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Introduction

The Double Lens

On the way to the new millennium, anthropology, still a young field, became prematurely forgetful. Anthropos almost vanished, crowded out by culture, the discipline’s celebrated contribution to social science. That contribution has been valuable, but too imperious in its claim on human lives. This book, while reserving an important place for culture, seeks to recover a focus on human beings for an anthropology worthy of its name.

The essays collected herein run against the strong culturalist current that has carried anthropology for the past several decades. Culturalism is a type of social or historical determinism. It consigns human beings to the margins of the analysis, as incidental to culture or else, more tendentiously, as culture’s effects. Its job is the interpretation of public representations, or symbols—words, images, performances, and narratives—which, it is said or implied, hold human minds in their thrall. Culturalism has a long pedigree in anthropology, especially in the United States, but recently it has, in its discursivist guise and in tandem with parallel shifts in critical and textual theory, achieved a position of near-dominance in the discipline. Indeed, many anthropologists now say that they practice “cultural studies,” an emerging, heavily discursivist field strongly influenced by literary criticism.¹

To be sure, culturalism opens up unique and fascinating problems. Culturalist perspectives illuminate human affairs from an intriguing angle, suggesting that human groups (tribes, nations, ethnicities, classes, castes, genders, and so on) cut up the world into arbitrary chunks, represented by arrays of symbols. In newer, more radical versions of culturalism, representations constitute, fragment, and reconfigure groups themselves. Culturalism encourages studies of the diverse frameworks of thought and feeling that purportedly ensnare us all. The thousands of ethnographies gathered in any university library attest to the fecundity of culturalist theories and their associated research practices.

But culturalism bears a high cost. That is why its triumph has not been complete. Many anthropologists, myself included, have now come to view the culturalist wave with reserve. Culturalism seems reductive. It arrogates too much to its own domain, disfiguring and oversimplifying human worlds. One line of criticism has emphasized culturalism’s appropriation of economic and political relations, its penchant for converting the materialities of social interaction into constructions of culture or discourse (Shaw 1995: ch. 1). Equally serious is the issue I highlight in this book: culturalism’s tendency to turn personal experience and human minds into derivative, spectral phenomena.

Some of my colleagues despair that anthropology may already be a lost cause for human (as opposed to cultural) studies. Research on human beings, they contend, is not going away, but will simply move elsewhere (D’Andrade 2000). They are certainly right that the study of human beings will not disappear, and they may be right about its future emigration from anthropology, but I do not believe that we—anthropologists concerned with substantial personal worlds, and skeptical of what Dennis Wrong long ago (1961) called “the oversocialized conception of man”—should lightly surrender a field to which we have contributed so much and which still, given its unusual perspective and its distinctive sensibilities, has so much to offer.

I outline a possible route to a cultural anthropology that, building on the insights of disciplinary ancestors and contemporaries, opens vistas for future work encompassing public and personal worlds. The “double lens” of the title refers to a theoretical eye holding both worlds in focus. I offer a view, through the double lens, of anthropology’s central concern: human worlds, in all their plenitude, variability, specificity, and complexity.

Beyond the Cultural Relativity Effect

The essays presented here draw on my ethnographic fieldwork in Brazil, done mostly in the mid-1980s, and in Japan, a decade later.² I worked primarily in two cities: São Luís, capital of the northeastern Brazilian state of Maranhão; and Toyota City, an industrial hub of central Honshu. In São Luís, I looked at local politics, Carnival, and interpersonal violence. In Toyota City, I examined the identity quandaries of Brazilian migrants of Japanese descent. Although the research topics were disparate, the theoretical focus remained the same: the intersection of public and personal worlds.

Strange as it may sound, over this period I gradually learned what I was talking about. Gregory Bateson once described theoretical advance in dynamic terms, as a dialectic between “loose thinking,” or heuristic play, and “strict thinking,” the hammering of intuitions and guesses into formal schemes (1972a). My own practice has likewise zig-zagged, crablike, between imagination and tentative formalization. I have come to understand better, and learned to formulate more precisely, my own concerns, presuppositions, and models. Such learning is not unusual among anthropologists, or among people in general. We speak or write, only later discovering what it is we have been trying to say. Then comes a moment when it makes sense to state it more coherently. I am writing this book at that moment of provisional lucidity.

Much of my work, I now see, has been spurred by a maddening ethnographic riddle: how to account for the vexing gap between abstractions of culture and specificities of persons and events. Initially, the problem appeared to me as the Cultural Relativity Effect. The first sentences of the first page of the preface of my first book read:

Doing anthropological fieldwork, I, like many others, sometimes experienced a frustrating relativity effect: the closer I moved toward a phenomenon, the faster it seemed to recede from my grasp. Every step forward revealed new complexities. The problem seems especially to bedevil the study of culture, something that when seen from a distance can appear monolithic and systematic but when viewed up close, in the ideas and feelings of individuals, seems to fragment into bewildering shards. (Linger 1992: vii)

Bewildering shards: a metaphor for the brute materiality and astonishing irregularity of people’s lives, so disconcertingly detached from the neat construct “culture” that pretends to speak for them. How does one reconcile such apparently antagonistic perceptions?

Obviously I am not the first writer to contemplate such questions. Repeatedly I have turned for inspiration to Edward Sapir. Early on, Sapir questioned Theodore Kroeber’s notion of culture as an evolving “superorganic” entity, divorced from human bodies and minds (Sapir 1917). Over a period of several decades he continued to warn against mistaking “fantasied universes of self-contained meaning” (1949a: 581)—that is, social-scientific abstractions—for the concrete, biographically contingent immediacies of human lives.³ Serious distortions arise when culture, viewed as a disembodied entity, is mistaken for human experience.

Unfortunately, much culture theory in the intervening years does, in spades, exactly what Sapir warned against. A big problem is the now-customary definition of culture as a system of symbols. For if, as conventionally characterized, symbols—public representations such as images, words, and rituals—are tangible forms that carry meaning, woven into a dense conceptual net, then they are in a weird sense mindlike.⁴ In employing the usual metaphors—symbols as “vehicles for” meanings, culture as a sticky “web”—cultural anthropologists, in the spirit of Durkheim, tend to fetishize representations. The reductio ad absurdum of this position is the idea that texts (or text-analogues) constitute an ideational cage, a cultural Supermind occupied by mindless people. Backing off from such a bizarre claim, we might more modestly propose that symbols evoke meanings in people, who draw upon their past learning and their own mental faculties in making sense of them. This premise also involves a strategic reification, as I note below, but it is a far cry from the notion that symbols constitute a weblike worldview inhabited by zombielike human beings.

