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 writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
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.”
Friday, April 6, 2007
Ethnographic Research Methods and Ethnographic Writing
Ethnography is one of the main things cultural anthropologists do. It’s not actually the thing most cultural anthropologists spend the most time doing – that would include a long list of activities, such as teaching classes, filling out paperwork, attending meetings, eating, sleeping, and a whole slew of other mundane behaviors, but doing ethnography is perhaps the activity that defines the endeavor of cultural anthropology.
As with the defining activity of any academic discipline or applied science, doing ethnography really means doing two disparate sorts of things – conducting ethnographic research (i.e. studying particular cultural contexts using a variety of specific methods, including participant observation, but also a number of others, such as various interview techniques, free listing, focus groups, pile sorting, etc.) and writing ethnographic texts (texts that can take on a variety of forms but which have as a primary motivation the presentation, evocation, representation, or interpretation of something essential about a cultural context).
I’ve written in several recent posts (April 2, March 23, March 10, March 5, February 12, February 10) about one or the other of these ethnographic practices, research or writing, whereas here I’d like to discuss the relationship between research and writing.
In “Thinking Problem: Rethinking Ethnographic Methods in relation to a study of students’ cultural models of drinking” (March 23) and “Measurement and Interpretation: Let us speak no more of Quantitative and Qualitative Research” (March 10), I argued against the tendency to conceptualize social research primarily using the rubric of qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis. There is simply no such thing as pure qualitative or quantitative research; further, the tendency to proceed as if these are clearly distinct and even mutually exclusive modes of research has often inhibited rather than facilitated scholarly communication. Without a different set of terminology to conceptualize research methods, we are left with this clearly imperfect set of terms, so I also argued that we should replace the emphasis on qualitative or quantitative with an emphasis on the components of measurement and interpretation which are present in all research.
In “Ethnography as Art or Science” (April 2), I discussed two distinct modes of ethnographic writing (with recognition of many ethnographies as falling somewhere in between the extremes), ethnography as an artistic or literary genre, where the creation of text as object to be experienced and appreciated in its own right is one primary goal (as I’ll discuss below, not the only goal, or we’re not dealing with ethnography), and ethnography as scientific text, where one primary goal is the efficient transmission of valid, reliable information about a particular context.
I see no problem with the use of any number of research methods, each of which has its own strengths and limitations. (I might have a problem with the use of a specific method for a particular question, but research methods are tools. In themselves, they are neutral, though for particular purposes in a specific context, one tool may be superior or inferior to another.) I also see no problem with different modes of ethnographic writing; on the contrary, I find myself enriched by the variety of ethnographic texts that have been produced recently and over the last century or so. I do have a problem with the all too common association of certain research styles and strategies with mode of writing. “Quantitative” research is typically presented in a scientific mode of writing, while “qualitative” ethnography is often presented in a more literary and narrative style (with the reverse association holding perhaps more strongly, in that most literary ethnographies are built upon “qualitative” research). It’s not the association between research method and mode of writing in a particular case that I take issue with so much as the fact that there is a clear general pattern.
Just as I regard the qualitative / quantitative divide as false and not a good way to conceptualize research methods, so I also don’t regard a concern with precise and rigorous measurement (where measurement can but need not equal quantification and enumeration) in methods as clearly linked with a particular mode of writing. The mode of writing is a choice independent of that of methods. The choice of methods is related to what one wants to find out, the hypothesis or question in mind to be examined. The choice of mode of writing is related to what one wants to convey, present, or communicate (not necessarily the same things) about the context and research encounter. Literary or scientific modes of writing can be related to data collected and analyzed using any number of methods. At least a handful of anthropologists and others have recognized this, writing very different sorts of texts with different aims and motivations from the same research, e.g. the work of David Maybury-Lewis (discussed below and in my April 2 post), Paul Rabinow's Symbolic Domination: Cultural Form and Historical Change in Morocco and the later Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco, or outside anthropology in the field of biology and ecology, Bernd Heinrich’s books Ravens in Winter, The Mind of the Raven, or Winter World, compared to his scientific reports. But generally, the style of writing ethnography seems to be chosen on reflex, as if only one style of writing could naturally relate to a particular data collection and analysis strategy, whereas choice of methods and choice of writing mode are actually independent choices (or at least should be).
All ethnographic texts, regardless of research methods employed or mode of writing, share something in common. They all share an interest in presenting an accurate fit between text and world (and hence should share a common interest in sound research methods), where our textual models present icons of some important aspects of the world, and in particular of the specific cultural context(s) being written about. This seems straightforward and simple for scientific writing, but this is deceptive, where a continual issue in assessing fit between model and world is assessing whether what we’ve modeled in our texts presents what’s there on its own terms and with its own logic rather than imposing a model that can be made to fit the context but may not reflect what’s there as much as the scientist’s interests and own cultural models. But it’s also true that artistic or literary ethnography share in the interest of fit between text and world, insofar as it’s ethnography in addition to being art.
