Waiting forFoucault, StillMarshall Sahlins

PRICKLY PARADIGM PRESSCHICAGO

Waiting forFoucault, StillBeing After-Dinner Entertainment by Marshall Sahlinsfor the Fourth Decennial Conference of the Association ofSocial Anthropologists of the Commonwealth, Oxford, 29July 1993. Now in an expanded, fourth edition.

Lord Jenkins, Professor Strathern, DearColleagues…and other Colleagues:

I have been charged by Professor Strathern withproviding “after-dinner entertainment” in thirtyminutes or less, presumably so that you will not befound sleeping when Professor Stocking delivers his

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Copyright © 2002 Prickly Paradigm Press, LLCAll rights reserved.

First edition published in 1993 by Prickly Pear Press. Second edition printed, 1996. Third edition published by Prickly Pear Pamphlets, 1999.

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The Invention of TraditionSince Britain is the homeland of “the invention oftradition” I hardly need to explain the phrase. Youalso know that anthropologists have rushed to adaptthe idea to the current nostalgia for culture amongstthe erstwhile colonial peoples. The third- andfourth-world over, people are proclaiming the valuesof their traditional customs (as they conceive them).Unfortunately a scholarly air of inauthenticity hangsover this modern culture movement. The academiclabel “invention” already suggests contrivance, andthe anthropological literature too often conveys thesense of a more or less counterfeit past, drummed upfor political effects, which probably owes more toimperialist forces than to indigenous sources. As apossible antidote, I call your attention to a remark-able invention of tradition, whose respectability noWestern scholar will be tempted to deny.

For it happens that in the 15th and 16th centuries abunch of indigenous intellectuals and artists inEurope got together and began inventing theirtraditions and themselves by attempting to revivethe learning of an ancient culture which theyclaimed to be the achievement of their ancestors butwhich they did not fully understand, as for manycenturies this culture had been lost and its languages(Latin and Greek) had been corrupted or forgotten.

Huxley Lecture. I don’t know what I have done todeserve this high academic honor, still less how tolive up to it, except that like many of you I keep anotebook of underground observations, rangingfrom one-liners to many-pagers, from which Ithought to offer you a selection of curmudgeonlyremarks on what’s up nowadays in Anthropology andprobably shouldn’t be. At the outset, however, I haveto confess that in looking over my notebook itstruck me that Lord Keynes didn’t tell the wholestory about the long run. At least as far asAnthropology goes, two things are certain in thelong run: one is that we’ll all be dead; but another isthat we’ll all be wrong. Clearly, a good scholarlycareer is where the first comes before the second.Another thing that struck me, and helped inspire mylecture title, was that this notebook was a lot likeMichel Foucault’s sense of power—poly-amorphousperverse. So it is in that post-structuralist spirit thatI offer the following pasticherie for your dessert.

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On the other hand, the historical lesson could bethat all is not lost. (Journal of Modern History, Spring1993)

For centuries also these Europeans had beenconverted to Christianity, but this did not preventthem from now calling for the restoration of theirpagan heritage. They would once again practice theclassical virtues, even invoke the pagan gods. All thesame, under the circumstances—the great distanceof the acculturated intellectuals from a past that waseffectively irrecoverable—under the circumstances,nostalgia was not what it used to be. The texts andmonuments they constructed were often ersatzfacsimiles of classical models. They created a self-conscious tradition of fixed and essentialized canons.They wrote history in the style of Livy, verses in amannered Latin, tragedy according to Seneca andcomedy according to Terence; they decoratedChristian churches with the facades of classicaltemples and generally followed the precepts ofRoman architecture as set down by Vitruvius—without realizing these precepts were Greek. All thiscame to be called the Renaissance in Europeanhistory, because it gave birth to “modern civilization.”

What else can one say about it, except that somepeople have all the historical luck? When Europeansinvent their traditions—with the Turks at thegates—it is a genuine cultural rebirth, the begin-nings of a progressive future. When other peoplesdo it, it is a sign of cultural decadence, a factitiousrecuperation, which can only bring forth thesimulacra of a dead past.

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Heraclitus vs. HerodotusOne of the current arguments against the coherenceof cultures and the possibility of doing any kind ofsystematic ethnography is that, like a certain famousphilosophical river, cultures are always changing.Such is the flux that one can never step in the sameculture twice. Yet unless identity and consistencywere symbolically imposed on social practices, asalso on rivers, and not only by anthropologists butby the people, there could be no intelligibility oreven sanity, let alone a society. So to paraphraseJohn Barth, reality is a nice place to visit(philosophically), but no one ever lived there.

On MaterialismMaterialism must be a form of idealism, since it’swrong—too.

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Japanese Culture is AlwaysChangingA Japanese friend said of the famous imperial shrineat Ise that it is unchanged since the 7th century, thesame as it was when it was first built. Of course, itdoesn’t look that old to Westerners. But accordingto the current tradition, the buildings at Ise havebeen rebuilt (in alternating sites) every twenty yearsin exactly the same way—using the same ancientinstruments and the same materials—with each stepof the process marked by the appropriate ancientrituals. Of course, the instruments couldn’t beexactly the same, could they? They haven’t lasted forthirteen centuries. And what does it mean to say thematerials are the same, since new wood is used eachtime? And are two ritual performances ever “thesame”?

(In fact, the rebuilding cycle was once interruptedfor more than 150 years, and the buildings and toolshave seen some changes. But that is not the domi-nant Japanese tradition or perception. The traditionis that they are unchanged and the perception isthey are the same.)

One Western art critic explains that the rebuiltbuildings are not “replicas” but “Ise re-created.”

Post-StructuralismThis is a modern American folk-tale to the sameeffect: Three umpires of major league baseball weredebating how to call balls and strikes, “I calls ‘emthe way they is,” the first said. “Me,” said thesecond, “I calls ‘em the way I sees ‘em.” “Naw,”declared the third, who had been around thelongest, “they ain’t nothin’ till I calls ‘em.”Technically, according to the Cours de gymnastiquegénérale, this is known as the “arbitrary character ofthe umpires sign”. Whence comes the post-struc-turalist dictum, “Don’t be Saussure.” (Eric Hamp)

Item: Chicago Tribune, May 23, 1993: Jim Lefebvrebecame the first manager ejected in the history ofJoe Robbie Stadium with Friday night’s incident.Plate umpire Ed Rapuano did the deed afterLefebvre protested a called third strike on SammySosa. “The ball was down”, said Lefebvre…“Whenhe kicked me out, he said ‘I don’t care where thepitch was.’ He doesn’t care where the pitch was?Big-league umpire!”

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And what should we make of the popular observa-tion that “culture is always changing”?

Perhaps something close to the Shinto conception,since nature is indeed involved, would be ourconcept of the continuity of a forest: the Amazonforest could be in existence for centuries ormillennia, even though every one of the originaltrees is gone, has been replaced many times. In anycase, it is obvious that identity is a relative construc-tion, based on a selective valuation of similaritiesand differences. At Ise, it is irrelevant that the mate-rials have been renewed—thus to Western eyes “notthe same”—so long as they are of the same type andput together under the ancient ritual and technicalregime. By such criteria, what we call TinturnAbbey could not pass under that name, the age and“authenticity” of the stones not withstanding. Itwould not be Tinturn Abbey, because it is a ruin.

In his life of Theseus, Plutarch tells the followingstory about the ship on which the hero returned toAthens after slaying the Minotaur: The thirty-oaredgalley in which Theseus sailed with the youths andreturned safely was preserved by the Atheniansdown to the time of Demetrius of Phalerum (317-307 BC). At intervals they removed the old timbersand replaced them with sound ones, so that the shipbecame a classic illustration for the philosophers ofthe disputed question of growth and change, someof them arguing that it remained the same, andothers that it had become a different vessel.

