Cultural Anthropology at Rice Since the 1980's
(Provost Lecture)

George Marcus, February 17, 1992

Aside from its puropose of informing the wider university community about particular scholarly projects at Rice, the Provost's kind invitation to deliver this talk provides me with an appropriate occasion to take stock of the phenomenal, even epic-like developments within the anthropology department here over the past decade. I think this is worth doing because the story of anthropology here exemplifies certain broader trends of dramatic critique, rethinking, and renewed possibilities that have swept through virtually all of the social sciences and humanities as well as most of the professions in the United States with varying degrees of intensity.

In 1980, the Department of Anthropology at Rice had shrunk rather suddenly from a faculty of 7 to 2. This was due to retirement, transfer to other institutions, and attrition through the tenuring process. Only Steve Tyler and myself remained.

To overhaul a department is a rare enough occasion in academia at any time, but to have done so in the early 1980s was a truly remarkable event given the fortuitous combination of the mood at Rice, the demographics of academia nationally, and a growing intellectual tendency toward self-criticism and restlessness especially in the humanities and social sciences. The great energy and hopes of the 1960s expansion had l ong since grown stale. With the advantage of hindsight, the rebuilding of the department thrived on its being positioned opportunistically in relation to these situations.

In the early 1980s, graduate programs were in a trend of severe retrenchment, and there was the accompanying loss and dispersion of an entire generation of scholars produced at the end of the expansion. In our recruitment, we thus faced a uniquely favorable surplus of talent in the academic job market. We were a veritable catchment for among the best, most experienced, and most interesting anthropologists from a time when entrance into the humanities and social sciences was as highly competitive a choice as moving into the professions. In our first rounds of hirings, Mike Fischer came to us from years of teaching at Harvard, and Julie Taylor similarly came from the University of California at San Diego. Rod and Susan McIntosh arrived to reorganize the archaeology wing of our program. While I limit myself here to the saga of cultural anthropology, the work of the McIntoshes is an equally remarkable story of achievement that deserves it own telling.

All this institutional opportunity and possibility would have been insignificant had not the intellectual vision and tendencies which formed a motivated strategy of rebuilding -- an intellectual project in the true sense -- not precociously anticipated a broadbased trend in American (and Western) academia, one that first showed up as a crisis of representation which I will turn to in a moment. Unburdened by a faculty representing the sedimentation of past fashions which is what indeed prevents the pursuit of any particular vision or theme in most departments, we were free to pursue our inclinations. Initially the roots of this plan for the department lay in the powerful critique of formalism in linguistics that Steve Tyler had developed through the 1970s, and his move into an exploration of hermeneutic philosophy, the study of rhetoric, and the relationship between oral and written forms of discourse. This work expressed itself as a strong form of skepticism that nonetheless was very influential in the development of our critique of the rhetoric and inventions of the way anthropologists had conceived and written about their objects of study. I had become interested in ethnographic accounts as a semi-literary form that in effect constituted authoritative knowledge of their traditional exotic or so-called primitive subjects. On the one hand, this inquiry led to a wide-ranging review of the discipline's history and current predicaments, and on the other hand, it was a liberating move that broadened the frame of subjects and problems to which work in anthropology might be directed. We originally thought of this interest in terms of repatriation -- that every act of ethnographic work elsewhere implicitly involved a critical commentary on one's own society. So why not encourage bifocal work that tacked back and forth comparatively and simultaneously between other cultures and Western society itself. This required a radical questioning of the ethnography itself as a form of knowledge and there was great interest in the department in doing this in the first part of the eighties.

Actually, this collective critique of paradigms of work in cultural anthropology took place within the vortex of a much broader, so-called crisis of representation that had been affecting a number of the disciplines of the humanities and more tangentially the social sciences and professions as well. The label "crisis" is a make-do for a very complex set of initiatives that range from the impact of academic feminism on revising taken for granted perspectives in many disciplines, to the permeation of radical critical ideas about the nature of language and the process of knowledge, produced during the 1960s by the so-called French poststructuralists such as Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan, and disseminated in the U.S. initially through literature departments. In its American context, the success in provocation of these various resources for critical ideas also had to do with the widely felt decline of American power since the 1960s in world affairs, and the alienation of left/liberal academics from domestic politics in the conservatives' dismantling of the welfare state.

The core of this crisis had to do with both language and authority in the conduct of those disciplines that produce current knowledge about society and culture. First, there was the bedrock sense that the concepts developed in various disciplines to describe, a ssimilate and domesticate reality were no longer adequate. The language of culture, class, sets of binary distinctions such as modern vs traditional, individual vs society etc. -- while these might have been critiqued piecemeal at different times in the past in various disciplines -- now seemed en masse to no longer capture the magnitude or quality of changes occurring in the contemporary world. There was a sense, differently expressed in different disciplines, of the need for a major overhaul of ways of thinking and writing, and ultimately of questions asked. This was far from a cosmetic or partial self-critique and it has led to a variety of productive and not so productive debates about different models of work and different objects of study in fields ranging from economics, to history, law, architecture, art, and philosophy.

