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GEORGE E. MARCUS
University of California, Irvine

THE END(S) OF ETHNOGRAPHY: Social/Cultural Anthropologys Signature Form of Producing Knowledge in Transition

PREFATORY NOTE In the Unites States, and perhaps elsewhere, the 1980s Writing Culture ([WC] Clifford and Marcus 1986) critiques and the trends that followed it marked a profound rupture and reorganization of the research agendas of social/cultural anthropology from its diverse, preceding postWorld War II so-called golden age of expansion. This was a move away from the four-eld organization of anthropology and an alignment with certain humanities-driven, energetically interdisciplinary appropriations of the concerns of the social sciences in the name of theory. In anthropology, this story can most cogently be told by focusing on what happened to its central professional culture of method: what ethnography looks like today and the conditions of research, encompassing eldwork, that produce it. Even more focally, the recent past of social/cultural anthropology and its present tendencies can be understood by how fashions take shape in the production of apprentice, career-making dissertation research and after. Todays investment in and calls for public anthropology are a symptom of this reorganization of social/cultural anthropology, which has left the center of the discipline intellectually weak relative to the vitality of its diverse interdisciplinary and even nonacademic engagements. An interesting question is whether this post1980s reorganized social/cultural anthropology might rediscover and reunite with some of its historic core associations (four-eld as well as topical) in the new terrains of research and partnerships on the peripheries of its old disciplinary center. A
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 23, Issue 1, pp. 114. ISSN 0886-7356, online ISSN 1548-1360. American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1525/can.2008.23.1.1.
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preliminary discussion of the strategic importance of refunctioning ethnography at the dissertation stage is in Ethnography through Thick and Thin (Marcus 1998). In February 2006, I was contacted by Marcelo Pisarro, an editor of the lively Argentine journal Potlatch, about doing an interview for the weekly cultural supplement of the newspaper Clarin in Buenos Aires. The cogency of Pisarros questions inspired me to summarize my thinking about the reconguration of social/cultural anthropology, especially in the United States. The result was published in Spanish in August 2006. *** MARCELO PISARRO: To begin with, in broad terms, how do you see anthropology nowadays? Following a course, with no course at all, confused, suspended, in good health, bad health? GEORGE MARCUS: Of your alternatives, I like suspended and in good health. A story of decline, or the long good-bye, is an awkward one to tell, or to articulate, in the arena of the politics of knowledge and in the competition of academic establishments where self-esteem, based on promises of advance, is a kind of fuel. Nonetheless, the story of sustained fragmentation and unraveling of originary vision is not necessarily a sad one (as I learned originally in my study of the maturing of dynastic families and fortunesin decline, new and creative arrangements emerge that were not possible beforethe owl of Minerva and all that!), and I think this is the case with social and cultural anthropology (in the United States, the largest number of anthropologists, among the four divisions of the eld, are such). Anthropology is in good health mainly because its past achievements, ideologies, and methods concerning the study of difference and change in the world, and its accumulated knowledge and, yes, wisdom, about the work of culture(s) are not only very much needed more than ever in the societies and states where it primarily arose as a discipline; but this actual demand for anthropology (especially for the ethnographic gaze in various institutional settings and processes that are sensing problems in their condence in purely rationalist and instrumental protocols but themselves do not have the means to act on these twinges of doubt) is also both acknowledged and manifest. In the United States anthropology is enjoying a renewed relevancebut still in its long-established role as a minor nonconformist outsider disciplinethat it has not enjoyed for decades. Who knows how long this trend will last? But on the inside, in terms of fresh thinking within its own traditions of thought, of the ability of anthropologists to stimulate themselves intellectually, the discipline is in suspension and has been I believe since the rupturing critiques of the 1980s.