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The Poetics of Culture, IAnthropologists wanted. No experience actuallynecessary. Make more than most poets.

Etics and EmicsAll etics or languages of objective scientific descrip-tion (so-called) are based on a grid of meaningful oremic distinctions. Take the international phoneticalphabet, by means of which the significant soundsof any language can be “objectively” recorded andreproduced. The phonetic alphabet is made up of allknown phonemic distinctions: of all differences insound-segments known to signify differences inmeaning in the natural languages of the world. So inprinciple the objective description of any languageconsists of its comparison with the meaningful orderof all other languages.

The same for ethnography. No good ethnography isself-contained. Implicitly or explicitly ethnographyis an act of comparison. By virtue of comparisonethnographic description becomes objective. Not inthe naive positivist sense of an unmediated percep-tion—just the opposite: it becomes a universalunderstanding to the extent it brings to bear on theperception of any society the conceptions of all theothers. Some Cultural Studies types—Cult Studs, inTom Frank’s description—seem to think thatAnthropology is nothing but ethnography. Betterthe other way around: ethnography is Anthropology,or it is nothing.

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“The Pseudo-Politics ofInterpretation”(Gerald Graff)In a recent issue of the vanguard journal CulturalAnthropology a certain cultural relativism wasdismissed as (I quote) “politically unacceptable.”Similarly, a summary comment to a recent book ofessays on Polynesian history warns that Geertz’sNegara and Sahlins’s Polynesian works, by theirattempts to understand history in such terms asculture or structure afflict the study of others with“dangerous” notions: that is, essentializing notionsthat falsely endow a people with eternal culturalqualities, or overvalue hegemonic ideologies byneglecting “the politically fractured and contestedcharacter of culture.” Dangerous? Hopefully the dayis not far off when this kind of terrorism will seempatently lunatic. In the meantime, however, the bestintellectual argument is the moral-political highground. To know what other peoples are, it sufficesto take the proper attitudes toward sexism, racismand colonialism. As if their truth was our right-mindedness. Or as if the cultural values of othertimes and places, the events they organized and thepeople responsible for them, were fashioned in orderto answer to whatever has been troubling us lately.But (I paraphrase Herder) these people did not

The Poetics of Culture, IIIn speaking of culture as a superorganic order, inwhich individuals counted for next to nothing, A.L.Kroeber liked to use the metaphor of a coral reef: avast edifice built by tiny microorganisms each ofwhich, acting simply according to its own nature,secretes an imperceptible addition to this structurewhose scale and organization by far transcends it.Just so in culture:

Lives of great men all remind usWe can make our lives sublime,And in passing leave behind us…A small deposit of lime.

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UtilitarianismA people who conceive life to be the pursuit ofhappiness must be chronically unhappy.

suffer and die just to manure our little academicfields.

And surely it is a cruel post-modernist fate thatrequires the ethnographer to celebrate the counter-hegemonic diversity of other people’s discourses—the famous polyphony or heteroglossia—while at thesame time he or she is forced to confess that shisown scholarly voice is the stereotypic expression of atotalized system of power. It seems that imperialismis the last of the old-time cultural systems. Ours isthe only culture that has escaped deconstruction bythe changing of the avant garde, as it retains itsessentialized and monolithic character as a system ofdomination. So anthropologists can do nothing butreproduce it. Advanced criticism thus becomes thelast refuge of the idea that the individual is the toolof shis culture. Which also proves that those whoare ignorant of their own functionalism are destinedto repeat it—the second time as farce.

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the whole a somewhat more encouraging prospectuson the same investment opportunities afforded byhuman suffering. In a famous essay setting out thefield, Lionel Robbins explicitly recognized that thegenesis of Economics was the economics of Genesis.“We have been turned out of Paradise,” he wrote,“we have neither eternal life nor unlimited means ofsatisfaction”—instead, a life of scarcity, wherein tochoose one good thing is to deprive oneself ofanother. The real reason Economics is dismal is thatit is the science of the post-lapsarian condition. Andthe Economic Man inhabiting page one of (any)General Principles of Economics textbook is Adam.

In Adam (Smith)’s Fall, Sinned We AllThe punishment was the crime. By disobeying Godto satisfy his own desires, by putting this love of selfbefore the love of Him alone that could suffice, manwas condemned to become the slave of insatiablebodily desires: a limited and ignorant creature aban-doned in an intractable and merely material world tolabor, to suffer, and then to die. Made up of “thornsand thistles,” resistant to our efforts, the world, saidAugustine, “does not make good what it promises: itis a liar and deceiveth.” The deception consists inthe impossibility of assuaging our libidinous desiresfor earthly goods, for domination and for carnalpleasures. So man is fated “to pursue one thing afteranother, and nothing remains permanently withhim…his needs are so multiplied that he cannot findthe one thing needful, a simple and unchangingnature.”

But God was merciful. He gave us Economics. ByAdam Smith’s time, human misery had been trans-formed into the positive science of how to make dowith our eternal insufficiencies: how to derive themost possible satisfaction from means that arealways less than our wants. It was the same Judeo-Christian Anthropology, only bourgeoisfied, and on

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appearance to truth. Max Weber, criticizing certainutilitarian explanations of religious phenomena,observed that just because an institution may berelevant to the economy does not mean it iseconomically determined. But following Gramsciand Foucault, the current neo-functionalism ofpower seems even more complete: as if everythingthat could be relevant to power were power.

Quite wondrous, then, is the variety of thingsanthropologists can now explain by power andresistance, hegemony and counter-hegemony. I say“explain” because the argument consists entirely ofcategorizing the cultural form at issue in terms ofdomination, as if that accounts for it. Here are someexamples from the past few years of AmericanEthnologist and Cultured (Cultural) Anthropology:

1. Nicknames in Naples: “a discourse practice usedto construct a particular representation of the socialworld, [nicknaming] may become a mechanism forreinforcing the hegemony of nationally dominantgroups over local groups that threaten the reproduc-tion of social power” [Boo; you never know what’s ina nickname!].

2. Bedouin lyric poetry: this is counter-hegemonic[Yeah!].

3. Women’s fashions in La Paz: counter-hegemonic

The Poetics of Culture, IIIPower, power everywhere,And how the signs do shrink.Power, power everywhere,And nothing else to think.

The current Foucauldian-Gramscian-Nietzscheanobsession with power is the latest incarnation ofAnthropology’s incurable functionalism. Like itsstructural-functional and utilitarian predecessors,hegemonizing is homogenizing: the dissolution ofspecific cultural forms into generic instrumentaleffects. It used to be that what you had to knowabout prescriptive joking relations—their “raisond’être” même—was their contribution to maintainingsocial order, even as totemic ceremonies or gardenmagicians were organizing food production. Now,however, “power,” is the intellectual black hole intowhich all kinds of cultural contents get sucked, ifbefore it was “social solidarity” or “material advan-tage.” Again and again, we make this lousy bargainwith the ethnographic realities, giving up what weknow about them in order to understand them. AsSartre said of a certain vulgar Marxism, we areimpelled to take the real content of a thought or anact as a mere appearance, and having dissolved thisparticular in a universal (here economic interest), wetake satisfaction in believing we have reduced

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12. The concept of culture as a seamless whole andof society as a bounded entity: hegemonic ideas thathave “effectively masked human misery andquenched dissenting voices” [quenched? Give usthen your tired and your thirsty].

“A hyper-inflation of significance” would be anotherway of describing the new functionalism, translatingthe apparently trivial into the fatefully political by arhetoric that typically reads like a dictionary oftrendy names and concepts, many of them French, averitable La Ruse of postmodernism. Of course theeffect, rather than amplifying the significance ofNeapolitan nicknames or Vietnamese pronouns, isto trivialize such terms as “domination,” “resist-ance,” “colonization,” even “violence” and “power.”Deprived of real-political reference, these wordsbecome pure values, full of sound and fury andsignifying nothing…but the speaker.

