thinking without a banister

Review dialogue

Thinking without a banister

Jackson, Michael D. The wherewithal of life:ethics, migration, and the question ofwell-being. 264 pp., bibliogr. Berkeley: Univ.of California Press, 2013. £24.95 (paper)

Review (Vincent Crapanzano)The wherewithal of life recounts the lives of three

migrants: Emmanuel Muamila, from Uganda to

Copenhagen; Roberto Franco, from Mexico, by way of

field labour in California, to Harvard; and Ibrahim

Ouédraogo, from Burkina Faso to Amsterdam. Jackson

bases his accounts on conversations he had with each

of them over a few days. Inserted in each life story –

as well as in his preamble and postscript – are

Jackson’s reflections on the ethical, but not just the

ethical, implications of the migrant’s experience –

more generally, on the human condition. His

reflections are complemented and at times

contradicted by the migrants’ self- and world-

understanding, creating, thereby, a conversational

space that invites the reader’s participation. Jackson’s

book is a reflective – more accurately, a co-reflective –

ethnography. It can also be read as an essay in moral

philosophy, one that is contextually rooted in actual

experience rather than the conundrums moral

philosophers like to invent, most often without

considering the implications of their own ethnocentric

invention.

For years Jackson has made a plea for an

existential anthropology that focuses on the individual

in situation. In The wherewithal, he postulates

movement as an ontological dimension of human life,

exemplified by the migrant, and in tension with a

rootedness in a home, a homeland, a place of origin.

His interlocutors suffer the tension between the two.

He focuses on the dynamics of intersubjectivity rather

than on the mechanics of those social sciences that,

emphasizing political-economic arrangements, reduce

the individual to a cipher that/who moves through a

slotted life-course. This reduction may well encourage

those maudlin, self-berating prefaces by ethnographers

who stress their inability to convey the texture of the

lives of the people they have studied. It is as if the

confession compensates for depersonalization. Of

course, the reverse is equally true. One can

sentimentalize the people one studies. Jackson does

not deny the effect of social, political, and economic

forces on the individual. They are the primary sources

of the contradictions – the contingencies – of social

life that demand remediation and, as such, raise not

just ethical dilemmas but, as Jackson’s conversational

partners remind him, questions of survival.

Demoralized to the point of suicide by years of

being refused jobs for which he was qualified,

Emmanuel finds himself caught between two courses

of action – remaining desolate in Denmark with his

wife and daughter or returning to Uganda and

suffering separation from them – each of which would

‘kill’ him, as he put it. (In the end he does find a job.)

Jackson observes that, ‘though Emmanuel’s actions

showed fortitude, courage, and generosity, he did not

reify these actions as virtues’. Emmanuel ascribed no

moral value to anything he did. He simply did his best

to survive and, in turn, to help others, Jackson asserts,

surprisingly (p. 77). How does he know? Is there not a

moral dimension, however attenuated, in any act

involving human beings? Interior experience always

exceeds exterior expression. Incisively, Jackson does

ask if we are entitled to retrieve the wherewithal of

life, when it has been withheld from us, even if by

doing so, we infringe custom or break the law (p. 79).

Although his interlocutors may not describe it this

way, they are faced with this dilemma, if a dilemma it

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Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 20, 774-781© Royal Anthropological Institute 2014

is, as they have little or no choice. No choice always

conjures doubt and evokes rationalization.

Jackson’s migrants do not fit the prevailing

stereotypes. All three are educated, married to citizens

of the country to which they immigrated (and not for

the purpose of gaining citizenship), highly articulate,

and reflective. They relate, despite Jackson’s own

evaluation of home, to their homeland with

significant differences in emotional intensity,

attachment, engagement, and nostalgia. All of them

suffered in their countries of origin the pains of

poverty, dislocation, étrangeté, prejudice, bullying,

ruthless exploitation, hunger (severe famine in

Ibrahim’s case), betrayal, cruelty, idiosyncratic

perversions (as when Emmanuel was forced into

near-incestuous relations with his sister by an aunt

who was their caretaker), and bouts of hopelessness

and depression. Roberto is the only one who crossed a

border illegally. Indeed, his account, punctuated by his

Pentecostalism, is consuming. Ibrahim is most prone

to discuss critically differences between Europe and

his homeland. Complaining about the difficulty of

crossing borders in Europe, he says angrily, ‘It’s papers

that count, not words. No one trusts anything you say.

