What a Difference Political Economy Makes: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era

Micaela Di Leonardo

Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 66, No. 2, Constructing Meaningful Dialogue on Difference: Feminism and Postmodernism in Anthropology and the Academy. Part 1. (Apr., 1993), pp. 76-80.

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http://www.jstor.org Wed Sep 12 15:04:06 2007 WHAT A DIFFERENCE POLITICAL ECONOMY MAKES: FEMINIST ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE POSTMODERN ERA

MICAELA DI LEONARD0 Northwestern University

While the postmodern turn in anthropology has largely ignored political economy, gender analysis, and its own theoretical antecedents, it does signal an important shift in attention. The post-structuralist/postmodernperspective alerts us to the problematics of one arena of cultural production, namely, that of ethnographic texts. This perspective, however, can be fruitfully applied not only inwardly, but also outwardly, in investigations of our informants' cultural production. This essay highlights the need for political-economic frames to make sense of such post-structuralist insights. [political economy, feminism, postmodernism, new ethnography, gender]

This essay could be described as a telegram from criticism to non-literary productions, and decenters the loyal opposition. It is a telegram because it is a pious certainties concerning artistic and "high cul- short commentary and summary, and I define my tural" canons. stance as loyal opposition because, in the context of In anthropology in particular the school I have these special issues, where we assume friendliness labelled "ethnography as text" after the article of to feminist anthropology and post-structuralism/ that title by Marcus and Cushman (1982) has postmodernism in writers and reading audience fruitfully analyzed the rhetorical strategies ethnog- alike, I must adopt the Cold War radicals' ox- raphers use to lend themselves authorial privilege ymoronic line towards Communist re- in order to claim the right to describe the lifeways gimes--critical support. In what follows, then, I ar- and cultural worlds of other human populations. ticulate some problems I perceive in both the Ethnography as text writers have compellingly dis- "postmodern turn" in anthropology and in some cerned our "fables of rapport," selection of "com- feminist uses of it. In so doing, I address in particu- mon denominator people," and use of allegorical lar the key intellectual perspective submerged, tropes. As well, they (particularly James Clifford elided, misdefined-take your pick, depending on and Renato Rosaldo, and the earlier work of Talal author-by postmodern anthropologists: political Asad) have focused on the ways in which the textu- economy. I end, pragmatically and illustratively, alization of the lives of Third-World Others has with a hypothetical ethnographic case: how I would been and is part of the process of colonization and approach my current fieldwork among black work- now neocolonialism. They have also, of course, no- ing-class women in New Haven, Connecticut, with toriously ignored the ways in which this analysis a post-structuralist frame alone, in contrast to the applies to the textualization of women's lives frame many of us now label "culture and political worldwide, as Fran Mascia-Lees, Pat Sharpe, and economy ." Colleen Cohen have contended (1989). I would add First of all, let me sketch my interpretation of that ethnography as text writers have also tended post-structuralism/postmodernism(see also di Leo- to avoid analysis of their own race, class, and gen- nardo 1991). Post-structuralism is a movement de- der placements, and their implications, in the acad- riving largely from literary criticism that fore- emy and in American society. grounds language over all other social phenomena Postmodernism is often used interchangeably and that particularly foregrounds textual art. It with post-structuralism. The term originally re- construes all texts-whether private letters, op-ed ferred to particular architectural innovations that pieces, Das Kapital, or scientific reports-as more mixed stylistic elements from different eras, mud- or less persuasive fictions. This iconoclastic stance dying formerly clean modernist lines. It has ex- advances our understanding of relations among panded to refer to any example of cultural produc- seemingly unrelated genres of writing, throws pre- tion that violates modernist conventions, sumptions of realist representation into a cocked particularly those of linearity and realist represen- hat, allows us to apply the analytic tools of literary tation. Thus ethnography as text writers, chiming 76 POLITICAL ECONOMY 77 ironically with and apparently in total ignorance of feminism, is notoriously essentialist and communi- I'ecriture feminine, have advocated tarian, hostile both to positivism, which it brands "postmodernist" ethnographic writing that would as male thought, and post-structuralism, which it textually subvert ethnographic authority through sees as both jargon-ridden and, in its endless rela- interlayering informants' and ethnographers' voices tivism~,denying the innate moral superiority of and other experimental writing techniques. women. Finally, marxist-feminism has a venerable Postmodernism also refers to the historical era in history inside feminism and within anthropology it- which we are living, which has apparently obliter- self, going back at least to Engels' publication of ated all modernist conceptions of linear evolution- The origin of the family, private property and the ary change. state in 1884, just after Marx's death. And while Thus we arrive at social constructionism as the some forms of marxist-feminism, particularly the natural but largely unrecognized isomorphism be- evolutionary work of the 1970s, have had close ties tween postmodern anthropology and feminism, as to positivism, others, in their attention to historical Mascia-Lees, Sharpe, and Cohen (1989) contend. contingency, show their kinship to post-structural- Certainly it is the case that major feminist texts ism as well. But my larger point here is that marx- have analyzed women's inscription as Other, just as ist-feminism cannot be ignored. It is a major strand ethnography as text writers have been concerned of feminism both inside and outside anthropology. with colonized male Others, and the latter group of If we open up our understanding of the scope writers has astonishingly ignored this obvious par- of feminist theory, allowing for the many femi- allel. Donna Haraway, in her recent, very admira- nisms that have existed and do exist, we can look ble study Primate visions (1989), evokes the "four more accurately at postmodern anthropology and temptationsfi-positivism or relativism, post-struc- its implications for feminist ethnographic practice. turalism or social constructionism, marxism, and Let me now harness this opening to my second ar- feminism/antiracism-that she sees as forces to be gument for marxism's place on the feminist ark. accepted and held in tension with one another, Mascia-Lees et al. and many others have com- equally important intellectual lenses that can be mented on the ethnography as text school's igno- equally deplorable traps if relied on singly. Mascia- rance and misconstructions of feminism. But few, Lees et al. and many other feminists would, I with the partial exception of Nicole Polier and Wil- think, construe post-structuralism and feminism/ liam Roseberry (1989), have attended to the same antiracism as a single overlapping frame and jetti- writers' ignorance and misconstructions of marxism son--or never take on board in the first or political economy. George Marcus, for example, place-realism and marxism. Realism can speak claims that marxism "provides a ready-made clas- for itself. Let me now argue, in two different ways, sic and familiar means of evoking the macrosocial for marxism's place on the feminist craft. order" (1986: 186), a description that would come First, to honor the literary-critical source of as a considerable surprise to marxists who disagree post-structuralism, let me make use of the classical vehemently with one another's "classic" visions. rhetorical term "synecdoche." Western feminism Marcus defines political economy, equally wildly has for more than a century continuously commit- and wrongly, as a "continuing commentary on ted the synecdochic fallacy of claiming to represent world conditions in terms most relevant to Western the lives of all women, rather than those of West- officialdom and statecraft" (p. 167). ern, white, and privileged women. Some Western What is political economy really and what dif- and non-Western feminists have also continuously ference does it make? According to William Rose- protested this hegemonic rhetorical framing. But berry, historical political economy is both the "at- feminism's use of part-for-whole logic does not end tempt to understand the emergence of particular there. Many of us have also continuously ignored peoples at the conjunction of local and global histo- strands of feminist thought and action not our own. ries, to place local populations in the larger cur- While contemporary liberal feminism certainly re- rents of world history," and "the attempt to con- lies, for example, on the social constructionist dis- stantly place culture in time, to see a constant tinction between sex and gender, it relies equally interplay between experience and meaning in a on positivist presuppositions that are anathema to context in which both experience and meaning are post-structuralism. Cultural feminism, certainly the shaped by inequality and domination" (1989: 49). strongest strand of contemporary non-academic Just as there are many feminisms, of course, so 78 ANTHROPOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

