In my previous post (“Some Thoughts on Ethnography”), I mentioned having recently reviewed the various essays in Writing Culture, including that by Mary Louise Pratt, while preparing for a discussion in a graduate seminar.
In Pratt’s essay, shortly after the section I discussed in my previous post, Pratt writes (p. 33; parenthetical added):
“Much must be left behind in the process (the process of converting subjective experience and field notes into formal ethnography, especially the components of ethnography engaged in objectivizing narrative)…There are strong reasons why field ethnographers so often lament that their ethnographic writings leave out or hopelessly impoverish some of the most important knowledge they have achieved, including the self-knowledge. For the lay person, such as myself, the main evidence of a problem is the simple fact that ethnographic writing tends to be surprisingly boring. How, one asks constantly, could such interesting people doing such interesting things produce such dull books? What did they have to do to themselves?”
I’ll grant that much ethnographic writing is boring, some more boring even than punk rock (see “On Why Punk Rock Is So Boring”). It is usually writing by academics after all, and most academic writing in general is dull in form and style, even when once read the material discussed might be quite exciting.
Still, each time I encounter this passage (I generally encounter it from time to time when I’m prepping for a class for which I’ve assigned Writing Culture as reading), I react negatively. This time around, I reacted a bit differently and with more positive results (i.e. I didn’t just snarkily wonder why someone from a lit theory background would leave the scintillating neighborhood of lit crit and theory to pay detailed attention to something as tedious as ethnography). I think that Pratt, in this passage, is both misperceiving the boringness of ethnography and asking the wrong sorts of questions of ethnography (or rather her questions are good ones, but they’re good questions about virtually any form of academic writing – why must writing about so many exciting topics [quasars, lemmings, market systems, novels] be so often so dreadfully boring?).
First off, as a genre of academic writing, a surprising number of ethnographies are not boring. Virtually every cultural anthropologist has a list of ethnographies that they’re positively passionate about, not because they’re excellent analyses (though that may be another [and ideally overlapping] list of books some are passionate about), but because they’re wonderful, well written, and engaging books.
I said above I think Pratt was asking the wrong sort of question about ethnography. My question is this: Why do we expect ethnographies (as examples of academic writing) to not be boring, and why are we disappointed when they are boring? (And I ask this non-rhetorically, for we [or at least I] do expect ethnographies to be interesting and experience disappointment when this isn’t the case.) After all, there are few other forms of scholarly writing for which we have such expectations (perhaps history writing). No one is disappointed when a physics report or economics article or essay of literary criticism is dull, because no one (I should probably say almost no one) expects them to be otherwise – it’s more a surprise if they’re not boring.
Virtually every academic discipline has a corresponding genre of popular writing written for a lay audience that’s expected to be interesting and engaging, but ethnography and professional history writing are the two forms of professional, scholarly writing that many if not most readers expect to be interesting as writing, even if they’re often disappointed. The most obvious, and probably most important reason for this is that these are the two forms of contemporary academic writing that often take the form of narrative, i.e. where we’re told a story. (As Pratt is discussing, the tension in ethnography comes in when the writing shifts from narrative to expository, objectivizing text.)
As I suggested in my previous post, another component of the allure of ethnography for many readers, and what draws many into anthropology in the first place, is the imagining of what Sontag called “The Anthropologist as Hero,” such that the reader expects not just a story, but a story of exploration and heroic adventure.
The popular imagining of “The Ethnographer” is not quite Gentleman Explorer á la Richard Burton or T. E. Lawrence nor Explorer lost in the Wilderness á la Cabeza de Vaca (or the ultimately anthropophagized title character of the film How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman); not quite castaway á la Robinson Crusoe (or Gilligan); not quite fictional adventurer á la Indiana Jones or Alan Quartermain; not quite contemporary television adventurer á la Steve Irwin (God Bless Him), Jeff Corwin, or Anthony Bourdain; not quite good feminist anthropologist battling (literally) man-eating cannibal feminists á la Shannon Tweed’s character in Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death (okay – not even close to that, though it is a movie any anthropologist with a sense of humor should see); but somewhere in the neighborhood of all of these.
Over the past few decades, anthropologists (alongside many others) have thoroughly critiqued most aspects of the discipline – the colonialist roots of ethnography, the major concepts of the discipline, the motivations of ethnographers, and this has been important and good. Like most cultural anthropologists today, I’m wary of any sense of ethnography as adventure, of being or trying to be “The Anthropologist as Hero,” but I’ll also be honest enough to say that the allure of heroic adventure is at least part of what attracted me to the discipline in the first place and no doubt is still a part of why I expect ethnography to be interesting if not positively exciting.
Showing posts with label Ethnography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ethnography. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Saturday, April 5, 2008
Some Thoughts on Ethnography
I recently read Robert Lowie’s The German People. It’s an ethnography of sorts of German culture, at least in the sense that it’s a “writing of culture” (more on this text as ethnography below). So far as I can tell, it’s a largely forgotten book, certainly much less widely read by anthropologists today than several other Lowie books, such as The Crow Indians, Primitive Religion, or Social Organization.
As I read The German People, I couldn’t help but to think of a more popular and more widely read ethnography, Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and The Sword. The two books have some important things in common. Both were written and published during World War II, and both can be seen as attempts to understand “the enemy,” both for the war and the succeeding occupation. (Benedict’s research was specifically commissioned by the U.S. government for this purpose.) In the processing of making sense of the Germans and Japanese respectively, the two texts also no doubt offered an important humanizing of the two nationalities.
The two works have a very different “feel” in other ways. Neither is the conventional ethnography written on the basis of participant observation field work in the culture in question. Benedict’s work was largely based in extensive interviews with Japanese-Americans (so that there was the use of interview methods typical of ethnography, but without the often more prominent participant observation). Benedict’s work “feels” very much like a conventional ethnography, even if based on for the time an unconventional total methodology. Ironically, Lowie’s experience of German culture was much more direct than Benedict’s of Japanese culture (Lowie was not a participant observer there, but had had extensive first hand experience of the culture as a student earlier in the century), while his text has little of the stylistic “feel” of an ethnography at all, really fitting more into the genre of social history.
Fortuitously, while I was reading Lowie’s The German People, I was also reviewing the various essays in the mid-1980s text Writing Culture for an upcoming discussion with grad students in a seminar on culture theory.
In Mary Louise Pratt’s essay in the collection, “Fieldwork in Common Places,” she writes (p. 32; parenthetical note on “it” added):
“James Clifford speaks of it (the persistence of personal narrative alongside objectifying narrative) as ‘the discipline’s impossible attempt to fuse objective and subjective practices.’ Fieldwork produces a kind of authority that is anchored to a large extent in subjective, sensuous experience. One experiences the indigenous environment and lifeways for oneself, sees with one’s own eyes, even plays some roles, albeit contrived ones, in the daily life of the community. But the professional text to result from such an encounter is supposed to conform to the norms of a scientific discourse whose authority resides in the absolute effacement of the speaking and experiencing subject.”
This quality of the ethnography does several things.
1. It gives ethnography a distinctive feel. Those texts we call ethnography generally do present in some way the ambivalence between personal, subjective narrative and third person, objectifying narrative. The lack of this subjective and personal element is largely what makes The German People feel like it’s not an ethnography, even if it is “writing culture.”
2. The tension between these elements in ethnography is, I think, what is largely responsible for the long history of conscious experimentation with the form of ethnography – something that’s been going on far longer than the writers of Writing Culture tend to acknowledge (see Experimental Ethnography Old and New).
3. This tension is one of the things that makes ethnography continually interesting because it is continually problematic at its formal core – more on ethnography as interesting or boring in my following post.
4. As Clifford and Pratt are pointing out, it’s the inclusion of the personal narrative that grounds the authority of the ethnographic narrator who experienced the culture and gives credence to the objectified narrative. Without such rhetorically established authority, why should we trust the strange things we read about in so many well written ethnographies are true? (Of course, being aware of this source of authority, why trust what we read to be true and not simply an interesting account of something which may or may not correspond to anyone’s lived reality?)
5. The continual presence of personal narrative as grounding authority is the chief means through which field work as rite of passage (as discussed so well, or at least so nicely by Lévi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques) is interjected into the text, creating what Susan Sontag called “The Anthropologist as Hero,” the ethnographer venturing out to where others dare not go and returning to bring us comprehension of the other. Contra the construction of anthropology as the “softest” of social sciences on the part of many other social scientists, we have here an image of anthropological ethnography as the most macho of social science endeavors, and one trafficking in an essentializing division of self and other. All of this is problematic (and silly), but I’d argue it’s still very much a part of the image and appeal of anthropology and ethnography. (In my own socialization into the discipline in a Ph.D. program in the 1990s, this was still part of how anthropologists thought of ethnography. My research along the U.S./Mexican border was suspect as ethnography, because my others might not have been other enough, and frankly because I’d be doing ethnography in places with running water and electricity, and that I could drive there, though ultimately, the fact that I’d be doing participant observation in some specific contexts that were sometimes actually potentially dangerous and always perceived as dangerous made it just acceptable. A friend, who did participant observation on human rights issues at the U.N. in Switzerland, never seemed to be able to shake people’s perceptions that he somehow wasn’t doing “real ethnography,” even if everyone agreed his work was “important.”)
As I read The German People, I couldn’t help but to think of a more popular and more widely read ethnography, Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and The Sword. The two books have some important things in common. Both were written and published during World War II, and both can be seen as attempts to understand “the enemy,” both for the war and the succeeding occupation. (Benedict’s research was specifically commissioned by the U.S. government for this purpose.) In the processing of making sense of the Germans and Japanese respectively, the two texts also no doubt offered an important humanizing of the two nationalities.
The two works have a very different “feel” in other ways. Neither is the conventional ethnography written on the basis of participant observation field work in the culture in question. Benedict’s work was largely based in extensive interviews with Japanese-Americans (so that there was the use of interview methods typical of ethnography, but without the often more prominent participant observation). Benedict’s work “feels” very much like a conventional ethnography, even if based on for the time an unconventional total methodology. Ironically, Lowie’s experience of German culture was much more direct than Benedict’s of Japanese culture (Lowie was not a participant observer there, but had had extensive first hand experience of the culture as a student earlier in the century), while his text has little of the stylistic “feel” of an ethnography at all, really fitting more into the genre of social history.
Fortuitously, while I was reading Lowie’s The German People, I was also reviewing the various essays in the mid-1980s text Writing Culture for an upcoming discussion with grad students in a seminar on culture theory.
In Mary Louise Pratt’s essay in the collection, “Fieldwork in Common Places,” she writes (p. 32; parenthetical note on “it” added):
“James Clifford speaks of it (the persistence of personal narrative alongside objectifying narrative) as ‘the discipline’s impossible attempt to fuse objective and subjective practices.’ Fieldwork produces a kind of authority that is anchored to a large extent in subjective, sensuous experience. One experiences the indigenous environment and lifeways for oneself, sees with one’s own eyes, even plays some roles, albeit contrived ones, in the daily life of the community. But the professional text to result from such an encounter is supposed to conform to the norms of a scientific discourse whose authority resides in the absolute effacement of the speaking and experiencing subject.”
This quality of the ethnography does several things.
1. It gives ethnography a distinctive feel. Those texts we call ethnography generally do present in some way the ambivalence between personal, subjective narrative and third person, objectifying narrative. The lack of this subjective and personal element is largely what makes The German People feel like it’s not an ethnography, even if it is “writing culture.”
2. The tension between these elements in ethnography is, I think, what is largely responsible for the long history of conscious experimentation with the form of ethnography – something that’s been going on far longer than the writers of Writing Culture tend to acknowledge (see Experimental Ethnography Old and New).
3. This tension is one of the things that makes ethnography continually interesting because it is continually problematic at its formal core – more on ethnography as interesting or boring in my following post.
4. As Clifford and Pratt are pointing out, it’s the inclusion of the personal narrative that grounds the authority of the ethnographic narrator who experienced the culture and gives credence to the objectified narrative. Without such rhetorically established authority, why should we trust the strange things we read about in so many well written ethnographies are true? (Of course, being aware of this source of authority, why trust what we read to be true and not simply an interesting account of something which may or may not correspond to anyone’s lived reality?)
5. The continual presence of personal narrative as grounding authority is the chief means through which field work as rite of passage (as discussed so well, or at least so nicely by Lévi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques) is interjected into the text, creating what Susan Sontag called “The Anthropologist as Hero,” the ethnographer venturing out to where others dare not go and returning to bring us comprehension of the other. Contra the construction of anthropology as the “softest” of social sciences on the part of many other social scientists, we have here an image of anthropological ethnography as the most macho of social science endeavors, and one trafficking in an essentializing division of self and other. All of this is problematic (and silly), but I’d argue it’s still very much a part of the image and appeal of anthropology and ethnography. (In my own socialization into the discipline in a Ph.D. program in the 1990s, this was still part of how anthropologists thought of ethnography. My research along the U.S./Mexican border was suspect as ethnography, because my others might not have been other enough, and frankly because I’d be doing ethnography in places with running water and electricity, and that I could drive there, though ultimately, the fact that I’d be doing participant observation in some specific contexts that were sometimes actually potentially dangerous and always perceived as dangerous made it just acceptable. A friend, who did participant observation on human rights issues at the U.N. in Switzerland, never seemed to be able to shake people’s perceptions that he somehow wasn’t doing “real ethnography,” even if everyone agreed his work was “important.”)
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Some Books By Non-Anthropologists For Cultural Anthropologists To Read
Like most scholars, I have a passion for books. Having enjoyed putting together two posts (here and here) on my favorite books from last year, I’ve decided to begin a semi-regular feature of discussing books I’ve found rewarding that I think other cultural anthropologists (or anyone else) might also find engaging, interesting, provocative, or otherwise worth reading.
The Riddle of the Dinosaur, by John Noble Wilford, Knopf, 1986.
I read this book when I was just beginning to organize the writing of my dissertation. I was reading a wide variety of non-fiction pertaining to an array of topics and disciplines to get a sense of the diversity of ways of organizing the presentation of a topic (a strategy I’d recommend for anyone now writing theses or dissertations). This book didn’t particularly influence my writing in any formal way. Instead it influenced my thinking about my relation to ethnographic data. (It’s also a fun read for anyone with a fascination for dinosaurs.)
You’ll learn a lot about dinosaurs from this book, but you’ll also learn much about the history of the paleontology of dinosaurs. Wilford’s account is essentially an epistemological history, tracing the history of the development of conceptualizations of dinosaurs and methods for studying them (I tend to think of methodology as applied epistemology – and I’ve found thinking about research methods a lot more interesting ever since I started thinking about it that way).
In most ways, paleontology and ethnography have little in common. In reading Wilford, I realized that one thing they have in common, albeit for different reasons, is that they’re both scholarly endeavors that tend to foreground epistemological concerns, if not to exist in a perpetual state of epistemological crisis. As I said the reasons for this are different: with paleontology, one is faced with a paucity of information and a real concern about what can legitimately be reconstructed about the anatomy and physiology, much less lifeways, of these creatures from 65+ million years ago with in most cases minimal and highly fragmented information; with ethnography, the researcher is generally overwhelmed with data, but with concerns about the effects of the researcher’s own prejudices and predilections on interpretations and even observations, and the reader is left with the task of attempting to discern the merits of the ethnographer’s text with no ability to engage in anything like laboratory replicability.
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, Pantheon, 2003, and Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return, Pantheon, 2004, both by Marjane Satrapi.
Although I’m no expert on the Middle East, much less Iran or Persian culture specifically, I’ve read quite a few books about Iran in recent years, several of them excellent, including Fredrik Barth’s minor class Nomads of South Persia (an ethnography from the 1950s), Michael Fischer’s Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution (an ethnography written right after the revolution, and one of the more insightful accounts of it), and Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi and Ali Mohammadi’s Small Media, Big Revolution: Communication, Culture, and the Iranian Revolution (another insightful account of the revolution focusing on the use of media technology by the revolutionaries).
Satrapi’s two volume graphic memoir (probably already familiar to fans of graphic novels and non-fiction, and recently made into a movie) is the one thing I’ve read, though, that gave me a sense of growing up and being in contemporary Iran (not that the memoir is confined to Iran alone – it also entails an account of Satrapi’s years in a European boarding school, for example).
Reading Satrapi’s memoir, as well as other graphic non-fiction, such as the various works of graphic journalist Joe Sacco, makes me wish I could draw. I don’t think any particular medium is the best way to write or present culture, but the form used here does have the unique ability to draw on the strength of the word and the image and to avoid to an extent some of the pitfalls of each, e.g. the way in which so much ethnography feels enervated, missing so much of the sensual reality of culture (though of course even here, the sounds, smells, and even colors [it’s in black and white drawing] are still missing), or the ambiguous quality of many images – lacking in context and conceptualization without commentary, yet coupled with an often overbearing sense of reality deriving from their visual impact.
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond, W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.
I may be one of the few cultural anthropologists who likes this book. Many cultural anthropologists have criticized this book, mostly as being geographically determinist (which is an incomplete charge at best, given the importance of the availability or absence of domesticated animals to societies in Diamond’s argument) or for reducing the highly various tapestry of cultural diversity to a simple narrative.
If you take Diamond’s account as a sufficient explanation of everything cultural, then it’s a disappointment, because it doesn’t do that, as if any theoretical framework could. Perhaps I’m overly charitable, or just plain wrong, but I don’t think Diamond claims to have explained everything in any case, but just to have laid out a set of arguments that explains much about human cultural history in general.
Insofar as Diamond draws our attention to factors many anthropologists might have otherwise not considered, such as the presence or absence of domesticated animals, directional orientation of trade and other cultural contact networks, or relative ease of transportation over long distances in different world areas, Diamond’s account is useful in making us aware of patterns that over long stretches of time have significant impact on the particular histories of specific societies.
Part of many anthropologists’ resistance to Diamond probably stems from the longstanding particularist bent of American cultural anthropology, the important emphasis on detail on cultural uniqueness, but also a sometimes corresponding resistance to identification of general patterns. (See Kerim’s post on the Savage Minds blog on this topic from about two months ago.)
Part of the resistance likely also stems from an academic turf-war mentality and a resistance to non-anthropologists poaching on anthropological territory. (There’s reason to be wary of the variety of sociobiologists, chaos theorists, meme theorists, economists, etc., who attempt to explain better than anthropologists the topics conventionally seen as anthropologists’ own. [If it makes any difference, Diamond, trained as a geneticist, is also poaching on geography’s turf.] Still, poaching doesn’t always make them wrong.)
There’s also a bit of internecine anthropological squabbling in disguise going on here. Though Diamond’s synthesis is highly readable and insightful, it is ultimately a synthesis of a lot of many scholars’ work from the previous few decades, notably William McNeill’s The Rise of the West, as well as Europe and the People without History by anthropology’s own Eric Wolf. I suspect a lot of the anthropological resistance to Diamond comes from anthropologists opposed to the more generalist approaches within the discipline, whether in the form of political economy, cultural materialism, or structuralism and their various progeny.
The Riddle of the Dinosaur, by John Noble Wilford, Knopf, 1986.
I read this book when I was just beginning to organize the writing of my dissertation. I was reading a wide variety of non-fiction pertaining to an array of topics and disciplines to get a sense of the diversity of ways of organizing the presentation of a topic (a strategy I’d recommend for anyone now writing theses or dissertations). This book didn’t particularly influence my writing in any formal way. Instead it influenced my thinking about my relation to ethnographic data. (It’s also a fun read for anyone with a fascination for dinosaurs.)
