Situating itself at the interface between critical theory and cultural studies, this chapter addresses the theoretical problem of the relationship between mimicry and mimesis, two terms which are often seen as being virtually interchangeable but which may, as I will argue here, have different cultural functions. Its point of departure, however, is the so-called cultural studies project, whose twin imperatives are, first, to redefine culture not as the privileged domain of an intellectual elite but as an arena for the everyday practices of conflicting social groups; and, second, to turn the exoticist gaze of anthropology back on the viewer, recognizing in the process that the study of culture might best begin at home.

Both of these objectives are, of course, open to question. In the first instance, it might be said that cultural studies’ fetishization of ‘the popular’ is no less elitist than the Arnoldian paradigm of artistic excellence it seeks to replace; in the second, it could be argued in defence of anthropology that the discipline, traditionally concerned with documenting ‘other’ cultures, has always dialectically performed a self-critique. A test case here is anthropology's alleged complicity with various projects of colonialism, which observers outside the discipline have been more than eager to attack. Anthropology has been accused of conspiring in imperialist representation (Mudimbe), and of silencing those on behalf of whom it claims the right to speak (Said, ‘Representing’; Spivak). Most damagingly, perhaps, the discipline has been seen as a tacit form of selfaggrandizement: as the Vietnamese filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha has famously pronounced, anthropology is ‘a conversation of “us” with “us” about them’ (65), a dialogue aimed at settling scores between white men and, less often, white women who bicker about each other's ethnocentrism under the banner of native equality.

Unsurprisingly, professionals within the field have tended to bristle at such polemical judgements. For instance, Talal Asad suggests in his introduction to a collection of essays on anthropology and the colonial encounter that it would be fair to say that anthropologists ‘have […] contributed, sometimes indirectly, towards maintaining the structure[s] of power represented by the colonial system’, or that their analyses have at times been affected by the ‘readiness to adapt to colonial ideology’.