in Anthropological Journal on European Cultures. VI: 2 ('Reflecting Cultural
Practice'). Frankfurt, GDR.. March 1998. ISSN 0960 0604 pp. 79-107 and forthcoming
in German in Freud and Culture Now (Series IFK Materialien), ed. Marie-Luise
Angerer and Henry Krips. Vienna: Viennese Böhlau Verlag. 1999.
"let us be more wary of the dangerous old conceptual fairy-tale which has set up a 'pure will-less, painless, timeless, subject of knowledge', let us be wary of the tentacles of such contradictory concepts as 'pure reason', 'absolute spirituality', 'knowledge as such': - here we are asked to think an eye which cannot be thought at all, an eye turned in no direction at all, an eye where the active and interpretative powers are to be suppressed, absent, but through which seeing still becomes a seeing-something, so it is an absurdity and non-concept of eye that is demanded. There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective 'knowing'; the more affects we allow to speak about a thing, the more eyes, various eyes we are able to use for the same thing, the more complete will be our 'concept' of the thing, our 'objectivity'" (Nietzsche 1994: 92, original 1887).
The subject-object distinction, traditionally constitutive of those discourses deemed
'scientific' or 'academic', has not ceased to bedevil anthropological practice and
theorising, even in the wake of the celebration of subjectivism which was post-modernist
ethnography. Anthropological discourse has continued to depend on positioning a 'subject
who knows' as the font of whatever knowledge the ethnography disseminates of the
objects which are 'known'. This siting distances the observer and his or her audience
not only from the human 'objects' ethnographies present but also, I will argue, from
the possibility of understanding the processes by which their own cultural activities
and interpretations are constructed.
Attempts to overcome the distance between the observer and the communities observed
by critiquing and undermining the authority of the usually disembodied 'voice' of
the anthropological narrator have produced innovative - and ofttimes fiercely attacked
- programmes both to 'situate' the ethnographer more visibly in the field he/she
offers up to the ethnography's readers and to 'give voice' to those living objects
which are the matter on which the text focuses (see, for example, the pieces collected
in Marcus 1992). Such innovations have nonetheless failed to prevent (and have arguably
contributed to) an even further widening of the ontological gap opened by cultural
relativism between persons and communities studied and those doing the studying.
In the late sixties and early seventies, when relativism became the hegemonic mode
of interpreting cultural difference, the 'modernist' stance of coming to know the
other in order to enable his or her eventual transformation into something culturally
and socially much more akin to the self was in large part delegitimated. Ironically
this delegitimisation led not to an increased appreciation of humankind's protean
diversity but to a reification of alterity - notable in the transformation of 'others'
to 'the Other' - which erects what seems to be wellnigh impassible boundaries between
the spaces occupied by 'them' and those carefully scribed off as 'our own'. In the
contemporary setting, where the inheritors of the West's enlightenment legacy increasingly
portray themselves to themselves as ghettoised within a world of potentially hostile
alterity, the anthropologist is called upon to carry out the apparently heroic task
of voyaging out and into those alien spaces so as to return 'home' with mappings
of those alien domains.
However, just as the modernist hubris which had supported Western hegemony
has faltered, so too has the anthropologist's confidence in being able to translate
the conceptual space occupied by the 'objects' studied into a terminology comprehensible
to his or her home audience. The two above-mentioned strategies - of rendering the
encounter with another culture as a more or less autobiographical account of one's
responses to alterity and of offering up large gobbets of the other's discourses
as the other's authentic voice - respectively fail to give us access to the ways
other peoples see the world in which they live or to offer us translations of their
ways of seeing into languages through which we can share those perspectives. The
former provides salutary insight into how anthropologists ideologically site themselves
at home and abroad as well as into their interpretations of what responsibilities
appear to them to devolve from those sitings. The latter offers opaque transcriptions
of the terms in which persons of other communities represent themselves and their
practices in the presence of an outsider. Neither offers audiences more than surfaces
beyond which the others reside. In the former case the surface is that of the ethnographer's
awareness of an outside which impinges on his or her self-consciousness and forces
a greater awareness of his or her own presuppositions and previously unarticulated
agendas. In the latter the surface is that of a string of signifiers which hides
beneath it the signifieds which would make it understandable.(1)
It is rare for the post-modern anthropologist - having feinted at authorial authority
- not to slide back into an unreconstructed objectivist voice offering up the meanings
of what was observed or the translations of what was transcribed. Ethnographers from
one tendency within post-modern anthropology, having repeatedly stressed the barriers
thrown up by their ideological and professional positionings before any real understanding
of cultural others, will proceed to provide interpretations of the way 'the others'
live 'there'. Those of the other tendency, having chastised anthropological tradition
for advocating speaking over the voice of the other, offer their readers long transcriptions
of 'native' speech before proceeding to distill out of those texts (which they have
transcribed, edited and arranged in place in their own texts) the significant elements
of what it is 'the others' have to say about their worlds.
On my shelves as I write I find only one text, written in the first decade of this
century, in which the ethnographer offers up, without commentary or interpretation,
the words of those worked with. Edward Sapir, who was well aware of the impossibility
of loosing signification from the context of its enunciation, provided in his Takelma
Texts no more than a bilingual rendering of his informants's words, with one
line of text offering a literal phonetic transcription of the North American Indian
myths and the next a literal word by word translation into English of the Takelma
words (Sapir 1909). This is, of course, a text of little use to anyone but the North
American Indian expert who brings to it the interpretative knowledge necessary for
rendering its matter meaningful. One suspects that even surviving Takelmas would
find the material collected by Sapir incomprehensible without some translation device
to close a gap of ninety years of social, cultural and political change.
The encounter with the opacity of Sapir's Takelma Texts, like those with the
double play of post-modernist ethnographers who say they cannot speak of or for the
other and then proceed to do so, suggests that cultural translation is necessary
if any understanding of other people's practices and discourses is to be achieved
by those not habituated to the locales in which those practices and discourses take
place. Talal Asad argues - in an essay which very much runs against the grain of
the collection in which it is published (James Clifford and George Marcus's Writing
Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography) - that the work of anthropology
must depend on some form of cultural translation. Translation must, however, be carried
out with sensitivity to the fact that some sorts of translation fail to offer insight
into the cultures studied or substantially distort the indigenous meanings of practices
and articulations. Asad demonstrates the degree to which translating or representing
entails power, and points to issues of inequality between the language of the anthropologist
and his or her culture and that of the peoples studied:
"the interesting question for enquiry is...how power enters into the process of 'cultural translation', seen both as a discursive and non-discursive practice.... anthropologists need to explore these processes in order to determine how far they go in defining the possibilities and the limits of effective translation" (Asad 1986: 163 and 164).
