@article{oai:minpaku.repo.nii.ac.jp:00004166,
 author = {小田, 亮 and Oda, Makoto},
 issue = {4},
 journal = {国立民族学博物館研究報告, Bulletin of the National Museum of Ethnology},
 month = {Mar},
 note = {The purpose of this paper is not to propound an overview of the
literature of postmodern anthropology, but to consider what questions
some recent controversies by postmodernists about Edward Said's Orientalism,
the issue of ethnographic realism, and cultural construction remain
unconsidered because of the postmodernist paradigm which
overemphasizes a theoretical opposition between essentialism and constructionism.
Postmodernists as cultural constructionists stand in opposition to
cultural essentialism. They criticize a set of reductive and specific
categories, such as `culture', `tradition', 'race' and 'nation', through
which academic ethnographers confer a discrete or specific identity and
use to survey other cultures. For postmodernists, realism, objectivism
or essentialism inevitably turns out to be neocolonialism, racism or Orientalism.
Postmodernists insist on casting out ethnographic realism,
which assumes that an ethnographer can represent objectivery the
essence of a particular culture as a whole, and which assures anthropologists
of their ethnographic authority to define culture and to tell
`authentic' culture from something `impure' or `spurious' .
Said's Orientalism [1978] is a critical study of cultural essentialism.
Said points out that Orientalism is "a Western style for dominating,
restructuring, and having authority over the Orient", and a systematic
displine which enabled European culture to gain a consistent identity by
setting itself off against the Orient.
Recently, Said has been criticised for his essentialism or realism by
some postmodernists. They accuse him of "Occidentalism", reversed
Orientalism, to blame the West. However these postmodernists' objections
against Said are not to the point, and they show their own dilemma,
not Said's.
Postmodernists or postcolonial anthropologists have also criticized
The Invention of Tradition [1983], edited by Eric Hobsbawm and
Terence Ranger, for not relinquishing objective distinctions between `genuine'
traditions and 'spurious' ones, that is, for essentialism or objectivism.
But, on the other hand, when indigenous nationalist practice or
discourse is subject to the analysis of cultural invention, not only an objectivist
analysis (e.g., Keesing) but also a constructionist one (e.g., Linnekin)
are politically blamed by native nationalists or postcolonial elites
for disturbing the natives' recovery of their `specific identity' or 'authentic'
tradition.
The Postmodernists' standpoint of thoroughgoing constructionism
or 'deconstruction', from which they criticize Hobsbawm and Keesing
for being politically incorrect, has kept them in a predicament, because if
they stick to such constructionism they could themselves be accused of
political incorrectness.
I believe that their predicament comes from the misleading
dichotomy between essentialism and constructionism. Within this
framework, we are given the false choice of 'politics of identity' based on
a consistent and specific identity such as nationality, ethnicity and sexuality,
or 'deconstruction' of even fragmentary or partial truths the
'subalterns' live by. This choice is a red herring because it conceals the
probability that one gains a postive self according to circumstances
without a consistent self-identity.
Constructionists are wrong in their Enlightenment assumption that
one should act or speak consistently and rationally according to his/her attribution.
They have a tendency to consider cultural construction or 'objectification'
to be conscious manipulation about culture, because they
think that it contains ethnographic authority at its base to point out
cultural construction which other people have done without knowing it.
However such thought is not free from the Enlightenment thought about
'knowledge' .
Without being a prisoner, it is not impossible to distinguish the
popular culture where there is no need of, and no room for, consistent or
specific identity, from the elite culture, that is, the modern technology of
hegemony, which forces people to maintain their consistent or specific
identity. For example, Benedict Anderson [1983] distinguishes modern
`imagined communities' such as nations from premodern imagined communities
such as kingdoms. "Communities are to be distinguished, not
by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined."
In premodern communties, the ties by which people were connectedt
o others they have nevers een werei magined" as indefinitelys tretchable
nets of kinship and clientship." To the contrary, in modern nations,
the individual is immediately connected to the abstract whole.
I point out that `specific identity' such as national identity is invented
by changing an indefinite network of metonymical relations such
as kinship and clientship into a relation between whole and part, synecdoche.
First, such structurist argument has the advantage of showing
that popular cultures are not unities discontinuously separated from
dominant cultures, but in arts of everyday practices, that is, `tactics' as
against 'strategy' (Michel de Certeau) or bricolage (Levi-Strauss).
Secondly, from this viewpoint, within the colonial or postcolonial
dichotomized system of neotraditional culture, such as between a world
of skul and that of kastom, a subaltern as bricoleur is able to cross the
border between two worlds by tying a fragment to another along
metonymical/metaphorical relations with `transversity'. Thirdly, being
incorporated into a dominant culture, these `bricoleur tactics', which
seem merely a compromise or obedience in the eyes of both constructionists
and indigenous elites, turn out to be a degree of unconscious but
flexible and tenacious resistance to the dominant culture.
Our notice of such resistance in 'the field of everyday life' shared by
`subaltern' people and ourselves keeps us free from the false dichotomy
between essentialism and constructionism, and from 'the politics of
identity' or the modern technology of hegemony.},
 pages = {807--875},
 title = {ポストモダン人類学の代価 : ブリコルールの戦術と生活の場の人類学},
 volume = {21},
 year = {1997},
 yomi = {オダ, マコト}
}