Clifford
Clifford
Clifford
Mead's article provoked a sharp response from Robert Lowie, writing from the
older Boasian tradition, more philological in its orientation.20 But his was a rear-
guard action; the point had been generally established that valid research could, in
practice, be accomplished on the basis of a one or two-year familiarity with a foreign
vernacular (even though, as Lowie suggested, no one would credit a translation of
Proust that was based on an equivalent knowledge of French).
Third: the new ethnography was marked by an increased emphasis on the
power of observation. Culture was construed as an ensemble of characteristic behav-
iors, ceremonies and gestures, susceptible to recording and explanation by a trained
onlooker. Mead pressed this point furthest (indeed, her own powers of visual analy-
sis were extraordinary). As a general trend the participant-observer emerged as a
research norm. Of course, successful fieldwork mobilized the fullest possible range of
interactions, but a distinct primacy was accorded to the visual: interpretation was
tied to description. After Malinowski, a general suspicion of "privileged informants"
reflected this systematic preference for the (methodical) observations of the eth-
nographer over the (interested) interpretations of indigenous authorities.
Fourth: certain powerful theoretical abstractions promised to help academic eth-
nographers "get to the heart" of a culture more rapidly than someone undertaking,
for example, a thorough inventory of customs and beliefs. Without spending years
getting to know natives, their complex languages and habits, in intimate detail, the
researcher could go after selected data that would yield a central armature of struc-
ture of the cultural whole. Rivers' "genealogical method," followed by Radcliffe-
Brown's model of "social structure," provided this sort of shortcut. Onc could, it
seemed, elicit kin terms without a deep understanding of local vernacular, and the
range of necessary contextual knowledge was conveniently limited.
Fifth: since culture, seen as a complex whole, was always too much to master in
a short research span, the new ethnographer tended to focus thematically on particu-
lar institutions. The aim was not to contribute to a complete inventory or description
of custom, but rather to get at the whole through one or more of its parts. We have
noted the privilege given, for a time, to social structure. An individual life-cycle, a
ritual complex like the Kula ring or the Naven ceremony could also serve, as could
categories of behavior like "economics," "politics," and the like. In the predomi-
nantly synecdochic rhetorical stance of the new ethnography, parts were assumed to
be microcosms or analogies of wholes. This setting of institutional foregrounds
against cultural backgrounds in the portrayal of a coherent world lent itself to realist
literary conventions.
Sixth: the wholes thus represented tended to be synchronic, products of short-
term research activity. The intensive fieldworker could plausibly sketch the contours
of an "ethnographic present"-the cycle of a year, a ritual series, patterns of typical
behavior. To introduce long-term historical inquiry would have impossibly compli-
cated the task of the new-style fieldwork. Thus, when Malinowski and Radcliffe-
Brown established their critique of the "conjectural history" of the diffusionists it
was all too easy to exclude diachronic processes as objects of fieldwork, with conse-
quences that have by now been sufficiently denounced.
These innovations served to validate an efficient ethnography based on scientific
participant-observation. Their combined effect may be seen in what may well be the
tour de force of the new ethnography, Evans-Pritchard's The Nuer, published in
1940. Based on eleven months of research conducted-as the book's remarkable in-
troduction tells us-in almost impossible conditions, Evans-Pritchard nonetheless
was able to compose a classic. He arrived in Nuerland on the heels of a punitive
military expedition and at the urgent request of the government of the Anglo-Egyp-
tian Sudan. He was the object of constant and intense suspicion. Only in the final
few months could he converse at all effectively with informants who, he tells us,
were skilled at evading his questions. In the circumstances his monograph is a kind
of miracle.