The Cultural Relativity Effect appears when the notion of culture as a Supermind clashes with the empirical fact (apparent to anyone who takes a close look) that the minds supposedly dwelling within it show incredible variation, activity, and eccentricity. The effect vanishes if, as Sapir suggests, we jettison the idea of a Supermind and move culture back into human lives. This move, I argue, replaces a pseudo-problem with a set of generative questions. But I am jumping ahead. Before I get to the specifics of my proposed alternative, some general observations about anthropological theory are in order.

Geometries Versus Models

Constructing human theory resembles a mathematical exercise. Mathematicians build imaginary edifices (sets of interrelated theorems) by applying rules of inference to an inventory of axioms, which are arbitrary specifications of elementary objects and relations. Thus in mathematics, certain definitions of points and lines and their properties yield the elegant plane geometry taught in high schools; a single alteration, denial of the parallel postulate, opens the way to non-Euclidean geometries, inventions in which triangles have less or more than 180 degrees and extraordinary universes emerge. János Bolyai, a pioneer of the new geometries, wrote his father in 1823: “I have discovered things so wonderful that I was astounded . . . out of nothing I have created a strange new world” (O’Connor and Robertson 1996). Similarly, assumptions about the nature of people and groups form the base upon which one can erect elaborate, ingenious, and diverse theories of the human cosmos. And in human as in mathematical theory, a shift in the foundation can have radical effects on the superstructure.

But human theories also differ from the strange and wondrous worlds of contemporary mathematics. The new geometries created by Bolyai and others are formal systems for which internal consistency, not conformity with the world, is fundamental (Black 1959: 156–59). Such geometries are jewels of the imagination. The Greeks, in contrast, thought of geometry as the study of physical space. For all its ethereal beauty, Euclid’s geometry was a model of something else. In an important respect human theory more closely resembles ancient geometry than contemporary mathematics. Human theories are models. Models are guides and blueprints: they orient thought and action in the world. Their adequacy depends not just on coherence but also on plausibility and explanatory value. Unlike the pristine fantasies of modern geometers, theories of the human cosmos touch the earth: they abstract, and are accountable to, a reality outside themselves.

To be sure, grossly unrealistic or questionable postulates, when employed in a provisional or experimental manner, can yield theories that cast human affairs in an unfamiliar, provocative light. Such theories can provide useful elliptical accounts, and they can be good to think with, even when one knows that they are bizarre or destined eventually to fail. Significant advances in theory, however, require significant refinements in basic postulates: quantum mechanics is unimaginable without a more complex, accurate foundation than the notion of indivisible atoms advanced by Democritus. Human theory is no different. Even theories based on sophisticated, plausible postulates can, and typically (though not always) do, sooner or later collide with the world and demand reformulation.

For most of his career Sigmund Freud built his psychodynamic model around the notion that the life instincts (bodily needs, especially sexual impulses) created tensions that the human organism was compelled to discharge (a tendency Freud described as the “pleasure principle”). But after the Great War something new intruded into Freud’s model, as he indicates in this passage from his late masterpiece Civilization and Its Discontents:

men are not gentle creatures. . . . [T] hey are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. . . . Who, in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion? . . . Anyone who calls to mind the atrocities committed during the racial migrations or the invasions of the Huns, or by the people known as the Mongols under Jenghiz Khan and Tamerlane, or at the capture of Jerusalem by the pious Crusaders, or even, indeed, the horrors of the recent World War—anyone who calls these things to mind will have to bow humbly before the truth of this view. (1961 [1930]: 58–59)

Life instincts and the pleasure principle failed to account for the carnage of Verdun. Freud’s cumulative “experience of life and of history” forced him reluctantly to wedge the death instinct, a novel postulate, into the foundations of his psychodynamic theory. My purpose here is not to argue for or against a death instinct—though had Freud lived past 1939 he would surely have found no reason to recant. Rather, I cite Freud to suggest that, like him, every practitioner of the human sciences draws on her own compelling experience for judgments about and reformulations of premises.

Closed Theories

Premises do not always give way, because some theories, unlike Freud’s, are impervious to contrary evidence. They are more like geometries than models. All theories are, in a restricted sense, provisionally insulated from the world, because their foundational assumptions are a priori specifications; I will return to this point a bit later. But in some cases the disconnect is complete, because the assumptions permit the elaboration of a model that can explain all worldly outcomes, and so neither the model nor its assumptions come under critical scrutiny. Such self-confirming theories form perceptions rather than generating falsifiable predictions. Note that rationality—the systematic inflation of premises into models—is not at issue. A theory can be rational and yet hermetic.

For example, consider the witchcraft and oracular beliefs of the Azande, inhabitants of central Africa studied by E. E. Evans-Pritchard in the 1930s. Once one accepts Zande mystical premises, notes Evans-Pritchard, it is clear not only that the system of beliefs erected upon them is entirely rational, but that no conceivable event in the world could contradict them. He describes the Zande divination practice wherein benge, a poison, is administered to a fowl, whose answer is delivered by its survival or death. A European might argue that the strength and quantity of the poison determine the fowl’s fate, but for the Azande benge is not a natural poison at all. It is a mystical substance that has been prepared in accordance with certain taboos and is used only in a prescribed ritual setting. Secondary elaborations of belief explain any apparent error in the oracle’s predictions: a taboo was breached, or witchcraft interfered with the action of the benge, or the batch of poison was “stupid,” and so on. Hence Evans-Pritchard’s account was intended to counter arguments that “primitive people” (unlike Westerners) thought irrationally. In this regard his book was a resounding success: the Azande emerge as eminently sensible thinkers.

Azande observe the action of the poison oracle as we observe it, but their observations are always subordinated to their beliefs and are incorporated into their beliefs and made to explain them and justify them. Let the reader consider any argument that would utterly demolish all Zande claims for the power of the oracle. If it were translated into Zande modes of thought it would serve to support their entire structure of belief. For their mystical notions are eminently coherent, being interrelated by a network of logical ties, and are so ordered that they never too crudely contradict sensory experience but, instead, experience seems to justify them. (1976 [1937]: 150)

One might now turn the tables and argue that Western theorists, just as rational as the Azande, are equally adept at inventing evidence-proof belief systems based on unexamined and questionable premises. Roy D’Andrade argues, for example, that much of contemporary cultural anthropology produces such models:

What theoretical work there is in [current] cultural anthropology is primarily based on reasoning from assumed first principles—people must be shaped by their symbolic worlds, psychology cannot be relevant to cultural facts, and so on. This makes for . . . much debate, principle-begging arguments, little clarity, and no progress. (2000: 226)

D’Andrade is referring to versions of culturalism that do not let the world talk back. If on first principles culture determines our ideas and actions, then our ideas and actions can only be evidence of culture’s agency. If representations axiomatically form or condense our thoughts and feelings, then why look any further than representations to infer what those thoughts and feelings are? Anthropologists’ proclivity for using the language of psychology to characterize symbols and discourses, treating them as if they were subjective phenomena, promotes such circularity. Hence we are often told, on the basis of an interpretation that makes no reference to any living person, that American films or magazines or television shows embody or transmit aggression or prurience or egoism or what-have-you—as if dispositions and desires resided in or were conveyed by inanimate representations!⁵

I do not think anthropology will prosper as a serious intellectual enterprise if it gets into the business of concocting closed belief systems. This practice leads either to camps of true believers or to epithets shouted, but rarely heard, across chasms of incomprehension. Nevertheless, every theory, however open to contrary evidence, requires provisional commitments to foundational assumptions.

