hobart - ethnography as a practice

8/6/2019 Hobart - Ethnography as a Practice

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EUROP.tEAJournal des Eu ropeo ll istcs / ) ourIlO ! of he Europeal1islS

D i r ~ c t i o n / EditorC iu li o Angion i

COOlite de Direction I Editorial floilrdGuy Barh icho n (Univcrsi tc de Paris . Sornon nc)

Alh erto Mmio C ir c.'1c (U ni vcrsi tc de Rome "La Sap ienza" ) Caro le Counihan (Millersvill e Un ive rs it y. US A)

John Davis (All So uls Coll ege. Oxford) Giovanni Lill iu (Accadcm ia dei Lineci, Rom e)

Marianne Mes 'nil (Univcrsitc Lih rc de Bruxd les) Vi ntila Mihflilcscu (U ni vcrs iLc de Hut:arcs L

Cristina Papa (L:nivcrs il c de PCfugiu) Pa olo PiqllcrcdJu (l SRE . Nuoro) Assia Pap a va (CN RS-LAC ITO. Par is-Sari n)

Ric ardo Sa nmartI n (U niv c rs idad ComplutcllsC , Madrid) James T


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Mark Hobart

supers tition and ritual 10 reason and enlightenment . This requiredstanding the cultural values of others: what made them what they were .'Whichever way you imagined the object of study, th e difficulty remained though

accounts were monolog ic. They privileged th e authoritati ve voice of thethe polyvoca'l reality of social life. Ac cording to thi s

ethnographic writings should include the voices of the members of theiety, so that th e final ethnographic text would, in both senses, represenl its

[Clifford 19831 . The sorts of new ethnogra phy proposed [e.g.; Dwyer 1982) look rather Iikc a step backwards to extracts from

notebooks of the old scientific anthropo logists with all th e problems of powerknowledge swept under the (Moroccan) carpetlFardon ed. 1990) . The idea of

authentic nati ve voices to speak for themse lves re in vents the originarysence and 'authorizes' th e natives . As usual it is on the an thropologist's lermsoba rt 19901 . In both textual and 'd ialogic' ana lyses th e ethnographer relales to

subjects through an intersubjectivity, th e term s of which, again, thedetermines [Hobart in press (a)). The paradox is that the more

ally imposing the arguments and the finer th e techniques for registeringe actualitie s. th e more th e actions, conce rn s and lives of the people described

e into paleness. It is not ju st that what is desc ribed becomes increasvirtual. The stcess is also increasingly on the knowing subject of the ethnog, so that th.e people who arc the objects or subjects of the account disappear,literally or by being biographized (e.g. Abu-Lughod 1993; cf. Lindholm

5: 809-8 11) and so overinterpreted and transmuted into a form quite alien toir own practices of self-description, whatever th ese mi ght be. Ethnography be

mes increas ingly reflexive to th e point that it comes close to dispensing with it st altogethe r. ' There is something se riously wrong here.

nderstanding also is easi ly adaptable 10 divining what people. as cons umers, wanl. Oftell. or course.s lakes the form of inlclllrcling . and so a\locating - 10 people wishes they did m)1know they had . finclined to think thaI the .ground gained (from the 1960s on) in l3rilish social anthropology by

as the predominant not ion is nO( co incidcmal to the hclillr.:d rcnlil'.alion or the Joss of empire. noremorcscencc of understanding as a nO lion with the triumph of capitalistn. howe\ 'cr disorganized ,

this seems to be part icularl y common (hut , fortunatel y. far from universal ) among AlIlCr il an in vi tes more considerat ion than it has been give n. ] suspect among A fri can s,

and Latin Amcricans it may ha ve somcthing to do with a rcac tion again st previous Europeanifications of them [Said 1 9 7 Among th ose AmClican an th ropologists much given to sel[cen reflexi vit y. I wonder whether thi s is not the combin ation of two strands among others . Thc first is

practices of confessiun . 111e second relates (much as I dep lore rece nt overuse of the term ) toUnited SlaLeS' period of 'hcgemony', as pan of the \ .:onstruct ion' of others in the image of se lf.

ElJROPtEA 1996 . II - I

F . I h J 1 0 ~ r Wi a PI'(lCl ice. or the Unimportance of Pen ,1 uill s

Quite what I think is wrong would take up at least a book. Let me deal withone strand . It is the presupposition in Euro-American academic writing, whichembraces ethnography, ethnographic writing and anthropology, that representingsomehow mi rrors a reality, the task of experts being to establish that reality undistorted and, if possible , in its full origi nality. Thi s presupposition gets in the wayof wondering if reality is quite of that k,ind and what part the inquirer plays indetermining that reality. let alone as to whether the people we work with appreciate th e issue in th e same way. In other words, the grip of a particu lar kind of timeless, situationless epistemOlogical thinking remains the default inte llectual position.The result is to create a dichotomy between epi stemology and ontology, betweensubject and object, which runs like a fault line through much European thought.

What is so wrong with such duali sm? Briefl y, it is bad manners . If we are toengage seriously with others, it is an ac t of powe r to impose our categories onthem before we even inquire what theirs' are . It also arroga ntly assumes the superiority of the knower to th e known, in a non-mutual, non-recip rocal relationship.It recreates th e world according to particular processes of mind, treated as separate from malter and bodies .' By making the relationship between the EuroAmerican intellectual and local intellectuals asymmetrical - the latter becomeobjects to be thought - it gets in th e way of that criti cal appreciation and recognition of difference, which I take to be a mutual process in some sense [Collingwood 1933). It trans fers agency from people in various arrangements rethinkingand reworking their lives, under conditions usually not of their choosing, ontothat of the knower. The e ffec t is to deify academics (well, it is the last chancethey will get) as kn owing subjects, who are invariably superior to , and detachedfrom, what they know . It is also hypocritical and incoherent. Anthropology livesby seeing and interpreting everything as culture-bound ( .. ) everything but itself(McGrane 1989: 125) . In what fo llows, I wish to consider if it is possible to wri tcabout ethnography as a practice in a way which avoids both such unnecessary

ierarchizing of kn ower and known (especially when the known are o ther peop le)and false identification by w hich we tame the strange. the different, by redescription, so making it mere ly a puzzle.

4 I think that it is easier to render a dualist sys tem in nondualist terms th an vice versa, hut I havcyet 10 wo rk thi s throu gh carefull y. As dualism remains the default position, even among some poststruturalists like Dcrrida [see Foucault 1972 : 602 Il], 1prefer to err towards a nondualist anal ysisboth hecau$;e i( makes a change from reinseribing a Europea n meraphysics and because it li ts betterwith my appreCiation of the presupposilionsof the people wi th who m [ work. namel y Balinese.

