Notes
Notes Introduction 1. Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler (1992) offer a compendium of work in cultural studies, including some articles by anthropologists, though most contributors are located in humanities departments. For a range of anthropological responses to cultural studies, see Nugent and Shore (1997). 2. I did fieldwork in Brazil from March 1984 to March 1986, and again in the (northern hemisphere) summer of 1991; in Japan, during the summer of 1994 and from July 1995 to July 1996. 3. See the essays on culture and personality collected in Sapir (1949b). Also of interest is Bateson's discussion of the relevance to anthropological theory of Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness (1958 [1936]: 262-63). 4. See Geertz (1973c) for the classic statement of this position. 5. For further discussion of this problem, consult Chapter 1. 6. Psychology is in some respects a case apart. Some branches of that discipline -behaviorism as well as recent culturalist variants-eradicate or minimize the personal (see Gjerde 2004), whereas others, such as some forms of psychoanalysis and cognitivism, do not. Hence psychology as a whole has followed a somewhat different trajectory than history, anthropology, and political science. 7. For Durkheim, anomie, a state of normlessness and thus disorientation, arises chiefly during periods of rapid social change. New versions of anomie emphasize the subjective fragmentation induced by the cacophony of urban or global postmodernity. Some of these recent conjectures are (equivocally) less pessimistic, citing the possibilities postmodernity opens up for playful or even euphoric cultural bricolage (Jameson 1984). In both the modern and postmodern variants, however, society's inability to impose clear patterns for living directly engenders disjointed or pathological mental states. For more on this topic, see Chapter 3. 8. At least this is the explicit stance. But as Obeyesekere (1981: 160) observes, Durkheim's social explanation for anomie suicide is both dependent on postulates about individual personality (in particular, a presumed need for integration ) and insufficient to explain exactly who will terminate their own lives. There is, in other words, an unacknowledged psychology in Durkheim's work, as in the work of many social theorists. I explore the point further in Chapter 7. 9. See Rapport and Overing's important discussion of the differences between individuality and individualism (2000b: 178-95). 10. In his last works Foucault seems to broach issues of creativity and selffashioning (see Knauft 1996: 166-68). His model of the person is, however, dif- 198 Notes to Pages 11-29 ficult to discern, and, as Knauft points out, "Foucault's corpus as a whole only thinly addresses issues of human agency or practice" (1996: 167). 11. Interestingly, Dumont's India would seem to have hit upon something close to traditional French sociology. 12. Very little of this work examines actual "individuals" to see whether the claims hold any water. The theories are hermetic in the sense discussed above: the individual in discourse is taken to be the individual in reality. Where such theories have been subjected to some empirical examination-as in Parish (1994) or Strauss (1997)-they seem to fail. 13. Of course, these terms have their own hazards, but they are less encumbered . I hope that my discussion creates a context that limits unwanted connotations . 14. Defining culture as the distribution of cognition is not new-see, for example, Wallace (1961) and Schwartz (1978), and Sapir's reflections anticipated theirs-but it remains unorthodox. It asserts, contra the interpretive mainstream , that meaning, in the thick sense, can never be read directly from public representations (cf. also Strauss 1992, Sperber 1996). 15. Two decades after Geertz's Interpretation of Cultures (1973c), a Europebased observer could write: "It has become a cliche of American anthropology that culture is a text, and ethnography a second-order text" (Kuper 1994: 547). See Austin-Broos (1987) and Ortner (1999) for varied assessments of the significant long-term impact of Geertz's interpretive approach. The claim that ethnographies are best treated as "second-order texts," themselves fodder for literary analysis, is strongly forwarded in Clifford and Marcus (1986) and Geertz (1988), and likewise has had lasting, controversial repercussions on ethnographic writing and criticism. 16. Thanks to Don Brenneis for suggesting the apt term "virtual subjectivity." 17. For discussions of person-centered ethnography, see LeVine (1982), Levy (1973, 1994), Hollan (1997, 2001), and Linger (2001b). Person-centered ethnography relies more heavily on inferring subjective worlds from sensitive ethnographic interviews than on interpreting public symbols. 18. Important works include Strauss and Quinn (1997); Sperber (1996...
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