Fieldwork is a dialectic between reflection and immediacy. Both are cultural constructs. Our scientific categories help us recognize, describe, and develop areas of inquiry. But one cannot engage in questioning and redefining twenty-four hours a day. The scientific perspective on the world is hard to sustain. In the field there is less to fall back on; the world of everyday life changes more rapidly and dramatically than it would at home. There is an accelerated dialectic between the recognition of new experiences and their normalization. Paul Rabinow1
Construing anthropology as either science or art, fact or fiction, true or false, knowledge or opinion implies an absurd antimony between objectivity and subjectivity, and the idea that we must somehow choose between one or the other. Michael Jackson2
Twenty-five years after his death, Bronislaw Malinowski – the reputed Father of Participant Observation – haunted the academic underpinnings of anthropology through the posthumous publication of his private field diary, originally inscripted in cryptic Polish. This was in 1967, when I was a sixteen-year old high-school junior dreaming of a career in archaeology. A decade later Paul Rabinow published his acclaimed Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco; the year was 1977 and I was making final preparations to head off to Yemen to begin my ethnographic fieldwork as a participant observer. Over three decades later, I still have not published the monographic ‘ethnography’ that would mark my post-ethnographic-present adult status in the discipline. The task – dissecting an increasingly distant dissertation of an unmanageable 725 pages into a more feasible and hopefully more mature book requires at this point a cutting-edge Caesarian moment. I went, I saw, I conquered my fears; now what? If ever there was an appropriate time to set down my reflections on my fieldwork in my village, this is it. Is this what being there was really all about?
Re-reading Rabinow at the same time as I relive my own diary entries from the field provides a fertile frame for these reflections. After all, Rabinow was one of the first to offer a reflexivist critique of his mentors, hinging on their unwillingness to let down their academically coiffured hair and tell it like it was regarding the ‘clan secrets’ about being in the field.3 Having been there, he wanted to know why he had not been prepared for the less than theoretical other[there]ness of this anthropological coming-of-age ritual. Rabinow, with an impetuous honesty, asked “leading anthropologists who espouse this ‘before and after’ view of fieldwork why they have not written on the subject themselves, since it seems to be such an important one for the field.”4 The “culturally standardized” response he received from the gentlemen in his academic gens was “‘Yes, I suppose. I thought about it when I was young. I kept diaries, perhaps someday, but you know there are really other things which are more important.’“5 There were, at the time, “memoirs or anecdotal accounts of sufferings,” including Malinowski’s infamous yet wonderfully humanizing diary of loneliness, disgust and lust. But the point for Rabinow was that “they all cling to the key assumption that the field experience itself is basically separable from the mainstream of theory in anthropology – that the enterprise of inquiry is essentially discontinuous from its results.”6 My increasingly distanced sense of that alleged discontinuity, as reflected in my field diary, is what this essay is all about.
It is not clear what anecdotal accounts of suffering, beyond the cryptic musings of Malinowski’s diaries, Rabinow was familiar with. It may be true that few discussions of the fieldwork experience were made in the classroom. Walter Goldschmidt reminisces that when he asked Alfred Kroeber in the 1930s for advice on conducting ethnography among the Nomlaki, he was just told to take along plenty of paper and pencils, since “it could not be taught.”7 Gerald D. Berreman notes that when he and his fellow students asked a professor what it was like to be in the field, the “counsel fell rather short of our expectations.”8 Recognizing the problem that anthropologists were reluctant to speak about their fieldwork experience, Morris Freilich in 1970 brought together articles by ten established ethnographers to discuss the issue. Rabinow appears not to have noticed Freilich’s comment: “What it is like includes feelings of frustration, fears, hopes, isolation, exciting ‘on-stage’ performances, euphoric heights, and deep depressions, and these feelings must be understood both for the anthropologist’s psychological comfort and for effective research.”9
Nor did Rabinow consider the hair-letting-down experiences from the personal accounts by a number of women ethnographers in Peggy Golde’s 1970 edition of Women in the Field, which is cited in his bibliography. When Laura Nader commented on “the intellectual problems of anthropology as they affect the field anthropologist,” was she to be dismissed as part of the “rustling-of-the-wind-in-the-palm-tree” or Return to Laughter genre.10 Helen Codere, who conducted fieldwork in Rwanda in 1959–1960 noted the embarrassment of being a White American liberal in a colonial context needing personal servants and described how she had to undergo her “own private revolution of cherished anthropological doctrine in order to function effectively.”11 What did Rabinow not understand when Ruth Landes said “Field work serves an idiosyncracy of perception that cannot separate the sensuousness of life from its abstractions, nor the researcher’s personality from his experiences.” She adds: “Underneath culture’s variations we are not all the same, but we are recognizable. When the field worker recognizes personalities this way in the alien culture, he discovers his own. This gives the human depth to information he gathers and will interpret for scholars and others.”12
Rabinow might have benefited from reading the poignant reflexivist account of Andreas Köbben, who in 1967 described his fieldwork experience among the Djuka of Surinam. “The personality and interests of the research-worker are thus a significant factor in determining the contents of his report,” concludes Köbben. “Pure description does not exist.”13 Like Rabinow, Köbben found life in the field to be a challenge, reflecting: “Personally, I lived under great psychological stress and felt little of the proverbial peacefulness of ‘country life.’ Few books touch on this subject, but I know that the same is true of quite a number of other fieldworkers. Perhaps it is even a sine qua non for field work.”14 It is hardly a sin if the sine qua non of “being there” does not provide the comforts of home for the participant observer. As Doug Raybeck reflects on fieldwork conducted in Malaysia in the late 1960s, “The problem with fieldwork is not that things are different; one expects things to be different.”15 At least one should expect that things will be different.
Rabinow quite consciously set out to violate the specific taboos that haunted him by arguing that “all cultural activity is experiential, that fieldwork is a distinctive type of cultural activity, and that it is this activity which defines the discipline.”16 Rabinow claimed that he was not challenging the need for fieldwork; he wanted to bring it out in the open for an airing. His radical suggestion at the time was that a “positivistic view of science” was a poor way to study humanity. He saw the reluctance of his mentors to speak about process as a byproduct of what many anthropologists were trying so hard at the time to show – that they were objective social scientists and ethnographic data were more than quantitatively deficient anecdotes. Fieldwork method, inaugurated in Malinowski’s pioneering Argonauts (1922) had now become a hermeneutical problem, exemplified in the private musings of the same author’s A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term (1967).
The predicament of having been there as an ethnographer is summed up neatly by Rabinow – as participant reflector – in Hegel’s oft-quoted insight that “the owl of Minerva flies at Dusk.”17 Minerva, the Italian goddess who began materially as a patron of handicraft and war à la the Greek Athena, served as a symbol of philosophical wisdom for Hegel. The idea of a twilight flight perhaps reflects Hegel’s own sense that his civilization had arrived at a stage in which such a bird’s eye view would be meaningful. The owl is a skillful hunter at twilight because it can see better than its prey, a fitting metaphor for the kind of rationality Hegel triumphed. In this philosophical sense, having the advantage of hindsight, the ethnographer should have a firm commitment to providing, as Hegel advised, “only a scientific and objective treatment.”18 A humanist mode of anthropology was, for Rabinow, just beginning to spread its wings, although I imagine Hegel would be surprised to learn that such a wise owl could fly at all in a world without definitive intellectual boundaries.
Paul Rabinow started reflecting on his field experience in Morocco as the perils of scientistic positivism were being debated among anthropologists.19 The debate spread far beyond anthropology to critical deconstruction of the paradigm inaugurated by Auguste Comte in the early 19th century as positivism, a philosophical dictum that preceded the development of modern scientific theory but still greatly influenced it. Rabinow ignores the previous criticism of Comte’s positivism, which cultural materialist Marvin Harris has labeled a “fatally muddled outlook.”20 “Anthropological activity is never only scientific,” noted Bob Scholte in his contribution to Dell Hymes’ Reinventing Anthropology.21 Tylor’s utopian hope for a science that produced laws analogous to the physical sciences could not withstand the complexity of human behavior that later ethnography documented. Some anthropologists, like Evans-Pritchard, have argued that anthropology shares more in common with history than the positivist thrust of the sciences.22 Even Johannes Fabian, whose critique of anthropology has been sharp, argues: “For those of us who continued to work as ethnographers because, not in spite, of our intellectual and political commitments, the struggle for liberation from positivism and scientism never meant that empirical accountability and claims to the scientific status of our findings were to be abandoned.”23
The question I see is not whether to be scientific of humanistic, but how to be both. That is, the ethnographer must strive to make his observations and analyses more rigorous than those of a casual observer and he must do so without losing the fundamental insights that are obtained by perceptive non-scientists (for instance, novelists). The humanistic view tends to overlook the advantages of rigor – especially of verifiability of findings; the scientist view tends to overlook the advantages of insight.24
Surely an anthropologist can be a pragmatic empiricist without having to be a card-carrying positivist.25 The problem, shared with many disciplines outside anthropology, is not a theoretical strait-jacket but finding appropriate ways as humans to study ourselves and, more specifically in ethnography, how we as particularly socialized humans represent others. Any anthropologist who thought she or he were really being totally objective was, in a fact-finding sense, never capable of such an impossible goal. Those who were looking for Truth could only find certain kinds of truths, at times the very kinds they were seeking. In many cases it is the misreading of what anthropologists write that is taken as truth rather than what the ethnographer believed or intended.
