REVIEW ARTICLES

The Poetic Turn in Postmodern Anthropology:

The Poetry of Paul Friedrich

Redwing. Paul Friedrich. Chicago: Benjamin and Martha Waite Press, 1982. 16 pp.
$2.00 (paper).
Bastard Moons. Paul Friedrich. Chicago: Benjamin and Martha Waite Press, 1979. 81
pp. $1.00 (paper).

STEPHEN A. TYLER
Rice University

This earth is honey for all creatures, and all creatures are honey for this earth.
Byhad-Aranyaka Upani4ad 2.5.1

ANTHROPOLOGY AS POETRY
These two collections of poems by Paul Friedrich are important not only as poetry but
because they tell us that anthropology in the postmodern world has taken a poetic turn,
manifest both in the writing of poetry and in an interest in poetics-in the form and
functions of discourse and rhetoric. This turn to poetics is also a turning away from
formal linguistics and modern logic as the dominant models of discourse, for it acknowl-
edges figurative synthesis as the previously constituted ground of all analysis and as the
enabling discourse that analysis can neither fully explicate nor transcend. As Friedrich
says:
I The world is uniquely metaphorized by language . . . and a language is pervasively poetic. . . .
Culture as well as language is a structure in process involving meanings and contexts, and many
of the relations among its symbols are analogous in part to poetic figures. . . . Culture is, to a
significant degree, a work of art. [1982:2]
-
Postmodern anthropology is relativistic in a new sense, for it denies that the discourse
of one cultural tradition can analytically encompass the discourse of another cultural
tradition. The anthropologist cannot speak for all peoples and all times. Postmodern an-
thropology refuses both the Hegelian and the scientific fusion of horizons, which reduces
all traditions to the shape and interests of Western discourse. It opposes the semiotic no-
tion that languages and cultures are just conventional systems of signs separate from
human use and intentionality, for this idea of signs is but a consequence of the technology
of writing, the sleight of hand by which the substitution of appearances is accomplished
and the illusion of system created. Postmodern anthropology reduces the idea of
system -in both its mechanistic and organismic versions - to a trope, a way of speaking
relative to the purposes of a discourse. It takes discourse itself as its object, worlds beyond

Copyright @ 1984 by the American Anthropological Association

0002-7294/84/020328-09$1.40/1

328
Tyler] THE POETRY OF PAUL FRIEDRICH 329

discourse being possible only inasmuch as they are implicated by a discourse. Neither ful-
ly coherent within itself nor given specious consistency through referential cor-
respondence with a world external to itself, discourse announces brief coherences and
enacts momentary as if correspondences relative to our purposes, interests, and inter-
pretive abilities.
The discourse of postmodern anthropology does not demonstrate by logical proof
alone; it reveals by paradox, myth, and enigma, and it persuades by showing, reminding,
hinting, and evoking. It does not locate meaning solely in the seeming certitudes of that
clear, precise, and unambiguous ratio of the Cartesian mythos, but seeks it as well in the
ambiguities of oratio. It rejects the Aristotelian hypotactic, monophonic economy of
discourse-that imitation of logic-as the only or best model for its discourse. Sorites,
polyphony, parataxis, parable, paradox, enigma, ellipsis, conceits, and tropes of all
kinds take their equal place as effective means of reasonable discourse along with the so-
called inferential patterns of dialectic and logic.
Though anthropology is now a discourse in and for itself, it is not yet a critical
method attempting to understand its own conditioning historicity, but one that hopes in-
stead to obscure and discredit its grounding in history and the commonplace world of
Western civilization by making that world and that experience the unreflective, universal
condition of all knowing. It is, in fact, ideological, reflecting both the political hegemony
of the West and its most formidable instrument of domination-modern science. It is a
method that forecloses forever the possibility of any understanding that does not first en-
tail cultural conversion or reduction to its own standards of mechanistic rationality as
prerequisites, and one that imposes a kind of hypocrisy on its practitioners, exhorting
them to suspend belief as a condition of knowing, but ensuring by the presuppositions of
its method that the one great belief in science itself is unsuspended and unsuspendable.
It thus affirms on the one hand what it denies on the other- that belief is not an impedi-
ment to knowing, but is instead its ground and means.
Gone now is the excitement of discovery that marked the formative period, and gone
too is the agon of opposition to convention that thematized its rhetoric and invited
thought to dialectic. This is not a lament for the founding past nor is it the tristesse that
comes in the spurugmos of a revolution; it is rather the expression of an impression that
the discourse has lost its way and has forgotten the metaphors of its founding pathos, for
it has become a discourse that seeks less to interpret alien culture than to interpret
itself-a discourse whose whole aim is not to make the aliens understandable within the
context of their own beliefs, but to sanitize them, to remove the threat of their
differences by washing them in the waters of the universals of scientific method and thus
to anesthetize our consciousness of their differences and make them fit for the context of
our beliefs.

