CATHE END(S) OF ETHNOGRAPHY: Social/CulturalAnthropology’s Signature Form of ProducingKnowledge in Transition

GEORGE E. MARCUSUniversity of California, Irvine

PREFATORY NOTE

In the Unites States, and perhaps elsewhere, the 1980s Writing Culture ([WC]Clifford and Marcus 1986) critiques and the trends that followed it marked aprofound rupture and reorganization of the research agendas of social/culturalanthropology from its diverse, preceding post–World War II so-called golden age ofexpansion. This was a move away from the four-field organization of anthropologyand an alignment with certain humanities-driven, energetically interdisciplinaryappropriations of the concerns of the social sciences in the name of “theory.” Inanthropology, this story can most cogently be told by focusing on what happened toits central professional culture of method: what ethnography looks like today andthe conditions of research, encompassing fieldwork, that produce it. Even morefocally, the recent past of social/cultural anthropology and its present tendenciescan be understood by how fashions take shape in the production of apprentice,career-making dissertation research and after.

Today’s investment in and calls for public anthropology are a symptom ofthis reorganization of social/cultural anthropology, which has left the center of thediscipline intellectually weak relative to the vitality of its diverse interdisciplinaryand even nonacademic engagements. An interesting question is whether this post-1980s reorganized social/cultural anthropology might rediscover and reunite withsome of its historic core associations (four-field as well as topical) in the new terrainsof research and partnerships on the peripheries of its old disciplinary center. A

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 23, Issue 1, pp. 1–14. ISSN 0886-7356, online ISSN 1548-1360. C© 2008 by theAmerican Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1525/can.2008.23.1.1.

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preliminary discussion of the strategic importance of refunctioning ethnography atthe dissertation stage is in Ethnography through Thick and Thin (Marcus 1998).

In February 2006, I was contacted by Marcelo Pisarro, an editor of the livelyArgentine journal Potlatch, about doing an interview for the weekly cultural supple-ment of the newspaper Clarin in Buenos Aires. The cogency of Pisarro’s questionsinspired me to summarize my thinking about the reconfiguration of social/culturalanthropology, especially in the United States. The result was published in Spanishin August 2006.

***MARCELO PISARRO: To begin with, in broad terms, how do you see

anthropology nowadays? Following a course, with no course at all, confused,suspended, in good health, bad health?

GEORGE MARCUS: Of your alternatives, I like “suspended” and “in goodhealth.” A story of decline, or “the long good-bye,” is an awkward one to tell,or to articulate, in the arena of the politics of knowledge and in the competitionof academic establishments where self-esteem, based on promises of advance, isa kind of fuel. Nonetheless, the story of sustained fragmentation and unravelingof originary vision is not necessarily a sad one (as I learned originally in my studyof the maturing of dynastic families and fortunes—in decline, new and creativearrangements emerge that were not possible before—“the owl of Minerva” andall that!), and I think this is the case with social and cultural anthropology (in theUnited States, the largest number of anthropologists, among the four divisionsof the field, are such). Anthropology is in good health mainly because its pastachievements, ideologies, and methods concerning the study of difference andchange in the world, and its accumulated knowledge and, yes, wisdom, about thework of culture(s) are not only very much needed more than ever in the societiesand states where it primarily arose as a discipline; but this actual demand foranthropology (especially for the ethnographic gaze in various institutional settingsand processes that are sensing problems in their confidence in purely rationalistand instrumental protocols but themselves do not have the means to act on thesetwinges of doubt) is also both acknowledged and manifest. In the United Statesanthropology is enjoying a renewed relevance—but still in its long-establishedrole as a “minor” nonconformist outsider discipline—that it has not enjoyed fordecades. Who knows how long this trend will last?

But on the inside, in terms of fresh thinking within its own traditions of thought,of the ability of anthropologists to stimulate themselves intellectually, the disciplineis in suspension and has been I believe since the rupturing critiques of the 1980s.

