Chapter Two - Anthropology On the Road
Ethnographers have often overlooked, or failed to acknowledge, the impact of their activities in the lives of the people they describe. At the same time, they have often insulated themselves from the life-altering influences sustained in their encounters with those same people. In both respects, such ethnographers operate like detached scientists, and perhaps not unlike arrogant philosophes. When one reads an ethnography like Chagnon's Yanomamo--or the sketch of it provided by Holly Peters-Golden (1997)--one can recognize it to be a careful and precise description, but at the same time, one can see that it is a work in which Chagnon and Peters-Golden step aside from dialogue with the Yanomamo, refusing the responsivity recommended in this work. They maintain the image of impartial observer, of a neutral eye that is neither changed in itself nor a cause for change in others. This guise of neutrality is suspect.
Chagnon's research has very likely contributed to some massive changes in Yanomamo life. Some have argued that his work has actually aggravated the fierceness of the Yanomamo that he sets out to describe. And at the same time, Chagnon himself shows no sign of having been personally altered by his contacts with the Yanomamo. Specifically, nothing about his observational stance or his scientific posture seems to have been changed as a result of his having lived with the Yanomamo. Unlike Robert Pirsig's Phaedrus -- in Lila --who continually struggled to find ways to become vulnerable to Lila during the time that he was trying to understand her, Chagnon seems uninterested in becoming vulnerable to the Yanomamo in any way at all. Instead, he treats them as if they were microbes under a glass, creatures to be observed by his all-seeing, ever-present, always accurate eye.
How did such an arrogant attitude emerge and spread to the point of dominating a whole field of study? What is the source of this posture of scientific invulnerability and of this passion to see without being seen and to explain without being explained? Surely, part of the answer lies in the story of the origin of science itself, a story that describes the efforts of the rising European middle classes to confront the terrors of massive social confusion coupled with urban violence, terrors so eloquently depicted in John Donne's "Anatomie of the World", 1611, that begins with those famously foreboding words, "T'is all in peeces, All cohearance gone; All just supply, and all Relation: Prince, Subject, Father, Sonne, are things forgot, For every man alone thinkes he hath got to be a Phoenix, and that then can bee None of that kinde, of which he is, but hee." How else to deal with such confusion than to climb above it, to rise over it, and to lash it into submission with the whip of reason. Hence the arrogance of scientific practice!
This story of science as a measured response to the disruptive forces of the day has been told by numerous historians of science,* (Toulmin, Reiss, Shapin & Shaffer). Their accounts help us to identify some of sources of scientific arrogance. But our distinctly ethnographic form of scientific arrogance could be profitably considered in the light of one additional antecedent, namely the popularization of travel.
Travel is of a piece with ethnography. It is the inevitable circumstance in which ethnographic observation takes place. Indeed, it would be hard to find any practice associated with the arrogance of cultural anthropology that is more taken-for-granted and more automatic than travel.
Automatic? Graduate students in cultural anthropology talk incessantly about travel, about where to go and about whom to encounter. Seldom do they reflect on the larger consequences of travel. Undergraduates who study anthropology speak in one voice of the joys of travel. In teaching undergraduates for the past twenty five years, only once has a student hesitated when asked if he enjoys travel and whether he intends to travel for enjoyment, for personal edification, or for scientific observation. On all other occasions, the response to my questions has been the same. "Of course, I want to travel. I want to get out of my little world so that I can see the big world. I want to visit the great historical sites, to wander around unfamiliar landscapes, and to encounter strange people. Doesn't everyone?"
So it seems, at least where anthropology is concerned. Travel is part of the job description. Pilots fly; carpenters build; miners dig; and anthropologists travel. This consensus about travel and anthropology should prompt us to reflect on travel, its various forms and styles, and its consequences. For starters, travel can take many forms, not just one. In different historical periods, different forms have been favored.1 The ancient Greeks certainly thought of travel as a positive and promising activity, an activity that provided an opportunity for travelers to better themselves. Their word for a travel-report was theory; one who travels out, sees new sights, and reports back is doing "theory." This "theory", to the Greek way of thinking, was of its very nature good.
