Anthropology Through a Double Lens: Public and Personal Worlds in Human Theory 9780812203691

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction
Part I. Meanings
Chapter 1. Has Culture Theory Lost Its Minds?
Chapter 2. Missing Persons
Chapter 3. The Metropolis, the Globe, and Mental Life
Part II. Politics
Chapter 4. The Hegemony of Discontent
Chapter 5. The Semantics of Dead Bodies
Chapter 6. Wild Power in Post-Military Brazil
Part III. Identities
Chapter 7. Whose Identity?
Chapter 8. The Identity Path of Eduardo Mori
Chapter 9. Do Japanese Brazilians Exist?
Notes
References
Index
Acknowledgments

Citation preview

Anthropology Through a Double Lens

Anthropology Through a Double Lens Public and Personal Worlds in Human Theory

Daniel Touro Linger

PENN

University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia

Copyright© 2005 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9

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Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4011 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Linger, Daniel Touro. Anthropology through a double lens : public and personal worlds in human theory I Daniel Touro Linger. p. em. ISBN 0-8122-3857-5 (cloth: alk. paper) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Anthropology-Philosophy. 2. Anthropology-Methodology. I. Title. GN33 .L56 2005 301'.01-dc22 2004057207

For my father

Contents

Introduction

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Part 1: Meanings

1. Has Culture Theory Lost Its Minds? 29 2. Missing Persons 50 3. The Metropolis, the Globe, and Mental Life Part II: Politics

4. The Hegemony of Discontent 79 5. The Semantics of Dead Bodies 111 6. Wild Power in Post-Military Brazil 126 Part Ill: Identities

7. Whoseidentity? 147 8. The Identity Path of Eduardo Mori 9. Do Japanese Brazilians Exist? 183 Notes

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References Index

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Acknowledgments

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Introduction

The Double Lens On the way to the new millennium, anthropology, still a young field, became prematurely forgetful. Anthropos almost vanished, crowded out by culture, the discipline's celebrated contribution to social science. That contribution has been valuable, but too imperious in its claim on human lives. This book, while reserving an important place for culture, seeks to recover a focus on human beings for an anthropology worthy of its name. The essays collected herein run against the strong culturalist current that has carried anthropology for the past several decades. Culturalism is a type of social or historical determinism. It consigns human beings to the margins of the analysis, as incidental to culture or else, more tendentiously, as culture's effects. Its job is the interpretation of public representations, or symbols-words, images, performances, and narratives-which, it is said or implied, hold human minds in their thrall. Culturalism has a long pedigree in anthropology, especially in the United States, but recently it has, in its discursivist guise and in tandem with parallel shifts in critical and textual theory, achieved a position of neardominance in the discipline. Indeed, many anthropologists now say that they practice "cultural studies," an emerging, heavily discursivist field strongly influenced by literary criticism. 1 To be sure, culturalism opens up unique and fascinating problems. Culturalist perspectives illuminate human affairs from an intriguing angle, suggesting that human groups (tribes, nations, ethnicities, classes, castes, genders, and so on) cut up the world into arbitrary chunks, represented by arrays of symbols. In newer, more radical versions of culturalism, representations constitute, fragment, and reconfigure groups themselves. Culturalism encourages studies of the diverse frameworks of thought and feeling that purportedly ensnare us all. The thousands of

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ethnographies gathered in any university library attest to the fecundity of culturalist theories and their associated research practices. But culturalism bears a high cost. That is why its triumph has not been complete. Many anthropologists, myself included, have now come to view the culturalist wave with reserve. Culturalism seems reductive. It arrogates too much to its own domain, disfiguring and oversimplifying human worlds. One line of criticism has emphasized culturalism's appropriation of economic and political relations, its penchant for converting the materialities of social interaction into constructions of culture or discourse (Shaw 1995: ch. 1). Equally serious is the issue I highlight in this book: culturalism's tendency to turn personal experience and human minds into derivative, spectral phenomena. Some of my colleagues despair that anthropology may already be a lost cause for human (as opposed to cultural) studies. Research on human beings, they contend, is not going away, but will simply move elsewhere (D'Andrade 2000). They are certainly right that the study of human beings will not disappear, and they may be right about its future emigration from anthropology, but I do not believe that we-anthropologists concerned with substantial personal worlds, and skeptical of what Dennis Wrong long ago (1961) called "the oversocialized conception of man"-should lightly surrender a field to which we have contributed so much and which still, given its unusual perspective and its distinctive sensibilities, has so much to offer. I outline a possible route to a cultural anthropology that, building on the insights of disciplinary ancestors and contemporaries, opens vistas for future work encompassing public and personal worlds. The "double lens" of the title refers to a theoretical eye holding both worlds in focus. I offer a view, through the double lens, of anthropology's central concern: human worlds, in all their plenitude, variability, specificity, and complexity.

Beyond the Cultural Relativity Effect The essays presented here draw on my ethnographic fieldwork in Brazil, done mostly in the mid-1980s, and in Japan, a decade later. 2 I worked primarily in two cities: Sao Luis, capital of the northeastern Brazilian state of Maranhao; and Toyota City, an industrial hub of central Honshu. In Sao Luis, I looked at local politics, Carnival, and interpersonal violence. In Toyota City, I examined the identity quandaries of Brazilian migrants of Japanese descent. Although the research topics were disparate, the theoretical focus remained the same: the intersection of public and personal worlds. Strange as it may sound, over this period I gradually learned what I

Introduction

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was talking about. Gregory Bateson once described theoretical advance in dynamic terms, as a dialectic between "loose thinking," or heuristic play, and "strict thinking," the hammering of intuitions and guesses into formal schemes (1972a). My own practice has likewise zig-zagged, crablike, between imagination and tentative formalization. I have come to understand better, and learned to formulate more precisely, my own concerns, presuppositions, and models. Such learning is not unusual among anthropologists, or among people in general. We speak or write, only later discovering what it is we have been trying to say. Then comes a moment when it makes sense to state it more coherently. I am writing this book at that moment of provisional lucidity. Much of my work, I now see, has been spurred by a maddening ethnographic riddle: how to account for the vexing gap between abstractions of culture and specificities of persons and events. Initially, the problem appeared to me as the Cultural Relativity Effect. The first sentences of the first page of the preface of my first book read: Doing anthropological fieldwork, I, like many others, sometimes experienced a frustrating relativity effect: the closer I moved toward a phenomenon, the faster it seemed to recede from my grasp. Every step forward revealed new complexities. The problem seems especially to bedevil the study of culture, something that when seen from a distance can appear monolithic and systematic but when viewed up close, in the ideas and feelings of individuals, seems to fragment into bewildering shards. (Linger 1992: vii)

Bewildering shards: a metaphor for the brute materiality and astonishing irregularity of people's lives, so disconcertingly detached from the neat construct "culture" that pretends to speak for them. How does one reconcile such apparently antagonistic perceptions? Obviously I am not the first writer to contemplate such questions. Repeatedly I have turned for inspiration to Edward Sapir. Early on, Sapir questioned Theodore Kroeber's notion of culture as an evolving "superorganic" entity, divorced from human bodies and minds (Sapir 1917). Over a period of several decades he continued to warn against mistaking "fantasied universes of self-contained meaning" (1949a: 581)-that is, social-scientific abstractions-for the concrete, biographically contingent immediacies of human lives. 3 Serious distortions arise when culture, viewed as a disembodied entity, is mistaken for human experience. Unfortunately, much culture theory in the intervening years does, in spades, exactly what Sapir warned against. A big problem is the now-customary definition of culture as a system of symbols. For if, as conventionally characterized, symbols-public representations such as images, words, and rituals-are tangible forms that carry meaning, woven into a dense conceptual net, then they are in a weird sense mindlike. 4 In

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employing the usual metaphors-symbols as "vehicles for" meanings, culture as a sticky "web"-cultural anthropologists, in the spirit ofDurkheim, tend to fetishize representations. The reductio ad absurdum of this position is the idea that texts (or text-analogues) constitute an ideational cage, a cultural Supermind occupied by mindless people. Backing off from such a bizarre claim, we might more modestly propose that symbols evoke meanings in people, who draw upon their past learning and their own mental faculties in making sense of them. This premise also involves a strategic reification, as I note below, but it is a far cry from the notion that symbols constitute a weblike worldview inhabited by zombielike human beings. The Cultural Relativity Effect appears when the notion of culture as a Supermind clashes with the empirical fact (apparent to anyone who takes a close look) that the minds supposedly dwelling within it show incredible variation, activity, and eccentricity. The effect vanishes if, as Sapir suggests, we jettison the idea of a Supermind and move culture back into human lives. This move, I argue, replaces a pseudo-problem with a set of generative questions. But I am jumping ahead. Before I get to the specifics of my proposed alternative, some general observations about anthropological theory are in order.

Geometries Versus Models Constructing human theory resembles a mathematical exercise. Mathematicians build imaginary edifices (sets of interrelated theorems) by applying rules of inference to an inventory of axioms, which are arbitrary specifications of elementary objects and relations. Thus in mathematics, certain definitions of points and lines and their properties yield the elegant plane geometry taught in high schools; a single alteration, denial of the parallel postulate, opens the way to non-Euclidean geometries, inventions in which triangles have less or more than 180 degrees and extraordinary universes emerge. J::inos Bolyai, a pioneer of the new geometries, wrote his father in 1823: "I have discovered things so wonderful that I was astounded ... out of nothing I have created a strange new world" (O'Connor and Robertson 1996). Similarly, assumptions about the nature of people and groups form the base upon which one can erect elaborate, ingenious, and diverse theories of the human cosmos. And in human as in mathematical theory, a shift in the foundation can have radical effects on the superstructure. But human theories also differ from the strange and wondrous worlds of contemporary mathematics. The new geometries created by Bolyai and others are formal systems for which internal consistency, not conformity with the world, is fundamental (Black 1959: 156-59). Such

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geometries are jewels of the imagination. The Greeks, in contrast, thought of geometry as the study of physical space. For all its ethereal beauty, Euclid's geometry was a model of something else. In an important respect human theory more closely resembles ancient geometry than contemporary mathematics. Human theories are models. Models are guides and blueprints: they orient thought and action in the world. Their adequacy depends not just on coherence but also on plausibility and explanatory value. Unlike the pristine fantasies of modern geometers, theories of the human cosmos touch the earth: they abstract, and are accountable to, a reality outside themselves. To be sure, grossly unrealistic or questionable postulates, when employed in a provisional or experimental manner, can yield theories that cast human affairs in an unfamiliar, provocative light. Such theories can provide useful elliptical accounts, and they can be good to think with, even when one knows that they are bizarre or destined eventually to fail. Significant advances in theory, however, require significant refinements in basic postulates: quantum mechanics is unimaginable without a more complex, accurate foundation than the notion of indivisible atoms advanced by Democritus. Human theory is no different. Even theories based on sophisticated, plausible postulates can, and typically (though not always) do, sooner or later collide with the world and demand reformulation. For most of his career Sigmund Freud built his psychodynamic model around the notion that the life instincts (bodily needs, especially sexual impulses) created tensions that the human organism was compelled to discharge (a tendency Freud described as the "pleasure principle"). But after the Great War something new intruded into Freud's model, as he indicates in this passage from his late masterpiece Civilization and Its Discontents: men are not gentle creatures .... [T]hey are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness .... Who, in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion? ... Anyone who calls to mind the atrocities committed during the racial migrations or the invasions of the Huns, or by the people known as the Mongols under Jenghiz Khan and Tamerlane, or at the capture ofJerusalem by the pious Crusaders, or even, indeed, the horrors of the recent World War-anyone who calls these things to mind will have to bow humbly before the truth of this view. (1961 [1930]: 58-59)

Life instincts and the pleasure principle failed to account for the carnage of Verdun. Freud's cumulative "experience oflife and of history" forced him reluctantly to wedge the death instinct, a novel postulate, into the foundations of his psychodynamic theory. My purpose here is

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not to argue for or against a death instinct-though had Freud lived past 1939 he would surely have found no reason to recant. Rather, I cite Freud to suggest that, like him, every practitioner of the human sciences draws on her own compelling experience for judgments about and reformulations of premises.

Closed Theories Premises do not always give way, because some theories, unlike Freud's, are impervious to contrary evidence. They are more like geometries than models. All theories are, in a restricted sense, provisionally insulated from the world, because their foundational assumptions are a priori specifications; I will return to this point a bit later. But in some cases the disconnect is complete, because the assumptions permit the elaboration of a model that can explain all worldly outcomes, and so neither the model nor its assumptions come under critical scrutiny. Such selfconfirming theories form perceptions rather than generating falsifiable predictions. Note that rationality-the systematic inflation of premises into models-is not at issue. A theory can be rational and yet hermetic. For example, consider the witchcraft and oracular beliefs of the Azande, inhabitants of central Africa studied by E. E. Evans-Pritchard in the 1930s. Once one accepts Zande mystical premises, notes EvansPritchard, it is clear not only that the system of beliefs erected upon them is entirely rational, but that no conceivable event in the world could contradict them. He describes the Zande divination practice wherein benge, a poison, is administered to a fowl, whose answer is delivered by its survival or death. A European might argue that the strength and quantity of the poison determine the fowl's fate, but for the Azande benge is not a natural poison at all. It is a mystical substance that has been prepared in accordance with certain taboos and is used only in a prescribed ritual setting. Secondary elaborations of belief explain any apparent error in the oracle's predictions: a taboo was breached, or witchcraft interfered with the action of the benge, or the batch of poison was "stupid," and so on. Hence Azande observe the action of the poison oracle as we observe it, but their observations are always subordinated to their beliefs and are incorporated into their beliefs and made to explain them and justifY them. Let the reader consider any argument that would utterly demolish all Zande claims for the power of the oracle. If it were translated into Zande modes of thought it would serve to support their entire structure of belief. For their mystical notions are eminently coherent, being interrelated by a network of logical ties, and are so ordered that they never too crudely contradict sensory experience but, instead, experience seems to justifY them. (1976 [1937]: 150)

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Evans-Pritchard's account was intended to counter arguments that "primitive people" (unlike Westerners) thought irrationally. In this regard his book was a resounding success: the Azande emerge as eminently sensible thinkers. One might now turn the tables and argue that Western theorists, just as rational as the Azande, are equally adept at inventing evidence-proof belief systems based on unexamined and questionable premises. Roy D'Andrade argues, for example, that much of contemporary cultural anthropology produces such models: What theoretical work there is in [current] cultural anthropology is primarily based on reasoning from assumed first principles-people must be shaped by their symbolic worlds, psychology cannot be relevant to cultural facts, and so on. This makes for ... much debate, principle-begging arguments, little clarity, and no progress. (2000: 226)

D'Andrade is referring to versions of culturalism that do not let the world talk back. If on first principles culture determines our ideas and actions, then our ideas and actions can only be evidence of culture's agency. If representations axiomatically form or condense our thoughts and feelings, then why look any further than representations to infer what those thoughts and feelings are? Anthropologists' proclivity for using the language of psychology to characterize symbols and discourses, treating them as if they were subjective phenomena, promotes such circularity. Hence we are often told, on the basis of an interpretation that makes no reference to any living person, that American films or magazines or television shows embody or transmit aggression or prurience or egoism or what-have-you-as if dispositions and desires resided in or were conveyed by inanimate representations! 5 I do not think anthropology will prosper as a serious intellectual enterprise if it gets into the business of concocting closed belief systems. This practice leads either to camps of true believers or to epithets shouted, but rarely heard, across chasms of incomprehension. Nevertheless, every theory, however open to contrary evidence, requires provisional commitments to foundational assumptions. Assumptions can be more or less crude, more or less plausible, more or less productive of insight and explanation. So let us begin at square one, with an examination and evaluation of the basic elements of standard social scientific theory.

Back to Square One In principle the human cosmos can be modeled in an infinite number of ways. But all ways are not equal. One starts by making some judicious

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elemental distinctions-judicious, not arbitrary, because our aim is to produce not a geometry, but a model. A primordial cut endemic to human theories, and one that I will strongly defend, is the division between two realms we might call public and personaL But the way this cut is made-what objects get assigned to which sphere, how those objects are characterized, and how relations among them are defined-has far-reaching implications for the construction of models in all of the social sciences (sociology, anthropology, political science, psychology, and history). My aim is not to criticize the conceptual division between public and personal, but rather certain versions of it that seem to me injudicious. Here I focus on sociology and anthropology, twin disciplines with deep shared roots. Examination of their origins reveals an asymmetry in the cut: a hypertrophy of the public and, correspondingly, an attenuation of the personal. 6 The skew originates in the work of a common ancestor, Emile Durkheim, who provided axioms that have warranted a family of social science models in which public facts reign supreme. In that Durkheimian family, as distant offspring, I include currently influential anthropological models that feature cultural interpretation and discourse analysis. I argue that their refusal to build personal phenomena into their foundations-a refusal that is the trademark move of culturalism-stunts our understanding of the human cosmos.

"Society" Versus "the Individual" Standard social science-that is, theory in the Durkheimian lineagemakes a distinction between public and personal that ultimately marginalizes or excludes the personal from its contemplation. Stripped to its essentials, the theory goes like this. "Society," social science's rightful object, is counterposed to "the individual," which is assigned to psychology and romantic philosophy. The business of social science is "social facts" (Durkheim 1964 [1895]), aggregate and emergent collective phenomena. Cognitive faculties, psychodynamic defense mechanisms, features of consciousness, biographical particularities, and biological processes are therefore bracketed. They are denied the status of social facts or else they are regarded obliquely, as collective representations or constructions. Biology and psychology are thus disregarded or, in the more extreme versions of such theory, epistemologically nullified. Although they sometimes pay lip service to the importance of studying "the individual," many social scientists consider flesh-and-blood persons to be of minor importance in human affairs, or, again, treat them as either exemplary of or epiphenomenal to the social. At best, then, Durkheimian social science establishes a cordon sanitaire between social and

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psychological disciplines; at worst, it smugly assumes that it is grappling with the stuff that counts, while the psychologists-practitioners of an ersatz discipline?-chase after trivia or the mirage of human nature. In a well-known introduction to sociology, Peter Berger gets to the heart of the Durkheimian view: If we follow the Durkheimian conception, then, society confronts us as an objective facticity. It is there, something that cannot be denied and must be reckoned with. Society is external to ourselves. It surrounds us, encompasses our life on all sides. We are in society, located in specific sectors of the social system. This location predetermines and predefines almost everything we do, from language to etiquette, from the religious beliefs we hold to the probability that we will commit suicide .... Society, as objective and external fact, confronts us especially in the form of coercion. Its institutions pattern our actions and shape our expectations.... If we step out of these assignments, society has at its disposal an almost infinite variety of controlling and coercing agencies .... Finally, we are located in society not only in space but in time. Our society is a historical entity that extends temporally beyond any individual biography.... It was there before we were born and it will be there after we are dead. Our lives are but episodes in its majestic march through history. In sum, society is the walls of our imprisonment in history. (1963: 91-92)

In this theoretical universe, "culture"-that is to say, society's meaningful aspect-is an ideational prison with walls so high that the prisoners (all of us, save perhaps the anthropologists themselves) mistake them for the boundaries of the world. It is true that Clifford Geertz, the towering figure in interpretive anthropology, emphasizes his Weberian (rather than Durkheimian) treatment of culture. Weber emphasized, as does Geertz, the overwhelming importance of meaning-making for human beings. But Weber made substantial space for human agency, for psychological motivation, and for the innovations of historical figures, whereas, despite hesitations and equivocations, Geertz's most famous analyses reject explicit forays into psychology and provide accounts of culture as "objective facticity." Culture becomes a dimension of the social. Expressed in language, encoded in symbols, enacted in rituals, enforced in coercive practices, culture for many, perhaps most, interpretive anthropologists ultimately seems to impress itself upon waxlike individual minds, a scenario thoroughly compatible with Durkheim's vision. Deviants and dissenters aside, individuals are thus under the sway of culture, as they are under the sway of other social facts. Deviation, dissent, and resistance are, of course, second-order social facts, since divergence from social norms and social consensus is a relative concept. The main explanation offered for divergence is one's adherence to the alternative meaning frame of a "specific sector of the social system" (a sub-

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group defined by coordinates such as gender, race, ethnicity, and so on). Nigel Rapport and Joanna Overing argue that such explanations "sanitize" diversity. "It is not the individuals who are diverse," they write, "so much as the working parts of the complex social systems of which they are components and conduits ... Diversity becomes ... a triumph of cultural order (2000a: 194)." The scheme replicates determinism at the level of subgroups, preserving intact the empire of the social. The Urtext that illustrates the pervasiveness of social control is Durkheim's book on the causes of that seemingly most private act, suicide (1951 [1897]). A collectivist society that cultivates notions of sacrifice for the common good encourages altruistic suicide. An individualist society that subjects people to feelings of unbearable personal responsibility and guilt encourages egoistic suicide. And a society in which social norms are confusing or in flux gives rise to anomie suicide. 7 From Suicide it is not that far, in theory or rhetoric, to Michel Foucault's famous first volume of The History of Sexuality (1990 [1976]), in which the intimacies of sex and pleasure decidedly take a back seat to the power-infused, historically changing public discourses that profoundly shape (and even conjure?) them. Here, society's temporal dimension is emphasized: Foucault lays bare, in Berger's words, the "walls of our imprisonment in history." Society thus conceived is, understandably, rarely seen in neutral terms, despite the original scientific pretensions of Durkheimian sociology and the morally relativist pretensions of later theory. Society is prized, a thing to be nourished and cultivated as an antidote to disorientation and egoism, by those who revere community; it is viewed as a menace to be reviled and resisted by those suspicious of power and alert to mystification; and it evokes something like awe in those who see its "majestic march" as a pervasive and irresistible mana-like force. The term catalyzes the most varied, contradictory moral and political discourses. Though the alternative model I forward has ethical implications, I do not wish to make society its ideal, its bete noire, or its God. If society and history are ultimate realities, "the individual" is by contrast a shadow. In classic Durkheimian theory, discrete living personsyou and !-become individuals. The individual is a monad: an anonymous unit among many identical units. It is easier to say what the individual is not than what it is. Internal structure seems lacking in the individual, which is conventionally treated as a fundamental particle, whose own biographical past and internal workings, whatever they might be, are socially irrelevant. 8 Much less does the individual have "individuality," the innate faculty of human consciousness (Rapport and Overing 2000a: 185). 9 Seen through the single lens of Durkheimian theory, then, the

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individual is not unique, not psychologically complex, not the product of a developmental process, and, it would appear, not even conscious. So far as I can tell, no one believes this image to be accurate, least of all as a self-description. But it is nevertheless the generative conceit underwriting a galaxy of prominent, far-reaching social theories.

