▪ Abstract A broad reflection on some of the major surprises to anthropological theory occasioned by the history, and in a number of instances the tenacity, of indigenous cultures in the twentieth century. We are not leaving the century with the same ideas that got us there. Contrary to the inherited notions of progressive development, whether of the political left or right, the surviving victims of imperial capitalism neither became all alike nor just like us. Contrary to the “despondency theory” of mid-century, the logical and historical precursor of dependency theory, surviving indigenous peoples aim to take cultural responsibility for what has been done to them. Across large parts of northern North America, even hunters and gatherers live, largely by hunting and gathering. The Eskimo are still there, and they are still Eskimo. Around the world the peoples give the lie to received theoretical oppositions between tradition and change, indigenous culture and modernity, townsmen and tribesmen, and other clichés of the received anthropological wisdom. Reports of the death of indigenous cultures—as of the demise of anthropology—have been exaggerated.

INTRODUCTION

Dare to know! But from what intellectual bondage would anthropology need to liberate itself in our times? No doubt from a lot of inherited ideas, including sexism, positivism, geneticism, utilitarianism, and many other such dogmas of the common average native Western folklore posing as universal understandings of the human condition. I do not presume to talk of all these things, but only of the civilizing theory which Kant responded to his famous question, what is Enlightenment? (1983 [1794]). For him, the question became how, by the progressive use of our reason, can we escape from barbarism?

But what kind of progressive anthropology was this? We are still struggling with what seemed like Enlightenment to the philosophers of the eighteenth century but turned out to be a parochial self-consciousness of European expansion and the mission civilisatrice. Indeed civilization was a word the philosophes invented—to refer to their own society, of course. Following on Condorcet, the perfectibility they thus celebrated became in the nineteenth century a progressive series of stages into which one could fit—or fix—the various non-Western peoples. Nor was the imperialism of the past two centuries, crowned by the recent global victory of capitalism, exactly designed to reduce the enlightened contrasts between the West and the rest. On the contrary, the ideologies of modernization and development that trailed in the wake of Western domination took basic premises from the same old philosophical regime. Even the left-critical arguments of dependency and capitalist hegemony could come to equally dim views of the historical capacities of indigenous peoples and the vitalities of their cultures. In too many narratives of Western domination, the indigenous victims appear as neo-historyless peoples: their own agency disappears, more or less with their culture, the moment Europeans irrupt on the scene.

WHAT IS NOT TOO ENLIGHTENING

Certain illusions born of the Western self-consciousness of civilization have thus proved not too enlightening. Worked up into academic gazes of other peoples, they became main issues with which modern anthropology has contended, sometimes to no avail. In the interest of examining the contention, I briefly examine this anthropological vision of the Other.

First, the set of defects that make up the historyless character of indigenous cultures—in obvious contrast to progressiveness of the West. Indeed Margaret Jolly (1992) notes that when we change it's called progress, but when they do—notably when they adopt some of our progressive things—it's a kind of adulteration, a loss of their culture. But then, before we came upon the inhabitants of the Americas, Asia, Australia, or the Pacific islands, they were pristine and aboriginal. It is as if they had no historical relations with other societies, were never forced to adapt their existence, the one to the other. As if they had no experience constructing their own mode of existence out of their dependency on peoples—not to mention imperious forces of nature—over which they had no control. Rather, until Europeans appeared, they were isolated—which just means that we weren't there. They were remote and unknown—which means they were far from us, and we were unaware of them. (My lamented colleague Sharon Stephens used to introduce her lectures on Vico by noting that though it is often said that Vico lived an obscure life, I'm sure it didn't look that way to him.) Hence, the history of these societies only began when Europeans showed up: an epiphanal moment, qualitatively different from anything that had gone before and culturally devastating. Supposedly the historical difference with everything pre-colonial was power. Exposed and subjected to Western domination, the less powerful peoples were destined to lose their cultural coherence—as well as the pristine innocence for which Europeans, incomplete and sinful progeny of Adam, so desired them. Of course, as Renato Rosaldo (1989) reminds us, the imperialists have no one to blame for their arcadian nostalgias but themselves. Nor should anything I say here be taken as a denial of the terror that Western imperialism has inflicted on so many peoples, or that so many have gone to the wall.

Accordingly, a main academic consequence of the cultural shock and psychological anomie inflicted by the West was the despondency theory that became popular in the mid-twentieth century. Despondency theory was the logical precursor of dependency theory. But as it turned out—when the surviving victims of imperialism began to seize their own modern history—despondency was another not terribly enlightening idea of the power of Western civilization. Here is a good example from AL Kroeber's great 1948 textbook, Anthropology:

With primitive tribes, the shock of culture contact is often sudden and severe. Their hunting lands or pastures may be taken away or broken under the plow, their immemorial customs of blood revenge, head-hunting, sacrifice, marriage by purchase or polygamy be suppressed. Despondency settles over the tribes. Under the blocking-out of all old established ideals and prestiges, without provision for new values and opportunities to take their place, the resulting universal hopelessness will weigh doubly heavy because it seems to reaffirm inescapable frustration in personal life also. (Kroeber 1948:437–38)

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A corollary of despondency theory was that the others would now become just like us—if they survived. Of course the Enlightenment had already prepared this eventuality by insisting on the universality of human reason and progress: a course of development that would be good—in all senses of the term—for the human species as such and as a whole. The unilinear evolutionism of the nineteenth century was a logical anthropological sequitur to this enlightened sense of universal rationality. Everyone would have to go through the same sequence of development. In his Primitive Culture of 1870, EB Tylor showed what doom was in store for the appreciation of cultural diversity by endorsing, as an appropriate procedure for constructing the stages of cultural evolution, Dr. Johnson's immortal observation that “one set of savages is like another” (Tylor 1903, 1:6). In any case, to get back to other peoples now confronted by Western civilization, Marx likewise supposed that the country that is more developed industrially only shows to the less developed the image of its own future (1967:8–9). A late classic of the genre was Walt Rostow's Stages of Economic Growth (1960), with its unilinear sequence of five developmental stages from “traditional societies” to the “age of high mass consumption.” (Rostow must have been among the first to perceive that the culmination of human social evolution was shopping.) Explicitly argued as an alternative to Marxist stages of progress—the book's subtitle was A Non-Communist Manifesto—Rostow's thesis had all the character of a mirror image, including the effect of turning left into right. Also shared with many theories of development was Rostow's cheerful sense of cultural tragedy: the necessary disintegration of traditional societies that functioned, in Rostow's scheme, as a precondition for economic take-off. A further necessity was the foreign domination that could accomplish this salutary destruction; for otherwise, the customary relations of traditional production would set a ceiling on economic growth. By its own providential history, Europe had been able to develop itself, but according to Rostow other peoples would have to be shocked out of their backwardness by an intrusive alien force—guess who? No revolutionary himself, Rostow could agree with Marx that in order to make an omelette one must first crack the eggs. Interesting that many peoples now explicitly engaged in defending their culture against national and international domination—the Maya of Guatemala and the Tukanoans of Columbia, for example (Warren 1992, Watanabe 1995, Jackson 1995)—have distanced themselves both from the national-bourgeois Right and the international-proletarian Left, refusing the assimilationist pressures that would sacrifice their ethnicity to either the construction of the nation or the struggle against capitalist imperialism. Contrary to the evolutionary destiny the West had foreseen for them, the so-called savages will neither be all alike nor just like us.

In this vein, and as the century wears on, Max Weber's comparative project on the possibilities for capitalist development afforded by different religious ideologies seems increasingly bizarre. Not that it is bizarre to talk of the cosmological organization of pragmatic action, not by any means. What seems increasingly weird is the way Weberians became fixated on the question of why one society or another failed to achieve this summum bonum of human history—capitalism as we have known and loved it. When I was in China recently, the topic evoked a lot of Confucian. One American Sinologist said China during the Qing dynasty had come oh so close. Yet it all seems like asking why the New Guinea Highlanders failed to develop the spectacular potlatch of the Kwakiutl. This is a question the Kwakiutl social scientist could well ask, since with their elaborate pig exchange ceremonies the New Guineans had come so close. Nearer to the point—or perhaps it is the point—is the Christian missionaries' question of how it could be that Fijians in their natural state failed to recognize the true god. One might as well ask why European Christians did not develop the ritual cannibalism of Fijians. After all, they came so close.

Finally, what has not been too enlightening is the way anthropology in the era of late capitalism is made to serve as a redemptive cultural critique—a morally laudable analysis that can amount to using other societies as an alibi for redressing what has been troubling us lately. (There is a deep tradition here: Anthropology was also like that when it was coming of age in Samoa and elsewhere.) It is as if other peoples had constructed their lives for our purposes, in answer to racism, sexism, imperialism, and the other evils of Western society. The problem with such an anthropology of advocacy is not simply that arguments get judged by their morality, but that as a priori persuasive, morality gets to be the argument. The true and the good become one. Since the moral value is usually an external attribute supplied by (and for) the analyst, however, it is too easy to change the signs, which leads to some curious double-bind arguments of the no-win or no-lose variety.

Take the devastating effects of Western capitalist expansion, on one hand, and on the other the autonomous ordering of these effects by local peoples according to their own cultural lights. Opposed as they may be as empirical conclusions, both can be rejected on the same moral grounds—and often are. For to speak of the historical agency of indigenous peoples, true as it may be, is to ignore the tyranny of the Western world-system, thus to conspire intellectually in its violence and domination. Whereas, to speak of the systematic hegemony of imperialism, true as it may be, is to ignore the peoples' struggles for cultural survival, thus to conspire intellectually in Western violence and domination. Alternatively, we can make both global domination and local autonomy morally persuasive—that is, in favor of the peoples—by calling the latter resistance. This is a no-lose strategy since the two characterizations, domination and resistance, are contradictory and in some combination will cover any and every historical eventuality. Ever since Gramsci, posing the notion of hegemony has entailed the equal and opposite discovery of the resistance of the oppressed. Just so, the anthropologist who relates the so-called grand narrative of Western domination is also likely to invert it by invoking local discourses of cultural freedom. Cultural differences thrown out the front door by the homogenizing forces of world capitalism creep in the back in the form of an indigenous counterculture, subversion of the dominant discourse, or some such politics (or poetics) of indigenous defiance.

Local societies of the Third and Fourth Worlds do attempt to organize the irresistible forces of the world-system according to their own system of the world—in various forms and with varying success, depending on the nature of the indigenous culture and the mode of external domination. What is not too enlightening is the way that New Guinea pig feasting, Maori land claims, Zimbabwe medium cults, Brazilian workers' do-it-yourself-housing, Fijian exchange customs, and any number of determinate cultural forms are accounted for, to the anthropologist's satisfaction, by their moral-political implications. It is enough to show they are effects of or reactions to imperialist domination, as if their supposed hegemonic or counterhegemonic functions could specify their cultural contents. An acid bath of instrumentality, the procedure dissolves worlds of cultural diversity into the one indeterminate meaning. It is something like The Terror, as Sartre said of a certain crude materialism: an intellectual purge of the culture forms, marked by an inflexible refusal to differentiate. It consists of taking the actual cultural content for the mere appearance of a more profound and generic function—in this case, the political or power—and having thus dissolved the historically substantional in the instrumentally universal, we are pleased to believe we have reduced appearance to truth (Sartre 1963). So nowadays all culture is power. It used to be that everything maintained the social solidarity. Then for a while everything was economic or adaptively advantageous. We seem to be on a great spiritual quest for the purposes of cultural things. Or perhaps it is that those who do not know their own functionalism are condemned to repeat it.

UP THE INDIGENOUS CULTURE

So let me end what Stephen Greenblatt (1991) called sentimental pessimism, the encompassment of other people's lives in global visions of Western domination. Not that there is no such domination, only that there is also other people's lives. Accordingly, the rest of my paper is a little more upbeat, being a discussion of how several of the problems bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment have been raised to new levels of perplexity by the advance of anthropology, and more particularly by recent ethnographic experiences of indigenous modernities. Many of the peoples who were left for dead or dying by dependency theory we now find adapting their dependencies to cultural theories of their own. Confronted by cultural processes and forms undreamed of in an earlier anthropology, such as the integration of industrial technologies in indigenous sociologies and cosmologies, we are not leaving the twentieth century with the same ideas that got us there.