1 Why Being There Matters
To me the experience is far more like a sharp blow to the head or a large spoonful of horseradish; it is a process that marks those who have been through it. Daniel Bradburd26
Critical theoretical critiques aside, the heroic (heroinic) contribution of fieldwork is the great achievement of a century of anthropology. James Peacock27
It borders on the redundant to suggest that anthropologists who have undertaken ethnographic fieldwork have no choice but to reflect. Some vent in diaries or letters, most in person to friends and lovers – off the publish-or-perish record – and certainly all of us are occasionally tormented, or at least mildly troubled, to some degree about what it all meant. At the risk of violating what may be a reflective clan taboo of much, if not most, distinctively postmodern reflexivist anthropology over the past two decades, I begin with an immodest counter claim: most anthropologists have been reluctant to discuss the implications of their fieldwork experience because there are really other things which are more important. When ‘I’ becomes the main issue, ethnography can easily descend into ordinary journalism where reflections tend to be self-serving, even when they are self deprecating. Placing the spotlight on the carefully crafted rhetorical ‘I’ in the ethnographic encounter does not in itself give the ‘other’ a more authentic voice. We should reflect in order to ease entry into the ubiquitous – yet hardly iniquitous – field context, continually hone our analytical tools, and filter our theories. Reflect, that is, in order to act responsibly rather than to keep on endlessly reflecting in mirror imagining.
This is a book for anthropologists and other social scientists who, like me, have read and listened with interest to the protagonists’ often heated exchanges – over polyvocality, reflexivity, colonialist discourse, audience, the nature of the relationship between anthropologists and informants, and the like – and still are just a little more interested in the content of the ethnographies we read and write down than in the ethnographers’ epistemologies.28
“Fieldwork is a dialectic between reflection and immediacy. Both are cultural constructs,” suggests Rabinow.29 Fieldwork is first and foremost about immediacy; ‘being there’ only comes into being when we are there. Methods courses and theory seminars aside, our collective rite of passage is a get-along-by-the-seat-of-your-pants experience that defies cogent description in academic language. The fieldwork context includes feeling lonely and out of place, getting sick as a dog, making foolish mistakes in etiquette, interrupting and often complicating the lives of others, and learning a lot you might not want to know about yourself. To assume otherwise is to be naïve, not necessarily duped by one’s university mentors. Fieldwork can also be exhilarating, a peak experience, a store of memories that will do more than haunt your lectures for decades.
Yes, we reflect in the field; as humans we tend to reflect wherever we are. But a ‘dialectic’? Not in a formally logical way, not one that arrives at a critical understanding, certainly not as Kant, Hegel or Marx would recognize dialectic as a process leading to ultimate clarification. Indeed, beyond the catachrestic fixation on ‘dialectic’ in much postmodern criticism, I fail to see how this term could be cited simultaneously with a rhetorical denial of the metaphysical base for a positivistic view of science.30 For Rabinow fieldwork is dialectic “because neither the subject nor the object remain static.”31 But what set of human relationships is ever static? What else could being there be if not culturally constructed? This was one of the compelling reasons I did not choose to collect rocks or split atoms but to live with people. A fieldwork context presents the opportunity for dialogue, but mandates neither the impossibility nor the necessity of arriving at a suitable synthesis. The key problem with Rabinow’s reflective gloss is how reflecting after the fact could logically resurrect the immediacy of fieldwork. It is only meaningfully immediate once. All else is representation, the truth of which is more often than not ascribed solely through the rhetoric of a unilaterally reconstructed post-dialectic.
“Our scientific categories help us recognize, describe, and develop areas of inquiry. But one cannot engage in questioning and redefining twenty-four hours a day” continues Rabinow.32 One cannot engage in anything twenty-four hours a day. But should we abandon training in formalized methodology and disciplined theory when this seems to clash and at times crash before our eyes in the immediacy of experiencing other cultures? Is it not possible to choose sounder categories from unsounder ones in representing others when reflecting on previous experience in the intellectual history of both the sciences and the humanities? Is there a better way than applying rational logic and avoiding logical fallacies – the force behind the philosophical concept of dialectic – for recognizing, describing and developing areas of inquiry as an anthropologist? If our anthropologizing cannot be sustained twenty-four hours a day, is it worthless? If we need to read a novel, drink ourselves silly or escape a pesky informant, do these personal moments constitute an indictment of who, what and why we are as anthropologists in the field? I do not think that reflection is unimportant, else this essay would not be written, but simply that it is worth considering what else may be more important.
“In the field there is less to fall back on; the world of everyday life changes more rapidly and dramatically than it would at home. There is an accelerated dialectic between the recognition of new experiences and their normalization” Rabinow notes.33 Precisely! This is true for anyone who crosses cultural boundaries, not only anthropologists; it is more challenging to function away from the comforts of home. The routine is not there, emotional supports may not be available; there’s no automatic pilot for behavior because every day in the field is not everyday any more. Hence the designation of ethnographic fieldwork as our quintessential – and emotionally stressful – rite of passage. Students of human behavior who do not go into the field can be brilliant and make lasting contributions to the field – Durkheim or Weber, for example – but consider how their ideas might have benefited from the disorienting and reorienting of being in a field and observing real others in context. It is because we are not at home and cannot be so – even when we try – that we have an opportunity to understand something significant about what is going on, with our own psyche as well as the culture we have come to study. As Daniel Bradburd reflects on his field experience in Iran, “While it is far from a perfect technique, spending a good long time with people, watching what they do, listening to what they say, understanding what is important to them, and constantly examining what one experiences living with them – in short, doing long-term fieldwork – remains the best way, and in my view probably the only way, to achieve some significant understanding of another culture.”34
To experience the immediacy of the field, we do have to be there. However, our collective having been there has been dismissed by some “hermeneutically sophisticated anthropologists,” in the connoting trope of James Clifford, as a power-stained tool to manufacture a textualized aura of ethnographic authority.35 Rabinow mentions his mentors’ disdain for those who worked in libraries as “not ‘really’ anthropologists, regardless of what they knew about anthropological topics.”36 The primary example he chose was Mircea Eliade, a distinguished historian of religion at the University of Chicago. But this example supports the very point Rabinow thought problematic. Despite Eliade’s recognized erudition, which his scholarly output establishes beyond any academically reasonable doubt, his lack of fieldwork and unchallenged ethnocentric assumptions clearly detract from the application of his work to specific cases. Eliade’s intuition, like that of his encyclopedic predecessor James Frazer, was extraordinary, but because “it had not been altered by the alchemy of fieldwork”37 I suggest that it remains untested against the immediacy of observing what people actually do and say they do with ideas. Is it not counter productive to suggest, even indirectly, that Eliade’s ideas about anthropological topics would have been less significant if he had actually done fieldwork somewhere? If Rabinow reflects on his own fieldwork experience as in some important sense disillusioning, does that mean there must be a bad alchemical reaction for all ethnographers? Styling fieldwork as alchemy only makes sense from the platform of the scientific method; otherwise everything might as well be mere intellectual fool’s gold.
“Rather, I take the object of anthropological science (Wissenschaft) to be the dynamic and mutually constitutive, if partial and dynamic, connections between figures of anthropos and the diverse, and at times inconsistent, branches of knowledge available during a period of time; that claim authority about the truth of the matter; and whose legitimacy to make such claims is accepted as plausible by other such claimants; as well as the power relations within which and through which those claims are produced, established, contested, defeated, affirmed, and disseminated.”38
What he defines as a narrowing of scope is rather an idiosyncratic philosophical meditation, where speculation outside the field is considered the only thing worthwhile.
2 Reflecting after Yemen
Reflections on fieldwork – it really does demand a lot just to be here – I haven’t begun to feel anthropological yet. Now I begin to understand the mentality of those who go to Ireland or someplace ‘like home.’ I will never understand the lure of New Guinea or the Amazon. Here at least we can live + eat European food (be it from cans).Field Notes 4/6/78
This living in a foreign country is a bit too much – and I really do not enjoy it (yet –). Perhaps in a village on our own – with a vehicle.Field Notes 4/29/78
Will I have happy memories of Yemen? I keep stumbling over my own mental state – still sulking in fear of this very real unknown – so easily known yet so seemingly far away.Field Notes 8/22/78
I arrived in Yemen on March 22, 1978. The next day I began a ‘Yemen Diary’ to record events and feelings.39 At the beginning I was quite diligent in my comments, in part because it took several months to obtain government permission to settle into a rural field site. Once in the ‘real’ field these diary entries became less frequent as I focused on research issues and wrote down specific field notes. Re-reading the diary years later I only vaguely recall the immediacy of the experience that prompted my reflections. I am more than a little chagrined at how much was left out of what I actually did in the field; there are details on where I went, what I ate, and how I was feeling, but these are sporadic and not a daily record. There is quite a lot of reflecting going on in these pages; some of it is refreshingly honest, while other parts seem contrived like poems written at the last minute for an English composition class. Would I publish it as is? I doubt it; no one would want to read its tedious droning of the mundane. Is it embarrassing? Not in a Malinowskian sense; less now than it would have been soon after I wrote it. Does it shed light on my ethnographic data? Not much for anyone but myself, I suspect.
About two weeks after arriving in Yemen there is an entry on my initial reflections to being there. I was undergoing initial culture shock, realizing how demanding it was not to be in my previous and far more comfortable ‘there’ at home. The consolation was that at least Yemen had some of the comforts of home. There seemed to be an abundance of my kind of super market food in cans, but oh how I would grow to despise those tins of rubbery Australian Kraft cheese, bland Asian mackerel, and out-of-date A&P peanut butter! I had reason to be a bit glum, since I still was not sure if I would be receiving a Fulbright grant, without which I had little idea how long I could stay in the field.40 That my wife, Najwa Adra, was also an anthropologist and we would be doing our fieldwork side by side is relevant for reflecting on what it meant for me to be in the field.41 We spent the first week with a friend of Najwa’s family, then found a temporary place to stay in the capital with a Yemeni family while we snailed through the bureaucracy to get permissions. None of my mentors promised this part would be fun; I just hoped it would be and sometimes it was not. In retrospect, however, I would not simply try to post hoc[us pocus] whine it away.