In the Christian era, travel meant pilgrimage. Pilgrims traveled to holy shrines, as is recounted in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, for the purposes of spiritual purification (about which we will have more to say later) . Typically, pilgrims would leave the site of sin (home) and travel out with strangers toward a shrine, making new relations and living a new life in hopes of transforming the old. In time, these pilgrimages underwent a process of secularization so that, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Europeans traveled to shrines of psychological and physical health, rather than to spiritual centers. The British often traveled for physical health: Scarborough, Bath and its seaside resorts were essentially health spas. Swimming in the sea, in those days, was pursued less as a religious activity-not to mention a leisure activity--than as a medicinal practice. In the course of the nineteenth century, matters of physical health became entwined with spiritual and intellectual health. In 1850, for example, Gustave Flaubert wrote to his cousin saying that he had to get out of the Paris that was suffocating him. He went off to the Orient (the nineteenth-century term for the Middle East) so as to breathe in some of the authenticity of Egypt. Thomas Mann's Hans Castorp, in The Magic Mountain, retired to a sanitarium to mend both his lungs and his philosophy. In the early 20th century, mountain retreats became the last resort for those who had been turned sour by a sickened society. Social healing, as much as physical and spiritual, began to rise to the top of the list of reasons that explain why modern people travel.
Currently, our modern travels are undertaken more often with an eye to social healing, rather than to spiritual or physical health. The shift was marked in the writings of the nineteenth-century American transcendentalists (2). Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Emerson were fond of counterposing verdant forests and rolling meadows to the rumbling engines of industry, recommending that moderns take time away from city life in order to recover balance. When hallowed in time, their recommendations became nostrums of common sense that were used to underwrite the formation of country hunt clubs at the end of the century. There, in the tranquility of the American countryside, one could hunt partridge, and immerse oneself in the rhythms of nature, all so as to recover the strengths necessary to return to and improve modern social conditions. Always, however, this hunting was cultivated as a gentlemanly and meditative activity, an exercise of a unified mind-body aiming to achieve balance in society. Vulgarians who might hunt just in order to eat, taking "pot-shots" along the way, were discouraged and unceremoniously ushered away. Such were the clubs that grew into country clubs which, in time, gave way to our golf clubs. Currently, of course, the rhetoric of gentility on the golf links has been complicated by a newly emerging rhetoric of a competitive athleticism - à la Tiger Woods. However, even today, one need not dig very far beneath the surface to recognize that golf is still cultivated as a gentlemanly walkabout, a ritual as much as a game, an activity that aims to revivify modern social life through a combination of contemplation and sublimation.
The activity of fishing, especially fly-fishing, is a second offspring of American transcendentalism and cousin to golf as an activity of utopist travel. When one reads Hemingway's "Big Two Headed River" and MacClean's A River Runs Through It - fly fishers are generally given to reading as much as to the actual fishing - one suddenly confronts fly-fishing as something much larger and deeper than just and hook and a line and a sunny day at the lake. Instead one finds there an image of fly-fishing as a summer rite for drawing close to nature and for restoring its balance with culture. The very act of walking a river, waist deep in rippling water, is portrayed as a dramatic and generative experience. For one brief moment, a cultural being is literally immersed in the swirling forces of nature. In the water, and subject to its rules, fishers gain a new perspective on life. Indeed, their first act is to carefully chart the cycle of life, not so much the life of the fish, but the life of the insects on which the fish feed. Such observations must be matched with a walking acquaintance of the river, its holes, its rocky outcroppings, its overhanging banks and half-sunken deadfalls. This river structure is, along with the hatching flies, nothing less than a metonym for Nature. Fly-fishing is not about slogging up a fly-ridden river. It is about posturing oneself on Nature stage, playing out a script that calls for consummate cultural grace. With willowy rods, fly-fishers carve delicious patterns in the air. Their obsessive acts of constructing, classifying, evaluating, and eventually casting flies, is all about profound matters of mingling culture with nature with such beatific balance that one cannot but walk away edified. Fly-fishing is less a sport than a liturgy. Little wonder that flyfishers react impatiently to snagging, live-baiting, and the gimmickry of modern American fishing. Theirs is a journey to Elysium, joyfully undertaken not merely for personal delight but also - albeit unconsciously - for social reintegration.*
This survey of travel in contemporary popular American culture would not be complete with reference to a quasi-anthropological form of travel that has been curried just as lovingly as golf and fly-fishing, and with equally deep social ramifications. I refer here to the the experience of mental travel into the lives of "the nature people." Nearly twenty years ago, the high-profile American Indian activist, Russell Means wrote passionate of the Lakota way and of the way of other American Indian peoples. "It is the way that knows that humans do not have the right to degrade Mother Earth, that there are forces beyond anything the European mind has conceived, that humans must be in harmony with all relations or the relations will eventually eliminate the dis harmony." He described American Indians as "the nature people" who, unlike Anglo Americans, have maintained their contact with and respect for Mother Earth (3). His image of Indians as "nature people", far though it might be from the views and practices of most American Indians, has served as a magnet, drawing the attention of alienated Anglos, and attracting their mental travels through stories, films, photos, and paintings (see, for example, "The Grandfather" by Susan Seddon Boulet).
