“The Predicament of Culture” In “The Predicament
of Culture,” Jim Clifford questions ethnographic authority in shaping
representations of ‘culture.’ Modernity, characterized by rootlessness,
mobility, alienation, scattered traditions, craziness, and disorder (Clifford,
3-4), entails historical uncertainty and undermines concepts of cultural
‘essence.’ This paper first examines the problem underlying “The Predicament
of Culture” and then Clifford’s ‘workaround’ approach to representing
‘culture,’ for which, as he suggests, there is no solution, precisely
because the ‘culture’ concept entails predicament. The crux of the ethnographic
problem of representation for him revolves around the production of texts,
which inescapably entails the production of a kind of fiction. Using
the French anthropologist Marcel Griaule’s work and the Cape Cod Mashpee
Indian tribe’s 1976 trial to reclaim land as examples, this paper suggests
that Clifford ‘resolves’ the ethnographic predicament of culture by suggesting
alternate, more inclusive forms of ethnographic representation. Problems of “The Predicament of Culture” Clifford contextualizes “the predicament of culture” in an historical understanding where cultural artifacts ‘shape’ paths of hybrid meaning. He contrasts this with a view of history which sees the authenticity of culture, peoples, and products (Clifford, 5-6) as endangered and in juxtaposition to modernizing influences. Thus he rewrites an oft-described or oft-assumed cultural dualism between authentic versus modern, by situating ‘pure products’ - artifacts, identities and communities - within blurring / shifting processes. For Clifford, the problem encapsulated in “The Predicament of Culture” examines “far-reaching questions about modes of cultural interpretation, implicit models of wholeness, styles of distancing, stories of historical development” (Clifford, 8). He therefore questions all ethnographic authorial authority by asking, for example, “Who has the authority to speak for a group’s identity or authenticity? What are the essential elements and boundaries of a culture? How do self and other clash and converse in the encounters of ethnography, travel, modern interethnic relations?” (Clifford, 8) He suggests that ethnographic authority heretofore embodies a crisis of representation where the meaning of ‘culture’ itself which shapes ethnographic authority, must be re-examined. Clifford also argues that one significant limitation of ethnographic authority is that it only represents the view of the author, when ‘culture,’ especially in terms of conjunctures shaped by modernity, is comprised of many voices. Thus modes of ethnographic representation which express many voices more accurately reflect ‘culture’ than ethnographies which utilize a single voice. While unable to throw out the “deeply compromised” (Clifford, 10) specific concept of ‘culture,’ which Clifford identifies as the relativist, pluralist, ironic-to-a-degree, “serious fiction” originating with Conrad and Malinowski, he historicizes it and strains to retain it as a concept “for its differentiating functions while conceiving of collective identity as a hybrid, often discontinuous process” (Clifford, 10). In his treatment of Malinowski and Conrad vis-a-vis culture, the shaping of self-identity emerges, for Clifford, as a key heuristic. Clifford thus examines ethnographic interpretations of self-identity as blurred and strained by culture. The problem of ethnographic intervention in an interconnected world in this context, for Clifford, is that “one is always, to varying degrees, “inauthentic”: caught between cultures, implicated in others” (Clifford, 11). This problem transforms questions of identity from analysis of its “essence” to questions of identity shaped by conjunctural processes. Thus the ethnographer, writer or intervener (e.g. Edward Said in “Orientalism”) himself or herself is conjuncturally shaped by modernity, further complicating modes of representation made explicit in “The Predicament of Culture.” The problem of ethnographic representations of ‘culture’ is partly definitional, situated within a historicized ethnographic landscape of conjunctural processes. In the context of today’s world, ethnography involves questioning the ethnographer’s authority to objectively and realistically portray the ‘other,’ as well as ways in which the ethnographer is a ‘product’ of culture. Culture itself has more to do with intersections of traditions rather than identifying what epitomizes cultures. For Clifford, modern ethnography:
Some “Workarounds” to “The Predicament of
Culture” Historically, Clifford suggests that polyphonous or heteroglossic ethnographic representations successfully mediate, or at least improve upon, the problem of single-voiced ethnographic authority. He examines and cites the ethnographic practices of Marcel Griaule’s Dogon ethnographic work as an example not only of incipient ‘heteroglossic’ ethnography (Griaule) but also of the effectiveness of Griaule’s multi-partied ethnographic team work, best suited for collecting and interpreting very complex rituals and practices, such as Dogon funerary (Clifford, 70) ceremonies where large numbers of people partake. Clifford thus juxtaposes Griaule’s work with early, founding British and American anthropologists’ work to demonstrate other modes of ethnographic representation, which do not rely solely on a single ethnographer’s voice to represent a polyphony of voices, and then often as one voice (the authors). This somehow peculiarly French genre of ethnography (Clifford, 61-62) thus represents a ‘cultural’ ethnographic approach distinctly different from American and British approaches. Clifford thus identifies an alternative approach to ethnographic representation.
Mashpee ‘Culture’ Clifford
himself engages and develops this practice - the ethnographic and polyphonic
representation of ‘culture,’ shaped by conjuncture rather than essence
– to shape specific understandings of cultural and historical identity.
Clifford’s analysis of the Cape Cod, If Mashpee ‘culture,’ after 350 years of interaction with Europeans, can be neither defined by language (they now speak English), nor structural features such as tribal institutions or ritual (structural - functionalism is history), nor geography (land boundaries have shifted), nor by ‘meaning,’ (Geertz is dated in this respect), etc., - all the historical yardsticks of ethnography - what makes this ‘culture’ cohere? What makes the idea of ‘Mashpee’ a question? References Clifford, James. 1988 The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography,
Literature, and Art. Griaule, Marcel. 1957
Méthode de l’ethnographie. Said, Edward. 1979 Orientalism.
copyright 2006
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