Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a
Transnational Anthropology
In chapter 2,l use the term ethnoscape. This neologism has certain ambiguities
deliberately built into it. It refers, first, to the dilemmas of perspective
and representation that all ethnographers must confront, and it admits that
(as with landscapes in visual art) traditions of perception and perspective,
as well as variations in the situation of the observer, may affect the process
and product of representation. But 1 also intend this term to indicate that
there are some brute facts about the world of the twentieth century that
any ethnography must confront. Central among these facts is the changing
social, territorial, and cultural reproduction of group identity. As
groups migrate, regroup in new locations, reconstruct their histories, and
reconfigure their ethnic projects, the ethno in ethnography takes on a slippery,
nonlocalized quality, to which the descriptive practices of anthropology
will have to respond. The landscapes of group identity-the
ethnoscapes-around the world are no longer familiar anthropological
objects, insofar as groups are no longer tightly territorialized, spatially
bounded, historically unselfconscious, or culturally homogeneous. We
have fewer cultures in the world and more internal cultural debates (Parkin
1978).' In this chapter, through a series of notes, queries, and vignettes, I
seek to reposition some of our disciplinary conventions, while trying to
show that the ethnoscapes of today's world are profoundly interactive.
-,
Alternative Modernitiesand Ethnographic Cosmopolitanism
? r
\;-
;.'9.
A central challenge for current anthropology is to study the cosmopolitan-- - --.--
i. (Rabinow 1986) cultural forms of the contemporary world withoZIZii-
6.: cally or chronologically presupposing either the authority of the Western
%>.
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+I'ry
experience or the models derived from that experience. It seems impossi,
.
.i
ble to study these new cosmopolitanisms fruitfully without analyzing the
transnational cultural flows within which they thrive, compete, and feed
i.
C',,
off one another in ways that defeat and confound many verities of the
S human sciences today. One such truth concerns the link between space,
%j..
:ti stability, and cultural reproduction. There is an urgent need to focus on
..
,... the cultural dynamics of what is now called deterritorialization. This term
. .
applies not only to obvious examples such as transnational corporations
and money markets but also to ethnic groups, sectarian movements, and
political formations, which increasingly operate~inways that transcend
>. -.
specific territorial boundaries and identi@. Detirritorial~zat~o;\(of which
I offer some ethnographic profiles in =hi<. 2) dffkcts the loyalties of
. . groups (especially in the context of complex diasporas), their transnational
manipulation of currencies and other forms of wealth and investment,
and the strategies of states. The loosening of the holds between
people, wealth, and territories fundamentally alters the basis of cultural
c---
~...
reproduction.~
At the same time, deterritorialization creates new markets for film companies,
impresarios, and travel agencies, which thrive on the need of the
relocated population for contact with its homeland. But the homeland is
partly invented, existing only in the imagination of the deterritorialized
groups, and it can sometimes become so fantastic and one-sided that it
provides the fuel for new ethnic conflicts.
The idea of deterritorialization may also be applied to money and finance,
as money managen seek the best markets for their investments, independent
of national boundaries. In turn, these movements of moneys are
the basis for new kinds of conflict, as Los Angelenos wony about the
Japanese buying up their city, and people in Bombay worry about the rich
Arabs from the Gulf states, who have not only transformed the price of
mangoes in Bombay but have also substantially altered the profile of hotels,
restaurants, and other services in the eyes of the local populationjust
as they have in London. Yet most residents of Bombay are ambivalent
about the Arabs there, for the flip side of their presence is the absent
friends and kinsfolk earning big money in the Middle East and bringing
back both money and luxury commodities to Bombay and other cities in
G l o b a l E t h n o s c a p t s
= 49 =
India. Such commodities transform consumer taste in these cities. They
often end up smuggled through air- and seaports and peddled in the gray
markets of Bombay's streets. In these gray markets (a coinage that allows
me to capture the quasi-legal characteristic of such settings), some members
of Bombay's middle classes and its lumpen proletariat can buy goods,
ranging from cartons of Marlboro cigarettes to Old Spice shaving cream
and tapes of Madonna. Similar gray routes, often subsidized by moonlighting
sailors, diplomats, and airline stewardesses, who get to move in
and out of the country regularly, keep the gray markets of Bombay,
Madras, and Calcutta Filled with goods not only from the West, but also
from the Middle East, Hong Kong, and Singapore. It is also such professional
transients who are increasingly implicated in the transnational
spread of disease, not the least of which is AIDS.
The vision of transnational cultural studies suggested by the discussion
so far appears at first sight.to involve only modest adjustments of anthro- 1
pologists' traditional approaches to culture. In my view, however, a gen- ,s
j
uinely cosmopolitan ethnographic practice requires an interpretation of ?
the terrain of cultural studies in the United States today and of the status
1'
of anthropology within such a terrain.2
Cultural Studies in a Global Terrain
As this volume concerns anthropologies of the present, it may be important
to ask about the status of anthropology in the present and in patticular
about its now embattled monopoly over the study of "culture" (from
now on, without quotation marks). The following discussion sets the stage
for the critique of ethnography contained in subsequent sections.
