5?

4 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [96,1994]

2
The ethnopoetics that I knew was, first & last, the work of poets. Of a certain kind of
poet.
As such its mission was subversive, questioning the imperium even while growing out
of it. Transforming.
It was the work of individuals who found in multiplicity the cure for that conformity
of thought, of spirit, that generality that robs us of our moments. That denies them to
the world at large.
A play between that otherness inside me & the identities imposed from outside.
It is not ethnopoetics as a course of study-however much we wanted it-but as a
course of action.
“I”is an “other,”then; becomes a wmld of others.
It is a process of becoming. A collaging self. Is infinite & contradictory. It is “I”and
“not-I.”
“Do I contradict myxelf? Very well, I contmdict myself. I is infinite. I contains
multitudes.”
Said Rimbaud/Whitman at the very start.
It is from where we are, the basis still of any ethnopoetics worth the struggle.
For those for whom it happens, the world is open, & the mind (forever empty) is
forever full.
There is no turning back, I meant to say.
Here the millennium demands it.

Whose Cultural Studies?

ROSAIDO
RENATO
Stanfmd Universily

Whatfollows is the text of a t& given to litma? scholars at a December 1992 M0ab-n Language
Associationforum called “Cultural Studies and the Disciplines: Are T h e Any Boundaries Left ?
It reflects on thepossibilities and arueieties aroused by culturalstudiesfmanthropohgkts and ethnic
studiesfaculty. It also tries to explain the potential ofanthropology and ethnic studies to members
ofEnglzsh + a r t m t s who, at times, see themselves as t h owners of cultural studies.

R ECENTLY A SPEAKER CAME TO MY HOME INSTITUTION and promised to tell us about

cultural studies. The turnout was tremendous. Graduate students came wondering
whether or not to invest their careers in cultural studies and curious faculty members
came hoping to find out what it was. Courses on cultural studies, not to mention the
Illinois megaconference, have been similarly mobbed, most probably for similar rea-
sons. In certain quarters cultural studies raises apprehensions about the dimly known
and the vaguely threatening; in other quarters it promises to solve all problems and
satisfyall customers. Faculty members who ”do”cultural studies often feel marginalized
and beleaguered because they have come under attack from departmentally confined
 FORUM 5“5

colleagues and because they have been underfunded by deans who invest primarily in
traditional departments. Ironically, graduate students not yet released from their
indentured servitude often feel oppressed by cultural studies agendas, which they regard
as the new hegemony. Yet the new hegemony, not unlike the notion of a liberal arts
education, seems to have as many definitions as it has definers.
These observations can, perhaps, be reduced to the following proposition: cultural
studies refers to a multistranded intellectual movement that has an oppositional history
but now dominates the intellectual action at the site where a number of disciplines
reproduce themselves-that is, among graduate students. At the same time, one finds
few departments or programs where faculty appointments can be made directly in
cultural studies. Faculty members who do cultural studies are thus required to pass
muster both in departmentally based disciplines and in their freely chosen interdisci-
plinarity. Unlike, say, American studies, interdisciplinary cultural studies lacks the
annual rites of intensification that reflect and produce the status of true disciplines, such
as the present scene, which derives from and annually re-creates the Modern Language
Association as a corporate body. For all the intellectual excitement generated by the
cultural studies movement, its material base seems pretty flimsy compared with that of
established departments.
Let me propose a pair of genealogies that imply a broad project for cultural studies.
The first genealogy traces my probably not unrepresentative history of beginning to do
cultural studies. The site for this beginning was the emergent invisible university of
reading groups where overworked faculty members tried to renew themselves through
intellectual conversation rather than departmentally based talk about budgets and
graduate programs. In the late 197Os,I participated in a newly forminggroupat Stanford
called the interpretation seminar. Participants came primarily from the law school,
literary humanities, and anthropology. We got off to a fast start by reading and then
meeting with French philosopher Michel Foucault. By the mid-1980s. however, the
seminar was subverted by its own success; it became too big to be much more than a
performance arena.
At that point, some nine years ago, a rebel group unwittingly became part of a larger
trend and formed a cultural studies seminar. In order to promote good discussion, the
new group suppressed its democratic impulses and resolved to remain small. In reaction
to cultural elitisms and disciplinary agendas, the group decided to read broadly:
imaginative literature, popular culture, social theory, political economy, and works
authored by people of color both in the United States and in the third world. The group
has read books and screened videos on authoritarianism and the state, the Middle East,
South Africa, official state and informal ethnic nationalisms, Los Angeles, the Philip
pines, displacement and transnationalism, and the politics of affirmative action and
multiculturalism. The group has also sponsored graduate student reading groups,
worked on teach-ins with local activists during the GulfWar, and organized a conference
on culture and the crisis of the national. Yet the group has not been able to institution-
alize itself beyond the level of a reading group.
The second genealogy for cultural studies is more generic. It begins with Raymond
Williams, E. P. Thompson, and Antonio Gramsci as representative cultural Marxist
thinkers whose work retains an analysis of political economy and a concern with human
emancipation alongside an understanding of culture, ideology, and human agency. In
this context, culture is laced with power and power is shaped by culture. Subsequent
links in this genealogy include the reconceptualizations required by the emergence of
gender, race, and sexuality as analytic concepts deriving from social movements of
feminists and their allies, members of historically subordinated racialized groups and
their allies, and gays and lesbians and their allies. Such a genealogy problematizes
previously taken-for-granted monolithic social unities. Once one notices that forms of
subordination can intersect, say, in a working-class lesbian Chicana, neither women,
Chicanos, lesbians, nor the working class can appear as homogeneous as they did before.
526 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [96. 19941