ElJROPAlA 1996. 11- t 5


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Mark Hobart

me start with a point about which most of us might appear to agree. "Eventsseem to be intelligible. Actually they have no meaning without interpretation

655). The first, and usual, reading (sic) is the idea that ethnographyand involves textualization as a prerequisite of interpretation. An

is a particular kind ofcreates meaning and makes textualization appear a natural. ,ogical,

step. The former account owes much to Clifford Geertz's [1973]of Ricoeur's The model of the text [1971). The latter is closer to Fou

of Nietzsche [1990].Textualizatiol1, on Rjcoeur's an d Geertz's account,

is the process through which unwriuen behaviour, speech, !Oeliers, oral traditionor ritual, come to be marked


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Mark lIohart

And Clifford's critique has its own difficulties. Note how he assumes that cultureis about meaning and, if natives do not have texts, they do not have lextuality.Clifford himse lf regards lextualization as something which gets in the way of thenative voice (his idiosyncratic rende ring of Bakhtin's notion of helerog /{Jssia ,which , on other readings, is aboul speech not voice at all). Clifford judges newapproaches

by their ability to give everyone involvcd in the elhnographi c project interpret crs. informants. various groups of natives, ClC . . an autonomous voi' time and attention in many parts ofthe world. The idea that people might escape textual closure is so horrendous thatwe have two related fields, cultural and media studies, the se lf-appointed task ofwhich is to textualize shopp ing and fashion , film and television . Just consider thetitle of Fiske and Hartley's analysis of television: Reading le levi.;(JII . Watchingtelevision and film or shopp ing may well involve textuality in complex ways. IIdoes not mean thai such aCl iviti es are texts . By textualizing Ihe world academicshave condemned themselves to be even more irrelevant than they already are. Forall anthropologists' claims to the common touch , our practices are deeply elit istand are enshrined in our originary moment - an aristocratic Pole facing the prospect of living with savages.

CultureWhat however is the object which is at once textualized and the means to textualization? It is commonly culture in some form . In finished anthropological writings ( ..) what we ca ll our data are really our own construction s of oth er peoples'constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to [Geertz 1973a: 9]." Ifthinking and speaking (which involve Ianguage) are cultural,' much social lifeconsists in people thinking and talking about thinking and talking. In fact this iswhere anthropologists start to come in. What we deal with arc a mixture of thesetwo, mostly the latte r. Our thinking is already third order. And our note-writing inthe field - our textualizing if you insist - is already fourth order. Which makes ourmonographs at least fifth order and 'cu lture' a co ncept so 'meta-' in its removal

Ii Thi sslillleaves the question: who 'radically c o n ~ l r u c ~ ' the texts , or rather 'the constnlctcd understanding of the lonsrucled natives constructed point of view'?[Crapanzano J9X6: 74). Gccrtz is quite happywith the idea of ficlion s . in Ihe sense of 'something made' {Geertz 1973: 15 J . it is somelh ing whichhas been, not is being made. It is already appreciated in archaeological modc. Gccnz, in Thick descrip tiol/, treats socia l reality as a building which has to be cx:c


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Mark Nohan

any possible social action that it is best not thoug ht about at all. Te xts e ntersimilar sp iral of csscntialized levels. Arguably culture doe sn't "include" oront ain" its basic values; it is its basic va lu es [McGrane 1989: 119). (No te how

uch rarefy ing filters o ul confusions, contlicts, antagonisms, which neve r loo medge in thi s vision of culture anyway .) Anthropologists have on th e whole been

oa th to consider the consequences of the lI SC of culture by themselves and co lonialns as a di viding practice, which ranked human bcings [Said 1978: 45] .

same holds for the Obj ec ti fying practice which almost eve ry one seemso engage in these days. It is where humans become identified metonym ica ll yth er with culture as what they have made (Geertz above) or invented [Wagner

J as cra ftsmen or innovators, or else which they own, possess, borrow,uire, commoditize and enjoy in a grand flou ri sh of the spirit of capitalism.Culture, ,like text, easily leads to a vicious circ le of academicizing. So let meth c Gordian knot. Johanne s Fabian remarked, percipiently, that

contrary to its popul ar image, cu llural anthropology has been a science, not ofemergence, but of disap pearance. Cu lture, inasmuch as it served as anthropology's gu iding co nce pt , has always been an idea POSI joctulII. a notion orientedtoward s the pas t ( to 'custom' and 'tradition'), descriptive of a state of af fairs(and o ften a status quo), a nostaJgic idea at best (when ie mi xed the stud y ofcXOl ic socie ties with re gret) and a reacti onary ideologeme at worst (when it wasused optimisticall y to explain away as 'vari ati on' what in many cases was theresult of discrimina tion and violence) [1991 : 91, 193].

Anthropological recourse to cul ture is a mortuary practice, a practice of buryingwhich keep polities going under the silt of custom, a ce lebrat ion

already dated (and usually male) compromises and deals. As an overarehingnc ep t, culture is a deeply apolitical, even anti-political, idea. Anthropologistsnot just study and write about - i.e. textualize - mortuary practices, anthropol

itself is such a practice. It is, in Levi-St rauss' phrase, en cie de mort [1966 :Perhaps it is time we bccame a little less infatuated with the idee Jalaie of

e text, or of culture.There is, as Fab ian notes in the sa me article, a quite different se nse of 'culture'

of thinking about and knowing abo ut so mething. Moreover, wherease ither sense) impli es a dicho tomy between tex t, thought and inte rpretation

n the one hand and the world on th e o ther, knowi ng does not necessarily [Hobart3]. My concern here is with what is involved in ethnography. Few scholars

rgued - yet at least - th at ethn ography has nothing at all to do with th inking,understanding. Wh at I wish to put forward here is a non-dualist

rgument for thinking, knowing, interp reting, understanding and indeed textualizing

EUROPftOA 1996,11 1

E"fJJ1Io,::ral'lnr as a Pmc lice. 01' IIie UlIimptJTUmce of PeT/Ruins

as social pract ices. Both the people concerned and anthropologists engage inthese prac tices in di fferent ways - ones which come to overl ap - as a centralaspect of ethnography .

PracticeUnfortunately, for my purposes, there is no useful account of practice. Marxistaccounts of praxis are part of a di scourse of structure and ideology, singularlyunsuited to my present concern s.' Bourdicu's theory of practice (an oxymoron,incidentally) is an anti -structuralist return to a form of transactional ism and againis unsuitable [Bourdieu 1977, 1990). It owes more to an indi viduali st and cconomistic complementin g of SlilJcture of the kind argued in anthropo logy by Firthand Barth th an to Marxist and post-Marxist thinking. Above al l it is deeplydualist: it proposes the determination of society by individual agency as againststructure. Its products, ltabilLls, are merely what British an thropologists used tocall 'social in sti tuti ons ' (that is, 'standardized modes of co-activity') in a newguise, prec ise ly the 'custom' whi ch Fabian criticized . I find the work of Fo uca ult[esp. 1972b, 1977 , 1982, 1984, 1986 ] prov ides a better starting point.

What I am a tte mpting to work out currently is an account of agency whichaims to transcend the dichotomy by presuming agents not necessari ly, indeed co mmonl y not, to be individuals, but compri sing complex co nfigurations [see Hobart1990b; Inden 1990; both foHowing Collingwood 1992] .' My account of practicepresumes there to be agents who are responsible for deciding upon a course of ac tion and wh o take , or are attributed with, responsibility for that action. The actionsare carried out by in st ruments. Actions are performed upon either pa ti ents or o bjects, depending upon whe ther they are considcred to be aware or effective lyunaware of what is being done to them. Agents may double as instrument, . So

K Ern eS lo Laclau is among the most interesting theorists in free ing act ion and thought from st ructure


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Mark 1-101>(11'1

may patients, spectacularly in those forms of discipline snch as the panopticon,where pri soners learn to monitor themselves, but not as agents. Actions also havean outcome. However I also take it that evaluations of agency, action and outcome arc underdetermlned and always open to subsequent acts of rc-presentationby subsequcnt agents. Following Taylor {1985]. I treat consc iousness as bestapproached as historically situated public actions, not as a mysterious, private,inner state possessed by a unitary coherent individual. Similarly I take it thatknowing, thinking and even remembering are public, historical and cultural actions[see Matilal 1986 on Indian philosophical parallels, also Hobart 1990a; 1995b].

