BOOKS
139
THE CULTURE INDUSTRY
THE INVENTION OF CULTURE.
By Roy Wagner. Prentice·Hali. $8.95.
Like everything else these days, anthropology is in a crisis. Since
the turbulence of the sixties, anthropologists have been looking at their disci·
pline with increasing self·criticism and, I should add, with all the narcissistic
delight ofspecular contemplation. Their delight, to be sure, was nurtured by
spiraling enrollments, easy fieldwork money, easy junket money , much
publicity, and the possibility, amidst such scandals as Project Camelot, of a
true cause: the Amerindians, South American ethnocide, Vietnam, and so
forth. Some anthropologists took wildly iconoclastic positions-always
fascinating to the public. Dell Hymes opened his recent anthology
Reinvent–
ing Anthropology
with these two questions : "If anthropology did not exist,
would it have to be invented? If it were reinvented , would it be the anthro–
pology we have now?" He answers both questions-they are , of course,
" anthropologically" absurd and philosophically inconsistent-in the nega–
tive , one suspects,
pour epaterla bourgeoisie anthropologique.
The brouhaha
that
Reinventing Anthropology
inspired-and it did inspire a brouhaha,
however contrived-was hardly merited by its
scandaleux
or by the excellence
of its contributions. Its title was a jibe, one supposes, at
Rethinking Anthro–
pology
by Edmund Leach, the anthropology doyen of
The New York Review.
Other anthropologists succumbed to the easy sloganism of a vulgar Marxism;
and still others, Bob Scholte is perhaps the most notable, adopted the self–
critical stance of the
Frankfurtschule,
the dialectical
raison
of Sartre , the
methodological probings of phenomenology and the new hermeneutics, and
the reasoned imbroglios of structuralist and post-structuralist thought . The
majority, ofcourse, bracketed off the problematic of their discipline and con–
tinued stalwartly in the " empirically-based, " "scientifically objective ,"
essentially" materialist" tradition that has constituted the American anthro–
pological tradition .
Roy Wagner, whose third book
Inventing Culture
has just appeared, falls
outside all of these categories . He is perhaps most strongly influenced by the
so-called symbolic anthropology of David Schneider, Clifford Geertz, and
Victor Turner. Waguer is a dedicated anthropologist , a compulsive writer–
he himself admits this- a superb fieldworker , a clumsy writer-he would
probably admit this too-and a theoretical loner. His first two books ,
The
Curse ofSouw
and
Habu ,
are first-rate ethnographies of the Daribi people of
Papua-New Guinea with whom Wagner spent two years . Indeed they vie in
their understanding with , say , Maurice Leenhardt 's
Do Kamo.
