Berichte und Kommentare 
229 
Anthropos 100.2005 
Capturing Emergent Forms 
Vincent Crapanzano 
“Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological 
Voice” 1 is a sprawling, encyclopedic work that at 
tests to Michael Fischer’s impressive erudition, his 
openness to new modes of thought, his enthusiastic 
commitment to a critical anthropology that is not 
stuck in a world gone by but immersed in one that 
is always on the verge - emergent, Fischer would 
say - and, therefore, risky in itself and in its (self-) 
representation and (self-) interpretation. He argues 
extravagantly that the anthropologist finds him or 
herself in a unique position to meet the challenge 
to understanding posed by the postmodern world. 
This challenge requires being able to work in techno- 
scientific imaginaries and infrastructures through mul 
tiple temporalities, cycles of political economy, and 
reconstructions of social arrangements across local and 
global expanses, as well as deploying and critiqu 
ing new, lively, metaphor-rich languages and semiotic 
skeins that arise from and articulate new cultural ex 
pressions, understandings, and forms of mediation. Such 
ethnographic work can help clarify emergent forms of 
life for which conventional ethical gui deposts from the 
past are not always sufficient, and while we have run 
out of “giving grounds” ... we can nonetheless watch 
ourselves perform ungrounded ways of acting that have 
both social and ethical weight and consequences (176). 
Does anthropology, we might well ask, really 
afford any observer such a privileged position? 
What indeed is the virtue of such observation? Do 
we, as postmodern as we may be, ever really act 
in ungrounded ways? 
Though Fischer works hard to conjoin the var 
ious essays in this volume through reference to 
postmodemity - which he (181) understands as a 
marker of the late twentieth century, as a moment 
m modernity’s cycles of renewal and decay, and 
as characterized by “the juxtaposition of things, 
events, and experiences that once were separated 
by time and space” - he fails, as any postmod 
ernist would expect, to bring about conjunction. 
But to argue that Fischer’s failure is a result of 
the fractured metonymies of his chosen themes or, 
indeed, of the very circumstances in which he finds 
himself, would be to miss a far more mundane 
Point, and an inevitable discursive conundrum. As 
1 Fischer, Michael M. J.: Emergent Forms of Life and the 
Anthropological Voice. Durham: Duke University Press, 
2003. 478 pp. ISBN 0-8223-3238-8. Price: £ 18.50. 
for the first point, the essays in this collection are 
of varying style, significance, and quality. Fischer 
includes a brief, superficial speech he gave in 
Vienna at the time of Haider’s rise to power; a 
long bibliographic essay on late or post moder 
nities, first published in the 1999 in the Annual 
Review of Anthropology and, despite its admirable 
synthesis, already out-of-date; an overlong, though 
quite fascinating, compte rendu of his interviews 
with the psychiatrist printmaker Eric Avery; and 
what amounts to little more than a parochial and 
no doubt outdated description of a plan of study 
for a degree in Science, Technology, and Society at 
MIT, where Fischer teaches. These essays, which 
either do not belong in a collection that presumes 
longevity or require considerable editing, detract 
from his other, first-rate ones: on Iranian and Pol 
ish films, “technoscientific narratives” (roughly, 
literate, scientifically sophisticated science fiction), 
autobiography, cyberspace, and the unseemly re 
search carried out among the Yanomami by James 
Neel and Napoleon Chagnon. I do not fault Fischer 
for their inclusion (for what author has not lost 
editorial perspective in the desire to see his or 
her works published as fully as possible?) than 
the Press and the readers to whom the collection 
was sent for evaluation. Have university presses as 
fine as Duke’s simply become packaging houses? 
They do neither themselves nor their authors credit 
thereby. 
My second, theoretical point concerns the rela 
tionship between discursive conventions and styles 
and subject matter, which, though not highlight 
ed by Fischer (despite his frequent references to 
Benjamin, Derrida, and other deconstructivists) is 
central to a putatively postmodern, hyperreflexive 
sensibility. Need we write like “postmodernists” 
(whoever they are and however they write) in 
order to write about postmodernism? Must we put 
into question our authorial position? Our position 
as commentators? Indeed our authority? Must we 
continually announce, through stylistic twist and 
insistent hedges as well as nested epistemological 
anguishing, our self-critical reflexivity? We are 
certainly not the first age to recognize the artifice 
of our constructions and representations and the 
possibility, if not the fact, of their groundlessness. 
(Think of the baroque era, in which we are never 
quite sure whether the evocation of god, saint, or 
devil is a product of belief or a matter of rhetoric.) 
We may seemingly suffer greater epistemologi 
cal anxiety than these other ages and we may, 
as so frequently happens in American renditions 
of the Mallarmeean convolutions of Lacan’s or 
a Derrida’s ironic skepticism, seek solace if not