You’ll learn a lot about dinosaurs from this book, but you’ll also learn much about the history of the paleontology of dinosaurs. Wilford’s account is essentially an epistemological history, tracing the history of the development of conceptualizations of dinosaurs and methods for studying them (I tend to think of methodology as applied epistemology – and I’ve found thinking about research methods a lot more interesting ever since I started thinking about it that way).
In most ways, paleontology and ethnography have little in common. In reading Wilford, I realized that one thing they have in common, albeit for different reasons, is that they’re both scholarly endeavors that tend to foreground epistemological concerns, if not to exist in a perpetual state of epistemological crisis. As I said the reasons for this are different: with paleontology, one is faced with a paucity of information and a real concern about what can legitimately be reconstructed about the anatomy and physiology, much less lifeways, of these creatures from 65+ million years ago with in most cases minimal and highly fragmented information; with ethnography, the researcher is generally overwhelmed with data, but with concerns about the effects of the researcher’s own prejudices and predilections on interpretations and even observations, and the reader is left with the task of attempting to discern the merits of the ethnographer’s text with no ability to engage in anything like laboratory replicability.
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, Pantheon, 2003, and Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return, Pantheon, 2004, both by Marjane Satrapi.
Although I’m no expert on the Middle East, much less Iran or Persian culture specifically, I’ve read quite a few books about Iran in recent years, several of them excellent, including Fredrik Barth’s minor class Nomads of South Persia (an ethnography from the 1950s), Michael Fischer’s Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution (an ethnography written right after the revolution, and one of the more insightful accounts of it), and Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi and Ali Mohammadi’s Small Media, Big Revolution: Communication, Culture, and the Iranian Revolution (another insightful account of the revolution focusing on the use of media technology by the revolutionaries).
Satrapi’s two volume graphic memoir (probably already familiar to fans of graphic novels and non-fiction, and recently made into a movie) is the one thing I’ve read, though, that gave me a sense of growing up and being in contemporary Iran (not that the memoir is confined to Iran alone – it also entails an account of Satrapi’s years in a European boarding school, for example).
Reading Satrapi’s memoir, as well as other graphic non-fiction, such as the various works of graphic journalist Joe Sacco, makes me wish I could draw. I don’t think any particular medium is the best way to write or present culture, but the form used here does have the unique ability to draw on the strength of the word and the image and to avoid to an extent some of the pitfalls of each, e.g. the way in which so much ethnography feels enervated, missing so much of the sensual reality of culture (though of course even here, the sounds, smells, and even colors [it’s in black and white drawing] are still missing), or the ambiguous quality of many images – lacking in context and conceptualization without commentary, yet coupled with an often overbearing sense of reality deriving from their visual impact.
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond, W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.
I may be one of the few cultural anthropologists who likes this book. Many cultural anthropologists have criticized this book, mostly as being geographically determinist (which is an incomplete charge at best, given the importance of the availability or absence of domesticated animals to societies in Diamond’s argument) or for reducing the highly various tapestry of cultural diversity to a simple narrative.
If you take Diamond’s account as a sufficient explanation of everything cultural, then it’s a disappointment, because it doesn’t do that, as if any theoretical framework could. Perhaps I’m overly charitable, or just plain wrong, but I don’t think Diamond claims to have explained everything in any case, but just to have laid out a set of arguments that explains much about human cultural history in general.
Insofar as Diamond draws our attention to factors many anthropologists might have otherwise not considered, such as the presence or absence of domesticated animals, directional orientation of trade and other cultural contact networks, or relative ease of transportation over long distances in different world areas, Diamond’s account is useful in making us aware of patterns that over long stretches of time have significant impact on the particular histories of specific societies.
Part of many anthropologists’ resistance to Diamond probably stems from the longstanding particularist bent of American cultural anthropology, the important emphasis on detail on cultural uniqueness, but also a sometimes corresponding resistance to identification of general patterns. (See Kerim’s post on the Savage Minds blog on this topic from about two months ago.)
Part of the resistance likely also stems from an academic turf-war mentality and a resistance to non-anthropologists poaching on anthropological territory. (There’s reason to be wary of the variety of sociobiologists, chaos theorists, meme theorists, economists, etc., who attempt to explain better than anthropologists the topics conventionally seen as anthropologists’ own. [If it makes any difference, Diamond, trained as a geneticist, is also poaching on geography’s turf.] Still, poaching doesn’t always make them wrong.)
There’s also a bit of internecine anthropological squabbling in disguise going on here. Though Diamond’s synthesis is highly readable and insightful, it is ultimately a synthesis of a lot of many scholars’ work from the previous few decades, notably William McNeill’s The Rise of the West, as well as Europe and the People without History by anthropology’s own Eric Wolf. I suspect a lot of the anthropological resistance to Diamond comes from anthropologists opposed to the more generalist approaches within the discipline, whether in the form of political economy, cultural materialism, or structuralism and their various progeny.
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Identity Politics and Faculty-Graduate Student Relationships
A short while back (a couple months ago if memory serves correctly – which it may or may not), there was a nice section of essays written by anthropology graduate students on the topic of graduate student – faculty relationships published in Anthropology News.
There was one sentence in one of the essays that particularly struck me. (I won’t say which essay, in part because as is typically the case, once I had finished reading the issue, I left it in my department for someone else to pick up and read, and as a result I don’t have it in front of me, and in part because it seems nasty to me to single out a graduate student as if for attack – not really my intent anyway – on the basis of one sentence out of an otherwise nice essay – and in any case, my reactions are more to the sentiment expressed there, which I’ve encountered among other students, too, while the rest of the essay seemed more original or unique in its content.) The sentence basically argued that faculty can’t really understand or fully relate to graduate students because they’re not in the structural position of being graduate students.
Even though I discarded the copy of the issue, I’ve kept mentally coming back to that statement since. I have three sorts of reactions to the sentiment expressed in it.
1. My initial and immediate reaction (and one I still hold, though it’s no longer my sole reaction) was to think something along the lines of, “That’s ridiculous. Of course, faculty can relate to graduate students.” One thing virtually all faculty have in common is that we’ve been graduate students. Many, if not most, faculty can relate to the experiences of current graduate students because we had similar experiences when we were graduate students. And if (a big “if”) understanding or relateability derive from experience of a structural position, faculty are in an ideal position to understand graduate students, even if the reverse is not true, at least not most of the time (I add this last qualification, because part of the experience of graduate school is often the gaining of things like “teaching experience” by partially occupying the position of “faculty member” – the division between graduate student and faculty is more of a graded continuum than a clear and absolute line).
2. My second reaction is that this is a strange position for an anthropologist to take. If direct experience in occupying a particular social position or structural position is a prerequisite for understanding or relating, then the discipline is in serious trouble (and there are many who think it is for many reasons, with a long line going back at least several decades at this point of worrying [or anticipating] that the discipline of anthropology is immanently going to fly apart, implode, disintegrate, deteriorate, or otherwise have big troubles).
If we take the sentiment that faculty can’t relate to or understand graduate students and extend it logically at all, we might wonder how graduate students might relate to one another – they don’t occupy the same exact positions and have the same exact experiences, or indeed how we might really understand anyone at all – a longstanding and still significant philosophical question. If we take philosophy and psychoanalysis at all seriously (and I do – at least much of the time), we might, even must, conclude that we don’t really understand or relate to our selves.
All of this is true, though in a sense operationally and pragmatically false – no one who functions in the world operates as if it is true. Put another way, this is to confuse total understanding with understanding at all, total relateability with ability to relate at all. In pragmatic terms at least, most of us relate to ourselves at least tolerably well; we relate to and understand those around us not absolutely but well enough to function almost as if we did; ethnographers understand something, even much, about their research subjects’ lives without, and without need of, total understanding.
3. I think what the student might have meant was that faculty members might not be able to relate to students in the here and now because being a grad student here and now is different from faculty member’s past and usually spatially/institutionally different experiences.
I often can relate quite well to my students, but it might be provisionally wise to proceed as if my first reaction is not true, and to attempt to relate to graduate students in the same way that anthropologists attempt to relate to research subjects – to stop, look and listen carefully.
Structural positioning doesn’t determine consciousness, experience, or actions deterministically, but it does matter, and my students don’t have the same experiences as I did as a student. Like a lot of scholars, I had experience in more than one graduate institution, in my case earning degrees from one quite large state university (the University of Georgia) and one medium-to-large private institution with lots of money (Cornell University). In some ways, my grad student experiences parallel those of the students I now work with – there are certain commonalities to the grad student experience the characterize most institutions of higher education – but teaching at a mid-size regional state university (the University of West Florida) with much less student funding available than at the graduate institutions I attended (just to identify one, albeit an important, variable – student funding), the students I work with in some ways have very different experiences and concerns than I did as a student.
That is, just as I do think the student writer was incorrect in arguing that faculty can’t relate to or understand graduate students (understanding or relating doesn’t depend on experience of the same exact structural positioning, and in fact in any case faculty have had structural experience as graduate students), having occupied a social structural position or having had experience of a particular identity category (in this case “faculty” or “student,” but the point could apply to identity categories and politics generally) doesn’t translate into automatic or necessarily easy understanding of others occupying the category.
There was one sentence in one of the essays that particularly struck me. (I won’t say which essay, in part because as is typically the case, once I had finished reading the issue, I left it in my department for someone else to pick up and read, and as a result I don’t have it in front of me, and in part because it seems nasty to me to single out a graduate student as if for attack – not really my intent anyway – on the basis of one sentence out of an otherwise nice essay – and in any case, my reactions are more to the sentiment expressed there, which I’ve encountered among other students, too, while the rest of the essay seemed more original or unique in its content.) The sentence basically argued that faculty can’t really understand or fully relate to graduate students because they’re not in the structural position of being graduate students.
Even though I discarded the copy of the issue, I’ve kept mentally coming back to that statement since. I have three sorts of reactions to the sentiment expressed in it.
1. My initial and immediate reaction (and one I still hold, though it’s no longer my sole reaction) was to think something along the lines of, “That’s ridiculous. Of course, faculty can relate to graduate students.” One thing virtually all faculty have in common is that we’ve been graduate students. Many, if not most, faculty can relate to the experiences of current graduate students because we had similar experiences when we were graduate students. And if (a big “if”) understanding or relateability derive from experience of a structural position, faculty are in an ideal position to understand graduate students, even if the reverse is not true, at least not most of the time (I add this last qualification, because part of the experience of graduate school is often the gaining of things like “teaching experience” by partially occupying the position of “faculty member” – the division between graduate student and faculty is more of a graded continuum than a clear and absolute line).
2. My second reaction is that this is a strange position for an anthropologist to take. If direct experience in occupying a particular social position or structural position is a prerequisite for understanding or relating, then the discipline is in serious trouble (and there are many who think it is for many reasons, with a long line going back at least several decades at this point of worrying [or anticipating] that the discipline of anthropology is immanently going to fly apart, implode, disintegrate, deteriorate, or otherwise have big troubles).
If we take the sentiment that faculty can’t relate to or understand graduate students and extend it logically at all, we might wonder how graduate students might relate to one another – they don’t occupy the same exact positions and have the same exact experiences, or indeed how we might really understand anyone at all – a longstanding and still significant philosophical question. If we take philosophy and psychoanalysis at all seriously (and I do – at least much of the time), we might, even must, conclude that we don’t really understand or relate to our selves.
All of this is true, though in a sense operationally and pragmatically false – no one who functions in the world operates as if it is true. Put another way, this is to confuse total understanding with understanding at all, total relateability with ability to relate at all. In pragmatic terms at least, most of us relate to ourselves at least tolerably well; we relate to and understand those around us not absolutely but well enough to function almost as if we did; ethnographers understand something, even much, about their research subjects’ lives without, and without need of, total understanding.
3. I think what the student might have meant was that faculty members might not be able to relate to students in the here and now because being a grad student here and now is different from faculty member’s past and usually spatially/institutionally different experiences.
I often can relate quite well to my students, but it might be provisionally wise to proceed as if my first reaction is not true, and to attempt to relate to graduate students in the same way that anthropologists attempt to relate to research subjects – to stop, look and listen carefully.
Structural positioning doesn’t determine consciousness, experience, or actions deterministically, but it does matter, and my students don’t have the same experiences as I did as a student. Like a lot of scholars, I had experience in more than one graduate institution, in my case earning degrees from one quite large state university (the University of Georgia) and one medium-to-large private institution with lots of money (Cornell University). In some ways, my grad student experiences parallel those of the students I now work with – there are certain commonalities to the grad student experience the characterize most institutions of higher education – but teaching at a mid-size regional state university (the University of West Florida) with much less student funding available than at the graduate institutions I attended (just to identify one, albeit an important, variable – student funding), the students I work with in some ways have very different experiences and concerns than I did as a student.
That is, just as I do think the student writer was incorrect in arguing that faculty can’t relate to or understand graduate students (understanding or relating doesn’t depend on experience of the same exact structural positioning, and in fact in any case faculty have had structural experience as graduate students), having occupied a social structural position or having had experience of a particular identity category (in this case “faculty” or “student,” but the point could apply to identity categories and politics generally) doesn’t translate into automatic or necessarily easy understanding of others occupying the category.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Reginald Shepherd on Samuel R. Delany
On his blog, Reginald Shepherd has written an engaging overview of the work of science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany, On Samuel R. Delany.
Here’s a quotation from Shepherd’s essay:
“Samuel R. Delany is a prolific science fiction writer, memoirist, self-described pornographer, literary critic, and social commentator. Since the publication in 1962 (when he was twenty) of his first book, The Jewels of Aptor, he has published numerous novels, short stories, essays, interviews, cultural commentary, and memoirs. What's most remarkable about this prodigious output is its consistent quality, wide range, and continual development. Delany has never been one to repeat himself or rest on his laurels. Unlike some writers who, beginning in the genre and subsequently seeking literary respectability, and despite his numerous works in other genres, Delany has always strongly identified himself as a science fiction writer. But his work has always pushed at and expanded the boundaries and conventions of the field, constantly seeking out new forms, ideas, and themes. Indeed, his work has become more challenging and complex over the course of his career.”
I’ve discussed Delany on this blog before (“Uses of Myth” and “Myth, Mythic Literacy, and Contemporary Culture”). Science fiction in general is a genre ethnographers should take seriously, given the parallel ways in which both involve the presentation in textual form of plausible worlds (though with the key difference that ethnography is ideally based on empirical fieldwork). Delany in particular is a science fiction writer worth taking seriously by anthropologists both for the consistently stimulating quality of his work and for the ways in which he takes seriously anthropological ideas and ideas from across the humanities and social sciences and incorporates them into his construction of plausible worlds.
Here is Shepherd again on a Delany novel that may be of particular interest to anthropologists:
“Babel-17 (1966), inspired by the famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic determnism (that our language controls our thought), centers on the efforts of the poet Rydra Wong to crack what is believed to be a military code used by an alien race with whom Earth is at war. What she finally discovers is that this code is a highly exact and analytical language which has no word for “I,” and thus no concept of individual identity. The novel examines the capacity of culture and language not only to control the way people see and act in the world but to determine who they are as persons. “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” as Ludwig Wittgenstein so famously wrote. Two different words imply two different worlds.”
Here’s a quotation from Shepherd’s essay:
“Samuel R. Delany is a prolific science fiction writer, memoirist, self-described pornographer, literary critic, and social commentator. Since the publication in 1962 (when he was twenty) of his first book, The Jewels of Aptor, he has published numerous novels, short stories, essays, interviews, cultural commentary, and memoirs. What's most remarkable about this prodigious output is its consistent quality, wide range, and continual development. Delany has never been one to repeat himself or rest on his laurels. Unlike some writers who, beginning in the genre and subsequently seeking literary respectability, and despite his numerous works in other genres, Delany has always strongly identified himself as a science fiction writer. But his work has always pushed at and expanded the boundaries and conventions of the field, constantly seeking out new forms, ideas, and themes. Indeed, his work has become more challenging and complex over the course of his career.”
I’ve discussed Delany on this blog before (“Uses of Myth” and “Myth, Mythic Literacy, and Contemporary Culture”). Science fiction in general is a genre ethnographers should take seriously, given the parallel ways in which both involve the presentation in textual form of plausible worlds (though with the key difference that ethnography is ideally based on empirical fieldwork). Delany in particular is a science fiction writer worth taking seriously by anthropologists both for the consistently stimulating quality of his work and for the ways in which he takes seriously anthropological ideas and ideas from across the humanities and social sciences and incorporates them into his construction of plausible worlds.
Here is Shepherd again on a Delany novel that may be of particular interest to anthropologists:
“Babel-17 (1966), inspired by the famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic determnism (that our language controls our thought), centers on the efforts of the poet Rydra Wong to crack what is believed to be a military code used by an alien race with whom Earth is at war. What she finally discovers is that this code is a highly exact and analytical language which has no word for “I,” and thus no concept of individual identity. The novel examines the capacity of culture and language not only to control the way people see and act in the world but to determine who they are as persons. “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” as Ludwig Wittgenstein so famously wrote. Two different words imply two different worlds.”
Monday, October 8, 2007
Difficulty in Ethnographic Writing
The following is a revision of an earlier blog post:
Most cultural anthropologists would agree that ethnographic and other anthropological writing should be as clear as possible. A primary goal of ethnographic writing is to communicate a sense or understanding of a particular cultural context. Clear writing facilitates this and unclear or difficult writing obstructs this. When engaging in “public anthropology” and attempting to communicate anthropological understandings to an interested lay audience, the stricture to write clearly is even stronger.
Something that anthropologists have not discussed much, though, is what exactly constitutes “clarity” or “difficulty” in writing. There is a general sense that we should avoid overly complex syntax or particular vocabulary that our intended audience might not be familiar with (or at least to clearly explain complex vocabulary when necessary), but not much consideration that there might be different types of difficulty (and hence different types of clarity) that might call for their own particular responses.
Here, I find the recent work of Reginald Shepherd illuminating. Shepherd precisely delineates types or sorts of difficulty in another genre of writing, poetry. What is difficulty in general? Shepherd argues (and I agree) that difficulty in writing involves in one way or another violating readerly expectations. This can be good or bad, a barrier to grasping meaning and/or a spur to further experience and pleasure, but difficulty in its different varieties always involves this violation of expectations (that the words used will be familiar, that its referents will be clear, that the sense of the text “makes sense,” that the text will have a recognizable and clearly interpretable form).
Shepherd discusses five types of difficulty, which he identifies as: lexical difficulty, allusive difficulty, syntactical difficulty, semantic difficulty (with two varieties – explicative and interpretive difficulties), and formal difficulty.
A major difference in poetic and ethnographic writing has to do with the goals or motivations for writing. With poetry, a primary goal is to create a unique sensuous object with its own qualities to be experienced in itself (something that happens with any text, but something that is a primary function of literary writing, including poetry). The poem may make reference to something in the world outside the poem through the sense of the words, but it need not necessarily do so, and in any case, that is not the main raison d’etre for poetry (and if you want to communicate something directly and clearly about the world, there are far better means than poetry). Ethnography at its best might have poetic or other literary qualities, but that’s not what makes it ethnography. Unlike poetry, a definite connection between the sense of the text and the context in the world outside the text which is its reference is a necessary component of ethnography – it wouldn’t be writing culture if it weren’t writing about culture.