As a topic, culture has many histories, some disciplinary, some that
function outside the academy. Within the academy, there are certain differences
between disciplines in the degree to which culture has been an
explicit topic of investigation and the degree to which it has been under- 1
stood tacitly. In the social sciences, anthropology (especiallyin the United 1
States but less so in England) has made culture its central concept, defining
1,
-.. ...
i
it as some sort of human substance--even though ideas about this sub\stance
have shifted,.over the course of a century, roughly from E. B. Tylor's
. ,
ideas about custom to Clifford Geertzi ideas about meaning. Some an-.
- i
thropologists have worried that the meanings given to culture have been far !.
too diverse for a technical term; others have made a virtue of that diversity.
I
I
At the same time, the other social sciences have not been unconcerned
I
/.
with culture: in sociology, Max Weber's sense of verstehen and George Sim- 1I
I
G l o b a l E t b n a s c a p r s 1
;. 50 =
G l o b a l E t b n o s c a p t s
..51 =
mel's various ideas have mediated between the German neo-Kantian ideas
of the late nineteenth century and sociology as a social science discipline.
As in many other cases, culture is now a subfield within sociology, and the
American Sociological Association has legitimized this segregation by
creating a subunit in the sociology of culture, where persons concerned
with the production and distribution of culture, especially in Western settings,
may freely associate with one another.
I;!11,
1;
I/
At the epicenter of current debates in and about culture, many diverse !I
streams flow into a single, rather turbulent river of many poststructuralisms
(largely French) of Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault,
Pierre Bourdieu, and their many subschools. Some of these streams are
li
self-conscious about language as their means and their model, while others
are less so. The current multiplicity of uses that surrounds the three words')
meaning, discourse, and text should be sufficient to indicate that we are not
I I!,only in an era of blurred genres (as Geertz [I9801 said presciently more ,
than a decade ago), but we are in a peculiar state that I would like to call 1
i!1"postblurring," in which ecumenism has-happily, in my opinion-given
iway to sharp debates about the word, the world, and the relationship between
them.
In this ~ostblurblur, it is crucial to note that the high ground has been
seized by English literature (as a discipline) in particular and by literary ,I!;,I s
studies in general. This is the nexus where the word theory, a rather prosaic I I,'
term in many fields for many centuries, suddenly took on the sexy ring of
a trend. For an anthropologist in the United States today, what is most
l ! ~l1
striking about the past decade in the academy is the hijack of culture by
literary studies-although we no longer have a one-sided Arnoldian gaze,
but a many-sided hijack (where a hundred Blooms flower) with many internal
debates about texts and antitexts, reference and structure, theory
and practice. Social scientists look on with bewilderment as their colleagues
in English and comparative literature talk (and fight) about matters
that, until as recently as Fifteen years ago, would have seemed about as relevant
to English departments as, say, quantum mechanics.
The subject matter of cultural studies could roughly be taken as the relationship
between the word and the world. I understand these two terms J
in their widest sense, so that word can encompass all forms of textualized '
expression and world can mean anything from the means of production and
the organization of life-worlds to the globalized relations of cultural re-
i
iii.
production discussed here.
Cultural studies conceived this way could be the basis for a cosmopolitan
(global? macro? translocal?) ethnography. To translate the tension be,
l II;!
l i i
tween the word and the world into a productive ethnographic strategy requires
a new understanding of the deterritorializedworld that many persons
inhabit and the possible lives that many persons are today able to envision.
The terms of the negotiation between imagined lives and detemtorialized
worlds are complex, and they surely cannot be captured by the localizing
', !
j strategies of traditional ethnography alone. What a new style of ethnogra-i
':
1 phy can do is to capture the impact of detemtorialization on the imagina.%..
j tive resources of lived, local experiences. Put another way, the task of
/ ',-= : \ ethnography now becomes the unraveling of a conundmm: what is the nature
of locality as a livedexperience in a globalized, detemtorializedworld?
- As I will suggest in t h e ~ e ~ e . c t i o n ,the beginnings of an answer to this
. . ,'puzzle lie in a fresh approach to the role of the imagination in social life.
