Review: Doing the Right Thing in Cross-Cultural Representation

Reviewed Work(s): The Predicament of Culture. by James Clifford: Writing Culture. by

James Clifford and George E. Marcus: Works and Lives. by Clifford Geertz:
Anthropology as Cultural Critique. by George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer
Review by: Thomas McCarthy
Source: Ethics , Apr., 1992, Vol. 102, No. 3 (Apr., 1992), pp. 635-649
Published by: The University of Chicago Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2381842

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 REVIEW ESSAY

Doing the Right Thing in Cross-

cultural Representation*

Thomas McCarthy

Looking back at the "rationality and relativism" debates that h

surrounded anthropology in recent decades, one cannot but no
that the distinctively philosophical contributions have tended to
behind developments in the discipline itself. There too, it seems,
Owl of Minerva takes flight only at dusk. Thus in the 1960s, as t
classical realist paradigm was giving way to structuralist approch
inspired by linguistics and interpretive approaches drawing on he
meneutics, the philosophical debate centered on questions of episte
and instrumental rationality-questions concerning the truth and
jectivity of beliefs and the efficacy and efficiency of practices. C
parisons of myth with science and of magic with technology, for exam
supplied the principal arguments that Popperians brought aga
Peter Winch's early efforts to steer the discussion toward question
meaning and intelligibility.' The emphasis on logical, epistemologi
and methodological questions continued into the 1970s but was in-
creasingly combined with a concern for problems of translating
interpreting across different languages, systems of belief, and st
of reasoning.2 In the 1980s problems of interpretation, particular
in the form given them by Quine and Davidson, finally came to domina
the philosphical side of the rationality and relativism debates as we
But this was happening just as developments in anthropology w

* A review ofJames Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harv

University Press, 1988), pp. viii+381; James Clifford and George E. Marcus, ed
Writing Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. ix+305; Cliff
Geertz, Works and Lives (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988), pp. vi+
and George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Crit
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. xiii+205.
1. For an overview, see the essays collected in Bryan Wilson, ed., Rationality (Oxfo
Blackwell, 1970).
2. See the collection edited by Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes (Rationality
Relativism [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982]).
3. See Michael Krausz, ed., Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation (Notre Dam
Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989).

Ethics 102 (April 1992): 635-649

(C 1992 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0014-1704/92/0203-197

635

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 636 Ethics April 1992

taking a new, "reflexive" turn, the nature and broader significance of

which are the common topic of the four books under review. To draw
out fully the more narrowly philosophical implications of these de-
velopments will no doubt take time. In this discussion I want only to
attempt a preliminary sorting out of the issues involved. Section I will
sketch the self-understanding of anthropology, its history, and its prese
circumstances that is more or less common to the works being consider
Section II will examine some of the philosophical questions posed in
these works, questions directed primarily to realist and interpretivist
paradigms of cross-cultural inquiry, and then will consider some of
the problems left unresolved by the newer reflexive approaches. Section
III will then focus more specifically on questions concerning the moral
and political presuppositions and consequences of cross-cultural rep-
resentation.

"Reflexive" anthropology has earned its name.4 While the study of

alien cultures has long been accompanied by heightened self-awareness,
it is only more recently that an acute self-consciousness has come to
be incorporated into state-of-the art ethnographic accounts. To judge
by the books under discussion here, the new avant-garde shares, at
least in broad outline, a conception of anthropology's past and present
that goes more or less as follows.5 Anthropology as a discipline was
embedded in colonialism. Observers from the imperial "centers" studied
and reported on the bizarre and wondrous ways of life on the "per-
ipheries": "the West studied the Rest." During the Victorian period,
accounts of alien beliefs and practices were typically framed in evo-
lutionary schemes that conceptually relegated those beliefs and practices
to an already superseded past. In reaction against this, the "classical"
anthropology of the first half of this century adopted relativism as a
methodological, not doctrinal, axiom: alien cultures were to be studied
in and for themselves, as self-contained, integral units of meaning and
behavior. After Malinowski's influential study of the Trobriand Islanders
appeared in 1922, the fieldwork paradigm became firmly established
in anthropology. Accounts of alien cultures, whether in the preferred
American mode of "culture and personality" studies or in the func-
tionalist mode preferred by the British, were expected to be based on

4. It is sometimes also referred to as "postmodern" or "deconstructionist." Though

the sorts of approach in question are by no means universally employed or even accepted
within anthropology, they are characteristic of what is widely regarded as avant-garde
work in that discipline. In any case, as I hope to show, they raise a host of interesting
philosophical questions.
5. This sketch is drawn primarily from the overview of twentieth-century anthro-
pology in Marcus and Fischer and the discussions of key anthropological texts in Geertz,
Works and Lives.

