On the Call for a Militant Anthropology: The Complexity of "Doing the Right Thing"

Author(s): Steven Robins and Nancy Scheper-Hughes

Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 37, No. 2 (Apr., 1996), pp. 341-346
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for
Anthropological Research
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2744354
Accessed: 09-05-2016 09:33 UTC

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

The University of Chicago Press, Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological

Research are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Current Anthropology

This content downloaded from 137.204.150.28 on Mon, 09 May 2016 09:33:09 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
This content downloaded from 137.204.150.28 on Mon, 09 May 2016 09:33:09 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 342 CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY
ulated by a government-orchestrated "third force")
daily slaughtered each other in and around worker
hostels in the name of "tribe," "ethnicity," and "cul-
ture." The relativizing, deconstructionist exercise
seemed irrelevant to the material history of op-
pressed and oppressor "tribes" in South Africa and
to the recovery of "spoiled identities" and "spoiled
ethnicities" . . . in the politically negotiated process
of new-nation building.
She claims for herself the moral high ground as custo-
dian of a nonrelativizing militant anthropology without
any attempt to understand the historically situated po-
litical motivations that produced these pedagogical tac-
ticts and "deconstructive" exercises.
Scheper-Hughes seems unaware that these "decon-
structive exercises" closely converged with the ANC's
response to apartheid propaganda claims of immutable
and primordial cultural difference that were dissemi-
nated in the schools, radio, television, and (some) uni-
versities. For a young white student entering the UCT
anthropology department in the early I98os this consti-
tuted a powerful critique of apartheid. In other words,
the political salience of deconstructing essentialist
"tribal" discourse in Anthropology ioi corresponded to
the liberation movement's attempts to decenter apart-
heid ideas about immutable cultural and ethnic differ-
ences. If anything, one could say that Scheper-Hughes's
UCT colleagues were too activist in their teaching.
However, the political imperative for challenging pri-
mordialist ideas about cultural identity has exerted a
powerful influence in the wake of the ongoing bloodshed
in KwaZulu/Natal and right-wing bombings prior to the
April I994 democratic elections.
These pedagogical tactics in the small spaces of lec-
ture rooms profoundly influenced students arriving at
university after having been exposed to apartheid educa-
tion and the fictions of primordialist ethnic identities.
For Scheper-Hughes, however, these anthropologists
were merely "drinking tea, talking about trifles, with-
drawing from the struggle." Commenting on Scheper-
Hughes's article, Kuper (CA 36:424-26) correctly points
out that English-speaking anthropologists were gener-
ally ANC supporters and sometimes "reproached for
allowing a political agenda to steer their scholarship" (p.
425). Kuper concludes that Scheper-Hughes presents a
caricature of colleagues who were actively involved in
research focused on the social dislocation and violence
of apartheid. Referring to Gordon and Spiegel's (I993)
overview of South African anthropology, he argues that
it is "little short of outrageous" that Scheper-Hughes
does not cite a single study from the University of Cape
Town department in the past decade.
Scheper-Hughes entirely ignores the history of "ap-
plied" or activist anthropology in South Africa. She does
not refer to the extensive literature on the politics of
knowledge that emerged in the I96os, I970s, and I98os
in response to the role of British, Dutch, and French
anthropologists in colonialism or of North American an-
thropologists in South-East Asia and Latin America (Bas-
This content downloaded from 137.204.150.28 on Mon, 09 May 2016 09:33:09 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
tide I973, Faris I973, Frank I979, Onoge I979, Grillo
and Rew i985). Although relatively little has been writ-
ten about "applied" anthropology in South Africa, it is
neverthless surprising that Scheper-Hughes does not
even mention that one of her colleagues at the Uni-
versity of Cape Town, John Sharp, has written on the
German-influenced Volkekunde anthropologists who
supplied apartheid ideologues with their "cultural
expertise" on "tribal customs." In fact, one of the archi-
tects of apartheid, W. W. M. Eiselin, who happened to
be the late Prime Minister H. F. Verwoerd's right-hand
man, became the head of the first Volkekunde depart-
ment at Stellenbosch University in I928 and is regarded
as the cofounder of Afrikaner anthropology (Sharp I98I:
29). Eiselin and the Volkekundiges provided the intellec-
tual framework for a segregationist ideology that consid-
ered South Africa's nine "ethnic" groups timeless,
bounded, immutable, and mutually incompatible ethnic
nations-an ideology drawn upon in an attempt by the
apartheid state to legitimate the Bantustan ("home-
land") system.
