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Being There , livre ebook

Pluto Press - C.W. Watson

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174 pages

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Description

This book draws on the experience of international anthropologists from Italy, the Himalayas, Northern England, Bangladesh and Indonesia. Being There examines the close relationships anthropologists establish with friends and informants in the field. Collectively they describe the varying ways in which that closeness affects the nature of the anthropologists’ observation, as well as an understanding of themselves and their discipline.
Introduction

1. Fictions of Fieldwork: Depicting the ‘Self’ in Ethnographic Writing (Italy) by Cris Shore (Goldsmiths College, London)

2. Location and Relocation: Home, ‘The Field’ and Anthropological Ethics (Sylhet, Bangladesh) by Katy Gardner (University of Sussex)

3. On Ethnographic Experience: Formative and Informative (Nias, Indonesia) by Andrew Beatty (Wolfson College, Oxford)

4. Learning to be Friends: Participant Observation amongst English School children (the North of England) by Allison James (University of Hull)

5. The End in the Beginning: New Year at Rizong (The Himalayas)by Anna Grimshaw (University of Manchester)

6. A Diminishment: a Death in the Field (Kerinci, Indonesia) by C.W. Watson

List of contributors

Index

Sujets

Anthropology

Science

Informations

Publié par	Pluto Press
Date de parution	20 janvier 1999
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781849640480
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,6250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

BEING THERE FIELDWORK IN ANTHROPOLOGY

EDITED BY C. W. WATSON

P Pluto Press LONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIA

First published 1999 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA

The right of the individual contributors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 7453 1497 X hbk

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Being there : six anthropological accounts of fieldwork / edited by C. W. Watson. p.cm—. (Anthropology, culture, and society) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0–7453–1497–X (hbk) 1. Anthropology—Field work. 2. Anthropology—Philosophy. I. Watson, C. W. II. Series. GN34.3.F53B45 1999 301'.07'23—dc21 98–37448 CIP

Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Production Services, Chadlington, OX7 3LN Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton Printed in the EC by TJ International, Padstow

CONTENTS

Notes on Contributors

Introduction: The Quality of Being There C. W. Watson

1 Fictions of Fieldwork: Depicting the ‘Self’ in Ethnographic Writing (Italy) Cris Shore

2 Location and Relocation: Home, ‘the Field’ and Anthropological Ethics (Sylhet, Bangladesh) Katy Gardner

3 On Ethnographic Experience: Formative and Informative (Nias, Indonesia) Andrew Beatty

4 Learning to be Friends: Participant Observation amongst English Schoolchildren (the Midlands, England) Allison James

5 The End in the Beginning: New Year at Rizong (the Himalayas) Anna Grimshaw

6 A Diminishment: a Death in the Field (Kerinci, Indonesia) C. W. Watson

Index

121

141

164

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Andrew Beattyis attached to Wolfson College, Oxford. He has conducted extensive fieldwork in two different regions in Indonesia and is the author ofSociety and Exchange in Nias(1992) andVarieties of Javanese Religion: An Anthropological Account(in press).

Katy Gardnerlectures in the School of African and Asian Studies at the University of Sussex. She is the author ofSongs from the River’s Edge(1991), a set of autobiographical short stories based on her fieldwork experience in Sylhet, Bangladesh, and a monograph entitled Global Migrants: local lives, travel and transformation in rural Bangladesh (1995). She is also the co-author (with David Lewis) ofAnthropology, Development and the Post-modern Challenge(Pluto Press, 1996). She is currently carrying out research on Bangladesh Sylheti migrants in Britain.

Anna Grimshawis a Lecturer in Visual Anthropology at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, University of Manchester. The fieldwork for her PhD thesis was carried out in northern India. She is the author ofServants of the Buddha(1992), an account of her experience living with a community of nuns in the Himalayas.

Allison Jamesteaches in the Department of Social Anthropology in the University of Hull. She has done extensive anthropological research in Britain. She is the author ofChildhood Identities(1993), and (with C. Jenks and A. Prout)Theorizing Childhood(1990). She is currently engaged in a study of the social organisation of children’s time.

Cris Shoreis a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Goldsmith’s College, University of London. He has worked extensively in Europe, and his research for his doctorate was carried out in Perugia. vi

Notes on Contributorsvii He is the author ofItalian Communism: the Escape from Leninism. An Anthropological Approach(1990), and (with Sue Wright) has edited Anthropology of Policy: Critical Perspectives on Government and Power (1997). He is currently writing a book on the anthropology of the European Union based on fieldwork among EU civil servants in Brussels.