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 McCarthy Review of Clifford, Marcus, Geertz, & Fischer 637
actually "being there" and "telling it like it is."6 Under the rubric of
"participant observation," the resultant predicament of fieldwork was
transmuted into its characteristic method, a combination of experiential
nearness and analytical distance. The desired outcomes of such forays
were accurate accounts of non-Western forms of life in danger of
disappearing precisely through having been "discovered" and colonized.
This pervasive salvage motif-get them down before they go-was
frequently joined with other, less natural-historical motifs-for instance,
anthropology as edifying discourse, demonstrating the arbitrariness
and contingency of what "we" unthinkingly regard as natural and
proper, or as liberal advocacy, with the anthropologist serving as pa-
ternalistic spokesperson for disenfranchised peoples. A basic assumption
underlying the natural-historical ambitions of classical anthropology
was that "they" could be accurately described in "our" terms. This
epistemological confidence was reflected in the realist genre conventions
typical of classical anthropological writing, for instance, the omniscient
narrator and free indirect style.7
The complex of attitudes, aims, and practices characteristic of
anthropology under colonialism began to alter perceptibly during the
decolonization struggles following World War II. New types of in-
terpretive or "symbols and meaning" ethnography came to the fore
in the 1960s and after. Their aim was to gain access to alien systems
of meaning-languages, cultures, forms of life-in order to provide
"thick descriptions" of how the world looked "from the native's point
of view."8 The standard metaphor for such approaches, "reading"
cultural "texts" for their "meaning," captures the shift in emphasis
from the explanation of behavior to the understanding of symbols. It
was often mixed with the metaphor of "dialogue" to yield an essentially
hermeneutic conception of the ethnographic enterprise; seriously to
read an alien cultural text amounts to a kind of virtual dialogue with
its "authors" about common concerns of human life, a conversation
of humankind in which the horizons of our form of life can be expand
through sympathetically engaging with theirs-in which our taken-

6. I shall be confining my remarks largely to British and American anthropology,

as it is those traditions that figure most prominently in the discussions with which I am
concerned.
7. James Clifford is good on the literary aspects of anthropology. See, in part
his "On Ethnographic Authority," in Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, pp. 21-54,
and his introduction to Clifford and Marcus, eds., pp. 1-26. The essays contributed
to the latter volume by Mary Louise Pratt, Vincent Crapanzano, James Clifford, Steph
A. Tyler, and Michael M. J. Fischer focus on rhetorical and literary aspects of ethnograp
as "a kind of writing."
8. There are brief accounts of this shift in Marcus and Fischer, pp. 26-32; and
Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, pp. 37-41. Clifford Geertz himself was one o
most influential figures involved in it. See, e.g., the essays collected in his The Interpre
of Cultures (New York: Basic, 1973).

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638 Ethics April 1992
for-granted beliefs and practices can be deabsolutized and our eyes
opened to other possibilities. Often associated with this was the cultural-
political motif of recovering and redeeming authentic native cultures
that had been besieged and battered by colonial forces. In this form,
ethnography, both Western and indigenous, could even be taken into
the service of national liberation movements and the new nation-states
that issued from them. Postcolonial regimes could seek to legitimate
themselves by the promise of returning to authentic traditions, customs,
and identities and of tapping their potential for shaping non-Western
modes of life.
More recently, many intellectuals in formerly colonial areas have
become disillusioned with regimes dominated by national elites, old
and new, and with the ideologies of recovered authenticity they have
used for their own purposes. In their view, the search for cultural
identity is not an exercise in excavation or decontamination but an
ongoing process in which elements of past and present, the local and
the global, have to be constantly woven and rewoven together. About
the same time-that is, roughly since the late 1970s-a new generation
of anthropologists weaned on the critiques of positivism and colonialism
have tried to incorporate a heightened awareness of their situation
into their work.9 They are conscious of writing not only for the tra-
ditional, almost entirely Western audience for anthropological studies
but also for a multicultural audience including postcolonial intellectuals
sophisticated in the ways of the "metropolis." The presence of this
critical audience places enormous pressure on traditional ideals of
objectivity, which were, after all, tightly linked to notions of intersub-
jective validation. The "community of investigators" that has to be
convinced now includes a great variety of "competent observers," among
them non-Western ethnographers, who cannot be counted on to share
the assumptions that have historically structured anthropology-
whether the evolutionary schemes of Victorian anthropology, the one-
way-mirror realism of classical fieldwork studies, or the deep meanings
and authentic identities lying beneath the surfaces of the cultural texts
read by interpretive ethnographers. Gaze is now met by gaze, description
by description, critique by critique. The realities of writing in this
increasingly decentered and multicultural public sphere have combined
with the general retreat of scientism in our academic culture and the
growing influence of literary-critical methods in the human sciences
to precipitate a "crisis of representation" in anthropology.'0

