Culture Contexture: Explorations in Anthropology and Literary Studies

410 Pages·1996·73.25 MB·English

by  E. Valentine Daniel

Culture / Con texture
Explorations in Anthropology
and Literary Studies
EDITED BY
E. Valentine Daniel
and
Jeffrey M. Peck
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley Los Angeles London
Culture/ Con texture
I
The editors wish to thank the University
uf Michig-.U1 for its financial assistance
in the preparation of this volume.
tini".,~ity of Cali fomia Pre""
&rl:.dq and Lt» Angde., california
ti"i"e~it)' of California PreO$
London, England
CoI'}Tight (l 1996 by
n 'e Rege"~ orlhe Uni"ersity ofCalifor"ia
hinted in the United State~ of America
lZ34.H.;89
ubrary ofCongr"SIj C.. .. taloging.in_Publication Data
Culture/Comel<ture: E><plor-.nion~ in Anthropology and uterary Sludie./
edited by E. V. . lcntin., Daniel andJcllrey M. Peck.
p. em.
lnchtdes bibliographical references (p. ) and indcl<.
ISB:-1 (. ...~ ZQ..08463-2 (doth: acid-free paper). _ ISBN
()..52(M)8446-(l (pM. . : add.frtt paper)
I. Ethnology-AltIhorship. 2. Uterature and anthropology.
3. Amhrop"l"g)' in lile ...~ ture. 4. Culture. ". Criticism.
I. Daniel, E. Valentine. II, Peck,Jdfrey M .. 19:.0-
GN307.7.C85 1996
306-<k20 94-3997
CIP
The paper u..,d in thi~ publication meets th., minimum r"quir.,m.,nts of
American National Standard for Information Sci .. nc. . _ Pe. . r manenc. .
of I'aper for Printed Librdry Materials. ANSI Z39,48-1984
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments / I1ii
Culture/ Contexture: An Introduction
From an Anthropologist's Point ofV;.:w: The Literary
E. Vaitnlint Daniel I 1
From a Literary Cliric/Germani!I', Point ofYiew: Anthropology
/tffrtJ M. Peel! I 13
TI", Crmtribm;ons
E. VahntintDanu[and/effrryM. Pull. I 20
PART I • NARRATIVE FIEI OS
I. The Culture in Pocll)' and the Poetry in Culture;:
PaZ/IEwri,!! I 17
2. The Story of tile jackal Hunter Girl
'8
Margartl Tmwidc /
.'I. Frc:.h Uma Ikan~ and Storie. from Occupied Cypms
Mary' N. La)l»m / 84
4. Narrative Etlmogt"?phy, Elile Culture, and the Language of the Market
Dan Rug I J05
5. Exogamous Relations: Tra\"e! Writing. the Incest Prohibition,
and Hawthorne's Tra1lsjrJrouJlio1!
Susan S/m)(Jrt / 132
6. The World in a Text: How to Read '1'"$1"$ Tropiqua
Chfford Gmt: / J'6
CONTENTS
PART II • IDENTITY MARKINGS
7. Ethnic Selves/Ethnic Signs: Invention of Self, Space,
and Genealogy in Immigrant Writing
Awu Sqhml / 17'
8. Turk.~ a.~ Subjects: The Ethnographic NO\'ds of Paul Geiersbach
ArimeA. T,.,.aolia / 19'