One of the surprises of late capitalism, for example, is that hunters and gatherers live—many of them—by hunting and gathering. As late as 1966, most people at the famous Man the Hunter conference in Chicago thought they were talking about a way of life as obsolete as that title sounds today.2Yet just a dozen years later, Richard Lee, one of the original conveners, remarked at another such conference: “Hunting is real. Hunting exists and hunting and gathering economies exist and this is to me a new fact in the modern world, because twelve years ago at the Man the Hunter conference we were writing an obituary on the hunters” (in Asch 1982:347). What Lee realized has not only been true of hunter-gatherers of Africa or Southeast Asia. All across the northern tier of the planet, scattered through the vast arctic and subarctic stretches of Europe, Siberia, and North America, hunting, fishing and gathering peoples have survived by harnessing industrial technologies to paleolithic purposes.

Nor is the survival of northern hunters a simple function of their isolation, since precisely their subsistence is dependent on modern means of production, transportation, and communication—rifles, snowmachines, motorized vessels and, at least in North America, CB radios and all-terrain vehicles—which means of existence they generally acquire by monetary purchase, which money they have acquired in a variety of ways ranging from public transfer payments and resource royalties to wage labor and commercial fishing. For upwards of 200 years, the Eskimo of Western and Northern Alaska (Yupik and Inupiat) have been engaged with the ever more powerful economic and political forces of world capitalist domination. You would have thought it was enough to undo them, at least culturally: the commercial whaling, fishing, and trapping and trading; the wage labor in jobs ranging from domestic service to construction of the DEW line and the pipeline; the missionization, education, and migration; the dependence on AFDC and Unemployment Compensation. To all this, the past 25 years added the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, followed by the formation of regional and local native corporations, followed by the spectacular exploitation of North Slope oil by powerful multinational corporations. If Eskimo have proven to be only pseudo-beneficiaries of these developments, it also seems they are only the pseudo-victims. However, I want to come back later to the Big Theoretical Issues raised by the apparent successes of native Alaskans and other peoples in dominating the capitalist modes of domination. For now I am simply making the point that the Eskimo are still there—and still Eskimo. Anthropological enlightenment begins with how wrong we were about that.

A sense of impending doom attended the concluding chapter of Charles Hughes's ethnography of Gambell Village on St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea, a community of Siberian Yupik speakers he studied in 1954–1955. The chapter was titled “The Broken Tribe.” Indeed “the time has passed,” Hughes said, “when entire groups or communities of Eskimo can successfully relate to the mainland economy and social structure” (1960:389). For Hughes, two movements in opposite directions—of mainland Western culture to the island, and of islanders to the mainland—were between them tearing the indigenous society to pieces. The Gambell villagers who moved to the mainland were “no longer Eskimos,” Hughes believed, “no longer people who retain a cultural tradition of their own.” In the 1950s and 1960s, when young men went off to the US military or to mainland schools under the sponsorship of the missions or the Bureau of Indian Affairs, when the BIA shipped whole families to Anchorage, Seattle, or Oakland under Relocation and Employment Assistance programs, the understanding was they would learn to live like white folks of the species Homo economicus, sever their relations to their villages and their cultures—and never go back. “They perforce have to forsake the overarching structure of Eskimo belief and practice,” said Hughes of the Gambell migrants. “In effect, if they are to adjust to the white world, they must become as much like white men as possible. And the more that people move in that direction the more Gambell, as an Eskimo village, disappears from the human scene” (1960:389).

Yet in the 1980s, Gambell was experiencing spectacular growth—from 372 people in 1970 to 522 in 1989—much of it due to returning migrants, come back to resume a “subsistence life style,” as a new generation of ethnographers explained, the epitomizing part of what they described as a general cultural “renaissance.” Gambell was one of a set of villages, including Wainwright on the North Slope and Unalakleet on the lower Yukon, that an anthropological team headed by Joseph Jorgensen got to know in some depth in the 1980s—with a view to determining how these “oil age Eskimos” were dealing with their increasing dependency (Jorgensen 1990, Jorgensen n.d.). Like Richard Nelson, who had first studied Wainwright in the 1960s and mistakenly thought then that the subsistence economy was finished—“subsistence” is a buzzword in Alaskan identity politics, whose meaning in this context would be about equivalent to “traditional custom”—like Nelson and many other ethnographers, the Jorgensen team found that the Eskimo of the 1980s and 1990s had changed very much more and very much less than anyone expected (Jorgensen 1990:5). More, because of the large influx of productive technologies and domestic conveniences; less, because these new techniques were overwhelmingly deployed to the subsistence life style and manipulated through its customary relations of production and distribution. The people's efficiency in hunting, fishing, and gathering was directly proportionate to their dependency on capitalism. But as their own modes of production were kinship-ordered—on Gambell by a still-functioning patrilineal clan system—the effect was an overall florescence of tradition that extended from intensive relations of reciprocity among kinsmen to cosmic relations of reciprocal life-giving between men and animals, passing by way of the revived winter festivals that had classically effected such interchanges. (In the Yukon I have heard these festivals referred to by English-speaking Yupiit as potlatches.) At the same time, instead of the migrant islanders going off to lose their culture, the effect of their stay for longer or shorter periods in Whiteman's Land has been to extend the village of Gambell from its home site in St. Lawrence Island to clansmen as far away as Oregon and California. Among other reasons: increased “subsistence” at home leads to increased “sharing” abroad. A study of one household's “subsistence sharing” by Lynn Robbins showed it was thus connected to 29 other households in Gambell, 23 in the St. Lawrence village of Savoonga, seven in Nome, two in Fairbanks, one in Sitka, two in Oregon, and six in California. The network included 315 people in 70 households, with the majority of gifts going to members of the patriclan. Echoing similar reports from all over Alaska, Jorgensen writes, “In short, there is a determination on the part of Eskimos to maintain traditional Eskimo culture and at the same time to adopt a pragmatic acceptance of the benefits of modern technology” (Jorgensen:6).

