But society is not a text that communicates itself to the skilled reader. It is people who speak. Talal Asad1
Textual strategies can call attention to the politics of representation, but the issue of otherness itself is not really addressed by the devices of polyphonic textual construction or collaboration with informant-writers, as such writers as Clifford and Vincent Crapanzano (1980) sometimes seem to suggest. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson2
If there were no culture concept in academic study, we would still have to invent one.3 Making sense of who we are is probably as old as any aspect we suspect makes us fully human. Making stone tools, something to emphasize because these are the main evidence of material culture that survives, stretches back well before our present anatomically modern species evolved some 200,000 years ago. But early hominid ingenuity is not only written in stone. As archaeologist Timothy Taylor suggests, the “first characteristically human artifact” may have been invented by a woman: the baby-sling which allowed her to move freely without fear of her child falling off. 4 Making and using such tools implies an intellectual ability that surely was more than utilitarian. The evolution of language is likely to have been influenced by a desire to tell stories and not just to tell hunters where the animals were. Language diversity implies cultural diversity, different ways of saying things to go along with different ideas for making sense of things and acting. But humans are hardly the only social animals which value communication, as the trajectory of the surviving great apes well illustrates. Just as there is no way to identify the first “human,” so there is no viable method for reconstructing the first bundle of intellectual activity that merits being called “culture.” Not knowing exactly how human culture began does not mean we should stop probing such a fascinating question beyond writing fiction.
It may be argued that every known society has a de facto culture concept, a framework for making sense of who they are and why they are different from others. Recognition of such diversity is not an entirely new idea. If you read Herodotus, it is clear that not all “barbarians” were the same, even if they were united in not speaking proper Greek. In the early 6th century CE the Roman philosopher Boethius was shrewd enough to note: “The customs and laws of diverse nations do so much differ that the same thing which some commend as laudable, others condemn as deserving punishment.”5 Or consider the brilliant essay “Of Cannibals” by Montaigne, who reflected on the atrocities committed in the exploration of the New World by observing “… I do not find, by what I am told, that there is anything wild and barbarous in this nation, excepting that everyone gives the denomination of barbarism to what is not the custom of his country.”6 Critical awareness of othering is not a modern discovery by any means.
Not for the hongre of gaine, or the ticklyng desire of the peoples vaine brute, and vnskilfulle commendacion: but partly moued with the oportunitie of my laisure, and the wondrefull profits and pleasure, that I conceiued in this kinde of studie my self, and partly that other also delightyng in stories, might with litle labour, finde easely when thei would, the somme of thynges compiled in one Booke, that thei ware wonte with tediousnes to sieke in many. And I haue shocked theim vp together, as well those of aunciente tyme, as of later yeres, the lewde, as well as the vertuous indifferentlie, that vsing them as present examples, and paternes of life, thou maiest with all thine endeuour folowe the vertuous and godlie, and with asmuche warenes eschewe the vicious and vngodly.7
Learning about others did not have the desired impact, as the bloodly religious wars within Europe and the imperialist trampling of exotic others over the ensuing centuries attest. But there were still lessons to be learned from the sheer diversity of human customs.
Contemporary concepts of culture have a long prehistory that has received extensive study. Edward Tylor did not elicit his foundational definition of culture in a vacuum; he built upon a range of Enlightenment scholars and German philosophers. Tylor was directly influenced by the German ur-anthropologist Gustav Klemm, whose massive Allgemeine Culturwissenschaft der Menschheit stretched to ten volumes by 1852.8 Klemm was in turn influenced by his compatriot predecessors Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottfried Herder, who must be included in the birthing process of modern anthropology.9 Although Tylor entitled his book Primitive Culture, his definition hedges between “culture” and “civilization,” the latter term with a historical trajectory from French thought. Historians have been far more comfortable using “civilization,” as Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History (1934–1961) exemplifies and political scientist Samuel Huntington’s more recent The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996) problematizes. To the extent “civilization” refers to an ultimate state in cultural evolution, it has little utility in contemporary anthropological analysis. It is in anthropology, more than any other major discipline, that the separation of a shared human culture from a privileged human civilization has been made.
When Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn set out in 1952 to document the range of definitions and conceptual models of culture at the time, their focus was on anthropologists and sociologists after Tylor. Their work stands as useful documentation of how the term was used in the first half of the 20th century, but there has been considerable discussion and refining of culture concepts over the past six decades. Their collection was not meant to be a definitive statement, but rather “for a stock-taking, for a comparing of notes, for conscious awareness of the range of variation.”10 As Roberta Lenkeit suggests, when their book is read end-to-end “the reader is left with the certainty that all anthropologists are talking about the same thing, but they use different words to describe the concept.”11 I do not advocate a formal updating of Kroeber and Kluckhohn’s compilation. However, we need to appreciate what led them to collect the range of definitions then available. Now, as then, it is important to take stock of the ways in which the term “culture” helps frame our analysis. This is the issue that anthropologists grapple with in the field and in writing ethnography. Not surprisingly, no single culture concept has emerged as definitive. Something as broad and as complex as the human experience should not be denoted by a single term; what is worth considering is what our use of the term “culture” can connote.
1 Text as Pretext Out of Context
At times ethnography shares its subject matter with literature, but its attitude is distinct. Robert H. Lowie12
Literary men are writing essays and little books about culture. Kroeber and Kluckhohn13
The literary men that Kroeber and Kluckhohn had in mind included critics Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot, since their anthology appeared before Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society in 1958. Williams, who later expanded on the literary appropriation of culture in his Keywords (1976) barely touches on the variety of anthropological approaches to culture. He assumes, wrongly, that cultural anthropology only treated culture as material production, even though he references the work of Kroeber and Kluckhohn that provides many examples to the contrary. Ironically, and wrongly, some have attributed Williams with having provided Cultural Studies with an “anthropological” understanding of culture.14 Williams’ emphasis is on the intellectual and artistic aspects that elevate culture to a privileged position, as is clearly evident in Matthew Arnold’s well-known Culture and Anarchy (first published in 1869). To the extent that culture refers to a matter of taste, it is primarily a taste acquired through literature.
The literary construction of the culture concept ignores virtually everything that anthropologists have said about actual cultures studied as well as the variety of cultural concepts documented before and after Kroeber and Kluckhohn’s archive. This is evident in Terry Eagleton’s book entitled Culture, where the focus is on Edmund Burke, Johann Gottfried Herder, T.S. Eliot, Raymond Williams and Oscar Wilde with only a passing reference to Edward Tylor and a reflexivist quote from Claude Levi-Strauss. Eagleton suggests that the “anthropological sense can be too amorphous” even if it has its uses.15 The problem is that Eagleton relegates anthropological framing to “tribal or premodern” societies rather than modernity, since in premodern times “the practical and the symbolic are likely to be more closely allied than they are in the modern age.”16 This misleading notion of modernity as a time-evolved evolutionary pinnacle assumes that the many societies that are not “modern” in the civilizational sense either do not exist or are peculiar survivals. Is it really fair to say that a Yemeni tribesmen is more symbolic than a Southhampton dockworker? Are the Amish, who nostalgically cling to a pre-electric mode of farming, modern or premodern? And if Eagleton flirts with the notion that culture has become a “secular version of divine grace,” is there no room for meaningful symbolism in collective life today?17
Anthropologists, until recently, tended to conduct ethnographic fieldwork in societies without written traditions, at least not in the literary sense that developed in Europe. Many of the peoples studied by ethnographers thought their own societies superior to those of the observer, but not because of a textual tradition. Even when fieldwork occurred in societies with a well-established literary history, such as the Middle East, the early focus was generally on illiterate people and their everyday life. Thus, the methodology of participant observation at first hinged on the fact that the only way to know what was happening culturally was to observe and communicate directly with people, not just read what the literate among them may have written and certainly not what the missionaries said.18 The recent turn to culture as an extension of literary analysis returns us to the mentality of the missionary age, only now the novel replaces the Bible.
The primary methodology of modern anthropology, in which the researcher usually resides in a foreign context and uses the locally relevant language to communicate and conduct research, is only a century old.19 The mere fact of “being there” does not guarantee accurate reporting nor mitigate the cultural biases with which we are all indoctrinated. The fact remains that ethnographic fieldwork is the primary method cultural anthropologists have used to gather information. Sidney Mintz does not mince his words when he writes: “My own view is that good fieldwork may be the silver lining to any cloud that hangs over our discipline. Fieldwork has always been what we do – and what we have learned to do – best.”20 As is true for all research, it is important to distinguish the value of fieldwork on the basis of its quality. The ethnographer must have competent language skills and be able to relate to the cultural context he or she is participating in. This is what “ethnographic authority” should derive from, not mere presence in an exotic locale. Not being in another cultural “there” limits our knowledge to the fragmentary and often skewed information that has been written down in texts.
