Anthropology and Orientalism

Author(s): Nicholas Thomas

Source: Anthropology Today, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Apr., 1991), pp. 4-7
Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
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 American governable by) volition. Actively inquiring, Rick states: never can - it's almost like running yourself into the
epidemiology',in R. I'm really just at the point of touching on something that's ground. And that's what I think AIDS is too. You're just
Bolton, ed., TheAIDS importantand trying to physically stomp it down somehow so used up because all you've been doing is trying ...
Pandemic- A Global by getting sick and putting my attentiononto my physical
Emergency,pp.23-36. body instead of going to the root of all these physical Once Rick formulates this interpretation,he con-
New York:Gordonand symptoms. It might be mental. I think it is mental or tinues to embrace it in the interviews that follow. It is,
Breach;Sontag,S. 1989. emotional. perhaps, a 'lurid metaphor' - to use one of Sontag's
Aids and its Metaphors.
New York:Farrar,
expressions - but Rick is not simply a 'victim' of his
Shortly after, I ask Rick: beliefs. Although the general proposition 'emotional
Straussand Giroux.
2. Sontag,S. Do you have any idea about what that is? conflict creates illness' has been learned, what gives
1990[1978]. 'Illness as I always try to say exactly what comes to my mind, and Rick's specific interpretationsalience is 1) its corre-
metaphor.'In S. Sontag, what [comes] to my mind ... is [my] relationshipwith my
Dad. I'd like to remember when I started feeling bad be- spondence to past experience and 2) the adaptive func-
Illness as Metaphorand
cause he just had a birthdayMay 14 - three or four weeks tions it performs. Rick's relationshipwith his father is
.AIDSand its Metaphors,
pp. 1-87. New York: ago - and I missed it. I missed calling him. ... I really effectively signified by his illness because so many ele-
Doubleday. don't usually call [my Dad] for his birthday but I have ments of his currentexperience - his feelings of help-
3. Ibid., p. 43. been over the last years to heal my relationshipwith him, lessness, his humiliation,his sense of being neglected -
4. Ibid., p. 58. to do what I feel is expected of me. ...
can be organized aroundhis memories of this relation-
5. Louise Hay is an
When you just said that, I think it is some old crap that I ship. Representinghis illness as derived from this con-
ordainedministerof the
Churchof Religious
am still carrying around with him. I talked to my flict also increases Rick's sense of control because it
[younger] sister about it [on the phone] the other night. ... posits a manipulable situation. The metaphor further-
Science. In its emphasis
We both realized that [he] didn't expect anything out of
on prayerand mental more focuses Rick's attentionon his subjective need to
us. ... We were underratedas people with ability. ... I
healing, the Churchof resolve the actual relationship with his father - some-
think I stopped looking for affirmationthere of self-worth.
Religious Science thing Rick was in fact able to do, to an extent, before
resemblesand has been
influencedby the
Here, the metaphor of illness as volition assumes a his death three months following this interview.
ChristianScience full complex form. No longer is Rick deliberating be- Would Rick's death have been more virtuous if he
Church.Louise Hay was tween the action of another and his own action as an had embraced it with a sense of meaninglessness,
raisedin a Christian explanation for his illness. Now Rick embraces a more 'purified,' as Sontag advocates, of metaphoricthinking?