Still, from the point of view of a traditional anthropology—not to mention world-systems and dependency theory, development economics and modernization theory, postmodernism and globalization theory—the question is, how did the Eskimo do that?

Moreover, the Eskimo are not alone. In the discussion that follows I evoke the analogous modern experiences of other societies, with a view toward unpacking some of the issues the Eskimo pose—and thus reconstructing a too traditional anthropology according to the ways the peoples reconstruct their traditional cultures.

THE INDIGENIZATION OF MODERNITY

This is a modern song of Enga people of New Guinea, about capturing the power-knowledge of Europeans, the “Red Men” in local parlance:

When the time comes,

Our youngsters will feed upon their words,

After the Red Men drift away from this land,

Our youngsters, like honey birds,

After the Reds have gone,

Will suck the flowers,

While standing back here.

We will do like them,

We shall feed upon their deeds

Like honey-birds sucking flowers.

(Talyaga 1975:n.p.)

Reversing the real relations of exploitation and domination, these verses could easily be mistaken for the wistful fantasies of the powerless. Yet it would be wrong to suppose them motivated by the people's self-contempt or a sense of their impending doom. Everything about the modern ethnography of Highland New Guinea indicates that the sentiment of cultural usurpation—here ambiguously figured as honey-birds feeding on the powers of banished White men—that this usurpation is the guiding principle of the Highlanders' historical action. Rather than despondency, it is a forward action on modernity, guided by the assurance the Enga will be able to harness the good things of Europeans to the development of their own existence. “Develop-man” is the neo-Melanesian term for development; and it would not be wrong to repidginize it back to English as “the development of man,” since the project it refers to is the use of foreign wealth in the expansion of feasting, politicking, subsidizing kinship, and other activities that make up the local conception of a human existence (Nihill 1989). This is what the working and warrior youth of Enga are urged to carry on. Rather than the death of tradition, Enga thus express their confidence in a living tradition, a tradition precisely that serves as a means and measure of innovation.

To put the matter anthropologically, which is to say to perceive great things in little ones, this active appropriation by Enga of the European power imposed upon them is a local manifestation of a new planetary organization of culture. Unified by the expansion of Western capitalism over recent centuries, the world is also being re-diversified by indigenous adaptations to the global juggernaut. In some measure, global homogeneity and local differentiation have developed together, the latter as a response to the former in the name of native cultural autonomy. The new planetary organization has been described as “a Culture of cultures,” a world cultural system made up of diverse forms of life. As Ulf Hannerz put it: “There is now a world culture, but we had better make sure we understand what this means. It is marked by an organization of diversity rather than a replication of uniformity” (1990:237). Thus, one complement of the new global ecumene is the so-called culturalism of very recent decades: the self-consciousness of their “culture,” as a value to be lived and defended, that has broken out all around the Third and Fourth Worlds. Ojibway, Hawaiians, Inuit, Tibetans, Amazonian peoples, Australian Aborigines, Maori, Senegalese: Everyone now speaks of their culture, or some near local equivalent, precisely in the context of national or international threats to its existence. This does not mean a simple and nostalgic desire for teepees and tomahawks or some such fetishized repositories of a pristine identity. A “naive attempt to hold peoples hostage to their own histories,” such a supposition, Terence Turner remarks, would thereby deprive them of history. What the self-consciousness of “culture” does signify is the demand of the peoples for their own space within the world cultural order. Rather than a refusal of the commodities and relations of the world-system, this more often means what the Enga sang about, a desire to indigenize them. The project is the indigenization of modernity.

So in certain indigenous respects, their engagement with the international capitalist forces has allowed Enga and other New Guinea Highlanders to “develop” their cultural orders, that is, as they understand develop-man: more and better of what they consider good things. Such is a common ethnographic report from the area since the 1960s. Benefitting from the market returns to migratory labor, coffee production, and other cash-cropping, the great interclan ceremonial exchanges—hallmark institution of Highlands culture—have flourished in recent decades as never before. Among Enga, Mendi, Siane, and others, the ceremonies have increased in frequency as well as in the magnitude of people engaged and goods transacted. Accordingly big-men are more numerous and powerful. Old clan alliances that had lapsed have been revived. Interpersonal kinship networks have been widened and strengthened. Rather than the antithesis of community, money has thus been the means. High-value bank notes replace pearl shells as key exchange valuables, gifts of Toyota land cruisers complement the usual pigs, and large quantities of beer function as initiatory presents (adding certain celebratory dimensions to the customary festivities). Captured in reciprocal obligations and bride-wealth payments, “the money which circulates in exchanges is generally not ‘consumed’ at all,” as Andrew Strathern noted of Hageners, “but keeps on circulating, through the momentum of debt and investment” (1979:546). Rena Lederman reports that among modern Mendi people the exchange obligations between clans and personal kin create a demand for modern currency far greater than the demand generated by existing market outlets (1986:231). Hence, from a Mendi point of view, they have the true exchange economy, by contrast to the mere “subsistence system” of white men (1986:236). Now there's a howdy-do.

TRADITION AND CHANGE

The struggle of non-Western peoples to create their own cultural versions of modernity undoes the received Western opposition of tradition vs. change, custom vs. rationality—and most notably its twentieth century version of tradition vs. development. The antithesis was already old by the time the philosophes undertook to écrasez l'infâme, to destroy entrenched superstition by progressive reason. It had been kicking around advanced European thought at least since Sir Francis Bacon proposed to smash the idols of the cave and the tribe by the exercise of rational-empirical wisdom—and thus rescue humanity from the metaphysical consequences of Original Sin. In the redemptive vision (version) of modern Development Economics, as we have seen, so-called tradition, being burdened with “irrationalities,” is presented as an obstacle to so-called development. The indigenous people's culture is something the matter with them.