In 1978 I arrived in rural Yemen for 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork among highland Yemeni farmers. I did not come with a tabula rasa researcher template, but the limited texts I had read about Yemen paled in the light of what I would soon learn through my observation and interactions in the field. I did not become Yemeni, nor would I claim to know Yemeni culture with the depth of experience of a native. Of course I was an outsider, like every other anthropologist in a new cultural context, but I became “an outsider who knows something of what it is to be an insider.”21 My understanding of why the men, women and children did what they did was enhanced by living with them, listening, talking, sharing and wanting to learn from them. The experience of participating, observing and recording within this local cultural context was neither irretrievably damaged a priori by my previous reading nor can it be reduced in a posteriori hindsight to what I have since written about my experience. What I write about aspects of Yemeni culture I observed is not that reality, but a representation that is based on actually sharing in that lived cultural context. Such an ethnographic lens allows a researcher to proceed from context to text rather than substitute text for context.
In my own case, fieldwork has been essential to understanding earlier Yemeni texts. While in the field I had access to a 14th century Yemeni manuscript describing aspects of the agriculture I was observing on a daily basis.22 After completing my dissertation I came across a 13th century agricultural almanac by an earlier Rasulid sultan. My edition, translation and annotation of this seasonal guide to agriculture and other events would not have been possible without the experience of living with farmers through an entire agricultural year.23 This is a case where being there allowed me to better understand the history of what I was observing in the present. Being an ethnographer aided my later work as a historian reconstructing a historical context centuries before. The issue is not just access to local dialect terms not recorded in lexicons, but the experience of observing a complete annual agricultural cycle.
To the extent that written ethnographies misrepresent or distort what is observed, the problem is with the representation and not with the experience of being there itself. As John Borneman and Abdellah Hammoudi warn: “There is no way to draw a clear line between the structure of the textual field and the actual vagaries of fieldwork.”24 Abdellah Hammoudi, for example, contrasts his own experience on the pilgrimage to Mecca with the textual analysis of ritual by Talal Asad. Analyzing texts about rituals, argues Hammoudi, creates serious tensions; he stresses that “ambiguities, contradictions, absurdities, and paradoxes are best described in situational encounters” where the anthropologist can focus on “people’s actions, speeches, views, and theories” before creating an ethnographic text.25 Thus, being in the field allows the ethnographer to better appreciate the texture of the life observed before it can ever be set to text. The contextual attitude needed is one in which we should strive to improve our methods of observation and recording, making them more transparent and collaborative; such analysis would be both informed and transformed by experience, not simply for the goal of creating texts that explore our own experience in the field.
In the past four decades a major fault line shifted the attention of many cultural anthropologists to the ways cultures are represented through ethnographic writing rather than the empirical basis for the assumed reality we observe as well as document in texts.26 Thus the influential Writing Culture (1986) anthology of James Clifford and George Marcus is subtitled: “The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography.” The contributors to Writing Culture brought out into the open the growing doubts about the validity of ethnographic writing and stimulated a needed debate on the process of anthropology. The importance of the book is obvious, but like all polemics it is more important for the ensuing debate than its specific content. Ironically, Clifford is a historian who never conducted ethnographic fieldwork. In a later reflection on the Writing Culture text he co-edited with Clifford, Marcus claims it is unfair to dismiss Clifford’s views on ethnography because he had no ethnographic experience, since other contributors had such experience.27 But this does not excuse the fact that Clifford’s understanding of ethnography is limited to texts produced after the fact of being there. This allowed Clifford to challenge the authority of the ethnographer as writer and to ignore the significance of the fieldwork experience itself or challenge the integrity of the data analysis.
Without question, this book marked a milestone in reflective criticism, at least from a male perspective. In her critique of this genre, Ruth Behar observes that “Writing Culture, not surprisingly, both saddened and infuriated many women anthropologists.”28 The not-surprising adverbial clause here is due to the absence of women from the agenda of the authors and the inference by one of the editors that “a woman writing about culture became a contradiction in terms.” In this sense, Micaela di Leonardo, another feminist critic of the male-centric tenor of ethnography-as-text writers, aptly notes that this group ends up “painting rude mustaches on some of our most sacred Mona Lisa texts.”29 Yet another critic, Lila Abu-Lughod, derides James Clifford’s claim that women had not produced “unconventional forms of writing”; he simply ignored them.30 But beyond Young Turk males savaging their dead-white-men ancestors and leaving women out of the picture, the reduction of ethnography to text needs to be countered.
Surely ethnographies have prosaic possibilities beyond the attributed poetic licentiousness of their authors. Nor should it be assumed that most field anthropologists have served as political pawns in a conspiratorial “othering” of the people they study. “Leaving aside its logical problems,” notes Adam Kuper in a critical assessment of the Writing Culture approach, “the postmodernist movement has had a paralyzing effect on the discipline of anthropology.”31 The paralysis consists in dismissing the process of fieldwork as though no method can be labeled socially scientific because no one writing about culture can be fully objective. Fieldwork is then judged only through the filter of the colonial context in which the earliest field studies were carried out. For James Clifford, experience in the field is dismissed as politically charged “[p]recisely because it is hard to pin down.”32 Not having experienced a field context himself, it is not surprising that he would find it hard to pin down when only looking at a self-serving sample of texts that begins with a French priest in the 18th century. Nancy Scheper-Hughes warns that this kind of postmodernism, as exemplified in texts like Writing Culture, is “an excuse for political and moral dalliance if ever there was one.”33 Regarding critical issues like social justice, structural violence and environmental degradation, Stuart Kirsch notes that “anthropologists have more to contribute to the solution of these problems than their texts.”34
Even a casual survey of reviews of ethnographic texts, stemming back decades, indicates that there has been critique within the genre all along. The problem is an academic bait-and-switch in which the anthropologist as author literarily replaces the people studied by the anthropologist. As Peter Rigby succinctly observes, “the objects of anthropological discourse cease to be real people, the production and reproduction of their social life and communities, their exploitation and suffering, and their attempts to fight back: they become the producers of texts, which it is the anthropologist’s job to ‘interpret.’”35 Texts written by anthropologists, and indeed ethnographic films, are the bathwater, which can be replaced or refilled, but critical ablutions should not throw out the baby of observed behavior because the bathwater needs changing. The process of ethnographic fieldwork should not be subsumed as mere writing. There is more at stake in giving an account of real people than composing a poem. Ideally criticism of texts, like the debate over methods and theoretical frames, should enhance collection of data, not challenge the nature of such an effort itself.
Almost any ethnography, if carefully read, might serve to show the advantage of actually being in a “there.” As an example I return to an individual who became a sacrificial goat for the denigration of “ethnographic authority.” British anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard wrote what has often been considered the quintessential ethnographic text, The Nuer (1940), although Evans-Pritchard characterized it as “sometimes scanty and uneven” due to the difficulties in living with and interviewing the Nuer.36 Almost half a century later Renato Rosaldo damned both author and text by comparing the early 20th-century fieldworker with the onerous agenda of a 14th century Catholic inquisitioner.37 A quarter century after Rosaldo’s tar and feathering of Evans-Pritchard, it is useful to return to both their texts in order to better situate the interpreter of the Nuer in context. Rosaldo’s main point is that Evans-Pritchard was complicit in the colonial project that subjugated the native peoples of Sudan. It is assumed that the British colonial office would only support him if he could provide details to assist them in their rule. Pointing out flaws in an anthropologist’s methods is fair game, as long as it is remembered when and under what circumstances he conducted his research. Evans-Pritchard’s work among the Nuer, unlike that of the Azande, was indeed in response to the interests of the colonial administrators, but this does not mean that he condoned the high-handed policies that disrupted Nuer society and took Nuer lives. In 1937 Evans-Pritchard wrote that the goal of his experience with colonial administrators was to “humanize policy and administration and to make change less unpleasant to natives than it would otherwise have been.”38 As his early writings demonstrate, he was deeply concerned with the moral issues of colonial policy in Sudan. It is reported that his view of the British Governor of the region, C. A. Willis, was one that was spoken of “only in words of four letters.”
By pulling phrases out of context, compounded by an American [dis]missing of the nuance of British writing styles, Rosaldo reduces the ethnographic writing of Evans-Pritchard to a mode that “verges on the comic.”39 The title of Rosaldo’s essay, “From the Door of His Tent,” suggests a scenario from the British comedic Carry On films in which the anthropologist is conflated with a colonial administrator sitting on his comfortable verandah and ordering about the natives. But the purpose of conducting research in the tent, where eventually many Nuer of both sexes congregated, was a pragmatic choice, since the ethnographer was unable to work with specific informants as he had done among the Azande. His tent was not a colonial administrator’s verandah, but a pivotal location to observe everyday life as it occurred in the campsite. The analysis of Nuer culture within both the tent and the text is entirely avoided by Rosaldo, who focuses on his own idiosyncratic reading of the style and ascribed intentionality of the ethnographer.
