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The once and future ethnographic archive

George E. Marcus History of the Human Sciences 1998 11: 49 DOI: 10.1177/095269519801100404 The online version of this article can be found at: http://hhs.sagepub.com/content/11/4/49

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HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES

© 1998 SAGE Publications

Vol. 11 No. 4
49

(London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi)

[0952-6951(199811)11:4;49-63; 006607]

and future ethnographic archive

once
GEORGE E. MARCUS

The

ABSTRACT

This article is concerned with the literal and metaphoric senses in which anthropologys accumulation of knowledge through the production of ethnography on the worlds peoples can be considered an archive. The relevance of this concept to ethnography has a very different past, present, and emergent associations. The Human Area Relations Files project as visionary science dependent on the making of an archive of ethnography contrasts with the uses of the past ethnographic record in the pursuit of contemporary fieldwork in a so-called postmodern world.

Key words archive, cultural anthropology, ethnography, fieldwork, representation

Archive: (From the Greek: magisterial residence, public office, government) a place in which public records or other important historic docu-

kept. (Oxford English Dictionary) The idea that anthropologys century-long accumulation of ethnographic scholarship constitutes an archive has had at least four expressions, both literal and metaphorical, which I am interested in exploring in this article. However, I will be most concerned with this reference in its metaphorical senses amid the creative and highly productive unravelling of cultural anthropology following a set of landmark critiques of the 1980s (see Clifford and
ments are

Marcus, 1986; and Marcus and Fischer, 1986), and in

as

well in

speculating

one of its literal senses about the present, uncertain future of the discipline.

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anthropologist refer metaphorically to the totality ethnography as an archive at a 1987 meeting in Princeton of the Working Group on Culture and Ideology, one of many such groups established by the Committee on Basic Research in the Behavioral and Social
an

I believe I first heard

of published

Sciences, in turn part of the National Research Councils Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education. The overall project was to report on scientific frontiers in the behavioral and social sciences - leading research questions and fundamental problems - and on the new resources needed to work on them (Gerstein et al., 1988: xi). Not by any means an official bureaucratic inquisition on the worth of the social sciences, this exercise nonetheless did tend to put disciplines on the defensive. The working groups were as much about how to word, and thus advertise, the past contributions and rationales of disciplines as about how to project a future for them. And this was particularly so for our group, focusing on cultural anthropology, a rather bohemian field little understood by the other social sciences anyhow. Besides, at that time anthropology was undergoing a bracing self-critique that, while not moving it out of the social sciences altogether, emphasized the strong influences upon it of critical trends in the humanities (under the banners of postmodernism, feminism and, a little later, cultural studies). The repeated trope that came to command our meeting was reference to the enduring value of anthropologys world ethnographic archive. It was particularly echoed by the committee chair, a prominent anthropologist, known originally for his richly descriptive account of the religion of an African people. While to hear anthropologists refer to the cumulative knowledge that they have produced as an archive is not that common, the archive metaphor used by the chair on this occasion of anthropologys past justification and future promise does stand for a powerful, satisfying and particularly comforting sentiment that anthropologists have often expressed: namely, that the production of ethnography, at the minimum, and at its most valuable, is the present making of documents for history. There is both a basic truth to ethnography in its own time and a relative truth to it in historic perspective. This is a minimalist but nonetheless powerful claim for anthro-

pology as a discipline.
As an archive for the present, it provides reliable material that functions as primary sources for the comparative, generalizing research projects of others in anthropology and beyond. As an archive for the future, it provides documents that can be read against other genres in the work of historical interpretation. In the present, the messy, constructed nature of ethnographic knowledge tends to be muted; for the future, in the hands of historians, the constructed nature of this knowledge as document, relative to others, becomes foremost. So, for example, on the one hand, anthropologists can lose

themselves in the realities of the Nuer

as

established in Evans-Pritchards

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monographs or of the Trobriand islanders in Malinowskis, in an enclosed professional archive that continues to generate the scope of the disciplines object of study for generations of students. This is the construction of the archive in the interest of sustaining the disciplines canon (see Marcus, 1992). On the other hand, these same monographs take on the status of mere accounts, among others, for students of the historical Nuer and Trobriand islanders. It is precisely on the horns of this difference between the realist ethnographic archive of the present and the relativist one of its historicized future that the authority constructed in ethnographic research and texts was caught and shredded in the 1980s critiques, focusing on the character of representation and context in the writing of ethnography. Nonetheless, the archive metaphor and what it stands for remain powerful for the several pleasing faces that ethnography offers its suitors. It reassures anthropologists that the conceptually simple but in fact nearly impossible task of fieldwork as required by ethnography will have enduring value as a life- and career-defining activity; it slakes the thirst of social science for reliable data of others in synchronic presentist perspective; and it satisfies the relativist, critical and historicizing inclinations of contemporary humanists - all at the same time. The question is whether, after coming to terms with the contradictions in the vision of ethnography as archive through the 1980s to the present, anthropologists can continue to settle for the sleight of hand that they are creating cumulative basic knowledge now
and for the future.

THE ETHNOGRAPHIC ARCHIVE AS THE BASIS OF VISIONARY SCIENCE: THE HUMAN RELATIONS
AREA FILES

Long before the critiques of the 1980s, in the days when the most visionary hopes for positivist social science still reigned in anthropology, the problem of constituting cumulative ethnographic knowledge as an archive for generalizing, comparative projects of research was addressed by a most ambitious and literal effort. This is the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF), begun in 1937 as the Cross-Cultural Survey of Yale Universitys Institute of Human Relations, an interdisciplinary move toward a unified science of individual and social behavior. George Peter Murdock was the founder of the project. In the words of Joseph Tobin, who in 1990 suggested an interesting reimagining of the HRAF as a radical text (1990: 473): Following in the tradition of Tylor, Morgan, Frazer, Spencer, Thurnwald, Westermarck, and Nieboer, Murdock
archivist
as

well

as a

saw himself as a cultural cross-cultural theorist. A student of A. G. Keller,

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Murdock was determined to carry out the dream of Kellers predecessor, William Sumner, of creating a truly Comparative social science based on a centrally located cross-cultural sample: The files represent the realization of a dream of a great American sociologist, William Graham Sumner, who used longingly to fantasize a great room with its four walls lined with deep shelves, one for each society of the world, within which all cultural and background inforriiation would be arranged in systematic order from front to back. (Murdock, 1950: 718):. Sumners dream lives on. The Human Relations Area Files Inc., now fills many deep shelves in a large room in the HRAF headquarters near the campus of Yale University. Micronched (and now CD-ROM) versions of the files can be found in over 250 libraries worldwide.... I would suggest that the majority of anthropologists who do not use the HRAF think of the files as a compendium of coded information. Since most committed HRAt&rs use the files and their spin-offs to do coding, and since the HRAF as an organization produces and distributes probability samples and publishes studies based on coded data and correlational analyses, this is a logical assumption. But in fact the HRAF files themselves are composed entirely of reprints of over 6000 ethnographic books, monographs, and papers on over three hundred cultural groups. At 750,000 pages, the HRAF is certainly the biggest ethnographic text and its growing every year.
.

There is a small but stalwart core of anthropologists today who do sys, tematic cross-cultural research using the fileg, but almost from the beginning the problem of contextualization of materials for use in broad comparisons was recognized among anthropologists. And the already noted virtue of the files in preserving the contexts of specific works in developing general categories of data only exacerbated the perception of this problem of control ling the diverse contexts of materials coded for uniform and broad comparison. Nothing could be more revealing of the heterogeneity of ethno-, graphic texts than when they were literally cut up and reassembled by HRAF archivists preparing them to be used as if they were primary sources. For many anthropologists, the HRAF remain a curiosity, and an expensive one at that. The maintenance of the files far outweighs their use in most libraries (Jane Segal, Rice librarian, personal communication). Aside from Tobins attempt in the milieu of the 1980s to understand the files as in fact autlibrless, polyvocal and radically deconstructive, they stand as a monument to the still prestigious goal of an objectifying, law-finding comparative social science - itself based on an outdated model of what it is to do science - and the bid of anthropology to participate in this project. Only in the framework

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of such a project could the cumulation of published ethnography be considered literally an archive of primary material. But we turn now to another sense of the archive at its most literal as primary source material; it is this that undercut the HRAFs earnest fiction - and the face-saving disciplinary selfjustifications related to it - of the archive in the pursuit of visionary science.
THE SENSITIVITY OF THE PERSONAL ETHNOGRAPHIC ARCHIVE

What emerges from every effort at fieldwork research in anthropology is a trove of diverse materials that constitutes an archive in its most literal and potentially most subversive senses in relation to the authority of cumulative published ethnography as cultural anthropologys most basic contribution to (universal, or at least western) knowledge. Aside from published monographs and articles, every anthropologist accumulates a mass of drafts, unpublished talks, photographs, tapes, diaries, correspondence and, of course, fieldnotes (see Sanjek, 1990). Hardly the only scholars that make such an accumulation, anthropologists, in my experience, tend to create personal archives with a special intensity, inspired both by the professional norm - near obsession even - with record-keeping and by the transmutation of the oral into the written as the key activity of the anthropologist in the field (e.g. see the Royal Anthropological Institutes hoary Notes and Queries [1959]), and by the classic impulse of the educated traveller to register experience and observation (see Clifford, 1997). This personal ethnographic archive while it is still in the anthropologists possession is in effect a rich inventory, a materialized extension that offers an objectification of the self, in whole or in part, at different stages of career and life for contemplation and analysis. Every anthropologist whom I know is an archivist of his or her own career in this way, and much can be understood about such a person in the range of habits by which he or she tends this archive - how it is displayed, how stored, how often and on what occasions parts of it are consulted and reread. This remains a very private archive unless it is deposited in a public library or museum at the end of a career or a life. Fortunately, the notes and papers of many prominent anthropologists have survived in this way, and at this point they become an archive in the most literal sense, the raw materials to be organized by librarians and to be worked through by historians. But it is just at this point also that personal ethnographic archives become potentially subversive sources in relation to the claim of prestige and authority for published ethnographic scholarship of being at least metaphorically of archival value (like primary sources) for anthropologys own as well as other disciplines analytic, generalizing projects of knowledge. For in every

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such

personal archive is evidence of human failings and fallibility, of the inability of any fieldworker to be a reliable scope of observation or a perfect translator and interpreter. Personal archives are most often humbling with regard to the more confident terms in which anthropologys knowledge quest has most often been publicly expressed. Fieldnotes often reveal the otherwise masked, often unresolved collaborations at the heart of ethnography. Most sensitively, they often evidence a struggling, incomplete grasp of an alien language, signs of an apparent command of which insures confidence in ethnographic texts.
an occasional revelation about this messy, diverse nature of the of making anthropological knowledge as exposed by materials in the personal ethnographic archives of particularly prominent historic figures in the discipline has haunted anthropology to the point of scandal. Two of the bestknown cases are that of Malinowskis diaries (1967) and that of Derek Freemans claims (1983) against the validity of Margaret Meads early fieldwork in Samoa, from which the enduringly influential and popular Coming of Age in Samoa was produced. The publication of Malinowskis diaries, decades after his death, was disturbing to anthropologists who still relied on the authority of his works, but they licensed an entire genre of fieldwork accounts, the best of which offered a reflexive critique of the way that fieldwork as method and professional ethos had largely been articulated. Freemans critique of Mead was very public indeed, the press attempting at first to characterize it as a possible instance of scientific fraud. At least it gave the history and circumstances of fieldwork a significance equal to the claims and descriptions within the covers of ethnographic texts. Of course the personal archives have been there all along in the production of anthropological knowledge, but until recently were registered only as part of largely tacit professional lore and in the intimate transactions between particular teachers and students. The more visible, intense and reflexive appreciation of these archives arose among anthropologists as an aspect of the 1980s critique of ethnography as diverse forms of inscription and writing in

Indeed,

phases. Clearly, anthropology has survived any embarrassment caused by delving into the most literal sense of its collective work as an archive. Indeed, as part of the thorough historicization of the discipline, it has diminished the subtle association of every fieldwork project with the trope of discovery, of first encounter, forcing every ethnographer to pass through a complex skein and history of previous representations and writings on entering any contemporary site of fieldwork. Most important has been the trend of the restudy of classic works in connection with new fieldwork among the same peoples, as, for example, in the case of Annette Weiners reconsideration of Trobriand exchange (1976) and Sharon Hutchinsons placing of the Nuer into colonial and postcolonial history (1995). Yet, the question remains whether the positive incorporation of what has been considered the personal

all its

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ethnographic archive into the new corpus of what is offered now as ethnographic knowledge to its publics reinvigorates the idea of archive as the form of ethnographys singular disciplinary achievement, or undermines this notion, in both its metaphoric and literal senses, altogether. That is, is the Nuer or Trobriand ethnography more or less canonical after its restudy in the broader context of the history of its personal archives? If less canonical,
as

