The Influence of Edward Said and Orientalism on Anthropology

The Influence of Edward Said and Orientalism on Anthropology, or: Can the Anthropologist Speak? HERBERT S. LEWIS In Orientalism, Edward Said ignores anthropology almost entirely, except to allow that Clifford Geertz was not so bad.1 It did not take long, however, for other writers practising literary theory and critical theory, to begin to write about anthropology and ‘the savage Other’, and ‘the primitive Other’, and just ‘the Other’. Soon it became fashionable to conflate or confuse anthropologists with missionaries, soldiers, colonial policemen and tax collectors, ivory traders, and Paul Gauguin. Even earlier, a number of anthropologists had begun to turn the big guns of ‘critique’ on themselves—or at least on their anthropological ‘Others’— both past and present. Anthropological writings, too, became packed with ingenious claims of the evils of anthropology, and, as a result, the field has been painfully wounded—from without and within. This essay deals with some of these assaults upon anthropology, and tries to answer the question of why so many anthropologists have been complicit in the Saidian project, and why Said’s accusations and others inspired and encouraged by him are so inappropriate for the discipline of anthropology. This discussion will be directed primarily at North American anthropology because the case is clearest here. First, American anthropology has by far the largest and most varied group of practitioners and developed as an academic discipline two decades earlier than the British. Second, American anthropologists have fallen hardest for ‘Orientalism’ and the whole train of ‘posts’.Third, when the critics write of the errors of anthropology they frequently turn to the notion of ‘culture’, a concept central to ‘classic’ American anthropology but peripheral to the British tradition, and the postcolonial imaginary is more likely to fasten on American anthropologists such as Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Clifford Geertz. (Malinowski and his infamous Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term is the type-case for British anthropology.2) Herbert S. Lewis is a Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Israel Affairs, Vol.13, No.4, October 2007, pp.774– 785 ISSN 1353-7121 print/ISSN 1743-9086 online DOI: 10.1080/13537120701445158 q 2007 Taylor & Francis THE INFLUENCE OF EDWARD SAID ON ANTHROPOLOGY 775 THE ASSAULT ON ANTHROPOLOGY Anthropology has probably been damaged more basically and seriously by the host of oppositional, post-colonial, and so-called ‘critical’ theories than any other social science discipline in the American academy. Historical studies are too basic to be lost to the world—as deeply affected as they have been; professors of literature and of new fields such as cultural studies have made a whole new living by building on Foucault, Said, Gramsci, Barthes, Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari, Gilroy, Hall, and so many others, and interest in literature (however defined) will never disappear. Anthropology, however, a much smaller discipline and the target of so many attacks on its very nature—has been drastically wounded at its core and transformed. Orientalism, the book, has had a powerful impact on anthropology— despite the discipline’s absence from its pages—because of a powerful mood that had taken hold of American anthropology by the 1970s. The ground was prepared in the late 1960s by the raging war in Vietnam and ‘the war at home’, on the campuses; the long civil rights battles that had grown more and more violent and fostered extremism on both sides of the divide; the urban riots, the assassinations (the two Kennedys, King, Medgar Evers, the Philadelphia Three, and others), and the killings at Kent State and Jackson State; the development of emotionladen identity politics, including the women’s movement, La Raza, Black Panthers, and the American Indian Movement. There was the exhilaration of ‘1968’ in Berkeley, Madison, and Paris, and the romance of revolution, with Frantz Fanon, Regis Debray, and others very much in the picture. Among those most affected on American university campuses in those days were the graduate students in anthropology—often with young, and not so young, faculty by their side.3 Because the glory of anthropology, our proud boast, was that we concerned ourselves with all the peoples of the world, and especially with the ‘marginalized’, the colonized, the far away, the ‘different’, and the ‘primitive’—we were particularly vulnerable when the student rebellions and the intellectual attacks on ‘the West’ were at their height. Our connection with living and colonized peoples gave us a more immediate connection with les damnees de la terre than that of most sociologists, economists, historians, art historians, museum keepers and philologists. We were on the front lines of the study of (what would become known as) ‘Otherness’: ‘the Others’ were said to be our ‘Objects’, and we would have to bear the blame for the sins of the ‘West’ in its quest for domination over the Rest. Or so it seemed to a highly vocal cohort of students. From 1968 on, those who criticized anthropology had many eager listeners. It began with the strident declaration by Kathleen Gough that anthropology is the child and/or handmaiden of colonialism. Her paper 776 ISRAEL AFFAIRS was seconded by a couple of others, and then the notion was sealed for good in 1973 by the volume edited by Talal Asad.4 ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE COLONIAL ENCOUNTER Between 1965 and 1970, the profession (in the United States) suffered from the alarms over ‘Project Camelot’ and ‘the Thailand controversy’, and some members gloried in the establishment of the ‘radical caucus’ of the AAA in 1969. In 1972 Dell Hymes published a collection of papers that had been brewing since 1968,5 urging Reinventing Anthropology. The volume included papers by his erstwhile Berkeley colleagues, Gerald Berreman,6 celebrating ‘Bringing It All Back Home’ (with credit to Bob Dylan), and Laura Nader’s paper, ‘Up the Anthropologist— Perspectives Gained from Studying Up’—calling for the study of the powerful and their institutions.7 And both papers mirrored and responded to the anger of their students. Then Marxist anthropology, and dependency theory, and world systems theory, flourished. Some students dreamt of joining ‘peasant revolutions’— but as Che and Regis found out, this wasn’t really as much fun as it looked. Another shock occurred in 1969 when a ‘native struck back’. Vine Deloria, Jr.’s book, Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto,8 with its unflattering chapter, ‘Anthropologists and other Friends’, was a terrible blow then, and continues to damage relations between American Indians and anthropologists. Nineteen breezy pages that shook our world, in a volume found in every bookstore in the land. It was in this context of malaise, confusion, disillusion, anger, and even rage, that there were rumours of the Frankfurt School, of Foucault, of Derrida, and then—the new key text, Said’s Orientalism. This book was joined a few years later by another making similar extreme claims— Johannes Fabian’s derivative and overly imaginative Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object.9 It, too, found a ready audience.10 These and many other publications, appearing without end and without mercy, have created a general disposition within the field of pervasive guilt and fear—the fear of doing wrong to ‘the Other’. On the one hand, younger anthropologists and students have grown up knowing little about older anthropology except that it was wicked; on the other, it keeps students and grown anthropologists terrified about their own possible ‘complicity’—a particular concern of the contemporary moment. Here is a recent use of ‘complicity’ in a sentence. The editor of the American Ethnologist, the field’s second journal, writes of: the continuing intellectual complicity of much anthropological thinking and writing in the privileging of men at the expense not just of women but also of other models and frames of understanding social and economic THE INFLUENCE OF EDWARD SAID ON ANTHROPOLOGY 777 forms of organization. . .. The possibility that it may even be true in some, or possibly most, of the scholarship on heterosexuality and heteronormativity, in queer theory, or in feminist rethinkings of kinship and marriage is enough to arouse the passion and ire of a number of our commentators and to lead to a detailed articulation of the theoretical or conceptual state of early twenty-first-century anglophone anthropology.11 Here the concern is about the complicity of others, but anthropologists must worry that their own words and works will be seen as complicit with capitalism, colonialism, heteronormativity, or of objectifying or Orientalizing or eroticizing or universalizing the people they study. (And this is just a short list.) As Inglis puts it, ‘Many contemporary practitioners of anthropology in particular and cultural inquiry in general affect sanctimony as part of the attire of self-righteousness to be worn on duty, so much so as to make it hard at times to say anything at all’.12 These fears are the result