Serendipity in Anthropological Research

The Nomadic Turn

Haim Hazan, Esther Hertzog

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317057062
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

Challenging the idea that fieldwork is the only way to gather data, and that standard methods are the sole route to fruitful analysis, Serendipity in Anthropological Research explores the role of fortune and happenstance in anthropology. It conceives of anthropological research as a lifelong nomadic journey of discovery in which the world yields an infinite number of unexplored issues and innumerable ways of studying them, each study producing its own questions and demanding its own methodologies. Drawing together the latest research from a team of senior scholars from around the world to reflect on the experience of research, Serendipity in Anthropological Research presents rich new case studies from Europe and the Middle East to examine both new and old questions in novel and enriching ways. An engaging examination of methodology and anthropological fieldwork, this book will appeal to all those concerned with writing ethnography.

PART I
Navigation

Chapter 1

Errancy in Ethnography and Theory: On the Meaning and Role of ‘Discovery’ in Anthropological Research

Ugo Fabietti

Prologue

When I was invited to contribute to a book on the ‘nomadism of the anthropologist’, I immediately shared the intentions of its editors. Quite apart from having conducted my own early research among the nomads, I also have a nomadic story linked to my professional background. First, to my university training. Having come from philosophical studies, I didn’t attend any courses in Italy on anthropology. I was therefore relatively late in turning to the discipline, and was something of an anomaly compared to standards prevalent in the 1970s in many European countries (and today including Italy). Second, to my theoretical leanings. By training, I am not firmly committed to any one approach over another. I waver, sometimes perhaps unconsciously, between different paradigms: not in homage to a form of eclecticism, but rather as a consequence of a realization that not everything can be treated in the same way. If I have convictions (or idiosyncrasies) about theory, they have never been of any ‘school’. And lastly, my nomadism is linked to my ethnographic experiences. I have transited, if I may so put it, with a certain conviction through three principal ‘terrains’: the Arabian Peninsula, the Iranian coast of the Persian Gulf, and south-west Pakistan. In Arabia I was with the Bedouin nomads of the Great Nefud desert; in Iran with the fishermen of the Hormuzgan region; in Pakistan with the sedentary farmers of southern Baluchistan. Between the beginning of the first and the end of the third, just under twenty years passed, during which my perspective (and above all my ‘anthropological awareness’) was enriched and changed direction. It was perhaps also sharpened by the diversity of contexts and objects on which I came to reflect.

I believe that certain aspects of my ‘nomadism’ show some of the limitations, as well as some of the strong points, of anthropology. The lack of absolute paradigmatic references, the transitivity from one disciplinary context to another, and the frequentation of different ethnographic fields can, in effect, impose limits for those who maintain that scientific work is the pursuit of a research programme geared to a hyper-specialist paradigm. But for others, and especially for anthropologists, empirical and theoretic mobility can prove to be a force and to constitute the truly vital elements of the discipline. This is because, by erring (personally or not) from one cultural context to another, and having incessantly to confront otherness (which is, in a sense, its bread), anthropology seems to be in a condition best to reflect, in its underlying inspiration, practice and epistemology, the reality of a ‘world in movement’ like that of today. This mobility in approaching its objects makes it possible to ‘see how’, and to ‘put into perspective’, as no other humanistic discipline can. The anthropological style of reasoning has by now ‘erred’ into bordering fields of knowledge, and is unlikely to be rejected by these in the future. Whatever may happen, the style of reasoning adopted by anthropology will remain a specific and necessary one for describing the ‘human condition’.1

Stating the Problem

I confess that these, and other more strictly epistemological matters, were not exactly the main focus of my attention when, in July 1978, I made my debut as a field researcher. Nor is it immediately possible to ‘stand aloof’ from one’s ethnographic research (or even to take such a possibility for granted). This possibility is, so to speak, ‘remodulated’ subsequently, on the basis of further experiences of field (and other) research, trial writings, and always the play of memory which of course opens up boundless and often unsuspected spaces for self-reflection, but also entails restrictions and imposes censorship.

