Histories of Anthropology Annual

My Background in Anthropology before Chicago

The anthropology that I brought with me to Chicago from Brooklyn College had emphasized the Boasian outlook, with its distrust of using external theories to understand the complexity of the cultural worlds studied. I had taken courses with Joseph Jablow, Solomon Miller, Robert Ehrich, and Gerald Henderson, and received help from many others in the New York City anthropological community (Colin Turnbull, Alexander Lesser, Margaret Mead, and Hortense Powdermaker, to name a few). My teachers thought that I had the kind of questioning mind that would have a place in anthropology more than in other social science disciplines, which they considered stagnant in comparison. Malcolm X was another New Yorker who strongly encouraged me to continue in anthropology. I met him first after hearing his debates with black intellectuals on the radio, and then at Brooklyn College when we invited him to address an naacp audience. After that, Minister Shabazz and I kept running into each other around town and talking about cultural topics. He needed help with several of his speaking projects and used students like me, who shared his interest in liberation movements everywhere, to gather data for him. He urged internationalism and learning about the world beyond Europe. Malcolm X was working on a solution to the problem of racism but never finished his work. His influence on my anthropology, like that of other prominent people that I met in New York, was indirect but definite. I met fiercely independent jazz musicians in my neighborhood. These musicians had appeared on cherished lp recordings. For me good anthropology approached jazz musicianship in its structured creativity and spirituality. My civil rights activities included arranging a jazz benefit at NYU at a time that seemed make or break for the cause.²

The possibilities of the Boasian outlook go far beyond what Mead and Benedict had used it to create. Boas saw a world in which many studies of a setting could be carried out fruitfully, each with its own methodology of observation. Later Thomas Kuhn (1962) suggested to anthropologists that they think of the field as a constant search for new paradigms, any one of which might lead to a scientific revolution that could change its strategies of data collection; what might seem less valuable data can become essential. Perhaps most importantly, Boas's historical particularism remained aloof from Western ethnocentrism. He advocated getting out there and finding out what the average man thinks and feels (see Boas 1940). There have been many critical evaluations of Boas's style and his problems with members of the groups he studied, but the possibilities that his culture-centered studies, focusing on non-Western peoples without [End Page 223] dogmas and parading themselves as science, made Boas's legacy an honored field, and one that seemed to encourage strong contributions from minorities.

Sixties Anthropology at Chicago

The growth of anthropology through fellowships and grant support during the sixties was part of a Vietnam War–era Johnson administration plan to study and confront the achievements of non-Western peoples through better understanding. This would justify our mission to save Southeast Asia from communism. The Johnson planners' image of anthropology was as a humanistic discipline with a group of changing theories, none dominant. I was entering a field that the president referred to in positive ways. This was the plan, but the war ended and the people who shared this view of anthropology's potential lost power. Scholars like Clifford Geertz, and many others in the profession, were on a mission to take back anthropology from the Boasians, who were regarded as anti-theoretical and intellectually weak. Boas's approach suggested that anthropology's issues would be generated at the grass roots level. In Geertz's view Western intellectual issues should chart anthropology's direction, not the imponderables of foreign cultures and their potential scholarly concerns.³

Kinship studies interested me because kinship theories dealt with how people make interpersonal moral choices in distant settings. Malinowski's focus upon human agency was especially interesting from this perspective. I was not as interested in top down social structural theories relevant to public administration, important in some Oxford and Cambridge kinship theories. Kroeber and Lowie had placed kinship studies in much wider cultural contexts but Chicago—save for Fred Eggan—tilted in a more Anglo-European direction. Eggan remained steadfastly loyal to the Boasian heritage of ethnology even though he had studied with A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and mentioned their intellectual relationship and friendship frequently in his lectures. Eggan's kinship studies were a branch of cultural and social history.

Disenchantment with the freewheeling studies that earlier American anthropology had encouraged became for some Chicago faculty what Bernard Cohn, one of my professors and an advisor, called the "hate the natives" movement, a turn that was accompanied by an acceptance of the dominant role of power in social relations. They adopted an idea popularized by E. R. Leach, who presented the clearest form of it in the early pages of his Political Systems of Highland Burma: "the conscious [End Page 224] or unconscious wish to gain power is a very general motive in human affairs. Accordingly I assume that individuals faced with a choice of action will commonly use such choice so as to gain power" (1954:10). Leach's idea became the kernel of a growing ideology surrounding power as a universal force shaping all cultures and even perceptions of reality. Anthropologists often labeled the political administrations of Asian and African countries corrupt and incompetent. The peoples that they administered, including their intellectuals, were seen as tools of the forces above them. A possible alternative view, the un's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is deeply cultural in its tone. Although the Declaration does not use the word culture, this document expresses what it hopes can be shown to be universal human ideals. But the anthropologists at Chicago rarely mentioned it or considered its possible usefulness in their work. This Declaration could certainly have provided a framework for field observations.

