Alternate Routes A Journal of Critical Social Research Editors Amanda McCarthy Siomonn Pulla Andrea Sharkey Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2011 with funding from Carleton University, Department of Sociology & Anthropology http://www.archive.org/details/alternateroutesc19alte Alternate Routes A Journal of Critical Social Research Volume 19, 2003 Editorial Policy/Call For Papers 4 Perspective Brian P. Miller Talk of Inventing Tradition: Sketching Limita- tions of Anthropological Concepts of Culture 5 Work in Progress Anna Arnone Being Eritrean in Milan 20 Articles Kenneth Fish Biotechnology and the Society-Nature Relation 58 Fiona Martin The Changing Configurations of Inequality in Post-industrialSociety:VolunteeringasaCaseStudy 79* Robyn Smith The Possibility of Pleasure: Foucaulfs Philoso- phy of the Subject and the Logic of an Appeal to Aesthetics 109 Errata and Contents ofPast Issues 123 . Uternate Routes Editorial Policy/Call For Papers Alternate Routes (.iR) is a refereed multi-disciplinary journal published annually by graduate students in the department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University Ottawa, Canada, K1S 5B6, altroutes@lists.carleton.ca. As a peer reviewed journal, .4R provides a forum for debate and exchange among North American and International graduate students. We are interested in receiving papers written by graduate students (or coauthored with faculty), regardless of university affiliation. The editorial emphasis of the journal is on the publication of critical and provocative analyses of theoretical and substantive issues. We welcome papers on a broad range of topics and encourage submissions which advance or challenge theoretical ques- tions and contemporary issues. We also welcome commentaries and reviews of recent publications, works in progress and personal perspectives. Alternate Routes is currently seeking submissions for Volume 20, 2004. Papers should be submitted double-spaced and in triplicate, following the American Psy- chological Association (APA) referencing system, keeping endnotes to a minimum. Please see our website for a style-guide. Back issues of Alternate Routes are available at the following prices per volume: Current Issue (Volume 19, 2003) - Individuals $12.00; Students/ Un(der)employed $6.00; Institutions $21.50. Volume 16/15 (99/97): Individuals $12.00; Students/ Un(der)employed $4.00; Institutions $12.00. All previous years: Individuals $3.00; Students/Un(der)employed $1.50; Institutions $6.00 . . litemate Routes is indexed in Sociological Abstracts and the Left Index. The Alternate Routes Collective gratefully acknowledge the financial assistance of the Carleton University community; the Departments of Sociology and Anthropology and its Chair, the Dean of Arts and Social Sciences, the Dean of Graduate Studies and Research, and the Vice-President of Research. We also wish to gratefully thank all of the anony- mous reviewers. Volume 19, 2003 Chemins Alternatifs Perspective Talk of Inventing Tradition: Sketching Limitations of Anthropological Concepts of Culture Brian P. Miller University of Manchester Introduction: On a Cultural Approach As an adolescent, 'culture' was always something to possess. Together, my family could walk out the door, hop in the Pontiac or Buick, and drive off to experience culture. We could visit the cultural center - the museum, the theatre, the cinema, the art gallery; we could tour a cultural site - a historic mansion, a battlefield, a realistically reconstructed colo- nial, or native settlement; we could even attend a cultural event - the St. Patrick's Day, or July Fourth Parade, the Greek or German festival. My family could venture anywhere but home to find culture. It was out in society and absent hi the neighborhood. The artist's object, the sym- phony performance, even the refined dinner experience was a means to ascertain the culture just downtown a few minutes drive. Culture found its way into my life through the relocation of my body to designated areas where culture was contained, erected, even illustrated, for my gaze and absorption, rearranging my perceptions and awareness, and readying me for a specific kind of experience. Naive at best, simple at least, culture was materialistic and experi- enced in certain interactions with others. Holy describes these elements of "high culture'' as ways in which shared meanings help to make sense of a world that constantly changes 1 . Never did it occur to me that culture might be an omnipresent force, a fluid, ebbing movement of perceptions and definitions, a point of contention, even argument... politically, a tool for negotiation, a system of reinvention or a shifting, limited concept of differentiation... a context for understanding. Numerous travels, global encounters, and, not the least, several years of academic anthropology have razed these adolescent definitions, or maybe just reconstructed Volume 19, 2003 5 Alternate Routes them. This paper focuses on the various dimensions and contentions the concept of culture brings to anthropology. The term is a functional and constructive idiom of language, not lim- ited to academic departments in the social sciences of the Western Hemisphere. People give culture meaning through how they use and refer to it. Ambiguity surrounds the margins of the culture concept and anthropology debates these notions as a matter of practice. As an ele- ment of the human being's social atmosphere, culture now lacks clarity even within the discipline of anthropology, having undergone a critical rethinking in the last twenty-five years. In attempting to reconcile the notion of culture and its multitude of meanings, its outline is less clear. The effervescence of the presence and significance of culture in the academy does not negate but diminishes embarrassment for my former notions when popular discourse still clings to similar, material defini- tions as those I once used. Understanding culture as a mode of interpre- tation and representation depends on context, conversation, and the audience of these two elements. It is not beyond an individual to watch a film where men perform "the monkey chant" in a jungle in Southeast Asia and gain insight into another culture, see that as something distinct from their own. The frontiers of understanding create boundaries for the knowing of the idea itself, though not rigid. The word culture is supposed to have perimeters; it functions with difference in mind. Limiting Anthropology Perhaps the suggestion that the identity of culture lie in the material aspects of my hometown was not entirely naive; rather, the context of using the term culture to construct this meaning limited other possibili- ties. The materialist definition was a valid description. In Culture in Practice, Marshall Sahlins illustrates, with slight disdain for this value, "for too many, 'culture' still has this predominantly aesthetic or intellec- tual signification (2000:16).*' His obvious point states that culture is more than the epitomized material expressions of society - more than the museums and intellectualized. institutionalized, elitist version. It comes from anthropological frameworks and not the day-to-day, popu- lar, lived conception that he acknowledges. Even in contemporary dis- cussions of culture, especially regarding authentic and invented traditions, the characteristics of a web of meanings arc made obvious. illustrative, and interesting through reference to site-specific rituals. 6 Volume 19, 2003 Chemins Alternatifs craft, language, and other, outwardly visible aesthetic products; expres- sive culture helps to differentiate. It is easy to glean from Sahlins* words here that anthropology has its own model and use for culture that it tends to continually try to renegotiate. Yet anthropology, and in par- ticular its hallmark methodology of ethnography, has played a part in Western intellectualism by reinforcing modernist ideas about what gets identified as a cultural item. What is worth consideration are the limitations of the anthropological treatment of the culture concept. The definitions and uses anthropology gives to the idea fluctuate too much, hovering just above comprehension, offering the inadequate guarantee of a definitive way to talk about the essence of culture. Employing the idea of culture as a way to delineate differences between groups of people does not allow room in an aca- demic discourse for those groups to alter their own identity'. A discur- sive fence prevents them from getting on with the process of sustaining and formulating meaning in their lives, bartering knowledge of the world with those who they see as lying beyond an imagined boundary. The very tension of continually calling to question and the redrawing of lines has been the subject of poignant investigations seen recently in the works of Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus, 1986) and Recaptur- ing Anthropology (Fox, 1991), as well as postmodernist, and afterological 2 thought. Though distinct approaches, their questions are real and warranted. Anthropologists have exerted - in fact, an entire dis- cipline and discourse found - over the central idea that culture (or some- thing dubbed as culture) is alive between, among, and through people. What is being asked is whether culture does have substance and how it is and can be defined and by whom? Is culture, as an empirical model, valuable? Is the "Very emphasis on 'culture' ... a betrayal" and misnomer for the complexities of human communication and behavior (Ingold, 1996:119)? Anthropology, from its conception and as a vehicle for study and debate, is so wrapped up in the project of modernity, that its constant self-critique, internal uncertainty, moral consciousness, and his- torical change, embody the modernist spirit of progress: teardown the old, build the new, rejoice, remit, renew. Nevertheless, these conven- tions are dependent on the morality of each era and anthropology is con- stantly at arms with itself in the face of changing concerns and timely issues. Negotiations of culture not only appear to occur in the global world of struggling, sentient, social forces but are also a mechanism of Volume 19, 2003 7 Alternate Routes the intellectual direction of the anthropological approach to understand- ing: to create a perception of meaning within human worlds. Returning to Marshal Sahlins', I had a chuckle reading "Two Or Three Things I Know About Culture' 7 when he wrote: It is possible to conclude from several decades of disciplin- ary self-reflection that anthropology doesn't exist, since if it isn't sociology, it's humanities. Alternatively, it is reassur- ing to know that anthropologists are able to share with the peoples they