After only a few days in Morocco, Rabinow notes “already I was set up in a hotel, an obvious remnant of colonialism, was having my coffee in a garden, and had little to do but start ‘my’ fieldwork.”42 Although his reflections on fieldwork have been widely read, his fieldwork monograph from 1975 is almost never cited. One reason may be that it is very thin description, only 100 pages, mostly derivative historical construction and uncritically anecdotal. For a work that proposes an actor-oriented approach, “to understand the actor’s view of his social world,” there is virtually no ethnographic actor in sight.43 The few times a local Arabic or Berber term is discussed, Rabinow relies on the range of meanings in a French dictionary. How ironic that a person known for his reflections on fieldwork did not seem to actually find much worth writing about in his published fieldwork ethnography.
After two weeks in the capital of Yemen I had not begun to feel anthropological yet. Rabinow says he was unsure what it meant to start his fieldwork, except to wander around the place a bit. “After all,” he concludes, “now that I was in the field, everything was fieldwork.”44 I was in the field alright, but there was much to be done before I could begin field research. I do not suggest that the preparation for getting to my field site was not part of the fieldwork process, but it felt more like spring training than the big league dissertation variety. First, our visas had to be renewed and a research permit negotiated, both requiring substantial assistance from the American Embassy. Unlike Morocco, Yemen did not have a system in place to deal with anthropologists. Nor had the colonial powers left their quaint remnants of third-class tourist hotels with waiters who spoke fluent French and served wine. The reality that faced us was quite simple: without the necessary permission, we would have to leave.45 Our ethnographic authority – a concept no Yemeni official would have recognized even in the abstract – could not be waived through the bureaucracy; postcolonial privilege is hard to brandish in a country that was never directly colonized.46 We also needed to find a suitable field site for our respective research plans before we could get to the there we came for.
Unlike Rabinow, I find it trite to think that everything happening to me in the field was fieldwork. The entire experience shaped my understanding of being an ethnographer, as did the type and extent of training and, by logical extension, almost any previous experience in my rather banal personal biography up to that point. Being there only made fieldwork possible. Chatting with an occasional waiter was certainly a useful experience for me as well, because it was exposure to Yemenis and a chance to begin dialectizing my staid textbook Arabic. But in my mind then, as well as now, this was preparatory to what I planned to do as formal research. I did not attend graduate school with the goal of ordering dinner in Arabic from a waiter-as-other. Other things seemed, and I think came to be, more important.
Nor is ethnography all fieldwork and no meaningful play. There are times when it is necessary to desist from taking notes and absorb the experience as a fellow human being intent on better understanding the other as well as oneself. There were times when I sought solace on my favorite rock, shared only with a blue agame lizard nearby. We both could watch the mist flow up through the fertile terraces below, billowing like waves but without sound. I might hear the voices of farmers calling to each other as the day’s work was done or the local imam calling the villagers to prayer. Here was where reflection came naturally – in the field. Why was I here? Here in Yemen, in this lush mountain valley, on this rock? Why was I here at all, born in a land my Yemeni friends could not imagine I left?
Who was I? It depended on who you asked. To the government officials who had to approve our papers, I was probably an unwanted pain in the posterior. Some no doubt wondered if we were really spies, as though living in a rural mountain village would aid American foreign policy in the waning days of the Cold War. In the field site we rented a room from a respected sayyid, the term used in Yemen for a literal descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. During the civil war following the collapse of the millennium-old religious imamate in 1963, he and his family had been forced to live outside Yemen. He had the benefit of a formal education, and, unlike the local villagers, he understood why we would want to do research. He was also willing to help us.
When we first met him, he offered us a room attached to his house. This was a room with a fantastic view of the terraces below, a separate entrance and a bathroom with water piped in from a nearby spring. Our first thought was that we should live in one of the nearby villages. After all, we would not want to look on the natives from a verandah, even if it was not a colonial venue. Our soon-to-be landlord took us on a brief tour of the nearest village. It was obvious that there were no available rooms. In fact new houses were being built at a remarkable pace, due to the remittances that Yemeni men working abroad were sending back home. If we lived in a village, water would have to be carried in from a nearby spring, the pail-on-head variety that Najwa soon discovered from personal experience was not easily learned on the steep terrace paths. We settled on the room in his spacious country house and welcomed his family’s support. We were free to visit villagers and they were free to visit us.
On Rabinow’s fourth day in Morocco he was, in his own words, “in a rather ideal ‘anthropological’ position … fluent in the language, familiar with the culture, concerned with related issues, yet unquestionably an outsider.”47 Fluent in “the language”? The language in question was of course French, which Rabinow says gave him an immediate ‘entrée’ into his “everything was fieldwork” assumption. Yet Rabinow had theoretically come to Morocco “intent on studying rural religion and politics,” not to discuss French philosophes.48 To what extent did his fluency in French allow him to be a participant observer of rural society? And, if French – surely not Moroccan French at first – was all he needed, why did he make the effort to start learning Arabic with a local, and untrained, teacher, or throw in “a few broken Arabic greetings” for a cafe owner?49 What are we to make of the experience of going to a wedding and realizing his “minimal Arabic did not permit much expansive conversation?”50 To make matters worse, at least linguistically, many of the people Rabinow met spoke Berber as a mother tongue. I admire Rabinow’s honesty about the difficulty of communicating when he did not know two of the three relevant field languages, but I am confused how this amateurish encountering could be considered fieldwork or how postcolonial French over red wine could unveil the mysteries of rural religion and politics. Rather than focus on the clannish taboo about the personal aspects of fieldwork, perhaps some criticism should have been redirected at mentors who did not stress the importance of attempting to learn some Arabic or Berber before going there.
Rabinow implies that he literally hit the ground running because of his fluency in French. I faced quite a different situation, since few Yemenis – especially the ones I wanted to talk with – knew anything other than Arabic and it was a specific dialect of Yemeni Arabic at that. Despite three years of formal university training in Arabic, I could barely understand a thing when I first arrived in Yemen. Because my wife and co-ethnographer was a native Arabic speaker, I was at first spared the embarrassment of making myself understood in my haltingly formal textbook Arabic.51 When we found a room soon after our arrival with a Yemeni family, I noted optimistically: “Hopefully this will accelerate my Arabic.” Two weeks later I bought my first English-Arabic dictionary, writing ‘al-hamdullah’ (thank God) in Arabic in my diary. This book turned out to be utterly useless for communicating in the local Yemeni dialect, which I had to pick up through conversation in the field.
I felt anything but fluent in the daily flow of language, so I filled my days by brushing up on Yemeni Arabic for the immersion I knew was coming once we arrived in what for me was going to be the ‘real’ field. I never hired a tutor; having a fluent wife as co-worker helped mitigate my nascent navigation through local dialect to a great extent. Several of my informants had the patience to teach me the local dialect by trial and error in conversation. Once in the field I improved through daily practice to the point where I could get along reasonably well – at least on my research topic – even if I invariably felt lost when listening to the poetry Yemenis were so fond of reciting. But it was only when I was able to use Arabic adequately that I can say my field research was enabled to expand beyond confused abstract observation to learning through participation.
Before coming to Yemen I had made a copy of Ettore Rossi’s 1939 L’Arabo Parlato a San‘â,’ which made it far easier to understand both the local dialect grammar and increase my vocabulary. Rossi, an Arabist who traveled to Yemen during the time of Mussolini’s fascist regime in Italy could easily be dismissed, as Edward Said would argue, as an Orientalist handmaid of colonialism. Whatever Rossi’s private views were, or his connections to the Italian government, his linguistic research on Yemeni Arabic stands on its own as a valuable contribution. It was indispensable for my research in the field and for my growing interest in Yemeni manuscripts. While in the field I was able to examine and photograph an abridged version of a 14th century Yemeni agricultural treatise with details and vocabulary remarkably similar to what I found in daily life.52 The agricultural system I was observing had a long history; it was not simply a tradition with a blurred and unchanging past. Learning more about this history greatly aided my understanding of what I saw; previous “Orientalist” research was vital for filling out my ethnographic study.
3 Flies in the Ointment
I find myself enjoying killing flies, which, of course, is an exercise in futility.Field Notes 3/27/78
Met M. W. for the first time – tall fellow sauntering about the room methodically swatting fliesField Notes 3/29/78
Spending first night in new room. Cleaned from 10:30–5:30. Swarmed with billions of flies – some rather pesky. Must get some screen to fly-proof this place.Field Notes 3/31/78
Went on a rampage against flies today, but they just kept on coming.Field Notes 4/1/78
Beautiful now – no flies, cool breeze, the mueddhins calling to each other in the distance, a glass of water (unboiled unfortunately) + quiet.Field Notes 4/2/78
So pleasant not to be hassled by flies.Field Notes 4/3/78
Just killed a fly with my Bic pen!Field Notes 8/17/78
Culture shock, the deep structure of the ethnographer’s superficial anxiety, takes many forms.53 For Rabinow this trope surfaces over the rudeness of Ali, who would not leave a late night wedding despite Rabinow feeling ill from a stomach virus.54 Feeling “confused, nauseous, and totally frustrated,” Rabinow told his friend he was acting like a baby and inhospitably let him off on the road five miles from town. Acknowledging later that this might have been a “grave professional mistake,” blame is reflected back on his professors “back in Chicago,” where they had advocated “one simply endured whatever inconveniences and annoyances came along.”55 For Rabinow this kind of anthropology “simply wasn’t for me.” “I found the demands of greater self-control and abnegation hard to accept,” he adds. “I was used to engaging people energetically and found the idea of a year constantly on my guard, with very little to fall back on except the joys of asceticism, productive sublimation, and the pleasures of self-control, a grim prospect.”56 But, we are told later, paradoxically, that Rabinow’s rude all-too-American response to Ali was exactly what he needed to do: “Indeed, from that point on, we got along famously.”57 The professors were wrong again; in-your-face not only felt good, it aided fieldwork. So is being rudely selfish, the ultimate ‘Ugly American’ trope, also part of fieldwork?