9. This is the central theme of the four books under consideration. For a brief
narrative account, see Marcus and Fischer, pp. 33-44. The last chapter of Geertz, Works
and Lives, and the introduction to Clifford and Marcus, eds., by Clifford offer compressed
but lucid accounts of the perplexities of doing anthropology in the present circumstances.
10. See the essays mentioned in n. 7 above and the overview provided by Marcus
and Fischer, pp. 45-76.

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 McCarthy Review of Clifford, Marcus, Geertz, & Fischer 639
Key features of this crisis are an acute self-consciousness of the
constructed nature of ethnographic texts and a radical experimentation
with the received conventions of this genre, with the aim if not of
removing, at least of displacing, "ethnographic author-ity." The virtua
dialogue of hermeneutic approaches has given way to experiments in
constructing texts from actual dialogues-for example, by directly
reproducing a native informant's contributions to a conversation-
or in constructing "polyphonic" or "heteroglossic" texts that permit
those being represented to speak in their own voices, tell their own
stories, challenge the ethnographer's constructions, advance alternatives
and the like. The smooth objectivity of realist rhetoric is broken by
repeated self-references to the messy realities of fieldwork-to inter
actions with informants and others, to problems encountered and
resistances met with, to strategies adopted and contingencies deal
with, as well as to the process of text construction itself. It is, in the
words of Clifford Geertz, as if Malinowski's shocking, posthumously
published diaries had been incorporated from the start into his published
accounts of the Trobriand Islanders, or as if the behind-the-scenes
talk of working ethnographers had been given a place of importance
on the ethnographic stage." In Section II, I will review some of th
trenchant criticisms of received epistemological-methodological and
moral-political assumptions that have accompanied these changes in
the mode of "writing culture."

II

Attention to the poiesis of ethnographic representation has undermined

the "God's-eye-view" objectivity of classical realism. Ethnographic ac-
counts are, and always have been, the products of complex, ambiguous
interactions between ethnographers and their subjects.'2 It was typically
assumed, however, that the native informants who played key roles
in constructing those accounts were providing insiders' deep knowledge
of the cultures under study. That they were often bribed, cajoled,
bullied, or tricked into revealing what they knew was seen merely as
a necessary prerequisite to getting at the unadulterated truth. But as
recent critics, Western and indigenous, have noted, informants often
had their own agendas and always had their own situated views of the
culture. By what warrant could the ethnographer assume that their
views were common to or representative of the culture at large or
some group within it? To consider only the most obvious form of this
problem, how could she or he assume those views to be shared by the

1 1. Geertz, Works and Lives, pp. 73- 101.

12. Clifford's discussion of Marcel Griaule (The Predicament of Culture, pp. 55-91)
is good on this point. See also Renato Rosaldo, "From the Door of His Tent: The
Fieldworker and the Inquisitor," in Clifford and Marcus, eds., pp. 77-97.

