Legacies of Derrida -- On the Gift - Annual Review

ANRV323-AN36-20 ARI 13 August 2007 18:40

Legacies of Derrida:AnthropologyRosalind C. MorrisDepartment of Anthropology, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027;email: [email protected]

Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2007. 36:355–89

The Annual Review of Anthropology is online atanthro.annualreviews.org

This article’s doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.36.081406.094357

Copyright c© 2007 by Annual Reviews.All rights reserved

0084-6570/07/1021-0355$20.00

Key Words

deconstruction, poststructuralism, language, writing, differance, gift

AbstractThis article considers the legacies of Jacques Derrida in and forAnglo-American sociocultural anthropology. It begins with a surveyof Derrida’s own engagement with themes that have historically beenfoundational to the field: (a) the critique of sign theory and, with it,the questions of language and law in Levi-Straussian structuralism;(b) the question of the unconscious; (c) the critique of the performa-tive and its consequences for the idea of ritual; (d ) the rereading ofMarcel Mauss’s concept of the gift, and of economy more generally;and (e) the analysis of the metaphysical basis of law, in both religiousand ostensibly secular formations. It then considers the state of thefield at the time when it was being infused with different forms ofpoststructuralism and explores the competing claims made by thesediscourses in relation to deconstruction. Finally, after tracing theconvergences and divergences between Derridean deconstructionand theory in sociocultural anthropology, it treats two main exam-ples of works produced against and under the influence of Derrida’sthought, respectively.

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INTRODUCTION

The first essay Jacques Derrida delivered inthe United States, “Structure, Sign, and Playin the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” of-fered a critique of Claude Levi-Strauss’s the-ory of language and undertook a radical re-thinking of the opposition between nature andculture in structuralist ethnology (Macksey& Donato 1970, Powell 2006). Derrida hadalready published “Force and Signification”(1978b [1963]), which denounced, by wayof a footnote, Alfred Kroeber’s (1948) den-igration of “structure” as a merely fashion-able term in social theory (Derrida 1978b,p. 301). He had invoked both Marcel Maussand Maurice Leinhardt as well. From the start,then, Derrida’s work solicited anthropology,despite being articulated from within philoso-phy. What are the legacies of that solicitation?And what shall they yet become?

BEGINNING WITH WRITINGAND THE ENDS OF MAN

Of Grammatology was published in 1967, al-though an essay by that name had appearedin 1965. It commenced by remarking the“ethnocentrism which, everywhere and always,ha[s] controlled the concept of writing” andby promising an analysis of “the declaredRousseauism of a modern anthropologist,”namely Levi-Strauss. Of Grammatology tra-versed hallowed ground for anthropology,taking on the topics that have been consti-tutive of the discipline since its inception: therelationship between nature and culture, theorigin of language, the relationship betweenlanguage and law, the incest taboo, the emer-gence of script, the question of history andmemory in societies with and without script,and the problem of ethnocentrism.

Initially, however, the call to anthropologywent largely ignored. This was in no smallpart because the critique proffered by Derridawas concerned less with the question of howto reform the discipline (about which he hadnothing to say) than with whether it could ever

be extricated from the metaphysics on whichits residual humanism was founded. His 1972(1982b) essay, “The Ends of Man,” was partic-ularly important in this regard. In the attemptsby Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger to breakwith the Western tradition of metaphysics—through the displacement of the concept ofman by that of consciousness (Hegel); by sup-planting the idea of rational humanity withthat of transcendental humanity (Husserl);or by rejecting the “metaphysical we-men”in favor of the proximity to essential being(Heidegger)—Derrida finds the repeated sub-lation of an old concept (Zaner 1972, p. 385).This concept, Man, is an a priori one, nei-ther empirically observable nor logically de-ducible. Hence, its continued invocation inand by philosophy and anthropology needsexplanation. Almost as much as his generaldisavowal of metaphysics (and his infamouslydifficult style), it was Derrida’s rejection ofHusserl’s attempt to replace an “empiricalanthropology” with a phenomenological in-terrogation of the world as consciously in-tended that seemed to foreclose a broader dis-ciplinary engagement of his thought in andby anthropology. These two epistemologicalcommitments, empiricism and phenomenol-ogy, have been central if not foundational tothe methodology of fieldwork, even when nottheorized as such.

If anthropologists are now comfortablewith the idea that their object of study isnot unitary, if they increasingly conceive ofthe discipline as an investigation of partic-ular social formations at particular histori-cal junctures, in relation to both their ownanteriority and the extralocal processes bywhich they are brought into relation withothers, the discipline has not yet done andperhaps cannot ever do without the ideaof the human as the basis of its compar-itavism. For this reason, one may have toadmit that there is no properly Derrideananthropology, and even that Derrida dis-avowed anthropology per se (although thiswould have to be tempered by the recogni-tion that he not only read and affirmed some

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of the insights of anthropologists, but alsoengaged with them in his seminars in Parisand in conferences (see, for example, de Vries& Weber 2001). However, this statement doesnot mean that no anthropologists exist whosework has not been shaped by their reading ofDerrida or that Derrida’s scholarship has notmade any significant impact on the field. Thepurpose of this article is to trace the trajectoryof Derrida’s influence and to understand how,when, and against what resistances his thoughtprovoked new kinds of questions and newkinds of analyses within the discipline. My fo-cus here is on the North American, English-speaking academy. Different stories couldbe told of Derrida’s impact in England orGermany, where, in fact, he has had far less in-fluence, or in Quebec, where the relationshipto French philosophy is not dependent on themarket decisions affecting translation. Therelative lack of reference to Derrida in Frenchanthropological circles has already been re-marked, if not deeply analyzed (Marcus 1999,p. 421). However, those stories await anothernarrator and a different set of references. Andgiven these parameters, it should be clear thatthe present reading of Derrida’s legacies foranthropology is a reading of his thought’smovement into English, and hence one mustconsider it against the backdrop of the prob-lem of translation, a problem at once linguis-tic, economic, and temporal, insofar as trans-lation and more specifically publications oftranslations take time.

Tedlock (1980) undertook one of the firstsignificant assessments of Derrida’s thoughtfor a major American anthropological venuein a multi-book review covering, in additionto Of Grammatology, works by Culler (1977),Hawkes (1977), Sebeok (1977), and Sperber(1975). Tedlock understands Derrida, whomhe describes “as a sort of theological coun-terpart to Marx” (Tedlock 1980, p. 827), tobe proposing a reversal of the received con-ception of language in which speech occupiesa temporally and metaphysically prior statusvis-a-vis writing. It is a flawed but not un-common misreading of Derrida’s argument.

Derrida does not simply reverse the orderof the speech/writing binary; he describesthe process by which that very differentiationemerges, and he gives to the more encom-passing category within which the oppositionbetween script and speech arises the name of“arche-writing.”

Like many, Tedlock finds confusing thedistinction between writing in the narrowsense (of script) and writing in the broadersense adumbrated by Derrida, where it in-cludes all processes of trace-formation, de-ferral, and delay, the crossing of presencewith absence, etc. This confusion leads himto an ironic affirmation of Derrida’s relevancefor anthropology in the battling of what heperceives to be the linguists’ error, namelythe reduction of spoken language to notation(Tedlock 1980, p. 828). In the end, Tedlockconcludes by rejecting Derrida’s concept ofwriting in favor of a vocality to which he at-tributes the capacities and qualities of natural-ness, spontaneity, and plenitude. He therebyaffirms everything that Derrida questions.

Cultural anthropology in the Anglo-American context has since undergone enor-mous transformations, becoming both moreaccommodating, in some areas, and more hos-tile, in others, to Derrida’s writings. This splitis itself the mark of an irrevocable change, onewhich may be construed, in both of its dimen-sions, as being part of Derrida’s legacy in andfor what may well be the last of the “human”sciences (Bruner 1986). To understand thislegacy requires both an account of his majortheoretical interventions and a survey of thediscursive space within which they were made.The latter requires that one consider the com-peting forms of poststructuralism, as well asthe critiques to which they were subject, andthe anthropological work that was ultimatelyinspired by deconstructionism. Space limita-tions demand brevity. Therefore, what followshere is a provisional schematization of thosestrands of deconstructionist thought that havebeen particularly significant for the field of an-thropology. They are (a) the critique of signtheory and, with it, the questions of language

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and law in Levi-Straussian structuralism;(b) the question of the unconscious; (c) thecritique of the performative and its conse-quences for the idea of ritual; (d ) the rereadingof Marcel Mauss’s concept of the gift, and ofeconomy more generally; and (e) the analy-sis of the metaphysical basis of law, in bothreligious and ostensibly secular formations.I begin with the analysis of anthropologicalstructuralism.

LEVI-STRAUSS, LANGUAGE,AND THE LAW OF CULTURE

Like his predecessor, Levy-Bruhl (1923[1922]), Levi-Strauss posits a categorical op-position between cultures with and without“writing,” and hence, with and without his-tory. Writing is, for him, associated with vio-lence, forgetting, and political hierarchy. It isthe instrument of colonization and the meansfor disseminating an economic logic whosemost salient characteristics are its abstractionof value, its simultaneous devaluation of util-ity, and its tendency to waste. The moral ap-peal of such an ostensibly antiethnocentricmodel masks, says Derrida, a profound eth-nocentrism built on metaphysical presupposi-tions (1976, p. 114). Although acknowledgingthe violence of writing, Derrida nonethelessquestions the conceptual basis on which thestructuralist bifurcation of the world rests(p. 106). This leads him to interrogatethe Saussurian model on which Levi-Straussdraws.

Saussure refers to writing as a secondarydevelopment, a reproduction of speech. In thisanalysis, writing is alienated from an originallyspontaneous and immediate communication,but it compensates for this loss with perma-nence and a capacity for abstraction. Saussureunderstands writing to be a historical develop-ment; thus, language for him is independentof writing. However, as Derrida notes, writ-ing provides the model for his analysis of lan-guage. Derrida (1976, p. 43) then claims to re-veal what Saussure “saw without seeing”: thatspeech implies writing. In what sense? Saus-

sure defines the sign as a unity of two dimen-sions: the sensible sound-image (signifier) andthe intelligible concept (signified). It is unmo-tivated and acquires its meaning only throughdifferential relations with all other signs. But,Derrida reminds us, this is not because thereis a substantive difference between them; thesigns themselves are comprised of two ele-ments, signifiers and signifieds, both of whichare produced through differential relations. Inother words, claims Derrida, language is rivenby absence or alterity (Spivak 1976, p. xxxix).It is comprised not of figures or reproduc-tions of an absent presence, but of traces—a notion he derives largely from Freud (seebelow). There is no original presence fromwhich other signs have been differentiated.Or, at least, one cannot posit such an orig-inary presence without making a metaphysi-cal move—something that the human sciences(however qualitatively oriented) had claimedto have disavowed.

Derrida’s notion of writing as that whichconditions the possibility of speech is linkedto a recognition that the discernment of signs,especially words, presumes the perception ofspaces or intervals, such that one word can beseparated out from another upon hearing andreading (Derrida 1976, p. 39). The foreign-ness of a language, one recalls, is experiencedas the incapacity to differentiate words fromthe stream of sound that greets the ear. Insofaras the discernment of the interval is a “spac-ing,” there is a graphic or graphematic ele-ment even in spoken language. To recognizethese graphic elements, however, they must beconceptualized through opposition to othersuch elements, and hence through gesturesthat entail abstraction as well as iteration.Both of these gestures converge in the practiceof citation, by which a word or mark is quoted,and thereby taken out of context. In LimitedInc. (Derrida 1995c) such “decontextualiza-tion” is read as the possibility that haunts ev-ery performative utterance, and indeed everyillocutionary act. As such, it forms the basis ofDerrida’s critique of both Austin’s and Searle’slanguage theories. Austin’s (1975 [1962])

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understanding of the performative (that state-ment which calls into being what it names)excludes citation as something abnormal andthreatening to the ideal situation in whichthe performative would otherwise exercise itsforce; it is this exclusion and redesignationof a structuring possibility as mere exceptionthat Derrida interrogates and that he readsin ethico-political terms as the secret groundof normativization in speech act theory, andmuch political ritual as well.

Derrida designates the spacing and nec-essary amenability to (de)contextualizationin language with the neologism “differance.”The term is intended to invoke the sensesof deferral and differing, as well as that ofdetour (Derrida 1982a, Spivak 1976). It is aprocess without end. As he repeatedly insists,the totality that the structuralists hypothesizeto provisionally fix the meaning of terms(whether myths or signs) can never be actu-alized except by imagining oneself to havearrived on the other side of time and history(Derrida 1978d, pp. 289–91; 1982b). But theprocesses of differing and deferral extend in-finitely. The spacing is also a “temporization.”

This argument about the differance oflanguage is at best tangential to a consid-eration of the empirical development of(narrowly conceived) writing forms, whetherhieroglyphic, ideographic, or alphabetic, tosay nothing of their possible relationship todifferent kinds of social organization. Indeed,Derrida (1976, p. 78) himself acknowledgesthat his analysis may have to be repressedfor positive science to develop, and he cites,approvingly, the anthropological research onprealphabetic scripts. Some anthropologistshave arrived, quite independently and withoutany reference to Derrida, at the conclusionthat, contra Walter Ong (1958, 1982) andJack Goody (1977), there is no necessaryrelationship between the development offorms of script and conceptual abstraction(Swearingen 1986, p. 153). If one rejects thecategorical opposition between speech andwriting as an opposition between immediacyand abstraction, however, one must also reject

the bifurcation of humanity into the literateand the unlettered, the historical and the ahis-torical. Again, Derrida’s logico-philosophicalapproach finds support in the research ofhistorical linguistic anthropologists such asSwearingen, who, on very different, empiricalgrounds, notes the extremely heterogeneousdistribution of knowledge of scripts evenwithin supposedly literate societies and who,on this basis, rejects the efforts to classifysocieties as literate or oral (1986). This kindof historicism nonetheless stops short ofthe more radical claim made by Derrida,especially in relation to Levi-Strauss, namelythat nonscriptural forms of social phenomenaalso partake of the structure of writing.

What, then, does it mean to say that aseemingly oral culture “has” writing? Thisquestion seems newly relevant, as a popularaudience emerges to embrace Everett’s (2005)claim that the Piraha of northwestern Brazilspeak a language (of the Muran language fam-ily) defined by near total immediacy: a lan-guage that lacks numbers, abstract terms ofquantity, colors, and the perfect tense—aswell as the capacity for writing. Everett be-lieves that the grammar of the Piraha notonly lacks but is incapable of supporting long-term memory and historical consciousness,or any imaginative aesthetic (Colapinto 2007,Everett 2005, Stranlaw 2006). His claims areuncannily reminiscent of those made by Levi-Strauss about the Nambikwara and will beaddressed further below. Here, I want toconsider Derrida’s analysis of Levi-Strauss’saccount of the Nabikwara in the “WritingLesson” of Tristes Tropiques to make clear whatis at stake in Derrida’s claim that orality doesnot lack the qualities generally reserved forconventionally understood writing systems.

Reading Levi-Strauss to excavate what hasbeen repressed within his discourse, Derridanotes that the Nambikwara prohibit the useof proper names, thereby inscribing the ideaof the proper name within classificatory lan-guage (one cannot prohibit anything exceptthrough the application of a general rule).They express much concern over genealogy


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and possess an elaborate mneumotechnics bywhich to recall their pasts. Insofar as an anx-iety over genealogy (and thus property) hastypically been associated with the historicaldevelopment of writing in the narrow sense(Derrida 1976, p. 124), Derrida wonders inwhat sense Levi-Strauss can claim that theNambikwara have no writing. They evenhave a name for writing, and they recognizethe power that accrues to one who possessesit. Within their own world, they mark outtheir landscape with paths and signs, whichthey can refer to (or quote) in narratives ofdaily activity.

These contradictions to the idea of writ-ing’s absence lead Derrida to argue that wemust think of the development of writing inthe colloquial sense (of script) not as a depar-ture from a prior orality, but in relation toother forms of iterability within the history ofwriting, understood now in its most capacioussense. The incest taboo, which Levi-Straussand so many anthropologists correlate withhuman existence, demonstrates this logic; itworks by prohibition (which is to say the appli-cation of a general rule), and hence by classi-fication, and by both conceiving and demand-ing substitution (of one object of desire foranother). Indeed, the incest taboo becomesone among many names for language here.And as with all law, it is inseparable from vio-lence. So Derrida refuses the romanticism thatwould efface the violence of the Nambikwara’sworld, especially violence between men andwomen.

Derrida is unconcerned about how onemight retell the story of the Nambikwaramore adequately, but anthropologists might,and indeed must, ask what such a critique de-mands. Many anthropologists have, of course,attempted to describe the mute texts of pu-tatively oral cultures, in the diverse idiomsof symbolic landscape (Munn 1973, Stewart& Strathern 2003), the “hidden transcripts”of everyday practice (Scott 1990), the “struc-turing structures” of domestic architecture(Bourdieu 1977), etc. But these acknowledg-ments of a “literacy” that exceeds the ques-

tion of alphabetic or scriptural competenceare often still saturated with the belief thatthose populations without writing possess anauthenticity and a proximity to nature (an im-mediacy) that mark their historical priorityand their vulnerability to corruption. If ex-ceptions exist to this implicit teleology, suchas Pierre Clastres’s Chronicle of the GuayakiIndians (1998 [1972]), which argues that theGuayaki are not primordially innocent of civ-ilization but have lost agriculture (and seden-tary life), they are rare—and Clastres himselfultimately returned to the romanticism of acertain primitivist anarchism (Clastres 1987[1974], 1994 [1980]; Lefort 2000 [1987]).

TRACE AND ITERATION:A CRITIQUE OF THECONCEPTS OF CULTURE ANDRITUAL AS REPRODUCTION

Having considered in such detail the par-ticular readings to which Derrida submit-ted Levi-Strauss’s work, it is now possible tomove more briskly to other strands of histhought. These remain continuous with theanalyses of the early works, although they addnew terms and objects, deepening or clar-ifying aspects of the argument about writ-ing. Among the most significant for anthro-pology is Derrida’s development of Freud’sconcept of the unconscious. Given the ill re-pute in which Freudian thought is generallyheld in anthropology—usually on the groundsthat the Oedipal formation is a historicizableand culturally relative structure for conceiv-ing filiation and sexual difference—this aspectof Derrida’s thought was perhaps doomed toresistance.

Ortner (2006) sums up the anxiety aboutthe unconscious as an anxiety about the po-litical. She calls, instead, for a recognition ofthe intentionality, subjectivity, and agency ofindividual actors, lest one efface the politicalcapacities of individuals, who “[try to] act onthe world even as they are acted upon” (p.110). This is not the place to examine theconcepts of subjectivity and agency posited

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by Ortner, or these concepts’ affinity with thediscourses of possessive individualism. But wecannot overlook the degree to which this neo-humanism functions as an alibi under whichto conflate very different concepts of the un-conscious: that of Levi-Strauss, for whom theunconscious is composed of universal forms ofthought, and that of Freud, for whom the un-conscious provides the structure in which in-dividuation can occur, but which ensures thatthe individual psyche is always split and over-flowing of its boundaries.

Freud treats the psyche as an always par-ticular structure of mediation within whichexposures to the phenomenal world preciselyescape immediate reflection (and hence “ex-perience”), passing both by and through con-sciousness to a domain where they constitutea reserve. The detour and the delay that afflictthe psyche is, in Freud’s analysis, a mechanismfor deferring what would otherwise endangerit (Freud 1955 [1920]; Derrida 1982a, p. 18l;1978c, p. 201). The “resurfacing” of the tracesproduced in this process, often in response toother stimuli and trace formations, is that onwhich consciousness reflects. Memory is thusthe effect of a resistance, but it is also an open-ing to those events or stimulations that mightotherwise harm the psyche. Derrida speaks ofthis process in the idiom of the trace, whichis the function of a “breaching,” stating that itis the differential between the various breach-ings that produces memory (1978c, p. 203).Here, Derrida emphasizes the quality of de-ferral and reserve in a manner that foreclosesthe possibility of simple or transparent recall.It is an analysis that demands a rethinking ofall those discourses and institutions ostensi-bly dedicated to memory: the museum, thearchive, and indeed, any movement devotedto the reclamation of genealogical relation(Derrida 1995a).

An understanding of memory as differanceand as trace constitutes a major challenge toany concept of culture that presumes it iseither a repository of collective memory orthe unconscious structure that determines orenables—on the analogy of script and en-

actment, score and performance—individualor even collective actions and possibilities.Anthropologists who have worked on ques-tions of recovered memory as a collective phe-nomenon associated with accusations of childabuse or with alien abduction, for example,have had to confront the question of memory’slack of transparency to an original event, and itis not incidental that a certain Derridean read-ing of Freud makes its appearance in thosetexts as much as in any others (e.g., Battaglia2005; Lepselter 1997, 2005). But the vast cot-tage industry on collective memory, partic-ularly in periods of political normalizationor transitions out of totalitarianism—manyinfluenced by Maurice Halbwachs’s Collec-tive Memory (1950)—might well benefit fromDerrida’s insights. Too often the problem ofanalysis in these works is imagined as that ofrecovery: of lost artifacts, deceased witnesses,or corrupted testimonies. When faced withincoherence or discontinuity in the record orthe recall of otherwise interrupted histories,this kind of approach often leads one to hy-pothesize either dissimulation or ignorance(whether as trauma or as ideological mystifi-cation), both of which may be sustained withinsocial constructivist accounts of “invented tra-ditions” (Hobsbawm & Ranger 1982). Ironi-cally, given their subject matter, these modelsshare an implicit concept of at least collectiveintentionality. What is represented as a distur-bance of historical consciousness produced byeconomic hardship or political violence, forexample, is then conceived as a blockage ofwhat would otherwise have been the contin-uous production and reproduction of mean-ingful worlds.

However, if culture cannot be construed asa repository of collective memory, it cannot beconceived as that which is merely reproducedthrough the performative logic of ritual either.At least this is the implication of Derrida’s dis-course on the performative, from “SignatureEvent Context” (1995d [1972]) forward. Inthis essay, Derrida asserts the simultaneousiterability of all cultural marks and the irre-ducibility of such iterations to a question of


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reproduction (of repetition without differ-ence). This much has already been noted,but the implications of this analysis for thequestion of intentionality, and hence forthose kinds of culturalism oriented by theidea of agency, have not yet been plumbed.They emerge most clearly in Derrida’s de-bate with the Austinian theorists of illo-cution, and especially Searle (1977; alsoFelman 1983; Norris 1987, pp. 172–93;Spivak 1980).

Derrida begins by questioning the conceptof written communication as that which trans-mits meaning between senders and receivers.If we begin with the assumption, which Austinand Searle both acknowledge and Derrida em-phasizes, that such communication can takeplace in the absence of the receiver (who maybe physically distant, or not even yet born) butalso the sender, we are left with the impres-sion that writing takes place only when it isassumed that such an absence is not only pos-sible but likely or even inevitable. Otherwise,why write? Of course, one writes to oneself aswell—and Searle adduces the grocery list asan example of such writing to oneself, using itto claim that writing is not determined by ab-sence, and indeed that it is contained in and bythe self-presence of the sender, whose inten-tions determine the fact of communication.Although he gives up the idea that proxim-ity obviates the need for writing, Searle over-looks the conditioning possibilities for com-municating at all. Derrida remarks that thevery fact of communication between persons,even those seated next to each other, implies adistance and difference between them. Theyare not fully self-present. The same can besaid in the situation hypothesized by Searle,namely of writing a grocery list for oneself.To speak to oneself, in whatever form, is toexpress the fact that the individual psyche isitself internally divided. Lest this be thoughtof as a mode of psychosis, one should note, asSpivak does (1980, p. 32), that Derrida treatsthis fact not as the grounds for nihilism but as arecognition that lack of self-presence is whatenables communication and hence sociality.

It is a positive fact, a necessary condition ofbeing-with-others.