You can’t talk to people directly. You’ve got to have

papers. Even if the papers are false, they will count

more than words. There is no more truth in words’

(p. 195).

Though sensitive to the way each of his

interlocutors approaches his past and present

circumstances, Jackson addresses them

straightforwardly, often asking how they view those

circumstances, producing thereby a reflective turn that

resists the objectification that is inherent in any

discussion in which individuals exemplify a particular

stance and, as such, figure rhetorically in a

conversation that by-passes them. Giving them voice,

as controlled as it is by the ethnographer, fosters the

illusion of freeing that ethnographer from

representational responsibility as he or she refigures

the individual in a new discourse. There is nothing

particularly new in this dilemma except for the

uncomfortable fact that Jackson uses his

conversational partners as a source for ethical

consideration that cannot be undergirded by scientific

pretence. I am not, however, questioning the sincerity,

indeed the importance, of his project. Discussions of

ethics and morality always loop over onto themselves.

Despite deontological rigidities, ethical and moral

considerations are always tentative, fragile, and

apologetic, if only because they attempt to give order

to a ‘space’ that hovers between the ideal and the real,

the presumptive and the contingent, the optative and

the indicative, scepticism, irony, and commitment.

This is especially true in those discussions, like

Jackson’s, that favour the particular over the

normative. He advocates what I would call an ethics of

immediate response – one that rests, so it seems, on

an unreflected sense of rightness and the good. It

precedes normative, indeed abstract, considerations.

Jackson cites Ricoeur’s ethics of living well, based on

phronesis – on the practical. He refers without critical

elaboration to Levinas’s presumption of ethical

responsibility that is provoked by a face-à-face

confrontation with the other. It is, like Hegel’s

master-slave dialectic, an allegory – an origin story

that bears scant relationship to the lived (empirical)

experience that is saturated by language, convention,

and the judgemental gaze of real or phantasmatic

witnesses. It is rhetorical, presuming, in my view, an

altogether unsubstantiated sense of a righteous

response to the vulnerability of the lone other. This is,

of course, belied by the inhuman confrontations that

Jackson’s interlocutors suffered and by Jackson’s own

experiences in strife-torn Sierra Leone.

Although there is a renewed interest in the

proto-ethical and culturally and linguistically

unmediated experience, the fact remains that we are

born into a linguistically and culturally endorsed

world, the constraints of which may well produce so

intense a longing for liberation that we postulate

escape in the pre-reflective. This can easily lead to a

sentimentalized, indeed an evasive, ethics that

wittingly or unwittingly condones moralism.

Fortunately, Jackson is too sophisticated to fall into

this trap. He situates himself ironically, oscillating

between two ontological styles: the allegorical, in

which human beings are exiled from truth, and the

romantic, which assumes the world to be coherent and

comprehensible (p. 198).

Traditional anthropologists are likely to criticize

Jackson’s life-histories for not describing in sufficient

detail the migrant’s cultural background and relating

that background to each of the migrant’s responses to

his emigration. After all, I can hear them ask, what can

we learn about someone’s life-story in a couple of

conversations? But, though I wished at times that

Jackson had added more cultural details, I reminded

myself that Jackson was writing neither an

ethnography nor conventional life-histories. Rather, he

was reflecting on conversations in which he was a

co-participant with people whose life circumstances

could not be easily reduced to mechanical

socio-cultural explanation. Can anyone’s life be?

Jackson has great faith in the power of stories.

