Social Analysis

Social Analysis was published for 23 years by the Department of Anthropology, University of Adelaide. From January, 2002 it will now be published in New York by Berghahn Books of New York and Oxford. In recent years, it has encouraged a dialogue within anthropology and especially in that interface between anthropologists and other scholars in the social sciences and humanities. However, the restructuring of the journal and the constitution of a new international editorial committee is intended to situate the journal strongly within debates and issues affecting human populations in all parts of contemporary globalized realities. More than ever the journal is concerned to intervene in the formation of an anthropological critical and empirical gaze relevant to contemporary realities. This intervention is directed to explore the horizons of the possibilities of anthropological analysis and understanding, of what might be described as the anthropological attitude which consistently problematizes every aspect of human social life and existence. The journal in this way seeks to break out of anthropology in a narrow disciplinary sense and to encourage contributions which express an open yet simultaneously rigorous approach to the crises of being human and which are enabled to draw from a great diversity of relevant fields of enquiry.

In a recent special issue of Social Analysis, Culture at the End of the Boasian Century (1997) the editors noted that the 1970s was a time of particularly intense anthropological debate about culture. They mentioned Geertz, Sahlins, Schneider and Boon as anthropologists who made some of the key theoretical contributions of that era, interrogating the meaning of the ‘culture concept’ and extending it in new directions. As much as those names conjure up a period of impressive accomplishment in anthropological culture theory, we feel there is an important omission from this list: Roy Wagner’s The Invention of Culture, first published in 1976 (with a revised volume published in 1981). In fact, we would argue that more than twentyfive years later, this book remains highly relevant to contemporary debates on the meanings and definitions of culture in anthropological circles and, indeed, to debates on the meanings and definitions of anthropology itself.

The year 2000 marked the twenty-fifth year anniversary of the publication of Roy Wagner’s book The Invention of Culture. One of the earliest and still most profoundly challenging considerations of anthropology from a quarter- century that went on to see its share of critical engagements with the discipline, the book’s recent anniversary provides an opportunity to look back at Wagner’s argument and consider what it has taught us and what parts of its message may still remain to be assimilated. In what follows, I take up these issues by examining the book’s reception, laying out its core argument, considering its contribution to critical anthropology and, finally, showing how its primary analytic strategy can be applied to the study of contemporary religious movements.

Twenty-five years ago, Roy Wagner in his book, The Invention of Culture asked his reader to comprehend the invention of society as an ongoing effort, especially an effort made by members aware of the changes that can be wrought by their actions. In doing so, he posed the problem of what kind of society people thought they were making, contrasting the social contract of the Euro-American political thought with the processual sociality imagined by Melanesians (1975, 1974). The theoretical insights of Wagner can be brought to bear on the period of independence in Papua New Guinea when Melanesians were making a new sociality. I will discuss the dialectics of Wagner’s approach, as they are played out at the time of the publication of his book; that is, in the early years of the creation of the new nation of Papua New Guinea.

There has been much anthropological ink spilled over the question of “structure” and “agency,” but those of us who have been spilling it over the last couple of decades do not often think of this activity as an example of the very process we are theorizing. Or, to phrase it another way, how many of us working on what we see as the ‘cutting edge’ maintain explicitly in consciousness the connectedness of our cutting-edge work to past work? True, most of us cite revered ancestors or respected contemporaries, but the politics of citation is one thing, an appreciation of meaningful intellectual genealogies quite another. I will admit that I have on occasion cited work I have not read, simply to avoid a referee’s anticipated objection or to bow to disciplinary fashion; but I will also admit to occasional feelings of despair underpinned by the old notion that “there’s nothing new under the sun.” That is, whether or not I bother to cite predecessors, I operate under the assumption that whatever I might figure out in “my work” will have been figured out by someone else, and probably by many other people on many other occasions.

A recent article in the popular journal Scientific American begins with the claim that scientists have succeeded in “cracking the code of life.” Two decades ago, such an announcement would have been met with wonder and amazement. Today, it is likely to elicit a far more subdued response. Over the past few years, we have grown accustomed to reading about the “miracles” of modern science. The expanding use of new reproductive technologies, genetic engineering, prosthetics, and cloning to name but a few of the most astonishing advances, have allowed us to become habituated to the dizzying pace of scientific discoveries. The ability of science to impress us with its seemingly impossible feats has become “extraordinarily ordinary” over the past five years (Hayden 1998).

