written 12/12/12
In her 1995 article, “The Primacy of
the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology,” Nancy
Scheper-Hughes describes a problematic encounter that she had with
squatters in the Chris Hani camp, a shanty town outside of Cape Town,
South Africa. Three young boys had been accused of stealing and were
badly beaten, kept in confinement for three days, and threatened with
“necklacing”—a process in which tires full of petrol are
wrapped around the necks of moral offenders and set on fire. When it
seemed that the smallest was in danger of dying from internal organ
damage and infection, Scheper-Hughes made the contentious decision to
take him to a nearby hospital, thereby breaking the terms of his
punishment. In writing about this decision, Scheper-Hughes situates
herself not as an anthropologist, but as a mother, and her decision
in the context of the boy as someone’s child. Scheper-Hughes uses
the dyadic model of a mother-child relationship to legitimate what
she frames as behavior stemming from a “precultural” ethics.
Thus, In “The Primacy of Ethics,” Scheper-Hughes is not merely an
anthropologist coolly observing the ethical arbitration of others—she
situates herself with her subjects as a participant in
calling for an
ethical anthropology.
The ire created by Scheper-Hughes’ behavior among the squatters at Chris Hani—as well as the myriad botched interventions of anthropologists across the world—problematizes the notion of the anthropologist as a potential abettor of lethal power asymmetries, at least in the field. Scheper-Hughes' experience is one of many that shows how, often through crises of confusion and miscommunication, ethnographic encounter can a crucial role in confusing anthropology's navigation of power and domination in a globalizing world. With this prompt, Webb Keane calls for an ethics of interpretation within anthropology in his 2003 article, “Self-Interpretation, Agency, and the Objects of Anthropology.” Keane argues that the tensions between ethnographer and subject—and their mutually destructive potentiality—arise from the inherently objectifying nature of linguistic processes, and suggests an interrogative praxis that “demands some portable objectifications” (2003:243). However Keane does not elaborate on the structure or implications of what such structures, or an anthropology capable of creating them, might look like. In response to Keane and Scheper-Hughes' lack of elaboration in their respective ethics, I will turn to an exploration of George Marcus’ “para-ethnography” and “para-sites” as a possible solution to the dilemma of the anthropologist as an ethical actor in the field.
The ire created by Scheper-Hughes’ behavior among the squatters at Chris Hani—as well as the myriad botched interventions of anthropologists across the world—problematizes the notion of the anthropologist as a potential abettor of lethal power asymmetries, at least in the field. Scheper-Hughes' experience is one of many that shows how, often through crises of confusion and miscommunication, ethnographic encounter can a crucial role in confusing anthropology's navigation of power and domination in a globalizing world. With this prompt, Webb Keane calls for an ethics of interpretation within anthropology in his 2003 article, “Self-Interpretation, Agency, and the Objects of Anthropology.” Keane argues that the tensions between ethnographer and subject—and their mutually destructive potentiality—arise from the inherently objectifying nature of linguistic processes, and suggests an interrogative praxis that “demands some portable objectifications” (2003:243). However Keane does not elaborate on the structure or implications of what such structures, or an anthropology capable of creating them, might look like. In response to Keane and Scheper-Hughes' lack of elaboration in their respective ethics, I will turn to an exploration of George Marcus’ “para-ethnography” and “para-sites” as a possible solution to the dilemma of the anthropologist as an ethical actor in the field.
Scheper-Hughes’ central concern in
"The Primacy of the Ethical" is the existence, following
Emmanuel Levinas, of a “precultural ethics.” Scheper-Hughes
quotes Levinas: ‘‘Morality does not belong to culture: [it]
enables one to judge it.’ Here I will tentatively and hesitantly
suggest that responsibility, accountability, answerability to ‘the
other’—the ethical as I would define it—is precultural to the
extent that our human existence as social beings presupposes the
existence of the other” (1995:419). Scheper-Hughes asserts that the
existence of “the other” is the first condition of a relational
ethics, and that “in presupposing all meaning, ethics makes culture
possible” (419). Here, Scheper-Hughes argues that, by virtue of
being human, we are all already ethically bound to one another. As
such, an anthropology that ignores this accountability in favor of
contriving a perspective in which “all humans are equal in the
sight of anthropology” (Scheper-Hughes 1995:416) inherently betrays
a mandatory collective obligation to be ethical.
The aspect of anthropology that
Scheper-Hughes views as being the greatest obstacle to the
fulfillment of a moral telos
(Faubion 2011) within anthropology is its grounding as an objective
science that presupposes a lived distance between anthropologist and
subject as such. Scheper-Hughes asks that instead, anthropologists
“make ourselves available…as comrades
(with all the demands and responsibilities that this word implies) to
the people who are the subjects of our writings, whose lives and
miseries provide us with a livelihood” (1995:420). In suggesting a
horizontal relationship between the anthropologist and her
“subject”—and, as such, the dismantling/desubjectification of
her subject qua
subject—Scheper-Hughes hits
on the central node examined by both Webb Keane's ethics of
interpretation and George Marcus' para-ethnography: the problem of
estrangement and objectification in the ethnographic encounter.
In “Self-Interpretation, Agency, and
the Objects of Anthropology” (2003), Keane primarily concerns
himself with negotiating the tension that has “always marked
ethnographic knowledge…[that] between epistemologies of
estrangement and of intimacy…[where] the latter has increasingly
claimed the epistemological and moral high ground in much cultural
anthropology, especially in America” (223). Keane aligns an
anthropology of estrangement with classical anthropology;1
by proxy, “the current emphasis on intimacy and engagement, and the
suspicion of objectification, are associated with post-colonial
critique, practice theory, deconstruction, power/knowledge, and
identity politics” (Keane 2003:223). In Keane’s genealogy,
anthropology’s attitude towards “objectification” is ultimately
what serves as the hinge between the two epistemologies. Principally,
Keane situates the disagreement between intimate and classical
anthropology as being around “the assumption that the separation of
subject from object can be understood only in negative terms, that to
say that a field of knowledge ‘depersonalizes’ is ipso
facto to discredit it”
(2003:222). Thus, Keane’s juxtaposition of “estrangement” and
“intimacy” mirrors the disjuncture that Scheper-Hughes posits as
existing between classical anthropology and her proposed “barefoot”
(Scheper-Hughes 1995:420) anthropology that privileges intimacy,
empathy, and a moralized accountability as field methods.
Both Keane and Scheper-Hughes’ focus
on legitimacy
in anthropological ventures is incredibly important, as epistemic
certainty about ‘proper’ field methods and broader field ethics
is what drives both scholars to make prescriptive claims about
anthropology as a discipline.2 Even more specifically, concerns about
the relationship between “objectification” and legitimacy is what
sets the stakes in both Scheper-Hughes’ and Keane’s delineation
of a more ethically oriented anthropology. Both recognize that,
following Foucault, truth games and relations of power in knowledge
production are ultimately what set the terms for the exercise of
biopower,
the categorical neglect or augmentation of certain forms of life by
dominant institutions (Foucault 1997:295). Fundamentally, it is
anthropology’s relation to exercises of biopower—and the role
that anthropologists could play in mediating the biopower manipulated
by larger and more aggressive entities, such as states—that seems
to be at stake for both Scheper-Hughes and Keane. Fundamentally,
Scheper-Hughes is concerned that anthropology functions primarily to
reify already existing power asymmetries and—when life is at
stake—she finds this morally reprehensible.
By proxy, Keane’s project is
genealogical rather than (directly) polemical. Keane therefore takes
issue with both “estranged” and “intimate” anthropologies,
and seeks especially to problematize the idea of the latter due to
its recent emergence in the field. In critiquing “intimate”
anthropology, Keane takes particular umbrage with the fact that Lila
Abu-Lughod’s “specific example of what a humanistic ethnography
of the particular3
would consist of requires both author and reader to accept as
transparent certain [social] categories… For this view of humanism
assumes there is nothing problematic about ordinary language, as if
we had full mastery of it and as if it did not bring all sorts of
things into our lives including both tacit values and modes of
self-deception and domination” (Keane 2003:236). Specifically,
Keane reads Abu-Lughod’s analytic focus on metalanguage—the
subject’s speech about herself and her world—as fundamentally
ignoring the communicative separation that exists not only between
anthropologists and their interlocutors, but also between the
intentions and actions of all agents. Keane reminds us that “to
privilege the agent’s own description of the action, especially as
it is linked to intentionality, commonly presupposes a sovereign
self-consciousness, a figure [of] increasingly spectral character”
(2003:233). It is via this appeal to the ontological uncertainty of
the subject as a knowing and intending actor4
that Keane arrives at the conclusion that undergirds his argument:
that “even such transparently natural and intuitively obvious
concepts [such as visibly policed ethical mores] are not immediately
present to the senses but depend on some mode of self-interpretation,
and thus some potential for self-objectification…” (2003:236).
Ultimately, Keane does not view studying metalanguages as a solution
to the self/other divide that “intimate” anthropologists seek to
avoid.
As part of his critique, Keane offers a
perspective that discredits an exclusive focus on metalanguage like
Lughod's. Keane's critique posits that objectification and
estrangement is inherent in all language, a position bolstered by
Derrida's concept of iteration.
Derrida argues that, as a code,
it is the function of language to create discrete and separable
categories that can be
inexactly reproduced
absent the distinguishing markers of context that created them.5
In Derrida’s analytic mode, even the subject’s speech about
herself
is alienating and othering due to the way language is structured.
Simply, Keane uses Derrida to argue that language use precludes
direct or “transparent” communication.6
Keane uses the concept of iteration
to particularly critique ethnographies that privilege subject’s
speech about herself over the analytic capacity of the
anthropologist. In this system of thought, an “intimate”
anthropology that places studying metalanguage at its core would not
actually bring an anthropologist “closer” to her subject, as
“even ‘we’ (whoever that problematic category might be) are not
fully transparent to ourselves” (Keane 2003:236). This “we”
includes both the anthropologist and her subject, for in Derrida’s
analytic both are equally opaque to themselves and one another.
However, while Keane specifically
attacks “intimate” anthropology’s reliance on metalinguistic
analysis and
the ethnographer’s experience,7
he does not completely dismiss “intimate” anthropologists’
fears of objectification. Keane writes,
But does not estrangement lead to
betrayal or reification, as Abu-Lughod claims? I want to suggest
that, real as these dangers are, they do not inhere in either
objectification or metalanguages per
se… Disruption and
objectification are already innate possibilities, since metalanguages
of action are not simply for ‘me,’ private and conceptual—they
are for ‘you.’ They are thus subject to objectification and
circulation as semiotic forms. As semiotic forms, they circulate
publicly and are realized materially. Metalanguages are therefore not
simply more or less arbitrary interpretations of a world. Rather,
they are causally
linked to material processes along several dimensions, and in
multiple directions (2003:239).
In this passage, Keane delineates the
space in which iteration in language may move subjects to action or
make an impact their behavior. This transition point is also where
the material stakes of speech and interpretation begin. As such,
iteration is also the place in which ethics enters the picture for
Keane.
To produce my own critical terms,
Keane’s focus is on interpretation—the
process of objectification that transforms action into sign; and
realization—the
process by which signs become embodied and produce material impact.
As I have noted above, it is in the domain of the ethical that
Keane’s analysis intersects with Scheper-Hughes, and where Keane’s
fixation on the terms of objectification rests. As both scholars
show, the interpretive cleft produced within processes of
communication has enormous consequences for ethical arbitration.
In an attempt to restore a sense of
mutuality to the interpretive process between ethnographer and
subject. Keane suggests a “third” analytic possibility. Keane's
ethics of interpretation rise in recognition of the stakes for bare
life—such as the lashing, confinement, and threat of “necklacing”
for the three young boys at Chris Hani—that processes of semiotic
interpretation and realization can create, not to mention the
incredible power
wielded by the anthropologist in determining the course of these
processes.
Contra to the options of either the
“intimate” anthropologist deciding “openly to claim the project
of demonstrating human self-determination,” or the “objectifying”
anthropologist to “seek some ultimate determination that will
settle matters with, perhaps, a wearied sigh of relief” (2003:242),
Keane asserts that we may
Keep in sight the problematic ground of
the ethnographic particular neither as a privileged foundation for
knowledge nor as a locus of self-determination. Rather, this ground
characterizes the space of encounter in which people seek or deny one
another’s recognition… On the one hand, our encounters should
take us away from them, and demand some portable objectifications. On
the other hand…our engagements should return us to them again.
This, at least, would acknowledge that the instigation for social
knowledge arises from within society (2003:243).
It is here that Keane concludes, but as
mentioned above, this premise is neither satisfactory nor conclusive
in that it does not address alternative material possibilities. What
on earth would such an anthropology look like?
For Nancy Scheper-Hughes, an ethical
anthropology would be a profoundly collaborative and revolutionary
effort—she writes, “We can disrupt expected
academic roles in the spirit
of the Brazilian ‘carnavalesque.’ We can make ourselves available
not just as friends or as ‘patrons’ in the old colonial
sense…[but] exchange gifts based on our labors, use book royalties
to support radical actions, and seek to avoid the deadening treadmill
of academic achievement and in this way subvert the process that puts
our work at the service of the scientific, academic factory”
(1995:420). While this is a heartening suggestion, it doesn’t
answer the question of what to do in situations like the one
Scheper-Hughes encountered in Chris Hani.
Scheper-Hughes’ model of the
anthropologist-as-comrade begins to negotiate a type of relationship
that could narrow the political
gap between the ethnographer
and her subject, but does not
concretely address the concern
grounding this essay.
Scheper-Hughes' work in Chris Hani shows that the power afforded to
the ethnographer by her position as an 'objective' moralist and
scientist
amplifies beyond reconciliation an estrangement already made manifest
by linguistic processes. Fundamentally,
relationships between subject and ethnographer in Scheper-Hughes’
“barefoot anthropology” still fall prey to the alienating
potential of language dynamics as Keane lays them out in
"Self-interpretation." Referencing Sarte, Scheper-Hughes
writes that “the generative prestructure of language presupposes…a
given relationship with another subject, one that exists prior to
words” (1995:419), but this presupposition does not account for the
fact that such a relationship does not necessarily imply the
existence of “another” that is at all legible or even
identifiable.
The inability of a “barefoot
anthropology” as Scheper-Hughes outlines
it to navigate and account for the miscommunication and
misrepresentation inherent in the ethnographer--interlocutor
relationship is a relevant concern for Scheper-Hughes because
identifying processes of objectification is at the center of
understanding her problematic interaction in Chris Hani. This becomes
especially evident in the way that Scheper-Hughes writes about the
experience.
Though many residents of Chris Hani were
furious with Scheper-Hughes for her decision to rescue the youngest
boy from his punishment for theft, Scheper-Hughes ends her
description of her time in the camp with the following testimony: “I
interfered not to be partial to three boys who wronged the community
but because I felt sorry for their mothers, who were ashamed of what
their sons had done but who were afraid to help them. [Here the older
women nodded their heads in agreement]… When I left Chris Hani, a
few older men scolded me for having exceeded my role as a visitor and
a guest, but the women invited me to a farewell beer party” (414).
In this passage, Scheper-Hughes directly implies that these women are
grateful to her for potentially saving the boy’s life, and seems to
position the Chris Hani mothers’ gratitude as being more
significant than the frustration voiced by male members of the town.
The way Scheper-Hughes frames the
significance of the Chris Hani mothers’ gratitude is the fulcrum of
my critique, for it is the place in which Scheper-Hughes creates the
mothers as her subjects: women whose (legitimate) emotions and
desires seem to rebel against the prescriptive norms of life in Chris
Hani. In the context of this portrait, Scheper-Hughes’ conviction
to save the smallest boy can be read in an additional context—that
of Scheper-Hughes’ emergent and prescriptive ethical convictions
about doing anthropology. She writes, “Anthropological writing can
be a site of resistance…a ‘negative worker.’ The negative
worker is a species of class traitor…who colludes with the
powerless to identify their needs against the interests of the
bourgeois institution: the university, the hospital, the factory”
(1995:420). Scheper-Hughes situates her decision to save the smallest
boy in the context of this disciplinary frame, and her doing so
immediately begs the following questions: if Scheper-Hughes indeed
viewed herself as functioning as a “negative worker,” what or
whom was she working against? The
patriarchy? The men in the town
that Scheper-Hughes contrasts with the mothers of Chris Hani
certainly did not constitute a bourgeois organization. Indeed, their
decision to punish the thieves was one made specifically outside
of hegemonic institutions;
Chris Hani was a camp comprised of people who had fled the heavy
police surveillance and brutality of apartheid.
Scheper-Hughes' situation
of Chris Hani's men and women as opposite
communities, one
of whom she can directly ally with,
is the critical moment in which her intervention fails. Though it
is arguable that Scheper-Hughes'
discussion with the residents of Chris Hani about alternative
punishments for the boys such as having them do community service
(1995:414) could have been generative, her intervention caused lethal
harm. Scheper-Hughes reports: “The intervention in the incident
with the three youths had provoked a crisis and the security
committee had quit the night before, and there had been bloodshed in
the camp… At the grave site…a close friend of the deceased
suddenly came alive…stamping his feet and chanting in English,
while staring fixedly in my direction, ‘Who’s the killer? Who’s
the killer? Who’s the killer?” (1995:413). This is the extent to
which Scheper-Hughes comments on the murder sparked by her behavior.
How are we to read this elision in the
context of Scheper-Hughes’ fixation on her conviction to save an
endangered life? This descriptive asymmetry is one of the many
moments in which Scheper-Hughes betrays the deeply problematic nature
of trusting anthropologists to be able to interpret their subjects
adequately and intimately enough to become necessarily productive
parts of those subjects’ lives. Scheper-Hughes writes of the
relationship between ethnographer and subject, “Just as many women
fail to recognize a human kinship with the newborn…so the
anthropologist can view her subjects as unspeakably other, belonging
to another time, another world altogether. If it is to be in the work
of an ethical project, anthropology requires a different set of
relationships. In minimalist terms this might be described as the
difference between the anthropologist as ‘spectator’ and the
anthropologist as ‘witness’” (1995:419). What is the difference
between witnessing and observing?
Scheper-Hughes likens it to active
listening, explaining, “Observation…is a passive act which
positions the anthropologist above and outside human events as a
‘neutral’ and ‘objective’ (i.e. uncommitted) seeing I/eye.
Witnessing…is in the active voice, and it positions the
anthropologist inside human events as a responsive, reflexive, and
morally committed being, one who will ‘take sides’ and make
judgments…“If ‘observation’ links anthropology to the natural
sciences, ‘witnessing’ links anthropology to moral philosophy”
(1995:419). By identifying reflexivity within the act of witnessing,
Scheper-Hughes aligns the anthropologist-as-witness with a
Foucaultian ethics that includes the possibility of “a subject
‘developing’ itself or ‘becoming more deeply’ itself or
acquiring or discarding one or another dimension of itself – but
without becoming someone or something else in the process” (Faubion
2011:46). As such, attempting to bridge the gap between self and
other thus become the askêsis
(ethical work) for
an ethnographer engaged in an “ethical” anthropology.
As Marvin Harris notes in his critique
of “The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant
Anthropology,” “Scheper-Hughes intends to ‘speak truth to
power.’ But I cannot see how she expects to do this and at the same
time accept the Foucaultian mantra that ‘the objectivity of science
and of medicine is always a phantom objectivity’” (Scheper-Hughes
1995:424). This criticism highlights the central problem with
Scheper-Hughes’ conception of “witnessing:” that once again,
the “anthropologist-as-witness” does not sufficiently address
either the social or linguistic conventions that so often prevent
accurate or appropriate interpretation and response on the part of
the “witness” or observer. If we are to accept Foucualt’s
assertion that all academic observation is inherently bound up in
games of power—which dovetails neatly with Derrida’s argument
that all “subjective,” intentioned individual communication is
inherently subject to iteration and manipulation by virtue of its
exposure to the countervailing forces of the world—the dichotomy
between scientific/anethical observation and empathetic/ethical
witnessing that Scheper-Hughes builds her argument upon falls apart.
By asking that anthropologists intervene
in the field, Scheper-Hughes is in no way outlining a disciplinary
convention that would ensure that such interventions would be
ethically equitable—if
such a thing is even possible. As Scheper-Hughes’ own case history
shows, even the most sincere belief that one’s own behavior is
ethical does not necessarily make it so. Without the instantiation of
concrete consensus processes, an individual decision that affects a
group cannot be understood as adequately representing the will, or
ethics, of that collectivity.
In the case of Scheper-Hughes and Chris
Hani, Scheper-Hughes’ “precultural” ethics seems to be that
life is good and worth saving whenever possible; in “The Primacy of
the Ethical" Scheper-Hughes equates the ethical with
“compassion, empathetic love, and care” (1995:418). The relevant
concern in the context of this assertion is not whether anyone in
Chris Hani would have disagreed with Scheper-Hughes, it is the
following: what other forms of life can the cessation or preservation
a particular life endanger or conserve? What about expressions of
love and care are not universal or "precultural?"
Scheper-Hughes implies that, by
attempting to stay out of cultural processes—working to conserve
culture inasmuch as it existed prior to the arrival of the
anthropologist—many anthropologists mortally neglect already
endangered life.8
Scheper-Hughes suggests that forging a personal relationship with
one’s subjects is the means to avoiding this kind of neglect.
However, it seems that Scheper-Hughes does not quite connect care and
mutual communication in her
model. By neither including the Chris Hani squatters in her decision
to save the youngest boy, nor her
characterization of the community's reaction, Scheper-Hughes both
injured community members and opened the potential for grave
misrepresentation in her work.
Thus, though practiced incompletely in
her own work, Scheper-Hughes’
analytic states that the
paramount responsibility of the anthropologist is
to attend to the flourishing of
her subjects.
Scheper-Hughes writes,
“Not to look, not to touch, not to record can be the hostile act,
an act of indifference and of turning away” (1995:418). The
fundamental questions
that this statement
raises are:
how can the anthropologist know when her intervention is actually
beneficial, and when it is not? How is it possible to determine
ethical behavior if ethics is essentially defined as the protection
and enhancement of life? Is it possible for anyone but the subject to
know what will assist her?
___________
In hopes of providing an
answer to the question of an alternative, potentially more ethical
ethnographic and field methodology, I turn to para-ethnography
as defined George Marcus in his 2009 article, “Multi-sited
Ethnography: Notes and Queries.”
I show how
Marcus’ model
addresses some of the gaps left by Scheper-Hughes’ and Keane’s
theories of interaction. Like
Scheper-Hughes, Marcus is invested in “displac[ing] the
anthropologist-other binary” (Marcus 2009:186), and similarly to
Keane, Marcus criticizes the trope of “being there” in
contemporary fieldwork (Marcus 2009:191). I
conduct this comparison with the following consideration: the primary
gap in Scheper-Hughes’ model is its inability to adequately
navigate the potential for unethical behavior created by the
communicative gap (following Derrida and Keane) that perennially
exists between ethnographer and subject. In brief, this comparison
focuses on Scheper-Hughes’ tacit assertion that it is possible for
the anthropologist to interpret her surroundings adequately enough to
interfere without negative consequence.
It’s arguable that Marcus’ analytic
has similar shortcomings, as it also relies on communication and
collaboration between speaker and interlocutor. However, the
difference between Marcus’ para-ethnography and Scheper-Hughes’
“barefoot anthropology” is that para-ethnography is decidedly
more rigorous in its description of the means by which anthropology
can become more transparent to those it documents. Implicit in both
Scheper-Hughes’ and Marcus’ analytics is the idea that a more
transparent anthropology would have more potential to be ethical.
Marcus describes para-ethnography as the
study of
“how culture operates within a continuously unfolding contemporary
and where everyone, directly or indirectly, is implicated in and
constituted by complex technical systems of knowledge” (2009:184).
In other words, Marcus’ analytic serves to reveal the extent to
which all persons, objects, and actors are implicated in cultural
processes in horizontally networked model that places more emphasis
on temporality than place. As Jalbert notes in “Para-sites and 3rd
Spaces” (n.d.), “This differs from previous ethnographic work
relying on analytical questions established by the ethnographer in
participatory observation or deep description that fail to implicate
impacts of the researcher…instead allow[ing] subjects to
co-construct articulations of studied knowledge.” As such, a
para-ethnographic perspective aims to overturn classical
understandings of agency and authority in processes of cultural
change by situating the researcher as a co-instigator of social
processes, rather than their observer.
Marcus’
para-ethnographic project distinctly concerns itself with temporality
instead of space, and this is the key way in which it differs from
Scheper-Hughes’
approach.
Marcus writes, “What is at stake in our conceptualization of the
paraethnographic are formations of culture that are not fully
contingent on convention, tradition, and ‘the past’, but rather
constitute future-oriented
cognitive practices that can generate novel configurations of meaning
and action
[emphasis mine]” (2009:184). It is here that Marcus’ project
dovetails both with Scheper-Hughes’ cry for an ethical, if not
interventionist anthropology, and Webb Keane’s appeal to the
development of an ethics of interpretation within ethnography.