Post-Durkheimian Anthropology Durkheimian theory has been extraordinarily influential, giving rise to innumerable variants and refinements over the last century. Among them, I have suggested, is interpretive anthropology, which arose in the mid-twentieth century and continues to flourish. More recently, some post-Durkheimian theorists have responded to Durkheim's capitalization of the social not by righting the model's foundations but by tilting them even more strongly toward social determinism, in its discursivist version. Postmodern (or postructuralist) theory, for example, sets itself against the holistic and synchronic tendencies of both traditional sociology and interpretive anthropology by emphasizing the multiplicity, historicity, and power of discursive formations. In the most extreme discursivist approaches, persons are either invisible (because irrelevant) or else epiphenomenal to "history," which, like "society," often enters accounts as a hypostatized supra-human entity. Sometimes, as in Foucault's book on discourses of sexuality, such accounts verge on social monism, swallowing whole the Durkheimian distinction between society and the individual. 10 The epidemic use of the word "discourse" in cultural anthropology is, outside the circles of the linguists, fairly recent, dating mostly from the publication of Foucault's works in English in the seventies and eighties. But there are anthropological antecedents for discursivism's core claim that representational frameworks have subtle and thoroughgoing constitutive effects on human beings themselves. A version of social monism surfaces, for example, in the work of Louis Dumont (1980 [1966]), a distinguished ethnographer oflndia, acknowledged intellectual heir to Durkheim, and poststructuralist avant la lettre. For Dumont, the distinction between "society" and "the individual" is a false dichotomy, because "the individual" is itself a modern Western construct. "Traditional societies [such as India]," he writes, "which know nothing of equality and liberty as values, which know nothing, in short, of the individual, have basically a collective idea of man" (8). 11 That is, "the individual" is a Western discursive effect, not a substantive entity in its own right. Dumont's point echoes through any number of works arguing that contemporary Euro-American society mystifies its control through the paradox of individualism. In declaring people "individuals," Protes-

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tantism, or the Enlightenment, or Western culture, or modernity (take your pick) created a phantom zone of personal autonomy. One might say that modern Western society granted the individual an irresistible illusion of freedom, perhaps even of existence. 12 Some recent writers have pressed the larger argument that persons, selves, emotions, and even experience are historically situated discursive constructions (see, e.g., Scott 1992). The thrust of this literature is to suggest that language in particular creates the realities that count, including psychological realities. For those who accede to such claims, psychologists' attempts to understand the workings of minds merely yield descriptions of historically contingent ephemera, cultural constructions that are here today, gone tomorrow. "Society" exists, with a vengeance, but "the individual" is an illusion. The strong discursivist position strikes me as fundamentally incoherent: the theoretical applecart itself seems destined to capsize. Be this as it may, neither Durkheimians nor post-Durkheimians take "the individual" seriously. Even when using the language of feeling, thinking, and experience, their models begin and end with the social. I find such a stance, which fails to treat persons as tangible, consequential realities, to be constricted, substantially closed, and unconvincing. This whole book is written against it.

Public Worlds, Personal Worlds I have argued for a distinction between personal and public, but against the particular distinctions made in Durkheimian and post-Durkheimian social science. What can we put in their place? Terminology does not ordain thought, and terminological quibbles can be sterile, but it is also true that the prudent use of words can discourage unwanted associations and encourage new ways of seeing. A theoretical partition between domains roughly designated by the linguistic distinctions individual/ social, internal/ external, and private/ public is fully justified. But the unbalanced opposition between "individual" and "society" carries unfortunate Durkheimian baggage. Better would be language suggesting that both internal and external domains are systems, that there is a theoretical parity between them, and that they are importantly linked. I propose the terms public wcrrlds and personal wcrrlds, with the understanding that human worlds cannot be fully understood without reference to both. 13 Public worlds are environments to which people are exposed, into which they are thrust, or which they build together, and from which people learn, over the course of their lives, to assemble everchanging universes of thought and feeling. Public worlds confront peo-

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ple with propositions, choices, dilemmas, imperatives, challenges, and opportunities. They present conditions that compel, permit, or evoke responses. Public worlds have interactional and representational dimensions: they are scenes of interpersonal engagement and scenes of linguistic and imagistic representation. They come in different shapes and sizes. A bar fight is a public world (Linger 1992); so is city politics ("The Hegemony of Discontent") or the global economy ("The Identity Path of Eduardo Mori"). Obviously, such worlds are nested in quite complicated ways ("Wild Power in Post-Military Brazil"). Public worlds, though they are unavoidable and often ensnare people, do not inevitably eclipse them or dictate the course of human affairs. People act within public worlds, but they also operate according to their own lights, sometimes transforming those worlds and even themselves. The phrase "personal worlds" is intended to suggest size, systematicity, variability, and complexity in lives and minds. Personal worlds are, in a manner of speaking, just as big as public worlds, and they are at least as complicated. Clearly, public worlds are incredibly varied, multi-leveled, and intricate, as anthropologists have amply demonstrated; but then, I will argue, so are the worlds of persons. Here is another way to put it. Personal and public worlds are systems, but not closed systems. Key anthropological issues, above all those related to representation and meaning-matters closely associated with the concept of culture-demand attention to both systems, and to the interactions between them. They demand, in other words, inspection through a double lens, which in turn requires new forms of ethnographic description.

Descriptions, Thick and Thin "Culture" can, of course, mean whatever an analyst wants it to mean. Anthropologists have used "culture" in myriad ways-Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952) discovered 164 definitions in the literature, a half century ago!-but these formulations are mostly attempts to give a strict sense to a small number ofloose notions. One such loose notion is "the degree to which people in a particular group experience things the same way." This loose notion can be formally captured by defining culture as the distribution of personal cognition. 14 The definition has the advantage of introducing flexibility, nuance, and precision into cultural analysis. A group does not, as in standard theory, have "a culture." Rather, an analyst can identify many cultures (or cultural clumps) among its members; conversely, each person participates in many cultures. Those many cultures may or may not be aligned with subgroups defined on the basis of standard social coordinates such as class or gen-

14

Introduction

der, or any obvious social coordinates, for that matter. For example, "getting high" and "being born again" are both U.S. American cultural scripts; though many Americans have intimate knowledge of both, many others do not, and many are familiar with neither. Moreover, a distributive definition draws attention to subjective disjunction-at least some meanings will be idiosyncratic, and all meanings, even apparently common ones, viewed at a sufficiently high resolution, will have singular personal dimensions and resonances. A subjectivity is always, ultimately, someone's, a personalized network of meanings contingent on the unique learning accomplished during a unique life trajectory. In other words, one's personal web of meaning is always, necessarily, custom-learned and custom-made, though it is learned in interaction and an analyst will see that some portions, at some levels of resolution, are shared with some others. Culture thus defined dispels the Cultural Relativity Effect. The term becomes an analytic convenience, a shorthand for describing the scatter of ways of thinking and feeling among members of a group. It helps one understand why people act as they do and how interactions and inner worlds unfold. But meaning-making involves more than thinking and feeling. Public representations (the "symbols" of conventional interpretive approaches), which, I am suggesting, should not be treated as culture, impinge upon cognition. I have come to think of public representations as rough, ambiguous, widely circulated messages that evoke varying cognitive responses. Representations thus characterized meet cognitive processes at the interface between public and personal worlds. To be sure, this formulation is a strategic objectification, a partial retreat in the direction of mindlike condensations. But it does not erase human minds from the picture. Consider, for example, an English lexical item such as "love." The word is comprehensible to English speakers in a basic sense, as an emotion ideally associated with affiliation between spouses or sweethearts or parents and children; but a moment's reflection should suffice to suggest that its connotations and feeling-tone are in many (and supremely important) respects highly personalized. It is crucial to emphasize that public representations so conceived are typically thin rather than thick. Their thickening occurs in human subjectivities. Rather than a web or cage, public representations constitute a somewhat haphazard, flexible, open lattice, which people adapt in their own ways and upon which they build the most fantastic and elaborate personal forms. Of course, some people's subjective creations may, and often do, overlap or correspond, owing to similarities in life trajectories and dispositions. But the theoretical artifice that thick meanings reside in the representations themselves strikes me as hazardous and misleading.

Introduction

15

The celebrated literary turn in cultural analysis is thus a wrong turn. 15 The problem with thick description and literary methods is that they provide unduly subtle and elaborate conjectures about meaning. They over-interpret. The practice is justified in literary criticism, where the object may be to produce a thought-provoking critique or an inventive original essay. But in ethnography thick description substitutes an analyst's professional and highly specialized, often brilliant, techniques of meaning extraction for the varied, biographically situated meaningmaking acts of members of a population. Literary readings are accounts not of subjectivities, but of virtual su!1ectivity-which is to say, no one's subjectivity, aside perhaps from that of the interpreter in his or her intellectualizing mode. 16 Clifford Geertz's own work yields impressive descriptions of communicative behavior and insights into possible worlds of meaning. But a portrayal of the range of actual thick, personal subjectivities cannot be rendered through such literary techniques, which depend too much on a single analyst's perspective and imagination. A more subtle and direct account requires empirical research methods such as person-centered ethnography, which seeks to explore the intricacies of personal worlds through specialized interviewing and observational practicesP Such practices typically have a minor role in interpretive anthropology. Person-centered ethnography, the topic of several of the following chapters, draws attention to the linkage between the circulation of public representations and diverse, textured human lives. This more inclusive problem of meaning-making has come to occupy a central place in my work. But finding appropriate analytical language has been difficult, and I have not been consistent in my use of terminology. With the benefit of hindsight, let me therefore set out some terms that should help the reader approach the essays, which were originally conceived at different moments. I find it useful to think about an arena of meaning having public and personal dimensions. The study of meaning calls for the characterization of both, as well as theory that can bridge them. Bridging theory spans public and personal worlds, requiring a double optic. And bridging theory, if it is to deal seriously with the spectacular variations and discontinuities in the world, must recognize that human beings make personalized meanings continually in the living of singular lives, and that they have a universal, and highly consequential, capacity for reflective consciousness. I discuss these broad concepts-the arena of meaning, bridging theory, singular lives, and reflective consciousness-in greater detail in the following section. They do not comprise a strict formal scheme: in a theoretical program so expansive, there are inevitable loose ends and inconsistencies. It is best to think of the concepts as a beginner's kit of

16

Introduction

rough mental tools-heuristics, postulates, and models-for grappling with the inclusive problem of meaning-making.

Mental Tools The Arena of Meaning Meaning is as elusive a concept as we have in the social sciences. It can seem extrinsic to human beings, located in language and images; alternatively, it can seem intrinsic, occurring in bodies and minds. The quasitheoretical, often ill-defined terms anthropologists have employed to talk about meaning-"symbol," "representation," "discourse," "culture," "subjectivity," and so on-are shot through with ambiguities about its location and nature. It is not only undergraduates who wonder exactly what anthropologists mean when they discuss meaning. Any given account usually adopts a general perspective that can be characterized as either "representational" or "experiential." The former, which sees meaning as located primarily in the public realm, typifies culturalist work in interpretive and discursive anthropology. Experiential approaches, which regard meanings as occurring in personal realms of minds and lives, more often characterize studies in psychological and phenomenological anthropology. Whichever direction they lean, most accounts deal to some degree, often fuzzily, with both representation and experience. But there is a less equivocal way to bring representation and experience into theoretical conversation. Along with a number of other anthropologists, I think of meaning as occupying, and being continuously built in, an arena that holds both public representations (language, symbols, images, performances) and personal experience (perceptions, feelings, ideas, memories) .18 Public representations are, as I have indicated, best regarded as proposals, or skeletal formulations, of meaning. Such proposals, disseminated in more or less forceful terms, are accepted, rejected, transformed, tailored, and fleshed out in individual life-worlds, whereupon they may be again concretized and recirculated, often in new representational forms and combinations, back to the public realm. I restrict the term subjectivity to the realm of the personal, as a property of experiencing human beings. Linkage between public and personal spheres has been a recurrent concern of the field known formerly known as "culture and personality" and today more commonly termed "psychological anthropology." Psychological anthropology counts among its practitioners and ancestors many talented and inventive theorists. Some have viewed culture as a convenient fiction, a useful sociological abstraction not to be con-

Introduction

17

founded with the experiential worlds of actual people (Sapir); or as a segment of a great arc of human possibilities (Ruth Benedict); or as a collective resource for the resolution of psychological conflicts (Melford Spiro, Gananath Obeyesekere); or as a bird's-eye distribution of personal subjectivities (Anthony Wallace, Theodore Schwartz); or as a fund of shared schemas, or intersubjective units (Roy D'Andrade, Dorothy Holland, Naomi Quinn, Claudia Strauss). 19 All these authors have grappled with the perplexities of double vision, attempting to move toward a unified theory of meaning. In theoretically separating representation and subjectivity we are led to pose important questions about learning and belief. How do representations get made, and how do they circulate? What makes them efficacious-credible or compelling-to those who encounter them? Why are some ignored, dismissed, or radically reinterpreted? How do new representations arise? Such questions have a dual aspect. On the one hand, they address personal motivation, the ways ideas hook into people's lives. Psychology and biography are relevant to such inquiries. On the other hand, they address public issues of power and politics. Bridging Theory Social anthropologists in the British tradition-especially Victor Turner, Max Gluckman, Fredrik Barth, and F. G. Bailey-have sought to link sequences of events with changes in patterned social relations. 20 At first glance, the project seems far removed from that of psychological anthropology, but abstractly, the two enterprises share a family resemblance. Insofar as both are concerned with the tie between particular cases (events and persons) and macroscopic phenomena (social structure and culture), both demand bridging theory, a leap in analytical perception. Bridging theory connects our singular destinies to public structures and processes. I owe much to the psychological and social anthropologists cited above, who regard the human landscape from different angles but with similar theoretical intent. Like them, I am drawn to bridging theory. But I am drawn to it, increasingly, from a certain perspective. I think singularities-specific persons and their specific actions-interest me more than public contexts or general mechanisms. This focus seems more a matter of inclination than a theoretical imperative. That I cannot convincingly find the big causes of events or the ultimate motivations of the actors is intriguing. It has led me to think that the most credible bridging theory is not determinate theory, leading all the way, in inevitable causal procession, from macro-patterns to persons and events, but accommodating theory that permits the emergence ofvari-

18

Introduction

ability, diversity, and the unprecedented. Perhaps one could say we need more strict thinking about loose theory. For the human world constantly astounds us. "Today will be like yesterday" is usually an excellent forecast-except when an epiphany turns Eduardo Mori's identity upside down ("The Identity Path of Eduardo Mori"). In other words, bridging theory must make room for the unexpected, if it is to accommodatenot necessarily explain-the profusion and uncertainty of the real world.

Singular Lives and Reflective Consciousness Profusion and uncertainty have come to occupy an ever larger place in my thinking. That human lives are singularities-that each is unique, a finite flow of experience in time-is self-evident, but of great significance for studies of meaning. I find it useful to think of that unique flow of experience as the product of continual learning, though "learning" -a bridging process-may be too weak, mechanistic, and passive a term for what I take to be, often, an active meaning-making practice. New events trigger new acts of meaning-making, which always occur with reference to a specific chain of past learning and thus take on eccentric colorations. Individual appropriations of meaning are always, for biographical reasons, utterly distinctive in important respects. 21 But this is not the end of the story, for there are also discontinuities in learning that yield wholly unexpected outcomes going beyond straightforward personalizations of meaning. Here we enter the realm of imagination. Words like "imagination" or "creativity" suggest rare inspiration or vision, but I am referring to a rather commonplace, if often overlooked and undervalued, quality of human thinking. A tentative approach to such discontinuities, formulated most straightforwardly in my book No One Home (2001 b), is to posit, as part of the person-system (or "mind"), an important human faculty of reflective consciousness. Formally, the move parallels Freud's adopting, after the Great War, the postulate of a death instinct, imposed upon him, the reader may recall, by his "experience of life and of history." Reflective consciousness acquired a name only in my recent writings, but the concept has colored my work for a long time. It is the human propensity to turn invisible patches of indefinite experience and common sense, including one's sense of self, into objects of reflection and refashioning. Common sense, a term prominent in Gramsci's work (1971) and also in interpretive anthropology (Geertz 1983), is transparent knowledge-what one knows without knowing that one knows it. Reflective consciousness is the catalyst that sediments common sense, rendering it visible and therefore tractable. I wish to emphasize not merely the existence of this cognitive

Introduction

19

faculty, which seems obvious, but its centrality to human lives and its significance for human theory. Even poststructuralists find it difficult to escape some gesture, however hesitant and ambivalent, toward a version of reflective consciousness. Consider the following excerpt from Joan Scott's provocative, if puzzling, essay on what she sees as the historical construction of "experience": Subjects are constituted discursively, but there are conflicts among discursive systems, contradictions within any of them, multiple meanings possible for the concepts they deploy. And subjects have agency. They are not unified, autonomous individuals exercising free will, but rather subjects whose agency is created through situations and statuses conferred on them .... These conditions [of existence] enable choices, though they are not unlimited. Subjects are constituted discursively, experience is a linguistic event (it doesn't happen outside established meanings), but neither is it confined to a fixed order of meaning. Since discourse is by definition shared, experience is collective as well as individual. (1992: 34)

Scott seems to be arguing with herself. She ties herself in knots trying to find a way to recognize the fact of the subject's distance from discourse while remaining committed to discursive determinism. The subject comes off badly, its reflections diminished to afterthoughts. Of course, I agree with Scott that the public world, including economic and political conditions and a repertoire of claims about the universe and human affairs, is extremely important. And in some settings, "total institutions" such as prisons, asylums, and concentration camps (Goffman 1961), the public world can be overwhelming, rendering personal agency socially inconsequential and suffocating reflection itself. Chaim E., a survivor of the Sobibor death camp, recalls: You didn't have any choices. You just were driven to do whatever you did. So it is not things that you planned that you do; it's just whatever happened, happened. You don't think ... As I say: we were not individuals, we were not human beings, we were just robots where we happened to do things .... It is hard really to tell what a feeling that is .... You think you are right, you know all the answers, and you try to find logic and things like that that doesn't exist at all. It is one purpose there: that is, to kill the people, so that's the purpose there. So all the logic doesn't apply there. It is really hard to explain that, to have this feeling. It is easy to tell, but the feeling is very hard really to bring over to somebody ... what really it means .... You were not thinking for tomorrow because tomorrow's thoughts were bad. Today was already better than tomorrow. (emphasis his) 22

As Lawrence Langer observes, in the "crushing reality" of places like

Sobibor, "the pain, the exhaustion, the cold ... prevented [victims] from fantasizing that they were someone or somewhere else" (1991: 4).

20

Introduction

At Sobibor, the distance between self and (nonlinguistic!) experience, in this case between self and an abject present, shrank to zero. In more than one sense the self "functioned on the brink of extinction" (1991: 183). Sobibor annihilated the reflective selves of the living dead trapped within its ring of towers and barbed wire, but not the capacity for reflection, which is quite evident in Chaim E.'s recollection above, made decades later. But in any case the death camp, as devastating and pathological a social milieu as one could imagine, is a poor metaphor (or metonym) for the social world most people inhabit, in which personal agency and reflection commonly have wide rein. I am arguing that reflective consciousness (and attendant agency) are not discursive constructs, but rather intrinsic endowments of human beings. That is, reflective consciousness is a substantial, albeit variably realized, human faculty whose maximal expression goes far beyond the navigation of discursive fissures or the selection of options from a cultural menu. Reflective consciousness is variably realized because local social conditions (including, but not restricted to, discursive environments) differ. Sobibor is an extreme, a zone of death where even the living "are not human beings." Elsewhere, reflective consciousness has space to assert itself, even if its precipitates sometimes evanesce, failing to harden into agendas for new forms of personal or social action ("The Hegemony of Discontent"). Indeed, people commonly step outside their mundane experience, their common sense, and even themselves ("Missing Persons," "The Identity Path of Eduardo Mori," "Do Japanese Brazilians Exist?"). Each case is different, a product of the encounter of specific people with specific forces and circumstances. The invisibility of common sense and its occasional sedimentation into knowledge are pervasive themes of these essays. Reflective consciousness turns common sense into the consciously known, and potentially, therefore, the consciously questioned and transformed. I think one can identify conditions that favor such sedimentation-a high level of sociocultural complexity, for example (Levy 1973, 1990); or lived injustices of class, race, gender, ethnicity, or caste (Baldwin 1985 [1955], Chodorow 1999, Parish 1996); or the personal ordeals of international migrants (Linger 2001b)-but its accomplishment, which requires a mental leap or discontinuity, can generate dramatic consequences that challenge attempts at determinate human theory. I did not make up "reflective consciousness," though the term is, to the best of my knowledge, my own. I apprehended it in the writings of psychological anthropologists such as Gregory Bateson and Robert Levy, who emphasize discontinuities in learning and perception, and of social anthropologists such as F. G. Bailey, who describes the self-conscious

Introduction

21

strategies of political entrepreneurs. And my own experience oflife and history confers credibility upon it. My personal trajectory, my professional practice, the actions of those I know, and the actions of those I know about all become more comprehensible to me in light of such an assumption. The alternative suggestion that consciousness cannot turn back on its own products, or only trivially so, and that human subjectivity can therefore be treated as a mere mechanical effect of discourse, culture, or environment, strikes me as quite simply unbelievable. It is well known that a deconstructively inclined philosopher can vaporize anyone's foundations. Nevertheless, no constructive theory whatsoever is possible without some such foundations. And reflective consciousness more than meets the plausibility test: indeed, its absence from, or depreciation in, the axioms of Durkheimian and post-Durkheimian theory is what is incredible. Moreover, reflective consciousness enables bridging theory that accommodates subjective diversity, yields provocative analyses, and opens an immense field for further research.