there are many political economies. The term was actual shifting intersections of gender, racelethnic- codified in the eighteenth century to describe the ity, class, sexual preference, region, and the like in unified subject that concerned Adam Smith, David evolving American populations, and the ways in Ricardo, and Karl Marx. Later academic develop- which they are construed in various contexts-that ments split this subject into the partially separable is, only doing "culture and political econ- purviews of economics, political science, sociology, omy"-gives us an historically contingent, but history-and anthropology. In recent decades polit- nonetheless real Archimedean lever on difference. ical economy has been revived as a label for inter- To make my critique as clear as possible, let disciplinary but economically-based marxist and me approach the issue from a slightly different di- radical work, for social science investigation of the rection. We can envision post-structuralism/ empirical interactions between governmental and postmodernism in institutional terms, as a form of other social forces, and for an extremely conserva- disciplinary colonization: the literary-criticization tive branch of neoclassical economics. Among the of the academy. (There are now outposts in history, radicals, scholars have disagreed on the relations political science, sociology, and economics, as well between economic forces and other areas of social as anthropology.) There is no question that ele- life, on the perception of the importance of human ments of this imperial venture are positive, the agency, and on the acceptance or rejection of vari- equivalent of Roman or British-built infrastructure. ous strands of social theory. In anthropology in After all, we can only be for interdisciplinary work. particular, political economic work has been bedev- But I want to suggest that this trope, unlike the iled by economic reductionism and evolutionism. road to Rome, runs both ways. The late Raymond But the existence of these flaws does not excuse the Williams' literary criticism was an example of a idealist reductionisms of too many anthropologists. deeply political economic vision of artistic produc- Certainly economies are culturally constructed, but tion, and many practitioners of the new historicism so are cultures economically channeled. To chop off are as concerned as he was with the facts that liter- and discard investigation of political and economic ary texts are produced inside and are part of ongo- life with the excuse that our informants have varying political economies, and that artists are histori- ing cultural constructions of these phenomena is to cal social actors. The parallels for anthropology are trade in false dichotomies rather than to transcend obvious. them. Finally, there is the question of connection to Thus we arrive at one difference historical po- pragmatic politics. I have already played the doz- litical economy makes. In the "culture and political ens on ethnography as text writers in print, point- economy" form that Roseberry and many others ing out that we cannot "escape our political and practice, it prevents the commission of synecdochic economic placement at home." It is significant that fallacies, whether of the non-feminist or feminist ethnography as text scholars tend to be most con- variety. When we insist on seeing individuals "at cerned with former French colonies, whose present conditions have little relevance for the evolving the conjunction of local and global histories," and American empire, while culture and political econ- always consider for both ends of the ethnographic omy scholarship flourishes in the United States' encounter "the interplay between experience and "backyard," the Caribbean and Latin America. meaning,"- it becomes difficult to erase particular populations or their influence on events. Thus we cannot solve the "difference" problem in feminist The French connection makes sense, given the theoretical foundations of the school. But it can entail, for an Ameri- studies through some sort of holistic, intersubjec- can, a lack of self-reflection, as intellectual and citizen. tive feminist methodology, as Ann Oakley and about one's own material and ideological connections to others have contended. Their methodological sug- current imperial enterprises (di Leonardo 1989: 352). gestions, in any event, derive from phenomenology, not feminism. Nor will the imposition of a contem- I believe that the same argument applies to femi- porary feminist Procrustean bed constructed nist anthropologists. We need to consider gendered through the lens of conflict in the feminist academy realities in historical political-economic contexts, serve to illuminate difference. Such a perspective even when our fundamental concerns are what used currently essentializes American racial differences, to be called "superstructure." Lila Abu-Lughod, recognizes sexual preference, but ignores American for example, does precisely this in her recent arti- class differences altogether. Only recognizing the cle, "The Romance of Resistance" (1990). POLITICAL ECONOMY 79