Ethnography is “writing culture,” but not all “writing culture” is ethnography – there are other literary writings that also skillfully evoke or present for experience some quality, truth, or information about a particular cultural setting, e.g. Joyce’s novels or Tobias Schneebaum’s memoir Keep the River on Your Right. However, such non-ethnographic texts which “write culture” need not be concerned about detailed fit between text and cultural world, even if they manage to communicate or evoke something profound about a particular cultural milieu. I might pick up Schneebaum’s text for an engaging, thought-provoking read (and for what it says, perhaps unwittingly – perhaps not, about western cultural notions of the other), but I’d never pick it up to try to find accurate, reliable, valid information about Peruvian Amazonian cultures. On the other hand, I might pick up either The Savage and the Innocent or Akwe-Shavante Society by Maybury-Lewis for accurate, reliable, valid information on Brazilian Highland societies – I might find the information I want more quickly and efficiently in Akwe-Shavante Society, and I find the other book a more engaging, memorable experience to read, but though they are written in different ethnographic modalities, they share the ethnographic concern with accurately presenting cultural contexts and models.
I'd like to thank Amy Mountcastle. A conversation at the recent Society for Applied Anthropology meeting with her helped prompt my writing in this post.
As with the defining activity of any academic discipline or applied science, doing ethnography really means doing two disparate sorts of things – conducting ethnographic research (i.e. studying particular cultural contexts using a variety of specific methods, including participant observation, but also a number of others, such as various interview techniques, free listing, focus groups, pile sorting, etc.) and writing ethnographic texts (texts that can take on a variety of forms but which have as a primary motivation the presentation, evocation, representation, or interpretation of something essential about a cultural context).
I’ve written in several recent posts (April 2, March 23, March 10, March 5, February 12, February 10) about one or the other of these ethnographic practices, research or writing, whereas here I’d like to discuss the relationship between research and writing.
In “Thinking Problem: Rethinking Ethnographic Methods in relation to a study of students’ cultural models of drinking” (March 23) and “Measurement and Interpretation: Let us speak no more of Quantitative and Qualitative Research” (March 10), I argued against the tendency to conceptualize social research primarily using the rubric of qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis. There is simply no such thing as pure qualitative or quantitative research; further, the tendency to proceed as if these are clearly distinct and even mutually exclusive modes of research has often inhibited rather than facilitated scholarly communication. Without a different set of terminology to conceptualize research methods, we are left with this clearly imperfect set of terms, so I also argued that we should replace the emphasis on qualitative or quantitative with an emphasis on the components of measurement and interpretation which are present in all research.
In “Ethnography as Art or Science” (April 2), I discussed two distinct modes of ethnographic writing (with recognition of many ethnographies as falling somewhere in between the extremes), ethnography as an artistic or literary genre, where the creation of text as object to be experienced and appreciated in its own right is one primary goal (as I’ll discuss below, not the only goal, or we’re not dealing with ethnography), and ethnography as scientific text, where one primary goal is the efficient transmission of valid, reliable information about a particular context.
I see no problem with the use of any number of research methods, each of which has its own strengths and limitations. (I might have a problem with the use of a specific method for a particular question, but research methods are tools. In themselves, they are neutral, though for particular purposes in a specific context, one tool may be superior or inferior to another.) I also see no problem with different modes of ethnographic writing; on the contrary, I find myself enriched by the variety of ethnographic texts that have been produced recently and over the last century or so. I do have a problem with the all too common association of certain research styles and strategies with mode of writing. “Quantitative” research is typically presented in a scientific mode of writing, while “qualitative” ethnography is often presented in a more literary and narrative style (with the reverse association holding perhaps more strongly, in that most literary ethnographies are built upon “qualitative” research). It’s not the association between research method and mode of writing in a particular case that I take issue with so much as the fact that there is a clear general pattern.
Just as I regard the qualitative / quantitative divide as false and not a good way to conceptualize research methods, so I also don’t regard a concern with precise and rigorous measurement (where measurement can but need not equal quantification and enumeration) in methods as clearly linked with a particular mode of writing. The mode of writing is a choice independent of that of methods. The choice of methods is related to what one wants to find out, the hypothesis or question in mind to be examined. The choice of mode of writing is related to what one wants to convey, present, or communicate (not necessarily the same things) about the context and research encounter. Literary or scientific modes of writing can be related to data collected and analyzed using any number of methods. At least a handful of anthropologists and others have recognized this, writing very different sorts of texts with different aims and motivations from the same research, e.g. the work of David Maybury-Lewis (discussed below and in my April 2 post), Paul Rabinow's Symbolic Domination: Cultural Form and Historical Change in Morocco and the later Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco, or outside anthropology in the field of biology and ecology, Bernd Heinrich’s books Ravens in Winter, The Mind of the Raven, or Winter World, compared to his scientific reports. But generally, the style of writing ethnography seems to be chosen on reflex, as if only one style of writing could naturally relate to a particular data collection and analysis strategy, whereas choice of methods and choice of writing mode are actually independent choices (or at least should be).
