Материал: Nigel Rapport, Joanna Overing, Social and Cultural Anthropology - The Key Concepts (2000)

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control. They are but inversions of self. A convinced Lamarckian, Freud assumed that the nature and experience of prehistoric humans were still relevant to the understanding of modern ‘civilized’ man: the primitive still lives within us, internalized, as a sort of lascivious and violent monster that it is the tragedy of modern civilized man to have to control. As Corbey concludes (1991:55–6), ‘The world within as Freud constructed it is intricately related to that of a nineteenth-century civilizatory discourse on races, sexes, classes and empire, and the wild other who inhabits this world within turns out to be an avatar of the colonial and sexual others constructed in this discourse’. This is also the discourse that anthropology inherited, and with which it still is having to contend.

See also: Gender, Humanism, Post-Modernism, The Rural Idyll,

The Unhomely

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The concept of auto-anthropology was defined (deliberately ambiguously and tautologically) by Marilyn Strathern as: ‘anthropology carried out in the social context which produced it’ (1987:17). More generously, the concept covers the notions of an anthropological study of one’s own, one’s home and one’s self, and explores that murky ground, at once physical, phenomenological, psychological, social and personal, which ‘an anthropology at home’ gives onto.

Auto-anthropology is situated at the confluence of a number of important debates in anthropology, concerning the very nature and status of the anthropological project: ‘Is anthropology politically correct as an undertaking?’; ‘Is anthropology better undertaken in certain geo-physical settings than others?’; ‘Is anthropology necessarily undertaken in certain existential states of mind?’; and ‘Is anthropology best seen as a universal attitude towards social life, an ethnomethodology in the construction of social relations?’. These questions all pertain to the place of reflexivity both in the life of a professional, primarily Western and university, discipline such as anthropology, and also in the lives of those whom anthropology has undertaken to study.

Is anthropology politically correct as an undertaking?

In a political situation very different from that in which modern anthropology was born, a situation in which erstwhile relations between

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the ‘West and the rest’, between Euro-American cultures and societies and others (of the ‘South’, the ‘under-developed’, the ‘Second,Third and Fourth Worlds’), have come to be described and decried as colonialistic, exploitative and imperialistic, the project of anthropology has itself been called into question. Is it possible to see anthropology as anything but a set of Western discourses and practices? Is it not irremediably tainted both by its birthplace and history and by its continuing intent to translate and compare (define and circumscribe) otherness?

One thing which an auto-anthropological awareness has instigated in the discipline, therefore, is an attempt to elucidate the unspoken analytical givens, concepts and techniques, historical and proximate, socio-cultural and personal, which the anthropologist inevitably brings to the work of engaging with others. Here is a reflexive awareness that ‘adequate anthropological accounts cannot be crafted without acknowledging the forces—epistemological and political—that condition their writing’ (Whitaker 1997:470).

Such reflexivity had always been an implicit part of the modern discipline—Malinowski having been plagued by questions concerning why he was doing what he was doing, and how valid his data were—but now it becomes explicit, and linked to issues of ethics and power. Such a ‘reflexive’ turn was perhaps first noted by Bob Scholte (1969), in the context of a consideration of the politics of fieldwork undertaken by Americans in the wake of the Vietnam War, and in the face of local distaste at thus being studied. Anthropologists, Scholte advised, must always be aware of the political asymmetries which their activities presuppose; also how these are implicated in the epistemological privileges of so-called objectivity and neutrality. Fieldwork and analysis are in the end one praxis, and what is reflexively called for is a critical emancipatory exercise which would liberate the discipline from the vestiges of value-free scientism.

Matters came to a head in 1986 with the publication of two volumes, Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (edited by George Marcus and James Clifford) and Anthropology as Cultural Critique. An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences (by Marcus and Fischer), and a flurry of intellectual activity which came to be known as ‘The Writing Culture Debate’. This gave onto three central resolutions: (1) the scientific epistemology on which anthropology had been hitherto based—that anthropology would one day evolve the perfect language for describing ‘real human nature’ or ‘real cultural essences’—was in fact a provincial, and politically unsavoury, Western specificity; (2) all writing was rhetorical, so any claims made by anthropologists about the others they studied spoke less of

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incontestable givens and more of the hegemonies of political and professional scriptural practice; (3) all so-called grand or meta narratives of knowledge and progress might be called into question and, by juxtaposing them against the equally specific narratives of diverse other cultures, deconstructed.

Anthropologists remain divided, however, on the matter of where this leaves the anthropological enterprise. Some (Prattis 1985) feel empowered reflexively to stand back and consider those discursive constraints on perception and knowledge production—others’ as well as our own—and, by use of ‘pragmatic methodologies’, still make translations across cultural and personal boundaries (1996:1073). Even if every language is partial and relative, unable to describe the diversity of human realities, then notwithstanding, a reflexive anthropology can hope to escape such tautology and unite observer and observed together in a new intersubjective space: a space of universal human being lying beyond language and culture. For some, in short, reflexivity shows the way towards a poetics by which we may access each other’s individual experience beneath a multiplicity of cultural surfaces.

