On the Relevance of Anthropology

Abstract

NEW RELEASES Jeremy MacClancy (ed). Exotic No More: Anthropology on the Front Lines Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. 384 pp. In the early 1920s, the critical theorist Georg Lukacs published a stinging indictment of what he understood to be the impasse of capitalist modernity. Most generally, he perceived an increasing-and increasingly alienating-disconnection between abstract forms and substantive content in modern and in modern society. The disconnection pertained at once, and for the same reasons, to the privileging of a priori concepts as the measure of truth, and to the rise of impersonal and rationalized institutional forms as the measure of life. As moderns, Lukacs argued, we had driven ourselves into an impossible situation. We might choose to stick with our existing universalizing concepts and institutions, all the time remaining conscious of their failure to encompass the embodied experience of everyday life. This was the path of continuing alienation. On the hand, we might choose to approach our lives and our in a radically different way, and make both our institutions and our philosophy responsive and permeable to the concrete particularities of our lives. In Lukacs' own words: either thought regresses to the level of a naive, dogmatic rationalism, or alternatively, we are forced to concede that actuality, content, matter reaches right into the form, the structures of the forms and their interrelations and thus into the structure of the system (Lukacs 1971[1923]: 118, original emphasis). Good Hegelian Marxist that he was, Lukacs identified the second path with the world-historical revolutionary mission of the industrial proletariat. Few subscribe to this particular telos today. But the tension that Lukacs described is still very much with us. In this age of self-conscious globalization, it animates all our conversations about whether notions like civil society, free markets, and democratic institutions can integrate a worldful of social agendas into meaningful and just wholes. Consequently, the tension has also become a central structural focus in many cutting-edge ethnographic projects. When Lukacs published History and Class Consciousness in 1923, the discipline that we now recognize as modern anthropology was taking professional and institutional form. Through the experience of long-term immersion in fieldwork, many of its early practitioners literally came face to face with the limits of authoritative Euro-American assumptions. Not the least of these taken for granted concepts was modernity itself which, following the trauma of the Great War, was only gradually coming uncoupled from the normative ideas that had allowed it to define the gap between the West and the Rest: progress, enlightenment, transcendent reason. From the beginning, anthropology confronted the complacent assumptions of a hegemonic civilization with difference, concretely and painstakingly documented, rather than speculatively deduced. Equally, however, anthropology was always deeply ambivalent about its own status as a science. Consequently, even as it strayed further and further from the armchair habitat that had cocooned the ethnologists of the nineteenth century, anthropology remained unwilling to jettison its reliance on metropolitan ways of knowing. This in itself was not a mistake; what was, however, unfortunate during this period was the tendency to reproduce the split between form and content in a segregated geo-political imaginary: on the one hand, a rationalizing and homogenizing Western modernity, on the a precious and perhaps threatened range of other lifeworlds, arrayed in formation across the globe. Even as anthropologists were frequently drawn towards partial identifications with their locations of study, the ontology of the discipline itself largely retained a reified separation between generalizing (universal) concepts and particularizing (local) data. …