All ethnographic texts, regardless of research methods employed or mode of writing, share something in common. They all share an interest in presenting an accurate fit between text and world (and hence should share a common interest in sound research methods), where our textual models present icons of some important aspects of the world, and in particular of the specific cultural context(s) being written about. This seems straightforward and simple for scientific writing, but this is deceptive, where a continual issue in assessing fit between model and world is assessing whether what we’ve modeled in our texts presents what’s there on its own terms and with its own logic rather than imposing a model that can be made to fit the context but may not reflect what’s there as much as the scientist’s interests and own cultural models. But it’s also true that artistic or literary ethnography share in the interest of fit between text and world, insofar as it’s ethnography in addition to being art.
Ethnography is “writing culture,” but not all “writing culture” is ethnography – there are other literary writings that also skillfully evoke or present for experience some quality, truth, or information about a particular cultural setting, e.g. Joyce’s novels or Tobias Schneebaum’s memoir Keep the River on Your Right. However, such non-ethnographic texts which “write culture” need not be concerned about detailed fit between text and cultural world, even if they manage to communicate or evoke something profound about a particular cultural milieu. I might pick up Schneebaum’s text for an engaging, thought-provoking read (and for what it says, perhaps unwittingly – perhaps not, about western cultural notions of the other), but I’d never pick it up to try to find accurate, reliable, valid information about Peruvian Amazonian cultures. On the other hand, I might pick up either The Savage and the Innocent or Akwe-Shavante Society by Maybury-Lewis for accurate, reliable, valid information on Brazilian Highland societies – I might find the information I want more quickly and efficiently in Akwe-Shavante Society, and I find the other book a more engaging, memorable experience to read, but though they are written in different ethnographic modalities, they share the ethnographic concern with accurately presenting cultural contexts and models.
I'd like to thank Amy Mountcastle. A conversation at the recent Society for Applied Anthropology meeting with her helped prompt my writing in this post.
Monday, April 2, 2007
Ethnography as Art or Science
Ethnography rests, sometimes uncomfortably, between art and science, between being a genre of writing aiming to present a unique sensuous experience evoking an other and being a genre of writing aiming to systematically pin down (a good entomological metaphor, where much effort in ethnographic science has been oriented toward what Edmund Leach, in Rethinking Anthropology (1959), termed cultural “butterfly collecting”) and explain cultural contexts.
Art presents a unique object to be experienced as an object of pleasure in itself. To the extent art is about something, it is largely through evocation. As I argued in my previous post (“Art that’s more interesting to think about than to experience”), when art becomes more concerned with explaining or being about something, the experience tends to become thin and cold. (This isn’t to deny that art can be about something. Nor is it to say that content is unimportant. This is particularly the case for literature. For example, novels that aren’t about anything tend to wear thin quickly, and poetry generally has some content. But when art is mainly about explaining or representing some idea, it’s only as interesting as the idea itself, and if your goal is to explain or communicate any set of complex information, there are far more efficient means than poetry.)
Science is about things. Science aims to systematically explore, understand, and explain things in the world. Scientific writing, like art, does present an object that is experienced, but in the case of science, that’s really not the point. Scientific reports, as a genre of writing, are typically formulated to efficiently convey complex information. The experience of reading a scientific report is generally not a memorable one in itself, nor is it intended to be.
Ethnography can work in either manner, or in a way that combines the two (something I discussed in a different way, in relation to myth and mythic thinking in an earlier post, “Ethnography, Science, Myth, and Cultural Criticism”). Of course, it can also fail in either manner, insofar as particular ethnographies might fail to be good art or good science, though I think it’s wrongheaded to fault ethnographies with more scientific intentions for failing to be good art or ethnographies with artistic intentions for failing to be good science.
The most memorable ethnographies are often those that work as art. This is so for the straightforward reason that what makes them work as literary art is that they provide a sensuous experience that evokes an other in a compelling way that is worthy of revisiting as a piece of artistic writing independent of the specific content. David Maybury-Lewis’ ethnographic memoir The Savage and the Innocent (1965) works in this way, evoking the experience of living among the Sherente and Shavante peoples, and doing so through a narrative that is an interesting experience in its own right. The “conventional” (The Savage and the Innocent is “conventional” as a memoir, or even as an ethnographic memoir, something that had an established existence as a genre by 1965) companion book, Akwe-Shavante Society (1967), is quite different, working more in the scientific mode. The Savage and the Innocent is more memorable, more evocative and even poetic at times, but that isn’t to say it’s a better book than Akwe-Shavante Society. It’s better at being art, but as a piece of science, the latter is clearly superior, being systematically arranged for the efficient communication of information about the Brazilian societies in question.
Art presents a unique object to be experienced as an object of pleasure in itself. To the extent art is about something, it is largely through evocation. As I argued in my previous post (“Art that’s more interesting to think about than to experience”), when art becomes more concerned with explaining or being about something, the experience tends to become thin and cold. (This isn’t to deny that art can be about something. Nor is it to say that content is unimportant. This is particularly the case for literature. For example, novels that aren’t about anything tend to wear thin quickly, and poetry generally has some content. But when art is mainly about explaining or representing some idea, it’s only as interesting as the idea itself, and if your goal is to explain or communicate any set of complex information, there are far more efficient means than poetry.)
Science is about things. Science aims to systematically explore, understand, and explain things in the world. Scientific writing, like art, does present an object that is experienced, but in the case of science, that’s really not the point. Scientific reports, as a genre of writing, are typically formulated to efficiently convey complex information. The experience of reading a scientific report is generally not a memorable one in itself, nor is it intended to be.