As a result, one difference between my writing about difficulty in ethnography and Shepherd’s in relation to poetry is a difference in attitude toward difficulty. Shepherd is interested in difficulty as an aspect of poetry which is neither inherently good nor bad – since reading poetry is about experiencing the poem as an object of experience in its own right, various difficulties in grasping its meaning are not bad per se, and are often important components in the experience of pleasure from the poem. In the case of ethnography, where communication about something in the world is a key consideration, to the extent it creates a barrier to understanding, difficult writing is often simply something to be avoided – though there are interesting exceptions.
Lexical Difficulty
Lexical difficulty is straightforward – words that are unfamiliar are used, or words are used in an unfamiliar way or at variance with convention. Anthropologists of all stripes commonly use words that are not familiar to the general public; we might speak of agglutinative languages, philopatric social organization among cercopithecine primates, or the differing consequences of avunculocal versus matrilocal residence alongside matrilineality. Recently, a student, after having read a chapter from a textbook on Native North American cultures and reading that some Plateau cultures practiced the levirate, came to me to ask just what in the heck the levirate was. He had even done what I always admonish my students to do when they encounter words they don’t know and had tried to look it up in a dictionary, but unfortunately even his dictionary didn’t help.
We use technical terms all the time that are unfamiliar to most people, and often with good reason – they allow us to very efficiently communicate complex and subtle shades of meaning. The response to difficulty is not to ban the use of “difficult” words – anyone can benefit from encountering new words and learning their meaning. Not knowing the meaning of a word doesn’t prevent learning and understanding it. In the interest of clarity, this is in some ways an easy form of difficulty to deal with. We can avoid the use of technical terms when they aren’t necessary, when less technical terms will in fact suffice, or by clarifying their referent and meaning when they are needed. The difficulty for a writer is judging the potential audience. It’s annoying when reading an article in a scholarly journal to have every technical term explained, given that most anyone who’s potentially reading it is probably familiar with the terminology or at least has an interest in finding out such things for themselves. In writing for a popular audience, lexical difficulty can be overcome simply by providing clear explanations when unfamiliar terminology is useful; e.g. the textbook my student was reading really should have briefly explained what the levirate was.
Allusive Difficulty
Shepherd writes of poetry, “The poem that alludes frequently eludes. The poet refers to something we’ve not heard of, assumes a piece of knowledge we don’t have.” Returning to the previous category, much lexical difficulty in ethnography can be seen as a variety of such allusive difficulty, insofar as the main problem is generally knowledge (of the meaning of a term) which it is assumed the reader has when in fact they may not. As a distinct form of difficulty, though, for ethnography what is meant is allusion to a set of facts or discussions which the reader is assumed to be familiar with. As with lexicon, for the writer this is often a matter of mastering the art of gauging one’s audience. In a scholarly anthropological publication, one could allude to the kula ring, or Geertz’s Balinese cockfight, or potlatching, or Coming of Age in Samoa and generally assume at least a passing familiarity with the allusion on the part of the reader, whereas in works for a popular audience the same assumption can’t be made. As with lexicon, the difficulty for the writer is not so much in being aware that one should write “clearly,” but in successfully gauging an audience, whether popular, scholarly, or specialist scholarly, in order to strike a balance between not assuming readers know something that they in fact don’t (and leaving them lost) and not assuming that readers know less than they in fact do (and leaving them annoyed or bored).
Syntactical Difficulty
Shepherd describes syntactical difficulty as “the obstacle of complex, unfamiliar, dislocated, broken, or incomplete syntax: one cannot discern or reconstruct the relations between the grammatical units.” In poetry, moving away from conventional prose syntax has often been put to creative and innovative use, but in ethnographic prose, syntactical difficulty is generally the result of plain bad writing. Also, we generally encounter only one subset of syntactical difficulty in ethnography. Except in cases of truly bad editing, dislocated, broken, or incomplete syntax, which can be used creatively in poetry, are not typically encountered in published ethnographic writing, even while they are increasingly encountered in more informal communication, such as email. And blogs. Overly complex, unfamiliar, or convoluted syntax, though, is all too common in ethnography and culture theory.
Semantic Difficulty
Shepherd writes of semantic difficulty in poetry: “We have trouble determining or deciding what a poem means, we cannot immediately interpret it. (It is important here to remember that sense and reference are distinct: sense is internal to the poem, as it is to language itself. As linguist David Crystal elucidates in How Language Works, ‘Sense is the meaning of a word within a language. Reference is what a word refers to in the world outside language.’ From this perspective, it’s more useful to think of the poem as a field of meanings than as a thing that means something else, a container for a vehicle of meaning.)” He writes also, “It is semantic difficulty which readers are usually experiencing when they say, ‘I don’t understand this poem.’” Shepherd further subdivides semantic difficulty into explicative and interpretive difficulty. “In the case of explicative difficulty, the reader cannot decipher the literal sense of the poem.” “In the case of interpretive difficulty, one grasps what is being said on the literal level, but doesn’t know what it means, what it is meant to do.”
Explicative Difficulty in Ethnography
In ethnographic and other anthropological writing, this sort of semantic difficulty, where someone looks at a passage of text and simply cannot make heads or tails of it, often involves in part a concatenation of all the previous forms of difficulty. Take the following sentence from Pierre Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice (p. 72, emphasis in original):
“The structures constitutive of a particular type of environment (e.g. the material conditions of existence characteristic of a class condition) produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of the generation and structuring of practices and representations which can be objectively “regulated” and “regular” without in any way being the product of obedience to rules, objectively adapted to their goals without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary to attain them and, being all this, collectively orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor.”
I often emphasize this particular passage when teaching this text because once all the elements are carefully unpacked, you have created a good starting point for understanding Bourdieu’s practice theory. This passage certainly has plenty of lexical, allusive, and syntactical difficulty, but even once its individual elements are carefully considered, the sense of the whole still escapes many a student forced to read Bourdieu for the first time. Even when understanding each individual word, the syntax, and the ethnographic traditions being alluded to, it’s still difficult to grasp the total meaning. Some of that difficulty could be clarified with more careful attention to lexicon, allusion, and syntax, but some ideas we wish to express are in fact subtle and complex aside from any difficulties we might add because of bad writing, and there will always be a certain amount of difficulty resulting from attempting to communicate complex ideas.
Interpretive Difficulty in Ethnography
Shepherd writes, “In the case of interpretive difficulty, one grasps what is being said on the literal level, but doesn’t know what it means, what it is meant to do. John Ashberry’s poems, usually syntactically and explicationally clear, often present this interpretive difficulty. To say that one doesn’t know what a poem means, if one understands its literal sense, is to say that one doesn’t know why it’s saying what it’s saying. The reader asks, ‘Why am I being told/shown this?’” There really aren’t many examples of this sort of difficulty in ethnographic writing. If the sense of the text is clear, the reference and reason for saying what has been said are generally clear also. There are some examples, though, and one that I find often confuses students is the ethnographic treatment of magic.
The convention in writing about magic in ethnography is to write about it as if magic has all the effects that its adherents claim and believe. Sometimes, the ethnographer indicates that people of a particular context believe or claim this or that, or do this or that, but as often as not, magic and its results are presented not as matters of belief and practice but as straightforward elements of natural reality. Students, not previously privy to the convention, are often confused, not knowing how to interpret such accounts, “Do (anthropologists think that) Trobriand witches really fly through the night? Do (anthropologists think that) muisak souls can really take vengeance by causing trees to fall on their killers?” What is often confusing here is a broader convention that encompasses the ethnographic treatment of magic, where cultural contexts are represented in terms of their own underlying premises and arguments.
Formal Difficulty
Formal difficulty involves the lack of recognition or the failure to accept the form of the expression. For a long time, free verse didn’t seem like poetry to a lot of readers, any more than Duchamp’s urinal seemed like art or the free jazz of Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, or Albert Ayler seemed like music. As Shepherd writes, many of today’s readers, raised on the free verse that has long been standard, now have trouble recognizing and appreciating aspects of the form of metrical or rhyming poetry. They have trouble recognizing and hearing the rhythms; they are turned off by or simply miss the rhyme schemes.
Formal difficulty in ethnography involves simply not recognizing some writing as ethnography. This sometimes involves writing that fits into another genre of writing, but which might also be ethnography. Other times, this involves writing that intends to be ethnography, but in an experimental way which violates or plays with the conventions of the genre in some way.
Writing Culture and the Writing of Culture
At least since Writing Culture, there has been widespread recognition that ethnography is “writing culture.” But is all writing of culture ethnography? Some texts that clearly fit into another genre are also writing of culture. Novels such as Ulysses or Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce, Orhan Pamuk’s Snow, The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, or Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones, all evoke a particular cultural setting in detailed ways, yet we wouldn’t normally recognize these or other novels as ethnography (and at the same time, most wouldn’t normally recognize Oscar Lewis’ The Children of Sanchez, which claimed to be both an autobiography of a Mexican family and a novel, as anything other than an ethnography).
Experimental Ethnography
Experimentation with form in ethnography has a long history in anthropology, with an intensification in such experimentation since the mid 1980s. As with atonal music, modern art or free jazz when they were new (or even now when they’re not new at all), many experience difficulty in interpreting how or to what extent some experimental writing is ethnography or why it should be written. Many experimental ethnographies, particularly those experimenting with the form of the genre, have been perennially among the most interesting and thought provoking ethnographic texts, but they are also among the most difficult to come to terms with, to understand, or to evaluate (and it is often largely these qualities which makes them interesting).
Without claiming at the moment to have any clear sense of what precisely defines the form of the ethnography in contrast to other genres and even other genres of writing culture, the presence of such “formal difficulty” spells out a need to more intensively investigate the importance of form for ethnography and other genres. We cannot glibly fall back on something like fictionality, at least not in a simple sense, to define the difference between ethnography and some novels – some “fiction” tells great truths; as Geertz pointed out long ago, ethnography is always a crafted writing; and we should keep in mind the many “fictional” aspects of much ethnography, including pseudonyms for people and places, composite persons, confabulations of place and story, etc. Perhaps an important difference is that ethnography is “writing culture” which has as a primary motivation the understanding of a particular context via a correspondence between the sense of the text and the reference in the world, a sort of iconicity between text and world that need not be adhered to for even the most “ethnographic” of “fiction.”
Most cultural anthropologists would agree that ethnographic and other anthropological writing should be as clear as possible. A primary goal of ethnographic writing is to communicate a sense or understanding of a particular cultural context. Clear writing facilitates this and unclear or difficult writing obstructs this. When engaging in “public anthropology” and attempting to communicate anthropological understandings to an interested lay audience, the stricture to write clearly is even stronger.
Something that anthropologists have not discussed much, though, is what exactly constitutes “clarity” or “difficulty” in writing. There is a general sense that we should avoid overly complex syntax or particular vocabulary that our intended audience might not be familiar with (or at least to clearly explain complex vocabulary when necessary), but not much consideration that there might be different types of difficulty (and hence different types of clarity) that might call for their own particular responses.
Here, I find the recent work of Reginald Shepherd illuminating. Shepherd precisely delineates types or sorts of difficulty in another genre of writing, poetry. What is difficulty in general? Shepherd argues (and I agree) that difficulty in writing involves in one way or another violating readerly expectations. This can be good or bad, a barrier to grasping meaning and/or a spur to further experience and pleasure, but difficulty in its different varieties always involves this violation of expectations (that the words used will be familiar, that its referents will be clear, that the sense of the text “makes sense,” that the text will have a recognizable and clearly interpretable form).
Shepherd discusses five types of difficulty, which he identifies as: lexical difficulty, allusive difficulty, syntactical difficulty, semantic difficulty (with two varieties – explicative and interpretive difficulties), and formal difficulty.
A major difference in poetic and ethnographic writing has to do with the goals or motivations for writing. With poetry, a primary goal is to create a unique sensuous object with its own qualities to be experienced in itself (something that happens with any text, but something that is a primary function of literary writing, including poetry). The poem may make reference to something in the world outside the poem through the sense of the words, but it need not necessarily do so, and in any case, that is not the main raison d’etre for poetry (and if you want to communicate something directly and clearly about the world, there are far better means than poetry). Ethnography at its best might have poetic or other literary qualities, but that’s not what makes it ethnography. Unlike poetry, a definite connection between the sense of the text and the context in the world outside the text which is its reference is a necessary component of ethnography – it wouldn’t be writing culture if it weren’t writing about culture.
As a result, one difference between my writing about difficulty in ethnography and Shepherd’s in relation to poetry is a difference in attitude toward difficulty. Shepherd is interested in difficulty as an aspect of poetry which is neither inherently good nor bad – since reading poetry is about experiencing the poem as an object of experience in its own right, various difficulties in grasping its meaning are not bad per se, and are often important components in the experience of pleasure from the poem. In the case of ethnography, where communication about something in the world is a key consideration, to the extent it creates a barrier to understanding, difficult writing is often simply something to be avoided – though there are interesting exceptions.
Lexical Difficulty
Lexical difficulty is straightforward – words that are unfamiliar are used, or words are used in an unfamiliar way or at variance with convention. Anthropologists of all stripes commonly use words that are not familiar to the general public; we might speak of agglutinative languages, philopatric social organization among cercopithecine primates, or the differing consequences of avunculocal versus matrilocal residence alongside matrilineality. Recently, a student, after having read a chapter from a textbook on Native North American cultures and reading that some Plateau cultures practiced the levirate, came to me to ask just what in the heck the levirate was. He had even done what I always admonish my students to do when they encounter words they don’t know and had tried to look it up in a dictionary, but unfortunately even his dictionary didn’t help.
We use technical terms all the time that are unfamiliar to most people, and often with good reason – they allow us to very efficiently communicate complex and subtle shades of meaning. The response to difficulty is not to ban the use of “difficult” words – anyone can benefit from encountering new words and learning their meaning. Not knowing the meaning of a word doesn’t prevent learning and understanding it. In the interest of clarity, this is in some ways an easy form of difficulty to deal with. We can avoid the use of technical terms when they aren’t necessary, when less technical terms will in fact suffice, or by clarifying their referent and meaning when they are needed. The difficulty for a writer is judging the potential audience. It’s annoying when reading an article in a scholarly journal to have every technical term explained, given that most anyone who’s potentially reading it is probably familiar with the terminology or at least has an interest in finding out such things for themselves. In writing for a popular audience, lexical difficulty can be overcome simply by providing clear explanations when unfamiliar terminology is useful; e.g. the textbook my student was reading really should have briefly explained what the levirate was.
Allusive Difficulty
Shepherd writes of poetry, “The poem that alludes frequently eludes. The poet refers to something we’ve not heard of, assumes a piece of knowledge we don’t have.” Returning to the previous category, much lexical difficulty in ethnography can be seen as a variety of such allusive difficulty, insofar as the main problem is generally knowledge (of the meaning of a term) which it is assumed the reader has when in fact they may not. As a distinct form of difficulty, though, for ethnography what is meant is allusion to a set of facts or discussions which the reader is assumed to be familiar with. As with lexicon, for the writer this is often a matter of mastering the art of gauging one’s audience. In a scholarly anthropological publication, one could allude to the kula ring, or Geertz’s Balinese cockfight, or potlatching, or Coming of Age in Samoa and generally assume at least a passing familiarity with the allusion on the part of the reader, whereas in works for a popular audience the same assumption can’t be made. As with lexicon, the difficulty for the writer is not so much in being aware that one should write “clearly,” but in successfully gauging an audience, whether popular, scholarly, or specialist scholarly, in order to strike a balance between not assuming readers know something that they in fact don’t (and leaving them lost) and not assuming that readers know less than they in fact do (and leaving them annoyed or bored).
Syntactical Difficulty
Shepherd describes syntactical difficulty as “the obstacle of complex, unfamiliar, dislocated, broken, or incomplete syntax: one cannot discern or reconstruct the relations between the grammatical units.” In poetry, moving away from conventional prose syntax has often been put to creative and innovative use, but in ethnographic prose, syntactical difficulty is generally the result of plain bad writing. Also, we generally encounter only one subset of syntactical difficulty in ethnography. Except in cases of truly bad editing, dislocated, broken, or incomplete syntax, which can be used creatively in poetry, are not typically encountered in published ethnographic writing, even while they are increasingly encountered in more informal communication, such as email. And blogs. Overly complex, unfamiliar, or convoluted syntax, though, is all too common in ethnography and culture theory.
Semantic Difficulty
Shepherd writes of semantic difficulty in poetry: “We have trouble determining or deciding what a poem means, we cannot immediately interpret it. (It is important here to remember that sense and reference are distinct: sense is internal to the poem, as it is to language itself. As linguist David Crystal elucidates in How Language Works, ‘Sense is the meaning of a word within a language. Reference is what a word refers to in the world outside language.’ From this perspective, it’s more useful to think of the poem as a field of meanings than as a thing that means something else, a container for a vehicle of meaning.)” He writes also, “It is semantic difficulty which readers are usually experiencing when they say, ‘I don’t understand this poem.’” Shepherd further subdivides semantic difficulty into explicative and interpretive difficulty. “In the case of explicative difficulty, the reader cannot decipher the literal sense of the poem.” “In the case of interpretive difficulty, one grasps what is being said on the literal level, but doesn’t know what it means, what it is meant to do.”
Explicative Difficulty in Ethnography
In ethnographic and other anthropological writing, this sort of semantic difficulty, where someone looks at a passage of text and simply cannot make heads or tails of it, often involves in part a concatenation of all the previous forms of difficulty. Take the following sentence from Pierre Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice (p. 72, emphasis in original):
“The structures constitutive of a particular type of environment (e.g. the material conditions of existence characteristic of a class condition) produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of the generation and structuring of practices and representations which can be objectively “regulated” and “regular” without in any way being the product of obedience to rules, objectively adapted to their goals without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary to attain them and, being all this, collectively orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor.”
I often emphasize this particular passage when teaching this text because once all the elements are carefully unpacked, you have created a good starting point for understanding Bourdieu’s practice theory. This passage certainly has plenty of lexical, allusive, and syntactical difficulty, but even once its individual elements are carefully considered, the sense of the whole still escapes many a student forced to read Bourdieu for the first time. Even when understanding each individual word, the syntax, and the ethnographic traditions being alluded to, it’s still difficult to grasp the total meaning. Some of that difficulty could be clarified with more careful attention to lexicon, allusion, and syntax, but some ideas we wish to express are in fact subtle and complex aside from any difficulties we might add because of bad writing, and there will always be a certain amount of difficulty resulting from attempting to communicate complex ideas.
Interpretive Difficulty in Ethnography
Shepherd writes, “In the case of interpretive difficulty, one grasps what is being said on the literal level, but doesn’t know what it means, what it is meant to do. John Ashberry’s poems, usually syntactically and explicationally clear, often present this interpretive difficulty. To say that one doesn’t know what a poem means, if one understands its literal sense, is to say that one doesn’t know why it’s saying what it’s saying. The reader asks, ‘Why am I being told/shown this?’” There really aren’t many examples of this sort of difficulty in ethnographic writing. If the sense of the text is clear, the reference and reason for saying what has been said are generally clear also. There are some examples, though, and one that I find often confuses students is the ethnographic treatment of magic.
The convention in writing about magic in ethnography is to write about it as if magic has all the effects that its adherents claim and believe. Sometimes, the ethnographer indicates that people of a particular context believe or claim this or that, or do this or that, but as often as not, magic and its results are presented not as matters of belief and practice but as straightforward elements of natural reality. Students, not previously privy to the convention, are often confused, not knowing how to interpret such accounts, “Do (anthropologists think that) Trobriand witches really fly through the night? Do (anthropologists think that) muisak souls can really take vengeance by causing trees to fall on their killers?” What is often confusing here is a broader convention that encompasses the ethnographic treatment of magic, where cultural contexts are represented in terms of their own underlying premises and arguments.
