Ethnography through Thick and Thin

George E. Marcus

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780691002538, 9780691002521
• eBook ISBN: 9781400851805
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In the 1980s, George Marcus spearheaded a major critique of cultural anthropology, expressed most clearly in the landmark book Writing Culture, which he coedited with James Clifford. Ethnography through Thick and Thin updates and advances that critique for the late 1990s. Marcus presents a series of penetrating and provocative essays on the changes that continue to sweep across anthropology. He examines, in particular, how the discipline's central practice of ethnography has been changed by "multi-sited" approaches to anthropology and how new research patterns are transforming anthropologists' careers. Marcus rejects the view, often expressed, that these changes are undermining anthropology. The combination of traditional ethnography with scholarly experimentation, he argues, will only make the discipline more lively and diverse.

The book is divided into three main parts. In the first, Marcus shows how ethnographers' tradition of defining fieldwork in terms of peoples and places is now being challenged by the need to study culture by exploring connections, parallels, and contrasts among a variety of often seemingly incommensurate sites. The second part illustrates this emergent multi-sited condition of research by reflecting it in some of Marcus's own past research on Tongan elites and dynastic American fortunes. In the final section, which includes the previously unpublished essay "Sticking with Ethnography through Thick and Thin," Marcus examines the evolving professional culture of anthropology and the predicaments of its new scholars. He shows how students have increasingly been drawn to the field as much by such powerful interdisciplinary movements as feminism, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies as by anthropology's own traditions. He also considers the impact of demographic changes within the discipline--in particular the fact that anthropologists are no longer almost exclusively Euro-Americans studying non-Euro-Americans. These changes raise new issues about the identities of anthropologists in relation to those they study, and indeed, about what is to define standards of ethnographic scholarship.

Filled with keen and highly illuminating observations, Ethnography through Thick and Thin will stimulate fresh debate about the past, present, and future of a discipline undergoing profound transformations.

Part One

AN EVOLVING PROPOSAL FOR MULTI-SITED RESEARCH

One

Imagining the Whole

ETHNOGRAPHY’S CONTEMPORARY EFFORTS TO SITUATE ITSELF (1989)

THE GROUNDING ACT of fiction in any project of ethnographic writing is the construction of a whole that guarantees the facticity of “fact.” As Robert Thornton has noted (1988:287):

Reference to some ulterior entity is always implicit in holism: we merely choose between the moral imperative of society, the “spirit” of history, the textile-like “text” which is no text in particular, or the “nature” of Man. Like the imaginary “frictionless space” in Newtonian mechanics, these ulterior images of wholes are not directly accessible to either the author’s nor his subject’s experience. They can only exist in the imaginations of the author, her informants, and her readers. This is the “essential fiction” of the ethnographic text.

The most common construction of holism in contemporary realist ethnography, as we will explore, is the situating of the ethnographic subject and scene as a knowable, fully probed micro-world with reference to an encompassing macro-world—“the system”—which, presumably, is not knowable or describable in the same terms that the local world of an ethnographic subject can be. Most often, this fiction of the whole, which also limits very definitely the range of kinds of stories that ethnography can tell about contemporary worlds, global or local, is treated cursorily with mere references to “the state,” “the economy,” or more specifically the “world system,” or “capitalism.” Yet, in demonstrating the distinct and plural manifestations of this ulterior whole—the system—when explored as forms of cultural life, the ethnographer cannot help but to import into the closely watched life of his knowable community of subjects unexamined assumptions and premises about the way the larger world really is. Such assumptions are essential both to giving his account closure and lending it an explanatory dimension. However slightly developed or imagined, then, as a direct concern of contemporary ethnographic writing, the fiction of the whole does indeed exercise a powerful control over the narrative in which an ethnographer frames a local world.

This consideration brings me to the central question I wish to raise in this essay: can we continue to let the conceptualizations, catchwords even, of other traditions or levels of study in social theory stand for the whole in our ethnographies, especially given the across-the-board questioning of basic frameworks of description in the human sciences that Mike Fischer and I (1986) labelled a crisis of representation? Even some of our best contemporary ethnography is written within a fiction of the whole that relies on gross constructs of state and economy that are relatively insensitive to the ways that those working in traditions of macro-system description, the Marxists or even the latter-day heirs of Parsons, have been revising their own classic frameworks of social theory. Writing about modern predicaments of ethnographic subjects in terms of mid- or early twentieth century, or even nineteenth century, visions and conceptual vocabularies of the world system, vitiates the powerful function of ethnography to represent the world with a certain currency. Thus, it also lessens the capacity of ethnography, in future perspective, to constitute a historical document in the making, keenly sensitive to its own times.