Assumptions can be more or less crude, more or less plausible, more or less productive of insight and explanation. So let us begin at square one, with an examination and evaluation of the basic elements of standard social scientific theory.

Back to Square One

In principle the human cosmos can be modeled in an infinite number of ways. But all ways are not equal. One starts by making some judicious elemental distinctions—judicious, not arbitrary, because our aim is to produce not a geometry, but a model. A primordial cut endemic to human theories, and one that I will strongly defend, is the division between two realms we might call public and personal. But the way this cut is made—what objects get assigned to which sphere, how those objects are characterized, and how relations among them are defined—has far-reaching implications for the construction of models in all of the social sciences (sociology, anthropology, political science, psychology, and history). My aim is not to criticize the conceptual division between public and personal, but rather certain versions of it that seem to me injudicious.

Here I focus on sociology and anthropology, twin disciplines with deep shared roots. Examination of their origins reveals an asymmetry in the cut: a hypertrophy of the public and, correspondingly, an attenuation of the personal.⁶ The skew originates in the work of a common ancestor, Emile Durkheim, who provided axioms that have warranted a family of social science models in which public facts reign supreme. In that Durkheimian family, as distant offspring, I include currently influential anthropological models that feature cultural interpretation and discourse analysis. I argue that their refusal to build personal phenomena into their foundations—a refusal that is the trademark move of culturalism—stunts our understanding of the human cosmos.

“Society” Versus “the Individual”

Standard social science—that is, theory in the Durkheimian lineage— makes a distinction between public and personal that ultimately marginalizes or excludes the personal from its contemplation. Stripped to its essentials, the theory goes like this. “Society,” social science’s rightful object, is counterposed to “the individual,” which is assigned to psychology and romantic philosophy. The business of social science is “social facts” (Durkheim 1964 [1895]), aggregate and emergent collective phenomena. Cognitive faculties, psychodynamic defense mechanisms, features of consciousness, biographical particularities, and biological processes are therefore bracketed. They are denied the status of social facts or else they are regarded obliquely, as collective representations or constructions. Biology and psychology are thus disregarded or, in the more extreme versions of such theory, epistemologically nullified. Although they sometimes pay lip service to the importance of studying “the individual,” many social scientists consider flesh-and-blood persons to be of minor importance in human affairs, or, again, treat them as either exemplary of or epiphenomenal to the social. At best, then, Durkheimian social science establishes a cordon sanitaire between social and psychological disciplines; at worst, it smugly assumes that it is grappling with the stuff that counts, while the psychologists—practitioners of an ersatz discipline?—chase after trivia or the mirage of human nature.

In a well-known introduction to sociology, Peter Berger gets to the heart of the Durkheimian view:

If we follow the Durkheimian conception, then, society confronts us as an objective facticity. It is there, something that cannot be denied and must be reckoned with. Society is external to ourselves. It surrounds us, encompasses our life on all sides. We are in society, located in specific sectors of the social system. This location predetermines and predefines almost everything we do, from language to etiquette, from the religious beliefs we hold to the probability that we will commit suicide. . . . Society, as objective and external fact, confronts us especially in the form of coercion. Its institutions pattern our actions and shape our expectations. . . . If we step out of these assignments, society has at its disposal an almost infinite variety of controlling and coercing agencies. . . . Finally, we are located in society not only in space but in time. Our society is a historical entity that extends temporally beyond any individual biography. . . . It was there before we were born and it will be there after we are dead. Our lives are but episodes in its majestic march through history. In sum, society is the walls of our imprisonment in history. (1963: 91–92)

In this theoretical universe, “culture”—that is to say, society’s meaningful aspect—is an ideational prison with walls so high that the prisoners (all of us, save perhaps the anthropologists themselves) mistake them for the boundaries of the world.

It is true that Clifford Geertz, the towering figure in interpretive anthropology, emphasizes his Weberian (rather than Durkheimian) treatment of culture. Weber emphasized, as does Geertz, the overwhelming importance of meaning-making for human beings. But Weber made substantial space for human agency, for psychological motivation, and for the innovations of historical figures, whereas, despite hesitations and equivocations, Geertz’s most famous analyses reject explicit forays into psychology and provide accounts of culture as “objective facticity.” Culture becomes a dimension of the social. Expressed in language, encoded in symbols, enacted in rituals, enforced in coercive practices, culture for many, perhaps most, interpretive anthropologists ultimately seems to impress itself upon waxlike individual minds, a scenario thoroughly compatible with Durkheim’s vision.

Deviants and dissenters aside, individuals are thus under the sway of culture, as they are under the sway of other social facts. Deviation, dissent, and resistance are, of course, second-order social facts, since divergence from social norms and social consensus is a relative concept. The main explanation offered for divergence is one’s adherence to the alternative meaning frame of a “specific sector of the social system” (a sub group defined by coordinates such as gender, race, ethnicity, and so on). Nigel Rapport and Joanna Overing argue that such explanations “sanitize” diversity. “It is not the individuals who are diverse,” they write, “so much as the working parts of the complex social systems of which they are components and conduits . . . Diversity becomes . . . a triumph of cultural order (2000a: 194).” The scheme replicates determinism at the level of subgroups, preserving intact the empire of the social.

The Urtext that illustrates the pervasiveness of social control is Durkheim’s book on the causes of that seemingly most private act, suicide (1951 [1897]). A collectivist society that cultivates notions of sacrifice for the common good encourages altruistic suicide. An individualist society that subjects people to feelings of unbearable personal responsibility and guilt encourages egoistic suicide. And a society in which social norms are confusing or in flux gives rise to anomic suicide.⁷ From Suicide it is not that far, in theory or rhetoric, to Michel Foucault’s famous first volume of The History of Sexuality (1990 [1976]), in which the intimacies of sex and pleasure decidedly take a back seat to the power-infused, historically changing public discourses that profoundly shape (and even conjure?) them. Here, society’s temporal dimension is emphasized: Foucault lays bare, in Berger’s words, the “walls of our imprisonment in history.”

