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PARTISAN REVIEW
this to Robert Herrick's "Delight in Disorder"-"A sweet disorder in
the dress / Kindles in clothes a wantonness." Herrick takes in the lady's
sexiness in a wink, while Fox ponders the idea and, one suspects, the
lady walks away.
Fox's volume, however, attests to something of broader cultural
importance: the rising prominence of literary self-expression among
anthropologists, a phenomenon that at once registers the increasing
epistemological muddle of the social sciences
and
the decline of aesthetic
standards in the culture at large.
Perhaps the benchmark event of this trend was the publication in
1994
of a poem by Jerome Rothenberg titled "Je Est un Autre: Ethnopo–
etics and the Poet as Other" in the
American Anthropologist,
the jour–
nal of record for anthropology in the United States. That issue of the
journal marked the first under the editorship of husband and wife Den–
nis and Barbara Tedlock, who declared their intention to open "its
pages to many new voices and new approaches to the study of
humankind," to publish work that "broadens the very forms of anthro–
pological discourse," and to cross "the boundaries of standard genres of
writing."
In the event, the Rothenberg poem was a Ginsberg-esque splat with
lines such as: "Before there was ethnopoetics there was the world. /
T
mean to say that we emerged from the second
world
war
&
knew it
was bigger / than that. The world,
T
mean." And:
If the mind shapes, configures the world it knows or holds, is there an
imperiallcolonializing mind at work here, or is this mind sharper
&
colleager still
pursuing its old work: to make an image of the world from what
appears
to
it?
Although the Tedlocks had their defenders, many anthropologists
were not amused. The Tedlocks held their fire for about a year and then
brought out another issue with two somewhat more component poems
by University of Chicago anthropologist Paul Friedrich, and a "found
poem" by University of Pennsylvania linguist Dell Hymes. Friedrich
gives the measure of what anthropo-poets are up to:
Or my own recall of the languages
of Mexican cities in the frosted dust around the quadratic plazas
you cross at dawn for some gruel of fresh field maize and anise
dished out by great-breasted matrons who whisper in Nahuatl
