Gonzalez, Alejandro - Lila Abu-Lughod Review

8/12/2019 Gonzalez, Alejandro - Lila Abu-Lughod Review

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Universidad del Rosario

Estudios sociales de la cultura

Alejandro González

Anthropology after culture: an Abu-Lughod’s “Writing Against Culture” review

Lila Abu-Lughod is an American anthropologist. She currently is a professor of Anthropology,

Women‟s and Gender Studies at Columbia University in New York . The most famous topic of her work

lies in gender studies, especially in thinking the role of woman in the Arab world. Related to the text that I

will review, “Writing against Culture” (1991/2005), there is a remarkable fact related with her position as

anthropologist: she has both Palestinian and Jewish ethnical origins and also she is a feminist. “Writing

against Culture” is a chapter from Anthropology in Theory: Issues in Epistemology, a book edited by

Richard Fox, which discusses some of the methodological and epistemological issues related with

contemporary anthropological practice.

According to Abu-Lughod, the main aim of the text is inviting us “to reconsider the value on the

conce pt of culture” (1991/2005, 446) in which are implied the dichotomist notions of „selves‟ and „others‟

who have shaped the anthropological work, through the analysis of feminist and „halfies‟ (people with

mixed national or cultural identities) anthropological approaches, whose positions “unsettles the boundary

between self and other” (Ibid.). So, since the anthropological concept of culture lies on that distinction,

and whenever that distinction implies certain kinds of subjugation or hierarchy, it follows that

Anthropology must abandon the concept of culture and try to writing against it (what explains the title).

On this point is relevant to remark the halfie and feminist position in which the author is talking, as we

remarked in the paragraph above. The following review will discuss essentially three issues: the thesis

whereby the hierarchical distinction between „selves‟ and „others‟, really often in Anthropology, it may be

called into question when considering the anthropological work made by feminist and halfies position.

The idea of how the concept of culture actually maintains certain essentialism in the way of understands

difference. And finally the suggestion of how an anthropologist can escape or evade the dangerous

consequences given the concept of culture, by giving three ways of writing anthropology against culture.



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The „self/other‟ distinction is really common to the anthropological practice. We just need to see

that Anthropology “is a discipline built on the historically construc ted divide between the West and the

non-West. It has been and continues to be primarily the study of the non-Western other by the Western

self ” (1991/2005, 267; emphasis added). That asserted, Abu-Lughod proceeds to show how the feminist

and halfies work can blur or put into question that distinction. In the former, is because women are

traditionally seen as the “other”, since men as always been the „self ‟. In the latter is because the halfie is

usually in the other side of anthropological practice: they usually are considered the non-Western other. In

both cases, the distinction seems to be shifted or transformed because of their position as affirming the

otherness over the selfness in their analysis. Is because their positionality as others that anthropological

practice, seen within the distinction from the self to the other, becomes troubling.

But in the self/other distinction we must recognized the role in which culture can be the actual

tool to essentialize the difference and therefore, to affirm the hierarchical relation between the self

studying the other, and the other that is studied by the self, which is the reason to consider culture as

something to be against with. According to this, the concept of culture, although it has pretensions to

dissolve the essentialism, ends up affirming essentialism in the comprehension of difference (i.e., the

comprehension of other by call it “other” as opposed to “self”). The concept of culture tries to make an

emphasis in the true nature of difference by affirming “homogeneity, coherence, and timelessness”

(1991/2005, 476) to those “different” cultures, but none of these characteristics are necessary conditions

for the knowledge of cultures but rather contingent or historically positioned. In other words the concept

of culture, whenever implies an essentialized version of difference, is equally dangerous to the kind of

essentialism that, in principle, the concepts wants to avoid.

And because of the danger that is implicit in every attempt for essentialize the difference, in

which every social community it has been seen as a separated, coherent and homogenized group, is that

the inviting of writing against culture makes sense for Anthropology. Indeed, the author wants to save

Anthropology of what we could consider a conceptual attack to culture. In order to do so, the author

suggest three possible ways in which Anthropology could survive once we have to get rid of the concept



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of culture: the first one is theoretical, the second one is substantive and the final one is textual. The

theoretical solution lies in replacing culture for „practice‟ or „discourse‟ and she sees already in Bourdieu

and Foucault (cf. 1991/2005, 472) some of the theoretical advances for this suggestion, respectively

(Bourdeu for „practice‟ and Foucault for „discourse‟). One reason why „practice‟ and „discourse‟ may

replace culture is that “they were intended to enable us to analyze social life without presuming the degree

of coherence that the culture concept has come to carry” (Ibid.) The substantive solution are related with

getting to the connections and interactions between the communities and the anthropologists who studies

them (blurring the distinction self/other), locating the specific contexts and historical positionality. The

textual solution recognized the writing-focused exercise that anthropologist made (the ethnographic

narrative), so it suggest “ethnographies of the particular ” (Ibid, 473) as opposed to traditional-generalizing

ethnography. Ethnographies of the particular aims to claim in a non-general, non-homogeneous, non-

timelessness terms the experience of particular individuals or groups, exploring the daily relationships,

connections, contradictions and, in sum, the daily variances of human-concrete life.

Is relatively easy to sense if the Abu-Lughod‟s account says something relevant to Anthropology

and moreover if it says something for Western thought as well. Her rejection to culture it seems to have

methodological and conceptual levels, and each of them presents challenges to Anthropology as the

science of “other” as well to the way in which Westerns societies have viewed themselves.

Simultaneously, the hierarchical relations between the „self‟ and the „other‟ presents not only political

problems of subjugation but rather epistemological ones that can rise the question whether all this is a

problem of conceptual distinctions that can be simply modified or nay a problem related with the merely

possibility of making science (i.e., the producing of truths), of producing knowledge of others ways of life

or, more deeply, the problem related with the Western insistence in knowing everything of his neighbor

(insistence that has gone beyond the limits of the Western, given the subaltern anthropology cases).

References

Abu-Lughod, L. (1991/2005). Writing Against Culture. In Moore & Sanders (eds.), Anthropology in

Theory: Issues in Epistemology (pp. 466 – 479). Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Gonzalez, Alejandro - Lila Abu-Lughod Review

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