PAULINE TURNER STRONG University of Texas On theoretical impurity COMMENTARY V iranjini Munasinghe’s genealogy of the concept of “creolization” (this issue) is an important contribution to the critical literature on anthropological theories that developed through appropri- ating and universalizing local categories and practices—most famously, “totemism” (L´ evi-Strauss 1963). The article also con- tributes to ongoing debates on the value of competing modes of interpreting cultural mixture and innovation—although, as I discuss below, this contri- bution turns out to be more limited than readers interested in the range of contemporary theories of culture may expect. Munasinghe begins by characterizing creolization as a “schizophrenic theory,” which she distinguishes from “pure theories” such as “habitus” and “alienation.” Although this distinction would bear further scrutiny (neither “habitus” nor “alienation” is actually free of vernacular associa- tions), Munasinghe’s notion of “epistemological collapse” is a useful one (and preferable, precisely because it is less appropriative, to “schizophrenic theory”). As Munasinghe notes, because lay, academic, and political dis- cursive modes are collapsed in the concept of “creolization,” ideological claims (specifically regarding nationhood) remain embedded in apparently empirical analyses. This is, of course, not unique to the concepts of “creoliza- tion” or “nation” (which Munasinghe also mentions); the concepts of “race,” “tribe,” “progress,” “tradition,” “identity,” “kinship,” and “culture,” among others, also involve epistemological collapse, as theorists such as Raymond Williams (1983) have demonstrated. But the commonality of such theoret- ical appropriations of vernacular concepts only increases the salience of “epistemological collapse” as a way of analyzing the ideological dimensions of cultural theories. With respect to the concept of “creolization,” Munasinghe’s central argu- ment is that this trope for cultural mixture continues, to its detriment, to bear the mark of its local exclusions (in particular, the exclusion of East Indians from creole culture and identity in Trinidad). In appropriating the Caribbean notion of creole identities and languages as the basis for universalizing cul- tural theory, Munsasinghe argues persuasively, anthropologists have been AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 33, No. 4, pp. 585–587, ISSN 0094-0496, electronic ISSN 1548-1425. C  2006 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, www.ucpress.edu/journals/ rights.htm.