A major part of culture shock is, of course, realizing how uncomfortable it is not to be in your own culture, not to know the rules, not to be able to avoid frustrations. One advantage not often recognized is that being seen as a fool, or someone with the social IQ of a small child, teaches the ethnographer what it is like to be on the receiving end. For Rabinow a robotic self-control was out of the question. Subordinating his own code of ethics, conduct and worldview was not what Rabinow wanted to endure. But what he describes is less a dialectic between reflection and immediacy than a zero-sum diatribe to let off steam. Is it simply me versus them, my dominating culture over and against their dominated culture, my reluctant give and their expected take? Is fieldwork necessarily a virtual war of will, one fought on a not-quite-level playing field where the anthropologist and the informant can never speak the same language? How interesting that Rabinow and Ali, his guide through Moroccan culture, sought to communicate through a second, culturally laden, language foreign to both.
Ethnography is never only about the “other” as Rabinow’s reflections or Malinowski’s diary clearly demonstrate. The problem with Rabinow’s memories of culture shock is that he valorizes the otherness he felt with Muslim Moroccans.58 His contact with Moroccans was said to “highlight our fundamental Otherness” which is blamed as “the sum of different historical differences.”59 Yet the personal feelings of the ethnographer reify the Moroccan as an other by accentuating the differences rather than looking for common ground in the quotidian give-and-take of all communication in the field. In a perceptive discussion of the nature of friendship in the field, Emilio Spadola, who also conducted fieldwork in Morocco, challenges Rabinow’s dismissal of his informant for seeing the anthropologist as a resource: “Is not the two men’s relationship mutually – blatantly – instrumental?” asks Spadola.60
Reading over my diary entries for the first ten days after arriving in Yemen, I am struck by a recurring theme – how I hated flies. Unlike Rabinow, however, none of my professors had cautioned me to simply ignore the flies and tough it out. I freely admit that these mentors avoided all mention of the insect pests they might have encountered in the field. If any had ingested grubs or suffered swollen limbs from mosquito bites, such lecture tropes did not get imprinted in my memory. Indeed, my notes in graduate anthropology classes show no evidence that these professors were even aware of the problem flies could pose for a graduate student fresh in the field. Without forewarning, I took action on my own from the very start, destroying a staggering number of these insolent pests. The bloody ichor literally dripped from the swatter as disheveled carcasses of this insolent enemy clustered and crusted wherever I went. Now that I was in the field, if everything was fieldwork then surely that would include killing flies.
Why was I so obsessed with flies? My diary gives few overt clues. I remember that they were easy to kill. Most were sluggish, perfect targets for my frustrations. They seemed to taunt me, oblivious to the fact I carried an American passport and in America cleanliness and killing flies are next to godliness. Since my own country had conquered flies, did they now loom as a symbol of the exotic – certainly not erotic – other I was indoctrinated to observe? No informants I know of were driven off by my ethnocentric American penchant for swatting. For every fly I swatted millions more were ready to take its place. In their face, their behind, anywhere I was lucky enough to land a blow, I zapped them. It felt good, but did it aid my fieldwork? Were there flies in the ointment as the owl of Minerva readied in the wings for a dusk-light flight?
I seriously doubt if any anthropologist in the field has escaped culture shock, although certainly some suffer more from its impact than others. I cannot say that my graduate coursework formally prepared me for the experience of such shock in the field, but none of my professors gave me the impression it would be a bed of roses minus any thorns. Coping in the field is a personal thing, not something easily learned from a book or lecture. My diary entries record that I spent a lot of time killing flies and that at times this might have seemed to me one of the more important things to do. But none of these flies made it into my field notes or my dissertation. Even if one or two did, after more than thirty-five years their preserved but dead presence is largely beside the fact.
4 Sick and Tired
Excellent dinner again – first time for a sponge-like bread, tastes something like pancakes – excellent with honey.Field Notes 4/3/78
I said ‘excellent dinner,’ but the results were not so excellent. During the morning I proceeded to lose my dinner, heaving it up in 5 monumental eruptions. The whole day long I had a high fever – almost to 103 + every muscle in my body ached. I tried to sleep, but every position was painful. Drank lots of liquids, but only yoghurt tasted like the real thing. So sick I could not write, and these notes are penned the next afternoon.Field Notes 4/4/78
This whole sickness business is a real pain – drumming up all those probing questions, like ‘why did I come here,’ ‘why give up the American standard of living?’ etc. When you are sick + far from home, it is possibly the worst of sensations; how saving that Najwa is here. Alone, this would have really zapped me. The family has been very nice + concerned, stopping in late last eve to see how I was doing. S + S brought me roses this morning – very thoughtful. I think the culprit of my malady was the ghee (let me clarify this better) in which the eggs were fried two mornings ago or else the cabbage. Whatever – I did receive the ‘Imam’s revenge.’ We used our pressure cooker for the first time yesterday – made a whole chicken in 20–30 minutes. The broth really hit the spot, thank God for chicken broth! From now on we boil our water + will get a filter soon.(4/5/78)
I had a case of heat exhaustion + spent the day in bed, suffering from chills … My off days all seem to get eaten up by being sick.(4/13/78)
Feeling rotten today. No voice – headache + terribly sore throat. I read our medical books, which didn’t help at all. There are a million things I could have. Am taking the ampicillin we have with us – maybe that will kill the blasted viruses. Today, has to be one of the low points thus far. When will I get back to normal? … I am so sick and tired of being sick and tired.(4/17/78)
In addition to culture shock most ethnographers tend to get sick at some point during their fieldwork. Rabinow felt “truly ill” at a late night wedding, although he does not expand on how illness might have affected his research.61 Soon after my arrival in Yemen, the local flora cruised into my American cuisine-conscious intestines and I felt like crap even though my ability to do so was literally watered down. Our thermometer indicated that my fever had reached 104.5, which I rationalized away as “Evidently, fevers get higher here because of the altitude” (4/24/78). My wife, sick of my stoic John-Wayne-solid resolve to just let the fever run its course, finally pushed me into a cab and dragged me to what at the time was one of the better hospitals in the capital city of Sanaa. It was formerly known as the Military Hospital and looked very much like it had been through a war or two. Najwa tells me that those at the front of the long line of Yemeni patients waiting to get into the emergency room took one look at me and told her to take me straight in because I looked to be at death’s door.
Once inside I have no clear memory of how the staff handled an obviously sick foreigner. My diary notes indicate that we were met by a Yemeni surgeon trained in Russia, someone I saw as a “very nice gentleman + one who inspires confidence.” But it wasn’t a surgeon I needed. Relatively soon a large Russian doctor examined me with a professional manner that belied what I thought was a relatively recent thawing in the Cold War. Not knowing English – and apparently not deigning to use Arabic – her bulging Soviet-sized hands prefigured the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, if you think of that wall as a metaphor for my spinal column. It was somehow important for me to record all the medicines prescribed: Resoferon, Mexase, Intestopan, Unicap M, Epargriseovit and “another capsule (God knows what).” The next day Najwa and I returned to the hospital so I could get a glucose shot. My frustrated diary entry is anything but politically correct: “The room this was to take place in had not been used in some time – very musty – a cat had crawled through the window screen, cobwebs on the ceiling – and the ceiling was partially falling in. To top it off, the bed was filthy.” My diary indicates that I survived and soon started complaining obnoxiously about being so sick and tired.
Being in bed, especially when you think you are recovering, is fertile ground for reflection. In this case my field research had not yet begun and already I was wondering why I had come. I was clearly venting, certainly not in a politically correct sense, in my diary. Nor did I find any of the locals insensitive to my condition. The family we were living with was very sweet. The two little boys I was at times tutoring in English brought me roses. Najwa kept me well stocked with chicken soup and yoghurt. A Yemeni health worker rode his motorcycle to our apartment every day for a week to give me a shot in the arm. But it was hard for me to accept this largesse without nagging doubts: “I still wonder about the hygienic aspects of all this – or is it just my western ‘hospital-clean’ bias?.” I am surprised on rereading this entry that I had written a letter to the chair of my department suggesting that Penn offer a course entitled ‘The Hygiene and Basic Health of Fieldwork Situations.’ I believe they never did.
My diary entries are quite understandably self-serving, like crying in your beer. We all need to do this at times. At that time these entries suggest there were other things that really were more important and I had yet to get to them. Just a few days after my trip to the hospital I wrote: “I really ‘miss’ regular things in America – the music, the food, etc. much more than I expected – no doubt accentuated by being sick here. I am quite anxious to go to a village. This place now is rather confining + I feel in limbo.” Limbo is an apt term to describe that unsatisfying stage between arriving in a country as an anthropologist and actually getting to a suitable field site. In the classic Van Gennep sense my sentiments fit easily into that liminal stage separating the profane (as ordinary and mundane rather than problematic) culture I chose to leave from the sacred (in pragmatic terms) fieldwork I was longing to start. “To see a sacred object for the first time is universally an act of very great import; the magic circle is broken for the first time, and, for that individual, it can never be completely closed,” argued Van Gennep without seeing his own reflection at the time.62 As I looked forward to my fieldwork as an alchemical rite of passage, my diary suggests I was very much a novitiate about to enter into immediate contact with an unknown that felt at the time to be both sacred and scary. I doubt I was consciously aware of the irreplaceable immediacy in this rite of the first time entering into fieldwork. Like all things sacred, the awe shapes the memory; but there is really no going back except via rhetoric inherent in memories.
