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1. Ethnography and Literature: A History of Their Convergence
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Inasmuch as the term literature, from Latin, littera , letter, for years in the West referred to whatever information a given culture wished to preserve and transmit by the technology of writing, it might be said that ethno-graph -y in its earliest manifestations was inevitably a part of literature. Thus, there was a time when all who were literate, who knew their letters, knew also the Latin of Caesar's account of the tripartite nature of Gaul and his descriptions of the Gauls themselves. It seems reasonable to say that in one form or another, ethnography most certainly existed in the classical period. Indeed, Tacitus's De Germania , a study of Teuton people appearing in the year 98 of the Common Era was, as one writer has called it, a political ethnography, for


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Tacitus was concerned about the threat that restlessness among the Germans might pose to the Empire's borders. If one wished to show anthropology's relation—perhaps an inevitable, most certainly a very longstanding relation—to imperialism, one could easily begin with Tacitus. (But Tacitus, like Thucydides, was also in some measure offering a criticism of the direction his own society was taking; so if his name may signal an early instance of imperial anthropology it may also signal an early instance of "anthropology as cultural critique.")

Although all writing, almost until the latter eighteenth century, was, as I have said, nominally literature, there did nonetheless exist a distinction between what was then called poetry—or poesie —the term for imaginative and affective writing (literature) and the discourses, most particularly, of history and philosophy. That epistemological distinctions among these types of writing were, or ought to be, clear and well-defined does not seem to have been nearly so important to ancient thought as it was to become later. In Foucault's useful terms, it was not so much whether statements were true ("scientific"), vrai , but whether they were dans le vrai , whether they met the appropriate conditions, epistemologically but also socially—"discursively"—to be taken seriously as making "truth claims." The operative distinction was not between truth (e.g., real, scientific, actual, empirically verifiable, etc.) and fiction (made up, invented, wished, dreamed, imagined, etc.) but, rather, between truth and error; rudely, to mix Foucault with Lévi-Strauss, between what was thinkable or "good to think" as opposed to impensable . At least until the late Renaissance, the blurring of genres that Geertz has remarked upon as particularly a development of our time was more nearly the rule than the exception.


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Thus the "voyage narratives" of the sixteenth century recounting European explorations of the New World, are an extraordinary mix of "ethnography" and "literature," of what probably appears to the modern reader as careful observation and description—the truth—on the one hand, and of the wildest assertions, which, from our present perspective, couldn't possibly be true. Yet what strikes us as inevitably "poetical" or fantastic imaginings in these texts—encounters with people ten feet tall, with four arms, or breathing fire—are also offered on the "ethnographic authority," in James Clifford's justly celebrated phrase, of the author's own experience, an experience which, for all our conviction that it "couldn't really have been that way," by conforming to the epistemic assumptions of its age, may perfectly well present "truth claims." (Hence the logic of the Church's rejection of Galileo's "discovery" of sun spots, and the refusal to accept an invitation to look through the glass and "see for oneself" as in any way relevant to the subject at hand.) There were enough of these narratives by the latter sixteenth century to spur the Reverend Richard Hakluyt—for purposes, it should be noted, that were not strictly those of a disinterested curiosity—to begin editing and collating them, a task taken up, after Hakluyt's death, by the Reverend Samuel Purchas, who published his massive Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes in 1625. As Mary Louise Pratt has recently shown (1986),[6] the mix of personal "narration" and cultural "description" established in these narratives continues to shape the presentational strategies of ethnographies from early in the twentieth century up to the present, for all that they operate with different epistemic premises than their predecessors;


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for all that, at least until the current postmodern reaction, they might claim to see things "as they really were," scientifically, realistically, and so on.