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Following the course of those critiques, the agendas of anthropological researchbecame almost wholly shaped and defined by the interdisciplinary movementswith which it associated and which inspired it: feminist studies, media studies,postcolonial and subaltern studies, science studies, etc.—all fueled by theoreticalsurges during the 1970s and 1980s coming from France and transmitted largelythrough literary studies wanting to become cultural studies. By the mid-1990s allof these surges had dissipated, as had the interdisciplinary movements that carriedthem. In the aftermath anthropology, compared to other disciplines, is dealingcreatively and with relative vigor with the legacies of the inflationary period of“binge” in critical ideas, so to speak. But this is only because its traditional messagesare in demand—not so much in the realm of interdisciplinary cultural studies butin the realm of emerging global political economies faced with the reconfigurationsof the usual actors and the appearance of new ones. So anthropology has thisrole, but on the inside—if that designation is even relevant anymore since theworking commitments of anthropologists are so interdisciplinary—there are nonew ideas and none on the horizon, as well as no indication that its traditional stockof knowledge shows any sign of revitalization—structuralism, functionalism, thestudy of kinship, etc.

Even the concept of culture, while emblematic of what the discipline isinterested in, is no longer viable analytically and has been appropriated everywhereand by everybody. So social and cultural anthropology in its long decline, orevolution into something else, is Janus-faced: in good health, for now, in relationto its publics; in suspension in terms of its intellectual drive and motivation—theideas that move and stimulate it. What’s left to do, then, is to follow events,to engage ethnographically with history unfolding in the present, or to anticipatewhat is emerging. The great majority of projects of anthropology are pursued inthis defining kind of temporality, which, in my view, has become much moreimportant than traditional spatial tropes of “being there” in situating ethnographyin time-space.

MP: We turn on the television, and we see young sons of immigrants settingcars on fire in Paris or journalists justifying idiot provocations in the name offreedom of speech. And soon we hear the explanations: “clash of cultures” andthings like that. Could it be that the world needs more anthropologists? Or that itis better to lower the curtain and declare the failure?

GM: Well, reiterating certain elements of the previous response, the worldthinks it needs more anthropologists (anthropology was there first, so to speak, onthese matters, so it gets a certain amount of outsized credit for being first), and

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anthropologists do have sane, humane sentiments about these matters. They are notthe only such voices, but the world needs as many of these expressions as possibleand as strongly as possible. But at the same time, anthropologists, in my view, haveno new ideas or analyses to offer about the complexities of the contemporary worldin which “the clash of cultures” and the things in which they have traditionally beeninterested occur in terrains and contexts which by their traditional methods a laMalinowski or Boas anthropologists are not at all prepared to study in ambitiousand adequate ways. By being identified as ethnographers, anthropologists are mosteffective in delivering their views when they are invited into various places andcontexts to study situations close-up, intimately. While their functions and sourcesof authority as experts are quite different from journalists, anthropologists oftenfunction nowadays like the best and deepest journalists—certainly their experiencesof other places, of sites of research and reporting, are similar today.

This is a valuable contribution, but does it justify a discipline? I would sayonly if anthropologists distinctively and collectively process these materials andreports that they accumulate. And this is precisely what they do not do, because thestrength of anthropology, as I argued before, is centrifugally in its interdisciplinaryinvolvements rather than in any distinctive discourse among anthropologists them-selves about what they are doing. The center is fragmented and, while not emptyliterally, is indeed empty of coherent ideas about what anthropological researchis, does, and means in the contemporary world. In place of ideas, anthropologicaldiscourse has become overly moralistic. Are organizing ideas that collectively assessanthropology’s diverse research results needed? Some may not think so or care.Obviously, I think some collective intellectual center of gravity is immensely im-portant for anthropology continuing to function anywhere, to replace a sometimesgrotesque expression of a liberal moral conscience or witnessing (with a too-easytendency to denounce or express outrage) as the purpose or primary rhetoric ofdisciplinary discourse.

So, to refer to your question, it is certainly better to lower a curtain on the waythat certain traditional sentiments of anthropology have evolved in their expressionbut not to declare failure. Rather, there is the need to deal with failure throughserious play. The arena of the professional culture of method in anthropology isthe terrain on which to do this.

MP: In your opinion, is there something left, methodologically speaking, ofthe “classic” anthropology (the one of Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard, Mead)? Canwe still speak about performing a “participant-observation” of the “object of study”in “the field”?

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GM: I think the key to growing the collective intellectual center of gravity,that I just mentioned, through a community of discourse again in anthropology onwhat it produces from ethnographic research is in reinventing its distinctive cultureof (fieldwork/ethnographic) method in line with certain unfulfilled potentials ofthe 1980s critiques and what occurred after. The question of method (or, rather,metamethod, since I don’t think the reinvention should be done, only or mostimportantly, at the level of literal technique) and its distinctive modes of pedagogyare the most important issues and topics of theoretical interest in anthropologytoday. It is the pivot by which the community of anthropologists could be reorientedand refocused intellectually in relation to what they have been doing as researchover the past two decades. We don’t need more conferences or seminars buta different style and process of training anthropologists, also a rethinking of thestandard forms and functions of writing in anthropology.

