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DOI: 10.1177/0308275X9201200401

1992 12: 371Critique of AnthropologyDavid Scott

anthropological disciplinarityCriticism and Culture : Theory and post-colonial claims on

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Criticism and Culture

Theoryandpost-colonialclaims on anthropological

disciplinarity

David Scott

University of Chicago, Illinois

Relativism is the bad faith of the conqueror, who has become secure

enough to become a tourist.

Stanley Diamond

I. Culture between insightand blindness

When, a few years ago, that anthropological or, if you like, meta-anthropological text, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Eth-nography (1986),2 appeared, something new and refreshing seemed tohave become suddenly visible on the horizon of our discipline. For thereseemed in this text, about it, if not the promise of a thorough-goingreconstitution of the whole anthropological project itself, then at least ananticipatory undertone of rumour in which we discerned the outline of anunprecedented rethinking of it. Its atmosphere was postmodernist in thatnow easily recognizable sense of the radical undoing of the legitimatingnarratives of masterful meaning,3 those narratives which, from theEnlightenment to Weber, have sought to inscribe the world within the telosof the West. Too, its accent was deliberately theoretical in that specificallypost-structuralist sense recently assigned to the word theory. It insistedon an

explicitand

rigorousattention to the

languagesof the

represen-tation of culture; it argued the partiality and partialness of points of view;it asserted the contingency of cultural vocabularies and conceptualschemes, the made-up character of cultural selves and histories.4Now whether you read this turn in anthropologys career as the triumph

of culture (i.e. as the historical moment of heterogeneity and difference),or as the end of it (i.e. as the collapse or disappearance of identifiable andhomogeneously bounded spaces), or again somehow as both, simul-taneously, depends of course on your attitude to modernity, to its sources

Critique ofAnthropology 1992 (SAGE, London, Newbury Park and NewDelhi), Vol. 12(4): 371-394.371

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of legitimation and its privileged representations. But that detail aside,what is to be noted here is that in all the inflation of anthropologicaldiscourse about culture that now circulates there appeared a small and

highlycurious

oversight:an inattention to itself as

history. Curious,Isay,because anthropology has surely had other occasions of renewal, other, so

to put it, Kuhnian occasions, when one conceptual vocabulary ofdifference was overturned, displaced, by another. Consider only the mostobvious instance: the anthropology, and with it, the anthropologicalmoment, of Franz Boas. Surely Boass redescription of anthropologybetween, say, roughly 1887 and 19045 - his (ironists?) unmasking of the(master) vocabulary of race and initiation of the (decentering) vocabularyof culture (in that usage which, up until yesterday at least, was still

contemporary) - must count not only for as much of a rupture as any inthe history of anthropology, but one with striking political and sociologicalsimilarities to this recent turn.6 Therefore the question that needed to beasked, and wasnt, was whether this turn was adequately thinking itselfhistorically. That is to say: at the same time that it announced to us therefreshing news ofthe contingency of its object, culture, was it adequatelythinking the contingency of the historical and discursive space of its own

insight? What, to use a now familiar Foucaultian formulation, were/are theconditions -

conceptualand

political -of its own

possibility?Several critics have by now expressed misgivings about the assumptionsof anthropologys new turn. One among them, Jonathan Friedman (1987a,1987b), may serve to orient us. In what I think are two very timely essays(both for their polemical tone as well as the general thrust of their

conceptual complaint), Friedman has criticized what he quite nicelycharacterizes as the recent spectacularization of anthropology. Notingthe inflation of a sort of throw-away concept of difference in this

anthropology, for instance, Friedman argues that it serves to occlude the

fact that the ethnographic enterprise is typically constructed out of (anddoes itself typically construct, one might add) a specific kind of difference-

one bound up with the hierarchical relation characteristic of the world

system implying the necessary silence of the other for whom we speak(1987a: 164). One need not then follow Friedman in making a plea forsome sort of global anthropology in which the anthropologist will occupya privileged objectivity to appreciate the importance of this recognitionthat the relations of difference inscribed in the discourse of culture are

relations ofpower.

In Friedmansview,

moreover, the culturalism that is

today so pervasive in anthropological discourse, is to be linked to a specificform of sociality in advanced capitalist social formations - a socialitycharacterized by what he calls the dissolution of modernist identity



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(1987a). Again, I dont think it is necessary to endorse entirely theconception of history or civilization to which Friedman subscribes tounderline his insistence that forms of anthropological discourse (as indeed

forms of any discourse, including those anthropologists study) havedeterminate historical conditions. In short, then, the value of Friedmansintervention is that he at least highlights the importance of continuouslyrecalling anthropology both to its own history (i.e. as discourse founded inparticular kinds of relations of power), and to the specific contemporaryhistorical conditions that establish the institutional and discursive space of

its thematic and theoretical formulations.