'Practice' I take to rcfer to certain recognized means of acting upon the worldand upon humans for the purpose of producing a definite outcome. Among practic es, those of particular significance deal with the making, changing or recognition of agents - complcx, human, Divinc - and so the unmaking of others, that isth e crealion of instruments and patients. Practice also invol ves making others, oroneself, the sub ject of actions. 'Actions' I take to be what agcnts decide npon andso to be ex traordinarily varied . It see ms se nsible therefore to think of practices asfar more encompassing than actions and, in being recognized, to be framed, whctherby the analyst or by people involved. Fai lure to rccognize th e latter is not anomission but an act of negation, however careless, by an agent. By 'activities', bycontrast, r have in mind congeries of actions which are ,ess directed tow ards aspecific goal, less formal or less exp licitly recognized. Whether they are aware ofit at the time or not, what anthropologists do in the field are as often activitiesthen as they arc practices.

Ethnography is not just any set of practices. [t is a triply reticulated sct. Atonce. the anthropologist is identifying, trying to work with or find out about, thenstndy, local agents. The anthropologist is also cxerting her agency - most notablyaftcr leav ing the ficld when she 'authorizes' the people she worked with. The peopleand organizations she studies are usua lly also trying to exert their agency on hcrto affect the outcomc. The possibility of ethnography howevcr supposes both adiffercnce, a tension, an antagonism [in Laelau's I990a sense] between ethnographer and cthographed . (The absence of the latter tenTI, or its equivalent, fromanthropological d.iscourse speaks volumes in the silences about just how , in theend, our much-vaunted 'collaborators' and 'friends' end up.) And , far from tryingto reinvent the ethnographer as hero, [ am co ncerned wit h the conditions whichmad e such determinations possible. on

If} A wonderful example in Bali is how one court , in Ihe vil!agc or UbuJ. 1 T 1 ~ l d c their \ ' i o n Il f Balihegemonic by 'cooperaling' with, and even inviting 10 Slay, distingu ished artists like Walter Spies

EUROPIEA t996, tt- I

Ethf/osraphvas 0 P r a L ( i c f ' ( II" Ihe Ulliml'0l"/f{fH(' '1 Peli81linx

Knowing. understanding, interpreting and writing, or textualizing, are not thenany humdrum set of practices. They are vital ones in identi fying. recog ni zing,imagining etc . agents and patients. In being inscribed , these accounts have a nastyhabit of becoming definitive, especial ly whcn the anthropologi st leaves the fie ldor the original pcople concerned die (in one horribl e scnse, thcy are much thesame). [n short, we are c10sc to what Foucault, partly retrospectively, elaboratedas his lifc long study of the different modes by which, in our culiure, human beingsare made subjects [1982: 208]. Thesc wcrc, first, the modes of inquiry whichtry to give themselves thc status of sciences such as anthropology. the ohjectivizing of the subject as cultural. Second, they included d ividin g practices throughwhich the subject is either dividcd inside himse lf or divided from others , youngagainst old, males against females , the object of study as againsl the subject whodoes the studying. Finally there are practices by which a human being turns heror himself into a subject [1982: 208].

OverinterpretationTreating cu lture, or life itself, as a text avoids a recognition of lextualizing as acultural practice. People write, speak, read and listen; textualize event s and actionsin circumstances which depend on the existence of previous practices of textualizing. What I call 'the Literary Tendency', which has become the fa shionable modcin anthropology, especially in the United Slates, is itself part of snch practices.Solipsistically its practitioners hypostatize practices into abstract Objects (tex ts)and imagine particular practices to be constitutive, essential or even universal.The sort of approach I am advocating here however trea ts practices as particular ,historical, situated and varying in degree and kind. I assume that, far from havinga determinate , ext ractable essence, facts are underdetermined by explanation Quine[1953, 1960] or, put another way, that reality tran scends the knower lInden1986: 402]. On Ihi s account, any activity or practice, the agents who engage inth em and the patients who are their subjects, are themsel ves partly a consequenceof, but are not fully determined by, past practices and activities . Among practices,somc rewo rk pa st practices (e.g. commenting, criticiz ing. correcting. but also legislating or even making fun of someone); " others aim at transforming patients

and scholars such as Margaret Mead and Gregory Batcson, to whose writings Cli fford Gccrtz owesso much of his vision or Bali. 11 The number of activities which mo.y go on during JOy one practi ce. such =ts nttcndmg a seminar. may be highly diverse. During the semi nar at which I first presented this paper, I noted down Ihe

EUROPIEA t996, I1-12 13


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Mark Hobart

(e.g. gradu ating, curing, managing) and the agent s themse lves (e.g. crowning,pray ing, self-di sc iplining [cf. Foucault 19 86]). O th er prac tices are c once rned withtransforming reality (these include textuali z in g, reco rding, wri tin g, measurin g,telev isin g e tc. am ong oth ers ) . Yet other prac ti ces are concerned with tryin g toeliminate th e underdelerm ina ti on of actions and eve nts, including much academicwriting and 'ritual'. I choose therefo re to trea t both explaining and interpr eting asoften prac tices of de termin atio n, or essentiali zing , in some fo rm.

Now, if there is one practice whi ch i s distincti vc of ethnog raph y among o therprac tices, but which is rare ly recognized as such, it is what fo r lack of a betterword I sha ll call overinterpret ing. This is ove rd etermining one in terpretati on wherealte rn at ive equally plausible interpretations are poss ible, or have in fact be en putfo rward . As a practi ce, overin terpr eting is a wh ole mass of pra cti ces which u suallysta rt wi th pre in terpreting prior to an y engagement with what is actually to beinterpreted (i.e. before you go to the field) and concludes in defending the interpre tati on against critic ism (i.e. oft en dec ad es a fter everyone but you is dead).

Ev identl y, local peo pl e, in thi s instan ce Balinesc , may well on occasion alsooverinterpret for all kinds of reas ons. Where they differ from ethnograp hers isthat Ih e latter's justification for existing is that they somehow add more 10 whatthe loca ls arc perfec tl y ca pable to saying for th emse lves . This so mething is alogical me th od fo r va lidating probable interpretations, presumed - in a fi ne exampleof preinterpretation - to be so supe rior to Balinese methods that no interpreter ha sbothered 10 inquire what th ey are or if th ey even ex ist. Interpreta tion in anthro pology is the trivia'i bu sin ess of tex tua li zin g a nd pl aci ng o ur in terprelations uponother peopl es' prac tices. In stead I am concerned wit h anal yzing how other peopleex pl ain ed and talked about the pr ac tices in which th ey were engaged in terms ofth e ir ow n presuppos it io ns. That is metaph ysics, in Collingwood's teI1]1 s [1 940).

