3.
Ethnographic Conjuncturalism:
The Work of James Clifford
If we are to break out of the nonhistorical fixity of postmodernism, then we must search out and counterpose an alternative tradition which may address itself not to this by now exploitable because quite inhuman rewriting of the past, but, for all our sakes, to a modern future in which community may be imagined again .
—RAYMOND WILLIAMS
In his jacket blurb for James Clifford's The Predicament of Culture (1988), Clifford Geertz describes Clifford as "one of the few persons" writing today "who connects history, literature, and anthropology." "He's had an enormous impact," Geertz continues, "because he provides a new perspective on the study of culture that would almost certainly never have been generated from within anthropology itself." The "connections" Clifford makes are, of course, important to my own ethnocritical project (which, I should say, is much indebted to Clifford's work). What I want to examine in this chapter is the nature of this "new perspective" of his.
In his introduction to Writing Culture , a collection of essays on "The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography" he
coedited with George Marcus in 1986, Clifford called for a "plural poesis " (1986 17), noting that "Ethnographic truths are . . . inherently partial —committed and incomplete" (1986 7). Most recently, Clifford has written on behalf of "A modern 'ethnography' of conjunctures"—what I have taken the liberty of calling ethnographic conjuncturalism—"constantly moving between cultures" (1988 9). Such a "perspective" would seem to have affinities with the perspective I have been calling ethnocriticism. And yet, as I hope to show, for all the similarities between ethnocriticism and ethnographic conjuncturalism, there are some major differences, not the least of which, perhaps, concerns the nature of critical "movement." This chapter consists mostly of a close reading of the introduction to Clifford's The Predicament of Culture , a complex and insightful text called "The Pure Products Go Crazy." I will, of course, make reference to other of Clifford's texts, for all that "The Pure Products Go Crazy," as I think, offers the most recent and the most developed theoretical statement of Clifford's "perspective."
"The Pure Products Go Crazy" begins with a commentary on a poem by William Carlos Williams. Clifford quotes Williams's poem in its entirety, and it is probably most convenient for the reader that I take the space to do so as well:
The pure products of America
go crazy—
mountain folk from Kentucky
or the ribbed north end of
Jersey
with its isolate lakes and
valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
old names
and promiscuity between
devil-may-care men who have taken
to railroading
out of sheer lust for adventure—
and young slatterns, bathed
in filth
from Monday to Saturday
to be tricked out that night
with gauds
from imaginations which have no
peasant traditions to give them
character
but flutter and flaunt
sheer rages—succumbing without
emotion
save numbed terror
under some hedge of choke-cherry
or viburnum—
which they cannot express—
Unless it be that marriage
perhaps
with a dash of Indian blood
will throw up a girl so desolate
so hemmed round
with disease or murder
that she'll be rescued by an
agent—
reared by the state and
sent out at fifteen to work in
some hard pressed
house in the suburbs
some doctor's family, some Elsie—
voluptuous water
expressing with broken
brain the truth about us—
her great
ungainly hips and flopping breasts
addressed to cheap
jewelry
and rich young men with fine eyes
as if the earth under our feet
were
an excrement of some sky
and we degraded prisoners
destined
to hunger until we eat filth
while the imagination strains
after deer
going by fields of goldenrod in
the stifling heat of September
Somehow
it seems to destroy us
It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off
No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car
The first nine of Williams's twenty-two triplet stanzas provide a context for the particular example of Elsie, who shares in and, finally, comes to epitomize the craziness of "the pure products of America." Elsie herself, however, is not quite one of those "pure products" by virtue, or defect, of her "dash of Indian blood"—"perhaps."
That is, to say what should be obvious, Williams's "pure products of America" are not the Indians—although, strictly speaking, who but they might better claim that title? Rather, Williams's American "pure products" are "devil-may-care men" and "young slatterns," inhabitants of Kentucky and north Jersey and anywhere along the railroad lines, transplanted Europeans with congenital historical amnesia; all they know is their present American restlessness and malaise. Nonetheless, thinking of American "pure products," and the absence here of "peasant traditions," Williams also thinks of Indians—"perhaps." This is not so
surprising because, for one thing, although Native American people have typically been represented in American discourse as possessing hunting rather than (counter to a good deal of evidence) agricultural traditions, still, from the seventeenth century forward, Americans nonetheless managed to think about Indians as remnants, as it were, of America's feudal past, substituting, in Francis Jennings's phrase, "Savage Form for Peasant Function."[1] For another thing, it is worth noting that about the time Williams wrote the "Elsie" poem, he was working on In the American Grain (1925), a book of prose meditations on America and American history, in which he seems to have thought of Indians a good number of times.