If distance in time from the ‘terrain’ enriches ‘field memory’, that same distance also produces an estrangement from the initial results of our research, exposing them to a sensation of thematic and methodological obsolescence. However that same distance has the advantage of enabling us to rethink certain aspects and moments of the work, which at times appear suddenly, and unexpectedly, crucial.

On rethinking a number of things about my work in the field, both the earliest and the most recent, I realized that, however much in our writings we may strive to recount the reflexiveness, positionings and power relationships in which we have been involved; the misunderstandings, the stratagems and the snares into which we have fallen or more or less luckily managed to avoid, we hardly ever recount the way we came into possession of certain apparently insignificant information which nevertheless helped us to make progress in our fieldwork. Or, if we do, we tend to present the matter in an incidental manner, without problematizing and discussing the exact role of such events in the process of our understanding. This non-problematization does not help to contrast the idea of anthropology as being a rather loose discipline largely founded on chance. And it ties up with another, fairly widespread idea in many academic circles, whereby our discipline would be the product of a ‘nonscientific’ practice, and therefore worthy of scant attention inasmuch as it is deemed incapable, unlike others, of evincing generalizations, quantitative data and predictive models.2 I believe there is not much to be done in the face of prejudices of this kind, which are based on a reductive idea of knowledge. I think we ought instead to explore – I might say in a Kantian way – the avenues along which anthropology proceeds, and to highlight the points in common between sciences and knowledge which, though remaining separate by virtue of the different nature of their object and ‘style of discourse’, are often founded on similar reasonings.

One of the elements that joins all types of research and learning together is what may generically be defined as ‘discovery’. As regards anthropology, the explanation of how we came into possession of certain information that enabled us to move forward in our research is methodologically crucial. It is connected with what I call ‘ethnographic discovery’, a topic that has in my opinion long been neglected in anthropological literature.

Before going into the details of the question through an example drawn from my own research, a few empirical as well as theoretical explanations are required.

On the empirical level, I must point out that by discovery I do not certainly mean having for the first time witnessed a rite, gathered a terminological system of kinship previously unknown, or been present at an encounter with a population of which no news had ever previously been received.3 Still less do I mean, by discovery, the innumerable things that come to be known in ethnographic routine, in the daily ‘fatigues’, as Lévi-Strauss observed, which reduce the ethnographer’s profession to ‘une imitation du service militaire’ (Lévi-Strauss 1984: 9). It is true that the anthropologist in the field keeps on ‘discovering’ things. But few of these will allow him (if ever) to reverse a perspective, to problematize in an absolutely new way a theme, or to hit on a factual confirmation of a characteristic aspect of a certain group or society.

By ‘discovery’ in ethnography I mean the identification of something that will allow the person identifying it to alter their perspective on a given theme or problem and, naturally, enable them go forward in the knowledge of their object.

The first social scientist to concern himself with what I call ‘discovery’ here was probably Robert K. Merton. In 1948, he published an article in which he asserted that ‘under certain conditions, a research finding gives rise to social theory’ (Merton 1948: 506). The three key points of Merton’s reasoning were: 1) ‘The fairly common experience of observing an unanticipated, anomalous and strategic datum which becomes the occasion for developing a new theory or for extending an existing theory’; 2) ‘The observation must be anomalous, surprising, either because it seems inconsistent with prevailing theory or with other established facts’; 3) ‘The unexpected fact must be “strategic”, i.e. it must permit […] referring to what the discovery brings to the datum than to that datum itself’ (Merton 1948: 506–7).

Abduction, Evidence and Serendipity

Although Merton makes no mention of it, his issue is linked to the notion of abduction which, according to Charles S. Peirce (1958: 7.218), indicates the logical process (considered by him to be ‘the first step of scientific reasoning’) by which, by inference, we obtain information about certain things that have a high probability of being true. An example of reasoning by abduction might be the following: I bring home a basket of red apples. After a while I happen to see a red apple on the kitchen floor. I have excellent reasons to maintain that the apple comes from the basket, even though this might not be ‘true’.

