Ethnography: A Theoretically Oriented Practice [1st ed.] 9783030517199, 9783030517205

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xi
Ethnography: A Theoretically Oriented Practice Introduction (Vincenzo Matera, Angela Biscaldi)....Pages 1-18
Front Matter ....Pages 19-19
Ethnography Before Ethnography: Genesis and Developments of Fieldwork in North America (Enzo Vinicio Alliegro)....Pages 21-49
Before and After Science: Radcliffe-Brown, British Social Anthropology, and the Relationship Between Field Research, Ethnography, and Theory (Alessandro Mancuso)....Pages 51-80
“Ethnography in France”: Ethnographic Practices and Theories in Marcel Griaule Between the Empirical and Rhetorical (Angela Biscaldi, Vincenzo Matera)....Pages 81-101
The Structural Formula of the Team: Reflections on Ernesto de Martino’s Ethnographic Method (Giovanni Pizza)....Pages 103-125
Front Matter ....Pages 127-127
Illusion of Immediate Knowledge or Spiritual Exercise? The Dialogic Exchange and Pierre Bourdieu’s Ethnography (Ferdinando Fava)....Pages 129-158
The Bridge and the Dance: Situational Analysis in Anthropology (Marco Gardini, Luca Rimoldi)....Pages 159-179
Politics Within Anthropology (Vincenzo Matera)....Pages 181-206
Stumbling Blocks: The Irruption of the Interpretive Approach in Twentieth-Century Anthropology (Patrizia Resta)....Pages 207-228
Front Matter ....Pages 229-229
The Anthropologist’s Eye: Ethnography, Visual Practices, Images (Francesco Faeta)....Pages 231-261
Dennis and Barbara Tedlock: The Dialogic Turn in Anthropology (Angela Biscaldi)....Pages 263-276
Ethnography and Embodiment (Ivo Quaranta)....Pages 277-291
Exploring Mobility Through Mobility: Some of the Methodological Challenges of Multi-sited Ethnography in the Study of Migration (Bruno Riccio)....Pages 293-309
Front Matter ....Pages 311-311
Participant Observation: The Personal Commitment in Native Life—A Problematic Methodological Topos (Gabriella D’Agostino)....Pages 313-340
The Weberian Line of Anthropology: George Marcus from Writing Culture to Design (Alessandro Simonicca)....Pages 341-370
Making the Invisible Ethnography Visible: The Peculiar Relationship Between Italian Anthropology and Feminism (Michela Fusaschi)....Pages 371-393
Beyond the Field: Ethnography, Theory, and Writing in Anthropology (Fabio Dei)....Pages 395-415
Back Matter ....Pages 417-429

Citation preview

Ethnography A Theoretically Oriented Practice

Edited by Vincenzo Matera Angela Biscaldi

Ethnography

Vincenzo Matera · Angela Biscaldi Editors

Ethnography A Theoretically Oriented Practice

Editors Vincenzo Matera Department of Cultural Heritage University of Bologna Ravenna Campus, Italy

Angela Biscaldi Department of Social and Political Sciences University of Milan Milan, Italy

ISBN 978-3-030-51719-9 ISBN 978-3-030-51720-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51720-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

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Ethnography: A Theoretically Oriented Practice Introduction Vincenzo Matera and Angela Biscaldi

Part I

2

3

4

1

Grounds for Sociocultural Anthropology: USA, UK, FR, IT

Ethnography Before Ethnography: Genesis and Developments of Fieldwork in North America Enzo Vinicio Alliegro Before and After Science: Radcliffe-Brown, British Social Anthropology, and the Relationship Between Field Research, Ethnography, and Theory Alessandro Mancuso “Ethnography in France”: Ethnographic Practices and Theories in Marcel Griaule Between the Empirical and Rhetorical Angela Biscaldi and Vincenzo Matera

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51

81

v

vi

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CONTENTS

The Structural Formula of the Team: Reflections on Ernesto de Martino’s Ethnographic Method Giovanni Pizza

Part II

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Anthropology (Theory) vs Ethnography (Fieldwork)

Illusion of Immediate Knowledge or Spiritual Exercise? The Dialogic Exchange and Pierre Bourdieu’s Ethnography Ferdinando Fava The Bridge and the Dance: Situational Analysis in Anthropology Marco Gardini and Luca Rimoldi

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Politics Within Anthropology Vincenzo Matera

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Stumbling Blocks: The Irruption of the Interpretive Approach in Twentieth-Century Anthropology Patrizia Resta

Part III

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103

129

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Visual, Dialogical, Sensorial, Multi-sited Ethnography

The Anthropologist’s Eye: Ethnography, Visual Practices, Images Francesco Faeta

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Dennis and Barbara Tedlock: The Dialogic Turn in Anthropology Angela Biscaldi

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CONTENTS

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Ethnography and Embodiment Ivo Quaranta

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Exploring Mobility Through Mobility: Some of the Methodological Challenges of Multi-sited Ethnography in the Study of Migration Bruno Riccio

Part IV 14

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293

Deconstructions

Participant Observation: The Personal Commitment in Native Life—A Problematic Methodological Topos Gabriella D’Agostino

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The Weberian Line of Anthropology: George Marcus from Writing Culture to Design Alessandro Simonicca

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Making the Invisible Ethnography Visible: The Peculiar Relationship Between Italian Anthropology and Feminism Michela Fusaschi Beyond the Field: Ethnography, Theory, and Writing in Anthropology Fabio Dei

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Author Index

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Subject Index

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Notes on Contributors

Enzo Vinicio Alliegro (Ph.D.) is Associate Professor of anthropological disciplines at the University of Naples Federico II. His study interests are focused on the history of anthropology—both Italian and North American—historical and symbolic anthropology, anthropology of the territory and the environment in crisis. He is author of the book Terraferma. Un’altra Basilicata tra stereotipi, identità e [sotto]sviluppo (2019). Angela Biscaldi (Ph.D.) is Associate Professor at the Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Milano. Her research focuses on ethnography of communication, with particular emphasis on performativity, agentivity and indexicality in everyday educational practices. She is coauthor, with Vincenzo Matera, of the book Antropologia dei social media (2019). Gabriella D’Agostino (Ph.D.) is Full Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Palermo University, Dipartimento Culture e Società. She is author of the book Sous le traces. Anthropologie et contemporanéité (2018), and Editor of the journal of Human Sciences “Archivio Antropologico Mediterraneo” https://journals.openedition.org/aam/. http://www.arc hivioantropologicomediterraneo.it/. Fabio Dei is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology in the University of Pisa. He is Editor of the new Journal Rivista di antropologia contemporanea. He is author of the book Cultura popolare in Italia. Da Gramsci all’Unesco (2018). ix

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Francesco Faeta is Full Professor of Cultural Anthropology. He has taught at the University of Calabria and the University of Messina and now teaches, as an external teacher, at the School of Specialization for the DEA Cultural Heritage of the University “La Sapienza” of Rome. He is author of the book La passione secondo Cerveno (2019). Ferdinando Fava (Ph.D.) is Associate Professor of Cultural and Urban Anthropology, at the Department of Scienze Storiche, Geografiche e dell’Antichità of the University of Padova, and “Chercheur Membre Statutaire” CNRS-UMR 7218 LAVUE (Laboratoire Architecture Ville Urbanisme Environnement) Équipe LAA. He is author of the book Qui suis-je pour mes interlocuteurs ? Préface de Marc Augé. Avant-propos de Monique Selim (2015). Michela Fusaschi (Ph.D.) is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Sciences of the University of Roma Tre (Italy). She is one of the main authors in the anthropology of the FGM/C practices, proposing an interpretative approach based on the concepts of bio-politics and moral economy. She is author of the book Corpo non si nasce, si diventa. Antropologiche di genere nella globalizzazione (2018). Marco Gardini is enlisted as Researcher at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Pavia. He is author of the book La Terra Contesa. Conflitti fondiari e lavoro agricolo in Togo (2017). Alessandro Mancuso (Ph.D.) is Assistant Professor at the University of Palermo (Italy). He did a long fieldwork among the Wayuu people of Colombian Guajira. He is author of the book Altre persone. Antropologia, visioni del mondo e ontologie indigene (2018). Vincenzo Matera is Full Professor of Cultural and Social anthropology at the University of Bologna, Department of Cultural Heritage (Ravenna Campus). He also teaches Social history of culture at USI (Università della Svizzera Italiana), Faculty of Communication, Culture and Society. He is author of the book Antropologia contemporanea (2017) and editor of the special issue De-constructing the Field, Archivio Antropologico Mediterraneo online, XVI (2013), 15 (2)—http://www.archivioantropologico mediterraneo.it/. Giovanni Pizza (Ph.D.) is Associate Professor in Cultural and Medical Anthropology at the Department of Filosofia, Scienze Sociali, Umane e della Formazione of the University of Perugia (Italy). He is author of the

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

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book Il tarantismo oggi. Antropologia, politica, cultura (2015), and Editor of AM. Rivista della società di antropologia medica—https://www.antrop ologiamedica.it/am-rivista-della-sicieta-italiana-di-antropologia-medica/. Ivo Quaranta is Associate Professor in Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology at the Department of History and Cultures of the University of Bologna (Italy) and Director of the Research Center in International and Intercultural Health (CSI) (University of Bologna). He is editor of the book Assemblages, Transformations and Politics of Care (2019). Patrizia Resta is Full Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the Department of Humanities Studies, Cultural Heritage, Education Science of the University of Foggia (Italy). Her scientific interests deal with specific thematic fields such as Legal Anthropology, blood feud and conflict resolution. She is author of the book Pensare il sangue (2002) and Editor of the book Di terra e di mare. Pratiche di appartenenza a Manfredonia (2009). Bruno Riccio (Ph.D.) is Full Professor of Cultural Anthropology and the director of the research center on Mobility Diversity and social Inclusion (MODI) at the Department of Education of the University of Bologna (Italy). He is Editor of the book From Internal to Transnational Mobility (2016), cofounder of the Italian Society for Applied Anthropology and codirector of the journal Antropologia Pubblica https://riv iste-clueb.online/index.php/anpub. Luca Rimoldi (Ph.D.) is researcher in Cultural Anthropology at the Department of Political and Social Science of the University of Catania (Italy). He conducts ethnographic research in Italy and Senegal, focussing on memory, work and forms of social exclusion. He is author of the book Lavorare alla Pirelli-Bicocca. Antropologia delle memorie operaie (2017). Alessandro Simonicca is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Sapienza University of Rome and, currently, Director of the Ethnological Mission of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs for South America. He is author of the book Sull’estetico etnografico (2019).

CHAPTER 1

Ethnography: A Theoretically Oriented Practice Introduction Vincenzo Matera and Angela Biscaldi

Over the last four decades, ethnography, which had long been imagined as a self-evident and unproblematic process of data collection, has become a complicated and tricky issue. This is especially true for anthropologists. The dense reflection and the vivid discussion about ethnography that emerged in the 1970–1980s inside the anthropological academic community clearly prove it. Ethnographic practice, ethnographic theory, and ethnographic writing are far from easy, epistemologically straightforward activities. Nevertheless, as a result of its widespread perception as both a powerful and easy-to-use tool to gain qualitative research data about a community, it became a privileged research method for sociologists, and also for psychologists and, finally, even for interculturally oriented scholars of any social science and humanities field (such as pedagogy).

V. Matera (B) Department of Cultural Heritage, University of Bologna, Ravenna Campus, Italy e-mail: [email protected] A. Biscaldi Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Milan, Milan, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 V. Matera and A. Biscaldi (eds.), Ethnography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51720-5_1

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With this volume we offer both a historical overview and a critical reflection on ethnography—how it originated, and how it was conceptualized, represented, and discussed by anthropologists. It is intended as a tool for deepening the conditions that have seen the emergence of the research practice, the branches it has taken in relation to particular theoretical needs, the role it played in the construction of anthropological knowledge and the limits that sometimes affected its effectiveness. It is also a “dense” support that is rich in indications and suggestions for anyone interested in practicing ethnography, studying it, becoming an anthropologist, or, more in general, doing social research. Furthermore, it aims to emphasize the particular and innovative character of the Italian anthropological tradition with reference to an anthropological gaze full of political sensitivity, long unexpectedly overlooked; it aims to account for the great liveliness that Italian anthropology has taken on, especially in recent decades, in the critical confrontation with the international guidelines of the discipline. The aspect that characterizes the volume is the central idea that animates it: repositioning ethnography at the core of the anthropological tradition and showing the extent to which ethnography is strongly connected to a sophisticated theoretical reflection and deeply embedded in cultural and social anthropology. Outside this intellectual endeavor, ethnography itself has little value, and nor does the knowledge one may hope to obtain through the naive use of a so-called “ethnographic method.” This does not mean to deny that ethnography also exists outside anthropology, for example in research based on Max Weber’s theory of social action, in the symbolic interactionism of the Chicago School or in ethnomethodology, but anthropology is certainly the discipline in which ethnography originated and which has cultivated it deeper and for longer. It is the discipline that maintains the most intimate and exclusive relationship with ethnography. As a consequence, ethnography can no longer be viewed as the simple empirical side of anthropology, or as a “practical” mode of research, a kind of technique; it requires a recognition of its high theoretical value since the real core of ethnography (and anthropological knowledge) lies in the way in which it formulates research problems and conceptually defines its objects.

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“Being there” in itself has no value; otherwise, the best ethnographers would be the missionaries—and there are those who have said this—or they would be the “natives” themselves—and there are those who have said this, as well. So, the common thread of the essays contained in this volume, beyond the particular perspectives of the individual authors, therefore lies in the belief that ethnography is a theoretical elaboration tool and, because of this, it becomes an indispensable part in any production of knowledge on social and cultural facts. We think that outside this frame, ethnography is nothing, just as little knowledge is believed to be able to derive by a “simple use” of the ethnographic method (that without reference theory does not exist). In the chapters of the volume, in fact, there are many ethnographic approaches, aimed at grasping worlds, networks, or flows of meanings, which both sprang from and are projections of theoretical concepts and intellectual sensibilities, but there is no “method.” To confirm what we say, we quote the sentence of a famous British social anthropologist, suspiciously very critical of the practice he had practiced for a long time, with intensity and with remarkable results during his career: Anyone who is not a complete idiot can do fieldwork, […]. It has been my woeful experience that many a student comes home from the field to write just another book about just another people, hardly knowing what to do with the grain he has been at such pains to garner. (Evans-Pritchard 1973, p. 3)

This statement should not be understood as an absolute criticism of fieldwork. Rather, it is an implicit call to those solid foundations of theory that allow the anthropologist to win the decisive battle, that is not fought in the field but in the study afterward, Evans-Pritchard said. In fact, theoretically oriented ethnography is necessary in order to go beyond the surface of everyday projects, actions and words, toward those invisible bonds that bind individuals together and give body to the community (or communities) to which they belong. Today (the last couple of decades), communities have opened up and become porous; the protagonists of primordial myths have been replaced (or joined) by movie stars or football champions, political leaders, and rock stars; the “dense” description is being replaced (or flanked) by the

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anthropology of global processes (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992; Fabietti et al. 2020). Anyway, ethnography is not a simple “global interview.” There is always something more, there is always another “level” that is not directly perceptible and that escapes the immediate conceptualization of the “here”—on the spot—and the “now”—in the present—of empirical research, of fieldwork. This “something” is certainly ambiguous, indeterminate, incoherent, asymmetrical, open to intertwining sometimes inextricable, but never completely meaningless; moreover, it is always attributable to constraints (for example, “material conditions of existence”) and to power relationships (for example, “dominant and dominated”); in other words, it is identifiable. This means that subjective, personal, and individual action is always rooted in society, history, and culture (Wright Mills 1961; Ginzburg 1986; Comaroff and Comaroff 1992; Appadurai 1996, 2004). The ways of this rooting are opaque, and we have the task of trying to make them as transparent as possible (cfr. Hannerz 2010). Without this projection in wider frames, toward the wider world of power and meaning, ethnography loses its potential. So ethnography emerges in this volume as a fragment—a multiplicity of fragments—which aims to be reunited with a (partial) totality (Fillitz 2013). How? There is no univocal answer to this crucial theoretical and methodological question, even if we consider the current enlargement of the classic ethnographic “field” (Matera 2013). Instead, there are many. Some of these are outlined in this volume. In fact, the volume presents both a historical overview of ethnography and a thematic discussion of its major trends, which have oriented research practice in the field in different periods. It also presents more marginal—in the sense that they are undervalued in history of anthropology or introductory textbooks—modes of ethnographic research (for example feminist and phenomenological approaches), those that had less impact and resonance inside the academic community, but that nonetheless had a solid theoretical frame and a range of insights with regard to their effectiveness as paths to gaining anthropological knowledge. The volume is divided into four parts. Part I, Grounds for sociocultural anthropology: USA, UK, FR, IT, lays the foundations for our discussion. Enzo Vinicio Alliegro, in Ethnography before ethnography argues that, although anthropologists

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are used deconstructing mythological narratives to unveil their underlying logic of power and functioning, they themselves contribute and are victim to them. This is the case in the history of ethnography, which is often simplistically traced back to the works of Malinowski and RadcliffeBrown in the early twentieth century. Through a thorough comparison with the specialist literature and relying on a large mass of documentary sources, the article deals with the origins of ethnography, focusing on the pioneering research activities conducted in the United States of America. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the sensitive and bloody question of the natives made the study of the so-called “redskins” urgent, and led to a methodology based on a long stay in the field. Even though an ill-concealed guilt has clouded this research period for a long time, after over a hundred years, it is now possible to go back to the contribution and brilliant intuitions of such students as Franz H. Cushing and James Mooney, who, along with colleagues of the Bureau of American Ethnology, laid the foundations of conscious scientific ethnological methodology, acknowledged as such first by M. Mauss and then by Claude Lévi-Strauss. Particularly worthy in this sense is the “transformative spiral” triggered during his fieldwork experience, by which Cushing changed from an “extraneous unidentified object” into a trustworthy “subject” according to a dynamic that recalls the anecdote that Clifford Geertz tells at the beginning of his perhaps most famous essay: My wife and I were still very much in the gust-of wind stage, a most frustrating, and even, as you soon begin to doubt whether you are really real after all, unnerving one, when, ten days or so after our arrival, a large cockfight was held in the public square to raise money for a new school… (1973, p. 413)

In the ethnographic cases presented in Alliegro’s essay, the radical importance of the experience marks the researchers in the body, as well as in the mind, and it stands out and qualifies their research as ethnographic. Why then, is the birth of ethnography linked to Malinowski? Alessandro Mancuso, in Radcliffe-Brown, Evans-Pritchard and the Issue of the Relationships between Fieldwork Methods, Ethnography and Theory in British Social Anthropology, analyzes another crucial context for ethnography, the British one, and focuses on the figure of A. R. RadcliffeBrown, who has contributed to the consolidation of the procedures for the construction of anthropological knowledge.

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Mancuso underlines how Radcliffe-Brown’s theoretical social anthropology program as a “natural science of society” empirically founded on the “comparative method” for generalization purposes on social phenomena has been seen as a fundamental research tool useful not only to guarantee reliability scientific work to collect and record ethnographic documentation, but also to empirically test theoretical hypotheses. In the first part of the paper, Mancuso exposes some points of debate inside British Social Anthropology before 1960 on how to organize fieldwork research and ethnographic monographs by trying to conciliate the stress that Radcliffe-Brown puts on the search for the normative and structural aspects of social life with the Malinowskian imperative of presenting thorough documentary evidence of every detail of “natives’” views, beliefs, discourses, and behavior, also taking in account individual variation. In the second part, he focuses on the new twist to which these epistemological dilemmas about the aims of fieldwork research and ethnography were submitted after Evans-Pritchard’s turn to a view of social anthropology as a discipline which rather deals with the study of “moral systems” and it is closer to history and humanities than to the models of natural sciences. Angela Biscaldi and Vincenzo Matera, in Ethnography in France. Ethnographic practices and theories in Marcel Griaule explore how ethnography in France—a relatively neglected scholarly practice till the late twenties—developed and was actually practiced and conceptualized during the two world wars up to the late fifties, when Marcel Griaule published his now classic Méthode de l’Ethnographie (1957), the first ethnographic handbook available in French. The chapter highlights how the idea of ethnography of Marcel Griaule was really variable and contingent, going from a documentary ethnography, to a semi dialogical and exegetical ethnography—as it emerges from the famous Conversation with Ogotemmeli—, to a new redefinition of ethnography as judiciary inquiry, as it was strongly expressed in Méthode. On the background of Griaule’s ethnographic in progress idea, there was the project of the Institute of Ethnology established by a physical anthropologist (Paul Rivet), a sociologist of Durheimian obedience (Marcel Mauss), and a socialist, politically influential academic philosopher (Lucien Lévy-Bruhl) at the University of Paris in 1925. During the twenties and thirties, the Institute of Ethnology promoted several “ethnographic expeditions” (among which the renowned Dakar-Djibouti mission, conducted in 1931–1933 by a research collective led indeed by the young Marcel Griaule), which

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contributed to codify ethnography as a specific set of practices which ultimately merged into the general scientific framework offered in Griaule’s handbook. From this standpoint, Conversations with Ogotemmeli appears as an exception, even if this exception probably become in the work of Marcel Griaule’s daughter, Genevieve, the bridge between this first ethnographic practice in France and the dialogical anthropology of the 80s in the United States. The chapter asks what kind of characteristics may help to describe a “French ethnographic tradition,” and according to which kind of features it might be considered specific in comparison to other relevant anthropological/ethnographic national traditions of the same time period (USA, UK, Italy). It finally asks to what extent a French ethnographic tradition contributed to developing a certain anthropological style (understood as a set of ethnographic practices and theories together). Giovanni Pizza, “The structural formula of the équipe [team].” Reflections on the historical-ethnographic method of Ernesto de Martino is the last chapter in Part I. The author proposes some reflections on the ethnographic methodology of Ernesto de Martino (Naples 1908–Rome 1965), in particular as regards what he himself called “la formula strutturale dell’équipe.” What is an “ethnographic équipe [team]”? It is the main question that the essay tries to answer. As he has been considered the “father” of a specific vein in Italian anthropology, de Martino is really an original thinker and an anthropologist whose theoretical lines as well as methodologies are really unique and original. In the chapter, after revisiting some of the main ethnographic research carried out by de Martino and his team in Southern Italy (above all the one in Apulia on tarantism), the author goes deep inside what has been considered as an “Italian style” in ethnography, stressing the advantages and limits of this peculiar scientific practice in the history of global cultural anthropology. The reinterpretation presented in Pizza’s text becomes the premise to resume the “Italian ethnographic style” with a somewhat ironic register. Pizza proposes a rereading of the ethnographer de Martino articulated in three main points: the role of fieldwork in the production of anthropological knowledge; the effects in terms of Italian mimesis of Demartinian ethnography; the “cognitive blindness” recently observed in the results of its production, after the southern Italy trilogy. Today, we wonder why de Martino did not take into consideration the entry of the Italian State on the southern scene, despite it seeming to be an anachronistic operation (a bit like criticizing Tristi Tropici for the lack of “ethnographic

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acumen”), because it is an important way to trace the foundations (and also the entanglements) of Italian anthropology from the postwar period up to now. Part II, Anthropology (Theory) vs Ethnography (Fieldwork), opens with the essay by Ferdinando Fava, Illusion of immediate knowledge (immediacy) or spiritual exercise? The dialogic exchange and Pierre Bourdieu’s ethnography. This contribution attempts to locate the ethnographic practice of Pierre Bourdieu by articulating two perspectives that are distinct but not separate. First of all, it illustrates the function that ethnography assumed in the construction of the central concepts of his “theory of practice” (habitus, field, temporality, symbolic capital) in his scientific and biographical trajectory. It then identifies the characteristics of Bourdieu contemporary reception and appropriation in socio-anthropological research contexts. How to read Bourdieu? This is the question that Fava asks at the beginning of the text to point out the complexity of reading the author’s work in a nontemporally offset way, so to speak, with respect to the author himself. Rather, it is a question of bringing out the logic of his research practice without reducing it to pure methodology. It follows very similar reasoning to the idea that the basis of an intellectual product is always a process of research, reflection, study, and thought. Ethnography is a product that is accessible to any reader. However, without the elements that can help to reconstruct the process that underlies it, it is de-historicized and reified by the writing. There is always a distance between theoretical statements and empirical practices; in the case of ethnography, this distance has appeared to be constant since the time of Malinowski. How is it possible to look closely without losing sight of the structures that produce what you look at. Fava tries to answer this question in detail and with strict reference to Bourdieu’s texts. Accounting for the “total meaning of the experience” is what he proposes, an outcome that can only be achieved through the gradual and progressive convergence of different research practices on the same subject. This is a modus operandi to be continuously reviewed to escape the “illusion of immediacy”: social relations are not reduced to interactions between subjectivities animated by intentions and motivations; rather, they are always stuck in social and economic positions. Here there is a distrust of an ethnography completely focused on action. A French and an Algerian, a conversation between a “white” and a “black”

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activate a communication between dominant and dominated, imbued with relationships of strength, colonial history, and politics. In the final part, Fava’s chapter presents the inversion that characterizes the way Gerard Althabe takes Bourdieu’s perspective: for Althabe, unlike Bourdieu, it is the world of the dominant that takes on meaning in the world of the dominated. Luca Rimoldi and Marco Gardini present an essay entitled An Anthropologist on the Bridge. Max Gluckman and his Analysis of Social Situations. It explores the ethnographic method of the Manchester school: a method based on the detailed descriptions of particular social situations, the analysis of different strategies and positioning of the actors involved, which aims to present the materials that anthropologists collected in the field, but which uses them not as illustrative examples of given structural principles, but rather as points of entry for understanding the dynamism and variability of the contexts under investigation. Specifically, the chapter explores the methodological contribution of Max Gluckman in his Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand (1940–1942; 1958). By analyzing the literature on this essay, it takes into consideration the communities and innovations that this text has produced over time. Although influenced by the structural-functionalist frame, the analysis that Gluckman carries out in describing the events of January 7, 1938, builds a bridge to a contemporary public anthropology. The three parts in which the essay is divided show the complexities of Gluckman’s idea of ethnography, expressed in the extended case study. Moreover, the ethnographic method proposed by Gluckman and practiced by the researchers of his Seven-Years-Research-Plan at the Rhodes-Livingston Institute and, later, by his students at the Manchester School, enriched the context of ethnographic analysis by bringing in new figures (colonial administrators and officials, missionaries, mine owners, and trade unionists), new sources (documents of colonial administrators, censuses, written and oral historical sources), new roles that groups and individuals play in producing, reproducing or questioning norms and values. The chapter highlights the interconnections between ethnographic practice and a sophisticated theoretical reflection. Vincenzo Matera, Politics within Cultural and Social Anthropology, aims to underline the theoretical depth of ethnography, retracing some significant steps of anthropology in the second half of the twentieth century. The goal is to trace and highlight the effects of the discovery of

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history and consequently of politics (and ethics) within the production of anthropological knowledge, also, though not only, through ethnography. In particular, the essay runs through Antonio Gramsci’s intuitions regarding the political potential of popular culture, and connects them to the developments of the Italian line of reflection, which are not always linear and sometimes ambivalent. It reveals the impossibility of a “neutral” anthropology and the power of a political sensitivity in the approach, ethnographic or otherwise, to social and cultural phenomena. The text also highlights that the Gramscian conceptualization of popular culture, which had and continues to have a lot of influence on cultural analysis, inside and outside anthropology, all over the world, has been elaborated in the enclosure of a cell. The chapter also focuses on one of the most famous books written by an Italian anthropologist and translated outside Italy: Vittorio Lanternari’s, The Religions of the Oppressed. A Study of Modern Messianic Cults. When Lanternari’s book was published in the American edition (1963), a great deal of criticism was directed at it. Some of this criticism was made by specialists in particular areas on the risks of large generalizations. In his reading of this debate, which is significant of the link between cultural anthropology and ethnography that was prevalent in the immediate postwar period, Matera would like to point out that omissions of ethnographic details and misunderstandings of the cultural significance of a specific element do not always undermine the theoretical, analytical, and heuristic relevance of the reading of such a large phenomenon as the one at the center of Lanternari’s analysis. And vice versa, we should also consider how much even maniacal ethnographic precision, achieved after years of specific in-depth study in the same “field,” does not ultimately prove itself to be devoid of any theoretical significance; in short, it is “missionary knowledge” of very little use for the purposes of anthropological theory. The last chapter of Part II is Patrizia Resta Stumbling blocks. The irruption of the interpretive approach in twentieth century anthropology. Geertz’s interpretive anthropology has guided the anthropological debate of the mid-twentieth century, laying the deconstructionist approach foundation privileged by the anthropological discipline at the end of the same century. In a broader perspective, without attempting to exhaust the topic, this chapter proposes to relaunch some questions: first, that of ethnographic practice. Did Geertz’s reflections undermine the authority

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of the ethnographic paradigm in its connection with the field as it had hitherto been known and practiced? Or is it possible to find the original features that distinguish the epistemological dimension of the ethnographic paradigm in its theoretical methodological proposal? In his collected works, do the “parochial facts” allow the emergence of the “broad principles” in which the possibility of understanding them is embedded? Or has reflexivity oriented his research to such an extent that no posthumous diary can allow a different interpretation? Very briefly, reevaluated at a distance, can we say that the interpretive paradigm has been truly revolutionary, innovative, alternative or that it must be repositioned in the discipline’s historical trajectory oriented toward assuming diversity within the framework of cultural creativity? The author emphasizes the critical issues of the interpretative and ethnographic perspectives that emerged in the twentieth century, in particular research contexts, such as those in which corruption and organized crime are articulated. Patrizia Resta highlights the great contradiction present in an ethnography that places itself, in the light of a long and settled empirical practice and theoretical reflection, as an effective tool for understanding the other with respect to which, however, it turns out to be condemned to the inscrutable opacity that the other opposes him. Despite the enormous influence it has exercised on the anthropological debate throughout the last century, the interpretative approach and anthropological writing show all their limitations and they stop in the face of contexts of unquestionable relevance in the contemporary world that oppose an unsurpassed impermeability. Part III, Visual, Dialogical, Sensorial, Multi-sited ethnography, counts four chapters on specific research approaches in ethnography. The first is by Francesco Faeta, Seeing means knowing (Zu sehen bedeutet zu wissen). On visual paradigm in ethnography. Taking as a matter of fact a specific and complex consideration of ethnography (authoritatively supported by other writings present in the book), Faeta’s chapter focuses on the issues of the gaze connected with fieldwork. He dwells on the critical exiguity of anthropological reflection on the topic, and on the need to define in theoretical terms, even with the help of conceptual frameworks tangent the disciplinary field (see, i.e., Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Pierre Bourdieu), the nature of the ethnographic gaze, in the perspective of the visual construction of the subject and of the access of this subject to the awareness of the ethnographic relationship.

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In this perspective, Faeta emphasizes the body-gaze and body-world relationships, on the background of the consideration that visual processes have had in the construction of knowledge in the contemporary West. Finally, he tries to focus on the link between ethnography and photography (identified as a valuable tool for a critique of the gaze), with attention to some possibilities of experimental and “conceptual” declination of this connection. Faeta points out that it is not important what we look at, but how we look and he points out that the critical and self-critical effort of each ethnographer must be based on a systematic analysis of his own, as well as others’, way of seeing. Visual ethnography can act as the foundation of the most extensive research practices as a tool for a critique of the gaze. Only this perception of reality can lead to the construction of an ethnography that restores the consistency of the data in front of us in a non-naive or superficial way. The second chapter in this section is by Angela Biscaldi. The chapter, entitled Dennis and Barbara Tedlock: Dialogical Anthropology, discusses three main aspects of Barbara Tedlock’s and Dennis Tedlock’s fieldwork and anthropological reflection; poetics, participation, and translation. According to Barbara and Dennis Tedlock, every act of speech, writing, or doing has a poetic dimension. They discuss how the categories of a poetics based in Western literacy tradition require extensive revaluation in order to improve our comprehension of native arts and our concept of performance too. Barbara and Dennis Tedlock were also interested in the personal encounter of the anthropologist and the informant and in examining how this encounter serves as the origin of the ethnographic material. They reflect on and critically engage with their own participation within the ethnographic frame and on the consequences of thinking and doing anthropology as dialogue, not only during fieldwork, but in publication as well. Barbara Tedlock created the concept of “Observation of participation.” During participant observation ethnographers attempt to be both emotionally engaged participants and coolly dispassionate observers. In the observation of participation, ethnographers both experience and observe their own and others’ coparticipation within the ethnographic encounter. The shift from one methodology to the other entails an important representational transformation. Finally, translation is the main topic of Barbara and Dennis Tedlock’s reflection. They proposed the concept

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of “dialogical anthropology”—an important epistemological paradigm turn. Analogical anthropology involves the replacement of one discourse (the native one) with another (the anthropological one). Analogical Anthropology is “Talking above,” “talking beyond,” or “talking later”; it produces a result. Dialogical anthropology is “talking across” or “talking alternately”; it illustrates processes and changes. Theoretical and methodological implications of this shift are relevant, and they are analyzed in the chapter. Ivo Quaranta Sensory and Embodied Ethnography presents in a critical way the paradigm of embodiment that helped to redefine the very way cultural processes are conceptualized and investigated in social sciences. By placing the analysis at the level of lived experience, embodiment has emerged as a powerful way to relate perceptions and sensations to broader socio-historical dynamics. Such a shift, though, did not focus merely on the issues of the cultural construction of the body and the senses, it rather allowed analyses to account for the very process of actors’ engagement in the production of meaning, i.e., in the practical embodied production of culture. If culture is rooted in, and emerges from, social practices and these are inevitably incorporated, then corporeality is not an accessory segment, a specialized theme, to rise to a constitutive and unavoidable dimension of anthropological reflection. Working through the incorporation paradigm does not require specific research objects or special data; it means adopting a posture aimed at grasping the relationship that research themes maintain with corporeality. The body of the ethnographer therefore should not be understood as a natural and unmediated tool for data collection, but as a tool for meeting, negotiating, and cultural production. Within this broader theoretical scenario, ethnography has been profoundly reframed as an embodied practice as well. The contribution aims at reconstructing such a theoretical debate arguing how sensory ethnography has allowed scholarship to de-intellectualize the interpretations of social reality, placing intercorporeality as the very lived ground of that mutual understanding that we represent through ethnographic writing. Bruno Riccio, Exploring Mobility through Mobility. The Challenges of Multi-sited Ethnography from Marcus and Hannerz to nowadays, closes this Part. With the aim of grasping “glocal” nexuses as much as different

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human experiences of movement (migration, tourism, aid, and development) within contemporary societies, mobile approaches as multi-sited research developed, where the field was shaped by following people, kin, and other social networks, economic and social remittances, political projects, etc. Drawing on ethnographic examples, Riccio shows how this methodological perspective is well suited to the analysis of displacement through space: considering migrants and their families in both the place of origin and contexts of arrival considerably facilitates the understanding of a complex and multidimensional process such as migration. By following migrants’ relationships and practices, Riccio connected up the different locations and methodological experiences (participant observation, interviews, archive research, and life stories) by continuously comparing their life and professional stories (similarities and differences) while also engaging spatially with the continuous references and comparisons between actions and thoughts that surfaced in the different field research sites. Simultaneously Riccio considers and discusses critical challenges to such an extension of the ethnographic field. More than on Space, he focuses on Time as a crucial variable to be managed in the attempt to compensate the “centrifugal” dispersion of multi-sited explorations. In fact, the multi-sited character of migration ethnography may be appreciated not only in terms of space, but also from a temporal perspective: ethnography is not only multi-sited but also multi-temporal, thus addressing the need to adopt a longitudinal perspective and periodically revisit the field as the years pass. The last Part is Part IV. Visual, Dialogical, Sensorial, Practical, Multi-sited ethnography. This Part opens with Gabriella D’Agostino Participant observation. A problematic methodological topos. The chapter begins with Malinowski, an author who could not be left out of a book dedicated to ethnography. While it is well known that the attribution of the ethnographic primacy to the Polish anthropologist is a matter of disciplinary tradition rather than of history [cf. Alliegro], the importance of the Argonauts, and also of the Diaries, remains unquestionable for the foundation of the ethnographic practice and for the scientific status of the knowledge acquired by its means. Gabriella D’Agostino reads in depth the most significant passages in this sense of the famous Introduction to the Argonauts, explains and problematizes the foundational value of a specifically ethnographic epistemology. She also reads Malinowski’s Diaries, not as a stone of a scandal

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but as a counterpart to a practice that is in itself reflective, ambivalent, and finally procedural, as the ethnographic one will later reveal in unsuspected years. This essay has several purposes: highlighting some issues related to Malinowski’s theory and practice of research, which are full of implications not always grasped in their theoretical and methodological complexity; recalling some criticisms that have been put forward in the anthropological debate toward the notion of reflexive observation; discussing some uses and abuses of ethnographic practice in disciplinary domains other than anthropology. We leave the reader with the difficult task of determining whether the pioneering role that disciplinary history attributes to Malinowski is founded or not. The second chapter of this part is by Alessandro Simonicca, Marcus and Clifford, between deconstruction and agency in anthropological field work. The essay aims to retrace some fundamental phases of the interpretive anthropological currents of the late twentieth century, focusing on the relationship between the “end of the subject” in philosophical deconstruction (first French, then American) and “text” as an ethnographic organization of anthropological discourse. Referring to authors such as George Marcus and James Clifford, it has the intention of demonstrating both the usefulness of the notion of text and the overcoming of the classical antinomies of the relationship between power/structure and action in ethnography. The concept of design is introduced here. Design is an analytical representation of reality: the researcher connects and groups certain aspects of reality by providing a category capable of understanding realities without clear boundaries. Both for logical structure and for theoretical references, it is connected to the ideal type of Wax Weber, in the sense of a conceptual framework that functions as a scheme for a case of the world. Anthropology, for Marcus, is topological research that focuses on the practice of connectivity. With it the anthropologist tries to undertake an ontological, conceptual, and moral commitment with the world; and this practice places “design” at the center, as an arrangement that gives access to an understanding of reality. The notion of “design” has been central in recent decades and continually appeals to how Marcus— referring to design disciplines such as architecture or art—defines his two souls: “design practice” and “design studio,” a model for doing and a

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model for understanding. The common matrix is the idea of a nontheory driven practice, but a series of regulatory skills whose structure is the collaborative cognitive enterprise, which is carried out by means of invention, learning, and analysis processes. Michela Fusaschi The theory and practice of gender ethnography: a textbook case of invisibility. The gender ethnography such as feminist anthropology has a long history, but they are a textbook case of invisibility, at least in Italy. The contemporary anthropology analysis has focused on denaturalizations and deconstruction to unveil the mechanisms of power and the dynamics of social hierarchy. In this sense, cultural anthropology would have had to acquire the commitment and reflexivity of gender and feminist ethnography without hiding them or relegating them into “dedicated texts.” Why are anthropologists such as Denise Paulme, Germaine Tillion, Michelle S. Rosaldo, Louise Lamphere, Nicole-Claude Mathieu, Gayle Rubin, Marilyn Strathern, Henrietta Moore, and Lila Abu-Lughod less famous than Bronislaw Malinowki, Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, Marcel Griaule, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Clifford Geertz? The author of this chapter proposes the reconstruction of some of these exemplary ethnographies to bring them to the heart of the history of anthropology. The goal is to show how theory, practice, and posture of feminist ethnography produce analytical-descriptive elaboration on gender and generation of how they are multi-located, sexed, and historicized even in the form of critique politics for the recognition of subjects and subjectivity. Fabio Dei “Beyond the field: research experience and theoretical elaboration in anthropological traditions ” closes Part IV. The centrality of field research, so strong in mainstream English-speaking anthropology, sometimes turns unduly into a sort of “mystique of fieldwork,” according to which anthropological knowledge stems directly from the researcher’s subjective experience. If Geertz and the Writing Culture movement insisted on rhetoricalliterary devices filtering field experience, its relationship with the theoretical dimension of anthropological writing is less clear. This aspect can be explored in two directions: (a) the analysis of anthropological traditions including forms of empirical research other than fieldwork; (b) the analysis of “mainstream” authors in which the research/theory relationship is configured in a less classical way, e.g., with a conspicuous theoretical elaboration based on the use of empirical data not directly produced through fieldwork.

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If the attention to the anthropology-literature link has diminished over time, Fabio Dei underlines how that intellectual season contributed to accentuate the myth of a fieldwork as a subjective experience, testimony of participation, of political denunciation, or of anti-hegemonic practice. It is a conception of research that perhaps still covers part of the real ethnographic work. But it does not account for a more widespread reality of empirical research, which does not take place in “other” worlds but also in “ours” and is no longer divided between a clearly separated Being there and Being here. It is research that uses multiple methods of dialogue, documentation, data “collection,” but also of engagement and involvement of the researcher in the context studied. In conclusion, the author calls for a different way of characterizing anthropological research, which arises from a broader comparison between the different histories and traditions. However, it takes into account the essential core of ethnography: an endeavor to cautiously and patiently punctuate the fine grain of social relations, that which generally escapes grand models and the surface of official and institutional self-representations. Finally, a retrospection. In 1997, a book entitled Ethnography. Writings and representations of anthropology was published in Italy written by Ugo Fabietti, and one of the two editors of this volume, Vincenzo Matera. The theoretical core of that volume is the writing, understood as the engine of any research project aimed at producing knowledge on social and cultural phenomena. The book emphasized that the strength of anthropology lies in its ability to construct wide-ranging discourses on cultural diversity and that this ability is played out in the field of writing and representation. The anthropologist creates a discursive field, a way of considering problems, events, conflicts, and values. Whether he uses fieldwork or other sources to do this, what matters is the power to engage with the representation he has built. In other words, the specificity of anthropological knowledge lies in the way it sets problems, thinks about them, and represents them, not in what, without theoretical openness, is reduced to a mere “technique” of research, nor (even less) in the “courage” of the intrepid explorer/ethnographer. Today, that position leads both editors of this volume to reaffirm that “ethnography without anthropology is nothingness” (Ingold 2007) to express a critique of the ethnographic “fashion” that has dominated and still dominates the recent field: a retreat into angles of the world from which few then succeed in

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coming out in a convincing way. The ability to persuade is played on a complexity that has many faces, as emerges in the following chapters.

References Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Appadurai, A. (2004). The Capacity to Aspire. In R. Vijayendra & M. Walton (Eds.), Culture and Public Action. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Comaroff, J., & Comaroff, J. L. (1992). Ethnography and Historical Imagination. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1973). Some Reminiscences and Reflections on Fieldwork. Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, 4(1), 1–12. Fabietti, U., & Matera, V. (Eds.). (1997). Etnografia. Scritture e rappresentazioni dell’antropologia. Roma: Carocci. Fabietti, U., Malighetti, R., & Matera, V. (2020). Dal tribale al globale. Milano: Pearson. Fillitz, T. (2013). Spatialising the Field: Conceptualising Fields and Interconnections in the Context of Contemporary Art of Africa. In V. Matera (Ed.), De-constructing the Field (Archivio Antropologico Mediterraneo [on line], XVI , 15(2), 19–28). Geertz, C. (1973). Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight. In C. Geertz (Ed.), The Interpretation of Cultures (pp. 412–454). Boston: Basic Book. Ginzburg, C. (1986). Miti, emblemi, spie. Torino: Einaudi. Hannerz, U. (2010). Anthropology’s World. Life in a Twenty-First Century Discipline. London: Pluto Press. Ingold, T. (2007). Anthropology Is Not Ethnography. Radcliffe-Brown Lecture to the British Academy. Lanternari, V. (1963). The Religions of the Oppressed. A Study of Modern Messianic Cults. New York and London: McGibbon & Kee. Matera, V. (2013). Deconstructing the Field. Archivio Antropologico Mediterraneo, XVI, 15(2). Matera, V. (2019). La memoria dell’antropologo. Retrospezioni o interpretazioni ex-post. Antropologia, 6(1), 49–61. Wright Mills, C. (1961). The Sociological Imagination. New York: Grove Press.

PART I

Grounds for Sociocultural Anthropology: USA, UK, FR, IT

CHAPTER 2

Ethnography Before Ethnography: Genesis and Developments of Fieldwork in North America Enzo Vinicio Alliegro

Between Mythopoetic Narrations and Historiographic Deconstructions Although anthropologists are accustomed to deconstructing mythopoetic narratives in order to grasp the apparatuses of power which substantialize their origin and stabilize their constitution, they may themselves sometimes be dominated by—or even become the architects of—these devices. This is, in fact, the case with the writing of ethnographic history, simplistically reduced in many historical reconstructions to the singular activity of Bronislaw Malinowsky. The Polish scholar, in the guise of a solitary hero, often assumed the role of super-hero or totemic ancestor who succeeded in the beginning from nothing and brilliantly and surprisingly becoming the protagonist, during the early years of the twentieth century, of the foundation of the research practice. Such a practice has been subsequently taken up as a

E. V. Alliegro (B) University of Napoli, Naples, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 V. Matera and A. Biscaldi (eds.), Ethnography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51720-5_2

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lesson in the method and style of the processes of production of anthropological knowledge (Harris 1968; Mercier 1972; Firth 1981; Silverman 1981; Kuper 1996; Rivière 1998; Fabietti 2001; Barnard 2000; Kuklick 2008; Pavanello 2009; Barth et al. 2010; Signorelli 2011). It is thanks to the eminent George W. Stocking that we have a clear and determinate distancing from this premise, which depends upon guilty historiographic omissions that overlooked a series of prior activities. In the well-known essay, The ethnographer’s: fieldwork in British anthropology from Tylor to Malinowski (Stocking 1983), Stocking conducted an accurate act of historical revision, demonstrating the presence of an interesting and well-established ethnographic tradition that preceded Malinowsky. Through a varied and dense body of documents, the historian highlighted the degree to which the narration that obscured the nineteenth-century roots of ethnography is ascribable, on one hand, to Malinowski himself, who was the architect of an insidious self-celebratory policy sustained by specific rhetorical strategies of self-representation that made their way into the noted 1922 monograph (Malinowski 1922) and, on the other hand, to the posthumous appraisals put forth by James Frazer, Alfred C. Haddon and Max Gluckman (Stocking 1983, pp. 110–112), which authoritatively sealed this self-investiture by supporting it with peremptory judgments. In the spirit of Stocking’s exemplary essay, and within the framework of a historiographic field which was never extinguished and which would warrant being appropriately revitalized, the present work aims to examine some of the ethnographic experiences of the nineteenth century that took place in North America, in particular in the United States, taking advantage of the remarkable heuristic value of documentary sources. That is to say, it makes use of field-notes —diaries, epistolary exchanges, and notes— that make possible the recovery of a very particular analytic perspective and the adumbration of the less evident secrets of the experience of fieldwork, exactly as occurred with Malinowski’s posthumous publications (Malinowski 1967). Preparing to write a history of ethnography before ethnography, that is to say, a prehistory or an archaeology of ethnography, not only entails the possibility of reflecting on the sociopolitical, historical, and cultural factors that facilitate—or impede—the genesis and the development of a kind of knowledge, but it also makes it possible to highlight the significance of a research trajectory aimed at delineating an anthropology of disciplinary memory, or, an ethnography of those retrospective writings which, in

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presenting themselves as impartial actions of representation of the past, actually end up exceeding this by assuming the honor of presenting a kind of group icon. In fact, employing peremptory judgments framed around specific genealogical directions, retrospective reconstructions push, in any case, toward the definition of “traditions” and “scientific schools,” configuring “legacies” and intellectual “loans” from the evident symbolic and identitarian functions. More generally, therefore, dealing with some of the mechanisms that underlie the reconstruction of the past entails examining the operations of stabilization and capitalization of memory, which are always conceivable in terms of the construction of identity (Alliegro 2011), that is, a strategy of research of the traits deemed foundational to, and constitutive of, the definition of any sort of cultural identity—in this case, a “disciplinary identity.”

Beginnings A specific conjuncture of political, social, and cultural variables acted as a particularly fertile soil for the development of ethnography in the United States. Within diligently controlled territorial boundaries, beginning with the scrupulous geographic mapping required for military control of the terrain, thousands of men from different continents found themselves compelled to share a close and problematic coexistence. The history of the “New World,” spanning multiple centuries beginning with the landing of the first European vessels, made the “Promised Land” a space that was strongly characterized in multi-ethnic terms and, thus, a fertile soil for the birth of anthropological studies. Nonetheless, those who evoked such ethnographic interest were neither western immigrants nor enslaved African peoples, but rather the native peoples of the North American continent who, by virtue of their singular and surprising “being-there,” constituted an obstacle to the politics of expansion—a material and moral impediment standing in the way of the “conquest of the West” (Bergamini 2002). The initial occasional observation of the native peoples and their subsequent closer investigation took place in a historico-political context in which the understanding of cultural difference was not only a matter of conscience, that is, an expiatory tool in the face of the evident ethnocide and genocide which was taking place, but also a matter of state—a patriotic enterprise serving the pressing demands of “state building”—as well as a matter of science—a cognitive opportunity to confront the questions

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with which the “civilisational” processes were invested and in relation to which the “autochthonous race” represented both an enormous question and an insidious solicitation. Between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, then, men who often shared a political and ideological orientation while having diverse and often controversial motivations and varying degrees of preparation, initiated investigative journeys in which the attention toward the indigenous peoples increasingly adopted the traits of a spatiotemporal dislocation which permitted—across borders and “en plein air”—the encounter, the interaction, and, occasionally, the confrontation with, alterity (Gruber 1959; Hinsley 1981; Bieder 1986). If the clergy sought to reach the “savages” in order to redeem them from “sin” (van del Geest 1990; Abler 1992; Steckley 1992), as in the case of the Jesuit Latifau who wrote, in 1724, the renowned Moeurs des sauvages amériquains, comparées aux moeurs des premiers temps, it was economic motives which motivated explorers and agents of commercial companies, while romantic and nostalgic expectations were at the root of the bold striding forward of artists and intellectuals (Eisen 1977; Gidley 1998; Ronda 2002). Alongside the documentary production of specialists of the “westernisation of the frontier,” a modality of knowing that emerged between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that was less proximate to the canons of the “fortune-seeking professionals” and aimed to free itself from voyeuristic and frequently radically ethnocentric observations. Within the framework of the experiences that had emerged in the western nations, by the middle of the eighteenth century, the United States witnessed the emergence of scientific fellowships where the rigid separation between the different branches of human knowledge had not yet consolidated. It is within the perimeter of these broad political and cultural receptacles that the investigative trends which would fall within the boundaries set by the future anthropology increasingly took shape. Such is the case of the American Philosophical Society (A.P.S.), founded in Philadelphia in 1743 and directed by prominent figures in the United States history (Wissler 1942). The A.P.S. focused a portion of its interest on indigenous populations, specifying in its charter that its mission should be the study of “antiquity, changes and present state of the country” (Wissler 1942, p. 189). It is precisely within the scope of the A.P.S that Peter S. Du Ponceau acted, writing a text on grammatical systems in 1838, together with John Pickering who, following the examples of the

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brothers Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt (Bunzl 1996), gave rise to a series of investigations in Indian territories. It is within this primordial atmosphere of the discovery and study of native populations—in which there was no shortage of in-depth historical and archaeological analyses like those of Ephraim George Squier (Barnhart 2005), who, in 1848, opened the publication of Smithsonian Institution (Hinsley 1981) with the volume Ancient monuments of the Mississippi Valley, as well as physical-anatomic studies, specifically in craniometry and anthropometry, tied to the 1839 work, Crania Americana, by Samuel G. Merton (Bieder 1986)—that the need to establish a relevant ethnological society took shape, giving birth to the “American Ethnological Society” (A.E.S.). Founded in 1842, the A.E.S. was directed by Albert Gallatin, a prominent figure in the political and cultural circles of the time, who distinguished himself by holding delicate diplomatic missions as well as by holding the position of Treasury Secretary during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson. As a collaborator of the Bureau of Indian Affairs , the office expressly created within the Ministry of War, Gallatin had the chance to begin an intense cognitive campaign, from which emerged one of the first classifications of the thousands of native tribes (Bieder 1986). Despite its good intentions, the A.E.S did not actually manage to stimulate ethnographic research, which instead found an essential fulcrum in the government agents, who were those who lived in close contact with the native peoples in the reserves. Among the figures who stood out in the context of this “proto-ethnographic paradigm” (Oswalt 1972) we must surely include Henry R. Schoolcraft (Bremer 1987), who produced, beginning in 1822, a series of publications based on first-hand knowledge of native culture, partly thanks to his marriage to an Ojibwa woman.

Lewis Henry Morgan Ethnographic observation, carried out as an accidental and fleeting digression from exploratory military, geological or naturalistic missions, or practiced instrumentally as an apparatus in service of aims that were not entirely scientific, within the context of political assignments, religious missions, or artistic adventures, gave birth to a research model which one can appropriately designate as prehensile, that is to say, a “predatory paradigm.” In such cases, the interaction with the other was mainly limited to the gathering of whatever was concretely removable and collectible, superficially perceptible and observable, as much outside of

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any precise schema of research as of any definite methodology and scientific inquiry. In most cases, it was a matter of extemporaneous incursions aimed at intentionally modifying the sociocultural and political structures of the native peoples. Around the middle of the nineteenth century, when there were as yet no institutions officially in charge of anthropological training and professionalization, Lewis Henry Morgan, an American lawyer and member of the American parliament, marked a considerable turning point in the field (Resek 1960; Moses 2009; Alliegro 2015a, b; 2017a, b). Born on November 21, 1818 in Aurora (Rochester 1881), New York, into an influential Presbyterian and masonic family of landowners, politicians, and army officials, Morgan had the opportunity to come into contact with native peoples. First as a young secondary school student, and subsequently through his work as a lawyer. It was in this context of close relations within the Indian reservations of Tonawanda and Onondaga— engaged at the time in a struggle to oppose the land occupation carried out by the Ogden Land Company—that Morgan, supported by Ely S. Parker (a young Seneca), gained the trust of the local community (Tooker 1994), which he demonstrated through specific in-depth studies on its material culture (Morgan 1850) as well as in a publication dedicated to the Iroquois league (Morgan 1851), considered to be one of the first monographs to appear within the field of anthropology (Comba 1998). In Morgan’s vast and diverse pioneering work, the analysis of the terminological system of kinship assumed a particular relevance. Having understood that various populations, including the Iroquois and the Objiva, adopted a system defined as classificatory, Morgan had the distinction of clearly and coherently defining a specific cognitive problem for his fieldwork, formalized through the following question: “May this code of descendancy be employed in an attempt to solve the great problem of the origin of our Indian race” (Morgan 1858, pp. 139–140). To confront this question, Morgan set out an articulate and organic program of investigation that was immensely innovative and complex for its time (Fortes 1969; Remotti 1986; Trautman 1987). On the one hand, he activated a network of collaborators to fill in specific questionnaires at a distance while, on the other, planning to position himself to work directly with native peoples. Consequently, it was with Lewis Henry Morgan that fieldwork assumed the value of a “dedicated modality” for the collection and construction of data strictly connected to a specific anthropological inquiry (Eggan 1965, p. 272; Fortes 1969, p. 9). Following a clearly

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analytical plan premised on clarifying anthropological goals to be established well in advance of the outset of any journey, an interlocutory paradigm to replace the earlier predatory one took shape with Morgan—a “dialogical paradigm” which demonstrated the degree to which ethnography could constitute a patient disclosing of “latent logics” within the framework of interrelational channels opportunely arrayed in the field, rather than a coercive excision. Morgan left Rochester on May 17, 1859 (White 1959; Alliegro 2017a), reaching Nebraska and Arkansas after a difficult journey which lasted about a month, during which he also traveled on foot. Having realized the enormous heuristic potentialities implicit in the up-close knowledge of the tribes of the Southern states, he revisited the tribes during three different journeys, in 1860, 1861, and 1862. Unlike the first two (in Arkansas and Nebraska in 1860, and in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the Dakotas in 1861), which were brief (the first began on May 25, 1860 and ended on 18th June of the same year, the second began on July 4, 1861 and ended on approximately August 10, 1861), the inquiry of 1862, which took place in Iowa, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Montana, lasted nearly seventy days. What were the salient aspects of his venture among the so-called “redskins”? How was the research actually carried out? In order to answer these questions, it is more useful to look into the travel diaries than the official reports, which intimate the many difficulties faced along with some of the resolutive strategies adopted and methodological realizations derived. As would later become clear, the field is not a closed system within which the researcher need only cast his or her nets, standing aside and waiting silently to catch the “prey.” The field of research is open and opaque, insidious, and problematic. Within its boundaries, artificially defined as such, the researcher experiments with critical issues of a relational, linguistic, and political nature, which he or she may unconsciously determine, forming a complex process of negotiation, which may, in some cases, itself alter the state of things. Morgan was fully conscious of the difficulty associated with the ethnographic encounter, as is demonstrated by some of his reflections concerning the need to identify the most patient and trustworthy informants as well as to submit the data to a review process, proceeding by way of repeated feedback and comparisons. Despite operating from within a positivist optic, according to which the document indubitably preexists the researcher, he demonstrated an

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awareness of a series of obstacles standing in the way of unveiling, as well as of the urgency of modeling relational contexts based on trust and reciprocity. Having begun the study while sharing some of the dominant positions circulating in the political contexts of the time, which placed profound faith in the inherent goodness of the (forced) assimilation of the indigenous peoples, Morgan was compelled to revise some of his points of view, to the point of reaching conclusions that were, in some ways, revolutionary and expressing the idea that only a genetic commingling, through intermarriage, could lead to the desired “Americanisation.” From a mere aseptic site of removal as it had been reductively conceived in many preceding experiences, the field of study came to assume the outlines of a multifaceted ambit, an occasion not just to verify preset formulas, but one for reflexive considerations on the nature of the research itself which, in the final pages of the travel diary, is described in clearly positive terms, precisely with respect to the achievement of the goals of the inquiry established upon Morgan’s departure: I have eleven schedules in my pockets in eleven different languages and have settled the existence of the same system in at least eight or ten others, beyond any question. I shall return quite satisfied with the general results of my inquiries, only regretting that I could stay so short a time in each place. (in White 1959, p. 69)

Bureau of American Ethnology Starting with an integrated methodological approach expressly devised to deal with problems and themes of great theoretical value, Morgan wrote two important monographs during the 1870s. These two books, Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (Morgan 1871) and The Ancient Society (Morgan 1877), were adopted by evolutionist theory as a manifesto. In light of Morgan’s acquired notoriety, the presidency of the Annual Congress of the National Association for the Progress of Science was assigned to him in 1879. This constituted an important acknowledgment for the process of public affirmation of anthropological knowledge, which occurred in the same year as the establishment, in Washington, of a research center exclusively dedicated to native studies, the Bureau of American Ethnology (B.A.E.)1 (Wallace 1954; Judd 1967; Woodbury and Woodbury 1999; Alliegro 2014b), whose direction was entrusted to John Wesley Powell (Aton 2010).

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Born in Mount Morris, New York, on March 24, 1834 ( Brooklyn 1902), before taking on the office at the Bureau, Powell was known for his delicate military activities and for his scientific explorations, including of the “Little Grand Canyon,” on the Mississippi River. These expeditions were followed by publications (Powell 1875, 1877) which did not lack accomplished ethnographic openings. It is precisely the biography of Major Powell, a loyal statesman and a devout proponent of the westernization of the native peoples, that makes the orientation given to the B.A.E. clear, where analytic research conducted outside the frontier acquired an increasingly important role. In 1880, only one year after its inception, the B.A.E. employed around twenty agents on a permanent basis. By the beginning of the twentieth century it would become the most important and qualified anthropological research center in the world (Haddon 1902), where, in addition to philologists, stenographers, and artists assigned to the work of cataloguing and filing, and to photographers, many researchers figured who were officially engaged with it as “ethnographers.” The most important results achieved by the group directed by Powell were published in the B.A.E.’s “Annual Report.” These were enormous, elegant volumes often exceeding one thousand pages, furnished with rich iconographic contributions, which made them an imposing step forward in the development of visual anthropology. From 1879 to 1902, the “Annual Reports” made space not only for analytic treatises about single ethnic groups and comparative analyses between multiple ones, but also to methodological insights, as shown by the first volumes, in which essays appeared such as On limitation to the use of some anthropological data (Powell 1881) and Illustration of the method of recording Indian Languages (Dorsey et al. 1881). During the period of time considered here, despite Powell’s imposition of an outline which was in some respects authoritarian, within the framework of rigidly evolutionist interpretative schemas, no official, exclusive, or dominant model of research affirmed itself in the B.A.E. Rather, there was a genuine “methodological pluralism” that never overflowed into “anarchism.” Among the many authors militating for and collaborating with the B.A.E., giving birth to monographs of unquestionable value going beyond the documentary,2 it is certainly important to linger a moment on Frank Hamilton Cushing and James Mooney.

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Frank Hamilton Cushing: “They Love Me, and I Learn” A modality of investigation that flourished under Powell, who furnished it with both a full theoretical legitimation and adequate financial resources, was one focused on a deep study of well-defined and localized ethnic groups. The research had to be carried out according to at least three methodological imperatives defined by the B.A.E.: (1) Long permanence in the field; (2) Acquisition of the language; (3) Sharing of daily life and ritual practices. Along this line of intervention, the work of the young autodidact Frank Hamilton Cushing emerged. ´ Born in a village in Erie County, Pennsylvania, on July 22, 1857 ( Washington 1900), Cushing joined the anthropological milieu with a background in Morgan’s works, and after having curated (since 1876) the ethnographic collections of the Smithsonian Institution (Curtis 1981). His name (Fontana 1963; Green 1990; Alliegro 2014a, 2016b) is indissolubly linked to that of the Zuñi “pueblos” of New Mexico (Tiberini 1999; Mcfeely 2001), where he carried out profound research that lasted almost five years, from September 19, 1879 to April 1884.3 Cushing’s experience among the Zuñi developed as an individual research project which unfolded in a public, collective, and institutional framework—that is, individual research project made public, since its outcomes were published even before it was complete, in numerous articles appearing in certain renowned newspapers (Cushing 1882a, b, c). This individual research soon took on the traits of collective research (though not carried out by a team), as it unfolded in direct contact with colleagues at the B.A.E. Ultimately, it was institutional, and partly “regulated,” research that paid particular attention not to slip into “methodological idiosyncrasy,” as Cushing constantly received methodological instructions from his director. Besides recognizing the high rate of scientific productivity associated with ethnographic research in this instance, as attested by the large number of publications that Cushing’s long permanence allowed (Cushing 1883, 1886, 1892a, b, 1894, 1895, 1896), the investigation among the Zuñi turns out to be extremely useful in highlighting an effect induced by experience in the field. Cushing, in fact, underwent a transformative spiral, during which he changed from an “extraneous unidentified object” into a trustworthy “subject” in the eyes of the Zuñi. Whereas the young man had been viewed with suspicion during the first months of

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his stay, by the end he had even gained access to their secret societies, assuming relevant political assignments (Patterson 2006) that eventually resulted in the destabilization of the community, causing the eruption of bloody micro-conflictual phenomena (Pandey 1972). With this “young white man” who made himself an “Indian,” too, it is the letters and the diaries (Green 1990; Alliegro 2016a) which offer us access to otherwise undisclosed aspects of the fieldwork, and the possibility of grasping, for example, the relevance assumed by a series of reflexive dimensions. These reflections began, with methodological questions, to interrogate the penetrability of “other worlds,” but transitioned to dealing with epistemological questions concerning the problem of these worlds’ intelligibility. In December 1880 Cushing wrote: For many months my suffering and loneliness were dreadful. I neither understood the Spanish language universally spoken by the whites here, nor the native Indian. My means were scant, my position – as a prayer into secret and forbidden rites – precarious. The Indians were all my master, and with the kindest intentions – those of making me a member of their tribe – they proved tyrannical. I was forced to adopt their mode of dress and manner of living, to live with them, and to share their food in common. By policy and patience, I won, in long months, their confidence (…). (in Green 1990, p. 137)

In a previous letter, dated October 29, 1879, after having demonstrated how the Zuñi would modify their rites in the presence of strangers, and how decisive it was, according to the canons of “urgent anthropology,” to document customs and traditions in anticipation of their disappearance, the researcher depicted his own peculiar ethnographic method, synthesisable in the formula “they love me, and I learn.” The literature on these people, with the exception of one or two recent brief articles, is utterly worthless; and if again I turn my face to the field, I shall hardly be faint hearted because an authority tells me he can do more with books than I can with ears and eyes, and a filibuster says that the tribe scientifically is “bed ridden”. I do not count myself a man of as much ability as those possessed who have preceded me; but my method must succeed. I live among the Indians, I eat their food, and sleep in their houses. Because I will unhesitatingly plunge my hand in common with their dusty ones and dirtier children’s into a great kind of hot, miscellaneous food; will sit close to having neither

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vermin nor disease, will fondle and talk sweet Indian to their bright eyed little babies; will wear the blanket and tie the pania around my long hair; will look with unfeigned reverence on their beautiful and ancient ceremonies, never laughing at any absurd observance, they love me, and I learn. (Green 1990, p. 60)

The research that unfolded according to a model that can be characterized as an “experiential and empathic paradigm,” where the “doing” is oriented by “thinking” a precise scientific problematic, did not provide at all for a separation between ethnographic and archival research. Rather, such a model constituted a worthwhile multidisciplinary approach, in the framework of a continuous comparison of sources and documents. The work carried out in the field, oscillating between depression and the feeling of satisfaction, of which Cushing’s diaries retain traces (Alliegro 2016a), persuaded the young ethnologist to consider the connection between the different dimensions of social action as fundamental to the comprehension of Zuñi life. Their “beliefs,” for example, were understandable only if read in light of an integrated system, considering behavioral codes as much expressive ones. In his study on ceramics (Cushing 1886), this particular way of proceeding, merging interpretation with a consistent documentary repository, was further confirmed. Participating for many years in Zuñi daily life, Cushing discovered that the decorations possessed a symbolic value tied to their general value system. This emerged from a careful analysis of objects and myths that demonstrated, for example, that in some artifacts used for cooking, the decorative lines were left open so that “something” animating the ceramic, once placed in contact with the flames, could leave the object, and be safe from the fire. It is, however, with the text Outlines of Zuñi Creation Myths (Cushing 1896) that Cushing’s knowledge would express its heuristic value to the highest level of abstraction. Through a patient labor of stitching together fragments of knowledge assumed in different moments of fieldwork, we see the anthropologist passing from a single aspect to more general modeling, pushing finally toward the reconstruction of a complex system in which the astral, earthly, and social dimensions, reciprocally intertwined, reverberate in the belief systems and in ritual practices, proceeding from specific classificatory patterns. The ethnographic research, beset with obstacles and rife with psychophysical uneasiness, results in the young researcher’s narration,

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punctuated nonetheless with scientific gratifications capable of providing relief and compensation for every kind of effort. Where the body suffers, the intellect rejoices, as Cushing underlines on July 18, 1880, referring to the ethnographic parenthesis as an indelible human experience, a sort of master key, destined to leave its signs in the mental, civil, and ethical arsenal of the man and the scholar: I can sum up in one sentence what my life here has been – physically, so far as the appetites are concerned, paralysis; socially, exile; ethically [and] theoretically, a feast, a peace of mind unapproached in all my previous experience. And as to results – probably impaired health during life; a strengthening and development of moral character in every respect, and aside from a more practical and cosmopolitan view of humanity and its institutions, I hope and pray (though sometimes dubiously) that it will make a worker of me. (in Green 1990, p. 117)

What the researcher does in the field is, in Cushing’s case, the product of a clear programmatic plan. The following program for work demonstrates this in an unequivocal manner: First, then, among the objects of extended residence with the Zunis would be the acquisition of the language, as essential to all the following; Second, the recording, in the original language and with faithful translation, of the industrial and art formulae; Third, [the recording] of the “Ancient Talks” (i-no-ti pe-i.e.-we) or religious instructions for ceremonies, dances, etc. and of the prayers and songs; Fourth, the collecting of a vast amount of material (costumes, altars, masks, wands, etc. etc.) illustrative of this study; Fifth, study of the plume sticks with collecting of a series: Sixth, [study] of the astronomic monuments, structures, etc., with photographs, plans, etc., illustrative; Seventh, [study] of the Zuni culture as compared to and illustrative of the other indigenous civilizations of America; Eight, [study] of the survivals of gesture language in use among the Zuni as an accompaniment to an oral speech; Ninth, [study] of the Zuni system of consanguinity and affinity a. present, b. primitive, c. geographic origin of the groups (“division”) of the gens, including the special histories of these groups, etc.

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Tenth, [study] of the I -no-te as related to ancient ruins, including the exploration, planography and photography of and collections from the scene; Eleventh, [study] of the primitive condition of the Shy-wi, its culture, etc., as compared to the present; Twelfth, [study] of the important origin of certain mythological usages now in vogue but only [partial] understood… (Green 1990, p. 104)

James Mooney Thoroughly different from Cushing’s approach is that assumed by James Mooney (Moses 1984; Alliegro 2019). Between 1890 and 1893, Mooney conducted demanding and extensive research, focusing on the study of prophetic movements linked to the “spirit dance,” revitalized before and after the massacre of Wounded Knee (Bergamini 2002). Mooney was born in Richmond, Indiana, on February 10, 1861 ( Washington 1921) into a catholic family of modest Irish immigrants. Attracted, since childhood, to the world of the native peoples, to which he devoted many years of intense readings centered on Morgan’s and Schoolcraft’s publications, Mooney initially dedicated himself to journalism. After applying as a self-taught ethnologist to the B.A.E. for the first time in 1883, and then again in 1884, he succeeded in his aim of going directly to Washington in 1885. There, Powell, then director of the B.A.E., diverted Mooney’s attention from a research trip to Central America in order to entrust him with various assignments that the young man carried out in the capacity of a volunteer, to be finally officially employed in the summer of 1886. Within a few years, Mooney established himself as a first-level expert on Western and Great Plains tribes (Tiberini 1999), introducing photographic devices and gramophones to ethnographic research as early as the 1890s (Jacknis 1990). In light of the close relationship that he was able to establish with many different ethnic groups, among them the Sioux, the Arapaho, and, above all, the Cheyenne, to which he dedicated many studies (Mooney 1889a, b, 1890a, b, 1891, 1892), the B.A.E. entrusted him with a particularly delicate assignment: to shed light on a “revolt” movement that had erupted in the reserves, the so-called Ghost Dance (GD). Mooney began his investigation on December 22, 1890, and ended it after three years, giving rise to a research plan which was structured, on one hand, around a phase of accurate consultation of the available

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historical and archival documentation and of a systematic examination of government and press sources and, on the other hand, around a phase consisting of direct exploration in the field, focused on the recording of narrations as much as on ethnographic observation. In the final research report, The Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890 (GDR), prepared in 1893 but published only in 1896 by the B.A.E. (Mooney 1896a), Mooney, with a pinch of ostentatious self-satisfaction, doesn’t fail to note that he remained with the Indians for twelve months altogether, during which he covered over 32,000 miles by every means possible, directly reaching no less than twenty tribes. Furthermore, unlike journalists and government agents who had already worked on the GD, in the GDR volume, Mooney highlighted that he alone had been able to reach, photograph and interview the prophet Wovoka, founder of the GD, among the Paiute, in the Mason Valley reserve in Nevada. In the GDR text there are many expressions such as “I could see with my own eyes,” “I could hear,” “I took part,” “I was informed,” modeled on a persuasive narrative style aimed at instilling a prominent sense of realism by deploying the “ethnographic present” (Matera 2015). In the text, Mooney lingers over his encounter, in 1892, with Wovoka, from whom he learned the origins and salient features of the messianic movement. If this accurate investigation effectively permitted Mooney to deviate from some of the conclusions disseminated by the military and journalistic apparatuses, demonstrating the validity of a cognitive perspective based on the close encounter with the “Other,” the emphasis posed on quantitative data related to the journey highlights the establishment and the diffusion, in the scientific community, of specific “criteria of validity” according to which the ethnographic work must be conducted, and the anthropological work of interpretative synthesis should be evaluated. During his lengthy survey, Mooney traveled to the western part of Oklahoma where, in the summer of 1891 in a Kiowa camp, a ritual practice which was different from the GC, based on the ingestion of a cactus originating from the Rio Grande valleys of New Mexico, attracted his attention. From this accidental encounter, therefore, but also by virtue of an evident intellectual receptivity that placed him in the position of grasping what life in the field revealed, emerged the research on Peyote Religion (Mooney 1896b, 1897). In this context, the ethnologist became the

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protagonist of many experiences that allow us to highlight some unexpected and unplanned effects associated with the public dimension of the work. In the early years of the nineteenth century, the Peyote Religion became the object of prohibitionist political actions. In this repressive plan, hard accusations were directed against Mooney who, as an anthropologist devoted to the documentation of “archaic and savage” rites, was considered responsible for their conservation and diffusion (Alliegro 2019). As a scholar of the native culture, therefore, and because of his intimate knowledge of the ritual practices and of their related symbolic universes, Mooney participated in the work of the parliamentary commission. There, he defended with conviction not only freedom of worship, but also the role of anthropological knowledge. This was based entirely on a nonmediated knowledge of native culture, and on a very specific cognitive and moral-ethical intentionality, in the framework of an ethnography that became “applied ethnography.”

Franz Boas In the 1888 edition of the B.A.E.’s “Annual Report,” a dense work on the Inuit of Baffin Island appeared, with the title The Central Eskimo (Boas 1888). It was characterized by a notable attention to material culture, with broader relevant ethnographic annotations. The work was written by Franz Boas (Stocking 1974; Darnell 1998, 2001), a young German student who drew Powell’s attention, precisely on account of his intense fieldwork in the polar regions. ´ New York 1942), Boas began Born in Minden on July 9, 1858 ( his studies in geography, and acquired a doctorate in physics (Cole 1999). In June 1883, he left his hometown to join the “Germany,” the ship that would take him to the Arctic (Alliegro 2014c). Once among the Inuits, Boas spent a year conducting geographical and ethnological research, while keeping a series of epistolary diaries (Alliegro 2014d). What emerged from his private writings was not just the difficulty of adaptation—especially concerning climate and food—determined by an environment that was not particularly conducive to scientific research, but also, and importantly, the difficulty of intersubjective relations. In fact, Boas reached villages where no Westerner had yet set foot. Concomitantly with his arrival, the local population was affected by the death of many children, which was ascribed to the “intruder.”

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Before leaving for the Arctic, the young man had clearly outlined a series of cognitive questions focused on the idea of carrying out a careful analysis of the relationship between local communities and environmental resources that could transcend geographical determinism. In order to achieve his aims, Boas underwent attentive linguistic and scientific training, while the meticulous preparation for the journey included the acquisition of particular clothing and packing of certain essential provisions. Having arrived in the Arctic and finished his food reserves, he was compelled to assume the local customs in order to face his new conditions, and to become, as he had clear-headedly planned and wished for, an Inuit. In his diary entry on February 15, 1884, he noted, addressing his future wife: In the evening Mitik was here and he told me eternally long stories, which Mikidgu corrected in reference to Ssikonilan and the surrounding area. As far as I know this is the only point about which my assembled information is still inadequate. This morning my friend Tokaving brought me a seal slaughtered by bloodletting, since he wanted some tobacco, which I game him (…). As you see, my Marie, I am now just like an Eskimo; I live like them, hunt with them, and count myself among the men of Anarnitung. (Müller-Wille1998, p. 182)

In order to survive in a place so terribly hostile, Boas was obliged to assume the local lifestyle and rhythms, entrusting himself to indigenous knowledge. In this case, ethnographic research did not articulate itself around a temporary immersion into the world of the “Other,” but unfolded through an intensive sharing of a form of life, becoming a radical twist of experience. In some articles published not long after the journey, some features of this effort emerge: Now I began in earnest to make my ethnographical studies (…). I spent every night with the natives who told me about the configuration of the land, about their travels, etc. They related the old stories handed over to them by their ancestors, sang the old songs after the old monotonous tunes, and I saw them playing the old games, with which they shorten the long, dark winter nights (…). I was very much disappointed to learn that all the information I had received in Europe was worth nothing. (Boas 1884, p. 253)

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and: As I learned the language of this people, I was able to understand the old songs and tales, which are handed down from their ancestors; as I lived amongst them as one of them, I learned their habits and ways, I saw their customs referring to birth and death, their feasts, etc. (Boas 1884, p. 271)

In line with what he had preemptively planned, Boas spent whole days with the native Inuits, both in the igloos and on the ice, helped in preparing the sleds and in the difficult procurement of dogs. His writings from the field are densely punctuated by the intense psychophysical involvement that accompanied the research, where informants and collaborators are not addressed with generic expressions, but with their given names—Ocheitu, Signa—and now considered invaluable friends. The specific need to write generates some of Boas’ reflections on cultural relativism, which would become the foundation of his formative path and of his way of conceiving anthropology throughout his entire career: I often ask myself what advantages our “good society” possesses over the “savage”, and the more I see of their customs, the more I find that we really have no grounds to look down on them contemptuously. Where among us is there such hospitality as here? Where are there people who carry out any task requested of them so willingly and without grumbling! We should not censure them for their conventions and superstitions since we “highly educated” people are relatively much worse (…). The Eskimos are now sitting alert, their mouths full, eating raw seal liver, and the blood stains on the other page will tell you I was assisting them. I believe that if this trip has a significant impact on me as a thinking person, then it is the strengthening of my notion of the relativity of all education and the conviction of how the value of people lies in the guidance close to their heart, which I find, or miss here, just as at home, and that thus all service which a person can render to humanity must depend on the furthering of truth, which may be sweet or bitter for humanity. Yes, whoever furthers it, whoever widely pursues the search for truth, may say that he has not lived in vain. But now back to the cold Eskimo country. (Müller-Wille 1998, p. 159)

When, during the first decades of the twentieth century, the Western totalitarian governments committed unspeakable atrocities, Boas spoke out vocally against every form of racism. The great bonfire on which his

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Nazi fellow countrymen burnt the book The mind of the primitive Man (Boas 1911) is a clear testimony of this (Lombardi Satriani 1998). After his research in Baffin Island, Boas returned to Germany, and finally moved permanently to the United States. There, he became the protagonist of other anthropological research that, based on an estimate by Leslie White, consisted of more than 33 months of fieldwork in total (White 1963, p. 10). His anthropology, characterized by a well-defined interrogative focus, and by a strict critique of the comparative method and of evolutionist theories, would not have been the same without this intense work of ethnography, and vice versa.

Conclusions On January 15, 1943 a small necrology, signed by Ruth Benedict, appeared in the journal “Science,” in which the passing of Franz Boas was announced, and in which was written: “He found anthropology a collection of wild guesses and a happy hunting ground for the romantic lover of primitive things; he left it a discipline in which theories could be tested and in which he had delimited possibilities from impossibilities” (Benedict 1943, p. 61). In order to grasp some of the basic traits of the historiographical climate at the beginning of the twentieth century that developed around Columbia University, where Boas held the first permanent American chair of anthropology starting in 1899 (Cole 1999), it may be useful to refer to Robert Lowie’s history of the studies of 1937 (Lowie 1937). In this work, with the exception of Morgan, the space reserved for the “preBoas” experiences was truly negligible. Boas himself was the architect of the obscuration of nineteenth-century ethnography (Silverman 2010, p. 173), only mentioning in passing a few of the names of the researchers of the B.A.E. in his imposing compendium of anthropological knowledge, General Anthropology (Boas 1943), along with Ruth Benedicts, who, in her book Models of Culture, which was partly dedicated precisely to the Zuñi, relegated Cushing to the footnotes, as a fleeting nineteenth-century witness. The strongest acknowledgment of the activities carried out by the B.A.E. would come not from America but from Europe. Emile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, and Robert Hertz treasured Cushing’s ethnographic annotations, while Lévi-Strauss, in relation to Cushing’s work, wrote that this: “demonstrates a penetration and a sociological invention,

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which should give its author a place alongside Morgan among the great precursors of structural research” (Lévi-Strauss 1998, p. 323). Thus, analogously to the events that occurred in England, in the United States, too, the various needs for auto-referential accreditation of the different schools and scholarly traditions gained the upper hand on more balanced readings of the past. The careful examination proposed here demonstrates how, well before the mainstream narrative that emerged around Boas’s and Malinowsky’s anthropology was established at the beginning of the twentieth century, the North American continent had already been the stage for significant initiatives of “great ethnographic depth.” Unlike the period between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, during which anthropological knowledge was mainly the product of individual initiatives which were often improvised, during the second half of the nineteenth century, the need for subjecting knowledge to the scrutiny of public verification asserted itself, beginning with the scientific associations specifically created for this purpose. It is, consequently, the historiographical acknowledgment of the advent of a specific anthropological scientific community—within the epistemological perimeter of which questions pertaining to research methodologies were foregrounded—that legitimates the necessity for a more strict rehistoricisation (and retro-dating) of ethnography’s emergence. From our examination of the late nineteenth-century experience, it is possible to deduce how, for the researchers we have considered, the field was a semantic and interrelational space to be built, in which it was important to proceed following a schema of research which established specific priorities in relation to the themes and fields of interest, rather than advancing casually, by way of confusion. The terrain, with its unpredictability, its production of shocking events, and by virtue of being a lived experience that had the potential to change into a “disorienting site,” was viewed by the protagonists as fraught with risks. Morgan, for example, was exposed to mental paralysis when news of the death of his young daughter reached him; Cushing was nearly compelled to marry a Zuñi woman against his will so as to complete the process of progressive assimilation to the Zuñi community, as the natives desired; Mooney risked intoxication as a result of testing the effects of Peyote on himself and was obliged, like Cushing, to halt his research as a result of having too strongly assumed the side of the native peoples. The ultimate risk of death hovered over Boas, who was nearly lost in a snowstorm, at −40°, on a long arctic night.

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Within the framework of various problematics, therefore, the newly formed American scientific community delineated, during what were challenging years, some of the “conditions of possibility” for specific methodological demands. Starting with the notion that facts are not selfaffirming, but must instead be brought to the surface so that sense can be given to them and a structure be recognized therein, the nascent anthropology acquired its own logos and episteme, so that other worlds could be thought and narrated, brought back to one’s linguistic apparatus and cognitive horizon, coherently with a specific system of needs and certainties. In this way, the ethnography that developed during those years undoubtedly contributed to the stabilization of a form of knowledge and, consequently, of its discipline, intended as a “putting in order.” This furnished the emergent anthropology with specific elements around which to put pressure to consolidate a particular “order of discourse,” one from which it dialectically received feedback and prompts. Thus, it appears more clearly how the researchers examined above developed the idea that the building process of knowledge does not impose itself as a natural action disclosing reality, but rather as critical reason applied for the purpose of new elaborations, albeit within the line of competence traced by that specific “truth apparatus” connecting ethnography with anthropology. Specifically, it was within the B.A.E. that the “proto-ethnographic” and predatory paradigms were overcome, in favor of the formalization of a “dialogical paradigm” that was “experiential and empathic,” merging into an innovative paradigm that can be characterized as “conscious ethnography,” where at least three aspects assumed a certain relevance: 1. cognitive intentionality, that is to say, leaving in order to face a precise problematic knot, within the framework of an unequivocal nucleus of interrogation, fixed by theoretical-methodological frames; 2. investigative planning, that is to say, following a cognitive picture according to a well-structured (but also flexible) predefined schema; 3. methodological and epistemological reflexivity, that is to say, assuming the validity of knowledge and of its theoretical and, eventually, pragmatic plausibility as the object of constant critical thought (before, during, and after fieldwork).

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In conclusion, it can be useful to return to some aspects to which we have hinted in the initial part of this work, that open toward considerations on research methodology, which in this case is not ethnographic but historiographical. In this regard, it may be of some relevance to highlight that the considerations deployed here are the fruit of a specific historiographical approach, where we register a pronounced attention to the “tiny,” namely, a gaze addressed toward aspects that have been marginalized by posthumous historiographical traditions. On this front, we report some elements that may restore the foundational dimensions of a historiographical methodology capable of fulfilling a sort of ethnography of sources and an anthropology of memory. The first point concerns a specific modality of conceiving of the writing of the history of the studies which is not reducible to the mechanic succession of hegemonic paradigms and authors but is, on the contrary, inclusive and open, sensitive to the so-called “minors”; the second is about a historical research practice which is extremely sensitive in relation to the heuristic value of the detail, conceived as a “trailblazer” of explorations that become increasingly dense and deep; lastly, the third point, which begins precisely from the theoretical-methodological aspects already highlighted, restores the ethical and moral choice that finds, in the attention reserved for the “excluded,” its distinguishing trait.

Notes 1. At the time of its foundation Bureau of Ethnology, from 1894 Bureau of American Ethnology (Judd 1967). 2. Among these we must remember at least Alice Fletcher, J. Owen Dorsey, George Bourke, Washington Matthews, the spouses Stevenson, J. Walter Fewkes. 3. Cushing was forced to leave the search for political conflicts.

References Alliegro, E. V. (2011). Antropologia italiana. Storia e storiografia (1869–1975). Firenze: Seid. Alliegro, E. V. (2014a). Frank Hamilton Cushing.“The Man Who Became an Indian”. La (ri)scoperta di un “classico” dell’antropologia. L’Uomo, 1, 161– 175.

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Alliegro, E. V. (2014b). John Wesley Powell e il Bureau of American Ethnology (1879–1902). Sulle origini dell’antropologia americana. Voci. Annuale di Scienze Umane, XI, 143–165. Alliegro, E. V. (2014c). Diventare antropologo. La spedizione artica di Franz Boas tra gli Inuit dell’isola di Baffin (1883–84) come problema storiografico. In E. V. Alliegro (Ed.), Franz Boas tra gli Inuit dell’isola di Baffin (1883– 1884). Diari e lettere (pp. 11–105). Seid (ed. or. a cura L. Müller-Wille, 1994). Alliegro, E. V. (Ed.). (2014d). Franz Boas tra gli Inuit dell’isola di Baffin (1883– 1884). Diari e lettere. Seid. Alliegro, E. V. (2015a). Lewis Henry Morgan. Un fondatore della ricerca antropologica. Archivio di Etnografia, VIII (1), 55–100. Alliegro, E. V. (2015b). Alle origini della ricerca etnografica. I diari di campo di Lewis Henry Morgan in Kansas e Nebraska (maggio-giugno 1859). Archivio di Etnografia, VIII (1), 103–118. Alliegro, E. V. (Ed.). (2016a). Frank Hamilton Cushing tra gli Zuñi del New Mexico 1879–1884. Note di campo, lettere, articoli di un pioniere della ricerca etnografica. Roma: Cisu. Alliegro, E. V. (2016b). Frank Hamilton Cushing. Un pioniere della ricerca antropologica. In Alliegro, a cura di (pp. 7–46). Alliegro, E. V. (Ed.). (2017a). Lewis Henry Morgan e la ricerca antropologica sui sistemi di parentela. Roma: Cisu. Alliegro, E. V. (2017b). Lewis Henry Morgan. Sulle origini della ricerca antropologica. In Alliegro (Ed.), (pp. 9–67). Alliegro, E. V. (2019). James Mooney e i nativi d’America. Efficacia terapeutica, libertà di culto e advocacy in un pioniere della ricerca antropologica. Antropologia, VI (1), 63–91. Aton, J. M. (2010). John Wesley Powell. His Life and Legacy. Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, Bonneville Books. Abler, T. S. (1992). Protestant Missionaries and Native Culture: Parallel Careers of Asher Wright and Silas T. Rand. American Indian Quarterly, 1(1), 25–37. Barnard, A. (2000). History and Theory in Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barnhart, T. A. (2005). Ephraim George Squier and the Development of American Anthropology. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Barth, F., Gingrich, A., Parkin, R., & Silverman, S. (2010). Storie dell’antropologia. Percorsi britannici, tedeschi, francesi e americani, (Italian Edition). Firenze: Seid. [First English Edition 2005]. Benedict, R. (1943). Franz Boas. Science, 97 (2507), 60–62. Bergamini, O. (2002). Storia degli Stati Uniti. Roma: Laterza. Bieder, R. E. (1986). Science Encounters the Indian, 1820–1880. The Early Years of American Ethnology. Norman: The University of Oklahoma Press.

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Boas, F. (1884). A Journey in Cumberland Sound and on the West Shore of Davis Strait in 1883 and 1884. Journal of the American Geographical Society of New York, 16, 242–272. Boas, F. (1888). The Central Eskimo. Sixth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology 1884–85 (pp. 399–669). Boas, F. (1911). The Mind of Primitive Man. New York: Macmillan. Boas, F. (Ed.). (1938). General Anthropology. Washington, DC: Heath and Company. Bremer, R. G. (1987). Indian AGENT and Wilderness Scholar. The Life of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft. Mount Pleasant: Central Michigan University. Bunzl, M. (1996). Franz Boas and the Homboldtian Tradition: From Volksgeist and Nationalcharakter to an Anthropological Concept of Culture. In G. W. Stocking Jr. (Ed.), Volksgeist as Method and Ethic. Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition (pp. 17–78). Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Cole, D. (1999). Franz Boas. The Early Years 1858–1906. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Comba, E. (1998). Introduzione. In L. H. Morgan (Ed.), La lega degli Ho-de’no-sau-nee o Irochesi (pp. XI–XXIX). Roma: Cisu. Curtis, M. H. (1981). Savages and Scientists. The Smithsonian Institution and the Development of American Anthropology 1846–1910. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Cushing, F. H. (1882a). My Adventures in Zuñi. Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, 25, pp. 28–47, 191–207, 500–511, 526. Cushing, F. H. (1882b, June). The Zuñi Social, Mythic, and Religious Systems. Popular Science Monthly, pp. 186–192. Cushing, F. H. (1882c). The Nation of the Willows. Atlantic Monthly, 50, pp. 362–374, 541–559. Cushing, F. H. (1883). Zuñi Fetishes. Second Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution (pp. 9–45). Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1880–81. Cushing, F. H. (1886). A Study of Pueblo Pottery as Illustrative of Zuñi Cultural Growth. Fourth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution (pp. 467–521). Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1882–83. Cushing, F. H. (1892a). Manual Concepts. A Study of the Influence of HandUsage on Culture Growth. American Anthropologist, 5, 289–317. Cushing, F. H. (1892b). A Zuñi Folk Tale of the Underworld. The Journal of American Folklore, 5, 49–56. Cushing, F. H. (1894). Primitive Copper Working. An Experimental Study. American Anthropologist, 7, 93–117. Cushing, F. H. (1895). The Arrow. American Anthropologist, 8, 307–349.

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Cushing, F. H. (1896). Outlines of Zuñi Creation Myths. Thirteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution (pp. 321–447). Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1891–92. Darnell, R. (1998). And Along Came Boas. Continuity and Revolution in Americanist Anthropology. Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Darnell, R. (2001). Invisible Genealogies. A History of Americanist Anthropology. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Dorsey, J. O., Gatschet, A. S., & Riggs, S. R. (1881). Illustration of the Method of Recording Indian Languages. First Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1879-80 (pp. 581–589). Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Eggan, F. (1965). Lewis H. Morgan and the Future of the American Indian. Proceeding of the American Philosophical Society, 109(5), 272–276. Eisen, G. (1977). Voyageurs, Black-Robes, Saints, and Indians. Ethnohistory, 24(3), 191–205. Fabietti, U. (2001). Storia dell’antropologia. Bologna: Zanichelli. Firth R. (1981). Bronislaw Malinowski. In S. Silverman (Ed.), Totems and Teachers. Perspectives on the History of Anthropology (pp. 101–139). New York: Columbia University Press. Fontana, B. L. (1963). Pioneers in Ideas: Three Early Southwestern Ethnologist. Journal of the Arizona Academy of Science, 2(3), 124–129. Fortes, M. (1969). Kinship and the Social Order. The Legacy of Lewis Henry Morgan. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Gideley, M. (1998). Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian, Incorporated. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Green, J. (Ed.). (1990). Cushing at Zuñi. The Correspondence and Journals of Frank Hamilton Cushing 1879–1884. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Gruber, J. W. (1959). Ethnographic Salvage and the Shaping of Anthropology. American Anthropologist, 61, 379–389. Haddon, A. C. (1902). President’s Address. What the United States of America Is Doing for Anthropology. The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 32, 8–24. Harris, M. (1968). The Rise of Anthropological Theory. New York: Crowell. Hinsley, C. M. (1981). Savages and Scientists. The Smithsonian Institution and the Development of American Anthropology 1846–1910. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Hudson, C., & Adair, J. (1977). James Adair as Anthropologist. Ethnohistory, 24(4), 311–328. Jacknis, I. (1990). James Mooney as an Ethnographic Photographer. Visual Anthropology, 3, 179–212.

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Judd, N. (1967). Bureau of American Ethnology. A Partial History. Norman: University Oklahoma Press. Kuklick, H. (Ed.). (2008). A New History of Anthropology. Oxford: Blackwell. Kuper, A. (1996). Anthropology and Anthropologist. The Modern British School. New York: Routledge. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1998). Antropologia stutturale. EST [First Edition 1964]. Lombardi Satriani, L. M. (1998). Libri al rogo e il colore dell’acqua. In F. Boas (Ed.), Antropologia e vita moderna (pp. X–XXII). Roma: Ei Editori. Lowie R. H. (1937). The History of Ethnological Theory. New York: Farrar & Rinehart. Malighetti, R., & Molinari, A. (2016). Il metodo e l’antropologia. Il contributo di una scienza inquieta. Milan: Raffaello Cortina. Malinowski, B. (1922). Argonauts of Western Pacific. With a Preface by Sir James, George Frazer. London: George Routledge & Sons; New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Malinowski, B. (1967). A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term. London: RKP. Matera, V. (2015). La scrittura etnografica. Esperienza e rappresentazione nella produzione di conoscenze antropologiche. Milan: Elèuthera. Mcfeely, E. (2001). Zuñi and the American Imagination. New York: Hill and Wang. Mercier, P. (1972). Storia dell’antropologia. Bologna: il Mulino. Mooney, J. (1887). The Medical Mythology of Ireland. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 24, 136–166. Mooney, J. (1888). Funeral Customs of Ireland. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 25, 243–296. Mooney, J. (1889a). The Holiday Customs of Ireland. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 26, 377–427. Mooney, J. (1889b). Cherokee Plant Lore. American Anthropologist, 2, 223–224. Mooney, J. (1889c). Evolution of Cherokee Personal Names. American Anthropology, 2, 61–62. Mooney, J. (1890a). Cherokee Theory and Practice of Medicine. The Journal of American Folklore, 3(8), 44–50. Mooney, J. (1890b). The Cherokee Ball Play. American Anthropology, 3(2), 105– 132. Mooney, J. (1891). Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Mooney, J. (1892). Improved Cherokee Alphabets. American Anthropology, 5(1), 63–64. Mooney, J. (1896a). The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890. In Fourteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1892–93 (pp. 641–1110). Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.

