Week 10/ Reflections on fieldwork and ethnographic writing

1. "Field": Where/how/why did ethnographers go? (Passaro 1997)

1.1. A site or a method?

1.2. Mainstream anthropology: Field is a pre-theoretical parameter to define anthropology.

1.3. Field and risk
1.3.1. The physical danger in a field is a part of a rite-of-passage aspect of fieldwork.
1.3.2. The physical and social well-being of the ethnographer have to be jeopardized.

1.4. The "field" as a sort of colonial thinking in anthropology
1.4.1. Taking anthropology out of "the field" is easy.
1.4.2. Taking "the field" (an object of study or analysis) out of anthropology is difficult.

1.5. Where is the "appropriate field" for anthropology?
1.5.1. Why the Mediterranean? Why not Paris or New York?
1.5.2. "Imperialist nostalgia": Field as a "culture areas" with preexisting social laws

1.6. "You can't take the subway to "The Field!""
1.6.1. The appropriate-ness of a field
1.6.2. Field as a laboratory: an isloated object
1.6.3. City is a chaotic, uncontrolled and unmanageable space.

1.7. Keeping distance from the field!
1.7.1. The social distance
1.7.2. The degree of "Otherness"
1.7.3. The condition of objectivity
1.7.4. Many complex series of encounters and negotiation of social differences

1.8. Anthropology of liberation: beyond "village" epistemologies
1.8.1. The field is not specified or given clearly before fieldwork
1.8.2. "The field" is subject to definition and redefinition
1.8.2. The example of homeless people in New York
1.8.3. Understanding the agency and subjectivity of the people in a highly fragmented world
1.8.4. Continuous challenges to our own objectifying practices

2. "Work": What did ethnographers do? (Rabinow 1984[1977])

2.1. Ethnographers do not study or discover culture "out there".

2.2. Preferable informants: Insider's Outsider
2.2.1. Interpreting the representations of the informants
2.2.2. The ability to objectify and represent one's own way of life depends on one's "other-ness" to one's social world.

2.3. Training informants
2.3.1. Informants learn how to objectify and self-reflect upon their life world from ethnographers.
2.3.2. Ethnographic knowledge is impossible without the presence of ethnographers
2.3.3. Example: The Man diaspora (James Watson 2004)
2.3.4. Anthropological analysis must incorporate two facts
-Ethnographers are historically situated through the questions they ask and the manner in which they understand and experience the field
-Ethnographers are understanding and analyzing the informants' representation.
2.3.5. Example: Was Malik poor? (Rabinow 1984[1977]: p. 117-120)
2.3.6. Studying mediations in the field.


2.4. From ethnographic authority to ethnographic responsibilities
2.4.1. Messy experience-->ethnographic orders
2.4.2. Dialogue and observation-->fieldnotes-->writings
2.4.3. Ethnographic authority resides in his/ her "visible" power in fieldwork but invisibility in writing.
2.4.4. Reflexivity: Decentering and reconstructing the ethnographic self/selves (James Clifford)
2.4.5. Is there any mission of ethnography?
2.4.6. Critique of cultural power (Marshall Sahlins)
2.4.7. Defamiliarization and resemblances (Renato Rosaldo)
2.4.8. The example of Margery Wolf:
-Decentering the ethnographic self by reconstructing four selves in writings (novel, fieldnotes, journal paper and critic)
-Double defamiliarization: Mrs Tan as an outsider of the modern world and her village
-Resemblances: Her discussion on gender politics and feminism

References:
Rosaldo, Renato. 1989. Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon Press.
Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP.

Culture as practice, part II

1. A story about Captain Cook and Hawaiian natives
1.1. Who is Captain Cook?
1.2. He visited Haiwaii in 1778 and 1779.
1.3. Natives’ conceptual categories
Gods/ Human
Sea/ Island
Outside/ Inside
Chief/ people

1.4. From the native’s point of view
1.4.1. “Foreigners from the sea” = gods.
1.4.2. According to their religious belief, giving birth of a baby by a god brought benefits and sacred power to them.
1.4.3. The native women had sex with the sailors.