I admired him for many things, of course, but I must confess he wasn’t the sort of person I felt very warm toward. He was in many ways a rather prejudiced man, and he reveled in his prejudice. He could say unkind things to make people uncomfortable. There were aspects of him that I thought were really not very likeable.41
It is not my intent to praise Evans-Pritchard as an “objective” observer, nor to insist that he did not have an exaggerated sense of self, but to turn attention to the content of his writing within the context of his fieldwork.
It is a pity Rosaldo did not read beyond The Nuer, to Evans-Pritchard’s Nuer Religion (1956). The detailed on-the-spot description of rituals, interviews with practitioners and ordinary Nuer and exploratory semiotic propositions in Nuer Religion make it as relevant today as when it was written, even given the obvious fact that Nuer culture today is not at all reducible to the ethnographic present of the 1930s discussed by Evans-Pritchard. This text was influential not because of any colonial medal for service to the crown but from the prestige afforded a professor at Oxford who actually went to live in Sudan, learn Nuer language and observe rituals first hand. This book was written for, and read by, a range of scholars interested in religion as a cross-cultural phenomenon.42 It opened up intellectual minds that had previously assumed, based on the available missionary and travel texts, that the belief systems of non-Western “primitives” were too facile and childlike to deserve the title “religion.” In both his earlier writing on the Azande and this work on the Nuer, the value of the ethnography is that it could demonstrate the rationality of the so-called “native.”
The earlier writings of armchair theorist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, whose work was discussed at length by Evans-Pritchard, posited a form of “pre-logical” or mystical thinking, implying a different mentality between “primitive” and modern Western cultures. Thus, Lévy-Bruhl broached the famous trope of Brazilian Bororo natives supposedly believing they could be both human and an arara bird at the same time. This was characterized by Lévy-Bruhl as a violation of the Aristotelian principle of non-contradiction, suggesting that these natives thought like children and not rational adults. As an armchair theory, Lévy-Bruhl’s argument was dismissed out of hand by most anthropologists. While noting that Lévy-Bruhl exaggerated the differences between so-called “civilized and primitive modes of thought,” Evans-Pritchard recognized that the deeper issue was the function that certain kinds of thought serve in any society.43 It was as wrong to exclude the mystical in our own Western culture as it was to exclude the empirical in native societies. Ironically, as J. Z. Smith pointed out some time ago, the problem was not with Bororo mentality but in the translation.44 The problem arose from a 19th century German traveler interpreting the meaning of “is” for a native language that has no equivalent “is” verb.
Evans-Pritchard contributed to this discussion of rationality with his analysis of the Nuer claim that a human twin was a bird. “It seems odd, if not absurd, to a European when he is told that a twin is a bird as though it were an obvious fact,” notes Evans-Pritchard before providing an explanation of why this is not a contradiction to the Nuer.45 They are not equating flesh-and-blood twins with real birds, but rather view both as relating through their animus as a spiritual metaphor to Kwoth, their expression of the ultimate divine power. Had he not been able to discuss this usage in Nuer language and observe the specific ritual acts involved, his analysis would have been mere second-hand speculation, as had been the case for Lévy-Bruhl in misunderstanding Bororo spirituality.
This difficulty is not easily overcome, because it is not merely a matter of definitions but involves also personal judgement. It would be useless to deny this and rash to ignore it. It may be said that in describing and interpreting a primitive religion it should make no difference whether the writer is an agnostic or a Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu or whatever he may be, but in fact it makes a great deal of difference, for even in a descriptive study judgement can in no way be avoided.46
At the end of his lengthy analysis, Evans-Pritchard offers reflections on contemporary theories of religion, noting which “have not been sustained by research.”47 He is only able to say this because of his ethnographic field research. He concludes that the “Nuer are undoubtedly a primitive people by the usual standards of reckoning, but their religious thought is remarkably sensitive, refined, and intelligent. It is also highly complex.”48 Clearly Evans-Pritchard did not simply parrot the “usual standards of reckoning” found in his own society. His conclusion resonated with other scholars, not simply because he was there and thus had to be believed, as Rosaldo insists, but because of the quality of his documentation and skill in comparative analysis. If there is an inquisitioner in the mix, it is surely Rosaldo who falsely brands the ethnographer as a positivist heretic.
2 Texting Out of Context
There is no fundamental epistemological distinction between ethnography and a multi-layered novel. Chris Barker49
Why should modern anthropologists reject their own tradition of ethnographic fieldwork in favor of mimicking textual analysis?50Borneman and Hammoudi
In response to recent theoretical preoccupation in anthropology with critical scholarship outside the discipline, I find it necessary to counter the textual attitude, exemplified in Edward Said’s Orientalism, that reads culture as if it were a text, and a modern kind of text at that. Novels, no matter how many layers, are imagined works of fiction; there is nothing imaginary in what happens to flesh and blood people anywhere. As Regna Darnell reminds us, “In writing fiction there is no reality check.”51 Ethnographic texts, whether successful or not in a critic’s eyes, attempt to analyze observable human behavior, not simply represent it in an aesthetic format. I would go further and argue that the metaphorically mesmerizing notion of culture as a “text” is a hermeneutic dead end, no matter how brightly lit up within Cultural Studies, for engaging the real world we live in. Human culture cannot be created in a factory or generated in a test tube, so neither should it be approached only as word play. As Bryan Turner suggests, “Textualism has resulted in a vicious solipsism in which there can be no distinction between fictional writing and social reality.”52 Irrespective of the intentionality or relevance of individual authors, the tools used to analyze and critique literary and philosophical texts are poorly adapted to understanding the evolution and current diversity of human culture. Recognizing the rather obvious fact that texts are enmeshed in a real world does not necessarily imply that the conceptual tools used to analyze texts, especially stemming from Western literary genres, are the best suited for understanding that reality.
The concepts of culture used in the social sciences are not like a written text in any form. Take Moby Dick or Heart of Darkness or Cat’s Cradle or the Magna Carta or The Declaration of Independence: all of these share a commonality as texts written down in an original or unchangeable form. Like a photograph or work of art, the form freezes the content. It can be interpreted and re-interpreted ad abundantiam, but the text itself ceased to be dynamic the moment it was inscribed. An ethnographic text or film of something cultural must inevitably suffer the same fate. It freezes the object of study between the liminal zone of the ethnographic present of the ethnographer’s presence and the writing of the ethnography. But what humans do goes beyond what is being observed and recorded by other humans; culture is a continuous process that can only be partially represented, not fully revealed, in writing. What anthropologists call culture is always in movement; human behavior occurs in flux rather than as a steady state, despite the attempts of strict functionalists to freeze the motion into an interlocking set of social facts. To substitute the representation for the reality is the sine qua non of fiction, but a cardinal sin if used to view humanity through a social science lens.
The slick description of ethnography as less a formal “scientific” method and “more like that of a literary critic” was valorized by Clifford Geertz, with a wink and a nod to the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle.53 But at first Geertz was thinking more of the way a historian constructs a reading of a manuscript “foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries” than a Victorian novel.54 In my own historical work on “medieval” Yemeni Arabic manuscripts, I come across some that are in poor shape or missing segments, but I also find manuscripts that are perfectly preserved and meticulously copied. Yet, like all texts, they share a common limitation: they exist in a frozen form, like a snapshot. I cannot tease the kind of information out of these texts that I can gain from observing behavior in the field and talking with farmers. Geertz also compares culture to “an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong.”55 This shoulder-view of interpretive ethnography fails as a useful metaphor, no matter how many texts are placed within the native point of view. While any outside observer may peer over the shoulders of someone, participant observation requires a dialogue between the ethnographer and the informant. It is the face-to-face encounter that informs the process of ethnography, not a passive reading over or into the behavior observed. Ethnography is an eye-to-eye endeavor informed through dialogue, not over-the-shoulder guess work.
