Back when I was re-re-revising the second last nearly but not quite final revision of chapters …
AAS paper 2013: Affect, emotion and Yolŋu exchange relations
- paper presented at the Australian Anthropological Society conference in Canberra (2013). Downloadable dhuwala.
What do emotion terms matter to the study of Aboriginal sociality and exchange? The study of affect/emotion is often considered a speciality topic or focus in anthropology. However, in this paper I argue that terms and concepts associated with affect/emotion are critical to a close appreciation of the way people consider value in material exchange. This paper centres around the following case study: yapa Batjikali’s entrepreneurial girri’ (personal effects, material goods, ‘stuff’) business:
Yapa (Z) Batjikali had been running (what was recognised to be) a successful girri’ business since before my arrival in camp. It was organised in such a way that she would purchase imported Indonesian clothing, bed-sheets, material, and other small-goods from Lynea [Lyn], a East Timorese small business owner who had a business in the nearby mining township. Batijikali had adopted Lyn (into the kinship system) as yapa (sister).
Every four months or so Batjikali would purchase a number of large boxes full of goods from Lyn, often on ‘tick,’ or in exchange for Batjikali giving Lyn her bankcard to hold for an indefinite period of time with the pin number written on the back. Batjikali then sold the girri’ at the nearby island community of Galuma, usually on the designated market day. She didn’t go on a regular basis for this purpose; more just when opportunity allowed. Given the nature of the universal or classificatory kinship system, Batjikali’s customers were almost exclusively close or extended kin.
On this particular day Batjikali and I were folding and packing the last of the girri’ she had in stock. She was flying over to Galuma Island for a meeting, which was to coincide with market day. Out of curiosity I asked how much she sold the items we were folding for. She was uncharacteristically circumspect. After another while I asked how much Lyn charged her for the items. She gave me a whole amount per box, which would have contained approximately sixty items. We kept packing. A few moments later, clearly having thought my question through, she repeated how much she paid per box, before pausing to explain:
“Yapa Lyn asks a big price. I make it easy for people. Yaka (not) making it hard, I’m a kind-heart woman, I allow my things, I only ask a little bit of money for that girri.’
It was clear that yapa Batjikali was selling the girri’ at less than cost price – and that she was more than aware that she was doing so. And yet, she was running what she and others considered to be a ‘successful’ girri’ business.
I should note that Batjikali was employed as the manager of a dress-selling business at the Methodist Mission on Galuma Island during Mission Time in the 1970s. Her responsibilities included ordering stock and recording and monitoring daily transactions. I also know from personal experience that her numeracy and mental arithmetic are far better than my own.
What is going on in this case? What can we say is the motivation behind Batjikali’s business? What value is being sought after or produced? And what might careful attention to terms and concepts associated with affect and emotion elucidate or bring to light about this case? To answer these questions I’ll first introduce a key body of terms and concepts in Yolŋu-matha, before addressing the different dimensions of this case in turn.
Local template of morality/value (Blakeman 2013)
This template represents part of emotion lexicon in Yolŋu-matha. Some of these terms are explicitly emotion-terms while others variously denote culturally recognised types or states of interpersonal relations. Together – as a body of terms and concepts – they are those that people draw on most frequently in everyday life as they interpret, evaluate, give commentary on, and generally talk about social action, interaction, and social relations – and this includes material relations. As a body of terms they were selected and compiled on this basis – because they are the most common evaluative terms that people use.
The horizontal dimension – as you can see – separates evaluatively positive and negative terms. On the left are those associated with negative types or kinds of relations, that make people feel bad OR disrupt the state of the relations between people. On the right are positive kinds of relations that make people feel good, and create a heightened sense of sociality. These are associated with hyper-activity and effervescence, usually in the context of ceremony, and are thus circumscribed or limited in time and space (i.e. you wouldn’t want to be in a state of hyperactivity forever). The midpoint, in the centre, are terms and concepts associated with balance and equilibrium. This is when everything is just normal – when there’s a sense of normalcy or contentment, when ‘everyone’s just enjoying themselves’ as my Yolŋu sister would say, that’s ŋayaŋu waŋgany.
As may or may not be clear, this body of concepts reflects a cultural conception of Self, and associated, evaluative ideas about the normal, proper relationship between the Self and others – what is normal, what is good, and what is bad. In the Yolŋu case, the cultural Self – as a moral and political actor – is considered to be fundamentally inter-dependent. To be Yolŋu is to be gurrutu and to be gurrutu is to know one’s Self in relation to significant Others. These are reciprocal or dyadic relations.
This basic, shared understanding about the inter-dependent nature of the Self is culturally elaborated at various social levels.
On a socio-centric level, for example, the relationship between groups is referred to as raki’ (strings [of relatedness]). The normative ideal state of the relationship between groups is when raki’ are manapan-mirri (joined, connected, linked [together to each other]), and the groups thus waŋgany-ŋura ([at] one). Proper practice and conduct is to malthun ŋhanŋu raki’ (follow [up] the string), while upset, disequilibrium, or conflict is said to threaten to gulk’thun ŋhanŋu raki’ (cut or sever the string).
On an interpersonal level this is paralleled by ŋayaŋu, the most basic concept of affect/emotion. I generally translate as ‘state or sense of feeling’ but while ŋayaŋu is experienced or felt by individuals (associated with the gumurr [‘chest’]), it is always and necessarily relational. That is, ŋayaŋu refers to the state or sense of feeling among and between people in any given situation or event.[1] The normative ideal state of the relationship between people is when they are ŋayaŋu waŋgany. Proper behaviour and moral conduct is said to be ŋayaŋu-yu (through ŋayaŋu), while moral transgressions register as ŋayaŋu wutthuna-mirri rom (law or manner of doing things that affronts or assaults the state of feeling).
Point being, it is not the individual and their autonomy that is foregrounded, in tension with a contrasting value of relatedness in the Yolŋu case, but rather, the state of the relationship between people that is emphasised and foregrounded as of primary social and moral concern.
Equilibrium in gurrutu relations
This is reflected more broadly, I suggest, in the template above. Balance and equilibrium are, in this local model sociality, cast between ‘more or less open’ and ‘more or less closed [off]’ types or states of social relations. The normative ideal ŋayaŋu waŋgany and associated concepts describe normal, positive and otherwise desirable relations as those in which people are ‘open,’ level, interdependent and at one. Negative, disruptive and otherwise undesirable relations are those in which people are more or less distant, ‘closed [off]’, ‘hard [chested]’, differentiated, distinct, and alone.