1.5. From the European’s points of view
1.5.1. Civilized/ uncivilized
1.5.2. Their conceptual scheme:
High/ low
Man/ women
Sex ≠ baby or benefit
Sex = services
Patron/ client

1.6. Exchange and consequence

1.6.1. Service<===>gift (silver and iron tools)

1.6.2. Exchange of symbols and objects

1.6.3. Gift exchange: a functional institution or symbolic-material exchange?

1.6.4.The death of Captain Cook (a controversial issue):
-In the first encounter, he, coming from the sea, was integrated into Haiwaiian people's symbolic structure.
-His return to Haiwaii was viewed as the return of the natives' Year-God Lono
-According to their Lono ritual, Lono was to be killed by their warrior god.

1.6.5. Further political changes
-Violating the tabu system
-Iron and siliver tools-->Challenging the authority of the chief.
-Polluting the god-like nature of foreigner

1.8. Some implications

1.8.1. Culture-as-constituted and culture-as-lived

1.8.2. The internal conflicts within the native society
-The natives used their own cultural codes to interpret the foreign culture and generated new practices and lived relations with others.

1.8.3. Their cultural codes were reconfigured in practices:
-The decline of chief authority
-The power of chiefdom was decentralized.
-De-sacrilization of western powers

1.8.4. Cultural domination or encounter?
-A popular theory of globalization (global capitalism): Native culture is invaded by global culture characteristic of the western culture and the material forces of capitalism.
-Culture is far less dominant and rigid than one usually expects.
-The colonial encounter might not be characterized by cultural domination; instead, it is a process of mutual reconfiguration of cultural codes.

1.9. Capitalism and culture
-The expansion of capitalism is not purely a material process.
-The commodities, particularly at the early stage of capitalism were highly embodied with cultural values.

2. Symbolic-material processes of Capitalism (the early 19th century)

2.1. The failure of free trade but the prosperity of private trade in the southeast

2.1.1. The imperial authority was not interested in trading with equal partner (The Chinese concept of imperial order)

2.1.2. Example: Yuan Ming Yuan: an imperial garden as a collection of baroque architecture, sculpture and western rare artifacts (photo 1/ photo 2)
Yuan Ming Yuan in wikipedia (Chinese/ English)

2.1.3. Example: Zheng He's journey to Southeast Asia, South Asia, Arabia and Africa (1405)

2.1.3. The local interest in trading with American merchants: Sandalwood (for Buddhist ritual, noble architecture and fine object of art)

2.2. Ameican merchants: Chinese goods<---->sandalwood

2.2.1. A great demand of Chinese or oriental goods
-The development of modern western civilization has depended on the consumption of an enormous amount of soft-drug culture.
-The spread of the ritual and habit of drinking tea
-Tea became popular beverage for the general public rather than the elite class before the 19th century

2.2.2. Shortage in silver

2.2.3. Sandalwood is a substitute

2.3. Hawaiian natives: Goods from the West (from the gods)

2.3.1. "Cultural and sacred goods" in the eyes of natives

2.3.2. The chiefs competed with each other for more goods from the westerners

2.3.3. They mobilized natives to provide as much sandalwood as possible for American merchants.

2.4. What is trade?
-It is not possible without socio-cultural formation of demand
-The socio-cultural formation is related to people's changing cosmologies.

3. Sahlins' contribution to our understanding of culture

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3.1. Culture is not confined to a social entity (a community, a group, a country, …)
3.2. Symbolic and material are not separated from each other.
3.3. Anthropology is a "critique" of cultural power (revelation of its historical formation or the possible conditions of existence).
3.4. Anthropology may be a way of opening up possibilities for practices.

Next week… …
Rabinow, Paul. 1977. “Respectable information.” Reflections on fieldwork in Morocco. Berkeley: University of California Press, 101-124.
Passaro, J. 1997. "You can’t take the subway to the field!”:‘Village’epistemologies in the global village"

Culture as practice, part I

1. The assumption of structuralist anthropology and symbolic(interpretative) anthropology

1.1. Culture as a cognitive structure or a textual structure

1.2. But... ... anthropologists come across various events in the field and reduce them to a relatively stable structure.