As for intention, Derrida holds onto theconcept while rethinking it as the expressionof a desire (a structural fact realized in indi-viduals) for a communicative relationship inwhich meanings would indeed be received andinterpreted as their senders intended them tobe (Spivak 1980, p. 30). This notion seems,initially, to bear some similarity to Habermas’s(1981) concept of the ideal speech situation,but a conscious ideal (of shared meanings) isnot the same as an unconscious desire, and inthe difference between these concepts a verydifferent kind of analytic emerges. If inten-tionality is the expression of a desire for thatwhich cannot be assumed, then we have thebasis of an anthropology of “positive” or “pro-ductive” misunderstanding as much as an an-thropology of shared meanings. One particu-larly potent example of this comes in Siegel’sThe Rope of God (2000), where he describes theconflicting and simultaneous intentions of fe-male and male speakers in a situation (Atjehafter the collapse of the pepper economy)where domestic relations are sustained by mis-translation: Women offer men what they un-derstand as indulgence, whereas men believethemselves to be receiving deferral.

This is a different kind of “failure” thanthat which Derrida asserts is the universalsusceptibility of all speech acts conceived intheir illocutionary dimension (as acts con-ceived in terms of their effect on the worldrather than their semantic content), but it isnot unrelated to it. Siegel’s point is that theeffectivity of the communication is partly in-dependent of meaning, and it may rely pre-cisely on the existence of a gap between in-tended and received meaning. The conceptof the performative comes apart under suchscrutiny, and the implications are nowheremore profound than in the analysis of thatanthropological fetish, ritual—and especiallythat category of ritual that accords a cen-tral place to spells and speech acts aimed atthe transformation of the world through pro-cesses of authorized naming. The examples

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of the performative most familiar to anthro-pologists are undoubtedly those associatedwith life-cycle rituals: events in which theidentity or status of a person is publicly re-designated (birth, initiation, marriage, anddeath). Insofar as these rituals were conceived,in classical anthropology, as the instrumen-tation for the production and reproductionof social structure, and insofar as they workby dissociating individual persons from moreperduring structures (permitting both indi-vidual transformation and social continuity),Derrida’s analysis bears serious consideration.

This is especially true when we extend thecategory of ritual beyond rites de passage, asvan Gennep (1960 [1909]) termed them andTurner (1969) analyzed them, to include allthose gestures treated under the heading of“the everyday”: habitual forms that “encum-ber” subjects and rise to consciousness onlyin the moment that they are neglected, vi-olated, or formally altered (Bourdieu 1977).This kind of reiteration or habit is often pre-sumed to constitute the ground of culturalcontinuity. Turner, of course, saw the space ofritual as the possible locus for generating newcombinatory logics and thus unprecedentedmeanings within the symbolic field, but suchinvention was itself exceptional in his anal-ysis and was most likely to emerge from thestaged space of ritual death. Moreover, the in-novation is often rendered, in his reading, likethe failure of the quotation in Austin’s anal-ysis: as the exception whose exclusion fromthe normative ideal of the ritual, or the per-formative, is necessary for the ritual (as so-cial reproduction) to operate “felicitously.” Atbest, we can perhaps say that there is an intu-ition in Turner’s work that, despite its contain-ment within a structural-functional paradigm,is available for a rereading such as Derrida per-forms on Levi-Strauss. It is the intuition thatritual, like all language, overflows itself and issubject to that most absolute of events, death,from which it attempts to derive its powerand over which it attempts, with even greatereffort, to exercise a containing mastery—themastery of metaphor (Derrida 2005, p. 152).

Turner’s sense of ritual’s exceptionality,broadly shared in anthropology, containswithin itself the contradiction that Derridadiscerns in Austin’s theory. It rests on an actof decontextualization, which also, and simul-taneously, provides the context within whichthe event can be read as ritual per se. If theboundary between event and context is un-derstood as an undecidable one, however, thenthe boundedness of ritual must also be ques-tioned. This does not mean that people donot perceive these events as exceptional—theycertainly do. But instead of assuming that thisexceptionality is an internal attribute of rit-ual, one can then pose the question of howand by which operations the appearance of aboundary is produced, as well as how and un-der which circumstances the event rises to thelevel of “ritual.” This is not merely a ques-tion of delineating the gestures that separateoff one day or act from the others, but of ask-ing how the thematization of such gesturesas ritual makes them available to legitimatelocal power, or to subject them to colonialrepression, for example. An anthropologicalinvestigation of this process, understood viaDerrida, would ask how a variety of differ-ent acts can be classified as being of the type,“ritual,” when, at other times and in othercircumstances, they would be innocuous ordifferently named. Pemberton (1994) has, forexample, deftly read the history of ritual dis-course in Indonesian and especially Javanesepolitics as a process of classifying a wide vari-ety of practices that, when signified as ritual,can become the basis for mystifying powerand sublating it in the idea of culture. Heshows that the designation of particular eventsas rites and of rites as ritual is not an inno-cent terminological practice but one redolentwith the interests of dominant classes, and hemakes clear that the linking of ritual with cul-ture works to efface such interests in the ideaof order.

The second corollary of this erasure ofthe boundary between event and context isthat the intended effects of the ritual cannever be understood as achieving completion.


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The ritual, always dependent on the contextfrom which it is separated out, is in fact in-sufficient to produce what it names. Such areading of ritual has, perhaps, been most ef-fectively extended into the domain of gen-der studies, where it has led to a recognitionthat the effect of rites of gender assignmentor marriage, for example, is less the accom-plishment of a new categorical status thanthe demand that individuals continually reit-erate the forms within which that status wouldbe socially legible (Butler 1993; Morris 1995,2006). What Butler terms “stylized repeti-tions” (she does not use the Derridean lexi-con in her earlier work, but relies mainly onFoucault and Althusser) can be understood interms of the always deferred nature of writing(in its broader sense). On this basis, some au-thors have seen in such rites an opportunityfor liberation from social norms. However, itis not enough to say that failure is as mucha possibility as is felicitous performance, andhence that ritual is an occasion from whichto disavow the ideal (Kulik 2000). Every iter-ation must, by definition, fail to achieve thefictive ideal of the performative.

In the end, the question of iterability—rather than reproduction withoutdifference—entails an absolutely radical chal-lenge for anthropology. The culture concepthas never not been tied, at least provisionally,to the idea of social reproduction—throughchild-rearing practices, formal institutionsof education, life-cycle rituals, architecturalform, mythologization, political ritual, etc.As Derrida himself remarks, in one of hislast books, Rogues (2005 [2003]), the rhetoricof reproduction is acquiring new force inthe age of genetic engineering and cloning.These technologies often express the fantasyof absolute repetition. Derrida’s call for aninterrogation of every desire for reproductionwithout difference seems especially salutary,given that this logic is not confined to therealm of biotechnology but extends intothe political as well—as, for example, whenthe mimicry of Western political forms isdemanded as the condition of receiving

foreign aid. The implications of this doubletechnology—of both biological and cultural(as well as national-cultural) self-extension—ultimately entail the exclusion of difference.And it is not surprising that much of theimpetus for developing genomic technologiescomes from social, religious, and politicalprojects that aim to map racial identities intime, in terms of descent from a putativelypure origin that they seek to preserve orrestore (see Abu El-Haj 2007).

But the drive to reproduction has enor-mous force in the lives of individuals and com-munities. What is this force that drives thedrive to reproduction, even if mere reproduc-tion would mean death? With Derrida, we canhold on to Freud’s observation that it is thefailure of pure reproduction that ensures cul-tural life. To think the structure of this strangedeath-dealing but also life-giving circle is tothink the gift.

THE GIFT AND THEGHOSTWRITING OF CAPITAL

Nowhere is Derrida’s work more dependenton the contributions of anthropology than inhis theorization of the gift. In its most distilledform, the gift is the figure of the impossiblefor Derrida (1992, p. 7), an impossibility as-sociated with the tautological nature of econ-omy in general. Drawing on Greek etymol-ogy, Derrida asserts that the word “economy”implies both the value of home and the obli-gation to distribute, circulate, and exchange(1992, p. 6). These are attributes of econ-omy in its most general sense, including theostensible (and seemingly oxymoronic) gifteconomies described by Mauss. For Mauss,of course, the gift is a figure of totality (Mauss1969 [1925], pp. 1, 3). Moreover, this total-ity transcends the division of society into thespheres of economy, polity, and religion (seealso Sahlins 1976). Gifts are that which mustbe given and circulated, but whose movementdoes not constitute an alienation for the giver(something of the person remains in and of thegift, says Mauss). They must also be returned,

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but in a manner that prohibits the appear-ance of their simply being rejected. Hence, the“return” must also make visible a difference;instantaneity and perfect commensuration areprohibited by it. Time, as Derrida remarks inall his writings on the topic, is an irreducibleelement of the gift.

Mauss himself speculates that the gift isthe origin of contractual relations and themeans by which communities terminate war-fare (Mauss 1969 [1925], p. 80). His argumenthas been applied to capitalism as well, and in-deed it expresses something of the ideologyof liberalism. Whether this explains the re-turn to Mauss and the proliferation of stud-ies of the gift (of which Derrida’s readingmust be counted as one) during the 1980sand afterward (e.g., Appadurai 1986; Godelier1999 [1996]; Humphrey & Hugh-Jones 1992;Munn 1986; Strathern 1988; Weiner 1976,1992), as Janet Roitman (2003, pp. 212–13)remarks, remains to be analyzed. In mostof these writings, “the productivity of debt[is] . . . understood in terms of a primary re-lation that puts debtor-creditor relations atthe very base of social relations” (Roitman2003, p. 212). They take off from Mauss’s ob-servation that sovereignty exists only whenthe gift (and debt) is refused (Mauss 1969,p. 71). Mauss’s own analysis leads him toposit sovereignty as an interruption of social-ity, then, not that from which the gift extractspeople by substituting exchange relations forwarfare. In other words, one is always alreadyin debt—which is to say, in need of the social.

Derrida takes Mauss at his word and goesfurther to emphasize the contradictions inher-ent in “the gift,” as a figure, and not merely ingift-giving as a sociological fact at odds with itsown ideology. Rereading Levi-Strauss’s anal-ysis of Mauss, he observes how the resolutionof these contradictions is invariably achievedin structuralist anthropology by invoking in-digenous terms and concepts for a mysteriousforce within the thing (Derrida 1992 [1991],p. 77), most famously the hau of the Maori.These lexical units supplement (in Derrida’ssense) the ambivalence of the Indo-European

words for the gift, which often imply both giv-ing and receiving (Derrida 1992, p. 79; Mauss1969). In place of this transcendental signifier,which always remains untranslated, Derridaspeaks of the impossible and, in the relatedwork, The Gift of Death (1995b [1992]), de-fines the gift as that which cannot be recog-nized without being annulled. It is the secretrather than the metaphysical origin of social-ity (1995b, pp. 29–30). The secret, it mustbe noted, is not the secreted thing but thefabricated discourse of a withholding, behindwhich there may be absence or presence.

Undoubtedly, the analysis of the gift hasbeen the most congenial of all Derrida’swritings for anthropologists, appearing, inso many ways, as an exculpation rather thana critique of Mauss, especially in relation toLevi-Strauss’s reading. Maurer attributes theappeal of Derrida in economic anthropologyto the fact that the problem of money is,invariably, a problem of representation,“revolv[ing] around questions of identity,trust, and faith in the stability of that whichis evident to the senses, . . . [but] backed bynothing at all (Maurer 2006, p. 28; also 2005,pp. 157–58). The Platonic problem of sensi-bility versus intelligibility returns here, and itis largely in these terms that Derrida’s revisionof Marx has also been read. In Specters of Marx(1994 [1993]), Derrida brings to the foreMarx’s analysis of the value form as a spec-tralized and spectralizing entity, one basedon abstraction and the temporary effacementor suspension of the sensuously perceptibledifference in material actuality. This abstrac-tion is premised on an anticipation of use anda simultaneous deferral of consumption—consumption being the end point of theexchange relation and of abstraction itself(Derrida 1994, pp. 148–63). Exchange bothpresumes a social relation and seems indis-pensable for the production of that relation.Thus, in an analysis that is as Kantian (or evenAristotelian) as it is Marxian, he emphasizesthe logical priority of the category of value,vis-a-vis the empirical determination of eitheruse or exchange value (see also Keenan 1997).


