Anthropology as Ethics. T. M. S. (Terry) Evens
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magician to which Foucault gave the name of power?
As against these two intellectual giants, it seems to me that when it is practiced unfailingly, reflexivity always leaves us in limbo, ever between self and other, such that the self is fixed only in its movement of becoming other to itself. This movement marks an eternal return that reiterates—with a peculiar twist—the essential and dynamic ambiguity of the other. Accordingly, both self and other are reaffirmed as they are cleared away: the other is reaffirmed as ‘other’ or what is irreducible to the self, and the self is reaffirmed as ever under construction (or, what amounts to almost the same thing, deconstruction), in view of its necessary, paradoxical foundation in the other. Whereas the wholly other, being nowhere in particular, is essentially homeless, the self, although positively defined in terms of indwelling or identity, can never quite go home again, because the security of its home has always already been breached as a condition of its being. The peculiar twist mentioned just above in relation to the Nietzschean notion of eternal return consists in the responsibility imposed on the self in the face of its at once limiting but enabling otherness. As a result of this condition of indebtedness, which arises together with reflexivity, the self-other tension and its attendant world of human existence are from their inception matters of ethics.
Using the method of doubt, Descartes—driven by philosophy in the identitarian sense given it by Plato, the sense in which ‘to know’ is always to know a thing in itself (an identity)—sought to arrive at indubitable knowledge or, more exactly, self-certitude. Certain knowledge and self-certain selfhood stand (and fall) together, since the cogito is implicit in the very idea of certain knowledge: how can the predicate be fixed and certain if its subject—that which knows—does not enjoy self-certitude? Foucault, however, having seen, felt, and documented the oppression of such an ‘enlightened’ epistemological regime (and, tellingly, echoing the Judeo-Christian God's punishing ‘critique’ of the First Couple for having fallen headlong for the Serpent's fascinating projection of their very own godlike selves), deployed the same method to expose the Cartesian or self-certain self as a pretense of power. The object of the present methodological exercise in reflexivity is neither exactly to secure nor to debunk the self. The object is, rather, in what I take to be the defining spirit of anthropology, to journey intellectually in search of otherness as it is found in both the other and the self. The idea is to make intelligible, with disciplinary rigor and purposefulness, what is ultimately irreducible to the self.
On the face of it, this endeavor—to make intelligible what is by definition unintelligible, or to reduce the irreducible—would seem self-defeating. But the appearance of unqualified contradiction here is a function of presupposing intelligibility to be nothing but a question of what has before now given the Occidental self its principal bearings, namely, reason in the strict sense. Once we set this formal presupposition aside, it becomes possible to conceive of the process of anthropological translation in terms other than strictly reductionistic ones. The terms I have in mind picture translation as, in a loose sense of the word, dialectical: the particulars of the other are indeed bent to fit those of the self, but not without the latter themselves suffering significant deformation in the process. The anthropologist must attend not only to the negative possibility of ethnocentrism, but also to the positive possibility of eccentrism: having done what he can to decenter himself (his self), the anthropologist opens himself to redefinition in terms of the other. Intelligibility, then, is wrought by virtue of a distinctly creative act, in which the reduction of the other by the self-preserving self is ultimately neutralized rather than finalized. It is neutralized because the self preserves itself only by becoming other to itself, thereby preserving both itself and the other for otherness.
Accordingly, making the other intelligible need not be, and at bottom is not, a question of reducing the other by appealing to reason or any other cognitive medium as a common ground, but rather of fashioning a common ground. The possibility of this immensely creative but utterly quotidian activity certainly has much to do with what obtains beforehand in the way of suppositions and presuppositions—and these, as the hermeneuts tell us, are prejudicial by nature. In view of the history of imperialist enterprise, inasmuch as this enterprise proceeded under the principle of enlightenment, it cannot be doubted that the presumption of reason—though still not, as I argue in this book, without its great and undeniable merits—has wrought damages of horrific impact and colossal proportions. Suppositions and presuppositions make a powerful difference.
More fundamentally, though, the dialectical possibility of generating a common ground does not rest with these pre-existing notions and attitudes, whether or not they comport reason. Instead, it rests with the ontological primacy of self-and-other as an essential tension. Considered as a tension rather than sheer opposition, the self- other relationship shows itself also in terms of continuity. Put another way, by virtue of this relationship people always already, in practice, enjoy a common ground. But in this form, the common ground does not exactly pre-exist: it obtains as a moving dynamic, something ever in the making. In which case, of course, it can never be fixed beforehand, and, for this reason, always goes to affirm abiding otherness. A firm and immovable common ground bespeaks only the selfsame or identity and renders otherness impossible. But otherness abides, and because it does, we never do arrive at the common ground—we only travel in its direction.
As the academic study of humankind, the profession of anthropology uniquely specializes in this mode of travel. Conceived of as a universalizing but intrinsically non- culminant journeying toward the other, anthropological translation carries definite methodological implications. It implies that the traditional goal of capturing ethno- graphically a specimen other-culture indulges a monographic idolatry, a disciplinary devotion to written presentations of social and cultural orders as if these orders were basically fixed and decided. But if the common ground is in fact always on the move, then such monographs present false pictures of ethnic realities. For not only is the ground ever shifting beneath the seven-league feet of the professional anthropologist, but also the ethnic realities themselves are ceaselessly engaged in the building of their own social and cultural common grounds.
This criticism of previous anthropological practice is hardly new, although the discipline is still straining to come to terms with it. In this connection, the sense of anthropological translation proposed here definitely does not imply that anthropology should, in view of such epistemological conceit, abandon the study of others in favor of self-study alone or even preponderantly. This now familiar remedial strategy, although impressively grounded in the fear of reducing the other to ourselves or, with Orientalism, to our counter-selves, serves to reinforce the dualism of self and other. It thus ironically also promotes the understanding of the self as absolute. What is more, the fact that the ethnic realities we study are never really fixed but are themselves always under self-construction and deconstruction suggests that the transformation of definition they suffer at the hands of the ethnographer is not in itself an imposition. The picture of ethnography as inherently intrusive or worse betrays a critical and evidently hard-to- dispel misunderstanding of the studied realities as utterly self-contained, if not culturally, at least in their capacity for self-determination. But the ethnographic interaction is no different in principle from the social interactions that take place from ‘within’. To be sure, the ethnographic interaction dramatizes the self-other and internal-external axes of social interaction, and for this reason is peculiar and carries special risks. But these are relative matters, for the tensions of self-and-other and internal-and-external constitute axes around which any social interaction revolves. The question that needs to be asked in respect to ethnographic ‘authority’, then, is not how we obviate this authority, but rather what form it should take and what the moral tenor of the definitional transformations it brings about should be.
If we are to understand the other, we must initiate a respectful process of give and take in which we need to be prepared to offer ourselves up, on behalf of our intellectual project, to otherness—not to resist but instead to enhance the way in which we are always already open to the other in spite of ourselves. One consults the other and, once so informed, modifies oneself accordingly, validating the other's otherness. When doing so, however, to make an absolutely critical caveat, one need always bear in mind that the anthropological (as distinct from theological or even zoological) other is, while peculiarly representative of otherness per se, also a self or egoity in its own right and therefore