Boas, Foucault, and the "Native Anthropologist": Notes toward a Neo-Boasian AnthropologyAuthor(s): Matti BunzlReviewed work(s):Source: American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 106, No. 3 (Sep., 2004), pp. 435-442Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3567609 .

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MATTI BUNZL

Boas, Foucault, and the "Native Anthropologist": Notes toward a Neo-Boasian Anthropology

ABSTRACT This article proposes the possibility of a neo-Boasian anthropology conceived at the intersection of Foucauldian geneal- ogy, Boasian historicism, and the epistemic rethinking of the discipline's Self/Other binary. Shifting from a perspective of posing the

ethnographic object as Other toward a Boasian conception of the past as the principal site of inquiry, the piece thus advocates an

anthropological project grounded in the history of the present. This conception, it is argued, can overcome several of the dilemmas

currently facing the discipline, the awkward status of "native anthropology" foremost among them. [Keywords: Boas, Foucault, native

anthropology, history of the present]

T O SPEAK WITH FRANZ BOAS, this article attempts a triangulation of three concerns that have their unity

in the mind of its author: (1) the place of Foucault's work in contemporary anthropology; (2) the affective desire for a recuperation of a distinctly Boasian ethnology; and (3) the dilemmas of the "native ethnographer." I will tackle these issues in reverse to arrive at a preliminary assessment of the possibility for a "neo-Boasian anthropology," an approach that would permit a Foucauldian perspective in place of the epistemological panopticism of classical ethnography. At the core of this theoretical project stands a vision of an- thropology as a history of the present, a mode of knowledge production that represents a genuine alternative to what has come to be seen as Malinowski's entrenched design of fieldwork as an encounter between ethnographic Self and native Other.

THE "NATIVE ANTHROPOLOGIST" AS SYMPTOM AND OTHER

Over the last few years, anthropologists have turned to crit- ical evaluations of the "field" as the constitutive site of anthropological knowledge production. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson have arguably been most trenchant in their critique, uncovering the hidden logic of what they, fol- lowing numerous other critics of anthropology, identify as the Malinowskian fieldwork tradition. This logic privi- leges direct observation and links it to a radical separation between "home" and the "field," which, in turn, creates a "hierarchy of purity of field sites." In this framework, "real" fieldwork is conducted in a remote site, a notion

that-along with the colonially veiled constitution of cen- ter and periphery-constructs the archetypical fieldworker as a "Euro-American, white, middle-class male" (Gupta and Ferguson 1997:12, 16). Fieldwork thus becomes synony- mous with a "heroized journey into Otherness," the trope that engendered and cemented Malinowski's mythopoetic charter of modern ethnography (Stocking 1992; cf. Clifford 1988).

As Gupta and Ferguson note, this normative construc- tion of anthropological fieldwork has been challenged most effectively by those most threatened by it. Kath Weston, for one, has eloquently written against the abject construction of the "native anthropologist" whose work is always "one step removed from 'the real stuff"' and, therefore, divested of ethnographic authority (1997:164). Echoing Gupta and Ferguson, she identifies the separation between "native" and "ethnographer," "field" and "home," as the site of pro- duction of the "virtual anthropologist"-the "native" and, hence, lesser cousin of the "real" anthropologist (1997:174). In a similar vein, Kirin Narayan has questioned the imag- ined subject position of the native anthropologist, arguing that shifting identifications (of race, class, gender, etc.) ren- der it inherently unstable (1993). Narayan calls for attention to the hybridities that separate all anthropologists from an imagined native authenticity. As she puts it, "The very na- ture of researching what to others is taken-for-granted real- ity creates an uneasy distance" (1993:682).

Weston and Narayan have made seminal contributions to the critique of the concept of the "native anthropol- ogist." What strikes me as peculiar, however, is that the

American Anthropologist, Vol. 106, Issue 3, pp. 435-442, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433. ? 2004 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California Press, Journals Division, 2000 Center Street, Suite 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223.