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Following the course of those critiques, the agendas of anthropological research became almost wholly shaped and dened by the interdisciplinary movements with which it associated and which inspired it: feminist studies, media studies, postcolonial and subaltern studies, science studies, etc.all fueled by theoretical surges during the 1970s and 1980s coming from France and transmitted largely through literary studies wanting to become cultural studies. By the mid-1990s all of these surges had dissipated, as had the interdisciplinary movements that carried them. In the aftermath anthropology, compared to other disciplines, is dealing creatively and with relative vigor with the legacies of the inationary period of binge in critical ideas, so to speak. But this is only because its traditional messages are in demandnot so much in the realm of interdisciplinary cultural studies but in the realm of emerging global political economies faced with the recongurations of the usual actors and the appearance of new ones. So anthropology has this role, but on the insideif that designation is even relevant anymore since the working commitments of anthropologists are so interdisciplinarythere are no new ideas and none on the horizon, as well as no indication that its traditional stock of knowledge shows any sign of revitalizationstructuralism, functionalism, the study of kinship, etc. Even the concept of culture, while emblematic of what the discipline is interested in, is no longer viable analytically and has been appropriated everywhere and by everybody. So social and cultural anthropology in its long decline, or evolution into something else, is Janus-faced: in good health, for now, in relation to its publics; in suspension in terms of its intellectual drive and motivationthe ideas that move and stimulate it. Whats left to do, then, is to follow events, to engage ethnographically with history unfolding in the present, or to anticipate what is emerging. The great majority of projects of anthropology are pursued in this dening kind of temporality, which, in my view, has become much more important than traditional spatial tropes of being there in situating ethnography in time-space. MP: We turn on the television, and we see young sons of immigrants setting cars on re in Paris or journalists justifying idiot provocations in the name of freedom of speech. And soon we hear the explanations: clash of cultures and things like that. Could it be that the world needs more anthropologists? Or that it is better to lower the curtain and declare the failure? GM: Well, reiterating certain elements of the previous response, the world thinks it needs more anthropologists (anthropology was there rst, so to speak, on these matters, so it gets a certain amount of outsized credit for being rst), and
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anthropologists do have sane, humane sentiments about these matters. They are not the only such voices, but the world needs as many of these expressions as possible and as strongly as possible. But at the same time, anthropologists, in my view, have no new ideas or analyses to offer about the complexities of the contemporary world in which the clash of cultures and the things in which they have traditionally been interested occur in terrains and contexts which by their traditional methods a la ` Malinowski or Boas anthropologists are not at all prepared to study in ambitious and adequate ways. By being identied as ethnographers, anthropologists are most effective in delivering their views when they are invited into various places and contexts to study situations close-up, intimately. While their functions and sources of authority as experts are quite different from journalists, anthropologists often function nowadays like the best and deepest journalistscertainly their experiences of other places, of sites of research and reporting, are similar today. This is a valuable contribution, but does it justify a discipline? I would say only if anthropologists distinctively and collectively process these materials and reports that they accumulate. And this is precisely what they do not do, because the strength of anthropology, as I argued before, is centrifugally in its interdisciplinary involvements rather than in any distinctive discourse among anthropologists themselves about what they are doing. The center is fragmented and, while not empty literally, is indeed empty of coherent ideas about what anthropological research is, does, and means in the contemporary world. In place of ideas, anthropological discourse has become overly moralistic. Are organizing ideas that collectively assess anthropologys diverse research results needed? Some may not think so or care. Obviously, I think some collective intellectual center of gravity is immensely important for anthropology continuing to function anywhere, to replace a sometimes grotesque expression of a liberal moral conscience or witnessing (with a too-easy tendency to denounce or express outrage) as the purpose or primary rhetoric of disciplinary discourse. So, to refer to your question, it is certainly better to lower a curtain on the way that certain traditional sentiments of anthropology have evolved in their expression but not to declare failure. Rather, there is the need to deal with failure through serious play. The arena of the professional culture of method in anthropology is the terrain on which to do this. MP: In your opinion, is there something left, methodologically speaking, of the classic anthropology (the one of Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard, Mead)? Can we still speak about performing a participant-observation of the object of study in the eld?
