Anthropologically speaking, what is a political economy?

Question

Anthropologically speaking, what is a political economy?

Answer 1

Anthropology and Political Economy

EXOTICS AT HOME by Micaela di Leonardo, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. 437 pp.

Reviewed by Lesley Gill

[from New Politics, vol. 7, no. 3 (new series), whole no. 27, Summer 1999]

LESLEY GILL teaches anthropology at American University.



ANTHROPOLOGISTS OVER THE COURSE OF THE 20TH CENTURY have become America's Guardians of the Offbeat--domestic traffickers in exotica who wittingly or unwittingly shape popular understandings of modernity and politics through their representations of Others. So argues Micaela di Leonardo in her highly original new book, Exotics at Home, which explores the connections between American anthropology, anthropologists and the shifting public sphere. di Leonardo's central assertion is that anthropological depictions of Others are too often disconnected from the historical, political and economic contexts in which they are embedded. The result is a welter of images that depict noble and nasty savages, but convey nothing about the power-laden, highly unequal contexts that structure the lives of anthropologists and anthropological subjects, shape the meanings of representations, and influence the consumption of ethnographies at particular historical moments. Yet decontextualized portrayals, whether advocated by anthropologists or simply accredited to them, facilitate a variety of political agendas that have ranged from crude imperialist racism to the ethnological anti-modernism currently marketed by ethnic boutiques.

Exotics At Home charts the shifting 20th-century political and economic terrain on which anthropological representations of exotic Others have been produced and consumed. We see, for example, the racialized hierarchies of peoples and cultures displayed at the 1893 Chicago World's Colombian Exposition, where African women of "the savage races" occupy the last rung of an evolutionary ladder that demonstrates the intrinsic worth of the peoples located on it. Such "nasty savage" representations operate as tropes for the legitimization of domestic and international racism in a period of intensifying capitalist exploitation. The nasty savage reappears in contemporary popular and scholarly accounts of the "underclass" that tend to blame poverty on the victims. In both settings, these decontextualized representations say a lot about unequal race, class and gender relationships, but their significance, according to di Leonardo, remains hidden in plain sight because of the ways in which they obfuscate serious, critical engagement with concrete social and historical processes.

Di Leonardo argues that popular, nasty savage imagery is always tied to its opposite twin: the noble savage. She demonstrates how, in the 1970s, constructions of "white ethnicity" and "women's culture" portrayed certain white ethnics and women as more natural and noble than mainstream WASP America, as well as temporally distance from it. White ethnics were envisioned, and envisioned themselves, as the gatekeepers of stable urban neighborhoods that contained an anti-modern charm and warmth distinct from both the alleged coldness and opacity of WASP modernity and the professed chaos and disarray of black neighborhoods. This construction of white ethnicity emerged at a particular historical moment in which black families were increasingly defined as pathological, black and latino demands for jobs, education and social services were exacerbating tensions with whites, and middle-class blacks were attempting to purchase homes in white neighborhoods. It served to delineate "good" and "bad" racial/ethnic families and behaviors, and it was also a key ideological element in urban gentrification, a process that, paradoxically, undermined the ability of all working class people to live in newly transformed, upscale neighborhoods.

In a similar fashion, "women's culture" ideology, whether feminist or anti-feminist, espoused the superior moral qualities of women and promoted the existence of a timeless feminine nature. It focused on relationships between women at a time when grassroots feminist activism was declining, emphasized "difference" from men rather than class- and raced-based forms of domination, and defined women as natural care givers. Whether used by feminists to counter right-wing assertions that they were selfish, embraced by the Right to celebrate the devotion of white ethnic women to family and home, or embodied in popular Great Goddess writing, the "women's culture" construct, like "white ethnic community" was false. It denied, and continues to deny, important race and class differences among women, and its ideological role must be understood within the recent political shifts of American society, particularly America's rightward lurch. Radical feminism, dedicated to eliminating the material basis of women's oppression, has been superceded by cultural feminism and its preoccupation with revaluing women and their allegedly superior qualities.

