Fabian Preence

Presence and Representation: The Other and Anthropological Writing Author(s): Johannes Fabian Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 16, No. 4, (Summer, 1990), pp. 753-772 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343766 Accessed: 09/07/2008 23:14
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Presence and Representation: The Other and Anthropological Writing

Johannes Fabian

In discussions of the Orient, the Orient is all absence,whereas one feels the Orientalist and what he says as presence; yet we must not forget that the Orientalist's presence is enabled by the Orient's effective absence. -EDWARD W. SAID, Orientalism

and Presence Representations
It is not without significance that in anthropological and sociological usage representation most often appears in the plural. The singular would put the emphasis onrepresentation as an activity or process. Instead, by privileging the plural, we invoke entities, products of knowledge or culture. That this is not merely a matter of practicality-of devising terms that best fit the analytical tasks to which we put themwill, I hope, become clear from the reflections that follow. Taken as a philosophical issue, the idea of representation implies the prior assumption ofa differencebetween reality and its "doubles."
This essay was developed from a contribution to a panel on "Othering: Representations and Realities," organized by Smadar Lavie, Kirin Narayan, and Renato Rosaldo for the 85th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Philadelphia, December 1986. In an earlier version, I wrote at this point: "I want to thank my friend andcolleague Bob Scholte for his untiring readiness to be a partner in discussions and to share his knowledge of the literature." I now dedicate this essay to his memory.
Critical Inquiry 16 (Summer 1990) ? 1990 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/90/1604-0006$01.00. All rights reserved.

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Johannes Fabian

Presence and Representation

Things are paired with images, concepts, orsymbols, acts with rules and norms, events with structures. Traditionally, the problem with representations has been their "accuracy," the degree of fit between reality and its reproductions in the mind. When philosophers lost the hope of ever determining accuracy (and thus attaining Truth), they found consolation in the test of usefulness: a good representation is one that works. The proof of itsworking is that it enables us to act on the world together.' In such a frame, science, including anthropology, is conceived as the pursuit of privileged representations, privileged in that, by their nature or by their combination, they establish knowledge of a special kind. In the case of anthropology, "culture" has served as a sort of umbrella concept for representations. The structuralists have...