The master narratives that currently guide much ethnography all have
Enlightenment roots, and all have been called into serious question. Foucault's
searing critique of Western humanism and its hidden epistemologies
has made it difficult to retain much faith in the idea of progress in its
many old and new manifestations. The master narrative of evolution, central
to anthropology in the United States, suffers from a profound gap between
its short-run, culturally oriented versions (as in the work of Marvin
Harris) and its long-run, more appealing, but less anthropological versions
as in the biogeological fablesof StephenJay Could. The emergence of the
\ individual as a master narrative suffers not only from the counterexamples
i of our major twentieth-century totalitarian experiences but also from thei
many deconstructions of the idea of self, person, and agency in philosophy,
sociology, and anthropology (parfit 1986; Giddens 1979; Carrithers,
Collins, and Lukes 1985).Master narratives of the iron cage and the march
of bureaucratic rationality are constantly refuted by the irrationalities,
contradictions, and sheer brutality that are increasingly traceable to the
pathologies of the modern nation-state (Nandy 1987). Finally, most versions
of the Marxist master narrative find themselves embattled as contemporary
capitalism takes on a more and more disorganized and deterritorialized
look (Lash and Uny 1987) and as cultural expressions refuse to
bend to the requirements of even the least parochial Marxist approaches.
(For example, see the debate between Frederic Jameson and Aijaz Ahmad
in Social Tixt [Jameson 1986, Ahmad 19871.)
Cosmopolitan ethnography, or what might be called macroethnogra-.-. - .
phy, takes on a special urgency given the ailments of these many postEnlightenment
master narratives. It is difficult to be anything but exploratory
about what such a macroethnography (and its ethnoscapes)might look
like,but the following section seeks by illustration to point to its contours.
Imagination and Ethnography
We live in a world of many kinds of realism, some magical, some socialist,
some capitalist, and some that are yet to be named. These generic realisms
have their provinces of origin: magical realism in Latin American fiction in
the past two decades; socialist realism in the Soviet Union of the 1930s;
and capitalist realism, a term coined by Michael Schudson (1984), in the
visual and verbal rhetoric of contemporary American advertising. In much
aesthetic expression today, the boundaries between these various realisms
have been blurred. The controversies over Salman Rushdie's The Satanic
Venes, over the Robert Mapplethorpe photographic exhibition in Cincinnati,
and over many other works of art in other parts of the world remind
us that artists are increasingly willing to place high stakes on their sense of
the boundaries between their art and the politics of public opinion.
More consequential to our purposes is the fact that the jmagination has
now acquired a singular new power in social life. The imagination--ex-..-
.-.
pressed in dreams, songs, fantasies, myths, and stories-has always been
part of the repertoire of every society, in some culturally organized way.
But there is a peculiar new force to the imagination in social life today.
More persons in more parts of the world consider a wider set of ~ossible
lives than they ever did before. One important source of this change is the
/--'.,.-mSs
media, which present a rich, ever-changing store of possible lives,
ki-.--.-.
some of which enter the lived imaginations of ordinary people more successfully
than others. Important also are contacts with, news of, and rumors
about others in one's social neighborhood who have become inhabitants
of these faraway worlds. The importance of media is not so much as
direct sources of new images and scenarios for life possibilities but as semi- '*
-- - . otic
diacritics of great power, which also inflect social contact with the
\ - _ metropolitan
world facilitated by other channels.
One of the principal shifts in the global cultural order, created by
cinema, television, and video technology (and the ways in which they
frame and energize other, older-media),has to do with the role of the
imagination in social life. Until recently, whatever the force of social
change, a case could be made that social life was largely inertial, that traditions
provided a relatively finite set of possible lives, and that fantasy
and imagination were residual practices, confined to special persons or do--
. - .
mains, restricted to special moments or places. In general, imagination and
fantasy were antidotes to the finitude of social experience. In the past
two decades, as the deterritorialization of persons, images, and ideas has
taken on new force, this weight has imperceptibly shifted. More persons
G l o b a l E t h n o s c a p t r
= 52 - G l o b a l E t h n o s c a p c s
= 53 =
throughout the world see their lives through the prisms of the possible
lives offered by mass media in all their forms. That is, fantasy is now ,a sos,.:
,.'?
cia1 practice; it enters, in a host of ways, into the fabrication of social lives
.f
.. ...- . . .
or many~peoplein many societies.
I should be quick to note that this is not a cheerful observation, intended
to imply that the world is now a happier place with more choices
(in the utilitarian sense) for more people, and with more mobility and
more happy endings. Instead, what is implied is that even the meanest and
most hopeless of lives, the most brutal and dehumanizing of circumstances,
the harshest of lived inequalities are now open to the play of the
imagination. Prisoners of conscience, child laborers, women who toil in
the fields and factories of the world, and others whose lot is harsh no
longer see their lives as mere outcomes of the givenness of things, but
often as the ironic compromise between what they could imagine and
what social life will permit. Thus, the biographies of ordinary people are
constructions (or fabrications) in which the imagination plays an important
role. Nor is this role a simple matter of escape (holding steady the
conventions that govern the rest of social life), for in the grinding of gears
between unfolding lives and their imagined counterparts a variety of imag:'
ined communities (Anderson 1983) is formed, communities that generate
new kinds of politics, new kinds of collective expression, and new needs
for social discipline and surveillance on the part of elites.