With the critique of the language and the cognitive models of disciplines also came a critique of the authority of the kinds of knowledge that they produced. Far from nihilistically destroying authority, the search has been for new forms of authority in reconfigured fields of knowledge production -- what is now to count as knowledge?, who is to be included and excluded from having a voice or position in the development of knowledge about society and culture? On what basis can a special authority for disciplines be established once the community who receives and assesses the knowledge that they produce widens within and beyond academia?

In anthropology, the crisis of representation has taken the form of two specific predicaments, that go to the very heart of its practice and the topics to which it has historically addressed itself. The idea of the primitive -- however modified this concept has become -- has been central to the way anthropology has conceived its object of study. Contemporary peoples on which anthropologists have focused have been conceptually viewed as alien to the experience of modernity -- as separate in time and space, as radical exemplars of difference and alternative possibility from us. Recent critiques of this view have argued that the category of the primitive has been an integral dimension of the development of the notion of modernity itself, and is inseparable from this notion at the core of our own self-identity in the euroamerican west. This means that our own identity and those of the peoples that anthropologists have studied should no longer be represented or described in terms of binary us-them contrast. This merging of what was previously and fundamentally contrasted in conceptualizations at the foundation of doing anthropology requires a radical reconfiguration of what our object of study is -- who we are as observers, and who the peoples we have observed are, if not primitives and exotics. This cri tique of the basic conceptual distinction at the core of anthropological work pushes us toward new objects of study and modifications in our methods.

Second and relatedly, there is a new sensitivity to the terms on which difference -- cultural, racial, gender, or class can be established and discussed. This gets to the basic task of anthropology as that of cross-cultural translation, of constituting its own knowledge on some representation of what the world seems like from another point of view, as an integral part of that knowledge. How to establish difference in a world where the object of study itself has been called into question raises additional theoretical and methodological questions for anthropology. Thinking about the nature of difference and how it emerges in social life is not just the emblematic concern of anthropology or of the emerging interdisciplinary arena of cultural studies; it is itself one of the key and widespread forms of social thought at this moment in the history of modernity, and is indeed one of the major topics for cultural analysis in anthropological research. In short, there is a certain identity or parallel between our own predicaments as a scholarly subculture and the cultures that are our subjects of study. This raises profound questions about the past forms of authority of anthropological representations, and on what basis a special claim for our own creation of knowledge about others might be made.

It was in addressing and giving a powerful articulation to these specific predicaments within anthropological discourse, which were indeed in the air, so to speak, and at least felt by many, especially younger anthropologists, that our department was able to make a seminal contribution in the mid 1980s. This collective work of the department took two institutional forms. One was a regular discussion group called the Rice Circle which included members of the anthropology department as well as a few from humanities departments. The critique of anthropological representation was deepened in this forum in comparison with parallel trends in other disciplines, and its relationship to a much more general crisis of language and authority was clarified. This was an intense, exciting, and rather rare moment of collegial exchange (lasting from 1983 until 1987). The Rice Circle was the kernel from which the present Center for Cultural Studies eventually developed after President Rupp arrived and initiated a program of enhancement.

Actually during this period such informal groups were common in many universities across the country, and we began to form cross-disciplinary collaborations especially with other scholars who were involved with the same critiques of how the West has represented in language and literature others, as primitives, as orientals, as peoples outside the modern. Most prominent among these was James Clifford, an intellectual historian and literary scholar in the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I had known Clifford when we were graduate students at Harvard, and he first came to Rice in 1980 just as we were formulating our first papers on the rhetoric of anthropological discourse. This working alliance with Clifford that spanned disciplinary boundaries was the source of the considerable strength and provocation of the critical work we produced. It was legitimated by participation from within anthropology, yet it clearly was shaped by first-rate scholarship in history and literary studies.

The culmination of the collaboration came in 1984 at a week-long, now legendary seminar at the School of American Research in Santa Fe with ten participants, three from Rice, Clifford from Santa Cruz, and six other prominent anthropologists and literary scholars. The resulting edited volume, published in 1986 and edited by Clifford and myself, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography came to have an immense impact in the arena of cultural studies, arising mainly from the humanities, and on a number of contemporary tendencies in the social sciences as well. The volume was widely received as a kind of manifesto for new frames of work in anthropology and cultural studies but also as a model for how serious critiques of disciplinary rhetorics might be undertaken. It stimulated debates with feminists, filmmakers, and many others trying to come to terms with ways of articulating difference and diversity in conditions of late twentieth century globalization. For those who wanted to experiment with different ways of researching and writing within their own disciplinary traditions, the book became important as a kind of counter-authority or license for new initiatives.

Also published in 1986 was the book Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences coauthored by Mike Fischer and myself, which while taking off from the sort of rhetorical critique of anthropological discourse in Writing Culture, tried to deal with its implications for the reshaping of projects and topics of anthropological research.

It also articulated a central tendency -- settling on the label cultural critique -- for the research that might be produced in this department following on the disciplinary critiques of the early 80s. Although a much different book from Writing Culture , Anthropology as Cultural Critique , published at virtually the same time, was generally received along with it as the "statement" of new trends. While Mike and I distinctly avoided prophetic prose, actually seeing ourselves as documenting a shift that could be read into a whole generation of new work already being produced, we were seen, as well as the Rice department itself, perhaps irresistibly, given the widespread felt need for overhaul, in more radical, provocative terms.

