Own or Other Culture

Judith Okely

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415115124
• eBook ISBN: 9781134821488
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Own or Other Culture challenges those anthropologists who suggest that fieldwork in the 'West' is easy or merely a reiteration of what is already 'known' to either Westerners or non Westerners. Revealing some pioneering articles in social anthropology written over a period of twenty years, Judith Okely discusses selected themes which include:
* questions of reflexivity and autobiography
* anthropology in Europe
* the cultural location of the anthropologist
* feminism in anthropology. Illustrated with photographs, Own or Other Culture covers subjects ranging from the author's own boarding school revealing a British exotica and colonial comparisons, to how Gypsies, who treat non-Gypsies as the 'other', act to create or manipulate cultural difference.
Feminist anthropology is developed in a reassessment of de Beauvoir and Kaberry while gender and bodily experience is explored in the face of popular demands by women readers for cross-cultural examples.

Chapter 1
Fieldwork in the Home Counties

Double vision and dismantled identity

Malinowski’s (1922) advice on fieldwork included the famous pleas to learn the indigenous language and to avoid contact with white men. Such advice would have been inappropriate for my fieldwork. Granted, Gypsies in England are respectably exotic as non-literate nomads, not found in the conventional typologies. Yet we shared the same language, apart from the occasional Romany word inserted into English sentences. Fieldwork did not require progress through grammar books, interpreters and mental translations. This apparent concordance with one’s own culture masked other differences.

We are always reassuring ourselves that anthropology highlights the contrasts between cultures. These contrasts are rarely experienced within the same space and time as they are during fieldwork at home. Long-term fieldwork in my own country made explicit the contrast with my customary life. The anthropologist abroad has a different relationship with the society within which the group studied is embedded. He or she is usually a stranger to all contexts. By contrast, in my case, I was moving from a specific experience defined by class, gender, race and education into a stigmatised minority about whom I knew almost nothing, beyond the non-Gypsy (‘gorgio’, the word used by Gypsies to describe the Other) stereotypes and representations. Until a community worker drove me to a cluster of modern caravans and lorries just off the M1 motorway, I should not have recognised them as members of the exotic category vaguely associated with horses and waggons. Previously, I should have thought I was looking at the caravans of temporary road workers.

You experience the sudden absence of basic amenities like water and a WC on a camping holiday, but usually in a depopulated, rural setting. The Gypsies did not live in the woods of the nursery rhyme. The camps were bordered by major roads and sometimes housing estates. Lorries thundered along the elevated dual carriageway a few yards away. On one camp we nestled beneath a factory floodlit at night. A costly new site was built on a former sewage farm. Cannibalised car bodies, piles of scrap and smoking tyres were my palm trees and coral strand.

To the Travellers I did not appear as an eccentric foreigner but as a member of the dominant persecuting society, albeit a well-meaning student. In this context, Malinowski’s (1922) and later, Powdermaker’s (1967) suggestions for a preliminary census were inadvisable at any stage. The Trobriand Islanders may on the face of it have been complimented by attention to their way of life. Or perhaps a colonised people has learned to submit to censuses, but nomads everywhere have learned how to evade them. I was warned by one Gypsy friend that I could be burned for writing down a genealogy. Evans-Pritchard (1940) and Chagnon (1974) have also known difficulties in getting mere names.

Unlike anthropology abroad, fieldwork at home is not a matter of memorising a new vocabulary; only slowly did I realise that I had to learn another language in the words of my mother tongue. I unlearned my boarding school accent, changed clothing and body movements. Dropping my ‘aitches and throwing in swear words, I was doing an Eliza Dolittle in reverse and without Professor Higgins to supervise me. After some months, a Traveller said, ‘Judith, your speech has improved’. Washing and eating became different procedures with the same utensils and food from the same shops up the road (see Okely 1983). My past identity was slowly dismantled in the home counties I had inhabited since childhood.

The view of a famous provincial town from the cab of a lorry crammed with Traveller parents and children looked both familiar and alien. As we drove through districts I had known before, the Travellers would show me another landscape stamped by their past: ‘That’s where I stopped as a kid with our waggon and horses’, ‘we tarmacked that forecourt’, ‘years ago we got loads of scrap from that air base’, ‘Billy rents this field for his horses’.

One summer, I was calling for scrap and rags in a sleepy village with my regular Traveller workmate: ‘Lovely houses these’, she said as we passed a desirable Georgian residence. The lilac hung heavy over a white garden seat, I dreamed of a Grantchester tea and imagined the view from a top window; it would make a lovely study, I was thinking. My daydream was fractured by my Traveller companion: ‘Lovely houses for calling— those rich people’ll have a lot to throw out.’ She had rightly seen them as a resource, a place for acquiring goods not a place for habitation. If she had pressed her face against the window pane, it would not be with any longing to enter.