To return to the case study, visa a this scheme, when yapa Batjikali gave her explanation of the pricing or workings of the girri’ business, what she was contrasting the value of being ‘open’ with the negative value of being ‘closed up or closed off.’ Having an ‘easy’ or ‘kind’ heart here, is a common gloss for being ŋayaŋu manymak or having a manymak ŋayaŋu. Being ‘hard,’ in contrast, is a common gloss for being gumurr däl (hard or difficult chested), and gumurr däl is a typical example of ŋayaŋu wutthuna-mirri rom.
So on one level, yapa is simply asserting a morally legitimate motivation for her business. To be gumurr däl and unmoving if people asked to buy the girri’ at less than cost price would indeed be a negative thing. To yaka-yun – to no or refuse people on this basis would not only would have made others feel bad but it would have made yapa feel bad. To yaka-yun is a typical instance of ŋayaŋu wutthuna-mirri rom (law or manner of doing things that affronts the state of feeling). So yapa is making it easy for the people – she doesn’t want to put herself in a situation where she has to refuse or deny anyone. This makes sense, but it is clearly not the whole story; it puts her actions in the local moral framework, but it doesn’t in itself explain the motivation behind her girri’ business. And as we know, the representation of emotion in language does not necessarily correspond to people’s private inner thoughts and feelings.
What of the other dimensions in this case? Here it is important to note that while Batjikali’s reference to, or rationalisation in terms of ŋayaŋu may seem incidental, people on the Homelands do not generally make a distinction between exchange and sociality, and evaluation and value – or morality and value. People are, of course, more than aware that this distinction exists, and that this distinction is of utmost importance to Balanda (white people, Europeans), and the way Balanda consider issues of morality. It is also true that most Homeland people partake in such impersonal forms of market exchange whenever they travel to the nearby township to do shopping etc. It is simply the case, however, that most Yolŋu do not embrace this distinction, nor do they consider it ‘natural,’ inevitable, or desirable. On the Homelands, rather, we see that balance and value in material exchange, are foremost and primarily a measure of ŋayaŋu, relative to social distance. And that this open/closed template prevails.
So what is part of the emotion lexicon in Yolŋu-matha, can also thus be seen as a partial template of schema of value. From this perspective this template is very similar to what Nancy Munn refers to as a generative schema or value template – but where Munn analyses the production of value at the level of symbols and meaning, recognition and attention to the affective or emotional dimension allows us to account for the important role of affective or motivational force. These terms and concepts not only describe emotions, or types of interrelationships, but they adumbrate culturally recognised and recognisable eliciting situations associated with each point along the continuum, and the state of feeling each describes. Important to this case, these eliciting situations include general descriptions of the interplay between forms, material conditions, and social relations of material exchange. From this perspective emotion becomes the key link between evaluative understandings, motivation and action – and the experience or feeling of realising value.
Balance in exchange is realised, produced, or maintained as or in an unmarked sense of equilibrium in interpersonal relations. In the Yolŋu case balance is realised in an open state of exchange – that is, balance is typically realised in ongoing relationships characterised by mutual interdependence and dynamic reciprocity. In material terms this open ‘state’ of exchange may be empirically observed by the unmarked and unremarkable flow of goods between people and Homelands, denoted or described by the concept of yän gurrupan (just giving).
Balance in gurrutu exchange relations
Value is realised or produced in positive, ‘good,’ or otherwise desirable affective experiences in interpersonal relations. These are typically ongoing relationships characterised by mutual interdependence, along a continuum of increasingly dynamic reciprocity – the kind of dynamism that accompanies large gatherings like those for ceremony. Or markets at Galuma Island. In material terms this dynamic state of exchange is denoted by the terms and concepts on the right hand side of the template.
Negative value or the negation of value is realised along a continuum of negative, bad, or otherwise undesirable affective experiences. As you can see on the left, this is typically when people refuse or deny others, when they are stricted, hard chested, lack the quality of sharing, or are wanting or delirious of being separate, distinct and alone. These are all typical examples of ŋayaŋu wutthuna-mirri rom – which threaten to ‘block off or close up’ the state of relations – to foreclose the state of exchange,[2] and thus negate the possibility of realising value.
At this point we can return to the second dimensions of this case study: In a local economy where balance and value are realised or produced in an open state of exchange – we see that difference is potentially realised as a value. That is, variable or differential access to resources is considered a source of value if or when it forms the basis for ongoing relationships characterised by mutual interdependence and dynamic reciprocity. Such valued difference affords an opportunity to ‘carry and hold’ one another (gäma, ŋayathama), to ‘assist or help one other’ (guŋgay’yun-mirri), to ‘care for and look after one another’ (djäka-mirri) – which are all important aspects of what it means to be and behave like gurrutu.[3] And this, I suggest, is what yapa Batjikali is doing: by introducing material goods that others cannot source or produce locally – yapa is introducing a valued form of difference, which forms the basis for an ongoing open state of exchange – for ongoing relations of interdependence and reciprocity – both with Lyn (who, remember, is holding Batjikali’s bankcard), and with her ‘customers’ – who are almost exclusively kin.
But this is still not quite the whole story as it’s clear that there is some entrepreneurial or self-interested motivation behind yapa’s business, and an element of non-monetary accumulation of sorts. This final element or dimension, I suggest, is that of ganydjarr (power, strength). One of the ways that ganydjarr manifest is in the the varying ability of people to regulate the yield, elicitation, and circulation of goods in material exchange. So, for example, one of my other close sisters who is often described as ganydjarr-miriw (lacking or without ganydjarr) has trouble even keeping the thongs on her feet (literally), and always gives her purse, money and keycard (and sometimes even her mobile phone) to someone else to hold when we visit the nearby township for shopping because she cannot hold onto them herself. What yapa Batjikali is doing, I suggest, is the opposite of this dynamic – by introducing a valued form of difference she is seeking to draw people and things towards herself, to become a node in the network of material relations as it were, and to thus become ganydjarr-mirri (lit. having or possessing power, strength) or ganydjarr yindi-thirri (lit. power, strength + big/large-becoming).
To close, to illustrate this kind of dynamic in an image – this, for example, is yapa Batjikali’s fridge – the only fridge in camp – at the beginning of mango season.
And to conclude in a sentence because I’m running out of time, we see that emotion emerges as the key link between motivation, action and value.
Thank you.
[1] And as something shared and contingent – or mutually interdependent – ŋayaŋu is something that people can do to one another; it is something that people can give and take – and something that they can exchange. A person can wekama (give), or märrama (take, bring, carry) any particular state of feeling to or from another person, a group of people, or a place. Ŋayaŋu can also be wutthun (affronted, hit, assaulted), djaw’yun märrama (snatched, stolen), or more positively, ŋama-thirri-yama (made good). And so on.
[2] Negative value is also be realised if or when material goods threaten to upset the state of relations between people. In these cases we see that ‘things’ or material goods (including bank-cards and telephones) that threaten to become napuŋga’-ŋura (in the middle, in between) are – or should – be hidden, destroyed or otherwise removed from the immediate setting as or where it serves to maintain or realise the normative-ideal and primary value of ŋayaŋu waŋgany.
[3] Homelands with resources that others do not have, for example, will realise this difference as a value in ongoing exchange with other Homelands who, in turn, have access to other such resources that they themselves don’t have. (It also extends to labour, knowledge and technology etc.)
Filed under Thesis/Yolngu related writing
One of my favourite Australian poets, and poems.
Robert Gray is an exceptional Australian poet, and this is one of my most love’ed of his works. I find myself cringing at its honesty and yet it stands an incredibly beautiful poem. I would say ‘powerful,’ but I want another word . . . . And apologies in advance for the rather stiff font – it’s the only way WordPress will format poetry correctly.
POEM TO MY FATHER
Dear father, you were buried
in perfect summer weather.
Such a day
you would sit outdoors
and put your bad leg up
in its slipper,
and pretend not to like it there:
too crowded
on the porch, with the pot plants,
or too shady,
or too hot;
you would call out
to my mother and sister
and make them run;
you’d have your lunch brought
on a tray, with doilies
and frangipani
presented
for you to fault.
Though, some found that day too hot,
and you could sympathize:
old-timers
from the RSL;
those red-faced
mates of yours, dabbing
with handkerchiefs
at hat-band welts
the purple onion-root
in nostrils,
cheeks,
flaring, urgently as
heat lightening at night.
I told myself, your father
is in the rank grass,
who gave you body and soul.
That is why I’ve searched
anxiously
your face
propped on the hospital pillows –
for some trait
like the corridor
of a dank hotel
at the end of which is
hung
a verandah, in the open.
I’ve found
such fine bones
in your face –
you have them yet.
What one might only wish to keep
of you, you keep,
also.
In you, now signifying nothing;
although
that chemistry was ineffectual,
always –
overcome
by some other gene
or something infancy had done.
That’s all there is to say.
That’s all.
But everything you did once
we thought against us.
The money you borrowed
won with
and lost again.
All those days you went to get blind,
so well turned out.
The condemnation
in a haughty voice
at every meal
of my books, my hopeless maths,
my choice of sport.
(I was the eldest
and had to sit beside you.)
It didn’t matter to you there was no
Rugby Union,
I ought to be playing it.
I was letting you down.
Who was this
thin-faced, hollow,
neurasthenic devil,
with his ulcers,
at the table with us?
To whom everything was distasteful.
Mocking.
How bad-tempered you looked
after your close
fortnightly haircut.
I could outrun you, and I needed to,
by the time I was eleven.
And we ran out
at night
when it was past the time
you should be home –
at our mother’s intuition
prodding
under the lantana
along the road.
We’d find you
with the bottles emptied
that you, already drunk, had decided
you were going to bring.
Once you began
you’d keep on
until the blessed, regular
Repat. Hospital interments.
But the day after
you would get up,
shave painfully, polish your shoes to righteousness,
and walk in the house
‘looking for trouble’;
an excuse for another
departure,
to spend the precious
TPI pension –
The Money.
I remember
our pathetic pride
to see you dressed again
and walking in the main street
of that town
as if you owned the place –
‘Such a hide,’
my mother said; she would look angry,
and almost smile.
We were those sun-browned,
skinny,
bare-foot, bike-riding
small animals
whom you ignored.
It didn’t worry us, for long;
we ran wild;
we were all right
so long as you weren’t around.
Some might have thought
you wanted to play the rake,
yet it was always
without panache –
with no verve, no enjoyment,
no gaiety,
that we could ever see.
With a determined, thin-lipped
selfishness.
What went wrong
when you were young? It was nothing exceptional
that I can find.
So, you will become now
in your children’s lives,
sometimes,
just the half-conscious, troubling
sense of something
we have forgotten to do,
or to bring
along with us,
if anything wants to remind us
of you.
You have gone
as if you were an illusion.
Although, my mother weeps.
It is real;
she loved you
when she could.
Your second wife, she got religion
and stayed.
What was going to happen
to you
otherwise?
She took in washing,
worked as a cleaner,
and got all of us by.
The closest I saw you together,
the most affectionate,
she was holding your hand
cutting the fingernails.
You were embarrassed,
hurrying her.
She wanted to play.
She was then past fifty.
Dear father,
you did everything badly;
the most
‘difficult patient’
in the nursing home.
Poor man.
I cannot believe
your wretchedness
on all the occasions I recall.
If I think of you
I am horrified – I become obsessed
with you. It is like
love.
I am filled with pity.
I want to live.
- Robert Gray 1995, New and Selected Poems, William Heinemann, Melbourne (Victoria), pp. 57-62.
Filed under Poetry turnstile
Vladimir Nabokov: In Paradise
A poem particularly lovely because I’m almost certain that Nabokov must have noted such thoughts, in his journal about someone he loved, well before they became a poem.
In Paradise
My soul, beyond distant death
your image I see like this:
a provincial naturalist,
an eccentric lost in paradise.
There, in a glade, a wild angel slumbers,
a semi-pavonian creature.
Poke at it curiously
with your green umbrella,
speculating how, first of all,
you will write a paper on it
then — But there are no learned journals,
nor any readers in paradise!
And there you stand, not yet believing
your wordless woe.
About that blue somnolent animal
whom will you tell, whom?
Where is the world and the labeled roses,
the museum and the stuffed birds?
And you look and look through your tears
at those unnamable wings.
- Vladimir Nabokov, from Collected Poems (2012), translated by Dmitri Nabokov, published by Penguin Classics, London.
Filed under Poetry turnstile
On value: Revisiting D’Andrade and Graeber
yeah!
I re-re-read Roy D’Andrade on value yesterday and was reminded just how interesting his findings. First, however, to give an overview on his overview, D’Andrade sets out five different definitions of value:
1) As in the phrase, ‘the value of x in this formula,’ value refers to some amount or quantity. This sense is generally found only in mathematical or linguistic discourse. There is no ‘goodness’ component in this sense of the term;
2) A notion of value that refers a preference for something, measured by the preference for that thing over another. Economists use the term ‘utility’ for this sense of value’;
3) Value as in the phrase ‘the value of IBM stock has risen 10 percent,’ which refers to price. He notes here that while utility and preference are connected to price, they are not the same thing: ‘Water, for example, has great utility for humans. But because the supply of water is normally large, one does not need to pay greatly for it (although this is changing). Price is affected by supply and demand, and so is not intrinsic to the object in the way that utility is. Value as price has a long history of debate in the social sciences, primarily focused on where the price comes from. Early economists, such as Smith, Ricardo, and Marx, thought that the price of objects came from the labor by which they are produced and that is why diamonds have more value than water. The labor theory of value was demolished by Turgot and the economists of the Austrian School who developed the marginal theory of value, although some Marxist-oriented social scientists still use varieties of the labor theory (e.g., Graeber 2001).’
