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Preface and Acknowledgments Some books take a long time to write, and this one began twenty years ago as a lecture accompanying a slide show that I gave in a class on the anthropology of Africa that Deborah Kaspin was teaching at the University of Virginia. In showing several juxtaposed images of people in the village in Guinea-Bissau inhabited by members of an ethnic group called Manjaco among whom I had been engaged in what anthropologists call ethnography, I wanted to illustrate to my audience how what we learn or don’t learn about other people in other places depends on how our desires and prejudices frame our subject. I showed, for example, two images of the Manjaco king, one in a suit, the other in a toga, and asked them to respond to those images. Almost all the students found the king in the toga more compelling, so powerful, so self-possessed. The king in the suit made them cringe. I then confessed that I had felt the same way, and I tried to demonstrate how all anthropological knowledge and how the discipline of anthropology itself is enduringly haunted by that problem of perception by also showing a series of images of rituals. Images of rituals made up the bulk of the hundreds of slides I had taken, yet rituals, in the scheme of things, were only a small slice of life in the village as I experienced it. Rituals were also what intrigued my audience. They were the kinds of images my audience expected from a sojourn in Africa. They made Africa appear at once primitive and exotic. They also were instantiations of that vague something we all had a name for—culture. In 1988 it was easy to make fun of such expectations and of the kinds of framing that shaped both the expectations and the images themselves. In 1988 anthropologists were busy flagellating themselves for their own complicity in a pernicious form of Othering that drew an all-too-predictable and comforting boundary between “us” and “them” by stressing cultural difference. Anthropology in the late 1980s was a guilty discipline, eager to confess its guilt and run away from the scene of the crime. Culture was becoming an embarassing xi Preface and Acknowledgments xii term, almost as bad as, indeed analogous to, race. So, in showing these slides and in emphasizing the similarity between my perspective and the perspective of my audience, I wanted to rub our collective noses in the stench of that crime. But I also wanted to do something else. I wanted to recover a certain essential creativity inherent in the ethnographic encounter. Photographs are real; they exclude and distort while remaining somehow true. Cultural differences are not mere figments. They are the stuff of what makes us human. And grappling with difference through the distortions of our own desires and prejudices is what we must do if we are to remain true to an essential commitment to human equality. This book emerges out of that lecture (described in more detail in chapter 6), which subsequently became a central component of my Introduction to Cultural Anthropology course, and out of that commitment, which I believe remains central to anthropology. What I discovered looking at my photographs and listening to my audience’s comments on them is hardly original. Indeed, I would argue that my version of anthropology is typical, quintessential. Other anthropologists might disagree. Because we are a discipline that emerges out of highly personal encounters, we develop a certain genealogy for ourselves that connects us with our disciplinary peers and forebears. So in writing this book, I constantly imagined an audience composed of those anthropologists, chief among them Clifford Geertz, whose own voice and perspective captivated me when I was an undergraduate and starting to read anthropology for the first time on my own. Geertz drew sharp distinctions between Balinese or Javanese and Moroccans to make a case for the existence of “local knowledge,” or “ethos,” or “culture,” in part to assert that those contrasts are more profound than, say, the more pervasive kinds of contrast that anthropology is given to making between the “contemporary moment” and the past, between the colonial and the postcolonial. As anthropology has become increasingly a guilty discipline, it also gives up on the creativity of contrast. That is a shame because exploring contrast is anthropology’s enduring contribution to human studies broadly conceived. Geertz always exemplified what he argued. Anthropology was best as an essay...

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