In perhaps an even more extreme reaction than that of
the North American anthropologists who rallied against
colleagues who collaborated with the U.S. military in
Vietnam (Grillo and Rew i985), Scheper-Hughes's col-
leagues at the University of Cape Town-as well as
anthropologists at Witwatersrand, Rhodes, and Natal
Universities-severed all ties with the Volkekunde an-
thropologists. Yet, Scheper-Hughes seems unaware of
the huge chasm and antagonism between these two
camps. The pedagogical tactics of UCT faculty in the
I980s were aimed at challenging the ideas of Volke-
kunde anthropology. These small acts of resistance may
not compare with wielding an AK-47, but they neverthe-
less challenged apartheid propaganda that many white
students were exposed to prior to coming to university.
In their challenges to essentialist and primordialist
notions of culture, race, and ethnicity, a number of
South African anthropologists at English-speaking uni-
versities in the I980s, ended up endorsing a vulgar
Marxism that rendered cultural identities as mere super-
structural epiphenoma or "false consciousness." Such
orthodox marxism convinced students like me that eth-
nic identities would undermine the solidarity of the
working class and the national liberation movement and
buttress the divisive and oppressive Bantustan system.
So we dutifully drew on class analysis, deconstructed
racial and ethnic identities, and reconfirmed our com-
mitment to a nonracial, unified South Africa. This fear
of the dangers and divisiveness of cultural, racial, and
ethnic difference prevented us from recognizing the
emancipatory potential of cultural identities and
struggles.
The South Africa of the I99Os, however, has created
the political space for all kinds of previously unthink-
able projects, including ones that take seriously the mul-
tiplicity of cultural identities and struggles. While the
ANC remains committed to nation building, a unitary
state, and an ideology of nonracialism, since the i99OS
it has been less concerned with containing and repress-

ing expressions of cultural and "ethnic" difference.
These days cultural difference is even celebrated by the
ANC, as was evident in the official theme of President
Mandela's inauguration in I994: "One Nation, Many
Cultures." Clearly, cultural difference is no longer
feared as an apartheid strategy of divide and rule.
Scheper-Hughes fails to recognize the political and
historical context within which the deconstructive
moves of South African anthropologists were located.
She dismisses this pedagogical project as politically ir-
relevant either because it is not sufficiently "militant"
for her or because she assumes that this was all that was
happening in South African anthropology. In fact, she
gives no indication that she knows what research any
University of Cape Town anthropologists and their stu-
dents were doing in the I98os. In i982 I was part of a
group of four post-graduate students who went to rural
areas in South Africa to investigate the social impact of
forced removals in South Africa's Bantustans. The ratio-
nale for this project was the need to document rural
poverty as part of a national research project coordinated
by the economist Francis Wilson. We believed that this
work would one day be useful to a future democratic
(ANC) government committed to developing the chroni-
cally overcrowded and impoverished human dumping
grounds of the Bantustan system.
Scheper-Hughes calls for a "militant anthropology"
without any understanding of the motivation for send-
ing post-graduate students to Transkei, Ciskei, Qwaqwa,
Lesotho. Instead of attempting to engage with the work
of members of the UCT Anthropology Department, she
resorts to caricatures of the departmental tea-room as a
colonial outpost. She does not address the profound need
for decolonizing the white-dominated discipline, a prob-
lem that U.S. anthropologists are equally aware of in
their own departments. Having recently relocated to the
predominantly black and "coloured" University of the
Western Cape, I am even more convinced of the urgency
of this task. It involves radical pedagogical innovations
in contexts where the acquisition of conventional aca-
demic literacies and the ethnographic canon(s) are expe-
rienced as alienating and intimidating. Transformation
of our universities may require not "truth commissions"
to examine the "complicity" of academic disciplines
with apartheid but a radical rethinking of dominant aca-
demic discourses and practices.
The call for anthropologists to intervene when they
encounter violence and injustice is not necessarily prob-
lematic. However, depending on the context, the inter-
vention of the "great white" anthropologist can smack
of paternalism and elitism and may aggravate rather
than alleviate the suffering of the "beneficiaries" (see
Grillo and Rew i985). Whether or not to intervene and
which side to take in the field are generally not as unam-
biguous and obvious as in Scheper-Hughes's interven-
tion in a Cape Town shantytown. Even if we accept that
she ought to have intervened in this instance, as many
of us no doubt would have, most field situations in
South Africa in the ig80s would have been considerably
less straightforward.
This content downloaded from 137.204.150.28 on Mon, 09 May 2016 09:33:09 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Volume 37, Number 2, April I996 | 343
Scheper-Hughes's call to side with "the oppressed" is
problematic because of her tendency to treat this group
as an undifferentiated category. Even during the darkest
days of apartheid, siding with "the oppressed" was
fraught with complexity and ambiguity. For example,
in the mid-ig8os Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the
then-Reverend Allan Boesak placed their lives and polit-
ical credibility on the line when they intervened to save
the lives of suspected "impimpis" (police informers)
whom angry crowds were determined to "necklace."
These courageous clerics could themselves have been
necklaced for attempting to save the lives of "the en-
emy." Similarly, press photographers were caught up in
ethical dilemmas when police demanded their photo-
graphs of such events in order to identify suspects. With
the death of apartheid it is even more problematic to
view "the oppressed" as a homogeneous grouping, and
"doing the right thing" more than ever requires a sophis-
ticated and nuanced understanding of the micropolitics
of local situations. The notion that the militant anthro-
pologist will have no problem identifying the oppressed
and the oppressor ignores the immense difficulties and
dilemmas that arise in fieldwork situations when local
factions and power brokers deploy "outsiders" (e.g., an-
thropologists) to further all types of "unprogressive" and
exploitative ends, often in the name of the oppressed
masses.
Clearly an argument could be made for anthropolo-
gists to intervene more directly in local struggles and
situations in specific contexts. However, this requires
a thorough understanding of the complexities of local
understandings and power relations. We may hope that
South African anthropologists will continue to be in-
volved in "applied" research and contribute to the
growth of an anthropology of development interventions
rather than retreating into the insular world of the acad-
emy and esoteric intellectualism. Scheper-Hughes's call
for a militant anthropology is unlikely to have much
impact in South Africa, but perhaps it will help to per-
suade North American anthropologists to grapple more
seriously with the desperate poverty and racial violence
experienced by those who live in the urban ghettos bor-
dering the policed universities of Hyde Park, Berkeley,
and Morningside Heights. While North American an-
thropologists such as Allen Feldman are doing impor-
tant work on AIDs, substance abuse, and homelessness,
they remain outside an academy that looks upon "ap-
plied" anthropology with some disdain.
My own fieldwork encounters convince me that doing
the right thing is far more complicated than Scheper-
Hughes cares to acknowledge. Moreover, if the reflexive
move in anthropology has taught us anything, it has
made us more acutely aware of the asymmetrical power
relations that shape most fieldwork encounters. Unless
there is critical reflection on these questions, the call
for a militant anthropology could begin to resonate with
images of U.S. "peace-keeping" interventions in the Per-
sian Gulf, Haiti, Grenada, Panama, Vietnam, and Korea.
Do we want to be associated with a new paternalism-a
"Pax Anthropologica"?
344 CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY
Reply
NANCY SCHEPER-HUGHES
Department of Anthropology, University of California,
Berkeley, Calif. 94720, U.S.A. I3 xI 95
"The Primacy of the Ethical" argues for a dual vision of
anthropology as a disciplinary field-a field of study-
and as a force field-a site of struggle and resistance.
The essay is not about South African anthropology, but
it does make reference in a few contentious paragraphs
to social anthropology in Cape Town. The statements
referred to the final year of the democratic transition,
I993-94, which constituted the "ethnographic present"
of my research and teaching year in South Africa. I sug-
gested that anthropology in Cape Town at that time was
experiencing some theoretical confusion and paralysis.
