How anthropologists think: configurations of the exotic

How anthropologists think:configurations of the exotic*

Bruce Kapferer University of Bergen

Anthropology has often been criticized for its exoticism and orientalism. They are the paradoxes of adiscipline focused on the comparative study of difference and diversity and are at the centre of thediscussion here in the larger context of the importance of anthropology in the humanities and socialsciences. The emphasis is on the role of the exotic as vital to anthropology’s study of difference andto its overall coherence and significance for the understanding of humanity as a whole.

Anthropology is a vast subject, the study of humankind no less, and in its historicaldevelopment as a university discipline sometimes appears as a micro-universe of theapproaches that are available and which are continually being invented concerning thenature of human being and the circumstances of its existence. There is virtually no limitto what the discipline can encompass, and the debates that constitute the intellectuallife of the space that anthropology embraces refract many of those that take placewithin and across those areas of intellectual inquiry that otherwise form separatedisciplines or enclaves within the modern university. There is a potential intensity, oftena frictional intensity, in anthropology that refracts the diversity of approaches that thesubject may incorporate – all the more so because from the time of its establishment inthe late nineteenth century it has bridged the divide between the sciences, on the onehand, and the arts and humanities, on the other. All that I have said applies to thesub-branch of socio-cultural anthropology, and possibly most intensely. While typi-cally classed as a social science (a category with which some of the pioneers of thediscipline, such as Edward E. Evans-Pritchard and A.L. Kroeber, were distinctly uncom-fortable: see Kapferer 2007), it manifests a marginality defying any definite positioningwithin the shifting orders of contemporary university schemes. This contributes to thedifficulty that socio-cultural anthropologists generally encounter in fixing upon anoverall conceptual and theoretical paradigm that would mark its distinction; the sameapplies to a neat declaration of distinguishing empirical focus. Those that have surfacedfrom time to time have been marked by a lack of specificity and reflect the already

* Huxley Lecture: British Museum, 16 December 2011.

bs_bs_banner

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 19, 813-836© Royal Anthropological Institute 2013

inchoate nature of the subject. Functionalism, structural functionalism, structuralism,post-structuralism, are conceptual and theoretical frames that are ultimately extraor-dinarily open in scope and interpretation; nor are they by any means the exclusiveprovenance of the discipline. The fast progression of anthropology through differentperspectives or the production and maintenance of competing approaches is a featureof the internal differentiation of the discipline which receives added impetus in thedemand for funding in the shifting contexts of constant university restructuring andmanagerialism.

As a consequence, anthropology is becoming increasingly an adjunct discipline –Business Anthropology, Design Anthropology, Medical Anthropology, Neuro-anthropology, and so on. The situation is complicated by the fact that anthropologistsfind their inspiration from throughout the intellectual universe – no wonder thatdiversity, heterogeneity, and hybridity have wide currency in the subject often virtuallydefinitional of the discipline; its brand, as one prominent anthropologist (Hannerz2010) recently declared in a spirit of concern for market demand. Territorial demarca-tions of the kind that socio-cultural anthropologists study society or, better, small-scalesocieties, or concentrate on culture or the force of value, or that anthropology isconcerned with ethnography do little to refine matters and in any case open up arenasof contest with other disciplines such as sociology or emerging subjects such as culturalstudies – the latter currently threatening to swallow up what many would regard to beanthropology or reduce its apparent relevance in today’s realities.

There is no doubt that the expanse and internal heterogeneity of approach and focusin socio-cultural anthropology contribute to its dynamism and have value in manyareas outside it. Social anthropology provides a forum for debate, a place where dif-ferent perspectives can intersect and be opened to critique. The frictional intensity ofthe discipline – or what John Comaroff (2010) refers to as its in-discipline – whilepotentially creating a space of generative excitement, can make it into a non-discipline.By this I mean a loss of a sense of a unifying project that may accelerate the disappear-ance of the subject, and some of the indeed grand potential of its beginnings, in all butname. Such a possibility may be further facilitated in current conditions of economicausterity and university restructuring, whereby anthropology is dissolved by amal-gamation, often in a reduced significance, into other disciplinary assemblages. Theremay be more anthropologists and apparently more anthropology being done (as thevastly increased size of annual conferences indicates) but to diminished intellectualand theoretical effect. The virtual loss of disciplinary distinction for socio-culturalanthropology, even the appropriation by other subjects of some its methodologicalinnovations – for example, long-term observational or participant fieldwork (multi- orsingle-sited) – may result in its growing invisibility, if not its thoroughgoing discipli-nary redundancy.

Socio-cultural anthropology was once far more distinctive than it is now. Indeed,that which made it so was its focus on the exotic, on those human practices that werelargely external or marginal to ruling orders. Let me say immediately, for I risk misin-terpretation, that I have no intention of recommending many features of the idea of theexotic or of exoticism that attached to socio-cultural anthropology in the past. Thesehave been more than well critiqued and continue to be so by anthropologists, althoughit is necessary to make some reference to them here. I do so in the interest of areconfiguration of the idea of the exotic: the exotic as methodologically central to theethnographic, empirically grounded attitude of the discipline in accordance with which

Bruce Kapferer814


anthropology makes its potentially distinctive contribution within the humanities andthe sciences (see Kapferer 2007). Everything and anything is potentially in an exoticrelation. Nothing is intrinsically exotic except through the relations into which it isdrawn, and my concern is with anthropology as a practice which engages with theexotic as a methodology for discovery and understanding.

The scandal of the exoticThe association of socio-cultural anthropology with the exotic is in many ways ascandal. The exotic defined populations subject to imperialism and to colonial author-ity, and these were primarily the subjects of anthropological work. Anthropology is stillconceived as being implicated in colonialism and in political discourses of Euro-American dominance, regardless of the fact that many anthropologists were stronglycritical, as in the Manchester tradition of Max Gluckman (see Evens & Handelman2006), with which I am proud to be associated. Anthropologists are keen to remove thestain, especially since scholars vital in the current intellectual development of thediscipline are postcolonials and from subaltern communities. None the less, there are inmany quarters of the subject repetitions of the past, though with clear differences. EricWolf commented, in a strangely innocent tone, that anthropology, which

began as a fraternal endeavour to understand men [sic] in their concrete similarities and differences,is rapidly becoming one of the ‘policy sciences’, a discipline of human control, the very denial ofhumanity. Prometheus yields to Procrustes both in our culture at large and in our study of it (1974: xi).

Since this was said in 1974, anthropology has witnessed the growth of embeddedanthropology as part of the Human Terrain programme in Afghanistan and Iraq, theexplosion of consultant anthropology often for major global corporations, and intensepressure by governments and business to be pragmatically relevant (see, e.g., Lattas2012; Sahlins 2011).

The difficulty for anthropology of its colonialist associations and its one-time stresson travels in remote regions – which the concept of the exotic also conjures – wasrecently driven home to me by the editorial comment made by a senior US academic (aprofessor of English). He advised that I cut the word ‘exploration’ from my text becauseit would evoke unfortunate colonialist associations among general readers preciselybecause the word was being used by an anthropologist with reference to materialscollected far away from the metropoles.

‘Exotic’ glosses many other things problematic for anthropologists. Edward Said(1978) attacked the orientalism that is deeply ingrained in the history of Europeanencounters with other peoples, and is particularly poignant for anthropology as adiscipline born in such encounters.1

Said (1994) was to modify his argument in response to criticism stating that helargely excluded those engaged in solid scholarship, although, of course, scholars of allkinds of knowledge disciplines are far from immune from the points of his discussionand continue to perpetuate the notions of which he complained, particularly in thecurrently expanding situations of global strife. Anthropologists, well before Said, wereeager to dispel the thinly disguised prejudices of racism and superiority (born of powerand its corollary, a discourse of advancement and progress) that were implicit even inthe romance of the exotic and apparent in celebrations of difference and the Other.That anthropologists in the view of outsiders effectively address exotic practices and

How anthropologists think 815


peoples despite the anthropological preference for terms such as culture, difference,and otherness (which anyway risk a closet exotic or orientalism), and the often thin lineof ambiguity they tread, was borne out in reactions to the BBC commoditization of theexotic in the 2007 series Tribe. The blurb for this series in the accompanying booklet forthe DVD reads as follows:

Former Royal Marine officer and expedition leader, Bruce Parry, shed the trappings of a westernexistence and lives alongside tribes, such as the forest people of Central Gabon, adopting theirmethods and practices. Taking adventure into a wholly new realm, Parry dares to go where otherpresenters fear to tread: hunting, cooking and eating like a native and even trying the local recreationaland ritualistic poisons. He also examines the way in which western influence is encroaching on theseremote region areas and asking whether this is a good thing.

Parry dismissed the view that he was making a parody of the serious work of anthro-pology, uncomfortable parallels notwithstanding. I think most anthropologists wouldsay that Tribe (a concept that many of them have now excised from their lexicon) is anegregious example of exoticism – orientalism played to its fullest extent in the com-mercial interest of audience ratings. Despite anthropologists’ claims of the seriousscientific purpose of their work, the exotic, unintentionally perhaps, plays no less a rolein the popular appeal of the discipline and, crucially, in the attraction of students in asituation where numbers may be just as important as relevance or even intellectualworth. Geertz makes subtle (or, depending on your point of view, not so subtle)reference to the commercial or commodity value of the exotic in anthropology whilestressing its significance for anthropological practice:

We [anthropologists] have, with no little success, sought to keep the world off balance; pulling outrugs, upsetting tea tables, setting off firecrackers. It has been the office of others to reassure; ours tounsettle. Australopithicenes, Tricksters, Clicks, Megaliths – we hawk the anomalous, peddle thestrange. Merchants of astonishment (1984: 275).

