Hunting budies

“The ethnographer pressed the point, asking what they would think or say if, through some impossibility, this eventuality [a man sleeping with his sister] managed to occur.  Informants had difficulty placing themselves in this situation, for it was scarcely conceivable: ‘What, don’t you want a brother-in-law? Don’t you realize that if you marry another man’s sister and another man marries your sister, you will have at least two brothers-in-law, while if you marry your own sister you will have none?  With who will you hunt, with whom will you garden, whom will you go to visit?…Incest is socially absurd before it is morally culpable.  The incredulous exclamatiuon from the informant: ‘So you do not want a to have a brother-in-law?’ provides the veritable golden rule for the state of society”

-Claude Levi-Strass, 1969 (The Elementary Structures of Kinship.  Boston: Beacon Press. Pg. 485)

Another tack

“I start from another tack: from the premise that these discrepant stories provide ethnographic entry into the confused space in which people lived, to the fragmented and incomplete knowledge on which they relied, and to the ill-formed and inept responses that knowledge engendered.  Coherence is seductive for narrative form, but disparties are ethnographically more compellingly powerful.”

-Ann Stoler, 2008 (Along the Archival Grain.  Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.  Pg 185.)

Counting (methodological) chickens

“…Hence inquiry begins midstream, always already embedded in a situation, one both settled and unsettled…

“…There are situations that may reach a determined state rapidly and others where it is not possible to tell before the inquiry is well underway whether, and in what manner, and for how long, it will take to move beyond a first loose state to one in which both the situation and its determinants become clearer, more determinate.  Thus, to claim to know beforehand precisely what one is going to do, or to find, as grant proposals demand, would constitute bad method, poor logic, and falsely disciplined inquiry.  Or, more accurately, it seems to me, run the risk of no doing inquiry at all…

“…since inquiry arises within a problematic and indeterminate situation, the inquirer is not outside the situation, nor is she in a position such that she could construct something that was not to a degree present already…

“…Hence, problems and solutions are terms that are joined in practice and in that sense coproductive…The solution to a particular problem consists in a series of steps whose particularities are not know before those steps are undertaken”

Paul Rabinow, 2008.  (Marking Time.  Princeton NJ: University of Princeton Press.  Pp 8-10)

The punster

“Puns are frequent in ethnography. They position the ethnographer between his world of primary orientation, his reader’s world, and the world of those others, the people he has studied, whom at some level, I believe, he is also addressing…Through the pun he appeals collusive to the members of one or the other world, usually the world of his readership, thereby creating a hierarchical relationship between them, He himself, the punster, mediates between these worlds”

-Vincent Crapanzano, 1986 (“Hermes’ Dilemma”. In Writing Culture. Clifford & Marcus, eds. Pg 69. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.)

Test of translation

“…’Our translations, even the best ones, proceed from a wrong premise. They want to turn Hindi, Greek, English, into German instead of turning German into Hindi, Greek, English…The basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue…He must expand and deepen his language by means of the foreign language. ([Pannwitz, in Benjamin] 1969: 80-1)’

…the good translator does not immediately assume that unusual difficulty in conveying the sense of an alien discourse denotes a fault in the latter, but instead critically examines the normal state of his or her own language. The relevant question therefore is…how she can test the tolerance of her own language for assuming unaccustomed forms”

-Talal Asad, 1986 (“The Concept of Translation in British Social Anthropology”. In Writing Culture. Clifford & Marcus, eds. Berkeley CA: University of California Press. Pg 157)

Self-portraiture

“…if indeed the Savage exists primarily within an implicit correspondence with utopia, the specialist in savagery is in dire straits.  He does no know what to aim at.  His favorite model has disappeared or, when found, refuses to pose as expected.  The fieldworker examines his tools and finds his camera inadequate.  Most importantly, his very field of vision is blurred.  Yet he needs to come back home with a picture.  It’s pouring out there, and the mosquitoes are starting to bite.  In desperation, the baffled anthropologist burns his notes to create a moment of light, moves his face against the flame, closes his eyes and, hands grasping the camera, takes a picture of himself”

-Michel-Rolph Trouillot, 2003 (Global Transformations.  New York: Palgrave Macmillan.  Pg 24.)

Anthropology, or nothing.

“…The phonetic alphabet is made up of all known phonemic distinctions: of all differences in sound-segments known to signify differences in meaning in the natural languages of the world. So in principle the objective description of any language consists of its comparison with the meaningful order of all other languages.

The same for ethnography.  No good ethnography is self-contained. Implicitly or explicitly ethnography is an act of comparison.  By virtue of comparison ethnographic description becomes objective.  Not in the naive positivist sense of an unmediated perception— just the opposite: it becomes a universal understanding to the extent it brings to bear on the perception of any society the conceptions of all the others…ethnography is Anthropology, or it is nothing”

-Marshall Sahlins, 2002.  (Waiting for Foucault, Still.  Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Pg 12)

Ale-house

“The ale-house is the key to every town; to know where German beer can be drunk is geography and ethnology enough”

-Walter Benjamin’s “One Way Street”, 1926 (Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 1 1913-1926.  Cambridge MA: Harvard.  1996.  Pg 485.)