Culture/Power/Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology

Abstract

Hodgson reviews "Culture/Power/Place: Exploration in Critical Anthropology" edited by Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson.

Culture/Power/Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology. AKHIL GUPTA and JAMES FERGUSON, eds. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1997; 361 pp.

In our relentless search for theoretical guidance in understanding "culture," the central conceptual cornerstone of our discipline, cultural anthropologists have long looked to other analytic realms and disciplines for insight. By counterpoising "culture" to ecology, personality, history, or now, "power" and "place," we have tried to not only define the nebulous contours of what culture is by exploring what it is not, but sought, more importantly, to understand how culture is produced, reproduced, and transformed. As part of this pursuit, contemporary anthropologists have turned first to history (think, for example, of the important volume Culture/power/ history edited by Nicholas Dirks, Sherry Ortner, and Geoff Eley), and more recently to geography for assistance. The widespread appeal of geography's conceptual apparatus is revealed in the plethora of spatial metaphors -- landscapes, spaces, places, maps, displacement, global, local, to name just a few - in recent titles in anthropology.

Culture/power/place is a landmark contribution to this current theoretical trajectory in cultural anthropology. The anthology reprints, in revised versions, the ground-breaking theoretical essays (by Lisa Malkki, John Borneman, James Ferguson, Lisa Rofel, Akhil Gupta, and Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson) which first appeared in a 1992 special issue of the journal Cultural Anthropology dedicated to the theme of space and place in anthropology. Since their initial publication these essays, especially those by Malkki, Gupta, and Gupta and Ferguson, have become pivotal to current rethinkings of the relationship between culture and nation, territoriality, identity, difference, transnational processes, and power. The additional seven essays in the volume (some of which, like Kristin Koptiuch's, are also reprinted versions of published articles) complement, enhance, and complicate the themes raised in these earlier essays (all of the pieces were originally presented at three panels for the American Anthropological Association annual meetings). The volume therefore has a theoretical coherence and depth rarely found in edited collections, for which the editors, Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, should be commended.

Two themes organize the format and contributions of the volume: issues of culture and space, and the relationship of culture and power. As Gupta and Ferguson argue in their introduction and in their article, ideas of place have always been implicit in cultural theory. The terms may be the territorially circumscribed, symbolically bounded notions of "cultures" and "culture areas" in earlier anthropology (and the assumed isomorphism of space, place, and culture) or those of current interests in the "global" and "local." Making these assumptions explicit enables anthropologists to go "beyond culture" in order to analyze the relationship between culture and place, particularly in the spatialized production of identity and difference. In other words, as John Durham Peters suggests in his provocative tour through fact and fiction, anthropologists must learn to "see bifocally," that is to read the local and global simultaneously in our ethnographic studies.

Authors of the remaining essays in the first section use detailed ethnographic studies to explore and expand aspects of this argument. Several papers problematize the concept of nation and nationalism in cultural theory. Lisa Malkki explores how ideas about nations and nationalism inform anthropological studies and theories of culture and identity, in part through her comparative study of two settlements of Hutu refugees in Tanzania. In an evocative complement to Malkki's analysis, John Borneman investigates the shifting, ambivalent meanings of Heimat (home, homeland) in relation to the structuring and restructuring of state, nation, and territory in post World War II Germany. Rather than explore the divisions within a nation, Akhil Gupta explores transnational linkages such as the Nonaligned Movement and the European Union as a means of denaturalizing the relationships between space, culture, and nation.

Other papers in this section emphasize the power of representation and/or vision in translating space into place. Karen Leonard's study of Asian immigrants in California demonstrates the power of cultural memory to shape visions of new landscapes, new homes, and thus new collective identities. James Ferguson interrogates changes in the contrastive meanings of "the rural" and "the urban" through a richly textured ethnohistorical exploration of their shifting deployment in Zambia. A different order of space informs Lisa Rofel's analysis of workers' negotiations of "spatial disciplining" in Chinese factories. She explores the changing relationships of space and power deployed in projects of modernity (here, urban factories) to reveal the cultural and historical specificity of all such projects.

Although the five articles that comprise the second section of the volume, "Culture, Power, Resistance," echo many of the above themes, they highlight the relationship of culture and power. As Gupta and Ferguson argue in their introduction, these essays "raise questions over the classical idea of culture as `order,' emphasizing instead questions of partiality, perspective, and - above all - power' "(p. 4). Like Malkki, George Bisharat uses ethnographic research among refugees to explore the relationship between territorial displacement and the production of social identity. He demonstrates convincingly that the social identity of Palestinian refugees has been transformed from one defined by exile and a desire to physically return to Palestine, to a collective identity grounded in the experience of occupation and committed to an abstract return to the idea of "Palestine." Kristin Koptiuch takes up this issue of material versus metaphorical ideas of place in her analysis of "third worlds at home." As her passionate overview of political-economic changes in urban Philadelphia suggests, the third world is not a place, but a representation, and one that is now used increasingly to designate and disenfranchise certain urban spaces in the United States. Rosemary Coombe's concern is with the place of consumers confronted with the lack of place of corporations and commercial media. In a fascinating account of the circulation of rumors about the racist meaning and production of certain corporate trademarks, she demonstrates how such rumors-which travel anonymously, without any clear origin or direction-challenge notions of consumer passivity by disrupting the complacent invisibility of corporate power. Richard Maddox cleverly intertwines a cautionary argument about the spectrum of actions collapsed by contemporary scholars into the category of "resistance" with a perusal of the political locations (or lack thereof) of scholars themselves. Finally, Mary Crain uses the case of an Andalusian pilgrimage tradition to explore the constitution and shifting meanings of locality in the face of mass media and consumer capital.

The merits of this superb volume rest not only on the impressive theoretical insights and contributions of each individual piece (a remarkable accomplishment for an edited collection), but on the intellectual conversations that are enabled by consolidating the articles into one volume. In their masterful introduction Gupta and Ferguson take full advantage of the valuable pieces at hand to synthesize and compare their findings for insights into the relationships between culture, power, and place, and the related cross-cutting themes of place-making, identity, and resistance. As their introduction makes clear, these essays represent the best of current efforts in cultural anthropology to trace the centrality of power to the production, reproduction, and transformation of culture by unmasking its historical and spatial contestations in shifting political-economic contexts.

Furthermore, the essays in the volume demonstrate not only the value but also the necessity for ethnographically grounded cultural theory. As others and I have discussed elsewhere, anthropologists (unlike literary critics) cannot confine ourselves to textual analysis, however enticing it might be as compared to the personal demands and political messiness of fieldwork. We must examine the people who produce, consume, and interpret such texts, set within the shifting contexts of their production. Of course, as the contributors to the volume make clear, the methods and objectives of ethnographic research are changing in response to the same spatial and historical reconfigurations the authors themselves document. Although moving "beyond culture" to capture the ethnographic texture of the intertwining of global and local (or "seeing bifocally," as Peters advises) is a formidable task, the articles in Culture/power/ place offer lucid models for such research and writing.

This volume is an intellectually stimulating and theoretically engaging must-read for any scholar of cultural anthropology and cultural studies. But it is also extremely valuable for those of us who teach in these fields, since the articles present theoretically sophisticated material in clear, accessible prose that can at once engage, challenge, and guide our students, some of whom will become the anthropologists of tomorrow.