Anthropology and the Politics of Representation

1. Double Trouble: Implications of Historicizing Identity Discourses

1 Double Trouble Implications of Historicizing Identity Discourses LesW .Field In this chapter, I will explore dynamic facets of the analy­ sis of identity in both anthropological circles and indigenous communities. As a part of this discussion, I will describe my work with a federally unrecognized tribe in California, the Muwekma Ohlone of the San Francisco Bay area, among whom the last dozen years of change and growth have helped me and others in the tribe to clarify and explore many of the facets of identity. The major theme I will explore here centers upon historicizing the identity discourse in anthropology and in anthropology’s engagement with the tribe with which I have been working. As an anthropologist, I am interested in how anthropologists come to pay attention to particular aspects of the sociocultural milieu in which they are immersed? How do particular parameters—such as race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality—come to be accepted as ones that are more important than others, as those to which new anthropological work should attend? These are his­ tori­ cal at least as much as purely analytic issues within the discipline, I contend.With respect to the derivation of contemporary analy­ sis of identity , I will argue, these histories are intricately intertwined with postwar social movements, and this chapter is placed within the elucidation of that relationship . Identity—Double Historicization as Theoretical Means and Practical End I have argued that both different sorts of anthropologists,on the one hand,and different sorts of movements and leaders of the so-­ called Fourth World (indigenous and aborigi­ nal peoples; marginalized, stateless, subnational groups; nomads and foragers), on the other hand, are simultaneously engaged in 20 / Field­ debates over constructionist and essentialist forms of identity (Field 1999a). If this is the case,it becomes important,I think,to his­ tori­cally trace the manner in which discourses of identity such as race, ethnicity, gender, or sexuality became so ensconced and naturalized in anthropological work. That tracing involves a complex double historicization,if you will.Identity movements have their own histories,as any scholar or activist knows,and the ideas used and developed by such movements form a part of those histories.­ Ingrid Rowland’s (2004) recent exegesis of aristocratic Tuscans’ obsessive focus upon identity in the seventeenth century and how that obsession was projected upon the Etruscans of antiquity illustrates the value of acknowledging the multiple and dynamically mutable meanings of identity over the centuries. But analytic ideas in academic circles also have their histories,and those ideas are not separated, whether his­ tori­ cally or conceptually, from the ideas that grow in and motivate social movements.This is hardly a groundbreaking observation , as Michael Kearney iterates: “[The] intellectual products of anthropology should be considered sociocultural artifacts,no different from any other cultural artifact that is situated within, and is the expression of, a particular sociocultural and po­ liti­ cal process;yet it is amazing that the history of anthropology is hardly ever approached with such a working assumption” (2004, 3).1 Notwithstanding Kearney’s insight, it may be unsurprising that anthropologists, like the great theorists who inspire much of their work, can seem to negate the historicity of their own production.While in Capital Karl Marx proposed an analy­ sis of capitalism in dialogue with the English po­ liti­ cal economists (Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Thomas Malthus), in Socialism , Scientific and Utopian and especially in The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, he and Friedrich Engels represented their analy­ sis as a science of history and, by implication, transcendental. Michel Foucault (in The Order of Things [1973], for example), who has inspired so much contemporary anthropological analy­ sis, also seemed to place his analy­ sis outside of the flow of history in a kind of meta-­ epistemic bubble.2 Taking into consideration just these two seminal influences upon postwar anthropology, it is challenging to untangle the braided, woven histories of ideas, analy­ sis, and activism refracted in the interdependent, relational development of identity discourses that dominate both social movements and the academy. In anthropology, the understanding of identity, particularly of Fourth World and other minority groups, has transformed in significant ways during the twentieth century. In my own work, these transformations can be summarized, perhaps somewhat simplified, as a movement from a traits-­ based essentialism, crystallized in the ethnography of California Indians by Alfred Kroeber (1925),to Barthian analyses of identity as defined as much by [18.218.38.125] Project...