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Locating the Anthropological Subject: Postcolonial Anthropologists in Other Places
David Scott
“You are so fortunate, you get to see the world….” Indeed, indeed, sirs, I have seen the world.
–Derek Walcott, The Fortunate Traveller
The modern discipline of anthropology once belonged to America and Europe. Now it no longer does. Or at least not precisely. Not in a simple way. There are not only American and European anthropologists or departments of anthropology. Now indeed, just what constitutes “America” and “Europe”–and thus “American” and “European”–is itself increasingly indistinct. It is even less clear what constitutes the “nations,” “nationalities,” and “cultures” of the so-called Third World. The presumed borders, in other words, of essential community are not as they might have appeared in the nineteenth or even early twentieth century. Part of the reason for this no doubt has to do with the extraordinary demographic movements of colonial and postcolonial peoples in the mid- to late-twentieth century. The postcolonial is now, in Derek Walcott’s felicitously ironic phrase, a “fortunate traveller.” However, even as we recognise this irreversible redistribution of the postcolonial map (one which Louise Bennett has so inimitably satirized in such poems as “Colonization in Reverse” [179-180]), we should not lose sight of the fact that these movements are rather one way than the other. Colonial and postcolonial peoples were/are going west. And if these movements are provocatively challenging the hitherto pristine image of the West, hybridizing it (if I might so put it), it is to be wondered whether they are really tarnishing its allure.
So that anthropology, as discipline, may well be said to have travelled, and already in more senses than one. One may now speak (if still not with an equal certainty) of “indigenous” anthropologies and anthropologists. [1] But is this visible discipline of anthropology (with its authorizing institutions, privileged object domains, prescriptive methodologies, and canonical texts) co-extensive with what we might call the concept of anthropology, its generative and genealogically specifiable idea of itself? And does this concept which inhabits the anthropological endeavour, with its peculiar linking of travel, difference, dialogue, and knowledge, move as readily across borders as the discipline that formalises it? Or does it still belong to the hegemonic figure of America and Europe (that is to say, to a sort of “social imaginary” of the West) in a profound if yet uncertain way? This interests me because the question I want to ask is whether the postcolonial, once (and indeed still)–as subaltern–so decidedly the silent object of this practice of composing knowledges and of its idea, can become–as intellectual– its subject? Can the postcolonial (intellectual) accede to anthropology as discipline and to its concept, its idea of itself? What I wish to do in the following pages is to sketch, if in an admittedly provisional way, something of the terrain of these questions.
Locating the Anthropological Subject
The interruption of the placid surface of theory by the heterogeneous claims of marginal voices has forced upon our attention the fact that disciplinary and theoretical practices establish–and are marked by–not only object positions but also subject positions. The kind of subject proper to a practice is not something external but rather is produced within the practice. Insofar as practices remain rooted at the point of their production, the location of these subject positions– epistemological, institutional, geographical–need not be problematised. When, however, the borders of practices are crossed such that different kinds of subjects come to occupy the positions authoritatively claimed for the practices, the question arises whether and to what extent these locations are fixed, and how and under what circumstances they are subject to displacement or at least to distention and dissonance. Certainly from a variety of marginal(ized) positions–feminist, minority, postcolonial, etc.–theory is now being required to name, or at least reflexively problematise, the voice (and thus the history and forms of identity) that speaks through its discourse.
In the particular dialogical relation that its practice constructs, anthropology likewise produces subject as well as object positions–positions framed by the specific problematic its discourse constitutes: cultural difference. The subject that establishes within its gaze a field of objects to be observed, questioned, translated, and finally represented in another place at another time is neither anonymous nor placeless. It always occupies intersections of privilege at once epistemological, political, and geographical. To be sure, in recent years anthropology has been called (and has called itself) into question on grounds that seek to make visible these intersections. But at least one skeptical commentator has recently maintained that the “problematic of the observer” has been “remarkably underanalyzed” in the “revisionist anthropological current.” The question Who speaks? For what and to whom? remains muted (Said 212). For what interests me here is the question of the postcolonial anthropologist in the making of a postcolonial anthropology.