As a result of this identification with formerly imperial Britain's intellectual heritage, and later with that of formerly imperial France, modern anthropology was becoming a kind of rural political science. Drawing upon discourse analysis and literary criticism, it urged us to consider political thoughts and feelings, the political culture, and to emphasize potential and real conflicts. The reason that these tendencies developed as quickly as they did reflects the origin of many of the students at Chicago. Many were graduates of private colleges where the roll-up-your-sleeves empiricist Boasian style was far weaker than the clean-fingernail Western humanities tradition and its styles. Peoples beyond their culture were to be a testing ground for their theories, not a potential model for cultural rebirth. A colleague laughs that the profession was being made over in the image of educated white kids from suburbia. These were people whom no one would ask for advice or ideas about anything in a crisis. They rarely did conventional fieldwork—that is, showed up in their village, got housing there and lived alone, without transport, through fluent use of the local language. They arrived in style in Land Rovers with their wives along and talked about the economic bottom line and corrupt local administrators while drinking their coffee and eating their cake. In fact, when there had been colonial administrators before them, informants asked them for intervention and help.

The professors that I interacted with had various approaches to anthropological studies. There was really no "Chicago school," although the currents described above were in the air. David Schneider had convinced me to come to Chicago when I was seriously considering going to Harvard or ucla, both of which had made generous offers. He told [End Page 225] me I could learn there and go my own way. He said he was doing what he called culture categories research, using ideas and distinctions from within the cultures studied to help revise naïve and ethnocentric theories of kinship. This was a very appealing starting point for a student with my background. Schneider also told me that there were others there who would woo me but that he urged independence. I think he was referring to Fred Eggan and Bernard (Barney) Cohn. Eggan studied kinship systems and trained several non-white anthropologists. He had a way with us interpersonally. Barney was easy to talk to and always actively engaged in the intellectual worlds around him. He was also from Brooklyn. Schneider was my advisor at Chicago at the beginning, but I became less certain toward the end since he hardly discussed my thesis with me and did not attend its defense.

Chicago Faculty

I got to know David Schneider as his advisee for two academic years. Schneider had strong individual relationships with students and this included a discussion of his own ethnicity. He constantly bemoaned his German background. Several sources have now noted that his ancestry was European Jewish.⁴ He would not speak German with me although he knew that my grandmother had spoken to me mainly in German. He knew Weber and Durkheim adequately and also was good teaching Parsons, his old professor. I liked Parsons's approach to nineteenth-century sociology, which Schneider showed me how to learn. Schneider avoided the legacy of Boas. Boas was to him a dreamer and visionary. Schneider was convinced that new ideas always are modifications of prior ones and emerge through clever critique. Many of his likes and dislikes seemed personally motivated (cf. Schneider 1965). Despite his military service he considered the U.S. diplomatic effort to be Central Intelligence Agency– dominated, and I quickly learned to disregard his advice that one should avoid American diplomats at all cost. They were an important positive influence for Americans traveling in Asia and were acutely sensitive to the bad treatment that minorities often receive in academia. They wanted to prove to locals that we United States citizens are part of one family, and gave us front row seats. We blacks often consider this a start in the right direction, not hypocrisy.

Schneider, for all his attempts to be a creative contributor, was a reactive scholar, whose influential works were critical essays. His major idea, that there is a dialogue between nature and culture permeating all peoples, came from Lévi-Strauss's early efforts. Ironically, Lévi-Strauss told [End Page 226] me, while I chauffeured him around for a couple of days during his visit to Chicago in 1967, that he did not recognize this idea in the form Schneider gave it. Lévi-Strauss considered Boas a kind of godfather for his work. (Lévi-Strauss was very interested in music, his avocation, and encouraged my own efforts in this area. He even discussed piano playing as a source of great sanity in this world. He loved Mozart and Haydn, as had my father.) He was a wonderful man to talk with, the kind of person that one can meet once and find an inspiration for a lifetime. After I met him I struggled through several of his Mythologiques in French (cf. 1964). They struck me as insightful, and as leaving many loose ends for others to resolve. His concluding essays in each volume are marvelously nuanced. Ultimately, however, his structuralism was arid and, although suggestive in many ways, did not suit me.

Schneider's personal commitments fascinated me. He thought that California college girls were the hope of the nation and talked about them when the conversation got around to what he admired. When he asked me about surfers and I yawned, he was aghast. He probably had a Beach Boys collection, I speculated. His worship of the American WASP–West Coast pattern resembled the fitness-to-rule complex of Caribbean peoples in their identification with aspects of their British heritage and its dialect and tastes, a heritage that they knew would gain them credibility in an academia that feared and still fears local minority intellectuals. He assumed that the American spirit was good even while conceding that there weren't many good Americans over thirty. After he moved from Chicago to Santa Cruz his colleagues asked me, at various conferences after they had discovered that I had been his advisee, how a forthright black person like myself hadn't put him straight on a huge number of things. They said he exercised a major voice while close to retirement. My response was that ours was one of those complex relationships and we were moving in different directions and parted company amicably.