And here, I suppose one would have to rethink and change the norms of train-ing anthropologists coming into being. The norms of training are peculiarly openand nurturing: letting students do almost anything they want to do while, at thesame time, being rigid and constraining in a few regulative ideals of practice—forexample, one must do fieldwork, preferably abroad, with all sorts of expectations ofprofessional culture embedded in this demand about what seems “right.” Given theemblematic and ideological significance of “doing fieldwork” for the identity of thediscipline, the power of these expectations of method without really being definedas method is wholly understandable. But it also constitutes the strategic site forreform of practice. Much of the pattern of the contemporary mode of production ofanthropological knowledge through ethnography—and its curiosities—flows fromthe conditions of training and how dissertations emerge. If one were to reformthe widely shared, emblematic training process, then, I believe, the whole careerpattern of research and the power of the culture of professional sentiments thatsupport it would change decisively—in good ways, I think, in line with the way an-thropological research is changing anyway below the surface of professional norms.

It would take a book to lay out ideas for the reinvention and refunctioning ofthe classic anthropological culture of method in its current situation and challenges.I believe this is a widely felt issue in anthropology today that is addressed anecdotally(as well as textually here and there) in so-called corridor and shop talk, in the sageadvice that mentors give students preparing for fieldwork, etc. The situation isnot that different from the circumstances leading to the appearance of WC—it wasa powerful textual intervention because it articulated in an effective mode whathad been on the minds of anthropologists for a long time about the state of their

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discipline. Now might be another such moment in which the problematic tropeis fieldwork rather than writing (but the two are not now, nor were, unrelated,although at the time of the WC initiative I think it was comforting for anthropologiststo think they were—that is, to consider critically the practices of writing waswelcome only because it did not touch, seemingly, the doing of fieldwork).

So, to return to the terms of your question—indeed, there is something left,methodologically speaking, of “classic” anthropology—something crucial that isdesperate for rearticulation, for updating. Many younger anthropologists workeclectically in terms of the classic method and probably do not identify much withthe texts of Malinowski, etc., except symbolically, as a display of filial piety, oras a means of cleaving to a certain ethos. Yet the tropes of method, establishedby the classics, are powerful regulating phantasms of training and constraintson shaping anthropologists that also provide the special licenses and freedomsof anthropological research as well. The trouble is that very little of the well-worn terms by which method is identified communicate to students or othersthe contemporary experience of doing fieldwork and building a career around it.Alternatives are being tried (e.g., the work of Paul Rabinow, Marilyn Strathern,the collection Global Assemblages edited by Aihwa Ong and Stephen Collier, amongothers). The field of science and technology studies is a veritable laboratory foralternative practices in ethnography with uncertain applications or relevance toother arenas of anthropological research. It is unclear how much a “makeover”and in what terms the professional culture of anthropology will tolerate, but it ishappening anyhow.

Incidentally, I have recently moved from Rice University, where, for manyyears, our department there has stood for the exploration of changes in anthro-pology, through changes in ethnography, to the University of California at Irvine.Here, I have just founded a Center for Ethnography, which will be devoted tovarious activities that explore in the broadest ways the shifts and reinventions ofpractices for doing ethnography. Aside from the usual seminars, discussions, andconferences, we hope to attach ourselves as “para-sites,” so to speak, to ongoingprojects (e.g., like the Laboratory for the Anthropology of the Contemporary thatPaul Rabinow and colleagues are forming at Berkeley) that are practicing the an-thropological research paradigm in innovative ways. The center will offer a spaceto follow the “meta” issues of change in method that may not be well articulated orexplored in these projects as they proceed.

MP: In your works you insist on the “collaboration” as a normative practiceof ethnographic work. Could you briefly explain what this is about?

