Spiro, Melford. 1990. "On the Strange and the Familiar in Recent Anthropological Thought," in Cultural Psychology: Essays on Comparative Human Development, eds. James W. Stigler, Richard A. Shweder, and Gilbert Herdt, 47-61. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
GN502.C85 1989.
Begins with the catalyst for his essay, a remark by T.S. Eliot that "all good poetry" should make the strange familiar and the familiar strange. First insight that he had with respect to this, many years ago, was that anthropologists did the same thing. Second insight, more recently, was that anthropologists, while they still adopt this approach in their teaching, no longer are in the business of making the familiar strange and the strange familiar as *scholars*. He dates this change to approximately 1970. Prior to that, anthropologists had developed a technical vocabulary, supposedly value-neutral, for translating both other cultures (making the strange more familiar) and their own (making the familiar strange) into comparable entities. This was thought to be useful not only for comparative but also for single-culture studies: "For it compels the anthropologist to include in his explanatory net a variety of variables which, because that culture - depending on whether the anthropologist is a native or a foreigner - is either too familiar or too strange, would otherwise remain opaque to his perceptions" (49). For the third hat that anthropologists wear, that of cultural critic, the activity of making the strange familiar is primary and is used to deny the moral or cognitive inferiority of people of other cultures. He does not claim that anthropology necessarily succeeded in these aims, only that attempts were made in good faith to achieve them.
Of the three hats, he sees the "sea change" in anthropology in scholarly and in critical work. "One group of anthropologists rejects the making of the strange familiar on the ground that the range of cultural diversity makes this operation impossible to achieve; a second group rejects it on the ground that, even if it were possible, Western 'domination' of non-Western societies makes it undesirable to achieve.... there is still a third group... who reject that operation on both grounds" (51). Of the first group, he notes, "...if cultures are comprehensible only in their own terms, then it is clearly not possible for a comparative anthropology to achieve its twin desderata of translating the different cultural worlds comprising human cultural diversity in a manner that at one and the same time makes each of them both meaningful and intelligible, on the one hand, and yet comparable with all others, on the other hand.... as the creature of Western culture, anthropology is no the transcultural science that it was formerly coneived to be; rather, it is more accurately conceived as an ethnoscience of Western culture, reflecting and being informed by the Western conceptual world" (52). "In short, the strange cannot possibly be anything other than Other" (53). Of the second viewpoint, the moral argument that calls for a "non-Western anthropology," he concludes, "When these cultures are conceptualized by that alternative - their own - ethnoscience, they still, of course, remain Other vis-à-vis Western culture, buth they achieve a status (at the very least) of equality with it. In sum, the strange can only become the euqal of the familiar not, paradoxically enough, by being made familiar, but by remaining strange" (53-54).
Concerning cultural criticism, the difference in the newer anthropology is that rather than attempting to make the strange familiar, critics tend to claim that the familiar is itself strange, in the sense that modern society is alienated from the "authentic" order of things represented by primitive society. Identifies two strands of thought that lead to this conclusion (although they seem pretty similar to me): "Primitivism and Utopianism on one hand, and on the other hand from any number of theories that (beginning with Marx) view Western capitalist society as the seedbed of alienation" (56). Thus, according to Spiro's characterization of current anthropological thought, there is "an unremitting perception of the entire human world as 'strange'" (57).
Makes a logical argument that the critical stance holding Western society to be alienating and non-Western cultures to be integrative must be an anthropological assumption and not a finding, because to compare cultures empirically violates the assumption of incommensurability. Cites Levi-Strauss on the paradoxes of such a critical stance vis-a-vis the "Otherness-of-the-familiar." Applies Hilary Putnam's critique of histories of science to anthropology to disarm the "Otherness-of-the-strange" assumptions about absolute incommensurability; "If strange cultures are not only different from, but are also incommensurate with, Western culture, then anthropologists would be incapable of describing, let alone interpreting, the cultures of the strange groups in which they conduct research" (58-59).
Mark DeWitt
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