At the beginning of the Winnebago trickster cycle, trickster fails as a chief by repeatedly calling a war party (which chiefs never do) each time only to be found cohabiting with a woman (which war leaders never do). Eventually leading his warriors, trickster utterly alienates them by smashing his own canoe and sacred war bundle. Finally left entirely alone, he then uses straw dummies to trick a buffalo into a quagmire, but as he carves the meat, his left and right arms fight over it; his right arm, holding the knife, butchers his left arm, leaving trickster to despair.

Like Gregory Bateson, Roy Wagner leaves no heirs. This is not the curse of Souw, but the curse of original thinking. Like Bateson though, Wagner has bequeathed to a future anthropology a certain style of thinking about Others, an elegant way of dislocating the Western self from its routines, its kinships, its ego, its diaspora. In this paper, and as a student of Wagner’s at Virginia in the 1980s and 1990s, I hope to trace some of Wagner’s work through Bateson’s and to compare some of the habits of mind of these two ethnographers and theorists and relate these back to The Invention of Culture. If I seem to forget that text in places or re-start it in others, it is because I have tried to stay close to that topic that led both in such opposite (one could say complementary schizmogenic) directions, one to biological sciences, the other to science fiction. I section off observations on their ethnographic theory by using poetry to express shifts in topics for, at their best, Wagner and Bateson are poets of that extreme human condition so sought after by ethnographers, culture shock.

One of Roy Wagner’s consistent positions is that meaning (or culture) does not simply exist as something out there in the world, but that it is elicited and created, something that people do and make. Anthropologists create culture as a more or less plausible account of what we think people are up to, and one of Wagner’s complaints is that the anthropologist’s success in this task often comes at the expense of recognizing the creativity of those we study. In our notions of culture-as-system we invent “rules” (conventions) and models of seamless wholes that leave precious little for people to do apart from being rule-abiding or occasionally deviant, when in fact they are improvising their way through life, making it up as they go along. Although this might sound a bit like Bourdieu’s practice theory, Wagner sees something else at work, a flow of innovation that leverages meaning out of the dialectic between the realm of the innate and the realm of human responsibility and action. Discontinuous but constantly impinging on one another, these realms provide the dynamic that moves culture along.

In this paper I want to trace how and why The Invention of Culture (IOC) has resonated strongly throughout my encounters with anthropological theory and fieldsite experiences in the Caribbean. I briefly outline how some of its key analytical arguments about the meanings and applications of the ‘culture’ concept can be productively compared and applied to what at first glance might appear to be quite unrelated ‘new’ theoretical models about gender and sexuality, particularly Judith Butler’s ‘performative’ approach, more than twenty-five years after its initial publication.

This is an excellent project. Making an anniversary out of the publication of The Invention of Culture (IOC) allows an interesting cross-section of scholars to set down, briefly, the effect which they think the work has had, and still has. Yet in one sense this is a self-defeating exercise: as some of the authors point out (Dalton and Stassinos) Wagner never stays in the same frame twice. A formula in his world view must always be in the past tense, for once a position is formulated, it has done its job. So in his own unfolding oeuvre, the ‘effect’ of IOC is located (refashioned) ‘elsewhere.’ Indeed, several of these papers find it necessary to draw from other parts of his work (Dalton, Murray and Stassinos). In another sense, what emerges from these essays is the prescience of Wagner’s work; the fact, for example, that IOC seemed to anticipate some of the melting pots into which the study of culture was to fall and its continuing vitality.

The World Trade Center disaster is an event of such significance that it exhausts interpretation. This is not because of the enormity of the event itself. Numerous humanly caused destructed of just the last hundred years dwarf it in scale, and the attention now addressed to it may over the next year appear disproportionate. But events are never significant in the imagination of human beings independently of the way they are socially constructed into significance in the context of the social, political and cultural forces that somehow are articulated through a particular event, and thrown into relief by its occurrence. Undoubtedly, much of the significance that attaches to the World Trade Center catastrophe relates to the character of the conflict it defines, and the several paradoxes the event gathers up in its prism: of the strong against the weak, the powerful as victims, the cycle of revenge, the generalization of suffering, the vulnerability of technological potency, and so on.

Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. xii+353. (Reviewer: Mark T. Berger).

Akhil Gupta, Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. xv + 410. (Reviewer: Mark T. Berger).

Fernando Coronil, The Magical State: Nature, Money and Modernity in Venezuela, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. xvii+447, photos, notes, bibliography, index. (Reviewer: Souchou Yao).

James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. (New Haven and London: Yale U.P., 1998), pp. xiv+445, notes, index, illustrations. (Reviewer: Clive Kessler).

Slavoj Zizek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion. (Verso: London and New York, 2001), pp. 280. (Reviewer: Michael Humphrey).

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass. 2000), pp. 478.

Notes on contributors