The Essays The perspective outlined above implicitly frames the following chapters. I have organized them into three topical sections: Meanings, Politics, and Identities. In each section, the emphasis is on theory and accompanying ethnography that span the gap between the public and the personal. Part 1: Meanings

Part I pries apart representation and subjectivity. All three essays criticize interpretive approaches that conflate the two. Interpretive analysts typically infer virtual subjectivity from representational evidence such as public symbols and performances, down playing or ignoring personalizations of meaning. I advance an alternative view that meaning-making, a slippery and varied process, occurs at the interface between public and personal systems, and therefore accounts of meaning-making require attention to the ways specific people engage meaningful public forms. "Has Culture Theory Lost Its Minds?" points to a cognitive skew among anthropologists themselves. The essay suggests that a commonsense model of linguistic representation misleads cultural theorists into thinking that words are like conduits or packages-that they carry meaning. This "conduit model," which underwrites interpretive (and discursive) anthropology, has, I argue, strongly biased culture theory in the direction of culturalism. To defamiliarize the conduit model, I contrast it with an imaginary, defective, but nevertheless instructive "inkblot

22

Introduction

model," which posits that, like subjects in a Rorschach test, people invent meanings for ambiguous stimuli. I emphasize that the actual production of meanings, captured in neither model, is best viewed as a double process: the circulation of meaningful public symbols coupled with discrete acts of personal meaning-making by those who encounter and respond to them. The next two chapters elaborate the argument. They insist that virtual subjectivity, the product of symbolic interpretation, is no one's subjectivity. The point is made first in "Missing Persons," which advocates caution in applying interpretive methods to historical evidence. I draw on person-centered ethnographic research I conducted in Japan to show that the contemporary identities of specific Japanese Brazilians cannot be deduced from well-known public narratives of Brazilian nationhood and Japanese ethnicity. Such public narratives propose, but do not determine, identity sentiments. Because historians dealing with the distant past have access only to public records and other symbolic detritus, virtual subjectivity, a crude, unreliable proxy, has to stand in-but should not be mistaken-for the mentalities of the dead. "The Metropolis, the Globe, and Mental Life" takes aim at virtual subjectivities adduced by Simmel (1950 [1903]) and Jameson (1984) for, respectively, urban dwellers and postmodern global villagers. These influential speculations, brilliant and provocative though they are, both falter in too readily inferring historically novel mentalities from generic aspects of the city and the globe. Life is not primarily lived "in the city" or "on the planet," but rather in concrete daily interactions that demand close observation and may yield experiential outcomes that bear little resemblance to conjectures made at a distance, on the basis of gross public phenomena. Part II: Politics

If, as I argue in Part I, collective discourse is not cognitive destiny, then what makes some representations more compelling than others? Why do some symbols tend to galvanize people, and others leave them cold? What inner trails does subjectivity follow in response to discursive incitement? What, in Melford Spiro's memorable formulation (1987a), makes representations cognitively salient? These are the central theoretical issues addressed in Part II. An inviting place to look for answers is in the domain of politics, where leaders constantly seek to define situations in their favor and to elicit commitment from their followers (Bailey 2001). Sometimes leaders succeed, and sometimes they fail. Why? For the revisionist marxist Antonio Gramsci, history gave no assurance that the workers would pre-

Introduction

23

vail. Capitalism had its contradictions, but those contradictions would not mechanically destroy the system that bred them. Ideas stood in the way, ideas that would not be swept aside in the impersonal rush of economic history. Common sense-invisible, customary understandings about the world and human beings-was the prime obstacle to political change. In Gramsci's Italy, an unreflective hierarchical worldview, profoundly shaped by Catholic religious belief, sustained more explicit political doctrines and arrangements that guaranteed the power of signori and the bourgeois state. Making that transparent foundation visible, and therefore vulnerable to transformative criticism, was, for Gramsci, the first task of revolutionary intellectuals. In other words, a new political order could only be founded on a new common sense, which could only be built after the old was revealed and then demolished.23 Inspired by Gramsci's provocative speculations, all three essays in Part II look at the political implications of common sense and reflective consciousness. The descriptions of local common sense that underpin the analyses draw on person-centered research I conducted in Sao Luis during 1984-86 and 1991.24 Through ethnographic case studies the chapters in Part II explore the articulation of political rhetoric and action with widely disseminated, largely nonconscious ideas and feelings. "The Hegemony of Discontent" assesses the role of sao-luisense common sense in a Brazilian political rivalry, a 1986 riot in Sao Luis precipitated by cynical machinations during and after a local election. I recount how the new mayor, Gardenia Gon(alves, found herself besieged in the city hall, finally escaping from a crowd who broke the building's windows, invaded it, and set it on fire. The analytical challenge is to gain some understanding of a complex, extreme, confusing event, of which no single person had a clear view. Why, I ask, was the mayor attacked with such rage and glee just a week after her resounding election to the office? The partial answer is that her opponents manipulated local feelings about patrons to their political advantage. According to sao-luisense common sense, patrons can be loyal benefactors or treacherous persecutors. Helped by her own miscalculations, Gardenia's political rivals used adroit political rhetoric to turn popular love for the mayor into hatred, amity into enmity, and trust into a sense of betrayal. "The Semantics of Dead Bodies," in contrast, describes a rhetorical boomerang, exploring the political and emotional implications of a 1985 Sao Luis murder trial. Di6genes-nicknamed "Didi, Terror of Anil" (a neighborhood of the city)-is accused, together with the federal narcotics agent Jose, of killing Natinho, a young man, and severely wounding Natinho's girlfriend Adelia. The prosecution paints Didi as a marginal, a vicious street thug; the priest who defends Didi claims that

24

Introduction

his client, neither angel nor killer, was framed by the police in a bid to exonerate Jose. Didi is convicted, an ostensible triumph for justice and public safety. But, I suggest, in highlighting the figures of marginal and policeman, the trial mobilizes ironic background understandings that undermine the state's own objectives. Shadowing the legal arguments are widespread suspicions that murderous police and murderous hoodlums are all made in Brazil, products of a corrupt, oppressive regime that even as it convicts Didi unintentionally reconfirms its own implacable brutality. I speculate that, even granting Didi's guilt, in the end the trial therefore intensifies, rather than reduces, the fears that the conviction, ideally, should assuage. In "Wild Power in Post-Military Brazil" I look at the survival of a commonsense view of power as wild and dangerous, or without limits. I suggest that "wild power," a trademark of the terrorizing practices of Brazil's military dictatorship (1964-1985), persists in the nooks and crannies of post-military Brazil. Once again, the setting is Sao Luis. I examine two types of events: maratonas, or gang rapes, and sequestros, terror-squad abductions. I argue that such forms of quotidian violence serve as residuals of, or (more ominously) reservoirs for, repugnant political practices. The perpetrators of maratonas draw on notions of wild power in enforcing oppressive sexual norms; those who abduct young men in sequestros use wild power to enforce oppressive political conformity. Wild power thus outlived the dictatorship, which testifies to its durability, but I do not mean to suggest that it is a national character trait etched in stone. Indeed, the corrosively critical popular song discussed in the paper's final pages is an incisive local challenge to wild power. Chico Buarque, the song's Brazilian composer, is, like one of Gramsci's organic intellectuals, excavating the common sense that underwrites a wide range of political abuses. Ideas of double-edged patronage ("Hegemony of Discontent") and dangerous power ("Dead Bodies," "Wild Power") are entrenched in Brazil, but not immune to critical formulation and censure. In these chapters, which deal with disheartening, often atrocious events, I hope to second those Brazilians who have before me identified such conceptual snares, impediments to the realization of Brazilians' hopes for greater equality and guarantees of basic rights.

Part Iff: Identities Identities, which are strongly associated with perceptions of self and propositions about relatedness, are premier candidates for examination through the double lens. Claims about identity, forwarded in symbols, stories, and performances, circulate in public worlds, often endorsed or

Introduction

25

created by powerful political actors. Official representations-historical narratives, folkloric displays, state pageantry, citizenship laws-are examples. Yet identity sentiments cannot be reduced to such representations. Once again questions of cognitive salience arise, for identities are differentially appropriated into the selves of those to whom identity representations are addressed. Personal factors intervene between representation and experience. The theoretical essay "Whose Identity?" discusses the significance of identity studies for key debates over culture and presents an overview of current anthropological approaches. I argue that reducing identities to discursive constructions, as is often done in the recent literature, is to accede to a questionable "null model of the person," which treats subjectivity as inscription on a blank slate. Other options-cognitive, psychodynamic, consciousness, or blended models of the person-are available to anthropologists, and all are superior to the null model, yielding more complex analyses that can grapple with experiential aspects of identities. I suggest, in sum, that all cultural accounts, especially accounts of identity, presuppose some model of the person, and that a convincing analysis of identity-one that effectively bridges public and personal worlds-therefore requires a carefully considered, robust model of the sort employed by psychological anthropologists. "The Identity Path of Eduardo Mori" discusses theoretical issues raised by a close study of personal ethnic identity. Drawing on my mid1990s research on Brazilian migrants in Toyota City, the chapter describes the twists and turns of a Japanese Brazilian factory worker's identity sentiments. Eduardo moves from feeling Japanese in Brazil to feeling Brazilian in Japan, though at all points his identifications are idiosyncratic, ambiguous, and ambivalent. I argue that such changing specificities of meaning, and Eduardo's own intervention in his identity path, are easily masked by analyses that invoke sociocultural determinism to deduce virtual subjectivities. The closing chapter, "Do Japanese Brazilians Exist?" is the most radical. Reflecting on the identity sentiments of yet other Japanese Brazilians, I wonder ifl am justified in invoking the ethnic category 'Japanese Brazilian" at all, even when they themselves do so. More generally, I question whether anthropologists have been justified in producing their customary monographs on culturally defined groups. That is, what ideological work do we do by focusing our work on "Japanese," "Brazilians," or "Japanese Brazilians"? Is it not the case that we ethnicize the people so designated, perhaps well beyond what their own experience will bear, and by extension ethnicize the world by implying that group categories and their associated putative cultures are paramount? Here-and, I now realize, elsewhere in the body of work presented here-I am endorsing

26

Introduction

an accelerating move to a new kind of anthropology, one that gives due weight to people's experience and recognizes that public categories and representational approaches often hide both "intracultural" variation and "cross-cultural" convergences. My own ethnographic practice has increasingly sought out such anti-culturalist crevices, which on closer inspection open out into vast new universes of anthropological possibility.

Part I

Meanings

Chapter 1 Has Culture Theory Lost Its Minds?

One Anthropologist's Point of View For most cultural anthropologists, the "native's point of view" remains the paramount object of ethnographic research. Nevertheless, interpretive and psychological anthropologists have come to envision the object differently. Positions on both sides of this blurry divide are varied and complex, but a sketch of ideal types is a useful point of departure. 1 By and large, interpretive, or symbolic, anthropologists tend to look at the human situation from the top down, or outside in. Culture makes people: the native's point of view is overwhelmingly a cultural product, the subjective imprint of a collective symbol system. A revisionist wing of interpretive anthropology, sometimes associated with postmodernism or poststructuralism, asserts that public discourses constitute multiple subjectivities, or subjective fragments, within native society. In contrast, psychological anthropologists are more likely to take a bottom up, or inside out perspective. The focus shifts to personal experience. A native's point of view, the ideational precipitate of a singular life trajectory, is a compound of culture-ideas and feelings shared with others-and idiosyncratic elements. That is, people (not just anthropologists) inhabit subjective worlds that are in some ways similar and in others incredibly diverse. To varying degrees, psychological anthropologists also emphasize that people are conscious agents who continually rework personal meanings and sometimes, through communication with one another, culture itself.2 My sympathy for the psychological side of this idealized debate is strongly rooted in theoretical considerations advanced below. Nevertheless, this chapter is not an unqualified defense of psychological anthropology. An appealing feature of postmodern (or discourse) approaches is their willingness to address volatile political and social questions-a willingness exhibited by our predecessors Boas, Mead, Benedict, and Bateson, but only sporadically evidenced in contemporary psychologi-

30

Chapter 1

cally oriented ethnographies. 3 We psychological anthropologists should not abandon our long-standing, productive concerns with the subtleties of learning, thinking, and motivation; inattention to such matters is a signal weakness of interpretive approaches. But psychological anthropology has much to contribute to ongoing, intense debates among our colleagues about power, identity, cultural politics, and anthropological knowledge. Moreover, in engaging such debates we open new theoretical perspectives for cultural anthropology as a whole. This chapter presents a critique of anthropological knowledge from a cognitive perspective. It identifies a major conceptual predilection, or bias, within cultural anthropology's interpretive and neointerpretive mainstream; defends a cognitive theory of culture sensible to the intricacies of communication; and calls for psychological anthropology to broaden its compass. The argument, in a nutshell, runs as follows. The linguist Michael Reddy (1979) suggests that English speakers share a cognitive model of communication that induces us to imagine, despite the absurdity of such a notion, that symbols are packages of meanings transmitted from senders to receivers. 4 This "conduit" model, I argue, makes the interpretation of symbols (the unpacking of meanings) seem a reasonable anthropological enterprise. But cultural analysis should not be imagined as code-breaking, however seductive such an approach may be and however obvious it may seem. The meanings do not inhere in the symbol; they arise in communicative events. Because interpretive accounts mistakenly invest language or other public symbols with meaning, they provide flat versions of culture that obscure important social and intrapsychic processes. By collapsing communication into a symbol/meaning package such accounts transmute life into text, effacing the agency of the natives, detemporalizing the flow of human interactions, and imbuing culture-disembodied symbols-with too much power. I argue, in short, that the conduit model of communication lends interpretive analyses commonsense credibility, with unfortunate theoretical and ethnographic consequences. I advocate a contrasting viewpoint founded on meaning-systems approaches in cognitive anthropology and cognitive linguistics. 5 Such approaches locate meanings in minds rather than symbols. Because symbols-texts, objects, totems, performances, rituals-do not "have" meanings, their interpretation cannot be the method, or their hidden meaning the object, of anthropological study. Symbols are tokens of communication. They have a truncated, experimental cast: they serve as spurs or invitations to meaning-making. Culture is a set of conceptual and emotional chunks temporarily shared and continually refashioned. In more formal terms, culture consists of intersubjective, mutable patches of feeling-thought closely linked (but not reducible) to public

Has Culture Theory Lost Its Minds?

31

symbolic action. 6 This concept of culture emphasizes motivation, practice, and temporality, recognizing in other persons the consciousness and agency that we anthropologists implicitly claim, through our professional performances and everyday actions, for ourselves. It enables analyses of communication in place of interpretations of symbols. Discourse theorists likewise reject the static, homogeneous notion of meaning often associated with cultural interpretation. But because they lack an interactive view of culture and discourse, studies of discourse, for all their merits, tend to be one-sided, focusing on symbolic production rather than broader communicative processes. In contrast, the communicative approach recommended here permits an account of the interplay between meanings and symbols. Such an approach can, I believe, generate cogent, multifaceted analyses of, for example, the bases and repercussions of political rhetoric, a topic favored by discourse-oriented anthropologists. The chapter has four parts. I first discuss the conduit model of communication and contrast it with an "inkblot" model. I then identity two ways in which an interpretive concept of culture, grounded as it is in the misleading conduit model, tends to distort anthropological theory and practice. In the third section I offer an alternative analytic framework: a cognitive concept of culture integrated into a nonconduit model of communication. I close with a commentary on Richard Handler's study of nationalist discourse in Quebec (1988), an exemplary postmodern ethnography. I suggest how a cognitive anthropologist might fruitfully reconceive national identity formation as a complex communicative interaction, thereby recovering the minds lost to current culture theory, and present some thoughts on possible convergences between discursive and cognitive approaches. A caveat before I begin. Writing on this topic-deep-seated misunderstandings about the nature of communication-is doubly hazardous. First, the argument implicitly turns back on itself; it is, after all, a symbolic objectification in a communicative process. I can only assure the reader that I am not attempting an excessively clever, unstated hall-ofmirrors exercise; there are enough other things to worry about here. Moreover, the available language for making the argument seems compromised; it too readily evokes the common sense I try to question. Hence I am acutely aware that I often stray into the very traps I diagnose. Nevertheless, neither the argument's unsettling self-reference nor its reliance on compromised language is, I think, necessarily fatal. I hope the contradictions and lapses do not undercut my overriding aim: to evoke a model of communication, still to be fully detailed, that can serve as a more productive point of departure for culture theory than the conduit model. The discussion exemplifies Gregory Bateson's "loose think-

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ing" -"the building up of a structure on unsure foundations," to await "the correction to stricter thinking and the substitution of a new underpinning beneath the already constructed mass" (1972a: 86).

Conduits Versus Inkblots Michael Reddy's "The Conduit Metaphor" (1979), a classic of cognitive linguistics neglected by anthropologists, argues that English language descriptions of communication mistakenly portray words as conduits-as little packets of meaning shooting from speaker to hearer. Reddy begins with three typical comments on failed communication: ( 1) Try to get your thoughts across better. (2) None of Mary's feelings came through to me with any clarity. (3) You still haven't given me any idea of what you mean. (1979: 286)

He points out that each exemplifies what he calls the conduit metaphor. Mter all, we do not literally "get thoughts across" when we talk, do we? This sounds like mental telepathy or clairvoyance, and suggests that communication transfers thought processes somehow bodily. Actually, no one receives anyone else's thoughts directly in their minds when they are using language. Mary's feelings, in example (2), can be perceived only by Mary; they do not really "come through to us" when she talks. Nor can anyone literally "give you an idea"since these are locked within the skull and life process of each of us. Surely, then, none of these three expressions is to be taken at face value. Language seems rather to help one person to construct out of his own stock of mental stuff something like a replica, or copy, of someone else's thoughts-a replica which can be more or less accurate, depending on many factors. If we could indeed send thoughts to one another, we would have little need for a communication system. (Reddy 1979: 286-87; emphasis in original)

In the appendix to his article, Reddy lists 141 examples of conduit metaphor expressions. He argues, in sum, that our metalanguage-the language we customarily use to talk about language-encourages us to make the absurd assumption that "human communication achieves the physical transfer of thoughts and feelings" (1979: 287). Reddy proposes an alternative model of communication, which he calls the "toolmakers paradigm" and illustrates with a parable. Each of Reddy's toolmakers lives in a sealed off compartment of a compound shaped like a wagon wheel (see Figure 1). The compartments are landscaped differently, though all have water, trees, plants, and rocks. The toolmakers can exchange crude diagrams through a device located in the hub of the wheel, but they cannot visit one another, nor can they exchange anything they make. Now suppose a toolmaker invents a use-

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Figure 1. The toolmakers' compound. Adapted from Michael]. Reddy. "The Conduit Metaphor-A Case of Frame Conflict in Our Language About Language," in Metaphor and Thought, ed. Andrew Ortony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 293.

ful implement. The problem Reddy poses is how can this toolmaker communicate the invention to another? Suppose that person A ... has learned to build a rake and finds he can use it to clear dead leaves and other debris without damaging the living plants. One day person A goes to the hub and draws as best he can three identical sets of instructions for fashioning the rake and drops these sets in the slots for persons B, C, and D .... Person A's environment has a lot of wood in it, which is probably why he has leaves to rake in the first place. Sector B, on the other hand, runs more to rock, and person B uses a lot of rock in his constructions. He finds a piece of wood for the handle, but begins to make the head of the rake out of stone .... When B is about halfway finished with the stone rake head, he connects it experimentally to the handle and realizes with a jolt that this thing, whatever it is, is certainly going to be heavy and unwieldy. He ponders its possible uses for a time, and then decides that it must be a tool for digging up small rocks when you clear a field for planting. He marvels at how large and strong a person A must be, and also at what small rocks A has to deal with. B then decides that two large prongs will make the rake both lighter and better suited to unearthing large rocks. (Reddy 1979: 293-94)

B sends instructions to the others for his rock-pick. A makes one-of wood-but finds the thing useless in his rock poor environment. He thinks B has misunderstood him, and sends new detailed instructions

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for the rake head. B cannot figure out what A's implement is good for. A and B continue to exchange messages, but they become increasingly frustrated. Finally, A, driven to distraction, sits down angrily, grinding two stones together in his hand-and has an insight. He sends new instructions, using icons for rock and wood; B now understands; the previous instructions all make sense to both toolmakers. A and B "have raised themselves to a new plateau of inference about each other and each other's environments" (Reddy 1979: 295)-they have achieved in tersubjectivi ty. We are all, of course, Reddy's toolmakers; we inhabit disparate, mutually inaccessible subjective universes. We send each other concrete messages in the form of signals (public symbols) ,7 but deciding which to send, and making sense of those received, are complex tasks. Private worlds of thoughts, feelings, and perceptions can be represented only obliquely and must be inferred by others. Our habitual assumption that the exchange of signals equates to the communication of meanings obscures the fact that intersubjectivity is an accomplishment, not a natural consequence of signaling. Reddy's own argument is an unintentionally telling, paradoxical piece of evidence for the position he espouses. His main point-that we easily fall prey to the illusion that symbols convey meanings-is underscored by an ambiguity that verges on a contradiction. If (as Reddy asserts) symbols do not convey meanings, then wherein lies the power of the conduit metaphor? By pinning the blame for our confusion on what he calls "our language about language," does not Reddy fall victim to the very model he renounces? 8 For this metalanguage is not reified thought, a symbol system that smuggles warped ideas into our brains, but an objectification to think with. The problem, as I see it, is not that English speakers are coerced by their language, but rather that conduit metaphors articulate closely with an entrenched way of thinking: evocative symbols and evoked thought seem nicely equilibrated, mutually reinforcing. As Naomi Quinn observes, Metaphorical systems or productive metaphors typically do not structure understandings de novo. Rather, particular metaphors are selected by speakers, and are favored by these speakers, just because they provide satisfactory mappings onto already existing cultural understandings-that is, because elements and relations between elements in the source domain make a good match with elements and relations among them in the cultural model. (1991: 65)

We process such metaphors more or less automatically: they make immediate sense, because their linguistic components link up readily with existing cultural models, that is, complex, broadly shared meaning systems (D'Andrade 1984; Holland and Quinn 1987).

