Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels

Chapter 1
UNEVEN DEVELOPMENTS: "CULTURE," CIRCA 2000 AND 1900
[A]lthough it is still spoken of as "the science of culture," modern cultural anthropology might be more accurately characterized as the "science of cultures." --George W. Stocking Jr.1
At the end of the twentieth century, the anthropological concept of "culture," once heralded as a colossal advance in social thought, occupied an uncertain terrain. On the one hand, its usefulness and even indispensability were championed in a series of ambitious studies of international economic and political relations, including such works as Samuel P. Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and David S. Landes's The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, which sometimes treated "cultural differences" as if they were capable of accounting for virtually every feature of contemporary geopolitics, and especially for every troubling feature. As the title of a recent Landes essay puts it, "Culture Makes Almost All the Difference."2 Such books reflected the term's phenomenal success outside of academic discourse, where, on talk radio and in book groups, on editorial pages and elementary schools, it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that sustained conversation about human affairs could hardly be carried on without almost constant recourse to the idea that the world population is divisible into a number of discrete cultures, and that these cultures determine or at least explain much of what goes on in the world.
At the same time, in progressive circles in the field that had developed and promulgated the concept, culture had become something of a pariah, an embarrassing relic of early disciplinary formation and of anthropology's implication in colonial institutions and agendas. Far from being an instrument encouraging sympathetic understanding of other peoples' ways of life, "culture" had been accused of functioning as an "essential tool for making other," corralling subjugated peoples into more readily governable thought-packets and giving the differences, separations, and inequities among groups of people "the specious air of the self-evident."3 The anthropological concept of culture, it was said, "might never have been invented without a colonial theater that . . . necessitated the knowledge of culture (for the purposes of control and regulation)."4 The "discourse of culture" was seen to operate "through [a] metaphor of totality [that] represses the reality of political differences and historical change."5 Paul Rabinow had written of the "symbolic violence" that turns real, encounterable-in-the-field people into nothing more than mouthpieces and mannequins for their cultures.6 Arjun Appadurai had referred to the way culture subjects living communities to "metonymic freezing," trapping them forever in (what James Clifford had called) that "ethnographic present" in which the "common denominator people" of anthropological discourse ("the Nuer," "the Trobriander," et cetera) describe the same "typical" motions endlessly.7 Anthropology had been found (by Johannes Fabian) to produce an effect of "allochronicity," a "denial of coevalness" by which practitioners separate themselves from their objects, whom they deny any such open-ended, living temporality as they and their Western, history-possessing and history-making cohorts enjoy.8 The relativism extolled by liberals of an earlier era had been sneeringly dismissed as "the bad faith of the conqueror, who has become secure enough to become a tourist."9 The best that might be said from within the terms of this critique was perhaps, as Bernard S. Cohn put it, that "[a]nthropologists developed practices through which they sought to erase the colonial influence by describing what they took to be authentic indigenous cultures," but that "[t]heir epistemological universe . . . was [ineluctably] part of the European world of social theories and classificatory schema that were formed, in part, by state projects to reshape the lives of their subjects at home and abroad."10
The multifaceted critique briefly surveyed here had tarnished the reputation of concepts and conventions central to anthropology, leaving it in a position not unlike that of certain companies unlucky in civil litigation that go on existing solely in order to pay off punitive damages to the plaintiffs ranged against them. Circa 2000 saw the publication of books considering The Fate of "Culture" and looking toward a future Beyond the Cultural Turn.11