Science environmentas specific and at the same time more encompassing meta- The stance against metaphorimplies an ideal of censor-
a child by her mother, a
phor, equating his illness with the relationship between ship, I believe. In spite of their vulnerability,the ill do
ChristianScience
practitioner. his father and himself. not need to be protected from ideas. Metaphors are
6. Hay, L. L. 1984. When you asked me it struck this thing like - all the time fragments. The more fragments, the more there is to
YouCan Heal YourLife. it's the same thing with my Dad, the relationshipwe have. build from. And who is to say what sense can or should
Santa Monica: Hay And he wasn't a terrible person. He was just ... I don't be made out of illness? O
House, p. 151. know. Maybe I just didn't get what I expected. I couldn't
win or do good enough. So I always have to prove myself
now. And when you have to prove yourself now - and you

Anthropology
and Orientalism
NICHOLASTHOMAS

Nicholas Thomasis a If we suspect that in all scholarly disciplines, the custo-
Queen ElizabethII mary way of doing things both narcotizes and insulates the
Research Fellow guild member, we are saying something true about all
affiliated with the forms of disciplinary worldliness. Anthropology is not an
AustralianNational exception.I
University.His books No-one who reads literary,historical,anthropologicalor
include Out of time:
philosophicaljournals could have remainedunawareof
history and evolution in
anthropological the intense debate sparkedoff by EdwardSaid's Orien-
discourse(Cambridge talism. What is conspicuous is not just the amount of
U.P. 1989) and comment the book has prompted,but also the polariza-
Marquesansocieties tion of views, and the level of vituperation.For some it
(OxfordU.P. 1990). In
October 1987 he is 'three hundredpages of twisted, obscure, incoherent,
contributedan article to ill-informed, and badly-writtendiatribe'2; for others it
A.T. entitled 'Narrative seems to open a new field of problems and critiques.
as practice?: accessible Hence there seems only a choice of hypercriticaland
adventurein
Swallows and Amazons'. uncriticalpositions: the first is clearly the defensive re-
action of an 'Asian studies' discipline that has all too
much in common with the Orientalismit succeeded; the
second, perhapsreacting in turnto the first, presumably
overlooks Orientalism'sfaults and omissions. My inter-
est in this essay is in the reception of Said's work in
anthropology,and the separatequestion of what its real
challenge or relevance might amountto. Because books
are perceived entities as well as stable texts, this is
however a more complex issue than might be initially
apparent.Orientalismcontained scarcely any direct ref-
erences to anthropology- one of which was laudatory,
4 ANTHROPOLOGYTODAY Vol 7 No 2, April 1991
suggesting that particular anthropologists had evaded
the enduring stereotypes to which most Europeanwrit-
ers on the Middle East had resorted - but anthropolo-
gists have often responded to the book as though it
was, by implication, a critique of anthropology,just as
scholars in regions other than the Middle East have
taken an interest in 'Orientalist' images of Pacific Is-
landers, Africans, and Indians. One of the most com-
mon objections to the book is that the critique is over-
generalized, yet ironically much of the generalization
has been performed by readers of Orientalism rather
than by Said himself. This is so in both positive and
negative senses: on one side, the style of analysis
developed with respect to the Middle East and Islam
has been transposedto many other parts of the world,
and extended and modified in various ways. On the
other hand, references to the book - in seminar discus-
sions and conversation as well as in print - often con-
vey a perception of a more unambiguouslythreatening
and negative polemic than the text really seems to sus-
tain. The Orientalism often argued about may thus be
ratherdifferentfrom the book that Said wrote.
Much of the comment on Said from within anthro-
pology has been tentative and qualified, even from
those whose work is regarded as critical and experi-
mental in other respects:3 Michael Richardson's com-

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ment ('Enough Said', A.T., August 1990) appearsto be
EdwardSaid
essentially a defensive reaction that misconstrues and
deflects Said's observations more than it addresses or
challenges them. Though his concern is particularly
with Said's 'methodological assumptions', he makes
two quite elementary mistakes right at the start in
asserting, first, that Said is an idealist and, second, that
it is insisted that Orientalism'sperceptionsof the Orient
were false. The claim that the approach is 'manifestly
idealist' is based not on a quotation from Orientalism,
but from Christopher Miller's Blank darkness, which
serves equally well because he is a 'disciple' of Said's.
Never mind that Miller clearly also has substantial
theoretical debts to various more committed decon-
structionistcritics, such as Paul de Man (whose work is
discussed at greater length than Said's in Blank dark-
ness), but it is somewhat more unfortunatethat whereas
Miller writes that 'perceptionis determinedby Oriental-
ism ratherthan Orientalism's being determinedby per-
ception'4, Said's own propositions are quite different.
