Against Ethnography

Author(s): Nicholas Thomas

Source: Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 6, No. 3 (Aug., 1991), pp. 306-322
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
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Against Ethnography
Nicholas Thomas
Australian National University

In March 1803 Lord Valentia was traveling through Awadh, a part of north

India which, as he observed, had not yet been liberated by the East India Company
from Muslim oppression. At Lucknow he was surprised to find in the Nawab's
palace an extensive collection of curiosities, including "several thousand English

prints framed and glazed . . and innumerable other articles of European manufacture."
The dinner was French, with plenty of wine ... the Mussulmauns drank none, [although] the forbidden liquor was served in abundance on the table, and they had two
glasses of different sizes standing before them. The room was very well lighted up,
and a band of music (which the Nawaub had purchased from Colonel Morris) played
English tunes during the whole time. The scene was so singular, and so contrary to
all my ideas of Asiatic manners, that I could hardly persuade myself that the whole

was not a masquerade. [Valentia 1809 1:143-144]

This aristocratic colonial traveler's confusion could be taken to be emblem-

atic of one of the predicaments of late 20th-century anthropology. The problem

of interpretation arises not from an ethnocentric expectation that other peoples are
the same, from a failure to predict the local singularity of their manners and customs, but from an assumption that others must be different, that their behavior
will be recognizable on the basis of what is known about another culture. The
visitor encounters not a stable array of "Asiatic manners" but what appears to be
an unintelligible inauthenticity.

This essay is concerned with anthropology's enduring exoticism, and how

processes such as borrowing, creolization, and the reifications of local culture

through colonial contact are to be reckoned with. Can anthropology simply extend
itself to talk about transposition, syncretism, nationalism, and oppositional fabrications of custom, as it may have been extended to cover history and gender, or
is there a sense in which the discipline's underlying concepts need to be mutilated

or distorted, before we can deal satisfactorily with these areas that were once excluded?

The current wave of collective autocritique within anthropology' has a paradoxical character in the sense that while reference is made to crisis, experimen-

tation, and even radical transformation in the discipline, one conclusion of most
efforts seems to be an affirmation of what has always been central. Clifford, for
306

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AGAINST ETHNOGRAPHY 307

instance, affirms that "ethnographic fieldwork remains an unusually sensitive

method" for cross-cultural representation (1988:23-24) and Borofsky's relativizing exploration of anthropological constructions of knowledge concludes with
rather bland reflections on the importance of ethnography (1987:152-156).2 In a
very different genre, a recent guide to method in economic anthropology claims
that the "great future" of the subject arises from its "direct observation method

of ethnographic analysis" (Gregory and Altman 1989:ix). There seems therefore

to be one point about which we are all convinced, one stable term in a highly
eclectic and contested discipline.

The second feature of current debate relevant here is that while "writing"
and "writing-up" have been increasingly problematized (in a manner which is

essentially necessary and constructive), distinctions are constantly effaced between fieldwork, ethnographic analysis, and the writing of ethnography.3 Gregory

and Altman like many conflate methods of observation and analysis, and assume
presentation in the standard form of the monograph (cf. Marcus and Fisher

1986:18-19). Of course, if the claims of cultural historians (e.g., Darnton 1984;

Dening 1988) to write "ethnographic history" are recognized, it might need to

be acknowledged that ethnography can be written in the absence of fieldwork (setting aside the metaphorical extension of that term to encompass the archives).
This article, in contrast, sustains a hard distinction between practices of research and the particular kinds of writing that we recognize as "ethnographic."4
The purpose of such an assertion is not, of course, to permit naive empiricist separations between observation and representation, since both research and writing

are clearly political, discursive practices. While methods and research techniques
such as inquiry through conversation and sociological questionnaires may
strongly influence the form in which information is presented, and the kinds of

questions asked of it, the relationships between practical research technologies

and forms of writing should be evoked in a notion of mutual entanglement, rather
than some kind of determinism: it is obviously possible to generate similar analytic discourses from very different research procedures, and equally to use sim-

ilar research procedures toward divergent theoretical genres. The survey, for instance, may be mainly associated with positivistic enumeration and claims about

correlations, but Bourdieu's Distinction (1984) absorbs those styles to a limited

extent in a work of "social critique" that seems closer generically to an 18th-

century philosophical and empirical dissertation than it is to either the theory

books or case studies of postwar sociology. My argument is thus that while ways
of observing and ways of representing are often tangled up, and while methods
admittedly constrain and influence forms of presentation, fieldwork and ethnography are separable, and that at present it helps to situate the enduring problems

of anthropological vision in the constitution of the ethnographic genre, while leaving open the potential for another kind of writing energized by the experience of
the field.

