anthropology

cultural fetish

economies of abandonment

incommensurability

nationality

American

occupation / innovator as

anthropologist

university professor

Columbia University

innovator in the field of

late liberalism

journalist

is tasked not to ask how a multicultural world is sutured at the end of some horizon of liberal communication, but to ask instead how how incommensurateness is made to appear commensurate.

What seems to be at stake then is how we come to characterize moments of social repression and social violence directed at left and right radical worlds as moving forward a nonviolent shared horizon, as the peaceful proceduralism of communicative reason, rather than as violent intolerance, i.e., the pragmatic aspects of communication. To do this we have to shift our perspective. We do not ask how a multicultural or plural nation (or world) is sutured at the end of some horizon of liberal, institutionally embedded, communication. We ask instead how the incommensurateness of liberal ideology and practice is made to appear commensurate. (Povinelli 2001 : 327-328)

is all trade in and around cultural difference: A concept-thing arising in the gap that comes about at the moment of contact between two cultures.

William Piety has argued that the cultural fetish-we might include under the sign of 'cultural fetish' all trade in and around cultural difference-is the mark of the foreclosure that occurs in the process of radical translation. 'Fetish is not of any one of the two cultures coming into contact. It is a concept-thing (an idea and a material thing at the same time) that arises in the gap that comes about at the moment of contact between the two cultures/languages. It becomes imbued with power to carry meaning across borders' (Piety 1985, 1987, 1988... see also Taussig 1993, and for recent full-length ethnographies incorporating these critical traditions see Ivy 1995, Rabinow 1999, Rofel 1999, Monis 2000). (Povinelli 2001 : 324)

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is a state in which two phenomena cannot be compared by a third without producing a serious distortion.

In other words, if indeterminacy refers to the possibility of describing a phenomenon in two or more equally true ways, then incommensurability refers to a state in which two phenomena (or worlds) cannot be compared by a third without producing serious distortion. (povinelli 2001 : 320)

Elizabeth Povinelli

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Elizabeth Povinelli