The Problem of the Unseen World of Wealth for the Rich: Toward an Ethnography of Complex Connections

Abstract

This paper is an effort to outline a major challenge (as well as opportunity) for a developing ethnography of modernity within anthropology through ironic reference to a traditional anthropological problem in the traditional arena of traditional society. The focus is on how the construction of order in everyday (modern or traditional) life depends on the postulation of at least dual, parallel worlds, one of which is unseen. In a broader sense, this paper reflects an effort to recast, but sustain, the comparative framework so central to anthropology's identity as ethnography and equally central to the discipline, to expand its capacity for representation in posing new questions and new objects for study. The foundation of cultural order among the Kaluli, the people of the Great Papuan Plateau of New Guinea so vividly represented by the Schieffelins and Steve Feld, rests on the positing of an unseen world that intimately parallels the happenings of everyday life. As Edward Schieffelin has written: