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"Anthropology is perhaps the last of the great nineteenth-century conglomerate disciplines still for the most part organizationally intact. Long after natural history, moral philosophy, philology, and political economy have dissolved into their specialized successors, it has remained a diffuse assemblage of ethnology, human biology, comparative linguistics, and prehistory, held together mainly by the vested interests, sunk costs, and administrative habits of academia, and by a romantic image of comprehensive scholarship. In this intense, precise, and sharply written book, six leading anthropologists from a variety of subfields question both the logic and the effectiveness of such sentimental 'holism' and produce a powerful critique of their profession's mythology."--Clifford Geertz, Institute for Advanced Study

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Unwrapping the Sacred Bundle

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Introduction Daniel A. Segal and Sylvia J. Yanagisako.........................................................1Rearticulating Anthropology James Clifford....................................................................24Unchosen Grounds: Cultivating Cross-Subfield Accents for a Public Voice Rena Lederman.........................49Flexible Disciplinarity: Beyond the Americanist Tradition Sylvia J. Yanagisako................................78Languages/Cultures Are Dead! Long Live the Linguistic-Cultural! Michael Silverstein...........................99An Archaeology of the Four-Field Approach in Anthropology in the United States Ian Hodder.....................126References.....................................................................................................141Contributors...................................................................................................161Index..........................................................................................................163

Chapter One

In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault argues that the modern disciplines, including anthropology, took shape during the nineteenth century in a discursive context where the figure of "man" had emerged as a complex subject and object of knowledge, simultaneously transcendent and empirical. I take this moment as a rough starting point for a discussion of how sociocultural anthropology makes and remakes itself in changing intellectual and institutional contexts. I write at a time of serious disagreement about whether we are at the end of the episteme Foucault identified-a set of assumptions under which "cultural" and "social" diversity across time and space can be construed as a describable and theorizable "human" inheritance. My approach, agnostic and metahistorical, leaves this and similar important disagreements unresolved while arguing that such disputes are constitutive of anthropology's shifting borders and intellectual alliances. I hope to describe a process of "disciplining" that is less about creating consensus than about managing dissent, less about sustaining a core tradition than about negotiating borders and constructing coalitions.

Invoking Foucault also recalls the embodied and institutional aspects of disciplinary formation. "Disciplining," as I understand it, is not only a matter of defining scholarly territories, research topics, and analytic methods-the "content" of a discipline. The term evokes older traditions of normative training and ascetic practice that take modern form in pastoral and governmental institutions, including the university. Disciplining is a process unfolding within these changing contexts. Anthropology is an academic practice unusually exposed to the post-1960s changes in perspective and political location associated with the linked phenomena of "decolonization" and "globalization." Modern anthropology, a comparative science of human diversity, was for its first century a "Western" science. This has begun, irreversibly, to change, along with the gendered, raced, and culturally conditioned bodies of its practitioners.

Elsewhere I have written about one aspect of this work-in-process, the normative function and professional habitus of "fieldwork," seen as a disputed, defended, and changing cluster of embodied practices (Clifford 1997b: 52-91). That discussion ends, like the current essay, with the prospect, but not yet the achievement, of "postcolonial" decentering. My concern is with institutional contexts of disciplining, especially zones of relationality, borderlands in which academic imagined communities routinely, creatively, and sometimes agonistically make and remake themselves. This approach extends what was postulated in the essay on fieldwork: a discipline most actively defines itself at its edges, in relation to what it says it is not. It does this by selectively appropriating and excluding elements that impinge, influences that must be managed, translated, incorporated. The process of incorporation also involves exclusion. A line is drawn in the interdisciplinary sand to mark a frontier. Something is taken in and something held at a distance, made "other." Over time, the line's position-contingent, policed, and transgressed-shifts tactically. This becomes apparent when one tracks anthropology's changing relations with history, with sociology, with literary studies, and with biology and evolutionary theories, to mention only some of the more well-traveled borderlands.

In an acute recent discussion, Virginia Dominguez explores the fraught and productive relationship of sociocultural anthropology with a new disciplinary alter ego, "cultural studies." Dominguez cites ten fundamental attitudes shared by anthropological and cultural studies work. She then demonstrates these overlaps in practice through an analysis of editorial board composition and articles published in two influential journals, Cultural Anthropology and American Ethnologist (both of which have abandoned "four-fields" coverage in favor of intensified links to social history, literary studies, Marxist analysis, race and gender studies, etc.). She then shows various tactics of disciplining that agonistically reestablish a sharp identity and sustain "a common presumption that Cultural Studies is 'other' to Anthropology" (1996, 46). At the current moment one can, in fact, observe a range of border attitudes, ranging from embattled "disciplinary patriotism" (Appadurai 1996, 29) to tactical, selective engagement to something close to a merging of horizons.

Sociocultural anthropology's self-image has long featured synthetic opportunism and openness to other disciplines. But too much engagement undermines a sense of integrity. Border crossing without policing erases the boundary. Thus even the most generous anthropological commentators on cultural studies are at pains to sustain at least a few key distinctions. For example, Richard Handler's review essay on the swiftly canonized and attacked collection Cultural Studies (edited by Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler), cited by Dominguez (1996, 57), does not fail to argue for anthropology's more broad-ranging and analytically complex concept of "culture," as well as for its "trump card," ethnography. The significance of these two elements as distinguishing features of the discipline will appear below.

As Dominguez observes, the border work follows patterns analyzed by Fredrik Barth in his seminal volume, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (1969). Disciplines, like ethnic groups, are subcultures of a wider polity-in this case, the university. They have no natural or autochthonous origin and must be articulated in situations of contact, overlap, and similarity. Populations, ideas, and practices routinely cross their borders and combine syncretically. For Barth, the sense of a group's distinction, its tradition or common culture, is always a secondary creation, not a primary cause or origin. Groups select certain traits with which they mark an identity, while trafficking among the many customs and practices they share with neighbors. In the community of sociocultural anthropologists, a fetishized practice of fieldwork has been used to sustain a professional distinction from qualitative sociology or cultural studies, marking off ideas and methods that might...