All this has many contexts and implications that cannot be pursued
here. But what does it imply for ethnography? It implies that ethnographers
can no longer simply be content with the thickness they bring to the
local and the particular, nor can they assume that as they approach the
local, they approach something more elementary, more contingent, and
thus more real than life seen in larger-scale perspectives. For what is real
about ordinary lives is now real in many ways that range from the sheer
contingency of individual lives and the vagaries of competence and talent
that distinguish persons in all societies to the realisms that individuals are
exposed to and draw on in their daily lives.
These complex, partly imagined lives must now form the bedrock of
ethnography, at least of the sort of ethnography that wishes to retain a
special voice in a transnational, deterritorialized world. For the new power
of the imagination in the fabrication of social lives is inescapably tied up
with images, ideas, and opportunities that come from elsewhere, often
moved around by the vehicles of mass media. Thus, standard cultural reproduction
(like standard English) is now an endangered activity that succeeds
only by conscious design and political will, where it succeeds at all.
G l o b a l E t b n o s c a p t s
= 54 e
1 Indeed, where insulation from the larger world seems to have been successful
and where the role of the global imagination is withheld from ordinary
people (in places like Albania, North Korea, and Burma), what seems
to appear instead is a bizarre state-sponsored realism, which always contains
within it the possibility of the genocidal and totalizing lunacies of a
Pol Pot or of long-repressed desires for critique or exit, as are emerging in
Albania and Myanmar (Burma).
The issue, therefore, is not how ethnographic writing can draw on a
wider range of literary models, models that too often elide the distinction
between the life of fiction and the fictionalization of lives, but how the role
of the imagination in social life can be described in a new sort of ethnog-
-.
raphy that is not so resolutely localizing. There is, of course, much to be
said for the local, the particular, and the contingent, which have always
been the forte of ethnographic writing at its best. But where lives are being
imagined partly in and through realisms that must be in one way or another
official or large-scale in their inspiration, then the ethnographer
needs to find new ways to represent the links between the imagination and
social life. This problem of representation is not quite the same as the familiar
problem of micro and macro, small and large scale, although it has
important connections to it. The connection between the problem of
ethnographically representing imagined lives and the difficulty of making
the move from local realities to large-scale structures is implicit in Sherry
Ortner's article "Reading America" (1991). Taken together, Ortner's argument
and mine point to the importance of embedding large-scale realities
in concrete life-worlds, but they also open up the possibility of divergent
interpretations of what locality implies.
The link between the imagination and social life, I would suggest, is increasingly
a global and deterritorialized one. Thus, those who represent
real
or ordinary lives must resist making claims to epistemic privilege in regard
to the lived particularities of social life. Rather, ethnography must
redefine itself as that practice of representation that illuminates the power
of large-scale, imagined life possibilities over specific life trajectories. This
is thickness with a difference, and the difference lies in a new alertness to
the fact that ordinary lives today are more often powered not by the
givenness of things but by the possibilities that the media (either directly
indirectly) suggest are available. Put another way, some of the force of
Bourdieu's idea of the habitus can be retained (1977),but the stress must be
put on his idea of improvisation, for improvisation no longer occurs within
a relatively bounded set of thinkable postures but is always skidding and
taking off, powered by the imagined vistas of mass-mediated master narrad
G l o b a l E t b n o s c a p e s
tives. There has been a general change in the global conditions of lifeworlds:
put simply, where once improvisation was snatched out of the
glacial undertow of habitus, habitus now has to be painstakingly reinforced
in the face of life-worlds that are frequently in flux.
Three examples will suggest something of what I have in mind. In January
1988, my wife (who is a white American female historian of India)
and I (a Tamil Brahman male, brought up in Bombay and turned into homo
academicus in the United States), along with our son, three members of my
eldest brother's family, and an entourage of his colleagues and employees,
decided to visit the Meenaksi Temple in Madurai, one of the great pilgrimage
centers of South India. My wife has done research there off and
on for the past two decades.
Our purposes in going were various. My brother and his wife were worried
about the marriage of their eldest daughter and were concerned to
have the good wishes of as many powerful deities as possible in their
search fora good alliance. For my brother, Madurai was a special place because
he spent most of his first twenty years there with my mother's extended
family. He thus had old friends and memories in all the streets
around the temple. Now he had come to Madurai as a senior railway official,
with business to conduct with several private businessmen who
wished to persuade him of the quality of their bids. Indeed, one of these
potential clients had arranged for us to be accommodated in a garishly
modern hotel in Madurai, a stone's throw from the temple, and drove him
around in a Mercedes, while the rest of us took in our own Madurai.
Our eleven-year-old son, fresh from Philadelphia, knew that he was in
the presence of the practices of heritage and dove to the ground manfully,
in the Hindu practice of prostration before elders and deities, whenever he
was asked. He put up graciously with the incredible noise, crowding, and
sensory rush that a major Hindu temple involves. For myself, I was there to
embellish my brother's entourage, to add some vague moral force to their
wishes for a happy marriage for their daughter, to reabsorb the city in
which my mother grew up (I had been there several times before), to share
in my wife's excitement about returning to a cityand a temple that are possibly
the most important parts of her imagination, and to fish for cosmopolitanism
in the raw.
