Critical Anthropology Now: Unexpected Contexts, Shifting Constituencies, Changing Agendas (review)

In the 1980s a spate of self-reflexive and critical scholarship identified a "crisis of representation" in anthropology that was linked, albeit in different ways, by this scholarship to the postmodern conditions of anthropological practice and the postcolonial dilemmas of cultural studies. Writing Culture [James Clifford and George Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986] was a compelling and widely read contribution to the debates that ensued. In the 1990s anthropologists sought diverse ways out of this crisis (some, of course, hotly disputed the validity of the notion of crisis itself) and several stimulating works resulted. The anthropological field site was redefined. Anthropological theory renewed through intense engagements with domains of inter-disciplinary theoretical production in literary studies, feminist studies, environmental studies, development studies, ethnic studies, religious studies, as well as anthropology's more conventional disciplinary interlocutors in geography, political science, linguistics, and philosophy.

Critical Anthropology Now is a product of this new robustness in the discipline that causes some observers from outside the field to marvel at Anthropology's appetite for new ideas and new research venues. As George Marcus writes in the introduction to this fine volume, the authors assembled in this collection,

simply want to demonstrate that the impact of the so-called postmodernist critiques of anthropology lies not in further discussions of postmodernism, but in the enactments of new kinds of research projects in anthropology, differently problematized and innovatively conducted

(p. 7).

With this admirable goal the volume gathers together a series of studies, not all by anthropologists, that examine major social issues in America and try to be transparent about their methodological creativity. The introduction suggests the notion of the "writing machine"-to remind the reader that ethnography participates in an existing and contestatory world of representation as one mode among many. Several essays illuminate the pertinence of this concept to the conditions in which anthropological research and writing is conducted these days.

Judith Stacey does this work by examining the trajectory of writing in family sociology. She argues that postmodernity as a sociological condition created new kinds of families in America. She goes on to examine why and how academic sociology allied with political organizations of varied ideological persuasions to keep debates centered on issues of family values cast in terms of the nuclear family. Stacey's conclusions that power/knowledge shifts have determined the content of family sociology more than disinterested research have, however, to be taken on faith as other possible explanations for these trends are not discussed. Sherry Ortner presents another tantalizing slice from her on-going research on class and culture in America. She makes the important point that journalism and anthropology constitute data for each other in a mutual competition to unveil the "truth" about American culture. This elegant and thoughtful essay nicely exemplifies many of the challenges and opportunities of doing research on middle class culture. Starting with her high school classmates in New Jersey, Ortner travels to different parts of America, where these former classmates and their children have dispersed, to learn how late capitalism embeds itself in social structure and creates similar generation-specific anxieties across significant class differences. The article concludes with a plug for the merits of long-term ethnographic fieldwork that is strangely at odds with a volume where such field work is not much in evidence and where its possibility in any bounded, discrete, sense of knowledge production has been seriously questioned.

Public culture and specially the various forms of representation that proliferate from the news-media industries are a major source of materials and a major object of criticism for several contributions in this book. Faubion constructs an account of the Waco conflagration resulting from the encounter between Branch Davidians and law enforcement agencies from media accounts. He argues that such incidents are a product, in part, of the incessant surveillance that results from state welfare...