2013/06/06 by Stephan Palmié · 2 citations
Social Sciences · Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · #Anthropological Studies and Insights #Race, Genetics, and Society #Geographies of human-animal interactions
paper · doi:10.1086/671196
In recent decades, approaches championing conceptions of hybridity and the hybrid have proliferated in our discipline. This has been hailed as, and may well represent, a salutary reaction against earlier tendencies toward reificatory holism in the construction of units of ethnographic description and analysis. Yet both current anthropological deployments (and critiques) of hybridity have not superseded a fundamentally questionable logic that mistakes the output of the operation of rules of discernment and discrimination inherent to human classificatory activity (including those variously in play in our own discipline) for more or less adequate descriptions of the world and its furniture. If, in this sense, anthropological analysis has long aimed to reveal the fundamentally arbitrary nature of socially operative categories of identity and difference through what Bowker and Star call strategic “inversions of classificatory infrastructures,” it stands to argue that we have neglected to submit our own practices of knowledge production to such metacategorical reflexivity. In failing to do so, we have tended to proceed from what Bakhtin calls “intentional hybridity” (i.e., deliberate translational commensuration across heterogeneous universes of discourse) to increasing degrees of operationally normalized “organic hybridity” that have come to inform our very conceptions of “the cultural.”