Micaela di Leonardo's Exotics at Home

...Di Leonardo divides the world of anthropology into friends (of the same intellectual/ political persuasion as herself) and enemies (lumped together in a kind of catchall "postmodernism...

...It has at least one important benefit that di Leonardo does not appreciate, in this case because of another of her problems with "culture...

...It includes the writings of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, English sociologist Anthony Giddens, American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, Indian historians of the so-called subaltern studies school, American political scientist James Scott, and some of my own work...

...On the other hand, it is an internal critique of the field, which has been dominated by a theoretical emphasis (a focus on "culture") and a methodology (ethnographic fieldwork) with which di Leonardo passionately takes issue...

...At one point di Leonardo seems to defend the practice of ethnographic fieldwork, criticizing a particular sociologist for doing "fake ethnography" with the "appearance —but not the discipline—of ethnographic work...

...But the cultural anthropologist would insist that people nonetheless operate according to terms that they define from their own points of view, or at least try to...

...On the one hand it traces the ways in which the world outside portrays anthropology and anthropologists and often uses these portrayals to advance problematic political agendas...

...But this message you will not get from Exotics at Home...

...This work—let us call it, just to have a label, "critical social theory"—also takes a variety of forms...

...And because she is locked into a simple culture-vs.political economy dualism, she is left with a narrow political economy perspective that undermines what she was trying to do with this book...

...Edward Said is a wonderful change from this brand of postmodernist poseur—but even Said nods . " Stephan Thernstrom fought the good fight against a certain kind of ethnographic study of race and ethnicity to which di Leonardo is opposed, yet ultimately he "capitulated" to it...

...what's right about ethnography at its best is that it seeks to recognize and illuminate and understand this process...

...The case that is always used to make this point, not only in this book but in many others, is the idea of the "culture of poverty," in which some researcher goes into a (usually African-American) community, sees the difficult and sometimes violent life in that community, and blames it on their "culture" instead of on the material deprivations and powerlessness, and the racism from the dominant society, that trap them in this situation...

...In fact, however, di Leonardo's position on fieldwork is best represented by Stephen Steinberg's discussion of "the ethnographic fallacy," which she quotes with approval: Too often—not always—ethnography suffers from a myopia that sharply delineates the behavior at close range but obscures the less proximate and less visible structures and processes that engender and sustain that behavior...

...her main concern is to link the bad anthropologies in the public arena to the hegemony of anthropologies she does not like within the field itself...

...and the period of an ongoing Victorian woman movement still tinged by racist and classist response to shortlived post-Civil War black male suffrage...

...Cultural studies" as an interdisciplinary arena stands both inside and outside of "anthropology" as a traditional discipline...

...Later figures like Margaret Mead (whose career plays a major role in di Leonardo's story) quite intentionally sought to shape public understanding of "anthropology," but even in her case it is clear that Mead had little control over the ways in which her work and even her persona were represented in the media...

...I was sure that di Leonardo would not be amused...

...Di Leonardo sees an anthropology that has gone the wrong way, emphasizing "culture" and "ethnography" instead of the hard, objective realities of political-economic forces impinging on people's lives...

...SHERRY B. ORTNER is professor of anthropology at Columbia University...

...In fact the critique was widely recognized as important and was picked up by a broad spectrum of anthropologists, including many whom di Leonardo would include among the culturalists and (worse yet) the "postmodernists" to whom she is so opposed...

...Finally, there is not a shred of humor...

...For example, Harvard anthropologist F.W...

...The first is the emergence of the interdisciplinary field of "cultural studies," which for the most part focuses on interpretations of "public culture"— usually media imagery...

...Later discussions include the use by some journalists of ethnographic formats to portray poor communities as pathological, and most recently the attacks on cultural relativism by right-wing ideologues like Dinesh d'Souza...

...Other scholars come in for similar treatment...

...Finally, discussing two works that allow women to speak at great length in their own terms—Marjorie Shostak's ethno-biography Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman, and the film N!ai: The Story of a !Kung Woman—di Leonardo criticizes them because they focus too heavily on the intimate details of the women's lives, and fail to give due attention to the ways in which the !Kung San people as a whole have been proletarianized and impoverished...

...In another case—a critique of Robert and Yolanda Murphy's Men and Women of the Forest—the issue is that, although the ethnographers do attend to women, their interpretations are either too Freudian or too ethnocentric...

...Thus in one case—a critique of Janet Siskind's To Hunt in the Morning—di Leonardo's point is that the ethnographer, while purporting to study gender relations, mostly discusses men and male politics as enacted through control over women...

...As I will discuss a bit below, the study of culture is not, as she assumes, necessarily uncritical and apolitical, nor does one have to choose between an interest in culture and an interest in political economy...

...Political economic analysis, which remains at the level of "objective" structures, cannot get at these forms of what Clifford Geertz called "local knowledge...