Socio-cultural anthropology is built on a paradox – its distinction and significantcontribution are grounded in the exotic, and the search for it, which inescapably mayhave exploitative and other problematic dimensions of a more methodological kind –that TV series and the expansion of tourism (e.g. eco-tourism) highlight. Much effort,from Lévi-Strauss to the present (e.g. Foster 1982; Stasch 2011), has been spent byanthropologists to criticize and distance their project from popular exoticism andparticularly forms of travel writing that combine a patronizing and, as with Tribe, anoften apparently self-critical and bemused empathy with stunning superficiality. Thiswould include the nineteenth-century travel writing of celebrated orientalizing ‘exots’,as Segalen (2002) refers to them, such as Gustav Flaubert’s sympathetically amusingaccounts of his sojourn in Egypt or the famed writings of Pierre Loti relating his travelsamong the peoples of the Pacific, the Middle East, and North Africa at the turn of thelast century.2

Exotic imaginariesBut the idea of the exotic and of exotic travel is a powerful imaginative device deep inEuropean traditions of trenchant socio-political satire, as in Rabelais and Swift. In themthe exotic gives rise to European absurdities that are exploded through fantasies of theexotic in the extreme. My own favourite is the work of the utopian anarchist Gabriel de

Bruce Kapferer816


Foigny, a de-frocked Franciscan priest who in 1693 published A new discovery of TerraIncognita Australis. Writing at the time of the great European expansion, which was alsoa period of political and religious turmoil in which European modernity gainedmomentum, de Foigny imagines a Swiftian Australian reality. It is an egalitarian worldthat is in every way the negation of European hierarchies and in which all difference iserased, including that of gender, for Australia is a terrain occupied by a race of her-maphrodites. De Foigny writes:

What is more surprising in the Australian Dominions, is, that ... this great country is flat. To thisprodigy may be added the admirable uniformity of languages, customs, buildings, and other thingswhich are to be met with in this Country. ‘Tis sufficient to know one quarter, to make certainjudgement of all the rest; all of which without doubt proceeds from the nature of the people, who areall born with an inclination of willing nothing contrary to one another (1693: 51-2).3

There are better-known imaginations of the exotic Other than de Foigny’s, writtenaround the same time, where an orientalism is engaged to powerfully criticize thesocio-cultural institutions of the Self. They have a closer genealogical connection toaspects of contemporary anthropology. Thus Montesquieu’s Persian letters (1973

[1721]), published just after the death of Louis XIV, develops around the fictionalcorrespondence between Persian princes travelling through France and their wives athome. France is presented through the imaginary lens of Persia whereby differencesand similarities are recounted. Montesquieu’s critique is a doubled exotic, as it were.The recognition of the similarity is itself a critique. Catholic priests are described asdervishes and revealed, therefore, as expressing the same empty mystical authority.Furthermore, through the imagination of exotic Persia, Montesquieu criticizes in areverse exotic many of the absurdities of French socio-political life and customs. Heachieves through the fictionalized Other some of the aims of that which becameenshrined as the anthropological comparative method: the de-centring of metropoli-tan assertions and the opening of dominant thought and practice to critical exami-nation at a moment of its own self-admiring imperial splendour. Like Montaigne,who came well before him, and, later, Chateaubriand and, of course, Rousseau,Montesquieu is a major figure for whom the exotic, real or imagined, enabledcritical reflection upon metropolitan realities (their barbarity and savagery) and aquestioning of emerging hegemonic theories of human evolution, its differences andinequities.

By the late Enlightenment, in the nineteenth century, when the discipline of anthro-pology began to be academically founded, the extraordinary discoveries and develop-ments in science and technology, combined with political revolution, religiousreformation, nationalism, and global imperialism, yielded an intellectual and socialclimate in which scientific positivism and rationalism reigned supreme. Authority wasvested without uncertainty in European thought, in which the success of science wasgiven ideological value even against the interest of that scientific approach whosecornerstone is an openness to possibility. In this context, the exotic became that whichwas not Euro-American and which did not exhibit the rationalism of science, the twobeing almost, if not quite, synonymous: the prejudices of one finding their justificationin the other with a consequent devaluation of all that was defined as the exotic.Montesquieu, Montaigne, and Rousseau were concerned to challenge such devaluationand the European self-admiration that Euro-American visions of the exotic encour-aged. Their influence continues.



But the critical turning-point in anthropology and its relation to the exotic wasreached in the context of Darwin’s discovery of evolution. Darwin opened an orien-tation to the exotic that, while facilitated in the imperialism of the time and wedded tothe confirmation of its attitudes, also created the exotic as the source of new concep-tions of the nature of existence that radically challenged the accepted order of things.It is this latter direction that has become the most fruitful in anthropology.

Science and the scientific exoticDarwin’s career manifests the adventure, romance, and Eurocentric imperialism impli-cated in travel in exotic climes (and, as I have said, far from absent in contemporaryanthropology and certainly a dimension of its commodity value), but above all thescientific worth of such experience. The voyage of the Beagle (1831) provided Darwinwith some of the data that led to The origin of species, although vital material was foundcloser at home: for example, in the study of barnacles and snails. The voyage throughexotic regions was probably far more significant in contributing to Darwin’s celebrity,preparing the way both for the popular interest and for the distortions of the radicalthesis of Origin. The thesis, thoroughly central to the de-centring of Man and God inthe cosmo-ontological scheme of things, none the less was appropriated into thesocio-political ideology of the time and made into a justification for imperialism andclass hierarchy. Thus Herbert Spencer, despite his own dislike of the state and a strongantagonism to colonialism and its imperial wars, was prominent in a reinterpretationof Darwin in Lamarckian terms giving social processes biological evolutionary effect.Spencer’s friend Thomas Huxley refused the idea that social evolution or social differ-ences between human beings could become ingrained and transmitted biologically.Natural selection and the evolutionary dynamic of creation, speciation, and extinctionoperated independently of any human desire or conscious selective action for fitness inSpencer’s terms.

Darwin’s work exemplifies what could be called, for want of a better phrase, thescientific exotic. By this I refer to the exotic as the appearance of a previously unknownphenomenon of existence or else a perturbation in the behaviour, creation, or forma-tion of phenomena that deviates from expectations or predictions based in currentknowledge, opinion, or theory. In these senses the exotic is at the edge of or beyondknowledge and, furthermore, is active in its generation. It is both new or originalinformation and is itself either active in the revision of conceptual and theoreticalunderstanding or else instrumental to the formation of a radical new understanding.The scientific exotic challenges received wisdom and, as in Darwin’s case, overturnstheories and becomes the basis for new ones.

This is a key dimension – whether or not Darwin is the inspiration – of the role ofthe exotic in anthropology, whereby the exotic is not that which is merely different orstrange, an artefact or an astonishing practice. More than difference, the exotic and itsrecognition have to do with the challenge to understanding, and, as I will develop, canbe as much a property of the familiar or what appears to be known as of that which isexternal or outside. There are poietic dimensions in the exotic in which case the exoticmay have the properties of an event, an emergence which reveals new potentials ofphenomena and may call forth a reformulation of how the nature of existence may begrasped.

Lévi-Strauss presents most clearly the anthropological direction to the scientificexotic. His intellectual journey parallels that of Darwin. Tristes tropiques stands in

Bruce Kapferer818


relation to Lévi-Strauss’s major works, The elementary structures of kinship and thevolumes of Mythologiques, as does The voyage of the Beagle to The origin of species. Theclosing pages of Tristes tropiques express a Darwinian sensibility:

The world began without man and will end without him. The institutions, morals and customs thatI shall have spent my life noting down and trying to understand are the transient efflorescence of acreation in relation to which they have no meaning, except perhaps that of allowing mankind to playits part in creation (1992: 413).

Tristes tropiques may be interpreted as an account of one anthropologist’s transitionfrom being, on the one hand, a traveller in exotic worlds, living, recording, and col-lecting difference – an ‘exot’ (of which he is critical and from which he distanceshimself) – into, on the other hand, a scientist, for whom difference and variation areinstrumental for radically new understandings, including a unified comprehension ofhuman diversity and its general import.

Lévi-Strauss is the major anthropological figure who epitomizes in his own intel-lectual journey the anthropological revaluation of the exotic: that is, of peoples andpractices at the margins of dominant centres and subject to their political and eco-nomic power. Effectively he conceives of those defined as exotic to be the effects ofdominant power and mirrors to the destructive processes of its globalizing dynamics.Lévi-Strauss refuses the marginalization of the exotic as a function of dominance. Herejects the anti-scientific orientation that attaches to power that ignores the contribu-tion of those excluded, those defined as exotic, to the stock of knowledge concerninghuman being as a whole and its general theoretical understanding. Lévi-Straussaddresses the difference of the exotic as a brachiation of differentiation, understandingthe peoples and practices so classed as not being aligned along a single evolutionary lineof flight (with the exotic at the bottom end) but as expressing different pathways ofhuman potential. With Lévi-Strauss, the exotic is brought in from the cold, as it were.He brings what dominant forces effectively created as the exotic and then used tofurther aggrandize their authority (moral, political, and scientific) into a position thatnot only questions such authority but also participates on a more equal plane incontributing to knowledge. The exotic ceases to be passive, mere evidence, positive ornegative, for scientific authority or for already established opinion in dominant centres.Through the mediation of Lévi-Strauss’s kind of anthropology, the exotic, thosedisempowered, dismissed, and excluded in the course of the march of progress, areyielded critical place in the general understanding of human being. This includes anunderstanding of the processes that have control and power over what is conceived tobe the exotic.