5 A Matter of Fact
Culture is interpretation. The ‘facts’ of anthropology, the material which the anthropologist has gone to the field to find, are already themselves interpretations. The baseline data is [sic] already culturally mediated by the people whose culture we, as anthropologists, have come to explore. Facts are made – the word comes from the Latin factum, ‘made’ – and the facts we interpret are made and remade. Therefore they cannot be collected as if they were rocks, picked up and put into cartons and shipped home to be analyzed in the laboratory. Paul Rabinow63
The fieldwork means less than nothing to me. I am no martyr to academics. I am not quite sure where my loyalties lie – perhaps in a fantasy – indeed I should think. At least, I have an easy subject – no deep probing needed to write about the most common of things – agriculture. And the people are most friendly here. Yet, I am still too much in awe of what I see to analyze it. Too uncertain as to the value of such analysis anyway. Another set of useless facts to waste away on library shelves.Field Notes 8/22/78
If we think of facts in a rock-hard materialistic way, it would be hard not to admit that they do exist. Stub your toe on a real rock and the immediacy of the encounter will convince you that both rocks and toes exist. It does not really matter how we classify rocks, or whether or not we choose to collect them and take them home. Some facts interrupt our consciousness with such stubborn regularity that it would be impractical to deny them. This, I think, is the spirit – if not the letter – of a soundly followed positivist approach to knowledge, at least as envisioned by Enlightenment scholars emerging from a commonly non-sensi-calculated world of spontaneous generation and leech therapy. But beyond the immediacy of the encounter with a fact, we have the ability, if not an obligation, to reflect on what facts mean to us. The facts we reflect are most assuredly figments of our rationalizing, re-presenting that which is now past but that we want to be present again. All ethnographic data are necessarily packaged in rhetoric; they can be debated, finessed, trussed up, and even disputed. After our toes have stopped reminding us that rocks can cause pain, we may decide that we only imagined that rock or that what we thought was a rock was really a marshmallow, but in fieldwork there really are more important things to think about.
As anthropologists we employ a variety of metaphors to interpret culture, but even if we declare rhetorically that culture is an illusion – or a hegemonic power play via discourse – we still have to reckon with the obvious fact that people exist and do things as if something called culture really does exist.64 Our theory and methodology, including our reflections, should account for more than a self-illuminating search for not-quite-universal chimeras. The four-field anthropology I was trained in approaches the world with several seminal starting points. Because we have evolved and were not placed here by fiat or aliens from another planet, we cannot understand what it means to be human unless we probe our evolutionary past and biological affinities with other living species. Ethnographic research shows that everywhere on earth humans form social groups with rules for behavior. Some of these groups appear homogenous, which is why earlier anthropologists mistakenly treated so-called “primitives” as closed cultural groups. Regarding the term “primitive,” by the mid 1950s Edward Dozier noted “the shaky and unsure ground” for use by anthropologists studying societies.65 Melville Herskovitz had already suggested abandoning the loaded term “primitive: in favor of “non-literate,” because the latter term is “colorless, conveys its meaning unambiguously, and is readily applicable to the data it seeks to delimit.”66 The sociologist Emile Durkheim confused the issue by referring to “social facts,” in an attempt to distinguish what he considered purely social from the organic or psychological, but anthropologists have rarely followed this distinction.67 To say that all facts are interpretations ignores the crucial point that some interpretations are more credible than others.
Perhaps we should take an epistemological cue from theology rather than rockhound data collecting. As anthropological ‘theologians’ we may and often do debate whether or not culture – our supreme being for being there – exists. Postmodern agnostics within the discipline may even write against culture, as if it were merely a heretical text that could be placed on the Index. But all this can only be done in a rhetorical way and only because we have been to a specific cultural there that we can reflect on. Theologians who do not believe in the formal definitions of God still go on doing theology simply because so many people say they do believe in God. Until most people in the world live as if culture were only an elusive interpretation, we should do ethnography, regardless of the theoretical creed we are trained to confess or deny.
“The fieldwork means less than nothing to me.” My plaintive diary entry has shock value only if distorted out of the mental tug-of-war of my immediate culture shock at the time. It came less than a month after we were actually set up in our field site. This day was obviously a low. Perhaps that is what brought the earlier and memorable sentiment of Malinowski to mind. Other entries suggest that some days were highs. Ups and downs, feeling alone and enjoying the throng, sick in bed, happily perched on top of a mountain – these conditions motivate the swings in moods that my diary notes record in a random, self-serving fashion. I also record the warmth and hospitality of the Yemenis I met and the friends I made. Such is the stuff of diaries. The immediacy of fieldwork demanded reflections and there they were – a Faustian dialogue jerking me through the exhausting yet exhilarating invention – or perhaps I should say the simultaneous de-invention and reinvention – of my culture and their culture.
Rabinow vents at his mentors’ lack of candor, accusing them of fostering the myth that “we are neutral scientists collecting unambiguous data.”68 Because some anthropologists may have given the false impression to Rabinow that the streets of fieldwork would be paved with unambiguous data, are we supposed to treat the search for ethnographic truths as counterfeit? My mentors also were reluctant to let down their golden – bordering on gray – hair and share their diaried dirty linen, at least in the classroom. Despite this apparent sin of omission, I did not arrive in the field expecting to pick the data literally off the trees. Nor did I assume that handing over my passport to the customs official was part of my fieldwork. There were data everywhere, an overwhelming mass of ambiguity that I hoped to make less ambiguous through the celebrated magic – dare I say alchemy – of participant observation. The success or lack of success of this, I thought then and still do, should be determined on several fronts: the obvious paper trail of what I produce as a scholar and teacher, the practical career trajectory provided by the fieldwork experience and what I am enabled to give back to the Yemenis with whom I continue to interact. Telling field initiation tropes or confessing my moment-by-moment mental vacillations can be entertaining in the short term, but if such rhetorical devices take precedence over the cultural reality I struggled to understand back then, then why should I want to be an anthropologist at all?
6 Picturing Fieldwork
This book centers on the mutual (yet always partial) construction of fragile commonplaces of activity and communication by the anthropologist and the people he works with in the field. Paul Rabinow69
Today I wanted to give a picture to a man. I was sure it was him. But he said it wasn’t. He didn’t recognize himself. What could I say?Field Notes 2/25/79
Reflections owe their origin mainly to our sense of the visual, the aesthetic underlying the intellectual exercise of bringing past events to textual life. My own makeshift diary is made up entirely of words, not rigorously framed by sound grammar and lacking in any photographs or drawings. Rabinow’s text includes several photographs visually representing the objects of his reflection.70 Inside the text, the first photograph (p. 12) shows a smiling key informant; the readers are allowed in black and white terms to quite literally look over, in a Geertzian sense, what appears to be Rabinow’s own shoulder. There is no mistaking the Persian manqué here, but the visual ethnographer plays no role other than an observing narrator who might as well be in a Parisian bistro. The next photograph (p. 37) is of Ali, who plays an important informant role in the reflections. Dressed in unmistakable Western-style clothing, Ali looks directly into the lens of the photographer/ethnographer, who once again peers over the back of a seated man who is wearing Moroccan dress and mentioned in the caption simply as an unnamed friend. The third photograph (p. 43) shows two Moroccan men, one standing and one seated, as an illustration for the fieldwork-escape trope of “Much time is spent hanging around cafes drinking tea.” Here both men gaze touristically at the camera, important primarily as drinkers of the empty tea glasses on the table.
Ironically, these images convey the experience of a tourist snapping shots of the locals and are devoid of ‘ethnographic’ color. The next image (p. 61) is of a young housewife – included just after a narrative discussing Berber prostitutes – standing on her doorstep in traditional Moroccan dress and staring at the photographer/ethnographer, looking ever so posed to be a simple housewife. Flipping the page, we find the stark contrast of an old Berber woman, again staring – almost defiantly – at the photographer. These are the only women to appear as visual objects inside Rabinow’s text. Indeed, the reflections given are decidedly male and unreflectively sexist. “Prostitution was a flourishing subculture in Sefrou,” notes Rabinow matter of factly.71 “Almost every Moroccan man I knew had his initiation into heterosexual activity through a visit to the prostitutes.” Even his friend Ali had a secret prostitute lover who apparently accepted the ethnographer with limited Arabic as “part of the roguish circle” in which the male anthropologist can comfortably observe that such prostitutes “were not systematically despised or ostracized in the medina.”72 I suspect that the inference about prostitution as rampant in Morocco is dubious. Beyond this, however, women are elided in the photographs as though they were on a par with men drinking tea.
Rabinow’s unabashed male narrative reflects back at the reader in his account of what he describes as “the best single day” he spent in Morocco.73 This was a day of adventurous male fantasy, the bored anthropologist following his risqué informant and two Berber girls to an eventual swim at a remote mountainside pool. “Ali and the two Berber sisters decided to go swimming,” Rabinow writes.74 “Swimming, nude, in Morocco!” he adds for emphasis. “I did not go swimming myself. I was too timid,” he confides. “So I sat on the edge of the pool while Ali and the Berber sisters splashed each other,” in a scene where the observer declined being the participant. “There was no strong sexual tone to this,” he recalls. “I am not sure why, but it was not there.” Back in the village, sexual overtone is disguised only in the ambiguity of his account. “Ali took me into the next room and asked me if I wanted to sleep with one of the girls,” notes the participant side of the observer. “Yes, I would go with the third woman who had joined us for dinner. She had her own room next door, so we could have our privacy.” The room had only one bed, and although the paid Berber woman is dismissed as “not that affectionate or open either,” she is reported to have kindly labeled Monsieur Paul as “Numero wahed, first class” the morning after.
