From Text to Context: How Anthropology Makes Its Subject

Abstract

Much has been said about writing culture. I argue that, underlying anthropological lies not just ethnographer as author but, more importantly, institutional embeddedness of scientificity and rootedness of academia in a public sphere. I have chosen to review critically development of anthropology of Taiwan to show in what senses it shares problematic features with social scientific subjectivity everywhere. At same time I will describe certain excesses in bureaucratization and politicization of knowledge.' Moreover, indigenous anthropologists have ironically long been studying their own societies-but not in way it has been trumpeted naively by advocates of the new ethnography. Far from being pristine, content and form of this knowledge reiterate even more academia's embeddedness in politics of public sphere. Over 25 years ago, in a work largely ignored by mainstream academics that became a cult classic among counterculture anthropology students, Robert Murphy (1971) pointed out that breadth and diversity of U.S. anthropology, as opposed to British anthropology, for example, were less a matter of intellectual influences than a function of rules of tenure and modes of academic