Anthropological Perspectives

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Ant hropolog caI perspectives:disturbing the structures of powerand knowledge

Michael HerzfeldThe articles in this issue of the InternationalSocial Science Journal, which continue the dis-cussion of current trends in social and culturalanthropology begun in the previous issue, allshare one important characteristic. In each arti-cle, the author shows u s something of the his-torical development of anthropological thoughtas refracted through the prism of a particulartopic. Although the subjects treated here arediverse, it is precisely this diversity that lendsunity to the collection, for ithelps to highlight a degreeof commonality which isespecially noteworthy in adiscipline notorious, in theview of some critics, for itsinternal fragmentation. Wehave already glimpsed thiscommon ground in the earl-ier set of articles. Here wegain an enhanced sense ofits origin in the parallel tra-jectory of the disciplinethrough the variety of top-ical territories discussed inthese essays.

experience - to propose or refine arguments ofa more or less general nature, and especially tochallenge pre-existing paradigms by showingwhy particular cases do not fit them.Underlying this set of common themes isthe central concern that perhaps best definesanthropologys mission in the world today. Thisis the questioning of received wisdoms thatreflect the totalizing domination of globalsociety by social and political paradigms largely

Michael Herzfeld is Professor of Anthro-pology at Harvard University, 33 Kirk-land Street, Cambridge, MA 02138,USA, email: [email protected] author of Cultural Intimacy: SocialPoetics in the Nation-State (1997). he haswritten extensively on anthropologicaland semiotic theory, the ethnography ofSouthern Europe, local politics, national-ism, and the reproduction of socialknowledge. He is editor of American Eth-nologist. The Editor wishes to thank Pro-fessor Herzfeld for his invaluable assist-ance as editorial adviser for the twoissues of the ISSJ reviewing issues andperspectives in anthropology.

Among the resulting similarities, the fol-lowing stand out with particular clarity: the use-fulness of traditional anthropological categoriesfor the analysis of modern society; the paradigmshift from static structures to a clearer under-standing of culture as entailing agency and pro-cess; the significance of teleology as an objectas well as a feature of theory (something thatwas also clear in the earlier set of articles); andthe use of certain ethnographic cases - usuallythose of which the authors have the most direct

conceived in, and for, theWest - that broad coalitionof industrial powers capableof inventing and using thetechnologies of control at aplanetary level.In the previous issue, Isuggested that anthropologymight provocatively bedefined as the comparativestudy of common sense. Tothe extent that ideas of thesensible are increasinglypresented in global terms,we may now also say thatanthropology may serve asa discourse of critical resistance to the concep-tual. and cosmological hegemony of this globalcommon sense. The essays presented in thisissue of ISSJ are all, in their appropriatelydiverse ways, illustrations of how anthropologycan protect a critically important resource: thevery possibility of questioning the universal

logic of globalization and exposing its histori-cally narrow and culturally parochial base byhearing other voices is preserved through thecritical investigations of anthropology. If, for

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example, economic rationality can be seen asthe driving force behind current representationsof rationality, Nurit Bird-Davids article showswhy many of the worlds people will not bepersuaded. What from the perspective of thedominant discourse looks like irrational tra-ditionalism emerges, on closer inspection, asan alternative logic. The comparison may alsocoincide with evidence that state global agenciesdo not necessarily act in accordance with theirow n stated rationality, an observation thatunderscores the importance of maintaining astrong sense of the conceptual and social diver-sity that still exists in the world.