[Yeah!].

4. The social categorization of freed Dominicanslaves as “peasants”: hegemonic [Boo].

5. The fiesta system of the Andes in the colonialperiod: hegemonic.

6. The constructed “spirituality” of middle-classBengali women, as expressed in diet and dress: hege-monic nationalism and patriarchy.

7. Certain Vietnamese pronouns: hegemonic.

8. Funeral wailing of Warao Indians, Venezuela:counter-hegemonic.

9. Do-it-yourself house building of Brazilianworkers: an apparent counter-hegemony that intro-duces a worse hegemony.

10. The scatological horseplay of unemployedMexican-American working class males: “an opposi-tional break in the alienating hegemony of thedominant culture and society.”

11. Common sense: “common sense thought andfeeling need not tranquilize a restive population butcan incite violent, if contained, rebellion.”

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and other victory celebrations; and the helmet essen-tialism. M. Sahlins. 1:30-4:30 Sat, extra credit for NewYear’s Day.

But that was not the funny thing. The funny thingwas how many students, including graduate students,took it seriously, believed there really was such acourse, and e-mailed asking to sign up for it. Oneperson wondered if I could employ him as ateaching assistant. After the quarter was over,another four people asked how the course went.Scary!

Courses for Our TimesA colleague at the University of Chicago, expert inmaterial culture, offered a course on “ChicagoBlues,” under the general heading “The IntensiveStudy of a Culture,” a portmanteau rubric forundergraduate courses devoted to the presentationof recent ethnographic research. I was prompted toput the following notice on the departmentalbulletin board, thinking if Chicago Blues was aculture, Michigan football could also be one—that Ihave done intensive research in.

INTENSIVE STUDY OF A CULTURE: MICHIGAN FOOTBALL

Anthropology 21215Saturday, 1:30 - 4:30 pmExtra Credit for New Year’s DayInstructor: Marshall Sahlins

Anthropology 21215. Intensive Study of a Culture:Michigan Football. PQ: Undergraduates only; limit of 10.Because of the impossibility of pure presence, the coursematerials will consist of video transmissions—consideredhowever in their textuality. There can be no pretence of atotalized or master narrative of Michigan football, only aconsideration of certain aporias of the Power-I forma-tion—which is to say, of postmodern subjectivity. Selectedtopics include: trash-talking or contested discourses; tightends, spread formations and other subject positions; postGerry-Fordism or de-center subject; post-deconstruction

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Polyphony is not Cacophony(for Maurice Bloch)

Malama Meleisea tells of taking down twocompletely different and conflicting stories aboutthe history of certain Samoan chiefs from the lips ofone and the same matai (chiefly title holder). Whenconfronted with the discrepancies, the mataireminded Meleisea that he held titles in twodifferent villages, and if Malama would recall he toldthe first story in one village and the second in theother. So obviously he was speaking as one chief thefirst time and as a rival chief the second. And whatwas so inconsistent about that? One is reminded ofthe Cartesian dictum about clear and distinctideas—I mean Hocartesian, of course, not to bemistaken for the essentialist doctrines of Descartes—the Cartesian dictum that in Fiji two contradictorystatements are not necessarily inconsistent. “Theyappear to us contradictory,” Hocart said, “becausewe do not know, without much experience, the pointof view from which each is made.”

But we are not likely to hear an end soon to post-structuralist litanies about the contested andunstable character of cultural logics: about percep-tions and meanings that are different for men andwomen, chiefs and commoners, rich and poor, old

RelevanceI don’t know about Britain, but in America manygraduate students in Anthropology are totally unin-terested in other times and places. They say weshould study our own current problems, all otherethnography being impossible anyhow, as it is justour “construction of the other.”

So if they get their way, and this becomes the prin-ciple of anthropological research, fifty years henceno one will pay the slightest attention to the workthey’re doing now. Maybe they’re onto something.

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describing the discrepancy. There is some system inand of the differences. Bakhtin did not for a minutesuppose that the presence of dissenting voices wasunsystematic. What he said was that in combinationwith the authoritative discourse, such heteroglossiaproduced a more complex system.

and young, this village and that, yesterday andtoday—as if a difference were necessarily a disorder.All the same, not everything in the contest iscontested (which also proves we come here to para-phrase Durkheim, not to bury him). As polyphonicor heteroglossic as the monograph may be one doesnot find a Japanese voice in a Sioux Indian ethnog-raphy. In order for the categories to be contested atall, there must be a common system of intelligibility,extending to the grounds, means, modes and issuesof disagreement. The differences at issue, moreover,entail some relationship. All the more so if they aresubversive and thus express the positional values andinterests of speakers in a certain social-politicalorder. As Cassierer says in another context, “anawareness of a difference is an awareness of aconnection.”

The alternative is to suppose that what people say isarbitrary and aleatory from the point of view of theirsocial existence—in which case, it is true, therecould be nothing like anthropological knowledge, orfor that matter a social existence. But if in regard tosome given event or phenomenon, the women of acommunity say one thing and the men another, doesnot the difference in what they are saying expresssocial differences in the construction of gender:their discrepant positions in, and experience of, acertain social universe? If so, there is a non-contra-dictory way—dare one say, a totalizing way?—of

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scientists, psychoanalysts and sane people: all haveso many irreconcilable opinions about whethermoney is good or bad, about what it can or cannotbuy, whether or not it can make you happy, how it isrelated to love, politics, beauty, justice, friendship,the human soul, and whatnot.

A lot of people, mostly people without a lot ofmoney, say that money can’t buy everything.Especially it can’t buy happiness: people with 25million, for example, are not perceptibly happierthan people with 24; and besides, rich people aregenerally unhappy. Still the rich have many consola-tions, as Plato observed—the chief among thempresumably being their money. And despite thefortitude it takes for the rich to endure their disad-vantages (Rex Stout), most modern philosophersagree that money is better than poverty—“if only forfinancial reasons,” as Woody Allen speculates. Thisconclusion has also been persuasively argued oncontrolled empirical grounds by Sophie Tucker:“I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor; rich isbetter.”

Some deep epistemological uncertainties likewiseattend the argument that money can’t buy knowl-edge, a proposition that the educational costs andoutputs of American private universities make excru-ciatingly problematic. A modern Jewish proverb,however, has it that although money won’t make you

Culture as a Metaphysical Pseudo-EntitySome grave conclusions have been drawn from thefact that anthropologists cannot agree on what“culture” is, the most serious being that the cultureconcept is an artifact of a certain historical period,logically incoherent and “loaded willy nilly withideological baggage and unconscious associationspeculiar to particular sets of historical circum-stances” (Christopher Herbert). Something as bad asthat, one would think, ought to be dumped as soonas possible.

And should we not do the same with money?“Money” is a totally elusive concept—even harder tohold onto, I think, than “culture.” Economists andeconomic historians cannot agree on a definition ofmoney. The differences among them on the natureof money make the Kroeber-Kluckhohn collectionof culture-definitions seem like an enviableconsensus. And matters get even worse when weinterview the natives.

In practice, “money” is a specious notion if everthere was one, a contested category without deter-minate bounds or content. Rich and poor, old andyoung, men and women, clergy and laity, poets and

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cial, historically particular and profoundly ideolog-ical. I say “ideological” because the promulgation ofthis fiction, in the same way as the promulgation ofthe essentialist doctrine of culture, has evident colo-nizing effects. Clearly the spread of the moneyconcept is useful to the imperialist ambitions ofWestern capitalism. Yet just as the totalized notionof “culture” constructed by anthropologists, this“money” is a metaphysical phantom, fundamentallyand incurably equivocal. Money, like culture, is apseudo-entity. And a fool is easily separated fromboth.

a physicist, it does help you like reality.