How and to what extent do the various forms of oppression coincide, collide, and
diverge?What are their social bases and their possibilities of alliance? These are not the
only valuable agendas for cultural studies, but they are prominent among mine.
Let me now speak first as an anthropologist and then as a Chicano anthropologist.
The present audience would probably be surprised to hear the reactions to cultural
studies voiced by senior anthropologists. One often hears laments about exclusion:
“They’ve shut us out,” “We’re being silenced,” and the like. Humanists most broadly
and literary critics in particular play the villains in these melodramas (as they do in not
unrelated anthropological melodramas about multiculturalism). Yes, literary scholars,
whatever their self-perceptions, are the all-powerful, hegemonic, exclusionary group.
Despite all the talk about interdisciplinarity, a large number of senior anthropologists
feel that cultural studies is just another name for literary studies. They feel downright
bad because they have not been invited to the party.
The feelings of exclusion predictably engender other recognizable feelings: “If I can’t
come to the party, then I’m going to take my toys and go home.” In public discourse,
such feelings usually are encoded as something like: “Cultural studies does nothing that
anthropology hasn’t already done long ago. These literary critics would do well to read
Franz Boas or to take an introductory anthropology course.” Now there is a grain of
truth in the anthropologist’s lament. An introductory anthropology course would
probably do relatively little damage. And one could probably learn that culture in the
anthropological sense (How many literary scholars sneer as they say “culture in the
anthropological sense”?) is neither high nor low; it is all-pervasive. Mediatian is the
keyword here. Rather than being a separate domain, like icing on a cake, culture in this
sense mediates all human conduct. It has to do with everyday life; material, economic,
and institutional realms; politics, romance, religion, and spirituality. To perceive cul-
tural dimensions, one need only ask Could things human be otherwise? Compare with
Nuer politics, Balinese romance, Navajo religion, and Huichol spirituality. Now explore
the tacit and explicit assumptions that guide local social relations and institutional
forms.
Not unlike sociologist Max Weber’s A.otRctantEthic,where a moral code governing the
restricted realm of monastic life moved into the broadest reaches of civil society and
market relations, the anthropological concept of culture has moved from the seemingly
esoteric domains of small-scale hinterland societies with relatively low levels of technol-
ogy into the world of advanced capitalism with its invasive commodification and its
global political economies that reach in milliseconds from Manhattan to Tokyo and in
maxiseconds from Cooperstown to Minatitlin. It has been applied to contexts that range
from modem British subcultures and renaissance self-fashioning to international rela-
tions and contemporary music in the African diaspora. In other words, it has diffused
from anthropology to literary studies, law, social history, communication, business,
media studies, and more.
Not unlike the faculty seminar on interpretation discussed a moment ago, and much
as any diffusionist would have predicted, the traditional anthropological concept of
culture has undergone a number of metamorphoses in the exhilarating borrowing and
lending propelled by its success as a hot commodity. The anthropological notion’s rapid
diffusion has led some to say that all that is solid melts into cultural studies as gender,
sexuality, and racism prove to have been socially and historically constructed. Here
cultural studies faces the analytical difficulty of attending, say, to racism as a historically
changing cultural construct without losing touch with the actual violence, whether
physical, verbal, or institutional, inflicted on living human beings through systemic
white supremacy.
Anthropologists have lost their monopoly on the concept of culture, and in the
process the concept itself has been transformed. It no longer seems possible to study
culture as an objectified thing or as a selfenclosed, coherent, patterned field of
meaning. (New critics, whose treasured, selfcontained texts have undergone a parallel
 FORUM 527

