Appadurai: ’Putting Hierarchy in its Place’ (1988) - ’culture as difference through selective representation of others’
by Steffen F. Johannessen
Appadurai’s text points to the problems of how the objects of anthropological inquiry are constructed through the production of our texts. He calls for awareness on how these representations tend to construct the object of study into idealized ’others’ confined to their particular places. He argues that this process relies on an assumption that cultures are ’wholes’, and the text offers a critique of such a bounded and static concept of culture embedded in the principle of cultural relativism. He criticises the practise of representation based on current understandings of this consept of ’culture’, a term which continues to be a imperialistic tool for creating the ’other’ within the anthropological discipline.
Appadurai himself largely avoids the concept ’culture’ throughout his text. In later work he argues for alternative concepts that are more dynamic and processual (Appadurai 1996). Since the concept of culture is implicit in his critique of how anthropologists tend to construct ’natives’ and confine them to particular places, I will formulate problems related to this consept more explicit, and question some of its consequences for the cause of provoking debate.
Through a process of socialization within a community during a lengthy fieldwork, anthropologist strives to overcome the difference between ’her’ and ’them’. Some have also referred to rather extreme incidents of this process as: ’To Go Native’. Though the practise of anthropological fieldwork is to strive to overcome this gulf, the distance is held important for analysis and comparison. However, when representing the communities we study, the distance tends to be reinforced. When analysing cultural features of other communities, anthropologists seek to explain them with reference to local frames of meaning. However, features for analysis are selected for their differences since those that are ’most different’ from ourselves are also features which call for an explanation. In the quest for explaining how actions unfold on different cultural premises than our own, anthropologists therefore come to view culture as dissimilarity. The problem is that what is most particular to a group, often come to be represented as what is most typical. Consequently, ’culture’ becomes a kind of deviance (Fuglerud: 2001). In other words: Culture, in anthropological texts, becomes what is different from daily life which does not need an explanation. These differences are also often understood as representing a culture in it most ’original’ or ’authentic’ form.
In contrast to people in western countries who are perceived to have been formed through historical turbulence, complexity, and shifting influences, ’natives’ are understood to represent a particular ’cultural authencity’ associated with continuity and traditions. In this process, culture becomes objectified as something that other people have. In turn, ’natives’ come to be imprisoned to the particular places they inhabit through anthropological representations. They not only come from certain places, but also belong to these in a sense that ’culture-as-difference’ means that movement and integration in another society is understood as a process of de-culturalization.
When employing such a concept of culture certain difficulties appear:
What happens to the authority of the native anthropologist? Is a Hindu anthropologist, as Dumont himself said, ’a contradiction in terms?’
Is the only attitude available to a native anthropologist, as Veena Das (1995) holds, to place her own background in the past, so as to create the ’other’ by constructing a temporal distance rather than a spatial one?
What happens to those second generation Asians in London (Fagerlid: 2005), people who necessarily needs to understand themselves and their existence as ’consisting of many radically different parts’?
What happens when the anthropologist’s and the informant’s knowledge systems converge (Fagerlid: 2005)? When people not only are aware of their orientalization by relating to our texts, but also reflect on the crisis of representation and the critique of the concept of culture? Are these informants beyond the scope of anthropological inquiry?
In his text, Appadurai calls for an alternative anthropology without radical difference in order to combat our tendency to totalize and essentialize the object of study by extreme ’othering’. He closes the paper with an appeal to develop a different analytical approach that uncovers the plurality of partly overlapping configurations of equality and difference, which would blur the constructed cultural borders between different ’natives’ confined to their particular places.
However, some anthropologists hold that the division between ’us’ and ’them’ is a necessary condition for the discipline. They argue that the problem of anthropologists is not that such operative distinctions are constructed, since this way of conceptualizing the world is not a particular anthropological or western phenomenon, but rather a universal process of thought.
But may it not be, as Shore holds (Shore:1996, in Fagerlid: 2005), that transcending of borders - identification, continuity and partwise overlappings - also are universal processes of thought?
Two questions thus appear:
Can we blur these borders without erasing the object of study?
And:
If there is a tendency within the discipline to understand culture-as-difference, if inter-human ressonance externalized in aspects of daily life, tend to be neglected in the quest for explaining what is different; may not the problem of ’translation’ be exaggerated?
References
- Appadurai, Arjun: Putting Hierarchy in its Place, 1988, Cultural Anthropology 3, S.36-49
- Das, Veena: Critical Events - an anthropological perspective on contemporary India, 1995, Oxford University Press, Delhi.
- Fagerlid, Cicilie: Antropologi uten radikal annerledeshet - Når informantens og antropologens kunnskapsprosjekter konvergerer,2005, Norsk antropologisk tidsskrift vol. 16 nr. 2-3,
pp. 153-162 - Fuglerud, Oyvind: Migrasjonsforstaelse - Flytteprosesser, rasisme og globalisering, 2001, Universitetsforlaget, Oslo