Society thus conceived is, understandably, rarely seen in neutral terms, despite the original scientific pretensions of Durkheimian sociology and the morally relativist pretensions of later theory. Society is prized, a thing to be nourished and cultivated as an antidote to disorientation and egoism, by those who revere community; it is viewed as a menace to be reviled and resisted by those suspicious of power and alert to mystification; and it evokes something like awe in those who see its “majestic march” as a pervasive and irresistible mana-like force. The term catalyzes the most varied, contradictory moral and political discourses. Though the alternative model I forward has ethical implications, I do not wish to make society its ideal, its bete noire, or its God.

If society and history are ultimate realities, “the individual” is by contrast a shadow. In classic Durkheimian theory, discrete living persons— you and I—become individuals. The individual is a monad: an anonymous unit among many identical units. It is easier to say what the individual is not than what it is. Internal structure seems lacking in the individual, which is conventionally treated as a fundamental particle, whose own biographical past and internal workings, whatever they might be, are socially irrelevant.⁸ Much less does the individual have “individuality,” the innate faculty of human consciousness (Rapport and Overing 2000a: 185).⁹ Seen through the single lens of Durkheimian theory, then, the individual is not unique, not psychologically complex, not the product of a developmental process, and, it would appear, not even conscious.

So far as I can tell, no one believes this image to be accurate, least of all as a self-description. But it is nevertheless the generative conceit underwriting a galaxy of prominent, far-reaching social theories.

Post-Durkheimian Anthropology

Durkheimian theory has been extraordinarily influential, giving rise to innumerable variants and refinements over the last century. Among them, I have suggested, is interpretive anthropology, which arose in the mid-twentieth century and continues to flourish. More recently, some post-Durkheimian theorists have responded to Durkheim’s capitalization of the social not by righting the model’s foundations but by tilting them even more strongly toward social determinism, in its discursivist version. Postmodern (or postructuralist) theory, for example, sets itself against the holistic and synchronic tendencies of both traditional sociology and interpretive anthropology by emphasizing the multiplicity, historicity, and power of discursive formations. In the most extreme discursivist approaches, persons are either invisible (because irrelevant) or else epiphenomenal to “history,” which, like “society,” often enters accounts as a hypostatized supra-human entity. Sometimes, as in Foucault’s book on discourses of sexuality, such accounts verge on social monism, swallowing whole the Durkheimian distinction between society and the individual.¹⁰

The epidemic use of the word “discourse” in cultural anthropology is, outside the circles of the linguists, fairly recent, dating mostly from the publication of Foucault’s works in English in the seventies and eighties. But there are anthropological antecedents for discursivism’s core claim that representational frameworks have subtle and thoroughgoing constitutive effects on human beings themselves. A version of social monism surfaces, for example, in the work of Louis Dumont (1980 [1966]), a distinguished ethnographer of India, acknowledged intellectual heir to Durkheim, and poststructuralist avant la lettre. For Dumont, the distinction between “society” and “the individual” is a false dichotomy, because “the individual” is itself a modern Western construct. “Traditional societies [such as India],” he writes, “which know nothing of equality and liberty as values, which know nothing, in short, of the individual, have basically a collective idea of man” (8).¹¹ That is, “the individual” is a Western discursive effect, not a substantive entity in its own right. Dumont’s point echoes through any number of works arguing that contemporary Euro-American society mystifies its control through the paradox of individualism. In declaring people “individuals,” Protestantism, or the Enlightenment, or Western culture, or modernity (take your pick) created a phantom zone of personal autonomy. One might say that modern Western society granted the individual an irresistible illusion of freedom, perhaps even of existence.¹²

Some recent writers have pressed the larger argument that persons, selves, emotions, and even experience are historically situated discursive constructions (see, e.g., Scott 1992). The thrust of this literature is to suggest that language in particular creates the realities that count, including psychological realities. For those who accede to such claims, psychologists’ attempts to understand the workings of minds merely yield descriptions of historically contingent ephemera, cultural constructions that are here today, gone tomorrow. “Society” exists, with a vengeance, but “the individual” is an illusion.

The strong discursivist position strikes me as fundamentally incoherent: the theoretical applecart itself seems destined to capsize. Be this as it may, neither Durkheimians nor post-Durkheimians take “the individual” seriously. Even when using the language of feeling, thinking, and experience, their models begin and end with the social. I find such a stance, which fails to treat persons as tangible, consequential realities, to be constricted, substantially closed, and unconvincing. This whole book is written against it.

Public Worlds, Personal Worlds

I have argued for a distinction between personal and public, but against the particular distinctions made in Durkheimian and post-Durkheimian social science. What can we put in their place?

Terminology does not ordain thought, and terminological quibbles can be sterile, but it is also true that the prudent use of words can discourage unwanted associations and encourage new ways of seeing. A theoretical partition between domains roughly designated by the linguistic distinctions individual/social, internal/external, and private/ public is fully justified. But the unbalanced opposition between “individual” and “society” carries unfortunate Durkheimian baggage. Better would be language suggesting that both internal and external domains are systems, that there is a theoretical parity between them, and that they are importantly linked.

I propose the terms public worlds and personal worlds, with the understanding that human worlds cannot be fully understood without reference to both.¹³ Public worlds are environments to which people are exposed, into which they are thrust, or which they build together, and from which people learn, over the course of their lives, to assemble ever-changing universes of thought and feeling. Public worlds confront people with propositions, choices, dilemmas, imperatives, challenges, and opportunities. They present conditions that compel, permit, or evoke responses. Public worlds have interactional and representational dimensions: they are scenes of interpersonal engagement and scenes of linguistic and imagistic representation. They come in different shapes and sizes. A bar fight is a public world (Linger 1992); so is city politics (“The Hegemony of Discontent”) or the global economy (“The Identity Path of Eduardo Mori”). Obviously, such worlds are nested in quite complicated ways (“Wild Power in Post-Military Brazil”).

Public worlds, though they are unavoidable and often ensnare people, do not inevitably eclipse them or dictate the course of human affairs. People act within public worlds, but they also operate according to their own lights, sometimes transforming those worlds and even themselves. The phrase “personal worlds” is intended to suggest size, systematicity, variability, and complexity in lives and minds. Personal worlds are, in a manner of speaking, just as big as public worlds, and they are at least as complicated. Clearly, public worlds are incredibly varied, multi-leveled, and intricate, as anthropologists have amply demonstrated; but then, I will argue, so are the worlds of persons.

Here is another way to put it. Personal and public worlds are systems, but not closed systems. Key anthropological issues, above all those related to representation and meaning—matters closely associated with the concept of culture—demand attention to both systems, and to the interactions between them. They demand, in other words, inspection through a double lens, which in turn requires new forms of ethnographic description.