Ethnography can work in either manner, or in a way that combines the two (something I discussed in a different way, in relation to myth and mythic thinking in an earlier post, “Ethnography, Science, Myth, and Cultural Criticism”). Of course, it can also fail in either manner, insofar as particular ethnographies might fail to be good art or good science, though I think it’s wrongheaded to fault ethnographies with more scientific intentions for failing to be good art or ethnographies with artistic intentions for failing to be good science.
The most memorable ethnographies are often those that work as art. This is so for the straightforward reason that what makes them work as literary art is that they provide a sensuous experience that evokes an other in a compelling way that is worthy of revisiting as a piece of artistic writing independent of the specific content. David Maybury-Lewis’ ethnographic memoir The Savage and the Innocent (1965) works in this way, evoking the experience of living among the Sherente and Shavante peoples, and doing so through a narrative that is an interesting experience in its own right. The “conventional” (The Savage and the Innocent is “conventional” as a memoir, or even as an ethnographic memoir, something that had an established existence as a genre by 1965) companion book, Akwe-Shavante Society (1967), is quite different, working more in the scientific mode. The Savage and the Innocent is more memorable, more evocative and even poetic at times, but that isn’t to say it’s a better book than Akwe-Shavante Society. It’s better at being art, but as a piece of science, the latter is clearly superior, being systematically arranged for the efficient communication of information about the Brazilian societies in question.
Monday, March 5, 2007
Difficulty in Ethnographic Writing
Most cultural anthropologists would agree that in our ethnographic writing we should be as clear as possible. The reason for this is obvious: given that 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 can obstruct this. When engaging in “public anthropology” and attempting to communicate anthropological understandings to an interested lay audience, the stricture to write clearly is even more strongly mandated.
Something that anthropologists have not discussed much, though, is what exactly constitutes “clarity” or “difficulty” in writing. There is a general sense, perhaps, 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 such complex vocabulary as must be used), 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 a recent post on Reginald Shepherd's Blog useful. In Defining Difficulty in Poetry Shepherd considers precisely this issue of delineating types or sorts of difficulty in another genre of writing, poetry. Shepherd discusses five types of difficulty in writing, which he identifies as: lexical difficulty, allusive difficulty, syntactical difficulty, semantic difficulty (with two varieties – explicative and interpretive difficulties), and formal difficulty.
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.
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).
An Additional Type of Difficulty: Formatting
In addition to Shepherd’s five types of difficulty, I’d like to add another type that I’ll discuss first because I think it works in a simpler manner (and is frankly less interesting – though it is something that anthropologists do discuss). I’ll call this “formatting” difficulty for the moment. We use different conventions for formatting ethnographic writing, often depending on the intended or assumed audience. There is a general sense that we should avoid the use of scholarly citation formatting when writing for a public audience. I’ve had several anthropologists over the years aver that we should avoid all those parenthetical citations or footnotes and bibliographies when writing for the public (and I’ve encountered essentially the same position in other disciplines as well).
Personally, I find the assumption that the general public will be tripped up or confused by scholarly formatting patronizing – it assumes that our readers are more stupid than (I hope) they are. I also find it hard to imagine readers being bored or otherwise put off simply on account of formatting if the text is otherwise engaging, though it is a legitimate issue to consider whether formatting elements (citational or otherwise) might create difficulty by violating readers’ habits and expectations. The same thing arises in other directions. Try submitting an empirically grounded, well argued ethnographic article without many source citations to a peer reviewed journal. You’ll likely be rejected largely because you’ve violated expectations; you’ve not cited enough sources (and it is often an open question how many sources you need to cite or should cite) and not grounded your discussion in the literature (and not given your arguments the authority that clear familiarity with the literature brings).
Lexical Difficulty
Lexical difficulty is straightforward – words that are unfamiliar are used, or words are used in an unfamiliar way or in a way at variance with convention or their dictionary definitions. 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. My students in Introduction to Anthropology have a devil of a time keeping straight the differences between hominoids, hominids, and hominines – not because they can’t grasp the basic referents, but because they’re unfamiliar words that are quite similar in sound and on top of that have highly overlapping but distinct referents. 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 have a definition for him.
