After Writing Culture

Epistemology and Praxis in Contemporary Anthropology

Andrew Dawson, Jenny Hockey, Allison James

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134749249
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This collection addresses the theme of representation in anthropology. Its fourteen articles explore some of the directions in which contemporary anthropology is moving, following the questions raised by the "writing culture" debates of the 1980s. It includes discussion of issues such as: * the concept of caste in Indian society * scottish ethnography * how dreams are culturally conceptualised * representations of the family * culture as conservation * gardens, theme parks and the anthropologist in Japan * representation in rural Japan * people's place in the landscape of Northern Australia * representing identity of the New Zealand Maori.

Chapter 1: Introduction The road from Santa Fe

Allison James, Jenny Hockey and Andrew Dawson

The publication of Clifford and Marcus’s edited collection, Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986), has come to be regarded as something of a watershed in anthropological thought. The outcome of a series of advanced seminars held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, its collective voice highlighted and responded positively to a crisis in anthropology that was inseparably epistemological and political. Eschewing the holistic persuasions of traditional anthropologists and recognising that their representations are fundamentally the products of asymmetrical power relations, it exhorted us to develop new forms of representation which could include the multiple voices of those being represented. Also rejecting its traditionally authoritative, realist and objectivist style it asked us to think of and explore anthropology itself as an institutionally, historically and politically situated writing genre. Together with its companion volume, Anthropology as Cultural Critique (Marcus and Fischer 1986), the collection instigated a wider debate about ‘writing culture’ which was celebrated as ‘a new experimental moment in ethnographic writing’ (ibid.).

Certainly, for some, these books heralded a new way forward and the implications for anthropological practice were embraced with enthusiasm (Rapport 1994:5). However, for others, they constituted the inception of a reactionary and postmodern malaise: the perpetuation of a ‘bourgeois, Western, individualistic ideology’ (Sangren 1988:423), the ‘ultimate argument for armchair anthropology’ and a recipe for ‘navel gazing’ (Jarvie 1988:428). More cynically, Clifford, Marcus, Fischer and their cohorts were portrayed as ‘scheming careerists’ (cf. Fischer et al. 1988:425) who, through the use of the millennial tones implicit in the phrase ‘a new experimental moment’ conferred on postmodern ethnography precisely the kind of authority they were seeking to destabilise (Sangren 1988:408–10).

Rather than the books themselves it has been, if anything, the severity of the backlash which has given them their millennial significance. Indeed, as Woolgar observes wryly, ‘we know that relativism brings out the religion in people. Reflexivity, it seems, brings out the venom’ (1988:430). As was noted at the time, the books represented a synthesis and extension of wider debates between modernists and postmodernists (Friedman 1988:426) that had been already well rehearsed in other disciplines (McCarthy 1992:638) and, indeed, in anthropology itself (McDonald 1988:429). A decade later it is possible to see the ‘Writing Culture’ debate as a crystallisation of uncertainties about anthropology’s subject matter (traditionally ‘the other’), its method (traditionally, participant observation), its medium (traditionally, the monograph) and its intention (traditionally that of informing rather than practice).

In this volume the contributors eschew the antagonisms and pessimisms that the debate aroused and respond constructively to the challenge for ethnography which constitutes the heart of the matter. As Hughes-Freeland notes, rather than contending an ‘empiricist theory of everything’ or a ‘hyper-postmodern end of everything’ anthropologists will, as long as there is a road forward to be imagined, go down the middle of it (1995:19). Thus, Hastrup’s (1995) insistence that the theoretical ‘crisis’ in anthropology can be overcome through concrete experience is collectively demonstrated in the decidedly ethnographic focus of the majority of the chapters that follow. The richness and detail of the field material with which each author engages underlines the point that ‘there is no anthropology to recapture because it was never at the point of vanishing’ (Hastrup 1995:10).

Central to the volume is an insistence on the inextricable relationship between epistemology, politics and practice which the ‘Writing Culture’ debate drew attention to. Here we explore this through questioning anthropology’s representation of its own knowledge and its representational role in social, political and legal contexts. Collectively, the chapters ask who, what, how and why might we represent? In this sense the volume draws on the multiple meanings of the term ‘representation’: representation as interpretation, communication, visualisation, translation and advocacy. Brought together within the same continuum of concern— from the ‘crisis of representation’ through to a more recent and urgent insistence that the anthropological endeavour has a practical bent via the political act of representing others through advocacy (Harries-Jones 1991)—the theme of representation draws these contemporary anthropological activities and worlds into dialogue with one another. However, the volume does not present a mere larder of opportunity from which the reader might pick and choose according to whim or fancy; rather, we argue that both ends of this spectrum of choice have a great deal to say to one another and indeed, more strongly, that they should. A central organisational theme, therefore, is that theoretical debates about the possibilities and problems of representing other peoples’ worlds are not just those of the Academy but can be both informed by and help inform the practice of anthropology and the practices of anthropologists. In turn the practising anthropologist—the development worker, the applied researcher or the consultant—is increasingly acknowledging the implicit politics of theorising which necessarily shape any kind of anthropology in action (Moore 1996).