* * *

In the course of my remarks in this paper I want to engage thiscontemporary anthropological inflation of culture and to do so from theside of a post-colonial (or anyway one post-colonials) skepticism. This Imight say is a skepticism whose primary area of focus (and of doubt) has todo with relations of power and knowledge between the West and its Others- or, more precisely, with the kinds of knowledge-claims made by the Westabout its Others. If (once-upon-a-time) such knowledge-claims have oftenbeen pronounced in the name of a singular and epistemologically superior

Reason,it has been one aim of recent

postmodernistcriticism to

disputethis. Culture, the domain of the local, has emerged (one should strictlyspeaking say re-emerged) as the conceptual site of the unravelling of themaster narrative of Reason.9 But I want to suggest that there are goodgrounds to doubt that what has been unravelled is really the Wests

assumption of epistemological privilege.I do not want to give the impression though of a hostility towards the

recent turn in anthropology, with its celebrated accent on theory. I toowant to acknowledge its insight, and, if I can, help to problematize the

profoundly destabilized character of the conceptual field inwhichwe write,that is in which we produce and circulate our descriptions of others, still,for the most part, non-western others. Such as it is my post-colonialskepticism is no less within theory, no less between disciplines.&dquo; But I dowant, at the same time (and for reasons that I try to spell out below), toreflect upon a certain blindness that seems to me to accompany this

insight, and which may, on one reading of it anyway, be its very condition.I wish to offer one or two doubts about the postmodernist beyond that

governsfor instance the allure in the title of Bernard McGranes

noteworthy book, BeyondAnthropology (1989).And again, not because Ithink that nothing significant has changed in the conceptual and ideologicalconditions of possibility of thought about culture, but rather because I am



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not convinced that having introduced a sophisticated vocabulary (contin-gency, heterogeneity, dialogue, power, and so on), and a remarkableroster of names (among them Bakhtin, Foucault, Derrida, Rorty),&dquo;

anthropology has resolved the theoretical dilemmas that afflict it. It seemsto me that there are urgent issues still at stake here, issues that these

conceptual and ideological conditions at once highlight and obscure.Andthese issues turn, it seems to me, on the complex relation between power,history and knowledge.What I wish to suggest in this paper are some ofthe ways in which, in the

postmodernity of theory and de-disciplinization, and, what is more, intheir name, power (the power of the West more specifically) continues tospeak authoritatively even as it appears to censure itself. I proceed alongtwo related axes, both of them turning on contemporary claims aboutculture : the first, theorys claims; the second, relativisms. The overallthrust of my argument is to make a case for limits to anthropologicalclaims. If, as I think is undeniably so, the disciplinary horizon we inhabit isone structured not so much by the epistemological experiments we try outbut by the historical relations between the West and its Others, I will alsoadvocate an anthropological criticism that seeks precisely to keep thevarious levels of this relation in view.

I/. Theorys culture

As I have suggested, one of the things that most distinctively characterizesthis postmodernist turn in anthropology is its affiliation with theory. Butwhat is theory? What is its labour? For after all, it wasnt post-structuralismthat invented theoretical practice. By theory (at least what I have beenable to make of it) is meant that diverse combination of textual orinterpretive (or reading) strategies - among them, deconstruction,feminism, genealogy, psychoanalysis, post-marxism - that, from about theearly 1970s or so had initiated a challenge to the protocols of a generalhermeneutics; the idea of a critical practice that could claim to govern,guide or otherwise interpret other practice from a place outside or beyondit (i.e. theory too, but the strong sense of it, and generally associatedwith the names of Critical Theory and Structuralism).

Theory, in this sense, offered itself as de-disciplinary, as in factanti-disciplinary, the virtual undoer of disciplinary self-identities. It

offered itself as a mobile and nomadic field of critical operations without aproper name, and therefore without a distinctive domain of objects.Indeed what theory went after was precisely the assumption (common tothe disciplines and their rage for method) of the authentic self-authoring



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presence of things, of histories, of cultures, of selves, the assumption ofstable essences, in short, that could be made to speak themselves once andfor all through the transparency of an unequivocal and analytical language.On

theorysaccount there could be no final

description,no end to

re-description, no ultimate perspective which could terminate once and forall the possibility of another word on the matter.But what must have seemed curious (if not alarming) to anthropologists

keeping a watchful eye on these sorts of developments in the humanitiesand social sciences (or at least what should have seemed curious, if not

alarming, to us), is that no sooner had theory arrived, no sooner had itannounced itself on the borders of literary studies, and in the processsurrounded itself with all the controversy befitting an undocumented

traveller,&dquo; than it was appropriating that very object-terrain, culture,over which anthropology (American cultural anthropology at any rate)had long claimed a special and indeed a privileged disciplinary com-

petence. Or perhaps more accurately, endeavouring - as part of thatresistance to itself to which Paul de Man has famously referred13 - tobecome more worldly, less textual,14 endeavouring to lodge itselfnow ina more historical/ideological form of inquiry, theory (one wing of it

anyway), found in the figure of culture the possibility of an affiliation.