The publication of these two volumes and a few others that followed (for example, Steve Tyler's The Unspeakable , in 1987 and Jim Clifford's The Predicament of Culture , in 1988) really have defined the terms of a central tendency or focus of debate in cultural anthropology, and for particular research interests within the emergent interdisciplinary sphere of cultural studies, from the mid 1980s into the 1990s.

The appearance of these volumes also marks a kind of watershed in the development of the department's program. They appeared just as President Rupp's enhancement initiative started. The formation of the Center for Cultural Studies, partly inspired by the department's energy and example, with Mike Fischer as its inaugural director, provided a much broader, more diverse realm of opportunity for pursuing our interests in an interdisciplinary environment. Cultural studies itself, a label evoking the success of a similar effort in post-War Britain, may or may not be a permanent label for this trend in the US, but it certainly seems to be sticking at the moment. It is indeed unclear whether cultural studies will assume disciplinary status -- its circumstances of founding and particular theoretical inflections vary a good deal from center to center.

Certainly, the focus on the keyword culture as an identity signals the new prominence of this messy, very complex concept in creating new approaches and objects of study in a multiple disciplinary field of mutual influence. It is what literary studies, a major force in having disseminated the theoretical ideas that power the new work and writings, would like to turn itself into in conjunction with history, philosophy, anthropology, and art, among other existing disciplines.

Traditionally, high culture -- the best a society has to offer, its science, arts, and literature -- has been distinguished conceptually from popular culture -- mass or low culture, easily accessible forms of entertainment, stories and the like -- which in turn has been distinguished from culture as the premises -- often tacit -- of everyday life. In cultural studies, the distinctions among these various meanings of culture are being blurred to create new frames for understanding a contemporary world in which culture, in all its senses is clearly more important, and in domains and in forms never encountered before. For anthropology, working traditionally in small-scale societies, the distinctions never did mean much, but many anthropologists are now quite amazed that a concept with which they have long been identified suddenly has arisen with new vitality and cogency in ways in which their own historic appropriation of the concept is not seen to be particularly relevant. Cultural studies still too often sees the work of anthropologists as relegated to the study of the exotic or primitive, even though these are now thoroughly discredited categories to actually describe peoples, while anthropologists see cultural studies as being too textual, too hermetic, and indeed too parochial within Western high culture despite its desire to "world" itself -- to be truly cosmopolitan, global, and politically engaged. In one important sense the Rice department's project is to work on the borderlands between the established discipline of anthropology and the emergent realm of cultural studies, trying to mediate and, through our collective research, contribute to a creative traffic of mutual influence.

During the late 80s our program strengthened considerably by the addition of three new members -- Sharon Traweek who came to us from MIT as an enhancement addition and whose work on the worlds of high energy physicists, particularly as observed in the US and Japan, is emblematic of the sort of innovative approaches and topics we are known for engendering; Nia Georges from Columbia giving us strength in medical anthropology; and Kathryn Milun, trained in comparative literature at the University of Minnesota, and doing research in arenas such as native peoples rights movements and the remaking of national identities in Eastern Europe. With Milun, trained in one of the major disciplines shaping cultural studies, we have sought to integrate a key interdisciplinary framework directly within departmental curricula and conversations. One of the most interesting intellectual legacies of our mid 80s interventions is the existence of a distinctive collective identity which, mostly to our amusement, but occasionally to our distress, has a life very much of its own within anthropology and beyond. The fact of a departmental identity itself in the present context is unusual, since unlike the prosperous period of the 1960s when departments built quickly and coherently around particular specialties and themes, the period of the late 70s and early 80s was one of dispersal, decay,and loss, in which, as I recounted earlier, our opportunity to rebuild a department over a short period of time around a vision was quite unique.

What kind of identity then is it? Within anthropology, we have been controversial, as sort of mundane outlaws, and this has been a source of pleasure and fun for us in a field that badly needed stirring up. Some have worried that the critique of anthropological rhetoric is only nihilistic and does not lead to new research programs; others fear the loss of a disciplinary tradition which they hold dear and for which they are nostalgic; others -- representing a form of Marxist anthropology that was expansive in the 1960s and early 1970s -- feel envious that their previous coveted occupation of the position of critics of the discipline has seemingly been usurped, while still others, and we think many more, found our critiques a legitimation for modifying and redirecting the distinctive ethnographic mode of inquiry in anthropology toward new rhetorics, strategies of research, and objects of study.

There have been attempts to label us as postmoderns which is a pervasive term of ambiguous reference in contemporary intellectual life. While everyone is willing to discuss postmodernism as a phenomenon, no one is willing to assume the mantle him or herself -- it functions as a kind of name-calling. The dissemination of the term is itself worthy of study and reveals important aspects of our time. Virtually no one is happy with the term anymore -- with its overuse, ubiquity and vagueness -- but it won't seem to go away or run the usual course of fashion in academia.

The term postmodern can refer both to the conditions of knowledge or intellectual sensibility at present a n d to the actual conditions of society which require new approaches for understanding them. As present conditions of knowledge, I like John Rajchman's characterization of postmodernism, expressed as part of his amazement that such a vague object could have become so ubiquitous and so focusing of discussions in the current interdisciplinary trend for so long. As he says,
Postmodernism is like the Toyota of thought:produced and assembled in several different places and sold everywhere....Postmodernism is a sign of the loss of the colonial model of a universal culture spread out to educate the world at large. It is rather theory for a postcolonial world of products sold in different places without a center...it is like the lingua franca of this world. It can be made and consumed everywhere and nowhere.