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 here is not to ban the use of “difficult” words – anyone can benefit from encountering new words and learning their meaning, i.e. not knowing the meaning of a word doesn’t prevent learning and understanding it. Further, 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 equally suffice, or by clarifying their referent and meaning when they are needed. The difficulty here as 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 allusive difficulty in 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.” In another realm of expression, jazz performance, I’m reminded of something I read in the liner notes by Orrin Keepnews to Thelonious Monk’s album, Thelonious Monk plays Duke Ellington, Monk’s first album on the Riverside record label. This album was recorded in 1955, and for much of his career up until then, Monk had been perceived by many as difficult or incompetent (by those who assumed that their difficulty in understanding Monk’s music must index an inability to play well) or highly eccentric at best. The decision to have Monk record an album of songs associated with Duke Ellington was partly the result of Monk simply liking the idea of doing so. At the same time, as Keepnews writes in the liner notes, part of the idea was to more clearly introduce Monk’s playing style to listeners who didn’t “get” him before. Melodic improvisation of the sort that Monk engaged in in his playing is a form of musical allusion, evoking a tune that is familiar to the listener, while simultaneously varying it, with much pleasure coming from the continual play between a known tune alluded to and the played music being improvised in relation to that tune but in variance with it. Up until this point, Monk had been mainly recording his own music. Today, most jazz fans are highly familiar with Monk’s music, but this wasn’t true in 1955, so many listeners simply weren’t getting the allusion. They didn’t know the tunes, and couldn’t tell the tune from the improvisation and variation on the tune, and couldn’t experience the pleasure that comes from that. By playing Ellington tunes that any jazz fan in the mid 1950s knew well, Thelonious Monk plays Duke Ellington was actually more effective in showcasing Monk’s improvisatory skills, and by giving listeners a window into his improvising style, also offered a better key for listening to other recordings of him playing his own music.
Returning to ethnography, much lexical difficulty 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, this is often a matter of mastering the art of gauging one’s audience well. In a scholarly 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 a textbook or a work for a popular audience the same assumption could not 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 generally 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 also says that “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, when someone looks at a passage of text and simply cannot make heads or tails of it, is quite often the result of a concatenation of all the previous forms of difficulty. Take the following passage 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 (i.e. if those difficulties were mitigated), 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 – and that’s clearly not a bad thing.
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 (which would be academically more honest – since matters of the supernatural are neither provable nor disprovable, why not restrict ourselves to what people say and claim, what they do, and the social consequences of what people believe, say, and do) but as straightforward elements of natural reality. Some historical writing, especially that focusing on Medieval saints’ lives, follows this convention as well. 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?” I’m not suggesting this difficulty is difficult to clarify – generally just informing students of the convention works, though at the same time, this and similar “interpretive difficulties” could be readily clarified in the writing itself, especially when, call me crazy, I don’t think that most anthropologists believe in flying Trobriand witches or avenging souls any more than they believe that any number of Medieval saints were exhumed years after their deaths, only to reveal their bodies completely undecomposed and smelling of roses. What anthropologists do generally believe and take seriously is the need to take such claims and practices seriously and understand them on their own terms, something that could be more clearly communicated by marking them as simply empirically observed claims and practices.
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 at all. 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 does fit 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, we 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). 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, I do think the presence of such “formal difficulty” spells out a need to more intensively investigate the importance of form for ethnography and other genres. (I also don’t think we can glibly fall back on something like fictionality – at least not in a simple sense – to define the difference between ethnography and some novels – 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 “ethnographic” “fiction,” but 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.)
Experimental Ethnography
I described in an earlier post, “Experimental Ethnography Old and New,” how experimentation with the form of 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. That earlier post of mine was originally written in response to reactions to a student of mine’s ethnographically based M.A. thesis. The student had written what I saw as a brilliant thesis and a beautiful ethnography. Her work was also somewhat experimental in form. The thesis committee received back from the college’s thesis reader and dean’s office requests for clarification. They wanted to know how this text was an ethnography, how it was a piece of scholarly work, and how to evaluate the quality of a work that was experimental and didn’t follow the form of more conventional social science writing. In other words, the readers of the text were experiencing formal difficulty, and I mention this example here not to take any sort of dig at anybody who didn’t get the text, but to recognize the legitimacy of the questions raised. It is the case that 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).
Something that anthropologists have not discussed much, though, is what exactly constitutes “clarity” or “difficulty” in writing. There is a general sense, perhaps, 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 such complex vocabulary as must be used), 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 a recent post on Reginald Shepherd's Blog useful. In Defining Difficulty in Poetry Shepherd considers precisely this issue of delineating types or sorts of difficulty in another genre of writing, poetry. Shepherd discusses five types of difficulty in writing, which he identifies as: lexical difficulty, allusive difficulty, syntactical difficulty, semantic difficulty (with two varieties – explicative and interpretive difficulties), and formal difficulty.
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.
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).
An Additional Type of Difficulty: Formatting
In addition to Shepherd’s five types of difficulty, I’d like to add another type that I’ll discuss first because I think it works in a simpler manner (and is frankly less interesting – though it is something that anthropologists do discuss). I’ll call this “formatting” difficulty for the moment. We use different conventions for formatting ethnographic writing, often depending on the intended or assumed audience. There is a general sense that we should avoid the use of scholarly citation formatting when writing for a public audience. I’ve had several anthropologists over the years aver that we should avoid all those parenthetical citations or footnotes and bibliographies when writing for the public (and I’ve encountered essentially the same position in other disciplines as well).
Personally, I find the assumption that the general public will be tripped up or confused by scholarly formatting patronizing – it assumes that our readers are more stupid than (I hope) they are. I also find it hard to imagine readers being bored or otherwise put off simply on account of formatting if the text is otherwise engaging, though it is a legitimate issue to consider whether formatting elements (citational or otherwise) might create difficulty by violating readers’ habits and expectations. The same thing arises in other directions. Try submitting an empirically grounded, well argued ethnographic article without many source citations to a peer reviewed journal. You’ll likely be rejected largely because you’ve violated expectations; you’ve not cited enough sources (and it is often an open question how many sources you need to cite or should cite) and not grounded your discussion in the literature (and not given your arguments the authority that clear familiarity with the literature brings).
