JAMES CLIFFORD

CLIFFORD, James (1986). Introduction: Partial Truths. In: James

Clifford/George E. Marcus (eds.), Writing Culture. The Poetics
and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: Introduction: Partial Truths
Univ. of California Press. pp. 1–26.
Interdisciplinary work, so much discussed these days, is not
about confronting already constituted disciplines (none of
which, in fact, is willing to let itself go). To do something in-
terdisciplinary it's not enough to choose a "subject" (a theme)
and gather around it two or three sciences. Interdisciplinarity
consists in creating a new object that belongs to no one.
ROLAND BARTHES, "Jeunes Chercheurs"

You'll need more tables than you think.

ELEN ORE SMITH BOWEN, advice for fieldworkers,
in Return to Laughter

Our frontispieee shows Stephen Tyler, one of this volume's

eontributors, at work in India in 1963. The ethnographer is absorbed
in writing-taking dietation? fleshing out an interpretation? reeord-
ing an important observation? dashing off a poem? Hunehed over in
the heat, he has draped a wet cloth over his giasses. His expression is
obseured. An interloeutor looks over his shoulder-with boredom?
patience? amusement? In this image the ethnographer hovers at the
edge of the frame-faeeless, almost extraterrestrial, a hand that
writes. It is not the usual portrait of anthropologieal fieldwork. We are
more aeeustomed to pictures of Margaret Mead exuberantly playing
with ehildren in Manus or questioning villagers in Bali. Partieipant-
observation, the classie formula for ethnographie work, leaves little
room for texts. But still, somewhere lost in his aeeount of fieldwork
among the Mbuti pygmies-running alongjungle paths, sitting up at
night singing, sleeping in a erowded leaf hut-eolin Turnbull men-
tions that he lugged around a typewriter.
In Bronislaw Malinowski's Argonauts 0/ the Western Pacific, where a
photograph of the ethnographer's tent among Kiriwinan dwellings is
prominently displayed, there is no revelation of the tent's interior. But
in another photo, earefully posed, Malinowski recorded himself writ-
2 JAMES CLIFFORD
lntroduction 3

ing at a table. (The tent flaps are pulled back; he sits in profile, and innovation and structuration, and is itself part of these processes.
some Trobrianders stand outside, observing the curious rite.) This re- Ethnography is an emergent interdisciplinary phenomenon. Its
markable picture was only published two years ago-a sign of our authority and rhetoric have spread to many fields where "culture" is
times, not his.! We begin, noCwith participant-observation or with cul- a newly problematic object of description and critique. The present
tural texts (suitable for interpretation), but with writing, the making book, though beginning with fieldwork and its texts, opens onto the
of texts. No longer a marginal, or occulted, dimension, writing has wider practice of writing about, against, and among cultures. This
emerged as central to what anthropologists do both in the field and blurred purview includes, to name only a few developing perspec-
thereafter. The fact that it has not until recently been portrayed or tives, historical ethnography (Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Natalie
seriously discussed reflects the persistence of an ideology claiming Davis, Carlo Ginzburg), cultural poetics (Stephen Greenblatt), cultural
transparency of representation and immediacy of experience. Writ- critieism (Hayden White, Edward Said, Fredric Jameson), the analysis
ing reduced to method: keeping good field notes, making accurate of implicit knowledge and everyday practices (Pierre Bourdieu, Michel
maps, "writing up" results. de Certeau), the critique ofhegemonic struetures of feeling (Raymond
The essays collected here assert that this ideology has crumbled. Williams), the study of scientific communities (following Thomas
They see culture as composed of seriously contested codes and repre- Kuhn), the semiotics of exotic worlds and fantastic spaces (Tzvetan
sentations; they assurne that the poetic and the political are insepar- Todorov, Louis Marin), and all those studies that focus on meaning
able, that science is in, not above, historical and linguistic processes. systems, disputed traditions, or cultural artifacts.
They assurne that academie and literary genres interpenetrate and This complex interdisciplinary area, approached here from the
that the writing of cultural descriptions is properly experimental and starting point of a crisis in anthropology, is changing and diverse.
ethical. Their focus on text making and rhetoric serves to highlight Thus I do not want 10 impose a false unity on the exploratory essays
the constructed, artificial nature of cultural accounts. It undermines that follow. Though sharing a general sympathy for approaches com-
overly transparent modes of authority, and it draws attention to the bining poetics, politics, and history, they frequently disagree. Many
historical predicament of ethnography, the fact that it is always caught of the contributions fuse literary theory and ethnography. Some
up in the invention, not the representation, of cultures (Wagner probe the limits of such approaches, stressing the dangers of estheti-
1975). As will soon be apparent, the range of issues raised is not liter- cism and the constraints of institutional power. Others enthusiastically
ary in any traditional sense. Most of the essays, while focusing on tex- advocate experimental forms of writing. But in their different ways
tual practices, reach beyond texts to contexts of power, resistance, in- they all analyze past and present practices out of a commitment to fu-
stitutional constraint, and innovation. ture possibilities. They see ethnographie writing as changing, inven-
Ethnography's tradition is that of Herodotus and of Montesquieu's tive: "History," in William Carlos Williams's words, "that should be a
Persian. It looks obliquely at all collective arrangements, distant or left hand to us, as of a violinist."
nearby. It makes the familiar strange, the exotie quotidian. Ethnog~ J\N\

raphy cultivates an engaged clarity like that urged by Virginia Woolf:

