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1. Ethnography and Literature: A History of Their Convergence
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"For the first time in the long and fruitful relationship between literature and science," David Porush writes, "literature actually has the means to meet science on its own territory in a contest concerning which epistemological activity does a better job of telling the truth" (373). The context for this "contest" is "postmodernism." For Porush, "literary postmodernism and scientific postmodernism [are best seen as] two aspects of a single enterprise" (376–7), an "enterprise," moreover, in which currently the balance has tipped in literature's direction. This is because, as Porush continues,

First, postmodernism places the self-conscious activities of the human observer/scientist/teller—and consequently the making of narratives—in the center of things. Second, postmodernism stresses the paradoxical power of structures of information and codes. That is, while the postmodern position states that codes create reality , postmodernism does not trust codes to tell the whole truth. . . . they do a good job of delivering information, but they are less successful at capturing an underlying inexpressible, inchoate, silent realm where meaning resides. (377)


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As Rorty and others have cheerfully submitted philosophy to literature, finding it advantageous for one reason or another to abandon the hopes—as I have said above—of a variety of logics and dialectics to the situation of an all-pervasive person- and occasion-governed rhetoric—so, now, Porush will bring science into (what he understands as) literature's empire. I will only a little worry the question of what "truth" can possibly mean in comments like these.[1] For if one really does believe that "codes create reality ," it is difficult to see how "truth" would be an operative term at all. How could such a view establish criteria for determining "which epistemological activity does a better job of telling the truth" (373, my emphasis), or for distinguishing "the whole truth" (377, my emphasis) from what James Clifford calls "partial [truths]—committed and incomplete?" (1986 7) "Truth" for Porush predictably elides to "meaning," but even so, it may be worth noting that, so far as literary aspirations in these regards are concerned, secular literature has only occasionally (and mostly from the latter eighteenth century forward) been interested in incursions into "underlying inexpressible, inchoate, silent realm[s]," in the interest of "capturing"—but I must here remark the belligerently imperial nature of Porush's discourse—the transcodal, as it were—for all that literature's capacity successfully to colonize such "realm[s]"—may currently be more attractive to "scientists" than it has heretofore been.

Porush does not question the premise that "meaning resides" in the "underlying . . . silent realm" he posits, sim-


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ply taking it as axiomatic that whatever we may mean by meaning does, in point of fact, live there . But his assumption, which I would characterize as a turn to mystico-religious and away from secular perspectives, is no doubt shared by many today in the context of postmodernism. Porush's reference to "literature and science" as "epistemological activit[ies]" (my emphasis) goes a ways toward explaining why it is that many of the social scientific workers called ethnographers have, of late, become particularly interested in literature. (Literary people have become interested in what the ethnographers do, as well—but less so.)

An obvious starting point for the current convergence is Clifford Geertz's self-interrogation of 1973. Asking, what does the ethnographer do? Geertz answered, he writes.[2] (I assume she does, too.) If it is indeed writing that is the ethnographer's central or preeminent activity, then clearly it is to the practice and product of that activity that we must attend, to its "signature" or individual author-specific nature, as Geertz would further state, and its "discourse" or style-specific nature (1988 9). Thus in 1982 we have the publication of an essay by Dick Cushman and George Marcus called "Ethnographies as Texts." Here, Cushman and Marcus, with all the excitement of Molière's bourgeois gentilhomme discovering that he has been speaking prose all his life, recognized that ethnographies were, indeed, texts, and that therefore "rhetorical analysis is prior to an evaluation of truth claims [the ostensible priority of "science"] because explanation and theory building cannot escape the rhetoric of the language in which they are expressed" (56n).

This implicit acknowledgment of a necessary attention to literary matters came more then fifteen years after Roland


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Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan, among others, at a Johns Hopkins University conference,[3] had announced to the Americans that just about everything was texte . And it came nine years after Hayden White's Metahistory had denied the possibility of any "truth claims" in the writing of history, so far as these might be evaluated according to more or less agreed-upon standards of verifiability or falsifiability. For White, there simply could be no objectively valid "truth claims" in a discipline like history, or, for that matter, in a discipline like ethnography "not yet reduced (or elevated) to the status of a genuine science [e.g., with agreed upon definitions and quantifiable data, where] . . . truth remains the captive of the linguistic mode in which it seeks to grasp the outline of objects inhabiting its field of perception" (1973 xi). This subordination of logical and empirical operations to the rhetorical, for White, meant that we were constrained to base our acceptance or rejection of any social scientific account whatever on strictly esthetic or moral grounds, for "there are no apodictically certain theoretical grounds on which one can legitimately claim an authority for any one of the [possible modes of historiography] . . . over the others as being more 'realistic"' (1973 xii), that is to say, more scientific. As White puts it in the epigraph (from Roland Barthes) to his most recent book, "Le fait n'a jamais qu'une existence linguistique" : a fact never has anything but linguistic existence (1987 n.p.). It should be noted here that the epistemology of science all these writers use—perhaps unconsciously, or perhaps strictly for polemical purposes—is essentially a Newtonian or "realistic"/positivistic one. The relativistic


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paradigms of Einsteinian/Heisenbergian science of the 1920s, the response to relativist science in the cybernetic revolution of the 1940s, and the various ongoing projects of postmodernist science, all go unmentioned.