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GM: I think the key to growing the collective intellectual center of gravity, that I just mentioned, through a community of discourse again in anthropology on what it produces from ethnographic research is in reinventing its distinctive culture of (eldwork/ethnographic) method in line with certain unfullled potentials of the 1980s critiques and what occurred after. The question of method (or, rather, metamethod, since I dont think the reinvention should be done, only or most importantly, at the level of literal technique) and its distinctive modes of pedagogy are the most important issues and topics of theoretical interest in anthropology today. It is the pivot by which the community of anthropologists could be reoriented and refocused intellectually in relation to what they have been doing as research over the past two decades. We dont need more conferences or seminars but a different style and process of training anthropologists, also a rethinking of the standard forms and functions of writing in anthropology. And here, I suppose one would have to rethink and change the norms of training anthropologists coming into being. The norms of training are peculiarly open and nurturing: letting students do almost anything they want to do while, at the same time, being rigid and constraining in a few regulative ideals of practicefor example, one must do eldwork, preferably abroad, with all sorts of expectations of professional culture embedded in this demand about what seems right. Given the emblematic and ideological signicance of doing eldwork for the identity of the discipline, the power of these expectations of method without really being dened as method is wholly understandable. But it also constitutes the strategic site for reform of practice. Much of the pattern of the contemporary mode of production of anthropological knowledge through ethnographyand its curiositiesows from the conditions of training and how dissertations emerge. If one were to reform the widely shared, emblematic training process, then, I believe, the whole career pattern of research and the power of the culture of professional sentiments that support it would change decisivelyin good ways, I think, in line with the way anthropological research is changing anyway below the surface of professional norms. It would take a book to lay out ideas for the reinvention and refunctioning of the classic anthropological culture of method in its current situation and challenges. I believe this is a widely felt issue in anthropology today that is addressed anecdotally (as well as textually here and there) in so-called corridor and shop talk, in the sage advice that mentors give students preparing for eldwork, etc. The situation is not that different from the circumstances leading to the appearance of WCit was a powerful textual intervention because it articulated in an effective mode what had been on the minds of anthropologists for a long time about the state of their
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discipline. Now might be another such moment in which the problematic trope is eldwork rather than writing (but the two are not now, nor were, unrelated, although at the time of the WC initiative I think it was comforting for anthropologists to think they werethat is, to consider critically the practices of writing was welcome only because it did not touch, seemingly, the doing of eldwork). So, to return to the terms of your questionindeed, there is something left, methodologically speaking, of classic anthropologysomething crucial that is desperate for rearticulation, for updating. Many younger anthropologists work eclectically in terms of the classic method and probably do not identify much with the texts of Malinowski, etc., except symbolically, as a display of lial piety, or as a means of cleaving to a certain ethos. Yet the tropes of method, established by the classics, are powerful regulating phantasms of training and constraints on shaping anthropologists that also provide the special licenses and freedoms of anthropological research as well. The trouble is that very little of the wellworn terms by which method is identied communicate to students or others the contemporary experience of doing eldwork and building a career around it. Alternatives are being tried (e.g., the work of Paul Rabinow, Marilyn Strathern, the collection Global Assemblages edited by Aihwa Ong and Stephen Collier, among others). The eld of science and technology studies is a veritable laboratory for alternative practices in ethnography with uncertain applications or relevance to other arenas of anthropological research. It is unclear how much a makeover and in what terms the professional culture of anthropology will tolerate, but it is happening anyhow. Incidentally, I have recently moved from Rice University, where, for many years, our department there has stood for the exploration of changes in anthropology, through changes in ethnography, to the University of California at Irvine. Here, I have just founded a Center for Ethnography, which will be devoted to various activities that explore in the broadest ways the shifts and reinventions of practices for doing ethnography. Aside from the usual seminars, discussions, and conferences, we hope to attach ourselves as para-sites, so to speak, to ongoing projects (e.g., like the Laboratory for the Anthropology of the Contemporary that Paul Rabinow and colleagues are forming at Berkeley) that are practicing the anthropological research paradigm in innovative ways. The center will offer a space to follow the meta issues of change in method that may not be well articulated or explored in these projects as they proceed. MP: In your works you insist on the collaboration as a normative practice of ethnographic work. Could you briey explain what this is about?
