Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics

Critiques of Anthropology: Literary Turns, Slippery Bends Author(s): Don Handelman Source: Poetics Today, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Autumn, 1994), pp. 341-381 Published by: Duke University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1773314 . Accessed: 06/09/2011 14:50
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Critiquesof Anthropology: Turns,Slippery Bends Literary

Don Handelman
Sociology and Anthropology, Hebrew University, Jerusalem

Abstract Postmodern anthropologists advocate the deconstruction of anthropology through its writings by importing theories of cultural and literary criticism. These critiques point up implicit strategies of text-building in anthropological writing that arrogate to anthropologists the judgmental power to authorize the natives captured in these texts. Among these strategies of textual persuasion is the use of neutral, scientific vantage points from which to observe and to hegemonize truths about others. These strategies conveniently ignore anthropology's colonialist heritage and its use of totalism and universalism to monopolize the right to speak objectively in the name of native others. However, this essay argues that fieldwork anthropology is unlike any of the humanities and other social sciences in that it is not a textmediated discipline in the first place. Consequently, it is the sole discipline that struggles with the turning of subjects into objects rather than the turning of objects into subjects. This is the experimental strength of anthropology, which should be conserved. This ethos of experimentalism in self/other relationships is why anthropologists should concentrate on reflexively deconstructing their discipline from within. The alternative is to fall prey to the expansionist aims of cultural studies that would resurrect a hierarchy of disciplines in which anthropology becomes hegemonized by history and literary criticism. Conventionalized in the name of radical critique, the experimental moment of anthropology would then cease to exist. My thanks to Smadar Lavie for her comments on an earlier version of this essay. This work began as a review article of five books chosen by the editors, and these volumes have remained the focus of the issues I raise on relationships among anthropology, literary criticism, and history. PoeticsToday15:3 (Fall 1994). Copyright ? 1994 by The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics. CCC 0333-5372/94/$2.50.

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How many postmodernistsdoes it take to change a lightbulb? A tale is told of Clifford Geertz doing fieldwork in Sefrou, a small Moroccan city near Fez. In the morning he takes to the street and bazaar, observing, listening, chatting with friends and acquaintances, taking the metropolitan pulse. Through the afternoon he readsphilosophy, literature, history. In the evening he reflects, weaving together practices of the town and thoughts of other theories. Whatever else the story may be (apocryphal, made up on impulse, accurate), it is allegorical on several levels that mirror the present-day dilemmas of sociocultural anthropology and its problematic relationships to neighboring disciplines of literary criticism and history. I will take up these allegorical readings, where relevant, during my discussion of the issues raised by the anthropological works covered here. For the moment, consider also Gabriel Garcia Marquez's description of his day while working on Love in the Timeof Cholera.During the morning he writes. In the afternoon he relaxes at the beach, followed by a siesta. After sundown he goes out into the city, tracking his characters through personae, language, atmosphere. He sleeps on it all. In the morning, he writes. Geertz and Marquez, fieldwork anthropologist and novelist, confront and embrace, each in his own fashion, the immediate experience of living otherness that many fieldwork anthropologists and some writers of fiction value highly. In this they are distinct and distant from all text-mediated disciplines-these include most of the social sciences and virtually all of the humanities. By "text-mediated" I mean work whose materia and products are both literally textual. But Geertz and Marquez engage in projects to create presence from absence, through writing. In this, fieldwork anthropology and fiction are no less textmediated than other disciplines. Here, issues of ideology take form: the realism and authority of representation, its canons and boundaries, its truth-value and politics. Here too, fieldwork anthropology and fiction conventionally veer apart: most practitioners of anthropology insist on the truths of its metonymic relationship to the lived-in worlds of others, while writers of fiction perceive this relationship more as a matter of genre. Nevertheless, their texts are likewise drawn into the orbits of disciplines that study textuality. In Worksand Lives, the 1983 Harry Camp Lectures, Geertz (1988) exposes implicit strategies of discourse in anthropological writings laid bare by textual criticism. James Clifford (1988b), in The Predicamentof Culture, and the contributors to Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986) hone their critical penetrations on contextual as well as textual considerations. The authors and editors of these three books are all active in what is now called "critical" or "postmodern" ethnography,

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and the forms of their texts-polemical essays and brief studies-are in keeping with these claims. Postmodern ethnography advocates the deconstruction of anthropology, especially from without, particularly through literary theory. Michael Herzfeld's work will also be discussed here. The Poetics of Manhood (Herzfeld 1988), a more conventional ethnography, argues for the centrality of rhetoric and poetics in a Cretan village, while Anthropologythrough the Looking-Glass(Herzfeld 1987) contributes to an alternative, critical agenda for the deconstruction of anthropology more through its own rubrics. Herzfeld's work also demonstrates why monographs are valuable, regardless of postmodern claims for the essayed fragment of hard angles and soft edges, trailing double entendres. ("Who now sets out to write an ethnography?" rhetorically exclaims Stephen Tyler [1984b: 335], a contributor to Writing Culture and an exponent of evocation in ethnography.) Clifford Geertz: The Way of Saying Is the What of Saying Notably absent from the tale of Geertz in Sefrou, as it has been throughout much of the formation of modern anthropology, is the very act of ethno-graphy, of what Lee Drummond (1983: 201) calls "graphing the ethnos," the inscription of humanity through textbuilding: the anthropologist as writer. By contrast, the Marquezian vignette is about writing. The creation of fictive otherness is Marquez's vocation. In Worksand Lives, Geertz (1988) tells anthropologists that they are creators of otherness, not its reporters. Naive scientism in writing is no longer acceptable. Through their writing, anthropologists bring human worlds into being with more or less conviction and persuasiveness. Because these constructed worlds are identifiable versions of real people in real places, anthropologists are cosmologists with special responsibilities to their texts. As writers, they should be highly aware of how they author, and thereby authorize, in their own names. (The most prominent feature of this volume's dust jacket consists of Geertz's initials, three inches high: the anthropologist auteur [see also Hutnyk 1989: 92]. For those who enjoy iconic games, the initial "G" here resembles the more involuted progression of the initial "C," processually creating the hermeneutic circle that has so influenced Geertz. This imagery is as close as Geertz has come to portraying himself, his life, in his texts . . . C. G.) Works and Lives teases apart the writing styles of Claude LeviStrauss (who has revolutionized analytical thinking in anthropology), Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard (the most influential of the British social anthropologists, known as "E-P" in the trade), Bronislaw Malinowski (whose forced stay in the Trobriand Islands, near the coast of New Guinea, during the First World War conventionally signposts

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the genesis of fieldwork anthropology), and Ruth Benedict (an American success story, given the popularity of her scholarly works). Their writing styles, argues Geertz, are emblematic of their metadiscourses. So, "the way of saying is the what of saying" (Geertz 1988: 68). How one says whatever one says is what one says. To compose a text is to empower it-to set it loose in the world as an autonomous force with the intent to persuade its readers of something. How much better, then (Isn't it? The question is not entirely rhetorical), if anthropologists know how it is that they do what they do. Consciously or not, all writers are stylists. Once paid attention to, the writing always has its constructed voice(s). Knowing how one writes forces one to confront what one writes. (Geertz has commented that he tries to write each sentence as a signature line; one may add, for that matter, as if every sentence were his last-a literal economy of style.') Geertz takes up Tristes Tropiques,Levi-Strauss's self-referential account of his Amazonian experiences, and its purpose-to display its own existence as a "made thing." TristesTropiques,Geertz tells us, is fashioned as a French Symbolist text whose logic enables Levi-Strauss to construe Amazon natives as other Symbolist mentalities. Their decoding reveals in them the fundamental replication of the text-that is, of Levi-Strauss's vision of humanity. The totality of the work is that of a myth, Levi-Strauss's own Ur-myth, the totem of his great Mythologiquesproject, a quest story that is unpacked only in traveling through the entirety of his oeuvre. Tristes Tropiquesis Levi-Strauss's most abstract intellectual program, his "syntax of syntax," despite its off-and-on masquerade as travelogue. For Levi-Strauss, "being there" is impossible. There is no unmediated experience of otherness. In Evans-Pritchard, Geertz finds a glazier artfully angling windows in his ethnographic edifice to show otherness in its entirety, stripped of secrets. Otherness is approachable and attainable since "what you see is what you get" (ibid.: 61). E-P's text-building strategy is one of such reasoned and reasonable description that no one should disagree. He uses simple, subject-verb-object sentences and flat declaratives. There is no syntactical space for semantic ambiguities or uncertainties. The style is intensely visual, cohering more like landscape than myth, "dedicated, above all things, to making the puzzling plain" (ibid.: 68): ethnography as a "just so" story. By contrast, Malinowski bases his ethnographic persuasion on being a credible I-witness (I was there ... I saw ... I inform). His sensibilities are made to engage otherness, and
1. Some readers find Worksand Lives simply garrulous (see Leach 1989: 139). The late Sir Edmund Leach loved to shock through blunt declaratives of difference, the antithesis of Geertz's style.

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therefore his persona must be made believable. This strategy requires constituting the author "as an object of desire" (ibid.: 90). In Benedict's work, Geertz discloses a Swiftian rhetorical strategythat of social critique accomplished byjuxtaposing the familiar and the wildly exotic. As they change places, the known is made strange. Benedict's style is spare, assured ("definite views, definitely expressed"), that of a truth-teller with one fundamental truth to tell. The dominant trope of her writing is that "we have met the not-us and they are not-us" (ibid.: 113). Geertz posits the anthropological text in the gap "between engaging others where they are and representing them where they aren't" (ibid.: 130)-there and here, the ethnographic text as inseam of the anthropological garment. In his own writing, style is not merely thatneither gloss of mannerism nor turn of phrase. Instead, his sense of text construction is closer to one of context, in the way that Gregory Bateson uses this term. In Bateson's thinking, context is not a container to be filled with whatever is then contained, in context, and thereby shaped by it. To the contrary, as its etymology implies, context is whatever there is, the weave of relatedness of all there is as what there is (cf. Bateson 1972). Geertz writes contexts (and calls them texts), tempting the reader to follow the strands of the weave, to become entangled in their persuasions. This sense of context is close to what he intends more generally by the concept of culture. Context also underlies his extremely influential popularization of the metaphor of culture as text (Geertz 1973, 1980). Yet the sense of context described above puts the use-value of the metaphor in question for the anthropologist. Culture as context and culture as text clash, and this is part of the unspoken, discursive rationale for Works and Lives. Over the years, Geertz has authored or advertised many memorable phrases: "models of... models for," "thick description," "from the natives' point of view," "blurred genres," and others. These are like scholarly jingles, erudite slogans, scholastic catchy-something pop tunes-and they have entered the folklife of anthropology and cognate disciplines. As I read these phrasings (hum them? chant them? recite them?), their project is not that of concept formation nor of theory-building. If we relate to them as refractions of a perspective, an attitude, a point of view, a subtle sensibility, then there is often profundity in Geertz the essayist. But this is tightly tied into the way many of his texts are constructed as context-constructed to alter mind-sets by just that bit that might make a difference. Geertz's style as essayist is unsettling, subversive. In Works and Lives he comments that Evans-Pritchard avoids clause-embedding in sentence construction, which contributes to the brilliant clarity of the

