I agree that Errington and Gewertz want a history that asks more questions than Diamond’s does. So do I! That’s one of a number of places where we agree about Diamond: his history closes down questions, seals up the messiness of modern experience tightier than a drum, buries contingency and agency a mile-deep under a pile of just-so stories. But that’s not what I’m noting in the point that you cite here. What I’m observing is that they actually appear in their blog posts to simplify Yali in several ways, to reduce his liminality, to insist that he primarily has to be understood as PNGuinean and indeed as consonant with a kind of typified moral critique of inequality and colonialism within PNGuinea. As they acknowledge in this post, and discuss at length in their book, Yali is more than that. Erik Hilsinger in another thread here observes that Yali was among other things a politician skilled at the operations of liminality. I think that means his question is never in any simple fashion “PNGuinean” or “just anticolonial”, in fact that the kind of moral economy claims that E & G describe operating within PNGuinea seem to me to be as much a product of contact with Western European societies (and later Australian, US, etc.) and produced out of the West’s own critiques of itself. In addition, as Hilsinger notes in his other comment, there’s the situation in which the question was spoken. It seems perfectly possible to me that Yali said his question one way to Diamond and another to E&G, and that in some sense both of them are right that they heard what they heard. All of these observations at the least have to blunt or modify the critique E&G are offering here of Diamond. In my opinion, they ought to lead to the outright abandonment of some of their lines of critique.

You are not going to find me ever arguing that we need to strip our understanding of human beings of an interest in the intricacy and complexity of meaning. That would be my own quarrel with accounts like Diamond’s. But it’s what I’m suggesting E&G are doing to Diamond and the audience for Diamond. I’m also suggesting an economy of argument, that they entangle themselves in epistemological dilemmas that I think aren’t productive in this particular case and that are in general dilemmas that are afflicting cultural anthropology as a disciplinary form.

Burke further writes: “It is ruled out of bounds [presumably by E & G] that Yali might have derived his question from the West, or out of an encounter with the West’s own capacity to ask the question, out of a history of relation.” Again, leaving aside Burke’s own reification of the category of ‘West’ here, this seems to me to be *exactly wrong*. The whole thrust of E & G’s comments is that a history of relation (where both ‘history’ and ‘relation’ are taken very seriously as analytic concepts) is *precisely* the way we must understand Yali’s question. They state this in many spots: e.g., that things-in-themselves are not the focus of Yali’s inquiry, but things in their social context(s). Moreover, I have nowhere read that E & G have ruled certain sorts of questions ‘out of bounds.’ Quite the opposite: they wish to open up an ostensibly air-tight argument about the nature of history to critical scrutiny: they appear to want *more* questions asked, not fewer. E & G, who have been critical advocates of what some have called the “New Melanesian Historiography” (for an explication of this, see Robert Foster’s History and Social Reproduction in Melanesia), would be the last anthropologists to couch an account of the colonial encounter and modernity only in terms of loss, degradation, and the like. Here, I suspect that Burke attributes to E & G positions he assumes to be widely held in cultural anthropology. Indeed, I suspect that Burke performs on their posts what he accuses them of doing to Diamond: making the part stand for the whole in an unfair way (or actually, the other way around: he attributes to E & G positions he apparently assumes to be dominant ones in all of anthropology). It sounds to me like Burke wants to have an argument with a strawman of anthropology (or in particular, critical or reflexive anthropology).

Burke apparently wants to strip this discussion of “epistemological finery” and “rhetorical adornments,” and elsewhere on SavageMinds there have been cogent and complex arguments about the substance of aspects of Diamond’s arguments. Yet such a move would be counterproductive if the point that one wants to make is that human being consists precisely in all the ‘finery’ and ‘adornment’ that both rhetoric and epistemology provide. That is to say, if one wants to argue that meaning is important to the ways in which people invent and conduct themselves, and that such meaning is in fact constitutive of human being and history, then critical (interpretive) attention to all the ornamentation of argument is exactly what will help us understand what it (the argument) is all about. That Diamond continues to frame his analysis with Yali’s question (as on PBS recently) suggests that the question means more to him and his perspective than the label ‘finery’ would suggest. Many of these points have been carefully argued in posts here on SavageMinds.