1.3. But how do anthropologists take account of event?

1.4. Example: Dressing code in Hong Kong Legco

1.4.1. Dressing code in the Legco as a (post-)colonial form of symbolic power

Causal wear: citizen
Legislator: elite

1.4.2. –How to make sense of “long hair”’s resistance?

1.5. Human agency?
-Culture makes human
-But could human makes cultures?

2. Huamn agency: Rational choice or cultural determination?

2.1. Cultural determination: anthropologists develop various concepts of "culture" to explain individual behaviour

Example: Cultural pattern and collective personality

2.2. Rational choice model
-Human are goal-oriented
-Humans have sets of hierarchically ordered preferences, or utilities.
-In choosing lines of behavior, humans make rational calculations with respect to:

• the utility of alternative lines of conduct with reference to the preference hierarchy

• the costs of each alternative in terms of utilities foregone

• the best way to maximize utility.

-Emergent social phenomena -- social structures, collective decisions, and collective behavior -- are ultimately the result of rational choices made by utility-maximizing individuals.

-Emergent social phenomena that arise from rational choices constitute a set of parameters for subsequent rational choices of individuals in the sense that they determine:

• the distribution of resources among individuals

• the distribution of opportunities for various lines of behavior

• the distribution and nature of norms and obligations in a situation.

2.3. Marvin Harris (Cultural Materialism): Cannibalism and Diet of Aztecs
-Why did Aztecs practice cannibalism?
-Their diet was meat-poor
-Cannibalism was a rational choice: distribution of animal protein to a dense population
-Cannibalism was one of the parameters encouraging people to continue cannibalism

3. Marshall Sahlins: Responses to rational choice or utilitarian model
3.1. Instrumental rationality as a modern westernized invention

3.2. Interest: material interest and cultural disposition are closely related
Example: Dogs are not edible not because their protein is insignificant to us. They are seen as "friends" of human beings and eating dog meat had been banned by the colonial government long time ago (e.g. "Royal Society for the Prevention of Curelty to Animals").

3.3. Sense: symbolic schema in the everyday life
-Pig and cow belong to the category of "Meat": pork, beef, ... ...
-Dog or cat is classified as "pet"
-Sense is not a rigid framework imposed on the world outside.
-Sense is both perceptive and structural

3.4. Agency: interest-sense
-Human beings re-arrange their conceptual categories to adapt to new environment.
-Rationality: Practical reason

4. Example: A story about an ethnographer

4.1. An ethnographer studied a group of migrant workers from inland provinces

4.2. What did an ethnographer do? Why did he take photos of their children? To make friend? To make money?

4.3. A rumour: He engaged in trafficking children

Familiar people	non-commercial
Stranger	commercial
Photo	Commercial
Stranger-photo	Non-commercial?

5. Example: Lord Macartney and Qianlong (1793)

5.1. Lord Macartney was a diplomatic envoy of George III requesting free trade with China.
5.2. He was asked by Qianlong to kowtow (present tributes to the Celestial Emperor).
5.3. Free trade is incomprehensible in the cosmology of the Qing Dynasty.
5.4. Macartney vs. Qianlong
Macartney:
Sovereignty-->Sovereignty (trade)
Qianlong:
Celestial Empire-->Feudatory (tribute)

6. Culture, practice and event:
6.1. Culture-as-constituted: symbolic structure (prescriptive structure)
6.2. Culture-as-lived: how people live in the material-symbolic world (performative structure)
6.3. Practice is situated in the dynamic relationship between culture-as-constituted and culture-as-lived.
6.4. Power relationship resides in practices, i.e. the dynamic relationship between “culture-as-constituted” and “culture-as-lived”.
6.5. Event or experience is not accidental but a structuring process at a particular moment.

Sahlins, Marhsall. 2000(1982). "Individual Experience and Cultural Order." Culture in Practice: Selected Essays. New York: Zone Books.

Culture as symbol, Part II

1. Anthropology in the post-colonial age

1.1. Modern anthropology is a reflection upon social Darwinism.

1.2. Social Darwinism is a school of thought emerging out of colonialism

1.3. Modern anthropology (e.g. Malinowski, Mead and Levi-Strauss) attempts to provide an alternative way of seeing “others” to the prejudices of social Darwinism.