NOBLE AND NASTY SAVAGE REPRESENTATIONS ILLUSTRATE THE STUBBORN REFUSAL of journalists and scholars to explore the changing contours of global capitalism and the shifting relationships of power that tie rich and poor, black and white, male and female, western and non-western together in highly unequal ways. Part of the problem, argues di Leonardo, s that anthropologists have under-theorized America and frequently have a superficial knowledge of "home." She is critical of anthropologists who view Americanist research as a form of rest and recreation from the rigors of fieldwork in distant third world locations. She correctly assails the arrogance of those scholars who, usually in late career, turn to Americanist research but never read American history, and who presume to grasp complex social processes simply by virtue of their residence in this country. These practices, according to di Leonardo, contribute to the erection of artificial boundaries between the United States and elsewhere and between "us" and "them." In addition, she argues that the profession's long-term failure to take research in the United States seriously, and its willingness to ignore the actual engagement of some anthropologists with serious U.S.-based research, aggravates the widespread popular perception of anthropologists as the experts on foreign "exotics."

While di Leonardo goes to considerable lengths discussing the political implications of anthropological research, or work that is attributed to anthropologists, she also attends to the political roles played by anthropologists and the varying ways in which the public and the profession have received them and their work at particular points in time. For example, she details sociobiologist Derek Freeman's Reagan-era attack on Margaret Mead and Glynn Custred's recent assault on California affirmative action programs. She offers interesting discussions of Majorie Shostak's Nisa, Laura Bohannan's Return to Laughter, Robert and Yolanda Murphy's Women of the Forest, Janet Siskind's To Hunt in the Morning, and the debates that greeted their publications. Di Leonardo, however, best displays her considerable scholarly and analytical talents in a fascinating exploration of the long career of Margaret Mead. She details how Mead adeptly reinvented herself and the significance of her work, shifting from Boasian liberal to culture and personality advocate, then to cold warrior, and ultimately to the espousal of identity politics; indeed, Mead's career is a thread that di Leonardo weaves through the entire analysis of twentieth century anthropology's engagement with the public sphere.

Despite her changing political orientations, Mead , according to di Leonardo, was always a social engineer who believed that "progress" and "Western values" should reign supreme. She viewed non-western peoples as the source of useful insights to improve "ourselves," i.e. the Anglo Saxon bourgeoisie and petite-bourgeoisie, and she skillfully marketed herself as the authoritative interpreter of foreign exotics. In addition, Mead was never the feminist foremother claimed by many contemporary anthropologists, whose historical amnesia di Leonardo exposes. For example, in s*x and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, published in 1935, Mead took a stance against equal rights for women and then repeatedly objected to interpretations that portrayed her work as feminist. She continued to disavow feminism until after it had been publically legitimated in the 1970s by second-wave feminists.

Exotics at Home iS AN IMPRESSIVE WORK OF SCHOLARSHIP that is mordantly witty, passionately argued, and takes no prisoners. The book is above all an argument for the importance of political economy, particularly a political economy approach that attends to historical processes and explores the interconnections between culture, power and representations. Di Leonardo is impatient with currently fashionable postmodernism and the obsessiveness with which its anthropological practitioners focus on the ethnographic encounter between researchers and their subjects. She argues that it is impossible to say much of importance about any society simply through ethnographic observation. Reference must always be made to existing scholarship, statistical resources, and historical materials that enable researchers to draw out the connections that unite people in larger historical and cultural contexts. Di Leonardo also makes a strong case for the continued salience of states and their policies for understanding social life in the context of late twentieth century capitalism. The analysis implicitly counters much of the current scholarly and popular discussion about "globalization," a concept rendered toothless by an overemphasis on cultural flows, technology transfers, and "hybridity" and an underemphasis on the changing nature of class politics at the end of the millennium. Di Leonardo thus sets out an important argument at a time when anthropology, and the social sciences in general, seem unable to move forward in a progressive direction. Her book should be taken very seriously.