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Cultural Dynamics
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Theoretical Currents in Late Modern Cultural Anthropology: Toward a

Conversation
Bruce M. Knauft
Cultural Dynamics 1997; 9; 277
DOI: 10.1177/092137409700900302
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THEORETICAL CURRENTS IN LATE MODERN
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Toward a Conversation
BRUCE M. KNAUFT
Emory University
—ABSTRACT—
Over the last decade, new ways of critically exploring culture and represen-
tation have energized and fragmented cultural anthropology. Can the range
of perspectives influenced by these developments have a productive relation-
ship with objectivist traditions of anthropological scholarship and ethnogra-
phy? The present paper suggests how and why this question should be
affirmatively answered.
Key Words &diams; critical theory &diams; cultural anthropology &diams; ethnography &diams; late
modernity
Over the decades, cultural anthropology has seen its share of heated
theoretical debates and has continued to grow despite and in some cases
because of them. Twenty years ago, debates polarized over whether struc-
tural versus material or symbolic factors were primary in the determination
of culture, and, if so, how deeply relations of power or domination were
implicated in this causation. Disputes about objectivity versus subjectivity
and whether anthropology was an explanatory science or an interpretive
one were strongly in gear. Today, the stakes seem, if anything, to be larger.
Debates contest not just the determinants of social life but the relativity,
purpose, and justification of our academic knowledge. Does anthropology
adequately reflect indigenous voices and alternative kinds of authorship
and understanding? The tension between objective explanation and sub-
jective interpretation has deepened from being a two-dimensional problem
of competing axes, projected outward onto others, to a three-dimensional
problem that centrally encompasses the role of the anthropologist him or
herself.
These matters are personal as well as placing the possibilities of theory
277

278 LATE MODERN CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
at issue-whether theoretical formulation is feasible or even desirable in an

era of anti-theory. Some would say the debate is about favoring or oppos-
ing a paradigm shift, while others would hold that the notion of paradigms
is itself outmoded.
The central question of this paper is whether a productive conversation
or mediation is possible across the divide that separates objectivity and
empiricist declaration from strong forms of dislocation and reflexivity. Is

there an inherently widening chasm between the positivism of high mod-
ernism and proliferating trends that are anti-paradigmatic? If such division
is irreconcilable, does it spell the fissioning or fragmentation of cultural an-
thropology as we know it? On the other hand, do these oppositions only
seem so large and threatening because they are so close to us in time and
space? Will we look back in 20 more years and see the seeming great divide
between the high modern and the late modern, and between dominant and
subaltern voicing, as yet another debate transcended by perspectives that
mediate the weaknesses of each with the strengths of the other? Viewed
historically, opposition between approaches that were seen as polar
alternatives-materialism versus symbolic analysis, structural constraint
versus individual choice, cultural logic versus contingent event-has often
been superseded by perspectives that de-polarized and re-articulated these
points of view. As debates progress, they can change from intellectual war
between essentialized alternatives into a conversation-albeit heated-of
reciprocal influence. Is such conversation also possible when potentially
explosive issues of reflexivity and personal politics run up against the pur-
suit of objectivity if not explanation?
I suggest that the answer to this question is yes-that such a conversa-
tion is possible, and possible in a productive way. It can be possible to
maintain a cultural anthropology that reaches out to embrace alternative
kinds of understanding or authorship and reaches in to critique our as-
sumptions of representation without precluding complementary moments
of attempted objectivity and without giving up the importance of our own
analytic voices. As Bakhtin (e.g. 1986: 110) emphasized, outsidedness in
some form is an inherent part of meaningful communication. Taking a
conversational rather than a military strategy of engagement, moments of
assumed objectivity can be vital even as they are in dialogue with perspec-
tives and moments of analysis that question this assumption. Indeed-and
this is my central point-intended objectivity and critiques based on
perspectival relativity are needed, reciprocally, to push each other to
deeper and more sophisticated understandings. ’Understanding’ in this
sense, Verstehen in a late modern mode, need not presume the possibility
of complete or unpositioned knowledge; it is critical of its own assumptions
and forms of representation. But as we recognize our partiality and
position, there is no need to deny the importance of communication, trans-
lation, and attempts at objective assessment. A dialogue is appropriate

BRUCE M. KNAUFT 279
between writing culture and theorizing culture; between searching for a

literary tradition and searching for an analytic tradition; between deterrito-
rializing ethnography and seeing others’ territorial realities. This dialogue
can engage competing works and emerge in alternative moments within
specific projects. Cultural anthropology articulates complementary modes

of analysis and presentation; it is both a science and an art.
Broader Sense of Purpose