The Christian pecuniary theology, incidentally, isanother heteroglossic nightmare. New Testamentviews about the relation between evil and the love ofmoney are well known, but there is more than asuggestion of heresy in the popular paraphrase that“the want of money is the root of all evil.”Regarding Abe Lincoln’s observation that “Godmust love the poor or He wouldn’t have made somany of them,” H.L. Mencken replied, “He mustlove the rich or he wouldn’t divide so much mazumaamong so few of them.”

All this suggests that money is a prototypical fuzzycategory. Ever subject to conflicting discourses, theconcept of money is constantly being underminedby a politics of interpretation in which hegemonicnorms are challenged by dissenting voices. It followsthat the meaning of money in relation to otherthings, the Saussurean value of the category, isalways shifting. Consider the categorical entangle-ments of “money” and “sex.” When we say thatsomeone is well-fixed or well-endowed, what exactlyare we talking about? The ambiguities are succinctlysummed up by Zsa Zsa Gabor: “What I call loaded,I’m not; what other people call loaded, I am.”

Obviously the concept of money, on whichEconomic Science has been running, is highly artifi-

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Orientalism(dedicated to Professor Gellner)

In Anthropology there are some things that arebetter left un-Said.

Consciousness of CultureThe word “culture” has become common fare. Forthe present generation it does much of the work thatwas formerly assigned to “psychology” or again“ethos.” We used to talk about “the psychology ofWashington (D.C.)” or “the ethos of the university;”now it is “the culture of Washington” and “theculture of the university.” It is also “the culture ofthe cigar factory,” “the culture of drug addiction,”“the culture of adolescence,” “the culture of theAnthropology meetings,” etc. For a long while I wasworried about this apparent debasement of theanthropological object. One day I realized thatEconomics is still going as a discipline despite thateveryone talks about “economics,” and “economies,”Sociology likewise survives all the uses of “social.”And recently I saw the following poster in a hotelelevator: “50 hotels, 22 countries, one philosophy.”You think we got troubles with “culture?” Whatabout Philosophy? Everybody’s got a philosophy. Itdidn’t kill Philosophy.

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The Origin of ReligionKant argues that concepts such as cause, substance,all or one, as well as time and space, are a prioriconditions of possible experience. Making up thedifference between percepts and empirical judgments,they turn the former into universal and objectivedescriptions: not, “when the sun shines on the stone,it grows warm,” which is merely a subjective judg-ment of perception; but rather, “the sun warms thestone,” which adds the concept of cause, convertingperception into the objective mode of experience.But as preposed to experience, the concepts or cate-gories of understanding are not necessarily limited tosensible intuitions. On the contrary, says Kant, wecannot help projecting the conceptual forms bywhich we have experience beyond the bounds ofanything empirical, and thus know a world of beingthat, without being sensible, has the same experien-tial qualities. So “the understanding adds for itself tothe house of experience a much more extensive wing,which it fills with nothing but beings of thought,without even observing that it has transgressed withits otherwise legitimate concepts the bounds of use.”In other words, nothing is known that has not theproperties of experience, even when its being cannotbe perceived. Is this not the origin of religion? Whatwe call the “spiritual” is but a normal sensibility ofthe “real.”

How to Solve the World'sProblemsThere is a sure, one word solution to all the world'scurrent problems: Atheism.

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Anthropology as CulturalCritiqueIf Anthropology is really cultural critique, we mightas well bring back Hobbes or Rousseau, who were atleast aware that they were inventing an antitheticalOther for salutary political purposes.

The Chinese RestaurantSyndromeWhy are well-meaning Westerners so concernedthat the opening of a Colonel Sanders in Beijingmeans the end of Chinese culture? A fatalAmericanization. Yet we have had Chinese restau-rants in America for over a century, and it hasn’tmade us Chinese. On the contrary, we obliged theChinese to invent chop suey. What could be moreAmerican than that? French fries?

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that he and Hobbes had more in common than thefact that, with the exception of Hobbes, both werebald.

Waiting for Foucault“A man of a thousand masks,” one of his biogra-phers said of Michel Foucault, so how seriously canwe take the guise he assumed to say that powerarises in struggle, in war, and such a war as is ofevery man against every man. “Who fights whom?”he asked. “We all fight each other.” Critics andexegetes hardly notice Foucault’s connection toHobbes except to mention the apparently radicaldisclaimer that his own notion of power is “the exactopposite of Hobbes’ project in Leviathan.” We haveto give up our fascination with sovereignty, “cut offthe king’s head,” free our attention from the repres-sive institutions of state. Power comes from below.It is invested in the structures and cleavages ofeveryday life, omnipresent in quotidian regimes ofknowledge and truth. If in the Hobbesian contractsubjects constitute the power, the Commonwealththat keeps them all in awe, in the Foucauldianschema power constitutes the subjects. All the same,the structuralism that Foucault abandoned for asense of the poly-amorphous perverse, this struc-turalism taught that opposites are things alike in allsignificant respects but one. So when Foucaultspeaks of a war of each against all, and in the nextbreath even hints of a Christian divided self—“Andthere is always within each of us something thatfights something else”—we are tempted to believe

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simply to waterways of different scales (JonathanCuller). Yet the French usage is no less an objective-empirical difference for all that it is not the onlypossible one. Locke said that men would not have itthought that they speak idly of the world; but thisdoes not prevent them from constituting the worldvariously, “according to the Manners, Fashions andCustoms of the Country.” The French are hung upon where the sea is. Paris, an inland city, has rightand left banks. Maybe it’s because England is there.

Objectivity as a SecondaryQualityAccording to the basic Enlightenment epistemology,knowledge is objectively grounded by interest, i.e.,pleasure and pain, which thus gives us the truthconditions for the properties of things. Why hasn’tanyone mentioned that this proof-of-the-puddingempiricism makes all objective knowledge theknowledge of “secondary qualities” in the Lockeansense? The objectivity of objects is relative to a bodywhose construction determines what is pleasurableand painful; and beyond that, insofar as this body issocially constructed, it is relative to the culturalorder. The same would follow from the obviousprinciple that it is impossible to exhaust the empir-ical description of anything, inasmuch as it can beknown by its relations to an indefinite number ofother things; hence the objectivity of the object isalways selective.

This is what makes the referential use of signs tricky,since such uses may well be perceptually true, henceseemingly natural, though never necessary. For theFrench the distinction of fleuve and rivière is thatbetween an inland waterway that flows to the seaand a substantial tributary thereof, thus incommen-surable with SAE “river” and “stream” which refer

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Some Laws of Civilization

First law of civilization: All airports are underconstruction.

Second law of civilization: I'm in the wrong line.

Third law of civilization: Snacks sealed in plasticbags cannot be opened, even using your teeth.

Fourth law of civilization: The human gene whosediscovery is announced in the New York Times—there's one every day, a gene du jour—is for somebad trait, like schizophrenia, kleptomania, or pneu-monia. We have no good genes.

Fifth law of civilization: Failing corporate executivesand politicians always resign to spend more timewith their families.

More on MaterialismHence the contradiction that Anthropology has beenliving with for some time, viz., that symbolicityencompasses the material determination of thesymbolic.

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Relations of Society =SymbolicityIt is intriguing how many of the dispositions usuallyattributed to human nature are intrinsic conditionsof symbolic discourse—and have in that regard someclaims to universality without the necessity ofbiology. This seems especially evident in the soci-ology of the linguistic “shifters”: “I” and “you,”“here” and “there,” “now” and “then,” etc. Theperson using the pronoun “I” thereby constitutesspace, time and objects (reference) from his or herpoint of view—egotism, or even the will to power.One’s interlocutor does the same, an alternativeassertion of world-making authority—competition.The same alternation recognized as the reversibilityof “I” and “you,”—reciprocity or altruism. Themutuality of personhood implied by this interchangeof subject positions—sociability. Symbolic discoursecontains within itself the elementary principles ofhuman social interaction.