Cultural poetics, cultural politics,cultural

criticism,cultural studies -

these are now the names of theorys culture. Not that some of us

anthropologists werent soon enough receptive, however. Indeed it wasalready evident that the appropriation was running both ways: anthro-

pologys culture was simultaneously seeking theory, or at least seeking a

theoretically sophisticated textuality (see Marcus and Cushman, 1982).One axial theme the postmodernist anthropologists propose is that

cultures are mobile, unbounded, conjunctural and open-ended.15 Incontrast to the textual practice of an older anthropology (those of the

school of British structural functionalism in particular, but also those of thepostwarAmerican cultural materialists schooled with Julian Steward),where cultures were represented as though they were timeless, historyless,spatially immobile, unmixed, it is argued that one now has to speak of thebetweenness of cultures, the displacement, the overlapping, the hybridityof cultural experience.

I do not entirely disagree. By this I mean that I can readily agree that in

yesterdays traditional realist ethnographies there was an unproblemat-ized

representationof culture as

static,and the rest.And

yetI think that

this recognizably anti-essentialist characterization of culture as mobile,as unbounded, as hybrid, and so on, is itselfopen to the question: for whomis culture unbounded - the anthropologist or the native? Is it in other



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words, for (western) theory or for the (local) discourse with which theory isendeavouring to engage, to inquire upon?And note thatmy questions hereare not the more familiar ones about the supposed objectivity (or lack of it)

of the anthropologists point of view as against that of the native (the olddebate about rationality and relativism). Rather what I am trying tosuggest is that the boundedness or otherwise of what is called culture is

something that gets established in kinds of discourse (more specifically, inwhat TalalAsad usefully calls kinds of authoritative discourse),16 of whichwestern theory is itself one, and the natives discourse another. Obviouslyneither boundedness nor its absence is given in the world: neither in theworld of the anthropologist nor in that of the native. To say a priori thatcultures are not bounded therefore is misleading since local discourses

do, in fact, establish authoritative traditions, discrete temporal and spatialparameters in which it is made singularly clear to cultural subjects and theirothers what is (and who are) to belong within these parameters, and what(and who), not. Surely part of the unhappy dispute between the Sinhalasand Tamils in contemporary Sri Lanka, for example (to mention only thatinstance most pertinent to some of my own recent work&dquo;), has to doprecisely with the question of how the boundary of Sinhala culture andthe boundary of Tamil culture gets authoritatively established and

hegemonicallymaintained. In

short,the

importantissue here is not the

ontological one of whether the being of culture is bounded or not, or theepistemological question of how we know that this is the case, but the

political one of how and in what kinds of material circumstances, throughwhat kinds of discursive and non-discursive relations, claims about the

presence or absence of boundaries are made, fought out, yielded,negotiated.

I wish to suggest that this currently prevalent idea - the idea that culturesare not bounded but hybrid, moving rather than static - is part of the

contemporary presumption of theory. I shall call theorys presumption itsunproblematized self-arrogation of an unmarked place from which itclaims to formulate a prioriconceptions ofwhat culture is or is not. What Iam trying to call attention to here is simply that this is, if anyones, theorysclaim; and if for theory culture is unbounded, what is necessary is that

theory ask itself why this should be so, why, in these historical andideological conditions (those of postmodernism suppose we say), it,theory, should produce the thought that this is what culture indeed is.This I take to be the first

responsibilityof an

anthropologicalcriticism: the

interrogation of the space of its own theoretical procedures.But what is it, we might be moved to ask, that makes it possible for

theory, this radical self-consciousness, to commit this presumption? Part of



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the reason, I think, has to do with its inadequately thought-out complicitywith power.And this complicity, I suggest, works itself out in the pervasiveassumption that theory performs a labour that other narratives (or, if you

like,the narratives of

others)do not and cannot - as

though theorywere

not itself one narrative among many, or rather, the first among many, andthat at least in good part because it is the narrative that has authored (andauthorized) the hegemonic career of the West. Not that theory has alwaysforgotten this, by the way. Indeed it is arguable that it is part of theorysmerit that it facilitates just such a grasp of its own ruses. In an instructivemoment in an interview some years ago with Richard Kearney, Derrida

(1984: 115) made the point (one that should, perhaps, have been unnecess-ary) that Logocentrism, in its developed philosophical sense, is in-

extricably linked to the Greek and European tradition.And he went on tosay:

Every culture and society requires an internal critique or deconstruction asan essential part of its development.A priori, we can presume thatnon-European cultures operate some sort of auto-critique of their ownlinguistic concepts and foundational institutions. Every culture needs anelement of self-interrogation, and of distance from itself, if it is to transformitself. (Derrida,1984: 116)

