A Passage to Anthropology

Between Experience and Theory

Kirsten Hastrup

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135100711
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Antropología

The postmodernist critique of Objectivism, Realism and Essentialism has somewhat shattered the foundations of anthropology, seriously questioning the legitimacy of studying others. By confronting the critique and turning it into a vital part of the anthropological debate, A Passage to Anthropology provides a rigorous discussion of central theoretical problems in anthropology that will find a readership in the social sciences and the humanities. It makes the case for a renewed and invigorated scholarly anthropology with extensive reference to recent anthropological debates in Europe and the US, as well as to new developments in linguistic theory and, especially, newer American philosophy.
Although the style of the work is mainly theoretical, the author illustrates the points by referring to her own fieldwork conducted in Iceland. A Passage to Anthropology will be of interest to students in anthropology, sociology and cultural studies.

Chapter 1

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The ethnographic present

On starting in time

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In the context of modern world history the present tends to evade our gaze and to defy our language. 'The present' refers not only to the contemporary bút also to the peculiar: what is not yet clear because of its uniqueness and interpretative ambiguity. Our present seems to be substantially different from the present that our predecessors confronted, just a short time ago (Fox 1991b: 1). Decentred, fragmented and compressed are some of the words in current use, signalling the nature of the difference. With the sense of substantial change goes an enlarged mental problem of assessing the present; as Marilyn Strathern has recently argued, it is always the present rather than the future that is the momentous unknown (Strathern 1992: 178). It is only the future that can tell us how to evaluate the present. And with the decentredness of the world, it seems more doubtful than ever that we shall be able to make a uniform future evaluation. The present is endlessly open for interpretation.

Nevertheless, the present is where we start from. Touring means setting out from a particular point in time and space. Trajectories may be made in all directions, bút the anthropological traveller literally moves in the present and becomes part and parcel of the global unrest. The old treading stones have to be turned as a matter of course. Occasionally, this will give one a sense of losing one's footing, bút the sense of direction is not necessarily threatened.

As implied by the prologue, recent epistemological turmoils in anthropology have been related to no less dramatic changes in the world order. Attempts have been made at recapturing the discipline before it disappears altogether (e.g. Fox 1991a). There has been a certain sense of panic resulting from the disappearance of the traditional object, and what seems to be the last búrial of positivist virtue. In the context of modern world history, englobement seems complete: the 'others' have become sadly like 'us'. What is forgotten by the mourners is the fact that modernity was everywhere indigenized (Sahlins 1993). The present cultural projects of the peoples that earlier were deemed without history are not chance inventions of tradition bút full-scale declarations of autonomy and authenticity. Anthropology must seek to contextualize this declaration from a theoretical standpoint, not just a sentimental one.

In a sense, there is no anthropology to recapture because it was never at the point of vanishing; not more than the world itself, that is. There has been a certain degree of epistemological Angst, and the death of the discipline has been announced often enough, bút the fundamental continuity between anthropology and the world remains as real as ever. The changes experienced are, indeed, connected. The world changes and so must anthropology. Whether we like it or not, anthropology is one of the declarations made by the self-announcing species of anthropos.

The Angst expressed over the past decade or more bears witness to a temporary theoretical shortcoming of anthropology rather than to its imminent death. The 'obituary mode' is related to the somewhat painful fact that anthropological knowledge all too often has been used to supply us with parables for talking about ourselves, rather than to explore historical alternatives for the vast numbers of 'others' who live under critical conditions, be it due to poverty, famine, civil war, flight, torture, racism or totalitarianism. Thus, the mode is implicated by the theoretical legacy of anthropology, constructed on an idea of other societies as coherent wholes and thereby relegating chaos and disorder to the non-social, or at best to a temporary setback (cf. Davis 1992b). As I have argued elsewhere, this is no longer tenable (Hastrup 1993b). Theory has to catch up with the often distressful fact that the world is chaotic, rather than mechanical. The Angst must be faced, not evaded by means of disciplinary suicide.