While advancing limited claims and making no secret of the restraints on his
research, Evans-Pritchard manages to present his study as a demonstration of the
effectiveness of theory. He focuses on Nuer political and social "structure," analyzed
as an abstract set of relations between territorial segments, lineages, age-sets, and
other more fluid groups. This analytically derived ensemble is portrayed against an
"ecological" backdrop composed of migratory patterns, relationships with cattle, no-
tions of time and space. Evans-Pritchard sharply distinguishes his method from
what he calls "haphazard" (Malinowskian) documentation. The Nuer is not an ex-
tensive compendium of observations and vernacular texts in the style of Mal-
inowski's Argonauts and Coral Gardens. Evans-Pritchard argues rigorously that
"facts can only be selected and arranged in the light of theory." The frank abstrac-
tion of a political-social structure offers the necessary framework. If I am accused of
describing facts as exemplifications of my theory, he then goes on to note, I have
been understood.2'
In The Nuer, Evans-Pritchard makes strong claims for the power of scientific
abstraction to focus research and arrange complex data. The book often presents
itself as an argument, rather than a description. But not consistently: its theoretical
argument is surrounded by skillfully observed and narrated evocations and inter-
pretations of Nuer life. These passages function rhetorically as more than simple
"exemplifications," for they effectively implicate readers in the complex subjectivity
of participant-observation. This may be seen in a characteristic paragraph which
progresses through a series of discontinuous discursive positions:
It is difficult to find an English word that adequately describes the social position of diet in a
tribe. We have called them aristocrats, but do not wish to imply that Nuer regard them as of
superior rank, for, as we have emphatically declared, the idea of a man lording it over others
is repugnant to them. On the whole-we will qualify the statement later-the diet have pres-
tige rather than rank and influence rather than power. If you are a dil of the tribe in which
you live you are more than a simple tribesman. You are one of the owners of the country, its
village sites, its pastures, its fishing pools and wells. Other people live there by virtue of
marriage into your clan, adoption into your lineage, or of some other social tie. You are a
leader of the tribe and the spear-name of your clan is invoked when the tribe goes to war.
Whenever there is a dil in the village, the village clusters around him as a herd of cattle
clusters around its bull.22
The first three sentences are presented as an argument about translation, but in
passing they attribute to "Nuer" a stable set of attitudes. (I will have more to say
later about this style of attribution.) Next, in the four sentences beginning "If you
are a dil . . .", the second-person construction brings together reader and native in a
textual participation. The final sentence, offered as a direct description of a typical
event (which the reader now assimilates from the standpoint of a participant-ob-
server) evokes the scene by means of Nuer cattle metaphors. In the paragraph's eight
sentences an argument about translation passes through a fiction of participation to
a metaphorical fusion of external and indigenous cultural descriptions. The subjec-
tive joining of abstract analysis and concrete experience is accomplished.
Evans-Pritchard would later move away from the theoretical position of The
Nuer, rejecting its advocacy of "social structure" as a privileged framework. Indeed,
each of the fieldwork "shortcuts" enumerated above was, and remains, contested. Yet
by their deployment in different combinations, the authority of the academic field-
worker-theorist was established in the years between 1920 and 1950. This peculiar
amalgam of intense personal experience and scientific analysis (understood in this
period as both "rite of passage" and "laboratory") emerged as a method: partici-
pant-observation. Though variously understood, and now disputed in many quar-
ters, this method remains the chief distinguishing feature of professional
anthropology. Its complex subjectivity is routinely reproduced in the writing and
reading of ethnographies.
"Participant-observation" serves as shorthand for a continuous tacking between
the "inside" and "outside" of events: on the one hand grasping the sense of specific
occurrences and gestures empathetically, on the other stepping back to situate these
meanings in wider contexts. Particular events thus acquire deeper or more general
significance, structural rules, and so forth. Understood literally, participant-observa-
tion is a paradoxical, misleading formula. But it may be taken seriously if reformu-
lated in hermeneutic terms as a dialectic of experience and interpretation. This is
how the method's most persuasive recent defenders have restated it, in the tradition
that leads from Dilthey, via Weber, to "symbols and meanings anthropologists" like
Geertz. Experience and interpretation have, however, been accorded different em-
phases when presented as claims to authority. In recent years, there has been a
marked shift of emphasis from the former to the latter. This section and the one that
follows will explore the rather different claims of experience and interpretation as
well as their evolving interrelation.
The growing prestige of the fieldworker-theorist downplayed (without eliminat-
ing) a number of processes and mediators that had figured more prominently in
previous methods. We have seen how language mastery was defined as a level of use
adequate for amassing a discrete body of data in a limited period of time. The tasks
of textual transcription and translation along with the crucial dialogical role of in-
terpreters and "privileged informants" were relegated to a secondary, sometimes
even despised, status. Fieldwork was now centered on the experience of the partici-
pant-observing scholar. A sharp image, or narrative, made its appearance-that of
an outsider entering a culture, undergoing a kind of initiation leading to "rapport"
(minimally, acceptance and empathy, but usually implying something akin to friend-
ship). Out of this experience emerged, in unspecified ways, a representational text
authored by the participant-observer. As we shall see, this version of textual produc-
tion obscures as much as it reveals. But it is worth taking seriously its principal
assumption, that the experience of the researcher can serve as a unifying source of
authority in the field.