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GM: Collaboration is an important topic to consider in how the classic scene of eldwork encounter is changing in anthropological research. Of course, eldwork has always been collaborative in nature, and one of the key themes of the WC critiques was an exposure of these de facto conditions of collaboration (in favor of, and distorted by, the purposes of the anthropologist in relation to his subjects) and their marginalization or suppression in the way that ethnography was produced and written. The proliferation of the genres of reexive writing following these critiques (and now perhaps clich d) was an act of atonement and e redressing of this methodological and textual neglect of collaboration as overt norms and ethics of research practice. Collaboration as a method is still not developed explicitly, as a norm in the professional culture of eldwork practice, but it is very visible and certainly discussed. However, today, the demand for collaborations as a basic way of doing eldwork represents something different than what it represented and how it was debated with reference to the classic scene of eldwork encounter. As eldwork has become multisited and mobile in nature, subjects are more counterpart than "other." Fieldwork becomes implicated in the organized knowledge of its subjects, in the form of social movements, NGOs, research groups. The basic trope of eldwork encounter shifts from, say, apprentice, or basic learner of culture in community life, to working with subjects of various situations in mutually interested concerns and projects with issues, ideas, etc. In other words, once the reexive subject is now the only kind of subject the anthropologist encounters, and where the reexivity of the subject exists in, or overlaps with, the same intellectual universe that informs the researcher (necessarily making the subject his epistemic partner, so to speak, in the conduct of research), then collaboration replaces the trope of apprenticeship (or its alternatives) as dening the scene of eldwork encounter. Collaboration, or equivalent terms (e.g., interdisciplinarity), is also the predominant tendency promoted by globalizing sovereignties, such as the spread of neoliberal forms, in organizing endeavor at all levels and in all places. This is the culture of organization that eldwork is obliged to go along with, to blend with. So there are pressures on eldwork, coming from multiple directions today, to dene itself in terms of the modality of collaboration. Anthropologists confront the other (now counterpart) in the expectation of collaboration, and in their appeal for funds, etc., in their relation to dominating and patron institutions, they should represent themselves as collaborators or themselves organized in collaborations. This is all very different from the way in which collaboration has been embedded, neglected, and redeemed in the traditional practice of ethnography. Collaboration
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instead is a key trope for condensing a whole complex of new challenges in the reinvention of anthropologys key method, which I have advocated. MP: It has already been more than two decades since the seminar that led to WC, the premises of which were scattered everywhere and in the most varied disciplines. From todays perspective, how deep was the impact that it produced? GM: Outside anthropology, and especially through the humanities (whose partnership was active in producing the critiques, e.g., notably in the coeditorship of WC by James Clifford, of the History of Consciousness Program at University of California, Santa Cruz), WC still stands for what anthropology means to these disciplines. So here the effect has been profoundit reestablished the relevance of anthropology in the humanities to an unprecedented level and at a very important time of ferment in the humanities that still shape them, and as a legacy it secured a reputation, or allure, for anthropology in humanities circles that is sustained. Inside anthropology, as Clifford Geertz pointed out in the early 1990s, the storm, so to speak, had blown over (by then), but the effects would be deep and long standing. And so they have been. As time goes on, in retrospect, WC stands even more distinctively as the text, marking a certain rupture, from which anthropology has not recovered (or rather, I would say, has beneted) in many ways. After WC, the interdisciplinary movements concerned with culture dened anthropologys research agendas, and it has never had its own questions within a theoretical fashion of its own design or making since then. Certainly when I travel to Europe or other places outside the United States, WC still denes anthropology, since nothing coherent or self-labeled like structuralism inside the discipline has emerged since. How one feels about this depends signicantly I think on generation, when and how one came into the eld, and to some extent, on background, gender, and ethnic composition (the demographic changes of who anthropologists are have been registered but not studied for their effects on how anthropology has substantively changed), and by the fact that many students enter anthropology as career training today inspired by how anthropology has been presented to them from within the humanities-driven interdisciplinary movements from the 1980s and 1990s, and in these of course WC remains a basic inuence. (I should say Anthropology as Cultural Critique [Marcus and Fischer 1999] is the counterpart text in what I have just remarked; its impact, twinned with WC, was most signicant in anthropology and along the same lines). MP: Although detestable, labels exist for a reason. Do you think that there is, or was, a postmodern anthropology, in the way we speak of a symbolic anthropology or a structural anthropology? Why do you think that there
