COMBINED REVIEW Ethnography as Commentary : Writing from the Virtual

Johannes Fabian’s contributions to anthropology are distinctive. Depending on where you start, he is an Africanist; a linguistic anthropologist; a partisan and critic of the “Writing Culture” moment in U.S. anthropology; a folklorist and student of popular culture; a historian of drug use by colonial anthropologists; a theorist of time, memory, and alterity; and now something of a hacker. Two books have been published recently that capture some of his heterogeneously distinctive work. The first, Memory against Culture, collects several recent talks and articles, including one called “Ethnography from the Virtual Archive,” which is the germ of the second book, Ethnography as Commentary. This second book is both a meditation on creating a “virtual archive” of ethnographic sources and a “late ethnography” of a popular ritual that Fabian experienced in 1974 in Zaire with a healer named Kahenga. Ethnography as Commentary is a fabulous (and short) book. It is an excellent introduction to the detailed practice of ethnographic interpretation; it is also a very thoughtprovoking meditation on the changing possibilities of the ethnographic monograph after the Internet and of the idea of ethnography as commentary. Last, it is an experiment in “late ethnography,” in which an explanation of a cultural event (Kahenga’s ritual exclusion and protection of Fabian’s house) is conducted through memory, notes, and other sources; contrasted with the practice of writing history; and used to shed light on the authority of ethnographies based in contemporary sources. The core of the experiment discussed by Fabian in Ethnography as Commentary is the creation of an online resource of materials: The Language and Popular Culture in