The presuppositions behind fi eldworkWh at does seem d is ti nc ti ve, indeed consti tutive, of anthropo logy is ethnograp hicfieldwork by participant-observation. But we are in deep trouble immediately.Anthropologists' in vestigat ive me th od depended upon a conj unction of a naturali st

fo llow ing (qu ite apart from the more narrow ly dermed acade mic activ it ies usual on such occasio ns).They included look ing al photographs, books . OUI of the window, at other peop le (no one hadbrough t proofs to read, a British favourite), doodling; dozing, chaUing; both caS!:icLLC and videorct.:ording proceedings; wandering 10 and fro in a gallery extension, smoking; promising copies ofone's work 10 others, avoiding ccrt


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Mark Hol}(lrl _ - EJ!,wu:rll,,/tV (J. { (I Pra tl ice, 01' I/lf' Un;mpnr IGJlr..e of P ( , / / l i I l

For HllIh ropolog is ts to sllstain thc falllasy of cuhurc as whole, s low , apprccia and textuali sm is thai thcy bo th subscribe to this ontology, albei l in slighllyble , thc y have to cnsure thei r inco mpetence in thc vernacular. David Pocock once differe nl ways, and land in the trap of how do you rcpresent the world in words ?emarkcd that whcn you met an anth ropologi s t who to ld you that aftcr a yea r o r Reco nsidering rcprcscnration as a pra ctice provicie:-; a way of avoiding thetwo he spoke the languagc flucntly, you had me t a bloody liar. If you ca nnot .. artesia nism which is presupposcd in so much cthnographic writing. I take it Ihatunderstand people speak in g to one another undcr any circumstance , as virtuall yno non -nat ive speaker can , thcn you arc res tricted to a degree to question andanswe r with a ll its we ll rchcarsed limi tat ions and misdirection s. When I onceasked why . on sllccessive fieldtrips, I rece ived different answers to tbe sameque stions , my Balinese co lleagues told me thai I wOludn't have unders lood therep ly ea rlier on. Hobart's 4th . law of ethnography reads: "Peop le gear down ..nforn1ati on to the ignora nce of the anthropologi st. So we tend to focu s on keywords and occas ions that our preformed theories tell us a rc paradigmatic, not onthe co mplexi ti es of translating or figuring how 10 addrcss the radica ll y co ntingcntnaLUrc of the conditions of pos sibility of social practices and thei r co nsequences.Wc shy away from an erotic of event s, surfaces, practices, to reimagi ne an Urhcrmeneutic depth with a transcendcntal object med ia ted by obscu re entities like IIIsymbo ls', 'ritual s' and institutions [Sontag 19721. It is like hunting by ge llingso meo ne to tie down your buffal o fo r you first. The stuffed head on the wall , likefading cop ies of ethnographic monographs - tel ls no ta les.

If you stop and think about it, fie ldwork is a very pecu li ar practice. Quite whatis it, in its pristine Malinowskian form, about a European male living among, ifnot part of, a gro up of pcoplc for two yea rs Or more , which imp arts a knowledge o r unders tanding - achievablc in no othe r way? The conventional answcrs aremost un satisfac tory. It does not fo llo w though, by recourse to a crudc bin arylog ic, that. if long-term fieldwork by participant-observation does not producece rtain knowledge, it is e ither di spensible in favour of evocative nco-impress ionism [Tyler 1986: 123 ; scc thc critique by Carneiro 1995 : 12-14] or rcducible toac ts oftcx tualizing, as Geertz [1988 ] and Boon [19 82, 1990] would have it.

The problem facing ethnog raphy, und er whatever description , might appear tobe that it involves two different ontologica l o rde rs. On the one hand there is thediso rdered world of cvcnts, actions, contingencies a nd unce rtainties, which happen,co nveniently, in that remote, pe ripheral place, 'the field'. On the one hand, therc isth at co he rent, structured, meaningful realm of narrative, tcxt and p rofcssional ac tivity, which coi ncidenta lly happens to be 'home', the centre. Quarles van Ufford hasargued Ihat il is this di sjuncture between planning and its implcmentati on in thcreal world which undermines so many deve lopment projects [1993]. Thi s argumentonly works howeve r from with in the dichotomous ontology which gave us thehi erarchy of mind ove r matter in the first place. Th e problem of both naturalism

t6 EUROP/EA IW o. II- I

represcnting is always a transformational acl. You represent something as something else Isee G oodman 1968: 3-10] on particu lar occas ions to particular age ntsor patient s for various purposes." Ethn og raphie s do not rcflect a realilY, more orless authentically, accurate ly , dramatically, expressively, meaningfully or truthfullyIt is practices of e thnographic writing which raise problems or rcwork prcviousarguments about what it is to bc authentic, accurate and so forth . By their practices,ethnographers turn a double dislocation into a tripl e dis loca tion and C()I1scquenllyare engaged in a triple act of articulation.

Lct me clarify what I am saying. I am deeply unhappy with the persistent tendency in thc human scicnces to dichotomize cx planations of rcificd notions ofsociety in term s of cithcr structural dcterminism or free human agency. (/\ppcalsto 'cullure' instead merely displ aces the problem onto an obscure ontological cntity , meaning [Qu in e 1970: Ho bart 1982].) Tcxt ua li zing is a mos t effec tive meansof di ss ipating the deg ree of rad ica l undecidability . Far f rom thc socia l comprisinga coherent struc ture, it is morc scnsi tively apprccia tcd as rent by proccsscs ofdi s location (the subject existing in virtue of such dislocat ions) and co unte rvailingprac tices of articulation . Arti cu lation here has a doubl e sense : it is both makingintelligibl e and co nnec ting that which is, or has bccn, separatcd [Luc lau J990a;cf. Hall 1986]. It is not so much that the e pi ste mOl og ical and structural aspects ofthe term overlap, whereby privilegin g one over the other cmpoverishcs andtrivializcs the notion . It is rather that the order which structure notiona lly instantiates is not scparab le from inquiring into, talking about, or ass uming that o rd e r,just as, recursivc ly, such practi ces presume an object. Arti cula ti on prcsupp osesthere to be something - under whateve r description - which needs articulating.

A doub le dis loca ti on then predates, and is not just the prccondition for thecthnographers' arrival, but for thc e thnographers' ex istence as such : these are thedis locati ons of each ethn og rapher's own soc iety and those of the soc icty whichshe studies . In turning up in the fi eld, the e thnographer, whose profcss ion. ex istence and presence in the field is predicated on one set of di sloca tions, is faced

For illst;mcc. when J originally presented th is paper, J was asked how identity fi lled in wi th myargument. I hope it is c\e-rtf (hm I do not adhere analyt ically (0 lhe idea of a uniHu), subJccl. far k ssany itienlilYof persons. objects o r events, which may be extrapolated as an csscncti


9/18

not onl y with another set. That, after a ll, was th e precondition andof ethnography. She is also faced wi th a di sloca tion be tween th e two disl

ra ison d'erre

oca ti onsbrought about by the practice of ethnograph y itself, whi ch sets up a ll so rt s o f in

coherences, challenges to orde r, surpri ses, crises. These arc far from being of apure ly insu lated inte llectual nature. They affect what th e ethnographer d oes (andeven is) subsequently. How temporary and superfic ial this is depends in pan onhow successfully the ethnographer manages to deny them. What Laciau refers toas antagoni sm [I 990a: 17 ff.l , for ethnography I take to be ev inced in the inte llectu al, politica l. material , gastric and other shocks th at ethnographic tlesh is heir to."