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have been so many people engaged in disqualifying anything that smelled of postmodern? GM: Yes, detestable, or at least unfortunate, is correct. It has to do with the inability of anthropology to name itself after the rupture. This kind of adjectival habit of designating subelds ended largely with the rupture. Aside from linguistic anthropology, and I suppose, medical anthropology, none of the adjectival subelds really held up or prospered. It is interesting to see how advertisements for jobs have been composed over the years. In the 1980s, things really became jumbled; area studies and specialties of the classic sort came to be questioned, as did the adjectival habit. The adjectival habit never really came back, so job ads asked for all sorts of cultural studies sorts of things (plus globalization this and that!), but at the same time, there was a strong return to asking for area specialties as a sort of stabilizer with the past, even though anthropologists are no longer areas specialists in the way they were. (E.g., having worked in Latin America does not necessarily make one an area expert, even though the discipline still recognizes these geographical categories in this way. Too bad, because how expertise is constituted in anthropology these days is much more interesting than the categories in terms of which the discipline recognizes itself are capable of encompassing.) More defensibly, postmodern was a moment in the development of an anthropology devoted to critique and theoretical traditions of critique. Given the shadows that now surround the term postmodern, to concretize a certain endeavor as postmodern anthropologywhich there never was (it is just an artifact of an obtuse, even anti-intellectual understanding of anthropologys own recent past) has the tinge of sneer or contempt about it, and that is really unfortunate, since like a virus, almost, everything that is prominently anthropology these days is postmodern anthropology, which means it has been invigorated and driven by critical theories. This goes back to the profundity of the legacy of the WC moment. Most of the people who were shaped by something that can be called a postmodern moment wont touch the term now, but with regard to what it was, and what it left behind, it substantively is certainly inside them by now. MP: There is a whole generation of professionals formedand even born after WC, who did not go through any crisis of representation of the 1980s and for whom the critical self-examination of their thinking and work habits is an almost taken-for-granted epistemological instance. I would like to know: how was the moment when all this came up, when it hit people who had had such a different formation and way of working? How was it to be in the eye of the storm?
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GM: I was a graduate student at Harvard in the early 1970s. In the graduate student culture around the Social Relations program there, there was an informal circle or invisible college of discussing theoretical literature that was indeed much more stimulating than what was being presented as graduate social science in courses, seminars, etc., and especially in my case, what was being presented in anthropology programs. Anthropology always had exciting potential through the experience of its method and its untapped possibilities, but the teaching of it was staleit was the end of the postWorld War II golden age, so to speak, in U.S. academia. In the informal circles of what students read at Harvard, there were a lot of rumblings of poststructuralism in the reading of Foucault, Barthes, Habermas, Altusser, and prominent feminist writers. In looking back, the generation of anthropologists with whom I most afliate were shaped, on the one hand, by assimilating these sources which were not yet in the curriculum and, on the other hand, by participating in the still very traditional training models of anthropology, for the attraction and potential they still had. Anthropology and related elds were more than ready for WC by the time it happened. If they werent, then WC never would have had the impact it had. So WC was articulating dissatisfactions and hopes for research (in ethnography and other modalities) that were out there, so to speak, especially among a generation of scholars coming into being who were formed more by their own invisible colleges or circles than they were by paradigms through the classroom. The trick, so to speak, was to deliver the most effective articulation of the critique that was in the air. This happened to be in the literary turn and all of the rich theory that was churning through the study of narratives, genres, rhetorics, and discourses at the time. If the critique had been articulated as a conventional critique of social theories in use (these were being produced all the time in any case, especially out of the 1960s), the critique of anthropology would not have been near as distinctive or effective. The WC critique was essentially a critique of forms, discourses, and practices, and this is what made it so effective. This was only possible because of the ideas that circulated among elite graduate students in the invisible colleges of the 1970s that occurred alongside the declining power of the authoritative disciplinary forms (in anthropology, it was structuralism, Marxism, and symbolic approaches that theoretically shaped the traditional interests and topics). People who came of age in my generation and the adjacent ones have experienced and brought about the transition. We instituted a quite different graduate curriculum, particularly in terms of theoretical sources and what could or should be studied (although the howthe eldwork method and the deep professional culture surrounding its inculcationas I have emphasized, has remained rather
