Is Anybody Out There ?

ion, but something he comes to himself during the course of the book as he is increasingly disillusioned with the explanatory power of science. Davis can reach a general audience because he ties his intellectual points to his own, lived, experience. What these three authors share with what I have described as preRomantic modes of writing is that, although they no longer have a direct social relationship with their readers, they tailor their writing to an audience upon which they hope to have an effect. That is, their writing is directly concerned with the context of its reception. Equally interesting, I would maintain, is the fact that in writing for a general audience, they have not watered down their theories or just simplified anthropological ideas. Rather, their theories are embodied in their styles of rhetoric: Montagu’s theory of human growth takes expression in a rhetoric which encourages that growth in the reader; Harris’s theory of organic functional interdependence is paralleled by a rhetoric that insists on connection and closure even when such connection is not organic; Davis’s juxtaposition of our culture and Haitian culture in the service of cultural relativity is made tangible by the portrayal of his personal transitions during the course of his quest. If these three authors are representative of trends in popular anthropology, I would suggest that taking audience into consideration is part of a process by which anthropologists are developing their theories, not just communicating them. Indeed, we may benefit by cultivating a more direct interaction between theory, rhetoric and audience. Other audiences, other possibilities This last point is suggested by Fred Myers (1988) in his discussion of the advocacy anthropology he and his wife undertook at the time of the ’discovery’ of ’uncontacted’ Australian Aborigines in 1984. Myers recognizes that his representation of these ’events’ potentially competes with a number of others. These alternate interpretations reflected the various concerns of a number of groups in Australian society: (1) the Labour government, whose main concern was to show that it had not mistreated the Aborigines and thus was largely concerned that they received ’proper’ Western medical care, (2) the newspapers, for whom the event was interesting insofar as it could be represented as the ’first contact’ of a stoneage people with civilization, and (3) the local Pintupis, who did not treat the events as a first contact at all, but a reunion with relatives with whom they had parted ways 20 years ago. As Myers notes, consideration of his various audiences became central to how he was to represent the events.