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The object of the analysis in Spectersis, first, money, and second, financialcapital—understood as self-(re)producingmoney. The specter he identifies is thus thatby which money seems to generate its ownexcess—its surplus. As Spivak has observed,this argument is dangerously close to repro-ducing the bourgeois economics that Marxhimself eschewed, and she takes Derrida totask for not considering either the place ofindustrial capital in general or the fact that, inthe extraction of surplus value from laborersunder the current economic dispensation[in which, some scholars say, circulation hassupplanted production as the locus of value-production (Baudrillard 1981, Goux 1973)],the disenfranchised poor and especiallywomen become increasingly and specificallysubject to the operations of transnationalcapital. These are the particular bodies beingspectralized that disappear in the abstrac-tions of “reproductive rights,” “populationcontrol,” and “post-Fordist homeworking,”among others (Cheah 2007; Ong 1999; Rofel1999; Wright 1999, 2001). Such processes,Spivak reminds us, are enabled not merelyby law but by the specific collusions of inter-national treaty organizations, transnationalcapital, and the aspirants of national capitalin the global south (Spivak 1995).

One cannot help but observe that it is inthe relative effacement of labor in the anal-ysis of capital that Derrida’s limitations as athinker of gender become most transparent.There is a great deal in Derrida’s writingsabout matters of sexual difference—from theerotic play of the The Post Card (1987a), to thequestion of heritability within the Abrahamictradition in Circumfession (1993a), to the prob-lematizing of the fraternal in The Politics ofFriendship (1997), and the rethinking of thefeminine “chora” as a dimension of writingin Khora (1993b). But the concern with sex-ual difference never generates an analysis ofthe labor of women, as opposed to the (con-ceptual or structural) labor of the feminine.A full assessment of Derrida’s thought wouldhave to account for this, just as it would have

to account for the fact that, despite the enor-mous conceptual investment made by Derridain the idea of auto-immunity, he almost nevermentions AIDS or pharmaceutical capital (an-other significant factor in the realignment ofstate sovereignty under neoliberalism)—evenas a figure of catastrophe. This spectraliz-ing, of women and those afflicted with HIV,must necessarily haunt anthropologists whoare otherwise moved by Derrida’s effort to re-claim from Marx’s ghost, as from religion, theaspiration to justice.

Perhaps, one could say, it is less capital andcertainly not capitalism, than Marx’s commit-ment to the messianic that concerns Derridain Specters of Marx, and in this way it re-mains a book about the gift, and thus abouteconomy writ large. What Derrida holdson to from Marx is the “messianic affirma-tion” that nonetheless resists “metaphysico-religious determination” (1994, p. 89). Thisdemands a relentless auto-critique and will-ingness to break with the party and “pro-duce events.” The orientation and receptiv-ity to the event need not actually posit anevent or “reveal” it, in the Christian idiom;it must simply think the possibility of theevent (1995b, p. 49). Under the influence ofLevinas, Derrida construes this openness tothe event as a form of radical responsibilityto the Other, and it is for this reason that hismeditation on Marx and Marxism leads himto insist on the necessity of thinking the po-litical and the religious together. His effortto redeem from Marx a messianicity withoutmessianism is at one with his effort to redeemfrom religion (and also from Hegel) a religionwithout determinate content (Derrida 2002b[1996]; Smith 1998).

It is nonetheless significant that one ofthe most popular of Derrida’s texts, even andperhaps especially among anthropology stu-dents, is the one that comes closest to be-ing a metaphysical text—and it is question-able whether the invocation of a messianic-ity without metaphysics is sufficient to escapethe charges of theological mystification, or atleast determinate religiosity. Caputo (1997),

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for example, reads Derrida’s response toMarxism as a fifth messianism, one that locatesMarxism in the tradition of the historicallydetermined monotheistic messianisms, in-cluding Judaism, Christianity, and Islam(p.140). In his attempt to purge Marxist mes-sianism of its inherently violent tendencies,however, Derrida largely passes over Marx’ssociologically significant questions. Anthro-pologists can and should lament the fact thatSpecters of Marx fails to address the histori-cal organization of productive relations or thefact that financialization does not do awaywith the industrial system, especially givenDerrida’s interest in the mechanical and theautomatic as principles within language thatare differently mobilized by religious andtechnological developments. And this omis-sion may confirm some skeptics’ sense thatDerrida is, in the end, not merely Eurocen-tric in his references but ethnocentric in out-look (Caputo 1997, Rorty 1995); there is pre-cious little about the global south in this book,and although questions of migrants, especiallyin France, occasionally surface, they are sec-ondary. The category of the messianic, meta-physical or not, is thought entirely withinthe Abrahamic tradition; there is no mention,for example, of the alternative messianismsoffered by an at least ostensibly antimeta-physical Buddhism—and nothing about thosetraditions that lack the messianic altogether.Moreover, the ghost of Soviet socialism,whose demise is the original incitement forthe book, inspires as much melancholy as hor-ror; neither the grotesqueries of the gulag northe criminal usurpation of the social dividendaided and abetted by U.S.-backed financialinstitutions after 1989 receives much carefulanalysis, although these might also have beenthought in terms of a negative messianism.

NO JUSTICE: ECONOMY ANDLAW, OR THE QUESTION OFTHE POLITICAL

One of the most significant shifts in contem-porary thought attributable to Derrida’s in-

terventions is the turn from normative analy-ses of the political to considerations of ethics.Again, because Derrida believes that all de-terminate political regimes rest on forms ofexclusion, and tend inevitably to violence, hiscritical project seeks to adumbrate an ethicsof openness, or nonexclusion. In his readingof the violence in the Middle East, for exam-ple, he questions those efforts to “appropri-ate” Jerusalem that rest on the exclusion of thePalestinians (Derrida 2002b). In his analysis ofthe discourse on “rogue” states, he observesthe predicament of the North African immi-grants in France and questions the hypocrisyof hospitality when it is construed as a relationof reciprocity bound by law, and hence as a de-mand for mirroring (Derrida 2005 [2003]).

In these readings, law is inhabited bythe logic of the double bind. It is both thatwhich contains and reduces or even inhibitsjustice, and that through which humanbeings must nonetheless attempt to pursuejustice. Economy is the domain of law, thename of a demand for commensuration andnormativization. The relationship betweenlaw and language, law and force, particularlyas it is analyzed in Derrida’s reading of WalterBenjamin and Hannah Arendt, has been ex-tremely productive for many anthropologists,particularly those working in contexts af-flicted by state violence and its “phantomaticother,” criminality, and terrorism (Aretxaga2003, 2005a; Sanchez 2001; Siegel 1998).

In many cases, however, the invocation ofDerrida’s reading of Benjamin does not re-mark the difference between Benjamin’s (1979[1921]) original argument, that law is severedfrom justice in the moment that the policetake on themselves the work of decision, ad-ministering violence to annul violence, andDerrida’s. And it must be noted that Derrida(1991) rejects the metaphysical fantasy of di-vine violence at the end of Benjamin’s essay,while also respecting the insight that justiceand law must always be heterogeneous to eachother. It is thus ironic that it is the question ofjustice on which Derrida is so often accusedof lacking political realism and relevance.


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Eagleton (2003) recoils before a hallu-cinated court case in which Derrida is onthe jury, unable to decide anything becauseethical decisions are, in Eagleton’s represen-tation of Derrida’s thought, “utterly ‘impos-sible,’ . . . outside norms, forms of knowledgeand modes of conceptualization.” Similarly,Das (2007, p. 9) worries that the critique ofpresence by which Derrida unsettles the no-tion of signature can be deployed by the in-stitutions of power, and specifically the state,to negate the authenticity of testimony fromthose whose injuries it refuses to acknowl-edge (especially when it has caused them).Perhaps we can acknowledge the improba-bility that any state would deploy a critiqueof presence as a means of evading the testi-mony of complainants against state violence—although Clifford (1988) has given us a sober-ing account of what can happen in a courtof law operating on positivist presumptionswhen “expert witnesses” deploy a crude formof social constructionism to argue the case ofindigenous complainants while also repudi-ating the ideas of tradition and cultural au-thenticity. Povinelli (2002), although certainlynot a Derridean, has nonetheless defended thepossibility that one can undertake a critique ofthe archive and its ideology of authenticity, aswell as the politics of recognition, while alsointervening in the field of law in the inter-est of minoritized communities. There is noneed to point the stick of political exigency tostave off the demands of Derridean reading(Beardsworth 1996).

CONTEXTS OF RECEPTIONAND DISSEMINATION

How, then, has this form of reading beenengaged within anthropology? Derrida’s “de-constructionism” entered a disciplinary spacethat was coming under pressure from differ-ent schools of criticism, many of which took,as their point of departure, the premises ofstructuralism. Its changing fortunes in andfor the discipline must thus be understoodagainst this backdrop of more general foment.

Lamont (1987) attempts to explain the “domi-nance” of Derrida’s thought within the Amer-ican academy as a function of its “fit” within a“highly structured cultural system,” achievedpartly through the targeting of his work to theFrench intelligentsia and the American “mar-ket” through journals and research groupscomprised of his students, as well as a strate-gic affiliation with members of the “privateelite universities that had been the centers ofliterary criticism.” She further suggests thatDerrida’s style garnered him cultural capi-tal, simply because its inaccessibility signifiedphilosophical erudition and therefore gen-erated “prestige,” or what Bourdieu (1984)would call “distinction.” Whether Derridaever assumed “dominance” is a matter open todispute, and certainly this is not the case in thehuman sciences. However, in addition to hererroneous descriptions of Derrida’s concep-tual interventions, and her improbable iden-tification of his thought with that of otherMarxist dialecticians (Lamont 1987, pp. 591–95), Lamont’s analysis remains incapable ofgrasping the tensions with and resistances tohis writing, or the complex and often antag-onistic relationship it had with other formsof poststructuralism. In this respect, however,she is not alone. Derrida has even been de-scribed as participating with Foucault in a sin-gle “line of attack” on those conceptions ofthe public sphere based on the presumptionof a transparently communicating, metaphys-ically grounded individual self (Reddy 1992).The matter deserves more careful scrutiny.

In the same year that Derrida delivered“Structure, Sign, and Play,” Foucault, oneof Derrida’s teachers, published Les Mots etles Choses (The Order of Things: An Archaeol-ogy of the Human Sciences). There, Foucault(1994 [1966]) attributed to anthropology a“constituent role in modern thought” butone in which the Kantian question, “Whatis man?” produced a confusion of the tran-scendental and the empirical (1994, pp. 340–43). Anthropology was, for Foucault, the“sleep” of philosophy, a redoubled dogmatism[Derrida (1978b) would also use this rhetoric

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of somnolence when describing structuralism(p. 4)]. Like Derrida, he questioned theanthropological desire to find in empirical ac-tuality the basis for a metaphysical pursuit ofthe foundation of all knowledge. And, likeDerrida, he too observed the emergent dom-ination of the human sciences by models de-rived from language and linguistics. [WhenSchildkraut (2004, p. 319) observes the pre-ponderant concern with inscription in the an-thropology of the body, citing Foucault andDerrida as examples, she both corroboratestheir observations and misrecognizes them asthe objects of those observations.]

According to Foucault, the human sci-ences have historically been organized inbinary pairs: conflict and rule, function andnorm, and finally, sign and signification. Aslanguage-based models assumed a dominantplace in social theory, these pairs came tobe dominated by their second terms (rule,norm, signification) (Foucault 1994, p. 357).As this occurred, the sciences of man becamecomplicit with the positing of alterity ascriminal, nonnormative, or insignificant(Foucault 1994, p. 350). Moreover, it becamethe task of the human sciences to understandthe relationship between the two terms ineach set. The dominance of psychoanalysisand ethnology in the twentieth century canbe explained, Foucault asserts, because theyconstrued this relationship in terms of theunconscious (1994, p. 373).

In an argument over their respective read-ings of Descartes and the history of mad-ness, Derrida accused Foucault of complic-ity with the same metaphysics he derided(1978a). And Foucault retorted by accusingDerrida of reducing discourse to traces andof eliding events, but also of consolidatingthe sovereignty of the pedagogue, whose mas-tery consists merely in reading (Foucault 1979[1972]; Spivak 1976, pp. lxi–lxii). It was a crit-icism that appealed to anthropologists, andthus, although there were detractors, and am-bivalence even among his creditors, Foucaultcame to dominate the American anthropolog-ical scene as the bearer of a self-consciously

politicized poststructuralism (see, for exam-ple, Comaroff 1985, Dreyfus & Rabinow1982, Stoler 1995). Derrida himself rejectedthe term poststructuralism (2005, p. 174), buthis work was often classed as part of the samephenomenon.