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Such "automatic" concordance between language and thought, while common, is hardly inevitable. 9 And restructuring thought through language is often difficult. For example, the toolmakers paradigm, an alternative symbolic rendition of communicative events, evokes a way of thinking that vanishes before we can grasp it securely. Focusing now on ideas rather than language, Reddy writes, "I do not claim that we cannot think momentarily in terms of [a nonconduit] model of the communication process. I argue, rather, that that thinking will remain brief, isolated, and fragmentary in the face of an entrenched system of opposing attitudes and assumptions" (1979: 297-98). Reddy's own seeming inconsistencies (and the many which, I am sure, the reader will find in this chapter) suggest the difficulties of both toolmaker thinking and its objectification in symbols that can sustain the new understanding. 10 That is, the interaction between mind and symbol is highly unstable: both understandings and symbols tend to revert to the conduit pattern. The toolmakers paradigm is, unfortunately, a cumbersome symbolic construction. To facilitate nonconduit thinking about communication, let me offer an alternative, more concise trope: the inkblot. Projective tests like the Rorschach, in which people are asked to comment on blotches of ink, evoke meanings on the basis of highly ambiguous stimuli. Because inkblots cannot easily be thought of as conduits, viewing ordinary symbols as if they were inkblots draws our attention to the interface between physical forms assumed to be meaningful (symbols) and the activity of meaning-making by persons. It may be objected, however, that the synecdoche {inkblot = symbol} is inappropriate: an inkblot, which does not stand for anything in particular and is indeed so designed, seems quite a deviant symbol. What does an inkblot have in common with, say, the dot-dash of Morse code, a symbol that has a precise referent-a "real" symbol? Although any figure of speech must be used cautiously, I think the inkblot trope jars us out of a deceptive mode of thought. We regard code units-dot-dash, for example-as better symbols than inkblots because conduit thinking easily accommodates an image of communication as the transmission of code units between cryptographs. But this is a travesty of most real-life communication, where symbols are subject to diverse construals (not one) by biographical persons (not machines). The inkblot trope is a provocation that forwards a narrow but crucial claim about all symbols: neither an inkblot nor dot-dash "has" meaning. It is true that those who know Morse code will make a meaning from dotdash more automatically than they will from an inkblot. 11 But such automaticity is the result of prior learning by discrete persons, not a property of the symbols. The inkblot trope underscores the point that meanings arise in interactions between symbols and human minds, whether those

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symbols be inkblots, dots and dashes, or ordinary symbols that elicit a combination of conventional and idiosyncratic understandings. 12 To summarize: metaphors are not concepts, words are not thoughts, symbols are not culture. I think Reddy's chief target is not deceptive language but rather a "misleading and dehumanizing" (1979: 308) commonsense cultural model, conduit thinking, which receives powerful reinforcement not only from conduit language, but also from unconscious perceptions. Because we typically experience words and other symbols as suffused with meaning, we sometimes imagine that our ideas and feelings have come, special delivery, from without. Our automatic processing of much everyday symbolic material provides experiential sustenance for conduit thinking: the world seems to speak for itself. Hence the receiver's meaning-making, essential to any communicative event, gets little attention in our practices of communicating and understanding and, I shall argue, in our theories of culture, which are thereby distorted in two major respects.

Distortions The First Distortion: Displacing the Natives For cognitive linguists such as Reddy, symbols are public, concrete objectifications. Meanings, on the other hand, are networks of knowledge accessed or evoked, but not conveyed, by symbols. Such linguists propose a shift from extensional to intensional theories of meaning (D 'Andrade 1990: 123). Extensional theories look for reference-for correspondences between words or other symbols and things in the world. If meaning is reference, the mind can be a black box; an account of meaning need not concern itself with cognition. By contrast, intensional theories focus on the sense that symbols have for natives. Intensional semantics insists that what things mean depends fundamentally on what and how people think, not on direct links between signs and referents or on features oflanguage per se. Because intension mediates between symbol and meaning, communication among toolmakers is a clumsy business; the visiting anthropologist's job is doubly difficult. It has been tempting for us to collect the messages, which are, after all, readily accessible, discover systematic relationships among them, and present an interpretation. Virtuoso readings of symbols and rituals by informed, sensitive observers well steeped in the local culture-for example, Geertz's Balinese cockfight (1973a), Victor Turner's Ndembu milk tree (1967), and David Schneider's American kinship (1968)-have been highly influential in the elaboration of Anglo-American culture theory. Other readers of cultural "texts" use

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more formal schemes, drawn from literary criticism, semiotics, structuralism and so on, as keys to unlock the meanings hidden within public symbols. Whether through cultural savvy or formal cryptography, interpretation aims to reveal deeper and more compelling messages hidden beneath an enigmatic or misleading "textual" surface of physical movements, objects, or words. 13 The social world in which anthropologists immerse themselves is not, however, a set of boxes within boxes with a treasure (or, perhaps, only more boxes 14 ) at the center. It is people doing things. Communication, rightfully a prime focus of anthropological inquiry, is a social and intrapsychic practice. It cannot be boiled down to a key, a set of meanings "conveyed" or "embodied in" symbols. Indeed, conceiving social and intrapsychic life as a disembodied text rather than a temporal flow makes the anthropologist, not the native, the meaning-maker. The communicative exchanges of the natives among themselves recede into the background, frozen through conduit thinking into the symbols from which the anthropologist generates his or her meanings. The anthropologist's performance of code cracking occupies center stage; the dramas of natives' lives, reduced to inert text, become a mere backdrop to the show. All this is not to deny that the anthropologist, like the native, is an agent who makes meanings: ethnographic meaning-making is a prime task of our fieldwork and writing. But it is precisely natives' dramas that we should feature in our ethnographies. We cannot do so without a responsible account of their meanings-an intensional account that is the product not of textual interpretation but of an engaged science. 15 The issue of fidelity cannot be sidestepped. The object of cultural research is not to clarify a text but to infer as best one can the subjective worlds of other people, meaning-makers in their own right living complex, thoughtful, and emotion-filled lives. The project makes some people uneasy. Much recent criticism of anthropology is predicated on the notion that cultural accounts are invasions, acts of imperious (or imperial) disrespect. Ethnography is in this view a genre of authoritarian "fiction" passed off as univocal truth (Clifford 1986, 1988; Tyler 1986; see also Geertz 1988). 16 There is some sting in the accusations. Unquestionably, an anthropologist's account is never transparent, always fashioned; it can be insensitive, disrespectful, or collaborative with imperial power; it can arrogantly lay claim to truth, violating the first principle of science, which is that any proposition is tentative. But why should provisional formulations of another's subjective experience be thought of as intrinsically authoritarian or invasive? 17 One could instead consider such formulations as respectful experiments in human imagination, for respect can equally well be viewed as a mode

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of interpersonal engagement that seeks to discover or cultivate in oneself hitherto unknown, unsuspected empathies or correspondences with others. That such correspondences can never be fully achieved; that they always bear the imprint of one's own confusions, cultural biases, and idiosyncrasies; that power is an element of the relationships that bring them to light (as it is of all relationships); and that our own objectifications (ethnographic texts) elicit myriad, divergent meanings in readers are not arguments for abandoning ethnography. To the contrary, the very difficulty of stretching imagination and sensibility, all too apparent in the self-absorbed, blinkered nature of so many human transactions, is what makes ethnography compelling. The idea that an objectification of someone else's thought is substantially an act of aggression and domination-that words have something like direct physical force-seems strongly tinged with conduit thinking. In this view words are missiles of conceptual imperialism. The tendency to attribute great power to symbols, which are, after all, tokens of communication produced, manipulated, and given meaning by human beings, contributes to a second common distortion in culture theory. The Second Distortion: Reifying (Deifying?) Culture

From at least the time of Durkheim (1964 [1895]) both sociology and anthropology have considered "culture" -collective representations, rituals, symbols, discourses, what have you-a powerful, even coercive, force on human thought and behavior. The conduit model dovetails nicely with top-down theorizing that strongly privileges social facts. It makes such theorizing good to think, lending it commonsense plausibility in the face of significant contrary evidence suggesting that knowledge is learned imperfectly, erratically, and variably by individual human organisms, and that such learning is not just a passive process. Children, for example, enter the world with no cultural knowledge whatsoever; they eventually become, after a long and arduous passage, imperfectly enculturated, quirky adults. 18 The irregular, unpredictable, and discontinuous aspects of cultural "acquisition" and "transmission" seem apparent; any "fax theory" of cultural reproduction is patently inadequate (Strauss 1992: 9-1 0). Adult learning of culture, an exhilarating, painful experience familiar to all ethnographers, offers similar puzzles. Psychological anthropologists have perhaps paid too little attention to how ethnographers learn something of other cultures, but they have been right to draw attention, in studies of socialization, enculturation, and education, to traversal of the boundary between public and private, between symbol and meaning, in an effort to understand how natives come to fashion their points of view.

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Interpretive ethnographies, on the other hand, seek powerful collective structures of meaning, congealed in public symbols, within which persons live out (often beyond the ethnography's field of vision) their unique lives. Culture, a thoroughly social phenomenon, is divorced from, and trumps, psychology. Persons are constrained by culture but culture is in all significant respects independent of psychological or biological factors specific to persons.Consider the approach of our most persuasive, complex, and influential interpretive anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, probably best known for his claim, forcefully presented in essays dating from the 1950s to the present, that symbols, rituals, and performances can be read as texts (e.g., 1973a), with the anthropologist as literary critic (1973f: 9). Even in his earlier, more Parsonian papers such as "Religion as a Cultural System," first published in 1966, Geertz expresses strong reservations about the utility of psychology for ethnographic analysis: Symbols ... are tangible formulations of notions, abstractions from experience fixed in perceptible forms, concrete embodiments of ideas, attitudes, judgments, longings, or beliefs. To undertake the study of cultural activity-activity in which symbolism forms the positive content-is thus not to abandon social analysis for a Platonic cave of shadows, to enter into a mentalistic world of introspective psychology, or, worse, speculative philosophy, and wander there forever in a haze of "Cognitions," "Affections," "Conations," and other elusive entities. Cultural acts, the construction, apprehension, and utilization of symbolic forms, are social events like any other; they are as public as marriage and as observable as agriculture. (Geertz 1973e: 91)

Stated briefly, a symbol is a "vehicle for a conception" (1973e: 91)-a conduit. "Systems of symbols" (90), or "culture patterns" (92), embody those conceptions-their meanings. Such systems, it is claimed, are amenable to analysis, at the "level" of culture; their interrelated meanings can be read without excursions into the marshes of psychology. 19 To objectify Geertz's work as I have above is, of course, somewhat unfair. In perusing The Interpretation of Cultures ( 1973c), I was struck by the fact that I could have selected passages that seem consonant with my own cognitive argument. I second Geertz's characterization of anthropology as an imaginative science, his impulse toward comparative theorizing, and his insistence on the embeddedness of meaning in the flow of social life. Consider also his assertion, in the same early essay cited above, that symbols "have an intrinsic double aspect: they give meaning, that is, objective conceptual form, to social and psychological reality both by shaping themselves to it and by shaping it to themselves" (1973e: 93; emphasis added). This is toolmaker discourse, as is Geertz's vivid claim that "man is an animal suspended in webs of significance that he himself has spun" ( 1973f: 5).

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Yet, as Gananath Obeyesekere remarks, "In reading Geertz I see webs everywhere, but never the spider at work" (1990: 285). Like Obeyesekere, we remember not the dialectical relation between symbols and "psychological reality," but that "culture is public because meaning is" (Geertz 1973f: 12). Geertz's most influential theoretical formulations and empirical analyses are those based in the conduit model, which portray thinking as public, collective, and culturally singular: the insistence on the "social nature ofthought" ( 1973d: 360); the brilliant, particularistic interpretations of the cockfight, the wajang, and the Balinese naming system. I would suggest that our perceptions of Geertz are distorted not through careless reading, though he is a demanding, subtle writer, but because he himself underplays the inkblot motifs in his writing and because we bring conduit understandings of communication to his work. We catch glimpses of alternative schemes, but Geertz registers most strongly with us when his writing articulates with and reconfirms our commonsense understandings. Most interpretive anthropology-pick an ethnography off the shelf-is less sensitive and fastidious than Geertz's. Generally speaking, interpretive studies draw upon and perpetuate the conduit model. When interpretive anthropologists look for meaning, they, like ordinary users of language, look for it in symbols. By assigning meanings to symbols, interpretive anthropology imparts a strongly culturalist bias to human studies. The point is not that a concept of culture is irrelevant to human studies-far from it-but that it must be put in its analytical place.

So Where, and What, Is the Culture? In rejecting the conduit model, I have also rejected the equation of culture with symbol systems. Culture consists of meanings in people, not meanings in tokens. This formulation, however, presents serious conceptual challenges. Theodore Schwartz (1978) recounts how, as he contemplated the incredible diversity in opinions offered by the inhabitants of Manus, he found himself asking "Where is the culture?" 20 He coined the term "idioverse" to designate a person's subjective reality. Idioverse is a useful heuristic concept. The toolmakers live in disparate idioverses; attaining correspondence between portions of idioverses is, according to Reddy, the object of communication-and, I would suggest, the origin of culture. Culture, then, refers to the overlap of idioverses among members of a given group at a given moment-the temporary set of their in tersubjective conceptual networks. As emphasized above, this intersubjective

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array is not just a determinant, but also an unfolding product, of the public trade in symbols. Unlike most culture concepts, which stress conformity and continuity, culture thus defined is partial, multiple, and plastic. Some meanings are noncultural; everyone participates in many discrepant "cultures"; and cultural meanings can and do change. A comparison of Reddy's work with that of a second cognitive linguist, Ronald Langacker, brings some of these points into sharper focus. Langacker's innovative, controversial "cognitive grammar" (1986, 1987, 1991), which unfortunately I can do no more than sketch here, offers a new paradigm for the field of linguistics. Denying that "language is a self-contained system amenable to algorithmic characterization, with sufficient autonomy to be studied in essential isolation from broader cognitive concerns," Langacker insists that "language is neither self-contained nor describable without essential reference to cognitive processing" ( 1986: 1). Indeed, he equates meaning with conceptualization rather than, as is usual, with bundles of essential features or sets of truth conditions (1986: 2-3). Thus lexical items are points of entry into "knowledge [conceptual] systems whose scope is essentially open-ended" (1986: 2). Both the entities comprising this system (concepts) and the relationships among them (perceptual and transformative cognitive processes) are postulated to be real features of the mental world rather than formal semiotic units and operations. That is, words "mean" a conventionalized network of concepts interrelated by various cognitive processes. By implication, the network activated (or accessed) by any lexical item is part of a knowledge system of encyclopedic size. Like Reddy, Langacker distinguishes between symbol and meaning: for him, symbols activate part of an immense knowledge system located in mind. But Langacker emphasizes congruent rather than idiosyncratic zones of idioverses. 21 Langacker's meanings are both cognitive and, because shared, cultural. Such conventionalized meanings-learned, shared meanings that are recognized as shared (Langacker 1987: 62; D'Andrade 1987: 113)-become fixed points of orientation in thought. 22 Hence Langacker takes up where Reddy leaves off-after the toolmakers have managed to agree upon meanings. Such consensus meanings need not be accepted as, or felt to be, paramount, but they are inescapable: herein lies culture's constraining quality. By contrast, Reddy's account of toolmaker incomprehension highlights not the symbol's instantiation of shared conceptual networks but the variability in its construal, the gap of indeterminacy between public symbol and private meaning that reveals culture's limits. A meaning-system view of culture emphasizes that conventionalized meanings are only

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part, often a small part, of the story. The clinical literature, of course, is rife with case studies of persons who attach unusual, elaborate, compelling meanings to banal items. Like inkblots, ordinary symbols routinely evoke powerful and diverse personal meanings that lie well outside cultural understandings. 23 A comparison of Reddy and Langacker also illuminates issues of cultural temporality. Langacker's conventionalized symbols are historically given, whereas Reddy's improvised symbols seem ahistorical. The propagation of language over time is a complex and far from automatic process, but for individual actors at a given moment the words exchanged are recognizable communicative gestures and the meanings evoked by those words are partially intersubjective. The contrived situation of Reddy's toolmakers, who circulate only slightly conventionalized "inkblots," differs radically. Historical time does not exist: the focus is on the present communicative event. Intersubjectivity is minimal. Reddy's premises are intentionally unrealistic; they serve his discussion of the problematics of intersubjectivity, stressing difficulties in real-time communication. But there is room for a synthesis. Our stock of symbols-words, rituals, physical signs-is, from the perspective of living persons, a social inheritance. Some of the meanings people learn to attach to those symbolsthe cultural component of idioverses-are intersubjective. In real time communication, such intersubjective meanings are relatively fixed, that is, reliably elicited as a consequence of common learning. But they are supplemented, at times even overshadowed, by private, biographically salient meanings. Hence, culture-in-the-short-run can seem an immutable, weighty legacy or a drop in a sea of unique and often powerful private meanings. In the medium or long run, intersubjective meanings themselves change, although such changes are hard to identify from available symbolic evidence, a point I explore further in the following chapter. Cultural anthropology does better with microcosmic, short-run analyses because the necessary fieldwork brings us into close contact with living persons: we can explore real-time communication rather than just tokens, the collective representations that those who study macrocosmic and historical events tend to think of as social level conduits of meaning. Foucault's sweeping macroethnographies of historical changes in categories ofWestem thought (e.g., 1977, 1990 [1976]) have inspired a sizable anthropological literature, sometimes called postmodem or poststructuralist, that includes both critiques of the discipline and a growing body of ethnographies. In such studies, the analytic concept "culture," a staple of both interpretive and cognitive studies, is displaced by "discourse." This is more than a stylistic move: the notion of discourse "is meant to refuse the distinction between ideas and practices

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or text and world that the culture concept too readily encourages" (Abu-Lughod 1991: 147). Discourses are not, precisely speaking, conduits, and ethnographies of discourse are notable for their attention to the making of meaning. Nevertheless I will argue that discourse approaches, like the interpretivism they self-consciously reject, rest substantially upon and propagate certain conduit assumptions.

Recovering Lost Minds

Discourse Versus Culture The discourse perspective has undeniable merits. Such studies examine meaning-making as a historical process. Discourse theorists distinguish themselves from interpretive anthropologists by their attention to diversity, temporality, and practice. Moreover, they have taken special heed of political issues, especially the constraining and oppressive social consequences of the historical production of meaning. Such concern, though not absent, has not always been prominent in either interpretive or psychological anthropology. Unfortunately, however, I think that discourse analysts, despite their criticism of the reification of culture in interpretive studies, do not themselves break free of reifying assumptions of the conduit model. A review of ethnographies of discourse is obviously beyond the scope of this chapter, but an exemplary study, Richard Handler's Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Qy,ebec (1988), offers insights into some strengths and weaknesses of the approach. Handler's beautifully written book has the hallmarks of the postmodern new wave of critical ethnography. It features discourse analysis, a discussion of the politics of social scientific knowledge, and a topicconstructions of human relatedness-that has long been, and continues to be, a mainstay of critical anthropology. Years ago, David Schneider's description of American kinship as a symbolic phenomenon (1968) brought into question the utility of "kinship" as a universal category; his subsequent observation that American kinship, religion, and nationality were, from a symbolic anthropologist's standpoint, much the same sort of thing (1969) suggested that all idioms of relatedness might be, in important respects, culturally specific. But if relatedness could be construed differently in different places, it could also be construed differently at different times; that is, ideas of relatedness could change. With the growing interest in cultural politics in recent decades, studies of relatedness have increasingly focused on the political manipulation of ethnic and national identities, as, notably, in the work of Benedict An de-

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rson (1991), Virginia Dominguez (1989), and Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger ( 1983). Like these authors, Handler stresses the invention of tradition in behalf of manufactured solidarity. He begins his unusually clear, concise analysis by rejecting what he identifies as the reigning concept of culture-an unmistakably interpretive concept: I began field work in Quebec in 1977 with the intention of constructing a cultural account of Quebecois nationalist ideology. Following David Schneider (1968) I sought to explicate the symbols and meanings with which Quebecois portray their national identity and allegiance. As research and interpretation progressed I tried to abandon what I increasingly came to see as the reifying implications of Schneider's approach ... while continuing to work at the type of symbolic (or "cultural" or "interpretive") analysis he advocates. In other words, I no longer claim to be able either to present an account of "the" culture or to demonstrate its integration, but will focus instead on cultural objectification in relation to the interpenetration of discourses-that is, on attempts to construct bounded cultural objects, a process that paradoxically demonstrates the absence of such objects. (1988: 14-15; emphasis in original)

Handler gives up his search for an elusive native's point of view in favor of the examination of a discursive field replete with shifting meanings. But taking issue with interpretive anthropology does not in this case mean relinquishing certain conduit-model assumptions that sustain both positions. Discourse approaches rely on what Reddy calls the "minor framework" of the conduit metaphor. The minor framework "overlooks words as containers and allows ideas and feelings to flow, unfettered and completely disembodied, into a kind of ambient space between human heads .... Thoughts and feelings are reified in this external space, so that they exist independently of any need for living human beings to think or feel them" (1979: 291). 24 The minor framework dispenses with the notion that words have insides, focusing instead on the projection of thoughts and feelings into a zone where, to use now Handler's language, the discourses interpenetrate. In short, discourses do not carry meanings from here to there, like conduits; they construct meanings in a contested idea space devoid of human minds. I do not mean to suggest that discourse analysts believe such a preposterous notion: theirs is a highly self-conscious mode of presentation intended to throw certain phenomena into relief. 25 But the scheme's consistency with basic premises of the conduit model works once again to veil the process at the heart of communicative eventsmeaning-making by persons. Discourse theorists are right to have reservations about a symbolic concept of culture, but the replacement of "culture" with "discourse"

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is a step at once too radical and not radical enough. The rejection of a culture concept is too radical because it stems from a false notion that "culture" in anthropology is inevitably a bounded, homogeneous, timeless entity attached to a determinate group and endlessly reproduced in symbolic codifications. Such a depiction of anthropological culture is a caricature. The partial, fluid notion of culture I forward in this chapter is hardly novel within psychological anthropology, and temporal analyses of "unlike frames of interpretation" (1973f: 9) can be found even in canonic thick descriptions, such as Geertz's report of the Moroccan encounter between Cohen, the sheik, and the French soldiers (1973f). The rejection of an interpretive concept of culture is not radical enough because the substituted concept of discourse is rooted in a modified version of the same conduit model that underwrites interpretive analyses. Why reject a meaning-is-in-the-symbol view of "culture" to replace it with a meaning-is-constructed-by-the-symbol view of "discourse"? Better to retain the concept of culture-but a cognitive concept of culture integrated with a nonconduit model of communication. This is the perspective from which I offer the following commentary, necessarily compressed, on Handler's account of Quebecois nationalism.

