englund, harri; leach, james. ethnography and the meta-narratives for modernity.pdf

Ethnography and the Meta‐Narratives of ModernityAuthor(s): Harri Englund and James LeachSource: Current Anthropology, Vol. 41, No. 2 (April 2000), pp. 225-248Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for AnthropologicalResearchStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/300126 .

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225

C u r r e n t A n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 41, Number 2, April 2000q 2000 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2000/4102-0005$3.00

Ethnography and theMeta-Narratives ofModernity1

by Harri Englund and James Leach

Current attempts to increase the relevance of sociocultural an-thropology encourage anthropologists to engage in the study ofmodernity. In this discourse dominated by sociologists, the con-tribution of anthropology is often to reveal cultural diversity inglobalization, leading to the notion of multiple modernities. Yetsuch ethnographic accounts draw upon familiar sociological ab-stractions such as time-space compression, commodification, in-dividualization, disenchantment, and reenchantment. This articleshows how an underlying meta-narrative preempts social scien-tific argument by making shifts in analytical scales look natural,as in the alleged need to “situate” the particular in “wider” con-texts. This analytical procedure undermines what is unique inthe ethnographic method—its reflexivity, which gives subjectsauthority in determining the contexts of their beliefs and prac-tices. Two ethnographic case studies are presented to supportthis argument, one from Melanesia on current interests in whitepeople, money, and consumption and the other from Africa onborn-again Christianity and individuality. The article ends by re-flecting not only on the limits of metropolitan meta-narratives inreturning relevance to anthropology but also on the contempo-rary conditions of academic work that undermine the knowledgepractices of ethnography and render such meta-narrativesplausible.

h a r r i e n g l u n d is Research Fellow at the Nordic Africa In-stitute (P.O. Box 1703, 751 47 Uppsala, Sweden [[email protected]]). He was educated at the Universities of Helsinki(M.A., 1990) and Manchester (Ph.D., 1995). His research interestsinclude political violence, migration, Christianities, andphenomenology.

j a m e s l e a c h is Leverhulme Special Research Fellow in theDepartment of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge(Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, England [[email protected]]). He was educated at the University of Manchester(B.Soc.Sc., 1992; Ph.D., 1997). His research interests include Mel-anesian kinship and social organization, land and landscape, andthe relationship between intellect, creativity, and ownership.

The present paper was submitted 15 xii 98 and accepted 26 iii99.

1. We thank Keith Hart, Anthony Simpson, and Marilyn Strathernfor their advice and criticism. Given the tenor of this article, theusual disclaimer applies with special vigor.

“As the end of the twentieth century draws closer,” Ak-bar Ahmed and Cris Shore write, “it is becoming in-creasingly apparent that the world is changing, not justincrementally but also qualitatively. Human societiesare moving into a new phase of history” (1995a:12). Thusopens an extended reflection on sociocultural anthro-pology in the contemporary world—a world, social the-orists are now wont to tell us, that is characterized bytime-space compression, deindustrialization, andintensifying identity politics (see, e.g., Giddens 1990, Ap-padurai 1996, Hannerz 1996). New phenomena, hithertoconspicuously absent in most ethnographies, are said topose unprecedented challenges to anthropological re-search practice, particularly the tradition of long-termand localized fieldwork. The anthropologist’s analyticallanguage comes to highlight social and cultural ruptures.At issue is a move which merges anthropology with adiscourse on modernity, a discourse that has been con-stitutive, in its arguments for and against the assumed“modernity,” of the discipline of sociology. We examinethe abstractions this move demands for ethnographicanalysis. On the basis of our fieldwork in Melanesia andAfrica, we give brief examples of how a current meta-narrative of modernity organizes ethnography and, withits specific emphasis on ruptures, obstructs the produc-tion of anthropological knowledge.

The current fin-de-siecle angst differs from the critiqueof ethnography in the 1980s. The influential “literaryturn,” in which the problems of ethnography were seenas largely textual and their solutions as lying in exper-imental writing (see Clifford and Marcus 1986), seemsto have lost its impetus. Its assault on “realist” ethnog-raphy was too categorical, its view of different currentsin the history of ethnography lacking in nuance (Fox1991a:5). The subjectivist agenda, moreover, was too ob-viously an inversion of perceived scientific objectivismto offer a plausible alternative (Grimshaw and Hart 1995:59). In the 1990s, major volumes assessing current chal-lenges to sociocultural anthropology focus on relevancerather than representation (see, e.g., Fox 1991b, Ahmedand Shore 1995b, Moore 1996a, James, Hockney, andDawson 1997). The reflexivity of the 1980s debate is nowlargely taken for granted, whereas its subjectivism is re-placed by a sense of ruptures in the real world and theconcomitant need for new methodologies. The quest forrelevance has its political edge, though hardly inspiringthe self-criticism of the decolonization period (cf. Hymes1972, Asad 1973). Instead, relevance calls into questionanthropology’s own identity politics. It would appearthat for anthropologists writing today the decentering ofWestern knowledge claims is now done most effectivelyby “postcolonial” or “Third World” cultural critics inmetropolitan academia who, by virtue of personal dias-poric experiences, have the insights that others mustundertake fieldwork to gain (see, e.g., Spivak 1988,Bhabha 1994). Fearful of being forever associated withthe esoteric, some anthropologists embrace, with theirdiscourses on “modernity,” these postcolonial critics andthe social sciences at large.

Tellingly, the volume on the future of anthropology



226 F current anthropology Volume 41, Number 2, April 2000

which begins with Ahmed and Shore’s prophetic wordsends with an equally bold judgment by a sociologist,Anthony Giddens. His verdict on anthropology is grim:“A discipline which deals with an evaporating subject-matter, staking claim to a method which it shares withthe rest of the social sciences anyway, and deficient inits core theoretical traditions” (1995:274). He does go onto concede that the world at the dawn of the 21st centuryposes no less difficult challenges for sociology. A keyreason is sociology’s long-standing commitment to an-alytical models which equate societies with nation-states. Globalization and the transnational flows of in-stitutions, ideas, and capital are rapidly underminingsuch models and encouraging sociologists to interrogatethe analytical category of society (see, e.g., Martin andBeittel 1998, Touraine 1998; for an earlier discussion, seeMoore 1966). The parallel to anthropologists’ fears of pa-rochialism is clear. Ethnography, Arjun Appadurai says,“must redefine itself as that practice of representationthat illuminates the power of large-scale, imagined lifepossibilities over specific life trajectories” (1996:55). Themass media, especially the electronic media, are impor-tant vehicles in effecting the enlargement of the imag-ination which makes the ethnography of specific, local-ized relations seem to him parochial.2

A fortunate collapse of disciplinary boundaries in thesocial sciences would seem to ensue, a long-awaited re-sponse to difficulties which have evoked much criticism(see, e.g., Wallerstein 1991 and 1998). Our insistenceupon the uniqueness of the ethnographic method goesagainst this current of convergence. This should not betaken to indicate anthropological chauvinism. Ethnog-raphy, in the sense we use the term here, entails revisionof analytical perspectives on the basis of reflexive livingin another setting, a research practice that is not nec-essarily confined to sociocultural anthropology (for aclassic nonanthropologist’s ethnography, see, e.g., Willis1977). Nor do we oppose anthropologists’ attempts to“think big”—to engage in public debates and to offersyntheses of historical and ethnographic materials (see,e.g., Wolf 1982, Tilly 1984). The issue of scale is critical,however. Anthropologists writing about modernity areoften highly aware of scale, but their claims to controlanalytical scales—in references to “larger-scale perspec-tives” or “wider contexts”—bypass valuable and still un-derdeveloped knowledge practices in ethnography. They

2. The anthropological parallel to sociologists’ reflections on theconcept of society is, of course, a critique of the concept of culture.The methodological and epistemological issues in the disconnec-tion between “culture” and locality are highly challenging, and wedo not wish to dispute the value of the innovative work that theseproblems currently inspire (e.g., Fog Olwig and Hastrup 1997, Guptaand Ferguson 1997). Nor do we dispute the value of studies whichfocus on the uses of “culture” as strategies of exclusion and em-powerment in current identity politics (e.g., Sahlins 1993, Turner1993, Friedman 1994, Wolf 1994, Stolcke 1995, Ong 1996a). Ourconcern with modernity’s meta-narratives in ethnographic analysisis linked to these bodies of work only indirectly, insofar as thenotion of “cultural diversity” in a current discourse on modernitysustains the concept of discrete cultures.

do so by organizing their ethnography in a meta-narrativewhich makes shifts in scale look natural.

We use the term “meta-narrative” to mean a set oforganizing assumptions of which only some may beenunciated in a given anthropological narrative. The as-sumptions surrounding “modernity” often perform theiranalytical work in ethnographies through such meta-nar-ratives rather than through explicit propositions. Insteadof engaging in explicit theorizing, anthropologists oftenrely on ethnography as the means of making an empiricalcontribution to the social scientific debate on modernity.This is how, at least in part, precious relevance is seento be regained in the discipline. Daniel Miller’s predic-tion in 1994 that his ethnography of modernity “is likelyto be one of several over the next few years which areexplicitly concerned with comparative modernities,based in non-European contexts” (1994:68), has provento have been rather perceptive.

These contributions, we must clarify, by no meansexpound one coherent notion of modernity. “Modernity”has become a buzzword to such an extent that we mustdistinguish a meta-narrative from the word and make itclear from the outset that our focus is on the former.The word “modernity” may or may not carry a meta-narrative. For example, it can simply mean “contem-poraneity,” surprising especially nonanthropologists, asin the intriguing expression “the modernity of witch-craft” (see Geschiere 1997). Profound difficulties follow,however, when “modernity” comes to delineate a con-dition of existence and to merge the concerns of eth-nography with those of Western sociology. Although theresult may be little more than an account riddled withtautology (Englund 1996), it is, above all, the extent ofethnographic ignorance in the perspectives organized bymodernity’s meta-narratives that concerns us here.

Current anthropological sensibilities have little pa-tience for a discourse on modernity in the singular. In-stead, a notion of multiple modernities appears plausible.We begin by exploring this notion, asking whether itsassumptions differ significantly from those of earlier no-tions of modernity. Our intent is not to establish whetherone notion of modernity represents an advance over an-other but to highlight how modifications retain key as-pects of earlier meta-narratives. Our critique revolvesaround certain specific abstractions in the current dis-course on modernity and, in particular, around the con-cept of the person that those abstractions involve. Ourethnography from Papua New Guinea on current inter-ests in white people, money, and consumption interro-gates “commodification” and “moral panic” and our eth-nography from Malawi on born-again Christianity“tradition” and “individualization.” Our alternative per-spective on personhood and sociality both arises from aconceptual critique and is nuanced by lived experienceduring fieldwork. We insist, in other words, on ethnog-raphy as a practice of reflexive knowledge production,not on an empiricist critique based on unmediated ex-perience. The knowledge practices of ethnography, weconclude, are unique in that they give the ethnographer’sinterlocutors a measure of authority in producing an un-



englund and leach Ethnography and Meta-Narratives of Modernity F 227

derstanding of their life-worlds. We end by reflecting notonly on the limits of the meta-narratives of modernityin returning relevance to sociocultural anthropology butalso on the contemporary conditions of academic workthat undermine the knowledge practices of ethnographyand render such meta-narratives plausible.

The Sociological Legacy

multiple modernities

Ambivalence, the uneasy wavering between hope anddespair, is an enduring principle in Western socialthought. Its source is arguably the Judeo-Christian cos-mology of human imperfection, qualifying even the op-timism of the 18th century (see Sahlins 1996). The his-tory of anthropology can be seen as a progression througha series of meta-narratives, some of which are foundedon this ambivalence. Marshall Sahlins’s Culture andPractical Reason (1976), for example, exposed two ab-stractions which derived from such meta-narratives: theimperfect means-ends relation among individuals andthe ecological factors which determined or constrainedthe social order. However, the belief that it is possibleto have a perspective without any preconceptions is dif-ficult to sustain in anthropology after the critiques ofethnography in the 1980s. Our concern in this article isnot, therefore, with the general fact that there are meta-narratives but with the specific abstractions that themeta-narratives of modernity entail. We examine the ex-tent to which ethnographic knowledge practices cansustain a critique of those abstractions. We begin,though, with the specific history of social thought whichgenerates the assumptions of personhood and disconti-nuity we go on to dispute through our ethnography.

The emergence of sociology at the turn of the 20thcentury introduced ambivalence as a key theme in a dis-course on modernity. Sociology broke with the spirit ofthe Enlightenment; it was “born pessimistic” (Touraine1995:129). The celebration of “modernization” in themid-20th century appears, with hindsight, unvarnishedin its optimism, although not even the modernizationtheorists spoke with one voice (cf. Eisenstadt 1992; Smel-ser 1992:380). Talcott Parsons’s (1967, 1971) notions offunctionally specific institutions and generalized valuesinvited the conceptualization of domination and conflict(Coser 1956, Dahrendorf 1959) and their incorporationinto functionalism as “breakdowns” in modernization(Eisenstadt 1964). Much earlier, Emile Durkheim (1933,1952) and Max Weber (1958) had already written the spec-ter of a countertendency into their understandings ofmodern society, differentiation and rationalizationbreeding anomie and the “disenchantement of theworld” (Weber 1958:155). While some would regard theextent of pessimism in these perspectives as a moot point(on Weber, see, e.g., Seidman 1983, Weiss 1987), theirambivalence over the imagined “modern” condition is,at any rate, palpable. They indicate, moreover, a “doublehermeneutic” in which, according to Giddens, “socio-

logical knowledge spirals in and out of the universe ofsocial life” (1990:15, emphasis omitted). In other words,the ambivalence over modernity that Durkheim and We-ber, among others, expressed was intrinsic to the world-view of self-consciously “modern” subjects and, in turn,nourished that worldview with further sociologicalthoughts.3

Toward the end of the 20th century, a sociologicalsense of “the darker side of modernity” (Giddens 1990:7) is, if anything, even more pronounced. Environmentalproblems and the nuclear threat are now seen as someof the pressing issues which the founders of sociologydid not envisage (cf. Beck 1992 and 1997). The differentviewpoints in the current “double hermeneutic” areunited by deepening disenchantement. This, WendyBrown observes, “is not so much nihilism—the oxy-moronic belief in meaninglessness—as barely maskeddespair about the meanings and events that humans havegenerated” (1995:26). In moral thought, disagreementsand even doubt about the possibility of common criteriaare now seen to be so pervasive that they underminecomprehension and morality (see, e.g., MacIntyre 1981and 1988; Horton and Mendus 1994; McMylor 1994).Whatever one’s standpoint on these issues, and even ifone chooses to define the current condition as “post-modernity,” the meta-narrative of ruptures, of sociocul-tural discontinuities, remains intact (Harvey 1989:117).4

It organizes, as ever in the discourse on modernity, theways in which relevant research questions are identifiedand their potential answers circumscribed.

Diversity is a key notion in this superabundance ofmeaning, of conflict and controversy, and it accords wellwith late-20th-century anthropological sensibilities.Even outside anthropology, it has become common toenunciate the “dialectics of modernity” (e.g., Tiryakian1992, Therborn 1996). The idea of countertendenciescontinues to animate scholarly debate, with disenchan-tement and differentiation, for example, serving as abackground for the contemplation of “reenchantment”and “dedifferentiation” (Tiryakian 1992). Scholars com-plicate their own disenchantment by observing that re-

3. The impact of the arts, for and against modernity, has also beengreat in this deepening self-consciousness (see Bell 1978, Berman1983). Among intellectuals, the Frankfurt School has representedprobably the most concentrated effort to expound the ills of mo-dernity (see Horkheimer and Adorno 1972; Jay 1973; Touraine 1995:151–64).4. Attempts to move “beyond” modernity merit a comment. Post-war modernization theory raised doubts about the distinction be-tween “tradition” and “modernity” which was constitutive of theperspective itself (Bendix 1967, Tipps 1973). A more comprehensiveassault on the foundations of modernity has been associated withthe rise of postmodernism (for overviews, see Vattimo 1988, Harvey1989, Turner 1990, Bauman 1992). Its emergence in anthropologyduring the 1980s received, lone voices notwithstanding (notablyTyler 1986), a lukewarm if not hostile reception (see, e.g., Sangren1988, Pool 1991). In the 1990s, major volumes assessing the stateof sociocultural anthropology routinely mention in their introduc-tory chapters the contribution that postmodernism has made toanthropologists’ own reflexivity but proceed to denounce its self-defeating political and epistemological relativism (see, e.g., Fox1991a:5–9; Ahmed and Shore 1995a:40; Moore 1996b:2–3).



