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PARTISAN REVIEW
Inventing Culture
is an altogether different kind of book .
It
is a theoretical
work.
It
treats American culture as much as it treats the Daribi .
It
too raises the
question of anthropology and, with virtually no reference to any other work ,
attempts an answer that is both radically committed to cultural relativity and
to human creativity and inventiveness. Wagner argues that culture , as the
term is used by anthropologists , who are at the same time influenced by the
traditional usage of the word, is an invention of the anthropologist , his re–
sponse to the confrontation with otherness .
It
provides him with a relativistic
basis for understanding other people . Culture becomes, if I understand
Wagner correctly, and he is not always easy to understand, the reification of
the anthropologist's attempt to make sense out of the experience offieldwork ,
to give meaning to what is at one level a unique experience even in this world
of intercultural mobility. At another level, and here Wagner's insistence is
important, it is no different than any human being's attempt to make sense of
his situation . We are all anthropologists , Wagner says. Anthropology itself,
however, is the Westerner's unique response to certain situations; it is by no
means a universal response. Wagner suggests, for example, that such messia–
nic movements as the cargo cults of Melanesia are a sort of reverse anthropol–
ogy . They metaphorize the same intersocietal relations . "Culture" and the
Melanesian "kago" are " to some extent 'mirror images' of each other in the
sense that we look at the natives' cargo, their techniques and artifacts, and call
it 'culture,' whereas they look at our culture and call it 'cargo .' " Of course
they mean by cargo far more than simply manufactured objects . "It's signifi–
cance is based rather on the symbolic use of European wealth to represent the
redemption of native society ." One wonders what the significance of culture
is for the Westerner.
Wagner's point, however spurious and contrived it may seem to his
colleagues , has considerable rhetorical force , for it suggests what another
invention of anthropology might look like . Such a suggestion is of consider–
able importance in a discipline that has exhibited extraordinary resistence to
the use of non-Western modes of analysis in its enterprise and has succumbed
so readily to the crudest reductionism (as in much of the writings in Culture
and Personality and Ecological Anthropology).
Having postulated culture as the anthropologist's invention , and the
layman's invention , Wagner goes on to explore the meaning of invention and
innovation. Here he becomes miserably entangled in his theory, which is
essentially a mix of structural-linguistic, contextual, dialectical , metaphorical
and metaphorizing theories of meaning. Put much too simply, Wagner
argues that invention and convention, in any act of meaning-production, are
always in a dialectical relationship, that meaning results from two comple–
mentary modes of articulation that mask each other, at least as far as the