Experiential authority is based on a "feel" for the foreign context, a kind of
accumulated savvy and sense of the style of a people or place. Such an appeal is
frequently explicit in the texts of the early professional participant-observers. Mar-
garet Mead's claim to grasp the underlying principle or ethos of a culture through a
heightened sensitivity to form, tone, gesture, and behavioral styles, or Malinowski's
stress on his life in the village and the comprehension derived from the "impon-
derabilia" of daily existence, are prominent cases in point. Many ethnographies,
Colin Turnbull's The Forest People for example, are still cast in the experiential
mode, asserting, prior to any specific research hypothesis or method, the "I was
there" of the ethnographer as insider and participant.
Of course, it is difficult to say very much about experience. Like "intuition" one
has it or not, and its invocation often smacks of mystification. Nevertheless one
should resist the temptation to translate all meaningful experience into interpreta-
tion. If the two are reciprocally related, they are not identical. It makes sense here to
hold them apart, if only because appeals to experience often act as validations for
ethnographic authority. The most serious argument for the role of experience in the
historical and cultural sciences is contained in the general notion of Verstehen.23 In
Dilthey's influential view, understanding others arises initially from the sheer fact of
coexistence in a shared world. But this experiential world, an intersubjective ground
for objective forms of knowledge, is precisely what is missing or problematic for an
ethnographer entering an alien culture. Thus during the early months in the field
(and indeed throughout the research) what is going on is language-learning in the
broadest sense. Dilthey's "common sphere" must be established and re-established,
building up a shared experiential world in relation to which all "facts," "texts,"
"events," and their interpretations will be constructed. This process of living one's
way into an alien expressive universe is, in his scheme, always subjective in nature.
But it quickly becomes dependent on what he calls "permanently fixed expressions,"
stable forms to which understanding can return. The exegesis of these fixed forms
provides the content of all systematic historical-cultural knowledge. Thus experi-
ence, for Dilthey, is closely linked to interpretation (and he is among the first mod-
ern theorists to compare the understanding of cultural forms to the reading of
"texts"). But this sort of reading or exegesis cannot occur without an intense, per-
sonal participation, an active at-homeness in a common universe.24
Following Dilthey, ethnographic "experience" can be seen as the building-up of
a common, meaningful world, drawing on intuitive styles of feeling, perception, and
guesswork. This activity makes use of clues, traces, gestures, and scraps of sense
prior to the development of developed, stable interpretations. Such piecemeal forms
of experience may be classified as esthetic and/or divinatory. There is space here for
otly a few words about such styles of comprehension as they relate to ethnography.
An evocation of an esthetic mode is conveniently provided by A. L. Kroeber's 1931
review of Mead's Growing up in New Guinea.
First of all, it is clear that she possesses to an outstanding degree the faculties of swiftly
apperceiving the principal currents of a culture as they impinge on individuals, and of delin-
eating these with compact pen-pictures of astonishing sharpness. The result is a representa-
tion of quite extraordinary vividness and semblance to life. Obviously, a gift of
intellectualized
but strong sensationalism underlies this capacity; also, obviously, a high order of
intuitiveness,
in the sense of the ability to complete a convincing picture from clues, for clues is all that
some
of her data can be, with only six months to learn a language and enter the inwards of a whole
culture, besides specializing on child behavior. At any rate, the picture, so far as it goes, is
wholly convincing to the reviewer, who unreservedly admires the sureness of insight and
effi-
ciency of stroke of the depiction.25
A different formulation is provided by Maurice Leenhardt in Do Kamo: Person and
Myth in the Melanesian World, a book which, in its sometimes cryptic mode of
exposition, requires of its readers just the sort of esthetic, gestaltist perception at
which both Mead and Leenhardt excelled. Leenhardt's endorsement of this ap-
proach is significant since, given his extremely long field experience and profound
cultivation of a Melanesian language, his "method" cannot be seen as a rationaliza-
tion for short-term ethnography.
In reality, our contact with another is not accomplished through analysis. Rather, we ap-
prehend him in his entirety. From the outset, we can sketch our view of him using an outline
or symbolic detail which contains a whole in itself and evokes the true form of his being.