In In the American Grain , Williams wrote, "I do believe the average American to be an Indian, but an Indian robbed of his world" (1925 128). Of course, it is the "real" Indian, the indigenous American, not the "average American," who was robbed—of his lands, at least—for all that he seemed still to be in possession of his "world." "Nowhere [in America]," Williams would further assert, "the open, free assertion save in the Indian" (1925 155).
This is not, of course, the "agent's" view, at least not of Elsie, who, like many a breed or mixedblood before and after her, is perceived as even more "desolate" than her untainted "pure" American coevals, crazy or not. And so she is "rescued . . . reared by the state," and placed in the quite traditional position not of the peasant but of the ser-
vant to an upper middle-class, suburban, professional family, "some doctor's family." Dr. Williams, at this point, as he moves to the cultural commentary in which Elsie expresses "with broken / brain the truth about us," refers to Elsie as "voluptuous water," attending not only to her "broken / brain" but to "her great / ungainly hips and flopping breasts" and their "address" to "cheap / jewelry / and rich young men with fine eyes." Here, Clifford writes, "suddenly the angry description veers" (3).
So it does—to a vision of the "earth under our feet" as "an excrement of some sky." But what is it that Williams is angry about? Obviously the degeneration of the "pure products of America," the lack of character in the "imaginations" of slatterns and "devil-may-care men," while "the imagination" (my emphasis) "strains" for—something else. Yet the brunt of Williams's anger is quite specifically directed at the sloppy and dirty yet clearly unsettling sexuality of working-class women (although "devil-may-care men" are promiscuous with these women, they "lust for adventure"). For if Elsie and her broken brain can come to express the truth about "us" only by way of her ungainly voluptuousness, it has earlier been the "young slatterns, bathed / in filth / from Monday to Saturday" who have specifically led Williams to his observation about the absence of those "peasant traditions" which might "give them / character." Working in the doctor's house, Elsie, like the "slatterns," is also probably bathed in filth a good part of her six-day week. Like the "slatterns" "tricked out . . . with gauds," Elsie also "addresses" herself to "cheap jewelry."
Clifford misses none of this and generously reads Williams's "anger" as an "angry, bleak sympathy " (5 my emphasis), claiming that Williams turns Elsie's "personal story
toward the general," "turns it all into modern history" (5), in which, seen "in the late twentieth century" (7), "a female, possibly colored body serves as a site of attraction, repulsion, symbolic appropriation" (5)—serves possibly as a representation of "groups marginalized or silenced in the bourgeois West" (5). Of course, to perpetuate a well-documented imperial tradition in which Indians, women, or the "colored body" serve as symbols, and symbolically to appropriate such persons for the purposes of generalizations useful to "us," is to practice a form of "sympathy" these people might well reject. "To Williams," Clifford writes, Elsie's "story is inescapably his, everyone's" (1988 4). But, here, too, one may wonder about the degree to which Elsie's story is "everyone's, "for neither Dr. Williams, nor Clifford, nor I can quite claim ourselves to be "silenced in the bourgeois West," even if our poetic and academic discourse is, indeed, "marginalized."