Formal Difficulty
Formal difficulty involves the lack of recognition or the failure to accept the form of the expression. For a long time, free verse didn’t seem like poetry to a lot of readers, any more than Duchamp’s urinal seemed like art or the free jazz of Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, or Albert Ayler seemed like music. As Shepherd writes, many of today’s readers, raised on the free verse that has long been standard, now have trouble recognizing and appreciating aspects of the form of metrical or rhyming poetry. They have trouble recognizing and hearing the rhythms; they are turned off by or simply miss the rhyme schemes.
Formal difficulty in ethnography involves simply not recognizing some writing as ethnography. This sometimes involves writing that fits into another genre of writing, but which might also be ethnography. Other times, this involves writing that intends to be ethnography, but in an experimental way which violates or plays with the conventions of the genre in some way.
Writing Culture and the Writing of Culture
At least since Writing Culture, there has been widespread recognition that ethnography is “writing culture.” But is all writing of culture ethnography? Some texts that clearly fit into another genre are also writing of culture. Novels such as Ulysses or Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce, Orhan Pamuk’s Snow, The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, or Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones, all evoke a particular cultural setting in detailed ways, yet we wouldn’t normally recognize these or other novels as ethnography (and at the same time, most wouldn’t normally recognize Oscar Lewis’ The Children of Sanchez, which claimed to be both an autobiography of a Mexican family and a novel, as anything other than an ethnography).
Experimental Ethnography
Experimentation with form in ethnography has a long history in anthropology, with an intensification in such experimentation since the mid 1980s. As with atonal music, modern art or free jazz when they were new (or even now when they’re not new at all), many experience difficulty in interpreting how or to what extent some experimental writing is ethnography or why it should be written. Many experimental ethnographies, particularly those experimenting with the form of the genre, have been perennially among the most interesting and thought provoking ethnographic texts, but they are also among the most difficult to come to terms with, to understand, or to evaluate (and it is often largely these qualities which makes them interesting).
Without claiming at the moment to have any clear sense of what precisely defines the form of the ethnography in contrast to other genres and even other genres of writing culture, the presence of such “formal difficulty” spells out a need to more intensively investigate the importance of form for ethnography and other genres. We cannot glibly fall back on something like fictionality, at least not in a simple sense, to define the difference between ethnography and some novels – some “fiction” tells great truths; as Geertz pointed out long ago, ethnography is always a crafted writing; and we should keep in mind the many “fictional” aspects of much ethnography, including pseudonyms for people and places, composite persons, confabulations of place and story, etc. Perhaps an important difference is that ethnography is “writing culture” which has as a primary motivation the understanding of a particular context via a correspondence between the sense of the text and the reference in the world, a sort of iconicity between text and world that need not be adhered to for even the most “ethnographic” of “fiction.”
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Discourse, Practice, and the Sewer
Like many anthropologists, I’ve long been interested in the relationship between patterns of discourse and practice, or in more simplified terms, between what we say and what we do. (“Saying” and “doing” is a more simplified presentation in that it potentially confuses the non-mutually exclusive nature of discourse and practice. Discourse and practice are not so much different human activities, as different modes of interpreting human activity – what we say, our discourse, is a key sort of practice, and our patterns of behavior constitute not just what we “do,” but also constitute a form of discourse – something recognized in phrases like “actions speak louder than words.”)
Recently, much of my own research has focused on public health issues, including especially the study of cultural models of drinking and related activities. I’ve also been interested in thinking about novel ways to do ethnography through utilization of a broader set of research methods than are typically used by anthropologists. (See my previous posts: Thinking Problem, Measurement and Interpretation, A Clarification on "Qualitative" and "Quantitative," Ethnographic Research Methods and Ethnographic Writing.)
On a topic such as this, it’s relatively easy to collect data on drinking discourse and on what people claim about their own drinking behavior – and in some cases observational data from participant observation style research can complement and inform such discursive data, but this often depends on the specific nature of the population being studied. For instance, along with other colleagues at my university, I’ve been specifically interested in students’ cultural models and actual drinking patterns. I could do participant observation on drinking behavior with this population, but I’m under no illusion that what I would see would come remotely close to “natural” behavior – while I strongly feel that participant observation is the best research method to use for some research purposes, here it’s simply not a very efficient or reliable way to go about studying the cultural context, and the precise relationship between what students claim about themselves and what they do when not being asked questions by pesky researchers is left murky.
I recently encountered an interesting news story on the website Medical News Today, Evidence in Sewage of Community-Wide Drug Abuse. Researchers analyzed raw sewage and were able to discern distinct community patterns of drub use. The research says nothing about any individual’s actions (and so, at least debatably doesn’t violate confidentiality or infringe upon informed consent rights – though that’s a debate I think would be worth having), but this style research could say quite a bit about aggregate patterns concerning any patterned behaviors which would result in chemical traces in urine. (I’m not sure what that range of patterned behaviors that could be studied this way would be, but it’s interesting to think about. On a related note, I remember reading a science news article from last January or so that talked about ecologists having detected elevated traces of cinnamon in Puget Sound as a result of people’s holiday baking.)
I certainly don’t expect ethnographers to dive into this style of research, but I do think it’s worth considering whether unconventional research methods such as this could be of use to the anthropological study of cultural patterns. In instances where behaviors result in chemical traces, such analysis could open an insightful window on that complex relationship between discourse and practice.
Recently, much of my own research has focused on public health issues, including especially the study of cultural models of drinking and related activities. I’ve also been interested in thinking about novel ways to do ethnography through utilization of a broader set of research methods than are typically used by anthropologists. (See my previous posts: Thinking Problem, Measurement and Interpretation, A Clarification on "Qualitative" and "Quantitative," Ethnographic Research Methods and Ethnographic Writing.)
On a topic such as this, it’s relatively easy to collect data on drinking discourse and on what people claim about their own drinking behavior – and in some cases observational data from participant observation style research can complement and inform such discursive data, but this often depends on the specific nature of the population being studied. For instance, along with other colleagues at my university, I’ve been specifically interested in students’ cultural models and actual drinking patterns. I could do participant observation on drinking behavior with this population, but I’m under no illusion that what I would see would come remotely close to “natural” behavior – while I strongly feel that participant observation is the best research method to use for some research purposes, here it’s simply not a very efficient or reliable way to go about studying the cultural context, and the precise relationship between what students claim about themselves and what they do when not being asked questions by pesky researchers is left murky.
I recently encountered an interesting news story on the website Medical News Today, Evidence in Sewage of Community-Wide Drug Abuse. Researchers analyzed raw sewage and were able to discern distinct community patterns of drub use. The research says nothing about any individual’s actions (and so, at least debatably doesn’t violate confidentiality or infringe upon informed consent rights – though that’s a debate I think would be worth having), but this style research could say quite a bit about aggregate patterns concerning any patterned behaviors which would result in chemical traces in urine. (I’m not sure what that range of patterned behaviors that could be studied this way would be, but it’s interesting to think about. On a related note, I remember reading a science news article from last January or so that talked about ecologists having detected elevated traces of cinnamon in Puget Sound as a result of people’s holiday baking.)
I certainly don’t expect ethnographers to dive into this style of research, but I do think it’s worth considering whether unconventional research methods such as this could be of use to the anthropological study of cultural patterns. In instances where behaviors result in chemical traces, such analysis could open an insightful window on that complex relationship between discourse and practice.
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Ethics, Human Subject Research, and the Institutional Review Process
Greg Downey, on the “Culture Matters” group blog, has written a series of insightful posts about ethnographic research ethics and the human subjects institutional review process. His comments are especially useful, written from the perspective of someone involved both in ethnographic research and in the institutional review process at his university.
I would especially recommend his latest post, “Some Practical Notes on Ethics Applications.” I think (or at least hope) that by now, nearly all ethnographers take seriously ethical considerations of informed consent, confidentiality, and minimizing risk to research subjects in the course of their research. Many, if not most, are by now aware also of the complexities involved at all levels of research, writing, and publication. What’s most useful about Downey’s latest post is that it provides a pragmatic guide for thinking through these important ethical considerations, and I think both as a way to ease the institutional review process and to think more systematically about seriously important ethical considerations for research activities.
I would especially recommend his latest post, “Some Practical Notes on Ethics Applications.” I think (or at least hope) that by now, nearly all ethnographers take seriously ethical considerations of informed consent, confidentiality, and minimizing risk to research subjects in the course of their research. Many, if not most, are by now aware also of the complexities involved at all levels of research, writing, and publication. What’s most useful about Downey’s latest post is that it provides a pragmatic guide for thinking through these important ethical considerations, and I think both as a way to ease the institutional review process and to think more systematically about seriously important ethical considerations for research activities.
Sunday, August 5, 2007
Accessibility/Difficulty as a Quality of Creative Expression
One quality of creative expression is its accessibility or difficulty. Although this quality can be expressed using either of two concepts, “accessibility” or “difficulty,” it is a single quality with accessibility and difficulty being inverse measures – a high degree of accessibility equals a low degree of difficulty and vice versa.
I have previously written about different types of difficulty (and thus, implicitly, different sorts of accessibility) in ethnographic writing as one form of creative expression (See Difficulty in Ethnographic Writing). In that piece, I was drawing on Reginald Shepherd’s writing in “Defining Difficulty in Poetry,” where he delineates five sorts of difficulty in artistic expression: lexical, allusive, syntactical, semantic, and formal difficulties, where in each case, difficulty results from disjuncture between readerly expectations and textual experiences, with different sorts of disjuncture arising from separate components of creative expression.
What I’d like to most emphasize here is that when it comes to artistic expression, accessibility/difficulty is an important quality (or really a set of qualities, given different varieties of difficulty) which is independent of the aesthetic merits of a work, that is, independent of whether a work manifests something profound or beautiful, independent of whether a work successfully unifies the concrete and universal, the timely and timeless (see my recent post, Great Art, Timeliness, and Timelessness).
This is actually a fairly simple and straightforward point, but I make it in opposition to common claims or assumptions that either accessibility or difficulty signal either good or bad art. (For example, I recently attended a conference on creative writing at Florida State University. During a panel discussion on poetic difficulty, one audience member continually asserted that poetic success was measured by “communication,” that accessibility fostered communication, difficulty hampered it, with the implication that accessibility is inherently good in itself and difficulty inherently bad.)
Similar assumptions are often made with regard to a related quality of creative expression – its popularity or obscurity (like accessibility and difficulty, these are simply inverse ways to regard the same basic quality). (These qualities are related not in that most accessible art is particularly popular nor that most obscure art is necessarily difficult. For that matter, a work’s level of popularity or obscurity can change over time without its level of difficulty particularly changing, e.g. a 1930s movie comedy I briefly mentioned in “Great Art, Timeliness, and Timelessness,” Earthworm Tractors, is now a quite obscure film, though it starred a then popular comedian, Joe E. Brown. It’s neither difficult now nor then. Instead, the relationship between accessibility/difficulty and popularity/obscurity is more that most popular works tend to be relatively accessible and most difficult works tend to be more obscure – it’s hard to imagine the free jazz saxophone work of Albert Ayler ever being hugely popular – though there are plenty of exceptions – inventor of free jazz Ornette Coleman will be playing at Bonnaroo.) Some argue that either popularity or obscurity signal good or bad art, something I argued against in my posts “Miles Davis’ Ferrari, or Popularity and Art” and “Art, Black Art, and Seriousness in Bebop.”
With accessibility/difficulty as an independent quality of creative expression, art that is profound or expresses beauty or is otherwise of high aesthetic merit can be either accessible or difficult. Much of Robert Frost’s poetry, or Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl, is fairly accessible. Orff’s Carmina Burana or Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring represent musically accessible works (perhaps deceptively so) in that most listeners are immediately able to ascertain basic features of these works (and most tend to immediately react positively or negatively to them as well – though both also have great depth in the sense that many subtle features of the works are typically missed on initial or superficial listenings). On the other hand, T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland is not what I’d consider accessible. Free jazz, serial music, and aleatory music in different ways present formal difficulty for many listeners – a feature they share in common is an often minimal distinction between musical sound and noise, making it difficult to ascertain such works’ status as music at all (see “Free Jazz and the End of the History of Jazz” and “The End of the History of Music”). Likewise, when it comes to bad art, both accessible and difficult examples could be found (an exercise I’ll refrain from here, because I don’t think it would add anything to the basic point and would simply be snarky).
Accessibility/Difficulty is a quality not just of art but of any form of creative expression, including ethnography. I’ve argued before that ethnography can function in an artistic mode, and at the least, many ethnographies have their artistic moments, but ethnography need not function that way, nor is that what makes it ethnography (see “Ethnography as Art or Science” and “Ethnographic Research Methods and Ethnographic Writing”). Ethnography has as a primary goal the elucidation or explanation of some cultural context. This makes a difference. With art, accessibility/difficulty is a quality independent of other considerations, whereas with ethnography, some forms of difficulty do comprise barriers to basic functions of the text as ethnography.
As I wrote in “Difficulty in Ethnographic Writing:”
“One major difference in poetic and ethnographic writing has to do with the goals or motivations for writing. With poetry, a primary goal is to create a unique sensuous object with its own qualities to be experienced in itself (something that happens with any text, but something that is a primary function of literary writing, including poetry). The poem may make reference to something in the world outside the poem through the sense of the words, but it need not necessarily do so, and in any case, that is not the main raison d’etre for poetry (and if you want to communicate something directly and clearly about the world, there are far better means than poetry). Ethnography at its best might have poetic or other literary qualities, but that’s not what makes it ethnography. Unlike poetry, a definite (and usually ideally clear) connection between the sense of the text and the context in the world outside the text which is its reference is a necessary component of ethnography – it wouldn’t be writing culture if it weren’t definitely writing about culture.
“As a result, one difference between my writing about difficulty in ethnography and Shepherd’s in relation to poetry is a difference in attitude toward difficulty. Shepherd is interested in difficulty as an aspect of poetry which is neither inherently good nor bad – since reading poetry is about experiencing the poem as an object of experience in its own right, various difficulties in grasping its meaning are not bad per se, and are often important components in the experience of pleasure from the poem. In the case of ethnography, where communication about something in the world is a key consideration, in most cases difficult writing, to the extent it creates a barrier to understanding, is more straightforwardly something to be avoided – though there are interesting exceptions to this as well.”
I have previously written about different types of difficulty (and thus, implicitly, different sorts of accessibility) in ethnographic writing as one form of creative expression (See Difficulty in Ethnographic Writing). In that piece, I was drawing on Reginald Shepherd’s writing in “Defining Difficulty in Poetry,” where he delineates five sorts of difficulty in artistic expression: lexical, allusive, syntactical, semantic, and formal difficulties, where in each case, difficulty results from disjuncture between readerly expectations and textual experiences, with different sorts of disjuncture arising from separate components of creative expression.
What I’d like to most emphasize here is that when it comes to artistic expression, accessibility/difficulty is an important quality (or really a set of qualities, given different varieties of difficulty) which is independent of the aesthetic merits of a work, that is, independent of whether a work manifests something profound or beautiful, independent of whether a work successfully unifies the concrete and universal, the timely and timeless (see my recent post, Great Art, Timeliness, and Timelessness).
This is actually a fairly simple and straightforward point, but I make it in opposition to common claims or assumptions that either accessibility or difficulty signal either good or bad art. (For example, I recently attended a conference on creative writing at Florida State University. During a panel discussion on poetic difficulty, one audience member continually asserted that poetic success was measured by “communication,” that accessibility fostered communication, difficulty hampered it, with the implication that accessibility is inherently good in itself and difficulty inherently bad.)
Similar assumptions are often made with regard to a related quality of creative expression – its popularity or obscurity (like accessibility and difficulty, these are simply inverse ways to regard the same basic quality). (These qualities are related not in that most accessible art is particularly popular nor that most obscure art is necessarily difficult. For that matter, a work’s level of popularity or obscurity can change over time without its level of difficulty particularly changing, e.g. a 1930s movie comedy I briefly mentioned in “Great Art, Timeliness, and Timelessness,” Earthworm Tractors, is now a quite obscure film, though it starred a then popular comedian, Joe E. Brown. It’s neither difficult now nor then. Instead, the relationship between accessibility/difficulty and popularity/obscurity is more that most popular works tend to be relatively accessible and most difficult works tend to be more obscure – it’s hard to imagine the free jazz saxophone work of Albert Ayler ever being hugely popular – though there are plenty of exceptions – inventor of free jazz Ornette Coleman will be playing at Bonnaroo.) Some argue that either popularity or obscurity signal good or bad art, something I argued against in my posts “Miles Davis’ Ferrari, or Popularity and Art” and “Art, Black Art, and Seriousness in Bebop.”
With accessibility/difficulty as an independent quality of creative expression, art that is profound or expresses beauty or is otherwise of high aesthetic merit can be either accessible or difficult. Much of Robert Frost’s poetry, or Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl, is fairly accessible. Orff’s Carmina Burana or Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring represent musically accessible works (perhaps deceptively so) in that most listeners are immediately able to ascertain basic features of these works (and most tend to immediately react positively or negatively to them as well – though both also have great depth in the sense that many subtle features of the works are typically missed on initial or superficial listenings). On the other hand, T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland is not what I’d consider accessible. Free jazz, serial music, and aleatory music in different ways present formal difficulty for many listeners – a feature they share in common is an often minimal distinction between musical sound and noise, making it difficult to ascertain such works’ status as music at all (see “Free Jazz and the End of the History of Jazz” and “The End of the History of Music”). Likewise, when it comes to bad art, both accessible and difficult examples could be found (an exercise I’ll refrain from here, because I don’t think it would add anything to the basic point and would simply be snarky).
Accessibility/Difficulty is a quality not just of art but of any form of creative expression, including ethnography. I’ve argued before that ethnography can function in an artistic mode, and at the least, many ethnographies have their artistic moments, but ethnography need not function that way, nor is that what makes it ethnography (see “Ethnography as Art or Science” and “Ethnographic Research Methods and Ethnographic Writing”). Ethnography has as a primary goal the elucidation or explanation of some cultural context. This makes a difference. With art, accessibility/difficulty is a quality independent of other considerations, whereas with ethnography, some forms of difficulty do comprise barriers to basic functions of the text as ethnography.
As I wrote in “Difficulty in Ethnographic Writing:”
“One major difference in poetic and ethnographic writing has to do with the goals or motivations for writing. With poetry, a primary goal is to create a unique sensuous object with its own qualities to be experienced in itself (something that happens with any text, but something that is a primary function of literary writing, including poetry). The poem may make reference to something in the world outside the poem through the sense of the words, but it need not necessarily do so, and in any case, that is not the main raison d’etre for poetry (and if you want to communicate something directly and clearly about the world, there are far better means than poetry). Ethnography at its best might have poetic or other literary qualities, but that’s not what makes it ethnography. Unlike poetry, a definite (and usually ideally clear) connection between the sense of the text and the context in the world outside the text which is its reference is a necessary component of ethnography – it wouldn’t be writing culture if it weren’t definitely writing about culture.
“As a result, one difference between my writing about difficulty in ethnography and Shepherd’s in relation to poetry is a difference in attitude toward difficulty. Shepherd is interested in difficulty as an aspect of poetry which is neither inherently good nor bad – since reading poetry is about experiencing the poem as an object of experience in its own right, various difficulties in grasping its meaning are not bad per se, and are often important components in the experience of pleasure from the poem. In the case of ethnography, where communication about something in the world is a key consideration, in most cases difficult writing, to the extent it creates a barrier to understanding, is more straightforwardly something to be avoided – though there are interesting exceptions to this as well.”