fate, no doubt can empathize with the anthropologist’s lament.) Instead of studying an
object in the world (that is, the culture), social analysts investigate processes of media-
tion through which meanings are selected and organized in complex fields that literary
theorist Mary Louise Pratt has called contact zones. In contact zones social relations are
often unequal and people may speak different languages or the same language with
different inflections, meanings, or purposes. An elementary school teacher who tells
students to beware of strangers would do well to pause and wonder what strangers look
like to six-year-olds.A New York sociologist who says national debates require civility
should not be surprised when a Chicano academic asks instead for mutual rapeto
because, for him, civility appears to be an ordeal-yet another imposition of coercive
Anglo conformity.
It should come as no surprise that anthropology has to remake itself and that some
scholars feel bereft and nostalgic for disciplines as they were in simpler, more comfort-
able times. Yet both anthropology and cultural studies have gained. New objects of study
come into view as anthropologists talk about arenas of interaction among members of
different cultures, in the increasingly obsolete traditional anthropological sense. Gradu-
ate students can work in widespread multicultural contact zones rather than continuing
to survey islands seeking that rare niche inhabited by an intact whole culture. At once
inspired by and inspiring work in cultural studies, younger anthropologists have increas-
ingly turned their gaze to the United States,where, one writer estimates, the past dozen
years have seen twice as much anthropological research as was done in the entire
previous history of the discipline. The intellectual labor of such researchers can
contribute to activist interventions in the ongoing process of democratizing this nation’s
major institutions, including universities and colleges. This shift in conditions of
possibility reveals that the traditional anthropological concept of separate and equal
cultures has little to offer when diversity resides inside a single classroom or in a single
decision-making room rather than in separate and usually not soequal rooms. In related
cases, with different and as yet little recognized implications, certain characteristics
attributed uniquely to the metropolitan postmodern condition have been found to
apply with equal ease to hinterland groups in Kalimantan and elsewhere whose daily
lives are being redescribed with the benefit of recent work in cultural studies.
Now let me speak as a Chicano anthropologist. Here one finds less lamentation and
more anxiety about cultural studies. If senior anthropologists feel that the discipline’s
crownjewel has been ripped off by cultural studies, faculty and students in ethnic studies
programs often feel that cultural studies is an only slightly disguised effort to restore
white male authority in areas where ethnic studies programs have a chance of speaking
with some authority. If certain majority scholars distance themselves from cultural
studies by saying that it is nothing more than ethnic studies writ large, certain minority
scholars counter that the covert agenda of cultural studies is to allow white authority to
coopt ethnic studies programs.
Consider the ChronicleofHigherEducation’srecent praise songs of insightful, moderate,
and sensible Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor’swritings on multiculturalism.What
happened to bell hooks, Charles Lawrence, Gloria Anzaldua, Cornel West, Man Mat-
suda, Gerald Lopez, Norma Alarcon, Houston Baker, Michelle Wallace, GeraldVizenor,
Patricia Williams, Henry Louis Gates, and Paula Gunn Allen? Lest there be any confu-
sion, the story on Taylor’swritings poses problems of reception, not of production. 1 do
not think that it takes one to know one. Taylor’s work is valuable; it makes significant
contributions to a discussion as vexed as it is significant for this nation’s future. The
problem resides not in the inclusion of Taylor (his inclusion is welcome) but in the
neglect of other prominent voices and the general tone of “in Taylor we’ve finally got
what we’ve all been waiting for, an alternative to Afrocentrism.” Is this an academic
version of the return of the great white hope? Didn’tJoe Louis put that one to rest? The
anxiety in ethnic studies programs is that their work on diversity; educational democ-
racy; race; white supremacy; intersections of gender, race, and sexuality; the politics of
528 AMERICAN AKTHROPOLOGIST [96, 19941