Few anthropologists are prudes; no doubt more than a few of the male variety have followed Malinowski in groping native women, or men, and even buying a night of sex. As evolved cousins of bonobos this is not a surprise, nor is it the ethical issue of a sexual encounter as such that concerns me here. The problem is telling the story as if the anthropologist is sitting on a barstool with other men and no ladies are present. This tryst trope exemplifies a major fault in the selectively male reflexivist writing of culture seen in the almost biblical Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986), edited less than a decade later by James Clifford and George Marcus. If male anthropologists are so concerned about the legitimacy of attempting to represent the other objectively, why is it alright to write women out of the process and also relevant to recollect how well or poorly they performed in bed? Is it any wonder that Ruth Behar, in her introduction to Women Writing Culture, wrote back: “The Writing Culture agenda, conceived in homoerotic terms by male academics for other male academics, provided the official credentials, and the cachet, that women had lacked for crossing the border?”75 In his laudatory preface to Rabinow’s Reflections, Robert Bellah warns us that “the presence of value judgments” is not dangerous, but rather “only those judgments that remain beyond the reach of critical reflection and are not subject to revision in the light of experience.”76 Precisely. An ethnographer has the right to casually reflect on a sexual tryst as a peak experience, but perhaps in fieldwork there are more important things to be done. Brian Edwards labels Rabinow a “Hippie Orientalist,” whose focus on his own particular experience in Morocco discounts the portrayals that Moroccans make of their own worlds.77 As Deborah Kapchan suggests, Rabinow’s approach amounted to “painting with a large, Western, and decidedly cynical brush.”78 That brush is decidedly male as well.
The largest photograph in Reflections is a two-page spread (pp. 108–109) in which the smiling anthropologist “toasts members of the holy lineage” with tea as he becomes the focal point in the center of nine Moroccan men. This is the only time in the book that we see the ethnographer face to face. The occasion is, at least visually, a picnic rather than an excuse for interviewing informants. It connotes a celebration of the ethnographer’s being there, being accepted and being comfortable enough to act – even if in jest – as host in a ritual that is thoroughly Moroccan. In contrast to the one-on-one private comfort of the bar in the first photograph in the book, this image validates Rabinow’s presence among others. Significantly, the scene is staged and camp, a consciously pictorial memento rather than in situ documentation of Moroccan culture. Through these images Rabinow treats the ethnographic encounter as a series of isolated events rather than as a methodological process with specific research goals.79
By contrast with the previous studioesque photographs, there are two which look ‘ethnographic’ in a more formal sense.80 In one we look over the shoulders of Berber observers viewing Berber horsemen said to be honoring a saint. In this the foregrounded men blend imperceptibly into the distant horsemen. All of the figures either have their backs turned or are too small to distinguish individually except in outline. The next photograph (p. 138) is the quintessential exotic dimension of an ethnographic image. Here we see a man slashing the underside of a cow’s neck for a ritual offering. “The botching of a ritual offering caused much anxiety,” reads the caption. Even without the ethnographer’s warning, it is clear that something is awry from the expressions of concern in the Moroccans’ body language. In this photograph we are at last able to look right at – not over anyone’s shoulder – men engaged in a direct and apparently unstaged ritual. Yet the exotic venue and the shock it could engender in a Western viewer are mitigated by Rabinow’s subjective gloss that this was a “botched event.”81 To only record visually the inability of the native to get it right is, in a purely visual sense, to deny the value of what the native is doing, or at least the native’s competence.
All of the photographs just described require the reader to engage, or at least flip through, the narrative of the text. There is no list of photographs, nor are they numbered. They are interwoven with the narrative like items in an old museum showcase, not as archived images in documentation, nor as illustrations of the ethnographic context. The one photo that overrides all others is that chosen for the cover. This, at least in the original paperback version, is a sepia tone shot of a shop owner gesturing forcefully – his left hand is actually out of focus – at the photographer, who might as well be the ethnographer and who draws us into a problematic voyeuristic role as viewer and potential reader. The expression on the man’s face, in my visual reading, appears to be one of anger. He seems to be saying, “Go away. I don’t want my picture taken. I don’t want you to take a picture of this young girl in front of my shop.” He could, of course, be joking, turning a common native repulsion of outsiders into shared terms of endearment. The young girl, in a plain native robe, may be a customer or neighbor, but that hardly matters here. Unlike the man, she glares back with what I interpret to be a bemused look, hand on her hip. Is she upset? Is she flattered? Is she a potential prostitute? These are the questions we are teased with visually, although none are addressed verbally in the narrative. For anyone about to open the book, this image cannot help but shape perceptions of what fieldwork involves for Rabinow in Morocco.
Were I not to read Reflections, but merely to reflect on what the chosen cover could mean to me, my immediate gut reaction would be that the ethnographer is an unwelcome intruder. The photographer thinks he has a right to snap a picture when he pleases, regardless of what the people being photographed think. For a book said to center on “the mutual (yet always partial) construction of fragile commonplaces of activity and communication by the anthropologist and the people he works with in the field,”82 it is visually only the anthropologist who constructs textually and visually the people studied. Nowhere is irony more present than in the cover image. Here the photographer/ethnographer is being waved off, told to mind his own business, and to ultimately go reflect on his own – which is what Rabinow in fact ends up doing.
I dwell on the visual images because of our genealogical drive – back across so many meta-narratives – to privilege the word, to assume that writing about culture is the ultimate purpose of being in a culture. Although there are no pictures in my diary, I took hundreds of photographs during my fieldwork, including many of men, women and children in the local villages. Like all fieldworkers, I remember a few moments when I knew snapping a photograph would be intrusive, the burden of outsiderness. Ironically, although I was loaded down with several cameras virtually whenever I walked in the agricultural fields I came to study, I do not remember ever being scolded to stop taking a picture. In part my excessive caution kept me from playing the snap-happy tourist, but I also made it a habit to ask permission before pulling out the camera. Photographs were a relatively recent and ambiguously viewed option in the rural valley that Najwa and I lived in. While individuals often wanted pictures of themselves or family members, they were reluctant to go to the capital and have them taken or developed by a stranger in a studio. After Najwa and I became trusted in the community, some individuals would ask for a picture to be taken of themselves or family members, especially after word spread that I would develop the pictures myself. An ethical decision we both made at the time was not to publish these photographs without permission or at least wait until so many years have passed that the issue becomes moot.
Photographic documentation has a long trajectory in anthropology as a visual aid to what can be seen and recorded in words. Archives of images that Franz Boas took a century ago of Kwakiutl rituals in the American Northwest preserve a heritage that current generations no longer can recall. Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead’s Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis (1942) remains a valuable resource for its multiple frames on the behavior of Balinese in the 1930s, even though their assumptions about the relation of personality and culture have long been superseded. Film has been a major aid to ethnographic documentation and is now indispensable in teaching courses in cultural anthropology. In addition to photographing agriculture and irrigation activities in Yemen, I shot footage that provides a broader context than I could ever describe in words. Najwa filmed the local dances at a time when relatively little visual imagery of Yemeni dancing was available; this now serves as a base for comparative analysis with the large number of recent Youtube videos uploaded by Yemenis in the last decade.
Images, like texts, cannot substitute for the experience of ethnographic fieldwork as a mutual engagement. Both freeze what was observed, felt and shared in the field. Like all representations, they only have value if they serve a purpose. and there is never only one purpose. It was important that I had the opportunity not only to photograph a Yemeni man as he plowed or irrigated, but also to talk with him, asking questions about what I did not understand and listening to him as he tried to teach me, the outsider who wanted to learn. Looking at my photographs years later does not replace the immediacy of being in the field, the vividness of relationships formed, but it does allow my memory to reflect, imperfect as all recollection inevitably is. One day I ran into a man I had photographed earlier and proudly gave the print to him, but he did not seem to recognize himself. He was sure it was someone else; I was sure it was him. In retrospect I suppose we were both right: the man in front of me could not be reduced to the image in the photograph.
7 Final Refractions
The book is a reconstruction of a set of encounters that occurred while doing fieldwork. At that time, of course, things were anything but neat and coherent. At this time, I have made them seem that way so as to salvage some meaning from that period for myself and for others. Paul Rabinow83
There are some scenes so rich in the textures of life, it would be tragic, if not criminal, to despoil them with photographs. A painting might capture the fancy in the artist’s eyes and thus do limited justice to the scene. But the old faithful recording of the photograph merely copies, without imagination’s permission, the sense of the scene. A sense that must be lived to be understood. Color gives life to everything – a vibrancy that brings tears to the eyes – but shadows make that life penetrate deeper and allow a partial union with nature.Field Notes 2/25/79
The problem I have found with much of the reflections-on-fieldwork genre is that the focus seldom shifts beyond ‘writing culture’ from memory. Fieldwork as the ethnographer’s quintessential rite of passage gets glossed over as a mere w(rite) of passage.84 Field notes either do not count or are deemed to be disposable for the purpose of spinning a personal narrative. My purpose in interposing my field diary reflections with Rabinow’s text is to highlight the difference between reflections in the face of the field’s immediacy and the almost infinite possibilities for reflecting retroactively. Rabinow’s “uncommonly perceptive and provocative reflections of an ethical-philosophical kind,” as noted on the back cover, are precisely that – reflectively removed from the immediacy of fieldwork. No longer being there, he and I are both free to make of that there what we will. Most of the time no one else bothers to go to the same there, the hindsight blinding of Margaret Mead and Napoleon Chagnon notwithstanding. And if another anthropologist does, it is easy to say that what is there today is not the same there as before. Reflections, like memoirs, give insights that people find worth reading because the rhetoric of reminiscence is seductive. But should we dissolve ethnography into its textual presence? This is what sets an ethnographic text off so formally from the fleeting, but I think far more satisfying, immediacy of writing a personal diary in the first place.