Amid the heat of recent debates, it is easy to lose sight of longer-standing
goals that have not only endured but become more central and elaborate in
cultural anthropology in recent years. One of these is the appreciative
understanding of cultural and subjective diversity. Anthropology’s val-
orization of alternative ways of life has a long history that articulates with
the desire to understand others’ subjectivities. This theme was developed
by Vico, Herder, and Dilthey, among others, and it also resonates with a
range of non-Western literatures and perspectives. Recent views that cri-
tique our own patterns of representation do not contravene this relativist
emphasis so much as extend it to a greater range of subaltern and gendered
perspectives and direct it more reflexively to our own practices of writing
and authorship.
A second important goal, which complements and cross-cuts the first, is
the documentation and critique of inequality and domination. Interest in
this issue is as old as human patterns of power and privilege; in the Western
intellectual tradition, it has legacies from figures such as Rousseau and
Marx, and, in the 20th century, Weber, Gramsci and Foucault, among many
others. Recently, we have been pushed to broaden our understanding of
gendered and sexual and racial and ethnic or religious as well as class-based
inequity, and also to examine the encoding of power in knowledge, dis-
course, and representation.
The appreciation of diversity and the critique of inequity have venerable
traditions in anthropology that deserve to be continued even as they are
expanded and made more relevant to late modern conditions and modes of
expression. Both of these aims, it may be noted, are also central to cultural
studies. But especially for anthropology, these core concerns require em-
piricist as well as subjective methods. Indeed, the anthropological pursuit
of these goals now encourages if not demands articulation between osten-
sibly objective and admittedly if not avowedly subjective points of view.
Time itself will tell whether articulation between newer and more
traditional perspectives on diversity and inequality is possible within an-
thropology. From the narrow vantage point of the present, the desire for
mediation may appear simplistic or even utopian. Critiques that are against
paradigms in principle-not to mention against master narratives and the

assumptions about knowledge that underpin them-raise the stakes as to

whether such conversation is possible or desirable. Even if such dialogue is
ultimately ineffectual, however, a contest of productive position still seems
preferable to a war of all-out scholarly maneuver that envisages the intel-
lectual annihilation of enemy positions.
Gendered Ethnography
Among other topical fields that could also be chosen, a groundswell of
works in the contemporary study of gender and sexuality can be used to il-
lustrate productively dialogic trends. Contributions within this field include
a growing range of overviews, collections, and wider analytic assessments
(e.g. di Leonardo, 1991; Wolf, 1992; Moore, 1994; Herdt, 1994; Yanagisako
and Delaney, 1995; Behar and Gordon, 1995; Ginsburg and Rapp, 1995;
Williams, 1996; Alexander and Mohanty, 1997; Lancaster and Scheper-
Hughes, in press). In addition, there is a proliferating corpus of ethnogra-
phy that engages critical issues of power and representation with the
concrete ethnography of gendered voicing. In American anthropology of
the early 1990s, such works have sprung from ethnographic research in vir-
tually all major world areas, and include important monographs by Kondo
(1990); Lavie (1990); Scheper-Hughes (1992); Weston (1991); Lancaster
(1992); Tsing (1993); Povinelli (1993); Abu-Lughod (1993, cf. 1986); Raheja
and Gold (1994); and Kratz (1994), among many others.
One of the strongest features of these recent works is their dedication to
draw out and critically contextualize contemporary experiences of women
and gendered experience more broadly.2Reflexive insights and textual
alternatives are worked through dialogically in the text rather than as-
sumed a priori; pigeon-holes are avoided. For instance, it is commonly
found that received gender asymmetries and discriminations become
elaborated for most women at the same time that features of modernity,
commodification, or ’progress’ become more influential.
All these ethnographies bring the hybrid nature of gendered experiences
to center stage. This is not a simple pastiche of fragmented identity parts so
much as the half-in/half-out dimension of gendered experiences at the bor-
ders and boundaries of power in matters of family, employment, politics,
and writing. Women come across as uniquely able to ’off-center’ power
relations. They do this not so much through bald resistance as by playing on
partiality to be both influential and slightly beyond the full reach of male
institutions. While women’s peripherality is illuminated, their position is
neither degraded nor viewed as having a single route up. Women maintain
dignity and meaning through creative trap-doors, mazes, and chambers of
refuge that can be cozy in the company of other women even as they are
confined and oppressed in a larger sense.

BRUCE M. KNAUFT 281
The doubly or triply disempowered position of women-their subjuga-

tion by ethnic, racial, or class as well as gendered discrimination -becomes
a special challenge for creativity and persistence. Women forge dignity,
meaning, and influence in conditions crying for criticism-as exploited

Japanese confectionery workers (Kondo, 1990); half-crazed but mind-full
spirit mediums and mad-women (Tsing, 1993; Lavie, 1990: ch. 4); domesti-
cally secluded Islamic wives or maidens (Abu-Lughod, 1993); wives-to-be
undergoing the creative domestication of initiation (Kratz, 1994); mothers
and wives who are tacitly or actively abandoned by husbands and sons
(Lancaster, 1992); disparaged dykes (Weston, 1991); disenfranchised post-
colonial foragers (Povinelli, 1993); or dowered daughters-in-law (Raheja
and Gold, 1994). Despite tragedies and oppression, there is a palpable
sense of resilience, often mixed with women’s-and men’s-refreshing
sense of humor or irony about the absurdities of power. At the same time,
the larger constraints of gendered expectation and domestic enforcement
temper these accounts against any simplistic ’romance of resistance’ (Abu-
Lughod, 1990). Because gendered voices are actively listened to in all of
these works, the ethnography emerges more organically from below than
imposed from above. It is gendered lives themselves that come across as
rich, creatively fragmented, and decentering.
As a more detailed account could reveal, the articulation of gender to
ethnic, racial, national, and class discrimination is nuanced and diverse in
these works. Specifics are not assumed, but articulations between gendered
and other inequalities repeatedly emerge. In some instances, these in-
equalities reinforce each other, while in others they work at cross-purposes,
leave interstitial openings, or pit opposition to one form of subordination
against the reinforcement of others. Theoretically, this means wrestling
with but ultimately steering between radical deconstruction, on the one
hand, and yawning theoretical deduction, on the other. In the process, the
articulation of gender to considerations of class, racial, or ethnic inequality
is surprisingly integral to these works.
All these works engage critical theory but tend to shy from theoretical
closure or programmatic trumpeting. They are reflexive about their own
authorship but shun radical deconstruction and the paralysis or confusion
that result from it.3 As such, they offer much to critical sensibilities that
have been either stung or stimulated by anthropology’s reflexive turn.
Postmodern nihilism has little place here. Rather, the space between the
simply critical and the merely cynical is a dynamic if not progressive site,
both in gendered lives and for those who write about them.
In short, recent monographs in the field of gender and sexuality illustrate
how rich ethnography can draw on contemporary awareness concerning
power and representation without being compromised by polarizing debate
or theoretical abstraction.

Recent Intellectual History and the Legacies of Postmodernism

Given present sensibilities, it can be useful to think more generally and
historically about the relationship between newer and more traditional
strains in sociocultural anthropology. Any such characterizations are open
to the critique that they are both too narrowly selective and too broad,
leading to the reification of different points of view. Though generalizations
can devolve into stereotypes or worse, they may be useful when admitted
as heuristic and positional rather than absolute.
We can start with ’postmodernism.’ A few years ago, the possibilities of
postmodernism were flirted with in cultural anthropology, as bequeathed
by 1970s and early 1980s developments in architecture, art, philosophy, and
literary criticism. Intrinsically contrastive to ’modernism’, the term by now
has only limited continuing use in anthropology, though it continues to be
employed as an epithet against those charged with New Age navel-gazing.
The label covers up as much as it reveals, in the same way that attributions
of ’Political Correctness’ have become an essential disparagement of those
seen as suspicious on the political Left. For engaged intellectuals, the
question, as Michael Rosenthal (1992) put it in the Socialist Review, is

increasingly ’What was postmodernism?’ A number of ostensible histories
of this trend have been published.44
Retrospectives aside, it would be short-sighted to pass too quickly over
the larger field that now appears as a fading icon of postmodern sensibili-
ties. Across a wide interdisciplinary front, there has been a persistent and
influential impetus to question the integrity of our assumptions about
knowledge and identity. Even as it is increasingly detached from its philo-
sophical and masculinist moorings, post-positivist sentiments now inflect
cultural studies, post-colonial studies, postmodern feminism, black cultural
studies, multiculturalism, the new historicism, queer theory, and other
trends that cannot be teased apart here but which have all provided stimu-
lation and provocation for cultural anthropology (see Knauft, 1996). This is
not to suggest that these disparate approaches are similar, nor that they are
in any way reducible to postmodernism, nor, on the other hand, that they
are all equally insightful. But, it does seem that diverse lines of emergent
thought have, as intellectual trends, been influenced by postmodern sensi-

bilities.
This like-it-or-not legacy of postmodernism is evident from some simple
examples. One can contrast Gramsci’s influence in British cultural studies
via Stuart Hall5 in the 1970s and early 1980s to the postmodernized version
of cultural studies that has proliferated on an international scale over the
last decade. This is prominently reflected in the massive Cultural Studies
collection by Grossberg et al. (1992) among many other works (cf. Morley
and Chen, 1996). Likewise, one could consider the critical positivism char-
acteristic of subaltern and postcolonial studies under Ranajit Guha6during

BRUCE M. KNAUFT 283
the early 1980s (or Frantz Fanon7 during the 1960s) and contrast it to post-
modern directions of postcolonial study that are evident in the work of
Homi Bhabha8 or Gayatri Spivak9 in the late 1980s and 1990s (see also
Amin and Chakrabarty, 1996). So, too, one could contrast the feminism of
Simone de Beauvoir (1952) or the classic ’second wave’ feminist anthro-
pology of the 1970s to post-positivist critiques of gender and sexuality by
Judith Butler (1990,1993), Donna Haraway (1990), Trinh Minh-Ha (1990),
or many others (see Nicholson, 1990; cf. in anthropology, Strathern, 1988,
1992; Moore, 1994). Even Foucault can seem positivist relative to current
developments in queer theory. A similar trend has inflected academic ver-
sions of multiculturalism and critical pedagogy, for instance, in the lines of
postmodern resistance that inform the work of Laclau and Mouffe (1985)
or Henry Giroux (1992, 1997; cf. also Kanpol and McLaren, 1995; Trend,
1996). In black cultural studies, one could contrast the earlier work of
James Baldwin’O or even Henry Louis Gates, Jrll with the more recent criti-
cal deconstructions of Kobena Mercer (1994) or the direction now being
taken by Paul Gilroy (1993, 1994; cf. also 1987). Even in the field of politi-
cal economy, one notes the contrast between the high modernist global
view prominent among figures such as Eric Wolf (1982) during the early
1980s and the greater emphasis on contemporary global disjuncture and
difference in the 1990s (e.g. Appadurai, 1996).
This general legacy of postmodern and related anti-positivist sensibili-
ties is not easy to see as a larger trend. Contemporary authors do what they
do rather than stepping back and analyzing larger fields of intellectual in-
fluence. Generalizations tend to be rejected as essentialist in any event.
Amid this tendency, recent edges of cultural critique can obscure larger
antecedents and developmental trends. 12
Late Modern Conditions: The World Outside the Academy