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prose. But Geertz himself is a master of the embedded clause, of inlay and involution in sentence composition. Reading Works and Lives, one is caught within a stream of fluently flowing words, then suddenly yanked and enveloped by the deep uncertainties of an undertow. Here is one example of such a sentence: "To argue (point out, actually, for, like aerial perspective or the Pythagorean theorem, the thing once seen cannot then be unseen) that the writing of ethnography involves telling stories, making pictures, concocting symbolisms, and deploying tropes is commonly resisted, often fiercely, because of a confusion, endemic in the West since Plato at least, of the imagined with the imaginary, the fictional with the false, making things out with making them up" (Geertz 1988: 140). While floating along the stream of words-taking that kind of tripone is shockingly caught in a vortex, the stream flowing into a whirlpool that sucks the reader in, down, spitting him out elsewhere (and elsewhen)-it's become that kind of trip: the kind that reacts recursively against the reader's attempts to fix and stabilize the text. If one reads Geertz closely, the embedded clauses, the inlays, become apertures, often openings within openings, all leading elsewhere, at times against the current itself. Reading the sentence in its fullness, one is cast onto other shores, carried to other destinations, with all the reflection this can evoke. As the text builds a stable presence, its inner moments take a radical turn, decentering the reader's stability and certainty. So too is there a distinct absence of the poetistic symmetries that enchant structuralists and deconstructionists alike, on the order of the structure of symmetry and the symmetry of structure, since these are self-sealing couplets of closure. There is much deconstructive power in Geertz's essays. Yet I suspect that he also decenters those of his writings that draw us to the metaphor of culture as text. This analogy, drawn in the interests of blurring genres and extolling cultural relativism, is the single worst move of his distinctive, highly creative, often brilliant scholarship. Context, in those very Batesonian intentions that should make sense to Geertz, is continuously in flux, its weave rewoven as elements accrete and detach. There is no fixed framing to context, and so neither its parameters nor its substance is ever stable. With each reading, each interpretation, the literal text is involuted, groping within to reach beyond. Still, the frame does not change, nor do the characters or the mise-en-scene. Regardless of the variety of readings, the parameters of the text are closed, unless it is literally rewritten. Applied to culture, in effect to context, the text metaphor makes these overly rigid and inflexible in their boundaries and substance. One anthropologist comments that "to see culture as an en-

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semble of texts or an art form is to remove culture from the process of its creation" (Roseberry 1982: 1022). Some say that Worksand Lives is peripheral to Geertz's intellectual projects, yet I think it central to understanding certain tensions he has embedded in his texts. These tensions often pit monograph against essay. Geertz the essayist deconstructs the stabilities built into many of his monographs. But the essayist-as-fabulist is not the painstaking monographer. Geertz's avid experimentalism is less evident in the numerous monographs. (Thus, The Religion of Java [Geertz 1960], Agricultural Involution: The Process of Ecological Change in Indonesia [Geertz 1966], and others are strongly analytical ethnographies, much more concerned with the production of knowledge than with how knowledge is produced.) Where he plays with monographic form the effort is labored. Bali (Geertz 1980) Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century is a case in point. The monograph is constructed something like a spectacle, for Negara is a forestage/backstage construction. The text is onstage, the endnotes backstage. There are 121 pages of endnotes, containing much of the technical detail and expertise needed to stage the text of 136 pages. This structure of the monograph resonates with its argument about the ethos of the theatre state. But there are difficulties in setting the stage. Bali is a complex society, and the conscientious ethnographer supplies complicated directions (social structure, history) for its staging. These take up most of the script, leaving only twenty-three pages of stage text for "spectacle and ceremony," the actual enactment of the theatre state. Such strategic problems do not burden postmodern ethnographers who dismiss monographs as positivist "holism" in search of unattainable truths.2 Neither is Geertz the essayist burdened in seeking to put, as he has phrased this, "a patch of a weave on a patch of a weave," playing with his own textual framing, perhaps also to deconstruct Geertz the monographer. The essayist, not the monographer, actively engages in how discourse and rhetoric are effected through textualities. The essayist tells us "what anthropology has been all about.... We have with no little success, sought to keep the world off balance; pulling out rugs, upsetting tea tables, setting off firecrackers. It has been the office of
2. In his Writing Culture paper, George Marcus contends that the essay rather than the monograph is best suited to today's paradigms in disarray. (The monograph genre, argues James Boon [1983: 137], is the mainstay of realist, functionalist writing in anthropology.) In Marcus's view, the essay absolves the writer from holistic analysis and from the need to tie up loose ends, enabling the essayist to assume a rhetorical posture of "profound half-understanding, half-bewilderment with the world" (Marcus 1986: 191).

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others to reassure; ours to unsettle. . . . We hawk the anomalous, peddle the strange. Merchants of astonishment" (Geertz 1984: 275). The anthropologist as trickster (although a rather prim, domesticated one at that-witness the rug and tea table), perhaps astonishing himself as well; the evocative rather than the analytical (see also Handler 1991: 611). Geertz has worked to nullify the persuasions of formal theory, of straightforward objectivism in cultural analysis and comparative studies. Yet on another level his work reproduces something of these tensions in the surreptitious dialogue of monograph and essay, of context and text, of standing for something (the natives' point of view?) and asking, Why this, why any, particular point of view? The author beset within himself, his alterity hidden by the guise of a fortified stand against scientistic certainties. and Lives (Geertz 1988: 148), there is the hint At the close of Works that Geertz too would do away with the monograph form-"something new must appear on the page." This may leach the creative focus of tension from what I read as his textual binarism; yet it might open the way to his moving more easily between distinctive cultural loci, enabling the comparative work with which he is less comfortable. This was my impression on listening to his Harvard-Jerusalem lectures at the Hebrew University in 1990, when he brought Indonesia and Morocco into conjunction more as a travelogue of that conjuncture than as a formal comparison. If there is something to my reading of Geertz, then it reflects his decades of fieldwork anthropology and scholarly erudition as well: something achieved through time, not acquired programmatically, ideologically. Despite his sloganeering ("thick description"), he offers no recipes (regardless of what humanists may think [cf. Veeser 1989: xi]). Rather, "one of the advantages of anthropology as a scholarly enterprise is that no one, including its practitioners, quite knows exactly what it is" (Geertz 1985: 623).3 Commandeering this ambiguous space, the "writing culture" crowd (many of whom are descendants of Geertzian interpretive hermeneutics) insists that modern anthropology has developed canonical forms that are blind to the constitutive grounds of their own formation in the worlds of postmodernity. These forms must be taken apart and made more responsive to historical contingency and dialogic textuality. Verbal metaphors of discourse must replace visual metaphors of seeing (Tyler 1986a: 23).
3. There are numerous discussions and critiques of Geertz's work. For those interested, the following works, among others, address this corpus from various perspectives, polemical and substantive: Walters (1980); Roseberry (1982); Shankman (1984); Schneider (1987); Kapferer (1988a); Biersack (1989); and Hutnyk (1989).

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"Crowd," in my usage, sometimes refers to the contributors to Writing Culture and sometimes to a wider aggregate. The intention of "crowd" is to indicate that these scholars belong perspectivally together much more than apart, that there are significant differences among them that cannot be identified in this condensed space, and that the boundaries of their collectivity are fluid. The "WritingCulture"Crowd: Ethnography Is Too Importantto Be Leftto Anthropologists At the 1986 Wenner-Gren Foundation conference on "Symbolism through Time," James Clifford declared in his congenial, laid-back style, "Ethnography is too important to be left to anthropologists."4 Geertz advocates blurring the boundaries between anthropology and other disciplines: anthropology is his subject. Clifford finds his orientations toward anthropology in other disciplines: anthropology is his object. Clifford is a historian of ideas, strongly influenced by literary theory and cultural critique. He brings these to bear on the writing of anthropology, as one genre of the textual inscriptions of humanity. Together, these genres constitute a wider ethnography in modernist aesthetics and postmodern politics. Arthur Danto (1988: 15) refers to Clifford as a "practicing anthropologist," and Bruce Kapferer (1988a: 95) calls him "an anthropologist of anthropology." He is neither. Clifford is a scholar of anthropological textuality in its historical formations. His domains of discourse include text (literary theory) and the interface of text and social order (cultural critique). He is relatively uninterested in how anthropologists arrive at a knowledge of others or their own analytical understandings of these other worlds. The production of anthropological knowledge is made the staged performance of ethno-graphy, with Clifford the critic reviewing that performance. At issue are textual persuasions, and, here, other genres exhibit more competence at ethnography than does anthropology. Here too, text is not a metaphor for culture but, rather, for living. Therefore, Clifford and other advocates of postmodern ethnography extoll the political power of textual poetics. His sterling outsider credentials, creative intelligence, and breadth of erudition make Clifford a key figure in the articulation of the "writing culture" crowd's perspective on American anthropology. In the Marquezian vignette, experience is turned into writing mediated by the fantasies and mysteries of sleep, accessible perhaps to psychoanalytic semioticians. Marquez is not obligated to explicate the premises of his textuality, apart from producing the text itself, the
4. My hearing. Selected conference (1990). papers were published in Ohnuki-Tierney

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authorization of his authorship. As author, his relation to life may be posited as the text he writes. Unlike Marquez, Geertz cannot sleep on it, but must explain himself. His work expounds argument. For field anthropologists in general, the embattled formations of ethnographic representation take shape in the lived spaces between there and here, now and then, other and self. Unlike the text-mediated sources of the literary theorist or historian, the field experiences of anthropologists are embodied sensorially, and the absence/presence of these embodiments in their written work is integral to its textualization. In his introduction to Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986) and in the essays of The Predicamentof Culture (Clifford 1988b), Clifford complements and extends Geertz. Clifford focuses on a quintessential dilemma of the field anthropologist-how to authorize the authority of subjective knowledge by inscribing it persuasively as objective, thereby endowing the immediacy of fieldwork with the status of a transparent template of the scientific method. (This is also the topic of Vincent Crapanzano's [1986] essay in Writing Culture and is raised in Paul Rabinow's [1986].) Until recently this dilemma was treated as a divisible and therefore invisible problem. Either anthropologists took the constructed character of their texts for granted, and therefore as unproblematic, or they focused on questions of intersubjectivity in the field without the sustained analysis of data. Rarely were both aspects of the dilemma given penetrating voice within the same work. From its inception, fieldwork anthropology has been pervaded by these dialectical tensions between subjectivity and objectivity, tensions that are reproduced in the oxymoronic, near-parodic formulation of the method of "participant observation" (Does this mean observing participants? Participating in observation? Observing self-participation? Observation/participation?).5 Yet the oxymoron is highly generative of perspectives and ideas since anthropological epistemologies emerge to an important degree from subject/object tensions in participant observation. Nevertheless, Clifford and others maintain that these tensions are manageable only by textual sleights-of-the-writing-hand. Accordingly, Tyler (1984a: 84) likens ethnography to "a textual practice intended to obscure its textual practices in order to present a factual description of 'the way things are,' as if they had not been written and as if an ethnography really were a 'picture' of another way of life." Prominent among these practices, according to the "writing culture" crowd, are the masking of anthropology's colonialist visage as well as anthropology's scientistic claim to the representation of others, appropriated through holistic
5. In Anthropology through the Looking-Glass, Herzfeld (1987) is perhaps the first anthropologist to label participant observation "oxymoronic."

