Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary, and: Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be: Learning Anthropology's Method in a Time of Transition (review)

Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary addresses issues that have been fueling discontent in American anthropology since the 1960s. In this volume Tobias Rees invites Paul Rabinow and George Marcus to dialogue about their role in transforming contemporary American anthropology. James Faubion also makes a cameo appearance during these conversations. The dialogues begin with some brief reflections on their academic training. Apparently Marcus was less than enamored with his training in Harvard's interdisciplinary social relations program. He portrays himself as rather estranged from anthropology and reading far and wide outside the field in search of interesting ideas. In sharp contrast, Rabinow extols the intellectual vitality at the University of Chicago and of anthropological mentors like Bernard Cohn. He characterizes himself as a "leftist Geertzian," which in this case means he was more discontented with American imperialism and capitalism and the Vietnam War than Geertz was. He says his association with Geertzian interpretive anthropology made him a target of prominent Marxist anthropologists like Eric Wolf, Laura Nader, Gerald Berreman, Eleanor Leacock, and Sherry Ortner. To my knowledge only Wolf identified openly as a Marxist, and the rest considered themselves "progressives." Be that as it may, Wolf and allies apparently ostracized Rabinow and prevented him from working at the City College of New York. According to the authors, the Marxist-leaning crowd generally rejected their Writing Culture critique to preserve a more positivistic notion of science and history. I found this story of petty academic politics fascinating. Most "cultural" or "post" Marxists whom I know would not stereotype the Writing Culture crowd as postmodern nihilists against scientific rationalism and grand theory. I thought the Writing Culture authors were an eclectic philosophical mix of Marxism, poststructuralism, deconstructionism, and critical humanism. As the dialogues suggest, Rabinow still leans toward poststructuralism and constant experimentation, and Marcus still leans toward critical humanism and building bridges between early and contemporary anthropology.

Their rather facile portrayal of the Marxists vs. the Writing Culture debate also leads into a problematic discussion of which perspective had the greatest impact on the field. The authors generally agree that Dell Hymes's Reinventing Anthropology (1972) and their Writing Culture (1986) were two distinct, powerful interventions into anthropological business as usual. For them the Hymes book was a political critique of anthropology's complicity in neocolonialism and its relative lack of public relevance. They contend that his political critique is now mainstream American anthropology in the form of subaltern studies of identity. The authors consider this reconstruction of anthropology a positive political development but a limited philosophical reconstruction of anthropological thinking. In their view, subaltern scholars substitute the concept of identity for the concept of culture, thus preserving anthropology's hallowed commitment to cultural holism. Regrettably, the authors then portray identity studies as the "exhausted paradigm" of mainstream anthropology. When asked what kind of contemporary anthropology they prefer, they characterize Appaduari's global studies, the Journal of Public Culture, and science and technology studies as a more "cosmopolitan" form of contemporary anthropology. For them cosmopolitan anthropology flows from the early Writing Culture critique and is free of the moralizing tendencies of subaltern identity studies; consequently, cosmopolitan anthropology is more inclined to study emergent cultural processes, not imagined cultural and social holisms.

The dialogues book probably was not intended to reproduce this shop-worn, divisive dichotomy, but it does so. The cursory comments on anthropological history gloss over subaltern scholars' reconstruction of cultural holism through a complex fusion of poststructuralist, feminist, Gramscian, Bourdieuian, and critical race theory notions of science, history, and method. Characterizing these developments as mainly "political" is not unlike the way orthodox Marxists stereotyped the...