Mark Goble

Department of English
Stanford University
m.goble@leland.stanford.edu

 

James Clifford’s Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997.

 

Why is it not surprising that the Oxford English Dictionary locates the word “vacationer” as a term used chiefly in the United States? Across the whole complicated spectrum of U.S. cultures, classes, and ethnic identities, it can be said that practically no one “goes on holiday” and only rarely does someone “travel.” Instead, Americans take vacations. The very locution suggests the intensity with which leisure is pursued and constructed in the U.S., the almost violent attachment to small bits of time away from everyday life here in the industrialized nation that keeps its workers at work–across the class structure–for more hours of more weeks than all but a few Pacific Rim nations, which are then of course demonized for making their workers work too hard. At frequent stops along the various ways through modernity that James Clifford charts in his latest book, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, he makes use of his own location as the American “vacationer” to orient himself and us within the many cultures-in-transit with which he is concerned. This is not to say that orientation, once achieved, is readily understood or long maintained. One of the particular strengths of Clifford’s work as “a historical critic of anthropology” (8), whether in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, a collection of essays he edited with George Marcus, or his previous book, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, has always been its willingness to dispense with rigid conclusions in favor of a dialectical flexibility across a heterogeneous landscape that excludes total purity of either theoretical abstraction or empirical experience.

 

Routes extends and amplifies Clifford’s familiar style of analysis, though sometimes departing from his established topics of interest. “Routes continues an argument with the concept of culture” (2), Clifford writes, but this argument is often carried out on a terrain in which academic argument itself is on a sort of vacation, purposefully avoided in hopes of radically re-creating some of the standard styles of writing in which the study of “culture” is done. As Clifford writes, “Experiments in travel writing and poetic collage are interspersed with formal essays. By combining genres I register, and begin to historicize, the book’s composition–its different audiences and occasions. The point is not to bypass academic rigor…. The book’s mix of styles evokes these multiple and uneven practices of research, making visible the borders of academic work” (12). Routes gives one the sense of critique carried out under conditions of compulsory movement from place to place and from discourse to discourse. And like an American vacation in the strict sense of the term, different historical sites are visited both literally and figuratively. Each of the book’s three sections is loosely organized around standard essays. “Traveling Cultures” and “Spatial Practices” set the terms for the book’s first section, “Travels”; “Museums as Contact Zones” serves as the critical mass for several pieces on “Contacts”; and “Diasporas” outlines what is at stake in the various “Futures” that Clifford investigates in the book’s third and final portion. These “formal essays” inform and contend with other texts that range in styles among the various aforementioned genres. There are several pieces of travel writing that visit such locations as the northwest coast of Canada, the Museum of Man in London, the bustling tourist center of Palenque, Mexico, and Fort Ross, California. And in the practice of “poetic collage,” Clifford visits such texts as John Wesley Powell’s The Exploration of the Colorado River and John Steven’s Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan, both works of nineteenth century U.S. travel writing; Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of my Name; and Freud’s Moses and Monotheism. The diversity of approaches and appropriations is in keeping with Clifford’s conception of the book’s deceptively plain yet formidable goal: “Routes begins with [the] assumption of movement, arguing that travels and contacts are crucial sites for an unfinished modernity…. The essays gathered here aim to make some sense, or senses, of people going places” (2).

 