I’m not sure Graeber would agree with this characterisation of his position, but anyhow . . .
4) The default or ‘unmarked’ meaning of value, which involves a sense of worth – the goodness of something. The term ‘value’ as used here refers to ‘the goodness attributed to something important.’ Whether something is good or bad appears to be one of the most frequent and salient assessments that humans make. People ‘rate’ things in a way that foregrounds the factor of ‘evaluation’ – the ‘good or bad’ property of things – with a broad sample of adjectives such as ‘’beautiful versus ugly, useful vs not useful.’ In the common sense of the word values are more than just ‘goodness’; for something to be a value it should not only be good, it should also be something that is ‘weighty and important – it should be worth something.’
5) Value as in phrases such as ‘he has no values,’ which refers to a moral subset of values. A person with no moral values is someone who is immoral. ‘Such a person knows that other people feel it is good to help others and bad to steal and cheat, but does not feel this himself. But such a person may have many nonmoral things they feel are good, like money and leisure. This is a specialized or marked sense of the term value, referring to a subset of values regarding moral issues.’ Expressed as a noun, ‘goodness’ seems to be in the thing or event.’ Expressed as a verb as in ‘he values social approval’ – goodness is not in the thing but rather, in the person’s response to the thing.’
At this point D’Andrade notes that a question remains as to whether values are just thoughts or whether they include some kind of feeling: ‘As a matter of ordinary talk, people say the experience of goodness is more than just cognition. Obviously, one can know about a value but not hold it. Somebody may know it is considered good to give to charity and even think abstractly that charity is good, yet feel nothing really about charity. The internal sense of its goodness is missing. We speak of value as internalized when a person believes some object or event is good, when the person experiences a strong sense of its goodness and responds with the feelings and motivations that are appropriate to such an appraisal (Spiro 1987). Values vary greatly in the degree that they are internalized. Much of the research on values involves trying to measure the degree of internalisation.’
After his introductory overview D’Andrade eventually settles on a definition of value defined as ‘the goodness attributed to something important.’ While the body of the text is admittedly a little touch dry, his findings are both surprising and really very really interesting. Two things! Two things:
First thing. The first interesting point of note in his study is D’Andrade’s emphasis on the fact that value dimensions are contrasts, not opposites: ‘Individualism versus collectivism and altruism versus self-interest are not formed by contradictory opposites such as up and down,’ he explains, ‘but . . . this does not mean that they are not dimensions. As dimensions they are formed by the correlational structure of semantic contraries (things opposed in nature or tendency) rather than contradictories (whatever is true of one is logically false about the other).’
This is coupled with his general hypothesis is that ‘values are always a compromise in a tension between opposing tendencies’ and a further hypothesis, that ‘value standards in many domains are a negotiated adjustment to a conflict’ (see the discussion on pp. 136-137). This is a lot of food for thought and a really interesting cluster of hypotheses, I think.
Second thing. The second thing I found particularly interesting is his finding that large differences in personal values across cultures do not exist but there DOES appear to be large differences in what-counts-as-what. This. is. an. incredibly. important. and. interesting. point. I think. – and one that had me wondering how one might go about studying eliciting scenarios for values, just as one might for emotions. To give more of a sense of this finding in the context of his study:
D’Andrade’s project began with the hypothesis that ‘values are organized into empirically isolatable clusters and dimensions and that some value dimensions are common to most societies. It was also hypothesized that most societies would display culturally unique value dimensions’ (p. 12). He concludes quite differently, however, and it’s worth quoting him at length here:
‘The ideas with which this book finishes are different from the ideas that it started with. It now seems large differences in personal values across societies do not exist. There are some differences in personal values between societies, but there is close to overwhelming evidence that these differences are small. The variation within a society is many times larger than the variation between societies in personal values. This does not mean that societies are all the same. First, as has been pointed out a number of times, there are large differences between societies in what-counts-as-what. The same value can be instantiated in very different ways. The canonical example is that the practices thought to give toddlers independence in a Japanese pre-school are different from the practices thought to give toddlers independence in an American preschool.
There also are, it is clear, great differences in institutionalized values. The largest value differences seem to be between roles within a society, but to the degree that the same institutionalized values are found in a variety of institutions, whole societies can vary greatly with respect to institutionalized values, as exemplified by the value of purity in India. . . .
Perhaps the fact that cultures do not vary much in personal values will be taken by social scientists to indicate that there is little sense in bothering to study personal values on the group level. This conclusion would be a mistake because life satisfactions and physical health are affected by the fit between personal values and institutionalized values in important life-world institutions such as work and family (Rohan 2000, Meglino and Ravlin 1998, cited earlier). Also, differences between personal values and institutionalized values can give rise to social conflict. Of course, given sufficient external power applied to keep the social standards in place, as in slavery or in totalitarian regimes, the distress caused by lack of fit can be ignored. That is, until the day comes when it cannot be ignored.’
You can imagine how much I was smiling at this point. And! but! anyway! – the part of the conclusion particularly relevant to my own research and the idea of moral misrecognition:
‘Were I to begin the study of values now, I would focus on these questions about the degree of fit between institutionalized values and personal values. It would also be helpful to find some way of systematically surveying what-counts-as-what. Techniques to do this could be helpful in resolving cross-cultural misunderstandings. Unless one knows what-counts-as-what, one cannot understand much of political conflict. It is easy to describe the conflicts but more difficult to dis-cover the nature of the linkages between values and the practices. What is needed is a general theory that can be used to conceptualize the psychological and cultural processes involved.’
This had me thinking about ALL KINDS of wonderful things! Final thing. One final thing. While D’Andrade and Graeber (2001) appear to be talking past one another in many respects in their respective texts, their conclusions in fact nicely parallel or reflect or echo one another. Consider, for example, dhuwala:
‘We are back, then, to a “politics of value”; but one very different from Appadurai’s neoliberal version. The ultimate stakes of politics, according to Turner, is not even the struggle to appropriate value; it is the struggle to establish what value is (Turner 1978; 1979c; see Myers and Brenne is 1991:4–5). Similarly, the ultimate freedom is not the freedom to create or accumulate value, but the freedom to decide (collectively or individually) what it is that makes life worth living. In the end, then, politics is about the meaning of life. Any such project of constructing meanings necessarily involves imagining totalities (since this is the stuff of meaning), even if no such project can ever be completely translated into reality—reality being, by definition, that which is always more complicated than any construction we can put on it’ (Graeber 2001, p. 88).