It is the self-appointed task of ethnographic writing to articulate these thrcenon-isomorphic di slocations and their acco mpanying antagonisms. E thnographicwriting then is a peculiarl y complex prac tice, beca use it involves notionall y threekinds of articul atory practi ces. To s implify ma tters, e thnographers usua lly privilegeone over th e others in their writin gs, and so dras tically o versimp lify the issue ofmultiple, non-coordinate kinds of articul ation. A remarkable amount of ethnographyis about using others to unders tand ourselves better. The ha ll mark of such writ ingis often a sin gularly vague and incoherent grammatical subjec t, th e 'we', 'the wes t'wh ic h such aecoums serve to suture. I wond cr though quite how oflen they areused seri ously to address, rath er than re-insulate, the unrecogni zed contingencieswhich permeate the ethnographer's home society. My impression is that there a refew indigenous ethnographies which primaril y art iculate antagoni sms in the societyin question, partly because the who le en terpri se of ethnog raphy is conditioned by,defined in terms of, and addressed to, th e dislocations of a quite different society.The retlexi ve tum in anthropology attempts to address the third disloca ti on."Espec ially in some of the woollier recent American versions however , articulation

1 If you study your own society . the


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EIJIIIORrtlpily (IS a Praclice, OJ' lhe Unimporwllce (4 Pcnguills

centre of handi craft production through which thirty or IllOre touristthunder each day. Agency was an issue in my fieldwork from the start. ntI began postgraduate research in Bali in 1970 -72 , the problem was how toa vi llage. Everyone I spoke to dismissed everyone else's sugges ti ons and ,hinted at dark secrets from the time or the mass executions of the COIllParty members in 1965-66. Choosing tbe least awful-sounding patrons, I

of thei r family in the local court in a suitable[Ardener 1987], and therefore wonderfully authentic, village. I was allo

a bodyguard, which seemed unnecessary at the time, but which turned outbe 'life-saving. Before I had spent a ni ght in the vi llage I was a political issuc,

because the rival fac tion to the co urt's wanted money from my presence andI had ste pped unwittingly into a hotbed - even by Balinese standards - of

and post-1965 intrigue. r had , especially initially, to work through relati onshad been assigned me. I felt less an agent than like a Ping-Pong ball. Theremote . As far as I have been able to ascertain, I seem to have

the third European to set foot there. But I doubtless exaggerate.During my second fieldtrip in 1979-80, 1 rented a co mpound ill the Sa me vil

ward and held open house . My research bill included 3,000 for alcohol,s tl y fruit liqueurs, which were a great attraction. The style of fie ldwork su itedstudy of indigenous styles of argument and philosophical ideas, as people

tum up and argue with one another. I belatedly realized that Balinese doof their thinking in informal and changing groups; and that di scussing, arhav ing meetings are among the most common prac tices in many places. So

have worked with single 'informants' only as an exception since then.My third study in 1988-89 was on the media and development. My closest

mpanion had insi sted that I s tay with him . No alternative was acceptab le toBy then public life in the village had co ntracted sharply . People worked day

halfway through the night making carvings; and watched television while doingNo onc would come to an open house; and my previous key site - the vi llagecoffee stalls - had mostly closed for lack of business . I worked mainly

groups of people who were thrown together by circumstance andhoice in an attempt to interpolate myself into existing groupings. Of course, my

II In n fuller aCcOLmt I would begin with how I ca me 10 uecide to study Bali in the first pl.lcc.grad uating I laught anlilropology al the University of Singapore with the aim M find

a su ilahk society to research. I had I() leach the work or Clifford GcCrll on Java and Bali. Hav .h


11/18

Mark I-Iobon l;mport !."L1! 0/ Pe 'JJ.lI ill5

will, of course, not appear to be the case because resea rch by dcfinit io n is about waffle. By whatever mcans, th e complex of pracli ces which is ethnography must iscovering something new. However what counts as new - Iikc what makes up be carefu ll y circumscribed and turned into a simulacrum [see Baudrillard 1983]. news on television - is massive ly prestructured and predetermined [Fiske 1989]. ikewise you are takcn through methodology courses whi ch, by defi niti on, prede Subject positions and activitiestermine how you will assess, record, measure and write about prccisely whatught to be unknown, situational, contextua l, to-bc-thought-ovcr and under noircumstances to be taken for granted or 'routinized'. We al so learn language as ift were a tool (to open a mental ca n?), not itself a contested and underdctermi ned Iet of practices [Volosinov 1973). But the more that grant-giving bodies demandrigorous train ing, the more we train thought out of future re searchers. The paradigm .o r research is previous examples of successful research. A moment's thoughthows this to be ret rogress ive. If rescarc h is about rethinking and breaking awayrom past practices, why train peop le to emu late them, except to learn from misakes and go beyond? If I drove a car around London facing backwards the wholeime, I would rapidly crash if I werc not arrested by the police first. Formulaic

military regulation is a better image of research than is critical thinking. It is notor nothing that Foucault wrote about disc iplinary p ractices.

A fu rther c rucial set of practices begin on your return from the field . This is the usi ness of 'authorizing' the people you worked wi th, so becoming their agent [Asad

1986; Hobart 1990) . If you were well trained, your notes are already so textualizedth e transi tion from provisional text to final text is relatively painless. The

rob lem of articulating th e conditi ons of your interpolation in other peoples' livesive ly by-passcd. Students who forgot their disciplinary background for a

oment and actually got on with the people they studied often have terrible troublecx tu alizing what happened. (There is a crude inverse corrclation between the origiality of ethnograph ic fieldwork and professional advancement. ) From the moment

return , the researcher is caught up in a series of ever more rigorous disciplinarys - from interpreting the result s, prescnting drafts of thesis chapters, to

ivi ng seminar papers, to attending Anthropological Association mcetings, to thc(w hi ch as the name suggests forec loses saying you got it wrong), toto 'networking', to be all owed to practise teaching on new initiates - dc

ned to turn her into a fully- fledged, totally-textual ized, reality-free professional.design in g coursc outl ines, teaching, exa mi ning, politicking and publish

because it is required are all prac ti ces of reinscription. The best way to copesuperfluity of fieldwork, its sheer exuberance, complexity, unce rt ainty,

fun - all the things academi cs are in business to textualize andy - is not to ignore all thi s, but to sanctify it by declaring cthnography thc founion, the originary moment, the epistemological prccondition or so me other

EU ROr' lEA 1996. 11 -1

Finally I can turn to ethnographi c pract ice in the narrowest sense. However, letme nol start with a round-up of the usual suspects. about which too mu ch imaginary has bcen written in accou nl s of fie ldwork, but with our relati onship with thelocal people into w hose lives we have interpolaled ourselves. We ca nnot do fieldwork, as Evans-Pri tchard discovered among the Nuer, unless they cooperate at leastminimally. So the first kind of practice in which the ethnographer is engaged, theprecondition to all othcrs, is disciplining the natives. Thi s takcs many forms.Minimally, we have to train them to speak, think and act toward s us in ways withwhich they are unlikely to have been familiar. Without this, there is nOlthe minimaldcgree of commensurabilit y we requirc to cngagc with them. As Wingcnsteinremarked, If a lion cou ld talk, we could not understand him [1958: 223] .

