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"Full of grace and erudition, of intellectual pleasures and provocations, this book is a rich exchange about inheritances, curiosity, pedagogy, ethnography, and experimental practice. What counts as the 'contemporary' is far from self-evident, and the need to think about what is happening in the world--what forms of life are in play and emerging--has never been greater. This book makes a strong ethical and epistemological claim on me, and perhaps on all its readers, to respond to this difficult task. At a time when brilliant performance prevails over collective craft, and systematic shared knowledge seems like a thing of the past, it highlights the necessity of accountability in building knowledge."--Donna Haraway, University of California, Santa Cruz

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DESIGNS FOR AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE CONTEMPORARY

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Introduction by Tobias Rees.......................................................13Dialogue I: Anthropology in Motion................................................33Dialogue II: After Writing Culture................................................45Dialogue III: Anthropology Today..................................................55Dialogue IV: The Anthropology of the Contemporary.................................73Dialogue V: In Search of (New) Norms and Forms....................................93Dialogue VI: Of Timing and Texts..................................................105Dialogue VII: Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary.....................115Afterword by Tobias Rees..........................................................123Notes.............................................................................135

Chapter One

TR: I would like to begin our conversations by framing what both of you have described as a distinct challenge facing anthropology today. Since the 1980s, anthropologists have moved into new terrains-technoscience, finance, media, law, etc.-but the concepts available to analyze these new terrains are largely survivals of the past, survivals from a time when anthropologists studied the culture and social organization of far-away others. The inevitable result is a profound mismatch between old concepts and new analytical requirements. Said in another, perhaps too schematic way, anthropologists are increasingly studying timely phenomena with tools developed to study people out of time. On the one hand, this mismatch is exciting for it invites conceptual innovation and demonstrations of analytical skill. On the other hand, it is unsettling, for the necessary innovation implies a thorough revision of the concepts, problems, questions, and topics that have been constitutive of the discipline. Ultimately, the challenge is to restate anthropology in relation to its classical tropes. Both of you agree with this broad task but there are some differences in the ways you would pursue it. Before we explore these differences, let's talk about how contemporary anthropology has been set in motion. Why did anthropologists enter into new research arenas? A good point of departure for discussing this question might be the critique of the 1980s that was epitomized in Writing Culture, an intellectual movement in which both of you have been protagonists. What happened? What were your dissatisfactions with anthropology as it existed in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s?

PR: In America, at least, the shift you note began well before the 1980s. And there is a specific prehistory to Writing Culture, centered on the figure of Clifford Geertz and the joint Harvard, MIT, and Ford Foundation projects of the 1950s that had combined Max Weber, Talcott Parsons, and the ambitious projects of the Harvard Social Relations group. The ideas of a carefully conceived and conceptually worked-out multidisciplinary project of research were put into practice on a large scale in Indonesia. Thus, Geertz was initially a forerunner in rethinking and reorienting the practices of the social sciences in general and anthropology in particular. So maybe that period would be a place to begin.

GM: There certainly was a more authoritative model of how one became an anthropologist in the days of the Harvard and MIT projects to which you refer. Of course, however much is owed to the pre-World-War-II era when Malinowski and Boas pioneered the discipline's distinctive research practices, that model was undergoing change. This was especially true in the United States during anthropology's short post-war expansion, the twilight of its Golden Age, which coincided with Cold War investments in academic expertise, notably area studies, with "development" being the common problem, and ending by the time Paul and I were becoming professors. Actually, we were its beneficiaries as students in elite graduate programs.

TR: Was there continuity between Boasian and post-war anthropology in the sense that anthropology remained concerned with the faraway other, located in "our" past?

GM: Yes. And in retrospect, what is most remarkable and striking in my view is the rupture that the period of the 1980s through the early 1990s marked and produced in the specific kinds of questions, topics, and quite deep traditions of inquiry with which anthropology had been concerned and through which it defined itself. The Writing Culture critiques and the debates they stimulated were only the catalyst, however powerful. Geertz is an interesting, towering, transitional figure in terms of the rupture that took place. I think he was the first figure who, even though still of the Golden Age and deeply within anthropology's traditional concerns, under the guise of symbolic anthropology, and then interpretive anthropology, also practiced an anthropology that centrally engaged other disciplines. I'm thinking here of his distinctive contributions to the modernization/ development paradigm of the day-the Harvard-MIT development projects in Indonesia and later the New Nations Committee at Chicago-to the flowering of his interest in the theories and philosophies that informed the study of literature and the humanities generally. That's how I see his enduring importance; he legitimated the stature and presence of anthropology in the interdisciplinary domains and peripheries where it now thrives (and not necessarily in ways he would have endorsed). He forged a presence and constituency for anthropology, by dint of a personal style of writing rather than forming a "school." He legitimated a different kind of core anthropology without it really ever being a project.

PR: I think that distinction is very important. Talcott Parsons at Harvard basically assigned "culture" to a small group of people, the most prominent of whom were Clifford Geertz and Robert Bellah. Bellah took up the Weberian project in Japan, asking, how did it become industrial and modern in the light of its cultural singularity? And Geertz's role was to develop and advance a theory of culture set within a neo-Weberian project of development at a time of decolonization. A version of this project was continued at the University of Chicago in the Committee on New Nations. However, the Vietnam War and the crisis of the development model brought all that to an end for Geertz. Others like Bernard Cohn continued in a more critical mode, for example, engaging actively with subaltern studies.

TR: So, Geertz's focus on culture goes back to Harvard and Talcott Parsons?

PR: It was part of the Harvard project to construct a total human science that would be multi-disciplinary, divided into specific analytical areas, graphically ordered in Parsons's famous tables, and unified under a "general theory of action." The project did not endure whether conceptually, institutionally, or politically. Thus, George's point that anthropologists were marginal is true, though for awhile at least, even after his "interpretive...