A Thrice-Told Tale

Feminism, Postmodernism, and Ethnographic Responsibility

Margery Wolf

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 1992
• ISBN:
  9780804788243
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

A Thrice-Told Tale is one ethnographer's imaginative and powerful response to the methodological issues raised by feminist and postmodernist critics of traditional ethnography. The author, a feminist anthropologist, uses three texts developed out of her research in Taiwan—a piece of fiction, anthropological fieldnotes, and a social science article—to explore some of these criticisms.

Each text takes a different perspective, is written in a different style, and has different "outcomes, " yet all three involve the same fascinating set of events. A young mother began to behave in a decidedly abherrant, perhaps suicidal manner, and opinion in her village was sharply divided over the reason. Was she becoming a shaman, posessed by a god? Was she deranged, in need of physical restraint, drugs, and hospitalization? Or was she being cynically manipulated by her ne'er-do-well husband to elicit sympathy and money from her neighbors? In the end, the woman was taken away from the area to her mother's house. For some villagers, this settled the matter; for others the debate over her behavior was probably never truly resolved.

The first text is a short story written shortly after the incident, which occurred almost thrity years ago; the second text is a copy of the fieldnotes collected about the events covered in the short story; the third text is an article published in 1990 in American Ethnologist that analyzes the incident from the author's current perspective. Following each text is a Commentary in which the author discusses such topics as experimental ethnography, polyvocality, authorial presence and control, reflexivity, and some of the differences between fiction and ethnography.

The three texts are framed by two chapters in which the author discusses the genereal problems posed by feminist and postmodernist critics of ethnography and presents her personal exploration of these issues in an argument that is strongly self-reflexive and theoretically rigorous. She considers some feminist concerns over colonial research methods and takes issues with the insistence of some feminists tha the topics of ethnographic research be set by those who are studied. The book concludes with a plea for ethnographic responsibility based on a less academic and more practical perspective.

CHAPTER ONE

Ruminations with a View(point)

THIS IS NOT a book for postmodernists, nor is it a book for their critics.¹ This is a book for anthropologists and other social scientists who, like me, have read and listened with interest to the protagonists’ often heated exchanges—over polyvocality, reflexivity, colonialist discourse, audience, the nature of the relationship between anthropologist and informants, and the like—and still are just a little more interested in the content of the ethnographies we read and write than in the ethnographers’ epistemologies. I do not intend by this comment to suggest disdain for the work of postmodernists like James Clifford, Michael M. J. Fischer, George E. Marcus, and Stephen Tyler. On the contrary, I find their analyses of ethnographic frailties and failings useful on the whole, and I think that their criticisms of ethnographers and their habits cannot but improve the product of those who give their arguments a fair reading. But, like most anthropologists, I remain more interested in why Chinese peasants do what they do, and, as Graham Watson (1987: 36) puts it, in “getting the news out.” I see much in the postmodernist ruminations that helps me toward that goal but much also that does not seem to me in the best interests of anthropology at all.

This is also a book for feminist social scientists who have long been concerned about some of the issues only now troubling (some) ethnographers, such as whether by studying our subjects we are also exploiting them and whether by attempting to improve women’s living situations we are imposing another (powerful) society’s values. What may at first seem an ethical intervention in terms of feminist principles, for example, can seem decidedly less ethical when one observes the effect of a particular change on other actors in the drama of village life. Who is to decide?

Although feminist theory has been ignored by the new critics of ethnography (a topic I will return to in more detail below), postmodernism is having a powerful influence on some feminists and a growing influence on feminist social scientists. To my thinking, there are some good things coming out of this intellectual encounter, but again, as with anthropology and postmodernism there are some dangers, both theoretically and politically.

This book is a personal exploration of some of these issues. It came about because, a few years ago, I discovered in my files a short story I had written nearly thirty years ago while living in a small village in northern Taiwan. I had forgotten writing the story, but after a search through fieldnotes and a reading of my journals for that period, the events that precipitated the story began to come back in almost unwelcome detail—sounds, smells, visual images, and emotional states. But what surprised me as I read and reread the various written records was that the fieldnotes, the journals, and the short story represented quite different versions of what had happened.

