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Cultural anthropology and the question of knowledge*

Jo hannes Fabian University of Amsterdam
Although it helps to be aware of what philosophers think about knowledge, anthropologists can neither simply relegate their epistemological problems to, nor nd solutions in, philosophy. In anthropology, knowing what and how we know is a practical, not just a theoretical, problem, one we face in all phases of our work, from eld research to writing (and teaching). Historical recollections of debates since the 1960s are followed by consideration of two aspects of the knowledge question in our discipline: Knowledge of what? and Whose knowledge? Guided by reections on knowledge and survival, the article ends by addressing the question of ethnographic evidence in the context of a current project.

Looking around: a view from cultural anthropology

Anthropology and anthropologists come in many kinds; the ones I may presume to speak for call themselves cultural anthropologists. In theory, the adjective expresses allegiance to culture as a guiding concept; in practice, it has served as a label for one of four elds that used to be considered de rigueur for American university departments of anthropology. When our colleagues in Great Britain prefer to call themselves social anthropologists, this is by now a matter of convention rather than of theoretical position, much less of actual division of labour.1 Such a view may meet with objections, among them that Boas and Malinowski were responsible for introducing lasting divergence in theoretical orientations and research interests: language, pattern, and meaning in American cultural anthropology versus relations, structure, and social cohesion in British social anthropology. While this may have been the standard story, it can be told only at the price of simplifying history. Arguably, Malinowski was a pioneer of a turn to language in its pragmatic understanding that is usually associated with the impact that Hymess ethnography of speaking had on cultural anthropology (more about that later). On a personal note, I remember that I had my rst truly challenging encounter with anthropological thought when my rst teacher, Paul Schebesta, made me read and review Problem and assumption in an anthropological study of religion, the Huxley Lecture by Raymond Firth (1959). Rereading it now, I am struck by an amazing convergence in substance (and often in
* Huxley Memorial Lecture, 4 February 2011 (revised).

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language) between this classic of British social anthropology and writing in US cultural anthropology exemplied, say, by Clifford Geertz.2 Further to complicate matters, ethnology, despite the somewhat old-fashioned ring it may have, survives on both sides of the Atlantic. In the US, the term connotes emphasis on empirical research and historical continuity; in Europe, to mention but two examples, Ethnologie may still be a synonym for anthropology (or Vlkerkunde) in German-speaking countries or a part of anthropologie, subdivided as ethnologie and ethnographie, in France. And not long ago, ethnology took on a new life when Germanspeaking folklorists decided to replace Volkskunde with Europische Ethnologie.3 All this adds up to the observation that anthropology is indeed a tattered umbrella under which by now countless subdisciplines and professional associations offer their specialties or just seek professional refuge. At the same time, under the banner of world anthropologies (Ribeiro & Escobar 2006), a still-prevailing Euro-American perspective on our eld is being contested. As I understand it, the plural anthropologies is neither just a plea for pluralism, nor a celebration of difference; it is meant as a challenge to metropolitan dominance and control of the conceptual and institutional denitions of our discipline. One may argue that what looks like mere quibbling about labels reects conicting interests in different historical circumstances. Still, beyond and beneath terminological quarrels, all conceivable varieties of socio-cultural anthropology (to add another current adjective) invariably base their legitimacy on claims to produce knowledge and to do this in distinctive ways. What, then, is anthropological knowledge?4 Given the topic of this article, I may be expected to come up with an answer to that question. Ill have one, more than one, but it will not be to propose a general theory of anthropological knowledge, either distilled in retrospect from the history of anthropology or formulated programmatically for future general debate.5 All I dare is present a case, an auto-ethnography reecting on reasons and occasions that made me think (and write) about knowledge and take one position rather than another.6 Ill have arguments to make and stories to tell. However, I should warn you at the outset that I nd it difcult to keep arguments and stories apart.7 But then, is this not something all ethnographies have in common?
Looking back: asking the knowledge question

Anthropology as I experienced it could be likened to a gargantuan costume party: Gargantuan has been our appetite for objects of inquiry; costumes stand for the many specialties we affect as disguises; party evokes the fun and excitement anthropologists are known to have (or seek), not only notoriously when they socialize at meetings, but also when they are doing their everyday work in what has always been a remarkably indisciplined discipline. Anthropology practised playfulness and anarchy before Thomas Kuhns notion of science as puzzle-solving and Paul Feyerabends everything goes made it possible to think of the pursuit of scientic knowledge as involving more than devising theories and sticking to methods. Theoretical feuds and bickering among structuralists and functionalists, Marxists and culturalists, materialists and symbolists, explainers and interpreters were all part of the fun until, to stay with my image, the party was crashed by those who began to ask the knowledge question and made epistemological critique their business. True, at the time when this happened, critique was already endemic in our discipline. Much of it was directed at its past and present political complicity, even outright collaboration, with Western colonialism and imperialism. Many, perhaps the majority,
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saw the ensuing crisis as a question of ethics and the task ahead as one of righting the wrongs of which anthropology and its individual practitioners were considered guilty. Others hoped to revolutionize theory by adopting political, more or less Marxist, positions. Without dismissing or ignoring ethics and theoretical allegiances of course it is important to act decently and let theory guide research still others put their bets on laying new epistemological foundations, not as a philosophical exercise but as a practical alternative to business as usual. Some of us (notice the change from they to we) thought and still think that to understand the nature and distinctive ways of producing and presenting anthropological knowledge is more urgent than arguing about right or wrong or deciding what counts as use and what as misuse of our discipline. Clifford Geertz had it right, although he was a bit late, when he, somewhat reluctantly, conceded that questions of epistemology ought to be asked:
How you know you know is not a question ... [anthropologists] have been used to asking in other than practical, empirical terms: What is the evidence? How was it collected? What does it show? How words attach to the world, texts to experience, works to lives, is not one they have been used to asking at all (1988: 135).