Monday, April 9, 2007
Ethnography, Science, Myth, and Cultural Criticism
The following is a combination and revision of several earlier blog posts.
In The Science of Culture (1949), Leslie White made a strong argument against the superiority of the physical and life sciences over the social sciences (in particular anthropology), as well as against reductionist tendencies to explain the social and cultural in terms purely of the biological or physical. These tendencies are as present now as they were then and are perhaps even more pervasive, with sociobiology and physics increasingly stretching beyond their very real strengths to claim sovereignty over the humanities and social sciences. The dreams of complete understanding and complete control manifested in overarching sociobiological syntheses or theories of everything in physics, not to mention the small but real steps toward totalization in the contemporary political arena, sound eerily like the scientific and political dreams of the early 20th century, seemingly having forgotten the lessons, horrors, and failings of totalization. In this scholarly and political environment, it is perhaps useful to revisit earlier anthropological critics of reductionist totalization like White and to examine the potential role of ethnography as science, myth-making, or engaged cultural criticism.
While recognizing that the physical and life sciences had made impressive steps in the quantification of their respective fields, White argued that there was a good reason that scientific method and modes of thought had developed earlier for these fields than for the humanities and social sciences. For White, the physico-chemical, the biological, the psychological, the social, and the cultural represented increasingly complex emergent levels of phenomena in the world, and just as biology developed more slowly than physics, sociology and anthropology have been more slow to develop a science of society and culture, because of the greater attendant complexity of their subject fields.
White was, of course, not the first to present such a model. As Norbert Elias discusses in What is Sociology? (1978), Auguste Comte had made similar arguments in the nineteenth century. Comte made a case that for each field, the physical, the biological, and the social, there was a gradual progression from mythic or theological thinking to scientific thought. As I have argued elsewhere (Philen 2005 a; 2005 b) and below, much of what ethnography does works in a mythic frame.
Ethnography as Science or Myth
Is anthropology at a stage of intellectual development where it is possible to move from a mythic to a scientific mode? The answer is in some ways yes, in some ways no. To some extent it all depends on what we mean by “science”.
White clearly thought anthropology was ready for a science of culture, but his efforts to produce such a science involved some of the most roundly critiqued aspects of his work. Take, for example, his reification of culture as a superorganic entity existing beyond human interactions (a common enough reification he shared with Kroeber, among others). Or his nebulous pseudo-mathematical formula C = E x T, postulating that the level of cultural evolution is equivalent to the quantity of energy harnessed to productive purposes times the level of technological development, a formula clearly not quantifiable as such, even if the postulated relationship between energy utilization, technological development, and culture is an interesting and insightful one. Elias argues that to the extent that sociology has produced a science of society it is through similar reifications of misperceived social interactions as the entities “society” or “social structure” or the “corporation.” (To point out the reified nature of such concepts does not mean that we can avoid such usage, rather that we should be aware of such reification and that the way in which sociological science has proceeded is through what Bourdieu (1977) calls the realism of the structure, treating such reifications as more real than they actually are.)
Where anthropology has been most successful in a scientistic mode is in the analysis of those ways in which culture acts as an adaptive mechanism. For example, cultural materialism and cultural ecology in general have been most convincing in explicating human interactions with the environment – especially with regard to subsistence activities and especially with regard to small societies most subject to the vagaries of natural cycles. However, when it comes to larger societies or other areas of cultural life where things are in some ways by definition arbitrary – as with language, myth, music, or art, those areas of cultural experience related to the production of meaning – such attempts at scientific explication fall short: even when illuminating something about meaning producing systems, such approaches leave much untouched concerning the meaning of meaning.
This of course begs the question of the nature of science. What is science? Lévi-Strauss (1966) presented it by analogy to the engineer imposing structure upon the world, in this case imposing scientific theory and hypothesis to produce events – experimental data. Ethnographic theorizing tends to work in ways more analogous to mythic thinking, cobbling together conceptualizations from cultural odds and ends. These odds and ends are drawn from the cultural context under analysis through the reflexive use of emic conceptual categories to theorize the context under consideration, but they are also drawn from the ethnographic, travel and other literatures pertaining to the cultural-geographic area, as well as from the ethnographic representation of other areas as anthropologists engage in ethnological comparison (see especially Appadurai 1988 on this point), with ethnographic theorization utilizing all such categories and conceptualizations reflexively to analyze the context in question. Given the Lévi-Straussian conceptualization of the distinction between mythic and scientific thinking, ethnography generally falls into the mythic mode – though there are exceptions and they are the sorts of exceptions I mentioned above, usually cultural materialist or other cultural ecological analyses focusing especially on the environmental adaptations of small scale societies.
Lévi-Strauss’ is not the only conceptualization of science, though, or even the most familiar. White defines science in terms of its characteristic activity. In the opening chapter of The Science of Culture, “Science is Sciencing,” he argues (1949:3):
"Science is not merely a collection of facts and formulas. It is pre-eminently a way of dealing with experience. The word may be appropriately used as a verb: one sciences, i.e., deals with experience according to certain assumptions and with certain techniques. Science is one of two basic ways of dealing with experience. The other is art. And this word, too, may appropriately be used as a verb; one may art as well as science. The purpose of science and art is one: to render experience intelligible, i.e. to assist man to adjust himself to his environment in order that he may live. But although working toward the same goal, science and art approach it from opposite directions. Science deals with particulars in terms of universals: Uncle Tom disappears in the mass of Negro slaves. Art deals with universals in terms of particulars: the whole gamut of Negro slavery confronts us in the person of Uncle Tom. Art and science thus grasp a common experience, or reality, by opposite but inseparable poles."
This, obviously, is similar to the common distinction between nomothetic and idiographic approaches to scholarly analysis, though without recognizing that idiographic accounts might focus upon the particular case with no pretense to universality. While I find the basic distinction compelling, it fails to deal with the presence of myth, music, or, I would argue, ethnography, which lie somewhere in between. I don’t think it’s a stretch to claim that most who have been drawn to anthropology through reading ethnography would not want it to be science in White’s sense. In the most compelling ethnographies, Uncle Tom does not disappear into the mass of slaves. Instead, particulars are dealt with in terms of universals, or at least generalizations often derived from the cultural context of the particulars, at the same time that universals or generalizations are embodied or manifested in particulars.
Still, part of White’s sleight of hand in claiming to have developed a science of culture is not just (a fairly standard) reification of culture and the presence of pseudo-mathematical formulae but also a redefining of science in terms (the act of nomothetic generalization) that anthropology can meet (for ethnography does include that – as does myth), even if at the expense of losing much that is compelling about it (the lived experiences and particularities of culture). But since most conceptions of “science” include something more than just generalization, I don’t think it worth jettisoning much that is valuable about ethnography when doing so still doesn’t get us into the science club. For most definitions of science include additional qualities, such as controlled experimentation or replicability of results. Leaving aside ethical dilemmas about controlled experimentation in cultural contexts, given the complexity of socio-cultural phenomena, we are not at this stage of scientificity – and given the arbitrary, historical, and contingent nature of so much of what is cultural, I don’t think we should expect to ever be at such a point.
The fact that we are not in a position to construct scientific proofs or deduce universal laws of human thought or behavior (Even Lévi-Strauss’ work on universal structuring of the mind is an interpretation of the implications of a large corpus of mythic text which does not function in the manner of mathematical or logical proof, nor was it derived from anything resembling hypothetico-deductive method or the like, nor does it present anything law-like regarding human behavior.) should not be regarded as cause for alarm; nor does it imply that we understand nothing about human culture. Nor does my argument that ethnography tends to produce meaning in a manner analogous to mythic thinking imply that anything goes or that ethnography is not empirically based. One of the things made clear in The Savage Mind, the Mythologiques series, and other works by Lévi-Strauss is that though myth is a product of the human mind, as of course are science and art, individual myths often pay close attention to the empirical world.
On the other hand, I don’t think that we should be complacent about the state of ethnography. Even if a scientific ethnography, at least with regard to all aspects of cultural life, is not now nor perhaps ever possible, we should not be content with purely mythic thinking, producing narratives which are good to think simply for the sake of narratives which are good to think. That is, ethnography is in some ways structurally analogous to myth – but it is not the same thing as myth, especially regarding its motivation and role. We should be trying to understand increasingly more about the world, and our narratives should be constructed with a critical awareness of their constructedness.
Culture and Critical Consciousness
Culture, which is the (or at least a) primary topic of ethnographic narrative, often has been presented as a real thing – that is, as something with existence beyond the interactions and discursive constructions of socially connected individuals. This is most evident with either White’s or A. L. Kroeber’s presentation of culture as a really existing superorganic entity, but even when it is acknowledged that “culture” is a reification of complex processes, it is a reification which is nearly impossible to avoid. So, I would argue that what is important is to acknowledge and to be conscious of its functioning as such and to deconstruct and critique its conceptualization, so that even if we do not escape the reification of culture for the moment, we can move on to new understandings of “it.”
Culture, to the extent that it is anything, is not a single over-arching entity, but consists, as I have argued elsewhere (2004), in a patchwork of argument, (By “argument,” I mean not just types of logical argumentation such as deduction or induction, but a type of sign, as conceived by C. S. Peirce [1992:27]: “a sign whose interpretant represents its object as being an ulterior sign through a law, namely, the law that the passage from all such premises to such conclusions tends to the truth.” This includes not just deduction and induction, but also other forms of logical argument identified by Peirce, such as abduction, as well as cultural themes and schemas [see Philen 2004].) i.e. in types of modeling behavior which can be seen as theorization broadly understood. Culture, then, as Clifford Geertz pointed out long ago (1973a), consists of models of and models for reality. If culture is to be understood as argument and the process of cultural modeling as akin to theorization, then theorization should be regarded as having something in common with cultural modeling, and ethnographic theorization should perhaps also be envisioned as engaging in both modeling of reality (which would be ethnographic theory as conventionally understood) and modeling for reality. Here we encounter Paolo Freire’s (1993) view of theory as praxis – the attempt to produce a unity of thought and the world, not by passively allowing thought to reflect or mirror a static world, but by critically reflecting upon the world and engaging in action informed by critical consciousness to produce a social universe compatible with that desired by such critical consciousness.
Anthropology is most valuable as cultural critique and as a contributor to the critical production of culture. Here, the insights of Michel Foucault and Theodor Adorno are useful in understanding ethnography’s value as cultural criticism. Foucault points out that what passes as true (that which is dans le vrai) is always political – and is discursively constructed and contested. In our era, one general feature of knowledge which is dan le vrai is “utility” – specifically constructed as utility for production and profit – hence the high estimation of the “practical” sciences and the lower estimation of the arts and humanities, and hence the belief of many that the natural or hard sciences can take them over adequately and should do so. Adorno, in his work in aesthetic theory, argues that art and literature are not “useful,” but rather are valuable precisely because they are not and because they can alienate us from our alienations.
In everyday life, our language, discursive constructions, and culture – which exist only through our practice – are alienated from us and perceived as things existing apart from us. Similarly, our real social relations are mystified in a commodity-fetishizing society into relations among things. Art can potentially expose this – it can’t just make alienation go away, but can alienate us from our alienations. I would argue that in its role as cultural criticism, ethnography can do likewise – in its longstanding project to make the exotic familiar and the familiar exotic. Doing this doesn’t change any of these social realities, but it does demystify the processes of social alienation and open the possibility for the critical production of desired cultural forms rather than the uncritical inertial production of cultural forms. Like it or not, we are enmeshed in a world of practice and cultural production. So, the choice in debates about applied anthropology and cultural relativism isn’t between acting or not acting, but between unconsciously contributing to self-mystifying cultural production or critically engaging in the process.
But what sort of consciousness does anthropology and ethnography embody, and to what sort of project is it suited to contribute? Anthropology was in part a product of the Enlightenment project. The Enlightenment’s questioning of the divine structuring of society and political authority gave rise not just to musings on the nature of the ideal society as seen in the work of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Jefferson, and others, but also to a gradual awareness of the multiplicity of possibilities for the construction of society which led to the development of anthropology. Anthropology, and especially ethnography, is also in a good position from which to contribute to the still unfinished projects of the Enlightenment – liberty, equality, fraternity (I would phrase this last as “community” to evade the gender bias of “fraternity” and argue that the development of true community freely chosen depends on the development of the first two). Ethnography is positioned to do so not just through cultural critique but also through applied anthropological praxis informed by critical awareness to contribute to the greater fulfillment (never a completed process – for even were it momentarily fulfilled, it would need to be maintained and reproduced) of the Enlightenment projects.
Anthropology’s Core Tension
There is a perennial tension in American anthropology between assumptions that humans are profoundly similar, sharing psychic unity with the same mental capacities, needs, and predisposition, and assumptions that people are profoundly dissimilar (with this the basis of cultural relativism), their thoughts and actions largely shaped by specific cultural context. This presents not a contradiction but an impetus to resolve the apparent tension which arises from the various roots of contemporary American anthropological thought, with the discipline taking its current shape in the late 19th and early 20th century from the traditions of the British and French Enlightenments, as well as the German (and sometimes Anti-Enlightenment) scholarly tradition.
These three traditions, the British, French, and German, were heavily influenced by national projects in the modern era in transition from divine right rule to rule by or for the “people” or on some other legitimated basis in modern nation-states. With Britain and France as already existing polyglot states before the era of nationalism, emphasis was on citizenship and rationality, with the two scholarly traditions emphasizing rational agents and regularities of social organization, whether in the intellectual lineage of Locke, Smith, Mill, and Tyler or in that of Montesquieu, Rousseau, Comte, and Durkheim. In 19th century Germany, in contrast, the national project was to cobble together a state from the population of German speakers spread across numerous states in Central Europe, with an emphasis on language and common tradition as unifying points. Scholarly focus was on national character (out of which the idea of “culture” emerges), with this not strictly determined by rationality, e.g. Freud and the unconscious or Ratzel and geographic determinism.
For American anthropology in the 20th and 21st centuries, the upshot is (or should be) recognition of both rationality and irrationality, commonality of capacities and needs alongside extreme diversity of patterned behaviors and the contents of thought. As Geertz argued (1973b), the profound interaction of biology and culture produced this condition in humans – the evolution of a mind capable of highly flexible and general adaptation, responding always to common needs but in quite diverse natural and cultural environments.
Boas and Cultural Relativism
This awareness and tension has been a part of American anthropology at least since Boas, a scholar all too often oversimplified as atheoretical or as an uncritical cultural relativist. As Boas student Ruth Bunzel (1962) pointed out, Boas’ cultural relativism was premised in respect for cultural traditions of all sorts, but it was an engaged stance, as is most clear in his public-oriented writing on the topic of race. Boas made clear that cultural relativism was rationally useful insofar as it opened our minds to the greatest diversity of perspectives and human possibilities, but was not meant to be a position of blind ethical neutrality whereby we must accept any tradition of another culture by mere virtue of its existence.
Further, as he was aware of the rational faculties of humans of all cultures, he also recognized the importance of things other than rationality in human thought and behavior. For example, he writes (1962:114-115; emphasis added):
"Here again the anthropologist and the biologist are at odds. The natural sciences do not recognize in their scheme a valuation of the phenomena of nature, nor do they count emotions as moving forces; they endeavor to reduce all happenings to the actions of physical causes. Reason alone reigns in their domain. Therefore the scientist likes to look at mental life from the same rational standpoint, and sees as the goal of human development an era of reason, as opposed to the former periods of unhealthy fantastic emotion."
"The anthropologist, on the other hand, cannot acknowledge such a complete domination of emotion by reason. He rather sees the steady advance of the rational knowledge of mankind, which is a source of satisfaction to him no less than to the biologist; but he sees also that mankind does not put this knowledge to purely reasonable use, but that its actions are swayed by emotions no less now than in former times, although in many respects, unless the passions are excited, the increase of knowledge limits the extreme forms of unreasonable emotional activities. Religion and political life, and our everyday habits, present endless proofs of the fact that our actions are the results of emotional preferences, that conform in a general way to our rational knowledge, but which are not determined by reason; that we rather try to justify our choice by reason than have our actions dictated by reason."
Nor, despite its explanatory power, can science ever offer us a purely rational alternative to the importance of emotion and other non-rational factors in decision making. Boas provides an example in a discussion of eugenics. His discussion was written before the various horrors of eugenics of the 20th century – which in themselves caution us against the idea that humans may be capable of perfect rationality – but his discussion is worth perusing, if only for hypothetical argument. Some medical disorders clearly are genetically inherited. Genetic science can clearly elucidate this for us, but it cannot clearly elucidate a definitive course of action. Should families with evidence of genetic disorders be subject to eugenic “solutions,” whether in the form of sterilization, selective breeding, or other even darker courses of action? Take for example the character Jubal’s proposition, in Robert Heinlein’s novel Stranger in a Strange Land, that hemophiliacs should be left to bleed to death so they can’t breed more hemophiliacs. Certainly that is one possible approach to take. Or, because most genetic disorders while compromising health do not preclude positive quality of life and because most genetic disorders will not be passed on to all offspring, should eugenic solutions be verboten? While this latter is probably (I hope) the position of most nowadays, logic and rationality alone do not dictate it. As Boas says, “This question cannot be decided from a scientific point of view. The answer depends upon ethical and social standards” (1962:199). We can certainly marshal logical arguments to back up our ethical choices once made, but there is no magical rational formula that can choose our ethical positions a priori.
Cultural Relativism: What it is and What it isn’t
The greatest intellectual contributions of the discipline of anthropology to contemporary American society and thought are the concept of culture and the associated notion of cultural relativism. Both have a long history within the discipline, but as with any concepts originating in a particular academic discipline and then escaping into the larger culture, they have moved beyond the control of anthropologists. That said, anthropologists (such as myself) are as free as anyone to attempt to influence the development and understanding of such concepts within that broader culture.
In its original conception, cultural relativism was developed by Franz Boas and his students in the early 20th century. Cultural relativism involves first the recognition of and respect for the importance of alternative cultural constructions of the world and the acknowledgment that there is no universal way to be a human being. Secondly, it involves a provisional suspension of ethical or moral judgment about the practices of other cultures and an impetus to understand cultural practices within their own terms or logic.
I would argue that there was both a pragmatic and an ethical motivation for the development of cultural relativism. Pragmatically, cultural relativism allows for better anthropological research. A non-judgmental attitude in research allows for an easier establishment of the rapport necessary to conduct high quality ethnographic work. The attempt to understand cultures within the terms of their own logic leads to a more refined understanding of cultural variability and possibility. As Janice Boddy has written concerning female genital modification (or female genital mutilation if you prefer that terminology) in Sudan, no matter what your moral or ethical position on the topic, the starting point should be cultural relativism. If you are interested in the topic neutrally as simply a subject of anthropological curiosity, then you need to approach it non-judgmentally and attempt to understand the practice on its own terms and within the logical of the cultural context. If you find the practice abhorrent or repellent and wish to alter the practice, you still need first to understand the practice on its own terms in order to have any hope of understanding the practical possibilities for change.
Boas was not out to change cultures (at least not in general – though his writings on race were attempts to intellectually engage racism, expose its absurdity, and contribute to changing it). Still, there was an ethical component to cultural relativism. Much earlier American anthropological work had been notoriously racist and ethnocentric in its approach (and obviously anthropological work in parts of Europe, like Nazi Germany, remained racist for quite some time into the 20th century), and the emphasis on not judging other cultures was an important counter to this. That said, this does not mean that he thought that cultural practices should be held beyond reproach or criticism simply because they were traditional practices of one or another culture. Boas stood for the importance of clarity and logic, whether applied to western culture and the exposure of racism as illogical and counter-factual, or to any other culture. Boas emphasized the equal capacity for logic and illogic cross-culturally.