I admit that there are times when I enjoy the reading of my diary more than my piles of hand-written research notes. The attraction of Rabinow’s Reflections, which anthropologists are more likely to have read than his earlier fieldwork ethnography, is that it liberated the reader from the strict form of the genre. Rabinow tries to free himself from the rules of a discourse that had by the time of his writing come unmoored across the humanities and social sciences. The issue beyond fieldwork is the perceived failure of a pre-postmodern positivism to provide objective and universal truth. Ironically, the founding icon of positivism, Auguste Comte, did not believe that a scientist or philosopher could ever achieve an absolute and unchanging knowledge of reality.85 Since Rabinow’s mentors apparently dished out an unreflective truth, sparingly as far as doing ethnography was concerned, the process of fieldwork itself gets challenged. In his later contribution to the canonical Writing Culture in 1986, Rabinow removes ethnography even further from the field experience. Rorty, Descartes, Kant, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Dewey, Foucault, Weber, Clifford, Jameson: these are the links in Rabinow’s intellectual genealogy that are reflected upon before we encounter an ethnographer, Clifford Geertz, who actually did fieldwork that was written down. This particular form of reflexivist critique flirts with being a surrogate post mortem for all ethnography. But if ethnography is the method few other disciplines dare or desire to lay original claim to, should field research be so easily written off within anthropology?
Reflecting on the writing of ethnography and the authority of ethnographic texts becomes in a text like Reflections a literary endeavor with metaphysical pretensions. As long as writing remains an important way – certainly not the only visual medium – we use as anthropologists to communicate the results of ethnographic fieldwork, criticism of texts will be necessary. The historiography of ethnographic writing is no longer taboo, if it ever was. But writing in anthropology should be a means rather than an end in itself. Do the rhetorical limitations in a written ethnographic text mean that the ethnographer failed to understand the culture or that ethnographic data do not exist apart from their rhetorical and artifactual construction after the fact? If any particular ethnographic text, usually critiqued independently of an ethnographer’s entire written corpus, comes up short on insights and long on relative inserts, is this because the ethnographer is incapable of finding out some meaningful truth about the other? Are the only truths to be spoken to be power those that can be teased out of texts?
Simply ‘being there’ in the field cannot qualify an ethnographer to produce a transparent account of what he or she has witnessed. Every observation is haunted by a multiplicity of places and times. This holds for ethnographers and the ethnographers of the ethnographers, not to mention the people they study. There is no act of reasoning that is not a leap of faith, both embodied and collective.86
It is not readily apparent from this what an account must do to be “transparent.” No account of what is observed in the field is ever a reproduction of reality; few anthropologists ever suggested it was. Textual representation, by its very nature, is a form of explanation, communicating a sense of what was observed and what the ethnographer makes of it. Thus, the “reasoning” involved must be received as a “leap of faith” on the part of the reader. But this does not mean it needs to be a blind leap over an unknown chasm into the fog of fuzzy rhetoric. There is an enormous gap between the leap in believing in a literal Adam and Eve and that of accepting the decodification of human dna. The scientific method, which I believe Hume would embrace warmly were he alive today, allows for leaps that are more faithful than the incessant hand-wringing of reflexivist doubt about the process itself. As philosopher Peter Winch remarked over half a century ago, the problem is with the “extra-scientific pretensions of science,” but even philosophy “has no business to be anti-scientific: if it tries to be so it will succeed only in making itself look ridiculous.”87
Rabinow was not the only Middle East anthropologist in the past three decades to reflect over and above the obligatory ethnographic monograph. Vincent Crapanzano, who also worked in Morocco, presented his innovative portrait of the Moroccan healer Tuhami as “an experiment designed to shock the anthropologist” from the complacency in which the anthropologist is eliminated from the ethnographic encounter.88 An ethnographer, Crapanzano later explains, “is a little like Hermes,” literally a decoder and an interpreter but more rhetorically a trickster who thinks he can convince you that he – a quite conscious ‘he’ for Crapanzano – is able to tell the whole truth.89 If Crapanzano’s Grecian metaphor is to earn the respect afforded by Rabinow to Hegel’s Minerva – and I certainly do not share in such an impishly divine origin for our craft – then it follows that even Crapanzano as ethnographer must be suspect. Reading beneath the surface of the classic essay “Deep Play,” for example, Crapanzano suggests that the author Clifford Geertz did little more than peer over the shoulder of the Balinese; he snapped the picture for us but forgot to put himself in it. His point is well taken. However, in his own work Crapanzano proceeds to skew the native view as well. By providing the words – framed and translated by the ethnographer of course – the informant Tuhami is hermetically assumed to speak for himself. As Susan Trencher concludes after analyzing the writings of both Crapanzano and Rabinow, “The understandings which fieldwork ethnographers reached were negotiated through the mind of the analyst, not the interaction of participants.”90 Recording and editing fragments of the ethnographer’s dialogue with a native do not reproduce the immediacy of the original interaction; the dialectic established in Crapanzano’s interchange becomes a rhetorical trope when it is after the fact but not really after facts. In contrast, Kevin Dwyer, who also worked in Morocco, successfully blends informant’s words and ethnographer’s interpretation. Part of what makes Dwyer’s work successful is that he records the entire interviews and was able to translate the material himself.91
My frustration with Rabinow’s and Crapanzano’s reflections about fieldwork is that they do not so much reflect as they refract. When I think of my own face reflected in a mirror, I am reminded of the limitations of a two-dimensional image of a reality I cannot literally see. I look in mirrors when I need to, but I consider it vanity to simply stare at my mirror image as though it held as much meaning as my actual face. A mirror image gives a view of the surface and only – I might add for the sake of a realistic analogy – when the light is on. My objections would greatly diminish if I viewed this rhetoric as fieldwork refractions in the sense physicists think of light refracting through a prism. Imagine a seemingly uniform wave of light deflected and changing direction with the practical result that we can see things more colorfully. In one spontaneously ethnopoetic entry in my diary, written while perched atop a rock as I surveyed the wider contextual beauty of my fieldwork valley, I was absorbed by the color that I could see so vividly and experience so intensely at the moment. At the time I saw color that I knew my black-and-white film could never do justice to; nor could even the most National Geographic-like color photograph capture the vibrancy of the view overwhelming my senses. The scene had to be seen and felt to be understood. If this is alchemy, so be it.
Ethnography is far more than alchemy, however. Being in Yemen was not to satisfy a desire to live in an exotic location, collect data and return home to write up a dissertation. Being in the field exposed me to everything that I could observe, not willing to rule anything out as a priori irrelevant. My research was premised on a specific theoretical issue: to what extent are rights of access to water dependent on the ecological context of water allocation. Occasional sitting on a rock and soaking in the local atmosphere did not prevent me from talking with farmers in the field, documenting their activities as they were performed, following up with discussions about what I observed and thinking through my experience against the backdrop of my graduate training.
Rabinow’s classic text, like most memoirs, functions primarily as a polemic trying not to be mere apologetic. Like literary critic Edward Said assessing the manifest biases of Oriental Studies through Orientalism, the returned ethnographer needed to say what many others were thinking. Although Rabinow was not the first to discuss the personal side of fieldwork, his work stimulated others to let down their hair as well. Polemics, Orientalism being a case in point, shoot across discipline borders like shooting stars, in a brilliant but temporary display of power. There was a moment, the late 1970s, when the discipline of anthropology needed to be lit up. Reflections are not wrong in themselves, for they were certainly right for Rabinow himself and the discipline, just as Said’s literary deconstruction of Orientalist discourse was significant for him and Middle East Studies in its time. Just as, I might add, my diary notes were right for me at the time and continue to remind me of the personal struggle fieldwork involved. Polemical texts have trajectories; eventually even the best written go out of print except for the very few that get co-opted into either an establishment or anti-establishment canon. And, of course, polemics are valuable since they beget countering polemics.
I first read Rabinow’s Reflections, as Geertz might say, after the fact. Fresh from my own fieldwork, I was at the time more concerned with generating the narrative that a dissertation requires than reflecting on the process. This was a book that I thought provocative and amusing, but also one I found confusing and at times disturbingly self-indulgent. Rabinow’s preoccupation with his post-field reflected male self seemed a detour along which the others he wanted to represent just went along for the ride.92 It was certainly à propos for a publication series designed to be “short enough to be read in an evening and significant enough to be a book.” Given that this book is still being read and has been consecrated in an anniversary edition, while his ethnographic study of Morocco has left the print world, the seminal status of his text and the productive career of the author remain intact. But I do wonder, at least as I consider my own ethnographic fieldwork, if there are not more important things to do.
Rabinow (1977: 38). A 30th anniversay edition of this text was published in 2007.
Jackson (1989:181–182).
Marcus and Fischer (1986:34) identify Rabinow’s fieldwork confessional as influential in opening up serious discussion on the epistemology of fieldwork as a method. In a later work Rabinow (2011) expands on his relationship with his mentors and earlier anthropological theory. For a trenchant critique of the reflexivist genre exemplified by Paul Rabinow (1977) and Vincent Crapanzano (1980), see Beal (1995), Darnell (2001:296–307) and Trencher (2000). Geertz (1988:91–99) comments on Rabinow’s and Crapanzano’s texts, which he classifies as a style of Malinowskian “diary disease” but he says little about what they share apart from the assumption that “being there” is both difficult and corrupting. Salzman (2002) provides a reconsideration of the role of reflexivity in anthropology.
