Anthropology and Cultural Studies:

Difference, Ethnography and Theory

Chris Eipper
Sociology and Anthropology
La Trobe University

This paper critiques the theorisation of culture as difference that dominates

Australian cultural studies and cultural anthropology. It argues that a perspective
on culture that gets beyond current preoccupations with difference has more to
be said for it than practitioners in either discipline have hitherto recognised.
Ethnography has long been recognised as crucial to the study of culture-which
suggests that we might best appreciate what it is that is being ignored and
neglected (not to say demeaned) in contemporary studies of culture if we turn
our attention to the way we study it. This paper reconsiders what we mean by
the assertion that ethnography constitutes an experiential mode of knowledge
which constitutes the most sustained and rigorous application of the principle of
verstehen available. In contesting the stress on difference that now dominates
the study of culture, a case is made for cultures conceived of as ensembles of
mystery and meaning. Whether born into a culture or researching it, as observers
and participants we struggle to make sense of what the world is about. As
ethnographers, we seek to do this empathically; this paper argues that to do it
effectively we must fashion a sensibility adequate to it. An appreciation of the
significance of sensibility, it is suggested, provides a much needed alternative to
the reduction of culture to difference.

What is wrong with the way we study culture? This paper takes as its point of departure
the theorisation of culture as difference that dominates Australian cultural studies. In the
past, cultural anthropology also privileged difference (even if it didn’t call it that), albeit
from a contrary theoretical standpoint. It continues to do so, though much of what it has to
say about the matter now derives from sources akin to those shaping cultural studies.
Ethnography has long been indispensable to the anthropological study of culture. It also
figures prominently in the eclectic and innovative synthesis of diverse approaches upon
which cultural studies prides itself-though what it means by the term often deviates
markedly from what is accepted in anthropology. If it is granted that ethnography is a
crucial, even indispensable, source of knowledge and understanding, the question remains:

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ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURAL STUDIES: .. 311

why is it? Might the answer tell us as much about our own culture as it does any other, as
well as something about how we might most effectively study it? The ultimate aim of the
argument that follows is to suggest that a perspective on culture that gets beyond current
preoccupations with difference has more to be said for it than practitioners in either
cultural studies or cultural anthropology have hitherto recognised.
Australian cultural studies is the creation of a politically conscious, assertive,
ambitious generation of academics possessed of an idea, the interpretation and application
of which has led to disputes amongst the devotees no less often than it has to conflict with
others working in related fields.’ In certain circles, commitment to-and opposition to-
cultural studies (like one’s orientation to postmodernism) could be described as something
akin to an identity politics for intellectuals. The pattern is familiar: differentiation
promotes recognition and reaction, intensifying identification while licensing and
legitimating dissident and disputatious modes of discourse.
Be that as it may, the problematisation of the disciplinary status of cultural studies, its
theoretical practice, and its empirical applicability from an activist as well as a scholarly
standpoint, has been integral to its development. What matters most is the politics-or so
the rhetoric would seem to suggest. All too often one is left with the impression that
culture counts because it is political, and if it weren’t, it wouldn’t.
This privileging of the political is doubly ironic. As much as anything, it grows out of a
critique of the way a certain kind of reductionism leached culture of its extra-economic
significance, only to substitute for it an analogous form of reductionism, one which
leaches it of its extra-political significance. Signification is ideologised and discourse dealt
with (in the first if not the last instance) as an effect of power.
I trust that it is clear that I am not wanting to demonise cultural studies nor reduce it to
its worst tendencies (any more than I would cultural anthropology, much of which still
tries to treat culture as somehow virtually autonomous because autochthonous). But nor
can the problem be ignored-particularly since the now hegemonic depiction of culture as
difference is an even more restrictive version of it. To say this is certainly not to suggest
that difference can be dispensed with, but its significance does need to be reassessed and
relativised.

1. Those seeking an introduction to, and overview of, the field as it has been represented
from Australia, might wish to begin with the Readers edited by Frow and Morris (1993)
and During (1993) and the anthologies edited by Turner (1993) and O’Regan and Miller
(1 994). Among others, Grossberg et al. (1 992) is representative of the construction put on
things in the U.S., while for the U.K., see Turner (1990), but also Inglis’s (1995)
interesting but idiosyncratic perspective. For controversy, see The Australian’s ‘Higher
Education Supplement’, 7th, 14th, 21st and 28th September, 1994-the columns by
Craven and Wark, and letters by Turner, Bennett, Curthoys, Lansdown and Clancy. See
also the ‘brawl’, as Arena Magazine advertised it, provoked by Morgan’s (1994:12-13)
report from the 1993 Australian Cultural Studies Conference in issue 9, and Grossman’s,
Cuthbert’s and Wark’s reaction on the one hand, and Morgan’s reply on the other, in issue
10:13-15. In The Ausfralian’s ‘Higher Education Supplement’, 18th and 25th March,
1998, see Windschuttle’s ‘Media’s theoretical breakdown’ (an edited version of an article
that first appeared in Quadrant) and the replies by Turner, Wark and Cunningham and
Flew.
312 THE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY

How else might we come at what is at stake here? Might we get a better appreciation of
what it is that is being ignored and neglected (not to say demeaned) if we turned our
attention to the way we study culture, and what that reveals?

Ethnography, experience and empathy

Since Malinowski pioneered extended participant-observation fieldwork, ethnography
has had a settled meaning in anthropology (in principle, that is, if not always in practice).
As someone trained in the methodology and an advocate of it, I am naturally keen to
endorse its use. But it has to be remembered-despite what many anthropologists
desperately try to pretend-that it is not the answer to everything. To claim that
ethnography ought to be accepted as the way to study culture, as some are inclined to do,
is absurd. In certain circumstances and for certain purposes, other methodologies may be
more appropriate (demographic, archival and statistical studies, for example). Other
approaches make available to ethnographers insights that no amount of fieldwork by itself
can be guaranteed to provide (the key instance in this generation being the impact
feminism has had upon anthropological analyses). Moreover, a work doesn’t actually have
to itself be an ethnography to showcase the ethnographic (certain kinds of cultural history,
for example, including ‘ethnographic’ history). That said, so long as those of us who
champion ethnography don’t succumb to hubris and become imperialistic in our
enthusiasm for it, we can rightly claim that it has something unique to offer, and that its
potential is far from exhausted when it comes to the investigation of contemporary
cultures.
Virginia Nightingale canvasses many of the key issues in her (1993) paper, ‘What’s
“ethnographic” about ethnographic audience research’? Although her focus is media
culture, the question she asks has more general applicability: ‘Is “ethnographic” an
appropriate description for research of this type?’ (1993: 152)? Anthropology, consistent
with its ongoing self-critique and willingness to explore ‘the implications for ethnographic
practice’ of such things as textual studies, literary criticism, cultural history, semiotics,
hermeneutics and psychology, arguably has as much to learn from cultural studies as it has
to teach it. That said, Nightingale is right to suggest that
It is time to look again at anthropology and at ethnographic research techniques,
to re-evaluate their use in cultural studies . . . both as a heritage and as a future
direction. It is time to learn our lessons from the pioneering work which has
been done and to develop strategies for cultural critique which provoke critical
appraisal while retaining respect for and appreciation of the popular texts which
accompany and orchestrate our lives. (1993:159)3
In certain areas of sociology (community studies, for example, and in its own way,
ethnographic history also), the principles and practice of ethnography have continued to
keep faith with something more than a minimalist interpretation of Malinowski’s

2. It bears mentioning that her answer to this question comes in the form of a laudably
detailed and empirically closely referenced discussion, much of which cannot be dealt
with here.
3. I have excised ‘audience research’ from the sentence so as to stress the general validity of
the point.
ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURAL STUDIES: . . . 313

methodological heritage. But following on from what Nightingale has demonstrated, the
story is otherwise when we come to cultural studies. Here the term ‘ethnography’becomes
vaporous, functioning as a legitimating signifier rather than a methodological de~cription.~
Deprived of its substantive content, its meaning tends to be metaphoric. In saying this,
I must make it clear that I have no objection to metaphoric (figurative) appropriations of
ethnography. The problem arises when people don’t recognise their metaphors for what
they are-and therefore are quite unable to distinguish between (as I call it) ethnographic
tourism and the real thing (as they say in the Coke ads). Nor have I any objection to
experiments in (what I call) virtual ethnography-for example, the ‘I-witnessing’ (cf.
Geertz 1988:73ff.) kind of thing Meaghan Morris does (e.g., 1993a, b and c), or ethno-
graphy-inspired biographical or fictional accounts. Indeed, I have long been an evangelist
for this kind of thing, having written one of my I don’t mind, then, when Graeme
Turner (1990) tells us that Hoggart’s (1958) The Uses ofLiteracy ‘is usually regarded as
an ethnography of the everyday lives of the northern English working class between the
wars (1990-169). I don’t mind because the nature of the work itself marks this as a
metaphoric statement; and because the quality and empathetic nature of the observations,
deriving as they do from prolonged and intense participation, suggests that the metaphor is
substantively grounded. Moreover, anthropologists far less critical of the discipline that
trained them than me, have never been averse to turning around the old adage that a
favoured monograph ‘reads like a novel’ and declaring that a favoured literary work ‘reads
like an ethnography’.
Yet much cultural interpretation that claims to be ethnographically based is no more so
than most sociology-that is, unless we are prepared to call any kind of empirical
investigation that goes beyond merely interviewing people an ethnography. As ridiculous
as that would be, it would at least avoid the absurdity so authoritatively espoused by
During: ‘Social scientists and market researchers have traditionally employed three modes
of ethnographic investigation’, he tells us. These are: ‘(i) large-scale “surveys” (or
“quantitative research”) using formal questionnaires . . . (ii) “qualitative research” or in-
depth or “focus” interviews’ which rely on ‘(usually group) discussion’, and ‘(iii)
“participant observation” in which researchers live alongside their subjects-this having
been most common in anthropology’ (During 1993:21). Can there be anyone other than
During and his research team who imagines that quantitative, questionnaire-based survey
research could be described as ethnography?
Once we move into the area of qualitative research, things become a little murkier
because During is not alone here: usage has long since become flatulent. If in the course of
your research you have actually talked to people, listened to them, watched TV with them,
shared a joke (never mind a serious laugh or good cry), it seems as though this is enough
to make you a bonejiu‘e ethnographer. If cultural studies has been overly complacent in its
appropriation of ‘ethnography’, anthropologists would argue that sociology too remains

4. Cf. Nightingale: ‘The encoding/decoding studies can be seen as an attempt by cultural

studies to colonise a new realm, the realm of audience research. In this respect the term
‘ethnographic’ acts to legitimate the research, to denote its cultural, phenomenal and
empirical methods, and even to signify its emphasis on “community”’ (1993: 154).
5. See my novel, Dieback, whose narrator, as a victim of cerebral palsy, is a participant-
observer of a special sort-hence his distinctive narrative voice (Eipper 1990a).
314 THE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY

overly talk and text-centric. Now as someone who has tried to extend the common ground
between the disciplines, I know only too well that anthropologists tend to stereotype
sociologists and vice versa. Nonetheless, it remains the case that, all too often, the
interview still has pride of place in qualitative, not only quantitative, sociological research.
Ethnographers focus less upon such talk, and more upon argument, conversation and
chatter. In this they rather resemble prospectors seeking out the incidental and accidental,
the hidden, lost and overlooked in everyday life. Going further, they orient themselves as
much to what people do as what they say (and say about what they do), to codes of
conduct as they are lived rather than reported. For them talk is, if not cheap, only one of a
number of cultural currencies. Of course, to the extent that sociologists of a variety of
persuasions have emphasised system, structure and process-have successfully criticised
and displaced talk and text-centric research strategies-the criticism applies less to the
discipline as a whole than to an enduring (and empirically still dominant) tendency within
it. And to the extent that specialties such as grounded theory, ethnomethodology, symbolic
interactionism and community studies have adopted and adapted an ethnographic
perspective, they can be said to have made a major contribution to rectifying the
discipline’s attachment to formalised discursivity. It remains to be seen whether cultural
studies will end up furthering this process or reversing it.
A s for ethnography proper, what needs to be said? To begin with, it has to be
acknowledged that anthropologists-some of the most famous and influential among
them-have not always practised what they preached. The conventional view is that
eighteen months to two years in the field is the minimum necessary for adequate research.
Yet the principle has frequently been honoured more by masking the amount of time
actually spent ‘on site’ than by faithfully adhering to the precept itself. Malinowski, his
heirs and successors, used to disparage (not always fairly) their predecessors for being
armchair theorists who, though they might indulge in the odd excursion lasting a few days,
weeks or months, failed to recognise the need for extended and sustained observation,
failed to understand that (as often as not) it is participation that promotes understanding,
and failed to appreciate the importance of the dialogue between the people’s (the emic)
and the analyst’s (the etic) interpretation.
A fail-safe mechanism is built into ethnographic encounters with radically different
cultures. Any attempt to do justice to them is so overwhelmingly difficult that
ethnographers are inevitably humbled. They are forced to reassess the relevance and
reliability of much of their theoretical and technical equipment. The epistemological
significance of this kind of lived humility is difficult to appreciate if you have not
experienced it. Which is one of the reasons why anthropologists have always been dubious
about students doing fieldwork ‘at home’. Many of the reasons given are spurious, but not
all of them.6 It is certainly the case that students studying their own culture(s) are less
liable to have their epistemological certainties experientially challenged than their peers
who venture further afield. I am not merely referring here to theoretical complacency, but
to the fact that we simultaneously know too much and not enough about the cultural world
in which we live. We assume we know what we know. A s a result, we don’t recognise, or

6. A predictable opinion given the nature of my own fieldwork-which has focused on

Ireland and Australia. For my reflections on anthropological practice in the light of the
Irish experience, see Eipper 1990b.
ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURAL STUDIES: . . . 315

misconstrue, the degree to which and the ways in which we are strangers to ourselves--or,
if you prefer, others to ourselves. The dialogue between emic and etic understanding is
therefore always in danger of being pre-empted or short-circuited when one works ‘from
home’ and ‘at home’.’ The arduous unlearning and relearning that coping with alien
lifeways inevitably entails may be avoided altogether.
As the colonial record demonstrates, provoking an encounter between contrastive
cultural gestalts is not always as corrosive of received wisdoms as we might today expect
or hope, yet there is nothing to compare to it. Indeed, as a procedure for getting access to
the meanings that people give to their actions, ethnography constitutes the most sustained
and (personally) rigorous application of the principle of verstehen available. As
bequeathed to us by Max Weber, this is a notion which asks of us that we place ourselves
in the position of others in order to interpret their actions as they might; doing so in order
to identify and ascertain their purposes, the connection they make between the ends they
wish to pursue and the means available to them.
In recent decades all the emphasis has been upon Othering mechanisms, yet
ethnography (however complacent and prejudiced, however marked by unrecognised
ethnocentrism), remains unsurpassed as an anti-Othering epistemological device.
Following from the work of James Clifford and his peers (e.g. Clifford and Marcus 1986),
we have become acutely sensitive to the fact that ethnographers authoritatively represent
cultural processes to the detriment of other voices and perspectives. But we only recognise
the power of this critique because we are already beholden to an ethnographic imaginary.
Acceptance of it, and the ecumenical desire to do ethnography differently that has resulted
from it, is testament to the fact that ethnographers were immediately attuned to the
implications inherent in it. If they didn’t before, they now recognised that verstehen on the
page is no less important than empathy, insight and cultural competence in the field. As
Geertz (1988) might put it, it is this which makes what we did ‘there’ meaningful ‘here’-
this transmutation of a private, personal act of apprehension into a public, collective
process of cultural comprehension.
It follows from this understanding of ethnography that it is nothing if not an
experiential mode of knowledge (see Turner and Bruner 1986, Jackson 1989, 1996, Eipper
1996a). Like John Dewey, it substitutes participation for spectatorship where it can. Its
prime epistemological principle has to do with the way it insists upon its practitioners
making witnesses of themselves. As such it is inherently-essentially-testimonial in
character. And so it is vulnerable (and so it should be) to the slings and arrows directed at
any and all testimony-which is (and this is perhaps its chief virtue) a frail and fallible
(and therefore eminently contestable and correctable) way of communicating what has
been learned from (lived) experience.
Consistent with the importance attached to verstehen, I would argue-as I have
elsewhere (Eipper 1996atthat as ethnographers we should prioritise the problem of trust