The latter was captured in a poignant moment-the tab-
leau of several members of the Department of Social
Anthropology at Cape Town sitting forlornly in the de-
partmental tearoom at high noon on April 27 during the
first-ever democratic elections in South Africa. They
were quietly discussing, over the nervous clink-clink of
teacups, the day's task: dismantling a field research stor-
age room crowded with long unused and unwieldy can-
vas tents, rusted mess-kits, half-used bottles of insect
repellent, and torn mosquito nets. And so, just as the
clatter of the ubiquitous tea-cart rumbles through the
satirical novels of the late Barbara Pym (some of these-
see, for example, Pym [I9871-dealing with British anti-
quarians and anthropologists), the tearoom emerged in
my commentary as a generative metaphor of postcolo-
nial British anthropology in South Africa.
White writing. Anthropology, like all academic disci-
plines in South Africa, suffered from the imposed isola-
tion of the academic boycott. One reaction was a bunker
mentality manifested in an obsessive self-preoccupation
that nonetheless fell short of a radically self-reflexive
postcolonial critique. It had been politically expedient
for British-speaking South African anthropologists to
"demonize"-not that this was entirely inappropriate-
Afrikaner anthropology for having served as a willing
and complicit tool of the apartheid state (see Sharp I98I,
Gordon I988) while defending the Anglophone tradition
of social anthropology as an intellectual force in the
antiapartheid struggle (see Boonzaier and Sharp I988).
But there were some lapses and lacunae in this history.
Despite pockets of activist resistance among social an-
thropologists and their students as early as the I970S,
for the most part social anthropology coexisted with
apartheid and survived at the English-language South
African universities (Cape Town, Witwatersrand, Natal,
and Rhodes) by sidestepping active political engagement
or critique. As W. D. Hammond-Tooke (I970:80) of
Rhodes University analyzed the situation for English-
speaking South African anthropologists at that time:
Much more serious is the complete dependence of
the [anthropological] researcher on the good will and
co-operation of the Department of Bantu Administra-
This content downloaded from 137.204.150.28 on Mon, 09 May 2016 09:33:09 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
tion and Colored Affairs. Permits are necessary for
entrance into non-White areas and can be summarily
withdrawn with no reasons given.... The general ef-
fect of this uncertainty is to force the research
worker to "play it safe" . . . by selecting as politi-
cally neutral a topic as possible . . . [avoiding
anything that] criticizes government policy either im-
plicitly or explicitly.
There were exceptions, of course. Among 2oth-
century South African anthropologists were Isaac Schap-
era and Monica Wilson, individuals of international stat-
ure and great moral integrity. In his day Schapera went
against the grain of conventional British social anthro-
pology by calling for the study of contemporary prob-
lems, what he called the the "here and now" of South
Africans, including the study of the large "Cape Col-
oured" population of the Western Cape, whose special
social and political reality had been largely overlooked
by social anthropologists interested only in "tribal"
South Africans. As early as the mid-I930s, Schapera in-
sisted that the colonial administrator and the mission-
ary were as much a part of the tribal social system "as
the chief and the magician" (Schapera I935:3I7) and
that they should be studied together. But through all,
Schapera "never openly took up a political stance in any-
thing he wrote" (Gluckman I975:27). He preferred writ-
ing detailed and comprehensive ethnographies filled
with facts to concerning himself with "superficially ex-
citing [political] analyses, inadequately grounded in
facts."
Monica Wilson, for her part, was sorely distressed
when her friend and UCT colleague the historian Jack
Simmons was "detained" and then "banned" for his ex-
plicitly antiapartheid politics, but she did not resign
from her prestigious post as senior professor in protest
of this action. The business of anthropology proceeded
as usual. Wilson was critical of the state, although al-
ways in her quiet and unassuming way (see, for example,
Wilson I975). It was said in her defense that "Cookie,"
her African servant, was allowed to wear the banned
ANC colors when she served table in the Wilson house-
hold in Cape Town. And one could "read between the
lines" that Wilson was often arguing in her writings
against the structure of migrant labour. Although she
invited the former South African president, Jan Smuts,
the so-called civilized white supremacist, to write the
prologue for one of her books, her son, Francis Wilson,
commented at a seminar in Cape Town honoring his
mother in May I994 that she "probably would not have
done so as her own political awareness grew in later
decades."