9. Narnuive, Genealogy, and the Historical Consciousnes.s:
SdOlOod in a Disintegrating State
lniln &mm&an / 214
]0 Rac .. and RlIins
lila Nunt~ / 235
II. Rae .. under Represclllalion
David fJujd / 249
PART III • llNSETTI.ING TEXTS
12. Reading Culture: Anthropology and the Textualj,(ation of India
2n
Njchmas B 1Jirlt.s I
] 3 Gh"st]j. .c [)"rn;'fc3rjon,,' Trx,w,] PI,.,"!""", and
tli .. Origins of Japanesc Nativist Ethnology
Marilyn /IJ'j / 296
14. The Construction of America: The Anthropologist as Columbus
MirhlUi TaU$sig / J23
15. Crushed Glass, or, Is There a Counterpoint to Culture?
F Vaknliur Danirl I 157
COSTR!BI!TORS I 177
INDEX 1 3tH
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission granted to reprint scveral
essays in this volume:
Clifford Geertz's essay is reprinted from his book Works and Lives: The
Anthropologist as Aulharwilh the permission of the publishers. Stanford Uni
versity Press. © 1988 by the Board ofTrustces ohhc Leland Stanford Junior
University. Permission to reprint also granted by Blackwell Publishers, Ox
ford, England.
Marilyn Ivy's essay is reprinted from her book Discourses a/the Vanislling:
Modemif)', Plwntasm, Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1995),
© 1995 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
David Lloyd's ess,1.}' is reprinted from the Oxford Literary Review 13 (Spring
1991): 62-94. Reprinted with permission.
Dan Rose's essay is reprinted from Anthl'opologiml Quarterly 64:3 (1991):
109-125, where the original title was MElite Discourses of the Market and
Narrath'c Ethnography.~
Susan Stewart's essay is reprinted from her book Crimes of Wrilillg: Prob
lems i'l the Containment of &jJrtseutation. Copyright © 1991 by Oxford Uni
\'ersity Press, 1m;. Rcpr'inlcd by pcnnission.
The essays by Stewart, Lloyd, and Ivy have been slightly revised for their
republication in this m1ume.
We owe special thanks to Marilyn Iv)" John Pemberton. Stephanie
Hoelscher, and especially Margaret Hoey-Daniei, who helped us at \'arious
stages in the preparation of the manuscript.
Culture/Contexture:
An Introduction
Jeffrey
E. Valentine Daniel and M. Peck
The presence of the literary in amhropoJogy is best described as "un
canny~-a nonscientific drive lodged in the heart of a putative science, a
presence both desired and dreaded, a Freudian unheimlich. For literary
study, anthropology has for the most sen'ed merely as a source of the eso
teric in theory and example. About fifteen years ago, the two fields found
deeper significance in each other, which resulted in a flurry of publications
heightening this awareness. In Culture/Conltxlufe,l scholars from these two
disciplines join, for the first time, to reflect on the antidisciplinary urge that
has made this creative rapprochement both possible and necessary. The
common urge springs from a common predicament. Both anthropology
and literary study-and culture and writing-are alive to their extrinsic and
intrinsic contexwrcs; MContcxture being the term Hobbes used to connote
both Lhe texwre Lhal surrounds and the texwre that constiwtes. The
Lhemes by which Lhe authors work through the fascination and fears Lhat
hold these disciplines together and hold them apart range from reading
and race, nation and narration, and writing and representation to state and
self, incest and violence, and travel and time. The resulting revelation is one
of rich possibilities that each side, in its own contexture, holds for the olher.
E. VALENTINE DANIEL: FROM AN ANTHROPOLOGIST'S
POINT OF VIEW: THE LITERARY
In previewing my colleague's "Point ofView~ that follows, I was struck by the
image he paints of scholars in literary swdy wanting to get their hands dirty
M
in the field.M Some anthropologists today, with more than a cemury's hind
sight, are more likely to identifY with Lady Macbeth fretting about all the
perfumes of Arabia not being up to snuff for sweetening her little hands.
2 CULTURE/CONTEXTURE: AN INTRODUCTION
For some of us al least, fieldwork is an act of "atonement,~ alOnement for
sins less sanguinary but more consequcntialthan Lady Macbeth's, atone
ment for ollr conceits and the conceit of the West wherein our disciplinary
interests originated. We provided the theory; they provided the cases. The
more romantic among us ha\"c sought to make such atonements by gelting
lO this unclUous word's radical etymology by achieving an al-<>ne.ment2 with
the Other \~hom ,,'C have violated. But stich attempts arc condemned 10 fail
c,'en as the awkwardness of the dccompounded word in question defies an
:u-onc-menl with "atonement. ~ The atonement an anthropologist is capable
of making is at best all atonement iNlwt:OI self and Other, almost never an
al-one-ment with the Other.