Schneider's nature and culture view of kinship replaced culture categories and offered no useful methodology to African Americans. His attitudes were a kind of ethnic hero worship, a set of attitudes about America that were surely not shared, at least not openly, by others on the Chicago faculty. He also understood that blacks had different goals and aspirations, but thought that these were probably ideas of the oppressed that would quickly vanish when they got to his California heaven. Describing a performance by John Coltrane, the tenor saxophonist, that he attended in Chicago, he commented on its anger and dismissed my hearing of its spirituality.⁵ I had just returned from California when I entered Chicago in 1965 and had never seen a place where the races associated [End Page 227] less and condemned each other so openly (this was just after the 1964 Olympics in Los Angeles and the Black Panther activism that shortly followed). Schneider had a deep and confident voice and air and loved to talk about his days on the Santa Cruz coast in the military as an armed guard.

Perhaps his most significant contribution to the Monday afternoon seminars, which Chicago held to introduce visiting speakers, was frequently expressing the opinion that the politics of the profession always takes precedence over truth. This explained to me his unwillingness to respect applied anthropology or any other humanistic trends. Anthropology was for Schneider becoming the study of finding truth through politics and power. He was unwilling to listen when others told him that his ideas would set conflicts in motion that would hurt the weak and the poor just as had the alleged social sciences of Germany and Russia. He enjoyed the support of Ortner (1972, 1984) and others who interpreted his nature and culture distinction in terms of conflict between the sexes. Schneider continually reminded me that women only listen to power. He had a right to think and say that, I suppose, but this was only shadow-boxing. All over academia there was an assumption that women were poised to advance. Scholars making alliances with feminists were not warriors in a battle with risks; they were cashing in their chips at the bank. Later this "power is truth" group of feminists and others led Schneider's dedication night at the aaa—an all-white podium.

Schneider would not receive my criticism that there was a danger of excessive commitment to any technological development. He was extremely positive on the suburban way of life despite its spreading pollution problems. His anthropology was not to be directly critical of central tendencies of white America. I was already wondering how long the West could use its technology to bully a position of leadership for itself. Schneider also did not question basic ethnic loyalties. His use of in-group language dialect with Jewish acquaintances was understandably related to the continuing oppression of Jews in academia. But use of in-group language does not negate oppression or create equality. Lévi-Strauss once asked me which members of the Chicago faculty were and were not Jewish. Shocked by his question, I answered that I did not always know. Lévi-Strauss then said, "these styles are impossible for me, I am quite French."

Schneider's model for the Jews seemed utterly inapplicable for minorities and explains his search for immigrants of color to compensate for his flight from American historical minorities. His inability to face the aspirations of our historical minorities was usual in the sixties and seventies. [End Page 228] His scholarly work offered no methodology that included the wealth of ideas held by non-whites on social relationships. Instead he argued that kinship was another false religion (Schneider 1984) that has many forms and is power based.

My comments on Schneider should not leave the impression that we did not have an interesting relationship. He was a very thorough critic of British social anthropology and helped make the French structuralists and other European scholarly schools more acceptable in the United States (Schneider 1964). He was interested in people's ability to make numerous kinship distinctions, but he did not approve of the potent approach of Lounsbury and Scheffler (see Scheffler and Lounsbury 1971) that makes easy sense of the ways that Brazilians tell us that they choose their terms for kin. One of his most useful methodological pieces, "What Should Be Included in a Vocabulary of Kinship Terms?" (1970), grew out of discussions that I had with him during a reading course in my second year, and the "vocabulary of kinship terms" was my suggestion in those discussions; a suggestion I made a basis of my own research. The article does not mention my contribution. He paid for my trip to a conference on kinship theories in the South Seas at Santa Cruz, where he noticed that I was more interested in the ideas of the participants than in the weather or the women. Santa Cruz was his heaven. For me it was just a place, misty and damp; nearby Fort Ord was just as interesting, and far more integrated (these were the days of Vietnam). It is amazing how much credit Schneider got by criticizing the creative efforts of others. Sherwood Lingenfelter (1985) has harshly criticized Schneider's Yap ethnographic material; perhaps there were regional variants of the same attitudes at play there.⁶

Clifford Geertz was a top-down thinker in virtually every way. We became acquainted through my serving briefly as his teaching assistant in late 1966. He wanted students to follow his lead, at the beginning at least; his research suggested that most ideas, values, and innovations filter down from the elite levels of society to the peasants and the workers, and these processes were analogous to his model of academia. Redfield's Great and Little Traditions (Redfield 1960; Geertz 1960) were not separate in his eyes. Geertz's Great Tradition was the prime mover whether it was prijaji aristocrats or settled santri Muslim traders directing peasant consciousness from above. The abangan peasant tradition, with its solidarity ritual, the selamatan, was the recipient (see Geertz 1960). Strangely, the approbation that he found outside the department among students, who filled his classes from all areas of the University, was far more restrained among Chicago's anthropology graduate students, who [End Page 229] were overawed by his strong scholarly credentials. He did not create a theoretical or methodological school of his own, and soon moved far beyond his initial concerns.