"Let us never cease from thinking-what is this 'civilization' in which "Literary" approaches have recently enjoyed some popularity
we find ourselves? What are these ceremonies and why should we take in the human sciences. In anthropology influential writers suchas
part in them? What are these professions and why should we make Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner, Mary Douglas, Claude Levi-Strauss,
money out of them? Where in short is it leading us, the procession of Jean Duvignaud, and Edmund Leach, to mention only a few, have
the sons of educated men?" (1936: 62-63)' Ethnography is actively shown an interest in literary theory and practice. In their quite differ-
situated between powerful systems of meaning. It poses its questions at ent ways they have blurred the boundary separating art from science.
the boundaries of civilizations, cultures, classes, races, and genders. Nor is theirs a new attraction. Malinowski's authorial identifications
Ethnography decodes and recodes, telling the grounds of collective (Conrad, Frazer) are well known. Margaret Mead, Edward Sapir,
order and diversity, inclusion and exclusion. It describes processes of and Ruth Benedict saw themselves as both anthropologists and liter-
ary artists. In Paris surrealism and professional ethnography regu-
1. Malinowski 1961: 17. The photograph inside the tent was published in 1983 by larly exchanged both ideas and personnel. But until recently literary
George Stocking in History 0/ AnthropololfY 1: 101. This volume contains other telling
scenes of ethnographie writing.
influences have been held at a distance from the "rigorous" core of
4 JAMES CLIFFORD Introduction 5
the discipline. Sapir and Benedict had, after all, to hide their poetry a trenchant essay, Rodney Needham surveyed the theoretical incoher-
from the scientific gaze of Franz Boas. And though ethnographers ence, tangled roots, impossible bedfellows, and divergent specializa-
have often been called noveIists manque (especially those who write a tions that seemed to be leading to academic anthropology's intellectual
little too weIl), the notion that literary procedures pervade any work disintegration. He suggested with ironic equanimity that the fieId
of cultural representation is arecent idea in the discipline. To a grow- might soon be redistributed among a variety of neighboring disci-
ing number, however, the "literariness" of anthropology-and espe- plines. Anthropology in its present form would undergo "an irides-
cially of ethnography-appears as much more than a matter of good cent metamorphosis" (1970: 46). The present essays are part of the
writing or distinctive style. 2 Literary processes-metaphor, figuration, metamorphosis.
narrative-affect the ways cultural phenomena are registered, from But if they are post-anthropological, they are also post-literary.
the first jotted "observations," to the completed book, to the ways Michel Foucault (1973), MicheI de Certeau (1983), and Terry Eagleton
these configurations "make sense" in determined acts of reading. 3 (1983) have recentlY argued that "literature" itself is a transient cate-
lt has long been asserted that scientific anthropology is also an gory. Since the seventeenth century, they suggest, Western science has
"art," that ethnographies have literary qualities. We often hear that an exduded certain expressive modes from its legitimate repertoire:
author writes with style, that certain descriptions are vivid or convinc- rhetoric (in the name of "plain," transparent signification), fiction (in
ing (should not every accurate description be convincing?). A work is the name of fact), and subjectivity (in the name of objectivity). The
deemed evocative or artfully composed in addition to being factual; qualities eIiminated from science were localized in the category of "lit-
expressive, rhetorical functions are conceived as decorative or mereIy erature." Literary texts were deemed to be metaphoric and allegori-
as ways to present an objective analysis or description more effectiveIy. cal, composed of inventions rather than observed facts; they allowed a
Thus the facts of the matter may be kept separate, at least in principle, wide latitude to the emotions, speculations, and subjective "genius" of
from their means of communication. But the literary or rhetorieal di- their authors. De Certeau notes that the fictions of literary language
mensions of ethnography can no longer be so easily compartmental- were scientifically condemned (and esthetically appreciated) for lack-
ized. They are active at every level of cultural science. Indeed, the very ing"univocity," the purportedly unambiguous accounting of natural
notion of a "literary" approach to a discipline, "anthropology," is seri- science and professional history. In this schema, the discourse of liter-
ously misleading. ature and fiction is inherently unstable; it "plays on the stratification
The -present essays do not represent a tendency or perspective of meaning; it narrates one thing in order to tell something eIse; it
within a coherent "anthropology" (pace Wolf 1980). The "four-fieId" delineates itseIf in a language from which it continuously draws
definition of the discipline, of which Boas was perhaps the last vir- effects of meaning that cannot be circumscribed or checked" (1983:
tuoso, induded physieal (or biological) anthropology, archaeology, cul- 128). This discourse, repeatedly banished from science, but with un-
tural (or social) anthropology, and linguistics. Few today can seriously even success, is incurably figurative and polysemous. (Whenever its
claim that these fieIds share a unified approach or object, though the effects begin to be felt too openly, a scientific text will appear "liter-
dream persists, thanks largeIy to institutional arrangements. The es- ary"; it will seem to be using too many metaphors, to be reIying on
says in this volume occupy a new space opened up by the disintegra- style, evocation, and so on.)4
tion of "Man" as telos for a whole discipline, and they draw on recent By the nineteenth century, literature had emerged as a bourgeois
deveIopments in the fieIds of textual criticism, cultural history, semio- institution dosely allied with "culture" and "art." Raymond Williams
ties, hermeneutic philosophy, and psychoanalysis. Some years ago, in (1966) shows how this special, refined sensibility functioned as a kind
of court of appeals in response to the perceived dislocations and vul-
2. A partial list of works exploring this expanded field of the "literary" in anthro-
garity of industrial, dass society. Literature and art were, in effect, cir-
pology includes (not mentioning contributors to the present volume): Boon 1972,
1977, 1982 ; Geertz 1973, 1983; Turner 1974, 1975: Fernandez 1974: Diamond 1974:
Duvignaud 1970, 1973; Favret-Saada 1980; Favret-Saadaand Contreras 1981; Dumont 4. "It might be objected that figurative style is not the only style, or even the only
1978; Tedlock 1983; Jamin 1979, 1980, 1985; Webster 1982; Thornton 1983, 1984. poetic style, and that rhetoric also takes cognizance ofwhat is called simple style. But in
3. See the work of Hayden White (1973, 1978) for a tropological theory of "pre- fact this is merely a less decorated style, or rather, a style decorated more simply, and it,
figured" realities: also Latour and Woolgar (1979) for a view of scientific activity as too, like the lyric and the epic, has its own special figures. A style in which figure is
"inscription." strictiy absent does not exist," writes Gerard Genette (1982 :47).
6 JAMES CLIFFORD
Introduction 7
eumscribed zones in whieh nonutilitarian, "higher" values were main- denies it!") or deploying a eonsistent manner of quoting, "speaking
tained. At the same time they were domains for the playing out of for," translating the reality of others. Purportedly irrelevant personal
experimental, avant-garde transgressions. Seen in this light, the ideo- or historieal cireumstanees will also be excluded (oneeannot tell all).
logical formations of art and eulture have no essential or eternal sta- Moreover, the maker (but why only one?) of ethnographie texts ean-
tus. They are changing and contestable, like the special rhetorie of not avoid expressive tropes, figures, and allegories that seleet and im-
"literature." The essays that follow do not, in fact, appeal to a literary pose meaning as they translate it. In this view, more Nietzsehean than
praetiee marked off in an esthetie, ereative, or humanizing domain. realist or hermeneutie, all construeted truths are made possible by
They struggle, in their different ways, against the reeeived definitions powerful "lies" of exclusion and rhetorie. Even the best ethnographie
of art, literature, scienee, and history. And if they sometimes suggest texts-serious, true fietions-are systems, or eeonomies, of truth.
that ethnography is an "art," they return the word to an older usage- Power and history work through them, in ways their authors eannot
before it had become assoeiated with a higher or rebellious sensibil- fully eontrol.
ity-to the eighteenth-eentury meaning Williams reealls: art as the Ethnographie truths are thus inherently partial-eommitted and
skillful fashioning of useful artifaets. The making of ethnography is ineomplete. This point is now widely asserted-and resisted at strate-
artisanal, tied to the worldIy work of writing. • gie points by those who fear the eollapse of clear standards of verifiea-
Ethnographie writing is determined in at least six ways: (1) eon- tion. But onee aeeepted and built into ethnographie art, a rigorous
textually (it draws from and ereates meaningful social milieux); (2) sense of partiality ean be a souree of representational taet. Arecent
rhetorieally (it uses and is used by expressive eonventions); (3) institu- work by Riehard Priee, First-Time: The Histomal Vision of an Afro-
tionally (one writes within, and against, speeifie traditions, diseiplines, American People (1983), offers a good example of self-eonseious, se-
audienees); (4) generieally (an ethnography is usually distinguishable rious partiality. Price recounts the specifie eonditions of his fieldwork
from a novel or a travel aecount); (5) politieally (the authority to rep- among the Saramakas, a Maroon society of Suriname. We learn about
resent eultural realities is unequally shared and at times contested); external and self-imposed limits to the research, about individual in-
(6) historieally (all the above conventions and eonstraints are chang- formants, and about the eonstruetion of the final written artifaet.
ing). These determinations govern the inscription of eoherent ethno- (The book avoids a smoothed-over, monological form, presenting it-
graphie fietions. self as literally pieeed-together, full of holes.) First-Time is evidenee of
To eall ethnographies fietions may raise empiricist haekIes. But the fact that aeute politieal and epistemologieal self-eonsciousness
the word as eommonly used in reeent textual theory has lost its eon- need not lead to ethnographie self-absorption, or to the eonclusion
notation of falsehood, of something merely opposed to truth. It sug- that it is impossible to know anything eertain about other people.
gests the partiality of eultural and historieal truths, the ways they are Rather, it leads to a eonerete sense of why a Saramaka folk,tale, fea~
systematie and exclusive. Ethnographie writings ean properly be tured by Priee, teaehes that "knowledge is power, and that one must
ealled fietions in the sense of "something made or fashioned," the never reveal all ofwhat one knows" (1983: 14)·
prineipal burden of the word's Latin root, fingere. But it is important A eomplex teehnique of revelation and seereey governs the eom-
to preserve the meaning not merely of making, but also of making up, munieation (reinvention) of "First-Time" knowledge, lore about the
of inventing things not aetually real. (Fingere, in some of its uses, im- society's erucial struggles for survival in the eighteenth eentury. Vsing
plied a degree of falsehood.) Interpretive social scientists have re- teehniques of deliberate frustration, digression, and ineompleteness,
eently eome to view good ethnographies as "true fietions," but usually old men impart their historical knowledge to younger kinsmen, pref-
at the eost of weakening the oxymoron, reducing it to the banal claim erably at eoek's erow, the hour before dawn. These strategies of el-
that all truths are eonstrueted. The essays eolleeted here keep the oxy- lipsis, eoneealment, and partial disclosure determine ethnographie
moron sharp. For example, Vineent Crapanzano portrays ethnog- relations as mueh as they do the transmission of stories between gen-
raphers as tricksters, promising, like Hermes, not to lie, but never un- erations. Priee has to aeeept the paradoxical fact that "any Saramaka
dertaking to tell the whole truth either. Their rhetorie empowers and narrative (including those told at eoek's erow with the ostensible intent
subverts their message. Other essays reinforce the pOint by stressing of eommunieating knowledge) will leave out most of what the teller
that eultural fietions are based on systematie, and eontestable, exclu- knows about the incident in question. A person's knowledge is sup-
sions. These may involve sileneing ineongruent voices ("Two Crows posed to grow only in small inerements, and in any aspeet of life
 8 JAMES CLIFFORD Introduction 9
people are deliberately told only a little bit more than the speaker France, largely because of the Vietnamese and Aigerian conflicts and
thinks they already know" (10). through the writings of an ethnographically aware group of black
It soon becomes apparent that there is no "complete" corpus of intellectuals and poets, the negritude movement of Aime Cesaire,
First-Time knowledge, that no one-Ieast of all the visiting ethnog- Leopold Senghor, Rene Menil, and Leon Damas. The pages of Pres-
rapher-can know this lore except through an open-ended series of ence Africaine in the early fifties offered an unusual forum for collabo-
contingent, power-laden encounters. "It is accepted that different ration between these writers and social scientists like Balandier, Leiris,
Saramaka historians will have different versions, and it is up to the Marcel Griaule, Edmond Ortigues, and Paul Rivet. In other countries
listener to piece together for hirnself the version of an event that he, the cme de conscience came somewhat later. One thinks of Jacques
for the time being, accepts" (28). Though Price, the scrupulous field- Maquet's influential essay "Objectivity in Anthropology" (1964), DelI
worker and historian, armed with writing, has gathered a text that H ymes's Reinventing Anthropology (1973), the work of Stanley Diamond
surpasses in extent what individuals know or tell, it still "represents (1974), Bob Scholte (1971, 1972, 1978), Gerard Ledere (1972), and
only the tip of the iceberg that Saramakas collectively preserve about particularly of Talal Asad's collection Anthropology and the Colonial En-
First-Time" (25)' counter (1973), which has stimulated much clarifying debate (Firth
The ethical questions raised by forming a written archive of se- et al. 1977).
cret, oral lore are considerable, and Price wrestles with them openly. In popular imagery the ethnographer has shifted from a sympa-
Part of his solution has been to undermine the completeness of his thetic, authoritative observer (best incarnated, perhaps, by Margaret
own account (but not its seriousness) by publishing a book that is Mead) to the unflattering figure portrayed by Vine Deloria in Custer
aseries of fragments. The aim is not to indicate unfortunate gaps Diedfor Your Sins (1969)' Indeed, the negative portrait has sometimes
remaining in our knowledge of eighteenth-century Saramaka life, hardened into caricature-the ambitious social scientist making off
but rather to present an inherently imperfect mode of knowledge, with triballore and giving nothing in return, imposing erude portraits
which produces gaps as it fills them. Though Price hirnself is not free on subtle peoples, or (most recently) serving as dupe for sophisticated
of the desire to write a complete ethnography or history, to portray a informants. Such portraits are about as realistic as the earlier heroie
"whoie way of life" (24), the message of partiality resonates through- versions of participant-observation. Ethnographie work has indeed
out First-Time. been enmeshed in a world of enduring and changing power inequali-
Ethnographers are more and more like the Cree hunter who (the ties, and it continues to be implicated. It enacts power relations. But
story goes) came to Montreal to testify in court concerning the fate of its function within these relations is complex, often ambivalent, po-
his hunting lands in the new James Bay hydroelectric scherne. He tentially counter-hegemonie.
would describe his way of life. But when administered the oath he Different mIes of the game for ethnography are now emerging in
hesitated: 'Tm not sure I can tell the truth.... I can only tell what many parts of the world. An outsider studying Native American cul-
I know." tures may expect, perhaps as a requirement for continuing research,
IV\I\
to testify in support of land claim litigation. And a variety of formal
restrictions are now placed on fieldwork by indigenous governments
It is useful to recall that the witness was speaking artfully, in a at national and locallevels. These condition in new ways what can, and
determining context of power. Since Michel Leiris's early essay of especially cannot, be said about particular peoples. A new figure has
195 0 , "L'Ethnographe devant le colonialisme" (but why so late?), an- entered the scene, the "indigenous ethnographer" (Fahirn, ed. 1982;
thropology has had to reckon with historical determination and politi- Ohnuki-Tierney 1984). Insiders studying their own cultures offer
cal conflict in its midst. A rapid decade, from 1950 to 1960, saw the new angles of vision and depths of understanding. Their accounts are
end of empire become a widely accepted project, if not an accom- empowered and restricted in unique ways. The diverse post- and neo-
plished fact. Georges Balandier's "situation coloniale" was suddenly colonial rules for ethnographie practice do not necessarily encourage
visible (1955). Imperial relations, formal and informal, were no longer "better" cultural accounts. The criteria for judging a good account
the accepted rule of the game-to be reformed piecemeal, or ironically have never been settled and are changing. But what" has emerged
distanced in various ways. Enduring power inequalities had clearly from all these ideological shifts, rule changes, and new compromises
constrained ethnographie practice. This "situation" was feit earliest in is the fact that aseries of historical pressures have begun to reposition
 10 JAMES CLlFFORD Introduc.tion 11