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436 American Anthropologist * Vol. 106, No. 3 * September 2004

program they enunciate fails to deconstruct the category of "native anthropology" itself. Having diagnosed the in- jurious effects of the ethnographer/native-dyad, Weston seems resigned to its reproduction. In this context, the na- tive ethnographer can do little but function as a perpet- ual reminder of "the power relations that fuel the pro- cess of nativization," a service that comes at the price of her continued abjection as a "virtual anthropologist" (Weston 1997:179). Narayan's scenario, for its part, is more upbeat, particularly since her argument about anthropol- ogists' inherent hybridity effectively evacuates the cate- gory of "native anthropologist." Pragmatically, this seems to solve the problem: No anthropologist is ever really native-- minimally because she operates as an anthropologist seek- ing to represent other people, more generally because she inhabits multiple identities that confound any essentializa- tion of native status. Setting aside for the moment whether such an argument would be accepted by the anthropologi- cal profession (and Weston's analysis suggests that it might not), it leaves the concept of "native anthropology" un- touched by constructing the practice of ethnography as its always already operative Other. The idea of difference gov- erning nonnative anthropology is thus routinized as consti- tutive of all fieldwork, a fact that reinscribes ethnography as a site of encounter between a Self and an Other. In Narayan's framework, a Self can never be her own anthropologist.

As Weston's and Narayan's contributions show, even the most radical attempts to rethink the concept of "na- tive ethnography" have fallen short of deconstructing the foundational Self/Other divide that organizes classical field- work and produces the native anthropologist as a virtual member of the discipline. In the dominant tradition of post- Malinowskian U.S. cultural anthropology, the epistemic di- vision between ethnographic Self and native Other is simply doxic, articulated with particular clarity by such luminar- ies of interpretive/symbolic anthropology as Clifford Geertz and Roy Wagner. For Geertz, person, time, and conduct in Bali are worth studying because "from a Western perspec- tive," they are "odd enough to bring to light some general relationships.., that are hidden from us" (1973:360-361). Wagner, for his part, is even more forceful, arguing that the production of all anthropological knowledge, which he glosses as the "Invention of Culture," rests on experiences of radical Otherness that can render culture visible (Wagner 1981[1975]).

What is more surprising is the degree to which such sentiments are echoed by the critics of classical modes of anthropology. To be sure, these scholars warn of the dan- gers of reifying Others and are thus wary of celebrating ethnographic fieldwork as an unproblematic encounter be- tween Self and Other. In fact, much of Gupta and Ferguson's critique is motivated by the fact that "ideas about Oth- erness remain remarkably central to the fieldwork ritual" (1997:16). But when they present their prescriptions for "rethought and revitalized forms of fieldwork," they deem "self-conscious shifting of social and geographical loca- tion" an "extraordinarily valuable methodology" in the

"discovery of phenomena that would otherwise remain invisible" (1997:36-37). Cultural differences between the ethnographer and her people, it would seem, are still cru- cial to anthropological knowledge production, even in this rethought and revitalized form of fieldwork.

James Clifford is even more insistent on the constitu- tive need for displacement and the consequent experience of alterity as foundational to the fieldwork process. Worried that fieldwork might be dislodged, thereby leaving the dis- cipline without a methodological core, he takes seriously the challenge posed by the virtual anthropologist. His rem- edy is to remind her that, she, too, often draws her ethno- graphic leverage from an experience with Otherness. In this vein, Clifford suggests that "the title of 'native' or 'indige- nous' anthropologist might be retained to designate a per- son whose research travel leads out and back from a home base, 'travel' understood as a detour through a university or other site that provides analytic or comparative perspective on the place of dwelling/research" (Clifford 1997:206).

In light of the explicit hierarchies anthropology's crit- ics have diagnosed in the model of Malinowskian field- work, such arguments do surprisingly little to offset the foundational problems raised by the Self/Other distinction. Quite on the contrary, Clifford's conception, for example, opens the door to a second-order logic, a hierarchy of dis- placement, in which the native anthropologist's qualifica- tions would be measured by the educational distance at- tained from her place of dwelling/research. In this manner, Clifford not only retains the figure of the native anthropol- ogist, but he does so by reinscribing cultural alterity as the privileged generator of ethnographic authority. Gupta and Ferguson do something similar when they refigure field- work as a "form of motivated and stylized dislocation" (1997:37). While articulated as criticisms of Malinowskian fieldwork, such positions reaffirm foundational aspects of the paradigm they deplore, sustaining the ethnographic hi- erarchy of Self and Other at the very moment they attempt to transcend it.