What was Foucault’s appeal, and why didit lead to a relative resistance to Derrida? Tobegin, his privileged metaphors of genealogyand archaeology had an obvious resonance forpractitioners whose work often entailed thediagrammatic study of kinship and the exca-vation of ruins. But it was perhaps the affinitybetween Foucault’s concept of episteme andAmerican anthropology’s concept of culture,tempered under the influence of structural-ism, that conditioned the discipline’s relativereceptivity to his thought. And even if, asMarcus & Cushman (1982) argue, Foucault’sconcepts of “episteme” and “discourse” seemremote from the kind of empirical minutiaethat anthropologists usually investigate, thesweep of his conclusions has proved nodeterrent to many.

Foucault’s lure was enhanced by his focuson the body as the ground of both norma-tivity and transgression. The analytic of thebody emerged from a reading of modern gov-ernmentality as a form of (bio)power operat-ing through the microscopic management oflife (Foucault 1984 [1975]). These ideas foundfertile ground in a field already confrontingthe legacies of colonialism but still method-ologically oriented toward the description ofeveryday life. Moreover, it addressed itself rel-atively overtly to the forms of liberationismthat dominated the United States at the time.It was less the memory of Bandung or “Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity” and the idea of non-alignment that swayed radical politics in theUnited States in the 1970s, than civil rights,antistatism, and the various agendas of femi-nism and queer liberation (in which the poli-tics of pleasure were often as salient as thoseof social justice). Within anthropology, ofcourse, there was more concern about theplight of the Third World, albeit as much as aspace of loss as a locus of future-building. Still,


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Clifford Geertz was espousing an anthro-pological analysis of the new nations (1963,1971), and Dell Hymes was gathering thosewho wanted to rethink the discipline’s impe-rial roots (1972; see also Asad 1973, Gough1968; Fabian 1983, and Stocking 1991).

By the 1980s, popular culture and anthro-pological theory seemed to converge arounda desire for a discursive foundation withinwhich to conceive a corporealized politicsof emancipation. Derrida’s passing referenceto Vietnam in “The Ends of Man” (1982b,p. 114) and his argument that ethnology isone of the compromised efforts to produceauto-critique through the “false exit” of anencounter with the West’s outside (1982b,pp. 134–35) undoubtedly appeared inade-quate or even contrary to this task. Mean-while, leftist critics, such as Terry Eagleton,accused him of defeatism after the failure ofthe student uprisings in May 1968 (Eagleton1983, p. 143; 1986).

And, if not Foucault, then Bourdieu. With-out the Nietzschean element of transgressioncentral to Foucault’s thought, Bourdieu’s con-cept of practice (1977) offered anthropologistsboth the lure of structure and the temptationof corporeality, conceived as part of a dialecticin which experience (bedrock of phenomenol-ogy and the idea of participant observation) isthe essence of historicity (Ortner 1984). Allthis was cast within a rather conventional dis-course of class, but with the recognition thatthe conspicuous display of cultural knowl-edge (and not merely consumption) now func-tions as the basis of recognition. Like Foucaultand many of the other left poststructuralists,Bourdieu (1984) takes issue with Derrida andthe Derridean critique of his own work, alsoon the grounds that Derrida effaces the exi-gencies of political actuality.

ENEMIES AND FAUX AMIS

For many anthropologists, Derrida was sim-ply one of many taking a stab at an antiquatedscience. Marcus & Cushman (1982, pp. 56–57) place him alongside not only Foucault,

but also Roland Barthes, Edward Said, andRaymond Williams. Geertz (2002) latercategorizes Derrida as part of an “elusive andequivocal” movement (among other move-ments, including feminism, anti-imperialism,indigenous rights, and gay liberation), whosemembers included Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze,and Guattari. Marshall Sahlins (1999),eschewing the idea of “invented traditions”(Hobsbawm & Ranger 1982) denounces“afterological” anthropologists for being theonly people without culture and withouta desire for it (p. 404). He borrows thewitticism from Jacqueline Mraz and uses it asan umbrella term for all forms of “postmod-ernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialismand the like”—including those influenced byDerrida (but see Derrida 2005, p. 174).

In those parts of the discipline still underthe sway of structuralism, the critiques ofLevi-Strauss made little impact. Thus, forexample, in the more than 1400 pages ofthe two-volume Echanges et Communications(Pouillon & Maranda 1970), featuring 88different authors including French, English,and American writers such as Pierre Bour-dieu, Louis Dumont, Luc de Heusch, E.E.Evans-Pritchard, Raymond Firth, JackGoody, Edmund Leach, Julian Pitt-Rivers,Marshall Sahlins, Evon Vogt, James Peacock,David Schneider, and Thomas Sebeok, onlyone mention is made of Derrida. HugoNutini (1970) briefly acknowledges Derrida’simportance in situating Levi-Strauss withinthe French intellectual tradition—but onlyafter remarking the likely resistance, amongAnglo-Americans, to his difficult languageand the “quasi-metaphysical tone of theargument” (p. 544).

The accusation of obscurantism hasachieved the status of a cliche (Hicks 1981,p. 964; also Doja 2006). Derrida’s (2005,p. 113) response to such criticisms, that hiswork is no more difficult than that of hisphilosophical predecessors—Plato, Kant,Hegel, Heidegger, Husserl—is hard todispute, but perhaps inadequately consolingfor the defenders of transparency.

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One could, perhaps, have imagined a moresympathetic reading of Derrida in the spaceopened by Geertz, to the extent that Geertzrejected any idea of a humanity prior to lan-guage, symbolization, and culture. More im-portantly, Geertz seems to have acknowl-edged an originary but also unlocatable lack,on which basis the human/linguistic being ofhumans could be understood only as an end-less becoming: “We are . . . incomplete or un-finished animals who complete or finish our-selves through culture” (Geertz 1973a [1966],p. 49). However, it was not toward decon-struction that Geertz’s interpretive anthropol-ogy would move but toward the hermeneu-tics of Ricoeur and the linguistic philosophyof Wittgenstein. Geertz never thought of theoriginary lack as an aporia. It was preciselythat which could be satisfied in and by culture.His notion of the supplement, if one may usethat term here, was one of quasi-theologicalsatisfaction and completion. Indeed, and forthis very reason, he would come under at-tack by many who found in the concept ofculture as a “web of meanings,” public andshared (Geertz 1973c), a strategy for effacingthe questions of power and difference withinsociety.

Moreover, linguistically oriented anthro-pologists who were, like Derrida, concernedwith questioning the fantasy of transpar-ent representation were as likely to turn toPeircean semiotics as they were to deconstruc-tion (Daniel 1984; Gell 1998; Keane 1997a,b,2003; Maurer 2005, 2006; Munn 1986;Silverstein 1976). Derrida (1976) himselfacknowledged that Peirce, and especially hisconcept of secondness, “goes very far in the di-rection that I have called . . . deconstruction”(p. 49). But for many Peirceans, Derrida’snotions of undecideability and play seem toolimitless. They insist on an analysis of themeta-conditions within which such play iscontained—the religious debates, culturaldiscourses, and political contexts in which,to use Foucault’s language, the interestedopposition between normativity and alterityis implemented (Keane 1997a). This concern

is compelling, and anthropologists cannotevade it, but it would be unfair not toacknowledge that the particular movements,philosophical arguments, and textual ex-pressions of these containments are also theobject of Derrida’s critical readings—albeitrarely in their institutional manifestations.

Perhaps, the deeper if ironic conditionof possible receptivity for Derrida lies notin the work of the culturalists, or the “lin-guistic turn,” but in Malinowski’s disciplinar-ily foundational conception of fieldwork. Of-ten read as a naıve discourse premised onthe fantasy of immediacy, Malinowski’s advo-cacy of fieldwork was nonetheless attuned tothe problem of meaning in a radical way. Inhis astonishingly perceptive essay, “Baloma,the spirits of the dead in a Trobriand soci-ety” (1954 [1916]), he describes the prob-lem of definition in a cross-cultural encounterwhere the European terms of “substance,”“nature,” “cause,” and “origin” have no coun-terparts. The Kiriniwinians with whom hespeaks nonetheless answer to the anthropol-ogist’s skeptical questions about the natureof the spirits. Malinowski remarks that theseanswers are as much similes as definitions(1954, p. 167). That is to say, they refer else-where and announce themselves as part of achain of signs, none of which can ultimatelybe anchored in the metaphysical touch-stonesof “cause” or “origin.” Although he doesnot emphasize this point, Malinowski’s intu-ition, that the anthropological project is in-herently a confrontation with this endlesslydivisible quality of language and the impos-sibility of eliciting a metaphysical mirror forthe West, can perhaps return us to a consider-ation of how and what a deconstructionist an-thropology might be—an antipositivism thatdoes not lead to the abandonment of empiri-cism [far from eschewing empiricism, Derridaconfesses to it in Of Grammatology (1976,p. 162)].

The aspiration to find such an openinghas been made before, and other anticipa-tions of Derrida have been discovered inanthropology’s archive. The most obvious


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of these is Bateson, whose definition of in-formation as “any difference that makes adifference” (Bateson 2000c [1970], p. 459)and whose use of the concepts of both“schismogenesis” and “double bind” (Bateson2000b [1969], 2000d [1956]) are widely re-marked for their idiomatic proximity toDerrida’s translated concepts. Indeed, Sahlins(1993a) accuses contemporary anthropolo-gists of forgetting these early interventionsin favor of poststructuralist reinventions anddisplaying a “lapse of anthropological connec-tion and knowledge” (p. 851). One does notneed Derrida to observe that apparent resem-blances may also mask deeper divergences,however.

Derrida’s (1986, 1998 [1996]) concept ofthe double bind has a Freudian genealogy.It refers not only to a problem afflictingconscious decision-making, but to the inter-nal dynamics of analysis, and of language asdifferance (Derrida 1998, p. 33). Derrida de-rives the notion from Freud, and especiallythe Freud of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1955[1920]), for whom binding and unbindingprovide the idiom in which to understandthe psychic relationships to external stim-uli. Borrowing and departing from this un-derstanding, deconstruction radicalizes twoseemingly contrary impulses: that which seeksthe originary and that which engages in the“decomposition-recomposition of an active orpassive synthesis” (Derrida 1998, p. 28). Thisstructure underpins all deconstructive analy-sis, which aims to disclose the inextricabilityof terms which otherwise appear to be op-posed. It can perhaps be seen most clearlyin the logic of the pharmakon, in which cureand poison are mutually entailed, but it ap-plies more generally and in some ways consti-tutes a disavowal of analytic closure (Derrida1998, p. 34). The undecidability of analysisentailed by this logic does not disable the ca-pacity to decide, practically, between alterna-tives in everyday life, although Derrida is of-ten accused of as much. Rather, it describesthe encumbrance of decision, the provisional-ity, and hence the ethical burden of decision,

which must be made in the absence of absolutedeterminations.

Bateson’s concept of the double bind is sig-nificantly different. It describes a pathologicalsequence of circumstances, usually within a fa-milial setting, whereby a maternal figure (orother family member) gives contactory mes-sages to a child, but also fails to give the meta-communicative signals that would allow thechild to distinguish and prioritize demands.As a result, the child does not develop an abil-ity to differentiate between orders of meaningand may develop schizophrenia. In Bateson’s(2000d [1956]) earliest theorization of this de-velopment, he emphasizes the schizophrenic’sconfusion of metaphoric and literal mean-ing, and the forms of defensive or para-noid behavior that result from such confusion(pp. 209–11). In his later consideration of thephenomenon, he acknowledges that “there isan experiential component in the determina-tion or etiology of schizophrenic symptomsand related behavoral patterns, such as hu-mor, art, poetry, etc.” (2000b [1969], p. 272).The schizophrenic is thus one who cannotredeem or transform the collapse of distinc-tions between the literal and the metaphoric.In any case, the important point for a consid-eration of the difference between Bateson andDerrida is that for Bateson the indeterminacyof the boundary between metaphoricity andliteralism is exceptional, whereas, for Derrida,it is intrinsic to all analytic gestures and in-deed to all decision-making in the politicalsphere.

As for schismogenesis, in Bateson’s (2000a[1935]) conception, it refers to the internaldifferentiation of societies into groups—sometimes becoming extreme enough tofracture the societies—which may be eithersymmetrical, as when rivalry produces amutually inciting set of oppositions betweensubsets of the culture, or complementary, aswhen hierarchies marked by domination andsubmission develop between groups (p. 68).The groups nonetheless remain relativelyinternally homogeneous. This is a very longway from Derrida’s concept of differance.