Those who think all ethnography is fiction fail to note that there are different kinds of texts, just as there are different forms of fiction. A novel, for example, may be based on reality but it results from an individual creative effort and not an attempt to document reality.56 Jane Austin and William Faulkner mesmerize the reader because of the way they express quotidian life. The ethnographer likewise uses his or her creative energy to communicate, but the best ethnographies are those that seek a realistic fit with what was observed above and beyond achieving literary excellence. No ethnography can be totally objective, nor is this form of writing the only kind of truth useful for understanding cultural others.57 But if our only understanding of each other is from words written down rather than experiences shared, we have little to contribute as anthropologists. I fear the perilous outcome if the immediacy of experiencing culture through fieldwork is hermeneutically sealed as a mere textual illusion. Consider the charge of Henry Munson, an ethnographer with fieldwork experience in Morocco: “If we are all free to spin the hermeneutic wheel as we will without any attempt to assess our interpretations empirically, why should anyone take us seriously? If all we write is fiction, then why not leave the task to those who do it really well.”58
Clifford Geertz, like James Clifford, was selective in the ethnographies he chose to criticize. In an essay that in effect reduces ethnographic fieldwork to persuasion through writing, Geertz suggested that ethnographies “tend to look at least as much like romances as they do like lab reports;” this sets up a disingenuous either/or.59 It is possible to find examples of both, from Mead’s novelesque Coming of Age in Samoa to Malinowki’s detail-driven Argonauts, but the critical difference in both cases is that neither is intended as fiction. There is nothing “romantic” about Mead’s appendices, where she describes her research methods; nor does Malinowski’s penchant for shocking his reader limit him to only describing Trobriand canoe-building skills. The vast majority of ethnographies by the time Geertz was writing his essay were neither presented as journalistic romances nor as mere lab reports, but rather represented attempts by trained scholars, some of whom were not skilled writers, to document and communicate what they observed. I am curious how Geertz would have classified his own previous ethnographic writing, such as Peddlers and Princes: Social Development and Economic Change in Two Indonesian Towns (1963). In this study, based on his fieldwork in Java and Bali, Geertz concludes that anthropological studies are relevant “to the whole range of development issues from import policy and taxation to industrial location and the allocation of scarce resources, for they describe the dimensions of the sociocultural world within which these issues take on a determinate and hence resolvable form.”60 To the extent Geertz was able to write readable prose, it does not automatically place his ethnography in the genre of romance.
The fact that a field loosely called “Cultural Studies” evolved out of literary studies and its practitioners now far outnumber the guilded discipline of anthropology is reason enough to revisit the ways we conceptualize culture. I have no wish to dismantle this large and legitimate intellectual field, nor do I blame scholars in literary studies, for they have not invaded the field of anthropology and forced their methods down our collective throats. As John Borneman and Abdellah Hammoudi observe, “No doubt the study of literary output, with a recognition of the authority of textual constructions, adds a good deal of information about prevalent concepts and their institutional settings, but it does not tell us much about the pertinence of all this to human action.”61 I do, however, blame those anthropological colleagues who have in theory slit their own throats, ignoring the theoretical and methodological insights of the discipline’s founders and sustainers as though these have no redeeming value. The destructive deconstruction of the study of culture has also opened up an intellectual vacuum for the return of biological determinism, despite all the effort by anthropologists in the last century to debunk it.62 The reflexivist critique of ethnography should yield more productive and responsible gathering of field data, not a rejection of the process itself for the all too inevitable flaws in its products. ““Ethnography, in other words,” suggests Michael Agar, “is a construction that shows how social action in the context of one world can be understood as coherent from the point of view of another.”63
All ethnographic writing needs to stand the air, even if it is gale force, of scrutiny. The problem I have with much of the reflexivist critique of ethnographic writing in the past several decades is not the writing about “writing culture” but writing as if culture were only something that is understood through the way it is written.64 Substance, which is the value of what is being documented, is ignored in favor of style. There has been considerable resistance to the notion that the most significant thing about an ethnography is the person who wrote it. Robert Murphy, for example, complains that self-critical ethnography is “not one that finds the ethnographer more interesting than the natives.”65 Paul Roth observes that “Stylized self-reflection no more guarantees authenticity than does a pose of detachment.”66 Rejecting the navel-gazing of reflexivist writing does not mean failing to put the observer into the picture; even the avowed cultural materialist Marvin Harris finds this a valid point.67
There is an underlying assumption in much of the critique that reality is mainly interesting for the ways it is represented or said to be misrepresented. To reduce an ethnographic text to representation qua representation suggests that there is no observable reality worth writing about. Argue as you like about Foucault’s playful reading of the author function, but every ethnography has a real author whose ethnographic fieldwork in a real place is the starting point for the text. When James Clifford suggests that “Ethnography’s tradition is that of Herodotus and of Montesquieu’s Persian,” he conflates the product with the process.68 The process of ethnography as participant observation, its methodological underpinning, is not textual but experiential. The Greek Herodotus may have been a traveling historian, but he held a blatantly biased view of the non-Hellenic world, not surprising for someone who lived two and a half millennia ago; he is not the Greek forebearer of modern ethnography. Montesquieu’s pun-in-cheek Persian letters were written with no experience among real Persians; should his satire be read as a serious communication of what Persian life was really like?69 Trashing the intentions of major anthropologists like Evans-Pritchard or Malinowski easily becomes a play with words on words. The mantra that “writing about” must be “writing against” because of who does the writing removes all pretense of scientific method from anthropology as the praxis of a social science.
Ironically, some of those who are most critical of writing about culture fail to write clearly in their own scholarly rhetoric, as they establish their anti-ethnographic authority. What exactly is one to make of Stephen Tyler’s comment about polyphonic and dialogic texts not being about representation because they “defy the ontic irresponsibility of the rhetoric of that mimetic mode and reckon differently”?70 Where are we to locate “a readership caught up in the post-Darwinian bourgeois experience of time” with “cultural islands out of time (or ‘without history’)” described by many ethnographers as having “a persistent prelapsarian appeal.”71 Does this mean that the Trobriand Islands are now firmly postlapsarian? As Robert Murphy notes, postmodern anthropologists eschew clarity when they create “thick writing” sentences that “range from one word to involuted puzzle boxes of embedded clauses.”72 A writer need not be overtly obtuse in sorting out the abstruse.
Nor should the long-standing critical engagement with the nature of science lead us into the blinds of assuming that all forms of rigorously analyzing human interaction, whether quantitative or qualitative, are on a par with poetry or prose fiction. The absurd claim by Chris Barker and other chroniclers of Cultural Studies that “there is no fundamental epistemological distinction between an ethnography and a multi-layered novel” suggests both a fuzzy view of what “epistemology” means and a distinct lack of reading actual ethnographies. Most ethnographers gain knowledge through methods designed to elicit what is being observed and try to communicate the results as faithfully as possible. A novelist relies on his or her creative imagination in order to embellish rather than to document real behavior. Whether or not an ethnographer’s interpretation is correct, the method that informs the writing is not overtly aimed at reducing reality to fiction.
Just as there is no single format for the novel, there has never been one way of writing an ethnography. However, to conclude that therefore an ethnography can take any form, as Stephen Tyler implies, is a “counsel of despair.”73 Two of the earliest ethnographic texts which obtained classic status were Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) and Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa (1928). Although they both describe island people in the Pacific, they are very different kinds of texts. Malinowski’s account is descriptive, documenting in detail crafts like canoe building, while reflecting his theoretical approach to culture as functioning to meet basic human needs. He provides extensive information in the Trobriand language, which he had to learn in order to conduct his research. Mead, on the other hand, wrote in a more popular narrative style at times resembling a novel. Although she provides descriptive details on the young Samoan girls she interviewed, it appears that most of her field data was collected in English. Unlike Malinowski, the main goal of her book and indeed her entire life was to show the relevance of studying other cultures to better understand our own.
Of course an ethnography can never be a totally objective substitute for the reality observed. “No science dealing with human beings can ever attain the degree of objectivity possible to the physical and biological sciences,” noted Ralph Linton in 1936.74 What matters is the fit between what is said or written with the documented observable situation and interchange between the anthropologist and those she or he is writing about. Evaluating any given ethnography is made more difficult by the fact that in many cases there is no way to independently verify what is being described. Even when an anthropologist visits a cultural group studied earlier by another anthropologist, the context will never be the same. Cultures are not static because human behavior is dynamic, which is why every ethnography relates to a specific “ethnographic present.” It is usually the reader, rather than the ethnographer as author, who essentializes what is written as a kind of timeless whole. Fieldwork, no matter how long and how intimate, does not make the anthropologist one with the local culture. As Cora Du Bois, reflecting on her fieldwork in India, once noted, “None of us are experienced ‘India wallas.’ We are, in varying degrees, amateurs (in both senses of the word) of the culture.”75 But amateurs can do more than write poetry.