Lévi-Strauss represents anthropology as pre-eminently a discipline of the minordiscourse.4 In this the concept of the exotic undergoes a vital shift from that typicallyassociated with orientalism. While indeed anthropology is created in the circumstancesof imperial expansion and concentrates its endeavour within erstwhile colonializedregions, this is the historical ground for its invention as a discipline of the minordiscourse which includes a revaluation of the concept of the exotic. Thus the exoticcomes to operate as a key term in the emergence of anthropology as a discipline ofthe minor discourse wherein marginalized, subordinated, suppressed, or outrightlydismissed practices from the perspectives of dominant power, its conventions ofopinion, as well as the ruling authority of science, are given serious expression and



consideration. In anthropology, the minority of a discourse, which the idea of the exoticidentifies, is given recognition as having potentially significant scientific and othersocial and political import independent of conventional, official, and/or scientificallyaccepted assumptions and theory.

Anthropology has a long tradition in marking the exotic of difference with the objectof challenging dominant thought.

When Evans-Pritchard (1987 [1940]) describes the Nuer as an ordered anarchy, heasserts a non-reducible distinction from ruling Eurocentric conceptions of anarchy orof state order. That is, their political process is neither chaotic in a common-senseunderstanding of anarchy nor to be comprehended in Western statist terms as disor-dering resistance. Nuer refusal of colonial political hegemony is not merely to begrasped as a rejection of colonialism, which it was, but has other roots not to beincorporated within the dominant European historical evolutionist rationalist schemeof things. Pierre Clastres (1987) expands the point, showing that such a dominantdiscourse (a particular compact of knowledge with power) not only distorts evolution-ary theory, but also fails to learn from that which it controls. Societies without statesindicate a pathway in history that in the trajectories they take give expression todynamics that are thoroughly within state systems and potentially threaten them to thecore. In other words they form a different unity with state orders from that proposed byregnant theory, whose very terms are constituted through the history of state power.Thus the import of Clastres’s argument is that so-called ‘stateless’ societies manifestdynamics that are also integral in societies of the state, socio-political systems in whichthe state has been long established. Moreover, these dynamics, although intertwinedwith state processes, are thoroughly inimical to the state, perhaps fundamentallycontradictory of state dynamics, underpinning the persistence of problematics for stateauthorities everywhere. Clastres’s indication is that even the concept of contradictionameliorates and masks what is at stake. It is already a concept appropriate withindominant discourses embroiled with the state and may insufficiently recognize thepossibility of dynamics, expressed by stateless societies, that are irreducible,untransmutable or unresolvable, to those that describe state dynamics. Furthermore,this leads Clastres to suggest an improved political theory that is not premised on termsinternal to the authority of state discourse (on the concepts born of state dominantcontexts), which asserts a resolution of difference in a self-legitimating universalizingtheory of progressive evolutionism. Here, I note, the critical point is not that the theoryis self-legitimating (although this motivates its misunderstanding) but that it is a badtheory which can be overcome in a theory that more accurately includes that which ithas demeaned or otherwise excluded. Through an anthropological attention to whatappear to be exotic and exoticized practices (the romantic light in which peoples suchas the Nuer may be seen, though motivated, none the less, in discourses orientated fromwithin perspectives of dominance), Clastres indicates a potentially more fruitful politi-cal theory applicable both to stateless societies and to societies of the state.

Edmund Leach’s earlier and classic Political systems of Highland Burma (1954) has asimilar implication, though not as overtly politically radical as that of Clastres, forruling Western paradigms concerning the political philosophy of the state of furtherrelevance to ongoing debates about democracy. Leach’s Kachin study, as most studentsknow, demonstrates the intertwining of a non-state logic with that of state orders, atthe same time indicating that they are not different stages in a dialectic proceedingalong the same line of flight: Kachin social dynamics is not synthetic with that of the

Bruce Kapferer820


neighbouring Shan hierarchical state order. Despite their embroilment, there are irre-ducible differences which are, none the less, vital in the overall political integrity of theShan-Kachin order.

Indigenous resistance movements in Latin America and in Asia display anarchistdynamics that are stimulated in the shadow of contemporary states. Their anarchismshould not be reduced, necessarily, to modernist concepts within which such resistancemovements can be captured and domesticated. Modern anarchist ideologies (examplesinclude de Foigny, as well as Proudhon, Bakunin, Bedyaev, and others) were con-structed within the orbit of recent state formations and refract their discourses, ifextremely critically. They are bound in a mutually reproductive dialectic. But as Evans-Pritchard indicated, the resistant anti-state orientation of some indigenous move-ments, or, better, their passionate antagonism (and I note that the very term ‘resistance’is also a concept with which ruling opinion is comfortable), may be fuelled by valueprinciples conceived quite independently of state discourse, although stimulated, asamong the Nuer, by colonial state oppression or that manifested in the circumstancesof the postcolonial state. When these value principles are given due consideration andin a way which is not conditioned by the dualisms and exceptionalist discourse ofdominant power, other, more integrated theory of greater explanatory capacity may beproduced.

The foregoing well-known examples underscore the idea of the potential of theexotic in anthropology to refuse its understanding through the conceptualizations of aEuro-American dominant discourse. Orientalist exoticism is an extreme of such domi-nance, and anthropology, if not orientalist, has been bound to the paradox born of itsbeginnings in the circumstances of Euro-American power and associated value. Thisgoverns recurrent debate.

Thus the conventional criticism of Lévi-Strauss is that he is tied to dualisms that givecommanding place to Euro-American conceptions despite his attempt to overcomethem. His oppositions of a West/Rest, modern/ancient, hot/cold kind underpin the veryorientalist exoticism that he powerfully rejects. Lévi-Strauss addresses this dualism as ahistorical-cum-cultural product or the historical working through of the openness orclosure of the logical possibilities of different ideas and practices. None the less, thedualism insists on an orientalist potential. This is so despite Lévi-Strauss’s appeal toscience as the universal capacity and potential of all human beings and his demonstra-tion that this is variously apparent in the ideas and practices across the dualist divide.His science is based in assumptions that claim to transcend Euro-American value thatis apparent in the positivism of Durkheim (or existentialist philosophy). Lévi-Straussstresses the scientific ideal of openness to possibility rather than the closure thatnineteenth-century hyper-rationalist science promoted in the face of major religiousdiscourses and in the interest of its establishment. None the less, this as well as his effortto use his own cultural/historical aesthetic sensibility (e.g. music) as a means forentering into difference – an explicit and positive recognition of the use of his ownsubjectivity as a scientific method – runs foul of the routine criticism of a Eurocentrismwithin anthropology. That is, Lévi-Strauss reproduces the authority of dominant dis-course, or a discourse of dominance, even in his methodological efforts to give voice tominor discourses and to establish their larger significance.

It should be clear that the criticism of Lévi-Strauss is not his scientific objective butthe Eurocentric cultural/historical dualisms that are embedded in it. I say this because,in my opinion, some of the criticism of Lévi-Strauss is rooted more in the legacy of the



division between the sciences and the arts in Western academia, itself Eurocentric, thanin the interests of developing better scientific or more rigorous understandings ofdifference and its contribution to knowledge. In this regard some of the criticisms ofLévi-Strauss motivated in Eurocentric humanist visions – sometimes ingrained inexoticism of the romantic kind – if not actually silly, border on being so. Nevertheless,some of the difficulties in Lévi-Strauss’s approach arise from a Euro-American-spawned dualism that is insisted on in his methodology. His critics, keenest amongthem being Geertz and some located in various currents of postmodern anthropologythat extend, if differently, from Geertz’s humanist relativism, may be no less committedto a similar if not the same dualism. Paradoxically, some aspects of the intense self-critique in anthropology concerning exoticism and orientalism may themselves expressthe very values of dominance and Euro-Americanism that they abjure. This may beparticularly so in the present situation of globalization and the hybridizing spread ofEuro-American ideas as a consequence of new forms of imperialism and the discoursesof control following from colonialism (see Kapferer 2000).

It is not the idea of the exotic per se in anthropology that is necessarily problematic;rather it is the dualism founded in the very historical origins and development of thediscipline. This achieves its irresolute and paradoxical intensity in the comparativism ofthe subject upon which anthropology rests and which guides the field’s determinationsof difference and the contrasts and oppositions so often implicated.

The aporia of the exotic and comparisonGandhi’s famous retort when asked what he thought of Western civilization, ‘I think itwould be a good idea!’, explodes the implicit understanding of Western value as thestandard present in dualism and anthropological comparison. Anthropologists arethoroughly aware of this; so much so that doing anthropology occasionally seems toreduce to an almost exclusive exercise, bordering on the narcissistic, of de-centring theWest. However, the clear aporia in this is that the very processes of de-centring andde-exoticism continue to be bound within the very terms from which the problematicof the exotic is produced. The dialectic of the cultural Self vis-à-vis the cultural Other,so much a feature of much anthropological analysis, is one example. The same mayapply to that de-exoticizing work that identifies the recognition of the exotic as havingits source in the globalization or imperialism of value connected with capitalist expan-sion. Anthropological de-exoticism often appears to invert the exotic rather than dis-pense with it – it is the exoticizer who becomes exotic.