1.4. Anthropologists adjust their mission and problematic to respond to the new age of post-colonialism.
1.4.1. Modernization and colonization do not create a unified modern world.
1.4.2. Anthropology in a multi-cultural setting

Kahn, Joel. 1995. “A World System of Culture?” Culture, Multiculture, Postculture. London: Sage.

2. Anthropology in a multi-cultural setting

2.1. Cities: a meeting place for a wide range of ethnic groups.

2.2. Indigenous people defend their rights and identities against the corporate and the state power.

2.3. Critique of functionalism
- Not every pattern of behavior or relation has functions necessary to the survival of individual and the society.
Example: Festival and other rituals in the modern society

2.4. Critique of structuralism and rationalism
-Deep structure is only a kind of academic fiction without material and historical complexity (Clifford Geertz).

2.5. Example I: Japanese food
-How do we explain why Japanese people hadn’t eaten salmon fish as sashimi until after the Second World War?
-How did salmon fish come into Japanese diet?
-What is the (symbolic) association between salmon fish and Japanese traditional diet?

3. Interpretive anthropology: Clifford Geertz (1923-)
“What the ethnographer is in fact faced with … … is a multiplicity or complex conceptual structures… …”

3.1. Example: Twitch, wink, parody and rehearsal?
The meaning of a facial expression or gesture is determined by our interpretations of multilayers of signification.

3.2. Seeing culture as a text

“Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of “construct a reading of”) a manuscript – foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behaviour.”

4. Culture and interpretation
4.1. Culture is public.
4.2. Public is subject to multiple interpretations
4.3. Interpretation is a symbolic process.

5. Thick description
5.1. We begin with our own interpretations of:
5.2. What our informants are up to,
5.3. What they think they are up to.
5.4. And then we systematize those.

Example I: Balinese birth-order names and “dramatism”

Birth-order names.
Individual: an assigned role in hierarchy.
Balinese society and designation are highly ritualized.
The world is an eternal cycle, an endless four-stage replication of an imperishable form.

Example II: When Coke becomes a national beverage, … …

Coke=Home
Home=Nation
Coke=National culture

pic 1 and pic 2

"I fight as much to help keep the custom of drinking Cokes as I am to help preserve the millions of other benefits our country blesses its citizens with."
A letter written by a US soldier to his family.

Mintz, Sidney W. 1996. "Food and its relation to power." Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture and the Past. Boston: Beacon Press.

6. What is anthropology (according to Geertz)?

6.1. Ethnography is a study in a place rather than of a place.

6.2. Ethnography is a series of interpretation of social discourse.

6.3. “Cultural analysis is (or should be) guessing at meanings, assessing the guesses, and drawing explanatory conclusions from the better guesses, not discovering the Continent of Meaning and mapping out its bodiless landscape.”

7. The object of analysis: Social discourse

7.1. Regularities within communication.

7.2. They could be identified in the everyday life.


8. Ethnography is … …

8.1. Ethnography is a fiction of material complexity.

8.2. Ethnography is never complete and its authority is always contestable.

8.3. The aim of anthropology: Enlargement of the universe of human discourse

8.4. Cultural analysis<---->natural science


Appendix: Interpretive anthropology vs. structuralist anthropology

Structuralist anthropology
-“Bodiless landscape”

Symbolic or interpretive anthropology
-Social discourses Symbolic regularities in -communication

Enlargement of the universe of human discourse

Culture as Symbol, part I

1. Example I: Witchcraft “reloaded”
1.1. Women with “more freedom” and “economic income” are accused of witchcraft
1.2. Are the terms “more freedom” and “wealthier” used by anthropologist or the natives?
1.3. Symbolic elements are involved: how are “women” with more money and freedom interpreted.