He stresses that the academic writing of many anthropologists tends, "by
the attribution of implicit meanings to an alien practice regardless of whether they
are acknowledged by its agents,...to create meanings for a subject" (Asad 1986:
161 and 162). Such attributions are made not only with little or no regard for whether
or not the people whose lives are thus rendered 'meaningful' would subscribe to -
or even recognise the pertinence of - that interpretation but also with indifference
to that question.(2)
Sperber notes that such 'explanatory' discourses tend to be products not of the fieldwork
experience but of its subsequent writing up. He contends that anthropologists returning
from the field erect in their writings barriers of alterity and incompatibility between
cultural groups which do not seem to have been there while the anthropologists were
engaged in fieldwork:
The best evidence against relativism is, ultimately, the very activity of anthropologists, while the best evidence for relativism seems to be in the writings of anthropologists. How can that be? It seems that, in retracing their steps, anthropologists transform into unfathomable gaps the shallow and irregular boundaries that they had found not so difficult to cross, thereby protecting their own sense of identity, and providing their philosophical and lay audience with just what they want to hear (Sperber 1985: 62-63).
Contemporary anthropologists 'other' the people they have studied so as to publicize
their expertise in penetrating and understanding the alien reaches beyond the bounds
of their originary cultures and to convince their audiences not only that the knowledge
of alterity provided is hard-earned and thus 'real' but also that it is a glimpse
of something really 'other' and not just another perspective on another extension
of the everyday.
In the instances of cultural translation critiqued by Asad and Sperber we note what
seem to be generic ethnographic tendencies to produce anthropological knowledge by
dismembering the world the anthropologist has come to know through dialogue and participant
observation in the field so that it can be reconstituted in the text to accord with
analytical categories foreign to those whose world is there re-presented. Such intellectual
analysis engages in the same process of subordinating event to classificatory principle
as does the early modernist eighteenth century natural history Mary Louise Pratt
describes:
"natural history's naming is...directly transformative. It extracts all the things of the world and redeploys them into a new knowledge formation whose value lies precisely in its difference from the chaotic original....the naming brings the reality of order into being" (Pratt 1992: 33).
The implication, explicit since Descartes's work on the constitutive relationship
of cogito to being, is that phenomena are in themselves effectively 'untrue'
until the reason of the (Western) intellectual has - through abstraction, induction
and re-assemblage - reworked them so that they appear as manifestations of
a-temporal laws or categories. A purely phenomenalistic account of an anthropologist's
experience of a community could only, by this rule, be either a journal (i.e., a
non-academic memoir) or the raw material of an ethnography in waiting; it would only
be a contribution to knowledge after after its data was transformatively reworked.
The division of the world into two distinct but interacting fields - the one a disordered
mass of phenomena emersed in contingency and the other a regimented body of a-temporal
laws standing over and against that chaos - is the founding move of what the West
came to define as modernity (Bowman 1996). Modernity constitutes the world (including
the unenlightened masses and persons of non-modern cultures) as a disordered material
to be made over by its technologies in accordance with images of its potential realization
discerned by the rational thought of an intelligentsia. The intellectual is located
'outside' the world in the 'ivory tower' of academia (a site the modernist professionalisation
of intellectual cogitation institutionalizes) from whence the world can be gazed
upon and legislated for without endangering the intellectual with implication in
its inherent confusion. Bruno Latour, in We Have Never Been Modern, describes
the process which underlies the mythology of 'modern' natural and social sciences
as a 'purification' dividing the world into two essentially disjunct realms of being
- those of nature and of culture.(3) Through this process of purification
'natural' entities and events are discursively constructed as operating solely in
accord with the laws of nature while 'cultural' beings and artifacts are shown as
the undiluted productions of human passion, will, ignorance and intellect. Between
and outside the territories of these two purified fields of knowledge rests phenomenal
reality - a domain marked by contingency, mutation and hybridity. Over all of these
disjuncted tracts ranges the disembodied gaze of the intellectual.
Latour deconstructs this foundational mythology by demonstrating that this radical
disjunction is not elemental but is the culmination of a process whereby initially
unitary phenomena (events resident in the space he calls that of 'natures-cultures'(4) ) are defined as intermediary 'mixtures' of Nature and Culture
which are then distilled to abstract from solution the pure forms of the Natural
and the Cultural. 'Hybrid' knowledges, produced through the creative admixture of
things and practices, are 'purified' by radically separating those 'objects' from
the historical, political and ideological processes which made them meaningful in
the first place. Latour instances Boyle's 'discovery' of his law concerning vacuums.
Boyle and his assistants, through an elaborate set of experiments involving technological
inventions such as the vacuum pump, created the phenomenon from whence Boyle subsequently
derived the law he then claimed to have 'discovered':
"Boyle and his descendants are not simply saying that the Laws of Nature escape our grasp; they are also fabricating these laws in the laboratory. Despite their artificial construction inside the vacuum pump (such is the phase of mediation or translation), the facts completely escape all human fabrication (such is the phase of purification)" (Latour 1993: 33).
Out of this discursive fabrication of "two entirely distinct ontological
zones; that of human beings on the one hand; that of nonhumans on the other"
(Latour 1993: 10), we who deem ourselves modern have come to two world historical
conclusions. The first is that there is a 'great divide' between our own scientific
culture - which knows and mobilizes nature - and all those other cultures which unwittingly
compound the laws of nature and the processes of culture and hence know neither themselves
nor the world they live in. The second is that an objective knowledge of the world
is possible for those who are modern, and that this knowledge is grounded on a radical
distinction between a 'subject/society' which knows the world of objects and the
world as such. One of the implications of these two conclusions is that other cultures,
and the people who make them up, are objectified so that they can be studied and
known by the intelligentsia of our own culture. The other implication, ironically,
is that we who can know others cannot know ourselves since the laboratory of life,
in which we create/discover the laws determining the being of objects and those regulating
the activities of subjects, is a place which must be disregarded and excluded to
protect the axioms which enable our forms of knowledge.
Although Latour's main field of analysis is that of the natural sciences, the implications
of his studies are powerful for the social sciences and for anthropology in particular(5). The 'field' is analogous to Latour's laboratory in being the
place where anthropologists bring their presuppositions and experiences into relation
with ethnological material provided by the speech and activities of the peoples they
study. The interrelation of anthropologist and those who speak and reveal the raw
materials of ethnographies produces new knowledges which are neither purely those
of the anthropologists's own cultures nor those of the cultures they observe. Paul
Rabinow, in his Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco describes the mutual understanding
labouriously worked out between anthropologist and informant as "a hybrid, cross-cultural
object or product" (Rabinow 1977: 152) and characterises "fieldwork...[as]
a process of intersubjective construction of liminal modes of communication."
