Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences

Citation

Marcus, G. E., & Fischer, M. M. J. (1986). Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. University of Chicago Press.

Chapter Summary

The book is a compact work of about 230 pages in its second edition. The contents list a preface, an introduction, six numbered chapters, "A Concluding Note", an appendix, notes, references and an index. The publisher describes the authors as using cultural anthropology to analyse debates that reverberate throughout the human sciences, looking closely at the discipline's past accomplishments, its current predicaments, its future direction and the insights it offers other fields. It addresses scholars interested in a critical approach to social science, art, literature and history as well as anthropology. The second edition, according to the publisher, considers new challenges that arose after the original publication. The chapter titles below are those in the publisher's table of contents; the descriptions stay close to what the titles and the publisher's description show.

Preface and Introduction

The front matter introduces the project of the book. The subtitle, "An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences", signals that the authors treat anthropology as part of a wider period of experimentation across the human sciences, not as an isolated discipline.

Chapter 1: A Crisis of Representation in the Human Sciences

The first chapter names the problem around which the book is organised: how the human sciences represent the people and cultures they study. By its title, it places the discipline's difficulties within a larger crisis that extends beyond anthropology.

Chapter 2: Ethnography and Interpretive Anthropology

The chapter concerns ethnography, the discipline's central method of research and writing, and interpretive anthropology, the approach that treats culture as something to be interpreted.

Chapter 3: Conveying Other Cultural Experience: The Person, Self, and Emotions

This chapter takes up the problem of conveying the experience of other cultures, with the person, the self and emotions as its subjects.

Chapter 4: Taking Account of World Historical Political Economy: Knowable Communities in Larger Systems

The chapter's title points to the tension between ethnography of particular, knowable communities and the larger historical and economic systems of which they are part.

Chapter 5: The Repatriation of Anthropology as Cultural Critique

The title speaks of the "repatriation" of anthropology as cultural critique, suggesting that the discipline's critical perspective is brought back to bear on the home society of its practitioners.

Chapter 6: Two Contemporary Techniques of Cultural Critique in Anthropology

The final numbered chapter presents two techniques of cultural critique currently used in anthropology.

A Concluding Note and Appendix

A short concluding note and an appendix close the book, followed by notes, references and index.

Key Concepts

Chapters 1–2

• Crisis of representation: the problem, named in the title of Chapter 1, of how the human sciences describe those they study.
• Ethnography: anthropology's method of fieldwork and writing, the topic of Chapter 2.
• Interpretive anthropology: the approach discussed alongside ethnography in Chapter 2.

Chapters 3–4

• Person, self and emotions: the subjects through which Chapter 3 treats the conveying of other cultural experience.
• World historical political economy: the wider system that Chapter 4 says must be taken into account.
• Knowable communities: the bounded communities that ethnography has traditionally studied, set against larger systems.

Chapters 5–6

• Repatriation: the term in the title of Chapter 5, suggesting anthropology's critical perspective returning home.
• Cultural critique: the book's central idea, practised through techniques discussed in Chapter 6.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• A clear, well-defined structure. Six numbered chapters move from a diagnosis of a crisis of representation through ethnography and interpretive anthropology and the question of experience to political economy, the critique of home society, and techniques of critique. That makes it possible to read it as a sustained argument.
• Beyond anthropology. The publisher stresses the book's relevance to social science, art, literature and history, and the subtitle sets anthropology within the human sciences, so it is valuable to readers in neighbouring fields.
• Compact. At about 230 pages in the second edition, the book can be read in full in a course on theory, unlike larger histories of the discipline.
• A second edition. The publisher notes that the second edition addresses new challenges that arose since 1986, which gives readers a later stage of the argument.

Limitations

• Assumes background. The book engages with ethnographic writing and anthropological debates of the 1980s, so readers will gain most after a first course in theory and some reading of ethnographies.
• Tied to a moment. The title frames the argument as "an experimental moment", and its themes come from the debates of the 1980s on representation and writing.
• Argues for a position. The book is a case for anthropology as critical practice, not a neutral survey of schools. Students who need a history of the discipline's theories should read a survey as well.
• Two editions. The book first appeared in 1986, and the second edition adds material responding to challenges that arose later. Readers who have the first edition should check it against the second edition's contents, which include a concluding note and an appendix.

Where It Fits in the Course

Within this anthropological theory course, Marcus and Fischer's book is a late twentieth-century critique of the discipline's methods of representation. Erickson and Murphy's A History of Anthropological Theory and Eriksen and Nielsen's A History of Anthropology are concise, student-oriented histories and the better places to start; Moberg's Engaging Anthropological Theory is a historical account of how theories emerged from social and political debates. They provide the map within which Marcus and Fischer's argument makes sense.

Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures is the work of interpretive anthropology that Chapter 2's topic points to, and reading it first helps with that chapter. Bourdieu's Outline of a Theory of Practice is a foundational work on practice theory, and offers another way of thinking about the relation between structure and action that bears on Chapter 4's concerns.

How to Use This Book

It suits advanced undergraduates and graduate students who have read some ethnographies and had a first course in anthropological theory, and readers in neighbouring human sciences who want to see how anthropology reflected on its own methods.

A practical plan:

• Core: the Introduction and Chapter 1 for the diagnosis, then Chapter 2 on ethnography and interpretive anthropology.
• Central arguments: Chapters 3 and 4, on conveying experience and on political economy, which together set out the tension between the particular and the systemic.
• Applications: Chapters 5 and 6, on repatriation and techniques of critique, read with an example ethnography in mind.
• Close: the Concluding Note.

Read it with a short history of the discipline at hand, and keep a list of the ethnographies it discusses so that you can read one or two of them in full. When reading, ask of each chapter what problem of representation it names and what alternative it proposes.