anthropology with respect to its "objects" of study. Anthropology no with semiotics and discourse analysis, the new rhetoric is concerned
longer speaks with automatic authority for others defined as unable to ~ith what Kenneth Burke called "strategies for the encompassing of
speak for themselves ("primitive," "pre-literate," "without history"). situations" (1969: 3). It is less about how to speak weIl than about how
Other groups can less easily be distanced in special, almost always past to speak at all, and to act meaningfully, in the world of public cultural
or passing, times-represented as if they were not involved in the symbols.
present world systems that implicate ethnographers along with the The impact of these critiques is beginning to be felt in ethnogra-
peoples they study. "Cultures" do not hold still for their portraits. At- phy's sense of its own development. Noncelebratory histories are be-
tempts to make them do so always involve simplification and exclu- coming common. The new histories try to avoid charting the discov-
sion, selection of a temporal focus, the construction of a particular ery of some current wisdom (origins of the culture concept, and so
self-other relationship, and the imposition or negotiation of apower forth); and they are suspicious of promoting and demoting inteIlec-
relationship. tual precursors in order to confirm a particular paradigm. (For the
The critique of colonialism in the postwar period-an under- latter approach, see Harris 1968 and Evans-Pritchard 1981). Rather,
mining of "The West's" ability to represent other societies-has been the new histories treat anthropological ideas as enmeshed in local
reinforced by an important process of theorizing about the limits of practices and institutional constraints, as contingent and often "politi-
representation itself. There is no way adequately to survey this multi- cal" solutions to cultural problems. They construe science as a social
farious critique of what Vico called the "serious poem" of cultural his- process. They stress the historical discontinuities, as wellas continui-
tory. Positions proliferate: "hermeneutics," "structuralism," "history ties, of past and present practices, as often as not making present
of mentalities," "neo-Marxism," "genealogy," "post-structuralism," knowledge seem temporary, in motion. The authority of a scientific
"post-modernism," "pragmatism"; also a spate of "alternate epistemol- discipline, in this kind ofhistorical account, will always be mediated by
ogies"-feminist, ethnic, and non-Western. What is at stake, but not the claims of rhetoric and power. 5
always recognized, is an ongoing critique of the West's most confident, Another major impact of the accumulating political/theoretical
characteristic discourses. Diverse philosophies may implicitly have this critique of anthropology may be briefly summarized as a rejection of
critical stance in common. For example, Jacques Derrida's unraveling "visualism." Ong (1967, 1977), among others, has studied ways in
of logocentrism, from the Greeks to Freud, and Walter J. Ong's quite which the senses are hierarchically ordered in different cultures and
different diagnosis of the consequences of literacy share an overarch- epochs. He argues that the truth of vision in Western, literate cultures
ing rejection of the institutionalized ways one large group of human- has predominated over the evidences of sound and interlocution, of
ity has for millennia construed its world. New historical studies of he- touch, smeIl, and taste. (Mary Pratt has observed that references to
gemonic patterns of thought (Marxist, Annaliste, Foucaultian) have odor, very prominent in travel writing, are virtually absent from eth-
in common with recent styles of textual criticism (semiotic, reader- nographies.)6 The predominant metaphors in anthropological re-
response, post-structural) the conviction that what appears as "real" search have been participant-observation, data collection, and cultural
in history, the social sciences, the arts, even in common sense, is description, all of which prestippose astandpoint outside-Iooking
always analyzable as a restrictive and expressive set of social codes at, objectifying, or, somewhat closer, "reading," a given reality. Ong's
and conventions. Hermeneutic philosophy in its varying styles, from
5. I exclude from this category the various histOTies of "anthropological" ideas,
Wilhelm Dilthey and Paul Ricoeur to Heidegger, reminds us that the which must a1ways have a Whiggish cast. I include the strong historicism of George
simplest cultural accounts are intentional ereations, that interpret- Stocking, which often has the effeet of questioning disciplinary genealogies (for ex-
ers constantly construct themselves through the others they study. ample, 1968: 69-90). The work of TerryClark on the institutionalization of sodal sei-
ence (1973) and of Foucault on the sociopolitical constitution of "discursive formations"
The twentieth-century sciences of "language," from Ferdinand de (1973) points in the direetion I am indicating. See also: Hanog (1980), Duchet (1971),
Saussure and Roman Jacobson to Benjamin Lee Whorf, Sapir, and many works by De Certeau (e.g., 1980), Boon (1982), Rupp-Eisenreich (1984), and the
Wittgenstein, have made inescapable the systematic and situational yeady volume History 0/ Anthropolagy, edited by Stocking, whose approach goes weil be-
yond the history of ideas or theory. An allied approach can be found in recent sociaI
verbal structures that determine all representations of reality. Finally, studies of science research: e.g., Knorr-Cetina (1981), Latour (1984), Knorr-Cetina and
the return of rhetoric to an important place in many fields of study (it Mulkay (1983).
had for millennia been at the core of Western education) has made 6. An observation by Pratt at the Santa Fe seminar. The relative inattention to
sound is beginning to be corrected in recent ethnographic writing (e.g., Feld 1982).
possible a detailed anatomy of conventional expressive modes. Allied For examples of work unusually attentive to the sensorium, see Stoller (1984a, b).
 JAMES CLlFFORD.
Introduetion 13
12
I'm getting new expressions almost every day, as if the language were growing
work has been mobilized as a critique of ethnography by Johannes
from every conceivable shoot. (1975: 9)
Fabian (1983), who explores the consequences of positing cultura~
facts as things observed, rather than, for example, heard, invented in I\N\

