From: pound@ruf.rice.edu (Christopher Brian Pound)
Subject: What anthropologists study and how 
Organization: Rice University
Date: Tue, 13 Oct 1992 17:07:29 GMT

In article <-1366950854snx@Gilsys.DIALix.oz.au> gil@Gilsys.DIALix.oz.au (Gil Hardwick) writes:
>In article <1992Oct11.033626.10551@midway.uchicago.edu> coonstot@midway.uchicago.edu writes:
> > Either I have not made myself clear, or I am in total misunderstanding
> > of one of my own fields of study.  I argue that anthropology
> > studies the interaction of the individual, the participation of
> > the individual 
> >                 . . .  interaction of individuals which may
> > or may not involve institutions.
>
>What you have plainly not done, sir, is read any Anthropology. If one
>of your fields of study is in fact Anthropology, you are indeed in
>total misunderstanding of it. Absolutely lacking any comprehension of
>the material whatsoever.

What you clearly haven't learned is a need for caution when throwing around
poorly-defined umbrella terms that cover up complexity.  The previous poster
isn't wrong, just maybe a little too careful in his word choice.

>Anthropology studies societies and cultures. The method is *ethnographic*.

What you clearly haven't done is read any Anthropology published in the past
ten years, and it's obvious you missed a good deal before that too.  You said
in a previous post something on the order of "Culture is a well-understood
concept and has been for some time" (my newsreader still has it if you think
I ought to read it again), and now you've got a definition of anthropology
that relies on that opinion.

The fact is, there are any number of ways to construct the culture concept
as a way of legitimating your work.  Kroeber and Kluckhohn found six
different types of definitions of culture (enumeratively descriptive,
historical, normative, psychological, structural, and genetic -- and
believe me, psychological doesn't mean "coming from psychology").  It's not
unheard of for anthropologists to want to do away with the notion entirely.

Lila Abu-Lughod argues that the term "'culture' operates in anthropological
discourse to enforce separations that inevitably carry a sense of hierarchy"
(in "Writing Against Culture," _Recapturing Anthropology_ ed. by R. Fox).

Michael Taussig goes a long way in transforming the culture concept as a tool
for social analysis in _The Nervous System_; it began as a study of terror in
Colombia . . . 

	"What mattered for terror was how it was passed from mouth to mouth
across a nation, from page to page, from image to body.  There was truth
enough.  And here I was implicating myself into that very chain.  Then it
swung into view again, _Nervous System_, now connecting . . . A System, all
right, switchboard of the commanding heights, delicate in the power of its
centrality.  But there was no System.  Just a Nervous System, far more 
dangerous, illusions of order congealed by fear -- an updated version of what
. . . Brecht had written in the 1930s, obsessed with ordered disorder, the
exception _and_ the rule.  "Hard to explain, even if it is the custom, Hard
to understand, even if it is the rule."

Overly poetic? Sure, whatever; that's just a matter of taste.  What's critical
is the way Taussig's idea here grooves with contemporary understandings of
hegemony and the trouble it presents for social analysis.

"Anthropology studies societies and cultures" doesn't quite cut it these days
especially if you're an anthropologist studying diasporas and issues of
transculturation, hybridization, or creolization (_ethnoscapes_ as Appadurai
would say).  Our "objects" of scrutiny just don't have good enough boundaries
for that definition to make sense; besides, plenty of anthropologists are
really only interested in a particular category of social analysis (law,
expert cultures, information, gender, language, whatever . . .) and couldn't
care less about (whole) societies or (whole) cultures.

You say "The method is *ethnographic*"?  Well, sure, I'd buy that as it stands,
but from the way you ragged on the previous poster for making individuals the
objects of anthropological inquiry, I doubt you're thinking of, say, life
histories (e.g. Crapanzano's _Tuhami_) or autobiographical works (e.g. Limon's
upcoming _Dancing with the Devil_) when you talk about ethnography.  Maybe
I'm wrong, but I think these kind of (ethnographic) works were what the
previous poster was referring to when he mentioned all that stuff about
individuals; that's not wrong, just maybe incomplete and overly cautious.
 
>The literature of Anthropology is manifest and abundant, and nowhere
>does it study either the interaction or the participation of the
>individual however long you want to stand there and argue references
>to an idea of your very own about "the individual-type study (???)

Oh, I see I was right in concluding that you hadn't thought about life
histories and autobiographical works as ethnography at all.  Your loss,
I guess.

>Interaction with what? Participation in what? What on earth is an
>"individual-type study"? The most attention we pay to individuals is
>as informants of their own society and culture, but we do not study
>them as such.

I refer you immediately to Dorinne Kondo's _Crafting Selves: Power, Gender,
and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace_.  Studies of identity/
ethnicity formation (by anthropologists) *do* pay attention to individuals 
"as such."  They serve indexical functions if they aren't all textually ground
up, as they would be in a realist (as opposed to a modernist) ethnography.

>Thank you for your interest in this news group.
>
>--
>Gil Hardwick                                      gil@Gilsys.DIALix.oz.au
>Independent Consulting Ethnologist                            3:690/660.6
>PERTH, Western Australia                                 (+61 9) 399 2401
>   * * Sustainable Community Development & Environmental Education * *

Oh, you're too kind!

-- 
Christopher Pound	+	I am human by my hands and my feet, my guts,
Anthro Grad Student	+	my meat heart, my stomach whose knots fasten
pound@ruf.rice.edu	+	me to the rot of life.	   -- Antonin Artaud