on the critical uses of difference: the uninvited guest and "the invention of culture"

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On the Critical Uses of Difference: The Uninvited Guest and "The Invention of Culture"Author(s): Joel RobbinsSource: Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice, Vol. 46, No.1 (Spring 2002), pp. 4-11Published by: Berghahn BooksStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23170123 .

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On the Critical Uses of Difference The Uninvited Guest and The Invention of Culture

Joel Robbins

The year 2000 marked the twenty-fifth year anniversary of the publication of Roy Wagner's book The Invention of Culture. One of the earliest and still

most profoundly challenging considerations of anthropology from a quar

ter-century that went on to see its share of critical engagements with the

discipline, the book's recent anniversary provides an opportunity to look

back at Wagner's argument and consider what it has taught us and what

parts of its message may still remain to be assimilated. In what follows, I

take up these issues by examining the book's reception, laying out its core

argument, considering its contribution to critical anthropology and, finally,

showing how its primary analytic strategy can be applied to the study of

contemporary religious movements.

Let me start by noting that The Invention of Culture has had an odd

reception history. It has, on the one hand, found a core audience of dedi

cated and very good readers. On the other, it has also attracted a very wide

following among those who know it primarily by reputation or quick

perusal and whose engagement is most intense with its title. It is not nec

essarily a bad thing to have these second kind of 'readers.' In fact, a soci

ologist who recently had occasion to muse on the way contemporary

classics are made pointed out that "no book can claim to be 'influential'

today until large numbers of people who have not read it (or have not read

beyond its introduction) have strong opinions about it (Goodwin 1996:

293)." But compared to, say, Imagined Communities, Europe and. the Peo

ple Without History, or The Invention of Tradition, three other influential

books that sport titles to conjure with, The Invention of Culture has been

largely ill-served by people's readiness to cite a book by its cover.

Social Analysis, Volume 46, Issue 1, Spring 2002



On the Critical Uses of Difference 5

It has been ill-served because those who take the title to epitomize the

book tend to assimilate The Invention of Culture to one of two closely related

schools of thought it fits only uncomfortably within: that of reflexive, critical

anthropology (e.g., as practised by Fabian or Rabinow) and that of the strain

of cultural studies that sees culture as a product of human efforts to dominate

one another. In anthropology, both of these schools have been grounded in an

"ontology of power and conflict" (see also Harris 1992; Milbank 1990: 2; Strenski 1998; Zeldin 1994) that Wagner does not share (Wagner 1995). In

keeping with his roots in "symbols and meanings" anthropology, he rather

starts from something more like an ontology of sense and sense-making. If for

those other schools the social relation between, say, a colonial officer and one

of his subjects stands as the model for the anthropological relationship and

indeed for all human relationships, then for Wagner, it is rather the relation of fieldworker to a world he/she must make sense of that best captures the

essence of the human condition (1981: 35).1 It is because of these funda mental differences in ontology that the title of Wagner's book, when read

through the conventions of these other approaches, can only get one so far.

Having pointed out some very fundamental differences, however, it remains to note that the author of The Invention of Culture does share a cer tain self-critical intent with the reflexive anthropologists. Like them, he wants to interrogate and situate anthropological practice. But here another

divergence arises. For while the most well known reflexivists tended to

encompass anthropology within a universalist account of social practice and its motivation, an account grounded in their ontology of power and

conflict, Wagner embeds his account of it in an analysis of what used to be

called, with a straight face, the uniqueness of the modern West. The Inven tion of Culture is structured down to the last detail by an argument about the "profound differentiation of mankind" into two groups that Wagner does not hesitate to label "tribal" (or 'peasant,' 'ethnic,' etc.—the category in fact becomes very broad as the argument develops) peoples and "we" of the modern West (1981: 104). This move is crucial to Wagner's critical pro ject—anthropology and the notion of culture only make sense to him as

specifically Western projects—but it is completely ignored by the second

kind of readers, and largely overlooked by many of the first. Indeed, sim

ply on the level of rhetorical strategy, this straightforward binarism looks like almost nothing else in modern cultural anthropology; it seems to rely on a trope we are all self-consciously in flight from. For most readers, it is

very much the uninvited guest at this party. But Wagner treats it as the

guest of honor, so it is hard to imagine a serious reading of the book that does not find an important place for it.



6 Joel Robbins

I want to argue for that place here, and I think three kinds of arguments for it need to be made. One, which I do not have space to elaborate, is that

the distinction is not absolute (1981: 104) nor is it obviously naïve or inten

tionally invidious. For present purposes, we can take Wagner's word for

this (e.g., 1981: 104, xiii-xiv). The second argument, which I will make only

very briefly and in formal terms, is that some such distinction is crucial to

the success of his or any other project that is both critical and properly

anthropological. The third is that Wagner's own distinction supports pro ductive ethnographic research and argumentation.