So we entered the fourteen-acre temple compound as an important entourage,
although one among many, and were soon approached by one of
the several priests who officiate there. This one recognized my wife, who
asked him where Thangam Bhattar was. Thangam Bhattar was the priest
with whom she had worked most closely. The answer was 'Thangam Bhattar
is in Houston." This punch line took us all a while to absorb, and then
it all came together in a flash. The Indian community in Houston, like
many communities of Asian Indians in the United States, had built a
Hindu temple, this one devoted to Meenaksi, the ruling deity in Madurai.
Thangam Bhattar had been persuaded to go there, leaving his family behind.
He leads a lonely life in Houston, assisting in the complex cultural
politics of reproduction in an overseas Indian community, presumably
earning a modest income, while his wife and children stay on in their small
home near the temple. The next morning my wife and niece visited
Thangam Bhattar's home, where they were told of his travails in Houston,
and they told the family what had gone on with us in the intervening
years. There is a transnational irony here, of course: Carol Breckenridge,
American historian, arrives in Madurai waiting with bated breath to see
her closest informant and friend, a priest, and discovers that he is in faraway
Houston, which is far away even from faraway Philadelphia.
But this transnational irony has many threads that unwind backward
and forward in time to large and fluid structures of meaning and communication.
Among these threads are my brother's hopes for his daughter, who
subsequently married a Ph.D. candidate in physical chemistry in an upstate
New York university and recently came to Syracuse herself; my wife's
recontextualizing of her Madurai experiences in a world that, at least for
some of its central actors, now includes Houston; and my own realization
that Madurai's historical cosmopolitanism has acquired a new global dimension
and that some key lives that constitute the heart of the temple's
ritual practices now have Houston in their imagined biographies. Each of
these threads could and should be unwound. They lead to an understanding
of the globalization of Hinduism, the transformation of "natives" into
cosmopolites of their own sort, and the fact that the temple now not only
attracts persons from all over the world but also itself reaches out. The
goddess Meenaksi has a living presence in Houston.
Meanwhile, our son now has in his repertoire of experiences a journey
of the Roots variety. He may remember this as he fabricates his own life as
an American of partly Indian descent. But he may remember more vividly
his sudden need to go to the bathroom while we were going from sanctum
to sanctum in a visit to another major temple in January 1989 and the
bathroom at the guesthouse of a charitable foundation in which he found
blissful release. But here, too, is an unfinished story, which involves the dynamics
of family, memory, and tourism, for an eleven-year-old hyphenated
American who has to go periodically to India, whether he likes it or not,
and encounter the many webs of shifting biography that he finds there.
G l o b a l E t b n o s c a p e s
= 56 =
G l o b a l E t h n o s c a p t s
= 57 ..
This account, like the ones that follow, needs not only to be thickened but
to be stirred, but it must serve for now as one glimpse of an ethnography
that focuses on the unyoking of imagination from place.
My second vignette comes from a collection of pieces of one kind of
magical realism, a book by ~ b l i oCortizar called A Certain Lucas (1984).Because
there has been much borrowing of literary models and metaphors in
recent anthropology but relatively little anthropology of literature, a word
about this choice of example seems appropriate. Fiction, like myth, is part
of the conceptual repertoire of contemporary societies. Readers of novels
and poems can be moved to intense action (as with The Satanic Verses of
Salman Rushdie), and their authors often contribute to the construction of
social and moral maps for their readers. Even more relevant to my purposes,
prose fiction is the exemplary province of the post-Renaissance
imagination, and in this regard it is central to a more general ethnography
of the imagination. Even small fragments of fantasy, such as Cort6zar constructs
in this brief story, show the contemporary imagination at work.
Magical realism is interesting not only as a literary genre but also as a
representation of how the world appears to some people who live in it.
(For an interesting commentary on one aspect of this approach to literary
narrative, see Felman 1989.) Cortizar is doubtless a unique person, and
not everyone imagines the world his way, but his vision is surely part of the
evidence that the globe has begun to spin in new ways. Like the myths of
small-scale society as rendered in the anthropological classics of the past,
contemporary literary fantasies tell us something about displacement, disorientation,
and agency in the contemporary world. (For an excellent recent
example of this approach in the context of cultural studies, see Rosaldo
1989, chap. 7.)
Because we have now learned a great deal about the writing of ethnography
(Clifford and Marcus 1986, Marcus and Fischer 1986; Geertz
1988),we are in a strong position to move to an anthropology of representation
that would profit immensely from our recent discoveries about
the politics and poetics of "writing culture." In this view, we can restore to
the recent critiques of ethnographic practice the lessons of earlier critiques
of anthropology as a field of practices operating within a larger
world of institutional policies and power (Hymes 1969). The Cortizar
story in question, which is both more light-handed and more heavyhitting
than some other, larger chunks of magical realism, is called "Swimming
in a Pool of Gray Grits." It concerns Professor Jose Migueletes's
1964 discovery of a swimming pool containing gray grits instead of water.