This
latter is what escapes us if we approach our fellow creature using only the categories of our
intellect.26
Another way of taking experience seriously as a source of ethnographic know-
ledge is provided by Carlo Ginzburg's recent investigations into the complex tradi-
tion of divination.27 His research ranges from early hunters' interpretations of
animal tracks, to Mesopotamian forms of prediction, the deciphering of symptoms in
Hippocratic medicine, to the focus on details in detecting art forgeries, to Freud,
Sherlock Holmes, and Proust. These styles of nonecstatic divination apprehend spe-
cific, circumstantial relations of meaning, and are based on guesses, on the reading of
apparently disparate clues and "chance" occurrences. Ginzburg proposes his model
of "conjectural knowledge" as a disciplined, nongeneralizing mode of comprehension
that is of central, though unrecognized, importance for the cultural sciences. It may
be added to a rather meager stock of resources for understanding rigorously how one
feels one's way into an unfamiliar ethnographic situation.
Precisely because it is hard to pin down, "experience" has served as an effective
guarantee of ethnographic authority. There is, of course, a telling ambiguity in the
term. Experience evokes a participatory presence, a sensitive contact with the world
to be understood, a rapport with its people, a concreteness of perception. And expe-
rience suggests also a cumulative, deepening knowledge (" . . . her ten years' experi-
ence of New Guinea"). The senses work together to authorize an ethnographer's
real, but ineffable, feel or flair for his or her people. But it is worth noticing that this
"world," when conceived as an experiential creation, is subjective, not dialogical or
intersubjective. The ethnographer accumulates personal knowledge of the field. (The
possessive form, "my people," has until recently been familiarly used in an-
thropological circles; but the phrase in effect signifies "my experience.")
It is understandable, given their vagueness, that experiential criteria of author-
ity-unexamined beliefs in the "method" of participant-observation, in the power of
rapport, empathy, and so on-have come under criticism by hermeneutically sophis-
ticated anthropologists. In recent years the second moment in the dialectic of experi-
ence and interpretation has received increasing attention and elaboration.28
Interpretation, based on a philological model of textual "reading," has emerged as a
sophisticated alternative to the now apparently naive claims for experiential author-
ity. Interpretive anthropology demystifies much of what had previously passed unex-
amined in the construction of ethnographic narratives, types, observations, and
descriptions. It contributes to an increasing visibility of the creative (and in a broad
sense, poetic) processes by which "cultural" objects are invented and treated as
meaningful.
What is involved in looking at culture as an assemblage of texts to be inter-
preted? A classic account has been provided by Paul Ricoeur, notably in his 1971
essay, "The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text."29
Clifford Geertz, in a number of stimulating and subtle discussions has adapted
Ricoeur's theory to anthropological fieldwork.30 "Textualization" is understood as a
prerequisite to interpretation, the constitution of Dilthey's "fixed expressions." It is
the process through which unwritten behavior, speech, beliefs, oral tradition or rit-
ual, come to be marked as a corpus, a potentially meaningful ensemble separated out
from an immediate discursive or performative situation. In the moment of textual-
ization this meaningful corpus assumes a more or less stable relation to a context,
and we are familiar with the end result of this process in much of what counts as
ethnographic thick description. For example, we say that a certain institution or
segment of behavior is typical of, or a communicative element within, a surrounding
culture. (Geertz's famous cockfight becomes an intensely significant locus of Balinese
culture.) Fields of synecdoches are created in which parts are related to wholes-and
by which the whole, what we often call culture, is constituted.
Ricoeur does not actually privilege part-whole relations and the specific sorts of
analogies that constitute functionalist or realist representations. He merely posits a
necessary relation between text and "world." A world cannot be apprehended di-
rectly; it is always inferred on the basis of its parts, and the parts must be concep-
tually and perceptually cut out of the flux of experience. Thus, textualization
generates sense through a circular movement which isolates and then contextualizes
a fact or event in its englobing reality. A familiar mode of authority is generated
which claims to represent discrete, meaningful worlds. Ethnography is the inter-
pretation of cultures.
A second key step in Ricoeur's analysis is his account of the process by which
"discourse" becomes text. Discourse, in Benveniste's classic discussion, is a mode of
communication where the presence of the speaking subject and of the immediate
situation of communication are intrinsic.31 Discourse is marked by pronouns (pro-
nounced or implied) "I" and "You," and by deictic indicators, "this," "that," "now,"
and so on, which signal the present instance of discourse rather than something
beyond it. Discourse does not transcend the specific occasion in which a subject ap-
propriates the resources of language in order to communicate dialogically. Ricoeur
argues that discourse cannot be interpreted in the open-ended, potentially public
way that a text is "read." To understand discourse you "had to have been there," in
the presence of the discoursing subject. For discourse to become text it must become
"autonomous," in Ricoeur's terms, separated from a specific utterance and authorial
intention. Interpretation is not interlocution. It does not depend on being in the
presence of a speaker.
