Is Anybody Out There ?

Anthropology and the question of audience

David E. Sutton
Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago
The recent profusion of anthropological writing on anthropological writing
has tended to ignore the question of who reads our texts and why.~We
analyze the texts we construct, the devices that give authenticity to what
we say, and the tropes and allegories we use, but we dont consider who
all of this is for. Marcus and Fischer (1986) hope to revive anthropology
as cultural critique, but the ethnographies they praise are often more unreadable to all but the initiated than are the dry functionalist monographs
they criticize (see Rabinow, 1986: 251). And for all their innovation, postmodernist anthropologists have failed to buck the trend towards increasing
sub-specialization and decreasing audience.
So I want to raise the issue of how intended audience and the rhetoric
and purposes in constructing anthropological texts are related. I want to
open up this issue for critical concern by first historically situating the
changing nature of the author-audience relationship and its effect on
written products. Second, I want to examine a few instances of how this
relationship operates among some contemporary anthropologists who have
attempted to spread anthropological ideas beyond the walls of academe,
that is, anthropologists who engage in that disreputable practice popularizing anthropology. And finally I will argue that writing for different
audiences does not merely raise technical concerns; nor is it merely a
worthwhile public service (see Beeman, 1987). I hope to suggest that a
concern for audience can point anthropology in new theoretical directions
as well.

When the pen

was

mightier...

We can begin to situate this issue by drawing on what some literary critics
have said about the author-audience relationship. In his essay The
Storyteller (1955) Walter Benjamin counterposes the role of the story-

Critique of Anthropology ©

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teller to that of the novelist. The storyteller takes his own experience and
that of others and relates these to the practical concerns of his audience.
He shares the companionship of his audience, and they can respond and
add to his creations.2The story itself contains, openly or covertly,
something useful. The novel, by contrast, is both constructed and
consumed in isolation. The concerns of the novelist are not necessarily
those of his readers, and the novelist is, according to Benjamin, a solitary
individual who ... is himself uncounseled and cannot counsel others
(Benjamin, 1955: 86-7).
These two conflicting attitudes-the former engaged and responsive, the
latter separate and sometimes disdainful-embody the distinction that I
am trying to get at. But I would argue that they are less a property of
storytelling (speech) vs. novels (writing) than of pre- and post-Romantic
attitudes towards language and literature. Today literature is seen as communicating a message, and we read to glean its meaning (the deconstructionists read for the texts refusal to mean, but they are still concerned
with meaning). Jane Tompkins (1980) argues that up until the eighteenth
century language was seen in terms of rhetoric and persuasion, and the
study of texts was undertaken not in order to understand their meaning but
to acquire the skills necessary to use language to influence others. Thus
Plato felt it necessary to banish poets from his republic, and such an
attitude would not have been unusual throughout most of Western history.
As Tompkins (1980: 204) notes, only someone who accorded poetic
language the highest degree of power in determining human action and
behavior could regard poets as dangerous enough to exile.
During the Augustan Age, for example, poems were weapons to be
hurled against an
1980: 211). Terry

century writing

opponent, often a current political figure (Tompkins,

Eagleton (1984) argues that during the early eighteenth

was

directed towards

an

audience that

was seen to

be

on

equal footing with the author. For writers such as Addison and Steele,
every judgement is designed to be directed toward a public: communication with the reader is an integral part of the system (Eagleton, 1984: 10).
Like Benjamins storyteller, the critic merely expresses ideas that could be
thought by anybody, and indeed everyone [that is every literate male] is
called upon to participate in criticism (1984: 21).
A turning-point came in Europe in the nineteenth century. This period
saw the decline of literary patronage and its replacement with the
impersonal forces of the marketplace. The result, as Tompkins (1980: 218)
notes, was that there was no longer any way for the poet to measure the
impact of his work on an audience, since the author and his audience are
no longer personally known to each other. Of course the success of

