The three claims I discuss can be f

The three claims I discuss can be found in concise and
explicit form in a recent article by Roger M. Keesing
(1994), published in a volume with contributions from
many distinguished anthropologists (Borofsky 1993).
Roger Keesing was a major contributor to anthropology
over the past few decades and his writing could often serve
as a weathervane. In this case he stated the new conventional
wisdom very clearly.


1. According to Keesing's critique: anthropology
treats the peoples it studies as "radically alter," not to
be understood in the same ways that we understand ourselves.
"If radical alterity did not exist, it wouZd be anthropology's
project to invent it." Radical alterity, he writes,
"a culturally constructed Other radically different from
Us fills a need in European social thought.... I believe
we continue to overstate Difference, in search for the exotic
and for the radical Otherness Western philosophy,
and Western cravings for alternatives, demand" (p. 301,
emphasis added). Since Edward Said's book, Orientalism
(1978), this sort of critique has been widely accepted as
true. Elsewhere Keesing (1990:168) speaks of"anthropology's
Orientalist project of representing Otherness."
Said's projects eems to have succeeded remarkably well.
It is not easy to disabuse graduate students of the notion
that anthropologists study only the exotic, the Other, even
by reading to them lists of Ph.D. dissertations or titles of
papers at AAA meetings that focus on peoples and topics
very close to home.

Here is another example, from Arturo Escobar's summary
of Lila Abu-Lughod's position on culture (Abu-
Lughod 1991):
To the extent that the culture concept has been the primaxy
tool for making the other and for maintaining a hierarchical
system of differences, we must direct our creative efforts
against his concept, she prescribes, by "writing against culture."
We need to look at similarities, not only at differences;
by emphasizing connections, we also undermine the idea of
'total' cultures and peoples.... Can we emphasize not
boundedness and separateness but connections?[Escobar
1993:381]

I shall argue that lines like these do great injustice to the
actual history and nature of our field.

2. Keesing contends that anthropology has always
been a historical. According to Keesing, "The world of
timeless, endlessly self-reproducing structures, social and
ideational, each representing a unique experiment in cultural
possibility, has (we now know) been fashioned in
terns of European philosophical quests and assumptions,
superimposed on the peoples encountered and subjugated along colonial frontiers"(p.301;cf.Dirksl992:3-4; Wallerstein
1996). Johannes Fabian's book Time and the
Other:H owA nthropology akesI ts Object( 1983),is the
text of choice here, with its claim that anthropologists
dominate by denying coevalness, contemporaneity, to the
exotic Others whom we study, our "Objects" (no longer
our "Subjects").


3. Roger Keesing claimed that anthropologists treated
each culture as an isolated unit, unconnected to any
others. "Their cultures are hermetically sealed, beyond
the reaches of time and the world system," he says (p.
306).

306).
This is so much a part of the current discourse that Andre
GunderFrank( 1990), scorning "traditional" anthropology
at the 1990 Annual Meeting of the AAA, claimed
that Boas's study of the designs on Eskimo needle cases
(Boas 1908) was designed to show the "separateness of
cultures" (emphasis added). That Frank did not know
what Boas's paper is actually about is unimportant; what
is disturbing is that he could make such a statement before
a hall full of anthropologists and remain unchallenged

Keesing goes on to decry those who "edit out Christianity,
trade stores, labor migration, contemporary politics
and cash economy . . ." in accounts of his ethnographic
area, Melanesia (p. 306).

Lest it be thought that these claims about anthropology
are idiosyncratic and uncharacteristic, Terence Turner has
enunciated a similar set of charges. Turner writes of (a)
"the chronic anthropological tendency. . . to focus on cultures as discrete units in isolation";and( b) "that endencies
. to treat culture as an autonomous domain, e.g., as 'systems
of symbols and meanings' essentially unconditioned
by material, social, and political processes, and the concomitant
abstraction of cultural change from political or
social relations,particularly relations of inequality,domination,
and exploitation" (Turner 1993:415). Elsewhere
(1991:292) he speaks of anthropology as having "defined
itself in abstraction from the 'situation of contact,' as the
antithesis of 'change' and the enemy of 'history.' "

These sorts of claims are by now so widespread, so
taken for granted, such a natural part of the intellectual
landscape, that they appear as basic truths. We find them
repeated in book reviews in The New York Times and The
New Yorker as well as in the writings of students and established anthropologists. And yet they are so far from the actual history and nature of our field that it should raise serious questions about the sociology of knowledge and the development and spread of ideas.

I shall consider each of Keesing's critiques in turn.