7. It surely goes without saying that the dangers associated with studying other cultures are
even more extreme, and anthropologists have become increasingly sensitive to this in
recent decades, addressing their dilemmas in a variety of ways. Meanwhile, postcolonial
historical processes have forced more and more of them into conceding that fieldwork ‘at
home’ has to be accepted as a legitimate alternative.
316 THE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY

as much as we have ethnographic authority. Indeed, it is time we recognised that too

exclusive a focus upon the issue of authority can have reductive consequences. It is
undoubtedly true that witnesses (of whatever kind) attempt to assert, establish, even insist
upon, their experiential authority; it is equally true that we do not take what they say at
face value, but naturally (nativistically) apply the hermeneutics of suspicion to any
testimony to which we are ourselves forced to bear witness. Yet it follows from this that
there comes a point when the hermeneutics of suspicion must answer to the hermeneutics
of trust. In exercising judgement (whether deliberately or by default) we are obliged to
decide-to trust our judgement if nothing else. In the courtroom of the academy we
seldom demand that testimonial claims be verified beyond reasonable doubt (in part
because we have rightly come to suspect strictures that impose inappropriate principles of
falsification and verification upon us). All of which is another way of saying-whether we
know it or not-we have been forced to recognise or rediscover something we ought to
have known all along: pursuit of (desacralised, profane) truths requires trust. To accord
trust is to commit oneself. It constitutes a form of engagement-one which is antithetical
to purified, sanctimonious criticality.
As Coady (1 992) has demonstrated, testimony’s epistemological credentials have long
been philosophically impugned. His work constitutes the first serious attempt to redeem
its epistemological status. To the extent that he has been successful, ethnographers are in
his debt.8 To the extent that we come to recognise that ethnography succeeds or fails less
because of its negotiation of the problem of authority, than its acknowledgment of the
problem of trust, he forces us to face up to the fact that, as cultural interpreters, we are first
and last witnesses whose testimony defines us. This is another way of saying ethnography
is more about keeping faith than declaring, asserting (or insisting upon) belief. Faith, as
against belief, is defined by doubt; the doubt that calls it forth, questions it, and to which it
is always a n ~ w e r a b l e .Unfortunately,
~ some of the most influential cultural theory of
recent times has in this respect been (at least imaginatively speaking) anti-ethnographic.
Indeed, while rhetorically championing the so-called Other, its practitioners may
actually silence the people in whose name they supposedly speak. As revealing as any
example of this is Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s and Sneja Gunew’s treatment of
subaltern women’s subjectivity, as Kalpana Ram (1 993) has so convincingly
demonstrated. A woman of Indian extraction herself, Ram writes not only out of this
experience but that of an Australian-educated ethnographer. According to her, Spivak
silences disparate voices by impugning the experiential. She does so by ahistorically
running together the colonial and postcolonial positioning of subaltern women in her text:
Spivak does not concede that there is in postcolonial India a discursive position
taken up by women, a position explicitly concerned with female suffering,
agency and voice. For Spivak’s purposes, which are to argue that the subaltern
woman remains doubly muted, she must not only ward off efforts by Western
humanists, and left-liberal scholars and activists, but she must also discount the
Indian left and feminist scholars and activists who have emerged as speaking

8. Despite his unargued and unqualified dismissal of cultural relativism, for example (Coady
1992:302-3).
9. Lest I be misinterpreted here, I should perhaps not only say that I am an atheist, but stress
that the problem of faith is not reducible to its usual religious incarnations-as any
number of issues in the philosophy of science all too clearly illustrate.
ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURAL STUDIES: . . 317

subjects on the postcolonial stage, and who have endeavoured to utilise their
new-found agency in what Spivak would have us regard as the misguided
project of lending an ear (Ram 1993:15).
Consistent with this, Ram calls for further examination of the concept of ‘experience’,
which has been ‘routinely designated’ as ‘empiricist’ or ‘essentialist’ and whose
‘persistent figuring in minority discourses’ has been ‘too readily accounted for and
dismissed’ as ‘the mere baggage’ of an identity politics which is not only essentialist but
indictable. Ram asks: ‘Can we in fact do without the category of experience-
reformulated as it must be-in order to develop a satisfactory account of the way in which
particular subjectivities are constructed?’ (1993:24).
Critiquing the politics of Gunew’s ‘brand of textualism’ which is ‘divorced from all
consideration of experience and lived history’ while construing ‘the politics of experience’
as ‘inevitably a conservative politics’, she argues that ‘Without an account that restores
and interrogates the value of experience, the concept of subjectivity is just the empty shell,
a caricature made up of the various speaking, reading and writing ‘positions’, that its
opponents have made of it’ (1993:25).
It would seem that subjectivity is too fraught, fallible, ambivalent and ambiguous for
some theorists. Quandaries, confusions, dilemmas and doubt must be done away with,
certainty sanctioned. Discursively . . . by theorising discursivity. To my mind what we all
too often end up with is something remarkably akin to all those disquisitions on ideology
and its discontents, which (as signalled by conspicuous adjustments of one’s vocabulary)
we were supposed to have got beyond.
Surely, though, there is more to culture than this. This is what I will now try to show.

Making sense of culture

The relationship of ideology to culture is destined to remain a problematic one; any
attempt to characterise it skews our appreciation of it. But from an ethnographic
perspective, I think it can be said that most expressions of it eventually revolve around a
central analytic/ethical difficulty: do we accept people, what they say and do, on their own
terms or not? And if we do not or cannot, on what terms do we make this decision? For it
follows that the terms we set for ourselves cannot be accepted without question either:
they too must be tested for their internal inconsistencies, contradictions and errors. Their
unexamined assumptions, unargued premises, unforeseen implications, must be assayed
from other perspectives-standpoints which are external, alien and even incomprehensible
to them.
Ethnographers have tried to deal with these issues in a variety of ways, one of the most
influential, as I have already indicated, being their attempt to establish a dialogue between
emic and etic understandings. All too often this has been treated as if it were a dialogue
between fixed and objectively formulable standpoints, as is true of the linguistic model of
phonemics and phonetics from which the distinction derives. But cultural phenomena-
language included-are seldom as amenable to testing as is the case with discrepancies
between sound production and meaning perception. As I conceive it, the dialogue between
the emic and etic in an ethnographic encounter is better regarded as a conversation which
318 THE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY

proceeds by educating at least one of the participants; to the extent that this is true, then
the ethnographer is impelled to become ever more reflective, reflexive and recognisant. It
follows that in principle the ethnographer’s standpoint is not singular (or should not be),
not fixed but fluid. The etic evolves . . . and the emic reciprocates.
This can be put another way: the interchange between etic and emic perspectives that is
integral to an ethnographic understanding is recursive. As a methodology, ethnography
generates procedures conducive to the creation of knowledge and understanding by
continually re-committing itself to transcultural dialogue. It replicates itself by
transforming the terms on which it proceeds, and its representation of the knowledge and
understanding which results from it is inextricable from its self-representation. An
historically specific but universally applicable cultural invention, it succeeds or fails as a
self-testing device which makes sense of itself by making sense of what can be translated
of people’s lives, experiences and imaginaries. If it transcends its limitations, it does so
not by escaping them but by transforming them, replicating them in newly productive
ways. As such it is emblematic of the cultural process itself, which is nothing if not a
mechanism of self-perpetuating invention and re-invention.
The emic/etic problem, and the Othering associated with it, takes on different
dimensions if one is studying one’s own culture, or a segment of it. The central
analytidethical difficulty becomes rather more circumscribed, specific, definite and
anxious. It can be characterised in something like the following terms: we cannot accept
the wholesale embracing of popular culture on its own terms by the mass of the
population, but on what terms do we make this decision? On what terms can we make it-
given that we are with the people (if not on their side in any simplistic sense, certainly not
against t h e m - o r at least the most exploited and oppressed of them)? On what terms can
we justify our championing of their cause (or culture) given that we must acknowledge we
can no longer unproblematically claim to be of them, claim that what we write can be said
to speak for them, let alone be by them? By the same token, on what terms can we justify
critiquing their cause/culture? How shall we justify judging their ideas, values, beliefs and
practices, the heritages they invoke and the futures they envision, especially when they do
not accord with what our analysis tells us we cannot deny?
To the extent that Australian cultural studies has been heir to British antecedents,
questions such as these have tended to be framed in terms laid down by, and answerable
to, a problematic inherited from the New Left’s preoccupation with ideology.
Genealogically the paradigm developed thus: ideology as invoked by Marx and Engels;
propagated by Lenin, Trotsky and the like; theorised by Gramsci and Althusser and others;
and connected to culture by Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson, Stuart Hall and their
colleagues. The work of Hall and his associates at the Birmingham Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies proved as influential as any. For many years they marked
with a slash one of their central problems: ideology/culture. A key concern here was how
to validate cultural integrity while indicting ideological impositions of integrity.
Integrity is my word, but it nicely symbolises what was at issue in an era when
‘identity’, ‘authenticity’ and ‘resistance’ were the prime concern-and what remains at
issue in an era when ‘difference’, ‘deconstruction’ and ‘essentialism’ have displaced them.
Integrity denotes wholeness, soundness, uprightness, honesty. It is a thing that theorists
today are suspicious of-that is to say, their suspicions extend not merely to false,
ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURAL STUDIES: ... 319

misleading or mistaken attributes of it, but the thing itself. It is an aesthetic as much as it is
a theoretical judgement; a disavowal which now serves as an epistemological premise.
Validation becomes ever more difficult and ever more perilous; ideological error ever
more pervasive, ever more insidious. At its worst, theory becomes a paranoid pursuit.lO
There was actually something promethean about (among others) Hall’s attempt to re-
mould culture’s clay, firing it with notions of power taken from political theory. Of the
established disciplines, the most entrenched and influential approach to culture at the time
was that associated with the ‘symbolic’ or ‘interpretive’ wing of American anthropology.
As often as not, its leading figures were animated by a desire to demonstrate the
irrelevance of materialist considerations and the inadequacy of explanations which unduly
emphasised political utility and economic interests-which was their criticism of the other
wing of the American discipline. Culture was effectively explained away by the ‘cultural
materialists’, its ‘rationality’ rationalised by ever more ingenious assertions about nascent
class interests, technological innovations, ecological constraints, energy management and
even nutritional needs Whatever might be said of each side’s treatment of economics
(technology and ecology included)--and I can’t go into that here-a peculiar consequence
of this intellectual warfare was the fallout it produced: a conception of culture on both
sides effectively emptied of politics.I1In light of this, am I perhaps not asking too much of
cultural studies to have expected it to go beyond ‘reversing the signs’ by over-
emphasising the political constitution of culture?
In order to contest the notion that there is an essential unity to cultures, it is neither
necessary nor wise to try to claim that meanings are derivative of social difference, of the
divisions in society rather than its unity. No, cultures are not unitary in the way our
predecessors so often supposed and asserted, but nor are they primarily-let alone
exclusively-defined by the differentiation and discrimination integral to them. As much
as they must struggle to construct their harmonies, so too is the opposite true. In stressing
that relations of dominance are embedded in culture and constitutive of it, it is not only
unnecessary but hyperbolic to construe culture as a mere effect of power. As someone

10. Not in the sense meant by Ross Gibson (1992), I perhaps should say, when he accuses
Peter Fuller of employing a ‘paranoid critical method’. Quite pertinent, though, is Hodge
and Mishra’s (1991:217-219) defence of their attempt to ‘exemplify’, as they put it, ‘a
paranoiac style of reading’. Theirs is a ‘quintessentially Australian’ approach, they would
have us believe, albeit one which reverses the signs. They go on to stress that they ‘are not
proposing to swap one pathology for another’ in their ‘cultural diagnosis’, thereby
claiming for themselves ‘a more acceptable or more fashionable form of the disease’.
Their legitimation is more sophisticated: ‘What we propose is in some respects a
homoeopathic repetition of the pathology, in a form of hyper-reading that is oriented to
criticism and change, while still recognising its roots in common cultural practices. It is
precisely the Australian tendency to paranoia that we want to mobilise in a new kind of
critical strategy’. If I have an allergic reaction to this sort of thing, is it because my own
reading is paranoiac? Alternatively, might it be too hebephrenic, i.e. too superficial, too
literal? Perhaps, but isn’t there a more obvious explanation?
1 1. It goes without saying that both sides would contest this assertion, including, I am sure,
two of its most influential figures, Clifford Geertz and Marvin Harris. But I stand by it-if
only because it was this perception (among a variety of others) which prevented me from
ever being able to align myself with either approach to cultural anthropology, which
complicated my attempts to think through the issues, and which made the work of the
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies seem so interesting.
320 THE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY

who, among other things, committed himself as a student to researching the dynamics of
power, it is indeed ironic to now find myself having to combat power-centric reductionism
of this sort. In wanting to stress that in differentiating people, differentials such as sex,
race and age (or their ambiguously aligned counterparts, gender, ethnicity and generation)
don’t simply generate discourses but are generated by them, is it really necessary to
privilege the latter over the former? In analysing the messages narratives convey, must we
reduce their significance to the status of bags or buckets into which and from which we
pour ideologies and discourses? In describing theories as narratives, must we similarly
demean them? And in speaking of cultures as texts, oughtn’t we remember that we are
employing metaphor?
Of course, students of contemporary culture have more of an excuse for treating
cultures as text than earlier generations of anthropologists, if only because the cultural
creations with which they concern themselves as often as not are literally texts. That said,
it remains the case that too little consideration has been given to the occlusions that result
from seeing culture as something we learn about from reading it. It is pretty obvious why
such a metaphor comes so naturally to the tertiary-educated, to those most people regard
as bookworms. But it is important to remember that there are aspects of culture even in the
most literate of societies which are only partially accessible to ‘readers’ of it-unless, that
is, we elasticise the metaphor of reading to the point of complete flaccidity.
Ethnomusicologists, for example, can write and read music-in the literal sense of coding
and decoding the tunes and songs they study, and in a variety of metaphoric senses too;
but they also have to call upon other modes of apprehension-technical, aesthetic, artistic,
spiritual-which are experientially no less significant; modes of engagement which are
enhanced by, and enhance, empathy, verstehen. To reduce these to reading would be to
imagine that music could be comprehended from within the confines of a cognitive cage.
Let me stress that I am not merely talking about the aesthetics of music here, aesthetic
culture. I am talking about that immense diversity of cultural phenomena which cannot be
adequately analysed without some rendering of it, some (however gestural) evocation:
representation. What such representations do is give us a sense of something (however
inadequate, misleading or false). The result is a gestalt which we are capable of
apprehending without ever quite comprehending-an ensemble of mystery and meaning
which, if effective, becomes a collective representation capable of motivating, mobilising,
orienting and organising people’s praxis.
In order to clarify and further elaborate the significance of what I am saying for the
concept of culture, let me invoke Geertz’s (1973) notion of ‘webs of significance’-a
conception he takes from Max Weber-in order to depart from it. Although he seldom
gets a mention in cultural studies,’* Geertz is surely the most influential and evocative
theorist of culture alive today. His critics have accused him of ‘disempowering’ the
concept (rightly in my view, though he would certainly-urbanely and elegantly-contest
the charge). Yet he is also one of the earliest and most ardent propagandists for a semiotics
of culture, advocating the reading of cultures as text and practising (with a flair for style
few can equal) what he preaches. His semiotics, though, is the antithesis of that which

12. Inglis (1995) is an exception, but then so too is his orientation to cultural studies which he
takes to be ‘the study of human values’. It is a definition which, irrespective of the merits
of his position, aptly illustrates how peculiarly his own is his approach to the field.
ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURAL STUDIES: . . . 32 1

tends to prevail in cultural studies. He goes out of his way not to ignore the non-cognitive
in the communication of cultural messages: his is not a cerebral semiotics; the codes he
wants to crack are not first and foremost identified by an ideology index. The winks and
twitches of traders and thieves, sheikhs and peddlers-not to mention philosophers and
ethnographers-matter no less to him than the devices elites use to authoritatively assert
and impose national unities-at least in so far as our comprehension of culture as a
process is concerned.
Problematic as his approach may be, from the point of view of conceptualising culture
his creative elaboration of ‘webs of significance’ remains as suggestive as any. The beauty
of it from my point of view has to do with its autonomy and adaptability; we can employ it
for our own purposes without having to commit ourselves to other aspects of his work.
Indeed, my suggestion is that we adapt his metaphor for our own purposes by
misinterpreting it in the following way. These are webs of a highly developed human sort:
synthetic cybernetic webs-that is to say, constructed or composed modes of control and
communication which order and organise. Being webs, they are as fragile as they are
elastic, as silky as they are strong, as supportive as they are ensnaring; they are (to borrow
from Shelley following Plato) characterised by ‘plastic stress’.
This use of ‘stress’ is meant to suggest that ordering and disordering principles are, as
often as not, one and the same-or, I should say, part of one and the same process. It
refers to a constraining and/or impelling force (as in under stress or driven by stress); it
refers to effort and demand upon energy (as in storm and stress, subject to stress), to the
influence exerted by contiguous entities (as in physics and linguistics). It also refers to
emphasis and accentuation (of the kind that conveys sense in stressed speech or verse).
This usage-stressing as it does its own plasticity-holds in tension the constituent
elements that make up the patterns of signification we recognise or ignore, endorse or
deny, appropriate or abandon. To illustrate the point, I will use a recursively appropriate
example. In trying to make sense of those human and social processes we now call
culture, throughout this paper I have often employed the word ‘sense’ where others would
have opted for ‘meaning’. Accordingly, my use of ‘sense’ has been laden with plastic
stress (unbearably so some might presently conclude). On the one hand, I had to ensure
that the sense of what I was saying was not lost; on the other hand, the term was
meaningful to me in a way that was not yet available to the reader, though my aim now is
to make it so. This interplay of latent and manifest meanings is as integral to our
socialisation into cultures (whether as babies, tourists or migrants) as it is to our
adaptation, contestation and transformation of them.
As I understand it, then, the term ‘sense’-as in making sense-refers to the agonistic
and enigmatic interplay of meaning and mystery which underscores all knowledge,
understanding and communication. Prior to the emergence of the notion that cultures are
arenas of contestation as much as they are serendipitous circles of consensus, the emphasis
tended to be on the fact that people had a need for meaning, expended considerable energy
in searching for it, spared no effort in shoring it up, fortifying it and improving upon its
foundations. Ironically enough, it was functionalist accounts which most stressed that
culture was about keeping chaos at bay; that most stressed the role of sanctions and social
control (e.g. in the absence of the state in acephalous societies); that saw society as
322 THE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY

inherently riven by centrifugal forces, culture providing the countervailing centripetal

force which kept society functioning.
Now of course I am not about to deny that people use meaning and indefatigably
search for it, nor that societies are wretchedly riven from top to bottom and side to side,
but I have been sufficiently influenced by two anarchist thinkers to feel the need to
emphasise another aspect of what it is that underwrites culture-Kropotkin stressed the
importance of mutuality in human affairs, stressed social solidarity without denying the
need for struggle, the inevitability of conflict; while Chomsky (whose interest in language
is more of a piece with his politics than many realise) stressed that we are born with a
‘universal grammar’ from which and by which we generate meaning (linguistically but
thereby also culturallytthat is to, say we make meanings because meaning is born in us
and borne by us.
From this perspective, it makes sense to say that meaninglessness is meaningless-
which is why we inevitably and invariably attribute meaning to it. Significantly, we tend
to do so by signifying it in a distinctive way: as I have done here, we imbue it with a
paradoxical importance; we make it emblematic of the unutterable; make the meaningless
meaningful by making a mystery of it. Mystery-making and mystification are thus paired
aspects of the creation of meaning. Describing this as an adjudication of difference, a
process of Othering, would be one way of coming at what is at stake here, but to stress this
to the detriment of everything else would be to miss the point due to our anxiety to make
another.
What I want to stress instead is the importance of limits to meaning, the function of
frames. It is consistent with Chomsky’s perspective that culturally as well as linguistically,
we cannot speak language only languages, cannot utter meaning only meanings.
Moreover, acquaintance with one code simultaneously enables and disables us when it
comes to acquiring others. The meanings that specific cultures make possible are
remarkably promiscuous but they are also definitely limited. In key respects meaning is
rendered meaningful, then, by the limits it sets itself-a central one being the way it
frames, and is framed by, that which is incompatible with it: the otherwise meaningless,
but this way meaningful, mystery.
In this connection we might informatively borrow from Kuhn and speak of cultures as
meaning paradigms; self-limiting devices for promoting and protecting patterns of living
(thinking, feeling, experiencing). But such a formulation would be too one-sided. To
speak of cultures as meaning paradigms is misleading mainly because as often as not it is
their mysteries which are generative of crucial paradigmatic elements. I can think of no
better example of this than the Resurrection story so central to Christianity (though the
point could be illustrated with an infinite number of others). Meaning is madefLom the
mysteries, not in spite of them. Indeed the mysteries are like inflammations to which
meaning is applied as a more or less desperate unguent. In other words, we anoint the
mysteries we cannot otherwise make sense of-anoint them with meaning. Or, to switch
metaphors in the hope of persuading those who have little tolerance for scriptural imagery:
mystery is the grit in the oyster which aggravates meaning into existence.
If we call the oyster ‘culture’, what are we to call the interactive process that produces
these pearls of wisdom and wonder that so excite our attention? Cultures like oysters, in
ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURAL STUDIES: . . . 323

responding to irritants, secrete a substance which beads around the grit, so transforming it.
We can appreciate the aesthetics of the process, but it does not have this as its purpose. If
gritty mysteries give rise to pearls of meaning, to what can we compare the ‘nacre’
(mother-of-pearl), its activity, agency? At the risk of over-extending the metaphor, let’s
say the work done by our sense-shaping faculties. For these faculties perform tasks central
to the reconciliation of what we can signify as explicable and what we cannot. Just as
there is always more to what we accept as the truth than we can establish by proof, so too
there are entire oceans of phenomena which we are sensible to, and sensible of, without
them ever in any sense possessing that clarity by which we identify meaning.
I have used the terms ‘sensible to’ and ‘sensible o f here quite deliberately. They
denote that threshold, crossing of which allows something to be perceived, to be
recognised as ‘appreciable’-as in ‘a sensible difference’. I also mean to suggest
sensitivity to, and an appreciation of, the senses-by which I mean to restore not an
empiricist conception of experientiality but a corporeal one; as people we embody the
cultures we inhabit, that inhabit us. We do so as biological beings who exemplify, as Levi-
Strauss (1985: 115-20) has suggested, the natural world’s transcendence of itself, culture
being nature’s way of doing things differently.
To the extent that learning relies upon instinct even as it supersedes it; to the extent that
it replicates even as it transforms the biological material from which it derives; to the
extent that human beings can never embrace becoming cyborgs without sacrificing the
humanity which distinguishes them both from other animals and all machines-to this
extent, one ‘sensible difference’ will remain culturally important: the peculiar, precious-
and all too rare-species of empathy which Kropotkin treasured so intensely, and which I
see ethnography (and the verstehen integral to it) as exemplifying. Empathy of this sort is
nothing if not sophisticated. For it to be effective, it must fashion a sensibility adequate to
it.13

Sensibility and the verstehen of theory

Sensibility? Is this not an antiquated aesthetic notion (Sense and Sensibility, Jane
Austen and all that?). Well yes it is, and no it need not be. In its heyday it was supposed to
be indicative of a capacity for identifying with and responding to the sorrows of others as
well as the beautiful (as against, say, Hobbesian notions of innate self-interestedness and
power mongering). Becoming ‘self-indulgent’, it declined into sentimentalism, showing a
propensity for ‘the luxury of grief which was what Austen criticised in her posthumously
named novel. For T.S. Eliot, who lamented what he called the ‘dissociation of sensibility’,
it was expressive of the ‘creative faculty’, one’s ‘quality of temperament’ (Cuddon
19821615-6).