Geertz's study of Moroccan Islam centered on the kingship. Muslims in Morocco and Java patterned their faith on the royal culture; Geertz saw little room for popular movements affecting royal patterns. In Bali, his next major fieldwork, kingship had a similar role (see 1968, 1980; comp. Barth 1993). Early on, my readings found scholars, often from Indonesia, who distrusted Geertz's ideas about this unidirectional pattern of culture change. These doubts came together in the well-annotated work of Mark Woodward (1989), who shows that as in most areas of the Muslim world, Sufism is a system with appeal among peasants and rural tribesman that nobility have to be quick to accommodate (see Levtzion and Fisher 1986). Islam's appeal to universalistic human values of equality before God and brother- and sisterhood were a driving force among Muslims that has even spread to non-Muslims apart from any political system, as has the veneration of the prophet Muhammad (see Schimmel 1975, 1985). Even James Scott's (1976, 1985) discussions around the same time of peasant moral economy and weapons of the weak tend to look at peasant behaviors as responses or resistance, rather than as at the creative forefront of change. It is certainly easier to collect data from peasants about how they deal with their elite than to attend social action gatherings in mosques, prayer halls, and impromptu gatherings, but I am surprised at how few colleagues actually attend this kind of gathering. Some have studied Muslims without ever attending prayers or listening to the related speech at Friday communal prayers—although anyone, Muslim or not, may attend these gatherings in most localities.

Sidestepping issues of peasant revolution and the Marxist intellectual camp, in the 1960s and 1970s discussions about Southeast Asian cultures hinged on the manipulation of the peasantry by distinct elites. Nationalisms became manipulative inventions and reinventions by these elites (see Anderson 1983; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). The extent to which anthropologists identified with Asian elites by studying them and their more or less successful cooptation of the poor is startling since fieldwork had long been the life blood of the field, but times were changing. The same emphasis on political leaders in recent terrorism, whether in Ireland, Israel, or Iraq, has turned out to be a hollow exercise, since terrorist acts seem to emerge spontaneously from the grass roots. Leadership elites cannot turn them on or off.

If Schneider was the outsider boring his way into the mainstream, Geertz wanted to create an anthropology that could be influential with [End Page 230] policy makers. But his goals were not always clear. He found one after another reason to impugn local traditional elites and to consider their behavior similar to past European patterns. Compare the scholarship on Bali of John Stephen Lansing (1974, 1995) with the theater-state paradigm offered by Geertz. One is top-down and the other bottom-up. Lansing helps the Balinese use their calendar system to solve problems of drought. Lansing's work is egalitarian in that the two peoples put their heads together and come up with a solution to a problem for both of them, an intellectual and humanitarian one for Lansing and a matter of survival for the Balinese involved in his project. His first monograph about the Balinese conceptions of evil (1974) is fascinating as is his summary monograph, The Balinese (1995). Geertz's images of Bali are often fanciful. They are more than "romantic," as Boon (1977) suggests. Having observed a Balinese cockfight and a full funeral with cremation, I would have handled the write-up quite differently, even though I concede that these events are memorable and transfixing. The Balinese were extremely kind to me, perhaps because my phenotype suggests the slave trade, of which, like my own group, they were victims for centuries (Reid 1988:129–146, esp. 133; Sullivan 1982). Barth (1993) and his wife, Umi Wikan (1990), brought some ground-level specificity to discussions of Balinese ceremonialism and present a more detailed treatment of the relationship of ritual to daily life there, and are a necessary supplement to the Geertz works on Bali.

I recall on one of my trips to Bali (this one in the 1980s, with my family) getting in a taxi with the family and talking to the cabbie in Indonesian. Once he determined that I was more fluent than my wife (whom he called "Mem" and "Vrou") he began telling amusing stories, as often happens with cabbies everywhere. I asked him about Kuta Beach, the place popular with nude white bathers and the site of the recent terrorist bombings. He told me "Brother, stay away. There's trouble brewing there." The driver agreed to take me to the stone ruins near the beach but not to the beach itself. Whites had already worn out their welcome there, but the locals could not expel them because their friends were making a good living exploiting the "girls have sex more readily on vacation" syndrome that we all should urge our daughters to avoid. Colin Turnbull had told me about these attitudes and even written about them, but Europeans and Americans often have had trouble understanding that they have worn out their welcome long ago in these cultural wonderlands. As an African American, I have usually been regarded abroad as part of an inchoate nation that is somehow not fully responsible for the attitudes and behaviors of Americans abroad. [End Page 231]