As an ’ism’, thepostmodern has been as much a symptom of contemporary
conditions as a description or analysis of them. In the rejection of post-
modernism, then, one can still embrace analysis of the late modern or post-
modern circumstances that are objectively evident in the world today. Late
modernity entails discernible features such as:
.
increasing articulation of industrialism with domestic commodity pro-
duction, with service and marketing industries, and with electronic and
mass media economy
. increase of information, information flow, and communication speed
.
increasing shift from the production of material commodities with as-
sumed ’use value’ to the cultural production of consumption
.
time-space compression; experiential dislocation; increased movement
of ideas and people

.
increasing communities of identity and imagination across space and
time; diasporic threats to national integrity
.
political and economic shift from centralization to decentralization, post-
Fordist or flexible accumulation, and transnational influence at the ex-
pense of nation-state autonomy
. decline of or disillusionment with master narratives of political progress,
including socialism, communism, and liberal democracy
In anthropology, these features have engaged new interpretive lenses on
the cultural dimensions of globalization (e.g. Hannerz, 1992, 1996;
Friedman, 1994; Appadurai, 1996); the study of public culture (e.g.
Breckenridge, 1995); diasporic studies (e.g. Gilroy, 1993; Appiah and
Gates, 1995); new considerations of space and place (e.g. Gupta and
Ferguson, 1992; Bird et al., 1993; Keith and Pile, 1993; cf. Soja, 1989); multi-
sited ethnography (Marcus, 1995; cf. Marcus and Myers, 1995); innovative
perspectives on nationalism and transnationality (e.g. Anderson, 1991; Ong
and Nonini, 1997); and late modern connections between culture, power,
and gender (e.g. Ginsburg and Rapp, 1995; Yanagisako and Delaney, 1995;
Williams, 1996; Alexander and Mohanty, 1997).13
It would be yet more surprising if changing conditions of a late modern
world did not have an impact on current directions of academic under-
standing and analysis. Refracting these changes, developments in cultural
theory question the integrity of high modern narratives, categories of
knowledge, and identities. They read across the grain of received wisdoms,
often with more fragmentary awareness; they expose new and often more
ironic or subversive vantage points of awareness and critique.
In American anthropology, these developments came on the heels of
interest in experimentalist or reflexive ethnography (e.g. Clifford and
Marcus, 1986; Marcus and Fischer, 1986; Taussig, 1987, 1992, 1993; Clifford,
1988; Fischer and Abedi, 1990; Lavie, 1990; Marcus, 1993; Tsing, 1993). As
influential as they were resisted, these initiatives provoked remarkable con-
troversy in American anthropology during the mid- and late 1980s, par-
ticularly given their relatively small number of core adherents. Regardless
of excesses, deconstructive or postmodern approaches to ethnographic
writing hit a raw critical nerve. And they had the appearance of riding a
new and potentially massive wave of transdisciplinary change.
In hindsight, these initiatives formed a selective slice into anthropology
of perspectives that have since influenced the field from a number of
alternative vantage points, including cultural studies, postcolonial and
diasporic studies, black critical studies, media studies, postmodern femi-
nism, globalization studies, literary criticism, and so on. At present, many
of these inflections are more sensitive to hegemonies of authority on the
basis of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and subaltern status than was the
earlier postmodern push. The legacy of this more contemporary field of

BRUCE M. KNAUFT 285
sensibilities continues to be highly important, and it has its own longer an-
cestry in each instance. 14 One result, as Holston and Appadurai (1996: 202)
put it, is that ’contemporary theory seems as displaced and dislocated, as
hybrid and diasporic, as so many of the world’s populations.’ As was the
relation of the postmodern to the modern, however, the larger coherence
of these developments-which, perforce, means their anti-coherence-is
primarily their attempt to undermine modernist categories and institutions
of understanding. As opposed to integrated systems or coherent units of
culture or society, a panoply of recent perspectives emphasize culture as a
site of contested representation or resistance within inescapable fields of
power.
Potentials and Problems
Above-mentioned developments in cultural anthropology carry special

potentials and special problems. On the positive side, they invigorate
anthropology by casting a large and creative net of cross-disciplinary initia-
tives ; these are importantly stimulating and far-reaching. In historical
terms, anthropology has often benefited from theoretical models derived
from outside itself. One may recall that figures such as Marx or Weber were
themselves not anthropologists, and that Durkheim was anthropological
only in a belated and armchair sense of the term. Borrowing theory from
other disciplines has indeed been the rule as much as the exception within
anthropology. 15 Durkheim was an alien outsider to much of anthropology
until the 1930s and 40s, Weber until the late 1950s, and Marx until the late
1960s and 1970s. Outside perspectives have often provided useful tools to
think with; they can be sharpened or problematized or critiqued by en-
gagement with ethnographic contexts not envisaged by the originators
themselves. More recently, such incorporations have expanded to include
the anthropological relevance of Gramsci, Foucault, Bakhtin, and
Benjamin, as well as the recuperation of subaltern and female writers, such
as Frantz Fanon and Zora Neale Hurston. Like Marx and Weber, most of
these were not anthropologists, and most developed foreign or subaltern
perspectives. The breadth and rough brilliance of such intrusions continue
to be ripe for selective and more ethnographically refined appropriation
and critique.
Dovetailing with these intellectual influences, cultural anthropologists
are being encouraged to consider the discordant representations, displaced
imaginaries, and cultural contestations of a late modern world. These are