While most comments on what has been variously called reflexive or postmodernist anthropology have been reactive and negative (e.g., Spencer 1989), I
take the overall perspective, if not the specific arguments, of works such as Writ-

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308 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

ing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986) and The Predicament of Culture (Clifford
1988) for granted. This article however attempts to move beyond the current debate by situating problematic features of anthropology, such as the tendency to
exoticism, in the constitution of ethnographic discourse. One obstacle here is the
commonsense epistemology of the discipline-which no doubt accords with a
broader cultural model-that understands knowledge primarily in quantitative
terms. Defects are absences that can be rectified through the addition of further
information, and more can be known about a particular topic by adding other ways
of perceiving it. "Bias" is thus associated with a lack and can be rectified or
balanced out by the addition of further perspectives. My preferred metaphor
would situate the causes of an array of moments of blindness and insight in the
constitution of a discipline's analytic technology: particular kinds of overlooking

arise from research methods, ways of understanding concepts, and genres of representation. This is essentially a model borrowed from feminist anthropology: as
those critiques developed, it became apparent that the essentially imbalanced
character of anthropological accounts of society could not be corrected without

complex scrutiny of methods and analysis, that "academic fields could not be
cured by sexism simply by accretion" (C. Boxer quoted in Moore 1987:2-3). It
is not clear, however, that the problems I discuss are analogous to illnesses; the

fabrication of alterity is not so much a blight or distortion to be excised or exorcised, but a project central to ethnography's rendering of the proper study of man.

Exoticism
Although Edward Said's work has aroused considerable interest in anthro-

pology, the response has often been qualified or critical (e.g., Marcus and Fisher

1986:1-2; Clifford 1988:255-276).5 It is sometimes asserted that because anthropologists have engaged in many studies of European or American societies, and
are concerned with universal humanity as well as cultural difference, the charge

of exoticism is only partly justified. Without disputing either that work carried out
under the name of anthropology has been extraordinarily diverse, or that a mis-

leading stereotype of the discipline has wide currency, it must be said that this

overlooks the fact that the presentation of other cultures retains canonical status

within the discipline. That is, despite a plethora of topics and approaches, there
are still strong prescriptions that certain anthropological projects (such as those
dealing with tribal religions) are more anthropological than others. The arguments

here deploy this stereotypic construct, even thought it is partly a misunderstanding

prevalent outside the discipline, and partly something that practitioners continue

to impose upon themselves and most particularly their graduate students. The object of my critique is thus an "analytical fiction" in Marilyn Strathern's sense
(1988:10),6 and this reified idea of a diverse discipline can only be unfair and
unrepresentative of a variety of innovative approaches. But if what is said here
applies only in a partial way to work remote from canonical types, the converse

also applies, and the critique is valid insofar as anthropological texts actually do
take the form of ethnographic depictions of other cultures.

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AGAINST ETHNOGRAPHY 309

Anthropology's most enduring rhetorical form uses a rich presentation of one

stable and distant culture to relativize cherished and unexamined notions imputed
to culture at home. Margaret Mead's Samoa destabilized certain ideas about sex
roles, while the Balinese polities of Geertz's Negara (1980) confound and deny
the central tenets of Western political thought.7 A strand in feminist anthropology
establishes that cultural oppositions elsewhere set up as universals are peculiar to
the West; in contrast Hagen people have "no nature, no culture" (Strathern
1980). More recently, the central theme of Borofsky's Making History was "how

Pukapukans and anthropologists come to possess different 'ways of knowing' "

(1987:xvii). And the machine of relativist displacement can work very effectively
upon its own products: while Mead exposed the cultural specificity of certain
American personality types, Gewertz (1984; Errington and Gewertz 1987) has
taken Mead to task for her own unreflective deployment of Western constructions
of the individual.

This operation clearly gives the discipline enormous scope and potential, because it can proceed from topic to topic exposing previously unrecognized cultural

differences: the Samoans have a different concept of the person, the Balinese dif-

ferent concepts of time, the Australian Aborigines different constructions of space

and geography, the Tahitians different ideas of growth and age, while the Japanese presumably have a different conceptual model of a restaurant menu. And no

doubt they do. Without wishing to deprive the discipline of a thousand dissertation

topics, it must be recognized that there is great scope for slippage from the appropriate recognition of difference, and the reasonable reaction against the imposition of European categories upon practices and ideas which, obviously, often

are different, to an idea that other people must be different. Insofar as this is stip-

ulated by this form of anthropological rhetoric, the discipline is a discourse of

alterity that magnifies the distance between "others" and "ourselves" while suppressing mutual entanglement and the perspectival and political fracturing of the
cultures of both observers and observed. As Keesing has recently observed, "be-