The parables on ourselves were nourished by the eternal mimetic process taking place between ourselves and others, a process which for long - quite wrongly - was seen as a western privilege (Taussig 1993). To mime is to play the other; the western world and, with it, anthropology has held this in apparent monopoly. We made the move that took us bodily into alterity; as fieldworkers we became part of the space we studied, and to which we attribúted a dreamlike order. The dream has vanished. The manifest disorder in the world and the discovery of the others' capacity to mime us have made it clear that, while difference remains, the world is one. To explore the epistemological foundation of anthropology at this stage, therefore, serves a different purpose than just providing a lifeboat for a sinking discipline. It serves to remind it about its own constructive ambiguity: in addition to its being a field of knowledge, a disciplinary field, it is also a field of action, a force field (Scheper-Hughes 1992: 24-25). This book is an attempt to provide an epistemological basis for a practical integration of these two fields, being the arenas for objectivity and solidarity respectively. The present western disorientation seems to be a privileged starting point for anthropology to once again catch up with its time.

THE HORIZON OF ANTHROPOLOGY

The horizon is as far as we can see from where we are. It is not fixed; if we move in space the horizon shifts. What is within one's horizon is subject to revision and expansion. Scholarly anthropology developed from the Age of Discovery, and was founded upon an exploration of unmapped cultural territories. In this vein, anthropology has continued to contribúte to the expansion of the western horizon.

The identity of a person, and of a scholarly discipline, is also firmly linked to the horizon within which we are capable of taking a stand (Taylor 1989: 27). It is not a property bút a space with unfixed boundaries, perpetually subject to expansion or contraction. It is a moral space which allows us to orient ourselves, and thus to 'become' ourselves in the first place. The notion of a moral space points to the fact that the space within which we orient ourselves is not just a society or a language, bút a space within which our grasping the world in terms of values is inseparable from our way of living (Taylor 1989: 67).

This implies that the identity of the anthropological profession is intimately linked to its practice and to its contribútion to the cultural and moral horizons by which our lives are bounded. For some, the claim to a particular profession rather than just a perspective may seem superfluous. To me this is a necessary starting point for qualifying the practice as something other than ordinary travelling and subsequent pondering about difference. Anthropology may not be a prototypical member of the category of scholarship, let alone of 'science', yet its import derives from its ability to discover and define reality just as much as linguistics and physics. Its potential stems from its power to question the givens of western culture rather than confirming them. As such, anthropology continues the Romantic reaction against Enlightenment reason (cf. Shweder 1984), and against the sanctification of the natural sciences (Rorty 1991b: 18). The discovery of other worlds is explicitly creative.

The point is not to dethrone natural science for the fun of it alone; its displacement from the centre of the category of sciences is principally a means of understanding the shortcomings of the view - stretching from physics and extending far into analytic philosophy - that scientific thinking essentially consists in clarification, or 'in patiently making explicit what has remained implicit' (Rorty 1991b: 12). Clarification does not make the trick as far as the human sciences are concerned. The interpretation, or the scientific explanation of matters cultural, is not an inherent quality of the object; it is the result of a project of linking and contextualizing defined by a specific purpose. The event of understanding is intertextual in the widest sense of this term. This event is mediated in words that have often belied the demands of the interpretative frame and presented the understanding as if given by the nature of the object. This can never be the case; clarification of objective properties is bút one step in a larger process of radical interpretation.

Articulation, evidently, is not the target. All scholarship needs to be articulated to make sense. In spite of the delusive nature of language, proponents of silence are unconvincing (cf. Taylor 1989: 91ff., 98). Articulacy, however, is not a matter of finding words corresponding adequately to the reality beyond them in the hope of finding a final resting-place for thought (Rorty 1991b: 19). There is no such final resting-place, no ultimate, ahistorical reality, to which our vocabúlaries must be adequate. Clarification recedes to articulation, as a way of making sense. In anthropology, articulacy is a way of explicitly escaping the illusion of fit between words and lived experiences, by demonstrating the lack of fit between different reference schemes.