An outstanding example of what I am saying relates to the anthropological discus-sion of sorcery and witchcraft, one of the most conventional sites for the de-exoticizingpractice of anthropologists. This is all the more so these days because sorcery andwitchcraft seem to have expanded in their popularity – especially in erstwhileimperialized zones of the world – and, furthermore, have assumed more bizarre shapesthan before. They have doubled in exotic value. Practices that are already sensitivegauges and pragmatic responses to the usual disturbances affecting everyday life havebounced off the graph, as it were, and in many ways have transmogrified, achievingfunctions hitherto not observable. All manner of calamities, from HIV to the manyspecific inequities and vulnerabilities of poverty and of wealth, appear to concentratetheir emotional, social, and political potencies into the realms of sorcery and witchcraftpractice. Once made sensible in their own cosmological and cultural terms, they

Bruce Kapferer822


demand new or additional interpretation, one which centres them in forces that aremore global in emphasis.

In Sri Lanka, a once relatively minor village demon of sorcery, low in the cosmicorder of beings, has been transmuted into one of the high gods of the Sinhala Buddhistpantheon (see Kapferer 1997). Formerly an ambiguous guardian of village boundariesand an outside force yet intimate within internal social relations and destructive ofthem, he is now a Guardian God of the Sinhalese. He patrols the territorial boundariesbetween ethnic Sinhalese and ethnic Tamils and has become a commanding figure ofjustice among largely urban Sinhalese. The former demon, now a god, uses his destruc-tive capacity positively, righting wrongs and punishing those causing personal distress(frequently, obstructive bureaucrats, abusive landlords, and rapacious businesspeople). His major temples are built at key sites of capital flow, ports of entry and egressof consumables, and, too, at critical points of social and political fracture, spaces ofcrime and zones of ethnic conflict and opposition. The new god manifests the changingsocial order motivated through capital and its generation of social and personal crisis.

What was conceived as the exotic of the local becomes the exotic of the global andof the modern and a mirror to dominant forces. There is an echo here of some earlieranthropological approaches that saw a logical connection between the faulty or illogicalreasoning of witchcraft, for example, and that of science where old theories are sus-tained against the new despite the bulk of evidence. Witchcraft and science share in acommon irrationality. I have no doubt as to the corrective value of such insights, andespecially in the context of the current global financial crisis, where the irrational ofcapital and of the science to comprehend it seems to have reached a new intensity. Thisis complete with a rash of Salem witchcraft-like accusations extending to the heights ofcapital control. However, such arguments continue the dualism that they seek to avoidor overcome, either inverting the terms (discovering the premodern in the modern) ordeclaring a universal (all express the same irrationalism or fetishism, only some moreso than others). The legitimacy of contrasts and oppositions – for instance, the natureof the rational vis-à-vis the irrational – is maintained, added to which are furtherarguments and assumptions internal to major, not to say dominant, discourses comingfrom global centres. This is not an argument against the spirit of such critique, butsimply a recognition that the dualism in which a discredited exoticism was formedcontinues, the Other, as it were, becoming the measure of the realities of the dominant,instead of the other way about. There is a reprise of orientalism through which anoccidental Unreason, now global, is reflected: the argument of Montesquieu re-surfacesbut without the same degree of fictive imaginative self-consciousness.

De-territorializing the exotic and overcoming dualismThe foregoing impasse, the circularity of a de-exoticizing discourse, is founded in theaporia of a dualism, whether of a universalizing or relativist kind, which may beembedded in the comparativism at the heart of anthropology and its emphasis ondifference and diversity. Here, I consider, is the potential contribution of Louis Dumont(1980; 1986) and his attempt to overhaul the orientation to comparison in anthropologyand to develop an appropriate methodology for it. It offers an approach that may avoidSelf/Other and Us/Them contrasts and oppositions of the kind which place the weightof the exotic on one or other side of the equation. Critically it is an approach thatde-territorializes the exotic: any people or practice is potentially exotic to any other.This is so in a way that enables the determination of the distinction in difference (or the



nature of an assumed similarity) that may establish the conceptual grounds for theconnection or unity with other practices without effacing their distinction. In this, theexotic of difference established through comparison can become a source of abstractconceptualization for the development of general theory that emerges from ethnogra-phy rather than being imposed upon it: ethnography as merely confirming ordisconfirming evidence rather than more actively participant in the production oftheoretical understanding of a specific and general kind. Dumont’s direction has theadvantage of liberating difference from the sometimes tyranny of commandingthought (whether explicitly or implicitly), wherever it may be centred, as well asliberating what may be in difference, the suppressed of the exotic and its conceptualcontribution to larger understanding.

Crucially, Dumont’s comparativism is post-Durkheimian and post-Lévi-Straussianstructuralism. He starts in orientalist terrain, countering the concepts and theory ofdominant Euro-American discourse, demonstrating their exoticizing distortion, andtheir universalizing limitation. Through this Dumont releases the distinction of thatwhich has been subordinated to the terms of the major discourse, the dimensions of itsnon-reducibility. Such distinction then becomes the basis of a new conceptualizationfor a comparative understanding which recognizes connection and unity throughdifference. His approach extends to a critical understanding of Euro-American domi-nant social science thought and steps towards the building of more general conceptsand theory appropriate to humanity as a whole through its diversity and difference.

Dumont’s direction was initially inspired in his Indian research on caste. His inter-pretation of the empirical evidence is the subject of disagreement, although I am largelysympathetic (see Kapferer 2010).5 This aside, it is the orientation of his approach withwhich I am concerned.

Caste is conventionally discussed in Euro-American social science as the extremeof socio-economic inequality and is contrasted with the emphasis on equality inWestern contexts. The contrast assumes that caste, as inequality, can be aligned alongthe same continuum as Euro-American equality, the former being the negative of thelatter’s positive to be understood through the same conceptual and theoreticalassumptions. This involves the privileging and weighting of ideological values sup-ported more in the circumstances of power and its moralities in which Euro-American discourse and theory are centred than in empirical or scientificunderstanding. Dumont indicates that it obscures the fact that Europe and Asia(India) are better conceived as historically divergent trajectories from out of the samehuman potential. They formed different configurations of relational processes thatcannot essentially or necessarily be contrasted in the same terms. There is a unity, butthe conceptual and theoretical understanding of this is not to be assumed prior to theinvestigation of the evidence.

The ideological weighting of Euro-American social science is evident in the empha-sis placed on the individual, the individual-as-value – that is, on the individual as theprimary starting-point for theoretical understanding, prior to or apart from its forma-tion in relations. This includes, in much social science, the value given to the essentialequality of all individuals that, while a worthy ideal largely developed in recent Westernhistory, can skew the interpretation of other systems. Most significantly in this discus-sion, it can deny the conceptual and theoretical contribution of other configurations ofpractice to the generation of knowledge concerning humanity and defeat or distortcomparative understanding.

Bruce Kapferer824


Exploring the variations of caste practice, Dumont shows that it is a particular formof social differentiation founded in ritual values of a specific holistic character. Thus thesystem of caste, or the differentiation of castes and the complexity of their interrela-tions, are formed out of the mutually negating forces of purity and impurity. To put thisanother way, purity and impurity are hierarchically enfolded (what Dumont refers to asthe encompassing of the contrary), purity being valued over impurity, each the negativeforce of the other. Purity and impurity are simultaneously processes and moments in acontinually unfolding dynamic of the whole which are ultimately expressed, in terms ofcaste, as oppositions at the limits of the system. This is a non-dualist system in that thedynamic is not produced by an opposition, but rather the opposition (e.g. Brahminvis-à-vis Outcaste) is a result of the dynamic.6 With reference to caste, particular castesmay be conceived as moments in the differentiating process of the whole (the encom-passing of the contrary), as are the qualities of inter- and intra-caste relations throughwhich the system is continuously sustained.

Therefore, for Dumont, caste cannot be placed along the same conceptual plane asinequality.Its formof hierarchicaldifferentiationisnotthehierarchyof commonWesternusage where it is synonymous with inequality and also stratification. These are socio-economic concepts grounded in the individual-as-value and are not embedded in a ritualholism of a pure/impure dynamic.Thus while class processes intermingle with caste,eachis not reducible to the other yet may well express a particular synergy of hybridization,as, for example, in contemporary violence towards outcaste dalits in India.7 The holismof caste practice is altogether different from ideas of the whole and of part/whole relationsin Euro-American everyday understanding and in social science thought. In the latter, thewhole is often defined as equal to or greater than the sum of its parts. In the part/wholerelation of such a system,the part can reflect the whole or act as if it was the whole.Notionsof cultureandsocietyandidentity inmuchWesternpractice implysuchholism.However,in the holism of caste the parts are emergent from within the dynamic of the whole,whichitself is integral to the parts and their relations. The whole is neither reducible to the partnor vice versa, as it is in much practice in the West.

