• DOI:10.4324/9780203931950-13
• Corpus ID: 158872465

Writing against Culture

@inproceedings{AbuLughod2008WritingAC,
  title={Writing against Culture},
  author={Lila Abu-Lughod},
  year={2008}
}

• L. Abu-Lughod
• Published 3 March 2008
• Sociology

Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986), the collection that marked a major new form of critique of cultural anthropology's premises, more or less excluded two critical groups whose situations neatly expose and challenge the most basic of those premises: feminists and "halfies" people whose national or cultural identity is mixed by virtue of migration, overseas education, or parentage.I In his introduction, Clifford (1986a) apologizes for the feminist absence; no one mentions halfies or the indigenous anthropologists to whom they are related. Perhaps they are not yet numerous enough or sufficiently self-defined as a group.2 The importance of these two groups lies not in any superior moral claim or advantage they might have in doing anthropology, but in the specialdilemmas they face,dilemmas that reveal starkly the problems with cultural anthropology's assumption of a fundamental distinction between self and other. In this essay I explore how feminists and halfies, by the way their anthropological practice unsettles the boundary between self and other, enable us to reflect on the conventional nature and political effects of this distinction and ultimately to reconsider the value of the concept of culture on which it depends. I will argue that "culture" operates in anthropological discourse to enforce separations that inevitably carry a sense of hierarchy. Therefore, anthropologists should now pursue, without exaggerated hopes for the power of their texts to change the world, a variety of strategies for writing against culture. For those interested in textual strategies, I explore the advantages of what I call "ethnographies of the particular" as instruments of a tactical humanism.