Let me note to begin with that the distinction between the discipline and concept of anthropology that I employ here is a necessarily tentative one. I suggest, however, that it may have some provisional strategic value in taking one’s postcolonial gauge in the contemporary crisis of anthropological affairs. The collapse of any but a possible administrative coherence in the chaotic career of anthropology and the postcolonial challenge which has now brought its very future as a practice or instrument of uncommon knowledge into question have, as it were, (re)opened a wedge between the formal or proper name of Anthropology and the disseminated moments that have been historically gathered together by/within it. Certainly it is this wedge of space which has both formed and forced the possibility of the recent moves in contemporary anthropological discourse.
The distinction attempts to relive in a more explicit formulation the constantly repressed or elided or marginalized tension between anthropology as a “science of culture” with delimited and specifiable object domains (kinship, ritual, etc.) and anthropology as a hermeneutics of knowledge that works what Geertz has so nicely called a “constant dialectical tacking” across a field or fields of difference. By means of it I want to emphasise that it is not so much the uncommon knowledge itself that is distinctive of anthropology as the movement, the idea of displacement, of mediation, which invests it and through which that knowledge is constituted. (After all, what is uncommon is only uncommon in terms of something else that is not.) The anthropological journey- -like all true journeys–entails a continuously recursive movement or drift: at once a departure and a return in which knowledge is always at least double–simultaneously knowledge of something other and self-knowledge, and each but a term in the invention of the other. This idea of a knowledge that must always emerge within a play of figure and ground (in which, as Stanley Diamond has insisted, contrast is the only way of seeing) is, it seems to me, the distinctive edge of any anthropological endeavor. [2] And it is this movement, I want to argue, of going and returning that organizes the epistemological and geographical disposition of the anthropological gaze.
This movement, however (and needless to say), has never been an innocent or unmarked one. The very possibility of the anthropological journey has been linked to the historical occasion of Western European expansion. And this occasion has not only enabled, facilitated and authorized the specific anthropological problematic of difference (that is, of what counts as difference) but also established its epistemological standpoint. This entailed return that marks the idea–the generative concept–of anthropology, has already embedded in it–as the insignia, so to speak, of the historical circumstance that gave birth to it and that (still) authorizes it–the insinuated presence of the social imaginary of the West. For if anthropology, in the constitution of its knowledges, privileges a tacking between places, this tacking has still always been between the West and elsewhere. And if this has often been more implicit than not in ethnographic texts (and for precisely the reason that anthropology has been a deeply Western enterprise implicitly constructing for itself Western subject positions whose absence from the surface of the text was the very sign of their authority), it was certainly an explicit element in the inaugural self-consciousness. We might recall Franz Boas’s statement in his seminal essay of 1904, “The History of Anthropology,” that the goal of this new comparative science is “to make us … understand the roots from which our civilization has sprung….” Thus, in the play of contrast, of figure and ground, through which it establishes itself, the anthropological cogito is always returning to the West.
The Postcolonial Anthropologist in Other Places
But now there enters the postcolonial intellectual in the discrete guise of the anthropologist–a slightly reconstituted figure, with acquired languages and books and “a hunger of journeys,” and to whom anthropology appears, at least at one level, a broad critical enterprise. Now if anthropology is but a “science” with discrete “objects” and “methods,” the postcolonial need only accede to its discipline. But how is one to participate in that tacking and displacement that is its distinctive idea? Certainly the epistemological assumptions embedded in Boas’s programmatic statement, his “us understand” and his “our civilization,” seem to define in some sense the location from which the anthropological subject speaks, the center of gravity of the anthropological cogito. So then must the postcolonial anthropologist enter upon this location? Or can she/he break with it, this location that privileges the social imaginary of the West? For if the hermeneutical movement of anthropological cognition is one in which the West is constituted as the locus of self-knowledge, how does the postcolonial anthropologist position her/himself in relation to it? Because, of course, the postcolonial presents us with a figure who has acceded to the languages of the West, to the sublime categories of its discourses, and even in this increasingly “post-national” world, to its cities and institutions. But not to its power or to its legend. How might this vitiate the postcolonial intellectual’s engagement in the anthropological endeavour? Moreover, even with this assumption of languages, of cities, how profoundly do they displace other modalities of (postcolonial) identification? Those, for instance, that mark historical experience in the solidary representation of the “Third World.”
