The Theater of Fact and Its Critics

Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography by James Clifford; George E.
Marcus
Review by: Roy Wagner
Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 59, No. 2, Ethnographic Realities/Authorial Ambiguities
(Apr., 1986), pp. 97-99
Published by: The George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research
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 THE THEATER OF FACT AND ITS CRITICS
W'riting Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. JAMES CLIFFORD and GEORGE E.
MARCUS,editors. Berkeley CA:University of California Press, 1986; 345 pages, $29.95
(cloth), $9.95 (paper).
If every age has its distinctive art form--
so that the architecture of Mozart's day
could be called "musical," the painting of the
Renaissance"statuesque"-then criticism is
the art of our times. WritingCulturemarks the
anthropological, rather than the musical,
painterly, social, or political, genre of this
aesthetic. And if criticism is truly an aesthetic,
its achievements have more to do with rais-
ing the level of awareness than with any
specific goals the critic (think of Marx's
Manifesto, Nietzsche's superman) has in
mind. This is an important caveat for an
important book, one that includes some of
the best critical wvritingin anthropology.
James Clifford's introduction, "Partial
Truths," presents what is likely the most
comprehensive overview of an anthropologi-
cal object that is itself a discussion, an
exploration, a critique, and a self-critique.
Clifford develops the parameters of the
"postmodern" hermeneutic against the foil
of scientistic factuality and literalism, argu-
ing that ethnographic truths are "...inherently
partial-committed and incomplete" (p.7).
He thus faults scientific literalism in its own
terms, for of course a powerful theory or a
readable ethnography always presents a
truth that is "partial"in several senses of the
word, as indeed it may well be that any truth
worth telling is necessarily partial.
Mary Louise Pratt asks in Chapter 2,
"How...could such interesting people doing
such interesting things produce such dull
books?" Her answer, dealing with the con-
tradiction within anthropology between per-
sonal and scientific authority, reviews histor-
ically the uneasy placement of personal
narrative in anthropological and pre-anthro-
pological accounts. The exotic travel narra-
tive is a genre larger than anthropology,
whose ironies, problems, and solutions
develop a history of their own. It is the grow-
ing circumspection of the genre itself, Pratt
implies, that heralds the self-consciousness
of postmodern anthropology.
Hermes, the god who is trickster and
messenger at once, who "steals" his message
97
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Reviewed by ROY WAGNER
University of Virginia
in the act of delivering it, is Vincent Crapan-
zano's potent metaphor for the metaphoriz-
ing ethnographer. The authority of the
messenger who never swore "to tell the
whole truth" to make his message convinc-
ing becomes the (hermetic) seal upon the
message itself. Crapanzano, like Pratt,
appeals to a genre that is larger than
anthropology itself; his examples include
George Catlin's shocked revelation of an
1832 Mandan ceremony, Goethe's account
of the Roman Carnival, and Clifford Geertz's
reading of the text of a Balinese cockfight.
Each exemplifies a particular style of
authority and therefore of allegory and...
theft.
Viewing the French "ethnographer of his-
tory" Le Roy Ladurie from the door, so to
speak, of E.E. Evans-Pritchard's tent and
reading Evans-Pritchard's Nuer as analogues
of Ladurie's medieval shepherds, Renato
Rosaldo develops an incisive cross-herm-
eneutic of ethnographic authority. "Stealing"
an allegory like Crapanzano's Hermes, each
ethnographer "launders" relations of harsh
domination (testimony to the Inquisition in
Ladurie's case, support from a regime that
was bombing and raiding the Nuer in Evans-
Pritchard's) into a rough-hewn pastoral
idyll.
Moving from the hermeneutical facticity
of authority to its allegorizing intent, James
Clifford rises, as well, to the fullness of
anthropological comprehension. Allegory in
his sense is the inescapable condition of
meaningful discourse about others. Thus
ethnographies, including modern, aware
reportage like Marjorie Shostak's Nisa and
classics like TheNuer,are but modes or types
of allegory. Clifford's delineation of the issue
through types like the "salvage" allegory(the
"rescue" of a "dying" people that of course
"kills" its subject matter) to the allegorizing
tendency of inscription itself is extra-
ordinarily comprehensive and powerful.
Stephen A. Tyler's concise, highly con-
densed, often cryptic projection of a post-
modern ethnography that in effect succeeds
98 ANTHROPOLOGICALQUARTERLY
science (pp.123-25) addresses the failure,
rather than the success, of ethnographic
authority. Discourse cannot determine its
effects; the holistic trope is a function of
author-text-reader with infinite loci and an
indeterminate range of possible evocations.
If our (scientific) theories of meaning cannot
control meaning, then the failure of ethnog-
raphy is something more than mere politics.
Ethnography, for Tyler, is not a record of
experience; "...itis the means of experience.
That experience became experience only in
the writing of the ethnography" (p.138).
Authority then is more a matter of experienc-
ing interpretation than of interpreting exper-
ience. The reflexivity of this subtle but
extremely important point is in many re-
spects the meta-message of the book..and
its own most potent self-criticism.
Talal Asad turns from the possibilities of
saying to the difficult issue of translation. In
an extensive examination and critique of
Gellner's Conceptsand Society,Asad pinpoints
the problematic of "cultural translation" in
the excessive literalness of that assumption,
the nonequivalent ("strong versus weak")
status of languages, and finally the decep-
tive equation of a language's formalism with
a culture's.