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concepts like culture and social structure. Such practices excise the voices of those others from the text. Yet there are no stable, neutral vantage points. Exposing this, adherents of postmodern ethnography insist, must result in the reorganization of the writing (What else is there?) of anthropology, under the critical yet benign aegis of history and literary criticism.6 These critics argue that anthropology is constituted through historical formations and in turn constitutes projects of writing in history. These were the grounds of its authorship, of its authority to authorize its accounts as authoritative during periods of Western hegemony. These too are the grounds of anthropology's loss of the authoritative representation of others, once it is reconstituted as historical and therefore processual and unfinished, rather than ahistorical and mythic. Academic anthropology is a Western construct premised on stable, superior centers of knowledge/power (here ... now) that exercise camouflaged control over colonial peoples who are reconfigured in Western tropes and images (there . . . then) (cf. Fabian 1983). But in these times of perpetual displacement, of the fragmentation of supposedly fixed social orders, and of movements of people and goods within world systems, the monological ideologies of anthropology are crumbling, and a new ethnography is emerging. The dust jackets of The Predicamentof Culture and Writing Culture iconize the intentions of their project. The cover illustration of The Predicamentof Culture is of back-to-back images of White Man, a character in Igbo masquerades. The face of the Igbo performer is swathed and concealed. On his own head he carries another, that of a sculpted white colonial official (or anthropologist?) under a topee. The performer holds an open notebook and a pen, ready to inscribe and capture the other. The Igbo, muffled and effaced by colonial power, is silenced and dominated in the construction of the conventional text (this interpretation is Kapferer's [1988a: 96]). The iconicity of the cover photograph of Writing Culture is more involuted: Stephen Tyler "in the field" (the photograph's caption), hunched over his notepad and engrossed in writing (the author is what he writes-a letter to his parents? his grocery list? field notes?), oblivious to the natives squatting behind him and staring at his back as it curves obliquely away from them (on this dust jacket, see also Paine 1990: 43). The anthropologist is doubly in the text-within the book and in his writing-and quadruply ambiguous, stretched be6. In an extreme case, Tyler (1986a: 45) advocates either giving "up on writing altogether" or achieving "by written means what speech creates without simply imitating speech." Tyler's call for the praxis of the evocative in ethnographic writing would do away with both dualism and dialectic, and therefore with the powers of the oxymoronic participant observation.

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tween irony and parody. Is he an irony of the modern (writing his text objectively, as if the living natives were irrelevant to this)? A deliberate parody of the modernist (the text is what counts since writing is the praxis that matters)? An unintentional parody of the postmodernist (the natives are in the picture, the field, yet are excluded from text-building)? Or, back to irony, but now of the postmodern (there are only fragments, of which the ethnographer is one, but what of the photograph?)? As a character in the noir thriller Blindside says: "Photographs lie; diagrams tell the truth" (Bayer 1990: 98). Is this the reason for the photograph? Or is this indeed an unintended parodic commentary by postmodernists on themselves? Is it at all important that such differences are made to exist? Probably it is, since Clifford and the Writing Culture crowd argue that new understandings of ethnography open up the text to the polyphonic voices and dialogic contestations of those who reclaim the right to represent themselves textually. One major premise is that all persons are ideologically and historically constituted beings who exist through changing contexts of power. Since all persons produce (rather than interpret) themselves and one another, they take positions of emergent political import, of creativity and resistance, that reposition themselves and others in relation to asymmetries of power. Because anthropological texts exclude or orchestrate these clamoring voices under the pretext of the truth-values of realism-science, obhas represented otherness as overly jectivity, theory-anthropology holistic, timeless, stable, integrated, and homeostatic. Absent from their own texts (cf. Handelman 1993), their omniscient gaze peering from everywhere but from nowhere in particular, anthropologists block out the ambiguities, ironies, and allegories that constitute lived realities. Given these anachronisms within postcolonial historical formations, conventional anthropology has lost its ideological mandate to control ethnography. Introducing WritingCulture,Clifford states that postmodern ethnography is "an emergent interdisciplinary phenomenon," spreading to historical ethnography (thus "the new cultural history" [Hunt 1989]), to cultural criticism (thus "the new historicism" [Veeser 1989]), and so forth. The ethnographer's "distinctively intimate, inquisitive perspective turns up in history, literature, advertising, and many other unlikely places" (Clifford and Marcus 1986: 23). Described generally and ingenuously, ethnography is "simply diverse ways of thinking and writing about culture from the standpoint of participant observation . .. a form of personal and collective self-fashioning" (Clifford 1988b: 9). Since present-day truths are fragmentary, politically contesting one another and historically unfinished, the ethnographic standpoint is a "historical site of narrative authority" (ibid.: 99).

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Clifford takes up, in scintillating ripostes, a variety of ethnographic endeavors and writings, as would the literary critic take up works of literature, but less in terms of style (unlike Geertz) and more as allegories reflecting the historical formation of their fashioning. Marcel Griaule, the great French ethnographer of West Africa, is shown to premise his work on the existence of cultural information that the natives keep secret. These hidden truths were brought to light first through rhetorical modes of interrogation that extracted "confessions" of knowledge from the natives and then by Griaule's undergoing native initiations, thereby partaking of their cultural revelations. In the process, this ethnography was made more dialogical since both ethnographer and natives actively participated in its production. Clifford compares Joseph Conrad's cultural liminality in the Congo and Bronislaw Malinowski's in the Trobriands. Conrad comes off better, not just differently, since textually his perspective toward representational truth is ironic and reflexive. He recognizes the fictiveness of his fictions, thus knowing himself through the limited practice of storytelling. He thereby fashions compelling relationships of self and other. By contrast, Malinowski is grandiose in his textual designs, devoting himself in all apparent earnestness to inventing "realistic cultural fictions" that are, after all, expressions of and solutions to his own dilemmas. These fictions take "Trobriand" forms because he happened to be there, a European at the eroding edge of colonialist disintegration. Modern anthropology expresses the dilemma of the loss of colonial hegemony and attempts to fix domination in place by textualizing natives ahistorically through scientific objectivity. This was done by professionalizing fieldwork and by installing Malinowski as the apical ancestor of fieldwork methods. In his contribution to Writing Culture, Clifford (1986b) contends, further, that anthropological ethnography is narrative, implicitly akin to the ritualistic performances of symbolic action that Geertz (1973: 448) limns in relation to the Balinese: "a Balinese reading of Balinese experience, a story they tell themselves about themselves." However, Clifford's storytellers and audiences are European; their stories are neither symbolic nor interpretive, but allegorical, and the postcolonial objects of their ethnographic desire are no longer localized and passive. A number of contributors to Writing Culture read scholarly texts in complementary ways. Most prominent is Renato Rosaldo's (1986) comparison of an Evans-Pritchard work on the Nuer, a Nilotic people, and Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou. Rosaldo discloses that Ladurie suppresses the will-to-power pervading the textualities of Inquisition confessions in order to invoke their will-to-truth about fourteenth-century peasant society. This "truth" turns out to be also that of Annales his-

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toricity, of the longue duree of French history, that enables Ladurie to position himself and the Montailloux within a fictive, mutual space of psychological kinship. Rosaldo finds "troubling" parallels between the fourteenth-century inquisitor and Evans-Pritchard. E-P surveys the Nuer from the doorway of his tent, under the all-encompassing hegemonic gaze that Rosaldo compares to panopticon surveillance, in Foucault's use of Bentham's model. However, the knowledge/power juncture popularized by Foucault holds only if knowledge compels the use of power. The Inquisition was predicated on this conception. So too is the panopticon gaze power not because it sees all, but because it torques this vision into the individuation of the person, into an imposed division of labor, into relations of production that connect the two, and into the protobureaucratic domination of the anonymous officials who control this machine (Handelman 1981: 6-12; Shamgar-Handelman and Handelman 1991: 307-9). E-P's power to view and inscribe the Nuer, hardly Kafkaesque, pales by comparison. Like many of the Writing Culture contributors, Rosaldo conflates the power of the textualized, literary gaze with power in the world of living beings. Nevertheless, this conflation reflects the present-day intellectual hyperbole that inflates the marketing of scholarly knowledge in the humanities. If textualizations shape the believable persuasions of the ethnographic work, are these enchantments the limits of knowledge that the text conveys? Other critical ethnographers (so long as they are committed to anthropology) are uneasy with the issue, their responses ambivalent. But Clifford is downright uninterested, since his project is an ethnography of ethnography in which the textuality of both levels represents expressions of authorship in historical moments. Yet when the enterprise of history is questioned in analogous ways, he evinces discomfort with a reflexive position that subordinates objective knowledge to ideological claims, as I will indicate below. Five chapters of The Predicamentof Culture abandon academic ethnography for modernist displacements of cultural artifacts within twentieth-century realities (surrealism, Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, Victor Segalen, Aime Cesaire, collage). And Clifford's talents are fully displayed in an incisive chapter on exhibitions ("Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern") at the Museum of Modern Art and in the Hall of Pacific Peoples at the American Museum of Natural History. MOMA's modernism parallels that of anthropology, appropriating and redeeming otherness by remaking non-Western artifacts in the image of universal, ahistorical features of humanity. Principles of art are made to transcend politics and history in order to posit affinities of classification between tribal and modern. These taxonomic shifts in

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definitions of art correlate with colonial expansion and the structuring of Western markets for "primitive" art. The Hall of Pacific Peoples is a different anthropological tale, a visual narrative of the death of cultures and of their redemption through museum salvage. This "narrative" reifies and freezes the idea of culture in a nonexistent, unchanging "ethnographic present" (itself a prominent anthropological trope, discussed in Marcus [1986]). Like museums, anthropological ethnography is a form of culture collecting, the authenticity of which "is produced by removing objects and customs from their current historical situation" (Clifford 1988b: 228). There is much to appreciate in these critiques of anthropology (I will return to the closing chapter of The Predicamentof Culture below): the repositioning of privileged constructions of reality; the evocation of reflexivity through radical juxtaposition; and the calls for egalitarian polyphony and dialogism in text-building. Experiments with innovative forms of textuality should awaken anthropologists critically to the premises of what they do matter of factly (in this regard the essays in Writing Culture by Michael Fischer [1986] and Stephen Tyler [1986b] are noteworthy). Anthropology needs skeptical self-examination, not canonical scholasticism. Nevertheless, important issues are papered over, dissipated, or even excised. Some should be introduced into this discussion of critique. The Distinctiveness of Anthropology Modern anthropology emerged from the conjuncture of two radical formations, on their surface utterly incompatible with one another. One was the implementation of an absolute hegemony over others that denied the relevance of otherness, except through the imagination and practice of domination-romantic selfhood as the template of otherness, of otherness backgrounding selfhood. This was the colonialist vision of the universal stratification of humankind under European control, one that led to the extermination of otherness in praise of selfhood. The second, converse formation was the intense yet no less romantic interest in puzzles of intersubjectivity, and therefore of unique differences in constellations of otherness and selfhood-of otherness foregrounding selfhood. In the twentieth century, fieldwork anthropology cohered under the hierarchical protection of the first, though often in opposition to colonial domination.7 Anthropology also took shape through the
7. Works and Lives highlights Evans-Pritchard'scolonialist attitudes during his irregular army service in a time of crisis, the first years of World War II, when colonial powers, British and Italian, confronted one another in the Sudan. However, those works, such as E-P's study of the Sanusi order in Cyrenaica, that are critical of imperialism are ignored.