Responses to the seventeenth-century voyage narratives prompted what may be the earliest, or at least they are the best known, enunciations of what we would now call positions of cultural relativism and cultural absolutism or evolutionism, and both are by authors firmly established as "literary." I refer, first, to Michel de Montaigne, whose celebrated essay on the cannibals rhetorically asks how a people who punish by use of the rack and execute by drawing and quartering (this latter practice seized upon by Foucault for the beginning of his Discipline and Punish ) can denounce as "primitive" those who merely eat their slain enemies. And I refer to William Shakespeare, whose play The Tempest , known to have been performed in 1611, anagrammatizes the term cannibal for the character of Caliban, who is presented as man in the state of nature, a filthy, lustful brute, far inferior to the cultivated human products of civilization.[7]

Perhaps the first self-conscious attempts to separate literature and ethnography, rigorously to distinguish between art and science, the imagined and the real, fact and fiction occur in the eighteenth century. Broadly speaking, these define science in the ways we continue to know it best, in terms of its commitment to sequential ratiocinative steps, quantitative and methodological documentation, and to procedures that are at least theoretically replicable. This is to say that although the observer's unique personal experience could convey upon her account a certain ontological


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authority—the être là , or simple fact of her "being there"—its scientific (epistemological) authority would depend precisely upon the absence of its uniqueness; had others been there, they would have seen and concluded the same. To offer a single, well-known American example, I will mention Thomas Jefferson's celebrated reply, in his notes on the State of Virginia , published in the latter 1780s, to the Comte de Buffon, concerning the "productions mineral, vegetable, and animal" of the New World. In this text, Jefferson refuses to speak of anything he has not seen himself—and he invites other interested parties to come and see for themselves. It is not the richness of his deductive powers that is to be celebrated but, as it were, the richness of the material itself—material, he is proud to imply, that is peculiar to America.

This is hardly an adequate account of Jefferson as naturalist-scientist. I mean my few words to indicate the way in which, from Jefferson forward, America will stand as one of the world's foremost laboratories for anthropological science, a science Americans proceed to establish upon the basis of detailed first-hand study of the Indian. Through the nineteenth century, in the researches of Cadwallader Colden, and, particularly, of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, a massive amount of information (some of it accurate, some of it not) on the languages and cultures of Native peoples began to be assembled, culminating, from the middle of the nineteenth century forward, in the work of Lewis Henry Morgan.

Morgan was an amateur or freelancer, a retired lawyer inspired by enthusiasm and a growing curiosity; he was not, that is, like the older voyager, or missionary, or entrepreneurial writer, an ethnographer only as an accident of his employment by a church or government, a land sale or fur-


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trading company. Morgan might, therefore, claim for his work the sort of disinterestedness that was to become one of the cornerstones of the new commitment to objectivity and science in American ethnography toward the end of the nineteenth century. Thus, those like James Mooney who did work for interested parties—government agencies or the great museums—still could demonstrate their commitment to science by the suppression of subjective commentary of an ethical or esthetic nature, by the assemblage of massive quantities of detail observed firsthand, and by a tone or rhetorical stance in their published texts that confirmed the distance between themselves and the subjects of their researches. It seems to me that it is a failure or a refusal to respect most of these criteria that still makes Frank Hamilton Cushing, for example, a rather enigmatic figure in the history of American ethnography. (David Murray's Forked Tongues has much to say about this—as it does about translation, autobiography, and other matters I discuss. Murray's fine book appeared while this one was in press so that, except for this parenthesis, I do not make reference to it.)

A fuller account of these matters than I can give here is to be found in such volumes as the 1974 Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society edited by John Murra and called American Anthropology: The Early Years ; in the studies of Regna Darnell; in Robert Bieder's Science Encounters the Indian ; and in George Stocking's masterful Victorian Anthropology . [8] What cannot be left out, of course, is the advent of Franz Boas, whose name—probably more accurately than not (for all that I interrogate the nature of


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Boas's contribution to anthropology as a science in the chapter that follows)—is synonymous with the scientization of anthropology, according to a largely positivistic model intended to parallel if not quite mirror the meaning of science in pre-Einsteinian physics. Of course, in the years of Boas's mature production, Einsteinian relativism (if not Heisenbergian uncertainty) was very much part of the intellectual climate, and cultural relativism was from the first a cornerstone of the Boasian program. But I see not so much as a hint of epistemological relativism among the Boasians. This is yet another subject I can only glance at here. Suffice it to say that Boas's privileging of fieldwork over library work; his insistence upon some fair degree of competence in the language of his or her "people" on the part of the ethnographer; his rejection of the broadly deductive generalizations indulged in by the evolutionist practitioners of the so-called "comparative method," in favor of an inductive, particularist, and rigorously relativist method: all of these were linked to attaching to ethnographic work the authority of the hard sciences.