(Rabinow 1977: 155). Neither the fieldworker nor the informant emerge from this process
as the same person he or she was before entering into it; the process Rabinow describes
(Rabinow 1977: 152) of objectifying elements of the everyday so that they can be
communicated to the ethnographer, like the procedure Cousins relates (see note one,
above) of separating ourselves from something so that we can comprehend its significance,
creates not only new knowledge but also new knowers. This defamiliarization effects
informants, who refigure their relationship to their world in offering its parameters
up to the ethnographer, as well as anthropologists who, taking up residence in new
domains, rework their assumptions about self and its habitus. Thus Rabinow,
writing of returning 'home' to New York from Morocco, relates that he was no more
at home there than he had been in the field: "the maze of slightly blurred nuance,
that feeling of barely grasped meanings which had been my constant companion in Morocco
overtook me once again. But now I was home" (Rabinow 1977: 148).
This problematisation of identity rarely if ever appears in subsequent ethnographies
where the voice of the ethnographer fades out and is replaced by that of the disembodied
observer. Just as these texts render invisible or relegate to a brief mention in
the foreword the hard collective labour of working out a series of metaphors for
translating the objects of everyday life from the minds of native observers into
that of an initially naïve visitor, so too do the texts replace the confused
and ofttimes querulous speech of the anthropologist in the field with a cool and
disembodied 'truth voice'. As Favret-Saada points out,
"ethnography as I learnt it - and even taught it - is considered a science so long as one covers up the traces of what fieldwork was like....A noteworthy feature of the ethnographic text is that the stating subject (or rather, the author) is regularly hidden. He withdraws in favour of what he states about his subject" (Favret-Saada 1980: 26).
In this process of 'purification', whereby a nebulous mass of impressions and approximations is shaped into a prison house of rules said to contain the culture discussed, the anthropologist also shape-shifts. The unheimlich processes of disorientation and loss which characterise the anthropologist's field experiences are generally excised from the ethnography. If they are mentioned it is to set them out as moments - analogous to those which anthropologists relate when discussing the transformation of afflicted persons into healers capable of curing the afflictions of others - in a process whereby the 'one who knows' is initiated into a position endowing him or her with the power to know even more. The, usually muted, 'mystical' character of this enhancement is wonderfully expressed by Merleau-Ponty in a piece discussing the anthropologist's development:
"He has only to have learned at some time and at sufficient length to let himself be taught by another culture. For from then on he has a new organ of understanding at his disposal - he has regained possession of that untamed region of himself, unincorporated in his own culture, through which he communicates with other cultures" (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 120).
In Merleau-Ponty's portrait of the anthropologist we see the ethnographer shedding
the lineaments of contingency and historicity Rabinow so carefully sketched in so
as to reveal 'himself' - for the Apollonian form is always masculine - as the bearer
of the cool and all-encompassing gaze of objective (read 'absolute') knowledge.
As I have argued above, we cannot avoid this modernist deification of the anthropologist
by simply expanding our autobiographical forewords into full-blown subjectivist ethnographies
(which are not the same as ethnographies of the self) or appending to our objectivist
texts long allegedly legitimising extracts of 'native speech'. These ploys, in different
ways, serve in the final instance to keep the subjects of our inquiries at a distance.
Furthermore, whereas the latter strategy falls back into anthropological objectivism
as soon as the necessity to 'speak for' the indigenous texts is acted upon, with
the former strategy - in those cases where the commitment to placing the self is
adhered to rigorously - the anthropological imperative of striving to understand
those of other cultures is displaced by the quest to understand the self. Ironically,
however, ethnographers attempting to escape objectivism's imperialist mandate by
abandoning the other and seeking the self often produce little more than academic
reification of the common sense categories which underwrite their own cultures(6).
The initial move towards a solution lies, I suggest, neither in redefining the nature
of the anthropological 'object' nor in reworking field methods but in rejecting as
untenable the 'pure will-less, painless, timeless, subject of knowledge' (Nietzsche
1994: 92) through whose mask we speak the conclusions our researches are alleged
to have generated. Such an unmasking entails, however, far more than a rhetorical
substitution of the proscribed first person for the third person voice of classical
ethnography. It involves discarding the 'one' which voices 'knowledge as such' and
substituting for it the 'I' of the ethnographer who speakes as one who has discarded
the certitudes of a previous identity and put in their place the provisional hypotheses
of a self constituted through dialogue with persons and places organised according
to 'alien' assumptions. Such a substitution, in effect, changes everything.
This move dissolves the community constructed by rhetorical conventions between the
subject who knows and the subjects addressed by ethnographic discourse. No longer
does the ethnographic voice speak an authoritative knowledge to an audience presumed
capable of unproblematically assimilating that knowledge(7). Instead
the ethnographer, speaking from a site dislodged by fieldwork experience from the
domain of shared assumptions that constitutes the common sense of his originary community,
attempts to communicate with a 'home audience' by constructing a network of descriptions
and models capable of engaging his or her audience in a work of interpretation and
conceptual distortion like that the ethnographer went through in making sense of
fieldwork experience. In other words, the ethnographic text, rather than inviting
its readers to join its author on the Olympian heights of objective knowledge from
whence they all can look down knowingly upon the anthropological objects (who - being
outside modernity - are themselves incapable of occupying that vantage point of self-comprehension),
calls upon its readers to enter through dialogue into community with a cultural expatriate.
Out of this dialogue may emerge a shared sense of what it is for them to occupy a
space other than that which surrounds their everyday lives.
The reader's imaginative occupation of the space of shared understandings which the
fieldworker and his or her informants constructed is not, I would insist, a complete
transposition of the reader into the fieldworker's experience of being on the edge
of two cultural domains. Just as the ethnographer comes to inhabit not the life world
of those he or she studies but a place which is a dialogically-constructed approximation
of that world strongly inscribed by elements of the culture in which he or she was
raised and trained(8), so too the people who make up the ethnographer's
audience construct images of the anthropologists's liminal habitus which are
hybrid meldings of aspects of the ethnographer's representations with experiences
and expectations particular to those readers.
That hybridization of everyday assumptions with matter taken from worlds organised
according to different assumptions provides the audience of the ethnographies I am
proposing with the experience Victor Shklovskij of the Russian Formalist movement
claimed emerged from engagement with good literary art. At the core of such poetry
and prose Shklovskij located the poetic device of ostranenie ('making strange')
which functions, in the words of Victor Erlich, in the following manner:
"Rather than translating the unfamiliar into the terms of the familiar, the poetic image 'makes strange' the habitual by presenting it in a novel light, by placing it in an unexpected context....By tearing the object out of its habitual context, by bringing together disparate notions, the poet gives a coup de grâce to the verbal cliché and to the stock responses attendant upon it and forces us into heightened awareness of things and their sensory texture. The act of creative deformation restores sharpness to our perception, giving 'density' to the world around us" (Erlich 1955: 150)(9).