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GM: Collaboration is an important topic to consider in how the classic“scene” of fieldwork encounter is changing in anthropological research. Of course,fieldwork has always been collaborative in nature, and one of the key themes ofthe WC critiques was an exposure of these de facto conditions of collaboration(in favor of, and distorted by, the purposes of the anthropologist in relation tohis subjects) and their marginalization or suppression in the way that ethnographywas produced and written. The proliferation of the genres of reflexive writingfollowing these critiques (and now perhaps cliched) was an act of atonement andredressing of this methodological and textual neglect of collaboration as overt normsand ethics of research practice. Collaboration as a method is still not developedexplicitly, as a norm in the professional culture of fieldwork practice, but it is veryvisible and certainly discussed. However, today, the demand for collaborationsas a basic way of doing fieldwork represents something different than what itrepresented and how it was debated with reference to the classic scene of fieldworkencounter. As fieldwork has become multisited and mobile in nature, subjects aremore “counterpart” than "other." Fieldwork becomes implicated in the organizedknowledge of its subjects, in the form of social movements, NGOs, researchgroups. The basic trope of fieldwork encounter shifts from, say, apprentice, orbasic learner of culture in community life, to working with subjects of varioussituations in mutually interested concerns and projects with issues, ideas, etc.In other words, once the “reflexive” subject is now the only kind of subject theanthropologist encounters, and where the reflexivity of the subject exists in, oroverlaps with, the same intellectual universe that informs the researcher (necessarilymaking the subject his epistemic partner, so to speak, in the conduct of research),then “collaboration” replaces the trope of “apprenticeship” (or its alternatives) asdefining the “scene” of fieldwork encounter.

Collaboration, or equivalent terms (e.g., interdisciplinarity), is also the pre-dominant tendency promoted by globalizing sovereignties, such as the spread ofneoliberal forms, in organizing endeavor at all levels and in all places. This is theculture of organization that fieldwork is obliged to go along with, to blend with.So there are pressures on fieldwork, coming from multiple directions today, todefine itself in terms of the modality of collaboration. Anthropologists confront the“other” (now “counterpart”) in the expectation of collaboration, and in their appealfor funds, etc., in their relation to dominating and patron institutions, they shouldrepresent themselves as collaborators or themselves organized in collaborations.This is all very different from the way in which collaboration has been embedded,neglected, and redeemed in the traditional practice of ethnography. Collaboration

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instead is a key trope for condensing a whole complex of new challenges in thereinvention of anthropology’s key method, which I have advocated.

MP: It has already been more than two decades since the seminar that ledto WC, the premises of which were scattered everywhere and in the most varieddisciplines. From today’s perspective, how deep was the impact that it produced?

GM: Outside anthropology, and especially through the humanities (whosepartnership was active in producing the critiques, e.g., notably in the coeditorshipof WC by James Clifford, of the History of Consciousness Program at Universityof California, Santa Cruz), WC still stands for what anthropology means to thesedisciplines. So here the effect has been profound—it reestablished the relevance ofanthropology in the humanities to an unprecedented level and at a very importanttime of ferment in the humanities that still shape them, and as a legacy it secured areputation, or allure, for anthropology in humanities circles that is sustained. Insideanthropology, as Clifford Geertz pointed out in the early 1990s, the storm, so tospeak, had blown over (by then), but the effects would be deep and long standing.And so they have been.

As time goes on, in retrospect, WC stands even more distinctively as thetext, marking a certain rupture, from which anthropology has not recovered (orrather, I would say, has benefited) in many ways. After WC, the interdisciplinarymovements concerned with culture defined anthropology’s research agendas, andit has never had its own questions within a theoretical fashion of its own design ormaking since then. Certainly when I travel to Europe or other places outside theUnited States, WC still defines anthropology, since nothing coherent or self-labeledlike “structuralism” inside the discipline has emerged since. How one feels aboutthis depends significantly I think on generation, when and how one came into thefield, and to some extent, on background, gender, and ethnic composition (thedemographic changes of who anthropologists are have been registered but notstudied for their effects on how anthropology has substantively changed), and bythe fact that many students enter anthropology as career training today inspired byhow anthropology has been presented to them from within the humanities-driveninterdisciplinary movements from the 1980s and 1990s, and in these of course WC

remains a basic influence. (I should say Anthropology as Cultural Critique [Marcusand Fischer 1999] is the counterpart text in what I have just remarked; its impact,twinned with WC, was most significant in anthropology and along the same lines).

MP: Although detestable, labels exist for a reason. Do you think that thereis, or was, a “postmodern anthropology,” in the way we speak of a “symbolicanthropology” or a “structural anthropology”? Why do you think that there

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have been so many people engaged in disqualifying anything that smelled of“postmodern”?

