3 - The Sovereign Subject under Siege: Ethnology and Ethnocentrism in Kafka's “Description of a Struggle, “Jackals und Arabs,” and “In the Penal Colony”

Summary

IN THE SEMINAL ESSAY “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (1969), Jacques Derrida makes the following aside concerning the origin of ethnology:

One can assume that ethnology could have been born as a science only at the moment when a decentering had come about: at the moment when European culture — and, in consequence, the history of metaphysics and of its concepts — had been dislocated, driven from its locus and forced to stop considering itself as the culture of reference.

Conversely, as a practitioner of a “primarily … European science employing traditional concepts,” the ethnologist “accepts into his discourse the premises of ethnocentrism at the very moment when he denounces them” (282). For Derrida, ethnology emerges as a divided subject that must constantly contend with the contradictory acentric and ethnocentric impulses that gave rise to the discipline.

The contradiction that Derrida perceives in the theory of ethnology also influences the practice of ethnology's modern successor, anthropology. On the one hand, as Clifford Geertz explains, the anthropologist conducting fieldwork while living among the objects of his enquiry must contend with the “difficulties of being at one and the same time an involved actor and a detached observer.” Conversely, the mere presence of an alien researcher in a community may radically alter the behavior of those subjects and thus produce the anthropological analogue to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, that is, a situation in which the very act of observation impinges upon the phenomena observed and thus precludes any objective findings.