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Provocations of European Ethnology TALAL ASAD / JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY JAMES W. FERNANDEZ / UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MICHAEL HERZFELD / HARVARD UNIVERSITY ANDREW LASS / MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE SUSAN CAROL ROGERS / NEW YORK UNIVERSITY JANE SCHNEIDER / GRADUATE CENTER, CUNY KATHERINE VERDERY / UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN Provocations of European Ethnology AT A SPECIAL WORKSHOP held in the fall of 1994, we as, we hope, a productive provocation to our colleagues gathered to discuss the rapid growth of interest in Euro- working in a world that has rarely been able to adopt a pean ethnography and ethnology, especially since the stand of indifference toward the idea of Europe and to- foundation of the Society for the Anthropology of ward all that this idea has entailed Europe in 1986, and its implications for the larger devel- opment of anthropological theory.1 After the delibera- tions, each of us developed the position paper originally Theorizing Europe: Persuasive Paradoxes formulated for that initial encounter. The texts that fol- low are the result. They claim neither thematic nor theo- Michael Herzfeld retical unity, but they do suggest that the refocusing of anthropological interest on one of the discipline's cul- In these comments we examine the question of tural contexts of emergence, coupled with the geopoliti- "Europe," both its presence in anthropology as an ob- cal shifts of the past decade, may have contributed to a ject of study and its relatively slow appearance in the reconsideration of the role of social and cultural anthro- canon of major ethnographic sites, in order to ask what pology in the formulation of a social theory. In one the recent "turn to Europe" portends for anthropology. sense the "anthropologizing" of Europe was a necessary Until only some two or three decades ago, our discipline methodological counterpart to the dethronement of often seemed preoccupied with just about every part of Europe as the fount of all wisdom. But what, for those the world except Europe. Yet few today would argue who still (or for the first time) claim it as their identity that this is still the situation—if, in more than a crassly and home, is Europe? We offer these brief ruminations littoral sense, it ever was. The goal now is thus not to ar- gue for some sudden and phantasmagoric capitulation in which ethnographers of the exotic turn abruptly to TALAL ASAD is a professor in the Department of Anthropology, Johns the study of Europe. To the contrary, such a move Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218. would deprive Europeanist ethnography of its greatest JAMES W. FERNANDEZ is a professor in the Department of Anthropology, asset: the peculiar status of "Europe" within the field University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637. has important lessons for all anthropologists. But these MICHAEL HERZFELD is a professor in the Department of Anthropology, do not include a catechism of conversion. Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138. I wish to suggest three areas of timely interest: new ANDREW LASS is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology ways of examining the concept of colonialism; a closer and Anthropology, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA 01075. SUSAN CAROL ROGERS is an associate professor in the Department of look at questions of who speaks for whom (and its em- Anthropology, New York University, New York, NY 10003. barrassing corollary, where do "our" ideas come from?); JANE SCHNEIDER is a professor in the Ph.D. Program in Anthropology, and an epistemological critique drawn from the well- Graduate Center, CUNY, New York, NY 10036. attested interpretation of nationalism, colonialism, and KATHERINE VERDERY is a professor in the Department of Anthropology, the rise and proliferation of our discipline. These three University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Ml 48109. areas possess a certain mutual relevance and coherence, American Anthropologi$m(4)W3-73Q. Copyright © 1997, American Anthropological Association. 