Note though that if, as Derrida is suggesting in this passage, theory, as wenow think of it, is specifically the auto-critique of a western tradition, this isnot the same as saying (to return for a moment to my Sri Lanka example),that theory has no business attending to the rhetoric of nationalism and thelegitimation of violence on the part of Sinhalas and Tamils. To thecontrary, I think that it does - and not least of all for those of us,

post-colonials, whose conditions of life and thought are such that wecannot now not speak in the languages of the West, in (if simultaneously

against)its

conceptsand its

imaginary.What I am

suggesting, however,is

that theory (or anthropology if you like) will inevitably fail to produceanything but the more or less sophisticated image of some aspect or otherof its own tradition as long as it fails to understand its encounter with SriLanka as the encounter of one historically constituted tradition withanother. I dont think that Im being controversial here. I am onlyreiterating, across the register of culture, the kind of critical reflection towhich Raymond Geuss refers when he writes, in his instructive little bookThe Idea of a Critical Theory:

A full-scale social theory ... will form part of its own object-domain. That is,a social theory is a theory about (among other things) agents beliefs abouttheir society, but it is itself such a belief. So if a theory of society is to give an



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exhaustive account of the beliefs agents in the society have, it will have togive an account of itself as one such belief. (Geuss, 1981 : 56)

This is precisely the responsibility of an anthropological criticism. I am

arguing that (anthropological) theory must first work out and make explicitto itself, to its questions, to the formation of its object, its own history, itsown circumstances and institutions, its own tradition; and needless to saythis (internal) relation is not a fixed but an historically altering one. It is,then, in relation to this critical internal dialogue, this moment when theideological content of its conceptual apparatus is open to itself (andothers), that a fruitful, by which I mean less hegemonic, less presumptive,dialogue can be conducted with the narratives and auto-critiques of the

traditions of others.To sum up what I have been saying so far about the relation between

theory and culture I could put the matter in the form of the followingquestion: if, as is now generally asserted, the new discourse of culture,theorys, occupies the space left vacant by the disappearance of thesovereign subject of Western Reason, how is it that this absence can itselfappear ideologically conditionless? Or again: what are the conditions oftheorys claims? For surely what is curious about anthropologys theory isthat its very valid criticism of the old anthropology for atheoretical naivete,for an objective realism that presupposes the possibility of transparentlyrepresenting the unchanging essence of anothers culture, is not ac-companied by a self-consciousness that simultaneously maps the placefrom which its own avant-garde and anti-essentialist18 claims are beingoffered. No wonder then that its pronouncements summon the suspicionsof critics who point out the paradox that the moment when the counter-memories of the people without history appear (in the various forms ofminority discourse, feminist discourse, post-colonial discourse) to chal-

lengethe voice of this

sovereign subjectit is

suddenlyclaimed that the

veryground of that argument is no longer valid, that in fact there is no ground,properly speaking, for argument.

Ill. Relativismss culture

I believe I can, and perhaps more pointedly, illustrate the kind ofpredicament which I am concerned to explore - the link between relativismand

power suggestedinmy epigraph,

theuncanny ability

ofpower

to erase

its own signature, the inclination of theory to efface its complicities in thevery moment of authorization - by focusing for a bit on two contemporaryAmerican (or, I should say, US) thinkers, one an anthropologist, the other



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a philosopher, whose work is widely considered to be of the first

importance in the current de-disciplinization of the humanities and socialsciences: Clifford Geertz and Richard Rorty. Few other US thinkers inrecent

decades,it seems to

me,have had the kind of simultaneous

cross-disciplinary impact of these two (Margaret Mead and John Deweyare probably the last such couple, and the parallels are, if you think aboutthem, striking indeed). Clifford Geertz, after all, is now the philosophersanthropologist, their native informant, occupying the place once reservedfor E. E. Evans-Prichard,19 and Richard Rorty, even more than the laterWittgenstein, is today the anthropologists philosopher, the person who, inhis Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1978), retold the story of

philosophy to sound like little more than the local knowledge of western

culture.20Now neither Geertz nor Rorty, it is true, has a very straightforward

relationship to what has been called theory. In many respects they appearto eschew it, or at any rate to treat it with a good deal of suspicion .2 Theyhave, of course, and each in his own way, paid homage to one or another

recently influential French theorist - Geertz to Paul Ricoeur, and Rorty toJacques Derrida.22 But they have perhaps been far more concerned tosituate themselves in (and by so doing have helped to celebrate, or at least

foreground)a more native

grain,and to do so

by speaking explicitlyfrom

within a distinctlyAnglo-American, neopragmatist tradition .21 ThusGeertz memorializes Kenneth Burke, for instance, and Rorty nowadays isalmost never not-invoking the name John Dewey.24 Geertz and Rorty areboth, in Giles Gunns very appropriate phrase, citizens of the new world ofrevisionaryAmerican liberalism (1990: 91). Nevertheless their sharedanti-foundationalism, their affiliation with ironism, with the idea of the

contingency of the self and of history,&dquo; have made them, if not exactlycard-carrying partisans, then at least fellow-travellers of theory. I

suggest, therefore, that in these two thinkers - Clifford Geertz and RichardRorty - you can discern, in a form particularly relevant to a discussion ofthe cultural/political topos ofUS intellectual life, the double movement oftheory and culture: anthropology (the science of culture) becomingepistemologically sophisticated; and philosophy (the science of theory),culturally aware.Moreover, what makes these two postmodern protagonists of contin-

gency particularly instructive for my purposes here is that they have both

directly engagedthe

problemof the

justificationof values, of

justice,fairness, and rights, that whole problem which, when traversed by theconcept of culture, summons up the contentious debate betweenrelativism and ethnocentrism. Once the idea of the constructed and