study the ability to construct ethnic differences by developing epitomizing contrasts of selected cultural val- ues (Sahlins, 1999:400). I wish to make clear that this was an eighteen page, "anthropological" paper in an "anthropological" journal. Anthropology does exist, just not as he had construed. Sahlins' demonstration of displacement summa- rizes the condition anthropology realizes itself in today - questioning its past, reassessing and evaluating its impressions and descriptions. The human being, as a mode of representation, no longer holds authority in the realm of science. Even anthropology has begun questioning the validity of scientific truth, its offerings to the human world, and its rela- tionship to upholding the foundations of a problematic, colossal hege- mony. A new anthropologists' creed might be offered, "I am not an instrument of objective measurement." Leaving the domain and genre of enlightened, empirical inquiry, Sahlins evokes a movement towards a discipline grounded in moral ingenuity. The inability to poise and sidle itself firmly in an academic category, wavering in empirical sensibility, reflects silent incongruities as well as resonating modernist elements of disconnection. Anthropology's self-prescribed role as purveyor of truth in Western society has changed: its legitimacy, debunked. Linked admittedly and forthrightly to a colonial project of domination since at least the late 19 th century, anthropologists have run headfirst into a quag- mire of morality and sclf-awarcncss. stimulating concerns of its effec- tiveness. In an idealistic. Western democratic sense of freedom and humanity - meaning, making way for the right of all humans to make their own decisions and choices, to live without oppression and violence from others - anthropology has become highly critical and sensitive to its role in politics and as an author of knowledge. 8 Volume 19, 2003 Chemins Alternatifs Conceivably, a residual guilt coats a professional conscience focused, in the last twenty or more years, on post colonialist (or late-imperialist, or high-imperialist) underpinnings. As a focus of debate, anthropology's own internal strife has muddled its definitions and reality of culture. Maybe this social and scholastic climate of over sensitivity to the con- temporary world condition of globalization, the capitalist world market, hyper-cautious political positioning, and the introduction of Western philosophical ideals into every niche of human communities around the globe have deconstructed an anthropological understanding of itself and simultaneously dug a moat, an unapproachable bastion, with anthropol- ogy in the center. Its own constructed tradition has marginalized its self- worth, making it difficult to approach and to venture out into new under- standing. In a gesture to support Marshal Sahlins, for I find agreement in much of his writing, he does correspond to the idea of ideological and practical toil. "Modern anthropology still struggles with what had seemed like Enlightenment to the philosophers of the eighteenth century but turned out to be a parochial self-consciousness of European expan- sion and the mission civilisatrice'' (Sahlins, 2000:501). Civilization sim- ply referred to the society in which the philosophers of that time lived; civilization was a concept and model, hierarchical to barbarism, a stage beyond savage primitivism to which, paraphrasing Kant, Sahlins (2000) writes, progress and reason would overcome. Returning, however, to another point about Marshall Sahilns" state- ment from "Two or Three Things," his comments allows, for no appar- ent reason, for anthropology to shake hands with itself for having the ability to make similar distinctions based on research in some locale that categorizes others through quintessential characteristics of difference. But at this stage in departure, making distinctions about the "world out there" and "other" people seems a universal characteristic of the human experience. The brain of an individual inherently creates differences of self and not-self and this procedure is played out on a grand scale in the social world of humans. This faculty does not confer, outside of situated knowledge, a truth about where lines ought to be drawn, or who is to decide what prevails as a boundary. The discipline of anthropology is consciously entwined with political manoeuvres and negotiations, but why should anthropology be a better judge or negotiator of culture? One answer is that in a Western society-, it is the institutional intellectuals Volume 19, 2003 9 Alternate Routes who produce identities for its constituents. This "position" that, in gen- eral: . . . The anthropologist's intervention will be meaningful in terms of [resolving culture conflict and dynamics of domi- nation]" or that s/he "can judge what is beneficial or 'envi- ronmentally sound' and what is not." based on familiarity with the location and knowledge of cultural values, is taken for granted (Escobar, 1995:669). This perspective seems positioned in a Western notion of power (though, also, a particular kind of negotiation). "Anthropologists need to be aware of the different ways - and the different social and political con- texts - in which anthropological ideas and concepts are used by non- anthropologists" (Ahmed and Shore, 1995:31). As I was saying, the Guggenheim is as much a cultural