ABSTRACT
Everything is related to the body’, observes Jean Starobinski (1989:353), ‘as if it had just been rediscovered after being long forgotten.’ With these words Starobinski draws attention to a recent eruption of literature devoted to the body’s multifarious histories and forms. It is a literature, moreover, that has proliferated to such an extent that one can now speak of a ‘fin-de-siècle’ platitude: the body is no longer ‘object’ (biological or otherwise) but a series of discursive traces. Although one would imagine that ethnography has provided an abundance of material for this evolutionary mutation from chromosome to text,2 one is surprised to note that the ethnographer has escaped a similar process of textualization, although the authority of one of the principal products of ethnographic activity-writing-has dissolved under the corrosive gaze of a critical textual politics. This paradox is amply illustrated in the case of the ‘timely’ publication (Spencer, 1989) of a collection of essays entitled Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. The collection of articles —boldly presented as ‘Experiments in contemporary anthropology’— is varied and contradictory in its approach to its subject, and yet its title and introductory essay speak eloquently of a new ethnographic moment-of writing about the writing of culture-which is clearly the product of an explosive mixture of poststructuralist thought, with its emphasis on a textually based interdisciplinary approach to the production of social knowledge, and an emergent self-reflexivity on the part of anthropologists. As such, the collection celebrates a late-modernist form of natural selection: a selfconfessed, apologetic, yet determined predisposition toward shedding ‘a strong, partial light’ or ‘a defensible, productive focus’ (Clifford, 1986a:21, 20) on the experimental ethnographic applications of contemporary textual theory and practice, applications clearly (though not exclusively) proclaimed and defended in James Clifford’s introductory manifesto on ‘Partial truths’. Clifford’s celebration of a new ‘emergent interdisciplinary phenomenon’ and his assertion that the ideology of the ‘transparency of representation and the immediacy of experience’ (Clifford, 1986a:3, 2) has crumbled in the face of an approach to ethnographic texts that proclaims the contested nature of culture and the ‘artisanal…worldly work of writing’ ethnography (1986a:6), highlights ethnography’s contemporary ‘historical predicament’ (1986a:2). Such proclamations have none the less been received with a certain amount of scepticism in a variety of quarters (see Rabinow, 1986:245; Gordon, 1988; Mascia-Lees, Sharpe, Cohen, 1989:13) which is understandable given the author’s focus on a male-dominated practice of writing to the exclusion of other gendered/indigenous forms of ‘ethnographic’ inscription. The complex and contradictory nature of this exclusionary focus is amply illustrated by a curious description, at the beginning of Clifford’s essay, of a photograph that not only adorns the cover to this self-proclaimed ‘controversial
collection’ of ‘post-anthropological’, ‘post-literary’ essays (Clifford, 1986a:24, 5), but also acts as a frontispiece to the collection as a whole.3