Tearful memories of enslavement, passed down orally, deeply penetrate the consciousness of the peoples that were its victims centuries ago. In Southeast Asia, they often do not deny or attempt to deny this unfortunate aspect of their pasts. African Americans are often surprised by this and will even ask if they should or can date and get serious with Southeast Asian women. The slave trade across the Pacific to Africa and within Asia has provided a medium for equality and intermarriage. This is something that several years' residence in Asia teaches. I gave a grandfather in Sabah a Paul Robeson cd recently and he cried as he put it on. Once I suggested to a Sabah resident that the Orang Suluk and Bajau (trading peoples living in boats) were black because of a New Guinea strain. They laughed. That and Africa, they said.

But Geertz was and is a transfixing lecturer and a wonderful discussant of issues in private. He is able to see social issues from sides that students do not, and even when his writings did not reflect it I became convinced that he hoped for a better world for tomorrow and thought that the American middle class had to be moved there in stages. I always sought out his ideas, in articles and books I collected and often chuckled about. In his many articles he often concedes that the best anthropology consists of fieldwork at the grass-roots level. I doubt that he is amused by one after another top-down approach by fieldworkers who use interpreters and do not spend the usual half year or so fumbling around before reaping the reward of speaking the local language. In our final contacts before his death, Geertz said that he was aware of and troubled by the problems raised here. He was preparing an essay on diversity to address them.

Fred Eggan was an important part of my intellectual development at Chicago. Schneider considered Eggan old-fashioned and uncreative. As much as that may have been true from Schneider's perspective, I remember Eggan's great tolerance for innovation even though he was hard to convince. He taught us to be clear about our data and methodology. He insisted that we tell what we were not collecting as well as what we were collecting, and urged us to conclude papers with a question for further thought and research, beyond the paper itself. We should criticize ourselves brutally, as Eggan often did our papers and in completing his own published work. No wonder Eggan is so frequently mentioned in the new world of ethnic studies departments and programs: he did not exile himself, and he was acutely aware of the potential of anthropology to be a weapon of domination but had a faith in empirical research to interpret and reinterpret evidence of the senses. Eggan loved people, all of them, and had much the feeling of an orchestra leader or a general who happily sees disparate groups, men and women, working together well. [End Page 232]

I met several other professors at Chicago who influenced my later work. Melford Spiro was interested in applying psychiatry to ethnographic materials. He showed me that since people are all one species their behavioral forms have inevitable consequences for human feelings and impulses. I have thought that finding some patterns of positive affect—that is, cooperation and protectiveness—among non-human species is a logical extension of his work. Spiro's work on Burma, although not exciting, was stimulating, as was his rewriting of the Trobriand material (1967, 1970, 1982). Paul Friedrich was another positive influence. He used a variety of historical and linguistic methods to wring new insights out of old sources. He loved methodological consistency and candid admissions of the difficulty of proceeding within one's own guidelines. I particularly have enjoyed his classic The Meaning of Aphrodite (1978).

Manning Nash and I did not get along. We squabbled after he called a Chinese-Malaysian girl whom he did not know impossibly vulgar names in Alor Setar, Kedah, and I had to apologize for the University of Chicago, even going to the Chief Kathi (religious official), whom I had known when he was a local kathi in Sik, where I did kinship fieldwork. I never forgot Nash's crude feeling that everything in Malaysia was inferior to the West. Perhaps he shared Schneider's hero worship of WASP culture, but there are some things one never does. Nash considered Islam crude Judaism for nomads. Non-subservient blacks were always angry in his view. I wonder what he would have responded had I shown him a recording of his unprovoked outburst in Alor Setar. Besides these personal issues I always found Nash's writings simplistic, although sometimes amusing.

One of the pleasures of studying at a great university is meeting scholars informally. This is how I met Milton Friedman, the economic historian from Brooklyn. Staff of the department introduced me to him as someone looking for a tutor in economic theory. Instead of recommending someone else, Professor Friedman asked me why I wanted to understand economics and I told him about my disappointing experience at Brooklyn College.⁷ He assigned me economic history texts to read and said that his father, like mine, also had trouble with doing honest business. I felt forever strengthened and continued with his reading list years later. His influence with governments must have been through his ability to make complicated specialized jargon approachable by common people and leaders. He was a wonderful teacher who didn't waste a minute with trivia and concentrated upon the crux of an economic matter. He made his political choices obvious without discussing them. There was a spiritual side to the man that endeared him to me. [End Page 233]