I think it

must

be, then what

sense

complex

and unwieldy

are the of archive?

uses

of this reconstituted,

more

THE ARCHIVE METAPHOR IN THE 1980s AMID AND AFTER THE WRITING CULTURE CRITIQUE aside from the demolishing implication of the personal ethnographic archive for the metaphorical comfort and authority offered by the idea of published ethnography itself as having the status of an archive, an additional challenge for anthropological ethnography was raised by the probing of its relation to other genres of writing in its same field of discourse and representation. In this regard, the 1980s critique of ethnography gave recognition and a direct relevance to diverse past and new writing about cultural alterity, brought on by social and intellectual movements concerned with issues of identity, ethnicity and indigenism. Anthropologists until now have been more or less successful in establishing the authority of ethnography, independently of, say, missionary writings, travellers accounts and writings from among the peoples they themselves have studied. However, intellectual trends in cultural theory and analysis of the past two decades have made this independent place for ethnographic writing untenable. No longer are genres blurred simply among academic styles of social and cultural analysis (Geertz, 1980); now this occurs in diverse terrains and among different communities of cultural production. The volume edited by Deborah Reed-Danahay, AutolEthnography (1997), captures this heterotopic nature of the discursive space of contemporary genres of writing about cultural alterity that might once have been dominated by anthropological ethnography in the academy. There is now a thorough mix, for example, of native anthropology, ethnic autobiography and autobiographical ethnography (Reed-Danahay, 1997), among other genres, that provide accounts of once traditional peoples, alongside and sometimes in engagement with the ethnographic text in the tradition of Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard and others. An exemplary expression of this dramatic reorganization of the discursive space of ethnographic representation - especially the diverse kinds of materials and sources that are now taken up on an equal footing by scholars is James Cliffords (1994) recent discussion of the emergence of diaspora

Quite

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distinct subject of reference and interest across the broad interdisciplinary realms of cultural and postcolonial studies into the changing forms of the long-standing objects of study and modes of representation of ethnography in anthropology. The interest in diaspora arises from a perspective on cultures in motion, or at least in dispersed and hybrid existence, rather than the more traditional ethnographic perspective on cultures in place. Clifford begins by respectfully criticizing a conventional attempt to establish diaspora as a domain of social typology that organizes it as a field for classic comparative analysis. This is the kind of framing that would require an archive of already constructed source materials - an archive of already produced
as a

ethnography: Safran is right to focus attention on defining diaspora. What is the range of experiences covered by the term? Where does it begin to lose definition ? His comparative approach is certainly the best way to specify a discursive and historical field. Moreover his juxtapositions are often very enlightening, and he does not, in practice, strictly enforce his definitional checklist. But we should be wary of constructing our working definition of a term like diaspora by recourse to an ideal type, with the consequence that groups become identified as more or less diasporic, having only two, or three, or four of the basic six features. Even the pure forms, Ive suggested, are ambivalent, even embattled, over basic features. Moreover at different times in their history, societies may wax and wane in diasporism, on changing possibilities - obstacles, openings, antagonisms, and connections - in their host countries and transnationally. (Clifford, 1994: 308) Instead, Clifford prefers a different constitution of the analytic and discursive space of scholarship to accommodate a much more heterogeneous
range of
sources

and writers:

approach would be to specify the discursive field diacritically. Rather than locating essential features, we might focus on diasporas borders, on what it defines itself against. And, we might ask, what articulations of identity are currently being replaced by diaspora claims? It is important to stress that the relational positioning at issue here is not a process of absolute othering, but rather of entangled tension. Diasporas are caught up with and defined against (1) the norms of nation-states and (2) indigenous, and especially autochthonous, claims by tribal peoples. (Clifford, 1994: 308) The conventional construction of the space for scholarly analysis assumes and requires a closed archive of at least implicitly constructed sources that already knows its object, so to speak. Cliffords alternative envisions an archive of materials that keeps its object of study continually in question.

