DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY

ASA FIRTH LECTURE

Janice Boddy, University of Toronto
Anthropology and the Civilizing Mission in Colonial Sudan: Themes and Variations in the Key of Ethnography
The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan was a crucible of anthropology. Not only the place where several notable figures did path-breaking research, it was also one of the contexts in which the contribution of ethnography to administration was assayed. The lecture examines the assumptions behind ethnographic information-gathering and practice during Sudan's colonial period, from the first Wellcome expeditions at the turn of the 20th century, through the founding of Sudan Notes and Records in 1919, Dame Margery Perham's description of colonial officers as "unconscious anthropologists," and the different methods adopted by scholars to understand Muslim and non-Muslim Sudanese.
Lecture references.

THE PITCH OF ETHNOGRAPHY

Speakers and abstracts

Rita Astuti, Anthropology, LSE
Checking our claims: evidence and inference in anthropology
In my presentation I will compare ethnographic methods used by anthropologists with experimental methods used by developmental psychologists. Despite some significant methodological differences, practitioners of both disciplines rely on interpretation to advance their claims and are therefore similarly open to the danger of making theory-laden attributions (e.g., interpreting a person’s statement as evidence that she has concept X on the grounds that in one’s own theoretical framework the statement would be predicated on concept X). I will suggest that, by comparison to anthropologists, developmental psychologists tend to take much more care to guard themselves from this danger, and I will argue that anthropologists can improve the accuracy of their interpretations and produce better pitched ethnographic accounts by adopting some of the methods used by developmental psychologists. As a background to my presentation, I post a paper about my research among the Vezo of Madagascar on adults’ understanding of biological inheritance, which is meant to illustrate the point.
Background reading: Revealing and obscuring Rivers’s pedigrees: Biological inheritance and kinship in Madagascar

Karin Barber, Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham
The sociality of texts
This paper starts from four simple and unoriginal propositions.
(1) Ethnography does not study people. It studies what people have made, in determinate conditions of existence: - houses, languages, relationships. This requires a certain respect, as one craftsperson to another. The “sideways glance” that Tim Ingold speaks of is the recognition that what people have made, they could have made differently, could unmake and remake. Thus what we study is the continually emergent process of making.
(2) Ethnography is distinguished from other social science by the fact that it gets some of its best ideas from the peoples whose acts of making it studies. And that is because those people (all people) are themselves already theorists with their own blueprints for, and rationalisations of, what they make.
(3) Ethnography usually ends up as text. The current self-consciousness about how we construct those texts may be salutary, but it may also distract attention from the fact that our sources “in the field” also, mainly, take the form of words - you talk to people, and then you write an account. The talk is not raw data; it is already incipiently entextualised, already becoming something worked-upon, “out there”, something made, and available for interpretation and commentary. The medium of enquiry is thus a process of making, just like the object of enquiry.
(4) Ethnography cannot be understood as immersion in social flow, as such. Rather, the process of making, which ethnography traces and participates in, involves constituting forms which take up a social existence, by endurance over time or dissemination over space, or simply by being recognised as being available to be maintained and interpreted by people. Verbal texts themselves are a central and illuminating instance of the establishment of recognisable - and thus social - form.

Joshua Barker, Anthropology, University of Toronto
An Interview in an Age of Globalization
This paper documents and reflects upon an interview I conducted with the anthropologist James Siegel on a recent field trip to Aceh, Indonesia. Aceh was the site of Siegel's doctoral research in the early-1960s. The interview took place against the backdrop of an excursion in which we were practicing a form of multi-sited, collaborative fieldwork which was new to me. In this paper, I reflect upon the role that new technologies played in shaping our research experience as a whole and the interview itself. Specifically, I address the question of how the mediations of contemporary ethnographic research—above and beyond those associated with ethnographic writing—serve to reframe the experience of 'otherness' that compels much ethnographic inquiry.

Dominic Boyer, Anthropology, Cornell University
Anthropology as Polylogue between Social Theory and Ethnography
This paper reflects on anthropology's conceptual and methodological investment in the practice of ethnography as a partial response to a question that accompanied our field throughout the 20th century, "What distinguishes anthropology among the human sciences?" I discuss two of the answers to this question that became stabilized in postwar sociocultural anthropology, "the study of culture and cultures" and "ethnography," and their insights and limits. Then I suggest that a more accurate (and also more inclusive) way of understanding the anthropological project in our contemporary moment, given the expanding horizons and hyperspecialization of anthropology's many subfields, is to think about it as a polylogue between social theory and ethnography. This is a set of conversations that neither originated in anthropology nor do they constitute an epistemic jurisdiction over which we can lay sole claim. But I contend it is fair to describe this polylogue as the core of our analytical and representational crafts, and when we look for cues to engender certain human-scientific knowledge as "anthropological" we are looking precisely for signs that this conversation animates both the research and its documentation. I close by analyzing what highlighting the engagement between social theory and ethnography suggests for the "pitch" of ethnography within anthropology.