Although the ethnographic reader's experience of imaginatively occupying the space
which the anthropologist was brought to inhabit by field research is bound to be
less powerful than the anthropologist's own experience insofar as the reader's is
vicarious, reading ethnographies should nonetheless serve to involve the reader in
the same denaturalization of previous cultural assumptions as the fieldworker experienced
in bringing himself or herself to understand that life can be lived according to
different rules. While traditional ethnography works to provide abstract decodifications
of those rules, and thus both to offer them up in familiar terms and to disengage
them from the worlds where the practices of everyday life make them manifest, a more
direct rendering of the anthropologist's experience of living with those rules will
serve to show them as reality-producing rather than as ideological errors which distort
the real. The vicarious experience of 'going through' a terrain thus differently
organized may induce the reader, in turning his or her gaze back to the rules which
organize the space of his or her quotidian life, to perceive them (at least until
the expatriating effect wears off) as yet another set of culturally-constructed models
for world building(10).
Shifting ethnography's focus so that it expresses a process of familiarization with
other cultural domains rather than relaying a decoding of materials abstracted from
the fieldwork experience removes the 'unfathomable gaps' Sperber describes as separating
the readers of ethnographies from the peoples portrayed in them. Once the artificial
'othering' Sperber sees as written into the ethnographic text is excised, readers
can vicariously experience crossing 'the shallow and irregular boundaries' the anthropologist
traversed in coming to reside within the habitus of the people he or she studied.
As a result, readers will encounter those others with whom the ethnographer enters
into dialogue no longer as depersonalised types demonstrating the radical alterity
of 'the Other' but - as do the readers of Rabinow's Reflections on Fieldwork in
Morocco or Favret-Saada's Deadly Words - as persons who, like the fieldworker
his or her self, struggle to produce meaningful statements and acts in a world scored
with contingency and potential incomprehension.
One effect of this is a redesignation of the 'objects' of ethnography as 'subjects'
who, rather than being displayed as depersonalized representations of either their
culture or of factions within that culture, are introduced as individuals attempting
to make themselves understood to the anthropologist at particular moments and in
particular contexts. This particularization undermines anthropology's typical objectification
of the other's 'culture' and instead shows that culture is only manifest in expression
(whether this expression be an individual utterance or the collective erection of
temple complexes) and is constantly varied and reworked as different contexts place
different demands upon its enunciators (and, in the case of the artifacts of material
culture, interpreters). There are radical implications to redefining culture so that
it is no longer represented as an entity which all its subjects's enunciations express
but as a mutable vocabulary emerging into consciousness through subjects's expressions.
If culture is a mode of expression rather than an entity - a language rather than
a matrix - then ethnography does not analyse 'Culture' per se (which may,
by this argument, be non-existent) but analyses a set of enunciations which can be
grouped as expressive of a particular mode of meaning-making engaged in by a greater
or lesser number of persons. In Favret-Saada's examination of what people say and
do when discerning and countering the attacks of witches it is clear that she is
working with small groups of persons whose discursive constructions of the realities
they inhabit isolate them - in their self perceptions as well as in those of other
communities they live with in the Bocage - from others around them. Similarly, in
works such as Griaule's Conversations with Ogotemmêle (Griaule 1965)
in which the reader observes the dialogic elaboration of a cosmology through the
conversations of fieldworker and informant, one recognises that - despite the ethnographer's
assertion that what is being 'revealed' is the authentic terrain of the culture studied
- a world is here constructed which exists for the ethnographer, the informant and
- perhaps - the reader of the text. In both cases the representations being relayed
are those constituted by informants and ethnographer through a developing mutual
understanding rather than - as the rhetoric of conventional ethnography (which Favret-Saada
rejects and to which Griaule adheres) implies - those of a culture whose tenets the
anthropologist has been able, with objective detachment, to discern, observe and
transcribe.
Discourse makes a world which is no less real because it is occupied only by those
who construct it through the process of sharing agreement on its elements. As Rabinow
demonstrates with the example of how his queries about a local saint - Sidi Lachen
Lyussi - impelled the community he worked within to 'discover' a history for a figure
they'd previously known only as a revered name (Rabinow 1977: 131-133)(11),
a discursively constructed reality can 'grow' as more and more people come to accept
the world it bodies forth. The more people who come to adhere to it, however, the
more 'play' there is in defining its terms and the rules of the 'language games'
it calls into being. Witchcraft, like the Dogon rules of smithy-building or the legends
of Sidi Lachen Lyussi, comes into being for persons when they accept that the term
designates a reality, but different groups - and different individuals - may represent
that reality to themselves and to others in quite disparate ways. Collective acceptance
of a reality-designating term can constitute a community around the belief that that
term designates a reality, but that community is continuously threatened with dissolution
by interpretative conflicts over what that thing is and what dictates it imposes
on those who believe in it(12). As Slavoj Zizek points out, "the
consistency of our language, of our field of meaning, on which we rely in our everyday
life, is always a precarious, contingent bricolage that can, at any given
moment, explode into a lawless series of singularities" (Zizek 1991: 153-154).
Ethnographers, who gain their knowledge of other communities's ways of life through
discussions with and observations of a small number of informants, must build their
interpretations of the life-worlds of those communities on the foundations of acquaintance
with a limited number of readings and enactments of 'the real'. If it can be acknowledged
that the realities represented are in fact a network of singularities emerging from
the contexts of field research, the essentialist - and othering - concept of Culture
can be jettisoned and with it the 'unfathomable gaps' dividing the people of the
anthropologist's originary community from those of the collectivities studied.
We appear to challenge the continuing existence of anthropology as a field of inquiry
by proposing to dissolve the category of culture into a bricolage of utterances
held together by speakers's assumptions that they are talking about the same things.
Once the category of culture is delegitimated, so too, it seems, is anthropology's
remit as a discipline examining human cultures. What is left, however, once that
definitional shift has been effected by the loss of the generalising authority of
'the subject who knows', is what always was at the core of field-based anthropological
endeavour - the study of human beings making of the world a setting in which they
can live meaningful lives. Whether the ethnographer's field of inquiry be the connections
between constructed environments and persons's understandings of their organising
principles or the attempts of individuals afflicted by misfortune to discern the
agencies behind those afflictions, anthropological inquiries have - at the moments
in which their data are collected - inevitably focussed on the interpretational processes
through which persons thrown into being in the world seek to render controllable
and coherent the contingencies and uncertainties of that world. David Pocock wrote
in 1971 that, "if it is to develop", social anthropology must constitute
as the object of its study "the play of society maintaining itself against,
modifying itself to meet, the steady flow of new individuals - whether people or
events" (Pocock 1971: 112-113). I would contend that this has, despite anthropology's
own varied self-definitions, been the object of anthropological study since the time
when anthropological practice determined that fieldwork would be the primary source
of anthropological data. Where the perspective Pocock demands in his call for an
anthropology "which enables us to conceive of society in duration" (Pocock
1971: 112) is occluded is not in ethnographers's approaches in the field to the objects
of their studies (after all, informants - like all human beings - are always caught
up in the labour of maintaining their assumptions against, modifying them to meet,
the steady flow of new experiences) but in the way subsequent reworkings of what
informants tell them abstract sets of atemporal and generalized codes and laws out
of the interpretational processes informants revealed. The 'culture' which emerges
from those abstractions not only freezes the social flux into an allegedly enduring
moment (see Fabian 1983) but also illicitly concatenates a series of statements,
made by different persons in different contexts, into the univocal voice of an entire
collectivity.