Such nature-hype has resulted in boom times for American Indians. On September 4, 1997, Civic Center in Hartford, Connecticut hosted the Schemitzun (prounced ska-MIT-sun) a four-day festival, derived from rites for celebrating the ripening corn, included 2,000 dancers and offered entrants more than $850,000 in prizes. Here, the civic-center venue, the crush of dancers, and the gush of money all attest to the popularity of the American Indian. However, the downside is that the Anglo interest in "nature people", driven by its own economic inertia, often diverges from and even ignores the experiences of American Indians themselves. Indeed, when Boulet claims that "the primitive" enables one "to bypass logical and linear thought and to penetrate the veil of everyday experience", one can suspect that this same concept of "the primitive" enables one to bypass the very people to whom primitive virtues are ascribed. Even more dramatically when German Indian-lovers explain their passion for American Indian lore by saying, as reported in the NYTimes, 1996, that "Indian beliefs echo their own love of nature and the earth," one suspects them of being "accidental tourists" who are using Indians to confirm their own beliefs and to encourage their own inclinations. The infamous Archie Belaney (aka Grey Owl), discussed by Deborah Root in her Cannibal Cultures, personifies this tactic of touring others for the sake of confirming oneself.
Traveling, whether physically like Hemingway or mentally like Seddon Boulet, can lure ethnographers into arrogance and non-responsivity. Traveling, in short, can be a trap..
Certainly, early American anthropologists thought of themselves as travelers. Their travels made it possible for them to break free of the provincialism of their little world and from their narrow home life. With eyes suddenly opened by broad new horizons, they could experience the rush of strange people and fresh opportunities. Goethe's Faust is the exemplar of such a modern traveler. Having struck his deal with Mephisto he could suddenly "move fluidly through the world, a wandering handsome stranger whose very marginality makes him a figure of mystery and romance...After a life of increasingly narrow self-absorption, he suddenly finds himself interested in other people, sensitive to what they feel and need, ready not only for sex but for love. He is disengaged from 'the little world'; he can return to it as a stranger, survey it as a whole from his emancipated perspective - and, ironically, fall in love with it. Gretchen - the young girl who becomes Faust's first lay, then his first love, finally his first casualty - strikes him first of all as a symbol of everything most beautiful in the world he has left and lost. (4) Admittedly, this modern form of travel seems to be a wholly noble activity and thoroughly admirable in its intent. It is undertaken for the purposes of opening the self to others. However, good intentions aside, when ethnographer-travelers find themselves amongst people who, like Gretchen, are not themselves traveling, they cannot help but feel themselves to be superior, self-liberated individuals mingling with provincial people who are confined to their "little worlds." Modern ethnographic travelers, in this sense, are heroes who discover their own liberation in the highly charged moments of visiting "folks" who remain stuck their own social ruts, and in this respect they are no unlike John Dunbar, Heinrich Harrar, and Nathan Algren.
Such travel implies the same arrogance of eighteenth-century scientists, only in a seemingly innocent form. The practices of modern travelers inevitably encourage the travelers to distinguish SELF from OTHER and to picture SELF as HERO and to picture OTHER as simple, isolated, and homogeneous in a word, "primitive."
Consider, for example, the writing of the highly regarded British novelist Somerset Maugham regarding the people of southern Spain. "Daylight was waning as I returned, but when I passed the olive grove, where many hours before I had heard the malagueña, the same monotonous song still moaned along the air, carrying back my thoughts to the swineherd. I wondered what he thought of while he sang, whether the sad words brought him some dim emotion. How curious was the life he led! I suppose he had never traveled further than his native town; he could neither write nor read. Madrid to him was a city where the streets were paved with silver and the King's palace was of fine gold. He was born grew to manhood and tended his swine, and some day he would marry and beget children, and at length die and return to the Mother of all things. It seemed to me that nowadays, when civilization has become the mainstay of our lives, it is only with such things as these that it is possible to realize the closeness of the tie between mankind and nature." (5) Maugham, here, fell into the travelers' trap, describing Andalusians as he wanted to see them, not as they were. Moreover, he wrote with air of superiority, perhaps a result of his overly confident embrace of British culture.
Ethnographers have often written with a similarly self-congratulatory style, due, on occasion, to a confident and uncritical embrace of the scientific method. One can see, for example, in the ethnography of the Yanomamo that was mentioned at the beginning of this chapter another example of this same travelers' trap. Never once does the ethnographer, Napoleon Chagnon doubt the fundamentals of his own knowledge, though he is constantly rethinking and representing the knowledge and practices of the Yanomamo in terms of his own scientific inclinations. Such arrogant ethnography is a sour habit that needs to be rethought.
