Another common place of the current

Another common place of the current discourse is that
anthropologists never studied at home, but only in exotic
places doing research on "tribal" or "primitive" Others.
The fact is that American anthropologists have been
working in North American and Western European settings
since the late 1920s, slowly at first but at an ever-increasing
pace. W. Lloyd Warner, who had studied with
Lowie and Kroeber at Berkeley and done research in Australia under the direction of Radcliffe-Brown, was the preeminent figure in this development, but not the only one.
Warner's ambitious research projects involved many
graduate student collaborators who went on to get their degrees
at Harvard and Chicago and to write significant
works. It began with the Yankee City research (1929-
1950) centered on Newburyport, Massachusetts( Warner
and Lunt 1941), and continued with the Western Electric
project (with Elton Mayo and others,1931-33), the Harvard
Irish survey (1931-33), Deep South (1933-36),
Black Metropolis (1938-43), Jonesville (1941-49),
Rockford, Illinois (1946 1948), Big Business Leaders in
America (1953-54), and the American Federal Executive
(1958-62). From these came some of the works of James
Abegglen, Conrad Arensberg, Horace Cayton, Eliot
ChapplesW . Allison Davis, JohnD ollard,S t. ClairD rake,
Burleigh Gardner, S. T. Kimball, Leo Srole, W. F. Whyte,
and many others (Warner 1988).

By 1942 Walter Goldschmidt had received his doctorate
at Berkeley for a study of a California rural community
(As You Sow) Charlotte Gower got hers at Chicago (1928)
for a study of life in Sicily (Chapman 1971), as did Horace
Miner (1937) for St. Denis: A French-Canadian Parish
(1939), and James Slotkin (1940) for a study of Jewish intermarriage in
Chicago. Other anthropologists had done
studies of rural agriculture in the United States under the
auspices of the Department of Agriculture during the New
Deal, and Hortense Powderrnaker had published the results of her research in Mississippi, After Freedom: Acultural
Study in the Deep South (1939) (see her account of
the background to this in Powderrnaker1 966). And Paul
Radin carried out a study of Italians in San Francisco
(Radin 1975).
The problem of cross-cultural similarities as well as
differences has been at the core of the cultural anthropological
enterprise all along. It was central to the notion of
cultural evolution and to the concern with diffusion. Both
Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown assumed the essential
sameness of human beings as the basis of their theories of
culture and society. Wissler, Murdock, Linton, and many
others wrote about "cultural universals," and the logic of
Murdock's exhaustive and ingenious book Social Structure
(1949) requires universal commonality. We have
been searching for similarities all along. Just look at the
organization and emphasis of our general text books.
It was not until Clifford Geertz's writings became
popular in the 1970s that this pursuit came to seem trivial
and wrongheaded", as arrogant, misguided,or futile, if I lot
all three" (Spiro 1992:ix). There is now such confusion
over the history and nature of our discipline that anthropology
as a whole is attacked indiscriminately and inconsistently
for both exotizising Others and for universalizing
them. And now the work of the critics of classical
anthropology is criticized as though it represented classical
anthropology itself. (This sort of confusion fills Keesing's
article.)
The attacks on anthropology from within the field, from
literary criticism, and from cultural studies have created
an atmosphere in which one must feel embarrassed about
being interested in what our sisters and brothers from
other times and places have created and thought. Clamoring
on the one hand for multiculturalism and the entry of
Others and the voiceless into "the canon," the critics chastise
those who have been engaged in researching, teaching,
and writing about the people of the world's many cultures
all along (see, e.g., Rosaldo 1994; Turner 1993; cf.
Perry 1992).
Practitioners of this project,anthropologists as well as
those in cultural studies, subject to their critical gaze: museums,
world fairs and exhibitions, artists and art collectors,
writers of general Election and of travel narratives,
photographers, cinematographers, publications( e.g., The
National Geographic), colonial officials, publicists and
journalists, even an amateur ornithologist (Hulme 1995).
Thus anthropology is condemned through a stipulated,assumed,
or insinuated association with anyone who has an
interest in "Others"( see, e.g., Bush 1995; Edwards1 992;
Faris 1996; Gordon 1997; Haraway 1989; Karp and Lavine
1991; Klein 1992; Kuklick 1991; Lutz and Collins
1993; Lyman 1982; McGrane 1989; Steiner 1995;
Thomas 1994; Torgovnick 1990). They seek to deconstruct,
to find unworthy motives and unconscious damage,
to unmask the evil beneath the appearance of a lively and
sympathetic interest. Remarkably they usually seem to
find it.
One must now be embarrassed to take an interest in, let
alone devote one's life to the study of, some group of people
who are not immediately evident as one's own. The extraordinary idea has been put about that choosing an object
to study that is far from home is a way of distancing and alienating
oneself from that object (Wacquant 1993; cf.
McGrane 1989: 114 ff.). To spend years of one's life trying
to learn the language of another group; to live with them;
to listen to them; to learn about their feelings, values, problems,
the bases of their social relations, their economic
struggles and political travails; to seek to understand their
rituals and beliefs: all this is really a way of distancing
yourself from them? What an ingenious paradox (cf.
Moore 1994: 125)! If true, it would indeed be a grievous
sin, but is it true?
In the 1580s Michel de Montaigne wrote, "I see most of
the wits of my time using their ingenuity to obscure the glory of the beautiful and noble actions of antiquity, giving
them some vile interpretation and conjuring up vain
occasions and causes for them. What great subtlety! Give
me the most excellent and purest action and I will plausibly
supply fifty vicious motives for it. God knows what a
variety of interpretations may be placed on our inward
will, for anyone who wants to elaborate them" (1948:
70).9
The myth of the anthropologist and the Other, the anthropologist and radical alterity m ay be a useful weapon in the war upon the past, in the struggle to establish one's
own credentials. It should not be confused with a reasonable
characterization of the field. To quote George A ppell,
"historical truth appears to be the first casualty of the battle
over the soul of anthropology" (1992: 196; cf. Moore
1994: 12S125).