Ethnographic Attitudes Modernist Anthropology: From Fieldwork to Text by Marc Manganaro; French Modern: Norms and Forms of the

Social Environment by Paul Rabinow Review by: Rima Drell Reck SubStance, Vol. 23, No. 2, Issue 74: Special Issue: Between Science & Literature (1994), pp. 107110 Published by: University of Wisconsin Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3685071 . Accessed: 08/03/2012 16:59
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Book Reviews

Ethnographic Attitudes
Marc Manganaro. Modernist FromFieldwork Text. Princeton: to Anthropology: PrincetonUP, 1990. ISBN0-691-06846-1.Pp. xii + 337. Paul Rabinow. French Modern:Normsand Formsof the SocialEnvironment.Cambridge,MA: MIT P, 1989. ISBN0-262-18134-7.Pp. x + 454.

"I see somebody at now,"[Alice]exclaimed last. "But coming slowly-andwhatcurious he's attitudes goes he very into." theMessenger skipping anddown, wriggling and like (For kept up aneel,ashecame with hands out fans along, hisgreat spread like oneach side.) "Notat all,"saidtheKing. "He's Angloan Saxon andthose Anglo-Saxon are Attitudes.He onlydoes Messenger them when happy." he's LewisCarroll, the Through Looking-Glass

Both the books here under review point the road toward a vision: all fields of knowledge and all social theory becoming one science, all critical and analytical thought simply differing inflections of a language we all speak, like Lewis Carroll'sMessenger-only when we're happy; and all of us standing in ethnographic attitudes, cheerfully confronting unfamiliar or defamiliarized culturalrealities armed with concepts and modes of analysis, comparison,and suspicion originating in the new, twentieth-century discipline of anthropology. Anthropology permeates contemporary literary and interdisciplinary studies. To Clifford Geertz we owe the very notion of "thick description," which describes far better than the word "overdetermination"-and with much greater elegance and a stronger appeal to the senses-the webwork of social, cultural, political, and plastic motivations and readings that underlies so much of the best work in literary/cultural studies. To James Clifford we owe a large measure of our currentsensitivity to the cultural-anthropological
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mythologies and countermythologies that have shaped much of what we study, from twentieth-century literary and artistic movements such as surrealism to the newer discourses of postcolonialism. Recent cultural and historical studies have begun regularly to take account of the kinds of "truths" anthropological discourse has scatteredin our midst, and to view these truths highly critically, a sure sign that the "new" has become the "received." The highly contentious and interesting review article "Culture,Power, and Text: Anthropology and LiteratureConfront Each 'Other',"by Frances E. MasciaLees and PatriciaSharpe, in the Winter 1992 issue of American Literary History, testifies vividly to the growing tendency to de-Brahminize the discourse of studies. Thus, the complex anthropology as it is practiced in literary-cultural playing field of anthropological literary discourse has become increasingly conflicted and interesting. The title of Marc Manganaro's fine edited collection of essays positions our present reading precisely where it belongs: along the incline of that crucial shift in anthropological theory from the transplanted ethnographer-scientist making presumably objective notations on primitive cultures to the artistanthropologist writing-in his or her study, and in good conscience-the artistically crafted literary texts which are only loosely related to the investigative fields of disciplinary predecessors. In this kind of textual pursuit, anthropology becomes an "attitude,"a style of work, rather than a discipline. This literary "turn"in anthropological discourse had already been signalled and as and Lives:The Anthropologist Author hailed by Geertz's analysis of Works 1988). But Manganaro'scollectionshines all mannerof new light on (Stanford, interconnectionsonly suggested by Geertzand offers living illustrations,in the form of extended, thoughtful essays by scholars working in a number of related cross-fields, of what these shifts of methodology and discourse mean in practicalterms. Manganaro, himself based in literary studies, not only serves as an exemplary editor;he also contributesan invaluable introductoryessay, 'Textual Play, Power, and Cultural Critique:An Orientationto Modernist Anthropology," a sound and wide-ranging, contemporary view of the discipline of anthropology and its shifting relationshipsto literarystudy; the essay literally builds a stage for the explorations that follow. Among the many first-rate essays included in Manganaro'svolume, several stand out for the originality and usefulness of their insights and analyses. Literary scholar Michble Richman's "Anthropology and Modernism in France:From Durkheim to the offers a densely informed, subtle analysis of the roots of Collegede sociologie" French sociology. In tracking French sociology's gradual shift toward the ethnographic stance, Richman offers an impressive analysis of "the reassembling of disciplines (218)" which positions Durkheim, Mauss, Bataille, LeviStrauss,Rorty,and Baudrillardalong a coherentintellectualcontinuum. Social anthropologistMarilyn Strathern's"Outof Context:The Persuasive Fictionsof

