Goodby to Tristes Tropes: Ethnography in the Context of Modern World History
Author(s)
Sahlins, Marshall
Abstract
In the midst of all the hoopla about the new reflexive anthropology, with its celebration of the impossibility of systematically understanding the elusive Other, a different kind of ethnographic prose has been developing more quietly, almost without our knowing we were speaking it, and certainly without so much epistemological angst. I mean the numerous works of historical ethnography whose aim is to synthesize the field experience of a community with an investigation of its archival past. For decades now, students of American Indians, Indonesia and the Pacific Islands, South Asia, and Africa have been doing this kind of ethnohistory. But only a few-notably Barney Cohn, Jean Comaroff, John Comaroff, and Terry Turner-have consciously raised the point that an ethnography with time and transformation built into it is a distinct way of knowing the anthropological object, with a possibility of changing the way culture is thought. This article associates itself with this project of historical ethnography as a determinate anthropological genre. In particular, I would like to offer some theoretical justification for a return to certain world areas such as North America and Polynesia, areas which have been too long slighted by ethnographers, ever since it was discovered in the 1930s and 1940s that they were “acculturated.” For these peoples have known how to defy their anthropological demotion by taking cultural responsibility for what was afflicting them. The very ways societies change have their own authenticity, so that global modernity is often reproduced as local diversity.