cause of the reward structures, criteria of publishability, and theoretical principles

of our discipline, papers that might show how un-exotic and un-alien other people's worlds are never getting written or read" (1989:460, cf. 469). Although
gestures are made toward the idea of common humanity and sometimes to cultural
universals, the postulate operates at such an abstract level that it does not override

the radical difference imputed to such people as the Balinese (and those works
that actually are concerned with universals, for instance in cognition and language, are generally very marginal to a discipline dominated by the sensitivity of

the local case study). Accurate ethnographic representation of stable and unitary
cultures thus conveys the radical difference of other peoples' original practices

and beliefs. It does not depict a succession of meanings and transpositions that
make cultures partly derivative and mutually entangled.

For instance, while caste in modem India has clearly been profoundly influ-

enced by British codification and the transformation of warrior kings into bearers

of hollow crowns (Dirks 1987) the most famous anthropological account (Dumont
1980) is concerned above all with the opposition between Indian hierarchy and

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310 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

the individualism of the West (and ironically also with the alleged superiority of

purity over power). While the power-claims of cultural ethnography have been
based on rigor in cultural translation, in a more faithful, less ethnocentric account
of local belief, that facilitates a professional potlatch of sophisticated interpretations, there is clearly a certain selectivity; it is notable that matter to be translated
must come from somewhere different. For instance, while informants in the societies of the "kula ring" frequently make analogies between the famous shell

valuables (that they sometimes call "Papuan money") and European cash,8 that
strand of local discourse is not conspicuous in the cultural ethnography of the
Massim. Beliefs and notions that are not different take on the appearance of difference through the process of apparent translation, through a discourse of the
translation of culture. Although there are sceptics within anthropology (Keesing
1989), those in other disciplines appear to have had a more balanced view of the
problems of translation and exoticism. In justifying the use of English categories
such as "class" and "capitalist" in the analysis of Indian history, Bayly recently
suggested that although there are "dangers in glib comparison . . . excessive

Orientalist purism has done little except make India seem peculiar to the outside
world" (1988:x).

The claim that anthropology is concerned with difference within as well as

between cultures is excessively charitable. There are, of course, works that deal
with conflict, disagreement about beliefs, and perspectival differences between

men and women, but these themes could hardly be said to have the same centrality
for the discipline as the operation of imputing difference between cultures. This
is in fact more accurately described as contrast, since the most persuasive and

theoretically consequential ethnographic rhetoric represents the other essentially

as an inversion of whatever Western institution, practice, or set of notions is the
real object of interest. Hence Balinese theater and aesthetics stand against the me-

chanical and narrowly political Western understanding of the state; and, without

endorsing Freeman's style of critique or ethological non sequiturs, it must similarly be acknowledged that Mead's theoretical orientation and literary flair led her
to render Samoan freedom as the mirror of American constraint. The proposition

that the gift is only intelligible as an inversion of the category of the commodity
hardly requires extended discussion here (but cf. Parry 1986:466-467).

Many works of the relativizing style were or are intended to be critical, at

least in the minimal sense that they aimed to affirm the value of other cultures and
express a certain scepticism about "Western" ideas that were taken to be natural

and eternal. But the cultural critique depended upon the fabrication of alterity,9
upon a showcase approach to other cultures that is now politically unacceptable,
in its homogenization of others and implicit denial of the significance of migrant
cultures within the West. After so many decades of "economic development"

and conflict in tribal and third world societies, it is ludicrous if anthropological

commentary continues primarily to place such peoples in another domain, in a

space that establishes the difference and contingency of our own practice (cf. Fabian 1983). I am not saying that people are all the same, and that cultural differences are inconsequential; the challenge is not to do away with cultural difference,

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AGAINST ETHNOGRAPHY 311

and with what is locally distinctive, but to integrate this more effectively with
historical perceptions and a sense of the unstable and politically contested character of culture. Hence, as Moore has noted, "understanding cultural difference

is essential, but the concept itself can no longer stand as the ruling concept of a
modem anthropology, because it addresses only one form of difference among
many" (1987:9).

The tendency to exoticize others could be regarded as a quirk of the individuals who become anthropologists, or an inevitable consequence of the encounter

of fieldwork. The second suggestion might seem compelling, given the pervasive
notion of fieldwork as the experience of an individual from one culture in another.