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Anthropology" analyzes the self-images and mechanisms of self-justification employed by anthropologists such as Frazerand Malinowski in order to identify the point on the chronologicaland intellectualtime line when modernism became something else, the point at which the "fictions of anthropology" inaugurated the new plotwe have come to call postmodernism. Severalreplies to Strathern'schallenging hypotheses immediately follow her essay, forumstyle, reinforcing the sense of a still-open debate conveyed by the entire volume. Interesting essays from still other disciplinary perspectives include comparatist and ItalianistFrancescoLorriggioon "Anthropology,LiteraryTheory, and the Traditions of Modernism" and anthropologist Richard Handler on "Ruth Benedict and the Modernist Sensibility." The volume doses with a dense and useful bibliography and an excellent index. Paul Rabinow's FrenchModem is one of the oddest books I've read in recent years, and one of the most difficult to classify. Partsof a lot of things are to be found in Rabinow's text: anthropologicalpremises and counterpremises; elements from the discourse of urbanism;much Foucault;some architectural history and much social theory applied to French colonialism; and a thick overlay of philosophy and culturalcriticism. The chronology and logic of each chapter, and of the entire book, is often incomprehensible. The first chapter, "TheCrisis of Representations:FromMan to Milieux," traces the antecedents to moder social theory from their emergence up to 1830;the second chapter, "Moder Elements: Reasons and Histories,"seems to gravitate around 1830. The elements of "Social Paternalism,"treated in the third chapter, float back and forth through the nineteenth century; chapter four, "New Elites,"seems largely centered around the late nineteenth century. Chapters seven, eight, and nine-the best glued-together in the book-deal, respectively, with persons, persons, and plots. In these concluding chapters, wildly overlapping mini-sections are annoyingly arrayed under a welter of subheadings in varying typographies. This account of the "changing plot" of the relations of "modernism" to social theory offers the reader a huge, onion-like structure: each successive peeled layer leads to still anothermore tightly wrapped package. One spends more time sorting, stacking, and mentally eliminating than discovering. Rabinow's attempt to define modernity, and in particular the strain of modernity he calls "middling modernism,"and his fitful portrait of the technocratic type he calls the "specificintellectual"come together in a fascinating but largely unsuccessful effort to construct a new view of "modernism"as a social plague. It is almost impossible to discern "the emergence of city planning in the French world" promised in Rabinow's acknowledgements, or to understand why the towering level of research and insight standing behind French Modemshould, in the final analysis, have been squandered in a volume that reads like a failed textbook.

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sort Such an enterprisemight have made riveting reading, in a "literary" of way, if the author had allowed his narrative to take precedence over his collecting of "facts"-if, for example, the multiple mini-biographies he supplies of French social theorists and colonial architectshad been woven into a background tapestry for Rabinow's own vision of how social theory in the colonies might usefully have functioned. But as executed, Rabinow's fuzzy cross-disciplinaryattack on modernism is far less persuasive than more tightly-focused and cogently organized tirades, such as art historian Thomas McEvilley's angry essay in the catalogue of the traveling exhibition Africa 20th CenturyAfricanArt. I disagree with both Rabinow and McExplores: in their insistent demonization of modernism, but McEvilley makes Evilley clear and succinct whyhe wants to "putthe hit" on a Eurocentricmovement in the arts-to enlarge and reinforce the stage for non-Europeanart both tribal and contemporary. Rabinow's diffuse offensive tactics and uneven tone make this a missed polemic in search of a rationale. My greatest disappointment in reading Rabinow'sbook is his inability to transform colonial architecture and its grounding in social theory into the essential metaphor for the social failures he has chosen sporadically to because chronicle. One has the sense that Rabinow wanted to use architecture, he senses accurately the importance of the physical and social organization of space to the ways people conceive themselves and their lives. But his grasp of the physicalityof the built environment comes across as oddly blurred and second-hand. Rabinow's ambitious effort to connect in a meaningful way the many disciplines he calls on for an analysis of the Frenchcolonial enterprise leaves this reader puzzled and unsatisfied, still on the lookout for what might best be called "an anthropology of architecture" as it relates to France's colonial empire. My one common criticism of both these books is the glaring absence of visual material. Clearly, in a book such as Rabinow's dealing heavily with architecture, the lack of illustrations is the more troubling. However, an iconography of the period and the figures treated in Manganaro's collection would have been extremely helpful in bringing to life the modernist period and the characterstreated. On balance, however, both these volumes show that the days of narrow disciplinarystudy are quickly slipping behind us. The styles and "fictions"of our future work will demand that we read and analyze and visualize in cross-field ways the "bordertexts" that all texts are presently becoming. RimaDrellReck Universityof New Orleans

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