As such, I wish to let the following line of argumentation dominate the rest of this essay. As part of a so-called contemporary crisis of representation, work in political economy and other disciplines dedicated to macro-modelling and the definition of systems is moving in a less totalistic, more pluralistic direction—one more open to decentralized, mutable ideas of structure. This is a direction more open, in short, to the demonstration of global cultural diversity which has been a major, if not the major, self-conscious goal of contemporary ethnography. This movement of convergence on the part of those concerned with the structure of macro or world systems—particularly the new, more labile envisionings of late capitalism within the traditional stage-framework of Marxist theory (see Lash and Urry, 1987)—creates new opportunities for innovations in ethnographic writing to break out of old narrative constraints by constituting a much more complex object for ethnographic study and representation. In a later part of this paper I want to envision such a complexification of the ethnographic subject, stimulated by a reimagining of the holistic frame for ethnography that is more sensitive to changes in macro-views of systems that themselves have been shaped by the same crisis of representation that has affected ethnography. For now, it is enough to say that the corresponding change in ethnographic research and writing that I have in mind is a shift away from the ethnography that is so centrally placeand local-world determined toward an ethnography that emphasizes a link-up with the more pluralistically sensitive systems perspectives. I want to consider an individual project of ethnography whose main ambition is to represent something of the operation of the system itself rather than to demonstrate continually and habitually in the spirit of pluralism the power of local culture over global forces of apparent homogenization. The point is to reconceptualize through ethnography such forces themselves, to efface the macro-micro dichotomy itself as a framing rhetoric for ethnography that seriously limits ethnography’s possibilities and applications in the context of so-called postmodern conditions of knowledge.

I want to work up to an elaboration of this line of argument through a set of discussions that I will present less in the holistic trope of a polished essay, than through a set of modular notes of varying length. While I hope these notes will have an order of progression and coherency that I intend, I do not see them as part of any ulterior whole itself except the one I am making up as I go along.

Note 1: On holism as the central rhetorical and structuring convention classic functionalist ethnographies.

In perhaps the most interesting discussion of holism as it has operated in the standard anthropological ethnography, Robert Thornton (1988:287) argues that:

. . . [the] imagination of wholes is a rhetorical imperative for ethnography since it is the image of wholeness that gives the ethnography a sense of fulfilling closure that other genres accomplish by different rhetorical means. Actually narrative has very little to do with structuring the classic ethnography, except where the experience of fieldwork is alluded to. Rather, the distinctive trope of holism in ethnography has been classification, that is, chapter and verse much like the bible has established its textual effect of totality.

As Thornton says further (1988:288), ethnography is:

. . . [a] genre in which the description of the economy exists side by side with the personal confession, the myth, and the well-worn fireside tale. It attempts to lead the reader to believe that the myth or the personal confession has a definite relation to the way the economy works. It attempts to establish the reality of the connections it describes. The vast apparent gap between the person who confesses and the economy that works must be bridged.

This bridge was achieved by the segmentation of everyday life into supposedly universal categories such as religion, economics, politics, ecology and kinship. The classificatory organization of the text, lent a systematic scheme of relationships by the application of abstract partwhole imagery of functionalist theory, allowed the physical text itself to stand for the wholeness of the social reality of which it was a representation.

The particular fiction of the social whole achieved through a rhetoric of classification, while it remains venerated and practiced in the pursuance of the classical sort of ethnographic project that can still circumscribe an isolated people as its subject matter, has otherwise thoroughly been called into question. The arbitrariness of modes of ethnographic classification, or rather its specific disciplinary and literary foundations as a mode of representation, has been explicitly critiqued, and further, ethnographers find few peoples who can be plausibly fictionalized as societies or forms of life whole unto themselves. The possibilities of writing ethnography as narrative have considerably increased with the displacement from dominance of the older classification rhetoric, and the foundational concern that the ethnography remain holistic has given way to various senses in which there is a desire among writers and readers of ethnographies that the latter be able to say more than they traditionally have and that they should contrive new fictions of the whole in which to ground their facts. A shift to which I now turn.

Note 2: The fate of the commitment to ethnographic holism in a moment of critique and experimentation.

If there is one broad contemporary impulse to change past conventions of ethnographic writing—to break out of generally acknowledged genre constraints—it can be characterized as the desire for ethnographies “to say more” than they have. This in turn is a response to multiple critiques of anthropological practices that have appeared over the past two decades, and that come down to complaints about the inadequacies of ethnographic accounts by various omissions or absences despite the anthropological spirit of holism. To unpack the different senses in which this “saying more” is being explored, I would argue, is to define a range of experimental strategies presently in play. I will outline four such strategies, and spend the remainder of the paper on the fourth.¹