increasingly considered closer to home, in complex societies, and in public
culture, as well as in arenas distant or remote on the world stage. New
intellectual influences present not just new theories and new sites of study
but new genres and genders of perspective and orientation. We see through
a rainbow of perspectives, as opposed to black and shades of gray as de-

fined through white. Anthropology is enriched by new critical awareness of

representation and contestation. Even if one wanted to, these develop-
ments could not be put back into Pandora’s box. Their critiques open new
vistas and revaluate myopically progressivist agendas. Though long ques-
tioned by Nietzsche and others, these agendas have been ensconced in
Western intellectual traditions since the onset of modernism if not since the
Enlightenment. Epistemic ruptures may not be as neat as the early
Foucault would have it, but the approaching millennium clearly finds us in
a critique of modernity that cannot be ignored.
On the other hand, it is important that emphasis on new positioning
should not take the place of scholarly or ethnographic content. Voicing
should not replace analysis. Critical figures such as Foucault, Gramsci,
Bakhtin, and many feminist and subaltern scholars would themselves agree
and often insist on this very point. And it is important to recognize that
identity on one axis of disempowerment, such as ethnicity or race or gen-
der, can be compromised by differences in personal experience along
others, including class background, which is now often undervalued. In the
drive to open anthropology’s authorship and to force alliances against
erstwhile doxa, who is speaking for whom cannot be assumed even among
the most ostensibly authentic of postcolonial or minority voices.
This problem relates to others at the cutting edges of contemporary cul-
tural anthropology. Many interpretive and theoretical initiatives are now
inflected through humanities fields such as literature, art, and philosophy
that place little emphasis on ethnographic rigor or systematic analysis. They
overweight the force and penetration of recent transnational developments
while underweighting longer traditions and continuities. Venerable values
and practices continue to influence-not determine, but influence-social
life in most if not all parts of the world. Many people still spend most of
their daily time and energy in their fields or gardens. As opposed to quo-
tidian realities, many newer orientations in cultural anthropology can be
ironically distant from the lives of most people, even as they creatively
mine features of mass media, popular culture, hybridity, and commercial-
ism. These abut concrete lives that continue to merit detailed participant
observation in rigorous fieldwork-the ’living with’ that provides the infor-
mation for ’writing up’ (see Ortner, 1995).
Within anthropology, interdisciplinary forces can have the unfortunate
effect of discouraging fieldwork. Concern with traveling cultural idioms
easily comes at the expense of careful or systematic documentation, par-
ticularly in matters of social action, discourse, and belief. In theoretical as
well as ethnographic terms, careful description and analysis are too easily
dismissed as a totalizing or master narrative. Of course, matters of textual-
ity and displacement are integral to ethnographic field research as well as
to the humanities. And it remains a crucial contribution to problematize
this fact. But we still need detailed accounts of peoples’ everyday lives;

BRUCE M. KNAUFT 287
their discourses, beliefs, and aspirations; their spirituality, world views, and
ethos; the details of their struggles, their interpersonal organization, their
patterns of labor, possession, and consumption; the particulars of their
political subordination or domination; and the individual and collective
histories of their disputes and social and mythic affiliations.
The task of collecting such information is not easy. There is no easy or
foolproof route through issues of multiple identities and the dangers of an
uncritical objectivism in late modern anthropology. It is far easier to indulge
in self-doubt and to disempower rather than intensify our ethnographic and
analytic commitments. Bakhtin (1981: 40) presciently suggested,
Our era is characterized by an extraordmary complexity and unusual growth in de-
mands on human discernment, on mature objectivity, and the critical faculty. The
author is not required to renounce hImself16 or his own consciousness, but he must to
an extraordinary extent broaden, deepen, and rearrange this consciousness to accom-
modate the autonomous consciousness of others.
Gramsci (1985: 403) wrote,

Fatalism is nothing other than the clothing worn by real and active will when in a weak
position. Pessimism is the most serious danger we are facing at the moment-because
of the political passivity, intellectual torpor, and skepticism about the future that such
pessimism induces.
Given current doubts, it is little wonder that the viability of ethnographic
fieldwork is being questioned (and in some cases dispensed with) by grad-
uate students of anthropology, particularly in the US. In some programs,
the privileged venues of field research threaten to become the library, the
personal diary, and the popular media-without adequate appreciation
that these important sites themselves require detailed empirical treatment.
Careful and critical scholarship needs to be maintained.
At the same time, criticism needs to be careful rather than reactionary.
The subjective cast of new initiatives can provide important stimulus and
provocation for anthropology. A finer and more critical appreciation of
representation and power is evident in journals relevant to cultural anthro-
pology from outside our field. One can note important contributions in
periodicals such as Critical Inquiry, Cultural Critique, Cultural Studies, New
Formations, The New Left Review, Social Text, Third Text, Diaspora,
Differences, Theory, Culture, and Society, Identities, Diacritics, Transitions,
and Representations, as well as Public Culture and mainstream journals
such as Cultural Anthropology, Cultural Dynamics, and recently (some
would argue), American Anthropologist itself. One need not minimize the
value of interdisciplinary sites of publication, nor of contemporary research
that draws on home-based or multi-sited vantage points, to emphasize that
rigorous ethnography remains crucial for cultural anthropology. We can
critically and selectively engage textual theory, historical and literary
archives, personal experience, and public culture to deepen the nuance,