Though elaborated for the purposes of collective professional self approbation,

this notion of inquiry and interpretation from a liminal perspective clearly cannot
be dismissed. But the point that is profoundly mystified in contemporary anthropological consciousness concerns the forms and diversity of the differences at issue. If one is seeking out contexts in which a sense of "not fitting" or "being

elsewhere" facilitates heightened awareness of the singularity and contingency of

both the culture of the situation and one's own assumptions, then it is clear that
there are many circumstances in which these conditions exist. There are numerous
contexts in "Western" cultures in which alienation or foreignness facilitate cul-

tural critique (a south London black woman in an Oxbridge college), and it is

obvious also that the crucial differences relate to age, sex, class, and various other
criteria, as well as the implicit ethnic categories that separate different "cultures." Or, to express the point differently, the notion of what constitutes cultural

difference seems to be restricted to distinction between an undefined "West" and

another domain of experience and meaning; the separation between these terms

energizes the interpretive project of ethnography, while difference might also be

situated between the sort of self-conscious exposition of local culture that is often

offered by senior men, and the voices of those without authority; between those
who stay in the countryside and those who have left; between those who hold fast

to what is valorized as local identity and those who appear to abandon it to become

Christians, Mormons, or communists. It could also, of course, be situated in difference among anthropologists, given that one of the reasons for engaging in research is to gather material that serves a particular argument.
From this perspective, the notion that fieldwork entails partaking of alterity
and thus requires an account of cultural difference is manifestly insufficient. All
the crucial questions are passed over because a multiplicity of cultural differences
are condensed. The contrastive operation discussed is almost inherent in any text
that explicates, or purports to explicate, the distinctiveness of a "culture." A
monograph is not about "other cultures" but rather another culture, and the fact

that this must at some level be treated as a bounded and stable system makes implicit contrast with a home-point almost inevitable even where there is no explicit
one-to-one juxtaposition. However, the number of cases in which showcase counterpositioning overtly animates analysis is considerable. Insofar as this is what
ethnographic writing is about, exoticism can only be disposed of by disposing of
ethnography, by breaking from one-to-one presentation into modes that disclose

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312 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

other registers of cultural difference and that replace "cultural systems" with less
stable and more derivative discourses and practices. These have a systemic character, but a dialectical account must do justice to the transposition of meanings,

their local incorporation. 10

It might be added that the theme of the difference of the other has been as
overplayed in anthropology as has the body in the library in detective fiction; even
ironic renderings (the body in the video library) seem merely to reproduce an established style that is not just unoriginal but seems rapidly to be becoming sterile.
It might thus be argued merely on literary grounds that it is about time for the
rhetorical form to be disfigured.

The Subsumption of Theory

The status of ethnography might also be problematized from an epistemological perspective. This is to open up a second line of criticism seemingly less
motivated by a political consideration (the objectionable aspect of inventing alterity) than a theoretical one: the view that the ethnographic genre localizes ques-

tions and thus refracts rather than generates any wider theoretical resolution or
cultural critique. However, this epistemological argument is also grounded politically: exoticism conveys a false view of historical entanglement and the trans-

position of meaning, while the particularizing effect of ethnographic discourse is

not merely unproductive theoretically but also associated with professional in-

troversion and a failure to engage in wider discussion.

An enormous amount of anthropology is motivated by questions at a high

level of generality. Anthropological texts legitimize the specificity of their case

materials and the localized and particular character of analysis by their bearing
upon problems that are taken to be theoretically consequential-the efficacy of
ritual, the nature of gift exchange, the intersection of status and power, the ritual

structures of divine kingship, the basis of gender asymmetries, and so on. But
what operation does the analytic technology of ethnography perform upon these
questions?

The argument here presupposes that our genre is a discourse of ethnography

and not a discourse upon it. " The question here is of the extent to which writing
is or is not contained by the process of representing its object; the second type
makes strong claims to external authority and supposes an analytic apparatus that

is not subsumed by the matter with which it deals. A discourse of something, on

the other hand, may attempt to depict or analyze something that is external to it,

but constantly creates discursive and analytical effects that can only be understood

in terms of categories that are already internal to the discourse. There is, for instance, an obvious difference between the ostensibly apolitical theoretical discourse upon politics in the academic discipline of political science, and the dis-

course of politics manifested in the speech of a professional politician or activist.

The authoritative claims of the latter are highly self-referential; there can be no
external validation of statements because the object, interpretative agency, and

theoretical categories are conflated in the very process of revealing and rendering.

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AGAINST ETHNOGRAPHY 313

The mode of representation recursively intertwines the moments of transcription,

explication of the terms for transcription, and the explanatory devices that posi-

tion the products of transcription. Of course, it is clear that these binary categories, like all similar analytic fictions, cannot ultimately be sustained as polar

types, but the distinction can have theoretical effect if it is associated particularly
with the discourse of ethnography. I take Strathern to endorse Runciman's sug-

gestion that the conventional understanding of the relationship between explanation and description be inverted: "Good descriptions in turn have to be grounded
in theory . . . the synthetic aims of adequate description . . . must deploy deliberate fictions to that end" (1988:10). Strathern's claims about her own methods
may not reflect views about the general condition of ethnographic writing, but the
proposition put forward here is in fact that depiction, theory and analysis are characterized by a high degree of mutual dependence.