Alexandre

Sticky Note

A hsitória da antropologia pode ser vista como um progresso através de uma série de metanarrativas, algumas das quais são fundadas na ambivalência colocada pela cosmologia judaico-cristã da imperfeição humana (esperança e desespero) (p. 227). Isso pode ser visto em Sahlins, em Cultura e Razão Prática: duas abstrações das quais derivam estas metanarrativas: a imperfeita relação meio-fim entre individuos e fatores ecológicos dos quais são determinados e constrangidos pela ordem social (p. 227). Contudo a crença que é possível se ter uma perspectiva sem qualquer pré-cpncepção é difícil de sustentar em antropologia principalmente depois das críticas a etnografia nos anos 1980 (227). A emergência da sociologia no inicio do século XX introduz a ambivalência como tema chave no discurso da modernidade. A sociologia quebrou com o espiríto do Iluminismo; nasceu pessimista segundo Alain Touraine. E no meio do século XX apareceu como sociologia otimista, mas nem sempre os teóricos da modernidade falam em uma voz. A noção de Talcot Parsosn de funcionalidade específica das instituições e valores generalizados conceitualizado da dominação e do conflito e de sua incorporação dentro do funcionalismo como desarranjos na modernização, mas há uma contratendência dentro de seus entendimentos de sociedade moderna, diferenciação criando anomia e o desencantamento do mundo, ou seja, a perspectia pessimista nestas perspectiva é um ponto discutível, sobre sua ambivalência na condição moderna imaginada é qualquer coisa palpável. Eles indicam no entanto uma dupla hermenêutica, que de acordo com Giddens, o saber sociológico é uma espiral no e fora do universo da vida social, Ou seja, a ambivalência sobre a modernidade em Durkheim, Weber e outros é foi expresso pela visão de mundo auto-consciente do objeto "moderno", e nutrida por uma visão de mundo com pensamentos socio lógicos posteriores (p. 227). No fim do século os problemas ambientais e os perigos nucleares coloca diferentes pontos de vista a dupla hermeneutica que são unidos por um profundo desencantamento (p. 227). Não é tanto um niilismo como um desespero mal disfarçado sobre os significados e evento que os humanos tem gerado (p. 227). Mas as rupturas da metanarrativa, as descontinuidades socioulturais, permanecem intactas (p. 227). Diversidade é uma noção chave nesta superabundância de significados, do conflito e controvérsia, e que estão bem de acordo com as as sensisbilidades antropólogiacas do final do século XX (p. 227). Mesmo fora da antropologia, isto torna-se comum ao enunciar a "dialética da modernidade" (p. 227). A idéia de contratendencia continuar a animar os debates acadêmicos, com desencantamento e diferenciação, servindo como um background para a contemplação do "reencantamento" e da "diferenciação" (p. 227). Os acadêmicos complicam seu próprio desencantamento pelo suas próprias observações das crenças religiosas que prosperam mais do que nunca e mesmo aqueles que especificamente rejeitam a religião como podendo encontrar novas formas de encantamento na fantasia que a tecnologia, filmes e viagens intercontinentais, entre outras coisas, parecem oferecer (p. 227-228).


ligious beliefs thrive as much as ever and that even thosewho specifically reject religion can find new sources ofenchantment in the fantasy that technology, movies, andintercontinental travel, among other things, seem to of-fer. But it is important to bear in mind that such fantasiesrepresent “reenchantment” only after self-consciously“modern” subjects have defined “disenchantment” asone of modernity’s key features.

Intrinsic to the current meta-narrative is the idea that“dialectics” constitute the contemporary world as a uni-verse of multiple modernities (see, e.g., Pred and Watts1992, Comaroff and Comaroff 1993, Featherstone, Lash,and Robertson 1995, Friedman and Carrier 1996, van derVeer 1996, Ram and Jolly 1998, Behrend and Luig 1999).Three important assumptions are usually made explicit.The first is that modernity, full-fledged and recognizable,is everywhere. This assumption precludes teleology;some parts of the world are not somehow less modernthan others. The second is that the institutional config-uration of modernity cannot be defined in advance. Theanalyst may choose to highlight witchcraft in one set-ting, aesthetics in another, and political economy in athird, but through the abstractions of “reenchantment”and “dedifferentiation,” for example, they all are somany illustrations of particular modernities. The thirdis that diverse cultures persist, offering, according tosome perspectives, “local” responses to “global” pro-cesses. Current accounts rarely pose a choice betweenhope and despair. “Dialectics” provides the analyst witha meta-narrative of both “creative opportunities” and“threat and danger” (see Geschiere and Meyer 1998:606).

The rhetoric of ethnographic holism takes on a newguise, now as a necessity to “situate” apparently discretecultures and societies in “wider contexts” (cf. Thornton1988; Marcus 1998:33–56). The new holism of multiplemodernities highlights “diversity within interconnect-edness” (Hannerz 1996:55), cultural specificity whichowes its emergence to “expansive markets and mass me-dia . . . commoditization and crusading creeds . . . booksand bureaucracies” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993:xiii).The new holism, which simultaneously celebrates cul-tural diversity and resists parochialism (cf. Geschiere andMeyer 1998), places emphasis on variation. However, itcannot obliterate the logical requirement of representingvariation against something that is invariable.5 The rest

5. Consider Cyril Black’s observation, expressed in the analyticallanguage of his times but with implications that are curiously cur-rent: “The situations faced by modernizing societies are universal,even though the solutions will more often than not be unique foreach society” (1966:164). The observation calls for analyses of par-ticular societies, because modernization assumes multiple forms.Sidney Mintz finds the notions of current changes in Africa andBronislaw Malinowski’s (1945) “theory” of cultural change “eerilysimilar” (1998:120). In his discussion of some current notions ofcultural diversity, Jonathan Friedman (1994:208–10) has observedthat the notions of “creolization” and “hybridization” convey animage of pure or original traits mixing to produce new forms. UlfHannerz (1996:67), a proponent of the “creolization” concept, hasvigorously denied the charge, finding further parallels in linguisticcreolization, which does not presume that creoles derive from asource that is itself historically pure. This response, in turn, seemsto ignore Friedman’s (1994:209) acknowledgment that many major

of this article considers some of the abstractions whichare taken to define the invariable ruptures brought aboutby modernity in its multiple refractions.

modernity and the person

The concept of the person provides a revealing perspec-tive on the specific abstractions of the current meta-narrative. Much follows from the way in which person-hood is apprehended, such as the notions of property andmorality which underlie the persuasive abstraction of“commodification” in the meta-narrative of multiplemodernities. We do not propose an alternative “theory”of personhood. Instead, we compare sociological and an-thropological concepts of the person in the study of mo-dernity and show how, despite anthropologists’ suspicionof the “individual” as a cross-cultural notion, some areinclined to forget the ethnographic record when theycontemplate modernity’s ruptures. A practice of reflex-ive knowledge production, in turn, defines our alterna-tive to the meta-narratives of modernity, a practice inwhich the possibilities of an analytical-cum-descriptivelanguage are explored both in scholarly critique and inthe fieldworker’s lived experience. Reflexivity in our ac-count therefore lies less in devising theoretical propo-sitions than in producing new anthropological knowl-edge in the very attempt at making a meta-narrativeexplicit.

Studies of modernity continue to identify it with a setof personal dispositions, from ways of perceiving, ex-pressing, and valuing (Inkeles and Smith 1974) to a “re-flexive project” in which self-identity becomes a centralobject in personal narrative and practice (Giddens 1991).For some sociologists, the individual as a particular so-ciocultural project merges, almost imperceptibly, withan analytical category. Roland Robertson, for example,is not only interested in documenting how “‘modernman’—and increasingly ‘modern woman’—has becomea globally meaningful notion” (1992:184); he also insiststhat “individuals are as much a part of the globalizationprocess as any other basic category of social-theoreticaldiscourse” (1992:104). The “individual,” in other words,is not only a consequence of modernity but an analyticalconstruct of timeless validity. Giddens could scarcely bemore explicit about the accompanying analytical di-chotomies: “Self-identity becomes problematic in mo-dernity in a way which contrasts with self-society re-lations in more traditional contexts” (1991:34).

If persons are individuals, then there must be societieswhich put them in relations with one another and cul-tures which supply them with repertoires of meaning.The analyst may choose to highlight modernity from theviewpoint of individual experiences or that of “whole”societies and cultures. Such dichotomies are integral tothe concept of the person as an individual and to thecontemplation of modernity’s ruptures. To be sure, an-

“natural” languages are indeed products of the same processes andthat therefore the theoretical value of the creolization concept iscontested in linguistics.



Alexandre

Sticky Note

Mas o importante ter em mente que estas fantasias representam um "reencantamento" somente depois que o objeto moderno auto-consciente teve definido o desencantamento como um dos recursos chave da modernidade (p. 228). E intrinsico na metanarrativa corrente é a idéia que a dialética constitui o mundo contemporâneo como um universo de múltiplas modernidasde (p. 228). Três importantes assuntos são explícitos: 1) Modernidade como de pleno-direito e reconhecida, está em todos os lugares. O que impede a teleologia, pois algumas partes do mundo não são de maneira alguma menos modernas que outras. 2) As configurações da modernidade não podem ser definidada a priori, antecipadamente. O analista pode escolher em um campo estudar feitiçaria, em outro ascetismo, política economica em um terceiro, mas todos através do reencantamento e de-diferenciação, todos trazem muitas ilustrações particulares de modernidades 3) As diversidades culturais persistem como respostas locais a processo globais. Raramente colocam uma escolha entre esperança e desespero (228). A retórica do holismo etnografico toma um nova aparência, agora como uma necessidade de situar culturas aparentemente discretas e socieade em amplos contextos. O holismo das multiplas modernidades ressalta a "diversidade junto a interconectividade", especificidade cultural da qual deve sua emergência a expansão dos mercados e das mídias de massa, comoditização e crenças cruzadas, livros e burocraciais. Esse novo holismo, que celebra a diversidade e as resistências paroquiais, coloca ênfase na variação.

Alexandre

Sticky Note

MODERNIDADE E PESSOA, Não estão propondo uma teoria alternativa da noção de pessoa, e sim uma comparação entre conceitos sociológicos e antropológicos de pessoa no estudo da modernidade e como se apresenta a despeito da suspeita antropológica no indivíduo como com uma noção cross-cultural . A prática da produção de um saber reflexivo, define nossa alternativa para a metanarrativa da modernidade, a prática na qual as possibilidades de um linguagem analítica-fecundo-descritiva são explorados ambos em uma crítica acadêmica e uma experiência vivida no trabalho de campo (p. 228). O individuo em outras palavras não é somente uma consequencia da modernidade mas um constructo analítico com validade atemporal. Mas os analistas vagam por entre descrever o individuo como uma experiencia de auto-identidade na modernidade, quando nas relações nos contextos tradicionais é clocado o problema de auto-sociedade. Ou seja, as analistas podem escolher ressaltar a modernidade a partir do ponto de vista de experiencias individuias ou nos papéis dados nas sociedades e cultuas. (p. 228). Os indivíduos são muito mais uma parte do processo de globalização como qualquer outra categoria básica do discursos téorico-social. O indivíduo em outras palavras não é somente da modernidade mas uma construção analítica sem tempo de validade (p. 228). Giddens: "A auto-identidade torna-se problemática na modernidade na maneira com a qual os contrastes com as relações da auto-sociedade em contextos mais tradicionais" (p. 228) O Analista pode escolher ressaltar a modernidade a partir do ponto de vista de experiências individuais ou dos papéis daquelas culturas e sociedades (p. 228).


thropologists have long been more eager than sociolo-gists to acknowledge that the “individual” may be anethnocentric notion of personhood. In recent anthropol-ogy, one alternative is to invoke specific cultural othersin order to arrive at a notion of dividual persons (Strath-ern 1988). Yet when juxtaposition is understood to rendercontrasting notions incommensurable rather than ver-sions of one another, such an alternative merely invitessomewhat contradictory accusations of essentialism andrelativism (see, e.g., Josephides 1991, LiPuma 1998).Against that, runs the current anthropological wisdom,all persons are both dividuals and individuals, and eth-nography comes to highlight how “individuality is cen-tral to modernity not only conceptually but as the locusof the forms of desire that define the modern” (LiPuma1998:76). The meta-narrative of multiple modernities, inother words, furnishes the ethnographer with a sense ofthe direction which the universal dividual-individualtension will take.

Once a meta-narrative of modernity is understood toorganize ethnography, its critique can draw upon a wholerange of alternatives in the intellectual legacy anthro-pologists generally think with. Consider, for example,the notion of internal relations which has long con-fronted individualistic notions of the person in Westernphilosophy (for an overview, see Ollman 1971:27–42).Rather than being external to the person, social rela-tionships are here imagined as internal to its being. Theperson is a composite, an embodiment of others’ con-tributions. A corollary is a certain blurring of subject-object relations and a difficulty in viewing property as aresource attached to particular individuals. Moreover,human beings are not the only loci of relationships; ma-terial objects may be similarly personified.

Consider also, with this philosophical alternative inmind, the notion of personhood that emerges from eth-nographies of unmistakably late-20th-century culturalrealities—new reproductive technologies (e.g., Strathern1992a, Franklin 1997, Konrad 1998). When their bodyparts and procreative substances derive from multiplesources, persons appear as composites. This invites cor-responding revisions in the concept of property, partic-ularly in litigation. In their attempts to imagine the needfor such revisions, Euro-Americans may well be inspiredby anthropological studies of the concept of the personin Melanesia (see Strathern 1998). They need not, how-ever, be confined to just one ethnographic region in theirquest for comparative insight. The ethnographic recordshows how material and immaterial agencies—divinities, animals, plants—have variously constitutedpersons under widely different historical conditions. AsHenrietta Moore argues, “the idea that the modern worldis producing individuals who are no longer fully human,that modernity attacks the completeness of the person,is misleading if we are trying to suggest that people inother times and places have been simply fully human”(1996b:8). The effect of consulting the ethnographic rec-ord would be to render new reproductive technologiesand cultural “others” coeval (see Fabian 1983), partnersin the production of social knowledges.

The meta-narratives of modernity, by contrast, wouldenvisage in technological innovation a rupture of a spe-cific kind. It is a rupture in the orders of meaning, atransition to “biosociality” or a “cyberculture” in whichprevious distinctions between nature and culture, hu-mans and machines, face a perplexing collapse (see, e.g.,Rabinow 1992, Escobar 1994). The familiar imagery ofnovelty and crisis underlies these accounts (cf. Franklin1995:178), and for some anthropologists the conse-quences are quite dramatic. Moral panic is seen to ac-company discourses on human cloning, the traffic inbody parts, witches’ use of zombies, and so on.6 An issuein these discourses, Jean Comaroff and John Comaroffclaim, is “a fear of the creeping commodification of lifeitself which erodes the inalienable humanity of persons,rendering them susceptible as never before to the reachof the market” (1998).

The imagery of “creeping commodification” is evoc-ative, suggesting modernity’s inexorability and a cultur-ally specific fantasy with sinister undertones. Our dis-cussion of the concept of the person enables us to discerna highly implausible meta-narrative of modernity insuch claims about the effects of generalized commodi-fication. The assumption that persons carry “inalienablehumanity” is enough to situate the Comaroffs’ perspec-tive in the ethnocentric legacy of social scientific dis-courses on modernity. Ethnographic inquiry, we argue,must be conducted in full awareness of this legacy—ofits adverse effects on attempts to appreciate social lifein specific historical conditions. Fear there may well be,even more likely argument and ambiguity, but we shouldnot presume to know what that fear is about, what its“real” sources and referents are, however much the so-cial sciences supply us with ideas about modernity andthe person.