AND THAT IS ALL MY STORY! There are a lot of colons in this post and erratic grammar. Goodbye.
Filed under Anthropology
Toward an Impure Poetry
It’s been a little quiet on here of late. Apologies. I hope to submit my dissertation next month, so I have been rather busy. Anyhow, I was enjoying an evening off just now when I just came across the following. It’s both strong and beautiful, and by Pablo Neruda.
Toward An Impure Poetry
It is good, at certain hours of the day and night, to look closely at the world of objects at rest. Wheels that have crossed long, dusty distances with their mineral and vegetable burdens, sacks from the coal bins, barrels, and baskets, handles and hafts for the carpenter’s tool chest. From them flow the contacts of man with the earth, like a text for all troubled lyricists. The used surfaces of things, the wear that the hands give to things, the air, tragic at times, pathetic at others, of such things – all lend a curious attractiveness to the reality of the world that should not be underprized.
In them one sees the confused impurity of the human condition, the massing of things, the use and disuse of substances, footprints and fingerprints, the abiding presence of the human engulfing all artifacts, inside and out.
Let that be the poetry we search for: worn with the hand’s obligations, as by acids, steeped in sweat and in smoke, smelling of lilies and urine, spattered diversely by the trades that we live by, inside the law or beyond it.
A poetry impure as the clothing we wear, or our bodies, soup-stained, soiled with our shameful behavior, our wrinkles and vigils and dreams, observations and prophecies, declarations of loathing and love, idylls and beasts, the shocks of encounter, political loyalties, denials and doubts, affirmations and taxes.
The holy canons of madrigal, the mandates of touch, smell, taste, sight, hearing, the passion for justice, sexual desire, the sea sounding – willfully rejecting and accepting nothing: the deep penetration of things in the transports of love, a consummate poetry soiled by the pigeon’s claw, ice-marked and tooth-marked, bitten delicately with our sweatdrops and usage, perhaps. Till the instrument so restlessly played yields us the comfort of its surfaces, and the woods show the knottiest suavities shaped by the pride of the tool. Blossom and water and wheal kernel share one precious consistency: the sumptuous appeal of the tactile.
Let no one forget them. Melancholy, old mawkishness impure and unflawed, fruits of a fabulous species lost to the memory, cast away in a frenzy’s abandonment-moonlight, the swan in the gathering darkness, all hackneyed endearments: surely that is the poet’s concern, essential and absolute.
Those who shun the “bad taste” of things will fall flat on the ice.
- from Five Decades: A Selection (Poems 1925 – 1970), edited and translated by Ben Nelitt, Grove Press, New York, pp. xxi-xxii
Filed under Poetry turnstile
Two basic concepts of emotion or affect in Yolŋu-matha
The key body of concepts comprising the emotion lexicon in Yolŋu-matha describe emotion and affective experience as fundamentally relational, as contingent upon the state of relations between people. If we ‘consider emotional meaning like any other semiotic practice, as a product of signification’ as Fred Myers suggests (1988, p. 591), most Yolŋu concepts associated with emotion and morality signify a particular state or sense of feeling among and between people. Yolŋu place emphasis not on the autonomous individual, nor necessarily even the individual self-in-relation-to-others, but rather, on the state of the relationship between people in any given situation or event.
This is not unique in the ethnographic literature. Emotions, Markus and Kitayama remind us, are typically conceived and experienced relationally, inter-personally, in the many places or cultures in which an interdependent view of the self prevails (Markus & Kitayama 1994 – but see also, for example, Geoffrey White 1994, D’Andrade 2008).
In this post I thought I would attempt to introduce and explain the two most basic terms or concepts associated with emotion or affect in Yolŋu-matha. This material is from Chapter 3 of my thesis.
Ŋayaŋu
The most basic concept is the emotion lexicon is ŋayaŋu, which I generally translate as ‘state or sense of feeling.’ As a cultural concept of affect there are a number of things that distinguish ŋayaŋu from the meaning and use of the English term ‘feeling’ and/or ‘feelings’ because ŋayaŋu does not necessarily distinguish between what Anglo-Europeans would normally consider distinct or different ‘senses’ – touch, sight, smell, taste and hearing – nor does it necessarily distinguish between affective and ‘physical’ feeling. Furthermore, while ŋayaŋu is experienced or felt by individuals (associated with the gumurr [‘chest’]) [1] it is always and necessarily relational. Ŋayaŋu refers to the state or sense of feeling among and between people in any given situation or event. The individual experience or sense of ŋayaŋu is considered as or ‘in’ relation to significant others – and contingent upon the state of the relationship between them. This last point is significant as it gives rise to a theory of morality which foregrounds the affective influence that people have on one another in everyday life, as well as how this positively or negatively affects the state of feeling or state of relations among and between people more generally.
As something shared and contingent or mutually interdependent, ŋayaŋu is something that people can do to one another; it is something that people can give and take – something that they can exchange. Any given state or sense of feeling, whether positive, negative, pleasant or hurtful, can be exchanged. A person may give wikama a particular state or sense of feeling such as gora (‘shame, embarrassment, guilt’) to another person or group of people, or märrama (‘take, bring, carry’) it from one place or person to another. Ŋayaŋu can also be wutthun (‘affronted, hit, assaulted’), or djaw’yun-märrama (‘snatched, stolen’), or more positively, ŋama-thirri-yama (‘made good’). Ŋayaŋu implicates both positive and negative capacities of the self and others in interpersonal exchange. To give a sense of the way ŋayaŋu is implicated in everyday talk, the following are excerpts from recorded discussions with yapa and waku.
“Ŋayaŋu manymak – nhe yurru lakarama-mirri[2] ŋarra-kala … so you and I have to have the same feeling. Yaka holding in. Yaka keeping in-nha anger. If I get anger with you, getting angry with you . . . because you not going to share your feeling with me – feelings-ndja, you must have holding something for me . . . a secret that you not going to share with me, but ŋarra-kala[3] ŋayaŋu yurru lakarama yurru that you holding something there for me but nhe yaka yukurra djäl-thirri-ndja lakarama-nha.
(Nice, pleasant, healthy ŋayaŋu – we will tell or talk to one another . . . so you and I have to have the same feeling. Not holding in. Not keeping in anger. If I get anger with you, getting angry with you . . . because you not going to share your feeling with me – feelings, you must have holding something for me . . . a secret that you not going to share with me, but ŋayaŋu will tell that you are holding something there for me but you are not wanting to tell or talk [about it])
If you don’t share your feeling, you have a lot . . . getting a lot of heaviness-ndja and everything is still stuck in your brain . . . then become a headache nhanŋu, brain tumour nhe yurru märrama because of that, keeping everything in, for yourself, whether it’s good or bad, see?”
