Culture/Power/Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology

Abstract

Culture/Power/Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology. AKHIL GUPTA and JAMES FERGUSON, eds. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1997; 361 pp. In our relentless search for theoretical guidance in understanding culture, the central conceptual cornerstone of our discipline, cultural anthropologists have long looked to other analytic realms and disciplines for insight. By counterpoising to ecology, personality, history, or now, power and we have tried to not only define the nebulous contours of what is by exploring what it is not, but sought, more importantly, to understand how is produced, reproduced, and transformed. As part of this pursuit, contemporary anthropologists have turned first to history (think, for example, of the important volume Culture/power/ history edited by Nicholas Dirks, Sherry Ortner, and Geoff Eley), and more recently to geography for assistance. The widespread appeal of geography's conceptual apparatus is revealed in the plethora of spatial metaphors -- landscapes, spaces, places, maps, displacement, global, local, to name just a few - in recent titles in anthropology. Culture/power/place is a landmark contribution to this current theoretical trajectory in cultural anthropology. The anthology reprints, in revised versions, the ground-breaking theoretical essays (by Lisa Malkki, John Borneman, James Ferguson, Lisa Rofel, Akhil Gupta, and Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson) which first appeared in a 1992 special issue of the journal Cultural Anthropology dedicated to the theme of space and place in anthropology. Since their initial publication these essays, especially those by Malkki, Gupta, and Gupta and Ferguson, have become pivotal to current rethinkings of the relationship between and nation, territoriality, identity, difference, transnational processes, and power. The additional seven essays in the volume (some of which, like Kristin Koptiuch's, are also reprinted versions of published articles) complement, enhance, and complicate the themes raised in these earlier essays (all of the pieces were originally presented at three panels for the American Anthropological Association annual meetings). The volume therefore has a theoretical coherence and depth rarely found in edited collections, for which the editors, Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, should be commended. Two themes organize the format and contributions of the volume: issues of and space, and the relationship of and power. As Gupta and Ferguson argue in their introduction and in their article, ideas of place have always been implicit in cultural theory. The terms may be the territorially circumscribed, symbolically bounded notions of cultures and areas in earlier anthropology (and the assumed isomorphism of space, place, and culture) or those of current interests in the and local. Making these assumptions explicit enables anthropologists to go beyond culture in order to analyze the relationship between and place, particularly in the spatialized production of identity and difference. In other words, as John Durham Peters suggests in his provocative tour through fact and fiction, anthropologists must learn to see bifocally, that is to read the local and global simultaneously in our ethnographic studies. Authors of the remaining essays in the first section use detailed ethnographic studies to explore and expand aspects of this argument. Several papers problematize the concept of nation and nationalism in cultural theory. Lisa Malkki explores how ideas about nations and nationalism inform anthropological studies and theories of and identity, in part through her comparative study of two settlements of Hutu refugees in Tanzania. In an evocative complement to Malkki's analysis, John Borneman investigates the shifting, ambivalent meanings of Heimat (home, homeland) in relation to the structuring and restructuring of state, nation, and territory in post World War II Germany. …