A PRESENTIST RECUPERATION OF BOASIAN FIELDWORK

It remains a question whether the historical Malinowski "fits" his recent construction in the critical literature. But even if we accept that construction only in its ba- sic contours, it is clear that the critics have not gone far enough. To offer a genuine alternative to what critics have come to think of as the Malinowskian field, we need to look for a conception of fieldwork that frames the ethno- graphic encounter beyond the Self/Other dichotomy. We might identify such a tradition by the absence of a native anthropologist-the abject symptom produced at the mar- gins of classical anthropology. And this is precisely what we can find in the Boasian tradition of fieldwork, in partic- ular in the work of the "early Boas," concerned with his- torical reconstruction and culture history. Ironically, Gupta and Ferguson note some of the qualities of that Boasian

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Bunzl * Boas, Foucault, and the "Native Anthropologist" 437

tradition, praising its eclecticism and skepticism of "en- countering intact, observable 'primitive societies."' But in their historical narrative, the Boasian approach is eclipsed by the time "American anthropology outgrew its 'salvage' phase." And while they go on to praise Boas's student Paul Radin for ethnographic experimentation that is said to rep- resent an alternative to the Malinowskian paradigm, when it comes to defining a revitalized form of fieldwork, neither Boas nor any of his students are mobilized as usable ances- tors (1997:21-24, 35-40).

Yet the Boasian tradition offers more than experimental methodologies; it offers a radically different understanding of the epistemology of fieldwork. This understanding does not rest on a distinction between ethnographic Self and na- tive Other but, instead, draws its analytic leverage from a rig- orous historicity that refigures the question of Otherness in terms of temporal rather than cultural alterity. Boas's sem- inal paper, "The Study of Geography" (1940[1887]), is the best place to begin a discussion of the rationale of Boasian fieldwork. Boas published the piece shortly after his emigra- tion to the United States at a time when he was making the transition from geography to ethnology (Stocking 1968). While Boas's famous opposition between the physical and cosmographical method was thus developed in the context of another discipline, it is generally accepted that the piece represents the foundational statement of Boas's anthropol- ogy (Bunzl 1996; Stocking 1968, 1974). Boas included the early piece in the collection of his papers, Race, Language and Culture (1940), because, he explained, it "indicate[d] the general attitude underlying [his] later work" (1940:vi).

Most readings of "The Study of Geography" have con- centrated on the epistemological contrast between the aes- thetic impulse, the desire to deduce laws from phenom- ena, and the affective impulse to investigate phenomena for their own sake. But implicit in this crucial distinc- tion was also an ethnographic research program that de- rived from such German counter-Enlightenment figures as Johann Gottfried Herder and Wilhelm von Humboldt. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, they had developed a Humanitiitsideal (ideal of humanity) in opposition to such French Enlightenment figures as Voltaire. In contrast to the conception of a uniform development of civilization, they had argued for the uniqueness of values transmitted throughout history. The comparison of any given nation or age with the Enlightenment or any other external stan- dard was unacceptable. Each human group could be under- stood only as a product of its particular history, propelled, in turn, by a unique Volksgeist (genius of a people). This foundational emphasis on cultural difference as the prod- uct of historical specificity was articulated in a cosmopoli- tan framework. The Humanititsideal affirmed the common bond of humanity but saw it expressed in diversity rather than similarity of human forms. In opposition to the French Enlightenment, which based its universalism on the essen- tial sameness of human beings as rational actors, Herder and Humboldt stressed the individual contribution of each cultural entity to humanity at large. And since humanity

was the totality of its multitudinous entities, each group needed to be studied in its individuality (Bunzl 1996).

In "The Study of Geography," this tradition was embodied in the cosmographical approach to phenom- ena. Following Herder and Humboldt, Boas asserted that "cosmography... considers every phenomenon as worthy of being studied for its own sake. Its mere existence enti- tles it to a full share of our attention; and the knowledge of its existence and evolution in space and time fully satis- fies the student" (1940[1887]:642). It is crucial to draw out some of the implications of this remarkable statement that captures the essence of Boasian anthropology. For Boas, the reason to explore cultural phenomena was not that they were "Other" but that they were "there." This seems like a trivial distinction, but it has enormous epistemological ram- ifications. As an heir to the German counter-Enlightenment tradition, Boas took the historical specificity of cultural and ethnic phenomena for granted. But rather than focus on their inherent Otherness (in an act of reification), he sought to understand them as the products of particular historical developments. Ultimately, it was not their difference that made them interesting, but the fact that they contributed to the plenitude of humanity. That fact "entitled [them] to a full share of our attention," which, in turn, meant the at- tempt to understand their history. As Boas put it, "As the truth of every phenomenon causes us to study it, a true history of its evolution alone can satisfy the investigator's mind" (1940[1887]:644).