Lexical Difficulty
Lexical difficulty is straightforward – words that are unfamiliar are used, or words are used in an unfamiliar way or in a way at variance with convention or their dictionary definitions. 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. My students in Introduction to Anthropology have a devil of a time keeping straight the differences between hominoids, hominids, and hominines – not because they can’t grasp the basic referents, but because they’re unfamiliar words that are quite similar in sound and on top of that have highly overlapping but distinct referents. 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 have a definition for him.
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 here is not to ban the use of “difficult” words – anyone can benefit from encountering new words and learning their meaning, i.e. not knowing the meaning of a word doesn’t prevent learning and understanding it. Further, 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 equally suffice, or by clarifying their referent and meaning when they are needed. The difficulty here as 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 allusive difficulty in 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.” In another realm of expression, jazz performance, I’m reminded of something I read in the liner notes by Orrin Keepnews to Thelonious Monk’s album, Thelonious Monk plays Duke Ellington, Monk’s first album on the Riverside record label. This album was recorded in 1955, and for much of his career up until then, Monk had been perceived by many as difficult or incompetent (by those who assumed that their difficulty in understanding Monk’s music must index an inability to play well) or highly eccentric at best. The decision to have Monk record an album of songs associated with Duke Ellington was partly the result of Monk simply liking the idea of doing so. At the same time, as Keepnews writes in the liner notes, part of the idea was to more clearly introduce Monk’s playing style to listeners who didn’t “get” him before. Melodic improvisation of the sort that Monk engaged in in his playing is a form of musical allusion, evoking a tune that is familiar to the listener, while simultaneously varying it, with much pleasure coming from the continual play between a known tune alluded to and the played music being improvised in relation to that tune but in variance with it. Up until this point, Monk had been mainly recording his own music. Today, most jazz fans are highly familiar with Monk’s music, but this wasn’t true in 1955, so many listeners simply weren’t getting the allusion. They didn’t know the tunes, and couldn’t tell the tune from the improvisation and variation on the tune, and couldn’t experience the pleasure that comes from that. By playing Ellington tunes that any jazz fan in the mid 1950s knew well, Thelonious Monk plays Duke Ellington was actually more effective in showcasing Monk’s improvisatory skills, and by giving listeners a window into his improvising style, also offered a better key for listening to other recordings of him playing his own music.
Returning to ethnography, much lexical difficulty 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, this is often a matter of mastering the art of gauging one’s audience well. In a scholarly 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 a textbook or a work for a popular audience the same assumption could not 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 generally 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 also says that “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, when someone looks at a passage of text and simply cannot make heads or tails of it, is quite often the result of a concatenation of all the previous forms of difficulty. Take the following passage 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 (i.e. if those difficulties were mitigated), 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 – and that’s clearly not a bad thing.
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 (which would be academically more honest – since matters of the supernatural are neither provable nor disprovable, why not restrict ourselves to what people say and claim, what they do, and the social consequences of what people believe, say, and do) but as straightforward elements of natural reality. Some historical writing, especially that focusing on Medieval saints’ lives, follows this convention as well. 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?” I’m not suggesting this difficulty is difficult to clarify – generally just informing students of the convention works, though at the same time, this and similar “interpretive difficulties” could be readily clarified in the writing itself, especially when, call me crazy, I don’t think that most anthropologists believe in flying Trobriand witches or avenging souls any more than they believe that any number of Medieval saints were exhumed years after their deaths, only to reveal their bodies completely undecomposed and smelling of roses. What anthropologists do generally believe and take seriously is the need to take such claims and practices seriously and understand them on their own terms, something that could be more clearly communicated by marking them as simply empirically observed claims and practices.
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 at all. 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 does fit 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, we 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). 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, I do think the presence of such “formal difficulty” spells out a need to more intensively investigate the importance of form for ethnography and other genres. (I also don’t think we can glibly fall back on something like fictionality – at least not in a simple sense – to define the difference between ethnography and some novels – 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 “ethnographic” “fiction,” but 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.)
Experimental Ethnography
I described in an earlier post, “Experimental Ethnography Old and New,” how experimentation with the form of 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. That earlier post of mine was originally written in response to reactions to a student of mine’s ethnographically based M.A. thesis. The student had written what I saw as a brilliant thesis and a beautiful ethnography. Her work was also somewhat experimental in form. The thesis committee received back from the college’s thesis reader and dean’s office requests for clarification. They wanted to know how this text was an ethnography, how it was a piece of scholarly work, and how to evaluate the quality of a work that was experimental and didn’t follow the form of more conventional social science writing. In other words, the readers of the text were experiencing formal difficulty, and I mention this example here not to take any sort of dig at anybody who didn’t get the text, but to recognize the legitimacy of the questions raised. It is the case that 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).