Dumont’s argument is that Euro-American concepts should be applied to the situa-tion of caste in India with some care. But he does not leave matters here. He asks if theconcepts that he has developed for and abstracted from his investigation of caste inIndia might be capable of larger application where those of Euro-American theoreticaldominance have failed. Thus he indicates that practices in the West can be conceived asconfigurational variations of the conceptualizations of holism and hierarchy derivedfrom his study of Indian caste. I stress them as configurational rather than transfor-mational to underline a unity in difference rather than expressions of extremes at theends of a continuum along a single line of flight or as different moments of the onephenomenon.

The argument is that the concepts of holism and hierarchy are of more universalvalue.8 This is so as abstractions which are drained of their ideological content. Suchideology itself is conceived as the product of specific configurations (of holism andhierarchy) in history which may achieve or exacerbate further positive or negativeeffects of an ethical or moral kind. Thus Euro-American practices, even the concept ofthe individual and the individual-as-value, are specific dimensions of configurations ofholism and hierarchy.

This is evident at the extremes of such configurations, especially in what are recog-nized as their pathologies, as certain ideological possibilities emerge within them as



well as excite them (see Rio & Smedal 2009). For example, forms of exclusion, discrimi-nation, and racism in contexts dominated by Western value demonstrate a specificpart/whole configuration where hierarchy is conceived as difference to be excluded inorder to maintain the integrity of the whole and an equivalent value of its parts. Thisis expressed as a positive, for instance, in de Foigny’s imagination of Australia fromwhich I quoted at the start of this essay, although it explicitly intimates its ownabsurdity. The thorough negative potential is manifest in Apartheid and NationalSocialism, for example, which realize a specific form of hierarchy in a dynamic ofexclusion whereby the integrity of the whole as a community of identical parts, asessentially the same, is constituted. That which is excluded and valued as less than thatwhich is included manifests, through its externalization, an intensification orre-insistence of hierarchy that, moreover, comes to define the unity of the included. Imight add that certain notions of the individual-as-value, those which stress a purity ofthe person as an integrated totality of equivalent parts, not only suppress hierarchy butalso recognize the immanence of hierarchy in difference as threatening the disintegra-tion of the part as whole.

In the situation of caste, hierarchy has its fundamental effect in a different configu-rational set. Its pathology is necessarily no less destructive or reductive of humanpotential, as the evidence more than indicates. However, this arises from a holism thatis the intensification rather than the suppression of hierarchy. A distinct part/wholerelation obtains in which hierarchy as the encompassment of the contrary, expressedmost clearly at the extremes, constitutes the dynamic of the whole. The parts aredifferentiated moments of the overarching and unfolding process in which mutuallynegating forces are held in hierarchical union, which is also vital in the relationsbetween the parts that sustain the integrity of the whole.

There are other, no less important approaches to comparison in anthropology thatengage with the exotic of difference and demonstrate its significance in general andtheoretical understanding. Two of the better known are those of Mary Douglas (1970;1973) and Marilyn Strathern (1988; 2004). Douglas’s famous example of the Lele pan-golin – thoroughly exotic as being outside all categories yet, none the less, a unity ofthem (hence its sacred quality) – can be regarded as one conceptual starting-point forher grid/group scheme of mix and variation. This has the great virtue ofde-territorializing and de-exoticizing the exotic and giving it a place in more generalunderstanding. But the scheme is still firmly set in Euro-dominant thought, its univer-sal classificatory scheme distributing societies and practices topographically accordingto different grid/group combinations, which, at the risk of being unfair, is areconfiguration of familiar Eurocentric oppositions: grid (open/individual) versusgroup (bounded, closed). The one receives no positive value over the other. However,for all its insight, it remains a classificatory approach whose explanatory potentialyields little to the phenomena distributed throughout it. These remain as illustrationsfor a theory that is already built into the scheme.

Strathern’s (1988; 2004) approach is far more orientated to opening the erstwhileexotic to produce a major theoretical rethinking. The Melanesian Other becomes thebasis for a reimagination of a sociological orientation that is forceful for the widespreadexamination of practices wherever located. Strathern’s orientation has much incommon with that of Dumont. Both de-centre that social science which takes the unitindividual as the theoretical starting-point and stress the person rather than the indi-vidual. The person is not a stable point and expresses different and changing possibility

Bruce Kapferer826


through relations. Here I think there would be some disagreement. Strathern writes ofthe dividual, along the lines of Melanesian conception, as a changing point of connec-tion in an open network assemblage in which there is no societal closure along con-ventional Durkheimian lines. Dumont might have seen this perspective as anotherform of individualism (which was his reaction to Marriott’s [1976] alternative directionto Indian ethnography influential for Strathern) and a return to Euro-dominance.There is a degree of correspondence between Strathern’s (2004) concepts of partialconnections, partible persons, and assemblages that, even if unintentionally, reflectsglobalizing inter-territorial corporatizing realities as it expresses an expansion from thesuggestions of Melanesian ontology and practice. However, this in no way necessarilydisconfirms her perspective.

Here, I think, Dumont’s comparative method and approach to the exotic achievepotential significance. Dumont articulates a methodological perspective that couldconceivably start from any point whatever on the globe without necessarily privilegingone logic of practice over another. Anything and everything is possibly exotic to anyother. This includes that which is within the domains or fields of commanding politicalcentres and their theories as well as that which is marginalized or peripheralized. WhatDumont offers is a method for determining the exotic as an authentic difference. Thatis, it approaches apparent difference or similarity in a way that guards against the returnof the same through the assertion of difference as well as a potential failure to graspwhat may be buried in difference, vital within it, that may contribute to larger under-standing. Moreover, Dumont’s comparative approach is a method of disclosure forrevealing what may be suppressed within practice and otherwise subdued in its under-standing – the exotic, in my usage. Furthermore, through such exotic (which can refractthe exotic in major discourses simultaneously with the hitherto minor), abstractionscan be extracted from ethnographic ground that can then be engaged to build conceptsand theory of more general comparative worth. That is, anthropology can worktowards the potential of generating broader or more encompassing understandingthrough its attention to diversity. This yields to such diversity, and indeed the ongoingdifferentiation in humanity, its own authority wherever it is and its contribution to thebuilding of theory rather than being a passive object of confirmation for imposedconceptual frameworks. The kind of methodological direction that Dumont and otheranthropologists project is an overcoming of dualisms in which exoticism is born(without sacrificing the authentic of difference) and, most especially, those dualismsthat are internal to the comparative emphasis of the discipline.

I refer to the almost perennial tension in anthropology caught between the extremesof relativism and universalism. In the former, anthropologists threaten an isolating –almost narcissistic – retreat into difference, a celebration of the exotic verging onexoticism, becoming Geertzian ‘merchants of the strange’. They demonstrate the limitsof grand narratives but the significance of what they have discovered is reduced to aspoiling tactic which may withhold that which is suppressed in the exotic that couldcontribute to a larger, more positive understanding. Alternatively, the concern to applyuniversalizing concepts and theory, apart from being overly premature in the context ofhuman differentiation, may involve the capitulation, if not collusion, of anthropolo-gists in the very suppression of what their ethnography otherwise discloses. The kind ofcomparative approach that Dumont and others indicate – I think of Clastres again –has the potential to bridge and perhaps overcome a negative and self-defeating dualismin anthropology. The significance of anthropology as the discipline of the minor



discourse founded upon the comparative study of difference and diversity is furtherrealized.

The exotic as an open plane of emergenceI now wish to expand on the idea of the exotic as a dynamic of disclosure andemergence: the exotic as a departure from the expected and which refuses constraintwithin established conceptual categories and theoretical understanding. The emphasisis on the exotic as that which breaks conventional and established frames of compre-hension and the exotic as the expression (or revelation) in practice of potential thatvarious forms of conventional and established kinds of interpretation or understandingocclude or suppress. My direction is to free the idea of the exotic from its constraintwithin a comparative Other/Self dialectics or Other-ing – in other words, tode-territorialize the exotic. I illustrate the direction with reference to two methodo-logical approaches involving (a) a focus on the event as a site for the realization andrevelation of potential, and (b) an analytical procedure that I call conceptual cross-register. These identify the exotic (the ordinarily occluded and suppressed ormarginalized) as an enduring potential of all practice anywhere and dislocate orde-situate the exotic as something necessarily obtaining in particular types of practiceor a feature of certain cultures or societies rather than others. All of these threaten thekind of exoticization and, indeed, orientalism that anthropology has long de-valued.

The exotic of eventsAnthropologists often appear to revel in the exotic of events, playing with acceptedcategories of the exotic – for example, ritual, magic, sorcery, forms of kinship andexchange often associated with small-scale systems at the margins of capitalist expan-sion – in an effort to destabilize and redirect conceptual and theoretical understanding.Thus, the state and nationalism are addressed as magical forms, their dynamics con-ditioned, furthermore, in a mytho-logic; mass ethnic violence bears the shape of anexorcism; identity politics expresses a new tribalism; capital describes a sorcery; theinternet indicates new lineaments of kinship and characteristics of exchange reminis-cent of archaic societies, and so on. Undoubtedly, conventional domains (e.g. of thepolitical, the economic, and the sociological) and their rationalities of description andexplanation are broken by calling on images and metaphors imbued with the sense ofthe exotic. But, as I have said, this is done at the risk of confirming an exoticism despitethe deconstructive and de-centring aims and the concern to give rise to innovativeinterpretation. My orientation here takes a different direction, stressing the event as anexotic in itself. This is so not in terms of conventional categories of the exotic. What isstressed is the exotic of the event or what the event as exotic signs/symbolizes as a goingbeyond, outside, and/or a revelation of processes or potentials of the world in which itmanifests. The idea is not to constrain the exotic of the event in established categori-zations of the exotic, which paradoxically may deny critical dimensions of the event(the exotic of the event) and even beg the question and constrain the move to novelunderstanding that it might demand.