A critique based on existing philosophical and eth-nographic scholarship is, however, only one step in re-flexive knowledge production. We subscribe to a tradi-tion of realist ethnography in which fieldwork as livedexperience is indispensable for the production of an-thropological knowledge. One hallmark of that tradition,though rarely sufficiently realized, is that ethnographersallow their own selves to be transformed in the processof inquiry (Davies 1999:24). Wherever it may take place,anthropological fieldwork regularly sends the ethnogra-pher into situations that are beyond his or her control,imposes interlocutors’ concerns and interests upon theethnographer, and challenges the perceptual faculties theethnographer is accustomed to trust (cf. van Dijk andPels 1996). It is the necessity to translate this experiencefrom one domain of “representations” into another (Sper-ber 1996) which carries the potential for new knowledgeabout both domains. While we acknowledge the unsa-

6. As an analytical term, “moral panic” means not mass hysteriabut the emergence of social movements to counter perceivedthreats to fundamental values. It is revealing that Jean La Fontaine(1998:22) should criticize Peter Jenkins (1992) for neglecting thequestion of “meaning” in moral panics. It is one thing to identifythe issue in a moral panic, another to understand its relation toother issues in a given setting.



Alexandre

Nota

O indivíduo pode ser uma noção etnocêntrica de pessoa. Enquanto que outros antropólogos estão tomando as noções outras específicas de cultura oferece uma noção de pessoa dividual. No entanto quando justaposição é para o entendimento no contraste com noções incomensuráveis mais do que versões uma das outros, tal como uma alternativa que convida um pouco a acusações contraditórias de essencialismo e relativismo (p. 229). Contra isto o saber antropológica tomas todas as pessoas, ambas dividuais e individuais, e a etnografia vem ressaltar como a individualidade é central para a modernidade não somente conceitualmente mas como locus de formas de desejo que definem o moderno (p. 229). A metanarrativa das múltiplas modernidades fornece ao etnógrafo com um senso de direção no qual a tensão universal dividual-individual possa ser tomada (p. 229). O registro etnográfico apresenta como agências materiais e imateriais - divindades, plantas, animais - tem sido pessoas variávelmente constituídas sobre diferentes condições históricas (p. 229). As metanarrativas da modernidade, em contraste, podem ver as inovações tecnológicas como uma ruptura de um tipo específico. A transição para uma "biosocialidade" para uma "cyberculturalidade" na qual distinções prévias entre natureza e cultura, homens e máquinas, face uma colapso perplexante (p. 229). Mas estas imagens seguem uma imagem de novidade e crise que sublinhas essas abordagens, e se seguem por consequências dramáticas, tais como o panico moral que se segue através dos discursos sobre a clonagem humana, o tráfico de partes do corpo, bruxas usadas como zumbis (p. 226). A imagem da comoditificação rastejante é evocada sugerindo a modernidade como inexorável e a cultura como uma fantasia específica de conotações sinistras. "Nossa discussão do conceito de pessoas nos permitiu discernir uma metanarrativa altamente implausível da modernidade nos que essas pretensões sobre os efeitos da comoditificação generalizada" (p. 229). "A suposição de que as pessoas seguem uma 'humanidade inalienável' é suficiente para situar a perspectiva dos Comaroffs no legado etnocêntrico do discurso social científico na modernidade (p. 229). A experiência etnográfica no qual o trabalho de campo como experiência vivida é indispensável para o saber antropológico (p. 229). Experiência da mudança de percepção do etnógrafo, e da imposição dos assuntos e interesses nativos sobre aquele, impõe-se a necessiade de fazer uma tradução dessa experiência a partir de um domínio de representações dentro do outro do qual carrega o potencial para um novo conhecimento sobre ambos os domínios (p. 229).


vory history of realist claims in the imperialist repre-sentations of cultural “others” (cf. Said 1993), it shouldnot deter us from allowing realist ethnography to makeits unique contribution to the social sciences. The factthat ethnographic writing often eclipses the lived ex-perience of fieldwork is less an argument against realismthan a reflection of conventions and power relations (cf.Jackson 1989, Stoller 1997).

In the two ethnographic cases that follow, we havechosen to report our own experiences as white Europeanmales not to indulge in “I-witnessing” (see Geertz 1988:73–101) but to show how bodily, emotional, and intel-lectual quandaries merge during anthropological field-work. Our cases highlight anxieties and practices whichaddress the “modern” condition. In our case from aPapua New Guinean periphery, villagers appear to bedistressed by money and new forms of consumption. Inthe capital of Malawi, born-again Christians appear tobe rejecting “tradition” in order to embrace modern in-dividuality. Although we may be aware that a meta-nar-rative makes these instances appear as persuasive ex-amples of multiple modernities, no amount ofconceptual critique enables us to anticipate the specificcontent of our interlocutors’ concerns. For all our ap-preciation of dividual selves and unexamined meta-nar-ratives before we commenced our fieldwork, we had pre-conceptions of what white people stood for in these twopostcolonial situations. A challenge deriving from livedexperience during fieldwork forced us to reconsider thesepreconceptions and spurred the above critique in theo-retical terms.

Knowing White People’s Wealth

interrogating the ethnographer

During his fieldwork in villages along the Rai Coast ofPapua New Guinea in 1994–95,7 Leach was often askedquestions about white people and the origins of money.After some months, new stories of “liver thieves” (manstilim leva) gave an alarming edge to these questions.The stories, widespread along the coast at that time,claimed that raskols (criminals, often youths) led by awhite man were patrolling the coast in a high-powereddinghy, capturing local people traveling in boats and kill-ing them in order to remove their livers and other in-ternal organs for sale overseas. As the reports multipliedover the next few weeks they became more elaborate:The police had captured the white man’s briefcase withplans of attacks and ambushes inside; there were sight-ings of white people leaving the airport in Madang (the

7. Fieldwork was undertaken mainly in the Mot 1 census district,and it is the people resident in this area to whom we refer as “RaiCoast villagers.” Tok pisin, the lingua franca of Papua New Guineaand widely used along the Rai Coast, is indicated by italics. Wordsin the vernacular of the people Leach worked with, Nekgini, areshown in square brackets where appropriate. Leach gratefully ac-knowledges the financial support of the Economic and Social Re-search Council (U.K.) for his research.

local town) with suitcases covered in newspaper andswarming with flies. Leach was made aware of the effectof these narratives when, on one trip he made along thecoast, people in the village of Warai scattered into thebush on his arrival. An old man who had been welcomingon previous visits approached cautiously, asking accus-ingly, “What are your people up to? We are afraid now”(Ol lain bilong yu wokim wanem? Mipela pret nau).

Questions about alternatives to the national currencywere a more persistent undercurrent to Rai Coast vil-lagers’ interest in Leach’s presence. In a tale which pre-ceded a particularly vigorous interrogation, some villag-ers were said to have gone to Madang to sell copra.Instead of the usual cash, in return they had received acheck for “triple-six money” (tripela-sikis moni), whichthey duly collected from an “office” (opis). The conditionof receipt was that at some later date the “owner” (papa)of this money would come to put his “number” (namba;see Robbins 1997a:49) on their scalps and demand a re-turn. Refusal would result in death. Assuming that sell-ing one’s soul would bring a higher price than sellingcopra, Leach was surprised to discover that his questionsabout the quantities of the money involved seemed ir-relevant to his interlocutors. Instead, a series of ques-tions was directed to him: Did he know of this kind ofmoney? Where did it come from? Who was the origin(owner) of this kind of money? Would it replace the na-tional currency, and when could they expect this to hap-pen? The story was clearly told at the time it was, inLeach’s presence, so that answers to such questionscould be elicited from him.

Evidence from elsewhere in Papua New Guinea showsthat similar narratives are fairly widespread (see, e.g.,Robbins 1997a, b; Wood 1995). They demonstrate thatinterrogation goes both ways in the fieldwork situation.When modernity’s meta-narrative comes to organize eth-nography, the content of such questions may appear self-evident. It may easily be viewed as reflecting Papua NewGuineans’ anxiety about their place in globalization. Thestory of liver thieves, for example, seems a particularlyforceful statement of “the use of the bodies of some forthe empowerment of others” (Comaroff and Comaroff1998). The danger is, however, that ethnographic obser-vations other than the narratives themselves become re-dundant. To avoid this danger it is necessary to studymore closely Rai Coast villagers’ notions of wealth andpersonhood. There is more to the separation betweenlocals and white people than meets the eye.

For villagers, the Rai Coast is las ples, the “last place”to receive development and change. With some self-dep-recating irony, they relate a story about Peter Barter, thelocal provincial member of parliament. Flown in by hel-icopter to campaign in the district in 1993, Barter uttered“Good night, Rai Coast” as his opening words. Spokenin broad daylight, these words were intended to conveythe “darkness” of underdevelopment. Part of this per-ception is borne out in fact. The position of the RaiCoast, hedged in behind by the steep Finisterre Rangeand crosscut along its length by swift rivers, makes roadtransport difficult. Year-round access is only by light air-



Alexandre

Nota

CONHECENDO A RIQUEZA DO POVO BRANCO Interrogando o etnógrafo Em sua pesquisa de campo na Papua Nova Guiné, Leach foi interrogado sobre as questões do povo branco e as origens do dinheiro. Surgiram depois de alguns meses apareceu novas histórias sobre os "ladrões de fígado" (man stilim leva) dão um alarme na borda dessas questões . A história de homens brancos sequestrando pessoas do locais em botes para mata-las e remover seus fígados e outro órgãos externo para serem vendidos além-mar (p. 230). Como os relatos multiplicaram por muitas semnas eles vieram mais elaborados: a polícia tem capturado pastas de homens brancos com planos de ataques e emboscadas dentro; pessoas brancas tem sido vistas no aeroporto de em Madang com malas cobertas de jornais e exames de moscas (p. 230). Leach acompanhou o efeito dessas narrativas quando fez uma viagem ao longo da costa junto a população da aldeia de Wari dispersa no mato com a sua chegada (p. 230). Leach foi recepcionado por um homem velho que se aproximou cautelosamente e perguntando acusatoriamente: "Até onde está seu povo? Nós estamos com medo agora" (p. 230). Leach observa que naquela população a questão (da venda da copra ao intermediário do escritório) a quantidade de dinheiro envolvido parecia irrelevante aos interlocutores. Ao invés disso, uma série de questões era direcionada a ele: se ele sabia qual era o tipo de dinheiro? De onde ele vinha? Qual era a origem daquele tipo de dinheiro? Se poderia substituir o dinheiro nacional, e quando eles esperavam isso acontecer? A história era claramente contada ao mesmo tempo em que as foram respostas, na presença de Leach, a cada questão que poderia ser elicitada por ele. (p. 230). Em toda Papua Nova Guiné, narrativas similares são muito difundidas. Elas demonstram que as interrogações vão de ambas maneiras na situação do trabalho de campo. Quando a modernidade da metanarrativa vem a organizar a etnografia, o conteúdo destas questões podem parecer auto-evidentes. Isso pode facilmente ser visto como refletindo a ansiedade dos Papua Nova Guinenses sobre o seu lugar na globalização. A história dos ladrões de fígado, pode ser um declaração contundente do "uso dos corpos de alguém para o empoderamento de outros". O perigo é, entretanto, que outras observações etnográficas mais do que narrativas elas mesmas tornem-se redundantes. Para evitar esse perigo é necessário estudar mais de perto as noções das populações da aldeias da Costa de Rai sobre riqueza e(bem estar) e pessoa. Ali é mais para separação entre nativos (locals) e pessoas brancas do que o encontro de olhos (p. 230). Para os nativos, a Costa de Rai é o último luga para receber desenvolvimento e mudança. Com alguma auto-depreciação irônica, eles relatam a história de Peter Barter, o membro local parlamentar. Fazendo campanha distrital em 1993 em um helicóptero, deu seu discurso em Costa Rai, falando da vinda da luz do dia, tentando transmitir a idéia da escuridão do subdesenvolvimento. Parte de sua percepção é de fato corroborada (p. 230) A localização de Costa Rai, limitada detrás por uma íngrime Finisterre Range e ao longo de toda a extensão transpassada de rios rápidos, que tornam o transporte nas estradas difíceis.


craft or sea. Furthermore, Rai Coast people have a rep-utation for resisting or subverting attempts to developthe area (see Lawrence 1964, Morauta 1974). These ob-stacles have not left the area untouched by colonial andpostcolonial influence, however. Missionaries workedalong the coast in the 1930s, and in their wake cameplantation owners. Many men worked in the plantationsat one time or another, went farther afield to the goldmines at Bulolo in Morobe Province, or worked as cooksand carriers for colonial officials and entrepreneurs.

At present, the plantation economy has all but col-lapsed, and most villagers rely for access to cash on asmall number of kin who are employed in towns. Cashis essential to purchase bush knives and clothes and topay school fees. It also changes hands in bride compen-sation, but it cannot wholly replace other forms ofwealth, such as pigs, shell wealth, dogs’ teeth, andwooden objects. In contrast to these other items, RaiCoast villagers say, money is too easily frittered away.People “eat money” (kaikai moni), and there is littleexpectation of a return for the money that is lent toothers for business projects. Cash crops evoke only spo-radic interest, and cash is sometimes denied to be a suit-able substitute for other forms of wealth. Difficult toutilize for productive exchange relations, money isclosely associated with white people. Its ubiquity raisesthe question of what could constitute a productive re-lationship with white people or among white peoplethemselves. Rai Coast villagers expected that Leachwould be able to answer such questions. The way inwhich they were asked, however, put him on entirelythe wrong track.

white people, the dead, and affines

In another encounter a deeply personal narrative startedto unravel the complex connections Rai Coast villagerswere attempting to make in their queries about moneyand white people. When visiting the hamlet of Saran-gama toward the end of his fieldwork, Leach was ap-proached by one of his acquaintances, an old man wewill call Pereng. On this occasion Pereng made much ofthe fact that he was an old man and had many worries.Too old to visit his gardens any more, all he could do,he claimed, was to sit at home and brood. His two wiveshad both died and left him. As Leach began to commis-erate over this tale of bereavement and old age, the oldman told Leach that compounding his loss was a dream.In that dream, his first wife had come to him bringinga bag full of money. She had told him that this was hismoney; it was meant for him. But then the dream hadended, and he had awakened with nothing. He contin-ued:

This, James, is what makes me so unhappy, so sad.And this is what I think about in my house everyday. Why did she take my money? When am I goingto get it? . . . I know, James, that you know wheremy money is, and you can get it for me. I know thatyou have ways of getting money from the graveyard,

that you must stand strong on the grave at night.But it is all right, I realize I am not supposed tomention this; the secret is safe with me. I know thisis the tambaran [secret/cult knowledge] of whitepeople, hidden from us in Papua New Guinea. Iwant you to help me and to get my money for me.After all, why did she show it to me if it was notmeant for me?

These kinds of requests were a regular feature of Leach’stime on the Rai Coast. They always made him uncom-fortable, because he felt that his response could neversatisfy his interlocutor. Moreover, he was vaguely fright-ened by all this talk of the dead and graves. It appearedthat white people were sinister figures in the local cos-mology. At issue was perhaps a critique of globalizationand colonialism, a critique that tacitly situated Leach atits sharp end. But with some distance, and therefore lessdiscomfort, the issues in the interaction between Perengand Leach appear more clearly. Pereng’s intent, we argue,was to elicit a response from Leach which would changehis feelings of bereavement and ineffectiveness in theworld. Pereng wondered whether Leach was willing tolink his project with Pereng’s own.

Pereng’s dream appears to be about loss. A loss of onekind (wives) is compounded by a loss of another kind(money). In the uncomfortable position of feeling obligedto deny knowledge of where his money was, the eth-nographer began to view the old man as manipulatinghim. In the immediacy of the discomfort, he failed toreflect on the limits to his own understanding of moneyand death. The substitution of persons for wealth, es-pecially women-as-wives for wealth, is consistent withquotidian practice along the Rai Coast. An active andpowerful man has relations with affines. It is throughthese relations that wealth comes to the man and newpersons, most obviously children, are generated.