A different

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Clifford reflects here the influential counter-canon of so-called postmodern thought. Not only do the identity and contours of the thing studied remain in question: its identity is the question. The imagined archive of such scholarship is productively unwieldy, heterogeneous, ungoverned by reigning typological procedures, and at least seemingly unpredictable. The ethnographic archive does indeed become a radical text that can never be mastered, a collection that can never be completed, a record that cannot be authoritatively ordered for any one particular vision of a disciplines knowledge quest. This ethos of conceiving the archive is not limited to the hybrid, hard-topin-down constructs favored by the counter-canon, but it has also influenced and reconfigured the existing ground of area studies, and especially the characterization of world culture areas on which the construction of the ethnographic archive - literal and metaphoric - has depended. Anthropologists are still identified by area expertise - a South Asianist, a Latin Americanist, an Africanist, or a Sinologist - but what it means to operate as an ethnographer under these covers has changed dramatically from an orientation toward mastery of the past scholarly literatures on these areas (of a frankly Orientalist sort) to a more common present orientation toward the opening of locales and regions to globalization and new histories. The archive for the contemporary ethnography of the latter depends on the construction of the archive in the same terms that Clifford prefers over those that he respectfully criticizes. What does such a development do to the past notion of the ethnographic archive as part of the professional ideology of anthropology? For example, it was promoted and defended in the 1987 meeting, described at the beginning of this article, just as the ethnographic record itself was being critiqued and rethought. In the intellectual mood of 1997 anthropology, it would be hard to claim with the same conviction and sense of apparent consensus what the chair of our committee was claiming with reference to the world ethnographic archive in 1987. The metaphor has lost its power because the discursive space of ethnography as well as the way it materializes its object of study have changed, along with anthropologys own sense of its future unfolding in the present. Under these changed circumstances, does the idea of the ethnographic archive in any of its past literal or metaphorical senses still have a use? What remains of the magnificent archive - a revised HRAF perhaps to be viewed, as suggested by Tobin (and reinforced by Clifford), as a radical text, in the way that ethnographic research is now being conceived in a so-called postmodern world?
-

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THE USEFULNESS OF THE ETHNOGRAPHIC ARCHIVE IN THE PRESENT FUTURE

Contemporary fieldwork in anthropology is increasingly multi-sited. It cannot just remain the study of the impacts of a globalizing world system or of colonial pasts and postcolonial presents on the peoples of formerly smallscale societies that anthropologists have traditionally studied. Peoples are unprecedentedly on the move today, processes of cultural production are dis-

persed and fragmented, and while always sensitive to the situated character of knowledge, ethnography surely cannot be satisfied with providing mere accounts of partial, local knowledge in a world where the category of the local itself is in question (see Appadurai, 1996). Ethnography emerging out of the interdisciplinary arenas of science and technology studies, media studies and cultural studies is reconfiguring the norms of the fieldwork method toward practices that combine different sorts and intensities of research experiences cross-cutting social terrains whose selected sites of focus might be in open, veiled, or even unintended conflict and opposition with each other (see Marcus, 1995, 1998). The basic contribution of ethnography here is to map from many different native points of view cultural formations that establish connections and links among peoples, elites, institutions and communities in transnational space, which might otherwise be missed in the heavy emphasis on political economy in establishing the emerging outlines of contemporary regimes of globalization. In the pursuit of multi-sited projects, anthropologists cannot simply identify with their former subjects in new circumstances - the former tribal and indigenous groups that have become subaltern citizens of nation-states, or marginalized working classes - as they tended to do in the age of economic development during the Cold War decades, but must incorporate this signature interest of their discipline into new ways of materializing objects of study. Although anthropologists are pursuing many different kinds of projects that take them far from their traditional subjects, encompassed in the metaphor of the world ethnographic archive of peoples, still, it is probably the case that the discipline continues to be identified with and continues to be legitimated by its interest in non-western, small-scale traditional societies, now encompassed within modern nation-states and globalizing political economies. It is also probably the case that most contemporary examples of multi-sited fieldwork do in fact develop from, or at least involve in some way, the present circumstances of indigenous peoples, traditional forms of culture and classic anthropological research on distinctive culture areas (e.g.
Mesoamerica, the Mediterranean, South Asia, etc.).
But what might be different in multi-sited projects is that the most intensive fieldwork phases of such projects, involving participant observation, interviews and sustained relationships with particular individuals who function as