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pervasive relativism and coevalness of the second. These tensionsthe uneasy rootedness in and confrontation with Western social formations, together with the quest for egalitarian intersubjectivity-are dissonant sources of the strong antinomian streak that has pervaded anthropology. Having served as wellsprings of creativity, these tensions should not be reduced, polemics aside, to facile oppositions between universalism and relativism, objectivity and subjectivity, science and humanism. The development of fieldwork anthropology in Britain and the United States constituted a radical break with all other academic disciplines that studied the human condition, in relation to the apprehension (the threefold meaning is intended) of otherness in its collective dimensions. The point is important to emphasize because critical ethnography glides over it in blurring genres to historicize and textualize the production of ethnographic knowledge. Fieldwork anthropology insisted on living presence-indeed, played with presence and absence (there . . . here/here . . . there)-on trying to know about others as members of living collectivities that they themselves comprehended as such. This entailed imagining a discipline in which the ethnographer's perceptions of others were formed interactively through relationships that subjected each party to the other. All in all, fieldwork anthropology has evinced a commitment to living persons and living collectivities. But I would go much further than this. By trying to emphasize presence in its contacts with others, fieldwork anthropology became the sole academic discipline of the human condition to objectify and to reify living beings as collective subjects. As a result, anthropology has strained ever since to straddle the enigmatic shifting of others from active subjects in their own lives to passive objects in ethnographic texts. But otherness has been so crucial to fieldwork anthropology only because this collective otherness is human and alive. More so than in any other humanistic discipline, the paradoxical relationships between the presence and absence of otherness have vexed anthropology from its beginnings. "Graphing the ethnos" may be too important to leave to anthropologists, but the ethnography that emerges from fieldwork should be deconstructed by anthropological critiques of anthropological epistemologies, not by those of literary theory. For the latter, human living is too often a metaphor for text, even a parody of the view of culture as text. The dimensions of this experimental moment (and it is one, despite the polemical efforts of the "writing culture" crowd to reduce it to monographic monologic) are evident on reflection. Within the social sciences, psychology made the individual an essential unit of being

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in his/her own right, one that could be examined under controlled semiotic conditions, often through representations like tests and other measurement devices. While sociology in the United States did develop fieldwork perspectives, grounded in the Chicago school of the 1920s, in present-day sociology these are vibrant but decidedly minor chords. Mainstream sociology emphasizes the absence of scholars from those sites where others live by replacing presence with mediating devices of interrogation, measurement, statistical analysis. Fieldwork anthropology itself broke with the disciplines of history and literary studies since their production of knowledge was always mediated by written texts, indeed by textism. Practitioners of all these disciplines either begin with or quickly pass on to texts of various kinds-they start from constructed objects whose fictional qualities may be highlighted or suppressed. Their initial premise is the necessity of distance from otherness. This reduces otherness to the status of passive object, one whose nearness and subjectivity are hypothetical and so may be reimagined at will. All these disciplines move information from one kind of text (archive, diary, biography, statistic, questionnaire, poem, novel, etc.) to another (monograph, book, article, essay, study, etc.). Mediation between the objectively existing text and its fabrications is an ever-present baseline activity of reading and interpretation. Fieldwork anthropology works contrarily, from the enigmatic authentication of alterity to its problematic objectification; from immediate experiences of otherness to their distanced textual representation. In contrast to history and literary criticism, only anthropology is made to insist, by its practitioners, that the representation of objects of study is interactive and intersubjective. In other words, representation is necessarily the re-presentation of subjectivity.8 Unlike subject/object relationships, there is no stable focus among subjects. The anthropologist is a person of parts, and these personae contradict one another during the process of research. Somewhat like "Sefroui Geertz," the anthropologist moves from paradoxes of intersubjectivity in fieldwork, through predicaments of historicity in relating to field materials that necessarily refer to a past, to dilemmas
8. This hyphenation foregrounds the necessity in anthropology of consciously textualizing the experience and knowledge of fieldwork. In this regard, every representation is indeed a problematic re-presentation. More generally, exposing the hidden hyphen demonstrates that representation is always open to external forces and, therefore, to changes within and among representations through time. The hyphenation is not merely graphical indulgence, but an opening of space by which to indicate that representation entails moral choices-that the aesthetic and the instrumental alike are imbued with moral dilemmas.

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of textual representation and reading that index all of these problems. In practice, unlike the Sefrou tale, all of these interpenetrate and jumble. Nevertheless, to handle them all demands high craft, and most of us are more likely to stress some and suppress others. The point is, however, that anthropology based on fieldwork stands alone, distinct from other social sciences and the humanities. With peripheral exceptions, all of these are text-mediated disciplines in the first instance and thus shielded from otherness by choice or necessity. Making text-building and textualization the heart of the anthropological enterprise can destroy fieldwork anthropology. Genres will be blurred, the experimental moment terminated. Is the cost worth the still unlit candle? Not if fieldwork is reduced ingenuously to "interested people talking with and being interpreted by an interested observer" (Clifford 1988b: 340). Even without the emphasis on language (What else will text-mediated scholars relate to?), this facile representation (akin to good talk in a coffeehouse) is a parody of fieldwork. Yet it follows easily from the capacity of literary theory to appropriate anthropology on the grounds that the latter is merely another text-mediated discipline, another textually fashioned self-representation. Thus Clifford is able to summarize the complex processes of intersubjectivity as follows: "The anthropologist as outsider and participant-observer (existential shorthand for the hermeneutic circle) is a familiar modern topos" (ibid.: 263). So is the literary critic as hegemonic cultural arbiter, lurking under the guise of textual explicator. In the blurring of genres, a hierarchy of academic disciplines is made evident. Literary theory can swallow anthropology, but not the converse. This too is implied by that Geertz in Sefrou. Such a hierarchy is integral to the jockeying for position among disciplines, in which a prominent sub-text (its status as pre-text concealed) is who controls the text. This is no less so for advocates of critical anthropology, given their reliance on textual critique, and despite their rhetorical aims of dissolving all stable centers of power in the name of the greater egalitarian good. Perhaps the Western anthropological exercise is impossible. Perhaps inequality in intersubjectivity is as necessary to turning life into fieldwork as it is to turning fieldwork into text. Perhaps the perfect praxis of self and other would create an utter lack of interest in research results. But perhaps its impossibility is the very strength of the enterprise. I quoted Geertz to the effect that an advantage of anthropology is that no one knows what it is. I prefer it this way. Outside of major academic centers there are no canonical anthropologies, despite what the "writing culture" crowd says. Anthropology was and is a dynamic field, its boundaries amorphous, allowing many of us the autonomy

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to fashion our own ways so long as we do not become satellites of the intellectual oikumene. The Fictionsof Anthropology It is not surprising, given their excoriation of claims for authentic representation in anthropology, that a favorite trope of the advocates of the literary turn is ethnography as fiction. Marilyn Strathern points to the realization that ethnographers too were "playing games," but didn't know it. Thus the use of the word "fiction" suggests a "self-conscious playfulness" that is particularly postmodern (Strathern 1987: 264, 265). The rhetoric is provocative, challenging objectivist claims to truth in representations of otherness. Clifford insists that this usage foregrounds ethnography's made qualities, unmasking its provisional, contingent status. The use of "fiction" places authenticity in question. The anthropologist must recognize and reflect on the premises of her own framing.9 Stephen Tyler (1984b) shows just how problematic this sort of textual formulation can be by making honesty in ethnographic writing the issue rather than truth. He identifies the latter with science, with archaic thought in the world of postmodernity (Tyler 1986b: 123). Tyler, a refugee from 1960s cognitive anthropology, with its mathematics and formal logic ("for the cognitive anthropologist cultural anthropology is a formal science" [Tyler 1969: 14]), pushes for ethnography as fantasy, not merely fiction (Tyler 1986b: 139). Since the aim of ethnography is discourse, it can no more be representation (an ideology of control over the appearance of otherness) than it can be interpretation (the imputation of selfhood to otherness). Neither, one may say, is other-wise. Ethnography must be poesis since otherness may be neither known nor experienced textually, but only evoked
9. This reaction has produced the trope of the reflexive anthropologist, writing himself or herself into ethnographic texts as a nexus of active voices, real presences, in dialogue with informants, with social situations, with one's projects and moral dilemmas, and with oneself (cf. Crapanzano 1980; Dominguez 1989; Lavie 1990; Shokeid 1989; Swedenburg 1992). Ironically, their authors present these polyphonic voices as true revelations of self and other, of their intersubjectivity,of their own inner grapplings with dilemmas. At times, such voices make me cry out for truth in self-advertising. Yet the one thing that the postmodern reader cannot do is accept these revelations and meditations as truths about anthropologistauthors in relation to their existential selves and phenomenal conditions. These ethnographic voices of selfhood are artful positionings of impression management related to strategies of textual construction. Even when postmodern ethnographers claim to unveil their agendas, this claim too is authored by the hidden strategies of hypothetical selves as they operate in fictional texts. The trope of the reflexive anthropologist is the artifice of artful self-disclosure, and the trajectory of that trope is one of infinite regress.