This is very obvious in some recent cultural ethnographies. For example, in

The Fame of Gawa (Munn 1986) there is a strong sense that no operation takes
place outside the elaboration of indigenous categories in theoretical terms, or the
reverse-that the elaboration of theoretical vocabulary is merely illustrated by indigenous counterparts. In this case, the analysis is brilliantly effective, but there

are few spaces for adjudicating plausibility or implausibility independently of internal coherence, and there is little scope for rereading ethnographic material that
is separable from the analysis from the perspective of a different kind of inquiry.
Ethnography thus establishes things in an empirically isolated and strictly illus-

trative manner; cases stand by themselves, and their adequacy depends more on

the effects created through internal analytical narration than either external theoretical validation or an interest in the replicability of findings (setting aside the

naive positivistic claims associated, for instance, with Freeman's "falsification"

of Mead). The assessment of a useful ethnographic book depends above all upon
the persuasive fictions of its analysis.
Munn's book might be regarded as an extreme case, but from the perspective

of this argument, it would be incorrect to consider this state of textual self-referentiality as a quantity present in some works to a greater degree than others. Such

an impression instead derives merely from distinct subjective reactions to different theoretical paradigms and devices such as Munn's neologisms. What for one
reader appear as clear tools are highly contrived for another. The view adopted
here, which may be counterintuitive, is that writing ethnography into the premises
of analysis is a basic condition of the genre.
I am not saying that prior assumptions play too substantial a role in the production of accounts of other cultures. The premise here is that any scholarly discourse is an illustrative outcome of a conjuncture of theoretical interests, disci-

plinary procedures, and case materials; questions of interest do not relate to the
relative proportions of these terms-that quantitative epistemological metaphor
having been eschewed-but instead concern the particular ways of seeing permitted or disabled by available disciplinary forms.

The most conspicuous feature of the discourse of ethnography is a disjunction between general questions in social and cultural theory of the kind mentioned

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314 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

above and a way of writing that by its nature cannot resolve them. The

process that takes place as issues of theoretical consequence are worked th

ethnographically is subsumption. The illustrative material can be seen in
gular way, but any revelations are ethnographically contained.
This may be briefly illustrated through reference to the ethnographic cri-

tiques of Ortner's important argument that universal gender asymmetry could be

explained on the basis of pervasive associations between the male/female and culture/nature contrasts (Ortner 1974). This was transposed to the register of ethnog-

raphy in an influential collection of critiques (Strathern and MacCormack 1980)

that argued that the nature/culture opposition was a singular form in Western
thought, could not be seen as a cultural universal, and was not necessarily articulated with gender. While similar contrasts sometimes were present, and were
associated with gender in indigenous symbolic systems, the effect of the critique

was to expose a form of difference between these societies and Western thought

that had passed unrecognized in Ortner's analysis. Ethnography thus disposed of

a general argument and affirmed the difference and specificity of other cultures.
The point here is not simply that the particular thesis advanced by Ortner was
ethnographically disfigured, but that there was no way of moving back from these

critiques to any similar argument at the same level of generality. Nature, Culture
and Gender offers no basis for any theory comparable to Ortner's, and it is not
surprising at all that the equally significant and generalized arguments of Rosaldo
and Chodorow, which epitomized the scope and force of Woman, Culture and
Society (Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974) have been criticized on analogous grounds
(Moore 1987:22-24; see also Gewertz 1988 on Bamberger 1974). I am not, of
course, arguing that the various criticisms were not reasonable, but am concerned
with the epistemological point that the discipline is supposed to tack between general questions and ethnography, but appears to be capable of moving only in one
direction, into shallower water.