It is interesting that Rajchman, like many others whose characterizations of postmodernism I have read, uses economistic metaphors like market competition, inflation, etc to characterize the conditions of knowledge or else use medical, epidemiological metaphors that suggest postmodernism is like a virus or an infection. Either way, what is ironic, is that real conditions of postmodernity, not well understood in sociological or ethnographic terms, are used as the source of metaphors for describing the conditions of postmodern knowledge and sensibility: the great changes afoot in economy, society, and polity are the metaphors for great changes in the culture and sensibility of intellectual life. It is also irresistible to go in the contrary direction and see how cultural discourse feeds back upon social, political, and economic processes. Indeed, as a department, we feel less threatened by the loose, anarchic conditions by which knowledge is now produced as postmodernism, but are much more interested in inquiring into the actual social conditions of postmodernity which we believe are perhaps the major stimulant of the crisis of representation -- the defeat of concepts, past approaches and rhetorics in the face of unprecedented levels of velocity and sources of change that disrupt our notions of what a society is, what a culture is, what an institution is, even what a person is.

So within anthropology while we are provocative and even a little dangerous in a mundane way, in the world of cultural studies we, among many others, represent a relevant, or a potentially relevant anthropology. It is to developing this potentiality under the banner of a project of cultural critique that the department's current research activity is directed.

One of the great benefits of this identity, out there so to speak, has been the strong revival of our graduate program in the midst of a partial revival of such programs nationally from the mid eighties on. We now compete for the very best graduate students entering anthropology or cultural studies programs. For the excellent students who do come we offer more freedom and encouragement toward independence than perhaps anywhere else in anthropology. Indeed, the core energy in the department can be understood to have shifted from the emphasis on discussion among colleagues during the heady days of the Rice Circle, when our graduate program was in limbo, to an emphasis on the shaping of our theoretical and research agendas through working with graduate students, a number of whom are refugees from other programs, who come to work with us in a semi-collegial atmosphere. Students typically find their way to faculty supervision as much as by their interesting us by their projects as by our recruiting them to ours.

So what has happened to the intensive department conversations after 1986? They remain present as atmosphere, as a tacit, invisible frame to our relations in the department. When we do frequently meet in graduate committee meetings, on the occasion of guest speakers and visitors, or casually in the hall, there is always a framework of agreement and debate to materialize and pick up on. This is the minimal, non-invasive, and non-oppressive consensus on which we can depend and which makes the department special. But what I personally value as much if not more than this level of consensus is the dissensus that we share which ensures the kind of productive tensions that keeps fresh ideas coursing through the department -- for example, Steve's Nietzschean and relentless critiques of representation that cuts perhaps our sometimes too optimistic hopes for a critical ethnography, while always giving us something to think about in the analysis of our subjects' language games; Sharon's consistent and powerful introductions of questions of gender into our works well as her incomparable understanding of the workings of complex institutions under postmodern challenge; Julie's concern that questions of power not be slighted when discussions of cultural symbols tend to be drifting from awareness of conditions of suffering and terror over large parts of the globe; or, the subtle differences in sensibility in the sharing between Mike and myself of an interest in how critical initiatives emerge in the lifeworlds of particular subjects cross-culturally. We have enough consensus to make our real differences interesting, enduring, and productive. But for such dissensus we would have run out of steam long ago.

I now want to turn to a personal characterization of what our central tendency or project, characterized as cultural critique, has been. What, more substantively, is the nature of the project we are pursuing? After all, internal critique of one's perspectives, practices and discipline is fine up to a point. But what does it open up? How does it form a base for responding to the real crisis of description and analytic language that exists?

Rather than dead-ending in repetitive, endless restatements of radical critique, or winding up with what we had before with just a change in rhetoric or jargon, or ending in a pallid plea to be more self-conscious about using the usual methods, the project of critique is finally justifiable only as a difference that makes a difference.

Those of you, raised in the tradition of social science may be ill at ease by this time with basing projects of research so wholly on critiques, deconstructive methods and the like. The latter certainly open the way to new venues, questions etc. but when does work settle into paradigms of research, projects that seem more positive? First, I hope I am making the case effectively that crises, critiques and the like -- such negative sounding words -- actually do serve as the positive bases of research -- they are productive and creative of new and systematic insights. Indeed, in the usual model of work, based on natural science ideals, simplicity is good and too much complexity is fruitless. Much of what I have been describing thrives on complexification -- the ability to overcome the languages and finesses which refined theory for the analysis of late nineteenth early twentieth century forms of modernity, but no longer seem to work for what seems to be unprecedented in contemporary social processes. To capture the velocity of contemporary changes and reorganizations of culture, economy and society both globally and locally requires a much more complex model of work and much more complex views of what objects of study are. Refinements can come later.

Second, I can't emphasize enough too much that critiques lead not to discovering novel paradigms, but to strategies of reinvention, a recreation of the intellectual capital of the past. In this sense there is a high tolerance for the fragmentation and recombinations of past theoretical legacies.