Because institutionalized Orientalism acquired such
authority, 'no-one writing, thinking, or acting on the
Orientcould do so without taking account of the limita-
tions of thoughtand action imposed by Orientalism.'
Said explicitly disowned the idea that 'Orientalism
unilaterally determines what can be said about the
Orient' and affirmed an interest in 'the determiningim-
print of individual writers upon the otherwise anony-
mous collective body of texts'5. Given the debates that
have raged over authorshipsince Barthes and others, it
hardly needs to be pointed out that this interest in the
perspectives of particularwriters places Said at some
remove from the main strandsof structuralistand post-
structuralist literary theory. Hence what is merely a
general and highly qualified premise which differs sig-
nificantly from a more rigorous deconstructionistposi-
tion, and which in fact seems to provide parametersfor
a more open inquiry into relationshipsbetween knowl-
edge and politics and the various manifestations of
Orientalism,is renderedas the book's dogmatic thesis.
This misreading aside, the more consequential error
seems to arise from a complete misunderstandingof
Said's theoreticalframework.Richardsonomits to men-
ANTHROPOLOGYTODAY Vol 7 No 2, April 1991
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tion that Said is drawing- admittedlyloosely - on Fou-
cault, and that Orientalismis understoodas a discourse,
not simply as an ideology or an arrayof ideas. In other
words, Orientalism was an institutionalizeddiscipline,
that possessed authority, that involved descriptive and
analytical practices that projected constructions of the
Orient in imaginative, sociological, military, and politi-
cal terms. For Foucault- and especially the Foucault of
Discipline and Punish, which Said appears particularly
indebted to - knowledge and power are mutually con-
stitutive. The imposition of philosophical straitjackets
which make any inquiry either materialistor idealist is
here entirely inappropriate;and when one reads Said's
assertionsthat 'never has there been a nonmaterialform
of Orientalism', and encounters again and again his
concern with the 'material effectiveness' of institution-
alized Orientalism in administration and policy, one
wonders how Richardsoncan have arrivedat his view.6
It is consistent with this non-recognition of the
theoretical ground that Richardsontakes Said to be in-
sisting that Orientalist perception 'was false.' To the
contrary, the interest is in establishing how it creates
truth.Hence, with respect to Lane's Modern Egyptians,
Said is concemed with the text's systematization and
organization, its use of detail, the role of the charac-
terizationof a typical life cycle, and so on: the question
is how the status of an unadorned, neutral and dis-
passionate account is evoked. And although many
generalized notions concerning the characterof particu-
lar colonized populations (such as postulates of 'the
lazy native') are clearly nothing other than pernicious
mystifications, the question of truth or falsity is not al-
ways the central issue. With respect to the great archive
of archaeological, philological and ethnological facts
conceming India that was inauguratedby Sir William
Jones and others in the Asiatick Journal, critiques of
Orientalismare not chiefly concemed to find fault with
translationsfrom Persianor Sanskrit,or revise drawings
of stone monuments.The point is ratherthat this infor-
mation became part of a prodigious archive, that
enabled the British to think that they knew India better
than Indiansever did themselves; this was never merely
an adjunctto rule, or a legitimizationof it, but ratheran
expression of dominance with its own distinctive aes-
thetics and peculiarintricacy.
More generally, Said's concem is with specifying
how the 'Orient' or the 'East' as an entity, could be a
reference point for extremely serious and confident
statements conceming, for instance, 'the Oriental
mind.' At this level, it must be clear that the Orient,
like 'America'7 in sixteenth and seventeenth century
ethnology, is not usefully understood as a real entity
that has been distorted by European writers, but as a
discursive construct. When, for instance, Lord Cromer
made pronouncements about the differences between
the capacities for logical thought in Egyptians and
Europeans - which were not merely idiosyncratic
views, but are reflected in a great variety of sources - it
is ludicrous to regard this negatively as error or bias.