First, then, the matter of the critique of anthropology and anthropol

ogy's potential as a kind of critical practice. Taking this as a formal issue, and thus not getting into the content of Wagner's us/them distinction yet, I would point out that the universalist critics of anthropology—those who

reduce anthropology to simply another version of a general kind of domi

nating social practice—tend to find the same kinds of social relations in

every society. This limits their critical efforts to a kind of continual unmask

ing that shows us that social life here, there and everywhere really has the

same ugly face underneath. Chastening though its results may be, this crit

ical work does very little to enlarge our social imagination or suggest

grounds for either a new anthropology or a new social life (cf. Graeber

2001: 30).2 That is to say, it does little to expand what Strathern (1999: 24) calls "the impoverished conceptual repertoire with which 'Euro-Americans'

seem lumbered." It fails at this tasks because, in Wagner's terms, it is a

capitulation to the Western construction of the innate as asocial and indi

vidualistic. As such, it never tells us things we do not already know.

Through its us/them structure, The Invention of Culture avoids this

universalizing trap. It posits a place outside the West from which to launch

not only criticism but also an effort to elaborate new standards. It dislodges innatist assumptions and plumbs for recombination. Even if you do not like

the particular other place Wagner has found, I think it would be hard to

miss the extent to which his ability to speak from such a place lends his

voice a calm and full moral tone so missing from the largely flat and pre dictable efforts at this kind of work that issues from so many other quar ters. It is a voice that also largely avoids the critical paralysis that Geertz

(1988: 137) has derided as "moral hypochondria," the kind of paralysis that

sets in when there is only one road in sight for everyone, the anthropolo

gist included and it is the low one.

If we pay close attention to the critical intent that underlies Wagner's binarism, and at the same time attend carefully to the moral tone of his

work, we can see that as singular as The Invention of Culture may appear,




it does not stand alone but rather has important precursors and successors.

Foregoing any attempt to lay out a full intellectual history here, it suffices

to note that it was Dumont (e.g., 1980, 1986) who did the most to mod

ernize the us/them binarism that anthropology inherited from the founding

figures of the social sciences, and that Dumont has been an important influence on Wagner (as Wagner (2001) acknowledges in his most recent

book). And if the binarism at the heart of The Invention of Culture has a

prehistory in Dumont's work, it also has an important legacy in that of

Strathern (e.g., 1988). In Strathern's hands, binarism becomes self-con

sciously tactical and heuristic, but her critical project and moral tone are

clearly akin to Wagner's. The collective impact of the work of Wagner, Dumont and Strathern, as well as the arguments that have surrounded

their writing, suggests that binarism may be a more powerful critical tool than the general run of anthropologists is ready to admit. At the very least, a reading of The Invention of Culture that seeks to consider the full force of

its argument needs to be open to this possibility.3

¡Urning now to the use ot Wagner's us/them binarism in analyzing

ethnography, it is time to tackle the content of that binary head on. In a short article, I cannot afford to luxuriate in the subtleties of an argument that is nothing if not subtle, so let me put matters quickly in just a few of the terms Wagner uses. All people make their worlds and in doing so they employ both conventional symbols and differentiated, novel versions of them that emerge when they are deployed in new contexts. 'We' assumes that differentiation and novelty are innate, part of nature, and we take the creation of convention as the paramount human project. 'They' assumes that convention is innate and that differentiation and novelty must be pro duced. In a shorthand way, we might put it that we assume the individual and make society a problem; they assume society and make the individual a problem. If we accept this scheme, one question that arises is how peo

ple might move from one position to the other. Wagner offers an account of the initial historical occurrence of this transformation in the West. I want to

go beyond this to' suggest that his model of that transformation can also be useful in studying what everyone seems to want to study these days: how it is that people who are not modern do or do not become modern in these

globalizing times.

In taking up issues of modernity and globalization, we could do worse than to talk about Christianity. Christianity, it is well recognized, is very often the thin end of the wedge of cultural globalization; the first part of the Western juggernaut to get leverage on 'traditional' cultures and begin to

dislodge them. But if Christianity is to make people modern in Wagner's



8 Joel Robbins

sense, it would have to persuade them to cease assuming that society is

innate. How might it do this?

Consider, in this regard, the literature on churches and sects. Ever since

Troeltsch (1960) and Niebuhr (1957) popularized these concepts, scholars of

Christianity have recognized that its expression has historically oscillated

between these two forms. Let us examine this oscillation in Wagnerian terms.

A church is a Christian institution aligned with the dominant society and

focused on the creation and maintenance of a stable social group in the form

of a congregation. It is, in Wagner's terms, a very modern kind of institution, one that assumes that individual differences are innate and works to over

come them by leading its members to work consciously at articulating and

upholding conventions. What about sects? In the standard account which I

follow here, sects arise in opposition to the worldliness and convention

bound nature of churches. They turn their back on convention, taking it for

granted, and make a project of the development of individual sanctity in

opposition to the church's tired, conventional routines. In their focus on indi

vidual differentiation, sects exist, as sociological jargon currently has it, "in

tension with society (Stark and Bainbridge 1985; Wilson 1990)." They are, in

Wagner's terms, intent on fostering processes of differentiation.