...But a good part of it—for example, that of Stuart Hall on media, George Lipsitz on popular culture, or Susan Bordo on rock stars and advertising —is concerned with the power and the possibilities of cultural images, and with the processes of cultural production, in relation to problems of globalizing capital, class polarization, sexism and racism, and so on...

...But the battle between anthropologists holding up the banner for either "culture" or "political economy" was largely fought out in the sixties and the seventies, and the field has come a long way since then...

...Yet the ethnographic endeavor has been changing for some time, including not only new kinds of projects, but new ways of doing ethnography—expanding it in space (through multi-sited fieldwork), and time (through linking ethnographic and historical perspectives), and combining it with a variety of other methodologies (for example, media studies)—all to escape the "timeless island" effect that is by now widely questioned...

...Closely tied to the critique of anthropology's focus on discrete "cultures" has been a critique of the emphasis on ethnographic fieldwork as the field's core methodology...

...She begins the book with two images—of Dempster Street in Evanston, Illinois, lined with stores selling "tribal" and "ethnic" merchandise, and of the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, where "living humans—Native Americans, Africans, Pacific Islanders, Middle Easterners, and Southeast Asians—were displayed to a buying public in ethnological zoos...

...But it is not clear how active a role he played, and in fact the huckster who organized the "ethnological zoo" complained that Putnam's role was entirely counterproductive...

...Some of the work takes a "postmodern" turn, interpreting the images for their psychological effects on a kind of unspecified and undifferentiated community...

...Although Exotics at Home is not primarily about gender issues, di Leonardo uses the anthropological treatment of women and gender (she calls this, quite infelicitously, the "dusky maiden" theme) as one of her unifying threads...

...Yet di Leonardo does not seem to have any consistent theoretical strategy for dealing with these issues...

...It is true that fieldwork can have this narrowing effect, and it is true that many early ethnographers tended to ignore "larger processes," whether in the form of outside forces descending upon people (missionization, colonialism, military occupations) or in the form of pressures compelling people to change their lives for the worse (wage labor, urban slums, alcoholism, and depression...

...Yet this has never been the central usage of the idea of culture, and is—in light of ongoing internal critique within the field—even less so today...

...political economy toward a systematic address of the ways in which these processes interact in practice, especially in the context of all forms of social and economic inquality...

...Because di Leonardo despises "culture," she fails to make these distinctions...

...THE OTHER major direction in which cultural work has gone in the past two decades has been focused on theorizing the relationship between cultural forms and the contexts of their emergence, operation, and transformation...

...She writes: Eric Wolf has argued forcefully that "the concept of the autonomous, self-regulating and self-justifying society and culture has trapped anthropology within the bounds of its own definition . . . . By endowing nations, societies, or cultures with the qualities of internally homogeneous and externally distinctive and bounded objects, we create a model of the world as a global pool hall in which the entities spin off each other like so many hard and round billiard balls...

...they have their divisions and differences and conflicts, and these all shift and change over time...

...One is that di Leonardo more or less ignores a good twenty-five years of feminist theory, both inside and outside of the field...

...And finally, on anthropologist Kathleen Gough's study of the dynamics of matrilineal kinship: "The times were such that even an anthropologist of impeccable left and later feminist credentials like Kathleen Gough" failed to make the correct political analysis of these systems...

...If di Leonardo were concerned to communicate to a general public what anthropologists are really doing these days, and to combat stereotypes of the intrepid anthropologist going off to study the bare-breasted maidens of "primitive" societies, she might have done well to spend some time on the extraordinary range of contemporary anthropological projects, many of them deeply concerned with the same social issues that concern her...

...For di Leonardo, the study of "culture" in this sense is eternally opposed to, and even inimical to, the study of materiality and power...

...Like cultural studies work, which operates on the borders between media studies, literary studies, and anthropology, this kind of work operates on the borders between anthropology, sociology (more of the French and English than the American sort), and history...

...What's wrong with a culture of poverty argument is that it denies this process of local meaning-making...

...As a result of these misapprehensions, anthropologists, at least in the United States, are rarely asked to contribute to public discussions of social issues "at home...

...Over the same period, anthropology has been engaged in self-scrutiny concerning fieldwork practices that once assumed a world that could be divided up into "anthropologists" and "natives," and concerning fieldwork methods designed for islands and villages in faraway places...

...This work, which has no general name, goes more in the direction of classic "social science," but instead of polarizing the relationship between cultural forms and social (including political-economic) processes, it seeks to understand the ways in which they shape one another...

...In all of this scholarship there is a move beyond the duality of culture vs...

...Culture" in this sense refers to systems of representations —the terms and forms and images and categories through which people understand and live their lives...

...These communities are not imagined as harmonious wholes...