In fact, Geertzs contemporaries had by then been asking these questions (and others he did not include in his catalogue) for about twenty years. Among them were those whom Dell Hymes inspired with his ethnography of communication, a pragmatist critique of linguistic formalism. At about the same time, Jrgen Habermass anti-positivist proposal for a new logic of the social sciences (incorporating principles of phenomenological and hermeneutic philosophy) suggested promising directions to take in the search for epistemological foundations. Both inuences converged in calls for shifting from observation to communication as the core of ethnographic inquiry.8 If I had to put a date on this initiative, it would be the Symposium on Epistemological Foundations for Cultural Anthropology: Critical Reections on Analytic Methods, organized by Bob Scholte and myself at the 69th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, 19-22 November 1970, in San Diego, California. Scholte proposed a Phenomenological critique of structuralism; I formulated Two theses concerning ethnographic objectivity. I.C. Jarvie, invited as our favourite adversary (and as a representative of British social anthropology), argued Against revolutions in anthropology: functional, materialist, and phenomenological, while Yvan Simonis reported on Marxist critique of structuralism in France: the impact of structuralism on Marxism. Dell Hymes, whom we saw as our mentor, was the discussant.9 For those of us who continued to work as ethnographers because, not in spite, of our intellectual and political commitments, the struggle for liberation from positivism and scientism never meant that empirical accountability and claims to the scientic status of our ndings were to be abandoned. Speaking for myself, I saw the move towards a language-centred approach to ethnography and the sweeping critique I formulated in Time and the Other (Fabian 2002a [1983]) as part of a long-overdue endeavour to modernize anthropology: that is, to take it beyond essentially eighteenth-century (or Newtonian) conceptions of scientic inquiry, by then long abandoned in the sciences.10 I mention this because, by the mid-1980s, projects to reinvent our discipline were overshadowed by anthropologys so-called postmodern turn, represented by, and often credited to, the publication of Writing culture (Clifford & Marcus 1986). Despite mixed reactions Geertz called it an interesting collection of the very good and the
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very bad, the knowledgeable and the pretentious, the truly original and the merely dazed (1988: 131 n. 2) the book succeeded in giving a focus to some may say, monopolizing discussions regarding the nature of knowledge we produce.11 Fortunately, those who feared that radical epistemological critique, the rage for redening anthropology as literature, and, more recently, the prospect of losing our moorings in talk about globalization would bring about the end of our discipline were proven wrong. Underneath the apocalyptic buzz, eld research and the crafting of ethnographies, business as usual, continued and exciting roads of inquiry were opened or reopened. Among them were new takes on culture as praxis and performance, recognizing the importance of history and memory, the rediscovery of things in material culture studies, advances in visual anthropology, increased attention to gender, as well as the rehabilitation of the body and senses other than vision as sources and mediations of knowledge. Where are we today? An ethics debate is as alive as ever. It is also clearer than ever that at issue in that debate is not morals12 but proper conduct, and that adopting ethical rules and regulations is a symptom of an academic discipline transforming itself into a profession, at best, and of attempts to make anthropology legally safe, at worst. As to Grand Theory, structuralism may have passed away with Lvi-Strauss, Marxism is hibernating, culturalism runs around like the proverbial headless chicken, while Foucault seems to have more staying power than expected and phenomenology has new converts.13 Humanists and scientists are still engaged in a battle that may come over as mostly academic but is in fact about resources and institutional support.14 I am sorry if I taxed your patience with telling you (and myself) a story you are likely to have heard before. Take it as an exercise in remembering the present, an attempt to nd or recover positions that both compel and encourage us to keep addressing what I called the knowledge question. More than ever I am convinced that epistemological critique is not cumulative.15 Contrary to what we once may have thought and hoped for, there are no such things as lasting epistemological foundations on which we can rest (and that goes a fortiori for methods and techniques of research). As they are for the cultural practices we study, change and breaks are conditions of the survival of anthropological inquiry (for the simple reason that anthropology, too, is a cultural practice).16 So the question is: after having survived decades of breaking with their colonial past by taking turns linguistic, literary, dialogical, poetic, sensuous-material, multi-sited, co-operative, accountable, public, global, you name it is it possible to give a coherent account of what cultural anthropologists mean by knowledge now?Of course notwould have to be the general answer; if at all, such a comprehensive account could be given only from a position outside or above and with the benet of historical hindsight that we dont have while we are in the middle of things. The best I can do is taketime outfrom my daily work with and on ethnographic texts (more about that later) and report on a number of answers I came up with after much agonizing over my self-inicted topic.17
The object and subject of anthropological knowledge Knowledge of what?