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literature could be measured by market value, a books sales. But its

power, how it works to persuade people to change their behavior and how
they react to it, is no longer within the view of the author. Thus the battle
cry art for arts sake could be seen as a way of turning necessity into
virtue. For those who still believed that literature had a function, the goal
shifted from moving men to action, to moving them to contemplation. For
others, Flaubert prominent among them, the value of literature is claimed
to be that it has no funtions, no uses, no causes to plead (Tompkins, 1980:

219).
Eagleton further ties the changing role of the author/critic to the
specialization of the capitalist economy. Critics were no longer judged at
the bar of general public opinion, but became academic specialists with an
audience of fellow colleagues. As Eagleton (1984: 57) puts it, criticism
became a species of technological expertise ... establishing its professional legitimacy at the cost of renouncing any wider social relevance.
The recent concern of writing has been to express meaning, then, and
criticism has been to elucidate the meanings of various texts. Historically,
this is still new, as opposed to a writing concerned with persuasion, which
involved a more direct relationship with its audience that allowed for
judging its effects. My three anthropological popularizers, like earlier
writers, are out to persuade. They reveal different kinds of attempts to
recreate or imagine an author-reader relationship that is more direct and
personal where no actual social relationship still exists.

Growing with Ashley

Ashley Montagus strength lies in his ability to engage the concerns of his
reader, and, more significantly, to make the reader an active participant in
this engagement. The central focus of Montagus work is the process of
growth. Growth, according to Montagu, is the defining characteristic of
life; it does not end when we reach a certain size or behaviorally become
adults (Montagu, 1981: 121). Montagu lays out his theory of growth
through neoteny, that is, the retention of fetal and childhood traits (physical and behavioral) of ones ancestors or ones own species into adulthood.
Noting the physical similarities between adult humans and primate fetuses,
Montagu argues that neoteny is one of the main evolutionary processes at
work in humans, and that indeed modern humans could have evolved
from neandertaloids by the simple retention of the juvenile traits of these
forms; that is to say, by neoteny (1981: 9).
The idea of physical neoteny sets the stage for Montagus discussion of
behavioral neoteny: childlike behavioral traits retained in adulthood. One

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such trait that Montagu emphasizes particularly is educability, which he

also glosses as flexibility, open-mindedness, curiosity and receptivity. As
he notes, The child is the most avid learner of all living things on this
earth (1981: 145). While educability is indeed longer-lasting in infant as
opposed to adult primates, humans are born much less developed than
apes and other mammals. By remaining infants for a much longer period,
humans have more time to be educated by other humans and to have
culture passed down from one generation to the next. Montagus argument is both descriptive and prescriptive: he explains how neoteny has
worked as a force on human evolution, and he suggests that we are
best served by encouraging this process further, by actively cultivating
neotenous traits such as educability. He advises us to continue to grow
until the day we die.
Montagus books not only present the idea of the process of human
growth, they aspire to be part of this process. Montagu hopes to educate
his readers. To educate is to care for, to nourish, to cause to grow. To aid
his readers in this process of growth, Montagu first shows that he shares
their concerns. In The Human Connection (1979) he introduces the reader
to 1970s social science, for example Goffmans interaction studies, by
suggesting that these studies focus on coping, getting through the day,
dealing with interpersonal crises. These are the same concerns addressed
by talk shows, self-help books and Dear Abby, and Montagu knows it; he
wishes to show that beneath its technojargon, science is concerned with
real life issues, not lost in abstrations. Its an effective writers strategy,
but Montagu is not simply trying to lure the reader into his argument.
Rather, he seeks to validate the readers experience by arguing for the
reasonableness of common sense and the trustworthiness of common

experience (1979: xii).