Moreover, as I thought about what had occurred, I realized that I was thinking about those long-ago events in a very different way than I did when they were dutifully recorded in my notes and, less dutifully, in the story. At that time, I thought of myself as the wife and assistant of an anthropologist who was on his first field trip; now, I think of myself as an anthropologist. At that time, they were notes on one more exciting event in the exotic environment in which I found myself living; now, they are an intriguing record of the ideology and social context that led residents of a small village to reach one conclusion about a member of their community rather than another. They have become data, interesting data that should be analyzed and shared with my intellectual community in the usual academic format, a book or a journal article, rather than in the fictionalized format I had used so many years earlier.

This could have been a simple project, but as I reviewed the old fieldnotes and mused over the short story that contradicted both some of the “facts” and some of the anthropological attitudes recorded there, I was also catching up on my general reading. I found myself enmeshed in the debates set off by the collection of articles edited by James Clifford and George Marcus (Writing Culture, 1986) and in the postmodernist critiques of ethnography generally, and the feminist critiques of postmodernism specifically.

Reflexivity was not a topic of much interest when Arthur Wolf and I first did field research in the late 1950s and early 1960s. We struggled to understand the cultures we studied, to be ethical in our interactions with our informants, and to stay out of trouble with the ruling party. When we analyzed our data and wrote them up, we felt a responsibility to “our” village to “get it right,” but they were “our” data, not theirs, and we assumed only our reputations as scholars would be affected by not “getting it right.” Our academic mentors stressed objectivity and minimal disruption of our informants’ daily lives. Those of us who were on our first field trips were usually trying to live on a shoestring and, in Taiwan, at least, were often treated by our hosts with a slightly patronizing indulgence of our “barbarian ignorance.” We would have had to think a while before we could recognize the enormity of the power differential between us and, for example, the domineering, nagging, and much beloved cook we hired. When we finally sat down to write up our data, being experimental with form or analysis was not encouraged. If we wanted to be taken seriously as scholars and to have our interpretation of Society X accepted, we knew that there was a style of presentation within which we had to work.

So, some thirty years later, when I turned to reconstruct certain events that occurred in the early spring of 1960 in the little village of Peihotien, I approached the fieldnotes and my personal journals not only as a very different person (a feminist anthropologist) but also in a very different anthropological climate, one in which the discipline is being buffeted by criticism from without and from within about the value, indeed, the very integrity of its product, the ethnography. Where once I was satisfied to describe what I thought I saw and heard as accurately as possible, to the point of trying to resolve differences of opinion among my informants, I have come to realize the importance of retaining these “contested meanings.” But only to a point, and that point is where my path diverges from that of the postmodernist critics of ethnography.

My view of China does not, by a long shot, reflect the views of all the people with whom I have talked. My ethnographic work represents my understanding of China as a result of conversations held and conversations overheard. Some of these conversations were foolish and ill-informed, and a few were designed to mislead; other conversations were with or between people who had only a superficial understanding of a topic—no matter how deep their understanding of other areas of life might be. (Sometime ask your Uncle Ned who works for Acme Hardware and knows all there is to know about wrenches what consciousness raising is.) Even the most ardent critic of old-fashioned ethnography would surely grant an authorial license to edit some of these flawed perspectives, but there are other differences in local understandings that perhaps ought not to have been resolved. Like most scholars who happen to reread some of their early work (not recommended), there are some things I wish I could revise, but in general, I still see my ethnographic responsibility as including an effort to make sense out of what I saw, was told, or read—first for myself and then for my readers.

Some postmodern critics question the very possibility of ethnographers representing the experience of another culture, and others question the ethics of even attempting to do so, seeing the process itself as an exercise in colonialism (domination). The questioning is important, the answers less so. Obviously (or so it seems to me), anthropologists can only convey their own understandings of their observations in another culture in their ethnographies. The better the observer, the more likely she is to catch her informants’ understanding of the meaning of their experiences; the better the writer, the more likely she is to be able to convey that meaning to an interested reader from another culture. Some kinds of cultural meanings may only be accurately understood and reported by one who has learned them without realizing it, but much of the cultural onion may be as easily or even more easily picked apart by a careful analyst who is not of the culture.² It would be as great a loss to have first-world anthropologists confine their research to the first world as it is (currently) to have third-world anthropologists confine theirs to the third world.