This discovery is quickly noticed by the world of sports, and at the EcoG
l o b a l E t h n o s c a p t s
= 58 =
logical Games in Baghdad the Japanese champion, Akiro Tashuma, breaks
the world record by "swimming five meters in one minute and four seconds"
(Cortizar 1984, 80). Cortizar's piece goes on to speak of how
Tashuma solved the technical problem of breathing in this semisolid
medium. The press then enters the picture, in Cortizar's own irreducibly
spare words:
Asked about the reasons why many international athletes show an evergrowing
proclivity for swimming in grits,Tashuma would only answer that
after several millennia it has finally been proven that there is a certain monotony
in the act ofjumping into the water and coming out all wet without
anything having changed very much in the sport. He let it be understood
that the imagination is slowlycoming into power and that it's time now to
apply revolutionary formsto old sports whose only incentive is to lower
recordsby fractionsof a second,when that can be done,which is quite rare.
He modestly declared himself unable to suggest equivalent discoveries for
soccer and tennis,but he did make an oblique reference to a new development
in sports,mentioninga glassball that may have been used in a basketball
game in Naga, and whose accidental but always possible breakage
brought on the act ofhara-kiri by the whole team whose fault it was. Everything
can be expected of Nipponese culture,especially if it sets out to imitate
the Mexican. But to limit ourselves to the West and to grits, this last
item has begun to demand higher prices, to the particular delight of countries
that produce it, all of them in the Third World. The death by asphyxiation
of seven Australian children who tried to practice fancy dives in the
new pool in Canberra demonstrates,however, the limitations of this interesting
product, the use of which should not be canied too far when amateurs
are involved. (82-83)
Now this is a very funny parable, and it could be read at many levels,
from many points of view. For my purposes, I note first that it is written by
an Argentine, born in Brussels, who lived in Paris from 1952until his death
in 1984. The link between magical realism and the self-imposed exile in
Paris of many of its finest voices deserves further exploration,but what else
does this vignette have to offer forthe study of the new ethnoscapes of the
contemporary world?The story is partly about a crazy invention that captures
the faraway imagination of Tashuma, a person who believes that "the
imagination is slowly coming into power." It is also about the transnational
journey of ideas that may begin as playful meditations and end up as
bizarre technical realities that can result in death. Here, one is forced to
think about the trajectory of The Satanic Verses, which began as a satiric
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meditation on good, evil, and Islam, and ended up a weapon in group violence
in many parts of the world.
The vignette is also about the internationalization of sport and the spiritual
exhaustion that comes from technical obsession with small differences
in performance. Different actors can bring their imaginations to bear
on the problem of sport in various ways. The Olympic Games of the past
are full of incidents that reveal complex ways in which individuals situated
within specific national and cultural trajectories imposed their imaginations
on global audiences. In Seoul in 1988, for instance, the defeated Korean
boxer who sat in the ring for several hours to publicly proclaim his
shame as a Korean and the Korean officials who swarmed into the ring to
assault a New Zealand referee for what they thought was a biased decision
were bringing their imagined lives to bear on the official Olympic narratives
of fair play, good sportsmanship, and clean competition. The whole
question of steroids, including the case of Canadian runner Ben Johnson
(see MacAloon 1990), is also not far from the technical absurdities of
Cortdzar's story, in which the body is manipulated to yield new results in a
world of competitive and commoditized spectacle. The vision of seven
Australian children's diving into a pool of grits and dying also deserves to
be drawn out into the many stories of individual abnegation and physical
abuse that sometimes power the spectacles of global sport.
Cortdzar is also meditating on the problems of imitation and cultural
transfer,suggesting that they can lead to violent and culturally peculiar innovations.
The adjective cultural appears gratuitous here and needs some
justification. That Tokyo and Canberra, Baghdad and Mexico City are all
involved in the story does not mean that they have become fungible pieces
of an arbitrarily shifting, delocalized world. Each of these places does have
complex local realities, such that death in a swimming pool has one kind of
meaning in Canberra, as do hosting large spectacles in Iraq and making
bizarre technical innovations in Japan. Whatever Cortdzar's idea about
these differences,they remain cultural, but no longer in the inertial mode
that the word previously implied. Culture does imply difference, but the
differences now are no longer taxonomic; they are interactive and refract
r ~ e ,so-thatcompeting for a swimming championship takes on the pecu-
..--
liar power that it does in Canberra partly because of the way some transnational
forces have come to be configured in the imagination of its
residents. Culture thus shifts from being some sort of inert, local substance
to being a rather more volatile form of difference. This is an important part
of the reason for writing against culture, as Lila Abu-Lughod (1991) has
suggested.