of the long-developing culture of persistent complaint, denunciation, and accusation that has overtaken and paralyzed the field, forcing it into ever more rarefied and incomprehensible flights of theory. And most theory these days is founded on an almost all-engrossing emphasis on domination, submission (except where there is resistance), and the evils of social formations, discourses, regimes, hegemonies, global capitalism, neoliberalism, and other phenomena of the human world. These are fears that keep ethnologists and ethnographers on their toes even about what to call the people they write of, let alone what they write about them. (This is known as ‘the crisis of representation’.) Two generations of anthropologists have been taught that comparison is always invidious and that it smacks of ‘science’ and ‘positivism’. (George Marcus writes of ‘the positivist sins of the past’—without humour.13) One must be very careful about any sort of generalizations, because generalizing might be interpreted as essentializing or totalizing or reification, and this is certainly wrong—unless, of course, one wants to essentialize, totalize, or reify the entire field of anthropology, or ‘Orientalism’, or ‘the West’. This approach has enabled a whole new genre of anthropological research and writing: ‘textual analysis’—‘the hermeneutics of suspicion’— used to attack the failings of discourses and individuals and reveal ‘the political interests which are served by the text’.14 Edward Said took, but he also gave—a whole new space for literary theorists and anthropologists alike, writing about anthropologists rather than about the people anthropologists (used to) write about. About the former they can say anything they like; it is unclear that they can say anything at all about the latter. (The praxis of ‘the literary turn’ is academically safer and can be carried out in the comfort of one’s own home or library.) Edward Said and his cohort managed to convert the notion of criticism in anthropology from questions of accuracy, ‘conformity to reality’, 778 ISRAEL AFFAIRS explanatory usefulness, theoretical sophistication, empirical support, to one of morally right and wrong. (Said himself pointedly refused to even consider the question of how a morally or intellectually and politically more acceptable anthropology might be possible.)15 In earlier times our self-image as anthropologists was that of proud seekers after the ‘truths’ of human behaviour in all places and all times; we thought we were at the frontiers of the knowledge of humanity both literally and figuratively. As early as 1887 Franz Boas warned us that the mental framework of our own cultural and ‘historical environment’ would keep us from seeing the full possibilities of what it is to be human, and told us that it is ‘absolutely necessary to study the human mind in its various historical, and speaking more generally, ethnic environments. By applying [the comparative] method, the object to be studied is freed from the influences that govern the mind of the student’.16 And so we went to the ends of the earth to see how things were done there, too. We intended not merely to be students of ‘our own’ distinctive time-bound and historically determined culture—but not merely students of ‘primitives’ either. We thought that we would go among all the peoples of the earth and learn what the range of possible human behaviours might be. Our concern was precisely to avoid assuming that ‘we’ were right and good and ‘they’ are wrong and bad—that ‘they are our Others’! We hoped to understand each people as far as possible in their own terms, to try to grapple with both the similarities and the differences among peoples, to understand the nature of human behaviour and diversity. We wanted to know about the ways of adapting to different types of environments, and grasp the implications of different ways of making a living in these environments, the range of possible family and kinship and political and economic systems, and beliefs, and so much more. We hoped to record for posterity the lives, thoughts, works, arts, languages, and struggles of all the world’s peoples. Through our efforts, peoples who were not—at that time—in a position to represent themselves ( pace Said and Spivak)—would be present on the roster of the world’s peoples and cultures. It was clear that many of the practices of the past were being lost as a result of the influence of colonial rule, missionaries and other outsiders, environmental changes, and the worldwide diffusion of new things and ways. Boas and his followers thought that other ways of being should be known—even if that