This is the direction of Gluckman’s (1958; see also Evens & Handelman 2006)methodological innovation of situational or event analysis that he and his Rhodes-Livingstone Institute and Manchester colleagues tried to develop especially in the 1950s.But they were stuck in an anthropology of representations, the legacy of theirDurkheimian roots. Victor Turner (1969), via his analysis of ritual – a still conventional

Bruce Kapferer828


category of the exotic harking back to the past if ever there was one – broke out, for hereconceived ritual events not as empty (mechanical, ritualistic) occasions or instru-ments in the cyclical repetition of the same, in the terms of van Gennep (1960) or Eliade(1949), but, in far more Nietzschean vein, as vital in the generation of the new. Theexotic were not merely bizarre or strange or terrifying representations or signs oftransition (as in initiation rites); they were themselves dense with the potential ofchange that they also effected. Transferring this understanding from ritual (specificallyits liminal moments) to other social and political processes, Turner (1974) identified theexotic of the event as a major point of differentiation out of which original meaningand social formation were to be constituted, although the directions that were to beestablished remained always open (e.g. Turner’s discussion of Hidalgo’s grito on the eveof the Mexican revolution).

Marshall Sahlins (1981; 2005), working from within a different genealogy, expandsthe point effectively, if not explicitly, discussing the exotic of the event as emergent inthe conjunction of differently motivated processes – or, in Deleuzian terms, the joiningof different lines of flight. In the event conceived as a moment of conjuncture, poten-tials are realized that in Sahlins’s view constitute the actualization of the imaginalpossibility of culture, culture as a dynamic virtuality of potential (see Kapferer 2005).This potential is not already present in the structuring of social relations, or experien-tial orders, and is not, therefore, a representation of reality, an event as an illustrationof what already is. In other words, a key aspect of the event is as a particular point ofgenerative emergence whose exotic both is outside pre-existing structural arrange-ments and indicates a new configuration of open possibility. Here the idea of the eventin a less radical way anticipates more recent notions of the event as a plane of emer-gence (Badiou 2001; Deleuze & Guattari 1994), which fits with the idea of the exotic Iam developing here.

I highlight the development of a methodology of the event in anthropology as are-centring of what is immanent in the role of the exotic for anthropology, but shornof exoticism. That is, the approach to the event outlined accents an attention to theemergence of the extraordinary within the domain of the ordinary. It is to be distin-guished from those analyses of ethnographic cases, still common in anthropology, thatare concerned with illustrating routine or typical practice. The approach to the eventthat I stress here concentrates on what would be deemed atypical, what is oftenexcluded from consideration, the marginal, the minority, the suppressed and the‘strange’ – what the idea of the exotic often communicates. But I suggest, rather thanengaging in a procedure of ‘normalization’ or ‘rationalism’ (often the feature of muchde-exoticization), what I describe as a methodological orientation to the exotic of theevent accents the poietic, the ‘strange’ unique of the event. This not only opens up orreveals the potential in what already may be but also emphasizes the role of the uniqueof the event for a rethinking of what is immanent in the structures of human practicein their particularity as well as the larger import for an understanding of humanity asa whole. This was the function of the orientation to the exotic in anthropology andachieved through the specific value placed on the details of ethnography which I thinkis re-insisted or given original emphasis in current anthropological methodologicaldirections to the event.

I have outlined the exotic of the event as an extension (and a de-territorialization)within the ethnographic emphasis of that anthropology pursued in the marginalizedrealms of the erstwhile exotic. Gluckman and Manchester’s direction to situational



analysis and the study of the event was, it should be noted, thoroughly concerned toreimagine the importance of anthropology as a basic social science discipline – to bringit in from exotic realms as it were. I now turn to the notion of conceptual cross-register,which I conceive to be a development from the methodological emphasis on compari-son in anthropology, whereby significant difference is discovered (or the exotic asdifference and an invention of the comparative conjunction or interrelation) and isengaged to reconceptualization and theorization in which unities of a new kind may berevealed.

The exotic of crossing the categoryCinema and ritual can be considered as two independent and irreducible categories ofaesthetic practice. The former is the invention of the modern technological age,directed to entertainment and enjoyment. Ritual is commonly conceived as virtuallyprimordial, a practice in which human beings originally began to realize their human-ity, and, in ongoing realities, to (re-)create and transform their conditions and situa-tions of existence. Cinema and ritual are poles apart, and comparing them brings tomind most of the dualisms which underpin discussion concerning the exotic andexoticism. They give rise to modes of understanding that are radically different. Yetbringing them into conjunction, into a conjunction that in itself is exotic, revealsdimensions that might expand features of the phenomena in themselves – ritual, forexample. Of course, upon reflection, this is what anthropologists in one way or anotherare continually doing – approaching practices through a positioning elsewhere andoften in terms of assumptions and metaphors that are under-examined for their impli-cations. This is a core paradox and problematic of comparison that I have alreadyaddressed.

Theatre is a frequent metaphor as well as a source of analytical tools for compre-hending ritual as, indeed, social performance (e.g. Goffman 1967), ritual widely oftenitself being treated as antecedent to theatre. I have mentioned Lévi-Strauss’s engage-ment with Amazonian myth through his understanding of Western music. The merit ofhis analytical mediation was that he made his strategy explicit, and my crossing thecategories of difference bears some similarity. I suggest the potential for an extension ofthe understanding of ritual through cinema as conceived by one of its most influentialethnographers, Gilles Deleuze (1986; 1989), and in the context of the work of VictorTurner (1962; 1967; 1968), whose ethnography of rite has been influential. Both Deleuzeand Turner conceive their approaches to be relevant for the larger understanding ofhumanity as a whole.

Following Deleuze, cinema is founded on the image (visual, sound, and other senseimages), on the moving image, and achieves much of its force through the invention ofthe moving, mobile camera. Ritual is based in symbols that are, for Turner, grounded infundamental human sense experiences using a technology and techniques that arethoroughly centred within and extensive from the body. Film, for Deleuze, is not centredin or extensive from the body; indeed, for him, it is founded in the mobile camera, itsdynamicof constructionlikenedtothatof abodywithoutorgans.Inmanyaspectscinemamanifests itself as a post-human phenomenon: that is, it is centred not in the human beingbut in realities that take their form through processes that encompass human beings and,for want of a better expression,are not founded in ordinary embodied human perception.The filmic opens to perception that which cannot be directly sensed from the ordinarypositioning of the human being. The radical effect of the cinematic is to take hold of the

Bruce Kapferer830


subject via the mobile camera and break up and distribute the subject, as Deleuze says,at any-point-whatever across the screen. As Woody Allen makes witty comment in ThePurple Rose of Cairo, in cinema the audience are potentially lifted from their seats andeffectively reconstituted as participants,or as particled or partible participants,within theon-screen action. The subjectivities of the audience are made continually to shiftperspective and are not those of an anchored, integrated, organic individual. They cometooccupyshiftingpositionalityviacameratechniquethroughadiversityof pointsof view:for example, human and nonhuman, distanced and virtually out of frame, or intensively,penetratingly close. In cinema there is no neat subject/object contrast and its actants, touse Bruno Latour’s concept, can be material and immaterial, both subjects and objects.The individuals in the audience are assembled and disassembled in the connections andrelations anticipated or created through the effect of camera motion. Thus the audiencecan become continuously and differentially consubstantial with the screen action so thataesthetic distancing and reflexive distancing are radically reduced (audiences are in themotion of the film as they might be in the motion of music which is vital in film). Thisis so to such an extent that occasionally the audience – even despite their resistance (in amelodramatic movie, for example) – are absorbed thoroughly into the dynamic motion/emotion of the action.

This is very different from a Turnerian analysis of ritual – for which drama andtheatre performance is the main metaphor – which depends on subject/object dualitiesand intersubjectivity, for which reflexivity is crucial. With Turner, ritual, while thor-oughly visceral, is also through and through meaningful. Deleuze’s post-structuralismexamines more the compositional dynamics upon which viscerality and meaning comeinto being.

