Comment: Interrogating the neo-pluralist orthodoxy in American anthropology

Abstract

Rarely do I read an essay where I disagree with so many of the parts yet admire the whole. Yet, this is how I felt upon reading Anthony Marcus's timely essay, "Interrogating the Neo-Pluralist Orthodoxy in American Anthropology." A good deal of his essay appears to be a critique of a specific article by Akhil Gupta, and for many readers it is his specific critique of Gupta that will have the greatest value. He is, nevertheless, clearly making a larger argument about anthropology, and I therefore will for the most part avoid commenting on his reading or critique of this article. His overall call for a critical reexamination of the anthropology of the state and the need to critically reexamine our engagements with adjunct disciplines is timely and necessary. Most of my problems with Dr. Marcus's essay reduce to two points with which I suspect the author would in some way agree. First, in questioning some prominent thinkers' (e.g., Gupta) positions on the anthropology of the state, he accepts their claims or assumptions about the history of political anthropology. Marcus provides an accurate account of the mainstream narrative of anthropology's engagement of the state. However, I disagree that the dominant narrative is accurate or at any rate complete. As Joan Vincent taught us some time ago, there are many other genealogies of political anthropology and we should no more take a colleague's official account of his discipline at face value than we would take any other informant's official account of his culture at face value (1990). There are several places where the essay points to other genealogies, but they are given insufficient attention. Second, had Dr. Marcus generally written "states" instead of "the state," he would be making his argument just as clearly, and I would find little to fault in it.