Paradoxically, almost all the “traditional” cultures studied by anthropologists, and so described, were in fact neotraditional, already changed by Western expansion. In some cases this happened so long ago that no one, not even anthropologists, now debates their cultural authenticity. The Iroquois confederacy was by most accounts a post-contact develop-man, as were the Plains Indian cultures that flourished through the acquisition of the horse. For all that, were the Iroquois less Iroquoian or the Sioux less Souian? Today in Fiji, Wesleyan Christianity is considered “custom of the land.” (I recall a recent man-on-the-street interview in a Suva newspaper, in which a Fijian matron, shocked by the nude bathing at tourist resorts, asked “how are we going to keep our traditional customs if people go around like that?”) Indeed Margaret Jolly rightly wonders why church hymns and the Christian mass should not be considered “part of Pacific tradition,” given that they “have been significantly remade by Pacific peoples, so that Christianity may appear today as more quintessentially a Pacific than a Western faith” (1992:53). If Pacific peoples gloss over the distinction—so critical to our own historical sensibility—between the colonial and the precolonial past, it is that they “are more accepting of both indigenous and exogenous elements as constituting their culture.” Indeed, since the exogenous elements are culturally indigenized, there is not, for the people concerned, a radical disconformity, let alone an inauthenticity. So-called hybridity is after all a genealogical observation, not a structural determination—perhaps only appropriate to the cosmopolitan intellectuals from whose external vantage such cultural theories are fabricated. Anthropologists have known at least since the work of Boas and his students that cultures are generally foreign in origin and local in pattern. Or if we have forgotten the diffusionists' lessons, we should at least recall the indigenous daily routine of the average American man described some decades ago by Ralph Linton. After breakfast our good man settles down to read the news of the day “imprinted in characters invented by the ancient Semites upon a material invented in China by a process invented in Germany. As he absorbs the accounts of foreign troubles he will, if he is a good conservative citizen, thank a Hebrew deity in an Indo-European tongue that he is 100 percent American” (1936:329).

In Europe and the Peoples without History, Eric Wolf (1982) correctly pointed out that most of the world was like that, a mix of the indigenous and the exogenous, by the time Western anthropologists got there. Imperialism had gotten there first. Regrettably, in his effort to convince fellow-anthropologists they had never really known the pristine peoples they hankered after, Wolf neglected to draw the complementary conclusion about the cultural differences the ethnographers had nonetheless discovered and described. If the indigenous peoples were not without history, it was because they were not without their culture—which is also why their modern histories have differed.

In the late eighteenth century, the Hawaiian chiefs largely monopolized trade with the British and American vessels stopping for provisions and sandalwood while enroute to China with furs from Northwest America. The chiefs, however, had distinctive demands, mainly for unique adornments and domestic furnishings, flashy goods that linked their persons to the sky and overseas sources of divine power, fashionable goods that could also differentiate them from their aristocratic fellows and rivals. Yet their Kwakiutl counterparts on the Northwest Coast were beginning a long economic history of a contrasting kind, demanding standardized items from the fur traders, eventually Hudson's Bay blankets by the tens of thousands. Moreover, rather than hoarding them up as Hawaiian chiefs did their treasures, the Kwakiutl distributed their blankets in potlatches in ways that allowed them to correlate and measure their otherwise distinct claims to superiority. By contrast to the rather mundane woolen blankets, Honolulu traders of Boston firms were sending to America for luxe: “Everything new and elegant will sell at a good profit. Coarse articles are of no use.” The letter books of these traders are full of orders for “fine calicoes and cambricks,” silks, scarves “in handsome patterns,” superfine broadcloths, cashmeres: a whole catalogue of Polynesian splendors in European idiom—commodities, moreover, from which the people in general were excluded. Unlike the Kwakiutl chiefs who were fashioning their preeminence out of common cloth, the Hawaiian elite were bent on unique projects of economic aggrandizement. But then, the Hawaiian chiefs were all more or less closely descended from the gods, and the main issue between them was how to turn these quantitative differences of genealogy into qualitative distinctions of standing. The Kwakiutl chiefs already represented distinct and unrelated lineages, with different divine origins and powers. As heirs of unique ancestors and treasures, they used stock European goods in public fashion to turn their qualitative differences in genealogy into quantitative measures of rank. Accordingly the politics, economics, and destinies of Hawaiians and Kwakiutl acquired different forms and fates in the nineteenth century (Sahlins 1988). The continuity of their respective cultural traditions consisted in the different ways they changed.

FUNCTIONAL DETERMINATION BY THE BASIS

As graduate students at the University of Michigan in the 1950s, we used to refer to the technological determinism of our maître, Leslie White, as “the cultural layer cake.” Technology was the basis. The middle level, social structure, was determined by the technical base, since it consisted primarily of an organization for putting technology to work. Ideology, the top layer, could only be a reflex of the way people were related socially and of the knowledge of the world to which they were led by their technological activity. I think White really believed that when people ascended to the heavens on rocket ships they would be able to see there was no God. But he was mistaken. Anyhow, he liked to quote Marx to the effect that “the hand mill gave us society with a sovereign, the steam mill industrial capitalism”—although we also figured out Marx was a bit more complicated than that.

Still, things got even more complicated when Lévi-Strauss, after rendering the homages to Marx that were customary in the 1960s—at that time everyone in France seemed to be a Marxist of some kind; even anti-Marxists would have to excuse themselves by something to the effect of “je suis peu marxiste”—things got more complex when Lévi-Strauss said, “Without questioning the undoubted primacy of infrastructures, I believe there is always a mediator between praxis and practices, namely the conceptual scheme by the operation of which matter and form, neither with any independent existence, are realized as structures, that is as entities which are both empirical and intelligible” (1966:130). If so, the conceptual scheme or the cultural order was the very organization of the economic basis. Practical action would be a particular functional expression of the meaningful relations of the cultural scheme. Culture included the basis.

I comment on this complication by an example, again having to do with the China trade, that I have discussed elsewhere for different purposes and in greater detail (Sahlins 1988).