Several of the articles (notably those byBird-David, Escobar, and Milton) highlightthese dimensions of the disciplines presentframework of activity. The concerns are practi-cal as well as academic. These three authors,implicitly but unequivocally, show that the iso-lation of the ivory tower from the real worldhas indeed been a remarkably significant polit-ical development, in which anthropologists(among others) have allowed a particular rep-resentation of reality to marginalize their per-spectives and so stifle their critical contribution.They can now resist this move by historicizingand contextualizing the conventional wisdomsthat have gained political ascendancy in theglobal arena.Thus, for example, Arturo Escobarembraces a post-structuralist position, of thekind that uninformed critics particularly chargewith refusing to engage with the real world.In point of fact, Escobar advocates active oppo-sition to precisely that lack of engagement -and the critics are unlikely to be happy aboutthat, for it is their logic that comes under fireas a result. For those concerned with the cul-tural and social impact of development, as forthose who argue that environmentalist pro-grammes must be fa r more sensitive to culturalvalues in order to stand some chance of success(as Kay Milton demonstrates here), this isindeed a necessary move for anthropology.Interestingly, we also find a similarly activistperspective argued in areas of anthropology thatin the past were usually relegated to the zoneof the purely academic - notably kinship stud-ies, an area in which John Borneman arguesfor a transformation that is both intellectuallymore defensible and politically more just. Even

areas once thought to be the domain of pureaesthetics and thus to be socially epiphenomena]and politically insignificant, such as music (asDavid Coplan shows us), become sites of apolitical engagement. This makes the analyticseparation of the intellectual from the politicalincreasingly indefensible and raises embarrass-ing questions for those who continue to insiston maintaining that separation.

All these arguments have to do with thedistribution of power, and all in some sensereflect an uneasy awareness that globalizationhas reduced, or at least threatens to reduce, thearenas of choice for all societies. Anthropologythus becomes a precious resource, not onlybecause of the esoteric knowledge of strangelydifferent cultures that it can offer (although thisin itself is not trivial), but also because itscharacteristic techniques of defamiliarizationcan be made to question the globalizingassumptions that increasingly dominate politicaldecision-making.

This critical stance required a consciouseffort to free anthropology from some of itsown historically accumulated associations withnationalism, colonialism, and global economiccontrol. Anthropologists now freely admit thattheir epistemology is profoundly Western inorigin - this acknowledgment must be the firststage in creating the necessary critical dis-tance - and, as Escobar points out, the anthro-pological endorsement of some early develop-ment efforts in Third World countriesunderwrote very particular forms of order andrationality. When Escobar insists that the dis-tinction between applied and academic anthro-pology has become tired and unproductivetoday, he is challenging a part of the currentlydominant symbolic order - of which the logicof development constitutes another segment. Byturning the spotlight of anthropological analysison this global cosmology, we can identify itsworkings more clearly and so stand back inorder to make more informed decisions aboutthe extent to which we are prepared to go alongwith it.Order, as Ossio points out here, is themajor concern of cosmological systems fromthe historiography of Guaman Poma (and thepre-existing schemata that informed it) to theargumentation of modern physics and chemistry.That scientific practices are themselves subject

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Anthropological perspectives: disturbing the structures of power and knowledge 455

to social and political constraints has been thesubject of sustained ethnographic investigation(see Latour and Woolgar, 1986; Rabinow, 1996;Traweek, 1988). From one perspective, environ-mental and other political debates are disputesover the predominance of one or another typeof order, and, as Milton notes, arguments aboutthe relationship of nature to culture - whichincreasingly take cognizance of various indigen-ous ways of framing that relationship - extendthis concern right into the heart of anthropologi-cal theory. Bird-David makes a strikingly simi-lar point about the significance of economicmodels derived from the populations to whichthey are applied. A world deprived of theseother views would be a truly impoverishedworld - and we must ask whose interests areserved by so depleting its conceptual resources.Even (or especially) the reduction of all kinshipto the family, as Borneman points out, reducesthe spaces for alternative arrangements thatwould make possible compassion and care forthose who do not fit in - those whom theprevailing cosmology defines as polluting (seeDouglas, 1966) - and universalizes a set ofvalues that was hitherto perhaps quite peculiarin the comparative global terms in whichanthropologists work.

To put this another way, we might say thatthe very possibility of comparison, essential toany notion of ethical choice, is being eroded.There is an obvious analogy with the plight ofbio-diversity in the world. An economistic ver-sion of survivalism does not offer much hopeof alternative futures. That model, like therelated socio-biological perspective, derivesfrom the bourgeois, Western milieu that informsso much of the global culture of today (seeespecially the critiques in Sahlins, 1976a;1976b). Ironically, this makes the vaunted uni-versalism of such rationalities seem danger-ously parochial.