knowledge did not seem important to the members of those societies at the time. American anthropologists also made a stand, in and beyond the classroom, against racism and ethnocentrism. We wanted to try to lessen misunderstanding and hatred among peoples—especially that of the dominant against the weak! There was, in fact, a significant moral and political dimension to the anthropology established by Franz Boas and his students. We thought we had accomplished something with our critique THE INFLUENCE OF EDWARD SAID ON ANTHROPOLOGY 779 of racial determinism and our message of cross-cultural understanding, at least with our students and those members of the public who heard the voices of the few anthropologists there were. (Until the 1960s there were fewer than 1,000 in all the four branches of the field—perhaps only 500 cultural anthropologists.) Suddenly these efforts came under attack from every point of view. As Thomas Gregor and Daniel Gross recently wrote, anthropologists live ‘within what has been a slowly developing culture of self-accusation and self-doubt’17—and here are a few aspects of this culture. ‘Doing ethnography is morally suspect’.18 We have been told (by those who have read Foucault) that ‘observation’, as in ‘participant-observation’, is akin to controlling the panopticon, as though we were the jailers in Jeremy Bentham’s ideal prison. Fieldwork itself has been condemned as exploitation of ‘the Other’, and writers easily speak of ‘the anthropologist’s gaze’—a term derived from the idea of ‘the male leer’. The very act of going to live among another people in order to ‘study’ them by speaking to them, and just being among them to find out how they live and what they say and believe may be considered wicked. Here is one version of that idea, from Bernard McGrane: Anthropology’s participant observer, the field ethnologist, appears on a concrete level to be engaged in intercourse with the ‘natives’, with the non-European Other. Analytically, this intercourse or dialogue is a fantasy, a mask, covering over and hiding his analytic monologue or masturbation.19 . . . [A]nthropology has been the modern West’s monologue about ‘alien cultures’. It never learned from them, rather it studied them; in fact studying them, making sense out of them, making a ‘science’ about them, has been the modern method of not listening, of avoiding listening, to them. The Other’s empirical presence as the field and subject matter of anthropological discourse is grounded upon his theoretical absence as interlocutor, as dialogic colleague, as audience. In order for modern anthropology to sustain itself, its monologue about alien cultures, those cultures must be kept in analytic silence.20 And speaking of silence, McGrane does not cite one single work of ethnography in his book. Not one! Just as Said does unto ‘Orientalists’, so does McGrane to anthropology. But at least we went to ‘jungles’, deserts, islands, and mountains to see the peoples we studied; McGrane could not even be bothered to go to the library.21 ‘Anthropology’ as a whole is accused of ‘primitivism’, ‘exoticizing’, and ‘romanticizing the Other’ on the one hand, and yet it is also found guilty of the evil of universalizing, believing that all peoples share certain things—at the risk of making what we do seem ‘normal’.22 780 ISRAEL AFFAIRS To stress the hegemony of the West ignores the agency of resisting people, but to stress agency and autonomy is to ignore the hegemony of the West.23 To generalize about the customs, social structure, or culture of a people is to totalize; to focus on the impact of individual choices and actions is to be guilty of ‘methodological individualism’. To study the history of a people is to harm them by ignoring the living; to study the living but not concentrate on their past is to be guilty of the sin of ahistoricism; and to speak in the language of the dreaded ‘ethnographic present’ is to assure oneself of a place in the flames of postcolonial hell. We have developed a culture in which many anthropologists say, ‘When I hear the word “culture” I slip back the safety-catch of my revolver’.24 It is a culture of ‘writing against culture’, one in which the former chair of anthropology at Columbia University, Nicholas Dirks (paradoxically, ‘Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology’), writes of ‘culture’ as a ‘crime’ and a ‘violent imposition’, something that was ‘invented’ in order to keep colonial peoples in thrall.25 It is not clear what this is supposed to mean, but it is certainly bad because he writes of, ‘the heart of darkness, the crime at the beginning of anthropology, the