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Mooney, J. (1896b). The Mescal Plant and Ceremony. The Therapeutic Gazette, XII (1), 7–11. Mooney, J. (1897). The Kiowa Peyote Rite. Der Urquell. Eine Monatschrift fur Volkskunde, 1, 329–333. Morgan, L. H. (1850, January 11). Report of the Regents of the University, Upon the Articles furnished the The Indian Collection, 31 December 1849. In Third Annual Report of the Regents of the University on the Condition of the State Cabinet of Natural History, and the Historical and Antiquarian Collection, Made to the Senate (pp. 66–97). Albany and Weed: Parson e Co. Public Printers. Morgan, L. H. (1851). League of the HO-DE’-NO-SAU-NEE, or Iroquois. Rochester: Sage & Brother. Morgan, L. H. (1858). Laws of Descent of the Iroquois. In Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (pp. 132–148). Eleventh Meeting, Montreal, Canada Est., August 1857, Joseph Lovering, Cambridge. Morgan, L. H. (1871). Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family. Smithsonian Contribution to Knowledge, Vol. XVII. Morgan, L. H. (1877). The Ancient Society or Research in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery, Through Barbarism to Civilization. World Publishing. Moses, D. N. (2009). The Promise of Progress. The Life and Work of Lewis Henry Morgan. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Moses, L. G. (1984). The Indian Man. A Biography of James Mooney. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Müller-Wille, L. (Ed.). (1998). Franz Boas Among the Inuit of Baffin Island 1883–1884. Journals and Letters. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Orser, C. E., & Mackay, J. (1983). The Explorer as Ethnologist. Ethnohistory, 30(1), 15–33. Oswalt, W. H. (1972). Other Peoples, Other Customs. World Ethnography and Its History. New York: Holt. Pandey, T. N. (1972). Anthropologist at Zuñi. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 116(4), 321–337. Patterson, T. (2006). A Social History of Anthropology in the United States. Oxford: Berg. Pavanello, M. (2009). Fare Antropologia. Metodi per la ricerca etnografica. Zanichelli. Powell, J. W. (1875). Exploration of the Colorado of the West and Its Tributaries. Explored in 1869, 1870, 1871, and 1872, Under the Direction of the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Powell, J. W. (1877). Contribution to North American Ethnology. Geographical and Geological Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region (Vol. I). Department of the Interior, U.S. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.

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Powell, J. W. (1881). On Limitation to the Use of Some Anthropological Data. First Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1879–80 (pp. 73–88). Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Remotti, F. (1986). Antenati e antagonisti. Consensi e dissensi in antropologia. Bologna: il Mulino. Resek, C. (1960). Lewis Henry Morgan. American Scholar. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Rivière, C. (1998). Introduzione all’antropologia. Bologna: il Mulino. Ronda, J. P. (2002). Lewis e Clark Among the Indians. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Signorelli, A. (2011). Antropologia Italiana (2nd ed.). Milano: McGraw-Hill. Silverman, S. (Ed.). (1981). Totem and Teachers. Perspectives on the History of Anthropology. New York: Columbia University Press. Silverman, S. (2010). Gli Stati Uniti. In Barth, Gingrich, Parkin, Silverman (pp. 171–232). Steckley, J. (1992). The Warrior and the Lineage. Jesuit Use of Iroquoian Images to Communicate Christianity. Ethnohistory, 39(4), 478–509. Stocking, G. W., Jr. (Ed.). (1974). The Shaping of American Anthropology 1883– 1911. A Franz Boas Reader. New York: Basic Books. Stocking, G. W., Jr. (1983). The Ethnographer’s: Fieldwork in British Anthropology from Tylor to Malinowski. In G. W. Stocking (Ed.), Observers Observed. Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork (pp. 70–120). Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Stocking, G. W., Jr. (1968). Race, Culture and Evolution. Essays in the History of Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tiberini, E. S. (1999). Senza riserve. Etnologia del Nord America, Roma: Bulzoni Editore. Tooker, E. (1994). Lewis Henry Morgan on Iroquois Material Culture. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Trautman, T. R. (1987). Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship. Berkeley: University of California Press. Van Del, Geest S. (1990). Anthropologist and Missionaries. Brothers Under Skin. Man, 25(4), 588–601. Wallace, S. (1954). Beyond the Hundredth Meridian. John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West. New York: Penguin Book. White, L. (1959). Lewis Henry Morgan. The Indian Journal 1859–62. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. White, L. (1963). The Ethnology and Ethnography of Franz Boas. Bulletin of the Texas Memorial Museum, 6, 1–66.

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Wissler, C. (1942). The American Indian and the American Philosophical Society. Symposium on the Early History of Science and Learning in America, 86(1), 189–204. Woodbury, R., & Woodbury, N. (1999). The Rise and Fall of the Bureau of American Ethnology. Journal of the Southwest, 41(3), 283–296.

CHAPTER 3

Before and After Science: Radcliffe-Brown, British Social Anthropology, and the Relationship Between Field Research, Ethnography, and Theory Alessandro Mancuso

In his view of social anthropology as a “natural science of society” (1957), Radcliffe-Brown always considered fieldwork, carried out according to the principles made renowned by Malinowski, an essential research tool not only to guarantee the scientific reliability of the collecting data and documentation work, but also and mainly a method of empirical verification of particular theoretical hypotheses concerning the principles of functioning of “social systems”. He deemed that the verification of theoretical hypotheses had to direct the choice of research problems, as much as the choice of where to carry out the fieldwork. It is unanimously renowned that in British anthropology the influence of Radcliffe-Brown’s theoretical orientation and the development of the general research program which he outlined, lasted

A. Mancuso (B) University of Palermo, Palermo, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 V. Matera and A. Biscaldi (eds.), Ethnography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51720-5_3

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far beyond his death, going on until about 1970, after which they were both dismissed (e.g. Kuper 2004; Leach 1977) up to our days. Not only did Radcliffe-Brown (e.g. 1952 [1940], p. 188) consider of questionable scientific value Malinowski’s theoretical contributions (except for in few circumstances, he indirectly debated them by critically commenting several ethnographic works by the pupils of the latter, see Stocking 1995, pp. 361–366), but he also saw in the primacy bestowed by Malinowski to ethnography a tendency which could have led to the disjunction of fieldwork from the pursuit of a scientific development of anthropology and consequently, in the end, an obstacle to such a development.1 In this essay, I will focus on the period of formation of RadcliffeBrown’s ideas about the relationships between field research, ethnography, and anthropology’s theoretical aims. This period began in 1906, the year in which Radcliffe-Brown started his field research in the Andaman Islands, whereas it ended in 1922–1923, with the publication both of The Andaman Islanders, the monography where he discussed the results of such research (1922) and the famous speech on “The methods of ethnology and social anthropology” (1923).

Field Research in the Andaman Islands Radcliffe-Brown carried out his field research several years before giving, in his renowned paper on “The methods of ethnology and social anthropology,” a first public presentation of his own ideas about social anthropology as a scientific discipline. His first and longest field research was carried out from 1906 to 1908 in the Andaman Islands, whose inhabitants back then were considered to belong to the most “primitive” of the four racial and cultural macro-groupings (the so-called “negritos”) into which South-East Asian populations were classified. The aim of the research was supposed to be the reconstruction of the different aspects of Andamanese people’s “primitive culture,” before it completely disappeared. The site of the field research and its objectives were established by Haddon, the most important of his teachers in Cambridge, along with Rivers (Urry 1993, p. 51; Stocking 1995, p. 306). Radcliffe-Brown’s actual stay in the Andamans Islands lasted about 10 months (ibid.). In the preface and several chapters of The Andaman Islanders: A Study in Social Anthropology, published in 1922 (the same

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year as Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific), he discusses what he considered as important flaws, gaps, and unfortunate circumstances of his fieldwork. Upon his arrival in Great Andaman, he met a population which had undergone a huge demographic fall over the previous fifty years, as a consequence of the development of epidemics spread by the presence of Europeans (Hastrup 2013; Venkateswar 2004). A large portion of the survivors had become strongly dependant for their own subsistence upon assistance and seasonal job offers by the colonial administration. The local culture proved to be so transformed by the contact with colonial agents that it could be reported only by memories and recollections that the older generation had of the way of living and the customs being in force during the previous decades upon the consolidation of the foreign presence, which occurred in 1858 with the establishment of the Port Blair penal colony. Furthermore, a study on Great Andaman’s “traditional culture” had already been published decades earlier, based on a research carried out under more suitable circumstances by E. H. Man (1885), who lived there for many years fulfilling several assignments related to the colonial administration (Tomas 1991, pp. 87–91; Urry 1993, pp. 22–23). After an initial period spent in Fort Blair, Radcliffe-Brown was dissatisfied with the results of the investigation carried out with the natives gravitating around this settlement. So, he decided to move toward Little Andaman, the smallest and southernmost island of the main two in the archipelago, whose population, the Önges, were very different in terms of language, history, and culture from the inhabitants of Great Andaman. On Little Andaman the “traditional culture” seemed to have remained more “untouched” having at the same time been studied very little. However, Radcliffe-Brown’s intention to pursue the rest of his fieldwork there was foiled by the impossibility of communicating with the Önges, who all spoke only the native language. He gave up pursuing his research after passing three months in Little Andaman, when he realized that it would take him two or three years in order to be proficient in the local language. Once he came back to Great Andaman, Radcliffe-Brown decided to focus his research on the northern part of the island, being the one where Man had worked the least and where he thought therefore that more probably he could find new useful information to retrace the cultural history and the social organization of the native populations.

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As for his work in Great Andaman, Radcliffe-Brown had to face difficulties in reaching a level of mastery of the native language: for most of his stay, while making headway in his learning, he communicated with the inhabitants mainly in Hindustani; only in the final months of his field did he find an Andamanese speaking English who could be able to act as his interpreter, allowing him to achieve what he considered to be the best results of his research. For all those reasons, when in 1922, 14 years after the completion of his fieldwork, Radcliffe-Brown published The Andaman Islanders, he wrote that he considered his research as an “apprenticeship” (RadcliffeBrown 1922, p. ix).2

Radcliffe-Brown’s Relationship with Haddon and Rivers Especially after their participation in the famous “Cambridge Anthropological Expedition” in the Torres Straits (1898–1899), both Haddon and Rivers underlined the importance of a series of significant principles of ethnographic and anthropological method (Malighetti, Molinari 2016, pp. 76–88; Stocking 1995, pp. 115–123; Urry 1993, pp. 46–52). Haddon, who was a trained biologist specialized in zoology, argued that field researchers interested in studying the more “primitives,” “races,” cultures, or populations were supposed to proceed in a similar way to natural science collectors of specimens, that is samples. In the case of anthropological research specimens consisted of traditions, customs, and artefacts of the populations at issue. The researcher was supposed to draft some reports, restricting himself to a description of each of “specimen” as a “fact,” presenting it in an abstract way from the “native life” context and endeavoring as much as possible to stress their objective nature. According to Haddon, this kind of procedure was aimed to allow, as for analysis, the comparison of documented facts and objects and their taxonomic grouping, according to principles of classification similar to those employed within natural science. Comparative operations were initially supposed to be about facts and objects collected in the same human group throughout the same investigation, then include the comparison between traditions, customs, beliefs, objects of different populations. In this sense, the comparative method was supposed to result in the construction of a taxonomy, premise in turn of the reconstruction of evolutionary

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sequences concerning a specific field of cultural phenomena. For that matter, both Haddon and especially Rivers insisted on the interconnection between the different parts and aspects of the “primitive culture” of a given population. So, for example, one could not reach an analytically satisfying interpretation of “religion” without examining its links with “sociology” and “technology,” the same principle being valid if the focus was on the social organization, technology, etc. (Urry 1993, pp. 12, 30, 50–51). Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown took different trails when confronting the apparent dilemma put forward by these methodological prescriptions. In fact, they could conduce either to present all the different aspects of a people’s “culture” as a whole (possibly devoting a book to the exposition of each particular aspect) without removing any piece by the fieldwork record and thus prioritizing the description rather than the theoretical framework of “facts” and “phenomena” being described; or, to focus just on those facets which seemed to be mostly useful for developing a theoretical framework, thus restricting oneself to report only those data which could be useful for supporting, denying, or modifying the latter (Kuper 2015, pp. 18, 45–56; Urry 1993, pp. 55–58). Throughout his whole career, Radcliffe-Brown (1952, 1957, 1958) would keep, although with some amendments, Haddon’s conception of anthropology as a particular kind of “natural science,” whose knowledge is produced through subsequent passages: the collection of “data” by means of field research; their analysis and comparison; the creation of “classes” or “types” of phenomena; finally, the formulation of “generalisations” and “laws,” and of more fine-tuned new hypotheses to be checked through carried out new fieldwork research. It has been highlighted (Kuper 2015, p. 7; Malighetti, Molinari 2016, pp. 85–86; Stocking 1992, p. 120) how Rivers pioneered the elaboration of new methods for field research aimed to produce an ethnographic study: as a matter of fact, he articulated the vast majority of the principles exposed by Malinowski in his famous introductive chapter of Argonauts of the Western Pacific. Rivers, as much as Haddon, thought that the field researcher was supposed to investigate the interconnection of the different aspects (sociology, technology, religion, etc.) of the “primitive culture” of a given people, but it must be emphasized as well how he was convinced that the study of the social structure and organization, in particular kinship systems, was the most promising for the development of anthropology as

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a scientific discipline, since this branch of human behavior comprised the one “where the principles of determinism are applied with the same firmness and precision as those of other exact sciences” (Rivers 1914a, cit. in Malighetti, Molinari 2016, p. 81). His insistence on the key importance of the “genealogic method” for collecting not only genealogies but also kinship terminologies, life stories, information about places of origin and residence of every person among the people about which the researcher wanted to investigate and retrace the culture,3 was primarily motivated by the relevance that he recognized to the study of these fields. He thought, in fact, they constituted, especially in the simplest social organizations (in Durkheim’s sense), along with the form of the local group and relationship between different social groups, the armor—what Radcliffe-Brown, in The Andaman Islanders (1922, p. 22), would call the “structure”—of the social relationship and the codes of conduct and behavior, so providing a privileged access key to the other aspects of the culture and the history of the population being studied as well. Even during the phase in which he adhered to the diffusionist approaches, Rivers continued to study kinship and social organisation not just in terms of its importance in historical reconstructions, but also as formal systems and published a number of important essays and books on these subjects” (Urry 1993, p. 122, cfr. Kuper 2005, pp. 135–147; Langham 1981).

Both River’s view of kinship relationships as the core of the social organization, his emphasis on the “genealogical method” in field research and, finally, his stress on the necessity of always accompanying the presentation of ethnographic materials within a unitary setting, left a lasting mark on Radcliffe-Brown’s theoretical and method positions. Nevertheless, this did not prevent the latter from developing a growing divergence from his teacher, especially with regards to the ultimate objectives of the analysis of kinship systems and models of social organization. The circumstance which made their diversity of viewpoints come to light, as we will see later, issued from the interpretation of the principles and distinctive features of the kinship systems and the forms of social organization which existed in the “cultural areas” where the two scholars focused their research, that is Melanesia and Southern India in Rivers’ case, and Aboriginal Australia and Andaman Islands in Radcliffe-Brown’s case.

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Specifically, while having no quarrel a priori with Rivers’ standpoint (once provided that the reconstructions of historical order were substantiated by appropriate documentary evidence), according to which the different forms of social organization and their connections were firstly supposed to be explained through reconstructing the history of contacts, transformations, adjustments and borrowings from which they would eventually issue, Radcliffe-Brown objected that these kinds of explanations did not allow one to succeed in formulating and verifying “sociological laws” on the basis of which to interpret such a relationship in terms of variants and invariants in the structuration of social systems in general or, more plausibly, concerning a previously identified and defined “class” of similar social systems (Stocking 1995, pp. 314–321; Urry 1993, pp. 122–123). After the publication of The History of Melanesian Society (Rivers 1914b) and, even more so, after Rivers’ death, the discrepancies between the two scholars became clearer. In this last work, Rivers exposed the point of view that complexity and plurality of forms of social organization within the Melanesian area had to be seen as an amalgamation and explained as an outcome of a long history of migrations and contacts between different populations which occurred in different moments. He described his method of analysis as halfway “between that of the evolutionary school and that of the modern historical school of Germany. Its standpoint remains essentially evolutionary in spite of its method becoming historical, a combination forced upon me because it was with social structure that I was primarily concerned” (1914b, pp. 5–6, cit. in Kuper 2005, p. 144). In accordance with his own methodological principles, Rivers in this work made a clear distinction between the exposition of the ethnographic documentation, introduced in the first volume, and the deductions and inferences upon which the theses developed in the second volume were based. As further confirmation of the continuity that at this regard continued to exist between Rivers and Radcliffe-Brown even after the development of their disagreement on theoretical matters and analysis procedures, it must be remarked that such a distinction between “description” and “interpretation” can be found, expressed even by the choice of the chapter titles, in the structuration of The Andaman Islanders (1922, p. 230). This continuity is also about the way in which the scientific method is meant. According to Kuper, Rivers “conceived of scientific method in

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what was then the more up-to-date way, as a process of deduction tested by observation” (2005, p. 144), and he adds that for Rivers as much as his pupils the scientific method kept being conceived basically as a recurring feedback among observed facts; the elaboration of hypothetical schemes so as to interpret in an analytical manner their relationship within a consistent theoretical framework; the return to the observation of those facts and new ones as a verification of such hypotheses; the revision and the enhancement of the latter (ibid.). In The Andaman Islanders Radcliffe-Brown totally espoused this point of view: In this science [social anthropology], as in others, if progress is to be made, the elaboration of hypotheses and the observation and classification of facts must be carried on as interdependent parts of one process, and no advantage, but rather great disadvantage, results from the false division of labour whereby theorists and observers work independently and without systematic cooperation. The most urgent need of ethnology at the present time is a series of investigations of the kind here attempted, in which the observation and the analysis and interpretation of the institutions of […] one primitive people are carried on together by the ethnologist working in the field. (1922, pp. 231–232, see Radcliffe-Brown 1958 [1923], pp. 33– 34)4

However, he continued: “It is clear that such studies need to be based on a scientific and carefully elaborated method. Unfortunately, ethnologists are not yet agreed as to the methods of their science. The question of method is therefore, at the present time, of the greatest importance” (ibid., p. 232). It is clear that here Radcliffe-Brown was talking, as he would in a clearer way in the shortly subsequent essay “The Method of ethnology and social anthropology,” about the scientific method in a more particular sense, i.e. as an inductive analysis procedure which does not aim at the reconstruction of relationships of historical casualty, as Rivers proposed, but rather the identification of the “general rules with which cultural phenomena comply […] on a greater or lesser generality level, each of them referable to a specific category of facts and events” (1923, pp. 33, 31). In the next paragraph it will be shown how this vision, shared by Radcliffe-Brown and Rivers of scientific undertaking as an accumulation

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of investigations and studies, producing a continuous progress of knowledge, can be seized right through the history of their controversy on Rivers’ interpretation of variations in Melanesian forms of social organization. As we will see, this controversy was the consequence of the new theoretical perspective of analysis and comparison of the social organization systems of Australian Aboriginal populations which Radcliffe-Brown proposed after he returned from the fieldwork he carried out in Western Australia between 1910 and 1911.

Fieldwork in Australia and the New Interpretation of Aboriginal Social Organization Even concerning his field research among Australian Aborigines, Radcliffe-Brown had to alter his original plan. The starting of his fieldwork was supposed to chime with the participation, along with the other members of the expedition, in a corroboree, that is one of the ceremonies on the occasion of the collective gathering of aboriginal groups coming from different places. Nevertheless, during the first phases of its execution, the ceremony was abruptly interrupted by a police raid because they were seeking out two men accused of a homicide; frightened, the Aborigines scattered and fled, without ever returning to the site. Under this circumstance, Radcliffe-Brown reprimanded the officers on account of the brutality of their behavior and he actually sheltered the two wanted men in his own tent until the police left the place (Stocking 1995, p. 312). So, he decided to head toward the north-westernmost point of Bernier Island, where there was a hospice in which Aborigines from different populations suffering from syphilis were gathered in a semi-reclusive condition. After spending about a year there, he spent six more months among three groups—Kariera, Ngaluma, and Mardudhunera—who lived in an area not far from there. In this case too, these populations had been having regular contact with British missions and farms for more than fifty years. Radcliffe-Brown himself (1913, p. 144) referred that many Aborigines were employed for working in sheep farming and could speak English satisfactorily. Throughout all the duration of the fieldwork: information was collected in formal interviews, mediated by interpreters, in artificial settings. The aim was not to observe what people did but rather to recover the customs of the past. It was the orthodox procedure of the time, but it was very different to the observations of social strategies, cooperation

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and conflict that Malinowski was soon to make in the Trobriands (Kuper 2015, p. 32).

After the publication of Malinowski’s monographs about Trobrianders, Radcliffe-Brown often indicated (e.g. Radcliffe-Brown 1958 [1931b], p. 70) the research of the Polish-born anthropologist as a model of a detailed and methodologically meticulous fieldwork and of the quality of the results it attained. On the other hand, as Kuper remarks, when defining the objectives of the ethnographic field research, he was concerned with logical, formal structures. In Australia, this boiled down to the structure of the kinship system, since, again like Durkheim, and indeed, like the Victorian ethnologists in general, Radcliffe-Brown took it for granted that the Australian band was nothing more than a community of kinfolk. The social structure was simply the family writ large (2015, p. 32).

The ethnographic documentation about Australian Aborigines was from 1880 onwards one of the most important, if not the primary, references for anthropological debates on the evolution of the forms of family and social organization and their relationship with the so-called “totemism,” which back then was meant as a system of partition of “tribal” societies into groups (“moieties” if there were only two, otherwise “clans”) each of which was especially associated with animal and vegetal species (Rosa 2003), according to varied kinds of beliefs (often related to the procreation’s causes and circumstances). In the decade immediately prior to Radcliffe-Brown’s fieldwork, the most debated matters were about the nature and the stages of development of the relationship among exogamic groups, generally referred to as “marriage classes” or “sections” (Radcliffe-Brown would choose the latter term)—of which, depending on the populations being examined, there could be two, four or eight—and “totemic” groups and, subordinately, those about the relationship of both of them with the composition of the local groups (among the several terms employed to design the latter, like “horde” or “band,” Radcliffe-Brown would choose the first one). Indeed, a comparative consideration of the ethnographic accounts of that time seemed to lead to the conclusion that in some populations of Australian Aborigines “totemic groups” coincided with “exogamic groups,” whereas

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in some others the intersection between the belonging to either the first or the second ones appeared to be only partial or completely absent. Furthermore, according to many accounts, in several groups the father’s physiological role in procreation was not acknowledged and such belief was often related to the fact that in a number of cases the totemic group to which an individual belonged was that one of the “totem” of the place where his mother thought that her pregnancy started or where the birth took place. These accounts seemed to support to the hypothesis that, in general, the choice of the spouse and the matrimonial prohibitions were established according to a system of “classes” rather than to a genealogical criterion, so that the terminological distinctions among categories of relatives were determined by the belonging to one of those classes. Henceforth, the possibility of interpreting all of this as a demonstration of a past situation (both among the Australian Aborigines and, more generally, in the history of mankind) characterized by “group marriage” (which, depending upon the ethnographic accounts, was not documentable for the “present”) got a foothold. Concerning sociological theory, in the first decade of the twentieth century much efforts were addressed to find a formal explanation in order to reduce the spectrum of different beliefs and social practices reported by ethnographers among these populations to a small number of common principles, possibly interpreting differences as steps in a possible evolutionary sequence (Hiatt 1996; Kuper 2005). In 1913 Malinowski published his doctoral thesis (Malinowski 1913) where he demonstrated, after an extensive review of the ethnological record, that the nuclear family existed and played a fundamental role in the actual life of all Australian Aborigenes. This work was highly praised by Radcliffe-Brown, who in turn published, from 1913 onwards, a series of papers culminating in The Social Organization of Australian Tribes (1931a) in which he irreversibly scathed this way of introducing the ethnographic documentation related to Australian Aborigines and completely reformulated the very terms of the comparative and theoretical debate regarding the link between their social organization and their “religion.” His new interpretative model would exert a long-lasting influence upon all the following studies. As Kuper observed: The Australian systems were based on the family, marriage was between cross-cousins, and the terms for kin did not determine the marriage rules

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but, on the contrary, reflected them. Even more radically, he denied that moieties, sections, and sub-sections were primary features of Australian society. They were not completely dropped from the model, but were displaced, becoming epiphenomena (Kuper 2005, p. 149).

It has already been said how in The History of Melanesian Society (1914b) Rivers argued that the variety of forms of social organization in Melanesia was the result of an amalgamation subsequent to a history of migrations and contacts between peoples coming from different areas. Rivers opposed the case of Aboriginal Australia—whose models of social organization he kept interpreting as based on matrimonial classes or sections, and totemic clans—to the Melanesian one, in which he put emphasis on the compresence of forms of marriage between cross-cousins and forms of marriage which, in accordance with an interpretation of kinship terms inspired by Morgan, would join—in some cases in the present, in others until a past that was not well defined—individuals which belonged to different generations. Up to the end of his life, Rivers oscillated between the view according to which the models of social organization in Australia and Melanesia were based upon different principles to such an extent that they were barely comparable, and the view according to which the second represented, in evolutionary terms, a stage of development subsequent to the first ones. Aware of the deductive nature of most of his conclusions and, at the same time, galvanized by both the results of Radcliffe-Brown’s research and, particularly, by a resemblance between some Australian and Melanesian kinship terminologies assimilating relatives from alternating generations, Rivers promoted from 1914 onwards a campaign of new field research in different Melanesian islands where he hoped to discover a new documentation which could shed light on the aspects of his analysis of Melanesian societies which appeared to him incomplete. Ambrym Island, lying about 2000 km north-east of Australia, was considered of great interest after several ethnographic reports documented the existence of a system based on the existence of six matrimonial classes. Relying on Deacon’s fieldwork, another of Rivers’ most brilliant pupils, as well as his analysis, published shortly after the author’s premature death (Deacon 1927), Radcliffe-Brown argued that it showed that the Ambrym system was nothing but a variant of the Type II Aranda.5 The general conclusion to be drawn was that both these two kinship

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systems had to be classified within “a single general type of kinship organization (the Dravidian-Australian type) found over a large area of South India and Ceylon […] and perhaps over the whole of Australia, and in certain parts of Melanesia […] possibly dating back to the first peopling of Australia and Melanesia” (Radcliffe-Brown 1927, p. 345).6 So, the marriage and kinship systems of Australia and Melanesia were similar, unlike what Rivers substantiated: in a more general way, his theoretical argument and method of analysis proved to lead to incorrect conclusions. As Kuper noticed, Radcliffe-Brown, throughout his whole career took it for granted that all the kinship systems in the world, past and present, could ultimately be ordered into a handful of types, each with its characteristic rules of marriage, residence and inheritance. Each type was to be identified by its distinctive way of classifying kin […He] believed that there was always a logical connection between the system of kin classification and the rules of descent and marriage (2015, p. 34).

At the same time, the debate on Ambrym illustrates perfectly the procedure of Rivers and his Cambridge students. They were sceptical and daring, but within the limits of the narrow tradition of research which derived from Morgan; and they were rigorous, but without doubting the value of their basic data, the kinship terms. Boas led his students away from the traditional obsessions of Anglo-American anthropology. In Britain, […] it was largely to Malinowski that a fresh agenda was set for the British anthropologists (Kuper 2005, p. 157).

The Andaman Islanders and the Revision of Durkheim’s Theory on Rituals’ Social Value In 1912 Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse was published in France. The long epistolary correspondence between Radcliffe-Brown and Rivers in the following years, which has already been mentioned, was focused on the importance that Durkheim’s theories on the relationship between social organization, beliefs, and rituals could have for the future developments of anthropological studies as much as, particularly, for the interpretation of Australian Aborigines’ ethnography.7

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In Les formes, Durkheim, as we know, based on a wide recognition of the ethnographic documentation, claimed that Australian Aborigines provided a key test in order to prove the theories about the relationship between “society” and “religion,” examined in particular in the social organizations based on a “segmentary clan system”. In Durkheim’s view, among those populations, “totemic” species had to be considered emblems through which every “clan” marked its diversity from any other “clan”. In myths and beliefs about the common descent of the members of a clan from its own “totem” this symbolic association gained ground. “Totemic” rituals, like every kind of ritual in general, had the function of socially integrating these subgroups, as well as local groups too, creating situations of collective interaction and generating collectively shared feelings and emotions as well, which in turn fostered and led to the strengthening of beliefs. Ultimately, through their adhesion to beliefs and rituals associating them to their “totem,” people acknowledged the transcendence of the social order and the social group to which they were subjected. In their epistolary exchange about Durkheim’s arguments, RadcliffeBrown and Rivers agreed about the necessity to reconsider totemism in terms of social organization and function of rituals, but they diverged on the interpretation of principles of social organization among Australian Aborigines. Indeed, Rivers kept thinking of “matrimonial classes” and “totemism,” the latter basically being considered an expression of an “exogamic clan” system, as two forms of social organization appearing to be coexistent among Australian Aborigines, and whose relationship was supposed to be analyzed from the viewpoint of the historical reconstruction as well. The latter, as a result of the Rivers’ approach to diffusionism, required especially the investigation of previous movements and migrations of different populations, and of the borrowings and mutual cultural influences which had occurred throughout their contacts. Conversely, as we have seen, Radcliffe-Brown thought that Rivers’ view of Australian Aborigines’ social organization was wrong and based on a misunderstanding of its principles of functioning, in which neither the “classes” nor the “clans” had their own role, for this was provided by the forms of cross-cousins marriage. “Totemism” had to be interpreted as a particular form of belief and, above all, ritual attitude, which made the integration between groups easier. While following Durkheim as for this general point, Radcliffe-Brown argued that the interpretation of totemic species as emblems of the group

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identity provided a partial and weak explanation from the ethnographic point of view. It was flawed by an inadequate interpretation of the aspects of the social organization in Aboriginal Australia without even specifying the reason why it was indeed natural species to be selected as emblems. In addition, Radcliffe-Brown questioned the thesis according to which Australian Aborigines provided an example of the “simplest” form of social organization. Specifically, Durkheim’s model was not able to provide a satisfactory explanation of the relationship between social organization, beliefs, and rituals among the Andaman populations in which there were neither “clans” nor “totems” but where, however, some natural species like turtles were the object of a complex and articulate system of beliefs, attitudes, and ritual behaviors. Radcliffe-Brown dealt with this case in The Andaman Islanders, in which he introduces in an embryonal form his new interpretation of totemism which he would enhance in a series of subsequent works (Radcliffe-Brown 1929, 1931b, 1951). There, he considers it as a special case of a more general phenomenon, that is the symbolic and ritual importance typically assigned to those natural world species and elements which have a considerable “social value” for the members of a population. In his monography, he resorted to the Australian Aborigines’ case as a term of comparison for the analysis and the interpretation of the principles of social organization among the Andaman Islanders. He pointed to the contrasting elements between the two cases but claimed explicitly to have not reached, unlike than for Aboriginal Australia’s case, a full grasping of the principles of the “relationship system” and, more generally, of social organization among the Andamanese (1922, p. 69, note 1). In fact, the conclusions that Radcliffe-Brown drew in this regard appear to be quite contradictory. He claimed that “the structure of the Andamanese society […] is extremely simple” (ibid., p. 22) but shortly afterward he went on to remark that: “What is really of interest to the ethnologist is the social organization of these tribes as it existed before the European occupation of the islands” (ibid.). Later on, he argues that the “simplicity” of the Andamanese relationship system would be inherent in the lack of a classificatory terminology (in Morgan’s sense), as well as of social subdivisions beside the family and the local group, of marriage prohibitions beyond the circle of the closest relatives and, finally, of a developed network of social relations among different local groups: for all these aspects, the Australian systems would

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manifest a greater “complexity” which would be reflected by their more elaborate social organization (ibid., pp. 52–53, 65, 69–70, 73). From this point of view, Radcliffe-Brown maintained that among the Andamanese many of the terms with which an individual referred to other persons denoted more the relationship between age and social status rather than consanguineal and affinal relationships; in this regard too, he highlighted the contrast with other “primitive societies” (ibid., pp. 69– 70, 81–82). By these annotations he came to suggest an evolutionist hypothesis: the Andamanese case would represent a stage of development of social organization prior to the one found among the Australian Aborigines. In any case, it is clear that Radcliffe-Brown was unsatisfied with the quality not only of his fieldwork but also and above all with his final interpretation of the Andamanese social organization.8 As has already been reported, he explained that such limits were caused by his insufficient fluency in the local languages as much as the upheavals introduced within the “traditional” organization by European colonialization, but it must be noted how, effectively, similar conditions characterized his fieldwork in Western Australia. The basic reason behind Radcliffe-Brown’s dissatisfaction must rather be identified in the fact that he could not succeed in postulating a theoretical model which could have allowed him to introduce, beyond their apparent differences, the Andamanese as well as the Aboriginal Australia models of social organization as two distinct “species” of a more general “class” of societies. In other words, while in his whole work he made references to multiple “types” of social organization (for example, Australian, Tlingit-Haida, Polynesian, African, Ancient Roman, modern United States; see Radcliffe-Brown 1957, pp. 73, 113, 128; 1958, pp. 187–188), sometimes suggesting a parallelism between the Andamanese and the “Eskimos,” he never got to consider the former (along with the latter) as representatives of a new “type” or “species” of social system. So, it is easy to understand why he considered the part of The Andaman Islanders dedicated to the interpretation of beliefs, myths, ceremonies, and rituals more innovative. Radcliffe-Brown devoted several pages of his monograph to the exposition of his own method of interpretation having a clear Durkheimian origin, despite the fact that the French scholar was quoted overall in just two notes (ibid., pp. 233, 325). He claims that his purpose was not to detect nor retrace the origins of these

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cultural expressions but to “discover their own meaning” (ibid., p. 229)9 through an analysis inspired by the theory according to which “Every custom and belief of a primitive society plays some determinate part in the social life of the community, just as every organ of a living body plays some part in the general life of the organism” (ibid.). The meaning of a belief, a myth and, above all, a ritual (or ceremonial custom) had to be traced in his “social function,” which in turn could be defined as the function fulfilled by it in the social integration of the group: Using the term “social function” to denote the effects of an institution (custom or belief) in so far as they concern the society and its solidarity or cohesion, the hypothesis […] may be more briefly resumed in the statement that the social function of the ceremonial customs of the Andaman Islanders is to maintain and to transmit from one generation to another the emotional dispositions on which the society (as it is constituted) depends for its existence (ibid., p. 234).

In the Andamanese’s myths and beliefs, the principles of social organization, as well as the relevance of any natural element or species having a “social function,” were expressed by people in a figurative form mediated by feelings and emotions socially instilled. Radcliffe-Brown stresses how through these expressions a correspondence came to be recognized between the perception of the society’s moral order and the perception of the natural order; the latter was assumed as a model of the former and simultaneously it was reinterpreted in terms of a moral order too.10 In his following works he would refine, with few integrations, this point of view in his substantial revision of the Durkheimian theory of totemism, proposing to consider the latter as a particular form taken by what seems to be a universal element in culture. Every culture that we know has some system of beliefs and customs by which the world of external nature is brought into a relation with society in which the two form a single conceptual structure, and relations are established between man and nature of a kind similar in certain respects to the relations established within the society between the human beings themselves. (1958 [1931b], p. 61; cf. 1952 [1929], pp. 129–130)

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Fieldwork, Ethnographic Representation and Radcliffe-Brown’s Theoretical Framework It is commonplace to say that Radcliffe-Brown did not leave any relevant contribution to the elaboration or fieldwork methods, in the sense of expedients or techniques of acquisition of information to follow in the fieldwork, and that he simply retook the principles he had learned by his teachers Haddon and Rivers. However, along with Nadel, he must be considered the British anthropologist, during the period between the First World War and the year of his death (1955), who, more than all the others, put forward some proposals about what, in anthropology, is supposed to be meant as a “reality” provided with a concrete existence and susceptible to empirical observation and, at the same time, about the nature of abstractions (which he categorized in expedient , that is useful and worthwhile for the theoretical results which they allow to reach, and inexpedient ) lying on the analysis procedures. His afterthoughts about all those issues, as much as on the choice and definition of conceptual terms, are evident when reading as a whole his works, sometimes published posthumously, in which he exposed his views about such matters. Occasionally, some wavering opinions coexist within a text, like in A Natural Science of Society (Radcliffe-Brown 1957). Here the statement that “social systems” and their “structure” both have an empirical reality is stressed several times (1957, pp. 45, 55). However, Radcliffe-Brown added that the delimitation of their boundaries implied a margin of abstraction which in some cases is lesser, in others is greater: In certain regions of Africa, it becomes more difficult to decide what unit to take. The problem becomes more complex still when you get a society like that of the United States today. […] There are no rules as to how we shall do this. […] A society, then, is not actually the same thing as a social system. A society is a body of people, in certain relations, which we study as a unit – as a conceptually isolated system – to describe and compare with other similar units”. (ibid., pp. 61–62, italics are mine)

Leach (1961, 1977) famously argued that Radcliffe-Brown deliberately assimilated the classification and comparison of several “kinds” of societies to the collection and building of taxonomies that is made in the case of natural species, but what Radcliffe-Brown actually did was to propose an

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analogy which moreover suggested that the building of “social” typologies is the result of operations involving abstraction (Radcliffe-Brown 1957, pp. 71–74, 129). In his introduction to Structure and function in the primal society he proposed a different formulation of the empirically accessible situation for the researcher during his fieldwork: “the concrete reality with which the social anthropologist is concerned in observation, description, comparison and classification, is not any sort of entity but a process, the process of social life. The unit of investigation is the social life of some particular region of the earth during a certain period of time” (Radcliffe-Brown 1952, p. 4; see ibid., 1958, p. 167). This formulation was presumably the result of a partial acknowledgement of the position Malinowski expressed throughout a public debate with Radcliffe-Brown held in London in 1938, in which the first one claimed that the reality being “revealed in fieldwork” proved that “culture” was to be deemed neither as (the way Lowie had suggested) an array of “a scrap-heap” nor as an evolving organism or a static condition, “but an active, integrative, adaptive, and instrumental process” (cit. in Stocking 1995, p. 364). With regard to his renowned stressing the primacy of a synchronic analysis approach as compared to the diachronic one Stocking admits that “Radcliffe-Brown regarded the privileging of synchronic analysis as simply a methodological strategy, and that what he opposed was not ‘real’ but ‘conjectural’ history” (1984, p. 182), although it is unquestionable that he “advocated […] a synchronic typological comparison of social systems rather than a diachronic statistical comparison of social practices” (Stocking 1995, p. 426), along with the fact that a consequence of the long-lasting influence exerted by his position was, in the years after 1950, the impossibility of finding a British scholar who accepted of being labeled as an “ethnologist” (Urry 2006, p. 22). While always remarking the utmost importance of following the principles of Malinowskian fieldwork, he did not ever think that the search of information could be exclusively based on this activity, and it is clear that he deemed as essential consulting also the historical sources, if they are reliable. He wrote: “it is obvious that importance attaches to the way in which these data are extracted from direct observation or particular facts, from statements by informants, or from historical records” (1958, p. 167). Moreover, Radcliffe-Brown wished both the carrying out of research in the same “field” by more than a single ethnographer and the cooperation

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of two or more ethnographers within the same fieldwork as strategies diminishing the risks of the “personal equation,” that is the influence that personal inclinations along with the particular academic education of each researcher could exert on the way the investigation was conducted and the interpretations proposed (1931b, p. 90). Ultimately, he gave a relevant contribution to the drafting of Notes and Queries ’ last edition, published in 1936; presumably, the section about “Social Structure” was written by himself (Stocking 1995, pp. 439–440).

Empirical Basis, Research Methods, Theoretical Objects of the Discipline: Does a Bequest of Radcliffe-Brown’s Approach Exist Today? Yet before Radcliffe-Brown’s death, not only was his theory of social phenomena the object of contestation but also, in a more radical way, his epistemology of knowledge and the direction toward which he would convey, at least between 1930 and 1970, the research programs associated with social anthropology. Murdock (1951) was among the first to argue that Radcliffe-Brown, although he had given a decisive contribution to the achievement in British anthropology of unsurpassed standards of a methodological and theoretical nature, joined with a rigorous formation and a professional expertise unknown elsewhere, held most of the responsibility for “narrowing” (Goody 1995, p. 148; Kuper 2015, p. 104; Stocking 1984, p. 179) the theoretical interest and the anthropologists’ fields of research to sociological problems which, what is more, were studied predominately in contexts considered to be scarcely affected by the modernization processes. As a matter of fact, Murdock asked whether it was necessary to still consider British “social” anthropologists as anthropologists or rather as “sociologists” particularly devoted to the investigation of the kinship systems and the social structures. Replying to him, Firth (1951) partly accepted Murdock’s remarks, but he argued that the goals achieved by British studies had been obtained through that kind of delimitation of the research problems and that the stress on structural principles and rules had to be seen as a necessary passage toward the study, in the next future, of the different aspects of variation in social behavior.

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Retrospectively, it can be said that Radcliffe-Brown’s theoretical approach was severely tested and challenged from both within and outside British Anthropology, [though] many consequences of his attempts to establish a “social” anthropology distinct from other fields of possible anthropological endeavour have remained the dominant identification of professional practice. This dominance has included a continuing stress on the importance of reducing the understanding of other cultures to social phenomena, a rejection of, or ambivalence towards, the concept of culture and a widespread suspicion of psychological approaches on the ground that psychology involves the study of individuals not social groups. (Urry 1993, pp. 136–137)

The criticisms made not only to the “sociologisation” perspective of anthropology promoted by Radcliffe-Brown but also to his theory of social phenomena, are too numerous and too well known to be listed here. Among them, one can mention the undervaluation of the several ways by which the temporal dimension intervenes both in the phenomena investigated and in the research situation; the complexity of feedback between research activities and human subjects met in fieldwork characterizing the social sciences (e.g. Barnes 1990, pp. 1–25, 133–149; Goody 1995, pp. 156–158); the lack of focus on the colonial context in which both fieldwork research and theoretical discourse were developed by British anthropologists.11 Most of the views which raised criticisms can “by no means be attributed solely to the influence of Radcliffe-Brown. In a somewhat different way, Malinowski also contributed to it; and the fact that a similar change occurred in American anthropology suggests that more general influences may have been at work” (Stocking 1984, p. 136). Much of these viewpoints about the complementary nature of the limits of the addresses impressed by Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown to British Anthropology, in particular those concerning the way of conceiving the relationship between fieldwork, ethnographic reports, and theoretical horizons can be found in the opinions about the two anthropologists, quoted in many historiographic works, which were expressed by Evans-Pritchard. Still young, before their relationship deteriorated because of personal disagreements, he wrote in a letter to Malinowski: “no fieldwork/Durkheim’s views; limited fieldwork/Radcliffe-Brown’s views;

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exhaustive fieldwork/Malinowski’s views” (quotation in Stocking 1995, p. 425). Some years later, in a letter to Fortes, Evans-Pritchard expressed remarkable perplexities about the ethnographic relevance of RadcliffeBrown’s conception of “social structure” as an empirical reality: “I quite agree that the structure of society is evident in any social activity. But when we say this, we say nothing. For there is no ‘structure’ outside the activities. They are the ‘structure’. Or, if you like, we create an abstraction called ‘social structure’ by observing social activities” (cit. in Goody 1995, p. 60).12 A few years later, he nevertheless exhibited an orientation which was much closer to Radcliffe-Brown in remarking the need of presenting fieldwork results within a clear and well-structured theoretical and analytic framework: according to a well-known anecdote told by Fortes, EvansPritchard took the cue to frame theoretically the Nuer’s political organization from the answer he received by Radcliffe-Brown when he exposed his doubts to him about how organizing the information gathered over the course of his fieldwork: “my dear Evans-Pritchard, it’s perfectly simple, that’s a segmentary lineage system, and you’ll find a good account of it by a man called Gifford” (cit. in Kuper 2015, p. 56). After his “break-up” with Radcliffe-Brown’s conception of social anthropology, marked by the Marett Lecture (Evans-Pritchard 1950), in a paper dedicated precisely to “The comparative method of social anthropology” (1963), Evans-Pritchard, rather ungenerously (since RadcliffeBrown expressed the awareness of such limits), pointed some of the “comparative experiments” (among which the famous essay about “The maternal uncle in South Africa” (1924)—in which, as is known, the principle “discovered” was the “siblings’ equivalence”) exposed by the latter as proof of “sociological laws”, as examples of what was not “a model of scientific procedure,” inasmuch they led to arbitrary generalizations or obvious “tautologies.” Indeed, in Evans-Prichard’s opinion, Radcliffe-Brown’s comparisons were sometimes based on the confrontation between just a few cases, other times on the deletion of those cases which could provide counterexamples disproving the theses proposed; yet others, finally, reached such generic and predictable conclusions that would be of no actual sociological interest (Evans-Pritchard 1963, pp. 13–15; see Leach 1961; Goody 1995, pp. 142, 157).

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In one of his last works, a compendium of his retrospective considerations on fieldwork, by assuming a stance alternating a request for strictness and skepticism, peering at (if not nostalgically fastening on) the past and the quandaries about the present conditions of anthropological research, he seems to take stock of what he deemed to be still valid not only in Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown’s approaches but also in his own approach to the relationship between fieldwork and ethnography: It is the British intense emphasis of field-research which certainly in part accounts for the demise of the once much-extolled comparative method. Everyone is so busy writing up his own field-notes that no one has much time to read books written by others. The importance of a thorough grounding in general theory begins to reveal itself when the fieldworker returns home to write a book about the people he has studied. I have had much, too much, field experience, and I have long ago discovered that the decisive battle is not fought in the field but in the study afterwards. Anyone who is not a complete idiot can do fieldwork [...] It has been my woeful experience that many a student comes home from the field to ’write just another book about just another people, hardly knowing what to do with the grain he has been at such pains to garner. (Evans-Pritchard 1976 [1973], p. 243) A certain degree of abstraction is of course required, otherwise we would get nowhere, but is it really necessary to just make a book out of human beings? I find the usual account of field-research so boring as often to be unreadable - kinship systems, political systems, ritual systems, every sort of system, structure and function, but little flesh and blood. One seldom gets the impression that the anthropologist felt at one with the people about whom he writes. If this is romanticism and sentimentality I accept those terms. (ibid., p. 254)

Although it was a text centered on the problems of fieldwork, we can glimpse an evident disillusion with respect to the idea that in the imminent future the contribution of the anthropological research could consist in bringing general conclusions of a sociological value. Evans-Pritchard’s pessimism, not only in these extracts but also in others not being quoted here, appears to be more linked to the fact that the “societies” studied by the anthropologists from his own generation were meanwhile changing by becoming “modern” than to an opinion about the inadequacy by itself of the fieldwork methods, the comparative operations, and the theoretical

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structure to study them, at least in the conditions in which they were met before their “Westernisation” (Kuper 2015, pp. 129–130; Urry 2006, p. 18). In his analysis of the trends and the “identity crisis” still underway in British anthropology after 1970, Kuper (2015, p. 134) in fact remarks that, from the viewpoint of the occupation of the niche related to the study of sociopolitical phenomena, already in the 1970–1980 decade, sociologists were quickly supplanting anthropologists, in terms of figures and research funds.

A Final Note In the last few decades, sociocultural anthropologists have called into question many methodological principles, concepts, theories, objects, and research results which they inherited from the discipline’s past. This large movement, in which the inner self-criticism interwove with the criticism coming from the outside, especially from that subjects who in the past were considered the privileged object of study of ethnologist (Cirese 1969; Trouillot 2003), also involved, as it is extensively known, the lack of the attention toward the historical-political contexts and dimensions which have so often accompanied the application of the “ethnographic method” principles outlined by Malinowski. Nonetheless, few anthropologists would dare to deny that in the majority of the research concerning social and cultural behaviors the adhesion to such principles is still an essential premise to guarantee the accuracy and the quality of both documentation and analytical as well as theoretical work (Goody 1995, pp. 155–156; Urry 2006, p. 28): their importance is acknowledged today, even from the specialists of other disciplines, from sociology to ethology, which actually claim the “ethnographic fieldwork” as a part of their methodological baggage and indicate it as a technique being often employed during their research. Rather, the problems we face today are of a different nature. One of them lies in the often-ambivalent use of the term “ethnography” itself, oscillating between the sense of “distinct methodology involved with qualitative, local level research” and “product of such research—ethnographic accounts of social and cultural groups including the form of such texts as literary objects” (Urry 2006, p. 1; see Ingold 2008). Another probably more serious problem is represented by the scarce capacity as well as habitus that contemporary anthropologists prove to have not so

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much when it comes to linking single case studies to broader theoretical frameworks, but in doing so by successfully conciliating the sharing of a common baggage of background knowledge (whose general validity essentially does not undergo any criticism), with the exercise of a critic which, however, in order to be constructive, should be largely shared too, within and outside the disciplinary field. Indeed, it is difficult to deny that nowadays the vast majority of anthropological studies, including those introduced as the result of fieldwork research, tend more to “reconsider orientations rather than hypotheses,” with an outcome resulting in a separation between “highly general ‘theory’ [and] highly specific fieldwork, as well as by the kind of ethnomethodological approach which limits its aims to recording the words and action of the people (or a person) themselves” (Goody 1995, p. 149). In other cases, “theoretical discussions have often degenerated into little more than stylistic statements of allegiance to current taste. Instead of structured arguments, we are presented with brief epigrammatic statements, usually rather vague and indecisive in form, which somehow are to be taken as profound” (Urry 2006, p. 28). Ultimately, it is difficult to deny that, as compared to the past and notwithstanding the incessant appeals for interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, anthropologists keep having, both during their academic education and subsequently in their work, a scarce familiarity not so much with theoretical notions and results as with the research and analysis methods commonly employed in other disciplines (Goody 1995, pp. 101, 143, 158). Radcliffe-Brown’s structural-functionalism as a theoretical framework within which to interpret social and cultural phenomena appears today, for many of its aspects and its definition of the research object, to be ruined by non-amendable flaws and imperfections (Kuper 2015, p. 141). Instead, his appeal for an in-depth discussion of method matters, for the search of strict principles of connection between empirical research, analysis procedures, and theoretical elaboration, remains still a current bequest to be developed for the near future of anthropological disciplines.

Notes 1. As he wrote in “The comparative method in social anthropology”: “the development of field studies has led to a relative neglect of studies making of comparative method. […] Without comparative systematic

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2.

3. 4.

5.

studies anthropology will become only ethnography and historiography” (Radcliffe-Brown 1958 [1951], pp. 109–110). The thesis in which he presented for the first time the results of his research was successfully debated in 1908, earning him the Trinity College fellowship in Cambridge. For a concise exposition of Rivers’ “genealogical method,” see Malighetti, Molinari (2016, pp. 81–83). The same vision can be detected in many of his following papers dedicated to the exposition of the purposes, methods, and fields of study of social anthropology as a discipline based upon the same principles of method used in physic and biological sciences: “the method of science is one involving observation, classification and generalisation, not as separate processes but as parts of a single complex procedure” (1957, p. 28, see 1958 [1931b], pp. 70–71). For Radcliffe-Brown (1913, 1931a), Australian kinship systems could be classified into two basic types, although he recognized the existence of variants and the possibility of defining intermediary types. In the first type, the prescribed marriage was with the mother’s brother’s daughter (MBD), i.e. a first cross-cousin, or with a woman classified into the same terminological category; in the second type, the prescribed marriage was with the mother’s mother’s brother’s daughter’s daughter (MMBDD), that is a second cross-cousin, or with a woman classified into the same terminological category. Type I could be exemplified by the matrimonial norm documented among the Kariera “tribe,” one of those among which Radcliffe-Brown carried out his fieldwork: here both the marriage with a matrilateral cross-cousin and the one with a patrilateral cross-cousin were promoted, although Radcliffe-Brown argues that, from a formal viewpoint, the first was the one upon which it was worth paying attention. In addition, all the relatives in each generation were divided into two terminological categories, each of which in turn divided by sex. Besides, among Kariera, relatives of alternating generations were classified together within the same category. From a formal point of view, the Type II represented a more complex version of the “Kariera Type” and was exemplified by the situation described among the Aranda and, more generally, the Central Australian “tribes.” From the point of view of the marriage pattern, it was also the one Radcliffe-Brown detected within another of the three populations among which he carried out his fieldwork, the Mardudhunera, who however, with respect to the Aranda Type’s descriptive aspects, showed important “anomalies” with regards to the kinship terminology. In the “Aranda” Type II, the prescribed marriage was with the actual mother’s mother’s brother’s daughter’s daughter or another woman terminologically classified within the same kinship category. This was related to a kinship terminology in which, within the same generation, each of the

3

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9.

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four categories of relatives of the Kariera Type were in turn divided into two categories, having overall eight categories as a result (four for the feminine relatives, four for the masculine relatives). The contraposition between the Kariera and the Aranda Type could also be expressed from the viewpoint of the “descent lines” which had to exist within each of the two systems so as to make the system work: two in the first Type, four in the second one. It is impossible to list in a single note the countless discussions and revisions concerning Radcliffe-Brown’s analysis of the Australian kinship systems and, in particular, the interpretation of their relationship with those of Southern Asia. On account of its huge influence, Lévi-Strauss’s analysis in The elementary structures of kinship (1967), to be integrated with Dumont (1975), must be mentioned. Among the most recent and updated discussions about Radcliffe-Brown’s analysis of the models of social organization among Australian Aborigines, see Hiatt (1996); Keen (2013). About the epistolary correspondence between Radcliffe-Brown and Rivers, see Stocking (1995, pp. 314–323) and Urry (1993, pp. 122–23). “It would not be safe, however, to base any arguments of importance to sociology on the above description of the Andamanese system of relationship alone” (ibid, p. 82, note 1). Besides, here Radcliffe-Brown exposes the principle, which he would discuss more extensively in his following works (1952, 1957, 1958), according to which the “social systems or types” are the most appropriate unities to conduct comparisons (1922, p. 230). For example: “the personification of natural phenomena [and animal species] is one of the methods by which the Andaman Islander projects into the world of nature the moral forces that he experiences in the society. […] Besides the social order there is another, the order of nature which is constantly acting upon the social order. […] The order of nature only affects [the individual] through the social order, and the two therefore necessarily seem to him merely two parts of one whole,—the order of the universe. […] The forces of the world, as the Andaman Islander conceives them, are not the blind mechanical forces of modern science: rather are they moral forces” (ibid, pp. 381–384). For Radcliffe-Brown’s analysis about Andamanese beliefs, myths, and rituals, see Kuper (2015, p. 31); Stocking (1995, pp. 328–331). Such a thorny matter was related many times, between 1930 and 1960, to the way of conceiving the relationship between an anthropology devoted to the “pure” research and “applied” anthropology (for a recent reconstruction of such a history, see Colajanni 2012). With respect to Radcliffe-Brown, he thought that the “application” of anthropology was useful and also necessary, but required preliminarily the development

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of “pure” research, whose conclusions around the processes of social changing were supposed to provide the lines upon which to base the first one (e.g. 1958, pp. 31–32, 89–95). Regarding the relationship between anthropological studies and colonialism, in Radcliffe-Brown’s texts written between 1930 and the outbreak of the Second World War, we can find passages witnessing a strongly negative judgment, if not on Colonialism itself, on the policies the processes and the injustice related to the latter; such a judgment is followed by an Enlightenment perspective about the corrections and the solutions to be adopted. 12. In his last works, Radcliffe-Brown seemed to have perceived the importance of replying to this objection, by introducing the distinction between social structure as “an arrangement of persons in institutionally controlled or defined relationships” and “the organisation” of a social system as a coordinated “arrangement of activities” (1952, p. 11); indicating “the concrete observable, phenomenal reality” in the “social process” (ibid., p. 3) and claiming that “the three concepts of process, structure and function are thus components of a single theory as a scheme of interpretation of human social systems” (ibid., p. 12). Cf. Radcliffe-Brown (1958).

References Barnes, J. A. (1990). Models and Interpretations. Cambridge University Press. Brown, A. R. (1913). Three Tribes of Western Australia. Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute, 43, 143–194. Cirese, A. M. (1969). Ultimi sviluppi delle scienze etno-antropologiche. In M. Daumas (Ed.), Storia della scienza. Vol. 2 (pp. 1196–1199). Laterza. Colajanni, A. (2012). Gli usignoli dell’imperatore. Lo studio dei mutamenti sociali e l’antropologia applicata nella tradizione britannica del contesto coloniale dagli anni’30 agli anni’50. CISU. Deacon, A. B. (1927). The Regulation of Marriage in Ambrym. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 57, 325–342. Dumont, L. (1975). Dravidien et Kariera. Mouton. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1950). Social Anthropology: Past and Present. Man, 50, 118–124. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1963). The Comparative Method in Social Anthropology. Athlone. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1973). Some Reminiscences and Reflections on Fieldwork. Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, 4(1), 1–12. Later included in E.E. Evans-Pritchard Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (abridged version). Oxford University Press 1976, 240–254. Firth, R. (1951). Contemporary British Social Anthropology. American Anthropologist, 53(4), 474–489.

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Goody, J. (1995). The Expansive Moment. Anthropology in Britain and Africa 1918–1970. Cambridge University Press. Hastrup, K. (2013). Andaman Islanders and Polar Eskimos: Emergent Ethnographic Subjects c. 1900. Journal of the British Academy, 1, 3–30. Hiatt, L. (1996). Arguments about Aborigines. Australia and the Evolution of Social Anthropology. Cambridge University Press. Ingold, T. (2008). Anthropology is Not Ethnography. Proceedings of the British Academy, 154, 69–92. Keen, I. (2013). The Legacy of Radcliffe-Brown’s Typology of Australian Aboriginal Kinship Systems. Structure and Dynamics, 6(1), 1–32. Kuper, A. (Ed.) (2004). Preface. In The Social Anthropology of Radcliffe-Brown (pp. 1–7). Routledge. Kuper, A. (2005). The Reinvention of Primitive Society. Transformations of a Myth. Routledge. Kuper, A. (2015). Anthropology and Anthropologists. The British School in the Twentieth Century. Routledge. Langham I. (1981). The Building of British Social Anthropology: W. H. R. Rivers and His Cambridge Disciples in the Development of Kinship Studies, 1898– 1931. D. Reidel. Leach, E. R. (1961). Rethinking Anthropology. Athlone. Leach, E. R (1977). Social Anthropology: A Natural Science of Society. Proceedings of the British Academy, pp. 157–180. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1967). Les structures élémentaires de la parenté. Mouton-MSH. Malighetti R., & Molinari A. (2016). Il metodo e l’antropologia: il contributo di una scienza inquieta. Raffaello Cortina. Malinowski, B. (1913). The Family Among the Australian Aborigines. University of London Press. Man, E. H. (1885). On the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Andaman Islands. Journal of the Anthropological Institute, 14, 253–272. Murdock, G. P. (1951). British Social Anthropology. American Anthropologist, 53(4), 465–473. Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (1922). The Andaman Islanders. A Study in Social Anthropology. Cambridge University Press. Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (1923). The Methods of Ethnology and Social Anthropology. Included in Radcliffe-Brown 1958 (pp. 3–38). Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (1924). The Mother’s Brother in South Africa. Included in Radcliffe-Brown 1952 (pp. 15–31). Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (1927). The Regulation of Marriage in Ambrym. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 57, 343–348. Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (Ed.) (1929). The Sociological Theory of Totemism. In Structure and Function in Primitive Society (pp. 117–132). Cohen and West.

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Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (1931a). The Social Organization of Australian Tribes. Macmillan & Co. Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (Ed.) (1931b). The Present Position of Anthropological Studies. Included in Radcliffe-Brown 1958 (pp. 46–95). Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (1940). On Social Structure. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 70(1), 1–12. Included in Radcliffe-Brown 1952 (pp. 188–204). Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (1950). Introduction. In A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, & D. Forde (Eds.), African Systems of Kinship and Marriage (pp. 1–85). Oxford University Press. Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (1951). The Comparative Method in Social Anthropology. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 81(1–2), 15–22. Included in Radcliffe-Brown 1958 (pp. 108–129). Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (1952). Structure and Function in Primitive Society. Cohen and West. Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (1957). A Natural Science of Society. Free Press. Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (1958). Method in Social Anthropology, Chicago University Press. Rivers, W. (1914a). Kinship and Social Organization. Constable & Co. Rivers, W. (1914b). The History of Melanesian Society. Cambridge University Press. Rosa, F. (2003). L’âge d’or du totémisme. CNRS-MSH. Stocking, G. W. (Ed.) (1984). Radcliffe-Brown and British Social Anthropology. In Functionalism Historicized. Essays on British Social Anthropology (pp. 131– 191). University of Wisconsin Press. Stocking, G. W. (Ed.) (1992). The Ethnographer’s Magic. Fieldwork in British Anthropology from Tylor to Malinowski. In The Ethnographer’s Magic and Other Essays of History of Anthropology. University of Wisconsin Press. Stocking, G. W. (1995). After Tylor. British Social Anthropology, 1888–1951. University of Wisconsin Press. Tomas D. (1991). Tools of the Trade: The Productions of Ethnographic Observations in the Andaman Islands. In G. W. Stocking (Ed.), Colonial Situations. Essays on the Contextualization of Ethnographic Knowledge (pp. 75–108). University of Wisconsin Press. Trouillot, M. R. (2003). Global Transformations. Anthropology and The Modern World. Palgrave. Urry, J. (1993). Before Social Anthropology. Essays on the history of British Anthropology. Routledge. Urry, J. (2006). The Ethnographicisation of Anglo-American Anthropology: Causes and Consequences. Sites, n.s., 3(2), pp. 3–39. Venkateswar, S. (2004). Development and Ethnocide. Colonial Practices in the Andaman Islands. IWGIA.

CHAPTER 4

“Ethnography in France”: Ethnographic Practices and Theories in Marcel Griaule Between the Empirical and Rhetorical Angela Biscaldi and Vincenzo Matera

Between Experience and Interpretation In the two decades 1920–1940 ethnography seemed to be searching for a definition. The styles used by anthropologists to present their studies as part of a convincing, authoritative, cognitive enterprise oscillated between a literary and subjective inclination and an objective and

The first three sections were written by Angela Biscaldi, the last three by Vincenzo Matera. A. Biscaldi Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Milan, Milan, Italy e-mail: [email protected] V. Matera (B) Department of Cultural Heritage, University of Bologna, Ravenna Campus, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 V. Matera and A. Biscaldi (eds.), Ethnography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51720-5_4

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scientific aspiration. Indeed, it is difficult to evaluate ethnographic practice (and, in general, anthropological knowledge) once and for all, to trace a preeminent trait, to place it in one or another area (Sperber 1985). The mysterious way in which an ethnographic experience—an experience that is inherently fragmented, almost always solitary, and even a little “eccentric”—becomes something complete and “scientific” in anthropological texts, can only be explained by the fact that anthropologists, when writing their reports, do so by respecting certain procedures presented as “correct”. In order to be recognized as scientific, field research experiences must in fact demonstrate that they have been conducted in compliance with certain techniques and methods of data collection. In addition to having to prove that he/she was truly “there” in the field (a demonstration that can be attempted through writing strategies), the anthropologist has always had to make explicit—sometimes directly, other times a little less so—the method he/she has followed to achieve his/her aim: to provide a representation, as “convincing” as possible, of his/her object. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, anthropologists have thus become accustomed to exposing the criteria they followed to “gather information” in the first pages of their texts: placing individuals within a genealogical scheme, recording myths, illustrating hunting techniques, annotating magic formulas. The illustration of these criteria served to confer scientific respect on anthropological research, but there is no guarantee that the same criteria were and are always followed in order. Anyone who has had ethnographic research experience knows that when you go into the field, however good your intentions are to respect the “methodological rules”, the reality is that you end up having to abandon them in favor of others that are more suited to the circumstances, or even that you end up “navigating by sight”. As Ulf Hannerz pointed out, a special role in field research must be recognized by “chance”, or rather by “serendipity”, which can literally lead to discovering something while looking for something else (Hannerz 2010; Biscaldi 2019). Of course, this happens, or can happen, because there is the theoretical orientation that makes the ethnographer sensitive to certain references, words, gestures, situations, or nuances.

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Without a critical orientation the data remain inert, and the value of the random ethnographic discovery decays. In any case, following certain procedures can, on some occasions, perform a reassuring function, for a researcher who is between an ideal of scientificity and a real experience that seems to have very little scientificity even in his eyes. As Ugo Fabietti highlighted, anthropological knowledge is nourished by the continuous tension between experience and interpretation: the interpretative dimension is always included in the experiential moment and, on the other hand, experience acts reflexively on the interpretative moment (Fabietti 1999). Also for this reason the different moments in the history of anthropology are marked by the affirmation of methodological rules, strategies, field choices, and interlocutors, particular styles of discursiveness, considered from time to time the foundation and guarantee of the authority of the ethnographer, and validity of his research. It so happens that while the activity of some anthropologists passes in silence, other authors can be identified with particular epistemological paradigms, they can become an essential reference point for those who want to do field research in some geographical areas, they can establish themselves as founders of discursiveness, that is, those writing styles that make a text truly “anthropological” (Geertz 1988). Marcel Griaule (1898–1956) is one of these reference figures, the virtual founder of French-speaking Africanist ethnology, and also the author of Dieu d’eau, published in France in 1948, one of the works of most famous anthropology ever, consisting of a description of the cosmology of the Dogon of Mali.

Ethnographic Extravagance The choice of the objective presentation of the results of an ethnography—the one that prevailed around the mid-twentieth century and up to the 1980s—clashes with the subjective practice which pervades it. If there is undoubtedly something extravagant in constructing texts with a scientific aspect starting from personal experiences (Geertz 1988), it is equally doubtful that, in a context such as that which pushes the birth of “modern” ethnography, this extravagance appears motivated or at least motivable (Clifford and Marcus 1998; Matera 1996).

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The anthropological tradition has chosen the narrative model of the “scientific” discourse, although, in many respects, it was more similar to the “literary” discourse. Malinowski (1978 [1922]) appears well aware of the enormous distance that runs between the brute matter of information—as it presents itself to the observation of the scholar immersed in the kaleidoscope of tribal life—and the authoritative final presentation of the research data. Evans-Pritchard, among the major representatives of the so-called “ethnographic realism”, was not unaware of the difficulties inherent in the ethnographic writing operation. Uncertainty/oscillation unites the main new-born or nascent anthropological and ethnographic traditions. Frank Speck believes he has to explain that his writing style (which risks appearing didactic) derives from an ethnographer’s conscious decision in the face of the complexity of what he has learned and which he must put in writing. He (from 1935) wondered to what extent anthropology can extend its specific language to adequately represent the concepts that subarctic hunters and gatherers (the groups he worked with) developed and which express the relationship between knowledge, power, and individuality (Ridington 1988); this is because, according to Speck, the uncritical and superficial application of concepts taken on by academic traditions to the analysis of the world views of subarctic groups risks creating bizarre and ethnocentric results: The business of creative ethnology being to interpret it [a system of belief and practices], not merely to describe it, the implication of a study of this character are sufficiently eloquent; to fulfill the requirements in an ideal sense would call for a complete mastery of the material. (…) Therefore, I have followed the plan of presenting the comments and explanations of native informants by transcribing as literally as possible the notes taken down by rapid notation during the discussions with them. This account for the first-person style of many passages which may seem didactic. (Speck 1935, p. 9)

This uneasiness was also expressed by Gregory Bateson. To the ethnographer, after a certain period of permanence (sometimes shorter, sometimes longer), culture appears reasonable, since he/she studied it in the field; however, how can it be represented to the readers so that it appears

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reasonable to them too? The question arises of the choice between scientific discourse or literary discourse: Such an exposition may be attempted by either of two methods: by either scientific or artistic techniques. On the artistic side, we have the works of a small handful of men who have been not only great travellers and observers but also sensitive writers—such men as Charles Doughty and we also have splendid representations of our own culture in such novels as those by Jane Austen or John Galsworthy. On the scientific side we have detailed monumental monographs on a few people; and recently the work of Radcliffe-Brown, Malinowski and the Functional School. These students have set themselves the same great task, that of describing culture, as a whole in such a manner that each detail shall appear as the natural consequence of the remainder of the culture. (Bateson 1958, p. 1)

This extravagance/ambiguity in itself is also emblematic of the work of Marcel Griaule, and in general of the birth of an ethnographic tradition in France, which is outlined in a climate in which an academic approach to theoretical and intellectual vagueness, a systematic collection of adventure exotic, scientific sponsorship and dissemination intent, artistic-literary ambition, and elements of political activism are mixed.

The Origins of French Ethnography Griaule was born in 1898 in a provincial town; he was a pupil of Marcel Cohen (linguist) and Marcel Mauss and carried out his first ethnological mission in 1928 in the Gondar region of Ethiopia. Le flambeurs d’hommes, published in France in 1934, is the travel story that derives from that expedition, already an expression of the hesitant situation of French ethnology between the two wars and of the ambivalent relationship of ethnology with literature; the latter, on the one hand, attenuates the objectivity of ethnographic data, on the other hand, however, as Bateson also argues, it seems necessary to transmit the cultural, ethical climate of a community. In 1931, the French parliament decreed the launch of the DakarDjibuti Ethnological Mission, with the aim of supplying the Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadérò with exhibition material and launching a long-lasting ethnographic program. It was an important date in the history of French ethnology and for Griaule’s career. It was the beginning of the expedition period of Griaule

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and his collaborators in fifteen countries, and also among the Dogons of the Bandigara plateau in French Sudan (Mali). Michel Leiris was also part of this trip; he was a frontline exponent of the surrealist movement, who in his diaries (Phantom Africa) left an embarrassing testimony of the ethnographic work of the Griaule team, the ways they “collected” information and also materials and objects (Leiris 1996 [1934]). The French ethnography of the 1930s was in fact very far from the Anglo-Saxon model of participant observation by Malinowski. Griaule did not adopt the principle of the solitary researcher, tense in the effort to identify himself with the society he studied. At least at the beginning, he worked in équipe according to investigation procedures aimed at capturing everything and “sifting through” the field; from 1931 to 1946 Griaule and his team described the culture, in particular the “material” one, of the Dogon; at that time, most ethnographers were more or less convinced of having to overcome the lies of informants using increasingly complex investigative methods (plural observation, cross-checking of information) or thanks to the quality and diversity of fact-recording techniques, places, and speeches. If necessary, it seemed legitimate to resort to deception or intimidation to achieve one’s ends, that is, to take possession of a ritual object or to confuse liars and obtain “confessions”, in the name of “scientific truth” and the recovery of traditions. Griaule, during various expeditions among the Dogon, ended up collecting a vast corpus of knowledge that included in a totality the material culture, the social uses, the rites, and through the beliefs and myths, the systems of metaphysical representations that are at the basis. The ambiguity of these activities also derives from the fact that, like everyone at the time, Griaule knew well that the possibility of carrying out his work was granted to him by the colonial authorities; for this reason he was not interested in the political situation—an attitude which also allowed him to rebuild a pure “culture”, immobile over time, isolated, immune from any contamination. Griaule did not support the colonial conquest of Ethiopia by fascist Italy, and he was in favor of a “conservative” colonialism, which would have allowed the millenary traditions that he believed he had discovered among the Dogon to be safeguarded. Defender of an “authentic” Africa and his legitimate spokesman, because of the knowledge he had accumulated during his studies on local traditions, until 1956 he was also

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a member of the Assembly of the French Union. In 1942 he became professor at La Sorbonne, the first chair of Ethnologie Générale at the French University. A significant turning point in ethnographic work dates back to 1946, when Griaule had, with an old Dogon hunter, Ogotemmèli, a series of interviews which he published in 1948 with the title Dieu d’eau. It was the second phase of dogon ethnography: the investigations were directed toward a nucleus of informants and privileged interlocutors through which we can reach a higher and “secret” level of knowledge, reserved for the few. In both cases, the distance between the ethnographic pole and the local pole, so to speak, remains high. In fact, to appreciate God of water in its true value, it is necessary to reinsert it into its context and refer to the date of its publication (1948). His deliberately unscientific guise and his deliberately literary style responded—as his daughter points out—to the author’s desire to bring to the attention of a nonspecialized public and without the usual scientific apparatus a work that the use reserves for scholars (Calame-Griaule 1965). Griaule presented dogon cosmology as the fruit of conversations with Ogotemmeli, an elderly blind hunter, “endowed with exceptional intelligence, a physical capacity which was still apparent in spite of his affliction, and a wisdom, the frame of which has spread throughout his country” (Griale 1965, p. 2). It provides an excellent example of the importance of the informant in anthropological research but, at the same time, it gives the impression that the exposure of this cosmology is the product of an uninterrupted and spontaneous flow of conversations with his interlocutor. Griaule’s ethnography took shape within a theoretical framework that turned culture into an intersubjective “material”, a canvas to be woven, a text to be transcribed. Ethnography became a dialogue, an exchange between two, decontextualized, between the anthropologist and the informant. Is this a reduction of ethnography to an exercise of intersubjectivity? A reduction of empirical research in terms of subject experience? This would not make anthropology a sort of global and ethnocentric interview (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992)? Griaule’s Ogotemmeli represents the figure of the informant as a privileged custodian of indigenous culture, the homogeneous heritage of the community, a sort of timeless cultural “essence” distributed in an almost uniform way, known through privileged informants.

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We know that God of water is the result of careful editing, that Ogotemmeli probably does not exist; it is the result of a patient work of selection and assembly of the interviews granted to him and his team by a group of dogon informants, which Griaule “merged” into the suggestive figure of the elderly hunter. It is an excellent example of “as if”, of ethnographic fiction, although not at all devoid of validity. The birth of French ethnography, therefore, appears marked by a paradox: when the discipline tries to obtain academic and scientific status, to adopt rigorous methods and research laboratories, ethnologists, such as Griaule and others of his generation however, they have deep links with the artistic, literary, and philosophical world (Jolly 2001).

A Strategically Oriented Dialogue To make an ethnographic report something “ethnographically authoritative” means to adopt a number of ways of presenting data that are suitable to produce the desired effect. An ethnographic report is never just a “list” of “things” seen and heard. It is always the outcome of a writing process, that is more or less complex, aimed to produce a very special representation of what one (the ethnographer) wants to talk about. Of course, no ethnographer has ever naively thought that “facts” could speak for themselves, everyone more or less skillfully orchestrates his or her own material, introducing, as we know, elements that could give originality and authority to his or her own research on the spot, trying (possibly) to give the readers the impression—according to the ideal of “science” prevalent at the moment of the research that facts could really speak “for themselves”. It should also be noted that several authors have not spent much time reflecting on their ethnographic experience, and that, if they ever did, they did so in the pages of some more or less secret diary (in this case, it is spontaneous to think of Malinowski’s Diary—Malinowski 1967). With regard to Marcel Griaule, one of the (probably the most famous) founders of French ethnology, the image of the ethnographic enterprise that one gets is that of a cognitive action much more based on what happens in the field than on the application of a real method previously elaborated. Despite James Clifford claiming that Griaule “worked out a distinctive ethnographic method (1988: 56)”, it is quite difficult to separate in Griaule’s ethnography the empirical from the rhetorical, especially if we think that his major ethnographic report, Conversations

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with Ogotemmeli, appears the outcome of a number of complex dialogical processes of education/initiation and exegesis. According to Clifford, it was “a crucial turn in the research process”; it marked “a new style of research” in which the trust of informants was finally recognized. “No longer untrustworthy witnesses subjected to cross-examination, the Dogon ‘doctors’ Ogotemmeli and his successors, were now learned interlocutors” (ivi, 83). Similarly, the ethnographer is no longer that aggressive collector of artifacts, texts, songs; he is now a transcriber of formulated lore, a translator, exegete, and commentator. In Griaule’s account of their meetings, Ogotemmeli was not interrogated in the manner outlined in Methode de I’ethnographie. As Griaule sometimes said, he had become a student; the secret was communicated freely, not confessed (ibidem). This may be true. Anyway, as a matter of fact, this new ethnographic style strongly contrasts with Griaule’s conception of ethnographic research: an intrusion; a kind of violence. A perpetual struggle for control (in the political and scientific senses) of this encounter. According to Griaule, the opposing interests of ethnographer and native could never be entirely harmonized. This idea of ethnography reflects, in a very significant way, the cultural and political context of the 30s in France: a background of celebratory and triumphant colonialism, which is the setting for a series of “spectacular” events of great popular impact: desert crossings, universal exhibitions, mass enthusiasm for the exotic; together with the need, posed by the charismatic figure of Marcel Mauss, to consolidate ethnology (as a scientific discipline). About twenty years later, Claude Lévi-Strauss’s famous statement at the beginning of Tristes tropiques (1973) closed any room to the exotic, that played such a large part in the birth of his discipline: “I hate travelling and explorers…”. After the Second World War, however, the cultural and political climate in France encouraged the passage from a salvage ethnography—aimed at the description, at the systematic inventory of cultures—to a new (and modern) ethnography—aimed at the valorization of African diversity, traditions, mythology, and cosmology. On the wave of the negritude movement, for the safeguard and reevaluation of African thought, Griaule intended to overturn Lucien Lévi-Bruhl’s thesis on prelogical thought and to reinforce a specific African thought—the Dogon one—really sophisticated and complex, at least comparable to that underlying Greek or Christian mythology (Lévi-Strauss 1953; Jolly

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2001, 2009). Such a “putting yourself in the others’ shoes” founded the claim for anthropology to become “dialogical”; in particular—according to Marcel Griaule—to recognize the role a native subject should play in the creation of anthropological knowledge, of ethnographic texts. Dieu d’eau (Conversations with Ogotemmêli in the English translation), the most famous Griaule book (and one of the most famous anthropological books in absolute terms), for some aspects—as has been said—anticipated the dialogue in ethnography: But he [Ogotemmêli] was waiting. He was perplexed by the result of his own approaches to this man whom he could not see. Not that the man was unknown to him: for fifteen years he had been hearing about groups of Europeans, who came, under this man’s guidance, to live rough and to ride about the country studying the customs of the people. […] But the situation was unique. How was one to instruct a European? How could one make him understand things and rites and beliefs? Moreover this white man had already found out about the masks, and knew their secret language. He had been all over the country in every direction, and about some of the institutions he knew as much as he knew himself. How then to set about it? The European relieved him of his embarrassment. ‘When your gun exploded in your face, what were you firing at?’ ‘At a porcupine’ The white man was trying by an indirect approach to lead the conversation to hunting and the attitude towards the animal world, and so to totemism. (Griaule 1965, p.14)

Is it really possible to read in this quote an anticipation of dialogical anthropology? Dialogical anthropology, which would emerge in the 1980s, aimed to safeguard and represent the plurality of voices emerging during fieldwork, staying alongside the “voice” of the ethnographer. The latter of course appears in the text in the first person, the voices of the natives usually represented by a sort of analogical reconstruction. In dialogical anthropology, “I” and “you” and the other deictic elements would be used to highlight intersubjectivity and the specific circumstances that characterize the ethnographic research situations. The research context and the related situations of interlocution would be widely reported in the text (cf. Rabinow 1977; Dumont 1978; Crapanzano 1995; Dwyer 1982; for oral literature transcription techniques, Hymes 1981; Tedlock 1983; Clifford 1988).

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What do Griaule—in particular in Conversations with Ogotemmeli (1965)—and dialogical anthropologists have in common? Probably the willingness of the anthropologist engaged in his/her fieldwork to interact with the natives, a willingness that derives from the particular attitude of the natives encountered in the field. Not always can this intentionality be realized. Marcel Griaule’s daughter, Genevieve Calame-Griaule, who devoted much of her research activity to the analysis of linguistic practices of Dogon people and to the analysis of the importance that this people give to the concept of “word” as well as to the weight it occupies within their cultural world, stressed that fieldwork is not a situation marked by a succession of well-ordered speeches, conversations in which everyone speaks in turn to express his or her own point of view. On the contrary: […] I have noticed that if an extremely competent informant happened to be asked to summarise or explain an entire problem, he was wholly unable to do so, such does Dogon thought depend on dialectic for its expression […]. For this reason it is sometimes difficult to disentangle from my mass of documents the name of the informant who should be credited with a particular piece of information, be it from a conversation among themselves or from cross-checks and evaluations I conducted with one or the other. (Calame Griaule, 1986, pp. xvi–xvii)

Calame-Griaule framed—or at least tried to stress the relevance of such a collaborative setting for ethnography—the ethnographic process in dialogical terms. The theory of speech that Calame-Griaule presented in her ethnography was almost partly a collaborative work, linked to the idea of ethnography expressed in her father’s conversations with the inhabitants of Sanga. In this sense, maybe, it is possible to delineate a bridge—by the mediation of Genevieve—between the “initiatory” period of Marcel Griaule’s ethnography and the dialogical stances, a conception of ethnography as a dialogical enterprise in which both researchers and natives are active creators or, to stretch a term, authors of cultural representations. In fact, Griaule’s experience with the Dogon may be better accounted for in this second perspective; but to say this presupposes a critique of initiatory authority. Dialogical, constructivist paradigms tend to disperse or share out ethnographic authority, while narratives of initiation confirm the researcher’s special competence. (Clifford 1988, p. 84)

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In Marcel Griaule, also in his exegetical second period, sharply distinct from the first, documentary period, the ethnographer holds the control of the research firmly in his hands, while dialogical anthropologists would strive to follow the research’s progress without excessive methodological or theoretical rigidity. If in the case of dialogical anthropology, the thought of the anthropologist and the thought of the native (which for the first time in this form of ethnography is taken into some consideration) are placed together in written form (a real dialogue in Kevin Dwyer (1982)), an indirect freestyle reconstruction in the case of Rabinow (1977), a middle way between these two forms in Crapanzano (1995), a transcription in the form of a dramatic text in Tedlock—1983), in Griaule’s case the inscription of Dogon cosmology in the general discourse of anthropology takes place by a rigorous selection and a special editing made for the ethnographic monograph (Fabietti and Matera 1997), according to a particular metonymic style: a characteristic movement from parts to wholes to more inclusive wholes was Griaule’s basic mode of ethnographic representation. It mirrored, and found confirmation in, Dogon styles of thought, with its encompassing symbolic correspondences of microcosm and macrocosm, of body and cosmos, of everyday details and patterns of myth. (Clifford 1988, p. 57)

In short, the anthropologist Marcel Griaule presents himself as a determined keeper of secrets, very different from that “problematic” character who would later become the ethnographer, one who tries, through a continuous process of negotiation, to reach an agreement with the natives on “what” their culture is, and where the reasons of the natives are not at all something that the anthropologist can and must ignore but, on the contrary, the very elements of the context within which ethnographic research takes on its true meaning. So, beyond any possible common points between the Griaule of the 33 Conversations and the dialogics, the most representative work of the Marcel Griaule conception of ethnography is probably Mèthode de l’ethnographie. A very different ethnographic style, indeed, emerges from the Mèthode, where the ethnographic investigation is depicted as a “strategic operation”. This operation, according to Griaule, must be carried out with care, and scrupulously following a series of indications concerning the choice of the informant, the cornerstone around which the whole ethnographic enterprise revolves.

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Jean Jamin (1982) analyzes the juridical language that Griaule uses to define ethnographic investigation. Metaphors that should not be surprising, partly because Griaule sometimes uses them as a provocation, partly because they correspond to a conception of the ethnographic work and of the relationships between researchers and informants in a particular colonial context and during a time when the field was becoming an obligatory and almost initiatory experience for all aspiring ethnologists. In the context of intensive investigations or itinerant “explorations”, the ethnographers’ aim was to see everything, capture everything, and possibly take everything away according to a complex protocol—including the most secret objects, beliefs, and facts, hidden behind the walls of houses or the silence of informants. The work necessary for Griaule to obtain the information that would flow into his most famous book was undoubtedly long and very complicated. This explains, perhaps, why he devoted several studies to the methodology of field investigation, especially oral investigation. In particular, Marcel Griaule tackled the problem of the choice and use of informants. There is no doubt that the interaction of the anthropologist with his “natives” has always been a methodologically relevant aspect of ethnographic research. However, anthropologists have been rather late in reflecting systematically on this aspect of their research, and in particular on what they have always perceived as a crucial issue for the success of their work: the “choice of the informant”. Perhaps no one more than Marcel Griaule has expressed, before and after him, this common concern spread between anthropologists in a real “theory” of the choice of the “indigenous collaborator”.

The Choice of the Native Collaborator A text published posthumously, in 1957, reproduces some lectures given by Griaule in the 1930s and 1940s at the Sorbonne; Methode de I’ethnographie is one of the most lucid reflections ever written on the techniques of “oral investigation” and on the choice and use of informants. It provides a rationalized version of Griaule’s own research practice. The value of this text lies not only in the “concrete” indications it provides, but also in the fact that Griaule was perhaps the one who, at a time when anthropology wanted to give itself a scientific form, recognized the importance of the field as a “discursive arena”, where worldviews (at least two),

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languages, will, intentionality (cf. Matera 1998), interact to produce a “knowledge”, the anthropological knowledge. The following statements are particularly significant of Griaule’s conception of field research. Not all natives are appropriate for the task: The choice of the indigenous partner, or even the right appraisal of what is sometimes imposed by circumstances, requires special attention […] Not all indigenous people are informants. These societies have their own numbskulls, their taciturns, their emotives incapable of expressing themselves. The qualities that are required to the native are of different kinds: social, technical, intellectual and moral, and physical. (Griaule 1957: p. 54)

Do not take the words of the Elder as sacrosanct truth: A relatively obvious principle is that those involved in a particular cult, the craftsmen practising a certain work, would be best qualified to describe or explain that cult and that work. This truth, which is in itself obvious, must in any case be reaffirmed because one often thinks that a native is aware of all the techniques, all the institutions and all the representations of his society. One must instead refuse to see in the old man an unlimited source of information […]. (ibid. 55)

Select the informants according to their respective competences: In some cases, for example in the case of medical-magic prescriptions, it will be necessary to find the competent man for each of them. The factor of competence should not, however, obscure the researcher. Because of his knowledge and understanding, or because he believes he understands, an informant often falls down dead ends. On the contrary, the incompetent, who knows things only partially, will sometimes provide valuable relationships without realising their worthiness. Thus, a child could reveal indiscretions, which will sometimes be at the origin of a discovery. An adult, who for fear of his relatives will keep silent about an aspect of a certain custom which he nevertheless knows well, will give precious indications about the customs of a close village which, however, he knows little […]. (ibid. 56)

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Beware of those who lie: The main moral and intellectual qualities of the informer that interest the ethnographer are memory and honesty. A liar is usually a liar just one time. Some crossing-checks quickly mislead him and it turns out that his own lies reveal fundamental truths. The liar acts for a joke, for he is a venal, for complacency, for fear of his relatives or of his gods. The first cases are of poor interest, the last, instead, deserves all the attention of the researcher who will usually discover, under the entanglement of the statements or under the coherence of the invented story, an underlying reason that will illuminate many obscure points. The most dangerous informant is the one who forgets, or the liar for omission, who provides a series of apparently coherent and sincere information masking the essential principle or principles of the institution […]. (ibid. 56)

Beware of whistleblowers who have been influenced by Europeans, because they will mock the customs of their people or because they would like to tell you their stories in their own way: One kind of liar who should be used with care is the informant who was influenced by Europeans. Converted to foreign religions, covered with a varnish of which he is almost always proud, the developed native, regardless of the degree of his development, gives rise to a character who, in any case, is not particularly well versed towards the enquiry. He despises the culture of his brothers, and at the same time desires to shine through his knowledge of customs; he is at the same time a completely rootless individual, producing nothing but discourses towards which one should be extremely cautious, and which will have to be carefully scrutinised by cross-checking. The least dangerous is the one who openly ignores his own customs and makes fun of the European concerned with and interested in “primitive wildness”. We knew many of them, like that alphabetised interpreter from northern Cameroon who laughed out loud as he saw us take note of the dance movements of the Sultan Kotoko of Gulfeil; or that teacher from the Niger delta who, even though he lived with his own people, ignored almost everything about the cult of ancestors practised in his native village. One cannot be at school and in the sacred forest at the same time […]. (ibid. 57)

From a certain point on, “methodological suggestions” change to “research strategies”.

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The anthropologist will have to profit from the competition between informants: Informants should be chosen not only for their worth as individuals, but also as members of a group into which they will have sooner or later to integrate, even and especially if they do not live happily with one another. They should in fact constitute a living, but not necessarily coherent and homogeneous whole. Intestine struggles, which generate emulation and promote reciprocal surveillance, are welcome […]. (ibid. 58)

And then he will have to treat them like real guilt parties or “patients”: Once the informant has been selected, all that remains is to use him. At this point only the “humanity” of the researcher will play a role. All talents are productive if they are observed in a proper manner. All indigenous talents are productive if they are used at the right time. The sniffer of social fact is in some cases comparable to the detective or the examining magistrate. The crime is the social fact, the guilty party is the interlocutor, the accomplices are all the members of a society (Clifford 1988). This multiplicity of responsible persons, the wide range of places in which they act, the plenty of evidence actually leads into often structured labyrinths. The desk becomes the theatre of life scenes. The researcher, each time an affable companion for the character placed on the bench of the accused, distant friend, severe foreigner, compassionate father, enthusiastic benefactor, apparently distracted listener in front of the doors open to the most dangerous mysteries, a complaisant friend who is keenly attentive to the story of the most insignificant family problems, must lead a patient, obstinate, breathless fight, full of touch and controlled passion. The prize consists of human documents. (ibid. 59)

A Cultural Representation of an Indigenous Culture Mary Douglas writes that if the Dogons had been studied by Englishspeaking researchers and the Nuers by French, we would have known these people in a completely different way (Douglas 1967). According to the anthropologist, a first difference between the two methods may be seen in the technique of inquiry. The Anglo-Saxons usually carry out short stays but in specific and predetermined places while Griaule plans

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to investigate for a long time in large areas. English-speaking anthropologists avoid asking direct questions and try to take the interviewees to the most important points of research. Griaule and his students start instead from the idea that every society has a particular secret aspect that through a “revelation” a good researcher has to obtain from the informants; every informant brings with him a kind of truth that the ethnographer has to evaluate carefully, to decide if and how to insert it in his cognitive project. According to Paul Mercier (1975) these differences in approach are connected to the different ways of exerting colonial power, the famous indirect rule of the British, and the unmediated control of the French. The scenarios depicted by Griaule would appear to reproduce that of the juridical inquiry and of the medical (or psychoanalytical?) session, with the ethnographer and the informant now in the role of the juge d’instruction (an examining magistrate) and of the accused, now in that of doctor and patient, respectively. According to his exegetes, Griaule was a man with a taste for dramatic and hyperbole (Clifford 1988). This explains, perhaps, the images he used to complete the scenario of the inquiry—the bench of the accused, the “depositions”, the criminal events (the facts the anthropologist wants to investigate) and the complicity (of the members of the community to which the informant belongs)—revealing the largely “circumstantial” nature of the latter. Metaphors that highlight the tortuousness of the path (the image of the labyrinths that the ethnographer should penetrate is significant); the incompleteness of the informants’ statements; the continuous effort made by the ethnographer to get the native who tends to digress “back on track”; the value that the digressions and silences of the informant have for the ethnographer as revelatory of other social facts. Armed with patience, obstinacy (and even a good dose of cynicism), the ethnographer “puts the blinkers on” the indigenous and “leads” him where the secrets of “traditional” culture are hidden. Griaule, it must be remembered, supported a kind of “salvage ethnography” with the task of recording social and cultural facts destined to disappear rapidly due to the influence of Western culture. Griaule and his team worked among the Dogons for many years, from the mid-thirties to the fifties. His works, and those of his collaborators, represent an effort to provide a coherent and complete picture of Dogon society and culture, and especially of the mythical, cosmological, and philosophical thinking of this population. Someone raised the suspicion that, precisely because he stayed in contact for so long with Ogotemmeli and the Dogon elders, Griaule and

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his staff came to write what the Dogon wanted him to write (Clifford 1988). This would be a paradoxical outcome, if we think that Griaule was not only an ethnographer who was very attentive to the question of the choice of informants but also, as we have seen, the theorist of their manipulation. After reviewing the many criticisms against Griaule (Balandier 1959; Sarevskaja 1963; Richards 1967; Douglas 1967; Goody 1967; Lettens 1971; Michel-Jons 1978; Hountondji 1978), Clifford argues that “it is always difficult, if not impossible, to know what happens in an ethnographic encounter” (Clifford 1988: 78), and that, even if it is true that the key informants “griaulized”, that Griaule himself “dogonized”, that Ogotemmeli’s wisdom was that of a single “theologian” and that the “secret”, initiatory nature of revealed knowledge was systematically exaggerated; even if other interests and methods would certainly have produced a different ethnography, it does not follow that Griaule’s version of Dogons is false. His writings and those of his collaborators express a Dogon truth, a complex, negotiated, historically contingent truth specific to certain reports of textual production (1993: 78). What is certain is that Griaule’s ethnography can appear very fragile from a strictly scientific point of view. Some have even argued that almost nothing that emerges as Dogon “knowledge” from Griaule’s work could be saved if subjected to empirical verification (van Beek 1991). However, there is no doubt that it has produced a very intense flow of cultural meanings, both within the nascent community of French ethnology and externally: art historians, art merchants, writers, sculptors, painters, filmmakers (including Jean Rouch), architects, philosophers, religious historians, French intellectuals dedicated to exploring the depths of African thought, psychologists grappled with the suggestions of the God of water in particular (but also Le Renard pale, Griaule and Dieterlen 1965); the book had translations in many languages, including Russian and Japanese, gave a strong impetus to tourism toward the Dogons, and even led to an attempt of Freudian reinterpretation of Dogon mythology. In short, Griaule produced the representation of a culture fairly disposed to incorporate foreign elements—outcome of a complex interaction between a very determined scholar, within a colonial situation, and a group of intelligent and creative informers. Griaule’s ethnographic story is therefore an excellent demonstration of the complexity of ethnographic research; a relationship between subjects experiencing unbalanced and

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ever-changing power, psychological and social situations. It also demonstrates that anthropological texts behind apparent narrative simplicity conceal encounters, strategies, selections, elaborations, and constructions that the ethnographer accomplished in dialogue not only with his multiple interlocutors in the field, not only with assistants, colleagues, and intellectual circles of reference, but also with the dominant representations of what an anthropologist is expected to “do”, “discover” or “tell” of the field. Finally, it demonstrates that the strength of anthropological knowledge sometimes (quite a few times) unfolds in its power to create discursive spaces, within the society in which it circulates as books, articles, conferences, films, photographic exhibitions, museum exhibitions, whose effect is expanding imaginary and cognitive horizons, making room for otherness and cultural diversity. Through a symbolic transfiguration of experiences, events, words, interactions, observations that are the core of anthropological knowledge itself. Thus, we get to the very heart of that definition of ethnography as true fiction that was so much a part of the internal debates of the discipline at the end of the last century.