If that abstractive reworking is abandoned and the anthropologist records all aspects
of the processes of manifesting significant acts or statements(13),
what will become evident to ethnographic readers is what was as well evident to the
ethnographer before he or she subsumed it in interpretative abstraction - the way
in which persons 'read' situations and contexts with reference to memories of previous
encounters with similar events (and in terms of their memories of other person's
narratives of analogous encounters), assess the ways contemporary encounters conform
with or diverge from those previous situations, and enact or adapt previous responses
to situations faced. In some situations the process of evaluation and response seems
to take place without hesitation whereas in others it can be long, arduous and productive
of anxiety. The eventual response - whether it be a statement, a gesture, or an activity
- is a reply to the query ('how do you respond to this?') thrown up by an event.
While an abstractive anthropology would disregard the process of assessment and reify
the eventual reply as an expression of 'culture' (thus effacing other replies), an
anthropology not committed to the quest for culture per se would seek to perceive
regularities and differences in the ways persons, at different times and in different
places, reply to what they encounter as they move through their lives. Such replies
need not be - and most often are not - explicit statements of comprehension or intent;
articulations, as Bourdieu has shown in The Logic of Practice, are also choreographed
activities expressing that "immediate but unselfconscious understanding which
defines the practical relationship [of the actor] to the world" (Bourdieu 1990:
18). The ethnographer then must attend to and record not only what people say about
their relationships with their contexts but also how they position themselves and
act in response to the situations in which they find themselves.
Such attention to the various responses of individuals to situations is not - despite
appearances - founded on the assumption, rejected in note six above, that the self
is the locus of anthropological inquiry. In what follows I will argue that the 'self'
is a dynamic internalization of a series of subject positions and repertoires offered
it, through its development in social contexts, by others. At this point I would,
however, stress simply that anthropologists must attend closely to the instances
in which so-called cultural representations are produced since the traditional alternative
- abstracting culture out of the contexts in which it is articulated - can only distance
the ethnographer and his or her audience from processes whereby previous experiences
and knowledges are mobilized and/or adapted to meet the demands which encounters
with new events or new individuals impose. The attention I propose paying to particulars
does not, however, trap me in a world which can only be represented as a congery
of singularities; as Favret-Saada shows in the concluding section of Deadly Words,
it is possible to deduce out of a field of enunciations a 'logic' or grammar underlying
the diversity of particular statements. Such deduction is licit insofar as the analyst
provides a sufficient corpus of original statements against which to test the generalising
hypothesis and acknowledges that that logic is not an entity existing in some space
autonomous from those statements but a hypothesis drawn from that series of statements.
Abandonment of the position outside the flux of events from whence one claims to
discern the laws governing the practices and statements of others unwittingly emersed
in that flux would bring about the ethnographer's recognition that he or she shares
a fundamental kinship with those observed. The anthropologist, like 'the other',
discovers a place for his or her self within an unfolding series of events taking
place before audiences which assess both those events and the ethnographer's attempts
to accommodate himself or herself to them. Like those he or she observes, the ethnographer
comes to understand the ways the surrounding community makes the world heimlich
by taking account of the reactions of that audience - the 'significant other' - to
the way he or she responds to situations encountered. Such 'reality testing' enables
the anthropologist to add to his or her repertoire of appropriate responses(14).
Anthropologists familiarizing themselves with host communities, like children being
socialized or migrants or refugees learning to accommodate themselves to new milieus,
differ from the communities with which they interact insofar as they are 'coming
into culture' from an outside. I have stressed that the anthropologist is not unlike
the people he or she studies insofar as he or she shares with them the experience
of continuously having to modify previous schemas of activity and interpretation
to accord with circumstance and the reactions of others. Nonetheless, persons who
are well accommodated to an environment will be used to performing the everyday adjustments
of previous experiences to changed situations and will - except in encounters with
radical anomalies or novelties - generally carry out that labour unselfconsciously.
The anthropologist, like the other 'outsiders' mentioned, will be very aware of remodeling
expectations and responses to fit with the new habitus he or she has come
to inhabit; he or she, like them, does not unreflexively share a 'common sense' with
the surrounding community. The experience of coming to terms with alterity through
a reflexive process of altering characterizes the anthropologist's experience.
The anthropologist, not unlike other expatriates(15), is distanced
from familiar modes of thinking the real and has to familiarize his or her self with
new ways of perceiving and responding to events.
The act of moving, willingly or unwillingly, from one community's habitus
to another's does not, however, mechanically provide the traveller with 'double vision'
- the ability to see one milieu in both the terms of its inhabitants and those of
its other. Displacement is a highly charged emotional experience, and the expatriate
may respond to it by denying, in a number of ways, the altering he or she has gone
through. These denials include explict refusals to identify either with the host
society (as with migrants or refugees who become even more nationalistic or religious
than people remaining in the communities they left behind) or with their community
of origin (as with fervent assimilationists who renounce any feeling for their previous
place of residence). Such refusals are, of course, rejections of conscious and unconscious
identifications with subject positions which, in the communities in which the refusers
were raised, provided them with basic personality structures and which, in the milieus
into which they have been adopted, allow them to communicate and act in the contexts
of everyday life. Self imagings of dedicated revanchists, like those of rejectionists,
are built upon foundations of disavowal. Ethnographers may, as well, engage in such
disavowal in their responses to the communities in which they work, and the work
of purification Latour describes, which retrospectively establishes an ontological
divide between the ethnographer and the objects of his or her study, is an aspect
of that denial.
It is self reflexive attention to the process of altering which distinguishes the
anthropological gaze from that of other displaced persons(16).
Coming to know how to act in a different cultural ambience involves the learner in
recognizing situations as being somewhat 'like' others he or she has already encountered
yet as demanding responses unlike those the previous encounters had demanded. It
is through awareness of this dialectical play of similarity and dissimilitude that
the anthropologist develops the ability to translate the terms of one world-making
process into those of another. Translation is akin to metaphor, as the etymological
roots of the two terms suggests(17), and the cultural translator
'transfers' to his or her audience the experience of transfer he or she has already
been through. Honest translation, like nuanced mobilization of metaphor, always makes
its audience aware of the substantial residue of dissimilarity which remains after
similarity is conveyed. Similarly, the fieldwork encounter leaves the ethnographer
(and, if he or she is honest in relating that encounter to an audience, the reader
of his or her monograph) with the uncanny feeling that while things 'there' are sufficiently
familiar to allow one to get on with the work of communication they are simultaneously
different enough that the conceptions which provided the ethnographer with his or
her initial foothold in the new space must be stretched and distorted if the ethnographer
is to move in that space (or the reader is to vicariously position his or her self
there).
