The Ethnographic Self as Resource

Writing Memory and Experience into Ethnography

Peter Collins, Anselma Gallinat, Peter Collins, Anselma Gallinat

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781845458287
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

It is commonly acknowledged that anthropologists use personal experiences to inform their writing. However, it is often assumed that only fieldwork experiences are relevant and that the personal appears only in the form of self-reflexivity. This book takes a step beyond anthropology at home and auto-ethnography and shows how anthropologists can include their memories and experiences as ethnographic data in their writing. It discusses issues such as authenticity, translation and ethics in relation to the self, and offers a new perspective on doing ethnographic fieldwork.

Chapter 1

THE ETHNOGRAPHIC SELF AS RESOURCE: AN INTRODUCTION

Peter Collins and Anselma Gallinat

The purpose of this chapter is to provide, briefly, the disciplinary context in which the idea of the self as resource in doing ethnography has emerged. We will delineate the relevant developments in the discipline with particular regard to ‘anthropology at home’, the reflexive turn and auto-ethnography. We will briefly introduce the work of scholars who already apply the kind of integrative approach we propose and then go on to detail the implications of such research and writing for methodology and the discipline at large. These include issues such as authenticity, ‘playing the native card’, memory and memorisation, ethics and honesty, and the question of whether this may lead from an anthropological ‘double vision’ to a ‘split personality’. Throughout we shall relate this volume's chapters to this discussion and the overall thesis.

Making Visible: the Ethnographer Brought into Focus

The assumption that we can better understand ourselves through understanding others has a long history. It suffices to say here that this apparently simple thought was the seed that slowly developed into what we now call anthropology. By 1900, intrepid individuals were leaving home with the intention of understanding other ways of life. To cast matters in black and white, there was a time, before 1970, when anthropology was almost entirely a matter of isolating the other. The person or self of the anthropologist remained unseen and mostly unheard. Like the movies, the conceit was that we (the viewer, the reader) had direct, unmediated access to the lives before us, that is, without the facilitating role of film crew, director, editor and so forth. The film gives us an objective representation of life itself. But there's the rub – it was the realisation that ethnography is representation, or life at least once removed, that caused what was and continues to be a reappraisal of the anthropological enterprise. The present volume is set in that tradition of reappraisal.

The adage was that anthropology sought to understand the other – at least partly in order better to know oneself. This approach to anthropology was epistemologically grounded in a fairly straightforward scientism. Here was the anthropologist and over there, ontologically discrete and entirely separate from him or her, were the objects of his or her attention – the other. Anthropology was a science, maybe not quite like physics or chemistry but similar enough to claim, or at first assume, a measure of objectivity in its practice. Anthropological accounts of others were therefore fundamentally realist. The aim of the fieldworker was to collect, accumulate, classify and analyse social facts. Language was considered a neutral tool that enabled the anthropologist to identify social phenomena and describe them exactly and truthfully. The discipline overall should be the accumulation of these facts. The personal identity of the anthropologist was an unimportant detail, though best practice assumed that the anthropologist, commencing their observations from outside of the frame should ensure that they took precautions to stay out. This is not to say that they chose to remain separate from the action during fieldwork. After all, at least since Malinowski's work on the Trobriand Islands, anthropological practice involved more or less systematic participant observation: the anthropologists should live among those whose lives they were attempting to understand for an extended period of time. But this was a practical strategy and was understood as a principle that distinguished the modern anthropologist from the Victorian armchair scholar who sifted through data gleaned by those – soldiers, traders, missionaries, colonial administrators – who had travelled there instead. It was certainly not a part of Malinowski's plan that anthropologists should place themselves in the ethnographic frame and he was careful to erase, wherever possible, the traces of his own presence in the field.

This means that, on the one hand, the anthropological endeavour gained legitimacy from ‘being there’ so long as evidence of ‘doing there’ was eradicated. In the field it was necessary to be ‘with’ the other as only in that way might one contextualise beliefs and practices in a holistic account of another culture: ‘to realise his vision of his world’ (Malinowski 1961 [1922]: 25). But Malinowski did not consider it necessary to include himself in his academic presentation of Trobriand life and kept his personal feelings and observations to his diary. This diary, published posthumously in 1967, is one of the more significant waymarks of our current journey as it remains a painful reminder that doing ethnography is inevitably intertwined with the rather subjective and deeply human being in the field.