Abduction is the logical process underlying what the historian Carlo Ginzburg, in an extensive and celebrated recognition of the processes of enquiry typical of the human sciences, from the history of art to psychology, from medicine to criminology (anthropology however was missing from this roll-call), defined as an ‘evidential’ process (indiziario, in the original). This was discussed by Ginzburg especially in relation to the problem of attributing works of art to a specific artist, to physiognomics and to the search for the causes of diseases in medical diagnostics. What is signified by reasoning according to clues is summed up by Ginzburg himself in the procedure adopted by a hunter:

Man has been a hunter for thousands of years. In the course of countless chases he learned to reconstruct the shapes and movements of his invisible prey from tracks on the ground, broken branches, excrement, tufts of hair, entangled feathers, stagnating odours. He learned to sniff out, record, interpret, and classify such infinitesimal traces as trails of spittle. He learned how to execute complex mental operations with lightning speed, in the depth of a forest or in a prairie with its hidden dangers (Ginzburg 1990: 102).

According to Ginzburg the impact of this paradigm lies precisely in its being ‘not very rigorous’, at least inasmuch as it cannot be quantified – a price which the human sciences seem obliged to pay if they are to achieve results of any importance and, most of all, of any perspicuity. The evidential approach to our knowledge of the world is found in everyday human behaviour, in the sphere of practical and technical expertise. It is closely connected with all types of knowledge or skills founded on coup d’oeil, instinct and intuition. Although it also belongs also to the physical and natural sciences, this approach is in particular characteristic of the human sciences – at least in the measure in which the latter almost always lack the possibility of elaborating an experimental method.

Merton, on the other hand, described the process qualified as evidential by Ginzburg, and abductive by Peirce, with the adjective serendipitous. Merton in fact takes up an English neologism dating from the mid-eighteenth century (serendipity) by means of which in time a series of events, behaviours and situations had come (almost always improperly) to be qualified (Merton and Barber 2004).

Serendipity is a word coined in 1754 by Horace Walpole, after he had come to hear of a ‘silly fairy tale’ (as he himself described it) published for the first time in Italian, in Venice, a couple of centuries earlier and in which is told the story of The Three Princes of Serendip.4

Walpole wrote to a friend,

As their Highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries by accident and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of: for instance, one of them discovered that a mule blind of the right eye had travelled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than on the right – now do you understand Serendipity? (Merton and Barber 2004: 108).

The term serendipity was used for two centuries with various shades of meaning, including that of ‘accidental discovery’. But this is not the signification Walpole wanted to give to the word he had coined. He in fact says that the three princes continually discovered, by accident and sagacity, things they had not been seeking. By accident and sagacity, hence by chance and on the strength of an intuitive reasoning ascribable to what Ginzburg calls precisely the evidential paradigm founded on abduction. One must insist on the conjunction ‘and’ because at times it has been maintained, as I was saying, that serendipity might stand exclusively for a chance discovery, such as that of a treasure underneath the floor of an old house, or that certain particular circumstances can enable us to act randomly in one way rather than in another. The examples of this latter way of understanding the notion of serendipity (and thus of ignoring its evidential-abductive component) can be summed up in the definition of the term given in the Concise Oxford Dictionary: ‘the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident’.

The difficulty of shaking off this generic (and not perspicuous) idea of serendipity and of tracing it back to an intuitive process based on inference, remains also among those who recognize this human mindset as having an important role in research. In an article based on his fieldwork in China, Frank Pieke, for example, recognizes that serendipity is central in

discarding the notion that reality is law-governed and knowledge is finite … [and that] serendipity in this enterprise is less random and more proactive than suggested by the standard gloss of the term’ [the definition of the Oxford Dictionary] … [as it] describes the creative tension between structuration and event, and that balance between control and creativity which defines science as a vocation within a discursive community (Pieke 2000: 129–30).

