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INTRODUCTION: ETHNOCRITICISM
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Ethnocritical discourse, in its self-positioning at the frontier, seeks to traverse rather than occupy a great variety of "middle grounds," both at home and abroad. At home, it will try to move between such positions as, for example, a persistent if (properly) contested humanism, on the one hand, and, on the other, a Derridaean/Foucauldian/de Manian virulent anti-humanism; between a Rortyian/Ly-


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otardian/Tylerian postmodernist evocative fragmentariness, and a social-scientific aspiration to cognitive adequacy; and so on. This is all quite easy to say. Abroad, however, ethnocriticism is a much less well-equipped traveler, making trips between the best definitions it can construct of an epistemological rationalism that valorizes categories like the empirical and material as "real," and the very different epistemologies of others—ones which, to the Western eye, appear irrationalist, magical, or whatever, but which, indeed, may appear so only because they radically refuse the dualistic and circumferential categories of the West.

Ethnocriticism at home rejects all forms of manichean discourse whether of a traditional and neocolonial or of a revisionist, "victimist" kind. Thus, ethnocriticism, as I have said, is concerned with differences rather than oppositions, and so seeks to replace oppositional with dialogical models. These latter always claim that the logical principle of the "excluded middle" itself excludes careful attention to the varieties of empirical differences discernible everywhere. Ethnocritical discourse regards border and boundary crossings, with their openness to and recognition of the inevitability of interactive relations, as perhaps the best means to some broadly descriptive account of the way things "really" work in the material and historical world. Ethnocriticism thus wishes to develop and refine dialogic models whose claims to accuracy, systematicity, and knowledge would reside in their capacity, in Anthony Wilden's sense,[16] to take in more context.

This is to say that ethnocriticism does not offer itself as a master narrative, while it does not either offer itself as just one position among others. An ethnocritical perspective


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will certainly invoke reason, philosophy, and science—in full awareness of the ways in which, in their modern Western forms, these have "failed," but also with a modest awareness of the ways in which they have "succeeded" in particular and locally specifiable instances. Given its frontier condition of liminality or betweenness, ethnocriticism by its very nature must test any appeals to "reason," "science," "knowledge," or "truth" it would make in relation to Other or non-Western constructions of these categories, or, for that matter, to any alternative categories Others may propose. As the frontier is "a culturally defined place" (Clifton 24), so, too, will "truth" likely be—so far as we may know it, whatever it may be "in itself"—a "culturally defined" place, a relative truth, therefore, but not necessarily in the sense of a full-blown epistemological relativism. Indeed, ethnocriticism seeks a position not quite (in R. J. Bernstein's phrase) "beyond objectivism and relativism,"[17] but instead somewhere between objectivism and relativism.

Just as ethnocriticism must consider other constructions of the categories it would employ, calling its own largely Western assumptions or origins into question, so, too, must it permit all who would articulate those alternate constructions to be heard. It must do this not only as a matter of fairness or decency, important as these are, but (again) as a consequence of its very nature as ethnocriticism, its constitution by the principle that all discourse, like all cultural practice and all actual speech, is inevitably plural, regardless of what is officially permitted. This need not condemn ethnocriticism to any delusively utopian absolute freedom and egalitarianism. Rather, for all the openness it values, it nonetheless admits the fact that any serious discourse pre-


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tending to effectivity must in some degree be regulatory , and thus constrained to argue for and defend those ideas and perspectives it considers more valuable or important than others—while yet refusing to suppress those it considers less valuable or important. Obviously all of this is easier to imagine, even to articulate, than it is to put into practice. But, as I have said, imagining and articulating it, so far as one can, is already to contribute, however incipiently, to its practice and the practices it may found.

Of course, there will always be something paradoxical about a criticism that insists on its betweenness—while seeking a certain privilege or centrality; a criticism that insists upon a commitment to dialogue and the shifting processes of "transculturalization"—in the name of such apparently monologous and fixed categories as accuracy, knowledge, and truth. But this is only to recognize that ethnocriticism is not only at but of the frontier, its situation and its epistemological status the same. As I have already said, the accuracy, knowledge, and truth invoked by ethnocritical discourse will of necessity be "deconstructive," in Gayatri Spivak's sense; liminal , in Victor Turner's term,[18] expressed explicitly or implicitly in the subjunctive , mood, domain of if-I-were-you , or should-it-turn-out-that . The trope most typical of ethnocritical discourse, in the rhetorical terminology I will use at times in this book, is the oxymoron , that figure which offers apparently oppositional, paradoxical, or incompatible terms in a manner that nonetheless allows for decidable, if polysemous and complex, meaning. Standard examples of this apparently paradoxical


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but ultimately coherent figure are such things as "thunderous silence," "dark light," "joyful sadness," or Emily Dickinson's notation of "thunders" that "hurried slow ." As a critical discourse which claims to be both on and of the frontier, traversing middle ground while aspiring to a certain centrality, descriptive and normative at once, it should come as no surprise that ethnocriticism and the oxymoron have particular affinities or, again, in Spivak's very particular sense, that a catachrestical figuration—"concept metaphor without adequate referent" (Spivak 794)—may also come into play.


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INTRODUCTION: ETHNOCRITICISM
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