Argumentation and Self: The Enactment of Identity in "Dances with Wolves.".

An intellectual historian of the year 2010, if such a person is imaginable, may even look back on the first two-thirds of our century and observe that this was a time when Western intellectuals were preoccupied with grounds of meaning and identity they called "culture" and "language" (much the way we now look at the nineteenth century and perceive there is a problematic concern with evolutionary "history" and "progress"). I think we are seeing signs that the privilege given to natural languages and, as it were, natural cultures, is dissolving. These objects and epistemological grounds are now appearing as constructs, achieved fictions, containing and domesticating heteroglossia. In a world with too many voices speaking all at once, a world where syncretism and parodic invention are becoming the rule, not the exception, an urban, multinational world of institutional transience-where American clothes made in Korea are worn by young people in Russia, where everyone's "roots" are in some degree cut-in such a world it becomes increasingly difficult to attach human identity and meaning to a coherent "culture" or "language." - James Clifford (95) As the human sciences in the twentieth century have turned increasingly to theories of the symbol as the "new key" (Langer) to understanding social processes and products, basic categories of analysis have been transformed from things into meanings. Indeed, "culture" itself has been recast as the entirety of the "webs of significance" which humanity spins, and within which it entraps itself (Geertz). The broad spectrum of forms of popular communication, including film, music, television, advertising, public discourse, magazines, and so on, become media that individuals and groups consume, constructing personal identities and cultural identifications in the process. Notions of self ("me") and society ("us") are built up and embedded in these practices. Under pressures from critical theory, post-structuralism, post-colonial cultural criticism, and other post-modernist currents that have problematized "essentialist" conceptions of culture, human agency, and meaning itself, particular attention has been paid to the manner in which notions of self and society are achieved only at the expense of an Other ("them"). "Our" identity, the general argument runs, is neither given nor natural, but is defined in opposition to what is alien and threatening (gender, race, ethnicity, etc.), a condition typically disguised by our hegemonic impulse to universalize or totalize our own individual and collective identities by displacing, marginalizing, silencing "their" voices. (Or, if suspicious of attributions of agency, one might say that this condition is disguised by the hegemonic power of oppressive "discursive formations" - to borrow Foucault's phrase - that we reproduce.) The function of critique then becomes to unmask these totalizing visions, to reveal the manner in which supposedly "natural" and "given" forms of life are in fact representations that, born of conflict, suppress competing alternatives and oppress those who would live them. While the postmodernist challenge has fomented a "crisis of representation" (Marcus and Fischer) in the human sciences generally, in anthropology - where "culture" is an especially important construct - this crisis informs what James Clifford calls the "post-colonial crisis of ethnographic authority" (8). Clifford argues that cultural identities should be seen as "conjunctural, not essential": "Because discourse in global power systems is elaborated vis-a-vis, a sense of difference or distinctness can never be located solely in the continuity of a culture or tradition" (11). There are no autonomous, "pure" or "authentic" cultures whose boundaries can be marked independently of their opposition to yet other cultures in which, in the opposing, they are implicated. Thus, Clifford says: Questionable acts of purification are involved in any attainment of a promised land, return to "original" sources, or gathering up of a true tradition. …