The degree to which the Other was not fetishized in the early Boasian tradition becomes even clearer in Boas's semi- nal lecture "Anthropology," delivered at Columbia Univer- sity in 1907 and published in 1908. Echoing Herder and Humboldt, Boas defined the task of anthropology in terms of two historical questions: "Why are the tribes and nations of the world different, and how have the present differ- ences developed?" (1974[1908]:269). For Boas, these ques- tions were not restricted to the world's "primitive" peo- ples. Quite on the contrary, he argued that, in principle, anthropology is concerned with the "investigation of hu- man types and human activities and thought the world over" (1974[1908]:269); but in practice this was not fea- sible, especially since other disciplines-such as history, economics, and sociology-"have taken up anthropologi- cal problems" (1974[1908]:269). In this situation, the "task that is actually assigned at'the present time to the anthro- pologist is the investigation of the primitive tribes of the world" (1974[1908]:269). But Boas stressed that "this lim- itation of the field" was "more or less accidental," a func- tion of the fact that "other sciences occupied part of the ground before the development of modern anthropology" (1974[1908]:269).

The implication of this position is, again, quite radi- cal in that Boas defined anthropology in terms of human history, conceived both in global and particular terms. If anthropologists focused on nonliterate peoples, it was only because other disciplines were already concerned with the investigation of literate groups. These disciplines had the

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advantage of textual material that allowed the reconstruc- tion of culture history using the philological methods de- veloped in 19th century Germany. In a radically universal- izing move, Boas sought to extend such philological work to all humans, implicitly arguing that the domain of culture (conceived in a fairly traditional humanistic sense) was not unique to literate groups. If other disciplines accounted for the culture history of the "civilized" world, it was incum- bent on anthropology to do the same for the "primitive" part of humanity (Stocking 1992).

However naive or problematic such a project may seem from a contemporary perspective, Boas's impulse in pur- suing his research agenda was guided by an attempt to overcome Otherness rather than cement it. Taking the his- torical specificity of "primitive" peoples for granted, he was much less interested in documenting their strangeness than in showcasing their similarity, which, in a counter- Enlightenment framework, he viewed in terms of their specific contributions to the plenitude of humanity. These contributions could be located in the "primitive" seeds of humanistic culture-mythology, folklore, and language foremost among them (Stocking 1968).

It was in this context that Boas's fieldwork consisted largely of the collection of texts. He obtained them from individual informants, treating them as expressions of the "genius of a people." Whether they were myths, folk tales, or other narratives, Boas saw these texts as a body of pri- mary materials that would allow the treatment of "primi- tive" peoples with the methods of philological scholarship. Boas stated this logic explicitly, commenting in a letter of 1905 that no one would "advocate the study of... the Turks or the Russians without a thorough knowledge of their languages and of the literary documents in these lan- guages" (1974[1905a]:122). Given that in the case of "Amer- ican Indians... no such literary material [was] available for study," Boas thought it tantamount to "make such mate- rial accessible,... letting this kind of work take precedence over practically everything else" (1974[1905a]:122-123; cf. Stocking 1974, 1992).

Boas's ethnographic style may have resulted in the fetishization of texts, collected with the naive idea that their subsequent philological treatment would result in recon- structions of the culture histories of "primitive" peoples. But in line with his general counter-Enlightenment orientation, it never resulted in the fetishization of native Otherness. Boas took the particularity of his informants for granted. If he was interested in them it was not because they were Other, but because they were carriers of cultural knowledge he hoped to preserve in the context of colonial onslaught. To put it differently, Boas drew no particular leverage from the different subjectivities of "anthropologist" and "infor- mant." The former was not mobilized to produce objective knowledge through the panoptic surveillance of the latter. In any case, the ethnographic knowledge Boas was inter- ested in (i.e., history) was never so transparent as to afford either anthropologist or informant ready access to the issues in question.