horror that undermines but also undergirds the heterological task of reading culture’.26 Edward Said can claim some credit for this attitude to the idea of culture in the discipline of anthropology. He projected his personal extreme unease about his ethnic identity and his misunderstandings of and discomfort with depictions of Arab and Muslim culture and history into Orientalism. His autobiography, Out of Place, bears striking witness to his visceral aversion to matters of ethnic identity, customs and cultures, and differences. (One of the most often cited anthropological attacks on culture, ‘Writing against Culture’, was written by Lila Abu-Lughod,27 the daughter of Said’s longtime friend and ally, and a colleague of Professors Dirks and Said at Columbia.) Authors operating with the license of ‘the literary turn’, with its remarkable ‘textual fetishism’, make implausible claims about the powerful deleterious impact anthropology has had on colonialism and the modern world. Here is Charles Briggs, accusing Franz Boas of socio-political crimes through his theoretical work. Briggs starts with the fact that: Practitioners in cultural and literary studies, postcolonial studies, ethnic and women’s studies, American studies, and other fields have often claimed the authority to define culture in ways that they see as countering the perceived complicity [note that word again] of anthropological constructions in consolidating hegemony. . . . If culture [as defined by the group above] ‘constitutes a site in which the reproduction of contemporary capitalist social relations may be THE INFLUENCE OF EDWARD SAID ON ANTHROPOLOGY 781 continually contested’. . . anthropology [Briggs’s emphasis] becomes, for many scholars, a synonym for locations in which hegemonic notions of culture, and attempts to reproduce inequality [my emphasis], themselves get reproduced’ (Briggs 2002: 482). [Who or what is attempting to reproduce inequality? Isn’t this reification?]28 The problems with the [Boasian] culture concept lie. . . in the way it helps produce unequal distributions of consciousness, authority, agency, and power [emphasis added].29 What is Briggs claiming here? He uses the literary people’s own ‘claims to the authority to define culture’ as the stick with which to beat his discipline. He does this by constructing a long and involved just-so story about Franz Boas’s notion of culture, in which, in the end: Boas’s theoretical move thus opens the door to dehistoricizing imperialism by reducing it to general effects of a universal process of reifying consciousness categories when applied to cross-linguistic and cross-cultural encounters. [Now] Balibar argues that this sort of reasoning provides neoracists with a cultural logic that naturalizes racism. Although [Balibar] seems to suggest that this trope constitutes a neoracist distortion of anthropological constructions, I would argue that it follows directly from Boas’s own culture theory.30 The key to Briggs’s involved argument is the fact that Boas wrote that speakers of different languages share distinctive ‘modes of classification’, and that much of what is done in speech (including the articulation of sounds) occurs ‘automatically and without reflection at any given moment’.31 That is the essence of his case.32 It follows, in Briggs’s logic, that ‘The ideological work that these notions perform helps sustain nation-states, colonial regimes, and relations of inequality’.33 Briggs would have us believe that neoracists, nation-states, colonial regimes—and other relations of inequality—were just hanging on the words of Franz Boas—as adumbrated most fully in the Introduction to the Handbook of American Indian Languages in 1911.34 Now that, truly, shows the power of anthropological ideas in action! But even if Briggs’s tortuous and loaded presentation of Boas’s arguments made sense, just what was the mechanism that transformed his ideas, known and appreciated by a handful of students in the 1920s, into this powerful tool for domination throughout the world? Since when does inequality and colonialism depend upon recondite articles by anthropologists? 