The relevance of this distinction for ethnography is perhaps too obvious. The
ethnographer always ultimately departs, taking away texts for later interpretation.
(And among those "texts" taken away we can include memories-events patterned,
simplified, stripped of immediate context in order to be interpreted in later recon-
struction and portrayal.) The text, unlike discourse, can travel. If much eth-
nographic writing is produced in the field, actual composition of an ethnography is
done elsewhere. Data constituted in discursive, dialogical conditions are appropri-
ated only in textualized form. Research events and encounters become field notes.
Experiences become narratives, meaningful occurrences, or examples.
This translation of the research experience into a textual corpus separate from
its discursive occasions of production has important consequences for ethnographic
authority. The data thus reformulated need no longer be understood as the commu-
nication of specific persons. An informant's explanation or description of custom
need not be cast in a form that includes the message "so and so said this." A tex-
tualized ritual or event is no longer closely linked to the production of that event by
specific actors. Instead, these texts become evidences of an englobing context, a "cul-
tural" reality. Moreover, as specific authors and actors are severed from their pro-
ductions, a generalized "author" must be invented to account for the world or
context within which the texts are fictionally relocated. This generalized author goes
under a variety of names: the native point of view, "the Trobrianders," "the Nuer,"
"the Dogon," as these and similar phrases appear in ethnographies. "The Balinese"
function as author of Geertz's textualized cockfight.
The ethnographer thus enjoys a special relationship with a cultural origin, or
"absolute subject."32 It is tempting to compare the ethnographer with the literary
interpreter (and this comparison is increasingly commonplace)-but more specifi-
cally with the traditional critic, who sees the task at hand as locating the unruly
meanings of a text in a single, coherent intention. By representing the Nuer, the
Trobrianders, or the Balinese as whole subjects, sources of a meaningful intention,
the ethnographer transforms the research situation's ambiguities and diversities of
meaning into an integrated portrait. But it is important to notice what has dropped
out of sight. The research process is separated from the texts it generates and from
the fictive world they are made to call up. The actuality of discursive situations and
individual interlocutors is filtered out. But informants-along with field notes-are
crucial intermediaries, typically excluded from authoritative ethnographies. The di-
alogical, situational aspects of ethnographic interpretation tend to be banished from
the final representative text. Not entirely banished, of course; there exist approved
topoi for the portrayal of the research process.
We are increasingly familiar with the separate fieldwork account (a sub-genre
which still tends to be classified as subjective, "soft," or unscientific). But even
within classic ethnographies, more or less stereotypic "fables of rapport" narrate the
attainment of full participant-observer status. These fables may be told elaborately
or in passing, naively or ironically. They normally portray the ethnographer's early
ignorance, misunderstandings, lack of contact, frequently a sort of childlike status
within the culture. In the Bildungsgeschichte of the ethnography these states of in-
nocence or confusion are replaced by adult, confident, disabused knowledge. We may
cite again Geertz's cockfight, where an early alienation from the Balinese, a con-
fused, "non-person" status, is transformed by the appealing fable of the police raid
with its show of complicity.33 The anecdote establishes a presumption of connected-
ness which permits the writer to function in his subsequent analyses as an omnipres-
ent, knowledgeable exegete and spokesman. This interpreter situates the ritual sport
as a text in a contextual world and brilliantly "reads" its cultural meanings.
Geertz's abrupt disappearance into his rapport-the quasi-invisibility of partici-
pant-observation-is paradigmatic. Here he makes use of an established convention
for staging the attainment of ethnographic authority. As a result, we are seldom
made aware of the fact that an essential part of the cockfight's construction as a text
is dialogical, talking face-to-face with particular Balinese rather than reading cul-
ture "over the[ir] shoulders."34
Interpretive anthropology, by viewing cultures as assemblages of texts, loosely
and sometimes contradictorally united, and by highlighting the inventive poesis at
work in all collective representations, has contributed significantly to the defamiliar-
ization of ethnographic authority. But in its mainstream realist strands it does not
escape the general strictures of those critics of "colonial" representation who, since
1950, have rejected discourses that portray the cultural realities of other peoples
without placing their own reality in jeopardy. In Leiris's early critiques, by way of
Maquet, Asad and many others, the unreciprocal quality of ethnographic interpreta-
tion has been called to account.35 Henceforth, neither the experience nor the inter-
pretive activity of the scientific researcher can be considered innocent. It becomes
necessary to conceive ethnography, not as the experience and interpretation of a
circumscribed "other" reality, but rather as a constructive negotiation involving at
least two, and usually more, conscious, politically significant subjects. Paradigms of
experience and interpretation are yielding to paradigms of discourse, of dialogue and
polyphony. The remaining sections of my essay will survey these emergent modes of
authority.