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key informants, often occur in places and institutions outside the realm of the traditional mise-en-scne of fieldwork among native peoples. In other words, the usual priority of method is inverted: culture in motion often requires fieldwork in places that were only tangentially treated in previous ethnography, while the ethnography of native peoples, so to speak - the expected mise-enscne of fieldwork - becomes treated, not necessarily tangentially, but by other means. What other means? I would argue that it is precisely here that the idea of anthropologys historic and world ethnographic archive, in its earlier as well as its revised and critiqued senses, comes crucially into play as present changes in the practice of ethnographic research unfold. This view perhaps finds more use in ethnographic works that have been dismissed by critique. It certainly suggests that anthropologists should pay closer attention to their own archive - not in the interest of a comparative science of Man, but to fill in the aporia of their own past as they explore other subjects. This is perhaps a post-fieldwork construction of the archive, in which the past accumulation of ethnography continues to serve a vital role in research, but where the priority and strategic choice of how to organize fieldwork moves the anthropologist away from her or his long-established mise-en-scne. In this way, the anthropologist in pursuing new trajectories of fieldwork also ironically returns to the old settings - the armchair, the library - from which pioneers of the fieldwork method such as Malinowski so encouraged professional anthropologists to depart. But this is possible only because the sense of the ethnographic has been critiqued and given new possibilities by being nested within a multi-sited research imaginary. Deep analytic work within the archive stands for the emblematic anthropological concern with local cultures as fieldwork itself moves elsewhere, pursuing peripatetic strategies of participant observation in the expert, corporate, institutional and activist cultures of globalization and social movements. I want to close this article with brief discussions of two examples of how the ethnographic archive of anthropology, focusing on traditional peoples, constitutes a defining component of projects that take on questions and processes far beyond the conventional confines of ethnography. These show something of the variety of ways in which the ethnographic archive, both metaphorically and literally, functions in contemporary work. One example deals with a developing project of graduate student research on bioprospecting as a form of contemporary transnational scientific activity; the other concerns a reflection on and an interpretation of recent events of rebellion in southern Mexico by Michael Taussig. Kris Peterson, a graduate student in the Rice University anthropology department, defines her research in this way (Peterson, n.d.: 1-2):
There is an emerging interest in bioprospecting. Questions currently being raised include which companies and scientific institutions are

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involved, where they conduct their work, the nature of the relationships that cross corporations and (largely indigenous) communities, the commodification of natural resources, and whether bioprospecting endeavors will really see future success. Although I find this roadmapping useful, I am more interested in how bioprospecting can inform the subtleties of globalization practices and transnational scientific activity. Within the global and transnational there may be more to learn about culture through debates and contestations that merge in bioprospecting spaces. This research project seeks to (1) trace a genealogy of ethno/botanic methodology in order to understand how current (industrial) methods are impacted, and perhaps created by, business practices, global markets, trade policies, and environmental and development discourses, (2) understand the development of current intellectual property laws and its impact on bioprospecting practices and different actors, and (3) make sense of the connections between different stakeholders by tracing the movement of plants, plant narratives, and the life cycle of an FDA approved drug.
In her

specific focus

on venture

capital enterprises like

Shaman Pharma-

ceuticals, and given the questions she poses, Peterson is most likely to devise fieldwork strategies for moving in the spaces defined by corporate operations
and the simultaneously economic/cultural programs that they pursue. This of course includes the Amazon rainforest itself and the peoples who dwell there. However, she is likely to spend little time there, unlike the conventional anthropological research strategy (typically, ethnography would be situated in the rainforest among indigenous peoples, with corporate capitalism as the murky, or all too certain, external force), focusing instead on the complex politics and appropriations of cultural identities at the heart of where business and science are pursued. Still, this is not a story that can be told without a parallel account and treatment of the history and present circumstances of specific peoples in the areas of interest of bioprospecting enterprises. Here the considerable ethnographic archive that exists for such peoples plays a crucial role in her work, in relation to which she must function somewhat like an old-time ethnologist, but with a thorough grounding in the Writing Culture kind of critique of representation. The best of past fieldwork on relatively isolated small-scale societies and contemporary fieldwork on movements of indigenous peoples constitutes a literal archive crucial to Petersons work. Working herself imaginatively into the ethnographic record is important for understanding how that record is itself being used by businessmen and corporate scientists who are making something of shamans in the interest of new wonder drugs. Still emblematic of the anthropologists interest in the variety of the worlds