scope, and power of anthropology’s attempt to portray and analyze alterna-

tive ways of life.
Ethnographic Rigor in a Late Modern Mode

Amid academic problems of theoretical debate and textual excess, bur-
geoning configurations of contemporary identity and affiliation are in fact
understudied and ripe for investigation. How do late modern fields of pres-
tige get constituted and juxtaposed in individual experience-not just in
our own lives, but in others’ local contexts from diverse world areas? What
forms of meaning and dignity arise amid a plethora of traditional and
emergent inequalities? What competing forms of indigenous and intrusive
practices are most deeply motivating, and which are most consciously
strategized about? How are traditional forms of gender, age, and ethnic
domination reproduced even as they are greatly transformed or selectively
subverted?
Equally important are the ways that people preserve historical continu-
ity and meaning through resilience. Long-standing practices and beliefs
resurface with creative regularity. The tensions and problems of post-
colonialism are legion, but the practical ways that people find continuities
and creative spaces within these conditions-while expanding and elabo-
rating their senses of agency-have only recently been opened to investi-
gation and theorization by cultural anthropologists. The careful study of
these developments quickly reveals a complex web of motivations and
outcomes. Simplistic notions of subversion or resistance are replaced by
more nuanced understanding of how different forms of aspiration or
subversion may be at odds with and complicate each other over time (see
Abu-Lughod, 1990; Brown, 1996).
The notion of practice continues be helpful in these regards, but in a late
modern mode that surpasses earlier assumptions (Knauft, 1996: ch. 4; cf.
Bourdieu, 1977, 1990). In contemporary work, we may not be able to
effectively delineate ’systems’ or ’cultures’ or ’structures’ or even ’hege-
monies’ or ’ethno-scapes’ or ’imaginaries’ (cf. Appadurai, 1996; Hall in
Morley and Chen, 1996). But we can study the contours of practical ex-
perience whereby people configure multiple goals and identities. We can
study how they employ limited resources to negotiate competing sources of
symbolic and economic capital. The abstract space of postmodernism or the
textualized space that continues to haunt cultural studies can be con-
cretized by looking at the construction of identity and domination in lived
experiences. That practices in late modernity mediate between conflicting
identities and aspirations injects a dynamism that practice theories
originally lacked; it makes processes of choice and change intrinsic rather
than residual to social action (cf. Ortner, 1994). Rich and emergent under-

BRUCE M. KNAUFT 289
standings of agency can result. These can articulate with rather than polar-
ize against larger-scale analyses of political economy-including the quan-
titative documentation that is so needlessly shied away from in cultural
anthropology. A new generation of dedicated field research is poised to ex-
ploit such possibilities.
If Anthropology of the early 20th century turned the Victorian concept
of ’Culture’ as ’Civilization’ into a relativized appreciation of diverse
cultures, general notions of ’Practice’ and ’Space’ in late modernity can be
pluralized to provide more detailed ethnography of contemporary practices
and spaces. The difference between these two twists on anthropology’s
spiral is a greater responsiveness to the complexities of a contemporary
world and a theoretical awareness of how power and representation create
difference. This perception expands anthropology’s appreciation of diver-
sity and its critical exposure of inequality.
Considerations of practice and epistemic power are productively inter-
twining in contemporary anthropology (e.g. Comaroff and Comaroff, 1993;
Dirks et al., 1994; Cooper and Stoler, 1997). Ethnographic insights compli-
cate Foucault’s notions of epistemic schism and continuity as well as
Bourdieu’s set-piece assumptions about symbolic and economic capital.
Practice and knowledge are increasingly seen as variable conduits that con-
nect older patterns of domination with emergent properties and potentials
of agency. A wide variety of authors have refracted or reflected upon the
triumvirate of culture, power, and history in important ways. As this trend
continues in cultural anthropology, it needs to deepen rather than reduce
its commitment to ethnographic and analytic rigor. This commitment is es-
pecially important as the legacies of practice and epistemic critique engage
public culture, transnationalism, and post-coloniality (e.g. Ong and Nonini,
1997).
The fluid nature of contemporary identities-what Appadurai (1993)
describes as postnational social formations-requires greater documen-
tation in social as well as in imaginary terms. And they require finer con-
nection to past continuities as well as to contemporary disjunctions. If the
analytic demands of late modern practices are more complex than they
were for people once thought to be without history, they remain as import-
ant on the social ground and in mundane experience as in the airwaves of
affiliation. When practices are viewed in actual spatial locations and not
just as microcosms of a new theoretical world, the specific features that in-
flect the relationship between inequality and culture come into clearer and
more specific view. Transnationalism, globalization, and the ripples of
world systems theory have been provocative and prolific in the anthropol-
ogy of the 1990s. But like the studies of resistance critiqued by Ortner
(1995), these often remain ethnographically and historically thin; there is
little detailed treatment of concrete conditions or real people. Though glo-
bal notions of space help refine our understanding of late modern diversity,