13. Some remarks by Geertz (1973:23) about the nature of what it is that ethnography has to
offer are relevant here. He wants to emphasise the complex specificity of the findings that
come from it, their circumstantiality. He goes on to stress that ‘almost obsessively fine-
comb’ extended field studies in ‘confined contexts’ give us ‘the sort of sensible actuality’
that ‘makes it possible to think not only realistically and concretely about’ our ‘mega
concepts’, but, ‘what is more important, creatively and imaginatively with them’. Note that
use of ’sensible actuality’.
324 THE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY

Sensibility, a term easily used narcissistically, then, to gratify rather than interrogate. A
useful term nonetheless-one which allows us to identify and distinguish between
contending hermeneutics, e.g., aficionados of theory versus grubbers of fact, Raymond
Williams’s workers versus Matthew Arnold’s elites, merchants versus scholars, diplomats
versus soldiers, mercenaries versus peaceniks, diesel dykes versus drag queens, and so on.
Gestural examples such as these ought to be enough to indicate that to acknowledge the
importance of contrary sensibilities and the crucial role they play at cultural transit points
does not entail any denial of the significance of the politics of culture (indeed, it is
important to recognise that these differences tend to take on considerable political
significance when cultural mediation is at a premium). Specific discourse dynamics and
ideological interpellations, we need to realise, may be a consequence as much as a cause
of the creation and consolidation of sensibilities. It also needs to be conceded that the
political has to be interpreted rather less schematically and with a lot more subtlety than
tends to be the case when semiotic certainty scorns hermeneutic humility.
When differing sensibilities clash, misinterpretation is inevitable. This is as true in the
intellectual arena as any other (for example, in debates between advocates of cultural
studies and advocates of cultural anthropology). Certain kinds of misinterpretation are
inadvertent, others are wilful, even perverse, but the most intransigent are paradigmatic: in
effect, they define what distinguishes one sensibility from another.
My own, for example. Am I misinterpreting (or wilfully misrepresenting)
contemporary cultural theory when I suggest that much of it is characterised by a
dissociation of sensibility?-a dissociation, moreover, that goes far beyond anything that
Eliot himself could have imagined.14 It is this as much as anything, I would venture, that
Kalpana Ram is objecting to in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Sneja Gunew’s treatment
of women’s subjectivity. Other no less extreme, and no less revealing, expressions of it
are easy enough to find. John Frow (1990:16), quoting Hegel, for example, tells us that it
is ‘the monstrous power of the negative’ that is important. Theory ‘carries the central
burden of criticality’, critique being ‘the dynamic core of any discipline’, an activity
which-‘rightly’, he insists-‘lacks all compassion’, for ‘only through destruction is new
knowledge possible’ (cf. Frow 1986, 1995, Eipper 1996b).I5 To my mind, such a
declaration-and the fact that many who read it will see nothing wrong with it-is as
telling an indicator as any of the extent to which the dissociation of sensibility has
corroded our comprehension of that cultural practice we call understanding.
What is at stake here is what I want to call the verstehen of theory: how one places
oneself in the position of a theorist in order to interpret the workings of theory; crucially,
how one situates oneself in order to identify and ascertain theory’s purposes, the
connection it makes between the ends that its advocates wish to pursue and the means
available to them-theory, that is to say, as an experiential activity.

14. Need it be stressed that we are not obliged to endorse Eliot’s own political and cultural
position simply because a key insight of his contributes to our understanding of
contemporary processes.
15. Cf. Henry James’s (1962:155) conception: ‘To criticise’, he wrote, ‘is to appreciate, to
appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticised
thing and make it one’s own’.
ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURAL STUDIES: ... 325

what concerned Eliot was not the sort of thought that was merely thought; thought
which was felt, experienced, was what mattered, thought which had the capacity to shape
sensibility in a distinctive way. Through the amalgamation of disparate experiences,
something new can be synthesised; when this happens, language, thought and feeling
ensemble themselves.
Today we are told by influential theorists and their followers that language, thought
and feeling ought to disassemble, ma1 ensemble, themselves-disrupt, distort and
denigrate purported and putative unities alike. Experience, we are asked to accept, is best
distantiated, abstracted, even repudiated. Sensuous immediacy ceases to be deserving of
admiration, aesthetics become an indictable category, prose becomes as abstruse as it is
agonistic-while the feeling in such writing, such as it is, acquires a rationalistic, self-
suspicious carapace. At the extreme, we are asked to do more than merely sanction the
dissociation of sensibility, we are meant to endorse it.
Will this ‘anti-sensibility’ prevail? If it were to, how could ethnography be conducted?
What good would theory be? I would argue that we need not ever fear a complete
obliteration of sensibility, but a self-denying sensibility-that is to say, an attitude of
mind, mode of being, whose reductio ad absurdum would be to be opposed even to itself
except as an act of nullification. What of it?
Negations tending in this direction can themselves always be negated-albeit in an
altogether different spirit, one committed to criticality but disinclined to fetishise it. But
we will need to learn to read and render culture-make sense of it-in new and more
imaginative ways, ones which seek to construct and communicate webs of significance
different from those that now preoccupy us. Of course it goes without saying that it will be
the nature of the difference, not mere difference by itself, that will decide the significance
of such attempts. The making of meaning is surely too complex, too mysterious, for us to
reasonably imagine otherwise. And unless and until we recognise that this is so, we may
‘live and learn, but not the wiser grow’.

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