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(Tyler 1984a: 95). Poetic evocation, the fantasy of cooperative storymaking between ethnographers and natives, is a therapeutic aesthetic that restructures experience. Knowledge is anachronism.10 All abstraction, any fixing of social life in description and analysis, is made. But Clifford's reliance on fiction's made qualities to deconstruct ethnography slips frictionlessly into its standard usage as "made up," hence make-believe, untrue, not to be believed unless rhetorically and stylistically persuasive. Ethnography need have no articulation to anyone beyond itself so long as it persuades that it does. Sustained fieldwork then becomes optional if one knows how to write persuasively. Fragments of others (interested people talking to interested people) are conjoined in fragmenting essays. With the boundary between the made and the made-up effaced, ethnography and novel conflate. Collage, pastiche, montage . . . and George Marcus: "It is not important that [Raymond] Williams is talking about the novel, whereas we are dealing with ethnography and interpretive analysis. With the latter in fashion, practical problems of description and exposition have become much like the problems of the socialist realist novel in the twentieth century" (Marcus 1986: 190). One difference between ethnography and fiction is, of course, accountability. Ethnographers may be committed to others, writers of fiction to otherness. But to whom is the ethnographer of fiction accountable? (Who gets the royalties? Why don't the plaints over textually appropriating the voices of others extend to monetary benefices, when a U.S. scholar's salary may be the last detail he is willing to disclose about himself?). Or is ethnography just another story-good, bad, indifferent-when hegemonized by fiction? In borrowing from text-mediated disciplines, there is no commitment to anyone beyond the text. These disciplines begin with texts and so are predicated on fictions, rather than beginning with living beings, who are not. None of the writers discussed here does sustained work on how "fiction" is intended. Clifford, for example, uses "serious fiction," "saving fiction," "collective fiction," "saving lie," "enabling fiction," "performed fiction," and "realistic cultural fiction"-but makes no serious effort to distinguish among these. Yet this terminology raises a host of questions: What is the epistemological status of fiction? Is "fiction" a form of fact, "fact" of fiction? Might they be continuous with one another rather than opposites? Are textualizations that fictionally make the
10. Tyler's ethnographic aesthetic should be distinguished from Psychedelic Anthropology, founded by the late Allan Coult in 1960s California. Coult argued that the anthropologist's first field trip should be into the hidden, primitive layers of his or her own mind, revealing archetypes of the history of consciousness (see White and Joseph 1972).

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dead live different from those that inscribe the living? Is the former more like imagining play as "free play" (see Strathern 1987: 267), the latter as playful? (On play, see Handelman 1990: 63-81; 1987b, 1992.) The ingenuousness of facile turns to fiction boomeranged on critical ethnographers during a 1988 American Anthropological Association symposium, "Unveiling Agendas: Person and Power in the Creation of Anthropological Knowledge." Ted Swedenburg's fieldwork on the West Bank prior to the 1987 intifada concerned the 1936-39 Palestinian revolt against the British and led him to adopt a Palestinian position which modified that history. He found that older Palestinians were reluctant to speak of that period, given the bloody infighting occurring then among rival Palestinian factions and the presentday desire to show a united front to the world. Swedenburg insisted that "out of solidarity," he felt "compelled to participate in those veilings and resist a full revelation [of that history] before the holders of power." I Clifford commented that Swedenburg's stance was that of "positioned objective knowledge . . . not something invented or fictional, not suppressing important evidence .... These are historical facts. They are objective, but they're generated by a specific research standpoint." Yet he and others then worried about the limitations of such "positioned knowledge," urging that it not lead anthropologists too far from the truth. Clifford continued, "This very partiality . . . raise[s] strong questions about the truth of the account we're getting. I'm worried about our objectivity" (Coughlin 1988: A5, A8). Of special interest here is that Clifford, a historian who advocates the fictions of anthropology, responded as he did to this enactment of the framing of history.12
11. Swedenburg (1992: 483) has since elaborated his position, stating, "I inevitably must select my evidence to make my argument ... for ... all academic discourse is selective, conducted through arbitrary closures," through what Clifford (1988b: 7) calls "powerful 'lies' of exclusion and rhetoric." The argument of theory precedes the evidence of data. Theory is ideological. Scholarly work consists of documenting the ideologically expected. The author legitimates this self-fulfillment of prophecy by being self-conscious about his ideological commitments and by taking responsibility for them. Intellectual discourse becomes a contest between ideologies, with its outcome decided by some sort of historically situated popular consensus: that version of history written by the winners. 12. The concept of "positioned knowledge" veers very close to the problem of who controls the writing of the past as a key to the interpretation of the present. Clifford steers clear of this morass by implicitly positing the historian as an encompassing, value-free researcher in the contingent present. But this continues to implicate the contradictions between relativism and truth. Tyler, as noted, solves this by plumping for honesty rather than truth in ethnographic writing. Just how problematic this maneuver is for the historian who (honestly) claims to control all of the avail-

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Clifford's response abruptly foregrounds the hidden role of hierarchy in the claims made by postmodern ethnography for the democratization of the text. I want to take up two aspects of hierarchy here. The first interjects the criticism that scholars of textuality have literally ignored one of the most elementary constitutive grounds of texts and how they are constrained: namely, the logic of organization of the book. The second addresses the hierarchy of disciplines that is implicit in the claims made by critical ethnography and that follows from Clifford's reaction, as noted above. Text Is Not Book All of the scholars discussed here advocate shattering hegemony over the ethnographic text and decentering the authority of its textual practices, yet all ignore the hierarchical premises of the book, premises that literally hold the text together. The following brief excursus argues that once these premises are recognized, their effects on the text must be taken into account. This influence constrains the extent to which the text may be opened to the polyphonic and the dialogical. "The book" here is a euphemism for any single, published scholarly work (monograph, article, essay, etc.). One must ask whether the logic of the book's structure is merely that of a practical device, a container that serves and is identified with the text, or whether it is an epistemology for locating the text in spatial and sequential (and therefore temporal) coordinates that influence how the text may be read. The structuring of the book fits well with theories of hierarchical organization (e.g., Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell's Theory of Logical Types).The overall space of the book as an object is produced and usually owned by a publisher. The publisher encompasses the book; the book encompasses whatever is within it. Most of its exterior space, the borders that separate it from entities of the same and other classes of phenomena, is called the "binding" and includes the "cover." As befits boundaries, the binding is of a different weight, thickness, and composition than the interior of the book. Parts of the binding (typically, the cover and "spine") are occupied by the "title" or name of the book. It is a particular, named entity. The primary name of the book may also be supplemented by a secondary, suborable evidence is demonstrated by the ongoing disputes over the historicization of German National Socialism (cf. Broszat and Friedlander 1988; Himmelfarb 1992: under the Nazi regime (Dow 13) and the analysis of folklore studies (Volkskunde) and Lixfeld 1991). These controversies brutally intrude powerful dilemmas of truth in writing in ways that are simply not accounted for by the "writingculture" crowd. (Contrasting moral attributions in fictional and historical representations of the Nazi genocide are discussed by Berel Lang [1990: 117-61].)

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dinated name, or "subtitle." The title is often more abstract or poetic, the subtitle more specific or factual. A named book usually has a named author or editor, or a group of these. Although a named book may exist without a named author (i.e., "anonymous"), it is much more difficult for an author to publish an unnamed book (this is indeed playing with frames-think of the referential paradoxes of classification thereby generated). The author is responsible for the text contained within the covers of the book. The text is subordinate to the author; the author is subordinate to the book as a named entity with an independent, printed existence; the book is subordinate to the publisher. This logic of hierarchy drives the text into lineal organization: title page, table of contents, chapters numbered I to N, pages numbered 1 to n. Chapter I is an introduction of some sort that signifies its function of beginning and contextualizing. Chapter N is a conclusion of some sort that signifies its function of closing and contextualizing. If the book is thought to be well-organized, each successive chapter will depend for its coherence and comprehension on the chapters that precede it. Jacket illustrations and photographs or other artwork embedded in the text are integral refractions of the organization of the book. The entire structure of the book overdetermines hierarchy, encompassment, subordination. The general and the particular are rarely confounded. The book is a logical construction for the suppression of the paradoxical and the enigmatic, which are produced by the confusion of levels of abstraction, by the erasure of borders of classification. The text lives within these strictures. The text, one might say, is tyrannized by the book-by a mechanism for the appropriation of discourse, one that is compatible with our cultural ideas of authorship and proprietorship of knowledge.13 So too does the book's inexorable sequencing, carried to the extreme in the modern scientific paper (cf. Beer and Martins 1990: 172), set the grounds for the writing of Western narrative, with its reliance on the temporal structures of beginnings and endings. (Among conventional genres, poetry has
13. Proprietorship over the authoring of textual production is not universal. About Bengali jatra playwrights, for example, Carole Farber comments that "while they are paid to write plays and while they relinquish claims over them, [they] do not keep copies of their plays, do not expect to be cited when the play is either rewritten or sold for 'movie or performance' rights, do not remember the titles they attribute to their plays, and do not assert the right to control the deployment of their literary energies" (Seguin and Farber 1978: 343). Farber attributes these characteristics of authorship to Bengali conceptions of creative energy as part of cosmic energy, which cannot be owned but merely possessed or shared.

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the greatest freedom from the constraints of the book. Here, Tyler's advocacy of poetic evocation is more interesting.) Postmodern ethnographers can promote the fullness of the dialogical and the polyphonic the interplay of book and textonly by ignoring context-here, thereby contradicting their own principled intentions to contextualize their texts. Short of a revolution, technological and epistemological, perhaps requiring alternatives to writing, I cannot see doing away with these structural tyrannies that constrain the ethnographic text. In this regard, as stimulating as it may be, opening the ethnographic text to the dialogical and the polyphonic amounts to merely flying a pretty streamer of aesthetic protest that in fact reaffirms the very premises of hierarchy that organize our texts as they do. BlurredGenres or Hierarchyof Disciplines? between anthropology and both literary theory and boundaries The blurred. The Society for Humanistic Anthrobecome have history American Anthropological Association, sponof the a section pology, sors competitions in the writing of short fiction and poetry by anthropologists and gives an award for ethnographic writing in the name of the late Victor Turner. Geertz and his "thick description" have been taken up not only by cultural historians (Walters 1980), but also by literary theorists, as fragments of Geertzian anthropology have become the New Historicism (Veeser 1989). James Clifford (1988b: 94) has called Stephen Greenblatt a "participant-analyst." (Greenblatt can't observe Shakespearean England, yet he can participate in its textual representations, can't he? Does the anthropologist do any more, any differently?) Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak refers to herself and Edward Said as "wild anthropologists": "anthropologists" because they went to live, to do "field work," and to go native in the West; "wild" because they then turned on "the scandal of [their] production" (Spivak 1989: 290). In these text-mediated disciplines and factions, theory is in discourse with theory, texts with texts. Living persons, living collectivities get uneasy, sidelong glances, for they are out of sync with abstract ideological programmatics. The Western intellectual game, to paraphrase Foucault (1979: 148), is to appropriate and subjugate the discourses of other literati, creating new genres of textual mastery. If, to cultural criticism, every difference of opinion is political (see Mitchell 1983), is anything political, in the sense of making a difference in the worlds that follow different drummers? Is reading doing? Do textmediated disciplines know much else? Is this what fieldwork anthropology should turn into? People are, at times, the passion of fieldwork anthropology. What are the passions of the new histories and liter-