the current tendency is still too often either to collapse these differences
into a singular and undifferentiated Space-the abstract space of late
modernity-or to legislate spaces, deconstructively, to a reflex of our own
representations or others’ literatures. As opposed to abstract theory or
anti-theory, people continue to act, understand, and create meaning.
A renewed commitment to ethnography also carries dangers. These
include the possibility of retreat into neo-empiricism. This possibility
threatens both from the experience-far descriptivism of political economy,
on the one hand, and from experience-near immersion in disoriented frag-
mentation or disempowered pain, on the other. Ever since Tylor and Boas,
particularism has presented difficulties as well as potentials to anthro-
pology, and the 1990s are no exception. The temptation to take reactionary
refuge by simply presenting more and more specifics or voices-as if their
significance was self-evident-may in fact be greatest during times of
theoretical uncertainty. But either as an escape into literature, history, ca-
cophonous voices, or the objective specificity of ethnographic minutiae, the
failure of neo-empiricism to provide a comprehensible theoretical context
makes it ironically uncritical of its own assumptions. One can perhaps take
a warning from the descriptive but ultimately meek and theoretically-at-sea
kind of empiricism that now lurches between macro-history and micro-
account in the once-proud Annales School of French structural history (e.g.
Nora, 1984-92). 17
As against this confusion, detailed ethnography can readily engage cur-
rent theoretical directions in cultural anthropology. As discussed earlier
with respect to gendered ethnography, the field is likely to favor those who
bring ethnographic experience and rich documentation together with new
developments in representational and critical theory. Conversely, those
who reject fieldwork are likely to have more difficulty developing
anthropological careers. Superficial fieldwork is thus likely to exert a
diminishing impact on the discipline over time.
It remains vitally important to draw upon critical sensibilities that cross-
pollinate forms of budding awareness across a multidisciplinary front.
These need to be employed selectively and ethnographically concretized.
Some of these interdisciplinary developments have opened out more fully
than anthropology to include fresh perspectives, including from a variety of
foreign, minority, gendered, and subaltern perspectives. The task for
cultural anthropology is to encourage and absorb this diversity without
compromising a commitment to ethnography and sophisticated critical
theory.
Against Conclusions: An Ongoing Dialogue

Viewed with a bit less contemporary hubris, the present moment in cultural

BRUCE M. KNAUFT 291
anthropology can be seen as a continuing part of our field’s longer past. In

cycles of the long term, theoretical innovations have often been upbraided
for neglecting the details of sociocultural life. Victorian evolutionism was
so criticized by Boas; structural-functionalism by Geertz, on one hand, and
Barth, on the other. So, too, ethnographic engagement was the hard stone
against which Marxism, cultural materialism, Levi-Straussian structuralism,
and ethnoscience were all tempered and sharpened. The same is true of the
excesses of Bourdieu, Foucault, Gramsci, and other-voiced alternatives
that both complement and contravene these points of view. The theoretical
push that is strong and abstract at the beginning gets refined through ethno-
graphic specifics in subsequent years. I hope and forecast the same for post-
Marxist and cultural studies legacies in anthropology, along with other
permutations inflected beyond the modernist post.
Faced with recent displacements, renowned anthropologists such as
Clifford Geertz, Marshall Sahlins, and Eric Wolf have been critical of
current tendencies in cultural anthropology and sometimes skeptical of its
future as an academic discipline. 18 Notwithstanding such misgivings, the
university demand for anthropology’s perspectives should continue to
grow. The world is getting smaller and the international purview of the
humanities and social sciences is getting correspondingly larger.
Anthropologists’ ability to engage theories of culture and action with a
world of diverse lives should prove increasingly important. The variety of
anthropology’s voices and its concept of ethnography are certain to expand.
The most important advances are likely to come from the interface
between theory, anti-theory, and ethnography as seen through freshly-
positioned eyes and voices. And though the university has been greatly
criticized, it will continue to provide an important space for critical and
sometimes creative thought and analysis-as our colleagues out of acade-
mia and from other less wealthy countries remind us.
Against these potentials are at least three major dangers in contempor-
ary cultural anthropology. The first, as I have just mentioned, is a retreat
into neo-empiricism, which narrows perspectives and easily breaks ap-
proaches into separate camps. The second danger is the lingering postmod-
ern threat of rarefication and disconnection from empirical detail and
systematic analysis. The third is a return to uncritical objectivism.

Does the future of cultural anthropology lie in new master narratives, or
is it destined to burst apart? As we confront the contested space between
high modern and late modern sentiments, it is tempting to feel we must
choose between these alternatives. But such a choice is unnecessary.
Without prejudging whether a given theoretical line is masterful or only
pretentious, anthropology will always experience an ebb and flow between
more centripetal moments that strive for greater coherence and those that
expand our horizons in a more diffuse and fragmentary way. The relation-
ship between these two may not be either/or so much as one of comp-

lementary, hermeneutic, or even dialectical moments of aggregation and

dispersement. Whatever words are used to describe these moments of
larger and lesser coherence, neither is likely to disappear in anthropology’s
future. It is in this sense that a conversation between paradigmatic and anti-
paradigmatic initiatives is not only possible but vital for contemporary an-
thropology. To mediate late modern sensibilities implies both subjectivism
and objectivism, both de-construction and re-construction. In the process,
the strengths of older approaches should not be forgotten even as they are
complemented by new perspectives, new sites of research, and horizons of
understanding that engage the complexities of a late modern world with
scholarly care and critical rigor.
Acknowledgements
A previous version of this paper was presented at The University of
Michigan, Ann Arbor, in the spring of 1996. Comments from audience
members and other commentators are gratefully acknowledged; all short-
comings remain my own.
NOTES
1. Various developments in the contemporary anthropology of race, nationality,