A discursive model of ethnographic practice brings into prominence the inter-
subjectivity of all speech, along with its immediate performative context. Ben-
veniste's work on the constitutive role of personal pronouns and deixis highlights
just these dimensions. Every use of "I" presupposes a "you," and every instance of
discourse is immediately linked to a specific, shared situation. No discursive mean-
ing, then, without interlocution and context. The relevance of this emphasis for eth-
nography is evident. Fieldwork is significantly composed of language events; but
language, in Bakhtin's words, "lies on the borderline between oneself and the other.
The word in language is half someone else's." The Russian critic urges a rethinking
of language in terms of specific discursive situations: "There are," he writes, "no
'neutral' words and forms-words and forms that can belong to 'no one'; language
has been completely taken over, shot through with intentions and accents." The
words of ethnographic writing, then, cannot be construed as monological, as the
authoritative statement about, or interpretation of, an abstracted, textualized reality.
The language of ethnography is shot through with other subjectivities and specific
contextual overtones; for all language, in Bakhtin's view, is "a concrete heteroglot
conception of the world."36
Forms of ethnographic writing which present themselves in a "discursive" mode
tend to be concerned with the representation of research contexts and situations of
interlocution. Thus a book like Paul Rabinow's Reflections on Fieldwork in Mo-
rocco is concerned with the representation of a specific research situation (a series of
constraining times and places) and (in somewhat fictionalized form) a sequence of
individual interlocutors.37 Indeed, an entire new sub-genre of "fieldwork accounts"
(of which Rabinow's is one of the most trenchant) may be situated within the discur-
sive paradigm of ethnographic writing. Jeanne Favret-Saada's Les mots, la mort, les
sorts is an insistent, self-conscious experiment with ethnography in a discursive
mode.38 She argues that the event of interlocution always assigns to the ethnogra-
pher a specific position in a web of intersubjective relations. There is no neutral
standpoint in the power-laden field of discursive positionings, in a shifting matrix of
relationships, of "I's" and "you's."
A number of recent works have chosen to present the discursive processes of
ethnography in the form of a dialogue between two individuals. Lacoste-Dujardin's
Dialogue des femmes en ethnologie and Shostak's Nisa: The Life and Words of a
IKung Woman are noteworthy examples.39 The dialogical mode is advocated with
considerable sophistication in two other texts. The first, Kevin Dwyer's theoretical
reflections on "The Dialogic of Ethnology" springs from a series of interviews with
a key informant and justifies Dwyer's decision to structure his ethnography in the
form of a rather literal record of these exchanges.40 The second work is Vincent
Crapanzano's more complex Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan, another account of a
series of interviews which rejects any sharp separation of an interpreting self from a
textualized other.41 Both Dwyer and Crapanzano locate ethnography in a process of
dialogue where interlocutors actively negotiate a shared vision of reality. Cra-
panzano argues that this mutual construction must be at work in any ethnographic
encounter, but that participants tend to assume they have simply acquiesced to the
reality of their counterpart. Thus, for example, the ethnographer of the Trobriand
Islanders does not openly concoct a version of reality in collaboration with his infor-
mants but rather interprets the "Trobriand point of view." Crapanzano and Dwyer
offer sophisticated attempts to break with this literary/hermeneutical convention. In
the process, the ethnographer's authority as narrator and interpreter is altered.
Dwyer proposes a hermeneutics of "vulnerability," stressing the ruptures of field-
work, the divided position and imperfect control of the ethnographer. Both Cra-
panzano and Dwyer seek to represent the research experience in ways that tear open
the textualized fabric of the other and thus, also, of the interpreting self.42 (Here
etymologies are evocative: the word text is related, as is well known, to weaving,
vulnerability to rending or wounding, in this instance the opening up of a closed
authority.)