...The billiard balls image then becomes one of the running tropes of di Leonardo's book, as she seems to assume that nothing has happened in the field since the early eighties, when Wolf published his critique...

...Because cultural studies work is usually not based on ethnographic fieldwork, it is usually not seen as "anthropology...

...At the same time, many anthropologists have recognized the importance of understanding the workings of "public culture" and have sought to incorporate it into their practices...

...Margaret Mead is first introduced as follows: She "turned in her master's thesis to Columbia University in 1924 at age twenty-two, died in 1978 at age seventy-six, and simply never shut up in all the long years . .. in between" (italics in original...

...Anthropologists these days are studying everything under the sun, "at home" and abroad, and with a wide array of methods...

...Much of this work has established the point that gender inequality cannot be reduced to political-economic inequality, and that it operates to a significant extent on a distinct logic...

...feminist theory is concerned precisely with both the distinctive logic of gender inequality and the ways in which it articulates with these other forms...

...The practice of fieldwork in a single place, in this view, tends to overemphasize local patterns of life and obscure larger politicaleconomic forces that cannot be studied "on the ground...

...The nub of the argument is that it is the internal weaknesses of the field, all the kinds of anthropological work that di Leonardo does not like, that have allowed its worst tendencies to be picked up in the media and used in the service of a range of bad politics...

...BUT WHAT is the relationship between the racism of some of the exhibits or other forms of "public anthropology" and what anthropologists were actually trying to do...

...Some are said to be claiming "a kind of permanent adolescence, or court jester status, among intellectuals...

...Although di Leonardo's critique of the anthropological representations of the !Kung San situation is compelling, the gender question here simply disappears...

...Only ethnography allows one access to both the terms in which people apprehend the world and the networks of relations that shape those terms...

...As di Leonardo does not draw on any of this literature, she remains stuck in a straightforward political economy perspective that is inadequate for developing a rich critique (or, for that matter, a rich appreciation) of this work...

...The examples range from the amusing to the chilling...

...The relationships between the two kinds of work are complex...

...She has, first of all, no compunction about describing work with which she disagrees in extraordinarily insulting language...

...My own position (which I need to declare at the outset, since di Leonardo locates me on the wrong side of all her issues) is not anti– political economy, but anti- the idea that just because people live within political and economic constraints (and privileges) they do not also live within a world of "culture"—of images and representations that have other kinds of power over their lives...

...We are told later about Mead's "kindergarten-like account of the mind" of her teacher, the founder of American anthropology, Franz Boas...

...when we do try to make such contributions we are misread, misheard, our ideas distorted...

...If we anthropologists want to get these images under better control we might think more about how we teach Anthropology 101, the only exposure to the field that most students get before they go out in the world and become, among other things, journalists...

...It 106 DISSENT / Fall 1999 was as well the end of the war of expropriation against Native Americans—the exposition opened only three years after the massacre at Wounded Knee—the heyday of American imperialist expansion into the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Pacific...

...It was, at one and the same time, the period of the consolidation of capitalist industrialization, of a bloody war against a significantly European immigrant labor force, and of federal abandonment of Reconstruction in the south and the establishment there of a white reign of terror against black Americans...

...Di Leonardo details the many stereotypes in play in the United States today: that anthropologists only study "primitive" societies, that we bring back "tribal wisdom" a la Carlos Castafieda, that we recover lost treasures while fighting off the "savage" a la Indiana Jones, that we teach the public's children an amoral cultural relativism, and more...

...A few of di Leonardo's allies escape without these kinds of judgments— Eleanor Leacock, Sidney Mintz—but by and large she seems incapable of refraining from finding a bad word about everybody...

...It weakens some of her own interpretations (for example, of the treatment of women and gender in anthropological studies), and prevents her from giving her readers an accurate picture of what is really going on in the anthropology of the late twentieth century...

...The ultimate irony of Exotics at Home is that, because di Leonardo is so hostile to an examination of cultural processes, she is unable to come up with a persuasive argument about why the representations of anthropology in the public domain are so bad and what we might do to fix them...

...Of the 1893 Columbian Exposition, for example, she provides this backdrop: The American fin de siecle was a political fulcrum...

...The enemies get treated to the sarcastic and withering (and often inaccurate) critiques just noted, yet even the friends do not always pass easily through the eye of di Leonardo's exceedingly fine political needle...

...The book has a double agenda...

...And so the story goes, up through the "debate" between anthropologists Bradd Shore and Derek Freeman on the Donahue show, in which the audience was more or less equally hostile to both of them, and culminating in di Leonardo's own experience of the futility of trying to educate a Newsweek reporter doing a story on sociobiological theories of physical beauty...

...Di Leonardo is very good at sketching the political and economic contexts in which imaginary anthropologies are nourished...

...Putnam nominally headed an "anthropological wing" of the fair...

...Contemporary anthropological projects are worlds away from these kinds of assumptions, both ethically and practically...