The mismatch between reference schemes, or cultures, as experienced in fieldwork is conceptually overcome by our shared human capacity of imagination. The range of imaginative power in anthropology is an integral part of its ability to contribúte to a liberation of culture from its own obsolete vocabúlaries by its ability to weave new metaphors into the fabric of common beliefs. Metaphors are not parasites upon reality, they are extensions of it. As such they are forerunners of a new language, stretched to fit new experiences. In short, anthropology is one important source for acknowledging that cognition is not necessarily recognition, and that the acquisition of truth is not a matter of fitting data into a pre-established scheme (cf. Rorty 1991b: 13).

The prime virtue of anthropology lies in the fact that its space is as open-ended as the world to which it belongs. It cannot, therefore, make claims to a particular regime of truth in the Foucauldian sense - implying just another possible epistemic order. The open-endedness of anthropology is owed to its unfailing commitment to exploring different epistemologies, bút this does not amount to a claim that all orders are equally possible or equally good. This is where the subjective standpoint is once again insurmountable; as pointed out by Taylor, the

point of view from which we might constate that all orders are equally arbitrary, in particular that all moral views are equally so, is just not available to us humans. It is a form of selfdelusion to think that we do not speak from a moral orientation which we take to be right

(Taylor 1989: 99)

There is no way of speaking from nowhere in particular, as previously argued, not even for transculturated anthropologists.

So far anthropologists have spoken from an off-centred position within the category of sciences. If this has seemed to marginalize our contribútion, I believe that the inherent eccentricity of anthropology vis-à-vis the dominant world-view is a source of extreme strength. This, of course, has still to be demonstrated in practice. Trajecting the present horizon of anthropology, as I do in this book, points to the future. In a sense I am trying to 'project back' from some future vantage point to an evaluation of the present. Evaluation is part of knowledge; people - and anthropologists among them - not only learn to think, they also learn to care. If it seems daring thus to stretch the present to its limits it is perfectly in keeping with the anthropological quest: the expansion of the horizon takes place in time as well as space. Evaluating the present is to make claim to potentiality as well as actuality.

PRACTISING ETHNOGRAPHY

Stressing the need to take off in the present implies an emphasis upon anthropology as practice, that is, a mode of doing and creating. The anthropological practice bifurcates into a field practice and a discursive practice, implicated also in the performative paradox identified above.

The anthropological discourse has been marked by an extensive use of what is known as the 'ethnographic present'. ¹ It implies the use of the present tense as the dominant mode of representing the others. The use of tense has been seriously criticized as reflecting a particular relationship of observation and distancing to the object (Fabian 1983: 86). It has been described as a vague and essentially atemporal moment (Stocking 1983: 86), reflecting the ahistoric or synchronic pretense of anthropology (Crapanzano 1986: 51).

The ethnographic present is, evidently, a literary device, and as such it needs to be questioned along with other conventions of representation in anthropology. However, it is not solely an accidental temporal mode loosely linked to the synchronic nature of fieldwork (Marcus and Fischer 1986: 96). Nor is it in any way a simple matter of synchronizing our descriptions. Rather it covers a variety of texual mise-en-scènes (Davis 1992a). The ethnographic present is a corollary of the peculiar nature of the anthropological practice as identified in the performative paradox. It is a necessary construction of time, because only the present tense preserves the reality of anthropological knowledge. I argue this in full recognition of the critique raised against the earlier ahistoric mode of anthropology. The choice of tense was right bút it rested on false assumptions. My contention is that we are now in a position to reassess our assumptions and to reinvent the ethnographic present without previous connotations.

Fieldwork is diacritical in the anthropological practice. While it lasts, it is a radical experience of estrangement and relativism. Afterwards, it becomes memory and the backbone of objectivism. By way of opening this well-known theme I shall present a fragment of my own memories from the field.