Demystified of a world of primitives, exotic societies in which it can operate, the field of inquiry of ethnography becomes the emergent present, the contemporary. And what of the contemporary? If there is one very large issue or debate that gives structure to much of the impulse behind the crisis of representation - a sense of things happening in the world that are impervious or not clearly seen through the available conceptual frames and rhetorics of the human sciences -- it is the question of the continued viability of nation states in the face of global reorganizations and phenomena in the not very well charted (call it post-modern) space of the transnational or transcultural. All that is local -- closely observed -- is at the same time global, and vice versa. How to achieve descriptions of this relation in very specific settings is our problem. As one of the pioneers of British Cultural Studies, Stuart Hall, remarked to me recently, it is clear that local life is alive and well, as in the global arena, though their intimate relationships are not well understood, but the nation-state itself and the concept of civil society, to which so much of what we have tried to understand as social and cultural life in modern societies has been directed over the past centuries, seems shaky at best.

Robert Reich of Harvard who visited Rice recently as a President's lecturer also elegantly explored this problem specifically with regard to competitive political economy in his book the World of Nations. [Reich's specialty is popularizing debates and positions from within academia for an upscale general readership and the policy elite -- this recent volume registers a growing sense of unease -- the crisis of representation I referred to -- about the habitual (what he calls vestigial) ways of thinking about the post cold War attempt to imagine a new world order based on a kind of neomercantilism. Reich sees the need for a completely different narrative and vocabulary of concepts from the legacy of Adam Smith]. In his most recent book, he speaks of the rise of an elite of symbolic analysts who no longer think or act in terms of the nation-state polity; in contrast, he describes a more populist vestigial thinking that prevent us from seeing the transnational processes taking shape, and he ends with a chapter cogently and provocatively titled "Who are us?" In his habit of speaking to elites, one can certainly question Reich's grasp of the state of global perspective in popular thought and culture, but it is striking to see the extent to which he has placed issues of cultural ana lysis at the very center stage of sorting out our current most material and political interests.

One could say that Reich's concluding question "Who are Us" is the larger orientation of anthropology as cultural critique through fine grained ethnographic studies strategically situated in the space of transnational, transcultural processes, we start with the presumption that the "US" can only be understood in terms of how cultural diversity, once tied to territorialized cultures as wholes in places far from our own, is becoming complex practices of cultural difference in the processes that escape conceptually and actually the nation-state frame.

I do not want to give the impression that the issue of the viability of the nation-state in the midst of emergent processes of transnationalism is decided -- it can't be because its happening. The nation-state seems powerful, still the focus and frame of attention about matters social and cultural, yet it also seems to be irrelevant to so many new initiatives in the world from the activities of corporations to grass-roots social movements dealing with the environment and ethnic identity. This is probably the most interesting and global debate for the social sciences and cultural studies of the contemporary, and it is into this fray that a critical anthropology is well prepared to enter with its fine grained descriptions of social and cultural processes from many different angles and many different places.

In the US, the debate has many different manifestations. The specter of national decline is one such high anxiety context, and it has made improbably bestsellers of such scholarly books as Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers , and Alan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind. Abroad, a United Europe challenges the birthplace of the ideas that shaped the modern nation-state, and in many other countries with huge diasporas, transnational flows of people, resources, and culture reshape local agendas. What's clear about the present is that it goes far beyond mere past Utopian hopes for internationalism or slogans like a new world order, or 1960s-like impulses to act locally and think globally. Now there is a sense of the immediate presence of local-global articulations in everyday life and within the operations of major institutions. It is to the emergence of such articulations in older contexts that so much of the new anthropology is oriented. In so doing, we are always operating against a more conventional frame -- vestigial thinking, provocatively put -- and as such this is why new research in its formulation must arise from practices of critique. But why cultural?

The stakes in the viability of the nation-state debate exceed the understanding of the emergent world. The nation-state frame has been an implicit if not explicit framework for our thinking about society and culture. Certainly, the dominant, high prestige forms of expert discourse on society in terms of economic interest and political value assume an economy and polity that in turn operate within variant forms of the Western evolved nation state. As such the crisis of representation, to which I have referred, is about the displacement of the foundational nation-state referent from the heart of our most public discourses about contemporary reality. In such reconfigurations, the role of the cultural sphere -- of value, of differences among races, places, gender and classes -- has moved more toward the center of concerns.

Culture has always been comfortably domesticated on the margins of the dominant discourses, but just as the latter no longer optimistically produce knowledge about their traditional objects, so an even less manageable notion of culture moves in from the margins. In a sense, the predicaments of anthropology that I described earlier have become general predicaments for many other disciplines where the weight of attention to culture has increased -- the predicaments of seeing others as now integral to us -- of seeing our own traditions and present concerns as mutlicultural -- a now infamous and loaded ideological term precisely because the means for thinking about cultures in new social contexts are not available. The problem is to conceive of difference not as something produced by far distant cultures, that is assimilable to understanding by a total and thorough knowledge of that culture in its own rooted territory, but rather as produced at the boundaries of interactions and the creations of new cultural forms in emerging transnational contexts. It is just these sorts of predicaments that call for a new vocabulary and set of values pertaining to culture. This would be a notion of culture far more radical than the older liberal views pioneered by anthropology and other fields. Rather than mastering other cultures by understanding them as total complete systems of language and cognition, and thus conquering, so to speak, cultural difference in the process by making the cultural other transparent, the critical study of culture confronts endless and intractable difference generated by the process of cross-cultural interpretation and understanding itself in various socio-political contexts.