Thus he presents social science in the 1970s-interactionalism, processual studies, game theory-as no longer, like previous social science,
skeptical towards common experience and lost in abstractions. Rather he
shows it to be centered on the same subjects that the common person is
curious about: greeting rituals, courtship, body language. If Montagu tries
to convince common readers that they should be profoundly concerned
with the findings of science, it is only because he has first shown how
profoundly concerned science is with common readers.
Montagus technique is a dialectical one: he affirms the readers beliefs
in order to criticize them, and criticizes in order to affirm. The Cultured
Man (1958) is a stinging critique of the conformity and materialism of
American life. But this critique is interlaced with a discourse on national
pride and patriotism. Montagu establishes a common ground from which

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criticize, claiming that it is Americas wonderful achievement and

potential that must make us sensitive to the faults of this fabulous land
(1958: 19).3
The key to Montagus techniques for educating his reader is that he
writes the readers role into his books. He is constantly insisting that the
reader has a part to play:
to

Now let us proceed to a discussion of the rationale, the scientific basis for
such ideas, so that the reader may judge for himself how well founded such
recommendations are. First I should like the reader to understand something
of the basic meaning of social relationships; this done, we may then
proceed .... (Montagu, 1952: 198)

in effect, suggesting a partnership with the reader, who will

have an active rather than a passive role.4Indeed, Montagu suggests that
in the presence of new ideas the truly scientific attitude is an active one:
neither to believe nor to disbelieve, but to investigate. Thus Montagu
stresses that if the full effects of his books are to be realized, the reader
must apply and test Montagus ideas by acting upon the world outside of
the books.
Although Montagu stresses action, he sees this action largely as
individuals changing themselves internally: The best way of remaking the
world is not by changing the world but by changing the people who make
the world the kind of place it is (Montagu, 1952: 189-90). Thus Montagu
lauds interaction theory and game theory, both of which tend to play down
the influence of larger social forces on individual behavior. For anthropologists who do not make the individual the center of their analyses,
but stress the extent to which political, social and economic forces shape
individual behavior, Montagus strategy may seen inadequate. But let us
now turn to the writings of Marvin Harris, whose popular work indeed
rests on the interconnection of large social forces.

Montagu is,

Harriss holism:
Like

why everything fits

Montagu, Marvin Harris also focusses on what he sees to be the

everyday concerns of his readers. While admitting that the quest for
meaning, ultimate truth, or other higher realities is a formidable force in
history, he insists that it rarely exists apart from the quest for solutions
to practical, everyday problems. Unlike Montagu, Harris does not attempt
to encourage the reader in personal growth. His theory rests on his being
able to fit diverse, seemingly unrelated phenomena into a complex, organic
cultural whole. Thus in a society that believes that the answer to most of its
social ills is to just say no, Harris forces his audience to think about

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diverse cultural phenomena as linked together in a network of causality, a

jigsaw puzzle from which no individual piece can be removed without
spoiling the whole picture. Harriss holism plays itself out not only at the
theoretical level, but at the textual level as well, in his emphasis on closure.
The subtitle of Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches (1974) is The Riddles of
Culture. It is the quest for answers to these riddles, for closure, that
occupies Harriss texts. But the answers will not be simple, and will be
more like shaggy dog stories than one-linCrs.
In his book Why Nothing Works (1981), Harris suggests that changes in
the functioning of the capitalist economy in post-war American society
have led to the shoddy products and incompetent services that we all have
to deal with in the course of our day-to-day activities. He lays out these
economic shifts in order to be able to explain what he sees as major cultural
shifts since the Second World War: Why women left home, Why theres
crime on the streets, and Why gays came out of the closet. The economic
changes include the following: (1) the automation of goods production
meant that producers no longer had a direct social relationship with
consumers or felt a responsibility to them; (2) the growth of oligopolies and
mergers meant that companies were changing hands frequently and thus
managers were more willing to compromise a companys good name in
quest of short-term profitability; and (3) since production was becoming
more automated, the workforce began to shift from goods to service and
information production.
Now Harris has set the stage for his cultural explanations. Why did the
womens liberation movement occur, touting a rhetoric of freeing women
from domestic responsibility to give them employment opportunities? Not,
according to Harris, because women suddenly had a change of consciousness, became dissatisfied with housework and yearned for other kinds of
fulfillment. Rather, the womens movement was a response to the fact that
married women were finding it increasingly necessary to seek employment
in order to keep up a familys standard of living in an economy of increasing inefficiency and shoddy goods and services. Furthermore, maledominated unions which might have organized to hold back married
women from entering the workforce in a goods-producing economy did
not perceive women as a threat. The service and information jobs, at least
at first, were jobs than men did not want, since they seemed more in line
with our cultures image of womens roles. It was these changes that led to
the cultural transformation of gender roles in the 1960s and 1970s, not vice
versa. As Harris (1981: 95) sums up:

97
Women were being asked to work in two places at once: to work for half a
mans pay on the job and for no pay at all off the job, and to remain
submissive and obedient to sexist husbands who no longer supported them.
And so it was women who had most to gain and least to lose by kicking at the
hollow pillars of the temple of marriage and childbirth.

Thus Harriss mode of argument: as each effect is explained and put

in place, it can be used as a cause to explain other effects. Once we
understand why women left home, we can now explain why black men
were forced into a life of crime, i.e. because the low-paying jobs that they
had filled when still in a manufacturing economy were now the pink-collar
jobs being filled by women. What I wish to suggest here is that the sense of
interconnectedness and holism that Harris conveys is more than just a part
of his anthropological theory, it is a rhetorical strategy designed to reach a
broad audience and to get them to think anthropologically.
This point becomes clearer when we consider Cows, Pigs, Wars and
Witches. Once again Harris is dealing in riddles which he promises to solve.
But the ties that bind things together are very different from those in Why
Nothing Works. To explain why Jews and Moslems shun pork, Harris
rejects a number of theories such as the claim that pork was avoided
because it caused trichinosis when eaten raw. Harris sees such an approach
as being in the right direction but too simplistic, constrained by a
physicians typical narrow concern with body pathology (Harris, 1974: 33).
Harriss explanation is that the climate and local floral and faunal
conditions made the pig a costly animal to domesticate in the Middle East
during the period of the flourishing of Hebrew culture. The fact that pig
meat was more fatty and succulent than goat, sheep or cattle meat made it
an extremely desirable luxury item. Since small-scale production would
only increase temptation, better to interdict it entirely and concentrate on
other animals.
One would think that Harris would now claim victory: the riddle of
pig-hate solved! But no, not all food taboos can be explained purely
ecologically: they may, for example, function to solidify identity. He then
extends our suspense, reminding us that there is more to come: Permit me
to resist the temptation to explain everything. I think more will be learned
about pig haters if we turn to the other half of the riddle, to the pig lovers
(1974: 38). And off we go to New Guinea. Closure is always suspended
until the end, when he brings everything together.
In Why Nothing Works Harris suggests causal relationships between

98

diverse

phenomena

that all

are

taking place

within the

same

culture. In

Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches, since the phenomena he is describing do

not belong to the same culture, the relationship between them is not
causal. Sometimes he argues that we must understand wars before we can
understand witches because he means to suggests similar historical
processes at work in each case. Elsewhere, however, the connections are
purely rhetorical: if we can explain pig hate, how do we explain pig love?
This does not suggest to me that Harris is foggy in his thinking. Harris is
cultivating a relationship with his audience, one much like the traditional
role of the healer in many societies. The healer is interested not, like his
counterpart in Western medicine, in discovering and treating a single
proximate disease causing agent, but in tracing out the connections
between the sick person and their family, community and ancestors to
understand the larger network in which the individual disease is enmeshed.
Harris engages with what is on peoples minds, with the things causing disease in our society, but he attempts to establish a frame of mind in the
reader that is holistic and anthropological. His rhetoric of connection and
closure on the textual level bolsters his theory of connection on the social
level. He gets the reader to think not only about why his toaster does not
work, but how this is connected to gay liberation.