References Balandier, G. (1959). Tendances de l’ethnologie Française. Cahiers internationaux de sociologie, juil-let-décembre, 27, 11–22. Bateson, G. (1958). Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of View. Stanford University Press. Biscaldi, A. (2019). La Serendipity dell’Antropologo nell’Epoca del Social Media. Antropologia, 6(1), 185–198. Calame-Griaule, G. (1986). Words and the Dogon World. Institute for the Study of Human Issues. Clifford, J. G. E., & Marcus, G. E. (Eds.) (1998). Writing Culture: Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. University of California Press. Clifford, J. (1988). The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art. Harvard University Press, Comaroff, J. (1992). Ethnography and Historical Imagination. Westview Press. Crapanzano, V. (1995). Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan. University of Chicago Press. Douglas, M. (1967). If the Dogon. Cahiers D’etudes Africaines, 7 (28), 659–672. Dumont, J. P. (1978). The Headman and I: Ambiguity and Ambivalence in the Field-Working Experience. University of Arizona Press.

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Dwyer, K. (1982). Moroccan Dialogues, Anthropology in Question. The Johns Hopkins University Press. Fabietti, U. (1999). Antropologia culturale. L’esperienza e l’interpretazione. Laterza. Fabietti, U., & Matera, V. (1997). Etnografia. Scritture e rappresentazioni dell’antropologia. Roma: Carocci. Geertz, C. (1988). Works and Lives. Stanford University Press. Griaule, M. (1965). Conversation with Ogotemmeli. An Introduction to Dogn Religious Ideas. Oxford University Press. Griaule, M. (1957). Méthode de l’ethnographie. Presses universitaires de France. Goody, J. (1967). Review to Griaule. Conversation with Ogotemmeli. American Anthropologist, LXIX, 239–241. Hannerz, U. (2010). Anthropology’s World. Life in a Twenty-First-Century Discipline. Pluto Press. Hountondji, P. J. (1978). Sur la “philosophie africaine”, Critique de l’ethnophilosophie. Revue française de science politique, 28 e année, 2, 376– 377. Hymes, D. (1981).“In Vain I Tried to Tell You”: Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics. University of Pennsylvania Press. Jamin, J. (1982). Objets trouvés des paradis perdus. À propos de la mission Dakar-Djibouti. In J. Hainard, & R. Kaehr (dir.), Collection Passion (pp. 69– 113). Neuchâtel: Musée d’Ethnographie. Jolly, É. (2001). Marcel Griaule, Ethnologue: La construction d’une discipline (1925–1956). Journal des africanistes, 71(1). Jolly, É. (2009). Ethnologie de sauvegarde et politique coloniale: Les Engagements de Marcel Griaule. Journal des africanistes, 89(1), Retrieved from: http://journals.openedition.org/africanistes/7598. Leiris, M. (1996). « L’Afrique fantôme » , Miroir de l’Afrique, édition établie, présentée et annotée par Jean Jamin. Paris: Gallimard. « Quarto » (ed. or. 1934). Lettens, D. A. (1971). Mystagogie et mystification: évaluation de l’oeuvre de Marcel Griaule. Presses Lavigerie. Levi-Strauss, C. (1953). Panorama de l’ethnologie (1950–1952). Diogène, 2, 96– 123. Levi-Strauss, C. (1973). Tristes Tropiques (trans. by J. & D. Weightman). Malinowski, B. (1922). Argonauts of the Western Pacific. Routledge. Malinowski, B. (1967). A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term. London, RKP. Matera, V. (1996). Raccontare gli altri. Argo. Matera, V. (1998). Conoscere senza riconoscersi. Identità e intenzionalità nell’incontro etnografico. In U. Fabietti (Ed.), Antropologi e Informatori (pp. 59–76). Roma: Carocci. Mercier, P. (1975). Histoire de l’anthropologie. Press Universitaire de France.

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Michel-Jons, F. (1978). Retour au Dogon: Figure du double et ambivalence. Le Sycomore. Rabinow, P. (1977). Reflections on fieldwork in Morocco. University of California Press. Richards, A. (1967). African Systems of Thought: An Anglo-French Dialogue. Man, 2, 286–298. Ridington‚ R. (1988). Knowledge, Power, and the Individual in Subarctic Hunting Societies. American Anthropologist‚ 90(1): 98–110. Sarevskaja, B. I. (1963). La Méthode de l’Ethnographie de Marcel Griaule et les questions de méthodologie dans l’ethnographie française contemporaine. Cahiers D’études Africaines, 4(16), 590–602. Speck, F. (1935). Naskapi: The Savage Hunter of the Labrador Peninsula. University of Oklahoma Press. Sperber, D. (1985). On Anthropological Knowledge. Three Essays. Cambridge University Press. Tedlock, D. (1983). The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation. University of Pennsylvania Press. Van Beek, W. E. A. (1991). Dogon Restudied: A Field Evaluation of the Work of Marcel Griaule [and Comments and Replies]. Current Anthropology, 32(2), 139–167.

CHAPTER 5

The Structural Formula of the Team: Reflections on Ernesto de Martino’s Ethnographic Method Giovanni Pizza

Here I carry out some unsystematic reflections on the ethnography of Ernesto de Martino (Naples 1908–Rome 1965). I do not intend to reconstruct his methodology of scientific research by working on the whole of his work1 . Rather I try to analyze his “formula of the team”, as it regards the ethnographic work from which he wrote his masterpiece: La terra del rimorso 2 , his last monograph dedicated to the south-eastern part of Southern Italy, Salento. At the beginning of the summer of 1959, under the direction of de Martino, the following people worked as ethnographers in Salento: the ethnomusicologist Diego Carpitella, the psychologist Letizia Comba, the social worker Vittoria de Palma, the psychiatrist Giovanni Jervis, and the anthropologists Annabella Rossi and Amalia Signorelli. But the focus of this chapter was based essentially on the intellectual autonomy of the Neapolitan scholar. Considered, along with Antonio Gramsci, to be the master and “father” of «a

G. Pizza (B) University of Perugia, Perugia, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 V. Matera and A. Biscaldi (eds.), Ethnography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51720-5_5

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specific line of studies in Italian cultural anthropology» (Gallini 2018), de Martino was an anthropologist whose theoretical and methodological lines are still unique and original. If revisiting La terra del rimorso consists in a practical immersion into the historically deep ethnographic field, it is probably from the contemporary territorial complexity that we should start again, in order to highlight some features of de Martino’s ethnographic methodology focused on the “structural formula of the team”.

Ethnography a` Rebours My Salento ethnography was an anthropology of anthropology. Salento is the place where the Demartinian team carried out their research, arriving there just before the summer of 1959 and leaving again when it was in full swing. My revisiting began in 1993, and in truth that research is still unfinished. Partly because I am working on it slowly, but also because the phenomenon I chose to study, neo-tarantism, is still going on indefinitely today, like a sort of never-ending story. I decided to go to Salento on the basis of a thesis I was following, and while I was in Arnesano (Lecce) with my field diary, I imagined all of the people involved—intellectuals, musicians, performers, painters, and other Salentino cultural producers as well as young people animated by a restless spirit of the place—busy sticking posters to the walls of their room with giant photos of Franco Pinna, covers of the various editions of the Demartinian cult book, La terra del rimorso, or the portrait itself of the great Neapolitan anthropologist. My intent was a realistic one: I was trying to find an answer to the open Demartinian question: «[W]hy was the biting, poisonous spider entitled to rise to the status of an unconscious symbol of conflicts, whatever they may be?» (de Martino 2005, p. 115 [1961, p. 161]). There was not a “psychoanalytical” solution, nor a “Freudian” one. I had started looking for it in the symbolism of small poisonous animals, which I was studying then, helped by the books by Dan Sperber (1974, 1975) and by the degree dissertation written by Patrizia Caione (1993), under my tutorship. And yet, when the barber, violinist, and tarantism therapist Luigi Stifani received the fifty thousand lire requested as compensation for our interview and gave Patrizia his business card as a “doctor in tarantismo”, something changed in me, as I have written elsewhere (Pizza 2015, p. 175). In 1993, Stifani was greyer and plumber than he was in the film by Gianfranco Mingozzi (1962), shot at the very end of the

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1950s. After meeting him, my ethnography in the field really changed. The inverted commas around the terms “tradition” and “popular culture” kept peeking out. And from then on, I would use them, until I discarded those very terms. In the early 1990s—if you look at the Italian anthropologists of my generation—an essay by Berardino Palumbo stood out. In my opinion, it was and still is a great work on ethnography: the title “You are going really deep” was taken from a statement he had collected among the Nzema in western Ghana from his privileged informant, Moke Mieza. Mieza had received important periodic rewards from the anthropologists of the Italian ethnological mission, who had spent a long time at Fort Apollonia, such as to build over time a real anthropological “tradition” at the Nzema in Ngelekazo, a village of about 300 inhabitants in the western part, not far from Behin (Palumbo 1991). Within that mission, he had already worked for his PhD in Anthropology, in the late 1980s, skilfully exorcising different spirits. The focus of that text, which also started from an experience of Africanist ethnography, was connected to a specific intent. But I think it should be underlined here, in order to show the limit of literary approaches in ethnography coming from the vulgate of anthropological deconstructionism. They had a very suggestive metaphorical and literary scope. Even though they were late compared to the United States, those approaches tended to be spread in Italy in the national academic-scientific field as well as in didactics. In that work Palumbo dealt with the analysis of his personal ethnographic experience in West Africa. He did so by interweaving it with three further elements: the anthropological study of the ethnographic tradition that he had worked on; the analysis of the network system, historically built by his main professional informer; the social scene, in which everyone was involved in the phase of a complex, metalectical, historical present. At that time, he engaged in a conscious defense of ethnography, contrasting anthropological deconstruction which risked dissolving its practical dimension. I was persuaded then, and I am still convinced today, that the safeguarding of ethnographic practice should be supported. I carried it out, planning a revisiting ethnography in Salento. In fact I thought it was to be replicated, just to push us to “consider the ‘practical’ character of ethnography, a scientific enterprise that can hardly be made to coincide with the mere activity of reading/transcribing/writing” (ibid, p. 255).

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Precisely in these words one could see a current message of popularization of anthropology. It is, in fact, a position that is both realistic and irreductionist. He performed it in different ways. Taking up the Bourdieuan notion of science as a “field of struggles”. Illuminating the concreteness of ethnographic research (Pavanello 2010) taking as an object of participant observation the consequent and determined relationships of force evident in the field. Reflecting on the involvement of the ethnographer, a flesh and blood person, as he/she changed the observed scene. All those points outlined the deep complexity of the contemporary moment. That moment does not lie only in the external change of the contents observable in the field, but in the decisive and conscious renunciation of a hyperrealistic and falsely empirical mechanicism. At the same time, you can find it in the equally firm rejection of the “calming force of certain literary metaphors” (Palumbo 1991, p. 260). It was not an easy positioning. «Mate!» . That’s what my closest “informant” in the field used to call me. “I’ll be your Stifani!”, he then added, slyly. And this duplicity, I must admit, disturbed me a little, because I did not understand how much the undeniable human sharing of a feeling of friendly closeness affected, perhaps even negatively, the ability to fully explore the field to be ethnographed. Just while the portrait of Ernesto de Martino stood out on the wall of the room where we held the first ethnographic dialogues, and the scholar was watching us with his smiling and satisfied air (after all in the photo he had the volume of the Essayer La terra del rimorso under his arm, fresh off the press!): «And indeed, weren’t our difficulties and efforts largely conditioned by the influence which his work had exercised, positively as well as negatively, on Italian cultural life?» (de Martino 2005, pp. 16–17 [1961, pp. 37–38]). All of this got tangled up before my eyes, making the scene even more intricate and multifaceted, when I reread de Martino’s masterpiece, in the very current originality of its ethnographic position, I noted that he became the coordinator of a collective and collaborative3 “ethnographic expedition”. The land of remorse is based on team ethnography. What new meanings can this scientific practice take on? How does the ethnographic relationship change when it becomes collective? What can such a multiplication promise or deny?

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Interdiscipline The monograph I rituali dell’argia, written by Clara Gallini in 1967, was dedicated to Ernesto de Martino—a name that her pupil already wrote with the lowercase (“de”). A photograph of the anthropologist was published on the frontispiece, with a cigarette between his lips, seemingly unlit. The Neapolitan scholar had prematurely died only two years before, in 1965. In the introduction Gallini writes: This book is dedicated to the memory of Ernesto de Martino: to devote a book to a memory means keeping constantly a severe presence of stimulus and criticism. […] We were constantly supported by one of his teachings: to improve the interdisciplinary dialogue. In recent years that was one of Ernesto de Martino’s most lively interests and methodologically new and open proposals (Gallini 1967, p. VII).

Supporting such an engagement to interdisciplinarity, conceived as a central methodological indication from Demartinian legacy, Gallini published, almost as a “preface” to his text on argia, an essay by him entitled La ricerca interdisciplinare nello studio dei fenomeni culturali (de Martino 1967). It was a paper given at the II National Conference of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Rome on 25–26–27th May 1963, in a portion of the conference program entitled Le ricerche interdisciplinari and placed on the second day, between the one by Alberto M. Cirese entitled Antropologia culturale e tradizioni popolari and the one by Luigi Meschieri entitled Ricerche sugli steretipi culturali 4 . De Martino’s speech started as follows: The principle of collaboration in scientific research can be said to have originated with modern science: in fact, Bacon, in his polemics toward the secret and anti-collaborative character of natural magic, already indicated in the publication of the results and in the collaborative efforts one of the aspects of the new science. In the natural sciences – continued de Martino – the collaborative principle is today in full development. In a more specific sense of interdisciplinary research, it means to enter the “no-man’s-lands” that have remained unexplored because they are on the border of different traditional specialisations (ivi, p. XI).

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Going on with an analysis of such an interdisciplinary principle, in the same paper de Martino pointed out how that methodology had developed late in human and social sciences. This was perhaps the reason why it still encountered several difficulties in establishing itself; there were at least three: (1) the specialist presumption, linked to a single individual mind; (2) a great epistemological diversity, which came from Italian philosophical thought, between the natural sciences and the cultural ones; (3) the lack of a common methodology and the disquiet of an interdisciplinary research in cultural sciences. Being committed to developing such a methodology, de Martino excluded any formal interdisciplinary, based on a false collaboration, one that often masks itself as openness to plural approaches only because it proposes the choice of a “sharable” object. “Dreaming”, for instance. In 1962 there had been an “interdisciplinary” conference on dreaming in California, the Acts of which de Martino was considering publishing5 . On that occasion the collective disposition to interdisciplinarity was guaranteed by the presence of different kinds of scholars: anthropologists, ethnologists, sociologists, historians of religions, psychologists, psychiatrists, and neurophysiologists. They produced an «extreme heterogeneity of approaches» which only rendered «illusory and nominal the sharing of a common object» (ibid.). According to de Martino, this illusion could only be avoided by collaborative ethnography: The type of interdisciplinary collaboration that is promoted by cultural anthropology research may appear more rich in possible developments, particularly in the field of community studies and those related to “culture and personality”. Here, in general, the interdisciplinary relationship takes place not in the abstract, with regard to mere common names such as the “myth”, the “ritual” and the “dream”, but in concrete terms, that is, in research in the field on a group of people, a living culture or subculture, and in the effort that each member of the team makes to understand how that human group, culture or subculture works (ivi., pp. XII–XIII).

In his paper he reflexively developed a collective ethnographic method pursued in his field investigations. Then de Martino clarified the research procedures he had consciously experimented in the 1950s, in southern Italy. First in Lucania (Gallini 1995) and then in Salento (Pavanello 2013). Dealing with tarantismo in several articles, essays, and speeches, he underlined the methodological aspects of his investigation, pointing it out as

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a particular type of interdisciplinary research, characterised by the molecolarità of a particular cultural phenomenon, the multiplicity of analytical approaches and the focus of understanding. We should observe a subordination of approaches to a particular specialist perspective, in this case a cultural-historical or an historical-religious one (ibid., p. XV).

I have addressed the notion of molecularity in other writings (Pizza 2015, 2020) in which I tried to show how de Martino drew the word from Antonio Gramsci. However, the communist theorist and politician did not understand the concept in the physical terms of a “microphenomenon”, as de Martino did (1967, p. XV). Rather Gramsci conceived it as a bridge-word between theory and practice, body and state, used both to describe sociopolitical change and the transformation-mutation of the person (Pizza 2020, p. 102). Anyway, here I would like to deepen the specific theory that de Martino expresses regarding his direction of the ethnographic team, defined by him as focalizzazione della comprensione (focus of understanding). Focus According to de Martino, the element that makes group collaboration effective in ethnography is what he calls the “focus of understanding” (de Martino 1967, p. XIII). In sociocultural studies, the ethnographic team is constituted as a true, and not only nominal, interdisciplinary group, only when that “focus” is implemented by «a central specialised perspective which can coordinate and subordinate other collaborations to itself integrating and unifying the results» (ibid.). This is obtained by avoiding those individual collaborative contributions which remain «unrelated or poorly related to each other» (ibid.). In fact, the prerogative of such a focus is to be understood as the basic concept of the Demartinian meaning of interdisciplinarity. In conclusion, de Martino states: The second point to highlight is the focus of understanding in interdisciplinary research of microphenomena. There is no doubt that a different focus can be chosen with regard to tarantism. A focus that is different, I mean, from the one we have chosen, namely our cultural-historical or religious-historical approach. Theoretically, it would be possible to think of an interdisciplinary team focused, for instance, around the psychiatrist, the psychologist, the sociologist, the ethnomusicologist and so on. But in any case, the research on tarantism conducted by us […] highlights a particular

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type of interdisciplinary research that seems to us to be particularly fertile in results. Therefore we promoted an understanding of human culture in which traditional specialisations question their specialist limits, and take into account the no-man’s-lands left unexplored both for the unlimited division and subdivision of competences. It is an ancient divorce between naturalists and humanists in the sciences of man (de Martino 1967, p. 15).

In truth he had already pronounced himself similarly in the Introduction to the Land of Remorse (de Martino (2005, pp. 1–18 [1961, pp. 19– 40]). In those twenty pages, de Martino’s theory of ethnographic research was condensed, associated both with its interdisciplinary vocation and with the search for the historical depth of the events observed. It was a central methodological essay for even contemporary theories of ethnography, if not only for non-European ethnography, but we follow what de Martino writes: also for metropolitan ethnography […]. The fact that, in this case the journeys to be undertaken are shorter and less arduous does not make them substantially different, since it is still a matter of an encounter with obsolete human behaviour, which contrasts the system “in which we were born and brought up”, recalling ideologies which are no longer current and for which we no longer possess the key (ivi, p. 4 [1961, p. 22]).

As the author himself states (ivi., p. 2 [1961, p. 20]), the quotation of the Lévistraussian expression taken from Tristes tropiques (Lévi-Strauss 1955), with which this introduction constantly dialogues, came just before La terra del rimorso, especially in the Italian translation by Bianca Garufi of Tristes tropiques (in July 1960)—appears very significant in this highly reflective writing, taken as one of the most current theoreticalmethodological essays of the Neapolitan scholar. This is certainly true of the theme of the necessary unveiling of the ethnographer’s passions, once hidden in anthropology, with which his book opens. In the Land of Remorse de Martino often uses the word “etnografia”, especially in its adjectival form “ethnographic”. We find expressions such as that already reported of “metropolitan ethnography” (de Martino 1961, p. 22), parallel to that of “positivist ethnography” (ivi, p. 19) or of “ethnography of the so-called primitive civilisations” (ivi, p. 22), to which a “religious ethnography” (ivi, pp. 24–25), and a “musical ethnography” are added to indicate the homonymous institute in Berlin (ivi, p. 33). “Ethnographic” is then the “report” (in the sense of “account”,

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ivi, p. 19), the “phenomenon” (ibid.), the “speech” (ivi, p. 20), and the “journey” (ivi, pp. 21, 282). “Ethnographic” is the “investigation” (ivi, pp. 19–20, 25, 30, 54, 99, 118–9, 130–1, 140, 150, 156, 172), “exploration” (ivi, pp. 20, 32, 35, 38, 44, 139, 155; expression taken from Appendix III, by Diego Carpitella on p. 1). 335, in Appendix V, by de Martino and Vittoria de Palma on pp. 378–391 or “una inchiesta” (in de Martino’s translation of a quotation from Lévi-Strauss) (ivi, p. 20). Or “ethnographic” is “analysis”, “investigation technique” (ibid., p. 28), “documentation” (ivi, p. 32), “observation” (ivi, pp. 125, 168, 270, and in the cited Appendix III, p. 336). “Ethnographically” observable or no longer observable, are certain cultural traits, or certain situations (ivi, pp. 36, 38, 118, 270). The word “ethnographer” appears thirteen times, often used by de Martino to refer to himself. One can “become an ethnographer” (ivi, p. 19), one proposes to reflect on what objectivity is for the “ethnographer” (ivi, p. 20), one takes the expression from the Lévistraussian quotations of Tristi tropici (ibid.), one compares the exotic ethnographer with the one “operating in metropolitan territory” (ivi, p. 22), one lays bare one’s passion as “itinerant ethnographer in southern Italy” (ivi, p. 23), or one assesses the perspective of “modern ethnographer” (ivi, p. 24); one also calls him into question when tarantism “in the chapel acquired for the ethnographer the meaning of an instructive ‘cultural experiment’”. (ivi, p. 112), to define him finally as a “historicalethnographer” (ivi, p. 118). They are all adjective variants of a figure and his professional activity, the ethnographer and ethnography, which also express the narrative will to include the protagonist of the cognitive disposition within the same research scene. An element on which one of the current features of de Martino’s ethnographic theory is played out. Team Équipe is, in French, the “team” or the “group”, with de Martino as team leader or ethnographer, covering the role of director. The team formula is constantly used by de Martino in his ethnographic journeys to the South of Italy. The decisive choice of an interdisciplinary methodology led the Neapolitan scholar to the strategically “structural” formula of the team for research in Salento in 1959, to theorize its composition and the rules of collaborative functioning in the introduction to the Land of Remorse, which became a true essay based on a methodological

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nature. The Demartinian team preserved the autonomous competences and wanted to recognize itself in a double framework: first of all, it was a framework founded, as we have seen, on a Demartinian “focus of understanding” and it presented to de Martino the responsible awareness of being the director of the team itself and, as such, interested in projecting on the group of scholars a preeminent historical-cultural and historicalreligious analytical function. The acceptance of this preeminence resided in the relationship of authority, including academic authority, which was being determined between de Martino and his collaborators. Secondly, the common frame is represented by the ethnographic scene itself, which deals with an issue related to malaise and the history of medicine. It could in fact reduce the traditional aversion between naturalism and historicism, paradoxically revealing its possible connivance and therefore pushing for greater integration toward a new direction. Because de Martino was there to invite the different scientific views to face concrete cultural forms of life, real people to deal with in the field. He writes: In this way, inspired by criteria inherent in the character of the study, the structural formula of the team about to begin fieldwork was developed: a historian of religions as director of the team and a group of four young collaborators trained, respectively, in psychiatry, psychology, ethnomusicology and cultural anthropology. Such a formula indeed seemed the most appropriate for the essentially religious-historical perspective of the investigation, and for the necessary testing of this perspective with regard to the phenomenon analysed. That is, the psychiatrist, the psychologist and the ethnomusicologist were called into watch over the historian’s interpretation, to mobilize their technical skills in order to point out the applications of their own disciplines to the historian, and at the same time to perceive the limits of their own “explanations” stimulated by the religious-historical applications continuously proposed (ivi, pp. 14–15 [1961, p. 35]).

In the case of tarantism, it was very important to set up a preliminary organizational phase that lasted for a long time and that de Martino indicates as “seminar in preparation for field research”. It was done in order to determine a greater unity of intent in the interdisciplinary team carried out through periodic meetings prepared “on site” (ibid., pp. 32, 36–38, 41). In that period, called Preparation in situ by Signorelli (de Martino 2011, pp. 75–168), it was a matter of elaborating a common framework, a language, in meetings which, as can be seen from de Martino’s own testimony, were not always, so to speak, “quiet”, even if the “consilience”

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(Pizza 2015, chap. 4) experimented there had to find a point of synthesis in Neapolitan historicist idealism: We spent the spring of 1959 at our centre conducting a seminar in preparation for the fieldwork. This involved establishing a first contact with the literature on the subject, agreeing upon a common scientific language in relation to the various aspects of the phenomenon, planning the field investigation, to the greatest extent possible, dividing up the tasks in a clear way, compiling the questionnaires, and above all, identifying working hypotheses that were acceptable to all in a fundamental unity of method and perspective. Bearing in mind the diverse professional specialisations of the team members and the distance dividing scholars of the humanistic disciplines and scholars of naturalistic disciplines (a particularly appreciable distance in Italy, for well-known historical reasons), it becomes clear how this effort toward methodological unification took on particular importance for the results of the fieldwork. Indeed, every interdisciplinary collaboration between humanists and naturalists is destined to failure if the complementary use of respective skills is not explicitly preceded by the choice of a dominant perspective, and if a minimum of conscious agreement on this point has not been reached by all the members of the team. Undoubtedly such agreement matured above all over the course of the fieldwork, when the agreed instruments of analysis begun to function and were tested with the response of reality. But the seed was already sown back at our centre in a series of meetings which constituted a singular experience for all, rich with precious teachings (de Martino 2005, p. 16 [1961, pp. 36–37]).

De Martino closes this paragraph, with the evocation of Benedetto Croce immortalized in a portrait that almost loomed, at my ambiguous reading, from the walls of the room of the team meetings that were held during the period preceding the ethnographic expedition, the so-called “Preparation on site”. I would like to note now how, recalling his ancestor Benedetto Croce, in view of the conclusion of his entire introduction to the Land of Remorse, de Martino gives a certain account of one of the horns of the problem of contradiction on which this text of ethnographic methodology is based. It is the question of the relationship between ethnography and history6 .

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Historian-Ethnographer The expression “historical-ethnographer” is used by de Martino only once in the Land of Remorse. To explain the passage from the first part, titled Salento 1959 and dedicated to the ethnographic study of the cultural “relics” of the present, to the second part, titled The Land of Remorse and addressed to the comparative analysis of the ritual: «The historianethnographer now had to make way for the historian-philologist, who could cover the passage of centuries gone by through the means of written documents or other equivalent traces» (ivi, p. 80 [1961, pp. 118–119]). Without a hyphen, the Demartinian expression was taken up by Amalia Signorelli in 1986 and, restoring the original Demartinian expression, also in the following years (Signorelli 2011a, b, 2015). In particular in the volume Etnografia del tarantismo pugliese, edited with Valerio Panza in 2011, at the beginning of the paragraph of the introduction entitled Lo storico-etnografo she writes: «Between the first and the second phase of the research, I placed, with the title “Lo storico-etnografo”, Ernesto de Martino’s notebook» (Signorelli 2011b‚ p. 18). In fact, it was Signorelli himself who gave prominence to this methodological Demartinian approach, to remind us several times that «his ethnography, as we know well, always aims to “identify the historical specificity” of the phenomenon studied» (ibid.), a method explicitly devoted to the conjugation of historiography and ethnography. In the face of the difficulties that can still be felt in defining de Martino’s complex professionalism, according to the anthropologist7 , “historical-ethnographer” is the (self-) qualification most suited to him. Recently graduated in cultural anthropology, her pupil in Rome, Signorelli took part in the ethnographic research of the Salento team in 1959: One year after graduating, between the end of winter 1958 and the beginning of spring 1959, De Martino called me to take part in the expedition to Salento. The research on the Apulian tarantism that will be the object of his perhaps best known volume: The land of remorse. It was the experience of a teamwork based on a very close and also very intense collaboration (Signorelli 2015, p. VIII).

Signorelli reflected at length on the methodology and technique of Ernesto de Martino’s fieldwork, contrasting old and new stereotypes, sometimes circulating, «of an intuitive and empathic, passionate and

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fond de Martino, who substitutes with the height of his brilliance to the asystematicity of his collecting techniques» (Signorelli 1986, p. 5). Comparing the practice of research as it emerged from her point of view as a member of the team directed by de Martino in Salento in 1959 for the study of tarantism, with the ethnographic theory often expressed in his writings by the Neapolitan scholar, the anthropologist obtained over the years a disorientation effect, succeeding in focusing Ernesto de Martino’s role as an ethnographer. She addressed the analysis of the relationship between history and ethnography in the Demartinian method of field research, letting the “Italian” peculiarity of de Martino’s ethnography emerge. This “Italianity” can be seen by addressing the specificity of de Martino’s ethnographic research methodology. As Signorelli writes: It was precisely in the years around 1950 that De Martino transformed himself from a historian of religions into a historian-ethnographer, as he would like to define himself. The passage is marked by a radically new experience that he had for the first time in those years: the experience of research in the field. Formalised with the 1952 expedition, anticipated by a series of short stays – auspices Vittoria de Palma, Rocco Scotellaro, Francesca Armento – the experience of field research had a substantial importance in De Martino’s intellectual maturity. And he too seems to agree (Signorelli 2015, p. 19).

Signorelli examined many aspects of her relationship with de Martino, often focusing her reflection on the ethnographic method of the team. Whether she asked herself «the most difficult of questions»8 , or she reflected on the relationship between Boas and de Martino (Signorelli 2011a), or else she addressed the issue of the unpublished Demartinian materials, owned by Ernesto de Martino’s Archive edited by Clara Gallini and property of Vittoria de Palma (Signorelli 1996) as well as the ethnographic notebooks of Salento 1959 in her archive (Signorelli 2011b), the reference to de Martino’s ethnographic methodology has always constituted a starting point for Amalia Signorelli. At the beginning of her speech at the 1995 conference on de Martino, dedicated to a penetrating analysis of the concept of «individual and collective presence » (Signorelli 1997; Solinas 2020), referring also to the work of Gallini’s first unpublished works (Gallini 1995), Signorelli did not fail to emphasize «the role that the descent into the field, the experience of research on the ground, in short the famous “expeditions”, have played in the maturation of some

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aspects of the Demartinian problem» (Signorelli 1997, p. 122). In fact, that role was played by the “real” encounter with the farming world, which had already occurred when de Martino, in Bari, participated in the organizations of the workers’ movement (Charuty 2009). Signorelli wrote in 2015: To complicate matters further, there is his quiet disregard for academic disciplinary partitions, so deeply rooted in him that it even prevents him from adopting a stable self-definition, valid for ever. He himself, from time to time, has defined himself as a historian, philosopher, ethnologist, ethnographer, anthropologist, historian of religions and historian-ethnographer. There is no doubt that the multiplicity and heterodoxy of approaches are among the constitutive elements of De Martino’s originality, and one of the reasons for the persistent fascination of his works. Anyway, this characteristic has not been without negative side effects (Signorelli 2015, p. XVI).

In fact, in de Martino’s experience of field research there is a certain overlap between the politician and the anthropologist, which is not always resolved in identification, but sometimes divides, not failing to mark advantages and limits of that specific ethnographic practice (Pavanello, 2013). It is therefore necessary to deepen this sort of “Italian style”, a specific national declination of fieldwork that appears clearer in some avant-garde of post-Demartinian anthropology in our country (Palumbo 2018).

FIS FIS, or Fieldwork Italian Style, is the slightly provocative acronym coined by Berardino Palumbo to designate Italian ethnography. As I said before (see par. 8.1), more than other anthropologists of our generation— those who are the same age as the Land of remorse—with his research Palumbo deepened the theoretical and practical awareness of ethnography. In an important recent book entitled The Strabismus of the G oddess [“Goddess” is a pun: in italian “Goddess” is “Dea”, but at the same time in Italy “DEA” is the acronym of “demo-ethno-anthropology” which is the Italian definition for anthropological disciplines]. Published in 2018, but actually ready earlier, he uses the classical and contemporary tools of ethnography to examine the field of anthropological studies in our country, starting in the Second Italian postwar period. He does it

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with such familiarity as to result in the conscious ironic management of the writer’s results. In the book, in parallel with the consideration of the originality of Demartinian approach, which makes stereotypical the accusation of having spent little time in Salento ethnography, Palumbo explains that when the Demartinian example is somehow “imitated”, a specific “style” of ethnography is produced: Such a style (which we could call FIS = Fieldwork Italian Style) is characterised by short periods (from a few weeks to a few months) of stay on the field, mainly within national borders, perhaps repeated several times over the years or, sometimes, decades; tendency not to fix the field in a single location, but inclination to extend the research to wider areas, such as a region or an area (Palumbo 2018, p. 111).

De Martino’s responsibility for these Italianist mimesis of his endogenous anthropology probably does not lie so much in his brief stays on the ground. Rather in a question that one can ask oneself (again): «Why did the last de Martino, distancing himself from Gramsci, take a different path, founding his own anthropology of history, clearly visible in his posthumous book La fine del mondo (de Martino 2019), definitively concluding the project of a “religious history” of Southern Italy that he had planned and founded, and the practical-theoretical, ethnographicanthropological presuppositions which he had founded in the 1961 monograph La terra del rimorso? As Palumbo states, the answer probably lies in identifying the historical-political limits of de Martino’s work relative to a sort of «cognitive blindness» (Palumbo 2018, p. 16). It seems to strike de Martino when he does not address the study of the functioning of the Italian state machine. In fact, Palumbo answers the above question with the whole of Chapter 5 of Strabismus, which closes the volume and appears to be of such interest that it arouses a wide debate in Italy and abroad.9 That chapter is entitled “The Eye of the King”.10 «Eye» is put in italics because it alludes to the «evil eye» , in the translation from the Neapolitan dialect studied by de Martino in the book Sud e Magia, published in 1959. It is the expressive form with which King Ferdinand of Bourbon (if you want to see him impersonated in cinema, look at the character masterfully embodied in a famous film by Peppino De Filippo11 ) stigmatized, with apotropaic words and gestures, a reckless engineer too insistent in asking him to approve his project

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for a railroad: the railway of Apulia (de Martino 1959, pp. 179–180). This is a fundamental chapter in the Palumbian book, which ends with a comparison between the monograph Sud e magia (ivi) and the essay The Magic of the State by Michael Taussig (1997). Although the second text (Taussig’s) appeared many years after the first one (de Martino’s), it is an effective comparison because it is mirroring, in an anthropologicalpolitical key, of the state of magic in the magic of the state (here the state is the everyday, ordinary, non-rational, and therefore non-Weberian statehood, so to speak). Therefore, according to Palumbo, the missing element in de Martino is the analysis of the nation-state. The Demartinian 1959 book South and magic figure as an opportunity eluded, even if only partially. I agree with this reading. And I add that if on the one hand, with that Demartinian work a missed opportunity is recorded, on the other hand there are also some “morphological predictions”12 implicit in the oxymoric analyses of an Enlightenment and elitist jecturing, of which the Neapolitan scholar revealed himself capable. In examining the reasons for this missed opportunity, I find pertinent the Palumbian analytical reflections with the aim of this paper: to draw the practical-theoretical effectiveness of the ethnographic model experimented by the Neapolitan anthropologist in Southern Italy. Without wanting to anachronistically criticize de Martino’s ethnography for having favored a sort of dichotomy between politics and anthropology, the unity of which he had always professed (on the other hand, in order to obtain an effect of estrangement on this point, let’s try to think of a hypothetical collapse of Gramsci to some form of bourgeois paternalism: It is as if Gramsci had written: «But I used to enter peasants’ houses as a companion» . Could we imagine that?). Many times we have said to ourselves that, in the same year in which de Martino, influenced by the photos of André Martin and after a long period of philological work and the construction and scientific amalgamation of the research team, descends to the province of Lecce, the Italian Government takes the decision to build in Taranto, almost eponymous place of the phenomenon he studies, the iron and steel industry, now called “Ilva”, which will be inaugurated by the President Saragat on April 10, 1965. After one month, de Martino passed away early (he would have been 57 years old about seven months later) so he could certainly not have studied that phenomenon in its early phase. And yet a doubt

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remains: how come that reality, so dynamic and at the same time contradictory, did not seem to arouse any ethnographic interest in de Martino? (cf. Ravenda 2018; Benadusi 2020). Let’s repeat what happened: when he went into the field in Salento, de Martino had already carried out most of the work of historicalcomparative research and hypothesis, precisely in the collaborative indepth study of the team conducted during the so-called “Preparation in site” (Signorelli 2011b) with the various scholars involved. With the ethnography team in Salento 1959, he capitalized, at the highest point, what Mariano Pavanello designed an «observation economy» : The experience of the group set up by de Martino emerges in all its originality, as does the happy combination of the team members and the decisive leadership and coordination skills of the research director. The production carried out in 19 days is surprising for quantity and quality. The principle (…) of observation economy seems to have been applied with extraordinary effectiveness in this case. It is, however, an in-depth ethnography in spite of the short fieldwork. And the characteristic of depth derives both from the intensity and plurality of the observation, and from its reflective posture which anticipates by at least a quarter of a century the so-called postmodern “turning point” (Pavanello 2013, p. 26).

Everything happens as if the “field” was for de Martino a place in some way similar to a library and the people he met in flesh and bones could solve the enigmas that emerged during the investigation previously carried out at the desk, drawing on the respective fresh skills of the team.

Epilogue: Back Home As a provisional conclusion we can perhaps say the following: de Martino certainly pursued a methodology of an interdisciplinary nature, proposing and initiating a dialogue of close collaboration between different types of knowledge. He was able to go so far as to solicit the relationship between the bio-natural sciences and the historical-cultural sciences, in order to build an interdisciplinary bridge that in his theoretical practice intended to be based on ethnography as a method. De Martino’s reflections on the theme of interdisciplinarity, the ethnographic memory of the research I have conducted in Salento in recent years, Palumbo’s reflections on ethnography, as well as the notation of colleagues on Apulian tarantism, have highlighted these beliefs, perhaps casting some new light on

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the advantages and limitations of the peculiar scientific practice of ethnography based on the structural formula of the team put in place by Ernesto de Martino in the heel of the Italian boot: in Salento, from June 21 to July 10, 1959 (Fig. 5.1). Photo from July 10, 1959, taken by Franco Pinna in Bella (province of Potenza), on his way back to Rome, of the ethnographic team that had worked in Salento that summer under the direction of Ernesto de Martino. The image is reproduced here as a scan of the original owned by Signorelli. It was published for the first time in the volume of materials of de Martino’s research on tarantism edited by Signorelli and Panza (de Martino 2011, p. 56) and was defined «extraordinary and significant» by the scholar Riccardo Di Donato (2013, p. 60). You can see from the top left, two children looking at the group, whose members are all smiling: Annabella Rossi, Giovanni Jervis, Letizia Comba, Giuseppe de

Fig. 5.1 Photo granted by Dina, Mario, and Sebastiano D’Ayala (Many thanks to Dina, Mario and Sebastiano D’Ayala for allowing access to the photo, to Fulvia D’Aloisio, Marcello Massenzio, Carmelo Pizza, Ivo Quaranta and Andrea F. Ravenda for reading a draft of this text)

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Sina, Ernesto de Martino with Vittoria de Palma, with two anonymous local citizens, one of whom shows the photographer the first Feltrinelli edition of the book Sud e magia, that had just been published. As Di Donato (ibid.) observes, Vittoria de Palma almost seems to embrace de Martino: «She seems to protect his shoulders. At the centre, a young, smiling and very beautiful image, is that of our friend Amalia Signorelli, clearly dressed and elegant, distinct from all the others. She is at the absolute centre of the image» .

Notes 1. There are many studies on the Demartinian ethnographic method. For a wider panorama cf. Massenzio (1994) and Gallini, Massenzio (1997). Massenzio succeeded Gallini in the role of President of the Ernesto de Martino International Association (AiEdM) and was the former director of the anthropological journal “Nostos. Laboratorio di ricerca storica e antropologica”, now directed by Gino Satta and Pino Schirripa. Among the other studies I point out here Satta (2005); Angelini (2008); de Martino (2011); Pavanello (2013); Signorelli (2015); Pizza (2019). 2. Cf. de Martino (1961), and the English translation by Dorothy Zinn (de Martino 2005). 3. The expression “collaborative” or “participatory” ethnography today indicates a slightly different research methodology, which involves sharing the ethnographic methodology not only within the collective of scholars, but also in a dialogue with the “studied” subjects. In fact, the informants constitute many possible allies in the production of cognitive and social knowledge. Accordingly, sharing ethnography is a full political gesture: cf. Lassiter (2005), Holmes, Marcus (2008) and, for Italy, Porcellana, Stefani (2016). On the analogous notion of “paraethnography”, in addition to the founding studies of Holmes, Marcus (2006), cf. also Islam (2015); instead, for a study of making ethnography in groups, cf. Clerke, Hopwood (2014). The elaboration of the concept of “co-disciplinarity” in the relationship between anthropology and medicine is interesting (Fainzang 2008). 4. The program of the Conference appeared in the journal “Lares”, Vol. 29, No. 1–2, January–June 1963, pp. 102–104. 5. The Proceedings of that Conference would be published by Laterza, edited essentially by de Martino, but with an Introduction by Vittorio Lanternari and an Introductory Note by Cara Gallini, without any indication of the Demartinian care and with all the authors listed in the header (cf. Caillois et al. 1966).

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6. Precisely at this point in his Introduction de Martino lists several traits of his own theory of the operational intervention of anthropology on the terrain in which it carries out ethnography. It is a subject to which he also dedicates the Appendix V of the Land of Remorse (de Martino, De Palma 1961). Here de Martino’s discourse on interdisciplinarity extends to his collaborator and companion (Marzo 2011). On these operative aspects of de Martino’s team ethnography see the interesting reading proposed by Benadusi (2020). 7. Amalia Signorelli (1934–2017), graduated in Classical Literature in 1957 with Ernesto de Martino at La Sapienza University in Rome and the following year she was called to participate in the expedition to Salento. With de Martino and other anthropologists including Tullio Seppilli (1928–2017), alone in collaboration, she carried out a lot of ethnographic research (see D’Aloisio, Ranisio 2020). 8. “This simple observation provokes the most difficult of questions: what is presence?”, Signorelli (1997, p. 128); see Pizza (2019). 9. See the two specialized book forums hosting numerous international scientific comments on Palumbo’s book (2018), which appeared, respectively, in two Italian anthropology journals, “Anuac” 2019, Vol. 8, N° 1 and “Lares”, 2019, N° 2. 10. This essay also appeared previously in two other versions (Palumbo 2016, 2017), and was prepared as a report to the International Conference held in 2016 at the Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana “Treccani” in Rome, entitled De Martino anthropologist of the contemporary world, organized by Massimo Bray (Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, Rome), Andrea Carlino (University of Geneva), and Giovanni Pizza (University of Perugia—School of Specialization in Demo-ethno-anthropological Heritage), in collaboration with the International Association Ernesto de Martino, chaired by Marcello Massenzio, at the Institute of the Italian Encyclopedia in Rome, May 26–27, 2016. 11. I am referring to the 1959 film, Ferdinando I° re di Napoli, directed by Gianni Franciolini who, although historically imprecise in the title, has masterful acting performances, first of all those of the de Filippo brothers (Eduardo, Peppino, Titina). 12. The notion of “morphological prediction” dates back to 1945, i.e. the work of Marxian exegesis by Antonio Labriola. See on this point Pizza (2020, p. 147).

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References Angelini, P. (2008). Ernesto de Martino. Roma: Carocci. Benadusi, M. (2020). Il Brodo in Pancia. Sviluppi e Ripensamenti dell’antropologia Applicata in Italia. In V. Alliegro, & M. T. Milicia (Eds.), (Special Issue), Voci. Annuale di Scienze Umane Diretto da Luigi M. Lombardi Satriani, XVI (in press). Caillois, R., Hallowell, A. I., Marjasch, S., Oppenheim, L., Devereux, G., Servadio, E., Brelich, A., Bastide, R., Paci, E., Eliade, M., Von Grunebaum, G. E., Cahen, R. (1966). Il Sogno e Le Civiltà Umane. Roma-Bari: Laterza. Introduzione di V. Lanternari. Caione, P. (1993). Saperi Naturalistici Locali Sugli Animali “Velenosi” in Salento, Volumi 2, Tesi di Laurea, Dipartimento di Studi Glottoantropologici, Relatore C. Papa, Correlatore G. Pizza, Università di Roma “La Sapienza”. Charuty, G. (2009). Ernesto De Martino. Les vies Anterieures d’un Anthropologue. Paris: Èditions Parenthèses/MMSH. Clerke, T., & Hopwood, N. (2014). Doing Ethnography in Teams. A Case Study of Asymmetries in Collaborative Research. Cham-Heidelberg-New YorkDordrecht-London: Springer. D’Aloisio, F., & Ranisio, G. (Eds.) (2020). Pensare la Contemporaneità. Amalia Signorelli e Il Suo Contributo all’Antropologia. Milano: Franco Angeli. De Martino, E. (1959). Sud e magia. Feltrinelli: Milano (Translated and Annotated in English by D. L. Zinn & Ernesto de Martino. [2015]. Magic: A Theory from the South. Chicago: Hau Books). De Martino, E. (1961). La Terra del Rimorso. Contributo a una Storia Religiosa del Sud. Milano: Il Saggiatore. De Martino, E. (1967). La Ricerca Interdisciplinare Nello Studio dei Fenomeni Culturali. In C. Gallini, I rituali dell’àrgia (pp. XI–XV), Padova: CEDAM. De Martino, E. (2005). The Land of Remorse. A Study of Southern Italian Tarantism (trans. and annotated by Dorothy Louise Zinn, foreword by Vincent Crapanzano). London: Free Association Books. De Martino, E. (2011). Etnografia del Tarantismo Pugliese. I materiali Della Spedizione nel Salento del 1959. Edited by A. Signorelli, V. Panza, Introduzione e commenti by A. Signorelli, Argo. De Martino, E. (2019). La Fine del Mondo. Contributo all’Analisi delle Apocalissi Culturali. New Edition by G. Charuty, D. Fabre e M. Massenzio. Torino: Einaudi. De Martino‚ E., & De Palma‚ V. (1961). Problemi di Intervento. In de Martino (1961): 378–382. Di Donato, R. (2013). Etnografia e Storia del Tarantismo. In Signorelli A., Sanga, G. (Eds.), Ernesto de Martino: Etnografia e Storia. Erreffe. La Ricerca Folklorica. Contributi allo studio delle classi popolari, 67–68, pp. 58–62.

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Fainzang, S. (2008). Antropologia e Medicina: Riflessioni Epistemologiche Sullla Co-dsciplinairtà nella Ricerca. AM. Rivista della Società Italiana di Antropologia Medica, 21–26/ottobre 2006–2008, pp. 11–24. Gallini, C. (1967). I rituali dell’argia. Padova: CEDAM. Gallini, C. (1995). La Ricerca, la Scrittura. In E. de Martino, Note di Campo. Spedizione in Lucania, 30 sett. 31 Ott. 1952 (pp. 9–74), Lecce: Argo. Gallini, C. (1999). Percorsi, Immagini, Scritture. I viaggi nel Sud di Ernesto de Martino. Fotografie di Arturo Zavattini, Franco Pinna e Ando Gilardi (pp. 9–47). Torino: Bollati Boringhieri. Gallini, C. (2018). Un Filone Specifico di Studi nell’Antropologia Culturale Italiana. Nostos. Laboratorio Di Ricerca Storica E Antropologica, 3, 183–207. Gallini, C., & Massenzio, M. (Eds.). (1997). Ernesto de Martino nella Cultura Europea. Napoli: Liguori. Holmes, D. R., & Marcus, G. E. (2006). Fast Capitalism: Para-Ethnography and the Rise of the Symbolic Analis t. In M. S. Fisher, & G. Domney (Eds.), Frontiers of Capital. Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy, (pp. 33– 57). Durham and London: Duke University Press. Holmes, D. R., & Marcus, G. E. (2008). Collaboration Today and the ReImagination of the Classic Scene of Fieldwork Encounter. Collaborative Anthropologies, 1, 81–101. Islam, G. (2015). Practitioners as Theorists: Paraethnography and the Collaborative Studies of Contemporary Organizations. Organizational Research Methods, 18(2), 231–251. Lassiter, L. E. (2005). The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1955). Tristes tropiques. Paris: Plon. Marzo, P. (2011). Etnografia e Servizio sociale: Il Contributo Interdisciplinare di Vittoria De Palma. Rassegna Di Servizio Sociale, 50(1), 88–111. Massenzio, M. (1994). Sacro e Identità Etnica. Senso del Mondo e Line a di Confine. Presentazione di C. Tullio-Altan. Milano: Franco Angeli. Mingozzi, G. (1962). La Taranta, 35 mm, film b/n, 20’. Palumbo, B. (1991). “You are Going Really Deep”: Conflitti, Pratica e Teoria in Etnografia. Alcune Riflessioni a Partire dal Caso nzema. L’Uomo. Società Tradizione Sviluppo, IV, n. s., 2, pp. 234–266. Palumbo, B. (2016). Gli “Occhi” del re. Naturalismo, Storicismo e Stato in Ernesto de Martino. Illuminazioni, 36, 59–117. Palumbo, B. (2017). L’occhio del re. Nostos. Laboratorio Di Ricerche Storiche E Antropologiche, 2, 137–191. Palumbo, B. (2018). Lo Strabismo della D ea. Antropologia, Accademia e Società in Italia. Palermo: Edizioni Museo Pasqualino. Pavanello, M. (2010). Fare Antropologia. Milano: Zanichelli.

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Pavanello, M. (2013). Il Tarantismo Osservato. Ricerca sul Terreno e Teoria in Ernesto de Martino. In A. Signorelli, & G. Sanga (Eds.), Ernesto de Martino: Etnografia e Storia. Erreffe. La Ricerca Folklorica. Contributi allo studio delle classi popolari, 67–68, pp. 21–34. Pizza, G. (2015). Il Tarantismo Oggi. Antropologia, Politica, Cultura. Roma: Carocci. Pizza, G. (2019). «Diplomazia Vitale» . De Martino, Gramsci e le Politiche della Presenza. Storia, Antropologia e Scienze del Linguaggio, XXXIV (2–3), pp. 87–108. Pizza G. (2020). L’Antropologia di Gramsci. Corpo, natura, mutazione. Roma: Carocci. Porcellana, V., & Stefani, S. (Eds.) (2016). Processi Partecipativi ed Etnografia Collaborativa nelle Alpi e Altrove. Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso. Ravenda, A. F. (2018). Carbone. Inquinamento Industriale, Salute e Politica a Brindisi. Milano: Meltemi. Satta, G. (2005). Le Fonti Etnografiche de Il Mondo Magico. In C. Gallini (Ed.), Ernesto de Martino e la formazione del suo pensiero. Note di metodo (pp. 57– 77). Napoli: Liguori. Signorelli, A. (1986). Lo Storico Etnografo. Ernesto de Martino nella Ricerca sul Campo. La Ricerca Folklorica, 13, 5–14. Signorelli, A. (1997). Presenza Individuale e Presenze Collettive In C. Gallini, & M. Massenzio (Eds.), 121–130. Signorelli, A. (2011a). Tra Ernesto de Martino e Franz Boas: la nascita dell’Antropologia Culturale in Italia. In L. Faldini & E. Pisu (Eds.), Saperi Antropologici, Media e Società Civile nell’Italia Contemporanea. Atti del I Convegno nazionale dell’Anuac, Matera 29–31 maggio. Roma: CISU. Signorelli, A. (2011b). Introduzione. In De Martino, E., 2011, 7–39. Signorelli, A. (2012). L’Antropologia Culturale Italiana: 1958–1975. L’Uomo. Società Tradizione Sviluppo, 1–2, 75–95. Signorelli, A. (2013). Il Problema e Il Documento. Sul Lavoro di Campo di Ernesto de Martino. In A. Signorelli & V. Sanga (Eds.), Ernesto de Martino: Etnografia e Storia. Erreffe. La Ricerca Folklorica. Contributi allo Studio delle Classi Popolari, 67–68, pp. 79-83. Signorelli, A. (2015). Ernesto de Martino. Teoria Antropologica e Metodologia della Ricerca. Roma: L’Asino d’oro Edizioni. Solinas, P. G. (2020). Con i Piedi per Terra. Individuo e Collettivo nella Ricerca di Amalia Signorelli. In F. D’Aloisio & G. Ranisio (Eds.), 67–82. Sperber, D. (1974). Le Symbolisme en Géneral. Paris: Hermann. Sperber, D. (1975). Pourquois les Animaux Parfaits, Les Hybrides et les Monstres Sont-ils Bons à Penser Symboliquement? L’Homme, 15(2), 5–34. Taussig, M. (1997). The Magic of the State. New York-London: Routledge.

PART II

Anthropology (Theory) vs Ethnography (Fieldwork)

CHAPTER 6

Illusion of Immediate Knowledge or Spiritual Exercise? The Dialogic Exchange and Pierre Bourdieu’s Ethnography Ferdinando Fava

Introduction “How to Read an Author” was the title Pierre Bourdieu gave to the postscript at the end of the second chapter of Pascalian Meditations (PM) after denouncing the scientist ’s vision of the world, that external and illusorily neutral spectacularization of the social universe (to the world as a representation, a spectacle), which originated from the oblivion and the repression of its social conditions that make it possible. How can we not ask ourselves again, especially now that, getting closer to his work, we wish to comprehend his ethnographic procedure and converse with it—and in the guise of a symmetrical mise en abyme of that question itself—“How to Read Bourdieu?”

F. Fava (B) Università degli Studi di Padova, Padua, Italy Laboratoire Architecture Anthropologie, Paris, France © The Author(s) 2021 V. Matera and A. Biscaldi (eds.), Ethnography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51720-5_6

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Certainly, the answer is not immediate, and it is not limited to matters of exegetical technicalities. Bourdieu is a social scientist with an intellectual and editorial fecundity with little equal in the twentieth century (Robbins 2019). Every reading which aims to be a synthetic figure of this complexity is doomed to failure; it always proves to be eccentric with respect to its original intentions. Upon starting a reading of Bourdieu in view of questioning the ethnography’s status in his research practice, the first question is pertinent to the device ruling our reading, that is, the choice of the modus operandi with which we wish to integrate, in relation to him and his works, those categories of opera themselves, interpretation, author and social philosophy which can lie unaware among its folds. If we read Bourdieu in Bourdieu’s style, with him, we cannot help but ask ourselves how our protocol (device) is coterminous with that “scholastic disposition” which, over the course of its itinerary, sought to bring to an end and defuse. It is about that disposition, skholè, at the heart of one of the scholastic fallacy forms (Bourdieu 2000, p. 22), which, in its reading theory, reduces the past and present auctores to their lectores , projecting “a self-aware act of deciphering” of the latter onto the former. It is a gaze that considers itself unbiased and relieved from the necessities of life and separates the auctor’s work from the historical temporality of his elaboration and, as a finished and absolute opus operatum, it overshadows the modus operandi whose product it is. It is no coincidence that just by continuing the Meditations he would indeed take Geertz as an example of this lector and this skholè in his interpretation of Balinese people’s gaze on cockfight (Bourdieu 2000, p. 52).1 Hence, the risk of a “scholastic” reading of Bourdieu would always be looming, a fortiori, when we want to comprehend the status of the ethnography he practiced and its relationship with the conceptual meditations that he created. That is, when we wish to seize his research practice’s logic, by now dealing only with its transposition into texts. The risk of reducing his operating to a code to decipher, of bringing it back to the known through the search for textual sources and genealogical sources of his thinking, not so much to “take him as he is” as to moderate the innovatory scope of his fulfilments, is still present, and not by chance. Furthermore, through this reading, the risk of reducing this logic to a rational scheme being glued from the outside is current, reducing it just to a methodology, procedure, all inscribed within the utility and teleology perimeter, without venturing a praxeological reading. This risk is

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not just connected to “objective” conditions; therefore, by now we just find ourselves before “traces” of his operating, a problem involving all those who deal with texts. Bourdieu’s intellectual trajectory is rich and composite.2 From philosopher to social scientist he crossed, in going back and forth from colonial France to Algeria, among urbanized worker of Algiers and the bachelor farmers of the region where he was born, then around half of the world’s universities, with auctores and against them which he created his acting and his thinking. So, the biggest risk while reading Bourdieu is precisely to read his ethnographic practice decontextualizing it and as a consequence losing its “originality.” In order to compensate this risk, we will try to make use of that epistemic reflectiveness, which consists “in objectifying the subject of objectification” and increasing the awareness about the premises subsequent to the inclusion into the research object (Bourdieu 1983, p. 233, 2000, p. 10) that is, those concerning the position occupied in the social field and the trajectory. The “participant objectivation” (Bourdieu 2003) will be the formula with which we will indicate, along with him, this reflective project and, thanks to this process indeed, we will be able to identify those conceivable spaces where we could have a critic word both with and against him. What is the outcome of this exercise of de-possession of the privilege of a knowing “subject,” of the lector who acknowledges him/herself as so involved in the work that he is reading and wishes to comprehend? The postscript itself comes to our aid. Bourdieu takes Baudelaire’s dehistoricizing and derealizing literary critic as an example of scholastic reading of an author. Conversely, in order to comprehend his work, it is necessary to actively participate “without the true or false modesty of the lector,” in his creative activity. The reader, Bourdieu writes, must equip him/herself to participate one way or another in the context which brought his/her work to light, the literary universe, his/her field, in which and against which the author’s creative project spawned, “the space of artistic (poetic) possibilities objectively offered by the field at the moment when the author was working to define his artistic intention. […]” (Bourdieu 2000, p. 89), a “this impossible possible” on which he worked to make it exist (Bourdieu 2000, p. 92). With and against, impossible possible: those incompatible oxymora describe his constant search for neutrality with respect to the dominating oppositions which marked his era: between individual and society, mental structures and social structures, history and structure, freedom and determinism, relativist historicism or universalist rationalism, subjectivism and

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objectivism, militancy and “axiological neutrality.” His incessant search for a third position between those opposite poles, between the Scylla of a reductive conciliation and the Charybdis of a totalizing denial, has not always been acknowledged by his contemporaries, a source of scathing criticism and, for this reason, conflicting interpretations. The ethnographic practice, along with all the other methodologies, cannot elude those dynamics. These are the figures (key? clue?) with which we will frame Bourdieu’s relation to ethnography. This will be done by finding again our relationship with this practice without narrowing rationality down to the single theoretical reason, that is, glean from our experience of field research as well, examined by epistemic watchfulness, so as to finally converse with this procedure starting from ours. Since “the actualisation of a disposition of the practical sense cannot discovered and fathomed but by revealing to itself in the work in which it is created” indeed, we will be able to converse and interrogate the tensions manifesting in his own procedure. We will try to place it within the space of the possible with respect to which it emerged. We will also do so by comparing him, subsequently, with an author contemporary to him, Gérard Althabe, who in that space of possible itself gave birth to a different research stance, to whose front my ethnographic procedure adhered and developed. In this framework where, the reader must certainly have realized, we have already started to enter the theoretical-practical device created by Bourdieu, we will analyze within it, more particularly, the status of the research interaction through which, conversely, the anthropological research practice claims to create its critic knowledge.

Bourdieu’s Ethnography As Bourdieu admits at the beginning of Pascalian Meditations, there is a distance between his theoretical statements and the empirical procedures supporting them. Thus his research procedure and, within it, what we have called in very broad terms ethnography so far has never been in the spotlight. What he practiced during those years and how he did it, his modus operandi, appears more and more in his communications over the last decade of his life. Apart from few exceptions (Hamel 1994, 1996, 1998; Mayer 1995), his ethnography has been the object of a posthumous analysis, especially his modus operandi in Algeria and his birthplace, Béarn, when at the beginning of his path he became interested in the Algerian

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underclass who was forcedly moved to the harvest fields and the bachelor farmers in Southern France (Goodman 2003; Wacquant 2004; Jenkins 2006; Hammoudi 2007; Goodman and Silverstein 2009; Bazin 2013).3 Everybody agrees on considering the Algerian and the Béarn research years as fundamental for the elaboration of his key concept (habitus, field, symbolic violence, etc.). What we have been calling ethnography from the beginning actually embraces procedures such as direct observation, interview, different kinds of ethnographic inventory, which Bourdieu himself lists and tells apart from closed questionnaire, statistical analysis, analyses of correspondences, opinion survey, and indexing (codage).4 The meaning of the ethnographic procedure, like for that matter in all the techniques he employed, must be searched in the theoretical context and in the epistemological premises in which it is practised (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 225). In fact, in Bourdieu’s opinion, there is neither a methodological neutrality nor a methodological monotheism, inasmuch as it is the choice of the object to be created that directs the choice of the procedures to be adopted step by step. We will focus on three texts which seem to us to make the ethnography status explicit and at the same time the tensions which, over the span of thirty years, make their apparition in his personal appropriation. The Foreword to the second part of Travail et travailleurs d’Algérie from 1963, in which he introduces more than sixty interviews following two hundred investigation pages redacted by statisticians; the references to ethnographic observation in opposition to open interview and non-directive dialogue, tests in The Craft of the Sociology and finally the methodological chapter “Understanding” as a conclusion of The Weight of the World in (1999 [1993]). In particular, as has already been mentioned, we will consider the status of the dialogue and the face-to-face interaction. In this way, it will be possible to discuss the way they are carried out in our fieldwork, which is practised and developed in the Althabian tradition. The dialogic exchange and the interaction between the anthropologist and his/her interlocutors, a fusion where the material of his/her analysis takes shape, will prove to be in the end the accumulation point of the tensions of his/her whole system. Bourdieu himself describes his relationship with ethnography (considered in a wider sense) and with quantitative methods: I can appear very close to the “Grand Theoreticians” (especially the structuralists) insofar as I insist on structural configurations that cannot be

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reduced to the interactions and practices through which they express themselves. At the same time, I feel a kinship and a solidarity with researchers who “put their noses to the ground” (particularly symbolic interactionists, and all those who, through participant observation or statistical analysis, work to uncover and to debunk the empirical realities that Grand Theoreticians ignore because they look down upon social reality from such heights), even though I cannot agree with the philosophy of the social world which often undergirds their interest in the minutiae of daily practices and which, in this case, is in fact imposed upon them by this “close-up view” and by the theoretical myopia or the blindness to objective structures, to relations of force that are not immediately perceivable, that this view encourages. (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 113, italics are mine)

How is it possible for Bourdieu to feel supportive toward those who “watch things closely,” a disposition that he has never shunned himself, and at the same time disagree with them? Which premises lead him to consider ethnographic description as an objectivation tool bringing to light empirical realities blind to the scholastic gaze and simultaneously a possible hurdle as well, which, just because it gets closer to reality, makes it short-sighted toward the conditions that create it? Necessary and short-sighted, with it and against it at the same time.

“The Essence of the Situation” In the preface to the second part of TTA Bourdieu introduces his work as a critical answer to Michel Leiris about the moral impossibility of doing ethnography in a colonial context. Indeed, aware of the fact that For the ethnologist […] there is no behaviour, attitude or ideology which can be described, understood or explained objectively without reference to the existential situation of the colonized as it is determined by the action of economic and social forces characteristic of the colonial system. (Bourdieu 2003, p. 13)

“the true responsibility of the ethnologist,” Bourdieu argues, lies “in the absolute epistemological imperative,” (not ethical) of seizing “the essence of the situation” i.e., “the system of predetermined, inescapable relationships independent of the will of individuals by reference to which attitudes and behaviours are organized” (Ibidem, p. 14). This premise would guide

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his way of using the ethnographic approach. The latter allows the identification, at the beginning of the research, of the pertinent questions to submit in a following questionnaire (“only ethnographic knowledge of the problems of work in rural and urban society could supply the set of initial hypotheses used to draw up the questionnaire,” Ibidem, p. 16). Ethnographic knowledge is necessary yet not sufficient. In fact, Bourdieu acknowledges that faced with the Algeria of colonization and conflict: The purely ethnographic approach clashed with a reality which was too broad, too complex for us to even think about generalizing the many conclusions offered by monographs,5 and run the risk that a small number of particular, but striking facts could relegate more important aspects of reality to the background. (Ibidem, p. 16)

The ethnologist “deals with a field with its ill-defined boundaries, this world where urbanization has introduced, at least diversification of activities, and in which it would be pointless to look for strictly defined social structures, uniform models of behaviour, and simple type of attitudes” (Ibidem, p. 16) even without “such indispensable instruments as censuses level of local units, civil status registers […]” (Ibidem, p. 16). The epistemological responsibility above compels him not to generalize conclusions inferred from few particular facts and not lose sight of aspects of reality that do not appear but are important. Hence, the sole statistical analysis can come to its aid because “it can identify pattern in diversity, hierarchy of lifestyles in apparent levelling of the material conditions of existence, and the latent order in manifest inconsistencies” (Ibidem, p. 16). Subsequently, ethnography would enhance the statistical so created by adding an interpretative dimension which allows the expression of the different elements of the social positions identified by the statistical analysis itself (“typical individuals” Ibidem, p. 17), the ideological representations and elaborations inherent to those positions and the ways of subjugation to the colonial domination (“based as it is on unimpeachable statistical data and on methodical analysis, the selection of typical individuals allows us to return, via a long detour and without the risk of lapsing into impressionistic intuitionism, to the traditional methods of ethnography,” Ibidem, p. 17). So, it is comprehensible how he concludes this preface. Ethnography as a “participation in the environment, dialogue and observation” (I will

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recall the more than a thousand photographs he shot during his years in Algeria) only “works” by going through “the laborious detour via figures, graphs and calculation” Thus, understanding can only advance through a constant interchange between evidence drawn from - blinding evidence, in both senses of the word - evidence of statistics - blind evidence which needs to be deciphered. The familiarity derived from participation in the environment, dialogue and observation could not do without the laborious detour via figures, graphs and calculation. Yet nothing would be more presumptuous than to identify sociological science with that which is only one aspect of it, namely the mathematical processing of data, and to regard the gathering of facts, in the form of dialogue with the particular object, the specific individual, [“l’individuo concreto” in the Italian translation] as the less important aspect of the research (italics are mine). (Ibidem, p. 17)

In the Foreword, there are all the elements foreseeing that horizon to which he would refer thirty years later in the quoted 1992 text, like the theoretical-practical premises which, by improving and making themselves explicit in his following research itinerary, would dominate his methodical choices.

The Illusion of Transparency To put it in other words, in this text a social universe theory6 strictly interwoven with a social research theory is already operating: if the social worlds are created by these determined and necessary relations, the purpose of sociological knowledge is exactly to bring them to light together with the mechanisms which guarantee their reproduction and transformation. Two theoretical premises are at the foundation of this position (Bourdieu 1990, p. 25). The first is the passing of the antinomy between a social physics issuing from the cognitive objectivism and a social phenomenology connected to the cognitive subjectivism, a passing which means to keep its respective inputs, gains, but without seeking the conciliation of their inflexibility (?). In fact, social physics denotes society as an entity consisting of objective structures which an external observer can seize, measure, whose articulations he can trace. Bourdieu would say that by using tools belonging to statistical analysis, ethnographic description, and formal modeling, the observer can recreate an “unwritten musical

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score according to which the actions of agents, each of whom believes she is improvising her own melody, are organised (italics are mine)” (Bourdieu 1979, p. 88), so that he could determine the objective regularities which the acting of the actors obeys. By contrast, social phenomenology7 returns society as the product of decisions, actions and acts of knowledge, and intention of aware individuals, to whom the world reveals itself as immediately familiar and the result of their daily routine. The second premise, closely related to the first one, consists in the necessity of an epistemological break with respect to common sense as a condition of possibility to be able to comprehend these structures. In this sense, the objectivist structuralist perspective helps in dissolving “the illusion of transparency of social world” which restricts the subjectivism of social phenomenology from the inside instead. So, the articulation between ethnography and statistical analysis as it is configured in TTA anticipates the composition of a modus operandi of this antinomy, established as the utilization of different research procedures acting in different moments of the analysis of the same object, the social. At first, that of the “break,” the statistical analysis, and the ethnographic description dishearten the ordinary representation and detect the objectives structures, called “fields” later on, the space of the positions, the distribution of the resources which bind interactions and representations. Thereupon, the analysis reintroduces the phenomenological description along with the immediate experience of the actors so as to clarify the perception categories and the dispositions which constitute their actions from the inside as their representations. In so doing, the experience of meanings (intentions and motivations) will become part of the “experience’s total meaning.” At this point, while being necessary, ethnography and statistical analysis are no longer as important as in TTA: the break instigated by the objectivating comprehension has and will have an epistemological priority upon the subjectivist comprehension. Object of Perception and Object of Science The ethnography status must therefore be fathomed against the backdrop of this gap of a theoretical nature about interactions, of which they are the direct object, and the structural configurations of which these interactions and the pertaining procedures would be a demonstration, which ethnography therefore seems to be unable to seize. Indeed, Bourdieu presupposes a reality that is not the object of direct experience, which

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conversely dominates what is the object of such an experience instead. At stake, it is not so much the ethnographic description or the empirical observation, which are far more effective techniques for performing a break than the close questionnaire or the tests, as he would say in The Craft of the Sociologist (CF), but rather the linguistic interaction in the form of the non-directive conversation or open interview (empirical description or observation do not require interaction). In order for this gap to occur, in Bourdieu’s opinion, a break from ordinary knowledge is necessary, summed up in the formula at the beginning of his CS “The social fact is won against the illusion of immediate knowledge” (italics are mine) (Bourdieu et al. 1991, p. 29). The consequences are considerable for the ethnographic practice, in its comprehensive sense of participant observation and open interview, which just seem to originate from this immediacy. Indeed, Bourdieu considers that “social life must be explained, not by the conception of it created by those who participate in it, but by profound causes which escape awareness” (italics are mine) (Ibidem, p. 15), by assuming that with Durkheim, in fact, social facts “have a constant mode of being, a nature that does not depend on individual arbitrariness and from which there derive necessary relationships” (italics are mine) (Ibidem, p. 15). If relations are determined, necessary and independent of individual wills and elude their consciences, it is not surprising that knowledge based upon dialogical interaction is thought to be lacking at best and then partial if not dangerous and misleading at worst. The spontaneous adhesion to linguistic categories and the interlocutors’ vision of the world would not lead to the social fact but rather the artefact, that is to say, conflate the object of the science with the prenotions from which we need to distance ourselves. The principle of non-consciousness that lies within the notion of “conquest of the fact” against the “immediacy illusion” of the consciousness becomes a constituent principle of sociological science. The framework of what would become field theory looms over the perception of relations, because “social relations cannot be reduced to relationships between subjectivities driven by intentions or motivations, because they are established between social conditions and positions and therefore have more reality than the subjects whom they link (italics are mine) (Ibidem, p. 18). Hence, some gestures typical of ethnography raise diffidence, practiced in an anthropological perspective, like the non-directive interview and the phenomenological description. A whole action philosophy is being taken off the table here. It is a theoretical premise implying, since it must always

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“move” from rational to real, a management of the research interaction which is not easy. One of the key matters of ethnographic “gesture” is exactly the articulation between what is the object of perception and what is the object of knowledge in “the here and the now” of the investigation situation. In Bourdieu’s opinion, the object of science has to differ from the real object, preconstructed by perception, the one which, in phenomenological terms, devotes itself to the intentional consciousness. The object of science sets itself apart insofar as it proves to be a system of expressly constructed relations different from those of the immediate perception. By still being faithful to the real object, the one of perception and the direct interaction, there is therefore the risk of mistaking elements which, instead, are pre-established objects within the common language and through it for “data,” the vocabulary and syntax are “a petrified philosophy of the social.” The Language Critique How can we break with common language? Which techniques should we employ? Bourdieu indicates in the CS as the techniques for performing breaks, logical critique of ideas, statistical testing of spurious sellevidences, radical and methodical challenging of appearance, the ethnographic inventories, well-tested methods of ethnographic research (with its specific techniques-morphological description, technology, cartography, lexicology, biography, genealogy, etc.) (Ibidem, p. 44). In Bourdieu’s opinion, ethnographic observation is “to social experimentation as observation of animals in their natural habitat is to laboratory experimentation”: the observation with no interaction makes perceivable “the fictitious, forced character of most of the social situations created by a routine exercise of sociology that induces neglect of the «laboratory reaction» precisely because it knows nothing but the laboratory and laboratory instruments, in the form of tests or questionnaires” (Ibidem, p. 41). Therefore, the act of breaking consists in setting apart those concrete and evident totalities of ordinary perception, so as to replace abstract criteria with their evidence, undoing the net of relations woven within experience. Statistical analysis makes the creation of new relations possible, which owing to their unusual nature enables the creation of relations of a superior order providing the explanation of those woven within experience.

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The force of the immediacy of the dialogical interaction must therefore be disempowered by restoring the dialogical exchange to the structural relations which dominate it. The communicative action—Bourdieu employs the Habermasian expression—it is in fact held by an objective structure shaping it, while still being unconscious and working behind the speech-makers involved in it (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 144). The examples that Bourdieu employs as a paradigm of this process holding the communicative action are self-explanatory. This is the dialogue between a “WASP” and a “Black-American,” a “French” and an “Algerian,” that is to say, it is about communication between dominating and dominated. This communicative action reflects into the language use, the appropriation or denial of the language of the one dominating (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, pp. 144–145), certifying that they are not “two persons who speak to each other”: In short, if a French person talks with an Algerian, or a black American to a WASP, it is not two persons who speak to each other but, through them, the colonial history in its entirety, or the whole history of the economic, political, and cultural subjugation of blacks (or women, workers, minorities, etc.) in the United States. (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 144)

As a matter of fact, each linguistic exchange contains the virtuality of a power act (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 145). Therefore, the ethnographer is separate from his interlocutor by social distance as compared to the necessity of the latter’s universe (Bourdieu 1998, p. 129), that is, from the capital differential which collocates both in asymmetric positions (rather than a Weberian net of meanings, Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 41). Admittedly, Bourdieu attributes the ongoing dialogical exchange in The Weight of the World, to the market “for linguistic and symbolic goods established every time an interview takes place varies in structure according to the objective relationship between the investigator and the investigated or, what comes down to the same thing, the relationship between all the different kinds of capital, especially linguistic capital, with which each of them is endowed (Bourdieu 1999, p. 609).” Thus, not only the diffidence toward the dialogical exchange in the investigation report and the necessity of its epistemic control but also the subsequent reduction of this interaction to structural mechanisms is comprehensible, against the backdrop of a symbolic

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violence for this reason always present and inevitable. The personal initiative, words, and procedures, is attributed to the requests of their respective social positions, determined in the related structural fields. Les personnes dans ce qu’elles ont de plus personnel sont, pour l’essentiel, la personnification des exigences réellement ou potentiellement inscrites dans la structure du champ ou, plus précisément, dans la position occupée à l’intérieur de ce champ. (Bourdieu and de Saint Martin 1978, p. 7)

The substitution of new relations of a superior order can and must be applied then to the concrete totality which is the real interlocutor. In Homo Academicus (HA), Bourdieu managed to tell apart the empirical individual and the epistemic individual as well as replacing the first with the second one. The first, the one being seized as singularity in ordinary language, is indeed supposed to indicate a difference without saying anything about that; the second one, instead, just like the science object, is “built,” it “is defined by a finite set of explicitly defined properties which differ through a series of identifiable differences from the set of properties, constructed according to the same explicit criteria (Bourdieu 1988, p. 22).” Hence, we are witnessing an application of the structural principle of “to mean,” by differences instead of substances, to the real individual who is de-materialized and brought back to a state of pure abstraction. This constructed individual, whom Bourdieu calls epistemic individual, has no reference in the ordinary space the same way as the real individual, but he does “in a space constructed of differences produced by the very definition of the finite set of effective variables”(Ibidem, p. 22). Namely, using Lévi-Strauss as an example, Bourdieu would talk about a doxic Lévi-Straus (synonym with empiric) along with an epistemic LéviStrauss: the first one refers to the author of Tristes Tropiques and is the individual of ordinary formulations, an identification telling him apart not only from his university colleagues but also all the men; the epistemic Lévi-Strauss is the outcome of the construction of sociological knowledge and, unlike the other one, acts as if he did not display any variable such as eye color, blood type, or height, features being therefore parenthesised. The concrete individual gets lost “in the system of differences, of uneven intensity and unevenly linked to each other, established between the finite set of his relevant properties in the theoretical domain considered, and the whole set of finite sets of properties attached to the set of other constructed individuals (Ibidem, p. 22). The doxic Lévis-Strauss

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is boundless, the epistemic one has nothing eluding conceptualisation, is completely transparent to himself. Obviously, this epistemic individual is not the object of research interaction and as such the concrete individual, his description, his daily context, they all lose interest in the construction of a theoretical viewpoint. The epistemic individual is not indeed created with what has been resumed in the interaction and the dialogue of the ethnographic situation but rather multiple indicators encompassing demographic data and indicators of cultural capital, acquired or inherited, university power, intellectual celebrity, scientific power, and prestige (annuals, headed papers…) (see the Appendixes to Homo Academicus ). What has been resumed up to now seems to address the relation of anthropological investigation, characterized by the direct encounter with concrete individuals and by its ur-modality, of conversation (Marcus 2012, p. XIV), to an ancillary dimension of its social research in the bestcase scenario (TTA) or its epistemic uselessness (CS and HA) in the worst one, rather by considering other procedures which today we would define as qualitative, direct observation if the object requires it, so as to conquer, create, and ascertain the object. Yet, this undeniable dismission is not absolute and coexists with a later positioning which seems if not to deny it, at least soften it. That as if certifies how the concrete individual is still a stumbling block against the backdrop of his “thinking tools,” the social, with a different scale and very well-structured among them. With the publication of The Weight of the World (WW), Bourdieu seems to modify his relationship with the conversation in the research relationship, repositioning the concrete individual’s singularity and his statute in the process of the creation of the theory’s viewpoint, even managing (?) to be accused, after this publication, of not applying those principles postulated by himself in the CS (Mayer 1995) or converting to qualitative methods (Hamel 1994). In 1992 An invitation to Reflexive Sociology, one year prior to the publication of WW , he wrote that a sociologist is “the one who goes out in the street to interview Mr. or Mrs. Anybody, listens to her, and tries to learn from her” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 204). Without this sentence being enough to make him a qualitative sociologist, something in the way of conceiving dialogical exchange in the investigation relationship was definitely changing.

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Words in Social Relationship, the Self’s Singularity and Conversion At the beginning of WW , Bourdieu addresses the reader by invoking Spinoza, acquiring the Dutch philosopher’s precept to understand, not hate, nor laugh or deplore, before drafting in more than eight hundred pages what this “understanding” basically is when we deal with people, that is, “taking people as they are.” At the end of these pages, he will close the volume with a chapter whose title resumes the same word from the beginning, “understanding,” providing a refined epistemological description of such an undertaking as “taking people as they are,” in the act of the investigation and in its writing as it is certified by the previous pages. Bourdieu means to show not so much the methodological instructions he employed as “the intentions and the procedural principles that we put into practice in the research” “to reproduce in the reading of the texts the work of both construction and understanding that produced them” (Bourdieu 1999, p. 607). He wishes to give the reader the tools to reproduce his modus operandi somewhat: what “taking people as they are” means, “by providing the theoretical instruments that let us see these lives as necessary through a systematic search for the causes and reasons they have for being what they are (italics in the text)” (Ibidem, p. 1). So, in the last chapter, he critically introduces the tensions being announced in the augural address intended for the reader and announcing or, at least, displaying a change in the thematization of the confrontation with the singularities in its frame: How can we give explanations without pinpointing individuals? How can we avoid making the interview and its analytic prologue took like a clinical case preceded by a diagnosis? The analyst’s intrusion is as difficult as it is necessary. It must proclaim itself openly and yet strive to go unnoticed. (Ibidem, p. 1)

How to conciliate two doubly contradictory objectives: the discussion must provide all the elements necessary to analyse the interviewees’ positions objectively and to understand their points of view, and it must accomplish this without setting up the objectivising distance that reduces the individual to a specimen in a display case […] it must adopt a perspective as close as possible to the individual’s own without identifying with the alter ego (which always remains an object, whether one wants it

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or not ) and turning into the subject of this world view (italics are mine). (Ibidem, p. 2)

What I wish to illustrate here is how the answers to these questions, which raised preoccupations that hadn’t been explicit before then, led Bourdieu to acknowledge from within his theoretical frame itself locations that prevent a monolithic reduction to what had undoubtedly been reported earlier but prove a different and tensional acknowledgment of the dialogical encounter’s ethnographic reality with historical singularities and their contexts. The text itself, the synthesis point, does not mean to be a rhetorical artifice, but rather “self-evident and natural, even given, constructions that are wholly inhabited by critical reflection” (not reduced just to structural mechanisms). The central concern is as ever the same, that is, to be clear about what effects the investigator can exert without realizing it. These effects are not so much those of the standard sociological tradition, for instance the bias that the matrix of the role takings of the interviewer and the informer from the second Chicago school claims to control, rather those more essential and then unaware distortion related to the social structure. Bourdieu mentions how the relationship between interviewer and interviewee: (Even) if its objective of pure knowledge distinguishes the research relationship from most of the exchanges in everyday life, it remains, whatever one does, a social relationship. (italics in the text) As such, it can have an effect on the results obtained (the effects varying according to the different parameters that can influence the relationship.). (Ibidem, p. 608)

I will mention that, in Bourdieu’s opinion, a social relationship is a relationship between distinct positions in the social field. As we have seen, the effect of this social structure, in particular the one in which the interview is carried out, is the effect of the symbolic violence referring to this and being completely exerted behind the interviewer’s back if he does not become aware of it. Only an ongoing reflectiveness at the time of the interview allows this effect to be lessened and controlled, without being deleted. Therefore, the investigation relationship is an asymmetric relationship in two ways: it is a sort of intrusion of which the initiator is the interviewer who “unilaterally and without any preliminary negotiations, assigns the interview its objectives and uses. These, on occasion, may be

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poorly specified - at least for the respondent”; he does kick-start the game and establish its rules. In order to compensate for this asymmetry, Bourdieu suggests seizing the extent of the distance between the objective of the study as interpreted by the respondent and the object assigned by the investigator. The investigator must ask him/herself: “to bring to light the respondent’s representation of the situation, of the study in general, and the particular relationship that it sets up, and of the ends it is pursuing, and to make explicit the reasons that led to participation in the exchange” (Ibidem, p. 609). This asymmetry is then redoubled by a social asymmetry whenever the investigator occupies a higher position than the investigated, within the hierarchy of the different types of capital, along with cultural capital. Hence, in order to compensate for this asymmetry and the symbolic violence operating in it, Bourdieu resorts to an active and methodical listening, not reducible to the listening of the non-directive interview nor that “dirigiste” of the questionnaire. It is a total availability to the person being questioned, a submission “to the singularity of a particular life history”—which can lead, by a kind of more or less controlled imitation, to adopting the interviewee’s language, views, feelings, and thoughts—with methodical construction, founded on “the knowledge of the objective conditions common to an entire social category.” It is about creating the conditions so that, through the investigator’s controlled language, the interviewed can, by answering, become the subject of this interrogation, and make it his own. This process can be made easier through the control of the social relationship structure and the related linguistic market, that is, by the cautious choice of the person to interview and, in Bourdieu’s view, as a research coordinator, of her interviewers. Certainly, all these “subterfuges” have some limits (the smallest distance threatens the non-relevance of the exchange and the uselessness of the interview, like the biggest distance, leads to the fear of social disdain). What to do when there is nothing which can help reduce or neutralize social distance? In order to answer this question, Bourdieu asks the investigator to show by the content of his own questions and his tone of voice if he is capable of mentally putting him/herself in his/her place (the place or respondent). Bourdieu does not mean to promote a phenomenological projection of the investigator’s self in the other but rather in the place that the investigated occupies in social space,8 “in order to understand them as necessarily what they are, by questioning them from that point

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on, and to some degree to take their part.” Thus, it is not so much putting oneself in his/her shoes as actually in his/her place to seize his/her position as if it had been marked by necessary determinants. “Necessiter une personne,” the original French phrasing, requiring a person, an expression which in Italian and English makes no other sense than needing a person, means here the generic and genetic comprehension of the social conditions of which it is the product: these are the conditions in which the investigated is placed and of which (s)he is product, therefore they are necessary, “a grasp of the circumstances of life and the social mechanisms that affect the entire category to which any individual belongs (high school students, skilled workers, magistrates, whatever)” but also “a grasp of the conditions, inseparably psychological and social, associated with a given position and trajectory in social space.” Here, Bourdieu seems to define the outline of the necessary binding constraints of the position and the trajectory of the investigated without necessarily reduce him to these. As a result, he came to the conclusion that “against the old distinction made by Wilhelm Dilthey, we must posit that understanding and explaining are one” (Ibidem, p. 613). The in-depth knowledge of the situation that Bourdieu solicits from the investigator, the theoretical equivalent of “knowledge associated with familiarity” is ultimately necessary but not sufficient. Indeed, this knowledge “could not lead to true understanding” if it is not associated with “an attentiveness to others and a self-abnegation and openness rarely encountered in everyday life,” that is to say, listening to “claim to uniqueness, the most difficult to hear by desperately ‘inauthentic’ means,” the reused speeches. For this reason, he would say what was quoted at the beginning of this chapter, i.e., the interview is to the interviewer a form of spiritual exercise 9 with the aim of gaining, through the forgetfulness of self (of the investigator’s self), a true conversion of the way he/she looks at other people in the ordinary circumstances of life. What Bourdieu clarifies later is astounding: The welcoming disposition, which leads one to make the respondent’s problems one’s own, the capacity to take that person and understand them just as they are in their distinctive necessity, is a sort of intellectual love: a gaze that consents to necessity in the manner of the “intellectual love of God,” that is, of the natural order, which Spinoza held to be the supreme form of knowledge (italics are mine). (Ibidem, p. 614)

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The oblivion of oneself, the investigator’s self, the self-abnegation, and the openness to the active and methodical listening, it all creates a wholly exceptional communication situation, free from obligations, which by providing alternatives allows the interviewed to express the awkwardness, even the ones that (s)he discovers exactly when expressing it. Essentially, the interviewer creates the conditions of the appearance of an extraordinary speech, with respect to the daily, which it may never have given and was already there, merely awaiting the conditions for its actualisation […] an opportunity also to explain themselves in the fullest sense of the term, that is, to construct their own point of view both about themselves and about the world and to bring into the open the point within this world from which they see themselves and the world, become comprehensible, and justified, not least for themselves (italics in the text). (Ibidem, p. 615)

Certainly, the distance from that radical devaluation of the non-directive interview is obvious, expressively upheld in the CS, considered as a social relation which is deeply factitious and breaks the mutuality of usual exchanges, with no control of the implicit premises, in which the social subjects have an overindulgent relationship with language impelling the subjects to produce a verbal artefact (Bourdieu et al. 1991, p. 41). In this case, the dialogical exchange becomes “an induced and accompanied self-analysis.” The analysis of the communicative action, whose paradigm was the communication between the dominating and the dominated, becomes therefore better-structured and more complicated. The example provided by Bourdieu is the one about the conversation between three schoolgirls. What it is said in the apparent conversation between them can be only understood if we read in their words the structure of the (present and past) objective relations, the structure and the path of the educational institute they attend, but also the structure and the story of the teaching system that is expressed there. Only by bringing to light those structures immanent to their situation speeches, Bourdieu says, we can seize what makes the idiosyncrasy of each of them and the complex singularity of their actions and reactions. In essence, the structure of the social space in which the girls are located from the start and the structure of the scholastic space within which they have followed different paths, while belonging to the past, keep orienting (without determining) the

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vision of their past and their scholastic future, as well as of themselves, in what they have most singular (Ibidem, pp. 617–618). In this closing chapter, many elements get to create some “flats” within the same “musical score which seemed to be stiff before. Admittedly, the acknowledgment that the dialogue in the investigation relationship can become a “self-analysis” of the interlocutor, induced and accompanied by the investigator and the fact that this relationship can appear to be for the latter a spiritual exercise, that is, a decentralization of his/her own gaze, a putting in his interlocutor’s place, that is, paraphrasing what it has been reported previously, the fact that two people can finally talk and the possibility of crossing the social distance and the symbolic violence implied, certainly without abolishing them. Gérard Althabe, Another Possible Impossible Fieldwork of the anthropological tradition (I am referring to the one which took hold with the so-called “interpretative turn”), in light of these tensions inserted in the theoretical framework becomes a procedure that can converse with the modus operandi mentioned above. In relation to the epistemological landscape sketched from the beginning of these pages, the possibility of the anthropological fieldwork being characterized, as being well-founded, if and only if, we presuppose that that social groups being the object of the research can establish bonds having a “relative autonomy” as compared to society structuration phenomena on a macro (global) scale. If this autonomy were not to be acknowledged, anthropological research would have no relevance. In other words, fieldwork research is possible if the actors, the interlocutors, the “empirical individuals,” the people, are “subjects,” that is, they are also creators of interpersonal exchanges, of a saying and a doing, which have their own solidity. Thus, like these exchanges, so are those emphasized by the research interaction. This premise does not imply as such a denial of structural relations but, quite the contrary, the acknowledgment that these relations must be taken over (?), given a meaning, reintroduced, represented, enacted in the construction of relations that the actors themselves establish with their own space, in singular configurations, always new and unpredictable. It is precisely by the field interaction and its own “relative autonomy” with a group of actors that anthropological research means to

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comprehend “from within” their social universe, that is, how they establish relations and the logic with which they reorganize structural relations and respond to those. It is the perspective ushered in by Gérard Althabe, a perspective that, if compared to Bourdieu’s, appears to be “specular and inverted” (Absi et al. 2014). He was a contemporary and fellow countryman of Bourdieu; they were born in two bordering villages. He was called to arms but he refused to go and fight in Algeria, and then served three years, from 1956– 1959, in a lockdown camp in Tchad. Althabe, who was initiated into anthropology coming from social psychology studies, performed fieldwork within Orstom, the French government agency of development, in Cameroon, Congo-Brazzaville, and Madagascar, before becoming Bourdieu’s colleague at the École des Hautes Études des Sciences Sociales. From the seventies onwards his field research would be the French urban outskirts.10 Althabe, in a colonial context, endeavored to show how the world of the dominating acquires a meaning in the world of the dominated (Althabe 1969; Absi et al. 2014, p. 162), unlike Bourdieu, who committed himself to analyzing the position that the dominated occupied within the world of the dominating. As a matter of fact, Althabe opted for a constructivist, inductive perspective, based on what the actors of social relations pro-duce, I would say in the literal sense of fabricating and showing up within the investigation relationship: anthropological research is a knowledge mode built upon the communication between the researcher and the group whose universe he wants to understand. Instead, Bourdieu basically chose a structuralist approach, which he reorganized originally to conceive domination relations through the mechanisms of their reproduction. For both of them, this “colonial scene” is a “mother scene” of the respective epistemological positioning; Congo-Brazzaville, Cameroon, and Madagascar for the one, Algeria for the other. The different perspectives fall under two different modes of considering this colonial scene. In Althabe, the effort to show how the world of the dominating acquires a meaning in the world of the dominated implies considering, in one’s own modus operandi, the meaning that the interlocutor attributes to the researcher over the research and identifying such a meaning as an operator within the scope of the interpretation and control of it. It is from this notion of implication of his that I would now like to inspect the investigation relationship as designed by Bourdieu in the final chapter of The Weight of the World.

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Implication, Objectify Differently Althabe uses the theatrical metaphor to describe the uniqueness of that complex knowledge protocol as implication is: “The ethnologist, placing him/herself into a local situation, is projected onto a scene where a screenplay is played, whose topic he does not know but where he has a role [italics are mine]” (Althabe 2001, p. 13). It is immediately clear how this notion refers to a perspective diametrically opposed to the inclusion of the investigator in the research relationship indicated above by Bourdieu. He began his Pascalian Meditations exactly with “implication and implicit” but, as we have reported, this implication is not what Althabe suggested; indeed, it is the inclusion issuing from the social distance between the researcher and the investigated, a distance assigning different positions with differentials of power and symbolic capital. The researcher is involved in the social structure which assigns a position to everyone. The objectivation of the objectifying subject would consist in bringing such an asymmetry to light so as to make the investigation possible. The investigation relationship as a social relationship seems to fade in this structural relationship. The implication device11 converses with these two dimensions of the research relationship, and interrogates l’entretien outlined above by clarifying from the inside two characters acting in it and connected to each other: the hermeneutic and objectifying nature of his performance (Althabe 2001; Althabe and Hernandez 2004) and the nature of the emerging social bond of the research social relationship (Fava 2013, 2017). The implication arose as a response to a buried question, “Who are you researcher to the investigated whom you meet?” It concerns the researcher’s identity that (s)he is given by those with whom (s)he interacts over the investigation. Its mediated and processual acknowledgment becomes an inalienable condition to critically interpret the investigation material. Like such a work, as an objectivation of the objectifying subject too. The theatrical metaphor helps explain it (Fava 2017, pp. 62–65). The inclusion of the researcher, the role to which his presence on the field and his research procedures are ascribed, the duality implied by the metaphor, are those of a character: that is, implication entails the attribution of a position, a script, and performances, defined by the force relations characterizing the local situation. The implication is subjective and personal only as an afterthought. The notion of screenplay refers to the social temporality of the investigation when linking

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“the here and the now” of the event of the research interaction, the interpretation unit, the “cosmos,” with a longer temporality than temporality of “here and now,” the one of the historical conjuncture in which the interlocutors are involved and through which they understand each other and act by positioning themselves with respect to the collective phenomena issuing, mediated, in the here and now. The present implication of the investigation cannot be solved by social statics but it rather declines the social becoming. With the notion of “character role” and screenplay, the implication leads us to analyze those dimensions of social action where the relationship between individual initiatives and structural constraints, biographical trajectories and collective history, movements, and social order spread. The microsocial in which it is produced, which in turn it denotes, is not returned as an isolated and atomized object but rather well-structured and associated with phenomena of a wider macrosocial scale. The character and the theme of the screenplay are always unknown at the beginning of the investigation and they represent what the researcher aims to recreate by it. The duality mentioned above, where (s)he is located and of which (s)he is aware, represents then a not-knowledge founder of his/her analysis. As I have said, the dialogue is not transparent (Fava 2005). It is from this acknowledged and movable position that the researcher builds the way of interpreting the events in which (s)he is one of the actors him/herself. (S)he knows that the processes that produce his involvement in the local situation are the same that characterize and organize the sociability in actu of the object of the study. If the researcher manages to comprehend “who (s)he is to the people with whom he interacts,” (s)he also manages to identify the processes that (s)he wishes to study and know a social universe from the inside, from within. (S)he is aware of the ways of building social relations right through a personal and dialogical relationship, based upon the acknowledgment of the difference, a human interaction in a full sense which becomes at the same time origin of the reflective consciousness of alterity as well. The Research Interaction, the Emerging Link What Bourdieu defines as “an induced and accompanied self-analysis,” a possible outcome of the dialogue in the non-occasional interaction, is not a recurring situation: certainly, the dialogue proposal is an intrusion and consists in an exchange different from daily dialogues, for its

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objective is of pure knowledge (Bourdieu 608); yet, this can generate a suspension of the social hierarchy and the relational conflicts pertinent to the remote and the near context of the “investigated,” the interlocutors. Two movements arise in the relationship with the researcher. The interlocutors interact with instructions of acting different from the usual ones of the daily (the “meaning” they assign to the researcher’s identity condenses this process of parenthesising and transgression of their usual social relations). Conversely, they can reflectively return to those relations themselves, the conflicts, and these hierarchies by putting into words the unsaid yet or the otherwise unsayable with another which, having come from the outside, since it is always external to their life and their history as much as the other concrete social relations, therefore becomes intimate to them. How can all of this happen? What makes possible the appearance of this “extraterritorial space of enunciation” (Selim 2010, p. 42)? What are the conditions of possibility for it to happen? Our answer is clear: the field research relationship installs, in long-term relations, an emerging bond, a real social bond, whose originality is exactly to relate as an emerging to existent bonds without being reducible to them. The always changing and never ultimate form of this bond is bestowed by the implication around which the two motive dimensions mentioned above concentrate and extend. This is the reason why, starting from the way (s)he interacts with his/her interlocutors, it is possible for the anthropologist to progress within the intelligibility of the social relations of the groups into which (s)he is gradually (and passively) introduced, furthermore without presupposing a universe to enter as much as having to resort to empathy and “putting in the others’ shoes” (Fava 2017, p. 134ss).