In a Malinowskian framework, the production of anthropological knowledge was a function of mere observation, as long as it occurred across-and, thereby, re- produced-a cultural chasm between ethnographic Self and native Other. The two subject positions were constructed as irreducibly distinct through the very epistemological clar- ity afforded the anthropologist in the ethnographic en- counter. This classical conception of ethnography was pow- erfully articulated in the methodological introduction of Argonauts of the Western Pacific, easily the most widely read and influential primer on anthropological fieldwork and the text most commonly used to define the Malinowskian tradition. There, natives "obey[ed] the forces and com- mands of the tribal code" but never "comprehend[ed]" them (1984[1922]:11). Only the anthropologist could dis- cern their culture. The "ethnographer's magic" Malinowski evoked was thus a function of panopticism that revealed cultural specificity through the prolonged observation of difference (1984[1922]:6). Malinowski was sincere in his optimism that the production of ethnographic knowledge would raise understanding for the native Other. Viewed in historical perspective, his work arguably did just that; but it came at the price of defining and fixing the ethnographic object as "very distant and foreign to us" (1984[1922]:25).

This conception invariably generated the "native an- thropologist" as an abject figure of the Malinowskian field. In the theory of Malinowski's original formulation, the no- tion of "native anthropology" was simply a contradiction in terms. If natives obeyed the tribal code without compre- hending it, they were inherently excluded from the subject position of ethnographer. In suspension of his own theoret- ical pronouncements, Malinowski actually trained a num- ber of native anthropologists. But in the context of a soon- to-be hegemonic paradigm, suspicion remained about the legitimacy of knowledge produced at the point in which native and ethnographer meet. In the absence of cultural alterity as the building block of anthropological knowledge production, the native ethnographer was rendered as the virtual echo of Malinowski's constitutive foreclosure. Na- tive ethnography could never be as "real" as "real anthro- pology," because it had no epistemological recourse to its foundational difference. Today's "virtual anthropologists" continue to bear the originary burden.

In Boas's fieldwork, a constitutive epistemological sep- aration between ethnographer and native was absent. To be sure, Boas exerted various forms of power over his infor- mants. But this power was never figured in terms of epis- temological privilege. From Boas's perspective, neither an- thropologist nor informant had immediate access to the history he hoped to reconstruct. In this situation, anthro- pologist and informant were united in a common epistemic position vis-a-vis the real Other of Boasian anthropology. That Other, ultimately, was the history that had generated the present condition, a history that eluded immediate de- scription due to the absence of written records.

In practice, this meant that Boas was just as happy if Native Americans generated ethnographic data themselves.

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Bunzl * Boas, Foucault, and the "Native Anthropologist" 439

In fact, as the important research by Judith Berman has shown, Boas was always eager to recruit literate informants who would produce texts on their own, thereby adding to the corpus of recorded Native American culture (Berman 1996). While Berman's careful reconstruction of Boas's re- lationship with George Hunt reveals the complex inequali- ties that structured their association of 45 years, she notes Boas's trust in the ethnographic authority of Hunt's texts. These texts, in fact, formed the basis of much of Boas's pub- lications on the Kwakiutl; and while the respective roles of Boas and Hunt were not always clear from the published product, Boas saw himself as rendering his informant's cul- turally authentic voice. If anything, Boas thought Hunt to be in an advantageous ethnographic position because he, at least, had some tacit knowledge of the culture history under question.

Hunt's lack of formal training never rendered him a full-fledged anthropologist. But there was at least one Na- tive American who attained this status by way of formal training under Boas. William Jones, part-Fox Indian and fluent in the language, received his Ph.D. at Columbia Uni- versity in 1904, undertaking research on the Fox and other Native American groups prior to his premature death in 1909 (Berman 1996:225). And insider status did not prevent Robert Lowie, perhaps the most faithful early Boasian, from publishing two authoritative monographs on the culture he considered his own (cf. Stocking 1974). His books The German People: A Social Portrait to 1914 (1945) and Toward Understanding Germany (1954) are quintessentially Boasian projects seeking to disentangle the domains of language, race, and culture without any apparent anxiety about the author's proximity to his object of study.

It would be possible to rehearse additional examples, from Ella Deloria to Zora Neale Hurston, but they would merely underscore what follows from the basic epistemo- logical premise of Boasian ethnography. In contrast to the Malinowskian variant that came to be hegemonic in the discipline, Boasian anthropology did not produce "na- tive" anthropology as the virtual Other of "real" anthro- pology. More accurately, perhaps, it could be said that Boasian anthropology did not produce the native anthro- pologist at all. As Berman puts it, united in a common project, "professional anthropologist" and "native field- worker" were not "mutually exclusive categories" and the "men and women who were [Boas's] students, prot~g~s, and correspondents combined" these roles in "various ways" (Berman 1996:221).