In August 1793, Lord Macartney, ambassador plenipotentiary of George III to the Celestial Emperor, in the vain hope of stimulating Chinese demands for British products by a display of their technical superiority—which for his lordship was equivalent to a show of “our superiority” tout court—gave a demonstration of up-to-date British light field-pieces to a group of prominent imperial officials. To Macartney's chagrin, the mandarins refused to be humiliated: “Though [the cannon] were remarkably well cast and of a most elegant form, and in every respect completely well appointed, and fired from twenty to thirty times in a minute, yet our conductor [himself a general] pretended to think lightly of them, and spoke to us as if such things were no novelty in China” (Cranmer-Byng 1962:90).3The problem arose repeatedly for members of the embassy, since their cunning diplomatic salesmanship presupposed a functional relation between technology and cultural sophistication that the Chinese did not appreciate. “In accomplishing the objects of the Embassy,” the mission's experimental scientist James Dinwiddie wrote, “it was meant to surprise the Chinese with the power, learning, and ingenuity of the British people, for which purpose a splendid assortment of astronomical and philosophical apparatus were among the presents to his Celestial Majesty.” How well Mr. Dinwiddie succeeded, however, may be judged by the reaction of the Emperor to a showing of the Brits' ingenuous apparatuses: “These things are good enough to amuse children.” (On the other hand, some Cantonese merchants treated to a demonstration of scientific instruments at least asked Dinwiddie “how much he intended to make by his goods.”) Dinwiddie's summary of the embassy's failure—with its vision of a Western civilizing mission that degenerates into violence, and its complementary incomprehension of the official Chinese view of technical oddity as cultural deficiency—is a textbook case of dissimilarities in native anthropologies:

Nothing but conquest by some polished nation will ever render this great people. Their prejudices are invincible. Ask them whether the contrivers and makers of such curious and elegant machinery must not be men of understanding and superior persons, they answer—“These are curious things, but what are their use? Do Europeans understand the art of government as equally polished?” (Proudfoot 1868:50)

In an equally classic Orientalist text written two generations later, the British Sinologist Thomas Taylor Meadows was still rehearsing the same complaint about the Chinese lack of Western social science, their inability “to draw conclusions as to the state of foreign countries from an inspection of the articles…manufactured in them.”

They cannot see that a country where such an enormous, yet beautiful fabric as a large British ship is constructed—an operation requiring at once the united efforts of numbers, and a high degree of skill—must be inhabited by a people, not only energetic, but rich and free to enjoy the fruits of their own labour; that such a country must, in short, have a powerful government, good laws, and be altogether in a high state of civilization. (Meadows 1847:235)

Meadows further complains that though the Chinese will concede the English have the power to do some extraordinary things, they remain unimpressed since “so do elephants and other wild animals.”

East is East and West is West. Where the twain still have not met is over the Western self-consciousness of culture as a total system erected upon, or at least functionally consistent with, its technological foundations. Here indeed is a native anthropology that has been dominant ever since industrial capitalism and enlightened philosophers combined to install human corporal need as “the onely spur to humane industry” (Locke): the source of our productivity, our sociability, and our empirical sense of reality. By their own theory of culture, the Chinese were always prepared to decouple technique and civilization, infrastructure and superstructure. Even in the late nineteenth century when Western technology became more interesting to them, they adopted it only on the condition of “Chinese culture, Western skills,” or in another celebrated rendering, “‘Chinese studies as fundamental, Western studies for practical use’” (Chow 1960:13).4Still, it would merely remain within the Western structural-functionalism to see this as an inversion of base-superstructure relations. It seems to represent the even more interesting anthropology in which praxis is an expression of a cosmic cultural scheme—by the realization of which matter and form are constituted as empirical and intelligible entities—the realization of a cultural scheme in a pragmatic function. The explication rests on the pertinence of meaningful values rather than mechanical causes. Granet tells the story of a certain duke of the Chou period of whom it was said that he failed to conquer China because at his death human beings were sacrificed to his ghost.

MONEY AND MARKETS, MORALITIES AND MENTALITIES

Eskimo culture, Western techniques. Or as the Yukon village leader said to the anthropologist:

We take whatever technology works and shape it to our purposes and uses…. Apparently that bothers people who want us to remain pristine, or to admit to our contradictions of wanting technology and controlling and preserving the resources of our own use…. Why not? We have always accepted and reshaped technology that works for our own purposes. (Jorgensen 1990:69)

I have already mentioned the snowmachines, CB radios, all-terrain four wheelers, rifles and powered 18′ and 32′ fishing vessels, but I forgot the Eskimo subsistence airplanes. The anthropologist Steve Langdon tells of five of them owned by the Yupik villagers of Togiak (in Bristol Bay). These planes were used “primarily to 1) extend subsistence range to areas where caribou are located and 2) provide on demand transportation for visiting relatives in nearby villages, objectives totally in congruence with the subsistence-based foundation of the community” (1991:284–85). Such modern modes of paleolithic production bring obvious efficiencies to the subsistence economy—and some not so obvious, such as relief from the necessity of catching, processing, and storing the 5000 chum salmon required to feed a dog team over the winter. But they also make it possible to engage more effectively in the market economy on which wild food-getting depends, affording the mobility or stability to intermittently hunt money also—when and where (and if) the opportunity presents itself. Contrary to the general opinions of the past two centuries, however, Yupik relations to animals have remained altogether distinct from the capitalist relations of production that provided them with the necessary hunting gear. Chase Hensel quotes John Active, a Yupik man who works at the public radio and television station at Bethel—the year of the interview is 1992:

The animals, birds and plants have an awareness, and we treat them with the same respect we have for ourselves. The non-Natives refer to these animals as “game.” Hunting for them is a game. We do not play games with animals. When we bring animals into our houses, we treat them as guests…. We thank them for having been caught and believe their spirits will return to their gods and report about how they are cared for. [The “gods” are apparently species spirit masters, as in the widespread northern cosmology.] If the animals are treated well, then those gods will provide more of the same…. Our ancestors didn't learn that from your book [the Bible] (Hensel 1992:71).

