HAOLE-ING IN THE WIND - ON THE RHETORIC OF IDENTITY ANTHROPOLOGY

What I do as an anthropologist is to understand culture, or a culture; and such understanding must surely be through the prism of my own cul tural subjectivity. Yet the dialogue I carry on is not with the cultur e: it is an understanding about culture that I carry our in dialogical form with my colleagues from where it spills over into modern life an d thought, influencing that life in a variety of ways. Tills spill, th is overflow has affected the discourse of the intelligentsia in probab ly every modern city in the world today. While it cannot provide the e nergy, the blindness, and the passion that religious and political fun damentalisms give to their adherents, it has at least that potential t o influence a vision of a more humane world order (Obeyesekere 1990b: 274). Material forces and circumstances always lead a double life in h uman societies; they are at once physical and meaningful. Without ceas ing to be objectively compelling, they are endowed with the symbolic v alues of a certain cultural field. Reciprocally then, without ceasing to be symbolic, cultural categories and relationships are endowed with materiality....It is sometimes necessary to remind ourselves that our pretended rationalist discourse is pronounced in a particular cultura l dialect. Western capitalism in its totality is a truly exotic cultur al scheme, as bizarre as any other, marked by the subsumption of mater ial rationality in a vast order of symbolic relationships. We are too much misled by the apparent pragmatism of production and commerce. Thi s whole cultural organization of our economy remains invisible, mystif ied as the pecuniary rationality by which its arbitrary values are rea lized (Sahlins 1994b: 384).