Anti-Relativism3

Cultural relativism is first and last an interpretiveanthropological—that is to say, methodological—procedure. It is not the moral argument that anyculture or custom is as good as any other, if notbetter. Relativism is the simple prescription that, inorder to be intelligible, other people’s practices andideals must be placed in their own historical context,understood as positional values in the field of theirown cultural relationships rather than appreciated bycategorical and moral judgments of our making.Relativity is the provisional suspension of one’s ownjudgments in order to situate the practices at issue inthe historical and cultural order that made thempossible. It is in no other way a matter of advocacy.

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Capitalism IMarx said, “the country that is more developedindustrially only shows, to the less developed, theimage of its own future.” In large part, however,this prediction would still fall under Durkheim’sdictum that “a science of the future has no subjectmatter.”

Postmodern TerrorismOne of the more poignant aspects of the currentpostmodernist mood is the way it seems to loboto-mize some of our best graduate students, to stifletheir creativity for fear of making some interestingstructural connection, some relationship betweencultural practices, or a comparative generalization.The only safe essentialism left to them is that thereis no order to culture.

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Capitalism III: Laissez Faire—Qui les a laissé?

It should not be forgotten that the theory of themost coercive and totalized institution known tohumanity, the theory of the state, is the correlaryand remedy of a condition of unrestrained self-interest—as in Hobbes, or for that matter St.Augustine. The theory reminds us that an enormoussystem of social control is required to maintain thelaissez-faire, the “free” play of self-interest, of a capi-talist nation-state. To think otherwise would be likesupposing that the feudal knights once chargingaround the countryside had fashioned their ownarmor and mounted their horses all by themselves.

Capitalism IIIn the same vein, in a century increasingly markedby the indigenization of modernity, Max Weber’scomparative project on the possibilities for capitalistdevelopment afforded by different religious ideolo-gies seems increasingly bizarre. Not that it is bizarreto talk of the cosmological organization of practicalaction, which is surely one of Weber’s greatest ideas.What seems increasingly weird is the way Weberiansbecame fixated on the question of why one society oranother failed to evolve this summum bonum ofhuman history, capitalism—as Westerners haveknown and loved it. In 1988, when I was in China,this topic was evoking a lot of Confucian. I heardone visiting American sinologist observe that duringthe Qing dynasty China had come “oh so close” to acapitalist take-off. Yet it all seems like asking why theHighland peoples of New Guinea failed to developthe spectacular potlatch of the Kwakiutl. This is aquestion the Kwakiutl social scientist could well ask,since with their elaborate pig exchange ceremoniesbetween clans the New Guineans had come so close.Nearer the point—or perhaps it is exactly thepoint—is the Christian missionaries’ question of howit could be that Fijians in their natural state failed torecognize the true god. One might as well ask whyEuropean Christians did not develop the ritualcannibalism of Fijians. After all, they came so close.

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Economic DevelopmentDeveloping countries, with American help, neverdevelop.

Conspiring in Western Violenceand DominationWe are warned—by Akhil Gupta and JamesFerguson, for example—that by celebrating thehistorical creativity of the indigenous peoples in theface of globalization, we ignore the tyranny of theworld system and conspire thus in Western violenceand domination. On the other hand, it is clear thatwhen we speak of the systematic hegemony of impe-rialism, we ignore the peoples’ struggles for culturalautonomy and conspire thus in Western violenceand domination.

The dilemma is compounded by the fact that bothhegemony and resistance are demanded by thecurrent politics of anthropological interpretation.Ever since Gramsci, posing the notion of hegemonyhas entailed the equal and opposite discovery of theresistance of the oppressed. So the anthropologistwho relates the so-called grand narrative of Westerndomination is also likely to subvert it by invoking“weapons of the weak,” “hidden transcripts” or somesuch local discourse of cultural defiance. In any case,this is a no-lose strategy since the two characteriza-tions, domination and resistance, are contradictoryand in some combination will cover any and everyhistorical eventuality.

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The Disciplines of ColonialismWe hear a lot about the disciplines imposed by colo-nialism—as of ethnification, sanitation, education,taxation, etc.—as though this history of the colo-nizers were also and equally the history of the colo-nized. In recent European history it hasn’t happenedthis way. The socialist states of eastern Europeenforced the study of Marx. As late as 1992, FrankManuel could write, “It is difficult to assess themeaningfulness of the required study of Marx,where it was enforced.” External state or colonialdiscipline is a two-edged sword. Something happensto it when people get a hold of it.

Economic Development IIEconomic development is properly defined as thematerial enrichment of the people's way of life.Their culture is the object of development, not theimpediment.

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historical beings. To paraphrase Freud on Marx,they do not all of a sudden become conscious of whothey are when they get their first paycheck. Rather,the forces of capitalist hegemony, mediated by thehabitus of specific forms of life, are then played outin the schemata of alien cultural universals.

Culture of Resistance;Resistance of CultureThere is much talk nowadays about “cultures ofresistance” though clearly what is going on amongmany victims of Western imperialism is betterdescribed as the resistance of culture. Moreover,such resistance has been going on for a long time,before and apart from Western imperialism.Involving the integration of the foreign in categoriesand relations of the familiar—a shift in the culturalcontexts of external forms and forces that alsochanges their values—cultural subversion is in thenature of intercultural relations. As a mode ofhistorical differentiation inherent in meaningfulaction, this sort of cultural resistance is more inclu-sive than any intentional opposition, as it neitherrequires a self-conscious politics of cultural distinc-tion nor has it been historically confined to the reac-tions of the colonially oppressed. (Recall the theo-retical genealogy that leads from the ordering ofBoasian diffusions of “culture traits” by Benedictine“patterns of culture,” through Bateson’s determina-tions of “schismogenesis” in culture contacts, to thesimilar dialectics of complementary differentiationin Lévi-Strauss’s Mythologiques). But pre-colonialculture change apart, even the subjects of moderndependency relations act in the world as social-

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Whatever Happened to“Late Capitalism”?It became neo-liberalism.

The Indigenization ofModernityThe globalization mavens—both in the academy andin the economy—who are now calling upon us totranscend the observation that local societies indige-nize the global order are the same ones who firsttold us to ignore the possibility.

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Return of the SuperorganicPost-structuralism, post-modernism and other“afterological studies” (Jacqueline Mraz) sometimescome down to a sense of cultural coercion, a narra-tive of hegemony so totalizing, as to put one in mindof the superorganic theory of culture promoted byLeslie White in the 1940s and 50s. (As a student, Iknew it well.) In White’s view, culture was an inde-pendent, self-moving order of which human actionwas merely the expression. The individual, Whitewrote, is in this respect like a pilotless aircraftcontrolled from the ground by radio waves. Yetsubstitute “culture” for “discourse” in the followingpassage from the up-to-date Foucault and we areright back to the obsolete White: “In short, it is amatter of depriving the subject (or its substitute) ofits role of originator and of analyzing the subject asa variable and complex function of discourse”(“Post-structuralist Studies,” M.H. Abrams wroterecently, “whatever their disagreements, coincide inabstracting literary texts from the human world andrelocating them in a nonhuman state—specifically inthe play of language—as such, or else in forces thatoperate within a discourse already-in-being.”)Indeed a good many anthropologists have beencontent to trade in “culture” for Foucauldian“discourse” in recent years—all the while disdainingthe “reified” “essentialized” and “totalized” char-

Man, the Hunter—and theFormer JournalAll across the northern tier of the planet, huntersand gatherers still exist—many of them by huntingand gathering. In Northern America particularly,they have harnessed industrial technologies—snow-mobiles, CB radios, motorized fishing vessels,modern weapons and camping gear, even airplanes—to their traditional “paleolithic” purposes and rela-tionships. As late as 1966, however, anthropologistsat the famous “Man, the Hunter” conference atChicago thought they were talking about an obso-lete way of life. Some years later, Richard Lee, oneof the original conveners, remarked at another suchconference: “Hunting is real. Hunting exists andhunting and gathering economies exist, and this is tome a new fact in the modern world, because twelveyears ago at the ‘Man, the Hunter’ conference wewere writing an obituary of hunters.” Indeed thetitle of the 1966 conference now seems as out-of-date as its contents. Today one could not possiblyhave a conference called “Man, the Hunter.” Itwould have to be something like, “The Journal ofthe Royal Anthropological Institute, the Hunter.”