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his unremitting drinking, was resolute and regular in attendance at theclinic....And so the confounded situation continued for several yearsuntil at length the Indian died.The value to Geertz of this little fable

(ashe called

it)is

supposedto

be that it illustrates the changed conditions under which culture presentsitself (presents itself, that is to say, in western democracies).As he put it:

The point of the fable ... is that it is this sort of thing, not the distant tribe,enfolded upon itself in coherent difference (theAzande or the Ik thatfascinate philosophers only slightly less than science fiction fantasies do,perhaps because they can be made into sublunary Martians and regardedaccordingly) that best represents, if somewhat melodramatically, the gen-eral form that the value conflict rising out of cultural diversity takes nowa-

days. (1986: 117)

This is important, I think, because it is worth observing how in Geertzsview the problem of culture is now (as opposed to when?) thought to becloser to home. On the story entailed in this view a radical historicalalteration has sometime taken place, and culture is no longer (but was itever?) at the other end of a long trip made (as Sir Vidia Naipaul onceremarked about his own peregrinations) with a return ticket. Now the

seeming contemporary predicamentof culture - if I

mightuse James

Cliffords (1988) expression here - has to do with the changing characterof metropolitan life itself, with natives participating (permanently - ifthey can get that green card) in its institutions, rather than the anthro-pologist participating temporarily in theirs. Now it is not a matter of theanthropologist making some individual moral adjustments to life amongthe natives, it is a matter about whether or not the very cultural insti-tutions of the anthropologists moral formation should adjust to accom-modate the natives coming here.And not in ones and twos, but in whole

communities. Let us grant that there is something to this. But whenGeertz says that at each of its local points the world now looks morelike a Kuwaiti bazaar than like an English Gentlemens Club (1986: 121),one is forced to ask: looks to whom? To Geertz and others looking fromwhere he looks from or to a peddler or a merchant in a Kuwaiti bazaar?26At any rate Geertzs take on the Case of the Indian is framed by this

story about the tumed-around situation of culture and the moral dilemmait seems to create for the institutions of the liberal democratic state. This

dilemma isnot,

Geertzsays emphatically,

that doctors

(orwestern doc-

tors more accurately) are insensitive, or that drunken Indians are adrift.Nor is it even that either one set of values or the other (doctors orIndians) or some combination or distillation of the two, should have



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prevailed. Geertzs, recall, is an anti anti-relativist position.As he puts it:

I cannot see that either more ethnocentrism [presumably the view that theIndian was ignorant or ungrateful or both], more relativism [the view that the

doctors could or should have tried to be sensitive to the Indians way oflooking at things], or more neutrality would have made things any better(though more imagination might have). (1986: 117)

If there was a failure in the encounter (and the matter, he says, is difficult todecide), it was a failure to grasp, on either side, what it was to be on theother, and thus what it was to be on ones own (1986: 117). The wholething, Geertz laments, took place in the dark.Now it is not at all clear, at least to me, just what it was that the Native

American failed to grasp in this encounter with western medicine; it isnot clear to me, for example, what precisely he might have gained had hebeen able to see things, as Geertz would have him, from the doctors pointof view. But even if he had gained this hermeneutical insight into where thedoctor was coming from (northeast-liberal and all that) and thus had

grasped the dilemma in which he, however inadvertantly, was placing him,why does Geertz imagine that this (coupled of course with a reciprocalimagining on the part of the doctor) would have made the encounter a lessdark one? Why are darkness and (at least by implied contrast) light theconfiguring tropes? I think that at least one reason is that Geertzsassumption here is the fairly familiar liberal pluralist one that things wouldbe whole lot better if the Wests Others - particularly those here - wouldonly accede to its democratic imagination, that imagination according towhich the other is marked out as the path to knowledge about the self .2But this moral nerve-pinching of Geertzs only points to the more telling

problem in the anti anti-relativist argument, namely, the occlusion of anystructure of forces or determinations. Geertz thinks that ethnocentrism

has conspired to obscure the idea that meaning is socially constructed(1986: 112). The ethnocentrists (Levi-Strauss, Rorty, and such like them),he complains, have taken this supposedly profound idea to mean thathuman communities are, or should be semantic monads, nearly window-less, whereas he, Geertz, wants it to mean that the reach ofour minds, the

range of signs we can manage somehow to interpret, is what defines theintellectual, emotional and moral space in which we live (1986: 113). Itseems to me though that if there are differences between these construc-tionist positions, they are differences around a single liberal-democratic

problematic. Certainly they do not appear to be as profound as Geertzimagines.At my angle, so to put it, both are versions of a view that thinksthat what is at stake is contingency and construction as such, rather than