Wade Davis goes to Zombiland

All of the books discussed so far are armchair anthropology; they are not
based on intensive fieldwork experience. Wade Daviss The Serpent and the
Rainbow, a recounting of the authors field experiences in Haiti, is in many
ways a foray into the traditional anthropological exotic. It recounts how
Davis was sent to Haiti by his scientific and financial backers in quest of a
poison reputed to induce apparent death for extended periods, and thus
account for the phenomenon of zombis. Davis set out dutifully in search of
the poison. He tested certain hypotheses, found them wanting, and moved
on to others. But Davis was not comfortable with the ability of his scientific
tools to describe the reality he encountered. To reflect this, the book splits
into two competing discourses that remain in tension with each other
throughout the remainder of the story. The first, his scientific voice, is nonnarrative. It begins with a statement to be supported, and it follows the
statement with bizarre and far-flung customs and practices that show
similarities to Haitian voodoo. The obvious anthropological forebear for
such a strategy is James Frazer. Like Frazer, Davis is attempting to make
fantastic behavior seem reasonable. And like Frazer, he does so by demonstrating that similar behaviors exist throughout the world.

99

But as Davis begins to penetrate Haitian culture, meets vodoun priests

and observes vodoun ceremonies complete with gyrating women and firewalking, he becomes enchanted with the exotic beauty of it all. He is
fascinated by a world-view in which, as he puts it, every action is but a
particle of the whole ... [and] there are no accidents (Davis, 1985: 77).
Davis slowly comes to see that the poison itself, how it works, what its
chemical formula is, is only a part of the mystery of zombis. Indeed, he
discovers that the same poison, made from the liver of a puffer fish, is used
as a stimulant by the Japanese. But the Japanese do not have zombis.
Thus he must grasp the larger belief system and social context of which
zombis are a part, and to do so he must penetrate the intricacies of Haitian
culture.
Davis describes his own change of attitude in the following passage:
while my backers still sought evidence of a single chemical that might
I had become more and more impressed by a people
who shared no such obsession with rational causality. I wanted to know the
magic; I wanted to know what it meant, especially to its victims. And if the
poison explained how a person might succumb, I now wanted to know why
that person was chosen. (Davis, 1985: 175)
...

explain zombification,

Daviss Frazerian voice gives way to a Malinowskian one: one that explains
the exotic not by putting it side by side with similar decontextualized
beliefs from all over the world, but by showing its place in a wider cultural
context. Grave robbing, making concoctions out of bone shavings and
fire-walking all turn out just to be ways of giving meaning and coherence to
life. From that conclusion, Davis takes the next anthropological step:
validating their beliefs and values leads to a relativizing of our own. Our
cultures belief in science and rational causality is just one among a number
of possible choices, and while it is good at providing an understanding of
some things, it is clearly not for others.
This critique is not conceptually new. What makes it interesting and
effective, however, is that Davis shows the process of coming to it during
the course of the book. What makes this book interesting to anthropologists is that it shows the emotional and intellectual transformations
that can accompany the field experience.
In another sense, though, this is also what makes the book interesting to
a general readership. In a recent discussion of the selection practices of
Book-of-the-Month club editors, Janice Radway notes that the books
chosen can experiment with form, plot, characterization and language, as
long as there is an identifiable narrative voice, a recognizable personality
with something to say about the world he or she shares with the reader
(Radway, 1988: 535).It is this that makes Daviss book effective: that his