“Fort Ross Meditation,” the book’s final chapter, is an exemplary place to begin to understand in more detail Clifford’s project in Routes. It is no accident that Clifford ends a book on “people going places” under the signs of the most global dynamics one can imagine–capitalism, communication technologies, the nation-state–with an essay that examines a place just hours away from Clifford’s home in northern California. The irony speaks to the dialectical complexity of modern “dwelling/traveling.” The most elaborate histories of travel more than likely await us wherever we are in the late twentieth century, and we need barely move in order to witness the mobile narratives of imperial conquest and cultural change that play across the landscape. The first-person plural, however, remains highly conditional in Clifford; he rarely generalizes his investigations in the service of a constructed totality under which the entire chronotope of contemporary life may be situated. The most seductive totality that Clifford avoids in Routes is that of an essentially “deterritorialized” postmodernism of the kind associated with Deleuze and Guattari. Clifford instead devotes himself painstakingly to the project of differentiating between the relative and unstable experiences of mobility and stasis that interact in the countless “contact zones” between and within cultures. Fort Ross, California may represent an upper limit case for the complexity of such encounters. Fort Ross–“Ross” here derived from “Russia”–was a fur-trading outpost of the Russian Empire, its southernmost point of expansion into the Spain’s empire in the Americas. In addition to Russia and Spain, Great Britain and the United States also come into contact at Fort Ross. But the presences of these nations give only the barest sketch of the different communities “located” at Fort Ross: others include the Kayshaya Band of the Pomo Indians, Russian Siberians, Aleutian creoles, and Mormon missionaries. Each of these communities experienced Fort Ross as a different kind of far-flung destination and/or rapidly-changing homeland, and constructed different histories of mercantile dreams, imperial devastation, labor exploitation, postcolonial decline, and international conflict. And these pasts, as Clifford narrates them one after another, were necessarily assembled in dialogue with different presents, depending upon who was doing the work of historical narration.

 

“Fort Ross Meditation” in many ways recalls “Identity in Mashpee,” the concluding chapter of The Predicament of Culture, but it is in its departures from that earlier piece that we see how Clifford has transformed and refined his project. “Identity in Mashpee” told the story of a New England Indian tribe’s courtroom drama of recognition in the face of a long and bewildering history of resistance, assimilation, reinvention, hybridization, and modernization: “What if identity,” Clifford asked, “is conceived not as a boundary to be maintained but as a nexus of relations and transactions actively engaging a subject?” (Predicament 344). His calculus attempted to track cultural identities over time, and his conclusions were that “culture” as “identity” must always and necessarily fail to account fully for the histories that converge at any one individual, and that neither narratives of total assimilation nor unchanging continuance adequately describe the diverse fates of Indian peoples in the United States.¹ In “Fort Ross Meditation,” however, the center of attention is not a people but a place, a construction of both ethnographic and geographic fashioning. This shift in focus is accompanied by a shift in analytic style as well, for if one of the purposes of “Identity in Mashpee” was to show how a kind of anthropological deconstruction could sift out the traces of something called “Mashpee culture” in unlikely histories and practices, then “Fort Ross Meditation” can perhaps be read as a work of polymorphous cartography, a multiplied mapping of a particular place by means of narrative proliferation: the story of Russian discovery written over the story of Kayshaya subjugation, written over the story of Spanish decline, written over the story of U.S. expansion, written over the story of Kayshaya resistance, written over the story of contemporary reconstruction of the story of Russian discovery, and so on. By choosing location itself as the “field” for his investigation, Clifford permits himself to speculate about histories that may exist in relation to a specific ecology of place in which the human is but one variable among many, often the most destructive but not necessarily the most important. The Russians came to Fort Ross because of the sea otter and the lucrative Chinese trade in pelts that made such a far-flung outpost profitable and therefore possible. Thus Clifford suggests the rather eccentric project of a history that not only accounts for the sea otter’s role in the local and international economies that came to a nexus at Fort Ross, but a history which actually belongs to the sea otter.

 

This makes for a strange moment in the book, for here it becomes necessary to ascertain just how much indulgence Clifford may be permitted in the rhetorical play that comes with any attempt to shift the work of critical analysis into a different register of language. As such, the following passages in “Fort Ross Meditation” suggest themselves as paradigmatic of the book’s larger aims both stylistically and thematically:

 

A symptom, perhaps, of this uncertainty [about the nature of historical agency and consciousness] is my hankering to ask an absurd question. What does the history of changing environments, including their own near extinction, commodification, and consumption since 1700, look like to sea otters? How might this history appear to them? The arrival of a new predator? Holocaust? The predator's removal? Survival? Can we imagine a nonhuman historical consciousness?... Why this desire to find something like historical consciousness and agency in nonhumans? What temporalities define the consciousness of sea otters? Day and nights? Tides? Seasons and currents? The life cycles of kelp and other food? Reproduction? Birth and death? Perhaps even generations--a sense of living through offspring? None of these temporalities, the feelings, actions, and skills associated with them, come within distant translation-range of 'history' in its human senses.... Why indulge in such speculations? Perhaps to glimpse, from a translated place of animal difference, the enveloping waters in which I myself swim, the environment in which my 'life' unfolds, a habitat called history. (325-326)

