Anthro-Signifying at the Millennium

Abstract

Introduction: Interpretive Language and Cultures Have interpretive anthropologists completely given up on shared, formal ways of apprehending expressive forms? Interpretive orthodoxies of past, despite their drawbacks, ensured reproduction of discipline by providing a reasonably effective tool kit any member could dip into and use. What among today's vanishing signs, mimetic doublings, and frequent dialogues approaches scope, power, and richness of Turner's architectonics of symbol or Geertz's thick description? The issue of sharedness emerges in a particular context that colors perception of problem - erosion of anthropological distinction. Other disciplines have appropriated topic of culture and broadened it to include everything from TV sets to corporate mindsets. Our methods too have been widely diffused while anthropology fragmented into anthropologies. Anthropology has always reproduced itself in engagement between two senses of word in phrases fieldwork and field of inquiry. The first refers to a laborious process of experiencing what is out there; other implies a coherent space of communicative possibility. Together, they enable practitioners to connect their experiences of often widely separated communities into meaningful wholes. Solutions to often-asked question, What is anthropology? which offer the culture concept or ethnography as operational definitions, provoke dissatisfaction because they fail to grasp this relational basis. They reduce anthropology to an essence, either cognitive or empirical, and preach its transmission to next generation. The question to ask is: Without essentialism, how can anthropologists secure reproduction of our own distinctiveness? These questions arise from reading two volumes that speak powerfully to each other about cultural anthropologies of future and past. Rhetorics of self-making (1995), edited by Debbora Battaglia, and The dialogic emergence of culture (1995), edited by Dennis Tedlock and Bruce Mannheim, are both result of invited sessions (1992 and 1984 respectively) at annual meetings of American Anthropological Association. Intertextual and insightful, each takes a different but comparable tack toward denaturing discipline, and so two effectively comment upon one another.' The Battaglia volume, hereafter RHETORICS, is engaged in seeking to privilege subjects' modes of knowledge and experience (p. 1). The Tedlock and Mannheim volume, hereafter DIALOGIC, abandons apt quotation for a collaborative enterprise that includes interpreter (p. 3) on equal dialogic footing. When read together they suggest a more comprehensive vision of ethnographic practice than either does separately. The boldest shared component of this vision is promotion of what we might call a virtuous alliance between ethnographer and informant - ethnographer makes her professional virtuosity concrete in sophisticated readings of interpretive virtues of her informants. The two key participants in construction of text, author/ethnographer and native/informant, mirror each other's cultural virtuosity and political virtue. This changes preferred textual devices for representing culture to dialogue, sympathetic characterization, appreciation of native agency, and plain, outspoken partisanship. Balanced with this affiliation is a rupture between practitioners and their disciplinary traditions conveyed through literary devices of critique and conversion. So anthropologist exits ivory tower for messy, tragic, political world. On this both volumes agree. They disagree, however, on where emphasis should fall in this new ethnographic practice. Should we continue to value traditional versions of ethnography? What problems are most exciting ones for future research? Which theoretical traditions deserve salvaging? …