dialogue, or transcribed. "Following Frances Yates (1966), he argues

An interest in the discursive aspects of cultural representation
that the taxonomic imagination in the West is strongly visualist in
draws attention not to the interpretation of cultural "texts" but to
nature, constituting cultures as if they were theaters ofmemory, or
their relations of production. Divergent styles of writing are, with
spatialized arrays.
varying degrees of success, grappling with these new orders of com-
In a related polemic against "Orientalism" Edward Said (1978)
plexity-different rules and possibilities within the horizon of a his-
identifies persistent tropes by which Europeans and Americans have
torical moment. The main experimental trends have been reviewed in
visualized Eastern and Arab cultures. The Orient functions as a the-
detail elsewhere (Marcus and Cushman 1982; Clifford 1983a). It is
ater, a stage on which a performance is repeated, to be seen from a
enough to mention here the general trend toward a specification of dis-
privileged standpoint. (Barthes [1977] locates a similar "perspective"
courses in ethnography: who speaks? who writes? when and where?
in the emerging bourgeois esthetics of Diderot.) For Said, the Orient
with or to whom? under what institutional and historical constraints?
is "textualized"; its multiple, divergent stories and existential predica-
Since Malinowski's time, the "method" of participant-observation
ments are coherently woven as a body of signs susceptible of virtuoso
has enacted a delicate balance of subjectivity and objectivity. The eth-
reading. This Orient, occulted and fragile, is brought lovingly to light,
nographer's personal experiences, especially those of participation
salvaged in the work of the outside scholar. The effect of domination
and empathy, are recognized as central to the research process, but
in such spatialltemporal deployments (not limited, of course, to Ori-
they are firmly restrained by the impersonal standards of observation
entalism proper) is that they confer on the other a discrete identity,
and "objective" distance. In dassical ethnographies the voice of the
while also providing the knowing observer with astandpoint from
author was always manifest, but the conventions of textual presenta-
which to see without being seen, to read without interruption.
tion and reading forbade too dose a connection between authorial
Once cultures are no Ionger prefigured visually-as objects, the-
style and the reality represented. Though we discern immediately the
aters, texts-it becomes possible to think of a cultural poetics that is
distinctive accent of Margaret Mead, Raymond Firth, or Paul Radin,
an interplay of voices, of positioned utterances. In a discursive rather
we still cannot refer to Samoans as "Meadian" or caU Tikopia a "Firth-
than a visual paradigm, the dominant metaphors for ethnography
ian" culture as freely as we speak of Dickensian or Flaubertian worlds.
shift away from the observing eye and toward expressive speech (and
The subjectivity of the author is separated from the objective referent
gesture). The writer's "voiee" pervades and situates the analysis, and
of the text. At best, the author's personal voice is seen as a style in the
objective, distancing rhetorie is renounced. Renato Rosaldo has re-
weak sense: a tone, ur embellishment of the facts. Moreover, the ac-
cently argued, and exemplified, these points (1984, 1985). Other
tual field experience of the ethnographer is presented only in very
changes of textual enactment are urged by Stephen Tyler in this vol-
stylized ways (the "arrival stories" discussed below by Mary Pratt, for
urne. (See also Tedlock 1983') The evocative, performative elements
example). States of serious confusion, violent feelings or acts, censor-
of ethnography are legitimated. And the crucial poetic problem for
ships, important failures, changes of course, and excessive pleasures
a discursive ethnography becomes how "to achieve by written means
are exduded from the published account.
what speech creates, and to do it without simply imitating speech"
In the sixties this set of expository conventions cracked. Ethnog-
(Tyler 1984c: 25). From another angle we notice how much has been
raphers began to write about their field experience in ways that dis-
said, in criticism and praise, of the ethnographic gaze. But what of the
turbed the prevailing subjective/objective balance. There had been
ethnographie ear? This is what Nathaniel Tarn is getting at in an inter-.
earlier disturbances, but they were kept marginal: Leiris's aberrant
view, speaking of his experience as a tricultural French/Englishman
L'AfTique fant6me (1934); Tristes Tropiques (whose strongest impact out-
endlessly becoming an American.
side France came only after 1960); and Elenore Smith Bowen's impor-
tant Return to Laughter (1954)' That Laura Bohannan in the early
lt may be the ethnographer or the anthropologist again having his ears wider
sixties had to disguise herself as Bowen, and her fieldwork narra-
open to what he considers the exotic as opposed to the familiar, but I still feel
I'm discovering something new in the use of language here almost every day. tive as a "novel," is symptomatic. But things were changing rapidly,
 14 JAMES CLlFFORD
Introduction 15
and others-Georges Balandier (L'Afrique ambigue 1957), David tion of "aetual" eneounters. It loeates eultural interpretations in many
Maybury-Lewis (The Savage and the Innocent 1965),jean Briggs (Never sorts of reciproeal contexts, and it obliges writers to find diverse ways
in Anger 197o),jean-Paul Dumont (The Headman andI 1978), and Paul of rendering negotiated realities as multisubjeetive, power-laden, and
Rabinow (Refiections on Fißldwork in Morocco 1977)-were soon writing ineongruent. In this view, "eulture" is always relational, an inscription
"faetuaIly" under their own names. The publieation of Malinowski's of eommunieative processes that exist, historieally, between subjeets in
Mailu and Trobriand diaries (1967) publicly upset the appleeart. relations of power (Dwyer 1977, Tedloek 1979)'
Heneeforth an implieit mark of interrogation was plaeed beside any Dialogieal modes are not, in principle, autobiographieal; they
overly eonfident and eonsistent ethnographie voiee. What desires and need not lead to hyper self-eonseiousness or self-absorption. As
eonfusions was it smoothing over? How was its "objeetivity" textually Bakhtin (1981) has shown, dialogieal proeesses proliferate in any
eonstrueted? 7 complexly represented diseursive spaee (that of an ethnography, or,
A subgenre of ethnographie writing emerged, the self-reflexive in his ease, arealist novel). Many voiees clamor for expression. Poly-
"fieldwork aeeount." Variously sophistieated and naive, eonfessional vocality was restrained and orehestrated in traditional ethnographies
and analytie, these aeeounts provide an important forum for the dis- by giving to one voiee a pervasive authorial funetion and to others the
eussion of a wide range of issues, epistemologieal, existential, and po- role of sourees, "informants," to be quoted or paraphrased. Onee dia-
litieal. The diseourse of the cultural analyst ean no longer be simply logism and polyphony are recognized as modes oftextual produetion,
that of the "experieneed" observer, describing and interpreting eus- monophonie authority is questioned, revealed to be eharaeteristie of
tom. Ethnographie experienee and the participant-observation ideal a scienee that has claimed to represent eultures. The tendeney to spee-
are shown to be problematie. Different textual strategies are at- ify discourses-historieally and intersubjeetively-reeasts this au-
tempted. For example, the first person singular (never banned from thority, and in the proeess alters the questions we put to eultural de-
ethnographies, whieh were always personal in stylized ways) is de- seriptions. Two reeent examples must suffiee. The first involves the
ployed aeeording to new conventions. With the "fieldwork aeeount" voiees and readings of Native Amerieans, the seeond those of women.
the rhetorie of experieneed objeetivity yields to that of the autobiogra- james Walker is widely known for his classie monograph The
phy and the ironie self-portrait. (See Beaujour 1980, Lejeune 1975') Sun Dance and Other Ceremonies of the Oglala Division of the Teton Sioux
The ethnographer, a eharaeter in a fietion, is at eenter stage. He or (1917). It is a earefully observed and doeumented work of interpre-
she ean speak of previously "irrelevant" topies: violenee and desire, tation. But our reading of it must now be eomplemented-and al-
eonfusions, struggles and eeonomie transaetions with informants. tered-by an extraordinary glimpse of its "makings." Three titles
These maUers (long diseussed informally within the discipline) have have now appeared in a four-volume edition of doeuments he eol-
moved away from the margins of ethnography, to be seen as eonstitu- leeted while a physieian and ethnographer on the Pine Ridge Sioux
tive, ineseapable (Honigman 1976). Reservation between 1896 and 1914. The first (Walker, Lakota Belief
Some reflexive aeeounts have worked to specify the diseourse of and Ritual 1982a, edited by Raymond DeMallie and Elaine jahner) is a
informants, as well as that of the ethnographer, by staging dialogues eollage of notes, interviews, texts, and essay fragments wriuen or
or narrating interpersonal confrontations (Laeoste-Dujardin 1977, spoken by Walker and numerous Oglala collaborators. This volume
Crapanzano 1980, Dwyer 1982, Shostak 1981, Mernissi 1984). These lists more than thirty "authorities," and wherever possible eaeh eontri-
fietions of dialogue have the effeet of transforming the "eultural" text bution is marked with the name of its enuneiator, writer, or tran-
(a ritual, an institution, a life history, or any unit of typical behavior to scriber. These individuals are not ethnographie "informants." Lakota
be described or interpreted) into a speaking subjeet, who sees as weIl Belief is a collaborative work of doeumentation, edited in a manner
as is seen, who evades, argues, probes baek. In this view of ethnogra- that gives equal rhetorieal weight to diverse renditions of tradition.
phy the proper referent of any aeeount is not a represented "world"; Walker's own deseriptions and glosses are fragments among fragments.
now it is specifie instanees of diseourse. But the principle of dialogieal The ethnographer worked closely with interpreters Charles and
textual produetion goes weIl beyond the more or less artful presenta- Riehard Nines, and with Thomas Tyon and George Sword, both of
7. I have explored the relation of personal subjectivity and authoritative cultural whom eomposed extended essays in Old Lakota. These have now
accounts, seen as mutually reinforcing fictions, in an essay on Malinowski and Conrad been translated and published for the first time. In a long seetion of
(Clifford 1985a). Lakota Belief Tyon presents explanations he obtained from a number
 16 JAMES CLlFFORD Introduction 17

