Ethnography through Thick and Thin

Ethnography through Thick and Thin. George E. Marcus. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. 275 pp.

These collected essays provide an important and timely statement, both for anthropology as a discipline currently and as a comment on contemporary knowledge production.

The collection is strong in the breadth of the topics considered and the coherence of argument from one essay to the next. But the particular originality lies in Marcus's capacity to "map" and trace the emerging practices and strategies of the discipline with such open eyes. Neither moralistic nor judgmental, Marcus builds his argument for the necessity and value of "multi-site ethnography" and "experimental writing," not so much from a simple claim about what should and what shouldn't be, but rather from a consideration of what actual practitioners are doing and what these practices might mean. Few of the senior generation of anthropologists have been able to do this, resorting instead to strategies of containment or refusal of the issues that seem to press in on us. In this respect, the essay "The Uses of Complicity in the Changing Mise-en-Scene of Anthropology" is really quite brilliant at showing a stepping back in Geertz's work from a range of representational and moral quandaries of fieldwork in defense of a valued project of ethnographic knowledge.

Another set of younger seniors--many of whom might be called the Young Turks--has made only a partial argument, failing to place their criticisms of received methods and practices into any sustained argument for a renewed or continuing practice of anthropology. In this respect, Marcus is quite distinct from many with whom he is typically grouped, being more concerned to develop, support, and outline in a positive way what might be the current project and directions of anthropology. What makes this collection even more valuable is that he charts these directions not as utopian imaginings, but with reference to an analysis of a broader institutional and interdisciplinary world in which anthropology and its (our) subjects are mutually imbedded. A critical anthropology in the truest sense is proposed, but one that is simultaneously engaged with its objects and its self.

Thus, Marcus argues--in essays following on the original famous interventions of Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus, eds., University of California Press, 1986) and Anthropology...