Perhaps the most egregious lapse came from the most
unlikely place. Max Gluckman, who took his first de-
gree in anthropology at the University of Witwaters-
rand before emigrating to Great Britain, published an
essay in I975 on "Anthropology and Apartheid" in
which he chastised these "younger anthropologists"
who "alleged" that the colonial system dominated the
research and writings of social anthropologists working

in the "dependent territories" of Africa. Gluckman
noted that some South African anthropologists "were
deeply influenced positively by the policy of segregation
which, after the election of the nationalist, dominantly
Afrikaner, Government in I948 . . . became hardened
into what is called apartheid (separateness)." Gluckman
certainly fell into the sticky web of apartheid ideology
when he noted that perhaps there was "some good,"
after all, in the apartheid notion "that indigenous cul-
ture is excellent in its own right ... and something they
should cling to and fight for, just as Afrikaners fought for
their language and culture against the might of English
culture" (Gluckman I975 :2I-22). "I consider it un-
wise," he continued, "to neglect the ideological basis
which sees African culture not only as appropriate and
valuable for Africans, but Zulu culture as good for Zulu,
Xhosa culture as good for Xhosa, Pedi culture for Pedi,
etc. . . . There have also been 'liberal' segregationists
who, in my judgement, tended to emphasize the beauty
and harmony, and even the appropriate uniqueness, of
each African culture" (p. 22). This sentence alone in the
recent annals of South African anthropology merits a
formal apology from the profession.
If the choice for Anglophone white South African an-
thropologists was not exactly "adapt or die," it was a
case of "accommodate or pursue anthropology else-
where." This was, in fact, what a great many white
South African anthropologists did, thereby greatly en-
riching our profession in the United States and the
United Kingdom. Not all South African anthropologists,
of course, had equal opportunity to do so, and some pre-
ferred to remain and to struggle-a choice fraught with
difficulty and danger. Taking an explicit political posi-
tion cost the life of one South African anthropological
activist, David Webster, in i989. Other burdens accom-
panied the choice to remain in South Africa. Ian Glenn
(I994), a professor of English at UCT, noted that a "poli-
tics of suspicion" hangs over the work of all contempo-
rary white South African intellectuals and academics.
Their life's work is often read through the mandatory
and "politically correct" prism of political relevancy:
Where does this fit into the struggle?
Still, I continue to question the failure of Anglophone
South African anthropology, particularly at UCT, to pro-
duce even a small cohort of black South African anthro-
pologists in the second half of the 20th century when
other disciplines and professions at UCT (law, medicine,
religious studies) have found ways of circumventing
state-imposed obstacles to do so. Of course, Dr. Mam-
phele Ramphele, now poised to become in January I996
the first black South African vice-chancellor of the Uni-
versity of Cape Town, is the dramatic exception. But
what if even a small number of other black South Afri-
cans had been given a similar opportunity and encour-
agement to study anthropology? That process is just now
beginning in earnest; Ramphele (i995:5) chides her uni-
versity for continuing to churn out "good little En-
glishmen" and calls for a "decolonization" process
which would "make a clean break with colonial En-
gland" (see Cape Times, October 6, I995).
This content downloaded from 137.204.150.28 on Mon, 09 May 2016 09:33:09 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Volume 37, Number 2, April I996 | 345
Who speaks for whom? Despite his provocative com-
ments (stated above), Gluckman and most of his white
South African colleagues did not participate in the "cul-
tural uniqueness" discourse that was favored (for obvi-
ous reasons) by the apartheid government. If anything,
they tended to go to the opposite extreme, favoring "uni-
versalist" discourses and avoiding references to distinct
cultural traditions. Many white South African anthro-
pologists, including Gluckman, were intellectual marx-
ists who used political economic paradigms to explain
social differences. They emphasized the biological simi-
larities and the shared human intellectual and social ca-
pacities of all peoples.