I also met and had a pleasant relationship with Elizabeth (G. E. M.) Anscombe, who was then a research fellow at Oxford on leave at Chicago before her election to a Cambridge philosophy professorship in 1970. She and I would match wits at her apartment amidst her children on topics related to her interest in justifications for faith in God. She was a Catholic and had quite a few children despite living apart from her husband, Peter Geach, another prominent philosopher. She liked to smoke cigars and drink small amounts of strong liquor. Elizabeth taught me that even the simplest experiences are related to many different patterns of thought, and that interviewing people will help us to understand these complex interrelationships, but our informants' ideas should not become a utopian place for us to hide. She thought that using power or sexual motives to help us to understand behavior is a self-delusion that analytical philosophy could readily expose. We must ask what underlying ideas we have about who we are and where we are going, and question these using the analytical method. She hoped that I would leave Chicago and take a degree in Oxford anthropology. Friends in New York thought that I would never figure the British scholarly scene out, but Elizabeth laughed that this was an advantage since people would have to tell me what they meant and their fundamental premises. There would be no assumptions. She also introduced me to her daughter my own age, a nurse practitioner, whom I later saw socially in London. Elizabeth was offended by racial violations of human rights and thought that people should live together amicably despite superficial differences like race and gender. She taught me to question myself and my ideas, as had Eggan. She liked to take me to dinner at the faculty club that, she said, had not previously admitted blacks.

Power, Truth, and Gender

The sixties was the decade when politics became a controlling model for social anthropology, replacing social structure. Life was seen as a struggle for power. Most people have little idea how extreme the political determinism of many modern anthropologists can be. I learned more about this while taking a summer seminar—Modern Asian Literatures in Translation—at the University of Michigan in 1992. In the view of textual analysts and their postmodern, anthropological followers, thought is only significant as political text; politics becomes a synonym for reality. For these scholars, other ways of considering observed materials are unscientific, backward, and useless. All cultural forms are only considered when reduced to text. There are no values, only poles in a constantly changing [End Page 234] set of processes of conflict revealed through textual analyses. These ideas developed from the rather more empirical ethnographic structuralism of Lévi-Strauss, followed by various post-structural and postmodern trends that include the ethnographer in the same matrix of power and conflict as the informant. In my view, studying power relations as the essential feature of social and cultural order has the effect of dignifying power, the weapon of the strong against the weak. Anthropology then becomes a broker defining real and potential conflicts; its information and analyses encourage those who would exploit conflict such as the world arms industry—power brokers are usual villains in influential Southeast Asian literature (Banks 1987, 2006).

Anthropology's debates after the 1960s no longer honored the special place of the informant, her feelings, and her complex predispositions to act, but instead looked—either from textual materials or other structures—for the most powerful hegemonic and global forces controlling the relations among observed people and between observer and observed. Anthropological studies showed that local oppression reflected global practices. Foreigners, including anthropologists, are merely border crossers in a global matrix of power. In public debates, power as a dimension of all social relationships is often confused with the political order. It is no wonder that both globalization and postmodernism have become such controversial and despised (they would say contested) concepts everywhere but the West. With globalization Westerners are equal with foreigners everywhere; national loyalties are either fantasies or tactics to ensnare the poor in their matrices of power.

The patterns that I describe coincide in time with the emergence of academic feminism as a major force shaping anthropology, and the common feminism of white Americans fit the same mold. Their assumption that physical sexuality is largely a competitive political struggle, found in the books of Helen Fisher (1992, 1999) for example, does not have a goal but rather adopts the capitalist model that competition works. Power was the overt and covert agenda of the emerging feminism, not making better or happier individuals, families, or homes. This privileging of power consequently downplays cooperation, compatibility, romance, and other such motivations—romantics were and still are frowned upon in feminist circles—in favor of competition and conflict. I guess this is why so many feminists had histories of cozying up to the powerful and challenging the weak. Western feminist claims to leadership in the struggle for gender equality have made them hated abroad in many places, and minority intellectuals have usually distanced themselves from this brand of feminism.⁸ [End Page 235]

American Anthropology versus the World

When a student of mine, ignoring my advice, attempted to find out whether ritual payments in Sumatra really did constitute a weapon that preserved patronage relationships and strengthened them as the post-modernist theories of the time suggested, villagers held a meeting and decided to poison him, we later learned. I had spent a considerable time trying to convince the student before he went to the field that he would be in danger if he tried to apply this methodology. Other anthropologists have been shot, beaten, etc., for similar misguided projects. Countries have begun expelling and refusing re-entry to anthropologists at the behest of the peoples studied. These governments can argue that it is their duty under the un human rights charter to respect the wishes of their constituent peoples. Anthropologists are shocked to find that people they have considered friends abroad are often waiting for someone to talk to—about them. I have been approached several times in Malaysia. I am sometimes asked whether the white anthropologist treats me any better than she or he treats them. These commentators rarely think that I will be surprised at their comments anymore. After all, they have gotten used to what is for them the unemotional style of Western backbiting, forbidden in Islam. My pain at home is their pain abroad. The issue here cuts to the heart of the interaction patterns between peoples and the kinds of scholarly interactions that are acceptable and honorable.