First fieldwork, usually conducted for an academic degree, is by definition provisional and often admittedly sketchy. Even when the ethnographer is able to spend one or two years in a given site, the data gathered seem miniscule in terms of what it is not possible to observe or document. As I returned to America after living over a full year in the valley of al-Ahjur, I wondered if I had enough information to write a dissertation. There was so much more I wanted to know, so many unanswered questions, some of which I realized could probably never be answered. I never assumed that my dissertation would be the last word on the subject, but hoped it would contribute to a debate over the adequacy of models used to interpret behavior. Most ethnographies I have read do not claim to be comprehensive and do recognize the difficulties of doing fieldwork. “In his early experience in the field the anthropologist is constantly grappling with the intangible,” notes Raymond Firth about his first work in 1928. “The reality of the native life is going on all around him, but he himself is not yet in focus to see it.”76 In his detailed We the Tikopia (1936) Firth confides that many of the problems he recognized in his ethnography could be better treated with a return visit, which he was able to do in 1952 and 1966. Return visits to our field site and continuing contact with several of the people who live there have enabled both Najwa and myself to revise earlier thinking.
In focusing on a specific ethnography, as the articles in Writing Culture do, critics invariably freeze the “ethnographic present” as though “being there” results in little more than a faded Kodak snapshot. No consideration is given to a number of ethnographic projects that have resulted in return visits to the same site or long-term field research of students and faculty. There are several relevant examples of such projects, which can justifiably be claimed to have “changed the face of anthropology.”77 One of these is long-term field study among the Navaho. Clyde Kluckhohn, who carried out ethnographic fieldwork among the Navaho in New Mexico during the 1920s, began the Ramah project in 1936 on the socialization of Navaho children, which was later focused on a comparative study of values from 1949–1955, followed by more recent research on healing methods and most recently resulting in collaborative work with the Navaho.78 Tracing the history of a project like this illustrates not only the change in methods and goals of ethnographic fieldwork but the lessons learned. What started out as salvage work, study of a marginalized community whose way of life was severely threatened, shifted as the paradigms in anthropological theory evolved. Beyond the archival value of the past documentation for the Navaho, the current emphasis on collaboration shows just how far anthropology has come of age in engaging the people studied as partners in the process.
3 Culture beyond Texts
Possibly it is inevitable and even desirable that representatives of different disciplines should emphasize different criteria and utilize varying shades of meaning [of culture]. But one thing is clear to us from our survey: it is time for a stock-taking, for a comparing of notes, for conscious awareness of the range of variation. Otherwise the notion that is conveyed to the wider company of educated men will be so loose, so diffuse as to promote confusion rather than clarity. Kroeber and Kluckhohn, 195279
As I read Writing Culture – my own words especially – I feel most profoundly their historicity, their distance. They belong to another world.80James Clifford
In their volume on culture concepts Kroeber and Kluckhohn, far from thinking that they had all the answers or that anthropology was somehow the only way to understand humanity, focused on the history of the culture concept to illustrate the range, not the fixed truth, of variation in approaching the human sense of being human. Their critical anthology, ridiculed by some as old-fashioned and out of date, should be revisited as an invitation to continue debating and refining anthropological approaches to the complex reality representable by the term “culture.” The range of variation in applying a culture concept evolved through lessons learned in ethnographic fieldwork, not by endlessly recycling the important, but hardly definitive, social theorists of the European Enlightenment. In his founding of the modern discipline of anthropology, Tylor was well aware that much of the information collected by travelers and missionaries suffered from bias and misunderstanding. His vision was to appropriate the emerging scientific methods to better understand the wide variation of cultural behavior. Like Darwin, Tylor was not a seer and should not be judged Whiggishly by what we know today. But his role in advocating a scientific approach to collecting ethnographic data must be acknowledged.
James Clifford took anthropology to task three decades ago and challenged the notion of “ethnographic authority” in representing cultural others. His critique of the very idea of ethnographic fieldwork and analysis centers on what he sees as weaknesses in the ethnographer. Rather than engaging critically with the information provided in the early ethnographic writings of Franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski, Margaret Mead, Marcel Griaule and Radcliffe-Brown, he lumps these pioneers together as communicating “a vision of ethnography as both scientifically demanding and heroic.”81 Early fieldwork was indeed demanding, given the ever-present health issues, difficulties of communicating in the native language and frequent lack of modern amenities. But the claim that these anthropologists promoted themselves as scientific heroes says more about individual personalities and students’ accolades than ethnographic methods, which have been used in various ways by literally hundreds of trained individuals. Franz Boas was adamant that scientists were not immune from cultural bias, noting in 1928 that the “emancipation from current thought is for most of us as difficult in science as it is in everyday life.”82 It was his emphasis on fieldwork that has enriched the discipline. As Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs emphasize, “Fieldwork produced observations of facts, not speculations about historical or psychological origins. Their publication, which constituted a major component of the Boasian program, transformed the texts into stable, publicly accessible observations that could be subjected to scrutiny, analysis, and comparison, like the collective observations on what took place in the glass container.”83
Bronislaw Malinowski was keen on stressing his work as “scientific,” but this must be seen in light of the contemporary social science opposition to the value of studying “primitive” others. In a classic article on Trobriand views of birth, Malinowski laid out the reasons for maintaining a scientific approach in the field: “The often fragmentary, incoherent, non-organic nature of much of the present ethnological material is due to the cult of ‘pure fact.’ As if it were possible to wrap up in a blanket a certain number of ‘facts as you find them’ and bring them all back for the home student to generalize upon and to build up his theoretical constructions upon. But the fact is that such a proceeding is quite impossible.”84 Similarly, Margaret Mead’s much contested Coming of Age in Samoa was an important rejoinder to the racially-tinged biological determinism of psychologist G. Stanley Hall’s theory of adolescence.85 Ethnographies should be read in the context of their time rather than deconstructed post hoc as politically charged allegoric fantasy.
Clifford’s six-fold dissembling of ethnographic authority shows a distinct lack of understanding of changes in the development of fieldwork methods. Nor has Clifford examined anthropologists’ analysis of the relevance of ethnography for understanding the culture concept.86 I find it hard to see a problem with the idea that a trained anthropologist, admittedly not with the same sophistication in the 1920s as later, held an advantage over amateurs and missionaries. Had Clifford read critically some of the missionary and amateur travel accounts, he might have seen how blatantly biased these usually were. Consider the case of the Nuer about whose religious system Evans-Pritchard wrote a ground-breaking study.87 In the mid-19th century Sir Samuel Baker, a British officer, described the Nuer as not having any religion, “nor is the darkness of their minds enlightened by even a ray of superstition.”88 A local missionary described Nuer religion as based on fear and terror, but Evans-Pritchard was able to demonstrate through his limited contact with the Nuer that there is comfort and hope along with the inevitable fears that religion evokes. Nor does Clifford appear to have read beyond a few “classic” ethnographies of the past, at least in English; there is only one reference in his 20-page bibliography to an article in the American Ethnologist, which has been publishing current ethnographic research since 1974.
In emphasizing the “power of observation” Clifford misses the reason it is called “participant observation” by anthropologists. To participate means to engage with the people the ethnographer is living with, not to simply walk around with a notebook and jot down observations. The limitations of mere visualization are well described by Michael Jackson in his ethnographic engagement with the Kuranko of Sierra Leone as “lived experience.”89 Drawing on the radical empiricism of William James, Jackson argues that it is the interaction between observer and observed that is critical in the ethnographic encounter. “As for our comparative method,” writes Jackson, “it becomes less a matter of finding ‘objective’ similarities and differences between other cultures than of exploring similarities and differences between our own experience and the experience of others.”90 This can only happen when the anthropologist is literally there, not sitting on a colonial-era verandah, in a contemporary academic study or delivering a paper at a university workshop.
Clifford’s deconstruction of ethnographic authority, based solely on his reading of a select sample of dated ethnographic texts, hinges on what he sees as ambiguity with the idea of experience: “Precisely because it is hard to pin down, ‘experience’ has served as an effective guarantee of ethnographic authority.”91 This echoes Geertz’s mischievous “Vas you dere, Sharlie?” trope from Baron Munchausen.92 The hubris that a person’s account must be accepted because he or she was there is hardly something invented by anthropologists. It has been a common trope of travel accounts for centuries. But there are multiple ways of “being there.” If ethnographic documentation was based solely on the mantra “I saw it with my own eyes,” this would hardly be proof of truth or accuracy. Good ethnographies provide sufficient information to evaluate the claims being made. Many times earlier ethnographers recorded information that is of historical value for the people studied.93 The point that Clifford evades is that nothing at all remotely resembling the actual situation can be said if one is not actually in a real “there.” The literary critic is free to feel at home in an arm chair, parsing a narrative, but the ethnographer must be physically present to observe behavior as it happens and try to make sense of it.
