THE DYNAMICS OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL

THEORY

KIRSTEN HASTRUP
University of Copenhagen

ABSTRACT

This article isa general discussion of the nature and implications of anthro-

pological theorizing in the contact zone, that is the space where cultures meet
and horizons fuse. In so far as we can no longer see anthropology as simply
the study of other cultures, the theoretical language of anthropology must be
a language of contrast, which may challenge the self-understanding on both
sides of the contact zone at the same time.
A distinction between designative and expressive theories is made,
amounting to a difference between clarification and radical interpretation.
The latter is seen as the more congenial to the general theoretical ambition of
anthropology, and indeed of any social theory, whose object is never a natural
one. Through the infiltration of self-understandings anthropology changes its

object in the very process of studying it. Therein lies part of its dynamic
potential, and its likeness to human action in general.
Key Words ♦ action ♦ agency ♦ experience ♦ theoretical practice

In this article I shall discuss the nature of anthropological theory with a

specific view to the study of action in the attempt to highlight the dynamics
of theorizing itself. There is no way in which I can review the precursors
and inspirations for this article save for pointing to a recent work of mine
in which I address the basic epistemological assumptions of the discipline,
as I see it (Hastrup, 1995).1 In this article I take my discussion a bit further
in that I put particular emphasis on the study of action and of agency as a
key to cultural dynamics, as part of my own current research interest and,
indeed, as an increasingly important topic on the anthropological agenda.
In recent volumes on the future of anthropology (Ahmed and Shore,
1995; Moore, 1996) the relevance of anthropology in the contemporary
world has been thoroughly discussed on the backdrop of the preceding
years of debate on postmodernism and related issues. The concern is

351
352 THE DYNAMICS OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY

generally with the status and legitimacy of anthropology in an era of

political disruption on the one hand and of new forms of communication on
the other. It is suggested that ’it is not a crisis of representation which now
threatens our discipline but a problem of relevance’ (Ahmed and Shore,
1995: 15). Relevance is to be understood in terms that are not simply utili-
tarian but also explanatory and profoundly moral. While sharing this view,
I believe that my own basic attitude is both less derogatory of previous
anthropology and more optimistic about the future than that of most of the
contributors to the debate on the future of anthropology. This is owed in
part to my view of anthropology as a pluralistic practice, based as it is in
shifting contexts. Part of my ambition in this article is to substantiate my
optimism, and if at times the rhetoric borders on universalism, this too
should be seen in context.
A few more prefatory notes are perhaps in order. As I see it, anthro-
pology today is not mainly a study of ’other’ cultures as social or semantic
spaces accounting for the meaning of individual action and speech, it is a
theorizing of the contact zone, that is the zone where cultures meet, and
horizons fuse (Pratt, 1992; Hastrup, 1995: 4). ’There is no vantage point
outside the actuality of relationships between cultures’ (Said, 1989: 216).
The ’othering’ that went into the old practice was a means of exclusion and
hierarchization, which we can no longer afford (see Moore, 1996: 6). To
suggest that anthropology always takes place in the contact zone, is also to
insist that whatever anthropological position we speak from, the practice of
anthropology itself presupposes the possibility of human understanding
across manifest difference; there is a basic assumption that people are at
least imaginable to one another. We could also phrase it like this: people do
not live in different worlds, they live differently in the world. One of the
most significant features of the world that we share is the experience of
relativity (see Ardener, 1989: 184). The sharing of this experience immedi-
ately points to the fact that we are here talking of conceptual relativity, not
ontological incommensurability-as we know from fieldwork.
My suggestion is that within this field of shared human experience,
theoretical anthropology itself takes up the position of ’radical other’ in
relation to the conceptual space under study; it seems to me that only from
this position can we contextualize relative understandings, and thus trans-
cend exoticism and essentialism. This is a specific echo, I believe, of
Edward Said’s representation of the intellectual as a definitional and con-
vocational exile: ’Exile means that you are always going to be marginal, and
that what you do as an intellectual has to be made up because you cannot
follow a prescribed path’ (Said, 1994: 46). In other words, you have to take
a stand outside the mainstream, because you have always to question it.
This immediately resonates with the collective experience of anthropology,
used to speaking against the wind of western rationalism, or to taking up an
eccentric position in the world.22
 KIRSTEN HASTRUP 353

This eccentricity is related to the dual nature of anthropology as a theor-

etical practice. The emphasis on the theoretical quality of our task makes us
realize that it differs from the practical lives of people, upon which the
theories are founded. The stress on anthropology as practice, however,
points to the fact that anthropology is more than just thinking, it is also
doing and intervening, if not by its being ’applied’ in the old sense of the
word then at least by its infiltration into people’s self-ascriptions. Even if-
at one level of analysis-people inhabit disparate, even mutually inaccessi-
ble universes (Linger, 1994: 289), nobody is immune to influence since part
of what it means to be human is to engage in communicative practices that
constantly redefine the universe. People are not only the victims of their
world, they are also the definers-in practice.