For others, a reflexive awareness points up the impossibility of ever studying ‘others’ except as a means further to define oneself—reducing otherness to a limiting space within one’s own construction.There is no possibility of attempting to repair anthropological representation merely by being more self-conscious about it. ‘Proper’ representation can only ever be that effected from within a home environment, and all anthropology can properly attempt is an enabling or advocating of local voices; at most, anthropology can cause an accession of local voices to global platforms.

For still others, an eschewing of generalization and comparison, even of a description of otherness, tends towards a radical relativism which simply plays into the hands of conservatism and reaction. The so-called ‘new’ insights into the production of anthropological knowledge which reflexivity provides are simply partial reiterations of old Marxian ones, now redrafted into an elitist language which disables action and possible critique.

Is anthropology better undertaken in certain geo-physical settings than others?

Leaving aside questions of epistemology for a moment, the politics of post-colonialism has also meant that the geo-physical setting of much anthropological fieldwork has changed of late, and that many anthropologists are focusing on their own or home societies. This is not

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a wholly new situation (cf. Little 1948; Frankenberg 1957;Warner 1959), but more now than before anthropologists routinely find themselves (in Cheater’s formulation (1987)) at once ‘investigator and citizen’.

This situation has a number of causes and a number of consequences. As Jackson puts it (1987:12), after a ‘century-long flirtation with exotic fieldwork’, anthropology has returned home (and seems home to stay) because research there is easier to access, cheaper and faster. More distant climes have become harder to reach due to decreasing Western funding, and due to suspicion elsewhere over Western research into local ‘primitivism’ or ‘tribalism’; to hark back to a (pristine) tribal past is to practise a present intellectual neo-colonialism. At the same time, anthropologists have discovered a long-standing ignorance concerning their own Western societies—their histories and cultures—and the extent to which they are home to a diversity of socio-cultural practices and world-views. Surely there is a place for the micro-social methodology and specialism of anthropology in disinterring the underlying nature of life in the West?

As a consequence of work in Western societies, moreover, genuine theoretical advances, of relevance to all locations of anthropological study, have been made. For instance, anthropology at home brings to cognizance the true extent of individual mobility and social change in a milieu, and the way in which boundaries between cultural groupings are in constant flux. It has been an anthropological orthodoxy since the time of Malinowski that societies and cultures may be associated with bounded locations, and that thereby isolated and somehow timeless communities could be imaged and imagined in which anthropologists were to do their work.And yet it is now clear that anthropological places and regions can be constructed in this fashion only by way of arbitrary and political exclusions; Malinowski’s Trobriand Islands were selfcontained tribal isolates only at the expense of rendering others (White administrators, missionaries, traders, et al.) invisible. In fact, boundaries between separate cultures cannot be demarcated and areas are always interconnected; place is never coterminous with identity, geo-physical regions are never homogeneous, and any cultural groupings are only ever provisional.

For this reason, Okely (1996) would describe the erstwhile anthropological privileging of the study of ‘other’, exotically constructed regions, to the neglect of its ‘home’, as the discipline’s worst example of exclusivity and elitism. Excluding study of its own centres of power, defining Europe, for instance, as outside its professional brief—because ‘easy’ or ‘known’ or the provenance of other disciplines—anthropology has missed both commonplaces elsewhere and exotica close by; it has

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mistakenly constituted itself as a regional as opposed to a theoretical specialism.

Anthropology ‘at home’, in short, has unique lessons to teach, concerning cultural ambiguity, hybridity and heterogeneity. The anthropologist of the West recognizes it as customary not exceptional, for instance, for a diversity of ways of thinking and being, a multiplicity of cultural realities and worlds, to co-exist in the same place. As anthropologists learn another language in the words of their mother tongue they see how surface similarities of form may hold contrary and subversive meanings (cf. Messerschmidt 1981).

On the other hand, anthropology at home has its own difficulties and dangers. It may not always be possible to gain that distantiation which has been the hallmark of anthropological method—so-called ‘cultureshock’, by which the conventions of local life are seen as strange and thereby calling for translation, if not ‘explanation’, by the anthropological observer. The anthropologist at home must sometimes work harder not to take things for granted and to make himself view things as a stranger might. Then again, as a citizen, the anthropologist expects to engage more mediately, not to say politically, with the socio-cultural milieu he is studying. Even if he does not see his writings as referring explicitly to the political situation of governance and the deployment of material and non-material resources, still those in power may make such direct links between the constructions of local intellectuals such as anthropologists and the workings of government policy. It may not be so easy for anthropologists at home to separate their academic from their more public pronouncements, and difficult, as Cheater puts it, to be a ‘parttime citizen’ (1987:176). Nevertheless, as more ‘indigenous anthropologists’ (albeit usually Western-trained) set about undertaking research in their home communities—in New Guinea, Brazil, India, Africa and the erstwhile Communist world, as well as the West—this is a situation in which more find themselves.

There is an awareness now abroad, in sum, that anthropology dare not overlook its own, usually ‘Western’ space—Western exoticism and multiplicity—in some banal occidentalism (cf. Carrier 1995). Studying ‘at home’, in fact, can lead to an awareness and a promotion of anthropological disciplinary expertise as an enterprise theoretically and experientially (rather than geo-physically or regionally) validated and based.

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