Culture and Truth: The Remaking ofSocial Analysis, by Renato Rosaldo.Boston: Beacon Press, 1989. ISBN 0­

8070-4608-6, xii + 253 pp, us$21.95.

such works before assessing anthropol­ogy's contribution to this and otherimportant issues. Developments inPolynesian Ethnology provides a soundfoundation for further areal synthesis.

PAUL SHANKMAN

University ofColorado'

The enormous significance of this booklies in great part with the central ques­tion it poses: What does it mean towrite about culture in our time? "Thesedays," Rosaldo writes in the preface,"questions of culture seem to touch anerve because they quite quicklybecome anguished questions of iden­tity" (ix). Situating his work within thecontext of the ongoing debate aboutthe nature of "cultural literacy" andrenewed interest in redefining Ameri­can national identity, Rosaldo arguesfor the need to pluralize precisely thesecultural categories of "literacy" and"identity." The task of social analysis isnot one of reinstituting the privilege ofcertain modes of knowing and being atthe expense of others; rather, it entailsthe discovery of those other identitiesand literacies that have been histori­cally repressed.

Writing about culture for Rosaldothus involves rethinking such cherishedsocial science categories as "objectiv­ity," "distance," and "thick descrip­tions" in terms of more indeterminatequalities such as subjectivity, engage­ment, and emotional force. In doingso, he seeks to interrogate the suppos-

BOOK REVIEWS

categories to make sense of Polynesianlives. For example, Shore reinterpretsthe concepts of mana and tapu in termsof their implicit cultural logic. This isan exciting enterprise, but it raisesproblems. There is the risk of overin­terpretation, imputing more logic andcoherence than the data warrant.There is also the question of salience­who in the society actually shares theethnographer's interpretation and atwhat levels? Finally, there is the ques­tion of the relationship of ancient con­cepts such as mana and tapu to con­temporary Polynesian worldviews.Shore is quite cognizant of these prob­lems, as is Marcus, but they do notalways provide solutions that will sat­isfy critics of cultural analysis.

Marcus' chapter on chieftainshipemploys the concept of the personhoodof the chief in the "reconstructionistproject." But Marcus is also interestedin the contemporary political economyof chiefs. Although Marcus finds thisperspective "missing" in the literature(195), in at least one country this kindof study is well under way. In WesternSamoa, the political economy of chieflyoffice has been the subject of work byJames Davidson, Pamela Thomas, andTim O'Meara. This work has a senseof immediacy and relevance that is notfully conveyed in some of the chaptersin the volume.

Surprisingly, there is little coverageof the Mead-Freeman controversy thatgenerated more press and professionalcommentary than any other in thehistory of the discipline. Polynesianethnologists should have a good deal tosay about the substantive issuesinvolved. Yet readers will have to waitfor Borofsky's forthcoming volumes oncontemporary Polynesia and other

::. ::.

9M;

47°

elim

THE CONTEMPORARY PACIFIC· FALL 1991

edly disinterested claims of classicalethnographic accounts (from Mali­nowski to Geertz) by recalling anthro­pology's historic association with colo­nial and postcolonial projects. Byhistoricizing anthropology as a dis­course permeated by and dependent onother discourses-of other disciplines,ideologies, and most important of all,of native informants-Rosaldo's workis allied with recent developments incritical theory that regard culture as a"busy intersection ... where a num­ber of distinct social processes inter­sect. The crossroads simply provides aspace for distinct trajectories to tra­verse, rather than containing them incomplete encapsulated forms" (17).

The notion of culture as crossroadsrather than a set of reified valuesdirectly relates to the methodologicalimport of this book. Rosaldo carefullyelaborates the pragmatics of doing anethnography on the "borderlands."Here, the border is not simply the markthat separates linguistic, social, andpolitical categories; it is also a zone ofexchange, conflict, and the reinventionof personal and collective identities. Anethnography of the border would thusstress difference and transformationrather than stability and stasis in aparticular society. Ethnographers whowrite on the border occupy multipleperspectives, implicated in the veryprocesses about which and in the con­ditions within which they write. It istheir task to approach culture asheterogenous, in process, and open­ended.

Rosaldo's work performs the com­plexities of this ethnographic position­ing, as can be seen in the remarkableproliferation of personal anecdotes in

his book. A couple of examples mightsuffice. He speaks fondly of his five­year-old son, Manny, who had beentold in school to be wary of "strangers"and to distrust their solicitations."Shortly thereafter, at a movie theatre,he surveyed the audience around himand said, 'It's good luck. There are nostrangers here' " (29). Rosaldo inter­prets his son's remarks to reflect thearbitrariness-hence, the cultural con­structedness-of the notion of "strang­ers." As it moves across the border thatseparates teacher from student, theconcept goes through considerablechanges. The humor of this anecdoteunderlines a more fundamental point:the transport of meaning opens it up tocontestation and ambiguity.

The consequences of such an insightmay at times be profoundly transfor­mative, as in Rosaldo's story aboutcoming to terms with his grief and rageat the untimely death of MicheleRosaldo, his first wife, while they wereboth doing fieldwork among the non­gots in the northern Philippines. Ini­tially unable and unwilling to under­stand what for the nongots seemed likea self-evident connection between griefover the loss of a loved one and therage that leads men to cut off humanheads, Rosaldo sought ways to ration­alize nongot headhunting in terms ofconventional theories of exchange andkinship. Not until he too experiencedthe force of loss at Michelle's suddendeath, and the blinding rage that over­came him and for which he could notfind an outlet, did he begin to slowlyunderstand nongot headhunting. Inother words, he was "repositionedthrough a devastating loss of my own"and thus able to "grasp [what] nongot

BOOK REVIEWS 471

men mean precisely ... when theydescribe the anger in bereavement asthe source of their desire to cut offhuman heads" (3). For Rosaldo then, itwas not a question of seeing death assymptomatic of a universal "humancondition." Rather, the death of oneclose to him enabled him to imaginerage as a form of mourning and thus tosee in Ilongot headhunting an intelligi­ble response to the emotional force ofloss. The grief of the Ilongots is notsubsumed into his; instead, he regardsit as an occasion to reflect on theimportance of anger over ritual inunderstanding social representationsof death.