(If you don’t share your feeling, you have a lot . . . getting a lot of heaviness and everything is still stuck in your brain . . . then become a headache for that person, and you will get a brain tumour because of that, keeping everything in, for yourself . . . whether it is good or bad . . . see?”)
Consider also the following excerpt taken from a discussion with waku. This particular part of the discussion was prompted by my asking if it makes sense to say ŋoy wikama (‘give’ the seat of emotions). I asked this question because there exist conventional ways and means of talking about ‘giving’ various states of feeling, and I wanted to ‘ask around’ ŋoy (‘seat of emotions’) to clarify my understanding about differences between ŋoy and ŋayaŋu in this sense:
“Yaka . . . “märr läy-yun” ŋayi ŋunhi . . . ŋayi ŋunhi “ŋayaŋu läy-yun” . . . yaka “märr wikama” wo nhawi . . . “ŋoy wikama.” Ŋunhi-ndja ŋayi ŋunhi “ŋayaŋu wikama-nha” ŋayi ŋunhi ‘doing’ – It is “doing something” . . . to get back.
(It’s not . . . “ease [collective/ancestral] power” . . . it’s “ease the state or sense of feeling” . . . not ‘ease [collective/ancestral] power,’ or whatchyamacallit . . . “give the seat of the emotions.” What you are referring to is “[to] give the state or sense of feeling” which is “doing” – it is ‘doing something . . . to get back [i.e. mutual or reciprocal exchange].)
[ . . . ]
Ŋayaŋu läpthun-marama is, it is make yourself free . . . lay-yun . . . laytju-irri-nha, mulkurr ga rumbal-nha läy-yun-ndja.”
(To make yourself open, it is to make yourself free . . . to ease or relax . . . becoming pleasant and smooth, [to] ease or relax the head [mind] and body.)
The act of ‘giving something’ as described above, it should be noted, is not differentiated from the act of giving or ‘letting out’ one’s feeling(s) or (‘läpthun-marama ŋayi ŋunhi ŋayaŋu’). They are both associative expressions, which have meaning and significance in contradistinction to ‘holding something in for one another’ or being däl (‘hard, difficult’). Persons or proclivities that are not ‘open’ (‘ŋayaŋu läpthun-marama-mirri’), which do not ‘give’ or ‘let out’ something for one another are considered or felt to dhal-yurra (‘block up, close off’) the possibility for realising or maintaining positive, moral, valuable relations.
It is important to note that being ‘open’ is not akin to or the same as ‘being open and honest’ in English. It denotes or describes an observant attentiveness to the state or sense of feeling between people in any given situation or event – and reflects the valued ability to be attentive and sensitive to the interpersonal context – the knowledge and ability to respond flexibly and adjust to social contingencies.[4]
Being ‘open’ is where ŋayaŋu and dhäkay-ŋäma meet; to be däl (‘hard, difficult’) is to be insensate, which is not to dhäkay-ŋäma.
Dhäkay
The verb most closely associated with ŋayaŋu is dhäkay-ŋäma, from dhäkay (‘taste, flavour or feeling’) and the transitive verb ŋäma (‘to experience or feel’). Where ŋayaŋu is the state or sense of feeling, dhäkay-ŋäma is the act of ‘getting a taste, getting a feeling’ of ŋayaŋu among and between people (and or place). People can dhäkay-ŋäma a person, group of people, a social situation or place. They may also dhäkay-ŋäma songs as well as things like food. An alternate but similar expression used interchangeably with dhäkay-ŋäma is dhäkay birkay’yun from dhäkay (‘taste, flavor, feeling’) and the transitive verb birka’yun (‘try, test, taste’). Dhäkay-birkay’-yun is thus something akin to trying or testing the taste, flavor or feeling. Another similar term often used interchangeably is ŋan’ku-ŋäma from ŋan’ku (‘taste, flavour’) and – once again – the transitive verb ŋäma (‘to experience or feel’). These interchangeable expressions are often glossed by English speakers as ‘getting a taste, getting a feeling.’ The following excerpt from a recorded discussion with yapa offers an example of the use of these terms or expressions:
“ . . . ŋuli ŋali yurru dhäkay märrama ga birka’yun, dhäkay-ŋäma dhuwala dhäkay: “Ya – dhuwali ŋatha wikaŋa, ŋarra yurru dhäkay-birka’yun!” Taste, like dhäkay, same ŋayi mayali, eh?
(. . . if we get a taste/feeling, that’s dhäkay-ŋäma, that’s dhäkay: “Hey give me that food, I’ll get a taste/feeling!” Taste, like dhäkay, same meaning, see?)
When you go for a taste, have a go for a taste . . . dhäkay-ŋäma ŋayi yurru yolŋu’yulŋu-nha, eh? Yo. Dhäkay-ŋäma it can goes to anything; anything nhe yurru dhäkay-birka’yun.
(When you go for a taste, have a go for a taste . . . Get a taste/feeling of those people, see? Yo. Dhäkay-ŋäma it can goes to anything; you can get a taste/feeling of anything.)
Me: wäŋa – ?
(Me: [of a] place?)
“Yoo . . . wäŋa ŋunhi ŋilimurru yurru birka’yun mak ŋayi ŋunhi milk’milk-mirri . . . mak milk’milk’-miriw. Eh bitjan, wo wiripu mak ŋayi wäŋa nunhi mari-mirri . . . wo mak ŋayi laytju, yo, balanyara wiripu-nha ŋayi.”
(Yo, we can get a try/test whether that place, perhaps it has sandflies . . . or perhaps it is without sandflies. See, thus so. Or perhaps that place is conflict-ridden . . . or perhaps it is pleasant and smooth, yo, that’s a different [example].)
Consider also the following excerpt from a discussion using the interchangeable expression ŋan’ku-ŋäma:
“ . . . ŋan’ku-ŋäma ŋanya yurru, ŋan’ku-ŋäma ŋayi Yolŋu-nha ŋanya . . . maymak ŋayi ŋayaŋu, wo nhanŋu yätj ŋayaŋu . . . ŋan’ku-ŋänara-mirri ŋali-pi-yu Yolŋu wo whether Yolŋu or Balanda . . .
(. . . get a taste/feeling that person, they will get a taste/feeling [of/for/with] that person . . . [is it] a good state of feeling, or is that a bad state of feeling . . . they themselves will get a taste or feeling [of/for/with one another], whether Yolŋu or Balanda . . . )
. . . ŋali yurru ŋan’ku-ŋanara-mirri feel one another feelings-ndja litjalaŋu-way because our bodies can tell us something. Dhäkay-ŋäma ŋali yurru eh balanyara . . . yo . . . we can feel our body can tell us something . . . ŋali feel with our own body whether ŋayi manymak Yolŋu or yätj, balanyara.”