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 640 Ethics April 1992

women who were almost totally excluded as informan

ethnographies? 13 Corresponding assumptions underla
counts of ethnographers undergoing rites of initiation into sacred
mysteries or taking instruction in some form of privileged knowledge.14
Contemporary critics have challenged the ready understanding of
these as gaining access to a deep knowledge of the culture rather than,
say, to the point of view of certain privileged groups or to a specialized
set of beliefs and practices situated within rather than representative
of the broader culture. In a word, reexamination of the use of informants
in classical studies has made clear the necessity of locating the subjects
with whom the ethnographer interacts within the larger society and
of allowing for differences in point of view due to social situations,
for biases owing to group loyalties, for omissions prompted by strategic
considerations, for dissimulations motivated by personal loyalties, and
the like.
Furthermore, as Malinowski's diaries have made abundantly clear,
the famous "rapport" appealed to as a warrant of the veracity of
ethnographic experience is often hard to distinguish from insincerity.
And this is no accident: it is rooted in the very idea of participant
observation, which, in the view of some of its contemporary practitioners,
is inherently "dishonest, pernicious, and self-serving," a form of "sym-
bolic violence" resting on a "tissue of careerism, deception, manipulation,
and micro-imperialism."15 All of this casts grave doubt on the putative
objectivity of classical ethnographic accounts in which the situated,
interactive, conflictual, and ambiguous nature of fieldwork experience
was made to disappear behind the realist prose of the published texts.
From this perspective, traditional ethnography left largely unresolved
its basic methodological problem: "If ethnography produces cultural
interpretations through intense research experiences, how is unruly
experience transformed into an authoritative written account? How,
precisely, is a garrulous, overdetermined, cross-cultural encounter shot
through with power relations and personal cross-purposes circumscribed
as an adequate version of a more or less discrete 'other world' composed
by an individual author?"'16
There is another host of problems tied to the traditional assumption
that what was to be represented was a coherent and unified whole
a self-contained culture, a collective identity, or a functional system.

13. There are brief remarks on feminist influences in recent anthropology in

Clifford and Marcus, eds., pp. 17-22, 103-9, 254-56.
14. See Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, pp. 80-91.
15. Geertz, Works and Lives, pp. 95-98. He is citing views expressed by Kevin
Dwyer in his Moroccan Dialogues (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1982); and Paul
Rabinow in his Reflections on Fieldwork (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977);
these are two frequently discussed experimental texts.
16. Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, p. 25.

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 McCarthy Review of Clifford, Marcus, Geertz, & Fischer 641
Symbolic anthropology has been no less inclined to this assumption
than has realist. Anthropological accounts were supposed to represent
"the Other"-the Azande, the Nuer, the Dinka, the Dogon, the Trob-
riand Islander, and so on. This unity, critics have convincingly argued,
was constructed from experience, but then suppressed or marginalized
diversity.'7 In addition to the sources of diversity mentioned above,
and to other differences and tensions internal to the societies studied,
there were from the start multiple responses-resistances, accom-
modations, adaptations, appropriations, and so forth-of indigenous
cultures to the incursion of colonizing forces. These were typically
treated by anthropologists as impurities that had to be removed to get
at the pure essence of a culture. 18 But the idea of distilling out anything
hybrid or syncretistic to get at what is authentic-that is, of retrieving
a pure traditional identity- has lost whatever plausibility it might once
have had. In the contemporary situation of global interculturalism,
the problem of postcolonial identity is not one simply of retrieval b
of ongoing constructive accomplishment.
Joined to this methodological criticism of earlier anthropology,
there has been an intensification of the moral-political self-questioning
that was already well underway in the 1960s and 1970s. Who gets to
represent whom, where, when, how, and for what purposes, is not
without political consequences.'9 Cultural representations help form
the images we have of others; if assimilated by those others, they h
form the images they have of themselves as well; they get embodie
in institutions and inform policies and practices. In these and other
ways, traditional anthropology not only grew out of the colonial situat
it reinforced it with images of the essential pastness, immaturity,
irrationality of non-Western cultures. "They" were, in the very proces
of representation, denied the competence to contest those represen-
tations. A heightened awareness that such asymmetries of representatio
enacted and reproduced the asymmetries of power in the colonial
world has enhanced the significance of "cultural politics" in this domain.
Contestation of the meanings and methods of cross-cultural repre-
sentation has taken on the same importance for Third World intellectu

17. An influential critique of the tendency in Western studies of non-Western

cultures to "dichotomize" into "we/they" contrasts and to "essentialize" the resultant
"Other" is Edward Said's Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978). In his discussion of
Said, Clifford (The Predicament of Culture, pp. 255-76) makes the point that he and
other critics of Eurocentrism tend to deploy an inverse "Occidentalism."
18. Marcus and Fischer add to this tendency to neglect internal variation a tendency
to neglect temporal change: "Fieldwork is by its nature synchronic" (p. 96). As a result,
ethnographic representations are typically too static as well as overly homogenized.
19. See Talal Asad's contribution to Clifford and Marcus, eds., "The Concept of
Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology," pp. 141-64, and his earlier An-
thropology and the Colonial Encounter (New York: Humanities Press, 1972).

