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tion. They are frequently belittled, and the most professionalized anthro–
pologist will take an odd pride in not having read them. Indeed,
"popular anthropology" is often a euphemism for "not very good an–
thropology." One would be tempted to dismiss this attitude as a reaction
typical of academics who are jealous of the success - usually financial–
of colleagues, were it not that academics are often genuinely embar–
rassed by the popular.
One reason for the embarrassment lies in the popular anthropolo–
gist's explicit use of the first person singular pronoun. Popular anthro–
pology, in fact, can be distinguished from professional anthropology (at
least in a working definition of the tenns) by this insistence on the "I" of
the anthropologist. Although such popular works as Turnbull's and
Cas–
taneda's purport to describe life among the pygmies of the Ituri forest
of the Congo, life among the dehumanized Ik of the mountains of
Uganda, or the teachings of a somewhat dubious Yaqui
brujo,
or sor–
cerer, from northern Mexico, they are really descriptions, incomplete to
be sure, of the ethnographic experience itself. Professional anthropology,
traditionally and somewhat naively, tries to evade the experience, to
bracket off the "I," in order to arrive at an "objective account" of the
"culture," the "social organization," the "religion" of the people under
study. Insofar as it fails to acknowledge that the "I" can only be
bracketed off for heuristic or rhetorical purposes, insofar as it fails to
acknowledge that the "I" intrudes into even such impersonal phrases
as "It is raining today," it remains a discipline in bad faith. Popular
anthropology specifically retains the "1." The ethnographic experience
remains, at least linguistically, personal. The author situates himself in
the experience, but insofar as he provides an opaque center for the
experience, he betrays the experience. Insofar as he refuses, as he must
necessarily refuse, to reveal
himself
completely, he is incapable of fully
revealing the experience. Both professional
and
popular works of anthro–
pology are inevitably responses to the ethnographic experience. They
are - and hence the embarrassment that is produced by the promiscuous
use of the "I" in popular works - symptoms of the experience.
The ethnographic experience is, of course, always threatening to
the anthropologist - and to a lesser extent to the reader - because it
provokes him to question, sometimes with much more subtlety than he
realizes, his most basic assumptions about the nature of reality. He is
driven to find order and meaning in what often appears to be without
order and meaning. (Some anthropologists are now talking about a
cognitive imperative!) Whether consciously or unconsciously, the ethno-