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ary theories for which a key metaphor is strategy, life as game? In the worlds of fundamentalisms, nationalisms, mass death, "the deconstruction of society is way ahead of the deconstruction of literary texts" (Friedman 1987: 40). The advocates of literary turns in anthropology are naive if they do not recognize the intentions of historians and cultural critics toward anthropology-or, for that matter, their own political agendas in their efforts to restructure anthropology's priorities. At the moment, literary theory and history are hungry disciplines, with numerous practitioners driven to self-advertisement in the purveying of their wares. This is especially so for literary criticism becoming literary theory turning into cultural criticism, which is still limited methodologically to textual analysis, but needs a larger corpus to inflate its symbolic capital as arbiter of intellectual substance. In the intellectual faddism that flourishes in the United States, authority over textuality is conflated with societal power (see Sangren 1988: 411). The embedded premises of political praxis are weak indeed. Given its colonial conjunctures, its unreflexive textualizations, anthropology has become a good acquisition for the merchandising of poetic practices in the American academic marketplace. The aims are blunt, as Gayatri Spivak blurbs (the neologic verb evokes the comicstrip quality of dust-jacket endorsements) that Smadar Lavie's (1990) admirable work, The Poetics of Military Occupation,"calls into question the very game of anthropology." In keeping is Edward Said's (Are you now or have you ever been a card-carrying ... anthropologist?) pronouncement: "It will be said that I have connected anthropology and empire too crudely, in too undifferentiated a way; to which I respond by asking how-and I really mean how-and when they were separated" (Said 1989: 214). Thus formulated (I hold here in my hand a list . . . ), the question is unanswerable, as Said intends (ibid.: 217, 220). The story of Geertz in Sefrou reproduces the hierarchy of disciplines that lurks around only a few more bends along this route, as genres are blurred and we traffic more in one another's advertising. That little narrative is framed in the progressive phases of Geertz's day, metaphorizing the maturation of intellect and the actualization of self in relation to scholarly hierarchy. The morning crush of living others in the bazaar is supplanted by intellectualized distance as the day grows older. The self withdraws from outside encounters with others, first into home and the mediation of text, and then further into the interior of self, the scholar communing with himself. So too, history and literature supplant fieldwork anthropology in their maturity and mediated distance from otherness. In the work of Clifford and others of the "writing culture" crowd,

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anthropology is subordinated to history and literary theory in accordance with these disciplines' respective capacities to deconstruct the grounds for the representation of otherness. History's premier place is a function of the temporal gaze, and therefore of displacement. However the temporal gaze may be qualified or made reflexive, it remains necessarily out-of-context, detached from the times into which it must look. The disavowal of metanarratives notwithstanding, the temporal gaze is always more or less encompassing because the past that it would apprehend cannot be experienced, except through conceits like that of Greenblatt as participant-analyst. The historian appropriates the past, turning objects into subjects. History is empowered by its temporal displacement to master the past. Since everything occurs through time, history is the master template for the deconstruction of all tropes, all fixations in time, all formations through time (see, however, MacCannell and MacCannell 1982: 155). Consider an advertising leaflet for the trendy interdisciplinary journal History and Anthropology(the lineal sequencing of this journal's name, of course, tells the whole story of hierarchy between these disciplines). The blurb states that the journal will stress the "mutually destabilizing relationship" between history and anthropology, and conthe contingency of anthropology, and the tinues: "History demonstrates of multivocality anthropology can questionthe authoritative claims and narrative forms of conventional history" (my emphases). This spells out the meta-message of hierarchy: history's capacity to deconstruct anthropology is unconditional, its rhetoric imperiously declarative; while anthropology's capacity to deconstruct history is qualified, more possible than actual, and in any case partial. Clifford (1988b: 112) expands on the hierarchical relationship of history to anthropology: "The truths of cultural description are meaningful to specific interpretive communities in limiting historical circumstances." Moreover, "unlike a historian, an anthropologist drawing on fieldwork cannot-even in theory-control all the available evidence" (ibid.: 235). Since ethnography is formed through historically constituted moments, its epistemological status is in the historian's grip. Postmodern literary theories claim the capability of deconstructing all texts precisely because these are understood as constructions-fictions-and therefore as contingent on periodicity. That is, the process of construction-building is necessarily structured through time. Comprehended this way, postmodern literary theory need not eschew various structuralisms, while being conspicuously evocative of change. But according to the "writing culture" crowd, conventional anthropology is ahistorical and insists on the factuality, rather than the facticity, of its findings. This produces synchronic models of functionalist clo-

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sure that have little power to deconstruct themselves. Critical ethnography proposes an alternative, hierarchical model: in the name of representation, of ethnography and textuality, anthropology should be colonized, domesticated, and dominated by history and cultural criticism. The ironic upshot would be the reproduction and preservation of a hierarchy of nineteenth-century disciplines from which the experimental moment of anthropology took flight. Different fabric, same dress. In the concluding and longest chapter of The Predicamentof Culture, Clifford, the historian of ethnographic representation, turns ethnographer, sitting through a lengthy 1977 trial in which the Mashpee Tribal Council of Cape Cod sued for possession of lands lost through nineteenth-century legislation. The real purpose of the suit was to determine whether the collectivity calling itself the Mashpee Tribe was a tribe and therefore entitled to tribal land. The trial was a complex discourse on the constitutive grounds of collective self-fashioning through the negotiation of "Indian" and "American" identities. Clifford uses published accounts of Mashpee history, social life, and litigation as well as the trial record and his notes. His choice of the courtroom context is strategic: the venue, the issues, the information permitted to be introduced as evidence are all determined by dominant cultural categories. It is in these official terms and in this judgmental place that the Indian accounts will be judged as persuasive self-inventions. Thus he prefers to keep his distance from the participants ("a courtroom is more like a theater than a confessional" [ibid.: 291]). Yet Clifford is a historian, and his distance from the living happens to resonate with the research styles of textmediated disciplines. Then, too, a courtroom is one of those American cultural locales where narrative is crucial, where interaction is easily framed as transcript and text, where saying is in very large measure doing: the kind of place where a cultural critic can feel at home. (The courtroom is also not unfamiliar with assertions of historical truth"swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but....") Clifford intersperses his account with sections on history and sociology, references to witnesses ("she looks like any American teenager" [ibid.: 301]), testimony, critical musings and commentary, and ironic asides (such as the following, during a discussion of totemic symbols: "suddenly some of us notice, just above [the judge's head] on the wall of the federal courtroom, a large eagle" [ibid.: 321]). We presumably know just how "any American teenager" looks, just what the behavior of people simultaneously noticing something is like, and so forth. The technique is collage/pastiche, with registers of voice, open or indeterminate borders, a contingent segment of a contested historical struggle. As fieldwork anthropology, as ethnography, the re-

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suits are ordinary, the conclusions conventional, the techniques (for all their fashionable veneer) a half-century old, borrowed or bartered, second- or thirdhand, from Max Gluckman's (1940) "situational analysis," which later flourished at the University of Manchester, through the "social drama" perspectives of Victor Turner and others. Is this what we anthropologists are being asked to accept in the name of remaking disciplines, in exchange for ethnography, this and programmatic rhetoric? What indeed is involved here on the anthropology side of things? Writing Culture came out of a 1984 seminar at the School for American Research in Santa Fe. The participants had powerful ideological commitments to converging theoretical perspectives, and the group formation of the seminar reflected personal and intellectual networks (Clifford and Marcus 1986: 20; Rabinow 1988: 430). Brilliant reflexive ethnographies, like that of Jean Briggs (1970), were given little attention since they had not foregrounded the correct ideologies. In 1986 there appeared the first issue of the journal Cultural Anthropology,the official organ of the newly founded Society for Cultural Anthropology, a section of the American Anthropological Association. Cultural Anthropology speedily established itself as the premier arena of cultural criticism in American anthropology, aimed particularly at anthropology's productions of knowledge, including those of ethnography.14 In this regard the journal medium was understood to have strategic value, as was the formation of a working alliance of anthropologists, historians, and cultural critics (Marcus 1991: 122-23). Of the nine contributors to WritingCulture, seven joined the and one (George Marcus) has editorial board of CulturalAnthropology, since completed his term as the journal's first editor.15
14. The social and institutional development of critical ethnography may best be contrasted to that of ethnomethodology in 1960s American sociology. Ethnomethodologist scholars bounded and bonded themselves as a select, secluded group, privy to a radical program (which it was), whose members distributed their studies and lectures in mimeographed form among themselves (see Mullins 1973: 183-212, for an early account). Ethnomethodology snuck into sociology by its back door. Postmodern ethnography's seductions are blatant, however, its assaults more in keeping with 1980s academic agitprop. 15. The journal publishes unintentional parodies of anthropology, thereby parodying itself in the first editor's postmodernist enthusiasm for importing models from other disciplines. Thus an anthropologist (Weiss 1990: 419, 427) canonizes a (Radcliffe-Brownian) anthropology that has rarely been mentioned in the last three decades in order to counterpose her own source of inspiration, Bakhtin. Yet she uses Bakhtin as a way of thinking about social relationships that was developed powerfully in anthropology during the 1960s and 1970s (actor, agency, strategic interaction and transaction, conflict theory) from sources unrelated to Bakhtin. These works are ignored both by the author (strategically?out of ignorance?) and by the journal's editor (not out of ignorance). Their complicity amputates signifi-

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In a sweeping critique of critical ethnography, Steven Sangren (1988: 406) comments that the "endeavor necessarily constitutes a play for socially constituted authority and power." He adds that the "authority" created in textuality has its strongest effects not in the hegemonized Third World, "but in the academic institutions in which its author participates" (ibid.: 412). Among the contributors to Writing Culture, only Paul Rabinow (1986) seriously raises such issues. The "writing culture" crowd avoids addressing the socially constituted grounds of its own historically contingent endeavors,16displacing these by the acceptable academic trope (hardy swimmers, all) of intellectual crosscurrents. Clifford (1988a: 425) responded to Sangren's critique by insisting that there are ideas and changes abroad "that cannot be reduced to disciplinary border wars," while Fischer, Marcus, and Tyler (1988: 426) pontificated that "multiple readerships and uses of anthropological ideas outside the academy make [our] concerns with ethics, reflexivity and the like far more important than Sangren's myopic concerns with power and authority within anthropology departments." Yes, indeed. Cui bono? (No question.) AlternativeAgendas: DeconstructingAnthropology from Within There are massive ironies submerged in the views of postmodernity essayed by the "writing culture" crowd and their collaborators in cultural criticism. Emphases on historical contingencies, discursive formations, and other relativisms are most timely just as the Rest come West. The hegemonic authority of the West over the Rest is now said to be fragmented, made egalitarian. By the same token (and conveniently, for Westerners), the Rest coming West are denied any such authoritative perspectives on the West. The political and aesthetic discourses of Western postmodernity grant voices to the Fourth and Third Worlds, but deny that these voices can speak authoritatively within Western postmodern formations. From this perspective, it is too late for the Rest to become a dominant formation in the postcolonial West since such otiose absolutism is crumbling. Accorded respect, the voices of the Rest will have to compete nonetheless for prime time along with everyone else. The deconstruction of anthropology's others
cant productions from the body of anthropological knowledge as if these had never developed. Instead (in this version), anthropology is made to descend from a new ancestor, Bakhtin, whose conceptions of sociation were much more simpleminded than those of the anthropologies thus dumped into the garbage can of history, but whose cultural-studies credentials are considered correct. 16. Interestingly, only one of the contributors to Writing Culture is a woman, Mary Louise Pratt (1986), and feminist theory has almost no place in the volume.