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But Sahlins (1983, p. 4) persists: “If cul-ture must be conceived as always and onlychanging . . . then there can be no such thingas identity, or even sanity, let alone continu-ity.” Differance is not change, of course. Itis divisibility and deferral. And we would dowell to remember that it was Sahlins whodemanded of anthropology that it take ac-count of the “event” and not merely the per-sistent structures (1983, p. 534). Although hisconcept of the “structure of the conjuncture”(Sahlins 1985) ultimately annuls the eventful-ness of the event, Sahlins’s call liberated an-thropology for an entirely new kind of histori-cism. And Derrida renews the gift.

LESSONS, NOT LEGENDS

Beyond the misreadings, the dismissals, andthe disavowals, there is nonetheless a signifi-cant and increasingly compelling body of an-thropological literature that has taken withinitself some of the “reading lessons” (not onlythe “writing lesson”) of Derrida. One cannotsurvey all this work or provide an institutionalaccounting of its emergence, although one canbriefly identify some of the dominant con-cerns in these works. It is not insignificant,however, that much of it has been produced bythose who were students of Siegel at CornellUniversity and who studied at Cornell duringthe period when deconstructionism was beingmore widely discussed in humanities circles.Siegel remains the most thoroughly and rig-orously Derridean anthropologist in the fieldtoday, as is discussed below. Others have, ofcourse, embraced some of the arguments andimplications of Derrida’s readings of anthro-pological texts, and these have been appro-priated and incorporated in a variety of ways.We can note a certain thematic convergencein these works, however, and this exceeds thequestion of areal focus. All of them share acommitment to reading and rereading localdiscourse to find the sources of internal differ-ence and indeed critical possibility. Thus, forexample, Rafael (2005) and Rutherford (2002)emphasize the idea and the work of the for-

eign, as an object of both desire and disavowal,which is simultaneously internal and externalto local identity in various parts of Indonesiaand the Philippines.

Ivy (1995) writes of the complex retrojec-tion of a past on which basis the present unityof Japan could be fantasized, while examininghow Japanese ethnology and culturalismworked by allying the past with an orality thatit had overcome. Similarly, Willford (2006)considers the emergence of an ethnic fetishin Malaysia and the uncanny dynamic thatcasts the past as something simultaneously“surmounted” and “familiar.” Spyer’s (2008)reading of the parergonal structure, withinwhich the cassowary was excluded from rep-resentation but ultimately rendered availablefor photographic inscription as Aru cameinto modernity, relies on Derrida’s Truthin Painting (1987b [1978]). And Sanchez’s(2001) account of spirit possession and culticpolitics in Venezuela treats them as forms ofinscription in Derrida’s sense and notes thatthe value of substitution is elevated to fetishstatus in times of political crisis. His senseof the phantomaticity of law in this contextowes much to Derrida and echoes Aretxaga’s(2005b) readings of Basque and northernIrish insurgencies vis-a-vis a state experiencedmainly in the form of police violence, a statethat produces its phantomatic others even asit produces itself by bringing violence to bearon them (Aretxaga 2003).

In studies of the archive (e.g., Bracken1997, Kelly & Morton 2004), and in the anal-yses of religion and media, Derrida’s inter-ventions are increasingly seen to offer anthro-pologists a new means of comprehending theproduction of normativity (and not merelypower, even in its dispersed Foucaultiansense). This is partly because it questions acertain post-Weberian tendency in the dis-cipline to posit religion and media in op-position to each other and to invoke themass media, in the sense of mechanical re-production, as a causal factor in the phe-nomenon designated as religious revival.Derrida’s argument, that technicity is internal


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to the idea of religion, and that mass me-diation can be seen only as a developmentwithin a history of mediation more generally,has helped prompt a revision in the ways thatreligion is problematized by anthropologists.Thus, for example, Morris (2000) reads the re-sponse of Thai spirit mediums to new formsof technologized mediation not as that whichrevives a ruptured tradition, but as that whichredoubles a tendency already within that formof mediation which is possession, while alsogenerating the fantasy and felt loss of a pre-mediatic tradition (see also Mazzarella 2004,p. 357). Much has yet to be done, beyond re-peating it, with Derrida’s observation (2002a,2005) that religion, conceived from withinthe discourses of the European philosophy, isalready a latinization and that globalizationis also a “globalatinization.” But this projectis now being undertaken, beginning with areflection on the false opposition betweensecularity and the theological (Asad 2003,Csordas 2004, Mahmood 2005).

If these references give the impression ofa veritable “school of thought” within an-thropology, the impression is exaggerated.Lamont’s vision of the dominant philosophernotwithstanding, few anthropologists not al-ready predisposed to philosophical rumina-tion have been affected by Derrida’s insights.To understand more fully what might begained from reading Derrida, and hence whathis legacy could be, one can consider both thework done under his influence and that whichwould have been very different had it taken onboard the deconstructionist critique. I beginwith the latter, by considering the current de-bate about the Piraha. This debate has enteredthe mainstream of popular intellectual culturein the United States, and I review it here be-cause it reproduces in so many ways the prob-lems that Derrida discerned in Levi-Strauss’saccount of the Nambikwara, but also becauseit indulges and even promotes the ethnocen-tric and primitivist sentiments of a publicthat continues to desire the authentic otheras the means to legitimate its own claims tosuperiority.

THE WRITING LESSON, ONCEMORE

In April 2007, the New Yorker magazine pub-lished a lengthy article on Everett’s (2005)controversial claims about the Piraha, a com-munity in the Amazon who he has describedas having a language constrained by the “re-striction of communication to the immediate expe-rience of the interlocutors” (p. 622, emphasis inoriginal). By this he means that “[g]rammarand other ways of living are restricted to con-crete, immediate experience (where an experi-ence is immediate in Piraha if it has been seenor recounted as seen by a person alive at thetime of telling), and immediacy of experienceis reflected in immediacy of information—encoding—one event per utterance” (p. 622).Everett defines an utterance as a sentence.He then provides a series of transliterations,diagrams, and translations to argue that thePiraha lack numbers, numerals, or a conceptof counting; terms for quantification or color;and embedding. He asserts that they havethe “simplest pronoun inventory known” andeven that the “entire pronominal inventorymay have been borrowed.” The language hasno perfect tense and no “individual or collec-tive memory of more than two generationspast.” Moreover, the Piraha people are saidto lack fiction, creation myths, and the ca-pacity to draw—except “crude stick figuresrepresenting the spirit world.” They not onlydo not but they cannot write, he says (2005,p. 626).

In a lengthy footnote to his Current An-thropology article (incorrectly referenced in theNew Yorker as Cultural Anthropology), Everettclaims that he does not consider the Pirahato be primitive, and moreover, that they haveboth a complex prosodic system and elabo-rate forms of joking and mendacity (Everett2005, p. 621). The same ethnocentrism, which“everywhere and always, ha[s] controlled theconcept of writing” (Derrida 1976, p. 3), is tobe found here controlling the concept of lan-guage per se. The first sign of this ethnocen-trism is to be found in Everett’s description

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of Piraha in terms of “gaps” or absences—of the grammatical forms present in otherlanguages (Surrales 2005, p. 639; Tomasello2005, p. 640). This lack is not, however, seento be a function of loss or trauma. In Everett’saccount, this community of people hasremained unchanged since the time of theirfirst “recording” by European colonialists in1784, an improbable timelessness that he linksto their resolute monolingualism. In the faceof this claim, we are surprised to discover,from Everett’s own account, that some ofthe Piraha speak Portuguese when negotiat-ing with Brazilian traders (2005, p. 626; alsoSurrales 2005, p. 639) and that “Their pro-nouns were borrowed from a Tupi-Guaranilanguage, either Lingua Geral or Kawahiv”(Everett 2005, p. 628). Both of these factsindicate contact with others, and linguis-tic transformation, including bilingualism,born of such contact. Nonetheless, by thetime Everett’s story has been printed in theNew Yorker, the myth of a willful and ex-clusive authenticity has been secured: “Un-like other hunter-gatherer tribes of the Ama-zon, the Piraha have resisted efforts bymissionaries and government agencies toteach them farming,” and even that theyhave “ignored lessons in preserving meatsby salting or smoking” (Colapinto 2007,p. 122).

It is not insignificant in this context thatEverett describes Piraha communicative prac-tice as taking place as much through singingand whistling as through speaking [a form ofcommunication among the Guarani alreadyremarked by Father Pedro Lozano (1768)in the mid-eighteenth century]—althoughhe himself does not analyze the song-formsof speech. This is an important observa-tion because it is related to one made byPierre Clastres, in his account of the GuayakiIndians, a group he describes as having been“Guaranized” in the process of being pushedout of their original territories of agriculturalproduction and into the forest (1998 [1972],p. 114). The Piraha appear to have shared withother groups in the area the experience of be-

ing Guaranized, to use Clastres’s term, andthis is not surprising, given the degree of co-erced mobility at the slave frontier. Euclidesda Cunha (1992), an early Brazilian national-ist, believed that the Mura (who are not ex-tinct, contrary to the New Yorker’s claim) hadbeen forced into the Brazilian Amazon fromBolivia. Manuela Caneira da Cunha (1992)also speculates that the lowlander Mura andPiraha may have originally been dislocatedfrom a more mountainous region, althoughshe suggests that they have resided in thearea for much longer (p. 980). In any case,the Mura, at least, were much remarked bythe Portuguese colonialists for their emphaticmilitarism, their command of the riverinetrade, and then, their apparently sudden ca-pitulation to colonial authority. Hecht (un-published observations, 2007) attributes thislatter fact to the combined effects of disease,warfare, enslavement, and, subsequently, theMura’s loss of their missionary interlocutors(from whom they had sought protection andassistance in conflicts with other local tribes).The latter, Hecht relates (personal communi-cation, 2007), were forced to withdraw fromthe area when the ardently secular Marquisof Pombal exiled all religious orders (alsoHemming 1987, pp. 21–23, 217–18).

Just how the ancestors of today’s Pirahaexperienced these violent transformationsis unclear, and Everett claims that they donot narrate them. But it is not unreason-able to imagine that such depredations, aswere endured by the Mura and the Piraha,would encourage some suspicion of thePortuguese-speaking foreigners in the area,and perhaps too the secreting of knowledge.However, Everett attributes antipathy tothe Portuguese to a cultural disavowal ofthe knowledge embedded in Portuguese,which is, he says, “incommensurate withPiraha . . . and culturally incompatible” be-cause, “like all Western languages, it violatesthe immediacy-of-experience constraint”(2005, p. 634). This domination by the valueof immediacy is also adduced to explain thePiraha’s “musical” language (2005, p. 626).


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Clastres notes that the whistling languageof the Guayakai was spoken in contexts de-manding secrecy (including ones in which hisoverhearing was not wanted) and hypothe-sizes that, as a form, this whistled-whisperingdeveloped within ordinarily spoken languageas a means to evade enemies, including notonly the spirits of the dead but also other,hostile Indians and, most especially, whites(Clastres 1998 [1972], pp. 137–38). KerenEverett (nee Graham), Daniel Everett’sformer wife, and also a linguist, who workedwith him for 25 years (during most of whichtime the two were employed by the SummerInstitute of Linguistics missionary organi-zation), is described by Colapinto as one offew foreigners to have learned an Amazonian“singing language.” She apparently believesits tonal and prosodic elaboration is not onlyhighly complex but that it is a primary modeof intimate communication, used to teachchildren to speak and also to convey dreams(Colapinto 2007, p. 137). Conceiving Pirahalanguage less as a strategic defense than asthe medium of interpersonal relation withinsiders, Keren Everett’s thesis supports theextrapolation of Clastres’s sense that theseGuaranized people operate in (at least) twolinguistic registers, according to the degreeof intimacy and trust that structures thecommunication. As Derrida would surelyobserve, this division and doubling within thelanguage take place within an already elabo-rate structure of differentiation and deferral(differance) and render untenable the claimsabout Piraha monolingualism. Moreover, itdemands a reconsideration of Everett’s claimthat the Piraha do not engage the Portuguesebecause their grammar ensures that they can-not permit translation or the incorporation ofculturally foreign linguistic structures. Thequestion is between an ontologized incapac-ity, which Everett calls Piraha culture, and ahistoricized account of an ongoing encounteron capitalism’s frontier. Everett has chosento reproduce the binarity that divides theworld into the literate and the congenitallyilliterate.