Fully aware of the radical, or as the poststructural theorists of the period would (cheerfully enough) say, the abysmal implications of White's confinement of history to the "prison house of language"—a full-blown postmodernist move—Cushman and Marcus referred their readers to "sources of literary criticism that might be useful to a perspective on ethnographic writing," among these the work of Barthes, Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Raymond Williams. (But Williams's insights, it seems to me, would not easily be consistent with those of his cited French contemporaries.) And Cushman and Marcus briefly surveyed what they called "Ethnographic Writing Experiments" (58) as these seemed to mark a dissatisfaction with what they called "realist ethnography."

In 1986, Marcus, now with James Clifford, used the etymology of the word ethnography itself for the title of their coedited book of essays titled Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography . Although the tone of the introduction and in some of the contributor's essays tends to be one of dismissing or, at least, of passing beyond Geertz, still, the editors and contributors essentially develop and expand upon the implications of Geertz's determination that what is central to ethnographic practice is ultimately the textualization of interpretations deriving from particular experiences/encounters. In 1987, we have the publication of Anthropology as Cultural Critique by Marcus, once again, and Michael Fischer, which, among its many inadequately theorized assertions and recommendations, turns to the Russian Formalist critics of literature of the early part


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of this century, and takes their central concept, ostranenie , translated usually as defamiliarization or, simply, making strange , as authorizing experimentation and innovation in the writing of ethnography—a practice that might or might not (Marcus and Fischer are curiously timid radicals, in these regards, as Marcus and Cushman were earlier) turn ethnographic writing from its traditional status as a "document of the occult" to an "occult document." I have referred once again, here, to the title of Stephen Tyler's essay in Writing Culture , one that defines the postmodern project of ethnography as indeed a shift from the production of documents of the occult to the production of occult documents.

Such documents—they would be conformable to Porush's enthusiasms—would subsume all claims to "scientific" realism or "truth" to an essentially "literary" evocativeness. In Tyler's words, a postmodernist ethnography "describes no knowledge and produces no action," instead transcending these "by evoking what cannot be known discursively or performed perfectly." This "Evocation," for Tyler, "is neither presentation nor representation;" it is "beyond truth and immune to the judgment of performance" (123). Occult document to be sure: for if one is to take Tyler seriously, ethnography's postmodern move beyond science (again, a science that is a straw man, one whose positivistic paradigm has long since been abandoned in theory, if not always in practice) here passes beyond all literature except that which specifically attempts to give voice to the mystico-religious "silent realm" of the inexpressible, and inchoate—which, indeed, in David Porush's account, the postmodernist scientist also values.

Of course, by 1973 and 1982, my points of beginning for this subject, a great many other developments had already


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occurred to prepare the current convergence of ethnographic and literary concerns. No account of this subject ought leave out the extraordinary conference held at Indiana University in 1958, which brought together anthropologists like the young Dell Hymes and Conrad Voegelin, literary critics of international reputation like René Wellek, I. A. Richards, and William Wimsatt, and, of course, linguists like Roman Jackobson, and Thomas Sebeok of Indiana's Research Center in Anthropology, Folklore, and Linguistics. The volume of papers from the conference edited by Sebeok and published in 1960 contained the influential "Concluding Statement" by Jakobson titled "Linguistics and Poetics." In it, Jakobson called for collaboration between the linguist and the literary critic, a call not for the estheticization of science, but, to the contrary, for certain scientization of literature. Only two years later, Jakobson would collaborate with an old friend, none other than Claude Lévi-Strauss, on an analysis of Charles Baudelaire's sonnet, "Les Chats." The essay was published in the French journal, L'Homme . In introducing their essay, the authors acknowledged that

It will perhaps be found surprising that a review of anthropology should publish a study devoted to a French poem of the XIXth century. Yet the explanation is simple. A linguist and an ethnologist decided to combine their efforts in an attempt to understand the creation of a Baudelairian sonnet, because they had found themselves independently confronted by complementary problems. (In DeGeorge and DeGeorge 125)

These "problems," of course, seemed amenable to solution by the methods of what was called structuralism, methods that, at least for a time, appeared useful equally to linguists,


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literary critics, and ethnologists. Lévi-Strauss's use of these methods for the study of myth, and, as well, his apparent willingness to intermix such seemingly disparate genres as autobiography and ethnography in texts like Tristes Tropiques , appealed for obvious enough reasons to literary critics. One reason for the appeal of linguistic and ethnographic structuralism, such as it was, to American literary critics was a certain fatigue with New Critical textual explication, the dominant critical paradigm from the latter twenties into the fifties.