Nevertheless in his detailed and interesting description of the research done by him in Beijing and in Raoyang, Pieke seems precisely to neglect the essential characteristic of serendipity: that of denoting random unintentional discoveries based on (abductive) intuition, and to confine himself instead to underling the ‘fortuitous’ character of certain encounters or situations that turned out to be important to the pursuit of his research.

On the other hand, according to Walpole’s idea, which at the empirical level anticipated the formal definition of the abductive process given by Peirce, are excluded from the qualification of serendipitous all ‘discoveries’ by chance, whereas in that definition may be included discoveries made ‘by sagacity’. These, albeit starting from a datum stumbled on by chance, make it possible to attain to more general conclusions about someone or something. To this specification must be added another, namely that Walpole’s definition also includes the idea that what is discovered is not being sought at all: in the ‘silly fairy tale’ the sons of King Serendip continually discovered ‘things they had not been in quest of’.

I now propose to illustrate, through a concrete case deduced from my personal experience in the field, this manner of proceeding which, if not exclusive to anthropological reasoning, does however play an essential role in ethnographic practice.

Prepare yourselves therefore to read ‘a silly fairy tale’. But not without first being informed of my personal ‘nomadic’ context into which it fits.

A Silly Fairy Tale (Part 1)

After reading philosophy I had turned my attention to Americanistics, also publishing a work on violence in Amazon societies based solely on ethnographic literature. However my closeness at that time to some French Africanists induced me to consider Africa, rather than South America, as a possible field of research.

At the beginning I had in mind an extremely vague project on the nomads of the Horn of Africa. But, thanks to a contact procured for me by my then thesis tutor Marc Augé at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, I was enrolled (and here serendipity did not come into it at all!) by a development research company and was aggregated to a fairly numerous and highly heterogeneous team of experts, with the task of conducting a two-year survey on aspects of ‘social change’ in Saudi Arabia. After an exhausting wait of various weeks, I left France (and an Italy troubled by obscure terrorist plots), and arrived in Riyadh on 15 July 1978.

In that period ‘my anthropology’ was inspired by a ‘critical’, para-Althusserian Marxism, complete with the ‘dynamist’ approach of Georges Balandier and with the ‘Manchester School’ perspective, both of which took on the dimensions of conflict and change as landmarks central to research. I had in fact for a number of years been mixing with some French anthropologists who were particularly sensitive to the use of categories and analytical tools originating from non-orthodox Marxism.

When I reached Arabia I felt reasonably well seasoned theoretically, but I was ill-trained in the techniques of field research. My background was philosophical and the lectures in anthropology attended at the EHESS in Paris during the two previous years were not, in this respect, of much help.

If I consider my beginnings I must admit that I treated my research from a prevalently theoretic, and probably too abstract, angle. I did however activate the tools at my disposal: my studies of domestic groups in East African agro-pastoral societies; travel literature on the Middle East, and particularly Arabia; the segmentary lineage theory, a spot of history, geography and linguistics. Modern works, and notably monographs, on the Bedouin of the Middle East and especially of Arabia, were rare. After the masterpieces by Musil on the Rwala (1928) and the book by Dickson on the Bedouin of Kuwait (1949), in practice nothing more at all had appeared until the classic study by Emanuel Marx on the Negev Bedouin (1967), followed by the concise, but very good, one by Donad P. Cole on the Ahl Murra of Rub’ al-Khali (1975); by a very interesting sociological study by Paul Bonnenfant on the urbanization of the nomads in Saudi Arabia (1977); and by a number of works on the Bedouin of Syri...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Table
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction: Towards a Nomadic Turn in Anthropology
• PART I NAVIGATION
• PART II MIRAGE
• PART III THE JOURNEY
• PART IV WANDERING
• PART V OASES
• Index