The Theater of Fact and Its Critics Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography by James Clifford;

George E. Marcus Review by: Roy Wagner Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 59, No. 2, Ethnographic Realities/Authorial Ambiguities (Apr., 1986), pp. 97-99 Published by: The George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3317355 . Accessed: 24/05/2013 20:47
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THE THEATER OF FACT AND ITS CRITICS

W'riting Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. JAMES CLIFFORD and GEORGE E.

MARCUS,editors. Berkeley CA:University of California Press, 1986; 345 pages, $29.95 (cloth), $9.95 (paper).
Reviewed by ROY WAGNER University of Virginia

If every age has its distinctive art form-so that the architecture of Mozart's day could be called "musical," the painting of the criticism is Renaissance"statuesque"-then the art of our times. Writing Culturemarks the anthropological, rather than the musical, painterly, social, or political, genre of this aesthetic. And if criticism is truly an aesthetic, its achievements have more to do with raising the level of awareness than with any specific goals the critic (think of Marx's Manifesto, Nietzsche's superman) has in mind. This is an important caveat for an important book, one that includes some of the best critical wvriting in anthropology. James Clifford's introduction, "Partial Truths," presents what is likely the most comprehensive overview of an anthropological object that is itself a discussion, an exploration, a critique, and a self-critique. Clifford develops the parameters of the "postmodern" hermeneutic against the foil of scientistic factuality and literalism, arguing that ethnographic truths are "...inherently partial-committed and incomplete" (p.7). He thus faults scientific literalism in its own terms, for of course a powerful theory or a readable ethnography always presents a truth that is "partial"in several senses of the word, as indeed it may well be that any truth worth telling is necessarily partial. Mary Louise Pratt asks in Chapter 2, "How...could such interesting people doing such interesting things produce such dull books?" Her answer, dealing with the contradiction within anthropology between personal and scientific authority, reviews historically the uneasy placement of personal narrative in anthropological and pre-anthropological accounts. The exotic travel narrative is a genre larger than anthropology, whose ironies, problems, and solutions develop a history of their own. It is the growing circumspection of the genre itself, Pratt implies, that heralds the self-consciousness of postmodern anthropology. Hermes, the god who is trickster and messenger at once, who "steals" his message 97

in the act of delivering it, is Vincent Crapanzano's potent metaphor for the metaphorizing ethnographer. The authority of the messenger who never swore "to tell the whole truth" to make his message convincing becomes the (hermetic) seal upon the message itself. Crapanzano, like Pratt, appeals to a genre that is larger than anthropology itself; his examples include George Catlin's shocked revelation of an 1832 Mandan ceremony, Goethe's account of the Roman Carnival, and Clifford Geertz's reading of the text of a Balinese cockfight. Each exemplifies a particular style of authority and therefore of allegory and... theft. Viewing the French "ethnographer of history" Le Roy Ladurie from the door, so to speak, of E.E. Evans-Pritchard's tent and reading Evans-Pritchard's Nuer as analogues of Ladurie's medieval shepherds, Renato Rosaldo develops an incisive cross-hermeneutic of ethnographic authority. "Stealing" an allegory like Crapanzano's Hermes, each ethnographer "launders" relations of harsh domination (testimony to the Inquisition in Ladurie's case, support from a regime that was bombing and raiding the Nuer in EvansPritchard's) into a rough-hewn pastoral idyll. Moving from the hermeneutical facticity of authority to its allegorizing intent, James Clifford rises, as well, to the fullness of anthropological comprehension. Allegory in his sense is the inescapable condition of meaningful discourse about others. Thus ethnographies, including modern, aware reportage like Marjorie Shostak's Nisa and classics like TheNuer,are but modes or types of allegory. Clifford's delineation of the issue through types like the "salvage" allegory(the "rescue" of a "dying" people that of course "kills" its subject matter) to the allegorizing tendency of inscription itself is extraordinarily comprehensive and powerful. Stephen A. Tyler's concise, highly condensed, often cryptic projection of a postmodern ethnography that in effect succeeds