POETRY AS ANTHROPOLOGY
--
Without anthropology neither modern poetry nor modern art would be what it is to-
day, for anthropology has given modern artists the mood of distance and estrangement
from their own familiar traditions, and, by enriching and relativizing the storehouse of
knowledge, symbols, and odd and diverse facts out of which poets or artists fashion their
work, has enabled their exploitation of the archaic, the exotic, the primitive, the primor-
dial, the universality of myth and symbols, and the relativity of language and thought. So,
we do not now find it strange that a poet might write in English as if it were Chinese, or
define the poetic line as if it were a yogic technique for the regulation of breathing, or
that much recent verse reads like the transcription of some oddly irreligious glossolalia, or
that the poets subjectivity appears only on the title page, having been excised from the
330 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [86, 1984

text in the manner of objective ethnography, or that a poet might speak of him or herself
as an archeologist or as the shaman or the tribe. Like the ethnographer, the
modern poet is not a creator, but one who, as Fenellosa says, records what is forced on
him or her by nature (1969). The poet is, in William Carlos Williams words, an object
among objects, another dog among a lot of dogs (1963). The ultimate anthropological
urge is to take poetry directly from the savage milieu undiluted by an intermediary civil-
ized poet, as in Rothenbergs recent collections of native poetry (1968; and Rothenberg
and Quasha 1974).
Even the innovations of language, the very form of modern poetry, has its source in
ideas of the archaic and primitive. The modern poets search for a predicational form
that would express agent-act-objectwas motivated by the notion that this schema best
represented both the primordial thought pattern and the nature of reality (Fenellosa
1969). So too, the preference for gerunds that characterizes much modern verse is an at-
tempt to recapture a primitive, non-Aristotelian reality as process rather in the manner
of Whorfs translations of Hopi. Each poetic line is an elliptical heap of raw perception,
an ideogram (Pound 1961) or hieroglyph (Olson 1966) in the order of natural per-
ception similar in many ways to the idea of inner speech in Soviet neurolinguistics. The
poem is a paratactic juxtaposition of these heaps, a collage whose cohesion is emergent
in the juxtaposition of particulars as a gestalt association or a Peircian abductive in-
ference. Cohesion is not mechanically produced by overt connectives, hypotactic devices,
or dramatic sequence, but by unstated relations governed by the poetic field, an
emergent frame which limits the possibilities of association and inference in a way
reminiscent of William Jamess constellation theory of association. The poem is an oc-
cult document (Duncan 1963), an open field of relations (Olson 1966), a locus of ac-
tion and process, a short-hand picture of the operations of nature (Fenellosa 1969); its
mimesis is kinetic and concrete, not static and abstract (Olson 1966). The poem reveals
the direct flow of thought in a non-Aristotelian pre- or postlogical consciousness in which
the juxtaposition of particulars, even of opposites, does not produce a third, a synthesis, a
more abstract thing, as does the dialectic; it leads instead to a nonlogical transcendent
complementarity, an unresolved catachresis, a thing in constant motion (Fenellosa 1969).
This suspension of logic is, however, only apparent, for much modernist poetry reads
like Wittgensteins Tractatus, and for good reason -poet and philosopher alike have
broken with the discourse-oriented logic of Aristotle (the syllogism is, after all, a
miniature discourse) that focused on the connections between propositions, and have put
in its place the logic of propositions that emphasizes the relations of elements within the
proposition itself. There is an obvious similarity between the poets agent-act-object
and the philosophers f(x, y), and both consign is to a dependent role outside the pro-
position in order to control its role in building metaphors, for both seek to speak in that
language beyond metaphor (Pound 1968:30) that allows comparison between things
but permits no identities of things originally unlike.
The modernist version of modern poetry, like all modernist movements, is an attempt
to remake art in the image of science. The poem is like a scientific theory: a collection of
perceptual facts out of which emerges a generalization, through no syllogistic connection
but in the identification of natural process. Like science, it refutes the commonsense ex-
perience of nature and attempts to replace it with the rational experience of nature as
understood by science. Nature for the modernist is not that nature of the Romantics,
given in everyday sensation and presumed in common speech, but a latent structure
discernible only by extraordinary perception and describable only in extraordinary
language. It denies that the individual ego is the center of this experience and preaches a
Heisenbergian-Zen doctrine of the identity of the observer and the observed which
obliterates the ego and merges subjectivity and objectivity into the undifferentiated
Tyler] THE POETRY OF PAUL FRIEDRICH 331