Michael Carrithers, Anthropology, Durham University
From Inchoate Pronouns to Proper Nouns: How Ethnography Specifies a Whole Populace
Among knowledge-based descriptions of a populace, ethnography wields substantial rhetorical force, a force different in nature and means from those of, say, quantitative sociology or geodemographics. In this paper I show how an analysis that begins from Fernandez¹s suggestive notion of Œinchoate pronouns¹ can provide a clear view of how the apparently local and particular matter of fieldwork is transformed into a compelling description of a whole populace. The examples are drawn chiefly from contemporary East Germany, though Gertrude Stein in wartime France does make an appearance.

Nancy Cartwright / Sophia Efstathiou, Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Sciences, LSE
Evidence-based policy and its ranking schemes: So, where’s ethnography?
Evidence-based policy is widely mandated now throughout the UK, the USA and increasingly in Europe. Mandates invite policing and policing calls for standards for compliance. So there are now on offer a host of advice guides about what counts as good evidence. Most of these are ranking schemes, ranking schemes that, not surprisingly, do not rank individual evidence claims but rather rank methods for producing evidence. Ethnographic methods seem never to appear in these rankings, presumably dropping off the bottom (along with physics’ favourite, derivation from theory, and biology’s tracing of causal pathways), beneath even the lowly ‘expertise’, which is generally the only non-statistical method on the lists. This talk will pinpoint some genuine virtues of the statistical methods listed, more basic than the usual grounds (‘guarding against bias’) for endorsing them, as well as concomitant vices, and raise the question of how well ethnography can compete on the virtues and how much it can help make up for the vices.

Paloma Gay y Blasco / Huon Wardle, Anthropology, St Andrews
Ethnography in the Human Conversation
Where ethnographies have been able to dent popular or inter-disciplinary and academic consciousness they have done so by creating a successful thought experiment - -a self-sustaining reticulated imagined space in which to explore alternative human possibilities. This is not to say that ethnography does not depend on and establish true knowledge, evidence, fact; simply that ethnography has a characteristic form. This form, built out of comparative reasoning, relational patterning and authorial ambiguation, gives ethnography two other strengths - -a particular kind of power to provoke and the potential to liberate our conversation about human possibilities from routinised common knowledge. If the last fifty years of debate have taught us not to confuse the imaginative world of the ethnography with a concrete entity, 'society', we still need to learn from the best ethnographies how to build conceptual frames for other modalities of human possibility. As Joanna Overing puts it, the most difficult intellectual terrain lies between relegating the others' knowledge to nonsense or elevating it to poetry. The paper presenters put some key ethnographies to the test in this respect.

Penelope Harvey, Anthropology, University of Manchester
Experimental Relations: anthropology and the impure science of engineering
This paper takes a critical look at the art of ethnography as anthropological practice. Engaging the philosophical writings of Isabelle Stengers (chemist and philosopher of science) I consider her call for a cosmopolitical approach to divergent knowledge practices (an approach that sets out to identify and take seriously what is at stake in divergence). Working through the knowledge politics that emerge in my current ethnographic study of civil engineering and public works in Peru I explore how the notion of experimental practice works across the distinct fields of anthropology, engineering and philosophy of science.