As an anthropologist, I argue that it is important to go beyond the skewed textual attitude of Western cultural traditions in order to consider the ways in which “culture” is lived worldwide, whether in literate or predominantly oral societies. Anthropologists have been documenting cultural groups for more than a century, no longer as open windows to our evolutionary past, but as evidence for the diversity of human experience in distinct contexts. Edward Tylor’s seminal definition of culture: “Culture or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired of man as a member of society” signaled a major paradigm shift in studying humanity.94 Tylor’s approach to culture as a “complex whole” rather than a “civilized” few offers a broad but meaningful path to better understand what it means to be human. His elaboration of culture was significant in placing all human societies within an evolutionary framework and proposing the psychic unity of mankind. This holistic approach to culture differed dramatically from the prevailing view that man was created a little less than the angels or that Western man had attained the pinnacle of rationality.
As Edward Sapir, in his class lecture notes written in the 1930s, noted, “it is illusory to think culture is clearly defined” in Tylor’s quote.95 Sapir considered Tylor’s definition as an orientation but realized that it was inadequate to explain the generative values that result in patterns of behavior and at the same time explain individual variation. He warned against conflating the connotations of “cultural” and “social” into a homogenous whole with no explanatory power.96 Sapir, a brilliant linguist with field experience among native Americans, also recognized the fact that our concepts about culture and society were “pre-judged in advance by the culture of the observer.”97 It is important to remember that Sapir was writing half a century before James Clifford. The debates among anthropologists about how best to approach culture have not been sterile, simply parroting Tylor’s broad definition. The critical comments of earlier anthropologists like Sapir deserve a re-reading, for most anthropologists today a first reading, in order to mitigate the hubris of contemporary scholars who think the wheels they inventively spin inevitably carry more weight than those of their intellectual ancestors.
Isaac Newton, the godfather of gravity-driven physics, is noted for remarking that he felt like a dwarf standing on the shoulders of giants. The origin of the metaphor appears to stem from the 12th century Bernard of Chartres, quoted by his contemporary John of Salisbury, in the phrase nanos gigantum humeris insidentes (dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants).98 Anthropology is no exception; we see farther today because of the work of men like Tylor and Sapir and women like Margaret Mead and Nora Zeale Hurston. The point is that we progress not simply by our own individual ability but by building on the work of those who came before us. Anthropology built on Tylor and Boas just as biology built on Darwin and physics on Newton. We can see further because of what we now regard, in hindsight, as successes and failures of these past scholars. These giants were products of their times, but their intellectual insights are worth engaging critically rather than disparaging out of hand. The problem with those who fail to learn from past perspectives is that they remain dwarves, stunted by their own self-imposed ignorance.
My argument here is hardly novel, although it is as necessary today as ever before. The distinguished American anthropologist Eric Wolf notes that “knowledge and insights gained in the past can generate new questions, and that new departures can incorporate the accomplishments of the past.”99 Sidney Mintz, acknowledging that some ethnographers have been ethnocentric, observes: “If we wish to call these ethnographers into question, we should nonetheless use caution in trashing the results of their fieldwork.”100 Even Clifford Geertz, who was not immune to iconoclastic critique, urged his readers that “there are better things to do with even a defective inheritance than trash it.”101 It is bad enough to pay no attention to our intellectual predecessors, but quite beyond the pale to either urinate or ejaculate all over them, as do some of those who write against culture, with iconclastic hubris.
Much of the current discussion by those who would reduce ethnography to poetry and politics suffers from a textual bias, in which culture is a pretext to opine on what texts mean rather than what human beings actually do and say they do as they do it. If “culture” is mainly something to be teased out of texts, whatever the genre, then our analysis is reduced either to the Nietzschean nightmare of a truth-to-power play or tail-wag-the-dog Derridaian word play, both ultimately self-serving chimeras. If the tools of literary criticism, valuable as they may be for the purpose of eliciting meaning from texts, are to trump participant field observation and reflectively sound ethnographic description, then we should fear, as Professor Turner warns, the end of anthropology.
4 So What is Culture?
We cannot take culture for a rigidly defined thing. [But perhaps there are nevertheless some common themes we might identify and thence arrive at out own idea of] the meaning of the concept of culture. Edward Sapir, 1930s102
One of the reasons “culture” has been so hard to delimit is that its abstractness makes any single concrete referent out of the question…”103Kroeber and Kluckhohn
The reality that anthropologists investigate is the shared diversity of a humanity which has evolved from earlier non-human species and shares in its bodily and basic mental forms an affinity with the other great apes in its extended family. Darwin suggested that humans differed by degree from other animals, but this idea was resisted in both theological and philosophical circles of his time, in addition to the man on the street who did not want a monkey for an uncle. However this totality of human experience is conceptualized, a major lesson of over a century of anthropological research is that some elements assumed in the past to be solely human, like tool-making or the moral quality of empathy, are shared with other species. We can choose to restrict the idea of “culture” to our own species, Homo sapiens, but it is obvious that we cannot use such a bounded view of who we are to explain what it means to be human. The common usage of “culture” in the broad sense is in reference to what humans can be observed to share over time. This sense is not about to disappear, nor need it be an obstacle to interpreting the kinds of things that appear to be unique to our species.
What matters is not any specific definition or concept of culture, but the ways in which we study ourselves. Anthropologists have never been willing to agree on a definitive culture concept, apart from the most general sense as a way to refer to human behavior in social contexts. No single culture concept could capture the complexity of human life, past and present. There is always a focus, whether on the material dimension, the economic aspects, the political and ideological, or the cognitive and psychological. All of these approaches are intertwined and not independent variables. Culture is not a thing, whether thought to be organic or superorganic, but an invented concept to deal with a reality that is not easily defined. Debates over the “reality” of culture confuse the issue by conflating the concept with what it is meant to represent. This is hardly unique to anthropology. Scientists refer to atomic particles and genes without suggesting that the concepts do more than give us a way to describe the structure of the universe and our genetic makeup. As Adam Kuper concludes in his survey of anthropological approaches to culture, “it is a poor strategy to separate out a cultural sphere and to treat it in its own terms.”104 Yet, whatever the shortcomings of specific culture concepts, there is something about human behavior worth conceptualizing.
A major confusion in studying human behavior is the fact that the term “culture” has been used both in the broad sense for what all humanity shares and also for a particular group of people. Conceptualizing human culture necessarily involves consideration of our evolutionary and archaeological past beyond the diversity of current behavior. Calling a group of people or what they share a “culture” is something very different and overlaps with ideas of what makes a society, an ethnic group, a language group or even a nation. In this sense the notion of “cross-cultural” often ends up comparing proverbial apples and oranges. The Kwakiutl of the American Northwest and the Yanomami of the Amazon are both cultures, but so is France or the Kurds of the Middle East. Even if all the ascribed cultures of the world could be documented, this would not define culture in the broad sense. The whole of humanity is not defined by the sum of its arbitrary social parts. A distinction must be made between the use of “culture” as a marker for various kinds of groups and the broad sense of “human nature.”
When James Clifford titles his book The Predicament of Culture, he is referring to the ways in which various groups of people have been categorized, often through a process of defining the other as inferior. The field of Cultural Studies is directly concerned with the political dimensions of human interaction, especially issues of race and gender. Invariably the sense of cultures emphasizes differences, a practice that has been going on as long as we have recorded history. Anthropologists did not invent the notion of bounded, individual cultures. As Marshall Sahlins observes, “ethnography has always known that cultures were never as bounded, self-contained and self-sustaining as postmodernism pretends that modernism pretends. No culture is sui generis, no people the sole or even the principal author of their own existence.”105 Some of the earlier anthropological writing flirted with such divisions, in part because there seemed to be so many differences on the surface. Ruth Benedict’s famous Patterns of Culture (1934) reified several Native American groups in order to fit a theoretical scheme derived from Friedrich Nietzsche in which a culture could be assigned a distinct personality. But this particularly American approach was a passing fad that has been long superseded in later anthropological theory.
To be blunt, cultural concepts are inventions, heuristic tools that can be honed when useful and cast aside or thrown out when no longer useful. There is no unequivocal answer to the question “What is culture?.” The more important question that has stimulated anthropological research from the start is “What is the reality behind the concept labeled culture?” As Ulf Hannerz observes, “people as actors and networks of actors have to invent culture, practice it, experiment with it, reflect on it, remember it (or store it in some other way), and pass it on. And along the way, they may just debate it, and change their minds.”106 Thus, there can never be a single concept of culture, whether emic or etic, but rather a range of approaches depending on the focus of the researcher. My ethnographic fieldwork in Yemen dealt primarily with a mode of production, the local irrigation system and distribution of water rights. My fieldwork site was a community of highland tribal farmers who practiced Islam and lived in a modern nation state which provided very few services to the local community. My study of water rights required not only participant observation of what was done in the fields and in resolving disputes, but analysis of local customary and relevant Islamic legal principles, the dynamics of local perceptions of what it meant to be tribal, and the process of adjusting to new forms of technology and contact with the outside world. I was immersed in the local “culture” and this is the primary value of fieldwork.