Deleuze and Turner operate different phenomenologies, and the former is consciousin his formulations of a distinction between the cinematic and, indeed, ritual. Deleuzeconceives what may be grasped as ritual to be constructed mainly as a system ofrepresentational instants (parts building towards a whole), whereas cinema worksthrough elements that are part/wholes, instants of continuous flow. Ritual and cinemaoperate with different cosmologies of space/time. In ritual, time is measured in move-ments across sections of space (very much, incidentally, Turner’s concept of the ritualprocess), whereas cinema is orientated to the expression of time in itself in whosemotion and depth audiences are placed. Effectively, cinema overcomes the limitationsof ritual and virtually creates the real or, rather, constitutes the realities of its experi-encing through a distinct technologically wrought poiesis. There is the suggestion inDeleuze that cinematographers in their pragmatism – in their concern to solveimmediate problems at hand rather than intellectual abstractions – have hit upon howindeed realities form in and around human beings. In this way cinema is able to createa semblance of lived experience, or the way human beings realize their realities, even inthe extraordinary of its action. In ritual, on the contrary, while it works within livedexperience, it also operates to radically interrupt and suspend the routine of experienceas it is ordinarily engaged. The techniques of rite are often thoroughly directed to attackordinary lived experience in order to enter within its underlying dynamics and tore-establish continuities in ongoing existence that have been broken or disrupted. Suchconsideration aside, crossing Deleuze’s conceptualizations grounded in the assemblingand formational dynamics of cinema into the domain of ritual opens potentials ofunderstanding that are otherwise closed to the conceptual approach of Turner, despitethe power of his insights. Turner’s orientation is destabilized through Deleuze, whose



phenomenology of cinema begins before language and meaning rather than withinlanguage and meaning. I express a caution here because Turner is equivocal on thematter, recognizing that many rites in their very primordialism start before languageand meaning and are orientated to give rise to them – think of Gilbert Lewis’s (1988)and Alfred Gell’s (1975) New Guinea ethnographies. However, Turner’s approach isultimately thoroughly grounded in language and meaning. This is not so withDeleuze’s perspective through cinema, which is premised on a coming or becoming tolanguage and meaning, the priority of the image to the symbol.

In cinema, Deleuze argues, consciousness is with the screen, consciousness exists, asit were, apart from the audience and it is projected onto them, drawing them into itsprocess. Deleuze explicitly announces a counter-phenomenology to that of Turner, forwhom consciousness is already with the audience or participants and arises intention-ally as a function of their direction to the screen. Consciousness and its process throughall manner of objects/subjects embraces audiences and they come to meaning in itscourse, and, indeed, they participate in the creation of meaning, even of entirely novelmeaning, through such filmic artifice as jump shots, irrational cuts, strange juxtaposi-tions, and so on. Applied to ritual, this approach, at least for me, expands an under-standing of such ritual phenomena as trance and a variety of effects where participantslose themselves in the ritual process and themselves become expressions of its shiftingmovement. This is so for participants who have had no prior experience of particularritual events. I am well aware that cultural predispositions are in all likelihood there, butthis depends on a psychologism that a Deleuzian perspective may, at least, in part,avoid. An orientation to ritual through a Deleuzian understanding of cinema breaks thegrip that drama and performance frameworks have had over ritual analysis and mayeven discover a closer connection with the phenomena of much ritual practices inthemselves. The concept of time that Deleuze develops in relation to cinema fits withmany village Buddhist rites in Sri Lanka (see Kapferer 1997; 2012), which operate withboth time as process in a spatial sense and with a concern to enter within time itself andthe void of creative generation. Many rites of which I have experience achieve theirnarrative effects through the distribution of subjectivities in virtually a cinematicfashion and break down subject/object dualities. All this, of course, should not reduceritual to cinema. What I stress is the exotic of their relation within which, via thecross-register from one to the other, new possibilities of understanding are opened.

My discussion of the exotic of events and of analytic cross-register is within the ideaof the exotic that I take as vitally central in anthropology, which is a long way fromnotions of the exotic and exoticism with which anthropology began. The exotic in thereconfigurations in the history of anthropology to which I have referred refuses thedichotomies and dualisms of the past, which on occasion still dog anthropology as theydo the social sciences as a whole; it is orientated instead to demonstrating the crucialrole that anthropology through its ethnography and the imagination of those humanpractices anywhere and everywhere contribute to the theoretical and interpretationalunderstanding of humanity as a whole.

Exotic evermoreIt has been said that anthropology is ‘exotic no more’ (McClancy 2002), a title of avolume supported by the Royal Anthropological Institute that was opposed to thesensationalist exoticism of some anthropology, a criticism with which in the main Iagree. However, in my view unfortunately, the book reproduces a dualism separating

Bruce Kapferer832


the anthropology of the modern from the anthropology of the non-modern, the exoticin its terms. It is such dualism that is the basis for the exoticism that the disciplinewould abhor. Moreover, dualist sensationalism of the exoticist sort which opened thisessay should certainly be exorcized, as should the seclusion of the exotic into the worldof the Other. This latter not only reproduces old hierarchies (that of imperialism, inwhich the non-exotic Self defined the Other as exotic) but also is thoroughly against thespirit of anthropology, which is for working towards a unified understanding ofhumanity in the circumstances of its cultural and social differences and similarities.This is achieved through the close attention to human diversity at all points in historyand at any point on the globe without any necessary privilege of concept or practice inthe construction of knowledge of what human being is or may become.

The problem at issue is how to achieve such knowledge without exoticizing in theegregious or more insidious ways that I have addressed in this discussion. Anthropologyis caught in a dilemma of the exotic even as it strives to be rid of it as a function of apersisting dualism in thought and practice. This is exacerbated in a continuing commer-cializing climate of the commoditization of the exotic and in a situation where the subjectas a university discipline even continues to draw sustenance from the fact. The statementby Ulf Hannerz that anthropology must discover its brand,which I cited at the start of thisessay, runs the risk of trading on the dualisms and exoticism of the past, even in the handsof this modernizer of the discipline. An accent on difference rather than the exotic doesnot necessarily overcome the difficulty, especially in situations of university reformswhere the very survival of the subject can depend on commercial appeal to the ideas ofthe exotic that anthropologists would normally abhor.

In a more positive vein, the replacement of the idea of the exotic with the notion ofdifference can weaken the potential contribution of anthropology. I say this in the senseof anthropology as a discipline of the minor discourse. That is, as a subject orientatedto the general understanding of humankind that reveals in its close ethnographicattention to myriad cultural and social practices dimensions that not only do not fit theregnant assumptions of dominant theory (which paradoxically can be an exoticizingforce) but also may lead to the establishing of its limitation as well as revision. The ideaof difference can weaken what is potentially contained in the idea of the exotic and, byso weakening, enable the persistence of dominant and dominating assumptions andtheory when they might otherwise be rendered intensely suspect.

The aim of this discussion has been to address some of the complexities anddilemmas surrounding the concept of the exotic. I have also been concerned with notnecessarily throwing the baby out with the bathwater impelled in some anthropologicalorientations to de-exoticization. This has involved me in a reconfiguration of the ideaof the exotic, principally away from an emphasis on essence and associated dualisms(and the hierarchy of theory and value that these can support) and a shift to the idea ofthe exotic as a relation, as an emergence and strange perturbation of potential, and asa methodology of cross-register that can reveal dynamics within and across humanpopulations and their practices that are otherwise hidden or suppressed in the con-structions of ruling theory and understandings. My whole discussion, of course, ispremised on a commitment to anthropology as not so much a discipline among somany others in the social sciences, for instance, but as a truly foundational orre-foundational discipline vital to the building of an authentic understanding ofhumanity upon the diverse and differentiating ground of what human being is and iscontinually becoming.



NOTES

I wish to thank colleagues in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen withwhom I discussed some of the themes of this article and particularly Bjorn Bertelsen, Ornulf Gulbrandsen,and Olaf Smedal. Terry Evens and Caroline Ifeka read an early draft and were willing discussants.

1 Clifford (1988: 255-76) presents a now well-known and important critical appreciation of Said’s thesis. Hemakes the major observation that its style and uncertainties express dimensions of the current processes ofglobalization. He indicates that the anti-orientalist argument of Said is itself highly ideological. Cliffordsupports Said’s disagreements with the dualisms of orientalism but he is less certain concerning Said’scritique, for example, of arguments relevant to anthropology of cultural coherence. This and other criticismsby Said (the inattention to subject diversity and over-collectivist representations by orientalists) have, I think,been more widely accepted by anthropologists since Clifford published his response. Clifford in his reactionextends a disquiet with what may be considered Said’s individualism or commitment to globalizing valuethat embeds a discourse of dominance and is discussed in different ways by various anthropologists (e.g.Dumont 1986; 1994; Kapferer 2007).

2 Loti is the pseudonym of Julien Viaud, said by him to mean ‘red flower’ and to have been bestowed on himby the natives of a Polynesian island – a similar conceit commonly expressed by many anthropologists assigns of their thorough acceptance and inclusion in the world of the Other.

3 These observations have some resonance with actualities in Australia which take their contemporaryform in dominant Australian egalitarian values. This is aggressively asserted in Australian nationalist populistimaginary – and often hegemonically engaged by the officers of the state. This imaginary suffers little in theway of difference or, at least, that kind of difference that is not conceived to be based in nature, as this isculturally and ideologically asserted. Difference that is ‘unnatural’ is overcome by ideologically influencedprogrammes of assimilation or exclusion, as in state policies towards immigration and refugees, or by somekind of combination of the two as exemplified in current Australian state policy relating to the interventionconcerning Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory (see Kapferer 2012).

4 I develop this concept from an idea of Gilles Deleuze in The logic of sense (2004) concerning minoritylanguages. Much of Deleuze’s philosophical work can be understood as a reconsideration of hithertosuppressed philosophical arguments in the Western tradition. Henri Bergson, who is a major reference inDeleuze’s work and crucial for his understanding of cinema, which I discuss at the end of the essay, waslargely excluded from serious consideration by Durkheim, Mauss, and others associated with them.