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power. In other words what both conspire to occlude is that since meaningis socially constructed, and since the space of that construction, the social,is a contested one (i.e. one constituted of differential forces), what needs

inquiringinto is how certain

meanings or, rather,certain kinds of

statements, discourse, certain traditions, acquire force, become authori-tative, and by so doing remake, refashion, that is to say reconstitute thepossible space of other statements, discourses, traditions. The crucial pointillustrated by the so-called Case of the Drunken Indian and the KidneyMachine, I think therefore, is not the banal (or moralistic) one that thedoctor did not see that the Indian had come a long and blistered way to getto the clinic, but rather the more political one that the forms of life of theIndian have historically been transfigured - that is, not simply unmade bythe incursion and destruction of colonial power, but actively remade by thepolitical technology of the modem democratic state in which he has newlybeen installed as a free citizen.~ It is this, it seems to me, and not

dragons, that needs looking into.29But before I remark further on Geertz let me summarize Richard

Rortys response to this article in his On Ethnocentrism:A Reply toClifford Geertz (1986). Rorty, as you can imagine, disagrees with Geertzsreading of the Case, and his disagreement has precisely to do with his

different,indeed more

appreciative,attitude toward the modem liberal-

democratic state. On Rortys view there was little in the Case of theDrunken Indian and the Kidney Machine to get so terribly worked upabout, and much in fact to positively celebrate. For as far as he could tellthe case indicated that liberal institutions [are] functioning well andsmoothly. The whole apparatus of the liberal democratic state, he says,an apparatus to which the press is as central as are the officers of the court,insured that once that Indian had the sense to get into the queue early, hewas going to have more years in which to drink than he would otherwise

have had (1986: 527).While Rorty agrees with Geertzs overall conclusion that no philosophi-

cal or foundational appeal (either of the ethnocentric kind, or of therelativist) would have helped, he does not share Geertzs conviction thatmore imagination (of his from-the-natives-point-of-view variety) wouldhave improved things. For from Rortys pragmatist point of view it isperfectly reasonable that there are some kinds of relations - doctors andtheir patients, lawyers and their clients, teachers and their students - thatdo not and should not

requirethis sort of

imaginative leapto

getthe

jobat

hand done. This sort of self/other hermeneutics, he thinks, manages onlyto get in the way of straightforward procedures. Moreover he chidesGeertz for not sufficiently appreciating that it is precisely the liberal



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bourgeois culture they both share that has empowered people like himselfand other agents of love (as he calls them: journalists, novelists, ethnogra-phers), to extend the range of societys imagination so as to includeotherwise

unintelligible peoplelike NativeAmericans as conversational

partners. Were it not for such connoisseurs of diversity, he says matter-of-factly, the Indian would never have made it to the clinic in the first place.At the same time, he goes on to maintain, this same liberal bourgeoisculture they share also provides for another category of persons, no less

indispensable, namely agents of justice, whose task it is to ensure thatonce that Indian gets into the queue, he will be treated like everyone else.

This view, says Rorty, is an anti anti-ethnocentric one because it doesnot say that we are trapped within our monad or our language, but merelythat the well-windowed monad we live in is no more closely linked to thenature of humanity or the demands of rationality than the relativelywindowless monads which surround us (1986: 526). On Rortys view, inother words, whereas he does not deny the Indian his language game, hismonad, his constructed form of life (which presumably is what he thinkswould make him a bad ethnocentric), he does not feel Geertzs soft-hearted compulsion to make a gesture of openness toward it. He does notfeel Geertzs squeamishness, guilt even, about the hard and bitter way theIndian has come. This is not because

Rortyis

against solidarity.On the

contrary, he takes it that solidarity (the concern to expand the we isbasically his definition of it) is the very best attitude a liberal can have. It isjust that (as an ironist) he doesnt think that any philosophical (i.e.metaphysical) arguments can be advanced in support of it. Or to put itanother way, Rorty sees solidarity as a salutary public attitude but as anunnecessary private one - nothing fundamental about ones humanityhangs on it simply because there is nothing fundamental about humanity to

hang on to.At the same time, and as a corollary, he himself does not feel

compelled to provide a reason, a justification, grounds for hisown viewthat his monad is well-windowed in relation to those of others. For of

course this he would say is precisely his quarrel with the wet liberals, theircontinuing need for foundations to secure their positions. He, for his part,merely asserts the superiority of the place he speaks from.But something is very unsatisfactory about this.After all, is ethnocen-

trism really just a language game? Is it simply an abstract philosophicalquestion about the way in which we perceive the monads of others inrelation to our own?