GM: Yes, detestable, or at least unfortunate, is correct. It has to do with theinability of anthropology to “name” itself after the rupture. This kind of adjectivalhabit of designating subfields ended largely with the rupture. Aside from linguisticanthropology, and I suppose, medical anthropology, none of the adjectival subfieldsreally held up or prospered. It is interesting to see how advertisements for jobs havebeen composed over the years. In the 1980s, things really became jumbled; areastudies and specialties of the classic sort came to be questioned, as did the adjectivalhabit. The adjectival habit never really came back, so job ads asked for all sorts ofcultural studies sorts of things (plus globalization this and that!), but at the sametime, there was a strong return to asking for area specialties as a sort of stabilizerwith the past, even though anthropologists are no longer areas specialists in the waythey were. (E.g., having worked in Latin America does not necessarily make one anarea expert, even though the discipline still recognizes these geographical categoriesin this way. Too bad, because how expertise is constituted in anthropology thesedays is much more interesting than the categories in terms of which the disciplinerecognizes itself are capable of encompassing.)

More defensibly, postmodern was a moment in the development of an an-thropology devoted to critique and theoretical traditions of critique. Given theshadows that now surround the term postmodern, to concretize a certain endeavoras “postmodern” anthropology—which there never was (it is just an artifact of anobtuse, even anti-intellectual understanding of anthropology’s own recent past)—has the tinge of sneer or contempt about it, and that is really unfortunate, sincelike a virus, almost, everything that is prominently anthropology these days is post-modern anthropology, which means it has been invigorated and driven by criticaltheories. This goes back to the profundity of the legacy of the WC moment. Mostof the people who were shaped by something that can be called a postmodernmoment won’t touch the term now, but with regard to what it was, and what itleft behind, it substantively is certainly inside them by now.

MP: There is a whole generation of professionals formed—and even born—after WC, who did not go through any “crisis of representation of the 1980s”and for whom the critical self-examination of their thinking and work habits isan almost taken-for-granted epistemological instance. I would like to know: howwas the moment when all this came up, when it hit people who had had sucha different formation and way of working? How was it to be in the eye of thestorm?

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GM: I was a graduate student at Harvard in the early 1970s. In the graduatestudent culture around the Social Relations program there, there was an infor-mal circle or “invisible college” of discussing theoretical literature that was indeedmuch more stimulating than what was being presented as graduate social sciencein courses, seminars, etc., and especially in my case, what was being presented inanthropology programs. Anthropology always had exciting potential through theexperience of its method and its untapped possibilities, but the teaching of it wasstale—it was the end of the post–World War II golden age, so to speak, in U.S.academia. In the informal circles of what students read at Harvard, there were alot of rumblings of poststructuralism in the reading of Foucault, Barthes, Haber-mas, Altusser, and prominent feminist writers. In looking back, the generation ofanthropologists with whom I most affiliate were shaped, on the one hand, by assim-ilating these sources which were not yet in the curriculum and, on the other hand,by participating in the still very traditional training models of anthropology, for theattraction and potential they still had. Anthropology and related fields were morethan ready for WC by the time it happened. If they weren’t, then WC never wouldhave had the impact it had. So WC was articulating dissatisfactions and hopes forresearch (in ethnography and other modalities) that were “out there,” so to speak,especially among a generation of scholars coming into being who were formed moreby their own “invisible colleges” or circles than they were by paradigms through theclassroom. The “trick,” so to speak, was to deliver the most effective articulation ofthe critique that was in the air. This happened to be in the “literary turn” and all ofthe rich theory that was churning through the study of narratives, genres, rhetorics,and discourses at the time. If the critique had been articulated as a conventionalcritique of social theories in use (these were being produced all the time in any case,especially out of the 1960s), the critique of anthropology would not have been nearas distinctive or effective. The WC critique was essentially a critique of forms, dis-courses, and practices, and this is what made it so effective. This was only possiblebecause of the ideas that circulated among elite graduate students in the “invisiblecolleges” of the 1970s that occurred alongside the declining power of the author-itative disciplinary forms (in anthropology, it was structuralism, Marxism, andsymbolic approaches that theoretically shaped the traditional interests and topics).