Descriptions, Thick and Thin

“Culture” can, of course, mean whatever an analyst wants it to mean. Anthropologists have used “culture” in myriad ways—Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952) discovered 164 definitions in the literature, a half century ago!—but these formulations are mostly attempts to give a strict sense to a small number of loose notions. One such loose notion is “the degree to which people in a particular group experience things the same way.” This loose notion can be formally captured by defining culture as the distribution of personal cognition.¹⁴ The definition has the advantage of introducing flexibility, nuance, and precision into cultural analysis. A group does not, as in standard theory, have “a culture.” Rather, an analyst can identify many cultures (or cultural clumps) among its members; conversely, each person participates in many cultures. Those many cultures may or may not be aligned with subgroups defined on the basis of standard social coordinates such as class or gender, or any obvious social coordinates, for that matter. For example, “getting high” and “being born again” are both U.S. American cultural scripts; though many Americans have intimate knowledge of both, many others do not, and many are familiar with neither.

Moreover, a distributive definition draws attention to subjective disjunction—at least some meanings will be idiosyncratic, and all meanings, even apparently common ones, viewed at a sufficiently high resolution, will have singular personal dimensions and resonances. A subjectivity is always, ultimately, someone’s, a personalized network of meanings contingent on the unique learning accomplished during a unique life trajectory. In other words, one’s personal web of meaning is always, necessarily, custom-learned and custom-made, though it is learned in interaction and an analyst will see that some portions, at some levels of resolution, are shared with some others.

Culture thus defined dispels the Cultural Relativity Effect. The term becomes an analytic convenience, a shorthand for describing the scatter of ways of thinking and feeling among members of a group. It helps one understand why people act as they do and how interactions and inner worlds unfold. But meaning-making involves more than thinking and feeling. Public representations (the “symbols” of conventional interpretive approaches), which, I am suggesting, should not be treated as culture, impinge upon cognition. I have come to think of public representations as rough, ambiguous, widely circulated messages that evoke varying cognitive responses. Representations thus characterized meet cognitive processes at the interface between public and personal worlds.

To be sure, this formulation is a strategic objectification, a partial retreat in the direction of mindlike condensations. But it does not erase human minds from the picture. Consider, for example, an English lexical item such as “love.” The word is comprehensible to English speakers in a basic sense, as an emotion ideally associated with affiliation between spouses or sweethearts or parents and children; but a moment’s reflection should suffice to suggest that its connotations and feeling-tone are in many (and supremely important) respects highly personalized.

It is crucial to emphasize that public representations so conceived are typically thin rather than thick. Their thickening occurs in human subjectivities. Rather than a web or cage, public representations constitute a somewhat haphazard, flexible, open lattice, which people adapt in their own ways and upon which they build the most fantastic and elaborate personal forms. Of course, some people’s subjective creations may, and often do, overlap or correspond, owing to similarities in life trajectories and dispositions. But the theoretical artifice that thick meanings reside in the representations themselves strikes me as hazardous and misleading.

The celebrated literary turn in cultural analysis is thus a wrong turn.¹⁵ The problem with thick description and literary methods is that they provide unduly subtle and elaborate conjectures about meaning. They over-interpret. The practice is justified in literary criticism, where the object may be to produce a thought-provoking critique or an inventive original essay. But in ethnography thick description substitutes an analyst’s professional and highly specialized, often brilliant, techniques of meaning extraction for the varied, biographically situated meaning-making acts of members of a population. Literary readings are accounts not of subjectivities, but of virtual subjectivity—which is to say, no one’s subjectivity, aside perhaps from that of the interpreter in his or her intellectualizing mode.¹⁶ Clifford Geertz’s own work yields impressive descriptions of communicative behavior and insights into possible worlds of meaning. But a portrayal of the range of actual thick, personal subjectivities cannot be rendered through such literary techniques, which depend too much on a single analyst’s perspective and imagination. A more subtle and direct account requires empirical research methods such as person-centered ethnography, which seeks to explore the intricacies of personal worlds through specialized interviewing and observational practices.¹⁷ Such practices typically have a minor role in interpretive anthropology.

Person-centered ethnography, the topic of several of the following chapters, draws attention to the linkage between the circulation of public representations and diverse, textured human lives. This more inclusive problem of meaning-making has come to occupy a central place in my work. But finding appropriate analytical language has been difficult, and I have not been consistent in my use of terminology. With the benefit of hindsight, let me therefore set out some terms that should help the reader approach the essays, which were originally conceived at different moments. I find it useful to think about an arena of meaning having public and personal dimensions. The study of meaning calls for the characterization of both, as well as theory that can bridge them. Bridging theory spans public and personal worlds, requiring a double optic. And bridging theory, if it is to deal seriously with the spectacular variations and discontinuities in the world, must recognize that human beings make personalized meanings continually in the living of singular lives, and that they have a universal, and highly consequential, capacity for reflective consciousness.

I discuss these broad concepts—the arena of meaning, bridging theory, singular lives, and reflective consciousness—in greater detail in the following section. They do not comprise a strict formal scheme: in a theoretical program so expansive, there are inevitable loose ends and inconsistencies. It is best to think of the concepts as a beginner’s kit of rough mental tools—heuristics, postulates, and models—for grappling with the inclusive problem of meaning-making.

Mental Tools

The Arena of Meaning

Meaning is as elusive a concept as we have in the social sciences. It can seem extrinsic to human beings, located in language and images; alternatively, it can seem intrinsic, occurring in bodies and minds. The quasitheoretical, often ill-defined terms anthropologists have employed to talk about meaning—“symbol,” “representation,” “discourse,” “culture,” “subjectivity,” and so on—are shot through with ambiguities about its location and nature. It is not only undergraduates who wonder exactly what anthropologists mean when they discuss meaning.

Any given account usually adopts a general perspective that can be characterized as either “representational” or “experiential.” The former, which sees meaning as located primarily in the public realm, typifies culturalist work in interpretive and discursive anthropology. Experiential approaches, which regard meanings as occurring in personal realms of minds and lives, more often characterize studies in psychological and phenomenological anthropology. Whichever direction they lean, most accounts deal to some degree, often fuzzily, with both representation and experience. But there is a less equivocal way to bring representation and experience into theoretical conversation.

Along with a number of other anthropologists, I think of meaning as occupying, and being continuously built in, an arena that holds both public representations (language, symbols, images, performances) and personal experience (perceptions, feelings, ideas, memories).¹⁸ Public representations are, as I have indicated, best regarded as proposals, or skeletal formulations, of meaning. Such proposals, disseminated in more or less forceful terms, are accepted, rejected, transformed, tailored, and fleshed out in individual life-worlds, whereupon they may be again concretized and recirculated, often in new representational forms and combinations, back to the public realm. I restrict the term subjectivity to the realm of the personal, as a property of experiencing human beings.