characteristic as the theory of com- modity culture. It represents specific aspects of, in this case, art, archi- tecture, and aesthetics of the twentieth century. The commodity, culture, is traded between forces. Culture then, implied from Sahlins" nod, is essentially the process of a group of people agreeing on shared similari- ties while creating differentiation from another group who is involved in an analogous practice. Yet it also encompasses the manifested, even physical, symbols of which these groups identify with. Both institute differences, enduring or not. " Take I: Make ofit whatyou will" Eric Wolf (1994) asserts, en route towards considering the nature of cul- ture as a global positioning device: Culture... has a societal background, and that background has implications for how we conceptualize and use [it]. I think of ideas as "takes' on the phenomena of this world and as instructions about how to combine these takes to ascer- tain their connections or. contrariwise, to hold them as apart, to beware of asserting linkages as false. I also think that particular takes arc prompted by background conditions and limited by these conditions (1994:2). 10 Volume 19,2003 Chemins Alternatifs It is important to point out that Wolfs paper talks about what the con- cept, culture, allows us to think and how it allows us to think. Without trying to be redundant, or simple, realizing that culture takes on different meanings within different social contexts is a critical link to understand- ing the limitations that talking about culture runs into. It is an illusion to see the term as possessing universality. Many "takes" differ from the obstinacy of anthropological "takes.'' Anthropology has developed its own history' of the world, including the writing of the history of the present. This conceit, somewhat radi- cally, imposed itself on the Western world with its refined order of facts and findings. Lingering within this paradigm, discursive anthropology in the twenty-first century tends to ignore its own placement in the fash- ioned epoch and its constructed, ideological networks that are them- selves "passing through a phase in global history." (Ahmed and Shore, 1995:32). Grimshaw and Hart decide that "established forms [of modern anthropology], both concepts and practices, no longer seem adequate for engaging with the shifting complexity' of contemporary society' (Grim- shaw and Hart, 1995:60)." When the paradigmatic grounds for the rela- tionship between inquiry and understanding have been excavated, anthropology cannot continue producing the kind of knowledge to which it is accustomed. Its correlation to Enlightened, modern motifs and motives prohibit talking about human communities without implying progressive social models and cultural distancing through a silent, hier- archical self-image. Moreover, anthropology's inherent reticence ques- tions its own values. It is the modern lament, evident in Sahlins' statement about anthropology's "parochial self-consciousness." In a perceptual world of categorized knowledge and institutionalized intel- lectualism, the broadening, fantastic world of Western European imperi- alism around the globe, principally, its encounters with "new" peoples, lead the way for the emergence of an understanding of these experiences through a logical system of symbols by which to order their lives. Anthropology introduced new meanings to new experiences through the fabric of science, a means familiar to its own, native social production of knowledge. When anthropologists begin asking themselves, "who belongs to cul- ture, and to whom does a 'culture' belong? Who can-and ought to - study and preserve it" (Jackson, 1995:17), they realize the schism, often overlooked in anthropological research. Jackson suggests that culture is Volume 19, 2003 11 . [Iternate Routes "something dynamic, something that people use to adapt to changing social conditions - and as something that is adapted in turn - [here] we have a more serviceable sense of how culture operates over time, partic- ularly in situations demanding rapid change (Jackson, 1995:18). In this definition, reliant on the context of communities of people struggling for identity and differentiation from each other, culture rests at the margins of daily, social existence where negotiations of a political nature are more alive than the perpetuation of a status quo (unless, of course, the struggle is the status quo). Jackson gives the impression that culture is a collective will and momentum. Here, there is a type of cul- tural understanding that is relevant to the use of the term in a socially expressive context: people outwardly contesting their identity. How- ever, in the status quo a certain mechanics of perpetuating and living out differences is a daily activity. Culture becomes functional, malleable, and manipulative. This may only be true in part because when culture is debated in this manner what is occurring is an expressiveness of particu- lar circumstances. Cultural systems become more apparent when con- ceived of in relation to another, when they disclose "their properties by the way they respond to diverse circumstances, organizing those circum- stances in specific forms and, in the event, changing their forms in spe- cific ways (Sahlins, 2000:499)." What is being alluded to is the utilization of existing cultural