Conclusions We started this text by promising to read Bourdieu with Bourdieu, making his “reading advice” ours, endeavoring to put ourselves in his place, his point of view, from which to comprehend his ethnographic method. This is what Bourdieu himself was wondering in the postscript resumed at the beginning of these pages, in order not to reduce an auctor to a lector (Bourdieu 2000, p. 88) and in the final chapter of The Weight of the World to reduce the social distance between the researcher and his/her interlocutor, so that the symbolic violence this distance entails is depowered. A margin of initiative and speech that is final acknowledged in The Weight of the World, in the forms and situations he indicated. It

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also opens a dynamic space in a framework which appeared, to many, to be monolithic, but actually is in the making, dialectic, and contradictory as well. L’entretien, the dialogical exchange, is no longer an illusion of immediacy. As he said himself, by wrong-footing strict methodologists and hermeneutic mystics, this research relationship also becomes a “spiritual exercise”: conversion of the researcher self’s gaze upon the others, active listening of the required (constrained, necessitée) singularity. The implication device of Althabian affiliation I have wanted to bring into question also joins this position, with no conciliatory bleeding hearts, by clarifying its own mobilizing dynamism as compared to it: the implication and the emerging bond. The effort to put oneself in the interlocutor’s place, using the phenomenological metaphor of the “trading place exchange” so evoked, becomes through implication the effort to acknowledge the position the interlocutor assigns to researcher and upon which the researcher has no control: the self’s decentralization from the researcher’s self, which is the condition of possibility of it, not only does work as its objectivation but also finally decreases the ghosts of every veiled epistemic narcissism in a more radical way.

Notes 1. Università degli Studi di Padova/Laboratoire Architecture Anthropologie ENSA, Paris La Villette, UMR 7218 CNRS Bourdieu does not even identify himself in that postmodern reflective gaze inaugurated by Writing Culture (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 46). This criticism without recourse stays in an ironic contraposition with Bourdieu’s celebration/appropriation in Writing Culture, where Clifford e Marcus associate him to de Certeau (Ibidem, p. 3) ignoring the latter’s discerning criticism to the habitus concept (de Certeau 1984, pp. 82–96). By making subjectivity the reflection of social structures, Bourdieu cannot account for those gestures that Certeau calls tactics, that is, gaping slots inside the ’habitus and the social forces producing it, for an unpredicted and free action, although temporally limited. Bourdieu, de Certeau says, sees those positions but writes them off as “bric-à-brac”, junk, scrap yard, since they were not adaptable in his system. Maybe, after his last theoretical remodulations about the habitus expressed in PM, such a consideration could be mitigated without it affecting however its basic horizon, that is, the critic of the possibility itself of every procedure theory.

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2. It has been and still is the object of reconstructions and analysis by many authors in different linguistic contexts: Anglo-Saxon (Robbins 1991, 2000, 2019; Lane 2000; Reed-Danahay 2009; Swartz 2012; Atkinson 2016; Italian (Paolucci 2011); French (Perreau 2019). Literature about him is legion. 3. Most recently, the discussion about the possibility itself of a bourdieusan ethnography (Sallaz 2018), in the sense of the most current acceptation of participant observation, compatible with his theoretical frame, does not seem to take into account the difficulties arising from his approach to ethnography, for example the status of the language and the spoken word and performs a reading of his itinerary in some parts reductive (it does not take into consideration Bourdieu’s changes manifested at the end of his path). The ethnographic “gesture” is by itself partial (Fava 2012): there is always an alterity of space and time eluding the “here and now” of interaction. Not all not being visible is unreal. It is exactly the ethnographic experience that reveals reality dimensions not being object of sense-experience but effective on “the here and the now” of this experience. The awareness of this feature that Bourdieu defines “flaws” but for external reasons to the ethnographic gesture itself—the theoretical structure—goes at the same pace as the awareness of his necessary integration with a macro analytical perspective as a way of knowledge anchored in microsocial but therefore not enclosed in it. 4. As he confesses during the interview that he granted to Axel Honneth (Honneth et al. 1986, p. 38), he was a self-taught ethnographer, learning in the field and in wartime (Bourdieu 2004, p. 423). 5. By monography he is referring to the dossier of every single interlocutor, interview, and description of the context included. 6. In these lines I have employed “theory” being aware that Bourdieu has always demanded not to create one rather than “thinking tools,” in his own words. 7. Actually, immediate knowledge of the world, the doxic experience, is what phenomenology itself means not only to describe but also explore for the purpose of understanding the structures which allow it to emerge (Throop and Murphy 2002). A more balanced evaluation of Bourdieu’s relationship with phenomenology taking into account his whole intellectual trajectory provides us a more detailed position, always dialectic (Perreau 2019). 8. I wish to point out that putting oneself in the place of the investigated in the thought is exactly the expression used by Husserl, Platzwechsel, to define intersubjectivity not as mind reading of the other thanks to the inferential projection of one’s own, what Bourdieu rejects here, but as an assumption that the world before one’s own eyes is the same as the other’s eyes because, if one put him/herself in the other’s place, (s)he would see

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what the other sees, would have the same “point of view” (Duranti 2010, p. 6). Therefore, it is an expression and an enhancement of an Husserlian and phenomenological inscription. 9. He is referring to the spiritual exercise of Epictetus and Marco Aurelio’s stoic tradition aimed to one’s own transformation, one’s own observation, learn to converse and to die. 10. For an introduction to Gérard Althabe I will refer the reader to Fava (2017, pp. 35–65). 11. The idea of implication contains the idea of “The social production of the ethnographer, in the sense of how they are viewed by informants – a critical moment in any observational study – by reconstructing the status and identity of the researcher from the informants’ point of view” (italics are mine) (Venkatesh 2002). Hence, it is different from that. This image is at the same time a “dominant framework” shaping the perception that the researcher’s subjects have, since it mediates the exchanges with him/her and establishes the conditions of possibility of the investigation’s performance itself. This consideration, developed starting from an ethnographic study in a district of Chicago, clarifies further elements which help better understand the epistemological pertinence of the researcher’s social production: on the one hand, he acknowledges that the viewpoint of the “informers” about the researcher is not only a window on the available cognitive resources to define it, but also a sign of the structural properties of the field’s social relations; on the other hand, he claims that this image is what concretely shapes the investigation. Therefore, by using the language of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, he confirms the element received by the French tradition of the current ethnology, in relation to which “my fieldworks” was created (Fava 2012). However, this perspective differs in a detail which does have methodological consequences: the “dominant” fieldwork is not an ethnographic datum having the same status as the others (interviews, speeches, observations), but it is the unsurpassable necessary mediation to comprehend the investigation situations in which these very materials are produced themselves.

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CHAPTER 7

The Bridge and the Dance: Situational Analysis in Anthropology Marco Gardini and Luca Rimoldi

Introduction This chapter explores the birth and development of situational analysis: a qualitative research method first introduced into anthropology by Max Gluckman (1940a, b‚ 1942) and subsequently developed by his students at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute and in Manchester. Based on the detailed descriptions of particular social situations (either conflicts,

The authors worked together in the drafting of each part of this text, the sections “Introduction” and “The ‘Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand’ and its Legacies” are attributed to Marco Gardini, and the sections “Observing and Analyzing an Urban Dance” and “Conclusions” are attributed to Luca Rimoldi. M. Gardini Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy e-mail: [email protected] L. Rimoldi (B) Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Catania, Catania, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 V. Matera and A. Biscaldi (eds.), Ethnography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51720-5_7

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rituals, or other public or private events), this method aims to account for the different strategies and positioning of the actors involved, shedding light on the broader socio-political scenarios that affect local contexts and more generally illustrating processes of change or continuity in particular social dynamics. It is a method that focuses on the precise presentation of the materials that anthropologists collected in the field, but which uses them not as illustrative examples of given structural principles, but rather as points of entry for understanding the dynamism and variability of the contexts under investigation (Handelman 2006; Kempny 2005; Schumaker 2001, 2004). As Bruce Kapferer has argued (2006, p. 125): […] the most important feature of Gluckman’s approach is that the event or situation is in an active rather than passive relation to the production of ethnographic understanding and the construction of theory. It is not intended as an illustration of larger processes and therefore passively representing what is already known; rather, it is a particular point of entry that opens toward a knowing that is not already apparent.

In the history of anthropology, the application of this method has had a number of crucial consequences. In the 1950s, situational analysis allowed British social anthropology to question many of the assumptions of functionalism, led the discipline toward less normative and more processual approaches, emphasized the importance of individual and collective renegotiation of norms for strategic purposes, and laid the groundwork for detailed studies of social change in colonial contexts and the various forms of social differentiation that are found in all societies. Gluckman’s students and collaborators, in particular Victor Turner (1957), Jaap van Velsen (1967) and James Clyde Mitchell (1956, 1965, 1969, 1983), further developed this method, showing on the one hand that it was necessary to observe the actors who had taken part in a particular event in subsequent social situations and, on the other hand, that it was crucial to account for the way actors actively renegotiate the entirety of their social networks. The first development of situational analysis involved juxtaposing a plurality of situations, events and cases in which the same actors had participated, over a longer or shorter period of time, in order to account for the way their relationships changed. In the latter case, on the other hand, the aim was to reveal the extent to which the social networks the actors wove and deployed in everyday life could transcend the spheres of kinship or tribal belonging (van Velsen 1967; Mitchell

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1969, 1983; Kempny 2005; Handelman 2006). The first method became known as extended case method, while the second formulation was termed network analysis: Gluckman himself acknowledged the validity of these two methodological tools and regretted not having applied them more fully during his own research (Gluckman 1967, pp. XIX–XX). Although situational analysis has often been regarded as the trademark of the Manchester School, it became, implicitly or explicitly, one of the most important methodological tools anthropologists use in their field research (Mills 2005). It is thus worth focusing on the genesis of this tool and the theoretical implications that its use entailed and continues to entail, focusing on two essays that signaled its birth (“Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand” by Max Gluckman 1940a, b, 1942) and its successful application (“The Kalela Dance. Aspects of Social Relations among Urban Africans in Northern Rhodesia” by James Clyde Mitchell 1956), respectively. These essays not only represent two classics in the study of social change in Africa, they also paved the way for lines of inquiry that, by departing from the analysis of abstract structural principles, succeeded in grasping the ability of individuals and groups to creatively appropriate norms and values within social fields characterized by intersecting, multiple interests and lines of social differentiation. In discussing these two essays, we will show that, in the history of the discipline, applying situational analysis (and its developments) has made it possible to question a series of consolidated theoretical assumptions and that, potentially, it continues to represent an indispensable tool for conducting fieldwork research.

“Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand” and Its Legacy Born in Johannesburg in 1911, Max Gluckman carried out his university studies at the University of Witwatersrand with professors such as Agnes Winifred Hoernlé and Isaac Schapera, probably the most influential South African anthropologists of the time. Together with the work of the historian William Miller Macmillan (1930) and Marx, Hoernlé and Schapera greatly impacted the education of the young Gluckman and instilled in him an interest in studying colonial contexts in Africa. During his doctorate, which was completed in 1936 at Exeter College in Oxford under the supervision of Robert Ranulph Marett, Gluckman came into contact with Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown, Edward E. Evans-Pritchard

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and Meyer Fortes, and gained familiarity with the functionalist perspective they had developed. In 1939, he was hired as a senior sociologist by the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, at the time headed by Godfrey Wilson and subsequently by Gluckman, starting in 1941 (Gluckman 1945). The years Gluckman spent heading the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute (1941– 1947) allowed him to create a large group of students, some of whom went on to comprise the core of the so-called Manchester School. After an interlude as a researcher at Oxford between 1947 and 1949, in fact, Gluckman was appointed to the first chair of social anthropology at the University of Manchester. He remained in that position until his death in 1975, training generations of anthropologists interested in investigating social change on the basis of the study of concrete cases.1 Precisely thanks to the large number of anthropologists Gluckman supervised, “Analysis of a Social Situation,” the first publication in which case analysis was used, is probably Gluckman’s most widely read and commented juvenile work. This essay originally comprised three parts, two of which were published in 1940 and the third in 1942 in the journal Bantu Studies/African Studies. Scholars who had worked at the Rhodes-Livingston Institute between 1941 and 1947, as well as Gluckman’s students in Manchester in the following years, soon recognized this essay as a founding text in terms of both content and methodology, and familiarly renamed it “the Bridge.” Indeed, the first part of the essay describes the opening ceremony for a bridge that was held on January 7, 1938 in Northern Zululand, more precisely in Malungwana, in the Mahlabatini jurisdiction. As Gluckman recalls (1940a, p. 4), the ceremony was important because it inaugurated the first bridge built in the region by the Department of Native States and because the event brought together all the components of colonial society at the time: colonial administrators and white administrative staff with their families, Zulu political authorities, including the regent of Zululand, the workers who had built the bridge, white missionaries and Christian Zulus belonging to the European churches, and Zulus who had not converted to Christianity or belonged to local Christian churches. The opening was followed by another politically relevant event during which the colonial magistrate and regent reprimanded some local leaders for having failed to prevent a series of raids by certain groups in the region. Gluckman defines these two events as “social situations” while also stressing the important role the observer plays in constructing them:

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[…] several events which were linked by my presence as an observer, but which occurred in different parts of Northern Zululand and involved different groups of people. Through these situations, and by contrasting them with other situations not described, I shall try to trace the social structure of modern Zululand. I call them social situations since I am analysing them in their relationship with other situations in the social system of Zululand […] A social situation is thus the behaviour on some occasion of members of a community as such, analysed and compared with their behaviour on other occasions, so that the analysis reveals the underlying system of relationships between the social structure of the community, the parts of the social structure, the physical environment, and the physiological life of the community’s members. (Gluckman 1940a, pp. 9–10)

Setting off from a detailed description of these two cases, Gluckman sought to inductively analyze both the type of social order that was produced in a society deeply divided between whites and blacks and the dynamics of historical-political change that had initially shaped the birth of the Zulu kingdom and, later, the consolidation of the colonial order. At the same time, however, the method that Gluckman employed made it possible to account for the extent to which both color groups were internally differentiated and the fact that some figures and relationships crossed the dividing line between colonizers and colonized people, thereby actually holding the society together. Some of these figures, such as village leaders and other native authorities, but also Christianized Zulus and some colonial administrators, who at times took the side of blacks against other whites in order to maintain order in the territories they administered, contained and often synthesized all the contradictions and social tensions of the colonial context of the time. These figures were all present at the opening ceremony of the bridge and, in the following parts of the essay, provide the main examples Gluckman analyses to show patterns of change and continuity in Zululand social relations. Although the essay was still driven by a functionalist approach and questions, as indicated by its emphasis on the factors ensuring a certain degree of social equilibrium in Zululand, it also contained a number of elements that Gluckman’s students considered to be potentially revolutionary. First, Gluckman did not view conflicts as pathological or dysfunctional for the social order, as was often the case in the more classical functionalist vulgate; rather, he considered them an integral part of the definition and reproduction of social and political relations. Using

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situational analysis to examine and make sense of the moments of crisis and the tensions embedded in every social order entailed looking at the main arenas in which the social system could potentially be modified: indeed, while some conflicts could be resolved without causing changes to the wider structure, in his essay Gluckman also described those conflicts that had radically changed the socio-political context of Zululand and emphasized the fact that human situations always develop in a continuous flow (Kapferer 2015, p. 7). Second, the essay ethnographically explored a social context of which the colonial administrators were as much an integral part as the Zulus. In arguing that both colonizers and colonized people participated, albeit in different positions of power, in the same social system, Gluckman was taking a stand in the debate between Isaac Schapera (1935), one of Gluckman’s former professors, and Malinowski (2013 [1938]). According to the former, in fact The missionary, administrator, trader and labour recruiter must be regarded as factors in the tribal life in the same way as are the chief and the magician. Christianity, in so far as it has been accepted, must be studied like any other form of cult, in its organization, doctrines, ritual, manifestations in tribal life, attitudes towards it of individual Natives, and so on. So, too, the trading store, the labour recruiter and the agricultural demonstrator must be considered integral parts of the modem economic life, the school as part of the routine educational development of the children, and the Administration as part of the existing political system. (Schapera 1935, p. 317)

In the introduction to Methods of Study of Culture Contact in Africa (1938 [2013]), Malinowski criticized this position, arguing that scholars should not consider colonial contexts as integrated social units, but should rather distinguish and separately analyze three cultural areas: the European sphere, the African spheres and the zone of contact between the two. Gluckman, for his part, considered this tripartition to be excessively rigid: That Zulu and Europeans could co-operate in the celebration at the bridge shows that they form together a community with specific modes of behaviour to one another […] here I note only that the existence of a single Black-White community in Zululand must be the starting point of my analysis. The events at Malungwana bridge – which was planned by

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European engineers and built by Zulu labourers, which would be used by a European magistrate ruling over Zulu and by Zulu women going to a European hospital, which was opened by European officials and the Zulu Regent in a ceremony which included not only Europeans and Zulu but also actions historically derived from European and Zulu cultures – must be related to a system at least part of which consists of Zulu-European relations. Those relations can be studied as social norms, as is shown by the way in which Blacks and Whites, without constraint, adapt their behaviour to one another. (Gluckman 1940a, pp. 10–11).2

According to Gluckman, the fact that certain Zulu “traditions” persisted or flourished in a colonial context should not be regarded as mere survival or failure to adapt. On the contrary, they should be seen as the result of a precise anti-colonial positioning on the part of certain actors, an argument which in many ways anticipated the theme of the invention of tradition. At the same time, the fact that the Zulus accepted certain practices from the colonizers (Christianity, the plough) had to be understood within the dynamics of opposition and conflict that characterized the Zulu society of the time. By paving the way for the study of colonial contexts and the dynamics of social change in less “culturalist” terms than the malinowskian approach (Malinowski 2013 [1938]), “The Bridge” effectively raised certain issues that were not fully incorporated into anthropological agenda until years later, thanks in part to the work carried out by the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute on the migration of African workers to the North Rhodesian copper mines (Wilson and Wilson 1968 [1945]; Epstein 1957; Watson 1958; Mitchell 1956, 1965, 1969; Schumaker 2001, 2004) and, in parallel, the work by George Balandier (1951, 1967) and his students on the impact of colonialism in restructuring African societies. In other words, the method of situational analysis offered anthropology the possibility to adopt more procedural approaches, to create a “bridge” between anthropology and history and to reposition the particular events and situations encountered in the field within broader socio-political contexts (Evens and Handelman 2006a, b). The analysis of social situations as proposed by Gluckman was aimed more at providing a detailed description of the actors’ practices than at conducting an examination of the normative principles that are supposed to regulate social life: it examined the way norms were concretely enacted in practice by flesh and blood people, the contradictions and ambiguities they embodied, and the exceptions and inconsistencies that emerged

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in a given social context. In other words, the case under analysis was not interesting because it illustrated dynamics that could be immediately generalized. Rather, it was interesting in itself, as a real arena in which principles, structures and norms were renegotiated, reproduced or contested in practice by actors with specific objectives and occupying unequal positions of power. According to Gluckman, the search for the underlying logics of social action could only take place afterward, and should not be based exclusively on the way the norms were made explicit by the actors involved, but should begin from an analysis of the way they were practiced, reactivated, or modified in a plurality of concrete cases. This was not meant to detract from the classical approaches that anthropologists of the time used, but to offer a method that could be combined with more normative-oriented analyses to show the exceptions, ambiguities, and shifts characterizing the practical application of norms and, consequently, to account for the dynamics that might trigger social change in a given context (Gluckman 1968). Moreover, it obliged the anthropologists to “play with their cards face up,” explicitly revealing the empirical material they had used to draw their conclusions. Indeed, as Jaap van Velsen pointed out: […] by this method the ethnographer presents his reader with abstraction and inferences from his field material but he also provides some of the material itself […] author using situational analysis is more exposed- he has put more cards on the table. The reader’s position is more like that of a reader of an historical work who can go back to the documents and check up on the author’s interpretations and conclusions. (van Velsen 1964, pp. XV–XVI)

By virtue of its ability to use the focus on specific cases to capture the dynamics of conflict operating in a given social context, situational analysis soon became one of the privileged tools for the anthropological study of the dynamics of conflict regulation. While network analysis has in fact become central to migration studies (Piselli 2001; Brettell 2009; Vertovec 2010), situational analysis and the extended case method soon became fundamental research tools for legal anthropology (Rouland 1988; Moore 2004). Indeed, Gluckman himself was one of the main representatives of this current thanks to the research he conducted in Barotseland (Gluckman 1955, 1963, 1965a, b). Cases of conflict, whether managed by the state apparatus or regulated by social institutions that were not

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necessarily part of it, lend themselves particularly well to this type of analysis (Moore 2001, p. 55). Applying situational analysis and the extended case method to cases of conflict regulation has entailed, and entails, a number of things. First of all, it allows scholars to explore the different axes of social differentiation (based on gender, age, origin, class, political, or lineage-related affiliation) along which conflicts are articulated, thus returning a more heterogeneous and differentiated image of the societies traditionally studied by anthropology. Secondly, it has made it possible to show the way in which the subjects who are involved in disputes and the institutions that regulate them activate or renegotiate norms and principles pertaining to different registers of legitimacy in their daily practices, thus calling into question the normativity that had characterized most of the structural-functionalist studies. It is not surprising, therefore, that such a method was central to the formulation of action theories (Turner 1957) and non-mathematical applications of game theories (Bailey 1969), i.e., approaches that emphasize the strategic character of individual behavior and the possibility of considering each social context as an arena with certain stakes and competing actors. Thirdly, as James Clyde Mitchell’s study of Kalela dance clearly shows, situational analysis and the extended case method has allowed scholars to re-problematize certain categories and dynamics, such as “tribal belonging,” which at the time were often taken for granted, while also paving the way for the study of contexts hitherto unexplored by anthropology, such as cities and mines.

Observing and Analyzing an Urban Dance James Clyde Mitchell (1918–1995) was born in Durban (South Africa). In 1942, after obtaining a degree in social sciences from the University of Natal (now the University of Kwazulu Natal), he joined the Royal Air Force as a volunteer and fought in World War II. In 1946 he became a research assistant at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in Lusaka (Northern Rhodesia)—which, at the time, was headed by Max Gluckman—and worked until 1949 conducting ethnographic research on forms of political authority construction and conflict management in southern Malawi. This research was the basis of his earning a doctorate from Oxford University. In 1950 he was hired as Senior Sociologist at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, and he went on to become director of the institute between 1951 and 1955. In 1964 he was hired as a Professor of African Studies in the Department of Sociology at the University of

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Rhodesia and Nyasaland in Salisbury (now University of Zimbabwe in Harare), which he had contributed to founding in 1955. Between 1966 and 1973, Mitchell held the Chair of Urban Sociology at the University of Manchester. He finished his career at Nuffield College, Oxford University, where he remained until 1995 as an Emeritus Fellow. In 1951, during a research project in the Copperbelt—a region at the border between the former North Rhodesia and Belgian Congo, known for its copper deposits—he collected the ethnographic data presented in his essay “The Kalela Dance. Aspects of social relations between urban Africans in North Rhodesia” (1956), perhaps his best-known and most widely commented work. Written in July 1951, the text was presented in 1953 at a conference of Rhodes-Livingstone Institute officials and at a seminar at the University of Manchester, but it was only published after Mitchell stepped down from his position as director of the research institute. In line with the methodology Gluckman proposed, Mitchell focused on the analysis of a specific case, the Kalela dance, and later developed more general considerations on the system of social relations operating in the Copperbelt; a system of relations fundamental for understanding what Mitchell called “the apparent paradox” inherent in dance itself. As Mitchell argues, in fact: In other words, we are presented with an apparent paradox. The dance is clearly a tribal dance in which tribal differences are emphasised but the language and the idiom of the songs and the dress of the dancers are drawn from an urban existence which tends to submerge tribal differences. I believe that this apparent paradox can be resolved if we examine the dance and its origin in its social setting. (Mitchell 1956, p. 9)

Mitchell’s point of departure was the observation that in the Copperbelt—as in much of southern Africa—tribal dances characterized everyday urban life. The most widespread of these dances was certainly the Kalela (dance of pride), and Mitchell had the opportunity to observe several performances of it by a group of young Bisa in the African district of Lunanshya: The team was made up of nineteen young men. The costume for the rank-and-file dancers was well-pressed grey slacks, neat singlets, and wellpolished shoes. Some carried white handkerchiefs in their right hands.

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Their hair was carefully combed with a well-defined parting. In short, they were young men dressed smartly in the European style. The team danced to the accompaniment of drumming on three large drums, which were made out of forty-four-gallon oil drums covered with cow-hide. Two drummers beat the drums with banana shaped sticks about two feet long. The sound of the drumming could be heard for miles around – at the dancing arena it was deafening. The drums were hung on a pole in the centre of a fenced enclosure in the location and the dancers circulated round them in single file. The dance was made up of short shuffling steps accompanied by a slight inward swaying of the body. Periodically the leader of the band punctuated the drumming with sharp blasts on a football whistle, after which the dancers turned in unison towards the drums. During part of the dance the drums were silent while the dancers sang a song. (Mitchell 1956, p. 2)

Contrary to the bridge opening that Gluckman analyzed, the Kalela dance allowed Mitchell to observe the dancers on several occasions, highlighting their performative flexibility in terms of choreography, music and singing. For instance, Mitchell reported some of the fourteen verses of the songs sung during the performances that he had transcribed in 1951, emphasizing the use of the city’s lingua franca (the Bemba).3 He also underlined that the popularity of the Kalela was due largely to the themes addressed in the songs and the fact that verses were continuously added and deleted. The lyrics recounted daily life in the city while emphasizing, however, the ethnic plurality of the urban population. In fact, after having sung verses celebrating their own group, the group of Bisa dancers Mitchell described ridiculed the specificities of other groups. You mothers who speak Tonga, You who speak Soli, mothers, Teach me Lenje. How shall I go and sing? This song I am going to dance in the Lenje country, I do not know how I am going to speak Lenje […]. All these places I have mentioned, mothers, Are where I am going to dance kalela; Then the dancer will return to Lamba country […]. (Mitchell 1956, p. 7)

Thanks to the words of his interlocutors and the analysis of the Russel commission documents,4 Mitchell traced the origins of the Kalela dance back to the Mbeni dance; the Mbeni dance had been practiced in the

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region since the 1920s and was suspected by the colonial administration of having played an active role in the organization of the uprisings sweeping across the Copperbelt in the early 1930s.5 The differences between the two performances explain, according to Mitchell, the rapid changes in local society and highlight the importance of the historicalsocial context in staging performative acts (Allovio 2002).6 Though Mitchell’s analysis of the Kalela dance is predominantly synchronic (Natali 2009), the text also highlights the extremely lively urbanization processes unfolding in the region in the late 1950s and how these triggered broader upheavals and readjustments of the social order that reflected the needs of colonial development rather than indigenous needs and requirements. These processes had already taken shape in the 1920s with the beginning of the Copperbelt mining activities, a development that had transformed a predominantly agricultural region into a set of interconnected and continuously expanding cities. As Epstein wrote in relation to some of these urban centres: “[…] towns have grown up in response, not to any indigenous or national need, but rather to those of colonial expansion” (1964 [1957], p. 85). The situational analysis of the Kalela dance revealed new social networks and new forms of collaboration and conflict in urban contexts. Mitchell’s findings led him to observe that, on the one hand, participants underlined tribal differences but, on the other hand, they also employed languages and customs related to urban life and these transcended tribal differences. The social context in which this dance was produced and its changes dissolved the apparent paradox of Kalela dance in that, according to Mitchell, the idea of “tribal belonging” and tribal categories were recognized and used in relations among Africans but were absent in contexts of interaction between Africans and white people. As Mitchell writes: one of the outstanding features of the kalela dance was that it was undoubtedly a tribal dance, in the sense that the team was composed mainly of Bisa tribesmen and they set out to praise the Bisa in general, and their chief Matipa in particular. But the clothing they wore and the language they used in their songs served to sink their identity as a tribal group, and to merge them with the Copperbelt African population as a whole. (Mitchell 1956, p. 42)

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The analysis of the dance also showed that those same tribal categories were constantly renegotiated in urban contexts. Mitchell notes that, from the point of view of a Copperbelt resident, all tribes other than those from his own area of origin tended to be grouped into three or four macrocategories named after the most powerful and well-known tribes at the time the Europeans arrived (‘Bemba’, ‘Ngoni’, and ‘Lozi’, for example): A tribe in the rural areas is a group of people united in a single social and political system, sharing a common set of beliefs and values. We use the word ‘tribe’ in the sense, therefore, to denote the group of people who are linked in one particular social system. But when we talk about tribalism in urban areas, we refer not to the linking of people in a patterned structure, i.e. a tribe, but rather to a sub-division of people in terms of their sense of belonging to certain categories, these categories being defined in terms of ethnic criteria. Tribalism on the Copperbelt thus refers to groupings made on the basis of broad cultural differences. There is a tendency for the Bemba and other tribes from the Northern Province to consider the Chewa, Nsenga, Kunda and other people from the Eastern Province, for example, as ‘Ngoni’, and all tribes from Nyasaland, though they are as different as Tunbuka and Lomwe, as ‘Nyasa’. In the same way the Eastern Province tribes tend to lump together the Lungu, Tabwa, Eastern Lunda, Bemba and other Northern Province tribes in one category - the ‘Bemba’. (Mitchell 1956, p. 30)

Contrary to Godfrey and Monica Wilson’s thesis (1968 [1945]) that urban contexts trigger processes of detribalization and the collapse of African social systems, Mitchell points out that tribalism continued to play a crucial role in the social life of the Copperbelt (Moore 1994). At the same time, however, he shows that it is always used contextually, as a category of interaction in broader socio-political contexts. Mitchell refers to the coeval work of Epstein (1953, 1958) and specifically his finding that the African miners’ union had harshly criticized the tribal representative system organized by the administration in the mines and that the majority of African workers had voted to abolish it. As Mitchell points out, consistently with what Gluckman went on to argue a few years later (1960, p. 57), this demonstrated that tribal categories, while important in daily relations between Africans, were not necessarily perceived as relevant at the moment people sought to make claims not as members of a particular “tribe,” but as African workers engaging with the white man’s system of exploitation. At the same time, however:

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Tribalism is still a significant category of social interaction within the field of African-to-African relationships, and the field exists simultaneously with many other fields. It is highly significant that, while tribalism may have disappeared as a relevant category in Management-worker relationships, within the African Mine Workers’ Union the struggle for power seems to have been phrased in tribal terms. This was shown when the General Secretary, Mr. Simon Kaluwa, a Nyanji-speaking man, was dismissed by the Supreme Council on 5th July, 1952. The President of the Union, Mr. Lawrence Katilunga, is a Bemba, and the Union appears to have been split along these broad ‘tribal’ lines. (Mitchell 1956, p 34)

In addition to the fact that Mitchell’s essay was precocious in raising issues that later became central when anthropology began to reveal the socially, politically, and historically constructed character of “ethnic” affiliations (Barth 1969; Banks 1996; Fabietti 1999), it is also an excellent example of the application of situational analysis. In fact, it focuses once again on “cases,” understood as situations that allow us to grasp phenomena and social processes that would be quite hard to perceive through more normative analyses. As Colajanni maintains, “[cases] are real units of sociological analysis and not mere illustrative devices of conclusions achieved by extrapolating, and projecting on the level of general theory, fragments of social action” (Colajanni 2012, p. 321). Mitchell, questioning the relationships between Africans in Copperbelt cities and investigating the meaning of tribalism in a geographical and social context far from that “traditional” context on which anthropology had focused up to that point, contributed to what Colajanni calls the “de-villagisation of social anthropology” (Colajanni 2012, p. 320). From the point of view of colonial administration, the urban environment had in fact brought the limits of indirect government to light (Gordon 2012, p. 70): Colonial chiefs could not extend their authority to the diverse peoples of the Copperbelt since they did not have the mechanisms of control equivalent to those in the villages. People who settled on the Copperbelt sought alternative ways to organise communities and promote urban identities. Dance societies brought men and women from similar cultural and linguistic backgrounds together. The Kalela dance, a variation on the Mbeni dance of East Africa, mimicked European colonial rituals and structures, especially those of the military and colonial bureaucracies. New ethnic affiliations emerged out of the broad ethno-linguistic regions of origin of the newly urbanised. Village political rituals, such as the jokes told

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between rival clans, became ways to identify ethnic identity and difference. The Ngoni and Bemba, for example, became “tribal cousins,” as rivalries and conflict gave way to necessary and tenuous forms of cooperation.

As Sobrero asserts: “It was no longer a matter of governing scattered villages, of repressing the revolt of a single tribe, perhaps taking advantage of its state of discord with another tribe” (Sobrero 1992, p. 98). On the local level, rising population density in urban centers and increasing migratory flows as well as the rapidly growing population made it necessary to rethink practices of governance and administration and to reorganize mechanisms of power and tribal authorities. As a consequence of these changes, ethnographic analysis was called on to consider a wider social space and the cases it examined required a more and more multi-scalar approach, in order to account for the tension between tangible individuals and abstract systems of rules, and to understand the way subjects enlarged and renegotiated their social networks beyond tribal affiliations. It was these aspects that drove Mitchell to develop and apply the methods of network analysis and to complement situational analysis with more quantitative-oriented instruments of investigation. As Sally Falk Moore argues (1994, p. 71): The “tribal” model had concentrated on the social norms that were thought to govern the social behaviour of individuals and to dominate their lives. Instead, the analysis of urban networks used an individual-centred approach. The chains of relationships that radiated out from a particular person, the people he/she knew and had dealings with, and the friends of those friends and so on, constituted a personal network. What quickly came to be of interest was not just the existence of links in the chain but the nature of the contacts between the persons in the network, the content of their transactions. As soon as these began to be studied, the fact that choices existed among norms and that people sometimes conformed and sometimes did not – in short, that they were given to manipulating the normative system in their own interest – could hardly be excluded from consideration. That led to a new orientation toward fieldwork, centred on agency, on individuals as active constructors of aspects of their own lives.

The study of these networks led anthropology to break with functionalist approaches once and for all.

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Conclusion By analyzing two particularly relevant essays in the history of anthropology, we have highlighted the methodological innovations introduced by the scholars of the so-called Manchester School. Conducting their research in contexts deeply marked by the changes brought about by colonialism, Gluckman and Mitchell, among others, are responsible for having enriched the vocabulary of social anthropology with the introduction of terms referring to the dynamism, conflict and processuality of social living through innovative research tools that soon became part of the methodological heritage of the social sciences tout court (Matera 2017; Kuper 1983, 1984). The extended case method and network analysis helped overcome the limits of evolutionism and functionalism by granting anthropological analyses of social change a temporally deeper and geographically broader perspective. The renewed mission of anthropologists in the field became, from that point onward, to analyze the succession and intertwining of events in their temporal and spatial levels, emphasizing the individual and collective strategies underlying behaviors, the dynamics of cooperation and social conflict, and the birth of new social networks and languages. It was precisely thanks to this renewed capacity on the part of ethnographic study that Gluckman and Mitchell’s ethnographies generated a type of multi-scale analysis that accounted for both the behavior of individuals and the social action of groups. As Colajanni writes (2012, p. 322), “a structural conflict that is constant and almost ‘necessary’ in every society is […] identified as having a fundamental character and theoretical importance, a conflict among values, norms and social ideals on the one hand and the particular interests, expectations and desires of individuals and small groups on the other.” The fact that situational analysis focuses on the political, spatial, and temporal spheres of social processes enriched the context of ethnographic analysis by bringing in new figures (colonial administrators and officials, missionaries, mine owners, and trade unionists) and new sources (documents of colonial administrators, censuses, written and oral historical sources). It allowed researchers to investigate processes and phenomena based on new networks of relationships created, for example, by the colonial context, the exploitation of local mines, and urbanization processes. In this sense, the analysis of behaviors and relations between individuals and groups during public events offered the opportunity to draw

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more general considerations regarding what these social relations—and their variables—might imply in contexts characterized by profound sociopolitical transformations and to underline the active role groups and individuals play in producing, reproducing, or questioning norms and values.

Notes 1. For a detailed description of Max Gluckman’s biographical and intellectual trajectory, see Brown (1979), Schumaker (2001), Cocks (2001), and Gordon (2018). 2. See also Gluckman 1947. 3. This is the Bemba language spoken in the Copperbelt: “it abounds with anglicisms, words from ‘kitchen kaffir’ (Pidgin Zulu), and references to the urban situation in one way or another” (Mitchell 1956, p. 5). 4. This was an inquiry committee set up to investigate the strikes and upheavals that had broken out in the Copperbelt in 1935. 5. For an in-depth historical analysis of the Mbeni dance which gave origin to the Kalela dance, see Ranger (1975). 6. Unless otherwise indicated, translations are the author’s.

References Allovio, S. (2002). Culture in Transito: Trasformazioni, Performance e migrazioni nell’Africa Sub-Sahariana. Milano: Franco Angeli. Bailey, F. G. (1969). Stratagems and Spoils. A Social Anthropology of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Balandier, G. (1951). La Situation Coloniale: Approche Théorique. Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie, 11, 44–79. Balandier, G. (1967). Anthropologie Politique. Paris: PUF. Banks, M. (1996). Ethnicity: Anthropological Constructions. London: Routledge. Barth, F. (1969). Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. The Social Organization of Culture Difference. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Brettell, C. B. (2009). Anthropology, Migration, and Comparative Consciousness. New Literary History, 40(3), 649–671. Brown, R. (1979). Passages in the Life of a White Anthropologist: Max Gluckman in Northern Rhodesia. Journal of African History, 20(4), 525–541. Cocks, P. (2001). Max Gluckman and the Critique of Segregation in South African Anthropology, 1921-1940. Journal of Southern African Studies, 27 (4), 739–756.

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Colajanni, A. (2012). Gli Usignoli dell’Imperatore. Lo Studio dei Mutamenti Sociali e l’Antropologia Applicata nella Tradizione Britannica del Contesto Coloniale, dagli Anni ‘30 agli Anni ’50. Roma: CISU. Epstein A. L. (1953). The Administration of Justice and the Urban African, London: Her Majesty’s Stationery’s Office. Epstein, A. L. (1958). Politics in an Urban African Community. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Epstein, A. L. (1964). Urban Communities in Africa [written in 1957]. In M. Gluckman (Ed.), Closed Systems and Open Minds. The Limit of Naïvety in Social Anthropology (pp. 83–102). Edinburgh and London: Oliver & Boyd. Evens, T. M. S., & Handelman, D. (2006a). Introduction: The Ethnographic Praxis of the Theory of Practice. Social Analysis: the International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice, 49(3), 1–11. Evens, T. M. S., & Handelman, D. (2006b). The Manchester School. Practice and Ethnographic Praxis in Anthropology. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Fabietti, U. (1999). L’Identità Etnica. Roma: Carocci. Gluckman, M. (1940a). Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand. Bantu Studies, 14(1), 1–30. Gluckman, M. (1940b). Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand. Bantu Studies, 14(1), 147–174. Gluckman, M. (1942). Some Processes of Social Change Illustrated from Zululand. African Studies, 1(4), 243–260. Gluckman, M. (1945). Seven Year Research Plan of the Rhodes-Livingston Institute of Social Studies in British Central Africa. Journal of the Rhodes-Livingston Institute, 4, 1–32. Gluckman, M. (1947). Malinowski’s ‘Functional’ Analysis of Social Change. Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 17 (2), 103–121. Gluckman, M. (1955). The Judicial Process among the Barotse of Northern Rhodesia (Zambia). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Gluckman, M. (1960). Tribalism in Modem British Central Africa. Cahiers d’Études Africaines, 1(1), 55–70. Gluckman, M. (1963). Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa. London: Cohen and West. Gluckman, M. (1965a). The Ideas in Barotse Jurisprudence. New Haven: Yale University Press. Gluckman, M. (1965b). Politics, Law, and Ritual in Tribal Society. Oxford: Blackwell. Gluckman, M. (1967). Introduction. In A. L. Epstein (Ed.), The Craft of Social Anthropology (pp. XI–XX). London: Tavistok Publications. Gluckman, M. (1968). The Utility of the Equilibrium Model in the Study of Social Change. American Anthropologist, 70(2), 219–237.

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Gordon, D. M. (2012). Invisible Agents: Spirits in a Central African History. Athens: Ohio University Press. Gordon, R. J. (2018). The Enigma of Max Gluckman. The Ethnographic Life of a “Luckyman”. In Africa. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Handelman, D. (2006). The Extended-Case: Interactional Foundations and Prospective Dimensions. In T. M.S. Evens & D. Handelman (Eds.), The Manchester School. Practice and Ethnographic Praxis in Anthropology (pp. 94– 117). New York: Berghahn Books. Kapferer, B. (1987). The Anthropology of Max Gluckman. Social Analysis: the International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice, 22, 3–21. Kapferer, B. (2005). Crisis, and the Anthropology of the Concrete: The Contribution of Max Gluckman. Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice, 49(3), 85–122. Kapferer, B. (2006). Coda: Recollections and Refutations. In T. M. S. Evens & D. Handelman (Eds.), The Manchester School. Practice and Ethnographic Praxis in Anthropology (pp. 311–321). New York: Berghahn Books. Kapferer, B. (2015). Introduction. In L. Meinert & B. Kapferer (Eds.), In the Event. Toward an Anthropology of Generic Moments (pp. 1–28). New York: Berghahn Books. Kempny, M. (2005). History of the Manchester ‘School’ and the ExtendedCase Method. Social Analysis: the International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice, 49(3), 144–165. Kuper, A. (1983). Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Kuper, H. (1984). Function, History, Biography. Reflections on Fifty Years in the British Anthropological Tradition. In G. W. Jr. Stocking (Ed.), Functionalism Historicized: Essays on British Social Anthropology (pp. 192–213). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Macmillan, W. M. (1930). Complex South Africa: An Economic Footnote to History. London: Faber and Faber. Malinowski, B. (Ed.). (2013 [1938]). Methods of Study of Culture Contact in Africa. London: Read Books. Matera, V. (2017). Antropologia contemporanea. La diversità culturale in un mondo globale. Roma-Bari: Laterza. Mills, D. (2005). Made in Manchester? Methods and Myths in Disciplinary History. Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice, 49(3), 129–143. Mitchell, J. C. (1956). The Kalela Dance: Aspects of Social Relationships Among Urban Africans in Northern Rhodesia. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Mitchell, J. C. (1958). Foreword. In M. Gluckman (Ed.), Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand, Rhodes-Livingston Papers, 28 (pp. IX–X). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mitchell, J. C. (1965). Theoretical Orientation in African Urban Studies. In M. Banton (Ed.), The Social Anthropology of Complex Societies (pp. 37–68). London: Tavistock. Mitchell, J. C. (Ed.). (1969). Social Networks in Urban Situations. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mitchell, J. C. (1983). Case and Situation Analysis. The Sociological Review, 31(2), 187–211. Moore, S. F. (2001). Certainties Undone: Fifty Turbulent Years of Legal Anthropology, 1949–1999. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 7 (1), 95–116. Moore, S. F. (1994). Anthropology and Africa: Changing Perspectives on a Changing Scene. Charlottesville: Virginia University Press. Moore, S. F. (Ed.). (2004). Law and Anthropology: A Reader. Oxford: Wiley/Blackwell. Natali, C. (2009). Percorsi di Antropologia della Danza. Milano: Cortina. Piselli, F. (Ed). (2001). L’Analisi di Network nelle Scienze Sociali. Roma: Donzelli. Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (1940). Preface. In M. Fortes & E. E. Evans-Pritchard (Eds.), African Political Systems (pp. XI–XXIII). London: Oxford University Press. Ranger, T. O. (1975). Dance and Society in Eastern Africa, 1890-1970: The Beni Ngoma. Berkeley: California University Press. Rouland, N. (1988). Anthropologie Juridique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Schapera, I. (1935). Field Methods in the Study of Modern Culture Contacts. Africa, 8(3), 315–328. Schumaker, L. (2001). Africanizing Anthropology: Fieldwork, Networks, and the Making of Cultural Knowledge in Central Africa. Durham: Duke University Press. Schumaker, L. (2004). The Director as Significant Other. Max Gluckman and Team Fieldwork at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute. In R. Handler (Ed.), Significant Others. Interpersonal and Professional Commitments in Anthropology (pp. 91–130). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Sobrero, A. M. (1992). Antropologia delle Città. Roma: Carocci. Turner, V. (1957). Schism and Continuity in an African Society. Manchester: Manchester University Press for Rhodes-Livingstone Institute. Van Velsen‚ J. (1964). The Politics of Kinship: A Study in Social Manipulation Among the Lakeside Tonga of Nyasaland. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Van Velsen, J. (1967). The Extended-Case Method and Situational Analysis. In A. L. Epstein (Ed.), The Craft of Social Anthropology (pp. 129–149). London: Tavistock Publications. Vertovec, S. (Ed). (2010). Anthropology of Migration and Multiculturalism. New Directions. London: Routledge. Watson, W. (1958). Tribal Cohesion in a Money Economy. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Wilson, G., & Wilson, M. (1968 [1945]). The Analysis of Social Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 8

Politics Within Anthropology Vincenzo Matera

Politics Within Social (and Cultural) Anthropology After introducing, practicing, and divulging the foundations of “modern” ethnography (Malinowski 1922), in the last years of his life Malinowski raised the problem of the changes that European colonialism had been producing in Africa, with reference to the possibilities of ethnographic research. The idea that the interactions/relationships between the invasive culture of Europeans and traditional African cultures could produce new “syncretic” cultures was considered worthless by the scientific community at the time (Firth 1957). The functionalist monographs showed an almost complete concealment of the impact of colonialism on tribal life, and also of the conditions under which ethnographic research was carried out. This, as is well known, was the premise to the intense debate that followed the publication of Malinowski’s Diaries (1967), a debate that went on with several echoes into interpretative and postmodern approaches.

V. Matera (B) Department of Cultural Heritage, University of Bologna, Ravenna Campus, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 V. Matera and A. Biscaldi (eds.), Ethnography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51720-5_8

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On a superficial level, the Diaries were understood as the scandalous denial of the image presented by Malinowski in the Argonauts. The unease and intolerance that Malinowski expressed against the natives, in striking contrast with the empathy that pervaded his scientific publications, were the stones of the disciplinary outrage. On a deeper level, they gave both the cue to recognise the excessive epistemological ease at the basis of ethnographic undertaking, and the first impulse to engage in a reflection on the conditions of a much deeper and more articulated anthropological understanding (Crapanzano 1992; Geertz 1983; Amit 2000; Marcus and Okley 2007; Gellner 2012). It soon appeared clear that the “scandal” was not (and should not be understood as) a personal one since it was related to the substantial analytical limits of the ethnographic method and of synchronic approaches to social processes and cultures. The former is not at all assimilable to a real experimental method, like the method in natural sciences, and it is closer to something depending, in a non-superficial way, on the subjectivity of research experience. Indeed, over the years it has become increasingly clear that it is precisely subjectivity, putting oneself at stake as a subject who interacts with other subjects, that is the main instrument of ethnographic knowledge. The latter were based on abstractions but, above all, on extractions of the temporality proper to the group under scrutiny, unfounded both theoretically and politically, even just with regard to the declared objective—to understand their present—because a present without a past is not contemplated either as part of human existence or of the productions that are the outcome of those historical existences. Precisely because they are historical, in fact, human existences suffer the blow of the anguish of history, which all societies, regardless of their technological level, express in an overwhelming way. This constituted, and still constitutes today, the framework for highlighting the previously blurred relationship between anthropology and colonialism (Asad 1973). Many scholars expressed strong criticism against colonial policies and against the various dispositions adopted by colonial administrations against local people; however, to find signs of what was later called the “colonial situation” in ethnographic literature from the first half of the twentieth century is a difficult task. On the contrary, removal of any political question—not of political anthropology, but of anthropological politics—is evident.

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It is only in 1957, during the decolonization period, that one finds such signs (although weak). For example, Peter Worsely (1957) placed at the very centre of his ethnography in New Guinea the oppression of local people (which found expression in millenarianisms). According to Worsely, the “great truth” was that anthropologists had not been studying backward and primitive peoples but colonial peoples, and that the only characteristic that states like those of the barotse and baganda and societies like those of the bushmen and veddas had in common is that they were all subjected to colonial domination (Worsely 1957). This was the finding, not, as I already said, of political anthropology, a field of study that Evans-Pritchard and Fortes had already inaugurated (Evans-Pritchard and Fortes 1940), but of “politics within anthropology,” the recognition that anthropology cannot be a neutral “science” in the sign of objectivity, but is an engaged “knowledge” because of the subjectivity and temporality that pervades it (Fabian 2000). I know very well, of course, that it may be worth discussing here the fact that it was arguably an important political move inside the anthropological (intellectual) style, so to say, in general terms. Indeed, discussing multiple “cultures,” promoting cultural relativists and overturning ideas that rank cultures in a hierarchy of values, as Franz Boas first did, is in itself politics. The difference is, I argue, that for the most part, this subversive power of anthropology remains (remained) implicit, understated in the academic-institutional work and positioning of anthropologists; sometimes, though rarely, it springs out. If we stay at Boas school, for example, we find Margaret Mead, as a pioneer in feminism and sexuality, and her efforts “to persuade Americans that understanding the lives of other people could help them understand their own, that a greater ease with sexuality (homosexual as well as heterosexual) could enrich them, that motherhood and careers could and should go together and that building support networks for the overburdened nuclear family would bring greater well-being for all” (https://www.history.com/top ics/womens-history/margaret-mead). Is all of this politics? Maybe it is, but certainly in a different way than Zora Neale Hurston—writer and anthropologist, and Boas’ student—did in her powerful insights of race, slave trade, and African-American experience. The former become a very famous anthropologist, the latter remained all but unpublished, almost until very recent times.

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Nothing that Anthropologists Investigate Is Balanced The discovery of politics within anthropology was therefore quite late; and in any case it did not have a great resonance in cultural theory and ethnography. However, the idea that “magic,” “mythology,” “rituals,” and, on the level of “internal unevenness” of culture (Cirese 1973), “folklore,” “popular religiosity,” and many other cultural, but also linguistic forms and expressions, such as dialects could not be considered as “islands,” “out of history,” within a positivist pot, but were to be primarily framed in the ongoing relationship of opposition to the “official” forms of culture, as well as a reflection of specific (and miserable) material conditions of existence, had been the ideas at the very center of the Gramscian vision of popular culture since the immediate post-war years in Italy. Such a political and strongly Marxist vision marked the awakening of Italian anthropology in the years immediately after the second world war, and was considerably advanced with regard to international anthropology (Gallini 2018). The “political” vision of anthropology, echoed at times by Ernesto de Martino, and expressed in his main works, has a series of fairly important repercussions and is condensed into relevant themes that explicitly emerged in international anthropology from the 1970s onward. Dell Hymes, in Radical Anthropology, was among the first to question, and urge the discipline to question itself, about its position and about politics within anthropology. Arguing that anthropology, precisely because it deals with the knowledge of others, cannot ignore the ethical and political responsibilities that become explicit and inevitable. The simple fact of living with them, among the “native” peoples, of acquiring knowledge about their lives and, above all, the final outcome of this knowledge, are all critical points to address (Hymes 1972, p. 54). In the same volume, Laura Nader argued that it was time for anthropologists to start “studying those at the top”; for various reasons they characterized themselves to “study those at the bottom,” interacting with people much less endowed with power and privileges than they were; however, the time had come to analyze the cultural practices of people at the top, which was no less important for understanding how powerlessness and poverty emerged. Hence, Talal Asad strongly questioned the legitimacy of a discipline based on asymmetric power relations (Asad 1973). A few years later, Richard Price presented other aspects of the same

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problem: the political (and ethical) tensions channelled into ethnographic research. Ethnographers, once in possession of the information and aware of its intrinsic value and power, cannot but question the legitimacy of their research and that of the possible publication that will transmit the knowledge to an audience, but which by its very nature deprives authors of any kind of control over their audience. There are many points that, from this “political” perspective, Price pointed out as potentially being critical (1983, pp. 43–45); among these, it seems significant that Price asks himself about the possible consequences of an identification of the men that shared their knowledge with him in the field; about the risk of imposing a “canonical” or “official” version of the Saramaka story; about the risk that the diffusion of written information, whose symbolic effectiveness lies in their “secrecy,” could diminish their semantic “density.” According to Price, taking a position on these (and other) issues is not easy for an anthropologist. It refers to a problematic issue dependent on the ethics of anthropology, and to some philosophical and political positions. According to James Clifford, Price’s work (1983) is good evidence that an acute awareness of political and epistemological problems does not necessarily force ethnography to withdraw into itself (1988). Out of the multitude of questions, emerges the one, epistemological but above all political question of the positioning of the researcher in the context of a discipline founded for the study of only one part of mankind (the primitive, backward, simple, marginal, without history, without writing people), which has been reworked in a “global” sense. This widening of perspective resulted in the idea that anthropology should transform itself from a discipline based on an objective model of the world to a discipline based on a moral model of the world (D’Andrade 1995; Zechenter 1997). As part of this transformation, we find the awareness of “engagement” as an essential feature of every anthropological approach. Nancy Schepher-Huges (1992) expressed this point very clearly in her work on Brasilian poor women. Her portrayal of these women, who were victims of extreme institutional and social abandonment, women that let some of their children die, as if this were an unnatural and inhuman act, says Schepher-Hughes, is a denouncement of the effects that a material existential condition of despair would have on anyone. Poverty, deprivation, sexism, chronic hunger, and economic exploitation are the traits of such a condition (Schepher-Hughes and D’Andrade 1992). SchepherHughes herself in another article clarifies the concept: suffering is encoded

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in messages expressed through cultural forms—disease and its metaphors, the body, words, and actions—coded messages launched in a bottle into the stormy sea, with a hidden meaning, to be deciphered and collected. As Philippe Bourgois wrote in the first pages of his ethnography In Search of Respect (2002), on a theoretical level, he was interested in the political economy of inner-city street culture. From a personal, political perspective, he wanted to probe the Achille’s heel of the richest industrialized nation in the world by documenting how it imposes racial segregation and economic marginalization on so many of its Latino/a and African-American citizens. Hence, the framework of “relationality” as the actual condition for the production of anthropological knowledge (and as the preferred modality of this process) emerged in a very clear way. I recall here what Edward Said wrote in his best known (and discussed) book, based on the very recognition of “relationality” as the core of the production of “orientalist” knowledge: the only solution to the crisis that affected anthropology from the 1980s onward would have been a reversal of the power relationship between the West and the rest of the world (Said 1978). The meaningfulness of an approach aimed at making explicit the interdependence between poles that do not exist in isolation emerged, even though it was much more “convenient” to think of them as such. Poverty, backwardness, protest and crime are intertwined with wealth (the slums of the megalopolis which produce necessary goods for the “rich” part, the “shadows” of the cities (Dal Lago and Quadrelli 2003) which offer services bought by the “respectable” citizens (drugs, sexual performance), development, established order, legality. None of what anthropologists study is balanced, and none of it is in splendid isolation; there is always an imbalance (of power) and a relationship at play: between colonised people and their colonisers, between subordinates and hegemonic anthropologists, between “poor” and marginal natives and “rich” and central anthropologists. In other terms, the relationship constitutive of anthropological knowledge is not a culturally marked, simple relationship between the “self” and the “other.” The unevenness of culture, whether internal or external, is always a sign of something else, a sign of other inequalities, and often stems from such inequalities. The failure to recognize this permanent imbalance is probably one of the reasons that often make (have made) many outcomes of the analysis unsatisfactory and that often cloak social and cultural research and those who carry it out in a subtle veil of ambiguity.

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I can notice at least two possible insights. The first leads us to highlight the aporia of an ahistorical and apolitical cultural relativism (of atemporal and apolitical anthropology, cf. Fabian 1983, 2000; Falk Moore 1994; Matera 2018), which is clearly a limit today, and was a constant of much anthropology, at least until after the Second World War.

The Aporia of an Ahistorical Anthropology When one states that Ernesto de Martino had identified and exceeded, well in advance, the limits of a neutral, scientific gaze on the others, arguing the need for historicization (de Martino 1948–1997), the reference is, in my opinion, exactly to the unrecognition of politics within anthropology; when one notes that the encounter with Ernesto de Martino is for the Americans (Clifford Geertz among the first, not to mention the most recent generation) a lost one, the reference is to the incapacity of a large part of American anthropology—albeit the most influential—to recognize politics within itself. A large part of American anthropology influenced European anthropology, including Italian anthropology, which in its search for interpretive keys between the 70s and 90s “mimed” the “neutral” posture, ignoring Gramsci (and also de Martino and Lanternari), in short, discarding as “irrelevant” all or almost all its past. To recall Ulf Hannerz’s (2010) revisiting not of the Italian tradition, which the Swedish anthropologist ignores, but of other anthropological traditions, we too have (would have) a “past that can be used.” It is not difficult to find the reasons for this generalized ignorance in the hierarchies that mark anthropology and make the hegemonic anthropologists able to ignore the subordinate ones without worrying about losing professional skills: Anthropologists working at the centre soon learn what they can and cannot ignore: for example, that it costs them nothing professionally to ignore what the suburbs do. The opposite is unthinkable, unless they want to put their professionalism and competence at risk: “they don’t even know who XY is”. (Gupta and Ferguson 1997, p. 25)

As Thomas Hauschild stated, English and American anthropologists, having carried out their research in the field of Ernesto de Martino, could ignore the Italian scholar and his deconstruction of the stereotypes of Anglo-Saxon discourse on Italy. This is connected to the power

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scape in the Mediterranean area, to the limits of freedom of anthropological thought, delimited by the ghosts and arabesques of power (see Note by Amalia Signorelli, A margine di un Convegno su Ernesto de Martino, 1995). Thus, politics that is external to anthropology overshadows politics that is internal to the discipline. The deep reworking, marked by a strong Marxist imprint, during the second half of the twentieth century, of a discipline that until that time had been poorly equipped to deal with the dimension of imbalance and interdependence, is evidence of this concealment (Layton 1997). Roger Bastide and George Balandier place at the very core of their analysis the social and cultural changes occurring in the societies of the “Third World,” not at all reducible to the alternative between the invariable preservation of their “cultural orders” and the passive assimilation and integration of Western patterns, as outcomes of their submission to colonial rule. Bastide (1971) focuses on the syncretism in Brazil; Balandier (1955‚ 1967‚ 1971) focuses, as already mentioned, on the “colonial situation” in Africa. Syncretism, interdependences, convergences of “internal” and “external” logics are striking social and cultural traits, evidence that is still embedded today—indexes of heavy historical and political legacies—within subjectivities in Africa, Latin America, India, and elsewhere (cf. Gaibazzi 2015; Menin 2016; Abu-Lughod 2013; Comaroff and Comaroff 1992). Directions of research sometimes intertwined with the one expressed by the “Manchester School”: “The Bridge”; the Kalela dance, and other studies. A convergence, therefore, toward the late but unavoidable recognition that societies are not those ordered, stable systems with welldefined boundaries, but heterogeneous and open systems, with changing and porous boundaries, in which social actors and interests, dynamic processes and normative and pragmatic rules, strategies for the exercise of power and forms of resistance coexist, whose adaptation, interconnection and functioning are always imperfect, provisional, contingent, and ambivalent (cf. Leach 1954 [1978]; Barth 1969): Unlike most ethnographers and social anthropologists, I assume that the system of variation as we now observe it has no stability through time. What can be observed now is just a momentary configuration of a totality in a state of flux. (Leach 1954, p. 63)

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This shift of perspective is entirely conveyed in the apparently marginal and modest article Analysis of a social situation in Modern Zululand, by Max Gluckman (1940). It reveals a great methodological innovation and a parallel and equally innovative political critique: methodologically, the text expresses a strong fracture with the ethnographic tradition, regarding the status of the description (not ethnographic material to analyze, but the details the ethnographer witnessed during a particular day), the object (not the specific features of a group, but the social changes and the effects of cultural contact within a colonial situation), the unit of analysis (not a tribe, closed in a village, but a region, a political area, open and exposed to multiple interdependencies). All this was wrapped up in historical depth since it became clear that the functioning of a social system can only be understood within a period of time. Politically, this text expresses a deep criticism of the segregationist system and a reaction to those who accused anthropology of feeding a policy of differences with its emphasis on otherness (cf. Keesing 1994). The ethnographic emphasis that Gluckman placed on interdependence and mutual activities shows that there is only a unique social system, although it is crossed by tensions and conflicts. They are not (cultural) differences that create (social) tensions, but (political) inequalities. The interest of such a theoretical-ethnographic approach is undoubted. The keystone is the political dimension, finally placed and recognized as deeply meaningful for anthropological understanding. That is to say, in the words of a historian of culture who argued many decades later the impossibility of purity (and authenticity), of local cultures. All over the world, states James Clifford, indigenous peoples have had to deal with the forces of “progress” and “national” unification. The outcomes have been both destructive and creative. Many traditions, languages, cosmologies and values have been lost; much, however, has been invented and revived in complex, contradictory contexts (Clifford 1988). The impact with external forces of “progress” and “unification” is not an irrelevant factor for anthropological understanding and ethnographic positioning: all over the world this impact activates gradual processes of change, reshaping, and reinterpretation of traditional resources, processes that take different directions, sometimes toward an eschatological and millenary sense, depending on expressive patterns locally available; reactions, answers, attempts to recapture a subtracted, stunted agency, provoked by the need (entirely political, whatever the form in which it is expressed) for not

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succeeding in modernization (often denied), marginality, progress (often illusory), to the nation (often imperialist). Understanding complex and contradictory contexts that are the outcomes of such an impact does not only require a simple “ethnography” but an ethnography infused with political sensitivity and, just as the outcome of the reactions and resistances that the weaker pole expresses against the pressure exerted by the stronger pole, according to a dynamic present “all over the world”, also requires a comparative attitude. Peter Worsely himself compared the “underdeveloped colonies” to the “underdeveloped areas” of Europe, including Italy, fractured by a deep cultural divide separating North and South, highlighted, Worsely wrote, by Antonio Gramsci (Worsely 1961, p. 13).

The Italian Cultural Fractures We arrive at (or return to) the second point that I promised to deepen. The Italian cultural “fractures,” namely those “fractures” that were molecularly detected first of all by Antonio Gramsci in their political value as (cultural) forms of protest, as an expression of a marginal and poor existential (material) conditions; such “molecules” found a slow, sedimented, deep anthropological translation in the work of Ernesto de Martino, resulting from the complex long-distance intercourse between Gramsci and de Martino (Pizza 2013). Thanks to a reflection that is unique on the international scene and definitely advanced (although understood very late) like the one by Gramsci, compared to the other traditions of research briefly mentioned above, the political imprint that characterises the Italian perspective on cultural fractures, clearly evident also outside Italy, but misinterpreted, is stronger. Worsely himself, when assimilating the “southern question” to a “colonial” problem, does not fully interpret the question, claiming that for certain respects, the “southern question” is a colonial problem, just as the “North” in Australia or the “West” in North America were “colonial” problems. Therefore, it is not surprising when striking similarities are found between the social unrest movements developed in Southern Italy and those we find in the contemporary colonial world in revolt. Anyway, it is not just a matter of reducing social unrest movements, regardless of their specificity, to Marxist and revolutionary instances in general, but, on the contrary, as Gramsci acknowledged, Marxism must be

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adapted to local historical and cultural specificities, ethnographically identified. As Gianni Pizza (Pizza 2013) recalls, in fact, Ernesto de Martino had grasped the heart of the great Italian southern question (never understood for example by the Italian left-wing parties, which still today struggle to grasp the cultural–political nexus) posed by Antonio Gramsci from the inside of his cell (in Turi, Sardinia), not in the generic terms in which, for example, Peter Worsely greeted its modernity (as we have seen above), but in other terms much deeper and “rooted” in Italian cultural history (which cannot be traced back to an unspecified great cultural divide between the North and the South of Italy). Gramsci’s great achievement lies indeed in having fully understood the need to historicize Marxism in our country, in accordance with Italian cultural history, that is to say, with respect to historicist idealism and Catholic spiritualism, and in having proposed the task—which unfortunately remained in a rough state—of elaborating on the Marxist side the appropriate response to the anti-Marxist activity of traditional culture (de Martino 1948–1993, p. 108). How did Gramsci come to understand so deeply the urgency of historicizing Marxism with respect to Italian cultural history? That is to say, to conceptualize folklore as a Culture of contestation (Lombardi-Satriani 1974)? The “living philology” that Gramsci placed as an index of his method of analysis of social and cultural processes and conflict relations is recalled here as a possible answer. On the Gramsci method I quote an illuminating statement by literary critic Giacomo Debenedetti (quoted in Pizza 2013): The human method that Gramsci suggests us is nothing more than the method of philology, extended over the whole of existence. That is, to take into account all the factors that make up man; …. Closed in a cell … (“space no longer exists for me”), time was the only dimension Gramsci could still move in. But it is that direction of his own, along which man proceeds to discover and analyse himself. What a rigorous vigilance Gramsci uses to carry out this analysis: he is always ready to reconsider, to go back, to start all over again, to dig into his memories and feelings, … In order to perceive things in their “totality” he has always needed the “molecular sensation”. Now he can control, write down those “molecules” (this is the word most frequently used in the Letters): the state of segregation, abolishing the accidental, enables him to determine the “essential and permanent reasons for life”. [Santarelli 1991, p. 265]

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Thanks to such a rigorous mental and analytical exercise, Gramsci produced, under conditions that were very different from the canonical ones, innovative anthropological knowledge of extraordinary worth, the premise of what de Martino produced later. However, in Gramsci— who worked “closed in a cell…”—nothing appeared to be further from ethnography, at least in the classical and Malinowskian (but also Geertzian) sense of the term, that of “being there,” in the field. In de Martino, on the other hand, the need to discover the experience ethnographically prevailed, to make ethnography the privileged cognitive experience to understand the concrete living forms of culture in the Italian Mezzogiorno. Living Philology Becomes Ethnography The Gramscian “living philology” became ethnography in Puglia, where de Martino worked as an official of the Socialist Party. “To get the point of view of the labourer,” is not just an invite to change our perspective. For an engaged anthropologist, it is the index of a new project aimed to ground the understanding of Italian hegemonic dialectics ethnographically. As is well known, the turning point in de Martino’s work came from his experience in the Left parties. Here we find the engagement as a fundamental component of ethnographic positioning, mentioned above. From 1945, de Martino was Secretary of Federation of the Socialist Party (PSIUP then PSI) in southern Italy. In1950 he became a member of the Italian Communist Party. Was the close contact, as a politician, with the peasants of the South, the impulse to move toward the field? We are in the difficult context of southern Italy in the postwar period. Another type of politics moved toward the field: Socialism. An article published in the newspaper L’Avanti in 1953, the year in which Anna Matera was elected to Italian Parliament, is particularly striking: “What are the olive pickers demanding?”. It is an article that presents a social problem that was grasped from the bottom, by an ethnographic mood that was sensitive to the details, aimed at putting oneself in the shoes of the poor people we are talking about, of whom one wants to be a spokesperson: “To go to the villages of the arid and steep Gargano, to penetrate into those houses carved out of the rock, to go around those streets burned by the glare of the sun on the whiteness of the lime, means to fully understand their tragedy.” A social problem made up of misery,

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precariousness, ignorance, and daily suffering then took on a new value in the rest of the article. Through the political lens it became a precise request for the decrease of social inequalities: “Let’s hope that the sale of that liquid gold that they strongly contribute to produce leads to at least a little less profit for the big agriculturalists and a little more profit for them, through the disciplining and moralising intervention of the State.” Politics and ideals were used as a way of making sense of the world, of understanding and enabling other people to understand what was going on. The rebirth of Southern Italy, a theme that long fascinated Anna Matera, not only in her political activity in the strict sense but also afterwards, in the following years, was made of these details, according to her perspective, the details of the daily existence of the masses of people, farmers, laborers, olive pickers, because it is from the details that one can act to improve, outside of theoretical discussions: “… it will be the heavy shoes of our farmers and our peasants to accelerate the move of our country on the path of progress and civilization” (cfr. Galante 2016). Of course, many other things pushed toward the “field” as well. A “field” that certainly did not reflect the canons of the Anglo-Saxon one, of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, to be more specific, but that contributed to that Italian Ethnographic Style already mentioned in this volume. Cristo si è fermato a Eboli by Carlo Levi (1945), the activity of Rocco Scotellaro, and finally the discovery of Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (1948). The Italian State would soon begin to deal with the “Questione meridionale,” founding the Extraordinary Intervention (managed by the neo-instituted Cassa per il Mezzogiorno, of which Anna Matera would be a member of the management board), that massive investment plan aimed at resolving the tragedy of the underworld, the misery of the people of Southern Italy (Pojman 2013). All relevant contributions to the definition of the “problem”—the tragedy of subordinate world, the poverty. Contributions that come neither from anthropology nor from sociology. One could not certainly have expected from Banfield, nor from the ranks of American researchers who followed him, the political sensitivity necessary to focus on the southern Italian problem in its “political” terms. In such a frame, the personality of Raffaele Pettazzoni stands out, a secular historian of religions, who was the first to establish the link between the religious dimension and the material conditions of life of peoples. Precisely this sensitivity—a gaze infused with “politics”—is what allowed de Martino to revise Worsely’s reading of cargo cults, and to reveal their political value,

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as Vittorio Lanternari would then do extensively. Melanesian prophetic cults are concrete forms of political, economic, and social claims, which are more concrete, more embedded in the reality of the facts, and more rational. To consider, as many scholars did, “millenarianisms” and “politics”, metahistorical and historical levels, poles of a rigid dichotomy, oppositional and mutually exclusive categories within a system such as “negative-positive”, “illusory-realistic”, “fantastic-concrete”, is a misleading interpretation. (Massenzio 1988)

Politics, on the contrary, has taken on different appearances in time and space, as both history and ethnology testify, in different contexts; artistic, linguistic, literary, and religious forms, which were in many cases strong innovative forces, driving forces for change. The Christianity of the origins, the religious movements of emancipation, the evangelical movements, the Islamic revolution in Iran (of the 80s), suicidal terrorism. The recourse to meta-history in order to guarantee the chance of being part of history—denied by a condition of deprivation—changes its sign according to the context. The Relationships Between Cultural Forms and the Contexts of Their Use The meaning of subordinate cultures within complex societies was detected, identified, also in its potentiality, for the first time by an intellectual (not an anthropologist), who was locked in a prison. Gramsci’s meticulous reflections on specific elements of folklore that he “remembers” reworking his personal experience in Sardinia are emblematic of how much ethnographic understanding requires an intellectual posture, a theoretically oriented mental gaze and of how sterile the opposite can be, the dogmatic and specialized “all in the field” who preferred ethnographic detail to wide theoretical intuition. Let us read what Amalia Signorelli remembers as a fundamental lecture by Ernesto de Martino: The ethnographic encounter, rather than on a combination of material conditions and conducts, is primarily based on a mental disposition. Thus, he can write Il mondo magico on the basis of completely indirect,

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second-hand documentation. […] de Martino discovers that anthropological research is first of all structured on a binomial that is the same for those who work in the field as for “armchair anthropologists”: the research is built on a concrete historical problem and on the document or documents that say something about its possible solution. Without a problem the document is inert, it tells nothing, it cannot be interrogated; but without the document, the problem remains empty. (Signorelli 2015, p. xxii)

How do empirical data take on heuristic value, significance, relevance? Through the problem that concretely illuminates empirical data, otherwise inert. As Alessandro Duranti wrote: In the summer of 1978, I arrived in the village of Falefa, on the north western coast of ‘Upolu, in Western Samoa. I was part of a research team sponsored by the National Science Foundation … when we started our project, my job was to collect and analyse the grammatical forms used by the adult population, whose speech constituted the “target” system for the young children growing up in the village. Over the next thirteen months, however, I become deeply involved in a realm of verbal performance – oratory – and a domain of social action – politics – that were quite distant from the kind of phenomena I had planned to study … During this experience, my professional orientation changed in a rather dramatic way. Instead of collecting and analysing grammatical forms, I became more and more interested in the poetical and rhetorical mechanism through which speakers celebrate their past, make a point, win an argument, blame, apologise, accuse, invoke sentiments, and redefine their own and other’s rights and duties. … I saw grammar as embedded in and constitutive of political action. This book is my attempt to recapture that experience and use it as an analytical grid – or perhaps “plot” – to uncover the interrelationships among texts and the contexts of their use. (Duranti 1994, p. 2)

Unveiling the interweaving of text (in a broader sense, action) and the contexts of their use (in a broader sense the situations in which actions are embedded). This is one of the crucial teachings of linguistic anthropology, which I assume is an invitation to dismiss the idea of cultural dimension as an “autonomous” dimension, a sort of “superorganic” in the Kroeber way, in order to recognise the interdependence between cultural dimension (production of meanings) and political dimension (negotiation of power relations). Vittorio Lanternari, as is well known, was the first one to consider the revivalist and syncretic religious movements of peoples of colonial and postcolonial Third World as part of a general theory of

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prophetism, seen as “historical experience” of all the peoples aspiring to a free future, as movements with a strong political content. Peter Worsely himself recognized the primacy of Lanternari, in the study of the cargo cults. Lanternari, drawing on second (sometimes third) hand sources, reconstructed, studied, and analyzed the emergence in Latin America, Africa, Asia, Australia, and Oceania of religious movements with different (ethnographically speaking) characteristics, but indicative of the same dynamics (anthropologically speaking). A “pre-political” reaction to the incursions, impacts, devastations, assassinations, and even imperialist creolizations in indigenous societies. Traditional authorities are losing prestige, also and perhaps due to the failure to face challenges imposed against them, so that there is a growing need for new leadership. Prophets fill this need. They adopt and rework against Europe the traits of Christianity (syncretism), for example by replacing the European Christ with the Black Christ; but this is not all: the point stressed by Lanternari is that almost always such religious cults turn out to be political. A historical-comparative approach, a perspective of Marxist analysis are the conceptual lines that distinguish Lanternari’s approach as a political one. An American edition of Lanternari’s book on religious movements was published in 1963. It received praise, but also much criticism. “Criticisms expressed by experts in specific areas about the dangers of large generalisations” (Schirripa, 2012). These experts highlighted a lack of ethnographic insights or misunderstandings of particular sources. For example: The book is over-ambitious, and hence somewhat uneven. Lanternari’s discussion of the African situation is both fascinating and apparently judicious. His chapters on North America do not seem so satisfactory, perhaps because I am more familiar with the data. The Asian material is rather sketchily handled, possibly for want of the necessary languages. His general conclusions present nothing particularly original or startling, and again, nothing with which most anthropologists would not agree. At one point, while discussing the cargo cults (p. 224), he appears to go off the rails completely, to the extent that I cannot even follow the argument; one gets the impression that he is riding a private hobby-horse. Otherwise, his presentation is both lucid and quite orthodox. (Dunn 1962, pp. 632–633)

When anthropological analysis does not aim to investigate a specific case but aims to arrive at broader generalizations, by assembling a vast amount of heterogeneous material (all based on secondary sources), the

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risk of misunderstandings, rushed readings, and omissions of sources is inevitable. The point here, however, is: how much do omissions or misunderstandings, if limited to some specific cases, affect the theoretical, analytical, and heuristic significance of the reading of a phenomenal frame, however reconstructed, proposed by a scholar? How much more could the ethnographic, even maniacal accuracy, that was reached after years of specific research in the same “field” ultimately be devoid of any theoretical scope? It is missionary knowledge, in short, that is not very useful for anthropology. The great anthropological books, after all, are not based on field research, but on the formulation of one or more problems (essential to “illuminate” the data), thus on comparative procedures based on ethnographies done by others. During a Conversation with Didier Eribon (1991, in Borofsky 1994), Claude Lévi-Strauss expresses a rather significant position in this frame: D.E.: One of the criticisms that are often raised, [is that] you have read a lot but have done little field work. C. L-S.: It was due to circumstances. If I had got the visa for Brazil in 1940 I would have gone back to my first fields of work and done more research. If war hadn’t broken out, I probably would have gone on another mission. Destiny moved me to the United States where, for lack of means and because of the international situation, I was not able to organise any expeditions, but where, moreover, I was completely free to work on theoretical issues … I also realised that in the previous twenty or thirty years a lot of material had been accumulated, but it was so messy that we did not know where to start or how to use it. It seemed urgent to discover the contents of all this mass of documents. And finally, why not admit it? I soon realised I was a bookworm, not a field researcher. … However, I did more field research than my critics would admit. In any case, I did enough to learn and understand what field work is: which is an essential prerequisite for making a careful evaluation and use of the work done by others. (pp. 43–45; p. 517)

I believe, therefore, that a non-exhaustive examination of the specificity of a cultural phenomenon within an analytical framework does not always invalidate the extent of the general intuition that supports that analytical framework. Otherwise, anthropology runs the risk of becoming a fragmentary plurality of details and peculiarities, without epistemological openness and without political value. Moreover, in the process of building

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anthropological knowledge, what Alfred Kroeber (1945) wrote years ago is still valid today: […] while any national or tribal culture may and must for certain purposes be viewed and analysed by itself […] any such culture is necessarily to some degree an artificial unit segregated off for expediency […] the ultimate natural unit for ethnologists is “the culture of all humanity at all periods and in all places”. (Kroeber 1945, p. 9)

A similar concept is expressed by Adamson Hoebel (a few years later, in 1958: XI), anthropologist and former student of Franz Boas, “Facts,” said Hoebel “are not enough. All phenomena have their meanings, but they never speak for themselves.” Therefore, cultural facts are always index of wider frames and more general processes (Wikan 2013). These broader frameworks and more general processes are decisive to make the politics inherent in anthropological knowledge explicit. Here I add my conviction that anthropology, like history, cannot be a “neutral” discourse, nor an objective one, but has a deeply political nature. I mean that ethnographic details, ethnographic fragments of a cultural field—that are all the ethnographer can see during fieldwork—should be connected to a “historically determined environment […] How do we connect parts to totalities? How do we make intelligible the idiosyncratic acts, lives, and representations of others?” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992, p. 17). This is the work of the ethnographic imagination (see also Willis 2000; Crapanzano 2004). “Culture” is always a “mask” of interests and power relations; systems of cultural differences always cover power asymmetries and structures of privileges. They mask global inequalities. Focusing on deep and detailed analyses of religious and cultural elements sometimes prevents us from clarifying wider, complex issues. The Religion of Oppressed is an example of cultural analysis with a deep political content: Lanternari’s book, as already underlined, has the clear merit of proposing an analysis of such movements as a social and political answer to particular crisis situations. The idea of seeing how politics is combined in religious language runs parallel to the idea that such movements, in their quest for freedom, propose a project and a practice of change. (Schirripa 2012, p. 304)

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These remarks can, in my opinion, usefully be resumed today, not only with reference to criticism addressed to Lanternari’s book more than half a century ago, to underline the fundamental theoretical short-sightedness of those criticisms, but also in a contemporary key. The oscillation between a general anthropology and an in-depth local ethnography was a constant in the history of the discipline, at least until the 60s and 70s of the twentieth century, when the “Geertzian manifesto” appeared. That “‘Other fields,’ as the Javanese say, ‘other grasshoppers’” (Geertz 1973), a turning point toward ethnography, that impressed a clear direction to interpret human diversity as the product of local cultures (“men are above all different”), and provoked a sort of renouncement of the general view of the cultural process (sometimes more, sometimes less marked). In part, of course, this happened because emphasizing that human diversity is only a cultural matter means contrasting racism. And there is always a great need for this contrasting, today as much as in the past. But there are also other reasons, which are more epistemological, rooted in the same local nature of ethnographic epistemology. For example, the fact that an increasing amount of ethnographic work, since then, has been carried on to decipher the content of specific cultures, and an increasingly marginal place has been given to the study of the “Culture of all humanity” and to a cultural theory (Hannerz 2003; Fischer 2007). Gramsci, de Martino, Lanternari, and Lévi-Strauss are examples of the latter direction. Intuition, synthesis, theoretical wideness, anthropological knowledge as an instrument for “framing” large portions of the world and major theoretical questions, not always and not necessarily deriving from ethnographic immersion. They also indicate that to tighten the link between the ability to produce anthropological knowledge and experience in the field (Bruner and Turner 1986) as the only way to do anthropology par excellence, the “real” one, is a mistake. Knowledge drawn from the interactions that the ethnographer may have with the natives, for example the face-to-face kind, bound to specific social relations (political, parental, economic, ritual and ceremonial, generational, environmental, cognitive, etc.) that take place within a limited community, is not enough to sustain a project such as anthropology (cfr. Hastrup 2004). An anthropology closed in the fields does not account for ethnography, which is much more than this. As Appadurai pointed out:

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[…] ethnography has to redefine itself as a practice of representation that illuminates the power of imagined life possibilities, on a large scale, above specific existential trajectories. (1996, p. 55)

In this redefinition of ethnography, the indexical power of details to connect specific “wheres” to broaden both imaginary and real horizons is crucial (Ginzburg 1986; Crapanzano 2004). From the micro-context of classical ethnography to the macro-scenarios of the contemporary world. On the one hand, in fact, their own cultural creativity allows human beings to imagine worlds of pure possibility; on the other hand, all human beings live within material contexts that make those possibilities almost entirely unrealizable. Of course, we can be content with surrogate lives (clumsily miming models that we find attractive, as is evident from empirical observation in the “fields” of ethnographic research), we can also imagine different ways of organizing our lives, but, as Marx pointed out a long time ago, the past is a burden on human beings’ minds. The burden of the past is the burden of a historical and political existence exhausted by inequalities, hierarchies and conflicts. Today, very few anthropologists still reason in terms of “naturalness” or “exotics” or “uncontaminated” places to define their ethnographic fields. In ethnographic practice, however, the belief that some “wheres” are more “anthropological” than others resists. An indigenous ritual, especially if strange, is almost automatically anthropological and the ethnographic account will be published in the most prestigious journals. Conversely, working on television or social media (see Miller 2016; Biscaldi and Matera 2019), which nowadays occupy so much space in the daily lives of millions of people all over the world, have not yet found full anthropological legitimacy (Hannerz 2010). When faced with the idea that social media may be a “field,” a fair amount of “orthodox” colleagues usually turn their noses up: “this is not ethnography.” It is the archetypal and never fully discussed conception that makes the field the criterion that makes the difference between “real” anthropologists and non-anthropologists (Fillitz 2013). Those that still support the orthodox conception do not understand that, despite their belief that they defend the specificity of the discipline (placing it in classical field research, so to speak), they actually make it weaker. The specificity of anthropology lies, much more solidly, in the way to delineate research problems and conceptually define its objects, not (not only at least) in a practical mode of research (Ingold 2007, 2017).

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It is indeed possible to approach the study of cultural facts at least on two different levels (Matera 2016, 2017b). One is the level of Culture (with a capital C) as a direct response to some basic traits and processes of human beings: incompleteness, the differentiation that marks us as a species, the necessity to produce meaning, the requirement that the meaning produced should be patterned according to recurring, ordered, directed, and stable configurations. This leads us to recognize the preeminence of repetition in human life: memory, the key to reading cultural production in its historicity and its political value. On another level it is possible to study the contents of particular cultures, those localized networks of specific meanings which, starting from Geertz’s proclamation that I have already mentioned, became the first aim of every “true” anthropologist or, better, ethnographer. Tightening the knot between these two levels of approach to cultural analysis is an epistemological problem of some relevance. On this crucial core of the construction of anthropological knowledge, the Geertzian manifesto, Toward an interpretative theory of culture (1973), beyond its most well-known suggestions (culture as a network of meanings, the textual metaphor), presents several incoherencies. Elsewhere I have highlighted what appear to me to be three critical points of this influential ethnographic/anthropological program (Matera 2013). Nevertheless, the fact is that the conditions of Geertzian anthropology/ethnography choke anthropology, condemning it to produce “local knowledge.” In any case, even if we admit the possibility of reaching with difficulty, through an intense and prolonged ethnography, an almost complete and (partially) detailed understanding of some (few) portions of local culture, of local cultural phenomena, it will be scarcely or not at all useful to enhance our knowledge of Culture as long as the local insights are without interconnections with the wider world, beyond the local, and with dense and wide-ranging problematic frameworks. Anthropology might have a certain interpretative and perhaps even predictive capacity (to formulate or read or predict scenarios). A capability that has certainly not been expressed in ethnographic fragments. Indeed, if we did that exercise of retrospection on our past (of the Italian anthropological community) that I have already mentioned to identify following Ulf Hannerz (2010) what “can be used,” we would have the best evidence of what I state. For example, evaluating how much some great anthropological books can guide us in framing relevant phenomena today.

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I quote here another statement that seems relevant to me, when it underlines the vitality of Vittorio Lanternari’s book as an analysis of such movements as a social and political response to particular crisis situations: The idea of seeing how politics is conjugated in religious language is in line with the idea that such movements, in their request for freedom, propose a project and a practice of change. (Schirripa 2012, p. 305)

The ethnographic reading of forms of protest, considered as a production of cultural meanings with a “subversive” value, aimed at questioning the usual social (and political) order, reveals connections with Lanternari’s analysis. Just on the symbolic framework side, Lanternari’s study allows us to interpret social movements (including religious ones) as an attempt to subvert the logic of domination and to affirm an alternative logic, based on the political use of the symbolic dimension of culture. Preserving agency is a specifically cultural function; without agency, social existence loses the specifically human character of temporality, of historicity, and becomes a simple presence, like that of a stone. Hope disguised as a (pre)vision of the future, where the insecurity experienced by people becomes part of a collective “call to arms,” and religion becomes politics (Matera 2017a).

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Lombardi-Satriani, L. (1974). Folklore as Culture of Contestation. Indiana University Press Malinowski, B. (1922). Argonauts of Western Pacific. With a Preface by Sir James, George Frazer. London: Routledge & Sons, E. P. Dutton & Co. Malinowski, B. (1967). A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term. London: RKP. Marcus, G., & Okley, J. (2007). How Short Can Fieldwork Be? Social Anthropology, 15(3), 353–368. Massenzio, M. (1988). Progetto mitico e opera umana. Contributo all’analisi storico-religiosa dei millenarismi. Liguori: Liguori, MO. Matera, V. (2013). De-constructing the Field. Archivio Antropologico Mediterraneo, XVI (15), 2. Matera, V. (2016). Understanding Cultural Diversity. Culture, Cultural Traits and Cultural Changes Between Global and Local Scales. In F. Panebianco & E. Serrelli (Eds.), Understanding Cultural Traits. Multidisciplinary Perspective on Cultural Diversity (pp. 21–42). New York: Springer. Matera, V. (2017a). Etnografia dell’incertezza. Etnoantropologia, 5(1), 1–14 Matera, V. (2017b). Antropologia contemporanea. La diversità culturale in un mondo globale. Roma-Bari: Laterza. Matera, V. (2018). We Are All Contemporaries: Time and Cultural Diversity. In P. Dusi, T. Moshe, & S. Potrandolfo (Eds.), Understanding Cultural Diversity in Education: Perceptions, Opportunities and Challenges (pp. 1–22). Hauppauge, NY: Nova Publisher. Menin, L. (2016). Men are not Scared: Luck, Destiny and the Gendered Vocabularies of the Clandestine Migration in Central Morocco. Archivio Antropologico Mediterraneo, 18(1), 25–36. Miller, D. (Ed.) (2016). How the World Changed Social Media. Bloomsbury: UCL Press. Pizza, G. (2013). Gramsci e de Martino, Appunti per una riflessione. Quaderni Di Teoria Sociale, 13, 75–120. Pojman, W. (2013). Italian Women and International Cold War Politics, 1944– 1968. New York: Fordham University Press. Price, R. (1983). First–Time: The Historical Vision of an Afro-American People. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. New York: Pantheon. Santarelli, E. (Ed.) (1991). Gramsci ritrovato: 1937–1947 . Catanzaro: Abramo. Schepher-Hughes, N., & D’Andrade, R. (1992). Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schirripa, P. (2012). Rileggere I Movimenti Religiosi. L’Uomo, 1–2, 297–305. Signorelli, A. (2015). Ernesto De Martino. Teoria antropologica e metodologia della ricerca. Rome: L’Asino d’Oro. Wikan, U. (2013). Resonance. Beyond the Words. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Willis, P. (2000). The Ethnographic Imagination. Cambridge: Polity Press. Worsely, P. (1957). The Trumpet Shall Sound. A Study of Cargo Cults in Melanesia. London: McGibbon & Kee. Worsely, P. (1961). The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of Cargo Cults in Melanesia. New York: Schocken. Zechenther, E. (1997). In the Name of Culture. Cultural Relativism and the Abuse of Individual. Journal of Anthropological Research, 53(3), 319–347.

CHAPTER 9

Stumbling Blocks: The Irruption of the Interpretive Approach in Twentieth-Century Anthropology Patrizia Resta

It was back in 2006 when Carolyn Nordstrom stressed the need to “breathe a little life into Theory within our academia” (2008, p. 142), a concern that took on greater argumentative consistency in Global Outlaws: Crime, money, and power in the contemporary world, published the following year (Nordstrom 2007) which was intended, among other things, to raise methodological questions of significant epistemic commitment in the analysis of the processes that arise within the mesh of extralegality. Nordstrom considered theory, intentionally capitalized for emphasis, as that system of knowledge that qualified anthropology as the discipline that, in Geertz’s view, had taken on the task of shaking the world and destabilizing interpretations rooted in common sense (2000), whereas in her view it dealt with what she calls radical contradiction. Radical contradiction is something that cannot be solved or avoided (Nordstrom 2008, p. 133), and signals the difficulty of being in the

P. Resta (B) University of Foggia, Foggia, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 V. Matera and A. Biscaldi (eds.), Ethnography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51720-5_9

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field in situations that derive meaning in relation to the multiple and complementary realities from which they are generated. By assuming this latter perspective, this paper will consider the concept of radical contradiction as that series of stumbling blocks, or rather obstacles, that interfere with fieldwork and stand in the way of understanding those multifarious, composite, mobile, and transnational processes that are viewed as mafia phenomena and corruption. In order to interpret the domain of extralegality where such phenomena take place, characterized by a very high level of fluidity and interconnectedness, the approaches that characterized ethnography at the turn of the century offer relatively little help. Hence the need, denounced by Nordstrom and re-proposed therein, to rethink the theoretical disciplinary contribution and, consequently, the anthropological research methodology of the future, at least in this area. It is all too well known why we need to return to the topic here, that twentieth-century ethnography, having crossed an interpretive and then a deconstructionist phase, resolved its anxieties by privileging both the critical and self-critical, dialogical, and reflective perspectives, made explicit in the writing stage that absorbs the field of ethnographic representation, both by making multi-positioned research the key to accessing transnational contexts and, finally, by making positioning the tool to overcome the ethical issues involved in the choice of fieldwork to be carried out and the necessary involvement with it while on location. In this regard, it is hardly worth mentioning that while the hermeneutic vision of ethnography introduced by Geertz pushed toward an interpretation of the field as a negotiated reality (Geertz 1988; 1983), where meanings took shape by virtue of the hermeneutic circle activated between the anthropologist and the natives, in the subsequent deconstructionist phase the importance of experience in the field dissolves, being regarded as the effect of the anthropologist’s work, created or, better, shaped during the phase of anthropological writing (Marcus and Cushman 1982; Tedlock 1991, Clifford 1986; Matera 2004). Therefore, notwithstanding the antithetical continuity expressed by the two positions, interpretation, and representation remain radically anchored to the experience in the field. Restoring fieldwork to its central role, however, means accepting to deal with what Geertz has called the problem of persuasion (Geertz 1988, pp. 4–5), referring to the wider question of the authoriality of ethnographic texts. This is a central theme for the issues to be dealt with in the remarks that follow, which are intended to examine the critical aspects of

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some methodological procedures that cause greater difficulties in the field than can be resolved with the aid of dialogic and participatory research. All the more so, considering that we shall find ourselves in one of those “battlefields” (De Lauri and Achilli 2008, p. 115) where violence and conflict are so closely intertwined with everyday life, even that of civil society, to be effectively incorporated and neutralized by it, to the point that in most cases such violence and conflict become invisible to the very social actors that have to endure them. In this respect, we must acknowledge that Nordstrom was once again a step ahead of us: in a debate held remotely with Anton Blok, she had already posed the question: “What forms of ethnography are capable of researching fluid hyper-placed realities and of phenomena “made-invisible” to formal reckoning and analysis by those pursuing econo-political dominance?” (Nordstrom 2010, p. 153). A decade later, and from a slightly different perspective, it would seem that the reference to the selective perception of hyper-placed reality suggests rather a reformulation—in broad terms and with no claim of being exhaustive—of an issue that has never been sufficiently investigated and that involves what Geertz has defined as authority, in connection with ethnographic writing. In short, we aim to consider whether the answer to the question “how do we know that we know,” which, in the Geertzian vision, anthropologists had posed “in practical, empiricist terms” (Geertz 1988, p. 135), when reasoning about corruption and organized crime, should instead be subject to subtler, more structured reflection which, freeing thus the ethnographer from the suspicion of providing a dogmatic and prejudiced reconstruction of a field which is difficult to penetrate as a shared milieu, gives credence to his/her interpretation. Such a procedure requires bringing back to the forefront of the debate questions with a rather old-fashioned flavor. “What is the evidence? How was it collected? What does it show?” are questions that can no longer be regarded as a legacy of a reductive hermeneutic approach (Geertz, ibid.); rather, they become emerging questions, posed today once more in order to validate the assumptions on which to claim some form, if not of authority, at least of recognizability and perhaps even of reliability for ethnographic research. It is not a question of chasing the misguided utopia of providing an objective, essentialist representation of the object of anthropological study, of pursuing the myth of handing out the truth through the ethnographic representation of phenomena. It is instead a question of making the ethnographic encounter possible, even before it can be expected to be

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fruitful, by addressing the analysis of a fluid reality such as the contemporary one, which has changed the game and brought about scenarios that play out in a context where the anthropologist no longer enforces the rules of engagement, makes the choices and induces the results, but is reduced to being a pawn forced into an uncomfortable position on the board. Others have already raised the issue of ethnographic encounters in less problematic areas. For example, in the analysis of political movements, where, however, shared ideals (Pitzalis 2015, p. 35) proved invaluable in solving the question of positioning. In our case, on the other hand, the researcher’s actions are immersed in a context governed by hidden agents who constantly alter their meaning, hampering comprehension not only on the researcher’s part. In these cases, the practice of ethnography is difficult, and the awareness emerges on the horizon that “we wander in the field with insufficient tools that meet the needs of academia but not those of its own realities” (Nordstrom 2008, p. 130).

The Field of Extralegality The hypothesis we intend to put forward is that the ethnographic approach needs to be refined if it is to be capable of dealing with those processes of transnational significance—which today are hardly noticeable in their participatory, dialogical, and multi-sited dimension—that fall within the realm of extralegality. This is a sphere of analysis where not only actions that are clearly recognizable as illegal, but also all the apparently legal practices whose unlawful effects are not recognized as such, converge. Corruption, the fertile humus of transnational criminal organizations as well as of political organizations, democratic and otherwise (Kawata 2006), and the mafias that, freed from the stigma of Italianness, have been recognized as special-purpose temporary joint ventures (Resta 2002) that shape the transnational criminal organizations active in different areas of the planet (Ziegler 2000; Nordstrom 2004; BöllStiftung and Schönenberg 2013; Varese 2013), reveal themselves to be, in fact, fields of analysis that are capable of challenging the effectiveness of ethnographic practice and at the same time the applicability of the anthropological knowledge obtained through it. To this end, we will try to demonstrate first of all that the information obtained in the field, even if acquired in a dialogical and participatory relationship, depends on the willingness of an authoritarian and self-referential context such as a gang and/or corrupt organization to lay it bare. Such groups reveal

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information selectively, concealing the most intimate sphere of each single criminal organization and their operational core. On the latter, information is strictly reserved for the initiated and can, at best, be traced through public records. Consequently, we will try to demonstrate that ethnographic authoritativeness concerning this specific field of study is limited by the material conditions in which the research is carried out, bound as it is by the particular nature of the practices chosen as the subject of investigation. Italy, as is well known, is perceived as the country that has given rise to criminal systems, the mafias that, despite the different regional forms in which they are organized, have been able to spread throughout the national political system and control, in addition to the illegal markets, the administrative machine through a network of clientelism and the associated system of corruption they run. Yet, apart from Blok’s monograph (1974), the Schneiders’s works on Sicily (1976, p. 2003) and very few other field experiences (Scionti 2011; Rakopoulos 2018), the number of essays and anthropological monographs dedicated in some way to studying mafia networks both in Italy (Lombardi Satriani and Meligrana 1975) and actually also in other national contexts (Resta 2002, 2005; Zerilli 2013b), together with a few other essays published in collective works (Lombardi Satriani 2005; Palumbo 2013), are sometimes the result of well-established lines of research, whereas at other times they seem to have arisen from momentary interests that have not given rise to a more organic reflection. Understanding the reason for this apparent lack of interest requires a step back. According to Geertz, the skill of ethnographers consists in inducing readers to believe that what they write is true, convincing them, by virtue of their rhetorical abilities (Geertz 1988), that they have truly penetrated into another form of life. Formulated in these terms, the axiom thus entails a greater persuasive capacity that the text possesses with regard to the field by virtue of having been there, having experienced and shared the local situation and having produced, to remain true to Geertz, a thick description. In his opinion, however, ethnography (1988, p. 7), including that generated around extralegal practices, would seem to correspond to that domain of discourse in which, according to Foucault, the author’s function is still strong (Foucault 1979, p. 11), a producer of meaning in the measure in which the author shapes the story and constructs its plot. On the other hand, considering the result of examining the contemporary literature in the more general context of corruption, and not only

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that linked to the contexts of organized crime, the authoritativeness of anthropological writing appears weak. The symbolic dimension of mafia language seems to be more successfully described by those who have dedicated themselves to literary or reportage rather than anthropological communication, as shown (at least in Italy) by phenomena such as Saviano, the narrative judges or investigative journalists. In these cases the realist novels seem to have been written by those who know the mafia system from within: the judges for having judged it, the journalists for the insights they dedicate to it more or less daily, and Saviano because he is an enfant prodige, able to narrate in such a compelling way, so rich in detail, that not surprisingly Gomorra (Saviano 2006) is defined as an ethnographic novel (Zerilli 2013a), alongside Noi, Tikopia (Firth 1963), in what we could call a spontaneous context self-ethnography. Nor does the situation change if, leaving aside the question of writing, we turn to the analysis of the methodology adopted. In this case it is appropriate to split the two areas: corruption and mafias, because in the research phase they pose different methodological problems.

Corruption Defined as “a mechanism through which “the state” itself is discursively constituted” (Gupta 1995, p. 376), corruption is an essential—albeit inexplicably overlooked—segment of political action, to which unsurprisingly the attention of social scientists was drawn when, on the basis of the conference held at the Wenner-Gren centre in 2016 and the trail left by the suggestive power of Trump’s election campaign in his bid to become President of the United States, the need arose to reflect upon the multifarious and complex system of actions through which it acts. The result was a rich debate, published in a special issue of Current Anthropology (Muir and Gupta 2018) which brings together a considerable number of ethnographic studies that demonstrate how corruption is organized in a system that seems to have no borders, as widespread in the North as in the South of the world, in so-called developed countries as in what once would have been called developing countries. Despite the wide spectrum of research that is accounted for, the volume also leaves unresolved the question which, for mere convenience, we continue to call ethnographic authority. The questions from which we start to raise the issues opened by an analysis of corruption may seem to be trivial: how can the sense of

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corruption be decoded in the various forms it takes on and of which mafia activity is imbued without practicing it? Without placing oneself in the meshes of the network of corruption with which modern democracies seem to cloak themselves? How can shared meanings be created from dialogical dia/logos, in contexts of corruption? Is it possible to trace precisely in the difficulty of interacting with criminal contexts the reason why corruption, of which the mafias put into practice only some possible strategies, has not particularly attracted the attention of political anthropology, either in Italy or abroad (Gupta 1995; Olivier de Sardan 1999; Miur and Gupta 2018)? If we consider corruption as a violation of public interests by abusing official positions for private interests (Kobayashi 2006, p. 9), which in its implementation becomes a “form of structural violence” (Gupta 2012, p. 76) to which it is easy to be personally exposed; that citizens, in most cases, experience the relationship with the State through their daily dealings with bureaucracy; that the latter acts through officials who operate at the local level, then the suspicion that they take advantage of the position they occupy appears, following the ethnographies produced in the special issue, an expression of a fear based on real experience. An experience that anthropologists can share in the field, even more so if their research is multi-sited and allows them therefore to follow the ideal path that combines habits, customs and different skills which, being the heritage of the corrupted and the corrupting, make corruption a current and widespread transnational practice. While effective, however, such an approach is reductive when compared to the actual scope of a practice capable of far greater intrusiveness, which expands and transcends the political party logic, to engulf even the tiniest segments of daily life, as has been demonstrated, at least in Italy, by some not-so-recent literature on clientelism (Licausi 1976; 1979; Signorelli 1983; Resta 1984; Zinn 2001). A practice endowed with such a pervasiveness as to induce one to consider corruption rather as a language (Muir and Gupta 2018, p. 5) characterized by polyvalence, ductility and transgressiveness. Focusing the attention on the difficulty of drawing the boundary between what is legal and what is illegal, between what is corruption and what is not, given the proven ability of corruption to reproduce fractal-like (Muir 2017, p. 77), different from but equal to itself, illustrates the difficulties encountered in fieldwork. Here the issue becomes particularly delicate, because neither the corrupted nor

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the corrupters represent themselves in the roles of victimized or victimizer, and often place their actions in a framework of meaning that does not recognize them as antithetical, to the extent that they are intended to be used for purposes which in their eyes do not necessarily appear illegal or criminal. The hypothesis formulated through the words of an informant in relation to the political rise of a local leader in Apulia in the 1980s, could still be credible today: “Paolo made himself a leader because he distributed a lot of resources…. He managed to help people. Many in the province turned to him for his kindness and helpfulness: his bond with the people derives almost exclusively from this commitment” (Resta 1984, p. 66). The corruption that feeds the clientele networks is in this case given back through the emphasis on caregiving, a predisposition that seems to be perceived as the distinctive feature of political activity, a shift of meaning that translates the discriminatory practice of distributing resources among one’s followers in terms of a relationship interwoven with kindness and helpfulness that hides the riskiness of procedures based on arbitrariness in the management not only of public affairs, but also of individual rights, and renders it invisible. In a context of such ambiguity, making sense of the relationship the interviewee’s testimony reveals means facing a radical contradiction. The negotiated point of view between the observer and the observed depends in this case on the positioning that the former chooses with respect to the ambiguity expressed by the social agent in relation to the falling apart of the contrast between legality and illegality. However, it is precisely this, the fact of having to choose, that indicates the critical elements contained in the interpretation that ethnographers will be able to offer of corruption, since they will not be able to consider as corrupt behaviors that the co-protagonists of the ethnographic encounter return within a broader range of possibilities but also not to ignore, and in this way deny, the weight that corruption has on the social scene. The latter is a perspective which calls attention to what is only apparently a secondary problem. If we consider corruption in its mimetic and fractal aspect, and we recognize that these are the qualities that lead social agents to perceive only vaguely its perverse effects in directing action, it should also be deduced that the antithesis to the culture of corruption cannot simply be traced back to the emphasis placed on the alleged effects of policies that have tended to make anti-corruption associations proliferate (Schneider and Schneider 2003). The latter, in fact, as has been demonstrated (Rokopulos 2018), operate within networks

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of meanings and practical activities that equally inspire patronage. The anti-racket cooperative associations in contemporary Sicily, for example, though founded to protect and guarantee actions inspired by opposite principles, on these foundations sometimes end up adopting selective— and in some cases discriminatory—criteria that reveal a disturbing analogy with the rules that govern the activity of the groups they were created to fight against: “the lives of co-op members themselves are embedded in a series of obligations, commitments, and generally social relations that often fly in the face of anti-mafia co-op principles” (Rakopulos 2018, p. 5). And indeed: “co-op members’ embeddedness itself proves to be a renovating aspect for anti-mafia cooperativism, as co-ops really draw from local kinship, gossip, work memory and neighbourhood relations to acquire their actual operational form on the ground” (ibid.). The fact that corruption is not attributable to a specific semantic context, that it operates at the transnational level while governing, with the same logic, even paltry local contexts, that it is capable of metamorphosing and changing its appearance and meaning while remaining essentially unchanged, entails a need to investigate its operating mechanisms, at the risk of taking part in them in order to grasp the regenerative properties that appear to be its signature feature. Pending methodological issues still pertain to the anthropologist’s placement within the study, but require shifting the focus to the examination of the data on which the researcher’s interpretation of corruption is based. Data are easy to collect from hearsay, but difficult to enact and validate starting from some form of participative involvement. Discourses and practices garnered in the field seem to run, in this case, on parallel tracks; but whereas discourses rarely offer a realistic view of the issue, tending in some cases to emphasize and in others to minimize the extent of the problem (Smart 2018, p. 38), actions that involve corruption are mostly hidden, being as they are a part of that encrypted information and behavior that both those who corrupt and those who are corrupted endeavor to conceal. It is no coincidence that, browsing through the aforementioned Current Anthropology, few or no relevant passages can be found that deal with the sources taken into account in order to study corruption, with how these sources find their expression in the field, with how effectively researchers managed to permeate that form of life and, consequently, with understanding the dynamics fueled by corrupt practices. Instead,

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many papers focus on the narrative styles (Muir and Gupta 2018, p. 10) employed to describe corruption. Smart’s contribution, on the other hand, dwells on the practice of Guanxi in China: a relationship of trust between people who are somehow linked by friendship or partnership bonds, in which the exchange of gifts may also suggest a form of corruption (Smart 2018). The stated objective is to explain how corruption, widespread in the 1960s in Hong Kong, was first defeated in the 1970s through a legislative process intended to clearly mark the distinction between legal and illegal practices, only to reappear at the beginning of the new millennium and to remain present and active, especially in the networks of governmental organizations. Although Smart emphasizes the importance of fieldwork (Smart 2018, p. 38), pointing out the methodological difficulties entailed by addressing these topics, in this case he builds his interpretation by using archival research. This short paper thus becomes a good subject of study for us. In his hypothesis, in fact, corruption becomes visible when facts or episodes are brought to light that expose its perverse effects, something that happens more frequently when a scandal erupts. Therefore, it is the scandal that reveals corrupt practices and it is the scandals that ought to be studied. Of course, a scandal—translated into a somewhat obsolete terminology perhaps—can be assimilated to an “affair,” the examination of which, according to the Manchester school that built a theory concerning its methodological efficacy, was nevertheless based on data collected during participant observation. Yet it is quite clear that while fieldwork concerning corruption cases would require the researcher to create the preconditions for an interaction capable of activating the hermeneutic circle with social agents that may have an interest in— or benefit from— concealing or contaminating the data, or with public officials who are generally bound by professional secrecy, reconstructing the story, connecting the dots and studying relationships through archival sources offers, in Smart’s proposal, undeniable advantages. Reading the documents that have been kept secret for fifty years allows one to recover that complicity that a practicing official, and on facts still covered by professional secrecy, would never reveal, even to a foreign researcher. Archival sources may in fact contain—and in the case examined by Smart probably did contain—comments, margin notes, or ruminations left on the documents in the belief that no one would use them, but that in his hypothesis turn out to be useful, in retrospect, to attain a deeper understanding of the facts.

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An undoubtedly fruitful stratagem, which certainly alleviates the effort of ethnographic practice, but which nevertheless ends up obscuring the added value of experimentation negotiated in the field. It relieves the researcher of the need to find a placement among the links of the relationships he intends to study in order to build a shared understanding; in other words, this means avoiding the questions posed as the starting point of our discourse and that was the finishing line of the methodological debate at the end of the twentieth century. The thesis that supports this choice could, moreover, be attributable to the belief that the documents are trustworthy, that the marginal notes are not contaminated by prejudices or by opportunistic and contingent choices. Even if we leave out from this discussion the effects of the debate that historians have conducted in relation to the construction of sources, we would nevertheless be forced to accept that historical research draws on an understanding of the issue on the basis of a wider and richer amount of data than the anthropological one, thus pointing out a flaw in the latter’s methodology, that ought to be regarded as unjustified insofar as it becomes clear that ethnography involves different sources and claims to be an integrated, dialogic and open cognitive system. Above all, it is silent on the need to modify methodological tools in order to build an ethnography of public memory (Dei 2007, p. 42) that is still lacking. A third option contemplates the possibility that such a choice could be motivated by the conviction that the documents offer a focus for immediate reflection compared to a long-term search. The contradiction between the construction of the sources and the duration of the fieldwork is probably to be found in the time necessary to bring to the forefront what is really going on, the background in which corruption prospers and flourishes. Experiencing corruption in the field, therefore, implies a choice that runs counter to the short time of contemporary research, characterized rather by frequent and repeated returns and limited permanence. A discontinuity that probably does not facilitate the establishment of that intimacy that would allow officials, politicians, and ordinary people to guarantee the researcher access to information and documents that would otherwise be confidential, if not downright classified, and seems rather to be motivated by an attempt to investigate the representation of what are conflicting rules of the game (De Herdt and Olivier de Sardan 2015), instead of the effective operation, dispositions and habitus brought into play by them that make it possible for corruption to spread. Even if it was sought to

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privilege this perspective—which, as we have seen, in the anthropological literature on corruption seems to enjoy greater success—it must also be borne in mind that, in the contemporary world, the representation of the rules of the game is entrusted rather to the interventions of opinion leaders, brought to the limelight in society events and political agoras, while the dissertations of social scientists receive far less attention. This is a disconcerting condition which, on the one hand, underlines the weak authorial function of anthropological writing, allowing the reassignment of its interpretation of such phenomena to the scientific sphere but, on the other, reveals the essential undesirability of the understanding that the ethnographic encounter can reach in decisive areas of social life from a political, economic, and moral point of view. Hence the need to launch a critical rethinking of those theoretical positions which, by emphasizing the situational nature of a research activity that remains nevertheless open to a multi-sited dimension, lose sight of the movement, which constitutes the key to those global flows that now weave new networks of meaning.

Transnational Mafias The anthropologists’ toolbox also seems inadequate in the analysis of organized crime, though the problems to be faced are different. Making use of multi-sited research, a perspective which is certainly necessary to deal with transnational phenomena such as the mafia, is of limited help. The doubts that have just been raised in the case of corruption also have an impact on identifying the most appropriate methodological choice to study the mafia phenomenon. The questions are still the same. Even if it is possible, for example, to conduct multi-sited research and collect qualitative data pertaining to mafia organizations, from Albania to Nigeria, through China or Turkey, Romania, or Georgia, etc.—to say nothing about Italy—in the environments in which they were born and those in which they operate, how can we resolve the question of participation in the criminal context under examination? And the timeframe? Whether short or long, would it ever generate the knowledge that arises from a shared situation? Does ethnographic methodology support these challenges, or do the standards adopted by contemporary ethnography lead to staying away from such critical areas of contemporary society and suggest a return to archive sources or literary allusions? We seem to be headed for an admission that it’s all much ado about nothing and that, after decades of methodological, self-critical, and reasoned reflection, anthropologists

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find themselves deprived of the support offered by time-honored conceptual categories, over-problematized during the deconstructionist phase. In fact, the uncertainty to which research is exposed due to their non-use in this specific context of analysis appears to be significant. The hypothesis we are putting forward is that, in the study of mafia criminal systems, the methodological hesitations that emerged in the case of corruption are compounded by others concerning the synthesis between fieldwork practice and theoretical reflection. These pertain to the decoding of meanings and the understanding of the networks of relationships, and of the groups that constitute them, regardless of the positioning of the researcher. To exemplify our point of view, we will use the concept of lineage to which great space has been allocated in the past in the analysis of the various forms of social organization, with particular reference to the analysis of kinship and political systems. A concept that in the second half of the last century was widely problematized (Sahlins 1961, Schneider 1984, Shimizu 1991) and reduced in its heuristic scope, without having at the same time taken steps to proffer convincing alternatives. In our hypothesis, recovering lineage as a hermeneutic category is appropriate in order to formulate wider and more comprehensive hypotheses concerning the relationships that contemporary transnational groups are weaving, and thus offer an understanding of the phenomenon which, taking advantage of the long research practice conducted on the different forms of aggregation in unilinear societies, is able to demonstrate the exclusive contributions that the discipline can make available to the scientific community and beyond. Contributions that, outside of the restricted scope of disciplinary debate, we hope to demonstrate the usability of a knowledge that can overturn the narrow vision of the criminal mafia phenomenon that contaminates common sense and reduces the possibility of opening up to a more effective contrasting action. An ancient article written to help understand the genesis of criminal associations in Albania, a country which for a long time had been free from them, subjugated as it was by an autocratic and liberticidal dictatorship, had in fact gone back to reflecting on unilineal descent and on the lineage that occurs within it in relation to the on-site gestation of the first criminal organizations (Resta 2002). The ethnography in support of the interpretive hypothesis introduced, was, in fact, able to demonstrate that the kinship groups present there benefited from a form of

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solidarity founded on a solid adhesive based on an ascribed membership which guaranteed the group’s compactness and the collective defense of interests, even when, or even mainly when, such interests were criminal in nature. In comparison, the temporary special-purpose ventures that come together in bilineal or cognatic contexts where solidarity and alliance are the results of individual choices, showed instead a lesser cohesive capacity, even if oriented by expansionist criteria. From pentitismo (the phenomenon of criminals who decide to collaborate with the State) which fractures the criminal world, to the shifting alliances that characterize internal party relations to a political dynamic that appears less and less anchored to the great ideologies and more and more inclined to pursuing personalistic objectives, the sphere of organized crime, like that of politics, already showed how a perspective limited to the axiological dimension of the groups was insufficient to find its bearings in the close weave of political and criminal activity, as is the case, for example, in Italy. The fact that the criminal organizations active therein are not homogeneous is certainly a truism; however, the differences that help create a hierarchy between the different groups are still traced mainly in relation to the criminal markets in which each is active, to the brutality of the actions through which it achieves its goals, to the nature of traffic and the infiltration capacity it manifests in civil society. This is the outlook that emerges from the documents produced by the National DIA (Semi-annual reports 2018 and 2019) and by the National Anti-Mafia Commission (Final Report 2018) which, at least for Italy, distinguish between the mafia, still rooted in the Sicilian province where it started, the Neapolitan camorra, the emerging Foggia clan and the Calabrian ndrangheta, whereas foreign criminal groups are each described in their apparent homogeneity, as an organic and indistinct whole. Such analyses reveal the belief that foreign criminal groups are subordinate to national ones and operate in the regional areas of our territory according to the rules imposed on them by national criminal organizations. On the contrary, the hypothesis we are trying to argue for opposes the hierarchical and ethnocentric perspective that attributes primacy to Italian mafias within the transnational mafia complex that operates in the national territory. Rather, it aims to achieve a more effective understanding of both the system of relationships that such different associations activate between each other, and the interconnections that they are able to manage, distinguishing between mafias that arise in unilineal societies and

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mafias that arise in bilineal societies like the Italian one. We are therefore moving through an insidious and problematic field, where the only certainty is that both are collaborating, demarcating the areas of mutual influence, supporting and amplifying each other’s criminal capabilities, taking their cue from the significant structural differences that characterize them as well. In a scenario in which such different organizations confront each other, however, the anthropological approach seems to be able to only partially support the analysis of the relational context in which criminal action develops, underestimating the cohesive force of the groups organized by assimilation to lineage systems, but also the effects to which the cohesive fragility of temporary joint criminal ventures exposes them. Hence the need to integrate the analysis of the groups, recalling those categories which, at the end of the twentieth century, seemed to have exhausted their heuristic scope and can still help us grasp the strategies implemented by organizations that, although different in their structure, have found a way to coexist and act, sometimes in symbiosis, sometimes allying and sometimes clashing. This allows us, for example, to retrieve, for the purposes of constructing the analysis, the principles of solidarity and alliance that organize the lineage structure, such as the category on honor. Honor is a significant corollary of lineage societies, whose obsolescence was celebrated perhaps too hastily at the end of the second millennium (Herzfeld 1980; Berger 1983); Blok, on the other hand, fruitfully reclaimed this concept at the beginning of the new millennium (2001). The principles of solidarity and alliance, in fact, recovered as norms that structure the field of aggregation, could be binding not only for criminal groups based on ascribed status, for which they are generally prescriptive, as can be observed in those criminal groups born in societies where the principle of solidarity is translated from the field of descent and belonging, but also for temporary special-purpose criminal ventures such as gangs and perhaps even ndrine in which Italian mafias structure themselves, for which these principles, although constantly evoked and emphasized, have traditionally been less binding. Interpreting the activities carried out jointly by the various criminal associations and the agreements reached between foreign cartels and national organizations in the light of the strength that organizations born in unilineal societies show to possess with respect to others, express as a strategic effectiveness deployed by adopting a more binding principle of solidarity, opens up new scenarios. It pushes us to probe how, for example, some of our

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local mafias are looking at models other than their own to climb to the top of criminal hierarchy. Considering just contemporary news, to look at the rise of the ndrangheta only on the basis of the brutality of its crimes is reductive. It would perhaps be more appropriate to look at the greater ability to infiltrate healthy tissues that it shows it has developed, in proportion to the compactness that the ndrine are demonstrating that they possess within themselves. It would be useful, for example, for Italian anthropology to develop a line of research in this direction. By adopting a perspective of this kind, it would in fact be possible to avoid the mistake of looking at the mafia complex as a hierarchical and standardized reality where Italian mafias have the upper hand. Neglecting to evaluate the cross-breeding processes affecting that complex, ignoring the disposition to fluidity acquired by the various criminal cartels due to the hyper-sited condition they place themselves and act in, failing to examine the role that the reliability of the alliance schemes pledged by the mafias born in unilineal contexts plays in the power relations between rival groups when it comes to territorial control means obscuring not only the change our own criminal associations are undergoing, but, above all, it means underestimating the potential of an associative reality that moves on a horizontal plane, weaving multiple networks that create strategic bonds guaranteed by structured, though mobile and even conflicting, schemes of alliances.

Negative Balance Sheets It seems possible to conclude that questioning the phase of turning the data produced in the field into text, the legitimacy of the methodological choice notwithstanding, has shifted the focus of attention from the evaluation of the fields under consideration to the possibility of even starting an ethnographic encounter in these contexts. Reasoning around the possibility of validating the assumptions on which to claim some form of recognizability of the interpretive construction provided by ethnographic research, we set out to describe the obstacles that ethnographic research faces in two fields: the first, somewhat more manageable, consists in corruption; the second, less comfortable and scarcely practiced, coincided with an analysis of transnational criminal systems. In the first case, it was easy to demonstrate that the information to acquire during fieldwork is not permeable, even if it generates dialogical and participatory situations, perhaps not even on the basis of an extended timeframe, and

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is limited by the willingness to reveal, in an area where the tendency is to conceal practices, reports, and norms. Surpassed in authoritativeness by opinion leaders, by successful media figures, by investigative journalists, anthropological research produces invisible and unpalatable knowledge, condemned in the fieldwork stage to subordinate its understanding of the phenomenon to an impossible negotiation and to explicit the role attributed to the sources used to reach an understanding of the rules of a game to which it is never fully admitted. A reexamination of the positions expressed on transnational mafias in anthropological studies has led to a similar conviction. Here we have tried to ponder on how significant, from a hermeneutical point of view, the choice was to relinquish some conceptual systems that guided anthropological research before the deconstructionist turning point, and to demonstrate how the failure to address lineage, considered as the basic element capable of structuring a sense of belonging in some types of transnational mafias, renders the subject matter less than manageable and, in some cases, may even undermine an understanding of the relationships that occur in an extremely mobile, fluid and transaction-driven criminal world, made up of interrelationships between mafia groups and criminals who rely on very different criteria of solidarity and alliance. The analysis of criminal activity, at the level of corruption and mafialike associations, also shows that the ethnographic encounter is subject to the willingness of the field actors to open up and allow themselves to be the object of anthropological research. Neglecting this aspect exposes the self-referential nature of an attitude to research which regards itself as the guardian of otherness, and in so doing betrays the most basic duty of deeming the other’s subjectivity and creativity as equal to one’s own. Perhaps the anthropological journey has gone too far, expanding into an imagery that perceives the field as a mobile scene, the backdrop of a stage on which anthropologists positions themselves with characters that they, through their authorship, recreate in writing. On the contrary, it is necessary to take a step back, and turning one’s hermeneutic exercise on oneself, simply admit that in some circumstances, or at least on specific topics, ethnography was and is still a limited tool because, as has been repeatedly observed, the dynamics that characterize the experience in the field must “be analysed in relation to the different contexts in which they take place” (Satta 2007, p. 11), in order to understand which of the assets of classical anthropology can be reused, albeit in a different constructive way. Obviously, one cannot bribe an official and receive favors in exchange

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for finding a placement within the corruption complex and experience its meaning. Similarly, one cannot join a mafia gang and participate in a massacre, traffic drugs or human beings to share the sense of action. This is the second, and perhaps most powerful, radical contradiction that the ethnographer must face in the field. One can look and try to understand, but one cannot share. Hence, the researcher remains in the uncomfortable condition of those who do not place themselves in the field but are placed in it, appearing on a stage where a plot written by others unfolds. These are the reasons, in my opinion, why the very few ethnographic studies dealing with mafia contexts—which, on the contrary, proliferate and are numerous in the world—do not warrant drawing up balance sheets or opening up perspectives of which the anthropologist, or better, anthropological knowledge, is perceived as the arbiter and even, in the most extreme positions, the deus ex machina. Rather, by focusing on the validation process of ethnographic research in relation to the social contexts where corruption is preponderant or are managed by criminal enterprises, it may be shown to what extent anthropological Theory and practice make circumstances hardly permeable to ethnographic encounters. In a nutshell, we have reached the conclusion that corruption and mafia systems are fields that highlight how the ethnographic turning point has put researchers in the uncomfortable position of concealing to themselves, even before concealing it to others, to what extent the research phase in the field is conducted by the researchers’ desire to become transparent, bound by the rules that govern the practices chosen as the subject of investigation, and limited by the context in which they move in search of a dialogicality that forces them to perform according to someone else’s script. We hope that the two examples presented, similar yet different, may serve as a stimulus to go back and look at the history of the discipline so that, learning from it, a reflection may start on the responsibility of a knowledge that, under the pretense of merely describing others, claims the right to create and direct the conditions required to penetrate another lifestyle and to participate in it to the point of feeling like a protagonist and recreating it through writing. Crapanzano, among others, had already stressed this; anthropology should be conceived as an antagonistic arena of creativity (Crapanzano 1980). Taking refuge in the exclusivity of a problematizing methodological approach is of little use. Ethnography has shown weaknesses in relation to extralegality which prevent the researcher from crossing the threshold of understanding its organizational

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strategies, its aims and ethos, those relationships that have proliferated in the contemporary world and that today, in the face of any condemnation one may want to express about them, inspire behaviors that represent the radical contradictions shared by each individual experience. Despite the many pages written, ethnography must be rethought in order to return to being a pure and simple description of an encounter between subjectivities which, on equal terms and in a field temporarily seen by the researcher as common, face each other in order to grasp part of the other’s humanity. A methodology that has so far characterized disciplinary knowledge and that seems to have been too disintegrated to respond to the challenges that post-global contexts posed to anthropological research. This may appear to be an ironic twist of fate, but all of this happens just as other disciplines, from sociology to pedagogy, have begun to practice a simplified ethnographic approach devoid of the theoretical frameworks that give it meaning in the disciplinary context in which it was born, in order to qualitatively support their research. Hence the urgency to start a new season of reflection in which the other is no longer imagined as a product of ethnographic writing, but is given back his creative autonomy.

References Berger, P. L. (1983). On the Obsolescence of the Concept of Honor. In S. Hauerwas & A. MacIntyre (Eds.), Revisions: Changing Perspectives in Moral Philosophy (pp. 172–181). Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press. Blok, A. (1974). The Mafia of a Sicilian Village 1860–1960. New York: Harper & Row Publishers. Blok, A. (2001). Honour and Violence. Cambridge: Polity Press. Böll-Stiftung, H., & Schönenberg, R. (Eds.) (2013). Transnational Organized Crime Analyses of a Global Challenge to Democracy. Political Science, 17 . Clifford, J. (1986). Introduction: Partial Truths. In J. Clifford & G. E. Marcus (Eds.), Writing Culture: Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (pp. 1–26). Berkeley: University of California Press. Crapanzano, V. (1980). Tuhami‚ Portrait of a Maroccan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. De Herdt, T., & Olivier de Sardan, J. P. (Ed.) (2015). Real Governance and Practical Norms in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Game of the Rules. London: Routledge.

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De Lauri, A., & Achilli, L. (2008). Campi di battaglia e campo dell’etnografo. Etnografia, conflitti, violenza. In A. De Lauri & L. Achilli (Eds.), Pratiche e politiche dell’etnografia (pp. 113–126). Meltemi. Dei, F. (2007). Storia, memoria e ricerca antropologica. In C. Gallini & G. Satta (Eds.), Incontri etnografici Processi cognitivi e relazionali nella ricerca sul campo (pp. 40–67). Meltemi. Firth, R. (1963). We, the Tikopia. Boston: Beacon Press. Foucault, M. (1979). What Is an Author? In J. V. Harari (Ed.), Textual Strategies (pp. 149–50). Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Geertz, C. (1983). Local Knowledge. Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic Book. Geertz, C. (1988). Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Geertz, C. (2000). Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gupta, A. (1995). Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State. American Ethnologist, 22(2), 375–402. Gupta, A. (2012). Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India. Durham: Duke University press. Herzfeld, M. (1980). Honor and Shame. Man, XV, 339–351. Kawata, J. (Ed.). (2006). Comparing Political Corruption and Clientelism. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing. Kobayashi, M. (2006). Political Clientelism and Corruption: Neo-structuralism and Republicanism. In J. Kawata (Ed.), Comparing Political Corruption and Clientelism (pp. 2–22) Farnham: Ashgate Publishing. Licausi, L. (1976). Antropologia e ideologia: note sul “patronage” nelle società mediterranee. Rassegna italiana di sociologia, 1(XVIII), 119–131. Licausi, L. (1979). Patronage” e clientelismo in una società mediterranea: Lampedusa 1896–1976. Uomo e Cultura, n.23–24, 45–76. Lombardi Satriani, L. M. (2005). Della mafia e degli immediati dintorni. In S. Morabito (Ed.), Mafia, ‘Ndrangheta, Camorra nelle trame del potere parallelo (pp. 33–48). Roma: Gangemi Editore. Lombardi Satriani, L. M., & Meligrana, M. (1975). Diritto egemone e diritto popolare la Calabria negli studi di demologia giuridica. Collana: Quale cultura. Marcus, G., & Cushman, D. (1982). Ethnographies as Texts. Annual Review of Anthropology, 11, 25–69. Matera, V. (2004). La scrittura etnografica. Roma: Meltemi. Muir, S. (2017). Recursive in/Formality Time and Ideology in a Distributed Monetary System. ANUAC, 6(2), 77–83. Muir, S., & Gupta, A. (Ed.) (2018). Introduction to “Rethinking the Anthropology of Corruption”. Current Anthropology, 59, Supplement 18, 4–15.

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Nordstrom, C. (2004). Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nordstrom, C. (2007). Global Outlaws: Crime, Money, and Power in the Contemporary World. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nordstrom, C. (2008). Interpretazioni in conflitto. Il ruolo dell’antropologia nell’analisi dei conflitti contemporanei. In A. De Lauri &L. Achilli (Eds.), Pratiche e politiche dell’etnografia (pp. 127–42). Rome: Meltemi. Nordstrom, C. (2010). On ‘‘Global Outlaws:’’ A response to Anton Blok. Dialectical Anthropology, 1(34), 151–157. Olivier de Sardan, J. P. (1999). A Moral Economy of Corruption in Africa? The Journal of Modern African Studies, 37 (1), 25–52. Palumbo, B. (2013). Il Viennese e il professore. Prospettive di ricerca antropologica su mafie e neoliberismo. In A. Balzola e R. Aldemaro Barbaro (Eds.), Società disonorata. Identikit multidisciplinare della criminalità organizzata italiana (pp. 117–160), Bruno Mondadori. Pitzalis‚ S. (2015). Positioning as a Method: The Earthquake in Emilia Romagna and the Forms of “Exilience”. Archivio Antropologico Mediterraneo‚ 17(1), 29–39. Rokopulos, T. (2018). From Clans to Co-ops Confiscated Mafia Land in Sicily. New York: Berghahn Books. Resta, P. (1984). Democrazia e particolarismo. Lecce: Milella. Resta, P. (2002). Pensare il sangue. La vendetta di sangue in Albania. Rome: Meltemi. Resta, P. (2005). Mafie Balcaniche: il caso albanese. In S. Morabito (Ed.), Mafia, ‘Ndrangheta, Camorra nelle trame del potere parallelo (pp. 131–136). Roma: Gangemi Editore. Sahlins, M. (1961). The Segmentary Lineage. An Organization of Predatory Expansion. American Anthropologist, 63(2), 322–345. Satta, G. (2007). Introduzione a C. Gallini G. Satta (Ed.), Incontri etnografici Processi cognitivi e relazionali nella ricerca sul campo (pp. 10–26). Roma: Meltemi. Saviano, R. (2006). Gomorra. Milan: Mondadori. Schneider, D. M. (1984). A Critique of the Study of Kinship. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Schneider, J., & Schneider, P. (1976). Culture and Political Economy in Western Sicily. Cambridge: Academic Press. Schneider, J., & Schneider, P. (2003). Reversible Destiny: Mafia, Antimafia and the Struggle for Palermo. Berkeley: University of California Press. Scionti, F. (2011). Capitalisti di faida, la vendetta da paradigma morale a strategia d’impresa. Rome: Carocci. Shimizu A. (1991). On the Notion of Kinship. Man, 26, 377–403.

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Signorelli, A. (1983). Chi può e chi aspetta Giovani e clientelismo in un’area interna del Mezzogiorno. Napoli: Liguori. Smart, A. (2017). Informality Within Government Agencies Tasked with Controlling Informal Economic Practices. ANUAC, 6(2), 91–95. Smart, A. (2018). The Unbearable Discretion of Street-Level Bureaucrats Corruption and Collusion in Hong Kong. In M. S., & A. Gupta (Ed.), Rethinking the Anthropology of Corruption. Current Anthropology, Volume 59, Supplement 18, 537–547. Tedlock, B. (1991). From Participant Obseruation to the Observation of Participation: The Emergence of Narrative Ethnography. Journal of Anthropological Research, 47, 69–95. Varese, F. (2013). The Structure and the Content of Criminal Connections: The Russian Mafia in Italy. European Sociological Review, 29(5), 899–909. Zerilli F. (2013). Corruption and Anti-Corruption. Local Discourses and International Practices in Post-Socialist Romania. Human Affairs. Postdisciplinary Humanities & Social Sciences Quarterly, 23(2), 212–229. Zerilli F. (2013). Gomorra” romanzo etnografico. In A. Balzola e R. A. Barbaro (Eds.) Società disonorata. Identikit multidisciplinare della criminalità organizzata italiana (pp. 161–179). Bruno Mondadori. Ziegler, J. (2000). I Signori del crimine, le nuove mafie europee contro la democrazia. Milano: Marco Tropea Editore. Zinn, D. (2001). La raccomandazione. Clientelismo vecchio e nuovo. Rome: Donzelli.

Sitografia http://direzioneinvestigativaantimafia.interno.gov.it/page/relazioni_semestrali. html. http://www.senato.it/service/PDF/PDFServer/BGT/1066861.pdf.

PART III

Visual, Dialogical, Sensorial, Multi-sited Ethnography

CHAPTER 10

The Anthropologist’s Eye: Ethnography, Visual Practices, Images Francesco Faeta

Introduction The admirable strategic aim of this book is to affirm the dignity, complexity, and depth of ethnographic poetics and practices, resisting a merely instrumental and reified vision of them. In recent years, such a vision has been pervasive, and ethnographic practice has been presented in a simplified, caricatured way, stripped of its hermeneutic and epistemological complexities, and tailored to fit naive methodological constructs, unchanging from discipline to discipline and context to context (be it medical semiotics, marketing strategies, the planning of a yoga center or the organization of a public exhibition space). We need to restore critical

In this essay I return to topics which I have dealt with at length in the course of my academic work, and which have indeed constituted its central hub. Merely for the purpose of providing an essential chronology, I would like to mention Faeta (2008, pp. 33–41, 2015, pp. 28–43). Italian text translated into English by Simon Tanner- University of Messina. F. Faeta (B) University of Messina, Messina, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 V. Matera and A. Biscaldi (eds.), Ethnography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51720-5_10

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depth to ethnography, and thereby to restore speculative depth to fieldwork, which I feel has been demeaned by an overly utilitarian approach lacking any theoretical benchmarks (the end of the great narratives of the world and History also seem to have seriously affected our modest, marginal discipline). This paper, taking for granted a specific and complex consideration of ethnography (supported by other essays here), will focus on issues of the gaze related to experience in the field. I will focus in particular on the lack of anthropological scholarship on the matter, and on the need to define the nature of the ethnographic gaze in theoretical terms, also with the help of conceptual tools tangential to our discipline. My approach will be based on the visual construction of the subject and the latter’s awareness of the ethnographic situation. In this perspective, I will emphasize body-gaze and body-world relationships, and how much importance has been given to visual and representative processes in the construction of knowledge in the contemporary West. Finally, I will try to focus on the connection between ethnography and photography (seen as a critical tool for the gaze), and on how we can classify this connection in experimental and “conceptual” terms.

The Ethnographer’s Eye and the Visualist Paradigm Ethnography, then, as an activity carried out in the field, as it has become consolidated in our disciplinary context, both in the classical phase of speculation and research, and in the reflective phase, is essentially based on the gaze and on a visualist paradigm. Students attending basic courses are always reminded that the members of the first society of anthropological studies defined themselves as “observers of man.” They are fed passages from what may be called the first professional manual, the Considérations sur les diverses méthodes á suivre dans l’observation des peuples sauvages, written in 1799 by Joseph-Marie de Gérando, who emphasized the importance of viewing reality head on, without prejudices (as if direct observation could be immune to them). Armchair anthropologists are stigmatized, while Bronisław Malinowskj’s participant observation approach is praised. Various experiences are mentioned— French, English, American, Italian—from the expedition to the Straits of Torres to the exploits of the Bureau of American Ethnology, from Edward Sheriff Curtis to Claude Lévi-Strauss. The aim is to trace what

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appears essentially to be a story of the anthropological gaze, offspring of the objective, and cumulative history of science as outlined in positivist thought. The approach I have summarized above is tenacious and lasting, and has been perpetuated in very recent times, as the teaching of codified knowledge mentioned above suggests, despite the critical revisions undertaken since the 1970s. Despite, for example, the consolidation, often ideological and polemically founded, of sensory anthropologies and of multisensory and multi-situated ethnographies, and the emergence, on a more solid and theoretically grounded level, against the backdrop of the reflection of Walter Ong (Ong 1969, pp. 634–647; 1986), of an opposition between ethnographies of the gaze and ethnographies of listening. The opposition is in fact only apparent, at least on an empirical level, as has sometimes been mentioned, since the latter are nothing other than ethnographies of the gaze disguised, being as they are often based on the vision of narratives and narrators, at least as long this is possible for the researcher. While, however, there is so much insistence on the central role played by the visual aspects of disciplinary practice, which, for my part, I do not intend to question,1 the theoretical confines of the ethnographer’s gaze inversely shrink. This is, above all, a “Cartesian” gaze, the product of a mens cogitans, which disengages from the real, concrete phenomenal conditions of looking; a gaze that, as Michael Herzfeld recalls, is based on the assumption that the senses are “windows on the world,” transparent in nature and therefore precultural (Herzfeld 2001)2 ; a gaze finally defined through representations set within the space-time categories functional to the configuration of the western world.3 Consequently, no attention is paid to the internal articulation of visual practices; to distinguishing looking (a process characterized by a certain biological imprint) from seeing (an intellectual, cultural activity), observing (a prolonged, finalized viewing practice), and representing (an oriented, cultural, social procedure). The conscious gaze of the anthropologist thus becomes opaque, as highly distinct activities and phases are conceived and addressed indistinctly (Faeta 2003a, pp. 15–28). The result is that an implicit positivistic (and crypto-positivistic) consideration prevails, whereby the ethnographer’s gaze is considered able to record the objectivity of the world and of things or, more recently and more cautiously, what the ethnographer believes to be the objectivity of

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the world and things (so that the gaze ensures, in short, objectivity as subjectivity). The fact that the gaze, in itself subject to complex systems of use, immersed in a composite and contradictory practice such as ethnography, should be subjected to critical analysis, from which the objectivity of the world and things as well as individual subjectivity would emerge fragmented, is rarely considered in our studies. Furthermore, it should be noted, albeit incidentally, that the ethnographer’s gaze is not part of the long, complex story that characterizes visualism in the West; rather it seems to originate from nothing, from an immediate, circumscribed practice, from a meeting, from a sudden impulse of curiosity or wonder. In reality, it is entirely organic to the processes that construct the western vision as an indispensable tool for hierarchical organization and domination. Herzfeld, among the few anthropologists sensitive to the issue, recalls that, starting in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in Europe, the sense of sight, significantly distancing itself from the others in terms of cultural relevance, was associated with the field of science (Herzfeld 2001). I would be inclined to date this beginning even earlier, at that complex point of encounter and conflict constituted by the introduction of perspective vision and by the almost parallel scandal of the vision of the Other, which was being affirmed through colonial exploration and conquest; at the crossroads between the rational need to propitiate, in terms of early modernity, the realm of reality, and the latter’s resentment at being circumscribed, framed, measured, and regulated. Rather than denying the visualist paradigm, therefore, rooted in Western culture, and embarking on a cumbersome search for alternative ethnographies, we need to work on widening the narrow horizon within which the gaze has been considered. Ethnographies, and visual ethnographies in particular, are an extremely serious thing, and require deep reflection and elaboration, not just a stroll with a camera or video camera around your neck, resulting in the projection of slides and videos in the latest academic salon. A critical approach to the gaze, moreover, has been applied with some success in other disciplinary contexts, in particular those related to philosophy, sociology, and to art history and criticism; and it also makes the occasional appearance in the anthropological field, albeit shyly.4 Illuminating observations have been made especially regarding painting, which we will examine later, and the construction of sense it adopts vis-à-vis so-called “reality.” A case in point is John Berger, a painter above all

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else, who not only offered public testimony, through the analysis of daily experience, of the elementary relativistic reason for seeing (which Alfred Haddon and William Rivers, first of all, had brought to the attention of a world that believed visual perception to be universally connoted), but also allowed us to explore what actually is in relation to the social, historical, and individual context (a gaze is, so to speak, relative per se, even before its manifestation in history or social theatre—Berger, 1995, 2008, 2013, 2015).5 I have the impression, however, that the intellectual tools of anthropology are inadequate to achieve a radical critique of the gaze, and in particular—and this does not seem paradoxical—of the ethnographer’s gaze. I will try to motivate this statement below, by examining some concrete cases, but would like to note for now, on a general level, that our limitations derive in part from the curious contradiction within the discipline, trapped as it is between theories lacking concreteness and practices lacking abstraction. In short, anthropological theories of the gaze and of the particular treatment of the gaze in the ethnographic context frequently flounder due to theoretical shortcomings, to their being referentially anchored to reality; they often also fail as a result of the opposite problem—a failure to take into account experience, as a result of a perceived need to be moored to abstract theoretical benchmarks. This ambiguous oscillation, which often leads to anthropological narratives being discarded by philosophy as well as by common sense, in particular makes any discussion related to the gaze sterile. If, then, this particular lack of discussion of the subject is true, we will need to draw on other sources; retrace lines of thought external or tangential to the anthropological context, extract significant observations from them regarding gaze and representations, and then try to introduce them into ethnography. This does not mean, of course, that the ethnographic dimension in anthropology has not been completely problematized from the point of view of the gaze and representations, but what has been mostly highlighted is the role of the body, as an object and cultural subject, in the fieldwork approach. The body is, bodies are, and therefore it is through the mutual interaction of such historical objects that what we call ethnography is constructed. This analysis, strongly centered on a social consideration of the body, ends up referring to a set of political options, with attention ethically oriented to the utilitarian pressures bearing on the reporting of fieldwork. No questions are

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raised, unless marginally, about how these pressures arise, what the underlying sensory mechanisms are, and what is inside this body perceived as a social and political subject. More specifically, we do not question the ways in which the gaze, the pivotal tool for processing bodily experience and, as we have seen, for constructing anthropological knowledge, shapes and orients the body that is in the field and that goes to build the field of formal interaction typical of ethnographies.

Neighbouring Territories Let’s try to explore the neighboring territories I mentioned above. Among the multiplicity of possible experiences on which we could draw (Gregory Bateson, Edmund Husserl, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ludwig Wittgenstein), let us dwell on two scholars who, in my opinion, have proven to have a particular affinity with the theoretical frameworks of our discipline. The first such scholar is Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In my opinion, he is to be attributed with identifying the most useful body-gaze-world relationship in our critical perspective, even if the phenomenologist has evident—and often acknowledged—debts toward Edmund Husserl, on the one hand, and to Jean-Paul Sartre on the other. Merleau-Ponty, together with Sartre, is the one who most consistently, especially in the latter part of his life, succeeded in “anthropologising” philosophy. “Contemporary philosophy,” he wrote in a well-known essay, “does not consist of concatenating concepts, but of describing the mixing of consciousness with the world, its incarnation in a body, its coexistence with others” (Merleau-Ponty 1979, pp. 175–191, 189). Phenomenology therefore makes it possible to essentially explore relationships and processes, and the recourse to it allows us to perform an analysis of the gaze and images that is both corporal and social, and begin to explore the conditioning processes that sight promotes in the context of the body–world relationship. It should be noted that sight does not constitute a separate sense for Merleau-Ponty; he assigns a central function to communication between the senses in the construction of that lived body, one of whose most important functions is to relate with others (Merleau-Ponty 1965, 1979, 1993). But it is true that sight is given a pre-eminent role in leading the body towards conscious self-perception and towards social relationships. This can clearly be seen in the last text that Merleau-Ponty was able to complete, L’Œil et l’esprit, written without reworking in the summer of

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1960, at the request of André Chastel who had asked him for a contribution for the first issue of “Art de France,” unaware that this would be the last period of his life, culminating in his fatal heart attack a few months later (Merleau-Ponty, 1960). It is a text written in a beautiful country house, in Provence, from whose windows one could contemplate that Mont Sainte-Victoire, seen by Bellevue, painted several times by Cézanne, which would remain as a symbol of a radical questioning of the mechanism of vision through painting. And in this text, as Claude Lefort points out, Merleau-Ponty in fact reinterprets painting and, through it, vision. He re-examines vision “as if it were the first time, as if the previous year he had not reformulated his old questions in Le Visibile et l’Invisible, as if all his previous works – and above all the imposing Phénomenologie de la Perception […] – did not weigh on his thoughts, or weighed too much, so that he had to forget them to regain the fullness of enchantment” (Lefort, in MerleauPonty 1989, pp. 71–75). L’Œil et l’esprit is, in fact, an enchanted text, inspired and approachable, in which some of Merleau-Ponty’s main ideas are concisely examined and reworked around the mechanism of vision and its roots, which are both, and inextricably, corporeal and social. It is a text which, again, it seems appropriate to define as anthropological, and which starts with an assumption of epistemological revision (which reminds us of the basic sociological positions of Pierre Bourdieu, to whom I will return). “Science,” begins Merleau-Ponty, “manipulates things and renounces living in them. It builds internal models of them and, operating on these indices or variables […], only occasionally engages with the actual world. It is, and always has been, that admirably active, ingenious, casual thought, that presumption to treat every being as an ‘object in general’, that is, as if it were nothing to us and yet was predestined to our artifices” (Merleau-Ponty 1989, p. 13). If science is to inhabit things, however, it must do so through the factual relationship that binds the observer’s body to others; it has to do so by establishing a cohabitation between subjects and objects that establishes the legitimacy of its approach. “Scientific thought […] needs to be repositioned in a preliminary ‘there is’, in the place, in the domain of the sensible world and of the processed world as they are in our life, for our body; not that possible body that may be legitimately called an information machine [my stress], but this actual body that I call mine, the sentinel who watches silently beneath my words and beneath my actions. Beneath my body, the associated bodies,

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the ‘others’, which are not simply my congeners, but which live within me, and which I inhabit, together with which I live a single actual present Being … must awaken …” (ivi, p. 15). I believe we find here a clear shift towards that science which empathically engages with the world, constituting our epistemological and deontological option. But what does the thought that inhabits the world construct, according to Merleau-Ponty? The gaze, an instrument that separates, that takes the world outside us and, by constructing the intersections between subjective thought and the givenness of the world, allows us to identify reality. Significantly, Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose reflections ran parallel to and dynamically engaged with those of the phenomenologist, albeit within a structuralist vision of the construction of knowledge, would write of vision as an essentially hemic activity of recognition of the world.6 Vision is a process that creates the world while vivifying the body, and which makes it possible to transform thought into experience and knowledge into subjective image. Again, for Merleau-Ponty, the key to the problem is “in the fact that my body is both seeing and visible. It looks at everything, but it can also look at itself, and recognise in what it then sees ‘the other face’ of its visual power. [My body] is a self not by transparency like thought, which can think of a thing only by assimilating it, transforming it into thought – but a self by confusion, narcissism, the inherence of one who sees to what he sees, of one who touches to what he touches, of one who feels to what is felt – therefore, a self that is taken by things, that has a face and a back, a past and a future” (Merleau-Ponty 1989, p. 18). From this it follows that “visible and mobile, my body can be counted among things, it is one of them, it is caught in the fabric of the world and its cohesion is that of a thing. But since it sees and moves, it keeps things in a circle around itself; things are an annex or an extension of it, they are encrusted in its flesh, they are part of its full definition, and the world, the home of others, is made of the same cloth as the body. These antinomies are different ways of saying that vision is taken, or is effected, in the midst of things, where a visible begins to see, becomes visible for itself and thanks to the vision of all things, where the undivided communion of who feels and what is felt persists” (ivi, p. 19). Merleau-Ponty, therefore, not only establishes, starting with Husserlian phenomenology, and various works of Sartrean existentialism, the central role of the body in the formation of culture and in the elaboration of social devices; he also has the merit of clearly describing the function of the eye in the creation of the body as a cultural object. The critique of

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the naive ontology of the mechanisms of imagination and representation, developed by Sartre (Sartre 1936, 1940), is aimed not at a mere refutation of its crypto-positivistic character, and of the consequent foundation of a theory of images free from naivety and ontologisms, but at evaluating the pragmatic dimension of the body-sight connection; because the body is largely made by sight and because the gaze constructs the body as a social subject. The second scholar I would like to discuss is Pierre Bourdieu. He develops a similar attention to sight in its founding function of corporeality. The notions of habitus and incorporation redefine the formation and expression of social behavior, the mechanics through which bodies become social actors, and also establish a pragmatics of the visual relationship. In this there is a strong link between Bourdieu and Merleau-Ponty, despite the differences and mistrust (the former’s line of thought in reality shows how he is irresistibly taken back toward that phenomenology he initially refused, both because of his political circumspection vis-à-vis the guru Sartre, or Merleau-Ponty’s power in the context of the École des Hautes Études, and because of his, albeit contradicted, proximity to structuralism; André Ducret rightly points out that Merleau-Ponty is the author of that Phénomenologie de la Perception with which and against which Bourdieu worked for a substantial part of his life—Ducret 2005, pp. 59–65, 64).7 The founding topoi of the sociologist, in which we find the concepts I mentioned above, are all too well known; habitus are also built through visual relationships, which fulfill an essential adaptive function; incorporation proceeds by introjecting what sight had largely contributed to entifying in its otherness. But it is to a set of notes accompanying Bourdieu’s photography in the field that I would like to bring the reader’s attention, since it seems to me that they further contribute to defining the framework of the relationships between anthropology, gaze, and ethnographic practice. The sociologist made use of photography initially in his research work in Algeria and then later in that carried out in Béarn (France). According to his notes, he produced a couple of thousand images, linked to these two fieldwork sessions, first with a Zeiss Icoflex (which he sorely regretted), then with a Rolleiflex (considered more suitable for “camouflaged” use in the field), to subsequently completely abandon the practice, without a motivated, clearly stated reason (pressing commitments, theoretical activity, academic work, and teaching duties, etc.). Some of these

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photographs, slightly over 600 considering those filed at the Fondation Pierre Bourdieu in Geneva, have survived, while the majority, again according to the sociologist, were lost during his numerous, complicated transfers. It is on the photographs taken in Algeria, in the years between 1958 and 1961, that I would like to dwell.8 It was, we should remember, the most intense phase of research in the African country still at war for its liberation, which would later result in the publication of many writings, some supported by more or less extensive series of images (Bourdieu 1961, 1963, 1964, 1972). Bourdieu’s Algerian photographs of (as well as those that, as mentioned above, he would produce a little later in Béarn, albeit with some differences that need not be discussed here), may seem, at first glance, images à la sauvette, according to the famous phrase used for Henri Cartier-Bresson. Photographs, that is, taken spontaneously and poorly constructed, with simple means, without pretensions, for the purposes of personal, soft memory—in the periods on the sidelines of the sociologist’s more intense, systematic activity—of scientific otium (I use the term otium in the sense attributed to it by Roland Barthes, of an existential condition dedicated to the production of images and representations, as opposed to that of studium—Barthes 1980). Nothing Could Be Further from the Truth These images, in reality, in themselves and in their relationship with the text (I am thinking in particular of Travail et travailleurs en Algérie), forcefully pose the problem of the image’s function in the construction of scientific knowledge and, in a wider perspective, the visual quality of knowledge in the social sciences, of eidesis in relation to thought. Beyond evenemential circumstances (some ways of childhood life in the villages of the interior, a break during a trip, the market scenes, in the sahel or in an urban environment, the battle between modernity and archaism in the streets of Algiers, the work of artisans and that in colonial capitalist companies, settlements “normalised” by the war and French repression, farming jobs, etc.), they essentially describe the level of social practices. In other words, they describe the interaction of actors, identified through the evidence of their body, with other actors. But they also describe the interaction of these actors, as a whole, with the researcher-observer. In short, they put us into contact not with realities, more or less objectively described and interpreted, but with systems of relationships between juxtaposed or opposed segments of reality. They are therefore the most

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visible sign of that empirical knowledge strategy that marks what the sociologist himself calls the conversion (from philosophy to social sciences and, in particular, to ethnography and sociology). These images indicate the posture of the observer in the context of ethnographic practices, and the writings that derive from them, and therefore constitute an instrument for understanding relationships of reflexivity in the social sciences (at least of that reflexivity which Bourdieu felt he adhered to; a reflexivity far removed from further attitudes, which Leonardo Piasere called fundamentalist—Piasere 2002—not particularly culturalist and based above all on the analysis of contexts and social practices). “Photography as Pierre Bourdieu put it into practice,” observed Ducret, “consists of testing bodies, positions, and somatic attitudes. But bodies in a social situation, at work, on the street, during a break, women at work, men in bars. Bodies that show their ages, noble elders, children laughing, teenagers striking a pose” (Ducret 2005, p. 64). But, even more importantly, by carefully analysing the images and reading what the scholar wrote about their position within his overall work, we can see that the photographs were, as well as a sign, an instrument for the conversion of the gaze of which I wrote before. This conversion led Bourdieu, by his own admission, to engage with the two major field studies mentioned previously, to understand the importance of social practices and the central role they have in building an idea of science. Photographs are the tool that makes it possible, for example, through a reworking of the theme of social affiliation, to move from the idea of the system to the idea of strategy in the context of his studies on kinship. They allow Bourdieu to understand that his investigations of the célibat des aînés in the native area are not only sorts of “sad tropes the other way round,” as he wrote, an experimental, and almost provocative investigation, for the French climate of the time, into what was near and known, but an unveiling of the complex, profound determination that binds observer and observed and that merges them into a common, inter-reactive social, and cultural system. The research in Béarn, Bourdieu in fact recalled, started with his contemplation of an old photograph of his classmates, and with his reflections on it, together with one of them, at the time employed in a nearby town, regarding those who had been considered immariables. “The most visible sign of the conversion of the gaze that involves the adoption of an observer’s posture,” he wrote in his Esquisse pour une auto-analyze, written in 2001, published first in Germany, in 2002, and then in France

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in 2004, after his death (therefore, in some way, a sort of spiritual testament of his long journey through the realm of reflexivity), was “the intensive use I made then [again in the investigation in Béarn] … of photography” (Bourdieu 2004, pp. 81–82). And it was in an interview granted to Franz Schultheis on 26 June 2001, that Bourdieu clearly summarized what I have tried, in turn, to summarize. “The sympathetic ethnologist’s gaze that I directed at Algeria,” he said, “I could also direct at myself, at the people of my country, at my parents, at the accent of my father, my mother; and I was able to recover all this without being dramatic, which is one of the great problems of all uprooted intellectuals, prisoners of the populist alternative or, on the contrary, of the shame of being linked to class racism. I have assumed, through men very similar to the Kabyles, men with whom I had spent my childhood, the gaze of grateful understanding that distinguishes ethnology. The use of photography, first in Algeria, then in Béarn, undoubtedly contributed greatly to and accompanied this transformation of the gaze which presupposes – I do not believe that the word is too strong – what amounted to a conversion. Photography is, in reality, a manifestation of the distance of the observer who records, and who never forgets he is recording (which is not always easy in familiar situations, […]); but it also presupposes the proximity of the familiar, attentive and sensitive to the imperceptible details that familiarity allows and requires him to learn and interpret in the field (is it not said of someone who behaves well, in a friendly way, that they are full of regard?), to all those minute details of practice that often elude the most attentive ethnologist. Photography is linked to the relationship that I have never stopped having with my object, which I never forget is made of people on whom I cast my gaze, which I would gladly call, if I did not fear ridicule, affectionate, and often full of emotion” (Schultheis 2003, pp. 19–44, 42 and 44). I have written above about an apparent, minute, and personal documentary function of photography and an effective hermeneutic function. It is Bourdieu himself who guides us. Photography, he argues, has in fact had essentially two functions for him: “the documentary function: there are cases in which I took photographs so that I could remember, and then make descriptions, that is [to provide evidence of] objects that I couldn’t take away with me; [but] in other cases, photography was a way of looking, […] a way of intensifying my gaze, I could have looked much better, and then, often, it was a way of approaching an issue” (Frisinghelli and Schultheis 2003, pp. 21 and 23).

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To summarize, through photography in the field in Algeria—which was as we have seen a fundamental element of empirical research as well as of Bourdieu’s theoretical approach—important objectives are pursued. In the first place, the social construction of the inhabited space is perfected through the description of the contrast between places of tradition and places of colonial domination. The photograph is here affirmed as a sort of sociogram of observed reality, of its habitat and of the internal relationships between people, with a theoretical-methodological stance that would soon lead Bourdieu to use it to clarify the complex structure of the societies observed, particularly of European society, to which he returned after his work in Africa.9 Secondly, as Christian Kravagna sensed, an important heuristic objective (a goal I would say central to any ethnographic activity) is realized, that of the restoration of coevalness, through a systematic action against that refusal that characterizes, as Fabian has pointed out, ethnographic practices (Kravagna 2007). The synchronicity of the photographic act, its substantiation of the ethnographic meeting process, translates into a reduction of allochronism, a readmission of the researcher and subjects of research into the same temporal dimension. Thirdly, the process of constructing the gaze is objectified, so to speak, its sequences are identified, and its use patterns are defined. Photographs, in particular, as far as we are concerned, the result of an ethnographic posture based on a radical questioning of the visual activity, familiarize us, through concrete objects, with the complexity of systems underlying the gaze and representation in ethnographic practice. My brief exploration of neighboring disciplines stops here. It seems to me that we have drawn from them important assumptions for the development of an ethnography, and one that is visual, and not naive: the complexity of the experience of the gaze, first of all, in the construction of the researcher’s body and of the dynamics of social relationships with the Other; the central role played by the process of translating field data into images, images which, far from being “devices for illustrating our themes” or “recording instruments” (Bateson 1962, pp. 49–54, 49) seem to be tools to forge (and acknowledge) forms and models of the gaze within ethnographic practice.

Homecoming What was collected in the restricted disciplinary context of these acquisitions and how was it elaborated? How has visual activity been critically

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taken into account in ethnographic work? Let’s try to compare, after a general preliminary consideration, some observations of Tomas Csordas and Tim Ingold, scholars who are sensitive to the consideration of visual themes and have a certain affinity with the theoretical field outlined above. The general consideration is as follows. As Marano recalled, “the consequences of Bourdieu’s theories, but especially of Merleau-Ponty’s, have produced a knock-on effect in recent anthropological theories” (Marano 2013, p. 16). Scholars with disparate critical viewpoints have engaged with the two authors, offering a differentiated range of ideas regarding the body and incorporation, with sometimes interesting repercussions on aspects related to fieldwork and ethnographic theory. With a superfetation, however, at times disorganized, of efforts to define, translated into the use of neologisms characteristic of an ideological and tautological approach. Marano also remembers, “perduction (Piasere, 2002), sedimentation (Leder 1990; Hastrup 1995), entanglement (Ingold), emplacement (Casey, Howes) or enaction, (Varela), and with them all the scapes (visualscapes, landscapes, sensescapes, taskscapes )” (ibid., p. 183), produced and prompted by pragmatic, topographical, and ecological turning points, directly or indirectly derived from a reworking of Merleau-Ponty and Bourdieu. Many of the positions mentioned above, then, again with reference to the two French thinkers, are oriented toward that sensory ethnography and anthropology of the senses mentioned at the beginning.10 The visual issue in ethnography is not however dealt with, either in serious critical works, or in basic textbooks. That set of considerations that help define the complexity of the gaze in ethnographic practice, subtracting it from automatism and ontologism, and from its mortifying positivistic approach, is not taken into account in all its fruitful hermeneutic function. Sometimes the visual specificity of ethnography appears, in the context of so-called “visual anthropology” (or more properly, as far as I am concerned, of “visual ethnography”), but it is largely limited to the construction methods of the visual document and only touches in passing on the central question of the gaze. Visual anthropologists have rarely questioned the specific forms of visual processing in fieldwork, even when the concept of fieldwork itself is being discussed.11 They have more often examined how an ethnographic photograph, film, or video is made and what the specific nature of this product (of this reporting method) may be in the wider category of anthropological

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activity.12 They have failed to comment on the questions and answers presented by Merleau-Ponty and Bourdieu. Returning to the wider disciplinary context, I have already mentioned the limitations of Fabian’s important book. It should also be noted that the key text that introduced a radical rethinking of ethnographic practices, in addition to shifting attention to the methods of reporting rather than those of investigation (the making of ethnographic texts ), obliterates visual reporting (Clifford and Marcus 1986). As do the critical works we mostly consulted, just when ethnography as an activity in the field and as a writing practice became most problematic, from the 1980s up to the early years of this century. These works skip over the problem of the body-gazefield-ethnography relationship, in both its theoretical and methodological aspects, impoverishing critical discussion on ethnography. I would like to offer a few brief examples, without claiming to be exhaustive. Observers observed, the critical work of historiography dedicated to fieldwork, edited by George W. Stocking Jr which generations of scholars have drawn upon, ignores the existence of the problematic issue we are dealing with. The essay by the editor dedicated to British anthropology skims over the expedition to the Straits of Torres, mentioning only, in a succinct comment, the presence of the complex, unfortunate character of Anthony Wilkin, “recruited to handle the photography”,13 ignoring the crucial visual issues connected with that experience, as well as the first use of a film camera in actual field surveys, to then completely omit the importance for Malinowski of photography in the process of collecting ethnographic data. The work dedicated to the construction of anthropology through fieldnotes, edited by Roger Sanjek, seems to ignore the fact that, at least starting with Malinowski, some of the fieldnotes were taken with traditional cameras, film cameras, or video cameras, and that consequently these notes had their own distinctive formal structure, which contributed to redesigning the forms and models of observation. Such disregard is also found in two other works, which in other aspects are of notable worth, edited by Kirsten Hastrup (one in collaboration with Peter Hervik), dedicated to the ethnographic relationship as a result of the encounter between theory and experience, and despite the scholar’s attention for aspects related to the body, to the incorporation of ethnographic techniques, starting with the questioning of the visualist paradigm, on the basis of a close criticism of Cartesian models. Some timid hints at the specific nature of the ethnographic gaze can be sensed between the lines of the work dedicated to the boundaries and levels of elaboration

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of the social sciences, edited by Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, while no specific consideration can be found in the reflections on fieldwork by Paul Rabinow and Michael Agar. Only in the book edited by Allan Megill dedicated to the rethinking of objectivity, with references to realism and ethnographic practices, do we find an essay, written by Dogmar Barnouw, who, starting with the analysis of Siegfried Kracauer’s thought, questions the relationship between historiography and image, and reflects on the forms of objectivity constructed through visual media. We cannot fail to admit that there has been a certain lack of interest in the issue.14 This lack of interest is also found in texts with a more clearly didactic vocation, such as that written in Italy in the late 1990s (containing a wide, carefully selected anthology of passages from international anthropology) dedicated to research practices15 ; or another, more recent text enjoying international diffusion, whose title once again contains a reference to the ways of seeing, despite this reference being ignored in the chapters comprising the work (Wolcott 2008). I could continue at length, mentioning a wide range of titles which seem evasive or reticent with respect to the topic: in short, this is a lasting, widespread disregard that extends, incidentally, also to the adjacent field of Visual Studies.16 Csordas and Ingold, on the other hand, tackle the matter of the gaze in relation to specific anthropological issues and practice in the field. Csordas, who analyses the two authors to whom I have devoted attention, and translates them into updated anthropological terms by starting with a critique of their positions, makes a considerable effort to make relevant to our discipline the needs expressed by phenomenology and, in particular, by Merleau-Ponty (Csordas 1990, pp. 5–47). At the heart of his reflections are the body and incorporation processes: one “understood as a biological and material entity and [the other] as an undetermined methodological terrain, defined by perceptual experience and by forms of presence and commitment in the world” (Csordas 2003, pp. 19– 42, 21).17 “The problem,” he writes, “is to understand how the body is an existential condition of life. We certainly have bodies, but there are many forms of incorporation and many styles of body objectification; these, in turn, are of crucial importance for understanding culture” (ibidem). Starting with this, his peroration of a cultural phenomenology, elaborated by “moving dialogically between textuality and incorporation and between representation and being-in-the-world,” a synthesis of the perspective immediately linked to the ego and sensible experience, and of cultural and social needs, is not without contradictions and unresolved

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issues. Nevertheless, it constitutes an original effort that is more solid, from the theoretical and methodological point of view, than the watereddown elaborations of Culture and Personality school or of psychologistic approaches, and more operational than Gregory Bateson’s theoretical assumptions about vision as a result of the complex interaction between mind and environment. In his search, however, for the tools that allow us to read the ways in which being-in-the world builds the body and culture, it seems to me that Csordas touches on the issues related to the function of the senses, and in particular to the sense of sight, whose central role in the formation of experience he also acknowledges on numerous occasions. The complexity of the operations connected to the sense of sight, the concrete ways in which they affect incorporation practices from time to time, the specificity of processing that each of them propitiates in being-in-theworld, are only touched upon. And we know nothing about what happens to this body when the concrete manifestation of being-in-the-world is ethnography, when the incorporation processes take place at the heart of the ethnographic relationship, in fieldwork, between looks, visions, and divergent, different, potentially antagonistic representations. What body does the ethnographer’s gaze construct? How does this body and gaze contribute to building the subjectivity of the ethnographic object? How does it transform a referent into a subject (a fundamental operation for comprehending any process of interpretation)? Csordas also stops at this threshold, and the use he makes of phenomenological notions takes him away from the field of specific potentials that they seem to outline. Ingold, with his notions of skilled vision and environmental perception, also comes close to dealing specifically with our issues (Ingold 2000; Janowski and Ingold 2012). It is no coincidence that his main influences include Bateson, James Gibson, Jakob J. von Uexküll, Martin Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. The substantial continuity between what appears natural, social, and cultural produces a substantially unitary body that becomes an instrument of the concrete vision of the world. The biological apparatus is actively integrated into the process of the making of cultural data. The gaze is shaped through the perception of the environment and becomes essential in the utilitarian orientation of the presence in the world. And above all, the relational approach and awareness of the continuous formal and substantial adjustment between objects, between subjects and environments, and between subjects and subjects, potentially

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contribute to establishing the morphology of that field of interaction that we call fieldwork. But, over time, in the body-world dichotomy, Ingold seems to shift the emphasis more to the world, resulting in an ecological conception that entrusts it with a sort of deterministic predominance in the formation of knowledge. Perceptual relationships are based in the natural and social environment and the discreet ability of the gaze is rather left in the background. Curiously, the notion of expert gaze, as a result of the practices adapting to reality performed by human groups dedicated to particular activities that select peculiar forms of visual ability, is not taken into consideration at the heart of the ethnographic tradition, or in the context of the cognitive practices characterizing it. Little is known, therefore, also through Ingold, of the complex issues that underlie the training and practice of the ethnographer’s expert gaze.18

Ways of Seeing and Ethnographic Practices So far I have attempted to briefly outline a historical-critical path based on some of the authors with whom, for better or for worse, I think we must deal with, because at the basis of our ethnographic practice, especially when, as is increasingly the case, it involves photography and filming, I believe we need to closely monitor our gaze. It is not important what you look at, but how you look, and the critical and self-critical effort of every ethnographer must be based on a systematic analysis of their own way of seeing, as well as of others’. Visual ethnography, therefore, can constitute the foundation for a wide range of research practices, not on the basis of the naive assumptions with which it has been mostly viewed (along the lines of the commonplace that “an image is worth more than a thousand words”), but as a critical tool for assessing the gaze, how the latter builds the operator’s body, and the field of significant relationships that are created around it. In short, the sense of ethnography does not lie in understanding how things are in a given section of reality that we have chosen to deal with, but how those things are within us; how they have been constructed through the sentient body we live in. Only this perception of reality can lead to the construction of an ethnography that records the data in front of us in a way that is neither naive nor superficial. Evidently, this is an approach that can promote ethnographic and filming practices that are completely different from those we are used to.

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In order to better define these practices, let us now try to return to some of Merleau-Ponty’s and Buordieu’s disregarded ideas, which I feel will allow us to find related topoi that can help us re-orient them. We will remember the contrast discussed by Merleau-Ponty between the body as an information machine and the effective body of the sentient subject. The former presupposes an external world, a perceptual apparatus and intentionality, again external to the subject, to communicate what is perceived and processed. The fundamental purpose of ethnography produced through the body as an information machine is to transmit to others (the natives or, in any case, the subjects directly concerned and the wider world) our vision of things, what we have observed. In this process, the actual body completely disappears and, consequently, it is no longer understood how this vision was formed and at what levels the consciousness was involved. While, in fact, the sense of sight goes through those cognitive stages that I have mentioned (looking, seeing, observing, representing), ethnographers must ensure the completeness and depth of the process. Through a full and conscious use of the gaze, they can build the subject within themselves, transforming it from a mere analogue reference into experienced reality. Ethnography thus starts with this first indispensable step, in which the observer receives the subject in their consciousness, through their body and gaze; the first step of ethnographic practice is to transform a restricted need of our body and to construct within ourselves the reality of the observed subject. But this construction opens the way to another, symmetrical process of emergence. It is the subject who, through the completeness of the ethnographer’s visual practice, acquires self-awareness. If the task of ethnography is to maieutically bring social actors to narrate their own story, if ethnography has the task of highlighting, as I wrote about Bourdieu, the mechanisms through which bodies become social actors, the ethnographer’s awareness proceeds hand in hand with the awareness of the subject involved in the ethnography. It will be remembered that according to the French sociologist, it is precisely a process of representation—that is, of a conscious coagulation of the gaze in a complex cultural formation, such as that accomplished with photography—which triggers, on the one hand, the “conversion of the observer’s gaze,” and on the other, the entification of those who are observed as subjects. In that meeting place that is the image, both of them refine the reasons for their meeting on a common ground. It is no coincidence that Bourdieu sees

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photography as an instrument that had a decisive influence on the conversion of his gaze, on the relational postures between him and social actors, because it is only through the completeness of the process that effective vision is achieved; only when representation has completed a difficult, complex course of entification, can we really say that we have seen. And only an ethnography that goes to the heart of the process of building images can really be said to be based on the gaze. This had been intuited by both Malinowski and Bateson when, albeit in different contexts, they stressed the corrective and hermeneutic power of photographic and film representations in fieldwork. And this may be the final step that allows us to understand, on the one hand, why the visualist paradigm is so important in ethnographic practice and should not be denied, and on the other what its essential critical function may be. I would like to try to make tangible (or visible) the epistemological and methodological ideas I have expressed so far with some examples taken from my photographic modus operandi in the context of fieldwork. As I stated at the beginning, in fact (and as I have often reiterated elsewhere), photography, thanks to the bare essentiality of the frame, with its radical epistemic function vis-à-vis representation processes, appears to be the most suitable and versatile tool for effecting pragmatic checks on theoretical formulations relating to the gaze. The images to which I will refer are among those produced in a long study conducted in a small mountain village in central Calabria, Ragonà, in 1978–1979; ethnographic and photographic research was carried out in order to draft a sort of experimental screenplay for a film, subsequently shot in 16 mm in color, directed by Maricla Boggio, with photography by Franco Lecca, and produced by Italian state broadcaster RAI.19 My photographic survey, carried out in black and white in Leica format, resulted in slightly fewer than 4000 images for a community of almost 400 inhabitants, observed for a period of about a year, with multiple stays on site lasting each time for two to three weeks (Faeta 2006, pp. 74– 88). In the images, the village is represented in the salient features of its cultural and social life, with a monographic approach that explores the environment, the inhabited area, the interiors of the houses, the construction materials used, the cultivation of the fields, and economic activities (sheep farming, timber, and coal), daily life, social, ritual and ceremonial relationships, the magic-religious protection of the environment and the territory, the cult of the dead, the action of the civic administration (progressive at the time), the elementary school (the only school

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present in the village), the appearance of the inhabitants, and the children’s games. Finally, particular attention is dedicated to the feast of the patron deity (Our Lady of the Poor), a sort of total social fact in the sense intended by Marcel Mauss. I feel it is appropriate here to offer some preliminary remarks on the relationships between ethnography, photography, and film. As I have already mentioned, photography played an intermediate, connective function in the complex ethnographic setting of that study. It was a matter of describing, in analytical, concise terms, a local context, its difficulties and its cultural choices, its effort to adapt to difficult historical circumstances and to control the environment and social relations, the critical event, the festival, which showed collective life and made it permeable to ethnographic survey and anthropological analysis. It was a matter of suggesting, at the same time, the critical and stylistic code that the cinematographic narration would have, translating an anthropological system into images. It was a matter of setting up an ethnographic representation, rescuing it from the older, and more misleading, rhetorical conventions affecting that area and that subject (above all, populist and neorealist approaches). The experience of Ragonà, as it developed, incidentally, shifting attention for a moment from the plane of research to that of its representation, shows that not only is it possible to envisage entirely visual ethnographic reports, but also to plan them step by step and in relation to various reproduction media and languages. In short, it is possible to imagine an ethnographic referent which is gradually poured into the image following an established path. In that case, to use a comparatively fitting comparison that illustrates the critical process followed, photography fulfilled the role that writing has in the elaboration of a fictional film. It built a sort of screenplay that allowed the film to be made in line with the theoretical project behind it. Of course, the type of script produced was completely freed from the constraints of the dual semiotic code typical of written narrative (Barthes), but made it possible to maintain a close relationship with the reality represented. It left the viewer free to think of reality in terms of images, but restricted this freedom to the formal setting of the photographic frame, a common matrix of expressive forms that engaged and collaborated with each other. Therefore photographic writing fulfilled an ethnographic function in the proper sense of the term, but also a semiotic function, in the sense of a process of signification through images of images, of criticism of the eye.

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So far I have provided some essential information and reflections on that experience. I had the chance to see for myself, every time I had an opportunity to show some of these images, even to audiences accustomed to issues of cultural anthropology and visual ethnography, that the meaning of the conceptual operations I had carried out in the field was disregarded or misunderstood. Above all, in terms of the relationships between ethnography, photography, and film, but also regarding the ethnographic function of the individual images. I was been forced to overlook the problematic issues that I have mentioned so far, and to fall back on a basic affirmation that the nature of my representation was non-objective, that it was a formal experiment breaking away from the precepts of late neo-realism, which at the time still held sway in the field when it came to recounting the farming worlds of southern Italy. These latter aspects may have appealed to my audiences, but were far from being my main interest. As far as we are concerned, from the wide range of materials that I have just mentioned, I will focus first of all on the portrait of a child, whom we will call Salvatore [photographs 1–3].20 This is actually one portrait, divided into three frames. Once I had started the shoot, after careful preparatory work, I let our respective positions remain unchanged for a few minutes, during which time I took the three photographs, a few seconds apart from each other (I remember that the analogue camera needed to be wound on, with all the consequences this had for the shot and the shooting interval itself). What was the reason for this procedure, for this conscious temporal expansion? I needed to take this approach in order to construct the subject portrayed in my consciousness; and this was something which it seemed crucial, from an ethnographic perspective, to recount. The children, to whom I will return shortly, constituted a large, deprived group, heading toward total social marginalization (which would end, a few years later, in mass emigration), who were present on the social scene as a collective entity. But what was the actual individual identity of these children, used to living in constant close contact with one another? Interpretative approaches had to be found. Salvatore set himself up as a subject through the three spaced-out, close-up shots. This dilated time of the photographic shoot allowed the image-making process to take root inside me. At the same time it constituted the platform within which the subject was entrusted, and his awareness of being constituted as such. Berger, in an essay dedicated to the uses of photography, warned about the sterility of the photographic image when it is constructed with the

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attitude of someone who is “a reporter addressing the rest of the world,” recalling on the contrary that a photographer must become someone who has the task of “incorporating the image into contemporary social and political memory, instead of using it as a significant substitute for reality.” He also recalled that the best images, those that have the possibility of “being narrated over time,” as historical time incorporated by the social memory and social action of the protagonists, are the images that are not made for a third world (of the spectator) but for the subjects portrayed and, I add, for themselves (Berger 1995, pp. 39–68).21 Because only the construction of the subject within our observing consciousness can transform a referent into a subject of himself. So, to summarize, Salvatore is certainly not the child as he is, to be shown to others; but neither is he, as has often been understood, a child translated into an image through an aesthetic experiment that satisfies the expectations of a spectator tired of the old realist models which contemplated the world of underdevelopment and social exclusion. I venture to say that Salvatore is the ethnographic image of himself, recognized as such both by me and by himself (when he established his own condition as subject). An intention, in some ways similar, to reconstruct significant social temporalities, can be found in the long sequence that I dedicated to all the children of the community, lined up in the same open space in a corner of the village [for an example: photographs 4–7].22 My aim was to represent the real extent of their need, which deeply conditions the future lives of the youngest. I felt that the real measure of childhood poverty and deprivation would not be clear to me until I had seen all the children, and lined them up along the wall of my mind. And only through the long sequence that I made after a few days of work did I become aware of the modulation of need within the social body of the children; starting with the realization that the ephemeral conditions of temporary well-being could only be a source of embarrassment and unease. The photographic survey of the children of the village was used to build a knowledge that went beyond statistics and temporal coercions, and restored to the local context an (at least possible) coincidence between time constructed and narrated and the time of awareness and social memory. Also in this case, the series of images, all the same and all different, was not intended to provide a sociologically reliable representation of some age groups within the village, nor to impress with a captivating experimental game of overlapping and juxtapositions, but to record the dynamics of the exact perception of a context, through sight, through its extension, through a

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concrete body that lives in a concrete historical and existential space. In my opinion, we need to keep in check the onset of reality, in the epiphenomenal forms that photographic reporting generally propitiates, and aim at the heart of the conceptual nucleus that it presents to the gaze. I could continue at length, discussing other sets of images, but I believe that a substantial part of that model of observation and representation of reality suggested to us in the reflections of Merleau-Ponty and Bourdieu, indispensable for constructing the ethnographic gaze, has been brought to light. To conclude, I hope I have been able to introduce a complex idea of visual ethnography: by outlining, first, the theoretical connection between the gaze and the critical construction of ethnographic and anthropological knowledge; and then by identifying a reflective posture that informs the analysis of the relational fields established by the activity of representation (by the images). I would like to finish, however, with a quote from a film, which dedicates attention to the relationship of gaze between a Westerner and the Other, namely, Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975). The man speaking is a native, and answers the protagonist, a reporter questioning him pressingly, as follows: “Mr. Locke, your questions are much more revealing about yourself than any answer would be about me.” This thought is something we must always carry with us in the field, together with our camera.

Notes 1. Francesco Marano, in an admirable book to which I will refer later, dedicates a chapter to what he calls post-visualist ethnographies. I personally believe that the habit of defining as post those things which cannot be easily classified according to customary definitions, and which we somehow want to hastily dismiss, is not the best way forward. Perhaps this label, which covers—as is often the case—highly disparate things, is unsuitable for a crisis that should not be ascribed to the visual (which on the contrary prevails in our domain, as in society as a whole), but to a lack of its anthropological theorization. Cf. Marano (2013). 2. Herzfeld, also on the basis of Constance Classen’s work, devoted attention to the hegemony of the visual paradigm in anthropology, in a detailed analysis that refutes the idea of vision as an objective mechanism, remembering that the senses are not “transparent”, rather they are highly codified tools that translate bodily experience into culturally recognisable

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3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

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forms (Herzfeld 2001). The work by Classen to which Herzfeld makes particular reference is Classen (1993). This is what we see, for example, in the work of Johannes Fabian, although characterised by an acute exegesis of the limits of the western vision and of the visual paradigm in anthropology, but in which the gaze appears as a mere culturalised abstraction, devoid of bodily reference, dedicated to the necessary but certainly not sufficient activity, of the spatio-temporal ordering of representations (tables, graphs, maps, cartographies). See Fabian (2002) particularly Chapter 4, pp. 105–141. By way of example, among an extensive production, (see Schneider and Wright 2010; “Field - A Journal of Socially-Engaged Art Criticism” 2018); here, see in particular T. Ingold (2018), Anthropology Between Art and Science: An Essay on the Meaning of Research. With specific reference to the relationship between art and science or the return to art to rediscover the humility that science has lost, see the considerations of Ingold (2016, pp. 5–23). In 1972, the BBC produced, with Berger’s scientific direction, a television series entitled Ways of Seeing, conceived as a straightforward, thoughtful introduction to the study of images, through the re-enactment of the daily experience of seeing and of those who could see. “The eye does not simply photograph objects: it encodes their distinctive features. These do not consist of the sensible qualities that we attribute to the things around us, but of a set of relationships.” (Lévi-Strauss 1984, p. 141). Regarding the complex relationships between Lévi-Strauss and Merleau-Ponty, I refer briefly to the explicit testimony of the former, written as the motivation for the dedication to the memory of the latter, who had died a few months previously, in La Pensée sauvage (1962). I would like to mention that if Bourdieu had not immersed himself in Algerian affairs, he would probably have completed his doctoral thesis on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty; see Calhoun (2012, pp. VII–XVI, XII). For a sample of these images, accompanied by information and critical reflections, (see Ducret and Schultheis 2005; Bourdieu 2012a, b). These volumes refer more or less directly to the exhibition, organized with the decisive contribution of “Camera Austria” at the Kunsthaus in Graz in the autumn of 2003, and subsequently itinerant. In short, there is a close relationship between the Bourdieu photographerethnographer and the Bourdieu dedicated to the socio-anthropological study of the uses and functions of photography, and this relationship matures in his fieldwork in Algeria. On the social functions of photography in Europe, with particular reference to the French region of Béarn, see Bourdieu and Bourdieu (1965), pp. 164–174 (an English translation

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11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

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exists of the article: Bourdieu and Bourdieu 2004, pp. 601–616), and Bourdieu (1965). For a discussion of the various positions, together with a reliable bibliography, I would like to refer once more to Marano, particularly pp. 141–197. As, for example, in the widely admired work edited by Devereaux and Hillman, 1995. But see also the classic texts by Wagner (1979) and Collier and Collier (1986). Among the vast literature, I would here like to mention Banks and Morphy (1997), Banks (2001, 2007), Grimshaw (2003), and Banks and Ruby (2011). Wilkin, born in 1878, was a remarkable explorer and photographer, who after taking part in the Torres Stait Islands expedition, worked in North Africa, particularly in Egypt and among the Berbers of Algeria, dying at the age of 23 in Cairo, in 1901. He actively collaborated with the Egyptologist David Randal-Maciver. See Wilkin 1900; Randall-Maciver, Wilkin, Libyan Notes, 1901. I mention here the figure of Wilkin, and the lack of historiographic attention dedicated to him, because he is one of the many examples of those who have worked with photography, cinema and today video being excluded from critical discussion. Cf. Stocking Jr. (1983a, b, pp. 70–120), Sanjek (1990), Megill (1994), Barnouw (1994, pp. 127–150), Hastrup and Hervik (1994), Hastrup (1995), Gupta and Ferguson (1997), Rabinow (2007), and Agar (2008). The book (Fabietti and Matera 1997), which displays considerable theoretical commitment, dedicates the whole of its first part and numerous passages of the other five comprising it to the methods of field research, also dwelling on the problems raised by the way ethnographic information is presented in anthropological literature. At no point, however, is attention paid to the function of the gaze in fieldwork and the production of reports. Sometimes this continued state of oblivion assumes paradoxical aspects: in a small introductory text to fieldwork, for example, the author, while providing basic bibliographic references, writes, with reference to a chapter expressly dedicated to investigative techniques: “for reasons of specificity and relevance I have left aside the specialist line of visual anthropology. For those interested in this issue, see, by way of introduction the extensive references offered by Loizos 1993 and Banks 2001” (Ronzon 2008, pp. 136–137). The central problem of field research is shelved, in short, because it is considered to be specialist in nature, and the reference is to two fairly dated texts which, above all, lie within the narrow (a-problematic) specialization mentioned. For a clear demonstration of the lack of interest reserved for the concrete forms into which the ethnographer’s gaze is translated, see Clifford (1988,

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17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

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1997) (in the latter of these, see, in particular, the third chapter); but see also Mirzoeff (1999, 2015). The article broadly translates into Italian the paper entitled Embodiment and Cultural Phenomenology, in Weiss, Fern Haber (1999, pp. 143–162). For a development of Ingold’s themes, characterised by attention to the expert gaze (also that of the ethnographer and anthropologist) in relation to places and habitats, see Grasseni (2003, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2011, pp. 19–44). Cfr. L’assenza del presente. Storia di una comunità marginale, directed by M. Boggio, photography by F. Lecca, a REIAC Film production, Rome, by Marina Piperno for Rai-Radiotelevisione Italiana, Servizio Ricerca e Sperimentazione Programmi, 155 minutes, 16 mm., colour, script by M. Boggio, F. Faeta, M. Meligrana, L. M. Lombardi Satriani (1980). The film served as the basis for an eponymous book, Boggio (1981). The portrait has already been published in Faeta (1996), photographs 114–16, and in Faeta (2003b, pp. 201–202). But by the author in this regard see also Berger (2015). See also Faeta (1996), photographs 121–5.

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CHAPTER 11

Dennis and Barbara Tedlock: The Dialogic Turn in Anthropology Angela Biscaldi

In the following pages, I will discuss the contribution made by Dennis and Barbara Tedlock’s dialogical anthropology to ethnographic methods, especially in connection with two interrelated areas of inquiry: the collection, study, and transcription of oral narratives, and the anthropologist’s methods of participating in the life of communities in the field. These two areas converge in a theoretical and methodological proposal for a dialogical anthropology whose key points will be illustrated below.

Poetics: Collecting, Transcribing, and Interpreting Texts For three decades, from the seventies to the nineties, Dennis Tedlock and his wife Barbara conducted field research in Nigeria, Brazil and Mongolia; above all, however, they worked among the Quiché Maya in Guatemala and the Zuni Indians of New Mexico (Tedlock 1972, 1993; Tedlock and Tedlock 1975; Tedlock 1991b, 1992a, b, 2005).

A. Biscaldi (B) Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Milan, Milan, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 V. Matera and A. Biscaldi (eds.), Ethnography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51720-5_11

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Dennis Tedlock describes these two communities with the following words: The language spoken at Zuni is an isolate (like Basque), spoken by about seven thousand people; the language spoken at Momostenango is Quiché, spoken by more than half a million people and belonging to the Mayan family, whose speakers total several millions. Both communities grow crops that are indigenous to the New World, both centre everyday religious practice on the veneration of those who were once living, both have priests who visit sacred springs and peaks to pray for the living, both occupy a point at which a vertical axis passes through the centre of a four-cornered world, and both think of distant places as occupying distant times. Both these places began their relationships with Europeans by participating in armed resistance to Spanish expeditions that included Tlaxcalan Indian auxiliaries from Mexico; by comparison with neighbouring Indian towns, both are traditionalist in religious matters and both are progressivist when it comes to technology. In the matter of storytelling, the two towns could not be more different (Tedlock 1983, p. 14).

These years of continuous, painstaking work in the two communities— whose “storytelling” is so very different—led to a systematic reflection on the issues involved in the ethnography of the spoken word that I believe to be particularly innovative and illuminating for two spheres of thought. The first regards our thinking about natives’ oral narratives: how can we understand them? How should we transcribe them? And how can they be conveyed to the reader as faithfully as possible? Dennis Tedlock notes that there has been a lengthy tradition of “literal” translations of native Americans’ oral narratives (starting from the Boasian crib) that have been unable to give the reader a feel for the text’s complexity: neither its stylistic aspects (its use of verbs indicating prolonged action, for instance, or onomatopoeia), nor its oral and paralinguistic features such as changes in intonation and tone of voice, loudness, pausing, and the narrator’s gestures. To render these features of oral storytelling effectively in translation, Tedlock suggests that they be transcribed with an agile system of notation, which “should not be so complex as to slow the eye of the sight-reader below the proper pace for the reader’s voice” (Tedlock 1983, p. 6). This system of notation should be similar to that of a theatre script or musical score: effective without overburdening the text.

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With such a notation scheme, pauses can be represented by line breaks, as in written poetry; an unusually loud tone of voice can be represented in capital letters; unusual softness, along with unusual voice qualities and various other features can be noted in parentheses at the left-hand margin, as is commonly done in plays. The goal is to restore—visually, on the page, as well as in the reader’s mind—oral narrative’s temporal dimension as a performed event, considering the audible narrative as poetry rather than prose, as in this example of a transcribed Zuni story (1983, p. 23): Now I’ll tell you one of those Zuni stories. (opening a book) My apologies for relying on the SCRIPT This is the story of the Shumeekuli. Shumekuli is something like a kachina, one of these beings that wears a mask whenever you see him — when they’re among themselves they don’t wear masks; when they come to visit people they do.

The proposed system of notation enables the reader to grasp at least some of the wealth of tones, of nuances, that can be re-evoked and re-experienced, and suggests the idea that the story is not just another literary genre, but is a “complex ceremony in miniature”, an occasion of “dramatic poetry” (1983, p. 51) that encompasses “aphorisms, public announcements, speeches, prayers, songs, and even other narratives” (1983, p. 3). The proposition that narrative is a form of performance has opened up innovative lines of thought and inquiry, enabling dialogue between linguistics, psychology, hermeneutic philosophy, pedagogy, narratology, and psychoanalysis (Conway 1990; Bruner 1990; Demetrio 1996; Fivush and Haden 2003). Seen as performance, narrative no longer stands as a “stable object” to interpret, but has become a space for experiencing the self and the other, for agency, for memory, and cultural resistance; not only a favored place for reaching important social meanings, but also—and above all— a place where, dialogically, culture makes, and remakes itself in dialogic interaction.