Linkage between public and personal spheres has been a recurrent concern of the field known formerly known as “culture and personality” and today more commonly termed “psychological anthropology.” Psychological anthropology counts among its practitioners and ancestors many talented and inventive theorists. Some have viewed culture as a convenient fiction, a useful sociological abstraction not to be confounded with the experiential worlds of actual people (Sapir); or as a segment of a great arc of human possibilities (Ruth Benedict); or as a collective resource for the resolution of psychological conflicts (Melford Spiro, Gananath Obeyesekere); or as a bird’s-eye distribution of personal subjectivities (Anthony Wallace, Theodore Schwartz); or as a fund of shared schemas, or intersubjective units (Roy D’Andrade, Dorothy Holland, Naomi Quinn, Claudia Strauss).¹⁹ All these authors have grappled with the perplexities of double vision, attempting to move toward a unified theory of meaning.

In theoretically separating representation and subjectivity we are led to pose important questions about learning and belief. How do representations get made, and how do they circulate? What makes them efficacious—credible or compelling—to those who encounter them? Why are some ignored, dismissed, or radically reinterpreted? How do new representations arise? Such questions have a dual aspect. On the one hand, they address personal motivation, the ways ideas hook into people’s lives. Psychology and biography are relevant to such inquiries. On the other hand, they address public issues of power and politics.

Bridging Theory

Social anthropologists in the British tradition—especially Victor Turner, Max Gluckman, Fredrik Barth, and F. G. Bailey—have sought to link sequences of events with changes in patterned social relations.²⁰ At first glance, the project seems far removed from that of psychological anthropology, but abstractly, the two enterprises share a family resemblance. Insofar as both are concerned with the tie between particular cases (events and persons) and macroscopic phenomena (social structure and culture), both demand bridging theory, a leap in analytical perception. Bridging theory connects our singular destinies to public structures and processes.

I owe much to the psychological and social anthropologists cited above, who regard the human landscape from different angles but with similar theoretical intent. Like them, I am drawn to bridging theory. But I am drawn to it, increasingly, from a certain perspective. I think singularities—specific persons and their specific actions—interest me more than public contexts or general mechanisms. This focus seems more a matter of inclination than a theoretical imperative.

That I cannot convincingly find the big causes of events or the ultimate motivations of the actors is intriguing. It has led me to think that the most credible bridging theory is not determinate theory, leading all the way, in inevitable causal procession, from macro-patterns to persons and events, but accommodating theory that permits the emergence of variability, diversity, and the unprecedented. Perhaps one could say we need more strict thinking about loose theory. For the human world constantly astounds us. “Today will be like yesterday” is usually an excellent forecast—except when an epiphany turns Eduardo Mori’s identity upside down (“The Identity Path of Eduardo Mori”). In other words, bridging theory must make room for the unexpected, if it is to accommodate— not necessarily explain—the profusion and uncertainty of the real world.

Singular Lives and Reflective Consciousness

Profusion and uncertainty have come to occupy an ever larger place in my thinking. That human lives are singularities—that each is unique, a finite flow of experience in time—is self-evident, but of great significance for studies of meaning. I find it useful to think of that unique flow of experience as the product of continual learning, though “learning”—a bridging process—may be too weak, mechanistic, and passive a term for what I take to be, often, an active meaning-making practice. New events trigger new acts of meaning-making, which always occur with reference to a specific chain of past learning and thus take on eccentric colorations. Individual appropriations of meaning are always, for biographical reasons, utterly distinctive in important respects.²¹

But this is not the end of the story, for there are also discontinuities in learning that yield wholly unexpected outcomes going beyond straightforward personalizations of meaning. Here we enter the realm of imagination. Words like “imagination” or “creativity” suggest rare inspiration or vision, but I am referring to a rather commonplace, if often overlooked and undervalued, quality of human thinking. A tentative approach to such discontinuities, formulated most straightforwardly in my book No One Home (2001b), is to posit, as part of the person-system (or “mind”), an important human faculty of reflective consciousness.

Formally, the move parallels Freud’s adopting, after the Great War, the postulate of a death instinct, imposed upon him, the reader may recall, by his “experience of life and of history.” Reflective consciousness acquired a name only in my recent writings, but the concept has colored my work for a long time. It is the human propensity to turn invisible patches of indefinite experience and common sense, including one’s sense of self, into objects of reflection and refashioning. Common sense, a term prominent in Gramsci’s work (1971) and also in interpretive anthropology (Geertz 1983), is transparent knowledge—what one knows without knowing that one knows it. Reflective consciousness is the catalyst that sediments common sense, rendering it visible and therefore tractable. I wish to emphasize not merely the existence of this cognitive faculty, which seems obvious, but its centrality to human lives and its significance for human theory.

Even poststructuralists find it difficult to escape some gesture, however hesitant and ambivalent, toward a version of reflective consciousness. Consider the following excerpt from Joan Scott’s provocative, if puzzling, essay on what she sees as the historical construction of “experience”:

Subjects are constituted discursively, but there are conflicts among discursive systems, contradictions within any of them, multiple meanings possible for the concepts they deploy. And subjects have agency. They are not unified, autonomous individuals exercising free will, but rather subjects whose agency is created through situations and statuses conferred on them. . . . These conditions [of existence] enable choices, though they are not unlimited. Subjects are constituted discursively, experience is a linguistic event (it doesn’t happen outside established meanings), but neither is it confined to a fixed order of meaning. Since discourse is by definition shared, experience is collective as well as individual. (1992: 34)

Scott seems to be arguing with herself. She ties herself in knots trying to find a way to recognize the fact of the subject’s distance from discourse while remaining committed to discursive determinism. The subject comes off badly, its reflections diminished to afterthoughts. Of course, I agree with Scott that the public world, including economic and political conditions and a repertoire of claims about the universe and human affairs, is extremely important. And in some settings, “total institutions” such as prisons, asylums, and concentration camps (Goffman 1961), the public world can be overwhelming, rendering personal agency socially inconsequential and suffocating reflection itself. Chaim E., a survivor of the Sobibor death camp, recalls:

You didn’t have any choices. You just were driven to do whatever you did. So it is not things that you planned that you do; it’s just whatever happened, happened. You don’t think . . . As I say: we were not individuals, we were not human beings, we were just robots where we happened to do things. . . .

It is hard really to tell what a feeling that is. . . . You think you are right, you know all the answers, and you try to find logic and things like that that doesn’t exist at all. It is one purpose there: that is, to kill the people, so that’s the purpose there. So all the logic doesn’t apply there. It is really hard to explain that, to have this feeling. It is easy to tell, but the feeling is very hard really to bring over to somebody . . . what really it means. . . .

You were not thinking for tomorrow because tomorrow’s thoughts were bad. Today was already better than tomorrow. (emphasis his)²²

As Lawrence Langer observes, in the “crushing reality” of places like Sobibor, “the pain, the exhaustion, the cold . . . prevented [victims] from fantasizing that they were someone or somewhere else” (1991: 4). At Sobibor, the distance between self and (nonlinguistic!) experience, in this case between self and an abject present, shrank to zero. In more than one sense the self “functioned on the brink of extinction” (1991: 183).