cosmic process. The real is process, the Heraclitian flux rather than the timeless struc-
tures of Plato. It teaches a syncretic mysticism drawing its inspiration from the hermetic
process thinkers of the Western tradition -Heraclitus through Wittgenstein -and from
Eastern religions. It proclaims the fusion of all cultural horizons into a single
transcendental field of fields, a cosmos of poetic potential in which the poet-shaman
divines intimations of order as he seeks that ultimate open-field poem known as the void
of plentitudinous emptiness- the sunyatg.

_--
THE P0ET:ANTHROPOLOGIST
~

Friedrich is not committed to this modernist enterprise, though he is, of course, in-
fluenced by it. He is eclectic; he uses whatever best gets the job done, to say what he needs
to say but cannot say in any other way. Some poems-Pig Doom, Chaos and Credo,
Chagalls Waltz, Four Stages (Solo),and Tree Necklace - are as ideogrammic as
Pounds Cantos. Four Stages (Solo), a poem about the stages of life, opens with these
staccato lines evoking the birth experience: Neonate. Icy Water. Silver Nitrate. /
Screams. Blinding Overhead Light./. Other poems-The Master of Words, The
Week with My Week Old Maria, The Prairie Warbler, How You Wept, How Bitter-
ly, and Distant Figures-have a clear rhetorical structure or narrative line reminiscent
of Frost. In The Master of Words there is this narrative sequence: My old father has a
German accent, OK / but he was a sort of master with our English words / . . . Today
he sits, trapped in an old peoples home / . . . his phrases piecemeal, strained out in slow
motion / . . . he sits, head crooked to one side / strapped to his wheelchair / the
master of words. Still other poems-The Cry of the Fox, Catalysis, Fury and Preci-
sion, and some of the bird poems- are almost haiku-like in their brevity and suggestive
imagery. In Bird and Soul, the line in the wind, rising, the wheat meets a descending
red-winged blackbird evokes in these few words the whole of a familiar rural scene and
at the same time suggests the meeting of earth and air, of soul and body. A few
poems- Deep Water, Castration, and Return-verge on surrealism. Deep
Water, for example, is like a dream sequence. I have swum deep water / . . . water
moccasins in dozens / . . . I dove, lungs cracking toward arctic grottos / into nothing:
There was no ice maiden / Flight of wild arms, wild images / over rocks of mined-out
quarries, a sea floor. In some poems such as Rape by Moonlight and The Black
Trooper these two realities are juxtaposed, creating another dreamlike sense of being
there as both observer and observed. Other poems range from the everyday reality of talk
about baseball in Sketches for an Ode to the Yankee Clipper, to the subconscious fan-
tasy of these lines from Return: . . . from a round world / like an amoeba / or a ball
of dough / fissioning / into my threaded screams.
Many of the poems have two parts in which the parts are inverses, contradictories,
identities, or different perspectives on a single event. The parts may consist of opposed
lines, stanzas, or larger divisions. In The Master of Words, the second part, depicting
the fathers senile incompetence, is an inversion of the theme of mastery in the first part.
The last three lines of The Poem of Life establish an identity, by means of the line the
lust for growth, between a maiden and the growth of a plant, the latter being the theme
of the first part of the poem. Fire, which in a winter bonfire destroys the cows and hay
in the final stanza of The Young Hayers contradicts the theme of summer husbandry
and preservation built up in the first two stanzas, and this metaphor of destructive fire
then carries over to the burnt-out lives of the young hayers. By juxtaposing preservation
and destruction and by making the acts of preservation-putting up the hay (possibly
before it was properly cured and thus a source of fire by internal combustion, and by
hayers also too young, uncured, and consumed by other fires) - agents of destruction he
332 AMERICAN A N T H R O P O L O G I S T [86,1984