Within Western society, sects clearly serve the function Wagner would

expect: that of correcting the relativization of convention, and then return

ing people, now convinced once again of the disruptive power of innate dif

ferentiation, to a focus on the articulation of collective contexts. That is to

say, they tend quite regularly to develop into churches dedicated to the cre

ation of their own rule-governed congregations (Niebuhr 1957). But what

happens when sect ideologies are transported to "tribal" contexts, where

the articulation of convention was never people's self-conscious project in

the first place? The first thing to note is that sects are 'off the bat' enormously popu

lar among those who have always taken differentiation as the primary human task. Sects share this emphasis, after all, and they promise people the kind of individual, creative power vis-à-vis convention they are always

searching for. In their rhetorical promotion of the profound transformation

of the everyday along differentiating lines, what they offer looks a lot like

magic—a way of tipping the conventional world off-balance in one's own

direction. Given these continuities, it is little wonder that missions that pro mote sect-like versions of Christianity are by far the most successful in

winning converts these days in places like Papua New Guinea.

The second thing to note is that amongst "tribal" people sects often

take indigenous conventions as the 'church' against which they differenti




ate. This leads to an unexpected turn in the development of sectarianism

in these areas.

As institutions that are 'in tension with society,' sects are by definition

minority groups (Niebuhr 1957: 19; Wilson 1982: 117); if they are to have

anything to differentiate themselves against, they must retain this status.

But very often in the "tribal" world, sects, by attacking traditional life in

general, end up converting entire societies. You then have the paradox of a

sect as big as society; a sect that ends up constituting that which it rejects. What do such outsized sects produce? I think what they produce is that

very problematization of society that Wagner calls modern. In their promo tion of the individual's divine spark, and their condemnation of the ways

society can snuff it out, sects that take over society render social relatedness

an artificial human project that must be carefully policed if it is to work at

all. This is so because innate sociality, from a sectarian point of view, is

reinterpreted as an innate propensity to sin. One of the most widespread

findings among those who study Papua New Guinea groups that have been

exposed to Christianity, especially its sect-like versions, is that they see

themselves as composed of people who are unable to get along with each

other, cooperate or even live together without falling into the clutches of

antisocial emotions like anger and envy (e.g., Brison 1991; Robbins 1988).4 These complaints give voice to the transformation from innate to artificial

sociality, and ultimately to the sense of communal failure that for Wagner always both haunts and motivates modernity's invention of culture.

I hope this very quick sketch gives one example of how the distinction at the heart of The Invention of Culture can find ethnographic application

addressing problems that were not in Wagner's sights when he wrote it.5

More broadly, I hope it suggests the value of working with this uninvited heuristic rather than simply setting it aside in our reading of the book.

Given the nature of this article, perhaps I can speak in closing in my own voice, rescuing it for a moment from the snares of our collective con vention. The single most important message of The Invention of Culture is

probably the one that cautions us not to try to catch up the creativity of oth ers in the forms of our own. The people we study are doing something, but unless they are modern what they are doing is probably not culture, and thus we should not make it take that form. To engage and understand with out assimilating and encompassing is tough enough as an analytic task. It is even harder to pull off as a social relation. But, as a teacher, Wagner rou

tinely does. Quick to foster growth, slow to enforce orthodoxy, and with the best ear for the voice of the other as it comes through ethnography I have ever encountered, he is an extraordinary teacher. His rare success in squar



10 Joel Robbins

ing personal practice with anthropological theory in this way means that to

pay tribute to the book is to pay tribute to the man, and it is with gratitude that I do both here.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I thank Rupert Stasch, Jukka Siikala and an anonymous reviewer for Social

Analysis for their comments on an earlier draft of this article. An earlier, shorter version appeared under the title "This Profound Differentiation of

Mankind: On the Uninvited Guest and The Invention of Culture." Suomen

Antropologi 26, no.l (2001): 29-34. As will probably be clear from the con

clusion of the article, Roy Wagner was my doctoral supervisor. I dedicate

this article to him.

NOTES

1. All unattributed references are to The Invention of Culture.

2. Alexander (1995: 193) offers an extremely cogent critique of Bourdieu in precisely these

terms. Robbins (1994) contains a more extensive elaboration of this argument about the

importance of difference to critical social thought. 3. In a short article, I cannot do justice either to the similarities or to the differences

between the works of Wagner, Dumont and Strathern, but in case my intent is not obvi

ous I should be careful to note that I do not mean to conflate them but only to point out

some very general similarities that clearly flow along lines of acknowledged influence.

4. Complaints about people's inability to get along as well as Westerners appear to do have

been widespread in colonial and post-colonial Papua New Guinea, even among those

who have not converted to sect-like versions of Christianity (e.g., Smith 1994). I would

argue that these complaints represent people's first inklings of what is involved in the

transformation from an indigenous view of the innate nature of sociality to a Western

view of its artificiality. Part of the appeal of sect-like versions of Christianity in Papua New Guinea is that they develop ('rationalize') these inklings into a full-fledged model

of the difficulties of social life and the dangers they present to the individual.

5. For an in many ways very similar discussion of contemporary religious movements that

also draws on The Invention of Culture, see Siikala (n.d.)




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