Gelling to know the Other has been anthropology's raison d'etTe. This
Other has existed for anthropology in two modes. The first concerns an
other people, the second another form. The form in que.~lion goes by the
popular appellation of the day, ~t.he text.·' Myemphasis in this introduction
will be on the form that sustains the notion of the text, the literary. To ap
preciate anthropology'S encounter with the literary, we need to briefly re
view anthropology's engagement with its other Other, another people. The
Other asa people has borne various names throughout anthropology's brief
histol)': primith'es. nath'es, traditional peoples, tribes, and ethnic groups, to
mention huta few. In shon. anthropology has been enamored by that which
is foreign to it. This Other with which anthropology has attempted to en
gage, and about which much has been written recently, is difference essen
tialized and distanced in time and space by a particular way of coming to
know it.3 Willingly or otherwise, this form of knowledge has abetted three
strategies of engagement with difference: conquest, conversion, and mar
ginalization (Connolly 1991: 36-63). The project is essentially Hegelian:
how to reconcile the radical divide generated by the Enlightenment. the
divide between subject and object, self and other, home and the world
(Adorno 1973). Conquest and coll\'ersion, the stratagems of conquistadors
and priests, respectively (Todorov 1985), played lambently on the methods
and theories of anthropology. Broadly speaking, from its Tylorean begin
nings in 1878 until E. E. Evans-Pritchard's 1950 Marreu IeClure, amhropol
ogy's conquests advanced on the shoulders of the pumped-up brawn of
positivist scientism in which reductionist explanations were the be-all and
end-all. Insofar as the quest was for explanations rather than interpreta
tions, laws rather than patterns, universals rather than particulars, the pre
,I
dictability or naturalized moral order rather than the spontaneity of a
moral~ cultural field, the conquest of the Other lay in the imposition on it
of such explanations, naturalized laws, and universals, with little regard to
the historically specific scientislic culture \0 which the5C valorized goals be
longed. Had the conquest in question, the conquest by imposition, been
limited to Qur understanding ofthe Other. it would have been a partial one.
CULTURE/CONTEXTURE: AN INTRODUCTION )
But to the extent that we may ha,"c succeeded in converting the Others to
our point of ,~cw witham rcciprocity, in making them see themselves as we
see them, our conquest is a resounding one. In many amhropology depart
ments in India, for example. cranial indexes and nasal indexes, along with
the concept of race, continue to preoccupy researchers. The high-precision
calibrating instruments needed for such measurements are no longer im
ported from Europe but are locally manufaclUred. Archaeology, history,
and folklore have become the instruments for constructing hoary traditions,
antiquarian nations, and jealous national identities (e.g., see Ivy, this
volume). And occasionally the point is made tragicomically vivid, as when
Margaret Trawick's search for thc Jackal Hunters' myth of origin ends at
the door of the group's Mchief nath'e-informant~ who informs her that the
uI'-text of the myth is lO be found in none other than the little black box of
a white man who had taped the myth some }'ears earlier. Authorship, in
its SC\'eraJ senses, had been surrendered to a foreign white male who, in
this instance, happened to be Trawick's own student (see Trawick, this
volume).
But the opposite point needs to be made as well. The muscle of scienti sm
and colonialism notwithstanding, and despitc Edward Said's (1989) pes
simistic picture of what anthropology had wrought, the Other has not only
bent to but also resisted, frustrated, and transformed anthropological de
signs. That is, the asymmetry in the power relationship has not been con
sistently tilted in the anthropologisl's favor. We certainly overstate the case
when we attribute too much power 10 the anthropological account, inter·
pretive or explanatory, in considering the dyadic relationship between thc
anthropologist and his or her Other. By and large, the Other's reality con·
tinue$ to exist, persist, grow, and change, independent of how that Othcr is
reconstituted in anthropological reality, Timcschange, too. Consider Edgar
Thurston, that British civil servant-cum-Iay ethnographer of the early part of
this century about whom Nicholas Dirks writes in his essay (this volume).