Our re lationships with our main informants go much furt her. In order to engagein cri ti cal discuss ion with thcm, wc havc to persuade them to Ih ink about - andperhaps engage in - their own soc ieties, their ac tions, themselves and thcir relatio nships in ways quite different from th osc to which th ey are uscd. T he processrequires th em to adopt unfamiliar 'subject positions' [in Foucault's terms, 1972]. Ihave been through this myself, when an ESRC research team was interviewingmembers of my department about our expe ri ences of leaching research students. Ifound myself represcnting such teaching in coherent terms whi ch bore little relation10 my experience of the situated practice of su pervis in g. The c ircumstances of thcinquiry made me articulate rela tionships , roles, pract ices , difficulties, both intellectually and, later, in pract ice. I fo und myself adopting a subject position I hadnever experi enced before. If Laclau's idea of the subject bein g constituted indislocations at the edge of structures [1990a: 61) had scemed elegant but somewhat ideal beforehand. it ga incd a curious immediacy through the encounter.

To elaborate briefly, I found myse lf at oncc exposcd and answerable not j ustfor my own actions but fo r accepted administrat ive procedures, which appcarcdstrangely shorn of thc situated understandings that make them possiblc. I wasrequired 10 step back and objectify li ved relationships into detached prosc . Beingover-coherent was effectively obligatory if I wcre to spcak about what wc ncverspoke about th at way . What surprised me far more was the sudden sense of Ihechasms which yawned under everyday activities, the shockingly contingent naturcof what it was to supervise students and my own relationship - or lack of it - to

EUROPIEA 1996 , II- t 212


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Mwk Hobart Etllllojt raphv {i.I {J Pm cJlic/:, or/ h e Ullilllpo/"/(iI/Ce of P e l 1 f < i t i l ! . ~

e superviso r in question. At the end, the researcher thanked me for my opennessmy colleagues had apparently sutured the ir work beller than I. I was aware while

interviewed that. if the re sea rch ers were 10 know \Vhm was happenin g. itupon me to tell the truth in full as I saw it , not to hide behind

platitude s. Many Balinese I have worked with seem to me to ha vetrugg led to maintain a kind of se lf-objec tifying honesty when working with me.

several occasions those I know the best have told 111e how straining it was. notthey did not wish to te ll the truth. As I now think back on what they said,

may have been because it was an unfamiliar kind of truth and the telling of it aexpe rience.

Being on the rece iving end is a salutaJY expe rience. As ethnographers, we are farfamiliar with the disruptions we encounter when entering the fi eld. There is

entire genre, ant hropological autobiography, to celebrate the experience. At itsit may say something about the dislocation around which et hnography ce ntres,see ms to address less the other dislocations which are its preconditi on. (One

of going once or twice a year to Bali is that I s lither gracelessly, butone mass ive apparatus for the displacement of radical contingcncy

o another and back.) The ethnographic process fee ls very diffe rent depending onthe agent (for the moment, the ethnographer) or its u ~ e II' we

the co mplexity of the c ircumstances we induce in those we talk tovas tl y different activity. Margaret

once said that, to study somewhere like Bali , you should be parachuted inno prior knowledge. My point is that we carry that knowledge as practices,

of non-reciprocal und e rstanding, with us anyway .Who is it that anthropologists ta lk to anyway? Marvin Harris [1969] tellingly

to the importance of 'we ll-informed info nnants' , people who are oftento their own society and who, like Cassius, think too much: such men

dangerous [Shakespeare, Julius Caesar I, ii]. Perhaps the most famous exis Victor Turner's relationship wit h the thinker and diviner, Muchono (71/ea man deeply distrusted, it seems, by the Ndembu. I would suggest that the

relate to, and can work with, are local inte llectual s. Weget on well with o ther people, but we ca l i/wI talk tu them about what malleI'S

There is an impo/lam work to be written about the relationship between acaand local intellectuals, be these traditional, organic, episodic or whatever.

What subject positions then did Balinese in the village where I worked ascribeo me, and I to thcm? And what were the attendant practices? I shall deal mainly

trip. At that time Balinese villagers had three kinds of ways of

EUROPIEA t996, II- I

.. ... III ... III IIIIiII III

dealing with outsiders, depending upon whether they were traders (to be dealtwith according to accepted language and etiquette of the market), bureaucrats (tobe deferred to and, if possible, persuaded to go away or at least placated intodirecting their allention elsewhere) or other visiling Balinese (to be Ireated initially according to caste and supplemented by any ot her available knowledge) . Ifell roughly into Ihe second category. The mcans of getting rid of me was 10 put itabout that I was a spy sent to inves ti ga te the murders in 1965. In my attempt toescape lhis categorization, it became clear I had powerful contacts. This made medangero us. What do you say 10 such a person? It is best to avoid them altogether _not a good basis on which to do fieldwork. Fonnally my Landrover was availablefor important public needs, including taking people to hosp ital. Years laler I discovered the villagers considered this as my main value, one they were prepared tomatch with conditional toleration of my presence. What I did not realize unlil stilllater, when I staned to rethink ethnography in terms of practice, is thai Iherumour-mongers had a rar subtl er appreciation of what I was doing than I, thetrained expert, had .

Alongside this, to the far sma ller number of people with whom I regularly haddealings, 1 gradually became - I like to thin k - part-human . To these peop le , onekey subject position I occupied, and which lasted over two fieldtrips . was ofovergrown child to be educated into Balinese ways of doing things, behaving andspeaking. They became responsible to the vi JJ age for my not causing seriousabuse, disruption or pollution, no easy task in Bali at that time . Simultaneously,in accepting money in some form, the se people were also my emp loyees or cli ents, relationship s which they understood because both were common. Theproblem was - did I? Again , they had to discipline me into understanding whatwas required of me , then ensure I continued to do it. What s tand s out from myfirst fieldwork is how much time Balinese spent disciplining me.

On my second visit, I realize in re trospect that I tried to introduce a new k.indof relationship and so new practices. I tilink, again after the evenl, thaI I was allowed to do so because people thought I had learned enough self-discipline to besemi-safe ou t on my own, as it were. In having an open house , [ was to a degreeemulating Ilgajakollg, when a wealthy villager invites others to work for him andreciprocates by showe ring them with food, drink, cigarettes (later cigars and evenpipe tobacco) and gifts . It is a relati ons hip marked by much obligatOly joJJiness.It does not la st. It had at least the vi rtue of in c lud ing rupture, which is important.Anthropologists go away : the people you work with know you arc going to goaway. They arc stllck there. Going back every year has made malters very diiferent.There is now a degree of co ntinuity and with it I have , tan ed to engage in

EUROPIEA 1996 , 1I-t4 25


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Mark Hoban ' h l t O ~ f ' ( J " h v as a P r l l e t l ' c ~ or I l Unimportance of Pe fl ,?,ttilts

easily recognizable practices with ain different capacities.