Departures

At this point I wish to establish a certain distance from the argument th

have developed, by stressing that analogous propositions could be developed
about any academic discourse that is tightly connected with a particular meth
ology or form of writing. Insofar as prehistory is a discourse of archaeology,

a prisoner of a certain kind of historical, social, and behavioral reconstruction t

is at once partial and inevitably circular. Some similar points might be made a
the inevitability of denying the worth of oral traditions from the perspecti
archive-bound conventional history; such devaluation arises necessarily in a

cipline that defines itself around rigorous work on a certain kind of material
though there is a direct parallel with the dismissal of travelers' reports in an

pology, it should be stressed that the discipline's investment in the practi

fieldwork is less disabling than the dominance of a narrow range of ways in wh

fieldwork is "written up." Hence the narrative and biographical genres of conventional history were ultimately more important than the fact that certain kinds

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AGAINST ETHNOGRAPHY 315

of "primary" research might be privileged. The point here, though, is t

this is a critique of ethnography's anthropology, it is not one that supposes that
some other scholarly discipline provides a model for a relationship between initial
general questions and the analytic form of the genre where the latter sustains

rather than subverts the former; if the hegemonic genres of anthropological writ-

ing now present themselves mainly as styles to be disfigured, the positive alter-

natives are not to be constituted through the old game of interdisciplinary borrowing, through the claim to fix up one line of inquiry by adding from another.

The association between exoticism and the marked tendency for ethnography
to render theoretical questions internal to local analyses is thus not entirely contingent. Both of these features of contemporary anthropology have a strong association with the dominance of ethnographic writing, which presents cultures as

unitary totalities. A book absorbed by a culture absorbed in a book cannot produce

a discourse upon ethnography, a discourse that uses ethnography to generate a
wider argument. At the same time the one-to-one juxtaposition that this form nor-

mally entails can only establish stability at a certain distance from the culture im-

puted to the reader; the truth of the ethnographic case depends upon its original
and nonderivative relation with the "us" to which it is opposed. It follows from
this, of course, that ethnographies that turn upon local comparison (e.g., Fox
1977; Leach 1954; White 1981) are likely to be less enmeshed in this orientalizing
and particularizing logic to the extent that dimensions of difference disconnected

from the us/them fiction are analytically consequential. The aim of this article is
not to condemn anything like the whole discipline, but to suggest that crucial

flaws are associated with the canonical model, rather than some superficial subjective interest in cultural authenticity. If there was merely a problem of self-deception, this would presumably have been expunged long ago. The persistence of
exoticism arises from the fact that it is precisely what ethnography is directed to
produce.

It is perhaps necessary to reiterate the earlier point that these arguments have
nothing to do with fieldwork, which is obviously a crucial way of learning. The
argument is rather that fieldwork should be drawn into other kinds of writing that

move into the space between the theoretical and universal and the local and ethnographic, and that are energized by forms of difference not contained within the
us/them fiction.

The potential responses are diverse. Montage clearly refracts and displaces
the pursuit of stable cultures through a succession of historical and experiential
contexts (as in Taussig 1987) and offers the most effective and radical assault

upon anthropology's tendency to fix a unitary symbolic system at a distance.'2

Here, however, I argue for an approach that in a sense is more grounded in conventional interests in an interpretative project, in analysis that works upon larger
problems toward a wider generative account of social and cultural phenomena.
From this perspective the reinvigoration of comparative anthropology appears to be crucial. The value of a method not contained by ethnography is apparent from its use from some feminist perspectives (Collier and Rosaldo 1981):

there is still a sense of political urgency about clarifying the broader nature of

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316 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

sexual asymmetries, which has resisted the tendency for these questions to be
subsumed within a localized ethnography of gender relations. The importance of
comparison emerges also from the fact that some kind of explicit discussion of
regional relationships and histories is necessary if older ethnological categories
and adjudications are not to be implicitly perpetuated. Many areal categories,
such as "Melanesia" and "Polynesia" live on in contemporary anthropological

parlance as though they had linguistic or prehistorical validity, while misleading

typifications of regional social structures and cultural forms provide silent contexts for ethnographic case studies (cf. Thomas 1989b).
At this point it might seem desirable to present an example of the kind of

project envisaged here, but this would partly misrepresent the claims and inten-

tions of the present article. 3 I do not appeal in a messianic manner to a style of

work that is unprecedented, which would be supposed to magically transcend the

orientalizing contrivance and particularism characteristic of the discipline at present. Since this critique is directed at a kind of canonical work, it is obvious that
much anthropological writing is not to be subsumed within that canon, and that

examples of comparative analysis already exist. The interest is thus in altering the
marginal status of that genre, and elaborating upon it in certain directions.
This is not to say, though, that there is an established style of comparison

that should simply be adopted and generalized. To the contrary, it appears that
much comparative work is inadequate because it is set up as a project secondary

to ethnography; one that perhaps operates at a higher level of generality, and with
more theoretical ambitions, but nevertheless one that is essentially parasitic upon

the richness of what can be described as "primary sources" (Strathern 1988:10).