Thus, as a framework for the papers that follow, this introduction sets out some key aspects of what, collectively, constitute an ongoing debate about representation through exploring in detail the different impacts that this questioning has had on forms and modes of representation within anthropological work of all kinds. We consider, for example, the ways in which different styles of representation reflect or help constitute particular theoretical stances towards the problem of representation itself. Further-more, by way of offering a reframing of the questions to be asked about representation, we show that questions of praxis can be of practical concern to the pure as well as applied arms of contemporary social anthropology.

In brief, what this volume argues is that the ‘Writing Culture’ debate has alerted anthropologists to the need to pay closer attention to the epistemological grounds of their representations and, furthermore, has made them consider the practical import of that process of reflection, both for the anthropological endeavour and for those who are the subjects of any anthropological enquiry. What we show here is that these themes, reiterated in various guises throughout this volume, are themselves manifested within a series of more particular dilemmas of praxis that have been bequeathed to anthropology by the ‘Writing Culture’ debate. Thus, within this volume and in the most part through detailed ethnographic illustration, we examine issues ranging from the aftermath of modernist epistemologies of the subject and the possible existence of shared or universal external references which might make cultural ‘translation’ viable, through to questions of authorial style and the nature and status of models which may be deemed effective in an applied setting. In Moore’s rendering, this process of interrogation problematises its own terms: ‘whose knowledge; what sort of knowledge; what constitutes the social?’ (1996:1).

The chapters are diverse in their responses to such questioning, yet each addresses some of the core issues raised by the ‘Writing Culture’ debate for in practical, everyday terms, these dilemmas face every practising anthropologist. Although partially overlapping and often in necessary dialogue with each other, we suggest here that four discrete epistemological and practical challenges can nonetheless be identified, dilemmas which are variously addressed throughout the volume. They are as follows: (1) the humanism of representational practices; (2) the difficulty of uncovering whose representations are being represented and by whom; (3) the problem of the form that different representational practices can take; (4) the politics and ethics of making representations. All these problematics have emerged as practical issues in the epistemological fall-out from the ‘Writing Culture’ debate. This volume makes no attempt to foreclose the debate; rather it portrays some of the ways in which contemporary anthropology is actively and purposefully engaging with them.

THE HUMANISM OF REPRESENTATION

Despite its Durkheimian legacy, anthropology has in some respects never been quite comfortable with the idea of ‘representation’ as a way of describing how humans come to know and act in the world. As has been remarked (Bourdieu 1977), how people represent themselves or their ‘world views’ and what they do in the face of everyday contingencies are not always in harmony. Indeed, they may be quite at odds, rather than merely incompatible. For example, during the 1970s the influence of feminist perspectives within anthropology led to a recognition that ethnographers who found easy access to male informants might be misled into believing that the appealingly well-structured accounts of systems of social organisation they gained actually accounted for life as lived, and indeed life as lived by both men and women (Ardener 1975). Here, already, was a recognition of the potential multivocality of culture (see Rapport, Chapter 11 of this volume). Furthermore, as more effort was focused on explaining such inconsistencies between expressed thoughts and observed actions and on documenting more precisely the ways in which people come to ‘believe in’ a world view that is incongruous with their practice, so disquiet with the idea of ‘systems of representation’ increased. Moore and Myerhoff (1977), for example, highlighted the riskiness of ritual practices which, as representations of life-as-imagined, were ever vulnerable to the discovery of their arbitrariness. By the mid–1970s, therefore, the argument, baldly stated, was that to grant a determining role to representations as a system for structuring human thought and practice, rather than to acknowledge their negotiated status as the outcome of acts of meaning-making (Crick 1976), meant a failure to acknowledge the situated nature of representational processes.

It is of course precisely the situated nature of ‘knowledge’ or ‘truth’ that is central to the many discussions that banded together under the ‘Writing Culture’ rubric, though the emphasis on the contingent nature of meaning-making has shifted away from ‘the other’ to the anthropologists themselves as they undertake the task of representing. It is an unsurprising parallel. If the lives of the ‘others’ upon which anthropologists gaze are to be regarded as negotiated, even personalised worlds of becoming, rather than static worlds of being, then the ‘professional’ accounts or representations of those social worlds made by anthropologists—who, after all, are for the most part shareholders in humanity—must be similarly contextual, mediated and, in the end, partial. Thus the dilemma for anthropology raised by the ‘Writing Culture’ debate is that, if we acknowledge the situated nature of other peoples’ ‘realities’ and social worlds, so we must finally reject any professional claim to being the purveyors of unmediated accounts or objective ‘truths’ (Tyler 1986).