The problematic of ethnographic charac-
terization is a significant feature of George
E. Marcus's sensitive and intensive analysis
of Paul Willis's Learning to Labour. In this
study of the nurturing and growth of a
counter-culture of protest masculinity (under-
stood by its author as class-awareness) amid
the ruins of Britain's industrial revolution, the
provocativeness of the work itself derives
very much from its subject matter. This
makes it a foil for a number of astute critical
points; does it not, Marcus asks, make a"sys-
tem" of established order so as to make its
own message live? Do not ethnography and
participant observation themselves submit
to a similar"tunnel vision?" The effort indeed
compounds reflexivity by capitalizing on one
side of a two-sided relation by making, as it
were, a reflexive monopole.
Michael M.J. Fischer's exploration of
ethnicity as a style of making new worlds
(rather than old worlds) of memory moves
into a terrain liberated by Tyler's realization
of discourse's non-determination of its
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effects. The autobiographical nature of
much writing on ethnicity turns the question
of authority back upon itself: to be surprised
by a past one takes responsibility for is to
evoke, rather than impose, authority. Fischer
reviews styles of mnemonic surprise in
Armenian-American,Chinese-American, Black
American, Chicano, and Native American
ethnic autobiography. It is rather unfor-
tunate, given the originality and power of
Fischer's conception, that these surveys of
style in Part IIof the chapter are not brought
to a conclusive statement to match the pro-
mise of Part I.
Representation is a philosophical issue
older than epistemology in the West; under-
standing it as historically and contextually
contingent, rather than epistemologically
grounded, Paul Rabinow essays what we
could call its "French Impressionism." Follow-
ing Richard Rorty and Michel Foucault,
Rabinow delineates a postmodern era in
which representation has become self-
conscious. His sensitive portrait of James
Cliffordas an ethnologist of ethnologists and
originator of the analysis of ethnographic
authority humanizes the critical aspects of
the quest, as his summary overview of
postmodernism (and modernism), dialogics,
and ethics delineates the ambiguities of an
art in which "how to paint" has become more
important than what is painted.
In a brief but concise Afterword George
Marcus examines the relation of ethno-
graphic writing to anthropological careers-
a subject that, as the contributing authors
would tend to agree, merits a more extended
treatment. In his discussion Marcus notes
that anthropologists, unlike historians, are
faced with the task of inscribing fieldwork-
experience, I would add, hence also a realm of
condensed imagery and interaction whose
possibilities are always larger than those of
inscription itself.
This point with its implication of Tyler's
message of the experientiality of interpreta-
tion returns us to the focal issue of authority
("author-ity").The striking thing about ethno-
graphic authority is that, implicit in prac-
tically every line of an ethnography, it is
hardly ever enough by itself to carry the main
point of an argument. (When it does become
the main issue, as in the Mead-Freeman con-
 THEATER OF FACT
troversy, it triggers fierce debate.) If the
experience becomes an experience only in
the writing of the ethnography, then the
authority derives (as author-ity should) from
the experience of writing culture. And if this
is the case, then a crucial factor in the con-
stitution of authority is the theoretical basis
according to which its canons of relevance
and interpretation are condensed. (Indeed it
is this condensation and its articulative
power that makes the experience of writing
ethnography.) Something of this point can
be found in the notion of "allegory"developed
in Crapanzano's, Rosaldo's, and Clifford's
contributions. But allegory involves primarily
the presentation of a subject matter, whereas
theory subsumes subject and allegory
together within a realm that transcends the
merely factual, or the referential underpin-
nings of hermeneutic.
The bent of "commonsense" thinking is
that theory is the mascara, the greasepaint,
with which fact is tricked out for dramatic dis-
play to a pragmatic audience. In truth it
seems to be the other way around: fact is the
make-up, the mascara, and authority (why
else would Evans-Pritchard and Malinowski
play at it with such ingenuous self-mockery)
is the play within the play, the theater, as I
shall call it, of fact.
Anthropological Quarterly
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99
It is this theater of fact, closely related, as
Pratt has pointed out, to the tradition of the
exotic travel narrative, to which much of the
criticism of Writing Culture is addressed. The
ideal, implied by many of the contributors,
would be some sort of ultimately self-aware,
holistic dialogics-a reformed theater of fact.
But it would seem as though such an
achievement must either amount to criticism
itself developed as an art form (a "fact of
theater," as it were) or be impossible. For the
ideal of the "postmodern" project is that it
wants to do with ethnography what a more
self-assured and less cynical anthropology
("Grand Theory," as the cant goes) did with
theory-develop powerful and decisive canons
of comprehension. Yet field experience is
not the experience of comprehension, and
the authority of writing culture is not the
authority of fact.
What can be said for the.postmodern proj-
ect, other than that a genre that makes it
almost as difficult to tell an honest lie as to
tell the honest truth is, at the very least,
remarkably circumspect? If criticism is
indeed an art form and the high standards
and often brilliant critiques of WritingCulture
represent the state of the art, then the proj-
ect stands a chance of raising the aware-
ness of anthropology and raising the level of
insight that informs its goals.
April 1986, 59:2