This is why it seems important to establish an intermediate level of writing

between problematic universalism and ethnographic illustration, a kind of writing

that incorporates ethnography but is not subordinated to it. At a theoretical level

this should be able to displace discourses of alterity by representing difference

within cultures and difference among a plurality (as opposed to one-to-one con-

trast). It should be able to combine nuanced firsthand knowledge of particular

localities with the interpretation of a broader range of "secondary" ethnographic

or "primary" historical descriptions. This type of grounding thus depends upon

a model of knowledge rather different to that implicit in various academic disci-

plines, where there is a strong if generally implicit idea that writing ought generally to be based on one's own specialized and original research. Other work is

often consigned to a secondary or residual category, such as that of the "literature

review" or textbook; even though it is obvious that many theoretically crucial

works have not derived from work that was primary in an empirical sense. A new
kind of post-ethnographic anthropological writing would presume the sort of local
knowledge that has always been critical for representing circumstances both at

home and abroad, but would refuse the bounds of conveniently sized localities
through venturing to speak about regional relations and histories. If case material
from a range of associated places cannot expose the historical contingency and

particular determination of social and cultural forms that might otherwise be up-

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AGAINST ETHNOGRAPHY 317

held as relativizing ethnological exhibits, it is difficult to see any other approach

that could sever anthropology's roots in the colonial imagination.

What I'm suggesting, then, is not the old kind of positivist comparison that
seeks to establish general theories, but a form of analysis that uses a regional

frame to argue about processes of social change and diversity, that is critically
conscious of its own situation in a succession of European representations of such
places, that develops its arguments strategically and provisionally rather than universally. The significance of regional comparison arises from the fact that it is

concerned with a plurality of others, a field in which difference emerges between

one context and the next, and does not take the radical form of alterity in a gulf
between observers and observed. Difference is thus historically constituted, rather
than a fact of cultural stability. The contexts that can be explored are not necessarily fenced around as "other cultures" but include historical processes and

forms of exchange and communication that have permitted cultural appropriation

and transposition. The second strand of this conclusion is thus that while anthropology has dealt effectively with implicit meanings that can be situated in the
coherence of one culture, contemporary global processes of cultural circulation
and reification demand an interest in meanings that are explicit and derivative.

Otherwise the risk is that our expectations about other cultures, like those of Lord
Valentia, will prevent us from seeing anything in local mimicry or copying other

than an inauthentic masquerade. It's not clear that the unitary social system ever
was a good model for anthropological theory, but the shortcomings are now more

conspicuous than ever. We cannot understand cultural borrowings, accretions, or

locally distinctive variants of cosmopolitan movements, while we privilege the
richness of localized conversation and the stable ethnography that captures it. The
nuances of village dialogues are unending, and their plays of tense and person

beguiling, but if we are to recover an intelligible debate beyond the multiplicity

of isolated tongues we must surrender something to the corruptions of pidgins and
creoles, trading others' grammars for our own lexicons. Derivative lingua franca

have always offended those preoccupied with boundaries and authenticity, but
they offer a resonant model for the uncontained transpositions and transcultural
meanings which cultural inquiry must now deal with.
Notes

Acknowledgments. The encouragement and comments of Henrietta Moore, Pascal Boyer,

and Margaret Jolly made it possible for me to write this article; but it should not be presumed that any of these people agree with the positions advanced.

'The discursive entity is obviously diverse, and the reification required by any disciplinary
critique must be inaccurate with respect to a variety of idiosyncratic and innovative works.
My interest here is not in establishing that what is said applies to any single work (which
would prove nothing about the genre) or the statistical extent to which the claims apply to
the range of work.

2The arguments here should not be read to denigrate the work of writers such as Clifford
and Marcus, upon which they obviously depend. While I take much of what they have

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318 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

advanced to be essential to any novel and critical anthropology, my complaint is that the

question of exoticism in contemporary anthropology has been passed over-as though such
works as Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (Asad 1974) had expunged the problem.

3This perhaps accounts for the curiously prevalent misconception that the authors of Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986) were putting reflection, criticism or some kind of

theoretical self-consciousness in the place of primary research; "it seems more than likely
that the book will provoke a trend away from doing anthropology, and towards ever more
barren criticism and meta-criticism" (Spencer 1989:161). It was quite clear from Anthro-

pology as Cultural Critique (Marcus and Fisher 1986) that at least two of the writers saw
a kind of critical ethnography, rather than any criticism detached from ethnography, as the
central project of the discipline; it might also be pointed out that since Writing Culture was

published some contributors at least have produced other substantive studies (e.g., Rabinow 1989) and not works of "metacriticism." The notion that the 1986 collection and
associated publications represented an assault on ethnography is thus clearly false; this
article departs from both Writing Culture and its aggrieved detractors by insisting on a

fieldwork/ethnography distinction and using that as a basis for doing what the reflexive
theorists have been unjustifiably accused of doing-arguing that ethnography's time has
passed.