714 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST • VOL. 99, No. 4 • DECEMBER 1997 and they serve to open up a discussion of the ways in In other words, we must confront two very differ- which current practical exigencies, from limited fund- ent, but interrelated, variants of the usual sense of colo- ing to geopolitical realignments and closed borders, nialism: the possibility of a non-Western variant aaid the may generate useful perspectival shifts at the level of distinct possibility that a more discreet and perhaps far theory. more insidious Western colonialism, one that is primar- Colonialism first, then. Europe is often seen as the ily engaged today in the international politics of cultural source rather than the destination of colonialism, yet distinction, is still very much alive and well. Europe contains a number of sites that were colonized My second point stems from the first and logically rather than colonizing even in Victorian times: Malta anticipates the issue that follows. It concerns the vari- and Cyprus are clearly defined examples. For Cyprus, ous responses of Europeans to the, sometimes startling, Vassos Argyrou (1996a, 1996b, 1997) has already docu- discovery that they are already under the dissecting mented some of the consequences for daily social prac- glaze of anthropologists. This is bo th an intellectual re- tice. There are some less obvious cases as well; Begona finement of a covert racism (of the uwe are not savages" Aretxaga (1995) and Jane Nadel-Klein (1991) have ar- variety), at one level, and at another, paradoxically, a gued for Ireland and Scotland, respectively, as the train- late version of the colonialist critique of anthropology. ing grounds for the grand expansions of colonial rule in These are not necessarily mutually incompatible stances. Africa, Asia, and elsewhere far from Europe (see also Taken together, however, they indicate how powerful Feldman 1991). Larry Wolff (1994) has suggested an and pervasive is the model of occidental superiority and analogous subordination of the former Eastern Bloc the idea that rational scholars are somehow free of cul- countries. There is also the vexed question of relation- tural constraints or the messy vagueness of symbolism ships between colonialism and class domination, and (see especially Connor 1993; Huntington 1993). this is further complicated by two other historical phe- Moreover, they reflect the perpetuation of colonial- nomena: the massive migration from the former colo- ist assumptions even, or especially, within the optimis- nies in Europe and the perennial challenges that groups tically named "new Europe." This appears with notable such as the Gypsies and the Jews have posed for bureau- force in the epistemological nativism of certain Spanish cratic and scholarly classification of nation-states (see anthropologists (e.g., Llobera 1986; Moreno Navarro Boyarin 1991; Okely 1987). In countries still recovering 1984), although rarely those in the national capital, a from the hardships of totalitarian control or local wars, contrast that shows how easily subnational hierarchies pluralism may not seem a high priority to the majority may reproduce international inequalities (see Fernan- population or even to some relatively privileged minori- dez 1983). As more moderate voices have cautioned, ties. however (on Greece, for example, see Bakalaki 1993; There is an additional and perhaps equally instruc- Gefou-Madianou 1993), there is ample space for mutual tive complication. Colonialism, as I have noted, is often generosity: displacing a genuinely colonialist arrogance taken to be a primarily European, or at least Western, by an equally monopolistic nativism may be historically project. (But see Robertson 1995 for a countervailing interesting and perhaps even politically understandable, example.) Greece, however, and indeed much of the but it risks reproducing the very discourse that it seeks Balkans entered the family of nation-states, not through to destroy, an irony already noted by some African intel- the breakup of a European empire but from the detritus lectuals in the postcolonialist context (Mbembe 1992; of Ottoman suzerainty, as did much of the Arab world It Mudimbe 1988). is thus important to ask whether Syrian, Greek, and Ser- The anthropology of nation-states—in which, after bian complaints about "the Turkish yoke" bear witness all, considerable intellectual labor has already been ex- to "another" colonialism or whether, as I suspect, they pended on ethnological questions (too often contemp- instead indicate a hegemony by certain specific West- tuously derided by anthropologists as "folklore")— ern powers that find it convenient to treat the Turkish benefits from a more dynamic interaction of endog- past as a stain on these countries' occidental escutch- enous and exogenous perceptions. It also, we should eon. For these powers the orientalist argument has add, challenges the essentializing propensities of both proved useful for reining in the lesser and more depend- and of the exceptionalisms (national and anthropologi- ent European countries' frequent demands for greater cal) that these terms imply. Mutual hostility is counter- control over their own destinies. It has perpetuated an productive; as a model more worthy of emulation, let uneven struggle over cultural capital at the global level, me mention George Saunders's recent (1993) explora- a struggle that is also reproduced, as again Argyrou's tion of Ernesto De Martino in this journal and its expo- materials especially illustrate, in everyday life. It is also sure to local discussion and dissection in the Italian important
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