The association in Pereng’s narrative is not merelybetween wives and wealth but between dead wives andwhite people’s wealth—money. The dead, and by exten-sion white people, appear analogous to, or linked with,affines, the source by which wealth comes to the man.It is the final factor in the narrative, the tambaran, whichindicates what Pereng understood to be the context ofthe request. The tambaran is a male spirit cult, but incontrast to the situation in other areas of the north coast(see Tuzin 1980), women also have a form of tambaran.Tambaran [kaap] in the villages where Leach conductedfieldwork indicates a technology of exchange with theancestors. Tambaran is not merely the designation of acult but a generic term for the modes of communicationpeople have with the spirits of places and ancestors, theagencies by which people are able to achieve the growthof their crops and children.8

8. As these observations suggest, tambaran (with its original in thevernacular [kaap]) is a polysemic term. The spirits with which themale cult is concerned are called tambaran [kaapu], the men of thecult when gathered together are known collectively as tambaran[kaapu], and the ritual paraphernalia are also known as tambaran[kaapu]. The spirits which ensure the growth of children in the



Alexandre

Nota

A população de Costa Rai é conhecida por resistir ou subverter o desenvolvimento da área. Mas estes obstáculos não impediram a influencia colonial ou pós-colonial. Missionários ali trabalharam a partir de 1930, e muitos homens trabalharam nas plantações dos missionários, em um tempo ou outro, ou que vieram trabalhar no campo das minas de ouro de Bulolo ou da provinicia de Morobe, ou trabalhando como cozinheiro ou carregadores de oficiais coloniais ou de empresários (p. 231). Mas com o colapso da economia agrícola muitos estão desempregados e poucos tem empregos na cidade. O dinheiro é essencial para compra de facões, roupas, e pagar as mensalidades da escola (p. 231). Os moradores de Costa Rai, dizem que é facilmente esbanjado. As pessoas "comem o dinheiro", e é uma pequena expectativa de retorno para o dinheiro que é emprestado para os outros para projetos de negócios (p. 231). Dificilmente utilizad para relações de trocas produtivas, o dinheiro é mais proximamente associado com pessoas brancas. Esta ubiquidade levanta a questão do que pode se constituido um relação de produção com as pessoas brancas ou entre as pessoas brancas elas mesmas. Os nativos de Costa Rai esperam que James Leach possa dar respostas a essas questões. Mas maneira na qual eles perguntam, entretanto, coloca ele (Leach) na trilha errada (p. 231). PESSOAS BRANCAS, A MORTE E AFINIDADES Os autores citam a etnografia de James Leach, e seu encontro com um velho homem sózinho e viúvo, que em um sonho uma de suas duas mulheres, lhe dá um saco de dinheiro, e pede a ajuda Leach para encontrar o dinheiro que viu em sonho, esse que só lhe causou tristeza e dissabor (p. 231). Da mesma forma, Leach se sentia desconfortável por não conseguir dar uma resposta satisfatória da relação dos brancos com o dinheiro. Mas Leach não conseguiria compreender plenamente a relação da morte e dinheiro entre os nativos de Costa Rai, porém, a uma ligação entre ideia mulheres e dinheiro, pois, há a prática de substituição de mulheres por valores. A relação do homem forte e ativo com os seus afins. É através dessas relações que a riqueza, os valores, trazem ao homem, e novas pessoas, crianças que são geradas (p. 231). A narrativa do velho Pereng, não é somente entre esposas e valores, mas entre esposas morta e valores de pessoas brancas - dinheiro. A morte, em extensão a pessoa branca, aparece análogo a ela [morte = pessoa branca], ou ligado com os afins, a fonte pelo qual a riqueza vem para os homens [afinidade = riqueza]. (p. 231) Isso leva ao culto ao espírito tambaran, que é homem, mas também há tambarans mulheres. Os tambaran, segundo a etnografia de Leach indica uma tecnologia das trocas com os ancestrais. Tambaran não é somente a designação de um culto, mas um termo genérico para os mods de comunicação que as pessoas tem com os espíritos dos lugares e dos ancestrais (p. 231) Agência pela qual as pessoas são capazes de alcançar o crescimento de seus corpos e das crianças (p. 231).


One needs the tambaran to manage one’s communi-cations with the dead and to provide necessary regulationand distance. The dead are, like affines, beings withwhom one can have productive relations if managed cor-rectly, but both the dead and affines are dangerous. Thedead cause sickness, death, and famine. Affines presentanother threat. No marriage occurs on the Rai Coastwithout a confrontation between the future relatives. Itis said that a man will always fight the man who hascaused his sister to fall in love with him. Her desire tobe with this man is all the evidence a man needs toconclude that she and by extension he himself have beendone great violence through love magic (Harrison 1993:122; Leach 1997:117). In other words, relations betweenaffines, like those between the dead and the living, aretense and potentially destructive. Affines constantly de-mand respect and deference in order to encourage thegrowth of children (see Wagner 1967). At the same time,relations between affines are absolutely necessary to thecontinuation of social life, to a productive future.

Pereng’s imagination is directed to discovering thetambaran of white people. How do they grow their formof wealth, money? What connection does it have to theirdead? The emerging association is not surprising. Farfrom personifying individuality (see LiPuma 1998:72),white people are another group of ambiguous beings, ob-viously powerful and obviously with wealth to exchange.It makes sense to think of whites as versions of thedead—capricious at times, hard to establish the right re-lations with, but potentially extremely importantexchange partners. Money in Pereng’s narrative is not,therefore, a negation of exchange relations or a good inits own right. Villagers on the Rai Coast have an interestin making money analogous to wealth of otherkinds—wealth that is both exchangeable for persons anda trace of the relationships between distinct realms orgroups of beings, just as bride compensation is. Pereng’sassumption is that, for white people, money plays thisrole.

The fear conveyed in Rai Coast villagers’ queries andnarratives thus may not be as it first appears. Their fearis not “moral panic,” sudden anxiety over extraordinaryassaults on the moral order. It is the fear that one rightlyhas of the dead or of one’s affines—and all unknownpeople are potential affines. Fear arises from passionsintegral to productive relationships. All wealth, all pro-ductivity, comes from tense and dangerous relationships,whether they are predicated on the separation of affinesfrom one another through love magic and the ensuingconfrontation, negotiation, and settlement (marriage) oron the violent separation of the dead from the living. ForRai Coast villagers, every instance of death is the re-sponsibility of hostile others. Pereng says that white peo-ple must be strong when they wait on a grave for money.If one is not strong, if one is afraid, one will not receive

womb, along with the moment of childbirth, are called “women’stambaran” [kaapu pareing]. The ritual cycle to which these spiritsare central is, in short, the source of a residential group’s appearanceof power and agency.

the reward of money. This is the same language as usedby the initiators of boys into the cult of the tambaran;their strength will bring them the reward of manhood.

productive relations: relations ofseparation

As do people in many other settings in Melanesia (see,e.g., Burridge 1960, Kirsch n.d., Wood 1995), Rai Coastvillagers often say that white people and their cargo(kago, material wealth) originated in their lands. The RaiCoast version is unusual in that it focuses on the sepa-ration as a necessary precondition for the creation of thewealth thus lost. In a myth, two brothers fight over awoman who is a “sister” to them both. The elder brothereventually expels the younger, marrying the woman. Theyounger brother leaves with what eventually becomeswhite people’s cargo, but not before he has instigated thepractice of exchange with the man who used to be hisbrother, now, by definition, his affine.

More than just a story about the origin of white people,the myth describes the beginning of social life itself.Prior to this, the narrative makes clear, there were nomarriages, no exchanges, and no children. The fight sep-arated kin and made their position as affines plausible.In claiming agency in creating difference, Rai Coast peo-ple claim agency in white people’s productivity. Theyalso envisage a productive recombination along the linesof marriage and exchange. According to local wisdom,one does not “eat oneself” (ne naki) or one’s own pro-duce. In other words, one does not marry one’s kin. Mar-riages balance a loss of kin with the products of anotherplace—substitutes, in the form of wealth and producewhich can be consumed, for the body, which cannot.Money, as mentioned, has an ambiguous position in suchexchanges. At times it simply disappears, leaving notrace of a relationship, whereas a pig that is given awaybrings respect and tangibly affects others’ growth andwell-being. When white people, separated from Rai Coastvillagers so that exchange may commence, return withtheir money, the local project is to accept it as anexchange item on a par with more established wealth.

The stories about triple-six money and liver thievesare examples of such attempts to determine whatexchange with white people entails. As in the case ofLeach’s interaction with Pereng, fear and intimations ofsatanic forces must be fully investigated. In their storiesabout triple-six money, Rai Coast villagers give their owncontext to their queries. The context is the national cur-rency, a form of wealth without an owner or a clear originwith whom exchange can be envisaged. In imagining tri-ple-six money, there is an attempt to establish relation-ships through wealth that indeed has an identifiable or-igin. Crucially, the biblical allusion to the devil demandsan appreciation of the Rai Coast’s specific historical con-text rather than of capitalism in general (pace Taussig1980; see also Turner 1986, Parry and Bloch 1989). As aconsequence of the upheavals on the Rai Coast led byYali Singina (Lawrence 1964, Kempf 1996), villagers haddriven the missionaries out by the 1950s. Tired of being



Alexandre

Nota

Os tambaram é uma forma de manejar a comunicação com os mortos e e prover a necessária regulação e distância. Os mortos, como os afins, são seres com quem pode-se ter relações produtivas se manejadas corretamente, mas ambos as mortes e os afins, são pessoas perigosos. O morto, causa doença, morte, e fome. Os afins, apresentam uma outra ameaça. Em Costa Rai, os casamentos não ocorre sem o confronto entre os futuros envolvidos. Os homens sempre lutaram com o que fazer a sua irmã cair apaixonada por ele (p. 232). Em outras palavras: tal como na relação entre vivos e mortos, a relação entre homens e afins é tensa e potencialmente destrutiva. Os afins constantemente demandam respeito e deferência de maneira a encorajar o crescimento da criança. Ao mesmo tempo que a relação entre afins é absolutamente necessária para a continuação da vida social, para um futuro produtivo (p. 232). A imaginação do velho Pereng é direcionada para descobrir o tambaran dos brancos. Como eles fizeram crescer sua forma de riqueza, dinheiro? Qual seria a conexão a fazer com a sua morte (p. 232). Mas longe de uma individualidade personificada, os brancos são outro grupos de seres ambíguos, obviamente perigosos, e obviamente poderosos com riquezas para trocar. Ou seja, faz sentido pensar o brancos como versões da morte, ao mesmo tempo caprichosos, difícil de estabelecer uma relação direta com, mas padrões de trocas potenciais extremamente importantes. Dinheiro, na narrativa do velho Pereng não é uma negação das relações de trocas ou um bem em seu próprio direito. Os nativos de Costa Rai tem um interesse em fazer dinheiro como algo análogo a riquezas de outros tipos - riquezas que podem ser trocadas por pessoas e um traço das relações entre domínios distintos ou grupos de seres, como uma compensação de noivados é. As suposições de Pereng é que, para as pessoas brancas, o dinheiro atua neste papel (p. 232). Medo que está em jogo entre os nativos de Costa Rai, não é ordem moral, um "pânico moral" mas o medo ou da morte ou dos afins, e todas as pessoas desconhecidas são afins em potencial. PRODUÇÃO DE RELAÇÕES: RELAÇÕES QUE SEPARAM. Mito de origem das pessoas brancas descreve o começo da vida social nela mesma. Que tem a ver com a noções de troca e casamento, pois alguém não se casa com um parente. O casamento implica a perda de um parente com os produtos de outros lugares, substitutos, na forma de riqueza e produzindo no qual pode ser consumido, pelo corpo e que não pode. O dinheiro tem um posição ambigua nestas trocas. O dinheiro simplesmente desaparece, não deixando traços na relação, onde o um porco que é dado traz respeito e tangencia os afetos de crescimento e bem estar do outro. Quando as pessoas saem de Costa Rai as trocas podem começar e retornam com seus dinheiro. A história do triple six-money e dos ladrões de fígados são exemplos de como são estas tentativas de determinar o que implica trocar com as pessoas brancas (p. 232). As narrativas e posições de medo e intimidação sobre os brancos e o dinheiro está mais ligado alusão bíblica das tentações do diabo no contexto histórico específico de Costa Rai, mais do que do capitalismo em geral. (p. 232).


condemned for using hunting magic and respecting an-cestors, they were not afraid of being called satan. DuringLeach’s fieldwork they happily said that they were satanbecause they had not been baptized or because they usedspirit names to assist planting their crops. Associationwith the biblical devil, in other words, was not neces-sarily moral opprobrium. “Satan” was simply one of thecontrivances of white people which needed to be probedfurther.

In a similar vein, wherever the stories of organ ex-traction may originate and whatever their truth valueelsewhere, they assume specific content in the contextof Rai Coast villagers’ notions of relatedness and whitepeople. Such stories represent white people not asmonsters but precisely as people who want somethingthat local people can provide (cf. Strathern 1992b). Thedesire for organs mirrors Rai Coast villagers’ own de-sire for a relationship of exchange and incorporation.Writing about Kamula in the Western Province ofPapua New Guinea, Michael Wood (1995:32) providesinsights which are suggestive also for the Rai Coast:

In these accounts the creation of difference betweenwhites and Kamula is presented as a consequence ofa flow of entities and powers out of the Kamula do-main. The narratives, while in part blaming Kamulaancestors for the current global situation, also set upthe terms for a partial or complete restitution of theloss. Indeed within the terms of these narratives theprocess of colonialism can be understood as the firstphase of realizing this restitution.

In ethnography organized by modernity’s meta-nar-rative, colonialism would hardly appear as the firstphase of restitution. Nor would violence and extrac-tion appear as preconditions of productivity. Rai Coastvillagers’ views of liver thieves resonate not only withtheir understanding that violent separation is neces-sary to marriage but also with the cannibalism thataffinity is seen to entail. The loss of a woman is com-pensated by a pig which is eaten by her kin. As theirnarratives suggest, before pigs had assumed their placeas “bodies” in bride compensation, the first-born wassent to the mother’s brothers, who would “eat” theyoung child in recompense for their loss. As potentialaffines, white people may require similar acts of can-nibalism. Far from being involved in a contentiousmoral argument, Rai Coast villagers interpret throughtheir stories the fact of relatedness. Their ethnogra-pher must bear the burden of accepting them as part-ners in envisaging human sociality. Modernity’s meta-narrative would make at least two crucialobservations redundant. One is that bodies do not be-long to persons as possessive individuals. The other isthat productive relationships are predicated on vio-lence and extraction.

Passions of Born-Again Christianity

pentecostalism and modernity’s meta-narratives

From a Papua New Guinean periphery our focus movesto a capital city in southern Africa, a region known forits long and tumultuous history of slave trade, interna-tional labor migration, political turmoil, and religiouspluralism. Malawi, a landlocked country of some 10 mil-lion people, has been a particularly important source ofmale labor for South African mines during both colonialand postcolonial times. This form of labor migration wasabruptly ended by the Malawian government in the early1970s. Many returned to smallholder agriculture, but mi-gration to plantations and urban areas within the countrybecame important for both men and women. Rural-urbanmigration among the poor is largely circulatory, withperiods in town interspersed with visits to villages. Thebuilding of Lilongwe as the new capital in the 1970s hasmade it the fastest-growing city in this predominantlyrural country. The continuing expansion of its poorestareas, such as Chinsapo township, indicates that urbanamenities fail to increase at the pace of migration to thecity.

In his attempt to study the complex religious and heal-ing practices in this impoverished township in 1996–97,Englund was inevitably drawn to Pentecostal churches.Pentecostalism, perhaps the most organized form of thewider movement of born-again Christianity, has an as-sertive presence in the township through severalchurches, active preaching even outside the churches,and a lifestyle said to be different from that of those whohave not been “born again” (obadwa mwatsopano inChichewa). In contrast to the Rai Coast villagers de-scribed above, Pentecostal Christians in Chinsapo town-ship seem to have domesticated the habits of white peo-ple. They not only put much emphasis on appearance,on smart suits and immaculate dresses, and on the vir-tues of monogamy but also vigorously reject “black peo-ple’s medicine” (mankhwala achikuda) in favor of“white people’s medicine” (mankhwala achizungu).They categorically condemn all “traditional” healers(asing’anga).