Surelyto understand ethnocentrism in this

wayis to

occlude not only the concrete historical and institutional practices bymeans of which one monad constructs and circulates authoritative

representations of the monads of others, but the ways in which one monad



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directly acts upon and, with varying degrees of violence, transforms theforms of life of others (call this process, for want of a better word,imperialism). If ethnocentrism is a language game (that is, a discursive

formation,an

internallystructured network of

possible utterances),it must

be rather a special sort of language game; it is one embedded in historicallyconstituted networks of power which enable it to intervene upon and,more, preempt the space of other possible language games. So that, again,what Geertzs case illustrates is not that the NativeAmerican had the goodsense to choose western medicine from among a plurality of possiblehealing practices (language games), but that the political conditions ofchoosing, even desiring, any other (the practices of his own monad forexample) have been utterly transformed, and precisely by the politicaldesign of the social space claimed by western medicine.The problem with Rortys argument then is little different from the

problem with Geertzs - what it erases is precisely its own occupation ofthat space of power. We may agree here with Richard Bernstein when he

writes: In the background of Rortys liberal rhetoric is his cynicalconviction that what is really crucial is who has the power to enforce hisfinal vocabulary (1990: 60).30 Or we may put it another way, and moreflatly still, and say that Rortys anti-foundationalism is the ideology of aWest that no

longerneeds

philosophyto

giveitself a rationale oran

identity- it is, to paraphrase Stanley Diamond, the ideology of a conqueror nowsecure enough to be a tourist.The difference between Geertz and Rorty then, such as it is, should now

not be too hard to see - it is the difference among postmodern bourgeoisliberals between moralism and cynicism. It seems to me that as long as weconcede that the terrain of the debate about relativism and ethnocentrism

is really that of the construction or contingency of language games (asboth Geertz and Rorty will have us do), rather than about institutionalized

power and the historically constituted practices through which itworks, thesmug self-satisfaction of the one, or the paternal humanism of the otherwill seem the only options available to us. This of course is not to say thatwe must do away with the idea that forms of life are constructed but onlythat, as TalalAsad (1986: 148) has put it, that idea will appear differentlydepending on whether we think of abstracted understanding or of

historically situated practices.

IV. Post-co%nial claims

With this we can bring our focus back to the specifiably post-colonial locusofmy skepticism about the kind of neo-relativism and neo-ethnocentrism I



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have been examining here, in order to remark, finally, on what I think it ispossible and necessary to do within our discipline. In the course of a mostinstructive discussion of the uses of relativism in his book, Nationalist

Thoughtand the Colonial

World,Partha

Chatterjeemade the

followingobservation:

It is not trivial to point out here that in this whole debate about the possibilityof cross-cultural understanding, the scientist is always one of us: he is aWestern anthropologist, modern, enlightened, and self-conscious (and itdoes not matter what his nationality or the colour of his skin happens to be).The objects of study are other cultures - always non-Western. No one hasraised the possibility, and the accompanying problems, of a rationalunderstanding of us by a member of the other culture - of, let us say, a

Kalabari anthropology of the white man. It could be argued, of course, thatwhen we consider the problem of relativism, we consider the relationsbetween cultures in the abstract and it does not matter if the subject-objectrelation between Western and non-Western cultures is reversed: therelations would be isomorphic.But it would not: that is precisely why we do not, and probably never will,

have a Kalabari anthropology of the white man.And that is why even aKalabari anthropology of the Kalabari will adopt the same representationalform, if not the same substantive conclusions, as the white mans anthro-

pology of the Kalabari. For there is a relation ofpower involved in the very

conception of the autonomy of cultures. (Chatterjee, 1986: 17, emphasisadded)

This is precisely what relativism masks: the fundamentally areciprocalcharacter of the ideological structure that makes anthropology possible.The relations between cultures, between the doctor and the Indian, say, orbetween Kalabaris and western anthropologists, cannot be adequatelyunderstood in abstract, pluralist terms such as those employed in theexchange between Geertz and Rorty.

To say this however is not to speak of the end of anthropology. Nor is itto suggest that Kalabaris should not seek to study (or study in) western ornon-western cultures. It is only to bring more sharply into focus the

founding ideological structure of our discipline, the ideological structurewhich in fact it continues to presuppose. It is to insist, moreover, that thisstructure can neither be wished, nor even criticized, away because itsconditions are not merely the institutional ones governing the discipline(or, for that matter, governing writing) but rather the political andhistorical ones that continue to shape the relations between the West andits Others, and which, as a consequence, give force and authority to certainlanguages and descriptions.31 No one today can doubt either the radicaldisparity or the violent force of these relations.Anthropology obviously



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did not create these conditions; nor indeed is it the only discipline impli-cated in that project. (Certainly the institution of English, its contempor-ary exorbitation notwithstanding, has had a far more direct and longlasting

impacton the lives of the

formerlycolonized than

anthropologyhas

had.32)Yet if anthropology cannot unhinge itself from its history, and from thisideological structure which makes it so inescapably and so unreciprocallypart of the imaginary of the West, it can, nevertheless, transform themanner in which it works within it and the limits of the claims it makes. In

as much as it remains a discipline, in as much as it remains a formal mode of

inquiry, this I believe must be the task before us. It is a task, I think, thatentails a continuous internal labour of criticism, a continuous (to adopt aphrase from Gayatri Spivak) unlearning of its privilege (see Spivak, 1985).

