Yes. The “West” is as much a geopolitical fiction as the “East” and as “Africa.” It is an unreflecting projection of the nationalist impulse to super-national groups. I first began seriously thinking about this problem when I decided to write about black music in America. On the one hand you have the real historical processes by which these various musics came into existence. On the other hand you have the various fictions of identity that have accompanied these musics from the beginning. Both Ken Burns’s PBS jazz series and some episodes of Martin Scorse’s (on the whole much better) PBS blues series presented standard mythology as though it were the truth as it is being pieced together by scholars who are aware of the mythologizing that surrounds these musics. My guess is that the whole metaphysical mess of the Self/Other Master/Slave dialectic that is being played out in Post-Colonial studies and in anthropology is alse being played in the ethnography of vernacular cultures in America.

It’s a mess.

Think of the West. We know that the West is rooted, in part, in ancient Greece. But which ancient Greece? The Greece where mature male citizens took boys as their lovers? The Greece where the temples were painted in gaudy shades of red, blue, yellow, and green? I think not.

And if we think about the modern West (where I am using the philosopher’s mensuration in which modernity starts with Descartes), how do we account for the fact that it would be impossible without the mathematics of China and India brought to Europe by way of the Islamic peoples of the Middle East? Without that mathematics, no scientific revolution, and no large scale trans-oceanic sailing.

No, I’m afraid the West is as much a fiction as the Orient.

Amen to that. In fact, I think the point might be put even more strongly. In many cases, the fascination with hybridity was never really intended as a strong critique of cultural difference or cultural identity. In the literary versions I’ve seen of this kind of stuff, the power of hybridity comes precisely from the way it foregrounds the pathos of difference and belonging–much as in the contemporaneous academic fascination with passing and other forms of racial transgression. I think it’s usually the implicit understanding that such liminal conditions are appealing less because they cast doubt on cultural or racial definition then because they dramatize it. Exceptions to prove the rule, in other words. Then, too, some people imagine that hybridity itself can be a special kind of culture. No challenge there either.

In any case, I think you’re exactly right to suggest that at bottom the dispute isn’t about whose epistemology is preferable, but whose politics are righteous. Good luck in that case getting people to climb done from moral pedestals. Won’t happen. Excellent post, though.

The issue that Errington and Gewertz have with Diamond is different: they believe that the kind of macrohistory he offers has a bad effect on its audiences and exists significantly for reasons of ideology, before they get around to saying that they also think it’s factually incorrect, at as an account of Papua New Guinea, material culture, and Yali’s Question. I think they’re a bit right about the latter, but the level they choose to make their points is epistemological, and as I’ve said at length, I think it’s the wrong level and the wrong fashion of challenge. On the former point, that Diamond should be understood as a bad text doing bad things in the world, I both disagree and think that they haven’t done anywhere near the kind of groundwork needed to make those kinds of arguments with fairness. Perhaps in the book from which their blogging is drawn?

Part of the reason Diamond may view things this way is because he is a scientist, and the history of science tends to work that way. If crick and watson didn’t discover the structure of DNA someone else would.

The jumping on “Yali’s Question” just seems silly.