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Conclusion Tending to Nature, Tending to Culture; or, Is Anthropology History? Modernity can be a kind of mourning—an endless lament for something we have lost and long to regain. What we have lost, we often imagine, is a profound connection to the world around us. We are no longer close to God, close to each other, or, worst of all, close to nature. If modernity is nature’s anathema, then that lament of loss can also be a compelling force for radical change. When modernity is imagined as technological advance, as industrialization, as consumption gone wild, such a perspective allows us to produce warnings for ourselves that compel us to become nature’s stewards. Consider for example, as one long-running television commercial had it, a swampy image of a trashcovered landscape choked with smokestacks that the camera scans until it comes to an Indian looking out over that scene of destruction. The camera focuses on his profile. As the old Indian looks at the trash-strewn world, a single tear slides slowly down his cheek. When we see that Indian, we too lament because we know that not only is the nature that ruined landscape evokes lost, but so too potentially is the Indian. The Indian is our stand-in, our superego, our conscience. His tears tell us that unless we can do something to restore that landscape—unless we can return it to a semblance of the natural and protect it from ourselves—it and he are history or are about to become history. Anthropology too might become history, that is, no longer relevant but instead passé. If there are no longer primitive people—radically different “others”—who will anthropologists study? In the past quarter-century anthropologists have endlessly addressed this question, as often as not from the perspective of a kind of guilty disavowal of our earlier—some call it romantic, somepatronizing—desireto shareinthespaceofand celebrate theprimitive. So one way anthropology has changed is that many anthropologists have literally become historians of our own discipline, scrutinizing our intellectual ancestors in order to find in their ethnographic practices and in the ethnographies they wrote traces of the prejudices of their times. When they focused on difference, 184 Conclusion 185 this could be seen as evidence of their desire for difference. They craved, as Michel Rolph-Trouillot so brutally put it, “the savage slot,” so they exaggerated difference for their own and their peers’ delectation. In this historical critique, anthropology’s past product can be scrutinized as a kind of pornography, the exotic erotic. Implied in such a critique is the abiding idea that there really never were any primitive people like the Indian after all. Sure, there were poor people, or people outside of capitalism, but their desires were the same as ours. Power, not cultural Otherness, is what made us different. A second shift in anthropology in the past quarter-century dovetails with the disavowal of our collective past by stressing the inappropriate moral distance our discipline used to put between the ethnographer and her subjects. Power—the fact that we inhabited positions of relative privilege and were generally unwilling to relinquish them—meant that we were only touristically involved in the lives of our research subjects, and even less in their plight. So an increasingly compelling program for research for anthropologists beginning their careers entails some kind of explicitly political or ameliorative agenda. In such research, anthropologists investigate the loci of power itself. Rather than go to the “out of the way places” Geertz once asserted were the scholarly terrain anthropology occupied, more and more anthropologists in recent years have “studied up,” following an agenda Laura Nader suggested at the end of the 1960s, an era when academia was becoming ever-more-explicitly radicalized. In Nader’s view anthropology had done far too much studying down. Indeed, the whole history of anthropology as an ethnographic encounter tended toward a certain social and cultural slumming. The political agenda of anthropology was therefore eclipsed by the thrill of encounters with exotic Others. Nader wanted to make anthropology more directly politically relevant. To study up is to treat as natives upper-level administrators who run prestigious institutions, business elites, scientists, government officials. She wanted to use the ethnographer’s capacity to develop rapport and make sense of the strange to pull the curtain back from the hidden actions of the powers that be in modern societies to expose elite actors to a public gaze. Hers was to be a...

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