Edward Said (1978) and those who accept his “orientalism” critique assert that ethnographic research is but another form of white domination, an ethical concern that is shared by many anthropologists. Labeling fieldwork an act of colonialism is an obvious overstatement, designed to draw our attention to the ways in which white privilege affects anthropological fieldwork. Certainly, we have plenty of historical evidence of careful, sensitive ethnographies being used by colonial regimes to tighten their control over “the natives.” That kind of obvious cultural domination is less common now, but the subtler kinds of domination—the sort that women have experienced in their own cultures and recognize with dismay in their research and that of their male colleagues—still haunts us. Power differentials within this society and between us and those we study exist and, alas, will continue to exist for the foreseeable future. Anthropologists must be constantly aware of how these differences in power can distort their perceptions and skew their interpretations. Obviously, they must also be careful not to take advantage of their (usually) considerably greater power in ways that will disadvantage the people they are studying.

But these dangers should not require abandoning cross-national research. Such a renunciation hardly seems ethical when one considers how often authoritarian regimes control information coming in and going out, information about living conditions, for example, that might be relevant to the survival of some groups and some ideas. There is a curious postmodernist politics that condemns us for our individual colonialist attitudes but remains aloof from the often bloody results of oppressive governments, of the left and the right. Feminist anthropologists, on the other hand, often find themselves caught between their own commitment to improving the lives of women everywhere and their discipline’s concern about interference in local politics. The power that accrues to being first world in a third-world country cannot be denied and yet cannot be used without alienating somebody. Postmodernism gives us little guidance here.

For anthropologists, Clifford and Marcus have become the symbols of the postmodernist critique of ethnography, and their Writing Culture the focal text—although there are a good many others who line up on the postmodernist side of the barricades. On both sides of the debate, as well as in the spectators’ gallery, one can find feminist social scientists who are indignant and at the same time wryly amused to hear the critiques they have leveled for years now being translated into postmodernist terminology and taken very seriously. If there is any page James Clifford has written that he may wish he hadn’t, I suspect it is the section in his Introduction to Writing Culture where he lamely explains the absence of a feminist paper in the collection. Clifford in particular and postmodernists in general have been roundly criticized for their male bias (e.g., Caplan 1989: 15; Gordon 1988: 14-15; Mascia-Lees et al. 1989: 11). I have a few things to add to this criticism, but I will also take issue in the pages and chapters that follow with some of the feminist positions on doing ethnography.

Before I get further into these issues, let me explain what follows. Because I did analyze and publish the material that led to the writing of the short story mentioned above (Wolf 1990a), I now have three texts describing in different ways what happened in the little village of Peihotien some thirty years ago. One is a piece of fiction written by me alone; another consists of unanalyzed fieldnotes recording interviews and observations collected by any of the several members of the field staff; and the third is entirely in my voice, written in a style acceptable to referees chosen by the American Ethnologist. Each text takes a different perspective, is written in a different style, and has different “outcomes,” yet all three involve the same set of events. Not surprisingly, in each can be found examples of the attitudes, methods, and ideas that our postmodern critics both hate and love. The three texts are presented here as Chapters Two, Three, and Four with minimal editorial interventions. Each chapter is followed by a Commentary, in which I use the text to illustrate and argue with some of the problems and promises this new period of reflexivity has brought to the fore.

Because in the rest of this chapter I want to draw on the ethnographic material that forms the backbone of this book, I must risk creating here a fourth version of what occurred in Peihotien in 1960. A young mother of three children began to behave in a decidedly aberrant, perhaps suicidal, manner. Over a period of about a month, she displayed symptoms of mental illness, spirit loss, possession by a god, and shamanism. Anyone who has lived in a small village will understand that this behavior would not long go unnoticed by her neighbors and would quickly become the major topic of conversation whenever two people met. Eventually, people from nearby communities became involved, and at times there were literally crowds surrounding her house and filling her courtyard. Mrs. Tan was an “outsider” as far as the local people were concerned, because she and her family had only lived in the village for ten years; to be a “real” member of the community, one had to be associated with a family that had been there at least a generation, preferably two.