782 ISRAEL AFFAIRS One cannot know from Briggs and the postcolonial discourse that Franz Boas and his students did more than any other group in history to bring into disrepute the deeply entrenched ideas of racial determinism that ruled political and intellectual life from the post-Civil War era until the Boasian message got widely disseminated in the 1930s.35 And those anthropologists who can still remember further back than the 1970s are still in the forefront of the effort to stave off a revival of ‘racial’ thinking. Briggs asks us to believe that Boas’s subtle theoretical points about language and culture had terrible, wide-ranging consequences, but he silences Boas’s widely distributed and influential, The Mind of Primitive Man.36 In this book, Boas not only argued against racial interpretations of history and culture, but also tried to demonstrate that all humans think in basically the same way, subject only to historically derived cultural differences. This work struck a major blow against any notion of a generalized, inferior, non-Western Other—to the extent that any such book can. This one was well known to intellectuals and liberals, and dreaded and reviled by literate racists and nativists; the Handbook was known to only a handful of specialists. The question is, what drives Charles Briggs to make such outlandish claims about the impact of the man who achieved most in the fight against racial determinism, and fought inequality and injustice and imperialist cant as few other academics did? And why was this paper published in the ‘Special Centennial Issue’ of the American Anthropologist, the journal Boas helped establish? Apparently nothing is too outrageous to be acceptable these days; little critical intelligence is applied to works that bear the imprimatur of the ‘post’. Here is another example of the far-reaching claims of the posters. Susan Wright writes: Whilst colonialism did not depend on anthropology. . . the discipline ‘trafficked’ in the images of the ‘primitif [sic ] other’, the mirror to modernity, through which the West knew itself and justified its ‘responsibility’ to control and administer ‘the other’. These images were therefore part of the mechanics of domination—even if anthropology did not invent them in the first place.37 Wright’s claim that ‘the discipline “trafficked” in the images of the “primitif other”, the mirror to modernity’ bears no resemblance to what American (and British) anthropologists were doing after anthropology became ‘a discipline’. It has no relation to the message of American anthropology as it developed from about 1900, when Boas’s first students spread out across the United States to establish the discipline. Not only did modern anthropology NOT feature a notion of a ‘non-Western Other’ ‘the mirror to modernity’, but Franz Boas began in the 1890s to argue against the whole notion that ‘primitive man’ had a different sort of mind from ‘civilized man’. His book, The Mind THE INFLUENCE OF EDWARD SAID ON ANTHROPOLOGY 783 of Primitive Man, was the most important work to refute notions of innate physical, mental, and cultural inferiority. Regrettably, the discourse represented by Said, McGrane, Briggs, Wright, and Hobart38 is the only discourse bearing on the history and nature of anthropology that many students and other readers have heard for the last twenty-five years. CONCLUSIONS Anthropology today is in a perilous state—brought to this condition by the great train of ideologies of which postcolonialism is just one of the last cars. The science of human behaviour through the study of comparative cultures has been consigned to a wicked past, and study of the peoples of the world in all their complexity is in danger of being replaced by turgid and non-replicable treatises on violence, inequality, ill-health, and poor body image. (Just browse the Abstracts recent annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association to verify this claim.) The profession has become thoroughly politicized, as a glance at the Anthropology Newsletter, or perusal of the American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Anthropological Quarterly and Cultural Anthropology will show. It is fitting and proper that anthropologists should study contemporary problems of the human condition, but these days this is most often done with single-minded applications of the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, guided by ‘the culture of complaint’, on a foundation of obsession with domination. The reputation of the field has plummeted and the discipline seems increasingly irrelevant. What are the important theoretical ideas and approaches of our day? What can we say are our contributions to knowledge and scholarship at this stage in the history of our discipline? I conclude with a paragraph from one of the remaining old-timers of the field—a man of the old democratic left and an icon even today—Sidney Mintz: We anthropologists have a heritage of our own. Our predecessors not only told the world but also showed the world that all peoples are equally human, equal in what they are, equal in what they have done for humankind. Nobody