merges the themes of preservation and destruction into a single statement of preserva-
tion-destruction. He who preserves also destroys and is destroyed. In Drowning a
change of voice from that of the mother to the brothers gives two different but com-
plementary perspectives on the drowning of a daughter/sister.
Most interesting to anthropologists, perhaps, are Friedrichs anthropological ex-
periments, poems that draw content, mythic themes, semantic categories, and
metaphoric structure from ethnography. Among these are the Tarascan poems, poetry
inspired by Friedrichs deep knowledge of Tarascan language and culture. In Indian
Country the comparison asserted in I.. . squash tendrils explore an adobe wall / like
passing a stranger on an isolated road and suspecting his intentions / , is unusual in part
because squash and its habits of growth are not important points in our cultural land-
scape-for most of us, at least. So too, After the thunderstorm the newly ploughed soil
breathes with fragrance / like understanding the elegance in some words by a
neighbor / (from Indian Country) strikes us as an odd comparison. Even though
some of us may know about the fragrance of newly turned soil after a rain, we are not
likely to connect fragrance and the elegance of words, since that cross-sensorial com-
parison is not dominant in our thought. It is like saying I smelled what it sounded like
or I can hear its smell, though we would not find it strange to say I see what it smells
like because that exploits our favorite sensorial metaphor-vision. I am tempted to say
that we not only suspect the idea of elegant words, but even more, recoil from the idea
that anything elegant might emanate from neighbors -elegance and neighbors do not
march together in our minds. Unfamiliar conjunctions of another kind appear in
Tarascan Pots where the viewer of pots must unlearn her taken-for-granted symbolism
and accept that the visual devices on the pots-the deer, streams, moonlike circles, and
dots-are not her deer, her streams, her moons, or her raindrops, but are design
elements of a style, cut loose from familiar reality.
The unfamiliar ways of other cultures also supply the content and guide the metaphors
of many other poems. In Russian Asymmetry bride grooms whip their brides and
fathers-in-law lie with their daughters-in-law not from poetic fancy but as ethnographic
fact made to serve poetry. Kinship Alpha draws on Friedrichs reconstruction of Proto-
Indo-European kinship, and Tree Necklace is based on his study of Proto-Indo-
European tree names. Then, too, there are the occasional and somewhat less unusual
allusions to Greek mythology, as in The Music of Language, which draw on his inter-
pretation of Greek mythology in his work Aphrodite. More subtle, and growing out of his
fieldwork in India, are thematic units and mythic elements taken perhaps almost un-
consciously from Hinduism. I note here especially the parallel between The Equation,
which celebrates the restoration of a family in the procreation and birth of a child, and
the content and form of the Byhad-&zFyuka Upunz$zd 6.4.21-28 (Hume 1931). The
Upani&zds are perhaps the source for the implied identity of birds and souls in the bird
poems (compare with Byhad-&z?yuka Upanz!ad 4.3.12) where the soul is identified with
the immortal swan). More direct uses of Indian material are found in other poems,
notably Chaos and Credo, in which electromagnetic energies hover over . , . The
equations applied consistently with the Upanz+ds, and in Cities where the Indian city
Madurai is conjured as the place of carved knee-crooking gods and goddesses in their
thousand cubicles. Here the image knee-crooking gods and goddesses stems from
Freidrichs knowledge of Hindu iconography.
Friedrich also departs from the modernists in his romanticism, in his celebration of the
self. For Friedrich, the indeterminate imagination of the unique individual is the central
reality of language where freedom in language predominates (19822-4). Language is
an infinitude of used or potential poems waiting to be molded into new realities by the in-
dividual (1983:l). In his poems we are conscious of the poets presence, of his other voice
Tyler] THE POETRY OF PAUL FRIEDRICH 333

