Материал: Nigel Rapport, Joanna Overing, Social and Cultural Anthropology - The Key Concepts (2000)

LITERARINESS

Hence, the calls, in recent years, for new, non-canonical ways of writing: first-person narratives; reflexivity; rhetorical self-consciousness; linguistic play; heteroglossia; verbatim recording; performative translation. In Stephen Tyler’s vision (1986), ethnography should become a dialogic and collaborative production which replaces the monologic ‘rape’ of a scientistic ‘alienation’ (with its synthesizing gaze, transcendent argument and final word) with a negotiated and cooperatively evolved text. This might hope to evoke in readers the therapeutic possibility of a new commonsensical reality, transformed, renewed, even sacralized.

Writing Culture

Writing Culture is introduced (by Clifford) with the claim that far from being objective, anthropological writings are literarily constructed accounts, in a word, inventions and fictions.They are fictions because any historically situated truth is only ever partial, and because every one telling of a story must deny the telling of another at the same time from another perspective. As Nietzsche (1911) put it: ‘all constructed truths are made possible by powerful “lies” of exclusion and rhetoric’. Anthropologists, then, are those who traditionally have had the power to tell their story of other cultures, while silencing the voices of the actual members and pretending to tell an authoritative, objective story in an omniscient way (with personal details, purple prose and rhetoric eschewed). But, however much anthropological writing intends to be impartial, even advocatory (written on behalf of the natives, and critical of present power relations), it is still enmeshed in a world of power inequalities; and it enacts further power relations.

More precisely, anthropological writings are overdetermined:

1contextually: by the social milieux in which the anthropologist lives while he or she writes;

2rhetorically: by the expressive conventions of language which are used, which use them;

3institutionally: by the specific academic discipline the texts feed into and the academic audience which reads them;

4generically: by the genre they add to (monograph; thesis; edited collection; textbook) and set themselves against (novel; poem; religious tract);

5politically: by the power they have to assume the authority to describe and analyse and publish ‘a culture’;

6and finally historically: by the fact that all the above factors are changing through time.

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In sum, the anthropologist must be constantly self-conscious when he writes: conscious of the historical situation which places him in the position of writing up accounts of others; conscious of possibly competing accounts; conscious of how he is constructing his text, so that while avoiding self-indulgent confessionals, he admits to the personal nature of his account.

Works and Lives: II

The way out of the moral asymmetries and discursive complexities, according to Geertz, is to admit that anthropology entails representing one sort of life in the categories of another (those of the writer), and to accept that anthropological texts are literary texts: to be looked at and not just through. Of course, this makes authorship more burdensome. For, it is art which is primarily involved in bringing anthropological texts to life and keeping them active, and such artistry cannot be displaced onto ‘method’ or ‘language’ or ‘the people themselves’. Anthropological writing entails telling stories, making pictures, concocting symbolisms and deploying tropes: ‘half-convinced writers trying to half-convince readers of their (the writers’) half-convictions’ (Geertz 1988:139). Only by admitting this can claims that the enterprise is iniquitous or impossible be countered.

And yet one still finds great resistance to seeing anthropology as a kind of imaginative writing. It is regarded as improper for anthropologists to reflect upon such literary questions instead of surveying the external world: an unhealthy self-absorption; narcissistic and decadent; time-wasting and hypochondriacal (cf. Sangren 1988:423; Spencer 1989). It is felt that anthropologists produce texts which do not warrant literary inspection: they are not aiming for distinct styles; they are not mixed up in the ‘sharp practice’ of rhetoric. Moreover, it is feared that disinterring how knowledge claims are rhetorically advanced will reduce their plausibility as serious knowledge.

To this, Geertz responds that reality privileges no particular idiom in which it demands to be described—literally, positivistically, or without fuss.Anthropological representation has always been an ‘impure’ business, of feelings and sentiments, deriving from a dialogue between anthropologist and informant which changes them both. Indeed, the ‘classic’ anthropological texts have always been stylistic tours de force (cf. Hymes 1973b).What is called for, then, is for anthropology to admit that its continuing genealogy is literary, not scientific, and that it is inappropriate to peddle scientific-sounding rhetoric concerning ‘induction’, ‘reification’, ‘generalization’, ‘truth’, or ‘fact’. After all,

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‘ethnographic reality is actively constructed, not to say invented’ (Dumont 1978:66). The anthropologist attempts to convey the multiplicity of voices and viewpoints which passed through his consciousness during his research, while knowing that his consciousness has inextricably transmogrified those viewpoints. Thus, anthropology should recognize its proper realm to be ‘“faction”: imaginative writing about real people in real places at real times’—where the ‘imaginative’ and the ‘imagined’ need not be confused with the ‘imaginary’, the ‘fictional’ with the ‘false’, or the ‘made-out’ with the ‘made-up’ (Geertz 1988:141).

Not that seeing anthropology as in important respects a literary vocation does not have its dangers. For then the enterprise may be seen as the seduction to intellectual positions through rhetorical artifice, with its central quarrels construed as conceptual ones, and its central value as aestheticism and the pleasures of a good read (cf. Marcus 1980).

