"The writer as vanguard ethnographer; the novel as all-containing Great Report – it's a lovely idea. The problem is, the anthropological model is fraught with problems; there's an almost systematic unworkability inscribed within it – a fact that Lévi-Strauss recognised all too well. What makes his work so fascinating is not so much its colourful accounts of Nambikwara ceremonies or Caduveo body art as its constant, melancholic undermining of itself (whence the tristes of his signature tome's title). Walking the streets of Lahore's old town, festooned by the 1950s with electric cables, he describes being struck with a sense of having come "too late" to see the vanished, "real" Lahore; although he knows that the ethnographer who came here 50 years before him felt the same thing, and that the one who'll come 50 years later will wish he'd come 50 years earlier to see what he, Lévi-Strauss, failed to see right there in front of him. This leads him to write of a fatal "double bind" afflicting anthropology: the very "purity" it craves is no more than a state in which all frames of comprehension, of interpretation or analysis, are lacking; once these frames are brought to bear, the mystery that drew the anthropologist towards his subject evaporates. Meeting a tribe that doesn't know what writing is, and seeing the tribe's chief borrow his pen and scribble on a sheet in order to dupe his subjects into thinking that he is versed in this activity, Lévi-Strauss realises that his own writing is itself no more than a form of duping – not just of readers but of himself too, carrying meaning to the point of ambiguity again and again in a bid to generate the very type of mystery on which it thrives."
If these problems – essentially literary ones, it should once more be noted, problems of perceiving, describing, writing – plagued anthropology in its mid-century heyday, how much more so do they now? Since Lévi-Strauss's era (and due, in large part, to the systems of equivalence he drew up that allow all cultures to be viewed through the same grid), the ethnographic viewfinder has shifted its gaze from the "primitive" world to the developed one, and to the very societies of which anthropologists themselves form part. The tribe is us. Where, then, is the dilapidated jetty? Where the rubber boat and ocean liner, and the study with its Twinings and its scotch? For decades now, the distinction (so vital to classical anthropology) between "field" and "home" has imploded – a collapse that goes hand-in-hand with that of the academy as a seat of "pure", unsullied knowledge. As any contemporary British academic will tell you, thanks to a double whammy of drastic cuts in public funding for and creeping privatisation of higher education, universities have become businesses – and not very good ones. Conversely, businesses, and particularly those at the leading edge of innovation, have taken over universities' former role as society's prime sites of knowledge generation. That the best engineers, mathematicians and visual designers should end up working in business is perhaps unsurprising – but a more eyebrow-raising statistic is that more than half of all anthropology graduates now work for corporations too. Not on but for: deploying ethnographic knowledge to help companies achieve deeper penetration of their markets, to advise cities how to brand and rebrand themselves, and governments how better to narrate their policy agendas."
- Tom McCarthy
Fascinating piece by Tom McCarthy in the Guardian. He seems to be bemoaning change and its reality. He doesn't even touch the tip of the iceberg, the new literature is three-dimensional, chockfull of various media. It is digital. Where is the leadership here? He wants to start a pity party. I refuse to enable or join in his dysfunction.
And I certainly don't join in his despair about the state of literary things. All over the Internet many writers are doing innovative things with literature. It is challenging but they see immense opportunities and are taking advantage of them. Thinkers and doers! So sexy! *goosebumps* And that is the other thing; one is struck by how provincial and insular he is. I wish African writers would be just as insular and provincial, write, just write, don't worry about what the others think. I know, easy to say, but we are not negotiating from a position of strength.
Here's the rest of the piece...
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