The point is rather that such a characterizationwas
positive and productive, in the sense that it enabled a
larger understanding of social and racial difference
which made Europeangovernment in colonized territo-
ries appropriateand natural.
On this point, as James Clifford has pointed out,
Said's argumentsare certainly not consistent, in that he
sometimes departs from writers such as Foucault in
suggesting that there is a real Orient that is distorted or
dominated.8 Though Said does not address the issue
5
 clearly and explicitly, it would seem importantto rec-
ognize that there are political as well as analytical im-
peratives, and distinguish levels of specificity in texts
and propositions. That is, while it is crucial that analy-
sis deal with the economy of truth which certain ways
of characterizingtopography,natives, and colonization
entail, it is equally crucial to point out what the truths
obscure, displace, or occlude. For example, colonial
discourses in certain parts of the world frequently em-
phasized both the naturalrichness and the vacancy of
lands in which white settlement was proceeding or pro-
jected, and which were in fact occupied by peoples
such as Australian Aborigines. In this case, and with
regardto the denials of the existence of the Palestinian
people that were long central to Zionist writing and
propaganda,it is not that something - the savage or
terrorist- is perceived falsely, but that one construct
permits the life and rights to land of a real people to be
suppressed. Rather than explore the ambiguities of
Said's approach to these questions in any thorough
fashion, Richardson makes much of the inconsistency
between Said's extremely cursory references to Geertz
in quite different contexts, as if Geertz's work was not
sufficiently heterogeneous to prompt a variety of re-
sponses, and as if there was something terribly wrong
with changing one's mind. While these references are
accordeddisproportionatesignificance, neitherRichard-
son nor other critics who assert Said's ignorance9seem
to make any systematic attemptto deal with or fault the
extensive discussions of Lane, Renan, Flaubert and
1. EdwardSaid,
'Anthropology's
many others which in fact constitute the bulk of the
interlocutors: book.
representingthe
colonized', Critical Other problems arise because Richardson, like a
Inquiry 15 (1989), number of other writers, is mainly concerned with
p.213. taking Said's work as though it were a criticism of an-
2. PierreRyckmans thropology. It is quite understandablethat anthropolo-
(aka Simon Leys),
gists should be concerned with such issues, but Said
'Orientalismand
Sinology', Asian cannot be faulted for misrepresentinga field of work
StudiesAssociation of that he never sought to represent,or not providing ap-
AustraliaReview 7 (3), propriateterms to discuss it. Hence, while the question
p. 20; these comments of reciprocity, that, it is suggested, is overlooked by
are typical of a number Said, is no doubt importantin interpretingthe constitu-
of statementswhich tion of ethnographicknowledge, it is of less signifi-
appearedin a review
cance when we consider much Orientalist repre-
symposiumover
several issues of that sentation, such as Balfour's and Cromer's statements.
periodical.Among These referred to Egyptians and Orientals but were
more negative reviews, never addressed to them; even texts that are far more
that of RobertIrwin is complex and ambivalent, such Kipling's Kim - though
more consideredthan it was and is no doubt read by Indians - was con-
most: 'Writingabout structed with a British and Anglo-Indian readershipin
Islam and the Arabs',
mind. The Hegelian master-slave dialectic, which Ri-
Ideology and
Consciousness9
chardsonsuggests needs to be considered, is simply not
(1981/82), 103-112. of direct relevance in this context, because Orientalism
3. e.g. George E. Marcus has generally created representationsof the Orient for
and Michael J. J. the West, that have served various culturaland political
Fisher,Anthropology purposes, but have frequently not even been circulated
as cultural critique, in the countries that were purportedlyrepresented,let
Chicago: U. of alone imposed upon the populationsthere. The cultures
Chicago P., pp.1-2.
of the colonized have their own dynamics, which some-
4. ChristopherMiller,
Blank darkness: times engaged directly with colonizers' discourses,
Africanistdiscourse in through collaboration and resistance, but which never
French (Chicago: U. simply stood in relation to them as a subordinateterm.