culture; histories of segregation and civil rights movements; movements for economic
democracy; and the critical issues of housing, health care, jobs, and education will be
appropriated by conferences with all-white panels of experts organized by the all-white
chief executive officers of cultural studies programs.
Although I share certain anxieties of people in ethnic studies, I remain hopeful-at
least on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Universities need both ethnic studies and
cultural studies. Ethnic studies programs both analyze and excavate oppositional uadi-
tions whose very existence has been lost to the established disciplines. Can intellectuals
in the United States afford to lose touch with such traditions? Far from fostering simple
separatist agendas, students and faculty who participate in ethnic studies programs
become articulate about distinctive issues and projects that they can bring to mainstream
courses in clear and persuasive ways. Cultural studies courses in particular allow an
opportunity to place contributions from ethnic studies in mainstream, often prestigious
settings. Both ethnic studies and cultural studies can, in principle, work out mutually
beneficial programs, especially if minority students and faculty work in both arenas. All
parties involved should be vigilant about the present moment’s lawlike tendency for
white authority to surface and attempt to claim a monopoly status, rather than entering
more egalitarian forms of dialogue.
Cultural studies requires diversity in order to cany out its projects. The diversity is in
part disciplinary. It would be absurd for a rebel band of literary scholars to corner the
market on interdisciplinarity, though it has been tried and though the would-be
emperors cannot always be counted on to notice their new clothes. A course on
anthropology and history, for example, should be cotaught by at least one of each, an
anthropologist and a historian. Similarly,when theorists who speak the purest forms of
Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault turn their metropolitan gazes to Juan Rulfo, Zora
Neale Hurston, and Rigoberta Menchli, they would do well to engage in dialogue with
speakers of the local languages and knowers of the local histories. Such collaborations
require and should produce knowledge built in tension between global and local
regimes.
Those with serious commitments to cultural studies would do well to ask over and
over: Who is in the room?Affirmativeaction for representation by different disciplines,
proponents of global theory versus local area studies, and the more usual gender, race,
and sexuality issues do not mean quotas and obligatoIy slot filling. They do mean
changing search procedures so that new names come into view. Once the process has
changed, the results can change without risk of inferior products. And one should ask
for results, both in terms of greater inclusion and high quality. That the one Chicano
we invited turned us down is not an excuse. In certain cases, the qualities sought may
shift, so that teachers of multicultural courses could be delighted to find an able classicist
who also knows Caribbean literature; but these shifts involve changing criteria of
excellence, not lowering standards.
Changing search procedures to get appropriate qualified people in the room should
apply to conference panels, academic committees, reading groups, classroom teaching,
authors assigned in courses, and authors cited in talks, published articles, and books.
Of course men should speak about women and vice versa, but would an all-male panel
speak about women? Should an all-white edited collection address issues of race or
multiculturalism?How often should all-straight,all-white panels talk about AIDS? There
are differences between speaking as an X, discussing with an X, and talking about an X.
Realizing goals of diversity will produce misunderstandings and rancor, especially in
periods of transition; it will make intellectual life less comfortable than in the past.
Scholars given to local concerns, for example, can be fiercelycombative toward poachers
and outrightly hostile to anything called theory. Certain theorists, on the other hand,
can be remarkably resistant to bringing theory together with practice, particular narra-
tives of experience, and other forms of local knowledge. In these and other dialogues,
 FORUM 529

however, the projects of cultural studies will most probably benefit from being subjected
to wider and more demanding perspectives.
Cultural studies entrepreneurs would do well to borrow and invent new forms of
collaboration among teachers, students, researchers, and conference organizers. Col-
lective work in equips goes against the grain of highly individualistic official university
life in the United States, but the invisible university of reading groups may provide
inspiration for the kinds of models sought. Other countries have worked in highly
productive ways with workshops and related extramural institutional forms of doing
intellectual labor. Need the formal academy and intellectual life coincide? It may be
that the presently interstitial status of cultural studies can be developed to its long-term
advantage with organized research units, programs, and reading groups. Perhaps
nonacademic intellectuals can more systematically be brought into the dialogue in the
hope of working toward the creation of a more public intellectual life in this country.
Concerns with social justice and human emancipation could well govern both the
intellectual production and the human composition of such working groups.
Cultural studies has brought anxiety to a number of anthropologists. It has also
brought opportunities for creative internal remaking. At a theoretical level, the disci-
pline could remake itself in order to consider not only separate cultures in separate
rooms but also multiple cultures in the same room. At a practical level, it could
increasingly diversify itself along lines of gender, race, and sexual orientation by
changing graduate admissions and hiring practices.
The opportunities for external remaking involve the predictable anxieties of shifting
from a small to a large pond. Yet anthropologists can offer long experience with the
concept of culture. Losing a monopoly need not be such a bad thing; maybe there is
something to be gained from working in more rough-and-tumble arenas where conflict
and misunderstanding reign alongside innovative transformations brought by fresh
applications and the remolding of familiar terms. Anthropologists have much to offer
in efforts to develop egalitarian multicultural collaborations, both within and beyond
the walls of academe. As full citizens of their institutions of higher education, more
anthropologists could interrupt their lamentations, knock on closed doors, and insist
on being included rather than waiting for the guilded invitation.

&NATO I. ROSAIN)is fiofissi, Dqbartmenl of Anthropology, Stanfid UntUersQ, Stanfmd, C4 94305.

Science and the Successful Female: Why There

Are So Many Women Primatologists

LINDA MARIEFEDICAN
University ofAlberta

T MUST HAVE BEEN FIFTEENYEARSAGO when I was first asked by a colleague in another
I discipline, ”Whyare there so many women primatologists?”At first the question struck
me as an odd one. My own supervisor had been a male, all my cohort of graduate
students in primatology had been men, most of my coauthors and collaborators up to
that time were men, and half of my own graduate students were male. Thus my
preliminary response was to answer this question with one of my own: “Why are there