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Barbara and Dennis Tedlock interpret the poetic dimension in the broad sense, as extending to and including all forms of dramatic performance. For example, they demonstrated that the textiles of the Quiché Maya can be regarded—from an intertextual perspective—as diagrams of verbal narrative texts and divinatory performances (Tedlock and Tedlock 1985). Similarly, in her study of dreaming, Barbara Tedlock analyzed how members of the Zuni community act upon their dreams in performances (Tedlock 1987): the Zunis avoid talking about their “good” dreams (good dreams are kept secret in order not to give away the good luck), while the “bad” dream is publicly reported and enacted (the dreamer may receive a ceremonial whipping to remove all traces of the dream thoughts and transform bad luck into good). In reporting the dream, its actual content is less important than the way the narratives take life, are shared, interpreted and influenced by the context, and at the same time by how the narratives can act on the context and transform it. It is thus important—and here we come to the second of the paths suggested by the Tedlocks—to extend our concept of interpreting (its ends and means) texts, whether they be narrative, dreams or textiles, to embrace the many emic perspectives on what “interpreting” means. Dennis Tedlock translated one of Mayan literature’s most important religious texts, the Popol Vuh, in its entirety (1985, 2010). The Popol Vuh was composed in Maya hieroglyphs (the original book has been lost) and transcribed into alphabetical writing between 1554 and 1558. The text provides testimony to pre-Hispanic literature, containing mythical interpretations of the creation of the cosmos and the clash of positive and negative forces, as well as information about the political and social organization of the Quiché state. It thus gives us a broad overview of Quiché civilization. In his translation and interpretation of the text, Tedlock argues that we must revisit our idea of what interpreting a text means, in terms of both content and form. It is important to understand that the Mayan narrative reflects the pre-Hispanic conception of history: Mayan history’s primary goal is never an objective narrative of facts as they occurred, but an articulation of the symbolic meanings of these facts. Man’s historical doings are interpreted as the expression of the cosmos’ energies of life, death, regeneration. Myth and history are complementary rather than opposed;

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human and divine presuppose each other and are forever joined by a mutual attraction. In interpreting texts, as Tedlock repeatedly emphasizes, we must work with the link between myth, history and poetics. In this connection, ethnopaleography can make a key contribution to our understanding of indigenous narratives. In systematic ethnopaleographic research, complete sentences and larger excerpts from ancient texts (and not just single words or items of content) are directly presented to local consultants for interpretation, in a continuous “attempt to hear the voices of the dead, but with the help of their living descendants” (1983, p. 125). From the standpoint of form, Dennis Tedlock suggests that discourses interpreting natives’ poetic texts should themselves be considered poetic forms, performances, given that even discourses that are interpretive in intention (which we tend to think of as texts that are entirely different from the texts being interpreted) live and take on meaning in acts of performance. Lectures, presentations at scientific congresses, meetings with experts and conferences are all forms of oral performance, exactly like native Americans’ oral narratives, which are also forms of the dialogical emergence of culture. Transcribing them using the same formal strategies used to transcribe natives’ oral narratives reminds us that every form of public oral communication is a form of poetry. In the chapter entitled “Learning to listen: Oral history as poetry,” Tedlock explains: Beyond the question of how to score oral performances lies the further question of how to talk about such performances. Might it not be that such talk, when published, should itself escape the prose format, arguing its case not only in its words and sentences but also in its graphic design? (1983, p. 107)

He then proposes a transcription experiment, presented in poetic form at a session on oral history at the 1973 Annual Meeting of the Organization of American Historians: We must question whether HUNDREDS of REELS of oral history TAPE ought to be converted into THOUSANDS of PAGES of PROSE typescript after which the tapes are all too often ERASED. To use a VISUAL analogy, such a procedure is as absurd

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as preferring to make pencil sketches from photographs of historical events and then destroy the photographs. Nobody, whether in a literate society or not SPEAKS in PROSE… (1983, p. 114)

Participation: Interaction, Reflexivity, Humanity The Tedlocks’ second area of inquiry centers on thinking epistemologically about how the anthropologist participates in life in the field (interaction). In an extremely dense paper entitled “From Participant Observation to Observation of Participation: The Emergence of Narrative Ethnography” (1991a), Barbara Tedlock notes that for much of the history of anthropology, the subjective, human experience of the anthropologist’s lived reality and relationships in the field was either not to be mentioned— as embarrassingly unprofessional—or was either confined to a few lines in the introduction to the official texts (Evans-Pritchard 1940), published as a novel, often under a pseudonym (Freshfield 1947; Record 1969), or narrated in firsthand accounts kept separate from the standard presentation of the data in impersonal scientific monographs (Turnbull 1965; Beattie 1965). Starting in the seventies, however, many ethnographic accounts began to shift from participant observation to what Tedlock calls “observation of participation” (Dwyer 1982; Barley 1986; Taussing 1987; Price 1989; Tedlock 1991a). A number of factors contributed to this shift: a new epistemological climate, dominated first by hermeneutic philosophy and then by the theory of social action; the greater interest and prestige attaching to the anthropologist’s work; the growing awareness on the part of members of the host communities, who are increasingly unwilling to be “objectified” and wish to speak for themselves. The human experience of fieldwork is no longer separated from the presentation of the data, as the two aspects blend together, each shedding light on the other: In the observation of participation, ethnographers both experience and observe their own and others’ coparticipation within the ethnographic encounter (Tedlock 1991a, p. 69)

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The concept of “observation of participation” moves attention away from the Malinowskian fieldwork model with its twin aspects of observation and participation and toward thinking of anthropologists and their interlocutors as part of a continuing process of negotiating meanings. As Barbara Tedlock notes, the anthropologist’s task during fieldwork is not only that of observing others and participating in their activities. But neither does it consist only in observing themselves, in an almost solipsistic exercise of introspection. What is important is to observe the interaction that takes place between the anthropologist and the host community. The anthropologist must engage in constant self-observation, watching his relational dynamics with others, and at the same time observing how others observe him. Ethnographic practice no longer centers on attempting objectification, but on reflexive exploration, dialogue with the host community, the problem of the anthropologist’s positioning and legitimation in the field and, lastly, on critical attention to the construction of the ethnographic text. Thus, the omniscient scientist who speaks of Others, objectifying them, is replaced by a dialogue that “belongs neither to the realm of objectivity nor to that of subjectivity, but rather to ‘human intersubjectivity’” (Tedlock 1991a, p. 71). In this sense, culture is a process that emerges in dialogical form out of everyday speech interactions, which are themselves shaped by their context (Tedlock and Mannheim 1995).

Dialogical Anthropology Although everything we learn in the field is the product of dialogue— between anthropologist and natives, and between natives—Dennis Tedlock points out that dialogues disappear entirely in the ethnographic texts to make room for the various forms that the anthropologist’s monologue may take. In this connection, Tedlock speaks of the persistence of a long-standing tradition of “analogical anthropology,” which consists in “the replacement of one discourse with another. It is claimed that this new discourse, however far removed it may seem to be, is equivalent or proportionate, in a quasi-mathematical sense, to the previous discourse” (1983, p. 324).

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The monologue can take the shape of an impersonal scientific description of the natives’ usages, a de-contextualized collection of myths, or the anthropologist’s confessions in field diaries. But it is always a monologue. Tedlock contrasts this analogical anthropology with his proposed dialogical anthropology: whereas analogos in Greek means “talking above,” “talking later,” “talking beyond,” dia-logos stresses “speaking alternately,” or “speaking across.” The former (analogical) presents ethnography as a finished product, a result; the latter (dialogical) as a continuing process. Rather than replacing the discourse between and with the natives with the anthropologist’s monological discourse, dialogical anthropology puts the voices of the people the anthropologist finds in the field in the foreground, making the sources, the situations, the contexts visible and explicit. It marks the shift from a one-dimensional perspective to polyphony, where there is space for all the multiple, heterogeneous subjectivities in the field. The ethnographic studies that espouse this approach either adopt a discursive style that allows ample scope for describing the research setting, highlighting the contribution to the text made by the informants (who thus become coauthors in a sense) or choose to report some of the dialog that took place in the field. The centrality assigned to dialogue draws attention to the issue of intersubjectivity as the special condition of the social sciences. Dennis Tedlock (1983) argues that there is an essential difference, all too often undervalued, between doing research in the natural sciences and in the social sciences. In the former case we observe in silence, in the latter we are inevitably in the midst of a world of words, a universe of knowledge, values, worldviews, and patterns of conduct shared by a community. Intersubjectivity becomes accessible only through dialogue that casts a bridge between different cultural worlds, however far apart they may be. The anthropological dialogue creates a world, or an understanding of the differences between two worlds, that exists between persons who were indeterminately far apart, in all sorts of different ways, when they started out on their conversation. This betweenness of the world of the dialogue is something I want to keep before us, or between us, all the way through this talk. (1983, p. 323)

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This “betweenness” is the ground where ethnographic research takes place; it is to this third world, that of shared and negotiated meanings, of the interplay of exchanged glances, that we must devote our attention. These meanings are neither those of the natives nor those of the anthropologist, but those of a world that “lies in the middle” (Fabietti 1999). The work of the anthropologist is thus not a matter of data to collect or theories to test: it is a question of interpreting a flow of meanings and the dialogue of representation that each projects onto the other. It is important to emphasize that the dialogical approach to anthropology does not require us to abandon or distance ourselves from the classic methods of cultural analysis. Rather, it means taking a perspective that recognizes our host subjects’ active role in constructing anthropological knowledge. The dialogue is not a method but a mode, a mode of discourse within which there may be methodological moments, on either side, and within which methods number among the possible subjects under discussion, both in field and armchair. In the writings of a dialogical anthropology, methods will be seen in their full range from happy accident to utter disaster. (1983, pp. 332–333)

Dialogical Anthropology: An Unresolved Debate Dialogical anthropology aims to abolish a fundamentally hierarchical relationship whereby we feel authorized to observe, study, analyse and describe them by virtue of our supposed cognitive superiority or position of power. Emphasizing intersubjectivity through dialogue, acknowledging the various interlocutors’ active role, and granting their words visibility and space in our writings would, as the idea goes, contribute to making this relationship less hierarchical. And here we come to a problem. It has been noted that the idea of dialogue advanced by dialogical anthropology risks leaving readers with a naïve view of the field as a place where there can be parity between two subjects—the researcher and the native—who have an equal relationship and the same opportunities to speak. But as we will see, dialogues in the field are not and cannot be egalitarian. The interlocutors in the field actually differ in age, gender, economic and cultural capital, cognitive intentionality and power. The relationship

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between anthropologists and natives is not symmetrical, nor can it be; in addition, the relationships that the researcher finds among people in the field are highly asymmetrical and marked by imbalances of power in varying degrees. And the anthropologist is inevitably caught up in these relationships and imbalances, interacting and interfering with them. It is an illusion to think that ethnographic practice can give us a dialogue between subjects situated in different, but horizontal and equal, “cultural” dimensions, with the same goals and the same ends (Asad 1986; Johannsen 1992; Hastrup 1992; Comaroff and Comaroff 1992). How and to what extent is it actually possible to construct a “third world,” a world where voices can speak and be heard on equal terms? What kind of “parity” and “equality” must this involve? The question that springs to mind is whether, fundamentally, this ideology of symmetry between the anthropologist and natives does not lead our efforts to understand in the wrong direction: rather than seeking to unearth and deconstruct the power dynamics the researcher finds in the field and that deprive some subjects of a voice, we may end up concentrating on an idealistic effort to write a text that—by presenting multiple narrative voices—is formally able to balance out the world’s asymmetries. Apart from the ethical-political intentionality that informs dialogical anthropology (giving voice back to the natives), there is also another problem. The textualization required of ethnology (the anthropologist must produce a scientific report), makes parity of voices very difficult to achieve in practice: at the end of the day, it is always the anthropologist who decides what to know, what and how to write: […] indigenous voices must have the same space in the text as the voice of the anthropologist. This call for co-enunciation is nothing if not ingenuous, as it expects that the natives’ words and speech can be conveyed independently of the anthropologists’ work of textualization. Now, no form of dialogue can do without textualization and the native, from the moment he becomes an informant, is immediately entangled in the textual strategy. (Kilani 1994, p. 24; my translation) […] So those who experiment with multi-vocal writing place the heuristic value of the polyphony included in the text in the foreground, hushing up the fact that this way of proceeding does not consist simply of reporting and juxtaposing the voices heard in the field: they forget to specify that this result is the outcome of an intense labour of recording and reformulating

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individual stories, where what is at work is a scientific authority that makes the informants’ words and statements more consistent and legible for the reader to whom the text is addressed. (Kilani 1994, p. 75; my translation)

Even in the field, moreover, those who speak up (who can or wish to make themselves heard) are self-selected in ways that change with the context and through processes that cannot be controlled, or even understood, by the anthropologist, as “dialogue conceals as well as reveals” (Crapanzano 1980). Sooner or later, then, the problem becomes one of choosing what order is to be given to the collected material and what voices are to be amplified. In particular, it is a question of deciding which of the meanings that came forward during the interaction may be more important than others and thus become data, and how these data can be incorporated in a broader cognitive project—that of the anthropologist. This is a responsibility that the researcher, however wholeheartedly he seeks dialogue on equal terms, cannot shirk. As Fabian (1990) points out, one thing is certain: dialogue as a literary genre does not guarantee that the dialogical nature of the knowledge process in fieldwork will be preserved. The researcher can produce ethnographic knowledge because he is capable of intersubjectivity, or in other words of communicating with others, but this capability is merely a matter of dialogue, of textualization; it can take many forms, as Unni Wikan reminds us with her reflections on empathy (1992). We can then ask ourselves whether today’s use of digital texts and open-ended multimedia forms of textualization can permit a diversity of host subjects’ voices to be heard and keep dialogue open after (and beyond) the consistent systematization of fieldwork that the anthropologist, as a social scientist, is called upon to produce.1 We can also ask ourselves if perhaps—precisely because of the processual and intrinsically open nature of research and dialogues during and after fieldwork, and the introduction of new and increasingly creative textualization methods—the anthropologist should abandon the idea of producing a final, definitive text in favor of forms of partial reporting, or forms where the various social actors involved by the anthropologist are all given voice, together or at different times.

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In the social media epoch, moreover, it is important to remember that the anthropologist’s dialogue in the field is increasingly influenced, conditioned, and reframed by the dialogues that precede and follow fieldwork, discourses that expand the “third world” far beyond the anthropologist’s ability to exercise control (Biscaldi 2019). Above and beyond these difficulties—which tie in with the changes that have taken place in forms of communication over the last thirty years—I believe that Dennis and Barbara Tedlock’s proposal for a dialogical anthropology is still relevant for anyone embarking on ethnographic work: a proposal for an anthropology that rather than seeking to turn out finished products, strives to reveal and engage in processes of understanding and opening up to possible worlds. It is a cultural proposal that reminds us that “conversations will stand or fall on their own merits as the meeting ground of two worlds, not on the basis of whether the investigator got what he claims he had been looking for (and at whatever cost)” (Tedlock 1983, p. 333).

Note 1. See Johnson, Roberts, Dawson in http://intergraphjournal.net/enhanced/ articles/article3/nct.htm.

References Asad, T. (1986). The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology. In J. Clifford & G. Marcus (Eds.), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (pp. 141–164). Berkeley: University of California Press. Barley, N. (1986). Ceremony: An Anthropologist’s Misadventures in the African Bush. New York: Henry Holl. Beattie, J. (1965). Understanding an African Kingdom: Bunyoro. New York: Rinehart and Winston. Biscaldi, A. (2019). La serendipity dell’antropologo nell’epoca dei social media. Antropologia, 6(1), 185–198. Bruner, J. S. (1990). Acts of Meaning. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Comaroff, J., & Comaroff, J. (1992). Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. Boulder: Westview Press. Conway, M. A. (1990). Autobiographical Memory: An Introduction. London: Open University Press. Crapanzano, V. (1980). Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Demetrio, D. (1996). Raccontarsi. L’autobiografia come cura del Sé. Milan: Raffaello Cortina. Dwyer, K. (1982). Moroccan Dialogues: Anthropology in Question. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1940). The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People. Oxford, NY: Oxford University Press. Fabian, J. (1990). Presence and Representation: The Other and Anthropological Writing. Critical Inquiry, 16(4), 753–772. Fabietti, U. (1999). Antropologia culturale. L’esperienza e l’interpretazione. Laterza. Fivush, R., & Haden, C. A. (2003). Autobiographical Memory and the Construction of Narrative Self: Developmental and Cultural Perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Association. Freshfield, M. [pseud. M. Field] (1947). Stormy Dawn. Fabriano: Faber. Hastrup, K. (1992). Writing Ethnography: State of the Art. In J. Okely & H. Callaway (Eds.), Anthropology and Autobiography (pp. 115–31). London: Routledge. Johannsen, A. (1992). Applied Anthropology and Post-Modernist Ethnography. Human Organisation, 51(1), 71–81. Kilani, M. (1994). L’invention de l’Autre. Paris: Payot. Price, D. (1989). Before the Bulldozer: The Nambiquara Indians and the World Bank. Washington, DC: Seven Locks Press. Record, P. [pseud. P. Drucker] (1969). Tropical Frontier. New York: Knopf. Taussing, M. (1987). Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tedlock, B. (Ed.). (1987). Dreaming: Anthropological and Psychological Interpretations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tedlock, B. (1991a). From Participant Observation to the Observation of Participation: The Emergence of Narrative Ethnography. Journal of Anthropological Research, 47, 69–94. Tedlock, B. (1991b). The Beautiful and the Dangerous: Writing in the Margins of Zuni Lives. New York: Viking. Tedlock, B. (1992a). Time and the Highland Maya. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Tedlock, B. (1992b). The Beautiful and the Dangerous. Encounters with the Zuni Indians. London: Penguins Book. Tedlock, B. (2005). The Woman in the Shaman’s Body: Reclaiming the Feminine in Religion and Medicine. New York: Bantam Books. Tedlock, B., & Tedlock, D. (Eds.). (1975). Teachings from the American Earth: Indian Religion and Philosophy. New York: Liveright.

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Tedlock, B., & Tedlock, D. (1985). Text and Textile: Language and Technology in the Arts of the Quiché Maya. Journal of Anthropological Research, 41, 121–146. Tedlock, D. (1972). Finding the Center: Narrative Poetry of the Zuni Indians, Translated from Performances in the Zuni by Andrew Peynetsa and Walter Sanchez. New York: Dial Press. Tedlock, D. (1983). The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Tedlock, D. (1985). Popol Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life, Translated, with Introduction, Commentaries, and Glossar. New York: Simon & Schuster. Tedlock, D. (1993). Breath on the Mirror: Mythic Voices and Visions of the Living Maya. New York: Harper. Tedlock, D. (2010). 2000 Years of Mayan Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tedlock, D., & Mannheim, B. (Eds.). (1995). The Dialogic Emergence of Culture. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Turnbull, C. (1965). Wayward Servants: The Two Worlds of the African Pygmies. Garden City, NY: Natural History Press. Wikan, U. (1992). Beyond the Words: The Power of Resonance. American Ethnologist, 19(3), 460–482.

CHAPTER 12

Ethnography and Embodiment Ivo Quaranta

Ethnography as Embodied Cultural Practice The postmodern shift in anthropology has led to the paradigmatic consolidation of a profound rethinking of ethnography as a self-reflexive practice. Such a turning point, since the first studies that paved its way in the 1970s (Geertz 1973; Rabinow 1977), on the one hand, has highlighted how the results of ethnographic research, far from being neutral descriptions of an objective reality, should be thought of as social facts; on the other hand, it has also indicated how the very practice of fieldwork should be conceived of as a cultural practice, given its inescapable interpretative and situated nature. In the 1980s, the academic debate focused particularly on writing, highlighting how the latter should be understood as the practical context for the production of ethnographic representations (Clifford and Marcus 1986). An experimental move in ethnographic writing was inaugurated, leading to the decline of a vision of ethnography in which the subjectivity of the researcher was concealed through specific rhetorical constructions that promoted a totalizing and crystallized vision of the social reality under analysis.

I. Quaranta (B) University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 V. Matera and A. Biscaldi (eds.), Ethnography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51720-5_12

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Writing, since then, has represented the elective ground for ethnographic self-reflexivity, with the aim of evoking the intimate dialogic process at the core of fieldwork practice. The subjectivity of the ethnographer, far from being seen as a problematic interference to be elided, is instead rethought as the inevitable ingredient for the production of data. Famous in this regard is the rereading proposed by James Clifford (1988) of the principle of participant observation in terms of the conceptual couple of “experience and interpretation.” Ethnography ceases, therefore, to be thought of as a moment of data collection in the field, but emerges as a process for their very production. In other words, it is reconceptualised as a performative process, i.e., as a specific practice for the production of cultural knowledge. If ethnographic knowledge emerges as the result of a process of intersubjective production of meaning, the ethnographer’s active role is not limited to the process of interpreting/translating local knowledge, but rather it is crucial as coproducer in the very moment of field research: to avoid it would be impossible and would undermine the very conditions for research practice. Being aware of such a productive role emerges as fundamental, in order not to reify the intersubjective and pragmatic process of knowledge production. It is then legitimate to ask: what kind of knowledge is produced through ethnography? If we consider anthropology as a specific form of cultural knowledge, then ethnography is necessarily destined to be seen as a specific form of cultural practice, characterized by a self-reflexive methodological posture. This vision of ethnography is organically elated to the profound rethinking of the concept of culture as rooted in, and emerging from, social practices: as a process under continuous creation - fluid, interconnected, diffusing, interpenetrating, homogenising, diverging, hegemonizing, resisting, reformulating, creolising, open rather than closed, partial rather than total, crossing its own boundaries, persisting where we don’t expect it to, and changing where we do. (Sanjek 1991, p. 622)

The reflexive shift in ethnography represented a precise invitation to dedicate particular care in the process of textual construction of the research results with the aim of making explicit the very process through which it

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was carried out, its specific practical conditions, the social positioning of the actors, their subjectivity, their “intersectional characteristics,” etc. If ethnographic knowledge is the intersubjective product of the researcher’s experiential implication with the context of analysis, and the reflexive invitation is intended to thematize the conditions of such an implication, why should reflexivity be limited to the moment of the textual construction after the field? Thomas Csordas has argued that such a view of reflexivity is the result of the semiotic shift inaugurated by Geertz’s thought and his metaphor of culture as a text. Csordas’ invitation (but see also: Jackson 1983; Laderman 1994; Nguyen 1996; Stoller 1997; Turner 2000) is not to limit reflexivity to post-field analysis, but to extend its practice to the very lived process of being-in-the-field, putting the researcher as an embedded subject on the analytical scene. In short, he proposes the concept of reflectivity as a dialogical partner of ethnographic reflexivity: prereflective gut feeling and sensory engagement are raised to the level of methodological self-consciousness by insertion of a phenomenological sense of embodiment into the ethnographic enterprise. In this precise sense, the reflexive and reflective can be understood as complementary contributions from textuality and embodiment to the reformulation of ethnographic practice. (Csordas 1999, p. 150)

The 1990s were deeply marked by the paradigm of embodiment, with its insistence on cultural practices as first and foremost embodied practices, thus shifting the analytical attention toward the dimensions of lived experience: ethnographers in the field, in other words, should question not only what their research partners think and say, but also what they feel and how they live what they think. The concept of reflectivity is intended to extend similar attention to what the researcher feels and lives in the field and how her/his experience is the lived ground of the understanding of the reality under analysis and ultimately of the co-production of meaning itself. Embodiment does not represent, therefore, simply a theoretical framework for the analysis of cultural phenomena in their relationship with corporeity, but also a paradigm that questions the latter’s role in every aspect of research, including the ethnographer’s engagement with and in the field. From an object of analysis, the body emerges as a subject of knowledge, now including also ethnographic knowledge.

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If culture is rooted in, and emerges from, social practices and the latter are inevitably embodied, then corporeality is not an accessory segment, a sub-theme, but is rather a constitutive and ineliminable dimension of anthropological reflection. This elucidation helps to clear the field from the misunderstanding that the paradigm of embodiment should have the body as its object of analysis. Working through the paradigm of embodiment does not require specific research objects or special data; it means adopting an analytical posture aimed at grasping the relationship any research topics may have with the body (Csordas 1990). Such a posture produces the appreciation of ethnography as an inter-corporeal practice of the co-production of meanings. Reflectivity represents an invitation to problematize the role played by the ethnographer’s body in the understanding of the phenomena that s/he investigates through fieldwork. The first consequence of such an embodied move in ethnography is the consideration that the researcher is always inevitably part of the reality s/he is investigating, even for the mere being-there as an embodied subject.

Participation and Involvement If Tedlock (1991) had formulated the invitation to rethink participant observation in terms of the observation of participation, the concept of embodiment helps to highlight how anthropologists’ participation should and can be the object of analysis, and not simply a variable to be controlled through analytical reflexivity. Being present in the field inevitably reverberates on the reality we are observing: we become significant participants in its intersubjective constitution, willingly or not. Ignoring the participation of the anthropologist as an active subject means distorting the very analysis of the processes of constitution s/he investigates. During my research experience on AIDS in Nso’, North-West of Cameroon, for example, my own participation in ritual events as well as in many other moments of community life, according to my local interlocutors, inevitably conditioned what was said and done. The king himself, locally called Fon, during my stay in Nso’, systematically raised the subject of AIDS when visiting the notables during the celebration of the annual rites of propitiation and protection (Quaranta 2006). I cannot know how things would have gone in my absence, but I am certain that my presence, even silent, was socially active in the intersubjective process of shaping

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local social practices. From the point of view of ethnographic analysis, not placing the presence of the researcher on the scene risks producing a false representation of the reality being investigated. In raising the issue of AIDS, the fon produced a representation of its reality which allowed me not only to understand local cultural logics, but also how different social actors bent those logics in directing responsibility for the contagion towards specific groups (for example, the youth were blamed for wanting to break ties with neo-traditional hierarchy). As Fabian suggested: “the ethnographer’s role then is no longer that of questioner; he or she is but a provider of occasions, a catalyst in the weakest sense, and a producer in the strongest” (1990, p. 7). Similarly Aaron Turner (2000), in discussing his research experience among British youth in the West London suburbs, highlights how the anthropologist cannot be present in a social field without becoming a significant author of events, practices, and social configurations, thus influencing what happens and its meaning. Carrying out a large part of his research with the “white” youth from Southall (a neighborhood mainly inhabited by Indo-Pakistani families) during their free time, most of the activities ended up revolving around competition: in football, pool, or darts. Invited to take part in these activities, Turner never refused, contributing with his action to co-produce a strong identification between competition, competence, and personal value. From his point of view, it would be improper to produce a representation based on the idea that “young white males often play football, and much of their interaction is around competition. This representation, although it parallels many anthropological representations of “cultures,” misses an essential fact through which these activities were pursued. I was an active participant in the processes whereby these practices were engaged in and in the processes in which their significance was found” (Turner 2000, p. 55). To place the ethnographer on the scene helps to take into account the processes by which social configurations emerge in practice and how their understanding is generated: the presence of the ethnographer therefore must be thematized as an object of analysis, both as a constituent element of the reality under investigation and as a very lived ground for the understanding of that reality. His invitation is to abandon a preconceived distinction between the ethnographer and his “others,” to look rather at the field of socially constitutive relationships that include the

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researcher himself. The anthropologist thus becomes an internal participant in the processes of meaning negotiation that we generally assume as our objects of analysis. The concept of embodiment is not just an invitation to question the role of the body in social practices, but it also aims at problematising the very role the researcher’s body plays in the process of social participation and negotiation of meanings. Reflectivity therefore does not want to be antithetical or substitutive of reflexivity: it is rather intended as an extension of reflexivity to research practice. This consideration leads us to another crucial aspect of the relationship between ethnography and embodiment: the ethnographer’s body is the lived ground not only of participation, but of the very understanding of the meaning produced through such participation.

Participation, Learning, and Co-production of Knowledge The concept of embodiment has animated a lively debate about the opportunity to promote a de-intellectualization of interpretation (Nguyen 1996): authors such as Michael Jackson, Paul Stoller, David Howes, Loic Wacquant, just to name a few, have highlighted how research experience allows us to penetrate dimensions of social reality that would otherwise be difficult to access. In various ways, these authors have reflected on how much the cultural encounter is practically realized through an intersubjective involvement, even if it is not limited to the interpersonal level, as we will see. Unni Wikan (1992) with the concept of resonance, Olivier de Sardan (1995) with that of impregnation, Tim Ingold (2000) with that of enskilment have highlighted how the embedded experience of the ethnographer is the source of that knowledge capable of giving meaning to what we annotate in the field through writing. As suggested by Judith Okely (1992, p. 16): notes taken in the field can be nothing more than a device aimed at activating embodied memories related to that practical learning of the implicit logics of a sociocultural context that takes place in the lived process of research. In this sense Loic Wacquant (2000) proposes a carnal sociology. Through the concept of habitus, he aims at showing how the visceral implication of the researcher in the field of a boxing gym is not a way to gain an identification with the native, but rather a means of exposing

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himself to the same practical logics, thus allowing a lived appreciation of that pugilistic ethos of sacrifice, which is charged with a heroic meaning only in the wider context of social exclusion that informs the black ghetto of Chicago. If the social logics are eminently practical, and emerge in the relationship between the lived body and the social fields, then for Wacquant the learning of boxing represents an ethnographic resource for the lived experience of the social structure that informs the gym and the wider social context of which it is part. In his words, learning allows us to grasp how the ordinary knowledge that makes us competent actors is an embodied, sensory, and situated “know-how” that operates below the control of discursive awareness and explicit reasoning. For Wacquant, learning can be consciously acted upon as a method to access the practical dimensions of the habitus, to study not the products but the production itself. Boxing initiation represented for him a way to access the practical dynamics of social actors’ constitution. Participation then becomes the lived ground of learning. If this principle informs the theoretical analysis of social practices, it is assumed as a methodological principle in guiding ethnographic research as well: the researcher’s body is literally put to use not only as a target of the practical logics of the context through participation, but as a living ground for their experience and therefore a potential source of their understanding. Wacquant himself (2005) warns us against considering his work as an auto-ethnographic exercise. On the contrary, he defines his work as antiauto-ethnographic, insofar as the goal remains that of understanding the context of analysis and not the researcher’s experience of it. The latter is simply made explicit, as it always and inevitably plays a role in the very process of the ethnographer’s understanding of the field. Such a thematization can open up areas of understanding that would otherwise be precluded. Another misunderstanding to debunk is that participation should not be seen as a way for gaining authentic knowledge of the experience lived by local actors, as if the broader dynamics in which the individual actors (including the ethnographer) participate did not play any role in the production of differences, and the body was a mere common (i.e., natural and universal) ground of unmediated and undifferentiated human experience. In Wacquant’s perspective, participation does not generate understanding because it makes us native: embodied participation allows us to extend the analysis to aspects of socio-cultural reality that would have difficulty emerging on the discursive and linguistic level. Authors such as

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Paul Stoller and Michael Jackson were among the first to invite anthropologists to move in this direction, highlighting how embodied experience can guide the researcher towards lived dimensions of experience capable of giving flavor to the world of local actors (Stoller 1989). Drawing on his own fieldwork experience in northern Sierra Leone, Michael Jackson (1983) highlights how specific body techniques are explicitly performed as a learning ground and means of transmission of specific moral values during initiation rites. Without going into the ethnographic details of his work, he investigates how cultural practices, focusing on the body, articulate broader social issues: specific ways of speaking and listening, spending the night in a smoke-filled house during initiation, etc., are all practical activities that refer to a moral order, which must be learned and acted upon through specific body techniques. During the kuranko initiation, what is done to the body, and with the body, is the basis for what is said and thought. From an existential point of view, bodily practices mediate the personal realization of social values: bodily mastery is therefore the basis for social and intellectual competence. On these reflections Jackson invites us to be wary of intellectualistic abstraction in ethnographic analysis, trying to avoid explaining human behavior in terms of interpretative models of the academic “turns” in vogue at the moment, engaging rather in an approach that starts from the interactions and movements of people in a specific context and considers in detail the patterns of bodily practice that arise within it. In line with this orientation, the author dwells on how much his embodied participation, mediated by the mimesis of local practices, represented the link between practices in the field and the elaboration of theoretical knowledge. For Jackson it is methodologically necessary to inhabit the world with others, taking part without ulterior motives. Participation becomes an end in itself, rather than a means to collect data that will then be interpreted elsewhere after the field. Ethnography then emerges as the practical dimension of the production of anthropological knowledge as an inter-corporeal cultural practice, rooted in participation as an experiential moment of understanding production. Not only “having been there,” but “having been with” emerges as a qualified moment of the methodology underlying anthropological reasoning. Ethnographic knowledge is realized through the lived experience of the researchers in their concrete participation in a context of relationships.

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As Ugo Fabietti (1999, p. 35) pointed out, the concept of impregnation evoked by Olivier de Sardan to refer to the ethnographer practical mastery of the cultural logics of the social reality under analysis, should be itself considered as an object of ethnographic reflection. At this point, it is crucial to give due consideration to reflectivity. In fact, it would be totally improper to think that the practical understanding generated through inter-corporeal involvement is devoid of cultural density and can be seen as a source of synthetic and non-mediated knowledge. On the contrary, as David Howes (2003) points out, sensoriality is always culturally organized and therefore embedded understanding is far from being precultural, metacultural, or pan-human. If the body is always socially and culturally informed, and through the processes of its own historical-cultural shaping it relates to the world and others, it would be a mistake to think that the understanding that takes place on a prereflexive level elides differences. The basic idea is to consciously make use of the carnal connections that develop in the field, placing the dynamics of difference within the experiential dimension. The invitation is to grasp those lived dimensions that contribute to the genesis of understanding and that would hardly be accountable by an interpretative logic focussed only on the discursive and logocentric level of representation. Jackson himself reminds us how recognizing the embedded character of our being in the world means discovering common ground, without forgetting though that this knowledge will be interpreted according to one’s habits or predispositions. Participation does not allow us to access native meanings in a more direct and authentic way, since meanings come into being in and through lived practices: participation allows us to be part of the processes of meaning production (Okely 2007). The misunderstanding that wants embodiment to be the foundation of understanding because it would make us native is naive to say the least. The ethnographer in the field is a significant and active player of the reality s/he investigates: s/he is inevitably an insider of the social processes s/he co-produces and whose meaning s/he can grasp by the very process of participation, in a game of differences sedimented, negotiated and therefore constantly transformed in, and from, bodies. These differences, however, are not to be conceived of as preexisting and essentialized givens between us and others, but as emerging in and from the constant social practices of identification and differentiation.

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The body is the ground of (intercultural) understanding not by virtue of its supposed universal nature, but as the lived ground of intersubjective meaning production. Being the existential ground of our constitutive involvement with reality and with others, the body should not substitute the text in ethnographic reflexivity: it should be added to it. That is why earlier we claimed that considering ethnography as an intersubjective and inter-corporeal practice does not mean to reduce the ethnographic encounter to the interpersonal level: the body is the lived precipitate of a complex network of historical relationships that are actualized through practices. In a nutshell, the ethnographer’s body should not be understood as a natural and unmediated instrument of data collection, but as an instrument of encounter, negotiation, and cultural production (Bendix 2000).

From Authenticity to the Conditions of Knowledge Production Reflectivity must therefore be understood as an extension of the dialogical space within the lived experience of the researcher, and not as a replacement of it. Csordas correctly, in my opinion, speaks of reflectivity as a dialogic partner of reflexivity. It is worth repeating this concept, because it helps us to understand how the evocation of embodied and sensory dimensions does not aim to undermine the textual and linguistic dimension of ethnography, but rather to complement it. Attempts to go beyond the textual dimension in representing research experience should therefore not be seen as attempts to identify more faithful ways of grasping the authenticity of the natives’ lived experience. Many authors (Dicks et al. 2005; Okely 1994; Pink 2010, 2012, 2015) have followed the pioneering reflections of Paul Stoller (1989, 1997) when, among the first ones, he wondered if there were no other dimensions of ethnographic discourse, other conventions of representation, than the ethnographic text, capable of conducting anthropology deeper into the forms of others’ existence (1989, p. 27). Sarah Pink, another key figure on the sensory ethnography front, also noticed how our exposure to and engagement with the multisensoreality of the places we encounter … leads us to doubt the adequacy of the existing methods

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and genres of ethnographic representation for the task of communicating about these ways of knowing. (Pink 2012, p. 153)

The challenge is still open and is to do with the forms by which we can effectively communicate a largely pre-objective and prelinguistic knowledge through academic canons, marked as they are, for historical and cultural reasons, by writing. The proponents of sensory ethnography seem to agree that some experiences simply cannot be translated into writing (Okely 1994; Tucker and Goodings 2014). As Sarah Pink (2010, 2012) rightly points out, the sensory material of our research (fixed in audiovisual media, for example) can certainly provide us with access to aspects that would otherwise be elusive, silent, or simply incommunicable through writing. It is certainly productive to reflect on possible forms of integration and combination of several means of representation (think of video-articles, ethnographic graphic novels, emotional writing proposed by Goodall [2000]) with the aim of saving what is otherwise ineffable through the sole means of textual rendering and the sole support of field notes (Low 2015, p. 309). However, it is of fundamental importance to reiterate how audiovisual tools, for example, represent another form of mediated representation and can certainly not boast some primacy in the rendering of lived experience. As Dicks and colleagues (2005, p. 69) point out, any form of representation is not merely a vehicle for data, but it is always a form of mediation charged with specific semiotic properties. Experimenting with forms of non-textual representation should not therefore aim to seek greater authenticity against translations and supposed betrayals of textualization, as if lived experience could be evoked in its unconditional immediacy by non-textual means and emerge as a simulacrum of the authenticity of meaning (O’Neill and Hubbard 2010, p. 56). Evoking the carnal and multisensory dimensions of ethnographic research should not therefore have as its main objective the representation of the purity of experience and meaning, but a more effective explanation of the conditions of production of understanding and knowledge. In specific research fields, the sensory dimension should certainly have a greater protagonism, being itself the object of analysis: think for example of Law’s (2001) work on how Filipino workers in Hong Kong produce a sense of belonging through the creation of places that emulate the scent of home; or Rice’s (2003) studies on visual and sound austerity as a device for sensory regulation of roles and behaviors in a hospital context. Beyond

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the specific feature of our topics of inquiry, putting ethnographic practice in dialogue with the paradigm of embodiment means being able to exercise oneself in the explicit reflection on the forms of implicit embeddedness through which knowledge is practically produced (regardless of the object of analysis): an implication that is always inevitably sensorial and corporeal, before becoming intellectual and cognitive. In this sense, the paradigm of embodiment can help us to shed light on what qualifies the specificity of ethnography as a method. In fact, reflectivity is configured as an invitation to extend self-reflexivity to the practice of research, thus making explicit the concrete and specific conditions of meaning production and understanding through participation. Ethnography thus emerges as a means by which we place ourselves in a process of participatory knowledge production: highly situated knowledge indeed, as it is grounded in forms of intersubjective proximity and mutual engagement. The proximity that qualifies the ethnographic method should not be seen as precious because it guarantees a greater authenticity of research results, but rather because it allows for the possible emergence of issues that might otherwise not become a thematic focus of attention. Meanings are not something we communicate, they are practically produced through interaction, and ethnography is precisely the lived method by which we participate in such a process. Reflexivity therefore implies the adoption of reflectivity to link the dimension of interpersonal experience with ethical and political positioning of the research process: through research we construct emotional relationships with the protagonists of the research in a common commitment to co-producing a sense of lived reality. It is certainly no coincidence that Paul Stoller, one of the most convinced assertors of the need to de-intellectualize research work, insists heavily on what he has defined at various times in terms of humility. Committing oneself to lived experience does not lead to greater authenticity, but on the contrary to a reduction of the anthropologist’s authoritative control in favor of a greater dose of intellectual uncertainty (Stoller 1989, p. 56; 2004, p. 832), precisely because the ground of reflection will cease to be the local context, objectified as an external reality scrutinized by a detached observation, but will become the relationship or rather the relationships we weave with the manifold dimensions of local contexts. After all, how could it be otherwise: if participation is the generative matrix of meaning, this can only be rooted in the relationships of participation that we interrelate with what we investigate. These relations,

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however, cannot be reduced merely to the intersubjective dynamics that the ethnographer weaves in the field: it is only when those plots are intertwined with other reflections, with other corpora of data (in historical, political, economic, or geographical terms) that the analysis is capable of giving them a wider relevance. These plots do not even end with the construction of representations, since the latter will in turn enter into other relationships in which their users, in turn part of other networks of relationships, will enter into dynamics of negotiation and co-production of meaning. Looking at writing and language as specific historical, socially legitimized, forms (as well as body techniques) of knowledge production feeds the search for other possibilities of imagining and practicing such a production, whose effectiveness could be declined not so much in the search for greater adherence to lived experience, but rather in the most effective evocation of the conditions of knowledge production. In this sense, forms other than writing, offered by audiovisual media and digital technologies, can lend themselves more to a participatory production of representation, an aspect that should not be underestimated and that goes beyond the purpose of this contribution, but that helps us to understand how much the productivity of representation should not be anchored to some claim of authenticity, which would only bring back essentialism that I frankly do not feel the need for, but to its political effectiveness.

Bibliography Bendix, R. (2000). The Pleasures of the Ear: Toward an Ethnography of Listening. Cultural Analysis, 1, 33–50. Clifford, J. (1988). The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Clifford, J., & Marcus, G. (Eds.). (1986). Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Csordas, T. J. (1990). Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology. Ethos, 18, 5–47. Csordas, T. J. (1999). Embodiment and Cultural Phenomenology. In G. Weiss & H. Haber (Eds.), Perspectives on Embodiment. New York: Routledge. Dicks, B., Mason, B., Coffey, A., & Atkinson, P. A. (2005). Qualitative Research and Hypermedia: Ethnography for the Digital Age. London: Sage. Fabian, J. (1990). Power and Performance. Ethnographic Explorations Through Proverbial Wisdom and Theater in Shaba, Zaire. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

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Fabietti, U. (1999). Antropologia culturale. L’esperienza e l’interpretazione. Rome: Laterza. Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Goodhall, H. (2000). Writing the New Ethnography. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press. Howes, D. (2003). Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Ingold, T. (2000). The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. Jackson, M. (1983). Knowledge of the Body. Man, 2, 327–345. Laderman, C. (1994). The Embodiment of Symbols and the Acculturation of the Anthropologist. In Csordas T. (Ed.), Embodiment and Experience. The Existential Ground of Culture and Self . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Law, L. (2001). Home Cooking: Filipino Women and Geographies of the Senses in Hong Kong. Cultural Geographies, 8(3), 264–283. Low, K. E. Y. (2015). The Sensuous City: Sensory Methodologies in Urban Ethnographic Research. Ethnography, 16(3), 295–312. Nguyen, V. K. (1996). Il corpo critico e la critica della razionalità. L’AIDS e la produzione di esperienza in un ospedale universitario nordamericano. In M. Pandolfi (Ed.), Perché il corpo. Utopia, sofferenza, desiderio (pp. 57–74). Rome: Meltemi. Okely, J. (1992). Anthropology and Autobiography: Participatory Experience and Embodied Knowledge. In J. Okely & H. Callaway (Eds.), Anthropology and Autobiography. London: Routledge. Okely, J. (1994). Vicarious and Sensory Knowledge of Chronology and Change: Ageing in Rural France. In K. Hastrup & P. Hervik (Eds.), Social Experience and Anthropological Knowledge (pp. 34–48). London: Routledge. Okely, J. (2007). Fieldwork Embodied. The Sociological Review, 55, 65–79. Olivier de Sardan, J. P. (1995). La politique du terrain. Sur la production des données en anthropologie. Enquête, 1, 71–109. O’Neill, M., & Hubbard, P. (2010). Walking, Sensing, Belonging: EthnoMimesis as Performative Praxis. Visual Studies, 25(1), 46–58. Pink, S. (2010). The Future of Sensory Anthropology/The Anthropology of the Senses. Social Anthropology, 18(3), 331–340. Pink, S. (2012). Doing Sensory Ethnography. Los Angeles: Sage. Pink, S. (2015). Approaching Media Through The Senses: Between Experience And Representation. Media International Australia, 154(1), 5–14. Quaranta, I. (2006). Corpo, Potere e Malattia. Antropologia e AIDS nei Grassfields del Camerun. Milan: Meltemi. Rabinow, P. (1977). Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Rice, T. (2003). Soundselves: An Acoustemology of Sound and Self in the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. Anthropology Today, 19(4), 4–9. Sanjek, R. (1991). The Ethnographic Present. Man, 26(4), 607–628. Stoller, P. (1989). The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Stoller, P. (1997). Sensuous Scholarship. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Stoller, P. (2004). Sensuous Ethnography, African Persuasions, and Social Knowledge. Qualitative Inquiry, 10(6), 817–835. Tedlock, B. (1991). From Participant Observation to the Observation of Participation: The Emergence of Narrative Ethnography. Journal of Anthropological Research, 47 (1), 69–94. Tucker, I. M., & Goodlings, L. (2014). Sensing Bodies and Digitally Mediated Distress: Serres, Simondon, and Social Media. The Senses and Society, 9(1), 55–71. Turner, A. (2000). Embodied Ethnography. Doing Culture. Social Anthropology, 8(1), 51–60. Wacquant, L. (2000). Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wacquant, L. (2005). Carnal Connections: On Embodiment, Apprenticeship, and Membership. Qualitative Sociology, 28(4), 445–474. Wikan, U. (1992). Beyond the Words: The Power of Resonance. American Ethnologist, 19(3), 460–482.

CHAPTER 13

Exploring Mobility Through Mobility: Some of the Methodological Challenges of Multi-sited Ethnography in the Study of Migration Bruno Riccio

Introduction Multi-sited (Marcus 1995) or multi-site (Hannerz 2003) ethnographies are fieldwork practices that take place in multiple contexts which are interconnected by both the phenomenon under examination and the ethnographic framing of researchers themselves. Anthropology began to develop an epistemological and methodological discussion about this research strategy in the wake of the discipline’s critique of the communitysite-field formula that had long dominated ethnographic research, and the discussion was fuelled by various attempts to explore new avenues for broadening the anthropological gaze and focusing on manifold globalization processes (see differently Marcus and Fischer 1986; Appadurai 1996;

B. Riccio (B) University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 V. Matera and A. Biscaldi (eds.), Ethnography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51720-5_13

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Hannerz 1996; Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Fabietti 1999; Benadusi 2006; Matera 2017). In the effort to fully grasp both the “glocal” links and multiple experiences of people moving in space in contemporary societies (migration, tourism, international cooperation, and the dislocation of work and production), scholars developed mobile approaches such as multisited research in which researchers construct their ethnographic fields by following people, including their families and social ties, their investments, work processes, economic and social remittances and political or development projects (Falzon 2009; Coleman and Von Hellermann 2011). Marcus’ well-supported literature review on the subject published in 1995 unquestionably represents a milestone in the development of this debate as well as a quite precise endeavor of defining and ordering this literature: Multi-sited research is designed around chains, paths, threads, conjunctions and juxtapositions of locations in which the ethnographer establishes some form of literal, physical presence, with an explicit, posited logic of association or connection among sites that in fact defines the argument of the ethnography. (Marcus 1995, p. 105)

This construction gradually occurs through the act of “following” people, things, metaphors, stories, biographies and conflicts (Marcus 1995). At the turn of the 1980s and throughout the 1990s, multi-sited ethnography became one of the most explored among the experimental strategies anthropologists adopted to broaden their ethnographic gaze and definitively move beyond the idea of a community or culture as an entity delimited by well-defined boundaries (Marcus and Fischer 1986; Appadurai 1996; Hannerz 1996; Gupta and Ferguson 1997). Field research in several sites is often pursued as a way to forge an anthropological practice prepared to explore the multiple “contemporary forms of nomadism” (Callari Galli 2007) such as tourism, international cooperation or diasporas. The imperative to “follow” may focus on different types of phenomena, such as the dislocation of production processes (Redini 2008) or a development project (Tarabusi 2008; Marabello 2012) as well as on different kinds of people: not only migrants, as I will show below, but also members of a ballet company (Wulff 2002), tourists (Römhild 2002) or foreign correspondents (Hannerz 2004). To a more limited extent, this chapter focuses on some of the opportunities and difficulties involved in multi-sited research within the

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socio-anthropological study of migration processes (Riccio and Boccagni 2014). When considering this point it is important to keep in mind that the research practice of studying migrants lives on two levels, the departure and arrival contexts extensively predates the debate mentioned above; for instance, it can be seen in the Manchester School’s contributions to the development of urban anthropology, and in particular the study of that single social field in which the rural and urban are interwoven (Epstein 1967; Capello et al. 2014; Riccio 2014; Gardini, Rimoldi in this volume). Indeed, such a dual-level methodological standpoint is typical of anthropological studies on migration. In addition to being employed in the 1950s and ’60s, as mentioned above, this standpoint was revived in the ’70s thanks to Watson’s volume presenting a series of empirical works that today we would define as multi-local studies (Watson 1977). As I have tried to highlight on multiple occasions (Riccio 2007, 2008) and in contrast to authors critical of this research strategy (Hage 2005; Candea 2007), I still tend to agree with Watson’s categorical statement (1977) that it is not possible to acquire a complete image of migration as a process without investigating people and their families on both sides despite certain methodological misgivings that Marcus (1995) and Hannerz (2003) have previously raised and that I will revisit in the course of this discussion. Indeed, as Sayad (1999) has taught us, an immigrant is always also an emigrant. I therefore believe that a multi-local exploration of the migratory phenomenon is always important regardless of whether or not the migrant in question might be defined as a good example of “transmigrant” (Grillo 2018).1 In other words, I believe that even the lives of migrants who are perfectly settled and integrated into their arrival context, only occasionally in contact with their contexts of origin (as is the situation with many refugees, for instance) deserves to be researched in a way that seeks to empirically understand both these contexts as well. It is not surprising, in fact, that several anthropological studies on migration conducted in recent decades have also adopted such perspectives in Italy.

Multi-sited Ethnographies on Transnational Migrations in Italy2 This focus on transnational processes has been accompanied by methodological changes as well, and researchers have developed ethnographic studies that connect several spaces which are important for migrants’ life

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experiences. The adoption of this approach in anthropological studies of migrations in Italy as well seems to have generated more in-depth analyses of the economic, cultural, and socio-political transformations that have occurred in the interaction between arrival and origin contexts. More and more research is being carried out by scholars engaged in transnational spaces that brings together the cultures of migration that develop in the contexts of origin with the social practices that migrants enact in the contexts where they settle. Most of these studies are ethnographic and usually focus on a specific national group of migrants (Salih 2003; Riccio 2007; Capello 2008; Cingolani 2009; Boccagni 2009; Vietti 2019; Notarangelo 2011; Ferrero 2018). Of the work on Moroccan migration in Italy carried out in the first decades of Italy’s evolution as a true context of immigration (Grillo and Pratt 2002), in addition to Ruba Salih’s pioneering research (2003, 2008) one study worth mentioning is Le prigioni invisibili by Capello (2008), which focuses on young Moroccans between Turin, on the one hand, and Khourigba and Casablanca, on the other. Another is Tra il Maghreb e i Caruggi by Notarangelo (2011), which more specifically addresses Moroccan minors in Genoa. Exploring the flow from Eastern Europe to Turin, two publications that stand out are Cingolani’s monograph on the Romeni d’Italia (2009) and Vietti’s exploring the world of caregivers in Il paese delle badanti (2019 [2010]) through the lens of migration from Moldova. More recently, Ferrero’s ethnographic research on Egyptian femininity between mobility and immobility, Femminilità egiziane tra mobilità e immobilità (2018), has offered a valuable example of the careful and conscious construction of a multi-sited ethnographic field, as I will discuss in the concluding remarks. In spite of their differences, these studies share a number of aspects such as a marked focus on the “cultures of migration” (Degli Uberti 2014) characterizing the contexts of origin (Riccio and Lagomarsino 2010; Bellagamba 2011), an aspect that seems to constitute one of the specific traits of anthropology in studying migration processes (Riccio 2014), the examination of gender and intergenerational relations within multiple forms of transnational families (cfr. Bryceson and Vuorela 2002) and, finally, the ambivalent experiences of exclusion and inclusion in a country of immigration, Italy, that was once a famous anthropological example of Mediterranean hospitality but has now become increasingly inhospitable and less “welcoming” of migrants and their children (Aime 2015; Fabini et al. 2019). For example, building on the interpretation

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proposed by Sayad (1999), Capello’s monograph (2008) shows that Moroccan migrants live in “invisible prisons”, experiencing a sort of dual exclusion comprising both the existential imprisonment caused by being excluded and marginalized in Morocco and transnational migration which leads to class subordination and exclusion on multiple levels (social, territorial, political) in Italy. Over the course of their migration trajectories, however, migrants enact strategies in keeping with complex and ambivalent logics that cannot always be grasped through excessively categorical lenses. What is certain is that this entire experience clashes with the expectations migrants developed based on the culture of migration generated in Morocco; as a result, many young Moroccans experience a marked sense of disillusionment (Capello 2008; Notarangelo 2011). These young people try to navigate through daily dilemmas related to their identities and the ongoing pressures arising from the collective representation that frames them as foreigners for life (Riccio 2016). The effects of this particularly hostile immigration context in terms of these young people’s transnational aspirations and yearning for change have yet to be explored as a field of research. From a more specifically methodological point of view, there is no doubt that considering migrants and their families in both the place of origin and contexts of arrival considerably facilitates the understanding of a complex and multidimensional process such as migration. All of the above-mentioned research shares this same arena by virtue of its attempt to capture the experiences of adults (Vietti 2019; Cingolani 2009; Ferrero 2018), young people (Capello 2008), and adolescents or pre-adolescent migrants (Notarangelo 2011) with respect to their multiple contexts of reference, highlighting the more or less transnational lives that they stage in their migratory contexts. What such studies convey is a powerful sense of ambivalence: on the one hand, no longer feeling at home either here or there (Sayad 1999) while on the other hand feeling rooted in both places, albeit in a contradictory way (Grillo 2018). These texts share not only a research methodology but also an experimental form of ethnographic writing by displaying a certain attention to narrative strategies and the way texts are constructed (see Matera 2017). In fact, all of the authors of these monographs chose to present themselves as an integral part of the text, especially by interspersing the text with pages from their fieldwork notebooks and making explicit their role in the ethnographic context and the power relations and relationships they established with their research participants. In particular, by using

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multivocality in constructing these texts and presenting different narrative registers, these authors are able to express the complexity of the migratory process by revealing the subjective and cultural nature of the migratory choices, and to effectively convey a kaleidoscopic and multi-faceted panorama (Giuffrè and Riccio 2012). Several of these texts are specifically structured around the journey itself, as a node. Almost as if conveying the dislocated character of the research, the journey simultaneously operates as a research methodology (Capello et al. 2014), a narrative strategy and an actual object of ethnographic interest. Through this object, the authors are able to unpack the multiple trajectories of mobility (Heil et al. 2017) and the various circuits related to migration (the circulation of objects, money, and people) in all their complexity. The move to focus ethnographically on the journey in its two-fold form of “journey of the researcher/anthropologist” and “journey of the migrants” thus allows the authors to avoid relegating their research sites to some fictitious ethnographic space and instead position them in a real space and contemporary time, on the one hand, and to provide a privileged view onto the circuits activated by migrants, on the other hand. This approach invites us to trace migrants’ tracks, to “follow people”, as Marcus (1995) suggests, in their movements and to study mobility through mobility. For example, the return minibus journey in Morocco as well as Romania and Moldova plays an important role as a metaphor for the “routes” (Clifford 1997) of the globalized world. Minibus car parks are reinterpreted as transnational places par excellence, hubs in which the different worlds of migrants and intermediaries intersect and the people who travel continuously from one side to the other (e.g., minibus drivers, but also people who return home more frequently) become the emblem of living between two worlds (Vietti 2019). For these authors, however, a focus on the journey goes hand in hand with the observation that local contexts continue to play a significant role in mediating transnational practices (Riccio 2011), almost to emphasize the fact that migrants are anchored to concrete and specific places. Indeed, the sense of place holds an important position in the ethnographies cited here. This awareness is especially marked in Cingolani’s monograph (2009), which stands out by virtue of adopting a diachronic perspective characteristic of post-socialist studies that he uses to explore the life stories of migrants and non-migrants with the aim of tracing the networks that have historically connected up specific local contexts of departure and arrival.

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Multi-sited Ethnography as a “Virtuous Spiral” In my own multi-sited field research, I have sought to observe and investigate the experiences and representations of Senegalese people in contexts of both origin and immigration. In particular, I have sought to explore how transnational networks influenced migrants’ lives in various ways and how they related to the limits and opportunities characterizing immigration contexts (Riccio 2007). In selecting the locations comprising the field of that ethnography, an operation that is far from “arbitrary” (Candea 2007) as I will have the opportunity to assert in my concluding remarks as well, I followed the people, but also their families and social ties, based on the contacts they established in Italy, Senegal, and vice versa. It is important, I believe, to note that the field connecting these locations is not an assortment of separate units but rather a set of contexts bound together by the relationships and practices of social actors. By following these relationships and practices, I connected up the different locations and methodological experiences (participant observation, interviews, archive research, and life stories) by continuously comparing their life and professional stories (similarities and differences) while also engaging spatially with the continuous references and comparisons between actions and thoughts that surfaced in the different field research sites. As Marcus (1989, p. 25) suggested as early as the end of the 1980s, activities and identities are constructed by multiple agents in varying contexts, or places, and ethnography must be strategically conceived to represent this sort of multiplicity, and to specify both intended and unintended consequences in the network of complex connections within a system of places.

As shown in other studies (Riccio 2007, 2008), emigration from Senegal to Italy has become an increasingly varied phenomenon that involves different and changing migratory paths. Multi-sited research allowed me to write an ethnography that highlights this multiplicity of trajectories and forges a multi-vocal representation of the transnational social space and the ‘Senegalese community’, thereby offering a representation that is more disaggregated than would be possible using excessively categorical typologies. Not only did my multi-sited trajectory prove effective in documenting the variety of points of view in relation to the migration process, it

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also facilitated my theoretical discussion of transnationality not only as a system of social networks crossing the political borders of nation-states, but also as a set of relational practices. I was able to illustrate not so much a rigid and self-contained system of networks, but a process of multiple networking. In fact, I found that family and friendship networks in the transnational community intertwined with informal and formal networks created in the multiple local contexts of immigration. Fellow country people abroad tended to overcome their ethnic or religious differences and some of them not only affirmed community ties but also tried to build other networks in the arrival context (see Gardini, Rimoldi on the situational approach to identification and affiliation processes in this volume). Moreover, by intermittently returning to their homelands, migrants expand their networks in various directions, for instance, to enlarge the potential market for import-export activities (Riccio 2007). In other words, carrying out research in a “translocal” space (Grillo and Riccio 2004) allowed me to clearly make explicit the processual and constructive nature of both ethnography (Coleman and Collins 2006) and the lives of migrant and non-migrant informants themselves (Riccio 2019). Paul Stoller (2002) points out that his previous work in Niger and good grasp of Songhai made it easier for him to access West African migrants living in New York. From this methodological point of view, multi-sited ethnography is constructed as a “virtuous spiral” (Riccio 2011; Ferrero 2018) with each subsequent stage of the research process benefitting from the previous stage. For example, I returned from my first stay in Senegal deeply enriched by the experience and my direct knowledge of the contexts of origin contributed greatly to facilitating my access to other interlocutors and strengthening my relationships with those I had already met. Moreover, even the task of selecting sites in which to carry out part of my fieldwork was the product of a gradual process of accumulating experiences and contacts as new insights developed and new relationships were established. This element appears to characterize the multi-local study of other forms of mobility as well; for example, in recalling his research on foreign correspondents, Hannerz (2012, p. 112) writes that: Meeting with foreign correspondents, I have sensed that it is often appreciated when it turns out that I have also talked to friends and colleagues of theirs in some other part of the world (…). As I have tried to include informants from the same news organization in different postings, to

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develop my understanding of its operations as a kind of triangulation, such connections can be discovered fairly often and easily.

On the other hand, these considerations prevent us from underestimating the psychological challenges underlying multi-sited research: when following biographies as well as practices and networks, a researcher never stops negotiating access to new fields (Gallo 2009, 2011). This kind of fieldwork may prove to be very physically tiring as well. Scholars do not stress enough the fact that multi-sited ethnographic research demands human skills such as friendliness and patience as well as the ability to adapt to frequent relocation. When scholars present the choice of multisited ethnography as stemming from practical and instrumental reasons, they seem to overlook these other features (Hage 2005). At the same time, researchers should curb their ambitions of achieving a holistic overview. It is quite difficult to develop an overall ethnographic grasp of the various spheres of life. Through multi-sited research, researchers tend to focus on certain aspects (in my case, transnational families, work, and specifically trade, co-development projects, the deterritorialization of religion, the representation of migrants, etc.) rather than others. As Hannerz rightly points out: most multi-site studies really also have built-in assumptions about segmented lives, where some aspects (work, ethnicity or something else) is most central to the line of inquiry, and other aspects are less so. The ethnographer may be interested in the embeddedness of a particular line of belief or activity in a wider set of circumstances, but this hardly amounts to some holistic ambition. (Hannerz 2003, p. 209)

Places and Relationships, Relationships and Places3 While multi-sited fieldwork has helped me to understand that the lives of certain people span different contexts and thus comprehend the nodal points in the diffuse networks of global and local relations comprising the everyday context of so many people today, we should bear in mind that “such nodal points are grounded in cultural constructions associated with particular localities” (Olwig and Hastrup 1997, p. 12). In fact, an aspect that proved fundamental in the analysis of not only the specific transnational community I studied but also several of the communities I

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discussed in the first part of the chapter (Boccagni 2009; Cingolani 2009) is that the different local sites of departure and arrival (concrete, not only imagined) are important in shaping migrants’ experiences. In relation to this point, Karen Fog Olwig (1997) argues that migrants frequently develop an attachment to specific places, which, although not their places of residence, play a decisive role in providing a sense of identity in their lives within the spaces generated by networks of global relationships. For many Senegalese, as for the Nevisians that Olwig researched, the fact that they have a territorially defined place toward which to aspire both organizationally and spiritually represents an important organizational solution for them. In other words, different local contexts of origin as much of immigration influence the frequency, depth, and breadth of transnational links. The risk of complex multi-sited ethnography, as already highlighted by Hannerz (2003) and Marcus (1995), is that it might undermine the kind of in-depth and intense analysis of a specific locality ensured by localized, traditional fieldwork (Falzon 2009). Although in the past this type of research strategy relied on a vision of culture as a natural whole with immutable boundaries (Fabietti 1999; Matera 2017) and sometimes risked becoming “fetishized” (Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Ferguson 2011; Matera 2013), it also provided detailed in-depth knowledge of social relations and historical context. The point I would like to make is that “the effort to present both the place and the system in multiple perspectives” (Marcus 1989, p. 19) is a difficult and complex task. The methodological challenge at hand is to broaden the ethnographic gaze in order to grasp transnational connections without losing sight of the local context, and remembering that this context is itself not a given but rather the changing and contested product of performance (Coleman and Collins 2006), practices, narratives, and power relations which become stratified over time. In fact, it is migrants and non-migrants themselves (Riccio 2019) who have highlighted the localized form of many transnational practices through their conversations and daily activities. Although it would be a mistake to downplay the effects of the transnational on the local, my research on Senegalese migrants revealed how crucial it is to contextualize transnational flows and led to revitalizing the local context in the research process as a whole. Although culture is borderless and constantly changing, it is still useful to recognize the heuristic value of constructs that help us understand the different ways in which the spheres of human life are connected (Riccio 2014). It is

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worth retaining at least this specific characteristic of the aspiration to a holistic view, and combining it with the awareness that historical contexts survive in that they are involved in processes of deterritorialization and re-territorialization (Appadurai 1996). I therefore support a rather ambitious project, namely that of considering the multiplicity of trajectories, the interconnections among places, without neglecting the relevance of local context and history. Codevelopment projects provide a methodological opportunity for moving in this direction. In some circumstances, the exploitation of transnational potentialities allows migrants to play an unprecedented role as “development actors” who rebuild their country of origin socially, if not economically. The process linking arrival and origin contexts may take on a “translocal” profile (Grillo and Riccio 2004; Boccagni 2009) by involving migrants in micro-projects of cooperation designed in Europe to be implemented in their countries of origin. These projects engage local authorities, associations, and NGOs in both contexts and constitute an interesting research field because they encourage researchers to focus on both migrants’ experiences and the organizations and institutions based in the various local contexts that come together in transnational migration. The study of cooperation decentralized through migration may provide a methodological solution for focusing our attention on interactions between host-society institutions and associations, and transnational practices and economic and socio-cultural transformations in contexts of origin (Marabello 2012). It may additionally offer a way to anchor multisited research to local contexts and their institutions, working side by side with informants and negotiating the meanings attributed to both the local and the transnational (Riccio 2011). One of the main aims of multi-local research is to demonstrate the relevance of relationships which are continuous even if they are not contiguous (Falzon 2009). Whatever the unit of analysis—material objects, interpersonal links, emotions, or other immaterial resources— a multi-sited approach revolves around forms of at-a-distance relational interdependence among the chosen sub-fields and the chances of studying these ethnographically (Boccagni 2016; Riccio and Boccagni 2014). If it is true, as Hannerz also reminds us (2012), that social anthropology focuses primarily on social relations and only indirectly on places, it is precisely by making explicit the way we actually construct a multi-sited field, with a certain “theoretical candour” (Fabietti 1999), that we can successfully also convey the sense of places for the people we work with

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when conducting ethnography. It was this point that concerned me when reading and discussing an otherwise brilliant and well-fashioned doctoral dissertation on Senegalese migration to Spain (Hernandez-Carretero 2016): in this dissertation, the contexts were entirely anonymous (see Piasere 2020) and it was thus unclear how the multi-sited field had been constructed by weaving and following social networks; furthermore, it was not even clear if the people the researcher had worked with in the immigration context had any kind of relationship with the people she had met in Senegal. Perhaps it is not necessary to ensure a “simultaneously matched” sample such as the one Mazzucato (2010) presented in her study on Ghanaian migrants in The Netherlands that was conducted in different places with members of the same families or social networks. However, it does seem vital that we hold a problematizing discussion about how transnational networks were actually followed, and which ones, in that performance that is the act of constructing the field. If only because it is not a matter of investigating a multiplicity of sites by chance, but of exploring and showing how they interconnect—that is, uncovering the network of translocal relations. On the contrary, in the case of Ferrero’s research (2018), the author herself defines the process of selecting people and contexts as a “funnel-matched sample”. Moving through space led to a decrease in the number of informants. In Turin I met people in different places in various ways, while in Egypt my presence was mediated by families, thus limiting my ability to meet people who did not belong to the social networks of those who hosted me. For this reason … my decision to stay with different families during the months of my field research addressed the need to extend my networks, which at any rate remained narrower than the ones I had in Turin. (Ferrero 2018, p. 49)

Here, the interconnection among sites is ensured and differences in the scale of the sample from one context to the next is openly addressed if not actually problematized. This allows readers to envisage for themselves an actual translocal social space in which the experiences of the Egyptian women Ferrero studied in both contexts unfolded.

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Conclusion Ferrero’s discussion therefore offers an example of good practice in scientific communication because, as Marcus himself (1995, 2011) suggests in the definition quoted at the beginning of this chapter, researchers must have an explicit and openly stated logic for connecting sites in order to define the object and field of ethnographic research. Moreover, it is interesting to note, in agreement with Harney (2014) among others, that the multi-sited character of migration ethnography may be appreciated not only in terms of space, but also from a temporal perspective. Delving into a familiar theme of anthropological debate (Fabietti 1999; Matera 2017), Harney refers to the different “temporalities” that are manifest in the life experience of an ethnographer and his or her interlocutors, as well as to the hiatus that typically occurs between the period of field observation and the moment the ethnography is published. However, he also references another aspect that I believe to be central to the discussion outlined in this chapter, namely the idea of ethnography that is not only multi-sited but also multi-temporal, thus addressing the need to adopt a longitudinal perspective and periodically revisit the field as the years pass and take advantage of the spiral effect mentioned above (Riccio 2007; Ferrero 2018). Due in part to the complexities I have identified above, it is precisely multi-sited ethnography that calls on us to avoid shrugging off the need for methodological accountability with a careless “I do things, I see people”.

Notes 1. The term ‘transnationalism’ refers to a multiplicity of social, economic, political and cultural processes through which migrants maintain social relations linking their societies of origin to those of arrival. For some discussions of the transnational perspective see Vertovec (2009) and within the Italian context, Ceschi and Riccio (2006), Ambrosini (2007), Riccio (2007, 2008), Giuffrè (2009) and Boccagni (2009). 2. This paragraph references and reviews some thoughts previously included in Giuffrè and Riccio (2012). 3. Some of the following considerations were presented recently (13 February 2020) at the conference International migration data: Advances and challenges, “Paolo Fortunati” Department of Statistical Sciences, University of Bologna; I would like to thank the organizers and participants who provided useful insights.

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and the Second Generation. How Children of Immigrants Find Their Space. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Riccio, B. (Ed.). (2019). Mobilità. Incursioni etnografiche. Milan: Mondadori. Riccio, B., & Boccagni, P. (Eds.). (2014). Migrazioni e ricerca qualitativa in Italia. Mondi Migranti, 3. Riccio, B., & Lagomarsino F. (Eds.). (2010). L’altra sponda delle migrazioni: i contesti d’origine. Mondi Migranti, 3. Römhild, R. (2002). Practiced Imagination. Tracing Transnational Networks in Crete and Beyond. Anthropological Journal on European Cultures, 11, 159– 190. Salih, R. (2003). Gender in Transnationalism. Home, Longing and Belonging Among Moroccan Migrant Women. London: Routledge. Salih, R. (2008). Identità, modelli di consumo e costruzioni di sé tra il Marocco e l’Italia. In B. Riccio (Ed.), Migrazioni transnazionali dall’Africa. Etnografie multilocali a confronto. Turin: UTET. Sayad, A. (1999). La double absence. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Stoller, P. (2002). Money Has No Smell: The Africanization of New York City. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Tarabusi, F. (2008). Tracce di inclusione. Antropologia nello sviluppo e cooperazione decentrata in Bosnia Erzegovin. Rimini: Guaraldi. Vertovec, S. (2009). Transnationalism. London: Routledge. Vietti, F. (2019). Il paese delle badanti. Milan: Meltemi. Watson, J. (Ed.). (1977). Between Two Cultures: Migrants and Minorities in Britain. Oxford: Blackwell. Wulff, H. (2002). Yo-yo Fieldwork: Mobility and Time in a Multi-local Study of Dance in Ireland. Anthropological Journal on European Cultures, 11, 117–136.

PART IV

Deconstructions

CHAPTER 14

Participant Observation: The Personal Commitment in Native Life—A Problematic Methodological Topos Gabriella D’Agostino

A Methodological Revolution It was 1922. Bronislaw Malinowski had come back from the Trobriand Islands four years earlier and published Argonauts of Western Pacific, which, according to Sir James Frazer in the conclusive section in the Preface to the book, was likely “to be one of the completest and most scientific accounts ever given of a savage people” (Malinowski 1922, p. 5). It is commonly known that Argonauts would go down in history as the first field monography, the first account that, by combining field research and theoretical reflection, had upgraded a personal experience to a necessary and qualifying condition in order to work as a social scientist for those populations that would later be described as “ethnographically-interesting populations”. The lack of models for the drafting of Argonauts is probably at the heart of both the enthusiasm and the critical scathing readings that this

G. D’Agostino (B) Dept. Culture e Società, University of Palermo, Palermo, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 V. Matera and A. Biscaldi (eds.), Ethnography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51720-5_14

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work has aroused and has kept on arousing, at various times. Malinowski had created a genre, recognized as field monography, and had tried to establish some procedures and a structure that aimed at qualifying the role of the professional anthropologist. This occurred not only with respect to colleagues who did not practise any field research, the so-called armchair anthropologists, but also to those who, while having meaningful encounters with “exotic” and “savage” societies, collected “data” and information about different aspects of the reality they observed. And, yet, they did not provide a punctual, consistent, and cogent account of a defined and delimited context both in space and time, in a nutshell, of the field under investigation. Malinowski’s experience placed itself in a perspective where a theoretical-methodological evolutionist approach was still dominant. As compared to this setting, his method was utterly eccentric in the field of the still young—as Frazer claims—anthropological science (Malinowski 1922, p. 2). “Participant observation” was called Malinowski’s method,1 although in his monography this expression never appears, whereas the noun on its own or in its adjectivized form (direct, actual, personal ) does (pp. 102, 211, 246, 265 in the English edition), and as a title of a chapter (“Importance of personal observation in native life”). Lacking a model to follow, Malinowski feels the need to clarify how, when, and through which passages he managed to write what he wrote, in view of examples of “works of great renown with a scientific guarantee mark on them, in which generalizations are introduced aplenty but they do not inform us about the real experiences through which the authors drew their conclusions ” (ivi, p. 30) at all. Therefore, Malinowski introduces his work as follows: Before proceeding to the account of the Kula, it will be well to give a description of the methods used in the collecting of the ethnographic material. The results of scientific research in any branch of learning ought to be presented in a manner absolutely candid and above board. No one would dream of making an experimental contribution to physical or chemical science, without giving a detailed account of all the arrangements of the experiments; an exact description of the apparatus used; of the manner in which the observations were conducted; of their number; of the length of time devoted to them, and of the degree of approximation with which each measurement was made. In less exact sciences, as in biology or geology, this cannot be done as rigorously, but every student will do his best to bring home to the reader all the conditions in which the experiment or the observations were made. In Ethnography, where a candid account of

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such data is perhaps even more necessary, it has unfortunately in the past not always been supplied with sufficient generosity, and many writers do not ply the full searchlight of methodical sincerity, as they move among their facts and produce them before us out of complete obscurity. (Malinowski 1922, pp. 2–3)2

Malinowski feels an urge to establish a method, to guarantee the objectivity of ethnographical accounts, yet he is fully aware that the subject on which he is working is “ambiguous” and “complex”. As a matter of fact, if he writes: I consider that only such ethnographic sources are of unquestionable scientific value, in which we can clearly draw the line between, on the one hand, the results of direct observation and of native statements and interpretations, and on the other, the inferences of the author, based on his common sense and psychological insight […]. Again, in historical science, no one could expect to be seriously treated if he made any mystery of his sources and spoke of the past as if he knew it by divination. (Ivi, p. 13)

however, he goes on to remark: In ethnography, the writer is his own chronicler and the historian at the same time, while his sources are no doubt easily accessible, but also supremely elusive and complex; they are not embodied in fixed, material documents, but in the behaviour and in the memory of living men. (Ibidem)3

If, on the one hand, it is necessary to guarantee the scientific dignity of ethnographic accounts according to the model of dominant science, on the other hand, he clearly spots the particular statute of the ethnographical “sources” in their being embodied (the word is neither predictable nor banal) in behavior and memory. Finally, as a conclusion to this first part of the Introduction, it is worth noting another interesting aspect. Malinowski writes: In Ethnography, the distance is often enormous between the brute material of information — as it is presented to the student in his own observations, in native statement, in the kaleidoscope of tribal life — and the final authoritative presentation of the results. The Ethnographer has to traverse this distance in the laborious years between the moment when he sets foot upon a native beach, and makes his first attempts to get in touch with the

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natives, and the time when he writes down the final version of his results. (Ibidem)

Here, the core of a key question seems to arise that will be asked later. The acknowledgement of the fact, although not problematized, that the ethnographical account—which is introduced as though it was built as the scholar gradually looks upon the reality being analyzed, the research context,4 in accordance with the “deal with the reader” mentioned in the Conclusions5 —is the result of a rhetorical strategy, a narrative ploy, a fiction (as it will be said later, in the etymological sense of “construction”). Therefore, after a brief reference to the initial phases of his “first initiation into field work” (“the compound of some neighbouring white man, trader or missionary”, the fact of being “the compound of some neighbouring white man, trader or missionary”, with no guides), he recalls “the long visits” during his first weeks subsequent to his arrival, marked by “the feeling of hopelessness and despair after many obstinate but futile attempts [that] had entirely failed to bring me into real touch with the natives” (ivi, p. 13). The “first entry into the village” is recalled as an experience from which some measures can be taken: whether you are with or without the “white cicerone”, the youngest natives gather around, lured by the smell of the tobacco while the elderly and the nobles stay aside. The white cicerone has his own way of dealing with natives but he neither understands nor cares about the way the ethnographer “will have to approach them”. Hence the awareness (or the hope), which will be completely achieved, that coming back by himself would make the task easier. Malinowski’s story goes on to depict “approaching” tactics and strategies6 : some compliments in pidgin, some tobacco changing hands, a certain attention to technology. However, pidgin does not allow a “free communication” and while collecting “concrete data” (village census, genealogies, plans, terms of kinship) Malinowski notices that all of this “remained dead material, which led no further into the understanding of real native mentality or behaviour”, since he could neither resort to a data interpretation of theirs, “nor get what could be called the hang of tribal life” (ivi, p. 14). From here onwards, the introduction focuses on “the secret of effective field-work”, the “ethnographer’s magic, by which he is able to evoke the real spirit of the natives, the true picture of tribal life” (ibidem). It is about “rules of common sense and well-known scientific principles”

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grouped by Malinowski in three main categories: there should be real scientific aims based on “values and criteria” on modern ethnography; the ethnographer should live “right among the natives”, with no contacts with the white men; he or she should apply scientific rules to collect, elaborate, and define some evidence which is being used. Among those rules, “the most elementary” is about the question of white men. The first of the “proper conditions for ethnographic work” is settling into the village of the natives, living with them as closely as possible. Having as a base a white man’s house for the goods and “a refuge there in times of sickness and surfeit of native” is “very nice”; however, it must be collocated to a distance so that it cannot be exploited while researching. “For the native is not the natural companion for a white man” (Malinowski 1922, p. 15), after spending many hours with him for the research, “you will naturally hanker after the company of your own kind”. Forcing oneself to live in the village has an essential purpose for the ethnographic investigation based on the creation of the relationship with the local native, because the search for his companion alongside the moment of the very investigation will lead you to know him better and “you become familiar with his customs and beliefs”. Therefore, learning the local language is the basic condition.7 So, life in the village, “which at first is a strange, sometimes unpleasant, sometimes intensely interesting adventure, soon adopts quite a natural course very much in harmony with his surroundings” (ivi, p. 15).8 Being part of the village life, Malinowski warns, means planning your personal participation to meaningful events but also finding interest in ordinary ones, giving a rhythm to your own life according to the lives of the others (“a day presenting itself to me more or less as it does to the native”). This constant presence allows the natives to get used to the presence of a stranger, who ceases “to be a disturbing element in the tribal life” and ends up being considered “as part and parcel of their life, a necessary evil or nuisance, mitigated by donations of tobacco” (ibidem). Gradually, by learning the etiquette and acquiring “‘the feeling’ for native good and bad manners”, by sharing the companionship of the natives, Malinowski writes that he started to understand that he was establishing a good connection with them, which was an essential condition for the research work. A paragraph follows in which he tries to draft the relationship between field theory and field practice. Having a good theoretical education and knowing the latest results issued from the area of study, requirements that

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were mentioned before, does not mean—Malinowski warns—reaching the field with “preconceived ideas”: If a man sets out on an expedition, determined to prove certain hypotheses, if he is incapable of changing his views constantly and casting them off ungrudgingly under the pressure of evidence, needless to say his work will be worthless. But the more problems he brings with him into the field, the more he is in the habit of moulding his theories according to facts, and of seeing facts in their bearing upon theory, the better he is equipped for the work […] The field worker relies entirely upon inspiration from theory. (Ivi, p. 16)

On the Field, from the Field We know the subsequent reflections concerning the status of the participant observation method as compared to the observer’s stance, the degree of implication within such a complex process as the field research and the proper distance from which an interlocutory relationship between the individuals can be built. For that matter, the expression “participating observation” under which we can identify the Malinowskian method is problematic, since it implies, at the same time, proximity and distance, which has been noticed and debated for a long time. Likewise, it is known that its status must be related to the historical conditions of the birth of the discipline and the necessity of embracing a specific method, typical of a disciplinary approach. However, any process of knowledge starts from a distance, from a gap. If a concatenation of technical actions, either formalized behavior or not, a belief, a way of organizing a party or even joining it, a set of customs, briefly one or more ways of living life by giving it a sense, are not in some fashion unknown and distant from those who observe them or establish a relationship with them, then it is not possible to launch a fact-finding action. After all, “participating observation” is an effective expression to bespeak the special position of the researcher and the approach of the ethnographic method, within anthropological research, bearing in mind that this position must imply a participating observation as well, an observed observation, an observed participation (Tedlock 1991), and a reflexive ethnography, that is it must burden itself with the critical afterthought which it must confront. Despite the paradox that many have detected,9 it is still a fundamental and constitutive part of the ethnographic experience, the special “being there”. This, along with

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the primacy of sight recognizing by degrees the role of the other sensory dimensions involved in the process of knowledge. The debate which flared up the day after the publication of Marinowski’s Diaries 10 may have to be reconsidered (or it should have been posed) not so much in the view of what Malinowski wanted to make his readers believe and the public image of the professional anthropologist which emerged after publishing Argonauts as what those readers, but mainly the scientific community, wanted to believe by fostering the myth of the researcher’s empathic skills as foremost conditions of fieldwork and ingredients of this experience’s “magic”. The condition of the research, the process, the real modalities of interaction, the subjective and emotional dimension, the uneasiness, some misunderstandings—which every researcher must have experienced to some extent—couldn’t fit next to the soundness of the theoretical frame, the authority and the adequacy of the argumentation, the accuracy of the method, in a disciplinary field which was to find a status and a legitimacy within the scientific research. Actually, it may just have represented the “qualifying and glorifying evidence” of the aspiring anthropologist (the rite de passage, indeed, as it has been written more than once). In essence, I think that the publication of the Diaries only revealed relevant aspects of experience, calling into question a certain image of the social scientist as the anthropologist is, with respect to the fieldwork, but I also think that sooner or later this crisis would have affected the academic field, regardless of the Diaries. Instead, the Diaries raised an interesting matter which I cannot find in the summaries or in the current references, on which it may be worth dwelling.11 Malighetti and Molinari (2016) quoting an essay by Murray L. Wax, “Tenting with Malinowski” (1972) report that Malinowski defined as “aristocratic” the status of the natives with whom he established a relationship and any kind of association with the inhabitants of the village based on an equality would have been deemed as an attack to the caste system and as a treason towards the feelings of solidarity between higher classes. Malinowski settled into the village as an elite member and took on a high position within the social hierarchy, waited on hand and food by a certain number of servants […] In this position, he was able to observe and interact with some favoured informers, but definitely not take part in their activities. (Malighetti and Molinari, 2016, p. 119)

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They add: Malinowski’s approach toward the natives stems from his status of superiority and asymmetry rather than dialogue and interaction. It produces a monologue based on power and monopoly of writing. Malinowski never loses sight of his own horizon; he never doubts his own authority. He talks about his interlocutor as an object but not about himself as a subject. Like all the ethnographers of his time he considers his object of study as a zoological specimen […] For his entire life he referred to the Trobrianders as “savages”, Stone Age Men, or also […] by using the racist term nigger. (Ibidem)

As things stand, I find it necessary to make a clarification, precisely referring to Wax’s essay. Indeed, it seems to me that his observations are defined and detailed as answers to the doubts raised by the publication of the Diaries, they do not sound like “presentism” and help give a context to some of the matters raised. In my opinion, the author makes the situation which emerged between the European colonial administrators and the Melanesian natives very clear. After referring to the impact of the European colonization on the local population (rules, taxations, penalty systems, punishments, etc.) and the related “cargo cult” movements, Wax observes: One can read Malinowski’s diaries as a testament of his difficulties with this social situation and of uncertainty about his proper social role. […] Malinowski’s writings, both then and later reveal a strong antipathy to the structure of colonial rule. From the outset the diaries express open outrage against the missions. The diaries also indicate that he found some of his colonial associates distasteful and other “loathsome” in their lack of finer sensibilities.12 (Wax 1972, p. 6)

In the generation subsequent to Malinowski, Wax writes, the awareness that field research in the form of participation in the natives’ lives was to imply an effort to establish some form of equality, got a foothold. Especially in the colonial situation, the anthropologist had to face the mask with which the native appeared before administrators, retailers and missionaries and so, by integrating the context and trying to share it was hoping to build “a different kind of relationship, to get a fuller and more human kind of knowledge” (Wax 1972, p. 8).

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The same desire of equality and participation in Malinowski’s work should not be expected, especially in the initial phase, nor be thought that his engagement in an intensive individual research could have had as an immediate consequence, the fact of pursuing a form of social equality with the natives. However, Unlike his fellow colonists, Malinowski did view the Trobrianders as men as complete as the Europeans and equally endowed with reason and morals. […] However, Malinowski’s insistence on the natives’ human stature should not be misinterpreted to mean that he was indifferent to the criteria of civilization. […] Malinowski could consider himself, the British colonist, and the Trobriand natives as equally human in the anthropological abstract, but in the concreteness of daily interaction, he considered himself a member of an intellectual and aesthetic elite, superior to both. (Ivi, p. 9) […] However, the unhappy truth in Malinowski’s diaries is that he neither participated in the ordinary run of native life nor was able to reciprocate native trust and honour by helping them deal with the British administrators, traders and missionaries. Malinowski was an uninfluential enemy alien to the missionaries. He did speak up in defence of natives, and later in life, he was to wage a literary campaign against the more brutal of colonial practices, but at this time he lacked the stature requisite for making the British take his criticism of their policies seriously. Again, Malinowski seems to have scarcely sought participation in Trobriand life, and in any case he was a sickly man and hence unfit to engage in their strenuous routine. (Ivi, p. 10)

Essentially, it seems to me that the argumentations are convincing and despite his research not being as it would be deemed to be nowadays, the fact that Malinowski was there marks an immeasurable distance from the previous research by setting the grounds of intensive research, in the native language, in sharing a routine, as high-ranking as it turned out to be, in view of a theory. Malinowski, in A Scientific Theory of Culture (1944/1960), would write: To observe means to select, to classify, to isolate on the basis of theory. To construct a theory is to sum up the relevancy of past observation and to anticipate empirical confirmation or rebuttal of theoretical problems posed. (Malinowski 1960, p. 12)

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As I had already noticed elsewhere (D’Agostino 2016, p. 55, note 8), the image of a project where science and scientists act according to determinate paths after examining a rationalistic simplification underwent a crisis at least with Popper (1963) and criticism to inductivism. The observation is “filled with theory”.13 If it is not possible to observe without a theory, the observer must also avoid being transparent and bear in mind his presence in the different phases of the research. Because a significant part of it, not only and not particularly for the interference that the presence of a “stranger” affects in terms of the normal routine in the context, but also the more or less close bonds that he is inevitably going to establish with the people whom he will meet, that will inevitably affect the relationship between them modifying balance and arrangement. Even before these matters, it is worth noting the relevance of the gender of the researcher, definitely more in the past than nowadays, but still meaningful with respect to the kind of field to investigate, the asymmetry of the terms between researcher and “natives” and, for a long time, the colonial context, as has been said earlier with Malinowski’s example.14

Being Here Despite all distinctions, in-depth analysis and problematizations referring to this method, it is unquestionable that the field is an inalienable experience for a discipline which has as an object of study what human beings do and say they do, do and they do not know they are doing, or do not do while thinking of doing (where “do” has not only a material, concrete, visible meaning, but also implies “be”, “believe”, “feel”). In brief, we are referring to a discipline historically interested in the production of knowledge, in the first place, about individuals who, just by means of this discipline, have been taken back to the group of human beings, whether they were here or somewhere else, whether it was historically a distant or a close alterity, the fundamental matter concerned the fact that in order to know them it was necessary to be there. The field,15 no matter what referent it is given, as long as the object of anthropological knowledge is about—first of all—human beings who act, regardless of the aim of their acting (from the ordinary dimension of existence), is always a delimitation of the research’s range of action, so that all of this can be “grasped”, a delimitation as arbitrary as it can be but still inevitable. Historically, it was distant alterity that was endorsed as an object of anthropological study, with the aim of leading what had been conceived, perceived,

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and classified by mankind as different back to a common, shared, human horizon again. This allowed us to extend human perspectives and to delve into the understanding of “human nature”.16 From this point, at least for a long phase, there were two different fields of research: the distant other and the close other, which can respectively be identified according to the effective distinction proposed by Stocking (1982, p. 172) and resumed by Hannerz (2010) as anthropologies of “nationbuilding” and anthropologies of “empire-building”. To limit oneself to the Italian context, it was the first of these paths that interested and characterized for a long time what we generally mean by anthropological research, which in Italy is referred to as the expression “demoethnoanthropology”, a label implying the three main fields of study identified elsewhere with demology and folklore, ethnology, (social and cultural) anthropology. Demology, folklore studies oriented on regional oral traditions and (material and immaterial) popular culture as an expression of internal differences (“dislivelli interni di cultura”, “internal cultural gaps” according to Cirese’s definition) gave birth to a kind of field of research declared as a “survey” investigation for the “production of documents” upon which ground the analysis, aimed at a new way to conceive museography as well.17 An interesting debate about demoethnoanthropological disciplines “physiognomy”, has developed over the last twenty years, although it is not widely known beyond our (both geographical and disciplinary) borders.18 In my opinion, what is specific about this approach, which Palumbo (2018) called FIS: Fieldwork Italian Style, must be detected not so much in the lack of exotic field (see Faeta 2005, 2011) as in the “textual” and morphological-structural approach instead, for long dominating, to the research objects, disembodied objects, “facts” and “group of facts” to be divided into categories, “types”, “forms” (see Cirese 1979, pp. 268–270).19 Hence, the process of “data” construction did begin from here but aimed at producing more or less articulated forms of “repertoralisation” with comparative purposes.20 Fabio Dei, led by some of Faeta’s positions on the “domestic paradigm” ushered in by Lamberto Loria’s “conversion” to the ethnography “of our people” and bound to be distinguishing category of Italian anthropological studies— from “Loria’s positivism to the overly provincial folklore of Fascism, from de Martino’s refined historicism to the Seventies’ Marxism” (Dei 2012, p. 100)—notices how the matter is not specific to Italy but a wider European horizon:

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In the rest of Europe, exotic ethnological studies – like German Völkerkunde – are not that strong, in any case they follow a classifying and generalising approach, closer to a physical anthropology of people and races than the “field as it is conventionally meant”. There are mainly studies about the “national” people – Volkskunde in Germany, Folklivsforskning in Scandinavia, Laographia in Greece, Ludoznawstwo in Poland, Artes y costumbres populares in Spain, Etnografija in Russia […]. It goes without saying that we are in the phase of maximal – ideological too – development of European nationalisms, which are fostered and legitimised by those disciplines. (Dei 2012, pp. 103–104)

France itself—Dei continues—despite its colonial empire and the particular charm for the exotic typical of its culture in modernist period, does not create a productive “terrain”. Its studies in the first half of the century are mainly dominated on the one hand by the theoretical approaches of Mauss and the sociological school, on the other hand by Van Gennep’s folklore research (moreover, they are proudly opposed). The Dakar-Djibouti expedition in the early Thirties is nonetheless a happy exception but, anyway, it is something very different from field research, Leenhardt’s ethnographies in New Caledonia and Griaule’s ones among the Dogons are forerunning experiences, which would not bear systematic fruit until the Second post-war period (ivi, p. 103). This specific physiognomy of Italian research must rather be retraced in the scarce acquaintance with Anglo-Saxon and American anthropology (for some aspects in European too), a complex matter upon which it is better not to dwell here, yet recalling that the poor diffusion of the knowledge of English among the anthropologists of that generation, in favor of French and German, played a significant role. Nevertheless, the uncommon tendency to write in English for a long period within Italian scientific production is related to the lack of references to this tradition in general works, whose aim is to retrace the event of anthropology as a global discipline.21 On the other hand, the fact that fieldwork must identify in a distant elsewhere so as to be “qualifying” is proven wrong by the front of the so-called urban anthropology, born in the United States from the confluence of anthropology and sociology. Hannerz (1980) identified the birth of this field of study as an academic discipline in the 1970s after the publication, in 1968, of the first book with these words in its title, Urban Anthropology, by E. M. Eddy, after which many other books would be named, as well as the birth of the review “Urban Anthropology” in 1972

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(Hannerz 1980, p. 2). However, as we know, the first empirical investigations about the city, the study of social behaviour in relation to institutions such as family, church, or courthouses; forms of segregation, spatial order, were carried out in Chicago University (established 1892) and its Department of Sociology with William Isaac Thomas and Robert Ezra Park. As Park wrote in a theoretical article published in 1925,22 Anthropology, the science of man, has been mainly concerned up to the present with the study of primitive peoples. But civilized man is quite as interesting an object of investigation, and at the same time his life is more open to observation and study. Urban life and culture are more varied, subtle, and complicated, but the fundamental motives are in both instances the same. The same patient methods of observation which anthropologists like Boas and Lowie have expended on the life and manners of the North American Indian might be even more fruitfully employed in the investigation of the customs, beliefs, social practices, and general conceptions of life prevalent in Little Italy on the lower North Side in Chicago, or in recording the more sophisticated folkways of the inhabitants of Greenwich Village and the neighbourhood of Washington Square, New York. (Park 1925/1967, p. 3)

Hannerz, in his remarkable reconstruction work of the path followed by urban anthropology, in order to retrace its historical connections and detect its possible future physiognomies, dedicated a lot of space to some important monographies produced in the domain of the urban research program of Chicago University which have a strong link to the “current urban anthropology” as to the position of researchers. So, he observed: This is not so true as far as explicit theory is concerned, but more true when it comes to choice or methods and topics, and to the form of presentation. The methodological battery of these Chicagoans was similar to that of anthropologists in emphasising observation of social phenomena in their natural setting but including also informal interviews, surveys, and the collection of personal documents such as life histories. (Hannerz 1980, p. 31)

He refers to works such as: The Hobo, by Nels Anderson (1923), The Gang, by Frederic M. Thrasher (1927), The Ghetto, by Louis Wirth (1928), The Golden Coast and the Slum, by Harvey W. Zorbaugh (1929),

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The Taxi-Dance Hall, by Paul G. Cressey (1932). The Hobo, in American slang, is a vagrant, a homeless worker who roams along the path of development of railways, in a period of an intense urban and industrial growth. Anderson himself experienced roaming after leaving school and he found a job in a family of farmers. He later resumed his studies encouraged by this family and supported himself with occasional jobs in different places. Once he became a sociologist, Anderson relied on his own personal experience to reconsider it in view of a perspective being consistent with the urban research program started within Chicago University. He detected the categories of those homeless individuals with respect to the path of their movements when looking for a job, the organization of their workaday life when residing, gimmicks to survive, the degree of participation in city events, the different forms of adjustment to precariousness conditions, also recording the codified denominations with which the roamers themselves detected among themselves some human types as to personality traits (“mission stiffs”, “jungle buzzard, “jack roller”). Hannerz reminds us that research in the 1970s confirmed the existence of these denominations (Hannerz 1980, p. 34). The Gang is research about urban criminality and the gang system among male teenagers and young people. Despite the huge number of gangs analyzed (according to Thrasher one thousand three hundred and thirteen), the different features of composition as to the number of members and their age, along with the articulation on a local and “ethnic” basis, Thrasher managed to outline a well-structured frame of a complex phenomenon, with interesting insights for his understanding in terms of alternative organization modalities for lack of institutional answers, at all levels (ivi, p. 40). The Ghetto is described as “a work of social history” (ibidem) which introduces an investigation about the Chicago ghetto after a historical analysis of European ghettos, with particular attention to the one in Frankfurt. The ghetto in Chicago began to come to light at the end of the nineteenth century in the western part of the city, West Side indeed. Research, consistent with the “ecological approach”23 developed by Chicago school’s sociologists, but especially with Park’s theory about “race relations” (ivi, p. 44), detected the ghetto as a “natural area” “like Little Sicily, the Black Belt, or even a vice area” (ivi, pp. 43–44). The Gold Coast and the Slums can be considered as an application of the principles of the “natural areas” to the Lower North Side of Chicago, definable as “communities”. Despite the fact that from the beginning the

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research topics favored by urban anthropology concerned aspects related to marginality, Zorbaugh introduces in his work the analysis of an urban center, Gold Coast, by Michigan Lake shore, populated by the most important four hundred families in Chicago. Besides, the investigation is based on a methodology which counts the direct participation of many of the actors concerned who wrote for Zorbaugh “friendly insights and half amused self-analysis” related to “a world of leisure” to which they belonged. Along with the settlement of Gold Coast, Lower North Side, Zorbaugh also discerned “the rooming-house zone, Bohemia, the dilapidated business and entertainment area centring on North Clark Streel, the slum, and Little Sicily” (ivi, pp. 44–45). The Taxi-Dance Hall is an analysis of a particular form of urban entertainment which was about a kind of dance hall attended by adult males who could pay a ticket to dance with the girls who were recruited by the hall owners for this purpose. Each ticket included a single dance with a specific girl who was entitled to half of the price of the ticket (or tickets) which was bought in order to dance with her. Since there were more coveted girls than others, this implied a certain competition (ivi, p. 50). Basically, it was about “taxi-dance girls”, between fifteen and twenty-eight years old, with different personal histories, who experienced “a socialization process” through this job (ivi, p. 51). Their professional career, unlike other kinds of career, consisted in a “downward rather than upward” movement (ivi, p. 52). Successful taxi-dance halls had tendentially “ethnic-based” property which also continued in succession, especially for those groups “with more powerful political connections – always an important factor in an enterprise operating on the edge of respectability and legality” (ivi, p. 51). Attended by clients with a heterogeneous physiognomy (“hoboes and workers, businessmen from out of town, and once-only slummers from higher social strata; […] black sheep from upper-class families (but no real black people); the dwarfed, the maimed, the pock-marked”) (ivi, p. 52), those dance halls also had many patrons among the “stigmatised groups” and there were many Filipinos among those, whose migration toward the United States was mainly male and who already knew those kinds of locals since they were already in their homelands (ivi, p. 53). As Hannerz noticed: The panoramic perspective of The Gold Coast and the Slum remains impressive. Noting that Zorbaugh had achieved one of the aspirations of Robert

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Park, David Matza […] has suggested that “it was as if an anthropologist, let loose in Chicago, had discovered urban America in its full diversity”. Yet one may feel that if he gained in breadth of coverage compared to most of his colleagues, he lost something in depth. While his descriptions provide fascinating glimpses of the variety of lives on the lower North Side, they seem more like the ethnographic notes supplied to colonial archives by touring district officers (although perhaps more lively) than the Malinowskian ideals of professional anthropologists. As far as giving an inside view is concerned, Wirth’s study of the ghetto and Anderson’s of hobohemia are considerably superior to The Gold Coast and the Slum. (Ivi, p. 49)

To be extremely succinct, from the methodical point of view, the prolonged and direct observation on site, the informal interviews, the fact of resorting to another kind of documentation to support the account, the collection of direct proofs even as life histories, characterize this work as “complete ethnographies” based on a qualitative approach. If, in the United States, the relationship between anthropology and sociology still continued even after their divorce,24 it did not elsewhere. In the Italian context, sociology began to embrace the ethnographic method and the participant observation from the 1990s onwards, according to what Dal Lago and De Biasi reported (2004) in an introductive volume to “social ethnography”. Four years later, a new review was established, “Etnografia e ricerca qualitativa”, directed by sociologists Pier Paolo Giglioli, Alessandro Dal Lago, Giolo Fele, and Marco Marzano, whose declared purpose in the Editorial of the first issue was: “to express and support the restoration of ethnography in our country by providing a specific benchmark for Italian ethnographers” (p. 3), in view of the fact that in the previous few years there had been a rapid growth of sociological research, textbooks, monographic issues in reviews and doctoral dissertations, targeting an “ethnographic approach”. The minimal definition of ethnography proposed is this: “By ethnography we mean a quantitative research style, whose purpose is the description and the explanation of the meaning of social actors’ customs ”, whereas it was specified on a note that “qualitative [is] the research in which the aim is to define the sense of the social and human action through direct and indirect data interpretation” (p. 4, italics in the original). I doubt that anthropologists, not only Italians, would identify themselves in this way of introducing the matter. There is a certain overuse of the word which seems to wink or hint at a tendency rather than represent

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the improvement of a horizon, a critical and reflexive posture, in some other disciplinary fields outside the anthropological one, although there is also a certain form of abuse inside, when it is about a label, a title of an essay or a book, an editorial series or a review. What Francesco Remotti wrote in reference to what he called “disciplinary fine dust” as a tendency of “current anthropological knowledge”, in my opinion may refer to a certain overuse of ethnography, whose concrete risk is a sort of “far less interesting”, valid and effective “journalism” than the “journalistic investigation itself” (Remotti 2012, p. 69).