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orthodox), but we also remained identied with our fathers so to speakwith the way of doing things before the rupture, since many of us started by doing rather conventional-style eldwork in traditional societies, and most of us do not repudiate this experience but, as we grow older, treasure it, while still having fully committed ourselves to certain changes. What we share with younger generations is precisely the regime of theory, topics, and ways of being interdisciplinary and with whom. There is no intellectual divide between us and those who have come after like there was between us and our mentors. Where there is a strong difference between us and our successors is in the sense of what an academic career is, should, or could be. We are much like our fathers in this regardwe are totally academic animals. Younger anthropologists have more divided commitments and hope more of even an activist or public nature can be done with academic work. MP: Do you think that the division of social sciences, back there in the 19th century, is not, or should not be, valid any longer? Does social sciences postmodernity (or post-postmodernity, or hypermodernity, or liquid modernity, to name just a few of the current theoretical proposals) actually stand for multidisciplinary work? Should the boundaries between anthropology, sociology, history, political science, and philosophy be obliterated for good? GM: The 19th-century creation of the social sciences, and the specic disciplinary shape they took in the university from the early to mid20th century, has been outdated for a very long time now, but the stakes of stable careers and academic institutions were organized around this regime so that this denes a certain inertia and hard reality when it comes to thinking about alternative. Everything I have said here is tied to the resilience of certain disciplinary ideas in anthropology through change, even though it has been one of the most open disciplines, especially when it comes to self-critique. Obliteration is a little strong, but I do think we are in the process of a sustained and prolonged transition. And that is why I think it is a progressive, healthy, and productive stance to think of anthropology in long decline. It is too early to understand what it might be becoming, despite occasional enthusiasms for one or another kind of interdisciplinary fusion. Interdisciplinarity seems visionary compared to disciplinary perspective, but most interdisciplinary perspectives have turned out to be just as myopic. Having come off a binge period of interdisciplinary engagement which both excited and formed me (that of which WC was part), I tend to be unfashionably concerned again with the fate of anthropology as a discipline, of course without being naive about the fact that the disciplines are a ction and an aging one as we have known them. But I am wagering now that with complete openness, it is a more productive enterprise
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to reimagine the disciplines we have and their historic problematics in the face of unexpected turns and partnerships than to promote some conventional discourse of interdisciplinarity, which I see as a rather conservative project at the moment. We are in a millenarian age of the hopes for science and technology (while we seem to be in a rather dark ages interval when it comes to government, politics, etc.) in light of their very real achievements. Consequently, I nd the crossovers and trafc between what has been done in anthropology and what is being done in technoscience to be the most stimulating direction of boundary blurring in the recent past (thus the literature of science and technology studies has stimulated me the most in recent years, although I personally am not interested in either science or technology in my own research). But I am unwilling to predict that this is where some big future for anthropology (and other social sciences) lay. In terms of what I have said, it does provide an environment where anthropologists can do something different with their method and ethos. MP: In Ethnography through Thick and Thin, you wrote: Clearly, I am not interested in the cultural studies clich of resistance by often sentimentalised e Others. Besides some exceptionsand I am thinking of your works about elitesdo you think that anthropologists have turned that academic clich into a e shield? That they are always running behind the poor and the defenseless to explain how they resist? GM: Yes, as unfair and imbalanced as this sentiment seems, it is pretty much how I feel, and it is something I would freely express in having a beer with a friend. Still, I am not a reactionary, an elitist, or even one who argues for elite studies as a counterbalance to the study of those who suffer. Rather, what might have been a study of elites, as a specialty, in an earlier period of anthropology has now become an embedded aspect of doing so-called multisited ethnography. Simply, we can only produce our own representations, writing, arguments about certain subjects by engaging with those who have already been there before us and provided such articulationsthis inevitably means realizing scenes and terrains of eldwork by engagements (collaborations?) with those from whom we would have distanced ourselves previously, in sympathy with the subaltern, as elites. Of course, much of the most interesting ethnography by now involves such engagements (it doesnt mean the politics or political sympathies of the researcher have to be aligned with such subjects), especially in science and technology studies. Given the new multisited terrains of most projects, this whole business about the study of elites as something unusual or controversial is moot now. The problem of how researchers relate to power, its concentrations, and structured inequalities remain in new