Puzzles of Quebecois Identity For Handler, the stuff of Quebecois identity is less a symbol/meaning package a la Geertz or Schneider than an ongoing effect of discourse, a contingent rhetorical product. He argues that Quebecois identity is "irreducible," part and parcel of a modernist claim to "individuated existence" (39). That is, the relation between nation and culture is circular: To be Quebecois one must live in Quebec and live as a Quebecois. To live as a Quebecois means participating in Quebecois culture. In discussing this culture people speak vaguely of traditions, typical ways of behaving, and characteristic modes of conceiving the world; yet specific descriptions of these particularities are the business of the historian, ethnologist, or folklorist. Such academic researches would seem to come after the fact: that is, given the ideological centrality of Quebecois culture, it becomes worthwhile to learn about it. But the almost a priori belief in the existence of this culture follows inevitably from the belief that a particular human group, the Quebecois nation, exists. The existence of this group is in turn predicated upon the existence of a particular culture .... What is crucial is that culture symbolizes individuated existence: the assertion of cultural particularity is another way of proclaiming the existence of a unique collectivity. (Handler 1988: 39)

Briefly stated, elite specialists, including anthropologists, assert that nations and cultures are bounded and that nation and culture are con-

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gruent. This expert discourse allies itself with that of Quebecois nationalists, for whom the existence of a distinctively Quebecois culture is entailed by the existence of the collectivity but the content of Quebecois culture is incidental. The specialists are called on to fill the empty vessel of Quebecois identity with the cultural substance that validates the collectivity. The book offers ample evidence, drawn from political speeches, nationalist tracts, and government edicts, of "cultural objectification" by politicians, bureaucrats, and the academic and literary entrepreneurs of the culture industry. The argument is ingenious and provocative, but I think not quite persuasive. That nationalists continually offer redefinitions of "Quebecois culture" seems clear; that such redefinitions are launched into a void seems less so. Handler seems to suggest that Quebecois political rhetoric works its magic-the conjuring of identity substance-before a credulous audience. That is, people want to "proclaim the existence of a unique collectivity," which requires a unique culture and identity. They are, therefore, willing and eager to accept as signs of the unique collectivity whatever cultural and identity substances the culture-making elite judges to be distinctive. But consider the following points. Can it be that cultural models of Quebecois identity-shared identity schemas among people "in Quebec"-are as indefinite as Handler suggests? For one thing, Handler's Quebecois-in-the-street informants do sometimes specifY criteria for membership in the nation, as he himself observes (1988: 32-39). The evidence is exceedingly slim. Unlike the public statements of politicians and ideologues, very few private statements ofnonelite informants are quoted at length, but people mention, for example, being born in Quebec, speaking French, eating typical foods, sharing a history, manifesting a certain joie de vivre. Taken at face value, these characteristics do seem thin reeds upon which to suspend a concrete sense of identity, and not everyone cites the same criteria. But as Mahmood and Armstrong (1992) point out in their excellent article that first drew my attention to Handler's book, conceptual commonality can be present even when, as in Quebec, there is verbal disjunction. Such disjunction can have several sources. Based on their own research in Friesland, Mahmood and Armstrong suggest that, despite apparent dissensus, people in Quebec might indeed share a model of Quebecois identity-a prototypic rather than a criteria! attributes model. Another kind of verbal disagreement surfaces when people express common preoccupations in contradictory ways. That is, they share a quandary rather than a determinate resolution; indeed, the contradictions are often indexes of joint concerns (Linger 1992: ch. 1). 26 Might we reconceive

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identity in terms of a congeries of problems rather than a set of assumed attributes or a prototype? And people's apparently unformed, inarticulate, or inconsistent musings and pronouncements can be points of entry into cultural models, constellations of widely shared ideas. In my own fieldwork on cultural models (Linger 1992: 255-61) I found that a person's seemingly facile initial response often opened up, in the course of patient interviewing, into an elaborate conceptual scheme. A passionate emphasis on local birth as a criterion for group membership, for example, need not be taken as simply an obsession with essence; implicated in such a claim may be not only complicated notions of blood relationship, but also theories of human development, emotional temperament, aesthetic sensibility, and so on. Handler's abbreviated discussion does not resolve the empirical question about possible shared schemas of Quebecois identity; the evidence presented draws mostly on public texts and public events rather than on interview material of the kind preferred by meaning system researchers.2' Leaving such questions aside, suppose we accept Handler's conclusion that people "in Quebec" worry a lot about discovering signs of their distinctiveness ("bounded cultural objects"), caring little about exactly what bounded cultural objects their intellectuals construct. Handler proposes that, in these respects, people "in Quebec" are pretty much like modern people everywhere. The "discourse of modern science and modern common sense," he writes, is one of "individuated units" envisioned as "naturally occurring entities" (Handler 1988: 189). One such individuated unit is the "nation." People "in Quebec," it would seem, are motivated to an assertion of irreducible identity-of nationhood-by virtue of their immersion in a modernity obsessed with identity and difference. Here Handler departs from his usually sure-handed, empirically grounded delineation of local particularities. I would not quarrel with the notion that identity everywhere tends to be socially (and psychologically) problematic, but the hypothesis that an urge to irreducible identity grips the modern world seems difficult to sustain empirically. Notwithstanding nationalist fissuring in Yugoslavia and Big Sur seminars to discover "your inner hero," counterexamples-ethnic proliferation in premodern New Guinea, moribund national movements, and persons indifferent to who they "really" are-come easily to mind. Even "in Quebec," as Handler points out, not everyone is a nationalist. The modern-urge-to-irreducible-identity hypothesis, in short, seems too sweeping. We are left to wonder why a national quest emerges "in Quebec" but not everywhere, and among some people "in Quebec" but not oth-

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ers-questions that cannot be answered, I would suggest, without attention to both sociopolitical factors and cognitive specificities. If one of these specificities is that many people "in Quebec" are unusually obsessed with irreducible identity and unusually indifferent to identity substance, some extremely interesting questions arise. Such a cultural model (for is it not exactly that, a shared ideational complex?) valorizes boundaries of the self but not, or only in a derivative manner, images or features of the self. What could motivate such a remarkable cultural configuration? 28 Why would the assertion of a national boundary, irrespective of its content, become the focus of so much anxiety? What kinds of political discourse engage persons who think and feel this way, and how do they respond? Again, such investigations could hardly proceed without a detailed account of local meaning systems. These are questions about who the natives are-about not the spoken, but the spoken-to of elite political rhetoric. National identity is, surely, as much based in cultural understandings as it is emergent from public discourse. Handler's analysis seems preoccupied with symbolic productions rather than how people make meanings from, and respond to, those symbolic productions. He does an outstanding job of presenting and interpreting discourses, but in the end we see only half of a communicative process. Of course, psychological anthropologists have been inclined to offer the other half-meaning systems ripe for instantiation, lost in interior space. I do not see any impediment in principle, however, to a productive rapprochement between discursive and cognitive approaches, that is, to an integrated vision focused squarely on a culturally, socially, and temporally situated analysis of communication. 29 Such a perspective is foreclosed equally by analyses of public discourses suspended in a cultural vacuum and by analyses of meaning systems suspended in a social vacuum.

The Inescapable Paradox I have argued that because symbols do not "have" meanings and because so-called symbol systems are not autonomous structures, symbolic interpretations should be treated with caution. Conduit thinking confers illusory plausibility on theories that overestimate the power of society and culture to dictate meaning, underestimate individual variability and agency, and portray symbols as highly coercive collective representations. To argue against interpretation as the goal of cultural analysis is not to throw cultural analysis out the window, for culture, an intersubjective phenomenon, is part and parcel of human communication. We need,

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in short, renewed theory-building across the frontier dividing symbols from thoughts and feelings. Our best chance at such theory-building is, I believe, establishment of a dialogue between those who wish to theorize about minds and persons without isolating them from society and history, and those who wish to theorize about macrosocial phenomena without dehumanizing them. 30 The project is certainly daunting. It must inevitably confront anthropology's most enduring and mind-bending paradox: the inescapable fact that, to paraphrase with a twist Geertz's paraphrase of Weber, we are suspended in webs of meaning that we ourselves keep spinning.

Chapter 2

Missing Persons

The Problem of Missing Persons History and anthropology continue to edge closer to each other. Culture, the anthropologist's stock in trade, has become an indispensable component of historians' accounts. For their part, anthropologists increasingly emphasize cultural change. Attuned to cultural relativism, they have readily made the further leap into historical relativism. One might say that both disciplines are trying to free themselves from ethnoand tempocentrism. I endorse this effort, but I have reservations about the widespread tendency to elide considerations of biography, consciousness, and personal agency from analyses of meaning. This erasure-the Problem of Missing Persons-afflicts both history and, less forgivably, my own discipline of anthropology. It is associated, I have argued, with the near-dominance achieved by interpretive and post-interpretive (discursive) approaches to the study of meaning. Those approaches explicitly or, more often, implicitly equate public representations with subjectivities. The interpretation of public representations has become a privileged method of cultural analysis. The appeal of the method, which treats such representations as texts, is evident. For anthropologists, it permits the inference of subjective patterns from concrete, readily observable, highly public material such as cockfights, naming practices, and shadow plays (Geertz 1973c). Moreover, interpretation provides a single method applicable to both past and present. Its utility is, if anything, stronger for historians than for anthropologists. That is, the interpretation of cultures (Geertz 1973c) dovetails nicely with the archaeology of knowledge (Foucault 1976). An archaeology of knowledge promises that from symbolic detritus-surviving documents and artifacts-a historian can read cultural (or discursive) formations, the changing universes of meaning through which the dead have paraded.

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But the dead were once alive. My own fieldwork over the past twenty years has convinced me that public representations are hazardous guides to subjectivities, which I think of as, roughly speaking, cognitive and experiential flows. Another way to say this is: An account of meaning that fails to engage living people cannot reliably infer thoughts, feelings, or motivations. At best an interpretive ethnography or history can sketch a representational environment-but people do radically different things with representations, and their meaning-making is partially hidden from view. To glimpse it we need to employ, where possible, techniques other than textual interpretation. The ethnographic practice known as person-centered ethnography (LeVine 1982; Hollan 1997; Linger 2001b) permits a fieldworker to explore how people go about making sense of the world in to which they were cast. Usually conducted through face-to-face interviews, such research reveals that people affirm, transform, negate, manipulate, and go beyond the public representations that are the objects of conventional symbolic analyses. By highlighting the gap between representational environment and meaning-making, person-centered studies point to the significant indeterminacies inherent in any interpretive ethnography or archaeology of knowledge. This chapter sounds a note of caution about Missing Persons approaches and suggests a partial (though sometimes unavailable) remedy for their limitations. First I outline some recent critiques of standard interpretive methods and describe the person-centered alternative. I next draw on my 1994-96 research in Aichi prefecture, in central japan, to examine how Oscar Ueda, a Japanese Brazilian migrant to the city of Nagoya, refashions his national and ethnic identities in an unfamiliar social milieu. 1 I end the chapter by discussing the implications of Oscar's self-making for anthropological and historical investigations of meaning.

Spiders, not Flies Recall Geertz's depiction of culture as a web of symbols. The metaphor has, as I noted in Chapter 1, suggested to many that people are flies rather than spiders-that they are caught "in culture" (or "in discourse"). The ethnographer's main task is, accordingly, to trace the sticky web of representations in which the flies are trapped. The unfortunate flies themselves are incidental to the cultural account. The method required is "thick description," an analysis of symbolic forms based on detailed, intricate interpretation. Criticism of representational approaches within anthropology has grown to a drumbeat in the past decade or so, though it has antecedents

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stretching back almost to the beginning of the century (Sapir 1917). From various angles, the critics make a similar point-that public symbols, rituals, narratives, discourses, and performances are, in Roy D'Andrade's words, "too elliptical" (1984: 105) to serve as reliable guides to meanings. 2 In other words, people are active spiders, not passive flies. Their subjectivities cannot be treated as mere imprints of public representations on minds (Strauss 1992; Strauss and Quinn 1997). Person-centered ethnography aims to catch the spiders at work--or, shedding the bug metaphors, to treat human beings as active meaningmakers in their own right. Because meaning is always somebody 's, the immediate object of person-centered ethnography is what Theodore Schwartz has called idioverses (1978)--ever-changing individual worlds of meaning. Person-centered approaches thereby recover the missing persons, moving human beings to the center of cultural accounts. In exploring idioverses, I favor flexible interviews over predesigned question-and-answer sessions. Informal, open-ended conversations encourage people to explore their personal networks of thought and feeling. Of course, conversation is no substitute for ESP. Drawing inferences about thoughts and feelings from what people say is a hazardous enterprise, for even "private," face-to-face talk is, in a restricted sense, public. Narrative conventions and interpersonal considerations certainly shape such talk (Bruner 1988; Hollan 1997). Yet the substance of a particular conversation is not reducible to rules, any more than the substance of an utterance is reducible to syntax. Moreover, because person-centered conversations take place in what is for most informants a novel interpersonal context, they offer rare opportunities for people to speak their minds. Most everyday conversations are occasions for sociability, verbal sparring, exchanges of opinions, displays of distinction, joking, and so on. So are, at times, person-centered interviews, but the main objective-the co-exploration of an idioverse by anthropologist and informant-is extraordinary. I try to foster an atmosphere in which my conversational partner can be heard by me, hear herself, and respond to her own words. This is unusual conversational practice, and, when successful, yields unusually rich material. Because rapport is essential, I prefer interviewing those with whom I have already established a comfortable relationship. I seek to put the person at ease, to assure her that her point of view is valued. I encourage her to think things through and to speak with candor. I try to ask questions that are pertinent, responsive to issues she herself raises. My efforts to elicit frankness, to avoid imposing my own perspective, and to listen carefully sometimes fail, but often I gain some insight into another's concerns and ways of thinking. People also appreciate the chance to

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reflect out loud and to be taken seriously. I used to be surprised when informants thanked me for talking with them, but no more. In underscoring the advantages of person-centered ethnography, I do not mean to discard Missing Persons approaches, which are always valuable and sometimes irreplaceable. The representational environment, past or present, here or there, deserves close attention. And where persons are in fact missing one must employ Missing-Persons methods: without a time machine one can hardly interview residents of ancient Athens. My aim here is simply to put Missing-Persons approaches in their place. They invite us to situate ourselves, with our own particular biographical, emotional, and conceptual baggage, among unfamiliar representations, and to make sense of them. The interpretive technique resembles, at worst, a projective test. At best, practiced by a sensitive, informed observer adept at leaps of imagination, it can undoubtedly yield insightful and provocative speculations about the propositions with which others are bombarded. But nothing can substitute for verbal give-and-take with those who inhabit an alien representational environment. 3 Oral explorations oflife histories, thoughts, and sentiments provide checks on interpretive conjecture and shed light on the personal meaning-making and subjective diversity missed by analyses of public symbols. A successful person-centered interview creates a space where the interviewee can verbalize and hammer out her understandings of the world and herself, bringing to life the generative dialectic between public representations and personal experience.

From Japan to Brazil to Japan Before moving to Oscar Ueda's reflections, let me sketch the historical context of his journey from Brazil to Japan. 4 Beginning in 1908, Japanese migrants, recruited and assisted by a Japanese government eager to export its surplus population, traveled to Brazil in large numbers to work on the coffee and cotton plantations of Sao Paulo and other southern states. 5 Most of the migrants (isseis) intended to return to Japan after a short stay, but they rarely did. 6 Instead they scraped together some money and bought farms or started small businesses. Their children (nisseis) and grandchildren (sanseis) spoke Portuguese and, for the most part, adopted Brazilian lifeways, even as they often identified as, and were labeled, japoneses. Members of the later generations also began to marry "Brazilians" at increasingly high rates, raising mestiro (mixedblood) children. 7 Brazil's current nikkei Qapanese-descent) population has grown to one and a half million, the largest in the world.

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But for well over a decade now Brazilian nikkeis have been flooding back into Japan. This so-called return migration was triggered initially by a labor shortage in Japan that coincided with hard times in Brazil. 8 Through the boom years of the 1980s, small and middle-sized Japanese factories found it difficult to recruit unskilled labor. Younger Japanese increasingly shunned menial, relatively low-paying jobs. Accordingly, some firms began to hire illegal workers from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and other less affluent regions of Asia. This practice partially alleviated the labor shortage, but produced (in the view of many Japanese citizens and, especially, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party) a new, acute social problem: the entry of foreigners considered to be alien and unassimilable. 9 In 1990 the Japanese government responded with a law permitting foreign nationals of Japanese descent, supposedly preadapted to Japanese language and customs, to live and work in Japan. The result was a huge influx of Latin Americans, most of them from Brazil, which had a large nikkei population and was at the time suffering a severe economic crisis. Although generally well-educated and prosperous by Brazilian standards, Japanese Brazilians could earn many times their Brazilian incomes by taking jobs in Japanese factories. 10 At first most of the migrants were men, but increasingly women and families, including minor children, also settled in Japan. By the mid-1990s, Brazilian migrants, scattered throughout Japan, numbered about 200,000.ll More resided in Aichi prefecture, my fieldsite, than anywhere else in the country. In Aichi, Brazilians work in a range of occupations, but mostly as unskilled laborers in the auto parts plants that supply the great manufacturers. As we shall see, by and large the Brazilians' sojourn in Japan has met neither their expectations nor those of their Japanese hosts. Most Brazilians speak little Japanese (and read less), do not in the main adhere to Japanese customs, and find the country somewhat inhospitable. In a nutshell, Japan ended up with people who look Japanese but are not, and Japanese Brazilians experienced not a homecoming but a kind of exile. Some Japanese local governments have responded by hiring a few college-educated, bilingual Brazilians, such as Oscar Ueda, as counselors and teachers serving the growing Brazilian population. During my stay in Japan I lived in Toyota City, in a public housing complex that was home to about 1,600 Brazilians. Toyota City, seat of Toyota Motors and many of its suppliers, lies close to the eastern city limit of Nagoya, the capital of Aichi prefecture and one ofJapan's largest cities. I visited those places where Brazilians had a marked presence: ethnic restaurants and bars, company-run apartment buildings, public offices, factories, and schools. I read Portuguese language newspapers published in Japan and collected posters and leaflets aimed at and pro-

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duced by migrants. I surveyed Japanese and Brazilian national representations: laws, narratives, treatises, popular formulations. But my most productive technique was person-centered interviewing, for I was interested primarily in how the migrants reconceived themselves while living in Japan. My interview with Oscar Ueda therefore focused on questions of ethnicity and nationality, eliciting from him wide-ranging reflections on Brazil, Japan, and a host of moral and philosophical issues entangled with his sense of self.

OscarUeda At the time of my conversation with Oscar Ueda, I had known him and his partner, Marcia Komatsu, for over a year. Unlike most nikkeis in Japan, Oscar and Marcia held white-collar jobs. Graduates of the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil's most prestigious university, both worked for the Aichi prefectural government as bilingual advisers to foreign workers. I often visited them at their respective offices to tap their expertise and exchange observations, and I developed a cordial relationship with each of them. Marcia, aged thirty, a sansei, was an all-purpose counselor and mediator. Her job required a thorough knowledge of Japanese employment practices and the country's medical, educational, and legal systems. Oscar, aged thirty-one, specialized in labor issues, dealing with disputes and workers' rights. "Because I love Marcia," Oscar explained, he followed her to Japan in 1993, both settling in Nagoya. Oscar and Marcia invited me in late October 1995 to meet them for a conversation at the Sabbath, a cavernous yellow-and-green "Brazilian restaurant" located in central Nagoya. 12 In the Sabbath, samba booms from loudspeakers and soccer players run and leap on video screens. The house specialty is churrasco, enormous quantities of barbecued meats. For reasons of brevity, I focus here on Oscar's comments, which I have edited into the following narrative. 13 If you ask, what's Brazil, Brazil is ... I'm Brazil. Pele, the soccer player, he's Brazil, the destitute person up there in the northeastern backlands is Brazilian. Japan is a very homogeneous society, and Brazil is a very heterogeneous society. Brazil is something more emotional. Here [in Japan], you live in a more rational way, rational but more mechanical. Brazil doesn't have any logic. It's not one plus one equals two. One plus one might be two, it might be three, it might be one, it might be four. Why? Because everybody thinks differently. I think this way but Marcia thinks that way. But

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no one gets mad on account of that. You just know how to live with differences. Ifyou tell ajoke to aJapanese, he doesn't get it. If it's a Brazilian, he breaks out laughing. The Japanese doesn't understand because he's so used to thinking logically, because one plus one is always two for him.