Recognition of local values does notcommit us to extreme relativism, however, andindeed the authors in this issue explicitly rejectthat approach. The extreme relativist position isone in which respect for all cultures is reducedto an absurd caricature, a socially impossibleand logically self-contradictory argument inwhich all moral and empirical judgment is sus-pended. How then does one deal with culturalvalues like ethnocentrism? How is one to con-

front genocide? Clearly, cultural relativism, ifit is to have any meaning at all, must be re-situated in a pragmatic vision. Expressed as ageneral ethical Diktat rather than as a sociallyresponsible position, cultural relativism ends updefeating the purposes for which it was orig-inally, and with the best of intentions, formu-lated as an epistemological creed (see alsoFabian, 1983).

The rethinking of relativism requires aspecifically historical reconsideration of its role.And it is the specifically historical accessibilityof the paths towards the present configurationof power that makes a critical purchase, asDavid Scott calls it, feasible as well as desir-able. By the same token, it is the demonstrableeffects of documented processes of environmen-tal and social intervention that make it absurd,as Kay Milton reminds us, to regard all causalexplanations as equally satisfactory or all out-comes as equally beneficial - but we mustalways ask whom they harm or benefit, therebysituating them in a particular social environ-ment. The common reluctance of anthropol-ogists to get involved is an abdication ofresponsibility, easier to sustain when we rest ona universalist form of relativism. Against thiscatatonic condition, a reminder that we inhabita socially and historically specific moment, adiflerent moment, is the best antidote.

The particularism of ethnography is not,then, a means of saying that anything goes, buta reminder that what purports to be a globalrationality is itself historically and culturallyspecific in origin, and - what is even moreimportant - a way of making space for whatEscobar describes as the alternative projects ofsubaltern populations. If the Western-derivedrhetoric of fair competition demands that thereshould be a level playing field, it should notthen be the West - if we follow the Westsown logic - that also appoints all the umpires.And even the West is itself hardly an unprob-lematic category (see Carrier, 1992): a judgmentof taste and cultural capital grounded in hier-archy, it has served particular hegemoniesdevastatingly well.Integral to the project of creating morespace for other perspectives is a critical histori-ography of anthropology itself. Many of theessays gathered here grapple directly with thismore historical appraisal of anthropology; each

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456 Michael Hergeld

does so in relation to its specific objects ofstudy. Escobar, for example, worries about theextent to which anthropology may have beencompromised by its involvement in the heavy-handed hegemony of earlier developmentschemes. In related vein, Scott, largely follow-ing Tala1 Asad, suggests that historical self-awareness should not lead anthropologists tojoin in the kind of political theodicy wherebycolonialism is blamed for all present ills andanthropology rejected as its conceptual lackey,but should instead interrogate the conditionsunder which that situation has been sustained(see also Mbembe, 1992). Viclav Hubinger,writing from the viewpoint of a country whereanthropological models have sometimesappeared as source of legitimation for the newcapitalist domination in Eastern and CentralEurope, similarly notes that anthropology wasborn of the project of modernity itself (muchas, one might add, was the concept oftradition), and traces to that hegemony theexclusion of formerly Eastern bloc countriesfrom the dominant idioms in European anthro-pology today.There is a direct parallel, in fact, betweenHubingers observation and Scotts demon-stration that it is the criteria of relevance, setby those with institutional power in the acad-emy, that define the lines of exclusion andengagement. A,$d Borneman, whose work isgrounded ethnographically in his examinationof the legal rtgimes of the former states ofEast and West Germany as constituting a virtualmoiety system (1992, pp. 3-4), and who thustransposes traditional anthropological frames ofreference onto the socialist-capitalist confron-tation over the definition of modernity in theheart of the West, derives much of the strengthof his argument from the extraordinarily long-term persistence of the heterosexual nuclearfamily as the defining unit of social univer-salism that lay at the heart of anthropologyitself. This has proved to be another type ofexclusion that reveals much about the valuesystem underlying the larger modernist projectof which anthropology has been a part.Exclusion is the social dimension of what,as a conceptual construct, we would call deter-minism. In-built teleologies transform the con-tingent into common sense, or what Douglas(1975) calls self-evidence (to revert for a

