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.
Part I
Meanings
Chapter 1
Has Culture Theory Lost Its Minds?
One Anthropologist’s Point of View
For most cultural anthropologists, the “native’s point of view” remains the paramount object of ethnographic research. Nevertheless, interpretive and psychological anthropologists have come to envision the object differently. Positions on both sides of this blurry divide are varied and complex, but a sketch of ideal types is a useful point of departure.1 By and large, interpretive, or symbolic, anthropologists tend to look at the human situation from the top down, or outside in. Culture makes people: the native’s point of view is overwhelmingly a cultural product, the subjective imprint of a collective symbol system. A revisionist wing of interpretive anthropology, sometimes associated with postmodernism or poststructuralism, asserts that public discourses constitute multiple subjectivities, or subjective fragments, within native society. In contrast, psychological anthropologists are more likely to take a bottom up, or inside out perspective. The focus shifts to personal experience. A native’s point of view, the ideational precipitate of a singular life trajectory, is a compound of culture—ideas and feelings shared with others—and idiosyncratic elements. That is, people (not just anthropologists) inhabit subjective worlds that are in some ways similar and in others incredibly diverse. To varying degrees, psychological anthropologists also emphasize that people are conscious agents who continually rework personal meanings and sometimes, through communication with one another, culture itself.2
My sympathy for the psychological side of this idealized debate is strongly rooted in theoretical considerations advanced below. Nevertheless, this chapter is not an unqualified defense of psychological anthropology. An appealing feature of postmodern (or discourse) approaches is their willingness to address volatile political and social questions—a willingness exhibited by our predecessors Boas, Mead, Benedict, and Bateson, but only sporadically evidenced in contemporary psychologically oriented ethnographies.3 We psychological anthropologists should not abandon our long-standing, productive concerns with the subtleties of learning, thinking, and motivation; inattention to such matters is a signal weakness of interpretive approaches. But psychological anthropology has much to contribute to ongoing, intense debates among our colleagues about power, identity, cultural politics, and anthropological knowledge. Moreover, in engaging such debates we open new theoretical perspectives for cultural anthropology as a whole.
This chapter presents a critique of anthropological knowledge from a cognitive perspective. It identifies a major conceptual predilection, or bias, within cultural anthropology’s interpretive and neointerpretive mainstream; defends a cognitive theory of culture sensible to the intricacies of communication; and calls for psychological anthropology to broaden its compass. The argument, in a nutshell, runs as follows. The linguist Michael Reddy (1979) suggests that English speakers share a cognitive model of communication that induces us to imagine, despite the absurdity of such a notion, that symbols are packages of meanings transmitted from senders to receivers.4 This “conduit” model, I argue, makes the interpretation of symbols (the unpacking of meanings) seem a reasonable anthropological enterprise. But cultural analysis should not be imagined as code-breaking, however seductive such an approach may be and however obvious it may seem. The meanings do not inhere in the symbol; they arise in communicative events. Because interpretive accounts mistakenly invest language or other public symbols with meaning, they provide flat versions of culture that obscure important social and intrapsychic processes. By collapsing communication into a symbol/meaning package such accounts transmute life into text, effacing the agency of the natives, detemporalizing the flow of human interactions, and imbuing culture—disembodied symbols—with too much power. I argue, in short, that the conduit model of communication lends interpretive analyses commonsense credibility, with unfortunate theoretical and ethnographic consequences.
I advocate a contrasting viewpoint founded on meaning-systems approaches in cognitive anthropology and cognitive linguistics.5 Such approaches locate