The anthropologist in the field is very much aware of the situation of moving between
two worlds, and it is this Janus-faced awareness which allows him or her not only
to grasp at an understanding of the field but also to formulate translations of that
field experience for his or her readers at home. The ethnographer's liminal positioning
facilitates insights into both the culture studied and his or her originary culture.
The term 'liminal' has, I would argue, been misused since Victor Turner made Van
Gennep's limen into the foundation stone of the conceptual edifice he called
liminality (Turner 1967). Although liminal, according to the Oxford English Dictionary,
means "of or pertaining to the threshold or initial stage of a process"
(O.E.D. 1971: 1628), Turner extends both the word and its sense to liminality
which, for him, is "the Nay to all positive structural assertions, but...in
some sense the source of them all, and, more than that,...a realm of pure possibility
whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise" (Turner 1967:
97)(18). Liminal, in its literal sense, is not a state but a moment
in a process, yet Turner freezes that process and inserts into the stilled interim
a meta-cultural viewing platform which provides, for the Ndembu and other subjects
whose cultures makes available such vantage points (Turner's later work strove to
prove that such points - whether 'liminal' or 'liminoid' - were available in all
cultures), a site analogous to the position of the subject who knows. Turner's invention
of a transcendent position from whence viewers can gaze with detachment upon the
particular forms their cultures forge out of pure possibility serves the same end
as does Western epistemology's siting of the subject who knows; both make it possible
to imagine subjects who pre-exist the social contexts in which subjectivity is inevitably
manifested. Both, in other words, are machineries for the production of ideological
categories of the autonomous self(19). However, the various 'liminal'
positions from which the anthropologist looks back towards the social milieu from
whence he or she came as well as into that into which he or she is moving are moments
(each of them different, as Rabinow shows in Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco)
in the midst of a dynamic process of remaking the self through taking into it images
of identity provided by experiences within the community the anthropologist is joinging.
The sites from whence the ethnographer gazes are not still and detached vantage points
of autonomous intellection, but wayside stops where he or she, threatened with vertigo,
pauses momentarily to take bearings by looking back towards the certitudes of an
identity beginning to distort with distance and forwards towards another ambience
which not only reveals different ways of being in the world but also, in demonstrating
how to live with others, others the self.
Psychoanalysis's most significant contribution to twentieth century thought is simultaneously
its most systematically disavowed insight(20). Sigmund Freud's
nuanced analyses of the relation of the infant to the structured world of family
or carers which encompasses it demonstrate that self is not born but made. Freud
shows that the human subject is constituted through identifications with subject
positions manifested to it through the activities of others with whom it is brought
into relation in the course of its development(21). Identifications
with others, other's characteristics, or with the objects of others's desires impel
the child - and the adult that develops out of that child's elaboration of a repertoire
of identifications - to engage, unconsciously or consciously, in scenarios within
which it plays out fantasies of intersubjective relations with significant others
in its real or imagined environment. These fantasies more often present dilemmas
than straight-forward mise en scènes of fulfillment, and in thinking
through resolutions to these dilemmas human personalities develop. Thus, for instance,
in going through the Oedipus Complex the male child sublimates desires which open
it to the threat of what it perceives as castration and substitutes desexualized
imagings of future relations with other persons for its scenarios of immediate corporeal
relations with either the mother or the father(22). Identification
is, for Freud, the primal movement of the infant out of the inarticulate sensorium
of its body into the socially structured world of others. It is in repetitions of
that process, through which the individual takes up new identifications and renounces
or re-forms previous ones, that that developing person more or less successfully
learns to negotiate the demands of others and to internalize from those demands what
it comes to perceive as its own needs and desires. Jacques Lacan's renowned elaborations
of Freudian insights, most notably in his work developing his insights into the interplay
of image and identification in 'the mirror stage' (Lacan 1977a; Lacan 1977b), demonstrates
that the self is constructed through identifications with others to the extent that,
as Lacan phrases it, "I is an other" (Lacan 1977b: 23).
Freud's above-cited essay demonstrating how negotiating the Oedipus Complex introduces
the child into the series of compensatory identifications providing access to the
social world of rôle-playing and language was published - through a synchronicity
which disciplinary divides and antagonisms have in large part rendered invisible
- in the same year Marcel Mauss presented "Real and Practical Relations between
Psychology and Sociology" to the Société de Psychologie in Paris
(Mauss 1924; Mauss 1979a). There Mauss assaulted, as it were 'from the other side',
the same wall dividing the social and the psychological which Freud was intent on
dismantling. In his address to psychologists he saw as committed to dividing "facts
of the various biological and psychological orders from social facts" (Mauss
1979a: 9), Mauss asserted that
"although we said that this essential part of sociology, collective psychology, is an essential part, we deny that it can be separated from the others and we will not say that it is only a matter of psychology, for this collective psychology or `sociological psychology' is more than that. And you yourselves have to fear its encroachments and its conclusions....[I]t is no longer sociology that is in question. By a curious reversal, it is psychology itself. The psychologists, while accepting our collaboration, could perhaps do well to defend themselves. Indeed, the contribution of collective representations: ideas, concepts, categories, motives for traditional actions and practices, collective sentiments and fixed expressions of the emotions and sentiments, is so great, even in the individual consciousness - and we make a very energetic claim to study it - that at times we seem to want to reserve for ourselves all investigations in these higher strata of the individual consciousness. Higher sentiments, mostly social: reason, personality, will to choose or freedom, practical habits, mental habits and character, variations in these habits; all this we claim as part of our province, along with many other things.... (Mauss 1979a: 9).
He continues by asserting that the proper domain of sociological analysis furthermore
"converge[s] with physiology, the phenomena of bodily life, for it seems that between the social and the bodily the layer of individual consciousness is very thin: laughter, tears, funerary laments, ritual ejaculations, are physiological reactions just as much as they are obligatory gestures and signs, sentiments that are obligatory or necessary or suggested or employed by collectivities to a precise end, with a view to a kind of physical and moral discharge of its expectations, which are physical and moral too" (Mauss 1979a: 10)(23).
Mauss, with Durkheim, asserted that the social provided the forms through which psychological and physiological matter took shape and found expression (see Durkheim & Mauss 1903; Durkheim & Mauss 1963), and Mauss, in his assault on the autonomy of psychology, stressed that "cries and words, gestures and rites - for example of etiquette and morality - are signs and symbols. Fundamentally they are translations. Indeed the primary thing they translate is the presence of the group" (Mauss 1979a: 21). In a later essay, "Les Techniques du Corps" (Mauss 1935; Mauss 1979b), in which he introduced the concept of the habitus, Mauss elaborated what he called 'prestigious imitation' - the process through which individuals learn the social language in terms of which they subsequently move (as well as emote, think and express themselves):
"What takes place is a prestigious imitation. The child, the adult, imitates actions which have/succeeded and which he has seen successfully performed by people in whom he has confidence and who have authority over him. The action is imposed from without, from above, even if it is an exclusively biological action involving his body. The individual borrows the series of movements which constitute it from the action executed in front of him or with him by others. It is precisely this notion of the prestige of the person who performs the ordered, authorized, tested action vis-à-vis the imitating individual that contains all the social element. The imitative action which follows contains the psychological element and the biological element" (Mauss 1979b: 101) .