* * * In Brazil, nikkeis are seen as Japanese. Often even they think they're Japanese, except that when they come to Japan, they discover they're not Japanese. So he has a moment in which he teeters, he doesn't know [who he is]. I think the first [problem here] is a communication barrier. Along with that, discrimination. He's not regarded as a Japanese descendant here, he's more branded as a guy who comes from the Third World, so he's inferior. It's very rare that a Japanese firm will give a Brazilian the chance to get a specialized job. Even if the Brazilian is a thousand times better than a Japanese, he's never going to get that chance. Why, because he came from the Third World. Japanese consider themselves inferior to Europeans and Americans. But a Brazilian will never be superior to a Japanese, in the eyes of Japanese society. And that's how a Brazilian discovers that the barrier doesn't depend just on his competence, he brings the barrier with him in his identity as a Third-Worlder. I like to do massage and acupuncture. But there's a barrier. I went around to a lot of clinics [seeking a job] ... I said the word "Brazilian" and boom!

* * * I speak Japanese fluently. I have an accent, but ifl try, often they don't realize I'm a foreigner. But I make sure they see that I'm a foreigner, that I'm not the same as them, that they can't treat me, make demands on me that they'd make on a Japanese, because I haven't grown up in this society. So I make a point of always saying my name. OSCAR, right, it's not a Japanese name, I'm Oscar. 14 The first job I had here was moving merchandise, big things in the supermarket, heavy manual labor. Even there I suffered discrimination. They push you into the dirtiest work, cleaning out the garbage. And they don't pay any attention to [Brazilians], either. So your [educational] level has little importance, because the first thing that's seen is your nationality.

* * *

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Each person has their own philosophy, what's life for you. For me it's not just a question of material things. Of course, everyone wants to have a base of material comfort. But if you think the most you can achieve is to be able to buy a Mercedes Benz, a better apartment, it'll always be the same life. And for me there's no challenge in this, this isn't living. Living has to have something more, some other interior motivation, some growth. I feel that here in Japan I became much more materialist than I was in Brazil, I've gotten much more into a crisis of loneliness, of... sadness with myself. Sometimes at night 1... I do massage too, Saturday nights I come home alone, after massaging a bunch ofJapanese people. And the sadness is really heavy, because something is missing ... I don't have a life, I'm just repeating things ... What's missing is to be at peace with what's inside you. The material side [of life] is important, but what's missing is the spiritual side. One day I was watching a Japanese television program about people who receive spirits, and others who remove the spirits. The Japanese TV manipulated the program to label those who worked with the spirits charlatans. Here things are very well thought out, but only in the logical aspect. This excess of logic takes away a little of what it is to be human, human beings aren'tjust a matter oflogic. In some ways they're inexplicable. [This is] a repressive society. It's different in Brazil. [There] human relations are not repressive. You can think your own way and you can do things your own way. If you go out into the street in a T shirt nobody thinks about it. Here in Japan, ifl go to work in aT shirt where everyone else works in a suit, they're just going to stand there looking at me. It's a very directed society. Japan still hasn't learned to live with differences. And now that it's starting to live with differences, that's provoking a certain internal crisis. They're afraid of anything different. They've never dealt with differences.

* * * I'm a gaijin ["foreigner" or "outsider," often a derogatory term], and I make no effort to hide it. [The word "gaijin"] doesn't bother me, except there's a pejorative sense. Gaijin in the sense of manual worker, Third-Worlder. There are gaijin and gaijin-san [respectful suffix], who are white Europeans. One is a model to be followed, the other is a model never to be followed. Being among nikkeis, speaking Portuguese, if you sit down next to a Japanese, the Japanese moves away. I don't know if it's fear of nikkeis,

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but it's like you were an alien [using the English word], an ET, an extraterrestrial. [Marcia and I could] naturalize ourselves as Japanese, but... [Marcia (drily): That's not what we want (laughs).] Right. Let's keep on being Third-Worlders from Brazil.

* * * I don't want to just look at Japan with prejudiced eyes, because there are some very good things I've learned here, for example, shiatsu, acupuncture, I've improved my Japanese, I've become a more methodical worker. It's a good thing, sometimes, that aspect of discipline. We can't just mention the negative things, because there's a positive side. Security, it's a safe country. Purchasing power, quality, if you want to buy French champagne, you can buy it as easily as buying chewing gum, anywhere. But life isn'tjust that. For example, we've got enough to buy a car, but we don't. We go around by bicycle, and by public transport. We chose to do so. We went [on vacation] to the Maldives, to do some diving. If you tell a Japanese that, he thinks it's absurd, he's got ten times as much money as we do, but he'll never go there. Sometimes I think Japanese people are very sad. They're mired in unhappiness, they preach unhappiness, that's life. The society has such a beautiful history, a beautiful culture, and today, the slogan of society is, Let's preach unhappiness. You go on a trip, and return with your face in smiles, people should feel happy to be around that good energy, but no way, they put you down because you missed all those long days of [work].

Personalized Nationalities Oscar and Marcia's choice of the Sabbath Restaurant for our meeting was hardly capricious. Suspended between their Brazilian upbringing and their Japanese blood, both have clearly come to identify more strongly with the former. Oscar has traveled a winding road, from 'Japanese" in Brazil, through a moment of uncertainty, to "Brazilian" in Japan. 15 He will someday return to Brazil, where his identity will probably take yet another turn. Hence the first point I would make is that identities are mutable: they can, perhaps typically do, change as people respond to changing circumstances and opportunities. Had Oscar never left Brazil, he would not have followed the identity path (see Chapter 8) that he describes here.

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Moreover, Oscar personalizes the meanings of the identity tags "Japanese" and "Brazilian," which for him have become antithetical. Those personal meanings are linked, but not reducible, to well-known public representations ofJapanese blood relatedness and Brazilian ethnic mixing. For Oscar, the opposition between Japan and Brazil has come to hinge most importantly on a set of loosely related, value-laden contrasts-logic versus irrationality, materialism versus spirituality, reason versus sentiment, uniformity versus diversity, sadness versus happiness. These oppositions seem motivated by his personal experiences of discrimination in Japan and his appreciation of nonrational phenomena and human unpredictability. Oscar describes with some bitterness the discrimination he encountered in the supermarket, in job searches, and in daily life. His appearance and linguistic skills permit him to pass as a Japanese, but only if he hides his Brazilian origins, which stigmatize him as a Third- World foreigner. To gain acceptance, he must keep a secret. Oscar deems this price too high. He deplores what he sees as Japanese First-World arrogance, stereotyping, and insistence on uniformity. He contrasts this purported Japanese prejudice with the tolerance he attributes to Brazil: "I'm Brazil ... Pele, the soccer player, he's Brazil, the destitute person up there in the northeastern backlands is Brazilian." 16 In the end, Oscar chooses to flaunt his secret-he is a gaijin, he is OSCAR. Oscar aligns his personal values and proclivities with Brazil in yet other respects. He is drawn to material simplicity, traditional forms of healing, and ecstatic religious practices. He identifies these interests as consonant with what he sees as Brazil's spiritualism, warmth, and ethnic diversity; conversely, they are antagonistic to Japan's consumerism, coldness, and ethnic homogeneityP And for Oscar, one plus one do not always make two. The indeterminacy, which he sees as essentially Brazilian, underwrites laughter, freedom, enjoyment, differences, worthwhile philosophical pursuits. It validates his own lifestyle and moral choices. Unquestionably, Oscar makes use of ideological public representations in fashioning his personalized identity. 18 Japanese ethnic narratives emphasize blood relatedness: nowhere does Oscar deny his Japanese roots. Brazilian narratives emphasize diversity, spontaneity, and warmth, conspicuous themes in his commentary. 19 Yet Oscar's identity path cannot be reduced to, or inferred from such narratives, for the sense he makes of them, and of himself, depends fundamentally on the twists and turns of his own lifecourse and the personal perspectives he has brought to them. Other Japanese Brazilians in Japan follow other identity paths. For them,Japaneseness and Brazilianness come to have meanings and evalu-

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ations that sometimes approximate, and sometimes diverge from, those described by Oscar. Here I cannot provide extensive evidence for this assertion, but consider the following excerpts from interviews with workers, students, and cultural brokers: I feel japanese. I don't have Brazilian characteristics. Brazilians are just black coffee. I don't like the Brazilian system. I'm more Oriental. Coming to Japan, a certain piece of clothing settled over me. A jacket that I was lacking, it completed me. (Moacir, sansei, a factory worker who hopes to gain japanese citizenship) There are times when it's preferable to be a Japanese descendant, there are times when you don't want to be a japanese descendant anymore. When you feel good, it doesn't matter. (Cesar, nissei, a factory worker) Now that I'm starting to go around with nihonjin Uapanese people], I'm leaving for Brazil, that's going to be a real drag for me ... I don't really feel very good [about the Brazilian part of me]. I'd rather be more nihonjin ... I'm going to miss this place a lot. If it was up to me, I'd never leave Japan. (Catarina, sansei, middle-school student, shortly before her departure fromjapan) I could live in japan for good, but I'd rather live in Brazil, I think Brazil has ... Ah, I'm BRAZILIAN, right. To be Brazilian is to be roguish, to be clever (laughs). [The Japanese] don't have it, that Brazilian thing, they don't have it (laughs). (Elisa, sansei, middle-school student) I might be a nikkei Brazilian. I'll admit I'm that, but I'm not JAPANESE. (Rosa, nissei with dual citizenship, bilingual teacher) Even I don't know how I feel (laughs). I think I'm really more Brazilian, there's nothing to be done about it, I spent most of my life in Brazil. I really admire the respect Uapanese people] have for other people. [But] for those of us accustomed to the freedom of Brazil, I think it's better there. (Eriko, issei [native-born japanese] who grew up in Brazil, translator) My blood is japanese but my life experience, everything I know, everything I like, everything ... It's Brazil. But because I also have my japanese side, the good things about japan I incorporated into myself. So ifl look at the way I live, I have both. There's no way to separate them. (Naomi, nissei with dual citizenship, bilingual teacher)

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Social Science: One plus One Might Be Three Oscar, Marcia, and the other nikkeis I interviewed know about, understand, and more or less accept established public narratives about japanese and Brazilian identity. By blood they are Japanese; by nationality, they are Brazilian; and each of them must negotiate the identity dilemma posed by ethnic blood relatedness vs. membership in a racially mixed, pluralist nation. But each does so in a different way, and the specific outcome-a sense of nationality, and the meanings associated with it-emerges as each grapples with his or her particular circumstances. The subjectivities of those I knew certainly cannot be inferred from public representations. An anthropologist or historian working in the present can explore the slippage between representations and subjectivities through person-centered ethnography, which reinserts missing persons into accounts of meaning. But those who work in the past, without the benefit of living interlocutors, have a more daunting task. It is entirely reasonable to infer a representational environment from symbolic debris-but we should remain aware that that environment is no one's subjectivity. Historical actors built perceptions and motivations with and against that environment; they were not simply its products. The enterprise known as psychohistory, which seeks to bring psychological perspectives to historical studies, rests on this very proposition. Among the most famous works in the genre are the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson's biographies of Luther (1962 [1958]) and Gandhi (1969). Erikson's works exemplify what Robert jay Lifton calls "the great man in history" model of psycho history (1974: 27), focusing on "the great man's monumental struggles at the border of religion and politics, with his simultaneous effort to remake himself and his world" (29). But as Lifton goes on to say, The great man tends to be inaccessible, at least to direct interview, or if accessible not yet great.... This does not mean that the psychohistorian cannot say useful things on the basis of careful observations from a distance. But when he is centuries removed from the individual he wishes to study in depth, problems of historical reconstruction are inevitable. (29)

How much more difficult it is to reconstruct the subjectivities of those lesser humans who, though they likewise struggled to make tolerable lives within the world into which they were born, left no rich records for later scholars to peruse. The implications of my argument are, I am afraid, inconvenient for those seeking a precise science of subjectivity. Meaning-making is a far more complicated business than most social scientists would like to

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think. Its analysis requires not only attention to representations, but attention to persons, which enmeshes us in all sorts of difficulties. Sometimes the people are dead; sometimes they are inaccessible; when available they are contentious, ambivalent, and hard to comprehend. Their points of view diverge, and change. Why does Oscar Ueda make himself as he does? An answer to this question seems well beyond our current grasp. The philosopher Colin McGinn has argued that consciousness presents a qualitatively different challenge to our understanding than most scientific questions (1989, 1999). McGinn notes that years of research have not made a dent in the mind-body problem, nor do we seem even to have a precise idea of the features of consciousness itself. He suggests that the obstacle to understanding lies not in the phenomenon, but in ourselves-that we are, as he puts it, "cognitively closed" to questions of consciousness. That is, McGinn proposes that human beings, who are like other animal species endowed with a highly specialized perceptual and cognitive apparatus, do not have the requisite faculties to productively address such questions. If McGinn's speculation is correct-the matter is far from clear-the implications for theory-making in the human sciences are huge. Be that as it may, we are so far from understanding mind, consciousness, and reflexivity that I think we had best adopt a prudent course: make a prominent space for indeterminacy in our theories of human affairs. 2o Unless one sees explanation as the exclusive goal of social science, this conclusion should not be discouraging. It is as important to demarcate zones of uncertainty as to fashion bold explanatory conjectures. There is much we do not and perhaps cannot know, and I suspect we will never resolve whether human affairs are determinate or not. Given this circumstance, as Oscar suggests, a dose of unpredictability may be a good thing for theories of human beings.

Chapter 3 The Metropolis, the Globe, and Mental Life

Out-of-Body Experience? Big theories in social science often treat subjectivities as social realities, assigning them to a group, a social formation, or an epoch. Well-known examples of concepts designating suprapersonal subjectivities are Durkheim's conscience collective (1964 [1893]), Marx and Engels's versions of "consciousness" and "ideology" (1972 [1845-46]), and Foucault's episteme (1976). Such top-down notions of subjectivity differ significantly in certain respects, but all make a strong claim: that collective or historical macroenvironments embody something like mentalities. Durkheim outlines his position in The Division of Labor in Society ( 1964 [1893]): The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to average citizens of the same society forms a determinate system which has its own life; one may call it collective or common conscience. No doubt, it has not a specific substratum; it is, by definition, diffuse in every reach of society.... It is, in effect, independent of the particular conditions in which individuals are placed; they pass it on and it remains .... It is, thus, an entirely different thing from particular consciences, though it can only be realized through them. It is the psychical type of a society, a type which has its properties, its conditions of existence, its modes of development, just as individual types, though in a different way. (1964 [1893]: 80-81; emphasis in original)

This characterization of human subjectivity is deeply puzzling on many counts. For starters, why should we expect the common conscience to be a diffuse totality and not, in good part, a mess of inconsistencies and contradictions? Why would it just get passed on, without modification or transformation? Don't new ideas constantly appear, and don't they sometimes take hold? Indeed, the holistic, static, and politically heedless aspects of Durk-

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heim's vision have received significant criticism. Marx and Engels anticipated the critique, now a staple of post-Durkheimian analysis, that ideational structures do not reproduce themselves eternally. Marxists have continually emphasized (and many others, notably those who follow Foucault, have more recently seconded them) that such structures are not necessarily monolithic, and that their fates are historically determined. Ideas fragment along lines of social stress, such as class, race, and gender; they compete for political supremacy; and configurations of ideational struggle change constantly. Such points are well taken. Nevertheless, as I have emphasized, a more fundamental Durkheimian assumption remains unquestioned by most social scientists, including (perhaps above all) those in the Marxist and Foucauldian camps. I refer to the premise, visible in the citation, that mind- and body-like stuff is, or should be treated as, located outside minds and bodies. That superorganic premise is the focus of this chapter. I consider influential claims about mentalities associated with urban and postmodern social formations, forwarded respectively by Georg Simmel and Fredric Jameson. My wider purpose in evaluating those claims is to challenge theories of subjectivity that rest on strong versions of culturalism or historicism.

I Am Being Thought-So Do I Exist? The contemporary strong culturalist position on subjectivity was foreshadowed by Durkheim's intellectual heir Louis Dumont. Dumont is an anthropologist whose most important work, which explores the caste system in India, is rooted in structuralist theory. The trademark of structuralism is that it focuses on relations between elements in a presumed whole, extracting from those relations an organizing rational principle. For Dumont, castes are not important as single entities; the key to understanding caste is to see that castes are organized into a system, which is based on the hierarchical complementarity between pure and impure that governs all caste relations. The ideological principle of hierarchical complementarity is, Dumont argues, diametrically opposed to the ideological principle that governs modern Western societies, namely egalitarian individualism. In sum, Dumont posits an extreme, sweeping contrast between Western individualism and Indian holism. His most famous book is provocatively titled Homo Hierarchicus (1980 [1966]), signaling his view that in subjective terms Indians are virtually a separate species from Westerners (Homo aequalis). Defending his taxonomic radicalism, Dumont writes:

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There is indeed a person, an individual and unique experience, but it is in large part made up of the common elements, and there is nothing destructive in recognizing this: tear yourself from the social material and you are left with nothing more than the potentiality for personal organization. (1980 [1966]: 6) In an appended footnote Dumont goes even further: This short discussion by no means claims to exhaust the sociality of man. For example it is well known that "personal organization" is itself not independent of relationships with other persons occupying defined roles.... [As] Arthur Rimbaud complained ... to Izambard (May, 1871): "It is wrong to say: I am thinking. One should say: I am being thought." (1980 [1966]: 344) There is a fascinating progression, marked by a series of increasingly restrictive qualifications and perfunctorily hedged assertions, from the first sentence ofthe cited text, which acknowledges that "there is indeed a person," to Rimbaud's "I am being thought," the position endorsed at the footnote's closure. By the end, it is hard to know what is left of the "individual and unique experience" we started with. "Common elements" seem to occupy most subjective space, and the ways those elements are apprehended and arrayed have, apparently, little to do with personal specificities. For, anticipating some strains of poststructuralist thought, Dumont, via Rimbaud, reduces even "personal organization"-the chief concern of the well-developed discipline we call psychology-to a substantial by-product of social fact. 1 Individual subjectivities are, in other words, at best slight variations on the sociallevel subjective themes that shape and imprint themselves upon them. The claim "I am being thought" has important, and problematic, methodological correlates. Because in this scheme human psychology properly speaking is trivial or epiphenomenal, theories of subjectivity can confidently proceed without taking notice of it. Subjective patterns reside in, and can thus be readily inferred from, macroenvironments, obviating the need for a close engagement with living people. Dumont follows his own counsel. Breathing persons with names and biographies are conspicuously absent from the pages of Homo Hierarchicus. In this chapter, I dispute the notion that subjectivities-which I take to be understandings, feelings, experiences, and selves-exist outside human minds and bodies. I do not think that they are negligible variations on collective themes, or that they can be readily construed from macrosocial formations. Top-down theories are top-heavy. Founded upon untenably thin models of the person, they infer questionable virtual subjectivities from public, or collective, evidence. The virtual subjectivities are then attributed, more or less as an afterthought, to the stickpeople, who themselves need not be closely consulted. I argue instead

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that the discovery of subjectivities demands a more nuanced ethnographic approach based in a more substantive view of human beings. Such research demands close attention to psychological realities, interactional immediacies, and the intricacies of personal worlds.

Epochal Mentalities Top-down theories come in cultural and temporal variants. The culturalism of Dumont, which discovers subjectivities in enduring structural principles, has a counterpart in historicist theory that unearths epochal mentalities. My critique of top-down theories applies to both variants, but in this chapter I want to focus on the latter. 2 I appraise the important work of two sophisticated theorists of historical subjectivities, Georg Simmel and Fredric Jameson. My discussion takes up nested questions. The immediate question is whether the epochs modernity and postmodernity are indeed characterized by radically distinctive subjectivities, or mentalities, as these and other influential thinkers have proposed. A second, more encompassing question is whether we have any good reason to expect that, more generally speaking, history and culture determine subjectivities in a straightforward, consistent manner, obviating the need to attend to human psychology or to actual, biographically distinct human lives. Simmel's and Jameson's influential, mutually resonant accounts of epochal mentalities bracket the twentieth century. In "The Metropolis and Mental Life," a famous essay written in 1903, Simmel examined hypothetical subjective adaptations to fin-de-siecle Euro-American cities. He proposed that the barrage of sensations besieging modern urbanites induced in them a characteristic defensive attitude of emotional detachment. Jameson's likewise renowned "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," which appeared toward the century's end (1984), identified a global mentality even more unhinged, characterized by disorientation, a propensity for pastiche, existence in an eternal now, and bleached affect. Simmel's urban mentality and Jameson's postmodern mentality are wonderful examples of virtual subjectivities, speculative patterns of meaning and mental operations inferred by social analysts from decidedly public evidence. To be sure, in the absence of telepathy, first-person experience is intrinsically closed to observers, and therefore all anthropological accounts of subjectivities are, narrowly speaking, virtual-but this is not to say that all accounts are equally virtual, or that all inferential techniques are equally speculative. Especially questionable are those techniques that rely on blank-slate or unduly simple models of the person, and which often yield too-generalized and over-interpreted read-

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ings of subjectivities derived from gross symbolic or social environments. Although the models of the person underlying Simmel's and jameson's creative analyses are not identical, neither is, I argue, sufficiently robust. Accordingly, the epochal mentalities those authors identify should be regarded as highly conjectural virtual subjectivities. Their validity, or lack of it, can only be established through detailed ethnographic scrutiny that utilizes person-centered techniques and rests upon a more complex notion of what human beings are.

