Self-Interpretation, Agency, and the Objects of Anthropology: Reflections on a Genealogy

If there is anything that exemplifies a certain common style in ethnographically-oriented approaches to culture and society today, and sets them apart from other kinds of social science, it is the habit, irritating to colleagues in some other disciplines, frustrating to students, deemed perverse by potential funders, and bewildering to the public, of responding to explanations with the remark, “We need to complicate the story.” The words “reductionist” and “essentializing” are brandished with scorn. One important perspective is expressed by this remark by Jean and John Comaroff, two influential anthropologists with solid roots in longterm fieldwork, the sobriety of British social anthropology, and the toughminded realism of the Marxist tradition: ethnography “refuses to put its trust in techniques that give more scientific methods their illusory objectivity: their commitment to standardized, a priori units of analysis, for example, or their reliance on a depersonalizing gaze that separates subject from object” (1992:8). These words, offered almost in passing, take a host of important arguments as settled. One is that it is no longer in much dispute that cultural anthropology is not merely at an “immature” stage, en route to something more akin to natural science. Most significant, perhaps, is the assumption that the separation of subject from object can be understood only in negative terms, that to say that a field of knowledge “depersonalizes” is ipso facto to discredit it. Yet in their own ethnographic and historical work the Comaroffs take their empirical materials very seriously and do not wholly reject the separation of subject from object— how could they? What is at issue, rather, is what kinds of “objects” and “sub-