characteristics, mostly epitomized, to reconstruct identity in the face of changing social contexts and condi- tions: inventing culture. Okay, so I brought it out in the open. The very mention of the idea that culture is "contrived"" gets eyes rolling and deep sighs among anthropologists. What makes culture authentic? What does it mean to invent a culture? In addition, what tradition is not? Globalization, through the imposition of a world economic system, has made these questions highly volatile. Anthropologists have been discussing them for nearly half a century in various forms. Culture has taken on new meanings as people wrestle with ways to retain identity and value in the context of rapid social bombardment and change. Nevertheless, can we say this is a modem phenomenon? Recently, these issues and the writing on them have had to do with the after effects of colonial encounters and the ways in which other cul- tures (other than the ones the anthropologists represented) adapted, or incorporated, or handled the new experiences introduced by the "West." 12 Volume 19, 2003 Chemins Alternatifs These societies, often perceived of as in need of civilization, proceeded to redefine themselves under the newly revamped conditions of their lives. Marshall Sahlins remarks about existing academic interpretations of the traditional culture myth that it is itself situated: Too many anthropologists say that the so-called traditions the people are flaunting are not much more than serviceable huinbuggery. They are 'invented traditions", fabricated with an eye politic to the present situation. Signs of a sup- posed indigeny and antiquity, the stories actually owe their substance as well as their existence to the Western capitalist cultures they would thus defy (1999:402). As much as they would like to concede, the culture to which the anthro- pologists are linked have fashioned their own traditions in direct relation to these pretentious beliefs, and thus distinctiveness, through their own form of "serviceable humbuggery." Saying that there is such a thing as an invented tradition is itself an invented tradition. It is a method of dif- ferentiation. Anthropology and Western society owe as much to the primitive world for giving them a sense of identity as the natives do to Europeans for teaching them about their own noble savagism. The academy claimed legitimacy in declaring and measuring authen- ticity in the name of scientific evidence, in the name of its encounter and influence on the people. Europeans never dreamt that the native had had an impact on their way of thinking. "Western social science consistently repositions itself as the originary point of comparative and generalizing theory" (Moore, 1996:3). Talk of inventing a tradition. 3 Inventiveness on the part of the "native" was rationalized by declaring that the absorption of Europeanisms, be it goods, or religion, or the reconfiguration of local customs, was indication of inauthentic culture. This perspective harks back to a predominant, underlying premise of modem progressive thought that alleged what was not Western was not civilized and thus timeless, inert, and in need of transformation. Simple dictionary defini- tions clarifying the term, invent, state that to do so is "to devise by think- ing; to produce for the first time through the use of the imagination or of ingenious thinking and experiment" (Merriam-Webster Online). Learn- ing to adapt and respond is not only a characteristic of the individual but Volume 19, 2003 13 Alternate Routes of a body of individuals, living together through similar perceptions. Inventiveness is a built-in instrument for cultural liveliness. Ding An Sich (the thing itself) Anthropologists in the contemporary scene investigate similar ideas about social ingenuity on the global stage. As the global village devel- ops and various cultures concede to a world economic market, anthro- pologists have been addressing the notion of homogeneity et al. global hegemony. This is the assertion that there subsists a common structure and vocabulary, or knowledge that all peoples (cultures) will understand and make meaningful their participation in this macro-network. This seems somewhat bleak. The argument against such plans demonstrates a connective, working, symbiotic relationship between the local and the global where invention is necessary' because the source and motivation for cultural distinctiveness is cradled in shared diversity. Communities are using symbolic characteristics to formulate their identity, to specify what is particular about their culture. A central property of capitalist democracy is the flourishing of variety and endless image making. The twentieth century has seen this process repeatedly with flourishing nationalist movements across the globe. Essentially, what is most valu- able within a common social perception is being heralded as quintessen- tial to that order creating subtle differences between communities. The concept of culture is a positional tool. Here, the association with one or another cultures is significant in that cohesiveness is formed in a way particular to the human capacity for order. I think an important factor in considering any discussion of the use of culture is, as stated earlier, how culture provides us with the abil- ity to have meaningful lives. Tim Ingold, in his 1996 edited volume. Key Debates in Anthropology, documents a deliberation on just that topic. I will not reiterate what the debate, "Human worlds are culturally constructed." says and decides, but I would like to state that the debate centered on the human being's facility to experience and perceive the world out there. Reflection of the social and cultural as a natural, instinctive, inherent (call it what you like) ability of the human species is often glossed over in understanding social and cultural order and defini- tions. Our ability to apply meaning to an objectified experience of the world too often elevates these systems to practices beyond what we deem as natural. A constructed world is solely within the human realm 14 Volume 19, 2003 Chetnins Alteniatifs of perception. It is how we think of our engagement with what we call an environment. When Roland Littlewood explains that to believe that culture is not a constructed event "is to suggest that we can really experi- ence the world out there as it is," he offers only part of the equation (1996: 122). He attends that we are the creators of the blocks with which we assemble our perceptual and real worlds, and "we determine our experience of it, our human world (122)." He is implying that culture is the only way we come to understand the world. His implications, though, lack an actual material reality. The part he has right is that human experience allows us to create (or think we create) meanings, such as what is cultural, to live out and to receive back from through interaction. The event is not so much a construction as it is a simulta- neous creation and exhibition of the encounter with a projected signifi- cance of the world out there, as it is. "Truth is the confirmation of Appearance to Reality (Whitehead, 1933: 241).*' In this sense, people live out their lives in the world with an "irreduc- ibly cultural character" because this experience of culture shapes the capacity to understand (James, 1996: 105). I do not see the dichotomy, or reciprocity, that Tim Ingold derives of the difference between living in a culturally constructed world and in a world where we humans are simply engaged. I see the lived experience as a unity of both, a depen- dence on both because people are able to disengage from their perceived worlds, and through the process of perception, the perceiver (the prod- uct) unites with this world through the capacity to formulate significance within it. Perception, then, is more than a mode of engagement; it cre- ates meaning that conceives an image of the world for the perceiver. Perception is the world out there and within. In the end, what both sides of the debate were arguing for is the magnitude that culture, not as a word but as an idea, has on the contexts of human life, both as a percep- tion and as an interpreter of perception. Culture is a means of engage- ment and reflection with ourselves in the world. Conclusion: Res Cogitans; Res Extensa Each endeavor to understand humankind works with a set of characteristic ideas that orient its inquiries and justify its Volume 19, 2003 15 Alternate Routes existence, and for anthropology ideas about. . .culture. . .have played that guiding and legitimizing role (Wolf, 1994:1). I have not endeavored to dilute the potency of the culture concept; I wanted to highlight that there are limitations on anthropological capaci- ties for understandings of it. My reminiscence of childhood perceptions is what got the wheels rolling on how culture is not just anthropology's contribution. The concept was not only physically manifest in my geog- raphv but it was the "expressive and customary means by which [my social constructs were] maintained" (Sahlins, 2000:15). In Western soci- ety (and plausibly others), despite resistance to this reality, culture still relates to these customary artifacts similar to those found in the societies that anthropologist study. "Cultures are not static," Jackson purports, they appropriate the possibility culture affords, and are not "homoge- neous systems on which change is imposed. Rather, cultures are sys- tems whose very foundations are characterized by dynamism, negotiation, and contestation" (Jackson, 1995:20). The networked brain of anthropology has propagated perceptions that are familiar to it. Culture concepts are strong and embedded in discourse and meaning. Theory and discipline fill the synapses, allowing a re- experiencing of the anthropological, as if there is an embodied response to approaching the world through its practice. Postmodernists would clap their hands at me for saying anthropology seems to be in a state of fragmentation. However, I am suggesting that anthropology is on a threshold, only frozen there, confused and too self-conscious to begin a new approach to a world that has out grown its vision. Appadurai offers his views on new understanding and approaches in referring to a "global cthnoscape" (1991). In the new design, anthropologists must admit the "dilemmas of perspective and representation" and the effects this plays on representation while also focusing on the historical problems of the twenty-first century (1991:191). He concludes, saying, "...it seems advisable to treat the present historical moment and use our understand- ing of it to illuminate and guide the formulation of historical problems (1991:208)." Appadurai is calling for a type of objectivity that