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642 Ethics April 1992
and their allies-including many contemporary anthropologists-as
has the contestation of established and influential representations of
gender, race, and ethnic and sexual differences for the politics of the
First World.
It is important to see that in the human sciences generally, and
in anthropology particularly, moral issues of this kind are not divorced
from epistemological issues. The objectivity and adequacy of an ob-
server's "third-person" account of beliefs and practices that are already
informed by "first- and second-person" accounts cannot finally be
warranted independently of the latter. This is no less true when the
observers are participant observers from other parts of the world.
Their representations are in principle contestable by the subjects whose
beliefs and practices are in question. This is one of the features of
subject/subject epistemic relations that distinguishes them from epist
relations between subjects and objects-pure-and-simple. Subjects can
talk back, criticize observers' accounts of them, offer alternative
understandings-they can even offer accounts of what it is about the
observer and the observer's home culture that tends to make his or
her representations misrepresentations in important respects. The one-
way descriptions of realist anthropology objectified others by desub-
jectifying them in certain ways, that is, by representing them not as
competent partners in dialogue-particularly dialogue about ethno-
graphic accounts of their way of life-but as the objects of a monologue
that disqualified them in certain key respects. Moral failings and ep-
istemic failings were thus closely linked.
This is true even of the interpretive forms of symbolic anthropology
that came to the fore in the 1960s.20 Though they replaced subject/
object models of description with subject/subject models of conversation,
the dialogues they produced were only virtual, not actual: this is what
they would say if they could speak for themselves. The very metaphor
of a text to be read simply displaces the active/passive asymmetry of
classical realism. The interpreter continues to assume an ethnographic
authority to represent meanings in ways that are not exposed to actual
contestation by those whose meanings are being represented. Moreover,
the horizons to be expanded through virtual dialogue are those of the
interpreter and his culture, not theirs: it is "we" and not "they" who
learn through such one-sided conversations.
The newer forms of experimental ethnography are intended pre-
cisely to address such asymmetries by allowing those represented to
costructure the communication in some way and to speak in their own
voices in the texts produced.2' The aim here is to replace monologue
and virtual dialogue with actual dialogue, or better yet with "polyphoni

20. See Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, pp. 37-41.

21. See ibid., pp. 41-50. As he notes, these experiments are often indebted to the
work of Mikhail Bakhtin.

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 McCarthy Review of Clifford, Marcus, Geertz, & Fischer 643
or "collaborative" texts in which many different characters have their
direct, rather than indirect, says. But such strategies as, for example,
including in the final product the communications that served earlier
ethnographers as a data base, reproducing conversations-not excepting
disagreements-with indigenous interpreters about the anthropologist's
understanding of various elements of a culture or about any other
matters that might be of mutual interest, using performative translat
and the like have in the end only further displaced but not dissolved
the asymmetries of ethnographic authority.22 However polyphonic,
playful, ironic, confessional, and so forth, the texts produced are, the
ethnographer retains his or her authority in one form or another.
Even as she or he has disavowed the role of omniscient narrator, she
or he has assumed the roles of producer, director, composer, orches-
trator, editor, and the like. Texts designed to communicate to the
anthropologists' home audiences-including, very importantly, the
academically trained audiences who will pass on their career-determin
successes and failures-require authoritative decisions about such
matters as who will get to speak, about what, in what order, and in
which forms. In short, the new ethnography has not been able "to get
round the un-get-roundable fact that ethnographic descriptions are
homemade, that they are the describer's descriptions and not those
of the described."23
But perhaps the nonreciprocity and asymmetry of cross-cultural
representation cannot be eliminated or even significantly countered
by literary self-consciousness and textual ingenuity alone. Maybe re-
placing scientism with aestheticism misses the root cause of the problems
haunting anthropology. This is not to deny that reflexively building
awareness of the diversity of potential readers into the construction
of multivocal texts is a legitimate and sometimes effective way of an-
ticipating the competence of "others" to challenge cross-cultural rep-
resentations. But it does not itself speak to the social, economic, political,
military, and cultural asymmetries of the global force field within
which anthropology is still situated.

III

Again and again in the works under consideration one encounters the
criticism that this or that mode of representation "objectifies," "de-

22. For instance, "while ethnographies cast as encounters between two individuals
may successfully dramatize the intersubjective give-and-take of fieldwork and introduce
a counterpoint of authorial voices, they remain representations of dialogue," over which
the ethnographer retains final control, much as Plato did over the Socratic dialogues
(ibid., p. 43).
23. Geertz, Works and Lives, pp. 144-45. A nice case in point is cited by Paul
Rabinow (Clifford and Marcus, eds., p. 251): when asked which part of their dialogue
had interested him most, Dwyer's Moroccan informant (see n. 15 above) replied that
he had not been interested in a single question asked by Dwyer.

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644 Ethics April 1992
subjectifies," or "silences" others, that it deprives them of a voice
altogether, speaks for them, or, while allowing them to speak, does so
only under the direction and editorship of the ethnographer. The
thrust of this line of criticism is clearly the illegitimacy of treating
others as less than responsible subjects, that is, of failing to respect
them as mature human beings capable of defending their own views
and challenging ours. In short, all protestations to the contrary not-
withstanding, the postmodernist critique of modern anthropology is
driven, willy-nilly, by the sort of universalist moral impulse expressed
in Kant's second formulation of the Categorical Imperative: "Act so
that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of
another, always as an end and never as a means only."24 In explaining
that formulation, Kant noted that it entails respecting the competence
of others to give or withhold their assent with reason; that is, it enjoins
treating them as miindige-mature and responsible-human beings
capable of conducting their own lives on the basis of their own insig
and deliberations.25 It is only from some such point of view tha
critiques of objectification, desubjectification, disenfranchisment, non-
reciprocity, asymmetry, and the like can muster the moral force they
are meant to have. Thus, while cultural relativism was for a time
effective as an abstract negation of Eurocentric universalism, it must
in the end give way to a more determinate negation in the form of a
multicultural universalism. The moral point of relativism-"to give
permission to diversity"-can be preserved in a framework of universal
discourse: while we all live in the same moral universe, we do not
occupy the same position within it.26
In light of this, it should be clear that experimentation with more
and more self-conscious texts and more and more complicated stagings
of other voices, while not inappropriate responses to the "crisis of
representation" in contemporary anthropology, are also not adequate.
That crisis can no more be resolved by purely aesthetic means than
it can by purely cognitive means. For it springs, in the last analysis,

24. I. Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Lewis White Beck (I
dianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1959), p. 47.
25. Onora O'Neill develops this aspect of Kant's thought in her Constructions
Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
26. The quote is from Richard Shweder, "Post-Nietzschean Anthropology," in
Krausz, ed., p. 99. The idea of "universal discourse" stems from George Herbert Mead's
"Fragments on Ethics," in his Mind, Self, and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1962), pp. 379-89. It has been developed byJiirgen Habermas as the basic idea
of his "discourse ethics" in his Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1990). This is not to deny that there are costs to universalism of
every sort, however respectful of particularity-a point made by Robert Gooding-
Williams and Tsenay Serequeberhan (personal communication). But even the good of
simply being left alone can be safeguarded in the long run only insofar as others
recognize one's (or a community's) right to it.

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 McCarthy Review of Clifford, Marcus, Geertz, & Fischer 645
from the de facto asymmetries of power that pervade cross-cultural
encounters. It is not only text production that is affected by these
asymmetries but text consumption as well. Sense is made of a text in
myriad, diverse readings, and that is something that cannot be controlled
by its author. Good intentions and literary inventions alone cannot
compensate for massive inequalities in the conditions of communication.
The crisis of cross-cultural representation could be resolved in the
end only through cross-cultural communications that were actually,
rather than virtually, decentered and multivocal, that is, only through
the actual empowerment of "others" to participate as equal partners
in the conversation of humankind.
Whatever its merits as a regulative ideal, universal discourse in
global public spheres free from distorting inequalities of power i
obviously not the situation of cultural studies today. In the postcolonial
neocolonial period, intercultural encounters are shot through with the
asymmetries that mark international relations generally. This results,
as Talal Asad has put it, in "strong" and "weak" languages.27 Non-
Western intellectuals who participate in intercultural communication
have to do so, by and large, in Western languages. It is because and
insofar as they have mastered the hegemonic cultures that they are
"qualified" as participants and given access to the international media
of communication. And these media are hardly a neutral means. They
are so closely linked to global political-economic relations that the real
ability of the periphery to challenge the cultural hegemony of the
center is severely limited.
At the same time, certain tendencies of intercultural exchange do
point in the direction of multicultural universalism. For one thing, the
globalization of culture that has accompanied the growth of economic,
technological, and political interdependence, the vast migrations of
populations (migrant labor, tourism, immigration, etc.), the ever-denser
networks of international telecommunications, and the like, have in-
creasingly placed all cultures in the situation of a global modernity.
Radical cultural relativism is now factually as well as conceptually a
red herring. The totally isolated and wholly alien cultural units that
classical anthropology hoped to salvage have little to do with the realities
of interdependence and change in non-Western societies or with the
increasingly hybrid, syncretistic, and asynchronous cultures that are
characteristic of them.28 Among other things, this has given rise to a

