03 September 2017--
Review by Carlin Romano, Philadelphia Inquirer, 10 July 1988
Probing modern ethnography
For most of us, anthropology calls to mind: (a) Margaret Mead, young, gifted and grass-skirted, looking like a Bar-nard sophomore who took the wrong turn at the headhunter's shop. (b) Margaret Mead, old, wrinkly and terminally tenured, looking bored to death talking about young Margaret Mead, or, (c) A Harrison Ford type in horn-rims and Banana Republic getout, thin yet tightly muscled, intently tak-ing notes as amiable primitives work amid the vines and corals of their yam gardens. A student, undoubtedly, of Margaret Mead. That's the visual cliche. The related intellectual cliche lingers from high school or college. "Anthropology," be-gins the World Book Encyclopedia article on the subject, "is the scien-tific study of humanity and of human culture..." Clifford Geertz, renowned anthro-pologist at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, knows better about that "scientific" stuff. To his more familiar specialties, such as Java reli-gion, he adds an abiding interest in the clothing of emperors.
So, in Work and Lives: The Anthropologist as Au-thor, he plays a role somewhere be-tween Martin Luther vis-a-vis the church and Donald Regan vis-a-vis the Reagan administration snitch, conscience, gadfly or father confes-sor, depending on your critical lights. In Works and Lives, he dons pith helmet and reading glasses and sets out after anthropology — more ex-actly, ethnography, the vanguard of the field that describes particular peoples — with magisterial command and smart-alecky insight. "The illusion," he begins, "that eth-nography is a matter of sorting strange and irregular facts into famil-iar and orderly categories a this is magic, that is technology has long since been exploded." He recognizes that 19th-century an-thropology "tended to be a sweeping, up-from-the-ape, study-of-mankind sort of business," evolving in the early 20th century into a focus on particular peoples as "crystal wholes, isolate and entire." Between the wars, he concedes, anthropologists consid-ered being a "real scientist" a "beat-ific state," an attitude shared in that period by philosophers and social sci-entists influenced by "the imperial expansion of the West and the rise there of a salvational belief in the powers of science." Nonetheless, Geertz argues, anthro-pology is far more a literary art than a hard science, a word-based genre that can do no more than represent "one sort of life in the categories of another." As Geertz puts it, "ethno-graphics tend to look at least as much like romances as they do like lab reports."
The great anthropologists, such as the four who receive extensive atten-tion here — Claude Levi-Strauss, Ed-ward Evans-Pritchard, Bronislaw Ma-linowski and Ruth Benedict — accomplish their tasks not by con-vincing us with facts, but by creating "theaters of language" that persuade us they've "been there" — they've penetrated their target cultures.
In the author's view, Claude Levi-Strauss, the living giant of French structuralist anthropology, didn't be-come an "intellectual hero" because of the odd facts and explanations he offered in such masterworks as Tristes Tropiques. Rather, he drew notice for his "essentially rhetorical accomplishment" of creating a lan-guage for anthropology that attracted formalist minds. Levi-Strauss' endur-ing thesis is that "the ensemble of a people's customs has always its partic-ular style; they form into systems." His structuralist lexicon of "sign, code, transformation ..." created a powerful mechanism for mapping such a system.
(Structural anthropology: immutable deep structures exist in all cultures, and consequently, that all cultural practices have homologous counterparts in other cultures, essentially that all cultures are equitable. Wikipedia)
From another direction, Evans-Pritchard, England's most influential anthropologist, cast the confident, un-derstated voice of the British univer-sity over his discipline's frame of mind. To him, writes Geertz, social anthropology consisted of substitut-ing informed opinion about primitive people for uninformed opinion. Among the tools was that Western "certitude of perception" that permit-ted Evans-Pritchard to declare, "In a strict sense, the Nuer have no law." His ever-so-Oxbridge attitude was that primitive people are "sensible enough when you get to know them, but with
their own way of doing things." In Evans-Pritchard's scholarship "the overriding point of every image, every elegance, every nod, is to dem-onstrate that nothing, no matter how singular, resists reasoned descrip-tion."