Family : Subsistence : Normal : Good : Secular : Male

Non-Family : Non-subsistence : Abnormal : Evil : Mythical : Female

2. Example II: Pastoralism vs. Hunting
2.1. Many Massai in Kenya make a living by raising cattle (drinking and selling milk).
2.2. The Massai people who are blacksmith or hunters are looked down upon.
2.3. Pastorialism vs. hunting

	Pastoralism	Hunting
Animal life	protecting	Killing
Consumption	milk	Meat
Purity	clean	Bloody

	Pastoralism	Hunting
Animal life	dignified	Degrading
Consumption	clean	Dirty
Purity	conserving	Polluting

2.4. A binary opposition hidden in people’s mind-set and language.
2.5. Culture is a deep structure (symbolic).

3. Claude Levi-Strauss: structuralist anthropology

3.1. Anti-social Darwinism:
-Civilized people and savages share a similar structure of mind (The Savage Mind)

3.2. Critique of functionalism
3.2.1. Etic or emic?
3.2.2. How come do we or they have these institutions and functions?

3.3. A rationalist approach
3.3.1. Knowledge does not come out of the empirical world directly.
3.3.2. Cognition and thought are the basis of society.
3.3.3. Living cultures are not “out there” but in thinking and language.
3.3.4. The only commonality between “we” and “they” is “reason”.
3.3.5. According to Levi-Strauss, reason is symbolic and poetic.
3.3.6. Human beings impose intellectual order onto their living environment.

3.4. Semiotics
3.4.1. Signified and Signifier
3.4.2. The meaning of sign is defined not by a correspondent object (identity), but by its differences from others.
3.4.3. Language (structure) and speech (element)
3.4.4. We are investigating language (structure) rather than speech.

3.5. The elementary structures of kinship system

3.5.1. What is kinship?
Example: Why do Chinese people address their mother's brother and their father's brother differently?
("Alliance": Mother's brother's sons and daughters are potential marriage partners)
("Taboo": Father's brother's sons and daughters are not marriage partners)

3.5.2. The basic structures of kinship
-Elementary, intermediate and complex kinship systems.
-The elementary structure of kinship is cross-cousin marriage
-There are three types of elementary kinship:
*Bilateral cross-cousin marriage
*Matrilateral cross-cousin marriage
*Patrilateral cross-cousin marriage

3.5.3. Two structural features of Kinship system:
-Kinship is based on the alliance between two families.
-The alliance is built upon exchange of women.

3.5. Culture as an unconscious symbolic structure: myth

3.5.1. Example I: Binary opposition of myth
-A myth about human beings acquired honey while they were still animal
-A myth extols hunting and gathering

Nature	Culture
Honey	Cooked food
Promiscuity	Cross-cousin marriage

3.5.2. Example II: Metonym（轉喻） and Metaphor（隱喻）

Magic with “hair”

Hair --------------->Body

(metonymic)

Destroying hair==============>Hurting body

(metaphoric)

3.5.3. Myth as lived relations

4. Mary Douglas: Purity and Danger

4.1. Culture as rationality: "A central part of my argument was that rational behaviour involves classification, and that the activity of classifying is a human universal."

4.2. One of the most basic classification is taboo on purity/impurity

4.3. No single item is dirty apart from a particular system of classification in which it does not fit.

4.4. Our concept of dirt is not simply defined by our knowledge in hygiene; instead, it emerges "out" of order/system of sacredness or purity

4.5. Example: Douglas' analysis of Hebrew's taboo on pig
-Pig is found abominable by Hebrew.
-Pastorship:
God's convenant with His people<==>The people's relation to their flocks and herds
-The dietary law: Cows, sheep and goats are sacrificed on the altar and killed in kitchen.
-The system of sacredness: God-people-herds and flocks (domesticated ruminates)
-Pigs, as non-ruminates, are abominable animal and food, out of the order

5. Critique of structuralism
5.1. Solipsism
Culture is reduced to an individual's cognitive mind

5.2. Culture is rational structure? How about emotion?

5.3. A-historical

6. Reflection on race

6.1. Is race "natural and separate divisions" based on "physical differences"?

6.2. Evidence from the analysis of genetics

6.3. "Physical variations in the human species have no meaning except the social ones that humans put on them."

6.4. The invention of "race" in the 18th century: a colonial classification

6.5. This colonial classification becomes a worldview

Further readings:
"The Structural Study of Myth" and other structuralist ideas