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98

ANTHROPOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

science (pp.123-25) addresses the failure, rather than the success, of ethnographic authority. Discourse cannot determine its effects; the holistic trope is a function of author-text-reader with infinite loci and an indeterminate range of possible evocations. If our (scientific) theories of meaning cannot control meaning, then the failure of ethnography is something more than mere politics. Ethnography, for Tyler, is not a record of experience; "...itis the means of experience. That experience became experience only in the writing of the ethnography" (p.138). Authority then is more a matter of experiencing interpretation than of interpreting experience. The reflexivity of this subtle but extremely important point is in many respects the meta-message of the book..and its own most potent self-criticism. Talal Asad turns from the possibilities of saying to the difficult issue of translation. In an extensive examination and critique of Gellner's Conceptsand Society,Asad pinpoints the problematic of "cultural translation" in the excessive literalness of that assumption, the nonequivalent ("strong versus weak") status of languages, and finally the deceptive equation of a language's formalism with a culture's. The problematic of ethnographic characterization is a significant feature of George E. Marcus's sensitive and intensive analysis of Paul Willis's Learning to Labour. In this study of the nurturing and growth of a counter-culture of protest masculinity (understood by its author as class-awareness) amid the ruins of Britain's industrial revolution, the provocativeness of the work itself derives very much from its subject matter. This makes it a foil for a number of astute critical points; does it not, Marcus asks, make a"system" of established order so as to make its own message live? Do not ethnography and participant observation themselves submit to a similar"tunnel vision?" The effort indeed compounds reflexivity by capitalizing on one side of a two-sided relation by making, as it were, a reflexive monopole. Michael M.J. Fischer's exploration of ethnicity as a style of making new worlds (rather than old worlds) of memory moves into a terrain liberated by Tyler's realization of discourse's non-determination of its

effects. The autobiographical nature of much writing on ethnicity turns the question of authority back upon itself: to be surprised by a past one takes responsibility for is to evoke, rather than impose, authority. Fischer reviews styles of mnemonic surprise in Chinese-American, Black Armenian-American, American, Chicano, and Native American ethnic autobiography. It is rather unfortunate, given the originality and power of Fischer's conception, that these surveys of style in Part IIof the chapter are not brought to a conclusive statement to match the promise of Part I. Representation is a philosophical issue older than epistemology in the West; understanding it as historically and contextually contingent, rather than epistemologically grounded, Paul Rabinow essays what we could call its "French Impressionism." Following Richard Rorty and Michel Foucault, Rabinow delineates a postmodern era in which representation has become selfconscious. His sensitive portrait of James Cliffordas an ethnologist of ethnologists and originator of the analysis of ethnographic authority humanizes the critical aspects of the quest, as his summary overview of postmodernism (and modernism), dialogics, and ethics delineates the ambiguities of an art in which "how to paint" has become more important than what is painted. In a brief but concise Afterword George Marcus examines the relation of ethnographic writing to anthropological careersa subject that, as the contributing authors would tend to agree, merits a more extended treatment. In his discussion Marcus notes that anthropologists, unlike historians, are faced with the task of inscribing fieldworkexperience, I would add, hence also a realm of condensed imagery and interaction whose possibilities are always larger than those of inscription itself. This point with its implication of Tyler's message of the experientiality of interpretation returns us to the focal issue of authority The striking thing about ethno("author-ity"). graphic authority is that, implicit in practically every line of an ethnography, it is hardly ever enough by itself to carry the main point of an argument. (When it does become the main issue, as in the Mead-Freeman con-

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THEATER OF FACT

99

troversy, it triggers fierce debate.) If the experience becomes an experience only in the writing of the ethnography, then the authority derives (as author-ity should) from the experience of writing culture. And if this is the case, then a crucial factor in the constitution of authority is the theoretical basis according to which its canons of relevance and interpretation are condensed. (Indeed it is this condensation and its articulative power that makes the experience of writing ethnography.) Something of this point can be found in the notion of "allegory"developed in Crapanzano's, Rosaldo's, and Clifford's contributions. But allegory involves primarily the presentation of a subject matter, whereas theory subsumes subject and allegory together within a realm that transcends the merely factual, or the referential underpinnings of hermeneutic. The bent of "commonsense" thinking is that theory is the mascara, the greasepaint, with which fact is tricked out for dramatic display to a pragmatic audience. In truth it seems to be the other way around: fact is the make-up, the mascara, and authority (why else would Evans-Pritchard and Malinowski play at it with such ingenuous self-mockery) is the play within the play, the theater, as I shall call it, of fact.

It is this theater of fact, closely related, as Pratt has pointed out, to the tradition of the exotic travel narrative, to which much of the criticism of Writing Culture is addressed. The ideal, implied by many of the contributors, would be some sort of ultimately self-aware, holistic dialogics-a reformed theater of fact. But it would seem as though such an achievement must either amount to criticism itself developed as an art form (a "fact of theater," as it were) or be impossible. For the ideal of the "postmodern" project is that it wants to do with ethnography what a more self-assured and less cynical anthropology ("Grand Theory," as the cant goes) did with theory-develop powerful and decisive canons of comprehension. Yet field experience is not the experience of comprehension, and the authority of writing culture is not the authority of fact. What can be said for the.postmodern proj-

ect, other than that a genre that makes it

almost as difficult to tell an honest lie as to tell the honest truth is, at the very least, remarkably circumspect? If criticism is indeed an art form and the high standards and often brilliant critiques of WritingCulture represent the state of the art, then the project stands a chance of raising the awareness of anthropology and raising the level of insight that informs its goals.
April 1986, 59:2

Anthropological Quarterly

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