 

This passage brings to mind Thoreau’s Walden and its allegorizing of a battle between two ant colonies to signify across a great many meanings from the most existentially abstract (the futility of human endeavor) to the most historically referenced (the potential for violence in a nation both free and slave). At the same time, Clifford wants to forestall an allegorical interpretation even as he dances across its possibility. There is something corny about all this and Clifford knows it: after an earlier collage on “White Ethnicity” has ironically detailed Clifford’s own formative encounters with bluegrass music and its performance of whiteness, I don’t think it an accident that “hankering” here makes what must be one if its first appearances in a book of cultural theory. The wider latitude of travel writing as a genre brings with it rhetorical dangers. Questions stack up and hover over each other like airplanes in a holding pattern at a busy airport. A down-home kitsch mediates a moment that oscillates between wildly divergent languages: on the one hand, Clifford reaches for a kind of metaphorical excess reminiscent of Benjamin in his phantasmagoric attempts to speak from the soul of the commodity, but on the other hand, he must ward off the kind of didactic sentimentality reminiscent of Charles Kuralt in his syrupy naturalization of history as another consumable for Sunday morning brunch. But no abstract of quotation and comment can stand in for the experience of reading a text like “Fort Ross Meditation.” The critical energies of the essay depend wholly upon the literary performativeness of the writing, a statement which is, I admit, a truism that could be said of any text, but a truism that is brought to the fore and animated by Clifford’s writing in Routes.

 

“I’m looking for history at Fort Ross,” Clifford begins one section of “Fort Ross Meditation,” “I want to understand my location among others in time and space. Where have we been and where are we going?” (301). The combination of flat tone and big questions would not be out of place on a postcard–though admittedly of a very particular kind. Clifford exploits the conventions of travel writing again in “Palenque Log,” a narrative reconstruction of one day in and around a major site of Mayan ruins in Chiapas. Here, Clifford maintains the form of a diary with exact notations of time and place as a device that both frames and generates the ethnographic discourse of the piece. The sentences are short. The syntax is economical. The text achieves the slightly compromised and degraded status of travel writing while simultaneously commenting on the very conventions it inhabits. Thus the entry for “11:00-1:30” begins “Jungle atmosphere in the hotel restaurant” and develops into a brief moment of reflection on the writings of a previous American tourist in Palenque, the nineteenth-century traveler John Stephens (227). Clifford invites, if not demands, a reckoning of his own travels against those of a predecessor of whose ideological limits he is only too aware. But whereas a conventional essay would extrapolate, evade, or contextualize such a moment of anxious influence, Clifford opts for a dazzling and deflating narrative gesture: he ends the entry by confessing, “I doze off” (228). Yet what sort of confession is this? Is it possible to doze off in the present tense? The present tense signifies a break in narrative time that is impossible to suture shut. No matter what a narrator writes–“I am falling asleep,” “I dozed off”–an implication of constructed discontinuity cannot be dodged, and Clifford makes no effort here or elsewhere to dodge these effects of writing as such.

 