5 Major disagreement focuses precisely on the issue as to whether Western-centred analytical frames canbe applied to caste. Thus scholars who oppose Dumont assert in the main orientations derived from MaxWeber or Karl Marx, or else revisions of such perspectives, in current globalizing circumstances. Reactionsto Dumont are complicated not merely because of the scholarly stakes involved (which are significant), butalso because his approach has some import for agendas of practical reform relating to caste in India.Dumont, of course, is highly aware of the human degradation that attaches to caste processes in modernIndia. But he suggests that this is exacerbated in Western and globalizing modernity and even by certainprogressivist policies which assume a universalizing truth that they do not necessarily have. Within anthro-pology, the most significant critic of the Dumont position has been McKim Marriott (1976), whose point,interestingly, is that Dumont is not centred sufficiently within the phenomenology of Hindu thought.Marriott’s approach is the basis for alternative perspectives upon caste among anthropologists and isinfluential for the development of what boils down to a rival comparative perspective (e.g. Strathern 1988;2004). Rio and Smedal (2009) present an important and thorough investigation of the Dumont argumentin relation to his major critics.

6 My representation of Dumont here is my extension from him and is not one that he develops. Theapproach here is a dynamic perspective, as against Dumont’s more static representation. None the less, Ithink, it is in keeping with his holistic orientation.

7 I am extending here the implications of Dumont’s own discussion of the disastrous religious violence atthe time of Partition in 1947.

8 It must be stressed that the concept of hierarchy in Dumont is one that achieves its particular develop-ment through the understanding of caste relations in India and allows him to develop a specialist under-standing that is distinct from common-sense notions of hierarchy within Western cultural and historicalcontexts. The concept of hierarchy – despite his specialist usage – maintains a confusion for critics ofDumont, who align it with concepts such as inequality and the associated notions of class and stratification,which are altogether different from Dumont’s hierarchy concept (see Iteanu 2009). Dumont, unsuccessfullyas it has turned out, has tried to develop the concept of hierarchy into one of genuine comparative worth thatis systematic with his holist orientation (see Kapferer 2012).

Bruce Kapferer834


REFERENCES

Badiou, A. 2001. Ethics: an essay on understanding evil (trans. P. Hallward). London: Verso.Clastres, P. 1987. Society against the state (trans. R. Hurley & A. Stein). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Clifford, J. 1988. The predicament of culture: twentieth-century ethnography, literature and art. Cambridge,

Mass.: Harvard University Press.Comaroff, J. 2010. The end of anthropology, again: on the future of an in/discipline. American Anthropologist

112, 524-38.de Foigny, G. 1693. A new discovery of Terra Incognita Australis, or the Southern World, by Jacques Saudeur, a

Frenchman. London: Charles Hern.Deleuze, G. 1986. Cinema 1: the movement-image (trans. H. Tomlinson & B. Habberjam). London:

Continuum.——— 1989. Cinema 2: the time-image (trans. H. Tomlinson & B. Habberjam). London: Continuum.——— 2004. The logic of sense (trans. M. Lester with C. Stivale). New York: Continuum.——— & F. Guattari 1994. What is philosophy? (trans. H. Tomlinson & G. Burchell). New York: Columbia

University Press.Douglas, M. 1970. Purity and danger: an analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo. Harmondsworth:

Penguin.——— 1973. Natural symbols: explorations in cosmology. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Dumont, L. 1980. Homo hierarchicus. Chicago: University Press.——— 1986. Essays on individualism: modern ideology in anthropological perspective. Chicago: University

Press.——— 1994. German ideology: from France to Germany and back. Chicago: University Press.Eliade, M. 1949. The myth of the eternal return (trans. W.R. Trask). New York: Pantheon.Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1987 [1940]. The Nuer. Oxford: University Press.Evens, T.M.S. & D. Handelman 2006. The Manchester School: practice and ethnographic praxis in anthro-

pology. New York: Berghahn.Foster, S.W. 1982. The exotic as a symbolic system. Dialectical Anthropology 7, 21-30.Geertz, C. 1984. Distinguished lecture: anti anti-relativism. American Anthropologist 86, 263-78.Gell, A. 1975. Metamorphosis of the cassowaries: Umeda society, language and ritual. London: Athlone.Gluckman, M. 1958. A social situation in modern Zululand. Manchester: University Press.Goffman, E. 1967. Interaction ritual: essays in face-to-face behaviour. London: Transaction.Hannerz, U. 2010. Diversity is our business. American Anthropologist 112, 539-51.Iteanu, A. 2009. Hierarchy and power: a comparative attempt under asymmetrical line. In Hierarchy:

persistence and transformation in social formations (eds) K.M. Rio & O.H. Smedal, 331-48. Oxford:Berghahn.

Kapferer, B. 1997. The feast of the sorcerer. Chicago: University Press.——— 2000. Star wars: about anthropology, culture and globalization. Australian Journal of Anthropology 11,

174-98.——— 2005. Ritual dynamics and virtual practice: beyond representation and meaning. In Ritual in its own

right: exploring the dynamics of transformation (eds) D. Handelman & G. Linquist, 35-54. Oxford:Berghahn.

——— 2007. Anthropology and the dialectic of enlightenment: a discourse on the definition and ideals of athreatened discipline. The Australian Journal of Anthropology 18, 72-96.

——— 2010. Louis Dumont and a holist anthropology. In Experiments in holism (eds) T. Otto & N. Bubandt,213-38. Oxford: Blackwell.

——— 2012. Legends of people, myths of state. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press; Oxford:Berghahn.

Lattas, A. 2012. Consultancy, neo-liberal conservatism and the politics of anti-politics. Oceania 82,113-18.

Leach, E.R. 1954. Political systems of Highland Burma. London: G. Bell and Sons Ltd.Lévi-Strauss, C. 1992. Tristes tropiques (trans. D. Weightman & J. Weightman). London: Penguin.Lewis, G. 1988. Day of shining red: an essay on understanding ritual. Cambridge: University Press.McClancy, J. 2002. Exotic no more: anthropology at the front line. Chicago: University Press.Marriott, McK. 1976. Hindu transactions: diversity without dualism. In Transaction and meaning: directions

in the anthropology of exchange and symbolic behavior (ed.) B. Kapferer, 109-42. Philadelphia: Institute forthe Study of Human Issues.

Montesquieu, C. de S. 1973 [1721]. The Persian letters (trans. C.J. Betts). London: Penguin.



Rio, U.M. & O.H. Smedal 2009. Hierarchy and its alternatives: an introduction to movements of totalizationand detotalization. In Hierarchy: persistence and transformation in social formations (eds) U.M. Rio & O.H.Smedal, 1–64. Oxford: Berghahn.

Sahlins, M. 1981. Historical metaphors and mythical realities: structure in the early history of the SandwichIslands Kingdom. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

——— 2005. Structural work: how microhistories become macrohistories and vice versa. AnthropologicalTheory 5, 5-30.

——— 2011. Iraq: The state-of-nature effect. Anthropology Today 27: 3, 26-31.Said, E.W. 1978. Orientalism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.——— 1994. Culture and imperialism. London: Vintage.Segalen, V. 2002. An essay on exoticism: an aesthetics of diversity (ed. & trans. Y.R. Schlick). London: Penguin.Stasch, R. 2011. The camera and the house: the semiotics of New Guinea ‘tree-houses’ in global visual

culture. Comparative Studies in Society and History 53, 75-112.Strathern, M. 1988. The gender of the gift. Berkeley: University of California Press.——— 2004. Partial connections. Cambridge: University Press.Turner, V.W. 1962. Chihamba, the white spirit: a ritual drama of the Ndembu (The Rhodes-Livingstone

Papers 33). Manchester: University Press.——— 1967. The forest of symbols. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.——— 1968. The drums of affliction: a study of religious processes among the Ndembu of Zambia. Oxford:

Clarendon Press.——— 1969. The ritual process. London: Routledge.——— 1974. Dramas, fields and metaphors. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.van Gennep, A. 1960. The rites of passage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Wolf, E. 1974. Foreword. In In search of the primitive: a critique of civilization, xi. New Brunswick, N.J.:

Transaction.

Comment pensent les anthropologues : configurations de l’exotique

Résumé

L’anthropologie a souvent été critiquée pour son exotisme et son orientalisme : c’est là l’un des paradoxesd’une discipline consacrée à l’étude comparative de la différence et de la diversité. Ces critiques sont ici lepivot d’une discussion plus large sur l’importance de l’anthropologie dans les sciences humaines etsociales. L’accent est mis sur l’importance vitale de l’exotique pour l’étude anthropologique de ladifférence et pour sa cohérence et sa pertinence dans la compréhension de l’humanité dans son ensemble.

Bruce Kapferer is currently Professor Emeritus, University of Bergen and Honorary Professor, UniversityCollege London. He has held the Chairs of Anthropology at the University of Adelaide, University CollegeLondon, and James Cook University. His books include A celebration of demons (Indiana University Press,1983, 1991), Legends of people, myths of state (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988, 2011), and The feast of thesorcerer (University of Chicago Press, 1997). His 2001 and Counting: Kubrick, Nietzsche, and anthropology willbe published by Prickly Paradigm Press in 2014. His field research is in Southern Africa, Australia, Sri Lanka,and, most recently, Kerala, India.

University of Bergen, Department of Social Anthropology, Fosswinckelsgate 6, Bergen, Norway N-5007, 47

55589247. [email protected]

Bruce Kapferer836


Documents

How anthropologists think: configurations of the exotic