James Clifford and the Ethical Turn in Anthropology

RETURNS: BECOMING INDIGENOUS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY By JAMES CLIFFORD harvard University press, 2013

The book's [Writing Culture] critique of representation somehow becomes an exemplar: its concerns are recast in terms of what it criticizes.

—Marilyn Strathern, Partial Connections

James Clifford muses himself to be an "amateur" anthropologist. Yet, or perhaps because of this, he has been one of the defining voices of academic anthropology's contemporary sensibility since the late-1980s, particularly in the United States. That sensibility, nicknamed the "reflexive turn," was inaugurated by his coedited volume (with George Marcus) Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986).¹ With Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century (2013), Clifford concludes his post–Writing Culture trilogy, which he first sent on its way with his magnum opus The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (1988), and following that, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (1997). There have been many a "re-" in Clifford's prolific writings. Thus, Returns could not be a more fitting occasion to look back on the significance of his proliferating "re-'s." What does it have to do with his self-professed amateurism? And what kind of "professional" anthropology has such a sensibility of amateurism enabled?

The subject matter of Returns is "indigenous historical practices" (15). The indigenous people of primary concern are Native Americans in Alaska, specifically, the Alutiiq/Sugpiaq. But the theoretical implications are expansive, encompassing "aborigines in Australia, Maori in Aotearoa/New Zealand, the Ainu of Hokkaido/Sakhalin, and the 'Indian' tribes of North and South America" (15). The Alutiiq/Sugpiaq make up the main focus in the final two chapters, and we will return to the riveting last chapter for a more sustained look. For now, we turn to Clifford's general statements on how to write about the contemporary issues of indigeneity.

Clifford has for some time termed his approach "realism." Other interchangeable names are "ethnographic-historical realism" (27), "contingent realism" (69), or "decentered realism" (40). By that, he means "an attitude of critical openness," as a way of "engaging with complex historical transformation" (13). "Realism," he says, "must be attuned to what is emerging" (29). For indigenous historical practices of the 1980s and 1990s, in his view, cannot be adequately captured by the heretofore conventional categories of "invasion, dispossession, resistance, and survival" (15). Rather, they consist of "dialectics of innovation and constraint" (32), "both confirming and exceeding" (47) abstract categories such as capitalism. "Global capital and the state are active forces but not determining structures," he writes (37). "Hegemony," he says, "is not domination, but rather a historical process: unfinished struggles, contingent alliances, and accommodations in an evolving field of unequal forces" (32). "Negotiated adaption(s)" to such forces, indigenous historical practices are not merely a "revivalist story of people returning to origins" (37). As such, he rejects the models of "all-or-nothing, before-after transformations" (35). "There is," he argues, "no longer a standpoint from which to definitively map particular, local stories in an overarching sequence, no narrative of human history, of enlightened progress, of economic development, or of a disseminating global system" (41). Instead, he calls for "partial histories," "big-enough, more-than-local, narratives" (41), "outside the frozen alternatives of local and global, structure and process, macro and micro, material and cultural" (45). Such is, he argues, a historical perspective that allows for "continually revised open-endedness" (22). "The result," he says, "is a more realistic, because multiscaled, dialogical and unfinished, understanding of contemporary sociocultural worlds" (45, emphasis added). His key concepts are "articulation, performance, and translation" (45).

I have three main points to make on Returns. These will be followed by two theoretical points on the anthropological ethos of our time, which came to internalize Clifford's "amateur" sensibility. The first point is about how Clifford conceives of the relation between his writing and his subject matter—that is, indigenous historical practices. My cue in unpacking that relation is Marilyn Strathern's...