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Dead White Whales:From Leviathanology to Subjectology,and Vice Versa

The opposition between Man and the City, betweenprivate and polis interest, is already present in clas-sical writings: in several dialogues of Plato as well asmany passages of Thucydides. In Thucydides theopposition is notably grounded in a self-regardinghuman nature driven by desires of glory and gain.The simple-minded sociological dualism of thiscounterposition of individual and society, the senseof a transparent and unmediated relationshipbetween them, was likewise destined to have a bril-liant historical career. Individuals in particular andsociety in general confronted each other over anempty social space, as though there were no institu-tions, values and relationships of diverse characterthat at once connected and differentiated them. Thisancient simplicity continues in the latest, mostadvanced notions of societal constraint, such asAlthusserian interpellation or Foucauldian power.True these speak of mediating structures, but only toassign them the singular function of transmitting thelarger order of society into the bodies of individuals.

Along the way to modernity, as it passed throughearly Christianity, the classical individual-society

acter of the old culture concept. It seems a fairbargain. As the “process through which social realitycomes into being,” or again a “system” that “deter-mines what can be thought and said,” as one anthro-pological Foucauldian recently put it, such“discourse” seems at least as terrorist as the old-timeculturology. Selectively dictating what can beperceived, imagined and expressed, “discourse” isthe new superorganic—made even more compellingas the effect of a “power” that is everywhere, in allquotidian institutions and relations.

One wonders if White and Kroeber could havegotten away with their cockamamie theories longerif they had developed a sense of people being themoral victims of the “superorganic.”

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viduals, as Jeremy Bentham and Margaret Thatcherwould have it; or individuals are nothing more thanpersonifications of the greater social and culturalorder, as in certain progressive theories of theconstruction of subjectivity by power that amount tothe death of the subject. The development of capi-talism and its discontents gave the old anthropolog-ical dualism still another twist, specifically politicaland in some ways dialectical. Right and Left pushedeach other into complementary and extreme argu-ments of individual and cultural determinism. Onthe Right, rational choice theory and other suchbrands of Radical Individualism: all content toresolve social totalities into the projects of self-fash-ioning individuals. On the Left, concepts of thecultural superorganic and other species ofLeviathanology: draconian notions of autonomouscultural behemoths with the powers of fashioningindividual subjects to their own purposes.

Radical Individualism is the everyday self-conscious-ness of bourgeois society; Leviathanology is itsrecurrent nightmare. Supposing that the values actu-ally originating in the society are, as the means andends of utilitarian action, attributes of the subject,Radical Individualism suppresses the social andcultural as such—ontologically, as Louis Dumontsays. Conversely, Leviathanology dispenses with thesubject as such, since he or she merely personifiesthe categories of the social-cultural totality, and shis

dualism had absorbed a heavy moral charge, makingthe conflict well nigh irreconcilable. Pericles mightreasonably argue that individuals could best achievetheir own happiness by submitting themselves to thepublic good. In the Christian version, however, theearthly city was no longer Athens but the residenceof inherently sinful man; hence the absolute positivevalue of society as a providential instrument ofrepression. For St. Augustine, the social control ofunruly bodies—of the child by the father, as of thecitizen by the state—was a necessary condition ofhuman survival in this contemptible world ofAdamic self-pleasers. Otherwise, men would devoureach other like beasts. For a mythico-philosophicaltranslation of the same, see Hobbes. For a modernsociological version, Durkheim. Man is double,Durkheim said, double and divided: composed of amoral cum intellectual self, received from society,struggling to hold in check an egocentric andsensual self that is essentially pre-human. ButDurkheim is not really modern. This idea of man ashalf angel, half beast is archaic.

Modern is the more imperialist philosophy thatattempts to encompass one side of the ancientdualism in the other: subsuming the individual inthe society or else assuming the society in the indi-vidual; such that in the end only one of the pair hasany independent existence. Either society is no morethan the sum of relations between enterprising indi-

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over all the children of pride.” Here was a primarysource of that ominous sense of culture as anauthoritarian prescription of conduct: especially self-defeating conduct, as in the so-called culture ofpoverty or the “traditional culture" that keeps“underdeveloped peoples” from becoming happyjust like us. But even the advanced leviathanologicaldiscourses of Althusser and Foucault retained char-acteristics of the terrific ancestor, employing apervasive sense of repression without contradictionin their constructions of subjectivity without agency.

Foucault especially. The most awesome transubstan-tiation of that old holy ghost, the Invisible Hand,into an all-controlling culture-at-large, would haveto be Foucault’s pancratic vision of power. Here ispower as irresistible as it is ubiquitous, poweremanating from everywhere and invading everyone,saturating the everyday things, relations and institu-tions of human existence, and transmitted thenceinto people’s bodies, perceptions, knowledges anddispositions. The theoretical effect of this vision,many critics agree, is not merely “an overestimationof the efficacy of disciplinary power,” but “animpoverished understanding of the individual whichcannot account for experiences that fall outside therealm of the ‘docile’ body” (L. McNay). Foucaultrightly denies he is a structuralist, since all that isleft of structuralism in his problematic is its avoid-ance of human agency. His position is indeed “post-

actions carry out its independent laws of motion.The famous liberal ideology of the Invisible Handalready harbored these antithetical anthropologies inits obeisances to the great objective social mecha-nism that mysteriously transformed the good thatpeople did for themselves into the well being of thenation. Laissez-faire thus included its negation. Andif Adam Smith & Co. could argue for the freedomof individuals to indulge their natural propensity totruck and barter, on the ground that the social goodwould automatically follow, the critique of capitalismcountered by rendering visible this self-subsistingGreat Pumpkin with the power of encompassing andconjugating the behavior of individuals in waysbeyond their power and control. Thus Marx, in thePreface to Capital:

Here individuals are dealt with only insofar as they arepersonifications of economic categories, embodiments ofparticular class-relations and class interests. My stand-point, from which the evolution of the economic forma-tion of society is viewed as a process of natural history,can less than any other make the individual responsiblefor relations whose creature he remains, however much hemay subjectively rise above them.

In the early 20th century, the “superorganic”Anthropology of Kroeber and White indeed envi-sioned a great cultural critter, with people as it weretrapped in its belly as it proceeded on its owncourse. “Behold now the behemoth…he is a king

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whole new cast of characters, featuring bourgeoissubjects, national subjects, postmodern subjects, latecapitalist subjects, colonial subjects, postcolonialsubjects, postcolonial African subjects, not to forget“the easily recognized wounded subject of themodern liberal state.” Then too there are theCartesian selves and the Melanesian selves, the neo-liberal selves and the subaltern selves, plus a wholepopulation of subjectivities: globalized, hybridized,creolized, modernized, commoditized and other-wized. It is a brave new world that has such peoplein it. Just as ancient mythologies could representcosmic forces in anthropomorphic guises, so in thepages of scholarly journals these abstract personifi-cations of cultural macrocosms now strut and frettheir hour upon the stage doing…what, exactly?