Still, so far as Clifford's observations are accurate—and in the main I think they are—what we have here is the early, post—World War I Williams in an apparent "revulsion from Americanism," in F. H. Matthews's phrase, "quarrying the national past in search of lost virtue"[2] (14): for there is not
much pure or sane in the modern, American world he sees around him. "In the 1920s," the period of this poem and of In the American Grain , Matthews writes,
the revulsion from Americanism and the search for a viable cultural community intensified into a major quest. Intellectuals in a position to assert their identity with some minority now fanned the embers of recently-declining traditions. . . . Writers who lacked a vital region or ethnic minority with which to identify turned instead, like Sherwood Anderson and William Carlos William[s], to quarrying the national past in search of lost virtue. (14)
Consistent with Matthews's account, Clifford takes Williams's lines as presenting a "feeling of lost authenticity, of 'modernity' ruining some essence or source . . . authentic traditions, the pure products, are everywhere yielding to promiscuity and aimlessness" (1988 4). Thus Elsie's story, whether it can be generalized as "everyone's" or not, is, nonetheless, an apparently tragic tale of loss, decline, and fall. As against this tragic vision, Clifford himself "proposes a different historical vision" (1988 5 my emphasis), one that "does not see the world as populated by endangered authenticities—pure products always going crazy" (1988 5). Clifford's "different . . . vision" is, it would seem, of a more nearly comic narrative, one that raises, as he puts it, "the political issue of history as emergence " (1988 7 my emphasis) to contest the politics of history as decline.
But in Clifford's subtly nuanced reading, it turns out that Williams's story is not strictly tragic—just as, indeed, Clifford's will not be strictly comic. Clifford discerns a certain
contrapuntal line at work in the "Elsie" poem, so that Williams does not only
resign himself sadly to the loss of local traditions in an entropic modernity—a vision common among prophets of cultural homogenization, lamenters of the ruined tropics . . . [but instead he] claims that "something" is still being "given off"—if only in "isolate flecks." (Clifford 1988 5)
Clifford discovers, then, that Williams also believes, as he himself does, in cultural "invention" (cf. Clifford 1988 17) and not only decline.[3] This hesitancy before either tragic or comic narratives parallels what Clifford calls Williams's "perpetual veering between local attachments and general possibilities" (1988 4). Under conditions of "ethnographic modernity" (1988 3), the culture critic must "veer," or as Clifford will say later "oscillate" (17), between narrative paradigms—as he must "tack," in Geertz's well-known term, between local/Western and general/global visions, moving back and forth between tragic and comic stories. For "there is no master narrative that can reconcile the tragic and comic plots of global cultural history" (1988 15).
But this veering and oscillating, as I will have further occasion to remark, while it avoids the "pervasive dichotomy" by which "[s]tories of cultural contact and change have been structured" (Clifford 1988 344), for all its proper doubts about the adequacy of strictly tragic or comic emplotments both locally and globally, and its disbelief in the
possibility of any metanarrative aufhebung or synthesis of the two dichotomous poles, turns out to be not an "invention" at all, but, rather, simply the choice of a third Western form of emplotment, of—to borrow the words of Hayden White—"an ironic mode of representation" (1989 30). In the most recent formulation of a point he has forcefully made on a number of occasions, White says, "A mode of representation such as irony is a content of the discourse in which it is used, not merely a form" (1989 30). And it is irony that is the content and form, newly "invented" or anciently recovered, of James Clifford's discourse about culture.
Thus it seems to me that Clifford provides for the story of culture in history the kind of negative critique that post-structuralism provides for narrativity in general. In a manner typical of the deconstructive mode, Clifford documents the unacknowledged contradictions and the ideological implications of narratives that would commit themselves wholly to tragic or comic emplotments, while largely exempting the equivalently ideological implications (for all that they are equivocal implications) of his own narrative's ironic stance. Clifford "contest[s] the prevailing narratives of Western identity," so far as these have been constructed as narratives of loss by raising, as I have noted, "the political issue of history as emergence" (7). He can show, that is, the comic possibilities always subverting ostensibly tragic narratives—as, indeed, he can show the tragic possibilities at work in ostensibly comic narratives. This is the standard methodology of ironists from Socrates to Boas to Paul de Man.
Clifford writes that
modern ethnographic histories are perhaps condemned to oscillate between two metanarratives: one of homogenization, the
other of emergence; one of loss, the other of invention. In most specific conjunctures both narratives are relevant, each undermining the other's claim to tell "the whole story," each denying to the other a privileged Hegelian vision. (1988 17)
It is all too easy, no doubt, to wonder why and how some narratives apparently escape the bivalence of "most [but apparently not all] specific conjunctures" (my emphasis)—although, it would seem, some do. In any case, this likely necessity to "oscillate," as I have said, is not so much a contestation of the modes of Western narrative representation as an unacknowledged choice of one of them—a choice not of comedy or tragedy, but of irony.