Even those with just a passing acquaintance with the recent history of anthropology will know that by the 1970s the character of ethnography had undergone considerable change. For a variety of more or less connected reasons, including the influence of the postmodern turn, anthropology began to take a growing interest in the self of the anthropologist, or at least in the relationship between self and other. The possibility that anthropologists – and anthropology as an increasingly institutionalised practice – may have had an impact on the representation of ‘an other’ culture gave rise to an increasing awareness of anthropologists’ position in the field. There was a growing recognition that Radcliffe-Brown might have been wrong and that the anthropologist can never be an entirely neutral ‘device’ for describing and explaining other cultures. The time had come when anthropologists felt obliged to confront the uncomfortable fact that they were always already implicated in ‘the field’; that they were, inevitably, constructing what they came to re-present.

Writing Culture

Making room for the self in ethnography depended partly upon the loosening of textual conventions. Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986) has become iconic of significant and identifiable tendencies within the discipline – including reflexivity as a necessary component of doing fieldwork, the importance of critique, a growing interest in the textuality of anthropology (the so-called ‘literary turn’), and the further possibility of doing ‘anthropology at home’ by the time of its publication. Although it would be overstating the case to cite Writing Culture as the cause of a paradigm shift, the book undoubtedly presented the most concise and subsequently most influential position statement of a new self-conscious and critical anthropology. We will consider a number of these trends here: reflexivity, ethnography as a form of writing, anthropology at home and auto-ethnography, and the employment of anthropology as cultural critique. We would argue that in one way or another each of these tendencies relates more or less directly to the emergence of the anthropologist's self in their ethnography. The tendency among anthropologists to attend more explicitly to the self was not merely a product of anthropology. Giddens (1991) and others have shown that reflexivity has been a part of the ambient climate of late modernity, a practice that characterises the world view of not only scholars but also the public at large. Indeed it might be argued that this text itself is another example of the modern tendency to dwell reflexively on the self.

Jay Ruby's edited collection, A Crack in the Mirror (1982), preceded Writing Culture by four years and anticipated some of the themes found there. The chapters in Ruby expertly indicate the inevitability of subjectivity in the ethnographic account comparing this to the sphere of cultural production. As the book aims to make the data-gathering process transparent (1982: 18–19), there is the stark realisation that at the centre of every ethnography lies the self of the anthropologist. From the 1970s on, there has been a growing tendency to acknowledge this presence, to have the anthropologist's self step from behind the camera and acknowledge her presence, both to herself and others (see also Coffey 1999). However, as Dyck says in his chapter here, it is unfortunate that this reflexivity has become a kind of reflex that is all too often confined to a preface or introduction as the new badge of ethnographic legitimacy. The information provided is often eclectic, limited and little commented upon (Salzman 2002); the text proceeds as before and little is gained. The actuality of the influence of the anthropologist's self on data collection and writing therefore tends, all too often, to be ghettoised and its consideration not properly developed. As Kohn remarks, in this way reflexivity also often appears rather static pointing to the anthropologist as a similarly static filter of the observed culture. In this volume Collins and Kohn make the case for a more processual form of reflexivity.

There are several notable instances, however, in which the self-awareness of the anthropologist has radically reshaped the form of their ethnography. One thinks particularly of Rabinow's Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco (1977), Dumont's The Headman and I (1978), Crapanzano's Tuhami (1980), Shostak's Nisa (1981), Dwyer's Moroccan Dialogues (1982). We should note Pratt's observation (1986) that such accounts are often secondary, following on from more standard objectivist texts – Rabinow, for example, published Symbolic Domination (1975) two years before Reflections (1977). It is also worth noting that earlier texts exist which point towards these more experimental works – Sydney Mintz's Worker in the Cane (1960), for example. In these cases, a concerted attempt is being made to foreground the dialogical nature of ethnography both as a fieldwork practice and as published text. On the one hand, the voice of the other is foregrounded and, on the other, the self of the anthropologist is made explicitly and constantly present. Whatever these texts achieve, they certainly confirm the impossibility of objectively representing, ethnographically, an unproblematic other. In this volume Šikić-Mićanović makes it equally clear that ethnographies, regardless of the details of their production, are jointly constructed by the ethnographer and her research participants and that the inclusion of the self of the ethnographer in the field is, in many cases, a precondition of ethnography.

These realisations are clearly apparent in the 1990s which witnessed an increasing use of self-narrative as well as biography in ethnography, for example Okely and Callaway's Anthropology and Autobiography (eds, 1992) and Reed-Danahay's Auto/Ethnography: Rewriting the Self and the Social (1997). More importantly, feminist monographs such as Abu-Lughod's Writing Women's Worlds (1993) and Behar's Translated Woman (1993) showed how one could write experience-near ethnographies that reveal subjectivity without losing academic credibility.