He reports his failed efforts to teach thePiraha to count and describes their “incapac-ity” to learn a general value form in whichto negotiate their trade with Brazilians—although the Piraha themselves requestedinstruction in counting so that they could“tell whether they were being cheated”(Everett 2005, p. 626). Clearly, the Pirahawere engaged in some form of commensura-tion if they perceived the possibility of be-ing cheated, of getting less than what was ap-propriate for their goods, although Everettinsists that this ability is absent. Finally,Everett tells us of a failed “writing lesson.”The Piraha “write” stories for Everett, mak-ing marks on paper, apparently in imitationof his note-taking. They “read” back thesesame “stories,” producing what Everett de-scribes as “random” accounts of their dailyactivities, again miming the form of readingwithout repeating the marks. The same storyis not told twice. “They do not understandthat all [ . . . ] such symbols should be precise,”explains Everett, and “the concept of a ‘cor-rect’ way to draw was profoundly foreign tothem” (2005, p. 626). The writing lessons, headds, were attended mainly for entertainment,and the Piraha do not believe that their ownlanguage can (or should?) be transliterated.

The scene is uncannily reminiscent ofLevi-Strauss’s account of the Nambikwara.Levi-Strauss interprets the chief’s mimicry ofwriting as an attempt to “amaze his compan-ions and persuade them that his intermediacywas responsible for the exchanges, that he hadallied himself with the white man, and thathe could share their secrets” (Levi-Strauss1997 [1955], p. 289). Like the Nambikwarathus described, Everett shows the Pirahaacquire writing instantaneously, which is tosay by virtue of a foreign intervention, andthe consequences are sociological rather thanintellectual (Derrida 1976, p. 127). Becausewriting remains exterior and unassimilatedto the Piraha culture, according to Everett, itdoes not lead to a transformation in thought.It is merely one act among many that seekrecognition from the anthropologist, who, in

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this case, is conducting a relentless batteryof tests and who invites others to conductsimilarly relentless batteries of (sometimescomputer-assisted) tests, occasionally relievedby viewings of Hollywood blockbuster videos.The Piraha do not learn to write becausethey cannot, says Everett. They cannot writebecause their language is beholden to thevalue of immediacy.

Many linguists have criticized Everett’s hy-potheses. Some argue that Piraha is not as ex-ceptional as he claims, noting that other lan-guages also lack numerals and color words(Levinson 2005, p. 637; Wierzbicka 2005,p. 641) or embedding (Berlin 2005, p. 635).Others reject his claims that the languageis absent of color terms (Kay 2005, p. 636).Wierzbicka questions Everett’s concern witha paucity of pronouns and the tendency to usethem to refer to only deceased or absent ob-jects (proper names being used in other cir-cumstances) and emphasizes the more impor-tant fact that Piraha has pronominal capacitiesby which to differentiate “I” and “you,” andshe doubts the possibility of these having been“borrowed” from Tupi-Guarani. Goncalves(2005, p. 636), who also works with the Piraha,claims that Everett misunderstands the valueof immediacy by reading it as a constraint. In-stead, he reads Piraha as a language and a cul-ture that privilege the constant constitutionof the world through human action: “Withinthis conception, to gain the status of an or-ganized discourse the cosmos depends uponsomeone who lives it, who experiences it”(p. 636).

Yet, Everett’s story travels, and it travelsbecause it restates, in the guise of a scien-tific demonstration, the ethnocentric fantasyof a people who live in presence and pleni-tude, without abstraction, without deferral: aliving origin. What Derrida means when hesays that all cultures are inscribed within thestructured possibility of deferral (writing), isthat “from the origin of life in general, when,at the very heterogeneous levels of organiza-tion and complexity, it is possible to defer pres-ence, that is to say expense and consumption,

and to organize production, that is to say re-serve in general” (Derrida 1976, pp. 130–31).Everett’s claims notwithstanding, this orga-nization of life is not absent among the Pi-raha, even though they store manioc flour foronly a few days, whereas their neighbors, theKawahiv, store it for longer periods (Colap-into 2007, pp. 123–24). Manioc production isa complex process, entailing several stages be-fore it can be turned into flour. It is certainlynot the kind of plant that “grows when you spitthe seed out,” which is how Everett explainsthe existence of other domesticated plant lifein the Piraha village (S. Hecht, personal com-munication, 2007). His only other alternativefor explaining the presence of such vegetationis that they were “planted by somebody else.”If the latter were the case, of course, any claimthat the Piraha are resolutely monolingual andevasive of relations with others would have tobe relinquished. But the more important is-sue, first raised by Derrida (1976, p. 129) inhis reading of Levi-Strauss, is the quantitativeconception of knowledge that undergirds theentire oppositional structure within which thePiraha are opposed to the West. How doesthe storage of manioc flour for a few daysrather than a few months provide evidence ofa categorical difference? What legitimates thetranslation of a short horizon into immediacy?The same question could be asked of the dis-cussion of generational memory, which is saidto be restricted to two generations, althoughEverett tells of some informants who can re-call four generations (a feat unlikely to be re-produced by most American youth). There is,simply, no logical grounds for construing thisbrevity of generational memory as an incapac-ity to express anything but immediacy. Theonly grounds for such a claim are metaphysi-cal, the a priori bifurcation of the world.

The question of reserve and the deferralof presence are, however, not only matters ofliteral storage. The same lack of self-presencethat Derrida theorizes is the necessary condi-tion for communication—even in the exam-ple of the grocery list described by Searle—is visible among the Piraha. It is why they


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can speak to each other, whether in song orin some other form. Are not the singing ofdreams and the ongoing relationships withthe dead testimony to the fact that the divi-sions within the social world, which produceand are produced by language, persist acrosstime and that they are the condition of a com-munity’s survival in time? The scales norma-tivized by capitalism have been granted thestatus of a canon against which all else mustbe considered lacking, deficient, or incapable.What grounds this canon? Why can we notconsider a model plane built on the arrival of areal plane (and no doubt for the pleasure of theforeigners) but not preserved as the culturesof anticipatory loss in the West would pre-serve it, as an aesthetic achievement? Equallyimportantly, why are irony and lying not tobe read as fiction (which is not to be confusedwith the institution of literature), as the exer-cise of an imaginative faculty that can contra-dict actuality, and hence depart from immedi-acy? And is not a pronoun, however few theremay be, always an abstraction? Everett’s com-mitment, so widely embraced by the popularmedia, is to an ancient opposition in whichwriting is the mark of mediation, orality thecondition of its absence. The lesson of thewriting lesson, which Derrida wrote underthe heading “The Violence of the Letter,” hasstill to be learned, it seems. It has not beenentirely lost, however, as the work of Siegelattests.

LEGACY

Today, the most significant bearer ofDerrida’s legacy in anthropology is Siegel. Adeconstructionist tendency has been evidentin Siegel’s work since his earliest publishedbook, The Rope of God (2000 [1969]), althoughit was not until his second work, Shadow andSound (1979), that this tendency identified it-self with Derrida’s thought. The Rope of Goddeparted from most of the anthropologicalthought on Sumatra, which preceded it (andmuch that followed it) by rejecting the modelof coherent cultural integration for one in

which the learned religious leaders (ulamas),as well as the sultans, were seen as foreignforces and were only occasionally engaged bylocal political authorities, namely uleebalangs,who alone sustained constant and reciprocallystructured relations with the peasants. Histask, in this work, is therefore to explain howthe society operated in the absence of unic-ity or integration, and to do so he develops anotion of translation or even mistranslation—rather than shared meanings, as Geertz wouldargue—at the heart of the social. Siegel alsoreads the growing authority of the ulamas overthe course of the twentieth century in terms ofan increasing dissonance between conscious-ness and society, one that the proponents ofreform Islam were able to mobilize. Preciselybecause they moved from village to pesantran,the ulamas turned foreignness into a claim onuniversality, argues Siegel, and this action cre-ated enormously powerful forces, ones thatwould both sustain and threaten the develop-ment of nationalism.

From the beginning, Siegel’s work offereda radical alternative to hermeneutic models,which aimed to discover an ultimate, hiddenmeaning. However, it is important to recog-nize that the concepts of discontinuity andmistranslation do not imply that people livein a state of chaos; they mean rather that dif-ferent individuals can operate with differentunderstandings precisely because their signi-fying gestures are polysemous (as when menand women perceive women’s relations to menin terms of deference or indulgence). The lat-ter situation is described by Siegel as a con-sequence of the demise of pepper cultivationand the loss of economic resources amongmen. In early reviews, both Bruner (1970,p. 741) and Kessler (1970, p. 344) ques-tioned the evidence for this historical devel-opment, but they nonetheless validated thegeneral argument for social discontinuity asthe ground of Islamic modernism’s rise inAtjeh.

The expanded edition of The Rope of God,issued in 2000, contains two additional chap-ters which both remedy the relative dearth

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of attention to women in the earlier work(George 2003, p. 351) and make visibleSiegel’s long engagement with the problemat-ics of language and the relationship betweenspeech and writing. The first systematic en-gagement with these issues, conceived in ex-plicitly Derridean terms, appears in Shadowand Sound, where Siegel (1979) describesAtjehnese history as an effort to “bring lan-guage under control” (p. 17). Here, perhapsfor the first time, the anthropological impli-cations of Derrida’s argument about writing(and his refutation of the metaphysical tradi-tion that has interpreted it as the transparentdisclosure of speech) are worked out.

Siegel presents translations of the HikayatPotjeot Moehamat and describes its recitation inperformances that he observed. These recita-tions were undertaken by heart for largely il-literate audiences, who reveled in the auralpleasures of performance but attended little,says Siegel, to the “meaning” of the texts, ameaning which was, in fact, evacuated by theprosodic practice of the orator. Nonetheless,Siegel notes the authority of the written textunder whose aegis performance was under-taken, and which was referred to as the ori-gin of the speech despite the fact that it re-mained opaque to those who were illiterate.For them, he explains, the text functions asa graphic sign, which discloses the possibilitythat writing may always harbor secrets. Thisopacity, which may harbor secrets is, Siegel ar-gues, the reason for a fear of writing or, moreimportantly, a fear of what he calls “unreadwriting” (1979, p. 229). In this analysis, notonly is writing not the mere transcription ofspeech, but it is discontinuous with it. More-over, the constant invocation of the text makesaudiences feel that the source of their pleasurein narrative is simultaneously present and il-legible, and this is the structure of the histor-ical thought that Siegel then discerns recur-ring in political life. He identifies a “surplusof meaning” (p. 263) being generated withinthis structure, one that manifests itself in aconstant suspicion of that which is illegible(the faces of communists, for example) and in

the periodic efforts at containment throughelimination.

Some admirers of The Rope of God foundShadow and Sound unpalatable, and even sym-pathetic readers criticized Siegel’s reading ofthe moment in “Si Meuseukin’s Wedding,”when a character hurls excrement on thewedding guests—a gesture that Siegel inter-prets as one of graphic signification (alongwith other graphic forms like royal insignias)through which a “fear of unread writing” isdischarged (Siegel 1979, p. 227; Fox 1980,p. 557; Reid 1980, p. 669). Some found theargument for internal difference to be be-lied by his discernment of an overly consis-tent unconscious aspiration: to bring languageunder control (Smail 1981, p. 764). Othersrecoiled before the deployment of “foreign”theory, either in the hope that a pure descrip-tion could be obtained of the “order of things”or in the belief that some theories—thoseof perhaps Marx, Durkheim, or Weber—areless foreign than others (e.g., Reid 1980). Nodoubt, Shadow and Sound is a demanding text,and neither it nor any of Siegel’s other workswill satisfy the critics who want more consis-tent diagrams of speech levels; statistical doc-umentation of economic transformations anddemographic change; or, for example, causalarguments linking media texts to other kindsof discourses and practices associated withpolicing (Hefner 2000). But in its opening ofthe question of how the relationship betweenspeech and writing is organized outside of theWest, and in its recognition that communi-cation is never complete, and also that it isalways in excess, Siegel inaugurated a new,radically nonfunctionalist approach to ques-tions of profound significance: of recurrentmass violence, of revolution and its failures,of nationalism and the limits of representativepolitics.