moment to the theme of the previous ISSJissue). Particularly dramatic in this regard is thestory of ways of understanding the relationshipbetween society and environment, a tale that,as Milton tells it, traces out the vicissitudesof determinism in anthropological theory moregenerally. Early attempts to establish sweepingcorrelations between ecological conditions andsocial arrangements did not hold for long; pos-sibilism (which focused on constraints ratherthan on causes) left too much unexplained; andMarvin Harris (1974) attempt to explain allsocial institutions as rationally adaptive did noteither adequately address the besetting issue ofteleology or furnish clear evidence that othermodes of causal explanation should be con-sidered inferior.

A central reason for the latter failure issymptomatic of larger issues within the disci-pline. The attempt to explain the Hindu banon beef consumption exemplifies this difficulty.From a Western, economistic perspective, it isno doubt true that the conservation of theresources provided by a plough animal wouldseem rational. But this does not alone accountfor the greater inclination of some cultures thanof others to practise such useful self-denial. Arewe to deduce that some cultures are objectivelymore rational than others? Any such assumptionis necessarily circular because it grants analyststhe right to sit in judgment on the cultures ofthe world, ranking them in a hierarchy of adher-ence to the principles of pure reason whileremaining exempt from such judgment them-selves.As we have already seen, moreover, ration-ality is itself a culturally parochial phenomenon.Mary Douglas symbolic explanation - that allfood taboos rest on principles of taxonomicorganization - does not prejudge cultural ration-ality in this way, but recognizes the culturalspecificity of different types of reasoning con-joined only by the common formal propertiespossessed, she suggests, by all systems ofthought (Douglas, 1966). It is also an expla-nation that works well for the taboos of thecultures that themselves lay claim to transcen-dent rationality - not a bad test of adequacyby their own standards of proof.The cultural ecology approach is in factflawed by the assumptions of functionalism aswell as of ethnocentrism. It rests on a teleo-

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Mr Demaitre showing an illustrated journal to inhabitants of the Ramu valley, Papua New Guinea, c. 1930. Mustede IHomme. Paris

logical presupposition not unlike Malinowskisassumption that social institutions served thepurposes of satisfying the collective psychologi-cal needs of a population: that institutional prac-tices regulating the availability of foodstuffs andof the other necessities of life must serve thepopulations rational adaptation to its environ-mental resources. This position reproduces theteleological weaknesses of earlier functionalismby presupposing purpose where in fact onlyeffect can be identified.Not coincidentally, 1 suggest, this approachis broadly consistent with some of the mostpowerful forms of development interventiondescribed by Escobar. From the perspective ofa universalist logic, the rationality of ecologicaladaptation harmonized perfectly with the

designs of apparently well-intentioned develop-ment agencies - much as the functionalist argu-ments of Malinowski, for all their circular tele-ology, at least had the virtue of counteringcolonial ideas about the fundamental irration-ality of natives. But such formulations remainflawed for one simple reason: they continue tolocate the capacity for universal reasoning inthe minds of authoritative interpreters, therebyreinforcing the power of international agenciesto exercise control over local social actors bytelling them where their interests lie, and brook-ing little or no disagreement (see Ferguson,1990).The opposition between a universalizingrationality and local concepts undergirds thelong-standing debate which pits substantivists

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45 8 Michael Herzjield

against formalists, and which is described hereby Bird-David as culminating in an ethnographi-cally grounded rejection of formalist modelsthat seek to disinter the economic from all othersocial forms of life. Drawing largely on theapproaches developed by Arjun Appadurai,James Carrier, Marshall Sahlins, and especiallyby Steven Gudeman, she shows how essentialistattempts to oppose gift to commodity sys-tems of value reproduces the global culturalhierarchy articulated by the capitalist West,and argues instead for an economic anthro-pology that pays close attention to the indigen-ous forms of economic reasoning - includingthose of Western economists, when appropriate.For, as anthropologists relinquish the view oftheir discipline as exclusively concerned withthe study of exotic Others, they also face thecosmological or symbolic aspects of their ownpresumed rationality - a point raised directlyhere by Juan Ossio - and so find the boundarybetween them and us increasingly difficultto sustain.

