CAWRITING CULTURE AT 25: SPECIAL EDITOR’SINTRODUCTION

ORIN STARNDuke University

Is twenty-five years a long time?That depends, of course, on your yardstick. “In geologic time,” as Hugh

Raffles (this issue) notes, a quarter-century is “only the slightest breath.” But in thefrighteningly short span of human life, it’s a long stretch indeed—a baby’s journeyto adulthood, the better part of an academic career, or, in the case at hand, enoughhindsight to grasp a book’s significance within a field.

I was in graduate school in 1986 when James Clifford and George Marcus’sWriting Culture appeared. It was instantly anthropology’s most talked about book,and, in fact, the flagship text for the debates about reflexivity and representationthat defined that whole decade in the discipline. You simply had to read—and havean opinion about—Writing Culture unless you wanted to appear as if you’d beenliving under one of Raffles’s proverbial antediluvian rocks.

Those opinions were quite radically polarized. Neither Marcus nor Cliffordever identified as a “postmodernist.” That did not keep some critics from brandingthe two Writing Culture editors as the ringleaders of a sinister “postmodern move-ment.” Along with Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer’s Anthropology as Cultural

Critique (1986), Clifford’s The Predicament of Culture (1988), and other influentialnew texts, the essays in Writing Culture seemed to threaten the old disciplinaryprinciples of truth, science, and objectivity with the relativizing epistemic murk ofnewfangled literary theory and other dubious influences.1 Then as now, job inter-views at AAA meetings were conducted in those horrible little curtained booths

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 27, Issue 3, pp. 411–416. ISSN 0886-7356, online ISSN 1548-1360. C© 2012 bythe American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1360.2012.01150.x

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at the convention hotel. You had to be ready to be asked about your views of“postmodernism” as if it were self-evident what that notoriously slippery and bynow antique-sounding term meant, let alone that one had to be “for” or “against”it. It sometimes felt as though someone might push the button to the trap doorunder your chair if you gave the wrong answer.

Why did Writing Culture generate such strong responses? Other calls forradically rethinking anthropology, after all, had already been sounded amid theturmoil of decolonization and social protest during the late 1960s and 1970s. Apair of earlier landmark anthologies—Reinventing Anthropology (Hymes 1972) andAnthropology and the Colonial Encounter (Asad 1973)—had circulated newly critical,sometimes denunciatory views of real and imagined disciplinary failings. The ascentof various brands of Marxist and feminist theory measured the turn toward a morepoliticized anthropology that foregrounded the themes of culture, power, andhistory in new ways.

Much about Writing Culture bore the imprint of 1960s radicalism, and, infact, its contributors were mostly baby boomers who had marched against theVietnam War and otherwise been influenced by the countercultural currents ofthose times. An antiracist, anticolonial sympathy for the subaltern ran through thebook. What Writing Culture added to the mix, however, was the overlapping newinfluences of literary, poststructuralist, and postcolonial theory in various guises.The anthology’s essays were by no means uniform in their agendas. Even so, thecitation of such otherwise disparate bedfellows as Derrida, Bakhtin, Baudrillard,Foucault, Frye, White, Barthes, Said, and others marked the growing interest inthe politics of discourse, language, and representation that was to define so muchinquiry in anthropology and related fields to the twentieth century’s close andinto the new one. As James Clifford (this issue) observes in hindsight, Writing

Culture occupied a “transitional moment,” somewhere between the agendas andsensibilities of the late 1960s and fin de siecle ones.

It was the new concern for reflexivity and representation that especially irkedsome. To treat ethnography not as a transparent record of other realities so muchas a genre of writing with its own conventions, tropes, gaps, and silences waslittle more than self-indulgent navel-gazing in one view. And then there was theanthology’s tilt to a “postmodern,” if I may be excused the word, skepticism aboutneat explanation and model-building in favor of a more mobile, open-ended viewof culture and society as a terrain of hybridization, disjuncture, and heteroglossia.It was not just old school positivists who found such tendencies objectionable andworse. Censorious criticism also came from the left, especially Marxist and feminist

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scholars. The Marxian-minded Nicole Polier and William Roseberry (1989), forexample, lamented that Writing Culture strayed too far from the ostensibly solidground of political economy into the treacherous shoals of a depoliticized, la-laland culturalism.2 Feminists objected, reasonably enough, to there having beenonly one woman, Mary Pratt, among Writing Culture’s nine contributors; they alsofaulted Clifford and Marcus for failing to acknowledge feminist genealogies ofethnographic experimentation and textual theorization.3 To the harshest critics,the postmodern turn of the 1980s was a step backward, a rear-guard action thatthreatened to undercut hopes for a transformed anthropology.