The second edition of The Rope of Godmade visible the concept of the supplementas it might be thought beyond the literaryor even the philosophical text. The bookincludes the entire first edition (publishedin 1969), complete with its index and its


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bibliography, followed by a literal supple-ment: two additional chapters. These supple-mentary texts suggest that there was some-thing there, in the original story which was notpreviously articulated but which, when seenin retrospect, seems to belong there, to be de-termined at the beginning. We read the sup-plements as though their absence in the firstedition was a lack, but of course they refer tolater moments in the history of Atjehnese andIndonesian life, moments which can onlyappear, later yet, as being marked by thetrace of their antecedent histories. This isthe (il)logic of the supplement described byDerrida. Siegel uses the revision of his book toperform this structure and to make it visible asa property not merely of textual organizationbut of Atjehnese language itself. The revisedtext is not merely expanded; it bears the tracesof Shadow and Sound and Solo in the New Order(1986, about hierarchy in Javanese society), inwhich Siegel develops the notion of a forcein language that exceeds the possibility of itsarticulation.

In its new form, The Rope of God concludeswith a radical conception of revolution as aphenomenon in which something beyond thevoice (the voice of the people but also voice asutterance and legibility) demands to be heardbut, lacking a mode of expression, nonethe-less leaves traces—“in the fear of the peo-ple and in the attempt of the army to re-coup that power for itself . . . [as well as] thesilence of the people today, in their willing-ness to wait for authorization before unleash-ing a possibly blind violence” (2000, p. 422).These same themes are taken up by Siegelin two related works, Fetish, Recognition, Rev-olution (1997) and A New Criminal Type inJakarta: Counter-Revolution Today (1998), writ-ten simultaneously to the “supplement” of TheRope of God. They are also related to each otherin the mode of supplementarity, and A NewCriminal Type demands a rereading of Fetish,Recognition, Revolution to understand what thattext and the history it narrates would seem tomake necessary in retrospect (but see Morris1999).

Fetish, Recognition, Revolution analyzes thedevelopment of the “lingua franca,” Melayu,in the context of colonial trade. As a lin-gua franca, says Siegel, Melayu functions asa mother tongue for no one (citizens gen-erally claim a more local language as theirnatal language). Subjectivity is, accordingly,never fully available within it. This newlingua franca offered greater mobility forJavanese or other proto-Indonesians subjects,vis-a-vis both the elaborate local hierarchiesof ritualized power and the world of Dutchcolonialism. But it also limited the degree towhich the speaking subject would be grantedauthority because Dutch was the language ofrights. In this context, says Siegel, the stagewas set for a politics of connection rather thancommunication and identification (1997, p.44). Proximity to power and recognition byauthority, rather than reciprocity or abstractequality, became the axes of political life in thenew nation.

At least two developments arise as a re-sult of this development, and Seigel tracesthem across the period of both revolutionaryand postrevolutionary Indonesia. First, a gen-eralized fetishism emerges by which the ap-pearance of Indonesians is policed—preciselybecause there is doubt about the degree towhich appearance reveals identity (this is thefear of unread writing in another form). Thisfetishism, buttressed by the new technolo-gies of photography and cinema, is ultimatelylinked to a certain quiescence, in which a de-sire to be recognized by authority, and espe-cially by the state, renders Indonesians vul-nerable to authoritarianism—in a manner thatcannot prohibit violence. Second, the linguis-tic conditions of the lingua franca, which made“overhearing” the risk that afflicted all speak-ers, developed and were intensified duringthe revolution, where immediacy was valuedabove all but where suspicion afflicted every-one. This suspicion was the condition of ter-ror, says Siegel, in a reading of several extraor-dinary testimonies by former revolutionaries.In the end, he shows how revolution dissem-inated suspicion and, by virtue of its demand

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for immediacy (demonstrated in, for example,its impatience with anything but purely in-strumental language), annulled the possibilityof any economy, even that of vengeance, bywhich the death that characterized the revo-lution could be cancelled or mastered (1997,p. 225).

This analysis is not, by any means, pro-posed as a general description of Indonesianculture, but it permits Siegel to understandthe extravagant violence of the anticommu-nist purges in 1965, the waves of extrajudicialexecution by which “criminals” are constantlyeliminated but still feared in Jakarta (1998),and finally, the witch killings of Banyuwangi,East Java, in 1998 and 1999. What would beneeded to interrupt this cycle, says Siegel, isan institution in which the value of deferralis embraced. Like Derrida, he gives to thatinstitution the name of literature, and morethan one anthropologist has balked at thissuggestion that literature would be an end tothe violence of both revolution and counter-revolution. After all, such violence is presentin societies with literature. Perhaps, however,we can recognize that states and societies inwhich the state is most consumed with con-trolling the power of language are those inwhich the writer is most persecuted. It is adifficult claim to prove, but Siegel certainlypoints to the life of incarceration to which In-donesia’s most prominent writer, PramoedyaAnanta Toer, was subject, and he is joined byothers, such as Maier (2004), who insist thatMalay (but not only Malay) institutions of lit-erary production are characterized by didac-ticism and by a conception of the writer asculpable not only for his own speech but forthat of the characters in his or her fiction. Thisis not literature in Derrida’s or Siegel’s sense.Literature in their sense is an institution thatacknowledges that writing is contrary to real-ity and it permits the writer as author the free-dom to fabricate truths as well as lies. There isliterature, then, but no developed institutionof literature in Indonesia, according to Siegel.

When, in his most recent work, Namingthe Witch, Siegel returns to the question of

what remains when death is the foreign thatone attempts to evict from the social, he offersan irresistable challenge to all that has beenthought under the category of culture, as wellas witchcraft. Considering both the archiveof anthropology’s discourse on witchcraft ac-cusation and the testimonies of those whoparticipated in witch killings in East Java,Siegel argues that witchcraft is the name ofa “strange institution,” which leads one toexpect the “contrary of normality” (2006,p. 101). The efforts to institutionalize andcontain witchcraft, through accusation andnaming, are doomed to fail because witchcraftoperates both by metonymy and on the ba-sis of a magical language whose characteristicform is the copula (Mauss 1972 [1950], p. 51).However, the copula that defines witchcraftis not just any copula; it is that which cangenerate the statements “You are dead” or,more startlingly, “I am dead” (Siegel 2006,p. 69). Rereading (again, in Levi-Strauss’swake) the account of a Zuni witch trial, thestory of magical death among the Murngin,and Evans-Pritchard’s famous explanation ofZande sorcery, Siegel demonstrates that an-thropologists’ efforts to render witchcraft as adiscourse that would otherwise exceed reason,or as an alternative rationality, are only partlycorrect, insofar as the efforts to institution-alize witchcraft in any society are themselvesdoomed projects aimed at the mastery of thatwhich cannot be mastered—the death that isinternal to society itself. These readings re-produce an anthropological fallacy and mir-ror the deathly error that the strange institu-tion of witchcraft implies for all who suffer itsviolence.

Siegel will not turn away from this vio-lence, and he confronts without hesitation theeroticized investment in narrating and renar-rating the stories of witchcraft and sorcery—which survives the texts even of those whowould explain it as an instrument of social or-der (albeit one that is acknowledged for its rel-atively frequent deployment against womenand the aged). To say that the accusers areattracted to the force in language, which they


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believe they can convert into their own power,and to observe that naming the witch cannever finally assuage the fear of death is notto abandon the social real, as many critics ofdeconstruction seem to fear. On the contrary,it is to demonstrate that the lessons of decon-struction, Derrida’s legacy, are to be found ina willingness to put the fantasy of social re-production under erasure.

BEYOND LEGACIES

Anthropology has been solicited, in theDerridean sense; it must henceforth tremblea little at the prospect that its object is un-der erasure but that the task of listening andunderstanding human predicaments is moredemanding than ever. This is the conclusionwe must draw from Derrida’s later works.And this is why Derrida himself closes hisanalysis of democracy in the post-9/11 worldby stating that new democracies, as they arebeing cultivated or coerced through variousAmerican and European foreign policy initia-tives, cannot be asked to merely mimic or re-produce that which is imagined as their origi-nary form: namely, the United States, at leastas seen from the proponents of democracy’sexport. Nor can the “democracy to come” bepermitted to be constrained by either culturalrelativism or nationalism (2005, p. 204). Itmust inhabit the double bind and consist inthe rational relationship between the singularand the universalizable, the calculable and theincalculable, the conditional and the uncon-ditional. Derrida offers several figures for thekind of radical democratic impulse that he en-visages. It must be acknowledged that he doesnot advocate an end to either culture or thenation-state; these are terms and forms with-out which we cannot do, just as metaphysics

cannot simply be relegated to the trash heapof intellectual history. But within these his-tories he claims that it is possible to figurean unconditionality that exceeds the questionof sovereignty (as autonomy and self-willing)and a democracy that is not reducible to thecalculative logic of elections and proxy rep-resentation. These figures are (a) hospitality,an openness to the other that does not de-mand recognition as its own precondition; (b)the gift, a generosity that does not demandself-recognition and hence return or repay-ment; (c) forgiveness, a relinquishment of theeconomy that would demand a return of andfor violence; and (d ) justice, which recognizesthe incommensurability between law andsingularity.

Each of these figures may also function asa figure for the others, the gift perhaps mostproductively of all, because in each case thereis an escape from economy, understood ascommensuration and the cancellation of dif-ference as debt. In a way, then, Derrida re-turns us to anthropology, indeed to an olderanthropology than that which has arisen toresist his thought. That anthropology con-strued the gift as the figure of figures forall that we, in the so-called lettered West ornorth, are not. However, that same anthropol-ogy misconstrued the gift as that from whichwe came, that which preceded debt, economy,and social hierarchy, but especially the mon-etized and then capitalized economies of in-dustrial Europe. For Derrida, the gift is notsimply a heuristic model for an institutionnever observed in its empirical innocence. Itis the name of an ethical futurity to whichwe must direct ourselves now (as it was forMauss), but without the alibis to which an-thropology generally turns: both nature andculture.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

The author is not aware of any biases that might be perceived as affecting the objectivity ofthis review.

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AR323-FM ARI 24 August 2007 20:38

Annual Review ofAnthropology

Volume 36, 2007Contents

Prefatory Chapter

Overview: Sixty Years in AnthropologyFredrik Barth � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �1

Archaeology

The Archaeology of Religious RitualLars Fogelin � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 55

Çatalhöyük in the Context of the Middle Eastern NeolithicIan Hodder � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �105

The Archaeology of Sudan and NubiaDavid N. Edwards � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �211

A Bicycle Made for Two? The Integration of Scientific Techniques intoArchaeological InterpretationA. Mark Pollard and Peter Bray � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �245

Biological Anthropology

Evolutionary MedicineWenda R. Trevathan � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �139

Genomic Comparisons of Humans and ChimpanzeesAjit Varki and David L. Nelson � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �191

Geometric MorphometricsDennis E. Slice � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �261

Genetic Basis of Physical FitnessHugh Montgomery and Latif Safari � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �391

Linguistics and Communicative Practices

SociophoneticsJennifer Hay and Katie Drager � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 89

vii

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AR323-FM ARI 24 August 2007 20:38

Comparative Studies in Conversation AnalysisJack Sidnell � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �229

Semiotic AnthropologyElizabeth Mertz � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �337

Sociocultural Anthropology

Queer Studies in the House of AnthropologyTom Boellstorff � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 17

Gender and TechnologyFrancesca Bray � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 37

The Anthropology of Organized Labor in the United StatesE. Paul Durrenberger � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 73

Embattled Ranchers, Endangered Species, and Urban Sprawl:The Political Ecology of the New American WestThomas E. Sheridan � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �121

Anthropology and MilitarismHugh Gusterson � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �155

The Ecologically Noble Savage DebateRaymond Hames � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �177

The Genetic Reinscription of RaceNadia Abu El-Haj � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �283

Community Forestry in Theory and Practice: Where Are We Now?Susan Charnley and Melissa R. Poe � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �301

Legacies of Derrida: AnthropologyRosalind C. Morris � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �355

Indexes

Cumulative Index of Contributing Authors, Volumes 28–36 � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �407

Cumulative Index of Chapter Titles, Volumes 28–36 � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �410

Errata

An online log of corrections to Annual Review of Anthropology articles may be foundat http://anthro.annualreviews.org/errata.shtml

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Legacies of Derrida -- On the Gift - Annual Review

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