Chicago P., 1985), p. Though Said has elsewhere writtenon Palestinianlife -
15. and Arab literature, cultural life in Cairo, and many
5. Orientalism(New other topics10- the impact of Orientalismon the Orient
York: Vintage, 1978),
is only indirectlytreatedin Orientalismitself.
pp.3, 23.
6. Said clearly also owes It is certainly the case, however, that anotherkind of
somethingto Raymond discussion could emphasize the interplay between out-
siders' and insiders' perspectives, and the ramifications
6 ANTHROPOLOGYTODAY Vol 7 No 2, April 1991
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of the former for constructionsof identity and ethnicity
in particularpopulations.Whetherthese would be well-
served by the Hegelian model, ratherthan historical at-
tention to the transformationof relationships and the
forms of encounters, is, however, a moot point; any
condensation of the self/other and subject/object op-
positions would seem to embody many of the difficul-
ties that efforts to rethink fieldwork and ethnographic
writing have sought to transcend.
It is a pity, given that his interest seems mainly to be
in the ramificationsof this literaturefor anthropology,
that Richardson had not read the essay of Said's that
specifically dealt with the discipline, and which did
something quite differentto merely extending the argu-
ments of Orientalism to anthropology. While Ri-
chardson warns us about the dangers of turning 'the
"Other"into an ill-defined universal' there appears to
be an equal risk of generalizing some quite specific
projects in literary criticism, anthropological theory,
discourse analysis, and contemporarypolitical commen-
tary into a 'post-modernist' criticism that is charac-
terized mainly by its objectionable subjectivism. The
subsumptionof Johannes Fabian's Time and the other
to this 'deconstructive'impulse is particularlymislead-
ing, given that the book manifestly owes more to an
earlier wave of interest in the communicativecharacter
of ethnographythat seemed influenced by hermeneutic
philosophy and Habermas rather than Nietzsche. But
perhaps any anti-positivism must 'fall into the trap of
all subjectivism and conflate general and specific cri-
tiques in a way that de-legitimizes both'? The critiques
of Said indeed indicate that this is a difficult trap to
avoid.
This is not to say that Orientalism does not have
faults or limitations. Because of the novelty of its pro-
ject, some homogenization of the object of study was
almost inevitable; though critical discussion of
European perceptions of non-Europeans was not, of
course, a new endeavour,Said redirectedsuch inquiries
by dealing not with a history of ideas or images, but
with a discourse, that was understoodas a systemic, en-
during entity. While the earlier genre had emphasized
stereotypesand particularvisions of others, Said's book
suggested the very significant epistemic level at which
discourses such as Orientalism could work: they pro-
duced representationswith considerablepolitical weight
and authority.Once the field had been opened up, how-
ever, it obviously becomes more productiveto examine
Orientalismsor colonial discourses in their plurality.As
Said as well as many of his critics anticipated, much
more attentionmight be paid to the differences between
traditionsof orientalistscholarshipin various European
countries, traditions relating to other regions such as
southeast Asia and the Pacific, more precise,periodiza-
tion of particularconstructs, and the differing interests
of particularcolonists, writers,artists,and scholars. The
aim is not to dissolve the field of questions into a mass
of particularities,but to gain a better sense of localized
projectsand their common ground.
More might also be done by way of examining coun-
terpartsto Orientalismin the culturesof indigenous and
colonized groups - that is, in exploring their charac-
terizationsof whites, among others, in ethnic typologies
and narrativesof colonial encounters.l While diverse
modes of 'othering' and stereotyping might be iden-
tified, it would be unfortunateif the result was a pre-
sumptionthat Orientalizingwas a universalkind of cul-
tural process - that people everywhere have always
done to each other. While that might be a valid state-
 Williams, hardlyan ment in a categorical sense, it is clearly the case that general level, it is, for instance, notable that many
idealist critic. See the capacities of populations to impose and act upon prominent works of anthropological comparison con-
'Narrative,geography their constructions of others has been highly variable tinue to emphasize us-them juxtapositions, using the
and interpretation',
throughouthistory; the distinctiveness of Europeanand 'other' as a counter-example to what is notionally a
New Left Review 180
(1990), 81-97.