Sobibor annihilated the reflective selves of the living dead trapped within its ring of towers and barbed wire, but not the capacity for reflection, which is quite evident in Chaim E.’s recollection above, made decades later. But in any case the death camp, as devastating and pathological a social milieu as one could imagine, is a poor metaphor (or metonym) for the social world most people inhabit, in which personal agency and reflection commonly have wide rein. I am arguing that reflective consciousness (and attendant agency) are not discursive constructs, but rather intrinsic endowments of human beings. That is, reflective consciousness is a substantial, albeit variably realized, human faculty whose maximal expression goes far beyond the navigation of discursive fissures or the selection of options from a cultural menu.

Reflective consciousness is variably realized because local social conditions (including, but not restricted to, discursive environments) differ. Sobibor is an extreme, a zone of death where even the living “are not human beings.” Elsewhere, reflective consciousness has space to assert itself, even if its precipitates sometimes evanesce, failing to harden into agendas for new forms of personal or social action (“The Hegemony of Discontent”). Indeed, people commonly step outside their mundane experience, their common sense, and even themselves (“Missing Persons,” “The Identity Path of Eduardo Mori,” “Do Japanese Brazilians Exist?”). Each case is different, a product of the encounter of specific people with specific forces and circumstances.

The invisibility of common sense and its occasional sedimentation into knowledge are pervasive themes of these essays. Reflective consciousness turns common sense into the consciously known, and potentially, therefore, the consciously questioned and transformed. I think one can identify conditions that favor such sedimentation—a high level of sociocultural complexity, for example (Levy 1973, 1990); or lived injustices of class, race, gender, ethnicity, or caste (Baldwin 1985 [1955], Chodorow 1999, Parish 1996); or the personal ordeals of international migrants (Linger 2001b)—but its accomplishment, which requires a mental leap or discontinuity, can generate dramatic consequences that challenge attempts at determinate human theory.

I did not make up “reflective consciousness,” though the term is, to the best of my knowledge, my own. I apprehended it in the writings of psychological anthropologists such as Gregory Bateson and Robert Levy, who emphasize discontinuities in learning and perception, and of social anthropologists such as F. G. Bailey, who describes the self-consciousstrategies of political entrepreneurs. And my own experience of life and history confers credibility upon it. My personal trajectory, my professional practice, the actions of those I know, and the actions of those I know about all become more comprehensible to me in light of such an assumption. The alternative suggestion that consciousness cannot turn back on its own products, or only trivially so, and that human subjectivity can therefore be treated as a mere mechanical effect of discourse, culture, or environment, strikes me as quite simply unbelievable.

It is well known that a deconstructively inclined philosopher can vaporize anyone’s foundations. Nevertheless, no constructive theory whatsoever is possible without some such foundations. And reflective consciousness more than meets the plausibility test: indeed, its absence from, or depreciation in, the axioms of Durkheimian and post-Durkheimian theory is what is incredible. Moreover, reflective consciousness enables bridging theory that accommodates subjective diversity, yields provocative analyses, and opens an immense field for further research.

The Essays

The perspective outlined above implicitly frames the following chapters. I have organized them into three topical sections: Meanings, Politics, and Identities. In each section, the emphasis is on theory and accompanying ethnography that span the gap between the public and the personal.

Part I: Meanings

Part I pries apart representation and subjectivity. All three essays criticize interpretive approaches that conflate the two. Interpretive analysts typically infer virtual subjectivity from representational evidence such as public symbols and performances, downplaying or ignoring personalizations of meaning. I advance an alternative view that meaning-making, a slippery and varied process, occurs at the interface between public and personal systems, and therefore accounts of meaning-making require attention to the ways specific people engage meaningful public forms.

“Has Culture Theory Lost Its Minds?” points to a cognitive skew among anthropologists themselves. The essay suggests that a commonsense model of linguistic representation misleads cultural theorists into thinking that words are like conduits or packages—that they carry meaning. This “conduit model,” which underwrites interpretive (and discursive) anthropology, has, I argue, strongly biased culture theory in the direction of culturalism. To defamiliarize the conduit model, I contrast it with an imaginary, defective, but nevertheless instructive “inkblot model,” which posits that, like subjects in a Rorschach test, people invent meanings for ambiguous stimuli. I emphasize that the actual production of meanings, captured in neither model, is best viewed as a double process: the circulation of meaningful public symbols coupled with discrete acts of personal meaning-making by those who encounter and respond to them.

The next two chapters elaborate the argument. They insist that virtual subjectivity, the product of symbolic interpretation, is no one’s subjectivity. The point is made first in “Missing Persons,” which advocates caution in applying interpretive methods to historical evidence. I draw on person-centered ethnographic research I conducted in Japan to show that the contemporary identities of specific Japanese Brazilians cannot be deduced from well-known public narratives of Brazilian nationhood and Japanese ethnicity. Such public narratives propose, but do not determine, identity sentiments. Because historians dealing with the distant past have access only to public records and other symbolic detritus, virtual subjectivity, a crude, unreliable proxy, has to stand in—but should not be mistaken—for the mentalities of the dead.

“The Metropolis, the Globe, and Mental Life” takes aim at virtual subjectivities adduced by Simmel (1950 [1903]) and Jameson (1984) for, respectively, urban dwellers and postmodern global villagers. These influential speculations, brilliant and provocative though they are, both falter in too readily inferring historically novel mentalities from generic aspects of the city and the globe. Life is not primarily lived “in the city” or “on the planet,” but rather in concrete daily interactions that demand close observation and may yield experiential outcomes that bear little resemblance to conjectures made at a distance, on the basis of gross public phenomena.

Part II: Politics

If, as I argue in Part I, collective discourse is not cognitive destiny, then what makes some representations more compelling than others? Why do some symbols tend to galvanize people, and others leave them cold? What inner trails does subjectivity follow in response to discursive incitement? What, in Melford Spiro’s memorable formulation (1987a), makes representations cognitively salient? These are the central theoretical issues addressed in Part II.

An inviting place to look for answers is in the domain of politics, where leaders constantly seek to define situations in their favor and to elicit commitment from their followers (Bailey 2001). Sometimes leaders succeed, and sometimes they fail. Why? For the revisionist marxist Antonio Gramsci, history gave no assurance that the workers would prevail. Capitalism had its contradictions, but those contradictions would not mechanically destroy the system that bred them. Ideas stood in the way, ideas that would not be swept aside in the impersonal rush of economic history. Common sense—invisible, customary understandings about the world and human beings—was the prime obstacle to political change. In Gramsci’s Italy, an unreflective hierarchical worldview, profoundly shaped by Catholic religious belief, sustained more explicit political doctrines and arrangements that guaranteed the power of signori and the bourgeois state. Making that transparent foundation visible, and therefore vulnerable to transformative criticism, was, for Gramsci, the first task of revolutionary intellectuals. In other words, a new political order could only be founded on a new common sense, which could only be built after the old was revealed and then demolished.²³

Inspired by Gramsci’s provocative speculations, all three essays in Part II look at the political implications of common sense and reflective consciousness. The descriptions of local common sense that underpin the analyses draw on person-centered research I conducted in São Luís during 1984–86 and 1991.²⁴ Through ethnographic case studies the chapters in Part II explore the articulation of political rhetoric and action with widely disseminated, largely nonconscious ideas and feelings.