As Marshall Sahlins has recently noted in Waiting for Foucault, Still (citation):
“Cultural relativism is first and last an interpretive anthropological – that is to say, methodological – procedure. It is not the moral argument that any culture or custom is as good as any other, if not better. Relativism is the simple prescription that, in order to be intelligible, other people’s practices and ideals must be placed in their own historical context, understood as positional values in the field of their own cultural relationships rather than appreciated by categorical and moral judgments of our making. Relativity is the provisional suspension of one’s own judgments in order to situate the practices at issue in the historical and cultural order that made them possible. It is in no other way a matter of advocacy.”
The most important contribution of the idea of cultural relativism has no doubt been the notion that all cultures are worthy of respect. Contrary to what Boas intended, cultural relativism is often invoked to support the notion that because something is a traditional practice of another culture one can’t criticize or critique it. This is analogous to suggesting that no one outside the U.S. Southeast could criticize the racist practices of the Jim Crow era South (an argument at the time made mainly by Southern white racists).
There are a number of problems with this conception of cultural relativism. First, it’s based on a faulty notion of clear and distinct cultures. This is a notion that has been long outmoded in anthropology. Even when anthropologists did model cultures as if they were discrete and bounded entities, it’s clear from close readings of most early 20th century anthropological texts that these anthropologists were well aware that they were treating culture as a model, as a useful fiction that contributed to greater understanding of cultural processes. But that model has long since outlived its usefulness.
The model of clear and distinct cultures has outlived its usefulness on the grounds of both theoretical utility and empirical reality. At a time when the discipline of anthropology was still establishing a cross-cultural ethnological baseline and developing its fundamental concepts, this model was useful in helping to simplify matters so that these two goals could be accomplished. Once the basic data sets and concepts of the discipline were established, however, this simplifying model of discrete cultures was no longer necessary, and models which dealt with cultural processes in a more complex way became more interesting and meaningful.
Further, throughout the 19th and into the 20th century, it was the case that many cultures were relatively bounded and discrete entities. The social life of Australian aborigines was largely Australian aboriginal; though the Kwakiutl potlatch was modified in some details of practice by both the introduction of new trade goods and the demographic consequences of European disease in the 19th century, it remained an overwhelmingly Kwakiutl sort of thing; people in many tropical South American societies led ways of life largely untouched by European or Euro-American influence (even though metal tools, sugar cane, and rice might have been introduced). Even though cultures were never clear and separate entities, up through the early 20th century, imagining them to be so simply simplified matters. But today, with an expanding global economy, global media, and global flows of people, it is impossible to clearly delineate one culture from another culture, and such a model doesn’t just simplify but distorts matters.
There is no clear cut “other culture,” no “them” that has not been profoundly influenced by western culture (and for that matter a variety of other cultural traditions as well – as Arjun Appadurai (cite) has discussed, while western liberals may fret [perhaps with good reason] about global westernization, the Papuan residents of Irian Jaya are more likely to be concerned about Javanization). Further, there is no clear “us”. For example, if I speak of “we” anthropologists, who am I talking about? North American and Western European scholars’ voices have been most clearly represented (and as is common to add, it has been mainly white, male, heterosexual, middle and upper class voices at that), but in my own thinking about cultural relativism and global cultural processes, I have been profoundly influenced by scholars such as the Argentine-Mexican Néstor García Canclini (like myself a Euro-American, but not North or Anglo American) or scholars from South Asia or of South Asian ancestry like Appadurai, and increasingly anthropological discourse has been the product not just of western voices, but Indian and Japanese and “indigenous” voices. Like it or not, we’re involved in global social interactions, and while we can and should refrain from rushing to judgment of other people’s practices, we can’t refrain from interacting with other people and affecting (or being affected by) them. As the notion of cultural boundaries between a “them” and an “us” becomes more and more farcical, it becomes equally farcical to think that “we” for some reason can’t or shouldn’t critically engage “them.”
Second, the refusal to critique the practices of other cultures is not without effect. To refrain from active engagement is to passively accept the status quo, and the status quo in any cultural context is the product of interactions in social settings laden with power relations. Refraining from active engagement is not to be neutral but to privilege the powerful over the weaker.
Finally, cultural relativism, when taken to imply a taboo on cross cultural critique, implies pessimism about the possibility of cross-cultural communication. It is in any case a taboo on cross cultural critical dialogue. Cultural relativism is a crucial means to avoid rushing to judgment of different practices and to foster respect for diversity and autonomy, but we are enmeshed in a global system in which we are always interacting with others. We need to foster critical dialogue cross-culturally, which depends on both respect and the willingness to critique (both ourselves and others) and be critiqued.
Identity Politics and the Prepositions of Speaking
There is a common way of thinking about identity in which identity categories (race, gender, age, ability, sexual orientation, class, ethnicity, caste, nationality, or other aspects of a person’s biography) are taken to explain the individual’s subjectivity and actions. It is the case that in complex societies a variety of identity categories shape individuals’ self-consciousness and interactions between individuals. So, while I would never suggest that identity and identity categories are unimportant, as I tried to make clear in my earlier post “Charlie Parker and Shostakovich: Art, the Artist, and Culture,” the individual is neither reducible to nor determined by identity categories and cultural context.
Much writing and thinking about identity politics is motivated by the desire to mitigate the effects of racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, ageism, ableism, or other prejudices and discriminatory practices. It often does so through the celebration of works and deeds of individuals of a particular identity category, e.g. the celebrations of black history month or women’s history month, or the commemoration of works by women composers, black poets, gay playwrights, etc. There’s nothing wrong with the celebration of anyone’s creative expressions or good deeds, and a lot right with calling attention to worthy creations of individuals often overlooked simply because of prejudice. At the same time, at its most extreme, identity politics involves a logic that minimizes the possibilities for critical dialogue and unwittingly recapitulates some of the effects of the very prejudices it desires to effect.
Identity politics goes awry when notions of authenticity are linked to authority to speak, when only those with authenticity are seen as having authority to speak about a topic or category and when those with authenticity are prescribed to speak or express themselves only in authentic ways. For example, when the work of black poets or musicians is called into question as not “black” enough, this doesn’t fight racism but recapitulates it by assuming that there is a particular domain of content and form which is “black,” that black individuals should limit themselves to such domains, and that the only reason why they might want to do otherwise is through internalized racism and/or inauthenticity. Further, when the perceived right to speak is linked to notions of authentic categorical membership, this in no way reduces prejudice or discrimination but places new boundaries in the way of open and critical dialogue.
Aside from the important problems with authority and authenticity, there is also here a confusion about prepositions, about the difference between speaking for, speaking as, speaking about, and speaking to.
Speaking For and Speaking As
Simply put, I can’t speak for anyone but myself and shouldn’t try to. Not being someone else, and not having others’ subjective experience, I can’t place myself in someone else’s subject position and refer to myself as “I” for them. As someone who takes the insights of Lacanian psychoanalysis seriously, I can’t even speak for myself in all contexts, times, and places. The same is true for anyone else, and it’s farcical for anyone to attempt to speak not just for another person but for an entire category or type of person.
What’s not so often recognized is that this is just as true for those within a particular category as those without. It may be more blatantly sexist for a man to try to speak for women, but no woman can speak for women other than herself.
Speaking as a member of a category is less problematic. Since social categories are perceived by others and shape interactions between individuals, identity categories do shape the experiences of individuals, and we can speak of experiences that tend to be common or statistically typical for members of a class. In that sense, a woman can speak as a woman, or a gay man as gay, insofar as their subjectivity reflects experiences often common to others sharing the same identity. But even speaking as cries out for caution, as it is easy to shift from speaking as someone whose subjectivity reflects experiences often typical of the group to speaking of oneself as the representative of the group. Speaking as easily slips into speaking for.
Speaking About and Speaking To
While I can’t speak for anyone other than myself (and can only problematically speak for myself by performing as if my subjectivity is more unitary than it is), I can speak about all sorts of things, including other people, and I can speak to anyone. Ideally I should do so with knowledge and with respect, but there’s no reason why anyone shouldn’t be able and free to speak about whatever they want and to whomever they wish. Approaches to identity politics that attempt to tie authority to speak to authentic membership in an identity group or possession of an authentic viewpoint inherently limit the development of human consciousness and communication.
Culture, Culture Change, and the Ethics of Cultural Intervention
In an article from 1958, “The Fox Project” (Human Organization, V. 17, pp. 17-19), Sol Tax both described an applied anthropological project with the Fox Indians of Iowa and laid out the basis for anthropologists’ engaging in processes of culture change in what he called “action anthropology.” Why revisit this almost 50 year old article? Primarily because it lucidly gets at the crux of what applied or action anthropology is about, as well as some of the ethical and value considerations associated with it.
Culture and Culture Change
Tax was clearly aware that in attempting to aid the Fox Indians in the economic development of their community, he and his students were engaging in an intervention into culture and engaging directly in a process of culture change. Recognizing this, he also recognized a need for basic ground rules for such intervention into culture. He writes of the potentials for culture change in the Fox community:
“The two irreducible conditions of community-wide changes are that the new behavior does not require either (1) a loss of Fox identity, or (2) violation of Fox moral beliefs. One takes for granted also that the change is practicably possible – that the new behavior required is understandable and feasible, and that there is some reason, from the point of view of the Indians to make it. Given these two general limitations, we suppose any change is possible.”
Implicitly, a particular sense of “culture” is being used here. Anthropologists and others typically recognize two senses of the word “culture” – one the ethos, manners, mores, and patterns of high culture, the other the sense more typically employed by anthropologists focusing on a total patterned lifeway of a people or population. In an important article, “Culture – Genuine and Spurious,” Edward Sapir noted that there are three important senses in which “culture” is used. He recognized that “culture” in the sense of high culture represented a restricted subset of the sense of culture as a total lifeway in that it represented the lifeway of a particular class context. He also noted, though, that there is another important way in which we used “culture.” As with “high culture,” we often use “culture” in a way more restricted than to refer to all aspects of the total patterned lifeway of a population. In this third sense, we mean the core premises of identity, values, ethos, and worldview and a restricted set of practices taken as “typical” or “essential.” It is typically these elements of the lifeway which are most durable, most valued, or that are the intended reference when people speak of their culture. So, for example, maquiladora factories and Coca-Cola are part of the total lifeway of Mexico today, and thus are part of Mexican culture in one sense of the word, but are not the sorts of things people (Mexican or otherwise) typically intend when speaking of “Mexican culture.”
For Tax or the Fox, behaviors or ideas that were simply part of the total lifeway’s set of practices were readily subject to change without controversy. It was those behaviors and ideas seen as essential to identity and moral beliefs (and I would venture to guess also those seen as essential to ethos and worldview) that were highly cherished and not changeable without controversy. Likewise, in contemporary controversies surrounding cultural description, critique, or intervention and cultural relativism, it is change with regard to those elements of the total patterned lifeway that are locally constructed (on whatever basis – in some cases ethos may be most highly touted, in others certain behaviors, in others elements of the worldview) as “the culture” in this third sense that generate controversy. No one (at least no one I can think of or imagine) is likely to criticize a critique by a non-Mexican of maquiladora factory production in Mexico City or Juarez as an example of cultural imperialism (if anything, such industrial production might be seen as cultural imperialism). A critique of “Mexican Machismo” very well might generate controversy, though.
The ethics of cultural intervention
Tax’s article is also useful in laying out provisional value orientations for engaging in applied anthropology and intervening in a particular cultural context. He lays out three values ideally involved when engaging in cultural intervention (or as he even says, “interference”).
His first value is that of truth. While ascertaining truth is an often formidable task, to value truth as a principle seems to me straightforward and non-controversial (except, perhaps, when it’s not – for example in cases where an anthropologist’s view of truth might stand in opposition to that of those being aided via applied anthropological work).
Tax continues:
“Second, we feel most strongly the value of freedom, as it is classically expressed and limited. Freedom in our context usually means freedom for individuals to choose the group with which to identify and freedom for a community to choose its way of life. We would also be embarrassed if it were shown that we are, for example, encouraging Indians to remain Indians, rather than to become something else, or trying to preserve Indian cultures, when the Indians involved would choose otherwise. All we want in our action programs is to provide, if we can, genuine alternatives from which the people involved can freely choose…”
In other words, Tax held (and I hold) the autonomy of the individual as a fundamental value.
Tax’s third value is what he called a “kind of Law of Parsimony which tells us not to settle questions of values unless they concern us.” This is an important pragmatic principle for operation, where, for example, even though some anthropologists involved in the Fox project felt that assimilation was in the interest of the Fox and others did not, Tax felt that it was inessential for them to decide, and in any case, given the higher valuation placed on the autonomy of Fox individuals, this was not the anthropologists’ decision in any case.
He discusses further the possibility of additional operating principles or premises, but decides against this. He uses the following example:
“People are always asking whether we think cannibals have a right to self-determination. With respect to cannibalism, would we not have to impose some value of our own? Now, I neither eat human flesh, nor like the thought of being eaten; I am revolted as others in our culture by the whole idea. I have no notion what I would do if I found myself involved in an action program on a cannibal isle; I can only think of jokes to say. If I attempt to answer seriously I am beset with all the value contradictions involved in so-called cultural relativism. But whatever my personal position on this, it has no significant bearing on what we should do tomorrow to help the Fox Indians develop more constructive relationships within their community, or with other Iowans.”
Frankly, I’m not sure why this example creates a conundrum, insofar as if one take the valuation of the autonomy of each individual at all seriously, then the autonomy of one person to develop themselves and determine their life to the extent possible (which obviously entails continuing to live) clearly outweighs the autonomy of another to eat them. (If you had a cannibal isle where some really autonomously consent to be eaten, then you’d have a real conundrum.) Still, Tax is right that the ethics of one case don’t really impinge on the ethics of another, so such hypothetical cases are pragmatically beside the point. Recognizing that it is pragmatically and ethically efficacious to avoid making decisions or judgment calls when not necessary, though, doesn’t help in knowing what to do when such decisions cannot be avoided. While anthropologists today are unlikely to have to grapple with the autonomy of cannibals, there are cases in virtually every cultural context where different individuals’ effective autonomy stand at odds and impinge upon one another.
While I find Tax’s article wanting in essentially evading this sort of all too common dilemma, at the same time I find that his three basic values (which are essentially the values of the Enlightenment project) serve us well. On the one hand, the combination of ethical parsimony, cultural relativism, and the valuation of individuals’ autonomy in many situations leads us anthropologically to simply attempt to describe and understand the context at hand. On the other, when the effective autonomy of individuals is at odds or is compromised (e.g. Philippe Bourgois’ example of Costa Rican plantation workers’ lives being largely shaped by decisions of landowners and managers – an example of individuals having opposed interests, or many examples of imposed female genital modification – an example where one individual’s autonomy is compromised by others for reasons typically seen as being in that person’s interest), then we must either be willing to critique such practices or realize that our lack of critique passively and tacitly accepts the imposition of power on the weaker.
Tradition and Individual Autonomy
One first principle I am asserting here follows from the enlightenment tradition and project and emphasizes the sanctity and autonomy of the individual’s freedom to act, within the limits of not violating others’ autonomy, i.e. anyone should be free to do and develop their self as they see fit. As with any first premise, this can’t be “proved,” but is a starting assumption which some will agree with and some will not.
At the same time, as a cultural anthropologist I respect the importance of cultural tradition and the diversity of ways to be human. For that matter, for me a corollary of respect for individual autonomy is a limited sort of cultural relativism, insofar as individuality is largely shaped within a particular cultural context and individual autonomy includes the freedom to practice a particular array of cultural patterned behaviors. When at odds, though, for me the individual always trumps tradition and custom (which is not at all to say that any individual’s autonomy trumps another’s right to the traditions or customs of their choosing, but rather that privileging tradition or the “norm” is to privilege one set of individuals’ autonomy over others).
To the extent that it is anything, tradition is the reification or objectification of the results of multiple individuals’ actions. To imagine tradition as functioning in a determinative or mechanistic way is to simplify and falsify the complexities of social interaction. As Pierre Bourdieu has said (Outline of a Theory of Practice, p. 73), “It is necessary to abandon all theories which explicitly or implicitly treat practice as a mechanical reaction, directly determined by the antecedent conditions and entirely reducible to the mechanical functioning of pre-established assemblies, ‘models’ or ‘roles’…” Further, if culture or tradition are not determinative (and they are not), to imagine tradition as requiring adherence and to value tradition more highly than the individual is to privilege a sort of tyranny of the statistical majority at best, and to privilege the more powerful who have greater control over what counts as tradition or status quo practice.
Conclusion
Where does this leave us? First, we should remember the universality of rationality, but also the potential for irrationality, among all human groups, as well as the importance and diversity of cultural traditions and social standards upon which rational and non-rational choices are made. But there is also the necessity of making choices and critically engaging in praxis on the basis of such choices. In a world where there is no universal moral code, but where we are also inherently engaged in globally cross-cutting social interactions of all sorts and where we cannot disengage and be totally neutral in political or ethical effect, we must maintain and refine the critical tension that has long been a part of American anthropology.
An uncritical rationalism falls short (1) in that there is no universal rational agent – not because people are not universally capable of rationality, but because the differing contexts of peoples’ lives present highly varying modes of rationalization, and because we are all so paramountly capable of irrationality – and (2) because the underestimation of cultural difference undermines the value of autonomy and freedom (including autonomy to develop cultural traditions, values, worldviews, etc.) of the enlightenment project of which rationalism is supposedly a part. At the same time, an uncritical cultural relativism falls similarly short. All too often it is based in the notion of a culture’s autonomy, which involves not just the useful reification of analytical modeling but a reification which obscures individuals’ actions and motivations in such a way that the status quo (which is itself a reification, of course) is taken as the decisions and norms of “the culture”, naturalizing asymmetrical relationships as tradition – as if all have equal autonomy in producing or consenting to this state of affairs, and normalizing the views of a culture’s elites as “typical”. A cultural relativism which sincerely values and respects differences is valuable. One that validates at face value anything which happens to be part of the traditions of a culture is problematic. When further wed to an identity politics in which only cultural “insiders” can speak about a particular context, cultural relativism can become insidious, undermining both the power of the human intellect and ability to communicate across cultures and not be confined to incommensurable languages and traditions, and falsifying the truly hybrid nature of all our cultural traditions which result from the history of human cultural interpenetration and communication. Instead, if anthropology and ethnography are to continue to offer something worthwhile, we need to refine key elements of our theoretical tradition to engage in an expanded enlightenment project, one which is rational and values equality, justice, and autonomy – including that of cultural diversity – but which is also involved in engaged cultural critique and praxis through cross-cultural communication and co-equal interaction.
References Cited
Appadurai, Arjun
1988 Putting Hierarchy in its Place. Cultural Anthropology. 3(1): 36-49.
Boas, Franz
1962 Anthropology and Modern Life. Third Edition. New York: Dover Publications.
Bourdieu, Pierre
1977 Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press.
Bunzel, Ruth
1962 Introduction. In Anthropology and Modern Life. Third Edition. Franz Boas. New York: Dover Publications.
Elias, Norbert
1978 What is Sociology? New York: Columbia University Press.
Freire, Paolo
1993 Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New Revised 20th Anniversary Edition. New York: Continuum.