Anthropology as Cultural Critique

The argument is taken on in Anthropology as Cultural Critique. Marcus and Fischer ask how precisely anthropological writing can be made more sensitive to its broader political, historical and philosophical implications. And their answer is: by questioning the conventions of representation and by seeing in a permeability of disciplinary borders— between social science and the humanities, between the textual and the contextual—a liberation from traditional (illegitimate-because- absolutist-and-essentialist) symbolizations of the world.We might rework traditional differentiations between disciplines and genres, and see them instead as analogous enterprises: as corresponding ways of treating social reality which can come into fruitful communication and complementary relationship.

As Pratt argues (1992), particular tropes and genres need not be seen as somehow natural or native to a discipline, and just as anthropologists have had recourse to particular ones in the past, so they might invent new ones now. Anthropological texts need not be so far removed from novels, from travel reports, memoirs and journalism, from avant-garde cultural commentary, where these are seen to be corresponding ways of ‘writing social reality’.

Or again, in the same way that the so-called realist novel (which depended on a narrator whose insight into circumstances and subjectivities was omniscient) was superseded by the modernist text (highlighting dialogue between the narrator and the other characters, between the writer, his subjects and the reader, so as to achieve a

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reciprocity of perspectives), so dialogue and reciprocity between a multiplicity of legitimate voices and views, may be watchwords for a new way of writing anthropology. The anthropologist engages in dialogue with his informants, and this can be conveyed in the text—with the reader then engaging in further dialogue. The processes of writing and reading alike could be conceived of as a series of multivocal exchanges in which a juxtaposition occurs of manifold cultural assumptions. In place of one culture representing another in its own terms, then, there are cultures juxtaposed, each framing questions which challenge the others’ preconceptions. After all, it is not only anthropologists who write socio-cultural reality, and by playing off of such realities against one another one may accrue (not ‘the truth’ but) fruitful dialogue without end.

Works and Lives: III

What is central to the anthropological text, Geertz urges, is the experience of its writer. If anthropological writings attempt to provide openings onto others’ socio-cultural realities, then they persuade not through the facts they contain, nor through their stylistic elegance, but to the extent that they convey, in its fullness, the author’s experience of travel between ways of life and worlds of meaning. In the conveyance of this, there might also be travel between ways of writing, between tropes and genres. Because not only does the reality anthropology approaches not demand one way in which it must truthfully be described, but, to the contrary, this reality is human reality—a necessarily experienced reality—and ever multiple. To travel between literary forms in one’s efforts to represent human socio-cultural reality is to seek to do justice to this multiplicity.

‘Factional’ genres?

Genres have been defined as ‘literary institutions, or social contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose function is to specify the proper use of a cultural artefact’ (Jameson 1981:106). To coin a term such as ‘faction’, as Geertz does, in order to refer to the ‘literariness’ of contemporary ‘anthropological’ writing, is at once to evince the relationship between academic disciplines and certain genres of representation, and to posit a destabilization of this relationship. Disciplinary boundaries between literature and anthropology should no longer disguise or subvert inter-disciplinary correspondences in their representation of socio-cultural realities.

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Ordinarily, however, it is still the differences (of genre, institutionality, artefact) between the two disciplines which tend to be emphasized by their various apologists and exponents. Thus, the fictional is claimed to address the might-have-been, the should-be, the could-well-be, the would-never-be (and so on); so that when actual people and events gain ascendancy over invention then literature becomes what it is not (cf. Lodge 1977:8). In anthropology, meanwhile, as Geertz reports, there is the broad claim that its writings may be speculative, and are probably inductive, but nevertheless they can, do and should aspire to being in true and direct relationship to the stimuli of an externally met world (to real people and events), and to representing themselves plainly and honestly.

More precisely, it is said that anthropology attempts something more than, or at least different from, literature, which lacks the realism of content of the anthropological endeavour, the expected rigour of research, method, theory and presentation.While literature takes cultural material and transforms it, exploits it, instead of presenting it for its own sake, the discipline of anthropology is based on the descriptive integrity of ethnography: a dedication to fact, not to the satisfaction of artistry; a holistic depiction of actual happenings in genuine settings, not an impressionistic fusion of idea and reality. Even if literature sets itself the goal of realism, then, this is not the same as descriptive accuracy because the idea will always come first and reality then be made to fit it (Erickson 1988).

Furthermore, the literary text is not beholden to a painstaking revelation of the steps in its argument, of the logic in its associations and extrapolations, so that conclusions can be reached which simply suit its opening ideas. The literary text is indirect and selective, introverted and self-oriented; it seeks to rivet attention on itself rather than seeking, as does the referential text in anthropology, to describe literally the external reality of an objective world (cf. Watt 1979:306– 8). Hence, anthropology remains a project well worth pursuing even by writers who will never achieve the artistry of literaryism and, indeed, might not aspire to it.

In sum, many anthropologists resist a ‘literary turn’ to their discipline when this is seen as a mooted change to their institutional practices and a threat to the tradition, ideology, training, purpose, prestige, in a word, the ‘culture’ of their discipline. For, here are ways of writing (of giving names to things; of orienting collective activity; of deriving meaning; of systematizing date; of configuring the truth) which are exclusive and exclusionary They are incommensurable and irreducible, relevant in different ways, for different times, and different purposes. To take a

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