Universidad del Rosario Estudios sociales de la cultura Alejandro Gonzlez

Anthropology after culture: an Abu-Lughods Writing Against Culture review

Lila Abu-Lughod is an American anthropologist. She currently is a professor of Anthropology, Womens and Gender Studies at Columbia University in New York. The most famous topic of her work lies in gender studies, especially in thinking the role of woman in the Arab world. Related to the text that I will review, Writing against Culture (1991/2005), there is a remarkable fact related with her position as anthropologist: she has both Palestinian and Jewish ethnical origins and also she is a feminist. Writing against Culture is a chapter from Anthropology in Theory: Issues in Epistemology, a book edited by Richard Fox, which discusses some of the methodological and epistemological issues related with contemporary anthropological practice. According to Abu-Lughod, the main aim of the text is inviting us to reconsider the value on the concept of culture (1991/2005, 446) in which are implied the dichotomist notions of selves and others who have shaped the anthropological work, through the analysis of feminist and halfies (people with mixed national or cultural identities) anthropological approaches, whose positions unsettles the boundary between self and other (Ibid.). So, since the anthropological concept of culture lies on that distinction, and whenever that distinction implies certain kinds of subjugation or hierarchy, it follows that Anthropology must abandon the concept of culture and try to writing against it (what explains the title). On this point is relevant to remark the halfie and feminist position in which the author is talking, as we remarked in the paragraph above. The following review will discuss essentially three issues: the thesis whereby the hierarchical distinction between selves and others, really often in Anthropology, it may be called into question when considering the anthropological work made by feminist and halfies position. The idea of how the concept of culture actually maintains certain essentialism in the way of understands difference. And finally the suggestion of how an anthropologist can escape or evade the dangerous consequences given the concept of culture, by giving three ways of writing anthropology against culture. 1

The self/other distinction is really common to the anthropological practice. We j ust need to see that Anthropology is a discipline built on the historically constructed divide between the West and the non-West. It has been and continues to be primarily the study of the non-Western other by the Western self (1991/2005, 267; emphasis added). That asserted, Abu-Lughod proceeds to show how the feminist and halfies work can blur or put into question that distinction. In the former, is because women are traditionally seen as the other, since men as always been the self. In the latter is because the halfie is usually in the other side of anthropological practice: they usually are considered the non-Western other. In both cases, the distinction seems to be shifted or transformed because of their position as affirming the otherness over the selfness in their analysis. Is because their positionality as others that anthropological practice, seen within the distinction from the self to the other, becomes troubling. But in the self/other distinction we must recognized the role in which culture can be the actual tool to essentialize the difference and therefore, to affirm the hierarchical relation between the self studying the other, and the other that is studied by the self, which is the reason to consider culture as something to be against with. According to this, the concept of culture, although it has pretensions to dissolve the essentialism, ends up affirming essentialism in the comprehension of difference (i.e., the comprehension of other by call it other as opposed to self). The concept of culture tries to make an emphasis in the true nature of difference by affirming homogeneity, coherence, and timelessness (1991/2005, 476) to those different cultures, but none of these characteristics are necessary conditions for the knowledge of cultures but rather contingent or historically positioned. In other words the concept of culture, whenever implies an essentialized version of difference, is equally dangerous to the kind of essentialism that, in principle, the concepts wants to avoid. And because of the danger that is implicit in every attempt for essentialize the difference, in which every social community it has been seen as a separated, coherent and homogenized group, is that the inviting of writing against culture makes sense for Anthropology. Indeed, the author wants to save Anthropology of what we could consider a conceptual attack to culture. In order to do so, the author suggest three possible ways in which Anthropology could survive once we have to get rid of the concept 2

of culture: the first one is theoretical, the second one is substantive and the final one is textual. The theoretical solution lies in replacing culture for practice or discourse and she sees already in Bourdieu and Foucault (cf. 1991/2005, 472) some of the theoretical advances for this suggestion, respectively (Bourdeu for practice and Foucault for discourse). One reason why practice and discourse may replace culture is that they were intended to enable us to analyze social life without presuming the degree of coherence that the culture concept has come to carry (Ibid.) The substantive solution are related with getting to the connections and interactions between the communities and the anthropologists who studies them (blurring the distinction self/other), locating the specific contexts and historical positionality. The textual solution recognized the writing-focused exercise that anthropologist made (the ethnographic narrative), so it suggest ethnographies of the particular (Ibid, 473) as opposed to traditional-generalizing ethnography. Ethnographies of the particular aims to claim in a non-general, non-homogeneous, nontimelessness terms the experience of particular individuals or groups, exploring the daily relationships, connections, contradictions and, in sum, the daily variances of human-concrete life. Is relatively easy to sense if the Abu-Lughods account says something relevant to Anthropology and moreover if it says something for Western thought as well. Her rejection to culture it seems to have methodological and conceptual levels, and each of them presents challenges to Anthropology as the science of other as well to the way in which Westerns societies have viewed themselves. Simultaneously, the hierarchical relations between the self and the other presents not only political problems of subjugation but rather epistemological ones that can rise the question whether all this is a problem of conceptual distinctions that can be simply modified or nay a problem related with the merely possibility of making science (i.e., the producing of truths), of producing knowledge of others ways of life or, more deeply, the problem related with the Western insistence in knowing everything of his neighbor (insistence that has gone beyond the limits of the Western, given the subaltern anthropology cases). References Abu-Lughod, L. (1991/2005). Writing Against Culture. In Moore & Sanders (eds.), Anthropology in Theory: Issues in Epistemology (pp. 466479). Malden, MA: Blackwell. 3