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There
are surely other macronamatives that spin out of this small piece
of magical realism, but all of them remind us that lives today are as much
acts of projection and imagination as they are enactments of known scripts
or predictable outcomes. In this sense, all lives have something in common
with international athletic spectacle, as guest workers strive to meet standards
of efficiency in new national settings, and brides who marry into
households at large distances from home strive to meet the criteria of
hypercompetence that these new contexts often demand. The deterritorialized
world in which many people now live--some moving in it actively,
others living with their absences or sudden returns-is, like Cortdzar's
pool of grits, ever thirsty for new technical competences and often harsh
with the unprepared. Cortdzar's vignette is itself a compressed ethnographic
parable, and in teasing out the possible histories of its protagonists
and their possible futures, our own ethnographies of literature can become
exercises in the interpretation of the new role of the imagination in social
life. There is in such efforts a built-in reflexive vertigo as we contemplate
Cortdzar's inventing of Tashuma, but such reflexivity leads not only into
reflections on our own representational practices as writers but also into
the complex nesting of imaginative appropriations that are involved in the
construction of agency in a deterritorialized world.
But not all deterritorialization is global in its scope, and not all imagined
lives span vast international panoramas. The world on the move affects
even small geographical and cultural spaces. In several different ways,
contemporary cinema represents these small worlds of displacement. Mira
Naiis films capture the texture of these small displacements, whose reverberations
can nevertheless be large. One of her films, India Cabaret, is what
I have called an ethn~drama.~Made in 1984, it tells about a small group of
women who have left towns and villages, generally in the southern part of
India, to come to Bombay and work as cabaret dancers in a seedy suburban
bar and nightclub called the Meghraj. The film contains (in the style of the
early Jean-Luc Godard) extended conversations between the filmmaker
and a few of these women, who are presented facing the camera as if they
are talking to the viewer of the film. These interview segments, which are
richly narrative, are intercut with dance sequences from the cabaret and
extended treatments of the sleazy paradoxes of the lives of some of the
men who are regulan there. The film also follows one of the women back
to her natal village, where we are shown the pain of her ostracism, as her
occupation in Bombay is known to everyone. It is mmored that this scene
was staged for the benefit of the filmmaker, but if anything this replaying
adds to the awkwardness and pain of the sequence. The film is not about
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happy endings, and it leaves us with possibilities of various sorts in the
lives of these women, all of whom are simultaneously proud and ashamed,
dignified and defiant de facto prostitutes who have fabricited identities as
artists.
For our purposes, what is most important about this film is the way in
which it shows that the cabaret club is not simply a marketplace for desire
but also a place where imagined lives are negotiated: the dancers act out
their precarious sense of themselves as dancers; the second-rate band tries
to work up its musical passions, which are fed by the aspirations of the
Catholic community in Goa (western India) to play European and American
instrumental music well. The men who come as customers clearly see
themselves as participants in something larger than life, and they behave
exactly like the customers in cabaret scenes in many Hindi commercial
films. In fact, the scenario that provides the meeting ground for all these
characters is provided by the cabaret sequences from Hindi commercial
cinema.
In many such stock scenes, a tawdry nightclub quartet plays an oppressively
sensuous melody combining Western and Indian instruments and
tonalities, while the villain and his cronies consume obviously nasty alcoholic
drinks and watch a painfully explicit dance routine by a vamp star.
The hero is usually insinuated into the action in some way that simultaneously
emphasizes his virility and his moral superiority over the tawdry environment.
These scenes are usually filledwith extras from the film studio,
who struggle to maintain the sophisticated visage of persons habituated to
the high life. These scenes are stereotypically vicarious in their approach
to drink, dance, and sound and are somehow depressing. The clients, the
dancers, and the band at the Meghraj seem to play out a slightly out-ofstep,
somnambulistic version of such classic Hindi film sequences.
Life in the Meghraj is surely driven by commercial cinematic images,
but their force is inadequate to cover the anxieties, the self-abasement, and
the agonized drama of leisure in which the characters are all engaged. Yet
the characters in this ethnodrama have images and ideas of themselves
that are not simply contingent outcomes of their ordinary lives (or simple
escapes from them) but are fabrications based on a subtle complicity with
the discursive and representational conventions of Hindi cinema. Thus, although
this film is a documentary in conventional terms, it is also an ethnodrama,
in the sense that it shows us the dramatic structure and the characters
that animate a particular strand of Bombay's ways of life. These
actors are also characters, not so much because they have obvious idiosyncrasies
attached to them but because they are fabrications negotiated in
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F
the encounter between the efforts of cinema to represent cabaret and of
real cabarets to capture the excitement of cinema. It is this negotiation,
not only the negotiation of bodies, that is the real order of business at the
Meghraj. The women who work in the cabaret are deterritorialized and
mobile: they are guest workers in Bombay. It is hard to see in them the discourse
of resistance (though they are cynical about men, as prostitutes
everywhere are), although their very bodily postures, their linguistic aggressiveness,
their bawdy, quasi-lesbian play with each other imply a kind
of raunchy and self-conscious counterculture. What we have is a sense that
they are putting lives together, fabricating their own characters, using the
cinematic and social materials at their disposal.
