Essentialism commonly appears as both a violation of anthropological relativism and one of the besetting conceptual sins of anthropology. Exemplified by such totalizing ideologies as nationalism and biological determinism, it is also frequently conflated with reification, objectivism, and literalism. All four concepts are forms of reductionism and there is substantive semantic overlap among them. Reification may most usefully be seen as concerned above all with the logical properties of concepts, however, and objectivism primarily entails a priori assumptions about the possibility of definitive description, while literalism may be specifically understood as the uncritical, decontextualized application of a referential and abstract semantics. The distinctive mark of essentialism, by contrast, lies in its suppression of temporality: it assumes or attributes an unchanging, primordial ontology to what are the historically contingent products of human or other forms of agency. It is thus also a denial of the relevance of agency itself.
This is the root cause of its generally bad press in the relativistic anthropological mainstream; it has only rarely been noted as an interesting aspect of ordinary social relations. Attention has been focused on its centrality to ideologies, such as nationalism, that appear to contradict and supress the local-level and actor-oriented practices that interest ethnographers. In "Geertz’s (1973: 234—54) influential study of nationalism, for example, essentialism appears in tandem with ‘epochalism’ as a defining characteristic of nationalism, and especially as the conflationary notion of ‘national character’ grounded in such shared symbolic substances as blood. In this sense, epochalism — a modernist zeitgeist — is temporally the antithesis but also the corollary of essentialism, which requires the construction of a set of age-old national traditions through which national origins are effectively placed beyond real time altogether. One form of essentialism, now much studied by anthropologists, is the search for cultural authenticity as a basis of collective legitimacy. In the study of religion, this has led to a curious parallel between a lack of anthropological interest in the local uses of orthodox ritual forms and the fundamentalist insistence on a single, all-encompassing herme-neutic. Thus, for example, Bowen (1992) has shown how the uncritical adoption of ‘scriptural essentialism’ can occlude the local and gendered reconceptualization of central Islamic rituals. Other persistent essentialisms include Orientalism (Said 1978) and Occidentalism (Carrier 1995).
In many anthropological treatments of nationalism, essentialism itself has been essentia-lized as a key, invariant feature. This ironic predicament recalls the historical entailment of anthropology in essentializing classificatory schemes that are closely related to those of nationalism, colonialism, and other officializing cultural ideologies. Conceptually, however, this fact can be usefully harnessed as a means of maintaining critical awareness of the provision-ality of all essentialisms. Both the necessity and the potential benefits of such an epistemologi-cal move are apparent in two parallel developments in which concepts of strategy and essentialism, superficially antithetical to each other, emerge in close mutual association: the feminist critique of male power and certain anthropological engagements with the politics of cultural self-ascription.
Strategies - ostensibly actors’ creative deployments of the apparent social rules and structures – subvert essentialist claims of immutable authority. But essentialized categories may conversely be viewed as products of the most durable strategies, those which have successfully concealed their own provisionality. This is the practical basis of much bureaucratic classification in the modern nation-state: civil servants deploy an apparently universalist and invariant set of legal precepts, especially those relating to ideas of national character and destiny, in support of what may be sectarian, partisan, or even personal interests.
Such ideas have a long history, and are clearly rooted in debates – central to anthropology and forged in the emergence of evolutionism — about the relationship between culture and biology. (A particular form of essentialism is sometimes called ‘biologism’; it is often ideologically framed — in medicine, for example — as ‘naturalism’, which is both etymologically and conceptually cognate with ‘naturalization’ as a bureaucratic procedure conferring citizenship.) In medical philosophy the static character of disease classification is attributable to the pre-Darwinian sense of order that can be found, for example, in humoral theories. Such ideas, as Greenwood (1984) shows, while largely discredited in the biological sciences, formed the basis of eugenics and other racist ideologies, and also underlie early European attempts to define national identity in terms of biological descent.
Knowing this contested history enables us to focus on the necessarily contingent character of all forms of essentialism. Feminist calls for ‘strategic essentialism’ as a political response to male-centred definitions and practices (see especially Spivak 1989; see also the special issue of Differences on essentialism in which this appears), while perhaps liable to relapse into reification in their turn, have offered pragmatic ways of achieving political and epistemological change. A considerable debate about the advantages and drawbacks of thus entering an essentializing contest has emerged, pitting past experience of essentialized (and especially biologized) reduc-tionisms about women against the potential value of haraessing the dangerous powers of essentialism to claim a political space for female subjectivity. In a parallel development, anthropologists are now able to acknowledge that charges that particular populations have invented (or ‘constructed’) histories and identities are politically threatening, especially when such groups are engaged in a political struggle for resources they could not hope to obtain from a more fragmented base. Such charges play into the hands of majority interests and occlude the established essentialisms of the latter. Clearly, this problem is related to the dynamic whereby postcolonial searches for identity must find themselves engaged in the discursive practices of colonialism in turn, and it also underscores the facility with which self-determination can be transmuted into repression of others. The critical issue here concerns the identification of the social entity against which such essentializing strategies are deployed, and requires that these strategies should not be considered independently of this encompassing political context (Lattas 1993). Indeed, it has been pointed out that anthropological relativism may itself be guilty of the kind of selective reading that fosters objectivism about the truth of (majority) history (Gable et al. 1992). Essentialism can thus become a decontextualized device for, ironically, essen-tializing those against whom one claims to defend agency and subjectivity. As a feature of everyday social life, it may encompass both global ideologies and interpersonal relationships. The critical debates that have qualified and modulated its status as an undifferentiated anthropological evil should increasingly illuminate the mutual entailment of local and global strategies of representation.