The process of prestigious imitation Mauss develops is analogous to that of identification
elaborated by Freud and Lacan. In both instances an image endowed with an aura of
power and success is drawn by the individual from the world of others which encompasses
it and is internalized to serve as a model for that individual's subsequent expressions.
Such expressions need not be public; Freud's studies of dreams and fantasies indicate
that such interior experiences play out possible intersubjective relations while
Volosinov argues that thought is itself a form of social discourse insofar as "there
is no such thing as thinking outside orientation toward possible expression and,
hence, outside the social orientation of that expression and of the thinking involved"
(Volosinov 1973: 90). The self, in private as in public, performs itself through
enacting and playing improvisations on the rôles it has learned through identifying
with others.
Mauss's work differs from Freud's insofar as the former's sociological focus led
him to approach generalizations about the 'total man' through arguments about collective
regularities whilst the latter's attention to individual case studies meant that
generalizations about psychological processes were most commonly made through observations
of individual maladjustment and deviancy. As a result, Freud's work attended more
closely to processes of internalizing and interpretating the demands of the social
order than did Mauss's. Despite their respective valorizations of the psychological
and the social, Freud and his more radical followers remained fully aware of the
determinative power of the social over the individual's psychic economy (as one can
see, for instance, in Lacan's stress on the force of the symbolic order) while Mauss
and the members of the Année Sociologique were attentive to the 'play'
particular histories of encounter introduced into the machinery of collective representation(24). Mauss and Freud alike demonstrated that the subject is not
an autonomous entity standing outside the social processes within which it choses
to engage but is a matrix of energies penetrated, shaped, and directed by social
exteriority. Their common perspective is summed up in Michel Henry's assertion that
the subject "is nothing but representation itself, the pure fact of setting
forth as the opening up of an Outside, an Outside that is the world as such"
(Henry 1991: 159).
Anthropology can only escape the solipsism brought to the fore by its recent efforts
to purge its practice of modernity's cultural imperialism by reasserting and developing
the insights Mauss and Freud elaborated in the early decades of this century. Those
insights, which stressed that the subject was incapable of transcending the social
matrices which gave it the materials of its consciousness, could not be accommodated
within the epistemology which had informed Western thought since the fourth century.
Mauss's and Freud's respective dismantlings of the wall dividing the subject from
the context in which it comes into being rendered unviable the camera obscura
allegedly occupied by the subject who knows, and as a result their works were systematically
misread by the mainstreams of the disciplines they worked within so that that wall
(and the 'objectivity' it protects) would continue to appear as unbreachable(25).
It is, however, in fieldwork - which similarly developed its contemporary authority
in the early part of this century through the work of figures such as Branislaw Malinowski
(whose Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, [Malinowski 1967] was able,
fifty years after it was written, to shock those who wanted to believe in the Olympian
objectivity of the master) - that the anthropologist is forced to observe the way
that he or she is infected with alterity in the course of seeking to understand it.
Like every subject which enters into its own subjectivity by taking into itself figures
and forms from the world which encompasses it, the subject which sees itself as an
anthropologist is made over by internalizing - through prestigious imitation and
identification - the 'objects' it studies. Traditions of ethnographic exegesis insist
that that subject regain its objectivity by overlooking this experience of altering
in the process of 'writing up', but an understanding of the 'Them' studied, as well
as of the 'Us' who study, can only be achieved through a meticulous observation and
recounting of the process of becoming a subject in and of the habitus observed.
Such a 'radical empiricism' is autobiographical but it is an autobiography of a self
which mutates into something other than what it was, and the narrative of that othering
can open to its readers the possibility of conceiving of the other as yet another
site with which the self can identify.
Glenn Bowman
Canterbury, Kent
28 October 1997
Endnotes
1. As Mark Cousins points out in a review of Lévi-Strauss's
Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, recognizing an act of communication
and comprehending the significance it carries are two distinct things: "within
twentieth-century anthropological commentaries the utterance of some Bororo who said
to von Steinem, 'We are red parakeets', resounds with a raging subjective intensity
of communication. The most foreign utterance is not only still one, it is perhaps
pre-eminently the one which communicates its subjective force. The problem is how
to separate ourselves from it, so that we may know it, know what it signifies"
(Cousins 1989: 84).
2. Asad contends that Ernest Gellner engages in cultural translation
as "a matter of determining implicit meanings - not the meanings the native
speaker actually acknowledges in his speech, not even the meanings the native listener
necessarily accepts, but those he is 'potentially capable of sharing' with scientific
authority 'in some ideal situation'....The fact that in that 'ideal situation' he
would no longer be a Berber tribesman but something coming to resemble Professor
Gellner does not appear to worry such cultural translators" (Asad, 1986: 162).
3. Latour, as an historian of science, locates the advent of modernity
in the early seventeenth century with the empiricist move to separate the domains
of ideology and nature. In my above-mentioned paper I argued that the advent of modernity
- as a movement to impose a universal 'truth order' on the matter of the world -
can be located much earlier with the fourth century imperial legitimation of the
missionary project of Christianity (Bowman 1996: 110-113).
4. "the very notion of culture is an artifact created by
bracketing nature off. Cultures - different or universal - do not exist, any
more than Nature does. There are only natures-cultures....similar in that they simultaneously
construct humans, divinities and nonhumans. None of them inhabits a world of signs
or symbols arbitrarily imposed on an external Nature known to us alone. None of them
- and especially not our own - lives in a world of things. All of them sort out what
will bear signs and what will not. If there is one thing we all do, it is surely
that we construct both our human collectives and the nonhumans that surround them"
(Latour 1993: 104 and 106).
5. Interestingly, We Have Never Been Modern is marked by
a profound ambivalence towards anthropology. Latour opens by posing anthropology
as a totalising model fit to deconstruct the mythological divisions of the fields
of 'modern' society ("in works produced by anthropologists abroad, you will
not find a single trait that is not simultaneously real, social and narrated"
[Latour 1993: 7]) but concludes by asserting that "[a]nthropology had been built
on the basis of science, or on the basis of society, or on the basis of language;
it always alternated between universalism and cultural relativism, and in the end
it may have taught us as little about 'Them' as about 'Us'" (Latour 1993: 129).
The clue to his ambivalence may lie in his assertion that "it is possible to
do an anthropological analysis of the modern world - but then the very definition
of the modern world has to be altered" (Latour 1993: 7); an anthropology which
draws its analytical categories from the 'modern' cannot - because of the epistemology
which underwrites those categories - do more than reiterate the illusions which constitute
modern society's understanding of itself.