Ever since its beginnings in the Enlightenment, anthropology seems to have navigated between two options, epitomized by Kants critique of reason and Diderots Encyclopedia: that is, between seeking knowledge of the principles or rules guiding human thought, feeling, and conduct and projects of documenting and describing, in time and through time, the actual variety of ways humans communicate with each other,
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construct their social and political relations, formulate and enact their cosmological and religious conceptions, extract and manage the resources of environments they live in. The anthropological concept of culture that emerged victorious from debates about reason and progress, race, and evolution made it possible to pursue both objectives, Kants and Diderots, under the roof of one academic discipline. With culture as its distinctive as well as encompassing idea, anthropology prospered as a producer of knowledge that was in public demand, especially when, after the Second World War, political projects such as the United Nations needed intellectual visions. Anthropology seemed well on its way to becoming what Thomas Henry Huxley would have called a gnosis, a self-contained pursuit and store of certain knowledge. Then anthropology woke up one day and found that it had lost faith in culture or, put more cautiously, culturalism. Today most of us are cultural agnostics, not so much as a matter of theoretical principle, but for pragmatic and indeed practical reasons which were forced upon us when we noticed that our traditional agendas and habits of empirical research made us lose touch with changed political realities, technological innovations, and concomitant social developments. We discovered that culture as a law-and-order concept, as an inherently positive notion focused on identity and continuity in place and time, or to speak the language of culturalism triumphant as a boundary-maintaining and equilibrium-seeking system, had lost its plausibility and made us blind to much that happened in the societies we visited and revisited. As it turned out, losing faith in culturalism was not the end of anthropology. If my work on African popular culture can serve as an example (Fabian 1998), it showed that what we lost in theoretical certainty (or security) we gained in renewed ethnographic fervour that made us study the unruly, boisterous, seemingly anarchic yet inexhaustibly creative forms of contemporary survival. Because it is impossible to study such phenomena from a distance (something on which culturalism in its prime prided itself), to conceive of research as an interactive, communicative, and, if you wish, a collaborative undertaking is not an option among others.18 Epistemologically that is, regarding the criteria by which claims to knowledge might be evaluated the development has been one from rigour to vigour; abandoning scientistic and positivist positions and recognizing relations between researcher and researched as intersubjective and coeval makes ethnography not less but more objective (Fabian 1991b, reprinted in 2001: chap. 1). Ethnography, we now think, does not reach its objectives when it succeeds in reducing unfamiliar and complex creations to familiar logical structures or clear-cut patterns (or, for that matter, strange and savage behaviour to comprehensible social functions). What we now aim for are reports, stories, and commentaries that are capable of making present the knowledge they represent. To rephrase Geertzs version of the knowledge question how you know you know we now ask (and should be able to answer) what we know about how they know what they know. That was the epistemological question guiding the work that produced the ethnographies I have been writing on popular religion, theatre, painting, and historiography. What we know about how they know what they know may sound much like what Trevor Marchand, in his preface to a JRAI special issue on Making Knowledge, says about the core activity of all anthropology: namely the making of knowledge about the ways other people make knowledge (2010: iv). However, while the approach and research agenda he advocates which is to study other peoples knowledge by acquiring it is legitimate and (as the collection shows) quite interesting, it does not answer the epistemological knowledge question in cultural anthropology. Paraphrasing a
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statement made in another context (to duplicate a procedure does not justify it), one could say that to learn a given kind of knowledge does not make the knowledge we are after in anthropology (Fabian 1991b, reprinted in Fabian 2001: 16).19
Whose knowledge?

An account of changing directions in the ways we have been asking the knowledge question would be incomplete if we were to overlook that critical reection on its object knowledge of what? went together with rethinking its subject whose knowledge? As long as anthropology felt safe in paradigms of natural history and scientic method, it was self-evident that we study them. That there might be a contradiction between ethnographic practices that worked because and inasmuch as researcher and researched as subjects interacted and communicated in shared time, on the one hand, and a theory-driven discourse that constructed its object savages, primitives, non-Western peoples in terms of temporal distance, on the other, either went unacknowledged or was treated as a political fact reecting relations of power and domination. Enacting such relations in producing anthropological knowledge could be exposed and denounced as unethical, but most of the time critique was directed at uses and abuses and not at the possibility that something may be wrong epistemologically that is, with the very conceptions of knowledge we hold. Instead of, and beyond, getting embroiled in questions of representativity and discussions of what representation means anyway, we ought to ask some simple yet fundamental questions. One of them has haunted me ever since an anthropologist used it as the title of a paper: Why do we know and they believe?20 That knowing and believing should and could be distinguished has been a preoccupation among philosophers for ages, one that is not likely to disappear, if only because it is part of common sense and daily experience for everyone who aims to conduct his or her life consciously and rationally. Ostensibly, sorting out knowledge and belief was the concern that sustained anthropologys involvement in, for instance, the so-called rationality debate of the 1960s and 1970s, with a focus, earlier, on kinship and magic and, more recently, on folk medicine.21 Arguments and evidence mobilized in that debate helped to show that boundaries separating knowledge and belief run through rather than around such practices. It is my impression that these efforts and ndings did little to change engrained habits of locating knowledge and belief in different types of society, primitive and advanced, traditional and modern. In the end, knowledge of what counts as knowledge and what as belief remained ours. Which brings me to a fundamental question: What does it mean to claim knowledge as ours? Let me try and answer by distinguishing between knowledge as a state, an activity or practice, or a possession.22 As a state, knowledge is opposed to ignorance, individual as well as collective. While it belongs to our Enlightenment inheritance to think of anthropology as engaged in ghting ignorance, using the possessive pronoun (as in our inheritance) is not something that gives us much critical pause. After all, we dont usually delude ourselves in claiming that ghting ignorance is our exclusive province of expertise. Matters appear in a different light when we think of knowledge as an activity or practice. We may then say that it is ours because we, individually and collectively, are agents who take initiatives with our projects of research and assume responsibility for the presentation of our ndings. However, calling anthropological knowledge ours became problematic when we realized that our activities of knowledge production,
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occurring as they did in real space and time, have been part of a history that had victims as well as agents. What about knowledge as a possession? There was an idyllic time when that question occupied most cultural anthropologists only in two respects: ethnographically, when we found that singers of epics, poets, specialists in genealogy, but also healers and practitioners of magic claimed (and sometimes sold) property rights for their knowledge; and mundanely, when we settled matters of copyright for our presentations of knowledge with our publishers. Then came the days when postcolonial and postmodern critique turned from accusations (and confessions) of misrepresenting those whom we study to allegations that we are ripping them off, appropriating something that is theirs. As a problem of ethics, this was referred to committees that came up with resolutions to mend our ways and urgent but vague calls to give credit to our informants and give something back to our objects of research. Under the heading of ethnographic authorship and authority, possession of knowledge was reected on in discussions of writing culture. If your tastes ran more to political economy than to literary criticism, reections on voice and authorship were seen to deect critical debate from analogies, even homologies, between exploiting the natural resources of colonized countries and transporting the fruits of research conducted in the eld to metropolitan centres of knowledge production.23 Little did we know then that such harsh verdicts, pronounced under the weight of a colonial past we hoped to leave behind, would soon pale in the doomsday perspective that is opened up on our discipline when, analogies and homologies aside, the making of anthropological knowledge is literally equated with a transfer of commodities. This is not the place to ponder the relevance for the knowledge question of the commodication of scholarship, partly imposed (partly because it takes two to tango) by nancial and administrative control over research exercised by a system that awards the ability to attract and consume large sums of money and the quick processing and circulation of the results with absurd results, such as crediting, preferably team-authored, papers but not book-length publications by a single author whose time-economy is outside the monitoring capacity of funding agencies and university administrations. This is how I concluded a recent essay (which I may be permitted to quote here because it appeared in a Dutch collection perhaps not easily accessible):
[W]hen research bureaucrats begin to make demands (by pushing more efcient methods, promoting projects that can be completed quickly, and insisting on time-saving modes or genres of writing and publication) thereby limiting or eliminating time that ... is constitutive and distinctive of the way in which anthropology produces knowledge, this becomes a matter of collective intellectual survival ... a political issue calling for strategies of protest and resistance. If the time we need is not given we may have to take it and live with the consequences (Fabian 2009: 199, emphasis added).