There is no doubt that the New Criticism, whatever else it did or didn't do, taught generations of American students of literature to read carefully, and to find citable bases in the language of a poem (more rarely of a story or novel) for what E. D. Hirsch, by 1960, was calling its "meaning." It did little, however, to help the critic determine the "significance"—I again cite Hirsch, who attributes his understanding of the distinction between "meaning" and "significance" to Husserl—of that meaning.[4] For help in that regard, prior to the appearance of structuralism (which, indeed, offered no help at all in these regards), the alternatives to New Critical close reading were Northrop Frye's version of myth criticism, announced in The Anatomy of Criticism , in 1957, and a variety of contextualist, historicist approaches, either Leavisite or more homegrown. (I am thinking of the work of Roy Harvey Pearce and a number of Americanists, particularly.) The first of these seemed to lead directly to religion, the second to sociology, or even—dreaded fate—to politics . (This is, recall, the late fifties and


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earlier sixties.) No wonder, then, that imported linguistic and anthropological structuralism might be appealing.

So appealing that Susan Sontag, in 1966, could call her essay examining Lévi-Strauss's early work, "The Anthropologist as Hero." What Sontag did not like about Lévi-Strauss's work, interestingly enough, was its refusal to relinquish claims to some kind of scientific status—a status Frye's own system most certainly courted. Throughout the fifties and sixties, I would suggest, there was an ambivalence—reactions, that is, of attraction and repulsion—on the part of literary people to science, but a clearly growing attraction to literature (with a concomitant rejection of science) on the part of social scientists.

Thus, for the student of literature in the sixties there were a number of anthropologist heroes—or at least ethnographers who worked in ways that (themselves influenced by literary study) appeared congenial to literary critics. I will mention only Victor Turner's dramatistic and performative studies of ritual, and Clifford Geertz's exposition, essay by essay, of an interpretive ethnography, anthropology as "thick description," in the phrase Geertz took from the philosopher Gilbert Ryle. By 1973, in "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture," Geertz could explicitly announce, "The concept of culture I espouse . . . is essentially a semiotic one . . . and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after" (5). It is one of the ironies of anthropology's recent history in America, I suppose, that Geertz should specifically criticize, for his espousal of an "ethnoscience, componential analysis, or cognitive anthropology" (1973 11) still "in search of law," none other than


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Stephen Tyler, whose attraction to a transcendent and evocative ethnography has all the passion of a recent conversion.

Of course Tyler, in his earlier enthusiasm for truth and law in anthropology, along with a number of other ethnoscientists or philosophers of the social sciences such as May Brodbeck,[5] was only carrying forward a call to make anthropology a bona fide science that was little more than a half-century old. And as these people did so, in the fifties, they encountered what I have remarked in Geertz, a strong reaction against claims to science and law in anthropology and a turn to semiotics, hermeneutics, and interpretation. This, to repeat, occurred at exactly the moment when literary people themselves became fascinated by semiotics, hermeneutics, and interpretation, most particularly of a structuralist sort—which, paradoxically enough, they partly valued for the scientific authority or at least the scientific aura structuralist methods appeared to bestow on literary studies. To employ Raymond Williams's useful terms once more, we have a curious mix of "residual," "emergent," and "dominant" values, where "science," as I believe, is the dominant disciplinary value of the period, and where (vaguely defined) esthetic values—"thickness" in description serving to indicate what once (as we shall see just below) had been called "atmosphere," and which would in our time be called evocativeness—have both a residual and emergent function. This would help explain the appeal of the Canadian Frye and the Frenchman Lévi-Strauss to Americans, inasmuch as both of them invoke scientific categories (for literary criticism and ethnographic explanation) while privileging the study of myth. It would help explain as well the


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attraction to semiotics on the part of literary people, for whom this study appears to be far more scientific in its methodology than anything they are used to, while for social scientists, it seems to open the door to interpretive/explicative rather than explanatory results.

I will only add that these disciplinary developments occur in the context of independence movements in the colonized worlds of Africa and Southeast Asia, movements which present the most direct sorts of challenges to "scientific" models of knower and known as epistemological justification for the maintenance of differential power relations, and in the context of American post-Sputnik anxiety, spurring aggressive hard-scientism in the most traditional mode. More needs to be said about both of these, apparently contradictory, developments. Nonetheless, I will, with all necessary, if inadequate, apologies, turn to a more distant history—and an essentially cultural rather than materiopolitical history.


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1. Ethnography and Literature: A History of Their Convergence
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