Pentecostalism, an apparent example of Protestantfundamentalism (see Gifford 1991, Martin 1991), wouldseem to provide a particularly vivid perspective on mo-dernity. The experience of being “born again,” for ex-ample, seems to sever the bonds of kinship. The Pen-tecostal way of life appears to be at variance with theobligations associated with the extended family, andPentecostalism can provide persons with a sense ofheightened individuality which justifies at least a partialwithdrawal from those obligations (see Meyer 1995,1998a, b, c). Moreover, Pentecostal Christians in urbanAfrica may be seen to use the abstraction of “tradition”and to insist on a “firm rejection of village culture” (vanDijk 1992:159), where “the village” becomes the site andsymbol of evil, rife with immoral traditional customs,witchcraft, and other evil powers (van Dijk 1992:166–69;



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Nota

Os brancos não são vistos como monstros mas como pessoas que querem algo que os nativos provem. O desejo por órgãos espelha os que os nativos de Costa Rai próprios desjam para as relações de troca e incorporação (p. 233). Não somente a relação da violência com a extração de órgãos, mas que essa extração também é violenta no casamento, ma que também tem haver com o canibalismo que esta afinidade ocasiona. A perda da mulher é compensada pelo porco que é dado e comido pelo parentes. Os porcos aparecem como uma compensação dos corpos, que é dado ao irmão da mãe que pode comer o jovem criança em recompensa pela sua perda. Com as pessoas brancas, como afins potenciais pode requerer atos similares de canibalismo (p. 233). As metanarratias da modernidade podem fazer duas cruciais observações redundantes: 1) Que os corpos não são estensivos as pessoas como possessões individuais. 2) O outro dado por relações produtivas são um predicado de violência e extração. (p. 233). PAIXÕES DE RENASCIMENTO CRISTÃO. PENTECOSTALISMO E MODERNIDADE METANARRATIVA A questão se desloca para a Mawali na Árica, que é fonte da mão de obra na África do Sul. Movimento que foi abruptamente interrompido nos anos 1970 pelo governo (p. 233). Englund fez pesquisas entre os pentecostais que tem grande força e são a principal expressão do renascimento cristão, com um grande presença. E ali os praticantes acreditam que a religião domesticou os hábitos das pessoas brancas. Rejeitam a medicina negra, e em favor da medicina branca (p. 233). Protestantismo é uma vivida perspectiva na modernidade. E de que a experiencia do renascimento cristão está vinculada a relações de parentesco; a maneira de viver pentescotal está associada com a família extendida, e que provê um alto senso de individualidade, que parece retirar parcialmente estas obrigações. Mas os pentecostalismo urbano em áfrica pode ser usado como uma abstração da tradição e que insiste em uma firme rejeição da cultural da aldeia e a "aldeia" torna-se o lugar e o simbolo do mal, de tradições e costumes imorais, bruxaria e outros poderes do mal (p. 233).


cf. van Dijk 1995, 1998). At issue appears to be an effortto reject one’s past in order to achieve a “second birth.”9

Individualization, seen by one anthropologist as aspiringto “the ideal of the modern person who is fully in controlof herself” (Meyer 1998b:202), would seem to underliethis effort. Thus Pentecostalism appears to be a way ofnegotiating the dichotomies—individual vs. society, tra-ditional vs. modern—which define the experience ofmodernity.

Just as the imitation of European conduct and dress insouthern African towns under colonialism was not suchan act of submission as it seemed to some (see Mitchell1956, Magubane 1971, Kapferer 1995), so too specificcases of contemporary Pentecostalism may be ill-under-stood in terms of a meta-narrative of modernity. For En-glund the uncomfortable experience of being observedby Pentecostal congregations rather than accepted as a“participant observer” began to unravel these complex-ities. No Pentecostal Christian Englund met would ac-cept that an impartial anthropological interest drove himto participate in Pentecostal services or to have casualconversations on questions of belief. He had to have apersonal thirst for “the words of God” (mawu aMulungu).

At first, recalling the widespread notion among Ma-lawians that every white person is a practicing Christian,Englund assumed that his appearance in churchesaroused interest because a white person was seen to bringthem prestige and recognition. In other words, if whiteswere quintessential Christians, then the appearance of awhite man in the church could only endorse the spiritualmaturity of the whole congregation. However, as the de-sire among many Pentecostal Christians to “teach” (ku-phunzitsa) him did not abate, this assumption becameless plausible. Uneasily concealing the fact that he hadnot belonged to any denomination for over ten years,Englund worked hard to show interest in and someknowledge of the intricacies of the Bible. The revelationthat he was not a Christian would, he thought, haveunduly disturbed his Pentecostal interlocutors. At thesame time, the more time he spent with PentecostalChristians the more he realized that, for all their pen-chant for “modern” attire, they by no means associatedthe born-again condition with white people or with aparticular class. Some township residents had, as watch-men and domestic servants, ample evidence of the de-plorable habits of whites in the city. Moreover, as is dis-cussed below, Pentecostal Christians in Chinsapotownship emphasize the gospel of “security” (chitetezo)more than prosperity. Rather than taking them to rep-resent Pentecostal Christians in general, let alone a de-sire to be “modern individuals,” the ethnographer mustappreciate their specific existential passions.

9. For Birgit Meyer (1998b:183), the concerns among Ghanaian Pen-tecostal Christians accord with those formulated by one of theforemost theorists of modernity, Jurgen Habermas (1987). They il-lustrate Habermas’s dictum that “a present that understands itselffrom the horizon of the modern age as the actuality of the mostrecent period has to recapitulate the break brought about with thepast as a continuous renewal” (1987:7).

healing and morality

The response of Pentecostal Christians to Englund’s ill-ness during fieldwork made apparent their view of per-sonhood. Several volunteered to pray for Englund butalso observed that he could be healed only if he “ad-mitted” (kuvomereza) that the Holy Spirit (Mzimu Woy-era) guided his life. This requirement leaves little chancefor the born-again Christian to be “fully in control ofherself” (Meyer 1998b:202). A similar, though morallyopposite, view of agency underlies the abstraction of“black people’s medicine.” Despite being aware thatmuch “black people’s medicine” is based on knowledgeof various plants and animals, Pentecostal Christiansview its practitioners as people possessed by evil spirits(ziwanda) sent by Satan (Satana). At the same time,“white people’s medicine,” far from being sufficient initself, often follows (or its effect is thought to be rein-forced by) the laying of hands on the afflicted and intensepraying in which “in the name of Jesus” (mu dzina laYesu) is chanted. Pentecostal Christians’ interest in En-glund resembles their interest in all the others in thechurch—do they, as persons, belong to the realm of Godor that of Satan? These observations, in turn, call for acloser look at Pentecostal Christians’ preoccupationwith healing. Does “black people’s medicine” signify“tradition” or “village culture”? Is “individualization”at issue when a person is constituted by Satan or God?

Healing (machiritso) is often the most time-consum-ing activity for Pentecostal pastors in Chinsapo town-ship. Toward the end of the sermon, the afflicted areasked to come to the front of the church, where thepastor and his assistants lay their hands on them andpray. More than half of the congregation usually answersthe call. Successful pastors are also distinguished by asteady flow of people at their houses, looking for prayersthat will heal their afflictions or help them to fulfil theiraspirations—from employment to happy domestic life.A pastor may receive some dozen visitors every day andis expected to attend to their troubles with equal fervorwhether they are members of his church or not. DuringEnglund’s fieldwork the pastor of a major Pentecostalchurch was evicted by his congregation precisely becausehe was seen to be an inadequate healer. Returning froma funeral in his home district, he found that the congre-gation had hired a lorry and removed his property to thechurch headquarters.

Given this emphasis on healing in the quest for se-curity, the virtual obsession of Chinsapo’s PentecostalChristians with “black people’s medicine” comes as nosurprise. Satan’s work under the guise of healing mustbe made explicit in order to discover the realm of God.In practice, however, the realms are situationally de-fined, and the existential weight of a particular afflictionmay be too daunting to permit denominational rigor. Inone case, a young woman had long suffered from insom-nia and various somatic ailments after her boyfriend hadabandoned her. A “traditional” healer (sing’anga) gaveher medicine which was meant to release her by inflict-ing her troubles on him. At the same time, however, she



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Nota

Individualização é visto pelos antropólogos como uma aspiração ao ideal da pessoa modernna que está totalmente no controle de si (p. 234). O pentecostalismo aparece como uma maneira de negociar as dicotomias: individuo vs. sociedade, tradicional vs. moderno, que defiiriam a experiencia da modernidade. Englund em sua experiencia com as igrejas pentecostais teve o desconforto de ser mais observado do que ser aceito como observador participante, onde as pessoas o tempo todo queriam ensina-lo as palavras de Deus (p. 234) Quando esteve doente em campo, Englund, observou as noções de pessoa que estavam em jogo: são, como pessoas, pertencendo ao domínio de Deus ou daquele do Diabo? A medicinas das pessoas negras significa tradição ou cultural de aldeia? É individualização quando a pessoa é possuida pelo diabo ou por deus? Na visão dos pentecostais o satã tem a aparencia de curandeiros porém de maneira a explicitar a descoberta para o reino de Deus. Estes dominios são situacionalmente definidos com uma existência em uma forma particular de aflição


began attending a Pentecostal church, where her partic-ipation in intense praying, singing, and dancing soongave her sound sleep and ended the other ailments. Con-vinced that God had released her, she disposed of themedicine in front of the congregation. In this case, thevigorous physical engagement with problems in the com-pany of a whole congregation stood in a sharp contrastto the lonely manipulation of murky medicine.

The abstraction of “black people’s medicine” is not astep on the way to further abstractions such as “tradi-tion” or “village culture.” Inspired and guided by Satan,the practitioners of “black people’s medicine” are ubiq-uitous, found everywhere from the wealthiest suburbsto the poorest villages. A great uncertainty often per-meates the life-worlds of Chinsapo’s Pentecostal Chris-tians, casting doubt on the morality even of members ofone’s own congregation. This uncertainty accounts forthe fact that the devil cannot be unambiguously local-ized. Chinsapo’s Pentecostal lay preachers and pastorsoften say that they prefer non-Pentecostal congregationsin villages to those in towns, but this is less because ofconcern about the fundamental immorality of village lifethan because of the difficulty of getting their messageheard in town. Preaching in urban markets or on streetcorners, it is said, is often interrupted by insolent passers-by who call one mad (openga). Perhaps worse, it may besimply ignored. In villages, by contrast, an attentive au-dience, eager to learn through listening and discussion,10

is usually guaranteed.Even though the devil is not a localized notion, mudzi,

the term for both “home” and “village,” has deep moralconnotations among born-again Christians no less thanother residents of the township. Material considerationsare inseparable from this moral sentiment. Chinsapo isa setting where the modernist narrative of permanenturbanization does not apply (cf. Ferguson 1990 and 1999;Macmillan 1993 and 1996). Most Chinsapo residents,both women and men, move between village and townseveral times during their life cycles, and cultivation inthe village is often a necessary supplement to their mea-ger urban incomes. As a moral sentiment, mudzi is notmerely a place but a set of relationships, a site of solic-itude which is not necessarily spatially demarcated. Inthe township, “people from home” (anthu a ku mudzi)may not be related through kinship and may even hailfrom a different village or a different chiefdom, but theyare sources and subjects of trust, welfare, and mutualsupport. Access to land, moreover, extends mudzi to a

10. Among the residents of Chinsapo township, Pentecostalchurches are not distinguished by differences in their gospel, andindeed a distinction between rural- and urban-based churches israrely recognized. Any such distinction is blurred even further bythe practice of “planting churches” (kubzala mipingo), where atown-based church or mission helps a new pastor to establish achurch in his or her area of origin. Church leaders in town oftenview “natives” of specific areas, because of their example and in-timate knowledge of the local setting, as the best persons to spreadthe gospel. For aspiring pastors in the township, scraping up a livingthrough petty business or underpaid employment, the prospect ofreturning “home” to lead a congregation is likewise highlyattractive.

particular place. “When things get difficult we shall re-turn” (zikadzabvuta tidzabwerera) is an oft-heard phrasein the township, evoking an image of a localized havenwhich, whilst certainly poor, defines the ultimate“home.”

united in the blood of jesus

If “black people’s medicine” does not condense “tradi-tion” and “village culture” into one neat formula, thenperhaps the abstract individual, another postulate of mo-dernity’s meta-narrative, could organize ethnography onPentecostalism in Chinsapo township? A brief compar-ison of personhood in “black people’s medicine” and inPentecostalism reveals the two, once again, to be phe-nomena of the same life-world. Both appear to emphasizepersonal experience not as an individual’s revelation butas a composite of spiritual and human agencies. The pathwhich leads to becoming a healer is paved with afflictioncaused by earlier personal misbehavior or by the spiritof a deceased relative (mzimu). In the former case, thepower to heal is gradually acquired by accepting a spiritfrom God, usually called the Holy Spirit, as one’s guide;in the latter case, the same occurs through an ancestralspirit. Likewise in Pentecostalism affliction or personalimmorality precede the “second birth” whereby the per-son receives the Holy Spirit. Although there is muchdispute between healers and born-again Christians overthe rightful claim to be possessed by the Holy Spirit,their similar cosmologies of the composite person makethe dispute mutually intelligible. The abstract individualin an unmediated relation to God would entail an irrec-oncilable discontinuity in cosmology.

The discontinuity that does emerge in the second birthseparates the person from those who have not been bornagain, but it does so by reconstituting the person in othersocial relationships. In the most prosaic sense, the Pen-tecostal congregation consists of “relatives in the Spirit”(azibale a mu Uzimu), persons who call one another“brother” and “sister” and who engage in mutual sup-port. This conjoining of persons in the Holy Spirit is,moreover, an embodied condition (cf. Csordas 1994). Theblood that Jesus shed runs in the veins of every spiritualbrother or sister. “Protected by the blood of Jesus” (ote-tezedwa ndi mwazi wa Yesu), the person cannot beharmed “because of the blood of Jesus which is in his orher body” (chifukwa cha mwazi wa Yesu amene alimkati mu thupi mwake). The afflicted become healedwhen they are “anointed with the power of the HolySpirit” (odzozedwa ndi mphamvu ya Mzimu Woyera).11

The Holy Spirit is, in brief, “in him or her” (mwa iye).United in the blood of Jesus, the bodies of PentecostalChristians are corporeal signs of composite selves.

Uncertainty, as we have said, haunts even born-again Christians. The interest that Englund’s appear-

11. This imagery resonates with a common practice among “tra-ditional” healers in exorcizing evil spirits. The possessed is washedand anointed with a medical substance said to produce smell(pfungo) that keeps the spirit away.



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Nota

UNIDOS PELO SANGUE DE JESUS. Se a medicina das pessoas negras não condensa a tradição a cultura das aldeias. A noção de pessoa na medicina das pessoas negras, com o pentecostalismo revela dois fenomenos de um mesmo mundo-vivido. Há uma relação de um compósito de espíritos e agências humanas. Há presente a idéia do espírito santo como um guia, e que o mesmo ocorre com espírito ancestral. Como há o renascimento no Pentecostalismo, o segundo nascimento, as pessoas recebem o espírito santo. Mas há uma irreconciliável descontinuidade na cosmologia, e essa descontinuidade é separada pelas pessoas a partir de que as pessoas não vem a nascer novamente, mas o que se faz é que há uma reconstituição da pessoa em outras relações sociais: as pessoas chamam-se de irmãos e irmãs e que estão engajadas em um mútuo suporte (p. 235). A idéia da continuidade corporal de si, pois a o corpo de Jesus é o próprio corpo da pessoa, e de que todos estão unidos pelo sangue de Jesus, ou seja, os corpos dos cristãos pentecostais são sinais corporais de eus compósitos (p. 235).


ance in Pentecostal churches aroused greets everystranger. Englund was not taken for granted as a Chris-tian, nor was the desire to teach him a simple effortto convert. Rather, he was under observation so thatthe relationships which constituted him as a personcould be established. The congregation can alwayshave those who only fake born-again ecstasy, fromone’s neighbor on the church bench to the pastor whois leading the sermon. Satan’s presence among theborn-again is especially disturbing, albeit not thoughtto be uncommon. Just as the protection and securitythat the Holy Spirit provides is embodied, so is satanicinfluence. When witches are directly addressed by pas-tors who lay their hands on them, their hearts beginto beat violently; they cry, fall down, and may startspeaking in incomprehensible languages which somemistake for the tongues of born-again Christians. Per-sons under Satan’s influence also begin to feel uncom-fortable when the congregation is singing and dancing;they feel hot, want to get out, and often begin to cry.A person does not have to be a self-conscious witchin order to be discovered a subject of Satan. On thecontrary, the experiences of cleansing that often ac-company the process of being “born again” gain theirforce from the realization that the person had beenconstituted by evil spirits all along. The evil spirit canbe an ancestral spirit, proof that the dead person him-self or herself was under the influence of Satan. Per-sons constituted by the Holy Spirit “sleep” (kugona)after death rather than afflicting their living relatives.

