Ron Emoff - Mementos, Artifacts and Hallucinations from the Ethnographers Tent

from the Ethnographers Tent

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Copyright 2002 by Routledge

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mementos, artifacts, and hallucinations from the ethnographers tent /edited by
Ron Emoff and David Henderson.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 0-415-93545-8 (acid-free paper) ISBN 0-415-93546-6 (pbk. : acid-free paper)

1. Ethnology Field work. 2. Ethnologists Biography. I. Emoff, Ron. II. Henderson, David, 1968-

GN346 .M46 2002
305.800723dc21

2002021967

Ron Emoff and David Henderson

Andrew Causey

Katherine J. Hagedorn

Ron Emoff

Kirin Narayan

Karen Tranberg Hansen

Amitava Kumar

Ben Feinberg

Laurel Kendall

David Henderson

Ruth Behar

RON EMOFF AND DAVID HENDERSON

When we write about our lives and the people who inhabit them, we often find ourselves searching for words that graphy, though, a common ploy is to move our experiences to the background while placing in the foreground what we have come to know about the experiences, perceptions, and lives of the people with whom we have lived. Franz Boas, one of the ancestral spirits of American anthropology today, lived among and wrote about the Kwakiutl of the northwest coast of North America in the late 1800s and early 1900s. While he collected an immense amount of information from one particular Kwakiutl man, George Hunt, there is very little in Boass work about George Hunt himself.

Sometimes, strange tales emerge when we condense, streamline, and translate the desiderata of our fieldwork. Margaret Mead, for example, has been criticized for making essentializing and inaccurate comments about a particular group of people in Papua New Guinea, using information given to her by a neighboring group. One of these groups lived by fishing, and the other practiced agriculture; each group told myths about their superiority over the other. But Mead, with her limited knowledge of Papuan speech genres, did not recognize what she heard as caricature and confabulation. Rather, she apparently felt compelled to author an ethnographic truth about one group of Papuans, based upon the comments of the other group.

Certainly, ethnographers have toiled assiduously to learn how to ascertain whether or not the information that they report is accurate. Many also have recognized that accuracy is not always ensured and enshrined within the collected data. Most importantly, some have argued that the conventional narrative strategies of ethnography leave little room to say anything about the research process itself. Turning the Nuer or the Newars into narratives about social structure and cultural patterns, for example, often omits much of the experience of doing ethnography and bypasses much of the reality of being there. This is not to say that understanding and representing something of the whole of culture has not remained of utmost importance in the work of anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, folklorists, and others; it has. But are there ways we might also explore a third space of researcha space that encompasses how others inscribe structures and patterns upon us, how we write these upon others, and how we brood over these transformations in the course of writing.

When we frame ethnographic narratives as realistic depictions of what happens among other peoples in other lands, or as overarching explications of how society or culture is constituted, we sometimes manage to slip around any troublesome differences of opinion as to what happened. We slide into a space where modes of representation operate separately from modes of production, where writing ethnography erases some of the muddle of doing ethnography. While we could take ethnography to be a matter of explaining and accounting for what happened, we also might undertake it as an exploration of the ways by which knowledge and culture come into being. Ethnography is clearly not just the work of the ethnographer. When ethnographers are at work, the people with whom they have lived are at work as well, struggling with the complexities of making meaning through discourse and making sense through observation. One way to do ethnography is to explore the unfolding of ethnographic events in ways that shake the authors faith in fixed interpretations, ways that reiterate that the meanings of events are never secure, ways that clarify that these meanings are socially produced and historically situated. Writing then becomes, in part, less the mastery of a form of knowledge and more a collection of excerpts, outtakes from a continuous conversation about what happens on the edges of multiple forms of knowledge.

Rethinking ethnography as open-ended rather than finished, then, some ethnographers have explored other narrative strategies for representing what they come to know, other ways of writing people. Their goals have been to tell something else of what is out there, huge and unwieldy as out there is; to explore other threads in the social fabric of a place, a fabric that is rent with irreconcilable differences of opinion and points of view; and to explore the possibilities of engaging the distinctive unfolding of life in other places and times.

Edmund Carpenter, a Canadian anthropologist who traveled and researched widely and briefly became an American media icon, once compiled a collection of fieldnotes in which he had made brief observations about the response of peoples everywhere to the electronic media that were becoming pervasive tools for creating, representing, and imagining just about anything. These were included in his book, Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me! (1974). In it, he confessed that in glancing through these notes recently, I found the observations superficial, the comments petty (71). But he recognized their value in addressing moments in fieldwork that were often elided in ethnographic writing, and he decided to include a number of them here because they refer to events which anthropologists rarely acknowledge (71). In this volume, we have brought together writers who try to depict such events and who admit their own struggles with representing them. They acknowledge events that might have been left buried in their notes or memories and try to overcome their inclinations to write about particular things in particular ways.

Culture, the presumed ground of our writing, has been depicted as many thingsas predicament, as locale or vehicle of critique, as site of being-at-home-in-the-world, and, of course as something good to write about. While perhaps living up to any or all of these things, culture comes into our imaginations and intellects through procedures of recounting, often laden with significant interruptions in time, place, and perception. Such spans of experience create varying modes of tension, often implicit, between the specific cultural field and writers and readers of culture themselves. As we read them, though, ethnographic monographs are more than mere representations of different practices, peoples, and places. We are privileged, sometimes again more implicitly than candidly, to be given not simply a representation of culture itself, but a view or sense of a complex system of interactions through which a cultural entity comes to (literary) life and through which it can be taken as truth.