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will hold no less in the future for another anthropology's inscriptions of the West. Michael Herzfeld's work on Greece is especially interesting in these respects. Herzfeld is an anthropologist and a semiotician, trained in classics. In Anthropologythroughthe Looking-Glass(Herzfeld 1987), he deconstructs anthropology as a European discipline that occasionally studies its own Grecian periphery. Anthropology is modeled here in its entirety according to European parameters. Looked at in this way (with the help of Vico, Herzfeld's intellectual forbear here), anthropology becomes a Eurocentric product of European formations of nationalism and their discourse of domination. Anthropology begins at home, not elsewhere, as do its relationships to otherness. Eurocentrism and anthropology foreground one another, enabling the deconstruction of both in relation to each other. The theoretical practices of anthropology reproduce those of the European nation-state. Both propagate hierarchy. Anthropology's differentiation of modern from primitive parallels that of center from periphery in statist thought. So too does anthropology's valuing of ahistorical structure over historical process reproduce nationalist preferences for mythic origins and eternal verities over the local, contextualized pragmatics of social action. The absolutist attempts by Greek statism to shape Greek identity are echoed in anthropology's positing of definitive otherness. The delineation of collective identity, and therefore of otherness, is the project of both nationalism and anthropology. Herzfeld's model depends on the appropriation of time and the segmentation of social order. Thus, in return for their political independence, Greeks were cast by the European powers as primordial ancestors of European civilization who then became, in modernity, degraded descendants of themselves. Eurocentric historicity suppressed time (as does myth) by co-opting the origins and histories of others, all the while postulating unbroken "cultural continuities" between past and present. In relation to the European powers, Greeks were made European aboriginals-passive, fatalistic, frozen in absolute time with no capacity for agency. On a lower level, these relationships were reproduced within the Greek state, with the latter arrogating to itself the role of the European powers and projecting that of the aboriginals onto rural Greeks. Greece internalized those problems of otherness that are so central to anthropology's visions of humanity. Herzfeld's model is one of hierarchical segmentation in social order. Unity and inclusion at the higher level presuppose division and exclusion at the lower. Each level reproduces distinctions of hierarchy and inequality, resonating with the Greek proverb "not all the fingers are equal [in length]" (ibid.: 165), so long as it is understood that all of

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these fingers are parts of the same hand.17 Europe includes Greece, but only to subordinate and marginalize it. Although the centralized, bureaucratic Greek state emphasizes unity among its constituent parts, it cannot suppress internal segmentary divisions that flourish from the bottom up. So while patri-groups are divided against one another within the village, they unite as a village against other villages, as do villages within a region against other regions in the state. These systematic divisions reproduce the relationship between Europe and Greece. And at each concentric level, people perceived as close are also seen as more likely allies against those perceived as more distant. The disemic play of oppositions pervades all levels of segmentation (ibid.: 123). Disemia is predicated on polar-ideal types of self-display and self-recognition (ibid.: 114). Self-display indexes higher-level social regularity and the exterior, public self, while self-recognition indexes the subversive denial of social regularity at lower levels and within the privacy of the self. These oppositions are related dialectically through a multiplicity of sign systems. The parameters of each set of oppositions are not fixed but historically and contextually contingent. Disemia relates higher-level rhetorics of official rules, freedom from context, and romantic historicity to lower-level rhetorics of local strategies, context dependency, history, and so forth. In keeping with its European constitution, and similarly to matters Greek, anthropology is likewise pervaded by disemic interplay, by the denial of relativities and by their persistent flourishing. Anthropology often privileges the general over the particular, theory over ethnography, its own deterministic concepts over more indeterminate native ones, its own rules over native practices. In a cognate spirit, anthropology has constructed "honor" and "shame" as a signal cultural discourse among Mediterranean peoples. With respect to Greece, Herzfeld argues cogently that these supposedly native conceptualizations were produced by an emergent division of labor between folklorists and anthropologists. The creation of the discipline of folklore in Greece "helped define the national culture" (Herzfeld 1982: 144). By recording "monuments of the word," folklorists established the ancient ancestorship of contemporary peasants, thereby patriotically legitimating the new Greek state from a philhellenic Eurocentric perspective (Kenna 1991: 137). This emphasized the disemic pole of self-display, the aggressive presentation of the idealized male self that could be glossed as "honor."The exteriority of Greek selfhood became associated with folklore studies. By contrast, anthropology focused more on uncovering intimacies, on the interiority of the concealed,
17. This sort of logic is the basis of Louis Dumont's (1979) telling critique of ungrounded binary oppositions in structuralist analysis.

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on knowledge of the private realities of selfhood, on what could be glossed at all levels as "shame." The honor/shame opposition, projected into native values, is exposed as a contingent construction of national and disciplinary formations.18 In its own right, anthropology reformed dynamic, disemic oppositions into rigid distinctions between types of societies, which then enabled comparative readings. Although rhetorics of segmentation, of honor and shame and other varieties of disemia, may coexist in many social orders, theorizing has suppressed their relativity in favor of typological classifications with evolutionist or functionalist implications. So segmentation has been made a central characteristic of tribal societies, honor and shame of peasant societies, and so forth (Herzfeld 1987: 184). The arguments of Anthropology throughtheLooking-Glassare original more pertinent to anthrocriticisms aside and stimulating. Leaving that are also relevant to The Poetics two I will address pology proper, his Manhood (Herzfeld 1988). Despite discerning attitudes toward of Herzfeld structuralist thinking, unduly restricts himself by using disemia. As an attempt at social dialectics, disemia is betrayed by its roots in the linguistic model of diglossia (Herzfeld 1987: 114). Regardless of the flexibility that Herzfeld tries to introduce, disemia remains limited to conjoining only two notions at a time, resulting in a multiplicity of sign systems pressed into the mold of dualism. So too is the synthesis of classical dialectics generally unmarked in these analyses, turning dialectics into a less telling "dualectics." As is common in anthropological usage (Handelman 1990: 112), these are more the dialectics of reproduction, of the replication of principles of social order, than they are generative of emergent principles and accompanying social forms. Some other conceptualization, equivalent perhaps to a field of simultaneously interacting forces, would be more powerful than a series of oppositions in the disemic mode, even when their substances are relativized as continua. For that matter, such continua may completely destroy the dialectical properties of disemia. Power, in Herzfeld's view, is control over discourse (Herzfeld 1987: 169), a position that he further develops in The Social Production of Indifference(Herzfeld 1992). What is the state, apart from a state of mind? Who are its officials? Are they not locals of one sort or another in many of their daily practices? Are these not persons who practice statism in ways other than rhetoricizing it? Are bureaucracies,
18. The social production of folklore knowledge is receiving increasing critical attention. As anthropology flourished under colonial regimes, so folkloristicstended to focus on the mythologies of primordial nationhood, in the service of the state (cf. Wilson 1976; Linke 1990).

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armies, and weapons systems primarily modes of discourse? (Are ideologies, for that matter?) The notions of power that Herzfeld adopts are neither sufficiently potent nor consequential enough to carry the force of statist control and action. Herzfeld considers the rhetoric of social life the most accessible dimension of social reality (Herzfeld 1987: x). Saying is undoubtedly doing, yet what sort of doing? Especially in the detailed ethnography of The Poeticsof Manhood,it is the sort of doing that tells us about other kinds of doing. Moreover, too little is told about the contexts of these tellings. Instead, the story, the anecdote, the joke or insult often must be read as its own contextualization. Stealing sheep (significant in The Poetics of Manhood) is not the context for telling of sheep-stealing (not significant in The Poetics of Manhood), nor is it the telling itself (significant in The Poetics of Manhood). The reader gets much information on the third, but little on the others. The Poetics of Manhooddetails the rhetoric of segmentation at the village level in Crete. Men are highly aware of the public meaning of their routine self-displays and are preoccupied with concealing their selfknowledge from others. They empower themselves and those close to them with agency, attributing fatalism and passivity to others, in keeping with the segmentary logic by which the Greek state relates to its rural populations, and Europe to Greece. Poetic principles of meaning guide all effective social interaction among men, the male self foregrounding everyday life, indeed leading it. Performative emphasis is placed on "being good at being a man," rather than on "being a good man" (Herzfeld 1988: 16). The book's cover photograph of a row of male figures is an ironic reflection of this emphasis. Three men (two of them armed) and one boy, on the periphery of the row, they are together in their physical closeness to one another, yet separate nonetheless, as each looks elsewhere, posturing himself differently. Only the immature boy's stance looks passive, closed, withdrawn. He shows self-knowledge in public and thus shows that he has yet to learn the difference between self-display and self-concealment. By contrast, the adult men confront their world as iconic exclamations of agon. The picture looks posed, a reflexive, rhetorical commentary on the argument of the book. One example of male performance will suffice here. In the recent past, many of these men were shepherds who, according to their own stories, engaged in sheep-stealing in order to make friends (ibid.: 174). By creating disputes through theft, they invited mediation, and this often resulted in alliances between aggressor and aggrieved, which was the original intent of the thief. Performing a successful act of sheep-stealing proved the worth of his force and guile, thereby showing him to be a worthy ally. In these ways young shepherds could