And by this, it should be clear, I do not mean the kind of criticism that ismade to operate rhetorically as a mere preface beyond which is to emergethe realinquiry, rather I mean as the inexhaustible substance of that inquiryitself.Any inquiry, in other words, into the cultural discourses and prac-tices of peoples we study - their determinate conditions, their distinctive

symbols, their varied modalities - must proceed by way of a continuous

unmasking of the discursive and institutional conditions that make it

possible. Because this is the only way of testing the relation between our

conceptual problematicsand the various

registersof the wider historical

structures in which they operate; of determining the ideological content ofcategoriesemployed in theoretical analysis; and of evaluating the degree towhich colonial problematics are being reproduced or being subverted.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This is a slightly retouched version of my Hoijer Lecture given at the University ofCalfiomia, LosAngeles, on 12 March 1991. I am grateful to the Department of

Anthropology there for extending the invitation to me, and to the audience for theirinterest and keen questions. TalalAsad and Elizabeth Eames read and commented

critically on an earlier draft; and Chella Rajan has offered instructive doubts aboutvarious aspects of my argument.I give thanks.I had taken my epigraph from StanleyDiamond in appreciation ofthe biting aphoristic quality of his mind. Now with sadnessand gratitudeI dedicate the use Ive made of it to his memory.

NOTES

1. See Diamond (1974: 110).2. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography edited by JamesClifford and George Marcus (1986).

3.I borrow this phrase from Barbara Johnson (1987: 43).



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16. For a discussion of authoritative discourse see TalalAsad (1979).17. See my The Demonology of Nationalism: On theAnthropology of Ethnicity and

Violence in Sri Lanka (1990).18. For an

interestingif nevertheless limited

interrogationofthe anti-essentialism of

theory see Diana Fuss (1988).19. See, for example, Richard Bernsteins Beyond Objectivism and Relativism

(1983).20.Among many possibilities see Paul Rabinows (1986) Representations are

Social Facts. I too, I might add, have found Rortys pragmatist critique ofrepresentationalist epistemologies very useful (see Scott, 1992).

21. See Geertz (1984: 275); and Rorty (1985a).22. See Geertz (1973). Says Rorty on one occasion: Pragmatists and Derrideans

are ... natural allies (1985a: 135; see also 1982, 1989: 122-37).

23. For a recent account of this tradition see Comel West (1989).24. See Geertzs preface to Works and Lives (1987: vi) where he records the

governing inspiration of Kenneth Burke. The places where Rorty calls on thename of John Dewey to situate and legitimate his argument are numerous. Butsee Rorty (1978). On this use of Dewey by Rorty see Richard Bemstein (1987).What this says about the shifting of intellectual centers - from Paris to London tovarious cities in the United States - is important to think about. The increasingself-confidence of US academic culture and the re-rise of pragmatism in literarycriticism and philosophy are, it seems to me, inseparable.

25. Theironist, says Rorty (1989a: xv), is the sort of person who faces up to thecontingency of his or her own most central beliefs and desires - someone

sufficiently historicist and nominalist to have abandoned the idea that thosecentral beliefs and desires refer back to something beyond the reach oftime andchance.

26. Note that the argument here is not the banal one about whether Kuwaitis arenow wearing Nikes or watching CNN - which is something that has to do withthe penetration of international capital in the Third World and the creation ofnewkinds of markets and desires - but whether it is necessarilyentailed that Kuwaitistherefore construct their cultural domain in a Geertzian discourse.

27. Geertzs well-known essay, From the Natives Point ofView (1983), is perhapsthe most elaborated presentation of this view.

28. Foucaults The Political Technology of the Individual (1988) is particularlyrelevant here. So is Asads forthcoming article, Conscripts of WesternCivilization (n.d.).I would like to thank ProfessorAsad for sharing this work withme.

29. Looking into dragons, Geertz (1984: 275) has written, not domesticating orabominating them, nor drowning them in vats of theory, is what anthropologyhas been all about. Fora pertinent critique ofGeertzs hermeneutics see Scholte

(1986).30. For other pertinent critical discussions of Rortys work see Fraser (1991), and

West (1989).31. SeeAsads (1986) discussion of unequal languages.



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32. See Gauri Visvanathans (1989) fine study of the role of literary studies in BritishIndia.

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