6. It is indicative of what Latour calls anthropology's failure
to have taught us any more about ourselves than about others that reflexive anthropology's
inability to escape the subject positions of western autobiography is mirrored by
mainstream anthropology's continued enmirement in the ideological category of the
self as the locus of anthropological inquiry - a position recently celebrated in
the work of Anthony Cohen (Cohen 1994).
7. "[I]n ethnographic writings neither the speaker nor his
partner - in other words, neither the stating subject, author of the scientific report,
nor his reader - are defined. It is implied that the 'I' need not introduce himself
because he is taken for granted, just like the 'you' who is talked to. It is so much
a matter of course that the 'I' and the 'you' converse about 'him', that the stating
subject can withdraw behind an indefinite subject, and call himself 'one'" (Favret-Saada
1980: 27).
8. As Rabinow points out, the informant, in developing a vocabulary
through which he or she can communicate with the fieldworker, is also displaced from
the life world he or she occupied prior to the necessity of communicating that world
to the anthropologist (Rabinow, 1977: 152 and 162f on Driss ben Mohammed).
9. My insistence, throughout this text, on using the clumsy pronominal
'he or she' and 'his or her' instead of the more familiar 'he' or 'his' is itself
an intentional mobilization of ostranenie meant to force the reader to reflect
on the cultural practice of eliding the feminine when producing a 'universal' subject
position which is in fact masculine.
10. What comes to mind as I attempt to formulate how ostranenie
might function in reading ethnography is my own experience, twenty years ago, of
feeling an extended sense of cognitive dissonance on finishing Larry Niven's science
fiction novel Ring World (Niven 1972) as I 'slid back' from a reality in which
lives I had imaginatively participated in were lived on great terra-formed hoops
circling their sun to one in which people lived on orbiting ovoid rock formations.
11. Rabinow's observations here lead one to query whether anthropologists's
rôle in enabling peoples to 'rediscover' their traditions may in fact be that
of facilitating what Hobsbawm and Ranger have called 'the invention of tradition'
(Hobsbawm & Ranger 1983).
12. In "A Country of Words" I have discussed the way
the term 'Palestine' constitutes a transnational community which tends to disintegrate
when its constituencies articulate different perceptions about what being 'Palestinian'
means and demands (Bowman 1994).
13. Favret-Saada notes that "I made it a rule to write...about
the native discourse including silences, slips of the tongue, repetitions, hesitations
and so on" (Favret-Saada, 1980: 150, note 2).
14. Bruce Kapferer's "Mind, Self and Other in Demonic Illness:
the Negation and Reconstruction of Self" (Kapferer 1979) demonstrates the testing
of self-constructs before the gaze of significant others in describing a Sri Lankan
exorcism ritual in which a range of potential future identities are staged for the
victim of possession before an audience made up of the local community.
15. But unlike the child who, whilst similarly coming into a symbolic
order from an outside, does not already possess another 'language' in terms of which
it can gauge and self-reflexively articulate the process of transformation.
16. It is not, of course, only the trained anthropologist who is
able to relay the experience of altering to audiences, as the proliferation of culturally
insightful works - both fictional and non-fictional - by émigré writers
demonstrates.
17. Both translation and metaphor derive from terms which, respectively
in Latin and Greek, mean to transfer (translation from the Latin translatus,
the past participle of transferre, and metaphor, from the Greek metaforus)
(O.E.D. 1971: 3381 and 1781).
18. Robin Horton has revealed the theological roots of Turner's
conceptions of sites of radical possibility in "Ritual Man in Africa" (Horton
1964: especially pp. 93-96).
19. Turner, with his talk of "an uncommitted man, an individual
rather than a social persona" (Turner 1967: 108), makes explicit the
ontological separation of subjects from societies which he sees as "structure[s]
of positions" (Turner 1967: 93). Although his Christian humanism is apparently
more generous than modernity's epistemology insofar as he suggests that all humans
can at times access sites which liberate from ideology (modernity restricts this
access to the enlightened intellectual), Turner's liberation is effectively millenarian
in that the energies which are temporarily loosed are - in this world - always rechanneled
into the work of social structuration (see Turner 1969).
20. Anthropologists willing to use psychoanalytic structures or
categories in their analyses of particular cultural traits (see, for examples, essays
in Heald & Deluz 1994) seem unwilling to ally themselves with psychoanalysis's
more global conclusions about subjectivity and the social.
21. In psychoanalysis identification is used not in the sense of
identifying, as when someone identifies an object or an act as being 'the same as'
another or 'in the same class or category as' other objects or acts ('A is the same
as B' or 'A is a B'), but in the sense of 'identification of onself with' a person,
a characteristic of a person, or (oftimes perversely) a thing (see Laplanche &
Pontalis 1973: 205-208).
22. See Freud's "The Dissolution of the Oedipal Complex"
(Freud 1961, original 1924). Juliet Mitchell's useful analysis of castration in her
Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Mitchell 1974: 74-100) emphasises the threat
which impels the male child into substitutive fantasies of identification
and points to Freud's failure to provide an account of female identifications. The
rôle of identification, and its implications for masculinity and feminity,
are further explored by Elizabeth Cowie (Cowie 1997: esp. 72-122) and Slavoj Zizek
(Zizek 1989: 105-128).
23. Although Mauss continues - strategically I believe - by saying
"[b]ut do not be afraid. We have an out-and-out respect for your frontiers,
having a sense of justice, and it is enough that there be an element of individual
consciousness, large or small, to legitimate the existence of an individual discipline
devoted to it" (Mauss 1979a: 10), he concludes the presentation by stressing
the necessity of the study of 'the total man' in which "the triple consideration
of the body, the mind and the social environment must go together" (Mauss 1979a:
31).
24. See, for instance, Mauss's study of Inuit social organization
(Mauss 1979c), Durkheim's work on suicide (Durkheim 1951), and, perhaps most strikingly,
Hertz's study of practices at the shrine of St. Besse (Hertz 1913; Hertz 1983).
25. Just as mainstream psychoanalysis reasserted the primacy of
the individual psyche over the social to an extent which made it necessary that the
Lacanian tendency be outlawed, so too did subsequent anthropology and sociology turn
away from the radical implications of the Année Sociologique's inquiries
into the social constitution of subjectivity. Claude Lévi-Strauss's stimulating
Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss (Lévi-Strauss 1950; Lévi-Strauss
1987) intriguingly rechannels the radical constructivism underlying Mauss's oeuvre
into a mentalism which fully extends itself in structuralism. Favret-Saada intriguingly
quotes Bertrand Poirot-Delpech to demonstrate that even the betes-noires of
contemporary rationalism, the deconstructionists, insist that they speak from a place
detached from the world of which they speak - "[a] total a-topia, an absolute
nomadism: to talk from nowhere, to become ungraspable, unapproachable, irrecuperable
in every way" (Poirot-Delpech, 'Maîtres à dépenser' in Le
Monde, 30 April 1976, quoted in Favret-Saada 1980: 14, n. 2).
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