which speaks at the imaginations farthest rim (Birches, Bridges, Love) and by means
of language struggles against language in order to bring into being something as yet un-
said but always meant. The poets self is sometimes there formally in changes of poetic
voice, as in Eulogy for a Courtesan, but is more often expressed in the content itself, in
the subject matter of resolved and unresolved conflicts, paradoxes, mysteries, and per-
sonal tragedies that reflect the poets choice of significances and his effort to make them
meaningful to himself by making them meaningful to Everyman, who may say with the
reader in Deborahs Latest Draft, I . . . understand suddenly what she had found to
say. . . .
In his Linguistic Relativism and Poetic Indeterminancy (1982) Friedrich declares
that poetry draws on two counterposed poles-myth and the musical potential of
language. By the latter, he means patterns of intonation, breath groups, the tone level of
vowels, the sound features of phonemes, syllables, words, and phrases, and phonetic sym-
bolism. This emphasis on the musical basis of poetry counters the modernists almost ex-
clusive interest in the mythological, ideational, or cognitive pole of poetry. Even the
breath groups of Ginsberg and Olson, the polyphonic fugal structures of Zukofsky or the
musical phrase of Pound attend only to rhythm, to movement in time, to that aspect of
music most closely approximating Fenellosas idea of the poetic line as things in motion,
motion in things(1969). But sound, after all, is more than the repetition of moments of
duration, it is also frequency, intensity, and sequence, the sources of harmony and
melody. The modernists impoverished idea of poetic music reveals not only their
predominantly cognitive biases, it also makes us aware that their poetry, like the science
it apes, exploits the sensory modality of vision rather than hearing, and explains their con-
stant emphasis on things, true seeing, and image in revelation. Their metaphors of
poetic effect are visual and their poetry something to be seen and puzzled out by hard
thought. Despite their claim to have resuscitated oral poetry, their poetry has little to do
with the world of aural perception and even less to do with the world view and techniques
of true oral poetry, for it is based on and expresses the technology of writing and the
cognitive economy of the visual (cf. Ong 1977). They are the converse of a poet like Dylan
Thomas, in whose poems the sound of language often overwhelms cognitive content. For
best effect, Friedrichs poems should be read aloud. The imagery comes as much from
the sound of words as from their meanings.
The mythic pole in Friedrichs polarity comprises various subsidiary oppositions,
although these tend to shade into each other and interact in a very complicated way. I
want the tune of all languages he says in The Music of Language, but then finds it in
Mexican landscapes or in Tarascan words for shape in a poem about pots. This interplay
between the particular and the universal is a constant theme in his poems, where seem-
ingly singular events portend characterizations of cultural or universal realities, as in the
eighth stanza of The Week With My Week Old Maria, where the face of a newborn
daughter conjures reflections on the masks of personality. In Kinship Alpha: Proto-
Indo-European, a single set of kinship terms entails all the ancient familial imagery of a
people, as in:
*patFr father, father, father
horn-hard-handed
household-holder
giver of daughters
tamer of horses
warrior
elder in my town and clan
The universal and the primordial shade into one another and reflect the present state of
humans. For Friedrich, birds are primordial symbols, often serving as chance reminders of
334 AMERICAN A N T H R O P O L O G I S T [86, 1984