What, to return to knowledge as possession, is going to happen to our discipline now that developments such as the UNESCO pronouncements about intangible cultural property have moved from a status of political declarations to that of international law?24 In my view, legal denitions of culture, especially of its intangible creations (including, of course, knowledge), as the legal property of ill-dened ethnic and political entities contradict and may ultimately destroy the intellectual substance anthropological knowledge on which they feed. Add to this the threat posed to research, at least in the United States, by human subject regulations.25 Dening, as they seem to do, ethnographic inquiry as a clinical activity would undo everything we gained by
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conceiving eldwork as communicative, dialogical, hence intersubjective all this for epistemological reasons that touch on the distinctiveness of anthropological knowledge not just on proper professional conduct. Railing against essentializing and commodifying culture and clinicalizing eld research may be a lost battle, but the war is still on as long as some of us think that our task is rst of all the production of knowledge and that circulation is not the most apt organizing trope of our questions, methodologies, analyses and accounts, as it was put in a statement of the theme for the 2010 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association.26 And while I am at it, let me add another lament. One of the buzz-words I notice when I try to assess the current state of anthropology is contemporary. Granted, the discipline needs to be contemporary, but the agreement seems to be that this can be achieved by making the contemporary the object/target of theory and research. This would be gratifying to observe if it meant that we are nally overcoming our disciplines allochronic stance, which I attacked in Time and the Other. At the same time, one observes that the Other begins to disappear from this and other theoretical debates.27 As a reaction to the inationary and mostly mindless use of the term, this should be welcome. However, I fear that all that apparent concern for contemporaneity could turn out to be yet another escape from facing the co- and the temporal in contemporary. In contemporaneity, not in its general, mundane sense, but taken as an epistemological notion, hence better called co-temporality, the co- indicates that an Other alterity, not to be equated with difference is essential to anthropological inquiry as long as our practices of empirical research require that we share time with those whom we study, something that is not given but has to be achieved even when we study our own societies, or global formations located in no particular society. In sum, the problem with the critique of an anthropology of the contemporary is to avoid confusion between co-temporal as an epistemological and pragmatic notion (derived from reection on the nature of eld research), contemporary as a kind of historical concept indicating the choice of contemporary societies as objects of study, and contemporaneous as a middle concept, implying, or pointing to, both epistemology and the choice/construction of an object. Could we say, then, the contemporary becomes contemporaneous by virtue of recognizing co-temporality in the practice?
Asking the knowledge question now: knowledge and survival