1. Saying more by “letting others say it.” This strategy is informed by recent textual theories in literary criticism that challenge the authority of the writer and more broadly the construct in discourses of the unified agent, integral subject, or the autonomous self. Such influences include the work of French post-structuralists—the semiotics of Barthes, the notion of discourse in Foucault, the attack on a metaphysics of presence by Derrida—as well as Bakhtin’s notion of polyphony, and feminist criticism. For ethnography in particular, the effect is to critique the dominating authority of the ethnographic writer in a text that is actually composed by many voices/perspectives out of fieldwork, and to seek alternatives to monologic authority given form by the writer, figured as scientist and sojourner. Thus while benefitting from recent trends in literary theory, this strategy is really trying to articulate a particular kind of ethics of anthropological representation in response to the specific past of ethnographic research and in facing up to the changing conditions of fieldwork in which subjects are far more militantly self-conscious about the historic contexts of anthropology.

Much of the existing experimental literature in anthropology—variously labelled by the characteristics of dialogic, reflexive, or hermeneutic concerns—is encompassed within this strategy and what motivates it. Likewise, much of the discussion of ethnographic rhetoric so far has been limited to this one sort of experimental strategy. Of all the above influences, Bakhtin probably has had the most appeal for Anglo-American ethnographers in pursuing this strategy. While insisting upon the multiple voices or texts that in fact compose any particular singular voice that asserts authority in writing, Bakhtin does not radically challenge the integrity or ethics of the act of representation itself. Rather, as in his study of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics (1983), he exposes (and approves of) the craft and technique of polyphonic representation. In this vision of polyphony as a counterfeiting craft, he is thus usable rather than undermining for ethnographers. He undermines monologic authority to be sure, while not subverting ethnographic knowing. Finally, he celebrates in his vision of carnival the kind of diversity that ethnography has sought but which has been masked by past genre conventions. This strategy of experimentation in ethnography, which has already been well labelled as dialogic, has generated a literature of collaborative works, confessional texts reflecting on the conditions of fieldwork discourses, and works with a heightened attention to the character and content of the multitude of distinct discourses (voices?) that compose any project of ethnographic research. The key recurrent problem in pursuing this strategy is that of Plato’s Phaedrus—a sense of corruption involved in the inscription of the oral in the production of ethnography.

2. Saying more by juxtaposing multiple levels and styles of analysis. This strategy is very methodology oriented, and is located securely within the traditional epistemological concerns of social science. Its urge toward analytical completeness as its version of the classical anthropological goal of holism recognizes the limitations of any one level of analysis, despite claims to completeness, as well as the intractability of levels to neat transcendent synthesis. It hopes to substitute a pragmatic holism that juxtaposes several alternative analytical accounts of the same subject or phenomenon. It is pragmatic in that it recognizes that you can’t really say it all; all analyses, no matter how totalistic their rhetorics, are partial. Rather, you can try for a comprehensive display of levels of analysis, of epistemological angles, so to speak. In the past, such ethnographic strategies might have juxtaposed the levels of social structure, culture, and psychology. Perhaps the one classic work in anthropology that best exemplifies this strategy is Gregory Bateson’s Naven (1936) which is composed of successive encompassings of incomplete but self-contained levels of analysis—different juxtaposed versions that comment on each other. Bateson is clearly bored by the initial sociological account of the Iatmul, but it is a necessary prelude to the more original discussions of ethos.

Nowadays the strategy might be to juxtapose structuralist analysis, historical analysis, and the hermeneutic/dialogic mode as different takes on a common object of study. This strategy is not however neutral among levels displayed by juxtapositions—there is indeed a subversive critical element. You write it one way, then by marginal commentaries, building on one another, you write it in other alternative ways.

For example, a beginning and a very conventional account of social structure would then nest more interesting levels of analysis that to some degree complement, and to some degree contest, the terms of the preceding social structural account. Each preceding account liberates the one that follows until you can write about a subject in an unconventional way. Thus holism and “saying more” is in the combinatory strategy of nesting levels of analysis. This evokes for me the style of Jacques Derrida, who writes on the margins of, or in reaction to, an object which is presumed to be constructed in a certain way before it can be deconstructed (in philosophical discourse, one can rely on others to construct the object of critique which opens one’s own perspective, but in ethnography, obliged to describe or at least evoke a whole world separate in time and space, the writer must do all the work herself of traversing possible levels of analysis). This strategy thus addresses the problem in ethnography of having to prepare so much ground conventionally (or else risk intelligibility) that the power of an alternative favored analysis is diminished. By the nesting of alternatives, this strategy finds a powerful marginal space for novelty.

3. Say more by drawing out the implicit critique of Western thought and society that is e...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• About the Illustration
• Introduction: Anthropology on the Move
• Part One: An Evolving Proposal for Multi-sited Research
• Part Two: Traces in Parallel Ethnographic Projects
• Part Three: The Changing conditions of Professional culture in the Production of Ethnography
• Index
• About the author