There are individuals here, to be sure, and agency as well, but what
drives these individuals and their agency are the complex realisms that
animate them: a crude realism about men and their motives; a sort of capitalist
realism that inspires their discourse about wealth and money; a curious
socialist realism that underlies their own categorizations of themselves
as dignified workers in the flesh trade (not very different from the housewives
of Bombay). They constitute a striking ethnographic example for
this chapter because the very displacement that is the root of their problems
(although their original departures turn out usually to be responses to
even worse domestic horrors) is also the engine of their dreams of wealth,
respectability, and autonomy.
Thus, pasts in these constructed lives are as important as futures, and
the more we unravel these pasts the closer we approach worlds that are
less and less cosmopolitan, more and more local. Yet even the most localized
of these worlds, at least in societies like India, has become inflectedeven
afflicted-by cosmopolitan scripts that drive the politics of families,
the frustrations of laborers, the dreams of local headmen. Once again, we
need to be careful not to suppose that as we work backward in these imagined
lives we will hit some local, cultural bedrock, made up of a closed set
of reproductive practices and untouched by rumors of the world at large.
(For a different but complementary angle on these facts, see Hannerz
1989.)Mira Nair's India Cabaret is a striking model of how ethnography in a
detemtorialized world might handle the problems of character and actor,
for it shows how self-fabrication actually proceeds in a world of types and
typification. It retains the tension between global and local that drives cultural
reproduction today.
I The vignettes I have used here have two purposes. One is to suggest
!
the sorts of situations in which the workings of the imagination in a deter-
I
ritorialized world can be detected. The second is to suggest that many
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lives are now inextricably linked with representations, and thus we need to
incorporate the complexities of expressive representation (film, novels,
travel accounts) into our ethnographies, not only as technical adjuncts
but as primary material with which to construct and interrogate our own
representations.
Conclusion:Invitations and Exbortations
Although the emergent cosmopolitanisms of the world have complex local
histories, and their translocal dialogue has a complex history as well (Islamic
pilgrimage is just one example), it seems advisable to treat the present
as a historical moment and use our understanding of it to illuminate
and guide the formulation of historical problems. This is not perverse
Whiggishness, it is, rather, a response to a practical problem: in many
cases it is simply not clear how or where one would locate a chronological
baseline for the phenomena we wish to study. The strategy of beginning at
the beginning becomes even more self-defeating when one wishes to illuminate
the lived relationships between imagined lives and the webs of cosmopolitanism
within which they unfold. Thus, not to put too fine a point
on it, we need an ethnography that is sensitive to the historical nature of
what we see today (which also involves careful comparison, as every good
historian knows), but I suggest that we cut into the problem through the
historical present.
While much has been written about the relationship between history
and anthropology (bypractitioners ofboth disciplines) in the past decade,
few have given careful thought to what it means to construct genealogies
of the present. Especially in regard to the many alternative cosmopolitanisms
that characterize the world today, and the complex, transnational
cultural flows that link *em.,_there is no easy way to begin at the begin\
-.\
. ning. Today's cosmopolitanis~ms-combine experiences of various media
with various f~ritfsof k~~erience-cinema,video, restaurants, spectator
sports, and tourism, to name just a few-that have different national and
transnational genealogies. Some of these formsmay start out as extremely
global and end up as very local-radio would be an example-while others,
such as cinema, might have the obverse trajectory. In any particular
ethnoscape (a term we might wish to substitute for earlier wholes such as
villages, communities, and localities), the genealogies of cosmopolitanism
are not likely to be the same as its histories: while the genealogies reveal
the cultural spaces within which new forms can become indigenized (for
example, as tourism comes to inhabit the space of pilgrimage in India), the
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histories of these forms may lead outward to transnational sources and
structures. Thus, the most appropriate ethnoscapes for today's world, with
its alternative, interactive modernities, should enable genealogy and history
to confront each other, thus leaving the terrain open for interpretations
of the ways in which local historical trajectories flow into complicated
transnational structures. Of course, this dialogue of histories and
genealogies itself has a history, but for this latter history we surely do not
yet possess a master narrative. For those of us who might wish to move toward
this new master narrative, whatever its form, new global ethnoscapes
must be the critical building blocks. Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1991)suggests
that the historical role of anthropology was to fill the "savageslot" in
an internal Western dialogue about utopia. A recuperated anthropology
must recognize that the genie is now out of the bottle and that speculations
about utopia are everyone's prerogative. Anthropology can surely
contribute its special purchase on lived experience to a wider, transdisciplinary
study of global cultural processes. But to do this, anthropology
must first come in from the cold and face the challenge of making a contribution
to cultural studies without the benefit of its previous principal
source of leverage-sightings of the savage.
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