Perhaps someone who watches his discipline from the sidelines of academic retirement should not ask questions, however accurate and timely, for which he has no answers and, if he had them, would not be in a position to act on them. Yet I still practise anthropology in research and writing and continue to believe or should I say, to know? that asking the knowledge question is not an option but a necessary part of our work. Therefore I shall, in the remainder, formulate some insights or contentions that make me pursue anthropology as a passion, albeit not a profession. Let me begin with a bold proposition: it is time to redene cultural anthropology. Rather than declaring that it is, generally and normally, the study of human life, we should think of it as the study of human survival. In itself this is not a new idea. In a more radical and pessimistic form it was expressed by one of the founders of our discipline, Adolf Bastian. In a programmatic manifesto he stated the following: For us, primitive societies (Naturvlker) are ephemeral, i.e., as regards our knowledge of, and our relations with, them, in fact, inasmuch as they exist for us [at] all. At the very instant
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they become known to us they are doomed (1881: 63f.).28 Subsequently, romantic doom was suspended (or sublimated) by evolutionist, diffusionist, functionalist, and structuralist theories and agendas of research, all of which kept us busy accumulating knowledge about how other societies live, or, more often, lived before they became like us. These theories held the object of anthropological inquiry at a safe distance from ourselves and made it possible to present anthropological knowledge as a scientic discourse. Following a formula used earlier, I am tempted to say that, whereas we may have been busy nding out how we live and they survive, we should now recognize survival as common human predicament. This is not a trivial or merely rhetorical shift of emphasis (and decidedly not a matter of pandering to a zeitgeist of globalization and ecological doom). Strife and struggle, afrmation and negation, are of the essence not only of what we study that seems to be widely agreed on but also of the production of anthropological knowledge in all of its aspects and stages.29 If I had to name one achievement (not just an outcome) of the decades of epistemological critique I reviewed earlier, it would be this: neither logical, nor aesthetic, and certainly not rhetorical criteria are sufcient to determine what counts as knowledge if, and as long as, cultural anthropology bases its claim on sources or documents found or made in practices of empirical inquiry we call eldwork. Our enterprise, though it may involve analysis and semiosis, explanation and interpretation, requires interaction and communication, and that makes it above all pragmatic. Pragmatic means that the kind of knowledge we seek changes the knower. There would be no history of anthropology beyond a mere chronicle of schools and -isms if this were not the case. That is no longer an issue of much debate.However,we still have to come to grips with another implication: once we conceive of it pragmatically, ours is, in essence, not just accidentally, inevitably, and occasionally a kind of knowledge that changes the known.Neither we nor those whom we study remain untouched by our projects of inquiry. This is not only a disturbing possibility which we may side-step by methodological sophistication, ethical safeguards, or critical contemplation of relations of power. Cultural anthropology is political in essence, and that must be the position from which we ought to face expectations that we offer neutral,scientic expertise for the management of ethnic diversity and conict,meet the challenges to metropolitan academic leadership issued by the world anthropologies initiative, take a stand on the involvement of our discipline in international intelligence and national defence, or deal with legal disputes regarding cultural property. Taking a pragmatic and dialectical position on the question of knowledge has consequences regarding the way we conceptualize and carry out our work as researchers and writers. As Gaston Bachelard once put it, All knowledge, taken at the moment of its constitution, is polemical knowledge (1950: 14). To me this pronouncement is as provocative and convincing now (though I would prefer to call it agonistic30 rather than polemical) as it was when I made it an epigraph for the concluding chapter of Time and the Other. Whatever our specic choices of methods of inquiry and literary forms of presentation may be, they should acknowledge that the making of anthropological knowledge requires not just that we observe, encounter, converse with, those whom we study, but that we confront each other, in the initial stages and again when we present our ndings, sometimes many years later.31
Late ethnography and the question of evidence

Years later is the cue for a nal section in which, after having reected on the knowledge question as it posed itself in my past work, I turn to the here and now. An
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ethnographic project I have on my work bench is called Objects of pain and pleasure: conversations with Katanga genre painters. It continues to explore aspects of Congolese popular culture, in this case a regime of collective memory discovered and rst described in the 1970s.32 Mentioning this project here is an occasion to have a nal go at raising the knowledge question, now with a focus on evidence, a theme that, if a panel at the 2003 annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association and a recent special issue of JRAI are indications, commands much current interest.33 When we speak of, and debate, evidence, much more is at stake than the longestablished requirement to back up our studies with data. We now feel obliged to argue our understanding of the nature of empirical evidence: Is it given or made? How and when exactly does it become part of the production of knowledge? Is starting out with a theory/question/problem and then collecting empirical evidence really the rule except in dissertation and other research proposals submitted for approval and funding? In my experience, ethnographic projects may just as well be triggered by persons, events, or objects by evidence that strikes us as such before we are able to articulate what it is evidence of. It is something that happens and cannot be controlled by deciding beforehand between inductive and deductive approaches.34 The evidence on which I base my current project consists of paintings and conversations with the artists who made them. Paintings were acquired, moved, stored, and photographed; conversations were recorded and, more than thirty years later, transcribed and translated, made into texts. This is the material I work with much as I have done in the past, but, more than in the past, a dialectical approach leads me to ponder the materiality of what we glibly call our material and the processual, hence temporal, dimension of an ethnography in this case, of genre painting. As evidence, paintings, we could say, started out as objects; as texts, communicative events were made into objects. As objects, both pictures and texts are pices de rsistance; we dont consume them when we transform them into knowledge. When paintings become part of collections and texts constitute corpora, they take on a life of their own. Collections of objects outlast the original purposes of both producers/ users and researchers. Archaeologists and museum anthropologists always knew this in practice and now begin to acknowledge it in theory.35 Similarly, ethnographers of contemporary culture should gure out the theoretical and practical consequences of the fact that corpora of texts survive and extend the communicative exchanges that produced them. Concretely, what I know and say about Katanga genre painting now is different from what I could know and say about it thirty years ago, and that not only because I have changed but because my evidence is no longer what it was then. A way to have the materiality and temporality of evidence converge is to think of it as an archive and to put this idea into practice by using available technology and setting up virtual ethnographic archives on the Internet.36 The kind of presence that texts and other documents have once they are publicly accessible in virtual space changes the conditions of writing and of reading ethnography in many respects. Above all, when access to them is not restricted, such archives can become depositories of remembered history for the people among whom we did our research. As such, they survive the particular projects for which they serve as evidence (notice: we are back to knowledge and survival). I am convinced but it will be for others to demonstrate this that setting up virtual ethnographic archives, far from being just a pastime of seniors who need them to fall back on research conducted in the past, will become an occupation (and, I would say, an obligation) for ethnographers who are in the midst of assembling
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evidence. In other words, we need archives less to cover our backs (documenting what we did then) than to give us ground to stand on (supporting what we do now).37
Summary

I have no resounding conclusion to the mix of story and argument presented in this article. All I can offer is a brief summary. Because both knowledge and anthropology may have to be regarded as oating signiers, I began with an attempt to anchor the question of knowledge to what I understand to be my position as a cultural anthropologist. Then I embarked on a retrospective based on a participants recollections of introducing epistemology in the critical debates about anthropologys postcolonial fate. Preparing for asking the knowledge question now, I suggested that the issue may be claried if we break the general epistemological query down to two questions: Knowledge of what? and Whose knowledge? When asked for the object of knowledge, our answer should be that we endeavour to show how we know what we know about how they know what they know. Regarding the second question (whose knowledge?), rather than staying embroiled in the age-old anthropological conundrum of opposing our knowledge to their beliefs, I proposed and briey discussed distinctions between knowledge as a state, an activity or practice, and a possession. The latter, knowledge as a possession, led to some sombre thoughts about current threats posed to anthropological inquiry by cultural property laws and human subject regulations and the disappearing Other in debates about an anthropology of the contemporary. Starting with the suggestion to redene cultural anthropology as a science of human survival, I then pleaded for a pragmatic and dialectical conception of ethnographic inquiry as confrontation. We are after knowledge, I argued, that changes the knower as well as the known. Because our work is inherently political, we have no neutral expertise to sell, something that seems to be assumed in current demands and efforts to establish or improve anthropologys chances in the marketplace. I ended my story with reections on the materiality and temporality of ethnographic evidence; in this case, of the objects and texts on which I base an ethnographic project that occupies me right now.
NOTES
1 In his Royal Anthropological Institute Presidential Address, Roy Ellen conrms this when he notes that the ofcial designation used by the British Academy changed from social anthropology to anthropology (2010: 392) and offers a vision of the discipline that, to say the least, converges with the classic American four-eld conception. 2 For Firth, like for Geertz, meaning and symbols were key concepts in his approach to religion; there are passages in Firths lecture (e.g. 1959: 133ff.) that sound, as I put it in a note in the margin, like classical Geertz. 3 In this case, Ethnologie would seem to refer to a different discipline, except that at least one university department I know of (at the University of Gttingen) chose to call itself Institut fr Kulturanthropologie/ Europische Ethnologie. This, I think, reects not only a regional orientation (an Association of European Anthropology is part of the American Anthropological Association) but a kind of disciplinary interpretation of folklore studies and cultural anthropology heralded by Dell Hymes and many of his students in the US. European ethnology is, of course, not a recent designation the journal by this name (published in Denmark) was founded in 1966. 4 A question related to, but not to be confused with, that of an anthropology of knowledge raised by Fredrik Barth (2002). 5 For a valiant attempt to do precisely that, see Berger (2010). 6 This auto-ethnographic approach is reected in the list of references. It is anything but a comprehensive bibliography on the topic. For quite a while, certainly since I have lived in retirement and relative isolation from the academy, my grasp of the literature has been tenuous and what I cite now would be even spottier