Quite apart from ~making much or (in both senses) the ~castes and tribes
of South India,~ Thurston's se,'en volumcs by that title became a paradig
matic text for thc construction of South India's cthnographic reality and a
\'critable manual for learning about South Indian society. By contrast, the
writings of most contemporary ethnographers lack that ~reality-makingM
power. I can think of at least six reasons for such a state of affairs. First, con
temporary anthropology has consciously attempted 10 disengage itselffrom
both explicit and tacit collusion with Ihe designs of the more obvious cen
ters of power. Second, in the late twentieth century, anthropological pro
ductions do not matter as much to these centers and institutions of power
as do lhe productions of economics, political.science, psychology, and C\'cn
sociology, Third, anthropology has come to possess self-doubts about its
prcvious claims (0 explanatory authority (the kind of self-doubts sadly lack-
4 CULTURE/CONTEXTURE, AN INTRODUCTION
ing in many of its sister social sciences). Fourth, anthropology's Other is not
only distanced by space and time but, as often, by stalUS and class as well. in
which, as Dan Rose shows in this volume, the anthropologist is his Other's
unequal. Fifth, a signifkant number of anthropologists have taken to heart
Evans-Pritchard's claim (or at least pans of it) that if anthropology Mstudies
societies as moral systems and not as nalUra! systems, then it "is a kind of
hislOriography, and therefore ultimately of philosophy of art. (It is] ...
interested in design rather than process, ... seeks patterns and not scien
tific law.~, and interprets ralher than explainsM (1962; 152). But finally and
most significantly, anthropologists as well as those in literary study- in
spired by the likes ofJ acques Derrida, Raymond \Villiams, Michel Foucault,
Mikhail B.lkhtin, Walter Benjamin, and Antonin Gramsci-ha\'e realized
that there are narratives, other than the available master narrative!!, that
need to be drawn on to compose ethnographies. The writing of such eth
nographies calls ror the cultivalion or an ear ror discourses that are normally
drowned out by hegemonic ones, Such discourses, or rather, Mcounter
M
discourses (Marcus 1992), have made McultureM into an unsettled and
unsettling thing, much like writing, or even more like "reading.~ The last
nm
point, reading culture, is amplified by Dirks in this volume, we arc geL
ling ahead or our story,
Ir conquest. and conversion are fWO interrelated operations employed by
anthropology, especially in its engagement with the Olher in distant lands,
marginalization is the strategy employed by anthropology (as well as the lib
eral sectors or the society in which it feels mostly at home) in its engagement
with the Other among us, The latter is most often expressed in the liberal
idiom of tolerance without the awareness thai toleration is but another rorm
or marginalization and neutralization. a point elegantly brought out by
David Lloyd in his chapter. The strategies of tolerating by marginalizing and
marginalizing by tolerating are resorted to mostly in coming to terms with
lhe stranger among us, who, in lhe argOl of our lime, is called the elhnic.
Regardless of which three strategies are resorted to, and in whiche\'er com
bination, the relationship between self and Other is embedded in a matrix
of a kind or power: ~the power overw rather than Mthe power to." A friend of
mine, in a moment of alliterative weakness, opposed MotheringM to "moth
ering.~ To continue this somewhat infelicitous pun, Mmo1heringW is no less
implicated in a relationship of power and can be construed in two ways. At
the negative end. it rhymes with "smothering~ and is found in various kinds
of mushy universalisms. in a lovcy-dovey "family of manM or Walt Dis
neyesque Small World and in Benetton ads with smiling faces of sevcral rcp
resenr,.'lIive Mraccs.M At its ideal best, it nurtures rather than smothers
difference. it invoh'es a power-to rather than a power-oycr: the power to
bring out the beSt in the other or make a space wherein the other might find
his or her identity and the freedom to express iL5 But irthat were to be the