The Study of Action

Part of the concern of anthropology in the last decade or more has been an

explicit aim to review the study of culture and system in the light of history
and process. While we have certainly become wiser as far as social process
and practice go, there seem to be some major difficulties in breaking away
from the implicit objectification of culture as a whole, defined by an inher-
ent logic rather than constituted in practice by acting and reflecting people.
In her review of studies of system and process, Joan Vincent portrays these
two strategical perspectives upon the world as complementary on the em-
pirical level (being cast for instance as the distinction between ’symbolic
systems’ and ’ritual process’), while asymmetrical at the level of scientific
evaluation: ’Systems metaphors have tended to be hegemonic in pro-
fessional anthropological discourse; a propensity to systematize is ever
present. Processual metaphors have been historically subordinate because
of their &dquo;non-scientific&dquo; character’ (Vincent, 1986: 100). The problem is
closely related to the fact that continuity has been viewed as the normal
state of affairs in society, while discontinuity has been seen as aberrant
(Hastrup, 1993). As argued by Moore, there is nothing mechanical even
about sameness; even continuity takes an effort on the part of social agents;
in her view process is simply a time-oriented perspective on both continu-
ity and change (Moore, 1987: 727).
In anthropology, ’processual analysis’ was first established in terms of
the ’extended case method’ which showed how a number of factors
combined to produce particular effects. While thus soundly questioning the
prescriptive nature of ’culture,’ processual analysis quickly became just
another description of social life, in what remained distinctly empirical
terms, often at a very detailed level of everyday minutiae that were then
generalized into models (e.g. Barth, 1966). The actors were allowed their
own acts on the cultural scene, but the ’social dramas’ brought into focus by
354 THE DYNAMICS OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY

Victor Turner in particular were still largely thought of as windows to some

kind of systematic order. As Turner has it when reflecting on his own work:
’social dramas revealed the &dquo;taxonomic&dquo; relations among actors (their
kinship ties, structural positions, social class, political status, and so forth),
and their contemporary bonds of opposition and friendship’ (Turner, 1982:
9).3 It is as if processes were just seen as a kind of temporary activity on the
surface of an orderly calm, but as Rosaldo has pointed out, there is still a
space between order and chaos to be studied (Rosaldo, 1989: 102ff). I
would suggest that there is nothing much else to study than this space.
There is no system of language or culture apart from practice, no human
life without actions that permanently challenge their own assumptions.
This is where the study of action gains new pertinence. The agent is a
maker of history, even if within constraints, as Marx saw it. In Ortner’s
words, history not only happens, it is made, and the whole point of the
practice approach is to get at this making (Ortner, 1984: 158). And, I would
add, not to subordinate this approach to a ’proper’ scientific approach; if
’processes’ are not as easy to totalize as are systems, there is still something
to be theorized about, some general knowledge of their momentum and
driving forces.
The call for a revaluation of the agent’s point of view is not simply to
question the coherence of culture, but to recontextualize it, and point to
the site where the fracture lines between the local and the global and be-
tween centre and periphery are actually repaired: the site of agency, which
in an important sense is also the locus of sociality. The study of action in
this vein, I believe, is taking the historization of anthropology to its radi-
cal conclusion (see Hastrup, 1992). It is not simply a matter of situating
local or anthropological knowledge historically, nor of studying both con-
tinuity and change under a time perspective, however important these
projects are, it is also a matter of disclosing or discussing the historicity, or
the historical potential, in every moment, and every action. If ethnography
is still in some sense ’current history,’ its historization is (also) a matter of
fully exploiting the historical within the present (Marcus and Fischer,
1986: 96).
It is matter of investigating the dynamic zones of any situation, society
or culture. Where do things happen, and how? The dynamic points are

probably different from place to place and from time to time, and I would
suggest that we devote some energy to the comparative study of social dy-
namics as such. What I am advocating here is not a study of processes, as if
they were empirical stretches of events. It is the processual in every event
that is my concern; its potential for ’newness’, as it were. Similarly, my con-
cern is agency as a vehicle of action, rather than actions in themselves-
even if these are of course the starting point of the analysis. This concern is
not empirical matter; it is a profoundly theoretical quest, and it echoes a
shift in the mode of theorizing itself: from reference to ’radical interpret-
 KIRSTEN HASTRUP 355

ation,’ to introduce a notion suggested by Donald Davidson (e.g. 1984: 128;

see Hastrup, 1995).
In some ways I am echoing Bourdieu in his recurrent emphasis on
practice; unlike many of his interpreters who simply use ’habitus’ as yet
another notion of systematic prescription. I believe that Bourdieu’s lasting
contribution to the social sciences lies in his emphasis on time, not simply
as a coordinate of social life but as fundamentally constituting it. ’In short,
because it is entirely immersed in the current of time, practice is insepar-
able from temporality, not only because it is played out in time, but also
because it plays strategically with time and especially with tempo’
(Bourdieu, 1990: 81). The precise tempo and mode of action in any context
reveal the quality of social relations; as such qualities differ so does the
aesthetics of description from one society to the next (Rosaldo, 1989: 126).
An elucidation of such differences is part of the comparative effort to
understand the tempo and dynamics of particular actions.
When studying practice from this perspective, including the aesthetics of
tempo, I believe that the world of theatre provides us with a privileged
field. As Aristotle had it, theatre is a ’mimesis of practice,’ or as it is often
rendered: a representation of action (see e.g. Halliwell, 1987: 37). The point
is that it is in itself an action; unlike anthropology which has to resort to
words rather than drama. As a mode of action in its own right, theatre is
one site of human agency among others. It is to be studied as such, there-
fore, not simply as a parable on action in real life; this is where my work
differs from ’performative anthropology’ effectively seeing performances
either as windows to culture or as metaphors of social action in general (see
Beeman, 1993). The fact that the world created on stage is in some ways
illusionary does not detract from the reality of the players, their actions,
and their motives for acting. In general I see my current work partly as an
attempt to undo old oppositions between illusion and reality, between
emotion and reason, and by extension between art and argument. In human
agency they all blend and combine in the impetus towards action.
The fact that art and scholarship were established as autonomous fields
of cultural production at the verge of modern society in Europe does not
cut them off from the context of society and of general social experience
(Bourdieu, 1993); even autonomy indicates a kind of relationship.
Theatre’s play on emotions and on sensory experiences does not alienate it
from the everyday. Nor does it prevent the anthropologist from taking a
professional interest which transcends the experience. I would agree with
Bourdieu, when he claims that the scholar must pursue a different track
than ’the friend of beautiful spectacles and voices,’ in that the reality he or
she studies ’cannot be reduced to the immediate data of the sensory
experience in which it is revealed’ (Bourdieu, 1996: xvi). Yet, when
Bourdieu continues to claim that the scholarly aim is not to offer insight or
feeling, but ’to construct systems of intelligible relations capable of making
356 THE DYNAMICS OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY

sense of sentient data’ (1996), I believe he (re-)introduces an obsolete

opposition between feeling and reason, quite apart from the inherently
totalizing objectification. For the anthropologist studying theatre as a site
of agency this opposition dissolves itself. Evidently, one must go beyond
the immediate experience of individual plays, but this does not imply that
one has to forget about feeling. Art and argument may work differently

upon our imagination, but both are intelligible only in terms that transcend
old oppositions of emotion and reason. I would argue that in dealing with
motivated action in general this is no less true.

Shared Experience
Actors and other human agents share a feature of attending to the world
through experience, not through its representation in language. In field-
work we duplicate this in the sharing of experience with people we do not
normally live with (they may still be part of the same society, but in prin-
ciple the anthropologist has to assume a stance of otherness, as discussed
earlier). In a fundamental way the sharing of experience is also a sharing of
time (Fabian, 1983), and, we may now add, of tempo. Just as life is in time,
so must fieldwork be; ’co-presence,’ to introduce a term proposed by

Marilyn Strathern (1995b: 167), has to be taken quite literally. Fieldwork is

paradigmatic to anthropology, precisely because the object of anthropology
is an experiential, temporal, world not a ’natural,’ atemporal, one. There
has to be a measure of consistency between the object and the method of
study.
Fieldwork has been defined in various ways, but it boils down to living
another world. There is, of course, a lot of systematic work involved, a lot
of method and questioning, but the essence of fieldwork is to learn another
world by way of experience; it is the shared social experience in the field
that is the foundation of anthropological knowledge (Hastrup and Hervik,
1994). It is the body-in-life, the living person, that is the locus of experience.
In order to really know culture, one has to ’suffer it,’ as it were. We suffer
our own culture on a daily basis and are therefore immune to the pain in-

flicted, unless we take the standpoint of the ’radical other’-the eternal

exile-whoever we study. We begin, however, with the living of another
culture. This is itself an action, akin to the actor’s action on stage. In both
cases, we must live our part, to be truly present. In the case of ethnographic
fieldwork it is clearly not the mere physical presence in a foreign country
that produces understanding of the local script, but the literal incorporation
of knowledge (Hastrup, 1994). Living is more than mere performing; it is
making not faking.
Unlike Goffman (1959) who distinguished between the performer (the
public persona) and the character (the private self), I believe that these two
 KIRSTEN HASTRUP 357

are always conflated in life, because the agent is inevitably the centre of
attention to the world, where individuals do not normally orient themselves
by means of maps (cognitive, semantic or otherwise) but by way of itiner-
aries, indicating meaningful stops on their particular route.
In the field we have to live our part, and given the nature of the contact
zone, this is also a part allotted to us by the others. From the authoritative
subject position of the researcher, the ethnographer is transferred into an
objective position in the world of the subjects studied (Parkin, 1982). The
ethnographer becomes a ’third person’ in the field, a ’he’ or ’she’ in the
speech of the others (Hastrup, 1987). If one wants truly to know, one must
not insist on one’s own definition of the situation. If you do, you will never
hear the significance of silence, or see how immobility may also be an
action.
Let me give you an example of this. Part of my fieldwork in Iceland was
among farmers, and on the farm where I lived, I was given the role of milk-
maid (Hastrup, in press). For a couple of months I milked and tended 30
cows, not very skilfully at first. Taking the cattle to the pasture was my
major problem in this rugged and unbounded landscape. I had to keep the
flock together across large and open stretches of more or less rocky ground
before arriving at the grazing area for the day, which then had to be
bounded by a mobile electric fence. Once the whole flock went madly
astray, and it took a couple of men several hours on horseback to collect
them again. I was ashamed, of course.
The point is not to exhibit my remarkable lack of skill, however, but to
point to its source. It is not simply that I had been working at a desk for
most of my life. More importantly, I could not act adequately when I still
saw the cows as a flock, even a category, and myself as an anthropologist

performing as milkmaid. I could only succeed when I truly began living the
character. That is, when I began to see the cows as named individuals with
distinct behavioural dispositions, and when I gave up my resistance to
yelling at them on my way to the pasture in what at first seemed to be an
almost obscenely loud and distorted tone of voice. From then on, the
farmers could also see me, and talk to me about their vision of the world.
Of course, others cannot see you from your own perspective, and to estab-
lish a true relationship the parties must be present in the same time-space:
the contact zone.
We cannot, of course, share the experience of others in any literal
manner (Kohn, 1994), but we may share a communicative space that
enables us, by way of imaginative investment, to comprehend at least part
of other people’s motives. Anthropologists have to work as double agents
in much the same way as actors, who have to be aware of themselves as
both acting persons and as characters in the play (Hastrup, 1997). I shall
therefore let the famous Shakespearian actor John Gielgud briefly speak to
us on performing Hamlet.
358 THE DYNAMICS OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY

In rehearsing Hamlet I found it at first impossible to characterize. I could not imagine

the part, and live in it, forgettmg myself in the words and adventures of the character
...It was not until I stood before an audience that I seemed to find the breadth and
voice which enabled me suddenly to shake off my self-consciousness and live the part
in my imagination, while I executed the technical difficulties with another part of my
consciousness at the same time. (Gielgud [1939] 1987: 105)

In the process of conflation between performer and character, life emerges

in the contact zone. This zone may be a theatre stage or an Icelandic
cowshed, and just like actors can only characterize by way of themselves, so
anthropologists become their own informants on the ’other’ space. As a
double agent, the anthropologist is bound to act within two worlds; one is
defined by the contact zone (the stage), the other by the theoretical scope
of anthropology (the actors’ technique). Yet, again, the point is that these
worlds meet in the anthropologist as a person, who must act in character,
so to speak, and with full integrity. Again the wholeness of the double agent
is testified to by an actor:
I have continued working on every production until I feel I have complete control of
the whole space. Maybe it’s my imagination, but I feel I reach a complete wholeness
with what I am doing, almost a kind of invulnerability. It’s a strange feeling. (Actor
Torgeir Wethal in Christoffersen, 1993: 179)
The purpose of exposing oneself to alien lifestyles, then, is not simply to
understand another society, even if this is a first step. The people who live
there already are masters of understanding-if tacitly and practically. The
goal of anthropology is not to recast what is self-evident for others, but to
achieve a general theoretical comprehension of those processes by which a
world and its values become self-evident in the first place. Beyond the
understanding of local or cultural knowledge, there is an ambition to pro-
duce a theoretical knowledge, which transcends the singular instances. The
interest is not so much an uncovering of particular images of the world as it
is an understanding of their motivational force in the daily life of people.
This is where the potential resides, and what gradually becomes history;
agency becomes a central tenet, and fieldwork is vital to its understanding,
because of its congeniality.
To get to the theoretical comprehension of motivation, and by impli-
cation of historical dynamics at some smaller or larger scale, we have to
invest our living selves in the process of understanding the wholeness of the
situation. Only by way of action may we understand action. Living a world,
any world, as we also do in fieldwork, implies a merging of action and
awareness. This merging is the basis for the self-evidence of incorporated
cultural knowledge-in everyday life.
This point of the merging of action and awareness, is a theoretical point.
It is not given by the object, yet it is derived from an experiential encounter
with the reality of other people. A small point though it is, if taken by itself,
it is nevertheless a general proposition about the nature of the process by
 KIRSTEN HASTRUP 359

which cultural models or images may have directive force in any world that
we may study, and of whatever scale. In the practical life-worlds of people,
appearance and reality are one. The Platonian split has no bearing on the
experiential space in which humans live, and which anthropologists may
present in their writing.
It is the ’resonance’ between our own and their experiences that gives
evidence to our imaginative understanding of actions, not ’reference.’
Words (and pictures) have no intrinsic connection to what they purport to
represent; possessing a concept is not only to possess a word, but to have
the ability to use sentences and images appropriately (Putnam, 1981: 19).
Achieving this ability is what fieldwork amounts to. It is not a matter of
being able to properly translate the odd word in use elsewhere, but to be
able to sense its experiential implications and put it to use in the interpre-
tative context.
In other words, fieldwork literally brings us in touch with another reality,
’other’ in the sense of being viewed from our chosen exile. During the con-
densed process of enculturation implied by fieldwork, we arrive at a theor-
etical understanding of how experiences may become incorporated as
’culture’ and sedimented as ’habitus,’ defined by Bourdieu as ’embodied
history, internalized as second nature and so forgotten as history’ (1990:
56). In the process of fieldwork, the field becomes more of a state of mind
than a country (see Taylor, 1992: 388).
With a view of the anthropological object as an experiential space rather
than simply a society, a community or a culture, we reinstate the human
agent-and the victim-in the world. Experiences cannot be measured or
counted, but they can be identified, and their relationship to the measur-
able world and the spoken word must be established. Words do not of
themselves reveal the real content of the categories. On the surface of it,
words posit all categories as internally uniform and mutually equal. Yet, in
experience, categories are distorted, and display features of ’semantic den-
sity’, that is centres of gravity within their broad signification, that may shift
with new experiences (Ardener, 1989: 172). This, again, takes us out of the
empirical and into the theoretical; if ’semantic density’ is a theoretical prop-
osition about the dynamic relationship between words and experience, we
may see ’habitus’ as a more comprehensive proposition about the dynam-
ics between actions and experience, since actions may include speech acts.
In both cases, we theorize not only about patterns and models but also
about motivations and themes of directive force in the worlds under study.
By exposing such themes, we also challenge them. If our theories possess
such power we shall now inquire into their nature.
360 THE DYNAMICS OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY

The Nature of Theory

First of all there is reason to stress the simple fact that theories are sen-
tences, internally linked by logic, and proposing particular interpretations
of the world, which by their nature can only be summaries. As such they are
immediately different from whatever actions they contain and comprise;
like language in general they relate to reality like the measuring rod to the
measured (see Ardener, 1989: 180). They are, therefore, inherently reduc-
tive and transformative. Stressing the linguistic nature of theory
immediately leads on to the general point that words, such as those that
constitute the anthropological theories, may travel, as may other knowl-
edge-making practices (see Strathern, 1995c: 177).
While all theories share the linguistic feature, they may differ in other
respects. Charles Taylor has suggested a main distinction between
designative and expressive theories (Taylor, 1985a: 218ff). The former are
relatively straightforward in their pointing out certain qualities of the
object; with such theories, the object tends to be naturalized and meaning
to be unmysterious. Such were the correspondence theories that we have
now largely left behind. The problem is that with them we have left behind
also part of the popular appeal of direct designation, and of a latent
behaviourism as far as the human sciences are concerned. A more reward-
ing path is opening for us to explore, however, namely the path cleared by
the development of expressive theories making the world manifest in em-
bodying it. As an expression in this sense, anthropological theory may be
partly enigmatic, and often presents only a fragment of the reality it em-
bodies. Yet, the point is that what is expressed is made manifest only by this
expression. However imperfect, expressions cannot be replaced by other
kinds of presentation. As expressive theory, anthropology maintains some
of the mystery surrounding language as a field of indeterminacy. Expressive
meaning is subject-related because it makes something manifest for some-
one. There is no knowledge independent of a knower.

Designative theories point to, and propose; expressive theories make

manifest, and realize. No doubt, our general cultural strategies for coping
with the world include both dimensions, just like our ways of using lan-
guage are both propositional and evocative. For anthropology to exploit its
own full potential, it will have to cultivate the expressive dimension of its

theorizing, thereby opening up a new dimension of understanding and

articulating a new awareness which not only brings new abilities to de-
scribe, but also facilitates new ways of responding. Expression in this sense,
or theoretical articulation, is different from mere ’clarification,’ in that it is
also always a definition. As far as the study of action is concerned, the
difference between the two (ideal) types of theory amounts to a difference
between intentions and motives, the latter of which can neither be
established empirically nor absolutely verified, but may be suggested
 KIRSTEN HASTRUP 361

theoretically, and specified within some or other analytical context. It is

also adifference between clarification and radical interpretation; the for-
mer is an explication of what is already an inherent part of the object, the
latter implies contextualization and a kind of understanding that is relative
to that context, including the reflexive anthropological perspective. Since
we have alluded to art already, we could say that it is also a difference
between mimesis and poiesis.
There is again something to be learnt from the study of acting, and from
using actors and directors as informants on action. As theatre director
Eugenio Barba has it:
The actor’s expressivity derives-almost m spite of hImself-from his actions, from the
use of his physical presence. The principles guiding him in these actions make up the

pre-expressive bases of expressivity.

It is our actions which, in spite of us, make us expressive. It is not the wish to express
which determines one’s actions; the wish to express does not decide what is to be done.
It is the wish to do which decides what one expresses. (Barba, 1986: 134)

Anyone recalling Lévi-Strauss’ account of the shaman Quesalid will

recognize the magic truth in this. Quesalid entered into apprenticeship with
a great shaman in order to unveil the true nature of his magic bluff. In spite
of himself, and although he had indeed uncovered the apparent fake, he
became a great shaman himself. ’Quesalid n’est pas devenu un grand
sorcier parce qu’il guerissait ses malades, il guerissait ses malades parce
qu’il etait devenu un grand sorcier’ (Levi-Strauss, 1958: 198). Quesalid’s
mastery was one of technique; this was the stuff of his wish to do. With
Barba’s words in mind, we may say that whatever Quesalid wished to
express, it was outdone by his wish to do. His craft and his art became one.
Once we focus on practice and agency, we will of necessity take the point
of view of the acting individual, for whom there are choices to be made, of
course, but who must always act in full character, as it were.
The wish to do is guided by principles and motivations, histories and
goals, views of past and future, to which no actor has complete access. Nor
has the anthropologist, of course, but depending on analytical scope one
may venture some suggestions about possible relations within a context
that differs from the immediate context of action itself, by its being theor-
etical rather than practical.
This is where the idea of mimesis-or representation-in anthropology
is seen as of limited scope, even if like art itself, anthropology was once con-
ceived in terms of mimesis; both imitated the real-by way of designation.
The Romantics-of past intellectual history and present day anthro-
pology-have a different conception of their artistry. In the words of
Taylor: ’the artist strives to imitate not nature, but the author of nature’
(Taylor, 1985b: 229). I suggest (rather immodestly) that this applies to the
social scientist as well; there is no mirroring but an attempt to understand
how the world is disposed in the first place; with the present scope of argu-
362 THE DYNAMICS OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY

ment in mind, we could say that what we are after is not action but the force
of agency. Anthropological theory must strive to realize the world in its
own theoretical terms; documentation is not enough.
The expressive nature of anthropological theory takes us back to the
exceedingly important part played by metaphor as a domain of language
use, and highlighting the fact that language is virtually inexhaustible. There
is always a linguistic ’remainder,’ that is parts of language use which remain
unaccounted for (Lecercle, 1990). Like in poetry in particular, there is a
surplus of meaning in language in general, just like there is a surplus
significance in any event, or-within the present argument-a surplus
historicity in any moment. The ’surplus’ is the potential, the not yet, or not
ever, manifest: the possible. As such it is evidently a theoretical point.
Physical possibilities are one thing, epistemic possibilities another.
Anthropology may influence the latter, by showing, first, how certain things
are or are not possible given the current knowledge conditions, and next, by

extending the knowledge conditions by articulating theories that realize the

world in unprecedented ways. Like metaphorical reasoning in general,
anthropology makes it possible to learn from experience (see Johnson,
1993: 3).
Theories arepublic and open for inspection and dissent, and the degree
to which anthropological theories are valid to a large extent hinges upon
the extent to which they can be shared. Social theory must have some
coherence with experience to be rationally acceptable. The sharing of
significance is related to the sharing of experience; this is the basis for learn-
ing from the cross-cultural encounter in the contact zone.
Theories are not synonymous with the world, yet there are limits to
licence. Although subject-referring (because there is no knowledge without
a knower), no interpretation is wholly subjective, because meaning must in
some ways be shared for it to be meaning at all. There are limits to which

questions make sense in a community of conversational partners. If theory

posits reality, this still has to ’resist’ the trial of intersubjectivity and
intertextuality. Theories (and we might wish to recall that they are but
sentences) can never exhaust the possible range of interpretation and
explanation; their inevitable focus implies a vanishing of others. Focusing
always reduces in the sense that it locates the act of perception (Strathern,
1995b: 170).
Because theory is not about reference but about interpretation, the re-
search process itself, including its location and context, is as important as
the results; in fact, there is no way of distinguishing absolutely between
them. The process is part of the result; the field of study is an experiential
space. Most of what we see as significant data in anthropology are ontolog-
ically not in the things themselves but in our (shared) experience of them.
So also for the social spaces that bound our studies, even if different areas
of culture may be varyingly theoretical, as it were, and therefore different-
 KIRSTEN HASTRUP 363

ly posited to our ambition. Therefore, or in that sense, anthropology is

more about competence and doing, than about facticity and knowing.
An anthropological account must relate to social reality even if it cannot
represent it (see Bourdieu, 1991: 127); only therein lies its claim to truth-
a claim that must here be understood in the vein of Quine, arguing con-

vincingly for the empirical under-determination of scientific truth (Quine,

1992). The nature of the relationship between theory and practical life,
therefore, must be one of linguistic indeterminacy, and this is where the
affiliation between poetry and anthropology lies.

The Incorrigibility Thesis

The expressive view of theory only holds if one does not subscribe to a
kind of metaphysical realism, in which there is an absolute, ’natural,’ truth
about the world which has to be either ’ours’ or ’theirs’. The point to
stress here is that whatever the degree of subjectivity in the study of some
world, close or distant, the theoretical project of anthropology differs
from the practical project of people living there (Bourdieu, 1990: 25). This
does not mean that the projects do not interfere with each other. Because
of the nature of the anthropological object-people-anthropologists are

always in some important sense part of the class of phenomena they are

studying.
More important, perhaps, than the fact that the anthropologist belongs
to the class of phenomena under study, is the fact that the object itself is a
subject. There is always a pre-theoretical understanding of society, always a
set of constitutive self-descriptions which cannot be bypassed by the an-
thropologist ; the ’native point of view’ is an extremely significant part of the
ethnography, and somehow this is what we must aspire to vicariously
sharing in the field. Because of the constitutive self-descriptions, however,
anthropology stands in a particular relationship to its object. Theorizing the
social potentially affects local understanding. Whereas theorizing the atom
does not by itself alter the object, theorizing people changes the object
immediately because it infiltrates self-understanding (especially, of course,
if it is presented in a not too alienating way).
Where natural theories can to some extent be exhaustively described as
means to ’clarify’ or ’explicate’ the innate properties of nature, social

theory never just articulates what is already part of the object.

The stronger motive for making and adopting theories is the sense that our implicit
understanding is in some way crucially inadequate or even wrong. Theories do not just
make our constitutive self-understandings explicit, but extend, or cnticize or even
challenge them. It is in this sense that theory makes a claim to tell us what is really
going on, to show us the real, hitherto unidentified course of events’ (Taylor, 1985a:
94).
364 THE DYNAMICS OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY

This is, I believe, how we should also understand Quine’s point referred to
earlier about theories being underdetermined by the empirical.
However, because the object is also a subject, the anthropological theory
filters back into the constitutive self-descriptions. As Charles Taylor has it,
’a theory can do more than undermine or strengthen practices. It can shape
and alter the way of carrying them out by offering an interpretation of the
constitutive norms’ (1985a: 99). This is what makes anthropological theory
a practice; and a practice which may not always be welcome among the

people thus challenged. And it is also why we must take our theories
seriously as such, not as mere representations. There is no way of simply
’representing’ the world, certainly not as far as actions or other non-verbal
forms of self-expression are concerned.
Taking the agent’s point of view poses distinct methodological problems,
which has been subject to continuous debate in anthropology over the
years, but in recasting the project as one of radical interpretation rather
than clarification also shifts the methodological problem around somewhat.
Again, Charles Taylor may be of help clarifying the issue, in his spelling out
of two common misapprehensions in the social sciences (deriving from the
old scheme), that are particularly pertinent to anthropology:

The first is that what it demands of us is empathy with our subjects. But this is to miss
the point. Empathy may certamly be useful in coming to have the understanding we
seek; but it is not what understanding consists of. Science is a form of discourse, and
what we want is an account which sets out the significance of action and situation.
(Taylor, 1985b: 117)

Empathy can only be part of the method towards theoretical understand-

ing, a first step in learning a culture as well as a language.
The second misapprehension is related to the first one, and consists of
the idea ’that understanding the agent involves adopting his point of view;
or, to speak in terms of language, describing and accounting for what he
does in his own terms, or those of his society and time’ (Taylor, 1985b: 117).
Normally, a theoretical proposition would have to be a different and poss-
ibly clearer statement of what somebody is doing than what he or she is
able to account for him- or herself. Understanding cannot, therefore, be
adopting the agent’s point of view, because in that case a theory would
never be able to form the basis for an altered practice. So, while an inter-

pretive social science cannot bypass the agent’s self-understanding (and

selfhood, see Cohen, 1994), there is no point of view which is incorrigible.
In this sense, anthropology may continue its time-honoured position as the
’uncomfortable science’ (Wright, 1995), and one which is potentially un-
comfortable not only to government or people in power, but to any human
agent in the world presented.
The incorrigibility thesis-in requiring that we explain or understand
each society and culture in its own terms-rules out an account which
 KIRSTEN HASTRUP 365

shows them up as wrong, confused or deluded. Each culture on this view is

incorrigible (Taylor, 1985b: 123). Accepting this extremely relativist view
means that any social or cultural theorizing is disempowered from the out-
set. My own position is a different one, one which sees anthropological
theory as a practice, involving both a field of knowledge and a field of
action, and potentially changing the world by infiltrating its self-descriptive
modes, and making new meaning emerge in the process.
We have to come to terms with this infiltration; it is not only that people
may not like the challenge that our models pose to their self-description, it
is also that we-the anthropologists-may not like the way that people
appropriate our concepts and ideas; we know for instance, that by the time
we were ready to give up the notion of culture, it was all over the world and

put to use in varied and not always very blissful ways (see Strathern, 1995a,
1995b: 154). Responses in the contact zone cannot be controlled.
This, in fact, once again likens our project to the project of theatre,
which explicitly is seen as a mode of action. Both seek to make history, to
make things happen, by creating a contact zone; and both have to work on
the assumption that meaning cannot be a fixed relation between sentences
and objective reality, as Objectivism would have it. ’Grasping a meaning is
an event of understanding’ (Johnson, 1987: 175); it is a dynamic, interactive
and fundamentally imaginative process relating to previous experiences
and embodied knowledge. Meaning is always dependent on someone’s
situation in a particular social space, and the criteria of relevance rest on
and reveal our whole system of values (Putnam, 1981: 202). The event of
understanding is deeply social.
This has an important and oft neglected implication for the understand-
ing of the subject of history made through recontextualization-in theatre
and in theory (the etymological link is no accident). The true subject of the
work of art is the artistry not the artist (Bourdieu, 1993: 118); it is the
artistry, the actor’s technique or ’technology of enchantment’ (Gell, 1992),
which is the source of power inherent in acting. Similarly, the force of any
anthropological argument is not located in the individual anthropologist
and his or her position (although that may be part of it) but derives from
the artistry in understanding within the mode of theory itself. Both the
artistry of acting and of theorizing imply that the actor knows how to make
an ’expression’ which somehow resonates with the audience’s system of
values. The artist always works with his audience’s capacities (Geertz, 1983:
118). The site of potentiation is found in the dynamics of the contact zone.

Potentiation

Part of the postmodernist critique of anthropology has been related to

what Renato Rosaldo has identified as ’imperialist nostalgia,’ that is the
366 THE DYNAMICS OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY

mourning of the disappearance of what we, the imperialists, have ourselves

destroyed (Rosaldo, 1989: 68ff). We may mourn the lost world, but our
theoretical interest must be to potentiate the ethnographic present.
Realizing that each moment has a surplus historicity, a statement which is
the result of anthropological theorizing, means that articulation is simul-
taneously such potentiation.
With anthropology the world is comprehended from a position of
eccentricity, as we discussed earlier. The conscious choice of a scholarly
perspective beyond the western centre makes room for an attitude of non-
ethnocentricity. This may seem somewhat paradoxical for a science like
anthropology, which is identified as a kind of theoretical understanding of
other people. While any interpretation is, of course, vulnerable and open to
criticism, it is not, however, particularly prone to ethnocentricity. This
would be the case of any Realist or Relativist theory. The former would
appeal to a neutral scientific language, while the latter would objectify any
local language. Both positions are untenable and essentially self-refuting,
because social theory is not about clarification, as I have already suggested,
but about radical interpretation.
The error in assuming that radical interpretation by definition is ethno-
centric is to think that the language of our cross-cultural theories has to be
either theirs or ours.

