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Preface
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anthropology emerged, inspired by Marxism, European phenomenol-
ogy, American pragmatist philosophy, and (Batesonian) ecology, and
when we almost believed (falsely, of course) that the critical work had
been done, there came Hayden White, Michel Foucauld, Edward Said,
and others. Perhaps they seduced some of us to new kinds of grand
theorizing and wallowing in post-modernism, but there is no doubt
that they also moved us to new levels of critical reflection on what an-
thropologists actually do when they work in the field and at home.
Where does this collection of essays fit in the current anthropolog-
ical landscape? When we want to characterize publications as being
important, we often call them seminal; they were, or are likely to be-
come, seeds. We have no corresponding term to designate work that
brings in an exceptional harvest. In the historical perspective in which
I read this volume, I cannot help but see it as reaping the fruits of crit-
ical labors that anthropology undertook, or had forced upon itself,
during the last four decades. Most exciting for me has been to find, in
chapter after chapter, evidence that distinctions and oppositions that
once were thought essential to maintain—subjective versus objective,
science versus politics, being agnostic versus being a believer, control
versus abandon, to name but a few—appear to have been re-cast as
what they should have been all along: quandaries that generate ten-
sion, and creative efforts producing knowledge that would have been
impossible to attain (or to present) had anthropology persisted in the
paradigms that were dominant a generation ago.
Moreover, as the editors make it clear in their introduction, theirs
is by no means an idiosyncratic enterprise. They join a growing “lit-
erature.” I use this term advertently because it seems obvious to me
that the writing represented here has matured into a genre expressive,
as is the case of all genres that are alive, of a shared communicative
praxis. It is a genre in which involved narration rather than mono-
graphic representation predominates but manifestly not to the det-
riment of scholarship and critical discussion. No matter what their
orientation in anthropology may be, and taking into account that
a certain boldness displayed in these essays may cause anxieties or
aversion, reasonable readers—all of us, we assume—will not be jus-
tified in dismissing what is offered here as gratuitous navel-gazing,
