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JONATHAN SPENCER
Text and context This bringsme finallyto Writing culture.There has been in the last decade a rising interestin America in what, with apologies, I shall call metaanthropology-the anthropologyof anthropologists.Key textsin this area are, apart from Writingcultureitself,the series of Historyof anthropology volumes editedby George Stocking(Stocking1983a; 1984; 1985; 1986), and two importantessays on ethnography-one by James Clifford(1983a) in thejournal Representations, and one by Marcus and Cushman (1982) in Annual reviewofanthropology. But withinthistrendthereare in facttwo discernible tendencies;I shall describe their exponents as Formalistsand Historians. Formalistsare concernedwith analysingthe internalstructureof anthropological texts as thingsin themselves;Historianson the other hand are concernedwith the 'external'relationsof texts,with sitingparticularwork in its own social, culturaland historicalcontext.Formalistsdo not referto themselvesas such, preferringon the whole sexier designationssuch as or experimentalist;Historians seem to be happy to be post-structuralist thoughtof as historians. Some people manage to be both-James Clifford,for example. In a review of Clifford'ssplendidbiographyof the FrenchmissionaryethnographerMaurice LeenhardtPersonand myth(Clifford1982), Paul Rabinow points to an area of tension within Clifford'swork; Clifford'sbook, he points out, hovers 'between a successfulstandardhistoricalapproach and a more dangerous post-modernone whose claims to traditionalstandards are less secure,but whose claims to creativityare stronger'(Rabinow 1983: 'On ethno196-7). This can be seen in Clifford'sessay in Representations: graphicauthority'(Clifford1983a). The essay startswith an unexceptional summary of the historical development of ethnographyas the central activityof modern anthropology,and aftera middle section on Geertz's interpretative ethnographyand the model of the text, proceeds to assess Dwyer's and Crapanzano's experiments,as well as the possibilityof more radicaldeparturesfromstandardmodes of authorship.But what we are left with in a ratherflat conclusionis a typologyof modes of authority('experiential,interpretive,dialogical, and polyphonic' (1983a: 142)), and the observationthat ethnographershave to choose between them. The lameness of this conclusion-which shows Cliffordin Formalist as to where to go next)-contrasts strongly mood (and not a little-baffled with, for example, his essay on Marcel Griaule in Historyof anthropology (Clifford1983b) in which Griaule's ethnographicpractice,as well as his ethnographicwriting,are assessed againsta subtlyinvoked backgroundof iolonialand post-colonialsociety. Similarly,Marcus and Cushman's essay on ethnographyis bland and unremarkablecomparedto Stocking's(1983b) recentreconstructionof the historicalcontext of Malinowski's Argonauts, withits playfulreadingof Malinowski'spreceptson fieldworkas a 'mythical charter'for subsequent anthropology,a reading which derives its force fromthe strengthof the historicalanalysiswhich surroundsit. On thebasis of Clifford'sown work, I think we are bound to reverse the terms of Rabinow's judgement: the 'dangerous post-modern'approach may look
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