The anthropology faculty of UCT in I993-94 were
and are, as Robins notes, well-known progressives who
took issue with the former state's racist ideology, which
explained social and economic differences in terms of
biological race and a biologized notion of "culture" (bet-
ter read, perhaps, as kultur). Beginning in the i980s, they
pursued a large teaching and theoretical research project
aimed at deconstructing "race," "ethnicity," "tribe,"
"gender," and "culture" (see Boonzaier and Sharp I988).
Any emphasis on "cultural difference," uniqueness, and
distinctiveness was seen as playing into the hands of the
apartheid government. But since this South African Key-
words project was not accompanied by a relentless, self-
reflexive critique, it reproduced other paradoxes.
For one, the project to obliterate the idea of unique
cultures and traditions (now to be understood as social
fictions and historical inventions) discredited the com-
plicated attempts of some marginalized groups in South
Africa, such as the resettled "Bushmen" of Kagga-Kama
and the "coloured" population of the Cape Flats, to re-
claim a social, cultural, and political space, albeit one
that flies in the face of ANC priorities and politics.
Moreover, the Keywords project was taught in a top-
down, obligatory manner stifling attempts to explore al-
ternative meanings, references, and uses of culture, eth-
nicity, and tribe.
When, near the end of this period, Harriet Nugubane,
a British-trained South African anthropologist, was ap-
pointed a professor at UCT-the first black South Afri-
can to fill such a position in the Department of Social
Anthropology-she met a chilly reception from her
white male colleagues. She departed from their obliga-
tory deconstructionism to argue, instead, for the distinc-
tive cultural identity of her native South African Zulu
community (see Nugubane I 988). The irony was not lost
on Nugubane that she, a black South African woman,
was simultaneously viewed as a "colonialist" and
treated as an "outsider." She noted the arrogance of
those who criticized her classes, modified her examina-
tion questions, and made her feel superfluous.
If we have learned one thing from the postcolonial,
multicultural arguments that have emerged since the
publication of Said's Orientalism in I979 it is respect
for the right of individuals and groups to claim their
own social self-identity. It did not escape Nugubane and
other black intellectuals at UCT that the "no race-no
tribe-no culture" rhetoric of white South African an-
 346 CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY
thropologists best served their personal, social, and po-
litical interests. In the postapartheid, democratic, and
African majoritarian state, white South Africans would
have the most to gain from radically deconstructed no-
tions of ethnicity, race, and culture.
References Cited
BASTIDE, R. I973. Applied anthropology. London: Croom Helm.
BOONZAIER, E., AND J. SHARP. Editors. I988. South African
keywords. Cape Town: David Philip.
FARIS, J. C. I973. "Pax Britannica and the Sudan: S. F. Nadel,"
in Anthropology and the colonial encounter. Edited by T.
Asad. London: Ithaca Press.
FRANK, A. G. I979. "Anthropology = ideology, applied anthro-
pology = politics," in The politics of anthropology. Edited by
G. Huizer and B. Mannheim. The Hague: Mouton.
GLENN, IAN. I994. Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee, and the pol-
itics of interpretation. South Atlantic Quarterly 93(I).
GLUCKMAN, MAX. I975. "Anthropology and apartheid: The
work of South African anthropologists," in Studies in African
social anthropology. Edited by Meyer Fortes and Sheila Pat-
terson, pp. 2I-39. London and New York: Academic Press.
G O R D O N, RBER T. I 9 8 8. Apartheid's anthropologists: The gene-
alogy of Afrikaner anthropology. American Ethnologist I 5:
535-53.
GORDON, R. J., AND A. D. SPIEGEL. I993. Southern Africa re-
visited. Annual Review of Anthropology 22:83-I05.
GRILLO, R., AND A. REW. I985. Social anthropology and devel-
opment policy. (ASA Monograph 23.) London and New York:
Tavistock.
HAMMOND-TOOKE, W. D. I970. "Anthropology at English-
language South African universities," in Southern African stud-
ies. Edited by M. R. Kettle and R. P. Moss, pp. 78-8I. Lon-
don: African Studies Association of the United Kingdom.
