6
Thus far I have attempted to define ethnocriticism at its broadest, in theory. In the chapters to follow, however, it will be seen that I practice it rather more narrowly (e.g., chapters 4 and 6), or, indeed, that I question the possibility of its full practice (chapter 5). Inasmuch as it seems fairly certain, for example, that a post-colonial, anti-imperialist, dialogical anthropology may well be achieved as a result of the conversation between Western and non-Western perspectives, I hope to have practiced ethnocriticism more or less fully in regard to anthropological discourse in chapters 1–3. In the same way, in chapter 4 I have tried to situate a Cherokee perspective in relation to the dominant American discourse of law in a manner that might question the assumptions of that discourse. Although it is a Cherokee perspective that confronts the American perspective, as the reader will see, it is a Cherokee textual perspective, one largely produced and expressed by highly acculturated Cherokee persons who may themselves already be seen as ethnocritics of a sort. When we come, however, to Native American oral literatures (chapter 5), and consider the radically different assumptions of Euramerican and Native
people concerning the genesis, ontology, transmission, and function of expressive discourse, it is by no means clear that any border encounters between them one might stage will be more nearly productive of a desired reconciliation—some new "invention" or synthesis—than of an altogether hostile confrontation. I have, in this book, as I suppose elsewhere, operated as a sort of perennial optimist in these matters; but I would not want to operate as a fool. I believe there is much already that ethnocriticism can do; I believe there is more it will soon be able to do; and I believe as well, however reluctantly, that there are some things that it probably will never be able (quite) to do.
In every case, the danger the would-be practitioner of ethnocriticism must try to avoid is, as I have to some extent indicated above, to speak for the "Indian," "interpreting" him or her, in Michael Castro's term,[19] in a manner that would submit her or him to a dominative discourse. This is a danger both for those (like myself) who can claim no experiential authority (i.e., they/we have no personal experience of being Indian), and also in some measure as well for those who have that experience. That is, it is always possible, as T. S. Eliot's Gerontion discovered, to have had the experience but missed the meaning—or to have provided a meaning that the experience cannot bear. Unwilling to speak for the Indian, and unable to speak as an Indian (although, as I have just said, simply to be an Indian speaking of Indians guarantees nothing), the danger I run as an ethnocritic is the danger of leaving the Indian silent entirely in my discourse. I don't know of any way securely to avoid this danger, for all that I hope it may somewhat be mitigated by a certain self-conscious awareness. It would,
of course, be possible simply to keep silent. In going forward with this book, it is obvious that I choose not to keep silent, for all that I have a strong sense that at this particular moment in history (I am working on revisions for this book as an American witness to what we have done to the people of Iraq; on the eve, too, of American celebrations of Columbus's "discovery" of a new world for domination) silence might indeed be the most decent choice. It is surely the best guarantor of safety.
Inasmuch as safety is bought at the price of some small usefulness, I choose not to keep silent in the tentative hope that my self-placement at some very particular frontier points, for all that it risks infuriating people on both sides of the boundary lines, may still in some degree help people on both sides of those lines in their understanding of the cross-cultural encounters I believe will increasingly mark the future.
Although I have argued elsewhere for the usefulness of retaining the category of literature as a distinct although not unique type of discourse,[20] these studies in ethnocriticism are very little concerned with specifically literary texts. This is not a change of mind, only an enlargement of interest—an enlargement that requires me to remind the reader on several occasions in the course of my treatment of anthropological or historical texts and subjects what he or she will already have surmised, that I am not an anthropologist, not a historian, and so on. Such disclaimers obviously serve the purpose of mitigating responsibility for error; such disclaimers also serve, I would suggest, as reminders of the position the would-be practitioner of ethnocriticism must inhabit, a position at the various frontier points where the
disciplines of anthropology and literature, literature and history, history and philosophy meet and interact.
In The Conflict of Faculties , Kant spoke, in a manner common to nineteenth-century German philosophical thought, of interdisciplinary studies as necessary to achieve the whole or totality of knowledge, the only goal sufficiently lofty to justify the existence of the University and lay claim to the scholar's devotion. Yet the actual history of the development of disciplines and fields within the University, as I have already noted—and, indeed, as Gerald Graff's Professing Literature abundantly documents—has tended to produce exclusivity and isolation rather than complementarity and community. Current trends toward interdisciplinarity, for all their commitment to community and complementarity of interest and information, do not, I believe, dream of recuperating the Kantian ideal of a totalized body of knowledge, Kant's ganze gegenwartige Feld , the whole present field, but, rather, of reconstituting the field, or reconceptualizing its divisions and unities.
This project has clearly engaged the attention of many in the Western disciplines. Consider, for example, Barbara Herrnstein Smith's title for a Modern Language Association Presidential Forum published in Profession 89 : "Breaking Up/Out/Down—The Boundaries of Literary Study." Contributors to the Forum call their individual essays, "On the Line: Between History and Criticism," and refer to "The Shifting Interaction," "Literary Revisionism," or, as in the text I shall consider just below, affirm that "Being Interdisciplinary Is So Very Hard to Do."[21] This would suggest that
while almost everyone recognizes that hard lines between the disciplines have softened as surely as the Berlin Wall has come down, this recognition has not as yet produced any agreement as to what this all means and whether it is, in general, a good or a bad thing.
I would suggest that commitments to interdisciplinarity—ethnocriticism, multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, and so on—are, currently, either determined gestures of trust, hopeful preparations for a future that will be very different from the past dominated by white, middle-aged, middle-class males, or, in a less prophetic mode, that they are quite simply sober gestures of realism. In just thirty years, to cite a fairly well-known statistic, thirty percent of the American population will be nonwhite (and women are already a majority). And, I suspect, well before the year 2020, for all that George Bush and William Bennett and Allan Bloom (not to mention a very great many professors of literature) may shout against the sea, it will not fail to break upon the shore—with all sorts of foreseeable and unforeseeable results. So it would perhaps be foolish rather than particularly brave not to be ethnocritical, multicultural, interdisciplinary, and so on.