And this is why Clifford's instantiation of the likely necessity of critical veering or oscillating, although it might seem to be a parallel perspective to ethnocriticism's frontier orientation to border and boundary crossings is, in fact, quite different from it. For the ethnographic conjuncturalist is committed to perpetual ironic free play, or undecidability; to the constant and unending rhetorical subversion of logic and dialectic; to continual rebellion, as it were, with no hope of revolution. And this oscillation without end, this perpetual shuttling back and forth between the privileged Western narrative paradigms of tragedy and comedy, on the one hand, for all that it refuses their allegorization as reified oppositions, and on the other, while it correctly recognizes that they "prevail [. . .]" in "narratives of Western identity" (7, my emphasis), nonetheless seeks to extend both their privileged status and the subversion of that status as relevant to the narrativization of "global cultural history " (1988 15, my emphasis).
Geertz's "tacking," at least in theory if not always in practice, is indeed between the local and global—which is to
say, between specifically Western ways of knowing and telling and other ways of knowing and telling, in the interest of providing descriptions/interpretations of cultural practice and transformation that, if "thick" enough, might alter, or at the very least, ambiguate Western narrative and explanatory categories. To alter or ambiguate Western narrative and explanatory categories is, of course, the project of ethnocriticism, for all that it is (I readily admit) still a project easier to expound theoretically than to carry out in practice. To practice ethnocriticism, at any rate, will require real engagement with the epistemological and explanatory categories of Others, most particularly as these animate and impel Other narratives. The necessary sorts of movement, therefore, are not only those between dominant Western paradigms but also those between Western paradigms and the as-yet-to-be-named paradigms of the Rest. (And even then, the deconstructive paradox of a "no" to that which founds one's discourse still stands.)
Perhaps this is the place to note that the sort of movements Clifford valorizes are not of this kind. He concludes "The Pure Products Go Crazy" by affirming that "Westerners are not the only ones going places in the modern world" (17), noting, "But have not travelers always encountered worldly 'natives'? Strange anticipation: the English Pilgrims arrive at Plymouth Rock in The New World only to find Squanto, a Patuxet, just back from Europe" (17). This is generous, but a bit too breezy, inasmuch as it makes it seem as though Squanto had just decided to take off and see a bit of the Old World rather than having been carried forcibly to England; that he had just had time to unpack before hurrying down to the shore to complicate the Pilgrims' vision of the New World.
Indeed, to speak now only of Indians, there is no doubt
that today, as yesterday, many—not all—tribal people are fond of traveling, using their cars and pickups as their ancestors used horses, to go around and visit. But this sort of traveling and visiting is very different from what a phrase like "going places," with its implications of progress and advance, connotes. As William Bevis in an important essay has shown,[4] the typical pattern of Native American fiction is what Bevis calls "homing in" rather than—the pattern typical of Euramerican fiction—moving out, breaking away, searching, seeking, transcending, and so forth. Indians, that is to say, travel a good deal, but they don't "go places." The sense of rootedness seems extraordinarily persistent in Native American peoples today, so there's really no place to go, no matter where one travels for one purpose or another.
Raising the question of place in regard to politics, Willard Gingerich in an essay on "The Southwest as Spiritual Geography" asks, "South of what, and west of whom?"[5] Beginning with a reading of "Blue, the Sacred Lake" by the New Mexican poet Leroy Quintana, and proceeding to an analysis of "Back into the Womb, the Center," a section of Simon Ortiz's "Between Albuquerque and Santa Fe," Gingerich comments that
It is decisively not regionalist issues that Ortiz wants to raise, but larger, national and historical interests and forces which he sees as the context of those regional issues.
Gingerich concludes his discussion by answering his own question—"South of what, and west of whom?"—as follows:
By incorporating the images of these centers into his work, Ortiz lays the foundation for a revisionist history, geography, and politics by attacking the east-west axis of manifest destiny at the very roots of its New World, new Adam, new West mythology. South of nothing, west of no one.