Caroline Humphrey, Anthropology, University of Cambridge
Subjects and events in troubled times
Certain kinds of anthropological experience seem to require the conceptualisation of singular analytical subjects, individual actors who are constituted as subjects in particular circumstances – e.g. the advent of new political regimes, the transformations wrought by wars, schisms of former social wholes, cultural confrontations, and in general the overturning of accustomed patterns of intelligibility. Anthropology has mostly privileged the everyday and the repeated rather than ruptures, and although there is a vast literature on the ‘person’ and the ‘self’, it has only more rarely attempted to theorise the subject in situations of innovation. Such contributions mostly refer to changes in a specific culture’s understanding of ‘the person’, or to the generic subject created by a particular (neo-capitalist) ideology (e.g. Martin 1996; 2000), not to the singularity of individual personalities. But anthropology has thus remained largely silent about the way people actually conceptualise and talk about ‘what happened.’ In circumstances of breaks with the past, singular personalities burst into the field of vision. What kind of account could be given of the Russian Revolution, for example, without Lenin? The requirement is not the accustomed anthropological exercise of constructing yet again the category of ‘the person’ in a given ‘society’ or ‘culture’. All three of those concepts are thrown into disarray in such situations. Rather, it is necessary to think about how a singular human being might put him (her) self together as a distinctive subject by adding to, or subtracting from, the possibilities given by culture as it has been up to that point, through the very process of taking action. This paper uses a critical engagement with the work of Badiou to suggest that events and ‘decision-events’ are temporal happenings through which singular subjects are produced.

Heonik Kwon, Anthropology, University of Edinburgh
Writing an International History from a Village Ethnography
Interests in international relations have long been part of ethnographic research and writing. Evans-Pritchard famously described in his 1940 monograph on the Nuer political system in Sudan the Nuer’s relationship to their neighbouring Dinka as foreign or international relations rather than intertribal relations. When Gluckman reinterpreted the Nuer data and spoke about their crosscutting ties and “the peace in the feud” in his 1955 BBC Lectures, he clearly had in mind a comparison with the radically bipolarizing geopolitical condition of the international community at the time. However, there is a persistent idea that ethnography is, traditionally, mainly about local communal relations, and this idea is particularly strong in works and disciplines that deal with a national society or international and global dynamics. This paper explores the conception of local and international in the production of ethnography, partly reflecting on my previous work on the social history of the Vietnam War. For people in southern Vietnam, the Vietnam-American War was at once a local, national and international conflict. Accordingly, the material and spiritual traces of death from this war existing in the village environment take on variable conceptual spatial origins and dimensions, although in ritual practice these are all considered local entities. When a Vietnamese villager lays incense sticks at a place associated with the apparition of an American soldier, is she doing it on behalf of a foreign identity traced to an international conflict? If an offering is made to the grave of an unknown Vietnamese soldier, is the recipient of this offering any different from the American ghost in terms of political geographical identity?

Mao Mollona, Anthropology, Goldsmiths College
Ethnographic realism and the 'new spirit of capitalism'. Experience, classification and class analysis
While ethnographic surrealism has been widely celebrated in anthropological theory, ‘realism’ has been often described as the backward twin of the modernist imagination. The article proposes ethnographic realism as a new form of anthropological engagement with issues of class, labour and world inequality. It starts with a discussion of the ‘cinematic realism’ of Grierson, Krackauer and Bazin intended both as a form of representation and of political engagement with reality. It then suggests a notion of ‘philosophical realism’ as a synthesis of Marxian ‘praxis’ and Kantian ‘ethics’. Finally, it discusses a specific ethnographic instance – the failed attempt of workers’ buyout of a steel factory in Sheffield – in which the anthropologist and the factory workers’ shared realist imagination helped them to make sense of the wider structural forces which framed their work in the factory.

Knut Myhre, Nordiska Afrikainstitutet
The Pitch of Ethnography: Language, Anthropology, and the Importance of Listening
In this paper, I investigate the notion of pitch in relation to ethnographic exploration and anthropological analysis. ‘Pitch’ suggests an audibility, which can serve as a point of departure for investigating anew the importance of language for social life, and hence for anthropological knowledge production. By emphasising the socially constitutive character of language in a broad sense, and the concomitant importance of listening for our discipline, I seek to highlight and dissolve some specific problems that emanate from long-standing anthropological approaches to, and conceptions of, language as a social phenomenon. I try to show how these issues resurface in connection with the so-called crisis of representation, which ironically appears to presuppose and involve an externalist and observationalist stance, similar to that which they critique. By drawing on alternative philosophies of language and select ethnographic examples, I explore how an emphasis on the importance of listening can reconfigure our approach to, and conception of, language in a manner that can attune the practice of ethnography to vernacular conceptual analyses, and thus retool anthropology as a form of empirical philosophy. By exploring the consequences of this for the conception of social relationality, as well as the manner in which anthropologists relate to this sociality, I argue that an investigation of the pitch of ethnography can serve to make a pitch for ethnography.