Thinking back on it, during the first fieldtrip I saw the villagcrs in sharplyr6les. First and foremost, they were a resource, a source par excel :

of information. My purpose in being in Bali was to extracl thai informaIf I couM get inside their heads and empty out the contents, I would have

and would be a profess ional success. My subject position was inme to be interrogator, at times inquisitor - or so I my practice was geared to extracting information, which I took to be

internal state. I.'ike other ethnographers, I mustered a ragbag repertoire of specialized activio achieve this. They included interviewing, attending meetings, listening,

discussing, above all misunderstanding; measuring, counting, enu, listing, recordi ng, abovc all writing notes , sketches, lists, ofcompulsively, usually unthinkingly; attending, eliciting, emoting, confidingthe purposes of being confided in), being taught, above all judging. I often

should have listened ; and, especiaJly during the early stages, should observe when I would not have understood what I saw anyway. Iinvariably judged prematurely and regretted itlatcr. ..ll this pales beside th e central and crucial practice: mi sunderstanding. For a

tart it is far from clear what it is to understand someone. And is what we undertand a person or their acti ons? Do we, through the mystic can-opener of inter ..ubjectivity, get direct psychic access to other minds? And how does this work

barely command the language? Or do we have to infer intentionality froms Iraces in what people said and did? And, if we resolved these problems, we rould still have to work out on what grounds we may assume others to understand

in terms we can understand without bcgging the qucstion. Anthropolis nothing if not a ma ss ive monument to human misunderstanding .

All this required discipline: attending endless rites , going through the etiquetteork', asking well-formed questions in Balinese, lookingto hear and troubled when they did not ,

when thcy expected me to. I learned to do what I thoughtto be what I thought they expected.

There were other contradictory images. I imagined Balinese at moments as IIIThis raises 4ucstions about what is the object, or subjcc t. of anthropological inquiry. )( is an issue

have dodged for the moM pan becau se the answers are banal , incohere!)1 or fnghtening. II1II6 EUROPJEA 1996, 11 - 1 I I

very stupid (they did not answer my questions as I wantcd th em to - I still havedifficulty with this one); as clevcr but unwilling to confide; as people from a different planet." Part of this though is retrospective from subsequent fieldwork. AIthe time, I remember seeing the villagers as dangerously unknown and exotic tobe handled with as much care as th ey themselves handled the spitting cobras,which were everywhere. My key practice then can be summarized as plaeatoryextractive . I cajoled and, as my bodyguard was a professional hit-man, sometimesbullied thcm for informati on, a ll the while stockpiling what I fondly imagined tobe the facts. In shon, I wheedled. After about a year I began to rea lize the futilityof this, but it was not until my second trip that I managed more or less complelclyto give on the idea of ethnography as extraction.

Over some i.ssues, different groups of villagers and I devcloped shared concerns. I was a source of amusement, mostly due to my incompctence, ineptitude(for example, one day I got 23 blisters on my hands froro agricultural hocing) andfor mistakes." The other day r attended the 50th. anniversary of Independence inthe village and it was clear that after twenty-five years most of the senior villagers are still not quite sure what to say to me. So mu ch for integration. I was, byagreement, a source of help and of cash to individuals and public causes. Theywere however clearly aware of the responsibility for my welfare wh ,ch was thruslon them by my prese nce. They havc neve r collectively , but occasionally individually, asked to make use of my official connections in Bali. By contrast, th emore senior government offi cials in BaJi seemed to find my presence when I wasspotted lent a certain cachet to their visits. My first ficldwork can perhaps besummed up as me ex tracting, them tolerating me and trying to limit the damage Jmight cause. To my shame, it was only after rethinking fieldwork as a practice forthis paper that I realized how important it was for th e villagers at such a sensitivetime to minimize the injury I could cause them.

Ethnographic practicesEthnography, I suggest, involves discipline. Ethnographers disc ipline the peoplethey work with, the se in turn have as a matter of urgency to discipline the ethnog

n The longer r am there , the more often this lhought pass es my mind. But then it do cs about mycolleagues and same ti mcs my sci f. B The most mortifying wa s when I had been treating a womall for tropical ulcers who was married to one of two identica l twins in the village. When I bumped into the mher twin and asked how his wife was, he repli ed: Not bad, considering she's dead . For a moment, to everyone's greal amuse ment , I thought J had killed her.

EUROPIEA 1996, 11 -1 21


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--

Mark/lobclr,

to self-disciplinc thcmselves greatly in dcaling with .c; and I have Icarncd to discipline mysclf wit h thcm. This makes ethnography ar, but not unique, congeries of practiccs. What I had not apprcciated at the

was the degree of mutual disciplining and se lf-disc iplining.The discipline was not howcvcr to those ends with which wc are familiar from iscipline and flunish. Those bear marc closely on examination (i ncluding, for

, thc cxaminat ion of your work as a research student). " The vi ll age rs ..erc concerned by contras t, I think , with discipline to quite other ends. I needed

contained, first from making a nuisance of myself: later, and more serious ly,om inquiries which threatened the ir accommodations with their own dislocations. ..

point of view, travel literature, ethno graphy, Ncw Age movements a ndvoguc for Asian religions are all ways we have of accorrUllOdating ours, who

'ours' is here.) My disciplining Ba linese was to make them tractable to a dif ..rent set of practices: investigation. Havin g e ngagcd in it for man y ycars, I thinkjusti fied in desc ribing it as an authoritarian scarch for aobserved or attested ..[a) sovereign power arrogating to itself th e ri ght to ..tab lish the truth by a number of regulated techniques ( 1977: 225). To read theof Fir th (1971) or Nadel (1951), or more narrowly th at infamous sc ries, Notes

queries 011 unthropology, culminating wi th Ellen (1 984 ) , you might be led tothat someone had thought Ihrough teChniques to address the difficult quesof foren sic inquiry, textu al cri ticis m, modes of eva lu ating hearsay, justified

from contradic tory sources, forms of non-fallaciou s reasoning which an ..hnog rapher, like a magistrate, requires as a mailer of daily rOUline. You wouldSome ethnographers arc of course superb inquirers, as is clear

their work. The 'regu lated' techniques are consigned though to courses called i i imethods', relega ted in Illy institution to be taught by casual hiredour. On the othe r hand, what a course on methodo log y that co nfronted

hnog raphy's triple dislocations and a rticu lat io ns, and then regulated them all,ld look like is the s tuff ni ghtmares are mad e of.There are other consequences of treating ethnography as a set of activities whi ch

part of a larger complex, designed to achieve more or less c learly stated goals. ..makes peop le easily dispensible as a means to an end. What concerns me hereThat mindless disL"iplinc, desgned 11.1 lOrn agenls into the instrument s of their 0''''0 self-subjec .... required an altogether dinercm rtgimc of power, the markel, and managcrialism as the mean silllcrprcling and imposing ils writ. Tha tcherism and Rcaganism have becn the 1l1l'"tlns to roundi ngleral and unreliable agents like academics by ever mOre rococo diSCiplinary m c a n ~ . such a -,crricicncy ami productivity report s. ..-