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projects, but this requires new thinking and perhaps a different ethical way of being in eldwork, which are beyond the verities that the academic clich as a shield (as e you put it) permits. MP: In your opinion, how is the success of a science measured? Medicine has found cures for some diseases, and astronomers have answered several questions on how the universe works. In thismaybe somewhat cynicalsense, what has anthropology achieved? GM: Well, parts of anthropology have real achievements along these lines, and I believe in terms of the archive of diverse human experience that social/cultural anthropologists during the rst hundred years of its modern disciplinary existence have amassed, and to a much lesser degree, continue to augment, there are real, more or less reliable, and cumulative contributions to collective knowledge that endure. And there is much potential for doing further work with this archive should fashions shift this way (it seems unlikely to me in the foreseeable future). But in its current efforts and passions, social and cultural anthropology cant be t into the discourse of achievement in natural sciences as it is conventionally perceived (although this has been thoroughly debated in recent years as well by real advances and achievements in the history and philosophy of science). Its real achievements are its critical interventions and the lending of certain kinds of understandings in the pursuit of hyperrational projects of various kinds. In this way its achievements as a minor science (in the way that Deleuze and Guattari wrote of minor literature) have been considerable but not separable from the projects of medicine, biology, science, physics, economics, etc. For this sort of achievement, the kind of anthropology that has emerged following the ruptures of the 1980s has more potential than ever, at least until, in the long term, it evolves into something else. MP: It is probable that, sometimes, some friend, relative, or perfect strangerthat is to say, an outsider regarding your professionmay ask you what anthropology is for. What answer would you give? GM: This is the only question I dont like, because slogans and sound bites come hard to me (as you can see from what has preceded). For now, my answer would be all of the above! ABSTRACT Todays investment in and calls for public anthropology are one symptom of the profound rupture and reorganization of the research agendas of social/cultural anthropology as it moved away from the four-eld organization of anthropology into an alignment with
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certain humanities-driven, energetically interdisciplinary appropriations of the concerns of the social sciences in the name of theory. In anthropology, this story can most cogently be told by focusing on what happened to its central professional culture of method: what ethnography looks like today and the conditions of research, encompassing eldwork, that produce it. This article is an examination of this reorganization of social/cultural anthropology, which has left the center of the discipline intellectually weak relative to the vitality of its diverse interdisciplinary and even nonacademic engagements. It asks whether this post-1980s reorganized social/cultural anthropology might rediscover and reunite with some of its historic core associations (four-eld as well as topical) in the new terrains of research and partnerships on the peripheries of its old disciplinary center.
Keywords: history of anthropology, ethnography, pedagogy NOTE
Editors Note. George Marcus was the founding editor of Cultural Anthropology in 1986. He has published particularly important volumes in the eld, such as WC (Clifford and Marcus 1986) and Anthropology as Cultural Critique (Marcus and Fischer 1999). An essay of his in Cultural Anthropology that may be of particular interest is his nal Editorial Retrospective (1991). Other authors have also written essays on the state and future of the eld of anthropology. See, for example, Paul Rabinows Beyond Ethnography: Anthropology as Nominalism (1988) and Elizabeth Enslins Beyond Writing: Feminist Practice and the Limitations of Ethnography (1994).

REFERENCES CITED
Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus, eds. 1986 Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Enslin, Elizabeth 1994 Beyond Writing: Feminist Practice and the Limitations of Ethnography. Cultural Anthropology 9(4):537568. Marcus, George E. 1991 Editorial Retrospective. Cultural Anthropology 6(4):553564. 1998 Ethnography through Thick and Thin. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Marcus, George E., and Michael M. J. Fischer 1999 Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rabinow, Paul 1988 Beyond Ethnography: Anthropology as Nominalism. Cultural Anthropology 3(4):355364.

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