Despite my change in clothing, when calling for ‘any old iron, scrap, batteries or rags’, I still couldn’t get the demeanour right. The housewives would invariably ask me, but not my Traveller mates, what it was for. Eventually, I found it simpler to say it was for charity than reveal that I was an anthropologist doing participant observation as a Gypsy on gorgio doorsteps. Some of the gorgio women looked like myself in another life. I was looking in a distorted mirror. In the company of Travellers, I did experience abuse as a Gypsy at garden gates and in shops, and was chased away where previously I would have been welcome.

An anthropologist abroad does not experience the double knowledge I felt, for example in the following case. My mate Reena persuaded one woman on a private estate to part with an old battery. As it was leaking acid, Reena wrapped it in newspaper. After loading up, Reena’s mother Aunt Doll stuffed the newspaper in the hedge, thinking she was being ‘tidy’. The gorgio woman had been watching us from her gravel drive. Her views on rubbish disposal were as intimately known to me as those of my Head Mistress. I shrank at her scorn: ‘What have you done with that newspaper?’ she called out. ‘It’s all right’, said Aunt Doll, ‘I’ve put it in the hedge.’ ‘That’s typical of you Gypsies, you like to live among old car bodies in a dust bowl!’ Aunt Doll drew herself up to her full height: ‘Madam, I’m not a Gypsy and I don’t live in no dust bowl. If you want to know I give up my time for this work, I’m working for charity.’ This time it was the gorgio woman’s turn to shrink away. Whereas Aunt Doll was detached from the criticism about rubbish disposal, she resented the stigma attached to the word Gypsy. I, on the other hand, was inwardly free of such identification, but I felt her pain. At the same time, I felt it ‘wrong’ to shove newspaper in that hedge.

The one or two unexpected visits to my camp by gorgio friends brought into sharper focus the contrast between my two existences and double vision in the same country. Anthropologists abroad may also risk intrusions from friends back home but at least the visitors have been partially sobered by the extended journey and the obvious strangeness. My friends, however, drove the same roads as the Travellers.

One afternoon, after an especially dramatic confrontation between Travellers and the police on the camp, a small mini-van pulled in. We wondered if this was another ‘pig’ in disguise. Out stepped my college friend Mike in chic King’s Road shirt, tight Levis and dark glasses. I had to emerge from the cluster of confused Travellers and identify myself. I switched to a fellow intellectual tone and became ungainly in my loosely hung attire. Despite his desire to hang around or sit gossiping in my caravan, I told him to drive me to a tea shop in the town. Mike had been given my exact ordnance survey location by a secretary at my London research centre.

The other male visitor, well over 60, caused a sensation by greeting me with a slight peck on the cheek. He also anticipated a free and easy conversation in my caravan. Soon we were joined by six children and three women, two of whom had never deigned to visit me before. Their presence was actually a useful protection against any accusation that I fitted the Gypsy stereotype of a free-wheeling gorgio woman, something I needed to disassociate myself from. My grey-haired ‘uncle’ (the only acceptable category I could offer) continued his Hampstead-flavoured literary discussion, naively complaining to me later of the ‘immaturity’ of the Travellers’ uncontrollable shrieks and giggles. My gorgio visitors found my prudish demeanour both comical and unnecessary. It was hard to explain that mixed-gender encounters are treated as sexual liaisons.

Anthropologists abroad, both today and in the past, have had to work under the shadow of officials and their policies towards subordinate groups. In my own case, government intervention occurred even before the research began. A senior civil servant wrote to the governor of our independent research centre reminding them of their partial state funding. He then objected to the centre’s proposed Gypsy research, all of which he insisted should be conducted within Whitehall. Fortunately a charitable trust had already offered funding. Anthropologists have to negotiate for permits and visas. Similarly, I depended on some official consent to living on a temporary site. In all cases, there is a risk of identification with the officials, whether or not you study them.

Malinowski was also troubled on occasions by a double vision. He could see the white administrator’s view of the Trobriand landscape while he was attempting to understand the Islanders’ experience of it, or at least while he was attempting to isolate his own view. When accompanied unwillingly by two officials he wrote: ‘I saw and felt the utter drabness of the Kiriwana villages; I saw them through their eyes (it’s fine to have this ability), but I forgot to look at them with my own’ (Malinowski 1967:163). Malinowski, like many other anthropologists, responded to this dilemma by cutting white men out of his research (see Okely 1975 and chapter 2, this volume). Fieldwork in one’s own country may make this separation of suitable research fields even less tenable. Apart from the theoretical and historical necessity of including the wider context, the effects of those same policymakers are lived with daily in the anthropologist’s country both before and after fieldwork.

The research project to which I was originally attached included a study of legislation and government reports (Adams et al. 1975). Research into officials entering the camps was as problematic as in colonial times. First, because I had had to negotiate with them for my own entry and secondly because they assumed I would identify with their view of the ‘Gypsy problem’. The Travellers also tended at first to identify me with the officials. This identification was hard to throw off. An officer giving me a lift from the County Hall suddenly stopped the car to ask a Traveller family on the roadside to move on. Predictably, that family never trusted me and spread a story that I collaborated with the police.