or history could also be highlighted.
2. See a broader discussion of these works in Knauft (1996: ch. 7).
3. All the monographs in question have been influenced by reflexive consider-
ations, but none have been dragged down or subordinated to it. Some, like
Scheper-Hughes (1992), explicitly critique it; others, like Lavie (1990), Kondo
(1990), and Tsing (1993), consider it more favorably, but all partake to some de-
gree of Abu-Lughod’s (1991, 1993) desire to acknowledge authorial positioning
without compromising the accounts of women themselves.
4. See Bertens (1995); Docker (1994); Dunning (1995); Seidman (1994); cf. Latour
(1993).
5. See Morley and Chen (1996); cf. specifically, Hall (1986a, 1986b, 1986c, 1988);
Hall and Jefferson (1976); Hall et al. (1978); Hall et al. (1980); Hall and Jacques
(1983,1990).
6. See Guha (1982-9, 1988a, 1988b, 1989, 1992).
7. See Fanon (1968, 1991).
8. See Bhabha (1990, 1994).
9. See Spivak (1987, 1990).
10. See Baldwin (1953, 1955, 1963).
11. See Gates (1986, 1987a, 1987b, 1989, 1991).
12. It is noteworthy that postmodern sensibilities have been more effectively ana-
lyzed by critical commentators of Marxist or post-modern persuasion—such as
David Harvey (1989), Frederic Jameson (1991), Mark Poster (1990), Linda

BRUCE M. KNAUFT 293
Hutcheon (1989), or Mike Featherstone (1991)—than by postmodern expo-

nents themselves (cf. Baudrillard, 1988, 1990, 1994; Lyotard, 1988; Kroker et al.,
1989).
13. Similar trends have informed the historical consideration of political economy,
culture, and ideology (e.g. Donham, 1990; Comaroff and Comaroff, 1991, 1992,
1993; Cooper and Stoler, 1997).
14. Concerning specific approaches, see Knauft (1996).
15. As Eric Wolf noted in the mid-1960s (1964: 6), American anthropology has al-
ways owed ’the greater part of its theoretical armament to importations from
across the Atlantic.’
16. The assumption of generic masculinity in authorship has of course been general
in the humanities, and in anthropology, until relatively recently (see Behar and
Gordon, 1995).
17. See an effective critique of recent developments in the Annales school by Dosse
(1994; cf. Nora, 1989). Macro-history trends in the Annales school are illus-
trated by the work of Braudel (1973), which strongly influenced Immanuel
Wallerstein, world systems theory, and the large-scale approach to political
economy developed by anthropologists such as Eric Wolf (1982) and the more
critical theorizations of Peter Worsley (1984). Micro-history and the ’history of
mentalities’ is illustrated in the Annales school by authors such as Le Roy
Ladurie (e.g. 1973, 1979, 1987, 1997), and, in Italian history, by the influential
work of Carlo Ginzberg (e.g. 1980, 1989, 1993). For a concise overview of the
Annales school, see especially Burke (1990).
18. Geertz (1991: 612) has predicted that anthropology will no longer exist in fifty
years or so. Sahlins’ evaluation of cultural anthropology’s current state (e.g.
1993a,b) leads him to assess that the field is ’in the twilight of its career’ (1995:
14). Wolf castigates the discipline’s proliferations (’They Divide and Subdivide
and Call it Anthropology’, 1980), and suggests that there is a ’general retreatism
in anthropology’ (1987: 116). Though such discontents are not unmitigated, they
reflect widely-shared opinions.
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Cultural Dynamics

Theoretical Currents in Late Modern Cultural Anthropology: Toward a

The online version of this article can be found at:

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at issue-whether theoretical formulation is feasible or even desirable in an

empiricist declaration from strong forms of dislocation and reflexivity. Is

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between writing culture and theorizing culture; between searching for a

specific projects. Cultural anthropology articulates complementary modes

Broader Sense of Purpose

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assumptions about knowledge that underpin them-raise the stakes as to

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The doubly or triply disempowered position of women-their subjuga-

meaning, and influence in conditions crying for criticism-as exploited

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Recent Intellectual History and the Legacies of Postmodernism

question, as Michael Rosenthal (1992) put it in the Socialist Review, is

thought have, as intellectual trends, been influenced by postmodern sensi-

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Late Modern Conditions: The World Outside the Academy

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Potentials and Problems

Above-mentioned developments in cultural anthropology carry special

imaginaries, and cultural contestations of a late modern world. These are

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fined through white. Anthropology is enriched by new critical awareness of

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Gramsci (1985: 403) wrote,

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scope, and power of anthropology’s attempt to portray and analyze alterna-

Ethnographic Rigor in a Late Modern Mode

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Against Conclusions: An Ongoing Dialogue

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anthropology can be seen as a continuing part of our field’s longer past. In

systematic analysis. The third is a return to uncritical objectivism.

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lementary, hermeneutic, or even dialectical moments of aggregation and

1. Various developments in the contemporary anthropology of race, nationality,

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Hutcheon (1989), or Mike Featherstone (1991)&mdash;than by postmodern expo-

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Anderson, Benedict (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and

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Christianity and Consciousness in South Africa, Vol. 1

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Lavie, Smadar (1990) The Poetics of Military Occupation: Mzeina Allegories of

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Wolf, Margery (1992) A Thrice-Told Tale: Feminism, Postmodernism, and

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Hutcheon (1989), or Mike Featherstone (1991)—than by postmodern expo-