our own alienation from the primordial natural world. In Unseen Angels he says, You
could go about asking for a long time in our city before you / find a man or woman
who / watches or even sees / the fluttering alternate wing strokes (the optical illusion) of
the swift. Or, in The Golden Eagle he speaks of seeing a captured eagle, whose
. . . agate eyes stare back, past us. And, the Prairie Warbler ends his brief visit to the
city, where pigs . . . get minced to ore colored slush (Schweinerei), because we had
just not met his high standards (Prairie Warbler). These and many other dualities are
resolved in that moment of poetic confrontation when language reveals, through the
power of its limits, what it cannot otherwise say. And this is the task of the poet - to trans-
cend language by means of its limits. Ancient wisdom everywhere teaches by this means
and so too do Paul Friedrichs poems.
Like the modernists, Friedrich assigns to myth the primary cognitive-symbolic role in
poetry, and like them he argues for the whole storehouse of myth as the source of poetic
ideas and symbols, not just those of the Western tradition that Eliot and other formalists
had invoked as the true fount of poetic inspiration. The book of commonplace knowledge
for the modern poet is written in many languages, not in Latin and Greek alone. Where
the modernists rummage through this Olsonite rag-bag for a language beyond
metaphor, Friedrich seeks there new ways of metaphor. Thus, the language of space and
shape in Tarascan provides the tropic form and content of his Tarascan poems (see his
discussion of this point in Linguistic Relativism and Poetic Indeterminancy,
1982:45-53). He is neither interested solely in the Aristotelian problem of how the form
of metaphor -comparison, identity, and so on -structures tropic content and transcends
it, nor in the modernist preoccupation with nontranscendental form-content metaphors
produced by mere juxtaposition. The Tarascan poems are exercises that stress not SO
much the interaction of form and content but their inseparability. The Aristotelian idea
of empty forms and formless content is itself a metaphor, an example of what Lakoff and
Johnson (1980) have called container metaphors, as if form were a universal pot filled
with and shaping the originally formless waters of Lake Patzcuaro. The contrasting
modernist version of emergent form sees the shape of Tarascan pots implied in the
natural and universal formlessness of water itself. Both versions neglect the fact that all
metaphors, like Tarascan pots, are made within a linguistic and cultural tradition. Thus,
for Friedrich there is no need to choose between these contestants, since the need to
choose depends on the prior and impossible separation of form and content, as if one
could, like the semiotician or modernist savage, somehow begin at the beginning of
language before it had form, content, and metaphor. In Friedrichs view, language is in-
escapably metaphoric and an already constituted form-content. One does not go beyond
metaphor, but from one metaphor to another. The poet-scientists dream of a language
beyond metaphor is at best only a dream, at worst, a death urge to annihilate the self
and somehow to get beyond language to that transcendent reality that language and ego
obscure. He or she dreams of a scientific language beyond language, of a universal but
concrete form of expression purged of ego and freed from abstractions, metaphors,
rhetoric, cultural significance, and all other sources of human error. In effect, the poet-
scientist seeks what can be achieved only by the means he or she seeks to suppress, or by
some kind of holy silence, for it is in that tantric limit of language in its commonplace
uses that the poet at last exceeds language by means of it and discovers at that limit not
the obliteration of the self, but its fulfillment.
Like the master in The Master of Words, the poet seeks to master language, to bend
it to his or her own purposes, and through this creation to create a self. Again and again,
Friedrich celebrates this theme, finding this act of self-creation through language
especially in mundane, everyday-sounding speech, in the seemingly ordinary things we
Tyler] THE POETRY OF PAUL FRIEDRICH 335

say to one another about the commonplaces of life. The language in Sketchesfor an Ode
to the Yankee Clipper is like snatches of conversation you might have heard on the way
to work this morning, but the juxtaposition of these bits of ordinary conversation creates
a transcendent, extraordinary context, and we are brought to see, even in the safe
familiarity of everyday expressions, unsuspected ambiguities, intentions uncertain, and
intimations far from prosaic, for this is language where accepted meanings tumble away
by their own inertia, revealing in the pattern of their disappearance some new, emergent
potentiality. But really, as the poet says in The Week With My Week Old Maria, it is
all more simple, and not told with such words.