This is not to say that Boas was oblivious to the different locations of "insider" and "outsider" ethnographers. Much of Boas's work was, in fact, concerned with such problems as "alternating sounds," the culturally conditioned misunder- standings that occurred in the attempt to "apperceive un- known sounds by the means of the sounds of [one's] own language" (Boas 1974[1889]:76; cf. Stocking 1968). While this problem rendered an outsider's recording of Native American texts exceedingly difficult, Boas thought that it could be overcome through the kind of training he pro-

vided his students. That training would allow ethnogra- phers to grasp languages and texts in a "purely analytic" fashion, that is, without recourse to their own grammat- ical and conceptual categories (Boas 1974[1905b]:178; cf. Stocking 1992).

While outsiders needed to overcome the problem of al- ternating sounds, insiders were subject to epistemological limitations as well. Central to Boas's position in this regard was the concept of "secondary explanation," the "ratio- nalizations of customary behavior whose origins were lost in tradition, but that were highly charged with emotional value" (Stocking 1974:6). Boas continuously emphasized the presence of secondary explanations among all human groups, a situation that rendered an insider's information regarding the history of any given text or custom inher- ently untrustworthy. In light of the larger Boasian project of reconstructing the histories of present conditions, anthro- pologists, be they insiders or outsiders, thus had to reach beyond secondary explanations in order to discern "true" history.

Insiders and outsiders were thus differentially posi- tioned at the onset of the ethnographic project. What is cen- tral in the present context, however, is that Boasian ethnog- raphy not only did not rest on that distinction but also was designed to efface it. Guarding against alternating sounds, outsiders would produce the same ethnographic data as in- siders; at the same time, the critical awareness of secondary explanations would guide insiders (and the anthropologists who derived their information from them) toward the ac- tual histories of contemporary ethnic phenomena. Concep- tually, this meant that insiders and outsiders would generate the same kind of data and attempt the same kinds of histor- ical reconstructions. To return to the example of Lowie for a moment, this meant that from his Boasian perspective, there was no qualitative difference between his work on Native Americans and Germans. Whether he occupied the subject position of insider or outsider in regard to the cul- ture under study did not affect his epistemological stance. In both cases, he sought to recuperate a history that was obscured by secondary explanations and, therefore, inac- cessible to the immediate grasp of insider and outsider.

NEO-BOASIAN ANTHROPOLOGY ASC FOUCAULDIAN GENEALOGY

Where does this leave us in terms of the possibility for a neo-Boasian anthropology? Much like its namesake, such an approach would be characterized less by a strict set of methodological presuppositions than a basic orientation. Central to that orientation is the Boasian understanding of anthropology as the history of the present. As I have ar- gued, only this Boasian move can overcome a Malinowskian fetishization of cultural alterity. In place of the generative opposition between ethnographic Self and native Other, a neo-Boasian anthropology would thus posit a tempo- ral dimension of difference as the focal point of analy- sis. In doing so, it would identify a hidden history as the

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principal object of anthropological investigation, thereby uniting "insiders" and "outsiders" in a common epistemic position vis-a-vis the ethnographic object. Anthropological knowledge would thus not emerge as a function of their reified difference but on the grounds of their analogous location.

It should be clear by now that the enunciation of a neo-Boasian anthropology is not an attempt to legitimize or privilege "native anthropology." Quite on the contrary, it seeks to deconstruct the very category through recourse to a critical genealogy that identifies it as a symptom of a hegemonic fieldwork tradition. That tradition not only reproduces itself through the reification of cultural differ- ence but also polices its boundaries by rejecting as virtual anthropologists those whose difference is in doubt.

Here again, it is important to note that such a stance in no way implies the denial of the existence and paramount importance of cultural difference. What it seeks to suspend, however, is the performative naturalization of cultural dif- ference as the constitutive element of ethnographic field- work. To do so, cultural difference needs to be dislodged from its position as the enabling principle of ethnography and turned into the very phenomenon in need of histori- cal explanation. Boas phrased the anthropological project in just these terms when he noted that the discipline's task was to account for why the "tribes and nations of the world [were] different" and how these "present differences devel- oped" (1974[1908]:269).