The Metropolis and Mental Life Simmel's essay is probably the most brilliant, subtle conjecture ever presented on adaptations to, as he puts it, "the psychological conditions which the metropolis creates" (1950 [1903]: 410). The backdrop for his paper is a contrasting, rapidly vanishing rural world infused with deeply felt, enduring, particularized emotional relationships that unfold over long periods of time and maintain a steady rhythm. Simmel focuses on the city-dweller's typical defenses against, again to quote from his paper, "the rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance, and the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions" (410). The kaleidoscope of city life can only be dealt with through the intellect: the urbanite "reacts with his head instead of his heart" (410). One could say that this is because, in the city, the head protects the heart. The dominance of the intellect is further, and strongly, reinforced by the money economy that has, in the modern urban world, replaced barter and personalized exchange. Money, in Simmel's unsettling phrase, is a "frightful leveler" that "hollows out the core of things" (410). The market reduces everything to quantities of identical units; it demands rational reckoning; it robs commodities of individuality; it destroys their associations with particular persons and scenes; it standardizes time. It "transform[s] the world into an arithmetic problem" (412). In Simmel's portrait, a novel historical social formation, a modernity whose outstanding features are city and market, enters a period of selfreproduction. His scheme is nonlinear. The constellation of urban life and money economy promotes distinctive subjective tendencies that themselves reproduce, and intensify, city and market. The chief subjective tendencies are matter-of-factness, a blase attitude, and an insensitivity to new sensations. As Simmel puts it, "the meaning and differing values of things, and thereby the things themselves, are experienced as insubstantial. They appear to the blase person in an evenly flat and gray tone" (414). Human beings are likewise distanced and drained of pres-

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ence. People respond to others with reserve, indeed with slight antipathy, a "practical antagonism" (416). One outcome of this general attitude of indifference is a problematic expansion of the sphere of personal freedom. The urbanite is encouraged to cultivate what Simmel calls "tendentious particularities" (421). Such cultivation is only in part the result of liberation from small-town surveillance. It also arises from what Simmel calls the city's imbalance between "objective spirit" and "subjective spirit" ( 421). By this he means that the urban explosion of what we might loosely call cultural forms-the proliferation of diverse technological devices, institutions, symbols, ways of life, and so on-far outpaces any possibility for an equivalent "elaboration of individuality" (423). "Stimulations, interests, uses of time and consciousness are offered to [the personality] on all sides. They carry the person as if in a stream, and one needs hardly to swim for oneself" (422). But this flow "tend[s] to displace the genuine personal colorations and incomparabilities. This results in the individual's summoning the utmost in uniqueness and particularization, in order to preserve his most personal core. He has to exaggerate this personal element," Simmel concludes, "in order to remain audible even to himself" (422). Let me summarize, in simple terms, Simmel's intricately linked main claims. The modern city, inseparable from the money economy, encourages certain psychological adaptations that are entwined with the very operation of that social formation. These adaptations include: pragmatism, a blase attitude, indifference and reserve toward others, a flat and gray emotional tone. The psychological adaptations, in turn, together with the "overgrowth of objective culture" (422), give rise to a desperate compensatory effort to make oneself heard by cultivating idiosyncrasies. Visible in this struggle is the desire of modern individuals to, as Simmel puts it in the first sentence of his essay, "preserve the autonomy and individuality of [their] existence in the face of overwhelming social forces" (410).

The Globe and Mental Life A hundred years later, Simmel's diagnosis of city life has striking resonances in current diagnoses of the postmodern world. The globe has replaced the city, but the globe purportedly does much of what the city purportedly did. Simmel's city-dweller's "blase attitude," the gray tonality of urban experience, the insubstantiality of urban meanings, the proliferation of urban cultural forms and specializations, all have counterparts in familiar accounts of postmodernity. Here I will take up

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one of the best-known of these accounts, Fredric Jameson's essay entitled "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" (1984). Jameson points to a break in world culture and economy occurring around the beginning of the 1960s, a move into the "third stage of capital," a decentered global capitalism whose typical technology is embodied in computers and television, which are machines of reproduction rather than production. The economic shift away from industrial, classbased capitalism toward this speedy global variant has a counterpart in a cultural shift, which Jameson analyzes mostly through a consideration of what others might call high culture (architecture, painting, music, and so on). The new "cultural dominant" is characterized above all by a merger of aesthetic production with commodity production, an "aesthetic populism" (53) quite different, especially in emotional tone, from what came before. The postmodem sensibility has the following features: (1) depthlessness or flatness, a literal superficiality; (2) the "waning of affect" (61), associated with the attenuation of depth models of the person, the corresponding irrelevance of concepts such as anxiety and alienation and the decentering or "fragmentation of the subject"; (3) the liberation from feelings, which are replaced by free-floating, impersonal "intensities" (64); (4) the end of personal style, which is replaced by pastiche, or "blank parody" (65) ; (5) the "waning of historicity," that is, the "colonization of the present by the nostalgia mode" (67), and our incapacity to "fashion ... representations of our own current experience" (68). Past and future alike are thereby reduced to contemporary "heaps of fragments" (71); there is a "breakdown of temporality" (73); time expands into a hallucinatory, often euphoric, present. Toward the end of his paper, eerily echoing Simmel,Jameson observes that we ourselves, the human subjects who happen into this new space, have not kept pace with that [postmodern] evolution; there has been a mutation in the object, unaccompanied as yet by any equivalent mutation in the subject; we do not yet possess the perceptual equipment to match this new hyperspace ... because our perceptual habits were formed in that older kind of space I have called the space of high modernism. The new architecture therefore-like many of the other cultural products I have evoked in the preceding remarks-stands as something like an imperative to grow new organs, to expand our sensorium and our body to some new, as yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately impossible, dimensions. (80)

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Jameson concludes by underlining what he characterizes as his "principal point": This latest mutation in space-postmodern hyperspace-has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world .... This alarming disjunction point between the body and its built environment-which is to the initial bewilderment of the older modernism as the velocities of space craft are to those of the automobile-can itself stand as the symbol and analogue of that even sharper dilemma which is the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects. (83-84)

Modern Man, the Postmodern Heap, and Proteus Simmel's and Jameson's accounts bear a strong family resemblance. In the most general terms, each proposes to link a historical watershed with a profound change in subjectivity. Huge socioeconomic shiftsurbanization and the entrenchment of the money economy, in the first case; the accelerating planetary expansion of capitalism, in the secondwork their way into, or even fashion, minds. Moreover the two accounts share a mood or tone: in each case we are plunged into a disorienting environment and urged to imagine a resultant state of confusion and incomprehension. Finally, the newly minted subjectivities identified by the two authors are in some respects similar. Simmel finds a blase attitude, a gray tonality of urban experience, an insubstantiality of urban meanings, a hitherto unimaginable proliferation of urban cultural forms and specializations, and a gap between this profuse "objective [urban] spirit" and the less expansive "subjective spirit" of those who inhabit the bewildering city. For his part, Jameson identifies emotional flatness, depthlessness, and, again, a "mutation in the object" unaccompanied by a corresponding "mutation in the subject." It is tempting to see Jameson's essay as an updated version of Simmel's, though Simmel is never cited. In some respects this makes sense, as I have indicated-and it is one reason why I have chosen to compare the papers-but there are some fundamental contrasts as well. The starkest is that between the subjects at the heart of the two essays. If both the modern and postmodern subjects experience flattened affect, an attenuation of meaning, and bewilderment, they do so differently. Simmel's modern subject is in an existential quandary. He is anxious; he feels drowned and overwhelmed; he has to devise defenses that permit him to become audible to himself. Not so Jameson's postmodern subject, who embraces the global ecumene with exhilaration. 3 That subject has no depths to explore, no authentic self to externalize. Challenged

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to "grow new organs," he, or she, or a splintered "they," revels in postmodernity's fragmented surfaces. Simmel's epochal subject, then, is Modem Man: an anxious existentialist. Jameson's is a Postmodem Heap of Fragments: a decentered, incoherent pastiche. Both are products of their times. But historicizations of subjectivity such as these make a further implicit claim: that another kind of subjectivity, seen in a larger frame, is malleable. Suppose that Simmel and Jameson are both right. Reading the two accounts together, a meta-subject comes into view. This is not a temporally bounded subject like Modem Man or the Postmodem Heap, but a longterm, trans-epochal entity with the capacity to mutate from Modem Man to Postmodem Heap of Fragments. Call this trans-epochal meta-subject Proteus. Proteus is, paradoxically, anti-essentialist human nature. The most profound subjective effects of the epochal socioeconomic shifts detailed jointly by Simmel and Jameson are therefore changes in the very constitution of the experiencing subject. Simmel's anxious Modem Man is replaced by Jameson's Postmodem Heap of Fragments. Both are ephemeral incarnations of Proteus. Proteus is the anti-essentialist human nature underpinning extreme theories of both historical and cultural relativism-the trans-temporal, trans-cultural meta-subject who, in Louis Dumont's approving phrase, has "nothing more than the potentiality for personal organization."

What About Reality? Thus far I have left to one side the question of the accuracy of these conjectures. There are good reasons to doubt the authors' empirical generalizations about Modem Man and the Postmodem Heap. Simmel's cosmopolitan man of the metropolis certainly exists-we all probably know people like this-but as a general characterization of urban mentalities, his thesis fails. For one thing, its scope must be narrowed. Cities are not all of the same type. Premodern cities, many of which were (and are) decidedly not fluid, kaleidoscopic, or diverse in the manner suggested by Simmel, are well known to historians, archaeologists, and cultural anthropologists (Bascom 1955; Sjoberg 1955; Smith 1960; Fustel de Coulanges 1956 [1864]; Weber 1958 [1921]). Enchanted cities, strongly tied to the supernatural realm, such as Varanasi (Eck 1985) and Bhaktapur (Levy 1990; Parish 1994), have been thoroughly documented in the ethnographic literature; the inhabitants seem rather well oriented in the cosmos, their geography has obvious, and deep, significance, and their affect seems anything but thin. The "metropolis" of Simmel's title must then be taken as the modem industrial, commercial city. But even such cities often lack the "objec-

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tive" and "subjective" features identified by Simmel. Counter-examples are legion; two will suffice. Ethnographers have discovered that people who live in Tokyo, a premier contemporary metropolis and one of the great world cities, commonly inhabit neighborhoods thick with local meaning and dense with personal relations (Dore 1958; Vogel 1963; Bestor 1989). Anomie and emotional indifference are not conspicuous among the Tokyoites studied by those authors. My own work in a sizable Brazilian city likewise revealed neighborhoods with little of the anonymity and confusion of the urban life, and urbanite, discussed by Simmel (Linger 1992). In Sao Luis, a state capital that had a population of about half a million when I worked there in the mid-1980s and early 1990s, there was plenty of conflict and diversity, but little evidence of blandness or indifference. It is true that sao-luisenses are quite capable of assuming a blase veneer in certain situationssay, while walking hurriedly in a crowd, or riding the bus-but even in these situations the veneer vanishes at the sight of a familiar face. And in less anonymous urban settings (the local bar or mom-and-pop store, the social club, the workplace, the school, the neighborhood street, the pra(:a, the festival, and so on) their attitude toward others is anything but cold and remote. Most sao-luisenses do not seem to me in the least confused, disoriented, or overwhelmed. "The Metropolis and Mental Life" is an inspired imaginative exercise in top-down theorizing, and has a certain empirical plausibility. But like the work of other urban theorists who followed in Simmel's footsteps, such as Robert Park (1969 [1916]), the essay substitutes experience-distant inference for experience-near ethnography. It transmutes a social pattern into a mental one. As Anthony Cohen writes, criticizing Park's memorable description of the city as a "mosaic of little worlds" and of the urbanite as a moral chameleon: "The mosaic image is extended beyond the city to the individual: a structure of little selves 'which touch but do not interpenetrate'" (1993: 203). Similarly, one might compare Simmel' s description of the kaleidoscopic aspect of the city with the supposedly bewildered aspect of urban minds. And what about Jameson? Again, I am afraid that the close-up ethnography of transnationalism will reveal the frailty of his conjectures. Certainly, my own recent research (Linger 2001 b) in a quintessentially transnational situation-among Brazilian workers of Japanese descent and their children who have migrated, in most cases temporarily, to Japan-is at odds with the picture he sketches. Here I can only present a few general conclusions. For one thing, the micro-global-the immediate quotidian environments that my informants inhabited-is hardly an incoherent jumble of superficial stimuli. Brazilians in Japan are confronted with inescapable, emotionally demanding situations: how to

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deal with Japanese bosses and work regulations in the factory, how to meet the demands of a Japanese curriculum and Japanese teachers in the schools, how to cope with their own instant illiteracy and secondclass status. Far from responding to these situations with aloofness or euphoria, people struggle mightily, often in states of high anxiety, to devise ways of dealing with material and relational difficulties. Moreover, I think it would be very difficult to see my friends and acquaintances as depthless fragmented persons. They wrestle with the problems of identity dealt them by virtue of their Japanese descent, Brazilian citizenship, and Japanese residence. These problems surface repeatedly in emotionally charged dealings with others. Though they continually reforge their identities, the product is no random pastiche. All are seeking to create an emotionally sustaining, more or less coherent sense of self. They are not, in short, Postmodern Heaps of Fragments. In the end, I would argue that Simmel's and Jameson's accounts fail the empirical test because they suffer from the same two fundamental conceptual problems. The first is the inference of environmental immediacies from macroscopic circumstances. The city up close is not necessarily the city at a distance; likewise, and more assuredly, transnationalism and globalization cannot be easily translated into the environmental immediacies of even those who most obviously are living transnational situations. That people are crossing national borders in astronomical numbers does not mean that as international migrants they experience their daily lives as a mosaic of little nations. Environmental immediacies are best examined through ethnographic investigation, not philosophical speculation. The second problem is the inference of virtual subjectivities. Topdown analyses demand that one follow a route from the environmental to the mental. To arrive at subjectivity that route must pass through a model of the person. For Simmel, the model is Modern Man, an existentialist who responds to disorientation through the cultivation of particularity. Though in thinking about a general model I have more sympathy for Simmel's existentialist than for Jameson's cut-and-paste artist, the former probably overstates a drive to self-affirmation and self-assertion. Jameson's be-here-now Heap, skimming the surfaces of postmodern hyperspace in a mood of blank parody, strikes me as itself close to a parody. Again, one may know someone like this, or someone who appears to be like this, but aren't such people fairly rare? If the theorists of postmodernity are right, shouldn't these people be everywhere? So where are they? 4 Certainly not among the quintessential postmoderns, the Brazilian migrants to Japan who have journeyed halfway around the globe, crossed a huge cultural gulf, and have often traversed a class divide,

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from middle to working class. If they're not disoriented heaps of fragments, then who is? It seems more likely that Jameson has described a transient mood associated with globalization, akin perhaps to the blase posture of the cosmopolitan urbanite in her or his most anonymous, citified moments. No doubt those who find Jameson's characterization persuasive will find it unfair, and perhaps benighted, of me to raise the further question of motivation, for motivation, in the postmodern model (as I understand it), no longer exists. Motivation is one of those passe features of depth models. But for recalcitrants like me who wonder "Why would anyone be like this?" and fail to encounter an answer, either in Jameson's own work or in one's own imagination, the Heap of Fragments remains a mystery, a conjectural model lacking evident credibility.

And What About Proteus? The fact that Modern Man may not describe urbanites, nor the Postmodern Heap global denizens, does not automatically discredit Proteus, the implicit model of the meta-subject that warrants both. Simmel and Jameson could both be wrong about their descriptions of historical subjects; yet it might still be the case that human beings are fundamentally malleable, capable of, as Rimbaud puts it, "being thought" by Culture and History. Insofar as strong versions of culturalism and historicism posit the existence of an individual, that individual is Proteus. But ultimately, with Proteus we enter the realm of closed theory. For what evidence could refute a belief in Proteus? A belief in the extreme cultural and historical plasticity of human beings obviously can accommodate anything-Dumont's Homo Hierarchicus, Simmel's Modern Man, Jameson's Postmodern Heap. Belief in Proteus is akin to Zande mystical beliefs described by Evans-Pritchard (1976 [1937]), for such convictions devour all evidence whole. If history and culture make subjectivity, and if subjectivity is inferred from historical and cultural evidence, the circle is closed. Virtual subjectivity does the logical trick of vitiating evidentiary challenges originating outside history and culture. The Zande, remember, are indifferent to the natural properties of the substance benge; for them the poison, as we would call it, operates on mystical principles, which no evidence can refute. For committed top-down theorists, the natural properties of subjectivity are irrelevant-indeed, any such properties, such as cognitive faculties, psychodynamic conflicts, and biological propensities, and even the discursive regime that permits their investigation (science), are themselves swallowed up in history's mystical maw. True believers in Proteus will remain true believers. I am afraid that

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my doubts will have the same effect on cultural and historical determinists as Evans-Pritchard's skepticism about the poison oracle had on the Azande. But for the rest of us there are questions of plausibility. If historical and cultural subjectivities are radically incommensurable, is it not suggestive that historians are able to give comprehensible accounts of the distant past, and ethnographers comprehensible accounts of the lives of others? If those who lived in the past, or those who live elsewhere, were so different, how could we produce any intelligible accounts of them at all-even a comparative account of the sort that underpins claims of radical subjective difference? Moreover, if history makes subjectivities, why aren't those subjectivities, when examined through person-centered ethnographies carried out at a specific historical moment, more uniform? Doesn't this fact indicate that history cannot dictate experience, that human mental capacities and the contingencies of human lives intervene between public and personal worlds? And finally, why would evolution, a process blind to anything but reproductive success, dream up Proteus? Isn't it likely that human beings, like ants, tigers, and gorillas, have rather clearly specified and delimited cognitive and behavioral capacities? My objections to strong versions of culturalism and historicism are not, of course, original: they are by now well-rehearsed in the anthropologicalliterature.5 For those who have serious reservations about Proteus, it is well past time to place a more credible and substantial model of the person at the center of our anthropological analyses, and to pay as much attention to the natural and actual properties of subjectivity as we do to its often-deceptive public shadows.

Part II Politics

Chapter 4 The Hegemony of Discontent

The Rebel Island At the heart of Gramsci's notion of hegemony is his most vital insight: culture is political.l For Gramsci (1971), hegemony springs not only from the explicit ideological, moral, and philosophical underpinnings of power but also from less fully conscious, transparent realms of thought-the experientially insistent world of common sense. This taken-for-granted portion of culture, the fragmented "'spontaneous philosophy' of the multitude" (421), muddies perceptions of injustice, inducing political passivity. In short, common sense makes revolution hard to think. I will argue against imaging common sense as a paralyzing mystification. The most insistent common sense is embodied knowledge, an amalgam of thought and sentiment. If common sense makes revolution hard to think, it more crucially makes it hard to feel, not because common sense anesthetizes the emotions but because it diverts them into politically innocuous channels. I have two major objectives in this chapter. First, I seek to integrate emotion into a theoretical concept of common sense. Second, I seek to show how common sense can fuel varieties of protest and rebellion that remain encapsulated within an unyielding political structure. The argument draws on events that occurred toward the end of my 1984-86 fieldwork in Sao Luis, capital of Maranhao, a socially traditional and economically depressed state of northeastern Brazil. 2 Within a period of two months, sao-luisenses revolted twice, first at the ballot box and then, violently, in the streets. In the mayoral election of November 1985, they defied Jose Sarney, political chief of Maranhao and the first maranhense president in Brazil's history, by electing Gardenia Gon~alves, wife of Sarney's archrival, Joao Castelo. Then, in January 1986, sao-luisenses reversed themselves: an enraged multitude set fire to the city hall as the new mayor barricaded herself behind overturned tables

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and her aides frantically gouged escape routes in the building's rear walls. Yet for all its authentic fury, the city-hall uprising was, like the bitter election that preceded it, part and parcel of a long-standing political game played by Sarney and Castelo, who used citizens as counters by manipulating deep commonsense understandings and emotions. Thus in Sao Luis, a historically restive city that proclaims itself the Rebel Island, common sense neither mesmerizes nor sedates the populace. Rather, it guides dissatisfaction into popular mutinies that can shift power from one elite competitor to another, but never-at least thus far-to the mutineers. This volatile hegemony thrives on discontent.

