MICHAELA di LEONARDO.
Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1998.
xvi + 445 pp., illustrations, notes, index.
228 p. ISBN 0-8077-3681-3
Teachers College, Columbia University
One thing must be said about di Leonardo: she does not lack courage as she charges every anthropological windmill (read ‘trope’, ‘gambit’, etc.) in sight, particularly if it is part of the industry that uses Others to talk about Us, and thus makes of anthropologists "exotics at home," who "trivialize ... the global poor, and racial, sexual, and other minority Americans alike" (p.65). Who else could write about a ritual speech by Lévi-Strauss as a "droll likening of a powerful, state-sponsored intelligentsia to a powerless group of Native Americans [,...] an example of chutzpah as obscenity" (p. 66). One should enjoy this line before possibly noticing, in the spirit of the author, that the comment substantizes "Native Americans," brands them as "powerless," and fails to mention that all rites of passage must involve power and gender issues, There as well as Here.
This "reading" (the author’s favorite word for her activity) of a sentence from the book is probably unfair and I do not want to use it as a sad tropic move to dismiss the book–even if, too often, di Leonardo dismisses lives’ work on the basis of throwaway comments in beginnings, endings, and other moments when anthropologists ("we," in the book and this review) must, inevitably, talk to those who are our consequential Others: editors, journalists, the non-anthropological public (including many in competing fields). The book has its uses–though probably only to those who can appreciate a sentence containing the phrase "sad tropic move." This is above all an elite anthropological book addressed to a particular subset of the anthropological elite. Many who are close to this elite, in whatever relationship, will enjoy the book as it Writes some recent arguments in the discipline into a history of the 70s and 80s with breathtaking flashbacks to Chicago’s 1893 Columbian World Exposition where Boas measured heads while exhibits displayed multifaceted representations of American racism. This image of the (symbolically male) anthropologist building himself up as the hero critical of that within which he participates is the theatrical version of di Leonardo’s point: the Anthropology she Writes (a fairly small subset of the work anthropologists continue to produce: the list of absences would be long indeed!) radically fails to distinguish itself from the political "anthropology-troping" that de-historicizes the Other and then Us.
Di Leonardo’s prototype for this anthropologist is Margaret Mead. Di Leonardo consecrates two chapters to her and she appears regularly, particularly at openings and endings, as the ultimate and willing participant in parlaying the "ethnographic fallacy" (p. 365), someone who "tailored her message to the changing cloth of American hegemony" (p. 364). Benedict, Bohannan, Shostak and many others (Warner, Lewis, Ortner, Geertz, Rosaldo, Lévi-Strauss, etc.) are closely dissected to reveal that they never were who they said, or let others say they were. Mead was no feminist. She did not produce a true anthropology of women. She was no liberal. She wasn’t even a "cultural relativist." She was "a metonym of American modernity," "profoundly American in her refusal to come to terms with power in history" (p. 363). That this branding of Mead as an "American" may contradict di Leonardo’s strictures about the proper usage of the term may be besides the point here.
All in all a tremendous amount of scholarship is brought to bear on something that, I agree, must be retold repeatedly: anthropology cannot escape "the water in which we all swim" (p. 364)–the old, and altogether most evocative metaphor for the human condition of private lives in the midst of "public cultures" that makes anthropology necessary. I suspect that Mead would have agreed, along with Boas, Benedict, and all the others. The problem we all face is that it is difficult for the fish to know much about water. Getting out of the water, into other public cultures, is, arguably, not quite as useless an exercise as some readers of di Leonardo’s work could get to believe. This, to me, is the fundamental issue: What is such a book useful for? She is calling for something positive, for a body of research that does not separate "water" from "air"–to extend the metaphor. This is a fine goal that might stand as a more precise telling of the anthropological mission ("making available to us answers that others ... have given" to quote Geertz’ poetic telling would be the less precise telling). The question is how best to move towards this goal given our current understanding of where we have gone wrong. The book catalogues many of these mistakes, and repeatedly tells us how terrible we have been for making them. I would find more useful a book that would focus on what can be retrieved of the work of our parents, letting some old idols grow moldy on forgotten pedestals, while building up new ones. To the very extent that the book Writes history, it reconstructs a canon, it re-guilds the figures it wants to dismiss, and it leaves in the shadows what di Leonardo says she does want to build: an anthropology that does not de-contextualize the Other from Us, one that respects power and history. We know at the end that the characters in the book do not do this. I am not sure I agree with her casting call, but this is somewhat besides the larger point: Where would a sympathetic journalist, dean, or funding agency turn if they read this book and took it for a fair representation of the state of the discipline?