In theory, Boasian anthropologists may have adhered to this entirely contemporary antifoundational project; in practice, however, they often tended to naturalize con- temporary differences through recourse to such transhis- torical notions as Volksgeist and culture pattern, an ap- proach characteristic of the influential second generation of Boasians (cf. Benedict 1934). Contrary to a commonly held assumption, Boasian anthropologists working in this mode never reified cultural boundaries as impermeable divides (as Bashkow notes, this issue); but some of them did come to regard them as given rather than made. While cultural al- terity never figured as the enabling condition of Boasian fieldwork, its reality thus often remained unexamined; it is at this point that the contours of a neo-Boasian anthro- pology come into view. In regard to Boas's original ques- tions on the origins and histories of cultural differences, a neo-Boasian approach would be wary of taking recourse to a transhistorical notion of culture. In its place, the reality of cultural boundaries would emerge as the object of ana- lytic scrutiny, requiring rigorous historicization in place of ethnographic naturalization. Rather than "finding" cultural differences, a neo-Boasian anthropology would thus follow Boas in turning our attention to their historical production and ethnographic reproduction,.

In rendering the Boasian project as an antifoundational history of present difference, an ally emerges in a surpris- ingly kindred analytic system-Foucauldian genealogy. The joint invocation of Boas and Foucault may seem counter- intuitive, but in regard to the theoretical concerns of this

article, their systems of thought converge in crucial ways. The projects of the early Boas and the late Foucault cen- tered on the history of the present. Much like Boas, Fou- cault developed this approach to interrogate and overcome the fetishization of difference. In place of naturalizing the "homosexual" as a distinct species, to take his most famous example, Foucault sought to account for the historical con- dition of "his" emergence (Foucault 1978). This approach was inherently nonpanoptic in that it refused to draw an- alytic leverage from the reified distinction of sexual ori- entation, accounting instead for its originary condition of possibility. In disrupting a regime of power that abjected certain bodies in terms of their reified subject positions, Foucault was thus engaged in a project of epistemologi- cal democratization that directly paralleled the Boasian at- tempt to efface the constitutive Otherness of the contem- porary "primitive." Both Foucault and Boas realized that this could only be achieved if such Others as "homosexu- als" and "primitives" ceased to be produced as reified sites of difference, a stance that necessitated the imagination of discursive locations beyond the hegemonic field of power. Being constructed and interpellated to speak as a "homo- sexual" or "native" always already reproduced the binary distinction of originary abjection. Only by suspending the discursive reproduction of such distinctions as heterosex- ual/homosexual and ethnographic Self/native Other was it possible to escape the reification of difference whose inter- rogation was the historical object of analysis.

In the hegemonic context of the Malinowskian paradigm, it has been difficult to mobilize a Foucauldian framework as a constitutive aspect of ethnography. This should not be surprising given how uncomfortably Fou- cault's genealogical analysis of subjection as the product of panoptic surveillance maps onto the foundational dis- tinction between ethnographic Self and native Other (cf. Rosaldo 1986). After all, in a framework designed to scruti- nize the production of knowledge as a form of generative power, Malinowskian fieldwork figures as a quintessential site of constitutive Othering. Foucault, of course, sought to put this very process of reification under analytic relief by unmasking its originary fiction. And it is for precisely that reason that Foucauldian genealogy cannot easily be incorporated into an ethnographic project enabled by the operative reification of cultural alterity.

Foucault does of course have his followers in anthropol- ogy. But it is symptomatic that the anthropologists whose work follows that of Foucault most closely have shied away from the panoptic site of the Malinowskian field (Horn 1994; Rabinow 1989). In so doing, they have tended to frame their projects away from immediate ethnographic en- counters, producing genealogies that account for the his- torical conditions of the present while not focusing on the present condition itself. This mode of analysis repro- duces the ethnographic blind spot of Foucauldian geneal- ogy, which is conceived as a history of such present phe- nomena as the "homosexual" but finds its realization in the account of "his" historical invention. What gets lost in

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Bunzl * Boas, Foucault, and the "Native Anthropologist" 441

the process-and the introductory volume of Foucault's The History ofSexuality is the paradigmatic example-is a system- atic investigation of the actual conditions of "homosexual- ity" in the present. There is every reason for such an ethno- graphic investigation to take place, however, provided that its operative principles accord with the genealogical project at large.