People who came of age in my generation and the adjacent ones have expe-rienced and brought about the transition. We instituted a quite different graduatecurriculum, particularly in terms of theoretical sources and what could or shouldbe studied (although the “how”—the fieldwork method and the deep professionalculture surrounding its inculcation—as I have emphasized, has remained rather

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orthodox), but we also remained identified with our “fathers” so to speak—withthe way of doing things before the rupture, since many of us started by doingrather conventional-style fieldwork in traditional societies, and most of us do notrepudiate this experience but, as we grow older, treasure it, while still having fullycommitted ourselves to certain changes. What we share with younger generationsis precisely the regime of theory, topics, and ways of being interdisciplinary andwith whom. There is no intellectual divide between us and those who have comeafter like there was between us and our mentors. Where there is a strong differencebetween us and our successors is in the sense of what an academic career is, should,or could be. We are much like our “fathers” in this regard—we are totally academicanimals. Younger anthropologists have more divided commitments and hope moreof even an “activist” or public nature can be done with academic work.

MP: Do you think that the division of social sciences, back there in the 19thcentury, is not, or should not be, valid any longer? Does social science’s post-modernity (or post-postmodernity, or hypermodernity, or liquid modernity, toname just a few of the current theoretical proposals) actually stand for multidis-ciplinary work? Should the boundaries between anthropology, sociology, history,political science, and philosophy be obliterated for good?

GM: The 19th-century creation of the social sciences, and the specific disci-plinary shape they took in the university from the early to mid–20th century, hasbeen outdated for a very long time now, but the stakes of stable careers and aca-demic institutions were organized around this regime so that this defines a certaininertia and hard reality when it comes to thinking about alternative. Everything Ihave said here is tied to the resilience of certain disciplinary ideas in anthropologythrough change, even though it has been one of the most open disciplines, especiallywhen it comes to self-critique. Obliteration is a little strong, but I do think we arein the process of a sustained and prolonged transition. And that is why I think itis a progressive, healthy, and productive stance to think of anthropology in longdecline. It is too early to understand what it might be becoming, despite occasionalenthusiasms for one or another kind of interdisciplinary fusion.

Interdisciplinarity seems visionary compared to disciplinary perspective, butmost interdisciplinary perspectives have turned out to be just as myopic. Havingcome off a binge period of interdisciplinary engagement which both excited andformed me (that of which WC was part), I tend to be unfashionably concerned againwith the fate of anthropology as a discipline, of course without being naive about thefact that the disciplines are a fiction and an aging one as we have known them. But Iam wagering now that with complete openness, it is a more productive enterprise

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to reimagine the disciplines we have and their historic problematics in the face ofunexpected turns and partnerships than to promote some conventional discourseof interdisciplinarity, which I see as a rather conservative project at the moment.We are in a millenarian age of the hopes for science and technology (while weseem to be in a rather “dark ages” interval when it comes to government, politics,etc.) in light of their very real achievements. Consequently, I find the crossoversand traffic between what has been done in anthropology and what is being donein technoscience to be the most stimulating direction of boundary blurring in therecent past (thus the literature of science and technology studies has stimulated methe most in recent years, although I personally am not interested in either scienceor technology in my own research). But I am unwilling to predict that this is wheresome big future for anthropology (and other social sciences) lay. In terms of what Ihave said, it does provide an environment where anthropologists can do somethingdifferent with their method and ethos.

MP: In Ethnography through Thick and Thin, you wrote: “Clearly, I am notinterested in the cultural studies cliche of ‘resistance’ by often sentimentalised‘Others.”’ Besides some exceptions—and I am thinking of your works aboutelites—do you think that anthropologists have turned that academic cliche into ashield? That they are always running behind the poor and the defenseless to explainhow they “resist”?

GM: Yes, as unfair and imbalanced as this sentiment seems, it is pretty muchhow I feel, and it is something I would freely express in having a beer with a friend.Still, I am not a reactionary, an elitist, or even one who argues for elite studies asa counterbalance to the study of those who suffer. Rather, what might have been astudy of elites, as a specialty, in an earlier period of anthropology has now becomean embedded aspect of doing so-called multisited ethnography. Simply, we canonly produce our own representations, writing, arguments about certain subjectsby engaging with those who have already been there before us and provided sucharticulations—this inevitably means realizing scenes and terrains of fieldwork byengagements (collaborations?) with those from whom we would have distancedourselves previously, in sympathy with the subaltern, as “elites.” Of course, muchof the most interesting ethnography by now involves such engagements (it doesn’tmean the politics or political sympathies of the researcher have to be alignedwith such subjects), especially in science and technology studies. Given the newmultisited terrains of most projects, this whole business about the study of elites assomething unusual or controversial is moot now. The problem of how researchersrelate to power, its concentrations, and structured inequalities remain in new

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projects, but this requires new thinking and perhaps a different ethical way of beingin fieldwork, which are beyond the verities that the academic cliche as a shield (asyou put it) permits.