Americancharacterizationsof various colonized or pro- 'western' institution or belief.15 While these studies -
7. Cf. Peter Mason, spectively colonized populations over the last several such as Clifford Geertz's Negara - frequentlymanifest
Deconstructing centuriescan hardlybe overlooked. a humanistic will to understandthe people described,
America,London, Whatever its faults, Orientalism thus opens up a they also subordinatetheir lives, cultures, and societies,
Routledge, 1990. whole range of questions for further exploration, but to the purposes of metropolitanrhetoric:the interestsof
8. 'On Orientalism'in many critics seem inclined to avoid the challenge by healthy scepticism or relativistic cultural criticism at
Thepredicamentof denouncing the book. The dismissive claim that Orien- home thus make the other admissible primarily as a
culture (Cambridge,
talism merely expresses its Palestinian author's grudge corrective to some aspect of 'our' thought. In the case
Mass.: HarvardU. P,
1988), p.260. This is against the West has been often reiterated,and this is of Negara, this leads to a highly picturesque account,
probablythe most why more is at issue here than the adequacy or other- similar in rhetorical form if not in content, to the
careful and extended wise of Richardson'sreadingof Said. He follows others us/themjuxtapositionof Enlightenmenttravel writing.16
* 17
readingof Said's work such as Leys in noting Said's 'personal stake' in the Contrary,then, to what Said implied in Orientalism
publishedwithin topics at issue, as if other writers were merely dis- constructionsof other cultures are not necessarily to be
anthropologythus far. passionate scholars who had no commitments,grudges, applaudedsimply because they avoid hostile or aggres-
9. e.g. Simon Leys, cited or personal investments in academic disciplines, institu- sive attitudes, which have hardly been conspicuous in
by Richardson.
tions, theoreticalstances, or particulararguments.While recent anthropology;his later article more appropriately
10. See for instance the
book with Jean Mohr's these commitments are in fact diverse, and linked up raises the question of what the problematicand interests
photographs,After the with individual biographies in a highly particularfash- of the observeractually are.18
last sky: Palestinian ion, it must be acknowledgedthat most scholars have a Many anthropologists'misgivings concerning 'reflec-
lives, New York, general stake in the credibility of their chosen discip- tive' anthropologyrelate to its perceived introspection
Pantheon, 1986, and line: this is, after all, the context and condition of salar- and narcissism. Whetherthese complaints can really be
'Homage to a ies, grants, personal prestige, and so on. Of course, the sustained by the literaturein question is a moot point,
belly-dancer',London extent to which this constrains scholarship is diverse: but Said suggests directionsfor a differentkind of criti-
Review of Books, 13
many academics obviously have a critical attitudeto as- cal anthropology,that is concerned with the formation
September1990, pp.
6-7. sumptions that establish particulardisciplines as clearly of anthropologicalknowledge in the context of colonial
11. 'Anthropology's separate and scientific endeavours, but there are evi- histories and contemporaryimperialism. While ethno-
interlocutors.' dently also many who respond to any questioning of a graphyand oral history have alreadycontributeda great
12. See for instance discipline's distinctiveness or rigour in an extraordi- deal to betterunderstandingsof indigenous responses to
JonathanHill (ed.) narily defensive fashion. In the wake of Writingculture colonialism, the perceptions and strategies of white in-
Rethinkinghistoryand and similar explorations of the constitution of ethno- truders, and those who planned or wrote about intru-
myth:indigenoussouth graphic texts, there have been many pleas to forget sion, have been relatively neglected.19 Anthropology
Americanperceptions
about sterile meta-theory- that is stereotyped as it is might now examine the cultures of colonizers, not only
of the past (Urbana,U.