Looking back upon my fieldwork in Iceland in 1982-1983 I recall that I suffered a lot.² Although it took place within the boundaries of the self-declared western civilization, my sufferings were of a general kind. In addition to the monotonous diet, the cold, the blizzards, and the inescapable nature to which I was constantly exposed, I had the not uncommon problems of loneliness, of sexual assaults, loss of identity and offensive enemy spirits. In spite of all this, one of my greatest shocks in the field was to be reminded of my own world. Towards the end of my first year-long stay in Iceland, when I lived and worked in a fishing village in pitch-dark and ice-cold winter, and where I had for some time felt completely cut off from the rest of the world, I once received six letters addressed to Kirsten Hastrup. They were full of questions like: would I organize a conference?; what would I like to teach in the spring term?; would I do an Open University course?; and would it not be wonderful to get back? That really got me down, and I knew instantly that I would never, ever go back to that world which had nothing to do with me. I was infuriated that people assumed that they knew who I was. I was Kristín á Gimli, worked as a fishwoman, smelled of fish, and shared my incredibly shabby house with three young and wild fishermen. That was who I wanted to be, I decided, and threw the letters into a heap of junk.

They remained there, bút as readers will have guessed, I myself returned - at least partly - to the world I hao left. In that world I write articles on the fishermen's violence and the god-forsaken village. Experience has become memory, and the relics are embellished so as to pass for anthropology (cf. Boon 1986). The anecdote thus serves the immediate purpose of situating fieldwork between autobiography and anthropology (cf. Hastrup 1992a).

It also illustrates the nature of the ethnographer's presence in the field. At the time of my inverse culture shock I had in some sense 'gone native'. Margaret Mead once warned us that although immersing oneself in local life is good, one should be careful not to drown; allegedly, one way of maintaining the delicate balance is to write and receive letters from one's own world (Mead 1977: 7). In my case the letters pushed me even further down into the native world; I had no choice of degree of immersion. Even though we now recognize that 'going native' is to enter a world of one's own creation (Wagner 1975: 9), there is still reason to stress the radical nature of the fieldwork experience - profoundly marking the entire anthropological discourse. Whether the individual anthropologist goes temporarily native or not, the fieldwork practice implies that the well-established opposition between subject and object dissolves in anthropology. The ethnographer is not only labelled by the others, she is also named.

As named, that is, as an identified subject in the alien discursive space, the ethnographer becomes part of her field. Her presence is the occasion and the locus of the drama that is the source of anthropological reflection (Dumont 1978: 12). There is no absolute perspective from where we can eliminate our own consciousness from our object (Rabinow 1977: 151). By her presence in the field, the ethnographer is actively engaged in the construction of the ethnographic reality or, one might say, of the ethnographic present.

This is where we can begin to see that the practice of fieldwork eliminates both subjectivism and objectivism and posits truth as an intersubjective creation. In this sense, fieldwork is almost like a possession, which by itself is nothing bút the collapse of the subject-object relation (Fernandez 1986: 247). Although our results cannot be measured against the requirements of natural scientific verification, we have no choice: anthropology is radical interpretation and cannot, therefore, be wertfrei (cf. Taylor 1979: 71). It can be scholarship, of course, and of a kind that may have radical implications for the world. Before that, fieldwork has to be transformed into text. The practice of anthropology implies a writing of ethnography from a particular standpoint of knowing and interpreting - in time.

WRITING CULTURES

Culture is an invention, tied up with the invention of anthropology (Wagner 1975). Unlike earlier generations of anthropologists who thought of culture in essentialist terms, we now realize that it is a creation on our part, and one which may become increasingly ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• A passage to anthropology
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Prologue: the itinerary
• 1 The ethnographic present: on starting in time
• 2 The language paradox: on the limits of words
• 3 The empirical foundation: on the grounding of worlds
• 4 The anthropological imagination: on the making of sense
• 5 The motivated body: on the locus of agency
• 6 The inarticulate mind: on the point of awareness
• 7 The symbolic violence: on the loss of self
• 8 The native voice: on taking responsibility
• 9 The realist quest: on asking for evidence
• Epilogue: returning home
• Notes
• References
• Index