This resonates closely with Kirkpatrick Sale's recent sweeping statement that
The only political vision that offers any hope of salvation is one based on an understanding of, a rootedness in, a deep commitment to, and a resacralization of, place . (446)
I would not want unequivocally to endorse the whole of this. Still, to come at these issues from an awareness of Native American perspectives is to be uncomfortable with at least some of the political implications of even a generously intended recognition that "Westerners are not the only ones going places in the modern world" (Clifford 1988 17). I hardly mean to bludgeon Clifford with his phrase; however, as both Gingerich and Sale remark, given the extraordinary persistence of the sense of home among Native American people today, there's really no place to go, no matter how many miles one may drive or fly. Thus it may be that the politics of placement, rather than the politics of travel, are what's needed for the most radical social (re-)inventions.
Ethnocritical movement is, obviously, a form of criticism and criticism is a form of movement. If "civilization," that is, is the product of neurosis (see Freud), then criticism may be considered the product of restlessness; centered peoples don't produce it in forms recognizable to the West (see chapter 5). Thus ethnocriticism cannot strictly be based on the rootedness and sacralized sense of place that the indig-
enous people of this continent had and continue to have. Its decentered center is indeed the "West," but its movement is not in the interest of going places; rather, it is a tentative feeling-around to encounters with Others who—for whatever reasons, less securely centered than some of their contemporaries or their ancestors—are also feeling their way around.
The movement Clifford recommends, however, as I have tried to show, is pretty exclusively a movement between Western narrative paradigms (so, too, in my view, was any movement Williams might be taken to recommend, his modernist irony here overlapping Clifford's postmodern irony), between narratives that are quite specific to Western culture, and which, even in dialogized form, may have little use as providing paradigms for the understanding of the variegated narratives of identity of other cultures. I see no sign, that is, that one culture's—"our" culture's—prevailing narratives of identity are in any way being contested by another's. Thus what I miss in Clifford's analysis (I can only slightly offer it in my own) is some developed awareness, if not a detailed description, of the very different narrative structures used by other cultures as explanatory emplotments and narratives of identity; those , I think, might provide examples that could more fully "contest the prevailing narratives of Western identity."
Consider, for example, the final chapter of The Predicament of Culture , "Identity in Mashpee." This lengthy essay treats the 1976 trial to decide a suit brought by the Mashpee Indians of Cape Cod for official recognition as an Indian tribe . The trial, Clifford writes,
seemed to reveal people who were sometimes separate and "Indian," sometimes assimilated and "American." Their history
was a series of cultural and political transactions, not all-or-nothing conversions or resistances. (1988 342)
With his usual acumen, Clifford sees that the story of Mashpee identity cannot adequately be told as a tragic or comic story, however much "Stories of cultural contact and change have been structured by a pervasive dichotomy" (344). Of course, to the Mashpee's misfortune, the law requires choice between these dichotomous terms, "Indian" or "American," a tribe or not a tribe, "all-or-nothing." (It should be noted, however, that in 1978, for better or worse, the Bureau of Indian Affairs promulgated new administrative procedures for tribal "recognition." These might prescribe somewhat different narratives of identity. Although the Mashpee trial was in 1976, Clifford's write-up of it did not appear until 1988, ample time for him to make reference to the change—if only in parentheses like this one.) But for those of us not bound by legal convention, those who with Clifford can recognize that "all-or-nothing," tragic or comic stories will not do, is there then no single story appropriate to Mashpee transactional or relational identity? Can one do nothing but oscillate and veer perpetually to do justice, at least representationally, to the Mashpee?
While it is altogether likely that the Mashpee Clifford encountered at the trial in Boston were probably a good deal more familiar with the stories of Western literature and American popular culture than with traditional Wampanoag story forms, I would be very surprised if some among them had not internalized various modalities typical of those forms. The paradigmatic structures of Wampanoag narrative—or, for that matter, of Navajo, Iroquois, Apache, Okanagan, Osage, or Pomo narrative—need to be considered as a pole against which to test those of Western nar-
rative. Clifford's "oscillations" between the tragic and comic poles of Western narrative structure can, as I have said, usefully dialogize Western tales of "cultural history," or identity, and that is all to the good. But they cannot, in my view, very well speak to the possible stories of "global cultural history" or to whatever concepts of identity exist among the present-day Mashpee.