“The Hegemony of Discontent” assesses the role of são-luisense common sense in a Brazilian political rivalry, a 1986 riot in São Luís precipitated by cynical machinations during and after a local election. I recount how the new mayor, Gardênia Gonçalves, found herself besieged in the city hall, finally escaping from a crowd who broke the building’s windows, invaded it, and set it on fire. The analytical challenge is to gain some understanding of a complex, extreme, confusing event, of which no single person had a clear view. Why, I ask, was the mayor attacked with such rage and glee just a week after her resounding election to the office? The partial answer is that her opponents manipulated local feelings about patrons to their political advantage. According to são-luisense common sense, patrons can be loyal benefactors or treacherous persecutors. Helped by her own miscalculations, Gardênia’s political rivals used adroit political rhetoric to turn popular love for the mayor into hatred, amity into enmity, and trust into a sense of betrayal.

“The Semantics of Dead Bodies,” in contrast, describes a rhetorical boomerang, exploring the political and emotional implications of a 1985 São Luís murder trial. Diógenes—nicknamed “Didi, Terror of Anil” (a neighborhood of the city)—is accused, together with the federal narcotics agent José, of killing Natinho, a young man, and severely wounding Natinho’s girlfriend Adélia. The prosecution paints Didi as a marginal, a vicious street thug; the priest who defends Didi claims that his client, neither angel nor killer, was framed by the police in a bid to exonerate José. Didi is convicted, an ostensible triumph for justice and public safety. But, I suggest, in highlighting the figures of marginal and policeman, the trial mobilizes ironic background understandings that undermine the state’s own objectives. Shadowing the legal arguments are widespread suspicions that murderous police and murderous hoodlums are all made in Brazil, products of a corrupt, oppressive regime that even as it convicts Didi unintentionally reconfirms its own implacable brutality. I speculate that, even granting Didi’s guilt, in the end the trial therefore intensifies, rather than reduces, the fears that the conviction, ideally, should assuage.

In “Wild Power in Post-Military Brazil” I look at the survival of a commonsense view of power as wild and dangerous, or without limits. I suggest that “wild power,” a trademark of the terrorizing practices of Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964–1985), persists in the nooks and crannies of post-military Brazil. Once again, the setting is São Luís. I examine two types of events: maratonas, or gang rapes, and seqüestros, terror-squad abductions. I argue that such forms of quotidian violence serve as residuals of, or (more ominously) reservoirs for, repugnant political practices. The perpetrators of maratonas draw on notions of wild power in enforcing oppressive sexual norms; those who abduct young men in seqüestros use wild power to enforce oppressive political conformity. Wild power thus outlived the dictatorship, which testifies to its durability, but I do not mean to suggest that it is a national character trait etched in stone. Indeed, the corrosively critical popular song discussed in the paper’s final pages is an incisive local challenge to wild power. Chico Buarque, the song’s Brazilian composer, is, like one of Gramsci’s organic intellectuals, excavating the common sense that underwrites a wide range of political abuses.

Ideas of double-edged patronage (“Hegemony of Discontent”) and dangerous power (“Dead Bodies,” “Wild Power”) are entrenched in Brazil, but not immune to critical formulation and censure. In these chapters, which deal with disheartening, often atrocious events, I hope to second those Brazilians who have before me identified such conceptual snares, impediments to the realization of Brazilians’ hopes for greater equality and guarantees of basic rights.

Part III: Identities

Identities, which are strongly associated with perceptions of self and propositions about relatedness, are premier candidates for examination through the double lens. Claims about identity, forwarded in symbols, stories, and performances, circulate in public worlds, often endorsed or created by powerful political actors. Official representations—historical narratives, folkloric displays, state pageantry, citizenship laws—are examples. Yet identity sentiments cannot be reduced to such representations. Once again questions of cognitive salience arise, for identities are differentially appropriated into the selves of those to whom identity representations are addressed. Personal factors intervene between representation and experience.

The theoretical essay “Whose Identity?” discusses the significance of identity studies for key debates over culture and presents an overview of current anthropological approaches. I argue that reducing identities to discursive constructions, as is often done in the recent literature, is to accede to a questionable “null model of the person,” which treats subjectivity as inscription on a blank slate. Other options—cognitive, psychodynamic, consciousness, or blended models of the person—are available to anthropologists, and all are superior to the null model, yielding more complex analyses that can grapple with experiential aspects of identities. I suggest, in sum, that all cultural accounts, especially accounts of identity, presuppose some model of the person, and that a convincing analysis of identity—one that effectively bridges public and personal worlds—therefore requires a carefully considered, robust model of the sort employed by psychological anthropologists.

“The Identity Path of Eduardo Mori” discusses theoretical issues raised by a close study of personal ethnic identity. Drawing on my mid-1990s research on Brazilian migrants in Toyota City, the chapter describes the twists and turns of a Japanese Brazilian factory worker’s identity sentiments. Eduardo moves from feeling Japanese in Brazil to feeling Brazilian in Japan, though at all points his identifications are idiosyncratic, ambiguous, and ambivalent. I argue that such changing specificities of meaning, and Eduardo’s own intervention in his identity path, are easily masked by analyses that invoke sociocultural determinism to deduce virtual subjectivities.

The closing chapter, “Do Japanese Brazilians Exist?” is the most radical. Reflecting on the identity sentiments of yet other Japanese Brazilians, I wonder if I am justified in invoking the ethnic category “Japanese Brazilian” at all, even when they themselves do so. More generally, I question whether anthropologists have been justified in producing their customary monographs on culturally defined groups. That is, what ideological work do we do by focusing our work on “Japanese,” “Brazilians,” or “Japanese Brazilians”? Is it not the case that we ethnicize the people so designated, perhaps well beyond what their own experience will bear, and by extension ethnicize the world by implying that group categories and their associated putative cultures are paramount? Here—and, I now realize, elsewhere in the body of work presented here—I am endorsing an accelerating move to a new kind of anthropology, one that gives due weight to people’s experience and recognizes that public categories and representational approaches often hide both “intracultural” variation and “cross-cultural” convergences. My own ethnographic practice has increasingly sought out such anti-culturalist crevices, which on closer inspection open out into vast new universes of anthropological possibility.