It is at this point that a neo-Boasian anthropology might emerge as the much-needed ethnographic dimen- sion of a Foucauldian project. The Boasian framework shares Foucault's constitutive goal of suspending the reification of difference through its historicization. In dealing with the fiction of difference, Foucault focuses his attention on the moment of its historical invention. In contrast, and as an in- herently ethnographic project, a neo-Boasian anthropology would turn its analytic gaze much more decisively on the order of difference in the present. In this sense, the present would never appear as a transparent entity, but as the very site of a critical investigation into ongoing processes of historical reproduction. The seeming reality of difference would thus function not as the starting point but as the explanatory telos of anthropological inquiry (Bunzl 2004).

Central to such a move from historical to ethnographic genealogy would be the Boasian concept of "secondary ex- planation." Supplementing a Foucauldian account of the "homosexual's" historical invention-to return to the pre- vious example-a neo-Boasian anthropology would chart the figure's social and discursive reproduction as an ongo- ing act of cultural mystification. Reaching beyond the orig- inary moment of speciation, the reality of "homosexual" difference and culture would thus become intelligible as the function of secondary explanations, the historically specific fictions that have been articulated through and around the "homosexual."

Such a neo-Boasian approach would neither demand that the experiences of those constructed as "homosexual" be discounted, nor would it suggest the dismissal of the discourses circulating around them. On the contrary, those would be the very phenomena in need of investigation, re- vealing, as they do, the processes of secondary explanation that reproduce the ethnographic reality of "homosexual" Otherness. As a history of the present, a neo-Boasian an- thropology emerges in this fashion as a genealogy of sec- ondary explanation, charting the ethnographic reality of cultural alterity without recourse to its performative reifi- cation. In practice, much contemporary ethnography ac- tually accords with these principles in broad terms. After all, the disruption of naturalized differences has become a central aspect of anthropology's conceptual work. But while the avoidance of "Othering" has become a veritable clarion call as the discipline has abandoned such traditional dis- tinctions as "primitive/civilized," that most foundational difference-between ethnographic Self and native Other-- has remained in effect. That will not change as long as theo- rists and practitioners attribute epistemological significance and ethnographic salience to alterity as a privileged basis of anthropological knowledge production.

Any history disruptive of transhistorical essentiali- zation-that is, any good Foucauldian history-fulfills the theoretical precepts outlined in this article. Dealing with the epistemological divides between past and present, more- over, rarely constructs historians as "too close" to their sub- ject of inquiry (a pejorative category of "native historian" does not exist). The vision outlined here ultimately oper- ates in analogy. Retaining anthropology's empirical focus on the present, it imagines scholars whose work produces neither native nor nonnative history but simply history-in this case the history of a particular present.

The recuperation of a Boasian paradigm for the present purposes is in some ways strategic. While the argument for anthropology's reimagination as a history of the present could be ventured from a purely Foucauldian position, the neo-Boasian approach sketched in this article promises a new anthropology deeply rooted in one of the discipline's originary traditions. That tradition conceptualized anthro- pology's task as a history of the present: a Foucauldian de- sign avant la lettre that not only transcends the reified di- chotomy of ethnographic Self and native Other but also turns our attention to the historical processes that origi- nate and sustain such distinctions in the first place. The fact that this tradition also identifies the concept of "secondary explanation" as the phenomenon that continuously masks the production and reproduction of cultural difference only heightens its relevance for the present purposes. Ultimately, this article envisions cultural anthropology as the historical ethnography of secondary explanations. Rooted in various genealogical pasts but operative in and constitutive of our contemporary lifeworlds, it is their histories that account for our present. Only a neo-Boasian anthropology can re- construct the history of that present beyond the difference between ethnographic Self and native Other and, in so do- ing, allow the discipline to surmount one of its most persis- tent dilemmas.

MATTI BUNZL Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801

NOTES Acknowledgments. Initial versions of this article were presented at the 1999 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Asso- ciation in Chicago and to the Sociocultural Anthropology Work- shop at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. On these and other occasions, I received helpful comments and encour- agement from Nancy Abelmann, Ira Bashkow, James Boon, David Dinwoodie, Brenda Farnell, Alma Gottlieb, Richard Handler, Bill Kelleher, Herb Lewis, Andy Orta, Lars Rodseth, Daniel Rosenblatt, Dan Segal, Michael Silverstein, George Stocking, Adam Sutcliffe, David Sutton, and Billy Vaughn.

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