Therein, it should be emphasized, lies agreat opportunity. For if anthropologists some-times appear greatly anguished by the apparentmarginalization of their discipline and its rela-tive exclusion from the exercise of meaningfulpower, they might reflect that certain co-opta-tions of their discourse - such as Samuel Hunt-ingtons (1996) expropriation of the concept ofculture, for example, raised here by VBclavHubinger - now invite a serious criticalresponse. Yet the task becomes correspondinglymore difficult as the politics and worldviewunder study move closer not only to home butto the centres of effective power. Anthropologyentails the unveiling of intimate practices thatlie behind rhetorical protestations of eternaltruth, ranging from thats always been our cus-tom, in almost every village and tribal societystudied by the anthropologists of the past, tothe evocation of science and logic by everymodem political elite (see, for example, Bal-shem, 1993; Zabusky, 1995). We should notbe surprised if those whose authority may becompromised by such revelations do not taketoo kindly to becoming the subjects of anthro-pological research.They can also take much more effectivemeasures to block such research than could thecolonial subjects of yesteryear. But, for that

very reason, their intransigence suggests some-thing worth pursuing, important questionsrequiring an answer, powerful forces sustainingan increasingly global and monolithic under-standing of common sense. This indicates animportant role for anthropologists in the future -although practitioners of the discipline shouldalso be careful not to let go of the specializedknowledge and unusual comparative perspec-tives that they have acquired through the moreexotic types of study as well, for it is preciselyby juxtaposing the Nayaka with New York thatthey are able to find their Archimedean patchof solid ground outside the structures that theynow seek to examine. Bird-David rightly tracesthis aspect of her approach back to Sahlinstreatment of capitalism as a cultural system.The perspective is critical in a double sense: itoffers an incisive intellectual critique ofreceived wisdom, and it is also necessary to thesuccess of any search for a more inclusiveworld.Against the positivist view that only hugesamples and the logic of Western scientificrationality can provide solutions, anthropologiststhus pit the prolonged intensity of field exposure(a statistical measure in its own right) and ananalytical stance that is not solipsisticallygrounded in its own cultural milieu (or that isgrounded in its own object of study but recog-nizes that circumstance). The resulting perspec-tive draws its inspiration from unfamiliar waysof construing the social, natural, and materialworld. But this interest in other ways of con-ceiving reality does not make anthropologiststhe unthinking cultural relativists that they havesometimes seemed to be in the past.

The extreme forms of cultural relativismare those in which cultures are treated as soincommensurable that no mutual understandingis possible, and no moral judgment is permiss-ible. As long as anthropologists treated societiesas isolates, this was perhaps a defensible pos-ition: each could be approached on its ownterms. As, notably, the critique by JohannesFabian (1983) has emphasized, however, theeffect is to relegate others to the status ofpassive objects held in the anthropologistsomniscient gaze. Moreover, the refusal to exer-cise moral judgment tended to produce mechan-istic ethical models for field conduct; thesemodels effectively paralysed scholars who