The model of dialogue brings to prominence precisely those discursive-circum-
stantial and intersubjective-elements that Ricoeur had to exclude from his model of
the text. But if interpretive authority is based on the exclusion of dialogue, the re-
verse is also true: a purely dialogical authority would repress the inescapable fact of
textualization. While ethnographies cast as encounters between two individuals may
successfully dramatize the intersubjective, give-and-take of fieldwork and introduce
a counterpoint of authoritative voices, they remain representations of dialogue. As
texts they may not be dialogical in structure. (Although Socrates appears as a decen-
tered participant in his encounters, Plato retains full control of the dialogue.43) This
displacement, but not elimination of monological authority is characteristic of any
approach that portrays the ethnographer as a discrete character in the fieldwork
narrative. Moreover, there is a frequent tendency in fictions of dialogue for the eth-
nographer's counterpart to appear as a representative of his or her culture-a type,
in the language of traditional realism-through which general social processes are
revealed.44 Such a portrayal reinstates the synecdochic interpretive authority by
which the ethnographer reads text in relation to context, thereby consituting a
meaningful "other" world. But if it is difficult for dialogical portrayals to escape
typifying procedures, they can, to a significant degree, resist the pull toward au-
thoritative representation of the other. This depends on their ability fictionally to
maintain the strangeness of the other voice and to hold in view the specific con-
tingencies of the exchange.
To say that an ethnography is composed of discourses and that its different com-
ponents are dialogically related, is not to say that its textual form should be that of a
literal dialogue. Indeed, as Crapanzano recognizes in Tuhami, a third participant,
real or imagined, must function as mediator in any encounter between two indi-
viduals.45 The fictional dialogue is, in fact, a condensation, a simplified representa-
tion of complex, multi-vocal processes. An alternative way of representing this
discursive complexity is to understand the overall course of the research as an on-
going negotiation. The case of Marcel Griaule and the Dogon is well known and
particularly clear-cut. Griaule's account of his instruction in Dogon cosmological
wisdom, Dieu d'Eau (Conversations with Ogotemme1i), was an early exercise in di-
alogical ethnographic narration. But beyond this specific interlocutory occasion, a
more complex process was at work. For it is apparent that the content and timing of
the Griaule team's long-term research, spanning decades, was closely monitored and
significantly shaped by Dogon tribal authorities.46 This is no longer news. Many
ethnographers have commented on the ways, both subtle and blatant, in which their
research was directed or circumscribed by their informants. In his provocative dis-
cussion of this issue, loan Lewis even calls anthropology a form of "plagiarism."47
The give and take of ethnography is clearly portrayed in a recently published
study, noteworthy for its presentation within a single work of both an interpreted
other reality and the research process itself: Renato Rosaldo's Ilongot Headhunt-
ing.48 Rosaldo arrives in the Phillipine highlands intent on writing a synchronic
study of social structure. But again and again, over his objections, he is forced to
listen to endless Ilongot narratives of their local history. Dutifully, dumbly, in a kind
of bored trance, he transcribes these stories, filling notebook after notebook with
what he considers disposable texts. Only after leaving the field, and after a long
process of reinterpretation (a process made manifest in the ethnography) does it
become clear that these obscure tales have in fact provided Rosaldo with his final
topic, the culturally distinctive Ilongot sense of narrative and history. Rosaldo's ex-
perience of what might be called "directed writing" sharply poses a fundamental
question. Who is actually the author of field notes?
The issue is a subtle one, and deserves systematic study. But enough has been
said to make the general point, that indigenous control over knowledge gained in the
field can be considerable, and even determining. Current ethnographic writing is
seeking new ways to adequately represent the authority of informants, and there are
few models to look to. But it is worth reconsidering the older textual compilations of
Boas, Malinowski, Leenhardt, and others. In these works, the ethnographic genre
has not coalesced around the modern interpretational monograph closely identified
with a personal fieldwork experience. We can contemplate an ethnographic mode
that is not yet authoritative in those specific ways that are now politically and epis-
temologically in question. These older assemblages include much that is actually or
all but written by informants. One thinks of the role of George Hunt in Boas's
ethnography, or of the fifteen "transcripteurs" listed in Leenhardt's Documents ne'o-
caledoniens.49
Malinowski is a complex transitional case. His ethnographies reflect the in-
complete coalescence of the modern monograph. If he was centrally responsible for
the welding of theory and description into the authority of the professional field-
worker, Malinowski nonetheless included material that did not directly support his
own all-too-clear interpretive slant. In the many dictated myths and spells which fill
his books he published much data that he frankly did not understand. The result
was an open text subject to multiple reinterpretations. It is worth comparing such
older compendia with the recent model ethnography, which cites evidence to support
a focused interpretation, and little else. In the modern, authoritative monograph
there are, in effect, no strong voices present except that of the writer. But, in Ar-
gonauts and Coral Gardens we read page after page of magical spells, none in any
essential sense the ethnographer's words. These dictated texts, in all but their physi-
cal inscription, are written by specific, unnamed Trobrianders. Indeed, any continu-
ous ethnographic exposition routinely folds into itself a diversity of descriptions,
transcriptions, and interpretations by a variety of indigenous "authors." How should
these authorial presences be made manifest?