Saturday, February 10, 2007
Experimental Ethnography Old and New
In many natural and social science disciplines, there are relatively formalized conventions for writing that make the assessment of text (including the ascertainment of the text as “scholarship”) fairly straightforward (and certainly this would be true of more social science oriented cultural anthropologists). In humanities disciplines (and cultural anthropology has always been as much linked to humanities as to social science scholarship), however, this is much less the case.
There is a long tradition in the humanities of concern with text, and related to this a long history of formal experimentation and play with text in scholarly writing, something that has been intensified since the 1980s with the influence of postmodernism and cultural studies. Below I address this long history of formal experimentation and play in ethnographic writing, as well as the specific changes or intensifications in this tradition since the 1980s.
The history of anthropological ethnography is rife with “unconventional” texts. Given that ethnography is the writing of culture, it has been natural that anthropologists explore ways in which various forms of writing or presenting culture shapes our understanding or provides new perspectives on the cultural contexts at hand. Tristes Tropiques (1955), by Claude Lévi-Strauss, is part memoir, part travelogue, is filled with novelistic detail, and is one of the classics of the ethnographic literature, shedding light on Native South American cultures and on how one anthropologist came by understanding and knowledge about those cultures.
Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian (1920), “by” Paul Radin, and The Children of Sanchez (1961), “by” Oscar Lewis, engaged in explorations of ethnographic form through having research subjects speak directly to the reader in their own voices. Balinese Character (1942), by Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, presented the visual aspect of Balinese culture via a montage of thousands of photographs with brief caption commentaries.
The Savage and the Innocent (1965), by Daniel Maybury-Lewis was a memoir of his time researching the Sherente and Shavante, but simultaneously an important contribution to the ethnographic literature through a combination of its rich cultural descriptions and its account of the social relations between Maybury-Lewis and Sherente and Shavante individuals which constituted his ethnographic research. Certainly, the discipline of anthropology has also produced more “conventional” social science texts, many of which have been quite influential, e.g. Robert Redfield and Alfonso Villa Rojas’ Chan Kom (1934), Roy Rappaport’s Pigs for the Ancestors (1968), or Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946) (a conventional social science text produced via unconventional ethnographic methods).
However, such conventional, highly formal, social scientific texts have never been the way of producing ethnography, and many of the most influential ethnographies have been the most unconventional, e.g. Tristes Tropiques, The Children of Sanchez, or In The Savage and the Innocent (which had far more influence in fact that its conventional companion piece Akwe-Shavante Society [1967]), perhaps precisely because their unconventionality forced readers to think about culture from different perspectives and think about their suppositions of culture and ethnography anew.
What changed in anthropological ethnography in the 1980s or so, then, was not an introduction of unconventionality or informality. Those were already long present in ethnography. Rather, more and more there has been a concern with the relationship between culture and representations of culture, with understanding the role of the individual researcher, with their background, agenda, and potential biases; in producing understandings of a cultural context and representations of such; with understanding the dialogical relations between ethnographer and research informants which constitute the “data” of ethnography as the social relationships that they are; with understanding the role that textual form plays in shaping our reading – and hence our understanding of the cultural context being represented, and because of the importance of textual form in all that, in calling attention to ethnographic writing and reading.
In Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan (1980), Vincent Crapanzano presents us not with a standard social science analysis of Morocco, but with transcripts of his interactions with Tuhami in a technique which hearkens back to Oscar Lewis or Paul Radin, but which also demonstrates the ways in which Crapanzano’s questions and presence shaped the interaction and thus the information available for interpretation.
In A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala (1999), Diane Nelson presents an anecdote concerning two encounters with a torture victim. The first involved her work as applied anthropologist with a human rights organization witnessing the acid burns and scars of the man and transcribing his testimonial about his torture. The second encounter was a chance meeting with the same man on a bus where the man proceeded to make a pass at Nelson. Why does Nelson include this anecdote, especially of the second encounter – it certainly has no place in a conventional social science text. The experience jarred Nelson’s understanding of what had transpired in the first encounter which she had understood in terms of the conventions of Latin American torture testimonial (a literary genre in its own right), with herself as mute transcriber of the testifying victim – a context in which she presumed an absence of erotic desire which had in fact been part of the man’s experience. In the inclusion of the anecdote, most readers’ assumptions are similarly jarred.
One of Michael Taussig’s latest books, Law in a Lawless Land: Diary of a Limpieza in Colombia (2003), is an ethnography – a writing of culture – in providing the sort of rich description of contemporary Colombian society characteristic of Taussig’s writing, but it also is a diary, one which ruminates on the ways in which the very personal and informal forms of the diary might shape our understandings of the world around us being written about – a critical concern for ethnographers since the primary means of data recording has long been the field diary. Such examples of interjecting the ethnographer as participant in the social scene being described, of representing the social interactions between anthropologist and informant which comprise the ethnographer’s data, of interjecting messiness (Nelson speaks of bodies and texts that are splattered if that terminology is preferred) have become in fact common and conventional in ethnographic writing.
By presenting the ways in which texts are formulated and the ways in which research was conducted in specific instances, such messiness is not sloppy, haphazard, or lazy. Instead, presenting the mode by which the text was produced provides an opportunity for readers to more objectively evaluate texts and the cultural understandings presented therein by allowing us to more critically examine the way in which they were produced and the ways in which the ethnographer’s specific actions shaped the understanding being presented.
