Asked about the appeal of his best-know book, The Invention of Culture, Roy Wagner
recently joked that most people read it only by title. ‘Which is fine with me!’, he
added. No doubt, the comment acknowledges that the sheer inventiveness of this
book about invention makes it ‘difficult’, by definition. Instantiating the very notion
of invention it seeks to articulate, the book is constitutively, as it were, steps ahead of
its reader. That this remains the case thirty-five years after its original publication is
in this sense testimony to its argument’s success. Notwithstanding its influence, the
book is still largely undigested by the discipline of anthropology, which it so radically
reformulates in its pages. The paradox is ‘fine’ for the argument it makes.
But Wagner’s joke is also ethnographic. Reading The Invention of Culture by title is
presumably to imagine its content through already familiar ideas about how cultural
phenomena are constructed, say, as ‘invented traditions’. This also, in a sense, is fine:
such projections of the familiar exemplify a particular way of imagining how human
beings go about things, namely that we bring the vagaries of an innately unpredictable
world under control by the artifices of our conventions – the norms we call ‘culture’.
This is also the imaginary of an anthropology that sees its job as charting peoples’
varied conventions, argues Wagner, effectively ‘inventing’ cultures for them in its
own image of how culture is ‘done’. Still, what if others go about things differently?
Presented as an ‘epistemology’ for Habu, Wagner’s earlier and more ethnographic
study of a quite different form of invention performed by people in Melanesia, this
book articulates just such an alternative. For Melanesians and other non-Westerners,
Wagner argues, it is the order of conventions, rather than the disorder of the world,
that is taken for granted. Kin relationships, social arrangements, cosmological
reckonings, language itself – in short, all those things we might imagine as norms that
are instituted by people to manage the world in which they live – are rather conceived
as ‘innate’ and prior to human action. People’s task, on such an image, is artificially
to subvert these conventional orders, to produce unique and powerful effects out of
them, like a jazz-player might bend scales to ‘do’ his solo. The work of culture, then,
is to invent life out of its order. So how might anthropologists think of culture in a
way that does not foreclose such an orientation towards invention? What concept of
culture do we need to invent to credit such creative un-doings of convention? How
might we invent culture as invention? For this, reading this solo of a book is fine too.