aims at the depiction of critical and moral issues among ever increasing, transna- tional identities. The subject of culture needs addressing, when and 16 Volume 19, 2003 Chemins Alternatifs where people are confronting differences on their own terms and not those envisioned by the anthropologist. Anthropology is about representing notions of the time, specifically, with clear contexts and boundaries in mind. Anthropology of "ethnos- capes" reflects this thought. This is the culture it comes out of and cul- ture is the context that creates meaning. It represents the objectives, morality, and politics of its time. Still, culture is not an exclusive cir- cumstance to anthropology, not anymore. Anthropology as a disciplined way of creating meaning in the world needs to rediscover value in its process while realizing that culture, in its various contexts, is itself about assigning values. "Anthropology has been predicated on maintaining clear boundaries between self and other," (Escobar, 1992:381) and for myself, these boundaries are what make anthropology a worthwhile exploration; they make anthropology a significant device to negotiate and discover shared understandings. What coexists with this signifi- cance is setting out "to question the productivity of the culture concept" in even- situation (Escobar, 1992:381). Difference exists; culture is one way it can and "essentialized descriptions are not the platonic fantasies of anthropologists alone; they are general cultural conditions of human perception and communication" (Sahlins, 2000:499). The traditions of anthropology are in the throes of new experience. The devices by which people and anthropologists gauge the acceptability of change are no longer capable of explaining and ordering the perceived world out there. 4 It may be optimistic, but it is time to move ahead and invent some new traditions. "SO PRETTYSOONEVERYONE WILL HAVEA CULTURE; ONLY THEANTHROPOLOGISTS WILL DOUBTIT"5 Notes l.Ladislav Holy, (1996: 12.) 2. Sahlins refers to Brightman (1995): "afterology:' 'Two or Three Things I Know about Culture." Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 5 (3): 399-421. 3. Marshall Sahlins (1999). "Two or Three Things I Know About Culture." Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 5 (3): 399-421. Volume 19, 2003 17 Alternate Routes 4. Regarding Sahlins' remark referencing Lamont Lindstrom (1982:316-29) in Culture in Practice (2000). New York: Zone Books. 5. Marshall Sahlins (1999). "Two or Three Things I Know About Culture." Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 5 (3): 399-421. References Ahmed, Akbar S. and Shore, Cns N. (eds). 1995. The Future OfAnthropology: Its relevance to the contemporary world. London; Athlone. Berman, Marshall. 1982. All That Is Solid Melts into Air: the experience of modernity.New York: Penguin Books Clifford, J. and Marcus, G (eds). 1986. Writing Culture: The poetics arid poli- tics ofethnography. Berkley: University of California Press. Crick, M. 1989. "Representations of international tourism in the social sci- ences: sun, sex, sights, savings and servility." Annual Review ofAnthropology 18:307-333. Escobar, Arturo. 1991. "'Anthropology and the development encounter: the making and marketing of development anthropology." American Ethnologist 18: 658-679. Escobar, Arturo. 1993. "The limits of reflexivity: politics in anthropology's post-writing culture era." Journal OfAnthropological Research 49 (4): 377-392. Kosko, Bart. 1993. Fuzzy Thinking: The New Science ofFuzzy Logic. London; Flamingo. Ingold, Tim (ed). 1996. Key Debates in Anthropology. London and New York; Routledge: 99-146. Jackson, Jean. 1995. "Culture, genuine and spurious: the politics of Indianness in the Vaupes, Colombia." American Ethnologist 22: 3-27. James, Wendy 1996. "Human Worlds are Culturally Constructed: For the Motion," in T. Ingold (ed) Key Debates in Anthropology. London and New York; Routledge. Marcus, George. 1994. "After the critique of ethnography: faith, hope, and char- ity, but the greatest of these is charity," in Assessing Cultural Anthropology (ed) R Borofsky; New York: McGraw-Hill. Marcus, G. and Fischer, M. 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique. Chi- cago: University of Chicago Press. Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary; http://www.m-w.com Moore, Henrietta. 1994. A Passion for Difference. Cambridge: Polity Press. Moore. Henrietta (ed). 1996. The Future ofAnthropological Knowledge. Lon- don: Routledge. Katch . John. 2001 A T ser s Guide to the Brain New York. Pantheon Books Sahlins, Marshall. 2000. Culture in Practice: Selected Essays. New York; IS Volume 19, 2003 Chemins Alternatifs Zone Books. Sahlins, Marshall. 1999. "Two or three things I know about culture." Journal OfThe Royal Anthropological Institute 5 (3): 399-421. Ulin, Robert. 1991 . "Critical anthropology twenty years later: modernism and postmodernism in anthropology." Critique ofAnthropology 11 (1): 63-90. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1933. Adventures ofIdeas. London; Collier Mac- millan. Wilk, Richard. 1995. "Learning to be local in Belize: global systems of com- mon difference," in Miller, D. (ed), Worlds Apart: modernity through the prism ofthe local. London: Routledge. Wolf, Eric. 1994. "Perilous ideas: race, culture, people." Current Anthropol- ogy 35 (1): 1-12. Volume 19, 2003 19