Part of this criticism, ironically, is far from ing-using terms like geechee and indicating famil- new. Two decades ago, the eminent leftist sociolo- iarity with the black popular music of their youth. gist Alvin Gouldner castigated the then-trendy And I would consider highly important local graf- schools of ethnomethodology and symbolic interac- fiti such as "The Ville is like Compton"-linking a tionism for fleeing politics for the study of micro- black neighborhood now made notorious through interaction. (The irony is that these schools of the two-part series in The New Yorker (1990) with thought are some of the unacknowledged intellec- the Southern California home of the rap group tual precursors of the ethnography as text school.) NWA. But micro-interactions are in fact laden with politi- The vignette in which Adolph Reed and I were cal implications. I would not say, with Gouldner, stuck in traffic on Dixwell Avenue after the Freddy "abandon the study of rhetorics or symbolism." I Fixer Parade, in an entirely black and largely would instead counsel, with E.M. Forster, "only young crowd blaring rap and dancing in cars and connect." There is no need to jettison new or newly on the street, and a young man yelled at me from articulated post-structuralist insights. But neither is the sidewalk, "Bensonhurst-roll up that window," there justification for using them as substitutes for would be prime grist for the ethnographic mill. The historical political economy. narrative structures and key themes of my women Now we come to ethnographic illustration. informants' life histories would be of great interest. Adolph Reed and I are engaged in long-term re- The librarian, for example, spontaneously head- search among working and middle-class and black lined her first long conversation with me with the and white Americans in New Haven, Connecticut, remark, "Women don't like me," which I was able focusing particularly on women's economic and to interpret contextually to mean, "other black kinship lives and their rhetorical constructions of women don't like me." I later managed to locate those lives. New Haven is a medium-sized deindus- this assertion in a Weltanschauung involving her trialized city with more than one-third black and sense of isolation in black New Haven because of approximately ten percent Puerto Rican popula- her non-United States background, and her loca- tion. It is heavily segregated on the classic New tion between what she saw as "dangerous, terrible England pattern, and its black population is almost people" and the "better class of black people." My entirely working-class or impoverished. We have elderly neighbor has worked with me on several life met individuals through our five-year residence in a history interviews whose rhetorical shape is clearly mixed neighborhood abutting two of the city's the allegorical triumph of the righteous. three poor black areas, through contacts in neigh- And in fact I do believe that all of these inter- borhood stores and bars, Little League connections, actional vignettes are highly important. Who our and through my volunteer tutoring in a local adult informants construe us to be is central to what they basic education class. I am beginning to collect life say in our company. The "garrulous, overdeter- histories of individual women, and we have at- mined, cross-cultural encounter shot through with tended a series of public events such as parades power relations and personal cross purposes," as and street fairs. James Clifford (1983: 120) described ethnographic Here is the hypothetical case. If I were to con- practice, itself must be described. I have learned as duct postmodern ethnography on the model of well from postmodern practice to think harder Crapanzano's Tuhami or Paul Rabinow's Rejiec- about the issue of textualization and to have strate- tions on fieldwork in Morocco, with only the obvi- gies for involving my informants in that process. ous corrections for gender bias, I would focus on But it is equally important that I understand my interactions with my informants and the rhetor- the historical political economy of New Haven and ical structures of their narratives. The fact that a of black populations in New Haven and in the middle-aged public librarian originally showed in- United States as a whole. In fact, all of the vi- terest in me because she suspected that Adolph gnettes that I have just sketched can be understood Reed's origins were Cape Verdean (as are hers) only in that context. The librarian, the elderly would be of interest. I would note carefully the way neighbor, the fly boys who write graffiti and who in which the natural conversation of my older, shout ironies to the passing white anthropologist Southern-born students in adult basic education exist within a deindustrialized region kept on mili- courses elides mention of race; I would also note tary-spending life support through the 1980s, in a their pleasure in and approbation of my signify- city ruled until recently by a white ethnic Demo- 80 ANTHROPOLOGICAL QUARTERLY cratic machine in bed with its major industry, a large in family life histories and contemporary ac- tax-avoiding Ivy League university. As a result of counts, not only in terms of shifting sexual divisions the sweetheart tax abatements, crony hiring prac- in occupational opportunities, but also in terms of tices, and corrupt management, the new black key women's and men's narrative themes, such as mayor administers a city on the verge of bank- female gentility. The librarian, a former cocktail ruptcy. The librarian constantly fears a layoff. The waitress, holds gentility at arm's length, while the elderly neighbor is secure with her pension but may elderly neighbor, a former social worker, embraces lose her black working-class tenants to the down- it with fervor. I am continuing to probe the class turn-there are now two empty apartments on our and racial implications for my informants of this block. One of the Southern adult education stu- key Western, gendered construct of the past two dents works for an industrial firm that has not yet centuries. shut down, as its neighbor just did, summarily lay- Historical political economy makes a differ- ing off thousands. His sister works, after years as a ence. It is the only practice that enables us to work domestic, as a private duty nurse for local elderly adequately with varying and opposing cultural con- whites. Her service sector employment, like service structions, whether those of our informants or our work nationally, is low paid but stable. The ways in own. Political-economic considerations do not allow which these individuals construe their lives are di- us to "read out" from base to superstructure, the rectly connected to these economic patterns, in- claim that many ethnography as text writers wish flected by gender and generation, as well as to their to identify synecdochically with all marxist very different familial histories of migration to the thought. They do allow us to interpret, to make region, varying from unlettered Southern share- sense, to contextualize ideologies, just as ideologies croppers to young newlywed high school graduates interpret, make sense of and contextualize political from northern New England, arriving from the economy. We feminists should not leave home 1920s to the near present. As well, gender bulks without it.

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