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establish and extend their social networks of protection and aid. These and other performances are reflexive, improvised, uncertain. They contest the normative designs of hierarchy, subverting the authority of statist, bureaucratic conceptions of social order. For these villagers, "life is regarded as a barren stretch of time, a blank page on which the genuine poet of his own manhood must write as engaging an account as he can" (ibid.: 45). Whether any of this interpretation is the ethnographer's own poeticism is difficult to determine from this sharply honed, self-sealing text in which Herzfeld himself is rarely present (despite claiming elsewhere [Herzfeld 1991: 146] that self-examination is a most useful irony). His writing is a bravura performance intended to be continuous with the rhetoric of village males, "theorizing actors" like himself (ibid.: 141). Herzfeld himself appears in two of The Poetics of Manhood's photographs, both of which are clues to the enactment of his larger project in these books.19 One is captioned "Hospitality for the ethnographer" and plays on the rhetoric of self-display. Herzfeld, front and center, his hands crossed submissively on the table before him, his neck and head extended forward, mouth agape, takes food (most likely meat) directly from the hand-held knife of his Cretan host. The blade is pointing directly into Herzfeld's open mouth. The third-person voice of the caption, in contrast to the centrality of the ethnographer in the picture, signifies his presence in the field, his professional distance from the text (Herzfeld 1988: 134). The second photograph is captioned "Coffeehouse life: outdoor scene in warm weather." The photographer's perspective, diagonal to the viewer's left, shows a cluster of seated men and is triangulated with the unidentified figure of the ethnographer, who is seated just within the picture's far-right margin. The ethnographer looks back at the cluster of men, as does the photographer, but from opposing margins of the frame (ibid.: 150). Both are situated as observers: the photographer-a simulation of the ethnographer-outside the frame, the ethnographerjust within it. Their gaze is distant, capturing the natives in their habitat. This photograph envisions the ethnographer's knowledge of the performance of others, his own self-knowledge made remote from them. These photographs reproduce the disemic argument of Anthropology through the Looking-Glass within The Poetics of Manhood. In the first photograph the self-display of the ethnographer is that of the segmentary outsider, domesticated and dominated by the self-display of
19. In these photographs, which are by Cornelia Mayer Herzfeld, Michael Herzfeld's self-presentation exposes the even tighter disemic weave between Europe and Greece, state and periphery, anthropologist and native, self and other.

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the native male beside him. In the second, the ethnographer's knowledgeable vision (self-recognition that is other-wise) triangulates with that of the photographer to contain and dominate the locals. As in conventional ethnography (which is what The Poeticsof Manhoodis, despite Herzfeld's [1991: 141] protestations), the anthropologist moves from participant (the first photograph) to objective observer (the second photograph), from self-display to display of self-recognition, just as he claims that the Greeks he studies do (and as the Sefroui Geertz does). This, of course, is the kind of deconstruction that Herzfeld does in Anthropology throughthe Looking-Glass. Herzfeld's writing style has come in for comment elsewhere (Damer 1987; Kenna 1991). In my view, it detracts from the potency of his argumentation, the clarity of his insights. His style is claustrophobicindeed, a "thick description" of itself. Geertz's words are embedded as asides, as tributaries of the flow of words that may be followed or not, as the reader desires-if not this one, then perhaps another. Herzfeld's asides continually signify themselves, each and every one insisting on the recognition of its own importance. So the use of word play and of emphasis by italicization and exclamation mark is highly prominent. He insists that the deformation of language is intended to shock us into unearthing our commonsensical assumptions. Nevertheless, his consistencies of style in this regard implicate standardization, not strategy. Style may be considered a matter of taste (Herzfeld 1991: 146), but this will hardly wash for a critical ethnographer of literary bent. Style too is a social construct (Bourdieu 1984). Herzfeld demonstrates that with some imagination and skill one can do fruitful deconstructions of anthropology from within the discipline, rather than turning automatically-and unselectively-to others in the first instance. The strategic blurring of genres has, of course, strategic value. Nevertheless, reflexive anthropology need not be obsessed with the level of individual actors, ethnographer and native, as is often the case in American anthropology. George Marcus (1986: 192) wants ethnography to "convey the quality of its subjects' experience, free of the mediation of customs and institutions, concepts that carry an embedded bias toward seeing order." This smacks of ethnography for people of means, individuals who can pretend to live in unmediated worlds by buying intercessors and shields: middle-brow ethnography for middle-class consumers. However, Herzfeld has demonstrated, from a reflexive perspective, what anthropologists have long knownthat collectivities and their members are inseparable parts of human endeavor.20
20. Bruce Kapferer (1988b) provides a stimulating perspective on reflexive intercultural comparison in anthropology.

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The major test of anthropology is not whether we can import expert wholesalers of deconstruction from neighboring disciplines (Handelman 1987a). Anthropological epistemologies evolve from fieldwork, not from the armchair. The choice of concepts we make often depends on our ethnographic materials, and this should remind us to be discerning in our selection of theoretical positions. Without fieldwork, there is no alternative to moving toward the totalistic embrace of theories from other disciplines. Deconstruction from without then becomes relatively easy since it need not respect the ethos that makes a discipline whatever it is, but it also becomes less valuable if one wishes to maintain a discipline as such. Deconstruction from within is difficult because it must weigh the worth of ethos, recognizing the vacuity of its absence. For this reason it is valuable as an alternative agenda. Reflexive perspectives from various directions are important to anthropology, for the reasons raised throughout this essay.21 Yet if adopted uncritically as fad, doggedly as fashion, the consequences would be akin to unrolling Lewis Carroll's map, made on a mile-tomile scale. Asked whether it had been used much, the mapmaker replied: "It has never been spread out yet. The farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So now we use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well." None. Light is metaphor. References
Bateson, Gregory 1972 Stepsto an Ecologyof Mind (New York: Ballantine). Bayer, William 1990 Blindside(New York: Signet). Beer, Gillian, and Herminio Martins 1990 "Introduction,"special issue on "Rhetoricand Science,"edited by G. Beer 3: 163-75. and H. Martins, Historyof theHumanSciences Biersack, Aletta 1989 "Local Knowledge, Local History: Geertz and Beyond," in Hunt 1989:
72-96.

21. Elsewhere, I have tried to play off texts that are strongly analytical against metacommentaries ("Interludes")on some of the autobiographical grounds that produced these analyses (Handelman 1990). Depending on the contingent circumstances of the analyses, these commentaries are sometimes irreverent, sometimes serious. Their purpose is to remind the reader that what we show in textualization may derive from the serendipitous and the quirky, although we may hide these to produce standardized accounts of our work. This is not intended to put the "game of anthropology" into question, but to encourage the discipline to be more responsive to its own sense of imagination and, therefore, to its own projects, which interrelate personal idiosyncrasy,agency, and scholarly convention.

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Boon, James A. 1983 "Functionalists Write, Too: Frazer/Malinowski and the Semiotics of the Monograph," Semiotica 46(2/4): 131-49. Bourdieu, Pierre 1984 Distinction: A Social Critique of theJudgement of Taste (London: Routledge). Briggs, Jean L. 1970 Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Broszat, Martin, and Saul Friedlander 1988 "A Controversy about the Historicization of National Socialism," Yad Vashem Studies 19: 1-47. Clifford, James 1986a "Introduction: Partial Truths," in Clifford and Marcus 1986: 1-28. 1986b "On Ethnographic Allegory," in Clifford and Marcus 1986: 98-121. 1988a "Comment" (on Steven Sangren's "Rhetoric and the Authority of Ethnography"), Current Anthropology 29: 425. 1988b The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-CenturyEthnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus, eds. 1986 Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press). Coughlin, Ellen 1988 "Anthropologists Explore the Possibilities, and Question the Limits, of Experimentalism in Ethnographic Writing and Research," Chronicle of Higher Education (November 30): A5, A8. Crapanzano, Vincent 1980 Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). 1986 "Hermes' Dilemma: The Masking of Subversion in Ethnographic Description," in Clifford and Marcus 1986: 51-78. Damer, S. 1987 "Poetics or Posturing?" Critique of Anthropology 7: 71-75. Danto, Arthur C. 1988 "No Island Is an Island Anymore," New YorkTimesBookReview (October 23): 15-16. Dominguez, Virginia R. 1989 People as Subject, People as Object: Selfhood and Peoplehood in Contemporary Israel (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press). Dow, James R., and Hannjost Lixfeld 1991 "National Socialistic Folklore and Overcoming the Past in the Federal Republic of Germany," Asian Folklore Studies 50: 117-53. Drummond, Lee 1983 "Jonestown: A Study in Ethnographic Discourse," Semiotica 46(2/4): 167209. Dumont, Louis 1979 "The Anthropological Community and Ideology," Social Science Information 18: 785-817. Fabian, Johannes 1983 Time and the Other: How AnthropologyMakes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press). Fischer, Michael M. J. 1986 "Ethnicity and the Post-Modern Arts of Memory," in Clifford and Marcus 1986: 194-233.

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Fischer, Michael M. J., and George E. Marcus, with Stephen A. Tyler 1988 "Comment" (on Steven Sangren's "Rhetoric and the Authority of Ethnography"), Current Anthropology 29: 425-26. Foucault, Michel 1979 "What Is an Author?" in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structural Criticism, edited byJosue V. Harari, 141-60 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). Friedman, Jonathan 1987 "Prolegomena to the Adventures of Phallus in Blunderland: An Anti-AntiDiscourse," Culture and History 1: 31-49. Geertz, Clifford 1960 The Religion of Java (Glencoe, IL: Free Press). 1966 Agricultural Involution: The Process of Ecological Change in Indonesia (Berkeley: University of California Press). 1973 The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books). 1980 Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton: Princeton University Press). 1984 "Anti-Anti-Relativism," American Anthropologist 86: 263-78. 1985 "Waddling In," Times Literary Supplement (June 7): 623-24. 1988 Worksand Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Gluckman, Max 1940 "Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand," Bantu Studies 14: 1-30, 147-74. Handelman, Don 1981 "The Idea of Bureaucratic Organization," Social Analysis 9: 5-23. 1987a "For an Uncertain Anthropology," in Cultural Anthropology: A Perspective on the Human Condition by Emily Schultz and Robert Lavenda, 310-11 (St. Paul: West Publishing). 1987b "Play," in Encyclopedia of Religion, 11: 363-68 (New York: Free Press). 1990 Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). 1992 "Passages to Play: Paradox and Process," Play and Culture 5: 1-19. 1993 "The Absence of Others, the Presence of Texts," in Creativity/Anthropology, edited by R. Rosaldo, S. Lavie, and K. Narayan, 133-52 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). Handler, Richard 1991 "An Interview with Clifford Geertz," Current Anthropology 32: 603-13. Herzfeld, Michael 1982 Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern Greece (Austin: University of Texas Press). 1987 Anthropology through the Looking-Glass: Critical Ethnography in the Margins of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). 1988 The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village (Princeton: Princeton University Press). 1991 "On Mediterraneanist Performances: A Response to Margaret Kenna," Journal of Mediterranean Studies 1: 141-47. 1992 The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy (Oxford: Berg). Himmelfarb, Gertrude 1992 "Telling It as You Like It: Post-Modernist History and the Flight from Fact," Times Literary Supplement (October 16): 12-15.

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