But for many others Writing Culture, if certainly not exempt from criticism,cleared exciting new ground. To those who admired the book’s verve, intelligence,and originality, it held out what John Jackson Jr. (this issue) calls “license to thinkunabashedly” about the craft of ethnography, and, more broadly, about the problemsand possibilities of anthropology as a whole. The book found readers in literature,history, visual studies, and other fields, and beyond the United States (it has beentranslated into Mandarin and four other languages). Several hundred citations inGoogle Scholar is one modern barometer of an influential academic book. Writing

Culture has been cited 6,518 times and counting.We present this special issue of Cultural Anthropology to mark the 25th an-

niversary of Writing Culture’s publication.4 As a start, we asked James Clifford andGeorge Marcus for their thoughts on the occasion. Clifford, always the brillianthistoricizer (and, it is sometimes forgotten, a historian and not an anthropologistby training), takes us back in time. His essay reflects on Writing Culture’s placein the intertwined stories of his own personal biography; the larger arc of late-20th-century anthropology; and the changing global geography that he calls the“decentering of the West.” For his part, George Marcus, ever the astute and some-times visionary trend-spotter, casts an eye forward. His article focuses on emergingdisciplinary developments—new collaborative projects, digital media experimen-tation, and the accompanying growth of what Michael M. J. Fischer has termed“third spaces” like studios, archives, and installations.5 Clifford writes here in amore uncertain, personal, and sometimes wistful register by contrast to the moreconfident, programmatic Marcus piece. The two Writing Culture editors broughtquite different and yet complementary sensibilities to the project in the first place.Their own distinctive angles of approach remain on display in these two essays25 years later.

We also invited six of today’s leading anthropologists to contribute essaysfor this Writing Culture anniversary. Each contributor takes the book as a launching

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point for probing matters of concern in their own thinking about anthropologyand the world. Their essays underscore Writing Culture’s role in catalyzing debate,reflection, and fresh disciplinary directions; they share Jackson’s feeling that it“licensed” various kinds of experimentation. The pieces, taken together, suggestthat anthropology continues to struggle within and against many of the samedesires, tensions, and possibilities that Writing Culture pried open for examinationa quarter-century ago, albeit in sometimes unexpected ways.

The problem of writing was at Writing Culture’s core, as the book’s verytitle announced. Anthropologists now, of course, still grapple with the poeticsand politics of ethnography. How, as Kathleen Stewart asks (this issue) with char-acteristic inventiveness, might we try to step “outside the cold comfort zone ofrecognizing only self-identical objects?” Her concern here lies in the anthropol-ogy of emergence, and, in particular, the problem of precarity from her NewEngland hometown, a Texas swimming hole, and the American road to hermother’s decline. Stewart sees Writing Culture as having encouraged the art of“reattuning” so as to “register the tactility and significance of something com-ing into forms through an assemblage of affects, routes, conditions, sensibilities,and habits.” Raffles offers his own version of such experimentation in his med-itation on stones. The lines between ethnography, poetry, autobiography, andcreative nonfiction blur, sometimes melt away, in these two wonderful shortpieces.

Writing Culture aimed to denaturalize ethnography by throwing its history,politics, and canonical conventions open to scrutiny. One enduring disciplinaryhabit, however, remains to presume a divide between field notes, typically un-published, and the resulting ethnography, the great fetish of the finished book stillthe gold standard for tenure and professional prestige. Yet Michael Taussig (thisissue)—who has so influentially experimented with form and writing for almostthree decades—wonders if “anthropology has sold itself short in conforming to theidea that its main vehicle of expression is an academic book or journal article.” Hespeaks in praise of the humble fieldwork notebook. Our notes, Taussig suggests,“capture ephemeral realities, the check and bluff of life” in ways that our moreformal published ethnography sometimes fails to do.