It is not simply that Eskimo cultures—or other northern groups such as Dené and James Bay Cree, of whom similar recent observations have been made—it is not simply that they have persisted in spite of capitalism or because the people have resisted it. This is not so much the culture of resistance as it is the resistance of culture. Involving the assimilation of the foreign in the logics of the familiar—a change in the contexts of the foreign forms or forces, which also changes their values—cultural subversion is in the nature of intercultural relations. Inherent in meaningful action, such resistance of culture is the more inclusive form of historical differentiation, neither requiring an intentional politics of cultural opposition nor confined to the reactions of the colonially oppressed. (All this was worked out in the theoretical line that leads from the refinements of Boasian diffusion by Benedictian patterns of culture, a development previously noticed here, through Batesonian culture-contact schismogenesis to the similar structural dialectics of Lévi-Strauss's Mythologiques.) Yet even the subjects of Western domination and dependency-relations act in the world as social-historical beings, so their experience of capitalism is mediated by the habitus of an indigenous form of life. In the upshot, the capitalist forces are played out in the schemata of a different cultural universe. Of course it is true that their too classic dependency could do in people like the Yupik. On the other hand, as Durkheim said, a science of the future has no subject matter. In the meantime, the apparent cultural mystification of dependency produces an empirical critique of the orthodoxy that money, markets, and the relations of commodity production are incompatible with the organizations of the so-called traditional societies.

Marx says that money destroys the archaic community because money becomes the community. As if, Freud complained, a person suddenly got a psyche when he drew his first paycheck. In a book called Money and the Morality of Exchange, Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry collect a number of examples to the contrary, from a variety of societies. As against the idea that money gives rise to a particular world view—the unsociable, impersonal, and contractual one we associate with it—they emphasize “how an existing world view gives rise to particular ways of representing money” (1989:19). At issue is the structural position money is accorded in the cultural totality. The famous statements of Marx, Simmel and company about the destructive effects of markets and money on community, presuppose a separate “economic” domain, as Bloch and Parry point out—an amoral sphere of transaction separated from the generosities of kith and kin. But where there is no structural opposition between the relationships of economy and sociability, where material transactions are ordered by social relations rather than vice versa, then the amorality we attribute to money need not obtain.

So in general, one of the Big Surprises of “late capitalism” is that “traditional” cultures are not inevitably incompatible with it nor vulnerable to it. Certainly the recent ethnographers of the Alaskan and Canadian north have had great academic sport with the classic 1950s and 1960s arguments of Service and Murphy and Steward to the effect that commercial trade will be the end of indigenous culture for hunters and trappers. Debt peonage, the breakup of larger communities and collective efforts, disintegration of extended kinship networks, reduction of kinship to nuclearization, the decline of food-sharing and other reciprocities, privatization of property, the development of economic inequalities and overall individualism, such were the forecasts of hunters' fate. The final phase, according to Murphy & Steward, would be marked by “assimilation of the Indians as a local sub-culture of the national socio-cultural system” and perhaps eventually in a “virtual loss of identity as Indians” (1956:350). To summarily categorize the contrary modern findings among northern hunters, however, their long, intensive and varied engagements with the international market economy have not fundamentally altered their customary organizations of production, modes of ownership and resource control, division of labor, or patterns of distribution and consumption; nor have their extended kinship and community bonds been dissolved or the economic and social obligations thereof fallen off; neither have social (cum “spiritual”) relations to nature disappeared; and they have not lost their cultural identities, not even when they live in white folks' towns (Fienup-Riordan 1983, 1986; Wenzel 1991).

To put it another way, dependency is real but it is not the internal organization of Cree, Inuit or Yupik existence. The loss of traditional skills—dog sledding, kayak-making, hunting methods and much, much more—makes their dependency all the more serious. But the real problem this poses for the people is not the unlivable contradiction between the money economy and the traditional way of life. The big problems come when they cannot find enough money to support their traditional way of life. For if one calculated, as some anthropologists have, how much income from government transfer funds and commercial trade is devoted to subsidizing the indigenous modes of production, then the internal economy clearly subsumes and integrates the external (Langdon 1986). Within the villages, moreover, the greater a person's or family's successes in the money economy, the more they participate in the indigenous order (Lonner 1986, Wolfe 1986). Sharing with kinsmen increases with monetary income, typically via the advantages money gives in hunting and gathering. But then, studies also show that the people with the greatest outside experience in education or employment are as much or more engaged as anyone in the local subsistence culture (Kruse 1986). If this helps explain why seemingly acculturated people are commonly traditional leaders, it also invites the question of why they ever came back to the village—which leads to another area of enlightenment offered by the indigenization of modernity:

REVERSING CENTER AND PERIPHERY

Cities are the favored places of merantu, the customary journeys of Menangkabau and other Indonesian men beyond the cultural bounds, whence they return with booty and stories worthy of their manhood. The Malay community in Mecca is second in size only to the Arabs. Some remain on the haj for 10 years or more; some are delayed for years returning via Africa or India (Provencher 1976). The Mexican villagers working in Redwood City, California, and the Samoans in San Francisco likewise intend to return, an eventuality for which they prepare by sending money back to relatives, by periodic visits to their native places, by sending their children home for visits or schooling, and otherwise maintaining their natal ties and building their local status. But how is it that Oaxacans, Samoans, Africans, Filipinos, Peruvians, Thais—the millions of people now cycling between the “peripherae” and metropolitan centers of the modern world-system—are content to return to a bucolic existence “after they've seen Paris?” Is it not true that Stadt Luft macht Frei? Or if not free, proletarians forever? Well, apparently not always, however true in an earlier European history. Today the huge phenomenon of circular migration is creating a new kind of cultural formation: a determinate community without entity, extending transculturally and often transnationally from a rural center in the Third World to “homes abroad” in the metropolis, the whole united by the to-and-fro of goods, ideas and people on the move. “The geographic village is small,” writes Uzzell of Oaxacan campesinos, “the social village spreads over thousands of miles” (1979:343).

Taking shape as urban ethnic outposts of rural “tribal” or peasant homelands, these synthetic formations were for a long time unrecognized as such by the Western social scientists studying them. Or rather in studying urbanization, migration, remittance dependency, labor recruitment, or ethnic formation, Western researchers presented a spectacle something like the blind men and the elephant, each satisfied to describe the translocal cultural whole in terms of one or another of its aspects. No doubt the Euro-American history of urbanization had a stranglehold on the anthropological imagination. The general presumption was that urbanization must everywhere put an end to “the idiocy of rural life.” By the very nature of the city as a complex social and industrial system, relations between people would become impersonal, utilitarian, secular, individualized, and otherwise disenchanted and detribalized. Such was the trend in Robert Redfield's “folk-urban continuum.” As the beginning and end of a qualitative change, countryside and city were structurally distinct and opposed ways of life. “After the rise of cities,” Redfield wrote, “men became something different to what they had been before” (1953:ix). British social anthropology of the period was hung up on the same dualist a priori. Gluckman was the father of the African version: “The African in the rural area and in town is two different men” (1960:69).

