What is ethnography good for?

Scholarship is accountable to its audiences, but who are anthropologyʻs audiences?

Anthropologists do not practice anthropology in Cloud-cuckoo-land.

We do anthropology in the real world, as a member of several communities

We are part of a community of other anthropologists
We are part of a larger society, and often rely on taxpayer money to fund our research.
We are part of an increasingly interconnected and interdependent world.

Yet anthropologists like to see themselves as outsiders in their own societies and in the societies they study.

Who are our audiences?

Salvage anthropology

Franz Boas is an important founding figure of cultural anthropology in the United States, and is responsible for the concept of culture as a shared world view. For Boas, culture is

A comprehensive, integrated system of thought
Shared among members of a single community
Particular to that community

Anthropologists think in terms of cultural relativism based on Boas’s argument that culture is a whole.

While Boas and his students were interested in each culture’s unique path of development, they also sought to document Native American cultures they feared would disappear.

Their ethnographic projects were a “salvage” operation to record a disappearing way of life and way of thinking.

They relied on interviews with people who had experieced an intact cultural pattern.
Their ethnographic descriptions were a reconstruction of a past society rather than of one in which they immersed themselves.
Though a minority, some still do salvage anthropology (or “urgent anthropology”). Is there a good reason for this to be done?

Scientific expertise

Like other fields, many anthropologists have claimed that they had expertise as scientists of human societies and their cultures.

W. H. R. Rivers investigated the reasons for what was believed to be a declining birth rate among colonized peoples of the Pacific.
Anthropologists after Malinowski viewed each society as a functionally integrated whole, like a machine or living organism. They advocated for colonial policies of noninterference.

For the most part, colonial governments had little interest in anthropologists’ studies (see Kuper 1973).

Theories of society

As more people were trained as ethnographers in the Boasian or Malinowskian sense, anthropology became a profession

It sought to separate itself as much as possible from the general public, other fields, and from government.
It turned inward; anthropologists spoke mainly to other anthropologists.
Its goals were to use ethnography to pursue greater and more abstract understanding of human societies in general.

While this may seem to have no positive impact, there are reasons why it is good for anthropological research to be carried out for its own sake and purely for the goal of developing new ideas.

Yet, at the same time, this view relies on a faith in rationality, and a faith in people’s capacity to control the world through reason alone. It belongs to a specific period in world history.

Anthropology as critique

Anthropologists do not all want to be scientists, although many want to remove themselves from society.

They speak back to their own society from the position of a critic and skeptic. Their ethnographic cases are sources of inspiration for social alternatives in their own societies.

Even when used as a basis for critique, ethnography always involves objectifying people (see Bell 2014)

Should anthropology then have another kind of audience, the people that are described in ethnography?

The injustices that research ethics cannot solve

No society exists in isolation.
- Auhelawa people live on an island, but they are connected to everyone else in the world, although on unequal terms.
- Someone can hold themselves to the highest possible standard of ethical behavior toward research subjects, but none of their conduct would do anything to remedy or ameliorate their unequal position with respect to the people they study.
According to Pels (1999), when we talk about the fieldwork situation in terms of ethical obligations is to erase the deeper asymmetries and inequalities in the situation which can only be addressed through politics. Ethical codes make the researcher into a saint and savior.
Rather than talk about what we shouldn’t do in research, let’s talk about ethical value of learning about each other’s differences.

“Ethnographic refusal”

Some argue that the “primitive isolate” image in ethnography is not only a distortion, but represents an ethical failure of anthropologists to document and critique forms of inequality and oppression experienced by the people they study.

Laura Nader calls on anthropologists to “study up” (Nader 1972).
- Anthropologists tend to study people who have less social and political power than themselves. They should instead seek to gain access to the people and communities with more power, that is, social, economic, and political elites. “Studying up” should investigate the social forces and cultural ideas that place elites in positions of dominance.
By contrast, Sherry Ortner speaks of an “ethnographic refusal.” Ortner means specifically the refusal by an anthropologist to emphasize the emic perspective over an etic perspective (Ortner 1995)
- Ortner’s concept of ethnographic refusal is when an anthropologist foregrounds the effects of colonialism and integration with the global system of capitalism as an explanation for people’s contemporary life, and refuses to look at these experiences in emic terms as part of a particular worldview.
- One example is the way people talk about so-called “cargo cults” in PNG. Are they an example of “episodic time” or do they represent people’s resistance to colonial domination (Billings 2002; Burridge 1954; Errington 1974; Jebens 2004; Kaplan 1995; Lattas 2007; McDowell 1988)?

Ships passing in the night

There is an irony in the history of anthropology.

Most research in anthropology today is conducted in a critical mode.

Most anthropologists want their work to “speak truth to power” (American Friends Service Committee 1955).
Most ethnography written today seeks to situate the object of description in a larger, even global, context. The ethnographer of today writes against a fictional “ethnographic present.”