100

cultural relativism is neither didactic nor some disembodied theoretical

abstraction, but something he comes to himself during the course of the
book as he is increasingly disillusioned with the explanatory power of
science. Davis can reach a general audience because he ties his intellectual
points to his own, lived, experience.
What these three authors share with what I have described as preRomantic modes of writing is that, although they no longer have a direct
social relationship with their readers, they tailor their writing to an audience upon which they hope to have an effect. That is, their writing is
directly concerned with the context of its reception. Equally interesting,
I would maintain, is the fact that in writing for a general audience, they
have not watered down their theories or just simplified anthropological
ideas. Rather, their theories are embodied in their styles of rhetoric:
Montagus theory of human growth takes expression in a rhetoric which
encourages that growth in the reader; Harriss theory of organic functional
interdependence is paralleled by a rhetoric that insists on connection and
closure even when such connection is not organic; Daviss juxtaposition of
our culture and Haitian culture in the service of cultural relativity is made
tangible by the portrayal of his personal transitions during the course of his
quest. If these three authors are representative of trends in popular
anthropology, I would suggest that taking audience into consideration is
part of a process by which anthropologists are developing their theories,
not just communicating them. Indeed, we may benefit by cultivating a
more direct interaction between theory, rhetoric and audience.

Other audiences, other possibilities

point is suggested by Fred Myers (1988) in his discussion of the

advocacy anthropology he and his wife undertook at the time of the discovery of uncontacted Australian Aborigines in 1984. Myers recognizes
that his representation of these events potentially competes with a
number of others. These alternate interpretations reflected the various
concerns of a number of groups in Australian society: (1) the Labour
This last

government, whose main

concern was to show that it had not mistreated

the Aborigines and thus was largely concerned that they received proper
Western medical care, (2) the newspapers, for whom the event was
interesting insofar as it could be represented as the first contact of a stoneage people with civilization, and (3) the local Pintupis, who did not treat
the events as a first contact at all, but a reunion with relatives with whom
they had parted ways 20 years ago. As Myers notes, consideration of his
various audiences became central to how he was to represent the events.

101

As he worked to advocate Pintupi control over the events and autonomy

from the states attempts to quarantine the new Pintupis, Myers also
gained greater insight into the centrality of the issues of control and
autonomy in the Pintupi construction of identity. In deconstructing the
notion of first contact, he was both rhetorically attempting to present the
local point of view to outsiders and interrogating the evidence in a new
way that provided a horizon of interpretive questions that actually
improve[d] our appreciation of the data (Myers, 1988: 623). As Myers
sums

up:
In rendering this struggle intelligible even to those who opposed some
dimensions of the Pintupi interpretation, my interpretation was heavily
metaphorical-presenting the contest over meaning as part and parcel of the
Pintupi struggle for autonomy, itself a struggle to maintain their own values
in the face of Euro-Australian domination. I came to see in this contest the
most significant social process in contemporary Pintupi life; thus, the new
questions did improve my understanding of their lives. (Myers, 1988: 623)

Myerss audience was not the general reading public, but a number of
specific audiences. Indeed I would suggest that we may gain even
more by writing for audiences with whom we have actual social relations
and do not have to imagine, as we must with a general reading public.
What I have in mind are ecological anthropologists writing for and
participating in the ecology movement; feminist audiences writing for and
participating in the feminist movement.6In the latter case we can already
see the mutual stimulation that has gone on between feminism as a political
movement and as an academic discipline. The gains provided by feminism
for anthropological theory have been substantial [see, e.g., Collier and
Yanagisakos (1989) documentation of the essential role of feminist
thought (and practice) in the development of practice theory]. But as
different

almost all feminist academics note, their interest arose out of a desire to
change the world as much as to understand it. Schrijvers formulation is
typical: Stimulated by the womens movement, I became engaged in the
study of male-female relationships and slowly deveioped a perception
which we later labeled feminist anthropology, and Every feminist knows
that her work originates in what we feel to be problematic in society, and
what we want to change (Schrijvers, 1987: 1, 9). Writing for and about the
feminist movement does not involve producing another specialist discourse
for a small circle of sympathetic colleagues. Rather the feminist movement
(like other grassroots social movements) provides anthropologists with an
actual audience, in the public sphere, with which ideas can be engaged,
discussed and disputed (cf. Eagleton, 1984: 119; Jameson, 1979: 136;
Kennard, 1981). Such an audience is what Lila Abu-Lughod envisions in

102

her call to
women

colleagues to write feminist ethnography: ethnography with

at the center written for women by women. The women at the

center will mostly be Other women and the women it is written for will be
mostly western women who want to understand womens situation (AbuIn these and similar ways we may hope to return to a
Lughod, 1988:
situation in which everyone is called on to participate in criticism.