But enlightenment was soon in coming. Explicitly taking on the folk-urban continuum, Edward Bruner demonstrated the continuity of identity, kinship, and custom between Toba Batak villages of highland Sumatra and their urban relatives in Medan. “Examined from the structural point of view, the Toba Batak communities in village and city are part of one social and ceremonial system” (1961:515). Speaking more widely of Southeast Asia, Bruner wrote that “contrary to traditional theory, we find in many Asian cities that society does not become secularized, the individual does not become isolated, kinship organizations do not break down, nor do the social relationships in the urban environment become impersonal, superficial and utilitarian” (1961:508). By the mid-1970s such observations had become common in the Latin American homeland of the folk-urban continuum as well as in ethnographies by Gluckman's colleagues and others throughout sub-Sahara Africa. And as the gestalt shifted from the antithesis of the rural-urban to the synthesis of the translocal cultural order, study after study groped for a suitable terminology. The scholars spoke variously of “a bilocal society,” “a single social and resource system,” “a non-territorial community network,” “a common social field” uniting countryside and city, “a social structure that encompasses both donor and host locations,” “a single social field in which there is a substantial circulation of members,” or some new species of the like (Ryan 1993:326, Ross & Weisner 1977:361, Trager 1988:194, Uzzell 1979:343, Bartle 1981:105).

What any and all of these descriptions express is the structural complementarity of the indigenous homeland and the metropolitan “homes abroad,” their interdependence as sources of cultural value and means of social reproduction. Symbolically focused on the homeland, whence its members derive their identity and their destiny, the translocal community is strategically dependent on its urban outliers for material wherewithal. The rural order itself extends into the city, inasmuch as the migrant folk are transitively associated with each other on the bases of their relationships at home. Kinship, community, and tribal affiliations acquire new functions, and perhaps new forms, as relations of migration: They organize the movements of people and resources, the care of homeland dependents, the provision of urban housing and employment. Since people conceive their social being as well as their future in their native place, the material flows generally favor the homeland people. The indigenous order is sustained by earnings and commodities acquired in the foreign-commercial sector. But should we speak of “remittances” as the foreign economic experts do? This flow of money and goods is better understood by the norms of “reciprocity,” Epeli Hau'ofa argues, since it reflects the migrants' obligations to homeland kin, even as it secures their rights in their native place (Hau'ota 1993). “Reciprocity” as opposed to “remittances” appropriately shifts the analytic perspective from a geographic village that is small to a social village spread over thousands of miles, and rather than lament the fate of a village that lives on “remittances,” one might with Graeme Hugo commend its success in reversing “the parasitic function traditionally ascribed to cities” (1978:264). In spanning the historic divide between traditional and modern, the developmental distance between center and periphery, and the structural opposition of townsmen and tribesmen, the translocal community deceives a considerable body of enlightened Western social science.

CULTURE IS NOT DISAPPEARING

Of course it is possible that the translocal community will soon disappear as a cultural form. If the migrants settle permanently abroad, the structure might have a sort of generational half-life, the attachments to the homeland dissolving with each city-born or foreign-born generation. Still, in parts of Indonesia, Africa, and elsewhere, circular migration has been going on for many generations. Reports from Nairobi in the 1980s echo observations in Java from 1916: The migrants were not being proletarianized (Elkan 1985, Parkin 1975). From a large review of anthropological literature on culture and development, Michael Kearney recently concluded just that: “migrants have not been proletarianized in any deeply ideological sense” (1986:352). However, the longevity of the form is not the issue I am concerned with here. What is of more interest is the ongoing creation of new forms in the modern world Culture of cultures. No one can deny that the world has seen an overall decrease of cultural diversity in the past five centuries. Indeed, anthropology was born out of the consciousness of the decrease as much as the appreciation of the diversity. There is no special reason now to panic about the death of culture.

Suppose for argument's sake we agree that Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific was the beginning of modern professional ethnography. If so, it is sobering to reflect it opens with these words:

Ethnology is in the sadly ludicrous, not to say tragic, position, that at the very moment when it begins to put the workshop in order, to forge its proper tools, to start ready for work on its appointed task, the material of its study melts away with hopeless rapidity. Just now, when the methods and aims of scientific field ethnology have taken shape, when men [n.b.] fully trained for the work have begun to travel into savage countries and study their inhabitants—these die away under our very eyes. (1922:xv)

Past objects? Yes, history studies these. But how many academic disciplines other than high-energy physics originated as the study of disappearing objects? And nowadays the distintegration of the cultural object seems to many anthropologists worse than ever. Confronted by the apparent disappearance of the old anthropology-cultures, the wreckage of coherent logics and definite boundaries appreciably effected by the passage of the World System, they are tempted to succumb to a postmodern panic about the possibility that anything like “a culture” actually exists. This panic just when all about them the peoples are talking up their “culture.” Now everyone has a culture; only the anthropologists could doubt it. But why lose our nerve? Presented by history with a novel set of cultural structures, practices, and politics, anthropology should take the opportunity to renew itself. The discipline seems as well off as it ever was, with cultures disappearing just as we were learning how to perceive them, and then reappearing in ways we had never imagined.

The best modern heirs of the Enlightenment philosophes know this. I mean, for example, the West African francophone intellectuals who argue, with Paul Hountondji (1994), that “culture is not only a heritage, it is a project.” Yet it is, as Abdou Touré (1994) insists, an African project, or set of projects, and precisely not the universal march of reason proclaimed by the eighteenth century and still worshiped in the development religions of the twentieth:

That which the minority of [elite] leaders has voluntarily forgotten is Culture as a philosophy of life, and as an inexhaustible reservoir of responses to the world's challenges. And it is because they brush aside this culture that they're able to reason lightly in terms of development while implying a scale of values, norms of conduct or models of behavior transmissible from one society to another!

Touré's conclusion is that Africa is no longer subjected to the Western model of development for the simple reason that there is no longer a model of any worth. Finally—enlightenment.