The Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. xii, 192 pp. US$22.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-6158-9.
It is uncommon to read a book at once solidly grounded in the fundamentals of anthropology, critically aware of some of the key problems with the discipline, and dynamically engaged with contemporary social and cultural theory. As the title of this insightful and thought-provoking book suggests, there continues to be great analytical value in comparative thinking about the nature and extent of social and cultural differences, but there are also critically important problems in conceptualizing how, why, and in relation to what kind of larger questions comparative research should be undertaken in the context of rapid globalization. Blurred distinctions caused by the movement of people, commodities, and ideas make comparisons more problematic but also more valuable, important, and insightful when done with rigour and sophistication.
As an anthropologist who has for many years studied religion and nationalism, and as a scholar whose work in South Asia has marked an important analytical shift toward the critical re-examination of essentialized analytical categories, here Peter van der Veer directly engages with a fundamental problem in comparative “cross-cultural” research: how to reconcile relativism and historical constructivism with analytical “generalization”—the process of gaining a better perspective on the larger whole—without essentializing important social, cultural, and historical differences.
To avoid the problematic essentialism of contrived binarism—local and global, individual and society, agency and structure—and methodological reifications attendant on these contrasts, van der Veer suggests that “fragments” can provide a useful framework for comparative analysis. While difficult to identify and define in abstract terms, a fragment may be conceptualized as a phenomenon, either a material thing or an institutionalized idea, that highlights the complexity of intersecting realities and domains of experience. Thus, commodities such as tea and opium are fragments that provide critical insight on the dynamic, inherently unstable interplay of cultural meaning in relation to trade, colonial history, emergent state boundaries, and modes of production, as well as globalizing forms of power more generally.
Fragments break down cultural preconceptions in analytically productive ways, producing critical insight on social relations and institutionalized systems of meaning—such as religion, ethnicity, and nationalism—by provoking questions that challenge fundamental assumptions. Building on this logic, the book is divided into three parts, each comprised of two chapters. The Fragment and the Whole introduces comparison—a “double act of reflection” (29) rather than a binary, two-dimensional juxtaposition—to problematize the anthropological concept of holism, and uses markets and money to fragment preconceptions concerning the logic of rational choice. Civilization and Comparison shows how value-laden cultural constructions of civilization and civil society are fragmented by discrete modes of exclusion. Here van der Veer effectively shows how we can better understand the nature of civilization in relation to the historical production of “Muslims” as a different kind of stranger in Western Europe, China, and India. Comparing Exclusion further develops an argument concerning the contingency of modernity’s reification of nations, nationalism, and religious communities by problematizing the binary structure of state vs. non-state formations in Southeast Asia. This is followed by a concluding chapter that very effectively and provocatively uses garbage and sanitation as “fragments” within the purvey of state systems of public management and civil society to help us better understand the dynamics of poverty, care, and “civic responsibility” in India and China.
Van der Veer’s analysis reminds us of the fundamental value of a critical, anthropological perspective, that necessarily works from within the inherent modernity of social science, to question basic assumptions concerning the “natural” integrity of constructs such as the individual as a rational actor, the cultural heritage of nations, the preemptive social legitimacy of states, and the cultural integrity of “religious” identities. Not only do analyses of fragments—commodities, identities, ethnicities, state institutions—reveal the ideological structure of these constructs, such analyses provoke interesting and important questions concerning the social and cultural dynamic of fragmentary wholes that do not conform to the hegemonic holism of global modernity and rational synthesis.
Considering what strikes me as the development and articulation of a very useful approach, one is, nevertheless, left with the question of what constitutes a fragment as clearly distinct from something that is neither a fragment nor fragmentary. Or at least that is a question that is likely to be posed by those—even some anthropologists—who seek stable, unambiguously demarcated and easily translatable terminologies that work within established frameworks of certainty. The best answer to this question is that fragments are made, they are not discovered. The making of fragments, very different from the production of synthetic wholes, entails adroit perceptivity, a chronically critical analytical attitude and, perhaps most significantly, intellectual sophistication. Anything can be analyzed as a fragment, and it is a matter of persuasive argumentation that makes the case for doing so either convincing or not.
Self-consciously intent on fragmenting certainty, Peter van der Veer makes a very convincing case for the productive instability and provocative inconclusiveness of definitive conclusions. As all good books do, this one opens outward to suggest as many questions as it answers. It is most certainly a book that should be read by scholars who engage—either explicitly or implicitly; consciously, unconsciously, and sometimes blindly, with the focused confidence of their categorical convictions—in the comparative analysis of social and cultural difference.
Joseph S. Alter
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, USA
pp. 132-134