However,
it seems that Marcus’ intervention is intended to occupy the realm
of the potential, rather than the present. Marcus writes,
“Multi-sited ethnography is also about mediations and
interventions. Michael Fisher (2007) thinks of this as the forging of
third spaces – reflexive domains with scenes of social action –
regimes of living, global assemblages – in which questions of
ethics are considered; the anthropological ethnographic intervention
is distinctive here. What seems basic is that once ethnography
becomes multi-sited and engaged intellectually with its subjects, its
arguments and articulations have constituencies within the field and
unpredictably beyond it” (2009:194). Marcus’ description of
para-ethnography’s merits reveals the central problem in
Scheper-Hughes method: she does not consult her subjects about her
depictions of them, but rather only about their feelings. She looks
only at past metalanguages without constructing a contemporary one
that includes her influence and voice.
In
conclusion, the problem with Scheper-Hughes is that while her
approach is concerned with ethics, it is not methodologically
reflexive—at least in the case of her interaction at Chris Hani,
Scheper-Hughes does not incorporate relational ethical praxis into
her field methods or her field writings despite the fact that both
are sites of ethical work and ethical consequence. Though
Scheper-Hughes is greatly concerned with her ability to make an
impact in the field as a politically engaged agent, she neglects to
acknowledge the processes of objectification that contribute to the
“ethical” decisions she ends up making both in the field and in
her ethnography. By
proxy, Marcus’ model manages to address the stakes of ethnographic
objectification while also opening a space for dialogue about these
processes that is inclusive to subjects. In so doing, Marcus also
opens up a space for better ethical consideration within
anthropology. While it is true that Marcus’ model is more oriented
towards post-facto ethical consideration, I argue that his focus on
directly engaging subjects’ feelings about their representation by
anthropology provides the basis for a kind of askêsis
that
is as yet unseen in contemporary anthropology. Marcus’ project is
still a study of metalanguage, but it is a metalanguage that is
permeable and—to satisfy Webb Keane—portable. Para-ethnography
allows the subject to come to the “other side” of the
anthropological process, and thereby enables her to serve as a
teacher to practitioners of a discipline that is still in its
formative stages of ethical development.
Bibliography
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Giorgio
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Derrida,
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1
George Marcus (2009) describes the kind of anthropology I’m
referring to as “Malinowskian.”
2
Foucualt asks, “After all, why truth? Why are we concerned with
truth, and more so than the care of the self? And why must the care
of the self occur only through the question of truth? …How did it
come to be that all of Western culture began to revolve around this
obligation of truth?” (Foucault 1997:295).
3
Abu-Lughod proposed that “anthropologists write ‘ethnographies
of the particular’ as instruments of tactical humanism,’
stressing specificity and internal complexity over generality and
simplicity” (Keane 2003:236).
4
I use Sewell’s invocation of contemporary anthropology’s
relation to the “intelligent and suffering human persons who
transform structures by their effectual actions” (Sewell 2010:206)
to inform this reading.
5
Following Derrida—all language is both predicated on arbitrary
sign assignations and unavoidably iterable. “A
written sign, in the current meaning of this word, is a mark that
subsists, one which does not exhaust itself in the moment of its
inscription and which can give rise to an iteration in the absence
and beyond the presence of the empirically determined subject who,
in a given context, has emitted or produced it” (Derrida 1988:9).
6
Derrida writes, “Given
the structure of iteration, the intention animating the utterance
will never be through and through present to itself and to its
content. [As
such,] the
iteration structuring [language] a priori introduces into it a
dehiscence and a cleft [brisure] which are essential... this
essential absence of intending the actuality of utterance, this
structural unconsciousness, if you like, prohibits any saturation of
the context” (1988:18).
7
“The very unity of the [analyst’s] object of study is
conditional on the situated character of human experience, which is
what motivates
the
interest in the object in the first place. This is a very peculiar
kind of knowledge and…encounters serious dilemmas that are both
epistemological (what kind of starting point can something as
problematic as ‘experience’ possibly offer?) and ethical (whose
‘country’ is it anyway?)” (Keane 2003:226).
8 This
includes “bare life” as Giorgio Agamben describes it: “human
life…included in the juridical order solely in the form of its
exclusion (that is, of its capacity to be killed)” (Agamben
1995).
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