of Pine Ridge shamans; and it is revealing to see questions of belief sociated with bringing elusive, "disappearing" oral lore into Jegible
(forexample the crucial and elusive quality of"wakan") interpreted in textual form. It is unclear whether James Walker (or anyone) can ap-
differing, idiosyncratic styles. The result is aversion of culture in pro- pear as author of these writings. Such lack of clarity is a sign oE the
cess that resists any final summation. In Lakota Belief the editors pro- times.
vide biographical details on Walker, with hints about the individual Western texts conventionally come with authors attached. Thus it
sources of the writings in his collection, brought together from the is perhaps inevitable that Lakota Belief, Lakota Society, and Lakota Myth
Colorado Historical Society, the American Museum of Natural His- should be published under Walker's name. But as ethnography's com-
tory, and the American Philosophical Society. plex, plural poesis becomes more apparent-and politically charged-
The second volume to have appeared is Lakota Society (1982b), conventions begin, in small ways, to slip. Walker's work may be an un-
which assembles documents roughly relating to aspects of sodal orga- usual case of textual collaboration. But it helps us see behind the
nization, as weB as concepts of time and history. The inclusion of ex- scenes. Once "informants" begin to be considered as co-authors, and
tensive Winter Counts (Lakota annals) and personal recollections of the ethnographer as scribe and archivist as well as interpreting ob-
historical events confirms recent tendendes to question overly clear server, we can ask new, critical questions of all ethnographies. How-
distinctions between peoples "with" and "without" history (Rosaldo ever monologieal, dialogical, or polyphonie their form, they are hier-
1980; Price 1983). Volume three is Lakota Myth (1983). And the last archical arrangements of discourses.
will contain the translated writings of George Sword. Sword was an A second example of the spedfieation of discourses concerns gen-
Oglala warrior, later ajudge of the Court of Indian Offenses at Pine der. I shall first touch on ways in whieh it can impinge on the reading
Ridge. With Walker's encouragement, he wrote a detailed vernacular of ethnographie texts and then explore how the exclusion of feminist
record of customary life, covering myth, ritual, warfare and games, perspectives from the present volume limits and focuses its discur-
complemented by an autobiography. sive standpoint. My first example, of the many possible, is Godfrey
Taken together, these works offer an unusual, multiply articula- Lienhardt's Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka (1961),
ted record of Lakota life at a crucial moment in its history-a three- surely among the most finely argued ethnographies in recent anthro-
volume anthology of ad hoc interpretations and transcriptions by pological literature. Its phenomenologieal rendition of Dinka senses
more than a score of individuals occupying a spectrum of positions of the self, of time, space, and "the Powers" is unparalleled. Thus it
with respect to "tradition," plus an elaborated view of the ensemble by comes as a shock to reeognize that Lienhardt's portrayal concerns, al-
a well-placed Oglala writer. It becomes possible to assess critically the most exclusively, the experience of Dinka men. When speaking of
synthesis Walker made of these diverse materials. When complete, the "the Dinka" he may or may not be extending the point to women. We
five volumes (including The Sun Dance) will constitute an expanded often cannot know from the published text. The examples he ehooses
(dispersed, not total) text representing a particular moment of eth- are, in any case, overwhelmingly centered on males. A rapid perusal
nographie production (not "Lakota culture"). It is this expanded text, of the book's introductory chapteron Dinka and their cattle confirms
rather than Walker's monograph, that we must now learn to read. the point. Only onee is a woman's view mentioned, and it is in affirma-
Such an ensemble opens up new meanings and desires in an on- tion of men's relation to cows, saying nothing of how women experi-
going cultural poesis. The decision to publish these texts was provoked ence cattle. This observation introduces an equivocation in passages
by requests to the Colorado Historical Society from community mem- such as "Dinka often interpret accidents or coincidences as acts of Di-
bers at Pine Ridge, where copies were needed in Oglala history vinity distinguishing truth from falsehood by signs which appear to
classes. For other readers the "Walker Collection" offers different men" (p. 47). The intended sense of the word "men" is certainly ge-
lessons, providing, among other things, a mock-up for an ethno- neric, yet surrounded exclusively by examples from male experience
poetics with history (and individuals) in it. One has difficulty giving it slides toward agendered meaning. (Do signs appear to women? in
these materials (many of which are very beautiful) the timeless, imper- significantly different ways?) Terms such as "the Dinka," or "Dinka,"
sonal identity of, say, "Sioux myth." Moreover, the question of who used throughout the book, become similarly equivocal.
writes (performs? transcribes? translates? edits?) cultural statements is The point is not to convict Lienhardt ofduplicity; his book specifies
inescapable in an expanded text of this sort. Here the ethnographer gender to an unusual extent. W'hat emerges, instead, are the history
no longer holds unquestioned rights of salvage: the authority long as- ~Ild politics that intervene in our reading. British academics of a eer-
18 JAMES CLIFFORD Introduction 19
tain caste and era say "men" when they mean "people" more often the fact that men's experience (as gendered subjects, not cultural
than do other groups, a cultural and historical context that is now less types-"Dinka" or "Trobrianders") is itself largely unstudied. As ca-
invisible than it once was. The partiality of gender in question here nonical topics like "kinship" come under critical scrutiny (Needham
was not at issue when-the book was published in Ig61. If it were, 1974; Schneider Ig72, Ig84), new problems coricerning "sexuality"
Lienhardt would have directly addressed the problem, as more recent are made visible. And so forth without end. It is evident that we know
ethnographers now feel obliged to (for example, Meigs 1g84 : xix). more about the Trobriand Islanders than was known in Ig00. But the
One did not read "The Religion of the Dinka" then as one now must, "we" requires historical identification. (Talai Asad argues in this vol-
as the religion of Dinka men and only perhaps Dinka women. Our urne that the fact that this knowledge is routinely inscribed in certain
task is to think historically about Lienhardt's text and its possible read- "strong" languages is not scientifically neutral.) If "culture" is not an
ings, including our own, as we read. object to be described, neither is it a unified corpus of symbols and
Systematic doubts about gender in cultural representation have meanings that can be definitively interpreted. Culture is contested,
become widespread only in the past decade or so, in certain milieux, temporal, and emergent. Representation and explanation-bothby
under pressure of feminism. A great many portrayals of "cultural" insiders and outsiders-is implicated in this emergence. The specifi-
truths now appear to reflect male domains of experience. (And there cation of discourses I have been tracing is thus more than a matter of
are, of course, inverse, though much less common cases: for example, making carefully limited claims. It is thoroughly historicist and self-
Mead's work, which often focused on female domains and generalized reflexive.
on this basis about the culture as a whole.) In recognizing such biases, In this spirit, Jet me turn to the present voJume. Everyone wi11 be
however, it is weIl to recall that our own "fulI" versions will themselves able to think of individuals or perspectives that should have been in-
inevitably appear partial; and if many cultural portrayals now seem cluded. The volume's focus limits it in ways its authors and editors can
more limited than they once did, this is an index of the contingency only begin to make apparent. Readers may note that its anthropologi-
and historical movement of all readings. No one reads from a neutral cal bias neglects photography, film, performance theory, documen-
or final position. This rather obvious caution is often violated in new tary art, the nonfiction novel, "the new journalism," oral history, and
accounts that purport to set the record straight or to fill a gap in "our" various forms of sociology. Thebook gives relatively little attention to
knowledge. new ethnographie possibilities emerging from non-Western experi-
When is a gap in knowledge perceived, and by whom? Where do ence and from feminist theory and politics. Let me dweIl on this last
"problems" come from?B It is obviously more than a simple matter of exclusion, for it concerns an especially strong intellectual and moral
noticing an error, bias, or omission. I have chosen examples (Walker influence in the university milieux from which these essays have
and Lienhardt) that underline the role of political and historical fac- sprung. Thus its absence cries out for comment. (But by addressing
tors in the discovery of discursive partiality. The epistemology this im- this one exclusion I do not mean to imply that it offers any privileged
plies cannot be reconciled with a notion of cumulative scientific prog- standpoint from which to perceive the partiality of the book.) Feminist
ress, and the partiality at stake is stronger than the normal scientific theorizing is obviously of great potential significance for rethinking
dictates that we study problems piecemeal, that we must not over- ethnographic writing. It debates the historical, political construction
generalize, that the best picture is built up by an accretion of rigorous of identities and self/other relations, and it probes the gendered posi-
evidence. Cultures are not scientific "objects" (assuming such things tions that make all accounts of, or by, other people inescapably par-
exist, even in the natural sciences). Culture, and our views of "it," are tial. 9 Why, then, are there no essays in this book written from pri-
produced historically, and are actively contested. There is no whole marily feminist standpoints? .
picture that can be "filled in," since the perception and filling of a gap
lead to the awareness of other gaps. If women's experience has been 9. Many of the themes I have been stressing above are supported by recent femi-
significantly excluded from ethnographic accounts, the recognition of nist work. Some theorists have problematized all totalizing, Archimedian perspectives
(jehlen 1981). Many have seriously rethought the sodal construction of relationship
this absence, and its correction in many recent studies, now highlights and difference (Chodorow 1978, Rich 1976, Keller 1985). Much feminist practice
questions the strict separation of subjective and objective, emphasizing processu;il
modes of knowledge. closely connecting personal. political, and representational pro-
8. "The stork didn't bring them'" (David Schneider, in conversation). Foucault de- cesses. Other strands deepen the critique of visually based modes of surveillance and
scribed his approach as a "history of problematics" (1984)' portrayal, linking them 10 domination and masculine desire (Mulvey 1975, Kuhn
 20 JAMES CUFFORD lntroduction 21

