COPYRIGHT 1991 BY
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First published in 1991 by Harwood Academic Publishers
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Fabian, Johannes.
Time and the work of anthropology: critical essays, 19711991 / Johannes Fabian.
p. cm. -- (Studies in anthropology and history : v. 4)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 3-7186-5179-3
1. Anthropology--Philosophy. 2. Anthropology--Methodology.
1. Title. II. Series.
GN345.F324 1991
301.01--dc20
91-20130
CIP
DESIGNED BY
Maureen Anne MacKenzie
Em Squared Main Street Michelago NSW 2620 Australia
TYPESET IN
Palatino set in 9 /14pt by Alfredo Pernin
FRONT COVER
Johannes Fabian teaching anthropology. Mode Mundu. 1974
WHAT ANTHROPOLOGISTS DO
H r mal, my father used to ask me, was ist eigentlich Anthropologie? Listen! What really is anthropology? I would sidestep his question and offer translations, like Vlkerkunde and Ethnologie that were familiar to him. Even then I must have known that this was a dodge, for the question behind the question was: What is it that you do?
Had we spoken to each other in English, I could, I suppose, have come up with a response that anthropologists used to find ingenious. Anthropology is what anthropologists do. When I was a graduate student this struck me as a courageous refusal to submit to narrow definitions. I liked a discipline where everything goes and nothing is protected from curiosity. I liked a discipline without discipline.
Something, nevertheless, always made me uneasy and suspicious about this non-definition. I must have felt that it was as unhelpful as the response I did in fact give my father. Now I know that to say anthropology is what anthropologists do may be a facile escape, substituting false candor for honesty, unless telling what we do, why, how, where and when, becomes part of doing anthropology.
I am prepared to call this being critical and reflexive as long as it is understood that critique and reflection are not extraordinary virtues or, worse, philosophical specializations. They are the way anthropology is done, even by those who give the matter little thought or reject the idea as unscientific. We may not reach great heights, or depths, of critical reflexivity in everything we write. Nor should a critical approach be confused with talk about being critical. In the end we will always be judged by our ability to report events, formulate knowledge that was worth the effort of inquiry and will be worth the effort of reading. Still, there are moments when critical reflection takes the foreground and when we use the occasion to spell out what goes without saying in our ethnographic work. For me, such an occasion was Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (1983). It is considered a successful book and that is gratifying, but I have been troubled by the fact that the insights it offers are often taken as a verdict of anthropology: as philosophical judgments pronounced, as it were, from the outside, and not as the reflections of someone who does anthropology. One reviewer of Time and the Other noted:
The survival and development of a properly understood ethnography is as important for Fabians conception of anthropology, as the survival of alienation and racism would be disastrous for it. Given this, and given Fabians interesting and substantial fieldwork experience, it is a pity that we dont hear a lot more about ethnography per se, its practices and their philosophical bases and implications (Roche 1988: 122).
To do just that, to give examples of the process of critical thought in confrontation with ethnography, has been the purpose of assembling this collection of essays and, I might add, the excuse for doing it myself. No effort is made to hide the disparate origins of the individual chapters, nor shall I pretend that they were conceived under some general outline. Nevertheless, what keeps them together is not a schema or system, but a trajectory.
Critique, as I shall be arguing in the concluding chapter, is not cumulative; it does not construct edifices that last. Nor can it be continuous. Now and then we must catch our breath. At its best, it can be like a beat, a pulse that surges and ebbs and thus keeps up the tension in our work. That is why I hope these essays will make an interesting story.
WHAT MADE US DO WHAT WE DO
If the first purpose of this collection is epistemological, to ground critique in the work of ethnography, the second one is historical. I want to set the record straight. We are being told ad nauseam that our discipline has reached its post-modern phase. Aside from the jargon that goes with it, post-modernism (or post-modernity?) signals a loss of faith in anthropologys capacity to produce knowledge that is scientific: objective, tested, replicable, predictive. Unfortunately, it seems to be of the essence of post-modern critique to think of itself as something that happened belatedly.
The essays in this collection ought to show that this loss of faith did not occur when literary deconstruction first began to undermine ethnographic authority. It really began when ethnographers realized that the positivist canon of rules which was supposed to govern scientific research was unable either to produce or to account for the kind of knowledge they were after. It would be wrong to think that the critique of scientistic pretensions was directed against modernity. On the contrary, the target was an ideal of science that was formulated in the sixteenth century. This was post-modern only in the sense that it was post-Newtonian. The aim, however dimly perceived, was to learn ways of thinking that were modem in contemporary natural science and philosophy (quantum physics, phenomenology, Marxist-inspired critical theory).
It was this critique of positivism that first brought about two turns that are now wrongly ascribed to post-modernism. The turn to language, the idea that ethnography is dialogue and communication, inevitably made us consider texts as being central to ethnography and to realize that anthropology must be an interpretive science. Similarly, the turn to autobiography responded to an epistemological need to include subjectivity among the conditions of ethnographic objectivity. To make our writing look subject- and author-less was to misrepresent what happens during ethnographic research and writing. And that tied epistmological critique to politics. Absence of self goes together with absence of other; both play into the hands of oppression in the guise of disinterested scientific inquiry.