EUROPAlA 1996.11 1

(;tlmo!!, I (JI,hv CIS a Prac,ice. or the Ullimponal1ce of PCl f!,lIins

is the kinds of practice implic it in those activi ties. During my first fie ld wo rk . th epractices which I imagined I was engaged in were loca ti ve (f inding th e bcst informants, i.c. those who confi rmed my preconceptions) and ex pl oitati ve (l'he parallel swith mining and with Dutch colonial economic interests is not coi nciden ta l).During my second fieldtrip, I was mucl1 more concerned with textualizi ng ." 1 tookit that th ere was implicit knowledge whi ch Balinese presupposed in order to gc tthrough the day, make choices and think retrospec tively about those choices . Iimagined, I think , that k.nowledge as textual, in the sense of it being Inscribed . ifnot physically. at leas t in peoplcs' memories. So I wrote endless notes, made hundreds o f hours of cassette recordings (the arriva l of the cassette recorder changedethnographic practice) and promptly textualizcd the recordings by paying Balineseto tran scribe them. So 1 turn ed c o n v e r ~ a L i o n s int o texts in the narrow sense . Sincethen I hope I have complica ted my practiccs somewhat to diversify from textual izing. but ram sti ll too close to them to judge what it is I am doing now,

In more general terms, during my first fieldwork I natural ized Bali and Bali nese . There was a so rt of ob jec t, soc iety, comp ri sing social insilLHlons. structure ,dyads, networks, sy mbols, be liefs etc. whic h had a sort of objective existence.Balinese talking and do in g things were evidence of the se objective structuresinstantiated. I am less interested in whether the conception of soc iety p r ~ c e d e d the practices of studying or vice versa than I am in how I objectified Balincsepractices, while at the samc time subjectified what they took to be objectivc, likctreating techniques for dealing with the non-manifest as 'ritual'.

I look back on that time with growing horror. Unfortunately , whi le my switeilto inquiring into Balincse philosophical ideas was an improvement in that I nolonger sought objective st ru clUres, in textualizing - and carefu lly eonte ' tualizing- those id eas I desituated them. (Constructivism is of course the reverse processof subjectivizing eve rything which leads, by yet another reduction, to biographyas the essence, the true voice, of the native, free of colonial hege mony, subalternism and ethnographic writing itself.) I retumed to Bali explicitly rejecting theid ea of abstract coherent patterns of knowledge independent of situated practice.However, my method of inquiry detached Balinesc intellectual practices more

Some of the staple acti vities of tcxtualizing seem to be: reading. rc.reading. rcOccl ing. savou nng,empathizi ng vicariou!ily. There follows the more familiar stages of writing. although I think Ihi5familiar ground needs criti ca l reexamination. In sum, lc:-:.[unli7.ing seems to mc a rather solitary. evenonanistic. acti vity. It is in many ways the antithes isof dialogue. which academic:; n:a ttach to tcx[ua lizing. but which seems to me pot entially to run the opposite way .

1('EUROPAlA 1996. It -I


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r'UUlQSfOI''',' a.f a Pracria or til., Ullillll'Of'Il.mC' of Pt'lJl4uins

necessary from the situations in whi ch they took place." Now I am not alonese objectify themse lves in different ways on different occasions

various practices. Where I went wrong is in failing fully to link my acto the articulations in which Balinese were engaged in so doing.

For the world at large though it is the objectifying practices of anthropologistshave the most serious consequences. Balinesc now learn

they are really like at university by reading Geertz's P e r s o / ~ lime, lind con ill Bali, an object lesson in textual objectification by reducing persons to

to calendars and action to etiquette, There are su btler forms of obpractice, Two recent ones are singularly effic ient in that they in volvc,

lly, self-discipline. One is development planning. Balinese are urged bygovernment advertising, civ il responsibility campaigns etc. to turn them

into se lf-regulating recipients of development. The other is television.levision-viewing practices arc means by which Balinese turn themselves if notalways into citizens of Indonesi a, at least into consumers, participants in new

and adopt new subject positions in the course of so doing. In the same, as it were, they ar e caught up in their ow n subjeetifieation as cuddly

filmed, photographed, financed , flown all over the world, fiitledand fucked by.

to do now?conclusion would be out of place - a Requiem perhaps less so. The possibilityanthropology has rested upon seve ral imp lic it , interlocked relati ons of under

g. These are the e thnographe r's understanding of the actions of the peopleworks with; their understanding of one another; their understandin g of the

understanding of one another. Ethnography isconfi ned to the first of the se possibilities, where understanding becomes a

of power far more frightening than mere knowledge. It e1aims direct accessminds, an access which is not reciprocal. Ethnographic writing is the bu si

of enabling distant others, who have no re lationship with the people in questo understand them vicariously, by proxy, requiring no more effort than simply

written page." [n their practice most anthropologists pay so litt le

There is. of course, no authen tic moment or experience which acts as a Y


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Mark Hol)ol"/ t."tlmogmpl/v { / . ~ () Prauir".l.'. or l he Unimlwr/(llIrc oj P ( ' J I / i l l s

stay when in Bali , to say I understand him or that he unde rstands mc, s e c m ~ a Bourdieu, Pierre1977 Ollilille of a I h e O l ~ \ ' qlpJ"(I clice. Ri chard t\'icc (lrans.). Cambridge, Cambridge UniversiLYPress.singularl y vacuo us statement. What wo uld it imply? To say lhat I kn ow such-and 1990 'lYle IO!4 ic oJflroclice, Richnrd Nice (trans.), Cambridge, Po li y Press.suc h about him and he knows u c h ~ a n d ~ s u c h about me hardly se ts the pulse Ca rneiro, Robert L.rac in g. To say that we recognize each other as persons, as nOll-unitary and : 995 'God7.illa meels New Age nnlhropology: faci ng the post-modernist cha llenge to


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- - - - - - - - - - - ~ ~ ~ - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ~ \ ~ ' ~a ~ r ; k wr FrlulfJxmphy as a Pmc(iCt', or t ~ {jllillllwrU/IIC(' o fPelHwins

Di.w:iplill c lIudpUI/;sh: ,11(, birrh offill! prisoJl. /\. M. Sheridan (lra11:-:.). llannondswonh. Penguin."The subjcct and power", Atterword 10 Ilubcrt I.. Drcyrus & Paul Rabi now. Mi cht:lFOl/umlf: beyond Sll"lu:wl" lI fism and IU!mlCllc li Jics, Br ighton. a r v c ~ t c r . The history o!Jexuolity. Vol. I. Robert Hurley ((rans.). IJarmondswoflh. Penguin.The use of plewmre, Volume 2 of /iilwry of Sl'X/WUty. Robert Hurley (lra ns.), Il ilrmond swort h, Vik ing."Ni c!zs l:hc . Freud, Marx M , in T r a l 1 . ~ f ( ) r m i n 'h e II(:rmcf!(wlir CO I l/ext: from M f'l lSChc toNanc),. Gayle L. Ormi ston & Alan D. Schrih (eds.). pr. 59-67. A lbany. N.Y .. l' c w Yo rk IIlal e University Press.

r tz, Clifford"Thick descripLon: towards an inlcrprc livc theory of cu lture", in Tile il1lerprclcllioll f . ~ r wltllre.I", PI'. 3-30, New York. Basic Books . ..Works (jJullil' l!s: the lIllllil'upologist as aUlhor, Cambridge, Po li ty Press.Pamela C hurch & Gihsun. Ro ma (eds.)

Dirty looks: women, pornography.p oHler, Lon do n, British Fi lm i n:o; titute .dm an, N elsonLlIlIgl/{jges a/art , Indianapolis , r3obbs':Vlcrr ili.

ll, S tnarl."On l l l o d e r n i s m


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Mrll'K Hobart

Rkoeur, Paul197J "TIle model or the {ext; meaningful

hobart - ethnography as a practice

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