Iracema Dulley
Iracema Dulley holds a BA in philosophy and a PhD in social anthropology from the University of São Paulo. She is currently Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon and Affiliated Professor at the Federal University of São Carlos. Her research considers processes of subject constitution from an interdisciplinary perspective including anthropology, psychoanalysis, and history. She has conducted fieldwork in and archival research on colonial and post-colonial Angola and her publications focus on ethnographic theorization, the case study, witchcraft, translation, naming practices, and processes of differentiation related to race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Research methodology and anthropological theory are central areas of concern.
Dulley has held post-doctoral fellowships at ICI Berlin, the London School of Economics, and the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning. She was Principal Investigator in a FAPESP grant project on subject constitution in African contexts at the Federal University of São Carlos from 2017 to 2020. She is the author of Deus é feiticeiro (Annablume 2010), Os nomes dos outros (Humanitas 2015), and On the Emic Gesture (Routledge 2019). Recent publications include the co-authored piece "Book Symposium: On the Emic Gesture, by Iracema Dulley" (Social Analysis 2023) and the articles “Naming Others: Translation and Subject Constitution in the Central Highlands of Angola (1926-1961)” (Comparative Studies in Society and History 2022), and “Chronicles of Bailundo: A Fragmentary Account in Umbundu of Life Before and After Portuguese Colonial Rule” (Africa 2021).
She is currently working on a book on naming practices in colonial and post-colonial Angola as well as on the edition and translation of Umbundu archival sources.
Dulley has held post-doctoral fellowships at ICI Berlin, the London School of Economics, and the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning. She was Principal Investigator in a FAPESP grant project on subject constitution in African contexts at the Federal University of São Carlos from 2017 to 2020. She is the author of Deus é feiticeiro (Annablume 2010), Os nomes dos outros (Humanitas 2015), and On the Emic Gesture (Routledge 2019). Recent publications include the co-authored piece "Book Symposium: On the Emic Gesture, by Iracema Dulley" (Social Analysis 2023) and the articles “Naming Others: Translation and Subject Constitution in the Central Highlands of Angola (1926-1961)” (Comparative Studies in Society and History 2022), and “Chronicles of Bailundo: A Fragmentary Account in Umbundu of Life Before and After Portuguese Colonial Rule” (Africa 2021).
She is currently working on a book on naming practices in colonial and post-colonial Angola as well as on the edition and translation of Umbundu archival sources.
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Introduction to the translation by Iracema Dulley and Olivia Janequine.
The question Dulley asks throughout her engagement with Wagner’s main essays is whether it is possible for the emic gesture to account for difference within difference without falling into the closure of totalization. Wagner’s work contains this potentiality but is hindered by its very foundation: the emic gesture, in which difference is circumscribed through a name that others. If this gesture is one of the pillars of anthropology, and one that allows for the inscription of difference, the reflection proposed in this book concerns anthropology as a whole: How can one inscribe difference within difference? Dulley argues that this can only be accomplished through an erasure of the emic.
Offering a comprehensive discussion of Wagner’s concepts and a detailed reading of his most important work, this book will be of interest to anyone who wishes to reflect on the relationship between ethnography and difference, and especially those who in various ways engage with the ‘ontological turn’. As the book reflects on how Derridean différance can be appropriated by anthropology in its search for subtler and more critical ethnographic accounts, anthropologists interested in post-structuralist theory and methodology will also find it useful.
The work of Roy Wagner deals with a fundamental issue in anthropology: how to describe difference. It has also, arguably, encouraged a deconstructive move with its discussion and displacement of anthropological concepts such as ‘group’ and ‘culture’ in the 1970s and 1980s. This work draws on Derridean ‘deconstruction’ to articulate Wagner’s text to the (con)text of anthropology, considered as a set of converging and diverging lines of force frequently organized around the rendering of difference. If a text is an inevitably ruptured attempt to produce meaning, in anthropology, brisure frequently occurs when empirical analysis is articulated to theoretical stance. In Wagner’s writings, rupture is made visible when the relationship between theory and ethnography is related to the coupling of dialogue at the empirical level with the author’s concept of dialectics at the theoretical level. In order to investigate how these levels of analysis are imbricated in description, Wagner’s account of Melanesian naming, ritual, myth, and currency is closely examined.
In The Invention of Culture, Wagner proposes that ‘culture’ may be construed as the dialectical interplay of convention and invention, which would enable anthropology to deal with the possibility of transformation. However, another kind of closure is instituted through the author’s naming of the supposed poles of dialectics: ‘traditional’, ‘tribal’, ‘religious’, or ‘peasant’ others are said to operate through a ‘differentiating’ mode of symbolization while ‘western’ people (and therefore anthropologists) would symbolize in the ‘collectivizing’ mode. Along this divide, the ‘differentiating’ mode would not distinguish between symbols and what they stand for–it would operate through ‘symbols that stand for themselves’–, whereas the ‘collectivizing’ or ‘generalizing’ mode would produce meaning through partition. This unfolds, in Wagner’s work, into a defense of holistic anthropology, i.e. of an anthropology that would appropriate the differentiating mode of symbolization to overcome not only the discipline’s crisis of representation, but also the limitations of ‘our’ own reading of the world.
A close reading of Wagner’s ethnographies reveals the points of rupture in this proposal and articulates them to the author’s defense of the emic as a parameter for anthropology, which resonates many of the current proposals to rethink anthropology from the perspective of the ‘other’. Through an interrogation of the emic gesture as iterated in Wagner and drawing on Derridean différance, this work proposes to erase the naming and description of difference as alterity.