MP: In your opinion, how is “the success” of a science measured? Medicine hasfound cures for some diseases, and astronomers have answered several questionson how the universe works. In this—maybe somewhat cynical—sense, what hasanthropology achieved?

GM: Well, parts of anthropology have real achievements along these lines, andI believe in terms of the archive of diverse human experience that social/culturalanthropologists during the first hundred years of its modern disciplinary existencehave amassed, and to a much lesser degree, continue to augment, there are real,more or less reliable, and cumulative contributions to collective knowledge thatendure. And there is much potential for doing further work with this archiveshould fashions shift this way (it seems unlikely to me in the foreseeable future).But in its current efforts and passions, social and cultural anthropology can’t befit into the discourse of achievement in natural sciences as it is conventionallyperceived (although this has been thoroughly debated in recent years as well byreal advances and achievements in the history and philosophy of science). Itsreal achievements are its critical interventions and the lending of certain kinds ofunderstandings in the pursuit of hyperrational projects of various kinds. In this wayits achievements as a “minor” science (in the way that Deleuze and Guattari wroteof “minor literature”) have been considerable but not separable from the projects ofmedicine, biology, science, physics, economics, etc. For this sort of achievement,the kind of anthropology that has emerged following the ruptures of the 1980s hasmore potential than ever, at least until, in the long term, it evolves into somethingelse.

MP: It is probable that, sometimes, some friend, relative, or perfectstranger—that is to say, an outsider regarding your profession—may ask youwhat anthropology is for. What answer would you give?

GM: This is the only question I don’t like, because slogans and sound bitescome hard to me (as you can see from what has preceded). For now, my answerwould be “all of the above”!

ABSTRACTToday’s investment in and calls for public anthropology are one symptom of the profoundrupture and reorganization of the research agendas of social/cultural anthropology asit moved away from the four-field organization of anthropology into an alignment with

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certain humanities-driven, energetically interdisciplinary appropriations of the concernsof the social sciences in the name of “theory.” In anthropology, this story can most cogentlybe told by focusing on what happened to its central professional culture of method: whatethnography looks like today and the conditions of research, encompassing fieldwork,that produce it. This article is an examination of this reorganization of social/culturalanthropology, which has left the center of the discipline intellectually weak relative tothe vitality of its diverse interdisciplinary and even nonacademic engagements. It askswhether this post-1980s reorganized social/cultural anthropology might rediscoverand reunite with some of its historic core associations (four-field as well as topical) inthe new terrains of research and partnerships on the peripheries of its old disciplinarycenter.

Keywords: history of anthropology, ethnography, pedagogy

NOTEEditor’s Note. George Marcus was the founding editor of Cultural Anthropology in 1986. He has

published particularly important volumes in the field, such as WC (Clifford and Marcus 1986) andAnthropology as Cultural Critique (Marcus and Fischer 1999). An essay of his in Cultural Anthropologythat may be of particular interest is his final “Editorial Retrospective” (1991). Other authors have alsowritten essays on the state and future of the field of anthropology. See, for example, Paul Rabinow’s“Beyond Ethnography: Anthropology as Nominalism” (1988) and Elizabeth Enslin’s “Beyond Writing:Feminist Practice and the Limitations of Ethnography” (1994).

REFERENCES CITED

Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus, eds.1986 Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University

of California Press.Enslin, Elizabeth

1994 Beyond Writing: Feminist Practice and the Limitations of Ethnography. CulturalAnthropology 9(4):537–568.

Marcus, George E.1991 Editorial Retrospective. Cultural Anthropology 6(4):553–564.

1998 Ethnography through Thick and Thin. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Marcus, George E., and Michael M. J. Fischer

1999 Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the HumanSciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rabinow, Paul1988 Beyond Ethnography: Anthropology as Nominalism. Cultural Anthropology

3(4):355–364.

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