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450 Johannes Fabian

than it is had not the invitation to deliver the Huxley Memorial Lecture compelled me to do some reading around, much of it after completing a rst draft. 7 For an illustrious precedent, see Geertz (2002). Like Geertz, I take personal stock of my grasp of the knowledge question. Another congenial retrospective I found in Stoller (2007). 8 See Hymes (1964), also in Hymes (1974a), and Habermas (1988 [1967]). 9 Titled Language, history, and anthropology, my paper appeared in Philosophy of the Social Sciences, edited by I.C. Jarvie (Fabian 1971b, reprinted in Fabian 1991a: chap. 1). Bob Scholte had formulated his thoughts on Discontents in anthropology at the same time (1971) and made an important contribution to Reinventing anthropology (1974 [1972]), the manifesto of critical anthropology edited by Dell Hymes (1974b [1972]). Jarvie (1974) took our efforts to amount to a phenomenological putsch. 10 For the sake of accuracy I should mention that, before I was ready to settle on Hymess ethnography of speaking, I dabbled in taxonomic approaches to cultural knowledge in the style of New Ethnography, also known as ethnoscience and cognitive anthropology (see both my MA thesis, 1965, and my dissertation, 1971a). 11 One of the most outspoken and coherent calls (focused on anthropology in Great Britain) for surmounting postmodernism in anthropology was the collection of essays edited by Ahmed and Shore (1995), putting its bets for the future of the discipline on its ability to remain relevant in a changing contemporary world. 12 Nor is it a symptom of masochist Third-Worldism (Kulick 2006). 13 For the latter, see also Duranti (2010). 14 And, of course, about power in institutions (see Fujimura 1998). 15 For the critical anthropologist, anthropology needs to be reinvented, not once but every time. The notion of a critical tradition should ll us with suspicion; critique is not cumulative. This is what I said twenty years ago in an essay, Dilemmas of critical anthropology (Fabian 1991a: 248). 16 For a concise and less involved account of the times remembered in this section, see Bunzl (2005). 17 I should at least refer to a recent collective effort to raise the question of epistemology in anthropology. It came to my attention too late to be discussed here except to note disagreement with the contention made by several contributors that epistemology and ontology implicate each other (see Toren & de Pina-Cabral 2009). 18 For a recent and convenient entry to this line of thought, see a review article and subsequent correspondence by Tobias Rees (2010a; 2010b) drawing on his participation in an exchange on anthropology of the contemporary (Rabinow, Marcus, Faubion & Rees 2008). Lassiters essay on collaborative ethnography and public anthropology (2005) is instructive on historical precedent and current debate. 19 For an early and a more recent example of, in my view, mistaken attempts at a critical understanding of how anthropologists produce knowledge, see Jarvie (1969) and Wilce (2006). 20 Years of searching for the source (I have visual recollections of a typed paper) were to no avail. I still hope that Ill eventually be able to acknowledge the colleague by name. 21 See Ulins attempt to map the wider context of debate (2001 [1984]) and a more recent assessment by Stambach (2000). 22 As will be seen in the following, these distinctions are mainly to give weight to what Ill have to say about knowledge as possession. 23 See, for example, Time and the Other (Fabian 2002a [1983]: 95-6). 24 For a detailed discussion of the complex consequences of cultural property legislation (in this case, in Indonesia), see Arragon & Leach (2008) and a more encompassing study of Ethnicity, Inc. in its mature form, a projection of the entrepreneurial subjects of neoliberalism onto the plane of collective existence by Comaroff & Comaroff (2009: 140). 25 See on this a statement by the National Science Foundation cultural anthropology program director: http://www.aaanet.org/press/an/infocus/hrp/Plattner.htm (accessed 9 February 2012). 26 In New Orleans, 17-21 November 2010 (http://www.aaanet.org/meetings/, accessed 9 February 2012). Going just on the titles of panels and papers as listed in the programme, I was struck by a general eagerness to invoke circulation, with results that border on the grotesque. 27 See, for instance, Rabinow et al. (2008). 28 Quoted and commented on in Time and the Other (Fabian 2002a [1983]: 122). Forty years later, Malinowski prefaced his Argonauts with a similar remark on the tragic position of anthropology (1922: xv). 29 I rst called for such a dialectical approach in the programmatic essay mentioned earlier (Fabian 1971b; see Fabian 1991a: 19-21), and later developed it in ethnography and theoretical reections on culture, identity, understanding, memory, and their negations (essays reprinted in Fabian 2001: chaps 2, 5; and Fabian 2007: esp. chaps 6-9). For a similar proposal to see knowledge and ignorance in a dialectical relation, see Dilley (2010), while Zeitlyn (2009) argues for a merological alternative to a dialectical view. Addressed to Kirsten Hastrups paper (2004; see note 33 below), Zeitlyns essay ends with a nal irony to consider: despite

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Cultural anthropology and the question of knowledge 451

profound philosophical differences between us, our practice as eld anthropologists may not be greatly different (2009: 225) an insight worth pondering. 30 James Boon (1997) called anthropology an agonistic discipline in a review of Fardon (1995). 31 What I mean by confrontation is stated in Fabian (2001: 5, 7, 25, 83). What ethnographic confrontation may look like is illustrated (literally as well as guratively) in Remembering the present (Fabian 1996). 32 See Fabian (1996: chap. 1) and Szombati-Fabian & Fabian (1976). 33 The panel on Anthropological Evidence and its Culture was sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and organized by Richard Fox. I was able to consult three published contributions (Csordas 2004; Gingrich 2003; Hastrup 2004). For the JRAI Special Issue on objects of evidence, see Engelke (2008). See also Chua, High & Lau (2008). Renewed concern for evidence arguably a symptom of recovery from postmodernism is not limited to anthropology: see, for instance, cultures of evidence, a research focus at the IFK, a cultural studies centre in Vienna: http://www.ifk.ac.at/index.php/cultures-of-evidence.html (accessed 9 February 2012). 34 See also Csordass reections when he rst states and then retracts the notion that in an alien society everything is evidence (2004: 475). The examples of uncontrolled evidence I am invoking here may be attributed to intuition and imagination in ethnographic research, both of which are widely acknowledged but rarely discussed in epistemological reections (but see Stoller 2007). 35 My favourite reference many others could be cited is from Olivier. He states, for example: Raising the question of a memory internal to archaeological systems (as regards ensembles of objects, sites, or complexes of sites) presupposes that there exists an identity that would be the identity that is proper to these systems, one that perpetuates itself in time. This identity is neither the one that historians, ethnologists, or archaeologists, nor even the one that people of the past who produced or constituted the things whose remnants we nd today, have attributed to those systems (2008: 107, my translation and emphasis).
36 Together with Vincent de Rooij we established Archives of Popular Swahili as part of a website devoted to Language and Popular Culture in Africa. That was a decade ago and, initially, we did it because it could be done. Figuring out the theoretical consequences came later, rst in a programmatic essay (Fabian 2002b; reprinted in Fabian 2007: chap. 10), then in a book-length experiment with writing from the virtual archive, titled Ethnography as commentary (2008). The latter was based on one text; in the project on genre painting I will work from a corpus accessible on the Internet in Archives of Popular Swahili: http://www.lpca.socsci. uva.nl/aps/vol12/katangagenrepaintingintro.html (accessed 9 February 2012). 37 Though some connections are obvious, I am not sure how exactly my experiments with writing from the virtual archive t the visions ofopen accessandanthropology of/in circulationexpressed in Kelty et al. (2008).