The more “writerly” chapters in Routes, like “Fort Ross Meditation,” “Palenque Log,” and the fascinating collage “Immigrant” (inspired by a Susan Hiller installation at the Freud Museum in London), all display–and I use this word pointedly, in conversation with Clifford’s own critiques of the display of objects in museums–their hybrid genealogies as interdisciplinary experiments in analysis and language. The less ostentatiously experimental chapters, like “Spatial Practices: Fieldwork, Travel, and the Disciplining of Anthropology” and “Paradise,” a wide-ranging essay that begins as a review of an exhibit on New Guinea at the Museum of Mankind in London and expands into a discussion of how the discourse of cultural hybridity addresses its own potential for hegemony, display the strengths familiar to readers of Clifford’s previous work. Whether writing about the historical construction of the “field” as a site of anthropology’s codification as a discipline, or about the role played by the discourse of diaspora in such works as Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic and Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin’s writings on Jewish identity, Clifford is a powerful synthesizer of diverse arguments. Yet even the more traditional essays in Routes eschew the more structurally aggressive kinds of arguments that Clifford made in The Predicament of Culture; for while Routes announces itself as a sequel to its predecessor, the thematics of the new book drive Clifford to more provisional conclusions. In “Traveling Cultures,” for example, Clifford tells how a re-reading of the essay “On Ethnographic Surrealism” led him to imagine an essay of the chronotope–the privileged theoretical figure of The Predicament of Culture–of the hotel in the 1920s and 1930s. “But almost immediately the organizing image, the chronotope, began to break up. And I now find myself embarked on a research project where any condensed epitome or place of survey is questionable. The comparative scope I’m struggling toward is not a form of overview. Rather, I’m working with a notion of comparative knowledge produced through an itinerary, always marked by a ‘way in,’ a history of locations and a location of histories” (31).

 

The book Clifford produces out of his struggle toward a “comparative scope,” a book in which modern experiences of relative habitation and relative mobility can be understood as mutually constituting one another even as they propel cultures and subjects along different paths through the twentieth century, must of necessity feature more instances of startling insight than comprehensive perspective. The book’s overall shape conforms imperfectly to any available models: too heterogeneous to articulate a single argument, too stylistically diverse for a collection of essays, and yet too rigorous to be considered a work of postmodern travel writing (whatever that might be). And while there is a great deal of autobiographical reflection in Routes, its field of vision is categorically more broad and more historically committed than most of the academic memoirs that have been appearing for the last few years. As Clifford himself notes, of the modern domains of knowledge, anthropology has long been the discipline in which the first-person singular plays the most compelling role in legitimizing the knowledge itself. Anthropologists insist that they were “there” in a way that few literary critics insist they have read the book. It is too soon to know if Routes is to be the first or the last statement Clifford makes within that peculiar tradition of autobiographical anthropology that includes Michel Leiris’s Rules of the Game and Malinowski’s Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, and that perhaps should cover James’s The American Scene as well. What is certain, however, is that for the time being James Clifford is among the most interesting traveling companions we’re likely to meet on the way to wherever it is we’re going.

 

Note

 

1. For an intriguing critique of Clifford, see Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham: Duke UP, 1995). In a long and cunning footnote, Michaels pushes at what he sees as the underlying incongruities in Clifford’s attempt to articulate a difference between reinvention and continuity as indicators of cultural presence and identity. Bluntly put, Michaels argues that there is no reinvention without the prior assumption of a continuity that renders a subject already a participant in the “culture” whose activities she pursues. Thus Michaels’s contention that “drumming will make you a Mashpee not because anyone who drums gets to be a Mashpee but because, insofar as your drumming counts as remembering a lost tradition, it shows that you already are a Mashpee” (177). Michaels imagines a laboratory condition in which all the variables of identity are burned away save two: freely chosen material practices and biological phantasms of race. Clifford revisits the predicaments of identity at several points in Routes, most notably in an exchange with Stuart Hall reproduced at the end of the essay “Traveling Cultures.” When pressed by Hall to articulate how “something” of an identity can be carried on through situations of pronounced migration, diaspora, and acculturation, Clifford argues that identity might be better conceived as “something more polythetic, something more like a habitus, a set of practices and dispositions, part of which could be remembered, articulated in specific contexts” (44). And later, Clifford augments this idea by figuring identity as “a processural configuration of historically given elements–including race, culture, class, gender, and sexuality–different combinations of which may be featured in different conjunctures. These elements may, in some conjunctures, cross-cut and bring each other to crisis. What components of identity are ‘deep’ and what ‘superficial’? What ‘central’ and what ‘peripheral’?” (46). I doubt that Michaels would be swayed by these statements either. Michaels’s critique of identity is all but irreconcilable with the most basic assumptions of anthropological discourse, namely that social agents larger than the individual and smaller than discourse itself really do exist.

Works Cited

 

• Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988.
• Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997.
• Michaels, Walter Benn. Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.