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cultures in transformation, the ethnography of Amerindian people becomes ironically a site of archival work while fieldwork is developed elsewhere. A project of cultural critique in this regard depends both on fieldwork being done other than in the usual mise-en-scne of anthropological research, and on creating a tension between an account of the appropriation of interests and subjects (like shamanism and curing) close to those of anthropology and a strategic probing of the accumulated anthropological scholarship on these same subjects and interests in a common arena of exploitation. In such a project, the literal ethnographic archive has new and significant uses. The second example I want merely to touch upon is Michael Taussigs developing work on the idea of the public secret and the social power generated by acts and rituals of unmasking or defacement (Taussig, n.d.). As with previous work (e.g. Taussig, 1992), Taussigs arguments here depend on original and intensive readings of early ethnography, often before Malinowski and focusing on work by relatively unknown writers. In a recent talk at Rice, he presented one piece of this most current work that concerns the cultural strategies in the emerging revolutionary politics in Chiapas, southern Mexico. The communiques of Subcommandante Marcos have been widely read and interpreted over the past few years by journalists and scholars. Taussigs particular fascination with them as well as the entire theater created by masking and unmasking in relation to Marcos identity is developed in the context of the use made of and the heightened meaning given to early ethnographic work in these politics. He sees this connection being made in a number of areas of the world, where the relevance of the ethnographic archive is renewed by the strategies of various social movements. The reinterpretation of already accumulated ethnography becomes crucial here. Again, what constitutes fieldwork in a situation where local politics and meanings have globalizing frameworks as well is far different from merely adding to the ethnographic archive as it was conceived in the classic period of anthropology and hallowed later as a permanent, minimalist contribution of the discipline. Fieldwork becomes something else - multi-sited moving across discontinuous and conflicted social and institutional arenas. But figuring out cultural productions and circulations in this new terrain requires of anthropology new interrogations of its older archive that anthropologists (but not other kinds of actors, if Taussig is correct) have ignored for so long in the waning of their comparative project, the glorious science of Man.
Rice

University, Houston,

USA

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Appadurai, Arjun (1996) Modernity at Large. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press.

Clifford, James (1994) Diasporas, Cultural Anthropology 9(3): 302-38. Clifford, James (1997) Routes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Clifford, James and Marcus, George E., eds (1986) Writing Culture: the Poetics and
Politics

of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. an

Freeman, Derek (1983) Margaret Mead and Samoa: the Making and Unmaking of

Anthropological Myth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Geertz, Clifford (1980) Blurred Genres, American Scholar 43: 1-22. Gerstein, D. R., Luce, R. D., Smelser, N. J. and Sperlich, S., eds (1988) The Behavioral and Social Sciences: Achievements and Opportunities . Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Hutchinson, Sharon (1995) Nuer Dilemmas. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press.

Malinowski, Bronislaw (1967) A Diary

a

in the Strict Sense

of the

Term. New York:

Harcourt, Brace, & World. Marcus, George E. (1992) A Broad(er)side to the Canon, Being a Partial Account of
Year of Travel among Textual Communities in the Realm of Humanities a Collection of Artificial Curiosities, in George E. Marcus (ed.) Rereading Cultural Anthropology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Marcus, George E. (1995) Ethnography in/of the World System: the Emergence of Multi-sited Ethnography, Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 95-117. Marcus, George E. (1998) Ethnography through Thick and Thin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Marcus, George E. and Fischer, Michael (1986) Anthropology as Cultural Critique: an Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Murdock, George Peter (1950) Feasibility and Implementation of Comparative Community Research, American Sociological Review 15: 713-20. Peterson, Kristin (n.d.) Preliminary Research Proposal, Department of Anthropology, Rice University Houston, TX.

Centers, and Including

Reed-Danahay, Deborah,
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(1959) Notes and

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Queries. Sanjek, Roger (1990) Fieldnotes: the Makings of Anthropology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Taussig, Michael (1992) Mimesis and Alterity. New York: Routledge. Taussig, Michael (n.d.) Defacement. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Tobin, Joseph (1990) The HRAF as Radical Text, Cultural Anthropology 5(4):
473-87.

Weiner, Annette (1976) Women of Value, Men of Renown. Austin: University of Texas
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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Rice University. He was inaugural editor of the journal Cultural Anthropology and is known for his fostering of the critique of anthropological writing during the 1980s through such works as Writing Culture (edited with James Clifford) and Anthropology as Cultural Critique (co-authored with Michael Fischer). He is currently editing a series of annuals, marking the end of the century, titled Late Editions (University of Chicago Press). His most recent book is Ethnography Through Thick and Thin (Princeton University Press, 1998).
GEORGE E. MARCUS

Address:

Department of Anthropology-MS 20,

Rice

University,

6100 Main

Street, Houston, Texas 77005, USA. [email: marcus@rice.edu]

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