else at that time had said it and demonstrated it; anthropologists did. It does not befit us children of that enlightenment to turn our backs on the method that was used to make those ideas accessible to all of us. NOTES 1. The positive attention that his book received from many anthropologists apparently encouraged Said to respond to his admirers with increasing polemical severity directed 784 ISRAEL AFFAIRS 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. explicitly at the contemporary profession. He then decided that Geertz is, in fact, bad. Edward Said, ‘Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors’, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 15, No. 2 (1989), pp. 205 –225. Bronislaw Malinowski, A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, London, 1967. Lest this be thought the ranting of one of the curmudgeonly conservatives on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus, the author proudly proclaims that he was one of the organizers of the second teach-in in the country, a few weeks after Marshall Sahlins and Eric Wolf played a similar role at Michigan. The author helped found Faculty for Peace and ran the speakers’ bureau—but did not support the student takeover of the anthropology office or their throwing a heavy bench through its plate glass wall. Talal Asad (ed.) Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, London, 1973. Dell Hymes (ed.) Reinventing Anthropology, New York, 1974. Gerald Berreman, ‘“Bringing it all Back Home”: Malaise in Anthropology’, in Hymes (ed.) Reinventing Anthropology, pp. 83–98. Laura Nader, ‘Up the Anthropologist—Perspectives Gained from Studying Up’, in Hymes (ed.) Reinventing Anthropology, pp. 284 –311. Vine Deloria, Jr. Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, New York, 1969. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, New York, 1983. Here is Charles Briggs’s summary of it: ‘Johannes Fabian argues that anthropological constructions of culture and cultural relativity have helped foster a “denial of coevalness” that has legitimated colonialism by locating other cultures outside the temporal sphere of modernity’ (Charles Briggs, ‘Linguistic Magic Bullets in the Making of a Modernist Anthropology’, American Anthropologist, Vol. 104 (2002), pp. 481–498). The argument makes no sense logically or historically but that does not keep it from being one of the most widely cited works in the current canon. Virginia Dominguez, Foreword to ‘Are Men Missing’, American Ethnologist, Vol. 32, No. 1 (2005), pp. 1 –2. Fred Inglis, Clifford Geertz: Culture, Custom, and Ethics, Cambridge, MA, 2000. George Marcus, Blurb on the back cover of Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing, Chicago, 1967. According to Ricoeur (speaking of Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud), the hermeneutics of suspicion is ‘a method of interpretation which assumes that the literal or surface-level meaning of a text is an effort to conceal the political interests which are served by the text. The purpose of interpretation is to strip off the concealment, unmasking those interests’. It unmasks and unveils untenable claims. It suspects the credibility of the superficial text and explores what is underneath the surface to reveal a more authentic dimension of meaning (Ruel F. Pepa, ‘Nurturing the Imagination of Resistance: Some Important views from contemporary philosophers’, 2004, www.philosophos.com/philosophy_article_85.html#footnotes (accessed 16 June 2007). This is the theory. In practice, the critics of anthropology rarely have the courtesy to analyze actual texts. It is usually acceptable to mention a work and then devote a few paragraphs to the claim that it has been harmful. Marianna Torgovnik’s deconstruction of Malinowski’s Sexual Lives of Savages—through the cover of the paperback edition of 1962—offers a prime example (Marianna Torgovnick, 1990) Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives, Chicago, 1990. Torgovnick points out the relationship between ‘man and sky and culture—woman and jungle and nature’ on the cover, but the cover was the work of a professional designer of book jackets, Janet Halverson, forty years after it was first published and twenty years after Malinowski’s death. There were always political arguments and some debates over morality, but never condemnations of a whole field. Franz Boas, Review of ‘Die Welt in ihren Spiegelungen unter dem Wandel des Volkergedankens’, Science, No. 10 (1887), p. 284. ¨ Thomas Gregor and Daniel Gross, ‘Guilt by Association: The Culture of Accusation and the American Anthropological Association’s Investigation