The volume was planned as the publieation of a seminar limited nography has foeused either on setting the reeord straight about
by its sponsoring body to ten partieipants. It was institutionally de- women or on revising anthropologieal eategories (for example, the
fined as an "advaneed seminar," and its organizers, George Mareus nature/eulture opposition). It has not produeed either unconven-
and myself, aeeepted "this format without serious question. We de- tional forms ofwriting or a developed refleetion on ethnographie tex-
cided to invite people doing "advaneed" work on our topie, by whieh tuality as such. .
we understood people who had already contributed signifieantly to The reasons for this general situation need eareful exploration,
the analysis of ethnographie textual form. For the sake of coherenee, and this is not the plaee for it. 10 In the ease of our seminar and vol-
we loeated the seminar within, and at the boundaries of, the diseipline urne, by stressing textual form and by privileging textual theory,
of anthropology. We invited partieipants weIl known for their reeent we foeused the topie in ways that excluded eertaip forms of ethno-
eontributions to the opening up of ethnographie writing possibilities, graphie innovation. This fact emerged in the seminar diseussions,
or whom we knew to be weIl along on research relevant to our foeus. during whieh it beeame clear that eoncrete institutional forees-ten-
The seminar was small and its formation ad hoc, refleeting our spe- l.lre patterns, eanons, the influenee of diseiplinary authorities, global
cifie personal and intelleetual networks, our limited knowledge of ap- inequalities of power-eould not be evaded. From this perspeetive, is-
propriate work in progress. (I shall not go ioto individual personali- sues of eontent in ethnography (the exclusion and inclusion of differ-
ties, friendships, and so forth, though they are clearly relevant.) ent experienees in the anthropologieal archive, the rewriting of estab-
Planning the seminar, we were eonfronted by what seemed to lished traditions) became direetly relevant. And this is where feminist
us an obvious-importaot and regrettable-faet. Feminism had not and non-Western writings have made their greatest impact. 11 Clearly
eontributed mueh to the theoretieal analysis of ethnographies as our sharp separation of form from content-and our fetishizing of
texts. Where women had made textual innovations (Bowen 1954, form-was, and is, contestable. It is a bias that may weIl be implieit in
Briggs 1970, Favret-Saada 1980, 1981) they had not done so on femi- modernist "textualism." (Most ofus at the seminar, excluding Stephen
nist grounds. A few quite reeent works (Shostak 1981, Cesara 1982, Tyler, were not yet thoroughly "post-modern"!)
Mernissi 1984) had refleeted in their form feminist claims about sub- We see these things better, of course, now that the deed is done,
jeetivity, relationality, and female experienee, but these same textual the book finished. But even early on, in Santa Fe, intense diseussions
forms were shared by other, nonfeminist, experimental works. More- tllrned on the exclusion of several important perspeetives and what to
over, their authors did not seem eonversant with the rhetorical and do about them. As editors, we decided not to try and "fill out" the vol-
textual theory that we wanted to bring to bear on ethnography. Our urne by seeking additional essays. This seemed to be tokenism and to
foeus was thus on textual theory as weIl as on textual form: a defen- refleet an aspiration to false eompleteness. Our response to the prob-
sible, produetive foeus. lem of excluded standpoints has been to leave them blatant. The
Within this foeus we could not draw on any developed debates present volume remains a limited intervention, with no aspiration to
generated by feminism on ethnographie textual praetiees. A few very b,e comprehensive or to cover the territory. It sheds a strong, partial
initial indieations (for example, Atkinson 1982; Roberts, ed. 1981) light.
were all that had been published. And the situation has not ehanged
10. Marilyn Strathern's unpublished essay "Dislodging a World View" (1984), also
dramatieally sinee. Feminism clearly has contributed to anthropologi- diseussed by Paul Rabinow in this volume, begins the investigation. A fuller analysis is
eal theory. And various fe male ethnographers, like Annette Weiner being worked out by Deborah Gordon in a dissenation for the History of Consciousness
(1976), are aetively rewriting the maseulinist eanon. But feminist eth- program, University of California, Santa Cruz.I am indebted LO conversations with her.
11. lt may generally be tme that groups long exeluded from positions of institu-
tional power, like women or people of color, have less concrete freedom to indulge in
textual experimentations. To write in an unorthodox way, Paul Rabinow suggests in this
1982). Narrative forms of representation are analyzed with regard to the gendered volume, one must first have tenure. In specific contexts a preoccupation with self-
positions they reenaet (de Lauretis 1984). Some feminist writing has worked to politi- reflexivity and style may be an index of privileged estheticism. For if one does not have
eize and subvert all natural essenees and identities, ineluding "femininity" and "woman" to worry about the exclusion or true representation of one's experience, one is freer to
(Wittig 1975, Irigaray 1977, Russ 1975, Haraway 1985)' "Anthropologieal" categories undermine ways of telling, to focus on form over content. But I am uneasy with a gen-
such as nature and culture, public and private, sex and gender have been brought into eral notion that privileged discourse indulges in esthetic or epistemological subtleties,
question (Ortner 1974, MacCormack and Strathern 1980, Rosaldo and Lamphere whereas marginal discourse "teils it like it is." The reverse is too often the case. (See
1974, Rosaldo 1980, Rubin 1975). Michael Fischer's essay in this volume.)

