Anthropos: Anthropos, 100.2005

Anthropos, 100.2005

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Zeitschrift

Strukturtyp:: Zeitschrift

Werks-URN (URL):: https://digi.evifa.de/viewer/resolver?urn=urn:nbn:de:kobv:11-714820

URN:: urn:nbn:de:kobv:11-714820

Persistenter Identifier:: BV043334262

Titel:: Anthropos

Erscheinungsort:: Fribourg

Verlag:: Ed. St. Paul

Erscheinungsjahr:: 1906

Sammlung:: Zeitschriften und Zeitungen > Zeitschriften zur Ethnologie

Wissensgebiet:: Sozial- und Kulturanthropologie > Allgemeines

Zeitschriftenband

Strukturtyp:: Zeitschriftenband

Werks-URN (URL):: https://digi.evifa.de/viewer/resolver?urn=urn:nbn:de:kobv:11-711755

URN:: urn:nbn:de:kobv:11-711755

Persistenter Identifier:: 1510223378432

Titel:: Anthropos, 100.2005

Erscheinungsjahr:: 2005

Signatur:: LA 1118

Sammlung:: Zeitschriften und Zeitungen > Zeitschriften zur Ethnologie

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Strukturtyp:: Zeitschriftenheft

Titel:: Bd. 100, 2005, Heft 1

Sammlung:: Zeitschriften und Zeitungen > Zeitschriften zur Ethnologie

Zeitschriftenartikel

Strukturtyp:: Zeitschriftenartikel

Titel:: Capturing Emergent Forms

Sonstige Person:: Crapanzano, Vincent

Sammlung:: Zeitschriften und Zeitungen > Zeitschriften zur Ethnologie

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

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