Anna Portisch, Anthropology, SOAS/Brunel
Learning the craft of ethnography
In the context of apprenticeship studies, it has been pointed out that learning the technology of a practice involves more than learning a technical skill. Over and above learning to use a set of tools or techniques of the body, it is a way of connecting with the particular socio-historical context of that practice, and to contribute directly to its life and nature. Moreover, learning the technology of a practice is also to embark on a personal and educational process of identity formation. There are interesting parallels between learning to conduct ethnographic research and undertaking an apprenticeship in a specialised craft. Learning the craft of ethnography however, is distinctive in the sense that it can involve a dual intentionality and outcome. On the one hand, its stated goal is to understand others’ practices, beliefs and knowledge about the world through an active engagement in their daily lives and specialist activities, and through this process becoming more like them. On the other hand it involves becoming a specialist on a particular area, with a unique experiential basis for a particular kind of ethnographic knowledge; that is, becoming a type of representative, an observer and an outsider. The term "participant observation" well encapsulates this duality. It has often been argued that writing, and more specifically the theoretical, generalising and comparative aspects of the discipline, serve as distancing devices in the crafting of ethnographic accounts. From an apprenticeship perspective, this paper inquires into the learning process of conducting ethnographic research and argues that it is when theory is generated through this learning process that a unique ‘pitch’ emerges.

Nanneke Redclift, Anthropology, UCL
Modest Witness? situated and situating ethnography
The anthropology of south-east Mexico is a rich field for considering the interplay between history and representation. The paper explores the changing positions of observer and observed over the last hundred years, in a context in which the social relations of the production of knowledge have been transformed. Issues of time, space, scale and difference emerge as key questions in a region where epistemological struggles are central to local practice.

Nathaniel Roberts, Anthropology, LSE/Columbia
Ethnographic particularism and the question of relevance, or, Ethnography for, as, and against anthropology
The essay asks how an ethnographic study of usually very few people, in a particular place and time, can be of any significance at all. Minimally, of course, it may be seen as providing yet another piece in the puzzle, as filling a gap in a gradually accumulating “world picture” of human diversity. More satisfyingly, an ethnographic study may supply a newly illuminating example of, or surprising exception to, some previously studied social or cultural form, or, better still, may even suggest some entirely new problem for anthropological investigation. But to confine the question of ethnographic relevance to the question of what is relevant to the discipline of anthropology is surely trivial. At the same time, ethnographies aspiring to other modalities of relevance —political, ethical, therapeutic, or that of policy formation, for example— risk being merely reactive to problems formulated outside the discipline, and thereby forfeiting the critical distance which anthropology can, ideally, provide. Focusing only on the first of these possibilities (i.e. of ethnography’s political relevance), the essay attempts to answer the question of relevance in terms of a tension between disciplinary anthropology, and anthropology in a broader historical sense (of which disciplinary anthropology is but one part), in which political legitimacy, knowledge, morality, etc. are grounded in the figure of “man”.

Lisa Wedeen, Political Science, University of Chicago
Ethnography as Interpretive Enterprise
Although anthropology today in no way entertains the notion of an objective observer central to the naturalism of old, nor does it betray the hyper-preoccupation with the individual anthropologist’s own experience in the field so characteristic of the 1970s and early 1980s. Instead, and largely as a result of Foucault’s influence, there is an abiding attention to epistemological reflexivity, to the ways in which concepts and styles of reasoning, as well as scholarly commitments, are historically situated and enmeshed in power relationships. Unlike the testimonial writings that made the ethnographer as person a primary object of her own narrative, the Foucauldian turn allowed anthropologists (as well as historians and philosophers) to analyze the discursive and institutional dynamics of scholarly production. Instead of searching for truths, Foucauldian analysts examine how truth claims work.
In “Ethnography as an Interpretive Enterprise,” I focus on the discipline of political science’s vexed relationship to the interpretive practices of anthropology. The paper contends that political scientists deserted anthropology just when anthropologists were generating important epistemological lessons about reflexivity and power—the latter being a primary concern of politics. Those lessons invite asking, for example: What sorts of disciplinary practices give particular research questions and methods the imprimatur of excellence while others are deemed unworthy? What are the practices that bound and normalize a discipline, enabling certain kinds of knowledge to thrive while foreclosing or de-authorizing other ways of knowing? What are the institutional conditions of fieldwork’s intellectual production, in particular? In this essay, I do not tackle these questions directly, but use them as an orienting device, as a way of considering political science’s interests in science, the possible relationships to ethnography in light of these scientific convictions, and strategies for pursuing ethnographic work in the discipline. I then identify some problems with current conceptualizations of ethnography among political scientists and offer suggestions for addressing them.

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