Geertz, Clifford
1973a Religion as a Cultural System. In The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
1973b The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man. In The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude
1966 The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Peirce, Charles S.
1992 Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs. In Introducing Semiotics: An Anthology of Readings. Marcel Danesi and Donato Santeramo, eds. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press.
Philen, Robert
2004 Bertrand Russell’s Chicken: Sign Experience and the Human Mind. Unpublished manuscript presented at Southern Anthropological Society, Annual Meeting, Atlanta, March.
2005a Reflections on Meaning and Myth: Claude Lévi-Strauss Revisited. Anthropos. 100: 221-228.
2005b The Stories we (don’t) tell. Connecticut Review. In press.
White, Leslie
1949 The Science of Culture: A Study of Man and Civilization. New York: Grove Press.
In The Science of Culture (1949), Leslie White made a strong argument against the superiority of the physical and life sciences over the social sciences (in particular anthropology), as well as against reductionist tendencies to explain the social and cultural in terms purely of the biological or physical. These tendencies are as present now as they were then and are perhaps even more pervasive, with sociobiology and physics increasingly stretching beyond their very real strengths to claim sovereignty over the humanities and social sciences. The dreams of complete understanding and complete control manifested in overarching sociobiological syntheses or theories of everything in physics, not to mention the small but real steps toward totalization in the contemporary political arena, sound eerily like the scientific and political dreams of the early 20th century, seemingly having forgotten the lessons, horrors, and failings of totalization. In this scholarly and political environment, it is perhaps useful to revisit earlier anthropological critics of reductionist totalization like White and to examine the potential role of ethnography as science, myth-making, or engaged cultural criticism.
While recognizing that the physical and life sciences had made impressive steps in the quantification of their respective fields, White argued that there was a good reason that scientific method and modes of thought had developed earlier for these fields than for the humanities and social sciences. For White, the physico-chemical, the biological, the psychological, the social, and the cultural represented increasingly complex emergent levels of phenomena in the world, and just as biology developed more slowly than physics, sociology and anthropology have been more slow to develop a science of society and culture, because of the greater attendant complexity of their subject fields.
White was, of course, not the first to present such a model. As Norbert Elias discusses in What is Sociology? (1978), Auguste Comte had made similar arguments in the nineteenth century. Comte made a case that for each field, the physical, the biological, and the social, there was a gradual progression from mythic or theological thinking to scientific thought. As I have argued elsewhere (Philen 2005 a; 2005 b) and below, much of what ethnography does works in a mythic frame.
Ethnography as Science or Myth
Is anthropology at a stage of intellectual development where it is possible to move from a mythic to a scientific mode? The answer is in some ways yes, in some ways no. To some extent it all depends on what we mean by “science”.
White clearly thought anthropology was ready for a science of culture, but his efforts to produce such a science involved some of the most roundly critiqued aspects of his work. Take, for example, his reification of culture as a superorganic entity existing beyond human interactions (a common enough reification he shared with Kroeber, among others). Or his nebulous pseudo-mathematical formula C = E x T, postulating that the level of cultural evolution is equivalent to the quantity of energy harnessed to productive purposes times the level of technological development, a formula clearly not quantifiable as such, even if the postulated relationship between energy utilization, technological development, and culture is an interesting and insightful one. Elias argues that to the extent that sociology has produced a science of society it is through similar reifications of misperceived social interactions as the entities “society” or “social structure” or the “corporation.” (To point out the reified nature of such concepts does not mean that we can avoid such usage, rather that we should be aware of such reification and that the way in which sociological science has proceeded is through what Bourdieu (1977) calls the realism of the structure, treating such reifications as more real than they actually are.)
Where anthropology has been most successful in a scientistic mode is in the analysis of those ways in which culture acts as an adaptive mechanism. For example, cultural materialism and cultural ecology in general have been most convincing in explicating human interactions with the environment – especially with regard to subsistence activities and especially with regard to small societies most subject to the vagaries of natural cycles. However, when it comes to larger societies or other areas of cultural life where things are in some ways by definition arbitrary – as with language, myth, music, or art, those areas of cultural experience related to the production of meaning – such attempts at scientific explication fall short: even when illuminating something about meaning producing systems, such approaches leave much untouched concerning the meaning of meaning.
This of course begs the question of the nature of science. What is science? Lévi-Strauss (1966) presented it by analogy to the engineer imposing structure upon the world, in this case imposing scientific theory and hypothesis to produce events – experimental data. Ethnographic theorizing tends to work in ways more analogous to mythic thinking, cobbling together conceptualizations from cultural odds and ends. These odds and ends are drawn from the cultural context under analysis through the reflexive use of emic conceptual categories to theorize the context under consideration, but they are also drawn from the ethnographic, travel and other literatures pertaining to the cultural-geographic area, as well as from the ethnographic representation of other areas as anthropologists engage in ethnological comparison (see especially Appadurai 1988 on this point), with ethnographic theorization utilizing all such categories and conceptualizations reflexively to analyze the context in question. Given the Lévi-Straussian conceptualization of the distinction between mythic and scientific thinking, ethnography generally falls into the mythic mode – though there are exceptions and they are the sorts of exceptions I mentioned above, usually cultural materialist or other cultural ecological analyses focusing especially on the environmental adaptations of small scale societies.
Lévi-Strauss’ is not the only conceptualization of science, though, or even the most familiar. White defines science in terms of its characteristic activity. In the opening chapter of The Science of Culture, “Science is Sciencing,” he argues (1949:3):
"Science is not merely a collection of facts and formulas. It is pre-eminently a way of dealing with experience. The word may be appropriately used as a verb: one sciences, i.e., deals with experience according to certain assumptions and with certain techniques. Science is one of two basic ways of dealing with experience. The other is art. And this word, too, may appropriately be used as a verb; one may art as well as science. The purpose of science and art is one: to render experience intelligible, i.e. to assist man to adjust himself to his environment in order that he may live. But although working toward the same goal, science and art approach it from opposite directions. Science deals with particulars in terms of universals: Uncle Tom disappears in the mass of Negro slaves. Art deals with universals in terms of particulars: the whole gamut of Negro slavery confronts us in the person of Uncle Tom. Art and science thus grasp a common experience, or reality, by opposite but inseparable poles."
This, obviously, is similar to the common distinction between nomothetic and idiographic approaches to scholarly analysis, though without recognizing that idiographic accounts might focus upon the particular case with no pretense to universality. While I find the basic distinction compelling, it fails to deal with the presence of myth, music, or, I would argue, ethnography, which lie somewhere in between. I don’t think it’s a stretch to claim that most who have been drawn to anthropology through reading ethnography would not want it to be science in White’s sense. In the most compelling ethnographies, Uncle Tom does not disappear into the mass of slaves. Instead, particulars are dealt with in terms of universals, or at least generalizations often derived from the cultural context of the particulars, at the same time that universals or generalizations are embodied or manifested in particulars.
Still, part of White’s sleight of hand in claiming to have developed a science of culture is not just (a fairly standard) reification of culture and the presence of pseudo-mathematical formulae but also a redefining of science in terms (the act of nomothetic generalization) that anthropology can meet (for ethnography does include that – as does myth), even if at the expense of losing much that is compelling about it (the lived experiences and particularities of culture). But since most conceptions of “science” include something more than just generalization, I don’t think it worth jettisoning much that is valuable about ethnography when doing so still doesn’t get us into the science club. For most definitions of science include additional qualities, such as controlled experimentation or replicability of results. Leaving aside ethical dilemmas about controlled experimentation in cultural contexts, given the complexity of socio-cultural phenomena, we are not at this stage of scientificity – and given the arbitrary, historical, and contingent nature of so much of what is cultural, I don’t think we should expect to ever be at such a point.
The fact that we are not in a position to construct scientific proofs or deduce universal laws of human thought or behavior (Even Lévi-Strauss’ work on universal structuring of the mind is an interpretation of the implications of a large corpus of mythic text which does not function in the manner of mathematical or logical proof, nor was it derived from anything resembling hypothetico-deductive method or the like, nor does it present anything law-like regarding human behavior.) should not be regarded as cause for alarm; nor does it imply that we understand nothing about human culture. Nor does my argument that ethnography tends to produce meaning in a manner analogous to mythic thinking imply that anything goes or that ethnography is not empirically based. One of the things made clear in The Savage Mind, the Mythologiques series, and other works by Lévi-Strauss is that though myth is a product of the human mind, as of course are science and art, individual myths often pay close attention to the empirical world.
On the other hand, I don’t think that we should be complacent about the state of ethnography. Even if a scientific ethnography, at least with regard to all aspects of cultural life, is not now nor perhaps ever possible, we should not be content with purely mythic thinking, producing narratives which are good to think simply for the sake of narratives which are good to think. That is, ethnography is in some ways structurally analogous to myth – but it is not the same thing as myth, especially regarding its motivation and role. We should be trying to understand increasingly more about the world, and our narratives should be constructed with a critical awareness of their constructedness.
Culture and Critical Consciousness
Culture, which is the (or at least a) primary topic of ethnographic narrative, often has been presented as a real thing – that is, as something with existence beyond the interactions and discursive constructions of socially connected individuals. This is most evident with either White’s or A. L. Kroeber’s presentation of culture as a really existing superorganic entity, but even when it is acknowledged that “culture” is a reification of complex processes, it is a reification which is nearly impossible to avoid. So, I would argue that what is important is to acknowledge and to be conscious of its functioning as such and to deconstruct and critique its conceptualization, so that even if we do not escape the reification of culture for the moment, we can move on to new understandings of “it.”
Culture, to the extent that it is anything, is not a single over-arching entity, but consists, as I have argued elsewhere (2004), in a patchwork of argument, (By “argument,” I mean not just types of logical argumentation such as deduction or induction, but a type of sign, as conceived by C. S. Peirce [1992:27]: “a sign whose interpretant represents its object as being an ulterior sign through a law, namely, the law that the passage from all such premises to such conclusions tends to the truth.” This includes not just deduction and induction, but also other forms of logical argument identified by Peirce, such as abduction, as well as cultural themes and schemas [see Philen 2004].) i.e. in types of modeling behavior which can be seen as theorization broadly understood. Culture, then, as Clifford Geertz pointed out long ago (1973a), consists of models of and models for reality. If culture is to be understood as argument and the process of cultural modeling as akin to theorization, then theorization should be regarded as having something in common with cultural modeling, and ethnographic theorization should perhaps also be envisioned as engaging in both modeling of reality (which would be ethnographic theory as conventionally understood) and modeling for reality. Here we encounter Paolo Freire’s (1993) view of theory as praxis – the attempt to produce a unity of thought and the world, not by passively allowing thought to reflect or mirror a static world, but by critically reflecting upon the world and engaging in action informed by critical consciousness to produce a social universe compatible with that desired by such critical consciousness.
Anthropology is most valuable as cultural critique and as a contributor to the critical production of culture. Here, the insights of Michel Foucault and Theodor Adorno are useful in understanding ethnography’s value as cultural criticism. Foucault points out that what passes as true (that which is dans le vrai) is always political – and is discursively constructed and contested. In our era, one general feature of knowledge which is dan le vrai is “utility” – specifically constructed as utility for production and profit – hence the high estimation of the “practical” sciences and the lower estimation of the arts and humanities, and hence the belief of many that the natural or hard sciences can take them over adequately and should do so. Adorno, in his work in aesthetic theory, argues that art and literature are not “useful,” but rather are valuable precisely because they are not and because they can alienate us from our alienations.
In everyday life, our language, discursive constructions, and culture – which exist only through our practice – are alienated from us and perceived as things existing apart from us. Similarly, our real social relations are mystified in a commodity-fetishizing society into relations among things. Art can potentially expose this – it can’t just make alienation go away, but can alienate us from our alienations. I would argue that in its role as cultural criticism, ethnography can do likewise – in its longstanding project to make the exotic familiar and the familiar exotic. Doing this doesn’t change any of these social realities, but it does demystify the processes of social alienation and open the possibility for the critical production of desired cultural forms rather than the uncritical inertial production of cultural forms. Like it or not, we are enmeshed in a world of practice and cultural production. So, the choice in debates about applied anthropology and cultural relativism isn’t between acting or not acting, but between unconsciously contributing to self-mystifying cultural production or critically engaging in the process.
But what sort of consciousness does anthropology and ethnography embody, and to what sort of project is it suited to contribute? Anthropology was in part a product of the Enlightenment project. The Enlightenment’s questioning of the divine structuring of society and political authority gave rise not just to musings on the nature of the ideal society as seen in the work of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Jefferson, and others, but also to a gradual awareness of the multiplicity of possibilities for the construction of society which led to the development of anthropology. Anthropology, and especially ethnography, is also in a good position from which to contribute to the still unfinished projects of the Enlightenment – liberty, equality, fraternity (I would phrase this last as “community” to evade the gender bias of “fraternity” and argue that the development of true community freely chosen depends on the development of the first two). Ethnography is positioned to do so not just through cultural critique but also through applied anthropological praxis informed by critical awareness to contribute to the greater fulfillment (never a completed process – for even were it momentarily fulfilled, it would need to be maintained and reproduced) of the Enlightenment projects.
Anthropology’s Core Tension
There is a perennial tension in American anthropology between assumptions that humans are profoundly similar, sharing psychic unity with the same mental capacities, needs, and predisposition, and assumptions that people are profoundly dissimilar (with this the basis of cultural relativism), their thoughts and actions largely shaped by specific cultural context. This presents not a contradiction but an impetus to resolve the apparent tension which arises from the various roots of contemporary American anthropological thought, with the discipline taking its current shape in the late 19th and early 20th century from the traditions of the British and French Enlightenments, as well as the German (and sometimes Anti-Enlightenment) scholarly tradition.
These three traditions, the British, French, and German, were heavily influenced by national projects in the modern era in transition from divine right rule to rule by or for the “people” or on some other legitimated basis in modern nation-states. With Britain and France as already existing polyglot states before the era of nationalism, emphasis was on citizenship and rationality, with the two scholarly traditions emphasizing rational agents and regularities of social organization, whether in the intellectual lineage of Locke, Smith, Mill, and Tyler or in that of Montesquieu, Rousseau, Comte, and Durkheim. In 19th century Germany, in contrast, the national project was to cobble together a state from the population of German speakers spread across numerous states in Central Europe, with an emphasis on language and common tradition as unifying points. Scholarly focus was on national character (out of which the idea of “culture” emerges), with this not strictly determined by rationality, e.g. Freud and the unconscious or Ratzel and geographic determinism.
For American anthropology in the 20th and 21st centuries, the upshot is (or should be) recognition of both rationality and irrationality, commonality of capacities and needs alongside extreme diversity of patterned behaviors and the contents of thought. As Geertz argued (1973b), the profound interaction of biology and culture produced this condition in humans – the evolution of a mind capable of highly flexible and general adaptation, responding always to common needs but in quite diverse natural and cultural environments.
Boas and Cultural Relativism
This awareness and tension has been a part of American anthropology at least since Boas, a scholar all too often oversimplified as atheoretical or as an uncritical cultural relativist. As Boas student Ruth Bunzel (1962) pointed out, Boas’ cultural relativism was premised in respect for cultural traditions of all sorts, but it was an engaged stance, as is most clear in his public-oriented writing on the topic of race. Boas made clear that cultural relativism was rationally useful insofar as it opened our minds to the greatest diversity of perspectives and human possibilities, but was not meant to be a position of blind ethical neutrality whereby we must accept any tradition of another culture by mere virtue of its existence.
Further, as he was aware of the rational faculties of humans of all cultures, he also recognized the importance of things other than rationality in human thought and behavior. For example, he writes (1962:114-115; emphasis added):
"Here again the anthropologist and the biologist are at odds. The natural sciences do not recognize in their scheme a valuation of the phenomena of nature, nor do they count emotions as moving forces; they endeavor to reduce all happenings to the actions of physical causes. Reason alone reigns in their domain. Therefore the scientist likes to look at mental life from the same rational standpoint, and sees as the goal of human development an era of reason, as opposed to the former periods of unhealthy fantastic emotion."
"The anthropologist, on the other hand, cannot acknowledge such a complete domination of emotion by reason. He rather sees the steady advance of the rational knowledge of mankind, which is a source of satisfaction to him no less than to the biologist; but he sees also that mankind does not put this knowledge to purely reasonable use, but that its actions are swayed by emotions no less now than in former times, although in many respects, unless the passions are excited, the increase of knowledge limits the extreme forms of unreasonable emotional activities. Religion and political life, and our everyday habits, present endless proofs of the fact that our actions are the results of emotional preferences, that conform in a general way to our rational knowledge, but which are not determined by reason; that we rather try to justify our choice by reason than have our actions dictated by reason."
Nor, despite its explanatory power, can science ever offer us a purely rational alternative to the importance of emotion and other non-rational factors in decision making. Boas provides an example in a discussion of eugenics. His discussion was written before the various horrors of eugenics of the 20th century – which in themselves caution us against the idea that humans may be capable of perfect rationality – but his discussion is worth perusing, if only for hypothetical argument. Some medical disorders clearly are genetically inherited. Genetic science can clearly elucidate this for us, but it cannot clearly elucidate a definitive course of action. Should families with evidence of genetic disorders be subject to eugenic “solutions,” whether in the form of sterilization, selective breeding, or other even darker courses of action? Take for example the character Jubal’s proposition, in Robert Heinlein’s novel Stranger in a Strange Land, that hemophiliacs should be left to bleed to death so they can’t breed more hemophiliacs. Certainly that is one possible approach to take. Or, because most genetic disorders while compromising health do not preclude positive quality of life and because most genetic disorders will not be passed on to all offspring, should eugenic solutions be verboten? While this latter is probably (I hope) the position of most nowadays, logic and rationality alone do not dictate it. As Boas says, “This question cannot be decided from a scientific point of view. The answer depends upon ethical and social standards” (1962:199). We can certainly marshal logical arguments to back up our ethical choices once made, but there is no magical rational formula that can choose our ethical positions a priori.
Cultural Relativism: What it is and What it isn’t
The greatest intellectual contributions of the discipline of anthropology to contemporary American society and thought are the concept of culture and the associated notion of cultural relativism. Both have a long history within the discipline, but as with any concepts originating in a particular academic discipline and then escaping into the larger culture, they have moved beyond the control of anthropologists. That said, anthropologists (such as myself) are as free as anyone to attempt to influence the development and understanding of such concepts within that broader culture.
In its original conception, cultural relativism was developed by Franz Boas and his students in the early 20th century. Cultural relativism involves first the recognition of and respect for the importance of alternative cultural constructions of the world and the acknowledgment that there is no universal way to be a human being. Secondly, it involves a provisional suspension of ethical or moral judgment about the practices of other cultures and an impetus to understand cultural practices within their own terms or logic.
I would argue that there was both a pragmatic and an ethical motivation for the development of cultural relativism. Pragmatically, cultural relativism allows for better anthropological research. A non-judgmental attitude in research allows for an easier establishment of the rapport necessary to conduct high quality ethnographic work. The attempt to understand cultures within the terms of their own logic leads to a more refined understanding of cultural variability and possibility. As Janice Boddy has written concerning female genital modification (or female genital mutilation if you prefer that terminology) in Sudan, no matter what your moral or ethical position on the topic, the starting point should be cultural relativism. If you are interested in the topic neutrally as simply a subject of anthropological curiosity, then you need to approach it non-judgmentally and attempt to understand the practice on its own terms and within the logical of the cultural context. If you find the practice abhorrent or repellent and wish to alter the practice, you still need first to understand the practice on its own terms in order to have any hope of understanding the practical possibilities for change.