Hegemony, Common Sense, and Political Structures Let me first set out some analytical terms. Hegemony is the maintenance of a political structure through the cultural shaping of experience, obviating or lessening reliance on illegitimate force. 3 Although worked out, explicit symbolic formulations constitute one aspect of hegemony, hegemony is not just ideology. Indeed, ideology is hegemony's weak point. Ideology is vulnerable because it is visible; public statements of belief and justifications for oppression invite contestation. Gramsci's originality lies in his emphasis on hegemony's invisible, insidious, more potent underside: the "practical consciousness" that saturates "the whole process of living ... to such a depth that the pressures and limits of ... a specific economic, political, and cultural system seem to most of us the pressures and limits of simple experience and common sense" (Williams 1977: 110). In Gramsci's scheme, common sense, a "crudely neophobe and conservative" (1971: 423) mishmash of unreflective popular thought, impedes the transformation in workers' consciousness that, according to a naive marxism, should be the inevitable ironic product of capitalist social relations. Common sense permits only the most sporadic and uncoordinated "flashes" of progressive political action ( 326-27). Hence Gramsci assigns a key revolutionary role to intellectuals: they invent the cultural criticism that remakes common sense into a new worldview "rooted in the popular consciousness with the same solidity and imperative quality as traditional beliefs" ( 424). This new common sense permits consciously revolutionary political practice. Unfortunately, Gramsci's discussion of common sense, however provocative an advance in political theory, is anthropologically thin. Anthropologists, on the other hand, have had a lot to say about common sense, mostly in the guise of culture, their stock in trade, but have often ignored its politics. In this chapter I hope to formulate a concept of

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common sense that is both anthropologically rich and politically sensitive. For Clifford Geertz ( 1983), common sense is the region of culture that is natural, practical, and transparent. Its picture of the world has an immediately veridical rather than pointedly representative quality. The trademark of common sense is its resistance to critical scrutiny. It is resistant first of all because it is shared: alternative constructions of reality are rarely voiced. More important is the silence of the inner critical voice. If common sense reaches consciousness at all, it does so in the guise of a plain fact or, I will argue, an emotion intertwined with plain facts. Anthropologists and cognitive linguists have for some time attended to the inseparability of thought and emotion. 4 Despite important continuing controversies over specifics, their studies have made clear that emotions are embedded in and structured by organized cultural understandings. In short, "concepts" are suffused with affect and "emotions" are bound up with ideas. Thus cultural meaning systems (D'Andrade 1984), as shared mental structures, blend cognition and affect in varying ways and proportions. Geertz's discussions of religious symbol systems likewise stress the fusion of thought and emotion (1973b, e). In privileging religion as the core of common sense, Gramsci (1971: 420) anticipates Geertz's point that religion, an alloy of "intellectual assent" and "emotional commitment" (1973b: 126), tends to shape secular perceptions and mores. For Geertz, the experience of the sacred validates the religious worldview; the religious worldview makes meaningful the experience of the sacred. This mutually confirming interplay of cognition and affect establishes "powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations" (1973e: 90) that "cast a derivative, lunar light over the solid features of a people's secular life" (1973e: 124). Because a religious meaning system distills a set of beliefs into imperious bodily sensations of devotion, bliss, piety, or conviction, it bypasses the inner critical voice. The immediacy of the experience-the self's immersion in "embodied thoughts, thoughts seeped with the apprehension that 'I am involved"' (Rosaldo 1984: 143)-inhibits the splitting of consciousness that would enable one to assume a critical perspective. Religion is therefore a good candidate for core common sense, but it is not the only one, as Freud and Marx have taught us. Certainly, familial relations produce profoundly embodied thoughts, and economic relations likewise engender ideas and sentiments that color our perceptions of the wider social world. If (as I argue) politically consequential common sense is forged largely in face-to-face, emotionally charged settings-in parent-child interactions, in encounters with saints and spirits, in transactions with

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the boss-then refashioning it requires not just the propagation of counterhegemonic ideas but the disembodiment of one view of social relationships and the embodiment of another. This task seems a little less forbidding if we can accept Gramsci's claim that the emotional foundations of a revolutionary consciousness already exist in the prerevolutionary situation. He contends that the people's "generic hatred" of signori (gentlemen) is the "basic, negative, polemical attitude" constituting the "first glimmer of [class] consciousness" (1971: 273). But Gramsci gives insufficient weight to the conceptual matrix within which that hatred is embedded. He writes as if hostility to powerful persons is the nucleus of hostility to an oppressive system, a dubious proposition. In Sao Luis, commonsense resentment is consistent with and confirms hegemonic understandings. Hence hatred of senhores is, paradoxically, incorporated into a political contest whose players are precisely, and exclusively, those senhores. This elite game is the political structure propped up by sao-luisense common sense. Following Bailey, I characterize a political structure as "a set of rules for regulating competition" (1969: 1). Such rules specifY the qualifications for competitors, directions for play, prizes at stake, guidelines for the composition of teams, and procedures for arbitration. I will focus on the critical first two areas: personnel (Who can play?) and competition (What are the rules for engagement?). Radical political change-a transformation in political structuremeans a unidirectional change in the rules of the game. The Russian Revolution and the abolition of untouchability in India are cases of radical change; reversals in the fortunes of Swat Pathan leaders (Barth 1959), or even swings between feudal and egalitarian social relations in highland Burma (Leach 1977 [1954] ), are not. 5 The latter two cases, like Sao Luis's political convulsions, exemplifY what Bailey calls repetitive change (1969: 193-96). That is, despite the fierce, at times violent, nature of the competition, Sao Luis's patronage structure seems immune to fundamental revisions in either the eligibility rules for competitors or the rules governing the competition.

Patronage as a Political Structure Schematically, we can think of a patronage (or clientage) structure as a pyramid, within which power ramifies downward in a pattern of inverted Vs. The nodes of the inverted Vs are patrons. All patrons (except for the hypothetical person at the apex of the pyramid) are simultaneously clients. Clients can call upon patrons for favors, not only for themselves but for their own clients as well. Hence one is, vis-a-vis one's own client,

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not only a direct source of valued goods and services but also a broker who can intercede with still more highly placed patrons. Unequal exchange and uncertainty are hallmarks of this structure. The patron has greater wealth and prestige and more influential "connections"; moreover, patron and client trade dissimilar things (Foster 1963). 6 Exchange is governed not by fixed, universal norms but by situational and personal considerations: the patron's behavior has a large element of discretion and arbitrariness when viewed from below. Local, regional, and national political systems can be based on patronage (Weingrod 1968). Social scientists and historians have long characterized Brazilian politics at all levels as clientelistic. More than fifty years ago Leal (1975 [1949]) described how Brazilian peasants sought the protection of the landowning coronet by voting as the latter directed. Significantly, backlands unrest has often crystallized in messianic movements (Cunha 1944 [1902]; Queiroz 1965), quests by the desperate and dispossessed for a powerful patron-a prophet or messiah who can effectively intercede with God on their behalf (Hutchinson 1966). That is, the failure of traditional patrons has typically prompted a search for new, more potent protectors. City politics too manifests patronage relations. The cabo eleitoral, or ward heeler, a fixture of the urban political scene, delivers votes to local candidates in exchange for promised benefits to voters. Local candidates in turn are tied to major political figures within the state, and these to patrons with national influence. Politicians build careers by creatively manipulating such ties (Leeds 1964). Indeed, argues Hutchinson (1966), many Brazilians view the national government itself as a superpatron. Populism, a style conspicuous in Brazilian politics, creates an illusory patron-client relation between the political leader and each ordinary citizen. 7 Social movements of various kinds have become increasingly active in Brazil in recent years, especially in the relatively prosperous, industrial, cosmopolitan regions of southern Brazil. 8 Yet patronage remains, even within many such "horizontal" organizations, and even in those modern areas, a crucial idiom of political dealings. And patronage politics are especially stark and entrenched in hardscrabble northeastern states such as Maranhao, as we shall see. The main features of a patronage-based political structure seem clear. The prizes are a relatively few high positions (upper level nodes) within the pyramid. One cannot compete at any but the lowest levels unless one already has some significant degree of power, resource control, and connections, for building a following means above all creating confidence among prospective followers that support can and will be rewarded. Success breeds success: power concentrates at the top. Hence,

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although an exceptionally astute person can, by cleverly parlaying "connections," rise from the middle ranks of this structure to its heights, competition usually flourishes within a dense network of the wealthy elite. In northeastern Brazil, the members of this elite are landowners, bureaucrats, politicians, and financiers. Typically, a powerful person occupies several of these statuses simultaneously. 9 Sources of income are shadowy; because patronage structures operate on the basis of favors, they create incentives for bribery and intrigue. Accusations of corruption-indexes of the structure's dubious legitimacy-abound. Within the elite, factions form and re-form in a perpetual struggle for advantage (Gross 1973), but losses are rarely irreversible: one can usually rework personal linkages so as to mount a new challenge. Hence even the losers have little incentive to disrupt the game being played. This political structure dissipates assaults from below. Ambitious politicians often present themselves as champions of the oppressed, thereby conscripting popular grievances-commonsense resentment-into their clientelistic strategies.

The Common Sense of Power in Sao Luis Obviously, not everyone in Sao Luis inhabits precisely the same world. In Sao Luis, as everywhere, everyone's life is unique. But one must select the analytical resolution appropriate to the question at hand. The present account, which explores the attempts of elite actors to sway an urban population in order to further their own political ambitions, requires a bird's-eye view of the city. The following discussion characterizes, in necessarily general terms, major tendencies within an enormous and diverse subjective field.

The Double-Faced Patron

What inhibits people from taking up a different game, from forgoing attachment to this or that patron in order to adopt an alternative mode of political organization? Why does rejection of a patron entail embracing another, rather than renouncing the patronal system? The prime reason is that clients see the patrtlo (female: patroa) as Janus-faced. The patron's split image reflects an ambivalence in his or her subordinates that plays itself out in volatile but repetitive political behavior. The following interrelated features attach to the good and the bad faces of the patron:

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Good patron loving loyal moral generous treats one like a "person"

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Bad patron abusive and exploitative traitorous corrupt selfish treats one like an "individual"

Similarly split images of superiors recur in other (nonpolitical) domains of social experience-within the family, in relations with deities and religious leaders, on the job. Hence the double-faced patron is a product not just of some "political culture" but of a common sense of power. This point is fundamental. Sao-luisense common sense about political patrons is grounded in (and ultimately reinforces) an embodied knowledge of personalized power. Issues of power arise in all social relationships. In Sao Luis, a basic conceptual pattern, a fundamental redundancy, extends across significant domains of social life. Its outstanding characteristic is the perception that power is personalized. That is, power is seen as emanating from discrete, idiosyncratic persons with whom one maintains unique relationships; power does not flow from abstract entities or from impersonal, universal laws or principles. Hence the exercise of power seems (and in significant respects is) capricious and improvised rather than predictable and routine. Although the treatment received depends in part on the specific relationship one has forged with the superior, such treatment always has an element of unreliability or arbitrariness. Moreover-and this is an essential feature underplayed by those who regard the patron-client relationship as a "lopsided friendship" (Pitt-Rivers 1954: 140)-because power is personalized, it signifies both a promise of benevolence and a threat of betrayal. The superior-parent, spirit, boss, patron-is therefore invested with hope and apprehension, with love and resentment. 10 This general pattern of splitting and ambivalence facilitates a conceptual synesthesia, as perceptions and feelings specific to one social domain easily shift into another. In other words, any given domain readily borrows metaphoric representations of generically common elements (for example, the two-faced superior) from other domains. Such cross-mapping is extremely complicated. No single domain is paramount, a model for all others. For example, family is undoubtedly an important source domain ("A patroa is like a mother"), but in some respects it is also a target domain ("A mother is like the Virgin Mary") .u In short, all these domains interpenetrate or exchange meanings with one another. 12

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Parents and Children

The colonial paterfamilias was a secular despot, father, and patrao rolled into one (Candido 1951; Freyre 1956 [1933], 1964). The plantation was a petty chiefdom, the European patriarch "virtually a temporal god" (Freyre 1964: 161). Although this patriarchal model does not (and never did) describe the actual structure of most Brazilian families (Almeida et al. 1982; Samara 1983), the powerful father-provider, protector, authority, and guardian of family honor-remains a central, albeit contested, ideological component of the family. 13 The good father is generous, protective, and loving; the bad father is high-handed and terrifYingly punitive. This tension is captured vividly by a sao-luisense man in his twenties who recalls how his father became transformed, in his imagination, into a monster of Brazilian folklore, the anthropophagous Bicho-Papao: There was a phase when I was a child, I had a certain respect and a certain fear [of my father], because at times I was very mischievous, I played too much, I fought a lot. He was a superpolite person, but [at these times] he would put the politeness aside and use an aggressive side, only he would not use aggression [itself]. He would just say that if I kept doing that he would come at me with a belt, you know how it is, and hit me. And then he would say that the Bicho ... he would terrifY me, [saying] that [the Bicho-Papao] would grab me, that he would eat me and everything else. And then I would try not to do wrong things anymore. I would imagine that there was a beast like that, super-aggressive, that it would come and grab me and kill me and other bad things. And then I would become terrified and try to stop. 14 The good mother is long-suffering, sacrificing herself in a struggle for the welfare of the family, especially the children (Aragao 1983). 15 The bad mother neglects and mistreats her children; by implication, she cares more for herself than for them. Her self-indulgence connotes sexual promiscuity and perversity and is linked to betrayal. 16 Many of the negative qualities of the bad patron resonate with these features of the bad parent and are summarized in an adjective applied to the bad patron, whether male or female: sacana. We might translate sacana as "wicked," but prototypically it refers to a fondness for sacanagem--anal sex, oral sex or more idiosyncratic, non-normative kinds of sexual activity.~' More generally, sacanagem refers to devious, deceptive, illegitimate behavior impelled by base motives and carrying a strong air of treachery. The most egregious bad patroa of maranhense legend is Ana jansen, a cruel slaveowner and ruthless political boss of early nine-

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teenth-century Sao Luis. 18 Like the Bicho-Papao, she is one of the familiar terrors of a sao-luisense childhood, a spectral figure in a chilling local fairy tale. For instead of succoring her servants-her figurative children-she beat and tortured them: her sadism was virtually incestuous. 19 In brief, the bad patron is, by an extension of and merging with the image of the bad parent, traitorous, self-centered, grasping, corrupt, predatory. Roberto DaMatta's distinction (1978) between "person" and "individual" points to the outstanding feature of the bad patron, who treats you not lovingly, as a relation, a discrete "person" worthy of care and indulgence, but instrumentally, as an object, an anonymous "individual" to be manipulated and exploited. In Sao Luis, symbolic nullifications of intimate ties or of another's sense of self-worth are dangerous. Dismissive words and actions can generate the humiliation, resentment, and desires for vengeance that spawn violent, sometimes deadly, encounters (Linger 1992).

Saints, Religious Chiefs, and Devotees Popular Catholicism-the religion as practiced by the average person-is a hierarchical system in which saints, who are openly recognized as patroes, bestow favors in return for promises (promessas) demonstrating faith and gratitude, such as a vow to make a pilgrimage (Bastide 1951; Gross 1971; Fernandes 1985; for a Mexican analogue, see Foster 1963). Devotion is tempered with pragmatism: if saints seem to inspire less ambivalence than do parents, nevertheless favors denied mean promessas withheld and a search for a new benefactor. Saints can even be blackmailed and punished: during droughts in the Brazilian northeast, images of the saints are exiled from their home churches to unfamiliar surroundings, to be returned only when it rains (Cascudo 1984: 224). Hence relations between human beings and saints bear all the trademarks of patronage: unequal access to desired goods and services, contingency of the client's support on the patron's discretionary boons, and the client's hardheaded readiness to transfer loyalty from one patron to another. The Catholic religion also appeals to sentiments of childhood vulnerability. Catholicism, official and popular, draws heavily on the metaphor offamily. The most emotional religious event in Sao Luis is undoubtedly Good Friday; in comparison, the celebrations of the resurrection and even Christmas seem tepid. Christ's martyrdom is equated with one's own sufferings: the event is presented and enacted so as to evoke an identification with jesus, whose status as son is paramount, on the cross. The Easter drama foregrounds the faithful love of the desexualized good mother and the punishment meted out by the bad father, here

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equated with the powerful political figure of Pontius Pilate (and, I think, with a distant and yet more powerful father who fails to protect-who, indeed, "forsakes" -his son). 20 I would speculate that those who identify with Mary as she mourns her child also become imagined victims of the bad father. The social organization of Umbanda, the most widely practiced MroBrazilian religion, closely resembles the patronage structure of popular Catholicism (Brown 1986; Fry 1978). The pai-de-santo or miie-de-santo (saint's father or mother) who heads an Umbanda center (terreiro) redistributes goods and services among members, performs cures, and brokers the terreiro's electoral support with politicians. Moreover, the entire Umbanda cosmology, like that of popular Catholicism, operates as a supernatural patronage network in which people exchange devotion for divine benevolence. 21

Bosses and Workers The good boss (patrao or patroa)2 2 antiCipates one's needs and responds to appeals for loans and other forms of assistance. A loyal and affectionate benefactor, she or he regards one as (again to cite DaMatta's useful distinction) a "person," someone of consequence, distinct from the mass. The bad boss, on the other hand, deals with one as an "individual," a faceless, dispensable entity, someone to be paid poorly, dealt with inconsiderately, and fired at will. Joana's account of her sojourn in southern Brazil focuses on emotional wounds inflicted by a bad patroa. An agent in Sao Luis offered Joana a pleasant job in Rio de Janeiro as companion to an elderly woman-a job promising close, warm relations with a considerate patron. But when Joana arrived in Rio, she found she was to work from dawn to bedtime, seven days a week, as a household servant. Her room overlooked a stinking dog kennel; her responsibilities included washing the dogs' bedding and cleaning up their excrement. Her mistress forbade her to converse with anyone, to watch television, or to leave the house. She could make no friends, could never even go to the beach. She wrote letters to her family, which she gave to her mistress for mailing; these were never posted. Mter working two months without pay, Joana pleaded to go home. The woman agreed to send her back north the following month, after Joana had accrued enough service-three months-to cover her bus fare to Maranhao. Before finally permitting her to leave, the woman checked Joana's bags to make sure she hadn't stolen anything. Penniless, Joana boarded the bus to Sao Luis with a mix of chagrin, bitterness, and relief. Deceived, dehumanized, isolated, silenced, and accused, Joana saw the hope of indulgent and humane

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employment sour into a deeply humiliating experience at the hands of an abusive, exploitative, disdainful boss. "Working" the System Parent, saint, boss, politician: these are figures who dominate a hierarchy in which one is vulnerable to the decisions of another to give or withhold favors, to administer or refrain from inflicting degradations and punishments. Rupture of the personal link is an ever present danger. Relationships with superiors are imbued with strong and contradictory emotions: hope, gratitude and love as well as fear, resentment and rage. To survive, one must secure the good will of powerful agents or effective intercessors. Brazilians have a well-developed vocabulary to describe how one "works" interpersonal ties (Leeds 1964). I have mentioned the promessa meant to secure a saint's favor. With humans, one uses pistolao-"pull"-with a higher power; one finds ajeito, a way to manipulate personal relationships, to get something done. Significantly, the average person sees reliance on impersonal rules in Brazil as an assurance of failure: laws and regulations are more often weapons of privilege than guarantees of equal opportunity or protection (DaMatta 1978). Effective action, in both sacred and secular realms, is through unofficial, personal channels-through the mediation of a patron. As a son or daughter, as a devotee, and as an employee, then, one is enmeshed in relationships of personalized, often arbitrarily exercised power. Subordinates hope for warm, generous treatment but suspect and fear that superiors may betray them in pursuit of selfish gratification. This is not a world that is dependable, nor is it a world that saoluisenses view as intrinsically or unambiguously good, but it is the commonsense, culturally shaped social reality that they inhabit-the reality permeating the dizzying political events of 1985-86.

Strategies of Elite Competitors: The Mayoral Election Background: The Feud The November 1985 mayoral election and its riotous aftermath, the city hall siege of January 1986, meant one thing to the townspeople and another to the politicians. For the voters and rioters, these events were opportunities to castigate bad patrons. For the politicians, both election and riot were moves in an ancient maranhense power game: a rising star challenges the reigning chieftain. This battle for local supremacy pitted the artful, resolute former governor Joao Castelo against another former

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governor, Maranhao's political boss jose Sarney, who in early 1985 had become president of Brazil. Sarney and Castelo had not always been enemies. In fact, Joao Castelo's political career had begun and flourished under Sarney's sponsorship, and Sarney was the godfather of one of Castelo's children. Castelo first seems to have caught Sarney's eye during the latter's term as governor of Maranhao (1966-70); Castelo's meteoric rise through the Bank of Amazonia (BASA) took place under the aegis of Sarney. 23 By the 1970s, Castelo's attention had turned to politics. With Sarney's backing, both he and Luiz Rocha, a long-time Sarney client, were elected federal deputies, beginning an intense and at times vicious rivalry for Sarney's favor. In 1978 Sarney designated Castelo governor, passing over Luiz Rocha. Castelo rapidly gave signs of wanting-and knowing how-to build an independent political constituency. As governor, he was a consummate populist, a master at divining what o povo, "the people," wanted. He was a builder; his most remarkable edifice was a 71,000-seat soccer stadium (in a city of 450,000) popularly dubbed, in a play on his name, the Castelao, the "big castle." The Caste lao was reputedly built with inferior cement at many times the expense of comparable stadiums elsewhere in Brazil, leaving lots of money floating around. Sao-luisenses deduced that the money must have floated into Castelo's Swiss bank accounts and financed his extravagances, pointing with amused outrage to the European bull, susceptible to the tropical heat and humidity, that Castelo was said to own and house in an air-conditioned stall. Castelo did more than build. He subsidized festivals and folkloric groups; he set up shops selling low-priced food (an enterprise perpetually wreathed in scandal); and he paved the way for Alcoa and the Shell subsidiary Billiton Metals to construct a gigantic aluminum factory in Sao Lufs (supposedly at considerable benefit to himself). Perhaps his most politically effective move was hiring 50,000 new employees during the last months of his administration, more than tripling the size of the state's payroll. 24 Castelo's populist measures generated a strong following, especially in the poorer bairros, even though most people felt he was corrupt. As sao-luisenses put it, echoing a common Brazilian characterization of the two-faced politician, "He steals, but he gets things done" ("Rouba, mas faz").2 5 Castelo, headed for the federal senate in 1982, wanted to choose his gubernatorial successor, but this prospect clearly made Sarney nervous. Sarney, who at the time was national head of the government party with entree at the president's palace in Brasflia and ministerial ambitions, could not jeopardize control of his home state. He blocked Castelo by

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nominating Luiz Rocha, a ploddingly tenacious but reliable and less dangerous (because less gifted) protege. Upon taking office, Rocha, who often described himself as "Sarney's son," wasted no time. Insinuating that his predecessor was corrupt, Rocha tried to jettison the hordes Castelo had just hired, but Castelo's counterattacks, which threatened to brand Rocha a bad patrao, made this impossible. The new employees, many of whom were said to have no specified duties, continued to drain the coffers of the state government. Historic national events now increasingly commanded Sarney's attention. Since 1964 Brazil had been living under the thumb of a military government. By the mid-1970s, the so-called Brazilian economic miracle of the junta's early years was over. The economy had stalled, the country had tired of censorship and repression, and the opposition had become increasingly vocal. The military leaders decided that the time had come to turn the mess over to a civilian president, albeit one of their own choosing. The government, headed by president and general Joao Figueiredo, therefore scheduled an indirect presidential election for early 1985. Although its candidate, Paulo Maluf, was controversial, he seemed assured of victory because most of the voters-federal and state legislators-were members of the government party. But the Brazilian public wanted more far-reaching change. In early 1984, millions of people marched in cities all over Brazil for immediate, direct presidential elections, "Diretasj