For most cultural anthropologists, the “native’s point of view” remains the paramount object of ethnographic research. Nevertheless, interpretive and psychological anthropologists have come to envision the object differently. Positions on both sides of this blurry divide are varied and complex, but a sketch of ideal types is a useful point of departure.¹ By and large, interpretive, or symbolic, anthropologists tend to look at the human situation from the top down, or outside in. Culture makes people: the native’s point of view is overwhelmingly a cultural product, the subjective imprint of a collective symbol system. A revisionist wing of interpretive anthropology,...

History and anthropology continue to edge closer to each other. Culture, the anthropologist’s stock in trade, has become an indispensable component of historians’ accounts. For their part, anthropologists increasingly emphasize cultural change. Attuned to cultural relativism, they have readily made the further leap into historical relativism. One might say that both disciplines are trying to free themselves from ethno-and tempocentrism.

I endorse this effort, but I have reservations about the widespread tendency to elide considerations of biography, consciousness, and personal agency from analyses of meaning. This erasure—the Problem of Missing Persons—afflicts both history and, less forgivably, my own...

Big theories in social science often treat subjectivities as social realities, assigning them to a group, a social formation, or an epoch. Well-known examples of concepts designating suprapersonal subjectivities are Durkheim’s conscience collective (1964 [1893]), Marx and Engels’s versions of “consciousness” and “ideology” (1972 [1845–46]), and Foucault’s episteme (1976). Such top-down notions of subjectivity differ significantly in certain respects, but all make a strong claim: that collective or historical macroenvironments embody something like mentalities.

Durkheim outlines his position in The Division of Labor in Society (1964 [1893]):

The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to average citizens of the...

At the heart of Gramsci’s notion of hegemony is his most vital insight: culture is political.¹ For Gramsci (1971), hegemony springs not only from the explicit ideological, moral, and philosophical underpinnings of power but also from less fully conscious, transparent realms of thought—the experientially insistent world of common sense. This taken-for-granted portion of culture, the fragmented “‘spontaneous philosophy’ of the multitude” (421), muddies perceptions of injustice, inducing political passivity. In short, common sense makes revolution hard to think.

I will argue against imaging common sense as a paralyzing mystification. The most insistent common sense is embodied knowledge, an amalgam...

Staring from the back page of my local Brazilian newspaper are the faces of the dead—bloated, crushed, streaked with blood. The photos invite unpleasant fantasies. They spur uneasy questions. Who is this? Who did that? How did it happen? Could this ever be me? Is this something I could ever do?

During my mid-1980s stay in São Luís, most of the city’s several dailies featured such images of violent death. The yellowest journals displayed grainy, often grotesque photos on page one, and would run particularly gruesome shots repeatedly, whenever a story resurfaced. On the back page or on the...

In 1985, civilians finally assumed control of the Brazilian government after more than two decades of military command. Like their counter-parts elsewhere in the Southern Cone, the Brazilian generals, crusading in the name of anti-communism, had governed through arbitrary decrees and had sponsored outrageous violations of human rights (Arquidiocese de São Paulo 1985). Repression peaked in the middle years of the regime—the early 1970s—a dark time followed by an agonizing period of controlled distention (distensão) and opening (abertura) culminating in the peaceful 1985 transition. The national government has remained in civilian hands since then, and without question the...

In a hybrid world, identity has paradoxically become a pressing popular and scholarly concern. The accelerated circulation of people, goods, and messages has kindled widespread anxieties. Unease over identity feeds ambivalent attitudes toward cosmopolitanism, ethnic mixing, immigration, standardization, international investment, and supranational organization. It motivates, at least in part, innovations in tradition, anti-globalization protests, ethnic renovation projects, revisions of history, and, more menacingly, the xenophobic hatreds that have embroiled much of the planet in intractable wars.

At the same time, quickened communication has multiplied identity possibilities. A bigger menu of identity options would seem to offer greater opportunities for self-discovery,...

Anthropologists tend to think of people as living “in” culture or “in” history. In this chapter I shift perspective to reveal culture and history in a person. I highlight the ways in which Eduardo Mori, a Brazilian of Japanese descent, engages and transcends social facts.¹ In so doing, I seek to complicate our vision of the relation between persons and history and to suggest a fruitful approach to questions of identity.

Eduardo Mori was born in Brazil to Japanese immigrants and grew up among Brazilians of many races and ethnicities. He now lives and works in Toyota City, an auto-manufacturing...

In this final chapter I look at the significance of self and place for Moacir Aoki and César Kawada, two Brazilians of Japanese descent living in Japan. Their stories suggest that it is misleading to refer to Japanese Brazilians collectively as “a diaspora.” I further question whether people such as Moacir and César should be regarded as “Japanese Brazilians” at all. The chapter thus raises explicitly an uneasy, controversial question that threads through this entire book. How should an anthropologist conceive of and describe another human being?

I interviewed Moacir and César during my mid-1990s field research on Japanese Brazilians...