If thiswere so, then any attempt at understandmg across cultures would be faced with

an impossible dilemma: either accept incorrigibility, or be arrogantly ethnocentric. But

as a matter of fact, while challenging their language of self-understanding, we may also
be challenging ours. (Taylor, 1985b: 125)

In other words, the theoretical language of anthropology is a language of

perspicuous contrast, which is neither theirs nor ours, but a separate lan-
guage in which we can formulate both their and our lifestyles as alternative
possibilities. In the words of Benthall, ’anthropology [is] the only social
science which is consistently committed to countering the ethnocentrism
inherent in all discourse about society’ (Benthall, 1995: 9). Before we
become too engrossed in self-congratulation it is worth recalling the theor-
etical, or intellectual, nature of our project; the very relational practice of
anthropology implies legion possibilities for simply shifting the context of
explanation or interpretation, as Marilyn Strathern has so convincingly
demonstrated, thereby simply externalizing the ’intractable’ (1995b: 165ff ).
Even with this warning, seeing the theoretical language of anthropology
as a language of contrast clearly does not land us in a mindless anti-ethno-
centrism in which judgement is precluded. The formulation of alternatives
presupposes a common scale, or context, against or within which they can
be compared. The language of contrast may show either their or our lan-
guage to be distorted or illusionary in some respects, by some scale that we
can agree to formulate, however provisionally. The strength of the
 KIRSTEN HASTRUP 367

anthropological language lies in its being able to construct such a scale on

the basis of an explicit fusion of horizons, while also avoiding the pitfalls of
the incorrigibility thesis. There are corrections to be made everywhere,
judgements to pass; self-understandings are not incorrigible. What we
should evince from anthropological theorizing is the ’rationalist theory of
rationality,’ viz. ’the idea that you are being irrational, and probably vi-
ciously ethnocentric, whenever you cannot appeal to neutral criteria’
(Rorty, 1991: 208).
While anthropological theory, like any other social theory, extends and
challenges self-understanding, it avoids criticizing it on irrelevant grounds
because it never just bypasses self-understanding. Theorizing in anthro-
pology is not solely about understanding the others, because the language
of contrast presupposes that we understand ourselves as well-from the
same critical perspective. The theoretical language of anthropology thus

brings the manifest reality of the contact zone to discursive effect.

Articulating the anthropological insight in a language of contrast means
understanding human practices in relation to each other. This is, it seems to
me, the only passable route between the Objectivist refutation of real dif-
ferences on the one hand, and the Relativist view of absolute incommensu-
rability on the other. Understanding is an event of juxtaposition. Radical
interpretation thus brings about the opposite of ethnocentrism.
The performative paradox of anthropological practice, i.e. the contra-
diction between the ’objective’ criticism of imperialism and the study of
others by way of intervention into their world, in theory transforms into
what I like to call the ’performative parallax’, as a parallel to the language
parallax in poetry identified by Paul Friedrich (1986). The parallactic power
is related to the eccentricity of anthropological theory which explicitly chal-
lenges western self-understanding, including Enlightenment notions of
rationality and reason, into a zone of performative indeterminacy, from
where new kinds of action may sprout. Just like a poem may have a surplus
meaning, reflecting the indeterminacy of words, so ethnography may have
a surplus significance, reflecting the surplus historicity in any moment.
Social change may result from the creative imagination that emerges in the
language of contrast. From the chaos of the contact zone, anthropology al-
chemizes a general theory that expands on the world.
With the notion of the performative parallax we are led back to the idea
of anthropology expanding the horizon by way of an expansion of a lan-
guage of contrast. This potential is owed to the implicitly metaphorical
nature of ethnographic reasoning. Metaphors are literal; their efficiency is
owed to the way particular words are used rather than to what they might
mean (see Davidson, 1984: 247). From the position of the radical other, the

anthropologist may create a field of argumentative force, if not of empow-

ering knowledge.
From this point we may realize that anthropology is not only a discipli-
368 THE DYNAMICS OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY

nary field, that is a field of knowledge, but also a force field, that is a field
of action (Scheper-Hughes, 1992). It is in this recognition and its implica-
tions that the relevance of social theory in general is to be found. Like the
words spoken from the stage in the world of theatre, so also for the words
or theories spoken by anthropologists: they are thoughts in action. Nothing,
in principle, remains the same after the words have been spoken, and the
context has shifted by way of this action. Thus, the dynamics of anthropo-
logical theory is like the dynamics inherent in any action: its potential for
bringing to life the surplus of historicity inherent in any moment.

NOTES

1. The repeated stress on anthropology etc. as I see it, is meant to counter recurrent
criticism on my work as exclusive of other viewpoints; most recently by Nigel
Rapport (1997) in his review of my book, A Passage to Anthropology (1995). The
point is rather the opposite, stressing that whatever I (and others, for that mat-
ter) have to say are positioned statements. My personal conviction is that schol-
arship grows in the space between positions, not in any single one, and that
agreement therefore is of less concern than argument in the scholarly dialogue—
which like any other dialogue must contain its own tension to make sense. The
obliteration of difference, or simple agreement, would take us no further.
I take the opportunity to thank one of the anonymous reviewers for reading
my paper in that spirit, and for highly constructive comments.
2. This is not to deny that anthropology has also served the purpose of western col-
onialism and may still be abused, as all knowledge may. It does imply, however,
that there is still an ideal to be pursued and a project to be kept alive. As Fabian
(1991) has convincingly argued, non-writing is not the answer to the dilemmas of
a critical anthropology.
3. These statements on the early trends in processual anthropology are very sim-
plified, and should not be taken as a general and facile rejection of what was then
a significant, and in many ways successful, attempt to make anthropologists real-
ize the living forces at play in culture.

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