Following Mrs. Tan’s first public outburst, she was quickly hustled off to a “hospital” in the nearby market town, where she was kept under physical restraints (tied to a bed) and psychological restraints (drugged). After a few days, she returned to the village, and before she was finally taken away from the area to her mother’s house, she was considered by some members of the community to be a tang-ki, or shaman, through whom a god was speaking.³ Throughout this period, the villagers debated among themselves and with ritual specialists—often in her presence—about whether she was “crazy,” had simply lost her soul (a fairly common occurrence), had been chosen as a vehicle for a god who wished direct access to believers (a recognized status), or was being exploited by her ne’er-do-well husband, who thought he could make money off her role as a tang-ki. I suspect for some villagers this debate was never truly resolved; for others, it was settled when she left the village with her mother.

This is a simple story that could have been told (and undoubtedly has been) by many, many people. To my knowledge, only mine has been written, let alone published, freezing it unnaturally and giving it unearned legitimacy. In Chapter Three, the events appear as a jumble of field observations and interviews. Arguably, this record could be considered the voice of the anthropologist. However, as I point out in the introductory paragraphs to that chapter, our field assistant, Wu Chieh, a young Taiwanese woman with the equivalent of a tenth-grade education, did the majority of the observing and interviewing, and in a very real sense defined the topic.⁴ She had been working with us for nearly two years, and she had learned to formulate questions and report answers in a format that was comfortable to our Western minds. She had come to look for, or at least to recognize, the kinds of issues that interested us. Even so, I felt then and continue to feel that the interest she took in these events was not as our employee but as one of Mrs. Tan’s neighbors. She also had a sympathy for Mrs. Tan as a fellow outsider that many of our neighbors did not and could not share. She pursued the story and people’s reactions to the obviously exciting activities that it encompassed with a personal concern that she rarely exercised in her other work with us. Nonetheless, the fieldnotes are a mé-lange of voices that were selected for recording from the yet more numerous set of voices still echoing in our ears when we sat down at the end of each day to write up the day’s notes.

In Chapter Four, the voice is clearly that of the anthropologist telling the story in the context of shamanism in Taiwan. I wanted to explore the factors in the community’s final decision about the nature of Mrs. Tan’s behavior. I made use of the voices that Wu Chieh provided in her interviews and observations, but my interpretations of them were based on my understanding of where those voices were coming from in relation to their status, Mrs. Tan’s status, and the cultural context. My control over possibly competing interpretations is determined by my ability to comprehend and process the data available.

Chapter Two, the short story called “The Hot Spell,” might conceivably be labeled “experimental ethnography,” but it was written as fiction—not as fact using fictional forms, as some postmodernists urge. The “I” voice, and I admit it still does feel a bit like me, is totally in control of the information. The action and emotions are presented directly, and even the doubts and conflicted voices come from the author, no matter how carefully worded between the quotation marks. A few, but very few, of the lines quoted appear somewhere in the fieldnotes or in my journals, although even now, many years since I have spoken or even heard that dialect, I can hear cadences and recognize the individuals who were amalgamated into a single character.

Had I time enough while in the field—and my readers patience enough—these events could have been recounted in numerous other voices. Many actors and observers could have been given the space for their accounts, their interpretations, of what happened in March 1960. Perhaps the most interesting would have been Mrs. Tan’s interpretation, which I suspect would have changed from day to day. Another fascinating perspective would have been that of the coterie of old women who controlled so much more of village opinion than anyone, including the middle-aged men who often “voiced” village opinion, realized. Wu Chieh’s own full account (there was much she did not tell me even off the record) might be very different from any of those presented here. The village children—who after any major event (such as New Year’s or a god’s birthday celebration) spent days incorporating vivid, and often embarrassing, imitations of adult behavior into their play—could have provided another sharp set of insights. And, of course, the ritual specialists—the tang-ki who tried to lure back Mrs. Tan’s wandering soul, and the old man I call Ong Hue-lieng, who made the final pronouncement about her possession—both would have had very different accounts to present.

All of these speakers, including those presented fully in the pages that follow, interpret events with a vested interest, some cons...