There is a long tradition in the humanities of concern with text, and related to this a long history of formal experimentation and play with text in scholarly writing, something that has been intensified since the 1980s with the influence of postmodernism and cultural studies. Below I address this long history of formal experimentation and play in ethnographic writing, as well as the specific changes or intensifications in this tradition since the 1980s.
The history of anthropological ethnography is rife with “unconventional” texts. Given that ethnography is the writing of culture, it has been natural that anthropologists explore ways in which various forms of writing or presenting culture shapes our understanding or provides new perspectives on the cultural contexts at hand. Tristes Tropiques (1955), by Claude Lévi-Strauss, is part memoir, part travelogue, is filled with novelistic detail, and is one of the classics of the ethnographic literature, shedding light on Native South American cultures and on how one anthropologist came by understanding and knowledge about those cultures.
Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian (1920), “by” Paul Radin, and The Children of Sanchez (1961), “by” Oscar Lewis, engaged in explorations of ethnographic form through having research subjects speak directly to the reader in their own voices. Balinese Character (1942), by Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, presented the visual aspect of Balinese culture via a montage of thousands of photographs with brief caption commentaries.
The Savage and the Innocent (1965), by Daniel Maybury-Lewis was a memoir of his time researching the Sherente and Shavante, but simultaneously an important contribution to the ethnographic literature through a combination of its rich cultural descriptions and its account of the social relations between Maybury-Lewis and Sherente and Shavante individuals which constituted his ethnographic research. Certainly, the discipline of anthropology has also produced more “conventional” social science texts, many of which have been quite influential, e.g. Robert Redfield and Alfonso Villa Rojas’ Chan Kom (1934), Roy Rappaport’s Pigs for the Ancestors (1968), or Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946) (a conventional social science text produced via unconventional ethnographic methods).
However, such conventional, highly formal, social scientific texts have never been the way of producing ethnography, and many of the most influential ethnographies have been the most unconventional, e.g. Tristes Tropiques, The Children of Sanchez, or In The Savage and the Innocent (which had far more influence in fact that its conventional companion piece Akwe-Shavante Society [1967]), perhaps precisely because their unconventionality forced readers to think about culture from different perspectives and think about their suppositions of culture and ethnography anew.
What changed in anthropological ethnography in the 1980s or so, then, was not an introduction of unconventionality or informality. Those were already long present in ethnography. Rather, more and more there has been a concern with the relationship between culture and representations of culture, with understanding the role of the individual researcher, with their background, agenda, and potential biases; in producing understandings of a cultural context and representations of such; with understanding the dialogical relations between ethnographer and research informants which constitute the “data” of ethnography as the social relationships that they are; with understanding the role that textual form plays in shaping our reading – and hence our understanding of the cultural context being represented, and because of the importance of textual form in all that, in calling attention to ethnographic writing and reading.
In Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan (1980), Vincent Crapanzano presents us not with a standard social science analysis of Morocco, but with transcripts of his interactions with Tuhami in a technique which hearkens back to Oscar Lewis or Paul Radin, but which also demonstrates the ways in which Crapanzano’s questions and presence shaped the interaction and thus the information available for interpretation.
In A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala (1999), Diane Nelson presents an anecdote concerning two encounters with a torture victim. The first involved her work as applied anthropologist with a human rights organization witnessing the acid burns and scars of the man and transcribing his testimonial about his torture. The second encounter was a chance meeting with the same man on a bus where the man proceeded to make a pass at Nelson. Why does Nelson include this anecdote, especially of the second encounter – it certainly has no place in a conventional social science text. The experience jarred Nelson’s understanding of what had transpired in the first encounter which she had understood in terms of the conventions of Latin American torture testimonial (a literary genre in its own right), with herself as mute transcriber of the testifying victim – a context in which she presumed an absence of erotic desire which had in fact been part of the man’s experience. In the inclusion of the anecdote, most readers’ assumptions are similarly jarred.
One of Michael Taussig’s latest books, Law in a Lawless Land: Diary of a Limpieza in Colombia (2003), is an ethnography – a writing of culture – in providing the sort of rich description of contemporary Colombian society characteristic of Taussig’s writing, but it also is a diary, one which ruminates on the ways in which the very personal and informal forms of the diary might shape our understandings of the world around us being written about – a critical concern for ethnographers since the primary means of data recording has long been the field diary. Such examples of interjecting the ethnographer as participant in the social scene being described, of representing the social interactions between anthropologist and informant which comprise the ethnographer’s data, of interjecting messiness (Nelson speaks of bodies and texts that are splattered if that terminology is preferred) have become in fact common and conventional in ethnographic writing.
By presenting the ways in which texts are formulated and the ways in which research was conducted in specific instances, such messiness is not sloppy, haphazard, or lazy. Instead, presenting the mode by which the text was produced provides an opportunity for readers to more objectively evaluate texts and the cultural understandings presented therein by allowing us to more critically examine the way in which they were produced and the ways in which the ethnographer’s specific actions shaped the understanding being presented.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)