The Composition of Anthropology

How Anthropological Texts Are Written

Morten Nielsen, Nigel Rapport

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138208124
• eBook ISBN: 9781315460239
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

How do anthropologists write their texts? What is the nature of creativity in the discipline of anthropology? This book follows anthropologists into spaces where words, ideas and arguments take shape and explores the steps in a creative process. In a unique examination of how texts come to be composed, the editors bring together a distinguished group of anthropologists who offer valuable insight into their writing habits. These reflexive glimpses into personal creativity reveal not only the processes by which theory and ethnography come, in particular cases, to be represented on the page but also supply examples that students may follow or adapt.

Texts with commentaries

1

Editors’ introduction

Veena Das’s chapter is a meditation on the thoughts, emotions and flashbacks of memory that went into writing her TEXT: a commentary on Nayanika Mookherjee’s book The Spectral Wound. Das shows how the constraints of length and genre helped her to narrow down questions proliferating in many directions, to ask: May we think of experience as having a conceptual content? In her COMMENTARY, Das traces what Gareth Evans called ‘grains of experience’ in the ethnographic moments when unbidden thoughts suddenly well up in women’s recounting of experiences of rape. Das finds affinities in these accounts to her own fleeting encounters with violence. These resonances cemented for her an argument about how experience clings to thought. Thinking becomes dethroned from its sovereign position as the moment of judgement and becomes part of the flow of life.

How do the aesthetic and the ethical become one in the textures of memory? Several moments of Das’s past, otherwise dispersed, become simultaneously present in her reading of Mookherjee’s text. The force of the descriptions and images of the raped women return Das to scenes of her own childhood, particularly to the ways texts of different kinds came into her life. Flashing resonances with myth – the woundedness of the women, whose husbands knew them to be faultless, yet were unable to not fault them; the figure of Rama, the mythical hero who expels his wife Sita even though he knows her to be faultless – are all equally searing moments of pain for Das. Finally, instead of resolving how different texts that she loves might be woven into a synthesis, she simply lets these texts find each other in her writing.

THE LIFE OF CONCEPTS AND HOW THEY SPEAK TO EXPERIENCE

Veena Das

Commentary 1

In the light of the provocative question the editors of this volume posed to its authors—viz., what were the actual processes that went on in the writing of a text—I have chosen a recent short commentary, entitled “The Life of Concepts and How They Speak to Experience,” that is to be published in the online journal Somatosphere. The text takes up Nayanika Mookherjee’s (2015) powerful book The Spectral Wound, which I had read and admired greatly. Yet, the book also gave me an opportunity to try out some ideas on questions that were perhaps implicit in the book. I asked myself whether one can come to the understanding of concepts through some other route than the classical one of assuming that concepts are about the intellectual procedures of comparing, abstracting, and moving from the particular to the general. I had been claiming in much of my writing that there was no sharp boundary between experience and concepts—that experience clings to concepts rather than being eliminated in the process of generating purity of thought. I had been invoking a number of passages from Wittgenstein and the devastating counter-examples he gives against the idea that concepts have a bounded definitional structure (Das 2015). In Mookherjee’s book, I had before me a subtle rendering of the experience of a number of women who were raped by soldiers of the Pakistani army during the 1971 war in Bangladesh. Mookherjee’s descriptions were subtle and sensitive to the texture of life (and death)—the voices of the women had not been deadened by repeated recitals before human-rights organizations or truth commissions. The nationalist discourse of Bangladesh reframed the women who were raped during the war as birangona (war heroines)—thus, not as stigmatized, impure women to be shunned but as heroines to be embraced. Their violation was rendered on the model of heroic sacrifice, putting them on a par with the sacrifices made by the male freedom fighters. Mookherjee thought of their presence in the national media and in left-liberal discourse as “spectral,” locating this concept within Derrida’s notion of “the trace.” The experience of real women, she wrote, had to be evacuated in order for the birangona to function as a national figure. I asked myself: Is there an underlying assumption here that in the cases of women in the village of Enayatpur, who had only been able to speak in fragments, we are witnessing the flow of lived experience, while in the discourse on the birangonas valorized in the national media, experience had been evacuated to generate a purified representation? Was the first capturing “lived experience” and the latter “concept formation”?

In my original commentary on Mookherjee’s book, I formulated my puzzle as follows: “In debates on testimony and trauma the discussion ranges around the polemics of speech and silence but how about the specificity of the grains of experience?” The expression “grains of experience” had stuck with me from Gareth Evans’s (1982) posthumous book Varieties of Reference as well as from its delicate elaboration in a recent book on concepts by Jocelyn Benoist (2010). The problem of reference had become engrossing because, while I had a healthy distrust of correspondence theories of truth, I could not simply turn away from such issues as what it is for our words to be world-bound (Das 2015). Nor could distinctions between the sign and the index suffice, for even when context was not linguistically marked, I took from Wittgenstein the idea that the whole of our language is context bound and yet our access to context can be easily lost, putting a world itself in jeopardy. It was then in the process of engaging these kinds of issues that I became quite obsessed with an intriguing remark in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations on the harmony between thought and reality: “The agreement, the harmony, of thought and reality consists of this: if I say falsely that something is red, then, for all that, it isn’t red. And when I want to explain the word “red” to someone, in the sentence “This is not red” I do it by pointing to something red” (Wittgenstein 1966 [1953]: para 429). Also on page 14 of Investigations, there is a remark: “Could one define the word “red” by pointing to something that is not red?” It took me more than a year to understand something of the importance of this remark, partly by working though Charles Travis’s (2000, 2006) two books on thought’s footing and partly by the dawning of the realization that any simple notion of correspondence between thought expressed in propositions and parts of reality might well be discarded, but this only makes the question of how thought finds a footing in the world more pressing. Harmony, then, for Wittgenstein, does not lie in correctly specifying the referent of a concept but rather in understanding that when I point to something as “not red” to explain the concept of red, I am in that space where the possibility that it could be red is there; however, if I pointed to a number and said “that is not red,” I would be thrown out of this harmony. Concepts, on this view, are about claims over the real, but they operate in the realm of possibility as much as the realm of actuality. This much I now understood, and I could also use the idea to decipher some of the most intriguing of Wittgenstein’s remarks on James Frazer’s Golden Bough: I could argue that there is a difference between “mistakes” and “errors” on the one hand and “superstition” on the other, the difference having to do with understanding the space of possibility. (The elaboration of these thoughts still awaits publication after more than two years of having been submitted, but it will, in time, see the light of day [Das forthcoming].)

TEXT

For now, the point is that as I read and re-read Mookherjee’s book over a stretch of time, I felt I was ready to tackle an issue that Evans had articulated. I knew I would need to keep returning to this issue, but the very limits within which a commentary is written gave me the incentive to put my swirling thoughts and emotions on paper, in some way to control my own wildness. In the commentary, my observations now took the following shape:

In his highly influential work on concepts, Gareth Evans (1982) proposed that the content of experience is non-conceptual—only when one has shifted from experience to judgment based on that experience has one moved from the non-conceptual to the conceptual content of experience. Taking his example from colors, (to stand in for other kinds of perceptual experience) Evans argued that the conceptual ability to recognize colors, as when we know what is red, green, or burnt sienna, is not enough since this naming and the capacity it represents is coarser in grain than the finer shades and details of our color experience. Thus, for Evans, there is something in experience that evades description in terms of conceptual content. This notion of the non-conceptual content of experience is tied to two different thoughts that might be interrogated. The first is that concepts are by definition abstract entities rather than concrete or empirical ones. (Despite the grudging acknowledgement by philosophers of “empirical concepts,” these are placed at lower levels of thought than say, “categories of understanding.”) Second, it could be questioned if a concept is embodied in a word, rather than in everything that goes on in the world with that word and others like it.

I then went on to take examples from Mookherjee’s account of the fragments of testimony that came out in the course of everyday activities during her interactions with the women. I wrote:

At another time Kajoli recalled how even as she was being raped by the military, she was thinking about whether she would lose her entitlements to rice and clothes in her conjugal home—a theme repeated in a number of other accounts in which unbidden thoughts about future losses come looming even as a woman is being violated and perhaps is even facing death. Rashida recounted that “When I was being raped I thought my life was over (…). I thought that I had been married for just a year, so my husband may not keep me at home, may not give me rice and clothes” (p. 111). In these statements we find years of experiences of women: the rendering of the precariousness of a woman’s life in her natal and conjugal home due to fights between co-wives, the hostility of in-laws, stories of abandonment and the importance of sexual chastity, becoming distilled in that episode of the specific violation.

Consider the sentence: “Even as she was being raped by the military, Kajoli was thinking.” Here, thought is not something done in the atmosphere of a philosophy lesson but within the thick of experience.

It is accounts such as these that have led me to acknowledge that there is something terribly wrong in assuming that there are distinct moments to experience: some in which we simply live and feel, and others in which we think. There is a wonderful way in which Jocelyn Benoist summarizes this view: “gôutez ou pensez.”

In my own work on sexual violation during the massive violence of the Partition of India, I had described stories as acquiring a footing in the real through being embedded within a field of force made up of swirling words, other stories, gestures, and much else (Das 2007). But there is also one particular experience that might stand as my personal tribunal through which I can put to the test the idea that feeling and thinking are not separated. Many years ago, a man, probably in the midst of a psychotic episode, broke into my house when I was alone and tried to strangle me. I talked him out of it, but all along my one compelling thought was that I did not want to die groveling and begging for mercy. So when Kajoli and Rashida speak of the way thoughts came unbidden even as they were facing such terrible violation, I feel that they offer an insight into the nature of experiential concepts that could be garnered from thought experiments in philosophy, but which carry far greater weight for me coming from the mouths of women who are offering their “extreme history” (chorom itihas) to the anthropologist.

Yet it is strange that I cannot say if I am able to decipher how experience clings to thought in these accounts because I had puzzled over these questions in Wittgenstein and Evans, or whether Wittgenstein and Evans began to make sense in the light of the realization that such issues appear outside textbooks too—they are not simply academic games. I do know that my confidence in my response was greatly strengthened by reading what women like Kajoli and Rashida were able to articulate.

But let us now say that I have been able to find some peace on the question that concepts do not have, or for the most part do not have, a definitional structure. Of course, I do know that under certain circumstances placing a boundary around a concept might be required, for example, in a court of law that might simply decree that a pigeon is a predatory bird, treating pigeons as pure legal objects (as Bruno Latour [2010] mentions in his book on law); or, in a Euclidian space when we can say without any ambiguity that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. But this “muscling down” of concepts to a region of the real—whether this real is related to legal spaces or mathematical ones—holds true only for that region. Outside the French administrative courts, the pigeon is not treated as a predatory bird; similarly, if the concept of distance itself changes, say, in a topological space, then the definition of the straight line, too, disappears. Thus, despite the tendency of many anthropologists to demand definitive definitions as a condition for building theory, we know that these classical notions of concepts have been put under considerable pressure for several decades now. Worries that now haunt me, after writing the Mookherjee commentary, are of a new kind. Let me elaborate.

Commentary 2

In my graduate classes, and in some recent writing, I have evoked Cora Diamond’s (2008) compelling reading of J. M. Coetzee’s fictional character Mrs. Costello, who is wounded by the thought of people eating animals—animals she can imagine as companions. Diamond calls this the “difficulty of reality” and the “difficulty of philosophy.” The rawness Mrs. Costello feels, what she is not able to comprehend, is how people could go about their ordinary lives as if nothing were amiss. I think there is a strong formulation here that it is not our concepts that help us overcome what is recalcitrant in reality but rather such simple things as the exchange of glances ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• INTRODUCTION On the genealogy of writing anthropology
• TEXTS WITH COMMENTARIES
• EPILOGUE Writing the human: Anthropological accounts as generic fragments
• Index