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Ellen, R. 2010. Theories in anthropology and anthropological theories. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 387-404. Engelke, M. (ed.) 2008. The objects of evidence: anthropological approaches to the production of knowledge. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) Special Issue. Fabian, J. 1965. !Kung Bushman kinship: componential analysis and alternative interpretations. Anthropos 60, 663-718. 1971a. Jamaa: a charismatic movement in Katanga. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. 1971b. History, language and anthropology. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 1, 19-47. 1991a. Time and the work of anthropology: critical essays 1971-1991. Chur: Harwood Academic. 1991b. Ethnographic objectivity: from rigor to vigor. Annals of Scholarship 8, 381-408. 1996. Remembering the present: painting and popular history in Zare. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1998. Moments of freedom: anthropology and popular culture. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. 2001. Anthropology with an attitude: critical essays. Stanford: University Press. 2002a [1983]. Time and the Other: how anthropology makes its object. New York: Columbia University Press. 2002b. Virtual archives and ethnographic writing: commentary as a new genre? Current Anthropology 43, 775-86. 2007. Memory against culture: arguments and reminders. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2008. Ethnography as commentary: writing from the virtual archive. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2009. Why does anthropology need time? In Antropologie in en zee van verhalen [Anthropology in a sea of stories] (ed.) T. Sunier (ed.), 185-99. Amsterdam: Aksant. Fardon, R. (ed.) 1995. Counterworks: managing the diversity of knowledge. New York: Routledge. Firth, R. 1959. Problem and assumption in an anthropological study of religion. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 89, 129-48. Fujimura,J.H. 1998.Authorizing knowledge in science and anthropology.American Anthropologist 100,347-60. Geertz, C. 1988. Works and lives: the anthropologist as author. Stanford: University Press. 2002. An inconstant profession: the anthropological life in interesting times. Annual Review of Anthropology 31, 1-19. Gingrich, A. 2003. Evidence in socio-cultural anthropology today: assessing the potential of social science approaches. Working Paper. Vienna: sterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften/Kommission fr Sozialanthropologie. Habermas, J. 1988 [1967]. On the logic of the social sciences (trans. S.W. Nicholsen & J.A. Stark). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Hastrup, K. 2004. Getting it right: knowledge and evidence in anthropology. Anthropological Theory 4, 455-72. Hymes, D. 1964. Introduction: towards ethnographies of communication. In The ethnography of communication (eds) J.J. Gumperz & D. Hymes, 1-34. Menasha, Wis.: American Anthropological Association. 1974a. Foundations in sociolinguistics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. (ed.) 1974b [1972]. Reinventing anthropology. New York: Vintage. Jarvie, I.C. 1969. The problem of ethical integrity in participant observations. Current Anthropology 5, 505-8. 1974. Epistle to the anthropologists. American Anthropologist 77, 253-65. Kelty, C.M., M.M.J. Fischer, A. Golub, J.B. Jackson, K. Christensen, M.F. Brown & T. Boellstorff (2008). Anthropology of/in circulation: the future of open access and scholarly societies. Cultural Anthropology 23, 559-88. Kulick, D. 2006. Theory in furs: masochist anthropology. Current Anthropology 47, 933-52. Lassiter, L.E. 2005. Collaborative ethnography and public anthropology. Current Anthropology 46, 83-106. Malinowski, B. 1922. Argonauts of the Western Pacic: an account of native enterprise and adventure in the archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. London: George Routledge & Sons. Marchand, T.H.J. 2010. Preface. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S) Special Issue: Making knowledge (ed.) T.H.J. Marchand, Siii-v. Olivier, L. 2008. Le sombre abme du temps: mmoire et archologie. Paris: Seuil. Rabinow, P., G.E. Marcus, J.D. Faubion & T. Rees 2008. Designs for an anthropology of the contemporary. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Rees, T. 2010a. To open up new spaces of thought: anthropology BSC (beyond society and culture). Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 158-63.

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Lanthropologie culturelle et la question de la connaissance

Rsum Sil est utile de savoir ce que les philosophes pensent de la connaissance, les anthropologues ne peuvent pas se contenter de dlguer la philosophie pour leurs problmes pistmologiques, ni dy chercher des solutions. En anthropologie, le problme de savoir ce que lon sait et comment on le sait nest pas seulement thorique mais pratique ; nous le rencontrons chaque phase de notre travail, des recherches sur le terrain lcriture et lenseignement. Lauteur fait suivre ici les rappels historiques des dbats qui ont eu lieu depuis les annes 1960 dune analyse de deux aspects de la question des connaissances dans notre discipline : connaissance de quoi ? et connaissance de qui ? Guid par une rexion sur le savoir et la survie, larticle sachve par lexamen de la question des preuves ethnographiques dans le contexte dun projet en cours.

Johannes Fabian is Professor Emeritus of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. Previously, he taught at Northwestern and Wesleyan Universities and at the National University of Zare in Lubumbashi. He carried out research and published numerous books on religious movements, language, work, and popular culture in the Shaba mining region of Zare. In his theoretical and critical work, he addressed questions of epistemology, of the history of anthropology, and, most recently, of ethnographic writing from the virtual archive (Ethnography as commentary, Duke University Press, 2008).

johfabian@t-online.de

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 18, 439-453 Royal Anthropological Institute 2012