A useful-if extreme-standpoint is provided by Bakhtin's analysis of the
"polyphonic" novel. A fundamental condition of the genre, he argues, is that it rep-
resents speaking subjects in a field of multiple discourses. The novel grapples with,
and enacts, heteroglossia. For Bakhtin, preoccupied with the representation of non-
homogeneous wholes, there are no integrated cultural worlds or languages. All at-
tempts to posit such abstract unities are constructs of monological power. A
"culture" is, concretely, an open-ended, creative dialogue of subcultures, of insiders
and outsiders, of diverse factions; a "language" is the interplay and struggle of re-
gional dialects, professional jargons, generic commonplaces, the speech of different
age groups, individuals, and so forth. For Bakhtin, the polyphonic novel is not a tour
de force of cultural or historical totalization (as realist critics like Lukacs and Auer-
bach have argued), but rather a carnivalesque arena of diversity. Bakhtin discovers a
utopian textual space where discursive complexity, the dialogical interplay of voices,
can be accommodated. In the novels of Dostoyevski or Dickens, he values precisely
their resistance to totality, and his ideal novelist is a ventriloquist-in nineteenth-
century parlance, a "polyphonist." "He do the police in different voices," a listener
exclaims admiringly of the boy, Sloppy, who reads publicly from the newspaper in
Our Mutual Friend. But Dickens, the actor, oral performer, and polyphonist, must
be set against Flaubert, the master of authorial control moving godlike among the
thoughts and feelings of his characters. Ethnography, like the novel, wrestles with
these alternatives. Does the ethnographic writer portray what natives think by
means of Flaubertian "free indirect style," a style that suppresses direct quotation in
favor of a controlling discourse always more-or-less that of the author? (In a recent
essay Dan Sperber, taking Evans-Pritchard as his example, has convincingly shown
that style indirect is indeed the preferred mode of ethnographic interpretation.50) Or,
does the portrayal of other subjectivities require a version that is stylistically less
homogeneous, filled with Dickens' "different voices?"
Some use of indirect style is inevitable, unless the novel or ethnography be com-
posed entirely of quotations, which is theoretically possible but seldom attempted.51
In practice, however, the ethnography and the novel have recourse to indirect style at
different levels of abstraction. We need not ask how Flaubert knows what Emma
Bovary is thinking, but the ability of the fieldworker to inhabit indigenous minds is
always in doubt: indeed this is a permanent, unresolved problem of ethnographic
method. Ethnographers have generally refrained from ascribing beliefs, feelings, and
thoughts to individuals. They have not, however, hesitated to ascribe subjective
states to a culture. Sperber's analysis reveals how phrases such as "The Nuer think
... ." or "The Nuer sense of time . . ." are fundamentally different from quotations
or translations of indigenous discourse. Such statements are "without any specified
speaker," and are literally equivocal, combining in an unspecified way the ethnogra-
pher's affirmations with that of an informant or informants.52 Ethnographies
abound in unattributed sentences like "The spirits return to the village at night,"
descriptions of beliefs in which the writer assumes, in effect, the voice of culture.
At this "cultural" level, ethnographers aspire to a Flaubertian omniscience that
moves freely throughout a world of indigenous subjects. But beneath the surface
their texts are more unruly and discordant. Victor Turner's work provides a telling
case in point, worth investigating more closely as an example of the interplay of
monophonic and polyphonic exposition. Turner's ethnographies offer superbly com-
plex portrayals of Ndembu ritual symbols and beliefs; and he has provided, too, an
unusually explicit glimpse behind the scenes. In the midst of the essays collected in
The Forest of Symbols, his third book on the Ndembu, Turner offers a portrait of his