Well, if not exactly nothing, not too much it seems.Occasionally there are inflated claims: as those madeof a certain “late socialist subject,” who according toan article in Public Culture was the “source” and“inner logic” of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Orcurious promises, as those of certain practitioners of“progressive social theory,” concerned “with thestatus and formulation of the subject, the implica-tions of a theory of the subject for a theory ofdemocracy.” But it is difficult to see how suchconcern for the subject can compensate for thehistorical formations and dynamics that have thusbeen anthropomorphized. All we get is postcolonial

structuralist,” inasmuch as it theoretically dissolvesthe structures—families, schools, hospitals, philan-thropies, technologies, etc.—into their instrumentaleffects of discipline and control. It is the classic acidbath of functionalist wisdom, reducing the actualsubstance of the institution to its conjecturedpurposes and consequences. Also classic is the effec-tive resolution of the problem to the simple society-individual dualism. Indeed, it all ends with thereturn of the repressed individual—Subjectology.

For with this dissolution of cultural orders intosubjugation effects, the only thing left standing, theonly thing substantively remaining to the analysis, isthe subject into whom these totalities have beeninterpolated—or the subject thus interpellated. Theeffect is indeed ironic because the original project ofLeviathanology, insofar as it was opposed to RadicalIndividualism, was to reduce the individual subjectto nullity. But in the upshot, all the structureshaving been erased as such in favor of their instru-mental effects, the subject is the only thing left withany attributes of agency or efficacy. Hence thereturn of the very metaphysics of the subject that theanalysis had meant to deny. Suddenly the pages ofthe up-to-date journals are filled with all kinds ofsubjects, subjectivities and selves, thus with anAnthropology in the form of allegory, telling tales ofcultural forms and forces in terms of abstract collec-tive persons. Taking the place of the structures is a

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Subjectology ContinuedThe secret is that Culture and Personality is back.“Subjectivity” is nothing new. Recall Ruth Benedict’sPatterns of Culture, which “patterns” turn out to becollective-subjective dispositions. (Just as essential-ized as the more recent subjectivities, they are alsoas much in need of Lacanian psychoanalysis.) TheChrysanthemum and the Sword, for that matter, is anunsung classic of Subjectology. And how ‘bout goodole “national character”?

The antithesis, it seems, is always preserved in itsneighbor. Leviathanology and Subjectology are inendless oscillation. To paraphrase Marx, culturologyhas never gone beyond the antithesis between itselfand individualism, and the latter will accompany itas its legitimate negation up to their blessed end.

subjects who resist (but in what determinate way?);colonial subjects who are disciplined or repressed(again, in what way?); bourgeois subjects who arealienated or wounded (like you and me?) or else whocommodify (what?) or consume (what?); nationalsubjects who identify (with what?), or other suchtautological people. If a cultural or historical analysiswere really wanted, one would have to return to thestructural conditions that had been lost in the trans-lation to subjective terms.

Nor will the liturgical invocation of "multiplesubject positions" do much good. Either the multi-plicity is resolved into pure individualism, since inprinciple there are as many subject positions as thereare individuals; or it replicates Leviathanology ingeneral by generating a school of whales, a collec-tion of essentialized, collective persons instead of theone giant one. Either way, Leviathanology ends upin the tautology with which Radical Individualismbegan: with an abstract and ideal subject possessingthe whole kingdom of social ends in the form of hisor her own private ends. In the theoretical event, allthe evils that were supposed to belong to culture,essentialization, totalization and their ilk, also gottransferred to this poor shnook.

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Borrrrrrring!Thomas Kuhn and others have wondered whetherthe social sciences have paradigms and paradigmshifts like the natural sciences. Nothing seems to getconcluded because some say that the natural sciencesdon’t even have them, and others that in the socialsciences you couldn’t tell a paradigm from a fad.Still, considering the successive eras of functionalexplanation of cultural forms—first, by theirsupposed effects in promoting social solidarity, then,by their economic utility, and lately, as modes ofhegemonic power—there does seem to be some-thing like a Kuhnian movement in the socialsciences. Though there is at least one importantcontrast to the natural sciences.

In the social sciences, the pressure to shift from onetheoretical regime to another, say from economicbenefits to power effects, does not appear to followfrom the piling up of anomalies in the waning para-digm, as it does in natural science. In the socialsciences, paradigms are not outmoded because theyexplain less and less, but rather because they explainmore and more—until, all too soon, they areexplaining just about everything. There is an infla-tion effect in social science paradigms, which quicklycheapens them. The way that “power” explainseverything from Vietnamese second person plural

Past History“Did Thucydides,” asks the classicist SimonHornblower, “ever envision a time when civilizedhuman beings would not speak what we call ancientGreek?” Because he clearly did not, anthropologistshave always been prepared to back Herodotus as“the father of history.” Herodotus recounted all thetales, tall and short, that the “barbarians” told him:an ethnographic bent that appealed to anthropolo-gists, but led the less credulous historians toconsider him rather “the father of lies.” Add into thecomparison Thucydides’ belief in a self-interestedhuman nature and the rational-realism of IR politics,and you will see why he has been the model ofWestern historiography ever since. So ifAnthropology was for too long the study of “history-less peoples,” history for even longer was studying“cultureless peoples.”

Fortunately, all that past history is also pastAnthropology, if not vice versa.

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Double IdentityThose who talk a lot about identity politics oftenpractice it in the way they talk about it. (You knowwhat I mean.)

pronouns to Brazilian workers’ architectural brico-lage, African Christianity or Japanese sumowrestling. But then, if the paradigm begins to seemless and less attractive, it is not really for the stan-dard logical or methodological reasons. It is notbecause in thus explaining everything, powerexplains nothing, or because differences are beingattributed to similarities, or because contents aredissolved in their (presumed) effects. It’s becauseeverything turns out to be the same: power.Paradigms change in the social sciences because,their persuasiveness really being more political thanempirical, they become commonplace universals.People get tired of them. They get bored.

In fact power is already worn out. Borrrring! As themillennium turns over, the new eternal paradigm dujour is identity politics. The handwriting is on thewall: I read where fly-fishing for trout is a way theEnglish bourgeoisie of the late nineteenth centurydeveloped a national identity. “In nineteenth centuryEngland, fishing, not less than war, was politics byother means,” writes anthropologist RichardWashabaugh in a book called Deep Trout. (Is this titlea play on Clifford Geertz, so to speak, or on “DeepThroat”?) Well, the idea gets at least some credi-bility from the fact that fishing is indeed the mostboring sport on television. Coming soon: the iden-tity politics of bowling, X-games, women’s pocketbilliards, and Nascar racing.

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The Political Economy of theHumanitiesAnthropologists have become the working-class ofthe Cultural Studies movement. Relegated to thestatus of ethnographic proles in the academic divi-sion of labor, they are the ones condemned to longdays, months and years of dirty and uncomfortable(field) work. Their minds numbed by laboring onobdurate cultural realities, they leave higher theoryto English professors. These cult studs are thethinking class, an emancipated (and emancipating)literati, while anthropologists are content to be thesubaltern clients of their hegemonic discourses.

Anthropologists of the world unite…

Know ThyselfAnthropologists generally live in the most capital-istic and commodified societies in the world. Alongwith all other human scientists, including cult studs,they tell us that capitalism and commodification arehegemonic forces cum discourses that enslave peopleto particular ontologies or regimes of truth: notablythose that resolve persons and the objects of theirexistence to exchange values. But do anthropolo-gists, living under the worst of such regimes, reallyexperience themselves as culturally unfree? And howcould they even conceive, let alone experience,cultural differences, the otherness of others?Hegemony is supposed to determine not only whatone thinks but also what one cannot think. Thismakes Anthropology a performatic contradiction ofthe latest cultural theory.

