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Urban Refuge, Voluntary Community

The history of twentieth-century anthropology (and beyond), at least for some, has entailed what Michael Jackson has referred to as a purging from our discourse of the 'idealist connotation[s)' of the concept of cultural community (2002: 109-110); aware that the imposition of all such collective nouns and identity terms convert 'subjects of experience' into 'objects of knowledge', reducing and traducing 'the open-endedness and ambiguity of lived experiences' (2002: us). Anthropology comes to reassert the existential unities of human being, and resist the cultural relativism of 'true believers/belongers' versus 'outsiders'. It is an irony, then, that as the theorist has deconstructed them, the practitioner has embraced and employed 'culture' and 'community' often in an essentialistic and exclusionary sense (cf. Amit 1996: 126). The ostensive purpose for this might be a countering of colonial and postcolonial discourses felt to be hegemonic, but this is seldom all that occurs, Jackson explains; instead of 'an ironing out of difference in the name of some notion of common humanity', existing inequalities are simply reversed (2002: 114).1 'Cultural fundamentalism' now initiates a kind of 'iconic othering', a brand of category terming and identity thinking which, in Ernest Gellner's words, amount to 'the double standards of inside-out colonialism' (1993a). How is anthropology to respond to this? Does it applaud demotic 'romantic authochthonization' (Malkki 1995: 52-63), or does it insist that essentializing arguments concerning culture and community ('ethnicity', 'race', 'tribe', 'nation', 'cosmos') threaten democratic process? Ought it to teach that there are better routes to people regaining a sense of integrity and authenticity; that, as Ernest Gellner quipped, 'we are all human' and we should not 'take more specific classifications seriously' (1993a: 3)? The question surely comes down to the nature of the anthropological concrete. What do we take to be the constituent units of humanity, ontological and agential, moral and rightsbearing? Distinct, self-determining cultural communities, or individual members of relationships (communitarian and other, cultural and other)? Is membership of a cultural community a contingent relationship, an option, and 'culture' a possible instrumentan idiom, a rhetoric, a resource, a vehicle for social synthesis and self-expression; or is cultural membership determinate? In his recent book, Culture and Equality (2o01), Brian Barry pursues what he calls an 'egalitarian' critique of 'culture' and 'community'; and there are times when his words and Ernest Gellner's resonate closely: