on anthropology

(free from ethnos)

What is it all about? What is anthropology?
What is anthropology's job? What's its domain?
... I don't know what anthropology ... is,
but I don't think that it is or should be defined as ethnography.

DAVID SCHNEIDER, Schneider on Schneider.

ONE

In retrospect it seems as if the ethnographic project of classical modernity came to an end at one point in the late 1990s. I write "in retrospect" because the passing away of anthropology in its form of classical modern ethnography was — awkward as this may sound — an unintended effect, an accident. As it was unintended, no one had been waiting for it, and so it could be recognized only in hindsight — in "retrospect" — and not without surprise and even sadness.

Already in the 1970s the ethnographic project as it was envisioned by Adolf Bastian and Friedrich Ratzel in Germany; by Franz Boas in the United States; by Alfred C. Haddon, William H. R. Rivers, Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown, and Bronis?aw Malinowski in Great Britain; and by Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, Paul Rivet, and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl in France had come under severe critique. The purpose of this critique was not to bring ethnography to an end. The goal of the various critical voices that had begun to emerge in a systematic, accumulative fashion since the late 1960s was to improve — poetically as well as politically — the ethnographic documentation of those faraway others that anthropologists had begun to systematically study at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. It was meant to correct what seemed to many to be the "mistakes" of the great ethnographers of the past.

For the purpose of my argument, there is no need to retrace here the intricate ways in which the many different kinds of inner-disciplinary critique developed over time; it suffices instead to provide a sketch of the one line of critique that marked, at least from the retrospective point of view from which I write, the beginning of the (unintended) end of classical modern ethnography, the critique of the philosophy of history on which ethnographers had relied since the late eighteenth century.

* * *

"Classical modern ethnography has come to an end."

What does it take for this sentence to sound as obvious and as uncontroversial as if one were to say, "Classical modern painting has come to an end"?

Is the end of classical modern ethnography really controversial?

TWO

In Europe, the second half of the eighteenth century brought what one could refer to as the "temporalization" of the spatial differences of life forms. It was a period during which the number of travel accounts that provided reports of foreign forms of human existence — whether from the past or from elsewhere — significantly increased, leaving interested observers with the baffling question of how one could make sense of this bewildering diversity.

The philosophes of the Enlightenment approached this challenge by way of inventing a new, previously unknown genre of scholarly literature, history. Authors as diverse as Voltaire, Turgot, Condorcet, Kant, Ferguson, and Herder (and many in their aftermath) began writing the first histories of "mankind" that were arranging the people of the world along a single axis that led from those others who were "still" living ab originem (the premoderns, "living fossils" as Edward Burnett Tylor would later famously call them) to those Europeans who had "already" progressed through history and hence were at home in the here and now (the moderns).

For the coming into being of anthropology, the emergence of history — and of the singular collective called humanity that was the imagined author of history — was a decisive event: the emphatic distinction between premoderns and moderns humans brought about the condition of the possibility of the field of study that late eighteenth-century authors began to refer to as "ethnography" — a field of study defined by its modern expert knowledge of those who were still living in the premodern past (for a history of the term ethnography see chapter 3).

Ethnography emerged as the "science" of the people without history, without state, without science — of those "still" living in a cosmos, with mythical structures, magic, and rituals.

The critiques of the 1970s and 1980s observed that many of the twentieth century ethnographers — even though they had long moved against the very idea of the "primitive" or the "premodern" — were ultimately still relying on the distinctions invented by eighteenth-century European philosophers: as long as they described the other with words like "cosmos," "myth," "ritual," "kinship systems," and "magic" — all markers of a past — they were ceaselessly re-inscribing the temporal distinction between "them" and "us" they had set out to critique. As long as the ethnographic project was conceived of in terms of classical modernity, there seemingly was no possibility to escape the predicament: anthropology was and continued to be contingent on the philosophy of history.

What was one to do?

The dominant response to what Johannes Fabian called the "denial of coevalness" (Fabian 1983) — the active effort, on behalf of ethnographers, to locate the friends they have found in "the field" in the past — was the effort to find ways of anthropological inquiry and ethnographic writing that would lead ethnography beyond the great divides of modernity. One important approach to this challenge was to write historical ethnographies, carefully documenting the long "world historical" involvement of other societies (thereby undermining the myth of the "timeless other").

Another significant approach designed to achieve coevalness was the effort to find ways of integrating concrete others into ethnographic texts — by way of naming friends one has found in the field, by way of giving space to their "voices," by way photography and co-authorship. Self-consciously, ethnographers began experimenting with new forms of writing ethnographies — an "experimental moment" that led to a wave of reflective, polyphonic, dialogic, and other forms of ethnographic texts.

In the shadow of these two dominant approaches — both of which, despite their critical intent, were affirming the very idea of the classical ethnographic project (they were meant as improvement) — a small group of anthropologists opted for an altogether different approach for leading anthropology beyond the temporal dilemmas so deeply inscribed in the idea of ethnography. And while this "third way" was initially hardly influential, it quickly gained a dynamic of its own — a powerful dynamic that was to lead anthropologists away from their established preoccupations and into thoroughly new terrains, empirically as well as conceptually.

For so many years, or so one could summarize the argument of this "third way" in...