Speaking of Tradition and Modernity: A Review Essay onHabits of the Heartand Other Recent Works on American Culture

Abstract

For some centuries now, we have been calling the counterpoint to traditional systems of meaning modernity. Today, as some indeterminate number and kinds of traditions (are said to) have lost or muted their voices to modernity's, we are situated, or lost (it is also said), in postmodernism. Anthropology's mission has to be counted as the most potently modernist of all the human sciences: it translates from many other tongues the ideas and forms that by their very existence assert a challenge to every other community's implicit belief in the authority of its own tradition. To suggest contingency and arbitrariness has been the whole comparative point. No less modernist is the anthropology of the contemporary United States, when it gives voice to what otherwise goes without saying by those from whom little has ever been heard, and when it reads between the lines of those who speak often. Sightreading the contemporary counterpoint between United States' traditions and current thought is a preoccupation of scholars in an studies' genre that includes social scientists, historians, and literary scholars. Their interpretations, listened to by scholars and a middle-class public alike, suggest patterns in relationships between history and values, between events and their meanings. In framing matters otherwise remote, opaque, and inchoate, many of these interpretations come to have long tenure as themselves ideologies. Such broad vision and critical works in the American studies genre are doubly interesting therefore: they tell students of cultures what some influential Americans see as being culture, structure, and history, and they manufacture social thought before our very eyes. My concern is with one detail of this interpretive process: the systems of meaning governing American cultural critics' apprehensions of the relationship between tradition and modernity. How do their understandings of the nature of that relationship influence the interpretations they produce? What kind of opposition do they posit? In ethnographically reading such works as a distinctive kind of Western cultural discourse built around a tradition/modernity distinction, I want to ask what the semantic and semiotic dimensions of a discourse might reveal beyond or about announced topics and methods.