Elizabeth Povinelli gave a 290 lecture yesterday worth attending. The room was packed and the lecturer (whatever one might think of the piece) presented a serious effort at thought. These two facts alone make the event a red letter day in the Berkeley anthropology department. It seems so little to ask for, but one does have to wonder why there are so few such events in the department throughout the year. Certainly Berkeley could attract people who people at Berkeley want to hear from. But that's another story...

I wanted to reflect on the talk here because I think it's relevant to some of the conversations we've had in labinar settings and it intersects a good deal with the manuscript of conversations we read between George Marcus and Paul last September. And I also had questions about it that I wasn't able (or prepared) to ask yesterday and so thought I would do so here.

Povinelli presented a critique of the ethical practice of anthropology. She was after what she called a description of anthropology's "way of life" in three senses: as a mode of knowing; an evidence producing machine; and a set of obligations that arise from the first two. Anthropology's method--which she argued is its distinction--is to produce evidence in partnership with other people through a dynamic of "coping" and "disturbance," a process that ends with the "exfoliation" of information or facts. This "co-substantial" production of evidence is then circulated through the "liberal logics of individuation" such as textuality, which denudes the evidence/information it circulates of the very social relations ('social rhetorics') that produced it. Both sides produce but the one side circulates and the other is subject to that circulation. Thus the form and method of ethnography are in ethical conflict, and this paradox is the anthropologist's way of life. I admit this is a simplification but I think I've got it about right. Corrections welcome.

My questions:

1. Does this argument presuppose a particular, a very traditional, kind of anthropological encounter--that is, one where the power differential is extreme? Povinelli implied that since all anthropology shares this methodology (the co-substantial production of evidence), that it all partakes in a similar ethical practice. But what happens to her argument if one is in a fieldsite where, first, everyone is a "liberal subject," where power relations are not so drastically unequal, and where the power and instrumentality may very well move in the opposite direction (i.e., when we are studying "up')?

2. Does her argument presuppose an "ethnos" in the equation? What about all the anthropology that proceeds without interest or involvement with such an idea? I heard her wanting to take in all anthropology, even delimiting when one might "stop being an anthropologist." What boundaries was she putting around "anthropology" beyond methodology?

3. Anthropologists derive evidence from many sources, so even if we accept her argument that the universal anthropological method is co-substantial production of evidence, how does it affect her argument to recognize the heterogeneity of actors who provide us with such evidence?

Finally, my overarching question is what would discussions about anthropology--its method, ethics, its "way of life"--look like if one did not necessarily proceed with the presumption that what anthropology does is provide information to the world about people who don't know how to hold hammers (so to speak).