Gerald Vizenor's insistence, for example, on a postmodern fluidity and "trickster"-like freedom for the individual is conjoined to a decidedly premodern allegiance to tribal identities as more nearly collectively constituted in terms of mutual responsibilities. Vizenor abhors the "tragic" and speaks, in general, for the "comic"; but it seems to me that the trickster narratives Vizenor recommends, and in his fiction produces, for all that they tend mostly toward (what I see as a recognizably Western) ironic structuration, still seem replete with possibilities that have yet to be explored fully.[6]I need to explore them more fully, at any rate, for an ethnocritical practice—and I think Clifford needs to explore them, or any practices at all like them, as well.
Otherwise, to amplify a point I made before, Clifford's practice can only continue Julia Kristeva's version of "feminist practice": it can, that is, "only be negative, at odds with what already exists so that we may say 'that's not it,' and 'that's still not it'" (in Alcoff 418). Thus, for Kristeva, in an essay called "Oscillation between Power and Denial" (my emphasis), anything like what Clifford raises as the "political issue of history as emergence" (1988 7, my emphasis), or indeed any politics, can only have a "negative function" (Alcoff 418). These are the problems with any
rigorously textualist position, poststructuralist or postmodernist, as I have remarked in the introduction; and those critics concerned to move to a politics outside the text will need to propose ways—as Nancy Hartsock, from whom I have earlier quoted, and Linda Alcoff do—to tell a more stable tale, even if it is only subjunctively constituted. One might, that is, in consideration of tribal narratives old or new, say: what if we told the story this way, or spoke conditionally of it that way, where these "ways" are neither tragic nor comic, not romantic or ironic, but, to adopt Gerald Vizenor's term, mixedblood narrative forms. From this perspective, the Mashpee "identities," so openly represented by Clifford, might, indeed, from a Western perspective, look like "a series of cultural and political transactions, not all-or-nothing conversions or resistances" (1988 342), but they might also, from an Indian perspective, look like—I don't know, perhaps some particular Wampanoag type that remains to be specified.
On the last page of "The Pure Products Go Crazy," the page on which he affirms that "modern ethnographic histories are perhaps condemned to oscillate between" (17) tragic and comic narrative structures, Clifford claims that his own book—certainly one of these "histories"—"surveys several hybrid and subversive forms of cultural representation, forms that prefigure an inventive future" (17, my emphasis). This seems to me an odd assertion: that hybrid forms are, indeed, potentially subversive forms is something I have most particularly learned from such writers as Gerald Vizenor, Gloria Anzaldúa, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and, consistently, from Clifford himself. But if that is the case, how can these hybrid forms "prefigure" an exclusively "inventive future"? By the logic of everything that has come before, the future could not exclusively be "prefigured" as
a story of invention, because any strictly comic narrative could never tell the whole story; it would need some form of the story of the future as tragic loss to—what? Dialogize, complicate, ironically subvert its claim to adequacy?
For Clifford has very strongly presented the case that—to take Edward Said's triad of world, text, and critic—whatever the world may be like, the critic in her text must tell its story inevitably as one of homogenization as well as invention, etc., himself perpetually veering and oscillating between these two perspectives. In regard to what, then, might we posit a purely "inventive future"? So far as I can tell, Clifford's permission of an apparently unqualified, comically inventive future here applies neither to the world, the text as product, nor to the critic as producer of the text, but, rather, to writing alone.
