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Berichte und Kommentare 
Anthropos 90.1995 
to specifying those episodes when pictures, texts or 
designs condense a range of social forces and rela 
tions, when images assume a high specific gravity” 
(1993: 244-245). This is where the question of 
representativity becomes acute - the “unimportant 
racist” Vernon Lee Walker is simply lacking in 
high specific gravity; “Heart of Darkness,” on the 
other hand, is a work of high condensation. In 
short, the presupposition that political consider 
ations are of overarching importance involves the 
imposition of a particular, a priori interpretive grid 
on the (selected) data; what Daniels envisages, on 
the contrary, is the provision of the logic by which 
to assess a specific case from that case itself. 
Thomas’ adoption of a particular interpretive 
framework in advance makes him necessarily 
- and justifiably - wary of universalist claims. 
Hence, understandably, he lumps “colonial dis 
course,” “the other,” orientalism and imperialism 
together as totalities which are attached too dog 
gedly to the notion of “colonialism” as a uni 
tary totality (1994a: ix). If colonial discourse is 
described through the psychic dynamic of self- 
other relations, he claims, it cannot be accorded 
historic peculiarity. On the other hand, he is not 
always equally averse to the idea to the perma 
nence of such general structures. For instance, he 
does not rule out the possibility of locating “an 
elementary structure of colonial discourse” in “the 
contradictory character of the colonial objectives 
of distancing, hierarchizing, and incorporating” 
(1994a: 142). Earlier in the argument, he delin 
eates three gestures of discerning and accounting 
for diversity in manners and customs - the denial 
of difference through assimilation; the affirmation 
of hierarchical difference; and the restricted affir 
mation of authenticated difference constitutive of 
exoticism and primitivism (1994a: 53). 
I do not think that there is any need to deny 
the existence of such general structures. However, 
the opposition of self/other, redolent of structural 
ism as it may seem to be, has a different, more 
complex structure: self and other are not binary 
opposites, precisely because of their mutual impli 
cation and contamination. As Jacques Derrida and 
others have stressed, self is marked by other, the 
other inscribes itself in self. Far from being a case 
of binary opposition (like black/white, night/day, 
etc.), the relation self/other is always in excess of 
itself, precisely because it is marked by alterity. In 
deed, one could see theories of alterity as marking 
the transition from structuralism to poststructural 
ism. One consequence of this is the ruling out of 
a priori priorities: since the presence/absence of 
the other leaves its trace on self, any attempt to 
set up an a priori interpretive grid is doomed to 
failure because of its inability to accommodate the 
potentially disruptive effects of the voice of the 
other. 
As Johannes Fabian demonstrated in “Time and 
the Other,” (anthropological) theory produces its 
own objects. Similarly, as Thomas demonstrates 
in his concluding chapter, colonial representation 
operates like a studio portrait. It provides a frame 
for representation that permits the narrator/photo 
grapher to surround decontextualized bodies with 
the meanings of his/her own choice. Anthropologi 
cal evocations of other cultures have followed this 
studio logic by constructing cultures that were ab 
stracted from the dynamics of interactions between 
colonizers and colonized (1994a: 194). 
If critique is to become postcolonial by turn 
ing its attention to the logic(s) of representation, 
as Thomas argues, it is not enough to focus on 
localized histories and particular settings, for such 
accounts, though possibly of interest to profession 
al ethnographers, are unlikely to be of interest to 
anyone else. Instead, I would suggest, it may be 
instructive to look more closely at the ways in 
which the logic of such particularized situations 
emerges from the situations themselves - as op 
posed to being imposed on them - and how this 
logic articulates with the gestures of recognition 
and nonrecognition, assimilation, and resistance, 
which always inform the relations of self to oth 
er. It is here that one might start to specify the 
limits and conditions of the possibility of colonial 
discourse. 
Anthropology, the study of the other, is inevi 
tably marked by the structures of alterity. Travel, 
whether the circular movement of the return to the 
familiar characteristic of Ulysses’ wandering and 
of modem tourism, or the openness to the other 
of Abraham’s departure into the unknown, is only 
conceivable in terms of a movement between self 
and other. Government, the imposition of self on 
other, as Foucault’s analyses make clear, is always 
a reductionist project in which the other has to be 
assimilated to self in order to become governable. 
Finally, “modernity,” which implies its antithesis 
“primitive,” is caught up in a to and fro movement 
in which self spawns what it conceives as other, 
unable to go beyond its own limitations to become 
receptive to, marked by, what is genuinely and 
irreducibly other. 
“Anthropology, Travel, and Government” is the 
subtitle to “Colonialism’s Culture,” and Thomas 
himself surreptitiously adds “modernity” to the 
triad (1994a: 7). All four terms, as we have just 
seen, are articulated within the structures of alter