Date: Sun, 19 Dec 2004 12:09:43 +1100
Subject: AUT: Re: "Tyranny of Structurelessness" - anthropology
From: Thiago Oppermann <difference_3ngine-AT-yahoo.com.br>


On 18/12/2004 5:39 PM, "Harald Beyer-Arnesen" <haraldba-AT-online.no> wrote:

> Chuck invokes ' thousands of years history'. Which tends
> to support my impression/memory ... that anthropologists
> were at least part of the story.
>       Apart from these 'thousands of years history' at
> times may be a somewhat romantized, and one might also
> underestimate that it in part was a means to upheld a
> degree of conformity -- for good and bad reasons --, and
> often might to a greater or lesser degree have functioned
> within a framework of 'natural' hiearchies ... the conditions
> are not at all directly comparable.

Its weird that these notions survive. The British Structuralists like
Malinowsky or Radcliffe-Brown, while often romantics of sorts, emphasised
the homeostatic nature of social structure (and they moved away from that).
Their whole theoretical outlook could be adapted to the present discussion
as: ritual defuses the tension caused by lack of consensus. People like
Evans-Pritchard or Leach produced ethnographies that were centered on the
fractured and fracturing, throroughly political nature of Sudane and Burmese
groups. The entire literature on Papua New Guinean political formations
emphasises the way that consensus is structured by dependency, force and
erases the fundamental sexual antagonism of the society. (eg. L. Josephides
"The Production of Inequality" M. Strathern "The Gender of the Gift").

Basically, the idea that anthropologists romanticise the societies they
study is mostly wrong, even though a romantic impulse (dating back to the
roots of the discipline in German philology) is constitutive of the
discipline. The discipline is constructed, one might say, by dialectical
engagement and negation of this constitutive trace. If anything,
anthropology has for years set itself the task of unmaskig the factual
humanity from underneath the veil of western representations; the criticism
of romanticism as ethnocentric prejudice is systematic, omnipresent and
devastating. It's more than a little insulting be blamed for the fact people
like John Zerzan or David Suzuki walk around radically misrepresenting the
discipline. Or for the fact that such is the nature of western political
racism that comforming to our fantasies is often the only route open for
indigenous peoples negotiating an existence. The real impulse of romantic
representation is to be found  to be immanent in western structures of power
and subjectivity; it is a western mythologeme with incredible potency that
recurs whenever nonwesterners are considered, or, as in this case, when
something is to be portrayed as natural, ancient, obvious, easy. This
underlying notion that primitives are the children of nature doing things
anyone of us could do has been the target of a ferocious attack by
anthropologists for over eighty years.

Thiago



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