Ethnography organized by modernity’s meta-narra-tive would contain some of the observations men-tioned above, but it would cast them in a mold thatwould leave most observations redundant. Belief inthe healing powers of the Holy Spirit and in the evilnature of “black people’s medicine,” for example,would be interpreted as part of the global counter-movement against “disenchantment.” In this inter-pretation, it would not necessarily be the ethnogra-pher who regarded “black people’s medicine” as“tradition” and Pentecostalism as “modernity”;rather, township residents’ own arguments would beseen to revolve around this dichotomy. The interpre-tation would be guided by a pre-given meta-narrativerather than close attention to the interaction betweenthe ethnographer and his or her interlocutors in theproduction of anthropological knowledge. The obser-vations above indicate the potential for ethnographicignorance in accounts organized by modernity’s meta-narrative. The tradition-modernity dichotomy, for in-stance, obscures the shared cosmology in the moraldisputes between healers and born-again Christians,the abstraction of individualization makes it difficultto appreciate the embodiment of human and spiritualrelationships, and so on.

Modernity’s Meta-narratives and theKnowledge Practices of Ethnography

creating contexts

It is important to be clear on the debate we are addressingwith our ethnography, because the evocation of multiplemodernities can have at least two broadly contrastinganalytical uses. One deploys “multiple modernities” forpurposes of contrast, “to make a critical point,” asGeorge Marcus and Michael Fischer (1986:162) explain.The strategy serves to defamiliarize phenomena whichhave been taken to be examples of Western modernity.It is, however, potentially ethnocentric both in its as-sumption of the “West” as the prototype of modernityand in its use of “others” for cultural critique “at home”;“what is at stake is our modernity (and view of theworld), not theirs” (Ong 1996b:61). Less ethnocentric is,apparently, the other use of “multiple modernities,” thefocus of this article. Here the issue of scale, the afore-mentioned need to “situate” the local and the particularin “wider” contexts, is critical. Anthropologists, Appa-durai argues, can no longer “assume that as they ap-proach the local they approach something more elemen-tary, more contingent, and thus more real than life seenin larger-scale perspectives” (1996:54). The implicationis that a wider context, Appadurai’s “larger-scale per-spective,” yields more knowledge about a narrower con-text than the focus on the latter context itself. “Mo-dernity” is a trope that links the shifts in contextstogether.

A laudable effort to distinguish one’s perspective fromother available notions of an interconnected world, suchas world-system theory (Wallerstein 1974, 1980, 1989)and the sociology of modernity in the singular (Giddens1990, 1991), often underlies this approach (see, e.g., Rob-ertson 1992, Geschiere and Meyer 1998). By the sametoken, the notion of multiple modernities creates its owncontext for social scientific argument. It preempts thatargument by offering its own analytical alternatives andrepresenting them as little short of repugnant: the pa-rochialism of particularism and the ethnocentrism ofmodernity in the singular. As a consequence, the Com-aroffs’ “ethnography of the middle-range,” which is “nei-ther unambiguously local nor obviously global” (1998),is, within the terms of the argument, reassuringlysensible.

The gist of our ethnography is to remind us of theanthropological insight that the ethnographer can neverassume prior knowledge of the contexts of people’s con-cerns. While neither a Papua New Guinean peripherynor a Malawian township has been spared the effects oftransnational regimes of exploitation, our discussionshows how anxieties over money, violence, the devil, andhealing provide, if probed more closely, their own con-texts for ethnographic understanding. From the analogybetween the dead, affines, and whites to the constitutionof all persons by spirits, the “wider context” is not forthe ethnographer to determine. Nor is it to be discoveredthrough unmediated experience, as if ethnographic un-



Alexandre

Nota

Tanto a idéia do espirito santo, quanto o da cura tradicional das pessoas negras, não podem ser vistas como uma oposição de tradicional (medicina das pessoas negras) e pentecostalismo (moderno) e sim de que estes são parte de um contramovimento global contra o desencantamento (p. 236). A interpretação pode ser dada por uma metanarrativa pré-dada, do que por uma atenção mais próxima para a interação entre o etnógrafo e ou seus interlocutores na produção do saber antropológico. O pontencial da ignorância etnográfica é organizada pela meta-narrativa da modernidade (p. 236). A dicotomia tradicional-moderno, obscurece a cosmologia compartilhadas nas disputas morais entre curandeiros e renascidos cristãos, a abstração da individualização torna dificíl a apreciação do corporificação humana e nas relações espirituais (p. 236). METANARRATIVA DA MODERNIDADE E SABER PRÁTICO DA ETNOGRAFIA CRIANDO CONTEXTOS. A ideia de multiplas modernidades serve para desfamiliarizar a ideia o fenomeno que tem sido de exemplos para a modernidade Ocidental. E isto é pontecialmente etnocentrico pois o Ocidente é tomado como protótipo da modernidade e usa os outros para a crítica cultura em casa "delimitamos nossa moderniade, não a deles" (p. 236). A noção de múltiplas modernidades cria seu próprio contexto para o argumento da ciêntifico social. A essencia de nossa etnografia é de nos lembrar de nossos insights antropológiocos que o etnógrafo nunca pode assumir a priori no conhecimento dos contextos que concernem os povos. Os autores intensionaram em mostrar como as discussões sobre a ansiedade quanto ao dinheiro, viloência, o demonio e a cura, se examinados mais de perto, eles são os seu próprio contexto de entendimento etnográfico (p. 236). O saber etnográfico não precede aos conceitos que são comunicados


derstanding preceded the concepts in which it is com-municated. Like the “new old realism” which Marcus(1998:40) has identified in the kind of holism criticizedhere, our realism presumes that the ethnographic worldis knowable only in the language that the ethnographerhas at his or her disposal. However, our realist ethnog-raphy is reflexive; it uses the ethnographer’s lived ex-perience, with due attention to its discomforts and af-flictions, to explore the possibilities and limits of thatlanguage.12 Taken in this sense, comparison is implicitin all ethnography.

A meta-narrative, not an effort to make the reflexiveproduction of anthropological knowledge explicit, organ-izes ethnographic writing in the discourse on multiplemodernities. The notion that modernity, in its multipleforms, does not represent a definite “sociohistoricalbreak” (Comaroff 1994a:303) is hardly plausible if it isstill assumed that culturally specific concerns transform“translocal discourses into local vocabularies of causeand effect” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1998). Far more in-triguing is ethnography which seeks to avoid a sense ofrupture by showing, for example, how in north-westernTanzania sorcerers are thought to be quite as capable ofoperating in the world of money as cosmopolitan busi-nessmen are able to engage in traffic in blood and corpses(see Weiss 1998). Here, the stories of blood sale and ex-traction prompt the ethnographer to delve into a nuancedstudy of blood as a substance and resource among Haya.Although the reader is treated to a wealth of detail, andalthough the ethnographer is able to make an ingeniousanalogy between the Haya understandings of blood andcommodity circulation, “commodification” introducesan unacknowledged meta-narrative into the ethno-graphic analysis. Because it is unacknowledged, the eth-nographer fails to reflect on the seeming compatibilitybetween Haya concerns and the social scientific under-standing of what “commodification” entails.

Perhaps the most fatal difficulty in the current meta-narrative is its ill-theorized relativism. The analysis ofmultiple modernities against the backdrop of commod-ification, nationalism, Christian missions, and so on,bespeaks a view of modernity’s historical origins in the“West,” and even a proponent of cultural diversity inglobalization locates the origins in the period of the de-cline of feudalism in Europe (see Robertson 1992:182).Relativism derives from the attempt to avoid naive beliefin diffusion from a core to a periphery. Cultural diversityand juxtaposition imply, it is argued, that the actual lo-cation of the emergence of modernity was the colonies,not the metropolis (cf. King 1995:113–14). Anthropolo-gists now see colonialism, in effect, as a process of strug-gle and negotiation rather than as progress or exploita-tion (Pels 1997). Quick to sense the danger of Euro-

12. This emphasis on the lived experience of the ethnographer asa situated subject likens our perspective to the “standpoint epis-temologies” of some feminist theorists (for a discussion, see Denzin1997:53–89). While the interest in lived experience has often re-mained abstract in their work, our case studies have indicated howit is through lived experience that assumptions in ethnographicwriting come to be exposed.

centrism, some anthropologists, such as the Comaroffs(e.g., 1993:xxviii), go even farther by insisting that con-temporary Western modernity is no less “magical” thanmodernities elsewhere. From its stock markets to its lot-teries, Western modernity has a “single common denom-inator” with other modernities in “the magical allure ofmaking money out of nothing” (Comaroff and Comaroff1998). “We are all equal,” Miller adds, “when it comesto the bizarre world of re-enchanted commodities” (1994:313).13 Even more, witchcraft beliefs elsewhere are saidto find parallels in the contemporary Euro-Americanmoral panics over the abuse, satanic or otherwise, ofchildren (see Comaroff 1994b, La Fontaine 1998).

Taken together, two observations prove the ultimateillogicality of the current meta-narrative. First, shifts incontext are offered as ways in which the true conditions,if not the causes, of cultural practices can be appre-hended. This comes dangerously close to regarding thosepractices (witchcraft, for example) as “mystification.” Id-ioms which are documented in ethnographies become“local vocabularies of cause and effect” (Comaroff andComaroff 1998) in the predicament anthropologists havedefined for various cultural others. Second, whatever theappeal for cultural diversity in the notion of multiplemodernities, it seems that anthropologists themselvesare outside culture altogether. How else could one ex-plain their capacity to step in and out of contexts at will,to gloss any culture, including the Western or the Euro-American, as “magical”?

This illogicality, mixing analytical high-handednesswith trendy relativism, marks the demise of reflexivity.It should be clear that it is not the analytical interest incontext that troubles us; shifts in context routinely pro-duce knowledge (cf. Duranti and Goodwin 1992, Strath-ern 1995, Howard-Malverde 1997, Dilley 1999). How-ever, the need to shift contexts that accompanies thelatest meta-narrative of modernity obscures, indeed mys-tifies, the production of anthropological knowledge it-self. The knowledge claims specific to anthropologistsstudying multiple modernities create, unreflexively, anepistemological vacuum in which the “wider context”inadvertently represents the anthropologist’s own su-perior understanding of the world. Unwittingly, anthro-pologists follow the analytical procedure whereby, inMoore’s words, “Western social science consistently re-positions itself as the original point of comparative andgeneralizing theory” (1996b:3).

between field and factory

The meta-narrative of modernity which currently ap-pears to be the most plausible, that of multiple modern-ities, is a response to analytical problems which soci-ologists and sociocultural anthropologists have long

13. The magical nature of commodities is an old idea which hasrequired little anthropological insight to emerge. One source is inKarl Marx’s work, and Walter Benjamin (1983) and Raymond Wil-liams (1980), among others, have more recently publicized it out-side anthropology.




created for themselves. The idea of rupture has alwaysaccompanied the notion of the “modern” society, andthe social scientific preoccupation with modernity ofcourse antedates anthropologists’ misgivings about therepresentation of “primitive” and “isolated” communi-ties. Taken together, the notions of modernity and cul-tural difference seem to offer a convenient solution tothe problems of both representation and relevance. Theindeterminacy of modernity’s institutional and ideolog-ical framework permits a celebration of diversity in eth-nographic accounts. The very notion of modernity, inturn, provides the “wider context” of a transnational,even global, predicament.

Although we would not want to block any scholarlypursuit, we insist that the uniqueness of the ethno-graphic method is at stake in the current fascination withmultiple modernities. Studies of multiple modernitiescelebrate diversity against their authors’ understandingsof the similarity underlying or even generating that di-versity. Sociocultural anthropology merges into culturalstudies and cultural sociology, and ethnographic analysesbecome illustrations consumed by metropolitan theo-rists. An implication is, as we mentioned at the outset,that our difficulty lies less with a word than with anunexamined meta-narrative. It would be most unfortu-nate if anthropologists learnt only to erase the word “mo-dernity” from their accounts without confronting thepersuasiveness of the accompanying meta-narrative.

At the same time, as we have suggested, anthropolo-gists are obliged to rethink comparison in ethnographicwriting. Our ethnography on the anxieties over moneyand consumption in the case from Papua New Guinea,for example, will be seen to present an instance of “de-commodification” only if Rai Coast villagers’ own con-cerns are obscured. Theirs is an investigative disposition,an effort to make sense of the wealth that seems so cru-cial to white people. Because Rai Coast villagers do notpresume that this wealth has a commodified form amongwhite people, they can hardly be concerned to “decom-modify” it. However, the abstraction of “commodifica-tion”—like “individualization” in the Malawi case—looms large in our own account precisely because mostreaders of our ethnography are able to understand thoseconcerns and practices only in relation to what they arenot. Every act of ethnographic writing is, explicitly orimplicitly, an act of comparison, because the ethnogra-pher has no choice but to write in relation to what hisor her readers can be assumed to know already. The fun-damental difficulty of the meta-narratives of modernitylies in their inability to make the ethnographer’s pre-dicament explicit. Instead, they eclipse the lived expe-rience of fieldwork and make “modernity” and the ab-stractions associated with it natural foundations forcomparison.

Could our argument be seen to resist development inanthropological fieldwork methods? The time-spacecompression effected by transnational travel and theelectronic media appears to transform the nature of field-work, if not to displace it altogether as a key anthro-pological practice (see, e.g., Appadurai 1996, Hannerz

1996, Clifford 1997). We are not, once again, arguingagainst innovations in anthropological practice such asmultisited ethnography, which, as Marcus (1998:94–95)acknowledges, has antecedents in anthropology beforethe current discourse on modernity and globalization.However, we find unwarranted the conclusion that long-term and localized fieldwork has had its day. The con-clusion caricatures ethnography by implying that its sub-stance can be reduced to what occurs in the course offieldwork in a particular locality. The focus on particularrelationships is, rather, a basis for ethnographic imagi-nation to transcend the confines of the particular. Inother words, intimate knowledge of a particular setting,through which flow many currents, provides a stand-point from which to address issues of scale in a way thatgeneralizing perspectives do not.

If the current critique of fieldwork arises in responseto “empirical changes in the world” (Marcus 1998:80),anthropologists can hardly boast much control over thepressures that those changes exert on their own practice.To do so would be to uphold the illusion of anthropol-ogists as “independent craftsmen” (Fox 1991a:8), freefrom the factory conditions of contemporary academicwork. In this regard, James Clifford’s critique of the “leg-acies of exoticist fieldwork” (1997:90) is in itself an il-luminating case of self-justifying craftsmanship. Field-work in anthropology, Clifford observes in nowdistressingly conventional terms, “is sedimented with adisciplinary history, and it continues to function as a riteof passage and marker of professionalism” (1997:61). Theemergence of cultural studies provokes renewed asser-tions of this disciplinary specialty, to the detriment of,in Clifford’s view, research practices more attuned totraveling than to dwelling as a critical contemporary con-dition. It is only in passing that he pays attention tomaterial constraints as factors beyond interdisciplinarycompetition in Anglo-American academia currently un-dermining fieldwork, arguing (1997:90) that declininglevels of funding are forcing anthropologists to shift fromlong-term fieldwork abroad to short visits or to sitescloser to “home.”

Given the relatively limited requirements of most fieldprojects in sociocultural anthropology, the problem offunding does not represent the biggest threat to the eth-nographic method. More fundamental are the “factoryconditions” and “audit practices” which now structureacademic work as a whole, particularly in Anglo-Amer-ican academia (see Strathern 1997, Shore and Wright1998). The constant monitoring of scholarly output, inquantitative at least as much as in qualitative terms,feeds the proliferation of journals, book series, confer-ences, and workshops, all of which presuppose contin-uous presence in academia. Reflection—a slow and un-predictable activity by its very nature—fits uneasily withthe logic of auditing. Under such conditions, the doctoralproject is becoming the only period of sustained and long-term fieldwork in a scholarly career. Unsurprisingly, per-spectives which require a minimum of fieldwork, per-spectives which demand instant ethnography to



Alexandre

Nota

Aqui os autores defendem a metanarrativa da modernidade da etnografia a parti de uma pesquisa de campo situada, pois ela dá a dimensão de escala que a uma perspectiva generalizante não consegue fazê-lo (p. 238). O etnógrafo terá um controle maior sobre a mudanças empiricas que podem ocorrer.


illustrate aspects of a metropolitan meta-narrative, holdincreasing appeal.

