Reflections on ethnographic works

The act of writing an ethnography can be seen as the presentation of observations gathered through fieldwork, and the successful ethnography is that which creatively explores ways of recreating the experience of the field. An ethnography or anthropological text becomes a vehicle for anthropologists to give meaning to what was observed in the field. According to Rabinow these “ ‘facts’ of anthropology, the material which the anthropologist has gone to the field to find, are already themselves interpretations” (Richards). “Doing ethnography is like trying to read a manuscript - foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behavior.” (Geertz) Therefore, a successful ethnography will go beyond the categories of the ethnographer to recreate life as experienced in the field. Anthropological “fieldwork is the distinctive method to collect data, but anthropology is the means to carry home, as it were.”(Hastrup) “The anthropological text is a controlled communication that the author uses to persuade or critique, invent, justify, or reaffirm a theoretical position” (Gudeman & Rivera). Therefore it is important to pay significant attention to the analysis of the ethnography itself, “the figures and metaphors, the historical position of the ethnographer and its impact upon the text produced, and the shifting, reflexive relation between observer and observed” (Gudeman & Rivera). In this way, anthropology is not an objective experimental science in search of a law, but an interpretive one in search of meaning (Geertz). It is more like art or discourse through which we try to make sense of the experience in the field. “If you want to understand what a science is, you should look in the first instance not at its theories or its findings, and certainly not at what its apologists say about it; you should look at what the practitioners of it do” (Geertz). In anthropology practitioners do ethnographies, so we have to understand what an ethnography is. Ethnographic texts describe something observed, give meaning to actions or practices registered by means of a “thick description”, a description of a human behavior that registers not just the behavior, but the complex context as well so that the behavior can become meaningful to an outsider. (Hastrup) The “experience in itself is not necessarily creative. To be so it has to be transformed and mediated, and we are back at the problem of how to transplant life from context to text in a way which does not kill it” (Hastrup). And it is with the goal of giving meaning to the actions and practices observed, that anthropologists come up with new words, resort to storytelling or become artists in order to create another dimension that cannot be seen through the lenses of our own culture. The use of creative vehicles to recreate field experiences is not meant to represent facts. For instance the “storytelling that thrives for a long time in the milieu of work... does not aim to convey the pure essence of the thing, like information or a report. It sinks the thing into the life of the storyteller, in order to bring it out of him again” (Benjamin). “But according to recent "textualists, [like Geertz]" the claim to have had the "experience" of "being there" is itself a rhetorical figure, a culturally and historically dated ideology used to justify the authority of the text in which it appears (Gudeman & Rivera). But it is through fieldwork, through engaging in real conversations, that the ethnographer has the opportunity to recognize a discourse constructed in ways that sheds new light, that challenges, that enriches her own stories, her own texts and, if creatively used, will enrich the conversations from the past and the ones being registered in the ethnographic text. Hastrup makes a distinction between being a writer, or being an author to describe the task anthropologists have. She explains that a writer simply states the facts observed, while the author finds creative ways to explain the field experience through “thick description”. However, it is important to understand that “the author does not write fiction even though he creates reality. The border between fiction and creation may be difficult to draw, but the point is that the author of ethnographic texts ha[s] internalized an alien (un-)reality, which he [or she] then externalize[s] in the aim of making it accessible” (Hastrup). In the early twentieth Century, Malinowsky presented the idea that isolating oneself of one’s culture and completely diving into the native culture generated a better and deeper understanding of the culture studied. Later Rabinow critiqued this approach stating that not only the ethnographer is “learning about the informant’s culture, but the informant as well sees a glimpse of his culture as viewed by an outsider” (Richards). In this way the ethnographer impacts the people she engages with while doing fieldwork and generates changes of which she should be aware, while at the same time in the best examples, the ethnographer understanding and conversation is enriched. This occurs both to the outsider and the insider, just like fish immersed in the water, we seldom objectify our own culture. When we mirror ourselves in others and allow to view ourselves from and with the other’s point of view, we become aware of the metaphors, the very universe of meaning that provides us with and identity and our communities with a history and a future. With this in mind Rabinow recognizes that “both the anthropologist and his informants live in a culturally mediated world, caught up in ‘webs of significance’ they themselves have spun. This is the ground of anthropology; there is not privileged position, no absolute perspective, and no valid way to eliminate consciousness from our activities or those of others” (Richards). And it is not a one way street. Like in any conversation, both interlocutors are changed. The creativity or rhetorical forms used by anthropologists is now receiving more attention as one argument states that anthropologists draw upon their “own culture’s form of persuasion and canons of expository style, [which] significantly control the way one culture ‘reads’ another” (Gudeman & Rivera). Not only do ethnographers try to categorize or pigeonhole the experiences based on their own, but the culture being observed already has their own models that describe their reality. Fieldwork can also change the original hypotheses and theories anthropologists bring to the field. Observations made in the field can overflow definitions, concepts and theories forcing anthropologists to redefine old terms or use new ones to describe what was observed. This is the case of “Conversations in Colombia” where the economics notion of means of production is overwhelmed by the local notion of “base”. The ethnographer explores the local notion and contrasts it with the “Western” or the academic notions originally used to frame field observations, enrich our understanding or both. The process of writing an ethnography is then a process of “sorting out the structure of signification” (Geertz). Not only the structures found in the fieldwork, but that of the practitioners themselves. Anthropologists then need to be prepared to switch their objects of study or modify and create categories, as the observations in the field and the local explanations, metaphors, models and universes of meaning illuminate the original notions or challenge and displace them. Ethnographers assume that categories and models are not universal, including the generalizations and universals notions of the discipline which are understood as yet another cultural product. With this understanding, both the ethnographer’s as well as the local assumptions and conceptual frameworks can be better understood. “Ultimately, the aim of the anthropologist is not to prove, but to understand. However, what anthropologists view as the path to understanding has changed considerably over time” (Richards). Sources: Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller”, n.d. http://www.slought.org/files/downloads/events/SF_1331-Benjamin.pdf. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York, 1973. Gudeman, Stephen, and Alberto Rivera. Conversations in Colombia : the Domestic Economy in Life and Text. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Hastrup, Kirsten. “The Challenge of the Unreal - of How Anthropology Comes to Terms with Life.” In Culture and History. Copenhagen, 1987. Richards, Rebekah. “Changes in Anthropology Fieldwork over Time.” Blog. Anthropology @ Suite 101, January 30, 2010. http://rebekahrichards.suite101.com/changes-in-anthropology-fieldwork-over-time-a195889.