i
_ _ _c
 22 JAMES CLIFFORD Introduction 23
N\I\
condition of m ulticulturallife demanding new forms of inventiveness
A major consequence of the historical and theoretical move- and subtlety from a fully reflexive ethnography.
ments traced in this Introduction has been to dislodge the ground Ethnography in the service of anthropology onee looked out at
from which persons and -groups securely represent others. A concep- dearly defined others, defined as primitive, or tribai, or non-Western,
tual shift, "teetonic" in its implications, has taken place. We ground or pre-literate, or nonhistorical-the list, if extended, soon becomes
things, now, on a moving earth. There is no longer any place of over- incoherent. Now ethnographyencounters others in relation to itself,
view (mountaintop) from which to map human ways oflife, no Archi- while seeing itself as other. Thus an "ethnographie" perspective is
median point from which to represent the world. Mountains are in being deployed in diverse and novel circumstances. Renato Rosaldo
constant motion. So are islands: for one cannot occupy, unambigu- probes the way its rhetoric has been appropriated by sodal history
ously, a bounded cultural world from which to journey out and ana- and how this makes visible certain disturbing assumptions that have
lyze other cultures. Human ways of life increasingly influence, domi- empowered fieldwork. The ethnographer's distinetively intimate, in-
nate, parody, translate, and subvert one another. Cultural analysis is quisitive perspective turns up in history, literature, advertising, and
always enmeshed in global movements of difference and power. How- lll<my other unlikely places. The science ofthe exotic is being "repatri-
ever one defines it, and the phrase is here used loosely, a "world sys- ated" (Fischer and Marcus 1986).
tem" now links the planet's societies in a common historical process. 12 Ethnography's traditional vocation of cultural criticism (Mon-
A number of the essays that follow grapple with this predicament. taigne's "On Cannibals," Montesquieu's Persian Letters) has reemerged
Their emphases differ. How, George Marcus asks, can ethnography- with new explicitness and vigor. Anthropological fieldworkers can
at horne or abroad-define its object of study in ways that permit de- now realign their work with pioneers like Henry Mayhew in the nine-
tailed, local, contextual analysis and simultaneously the portrayal of teenth century and, more recently, with the Chicago school of urban
global implicating forces? Accepted textual strategies for defining cul- sociology (Lloyd Warner, William F. Whyte, Robert Park). Sociologieal
tural domains, separating micro and macro levels, are no longer ade- description of everyday practices has recently been complicated by
quate to the challenge. He explores new writing possibilities thatblur edlnomethodology (Leiter 1980): the work of Harold Garfinkel,
the distinction between anthropology and sociology, subverting an un- Harvey Sacks, and Aaron CicoureI (also neglected in the present vol-
productive division of labor. Talal Asad also confronts the systematic urne) reflects a crisis in sociology similar to that in anthropology.
interconnection of the planet's societies. But he finds persistent, gla- Meanwhile a different rapprochement between anthropological and
cial inequalities imposing all-too-coherent forms on the world's diver- sociological ethnography has been taking place under the influence of
sity and firmly positioning any ethnographie practice. "Translations" ~arxist cultural theory at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary
of culture, however subtle or inventive in textual form, take place Cultural Studies (Stuart Hall, Paul Willis). In America fieldworkers
within relations of "weak" and "strong" languages that govern the in- -<J.l"e turning their attention to laboratory biologists and physicists
ternational flow of knowledge. Ethnography is still very mueh a one- <!4tour and Woolgar 1979, Traweek 1982), to American "kinship"
way street. Michael Fischer's essay suggests that notions of global (Schneider 1980), to the dynastie rich (Marcus 1983), to truckers
hegemony may miss the reflexive, inventive dimensions of ethnicity (Agar 1985), to psychiatrie clients (Estroff 1985), to new urban com-
and cultural contact. (And in a similar vein, my own contribution mupities (Krieger 1983), to problematic traditional identities (Blu
treats all narratives of lost authenticity and vanishing diversity as self- 1980). This is only the beginning of a growing list.
confirming allegories, until proven otherwise.) Fischer locates ethno- . What is at stake is more than anthropological methods being de-
graphie writing in a syncretic world of ethnidty rather than a world of ployedat horne, or studying new groups (Nader 1969)' Ethnography
discrete cultures and traditions. Post-modernism, in his analysis, is is moving into areas long occupied by sociology, the novel, or avant-
more than a literary, philosophieal, or artistic trend. It is a general garde cultural critique (Clifford 1981), rediscovering otherness and
difl"erence within the cultures of the West. It has become clear that
every version of an "other," wherever found, is also the construction
12. The term is, of course, Wallerstein's (1976).1 find, however, his strong sense of
a unitary direction to the global historical process problematic, and agree with Ortner's of a "self," and the making of ethnographie texts, as Michael Fischer,
reservations (1984; 142-43). Vincent Crapanzano, and others in this volume show, has always in-
 24 JAMES CLIFFORD Introduction 25
volved a process of "self-fashioning" (Greenblau 1980). Cultural logical questions are sometimes thought to be paralyzing, abstract,
poesis-and politics-is the constant reconstitution of selves and dangerously solipsistic-in short, a barrier to the taskof writing
others through specific exclusions, conventions, and discursive prac- "grounded" or "unified" cultural and historical studies. 14 In practice,
tices. The essays that follow provide tools for the analysis of these pro- however, such questions do not necessarily inhibit those who entenain
cesses, at horne and abroad. . them from producing truthful, realistic accounts. All of the essays co 1-
These essays do not prophesy. Taken as a whole, they portray his- lected here point toward new, beuer modes of writing. One need not
torical constraints on the making of ethnographies, as weIl as areas of agree with their particular standards to take seriously the fact that in
textual experiment and emergence. Talal Asad's tone is sober, pre- ethnography, as in literary and historical studies, what counts as "real-
occupied (like Paul Rabinow) with institutional limits on interpre- ist" is now a matter of both theoretical debate and practical experi-
tive freedom. George Marcus and Michael Fischer explore concrete mentation.
examples of alternative writing. Stephen Tyler evokes what does The writing and reading of ethnography are overdetermined by
not (cannot?) yet exist, but must be imagined-or, beuer, sounded. forces ultimately beyond the control of either an author or an in-
Many of the essays (especially those of Renato Rosaldo, Vincent terpretive community. These contingencies-of language, rhetoric,
Crapanzano, Mary Prau, and Talal Asad) are occupied with critical power, and history-must now be openly confronted in the process of
ground clearing-dislodging canons to make space for alternatives. writing. They can no longer be evaded. But the confrontation raises
Rabinow identifies a new canon, post-modernism. Other essays (Tyler thorny problems of verification: how are the truths ofcultural accounts
on oral and performative modes, my own treatment of allegory) re- ev;uuated? Who has the authority to separate science from art? realism
capture old rhetorics and projeets for use now. "For use now!" Charles from fantasy? knowledge from ideology? Of course such separations
Olson's poetic rule should guide the reading of these essays: theyare will continue to be maintained, and redrawn; but their changing poetic
responses to a current, changing situation, interventions rather than and political grounds will be less easily ignored. In cultural studies at
positions. To place this volume in a historical conjuncture, as I have least, we can no longer know the whole truth, or even claim to approach
tried to do here, is to reveal the moving ground on which it stands, it. The rigorous partiality I have been stressing here may be a source of
and to do so without benefit of a master narrative ofhistorical develop- pessimism for some readers. But is there not a liberation, too, in recog-
ment that can offer a coherent direction, or future, forethnography.13 nizing that no one can write about others any longer as if they were
One launches a controversial collection like this with some trepi- discrete objects or texts? And may not the vision of a complex, prob-
dation, hoping it will be seriously engaged-not simply rejected, for lematic, partial ethnography lead, not to its abandonment, but to more
example, as another auack on science or an incitement to relativism. subtle, concrete ways of writing and reading, to new conceptions of
Rejections of this kind should at least make clear why close analysis of culture as interactive and historical? Most of the essays in this volume,
one of the principal things ethnographers do-that is, write-should for all their trenchant critiques, are optimistic about ethnographic writ-
not be central to evaluation of the results of scientific research. The ing~ The problems they raise are incitements, not barriers.
authors in this volume do not suggest that one cultural account is as These essays will be accused of having gone too far: poetry will
good as any other. If they espoused so trivial and self-refuting a rela- again be banned from the city, power from the halls of science. And
tivism, they would not have gone to the trouble of writing detailed, extreme self-consciousness certainly has its dangers-of irony, of elit-
commiued, critical studies. ism, of solipsism, of puuing the whole world in quotation marks. But I
Other, more subtle, objections have recently been raised to the lit- trust that readers who signal these dangers will do so (like some of the
erary, theoretical reflexivity represented here. Textual, epistemo- essays below) after they have confronted the changing history, rheto-
ric,and politics of established representational forms. In the wake of
13. My notion of historicism owes a great deal to the recent work of Fredric semiotics, post-structuralism, hermeneutics, and deconstruction there
]ameson (1980, 1981, 1984a, b). I am not, however, persuaded by the master narrative
(a global sequence of modes of production) he invokes from time to time as an alter-
hasbeen considerable talk about areturn to plain speaking and to re-
native to post-modern fragmentation (the sense that history is composed of various alism. But to return to realism one must first have left it! Moreover, to
local narratives). The partiality I have been urging in this introduction always presup-
poses a local historical predicament. Trus rustoricist partiality is not the unsituated "par- 14· The response is frequently expressed informally. It appears in different forms
tiality and ftux" with which Rabinow (see p. 252) taxes a somewhat rigidly defined in RandalI (1984), Rosen (1984), Ortner (1984: 143), Pullum (1984), and Damton
"post-modernism." (1985).
26 JAMES CUFFORD

