Things are thus not, or at least in my view they are not, coming progressively together as the discipline moves raggedly on. And this, too, reflects the direction, if it can be called a direction, in which the wider world is moving: toward fragmenta- tion, dispersion, pluralism, disassembly, -multi, multi-, multi-. Anthropologists are going to have to work under conditions even less orderly, shapely, and predictable, and even less susceptible of moral and ideological reduction and political quick fixes, than those I have worked under, which I hope I have shown were irregular enough. A born fox (there is a gene for it, along with restlessness, elusiveness, and a passionate dislike of hedgehogs), this seems to me the natural habitat of the cultural ... social ... symbolic ... interpretive anthropologist. Interesting times, an inconstant profession: I envy those about to inherit them.--AN INCONSTANT PROFESSION: The Anthropological Life in Interesting Time (2002)
Well, you can see the problem. Merely in presenting untoward, out-of category material, material not easily bent to proprietous shape, one risks being branded an enemy of progress, or worse. But despite all the hollering, the fear here is not really of "indigenous illiteracy and superstition" or the glamorization of barbarism. The most vain and self-indulgent of multi culturalized Western authors (and I am not the worst), smitten by exotic customs and dubious of some of our own, is not going to try to sell widow burning to anyone. And the Balinese are neither illiterate nor, as these things go in the world, particularly profligate, misogynous, or superstitious. The fear here is that in entangling our own sense of life and its "classic representations" with ones more than a little at angles to it and to them, we will so weaken our convictions as to make us unable to sustain them and impress them with sufficient force on the world at large. It is the very destabilization, the confusion of impulses that my honest sea captain felt that in quoting him I wanted my readers to feel too. Why do we teach Jane Austen, or Icelandic sagas, or Hindu funerals? Just that: to wound our complacency, to make us a little less confident in and satisfied with the immediate deliverances of our here-and-now imperious world. Such teaching is indeed a subversive business. But what it subverts is not morality. What it subverts is bluster, obduracy, and a closure to experience. Pride, one could say, and prejudice. --A Strange Romance: Anthropology and Literature (2003)
We are, most all of us now, not just anthropologists, folklorists, or connoisseurs
of the odd and arcane, thus somewhat employed. The jumbling of the
world’s catalogue is, by now, general to the point of near universality. Cheekby-
jowl contrast, not only of religious allegiance, but of ethnic background,
‘race’, language-community, place of origin, and God knows what other
allegiance or marking people may contrive to distinguish themselves from one
another and persuade themselves of their own solidity, is pervasive, not just in
Western Europe and North America, towards which migration has recently
been perhaps the most marked, but also in Asia, Africa, and Latin America,
drawn with increasing force and inevitability into the whirl of the world’s
variety. It is, of course, possible that all this here-we-are-and-there-we-are will
in time sort itself out and large, neat, hermetic blocs of cultural commonality,
what we used to imagine ‘nations’ to be, will either re-emerge or be
created anew. But, so far as I can see, there is at the moment precious little
sign of it. Jumble is with us late and soon.--SHIFTING AIMS, MOVING TARGETS: ON THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF RELIGION (2005)
Well, you can see the problem. Merely in presenting untoward, out-of category material, material not easily bent to proprietous shape, one risks being branded an enemy of progress, or worse. But despite all the hollering, the fear here is not really of "indigenous illiteracy and superstition" or the glamorization of barbarism. The most vain and self-indulgent of multi culturalized Western authors (and I am not the worst), smitten by exotic customs and dubious of some of our own, is not going to try to sell widow burning to anyone. And the Balinese are neither illiterate nor, as these things go in the world, particularly profligate, misogynous, or superstitious. The fear here is that in entangling our own sense of life and its "classic representations" with ones more than a little at angles to it and to them, we will so weaken our convictions as to make us unable to sustain them and impress them with sufficient force on the world at large. It is the very destabilization, the confusion of impulses that my honest sea captain felt that in quoting him I wanted my readers to feel too. Why do we teach Jane Austen, or Icelandic sagas, or Hindu funerals? Just that: to wound our complacency, to make us a little less confident in and satisfied with the immediate deliverances of our here-and-now imperious world. Such teaching is indeed a subversive business. But what it subverts is not morality. What it subverts is bluster, obduracy, and a closure to experience. Pride, one could say, and prejudice. --A Strange Romance: Anthropology and Literature (2003)
We are, most all of us now, not just anthropologists, folklorists, or connoisseurs
of the odd and arcane, thus somewhat employed. The jumbling of the
world’s catalogue is, by now, general to the point of near universality. Cheekby-
jowl contrast, not only of religious allegiance, but of ethnic background,
‘race’, language-community, place of origin, and God knows what other
allegiance or marking people may contrive to distinguish themselves from one
another and persuade themselves of their own solidity, is pervasive, not just in
Western Europe and North America, towards which migration has recently
been perhaps the most marked, but also in Asia, Africa, and Latin America,
drawn with increasing force and inevitability into the whirl of the world’s
variety. It is, of course, possible that all this here-we-are-and-there-we-are will
in time sort itself out and large, neat, hermetic blocs of cultural commonality,
what we used to imagine ‘nations’ to be, will either re-emerge or be
created anew. But, so far as I can see, there is at the moment precious little
sign of it. Jumble is with us late and soon.--SHIFTING AIMS, MOVING TARGETS: ON THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF RELIGION (2005)
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