I was given free access to files at County Hall because it was assumed, despite my explanations to the contrary, that my research centre was attached to the Ministry and also that my write-up would be wholly favourable. My boarding school accent was useful again. This called for another change of clothing. As a female, I was also seen as harmless. The files proved to be a Pandora’s box and when my guarded queries betrayed a lack of consensus, some of the files were mysteriously withdrawn. My double identity had become apparent. Later, official controls operated in gentlemanly ways, unique to anthropological fieldwork at home. My research centre insisted on sending drafts of our report to the council who sanitised it and inserted a final paragraph which made nonsense of the rest. It was never considered appropriate to send similar drafts to Gypsy representatives (Okely 1987).

When publication is in the same country as fieldwork, the anthropologist cannot escape being read or misread by a wide range of interested parties beyond the usual academic constituency. The text will therefore bear the marks of such future scrutiny. If the study includes a minority group, the publication will be read more easily by some of its members. This development is to be welcomed, for the anthropologist cannot avoid the political consequences of his or her research. These consequences remain on the anthropologist’s doorstep. Any latent tendency to treat people as objects or distant curios has to be confronted, not left repressed in a secret diary. The double vision has to be focused correctly. The fieldworker at home cannot split identities between countries.

REFERENCES

Adams, B., Okely, J., Morgan, D. and Smith, D. (1975) Gypsies and Government Policy in England, London: Heinemann.

Chagnon, N. (1974) Studying the Yanomamo, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Evans-Pritchard, E. (1940) The Nuer, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Malinowski, B. (1922) Argonauts of the Western Pacific, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

——(1967) A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Okely, J. (1975) ‘The self and scientism’, Journal of the Anthropology Society Oxford, Oxford, Trinity Term.

——(1983) The Traveller-Gypsies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

——(1987) ‘Fieldwork up the M1: policy and political aspects’, in A.Jackson (ed.) Anthropology at Home, London: Tavistock.

Powdermaker, H. (1967) Stranger and Friend, New York: W.W.Norton.

Chapter 2
The self and scientism

In this chapter I examine some of the background to the debate about subjectivity in participant observation; the primary methodological technique in empirical anthropological research. Earlier versions given at seminars included more detail of my own fieldwork experience. This I have had to leave out for more elaborate analysis in future writing. Meanwhile, I have presented some of my fieldwork as examples in the approaches explored and suggested for participant observation. There is a need for more explicit recognition of fieldwork as personal experience instead of sacrificing it to a false notion of scientific objectivity.

The problem of subjectivity in research is recognised by most contemporary social scientists mainly to forestall criticism and further argument. The traditional response is to refine the ‘objective’ methodology by formally eradicating the direct link between observer and observed. For example, the questionnaire method in much empirical sociological research predetermines the subject matter, and questions arising and information transmitted are selective and curtailed. This premeditation and control over interaction is presented as proof of objectivity. The questionnaires are administrated by assistants (nameless and usually female) and the ‘hard data’ written up by (named and usually male) research lecturers. The larger the sample and the more random the selection, the more ‘scientific’ the findings. The people interviewed are usually willing to volunteer fundamental and unpredictable insights which are merely jotted down under supplementary ‘remarks’. Even in more informal unstructured interviews, the inquisitor never abandons his or her dominant role. Other information acquired in less formal contexts is referred to as ‘impressions’, and ‘soft’ data to be tested by the hard data (see Young and Willmott 1962: Appendix). The method is inherently authoritarian.

In anthropological participant observation there is greater reciprocity in the exchange of information. Here the problem of subjectivity becomes explicit. The fieldworker, as opposed to those who analyse other people’s material, has a peculiarly individualistic and personal confrontation with ‘living’ data. This close contact has made anthropologists feel vulnerable to criticism from those who employ formal techniques of distancing between subject and object. Hence the peculiar coyness which anthropologists have shown in discussing their relationship with the various people they have studied.

The participant observer does not deliberately impose preconceived notions of relevancy and ready-worked hypotheses on the data to which he or she has access. Despite criticisms from the formalists, this absence of filtering is the source of strength. The individual is open to a complete range of information and not merely what people say they do.¹ This material is of course analysed in the light of existing anthropological theory but not pr...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• DEDICATION
• FIGURES
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 1: FIELDWORK IN THE HOME COUNTIES: DOUBLE VISION AND DISMANTLED IDENTITY
• CHAPTER 2: THE SELF AND SCIENTISM
• CHAPTER 3: TRADING STEREOTYPES
• CHAPTER 4: GYPSY WOMEN: MODELS IN CONFLICT
• CHAPTER 5: FORTUNE-TELLERS: FAKES OR THERAPISTS
• CHAPTER 6: WOMEN READERS: OTHER UTOPIAS AND OWN BODILY KNOWLEDGE
• CHAPTER 7: GIRLS AND THEIR BODIES: THE CURRICULUM OF THE UNCONSCIOUS
• CHAPTER 8: PRIVILEGED, SCHOOLED AND FINISHED: BOARDING EDUCATION FOR GIRLS
• CHAPTER 9: RE-READING THE SECOND SEX
• CHAPTER 10: DEFIANT MOMENTS: GENDER, RESISTANCE AND INDIVIDUALS