During the past three decades, the call of reflexive andcritical anthropology has been for awareness of powerrelations in both fieldwork and academic institutions(e.g., Scholte 1972). However, whereas much of this crit-icism has sought to decolonize anthropology, academicauditing makes anthropologists inadvertently participatein the undermining of their own knowledge practices.While decolonization remains to be accomplished, newpressures may require a new reflexive anthropology. Itmust confront the quest for relevance when the corollaryof relevance is ethnographic ignorance. It must also con-front cynicism about “a rite of passage and professionalmarker” (Clifford 1997:61) when cynicism justifies a vir-tual disengagement from those parts of the world which,quite emphatically, are not well linked to the forces oftime-space compression, such as the electronic mediaand mass tourism. When social scientists explore thenew phenomena that global capital helps to create, it isimportant that the assumption of an inexorable force bethoroughly interrogated.

Throughout this article, a new reflexive anthropologyhas appeared as a renewal of the discipline’s old con-cerns. We have insisted upon the uniqueness of the eth-nographic method in the repertoire of contemporary so-cial scientists. At its best, it allows the subjects ofresearch to participate in the production of anthropolog-ical knowledge by indicating the contexts which are rel-evant to their own practices and by interrogating basicanalytical notions such as the concept of the person.Thus stated, our position renews the anthropological tra-dition of treating with suspicion the ideas and practiceswhich are current in the anthropologist’s own immediateworld.

Comments

charlotte aull daviesDepartment of Sociology and Anthropology,University of Wales Swansea, Swansea SA2 8PP, U.K.([email protected]). 2 vii 99

Englund and Leach have two principal concerns in theirarticle. The first is to alert anthropologists to the wayin which a particular widely adopted theoretical orien-tation—the meta-narrative of multiple moderni-ties—and its associated conceptual vocabulary are tend-ing to replace genuine theoretical inquiry grounded inethnographic research. Their second and, they believe,related concern is that dependence on this meta-narra-tive is seriously undermining “anthropological researchpractice, particularly the tradition of long-term and lo-calized fieldwork.” The meta-narrative supporting theconcept of multiple modernities, with its apparent cel-ebration of diversity, is particularly appealing for an-thropologists. However, this discourse tacitly assumes a

universal modernity that is rooted in its concern withfundamental ruptures, or discontinuities, in sociocul-tural forms held to accompany modernity. Thus ethnog-raphies from within this meta-narrative are seen to es-pouse a new holism in that they simply provideempirical examples of surface variation in aspects of mo-dernity such as “commodification” and “individualiza-tion,” which represent some of “the invariable rupturesbrought about by modernity in its multiple refractions.”In such ethnographies, the meta-narrative takes over thework of theorizing, essentially acting as an explanatorygloss that is imported and placed on ethnographic ob-servations rather than as a theoretical constructgrounded in them. This outcome derives in large partfrom ethnographers’ insufficient reflexivity regarding thespecificity to Western social thought of the constructsof multiple modernities and globalization and their con-sequent failure to problematize these concepts and in-vestigate—rather than assume—their applicability totheir own research settings. I have argued elsewhere (Da-vies 1999) that a thoroughgoing reflexivity which oper-ates at various levels, including that of the ethnogra-pher’s broader intellectual context, is integral to goodresearch and can be pursued from within a critical realistepistemology without succumbing to a radical reflexivecycle of increasing self-absorption. The authors provideexamples from their own research which accomplish pre-cisely this: While recognizing the necessity to addresscurrent theoretical perspectives of modernity and glob-alization, they demonstrate how a more reflexive use ofthis theoretical base can lead to alternative explanationsand conclude that “the ethnographer can never assumeprior knowledge of the contexts of people’s concerns,”not even the global context of “transnational regimes ofexploitation.”

Another broad effect of this meta-narrative has beena critical reflection on the role of anthropology in a worldcharacterized by increasing interconnections whichbring the so-called exotic into the everyday and viceversa (Ahmed and Shore 1995b, Fox 1991b). In particular,the relevance of the traditional form of anthropologicalfieldwork, in which ethnographers study culturally andusually spatially distant people by going to live amongthem for an extended period, may be questioned giventhat similar experiences are available to more adventur-ous and well-heeled tourists and vicariously accessiblevia electronic media to many others. While I agree fullywith Englund and Leach that ethnographic knowledgebased in critical reflexivity provides a qualitatively dif-ferent standard of validity and intellectual responsibility,I am less sanguine about their apparent preference forethnography in localized sites. Certainly sites which “arenot well linked to the forces of time-space compression”must not be ignored. Yet clearly they are becoming lesscommon, and it would be folly to tie anthropology andits ethnographic research practices too closely to such acontext. I would prefer to see the reflexive realist eth-nographic perspective they advocate extended to less tra-ditional field sites and unconventional topics, especiallyto sites that are not localized or clearly bounded spatially.




I contend that the hallmarks of ethnographic practicecan be applied in such non-traditional “sites.” Specifi-cally, such research should be characterized by, first,long-term and intensive involvement with a collectiv-ity—although this may have to be accomplished throughmore sporadic contact than is typical of a village-basedethnography, as for example with elite collectivities thathave the resources to control access to their spaces andactivities. Nevertheless, there are important ethical aswell as intellectual reasons, recognized at least since the1960s (Hymes 1972), for developing ethnographic re-search in such sites. (In emphasizing this characteristicof good ethnographic research, I obviously share the au-thors’ concern about the way in which current condi-tions of academic work militate against such long-terminvolvement.) And second, ethnographic practice shouldincorporate a thoroughgoing reflexivity at various levelsbut particularly one in which ethnographers recognizethat they are themselves transformed through their re-search and include such transformations as an integralpart of their knowledge-seeking practices for understand-ing others’ social and cultural contexts.

akhil guptaDepartment of Anthropology, Stanford University,Stanford, Calif. 94305, U.S.A. ([email protected]). 8 vii 99

My reading of the chief argument in Englund and Leach’sprovocative and detailed article is that they are worriedthat a concern with sociological analyses of modernity,with its emphasis on commodification, individualiza-tion, and disenchantment, might be leading anthropol-ogists to smuggle in ethnocentric concepts even as theystruggle to reformulate Western understandings of mo-dernity. The authors believe that the only way to preventthis from happening is to re-engage reflexively with long-term fieldwork in particular localities. Their ethno-graphic materials present interesting examples of coun-terintuitive “readings” of cultural Others’ en-counters with stereotypically “modern” and “Western”institutional forms: money and the commodity form inPapua New Guinea and evangelical Christianity inMalawi.

I will raise three sets of questions about this paper thatfocus in turn on ideas of context and locality, on under-standings of the relation of modernity to Otherness, andon the continued relevance of long-term “local”fieldwork.

Englund and Leach make the important point that eth-nographers should not assume prior knowledge of thecontext that they are studying. They fear especially thatnarratives of modernity supply anthropologists with cer-tain discourses about the “larger” context that may beused uncritically. They thus strike an important cau-tionary note. However, their critique is built on a notionof “the local” that is problematic, especially in that itdoes not respond to the challenges mounted by the verycritics, such as Appadurai, with whom they find fault.

The central point here is that one cannot assume, asanthropologists have been wont to do, that “the local”is its own universe, a geographically circumscribed spacewhere meanings are made, where the most importantsocial interactions occur, where economic and affectivelife is lived, and where social structures are reproduced.Nor is it adequate to employ spatial imagery in which“the local” is part of a “larger” world that encloses andencompasses it. One popular image (although a host ofother similar ones exist) is that of a series of concentriccircles in which “the local” is the innermost circle, sur-rounded by circles representing the region, the nation,and the global, with arrows pointing to lines of influenceand flows across them. In fact, the authors give us “local”contexts that belie such a frame, contexts saturated withthe actions of national states, national and transnationalmedia, global political economies, and histories of co-lonialism. But they then fall back on the fiction that thelocations they study are localities, without adequate re-flection on what makes them so. One of the conse-quences is that their ethnographic subjects emerge ascollective actors: thus Rai Coast villagers all seem toshare certain notions of wealth and personhood and Pen-tecostals in a Malawian township all share certain ideasof the individual. Do such ethnographic moves bring usback to ideas of “a culture” that emphasized “the sharedunderstandings” of its people? This is precisely the viewof locality that the modernist ethnographers whom En-glund and Leach criticize have so successfully broughtinto question, and it is somewhat surprising that theirchallenges have not been taken into account.

The lack of attention to differentiation brings me tomy second point about the relationship posited by theauthors between modernity and Otherness. Do under-standings of wealth and commodities on the Rai Coastor constructions of personhood in Malawi differ accord-ing to age, gender, class, social position, migration his-tory, and occupation? Englund and Leach’s point thatother people may construct contexts differently from theethnographer relies on a dichotomy between the con-texts constructed by Others and by anthropologists. Theassumption is that these contexts are naturally differentbecause Others do not think like ethnographers. Butwhat if the ethnographer is a “native”? It is highly un-likely that no one on the Rai Coast or in the Malawiantownship studied by Englund was intimately familiarwith “modernist” discourses about money, commodi-ties, and persons and able to occupy more than one cul-tural framework or to translate between different un-derstandings. It is even likely that all of the people inthose different areas participated in uneven and contra-dictory ways in modernist discourses and utilized themin some way in making sense of their own worlds. It ishard to visualize how their respective encounters withcolonialism, modernizing states, and global marketswould have left them with modes of understanding andexplanation that were not radically changed. Thus, whenEnglund and Leach insist that Other people may havedifferent ways of delineating “wider” contexts from theethnographer, how do they account for the fact that the




understandings of “the natives” themselves are complex,hybrid phenomena interweaving different strands oflived experience no less than the ethnographer’s? Thatsome natives might share more with the white ethnog-rapher than with other natives? That the axes of simi-larity and difference may not run uniformly throughcommunities and geographical locations? I think theirpoint about differences in conceptualizing contexts relieson a notion of difference that could be interrogated fur-ther, a difference that they appear to think lies awaitingdiscovery through “close” ethnographic encounters withcultural Others.

What is wrong with this picture of reflexive fieldwork?I am skeptical that one can attack the organizing as-sumptions of the discipline simply by being more re-flective in the production of anthropological knowledge,while reproducing the dichotomies of Self and Other,(white) ethnographer and native informant, and modernsocial science and indigenous knowledges. Neither thebridge of empathy nor that of the vulnerability of theethnographer or the practice of letting people define thecontexts of their own practices is sufficient without amore radical revision of the terms in which we under-stand what anthropology is and what it does, to whomand by whom, and through what kinds of power rela-tions. What would happen to Englund and Leach’s anal-ysis if one did not assume that the ethnographer came(as they did) from a different social world from his in-formants? Or if one assumed that the informants sharedmuch with the ethnographer even as they differed fromhim? Or that the primary axis of difference across whichthe anthropologist was working was not “culture” butrace, class, age, gender, or sexuality? One place wherethey do their own cause injustice is in unfairly charac-terizing the proponents of a reconceptualized ethnogra-phy as those who believe that “long-term and localizedfieldwork has had its day.” Interestingly enough, thissentence does not cite any particular proponent of thisview. I was left wondering why the authors run “long-term” and “localized” together. Can one do “long-term”research that is multisited or that follows a particulargroup of people rather than being situated at one locationor focuses on institutions that are geographically dis-persed? Do the authors rule out the possibility of goodethnographic work done on temporary sites such as ref-ugee camps and work camps for migrant laborers, whichby definition cannot be long-term? (For detailed explo-ration of this theme, see Gupta and Ferguson 1997.) Itrust that the questions and criticisms I have offered willbe taken in the spirit in which they have been offered—asa way of inviting further dialogue and discussion ratherthan as a rejection of the authors’ positions, which I findchallenging and creative.

birgit meyerResearch Centre Religion and Society, University ofAmsterdam, Oudezijds Achterburgwal 185, 1012 DKAmsterdam, The Netherlands ([email protected]).17 ix 99

I share the authors’ enthusiasm about the need for long-term intensive fieldwork to produce valuable knowledge,as well as their concern not to subordinate ethnographyto one or another meta-narrative. But I contest their viewthat much current anthropological work—includingmine—is “organized by the meta-narrative of modern-ity” and that this obstructs the production of anthro-pological knowledge, for instance, with regard to Pen-tecostalism in Ghana.

Englund and Leach suggest that anthropologists em-ploying the notion of modernity carry a certain bias intotheir fieldwork and merely reproduce preconceivedviews rather than engaging in “reflexive knowledge pro-duction.” In so doing they not only caricature anthro-pologists like myself but also assume a particular hier-archical relationship between theoretical concepts andthe practice of research in which the latter is completelysubsumed under the former. This is not at all, however,the way I and others criticized by them use the notionof modernity. For me, engaging with modernity is a crit-ical endeavour that calls for a phenomenological ap-proach and hence a dialectical relationship between the-oretical reflexion and research in which each iscontinuously examined in each other’s light. Hence, forme “modernity” raises a host of fruitful questions ratherthan providing pre-given answers. I consider “modern-ity” productive for my work because the notion enablesme to get beyond a view of cultures as separate, boundedentities standing by themselves (without, however, los-ing sight of cultural specificity), to consider the historyof encounters between Western colonial agents and localpeople from a critical perspective beyond the moderni-zation paradigm, to take into account actual global en-tanglements and similarities in postcolonial conditions(the “wider contexts” alluded to by Englund and Leachare of course not abstractions on the part of social sci-entists but lived-in realities), and to develop a sharedlanguage which makes possible comparison between dif-ferent cases as well as debate among social scientists. Inmy view, sound fieldwork and theoretical reflexion inthe light of “modernity” do not exclude each other, andI do not see how anthropology can proceed by empha-sizing only the former. This is not to say that “modern-ity” has to remain part and parcel of anthropologicaldiscourse forever—it is certainly important to discuss itsusefulness (albeit not in the rather unproductive termsset by Englund and Leach). The point is that in my viewgood anthropology will always be inspired by and at thesame time challenge theoretical concepts. Nothing canbe gained by isolating ourselves from debates in the so-cial sciences and retreating into our discipline’s “old con-cerns” with fieldwork.

In the section on Pentecostalism, the authors seriouslycontest my work on Pentecostalism in Ghana. They in-




troduce me as a researcher who simply conflates AfricanPentecostalism with modernity and casts her researchfindings in pre-given terms, thereby overlooking whatreally matters to the people studied. This is a completemisrepresentation of my approach. Far from simply plac-ing Ghanaian Pentecostalists in the mould of “modern-ity,” my work is characterized by long-term encounterswith Ghanaian Pentecostalists, on the one hand, and acritical Auseinandersetzung with thinkers on “modern-ity” such as Marx, Weber, and Habermas, on the other.What has struck me so much in Ghanaian Pentecostaldiscourse is the strong emphasis placed on the wish tobe “modern,” to “make a complete break with the past,”to be “in control of oneself,” etcetera. All these are state-ments made by the people concerned, not things I madeup. Yet at the same time—and Englund and Leach aresilent about this in their criticism of my work—peoplekeep on talking about all the things which impede thedream of “being modern,” things they subsume underthe image of the Devil (for an elaboration of this point,see Meyer 1999). The main point I make about Pente-costalism is not that it is a harbinger of modernity butthat it offers people a space and a discourse for reflectingupon the pitfalls, if not the impossibility, of the projectof modernity and for embodying precisely that whichthey otherwise seek to leave behind. In fact, I becameinterested in the notion of “modernity” because the peo-ple among whom I conducted my research kept on talk-ing in the terms stated above, and my work seeks toappreciate how their views of modernity differ from, forinstance, Habermas’s notion of rupture (Meyer 1998b) orMarx’s notion of commodity fetishism (Meyer 1998c). Iam more than surprised that Englund and Leach fail torecognize this. Moreover, I am struck by the fact thatthey use Englund’s findings on Malawi to criticize mywork on Ghana. Why should Pentecostalism in thesetwo contexts be the same? I have never suggested thatmy work on Ghana would apply to the whole of Africa,and I find it fascinating to see how the Malawian situ-ation differs from what I encountered in Ghana. In myview, it is important to appreciate the different trajec-tories of Pentecostalism in different contexts rather thanseeking to criticize the findings pertaining to one contextwith those generated in a considerably different one.

joel robbinsDepartment of Anthropology, University of California,San Diego, La Jolla, Calif. 92093, U.S.A. ([email protected]). 29 vi 99

Having long since set themselves up quite nicely by plu-ralizing the notion of culture, anthropologists are nowhard at work putting the “s” on “modernity.” Yet despitethe comforts of relying on such a well-rehearsed diver-sifying maneuver, the authors of this timely and stim-ulating article worry over this second pluralization. Inparticular, they fear that it will erase the gains of thefirst by smuggling in a universalizing meta-narrative thatmakes modernity at its core everywhere the same. An-

thropologists, they argue, regularly treat modernity as an“invariable” set of ruptures in ideas about such thingsas exchange, production, and personhood. Local modern-ities thus always consist in the ways people adopt, con-test, or otherwise live with the effects of these ruptures.