Boas was not out to change cultures (at least not in general – though his writings on race were attempts to intellectually engage racism, expose its absurdity, and contribute to changing it). Still, there was an ethical component to cultural relativism. Much earlier American anthropological work had been notoriously racist and ethnocentric in its approach (and obviously anthropological work in parts of Europe, like Nazi Germany, remained racist for quite some time into the 20th century), and the emphasis on not judging other cultures was an important counter to this. That said, this does not mean that he thought that cultural practices should be held beyond reproach or criticism simply because they were traditional practices of one or another culture. Boas stood for the importance of clarity and logic, whether applied to western culture and the exposure of racism as illogical and counter-factual, or to any other culture. Boas emphasized the equal capacity for logic and illogic cross-culturally.
As Marshall Sahlins has recently noted in Waiting for Foucault, Still (citation):
“Cultural relativism is first and last an interpretive anthropological – that is to say, methodological – procedure. It is not the moral argument that any culture or custom is as good as any other, if not better. Relativism is the simple prescription that, in order to be intelligible, other people’s practices and ideals must be placed in their own historical context, understood as positional values in the field of their own cultural relationships rather than appreciated by categorical and moral judgments of our making. Relativity is the provisional suspension of one’s own judgments in order to situate the practices at issue in the historical and cultural order that made them possible. It is in no other way a matter of advocacy.”
The most important contribution of the idea of cultural relativism has no doubt been the notion that all cultures are worthy of respect. Contrary to what Boas intended, cultural relativism is often invoked to support the notion that because something is a traditional practice of another culture one can’t criticize or critique it. This is analogous to suggesting that no one outside the U.S. Southeast could criticize the racist practices of the Jim Crow era South (an argument at the time made mainly by Southern white racists).
There are a number of problems with this conception of cultural relativism. First, it’s based on a faulty notion of clear and distinct cultures. This is a notion that has been long outmoded in anthropology. Even when anthropologists did model cultures as if they were discrete and bounded entities, it’s clear from close readings of most early 20th century anthropological texts that these anthropologists were well aware that they were treating culture as a model, as a useful fiction that contributed to greater understanding of cultural processes. But that model has long since outlived its usefulness.
The model of clear and distinct cultures has outlived its usefulness on the grounds of both theoretical utility and empirical reality. At a time when the discipline of anthropology was still establishing a cross-cultural ethnological baseline and developing its fundamental concepts, this model was useful in helping to simplify matters so that these two goals could be accomplished. Once the basic data sets and concepts of the discipline were established, however, this simplifying model of discrete cultures was no longer necessary, and models which dealt with cultural processes in a more complex way became more interesting and meaningful.
Further, throughout the 19th and into the 20th century, it was the case that many cultures were relatively bounded and discrete entities. The social life of Australian aborigines was largely Australian aboriginal; though the Kwakiutl potlatch was modified in some details of practice by both the introduction of new trade goods and the demographic consequences of European disease in the 19th century, it remained an overwhelmingly Kwakiutl sort of thing; people in many tropical South American societies led ways of life largely untouched by European or Euro-American influence (even though metal tools, sugar cane, and rice might have been introduced). Even though cultures were never clear and separate entities, up through the early 20th century, imagining them to be so simply simplified matters. But today, with an expanding global economy, global media, and global flows of people, it is impossible to clearly delineate one culture from another culture, and such a model doesn’t just simplify but distorts matters.
There is no clear cut “other culture,” no “them” that has not been profoundly influenced by western culture (and for that matter a variety of other cultural traditions as well – as Arjun Appadurai (cite) has discussed, while western liberals may fret [perhaps with good reason] about global westernization, the Papuan residents of Irian Jaya are more likely to be concerned about Javanization). Further, there is no clear “us”. For example, if I speak of “we” anthropologists, who am I talking about? North American and Western European scholars’ voices have been most clearly represented (and as is common to add, it has been mainly white, male, heterosexual, middle and upper class voices at that), but in my own thinking about cultural relativism and global cultural processes, I have been profoundly influenced by scholars such as the Argentine-Mexican Néstor García Canclini (like myself a Euro-American, but not North or Anglo American) or scholars from South Asia or of South Asian ancestry like Appadurai, and increasingly anthropological discourse has been the product not just of western voices, but Indian and Japanese and “indigenous” voices. Like it or not, we’re involved in global social interactions, and while we can and should refrain from rushing to judgment of other people’s practices, we can’t refrain from interacting with other people and affecting (or being affected by) them. As the notion of cultural boundaries between a “them” and an “us” becomes more and more farcical, it becomes equally farcical to think that “we” for some reason can’t or shouldn’t critically engage “them.”
Second, the refusal to critique the practices of other cultures is not without effect. To refrain from active engagement is to passively accept the status quo, and the status quo in any cultural context is the product of interactions in social settings laden with power relations. Refraining from active engagement is not to be neutral but to privilege the powerful over the weaker.
Finally, cultural relativism, when taken to imply a taboo on cross cultural critique, implies pessimism about the possibility of cross-cultural communication. It is in any case a taboo on cross cultural critical dialogue. Cultural relativism is a crucial means to avoid rushing to judgment of different practices and to foster respect for diversity and autonomy, but we are enmeshed in a global system in which we are always interacting with others. We need to foster critical dialogue cross-culturally, which depends on both respect and the willingness to critique (both ourselves and others) and be critiqued.
Identity Politics and the Prepositions of Speaking
There is a common way of thinking about identity in which identity categories (race, gender, age, ability, sexual orientation, class, ethnicity, caste, nationality, or other aspects of a person’s biography) are taken to explain the individual’s subjectivity and actions. It is the case that in complex societies a variety of identity categories shape individuals’ self-consciousness and interactions between individuals. So, while I would never suggest that identity and identity categories are unimportant, as I tried to make clear in my earlier post “Charlie Parker and Shostakovich: Art, the Artist, and Culture,” the individual is neither reducible to nor determined by identity categories and cultural context.
Much writing and thinking about identity politics is motivated by the desire to mitigate the effects of racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, ageism, ableism, or other prejudices and discriminatory practices. It often does so through the celebration of works and deeds of individuals of a particular identity category, e.g. the celebrations of black history month or women’s history month, or the commemoration of works by women composers, black poets, gay playwrights, etc. There’s nothing wrong with the celebration of anyone’s creative expressions or good deeds, and a lot right with calling attention to worthy creations of individuals often overlooked simply because of prejudice. At the same time, at its most extreme, identity politics involves a logic that minimizes the possibilities for critical dialogue and unwittingly recapitulates some of the effects of the very prejudices it desires to effect.
Identity politics goes awry when notions of authenticity are linked to authority to speak, when only those with authenticity are seen as having authority to speak about a topic or category and when those with authenticity are prescribed to speak or express themselves only in authentic ways. For example, when the work of black poets or musicians is called into question as not “black” enough, this doesn’t fight racism but recapitulates it by assuming that there is a particular domain of content and form which is “black,” that black individuals should limit themselves to such domains, and that the only reason why they might want to do otherwise is through internalized racism and/or inauthenticity. Further, when the perceived right to speak is linked to notions of authentic categorical membership, this in no way reduces prejudice or discrimination but places new boundaries in the way of open and critical dialogue.
Aside from the important problems with authority and authenticity, there is also here a confusion about prepositions, about the difference between speaking for, speaking as, speaking about, and speaking to.
Speaking For and Speaking As
Simply put, I can’t speak for anyone but myself and shouldn’t try to. Not being someone else, and not having others’ subjective experience, I can’t place myself in someone else’s subject position and refer to myself as “I” for them. As someone who takes the insights of Lacanian psychoanalysis seriously, I can’t even speak for myself in all contexts, times, and places. The same is true for anyone else, and it’s farcical for anyone to attempt to speak not just for another person but for an entire category or type of person.
What’s not so often recognized is that this is just as true for those within a particular category as those without. It may be more blatantly sexist for a man to try to speak for women, but no woman can speak for women other than herself.
Speaking as a member of a category is less problematic. Since social categories are perceived by others and shape interactions between individuals, identity categories do shape the experiences of individuals, and we can speak of experiences that tend to be common or statistically typical for members of a class. In that sense, a woman can speak as a woman, or a gay man as gay, insofar as their subjectivity reflects experiences often common to others sharing the same identity. But even speaking as cries out for caution, as it is easy to shift from speaking as someone whose subjectivity reflects experiences often typical of the group to speaking of oneself as the representative of the group. Speaking as easily slips into speaking for.
Speaking About and Speaking To
While I can’t speak for anyone other than myself (and can only problematically speak for myself by performing as if my subjectivity is more unitary than it is), I can speak about all sorts of things, including other people, and I can speak to anyone. Ideally I should do so with knowledge and with respect, but there’s no reason why anyone shouldn’t be able and free to speak about whatever they want and to whomever they wish. Approaches to identity politics that attempt to tie authority to speak to authentic membership in an identity group or possession of an authentic viewpoint inherently limit the development of human consciousness and communication.
Culture, Culture Change, and the Ethics of Cultural Intervention
In an article from 1958, “The Fox Project” (Human Organization, V. 17, pp. 17-19), Sol Tax both described an applied anthropological project with the Fox Indians of Iowa and laid out the basis for anthropologists’ engaging in processes of culture change in what he called “action anthropology.” Why revisit this almost 50 year old article? Primarily because it lucidly gets at the crux of what applied or action anthropology is about, as well as some of the ethical and value considerations associated with it.
Culture and Culture Change
Tax was clearly aware that in attempting to aid the Fox Indians in the economic development of their community, he and his students were engaging in an intervention into culture and engaging directly in a process of culture change. Recognizing this, he also recognized a need for basic ground rules for such intervention into culture. He writes of the potentials for culture change in the Fox community:
“The two irreducible conditions of community-wide changes are that the new behavior does not require either (1) a loss of Fox identity, or (2) violation of Fox moral beliefs. One takes for granted also that the change is practicably possible – that the new behavior required is understandable and feasible, and that there is some reason, from the point of view of the Indians to make it. Given these two general limitations, we suppose any change is possible.”
Implicitly, a particular sense of “culture” is being used here. Anthropologists and others typically recognize two senses of the word “culture” – one the ethos, manners, mores, and patterns of high culture, the other the sense more typically employed by anthropologists focusing on a total patterned lifeway of a people or population. In an important article, “Culture – Genuine and Spurious,” Edward Sapir noted that there are three important senses in which “culture” is used. He recognized that “culture” in the sense of high culture represented a restricted subset of the sense of culture as a total lifeway in that it represented the lifeway of a particular class context. He also noted, though, that there is another important way in which we used “culture.” As with “high culture,” we often use “culture” in a way more restricted than to refer to all aspects of the total patterned lifeway of a population. In this third sense, we mean the core premises of identity, values, ethos, and worldview and a restricted set of practices taken as “typical” or “essential.” It is typically these elements of the lifeway which are most durable, most valued, or that are the intended reference when people speak of their culture. So, for example, maquiladora factories and Coca-Cola are part of the total lifeway of Mexico today, and thus are part of Mexican culture in one sense of the word, but are not the sorts of things people (Mexican or otherwise) typically intend when speaking of “Mexican culture.”
For Tax or the Fox, behaviors or ideas that were simply part of the total lifeway’s set of practices were readily subject to change without controversy. It was those behaviors and ideas seen as essential to identity and moral beliefs (and I would venture to guess also those seen as essential to ethos and worldview) that were highly cherished and not changeable without controversy. Likewise, in contemporary controversies surrounding cultural description, critique, or intervention and cultural relativism, it is change with regard to those elements of the total patterned lifeway that are locally constructed (on whatever basis – in some cases ethos may be most highly touted, in others certain behaviors, in others elements of the worldview) as “the culture” in this third sense that generate controversy. No one (at least no one I can think of or imagine) is likely to criticize a critique by a non-Mexican of maquiladora factory production in Mexico City or Juarez as an example of cultural imperialism (if anything, such industrial production might be seen as cultural imperialism). A critique of “Mexican Machismo” very well might generate controversy, though.
The ethics of cultural intervention
Tax’s article is also useful in laying out provisional value orientations for engaging in applied anthropology and intervening in a particular cultural context. He lays out three values ideally involved when engaging in cultural intervention (or as he even says, “interference”).
His first value is that of truth. While ascertaining truth is an often formidable task, to value truth as a principle seems to me straightforward and non-controversial (except, perhaps, when it’s not – for example in cases where an anthropologist’s view of truth might stand in opposition to that of those being aided via applied anthropological work).
Tax continues:
“Second, we feel most strongly the value of freedom, as it is classically expressed and limited. Freedom in our context usually means freedom for individuals to choose the group with which to identify and freedom for a community to choose its way of life. We would also be embarrassed if it were shown that we are, for example, encouraging Indians to remain Indians, rather than to become something else, or trying to preserve Indian cultures, when the Indians involved would choose otherwise. All we want in our action programs is to provide, if we can, genuine alternatives from which the people involved can freely choose…”
In other words, Tax held (and I hold) the autonomy of the individual as a fundamental value.
Tax’s third value is what he called a “kind of Law of Parsimony which tells us not to settle questions of values unless they concern us.” This is an important pragmatic principle for operation, where, for example, even though some anthropologists involved in the Fox project felt that assimilation was in the interest of the Fox and others did not, Tax felt that it was inessential for them to decide, and in any case, given the higher valuation placed on the autonomy of Fox individuals, this was not the anthropologists’ decision in any case.
He discusses further the possibility of additional operating principles or premises, but decides against this. He uses the following example:
“People are always asking whether we think cannibals have a right to self-determination. With respect to cannibalism, would we not have to impose some value of our own? Now, I neither eat human flesh, nor like the thought of being eaten; I am revolted as others in our culture by the whole idea. I have no notion what I would do if I found myself involved in an action program on a cannibal isle; I can only think of jokes to say. If I attempt to answer seriously I am beset with all the value contradictions involved in so-called cultural relativism. But whatever my personal position on this, it has no significant bearing on what we should do tomorrow to help the Fox Indians develop more constructive relationships within their community, or with other Iowans.”
Frankly, I’m not sure why this example creates a conundrum, insofar as if one take the valuation of the autonomy of each individual at all seriously, then the autonomy of one person to develop themselves and determine their life to the extent possible (which obviously entails continuing to live) clearly outweighs the autonomy of another to eat them. (If you had a cannibal isle where some really autonomously consent to be eaten, then you’d have a real conundrum.) Still, Tax is right that the ethics of one case don’t really impinge on the ethics of another, so such hypothetical cases are pragmatically beside the point. Recognizing that it is pragmatically and ethically efficacious to avoid making decisions or judgment calls when not necessary, though, doesn’t help in knowing what to do when such decisions cannot be avoided. While anthropologists today are unlikely to have to grapple with the autonomy of cannibals, there are cases in virtually every cultural context where different individuals’ effective autonomy stand at odds and impinge upon one another.
While I find Tax’s article wanting in essentially evading this sort of all too common dilemma, at the same time I find that his three basic values (which are essentially the values of the Enlightenment project) serve us well. On the one hand, the combination of ethical parsimony, cultural relativism, and the valuation of individuals’ autonomy in many situations leads us anthropologically to simply attempt to describe and understand the context at hand. On the other, when the effective autonomy of individuals is at odds or is compromised (e.g. Philippe Bourgois’ example of Costa Rican plantation workers’ lives being largely shaped by decisions of landowners and managers – an example of individuals having opposed interests, or many examples of imposed female genital modification – an example where one individual’s autonomy is compromised by others for reasons typically seen as being in that person’s interest), then we must either be willing to critique such practices or realize that our lack of critique passively and tacitly accepts the imposition of power on the weaker.
Tradition and Individual Autonomy
One first principle I am asserting here follows from the enlightenment tradition and project and emphasizes the sanctity and autonomy of the individual’s freedom to act, within the limits of not violating others’ autonomy, i.e. anyone should be free to do and develop their self as they see fit. As with any first premise, this can’t be “proved,” but is a starting assumption which some will agree with and some will not.
At the same time, as a cultural anthropologist I respect the importance of cultural tradition and the diversity of ways to be human. For that matter, for me a corollary of respect for individual autonomy is a limited sort of cultural relativism, insofar as individuality is largely shaped within a particular cultural context and individual autonomy includes the freedom to practice a particular array of cultural patterned behaviors. When at odds, though, for me the individual always trumps tradition and custom (which is not at all to say that any individual’s autonomy trumps another’s right to the traditions or customs of their choosing, but rather that privileging tradition or the “norm” is to privilege one set of individuals’ autonomy over others).
To the extent that it is anything, tradition is the reification or objectification of the results of multiple individuals’ actions. To imagine tradition as functioning in a determinative or mechanistic way is to simplify and falsify the complexities of social interaction. As Pierre Bourdieu has said (Outline of a Theory of Practice, p. 73), “It is necessary to abandon all theories which explicitly or implicitly treat practice as a mechanical reaction, directly determined by the antecedent conditions and entirely reducible to the mechanical functioning of pre-established assemblies, ‘models’ or ‘roles’…” Further, if culture or tradition are not determinative (and they are not), to imagine tradition as requiring adherence and to value tradition more highly than the individual is to privilege a sort of tyranny of the statistical majority at best, and to privilege the more powerful who have greater control over what counts as tradition or status quo practice.
Conclusion
Where does this leave us? First, we should remember the universality of rationality, but also the potential for irrationality, among all human groups, as well as the importance and diversity of cultural traditions and social standards upon which rational and non-rational choices are made. But there is also the necessity of making choices and critically engaging in praxis on the basis of such choices. In a world where there is no universal moral code, but where we are also inherently engaged in globally cross-cutting social interactions of all sorts and where we cannot disengage and be totally neutral in political or ethical effect, we must maintain and refine the critical tension that has long been a part of American anthropology.
An uncritical rationalism falls short (1) in that there is no universal rational agent – not because people are not universally capable of rationality, but because the differing contexts of peoples’ lives present highly varying modes of rationalization, and because we are all so paramountly capable of irrationality – and (2) because the underestimation of cultural difference undermines the value of autonomy and freedom (including autonomy to develop cultural traditions, values, worldviews, etc.) of the enlightenment project of which rationalism is supposedly a part. At the same time, an uncritical cultural relativism falls similarly short. All too often it is based in the notion of a culture’s autonomy, which involves not just the useful reification of analytical modeling but a reification which obscures individuals’ actions and motivations in such a way that the status quo (which is itself a reification, of course) is taken as the decisions and norms of “the culture”, naturalizing asymmetrical relationships as tradition – as if all have equal autonomy in producing or consenting to this state of affairs, and normalizing the views of a culture’s elites as “typical”. A cultural relativism which sincerely values and respects differences is valuable. One that validates at face value anything which happens to be part of the traditions of a culture is problematic. When further wed to an identity politics in which only cultural “insiders” can speak about a particular context, cultural relativism can become insidious, undermining both the power of the human intellect and ability to communicate across cultures and not be confined to incommensurable languages and traditions, and falsifying the truly hybrid nature of all our cultural traditions which result from the history of human cultural interpenetration and communication. Instead, if anthropology and ethnography are to continue to offer something worthwhile, we need to refine key elements of our theoretical tradition to engage in an expanded enlightenment project, one which is rational and values equality, justice, and autonomy – including that of cultural diversity – but which is also involved in engaged cultural critique and praxis through cross-cultural communication and co-equal interaction.
References Cited
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