Critical Junctions: Anthropology and History Beyond the Cultural Turn

By Walkowitz, Daniel J

Critical Junctions: Anthropology and History beyond the Cultural Turn. Edited by Don KaIb and Herman Tak (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005. viii plus 185 pp. $45.00 [paper, 2006. $22.50]). This collection of essays, which was in the works over a decade, may be new to social historians interested in the historical anthropology’s encounter with the cultural turn, but it will be old news to those steeped in the historiography of the last decade on history and theory. The volume has a foot solidly anchored in the debate over the cultural (or “linguistic”) turn circa 1995; few of the references in the essays are to critical analysis-either theoretical or empirical-produced in the New Millenium, Indeed, the editors, both well-regarded social anthropologists who have taught at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, developed the collection from a special 1996 issue of Focaal European Journal ofAnthropology and a subsequent meeting that same year of the American Anthropological Association. The authors are predominantly historical anthropologists (a couple of them are historians by training, and a couple of them also have training in sociology). Though these essays originate in the mid-90s, the editors encouraged authors to rewrite their essays over the next years (and some clearly did), and in an Introduction, the editors locate the eight essays in an updated conversation. So, despite a sense that this debate is stale, the collection-both the editors’ Introduction and the theoretically engaged essays-provides several important lessons for historians.

The volume proceeds from the view shared by the authors that the cultural turn’s “obsession” with ” ‘meaning,’ symbols and signs” has led (citing the anthropologist Eric Wolf) to “analytic ‘deforestation.’ ” If historian critics have argued against what they see as an ahistorical relativism of the ‘turn,’ editors KaIb and Tak focus on what Sherry Ortner bemoans as the poststructuralist ” ‘lack of a systemic sociology’ ” which has heretofore been fundamental to symbolic anthropology. The result of the “turn,” according to the editors, is a “turning away from ‘the social’ and the political, [and] the relative neglect of praxis…. ” (2) One of the “main culprits” of the reductionism, they then note, has been class analysis, and the volume’s not-so-modest project is no less than the reinvigoration of class in historical anthropology, a project with which I am wholly sympathetic.

This project will not be new to some historians. Critics of the cultural turn from within the historical profession, especially male labor historians in the 1990s (most notably Bryan Palmer1), spoke often passionately against the evisceration of a materialist basis for class in the rush to take the cultural turn. But this volume has several virtues. First, the authors make the case in less overheated terms with which I think historians who have themselves embraced the cultural may be more receptive to engage. The editors stake out an appealing middle ground that builds on the expanded notion of class that the cultural turn itself advanced against a narrow economism of an earlier generation. second, the volume reminds us of the legacy of anthropology to historical thinking.

To begin, I suspect that when most historians think of the cultural turn, they think of French social theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Ferdinand de Saussure, Jacques Lacan, and Pierre Bourdieu. KaIb and Tak offer an expanded genealogy which emphasizes the critical role played by anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz, Eric Wolf, George Marcus and James Clifford. At the same time, citing the influence that British Marxist historians like E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams and Eric Hobsbawm had on an earlier generation of New Social Historians-work too little read today-they urge a resurrection of the quite dynamic notions of class and culture that were both materialist and cultural and introduced forty years ago.

The essays in this collection seek to revitalize “the social” with a reconstructed Marxism that builds on the above mentioned French theorists and the earlier generation of social historians, but moves beyond them to focus study on what they see as four “critical junctions” which shape modern subjects. These interconnected junctures expose the social relations that they see as fundamental to collective social life: “relations through time, relations in space, relations of power and dependency,” and a fourth set of imagined, remembered, and material relations about which they are more abstract-the “interstitial relations between nominally distinct domains such as economics, politics, the law, the family, etc.” (3).

The eight essays in the collection provide case studies of the analytic power of critical junctures for providing a dynamic sense of class as it arises from “the social” and political praxis rather than from what they deride in the “turn” as “culture-as-template.” The various authors-scholars who in previous field work have done microethnographies or local histories-draw minimally on this ear lier work to interrogate of the relationship between history and anthropology. They do reference their own work-studies as varied as August Carbonella’s work on Fordism in America to Don Kalb’s research with narratives of female labor in the Netherlands in the first half of the twentieth century to Patricia Musant’s study of the resistance among agricultural workers in modem Mexico. But they use the local to make visible the materiality of culture, to see how cultural forms operate as dynamic forces that shape social relations and, in turn, to provide the context in which people “make” their own history. This “making” of course echoes E.P. Thompson’s title from 1963, but the context is about time, space, place, and power, both local and global-words that echo in the essays as a mantra.

The effort to provide a sense of class with the materialist base present in the New Social History may, as I have suggested above, find an appreciate audience in its forceful but non-polemic presentation. My own sense is that the authors have tended to make a straw man out of the cultural turn based on an out-dated figure; the vitriolic exchanges that marked conferences in the early nineties have receded with a general victory for a “turn” that is engaged the material world. The more important weakness in the authors’ presentation-and this may be a testament to the dated character of the volume-is that the imaginings of class and language that are at the core of subjectivity-and of praxis-falls out of the volume. The formulation is duly raised in the Introduction, but not very much engaged in the authors’ own practice.

Still, this volume offers social historians an interesting window into historical anthropologists’ engagement with the cultural turn in history. I am less convinced that the term “critical junctures” will transform historical writing, but the social relations of power, time and space that the notion encapsulates does serve to renovate “the social” in its relationship to the cultural. 1 think this project is now underway in many historical circles, but 1 am happy to have these anthropologists articulate the case so well.

ENDNOTE

1. Bryan D. Palmer, Descent into Discourse : The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History (Philadelphia, 1990).

Daniel J. Walkowitz

New York University

Copyright Peter N. Stearns Summer 2007

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