What is extraordinary about theseand other anecdotes are the ways theyforeground the "I" of the anthropolo­gist. At stake in these narratives is noless the refiguring of the relationshipbetween the personal and the social,the ethnographer and the nativeinformant, such that neither is seen tohold special purchase over the other.Anecdotes function like parables inso­far as they open up a process of inter­pretation. Because they highlight theirnature, both as stories that unfold intime and as artifacts that shape and areshaped by specific human agents, anec­dotes form an important strategy forfurthering the "remaking of social anal­ysis." In them, Rosaldo finds ways ofdefamiliarizing the familiar, unhingingthe domesticating power of conven­tional anthropological approaches,thereby bringing the borderline charac­ter of cultural formations into promi­nent view. Moreover, such anecdotesallow him to illustrate persuasively theneed to consider the position of thesubject that speaks and the subject that

is spoken to and about. To see subjec­tivity as simultaneously situated andmobile is to raise yet another series ofissues regarding ethnographic repre­sentations: Who speaks in suchaccounts? For whom, for what pur­poses, and under what sorts of histori­cal conditions? And under what formsof authority?

In a series of astute readings,Rosaldo addresses these questionsfrom various angles. He recalls thehistorical links !:>etween the rise ofanthropology as an academic disciplineand the consolidation and fragmenta­tion of imperialism in the West. Decol­onization brought with it new forms ofinterpretations that had the cumulativeeffect of redrawing the idea of "objec­tivity." The "objective" and the"rational" were no longer coterminouswith the real, but were rather increas­ingly seen as rhetorical operations thatgenerated conventions of thinking andacting in the same way that habits cul­tivate systematic blindness to theircontingent nature. Knitting contempo­rary ethnographic works, including hisfield notes on the Ilongots, with a selec­tive mix of literacy theory, cognitivepsychology, and philosophy, Rosaldomoves deftly between critiques ofimperialist nostalgia and liberalhumanist ideology characteristic ofclassical ethnographies. In the finalsection of the book, he offers a set ofalternative ethnographies that includeessays on the shifting modalities ofChicano identity gleaned from histori­cally and sexually distinct narratives;the salience of subjectivity in drawingattention to the shifting relations ofpower between ethnographer andinformant; and the irrevocably hybrid

472 THE CONTEMPORARY PACIFIC· FALL 1991

nature of contemporary Americanculture where the resurgence of ethnicidentities (and its regressive counter,racism) have made it all the moreimperative to see culture "on theborder."

The summary account I haveoffered of Rosaldo's book falls short,of course, of portraying the vibrantand extensive range of its insights. Hehas quilted together a remarkable arrayof contemporary social theories inways that rescue them from academicobscurity and make them available forwider discussions and varied appropri­ations. In doing so, he has raised thepolitical and ethical stakes of culturalstudies, locating the question of cultureon the terrain of other struggles overthe future direction of American educa­tion. Herein lies what I take to be thesignificance of the book's title. UnlikeMatthew Arnold's stark and reductiveopposition of "culture" to "anarchy,"the "truth" of culture in Rosaldo's writ­ings lies less in its "civilizing" and nor­malizing effects than in its capacity tobring to bear on our lives whatAdrienne Rich calls an "increasingcomplexity."

VICENTE L. RAFAEL

University ofCalifornia, San Diego

~:-

Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects,Modern Lives, by Marianna Torgov­nick. Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1990. ISBN 0-226-80831-9, xi+ 328 pp, illustrations, notes, bibliog­raphy, index. US$24.95.

In her book Gone Primitive: SavageIntellects, Modern Lives, Marianna

Torgovnick unravels the Western dis­course on the "primitive." By examin­ing a number of diverse cases fromanthropology, art, art history, litera­ture, and psychology, she outlines thevariations of the Western obsessionwith the "primitive," explores its impli­cations, and discusses its relevance formodernism and postmodernism,because "to study primitivism's mani­fold presence is to recontextualizemodernity" (193). She critically probesthe texts of Edgar Rice Burroughs (Tar­zan of the Apes); of art historiansRoger Fry and the Museum of ModernArt's William Rubin; of ethnographersMichel Leiris, Claude Levi-Strauss,Bronislaw Malinowski, and MargaretMead; of novelists D. H. Lawrenceand Joseph Conrad; of Sigmund Freud;of professional adventurers TobiasSchneebaum, Lorne and LawrenceBlair, and Henry M. Stanley ("DrLivingstone, I presume"). She showshow the authors rely on, and con­struct, power hierarchies when writingabout the "primitive," how their fasci­nation with the "primitive" has to dowith their "need to clearly demarcatesubject and object even while flirtingwith other ways of experiencing theuniverse" (157), and how "gender issuesalways inhabit Western versions of theprimitive" (17). Torgovnick's book is aself-critical analysis of our (Western)view of them, and a polemical critiqueof men's representations of non-West­ern humankind and of women.

The illustrations Torgovnick haschosen for her book supplement thetexts she quotes. In much the samemanner that she unmasks Westernprimitivism in novels and ethnogra­phies, she analyzes paintings such as