Bowman (Chapter 3) contests the implications of such an approach, arguing that it throws out the baby of common humanity with the bathwater of modernism’s project of imposing a universal regime of truth upon all humanity. Rather than a bemused concern with what might replace authority as a characteristic of academic products in a world where alterity rules, Bowman would have us recognise the commonality of a universal experience of contingent identity-making. Evidence for this view, he argues, is found within the fieldwork experience itself, where the ‘difference’ reified by a postmodern anthropology begins to dissolve as the ethnographer sets about amalgamating him or herself into another culture’s conceptual space. Identity, in this view, remains fluid and contingent but the ability to create or perform an identity is fixed as a generalised human characteristic. Bowman, therefore, endorses the ‘performative contradiction’ of anthropology which makes ‘claim to objective historical scholarship…which is at odds with the implications of the anthropological practice of studying others by way of engagement’ (Hastrup (1995:4).

However, it would seem that a discipline that has grown up within a wider cultural climate of positivism cannot easily dispense with its claims to authority. For some, therefore, the present dilemma turns on whether or not, and in what form, to ‘come out’ with statements about the fictional, situated nature of our accounts. Can we argue persuasively for our accounts to be accepted if what we offer has to be acknowledged as the provisional product of our interaction, as individual anthropologists, with individual informants who are themselves interacting with and representing one another? Can we live with and within a discipline that sees each account as situated within the contexts of both the field encounter and the anthropologist’s intellectual milieu?

In Josephides’ view the answer to these questions is yes. In her account of three powerfully contrastive ethnographies (Chapter 2) she reveals the discipline’s contemporary flexibility. It has, she argues, the potential (1) to reflect the metatheorising that already takes place among informants; (2) to claim authority by refusing a separation between ethnographer and informant; and (3) to focus on social action as the site of meaning-making within the field. What Josephides highlights is the need for ethnographic strategies that are shaped by the situations of informants, both locally and globally. In her view, therefore, theories about how to do fieldwork have to be constructed responsively in the field.

In contrast, Wallman (Chapter 15) argues that to abandon all authorial authority is to dismiss the practical role of anthropology and its appropriateness in the modern world. The act of representation, particularly for the jobbing anthropologist (Barnett and Blaikie 1994), involves making a good-enough model of the world, one which serves its intended purposes as, for example, is the case when working alongside medical specialists. The offer of an account that makes no claims to even a contingent authority might appear to reflect the integrity of its producer, but it is an account that cannot be evaluated, assessed or contested. One could add to Wallman’s practical focus other political and ethical imperatives for maintaining the facticity frame. As Birth (1990) argues, it offers a standard of accountability against which the subjects of ethnographic writing can argue that the representation is a lie or a distortion. Both these points of view are a bulwark against anthropology, and its potentially counter-hegemonic message, being marginalised in the context of other more ‘scientific’ discourses (Sangren 1988).

A final and entirely different element in the dilemma raised by the ‘humanism of representation’ speaks to an older debate. Here the argument turns on the way in which forms of social theory that foreground representations as systems/modes of thought or social constructions of reality, ultimately ignore the materially grounded dimensions of individuals’ everyday practices (Bourdieu 1977; Caws 1984; Stoller 1989; Ingold 1991; Richards 1993). The view of such authors, though variously expressed, is that a purely cognitivist vision of human agency underplays the individual’s direct engagement with a social and material world and fails to account for the ways in which that engagement might actively contribute to or shape representational knowledge itself. As Lakoff and Johnson (1980) argue, systems of thought should be seen as experiential rather than either subjective or objective. In coining this phrase they are developing a view of representation-making as the generation of hypotheses that are tested through experience within the social and material environment, subsequently to be abandoned or developed as a result of their aptness or usefulness. Simpson (Chapter 4) provides an account of how separated parents actively seek to make sense of, or even reconcile, discrepancies between their own lived experiences of marriage and parenthood and the state’s hegemonic models of ‘the family’, prompted by their everyday engagement with the social roles of ‘husband’, ‘wife’, ‘father’ and ‘mother’.