(. . . we will get a taste/feeling [of/for one another], feel one another feelings our way because our bodies can tell us something. We will get a taste/feeling thus so . . . yo, we can feel our body can tell us something . . . we feel with our own body whether that person is good or bad, thus so.)
Interestingly, one of the many stereotypes of Balanda is that they are always däl (‘hard, difficult’) and lack the sense, skill or ability to dhäkay-ŋäma (get a taste or feeling). There’s obviously a lot more to say about these ideas and concepts, but perhaps some other time I hope.
[1] There are more idioms based on the word ‘gumurr’ than can be addressed here, however, to give a sense of the way they are used, or what they imply I will briefly introduce a few. The expression ‘gumurr-mirri’, translated literally as ‘having or possessing the quality of a chest’ is an expression meaning ‘to spread out.’ The expression ‘gumurr-yun’, translated literally as ‘to chest’ is an expression meaning ‘to meet’. ‘To meet’ may also be referred to as ‘gumurr-buna’, literally ‘chest-arrive’. The expression ‘gumurr-manydji’, translated literally as ‘reciprocal relationship between chests’, is an expression used to describe or refer to close friends or consociates. The expression ‘gumurr-darrwa’, which translates literally as ‘multiple or many chests’ is used to describe someone of inconsistent loyalties who is irresolute or inconstant in some way. The expression ‘gumurr-djararrk’, literally ‘chest-beloved’ is one of the more common exclamations of affection, sympathy and compassion, meaning something akin to ‘my poor dear one!’ ‘Gumurr-yu-gäma,’ literally ‘to carry by the chest’ is used to describe the act of fare-welling someone, seeing them forth or carrying them onward a way. The final example is the ‘gumurr-yu-märrama,’ translated literally as ‘to take or get by the chest’. This is the expression used to describe the act of adopting a non-Yolŋu person into the Yolŋu kinship system and wider social networks.
[2] lakarama-mirri is difficult to translate directly into English and I am not completely satisfied with this particular translation. The term or expression is from the transitive verb lakarama (‘to talk or tell [of or about]’) and the suffix –mirri which here denotes the reflexive reciprocal form of the verb – to do to one another.
[3] This term or expression – ŋarra-kala is literally ‘with/at me’ – so this sentence could be more accurately (but awkwardly) translated as: ‘but ŋayaŋu will tell with or at me . . . ’
[4] This is, as the reader will appreciate, quite a different thing to being ‘open and honest’ in English. In fact, being ‘open’ in the sense in which it is used here often entails withholding (or highly regulating the expression of) one’s private inner thoughts and feelings – so as to maintain a state or sense of ŋayaŋu waŋgany (‘one state or sense of feeling)
Filed under Ethnography, Thesis/Yolngu related writing
An elaboration on the method and process of ethnography (non-anthropologist friendly!)
Clifford Geertz being handsome
What do anthropologists do? This is a very good question. We do lots of things. But ethnography is generally considered the methodology of our discipline. What is ethnography? This is another very good question. It is lots of things. But it usually takes the form of long term participant-observation. Below is one of the better known (and loved) elaborations on the question of ethnography from the late, handsomely wonderful Clifford Geertz. It’s a beautiful read. He just writes so beautifully.
‘In anthropology, or anyway social anthropology, what the practioners do is ethnography. And it is in understanding what ethnography is, or more exactly what doing ethnography is, that a start can be made toward grasping what anthropological analysis amounts to as a form of knowledge. This, it must immediately be said, is not a matter of methods. From one point of view, that of the textbook, doing ethnography is establishing rapport, selecting informants, transcribing texts, taking genealogies, mapping fields, keeping a diary, and so on. But it is not these things, techniques and received procedures, that define the enterprise.
What defines it is the kind of intellectual effort it is: an elaborate venture in, to borrow a notion from Gilbert Ryle, “thick description.”
Ryle’s discussion of “thick description” appears in two recent essays of his (now reprinted in the second volume of his Collected Papers addressed to the general question of what, as he puts it, “Le Penseur” is doing: “Thinking and Reflecting” and “The Thinking of Thoughts.” Consider, he says, two boys rapidly contracting the eyelids of their right eyes. In one, this is an involuntary twitch; in the other, a conspiratorial signal to a friend. The two movements are, as movements, identical; from an l-am-a-camera, “phenomenalistic” observation of them alone, one could not tell which was twitch and which was wink, or indeed whether both or either was twitch or wink. Yet the difference, however unphotographable, between a twitch and a wink is vast; as anyone unfortunate enough to have had the first taken for the second knows. The winker is communicating, and indeed communicating in a quite precise and special way: (1) deliberately, (2) to someone in particular, (3) to impart a particular message, (4) according to a socially established code, and (5) without cognizance of the rest of the company. As Ryle points out, the winker has not done two things, contracted his eyelids and winked, while the twitcher has done only one, contracted his eyelids. Contracting your eyelids on purpose when there exists a public code in which so doing counts as a conspiratorial signal is winking. That’s all there is to it: a speck of behavior, a fleck of culture, and – voilý! – a gesture.
That, however, is just the beginning. Suppose, he continues, there is a third boy, who, “to give malicious amusement to his cronies,” parodies the first boy’s wink, as amateurish, clumsy, obvious, and so on. He, of course, does this in the same way the second boy winked and the first twitched: by contracting his right eyelids. Only this boy is neither winking nor twitching, he is parodying someone else’s, as he takes it, laughable, attempt at winking. Here, too, a socially established code exists (he will “wink” laboriously, over-obviously, perhaps adding a grimace – the usual artifices of the clown); and so also does a message. Only now it is not conspiracy but ridicule that is in the air. If the others think he is actually winking, his whole project misfires as completely, though with somewhat different results, as if they think he is twitching. One can go further: uncertain of his mimicking abilities, the would-be satirist may practice at home before the mirror, in which case he is not twitching, winking, or parodying, but rehearsing; though so far as what a camera, a radical behaviorist, or a believer in protocol sentences would record: he is just rapidly contracting his right eyelids like all the others. Complexities are possible, if not practically without end, at least logically so.