Digitality, obviously, introduces a whole new, unanticipated set of factors intothe equation. In 1986, most anthropologists still prepared their manuscripts on thatnow-obsolete inscription device, the typewriter; none of us had yet heard of e-mailand the Internet, much less had any premonition about how they would rule ourlives. John Jackson Jr. (this issue) asserts that “the digital rewires anthropological

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possibility” by “bending time and space” to recalibrate “the dyadic relationshipthat serves as a pivot for the entire ethnographic encounter.” Here the visual—enabled by new digital cameras, streaming, webcasts, and other 21st-centurymedia—assumes a larger place in anthropology than in a precyber world whenthe written word seemed so far and away the dominant mode of ethnographicrepresentation. Another consequence of digitalization, Jackson suggests, has beennew monitoring and accountability. Jackson worries about members of the BlackIsraelites, the religious sect he has studied, watching and perhaps disliking a talk hegave about them at Stanford University, now archived as a webcast. The Internet,Jackson concludes, humbles “the ethnographer’s aspirations for a kind of one-sidedvoyeurism.”

But what now about the politics of ethnography? It can be argued that a seachange occurred in anthropology starting with the upheavals of the late 1960sand 1970s.6 Ever since, and for all the changes, the discipline’s zeitgeist has beenflavored, perhaps dominated, by an implicit, sometimes very explicit moral andpolitical zeal for unveiling the workings of power and domination. In their contribu-tions, Kim Fortun and Danilyn Rutherford paint Writing Culture not as having beensome depoliticizing retreat into textual indeterminacy but, rather, an invitation tothink through the challenges of disciplinary engagement, activism, and responsibil-ity. Neither Fortun nor Rutherford, although alert to ambiguity and contradiction,wishes to wallow in what David Chioni Moore calls “anthro(a)pology” for ourdiscipline’s shortcomings.7 Fortun instead envisions ethnography as a means foreliciting the “future anterior,” a “space of creativity, where something surpris-ing, something new to all emerges.” Her own multimedia, crossprofessional, andtransnational Asthma Files project exemplifies such an endeavor. Rutherford coinsthe label “kinky empiricism” to describe her agenda. This would entail a supple,unapologetic, conjoined commitment to the empirical and the ethical that eschewsthe false guarantees of analytical closure much less moral certitude. Both thinkersput forward, in other words, their own strong cases for an anthropology that mightmatter for the better in a dangerous, divided world.

It’s clear enough that Writing Culture left its mark. By now, certainly, ourdisciplinary geology has put down many layers of sediment. The latest debates,texts, and trendy theories deposit themselves over the ones that came before, onlyto be covered over themselves with a bit more time’s passing. But, like the specialstones we keep from old walks, the books that matter most to us always have aplace on our shelves.

Writing Culture, for many of us, remains just such a book.415

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NOTES

1. See Taussig 1987, p. xiii.2. See Polier and Roseberry 1989.3. See, for example, Mascia-Lee and colleagues (1989) and Behar and Gordon (1996).4. The papers were initially presented at the “Writing Culture at 25: Theory, Ethnography,

Fieldwork” conference, cosponsored by the Department of Cultural Anthropology at DukeUniversity and Cultural Anthropology, Durham, North Carolina, September 30–October 1,2011. Video excerpts from the presentations can be found at culturalanthropology.duke.edu.

5. See Fischer 2003.6. See Marcus 1998, pp. 57–78.7. See Moore 1994.

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Asad, Talal, ed.1973 Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. New York: Humanities Press.

Behar, Ruth, and Deborah Gordon, eds.1996 Women Writing Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Clifford, James1988 The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and

Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus, eds.

1986 Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: Universityof California Press.

Fischer, Michael M. J.2003 Emergent Forms of Life and Anthropological Voice. Durham, NC: Duke

University Press.Hymes, Dell, ed.

1972 Reinventing Anthropology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Marcus, George

1998 Ethnography through Thick and Thin. Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress.

Marcus, George, and Michael M. J. Fischer1986 Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human

Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Mascia-Lees, Frances, Patricia Cohen, and Colleen Ballerino Cohen

1989 The Postmodernist Turn: Cautions from a Feminist Perspective. Signs15(1):7–33.

Moore, David Chioni1994 Anthropology Is Dead, Long Live Anthro(a)pology: Poststructuralism, Literary

Studies, and Anthropology’s “Nervous Present.” Journal of AnthropologicalResearch 50(4):345–365.

Polier, Nicole, and William Roseberry1989 Tristes Tropes: Postmodern Anthropologists Search for the Other and

Discover Themselves. Economy and Society 18(2):245–264.Taussig, Michael

1987 Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing.Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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