The scientization of ethnography under Boas paralleled its professionalization as this was directly linked to its academicization, its institutionalization, in the University. Boas, to be sure, began his career with the Berlin museum and had associations in this country with the Field and the American museums, but his enormous influence is directly associated with his almost half-century-long tenure (1896–1942) at Columbia University—during which time the government ethologists (particularly in the Bureau of American Ethnology under Major John Wesley Powell) and the museum ethnologists declined in influence. Only Clark Wissler, so far as I know, was both a Boasian and a "museum


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man." By 1926, as George Stocking has noted, every academic department of anthropology in the United States was headed by one of Boas's students.[9]

Now, for all that was gained by the linkage of anthropological professionalism and anthropological academism in the name, to be sure, of anthropological science, there was one important loss, the consideration of which will bring us back to literature. I mean to point to the fact that the professionalization and academicization of anthropology were achieved at some cost to what I will simply call its public significance and utility. Most of the collections made by the museum anthropologists were, after all, available for public viewing; the ethnographic data gathered by the anthropologists attached to the government bureaus were available for use in making public policy. And, with whatever qualifications we might want to add, Americans did actually go to the museums, did actually feel the government was in some substantial measure "theirs."[10] But to whom did the data gathered by the Columbia University anthropology department belong? Of what use was it to anyone but the academic anthropologist and his or her students, a number of whom would themselves perhaps become anthropologists, and study and teach, turn and turn again. It is exactly the success of anthropological science in achieving the status of disinterested professionalism that threatens to render it trivial or irrelevant. The issue to be addressed here is not epistemological so much as sociopolitical. Boasian social scientists, as I shall have further occasion to explain in the following essay, are secure, or, at the least, highly optimistic


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about the anthropologist's ability to arrive at the scientific truth; what they decently wonder about is the social uses of such truth.

Two sorts of response to the problem of academic anthropology and social significance seem to have developed. One was given in Boas's own citizenly practice. For although Boas pretty thoroughly avoided the statement of theoretical implications or the suggestion of practical applications in the vast majority of his published work, some of that work vigorously deployed scientific findings to combat, for example, racism and anti-Semitism in American society. Boas believed in the public role of the academic, professional scientist; he wrote letters to editors, and spoke out on behalf of his beliefs and principles, never as a scientist—for Boas took for granted, in a way I think we cannot any longer, the value-free nature of science—but always as a citizen informed by science. Academic anthropology, then, could show the way toward a more clear-sighted society, founded upon the best modern scientific information rather than upon ancient prejudice. The career of Margaret Mead, Boas's student, may, in the future, remain most interesting to us precisely as developing this line of response; that is to say, whatever the academic-scientific status of Mead's data from Samoa, the social force of her prescriptions ostensibly based upon that data was substantial.

Another sort of response to the separation of academic science from public significance came in the attempt on the part of some anthropologists to engage the interest of an audience not strictly professional by attempting literary forms of writing, couching some of their observations about Native people and cultures in autobiographies elicited from them, and, most particularly, in fictional narratives about those cultures and people. Whatever the philosophical in-


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fluences on Boas's thought and on that of his students, I believe that the view of literature they had would have inclined them toward the traditional capacity of literature to provoke the reader to moral imagination, and thence to moral action. They would not, if I am at all correct, have seen the function of literature as merely to entertain or amuse, not even to put one transcendentally in touch with the "beautiful." If this is so, then the esthetic of the Boasian milieu would have been as old-fashioned as its epistemology, for—as I shall have further occasion to note—it would be based upon romantic-realistic perspectives at just the moment when these were being abandoned for modernist perspectives. To say this, I hope it is clear, is not to say that either the esthetic or the epistemology was hopelessly mistaken. Fuller biographical work on Boas, Radin, and Kroeber is necessary to determine whether the speculative intuitions I have offered are more accurate than not.