WHY POETICS?
Our interest in poetics stems from contemporary threats to the established way of doing
things in anthropology. Whether engendered by the dialectic of anthropological thought
or forced on us by circumstances beyond our control, these threats have a common source
in our perception, and in the perception of others (not the least of whom are the people
we study), that scientific discourse, particularly in the social sciences, is deeply men-
dacious. Three circumstances illuminate our discontent. One is our disillusionment with
the ethnographic genre itself. Who now sets out to write an ethnography (Marcus and
Cushman 1983; Clifford 1983)? The second, not at all separate from the first, is a new
tentativeness in the relationship between the anthropologist and his or her informants.
Who now can do fieldwork and remain blind to its dimensions of power and ideology
(Scholte 1982)?The third is our fear of outsiders who question the worth of anthropology.
Every form of discourse entails more or less consistent commitment to one or another
master trope. In the case of scientific discourse, the preferred trope is mechanistic ra-
tionality, which focuses on the relation of parts to parts, requires strict separation of fact
and value, of cognitive from noncognitive, of objectivity from subjectivity, of demonstra-
tion from persuasion, is projected from the autonomous perspective of an observer who is
outside the field of observation, affects it minimally by his or her presence, and attempts
no fusion of relative perspectives. It places description ahead of integration and demands
a language of description in which words are only substitutions for things and all mean-
ings are thus strictly referential -one word, one thing. Figurative meanings, apart from
those contributed by the master trope itself, are prohibited. The form of this discourse is
hypotactic, a hierarchic structure of increasingly general principles motivated by induc-
tion from paratactic, descriptive, visual evidence (cf. Kinneavy 1971). The whole dis-
course is ideologically motivated only by the ideology of science.
No science fully meets these requirements or ever could, but some fail more spectacu-
larly than others. Save economics, none fails more spectacularly than anthropology. Any
comparison between these canons of discourse and the actual performance of anthropol-
ogists can only lead to the conclusion that anthropologists who continue to employ this
mode of discourse do so by deceiving themselves or by hypocritically deceiving those who
are keepers of scientific ideology and dispensers of its rewards. Anthropologists are vic-
tims of a kind of mental illness that arises from the sense of guilt generated by pretending
to do what they know cannot be done.
This is the crisis of contemporary anthropology. It is a crisis of discourse, a crisis of
poetics, and that is why we turn to poetry, to find there some solution to the dilemmas
created by a mode of discourse whose master trope and ideology condemn us forever to
failure, hypocrisy, and neurosis. It is not that we should all become poets, but that we
should think again about the possibilities of figurative integration and search for new
means of discourse dedicated more to honesty than truth.
336 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [86, 1984

NOTES
Modem, modernist, and postmodern mean different things to different people, but in
this context modern is largely used in the sense of 20th century while modernist implicates an
attack on common sense, a positivistic attitude toward language, a negative attitude toward ones
own cultural tradition, and a fascination with the exotic either through a distortion of the mundane
refracted through mysticism or oriental or primitive culture. On this reading, Eliot, Yates, Frost,
and Lowell, for example, are merely modern, but Pound, Olson, Zukotsky, Williams, Duncan,
Creeley, Bly, Ginsberg, and Snyder are modernist. Postmodernism implies a rejection of the
linguistic program of positivism, an openness to ones own culture and traditions, an appreciation of
common sense, and a refusal to reduce all cultures to a single manistic horizon. T h e form of poetry,
modem or modernist is not really a diagnostic feature, since it derives from an attitude toward
language. Strictly speaking, there are no postmodern poets, only poets with postmodern tendencies,
such as the later work of Ginsberg and Ashberry, and of course of Paul Friedrich.

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Duncan, Robert
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Fenellosa, Ernest
1969 The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. Ezra Pound, ed. San Francisco:
City Lights Books.
Friedrich, Paul
1978 The Meaning of Aphrodite. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
1979 Language, Context and the Imagination. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press.
1982 Linguistic Relativism and Poetic Indeterminancy. Mimeo.
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