| Critics of culture, from Max Weber to Clifford Geertz, from Claude Levi-Strauss to James Clifford, have struggled repeatedly to generate a materialist method with which to study diverse social forms. The philosophical and historical (and political) legacy of such a struggle has been mixed. On the one hand, the study of culture emerged as an observer science, where cultural others and their productions were studied rationally and impartially by critics. This led to one-dimensional and non-reciprocal understandings of culture that failed to take into account the perspectives of those cultures under observation and of culturally situated perspective of the social critic. On the other hand, recent studies of culture have adopted the opposite stance, suggesting that critics are not observers but participants in the interpretive art of culture. This has led to a peculiarly linguistic and relativistic understanding of cultural criticism where interpretation is the only game in town (hence the preponderance of literary models in current ethnographies). When the universal science of cultural criticism was exchanged for the local art of cultural criticism, one problematic paradigm was replaced with another, equally problematic one. It is in the context of this unsatisfactory paradigm shift that this study is situated. Drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, I develop the construction of constellations as a methodological alternative to the model of text and text-reading that is now commonplace in social theory. The constellation is a radical methodological relationism that takes seriously the constructed character of social fields without lapsing into relativism or linguistic reductivism. I argue that the method of constructing constellations can reflexively incorporate the observer-participant perspective of the social critic and may be linked to a descriptive and normative conception of truth. |
