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Is "Closer and Closer" Ever Close Enough? Dereification, Diacritical Power, and the Specter of Evolutionism
Abstract
Recent work in anthropology dereifies Western and non-Western societies and demonstrates that they are much more similar than previous paradigms supposed. Moreover, anthropologists assume that by deconstructing such essentializations, they also demonstrate cultural equality between the West and the Other. I suggest that the division of the world does not deny similarity but identity, in the double sense of the word. In more general terms I argue that the effort to dereify and unify the world is a symbolic denial of a mode of being in which "to know" is "to discriminate" and "to be" is "to be different." Inadvertently, but perhaps inevitably, the work of dereification reproduces the very structures of power and inequality that it sets out to undermine.
This introduction to the special issue describes recent developments in intelligence studies that support the establishment of a critical intelligence studies (CIS) subfield. It reviews work published both within and outside the field of intelligence studies to outline the general commitments and orientations of CIS. It concludes by previewing the essays collected for this special issue.
What is the relevance of Europeanist ethnography for anthropological theory generally? Considering a region usually regarded as the source rather than an object of anthropology and colonialism alike, seven anthropologists reflexively address, inter alia, the implications of studying spaces already deeply explored by other disciplines, the potential of economic history to defamiliarize Eurocentric models and of recent events to illuminate such concepts as state and market, the meaning of "West" as a specific locus of power and reification, the limits of the "local" as the focus of ethnography, and the tensions among politically and culturally disparate entities within emergent ideologies of cultural unity.
This article examines the claim that there is a crisis in ethnological representation. It argues that no such crisis exists because the truth of the most fundamental ethnological representation-Sameness-is questioned by no one. It suggests that this claim must be understood as an attempt to uphold Sameness in the face of representations of difference that contradict it. The article further argues that it is impossible to demonstrate Sameness and that every attempt to do so results in the production of difference and Otherness. It concludes by suggesting why anthropologists must nonetheless persist in this self-defeating endeavor.
L'A. repond aux trois critiques faites par Vassos Argyrou sur son ouvrage «The Macedonian Conflict» (Danforth 1995), selon lesquelles : 1) elle n'aurait pas adopte une attitude tolerante et comprehensive envers le nationalisme grec ; 2) elle n'aurait pas analyse le nationalisme grec en termes symboliques et 3) elle aurait orientalise la Grece en se fondant sur une opposition regressive entre un Orient non-civilise et une Europe moderne
In this article I analyze the ways in which a national response to an international controversy—the naming of the “Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia”—is mediated by local-level kinship practices. While the Greek government insists that it has historical claims to this name, much of the press in the United States and Europe depicts Greece as displaying “hysteria over history” with respect to this issue. Both of these discourses mask the significance of the issue of the name “Macedonia” for ordinary Greeks, as interpreted through their ideologies and practices concerned with giving baptismal names and with inheritance and continuity. These provide the unstated assumptions through which a national ideology of historical continuity is filtered and reformulated. This case study suggests how anthropologists can make a unique contribution to current studies of nationalism “from the bottom up.”
This discussion, which introduces the first of two issues of the ISSJ devoted to social and cultural anthropology, focuses on the expansion of anthropological methods and concerns beyond what can be written or visually apprehended, and addresses the paradoxical but substantive advantages of the discipline's intensively localized focus in field research (ethnography) for the analysis of global phenomena. The author argues that the increased importance of agency and practice has coincided with an emphasis on multiple modernities to make a culturally reflexive approach both pragmatically useful and empirically rich. While anthropology may itself be increasingly implicated in global and local identity politics, its ability to recognize that phenomenon - a potential liability - also enhances its capacity for social and cultural criticism and analysis.
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