The original winker might, for example, actually have been fake-winking, say, to mislead outsiders into imagining there was a conspiracy afoot when there in fact was not, in which case our descriptions of what the parodist is parodying and the rehearser is rehearsing of course shift accordingly. But the point is that between what Ryle calls the “thin description” of what the rehearser (parodist, winker, twitcher . . . ) is doing (“rapidly contracting his right eyelids”) and the “thick description” of what he is doing (“practicing a burlesque of a friend faking a wink to deceive an innocent into thinking a conspiracy is in motion”) lies the object of ethnography: a stratified hierarchy of meaningful structures in terms of which twitches, winks, fake-winks, parodies, rehearsals of parodies are produced, perceived, and interpreted, and without which they would not (not even the zero-form twitches, which, as a cultural category, are as much non-winks as winks are non-twitches) in fact exist, no matter what anyone did or didn’t do with his eyelids.
Like so many of the little stories Oxford philosophers like to makeup for themselves, all this winking, fake-winking, burlesque-fake-winking, rehearsed-burlesque-fake-winking, may seem a bit artificial. In way of adding a more empirical note, let me give, deliberately unpreceded by any prior explanatory comment at all, a not untypical excerpt from my own field journal to demonstrate that, however evened off for didactic purposes, Ryle’s example presents an image only too exact of the sort of piled-up structures of inference and implication through which an ethnographer is continually trying to pick his way:
“The French (the informant said) had only just arrived. They set up twenty or so small forts between here, the town, and the Marmusha area up in the middle of the mountains, placing them on promontories so they could survey the countryside. But for all this they couldn’t guarantee safety, especially at night, so although the mezrag (trade-pact-system) was supposed to be legally abolished it in fact continued as before.
One night, when Cohen (who speaks fluent Berber) was up there (at Marmusha) two other Jews who were traders to a neighboring tribe came by to purchase some goods from him. Some Berbers – from yet another neighboring tribe – tried to break into Cohen’s place, but he fired his rifle in the air. (Traditionally, Jews were not allowed to carry weapons; but at this period things were so unsettled many did so anyway.) This attracted the attention of the French and the marauders fled. The next night, however, they came back, and one of them disguised as a woman who knocked on the door with some sort of a story. Cohen was suspicious and didn’t want to let “her” in, but the other Jews said: “oh, it’s all right, it’s only a woman.” So they opened the door and the whole lot came pouring in. They killed the two visiting Jews, but Cohen managed to barricade himself in an adjoining room. He heard the robbers planning to burn him alive in the shop after they removed his goods, and so he opened the door and – laying about him wildly with a club – managed to escape through a window.
He went up to the fort (then) to have his wounds dressed, and complained to the local commandant, one Captain Dumari, saying he wanted his “ar-ie”, four or five times the value of the merchandise stolen from him. The robbers were from a tribe which had not yet submitted to French authority and were in open rebellion against it, and he wanted authorization to go with his mezrag-holder, the Marmusha tribal sheikh, to collect the indemnity that, under traditional rules, he had coming to him. Captain Dumari couldn’t officially give him permission to do this – because of the French prohibition of the mezrag relationship – but he gave him verbal authorization saying, “If you get killed, it’s your problem.”
So the sheikh, the Jew, and a small company of armed Marmushans went off ten or fifteen kilometers up into the rebellious area, where there were of course no French, and, sneaking up, captured the thief-tribe’s shepherd and stole its herds. The other tribe soon came riding out on horses after them armed with rifles and ready to attack. But when they saw who the “sheep thieves” were, they thought better of it and said, “all right, we’ll talk.” They couldn’t really deny what had happened – that some of their men had robbed Cohen and killed the two visitors – and they weren’t prepared to start the serious feud with the Marmusha, a scuffle with the invading party would bring on. So the two groups talked, and talked, and talked, there on the plain amid the thousands of sheep, and decided finally on five-hundred-sheep damage. The two armed Berber groups then lined up on their horse at opposite ends of the plain with the sheep herded between them, and Cohen, in his black gown, pillbox hat, and flapping slippers, went out alone among the sheep, picking out, one by one and at his own good speed, the best ones for his payment.
So Cohen got his sheep and drove them back to Marmusha. The French, up in their fort, heard them coming from some distance (“Ba, ba, ba” said Cohen, happily, recalling the image) and said, ”What the hell is that?” Cohen said “That is my ‘ar’.” The French couldn’t believe he had actually done what he said he had done, and accused him of being a spy for the rebellious Berbers, put him in prison, and took his sheep. In the town, his family, not having heard from him in so long a time, thought he was dead. But after a while the French released him and he came back home, but without his sheep. He then went to the Colonel in the town, the Frenchman in charge of the whole region, to complain. But the Colonel said, “I can’t do anything about the matter. It’s not my problem.”
Quoted raw, a note in a bottle, this passage conveys, as any similar one similarly presented would do, a fair sense of how much goes into ethnographic description of even the most elemental sort – how extraordinarily “thick” it is. In finished anthropological writings, including those collected here, this fact – that what we call our data are really our own constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to–is obscured because most of what we need to comprehend a particular event, ritual, custom, idea, or whatever is insinuated as background information before the thing itself is directly examined. (Even to reveal that this little drama took place in the highlands of central Morocco in 1912 – and was recounted there in 1968 – is to determine much of our understanding of it. There is nothing particularly wrong with this, and it is in any case inevitable. But it does lead to a view of anthropological research as rather more of an observational and rather less of an interpretive activity than it really is.
Right down at the factual base, the hard rock, insofar as there is any, of the whole enterprise, we are already explicating: and worse, explicating explications. Winks upon winks upon winks. Analysis, then, is sorting out the structures of signification – what Ryle called established codes, a somewhat misleading expression, for it makes the enterprise sound too much like that of the cipher clerk when it is much more like that of the literary critic – and determining their social ground and import. Here, in our text, such sorting would begin with distinguishing the three unlike frames of interpretation ingredient in the situation, Jewish, Berber, and French, and would then move on to show how (and why) at that time, in that place, their co-presence produced a situation in which systematic misunderstanding reduced traditional form to social farce. What tripped Cohen up, and with him the whole, ancient pattern of social and economic relationships within which he functioned, was a confusion of tongues.’
- Clifford Geertz (1972) from his wonderful essay, Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.
Filed under Anthropology, Ethnography
Quotations of note: Arundhati Roy (on writing)
‘Writers imagine that they cull stories from the world. I’m beginning to believe that vanity makes them think so. That it’s actually the other way around. Stories cull writers from the world. Stories reveal themselves to us. The public narrative, the private narrative — they colonize us. They commission us. They insist on being told. Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.’
The full text can be found here.
Incidentally, Arundhati Roy is also (as I have learned only recently) a seriously impressive ethnographer. The featured image was taken while she was doing research for what became her recent book, ‘Walking with The Comrades.’ You can read an excerpt from this book here or alternatively listen to Arundhati read the excerpt herself – which I highly recommend – featured as a podcast (#11), here.
Filed under Ethnography, Incidental, Posts of an unqualified kind
