George Marcus: "The End(s) of Ethnography: Social/Cultural Anthropology's Signature Form of Producing Knowledge in Transition"

I just wanted to call everyone's attention to Prof. Marcus's article in the latest Cultural Anthropology (23:1, pp. 1-14) for those who haven't read it already. It ties in well, actually, with the comment thread on the George Stocking post. It is a conversation between Marcus and Marcelo Pisarro, the editor of the Argentine journal Potlach, from February 2006 wherein they discuss the "rupture" in anthropology in the wake of Writing Culture's publication in 1986. There is some fascinating background about the minds behind the so-called rupture, as a reaction by graduate students in the 1970s to the introduction of Foucault, Barthes, Habermas, and Althusser, among others into the discourse of the social sciences. Marcus explains how the Writing Culture critique was a critique of form in anthropology, especially in relation to what constitutes fieldwork, with the traditional four-field approach to anthropology waning in favor of an interdisciplinary approach based on developments in the humanities, especially in literary theory.

Ethnographic methods were central to this critique, especially the idea of ethnography becoming collaborative, rather than a sort of apprenticeship. As Marcus puts it, "As fieldwork has become multisited and mobile in nature, subjects are more 'counterpart' than 'other.'" (pg. 7). The debate that began over the Writing Culture critique gets us back to the question of whether anthropology should be thought of and practiced as its own discipline with a specific set of almost canonical methods, or whether a more interdisciplinary approach is possible, and indeed more appropriate for the type of social research being done today. What I've heard called the "solipsistic turn" in anthropology in the 1980s, that is, the "overuse" of reflexivity on the part of the researcher so much so that the stated subject of research is at times lost, drew a lot of criticism and continues to today. Marcus believes that the question of how to do ethnography is the most important question that we should be discussing today. In particular, he cites the interdisciplinary work between anthropology and technoscience (which naturally excited me on a personal level) as a possible site for the development of new ethnographies.

Marcus argues that while new theoretical sources are appearing in the anthropology curriculum, the pedagogical approach to fieldwork has not been as amenable to change. Even though he says that it is "a progressive, healthy, and productive stance to think of anthropology in long decline," he also admits that "interdisciplinarity seems visionary compared to disciplinary perspective, but most interdisciplinary perspectives have turned out the be just as myopic." (pg. 11) Clearly, there is still work to be done and the debate, even after 22 years, is still not over.

At least, that's my reading of it. If you have a membership with AAA, you can access it through AnthroSource. Also, here's a link to the Center for Ethnography at UC-Irvine.

Henry Maine 1861: "Primitive society and ancient law"

Why this reading, why now? Well, I doubt it's because we're supposed to take particularly seriously Henry Sumner Maine's conclusions about the origins of law in "primitive" society (that will be my one allotted "scare quote" for the word "primitive". This post will be far too cluttered, otherwise, and it's a bit of a mess as it is). In a 1950 article Robert Redfield picked over and in many cases rejected Maine's substantive arguments on that front.

(Amazingly, outside the discipline we can see Maine cited with approval for this purpose as recently as 1981--by legal stuntman and "human Pentium" Richard Posner in his book The Economics of Justice.)

And while Maine's accounts of changes in Roman law--he spends a great deal of time discussing the Patria Potestas, the principle of the "Power of the Father", and its changing purview with regards to both adult sons and wives--and the effects of these changes on subsequent European law are fascinating and may or may not represent an accurate reading of legal history (I'm way, way out of my depth on that one), I doubt that this is what we're looking for either.

All of which is to say that we probably shouldn't read Maine as "presentists", looking for present-day utility in his 150-year-old conclusions. Rather, we should follow Stocking's injunction and take a "historicist", affective and understanding approach in reading Maine.

Maine is concerned with the same sort of problem that has exercised anthropologists ever since: how to conceive of and explain the difference between our society and others. In Maine's case, he's interested in the difference between modern, "progressive" societies and "primitive" (and as Redfield points out Maine in many ways allows late and early Roman society to stand in for those two types of society, respectively).

Maine's key contribution to answering this question is contained in his concluding paragraphs: most succintly, with his famous assertion that "the movement of the progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from Status to Contract". This shift is such that "from a condition of society in which all the relations of Persons are summed up in the relations of Family, we seem to have steadily moved towards a phase of social order in which all these relations arise from the free agreement of Individuals ".

This idea has had a lasting effect in social science. Redfield, for instance, still approved of this as a substantive point in 1950. To some degree Maine's point is mirrored in Tönnies' gemeinschaft/gesellschaft distinction, in Weber's "disenchantment" of the world and his concerns about the "iron cage" of rationalization, and in Durkheim's distinction between mechanic and organic solidarity. I think we can also see Maine's desire to posit a clear break between primitive and "progressive" societies echoed somewhat in contemporary work that depends on the notion of a postmodern "rupture" with the coming of post-industrial, post-Fordist capitalism. (I would put some of the Comaroffs' writings on South Africa--their "Occult Economies" article, for instance--in this category. I believe some of Appadurai's work on Modernity also fits here, as well as a lot of early 1990s work on globalization by Anthony Giddens, among others. Harri Englund and James Leach give a good summary--and critique--of this line of research in a 2000 article.)

Like the fascination with the primitive in general, then, the impulse to identify the characteristics that mark a given society as pre-modern, modern, or post-modern can be problematic. But if it's problematic it's because this type of model seems to have explanatory power, or else people wouldn't return to it again and again.

So thanks, Henry Sumner Maine. I think.

(I'm very open to correction about the genealogies I construct above. Get your sticks out--I fear I may have just hoisted up a plump piñata just waiting for a pummeling.)