So far as this is true, I might note, too, that Clifford's admirable essay, "On Ethnographic Authority," both in its original version (1983) and in its slightly revised appearance in The Predicament of Culture (1988), also turned to writing as its ultimate horizon. In the final paragraph of that essay—I will quote its first and last sentences—a strictly inventive future for writing is endorsed, but, in this instance, nonetheless inevitably problematized. Clifford says,
Experiential, interpretive, dialogical, and polyphonic processes are at work, discordantly, in any ethnography. . . . If ethnographic writing is alive, as I believe it is, it is struggling within and against these possibilities. (1983 142; 1988 54)
While it might be thought that some of the "processes. . . at work" in ethnographic writing could possibly be concordant with one another, as Clifford describes them they are
"struggling" discordantly. And so, here, at least, it is ultimately for writing as it is for the world, the text, and the critic. The choice of verb here, "struggling," recalls the choice of verbs to describe the condition of "modern ethnographic histories" and of the writer of those histories. The histories were said to be ("perhaps") "condemned to oscillate " between two paradigmatic stories or "metanarratives," and, inasmuch as "modern ethnographic histories" (17) don't actually write themselves—as, indeed, "writing" doesn't quite write itself—the one who writes them must also be condemned to oscillation or struggle—"caught ," to cite an earlier formulation, "between cultures" (9, my emphasis).
If Clifford's ethnographic conjuncturalist "moving" between cultures (9) is, in his movement, "caught" between cultures (9), "condemned" (11) to oscillate between cultures, then even his writing can't, for more than a moment, be taken as exclusively comic and inventive. Writing, like the world, the text, and the critic, must also be implicated inevitably in a story of decline—a story which, to be sure, like Clifford's ending to "The Pure Products Go Crazy," will still swing back to an upbeat rhetoric of representational aliveness and inventiveness, to the belief in strenuous yet hopeful struggle, and to a whole world emergently "going places."
The content of Clifford's form, the emplotment of his story, is, then, as I have said, ironic through and through. The predicament of culture is the same as the predicament of the writer of culture, as it is, too, of cultural writing. No one narrative will do; stories of homogenization and decline must interact and intersect with stories of invention and emergence, and equivalently for the world, the text, and
the critic. Still, as also noted, for writing, the impulse to ground an unsubverted comic inventiveness is allowed at least a momentary play.
In the same way, it seems to me that there is an impulse to see the predicament of the writer of culture—for all that this impulse is not indulged in any explicit way—in a distinctly tragic fashion. What I am laboring to say here is that I read Clifford's strongest leanings as oriented toward narrating cultural change in inventive, emergent, and politically progressive modes; for all that he regularly insists upon a radical relativization of these leanings, it nonetheless seems to me that he does, indeed, want to propose a "different" vision from that of William Carlos Williams, a comic vision. In regard to the situation of the writer of culture, however, I read Clifford as leaning strongly toward more nearly tragic descriptions (for all that, here, too, he regularly qualifies any description offered). Consider the following self-characterization. Clifford says,
my topic is a pervasive condition of offcenteredness in a world of distinct meaning systems. . . . A modern "ethnography" of conjunctures, constantly moving between cultures, does not . . . aspire to survey the full range of human diversity or development. It is perpetually displaced. (9)
And notice that the practitioner of ethnographic conjuncturalism is not only "perpetually displaced," but—to cite more fully the words I quoted above—that "Intervening in an interconnected world, [he or she] is always, to varying degrees, 'inauthentic': caught between cultures" (11). Clifford risks, here, reinstantiating the oppositional categories or "pervasive dichotomy" (344) he has been at pains to deconstruct, for one can only be "offcenter" if "centeredness"
is taken seriously as a meaningful, positive term; the quotation marks around "inauthentic," to be sure, qualify the invocation of the set authentic/inauthentic: but in relation to what other than a sense of authenticity would "inauthenticity" have semantic and affective force? It is the same with Clifford's use of the verb "displaced." Displacement, as the continuation of his sentence has it, means "both regionally focused and broadly comparative, a form both of dwelling and of travel in a world where the two experiences are less and less distinct" (9). Thus the ethnographic conjuncturalist today must be a dweller in culture and a traveler among cultures. This seems altogether unexceptional—for all that, as I have remarked above, Clifford's comparativity does not seem to me very broadly traveled outside the West. But I hardly see how the both/and of local/global, or regional/"broadly comparative" need add up to a sense of being "perpetually displaced "—unless, to repeat, placement is something one believes in and only very painfully gives up.