And yet, many other critical social sciences have ethnography envy.

Many people outside of anthropology think classical ethnographic writing, particularly the kind that seeks to capture a distinct emic perspective, is a great way to do engaged, political work that advocates for change, or “action research.”

Feminist “participatory action research” is ethnography

Consider what feminist sociologist Shulamit Reinharz says about participatory action research:

In feminist participatory research, the distinction between the researcher(s) and those on whom the research is done disappears. To achieve an egalitarian relation, the researcher abandons control and adopts an approach of openness, reciprocity, mutual disclosure, and shared risk. Differences in social status and background give way as shared decision-making and self-disclosure develop. (Reinharz 1992, 181)

For her, participatory research means the researcher:

“abandons control”
strives for “an egalitarian relation”
relies on mutual trust between researcher and researched.

Sound familiar?

Participatory research has been treated skeptically in anthropology

Anthropologists are always skeptical. They like the idea of activist research, since they generally want to do good for their research subjects, but they question whether it’s possible

“In ‘community-based’ research, how do you know who is included and excluded from this community?”
“Who speaks for this community? How do you know you’re not just be co-opted by the ‘loudspeakers’ in the community?”
“What are the unintended consequences?”

How might ethnography speak to its own object?

More recently, scholars have revived Ortner’s skeptical label of “ethnographic refusal” and argued for a positive interpretation.

When they use the term, they mean refusal to represent specific topics in pubilshed academic ethnographic writings, and instead collaborate with their informants on ways to for them to speak for themselves and create knowledge about themselves that is valuable for their community (Simpson 2007)

Intellectual ownership
Secrecy
Refusal to make people into ethnographic objects

What makes community-led research successful?

Indigenous-controlled and directed research has only grown since Christen’s work on this topic. But it seems like there are several crucial elements that have to be present for it to work.

The community that directs the research on itself, and may even commission the research project, usually already has some degree of political recognition as an autonomous body, and has its own institutions to exercise its rights of self-determination in a larger sphere.
Like all communities, it already generates knowledge of itself. In community-led research, people have also developed a consciousness of themselves as a community and can thus more effectively communicate their knowledge of themselves to others, including
- the dominant society in which they are embedded
- networks of communities, scholars, and activists with similar identities and in similar situations.

Does a community that has empowered itself to create, transmit, and develop its own knowledge of itself even need anthropologists to help it create new knowledge?

Would becoming an anthropologist of oneself and one’s own community be the best way to know yourself?

References and further reading

American Friends Service Committee. 1955. Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence. Philadelphia: American Friends Service Committee. http://www.quaker.org/sttp.html.

Bell, Kirsten. 2014. “Resisting Commensurability: Against Informed Consent as an Anthropological Virtue.” American Anthropologist 116 (3): 511–22. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.12122.

Billings, Dorothy K. 2002. Cargo Cult as Theater: Political Performance in the Pacific. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books. http://books.google.com?id=htaAAAAAMAAJ.

Burridge, K. O. L. 1954. “Cargo Cult Activity in Tangu.” Oceania 24 (4): 241–54. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40328944.

Errington, Frederick. 1974. “Indigenous Ideas of Order, Time, and Transition in a New Guinea Cargo Movement.” American Ethnologist 1 (2): 255–67. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1974.1.2.02a00030.

Jebens, Holger, ed. 2004. Cargo, Cult, and Culture Critique. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press. http://books.google.com?id=F5v7UD4FOigC.

Kaplan, Martha. 1995. Neither Cargo Nor Cult: Ritual Politics and the Colonial Imagination in Fiji. Duke University Press.

Kuper, Adam. 1973. “Anthropology and Colonialism.” In Anthropologists and Anthropology : The British School, 1922-1972, 123–49. New York: Pica Press. http://archive.org/details/anthropologistsa0000kupe.

Lattas, Andrew. 2007. “Cargo Cults and the Politics of Alterity: A Review Article.” Anthropological Forum 17 (2): 149–61. https://doi.org/10.1080/00664670701438407.

McDowell, Nancy. 1988. “A Note on Cargo Cults and Cultural Constructions of Change.” Pacific Studies 11 (2): 121–34.

Nader, Laura. 1972. “Up the Anthropologist: Perspectives Gained from Studying Up.” In Reinventing Anthropology, edited by Dell Hymes, 284–311. New York: Pantheon Books.

Ortner, Sherry B. 1995. “Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37 (1): 173–93. http://www.jstor.org/stable/179382.

Pels, Peter. 1999. “Professions of Duplexity: A Prehistory of Ethical Codes in Anthropology.” Current Anthropology 40 (2): 101–36. https://doi.org/10.1086/200001.

Reinharz, Shulamit. 1992. Feminist Methods in Social Research. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://archive.org/details/feministmethodsi0000rein.

Simpson, Audra. 2007. “On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’ and Colonial Citizenship.” Junctures 9: 67–80.