To Set the Record Straight A few years ago, Tim Ingold (2014) took a clear stand with respect to the misuse of the term ethnography. That’s enough about ethnography! is the meaningful title of the essay in which the anthropologist shed light on the risks of overusing the term in the field of our disciplinary approach. With a “perspectival” and not “retrospective” purpose, along with a “partisan” position (Ingold 2014, p. 383), he denounced the risk of the anthropological project turning “into the study of one own’s way of working”, jeopardizing form, the very foundation considered anthropology’s distinctive trait, the ontological commitment and the educational purpose. Ingold’s aim was not to remove ethnography or “conquer” it from anthropology, but to outline its meaning in order to avoid the risk of making “the whole task” worthless. Ethnography is nothing but a way of referring to qualitative research: Such a procedure, in which ethnographic appears to be a modish substitute for qualitative, offends every principle of proper, rigorous anthropological inquiry – including long-term and open-ended commitment, generous attentiveness, relational depth, and sensitivity to context – and we are right to protest against it. And, we are equally entitled to protest when those who assess our own proposals demand of us, in the name of ethnography, the same slavish adherence to the protocols of positivist methodology, by requiring us to specify – for example – how many people we intend to talk to, for how long, and how they will be selected. (Ivi, p. 384)

However, rather than say what ethnography is, fostering matters debated “ad nauseam”, Ingold focused on what it is not. When researching, we

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meet people, we talk to them, we ask questions hoping to learn something from them, about their practical skills, what they think. As soon as possible, in order not to forget what we have observed and listened to, we take field notes. Is this thirst for knowledge, this willingness to memorize and this taking notes what qualifies an encounter as ethnographic? Ingold does not think so: to cast encounters as ethnographic is to consign the incipient – the aboutto-happen in unfolding relationships – to the temporal past of the already over. It is as though, on meeting others face-to-face, one’s back was already turned to them. This is to leave behind those who, in the moment of encounter, stand before. (Ivi, p. 386)

Ethnography does not overlap fieldwork either, actually—Ingold warns— this is another cliché of the discipline, which has not been investigated very much. Moreover, if the way of conducting field research is participant observation, ethnography and participant observation “are not the same thing at all” (ivi, p. 387). Ingold subscribes “with all his heart” with the participant observation procedure and considers anthropology as the discipline which, more than any other, shows how knowledge spawns from the “melting pot of lives being lived with the others” (ibidem). It consists not in propositions about the world but in the skills of perception and capacities of judgment that develop in the course of direct, practical, and sensuous engagements with our surroundings. This is to refute, once and for all, the commonplace fallacy that observation is a practice exclusively dedicated to the objectification of the beings and things that command our attention and their removal from the sphere of our sentient involvement with consociates. […] to observe is not to objectify; it is to attend to persons and things, to learn from them, and to follow in precept and practice. Indeed, there can be no observation without participation – that is, without an intimate coupling, in perception and action, of observer and observed […]. Thus, participant observation is absolutely not an undercover technique for gathering intelligence on people, on the pretext of learning from them. It is rather a fulfilment, in both letter and deed, of what we owe to the world for our development and formation. That is what I mean by ontological commitment. (Ibidem)

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Anthropology is also a practice of education—Ingold warns—the study of “conditions and possibilities of being human”, in the sense of “leading novices out into the world than of instilling knowledge into their mind” (ivi, p. 388): Surely participant observation, if nothing else, is just such a practice. It is one that calls upon the novice anthropologist to attend: to attend to what others are doing or saying and to what is going on around and about; to follow along where others go and to do their bidding, whatever this might entail and wherever it might take you. This can be unnerving and entail considerable existential risk. It is like pushing the boat out into an as yet unformed world – a world in which things are not ready made but always incipient, on the cusp of continual emergence. Commanded not by the given but by what is on the way to being given, one has to be prepared to wait […]. Indeed, waiting upon things is precisely what it means to attend to them. (Ivi, p. 389)

This special position of the wait, “that couples the forward movement of one’s own perception and action with the movements of others”, as it is known, is identified by Ingold as a “correspondence”25 : Correspondence is neither given nor achieved but always in the making. […] it is not a relation between one subject (such as the anthropologist in person) and others […], but one that carries on or unfolds along concurrent paths. (Ivi, p. 389) To practise participant observation, then, is to join in correspondence with those with whom we learn or among whom we study, in a movement that goes forwards rather backwards in time. Herein lies the educational purpose, dynamic, and potential of anthropology. As such, it is the very opposite of ethnography, the descriptive or documentary aims of which impose their own finalities on these trajectories of learning, converting them into data-gathering exercises destined to yield “results”. (Ivi, p. 390)

In conclusion, it is an admonishment to an anthropology which resembles a philosophy (again a philosophy as Malinowski hoped26 ), however more effective than the latter because it is embedded in an observational engagement with the world and because it requires a co-operation and a correspondence with its inhabitants (Ingold 2008, p. 90).27

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Notes 1. So was it in handbooks, at least in the most widespread ones, and more. According to Olivier de Sardan (1995), the expression is due to Eduard C. Linderman, in his Social Discovery: An Approach to the Study of Functional Group, New York, Republic 1924, as reported by J. Kirk and M. Miller in Reliability and Validity in Qualitative Research (Newbury Park, Sage, 1986, p. 76, note 20). Copans (1999, p. 35, note 1) refers that Perez, in Les méthodes de la sociologie. L’observation (1998, pp. 40–44) credits Lohman with the expression in “The Participant Observer in Community Studies” (American Sociological Review, 2, 6, 1937). Wax (1972, p. 7) seems to credit Hortense Powdermaker with it, starting from 1966. 2. The quotations in Italics from Malinowski 1922, if not specified otherwise, are mine. As I wrote elsewhere (D’Agostino 2016, pp. 54–55): ‘The ideological horizon beneath this “declaration of intents” feeds on a will to truth typical of that time, a will to knowledge based on the ideal of science issued from the European culture between the sixteenth and the seventeenth century. This modern ideal presents in whole new characters as opposed to the previous ones, owing to the abandonment of the metaphysical speculation, the choice of the mathematical-experimental method, and the transformation of the concepts of space, time, and experience. A scientist is a carrier of such a vision of the world that the latter is not exactly as it seems to our senses but it is scientifically knowable through the application of measurement procedures. The subject of the science is an observer “being detached from the observing world, regardless of – as for cognitive processes – his own collocation in the world and deprived of influence – as for the operations and the results – on the investigated object” (Amsterdamski 1981, p. 550). So, he is capable of finding the premises of valid theories no matter when or where and discovering what has a universal nature in the natural order’. ‘The shift which made the birth of the modern ideal of science possible consisted in replacing the world of sensitive qualities with a world of quantities and forms, removing from scientific practice every “anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism, every matter based on values or an immanent sense of the world” (ivi, p. 552). A will to knowledge which outlines “plans of possible, measurable and classifiable objects”; which imposes a certain position, a certain look, and a certain function on the knowing subject (to see more than to read, to verify more than to comment on) (Foucault 1972, 15). A science of rigorous observation, whose results should be verifiable, reproducible, which then includes in its own discourse control procedures’. 3. Malinowski will insist on this point several times. See also Malinowski (1922, p. 17).

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4. We must remember the use of some recurring expressions such as: “Let us imagine …”, “Imagine yourself …”, “Let us now move …”, “We are now …”, “We see …”. Following this “effect of reality” created by writing, we must also remember the observation of Stocking (1983) and the comments of Clifford (1988a, especially pp. 28–33). Matera, in a work as far back as 1996 about ethnographical writing, related some ethnographical descriptions of Argonauts with some extracts from Malinowski’s Diaries (1967), so as to simplify the construction process from the observation to the descriptive account (Matera 1996, pp. 31–68). 5. See Malinowski (1922, p. 278). 6. Sometimes prose resorts to metaphors related to hunting art. As well as the previous reference concerning the attraction power of tobacco smell, some terms such as nets, hunter, quarry, or lairs can be found: for example, “the Ethnographer has not only to spread his nets in the right place, and wait for what will fall into them. He must be an active huntsman, and drive his quarry into them and follow it up to its most inaccessible lairs” (ivi, p. 16). 7. In the 1912 edition of Notes and Queries, language knowledge had already been detected as an essential condition for the field inquiry. As Stocking reports (1983, trad. it. 1995, p. 119), Rivers had already developed for this edition a “General Account of Method”, telling apart intensive and extensive research “linguistically speaking”: language is the only key we have for a both correct and complete understanding of life and people’s way of thinking”. However, Rivers’ “researcher” looked […] more like an “inquirer” than an “observer”. See Malinowski (1922, pp. 23–24). About Malinowski and the pragmatic theory of language, see also Adam (2002, pp. 268–282) and Duranti (1992, 1997). 8. It is worth noting that yet Malinowski does not withhold the distance between researcher and natives. In this sense, as it will emerge from the Diaries, as well as requiring being read in view of the specific historical context and the colonial situation, it will be a private and intimate outburst of uneasy moments and strong annoyance for specific circumstances. As Wax notices (1972, p. 11) “[…] his key informants thwarted him. He complains […] irritably that the natives are lying to him”, and adds: “In such a situation, a modern participant observer fieldworker would try to discover the meaning of the natives’ attempt to deceive him” (ibidem). About the Diaries matter, see infra. 9. Duranti (1992, pp. 19–20), proposed again in several ways, just to give few examples, in Fabietti and Matera (1997, p. 162), Fabietti (1999, p. 34), Pavanello (2010, p. 57), Cuturi (2013, p. 126 and note 1); but already in Bianco (1988, p. 146), to limit myself to the Italian context, raised a question about that. However, Paul (1953, p. 441) had already highlighted how an approach in a methodological essay about

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ethnographic investigation techniques could be problematic. Bourdieu (1980, p. 57) detected its contradictory nature too. About this “empathic misunderstanding” so did Malighetti, Molinari (2016, pp. 112–119) most recently. About this supposed contradiction of this position Tim Ingold (2014) observed: “how can the engagement of participation possibly be combined with the detachment of observation? These questions […] are founded upon a certain understanding of immanence and transcendence, deeply rooted in the protocols of normal science, according to which human existence is constitutionally split between being in the world and knowing about it. The alleged contradiction between participation and observation is no more than a corollary of this split. As human beings, it seems, we can aspire to truth about the world only by way of an emancipation that takes us from it and leaves us strangers to ourselves” (Ingold 2014, p. 387). About the statute of the participant observation according to Ingold, see infra. As to the reactions, see Wax (1972, pp. 3–4). At least except Clifford who observes: “[…] the Diary […] is only one important version of a complex intersubjective situation […]. The Diary is an inventive, polyphonic text. It is a crucial document for the history of anthropology, not because it reveals the reality of ethnographic experience but because it forces us to grapple with the complexity of such encounters and to treat all textual accounts based on fieldwork as partial constructions” (Clifford 1988b, p. 97). Here Wax is quoting two extracts from the Diaries where Malinowski writes: “This [missionary] disgusts me with his [white] superiority” (October 21, 1914); “Beautiful moonlit nights on the veranda at Mr and Mrs. McGrath’s – I am filled with dislike for these ordinary people who are incapable of finding a glimmer of poetry in certain things which fill me with exaltation” (October 5, 1914). The Science of philosophy in the twentieth century wondered about the cognitive reach of scientific theories about the feasibility of intersubjective control procedures (see Heisenberg 1999). Still in reference to Malinowski, consider Annette Weiner’s work (1992) and the questions she raises with respect to the search for the “Master”, when he reached his own field in the 1970s. In this case as well, despite being about accounted for and legitimate questions, referring to a research which had been done fifty years earlier, yet they sound like “presentism”. Far beyond the concrete, material fact, field is a dense theoretical notion upon which it has been pondered abundantly, especially from the mid1990s. In other words, field is not only a physical, material, concrete space where the anthropologist goes to give an image or a description of it. Rather, it is firstly a concrete space delimitation, starting from a theoretical perspective, so as to dig out dimensions of living, believing,

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organizing, starting from the anthropologist’s questions which define that space in a certain way and not another, providing therefore some answers instead of others. Malinowski, as a conclusion to his work on kula, writes: “There is […] one point of view deeper yet and more important than the love of tasting of the variety of human modes of life, and that is the desire to turn such knowledge into wisdom. Though it may be given to us for a moment to enter into the soul of a savage and through his eyes to look at the outer world and feel ourselves what it must feel to him to be himself — yet our final goal is to enrich and deepen our own world’s vision, to understand our own nature and to make it finer, intellectually and artistically. In grasping the essential outlook of others, with the reverence and real understanding, due even to savages, we cannot but help widening our own. We cannot possibly reach the final Socratic wisdom of knowing ourselves if we never leave the narrow confinement of the customs, beliefs and prejudices into which every man is born. […] The Science of Man, in its most refined and deepest version should lead us to such knowledge and to tolerance and generosity, based on the understanding of other men’s point of view. […] The study of Ethnology — so often mistaken by its very votaries for an idle hunting after curios, for a ramble among the savage and fantastic shapes of ‘barbarous customs and crude superstitions’ — might become one of the most deeply philosophic, enlightening and elevating disciplines of scientific research. Alas! The time is short for Ethnology, and will this truth of its real meaning and importance dawn before it is too late?” (Malinowski 1922, pp. 278–279). The scholars of my generation, but not only them, surely remember the indications from the famous part B, contained in A. M. Cirese’s manual Cultura egemonica e culture subalterne, published in 1971, with a new edition in 1979 in more than 20 reissues. Cirese’s book, its approach, an appraisal and possible perspectives are the subject of a very interesting special issue of the journal “Lares”, edited by F. Dei and A. Fanelli (Lares, nn. 2–3, maggio–dicembre 2015). A matter which should deserve a wellstructured ponderation is the investigation based on life stories, about which I will refer to Clemente (2013). I will report the most significant references on this debate: Alliegro (2011), Faeta (2005, 2011), Dei (2009, 2012), and Palumbo (2018). Ernesto de Martino should deserve a discussion aside, about which I will refer to Signorelli (2015), Signorelli and Sanga (2013), Alliegro (2011, Chapter VI), Dei (2012, pp. 104–110), and Gallini (1986). I will refer to Palumbo (2018, especially chapter 3 and passim) for the analysis of the features of the “Fieldwork Italian Style”, characterized by a “philosophical-theoretical tendency” and “a connected caution towards the empirical involvement” (ivi, p. 111). However, it can be interesting to

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remember that a convention held in Rome at the end of 1979 was dedicated to field research. Communications of the workshop were collected in a monographic issue of the review “L’Uomo” (1980, IV, n. 2) and show a certain attention to method matters upon which it is worth pondering once again, so as to recreate the debate within Italian anthropology on that topic. Just for a few examples, see the absolute absence of references to the Italian tradition in Hannerz (2010) to which I will refer for the language matter as well in relation to the reference scientific community and the reading audience. The same thing emerged from a volume recently translated in Italy about a topic which in our tradition of studies is quite discussed, i.e., heritage, fairly lacking references to this section of Italian anthropology (Harrison 2013, see about it D’Agostino 2020). In a similar way, in a recognition work about the different anthropological traditions, published in 2005 (It. transl. 2010), written by F. Barth, A. Gingrich, R. Parkin, S. Silverman, the title says meaningfully: One Discipline, Four Ways: British, German, French and American Anthropology. A previous version of the article was published in American Journal of Sociology (vol. 20, n. 5, Mar. 1915, pp. 577–612). The 1925 version is more detailed and displays partially different bibliographical references, along with reformulated extracts integrated with new considerations. The City would be republished in 1967 by University Chicago Press for the Midway Reprint series, with Morris Janowitz’s introduction. About the perspective of “human ecology” and ecological areas elaborated by Park, later developed and applied by his youngest pupils, I will refer to Hannerz’s observations (Hannerz 1980, pp. 26–30) and the bibliographical references here reported. In the studies where the spatial dimension is key (see for example Ernest Burgess’ ideal-type diagram of the city), the analysis focuses on the distribution on a large scale of particular social phenomena related to the urban dimension, in a “social pathology” perspective. Therefore, as Hannerz observed: “The outcome of the accumulating knowledge of this sort was a series of correlative studies using abstracted quantitative data—not […] the manner of conceptualization and research which anthropologists usually favour. […] In concentrating on aggregate data and disregarding the inside view, it has thus taken another road than that which appeals most to anthropologists. Park, for his part, had his doubts about the wisdom of neglecting qualitative data, but also had a stake in making sociology scientific. And science, at that time, was big on measurement. So around 1930, at the University of Chicago and elsewhere, what was termed urban sociology began to grow away from ethnography” (ivi, pp. 29–30). Particularly with Robert Redfield and his vision, for some aspects complementary, of folk-society (see Hannerz 1980, about it). Besides, as Sydel

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Silverman resumed (2005, p. 287): “R. Radcliffe-Brown’s fateful stay at Chicago in the 1930s introduced a view of anthropology as comparative sociology, which was strengthened by the appointment of W. Lloyd Warner (at Radcliffe-Brown’s urging). In the postwar years, Chicago also saw the founding of interdisciplinary social science programs in which anthropologists participated, including the Committee on Human Development and the Committee for the Comparative Study of New Nations, which was headed by the Parsonian sociologist Edward Shils.When Geertz and Schneider arrived at Chicago, they proceeded to shape the anthropology department in the direction of Parsonian systems theory, and as they both moved toward more extreme culturalist positions they urged the department along in that direction. In the process, they undercut the other subfields of anthropology as well as the social-structural tradition of the department, making it a bastion of cultural anthropology of the symbolic variety”. 25. See also Ingold (2008, 2013, 2017, passim). 26. See infra note 16. 27. Remotti (2012, pp. 51–73), starting from a consideration about his educational years, argued in an interesting way about the role of anthropology “as a kind of blemished philosophy” (ivi, p. 54), “sufficiently combative to confront philosophical subjects and problems” (ivi, p. 55), as well as, in a more general perspective, about the relationship between anthropological knowledge and ethnographic knowledge. About his “unfashionable anthropology” program, see also Remotti (2014, 2019).

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Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. London: Routledge. Ingold, T. (2014). That’s Enough About Ethnography! Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 4(1), 383–395. Ingold, T. (2017). In Human Correspondence. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, n.s. 23, 9–27. Lares, special issue “La demologia come ‘scienza normale’? Ripensare Cultura egemonica e culture subalterne”, anno LXXXI , nn. 2–3, maggio–dicembre 2015. L’Uomo. Società Tradizione Sviluppo, special issue “La ricerca sul terreno”, vol. IV , n. 2, 1980. Malighetti, R., & Molinaro, A. (2016). Il metodo e l’antropologia. Il contributo di una scienza inquieta. Milan: Raffaello Cortina. Malinowski, B. (1922). Argonauts of Western Pacific. With a Preface by Sir James, George Frazer. London: George Routledge & Sons and New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Malinowski, B. (1944/1962). A Scientific Theory of Culture and Other Essays. With a Preface by Huntington Cairns. New York: Oxford University Press. Malinowski, B. (1967). A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term. London: RKP. Matera, V. (1996). Raccontare gli Altri. Lo sguardo e la scrittura nei libri di viaggio e nella letteratura etnografica. Lecce: Argo. Olivier de Sardan, J.-P. (1995). La politique du terrain. Sur la production des données en anthropologie. Enquête, 1, 71–109. Palumbo, B. (2018). Lo strabismo della DEA. Antropologia, accademia e società in Italia. Palermo: Edizioni Museo Pasqualino. Park, R. E. (1925/1967). The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment. In R. E. Park, E. W. Burgess, & R. D. McKenzie, The City (pp. 1–46). With an Introduction by M. Janowitz. Chicago: The University Chicago Press. Paul, B. D. (1953). Interview Techniques and Field Relations. In A. L. Kroeber (Ed.), Anthropology Today (pp. 430–451). Chicago: The University Chicago Press. Pavanello, M. (2010). Fare antropologia. Bologna: Zanichelli. Popper, K. (1963). Conjectures and Refutations. The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Remotti, F. (2012). Antropologia: un miraggio o un impegno? In L’Uomo. Società Tradizione Sviluppo, 1–2, 51–73. Remotti, F. (2014). Per un’antropologia inattuale. Milan: Elèuthera. Remotti, F. (2019). Somiglianze. Una via per la convivenza. Bari-Rome: Laterza. Signorelli, A. (2015). Ernesto de Martino. Teoria antropologica e metodologia della ricerca. Rome: L’Asino d’oro.

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Signorelli, A., & Sanga G. (Eds.). (2013, aprile–ottobre). Ernesto de Martino: etnografia e storia. Special issue La ricerca folklorica, 67–68. Silverman, S. (2005). The United States. In F. Barth, A. Gingrich, R. Parkin, & S. Silverman (Eds.), One Discipline, Four Ways: British, German, French and American Anthropology (pp. 257–348). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Stocking, G. W., Jr. (1982). Afterward: A View from the Center. Ethnos, 47 (1– 2), 172–186. Stocking, G. W., Jr. (1983). The Ethnographer’s Magic. Fieldwork in British Anthropology from Tylor to Malinowski. In G. W. Stocking (Ed.), Observers Observed, History of Anthropology I (pp. 70–120). Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Tedlock, B. (1991). From Participant Observation to the Observation of Participation. The Emergence of Narrative Ethnography. Journal of Anthropological Research, 47, 69–95. Wax, M. L. (1972, February). Tenting with Malinowski. American Sociological Review, 37, 1–13. Weiner, A. (1992). Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving. Berkeley: University of California Press.

CHAPTER 15

The Weberian Line of Anthropology: George Marcus from Writing Culture to Design Alessandro Simonicca

Rationale Writing Culture is a ‘research programme’ of contemporary anthropology, whose manifesto is presented in two important publications from the mid-1980s (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fisher 1986) and revolves around the figure of George E. Marcus. Is there a theoretical and conceptual legacy of Writing Culture? There is no lack of international discussion on post-Writing Culture.1 For the present occasion, we will identify the basic lines from which the two texts start, to move on to another parallel pair of texts, from the first decade of the twenty-first century and beyond (FIELD 2009: Faubion and Marcus 2009; THEORY 2015: Boyer et al. 2015), which take forward the notions of ‘connectivity’ and ‘contemporary’ until they coincide with the anthropological meaning of ‘design’. This is possible thanks to the innovative re-emergence of Max Weber’s thought,2 and in particular to the reflection on the relationship between Lebensführung (conduct of life) and Modernity, within the coordinates of the ‘social science method’ and

A. Simonicca (B) Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 V. Matera and A. Biscaldi (eds.), Ethnography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51720-5_15

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‘intellectual work as a profession’, rather than the universalisation of the ‘rationalisation’ and the ‘iron cage’ of capitalist social history.

The Critique of the Concept of Culture and the Positioning of Writing Culture The program of Writing Culture starts from the theoretical and political collapse of the holistic notion of ‘culture’ and invites us to deeply rethink the variety of spatial devices and regimes of historicity that the anthropological enterprise is facing, maintaining a critical commitment to cultural diversity and against the dehumanizing effects of westernization. The fundamental point of the program concerns the profound contradiction in which ‘ethnography’ finds itself, between being considered a ‘scientific method’ for recording human facts, and continuing to manifest/show a state of disorderly ambiguity that the first thirty pages of the Argonauts’ notes by Malinowski are by no means sufficient to overcome. Such a contradiction would go back to an ideological vision of fieldwork, which attributes an out-of -time temporal regime to the studied population (the ‘ethnographic present’) and obliterates the historical and political time in which the actors are placed on the scene. The authors, in truth, participate in the international life of cultural anthropology of the time, which is characterized by strong moments of political criticism of the discipline (Hymes 1969; Asad 1973). The theme was not new and was at least given by Franz Boas’s controversy about anthropology-spies at the turn of World War I or Ruth Benedict’s assent to collaborate with the U.S. Military Intelligence Service for the study of the ‘Japanese mentality’ (1946), up to the hard alignment against the discipline’s commitment to American anti-insurgency actions in the Camelot project in Latin America or the Thai Affair in Indochina. For a Boasian, after all, the anthropological commitment to intervene on the present reality was taken for granted, but the change of direction that Hymes, for example, proposed for the scientific status of anthropology was less obvious. Was another kind of anthropology possible? Was another method possible? For Hymes, it was, but not for Clifford Geertz. Writing Culture, in truth, does not set the goal of applied anthropology, advocacy or political criticism of the discipline itself, but it operates an intellectual critique of the idea of ‘social science’ (considered

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impossible), revisiting the most relevant issues of ethnographic methodology, starting from field writings. The novelty of the program consisted in studying the way fieldwork is transformed into monographic writing.

The Weaving of the Program There are probably three main perspectives that Writing Culture opens to the reader and the specialist on the destiny of anthropology. Reflexivity Reflexivity has to do with the restitution, in the form of written weaving, of the experiences of the ethnographic self on the ‘scene of the encounter’, just as romance or the novel are the actualisation of the writer’s ‘literary imagination’. And there are probably two major critical references to which Writing Culture refers: the cultural studies and the linguistic turn in history. In the first case, the position of Raymond Williams is emblematic, who, rejecting the reduction of culture to the ideology of the dominant class, elaborates a theory of intellectual production and of the forms in which cultural expression is produced, distributed, communicated, and enjoyed within the capitalist economic-social formation (‘cultural Marxism’, precisely), capturing ‘from below’ the social hierarchy, the voice of the English working class, and generally of the oppressed. This point of view is captured by the literary gaze. In the same way the ethnologist should recover the voice of the Other in the ethnography which becomes text (Williams 1966, 1973). The second case refers to Hayden White. White, the theorist of the linguistic turning point in history, maintains that the historian does not have the task of reconstructing the presumed truth of what happened, but of bringing out a plausible story from a conglomeration of facts that, in their primitive state, make no sense. Using a general theory of the structure of the historical work, White argues, therefore, that it is precisely the historiographic style that anticipates the form, and thus ‘prefigures’ the documentary data and, with it, the historical field itself (White 1973; White and Doran 2010). Perhaps the greatest application of Hayden White’s formalistic theory to anthropology is a text by Clifford Geertz (1988), who proposed—in an approximate way, to tell the truth—we read anthropological knowledge

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using four linguistic-literary genealogies: the metaphor-novel by Claude Lèvi-Strauss, the novel-metonymy by Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, the metonymy-novel by Bronislav Malinowski, and the satire-novel by Ruth Benedict. The interpretative criteria that Geertz holds in reference come, first of all, from the practices of comparative literature and have at their center the use and identification of tropes, styles, topics, and concepts of interdisciplinary dialogue, which characterize the human being in terms of cultural identity. The concept of ‘person’, after all, in the 1980s (Simonicca 2019), was widely used to replace the collapsed notion of culture with the (perhaps too ductile) notion of ‘ethnography’; a position well shared by Anthropology as Cultural Critique, where the ‘person’ takes on an entirely central role. At the base of those years lies probably Geertz’s strongest statement that anthropology is or is reducible to ethnography tout court, as an intellectual reconnaissance of the ‘canvas’ of the constitutive meanings of a ‘local common sense’. The Geertzian operation, more than a rappel à l’ordre to the founding father of anthropology (Malinowski’s thesis on the priority of the ‘native point of view’) was the arrival of a sort of ethnographic weberism, which exalted the cultural use of the notion of significant action. Today, we can say that the affirmation that anthropology is completely reducible to ethnography, is the most devastating of Geertz’s stances, because it exalts the ‘field’, but overshadows the question of theory and the role of ‘comparison’ in anthropological disciplines, leaving the core of anthropology indistinct, whether it is an autonomous or a trans-disciplinary activity. The Writing Culture program, in any case, initially accepts the centrality of ethnography, enucleating two basic registers: ethnography as writing and ethnography as fieldwork. The first register is well demonstrated by the architecture of Anthropology as Cultural Critique, focused on the three functions satisfied with ethnographic writing: – the learning of models from exemplary or ‘classic’ writing (paideia), – the creative imagination of the ethnographer who shapes the experience (poiesis ), and – academic accreditation in terms of career legitimacy (praxis ).

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From the point of view of content, instead, the volume offers a generous reconstruction of the ethnographic writings of the time, using three main classification criteria, (a) the person-centered ethnographies, (b) the political-economic ethnographies, and (c) the critical-cultural methods of the post-ethnological repatriation of anthropology. Particular importance is given to ‘modernist texts’ that, going beyond the point of view of the external and omniscient reader/author, aim to build various modes of intercourse. The idea that every ethnography is a text (Marcus and Cushman 1982) and that the text means a reality, is relevant here, as long as we do not accept the thesis that realism is the only way to ‘de-scribe’ reality. The ‘crisis’ of representation lies here, in the literarily constructed character of all forms of ethnography, including the so-called realistic representation of the object, which is nothing Other than an effect of stylistic and scriptural practice. The return of ethnography to writing and text, opens up to the peroration of the multiplication of styles and perspectives, hoping for an attitude of ‘experimentation’ in field work (Marcus 1995). The terms ‘experimentation’/‘experiment’ are certainly the most widespread terms in the two volumes, and not always conceptually controlled, in line, perhaps, with the tendency towards anarcho-rationalism,3 which often appears in the intertexts of those years. It would gradually be downgraded in favor of ‘design’. Public Culture The project of an anthropology of public culture and global cultural sphere for Marcus soon became more interesting than the focus on identity, and closer to the issues related to the changing conditions of cognitive production in anthropology.4 The most innovative aspects are manifested in a decisive change of course toward the ‘objective’, the rehabilitation of material culture, as well as the issues related to the ‘life of things’. If Anthropology as Cultural Critique represents the answer to the epistemological nature of fieldwork, while Writing culture deals with the rhetoric of ethnographic writing, the texts that Marcus and his collaborators and interlocutors edit from 2008 to 2015 testify a progressive abandonment of the perspectives of ‘reflexivity’ and ‘identity’, in order to decisively address the issue of the relationship between space, time, and

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human element in fieldwork. These themes are central in the treatment of two new registers of field research, the ‘contemporary’ and the ‘design’. The ‘Contemporary’ On the ‘contemporary’ there is a rich discussion between George Marcus, Paul Rabinow, and James Faubion,5 which starts from the acceptance of Arjun Appaduraj’s thesis about the mobile nature of the current spaces of culture, irreducible to the explanatory models of the ‘classics’ of ethnography. Within this horizon, the ‘contemporary’, more than temporal occurrence, is an actual connotation of meaning, with which the modern expresses itself in terms of ratio and intellectual enterprise together, connecting recent past and near future, reinterpreting tradition.6 The most radical position is represented by Paul Rabinow, for whom an anthropology of the contemporary starts from the rejection of the outof-time ideology of ethnos, to insert itself in the temporal dimension of the study of human and social micro-practices. Rabinow goes back to the Nietzsche of the Unzeitgemässige Betrachtungen (1873–1876), and to his idea of ‘untimely’, understood as a critical distance from the present and at the same time, an intense relationship with it, that makes it possible to ‘feel’ the registers of historicity and to grasp their internal dissonances. If the ‘contemporary’ for Rabinow coincides with the clear overcoming of ethnology,7 for Marcus (as, then, for Faubion) the task of the anthropological analysis of the present can be correctly reformulated only if we understand ethnography and anthropology as moments of a ‘theory of formation’ and therefore a training forge (Werner Jaeger’s paideia), and therefore objects and paths for the formation of the Self. For Marcus, the most onerous commitment for the ethnographer is related to the responsible presentation of the relationship between the ‘place where one looks from’ and the ‘place one looks at’ (natives, locals, residents, experts). The focus of ethnography can certainly continue to remain the ‘scene’ and the encounter, provided that we succeed in maturing the awareness that the center of gravity probably lies elsewhere and that, if necessary, it must be repositioned within the wider public sphere of belonging. The price to pay in this complex operation is high. Above all, it is a question of overcoming the typical assumption of twentieth century anthropology that the anthropologist must privilege the worlds of the

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subordinates and, that fieldwork is able to reproduce the idea of community, romantically.8 To take up a well-known ethnographic outline of Marcus, it is not so much a matter of studying the ‘elites’ as social or power groups, as of studying the substance of the ‘problem-wealth’, within whose definitive, procedural, and relational archive the referential subjects correlate. The passage from the reality of the ‘social group’ to the sphere (more or less) within which they are located, means overcoming the Malinowski’s underestimation of the internal forms of rationality in the world of things and objects, and making a passage toward the ontological states of the world9 and, first of all, toward the institutions. The ethnographic encounter continues to always remain an epistemological scene; however, its representation asks for two different levels: the one in loco, on the spot, and the one built by the analytical imagination; here, according to Marcus, there is the line of continuity between the classical ethnographic method and the new multi-sited perspectives, that the design, a new free intellectual language, opens to the new generations of anthropologists. (The Necessity of) The Design In the self-critical turning point between 2008 and 2010, the Writing Culture group carried out a profound revision of the two ideological assumptions (scripts) to overcome, which were still considered to last into the 1980s10 : the study preference for ‘peoples without history’ and the priority of political ethics over conceptual analytics. The post-ethnological starting point, on the other hand, implies the redefinition of the place (‘ethnographic space’) and its inhabitants, breaking down the historical link between ‘ethnography’ and fieldwork that goes back in time to the work of Julian Pitt Rivers. If it is not a matter of decoding or finding a hidden order to which the multiple surface of reality can be traced, but of facing the chaotic, irrational, and fragmented life of the contemporary world, the anthropologist often finds himself in an annoying oscillation between the inability to select the right pertinence and the difficulty in identifying the right focus among the different occurrences of the world. The initial move to get out of the impasse is to work for a correct reconfiguration of things, objectifying them by contrast on the bottom where they live or where we find them.11

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The anthropologist does not work on (or against) an object of study. What stands before him are bundles and links of relations between ethnographers, clients, research partners, and recipients, in particular relations with the ‘counterpart’ of the experts12 toward whom, the weaving of the ‘ethnological complicity’ that is the foundation of classical ethnography is much more complex than the poetics of the Balinese cock fighting.13 The feeling of ‘extraneousness’ (‘foreign-ness’) that emerges from the field is not the exotic, it is not born from the Other, but from the feeling that the contemporary generates in witnessing the current difference between yesterday and today. Marcus’s move is aimed at building a framework that gives meaning to the mass production of the material, attributing to the notion of ‘design’ the possibility of definitively operating that break between ethnography and fieldwork that the notion of ‘experimentation’ had more evoked than clarified. Between anthropologists and the world there are a series of relationships whose correct identification, enucleated in a series of including dialogues, will make it possible to move on to the construction of an ‘imaginary’ concept, whose core is highlighted by the emergencies brought to light. These connections are the design lines that represent a world, and these lines represent the design connections of a current anthropology, which operates as a scaffolding (if you like, a là Jerome Bruner) to generate new forms and norms of possible understandings of the future. Marcus defines as contraption the device that objectifies the practices and related relationships between experts and anthropologists: it is the central network of ideas centered on the object on which multi-situated ethnography insists, starting from a first site to operate for continuous connections and select continuous combinations between ‘emerging’ and ‘current’ events/processes. Therefore, fieldwork is not a given, it is not given for itself; rather, it is a representation and at the same time a construct,14 which, far from being the ‘moral imagination’, which Geertz (1977) asks to decipher the differences between the different cultural meanings of ‘being a man’ (with), (which) presents itself as an imaginary concept with lines and itineraries that provide analytical maps of fieldwork. Such maps are defined by Marcus’s ‘para-ethnographies’ and delineate a new pattern of plural ‘native’ points of view.

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The ethnography of the ‘para-site’ is both ‘thin’ and ‘thick’: it is thin, because it connects distant points on the map; it is thick, because it retrieves emergencies that come from new connections. The thin-ness is not the mark of the failure of an ethnographic research whose center seems to have been lost, but only a moment of awareness of the inexistence of preordained algorithms in getting to know the Other. The ethnographic thin-ness is the effort for building all the possible connections on the ground and, at the same time, the moment in which the low rate of theories, which the research starts with, makes the research more sensitive to the particularity of the location (otherwise mechanically traced back to the event of a trend or confirmation of an exemplar). In short, it is the excess of theory that distances research from original solutions, while it is the thin-ness of the character that establishes innovative indexes of sensitivity to the context. Such a passage and such a break can be defined as Weberian, since Marcus’s notion of contraption shows great conceptual similarity with Ernst Mach’s notion of mental experiment and ideal type,15 in the version of the ‘medium’ and/or ‘ideal’ ideal type (see Burger 1987, cp. IV and Gordon 1987). ‘Para-ethnography’ is the conduct of multi-site ethnographic research, which proceeds by ‘lateral knowledge’, and this end requires a path, variously identifiable in terms of charts, maps, diagrams, which for the anthropologist becomes a necessary imaginary interface to explore and probe analytically. Design as a Regulatory Device The long term field research, therefore, remains but changes the way knowledge emerges from fieldwork: its object can no longer be the social group-population-ethnos nexus, but rather the temporal processes, generating forms of rationality, institutions, assemblages, and further fieldwork. ‘Design’ is a two-faced device. On the one hand it is a form of research on cultural spaces, on the other hand it is a form of presentation of the text; on the one hand it is the art of finding connections, on the Other it is the art of translating for those who learn the profession of an anthropologist. This double level of meaning unifies the field of research and the field of teaching, analytical practice and ethical practice, within a unitary process of conceptual and mental formation. The design/contraption also operates in depth on the regime of historicity of anthropological work, because, in a similar way to the role

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played by the ‘assemblage’ in P. Rabinow,16 it runs through the layers of time and space and connects the residual, the dominant, and the emerging, identifying their co-presence in a specific singularity. If the conventional viewpoint was to extract the design-form from the fieldwork, it is now a matter of producing a specific design-imagination for a particular fieldwork. In other words, if before it was a matter of finding a set of connective lines in the same reality, it is now a matter of equipping oneself with a specific imagination of maps and paths to arrive at ethnographically valid results. Marcus does not enucleate constitutive rules, but rather provides regulatory rules and therefore gives life to a sort of ‘meta-method’, to amend the intellect from the ‘idols’ of the method, to relativize the absoluteness of the data and allow the start of the research paths.17 The rules are propositions functional to the training process (to be distinguished from ‘research tactics’, such as interviewing, measuring, etc.), and therefore indicate effective research actions: 1. the results of fieldwork derive from a professional culture rather than from questions of truth; 2. the fieldwork can de-essentialize only if the research starts from the ‘problematisation’; 3. the method of an anthropologist comes from the first training; 4. To experiment shared and alternative strategies is the aim of anthropology. The founding strategies of the anthropological profession can, in turn, be indicated in the following way: 1. passing from ‘fieldwork’ to ‘design process’, as a collective practice; 2. subjecting ethnography to the norm of ‘incompleteness’, i.e., the open-ended imaginary concept of ongoing research; 3. guaranteeing the presence and respect of the partners as epistemic subjects of the research; 4. ensuring that the design process can become the subject of the ‘public sphere’ in general and the anthropological community in particular.

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Analytics and Ethics Problematization Design is an analytical representation of reality, which the researcher connects and groups certain aspects of reality, providing a category capable of understanding realities without clear boundaries. Both for logical structure and theoretical references, it is linked to the ideal type, ‘a pure ideal boundary-concept, with which reality must be measured and compared to, in order to calibrate certain significant elements of a given empirical content, providing an interpretation’.18 Its conceptual genesis comes from a priority plan of ‘problematisation’19 on the relationship between common sense of the world and apparently ‘strange’ elements. The resulting relationship between figure and background assumes a qualitative measure more or less near or far from Other examples or phenomena on which there is a cognitive decision, building a qualitative scalar dimension of meaning/sense that goes from a maximum to a minimum of acceptability with respect to the initial case.20 Max Weber’s presence here is central21 and is connected to the discussion—quite fierce in the 1980s—on his thought and its use for the issue, then on the agenda, of the meaning to be given to Modern and Modernity. In particular, the focus was on the theory of the ‘disenchantment’ of the world and therefore on the process of rationalization and bureaucratisation as an epochal device of the West. There were those who then sided in favor of the worldwide diffusivity of the iron cage thesis (Schluchter 1985, 1987), and those who supported the non-universality of the device of rationalization and exalted instead, the notion of ‘conduct of life’ (Lebensführung ) and the diversified forms of its rationalization (Hennis 1987a, b), that brings it very close to Foucault.22 The arguments that Wilhelm Hennis advanced against Wolfgang Schluchter’s theses were (and are) convincing, as were his preferences for the Weber in The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism or the Sociology of Religions, as well as his 1904 essay on Objektivität. For an anthropologist the theory of iron cage is an unsustainable thesis, if at all uninteresting, and when Geertz went to study Southeast Asia he went there with a Weberian plan and therefore with the idea of a cultural diversity of world economic developments, rather than monitoring the processes of Europeanization of former European colonies, as perhaps the academic establishment of the time hoped.

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The most interesting Weber is the author who links the method to the cases of economic-cultural behavior, studies the ‘ethics of the profession’ and of world religions (Weber 1904, 1919), and the theorist of what would later be defined as bounded rationality (Simon 1969). The problematization23 is the initial moment with which the research starts from. The relevance of the ‘problem’ is not commensurate with the mere quantitative logic24 of the preferences of the so-called stakeholders,25 because it runs the risk of restricting the public sphere only to the group of decision makers, excluding all Other possible subjects. And opening to global spaces means opening the anthropological analysis to the analytical arena of new spaces of knowledge, such as economic and financial sciences, the market, the circulation of art, the media, the wider cultural performances, starting from the assumption that for the anthropologist the interlocutors are subjects and/or groups with their own knowledge and view of the world, value judgements included. (enunciatory, epistemic communities ). There is undoubted similarity between the Weberian notion of Lebensführung and the Foucaultian notion of éthique du souci de soi and technologies of the self of the last American experience. Foucault, in truth, theoretically follows Schluchter’s thesis on the ‘rationalisation process’ by charging Weber with a neo-kantian formalistic epistemology (the ideal type as a principle); in practice, however, he takes up Hennis’ thesis on the heuristic and singular (not universal) character of the notions themselves: The rational patterns of the prison… are not general principles that only the historian can find through retrospective interpretation. They are explicit programs; they are calculated and reasoned prescriptions according to which institutions must be organised… they have an ideality of programming that is left in abeyance, not that of a general meaning that would have remained hidden. (Foucault 1994, pp. 846–847)

This is followed by the reading of Objektivität, which Rabinow would give shortly afterwards (Rabinow 2003, pp. 49–55). The problematization26 represents the element or series of elements through which it is possible to make visible the process of thought. Foucault identifies two steps in this process: first, the becoming uncertain and the loss of familiarity with a domain of action; second, the taking care of the situation by thought.

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Foucault’s discussion about the problematization and the ethics of Self is significant, because it illustrates that the implementation of the understanding of the subject formation practices (the Bildung for Marcus and Rabinow) is not to be interpreted in terms of a logic of reproduction by subjugation, but in terms of transformation—situated, discussed, and reflected—of the Self.27 This Foucaultian intent then gives rise to the nascent sphere of anthropology of ethics (Faubion 2011). The Objektivität of the method starts from the practice of problematisation, where the opportunity is built for understanding the obstacles and tensions of the real, to which it is given an expressive ‘form’ through the search for adjacencies and connections.28 Connecting Connections express the result of the (postmodern or, if you like, ‘fractal’) modality of a measurement based on a qualitative scale that does not abstract in numerical terms, but places the data and their temporal differences in the spaces of diversified proximity or distance between home and field, so as to favour an adequate parameter for achieving an internal similarity. The strong point is the conquest of the space of ‘proximity’, thanks to a method that works on ‘lateral knowledge’, escaping the illusion of finding a ‘radial’ center to go to or from. The double problematisation-connections nexus constitutes the basis of the first coordinates of fieldwork, which is not given, but is constructed along the true process of research; and ethnography is a doing that is not definable in advance, coinciding with the actions of the process, while the method has no constitutive rules, but only (if you like) regulatory ones. Here, is the Weber of theoretical sociology, which attributes to sociology the (ancillary) role of introducing generalizing elements within the ideographic dimension of history, as pointed by the definition of an ideal type: An ideal type is obtained through the unilateral accentuation of one or some points of view, (…) in a conceptual framework that is in itself unitary (…) to which reality must be measured and compared, in order to illustrate certain significant elements of its empirical content. (Weber 1904, p. 188)

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Even the anthropologist actually uses scales of qualitative relationships to establish ontological or epistemological proximity between certain phenomena, but, given the inexhaustibility of worldly things, he can only establish partial connections between the various phenomena.29 For Marcus’s school, such partiality makes visible and demystifies the holistic reification of culture and exalts the intentional nature of the point of view of the actor who performs an action that is significantly understood, multiplying the subjects and ‘experts’ of the current domain of things.30 We have as a result a weberisation of ethnography, irreducible to any list of method rules, but only to the theoretical work that is organized in the field itself. The triplet that Marcus and his collaborators have ahead of them is the fieldwork-ethnography-theory triangle, where in practice there is only a long process of concept formation, where the field is constructed, ethnography is the plane of relations between the actors on the field and theory is only the sequential accumulation of classifications and concepts, which the ideal type sets in motion and activates in terms of ‘possible’ worlds. For Marcus, as well as for Rabinow, one of the limits of twentieth century cultural anthropology lies in giving priority, both theoretical and operative, to the political dimension of the subjects under investigation. Marcus and Rabinow’s moves are to decisively overturn the relationship and attribute the greatest burden to the analytical dimension of the fieldwork multi-situated ethnography.31 The basic procedure consists in giving a shape to the figure, repeating this operation for different scales, until the homothetia (self-similarity) of the objects is reached, making the fieldwork eternal and infinite, like a work of Sisyphus. The operation decrees the end of ethnography as an activity in its own right, without putting in check Geertz’s thesis of the equivalence between ethnography and anthropology. If fieldwork is not given, but constructed, there is not even theory per se, there is only theoretical work (theory work), or, in Rabinow’s terms, there is only a ‘laboratory of knowledge’ (Wissensarbeitsforschung ), in which science as a profession (Wissenschaft als Beruf ) is a constitutive element of, because—with extensive thesis of undoubted importance—all existing theories are only human practices (Rabinow and Bennett 2012a; Rabinow and Stavrianakis 2014, pp. 29 ff.). Against an anthropology, as uninterrupted advocate, from Tylor to the present day, of a romantic science of the moral reform of peoples to the

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disaster of ‘reinventing oneself’, Marcus and his school reset the importance of the ‘we-their’ opposition as well as the presumed priority of the ‘native point of view’32 and adhere to the hermeneutics of ideal types. Anthropology, for Marcus, is topological research that focuses on the practice of connectivity, with which the anthropologist undertakes an ontological, conceptual, and moral commitment to the world; and this practice focuses on ‘design’, as the structure that gives access to the ‘idols of the tribe’. The spatial and cognitive fieldwork-ethnography-theory circularity means that the theory does not ‘derive’ directly from the world, but that the work of the anthropologist is doing theory, doing theoretical work (theory work, doing theory), starting from the singularity of events and processes, circumscribing forms and figures in the articulations of the various spaces connected by relationships of metonymy or synecdoche, such as the ‘para-ethnographies’ (Deeb and Marcus 2011), the ‘third spaces’ (Fischer 2003), the ‘lateral reasoned zones’ (Maurer 2005), the ‘para-sites’ (Sunder Rajan, in THEORY, pp. 104–146), as well as—to enter the thicker world of technologies—the ‘platforms’ (informatics and digital), the ‘installations’, the ‘prototypes’ (Boyer et al., in THEORY 2015, pp. 55 ff.), such as reorganizations of events understood as ‘particularities’ thanks to an ethnography based on a solid ‘technological discipline’ in formulating problems.33 Theory work 34 is the activity at the heart of the field experience, with reconnaissance of participants, roles, reliabilities, and different receptions. This means working on the two aspects of anthropology, the circumscription of the acts of actors and experts in particular and the formative presentation of the issues emerged in the field of research (Bildung ). The duplicity of this mission in turn brings to light the ‘cultural intimacy’ of the anthropologist in his field practices, and the often contradictory tension between the agency of research and the presentation of field practices, between the effectiveness in finding funds and the legitimation of anthropology as an autonomous discipline. To better establish the conceptual status of the circular ethnographic space that Marcus emphasizes, let us take up his well-known essay on multi-site (Marcus 1995). There, criticism converged on two weak points of old ethnography: spatial staticism, and the supremacy of the native point of view. To these defects Marcus opposed a critical-cultural analysis of new fields of research: media studies, social and cultural studies of science and technology and cultural studies.35

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More specifically, the methodological aspect concerned the passage from the single reality of a site to the rigorous objectification of the built connection; the multi-site is built within a space connected by the anthropologist’s movement that is on the trail (following) of different attractors: people, things, metaphors, stories, biographies, conflicts. It is characterized by chains, paths, threads, conjunctions, or superimpositions of places where the ethnographer establishes literal forms of physical presence through a specific associative and connecting logic between sites that in fact defines the topic of ethnography. The non-centrality of the study of the subalterns in anthropology remains; however, it is not a question of thinking that the multi-site is a complex which Other aspects must be added to, such as the ‘studying up’, to reach a hypothetical completeness.36 The subject the research constructs is not subject-substance, nor subject-difference, nor mere summation of single sites; it is an ‘emerging’ reality with an interdisciplinary value, which depends on the post-structural coordinates that Marcus believes to be the true conditions of the research methodology (knowledge/power, heterotopia, rhizome, dissemination). The scientific problem is how to materialize the ‘field’ of field work, how to regulate the research of the traces. The openness to the concept of ‘design’ is the way Marcus approaches the methodological question again, when he problematizes—the central moment of his scientific production—the meaning to be attributed to the use of the notion of ‘space’. When he reconstructs the genetic-conceptual focus of the multi-site, Marcus is forced to acknowledge that, due to ambiguities in the text itself, the notion of ‘multi-site’ has often been juxtaposed to geographical space and not to the topological-conscious space necessary to identify the ‘emerging’ subjects of research, as it had been thought from the beginning. In fact, Marcus points out that the emergence of the multi-site, from the very beginning, rotated, in particular, around the following the metaphor (Marcus 1995, pp. 92–93) as the maximum means to produce ethnography, and this means was at the time Latour’s ANT Theory, considered the most innovative model to ‘textualize’ the mobile and circulating processes of knowledge, representing the objects–things– persons relationship in the researcher’s ethnographical complicity.37 Differently from how it was then, Marcus concludes, the main metaphor of today’s research is given by another theoretical imaginary,

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that is, by thinking that the circulation of knowledge, anthropologically relevant, is best materialized in the dimension of microscale and network. The focus of this shift makes the conditions of thinkability of fieldwork possible, in terms of the textualization of sociality (Marcus 2012); and this link activates a link between private and public in research, for objectifying a text circularly between interlocutors, experts, and recipients in connection, thanks to a conceptual ‘creative’ interface (Marcus 2008), which refers to a de facto multi-situated trajectory as a construct of ideas emerging from the field scenes, based on a technological cluster of questions. The technology used to problematize the research refers to a series of criteria that can guarantee an always open-ended outcome: collaboration, cognitive apprenticeship, identification of the interface (as a set of texts and fieldwork), platforms, digital experiments with compositions, commentaries, relations, reception, identification of a micro-public and textuality. The set of these criteria defines the possibility of the creation of ‘intellectual devices calibrated on the present’ (contemporary contraptions ).38 Contraption is an inclusive and endless strategy, which assembles (like the anthropologic notion of gift) a very rich set of associations. (Rabinow et al. 2008, in DAC, pp. 71–81). Contraption is the materialization of the idea of ‘experimentation’, already a program of Writing Culture, a cautious Prometheus, whose main attractions for creative effectiveness today are two: the attraction toward ‘design’ and the traditional attraction toward the installation of specific sites and conceptual art (Marcus 2015, in THEORY 2015, p. 60). The oscillation between design and art takes up in another form the dyadic life of design between form and process (Marcus 2018).39

Design Anthropology The notion of ‘design’ has been central to the last few decades and makes fully manifest what Marcus—referring to design disciplines such as architecture or art—defines as his two souls: ‘design practice’ and ‘design studio’, model for doing and model for understanding.40 The common matrix is the idea of making a series of regulatory skills for a collaborative cognitive enterprise, expressed through processes of invention, learning, and analysis (Rabinow et al. 2008).

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The idea has a long conceptual history, to be referred to Herbert Simon (1969),41 for whom there is a general science of ‘design’ articulated in two major registers: the natural and the artificial. The former underlines the logical-descriptive nature of the statements, aimed at explaining the functioning of the real world; the latter is, instead, the representation of the world in the forms of its ‘possibility’. The ‘artificial’, in short, is the intellectual imagination, the search for the scheme, the study of a project to do or to think. And all these determinations lead to ethnography, according to Marcus, as theoretical work on possible worlds. The two terms are constitutive (though not regulatory) of the ‘anthropology of design’ (Murphy and Marcus 2013). Between the two aspects, for Marcus, there is a continuous mutual correlation, establishing a field of continuity between anthropology and academic disciplines. The design is the final form, according to which a product-object is built and intended for the use/consumption of a user, but it can also be the project/plan the anthropologist elaborates to carry out his research. The category of ‘design’ requires a strong frame of materiality, which has metabolized the perspectives of material turn and ontological turn, to become in Marcus the ethnography of relationships between people and things, in different fields (narrative performance, theatre practice, scenic and staged environment), connecting the social life of things (in Appaduraj’s sense) to their social ‘presentability’. ‘Anthropology of design’ is a terribly polysemic term (cf. Miller 2018; Murphy and Marcus 2013; Ingold 2013a, b). It refers to the preferences of the consumer (Sutherland et al. 2007); it is the shape of the object according to the devices of the technological sciences that regulate the relationship between means, ends, and planes (Sutherland et al. 2007); it is a self-critical discipline deciphering the intersubjective character of design (Suchman 2011); it is critical study of the assemblage of power (Margolin 2002); it is anthropology of performance and artistic installations (Clarke 2018). Then, it is criticism of technological humanitarianism (Tunstall 2013); and, it is a perspective aimed at making voice to subaltern subjects (Escobar 2018). There is, finally, the ‘design’ a là Tim Ingold, which is the trace of a subjectivity that ‘corresponds’ to the world, emphasizing the power of free creativity.42 We have seen that one of the methodical rules that Marcus has established over the years is that the results of fieldwork derive from a ‘professional culture’ rather than

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from truth questions. This means that the more theoretical anthropological work acquires breadth of reference and overall challenges, the more the conceptual armamentarium of ‘old ethnography’ becomes obsolete; in Rabinow terms, the most awkward, self-referential, and one-sided; in a word, academic.43 Design as an analytical category and as a process of action impresses, in this sense, a strong acceleration of the past–present– future relationship,44 emphasizing, in full counter current compared to classical ethnography, the priority of the future over the present–past (Bryant and Knight 2019, pp. 192 ff.), and therefore the need to rethink the dimension of the ‘subaltern’, within a meaning of the future that is both methodical and indicative. The extensive use of ‘design thinking’ is a way to avoid the conceptual collapse of the anthropological concept of ‘culture’; in fact, both Marcus (in a vision that sees continuity between theory and ethnography) and Rabinow (replacing with a discontinuistic style the same terminology of actual hegemonic anthropology) operate trying to change both the dimension of research and its conceptualization. Others, like David Graeber, have talked about ‘suicide of discipline’, probably sinning in rhetoric, because for decades the international anthropological research has assimilated a large number of categories from Other disciplines, practiced multi-disciplinary work schemes, without taking care to draw the (desirable) theoretical consequences. Even ‘design’, however, represents a galaxy of more or less close thematic nuclei, ranging from the perspective of technological functionalism to the political and critical-radical vision.45 And the risk is that the renaming tends to become the evocative totem of something Other than itself. Probably, the role of ‘theory’ with respect to ethnography is the great central theme of our present,46 testified by the current oscillation in the research between two great territories, the former ‘the subalterns’ and the latter—reintroduced—‘the institutions’. Beyond the results, still in the process of becoming, on the Other hand, of the currents of anthropological studies that began with Writing Culture, we must agree that what in sociology and social sciences is usually defined as ‘operationalisation’ has become a problem that is not only technological or documentary, but also epistemological or, according to Others, ontological. Just as it has become clear that the discrepancies encountered, from the teaching of anthropology in places of learning and research, without exception, since the 1990s, do not refer to questions on an abstract method, but to different needs for training, which can be answered by working on the

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difficult relationship between disciplinary core, training, and application languages, without referring to the immediate ‘field’ or the mere ethnographic experience the solution of internal problems within the albeit ductile anthropological ‘canon’.

Notes 1. The theme is very broad and crosses the research and training coordinates of both national and regional anthropological schools and professional research programs. For our limited purposes, it is enough here to indicate the status of art in the Italian panorama, indicating two texts that take stock of the matter (Fabietti and Matera 1997; Matera 2015). 2. We do not mean that Max Weber’s presence in anthropology happens only now, just think of The Foundations of Social Anthropology by S. F. Nadel (1951) or Understanding Social Anthropology by D. F. Pocock (1975), if not the same Homo Aequalis by L. Dumont (1977). The difference with the previous ‘loans’ is that, in the treated context, Weber, intentionally or not, is used in a fundamentally anti-Malinowski key; and Writing Culture program would never have seen the light without Geertz’s translation of the sociological notion of ‘social structure’ in terms of a network of significant, and then semiotic, actions, detaching itself from the parsonsian theoretical establishment. 3. The major reference here is to I. Hacking’s (1975, 1983) ‘transcendental nominalism’, who, particularly in those years, combining T. Kuhn and M. Foucault, traces complex interactions between the human world and its historical classifications, scientific included. 4. Here we need to only mention the influential current of the anthropology of globalization, of the late twentieth century and, at least, the A. Appadurai of Modernity at Large and the Journal of Public Culture. 5. Rabinow et al. (2008, pp. 55 ff. [from now on: DAC]), Rabinow (2008, pp. 12 ff.; 2011, pp. 99 ff.), and Rabinow and Stavrianakis (2014, pp. 59 ff.), and Faubion (2016). 6. Without forcing the terms too much, the contemporary, in its own way, approaches the image of time in the Platonic Timaeus, as a current intuition of the continuous passing of yesterday-today-tomorrow. 7. See Rees (2018, pp. 7 ff.), which radicalizes the nominalist paradigm of P. Rabinow. 8. FIELD (2009, pp. 157 ff) and THEORY (2015, pp. 48 ff). 9. It is enough just to mention here that the ontology we are talking about is completely different from the ontologic turn in terms of political ontology, more recently, of Viveiros de Castro. 10. DAC, p. 90.

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11. Cfr. On the ‘Gestalt’ metaphor, cfr. Fortun, in FIELD (2009, p. 182) and in THEORY (2015, pp. 147 sgg). 12. On the recognition of the ethnographer’s interlocutors as ‘counterparts’, see Marcus (Ed.) (2000, pp. 7 ff.) with rich examples. 13. For the theme of ‘complicity’ see Marcus (1997) with the classic example of the Geertz couple accomplices of the Balinese on the arrival of the police who forbid cockfighting, but also the more complex experience of Douglas R. Holmes (1989) with racist groups of the political right in the north-east of Italy. 14. For some examples on this line, see Amit (2000). 15. Of course, this conceptual achievement does not happen without problems. The methodological objection that Rabinow would make is central: How many multi-sites are we able to master? How many ones are we able to identify to build an ethnographic space? In Rabinow we recognize the closeness both to Weber’s ideal types and to the Begriffsgeschichte by R. Koselleck and the Bielefeld school, which he interprets in a Foucaultian key (Rabinow 2003, cp.2; 2008, pp. 54 ff.). Correctly, J. Hunt (2015, 2018; DAC, pp. 96–97) identifies a difficult gap to resolve between the ‘paranoia’ of omnivorous connection and the need for a rigorous ‘critical design’. However, it must be remembered that the structural similarity between Foucauldian ‘discourse’ and Weberian ‘ideal-type’ was lucidly in the historiographic field identified by P. Veyne (2008, pp. 85 ff.). 16. For the notion of ‘assembly’ see Rabinow (2003, pp. 113 ff.; DAC 2009, pp. 92 ff.; 2011, pp. 113 ff.) and Rees (2018, pp. 84 ff.); on the general theme of a rigorous welding between local and global, see Ong and Collier (2005). 17. The canon, which Marcus refers to, is undoubtedly a Baconian and not Galilean one. 18. See Weber (1904, pp. 188–189). As the last Wittgenstein asserts, knowledge is a bit like putting a ‘meter’ close to reality: if you change the meter, you change the linguistic game, you change judgment. Unlike Geertz, who made abundant use of Philosophische Untersuchungen’s author, Wittgenstein was never central to Marcus and his school. Instead, the theoretical proximity is unquestionable. 19. J. Dewey’s orientation on what the ‘logic of inquire’ was and on the imputability of the latter to the logic of ‘problematic situation’ is a central moment in the whole postmodern panorama and in particular in R. Rorty, who perhaps more than any Other, has anchored to the American pragmatist his polemic against the essentialism of the Modern. 20. On the primary importance of ‘connectivity’ theorized in full by J. Faubion and which Marcus fully embraces, see FIELD (2009, pp. 245 ff.). Both Marcus and Faubion and J. Fabian (1983) present the thesis of this mechanism, which partly coincides with the multi-site. For an excellent

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21.

22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

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example of a model, so typified, at the level of global and local for the climate scheme, see Tsing (2005, pp. 55–60, 112 ff). It is probably Rabinow who declares the Weberian weaving of the general references of his thought: cf. Rabinow (2011, pp. 177 ff.; 2005, pp. 40 ff.; 2003, pp. 43 ff.), with unitary deployment of the complex Foucault-Weber-Dewey line. Cfr. Gordon (1987), and, in an extended manner, Szakolczai (1998, pp. 38 ff and 246 ff.). On the role of ‘problematisation’ as how the human being conceives and directs his own self and the different aspects of his collective and individual being as an open problem, cf. Rabinow and Bennett (2012a, b) and Rabinow and Stavrianakis (2014, pp. 9 ff.), with express reference to Dewey’s ‘logic of inquire’, the Weber’s ‘method’ and Foucault’s ‘problematisation’ from Histoire de la folie to Histoire de la sexualité. Because of the need for an epistemological critique of ‘statistics’ as the only cognitive canon, Weber had already expressed himself clearly since 1904, and various currents, from Bourdieu to Marcus and Rabinow, and to philosophers of science themselves, such as Ian Hacking. Obviously, the question of the anthropological validity of the mixed (quali-quantitative) methodology and its relationship with ideal-typical analysis still remains open. Further on, the relationship between anthropology and economics is still open. On the subject of ‘stakeholders’ as subjects having the right (economic and/or cultural) to talk about a territory there is much discussion in the frameworks for ‘local development’ processes or for ‘projects’ in anthropology of development: see, in a general way, Olivier de Sardan (1995). For the importance of the notion of ‘problematisation’, in practice the last argument which Foucault goes beyond the notion of ‘parrhesia’ with, see his interview with Rabinow (1984c) (Polemics, Politics and Problematizations, in Rabinow 1984, pp. 381–390), which takes up the themes already addressed in the second volume of the History of sexuality (Foucault 1984a, b, pp. 7–37; c), as well as in the lessons on the hermeneutics of the subject (Foucault 2001) and biopolitics (Foucault 2004, pp. 97 ff., 113 ff.), where the figure of Weber takes on a positive orientation value. Unlike in Althusser (1965), who relates the use of the concept of ‘problematisation’, taken from J. Martin and G. Bachelard, to the theme of the ‘epistemological rupture’ in the passage of theoretical practice from ideology to science, in Foucault the notion plays a key role because it expresses how to identify the genetic ‘forms’ (logical and at the same time behavioral) of the ‘practices of the self’ and their mutual coalescence or opposition. Even between Rabinow, who introduces the discussion on the

15

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28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

33. 34.

35.

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notion of ‘problematics’, and Foucault, who responds in terms of ‘problematisation’, there are actually differences of nuances, but the substance of the reflection remains undisputed, that is, the analysis of the ‘game of telling the truth’. It opens the chapter—much more important for the anthropologist— about the crisis of the ‘microphysics of power’ and of the abstract category of ‘biopolitics’, with the commitment of the last Foucault to consider the dimension of the ‘human’ as management et conduite de soi, overcoming the alternative between the essentialism of the notion ‘person’ and the annihilation of the widespread ‘power of knowledge’. For Foucault’s discussion on ‘ortho-liberals’ and Max Weber, see Foucault (1994, pp. 240 ff.; 2004, pp. 967 ff., 113 ff., 130 ff). On ‘adiacency’, see Rabinow, Marcus, Faubion, in DAC, pp. 55 ff. On the necessity and at the same time fecundity of ‘partial connections’, see the important volume by Strathern (1991). For a transitional meaning of the intermediate zone between external and internal side in terms of possible creative play, see Winnicot (1971). For a more specific line by J. D. Faubion, who links ethics to connectivity and the priority of analysis, see Rabinow et al., in DAC (2008, pp. 28 ff.), Boyer et al., in THEORY (2015, pp. 38–58), and Faubion, An Anthropology of Ethics (2011). Marcus’ lesson is also absorbed by the Boasians, e.g., by Matti Bunzl (2004), who advocates the intersection of Foucault’s genealogical device and Boas’s biography, passing from the positioning of the ethnographic object as Other to the conception of the past as the main place of research, and therefore to the study of present history. Up to the possible anthropological interpretation of project management in the practices of ‘development projects’. The list, in the essay, which is richer in additions than in synthetic rigor, is long: reproductive technologies, epidemiologic studies, new media communications, environment and disasters, biotechnologies, public culture, migrations studies, development studies. The list, in the essay, which is richer in additions than in synthetic rigor, is long: reproductive technologies, epidemiologic studies, new media communications, environment and disasters, biotechnologies, public culture, migrations studies, development studies. Studying up’ is the study of the ‘hegemonic world’ hoped by L. Nader (1969), as a critical anthropological task for American society. In the second half of the twentieth century, in general, this study was often challenged by a theoretical structure of thin ethnography, to which to oppose a thick ethnography, typical of the holistic cultures of the subaltern worlds. The anthropology of ‘theory of practices’, supported by S. Ortner (1984, 1995) who charged the Writing Culture program with the

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38.

39. 40.

41.

42.

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risk of the liquidation of the ‘resistance’ paradigm and the end of ethnography, and therefore of anthropology itself. The author herself has more recently taken more cautious positions (Ortner 2010; Shyrock 2017). On this point, more recently, see Simonicca (2017). In 1995 Marcus defines the ethnographer as a ‘circumstantial activist’, in order to determine the methodological position that the researcher has, in a continuous and contextual renegotiating his own identity during the movements between sites, while the contraption is the ‘strange’ device to be decoded because of the current co-presence of conflicting parts. The ‘simulative’-‘imaginative’ character of the contraption makes it necessary to rethink the temporal modalities of the fieldwork, with an acceleration of the research time (except for the research on micro-processes) and a different attitude compared to the classic criteria of participating observation, which reconfigures the same figure of the ethnographer. The design orientation in ‘visual studies’ is enormous: see recently its use as a ‘mind-film’ in Fillitz (2013). The double value of the ‘model’ as a device to understand and a device to operate was already a robust hermeneutical theme solved by Geertz, in a kind of Hegelian Aufhebung ending in the synthesis of the ‘text’. We cannot dwell on the figure, decidedly important by the author, who, thinking strongly of the sociology of the organization, economics, psychology and systems theory, fully formulates a general outline of the associated human national, in terms of ‘bounded rationality’. See Ingold (2013a, chap. 9), which strongly combines ‘design‘ with ‘education’; then, Ingold (2018), along the lines of the ‘design education manifesto’ movement. For a recent ethnographic update of design in the anthropology of education in the Italian context, see Bonetti (2019). Whether anthropology is still an entrenched academic discipline or should become an autonomous form of knowledge of the present, it is what perhaps most differentiates the perspectives of Marcus (continuist) from Rabinow (discontinuist). We remember, in any case, that both believe professional culture must position itself differently at the institutional level, as research institutes show that both Marcus (Center for Ethnography, at the University of California, Irvine—UCI), and Rabinow (Research Center for the Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory, as a study platform for biotechnology, with seminar and laboratory programs, at Rice University) founded in the early 2000s (Rabinow, Marcus 2008, in DAC 2008, pp. 115 ff.). Let us not forget, however, the role of the Ford Foundation in the Harvard of the postwar years, for the social relations group of Talcott Parsons and then for the professional trajectory of C. Geertz.

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44. For the recent conceptual highlight of the concept of ‘future’ in anthropology, see EASA Future Anthropologies Network, Future Anthropologies Manifesto (Pink and Salazar 2017, respectively pp. 1–2 and 3–21; Smith et al. 2018). And of course, the important Appaduraj (2006) should be mentioned. 45. In fact, there has often been talk of ‘right’ and ‘left’ design, as in the 1980s there was of right and left Geertzians (or interpretive anthropologists), remaining the same substance. 46. The need for a serious rethinking of the role of ‘theory’ within the ethnographic dimension is given by the fundamental challenge of Hau. Journal of Ethnographic Theory, which is already ten years old.

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Hacking, I. (1975). Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy?. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hacking, I. (1983). Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hennis, W. (1987a). Max Weber: Essays in Reconstructions. London: Unwin Hyman. Hennis, W. (1987b). Personality and Life Orders: Max Weber’s Theme. In Whimster & Lash (1987), pp. 52–74. Holmes, D. R. (1989). Cultural Desenchantment: Worker Peasantries in Northeast Italy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hunt, J. (2015). People in Glass Cages (Shouldn’t Throw Theoretical Stones). In THEORY (2015), pp. 192–197. Hunt, J. (2018). Prototyping the Social: Temporality and Speculative Futures at the Intersection of Design and Culture. In Clarke (2018), pp. 87–110. Hymes, D. (1969). Reinventing Anthropology. New York: Pantheon. Ingold, T. (2013a). Making: Anthropology, Archeology, Art and Architecture. Abingdon: Routledge. Ingold, T. (2013b). From Description to Correspondence: Anthropology in Real Time. In Gunn et al. (Eds.), (2013), pp. 139–158. Ingold, T. (2018). Anthropology and/as Education. New York: Routledge. Marcus, G. E. (1995). Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-sited ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 95–117; poi in Marcus (1998), pp. 79–104. Marcus, G. E. (1997). The Uses of Complicity in the Changing Mise-en-Scène of Anthropological Fieldwork, Representations, 59, 85–108; poi in Marcus (1998), pp. 105–151. Marcus, G. E. (1998). Ethnography Through Thick & Thin. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Marcus, G. E. (Ed.). (2000). A Casebook Against Cynical Reason. Para-Sites. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Marcus, G. E. (2008). Contemporary Fieldwork Aesthetic in Art and Anthropology: Experiments in Collaboration and Intervention. In Panourgiá & Marcus (2008), pp. 29–44. Marcus, G. E. (2012). The Legacies of Writing Culture in Contemporary Anthropological Research. Cultural Anthropology, 27 (3), 427–445. Marcus, G. E. (2015). The Ambitions of Theory Work in the Production of Contemporary Anthropological Research. In THEORY (2015), pp. 48–64. Marcus, G. E. (2018). Jostling Ethnography Between Design and Participatory Art Practices, and the Collaborative Relations It Engenders. In Smith et al. (2018), pp. 105–119. Marcus, G. E., & Cushman, D. (1982). Ethnographies as Texts. Annual Review of Anthropology, 11, 25–69.

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Marcus, G. E., & Fisher, M. M. J. (Eds.). (1986). Anthropology as Cultural Critique. An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Margolin, V. (2002). Politics of Artificial. Essays on Design and Design Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Matera, V. (2015). La scrittura etnografia: Esperienza e rappresentazione nella produzione di conoscenze antropologiche. Milano: Eléuthera. Maurer, B. (2005). Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reasons. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Miller, C. (2018). Design + Anthropology: Converging pathways in Anthropology and Design. New York: Routledge. Murphy, K. M., & Marcus, G. E. (2013). Epilogue: Ethnography and Design, Ethnography in Design … Ethnography by Design. In Gunn et al. (Eds.) (2013), pp. 251–268. Nadel, S. F. (1951). The Foundations of Social Anthropology. London: Routledge. Nader, L. (1969). Up the Anthropologist—Perspectives Gained from Studying Up. In Hymes (1969), pp. 284–311. Olivier de Sardan, J. P. (1995). Anthropologie et développement. Essai en socioanthropologie du changement social. Paris: APAD Karthala. Ong, A., & Collier, S. J. (Eds.). (2005). Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. Oxford: Blackwell. Ortner, S. (1984). Theory in Anthropology Since the Sixties. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 26(1), 126–166. Ortner, S. (1995). Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal. Comparative Studies for Society and History, 37 (1), 173–193. Ortner, S. (2010). Access: Reflections on Studying Up in Hollywood. Ethnography, 11(2), 211–233. Panourgiá, N., & Marcus, G. E. (Eds.). (2008). Ethnographica Moralia: Experiments in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Fordham University Press. Pink, S., & Salazar, J. F. (2017). Anthropologies and Futures: Setting the Agenda. In Salazar et al. (2017), pp. 3–21. Pocock, D. R. (1975). Understanding Social Anthropology. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Rabinow, P. (Ed.). (1984). The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought. New York: Pantheon Books. Rabinow, P. (2003). Anthropos Today. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rabinow, P. (2005). Midst Anthropology’s Problems. In Ong & Collier (Eds.) (2005), pp. 40–54. Rabinow, P. (2008). Marking Time. On the Anthropology of the Contemporary. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rabinow, P. (2011). The Accompaniment. Assembling the Contemporary. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

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Rabinow, P., & Bennett, G. (2012a). Designing Human Practices: An Experiment in Synthetic Biology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rabinow, P., & Bennett, G. (2012b). Contemporary Equipment: A Diagnostic. http://anthropos-lab.net/documents/contemporary-equipment-diagnostic. Rabinow, P., & Stavrianakis, A. (Eds.). (2014). Designs on the Contemporary: Anthropological Tests. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rees, T. (2018). After Ethnos. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Salazar, J. F., Pink, S., Irving, A., & Sjöberg, J. (Eds.). (2017). Anthropologies and Futures. Researching Emerging and Uncertain Worlds. London: Bloomsbury. Schluchter, W. (1985). The Rise of Western Rationalism: Max Weber’s Developmental History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schluchter, W. (1987). Weber’s Sociology of Rationalization and Typology of Religious Rejections of the World. In Whimster & Lash (Eds.) (1987), pp. 92–115. Shyrock, A. (2017, June 12). More Thoughts on Resistance and Refusal: A Conversation with Sherry Ortner. Comparative Studies for Society and History - Dialogue. Simon, H. (1969). The Science of the Artificial. Cambridge: MIT Press. Simonicca, A. (2017). Recuperare la scalarità del denso, tra resistenza e studying up. International Gramsci Journal, 2(3), 87–112. Simonicca, A. (2019). La persona fra soggetto e contesto nella antropologia degli anni Ottanta del Novecento. In F. Dei & L. Paggi (Eds.), Cultura, potere, genere. La ricerca antropologica di Carla Pasquinelli (pp. 161–182). Verona: Ombre corte. Smith, R. C., et al. (2018). Design Anthropological Futures. London: Bloomsbury. Strathern, M. (1991). Partial Connections. Savage: Rowman & Littlefield. Suchman, L. (2011). Anthropological Relocations and the Limits of Design. Annual Review of Anthropology, 40, 1–18. Sunder Rajan, K. (2015). Trans-formation of Biology and of Theory. In THEORY (2015), pp. 104–146. Sutherland, P. L., Denny, R. M., & Clarke, A. J. (Eds.). (2007). Doing Anthropology in Consumer Research. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press. Szakolczai, A. (1998). Max Weber and Michel Foucault: Parallel Life-Works. London: Routledge. THEORY (2015) = Boyer, D., Faubion, J. D., & Marcus, G. E. (Eds.). (2015). Theory Can Be More Than It Used to Be. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Tsing, A. L. (2005). Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connections. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Tunstall, E. (2013). Decolonising Design Innovation: Design Anthropology, Critical Anthropology and Indigenous Knowledge. In Gunn et al. (Eds.) (2013), pp. 232–250. Veyne, P. (2008). Foucault. Paris: Albin. Weber, M. (1904). Die Objektivität sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis. In M. Weber (1982), Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre (pp. 146–214). Tübingen: Mohr. Weber, M. (1919). Wissenschaft als Beruf. In M. Weber (1982), Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre (pp. 582–613). Tübingen: Mohr. Whimster, S., & Lash, S. (Eds.). (1987). Max Weber, Rationality and Modernity. London: Allen & Unwin. White, H. (1973). Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in NineteenthCentury Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. White, H. V., & Doran, R. (2010). The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory. 1957–2007. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Williams, R. (1966). Culture and Society. 1780–1950. New York: Harper and Row. Williams, R. (1973). The Country and the City. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Winnicot, D. (1971). Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock.

CHAPTER 16

Making the Invisible Ethnography Visible: The Peculiar Relationship Between Italian Anthropology and Feminism Michela Fusaschi

Preliminary Postures Despite their history, gender anthropology and ethnography seem to be invisible in Italian handbooks or are present in dedicated Sections.1 It is not about defending or taking sides, but about making what is invisible visible again. Gender anthropology is often understood as “uselessly complicated or a topic of interest mainly for women, which has led to an underestimation of central authors in the contemporary anthropological debate” (Ribeiro Corossacz and Gribaldo 2018). Why are scholars such as Denise Paulme, Audrey Richards, Phyllis Kaberry, Rayna Rapp Reiter, Michelle S. Rosaldo, Louise Lamphere, Nicole-Claude Mathieu, Gayle Rubin, Marilyn Strathern, Henrietta Moore, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Veena Das, just to cite a few, less known than Margaret Mead2 and Françoise Héritier,3 or Bronislaw Malinowski, Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, Marcel Griaule, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and

M. Fusaschi (B) Department of Political Sciences, University of Roma Tre, Rome, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 V. Matera and A. Biscaldi (eds.), Ethnography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51720-5_16

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Clifford Geertz? The answer to this question was supposed to be covered in these pages. But when I proposed it, Anglophone colleagues criticized me. According to them the majority of the North American and British anthropologists, regardless of different “positionalities,” have been incorporating feminist theoretical trends into their work since at least the 1980s. I assume they meant questions about positioning, intersubjectivity in the relation between informant and researcher, the gender-power relations. I would have added nothing that had not been written before. They were probably right if I think about their context. I tried to go further, considering that these female anthropologists found a space, albeit minimal, dedicated or relegated in Italy, even before Strathern characterized the relationship between feminism and anthropology as “awkward” (1987). I, therefore, asked myself: do an Italian anthropology of women and a feminist ethnography exist? Is it visible? I myself wasn’t taught about gender, but found out about it by myself, also thanks to some “ethnographic accidents” (Fusaschi 2003, 2011, 2013, 2018a) where I experimented empirically the “inconsistency of a neutral anthropology” (Maher 1989, p. 6). I also established how mistaken it is to think that a female researcher has a privileged access to her interviewees to state that a universal category of women exists. I would therefore analyze what happened in the demo-ethno-anthropology4 regarding gender. Trying to understand if the ethnographies here examined have considered the international debate, knowing that the Anglo-American positions do not overlap with the French ones. Finally, if there has been, conversely, an Italian case able to affect the national and/or international debate. Focusing on Italy has meant crossing topics of a political nature, both internal and external at the academy, and “complex stereotypes” (Signorelli 1982). This has led to a selection between times and spaces, ideologies and positions, strategical and not, together with other “politically” relevant distortions of which these pages constitute a minimal introduction. In this sense, I chose to focus on the historical moment of transition from the anthropology of women to a gender and feminist one, between the ’70s and the ’80s. I also wanted to underline how the term gender was introduced and translated in Italy as genere. It is neither comparable to genre in the French context nor to gender in the AngloAmerican one. When Paola di Cori had to translate gender with genere, it turned out to be a difficult task. The term had to include “both the conceptual complexity which it had assumed at that point (the universe of post-structuralism theoretical debate) and the grammatical features of the

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English language (for instance the fact that nouns can also have a verbal form)” (2000, p. 20). Due to contingent needs within the academic institutions5 and in politics, through demands of participation and representation, since the end of the ’80s the term genere has been able to include both sexes or be a synonym of women. This ambiguity “far from inoffensive, has been the element in favour of the success of the term genere, which can be used to express several conflictual intentions and at the same time it guarantees not to take too many risks in using it” (ibid., p. 21). This consideration has led to conceive, often in the Italian academy, the term genere as an equivalent to women. The object of the study and subject that studies it: women that study other women (conceived as objects out of time and out of relations); specialists/feminists (feminism considered as a minus compared to the scientific objectivity). Therefore the “field of feminists”, or rather a group of friends that chat, “women in the ghetto” (Moore 1988, p. 5). Not as a field where belonging to a gender can also be achieved through ethnographically relevant relations (Cavatorta 2018). On the other hand, the anthropology of women has led the way to a feminist anthropology to give visibility to them revealing the androcentrism within monographies, even if it appears as a fix (Moore 1988). Using the analytic category of gender, feminist anthropology (Collier and Yanagisako 1989; Visweswaran 1997)has focused on the relations between men and women and on the object, “of the interrelations between women and men, and of the role of gender in structuring human societies, their histories, ideologies, economic systems and political structures […]. It wouldn’t be possible to pursue any other type of social science without a concept of gender” (ibid., p. 6). Nicole-Claude Mathieu specified that the difference between “the new anthropology of women” and “the anthropology of sex/anthropologie des sexes” was about size. The first one, just as classic anthropology, focused on men and stated that the (inferior) status of women was a consequence of the men’s status. The second one focused on women proving that the (privileged) “status” of men is influenced or directly determined by women’s work and its invisibility, their invisibility, which appears in the societies examined and in the analysis conducted. The difference is that in terms of facts. It’s not about the respective statuses (static point of view) but about the analysis of social functioning and the reciprocal definition

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of sexes, dialectic, not wanting to define it egalitarian. (1985, pp. 6–7, emphasis of the author)

Whether it was about scientific ideologies or the ones of different societies, the visibility of social male actors as a sexual group depended on the invisibility of women as social actresses and their representation as “nonactor sexes ” (ibid., p. 7, emphasis of the author). In the United States, the preventive exclusion of women from science and the differential treatment led to women’s studies. Volumes such as Woman, Culture, and Society by Rosaldo and Lamphere (1974) and Toward an Anthropology of Women by Rapp Reiter (1975), challenged the anthropological epistemology by proposing a project of revision, theoretical and in the field with the purpose of fighting the male prejudice that made men the privileged interviewers in research and women mere appearances. Reiter argued in favor of studies that wouldn’t trivialize or misinterpret the role of women but rather redefine anthropology as the study of humankind; that could be achieved through a reanalysis of earlier theories and a critique of everything that “we admit as constituent of factual data” (1975, p. 16). Firstly, ethnography could unfold the “scientific androcentrism” as a symptom of that “sick” anthropology in its entirety. From the ’70s onwards, the most relevant innovations in feminist anthropology were specifically about methodological questions, which derived from the revision of the image of reality shaped by the anthropology of men that would also translate in a “exploitation of thematic areas or social life neglected or absent from male anthropology” (Maher 1992, p. 42). And what was happening in Italy?

Questions In 1987, the economist Maria Cristina Marcuzzo and the historian Anna Rossi-Doria enlivened a conference in Modena called Women’s research. Feminist studies in Italy whose records would have been published in 1988. The organizers, whose purpose was to verify the results of crossing feminism and disciplinary knowledge, focused on the relation between feminism and universities, acknowledging what “divided culture and politics” (1988, p. 7). This purpose was soon surpassed, because the speeches made led to a strong positioning regarding feminism, especially of historical kind, within disciplines where the theoretical-political feature was underscored. Considered as a “discipline with a weak paradigm” (ibid.,

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p. 23), cultural anthropology denoted the “peculiarity of the Italian case” (ibid., p. 8). Unlike history, psychoanalysis or philosophy had not been able to exercise compelling criticisms toward the dominant paradigm, namely androcentrism. In the field? Regarding the theoretical production? Within the academy? Publicly? The Comment to Cristina Papa’s 6 report by Bia Sarasini went exactly in these directions. Sarasini stated that: Talking about the impact between anthropology and feminism in Italy means talking about an absence. The absence of a project and research, in some ways comparable, shared by a significant group of women. Research aimed both at the theoretical work, with the production of concepts and the discovery of problematic areas, and in the creation of relationships among female anthropologists, able to give strength and value to their work. (Sarasini 1988, p. 138)

Italian anthropology had not been able to create anything that was comparable to the Anthropology of women in the Anglo-American context, or to the Anthropologie des sexes, in the French one. The former was historically considered as revolutionary because of its vocation to “accompany the action to a social and fundamental change” (Reiter 1975, p. 19); the latter because of the subtle analysis made by a group of materialist feminists who were opposed to differentialism, essentialism, and naturalism, among which we should remember Paola Tabet (2004) and the previously mentioned Mathieu (1985, 1991). Sarasini did not ask for a generic commitment from anthropology but a precise and “strong contribution to the elaboration of the thought of sexual difference, in discovering the determination of the female sexual subject. Me, Woman, Feminist and […] Western” (1988, p. 142). This philosophy was represented in the same conference by Adriana Cavarero and it was built, among other things, on the idea of a patriarchal order, conceived in an unhistorical sense and as a structure,7 at the base of the western culture of the male subject, which pretends to be universal and neutral. Stating his centrality, the man surrounds himself with female figures who reflect his sense of the world also through language, which is the first element to undermine and sexualize. Sarasini claimed the thought of identification of a feminist political subject, already defined by the body-based sexual difference, a female subject essentialized, built through a nonnegotiable identity. She asked the discipline to take a stand on “the existence of cruel forms of oppression,” to which I will return, like “the

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burning of widows in India, the killing of adulterous women in fundamentalist Islam […] but above all the practice of excising the clitoris, which has provoked emotion and rejection8 ” (ibid.). Furthermore, she accused anthropologists of rarely9 exposing themselves in the public sphere. The debate between Luigi Lombardi Satriani, a leading exponent of “demologia,”10 and Amalia Signorelli,11 reported in the newspaper La Repubblica in August 1977, is more interesting to understand the ethnographic and academic positioning. Implicitly answering the issues the feminist movement posed while avoiding mentioning the movement itself, Lombardi Satriani, in L’ambigua verità della tradizione. Se anche il folk le vuole schiave/The Ambiguous Truth in Tradition. If even folk wants them enslaved (August 9, 1977), recognized some forms of oppression on peasant women but also pointed out that they were the “depositary of tradition” and central in a symbolic and ritual way. He then referred to De Martino’s works about funeral laments where peasant women were the “privileged” mediators between the world of the living and the dead. These roles were being lost with the urban drift, which imposed on these women even more oppression as a “result of the neocapitalistic culture and its ethnocide practices.” In Com’è triste difendere i valori patriarcali/How Sad it is to Defend Patriarchal Values, Signorelli (August 20, 1977) responded criticizing firstly the definition of “peasant woman,” considered an abstraction, and preferring terms such as day laborers and farmers. She also criticized the symbolic centrality of women because it was defined based on “the standards of male advantage.” A posture conceivable as feminist, although she never claimed it either on a movement level or on an academic one.12 In the field, she had already proved how many women refused the idea of a cultural continuity. They found themselves passing down “values that they didn’t help to create, values that legitimate and ratify their double kind of oppression as women and members of a subordinate class; values that socialise the acceptance of that oppression, everyone who is forced to interiorise them, including men” (ibid.). This discussion, which moved from a newspaper to a scientific journal,13 soon ended. Sarasini carried on her accusation to the anthropology not to be able to support the movement of women in the years that were crucial for it. To justify this lack, evidently, no “questions were made by feminism to anthropology” (1988, p. 141). It is not clear if the question was explicitly directed at Cristina Papa in her dual role

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as a scholar and politician. Anyhow, feminism and anthropology have something valuable to give. The possible support of ethnology to feminism depends on a better knowledge of other societies about gender relations. The feminist analysis could highlight sexist prejudices within anthropologic knowledge (Échard and Mathieu 1982, pp. 45–49). At this point it is mandatory to focus on Papa’s intervention, called Problemi e prospettive di una antropologia dei sessi in Italia /Problems and prospects of anthropology of sexes in Italy,14 that had brought up many questions/accusations. The anthropologist had attempted, meanwhile, to make an evaluation that necessarily intertwined with the problems of development of the discipline as a whole, its crisis, many questions within it […]. A troubled development, with unfinished outcomes, which faces […] Problems dictated by the deep changes that affected the objects and the fields of the discipline during these last years, so to undermine the uncertain boundaries which were established among contiguous disciplines: ethnology, cultural anthropology, demology. (1988, p. 123)

A structural weakness of the “disciplinary statute and uncertain horizons […] didn’t support the constitution of an anthropological perspective which was knowingly partial and feminist” (ibid., p. 124) and that forced female anthropologists to measure themselves with more general problems regarding disciplinary assumptions and to get to the inside of a dialectic heavily marked by class connotations and by the meridional issue. Thus, the sexual difference was not understood, at least in Italy, and neither fully legitimated within the discipline, as a level of analysis about fair dignity about other scraps and other differences. The ones between dominated and dominant, popular and educated, subordinate and dominant classes, traditional and modern […]. Therefore sexual difference is not considered, if not episodically, as a factor that can influence the work of the anthropologist. This partiality usually ends up being contemplated as insufficiently valid, unlike what happens for other partialities, which are recognized as essential to the relation between subjectivity of the researcher and the finalities and theoretical foundations of the discipline that establish the object of the research (ibid.). Except for the reference to Mead, Papa does not refer to other writers or to debates, although it was 1987, therefore at least a decade after the birth of what would become gender anthropology. Though by not

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mentioning feminist ethnography, she recognized how the awareness of a female subjectivity in the cognitive process had influenced Italian anthropological research. This created ethnography that would have matured “unlike what had happened so far, the conscious assumption of a specific research field focused on relations between sexes” (ibid., p. 130). Nevertheless, some Italian anthropologists had already engaged in research in this direction by the ’70s (Bellagamba 2000, 2001). The efforts made were not translated into a clear visibility and capacity of auto definition, to produce, as should have been necessary, a disruptive outcome and capable of asserting themselves within the discipline. The debated topics, the suggested approaches, the achieved results remained on the sidelines, not being able to create a lot of initiatives and suggestions capable of catalyzing everyone who worked in this direction (ibid.). Some of them15 had done research “in an individual and separated way [not being able] to establish a place of elaboration and specific debate” (ibid.). Papa also had strong doubts about the foundation of a distinct field in the academy. In her words “the relations between sexes represent a core feature of the social and cultural organisation” (ibid.), although she previously referred to it as “specific partiality” (supra). No forms of organization and institutionalization could have legitimated this positioning, while sharing, in some ways, what would have become, already was, gender and feminist anthropology: “the non-neutrality of the subject and object of research; the attention of disparities, to scraps, to conflicts, to the interrelation in society and culture” (ibid., p. 131). Having presented this synthesis, I consider Papa’s intervention crucial to eviscerate some problems concerning the internal political field, or rather academic; but also the external one compared to the feminist movement and its impact on the anthropology of that period. Retrospectively, it is important to remember that Ernesta Cerulli, in 1968, was “the first woman to be a full professor in the demo-ethnoanthropolgy group in Italy” (Alliegro 2014, p. 104). This designation, at the time, caused a stir: because of the young age of the scholar (41 years old) and because of the period “in which women had no space whatsoever. […] when I arrived in Genova […] much younger than my male colleagues and the only woman, being the youngest I had to work as a secretary for the Faculty Councils” (Cerulli in Alliegro 2014, p. 117). She was one of the first to focus on women, because she wanted “to see what interested them” (ibid.). She also questioned the ethnographic

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method used at that time—based on the formulation of direct questions— to privilege an analysis of a wider context. She criticized the ethnographic postures for which “the informer is always a male” (Cerulli 1980, p. 126). The academic acknowledgment of the discipline, which happened only by the end of the ’50s and the early ’60s, had a precise meaning. Since the (considered) weak disciplinary foundations, in Papa’s opinion, the focus on gender anthropology would have further weakened the discipline. Specifically, it would have affected mostly the status of the female scholars that would have been relegated to the sideline. Or better, marginalized because of their focus on a “single specific part,” failing to pursue the universalistic principle that the feminist movement at the time defined monolithic, prisoner of a neutral vision, and coincident with a male gaze. Actually, not “coming forward” at the time as a posture deemed strategic, just reified the stereotyped thought according to which the feminist and/or gender anthropology only studied women. Instead, it could have underlined how the gender perspective in ethnographies can expose the asymmetries between sexes and the powers beneath them, which should concern the ethnographic posture itself. There is also the relation between anthropology and the political world to consider. In that historical moment, female anthropologists did not side with the feminist movements: it was an explicit choice, also made, evidently, due to the fear of repercussions. Yet, the question is: didn’t they consider the anthropology of women of the ’70s? Or the feminist ethnography, which was rising at the time, a field of fertile interlocution? Was the overseas language still an ideological barrier coming from the cold war?