4This was intended, but not made properly explicit, in Out of Time (Thomas 1989a). The
present article is intended to some extent to be an amendment to that critique, even though
it does not take up the question of ethnography's lack of history, which was central to my
book.

'This form of words may suggest that I do not regard criticisms of Said's project as justified;
I hope to explore the topic of the reception of Said's work in a separate article, but can note
briefly here that I agree with some of the points made by Clifford, but believe that most
anthropological critics have neglected the sense in which Orientalism is a work of specifically literary scholarship and secondly that it is but a part of a series of works that operate
at distinct levels of generality and with distinct purposes (Said 1978, 1979, 1981, 1984,
1986; Said and Hitchins 1988). Some of these works are referred to by Clifford, but most

authors cite nothing other than Orientalism; I am not, of course, complaining about incomplete bibliographies, but draw attention to the fact that Orientalism has been criticized for
not doing things that Said actually has done elsewhere.

6Strathern however implies that her propositions are simply intended to generate novel theoretical effects, as if the epistemological status of analytical fictions excludes both sub-

stantive claims, and disputation based on the noncorrespondence of a fiction with evidence.
If this is in fact the position of the preface to The Gender of the Gift, it would seem at odds
with what are in fact substantive propositions in the body of the text, and also a stance that

rather disables one's own analysis. My view, which may or may not diverge from a posi-

tion that Strathern did not succeed in expressing unambiguously, is that analytical fictions
are, like other forms of knowledge, partial (in the sense of being both interested and in-

complete), and because of this condition (rather than in spite of it), may offer an account
of things in the world that is adequate for the purposes of a historically situated community
or array of people. Insofar as a fiction is seen to be representative, its substantive claims
are as true as any of the other things we believe.

7My use of Negara as a model of the one-to-one contrast that is fundamental to ethnographic writing is quite deliberate, since the historical character of the work makes it ob-

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AGAINST ETHNOGRAPHY 319

vious that ethnography can and must be understood at a separate level from fieldwork.
However, as Marcus and Fisher have noted with respect to that book, the form of "cultural

criticism [offered] as epistemological critique . . . is also characteristic of many other

such works in anthropology" (1986:145).
8Martha Macintyre, personal communication.

9This point that these varieties of cultural critique have a dark side is generally passed over
in Marcus and Fisher's discussion of various "techniques of cultural critique in anthro-

pology" (1986:137-164). It is still possible to take arguments proceeding through phrases

such as "By contrast, Balinese conceptions of the state . . ." (p. 145) as though they operated only upon the "Western" ideas that are displaced. It should be noted, however, that
they do discuss some of the shortcomings of the "static, us-them juxtaposition" (pp. 160-

162) and the ways in which consciousness has moved "to locate [an other culture] in a
time and space contemporaneous with our own, and thus to see it as part of our world,
rather than as a mirror or alternative" (p. 134). However, their suggestions that cultural

critique would revolve around anything other than juxtaposition or the repatriation of meth-

ods employed to study the exotic are weakly developed. It is notable that what is loosely
called reflexive anthropology has not engaged much with feminism, while the perspective
advanced here takes the feminist critique of perspectival and political difference within
cultures as a model for breaking from a discourse preoccupied with difference between.

'0According to Sahlins, world systems theorists argue "that since the hinterland societies
anthropologists habitually study are open to radical change, externally imposed by Western

capitalist expansion, the assumption that these societies work on some autonomous cultural-logic cannot be entertained. This is a confusion between an open system and a lack

of system" (1985:viii). The question that is not addressed, however, is quite what this
openness generates: in Sahlins' view, events and external intrusions are creatively turned
to the purposes of a local cultural order. This is to save structural anthropology's set of

original meanings from historical transposition, and is an apt approach (irrespective of the
plausibility of realizations) for histories of early contact. The problem arises from the fact
that these hardly exemplify global processes or even later phases of colonial contact; here

the cultural ramifications are analogous to linguistic creolization. I do, however, agree with
Sahlins that global systems theory is not up to the task of accounting for "the diversity of
local responses to the world-system-persisting, moreover, in its wake" (1985:viii).

"This distinction is abducted from the work of Peter De Bolla (1989:34 and passim). It
will be obvious to anyone who consults this book that I have distorted and recontextualized
the contrast for my own purposes.

'2There are, however, arguably risks that authorial encompassment is relocated covertly
through the refusal to enunciate precise arguments and methodological claims (cf. Kapferer
1988).

'3A comparative study of exchange, transcultural movements of material culture, and colonial history in the Pacific (Thomas in press) does however attempt to exemplify the style
of comparative and historical analysis advocated here.
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