So deeply has this bad habit worked its way into anthropologists activities, that it has begun to sprout a whole tree of dangerous consequences. Scientific anthropologists, for example, are just a little to eager and ready to "name" the groups they encounter, designating them with terms that sets them off and groups them together, naming them, for example, Yanomamo. True, such names have often been used with the purpose of paying respect to those people by elevating them to a status comparable to that which is named by terms such as "French" "German" "English." Indeed, when Chagnon approaches a group people in southern Venezuela and, like others before him, calls them "Yanomamo," he may well do so out of a desire to recognize their equality of value with other, politically more prominent, nationalities. However, the problem with such naming practices is that they are riddled with our own peculiar understandings of social respect, and are tainted with our Western nationalist experiences over the past 200 years. Richard Handler (6), among others, has suggested that ethnographers stop referring to groups as if they were ethnic and national identities.
Let me summarize the progress we have made in these first two chapters. Ethnography is an intellectual activity, simultaneously descriptive and utopian. Ethnographers travel out to encounter people on the margins of their experience, describing their practices as accurately and objectively as they are able. Ideally, they strive for a kind of intimacy with those others. They aim to construct sensitive and sympathetic accounts that portray others with a deep level of appreciation, probing beneath the bare demographic facts of who lives where doing what for how long, ultimately arriving at a recognition of the character of others, not unlike the rich appreciation that develops between fast friends. Anthropologists' motivations for pursuing such rich and deep accounts results from a curious heritage of humanist religiosity and rationalist utopism. However, in reality, anthropological descriptive practices frequently subvert these ideals. More often than not anthropological muscles have strained to create objective accounts of human realities that quality as objective scientific descriptions. Unfortunately, as Isaiah Berlin has suggested with magisterial simplicity, science has no straightforward method for approaching human character. (7)
Looking back over the twentieth century and reflecting on the linkage between traveling, writing, and the arrogant non-responsivity, we must conclude that ethnographers and other anthropologists must rethink their practices. They must learn to engage in dialogue; they must learn to dance. It is just such a "responsive anthropology" that is being developed here.
______
Questions for Reflection
1. What's so wrong with W. Somerset Maugham's narrative?
2. In what ways do your own desires for travel match those of one or another intellectual period described here? Can you imagine NOT wanting to travel at all?
3. What might it be like to undertake dialogic travel? Where would you go? What would you do? What consequences would follow?
4. Global travel, and armchair scholarship are aspects of Enlightenment cultural life that contributed to the development of modern anthropology. Discuss the style of such a cultural life as it is depicted in The Connoisseur by Honore Daumier.
______
NOTES
1. For more on the concept of travel, see the films Mountains of the Moon and The Sheltering Sky, and books by Eric Leed The Mind of the Traveler, 1991 and by Victor and Edith Turner Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, 1978, by Richard Terdiman Discourse- Counter-Discourse, 1985, by John Urry The Tourist Gaze, and by Deborah Root Cannibal Cultures.
2. See Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden and Peter Schmitt's Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America, 1969. *All these writings suggest that one must be circumspect regarding the moral uplift generated by walking in the wood, or fishing in a stream. But none is quite so harshly cynical as Georg Simmel: "The clearest expression of this error is the confusion of the eogistic enjoyment of alpine sports with educational and moral values....One forgets that the forces deployed are a means to goals which have no moral claim and indeed are often unethical; as a means for momentary enjoyment, which comes from the exertion of all one's energies, from playing with danger and the emotion of the panoramic view. Indeed, I would place this enjoyment as the highest that life can offer. The less settled, less certain and less free from contradiction modern ixistence is the more passionately we desire the heights that stand beyond the good and evil whose presence we are unable to look over and beyond." (Simmel "The Aline Journey" Theory, Culture and Society (1991, vol. 8, p. 95)
3. See Sam Gill Mother Earth; Deborah Root Cannibal Cultures, 1995.
4. The quotation about Faust is from Marshall Berman's All that is Solid Melts Into Air, 1983: 52. 5. The excerpt from W. Somerset Maugham is from his Andalusia, 1920. Contrary to Maugham's musings, this allegedly dull-but- natural swineherd, this prototype of an allegedly dull-but-natural culture of Andalusia, was probably not dull, and he was certainly not isolated from contact with modern life. Recent histories show us that the sort of malagueña described here, was a song that had been trumped up in the early 19th century to make a killing on the music circuit. It had been exported to the stages of London and Russia before mid-century, and by the time Maugham heard it in the first decades of the 20th century, it had already been thoroughly transformed by market forces and entrepreneureal interests. So much for the simplistic and innocence of primitive folks!
6. Richard Handler, The Politics of Culture in Quebec
7. Isaiah Berlin The Sense of Reality, 1997, reviewed by Gray, 1997
last revised 7/05