C. W. (Bill) Watsonteaches in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Kent at Canterbury. He has been doing fieldwork in Indonesia for a number of years. He has edited (with Roy F. Ellen) Understanding Witchcraft and Sorcery in Southeast Asia(1994) and is the author ofKinship, Property and Inheritance in Kerinci, Central Sumatra (1994).

INTRODUCTION: THE QUALITY OF BEING THERE C. W. Watson

If, very broadly speaking, we think of anthropology as the discipline of explaining the behaviour and thoughts of people bounded within a culture in terms that are intelligible to people outside that culture, then fieldwork is that part of the process which takes place when the anthropologist is in the field dwelling among the people she hopes to describe. This is not to say that the anthropologist only begins to acquire knowledge once she is in the field; we are all aware how significant the pre-fieldwork period is for establishing concepts, understandings and notions of the people and culture we shall be encountering. Even when, as often happens, experience in the field leads us to react against our own earlier views, the tenacity of our preconceived ideas through the very process of reaction contributes substantially to how we formulate our knowledge of the time. Nor, on the other hand, is the emphasis here on fieldwork meant to suggest that the period of post-fieldwork, when one has left the field and is engaged in constructing the ethnography, is any less significant in the process of coming to an understanding. Again, as we generally acknowledge, reflection at a temporal and spatial distance from our experience within a different cognitive and experiential context inevitably brings about further reformulations and recastings of our thoughts and ideas and the best way of expressing them. There are yet further stages of anthropologi-cal creativity, perhaps not so commonly recognised, even after the ethnography has been secured in a text. Anthropologists – with increasing frequency these days as a consequence of ever-improving communications – often return to the field, pick up the threads and find themselves weaving a very differently patterned cloth from that which they wove so confidently during their previous encounter (for 1

2Being There example, Caplan 1992). A variation of this return to the field occurs when anthropologists revisit their own writings and find themselves unhappy with a description, irritated at the lacunae and generally dis-satisfied with the inadequacies of their presentation. Before, during, after and second-thoughts – all these, then, are different stages that the anthropologist passes through in the never-to-be-completed task of full understanding and perfect translation. It may therefore seem deceptive or deliberately misleading to mark off the period in the field as being worthy of special consideration when giving an account of the way anthropological knowledge is created. But while taking this point, and acknowledging that the period in the field is simply part of the ongoing temporal experience of coming to an understanding of other people, most anthropologists would, I think, recognise that although in terms of intentionality and intellec-tual endeavour there is no clear break in the temporal flux, the sheer physical, emotional and psychological experience of being in the field gives that time a unique quality, one which indelibly impresses itself on the personality and self-understanding of an anthropologist: things are never quite the same again. This, then, might be one justification for giving fieldwork such prominence in any description of anthropology: it is a period of par-ticularly heightened intensity. More conventionally, however, the justification would be not in drawing attention to the personal sig-nificance of fieldwork for the anthropologist – though there is still a powerful lobby within the profession that argues, very much like psycho-analysts for psychoanalysis, that one cannot be an anthropologist without having undergone thatrite de passagewhich is constituted by 1 fieldwork – but in arguing that the period in the field is one of intensive, close engagement of a limited duration, in which through the employment of various techniques and strategies, of which ‘immersion’ is the most well-known, the anthropologist is able to engage in different styles of learning and understanding, acquiring discursive and practical knowledge, being simultaneously ‘in’ but not ‘of’ the other culture. As Hastrup and Hervik (1994:1–12) point out in an intro-duction to a recent collection of essays devoted to this issue, the process of acquiring that social knowledge in the field is central to the anthropological enterprise, yet we know surprisingly little about it: how understanding of the other occurs is insufficiently documented and still not fully understood.

Introduction3 There are, however, some who would deny that there is any mystery in the process, who would argue that there are, for example, procedures which allow you to conduct the research according to objective quasi-scientific procedures, hence the spate of publications on fieldwork techniques, statistical procedures, computer packages, a point nicely made by Karp and Kendall when they talk about the ‘myth of fieldwork methods’ (1982:251). Of course, no one would deny the benefits of judiciously using some of these advances in data-gathering techniques; the implicit criticism of the amateurism of an earlier generation of anthropologists who superciliously appeared to scorn method while producing, it is generally admitted, the classic and still (only just?) readable monographs, is readily accepted. Indeed many of us remember only too well how little prepared we were when we went into the field and how for a large part we were simply expected to 2 pick things up as we went along. The situation has changed in the last decade or so, especially in these days of quality control, but there is still a general feeling of dissatisfaction and uneasiness among students doing postgraduate courses in research methods and about to go into 3 the field. This uneasiness frequently gives rise to a lack of confidence both with respect to the quality and quantity of the material that students record in the field and subsequently in relation to writing up the material for a thesis or for publication. The reminder that we need to be more systematic in how we impart practical skills to students is, then, well taken, but techniques should not be regarded as an end in themselves, and we need to be equally forcefully reminded of what we hope to achieve by their use. There is a genuine danger that obsessive concern with technique can lead to the suppression of that point of departure so crucial to any successful anthropological enterprise: that other people experience the world in a way different from ourselves, and we can never be sure that we understand what the experience is which is masked or reflected by the behaviour which we are so busily monitoring and recording with our data collecting equipment. To give an over-simple example: how do we know what a smile means? Even in our own intimate circles can we always be sure that we know if it is expressing pleasure, contempt, bafflement, disdain, incomprehen-sion, dismissal, anger, deviousness, distance, intimacy? And if we have 4 such a problem within our own familiar, brightly lit surroundings where we share a common set of habits, and when we have undergone years