The following then are some of the general premises on which very specific projects of critical ethnographic research is now conceived; and undertaken. These premises are not rules or even methodological guidelines. They are new assumptions that are not necessarily easy to follow -- in fact, they are each subjects of various theoretical side debates themselves. But while these debates rage they are issues they each project of research must come to terms with on its own, by some set of strategies.

1. The assumption of a sharp discontinuity with the past. History is of course important, and historicizing one's contemporary subject is essential to prevent flights of Utopian fantasy. Indeed there is a wing of cultural anthropology whose strategy is to negotiate a new relationship with historians to whom anthropology has always been close. This is valuable, but in focusing on the contemporary, historical narrative is less of a guide -- the assumption is that the present is a departure from the flow of 20th century historical narrative, and this methodologically gives one a different set of lenses without falling into futurology. Certainly ,the history built into the concepts we use to think about society in a taken for granted way is a main contributor to the crisis of representation, or vestigial thought in Reich's terms. On the other hand, more daring and less contiguous forms of comparative history are thought experiments that may indeed help reconceptualization of the present. For example, certain fascinating parallels between the end of the 15th century in Europe and the present. Talking about others times and places becomes sometimes a most interesting surrogate for talking about our own predicaments.

2. Relatedly, critical ethnography works in a fine grained way to develop understandings of emergent processes in the transcultural or transnational sphere by not giving authority to any particular metanarrative. We work without the authority of a paradigm such as Marxism, or structuralism, borrowing, recombining, and committing ourselves with a sense of irony from within whatever legacies of thought are available to us. In this style, a favorite move is to recover the present relevance of forgotten or near forgotten thinkers. For example, between the wars thinkers like Georges Bataille and Walter Benjamin have been recuperated with interesting consequences in Cultural Studies.

3. The avoidance of binarisms and dualisms which conceptually have structured most modes of theoretical thought -- modernity vs tradition, individual vs society, religion vs science, history vs memory, body vs mind, oral vs literate, and of course, us vs. them. Modern thought has been built on these kinds of distinctions which in the present context has probably made invisible many of the mergings, mixings, and interreferences going on. The point is to develop an analytic discourse that is nonessentialist.

4. Relatedly, a taste for linking what seems incommensurable, for relating processes that seem by conventional thinking "worlds apart." This desire to perspectivally merge what has been kept apart is also signaled by the subtitle of Writing Culture -- politics and poetics -- which has actually become a common slogan -- the idea that culture, aesthetics, symbols have a renewed relevance to understanding spheres of interest, politics, production, economics, political economy from which it had long been separated -- also vice versa. This combining of politics and poetics -- juxtaposing them blocking them together, and if lucky finding systematic relations between them is one of the major impulses in trying to work with emerging transcultural and transnational spheres of social and cultural organization.

5. Finally, anthropology as cultural critique is reflexive, which is perhaps its most emblematic feature and the one that radically separates it from the dominant tradition of work in the social sciences. Reflexivity means more than merely being aware of your assumptions. Rather it presumes that in any study of the contemporary there is always already existing relationships of an historical, institutional, and personal value between the scholar and his or her object of study, and that an embedded part of the work itself -- from inquiry, analysis, to writing involves creative ways of thinking about and incorporating this connectedness of oneself, and the specific academic institutions and society that produces one's perspective to the object of study. Rather than mere self-awareness, reflexivity requires positioning of the knowledge that one creates as constitutive of that knowledge. This of course is the cornerstone of hermeneutic philosophy and method on which anthropology and other humanist perspectives in the social sciences have historically been based. This does not lead to subjectivism, or vagueness, but rather to a reconstituted form of qualified objectivity. Indeed it leads to a precision of concept and analys is because research is so explicitly positioned, situated and not the product of the myth of a detached, impartial. Archimedean perspective.

These premises operate in ethnographic research situated in transcultural/transnational spaces of social and cultural life and interested in such phenomena as the processes by which social or public identities are reforged by individuals, groups, regions, and states; life in exile and among diasporas and refugees, the transformation of older urban areas into communities of yet unknown demographics and cultural make-ups, in the internationalizing bases of local organizations everywhere; the role of media in cultural creolization, as it might be called, the effect of political violence and terror on reconfiguring older colonial areas of the world, adequate conceptualizations of middle-classes and their formation outside the U.S. and Europe; the commodification of cultural objects everywhere and the creative response to this in popular cultural fans, etc.

II. The Work of the Department

Shifting now to the actual contemporary work of the department, the following run-through listing of topics of research being pursued at various stage by faculty and graduate students in our department -- some of them from verbatim statements elicited by me, others being my own glosses -- is intended to give a snapshot portrait of the range and variation of current work within the broader frame of our collective effort to define a cultural critique of emergent and transforming social realities at the end of the century.