When I speak of Yemeni “culture” I cannot sum up the diversity within the geographic area in which people define themselves as “Yemeni,” but I do reflect on the connections I could see based on the limited contact I had at a particular point in time in the field. As a historian I know that the context I lived in has undergone considerable change over the centuries, even though it is so easily viewed at first glance as an unchanging “traditional” society. I speak of Yemeni culture as a shorthand, for talking about the things I observed and not to create a bounded group and certainly not to argue that there is anything inferior to the society I come from. My interpretation of Yemeni culture is an invention that represents what I saw going on and what people told me to the best of my abilities as an ethnographer. A large part of my research was documentation, but ultimately the goal is interpreting what I saw. Any interpretation or representation requires concepts, whether articulated or not. I could hardly write about the Yemenis I know as though they didn’t live in a cultural context that is not the same as my own. Yemenis can experience their own “culture” without a specific concept, but as an outsider I cannot.
Instead of asking what a culture is, why not think about what a culture is not?107 A century of ethnographic research, through thick and thin reporting, suggests several things that poorly define a culture. No culture is homogenous, no matter how many things are shared by the people who share the same group name. Otherwise we would not have needed to coin the term “sub-culture.” No culture is truly isolated, living without contact since time immemorial in a distinct location. There is no inherent equivalence between the groups of people that get labeled as cultures, whether in scholarly usage or popular understanding. There is no justification for judging cultures as inferior or superior to another; this is the common theme of cultural relativism that is a defining principle of anthropology as a discipline. We need to conceptualize culture for what we think it is, learning from the lessons of what research suggests it is not. The reality out there of human behavior does not need our concepts, but we do if we want to make sense of it, whether we admit it or not.
Asad (1983:155).
Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (1997:46).
As Morris Freilich (1989:2) notes, “Professional anthropology found rather than invented culture.” The number of texts tracing the overall history of the concept of “culture” outside of anthropology is vast, stretching across old disciplines and new interdisciplinary studies. The survey by Ramond Williams (1976), originally published in 1958, is a basic starting point, but for this one should consult Smith (2001). Terry Eagleton (2000) provides a Marxist spin on the evolution of the use of culture concepts.
Taylor (1996:45–46). Taylor’s example illustrates his critique of earlier evolutionary scenarios that assumed all meaningful change came from males.
Quoted in Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1963:4).
Montagne (1811(1):246). This is the English translation by Peter Coste. As Geertz (2000:45) notes, Montaigne’s notion “whatever its problems, and however more delicately expressed, is not likely to go entirely away unless anthropology does.”
Boemus (1555[1888]:14).
As quoted by Lowie (1937:12), Klemm defined culture as “customs, information, and skills, domestic and public life in peace and war, religion, science, and art.”
See Zammito (2002). For a survey of Kant’s sense of philosophical anthropology, see Fischer (2009:215–234) and Wilson (2006), who notes that Kant’s focus was on developing critical thinking.
Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1963:7).
Lenkeit (2014:5). Fischer (2007:44, note 2) suggests that it is worthwhile revisiting rather than dismissing this discussion of culture concepts.
Lowie (1937:3).
Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1963:3)
Barker (2003:60) views the work of Williams as “‘anthropological’ since it centers on everyday meanings: values (abstract ideals), norms (defnite principles or rules) and material/symbolic goods.” Williams’ (1958) Culture and Society 1780–1950 does not mention one anthropologist and treats Arnold in a literary vacuum. Williams (1976) survey of Cultural Studies barely mentions any actual anthropological ethnographers or ethnographic texts. Compare the far more comprehensive analysis of the rise of the culture concept by Michael Fischer (2007).
Eagleton (2016:3).
Eagleton (2016:6–7).
Eagleton (2016: 28–29).
For a survey of the scientific and humanities methods of participant observation, see Bernard (2002:322–364).
In 1906 Franz Boas (1906:642) remarked: “It would seem to me that the classical archeologist or the classical philologist must always have an indulgent smile when he hears of serious anthropological studies carried on by investigators, who have neither the time, the inclination, nor the training to familiarize themselves with the language of the people they study.” Boas was instrumental in stressing the need for his students to learn the local language.
As James Boon (1982:8) has noted, “The contemporary identity of the anthropological profession centers, rightly I think, on fieldwork – in act and ideal.”
This phrase is from Roger Keesing (1992:77). Geertz (1974:30) explores the issue of “experience-near” fieldwork, noting: “In the country of the blind, who are not as unobservant as they appear, the one-eyed is not king but spectator.”
The text was a manuscript owned by the Rasulid sultan al-Malik al-Afdal al-‘Abbas, who died in 1377 CE. The Arabic text is produced in facsimile in Varisco and Smith (1998) and my English translation is forthcoming.
Varisco (1994). I thank Dr. David King, the noted historian of Islamic science, for providing me with a copy of this important text.
Borneman and Hammoudi (2009:13). Although coming from a different perspective, Trouillot (1991:37) argues that the “recent discovery of textuality by North American anthropologists is based on a quite limited notion of the text,” ignoring pre-text, con-text and content. The critical turn to anthropology as a textual genre has been resisted since it was first proposed, although such counter critiques have not been as widely read; see, for example, Azoulay (1994:16), who notes that texts, unlike people “do not speak back.”
Hammoudi (2009:32).
One of the main stimuli was a volume entitled Redefining Anthropology, edited by Dell Hymes in 1969 and published in paperback in 1974. As Bob Scholte (1974:431) has remarked, “Anthropology is never only scientific.” I suspect that most of the earlier major anthropologists of the 20th century would have agreed.
Marcus (2001:175).
Behar (1995:4–5). Other reviewers were also critical of the earlier volume. Birth (1990:555) concludes: “Thus, not only does Writing Culture’s version of anthropology as cultural critique fail logically and pragmatically, it also fails ethically.”
di Leonardo (1991:23).
Abu-Lughod, (1990:17). Trouillot (1991:43, note 16) criticizes Clifford for his “indulgent neglect of feminism.” For another feminist critique of the postmodernist turn in anthropology, see Mascia-Lees, Sharpe and Cohen (1989).
Kuper (2000:223). The impact in sociology, which has a stronger focus on quantitative methods, appears to have been less. For a sociological critique of postmodern theories, see Powell and Owen (2007). In their volume, for example, Derek Layder (2007:5) describes the “barrenness of vision and the paucity of descriptive and explanatory power of postmodernism’s uncompromising anti humanism.”
Clifford (1988:37).
Scheper-Hughes (1995:414). The problem, as noted by Geertz (2010:195) is that postmodernism is “more a mood and an attitude than a connected theory.”
Kirsch (2018:3).
Rigby (1996:89–90).
Evans-Pritchard (1940:9). In addition to the hardship of arriving among the Nuer, he was ignored by most Nuer apart from the youth who he notes did not view him as an “obnoxious” foreigner (Evans-Pritchard 1940:11). Their disgust, as he indicates, was due to the intervention of the British military, which made his work far more difficult. But on his final trip, the Nuer became “persistent and tireless visitors” (Evans-Pritchard 1940:14).
Rosaldo (1986:78). As Handleman (1994:354) points out, Rosaldo “conflates the power of the textualized, literary gaze with power in the world of living beings.” Salzman (2002:808–809) challenges Rosaldo’s reflexivist account of fieldwork among the Ilongot as “preposterous.” Geertz (1988:49–72) later published his own dismissal of the writing style of Evans-Pritchard, but without challenging the ethnographic data about the Nuer or Azande. Rosaldo did not follow the advice of Karp and Maynard (1983:491) about reading The Nuer: “We can learn from both its achievements and its failures, but we will not learn from the failures until we have mastered the achievements.” For a nuanced account of the work of Evans-Pritchard in relation to British imperialism, see James (1973).
Quoted in Johnson (1982:242). Evans-Pritchard (1931) published an important work on African sorcery and magic, arguing against the attitude of administrators and missionaries who failed to recognize the local moral basis involved. He noted: “The native does not so much distrust European justice and education as he despairs of the administrator and missionary ever understanding, or attempting to understand, his point of view as expressed in laws and public opinion … The native becomes convinced finally that the European is quite incapable of seeing the difference between right and wrong, between the proper use of a cultural weapon fully sanctioned by public opinion, such as white magic, and a heinous and cold-blooded murder, such as the crime of black magic or sorcery” (Evans-Pritchard 1931:22).
Rosaldo (1986:90–91).
