Sahlins, M. "Goodbye to Triste Tropes"

Goodby to Triste Tropes: Ethnography in the Context of World History. in Culture in Practice

Sahlins M.

Zome Books, New York (2002)

Sahlins writes in opposition to several schools of thought, 'reflexive anthropology', 'post-modernism', 'post-structuralism', and 'World Systems' in different sections of the article, but what these schools of thought seem to have in common is a tendency to render indigenous culture as something that is corrupted by global modernity. As an alternative to this, he proposes historical ethnography and archive work as a way to see how culture and tradition have been constants through a people's history and are actually the method of social change, rather than its victim. Lots of good examples of indigenizing modernity. He sees historical ethnography as a response to 'reflexive anthropology' that believes it cannot understand the Other. The "triste tropes" of the title come down to idea that global capital/modernity is coherent and powerful and indigenous cultures are incoherent and weak.

"World Systems": (see Sahlins "Cosmologies of Capitalism" in the same book.)

From Eric Wolf's Europe and the People without History, the World System is the global expansion of Western capitalism. Wolf argues against seeing the world as one system of Western capitalist domination; this makes indigenous populations into historyless subjects without their own systems. Agreeing with Wolf's argument against One World System, Sahlins' issue with Wolf is his use of Marxian materialism and culture as a 'mode of production' that ultimately has the same consequence of turning indigenous peoples into bourgeois subjects. Instead, Sahlins argues that we need to take indigenous understandings of the world as something with equal weight as Western theories.

A recent movement of 'culturalism' goes beyond distinct culture and tradition to political rights in opposition to foreign imperial presence (474-5).

I loved the use of the Renaissance as an example of a culture reinventing itself based on the perceived values of other cultures. Perhaps a parallel could be drawn with the Cultural Revolution, or more broadly China's constant project of integrating foreign conquerers into its self-conception.

It is unfortunate that Sahlins' opponents in this piece remain mostly generalized strawmen. I would like to see him engage more directly with the statements of the 'post-structuralists' and 'post-modernists' and 'reflexive anthropologists' and 'World Systematists' (he goes into 'World Systems' more specifically in "Cosmologies of Capitalism." While it is good to acknowledge the strength of indigenous culture, I think it would be a hazard to ignore the very real differences in power between colonizer and colonized, especially when it is measured in guns and lives. Sahlins recognizes this as well. What Sahlins is saying, I think, is that cultural hegemony does not have a total destructive power, and it is not anthropologists' business to declare cultures in jeopardy or destroyed when they are actually changing and reinventing themselves.

This fits with two aspects of my work. One, the historical perspective. I could use this article to justify my historical perspective as a way of avoiding instead of enabling essentializing the Chinese experience. Contemporary work on China is often very concerned with the State and the influence of the State, as well as a modernizing, urbanizing, capitalizing China that is increasingly at the center of global issues. Instead of turning "China" into "the Chinese State and its challengers", my approach acknowledges the continuing traditions of China as a set of consistencies that enable and guide change. Rather than talking about Confucianism or "China" vs. "the West" becoming a way of creating an essential 'Chinese character', the historical perspective deepens my analysis of contemporary China by looking at what endures through modernity.