In contrast with this emphasis on the embodied processes that produce representations, other chapters variously detail a knowing intervention by people in the political praxis of manipulating representations for explicit ends. Macdonald (Chapter 10), for example, provides an ethnography of expert museum staff, an elite which specialises in representation. Subject to external scrutiny in the form of mission statements and performance indicators, they reflect on their own acts of cultural translation and sensemaking and it is to the politics of this process that Macdonald’s chapter gives us access. Similarly Knight (Chapter 9) describes events that formed part of a Japanese village revival movement, a process of reinventing a rural past in order to promote municipal integration alongside tourism. Like Macdonald, Knight inserts his experiences into the text as field material in order to reveal the social and political processes that constitute acts of representation. In addition, both describe how they found themselves—like it or not—appropriated by the very process of ethnographic representation that they were seeking to record. In comparative examples, Edgar (Chapter 5) documents the process by which members of a dreamwork group facilitate a shared resolution to the problematic of their dreaming, by recounting and analysing one another’s dreams, while Hendry’s account of theme parks and gardens in Japan (Chapter 12) explores the appropriation of Western images for Japanese identity.

This emphasis on the negotiated character of representations, a quality that often emerges through participation in social and political events that have a quite evident material outcome, reminds us about the extent to which representation might be understood from a more materialist approach. Layton, for example, in his account of the politics of Aboriginal land claims (Chapter 8) bids us address the distinction between representations that carry a direct reference to an external, locally situated material reality—a hole in a rock, a track, a river valley—and representations that are self-referential, which carry meaning only to the extent that they make sense within the framework of a culturally specific knowledge-base. This might be a sacred site which marks the passage of a totemic creature. His intention is to examine the complexities for the Westerner of literally trying to ‘see’ the landscape which the Alawa understand themselves to inhabit. For Layton, therefore, some truths are more situated than others.

WHOSE REPRESENTATIONS ARE THEY?

If the battle against scientism (Okely 1975) may seem to have been finally won, or at least a truce to have been agreed, a second dilemma poses more of a problem. If anthropological representations are personal, non-replicable, difficult to verify, and if there are competing views within the anthropological world, then so too must the competing claims and dissenting voices that constitute the social worlds of ‘others’ be taken account of. They also are multivocal. However, this recognition has implications for ethnography’s traditional claim to make representations of whole cultures in its writings. Forgoing holism threatens to strike at the heart of anthropological practice which, alongside a commitment to being comparative, has long been synonymous with the representation of ‘whole cultures’. Indeed, it is this characteristic that, traditionally, has served to distinguish anthropology from its close cousin, sociology, a discipline which singles out particular attributes of social life that theorists understand to be fundamental to social formations.

Working within a discipline hereto committed to holistic accounts, Simpson’s chapter, as noted, foregrounds the multivocality of conceptions of family. Using material from a ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• FIGURES
• CONTRIBUTORS
• PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION THE ROAD FROM SANTA FE
• CHAPTER 2: REPRESENTING THE ANTHROPOLOGIST'S PREDICAMENT
• CHAPTER 3: IDENTIFYING VERSUS IDENTIFYING WITH 'THE OTHER': REFLECTIONS ON THE SITING OF THE SUBJECT IN ANTHROPOLOGICAL DISCOURSE
• CHAPTER 4: REPRESENTATIONS AND THE RE-PRESENTATION OF FAMILY: AN ANALYSIS OF DIVORCE NARRATIVES
• CHAPTER 5: THE TOOTH BUTTERFLY, OR RENDERING A SENSIBLE ACCOUNT FROM THE IMAGINATIVE PRESENT
• CHAPTER 6: CROSSING A REPRESENTATIONAL DIVIDE: FROM WEST TO EAST IN SCOTTISH ETHNOGRAPHY
• CHAPTER 7: DECONSTRUCTING COLONIAL FICTIONS?: SOME CONJURING TRICKS IN THE RECENT SOCIOLOGY OF INDIA
• CHAPTER 8: REPRESENTING AND TRANSLATING PEOPLE'S PLACE IN THE LANDSCAPE OF NORTHERN AUSTRALIA
• CHAPTER 9: ECHOING THE PAST IN RURAL JAPAN
• CHAPTER 10: THE MUSEUM AS MIRROR: ETHNOGRAPHIC REFLECTIONS
• CHAPTER 11: EDIFYING ANTHROPOLOGY: CULTURE AS CONVERSATION; REPRESENTATION AS CONVERSATION
• CHAPTER 12: WHO IS REPRESENTING WHOM?: GARDENS, THEME PARKS AND THE ANTHROPOLOGIST IN JAPAN
• CHAPTER 13: REPRESENTING IDENTITY
• CHAPTER 14: SOME POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES OF THEORIES OF GYPSY ETHNICITY: THE PLACE OF THE INTELLECTUAL
• CHAPTER 15: APPROPRIATE ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE RISKY INSPIRATION OF 'CAPABILITY' BROWN: REPRESENTATIONS OF WHAT, BY WHOM, AND TO WHAT END?