This is to say that although Clifford's conclusion to his introduction promises a bright and inventive future for modern ethnographic writing, still, the language at this juncture suggests a decided nostalgia in regard to the critical writer, not for cultural "purity," but, rather, for that fuller empowerment, that greater "ethnographic authority," of an earlier generation. I am far from superior to such nostalgia: how many of us, after all—we academics who attempt to write culture and its history in one form or another—can honestly claim to be free of any longing for a time when one might actually have "aspire[d] to survey the full range of human diversity or development" (1988 9), to have done so with a clear conscience, and with the hope of telling the "whole" or "true" story?
With Clifford, I believe, of course, that between cultures
is where critics must situate themselves, but I see that position as not off the center, but, instead, on the borders. The difference is that the border intellectual, or, in my specific terminology, the ethnocritic, ideally, and I trust, in actual material practice, is not engaged in writing or in acting out a tragic or a comic destiny or identity but, rather, with recognizing, accommodating, mediating, or, indeed, even bowing under the weight of sheer difference. This is not, of course, the way in which the metropolitan critic, securely draped in the mantle of full competence and authority, went about his business in the past. But surely those who write to produce—I return again to Said—noncoercive knowledge in the interest of social justice cannot mourn the passing of that type of authority; if that is what has been displaced, well, all to the good.
My guess, for what it may be worth, is that Clifford would not disagree. And yet he seems uncomfortable accepting even a provisionally stable commitment to a comically emplotted politics of emergence and invention, in the interest of what Allon White has called a cosmopolitan "unity-in-difference" (233), while trying bravely to speak up for what is nonetheless correctly named as displacement. Thus for all the upbeat conclusion to "The Pure Products Go Crazy," with its apparently unqualified endorsement of multiculturalism and "an inventive future"; with its distinct recognition "that Westerners are not the only ones going places in the modern world" (17); there is still the odd Foucauldian determinism constraining, condemning us to "oscillate" or "veer" to the pole of homogenization and loss, however much we may attempt to choose other forms of positionality.
Is it inappropriate to suggest that it is mostly for persons who had, in whatever degree consciously or unconsciously,
expected to occupy positions of epistemological and discursive centrality, that an acknowledged loss of that centrality must be deeply disconcerting and productive of a sense of being displaced, offcenter, caught, or condemned? But—and I remind the reader here of the quotation from Nancy Hartsock earlier (p. 24)—for those persons who formerly never could expect to occupy such positions, the possibility the modern world opens is to perform in neither a tragic nor a comic plot, but, regardless of the form their story takes, simply to be visible and to be heard. Betweenness for them—I might offer bits of autobiography here in the interest of justifying the pronoun "us"—betweenness for those who have hitherto been marginalized for reasons of race, class, or gender first and foremost means nonperipherality: not centrality, nor an "'alterity,' which understands itself as an internal exclusion" (Alcoff 418). Such people—and the historical probability is that they (here, I could not say "we") will for the most part be persons of color, and women, Elsie in New Jersey and globally—such people are not likely to think, speak, and write from a sense of lost authenticity or centrality. As they increasingly have the opportunity not necessarily to be "going places," but in whatever ways only to present themselves as not entirely Other nor yet the Same, they will not, I think, feel themselves caught, or describe their betweenness as a condemnation.
Let me cite the words of Gloria Anzaldúa in this regard. She writes, in the preface to her Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza ,
Living on borders and in margins, keeping intact one's shifting and multiple identity and integrity, is like trying to swim in a new element, an "alien" element. There is an exhilaration in
being a participant in the further evolution of humankind, in being "worked" on. I have the sense that certain "faculties"—not just in me but in every border resident, colored or noncolored—and dormant areas of consciousness are being activated, awakened.
It is along these lines that ethnocriticism wishes to constitute itself as a critical practice in no way condemned to ironic oscillations between Western narratives, but, rather, as freely choosing a commitment to the production of whatever narratives—and it is impossible to predict with any accuracy the forms these will take—may serve to tell the emerging story of culture change today and in the future. Anzaldúa's willingness to be "worked" on in the margins and on the borders is very different, I think, from Clifford's being caught between. And the difference makes a difference, for all that the "work" that must go forward needs both Clifford and Anzaldúa.