27. Asad, "The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology,"

pp. 141-64.
28. See, e.g., Kwame Anthony Appiah's discussion of contemporary Af
in "Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?" Critical Inqu
336-57. As Marcus and Fischer explain, increasing globalization also prese
methodological problem for interpretive anthropology: "how to represent th
of richly described, local, cultural worlds in larger, impersonal system

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646 Ethics April 1992
great diversity of texts, from both the metropolis and the periphery,
calling into question the West's representation of itself and of its relations
to its "others." One form this takes is the "ethnography in reverse"
practiced by members of cultures earlier studied by Western anthro-
pologists. Themselves trained as sociocultural interpreters, they turn
their gazes toward the societies that represented them and, drawing
on the "weapons of critique" that are part of their colonial legacy,
offer trenchant analyses of the cultural relations of production behind
those representations.29 "The Empire writes back," as Salman Rushdie
has put it. Moreover, these voices from the periphery are increasingly
entering into the cultural formation of intellectuals at the center. In
fact, even this dichotomy is losing some of its point: postcolonial Third
World writers often have more in common with avant-garde intellectuals
from the First World than either does with other groups within their
societies.
The outpouring of literature and scholarship from modernizing,
postcolonial societies has tended to reinforce the challenges to long-
established hierarchies currently issuing from the newly empowered
voices of women and marginalized minorities in the West. One element
of these challenges has been characterized as "the repatriation of eth-
nography":30 Western social critics have increasingly essayed "thick
descriptions" of putatively "rational," "impartial," "objective," "efficient,"
etc., practices here, to display their contingency, bias, arbitariness, and
the like. Studies abound of how cultural hegemonies-for example,
in specific institutions, professions, or disciplines-are established and
maintained, and of how social identities-for example, gendered, racial,
ethnic, and sexual identities-are constructed and reproduced. All of
this has contributed to placing in question the taken-for-granted ra-
tionality of entrenched ways of seeing and doing things and thus has
opened public discourse in the West (a bit) to the possibility of alternative
paths of development. It has also made clear how great were the
diversity and difference glossed over by the we/they dichotomies of

economy?" (p. 77). The local unit can no longer plausibly be portrayed as "an isolate
with outside forces of market and state impinging on it," since such "outside forces"
are in fact "an integral part of the construction and constitution of the 'inside,' the
cultural unit itself, and must be so registered, even at the most intimate levels of the
cultural process" (p. 77). This is one instance of a central problem for social inquiry
generally: how to grasp the recursive relations between sociocultural practices situated
in large-scale systems and macro-historical processes, on the one hand, and the ongoing
sociocultural production of such situation-defining systems and processes, on the other.
For a recent discussion see James Bohman, New Philosophy of Social Science (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1991), chap. 4, pp. 147-85.
29. See Edward Said, "Third World Intellectuals and Metropolitan Culture," Raritan
9 (1990): 27-50.
30. Marcus and Fischer, pp. 111 - 36.

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 McCarthy Review of Clifford, Marcus, Geertz, & Fischer 647
received cross-cultural comparisons. The focus on science and tech-
nology-versus myth and magic, for example, or versus traditional
beliefs and practices generally-strongly skewed such comparisons in
the direction of that area of modern culture where there is perhaps
the greatest agreement-as if Western beliefs could be equated with
science and Western practices with technology. Too little attention was
paid to the vast disagreements pulsating through key areas of modern
culture-ethical, political, social, economic, religious, philosophical,
and aesthetic disagreements, among others-that is, to the quite obvious
fact that many basic questions have remained open "for us" and thus
open to discussion with "others" who might throw new light on them,
provide new insights, and generally enlarge and enhance the conver-
sation. This is especially true at present, when so many of our established
folkways-including the deeply implanted views of, attitudes toward,
and ways of dealing with nature embodied in science and tech-
nology-are being subjected to critical scrutiny and when the widely
felt need for "a new world order" calls for a revised, postimperialist
understanding of the interdependent pasts, presents, and futures of
the Western and non-Western worlds. It is not clear how far these
developments will take us, but it is clear that they have made any
return to a one-way-mirror anthropology highly improbable. Let me
conclude this discussion by suggesting how a reflexive ethnography
might function in an enlarged conversation of humankind, together
with other modes of sociocultural inquiry-objectifying, interpretive,
and critical included.
Awareness of the constructed nature of sociocultural representations
does not mean that we can do without them. Everyday communication
is organized around a continual shifting back and forth among first-,
second-, and third-person perspectives, whereby we adopt in turn the
roles of speaker, hearer, and uninvolved observer. The idea of pros-
cribing talking about other persons in favor of talking exclusively to
them makes no sense in this context. Nor does it in the public spheres,
political and cultural, of contemporary societies, nor in the disciplines
of the humanities and social sciences. And in none of these domains
do we feel a general need to give everyone talked or written about
"equal time" within our accounts of them; they can contest what we
say on their own time and in their own texts.31 That is, these domains
are, to greater and lesser degrees, structured to permit challenges and
rejoinders by those who think that they are being misrepresented. It
is basically for the same reason that claims to universal validity-for