Rabinow (1977:4). As Crapanzano (2011:126) suggests, “That anthropologists have not always proclaimed their reflexivity does not mean that they have ignored it. It is rather their mode of critique that demands scrutiny.” Since the reflexivist turn in anthropology over the past four decades many accounts of the fieldwork experience have been published, both by individuals (e.g., Caton 2005) and in anthologies (e.g., DeVita 1992, 2000; Kemper and Royce 2002).
Rabinow (1977:4).
Rabinow (1977:5).
Goldschmidt (2000:792).
Berreman (1962:3).
Freilich’s (1970:32).
Nader (1986:97). Lutkehaus (2008) analyzes the failure of males like Evans-Pritchard and James Clifford to respect the popular writing style of Margaret Mead. Return to Laughter was the title of a fictionalized reflective narrative by Laura Bohannon, the wife of fellow anthropologist Paul Bohannon (Bowen 1954).
Codere, Helen (1986:153).
Landes (1986:121).
Köbben (1967:41).
Köbben (1967:46).
Raybeck (1992:5).
Rabinow (1977:5).
Rabinow (1977:7). This quote is taken from the introduction to Hegel’s (1954:227) Philosophy of Right and Law, a classic defense of the positivist rationale that truth can be found. In a 1989 interview with Susan Trencher (2000: 11), Rabinow noted that he wrote Reflections as an intentional mirroring of Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit.
Hegel (1954:227).
As Paul Roscoe (1995:493) notes, the resultant reflective criticism of Rabinow and others became a kind of intellectual free fall in which “everybody is a positivist save critics of positivism – and they turn out to be ‘cryptopositivists.’
Harris (1968:66).
Scholte (1974:431).
Regarding a late 19th century comment of the British historian F. W. Maitland, Evans-Pritchard (1962:190–191) writes: “Maitland has said that anthropology must choose between being history and being nothing. In the sense I have outlined, and in which also I believe he wrote, I accept the dictum, though only if it can be reversed – history must choose between being social anthropology or being nothing – and I think Maitland might have accepted the stipulation.”
Fabian (2012:442). He adds that the argument over whether or not anthropology is a science or a humanity has a great deal to do with academic resources and institutional support.
Berreman (1968:368).
I owe this thought to Douglas Raybeck, personal communication. It is even possible to be a Humean “kinky empiricist” (Rutherford 2012).
Bradburd (1998:161).
Peacock (2002:54).
Rabinow (1977:38).
In reviewing the term ‘dialectic,’ Raymond Williams (1976:93) noted it has been used in a variety of different ways: “It is not often easy to see which of these various senses is being used, and with what implications, in the course of contemporary argument.” A case in point is Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s (1999:58, 331) “crudely dialectical reading of a moment in the Gita,” which eventually leads to the Derrida-on-arrival notion that ‘dialectic’ could be ‘aporetic doublethink.’ The fact that Spivak (1989:290) refers to herself and Edward Said metaphorically as “wild anthropologists” is pure catachresis. For a nuanced anthropological discussion of “dialectical,” see Jackson (1989:2–3, 171–187).
Rabinow (1977:39).
Rabinow (1977:38).
Rabinow (1977:38).
Bradburd (1998: 11).
Clifford (1988:38).
Rabinow (1977:3).
Rabinow (1977:3).
Rabinow (2007:4).
I have not counted the pages of diary notes, but imagine loose sheets of ruled paper about half an inch thick. For those readers who did not conduct fieldwork before the personal computer age, a comment on our notation system may be useful. While in the field all our notes were written, mostly with carbon copies, on 5 1/2 by 8 1/2 sheets of paper and filed in small notebooks arranged largely by topic. The combined output now covers about two dozen notebooks in our study. Steven Caton (2005), who carried out ethnographic research in Yemen about the same time, has written an “ethno-memoir” with extensive use of his personal diary notes as well as his field notes.
I received a Fulbright Hayes Doctoral Dissertation Research Grant for 1978–1979.
Najwa focused her ethnographic research on the semiotics of dance and Yemeni tribal identity. For a concise description of her ethnographic research, see Adra (2011, 2009, 1998, 1985, 1983). My dissertation (Varisco 1982) has long since disappeared into the maze of University Microfilms.
Rabinow (1977:11).
Rabinow (1975:3).
Rabinow (1977:11).
I do not make this point facetiously. More than one anthropologist has in fact been denied permission to conduct ethnographic research in Yemen; a few have even been asked to leave.
Our research was conducted in North Yemen, the former Zaydi imamate, which no Western power had ever controlled. The British controlled the southern port of Aden from 1839 to 1967, and the two Yemens did not unite until 1990.
Rabinow (1977:19). As Deborah Kapchan (2013:170) notes, in her “visceral and almost violent reaction” to Rabinow’s book, it “was written by a man whio did not speak Arabic except cursorily.”
Rabinow (1977:11).
Rabinow (1977:24,33).
Rabinow (1977:41).
Textbook Arabic is an obvious beginning, but it does not prepare an ethnographer for the nuances of dialect. In his lively account of travel in Yemen, Tim Mackintosh-Smith (1997:1) captures this disconnect well: “Cowan’s Modern Literary Arabic lay open at ‘The Dual’ (not content with mere sungulars and plurals, Arabic also has a form for pairs): ‘The two beautiful queens’, it said. ‘are ignorant.’ The odds against ever uttering such a sentence were high: grammars, like theatre, call for a suspension of disbelief.”
I received help in understanding this important text from Professor R. B. Serjeant, with whom I planned to publish a facsimile of the manuscript. This was eventually published by the Gibb Memorial Trust (Varisco and Smith 1998).
For examples of culture shock by anthropologists in the field, see Golde (1986:10–12). Kirsten Hastrup (1995:15) notes that beyond the monotonous diet, cold weather, loneliness, sexual assualts and loss of identity in Iceland, “one of my greatest shocks in the field was to be reminded of my own world.” Further examples of shock and awe in the field can be found in two volumes edited by Philip R. DeVita (1992, 2000).
Rabinow (1977:40–45). For an extended analysis of this event, see Trencher (2000:76–8, 83–4).
Rabinow (1977:46).
Rabinow (1977:47). Deborah Kapchan (2013:170) suggests that “Rabinow decidedly did not feel at home in Morocco.”
Rabinow (1977:49). Rabinow’s “general characterization of Moroccan intimacy as tests of domination and submission, weakness, and humiliation” does not square with the experience of Emilio Spadola (2011:755, note 2) or Deborah Kapchan (2013:173–178), who also conducted fieldwork in Morocco. The personal experience of any ethnographer is always an interplay of his or her social performance and local cultural norms.
This point is made by Beal (1995:295).
Rabinow (1977:162).
Spadola (2011:742).
Rabinow (1977:43).
Van Gennep (1972:177).
Rabinow (1977:150).
As Marshall Sahlins (1999a: xx) laments, facetiously of course, “Now everyone has a culture; only the anthropologists could doubt it.”
Dozier (1955:187). He further notes (p. 195) that “when the term ‘primitive’ is used to designate a particular non-literate society, the popular assumption is that such people are racially, mentally and culturally retarded.” Thus, the term should not be used.
Herskovitz (1948:75).
Durkheim (1982:52). Durkheim’s approach in forming a distinct academic field of “sociology” should be read in light of the philosophical and psychological views of his day in France. Even so, his definition is more about the influence of cultural constraints than equating social facts with those in the physical sciences.
Rabinow (1977:152).
Rabinow (1977:back cover).
The photographs in Reflections were taken by Paul Hyman, who also provided the photographs used at the start of Rabinow (1975).
Rabinow (1977:58).
Rabinow (1977:61).
Rabinow (1977:66).
Rabinow (1977:67–69).
Bellah in Rabinow (1977:xi)
Edwards (2005:270). In discussing a dialogue between Rabinow and an informant, Edwards (2005:272) observes “The work of the cultural anthropologist cannot be sustained by an informant who is able to make his own cultural comparisons.”
Kapchan (2013:172).
This has been pointed out by Trencher (2000:66).
Rabinow (1977:134, 138).
A similar cute or flippant attitude about captions is evident in Rabinow’s (1975) formal ethnography, where the scene of a man using a scratch plow is simply titled “With limited possibilities…” Did the Moroccan using such a plow tell the ethnographer how limited this technology was? Was it limited because it was traditional, not a new tractor donated as development aid? Is it only the ethnographer who can best define the limits of agriculture?
This is taken from the back cover of the original paperback edition.
Rabinow (1977: 6).
I borrow the pun from Trencher (2000:92), although I suspect it has multiple, independent origins.
This point is stressed by Evans-Pritchard (1970:17) in his analysis of Comte’s views on sociology.
Rutherford (2012:471).
Winch (1958:2). I am not defending Winch’s view of social science; for a critique of this, see MacIntyre and Bell (1967), who cite several anthropological case studies.
Crapanzano (1980: xii).
Crapanzano (1986: 51). Lett (1997:18) suggests that Crapanzano’s Hermetic rejection of “reason” as a Western cultural prejudice is “the most misguided and pernicious argument in our discipline today.”
Trencher (2000:85). To be fair, in a recent essay Crapanzano (2011:120) reflects back on his earlier reflections, noting “but the sense of dialogue that is promoted seems to be our construct and rather saccharine.”
Dwyer (1982: 278–279, note 6) provides a critique of both Rabinow and Crapanzano.
A joke, quoted in Rutherford (2012:467) expresses this well: “‘I’ve talked enough about me,’ the ‘postmodern’ anthropologist in the famous joke says to an informant. ‘What do you think about me?’“ As Darnell (2001:320) notes, in his reflections, “one learns more about Rabinow than about Morocco or Morrocans.”