Rosaldo (1986:92). Anthropologists have borrowed several concepts from the work of Michel Foucault. Paul Rabinow (1984) edited The Foucault Reader. Those anthropologists less than enthralled with the way in which Foucauldian concepts filtered into anthropological writing include D’Andrade (1999:96–97), Geertz (2010:29–38) and Sahlins (1999b:410; 2002:40–41, 67–68). Others, such as Michael Jackson (1989:171–179) draw inspiration from Foucault’s analysis of historical epistemes. In a caustic retort to Lila Abu-Lughod’s invocation of Foucault’s discourse, Sahlin’s (2002:21) describes it as “translating the apparently trivial into the fatefully political by a rhetoric that typically reads like a dictionary of trendy names and concepts, many of them French, a veritable La Ruse of postmodernism.” Similar critiques are found outside the discipline, for example, Berman’s (1988:34) comment that “there is no freedom in Foucault’s world,” and Paglia’s (2013) blistering aside: “The exhausted poststructuralism pervading American universities is abject philistinism masquerading as advanced thought. Everywhere, young scholars labor in bondage to a corrupt and incestuous academic establishment.”
Quoted in Scott and Hirschkind (2006:246).
Philosophers and historians of religion who respond to Evans-Pritchard’s analysis of Nuer and Azande religion include Ramsey (1959), Smith (1993) and Winch (1958); see also Springs (2008:936).
Evans-Pritchard (1965:91–92).
Evans-Pritchard (1956:128–133).
Evans-Pritchard (1956:vii).
Evans-Pritchard (1956:311).
Evans-Pritchard (1956:311).
Barker (2003:26).
Borneman and Hammoudi (2009:9).
Darnell (2001:321).
Turner (1994:7). Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1991:37) writes: “The recent discovery of textuality by North American anthropologists is based on a quite limited notion of the text.” As Paul Roth (1989:557) notes, “once the assumption is made that ethnography is not a science, scientific standards are no longer essential even to the critique of ethnography.”
Geertz (1973:9). As Susan Trencher (2002:227, note 10) notes, “By the time Geertz borrowed Ryle’s ideas, the latter had been widely criticized as: philosophically naïve (claiming to solve the problems of dualism based on an insufficient understanding of it); a nominalist (for reducing the range of ‘facts,’ and preferring description to explanation); and a ‘logical behaviorist’; as well as making his own category mistake (reducing philosophy to logic).” Geertz was influenced by a number of social theorists and philosophers, including Ludwig Wittgenstein (Springs 2008). June Nash (1997:21) notes that Geertz did more than wink: “By exposing the artifice in ethnographic writing, Clifford Geertz opened to suspicion the very question as to whether the understanding of humankind was advanced by fieldwork.” Although Geertz is recognized outside anthropology as the major anthropological icon of the last half of the 20th century, Laura Nader (in Scheper-Hughes 1995:427) complains that he was responsible for an “erasure of anthropology as a discipline” and that his followers “did not read much anthropology either.” Geertz was not trained in the sciences, and as S. P. Reyna (1994:558) notes, “Geertz gave up science because he did not ‘buy’ it.” Rabinow (2011:29) suggests that Geertz used the label “science” as a rhetorical device.
Geertz (1973:10).
Geertz (1973:452). As Sherry Ortner (2016:49) observes, those critical of Geertz argued that “treating culture as literary texts, they ignored the harsh realities of power that drove so much of human history.” As William Roseberry (1994:24) observes, “A text is written; it is not writing. To see culture as an ensemble of texts or an art form is to remove culture from the process of creation.”
Steven Caton (2005:66) writes: “Like the historian, the anthropologist enters into an implicit ‘contract’ with the reader in averring that his ethnographic representation of the world is as factually true as he can make it. Unlike the historian or anthropologist (or for that matter, journalist), a writer of fiction is bound by no such contract.”
Some anthropologists have experimented in writing fiction as well as ethnography, a major example being Michael Jackson’s 1977 ethnography on the Kuranko, followed by his 1986 Barawa, and the Ways Birds Fly in the Sky.
Munson (1993:185).
Geertz (1988:8).
Geertz (1963:157).
Borneman and Hammoudi (2009:15).
This point is made by Goldschmidt (2000:799), who argues that the four-field approach of American anthropology keeps a “balanced position in the confrontation between the biological and the cultural.”
Agar (2004:21).
For a review of the reflexivist dismissal of fieldwork, see Lewis (2014), Poewe (1996) and Trencher (2000). As Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1995:419) suggests, “The answer to the critique of anthropology is not a retreat from ethnography but rather an ethnography that is personally engaged and politically committed.”
Murphy (1994:57).
Roth (1989:560).
Harris (1999:78).
Clifford and Marcus (1986:2). The trope that Herodotus was either the father of ethnography (e.g., Clair 2003:3) or history assumes that ethnography is simply writing about the other.
For a critique of this contention, see Varisco (2007:187).
Tyler’s reply in Roth (1989:566).
Clifford (1986:111).
Murphy (1994:56). He also calls this “egghead rap-talk.”
Layton (1977:212), responding to Tyler (1986:123). In his review of Writing Culture, Birth (1990:554) suggests that Tyler’s article “verges on the incomprehensible.” For an extended critique of Tyler’s anti-science stance, see Reyna (1994:561–563).
Linton (1936:3–4).
Du Bois(1986:227).
Firth (1967:2).
Kemper and Royce (2002:xvi). See their text for twelve accounts of long-term and large-scale ethnographic projects. Collaborative research also includes ethno-archaeology, research that critics of ethnography completely ignore.
Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1963:7). This sentiment was expanded by Kroeber in a joint statement with Talcott Parsons about the confusion between anthropological and sociological usage of the terms “culture” and “society.” “We therefore propose a truce to quarreling over whether culture is best understood from the perspective of society or society from that of culture. As in the famous case of heredity “versus” environment, it is no longer a question of how important each is, but of how each works and how they are interwoven with each other,” they suggest (Kroeber and Parsons 1948:583).
Clifford (2012:419). In a later rambling reflection, Clifford (2015:27) reminisces that Writing Culture was embedded in a historical moment, but appears to admit that his own writing had too much “certainty of its uncertainty.” His focus is on style, not on the failure to provide a historical defense of the writing against ethnography.
Clifford (1988:30).
Boas (1928:206). His student, Edward Sapir (1994:42) argued in the 1930s: “If we are honest with ourselves we must recognize that no matter how careful and scientific one tries to be, the student of culture faces some serious methodological difficulties.”
Bauman and Briggs (2003:273).
Malinowski (1916:418–419).
Mead’s work should be read alongside Hall’s (1921) massive study of adolescence, where savages are depicted as children in need of civilized salvation and the teen age years were everywhere seen as destined for stress. The caustic critique of Derek Freeman on Mead’s discussion of Samoan sexuality is discussed in detail by Shankman (2009). The fact that Freeman disagreed with Mead’s findings should not be seen as a failure of ethnographic method. “Different ethnographers will produce ethnographies that will differ from each other,” notes Michael Agar (2004:20), “That is to be celebrated because they can be compared to obtain a larger perspective than just one alone can provide.”
See LeVine (1984). As Herb Lewis (2014:xiii) observes, “As a rule these works are rich with references to current critical and theoretical literature but largely devoid of references to the books and papers of the anthropologists whose work is condemned.”
Evans-Pritchard (1956). He mentions the missionary reaction on p. 312.
Quoted by Evans-Pritchard (1965:607). Baker was speaking to the Ethnological Society of London in 1866.
Jackson (1989:2).
Jackson (1989:4).
Clifford (1988:37).
Geertz (1988:5).
Lewis (2014:60) notes that his 1950s fieldwork among the Oromo in Ethiopia provided details on political processes at the time that Ethiopian scholars and members of the local community find valuable for better understanding their own past.
Tylor (1871:1). For his re-orientation of 19th century anthropology, Tylor is credited as the father of modern anthropology e.g., Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1963:14, Leach 1967:24, Lévi-Strauss 1967:19. In the last three decades many introductory anthropology texts have begun with Tylor’s seminal definition; e.g., Hicks and Gwynne (1994:47); see also the discussion by Brumann (1999:S4).
Sapir (1994:35). This caution is echoed by Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1963:79), who state: “Moreover, all ‘definitions’ are constructed from a point of view – which is all too often left unstated.”
Sapir (1994:47).
Sapir (1994:48).
Wolf (1994:220).
Mintz (2000:176).
Geertz (2000:18).
Sapir (1994:23), from a reconstruction of his lecture notes.
Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1963:80).
Kuper (2000:247).
Sahlins (1999b:411).
Hannerz (2016:144).
I am indebted to Gerald Sider for this idea.