recognize the poetie dimensions of ethnography does not require that MARY LOUISE PRATT
one give up facts and accurate aeeounting for the supposed free play
of poetry. "Poetry" is not limited to romantie or modernist subjeetiv-
ism: it ean be historieal, precise, objeetive. And of course it is just as
conventional and institutionally determined as "prose." Ethnography Fieldwork in Common Places
is hybrid textual aetivity: it traverses genres and diseiplines. The es-
says in this volume do not claim ethnography is "only literature."
They do insist it is always writing.

I would like to thank the members of the Santa Fe seminar for their many sugges- In his introduetion to Argonauts 0/ the Western Pacific (1922)
tions incorporated in, or left out 9f, this Introduction. (I have certainly not tried to rep-
resent the "native point of view" of that small group.) In graduate seminars co-taught Bronislaw Malinowski eelebrates the advent of professional, seientifie
with Paul Rabinow at the University of California at Berkeley and Santa Cruz. many of ethnography: "The time when we could tolerate aeeounts presenting
my ideas on these topics have been agreeably assauited. My special thanks to hirn and to us the native as a distorted, ehildish earieature of a human being are
the students in those classes. At Santa Cruz. Deborah Gordon, Donna Haraway, and
Ruth Frankenberg have helped me with this essay, and I have had important encour- gone," he declares. "This pieture is false, and like many other false-
agement and stimulus from Hayden White and the members of the Research Group on hoods, it has been killed by Scienee" (Malinowski 1961: 11). The state-
Colonial Discourse. Various press readers made important suggestions, particularly plent is symptomatie of a well-established habit among ethnographers
Barbara Babcock. George Marcus, who got the whole project rolling. has been an in-
estimable ally and friend.
of defining ethnographie writing over and against older, less special-
ized genres, such as travel books, personal memoirs, journalism, and
~ecounts by missionaries, settlers, colonial offieials, and the like. AI-
~ough it will not supplant these genres altogether, professional eth-
nography, it is understood, wil! usurp their authority and eorreet their
abuses. In almost any ethnography dull-Iooking figures ealled "mere
travelers" or "easual observers" show up from time to time, only to
have their superficial pereeptions either eorreeted or eorroborated by
the serious seientist.
This strategy of defining itself by contrast to adjaeent and ante-
eedent discourses limits ethnography's ability to explain or examine
itself as a kind of writing. To the extent that it legitimates itself by op-
position to other kinds of writing, ethnography blinds itself to the fa<;:t
t~at its own diseursive praetiees were often inherited from these other
genres and are still shared with them today. At times one still hears
expressed as an ideal for ethnography a neutral, tropeless discourse
that would render other realities "exaetlY as they are," not filtered
through our own values and interpretive schema. For the most part,
however, that wild goose is no longer being ehased, and it is possible
to suggest that ethnographie writing is as trope-governed as any other
diseursive formation. This reeognition is obviously fundamental for
those who are interested in changing or enriehing ethnographie writ-
ingor simply in inereasing the discipline's self-understanding. In this
essay I propose to examine how some tropes of ethnographie writing
are deployed and how they derive from earlier diseursive traditions.
In partieular, I propose to foeus on the vexed but important relation- .