26).~

In conclusion, I feel that if we adopt a more conscious attempt to define

the audiences for which we write we may find that this leads not simply to a
surface shift in rhetoric, but to a more basic change in the knowledge we
are communicating. It also means that instead of critical anthropologists
continuing to write about knowledge and power for the ever decreasing
circle of colleagues who share the same discourse, we can use our knowledge as power in finding ways to write for those parts of society which we
feel most committed to engage and affect.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
An earlier version of this article appeared m Chicago Anthropology Exchange, vol 18 I
should like to thank the following people who read and offered advice on various versions
of this article John Comaroff, James Fernandez, Antonio Lauria, Alan Lenhoff, Michael
Scott, David Slater, George Stocking and Constance Sutton

NOTES
in his latest book Works and Lives (1988), touches on this issue when he
describes Evans-Pritchard as writing for his friends at an Oxford pub and Benedict for a
general public whom she hopes to shock with her juxtapositions
2 Ricoeur (1985) and Ong (1977) draw distinctions between speech and writing similar to
those discussed here But what Benjamin views positively—the social context on which
speech relies—Ricoeur sees as the essential weakness of speech For Ricoeur, it takes
writing to come to the rescue of speech and to preserve the a-contextual meanings for
future generations But as Fernandez (1985) argues, this context-dependence of
speech, which Ricoeur would have us rid of, is the very stuff of anthropological

Geertz,

knowledge
Montagus work can here be compared to the projects of Lentricchia (1983) and
Robbins (1987) who urge intellectuals to produce a dialectical rhetoric that conserves
as it negates (Lentricchia 23) and occupies some of the enemys positions (Robbins
15) Also cf Walzers (1988 26) discussion of connected critics who stand close to but
not engulfed by their company
4 In The Cultured Man Montagu provides 1500 questions at the end of his essay, in areas
ranging from archeology to manners, on which the reader is to test his knowledge
Montagus intention, once again, is not to assign static places on a cultural hierarchy,
but to encourage growth to tell you in what directions you need to move
No one
grows who stands still (Montagu, 1958 69)
5 Note the similarities between Radways description and Eagletons depiction of
eighteenth-century author-audience relations In the contemporary case, however, the
3

103
audience does not talk back directly to the author, and must, in fact, be imagined
6 Another promising possibility that I do not discuss here, but that has begun to receive
critical treatment, is writing for ones ethnographic subjects, a process which, though
still highly problematic, has pointed us in new theoretical directions as well [see
Clifford on polyphony (1988), also Marcus and Fischer (1986)]
7 Although not primarily involved in producing ethnographies, the International Womens
Anthropology Conference (IWAC) provides another example of both the conscious
linking of issues in anthropological and feminist scholarship to those raised by the
International Womens Movement, and the possibility of creating a sphere for the
discussion of these issues But contra Abu-Lughod, IWAC is not only Western women
talking about other women, but a polyphony of voices from the West and the non-West
debating issues such as womens collective action (Sutton, ed , n d ), the methodology
involved in conducting research in which ones subjects are collaborators (IWAC,
1985) and the plural meanings of feminism (Sutton and Callaway, 1987)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abu-Lughod, Lila,
Can There Be Feminist Ethnography?, Paper delivered at the New York Academy
of Sciences New York, 29 February
Beeman, William O,
1987 Anthropology and the Print Media, Anthropology Today 3 24
1988

Benjamin, Walter,
1968 [1955] The Storyteller Reflections on
Illuminations, trans by H Zohn New York
Clifford, James,
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