A more recent example is Rapport's short essay, ‘Hard-Sell or Mumbling “Right” Rudely’ (1997). Here, Rapport places his self squarely at the centre of the action. He is drawn, after receiving an invitation and promise through the post, to a city centre hotel in the hope of receiving a substantial prize of some sort. Rapport describes his slow and steady humiliation at the hands of timeshare salesmen in a manner that is likely to cause his reader both amusement and discomfort. Unsurprisingly, he leaves the hotel after a gruelling and embarrassing two-hour ‘hard-sell’, with nothing more than the continued and now heavily tarnished promise of that prize – a prize that never materialises. Rapport offers an ‘experience-near’ auto-ethnography, an account that many of his readers will feel uncomfortably familiar with – the unfulfilled promise of free enterprise. Rapport's work, both in this essay and more generally (see especially Rapport 1994a), reflects and develops a more explicit connection with forms of writing that are traditionally thought of as ‘fiction’.

Even these examples suggest, by their heterogeneity, that ‘the literary turn’, as it is often called, is hardly a coherent movement in anthropology. There are at least three separate, though admittedly overlapping, developments here. First, there is a movement towards experimentation in the style of ethnographic writing itself. Perhaps the most notable examples include Stephen Tylor's essay in Writing Culture, along with the biographical and dialogic examples cites above. If one accepts that ethnography is a ‘form of writing’ (this is impossible to deny, even if one refuses to countenance departures from the standard genre), then there is no reason not to experiment with non-standard forms. Such experimentation has been taken further in sociology than in anthropology under the label of ‘auto-ethnography’. One might, for instance, look to the collections edited by Ellis and Bochner (1996; see also their extended meditation on experimental forms in Bochner and Ellis 2002). Their earlier collection include, for example, an account of the life of a mentally retarded woman by her (sociologist) daughter, a first-hand account of a bulimic, an extraordinary case study in child sexual abuse and a wistful piece on the author's father's journey across America in his Model T Ford in 1924. In each case, and despite the apparent idiosyncrasy of the topics, the author draws on the quotidian in order to illuminate more general themes.

In this collection, Dona and Dorothy Davis turn their attention to the experience, and in particular their experience, of being identical twins. This is as ‘experience-near’ as ethnography gets. They intimate, at one point, the possibility of existential unity, arguing, not that one individual may contain several selves, but that two individuals may share, at least for an instant, one self. In this case, and, indeed, in all cases here, experimental writing takes a back seat as the form and content of ethnography as a methodology are interrogated. Indeed, that case of the Davis twins’ contribution is especially interesting and indicates not only the tenacity of the standard format of ethnographic writing but also its capacity to contain even the most unusual fieldwork: perhaps this is due to its flexibility – or, of course, to the ingenuity of the writer.

The second movement is the treatment of ethnographic texts as texts. During those years when the major paradigm in anthropology was characterised by its scientificity there seemed no point in bringing the ethnographic account itself under scrutiny. After all, texts in other scientific disciplines did not undergo the lit. crit. treatment. Perhaps it was the interpretive turn spurned by Clifford Geertz’ work (1973) that prepared the ground for this possibility. Indeed, Geertz himself led the way with what turned out to be his most controversial book – Works and Lives (1988) – and Van Maanen published Tales of the Field (1988) in the same year, both books dealing with the rhetorical devices employed by influential anthropologists. Indeed the minor furore caused by Works and Lives indicates the suspicion with which some anthropologists viewed foregrounding anthropological writing (Spencer 1989). There have long been texts that are in a sense ambiguous with respect to genre (think of Bohannan 1954; Powdermaker 1966; Briggs 1970), which early on highlighted the inevitable subjective nature of ethnography as method and texts. If taken to its logical conclusion this realisation requires critical reading. More recently, there have been texts that at one level at least may well be seen to be fictional accounts, though each case needs to be treated as something sui generis. We are thinking particularly of Michael Jackson's Barawa and the Ways Birds Fly in the Sky: An Ethnographic Novel (1986) and Michael Taussig's The Magic of the State (1997). Indeed, here are two anthropologists, a New Zealander and an Australian, who most clearly exemplify a kind of experimentation that the editors of Writing Culture sought to encourage (though without providing specific direction). Michael Jackson has published not only non-standard ethnography (1989, 1995, 2002a, 2002b, 2005) but also novels and volumes of poetry (1986). And there is a continuity across genres in Jackson's work, facilitated by an existential perspective. Taussig, too, has been among the most adventurous ethnographers. In Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wildman (1987), he commends a certain ambiguity in ethnographic writing – at least in dealing with the kind of field in which he works:

Killing and torture and sorcery are real as death is real. But why people do these things, and how the answers to that question affect the question – that is not answerable outside of the effects of the real carried through time by people in action. That is why my subject is not the truth of being but the being of truth, not whether facts are real but what the politics of their interpretation and representation are. (1987: xiii)

It is evident from this passage that Taussig writes the way he does for a purpose and that purpose is critique. Taussig is not unconcerned with describing the everyday lives of Colombian people but he is considerably more interested in t...