of Darkness in El Dorado’, American Anthropologist, Vol. 106, No. 4 (2004), p. 696. Gregor and Gross, ‘Guilt’, p. 689. Bernard McGrane, Beyond Anthropology: Society and the Other, New York, 1989, p. 125. McGrane, Beyond Anthropology, pp. 127–128. THE INFLUENCE OF EDWARD SAID ON ANTHROPOLOGY 785 21. McGrane includes a few standard texts of history and of theory, such as: Marvin Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory, New York, 1966; Melville Herskovits, Cultural Relativism, New York, 1977; E.R. Leach, Rethinking Anthropology, New York, 1961; Leslie White, The Science of Culture, New York, 1949. He either ignores or is unaware of the fact that as early as the 1890s Franz Boas advocated collecting the words of ‘natives’ themselves, and taking them seriously. 22. Herbert S. Lewis, ‘The Misrepresentation of Anthropology and Its Consequences’, American Anthropologist, No. 100 (1998), pp. 716–731. Sally Falk Moore writes—‘Mention of difference is now sometimes treated critically as a deliberate distancing from the Other, tantamount to a refusal to recognise a common humanity’, p. 125), pp. 78 ff. Anthropology and Africa: Changing Perspectives on a Changing Scene, 1995. (For the opposite offence, see C. A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins, Reading National Geographic, Chicago, 1993.) 23. Marshall Sahlins, Waiting for Foucault, Still, Chicago, 2002, p. 52. 24. Nazi playwright H. Johst, ‘When I hear the word “culture” I slip back the safety-catch of my revolver’. ‘Culture’ from Oxford English Dictionary, from Clara Leiser, Nazi Nuggets 83. The author realizes that Johst meant ‘high culture’—Matthew Arnold’s ‘culture’. 25. Nicholas Dirks, Introduction to Nicholas Dirks (ed.), Colonialism and Culture, Ann Arbor, MI, 1992, p. 92; Nicholas Dirks, ‘The Crimes of Colonialism: Anthropology and the Textualization of India’, in Peter Pels and Oscar Salemink (eds.), Colonial Subjects: Essays on the Practical History of Anthropology, Ann Arbor, MI, 1999, pp. 153–179. 26. Lila Abu-Lughod, ‘Writing against Culture’, in Richard G. Fox (ed.) Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, Santa Fe, 1991, pp. 137–160. Edward Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, New York, 1999. 27. Briggs, ‘Linguistic Magic Bullets’, p. 482. 28. Briggs, ‘Linguistic Magic Bullets’, p. 482. 29. Briggs, ‘Linguistic Magic Bullets’, p. 487. 30. Briggs, ‘Linguistic Magic Bullets’, p. 484, col. 1. 31. Briggs might have noted that Bourdieu’s more recent and fashionable substitute for culture, ‘habitus’, assumes the same unconsciousness that Briggs finds so treacherous in Boas (Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, Chicago, 1992, p. 128). 32. Briggs, ‘Linguistic Magic Bullets’, p. 494. 33. “Introduction” to Handbook of American Indian Languages, Washington D.C., 1911. 34. See, for example, Elazar Barken, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars, Cambridge, 1992. 35. Franz Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man, New York, 1911. 36. Susan Wright, ‘Anthropology: Still the Uncomfortable Discipline?’, in Akbar Ahmed and Cris Shore (eds.), The Future of Anthropology, London, 1995, p. 76, after Talal Asad, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, London, 1973; and Edward Said, Orientalism, New York, 1978. 37. The savaging of anthropology knows no bounds of decency. Mark Hobart, in an article about anthropology in Indonesia, begins with a nasty and gratuitous story (a ‘party piece’ he calls it) about a Nubian slave thrown to the lions in the Roman circus. Not only is this hapless but gutsy Nubian about to be eaten by the lion, but he is brutally insulted by a Roman spectator as well. Hobart tells us that we anthropologists have ‘more similarities with the Romans in the story than most care, or dare, to admit’. Why? Because anthropologists are apparently only allowing people of other cultures to have their voices back on our terms (see McGrane, Beyond Anthropology) and still have not got the dialogic and inter-subjective relationship right, says Hobart. In the conclusion he writes that, ‘anthropologists’ representations of other people have helped in their own small way to condemn them to the fate of the Nubian’, who is about to be eaten by a lion in the story. If this is Hobart’s idea of a joke it is in very bad taste. If he means that we get the people we study killed, as well as insulted, he should have more evidence of this than merely his disagreements with Clifford Geertz. 38. Sidney Mintz, ‘Sows’ Ears and Silver Linings: A Backward Look at Ethnography’, Current Anthropology, Vol. 41 (2000), pp. 169–189.