The comparative and transcultural study of contemporary "big science" projects in biology, physics, and medicine, such as the supercollider and the human genome projects. How distinctions of race, class, and gender operate in these projects of science that are oblivious to or self-consciously try to transcend these distinctions. Specifically with regard to high energy physics, how efforts at radically internationalist science take root quite differently in American and Japanese contexts.

The global as well as specifically within the U.S. activities of major Islamic and Asian philanthropic organizations.

The creation of new approaches to the study of autobiography as an access to one domain where reflexive, critical thought is produced in the flow of social life, and as an aide to devising avenues of inquiry into connections, relationships, and lives within groups that are relatively inaccessible, have gone unnoticed, or are difficult to conceptualize -- the autobiographies of scientists, those in exile or diasporas, the lives of cultural producers who have moved fluidly between realms of high and low culture industries.

The different responses to recently ended periods of national political trauma in Argentina and Latin America generally -- the national security state of the 1960s and 1970s at the end of its rationale. Modes of collective and individual remembering/forgetting experiences of terror and torture in the recent past, and the blocking or holding of those responsible accountable.

In the wake of the Argentine terror, the aesthetics of suffering and of diaspora as especially phrased in the transnational art form of the tango; and state terrorism: its parallels in Western ideologies of liberal democracy and law.

The fluidity of cultural productions in countries such as Iran, India, and China -- the connections between film and advertising industries in India, the spaces where new public cultures are being shaped, new ways to join ethnographic analysis and the study of media, such as film and video.

The appearance of new kinds of aboriginal rights, or native peoples' movements and their growing alliance with environmental groups and non-governmental organizations.

The transformation of political film in eastern Europe and the relationships between intellectuals, politicians, and popular culture stars.

The investigation of transnational spaces that are created within the overlaps of nation-states. In particular, the case of Iranian exiles in California and their creation of exile T.V. and computer bulletin boards.

A study of the cultural politics of Galveston Island's historic preservation movement. It examines Victorian "tradition" and "born on the island" mythology as the two modes of historical consciousness deployed in an ongoing competitive struggle for entrepreneurial leadership of cultural production on the island. Of particular interest is the simultaneously emerging resistance to these self-conscious attempts to give Galveston a history for the sake of its economic situation.

The study of economists and their use of transnational theoretical discourses to create policies that redefine nationalism, specifically, a comparative study of the strategic rhetorics and practices of Argentine and Slovenian economists to position their societies in a changing world order while redefining their internal agendas after dramatic political reorientations.

The comparative study of new social movements organized around ecological issues in Los Angeles, the site of one of the most interesting mixes of new and old diasporas that has so far defied systematic description. Ecological movements are remapping this urban landscape in ways that exceed their stated concerns.

Cross-cultural experiences and interpretations of new reproductive technologies. Specifically the use of fetal ultrasound imaging in "the management" of pregnancy and birth in Greece. An emphasis on the way that technical expertise is disseminated and authoritative knowledge is produced. Relatedly, abortion issues in a Greek context, what Greek women's accounts of abortion reveal about notions of personhood and morality across the life cycle.

The influence of postmodernist ideas on theories of language, especially on the creation of performances without scripts and writing without textual representation. An interest in exploring writing in the middle voice, an ancient form which is neither passive nor active, and where subject and object are merged.

In studying alternative "New Age" healing, an interest in the practices of healers and seekers derived from diverse, sacred and secular cultural practices. How a self-conscious spirit of revision, critique, and experimentation permeates the everyday life level of meaning and experience in this domain of healing.

The limitations and possibilities of addressing historical figures once that category has been put into question. This means looking at the possible alternative accounts of subjectivity through biographical, social, professional, filmic, and textual frames. This complex approach to biography and the predicaments of producing it in the current frame of deconstructive theories etc. will play back on French academic and artistic traditions themselves of the twentieth century, and particularly the entwined biographies of Georges Bataille, Sylvia Bataille, and Jacques Lacan.

The social history of a Siberian people in the age of Perestroika, by the first Western ethnographic project in the Soviet Union since the early 1 970s. Shifting local interpretations of loyalty in a totalitarian state; the politics of cre ating new cultural vitality in the balkanized situation of the former USSR and eastern Europe based on claims to being cultureless, or a culture in ruins from years of Stalinization and after.

The recrudescence of Armenian nationalism through tracing the relationships between the diaspora and the politics at home before and after Gorbachev. Fieldwork in Armenia throughout the entire period of the democratic movement and the earthquake. This work focuses on the changing role of the repatriates to Armenia, those who came to Armenia in the aftermath of each of the World Wars and most recently the massive population transfer between Azerbaijan and Armenia. The key concern is with the role of diasporas in the creation of modern nation states, with the comparative frames for this being Greece and Israel, in both cases of which key state elites have come from other countries. Today in Armenia, the ministers of Foreign Affairs and Energy, as well as the deputy minister for North American Affairs are Americans, the deputy minister for Europe is French.

Revival of folklore and dance in Turkey just as it seeks a renegotiation of its Western and Islamic allegiances as its strategic position changes in the Middle East.

The changing fortunes of the Karen peoples of Thailand and Burma, and the role of literacy and missionaries in shaping a contemporary identity.