31. None of the authors under discussion here, e.g., feels the need to give the
objects of his interpretation or criticism independent voices in the representation o
their views. Why is this lack of textual "polyphony" permissible here and not in cross-
cultural inquiry?

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648 Ethics April 1992

example, to the truth of statements or the rightness of actions and

norms-need not always be placed in ironic quotes in domains in
which they can be contested by others. In fact, strong claims of this
sort are an important element in keeping the conversation, as we know
it, going. What has made objectifying representations and universalist
claims particularly offensive in the anthropological context, I want to
suggest, are just the asymmetries of power that have prevented colonized
peoples from participating in the conversation on equal footing. The
root problem is political and thus cannot be resolved by new devices
of representation, however useful they may be in their own rights. It
is a problem of access to international public spheres generally and
not to the individual texts produced within them. When representations
of others are constructed under the pressure of possible contestation
by them, the ever-present dangers of symbolic violence are corre-
spondingly mitigated. In global public spheres less skewed by powerful
inequalities than at present, cross-cultural generalizations, interpre-
tations, and criticisms would be no more or less problematic than the
various modes of inquiry into the human world generally are. As the
examples of gender and minority studies indicate, when previously
subordinated groups can speak in their own voices, there are marked
changes in the very construction of texts dealing with them. At the
same time, such studies have also made clear that new types of text
can assist in the formation of new structures of public discourse. There
is an interplay here between institutional and textual dynamics, between
the empowerment of different voices and writing in different voices,
between politics and poetics.
I have focused my concluding remarks on the moral and political
aspects of cross-cultural representation rather than on the episte-
mological and methodological or rhetorical and poetical aspects, not
because the problems raised in these dimensions by recent developments
in anthropology are any less challenging but because the ethical pre-
suppositions and implications of the human studies have tended to
get comparatively short shrift both in the overly cognitivized discussions
of "the logic of social science" and in the overly aestheticized discussions
of "the poetics of cultural representation."32 Perhaps my focus is also

32. In my view, recent attempts to reduce epistemological and methodological

issues to questions of power politics are no less one-dimensional. The challenge presented
by developments in the human sciences is, rather, that of reconceptualizing and inter-
relating all of the interdependent aspects of sociocultural inquiry. Awareness of the
rhetorically constructed and politically situated nature of ethnographic accounts, e.g.,
does not entail that there are no such things as facts and accuracy and inaccuracy in
reporting them, or culturally established meanings and better and worse understandings
of them, or systemic economic relations and more or less adequate models of them.
But we are far from having an adequate understanding of the situated construction of
meanings, facts, relations, and so forth. As recent ethnographic approaches to natural-

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 McCarthy Review of Clifford, Marcus, Geertz, & Fischer 649
warranted by what Kant called the primacy of practical reason. The
moral-political perspective on cross-cultural representation has a cert
priority, for it addresses the very conditions of the public discourses
in which validity claims, including cognitive and aesthetic claims, are
discussed and evaluated. Particularly in the domain of cultural studies,
no such claim can be more than a promissory note until those addressed
by it are empowered to comment, in their own voices, on its validity.
In any case, the "crisis of representation" in contemporary an-
thropology makes the interconnection of logic, rhetoric, and politics
in the human studies clearer than ever. If philosophers were to take
up the discussion, that might help to counter our long fixation on the
first aspect to the neglect of the others. It could also provide a convincing,
and badly needed, object lesson on the historical situatedness of inquiry
into the human world. These considerations alone mark this discussion
as of the greatest importance for social and political philosophy. And
there is no better way to enter it than through the books under revie

scientific inquiry ("laboratory life") suggest, this is one of the principal challenges t
contemporary theory of knowledge across the board.

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