There is a certain species of academic whiffle birdthat is known to fly in ever-decreasing hermeneuticcircles until…

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them with all the necessary means of administration,regulation and compulsion. But the Athenian empirewas domination without administration. In manyways it was an empire of signs—signs of power:magnificent, draconian or both at once, that broughtother states more or less voluntarily into submission,perhaps for their own advantage and protection butsurely on pain of their destruction. Athens did notdirectly rule the others, but everywhere she couldshe intervened in local politics, often by force or byshow of force, to create proxy democracies thatwould be like and compliant with her own.Imperialism as a democratic mission. Many of thetributary cities were nominally “allies,” culturallybound to Athens by common heritage (as IonianGreeks) and politically bound in a League of whichshe was the hegemon. Securing the sea routes andthe resources of trade, the empire was the politicalcondition of the great commercial enterprise thatmade Athens the richest and most populous city-state of the Hellenic world. In turn the wealth theAthenians drew from the empire went into thedisplays of high culture and brute force by whichthey kept it under control.

The marvelous and the murderous: an empire ofdomination without administration works largely bydemonstration-effects of its power. On the onehand, Athens was a spectacle of culture that func-tioned—to adopt a Hobbesian phrase of gover-

An Empire of a Certain KindRallying the Athenians after a second year of warwith the Spartans, the second year of thePeloponnesian War, Pericles warned his countrymenthat they were not only in peril of losing theirempire but of suffering “from the animositiesincurred in its exercise.” “For what you hold,” hetold them, “is, to speak somewhat plainly, a tyranny.Perhaps it was wrong to take it, but it would bedangerous to let it go.” Tyranny abroad was thework of the first and (some would say) the greatestdemocracy known to history. But then, the same sortof contradiction between freedom and subjugationinhabited Athens’ domestic politics, where immi-grants, slaves and their descendants, as well aswomen, were denied many of the democratic privi-leges enjoyed by the minority of the population, thefull male citizens.

The Athenians developed an empire of a distinctivekind—and distinctively disposed to brew up avolatile mixture of attraction and humiliation amongthe people dominated by it. It was not like theEuropean colonial empires of modern times thatphysically imposed their own state on other territo-ries and societies. Gained by invasion and main-tained by occupation, such imperial states were actu-ally sovereign over the subject peoples, governing

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economical, aiming to induce the fear and obedienceof the many out of the brutal example made of thefew. So argued the bellicose Cleon, urging theAthenians to respond to the revolt of the allied cityof Mytilene by exterminating the lot of them.“Punish them as they deserve,” he said, “and teachyour allies by a striking example that the penalty ofrebellion is death.” In this case, a counter argument(to the same exemplary effect) that it would beunwise to kill the innocent common people, whowere everywhere Athens’ natural democratic allies,limited the Athenians to the slaughter of the 1000 orso Mytilinean aristocrats they held responsible. Butin the famous case of Melos, a Spartan colony thatwould not submit to the Athenians, offering insteadto remain neutral and friendly to them, the outcomewas much less fortunate. Your friendship, theAthenians told them, would only be “an argument toour subjects of our weakness.” This was thesixteenth year of the Peloponnesian war, well afterthe Mytilene affair, when demonstrations ofAthenian might and resolve were taking on moreand more strategic value. So now, delivering an ulti-matum to the Melians, they in effect said, you’reeither with us or you’re against us. If states maintaintheir independence, it means they are strong, and if“we do not molest them it is because we are afraid;so that beside extending our empire, we should gainin security by your subjection.” Counting on thejustice of their cause and the feckless hope that the

nance—“to keep them all in awe.” Such was thepolitics of this glory that was Greece: the magnifi-cence of her architecture and art, the brilliance ofher theater, the glittering processions and cere-monies, the Academy and the Agora, the gymnasiaand the symposia. “Our city,” boasted Isocrates, “is afestival for those who come to visit her.” Subjectcities notably visited her with their annual tributes atthe time of the principal religious festival, the CityDionysia, which was also the theater season. Eventhose who never saw Athens could know her superi-ority by the reputation of her writers and philoso-phers, her politicians and her athletes. Almostinevitably, then, her greatest enemy, oligarchicSparta, opposed her by a strategy of cultural nega-tion: adopting a material fundamentalism and a puri-tanical moralism that denied the values Athens knewas civilization. A mere collection of old-fashionedvillages, Sparta, commented Thucydides, could showno measure of her fame in the poverty of theremains she would leave for posterity; whereas, theruins of Athens in time to come would make herpower seem twice as great as it actually was. On theother hand, those who were not awed by Athens’glory, who did not acknowledge her superiority orrevolted against it, would feel her sting—again byway of demonstration.

In the empire of signs, force too is a sign of force,perhaps the most effective if not always the most

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materiel and manpower; as conversely, increasingcommerce meant developing the maritime-militarystrength necessary to secure it. Democratic Athensbecame a predatory power. Yet its burgeoning popu-lation and business soon made it dependant on crit-ical energy imports from barbarian (i.e., non-Greek)lands situated at the limits of its military force: therich food grains of distant Sicily, Egypt, and theCrimea. Placed at the center of a sphere of domina-tion that was thus moving outward in many direc-tions, Athenian interests, costs and dangers were allsubject to geographic multiplication on the order ofthe square of the radius of an expanding circumfer-ence times 3.14159. To meet its difficulties, Athenscould put pressure on fellow Greeks, as by turningallies into tributaries, or she could find new barbar-ians to conquer. In either case, the empire thatbrought well being in the homeland spread humilia-tion and resentment abroad. Caught in a viciouscycle of expansion and repression, Athens could begenerally detested in the same degree she becameglorious and admired.

The Peloponnesian war was a testimony to this cycleof domination and resistance—and over time, exag-gerated it. As opposed to the incidents that set it off,the war’s “truest cause,” as Thucydides said in afamous passage, “was the growing power of theAthenians and the fear this inspired in the Spartans.”If the war then required the Athenians to further

Spartans or the gods would save them, the Meliansrefused to surrender, and were wiped out. All themen were killed, all the women and children soldinto slavery. Not that they hadn’t been warned ofAthens’ will to power. “Of the gods we believe,” theAthenians told them, “and of men we know, that bya necessary law of their nature they rule whereverthey can.”

Thus driven by a desire of power after power, theAthenians in the end overreached themselves, andthey lost everything. They had gotten to the pointwhere it seemed they would collapse if they couldnot expand. “We cannot fix the exact limit at whichour empire shall stop; we have reached a position inwhich we must not be content with retaining whatwe have but must scheme to extend it, for if wecease to rule others, we shall be in danger of beingruled ourselves.” So spoke Alcibiades in winning theapproval of the Athenian assembly for the grandioseSicilian campaign that ended in complete disaster,and set the course of empire toward decline anddefeat. But already at the beginning, nearly fiftyyears before the Peloponnesian war, when theAthenians, in beating off the Persian menace,discovered their own destiny as a sea power, they setin motion a geopolitics of expansion that was almosta formula for spinning out of control. Increasingrule of the seas meant developing the commercialpower that would deliver the necessary money,

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exploit their “growing power,” it also offered theirsubjects new possibilities of revolt and (Spartan)liberation. Cleon’s warning to the Athenians in thefifth year of the conflict was even stronger thanPericles’—“your empire is a despotism and yoursubjects disaffected conspirators”—and events didnot prove him wrong. At the end of the war, as theSpartans under Lysander closed in on their besiegedand starving city, the Athenians, as Xenephon said,mourned for their loss and still more for their fate,as they feared they would be dealt with as they haddealt with so many other peoples. All Greecerejoiced to see this city fall and those they haddriven out of their own cities now restored to them.Thucydides tells us that he did not set out to write ahistory merely in order to please the immediatepublic. He dared to hope his recounting of thePeloponnesian war would “last forever”—inasmuchas human histories of this kind were sure to happenagain. So he would be content, he said, “if thesewords of mine are judged useful by those who wantto understand clearly the events which happened inthe past and which, in the course of human things,will at some time or other and in much the sameways, be repeated in the future.”(Social Analysis, Spring 2002) �

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