of Illinois P., 1988). accused of stereotypingconventional work - and get on through ethnographicor ethnohistoricalstudies of par-
13. e.g. R. Borofsky, with the job. ticular groups such as missionaries, but in a more wide
Making history, The challenge posed by Said's work is ratherdiffer- ranging way in relation to the development of repre-
CambridgeU. P. 1987, ent. In fact, much of the reflective literature on the sentationsof others in metropolitancultures. Given that
pp. 152-56. making of ethnographies seems to have a celebratory such studies are now attemptingto deal with the local-
14. Orientalism,p. 237. character, and affirms rather than deconstructs ethno- ized manifestationsof such discourses, as well as their
15. For discussion with
graphic authority;this tendency no doubt arises from general contours,it might seem that anthropology'spar-
respect to the Maussian
the orientationtowards individual fieldworkers and in- ticularist vision might make a distinctive contribution.
literatureon the gift,
see N. Thomas, dividual ethnographythat has characterizedthe litera- The challenge of such research, though, lies not in the
Entangledobjects: ture, and in particular,the emphasis on autocriticism.13 scope there might be for reinterpretingthe Cook voy-
exchange, material Said, on the other hand, is oriented more towards ages, Mungo Park,or more recent travellersand ethnol-
cultureand colonialism genres and the enduring metaphors and structure of ogists, but in the continuity between such endeavours
in the Pacific, Harvard writing on the Middle East. He points out that writers and contemporaryscholarship. Just as Orientalism es-
U. P., in press. such as Lawrence and Doughty saw their own concep- tablished the continuities between various scholarly
16. Some of the more
tions of the Orient as highly individual, 'self-created traditions and anti-Arab political propaganda- which
particularconnections
between colonial
out of some highly personal encounter' yet tended has regrettablybeen given a new lease of life in the
ethnology and modem nevertheless to confirm traditional attitudes and ulti- western media by the Gulf war - what are the connec-
anthropologyare mately disparagethe Orientin a conventionalfashion.14 tions between colonial constructionsand modern popu-
discussed in my paper, In a similar way, anthropologiststend to see their por- lar and anthropologicalviews of particula'rsocieties?
'The force of traits of peoples studied as the outcomes of a singular And what political projects or imperativesdo these dis-
ethnology: origins and and personal experience, while neglecting the impor- courses express? If some kind of collective self-under-
significance of the tance of genre constraints and enduring rhetorical standing is a legitimate aim for an academic discipline,
Melanesia/Polynesia forms. Ethnographicaccounts still seem to be regarded the interest in the making of contemporarytexts might
division', Current
as a novel genre associated with professional anthro- be complemented by an awareness of precedents and
Anthropology30
(1989), 27-41; 211-213. pology, even though the most cursory reading of eight- continuities, that is, a sense of anthropology'splace in
17. Orientalism,p. 325. eenth and nineteenth century travel writing and larger discourses such as Orientalism. While some
18. 'Representingthe ethnology makes significantcontinuitiesapparent. patches of blindness are perhapsinevitable correlatesof
colonized', p. 212. If anthropologists are to draw anything from work the kinds of insight that particulardisciplines enable,
19. For recent work in such as Said's, it is perhaps less importantto take the we should not complacently succumb to the guild
this direction, see the critique of Orientalismas though it might be directly members' narcotic;the dose of politics and history that
special issue
transposed to anthropology, and instead apply similar a critical investigation of anthropologicaland colonial
(November 1989) of
AmericanEthnologist
interpretativemethods to both general styles and re- discourses might bring is no magic solution, but a par-
on 'Tensions of gional traditions of research and writing. At a very tial antidoteis betterthan none.a
empire'.

ANTHROPOLOGYTODAY Vol 7 No 2, April 1991 7

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