By raising in different ways the problem of “place” and the non-Western anthropologist, both Talal Asad and Arjun Appadurai have suggested that to undermine the asymmetry in anthropological practice many more such anthropologists should study Western societies. This, to be sure, is a step in the right direction inasmuch as it subverts the pervasive notion that the non-Western subject can speak only within the terms of his/her own culture. Moreover, it privileges in some degree the possibility of a tacking back and forth between cultural spaces. At the same time, it would seem to fix and repeat the colonially established territorial boundaries within which the postcolonial is encouraged to move: center/periphery–and typically, the center of neocolonial governance and the periphery of origin. European and American anthropologists continue to go where they please, while the postcolonial stays home or else goes West. One wonders whether there might not be a more engaging problematic to be encountered where the postcolonial intellectual from Papua New Guinea goes, not to Philadelphia but to Bombay or Kingston or Accra.
This question of the postcolonial intellectual in other–that is to say, postcolonial–places raises the problem of the location of the “subject” in a distinctive and defamiliarizing way. Because in that crossing of borders that is constitutive of the anthropological endeavour, the postcolonial intellectual stands in an ambiguous place: neither “inside” nor “outside,” but occupying a “between” always open on both sides to contestation. The location of the postcolonial anthropologist in other (subaltern) places turns on an intersection of identity, privilege, and the imaginary of the West.
This dilemma is nicely illustrated in Amitav Ghosh’s tale “The Imam and the Indian,” an account of an Indian’s encounter with two men in an Egyptian village–one, the village Imam, and the other, a sort of village jest known to all as Khamees the Rat. The story unfolds through three discrete encounters: between Indian and Imam; between Indian and Khamees the Rat; and between Indian and Imam again (with Khamees the Rat playing a facilitating role). Each encounter is a stage, in the narrative’s economy, in the progressive deterioration of the Indian’s relations with members of the village. What interests me are the encounters with the Imam. The Indian goes to Egypt in search of Tradition. He is, after all, an anthropologist. He goes to meet the village Imam to ask about his herbs–i.e., Tradition. The Imam, however, marginalized by changes in the village, does not take kindly to the Indian’s inquiries. Don’t you have herbs in your country, too, he wants to know. Well go and study those. And he promptly produces a box of syringes and phials to show that he himself has no more use for herbs.
Sometime after, the Indian and the Imam meet again. By this time it has been widely circulated in the village (apparently by the well-informed and mischievous Khamees the Rat) that in the Indian’s country the people worship cows and, worse, burn rather than bury their dead. The Imam uses this information to ridicule the Indian–but, interestingly, not to assert the superiority of his own culture–or rather not simply. He invokes an imagined West as sovereign and as sovereign measure. In the midst of a gathering crowd, he confronts the Indian:
Why do you allow it? Can’t you see that it’s a primitive and backward custom? Are you savages that you permit something like that? … You’ve even been to the West; you’ve seen how advanced they are. Now tell me: have you ever seen them burning their dead?(Ghosh 144)
And this “West” of the Imam’s is a place not of such things as herbs but of military technology and scientific knowledge. Invoking this figure of power, the Imam continues, incensed:
They don’t burn their dead in the West. They’re not ignorant people. They’re advanced, they’re educated, they have science, they have guns and tanks and bombs. (Ghosh 144)
At this the now intimidated Indian, confused and angry, searching for words in a language he has only recently learned, shouts back: “We have them too…. We have guns and tanks and bombs. And they’re better than anything you have–we’re way ahead of you” (Ghosh 144).
And so it goes on. The Indian/narrator, turning away now from the scene he has thus enacted, comments on these “delegates from two superseded civilizations vying with each other to lay claim to the violence of the West.” “West” for them both is a kind of shared imaginary, a place elsewhere but producing its allure everywhere, which informs, indeed constitutes, the nature of their relationship with each other. “We were both traveling, he and I: we were traveling in the West.” Moreover, the Indian perceives his own position as discrepant. The Imam wouldn’t have dared say such things had he been a Westerner because:
… I would have had around me the protective aura of an inherited expertise in the technology of violence. That aura would have surrounded me, I thought, with a sheet of clear glass, like a bullet-proof screen; or perhaps it would have worked as a talisman, like a press card, armed with which I could have gone off to what were said to be the most terrible places in the world that month, to gaze and wonder. And then perhaps I too would have had enough material for a book which would have had for its epigraph the line, The horror! The horror! –for the virtue of a sheet a glass is that it does not require one to look within.(Ghosh 145- 46)
The point that I want to draw attention to here is not that anthropology is a kind of Conradian theatre (which I think it is not), nor that Western anthropologists are protected by a transparent sheet of glass (which I can hardly imagine they are). Rather what I want to notice is the way the imaginary West interrupts and mediates the intersection (or collision) of postcolonial identities and histories. The history of colonialism and neocolonialism is probably such that this is inevitable– two pathetic figures invoking the imaginary West under the fabled light of an Eastern sky.