As early as 1913, Paul Radin, of the first generation of Boas's students, had published "The Personal Reminiscences of a Winnebago Indian"; this was followed by "The Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian" in 1920. In the introduction to that text, Radin noted that "For a long time most ethnologists have realized that the lack of 'atmosphere' in their descriptions is a very serious and fundamental defect," a defect, according to Radin, that "could only be properly remedied by having a native himself give an account of his particular culture" (1920 1)—which account, to be sure, would be edited and actually published by the anthropologist. But Radin had published both "The Personal Reminiscences" and "The Autobiography" in scholarly journals, not the best way to reach a broad audience. Accordingly, he revised and expanded the 1920 "Autobiography," composed an introduction which began with the acknowledgment that


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"the common-sense man, the man in the street, has always been good-naturedly skeptical of the academically trained scholar" (xv), and published it as Crashing Thunder: The Autobiography of an American Indian in 1926 with the commercial publisher D. Appleton and Company of New York.[11] Although Boas himself, late in his life, was to deny the scientific usefulness of Indian autobiographies, noting them as good only for documenting "the perversion of truth by memory" (1943 335), a great many anthropological life histories continued to be recorded.

The other important linkage of ethnography and literature I want to mention comes through what I will call ethnographic fiction, a literary genre with ostensibly wider public appeal than the (developing) genres of professional ethnography. Here the example of Adolph Bandelier's novel The Delight Makers , published in 1890, serves as an important precursor. In his preface, Bandelier wrote that he

was prompted to perform the work by a conviction that however scientific works may tell the truth about the Indian, they exercise always a limited influence upon the general public; and to that public, in our country as well as abroad, the Indian has remained as good as unknown. By clothing sober facts in the garb of romance I have hoped to make the "Truth about the Pueblo Indians" more accessible to the public in general. (xxi)


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We may compare this statement to that of Boas's student Elsie Clews Parsons, in her preface to a volume she edited in 1922 called American Indian Life . In that book, Parsons offered no less than twenty-seven short fictional pieces by professional anthropologists focused on the cultures about which they had formerly published scientific papers. The final text is by Boas himself, his unique attempt, so far as I am aware, at writing fiction. Parsons asks:

Between these forbidding monographs [by the scientific anthropologists] and the legends of James Fenimore Cooper, what is there to read for a girl . . . or, in fact, for anyone who just wants to know more about Indians? (1)

It was "From these considerations," Parsons explains, that "this book was conceived." Like Bandelier before her, Parsons, like Boas's students generally, firmly adhered to a rigorous separation of literary "legends" from ethnographic "science," while being attracted to the possibility that science might use the novel's (apparently predictable and foreknown!) form and manner for its own purposes, purposes which might, indeed, be "just . . . to know more," for all that I would again propose that knowing more implies doing better. The important thing, as Alfred Kroeber, the first to take a Ph.D. in anthropology with Boas at Columbia, remarked in his introduction to Parsons's book, is to adopt "The method of . . . the historical novel, with emphasis on the history rather than the romance" (Parsons 13). In that introduction, Kroeber went on to praise Bandelier's Delight Makers —for all that Bandelier himself referred to his book not as a "historical novel" but as a romance.

What may be interesting to note from the point of view of literary history is that the anthropologists in their ele-


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vation of the novel over the "romance" or "legend" as the literary genre most congenial to—although still quite clearly distinguishable from—the realism of their science, are taking positions in a battle that long ago had been won. From somewhere around the time of Henry James's brief study called Hawthorne , in 1879, the realistic novel in this country began to take on an authority vastly superior to the romance in American literature. Bandelier's accommodation of his text to the romance is, in this regard, similarly belated; by 1890, romance means Cooper and Longfellow, if not necessarily Hawthorne, as they represent a tradition thoroughly out of fashion in an age ready to admire William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Edith Wharton. And by 1922, when Kroeber indicates his own approbation of the novel over the romance in his introduction to Parsons's book, even the realistic novel is in eclipse; 1922 is the year James Joyce's Ulysses , that masterpiece of a modernism bent on subverting the pretensions of realist fiction, was published. But it is also the year Bronislaw Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific was published, a text which has been said to instantiate a "modernist" anthropology, which, here, means a "scientific" anthropology, in line with a largely abandoned realism in the novel (not to say a realist/positivist science that atomic physics with its relativist findings also eclipses). To complicate matters further, we may note that 1922 is also the year T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" was published. Eliot's poem owed much to the work of Sir James Frazer—whose particular sort of "armchair anthropology" Malinowskian anthropology supposedly superseded.

