The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art by James Clifford (review)

Recent Writing on Interculturalism The Predicamentof Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art James Clifford Harvard University Press; 381 pp.; $30.00 (cloth), $13.95 (paper) "Perhaps there is no return to a native land," writes James Clifford, "only field notes for its reinvention." Though it refers to Caribbean poet Aime Cesaire, this assertion characterizes Clifford's perspective throughout his provocative volume of essays. Whether he is interpreting Joseph Conrad or Edward Said, Clifford consistently addresses issues of cultural displacement , emergence, and collection. Accepting the uncertainty of a "postcultural ," posthistoire world, he assiduously promotes its productive aspects, eschewing pessimistic notions of monoculture and Western hegemony. In so doing, Clifford expands and enriches a debate that grows increasingly pertinent in a progressively intercultural era. Interculturalism is both a powerful intellectual concept and a sociopolitical reality. There are, however, varying extents to which it affects and shapes different disciplines. Theatre practitioners like Peter Brook benefit creatively from the permissiveness the trend allows; but what of anthropologists and ethnographers trained to "collect" individual cultures as if they were endangered species, omitting mention of hybrid, impure cultural forms? How will they reconceive their project in response to a trend that renders conventional methodology obsolete and redefines it as oppressive ? Clifford may not provide the ultimate answers to these questions, but he certainly indicates the direction discussion should take. One of the strengths of The Predicament of Culture is the ease with 235 which it moves among different disciplines and genres to articulate the terms of its discourse. Clifford examines the history, trends, and tendencies of ethnographic thought in some unexpected places: modernist poetry, diaries, museum displays and development, colonial postcards. His writing itself is a mode of travel. In its productive juxtaposition of diverse subject matter, the book exemplifies the approach Clifford wants contemporary ethnography to take when it confronts our highly syncretic culture. "On Ethnographic Surrealism" may be the capstone of his argument. Comparing Parisian surrealists of the twenties and thirties with Parisian ethnographers from the same period, Clifford discovers their methodological and thematic similarities. Culture-aesthetic and ethnographic-is composed of "assembled codes and artifacts always susceptible to critical and creative recombination." Surrealists and ethnographers (and people like Bataille who were both) opened up cultural possibilities through innovative bricolage. For Clifford, their practices suggest ways to insure the recognition of emergent cultures. Clifford makes an extremely apt connection between modernism and ethnography. The era that saw their emergence also witnessed the general acceleration and diversification of everyday Western life. Rapid advances in information systems, transportation, and patterns of migration placed the exotic firmly beside the familiar. Cultural definitions-and definitions of the self-grew more elusive. The Predicament of Culture opens with a poem by William Carlos Williams that addresses these changes and frustrations. In "To Elsie," Williams depicts a world of displaced cultural absolutes, dispersed traditions that cast the writer adrift in an off-centered world where the "pure products " have all "gone crazy." Though shaken by the probability that there is "no one to drive the car" that will take us to our cultural future, Williams perceives the possibility of regeneration, of "isolate flecks" that signify emergent forms. To be sure, these new possibilities are frightening, for they proceed at their own pace, in their own direction, and group themselves as they will. In short, they are self-defining. Issues of self-definition are an intrinsic part of the twentieth-century experience . In a brilliant reading of Conrad and Malinowski, two displaced Poles, Clifford historicizes the concept of culture and the cultural constitution of the individuals within it. More significant, he demonstrates how the traditional ethnographic method of participant observation fictionalizes, or conceptually fashions, cultural identity. In effect, classic ethnography always embodies an experiential duality that works itself out in writing. Malinowski's need to create a stable, ethical personality for himself among the Trobriand Islanders is revealed in his diaries but suppressed in his classic 236 Argonauts of the Western Pacific.The latter is transformed by this need. It presents not only a unified picture of a culture, but also a newly constructed , consistent public figure: the ethnographer. Malinowski was a great admirer of Conrad. In fact, his "self...