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might otherwise have wished to become moreinvolved in various forms of activism. Clearlythat response has fallen foul of its inherentcontradictions and is consequently now givingway to a more engaged anthropology.As Kay Milton points out here, the aban-donment of the rejectionist mode of relativismnow permits anthropologists to return to thearena of public debate - less, perhaps, asapplied anthropologists than as informed com-mentators on social and cultural consequencesthat do not lie within the purview of othersocial sciences. Her example of the relationshipbetween car ownership (and use) and Americansocial ideologies - may we call them cos-mologies? - is an excellent illustration of howuseful it may be to transgress the old boundarybetween them and us.Such transgressions clearly necessitatesome degree of reorientation with regard to theentities that anthropologists take as their pri-mary units of research. The old model ofbounded cultures, grounded as it was in col-onial and nationalist models (Handler, 1985; seealso Hannerz, this issue), came under attack inFredrik Barths celebrated critique of the ideaof the ethnic group (1969). Yet the notion ofbounded cultures, which received strongimpetus both from nineteenth-century folklorestudies and from post-World War I1 cultureand personality approaches (e.g. Benedict,1946), dies hard. For one thing, as Ulf Hannerznotes, industrial concerns often see anthropol-ogists as useful sources of textbook knowledgeabout how to deal with people of alien culture.Today, however, most anthropologists would bedeeply uneasy at this use of their work. Inessentializing cultures for the express purposeof invading their economies and lifestyles,such crude co-optations of anthropologicalknowledge directly conflict with the respect forcultural diversity that marks the discipline.Anthropologists especially reject the impli-cation that the target cultures of such exercisesare in some way less rational, more symbolic,and less worthy of retention in a thoroughlyglobal world than are the cultural arrangementspromulgated by the industrial West. On the con-trary, the comparativism of anthropologyrequires a common framework. Against thenotion that there has been a distinctive momentthat we can characterize as uniquely modem,

we can set the persistence of certain schematathat are not confined to the so-called primitivesocieties in which they were originally identifiedby anthropologists. Symbolism itself is such aproperty. Hubinger, for example, productivelyinvokes the idea of the cargo cult (originallyidentified in Melanesia) to explain the almostmessianic appeal of capitalism to the countriesof the collapsing Soviet bloc. Lindstrom, how-ever, warns us that generalizing representationsof the imitation of the West by Melanesiancultists to all the worlds peoples curiouslyreproduces and reinforces a consumeristromance tale (1995, pp. 56-57). Yet it is surelyuseful to recall that symbolism is as much afeature of Westem industrial modernity as it isof the societies traditionally studied by anthro-pologists. Hubinger and Lindstrom converge inimplicitly acknowledging that the discriminationbetween European and other societies is part ofa global taxonomy that serves distinct politicaland economic interests. Anthropologists mayobserve the effects of that taxonomy in thecourse of their fieldwork among peoples classi-fied as other, who often actively resist - andcertainly resent - its demeaning implications.The difficulty (and this seems to be the majorlesson to be learned from Lindstroms critique)is that our own fables of global commonalitycan too easily seem to play into the very ideol-ogies and hierarchies that we think we areattacking; yet our well-intentioned rejection ofradical difference remains a powerful antidoteto bigotry and domination. Inequality existswithin the West, Hubinger reminds us, as wellas in countless other zones of political and cul-tural engagement. Globalizing otherness is auseful instrument for disturbing the certaintiesof the powerful, but it can too easily be trans-muted into complaisance: we must never forgetthat global interests are always particular inter-ests. Those interests are encoded and enacted asteleology, in a manner that today is perhapsmost obvious at the level of the nation-state.They become vitally significant in that, asVeena Das observes, national bureaucracies(and, to an increasing degree, supra-nationalagencies) appropriate to themselves the suffer-ings of individuals and groups. This process isperhaps not unlike the gradual assumption bymonarchies of the right of vengeance, a process