4Being There of training in how to decode social cues, how much more perplexing is the situation we face in the dimmed lighting of an alien culture? There are two levels at which this problem of understanding is crucial in the field: one relates to the whole anthropological project of the moment; the other concerns the issue of simply coping with the quotidian reality of experience in the field. With regard to the first, there is now general agreement about the way in which fieldwork determines observation. It was again Evans-Pritchard (1976:241) who made the point that the best preparation for going into the field was a thorough grounding in the theory of social anthropology, since it was only through familiarity with such theory that one could properly direct one’s observations and theoretically contextualise the impressions one was observing in the field. Regarding the second, there has perhaps not been so much discussion as the matter has warranted. What is at issue is the way in which we unavoidably bring into our under-standing of what goes on around us those codes and conventions which we are familiar with from our own culture and to which what we observe seems most assimilable. In other words, we use ourselves and our own personal experience as primary research tools. We are, however, rarely conscious that we are playing this dual role of investigator and instrument, that is, we rarely step outside ourselves in order to reflect on how our own life-histories are con-tributing to the perspectives we are accumulating: the reflexivity, if it comes, usually comes later when, self-consciously practising our profession, we write our ethnographies.In the field the professional and the personal are fused and we unconsciously engage in the process of making sense by assimilating.This process usually begins with dissonance, as time and time again in those first few months in the field we encounter unsettling situations in which we discover that our perceptions and expectations do not in fact measure up to the events which occur.The process ends in consonance, when we discover that our predictions are more likely to come out correctly because we have by this time learned new codes.Even at the end of our fieldwork, however, we may never be entirely confident that interpretations are unassailably correct. This point about the difficulty of being sure of one’s interpretation has been made many times before, most notably by Clifford Geertz in his account of ethnography as ‘thick description’, that detailed explanation of the symbolic actions of speech and gesture which

Introduction5 allows us to understand the meaning which actors ascribe to their performance, enabling us, to take his famous example drawn from Ryle, to distinguish between a wink, a nervous tic of the eye and a parody 5 of a wink (Geertz 1973b). The point, however, needs to be stressed, not least because along with some well-taken criticisms of Geertz in relation to his practice, there is sometimes a failure to acknowledge the substantial contributions he has made to anthropology by his insistence on the discipline being largely one of interpretation. What we are doing in the field, then, to repeat, is making ourselves inward with a culture to the point where we feel as comfortable with it as we do with our own: where we have reached that degree of confidence that we can assure ourselves that even if we do not know the meaning of this one particular smile of the moment, we know at least the range it can encompass – we know how many types of ambiguity there are in the text. The enterprise is of course impossible. To keep to the textual analogy for the moment, F.R. Leavis constantly used to deny the possibility of a literary critic dealing adequately with a literature written in a language other than his own, the implication being that the subtleties and nuances of the language, as well as a text’s embedded-ness within a historical tradition of language to which one begins to attune oneself from the instant of recognising the words, phrases, sentences and songs with which one is addressed from birth onwards, are impossible to grasp unless one is born to it.Mutatis mutandis, anthropologists going to the field relatively late in life must realise their limitations and the impossibility of total comprehension while still striving to accomplish the ideal. Inevitably there will be areas of knowledge which lie beyond their range, which will at times inhibit the grasp of the full meaning. Having sounded this note of caution with respect to the limits of ethnographic competence, we must, however, give due credit to the fact that a substantial amount can be shared, understood and passed on. The point, though, is how? Are there techniques for facilitating the process of understanding of meaning as well as those for recording the behaviour which is an intentional expression of that meaning? Or is the process elusive, a question of individual temperament? One of the ways of explaining the procedure, indeed an explanation which is sometimes translated into specific advice, suggests that we regard the anthropologist as a role-player: child, stranger, friend, fictive-kinsperson