OPEN ANTHROPOLOGY

But it’s not ethnographic.

It’s not a real ethnography.

How many times have fellow anthropologists heard such statements? Don’t lie: say “dozens of times.”

Some, perhaps most anthropologists have convinced themselves that the path to truth runs through fieldwork. Any other knowledge gaining methodology is suspect, tainted, partial (i.e., surveys, reading newspaper reports, archival research, or even cross-examining “theoretical” texts).

I do not like to impart this kind of thinking to students. I know how vital personal life experiences can be in shaping how we see the world, and I know that students, like all others, can derive and gain wisdom in a great many ways. Ethnography is not indispensable to wisdom.

In actuality, most anthropologists must silently, perhaps unconsciously, concur with this last statement. They would never dream of sending students into “the field” without adequate “training.” (Yes, the language of discipline often sounds like regimentation.) And so they load students heads with stacks of theory, theory, theory, and other ethnographies, and other books, and other articles, other, other and more other of everything. “Situate yourself in the literature” they tell their students–in other words, cite us, engage in slavish recitation…consume. “Don’t reinvent the wheel”–we are back to dealing with universal science again…look at how it never went away. Ethnography is clearly a secondary sporting activity, and “the field” is where one goes to harvest some ornamental empirical illustrations for a story line that was conceived well in advance of “arrival.” (Anthropologists never “arrive”, they simply get there.) Moreover, the story line was itself conceived by people who themselves sit in armchairs, and the product is “negotiated” (read: controlled, managed, screened).

Ethnographic writing is itself thoroughly in pieces following a generation of absolutely scathing post-modern critiques: we tell stories, fictions, partial and incomplete truths; we are translators, therefore interpreters, thus we produce renditions, not accounts.

Alright then, so am I advocating that students and others completely ignore what may be dozens, even hundreds, of anthropological texts on any given subject? Not at all–that would be to advocate ignorance, to celebrate indifference, and to nourish patterns of lazy disregard for the output of many bright and devoted minds.

What I am instead talking about is a personal power relation, of actively engaging in production but with a keen regard for the fact that nothing we do is ever truly “original” and that our whole lives are lived in a thick web of social relations, and hence our ideas are just as much tangled up in that web. Knowing that, however, also repositions ethnography as by no means the best, most important, primary, or any other privileged way of accessing “the truth,” or “reality.”

One can always read “the other literature”, and sometimes it makes more sense to figure out what the relevant literature is, what is of interest, and what may be useful for building an explanation after one has had the chance to engage and reflect upon immersive personal experiences. The key activity is trying to understand why one is interested in some questions, and not others, what makes a question interesting, and what makes a problem a problem.

“We have ethnography” could very well stand in as the ruling motto for what is now orthodox anthropology. If there is one long-standing, enduring trait of disciplined anthropology is the constant craving for recognition. Many anthropologists thought they had constructed a solid pillar on which to stand a discipline by claiming ethnography as their very own. They had managed to convince themselves–and the US military and intelligence establishment in the 1940s, 1960s, 1970s, and again now–that ethnography was invented by anthropologists, as a unique, direct, and personal way of gaining data. Needless to say, this kind of self-serving history mandates that we forget the many independent researchers who appeared on the scene long before any Malinowski, and who lived with some or even many “tribes”, married into them in cases, and lived with them for a generation or more.

So one can imagine the alarmist shrieks of indignant anthropologists who hear of “ethnography” in Communications departments, in Media Studies, in Business, and so forth. They had become used to the Sociological tradition of ethnography, especially coming out of Chicago, and often sneak in books from this tradition into their courses, with little in the way of an explanation that the author is a sociologist (e.g. William Foote Whyte’s Street Corner Society). Indeed, sociologists and others are frequently absorbed into teaching and research in anthropology, with little in the way of the kind of deferential explanation or apology that anthropologists have come to expect when others “misappropriate” their traditions.

The message here is obviously ambivalent:

What’s ours, is ours. What’s yours is also ours. Recognize what is ours, but be careful not to use it, at least not without our supervision.

The very serious downside of this state of affairs is that it is increasingly common, in both everyday discourse in the discipline, and often printed in various policies for graduate programs, that we find anthropology being equated with ethnography, specifically “fieldwork” (one of the most deadeningly colonial terms that we still use). Ethnography has become everything. Book reviewers in the discipline now approach each ethnographic work with the wrong expectation that it will, can, or should be all sorts of other things: it should be theory, it should be “comparative” (they forgot: comparative work in anthropology is not ethnography, that is ethnology), it should be a vast review of other people’s works (also a convenient pretext for reviewers to fault a book for not having cited them). The discipline that claims ethnography does not even know to handle it anymore, how to position it, how to understand it.

Orthodox, disciplined anthropology has reduced and essentialized itself…it identifies itself with a tool. It is as if there were to be a discipline called: “Reading Reports,” or “Interviewing with a Tape Recorder.” This is surely one sign of a discipline sounding its own death knell, when almost all of its subjects of study are imports (nationalism, ethnicity, tourism, migration, globalization, etc.) as well as its theoretical objects (power, governmentality, etc.).

As if to validate Pierre Bourdieu once again, orthodoxy is always a sure sign that a previously dominant system is now in trouble, when what was previously taken for granted is now taken as a lifesaver by some cold, angry, white hands.