In Portuguese communities, catching a cuckold involves both speaking out in a language of cunning, "resistance" and freedom and acting out a romantic dream of attachment and containment. The language of cuckoldry embodies not only an individual's relationship in a slippery, illusionary and confining community but the relationship of that "community" to an equally contradictory "world" of cheating politicians, of knowledge fatefully gained and preciously guarded, and of glimmering hope-chests filled with consuming passions as seductive as venus fly traps. This study avoids placing cuckoldry into the usual exotic cultural scenarios, but explores it for what it tells about the role of passion in everyday social, political, and economic life.

Secrecy as a mode of creating informal hierarchies within the contemporary Colombian state; a close look at the repatriation of former guerrilla groups in Columbia into conventional social life and politics.

Rock music, and particularly, its grass roots participation and reception as a perspective on postwar U.S. cultural change in general.

A study of environmental and political activism in Bhopal, India, the site of the Union Carbide disaster. Work with the victims of chemical disaster at Bhopal, helping and observing grass roots activists strategize issues of political democracy, legal accountability, ecological policy, and gender politics in the aftermath of the failures of Indian state socialism, Ghandian nationalism, and various forms of middle-class based activism.

The study of Hispanic popular cultural forms, especially low-riding and murals in Los Angeles, Houston, and New Mexico.

A critique of theories of aphasia in neurology and clinical practices of treating it, from the perspective of postmodern approaches to language.

The study of a the collecting practices and organization of a great private art collection in Houston as access to ways in which Western high culture and value is being reconditioned at a time of great social challenges to its moral integrity and historical coherence.

Finally, I want to briefly describe a collective, continuing project in which the department has become involved with the participation of the Center for Cultural Studies. We have begun to produce a series of volumes, entitled the Fin-de-siecle annual, the first volume to appear tentatively in 1993, with a volume each year until 2000 at which point the project will end or transform into something else. We are not so much interested in literal parallels with the end of last century, which the term fin-de-siecle evokes, except perhaps ironically, nor do we see ourselves engaging in futurism or futurology, as was in brief fashion during the 1960s and 1 970s. Rather, we are interested in emergent cultural formations out of the maturing or exhaustion of ideas and structures that have been powerful in the twentieth century, and the continuing vitality of which are explicitly in question in many milieus and contexts of everyday life globally. For us, fin-de-siecle is far from the Eurocentric phenomenon it was at the end of the last century, but it does problematize the notion of modernity, or the modern in the diverse forms that these referents take globally.

A lot of themes that we will be interested in have already been articulated or partially articulated in the realm of cultural studies. We want to focus on issues that have not been too chewed over, and we have a resolutely sociological or ethnographic orientation to them (that is, we want the articulation of the issues to come from within, or be true to the idioms of the scenes of social action). Much. thought will be given in each annual to innovative means of presenting issues from a curiosity about the way ideas reflected in the academy play out and are reflected upon at sites of enactment in the "real world", or rather, others' worlds, which so much of the work in cultural studies refers to and desires connection with.

The first volume in preparation will take the form of conversations, a cross between ethnographic interviews and New Yorker Profiles or Playboy Interviews, and will register in different locations and from the in-depth perspectives of particular social actors changes in public life and the terms of everyday discourse in the wake of traumatic political changes. Contributors, a number of whom are faculty and graduate students in this department, with deep experience of historical and ethnographic research in certain countries have conducted interviews and held conversations with persons who have been actively involved in processes of change. Each contribution will be structured around carefully edited conversations. The first volume will be focused on the former USSR (the debates over the reorganization of the Writers' Union in Moscow, the constitution of the new leadership of independent Armenia from among others, scholars with PhDs, the resurgence of shamanism in Siberia), eastern Europe (the role of rock culture in creating a new Hungarian identity; the environmental movement in Lithuania as a proving ground for the movement leading to independence; the remaking of ethnic identities in Romania), and the new collective Europe (an articulation of right wing positions in the politics of the new pan European parliament in Strasbourg). Comparative contributions will come from India, Greece, South Africa, and Argentina (focusing on a military officer who refused to go along with the "dirty war" there). The idea will be to expose voices from within situations of rapid transformation and emergence that are in some ways like those of middle-class educated people in the West, but also very foreign in terms of cultural inflection and political situation. So much of the concern of cultural studies scholarship with the contemporary is mediated through texts. In the best tradition of ethnography, the contributions of this volume through conversations should be able to expose unusual connections and relationships that constitute processes of change.

Subsequent volumes using the same or different formats might deal with global efforts in science, the rise of social movements based on environmentalism, on diasporas, socialisms after the Cold War, and on the effects of media on the remaking of local cultural identities. In May of each year, the department and others interested meet with two outsiders, invited to stimulate discussions concerning the theme for the following year. The contributors for each year either visit the department singly to present versions of their projects, or come in the spring for a collective editorial meeting before each annual is sent to the publisher.

This effort not only provides a structure of coherent intellectual activity for cultural anthropologists at Rice each year, around topics of long time concern to themes on which the reputation of the department has been built but it also demonstrates a key and unique contribution of anthropology to the concerns of cultural studies.

As a concluding word to this departmental muster of research as well as to this talk, I want to point to one downside of all the excitement and rethinking that the ferment of critique brings, and this is the avantguardist tendency to think that one is making history, but this can be true only to the extent that one's academic work, as we conceive a project of cultural critique here, constantly focuses the fact that history is being made elsewhere.