This "out-of-phaseness,"[12] as the anthropologist Edwin Ardener has called it, between literature and ethnography,


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even as literature and ethnography importantly influenced one another all through the twentieth century, currently continues in Marcus and Fischer's turn to the Russian Formalists and to their encouragement of what they (Marcus and Fischer) call modernist experimentation in contemporary ethnographic writing. To call for modernism today is quite as belated as Bandelier's turn to the literary romance or Kroeber's to the historical novel, inasmuch as the experiments of modernism have themselves, for many, become old hat, monumentalized and stultified, so that the genuinely new appears to take form in a postmodernism that is itself already more than two decades old—a postmodernism that may be the continuator of a modernism whose revolutionary potential has been more nearly occluded than ended, for all that most of the present-day ethnographers—Tyler, and others—interested in it have embraced only the postmodern break with modernism (see chapter 2).

Not only Parsons, but Ruth Underhill and Ella Cara Deloria, among anthropologists in the Boasian milieu, wrote ethnographic novels, always marking these off, as Boas insisted they could and should be marked, from their truly "scientific" work. Thus in 1939, Underhill published a scientifically proper Papago ethnography, the Social Organization of Papago Indians , and followed it, in 1940, with a novel about these people, Hawk Over Whirlpools . Deloria, a Dakota from the Yankton Reservation, who had worked with Boas in 1915 and 1928, after a great many years devoted to the scientific study of Dakota language and culture, sometime in the 1940s set to work on the novel that would be called Waterlily (1988). According to Raymond DeMallie, in his afterword to the book, it was Boas and Ruth Benedict who suggested she attempt the work. Other of Boas's students, in particular Ruth Benedict and Edward Sapir, also had a strong penchant for literary work, both of


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them writing and exchanging poetry (some of which Benedict published under the name of Anne Singleton). Sapir's book of poems, Dreams and Gibes , appeared in 1917.

All of those I have named, whatever their attraction to literary pursuits, did keep their art distinct from their scientific pursuits, pursuits which, for the most part, defined their working lives. Nor is it clear whether—or how much—the injunction to keep literature and ethnography, art and science apart caused these second-generation Boasians pain. This is not the case with the last of Boas's students I must mention here, Zora Neale Hurston. Hurston studied with Boas and with Benedict at Barnard College, from which she graduated in 1928. Although she admired "Papa Franz," whom she referred to as the greatest anthropologist alive, Hurston's major was English, not anthropology; and her major achievement came in the writing of literature, not ethnography. Thus a text like Hurston's novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God , for all that it is rich in ethnographic detail, could not fairly be categorized strictly as ethnographic fiction—an appropriate enough appellative for The Delight Makers, Hawk Over Whirlpools , or Waterlily , all of which, to be sure, are books I admire. Unlike these latter, Hurston's novel is more nearly modernist in its esthetic—its commitment to verbal and linguistic richness and ingenuity, and a "poetics" very different from realist poetics or prosaics—and in its intentionality, at least partly animated by the concern of her friends associated with the Harlem Renaissance, to show that the "negro" may be the subject of "high" literary culture.

To call Their Eyes Were Watching God a "masterpiece" rather than a "mere" example of "ethnographic fiction" would require an excursus on evaluative standards that would take us too far afield just here. Perhaps it may be all right, if not quite adequate, to say that the range of its


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possible interest to the reader—its portrait of Florida's rural black culture, its version of a highly elaborated vernacular speech with a determinedly poetic narrative style privileging the spoken over the written, and, of course, its questioning of accepted gender relations—qualify it for comparison to the most interesting American novels, and make a strong claim for its inclusion in the canon of American literature.

Even in the ethnography she published, Hurston regularly threatened to collapse what was still seen as the hard-won distinction between science and art. Her Mules and Men , a study of southern black folklore published in 1935, was legitimated as "science" thanks to a single-page preface provided by Boas—after he had authenticated all the facts. Hurston's Tell My Horse , of 1938, an account of visits to Jamaica and Haiti (where she wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God ), received no such legitimation—indeed, its manner of proceeding did not permit that—and as a result, as late as 1977, Robert Hemenway, Hurston's first (and, to date, her only) biographer could call Tell My Horse Hurston's poorest book. It is exactly this book, however, that seems to me likely to be of special interest to ethnographic and literary theorists. Hurston's persistent discomfort with the stance of detached, scientific, professionally disinterested observation, a stance upon which Boas insisted, now may be seen as contributing to a redefinition of ethnography, one that places it more comfortably in our present moment of ethnographic and literary convergence than in its actual historical moment.


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