Answers In 2018, Papa would intervene again in her text, trying to give an answer. The problem of absence in the dialogue between feminism and anthropology resulted from the fact that the thinking of sexual difference in feminism questioned the discipline. The Italian feminism was/is characterized by, sometimes superimposed on, the feminism of thought of sexual difference. According to Papa “to the point where there hasn’t been a distancing in Italy, despite the critiques which have never been able to emerge”16 (Papa 2018, p. 35). The scholars of thought of sexual difference (the differenzialiste, in the Italian vulgate) had, right from the beginning, forms of organization, effective publishing tools, and the support of

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some academic disciplines. Among these tools, for instance, DWF, Donna, Woman, Femme review. This journal became their publishing megaphone in 1975 and it introduced, in Italy, important essays from the international feminist debate, also anthropological, with an “admirable promptness” (Di Cori 2000, p. 17). The first and only journal that, almost at the same time, translated Gayle Rubin (1976) and Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo (1981). This could be an explanation of their success. Furthermore, on the wider public level this school of thought, used anthropology to denounce “the condition” of the Others, through a moralized and victimized reinterpretation which has had a great impact. The book Donna perché piangi? Imperialismo e condizione femminile nell’Africa nera (1976) by essayist and author Maria Rosa Cutrufelli pointed in the same direction; it was translated into many languages and published by the international publisher Zed Book, Women of Africa: Roots of Oppression (1983). The author always expressed the desire to entrench women’s writing as a place of experience, through inspiration by Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray. This position of hers resounds everywhere in the book about Africa, as a verdict: “All the African women live in a dependent political and economic context” (ibid., p. 245). This trait was useful to obtain a prejudicial view applied to prostitution or to the so-called female circumcision, to marriage, and to other rituals. African women, for instance, need to be saved. Men practice excision to “increase their sadistic pleasure” (ibid., p. 188)17 and to hold them hostage. These women are predestined as they were not born in the Western part of the world. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, from a sociological point of view, profoundly criticized Cutrufelli, also for using the expression “African women” (2003) deemed a pure abstraction,18 just like the term female peasants. Moreover, there are some unsolved questions, from an anthropological point of view. Cutrufelli’s text is full of citations from anthropologists, such as Evans-Pritchard, Cohen, Meillassoux, Gluckman, Schapera, Balandier, Audrey Richards and Lucy Mair, and also some Italians like Lanternari and Scarduelli. As previously mentioned, the “revelation” of a “scientific androcentrism” (supra), which Cutrufelli did not seem to consider, is from those years. It would be interesting to know if the author deliberately ignored this “revelation.” She does not doubt the male neutral, proper of the authors she refers to, reinforcing a (male) stance that the thinking of sexual difference, on the contrary, wanted to fight. Strategy? Surely, the book reified that miserable image of the

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“woman from Africa” with an inferior status, poor, dependent, and forever a victim (Fusaschi 2010). The image that is still used today: condescendingly by the left-wing, often within the humanitarian government (Fusaschi 2011, 2015), and as discrimination by the right-wing. In that historical period, Cutrufelli, a free and emancipated western writer, contributed to legitimizing two opposite female images. The leading woman in the western culture (crusader who saves the Others) versus the victim of the African culture (the Others cannot save themselves) (Fusaschi 2011). By criticizing colonialism, she ironically endorsed a different and female colonialism, in terms of neo-evolutionism, which is still successful across Italian politics. Sixteen years earlier, Denise Paulme, already a team member of the Griaule’s expedition,19 published an edited book, as pioneering as little known, which was never translated in Italy, called Femmes d’Afrique Noire (1960).20 It collected six ethnographies of female ethnologists, who had worked in the field for at least ten years. Diverging from common prejudices about the inferior status of women in the traditional African context each essay deals with women in their everyday life and with the problems that particularly concerned them. This is a new approach, for, site ethnographic research has almost always been exclusively carried out with the help of, and among, the male part of the population. The picture that has emerged to a large extent has been an image which men, and men alone, have of their society (1960, p. 9). […] The usual conclusion drawn is that women are oppressed and exploited, have no freedom of action and are held in low esteem. In this judgement by the outside observed there lurks a hidden assumption: that any divergence from the Western ideal would necessarily imply a lower status for women. (ibid., p. 12)

Paulme’s intentions are in contrast with Cutrufelli’s approach. Paulme’s text is not even mentioned among Cutrufelli’s references. Why? An essentialist feminist or a strategic literary essentialism? Within Italian anthropology, at that time, Cutrufelli’s text was not particularly debated. It was remarkable considering that the publishing activity of thinkers of the sexual difference school had succeeded, to some extent, in creating a work of cultural hegemony of Gramscian tradition. Because of its ability to permeate society, this school of thought could achieve a political acknowledgment within the left-wing parties. After the end of the Communist Party and with the turn of events in the ’90s, the

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Left-Wing Democratic Party,21 to regain the endorsement of the feminist movements, fully embraced the thinking of sexual difference, right when its space for movement was “shrinking,” as Papa recalls (2018, p. 37). It must be said, however, that in Italy the topic of gender anthropology and ethnography has never been particularly relevant in national conferences of anthropological associations. So today, we experience a widespread thought of sexual difference, easy to understand because the men are the condition and the women are the relation.22 This attitude is difficult to deconstruct because it feeds the Italian public opinion, media, and politics.

Conclusions: In the Field, and Alone I would like to conclude with a few lines on what Interview with Maria meant to me, to reverse perspectives. A colleague and friend told me one day: there is a specific female way of doing research. What makes the difference is that we put everything into research, “brain and giblets.” She implied a truth that I believe cannot be neglected if you read it in the right way, which is not that women are more sensitive. “Brain and giblets” means that every activity of knowledge and rationalization is the result of a process of combination and/or distancing from the object that is also passion. Or, better: it is not even so, since I have doubts about a strict dichotomy between passion and intellect during the cognitive process. The rationalization comes as the greatest moment of the (positive or negative) reference process regarding the other, a process which involves the entire person with all her/his ways of feeling and shaping that feel. A cognitive process that modifies our lifestyle, not as much in terms of our intellectual choices, as on a certain reliance on the approach to the other, also in terms of subjectivity (ibid., pp. 103–104). These two long quotes are from Intervista a Maria, a Clara Gallini’s book. The protagonists are the informant Maria, a woman from Tonara, Sardinia, who was born in 1910 and the same anthropologist Clara Gallini,23 who was born in 1931 and died in 2017. The original audiotape was broadcast on Radio 3 during the program Us, You, Them, Woman. The transcription and the issues concerning the publishing show some difficulties. The text was rejected by Laterza Editions24 and accepted by Sellerio Editions,25 but on the condition that it would not be published in co-authorship with Maria, as Gallini wanted (Honkasalo and Assmuth 2013, p. 280). Gallini considered herself “different and isolated”

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(ibid., p. 275). She declared “I didn’t want, or couldn’t, or didn’t know” (ibid., p. 282) how to bring to life a school of thought. On the other hand, she was very engaged in public politics and writing newspaper articles especially in Il Manifesto26 and L’Unità27 on topics ranging from racism to the so-called question of women. Gallini did not ascribe herself to feminism. Rather she criticized a historical reconstruction of the role of women, which underlined the aspect of exploitation or a culturally emerging creativity instead of highlighting, for instance, “the secret intelligence that is required in the daily life even of the most integrated housewife” (1981, p. 113). However, Intervista a Maria (1981) includes some elements, which could be read as crucial to feminist ethnography. First, the positioning, that is considering gender, origin, and class roles in the field and, second, the “contextual assessment, according to the same criteria, of behaviours and statements of its interlocutors” (Maher and Sacchi 2007, p. XIII). Gallini conceived it as the difference between the old and the new way of doing research where she discovered “having been influenced, much more than I had believed, by my culture, specifically by the culture of a middle-class person” (1981, p. 111). She also believed that she had underestimated the issue of critical conscience, “the ability to test one’s grids compared to the reality of grids fabricated by the dominant class, which is often the answer to include the needs of subordinate social groups, the contradiction of class, etc.” (ibid., p. 114). She, in some ways, anticipated what would later be called intersectionality, a concept elaborated overseas by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989). It is worth noting that this concept is much more acknowledged and referred to than Gallini’s stance, even in Italy. There was also the relation between researcher/informant and the creative process built in the field as a reciprocal speech defined “fallingin-love” (Gallini 1981, p. 104). An attempt, as she said some years after, to practice an ethnography that ignored itself in terms of “reflectivity” and “dialogue.” She proposed a position to get beyond De Martino’s tradition, giving more space to the expression of a critical consciousness of both subjects: “researcher” and “researched” (ibid., 2007, p. 8). The term falling-in-love was considered so unusual in science that it caused disorientation and perplexity in Pietro Clemente.28 This exponent of demologia, with a kin interest in autobiographical reflection, significantly solved this expression with caustic and superficial state: “It was feminist times and that seemed to me a mitigating factor” (2007, p. 28).

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In those years Amalia Signorelli, as a member of De Martino’s team (1986), who was Gallini’s friend and colleague, and with whom Gallini also shared a part of her academic life in Naples, was not a self-declared feminist. Yet, the debate in 1977 and the critique of the anthropological discipline that from the ’50s had prioritized the topic of “family” instead of “woman,” tells us something different. Returning to the issue of the “peasant woman,” Signorelli noticed that the definition was described as “backward” “with a characteristic emancipationist progress [through which] a series of data could be summarised: the high number of pregnancies and births, the ‘submission’ to the man, the segregation at home, the exclusion from the extra-domestic work” (1982, p. 4). An archaism highlighted not only in things, but also in the heads […] superstitious and bigots. It was common to think that most of the resistance to the innovation of the rural world would have come from women; that the conservative vote was to be attributed to them; that the lack of inclination to participate in the public and collective life and being interested in something other than one’s family was a feature of southern peasant women’s mentality. (1982, p. 4)

Stereotypes that can also be linked to the influence of De Martino’s research, which described these women not as peasants but as tarantolate, exorcists or mourning women, out of history and context “ready to take part in the myth. And the myth is there, beautiful, ready to be retrieved and retrieved quickly: and the Mediterranean mother, chthonic, earthy, black, tragic and powerful dominant of the family, unchangeable keeper of values” (ibid., p. 6). It was not about simply criticizing the class centrism and sexism, but also underlining complex stereotypes, the analysis dynamics which overcome those reductive interpretations typical of a certain folkloristic anthropology which caused several deformations and that ignored the mainly sexist analysis mode and from a family perspective, when considering the female participation in the fight for lands (ibid., p. 5). A fact that reverberated on the role of the researcher, where the fact of being a woman had a role. I find surprising the fact that De Martino didn’t report the drastic prohibition to the presence of male spectators in the Chapel […]. The presence of the female “doctors” [Signorelli, Gallini, Vittoria de Palma, and Annabella Rossi] wasn’t annoying to the tarantate. Actually, it was

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appreciated. The outpourings of affection between the tarantate and me or my researchers were reported, a fact that I haven’t forgotten, that I believe can’t be easily forgotten by anyone who ever experienced it (ibid., p. 9). According to Signorelli the reasons for De Martino’s reticence were not discussed back then, but should have been. De Martino’s problem was that the behavior of the tarantate in the Chapel was erotic (it had already been exploited years before by a pornographic magazine). This ethnography gave an account of the relational dynamics of these women linked to agricultural and extra-domestic work. But none of the researchers had thought to consider as a crucial and co-explanatory data of what was then the “condition of women”: “I saw many women loading, driving, unloading wagons, I saw them carrying sheaves and bundles, sowing, weeding, harvesting, hand-threshing, picking olives, hoeing, milking and grazing. I also saw them ploughing, reaping, tasks that are said to be masculine tasks” (Signorelli 1982, p. 8). Through the analysis of the economical level, upon which the independent female cultural production was founded, as a cultural capital to quote Bourdieu, and that was not entirely determined by male domination. There are power relations which also concerned women in intertwining parental, economic, political, and religious relationships. In this sense Signorelli formulated the concept of “women’s pragmatism” (ibid., 1989). Toward the end of her career, Signorelli considered the concept of gender “almost useless” (2011). She did a fierce critique of the feminism of sexual difference and the ways the term had been re-proposed on the public scene during the years of Berlusconi. This was a historical experience in Italy which deeply reshaped the image of women in neoliberal terms (Gribaldo and Zapperi 2012) and is hard to eradicate. In conclusion, referring to the initial critique, undoubtedly the Italian language played a restraining role in making these anthropologists known, compared to the hegemonic English; therefore, the majority of their work isn’t well-known outside national borders. This invisibility also occurred internally, due to both problems connected to the status of the Italian anthropology and the fact that younger generations consider the overseas or the cross-Channel privileged places for anthropological elaboration. Yet, the work of the above-mentioned anthropologists anticipated, sometimes with great foresight, topics, and perspectives of anthropology crossed by a gender approach, although scattered and “isolated,” to quote

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Papa. Nevertheless, their investigations were able to produce analyticaldescriptive elaborations on gender and generation underlying the ways that they are located in space and time, beyond the view that conceives them as given and hierarchized. Their ethnography was not only a description because, in the way of describing, they at the same time created theory (Nader 2011). It is in this sense that ethnography becomes a theory of description, thanks to the gender prism that was and remains a form of political criticism (Fusaschi 2018b). This in-Visibility in the handbooks on the History of Italian Anthropology deserves a (re)discovery to build an anthropological space under a new light, surely not for nostalgia of the past, but for usefulness in the present.

Notes 1. For instance, Busoni (2000) considered as a handbook of gender anthropology and reprinted nine times. This text is a summary of international debates that neglects the national one and has received some critiques: cf. D’Agostino on Héritier’s reception (2000, pp. 9−61); Remotti, cf. infra note 5. 2. In Italy one of the most adopted handbooks is Storia dell’antropologia (Fabietti 2011): the term gender only appears in chapter 13, par. 4, titled Margaret Mead: adolescence, temperament and gender. Approaching the term gender to Mead is unusual, considering that she never used it. There are no further chapters or paragraphs about anthropology of women or feminist ethnography. 3. Héritier claimed not to be a feminist militant. In Masculin/Féminin I (1996) Héritier used the term gender only once in the first chapter and in Masculin Féminin II (2002), by which she tried to distance herself from the critique of essentialism that the first volume had got, she used gender five times as a synonym of sex, but never as an analytic category, to which she preferred the structuralist approach of “the differential value of sexes.” 4. This threefold origin of Italian anthropology is “enshrined in a portmanteau term originally proposed by Alberto Cirese—a leading exponent of demologia with a kin interest in Lévi-Strauss’s work and a sophisticated grasp of the main trends in world anthropology—which is still officially adopted in the ministerial vocabulary: ‘demo-ethno-anthropological disciplines’” (Viazzo 2003, p. 7). Referral, among many, to Alliegro (2011); Palumbo (2018). 5. For instance, Remotti, in 2018, retraces the term etymologically and within the philosophical and sociological tradition, without referring to

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7. 8.

9.

10.

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the history of gender anthropology. There is a critique to Busoni (2000) concerning her definition of relations of power as a form of male dominance on women, social categories “out of time”. The critique is shareable but incomprehensible, if it’s not traced back to the position held by Busoni within the school of Thought of Sexual Difference elaborated by Italian feminist philosophers which Remotti does not mention, but I will do further on. Cristina Papa attended the conference as a Researcher in Anthropology. In 1985 she was also nominated assessor for Project Woman and for the Environment in the communal Council of Perugia, where she would remain until 1990. She had also filled the role of parliamentarian in the VII legislature and in the Council of Europe (1976–1979). She was professor of Economic anthropology and gender anthropology at the University of Perugia (2000–2018). Fusaschi (2020) for a radical critique to this concept. On this specific issue, Sarasini and I crossed paths a few times and we always had, with mutual respect, different ideas and positions, even from an anthropological point of view. When my first book about the topic came out (2003), I used the term “modification,” as an ethnographic posture that could allow me to converse with affected women and their subjectivity, instead of the term “mutilation,” which is a tool of condemnation globally recognized. I was criticized and “accused” of being relativist in a justificationist way; cf. Fusaschi (2020). In the same years, Ida Magli, professor in Rome, had become known thanks to an editing of the primitive matriarchy (1978), which was appreciated by the movement. “Intermittent” feminist, Magli, would later assume, until her death in 2016, reactionary, anti-feminist, racist, Islamophobic, homophobic, and anti-European positions, collaborating with conservative newspapers. At the same time, Gioia di Cristoforo Longo contributed to the founding of the 8th of March Court (1979). She was a professor of Anthropology from the ’90s and had some visibility because she was a member of the National Commission for Equal Opportunities (1983), characterized by an emancipationist approach, with female quota and equal opportunities, that today would be defined mainstream; this approach wasn’t appreciated by some feminist movements. He was Professor of Ethnology, University of Sapienza, Rome (starting in 1974): his major interests were in the study of folklore and popular religion of the subordinate cultures of the agro-pastoral universe in a Marxist perspective. He extended the Gramscian base into a consideration of folklore as a “culture of contestation.” She was Professor of Cultural anthropology, Univ. Naples. She studied with the famous ethnologist, Ernesto de Martino, and she did her first fieldwork as part of his team in the 50s. Her major interests were the

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12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

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cultural modernization processes in Southern Italy, migration and the status of women. She was born in 1934 and died in 2017. She defined herself as an old feminist in some television programs in the late years of her life, in the 2000s. In Fronte Popolare, speeches, between 1977 and 1978. Italian expression “antropologia dei sessi” which could lead to essentialism, but which probably indicates, I agree with Ribeiro Corossacz on this, “the social and cultural feature of relationships between women and men” (Ribeiro Corossacz and Gribaldo 2010, p. 12). Including female anthropologists Maria Arioti, Gabriella da Re, Clara Gallini, Maria Minicuci, Giannetta Murru Corriga, Amalia Signorelli, and Sandra Puccucini. I only partially agree because, at least in the last two decades for different reasons, some Italian scholars, both male and female, have radically countered this philosophy with their ethnographies, often characterized by a declared position of public anthropology and outside some schools of thought. Among others: Paola Sacchi and Vanessa Maher, who translated and introduced the thought of Lila Abu-Lughod (1990); Valeria Ribeiro Corossacz, one of the few to introduce the work of French materialists (2013); Alessandra Gribaldo, who wrote about medically assisted procreation, following Strathern (1992), or about the interweaving of feminism and visibility regimes (with Zapperi 2012); Barbara Pinelli, with her intersectional analysis about female refugees (2019); Gianfranco Rebucini, who wrote about hegemonic masculinities in Morocco (2013) and also, more modestly, me about the modification of female genitalia, using a perspective, not particularly loved by differentialists and therefore defined “decolonial” feminist (Fusaschi, 2003, 2011, 2018a, b). I apologize to those not mentioned for reasons of space. I take the liberty of referring to my works of critical anthropology on this very topic Fusaschi (2003, 2011) and Fusaschi and Cavatorta (2018). Cf. also Fusaschi (2003, 2011, 2020) and Pinelli (2019). Griaule concentrated the work in his own hands, for instance through the “requisition” of the best informants, considered so because of their knowledge of the language spoken by the colonizer. They would be paid for their work only if they “answered correctly,” which meant choosing only men, since women were not educated, cutting out fundamental elements of the community life (Fusaschi 2009). The English edition was published in 1963, Women of Tropical Africa, Psychology Press. The Left-Wing Democratic Party (Italian: Partito Democratico della Sinistra, PDS) was a democratic-socialist and social-democratic political party in Italy.

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22. In The Symbolic Order of the Mother (1991), Luisa Muraro identifies the bond between mother and child as ontologically fundamental to the development of culture and politics, and therefore as key to achieve truly emancipatory political change. Muraro is one of the leading members of thought of sexual difference and in the last few years she has been taking positions considered homophobic in some right-wing newspapers. In particular she advocates prohibiting surrogacy to avoid the risk of the market erasing the fundamental maternal relationship, in which a woman discovers herself as a woman. 23. Clara Gallini started her career in the early fifties as researcher assistant in De Martino’s team. After the death of de Martino she edited and published the de Martinian life work and heritage and then spent a long period of time doing fieldwork in Sardinia. Throughout her long career, Gallini was actively engaged politically in the communist party. 24. One of the most important publishing houses in Italy, since 1901 with Giovanni Laterza, the founder. After the II World War, under the critical guidance of the famous Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, Laterza became the meeting point for novel voices and ideas; a defender of the values of freedom of criticism and expression with its opposition to the fascist regime and defense of state subsidized education and of the freedom of teaching. 25. The Sellerio publishing house was founded in 1969 with a small investment by Elvira Sellerio and the photographer Enzo Sellerio to give a voice to Sicilian literature as well as the less known European literature. The idea of opening a publishing concern took shape discussing it with writer Leonardo Sciascia and anthropologist Antonino Buttitta. The 80’s also saw a discovery of a new genre named the Italian “giallo” by the Sicilian writers Andrea Camilleri and Santo Piazzese. 26. Il Manifesto, an Italian national daily newspaper, was founded as a monthly review in 1969 by a collective of radical, left-wing and communist journalists. 27. l’Unità was founded by Antonio Gramsci in 1924 as the “newspaper of workers and peasants,” the official newspaper of the Italian Communist Party (PCI).The daily was a mouthpiece for the PCI until 1991. 28. Emeritus professor of Cultural Anthropology and Anthropology of the cultural heritage at the University of Florence.

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Signorelli, A. (1986). Ernesto de Martino. La ricerca e i suoi percorsi. La Ricerca Folklorica, 13, 5–14. Signorelli, A. (1989). Il pragmatismo delle donne. La condizione femminile nella trasformazione delle campagne. In P. Bevilacqua (Ed.), Storia dell’ agricoltura italiana (pp. 625–659). Venice: Marsilio. Tabet, P. (2004). La grande beffa. Sessualità delle donne e scambio sessuoeconomico. Rome: Rubettino. Strathern, M. (1987). An Awkward Relationship: The Case of Feminism and Anthropology. Signs, 12(2), 276–292. Strathern, M. (1992). Reproducing the Future: Essays on Anthropology, Kinship and the New Reproductive Technologies. Oxford: Manchester University Press. Viazzo, P. P. (2003). Teaching and Learning Anthropology in Italy. Institutional Development and Pedagogic Challenges. In D. Dracklé, I. Elgar & T. K. Schipper (Eds.), Educational Histories of European Social Anthropology (pp. 181–192). New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Visweswaran, K. (1997). Histories of Feminist Ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology, 26, 591–621. Zimbalist Rosaldo, M. (1981). Usi e abusi dell’antropologia. Nuova DWF, 15, 61–87.

CHAPTER 17

Beyond the Field: Ethnography, Theory, and Writing in Anthropology Fabio Dei

“Paradigms” and “Turning Points” Over the course of the twentieth century, the history of anthropology gradually moved from a phase marked by theoretical paradigms (diffusionism, functionalism, structuralism, Marxism…) into one of “turns”, which sometimes overlapped like the dangerous hairpin turns of a mountain road. An interpretive turn followed a linguistic one; then a reflexive turn and a rhetorical turn, and finally the rather foggy and sinister “Ontological Turn”. I believe that the two phases differ from each other primarily in the inherent relationship between research, theory, and writing. During the golden age of anthropology, at least until decolonization, research was considered an instrument for building up an archive of positive, potentially cumulative ethnographic knowledge. Accordingly, fieldwork was seen as a methodology of data collection, even though its epistemological complexities were already apparent; it was not a chiefly personal experience, or quasi-mystical connection with the Other. Fieldwork was unquestionably considered a crucial stage, but nonetheless was

F. Dei (B) University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 V. Matera and A. Biscaldi (eds.), Ethnography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51720-5_17

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thought of as separated from theory. Radcliffe-Brown expressed this in the most radical way by contrasting «ethnology» and «social anthropology» : the former characterized by «historical» , idiographic methodologies; the latter by «inductive» , nomothetic ones. According to him, the former therefore aimed at establishing «facts» about things that occurred somewhere, sometime in the past; the latter instead consisted of a purely inductive study of cultural phenomena, with a tendency to discover the general laws and adapt the ordinary logical methods of the natural sciences to their object of study (Radcliffe-Brown 1958, p. 47), with the aim of formulating generalizations, explanations, laws. Mistrust in positivist and naturalist frameworks and grand nomothetic objectives (“explain human behaviour”) produced a shift of attention toward the production of ethnographic “data”. That is to say, that intricate tangle of epistemological, ethical, political, and rhetorical dimensions originated by the ethnographic encounter that has been termed fieldwork. Several factors contributed to the problematising of ethnographic “facts”. On the one hand, Western “guilty conscience” in the era of decolonization; on the other hand, the influence of post-empiricist philosophies of science as well as anti-naturalist and Verstehen sociologies. The debate aroused by the publication of Malinowski’s Diary, often cited in handbooks as the cause of the reflexive and rhetorical turns, is indeed the consequence of an already changed sensibility. The problem of anthropological knowledge was then set in the following terms: how is it possible to turn fieldwork experience, so eminently subjective and dialogicalrelational, into “data”, that is, objective knowledge? What alchemy makes it possible to move, with Geertz, from Being there to Being here? Or to move from a personal experience of the “heart of darkness” and the profound turmoil and transformation of Self, to an orderly, rational, scientific representation? This question was as natural and reasonable in the phase of theoretical “turning points”, as it would have sounded bizarre to previous generations. For the latter, research was after all a tool calibrated to the purpose of gathering information and empirical data, which in turn would validate or falsify some initial theoretical hypotheses. Surely fieldwork research could be a life experience too, but it didn’t receive its legitimation and meaning from subjective aspects. One went to the field to do science—not to develop self-awareness or engage in political activism, let alone cultivate literary ambitions. Things changed radically with the Rhetorical Turn of the 1980s. The main controversy, closely associated with the Writing Culture movement,

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focused precisely on the disregard for the subjective aspects of research shown within anthropological literature. It is thus argued that ethnographies, while claiming to present unadulterated data, fail to make explicit how they are acquired (privately, dialogically, etc.). For instance, individuals whom we address as fieldwork informants are not mentioned; the political circumstances of the research, understood in a broad sense that includes gender and other power relations, are not made explicit; most importantly, a whole array of field experiences go unspoken of: the ethnographers’ feelings and emotions, such as uneasiness, nostalgia, anger and joy, let alone his or her sexual desires and frustrations, and even outlandish, “paranormal” occurrences. According to those who underline the criticality of the anthropologist’s positioning within the field, such components of the research context all contribute to the production of ethnographic knowledge: as such, they should be scrutinized, if we pursue rigorous scientific reflexivity. Hence the proliferation in the last two decades of the twentieth century of what we could call metaethnographic literature, which focuses on such aspects of research-asexperience. Accordingly, the ideal of the ethnographer as a disembodied scientist, a neutral observer who strives to be unbiased in order to offer reliable data and analyses, no longer has legitimacy. In place of this disembodied scientist is an altogether more human one, one expected to come into presence in the ethnographic encounter with her body, emotions, unconsciousness, and relationships as well as political, ethical, and sexual orientation. After all, this new ethnographer conforms to the intellectual figure that was predominant in American colleges during the extended post-1968: nonconformist and politicized, but in an entirely different way. Identity politics qualifies this figure’s political engagement: predicated on minority rights, on the emergence of what is private and subjective (“the personal is political”). But I shall return to this shortly. In the meantime, I would like to observe that the juxtaposition of anthropology and literature—which would become very popular in the last twenty years of the twentieth century—took shape in the climate of the reflexive turn. My generation came into contact with Writing Culture in the initial phase of our anthropological training. I should confess that at the time I welcomed it enthusiastically, an impression that I’m going to rectify, at least in part. In returning to this season of anthropology, one of my aims here is to analyze certain aspects of that theoretical turn that at the time were not clear (at least for me), and that temporal distance make stand out. Moreover, that “turning point” will help us to better

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understand new, alleged turns, which are routinely announced in the contemporary debate. At the end of the 1980s, the idea that one should resort to the interpretive tools of literary criticism to analyze anthropological texts and, further, make explicit use of stylistic, rhetorical, even poetical and narrative resources to write anthropology, appeared fresh and unorthodox compared to the hated “scientific” tradition. But above all it presented itself as a natural and elegant solution to the problem stated before: how to turn subjective field experience into objective knowledge? On second thought, however, it was a bizarre solution. After all, why literature?

Geertz vs. Writing Culture Geertz was the first to set out the problem in his interpretive anthropology manifesto, where he maintains that “to write” or, more exactly, “to inscribe” is the ethnographer’s defining activity. He/she “inscribes” the flow of social discourse in a form that makes it readable, thus rescuing it through a written form from its innate evanescence. In emphasizing the activity of textualization, Geertz’s purpose is undoubtedly to distance himself from positivistic approaches that understood writing as a merely communicational issue: a derivative one, all in all insignificant with respect to the acquisition of ethnographic knowledge. For Geertz, ethnographic texts do not simply convey something that already exists, wholly constituted, in the researcher’s mind: they are, rather, an opaque medium through which the hermeneutic process of understanding takes place. Hence his famous statement on ethnographies as fictions— «They are, thus, fictions; fictions, in the sense that they are “something made”, “something fashioned”—the original meaning of fictio - not that they are false, unfactual, or merely “as if” thought experiments» (Geertz 1973, p. 15). And from here follows the disputed juxtaposition of ethnographer and novelist. As we know, in order to illustrate the concept of “dense description” Geertz tells the story of Cohen, a Jewish trader from Morocco, who in 1912 became implicated in complex negotiations with Berber and French colonial authorities, over the theft of his sheep. He juxtaposes this description with the character of Madame Bovary in the eponymous novel by Gustave Flaubert: To construct actor-oriented descriptions of the involvements of a Berber chieftain, a Jewish merchant, and a French soldier with one another in

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1912 Morocco is clearly an imaginative act, not all that different from constructing similar descriptions of, say, the involvements with one another of a provincial French doctor, his silly, adulterous wife, and her feckless lover in nineteenth century France. In the latter case, the actors are represented as not having existed and the events as not having happened, while in the former they are represented as actual, or as having been so. This is a difference of no mean importance; indeed, precisely the one Madame Bovary had difficulty grasping. But the importance does not lie in the fact that her story was created while Cohen’s was only noted. The conditions of their creation, and the point of it (to say nothing of the manner and the quality) differ. But the one is as much a fiction—“a making”—as the other. (Ibid.: 15−16)

Geertz will return to the analysis of anthropological texts as literary creations fifteen years later, with Works and Lives (1988). By then, however, the Santa Fe congress, Writing Culture, had already been held and the eponymous volume, whose subtitle reads The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, had been published. With Marcus and Fischer’s Anthropology as Cultural Critique and James Clifford’s The Predicament of Culture, the volume would be in the foreground of anthropological debates for over a decade (Clifford Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986; Clifford 1986). Apparently, these scholars’ program was similar to Geertz’s: they meant to address the rhetorical-literary construction of ethnographic representation and anthropological discourse; to understand, in the words of Clifford (1986, p. 4), how «Literary processes – metaphor, figuration, narrative – affect the ways cultural phenomena are registered, from the first jotted “observations,” to the completed book, to the ways these configurations “make sense” in determined acts of reading.» (p. 4) In reality, however, there was no love lost between Geertz and the Santa Fe movement. Indeed, Geertz is not treated well in Writing Culture, especially by Vincent Crapanzano, who “deconstructs” his essay on the Balinese cockfight. Crapanzano’s primary target is Geertz’s “subtle” ethnographic strategy, in the end distancing himself from the “natives”. One of the criticisms he puts on Geertz is that «There is never an I-you relationship, a dialogue, two people next to each other reading the same text and discussing it face-to-face, but only an I-they relationship. And, as we have seen, even the I disappears - replaced by an invisible voice of authority who declares what the you-transformed-to-athey experience» (p. 74). In other words even Geertz, his hermeneutics

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notwithstanding, would employ strategies of “writing the other” that rely on a history of colonial domination and western superiority (Crapanzano had already touched on these points a few years earlier in a very harsh review of Geertz’s volume on Morocco; Crapanzano 1981). For his part, Geertz was certainly not fond of the movement. In a chapter of Works and Lives, he dwells very critically on the “reflexive” ethnographies of Paul Rabinow, Crapanzano himself and Kevin Dwyer, seen as poor solutions to “Malinowski’s dilemma”. The latter being a tension between «a mode of research that, at its limits anyway, virtually erases, or claims to, the affective distance between the observer and the observed, and a style of analysis […] that, at its limits, renders that distance, or pretends to, near absolute» (Geertz 1988, p. 83). The aforementioned ethnographers resolved this tension by way of radical reflexivity. Given that anthropological knowledge is generated by the researcher’s self in the field, they thought, fieldwork accounts in which his/her presence is not addressed cannot be considered rigorous. The researcher has to put herself/himself at the heart of ethnography—while at the same time giving a faithful account of the conversations that make up the research experience: conversations with real and distinct people, not generic “informants” who are supposed to represent a whole group. On the wave of Writing Culture, these ethnographies will be called experimental, reflexive, and dialogical/polyphonic (terms borrowed from Bakhtin’s literary criticism). As James Clifford put it, they give center stage to the construction of ethnographic authority, rather than disguising it. Geertz instead qualifies them as “confessional”: in the sense that they are saturated with the “Self” and plagued by a “diary disease” that could potentially—he claims—turn into an epidemic. Like diaries, they appeal to sincerity and total transparency: however, sincerity turns into its opposite when it is consciously staged and used as a rhetorical move. Quoting Roland Barthes, Geertz (Ibid., pp. 89−90) points out the paradox of intimate diaries composed with the purpose of publishing: in such a case the Self claiming to get naked is in fact a literary character (and therefore fictional). In pages filled with irony, Geertz conveys his irritation at the overly explicit and somewhat exhibitionist emergence of the ethnographic Self, as well as at the type of Self unveiled and placed at the center of the ethnographic scene. A Self who is angry, inflexibly moralizing, suffused with an imaginary «… of estrangement, hypocrisy, helplessness, domination, disillusion. Being There is not just practically difficult. There is

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something corrupting about it altogether» (1988, p. 97). In discussing Dwyer’s ethnography, for example, he notes: It is Dwyers view that just about all of anthropology, including, in a sort of Cretan paradox, his own, is “dishonest… pernicious and self-serving”; that it is an extension of the “Western societal project”—imperialist, intrusive, and disruptive—to “pose all the questions” and assess all the answers; that the practice of it leads, even “in the best of cases”, to “personal despair”; and that its main animus, concealed of course and mystified, is to “[shield] the Self and… distance and disarm [and thus dominate] the Other” […]. The question that arises, of course, is how anyone who believes all this can write anything at all, much less go so far as to publish it. (1988, pp. 96–97)

What exactly is Geertz decrying here? Not simply excessive autobiographical tendencies, or Dwyer’s naïve notion that it would enough to report “faithfully” the words of field interlocutors in order to honor them. There is something more. Perhaps resentment toward the militant arrogance of younger scholars who bring into the anthropological arena certain moral concerns and linguistic tics emblematic of the political culture then consolidating in American colleges. Looking at this culture, we can perhaps answer the question posed above: why was literature chosen as the dominant term of comparison in the postmodern anthropological “turn”?

Why Literature? Indeed, the Writing Culture movement could not be further from Geertz’s interpretive program. Different generations, different institutional positions: the Santa Fe group saw the oldest teacher as part of the establishment to be fought, in line with post-1968 attitudes. Geertz’s theoretical references can be traced back to the classics of antifoundationalist thinking (from pragmatism to Kuhn, from Wittgenstein to Ricoeur’s hermeneutics); Clifford, Marcus and the others were instead immersed in the intellectual fashion of the time, namely deconstructionism and so-called French Theory. Geertz was a liberal democrat, while they held radical views generally described as postmodernist. Postmodernism is however too general a label. The definition Lyotard provided in 1979 incorporated a repudiation of the Great Narratives and distrust of absolute notions of Truth, while embracing an essentially reflexive understanding of knowledge, including the scientific one.

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This was close to Rorty’s pragmatism (and Vattimo’s “weak thought”), and on the whole it was compatible with hermeneutic and interpretive approaches. But the variety of “postmodernism” that emerged in the American Academy in the 1980s was altogether different: its distrust of objective science had political rather than epistemological foundations. Knowledge depends on power, according to a simplistic reading of Foucault’s works. In this perspective, neutral efforts to achieve truth are impossible: the only options left are resistance to power or its opposite, subjugation. Anthropology is evidently an ideal field of application for this perspective. Not unlike Said’s orientalism, anthropology turns into the discursive shadow of colonialism. Following Fanon (or, rather, Sartre’s interpretation of Fanon), the charge would be of “epistemological violence” and of being, in effect, an accomplice of domination. Anthropology’s discourse would thus pursue the distancing and objectifying of others, the colonized: deconstructive analysis could reveal how the apparent innocence of tropes and styles hides strategies for constructing the Other as an inversion of the Self, a dark flip side of Civilization. The Great Narratives, therefore, do actually return. This perspective is based on a specific philosophy of history, though turned on its head with respect to the Hegelian model, whose focus is the destiny of the West. This was the breeding ground out of which Writing Culture emerged. Such theoretical shifts were also part of a profound transformation of leftist politics in the United States. While the country had taken a clear conservative turn with the Reagan presidency, radical culture folded in and entrenched itself in campuses, particularly in Humanities faculties. Here it underwent a process of radicalization in a heavily self-referential style and acquired a component that can be described as “identitarian”, a term that has very different connotations in Europe. Indeed here, in the 1980s, far-right, xenophobic groups—which presented themselves as defenders of “Western civilization” and were oriented toward cultural fundamentalism—started calling themselves “identitarian”. In the United States, however, identity politics is marked by advocacy for the rights of minority or “subordinate” groups, which are defined along “racial” or ethnic grounds, as well as gender and sexual orientation. In this guise politics no longer fixes its attention on the emancipation of the dominated classes, but rather on groups that see themselves as victims of the hegemonic majority of white, heterosexual males. The analysis of social inequalities is no longer grounded on the position of the subject within the modes of production or, more trivially, the material conditions of

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existence, but on ideological elements and “symbolic violence”. Hence the spasmodic attention paid to PC (politically correct) issues, or the conflicts over the academic “canon” of literature, dominated by the socalled DWEM (Dead White European Males); or the calls for “positive discrimination” in the recruitment of teachers, with quotas reserved for women, blacks, those who identify as gay, and so on. Abundant literature has been devoted to this trend (e.g. Harold Bloom’s discussion of the “school of resentment”, and Robert Hughes’s lectures on the “culture of complaint”; Bloom 1994; Hughes 1993), which has somehow reached Europe and has, according to many, estranged the left from the social forces that used to be its basis; in other words, from the so-called “popular masses” or subaltern classes. While these forces gravitated first toward the Thatcherian right, and later various brands of populisms, leftist values became distinctive—in Bourdieu’s sense of the expression (1979)—of smaller groups with high cultural capital (e.g. Lila 2017; Ricolfi 2017; Friedman 2019). But let us go back to the correlation between this wider phenomenon and the trends in disciplines such as anthropology. As mentioned earlier, the language that established itself through the identity politics “turn”, eventually becoming its hallmark, is that of postmodernism and French Theory. The latter is a canon of post-structuralist and antihumanist philosophers (especially French, such as Foucault, Deleuze, Lacan, Derrida, and Baudrillard) who were fiercely critical of the processes of subjectification of late capitalism and adopted (with Foucault’s exception) a radical rhetoric in Heideggerian fashion. While Geertz theorized the centrality of language in a methodological sense (understanding occurs within texts and conversations), these French theorists gave it ontological status: there is nothing outside the text. The “revolution” must therefore take place, above all, within the text. Hence the endeavor to dismantle common sense in their writing, through the extensive use of neologisms, analogical short-circuits, and cryptic formulas, which would become a distinctive feature (used indexically by their followers; see Dei (2017, pp. 14−22) for the indexical uses of Lacan’s “foreclosure” and Agamben’s “bare life”; see Carnevali 2018 for a critical examination of the concept of “[French and Italian] Theory” in philosophy). Françoise Cusset, in a very well-documented volume (2003), analyzes how the “French Theory” reached the American academy with the work of such post-structural French authority figures. A history of ideas that migrated, initially, through post-1968 avant-garde journals, and then

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through fascinating processes of adaptation, such as editorial strategies of translation and anthologization that turned the original French philosophical works into volumes with titles such as The Essential Derrida, The Foucault Reader, and Selection from the Prison Notebooks, the latter of course from an Italian philosopher, Antonio Gramsci, mistakenly thrown into the post-structuralist cauldron. Most interesting for the purposes of this discussion is Cusset’s insight that “French Theory” was conceived mainly within literature departments; not in philosophy departments (in the United States these remain mostly dominated by analytical approaches) or social sciences ones (we shall return to this point in due course). “French Theory” enabled literary criticism to connect to the great intellectual debates of the time, representing a winning weapon to thoroughly revamp a somewhat dusty image and remain relevant when other disciplines threatened to take over academia. On the one hand, French thinkers inspired a form of narrative relativism, which, “by brandishing a few operative concepts and a few names of newly translated authors […] made it possible to reread the discourses of philosophy, the novel, sociology, or history as so many narratives, embedded in a yet vaster narrative structure” (Cusset 2003, p. 78). Anthropological discourse can be included in the list. Thus, the scope of literary criticism can extend beyond the field of cultured artistic production, to serve as wide-ranging instrument of analysis of contemporary society and culture. An instrument to which nothing can ultimately escape, not even the discourse of the so-called “hard sciences”, analyzed in its rhetorical assumptions and structures. The paradoxical outcomes were well documented by the Sokal hoax in 1996 (see Sokal and Bricmont 1997; Sokal 2008). On the other hand, literature departments (French, English and comparative) could position themselves as sites where the political issues that underlie “French Theory” could gain greater visibility. The latter’s Nietzschean obsession with the unveiling of power relations behind speech served as the basis for the aforementioned identitarian preoccupations. Thus the foundations of a radicalism “more aesthetic, or apocalyptic, than political” were laid (Cusset 2003, p. 81); and the “narcissism of small differences”—so widespread in college life and in the political education of students and aspiring intellectuals—was legitimized through a “high” cultural language, challenging enough to be distinctive.

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Disciplinary Encroachments All this had important consequences on the institutional level. The stimulus coming from literature departments indeed encouraged, from an academic point of view, the creation of research centers and interdisciplinary degree programs. It was “French Theory” that made it possible to connect and overcome traditional disciplinary boundaries. The same applies to the 1980s development of Cultural Studies in the United States—a field with quite different characteristics to its 1960s British prototype. The latter was associated with the Birmingham school and the CCCS (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies) of Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall, the history of the English working class and the study of hegemony processes from a historicist and Gramscian perspective. Above all, it relied on solid qualitative and specifically ethnographic research methodologies in specific social contexts—if unusual ones for anthropology, such as private living rooms for the analysis of television audiences and groups of young people for subcultural styles. Cultural Studies in the United States are very different. In the first place, as Cusset points out, “in the United States, where social class is much less of a determining factor, a more mobile segmentation of society into ‘communities’ and ‘microgroups’ replaced the English system of polarised social classes” (Ibid., pp. 145−146). Furthermore, their predominantly literary approach (rather than historical or sociological, as in the British case) privileges the analysis of texts over social contexts. In particular, they prioritized the study of mass culture from the perspective of a critique of imperialism, racism, and sexism, in other words in the framework of the subjugation/resistance of certain subordinate identity groups. Accordingly, the analysis of the text replaced ethnographic research—a significant setback from the British line of research, which had displaced semiology precisely to further the centrality of fieldwork. Likewise, according to Cusset, it was the very centrality of fieldwork in the tradition of American anthropology to limit the penetration of “French Theory” in it. In this respect Cusset’s point of view, however, appears lacking and naive: indeed it only takes into account Geertz who, on the one hand, by imparting a “cultural” turn in the social sciences, seems to “prepare the ground for a fruitful debate with French theory”; and yet, on the other hand, he could not help but be skeptical of “generalisations without proof”, “evasive” formulas, and the French theorists’ negative attitude toward empirical research (Ibid, p. 95). Here Cusset

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makes some confusion, even tracing Geertz’s attitude to the positivist legacy of American social sciences. He forgets that Geertz’s endeavor to restore an interpretative understanding of culture in anthropological analysis and research was a radical break with the positivist tradition, but was also from the outset incompatible with the French approaches, which had displaced “culture” in favor of “power”. Above all, while delineating the resistance offered by anthropology (and sociology, in his opinion) to the “French Theory”, Cusset entirely overlooks the Writing Culture phenomenon and the truly important role it played in the 1980s– 1990s. It is in the context described so far that Writing Culture becomes possible: indeed, inevitable. It represented precisely the interface between an anthropology founded on the fieldwork tradition and a new theoretical environment prevalent within humanities departments and radical culture in the United States. How did this mediation become possible? Essentially, fieldwork remained central in the anthropological enterprise, but was reframed as a strictly subjective and personal experience, which in turn required the explicit or implicit support of literary creativity to be turned into a text (an objectified, publicly transmissible form of knowledge). Two strategies were deployed to thus remodel ethnographic research. On the one hand, the history of anthropological studies was recast so as to show the constant, albeit implicit, presence in anthropology, from its origins, of these two key elements: the existential experience of fieldwork as a form of cultural estrangement, and its “literary” rendering through various authorial postures. On the other hand, new forms of ethnographic authority were experimented, trying to make more manifest and aware the use of rhetorical, stylistic, and narrative resources. As for the first point, throughout the 1980s there were attempts to systematize what could be called a literary theory of fieldwork, in particular through the characterization in terms of “ethnographic realism” of the classic phase in the history of anthropological research and production. The Writing Culture group advanced the idea, at once fascinating and bizarre, of consistent parallelisms between the standard form of classical ethnographies (at least in the English-speaking environment) and the nineteenth-century realist novel. Fascinating since even the mere parallelism brought attention to certain features of ethnographic writing that had until then not been thematized and had remained implicit: this made it possible to investigate the narrative pact between author and reader, the strategies of construction of the ethnographic authority and the degree

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of “creativity” inherent in the “data”. For example, the analogy with realism highlights the adoption of an impersonal point of view (“the eye of God”), which conceals the narrating Self; a predominantly visualist register (in contrast to a dialogic one) that produces “reality effects” by dwelling on minute descriptions; or the “ethnographic present”, a narrative construct that results in a dehistoricization of the fieldwork setting (this far, ideas in full consistency with Geertz’s). The pretense to draw exact parallelisms with literary styles however feels forced and results in inconsistencies (as in Marcus and Cushman 1982). The much flaunted “experimental ethnographies” also appear forced, with their pretense to leave behind colonial hypocrisies, “realist” objectifications, and the distancing of the Other. The narrative, dialogical, polyphonic, even poetic formats, which should have established an ethnographic new wave, soon turned into a disappointment to their own proponents—who ceased to theorize them and to (try to) put them into practice. No doubt the literary-inspired criticism of old models had at least the effect of supplying greater liveliness to ethnographic writing; for instance, it legitimized the use of the first person, diminished the field interlocutors’ anonymization and provided more scope to individual life stories. Nevertheless it did not yield new models: on the contrary, it entailed the risk of dialogism and narrative mannerism, the “I was on the veranda on a summer evening” tone of writing, even more objectionable than old-fashioned scientistic conventions.

Narration or Theory? The combination of “lived” notions of research and literary approaches to ethnographic texts sanctioned a specific interpretation, surely a legitimate one, of anthropological work; at the same time, however, it obscured others. The image of the history of anthropology provided by Writing Culture is first of all brazenly Anglocentric. The idea of a long twentieth century dominated by the “realist monograph” model applies to British and North American academic mainstream (still, on the condition that we ignore several alternative experiences); it leaves out other traditions however, for example in continental Europe, structured around altogether different types of research, treatment, and elaboration of empirical materials. It is true that James Clifford fully acknowledges the French tradition, however he treats it as a sort of variation of the Malinowskian model, that largely conforms to its categories. In fact, he focuses on such

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figures as Maurice Leenhardt and Marcel Griaule, who are the most proximate to the research cliché of the “lonely hero in the heart of darkness” (distant and exotic settings, long stays on the field, etc.); or on the prewar Surrealist movement and personalities such as Georges Bataille, whose inextricable blend of ethnographic, artistic, and literary proclivities plays into the hands of a textual interpretation. But otherwise, the ethnology of—say—Mauss or Lévi-Strauss does not fall into category with the field analyzed by the Writing Culture movement (with the obvious exception of Tristes Tropiques, for its explicitly literary nature). Certainly The Gift and The Elementary Structures of Kinship are not examples of “armchair anthropology”: these works articulate the relationship between theory and empirical data differently from the classic ethnographic monographs, and are not liable to be analyzed in terms of literary strategies. Or rather, they very well could be, given that anything can be discovered in a text through denotative and tropological analysis. But what would the point be? The truth of the matter is that the framework and organizing principle of texts like the ones mentioned is, by no means, “literary”, metaphorical, mannerist, etc., but rather theoretical. It would be very banal to remind us of it now, had it not been meticulously concealed by deconstructive analyses. The issues tackled by the author of The Gift do not pertain to the experience of meeting the Other, but rather to the forms of exchange and the related role of “morality” within nonutilitarian models of economic rationality. The same is true for The Elementary Structures, whose organizing principle is the discovery of the generativetransformational grammar that underlies the great empirical diversity of kinship systems. It is true that in other works Lévi-Strauss poses questions about the existential and political implications of encountering the Other as well as about the West’s colonial guilt: these are however kept separate from the theoretical elaboration, which relies on a large amount of data that are not—and could not possibly be—the result of the author’s personal experience. Moreover, the same applies to works within the Anglo-American tradition. A very interesting case is that of Bateson’s Naven. In the “literary” climate of the 1980s, this work aroused renewed interest thanks to its striking peculiarities in comparison to then widely accepted ethnographic standards. It is certainly a fieldwork report, despite not being particularly concerned with making a holistic representation of the society within which research was carried out (the Iatmul of New Guinea): it prioritizes

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the Naven ritual, and retraces the wider characteristics of that culture from it—its eidos (“an expression of the standardised cognitive aspects of the individuals” and its ethos (“the corresponding expression of their standardised affective aspects”; Bateson 1936, pp. 118, 120). It is an articulate and complex work, in which descriptions of the local culture and broad epistemological and psycho-cultural theorizations are intertwined around the concept of schismogenesis. Why did Naven, which had somehow been repudiated by Bateson (in the 1958 edition he distanced himself from the volume’s structure, and would never write an ethnographic monograph again), captivate postmodern anthropologists to such an extent? The answer lies in its being viewed as a precursor to the “experimental” and “antirealist” ethnographies they theorized. As Marcus and Fischer put in what can be considered a “manual” of postmodern anthropology, Anthropology as Cultural Critique, Bateson’s Naven deals with “alternative modes of representation”, and for this reason has become “an inspirational text in the current trend of experimentation”] (Marcus & Fischer 1986, pp. 40–41). Yet Marcus himself had observed, in a 1985 article, how inaccurate this interpretation would be: to think of Naven as “experimental ethnography” meant to misread it and betray the author’s intentions. A felicitous misreading, according to Marcus (1985, p. 79): since ultimately Naven is a failed essay (Ibid., p. 66). Bateson himself had understood that the ethnographic format, at least as intended in his day, would not allow his socio-cognitivist arguments to develop coherently. Hence the wavering quality of Naven, “a long, rambling text full of unexpected turns, rebeginnings, and hedging asides. This writing project flirts with incoherence because of the epistemological obsessions of its author in trying to represent the details of an alien social reality” (Ibid., p. 66). Afterward, he would only write essays on theoretical, didacticspeculative issues. According to Marcus, “[Naven] led Bateson out of anthropology, or at least away from its central practice, the ethnographic account” (Ibid., p. 67). Epistemological obsessions: Marcus, despite his very perceptive commentary, seems unable to conceive that these “obsessions” are themselves the axis in the organization of the text, more than the very ethnographic account, more than the “representation of an alien society” or the problematization of the relationship between researcher and natives and so on. Not unlike Vincent Crapanzano who, in his aforementioned criticism of Geertz, doesn’t grasp that the author’s purpose in the essay on cockfighting in Bali is to advance an interpretation of a specific practice, not

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to take a politically correct position toward the natives (or toward his own wife). “Here, at a descriptive level, he blurs his own subjectivity - his experience of himself in those early Balinese days - with the subjectivity and the intentionality of the villagers. (His wife’s experience presents still another problem as well as something of a conceptual embarrassment: she is dismissed from this tale of men and cocks)” (Crapanzano 1986, p. 70). The reference here is to Geertz’s ephemeral mention of his wife, Hildred, in the narrative of the events that lead to him being accepted by the locals (the two of them were attending a cockfight with other Balinese and the whole party fled together when the police raided the scene). She is not mentioned again in the rest of the essay. Very well, but why should he have written more about her, save for a misguided feminist dogmatism? (Crapanzano plays mischievously on the double meaning of the English word “cock”). The point is that Geertz’s objective is to offer an interpretation of that practice as “deep play”, relating it to—among other things—the analysis of western practices of sport and gambling. It is not a narrative or “descriptive” task, but rather a theoretical one. It is thus unclear why he should have written more about his wife, or his sexual life, his sense of disorientation and nostalgia, and about other personal circumstances that seem of such great importance to a literary-experiential anthropology.

“Field”, Empirical Research, and Other Anthropologies Furthermore, it becomes clear that—for the Writing Culture movement—continental lines of research that document cultural differences within European countries, rather than distant and “alien” places, fall outside the scope of anthropology. Indeed, the postmodern, rhetoricalpolitical “turn” has never encompassed folklore studies. It could be because in the United States, unlike Europe, they are totally separated from anthropology in academia. Or perhaps because their discourse on “tradition”—on balance quite conservative—was viewed with suspicion from a multiculturalist and postcolonial perspective. Yet, in countries such as France and Italy, Gramscian approaches to popular culture were at the forefront of the politically engaged attitude of postwar social science— with paradigms of research closely involved in the emancipation of the subaltern classes. The only one in the United States to notice the potential significance of this line of inquiry was George E. Saunders, in a

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1993 article on Ernesto De Martino, published in the American Anthropologist. In this article, the Italian anthropologist and philosopher is described as a precursor of the political-rhetorical turn (Saunders 1993). In those same years Pietro Clemente (1991) introduced the idea that the “turn” in the anthropological mainstream could confer new visibility and legitimacy upon well-established methodologies and prerogatives within European ethnological and folklore research: in particular, those related to oral sources, to the urgency of “giving voice” to the lower classes and recording their forms of life and consciousness, without filtering them through the ethnographer’s “experience”. After all, dialogism and polyphony—yet again literary terms flaunted by Clifford and colleagues as watchwords of experimental ethnography—are exactly that. Actually, the postmodern framework does not accommodate any of this. Partly because the “subordinate classes” of European folklore studies do not coincide with the “subordinate subjects” posited by American radical theorists and “French Theory” proponents: to them, class difference is of less account than the purported radical alterity embodied by ethnic and sexual minorities. But I believe that, above all, European folklore and ethnological research practices were incompatible with the then dominant fieldwork model, centered on rendering into (literary) text the ethnographer’s “experience”. In European popular culture studies, the researcher is usually from within the culture studied (although classically approached from the perspective of class difference); he/she does not uproot him/herself to participate immersively in an “alien” setting, nor is he/she caught up in the dialectic between Being There and Being Here; the researcher comes and goes according to convenience, so to speak. His/her subjective experience of estrangement is not at thecenter, nor is the relationship with the Other burdened with colonial guilt (although awareness of this is sometimes very accentuated, as in De Martino): what matters most is the production of knowledge (or, we could say provocatively, “data”, blowing the dust off a term that has been stigmatized by the criticism of positivism). From the Writing Culture group’s perspective, all this is not even “real” anthropology. The rhetorical-political “turn” put forward new modes of writing without calling into question the paradigm of fieldwork; on the contrary, it absolutized it. From being one of many research methodologies available, it became the essence of lived experience, to be reworked through literary strategies; not a methodology, but a form of knowledge that is accomplished in itself. As Kevin Dwyer put it in

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Moroccan Dialogues, the problem of anthropology is “to make the experience concrete, to turn it into a text and make it accessible to people who had not participated in it” (Dwyer 1982, p. xviii). For Dwyer, the entire history of the discipline has been based on “contemplative” attitudes, aimed at distancing the Other and “neutralizing” the SelfOther relationship; an attitude, in turn, related to the Western project of world domination (Ibid., p. 270). The only way out of this politicalepistemological trap would be to avoid setting the goals of “observing external events”, “discovering hidden phenomena”, “observing scientific facts”; but to aim instead at “making one’s vulnerability central”, to show “the tie between an Other that is created as a relation to Self, and a Self that emerges in its encounter with the Other” (Ibid., p. 272). We are here very far from the poetics of what Clifford sometimes describes as kaleidoscopic, fragmented, “inauthentic” ethnography, and which led Clemente to hope for the recovering of techniques of documentary “collection”, patient and by no means “heroic”, hallmarks of the continental folkloric and ethnological tradition. Dwyer’s statements, while purporting to subvert classical anthropology, reaffirm, and actually enhance its central premise, the integral authenticity of the ethnographer’s estranging experience. Today, the latter brings with him/her the critical self-awareness of the West, and no longer a progressive project of civilization; his/her awareness of being inexorably immersed in literature, rather than the presumption of doing science. But he/she remains “the lone stranger in the hearth of darkness” (Salzman 1993). To conclude: I have tried to suggest how the juxtaposition of anthropology and literature hinged on attempts to accommodate the first to a new intellectual and academic environment, rather than being an intrinsic, reflexive resolution within the discipline. The environment in question was centered on literary studies and departments, around which gravitated a constellation of social and intellectual phenomena such as the “French Theory” movement, identity-politics activism, the culture of political correctness and postcolonial posturing. I should point out that this is a mere proposal that might be further developed: a full demonstration would have entailed extensive philological analysis, and the delineation of the education, intellectual, and academic careers of the protagonists of the rhetorical-political turn. I don’t have the space and the competence, let alone the interest, to carry out such an analysis here. A further clarification needs to be made: I hope I have not given the impression, in highlighting certain ideological constraints of the Writing Culture

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movement, of underestimating its importance. Its ideas had enormous influence during the 1980s and 1990s; I also believe (especially with reference to the work of James Clifford) that these ideas substantially improved anthropology’s epistemological awareness. Yet it is obvious to me that the rhetorical-political turn, starting from the “reflexive” and hermeneutic foundations already set by the interpretive perspective, has led the discipline toward very distant shores, i.e. the shores of “critical” and postcolonial thought, fed by neo-Marxist elaborations and by post-structural analyses of subjectivation and biopower. Master Narratives and Theories of suspicion, which were supposed to be liquidated by hermeneutics, are thus back under a different guise. The “epistemological obsessions” of interpretive anthropology are therefore replaced by “political” ones, which in essence aim at doing away with the very concept of culture, at the benefit of “power” (understood in Marxist, Foucauldian, and Nietszchian terms). Hence the recent inception of additional “turns”, such as the so-called ontological one, which is above all an assault on epistemology as the basis of anthropological knowledge. “All I know is that we need richer ontologies, and it is high time to put epistemological questions to rest”, writes Eduardo Viveiros De Castro (2012, p. 4153), the true prophet of the ontological turn. Hence urging us to enter the utmost stage of anti-colonial self-awareness: by recognizing that the differences experienced in the field are not the result of different representations of the world, but of ontologically incommensurable worlds. After all, hasn’t entering into another world always been the secret dream of every anthropologist? Attention to the relationship between anthropology and literature has faded over time (leaving behind, as a positive side effect, an interesting line of anthropological analyses of literary texts). “Experimental ethnographies”, as already pointed out, are no longer fashionable. But that intellectual season helped to establish the myth of fieldwork as an ethereal, subjective experience, a radical witnessing of participation, Einfühlung, political complaint, and anti-hegemonic activism. This view of research, perhaps, still accommodates a part or a single aspect of ethnographic work. It does not however account for a wide range of varieties of empirical research in the field, which does not take place in “other” worlds but in “ours”, and is no longer clearly split into a Being there and a Being here. Modes of research that entail various types of conversation, documentation, data “collection”, as well as of engagement, and involvement

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of the researcher in the context studied. The fact that “field”, in anthropology, remains the term used to indicate empirical research tout court testifies the persistence of the myth of fieldwork. Even though there is no tent to pitch, no radical otherness to comprehend (but rather excessive familiarity toward which we have to exercise an epoché); even though the problem is neither one of “showing the Other and the Self built in their mutual relationships”, nor of mobilizing a sense of colonial or class guilt (today’s ethnographers often occupy a status of social and economic subordination toward the contexts and subjects of analysis). I therefore believe in the need for alternative ways of delineating anthropological research, ways that result from a broader comparison among traditions of documentary and qualitative research, certainly still prioritizing what I think to be the essential core of ethnography: an endeavor to cautiously and patiently punctuate the fine grain of social relations, that which generally escapes grand models and the surface of official and institutional self-representations.

References Bateson, G. (1936). Naven. A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe drawn from Three Points of View. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bloom, H. (1994). The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Age. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company. Bourdieu, P. (1979). La distinction. Critique sociale du jugement. Editions de Minuit. Carnevali, B. (2018). Contro la Theory. Una provocazione. Studi Culturali, XV (1), 75–80. Clemente, P. (1991). Oltre Geertz. Scrittura e documentazione nell’esperienza demologica. L’uomo. Società tradizione sviluppo, 4(1), 57–69. Clifford, J. (1986). Introduction: Partial Truths. In J. Clifford & G. E. Marcus (Eds.), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (pp. 1–26). Berkeley: University of California Press. Crapanzano, V. (1981). Review of C. Geertz, H. Geertz & L. Rosen, Meaning and Order in Moroccan Society: Three Essays in Cultural Analysis. Economic Development and Cultural Change, 29(4), 849–860. Crapanzano, V. (1986). The Hermes Dilemma: The Masking of Subversion in Ethnographic Description. In J. Clifford & G. E. Marcus (eds.), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (pp. 51–76). Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Cusset, F. (2003). French Theory. Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Cie et les mutations de la vie intellectuelle aux Etats-Unis. Paris: La Decouverte. Dei, F. (2017). Di Stato si muore? Per una critica dell’antropologia critica. In F. Dei & C. Di Pasquale (Eds.), Stato, violenza, libertà. La «critica del potere» e l’antropologia contemporanea (pp. 9–18). Roma: Donzelli. Dwyer, K. (1982). Moroccan Dialogues: Anthropology in Question. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press. Friedman, J. (2019). PC Worlds. Political Correctness and Rising Elites at the End of Hegemony. New York: Berghahn Books. Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Geertz, C. (1988). Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hughes, R. (1993). The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America. New York: Oxford University Press. Lila, M. (2017). The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics. New York: Harper and Collins. Marcus, G. E. (1985). A Timely Rereading of Naven: Gregory Bateson as Oracular Essayist. Representations, 12(Autumn), 66–82. Marcus, G. E., & Cushman, D. (1982). Ethnographies as Texts. Annual Review of Anthropology, 11, 25–69. Marcus, G. E., & Fischer, M. M. J. (1986). Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (1958). Method in Social Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ricolfi, L. (2017). Sinistra e popolo. Il conflitto politico nell’era dei populismi. Milano: Longanesi. Salzman, P. C. (1993). The Lone Stranger in the Heart of Darkness. In R. Borowski (Ed.), Assessing Cultural Anthropology (pp. 29–38). New York, NY: McGrow Hill. Saunders, G. R. (1993). Critical Ethnocentrism and the Ethnology of Ernesto De Martino. American Anthropologist, 95(4), 875–893. Sokal, A. (2008). Beyond the Hoax. Science, Philosophy and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sokal, A., & Bricmont, J. (1997). Impostures Intellectueles. Paris: Odile Jacob. Viveiros De Castro, E. (2012). Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazzonia and Elsewhere: Four Lectures Given in the Department of Social Antropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University.

Author Index

A Abu-Lughod, Lila, 16, 188, 371, 388 Agamben, Giorgio, 403 Agar, Michael, 246 Althabe, Gérard, 9, 132, 148–150 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 254 Appaduraj, Arjun, 346, 358, 365 Asad, Talal, 182, 184, 272, 342 B Balandier, George, 98, 165, 188, 380 Banfield, Edward, 193 Barnouw, Dogmar, 246, 256 Barthes, Roland, 240, 251, 400 Bastide, Roger, 188 Bataille, Georges, 408 Bateson, Gregory, 84, 85, 236, 243, 247, 250, 408, 409 Baudelaire, Charles, 131 Baudrillard, Paul, 403 Benadusi, Mara, 119, 122, 294 Benedict, Ruth, 39, 342, 344 Berger, John, 234, 253, 255, 257 Blok, Anton, 209, 211, 221

Bloom, Harold, 403 Boas, Franz, 36–40, 63, 115, 183, 198, 342, 363 Boggio, Maricla, 250, 257 Borofsky, Robert, 197 Bourdieu, Pierre, 8, 9, 11, 129–147, 149, 150, 152–154, 237, 239–242, 244, 245, 249, 254, 255, 334, 362, 385 Bourgois, Philippe, 186 Bruner, Jerome, 199, 265, 348 C Caione, Patrizia, 104 Calame-Griaule, Genevieve, 87, 91 Capello, Carlo, 295–298 Carnevali, Barbara, 403 Carpitella, Diego, 103, 111 Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 240 Cavarero, Adriana, 375 Cerulli, Ernesta, 378, 379 Cézanne, Paul, 237 Chastel, André, 237 Cingolani, Pietro, 295–298, 302

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. Matera and A. Biscaldi (eds.), Ethnography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51720-5

417

418

AUTHOR INDEX

Cirese, Alberto M., 74, 184, 323, 335, 386 Clemente, Pietro, 335, 383, 411 Clifford, James, 15, 83, 88, 91, 92, 96, 98, 185, 189, 208, 245, 256, 277, 278, 298, 333, 334, 341, 399, 400, 407, 413 Cohen, Marcel, 85, 380, 398, 399 Colajanni, Antonino, 77, 172, 174 Comba, Letizia, 26, 103, 120 Crapanzano, Vincent, 90, 92, 182, 198, 200, 224, 273, 399, 400, 409, 410 Crenshaw, Kimberlé, 383 Cressey, Paul G., 326 Croce, Benedetto, 113, 389 Csordas, Thomas, 244, 246, 247, 279, 280, 286 Curtis, Edward Sheriff, 232 Cushing, Frank Hamilton, 5, 29, 30, 32–34, 39, 40 Cushman, Dick, 208, 345 Cusset, Françoise, 403–406 Cutrufelli, Maria Rosa, 380, 381 D Dal Lago, Alessandro, 186, 328 Das, Veena, 371 Debenedetti, Giacomo, 191 De Biasi, Rocco, 328 De Castro, Eduardo Viveiros, 360, 413 de Gérando, Joseph-Marie, 232 Dei, Fabio, 17, 217, 323, 335, 403 Deleuze, Gilles, 403 de Martino, Ernesto, 7, 103, 104, 106–122, 184, 187, 190–194, 199, 335, 376, 384, 385, 387, 389, 411 de Palma, Martino, 111 de Palma, Vittoria, 103, 111, 115, 121, 384

Derrida, Jacques, 403 de Sardan, Olivier, 213, 217, 282, 285, 332, 362 Dicks, Bella, 286, 287 di Cori, Paola, 372, 380 Douglas, Mary, 96, 98 Ducret, André, 239, 241, 255 Du Ponceau, Peter S., 24 Duranti, Alessandro, 195 Durkheim, Emile, 39, 56, 60, 63, 64, 138 Dwyer, Kevin, 90, 92, 268, 400, 401, 411, 412

E Eribon, Didier, 197 Evans-Pritchard, Edward, 3, 16, 71–73, 161, 183, 268, 344, 371, 380

F Fabian, Johannes, 187, 243, 245, 255, 273, 361 Fabietti, Ugo, 4, 17, 22, 83, 92, 172, 256, 271, 285, 294, 302, 303, 305, 333, 386 Faeta, Francesco, 11, 12, 231, 233, 250, 257, 323, 335 Faubion, James, 341, 346, 353, 357, 360, 361, 363 Ferguson, James, 187, 246, 256, 294, 302 Ferrero, Laura, 296, 297, 300, 304, 305 Firth, Raymond, 22, 70, 181, 212 Flaubert, Gustave, 398 Fortes, Meyer, 26, 72, 162, 183 Foucault, Michel, 211, 332, 351, 352, 360, 362, 363, 402, 403 Frazer, James, 22, 313

AUTHOR INDEX

G Gallatin, Albert, 25 Gallini, Clara, 104, 107, 108, 115, 184, 382–384 Garufi, Bianca, 110 Geertz, Clifford, 5, 10, 16, 83, 130, 182, 187, 199, 201, 208, 209, 211, 279, 337, 343, 344, 351, 354, 361, 364, 372, 396, 398–401, 403, 405–407, 409, 410 Gibson, James, 247 Gluckman, Max, 9, 22, 159–169, 171, 174, 175, 189, 380 Goodall, Jane, 287 Graeber, David, 359 Gramsci, Antonio, 10, 103, 109, 117, 118, 190–194, 199 Griaule, Marcel, 6, 7, 16, 83, 85–89, 91–94, 96–98, 324, 371, 381, 388, 408 Gupta, Akhil, 187, 212, 213, 216, 246, 256, 294, 302

H Habermas, Junger, 140 Haddon, Alfred C., 22, 29, 52, 54, 55, 68, 235 Hall, Stuart, 405 Hannerz, Ulf, 4, 82, 187, 199–201, 293–295, 300–303, 323–326, 336 Harney, Nicholas, 305 Hastrup, Kirsten, 245, 256, 272, 301 Hauschild, Thomas, 187 Heidegger, Martin, 247 Hennis, Wilhelm, 351, 352 Héritier, Françoise, 371, 386

419

Hertz, Robert, 39 Hervik, Peter, 245, 256 Herzfeld, Michael, 221, 233, 234, 254 Hoebel, Adamson, 198 Hoernlé, Agnes Winifred, 161 Hoggart, Richard, 405 Howes, David, 282, 285 Hughes, Robert, 403 Hurston, Zora Neale, 183 Husserl, Edmund, 154, 236 Hymes, Dell, 90, 184, 342 I Ingold, Tim, 17, 74, 200, 244, 246– 248, 255, 257, 282, 329–331, 334, 337, 358, 364 J Jackson, Michael, 279, 282, 284, 285 Jaeger, Werner, 346 Jamin, Jean, 93 Jervis, Giovanni, 103, 120 K Kaberry, Phyllis, 371 Kapferer, Bruce, 160, 164 Kracauer, Siegfried, 246 Kravagna, Christian, 243 Kroeber, Alfred, 195, 198 Kuhn, Thomas, 360, 401 Kuper, Adam, 22, 52, 55–57, 60, 61, 63, 70, 72, 74, 75, 77, 174 L Lacan, Jacques, 403

420

AUTHOR INDEX

Lamphere, Louise, 16, 371, 374 Lanternari, Vittorio, 10, 121, 187, 194–196, 199, 202, 380 Leach, Edmund, 52, 68, 72, 188 Lecca, Franco, 250, 257 Leenhardt, Maurice, 324, 408 Lefort, Claude, 237 Leiris, Michel, 86, 134 Lévi-Bruhl, Lucien, 89 Levi, Carlo, 193 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 5, 16, 39, 40, 77, 89, 110, 111, 141, 197, 199, 232, 238, 371, 408 Loria, Lamberto, 323 Lowie, Robert, 39, 69, 325 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 401 M Mach, Ernst, 349 Macmillan, William Miller, 161 Mair, Lucy, 380 Malighetti, Roberto, 4, 54–56, 76, 319, 334 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 5, 8, 14, 15, 22, 51–53, 55, 60, 63, 69, 71, 73, 74, 84–86, 88, 164, 165, 181, 182, 193, 245, 250, 313–317, 319–322, 331, 342, 344, 347, 371, 396, 400 Man, E.H., 53 Marano, Francesco, 244, 254, 256 Marcus, George, 15, 83, 121, 142, 153, 182, 208, 245, 277, 293– 295, 298, 299, 302, 305, 341, 345–350, 353–358, 360–364, 399, 401, 409 Marcuzzo, Maria Cristina, 374 Marett, Robert Ranulph, 161 Marx, Karx, 161, 200 Matera, Anna, 192, 193 Mathieu, Nicole-Claude, 16, 371, 373, 377

Mauss, Marcel, 5, 6, 39, 85, 89, 251, 324, 408 Mead, Margaret, 183, 371, 377, 386 Megill, Allan, 246, 256 Meillassoux, Claude, 380 Mercier, Paul, 22, 97 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 11, 236–239, 244–247, 249, 254, 255 Merton, Samuel G., 25 Mingozzi, Gianfranco, 104 Mitchell, James Clyde, 160, 161, 165, 167–175 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 380 Molinari, Angela, 54–56, 76, 319, 334 Mooney, James, 5, 29, 34–36, 40 Moore, Henrietta, 16, 371, 373 Moore, Sally Falk, 171, 173, 187 Morgan, Lewis Henry, 26–28, 30, 39, 40, 62, 65 Murdock, George, 70

N Nader, Laura, 184, 363, 386 Nordstrom, Carolyn, 207, 209, 210 Notarangelo, Domenico, 296, 297

O Okely, Judith, 282, 285–287 Olwig, Karen Fog, 301, 302 Ong, Walter, 233, 361

P Palumbo, Berardino, 105, 106, 116–119, 122, 211, 323, 335, 386 Papa, Cristina, 376–379, 382, 386, 387 Park, Robert Ezra, 325, 326, 328 Paulme, Denise, 16, 371, 381

AUTHOR INDEX

Pavanello, Mariano, 22, 106, 108, 116, 119, 121, 333 Pettazzoni, Raffaele, 193 Piasere, Leonardo, 241, 244, 304 Pickering, John, 24 Pink, Sarah, 286, 287, 365 Pizza, Gianni, 7, 104, 109, 113, 122, 190, 191 Popper, Karl, 322 Powell, John Wesley, 28–30, 34, 36 Price, Richard, 184, 185 R Rabinow, Paul, 90, 92, 246, 277, 346, 350, 352, 354, 357, 359, 400 Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred Reginald, 5, 6, 51–73, 76, 77, 161, 193, 396 Rapp Reiter, Rayna, 371, 374 Ravenda, Andrea F., 119, 120 Remotti, Francesco, 26, 329, 337, 386, 387 Rice, Tom, 287 Richards, Audrey, 98, 371, 380 Ricoeur, Paul, 401 Rivers, Julian Pitt, 347 Rivers, William, 235 Rorty, Richard, 361, 402 Rosaldo, Michelle S., 16, 371 Rossi, Annabella, 103, 120, 384 Rossi-Doria, Anna, 374 Rubin, Gayle, 16, 371, 380 S Said, Edward, 186 Salih, Ruba, 296 Sanjek, Roger, 245, 256, 278 Sarasini, Bia, 375, 376, 387 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 236, 239, 402 Satriani, Luigi Lombardi, 39, 191, 211, 257, 376 Saunders, George E., 410

421

Saviano, Roberto, 212 Sayad, Abdelmalek, 295, 297 Schapera, Isaac, 161, 164, 380 Schepher-Huges, Nancy, 185 Schirripa, Pino, 121, 196, 198, 202 Schluchter, Wolfgang, 351, 352 Schneider, Jane, 214 Schneider, Peter, 214 Schoolcraft, Henry R., 25, 34 Scotellaro, Rocco, 115, 193 Signorelli, Amalia, 22, 103, 114–116, 120, 188, 194, 213, 372, 376, 384, 385 Simon, Herbert, 352, 358 Smart, Alan, 215, 216 Sobrero, Alberto, 173 Sokal, Alan, 404 Speck, Frank, 84 Sperber, Dan, 82, 104 Spinoza, Baruch, 143, 146 Squier, Ephraim George, 25 Stifani, Luigi, 104 Stocking, George W., 22, 36, 52, 54, 55, 57, 59, 69–71, 77, 245, 256, 323 Stoller, Paul, 279, 282, 284, 286, 288, 300 Strathern, Marilyn, 16, 363, 371, 372, 388

T Tabet, Paola, 375 Taussig, Michael, 118 Tedlock, Barbara, 12, 208, 263, 266, 268, 269, 274, 318 Thomas, William Isaac, 325 Turner, Aaron, 279, 281 Turner, Victor, 160, 167 Tylor, Edward Burnett, 354

422

AUTHOR INDEX

V Van Gennep, Arnold, 324 van Velsen, Jaap, 160, 166 Vattimo, Gianni, 402 Vietti, Francesco, 295–298 von Humboldt, Alexander, 25 von Humboldt, Wilhelm, 25 von Uexküll, Jakob J., 247 W Wacquant, Loic, 133, 134, 140, 142, 153, 282, 283 Wax, Murray L., 319, 320, 332, 334 Weber, Max, 2, 15, 341, 351, 352, 360, 361, 363

White, Hayden, 343 White, Leslie, 39 Wikan, Unni, 273, 282 Wilkin, Anthony, 245 Williams, Raymond, 343 Wilson, Godfrey, 162, 165 Wilson, M., 165 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 236, 361, 401 Worsely, Peter, 183, 190, 191, 193, 196

Z Zorbaugh, Harvey Warren, 325, 327

Subject Index

A Abstraction, 32, 69, 72, 141, 166, 182, 235, 255, 284, 376 expedient , 68 inexpedient , 68 American anthropology, 71, 187, 324, 405 American Ethnological Society (A.E.S.), 25 American Philosophical Society (A.P.S.), 24 Andamanese, 52, 54, 65–67, 77 Anthropological deconstructionism, 105 texts, 82, 99, 398, 399 theory, 3, 10, 224, 343, 351, 359 Anthropological knowledge, 2, 4, 5, 16, 28, 36, 39, 40, 82, 83, 90, 94, 99, 186, 198, 199, 201, 210, 224, 236, 271, 322, 337, 343, 396, 400, 413 production of, 7, 10, 22, 186, 284 specificity of, 17

Anthropologist, 1–4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 14–17, 21, 32, 36, 63, 68, 70, 71, 73–75, 81–83, 87, 91–93, 96, 97, 99, 103–105, 107, 108, 114, 116, 118, 122, 133, 152, 160–162, 166, 174, 183–187, 192, 194, 196, 200, 201, 208–210, 213, 215, 218, 223, 224, 232–234, 244, 257, 263, 268–274, 280, 281, 284, 288, 294, 314, 319, 320, 324, 325, 328, 331, 334, 336, 337, 346–352, 354–356, 358, 363, 365, 372, 375–380, 382, 385, 388, 389, 397, 409, 413 Anthropology analogical, 13, 269, 270 and colonialism, 78, 182, 402 and literature, 9, 17, 211, 218, 256, 397, 412, 413 as a global discipline, 324 as engaged knowledge, 183 dialogical, 7, 13, 90, 92, 263, 270–272, 274

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. Matera and A. Biscaldi (eds.), Ethnography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51720-5

423

424

SUBJECT INDEX

Haddon’s conception of, 55 linguistic, 195 of disciplinary memory, 22 of global processes, 4 of public culture, 345 of the contemporary, 16, 346, 371 “sociologisation” perspective of, 71 strength of, 17, 99 urban, 295, 324, 325, 327 Arapaho, 34 Auctores vs lectores , 130 B Balinese, 130, 348, 361, 399, 410 Bemba, 169, 171–173, 175 Body, 3, 5, 13, 22, 67, 109, 169, 186, 235, 236, 238, 240, 244–249, 254, 280, 283, 284, 286, 397 as a subject of knowledge, 279 Bureau of Indian Affairs , 25 C Cambridge Anthropological Expedition, 54 Camelot project, 342 Camorra, 220 Cargo cults, 193, 196 Cheyenne, 34 Circular ethnographic space, 355 Classificatory system, 26, 32, 65 Clientelism, 211, 213 Colonialism, 78, 86, 89, 165, 174, 181, 381 Common sense, 137, 207, 219, 235, 315, 351, 403 Comparative method, 6, 39, 54, 75 Correspondence, 63, 67, 77, 133, 331 Corroboree, 59 Corruption, 11, 208–219, 223, 224 Cultural hegemony, 381 Cultural relativism, 38, 187

Cultural studies, 343, 405 Culture production of, 13, 202 representation of, 98 syncretic, 181 D Dakar-Djibuti Ethnological Mission, 85 Data collection, 1, 13, 17, 55, 82, 278, 286, 395, 413 Demoethnoanthropology, 323 Demologia, 376, 383, 386 Dense description, 398 Design, 15, 341, 345, 346, 348, 349, 355–359, 364 Dialogical anthropology, 7, 13, 90, 92, 263, 270–272, 274 Dogon, 83, 86–89, 91, 92, 96–98, 324 Dominating vs dominated, 140, 147, 149 Doxing/epistemic, 142 E Embodiment, 279, 280, 282, 285 paradigm of, 13, 140, 279, 280, 288 Empathy, 152, 182, 273 Emplacement , 244 Enaction, 244 Entanglement, 244 Ethnographer, 3, 7, 12, 13, 17, 29, 61, 69, 82–84, 86, 89, 90, 92, 93, 95, 97–99, 103, 106, 110, 111, 115, 116, 140, 154, 155, 166, 185, 189, 198, 199, 201, 209, 211, 214, 224, 233–235, 247–249, 256, 268, 278–283, 285, 286, 289, 301, 305, 316, 317, 328, 333, 346, 356, 361,

SUBJECT INDEX

364, 397, 398, 400, 411, 412, 414 Ethnographic approaches, 3, 11, 105, 208, 407 authoritativeness, 211 documentation, 6, 57, 60, 61, 64 encounter, 12, 27, 89, 98, 144, 194, 209, 210, 214, 218, 222–224, 245, 268, 286, 347, 396, 397 epistemology, 14, 199 equipe, 7, 86, 111 evidence, 185 experience, 12, 22, 82, 88, 105, 154, 192, 194, 243, 245, 251, 282–284, 305, 318, 334, 343, 360, 411 fashion, 17 fiction, 88, 398 field, 4, 8, 11, 14, 52, 60, 69, 99, 104, 105, 108, 197, 199, 200, 208, 222, 224, 232, 243, 245, 252, 278, 279, 281, 294, 296, 299, 305, 344, 354, 358, 360, 373, 379, 383, 408, 414 frame, 3, 4, 12 gaze, 11, 12, 232–235, 239, 243–245, 254, 256, 294, 302 imagination, 198, 344, 347 interactions, 93, 139, 199, 236, 284, 288 method, 2, 3, 9, 31, 54, 74, 88, 108, 115, 152, 182, 263, 288, 318, 328, 347, 379 monograph, 6, 92, 298, 408, 409 paradigm, 11, 364 practice, 1, 7–10, 14, 82, 105, 116, 120, 131, 132, 138, 200, 210, 217, 231, 239, 241, 243–246, 248–250, 269, 272, 279, 288, 293, 358

425

present, 4, 5, 11, 13, 35, 61, 297, 301, 342, 346, 359, 397, 407 realism, 35, 84, 246, 345, 406 research, 2, 4, 7, 25, 30, 32, 34, 37, 82, 89, 90, 92, 93, 98, 106, 114, 122, 139, 167, 181, 185, 200, 209, 222, 224, 271, 277, 283, 287, 293, 296, 301, 349, 381, 405, 406 style, 89, 92 team, 109, 120 theory, 1, 111, 115, 244 tradition, 22, 84, 85, 105, 189, 248 writing, 1, 13, 84, 209, 225, 277, 297, 344, 345, 406, 407 Ethnography and film, 248, 251, 252 and history, 113, 115 and photography, 12, 232, 251, 252 and political sensitivity, 10, 190 applied, 36, 41 archaeology of, 22 as judiciary inquiry, 6 as self-reflexive practice, 277 conscious, 41, 84, 105 de Martino’s theory of ethnography, 109–111 dialogical, 6, 91, 144, 279, 407 documentary, 5, 6 essential core of, 17, 414 exegetical, 6 gender, 16, 371, 372, 382, 383, 386, 402 Gluckman’s idea of, 9 Griaule’s idea of, 6 hermeneutic vision of, 208 history of, 5, 22 in a colonial context, 134 in the United States, 22, 23 metropolitan, 110

426

SUBJECT INDEX

multi-sited, 14, 210, 294, 296, 300–302, 305 of public memory, 217 origins of, 5 outside anthropology, 2, 10 positivist, 110 salvage, 89, 97 sensorial, 11, 14, 288 theoretical depth of, 9 theoretically oriented, 3, 194 uses and abuses of, 15 visual, 11, 12, 232, 234, 243, 244, 248, 251, 252 Ethnomethodology, 2 Ethnomusicology, 112 Ethnopaleography, 267 European anthropology, 187 Evolutionism, 174 Existentialism, 238 Experience, 3, 5, 13, 14, 16, 24, 28, 30, 36, 39, 40, 83, 93, 99, 105, 115, 119, 137, 139, 182, 192, 199, 208, 211, 213, 225, 232, 235, 236, 238, 245, 247, 252, 268, 279, 281, 283, 284, 286–288, 294, 296, 297, 299, 300, 302, 304, 313, 319, 324, 344, 355, 380, 382, 385, 395–398, 406–408, 410, 411, 413 Extended case analysis, 174 F Field, 3, 5, 9–11, 14, 26, 27, 30, 32, 35, 38, 52, 54, 55, 75, 82, 84, 88, 91, 112, 115, 119, 133, 155, 165, 192, 193, 199, 200, 208, 213, 217, 221–223, 225, 239, 243, 263, 269–273, 279, 283–285, 322, 334, 353, 354, 356, 376, 378, 400, 402, 413 as a “discursive arena”, 17, 93

as disorienting site, 40 Fieldnotes, 22, 245, 287, 330 Fieldwork aims of, 6 as transformative spiral, 5 different moments of, 32 mystique of, 16 preparation of, 113 Focalizzazione della comprensione (focus of understanding), 109 Folklore, as a Culture of contestation, 191, 387 Founders of discursiveness, 83 Framework theoretical, 4, 55, 58, 75, 87, 148, 154, 225, 236, 279 French ethnographic tradition, 7 French Theory, 401, 403–406, 411, 412 Functionalism, 160, 174, 359, 395

G Genealogic method, 56 Genere, 372, 373 Ghost Dance (GD), 34, 35 Guanxi, 216

H Habitus, 8, 74, 133, 217, 239, 282, 283 Historical-ethnographic method, 7 Historical present, 105 History, 4, 6, 9, 14, 53, 77, 131, 161, 194, 198, 232, 267, 303, 343, 363, 371, 404 discovery of, 10

I Illusion of immediacy, 8, 153 Indigenous knowledge, 37

SUBJECT INDEX

Informant, 12, 27, 38, 86, 87, 89, 93, 94, 214, 270, 272, 303, 304, 372, 400 choice of the, 92, 93, 98 Interdisciplinarity, 75, 107–109, 119, 122 Intersectionality, 383 Inuit, 36–38 Italian anthropological tradition, 2 cultural history, 191 ethnographic style, 7, 193

K Kalela dance, 167–170, 172, 175, 188 Kariera, 59, 76, 77 Kinship, 26, 55, 56, 60, 62, 63, 70, 76, 77, 160, 215, 219, 241, 408 Knowledge, 2, 3, 14, 22, 24, 27, 41, 55, 59, 75, 84, 86, 94, 98, 119, 137, 152, 154, 184, 218, 219, 238, 248, 273, 282, 284, 287, 319, 330, 332, 335, 352, 356, 361, 364, 377 lateral, 349, 353 visual quality of, 240 Kula, 314, 335 Kuranko initiation, 284

L Language, 28, 30, 33, 53, 66, 84, 93, 98, 113, 139, 140, 145, 147, 154, 155, 168, 170, 174, 189, 196, 202, 212, 213, 251, 289, 317, 321, 336, 347, 360, 375, 380, 385, 403 Lebensführung, 341, 351, 352 Lozi, 171

M Mafias network, 210–213, 220–222

427

Mardudhunera, 59, 76 Marriage classes, 60 Mbeni dance, 169, 172, 175 Methodological idiosyncrasy, 30 imperatives, 30 questions, 31, 207, 374 Migration, 14, 165, 294–296, 327, 388 as complex and multidimensional process, 14, 297 culture of, 297 Missionary knowledge, 10, 197 Mobility, 296, 298, 300 Molecular/molecularity, 109 Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadérò, 85 N National Anti-Mafia Commission, 220 Ndrangheta, 220, 222 Ndrine, 221, 222 Negritude movement, 89 Network analysis, 166, 173, 174 Ngaluma, 59 Ngoni, 171, 173 Nuer, 72, 96 Nzema, 105 O Önges, 53 Oral narrative, 263–265, 267 P Paradigm dialogical, 27, 41 interlocutory, 27 interpretive, 11 predative, 25, 27, 41 proto-ethnographic, 25, 41 visualist, 232, 234, 245, 250

428

SUBJECT INDEX

Participant observation, 12, 14, 86, 106, 138, 154, 216, 232, 268, 278, 299, 314, 318, 328, 330, 331, 334 Participation, 12, 17, 54, 59, 145, 280, 282–284, 288, 413 observation of, 12, 268, 269 Pentitismo, 220 Perduction, 244 Performance, 12, 150, 155, 168–170, 265–267, 302, 304 Peyote Religion, 35, 36 Phenomenology, 136, 154, 236, 239, 246, 255 Politics, 9, 183, 192–194, 198, 220, 373, 382 and anthropology, 118, 182–184, 187, 188, 213 discovery of, 10, 184 Popol Vuh, 266 Popular culture, 105, 323 Gramscian conceptualisation of, 10, 184, 410 political potential of, 10 Postmodernism, 401, 402

Q Questione meridionale, 193 Quiché Maya, 263, 266

R Reflexive observation, 15 Relationality, 186 Research, 6, 8, 326 individual vs collective, 115, 160, 174, 362 Research/theory relationship, 16

S Saramaka, 185 Schismogenesis, 409 Scientific androcentrism, 374, 380 Sedimentation, 244 Senegalese, 299, 302, 304 Sensoriality, 285 Serendipity, 82 Sioux, 34 Situational analysis, 160, 161, 164–167, 170, 172, 174 Smithsonian Institution, 25 Social anthropology de-villagisation of, 172 Social change function, 174 network, 160, 170, 174 organization, 53, 57 relation, 65, 138, 251 structure, 131, 144 Social ethnography, 328 Sociological laws, 57, 72 Storytelling, 264 Structural-functionalist frame, 9 Subjectivity, 16, 153, 182, 183, 223, 234, 247, 269, 277–279, 358, 377, 378, 382, 387, 410 Subordinate, 109, 186, 187, 193, 194, 220, 223, 347, 376, 377, 383, 387, 402, 405 Surrogate lives, 200 Symbolic capital, 8, 150 Symbolic interactionism, 2 Symbolic violence, 133, 141, 144, 145, 148, 152, 403 Synchronic analysis, 69

SUBJECT INDEX

T Tarantate, 384 Tarantism, 7, 104, 109, 111, 112, 114, 115, 119, 120 Team ethnography, 106, 122 Thai Affair, 342 Theory of practice, 8, 363 Time, temporality, 8, 9, 14, 86, 93, 160, 161, 181–183, 188, 189, 202, 241, 302, 332, 342, 345, 347, 360, 373 Totemism, 60, 64, 65, 67, 90 Transnationality, transnational community, 300, 301 connections, 302 flows, 302 networks, 299, 304 practices, 298, 302, 303 social space, 299 Trobrianders, 60, 320, 321 Turn, 91, 151, 212, 242, 289, 342, 350, 381, 396, 401, 403, 406 ontological, 358, 395, 413 rhetorical-political, 410–412 U Urgent anthropology, 31

429

V Vision, 58, 129, 148, 237, 238 Of the Other, 234 Of the West, 255 Visual, 239, 244, 287 anthropology, 29, 244, 256 practices, 233, 249 Visualism, 234

W Western, 12, 38, 188, 380, 396 culture, 97, 234, 375, 381 “guilty conscience”, 396 Westernisation of the frontier, 24 Wounded Knee, 34 Writing, 8, 11, 12, 24, 110, 143, 223, 240, 251, 271, 277, 278, 287, 333, 395 of ethnographic history, 21

Z Zulu, 162–165 Zuñi, 30–32, 39, 40