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that in Europe and elsewhere underlies thestates standing as the only possible source ofjustice; it also parallels the states arrogation toitself of the moral force of kinship to such adegree that nepotism and other familisticarrangements become the symbolic pollutant(corruption) of the polity. This is the sameprocess to which, in Bornemans view, theanthropological exaltation of the family haslent such unfortunate authority, suppressingalternative ways in which social relationshipsnot sanctioned by the state and by powerfulinternational organizations might provide a bul-wark of affection and care against the realityof suffering. It is an irony of this historical turnthat the model of the family should be so deeplyrooted in Christian ethics, in much the sameway, as Asad (1993) has argued, as the similarlyuniversalistic category of religion also dependson criteria defined by the Christian tradition.Das traces the genealogy of her own cur-rent perspective on suffering back to Durkheimand Weber, in whom, however, she identifiesthe teleology of an argument that sees muti-lations as the means of creating societal identi-fication. She stands these writers on their headsby pointing out that the agents of state or indus-try may inflict excesses of pain that they, asagents, can then use to increase their power.Their capacity to routinize suffering grows inthe making, especially in the present age ofrapid an d intensive media reproduction, and isbacked by an elaborate exegetical apparatus -what Weber and others have called theodicy,offering salvation as the balm for present agon-ies and a cosmological explanation of the per-sistence of suffering in the world.In the sense that theodicy is now generatedby the sources of suffering themselves, tele-ology is also tautology: the proclamation ofcommon sense has become a self-fulfillingprophecy, enshrined in the circularities ofbureaucratic forms of dictatorship andrepression. The state, in such cases, becomesadept at explaining its failures to provide com-plete freedom as the marks of a transcendentsuccess - the dictatorial coup detut, forexample, that promises to save a nation fromitself. And every well-intentioned bureaucratic(or religious) system can be so transformed bythose willing to use physical as well as subtlerforms of violence in the pursuit of sectionalinterests (see Kapferer, 1988).0 UNESCO 1997.

Suffering is one side of a coin, the obverseof which, as Das recognizes, is the extraordi-nary creativity of human beings in coping withit. That creativity is not a free flow of spon-taneous culture with no history. On the contrary,it responds to past events, and makes its mean-ings clear by playing with recognizable -because already existent - structures of formand meaning. Thus Coplans recognition thatnational music can be a site of resistance aswell as enforced (seeming) acquiescence illus-trates the limitations of official teleology, a con-dition which Das also documents in her com-ments on the extraordinary forms of resistancethat people are able to carve out of the appar-ently intractable spaces of repressive power.Music is structured, says Coplan, and this ines-capable aspect of the definition of music setsthe limits to postmodernist attempts to deny theexistence of structure in cultural and social life.But it is also the enabling property for improvis-ation - for the rethinking of order, cosmology,syntax, musical form, even of identities longheld to be primordial.This is the basic tension of all human pro-duction: the fact of structure creates illusionsof fixity, but is itself a necessary preconditionof invention - for all social production is, asCoplan observes, necessarily also a matter ofprocess, not of static forms (see also Moore1987). In consequence, no symbolic form isimmune to transformation, transmutation, orstraightforward abuse (defined in terms of itsprior commitments). A democratic vocabularyand constitution are not immune to dictatorialexpropriation. As the anti-dictatorship sloganexpressed its rejection of the Greek colonels1967-74 usurpation of demokratia: in the landof democracy, democracy has died. Conversely,as this slogan shows, the trappings of repressioncan also be turned into the instruments of revol-ution - much as, mutatis mutandis, the rhetoricof a strict morality becomes the enabling con-dition for what, in its own terms, are highlyimmoral antics. For such is the fundamentallesson that village ethnography can teach thestudy of states and of international relations.It is also instructive to find that whileanthropologists who study economics and devel-opment issues have embraced the discourse-ori-ented insights of postmodern or post-structur-alist thinking, it is those who deal with the artswho have, in a contrary move, sought instead


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to rediscover structure and order. This, too, is areversal of our conventional expectations. Whatthese anthropologists share, however, is theempirically grounded understanding that effec-tive knowledge is to be sought in the dialecticalspace in which neither positivism nor decon-struction predominates, but where the prag-matics of the field experience open up our readi-ness to accept and embrace surprising con-catenations.If, then, the inclusion of ecologies, eco-nomics, musics, and sufferings in a singleframework may seem distinctly odd, the readershould treat the puzzlement thereby experiencedas a vicarious introduction to fieldwork. That

activity is a process akin to problem-solving insocial life, in which the learning of culturelargely proceeds through an edification bypuzzlement (Fernandez, 1986, pp. 172-79). Asa reaching for larger, more inclusive expla-nations of experience, it is at the same time aquestioning of order - and especially of claimsthat a given order is rooted in eternal truth,whether cosmological or scientific. It is, in aword, the critical appraisal of common sense.It is thus a fundamental source of human under-standing, accessible only at moments when thecategorical order of things no longer seemssecure.

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