KUPER, ADAM. I995. Comment on: Moral models in anthropol-
ogy, by Roy D'Andrade, and The primacy of the ethical, by
Nancy Scheper-Hughes. CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY 36:424-26.
NUGUBANE, HARRIET. I988. Reshaping social anthropology. Pa-
per presented at the Department of Social Anthropology, Uni-
versity of Durban-Westville, South Africa.
ON 0 GE, 0. F. I979. "The counter-revolutionary tradition in Afri-
can studies: The case of applied anthropology," in The politics
of anthropology. Edited by G. Huizer and B. Mannheim. The
Hague: Mouton.
PYM, BARBARA. I987. Less than angels. New York: Harper and
Row.
RAMPHELE, MAMPHELE. I995. My vision of UCT beyond 2000.
Cape Town: University of Cape Town.
SAID, EDWARD. I979. Orientalism. New York: Random House.
SCHAPERA, ISAAC. I935. Field methods in the study of modern
culture contact. Africa 8:3I5-28.
SCHEPER-HUGHES, NANCY. I995. The primacy of the ethical:
Propositions for a militant anthropology. CURRENT ANTHROPOL-
OGY 36:409-20.
SHARP, JOHN S. I98I. The roots of development of Volkekunde
in South Africa. Journal of Southern African Studies
8(I):I6-36.
WILSON, MONICA. I975.... So truth be in the feld. Afred and
Winifred Hoernle Memorial Lecture, University of Cape Town,
South Africa.
This content downloaded from 137.204.150.28 on Mon, 09 May 2016 09:33:09 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
On Archaeological Theory:
Who's Who in Setting
the Agenda?
L. S. KLEJN
Zheleznovodskaya 27, #27, Sanct-Petersburg I99 I55,
Russia. 5 VII 95
I am surprised by Murray's (CA 36:290-92) stormy reac-
tion to my review (CA 34:508-II) of the collection in
which he participated (Yoffee and Sherratt I993). What
strikes me most about it is its error in perceiving the
general characteristics that I (justly or unjustly) attri-
bute to a whole approach as applying to every individual
advocate of that approach. For example, with reference
to whole Third World, I remarked on the poor, hungry,
and downtrodden, and Murray immediately feels of-
fended for Australia. Let Klejn keep his sympathy for his
fellow Russians, he suggests. Well, I shall. The Russians
are changing their social system now, experiencing vari-
ous collisions and indeed sometimes finding themselves
unable to cope with their difficulties. Further, I sug-
gested that in general contemporary archaeological and
anthropological relativism resulted from a subconscious
weariness in the advanced nations with the troubles of
peoples until recently colonial- a weariness stimulated
by feelings of guilt. But this does not mean that I sup-
pose every relativist to be weary and guilt-ridden.
Klejn has misread me, Murray declares, and does not
understand our context. Of course, I could well be con-
fused about that distant context, could be incorrectly
reading statements in a foreign language abounding in
idioms and scholarly slang, but let us turn to the particu-
lar realization of these accusations:
i. "Klejn tars all the contributors with the same broad
relativist brush" (p. 29i). Not all of them. I tried to dif-
ferentiate the articles presented in the collection, to see
which ones were stronger and which weaker, which
nearer to processualism and which to postprocessual-
ism, which relativist and which not. In particular, Mur-
ray stipulates that he does not always follow relativism,
but in reality he expounds nearly everything in the rela-
tivist spirit.
2. Klejn considers "all of the many varieties of relativ-
ism to imply a kind of 'antiobjectivism"' (p. 29o). What
"varieties of relativism" are meant here? Objectivism
can be understood as the absolutization of the objective
perception of reality. Perhaps Murray calls rejecting ab-
solutization a milder variety of relativism? To me both
relativism and absolutization of the objective perception
of reality (I hesitate to call it objectivism) are extremes,
and both are bad.
3. Klejn does not see that relativism has contributed
something useful to our discipline and "does not under-
stand that there is a middle ground between objectivism
and relativism in archaeological epistemology" (p. 292).
However, I indicated the positive contributions of the