Malinowski, in turn, comes down to us as the "prime apostle" of "join-the-brutes ethnography." On Malinowski's view, "One grasps the exotic not by drawing back from the immediacies of encounter into the symmetries of thought, as with Levi-Strauss, not by transforming them into figures on an African urn, as with Evans-Pritchard. One grasps it by losing oneself, one's soul maybe, in those immediacies." As Geertz shows by excerpts from Malinowski's diary, the adventurer ag-onized and ecstasized in the field. "At moments I was furious at them," he wrote at one point of his Trobriand-ers, "particularly because after I gave them their portions of tobacco, they all went away. On the whole my feel-ings toward the natives are decidedly tending to 'Exterminate the brutes." After first meeting them, however, he let loose with a "Eureka," writing, "Feeling of ownership: It is I who will describe them. ..." Geertz describes this form of ethnography as one that requires "rendering your account credible by rendering your person sat,
Rounding out the four is Ruth Bene-dict, author of Patterns of Culture and Margaret Mead's teacher. Benedict's ongoing rhetorical strategy, accord-ing to Geertz, was a "juxtaposition of the all-too-familiar and the wildly ex-otic in such a way that they change places." Examples were her compari-sons of war and cannibalism, and American and Japanese culture. Geertz calls her strategy a "look-unto-ourselves-as-we-would-look-un to-oth-ers" strategy. It was an "anthropology designed to improve," delivered in a resolute, lapidary style. Yet for all his admiration of these four giants, Geertz delivers a pointed message to us about Homo anthropolo-gist, whose career generally consists of "a few years, now and again, scuf-fling about with cattle herders or yam gardeners, a lifetime lecturing to classes and arguing with colleagues." And the message is — life has never been tougher.
"The gap between engaging others where they are, and representing them where they aren't," Geertz ex-plains, "always immense but not much noticed, has suddenly become extremely visible. What once seemed only technically difficult, getting `their' lives into 'our' works, has turned morally, politically, even epis-temologically delicate." Part of the difficulty is a fundamen-tal shift in Western thinking. Al-though the message still hasn't trick-led down well to the media culture, leading thinkers over the last 25 years in disciplines from physics (Thomas Kuhn) to philosophy (Wittgenstein) to history (Micke) Foucault) have un-dermined faith in such notions as brute fact and objective knowledge. Anthropology stands vulnerable to these criticisms, and Geertz, among others, functions as a leading town crier. Modern politics and technology also pose a great challenge. Levi-Strauss' rage for order, Evans-Pritchard's cockiness, Malinowski's thirst for ex-perience, Benedict's sangfroid —
all understandable in judging peoples once called "primitive, tribal, tradi-tional or folk" — are not so apt for peoples now called "emergent, mod-ernizing, peripheral or submerged."
"The end of colonialism," Geertz remarks, "altered radically the na-ture of the social relationship be-tween those who ask and look and those who are asked and looked at." According to Geertz, as the people most anthropologists study have gone "from colonial subjects to sovereign citizens one of the major assump-tions upon which anthropological writing rested until only yesterday, that its subjects and its audience were not only separable but morally disconnected, that the first were to be described but not addressed, the sec-ond informed but not implicated, has fairly well dissolved." In a modern world stocked with Yoruban, Sinhalese and Tewa anthro-pologists, the Western version, Geertz asserts, can seem both comic and pre-sumptuous. It is, he suggests, "as though Gibbon were to find himself with a Roman readership." Yet Geertz sees a future for his Gibbons.
Ethnography, he believes, is a "work of the imagination." Anthro-pologists can still produce powerful works if they become self-aware, and learn to sound more like pilgrims than cartographers. Geertz's own voice -- as clever and persuasive in its chatty banter as any of the great ones he annotates provides a mod-el. We live, this loyal whistleblower concludes, in a world where "it is increasingly difficult to get out of each other's way." For anthropology to survive, the discipline must turn from pronouncement and toward conversation. Once that's done, its dancing duels, leopard-skin chiefs and cucumber sacrifices will prove no less fascinating.
The Philadelphia Inquirer-- 10 July 1988
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