The ‘Primitive,’ the ‘Real,’ and the ‘World System’: Knowledge Production in Contemporary Anthropology

RICHARD LEE The 'Primitive,' the 'Real,' and the 'World System': Knowledge Production in Contemporary Anthropology That we are living in an age of crisis is taken for granted. Far more difficult to comprehend is how the crisis manifests itself across the disciplines. Anthropology has been particularly hard hit by the epochal and cataclysmic events of the late twentieth century. With the accelerating expansion of the capitalist world system into the remotest corners of the globe, Anthropology has had to witness its traditional objects of study, the so-called primitive peoples, disappearing with the speed of light. One after another, the world's tribal and peasant societies have been 'pacified/ settled, and put to work in the fields and sweatshops of the New World Order. As a result the question of what constitutes knowledge of the 'Other' and how it is produced has become particularly troubling for anthropologists. These ·current trends have brought to the surface long-suppressed ambiguities lying at the very root of the discipline of anthropology, not the least of which revolves around the much-debated concept of the 'Primitive.' Many would argue along with the late Stanley Diamond (1974, 118) that the 'search for the primitive' is the heart of anthropology's unique role in the human sciences. Much of the history of anthropology is linked to our multifaceted understandings of the primitive in Diamond 's sense, in the quest for origins and fundamentals, or in what LeviStrauss terms anthropology's deeper purpose: 'to bear testimony to future generations of the ingeniousness, diversity, and imagination of our species' (1968, 349). But for other anthropologists the preoccupation with the primitive is an anachronism. For these the primitive is an il1usion, an arbitrary construction of the disembodied 'other' divorced from history and context (e.g. Clifford 1983; Sperber 1985; Wagner 1981). The result of this ambiguity is that there is a body of opinion in anthropology - not unconnected to views in other disciplines about 'the end of history,' and particularly among postmodernists - which would find anthropology's preoccupation with the primitive an acute embarrassment; and as a consequence the raison d'etre of anthropological inquiry becomes moot (WiImsen 1989, xi-xviii, 1-6). A second area of ambiguity is the nature of the anthropological enterprise. Since its establishment in the 1870s and 18805, anthropology UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 61, NUMBER 4, SUMMER 1992 474 RICHARD LEE has never declared itself unequivocally on whether it is a particularizing, historical discipline interested in understanding unit cultures, or a generalizing, nomothetic science searching for the broadest possible explanatory frameworks. The founders of modernist anthropology included vigorous adherents of both these tendencies, with Boas (1936; 1966) and Kroeber (1925) exemplifying the first, and Steward (1936; 1938) and Radcliffe-Brown (1922; 1931) the second. These ambiguities in turn can be traced to the complex contradictions of the intellectual currents in the eighteenth century (Adorno). The Enlightenment project was a manifesto at once for a scientific world view, for philosophical humanism, and for political emancipation. It entertained equally the doctrine of progress and progressive evolutionism, on the one hand and the germs of culhJral relativism on the other (Harris 1968). The one proclaimed the technical and moral superiority of the 'advanced' nations; the other, the doctrine of universal humanity and the rights of man. These contradictions remain with us. TWO CULTURES, OR THREE, OR FOUR? What analytical frameworks would be most useful and productive to sort out the complex currents and countercurrents in anthropology's study of non..:Western peoples today? As a starting point it might be helpful to recall C.P. Snow's gloss on the core contradiction of the Enlightenment. In his famous essay 'The Two Cultures' (1959) he explored the eternal conflict between two irreconcilable academic subcultures: the humanistic ,and the scientific. In the firstJ scholarship was devoted to the study of meanings and interpretations in great works of art and literature. In the second, scholarship was dedicated to systematic and rigorous investigation of natural laws and general principles governing the natural and human world. Anthropology is an apt example of a discipline that finds itself straddling the boundaries of Snow's two cultures. Within the discipline today there is...