There was no model during the sixties and seventies of a worldwide anthropology emerging that ensured an active presence for weaker non-sponsored peoples in the field. Sol Tax's vision of a democratic and worldwide anthropological discussion was looked at with skepticism, even though it reached its height at the 1973 International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences held in Chicago (Stocking 2000). Schneider commented that the Congress would be a zoo that he had no intention of attending. Tax was concerned with world anthropological participation as well as recording of the world's vanishing cultural heritages. Anthropology was rapidly defining itself as a post-colonial discipline that did not take nationalism or national boundaries as basic building blocks. White American intellectual nationalism had exercised a subtle domination through its emphasis upon the dynamics of power as a necessary force, explaining interaction patterns in field situations—and perhaps, more subtly, explaining their own acquiescence in American arms sales abroad.

Anthropological theories seldom honored the concept of a people building up rights in a land, and when they did they tended to limit it to [End Page 236] aboriginal peoples. Such a conception would require representation for all of a nation's peoples in all scholarly areas. Without such a conception exchanges between scholars across national borders would become dangerous, as Western conceptions of postmodernism and globalization denigrated governments in other parts of the world. Previously, a scholar traveling abroad could be seen as part of an exchange, but true exchanges became increasingly clouded and one-directional.

I feel that minority anthropologists at Chicago and other departments did have an impact on the development of anthropology after the seventies. This impact, however, was largely outside the mainstream since their work suggested very different directions from that of the white majority. Once black anthropologists had rejected the top-down study of power as the central contribution of anthropology to the study of primitive, peasant and modern peoples, the white center developed elaborate defenses of that position. These defenses allowed for a non-racist but nonetheless all-white anthropology, and led to the ironic conclusion that the least culture bound of the social sciences could exclude on the grounds of cultural difference, in the guise of quality; the ruling cliques in journals rejected articles as not germane or poorly supported. Schneider and Geertz knew early of this minority rejection of the power model, and nevertheless began its implementation. For Schneider there was no kinship, even though some idea like it is easily translated into most languages. Why refine it or confront its cultural nuances? After all, they—"the natives" as he called them—are often deluded. The divorce from the historical minorities, who did not think or act at all like the white anthropologists' immigrant fore-fathers, continues. These minorities believed—and believe—that their ideas should receive recognition and support even though they are not part of the white mainstream.

Many forces contributed to this outcome. The mainstream studies were easy to carry out and involved less empathy with local moral attitudes and values. Scholars were largely secularists who accepted the Newtonian boundary between body and mind, and their approaches tended to ignore studies of "how culture works" that attempted to include corporeal and biological dimensions.⁹ Aesthetic areas, central to many people's self-definition, were hardly approached apart from their power dimension, although they are rich in potential for model building. For example, African American fascination with the middle of a performance, in jazz and blues, and not its beginning and ending, provide a clear contrast with singing or playing closed songs as in country and "pop" music. This study could lead one toward the analogues of African American music in [End Page 237] Sufi chanting, etc. and even in ways of approaching social situations and moral dilemmas.

The major challenges that anthropology faces continue to involve the ability to present an outsider's perspective on a culture while honoring those cultures by allowing their intellectuals to participate in the world movement of cultural anthropology on an equal basis. Chicago did not clearly face this challenge—and no African American anthropologists trained at Chicago have moved on to positions of leadership in the discipline—nor has the profession truly faced it in the decades since the 1960s.

Conclusions: Antinomianism versus Human Rights and the Possible

The sixties at Chicago saw the growth of trends in anthropology that were soon to deemphasize inclusion and move in a more closed theoretical direction. This had some ironic results. Schneider, a major figure in American kinship studies, declared that family concepts were less important than study of the dilemmas of individuals in their universal quests for power. People were living in a bubble that was far more closed off from the rest of the animal world than it had ever been before, and even behavioral observations of restraint and affection among people and lower animal forms were seen as aspects of a quest for power. Anthropology's theories began to approach antinomianism, hated by the monotheistic religions: the ideology that evil is just a word in pursuit of self-interest and has no real analytical place in understanding the human condition.

Minority scholars were instead moving toward human rights as a revisable standard in which good and evil receive clear definitions and separation. Cultural studies should cast light upon the dilemmas of human rights, even when these dilemmas were perceived through other eyes, in other times and places. Minority studies also showed great interest in areas in which non-Western peoples had taken the lead in understanding some common problem that might imply different directions for change: anthropology could become the study of the possible. Majority group anthropologists were moving in a completely different direction, one that cast doubt upon cherished social institutions like the family, religious worship, and the bases of human sexuality. Western cultural anthropology pursued a series of Euro-American agendas that marginalized non Western intellectuals and intellectualism save as they were incorporated into what was seen as a permanent Western hegemony. Emphases on power and conflict clearly pleased arms lobbyists, but anthropologists have become less and less influential at home and abroad. They have [End Page 238] moved into a kind of self-contained intellectual oblivion; minority anthropologists warned them of this four decades ago.