What troubles the authors in all this is their sense thatanthropologists are increasingly allowing theories of mo-dernity to stand in for ethnographic detail in character-izing the way people understand modern versions ofexchange, production, personhood, etc. The suggestedantidote to this turn away from the ethnographic recordis, of course, to do more careful ethnography and to beready to use what is learned thereby to interrogate uni-versalizing theories of modernity. This strikes me as aplea for good anthropological practice, and as such it isa welcome intervention in the contemporary discussionof multiple modernities.

But in an article that so forcefully promotes the valueof ethnography, it is also important to look at the eth-nographic material the authors present. And it is herethat I find myself unsettled. What is revealed in the eth-nography here is that once one has defined the meta-narrative of modernity as a story about ruptures, the eth-nography ranged against that meta-narrative must workto prove nothing but continuity. Hence, in the materialfrom Papua New Guinea, whites turn out to be nothingmore than an avatar of traditional types of potentiallyproductive “others” such as affines and the dead. Simi-larly, Malawian Pentecostals whose lives are guided bythe Holy Spirit are really no different from traditionalhealers, whose personhood is also a composite of “spir-itual and human agencies.” As in many models of syn-cretism, the names have been changed but the real storyis one of continuity.

Making a fetish of continuity strikes me as at least asdangerous as going whole hog for the modern meta-nar-rative of rupture. Indeed, in contrast to the way the au-thors see the discipline’s approach to modernity andchange, I think that anthropologists are more likely totry to explain change away than they are to confront iteither through the meta-narrative of modernity orthrough some other analytic lens (Robbins 1998). In ac-counting for this difference in perspective, I note that itsometimes seems that the Comaroffs and their studentsstand in here for all anthropology. This synecdoche mayexplain why the authors see the rupture meta-narrativeeverywhere while I do not (Englund 1996 is morestraightforward on this point). In any case, I want toconclude by suggesting two problems that arise whenone sets out to solve the ethnographic equation primarilyfor continuity.

First, if change or rupture did occur, how would weknow? This question is trickier than it looks. This isespecially so when we assume that “traditional” cate-gories are always primary and more meaningful, suchthat we cannot imagine that affines and the dead are inany sense now kinds of whites but must instead assumethat the relation runs the other way round. Unless wetake new ideas as seriously in their own terms as wetake old ones in theirs, as for example Foster (1995) does




to good effect in Melanesia, we will find continuity evenwhen local people do not see it as the most interestinggame in town.

And that raises the second problem: what kind of eth-nography do we produce when the people we study arethemselves committed to rupture or to “the sense ofpossibilities which the unincorporated foreign stimu-lates” (Siegel 1997:147)? There is certainly no shortageof works that handle this situation by telling us thatwhile the people discussed see themselves as leadingnew lives, the trained observer can easily see that tra-dition still patterns what they do (e.g., Gnecchi-Ruscone1977; Burt 1994:253–54). Is this preferable to the mul-tiple-modernists’ trick of branding witchcraft a “mysti-fication”? Or is it a similar kind of ethnographic refusal?Given what I know of Papua New Guinea and of Pen-tecostal Christianity, I would be surprised if the peopleof the Rai Coast or the Pentecostals of Lilongwe did nothave their own ideas about change and rupture, their ownprojects that valorized transformation and worked to re-make some aspects of their world. It is by working tounderstand these projects, the various temporal and spa-tial contexts they posit, and the constraints they facethat we can best construct an ethnography of moderni-ties. This article opens a theoretical space for this kindof research, and it is for that important work, rather thanfor the way its ethnographic examples imply uncompli-cated cultural continuity, that it deserves to be widelyread.

p . steven sangrenDepartment of Anthropology, Cornell University,Ithaca, N.Y. 14853, U.S.A. ([email protected]). 8 vi 99

Englund and Leach justly criticize a widespread penchantin contemporary anthropological writing for a “meta-narrative of modernity,” a conceit they characterize asaimed at preserving ethnography’s traditional focus onlocal particularities while at the same time locating suchparticularities within “wider contexts” of globalization.They argue that employing this meta-narrative obstructsrealization of the methodological virtues of ethnographic“reflexivity.” Their illustrative discussions of fieldworkin Malawi and Papua New Guinea show that identifyingwhat wider “contexts” are in fact locally relevant re-quires an open- (and, implicitly, local-) mindedness pre-cluded by such meta-narrativizations. Fieldworking eth-nographers must allow the subjects of study to enter intodefining what these contexts are. In these terms, thepaper is both convincing and useful; it gently but trench-antly calls into serious question some of the most influ-ential studies and trends on today’s anthropologicalscene, and it laments the reward system of academicinstitutions for undermining the discipline’s authenticvirtues.

But, of course, there is always more to say. I shallorganize my comments along two dimensions—first,with reference to the critique of the meta-narrative(s) ofmodernity and, second, with reference to just what sort

of more general (if not “meta-”) framings might be pro-posed to locate the local and particular in the “wider”and the “general” or “comparative.”

Englund and Leach hit the nail on the head in pointingout how exaggerated conceptions of “modernity’s” dis-continuities, its radical ruptures not only with the pastbut with “non-Western” or traditional lifeways, contrib-ute to locating all effective historical agency or causationin metaphysically conceived “wider” forces like “indi-vidualization,” “commodification,” or “globalization.”This essentialization of what constitutes the anthropo-logically “relevant” becomes not only a cover for “eth-nographic ignorance,” as they argue, but also (it seemsto me) a warrant for theoretical ignorance. In many ofthe writings they criticize, emphases on the rapidity ofmovements of people and information in today’s world,associated with a decline of spatially bounded commu-nities and an alleged decline of the nation-state—the endof “society” if not “culture” as anthropology has knownit—are wedded to the notion that such circumstancesobviate anthropological theories developed with refer-ence to the presumably no longer relevant realities ofthe “bounded” communities and cultures of the past.Radically new worlds require radically new “theories.”In other words, it is not only the discipline-definingmethod of ethnography that is at stake but social the-ory—the conceptual tools with which we attempt tocomprehend social life. One finds little evidence, how-ever, of compelling retheorizations other than themainly descriptive meta-narratives themselves. Mypoint is that the “meta-narrative of modernity” is notsocial theory but postures as one, and it does so in a waythat erases the history of anthropological theory and con-verts ignorance of this history into an academic virtue.

Still, as Englund and Leach are aware, one must avoidbeing misread to suppose that globalization and mod-ernization are not important social realities that call forcomprehension. There are important distinctions to bemade among studies that employ “modernity” as expla-nation or cause for local realities and those that analyzein careful sociological terms the changes that accompanyeconomic integration, technological transformation, ed-ucation, and so forth. In this regard, Englund and Leachmight have said more about how ethnography and an-thropological theory might contribute in more generaland comparative terms to understanding modernity. Iwould argue that anthropology must draw from its richhistorical repertoire as social theory as well as from eth-nographic reflexivity to treat of “multiple modernities”as local social realities to be explained rather than merelyas local responses to “wider” metacausal, teleologicalforces. In other words, I agree that world-systems theoryand especially the romantically tinged, sometimes apoc-alyptic rhetoric of radical rupture characterizing manyof the studies they criticize are anthropologically inad-equate, but the next step ought to be to address the re-alities of “wider contexts” in a more compelling way.

This latter observation leads me to my only substan-tial query: The article leaves somewhat vague just howwhat I have just termed social theory might relate to




meta-narrative. In some quarters, social theory itself isderided as “meta-narrative,” condensing a totalizing butneurotic ambition that betrays the theorizer’s self-serv-ing will to power. Englund and Leach claim that theyare not opposed to meta-narrative in general (only thespecific meta-narrative of modernity); they recognizethat one cannot engage in fieldwork in the absence ofpreconceptions; they affirm that variation cannot co-herently be represented in the absence of something thatis invariable; and they avow the value of comparativework. Yet the article leaves the impression that some-how “reflexive ethnography” and “social realism” suf-fice to provide the basis for such comparison. “Reflex-ivity” as characterized here amounts to the give-and-take of learning about the world; one must con-stantly modify one’s preconceptions as the resistanceconstituted by reality imposes its own form of discipline.Meta-narratives of modernity refuse to accommodatethese realities, assimilating the world to their precon-ceptions. “Reflexivity,” in these terms, strikes me asboiling down to something quite close to scientificmethod, and I applaud Englund and Leach for so definingit.

Left out of consideration, however, are the complexprocesses embedded in the history of anthropology thathave led to the emergence of what I have termed socialtheory. Among anthropology’s mandates ought to be thetask of theory building—developing conceptualizationsof social and cultural processes at a level of abstractionsufficiently general to make sense in comparable termsnot only of vastly differing societies but also of the com-plex local and global realities so portentously proclaimedby anthropology’s would-be pundits. In sum, I agreewholeheartedly with Englund and Leach that the rhet-oric of novelty and crisis that characterizes meta-nar-ratives of modernity obstructs the production of anthro-pological knowledge, but in response it is important toaffirm not only reflexive ethnographic method and a be-lief in social reality but also the necessity of “reflexively”produced theory.

Reply

harri englund and james leachUppsala, Sweden/Cambridge, U.K. 29 x 99

It appears to some of our commentators that by ques-tioning the meta-narratives of modernity we merely priv-ilege continuity. One instance seems to be our insistenceon the utility of localized fieldwork in the production ofanthropological knowledge. This, Davies and Gupta fear,subscribes to an obsolete research tradition in which an-thropologists define their “field” as a locality which hasits own sociocultural universe. Our interest in localizedfieldwork, however, has nothing to do with a spatial def-inition of the anthropologist’s field. To assume that lo-calized fieldwork presupposes a spatially demarcated lo-

cality is to ignore our focus on relationships. As we statein the article, our interest is in how “a particular setting,through which flow many currents, provides a stand-point from which to address issues of scale in a way thatgeneralizing perspectives do not.” The township in Li-longwe and the villages on the Rai Coast hardly appearas isolated entities in our accounts. People’s relation-ships in these two settings span spatial boundaries andprovide insights into the workings of relations of radi-cally different scales.

It follows that we can agree with Gupta—and withAppadurai, whom he cites—that the local is not its ownuniverse and that localized fieldwork is not the onlymethodological strategy which sociocultural anthropol-ogists may follow. We made the point about places whichare not well linked to the technologies of time-spacecompression for a political purpose—these places toomerit attention of a reflexively informed kind, especiallyif they appear to have imported both the hopes and thedespair of the project of modernity. But this does notmean that they are the only places to be studied or thatgeographically dispersed institutions and such tempo-rary sites as refugee camps fall outside the scope of an-thropological inquiry. Our related political interventionwas to point out that long-term and localized fieldworkis becoming less feasible within the institutional frame-work of academic anthropology. This, in turn, encour-ages the production of instant ethnography based onshort-term visits to various sites.

Our main objective, however, was less to compare thevirtues of localized and multisited fieldwork than todraw attention to certain unreflexive uses of the notionof modernity in ethnography. Robbins’s comment un-fortunately illustrates the difficulties in such a reflexiveenterprise. Whereas Davies and Gupta suspect that wepromise undesirable continuity in methodology, Robbinsfeels that we emphasize continuity in our case studiesto the point of not seeing any ruptures at all. It is not,however, the idea of rupture per se that we object to butthe interpretation of specific experiences as examples ofthe ruptures that characterize modernity. Our aim is toestablish that other ruptures exist for the people we writeabout, not to prove “continuity” as the alternative torupture. The rupture between white people and RaiCoast villagers is a pertinent concern both in the nar-ratives presented and in the history to which these nar-ratives speak. Pentecostal Christians in Lilongwe expe-rience a profound spiritual rupture in their second birth.But Robbins means to cast a more fundamental doubtover our approach. He accuses us of wanting to find con-tinuity so that we can claim the primacy of “traditionalconcepts.” Yet we pointed out that the concepts definedin the sociological discourses on modernity may not beprimary. There is, in short, no fetish made of continuityin our argument, as there is no fetish made of the locality.Tradition and continuity, of course, belong to the verymeta-narratives we criticize. They necessarily evoketheir counterparts—modernization and change.

It is revealing that although Robbins identifies twomoments of pluralization in current anthropology




—“cultures” and “multiple modernities”—he does notreflect on how the second pluralization depends on thefirst. The notion of “multiple modernities” is supposedto counter the assumption that the locality is its ownuniverse, but it does nothing to examine the real cul-prit—the notion of cultures in the plural. Both notions,in effect, sustain the predilection of modernist observersfor classification and taxonomic organization which in-crease entities (individuals, groups, societies, cultures,culture areas) in proportion to the scale of analysis. Ourunderstanding is that the social world is continuous and,as Gupta implies, the Other can be anyone and everyone.The great promise of ethnography is precisely compari-son and not merely juxtaposition, a point which we il-lustrated with the coevalness of Melanesian “others”and the new reproductive technologies. At the sametime, while we accept Gupta’s point about different sub-ject positions in any given social field, we also contendthat the question of difference must be debated in rela-tion to specific historical conditions. Insecurity such asthat faced by township dwellers in Lilongwe and villag-ers on the Rai Coast may well cause a coherence of viewsaround interpretations which make sense of experience.

We share Sangren’s view that the meta-narratives ofmodernity do not qualify as social theories, but we admitpuzzlement over what he calls “theory building.” Doesnot our contribution indicate the risks involved in pro-ducing “social theory” that is disembedded from eth-nographic practice? This is not an argument against alltheory but a recognition of the fact that anthropologicalknowledge does not arise in a vacuum. At least two cen-tral issues in current social theory—personhood and con-textualization—received attention in our article. More-over, as Meyer’s comment demonstrates, the sociologicaldiscourses on modernity appear to many anthropologistsprecisely as ways of attaching one’s contributions to thebroadest field of social sciences. We never doubted thatsuch anthropologists find the notion of modernity “fruit-ful” because it allows them to represent, for example,Pentecostalism in Ghana and Malawi as different andyet to view both as instances of modernity as it is definedin current social scientific thinking. It would indeed bea “caricature” of those anthropologists’ work if we de-nied their analytical quest for understanding differenceand variation, a charge which we regard as unfounded inMeyer’s comment. As we argued in the article, one doesnot dissociate oneself from a meta-narrative simply bycontinuing to use familiar notions in a critical way. It isthe invariable underpinnings of variations that must beaddressed.

Meyer sees the danger in our approach that we isolateourselves from the social sciences. This reminds us ofthe dichotomy between “modern social science and in-digenous knowledges” in Gupta’s comment. It is not ourdichotomy, because our desire is to elaborate reflexiveethnography in which ethnographers and their interloc-utors are partners in the production of anthropologicalknowledge. Why assume, for example, that Rai Coastvillagers are not engaged in a version of social sci-ence—in an analysis of white people and their economic,

political, and religious relations through questions posedto Leach about triple-six money or through rituals whichattempt to capture the essence of alien political insti-tutions? Our approach is to comment upon and reviseanalytical notions through a reflexive engagement withthe lived realities of sociocultural life. An anthropologywhich goes beyond seeking and representing “separatebounded entities” is the enterprise we are engaged in. Itis for this reason that we attempt to take as seriouslythe contributions of our interlocutors as those of thetheorists of modernity.

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