...Gender, like race, overlaps in many ways with class and other forms of economic inequality...

...Di Leonardo criticizes the idea of "culture" from several different angles...

...It includes things like worldviews and values, not only the world as it "really" is, but the world as people see it...

...110 DISSENT / Fall 1999 I cannot end this review without a few words about di Leonardo's style, which is part and parcel of the way in which she constructs the project as a whole...

...BY NOW IT would be impossible to find an anthropological project constructed as a simple study of the cultural beliefs or the social organization of the Soandso...

...My own sense is that a certain kind of simple-minded anthropology enters the popular discourse not from anthropologists trying to intervene in that discourse—interventions that almost always have very mixed results— but largely from their teaching a watered-down "introductory anthropology" course to university students...

...The complicated politics of this fulcrum period were exceedingly well represented in the structures and processes of the Chicago fair...

...There are, I think, several things going on behind this inconsistent critique of early genDISSENT / Fall 1999 109 der anthropology...

...a little further down the page they are described as taking on the role of "class clown...

...Although a recent Roz Chast cartoon of a (sillylooking, of course) pith-helmeted anthropologist visiting some natives of a New Yorkish apartment building made me laugh, I immediately felt guilty for doing so...

...LET'S START with the women and gender question...

...Di Leonardo never actually advocates dropping ethnographic fieldwork, but she complains a lot about its limitations, does not acknowledge the many new developments, and generally seems to relegate it to a marginal position within the field...

...Di Leonardo has collected an enormous array of examples from such things as World's Fairs, museum exhibits, and store window displays to novels, political tracts, and newspaper columns...

...Messy v. Ferguson, the landmark Supreme Court case establishing "separate but equal" uncivil rights, would be decided in 1896...

...If we think of "culture" in the "culture of poverty" sense, we do indeed blame the victim...

...One of the collections I reviewed, for example, contained anthropological studies of contemporary scientific practices, transnational business networks, tourism, environmentalism, and local guerrilla movements, and AIDS discourse among medical practitioners...

...And then there is the heavy tone of political judgment...

...She is the author of Life and Death on Mount Everest: Sherpas and Himalayan Mountaineering (Princeton University Press), and the editor of The Fate of 'Culture': Geertz and Beyond (University of California Press), both forthcoming...

...Mead's most well-known book, Coming of Age in Samoa, is described as being written "in the style of children's literature...

...But the question of the "public standing of anthropology" is a "cultural" question—a question of the production and consumption of images and interpretations...

...Di Leonardo's anticulturalism also prevents her from acknowledging a range of new cultural work that has gone beyond the tired oppositions of the seventies and that is not in fact incompatible with the kind of critical anthropology she would like to see...

...But di Leonardo does not address teaching...

...In contrast, most anthropologists would 108 DISSENT / Fall 1999 insist that ethnography must remain central to the practice of anthropology...

...David Hollinger is one of the "good guys" (her term) on issues of race and ethnicity, but even he "founders" on issues of gender...

...Rather, its central meaning, and the meaning that gives ethnographic fieldwork its continuing importance, is as the webs of values and intentions and desires embodied in public forms of all kinds within specific communities of people...

...In sum, in the past two decades or so anthropology has entered into a range of exchanges with other disciplines that has enriched and transformed its theoretical orientations and its empirical work (and that has, I dare say, transformed those other disciplines as well...

...The ongoing saga of the popular (mis-)representation of anthropology is certainly the strongest and most interesting aspect of the book...

...This is where the problems begin, because di Leonardo's complaints about what's wrong with anthropology, at least in the context of this book, seem to be a good twenty years out of date...

...In every case it is clear that what the public sees and hears as "anthropology" has little to do with what the anthropologists were trying to say, and that a much more complex process was at work between the production and the reception of the images...

...DISSENT / Fall 1999 111...

...I recently reviewed three collections of articles on the theme of "the future of anthropology," and there was not a single study of the billiard ball sort...

...It is certainly the case that some individual anthropologists have actively participated in the construction of public anthropologies...

...Micaela di Leonardo is right to worry about the public standing of anthropology, which sometimes seems to have become everybody's favorite academic villain...

...One line of criticism departs from the famous passage in Eric Wolf's Europe and the People without History, attacking the anthropological penchant for studying people grouped into "cultures," that is, for chopping the world up into separate groups and studying them for their internal coherence, rather than recognizing the ways DISSENT / Fall 1999 107 in which these entities are parts, and products, of larger systems of political and economic relations...

...Many of them have, moreover, been doing this kind of work with precisely the politically critical sensibilities that di Leonardo calls for...

...Micaela di Leonardo, professor of anthropology and women's studies at Northwestern University, is concerned that the American public's conception of anthropology is highly stereotyped and mostly wrong, a point with which most anthropologists, including myself, would agree...