Minority anthropology was and is going in other directions. Minorities were studying the little person from the bottom up, and took an intense interest in local responses to legal and political trends that they saw as outside of their communities and experiences. For example, my own study of Malay kinship at the village level was an attempt to start at the village level and move on to the ways that Malay intellectuals had tackled similar data from their own experiences. My work with Malay novels showed that we shared a common desire to understand Malayness and its nationalistic expressions in terms of the life of the poor peasant (Banks 1983, 1987). Walker investigated the common affects of trance in ritual experiences in Africa and among African Americans (1972). She remained active in pursuing the cultural uniqueness of African American identities (Walker 2001). Daniels has done important work on Muslim movements in Malaya that attempt to revitalize the practice and experience of Islamic religiosity through consciousness of Islam's role in Malay ethnicity (2005). Daniels's work, along with my own articles and more recent essays, attempt to define Islamic piety in local terms, apart from the theological treatises or syariah law (Banks 1990, 2006).

These brief examples do not suggest a completely different minority or African American anthropology but they do suggest interests rarely shared by the majority. When I mention projects to white scholars interested in religion that involve patterns of guilt, I often get yawns unless I make the power dynamics of worship central rather than aspects of productivity and creativity; guilty people are often thought less productive and if that is a problem for them, it surely is interesting to me. Senior Asia scholars are not and never were bored with such issues.

Power models really only observe and describe. They tell us at least as much about the observer as the observed. I also feel that the Newtonian division between levels, implicit in Parsons's and other models that Schneider considered part of his basic social science, is no longer useful in the age of developed quantum theory. Quantum studies confront the failure of classical physics to offer useful predictions in the subatomic world. These studies imply models of wholeness, far closer to social structuralism's consensus theories of the mid-twentieth century than to the conflict or opposition-dominated work of later decades (see Sherden 1998). The concepts of wave function and the particle/wave duality of light and other forms of energy that flowed from quantum research suggest uncertainty, suspicion about attempts at methodological consistency and [End Page 239] prediction. Newtonian determinism is obsolete in the new science; subatomic behavior suggests free will. Physicists have taken the lead in going back to William James's attacks on social science's reductionism, and urge a movement in social science back to a kind of less theoretical relativistic description that states its premises (see Stapp 1993). F. David Peat (1994, 2002a, 2002b), a prominent quantum physicist, has written two historical ethnographies suggesting that ideas analogous to those of the new science were present among primitive and ancient peoples. Both of these authors conclude that humans have the potential to take charge of and change our world for the better. There is no reason to regard power and its manipulation as worthy of such a huge professional investment.

Susan Strehle (1992) suggests that a quantum ideology and worldview permeates the novels of Thomas Pynchon, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, and Margaret Atwood, among others. Strehle, in putting fiction's Newtonian past on the obsolete shelf, quotes Norman Mailer that reality "is no longer realistic." Some Malay novelists lectured me on their new fiction methods, as they called them: no main characters, no theories or forces driving the plot forward. Everyone in these novels counts equally. Understanding some aspects of the subatomic world and its likely relation to consciousness and thought processes suggests a broader, more open anthropology that is not dominated by any clique or sense that we are soon on the way to methodological completeness. The world is whole. Theories are not. Let's all be tolerant and try to comprehend each other.

In summary, when I consider the impact of my intellectual experience at Chicago from my entry in Fall 1965 to my graduation with a PhD in December 1969, I can only conclude that it had less of an effect on later commitments than my field experience in Malaysia, which had begun with a junket there as student leader in the summer of 1965. In Malaysia, I was able to enter a new world of ideas relevant to my own and to revise the understanding of morality and society that I had learned previously. Deeply religious before going there, I adopted a new religion in Malaysia, Islam, which I first took on as a moral and intellectual commitment but eventually as a deeply felt religious practice. My adopting Islam has been more like a return than a conversion. I did not feel comfortable with studies of power, conflict, and competition—or any studies that I thought related to them.¹⁰ I have not found such studies of much interest among minority colleagues, who will include these aspects but not make them central. Perhaps it relates to the Christian spiritual line "I'm not going to study war no more."

The reason that Euro-American colleagues and some teachers moved in the power, conflict, and difference direction seems to be the different [End Page 240] points of cultural origin that have made these ideas and methodologies related to them more comfortable and acceptable. As Milton Friedman told me, economics is an important tool that need not dominate our lives or way of thinking beyond it.¹¹ My interest in the new science reflects the multiple perspectives that it implies, which bring back the kind of thick descriptions that Geertz (1993) considered to be a basic element of anthropology, as had Boas and his students. The severely self-critical attitude that I have seen in anthropology has led us to adapt the field to a narrow set of ideas rather than to accept the commitments that emerge from the cultural backgrounds of members of other groups.