The position of the post-colonial anthropologist in other postcolonial places is necessarily an ambivalent one: “not you/like you,” in Trinh Minh-ha’s phrase. The “doctor” as Indian is “like us”; for after all, he has Tradition, too–herbs (and much else besides, like worshipping cows and burning the dead). But the Indian as “doctor” wants to set that aside, to arrogate to himself the seeming empty unmarked space of investigative subject; he wishes to enact the subject of that (pre)figured anthropological journey, someone who, from the space of the absence of Tradition, goes in search of its plenitude and authenticity to inquire of it, to inscribe it. That empty space of power bears, of course, the inescapable historical imprimatur of the West. And I would propose that it is precisely this imposture that the Imam–bitten by the erasure of his own authoritative position in the village, and that too in the name of a West he must increasingly negotiate, with his syringes and phials–wants to unmask in his adversarial challenges.
The issue, of course, is not to erase the West as though to restore to its others some ancient pre- colonial unity, as though, indeed, the West were erasable. The issue, it seems to me, is rather to establish a reflexively marked practice of dialogical exchange that might enable the postcolonial intellectual to speak to postcolonials elsewhere (subalterns, but intellectuals too) through those shared-but-different histories and shared-but-different identities. The issue for a postcolonial’s postcolonial anthropology, or at least one kind of it, is to reconstitute the map so as to engage in a tacking between postcolonial spaces, a recursive movement of figure and ground in which that West–so much the sovereign legend of the colonial imagination–is at once interrogated and displaced, interrupted and critiqued.
In these pages, I have attempted to do no more than direct our attention to an area of anthropological reflection which has been the object of comparatively little critical concern: the postcolonial anthropologist in other postcolonial places. Certainly, one of the themes that repeats itself through some of the contributions to this volume (and which found a “sounding,” so to speak, at the conference out of which they grew) [3] is that just as Theory does not occupy an empty or ahistorical space, so the subject positions problematised within its discourse are themselves not unmarked. And these markings have implications for the articulation of minority/marginalized positionalities. One instance of these positions–with locations that are simultaneously several–is that of “postcolonial” intellectual subject. And if the “task” of the postcolonial intellectual is, as Gayatri Spivak (120) would have it, to radically “unlearn” that privilege which makes her/him wittingly or unwittingly complicitous with the subject positions of “Western” theory, then surely the postcolonial anthropologist crossing several borders at once must find a different set of quadrants to map that oscillation which is the “traveller’s eye.” [4]
Acknowledgements
This is a revised version of a paper of the same title given at the “Predicaments of Theory” Conference. I should like to thank those participants who responded to it in various ways. Earlier drafts were read by Teshome Gabriel and Martin Blythe. Its writing was framed by an ongoing discussion with Vivek Dhareshwar, Mary John, and Satish Deshpande, whom I particularly thank.
Notes
1. See the important volume edited by Hussein Fahim, Indigenous Anthropology in Non- Western Countries (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 1982). In some sense, one might read the various essays in this text as asserting a political and, if you will, explicitly “nationalist” claim on the discipline of anthropology. My own question emerges where the “nation” itself, both narratively and geographically defined, is no longer an unproblematic assumption. Back to main text
2. I am thinking particularly of his “Anthropology in Question” in In Search of the Primitive (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1974). Back to main text
3. I am thinking particularly of the papers by Lata Mani, Mary John, and Vivek Dhareshwar. Back to main text
4. The phrase is, again, Derek Walcott’s, taken from the poem “The Fortunate Traveller” (in the volume The Fortunate Traveller). The line from which it comes, significant for the oscillation that I have tried to emphasize, runs: “Like a telescope reversed, the traveller’s eye …” (89). Back to main text
References
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Minh-ha, Trinh T. “Not You/Like You: Post-Colonial Women and the Interlocking Questions of Identity and Difference. Inscriptions 3/4 (1988).
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