And yet, as Stanley Fish has argued, "Being Interdisciplinary Is So Very Hard to Do." Indeed, Fish has insisted, "more than hard to do; it is impossible to do" (19). Fish's point is that each "imported product," from one discipline to another,
will always have the form of its appropriation rather than the form it exhibits "at home"; therefore, at the very moment of its introduction, it will already be marked by the discourse it supposedly "opens." When something is brought into a practice, it is brought in in terms the practice recognizes; the practice cannot "say" the Other but can only say itself. (1989 19)
For Fish, there is really no such thing as "traveling theory," in Edward Said's phrase,[22] no complex interaction between the place (and time) of a "product['s]" origin, its final destination, and the vagaries of the voyage. For Fish, things are distinctively what they are only if they stay where they are; should they move, they then become transformed entirely, taking on the characteristics of the place to which they have moved. It is curious to note the parallels between Fish's extreme topological determinism (to call it that) in regard to disciplines, and one version of "melting pot" theories of American culture in the period just after World War I.[23]
Then it was assumed by some that being multicultural was also not only hard but impossible to do: Italian or Polish or Chinese culture, once imported by immigrants to these shores, would be intelligibly American only as these melted down to a monolithically conceived Americanism. The new immigrants would most certainly not "open" American "discourse" or culture, or impart to it nuances or inflections it had not formerly known, for America could not "'say' the Other but . . . only . . . itself"—nor did it have the slightest intention or desire to try and do so.
Fish, of course, does not say this of persons or cultures, only of disciplinary practices. But his arguments and his conclusions are the same as those of the monocultural purists of the twenties. Philosophy might as well stay home with the philosophers, ethnography with the anthropologists; for, should they decide to emigrate to the literature faculties, they will only be melted down into a literary dis-
course that endlessly "can only say itself." "The American mind," Fish concludes with reference to Allan Bloom, "like any other, will always be closed" (21). The only question, for Fish, "is whether we find the form of closure it [the American mind] currently assumes answerable to our present urgencies" (21). The options seem to be to say yes, the current form of closure is "answerable"; or to say no, the current form of closure isn't "answerable" at all. If we say no, we still can do nothing but wait until the forms of closure change (by what means Fish never indicates)—and in full cognizance of the fact that they may not change in the direction of any greater "answerability."
Politically, this position is very much like Rorty's in its cheerful conviction that, here in the good old U.S. of A., things just go on as they go on—and that's not bad at all. But this position, to invoke an earlier American instance, has its more sinister side in its resemblance to Hawthorne's response to the problem of slavery. Slavery, Hawthorne wrote, is
one of those evils which divine Providence does not leave to be remedied by human contrivances, but which, in its own good time, by some means impossible to be anticipated, but of the simplest and easiest operation, when all its uses shall have been fulfilled, it causes to vanish like a dream. (In Arac 254)
And so we—who are not slaves—just wait, doing exactly what we've always done until change occurs, in God's or history's own good time. As with Hawthorne and slavery, so Fish with the academic disciplines: no change can be brought about by "human contrivances" because any attempt to do differently from what has always been done is inevitably to continue doing just exactly what has always
been done. I do not mean to suggest that Hawthorne's complacency about slavery and Fish's complacency about interdisciplinarity are morally equivalent: they clearly are not—although both equivalently recommend a quietism and submission to the status quo that I find wholly obnoxious. In any case, Fish's monolithic and totalized concept of the disciplines has a very bad fit with the actual world of current academic practice where, however much literary critics may domesticate anthropological or philosophical materials, these latter still retain and "say" a certain Otherness which not only can have but in innumerable cases has had effects upon literary practice that would not likely have come about without their "appropriation."
But let me leave Stanley Fish's untroubled denial of the very possibility of interdisciplinary work (and this would also mean denying the possibility of ethnographic work) to consider problems that arise when, in spite of Fish, one nonetheless attempts to engage in such work, not only crossing disciplinary but cultural boundaries as well. One of these is the temptation dilettantishly to dabble . Too many Westerners have played carelessly in the realms of Otherness, taking what they wanted—a little of this, a little of that—and blithely moving on, "savagizing" or "orientalizing" the Other.[24] Another danger of transgressing traditional boundaries is illustrated by the work of some of the contemporary French savants who occasionally seem to "savagize" or "orientalize" not the Other, but, rather, the historical record. I am thinking, here, of some of what Michel Foucault has written about the family, the clinic, and the prison, and of Jacques Derrida's accounts of the
fortunes of speech and writing in the West. Both of these authors, that is, often proceed so as to force one to accept or reject their arguments independently of the accuracy of the empirical data that is offered—for all that, some, if not always very much, empirical data is, indeed, offered. It is a tribute to the imaginative and rhetorical power of Foucault and Derrida that their work continues to have value even when, as has happened again and again, it is shown to be based on factually dubious or radically incomplete information. Even so, I want the ethnocritic to encourage as much frontier interaction as possible between the empirical and the logical, between concrete practice and abstract theory.
Hard as it is to get the details right in any one field, culture, or period, it is harder still to get them right in several. Still, I believe one ought to try to get as many of the details right as possible—in several fields, if interdisciplinary or ethnocritical work is properly to be pursued at home, and in foreign fields as well. For all the difficulties of the ethnocritical position, I continue to think that boundary-crossing with care, self-positioning, as I have said, at the various frontiers of historical and cultural encounter, in the interest of questioning the culture that constitutes one's "self," remains foremost among nontrivial options for cultural critics today.