Whatever other value they may have, he also sees them

as ‘coping strategies’, which are shared across the

cultures of the world, which permit us to share the

ordeals we/they have suffered. ‘Not only does

confession free us from thralldom to what has been

repressed; it clears the way for a fresh start in

relationships that have been lived under a cloud of

ambiguity and shame’ (p. 45). Comedy, he argues,

gives us a sense of agency. By identifying with a

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depersonalized other – a stock character – ‘we separate

ourselves from the hapless victim and recover our

power to determine events as retrospective

commentators on the human condition’ (p. 39).

Comedy is not the opposite of tragedy ‘as much as a

strategy for countermanding the tragic with distance

and indirection’ (p. 39). But does it work? Does it

restore agency? Does the story faciltate rebirth?

Perhaps some of the time, even most of the time, but

it can also entrap the storyteller in a paralysing

version of what was experienced, as I saw with the

Harkis (Algerians who sided with the French during

Algeria’s war of independence). Their individual

experiences were subsumed in a frozen – shared and

generalized – discourse that could only repeat and

with each repetition diminish whatever power it had

had. Liberation, rebirth, the restoration of agency,

coming to terms with the tragic, whether by

mourning or through the comic, always

resuscitates, as any dialectician knows, that from

which it essays to free itself. We are left at best

with resilience.

Author response(Michael Jackson)

Even though we have lost yardsticks by which

to measure, and rules under which to subsume

the particular, a being whose essence is a

beginning may have enough of origin within

himself to understand without preconceived

categories and to judge without the set of

customary rules which is morality.

Arendt 1994: 321

In Negative dialectics, Theodor Adorno prepares us for

a philosophy that no longer has the infinite at its

disposal, and must do without the consolation that the

truth cannot be lost (1973: 13, 34). This ‘changed

philosophy’, disenchanted with the ‘conceptual shells

that were to house the whole’ (1973: 3), insisting that no

concept can adequately cover, contain, exhaust, or

explain the wealth of lived experience, and declaring

that ‘we cannot say any more that the immutable is

truth, and that the mobile, transitory is appearance’

(1973: 361), was born in the shadows of Auschwitz.

There, the very concept of God collapsed in the face of

unspeakable suffering. In this ‘gray zone’ (Levi 1989:

36), hope died, moral norms lost their force, and

cultural codes were eclipsed by desperate struggles to

simply survive.

Though some might argue that the Holocaust has

no precedent in the history of man’s inhumanity to

man, examples come readily to my mind of human

life reduced to a state in which norms no longer hold

true – the plight of the Ik, the traumatic suffering of

millions of Africans torn from their homelands and

shipped into slavery, the catastrophic loss of lives and

livelihoods that indigenous peoples endured under

colonial regimes, and in our own time the

vita nuda of countless refugees from warfare and

want, living in limbo with little prospect of ever

returning home. In his compelling account of the

Harkis, who after Algeria’s war of independence

found themselves ‘like figures in Greek tragedy,

betraying (perhaps) and betrayed, abandoned,

ostracized, and exiled to an alien land where they

would remain strangers’, Vincent Crapanzano (2011: 6)

speaks of the individuals he came to know as both

confirming and denying our traditional modes of

understanding. He asks, ‘What is it to be apart in a

society’, suffering ‘a condition that is constantly

undermined by the reality of being among a people

who would prefer you were not there and never had

been there as they have to accept you or at least give

you a place that is yet a no place?’ (2011: 7). What

psychological and social price do the Harkis and their

progeny pay for electing to forget the past, retreating

into themselves and into silence (2011: 9)? What is ‘the

wound that never heals?’

In a celebrated essay, Edward Said speaks similarly

of exile as ‘the unhealable rift forced between a human

being and a native place, between the self and its true

home’ (1984: 159). This rift has both existential and

epistemological implications. Though anthropologists

have documented, with compassionate thoroughness,

the trauma of displacement, they have been less

successful in responding to Adorno’s call to rethink

the conceptual apparatus of academic life – the

substantive, supersensual terms like culture, religion,

ethnicity, identity, and morality that belie the mobility,

multiplicity, and mutability of lived experience,

particularly in extremis, when abstractions are the last

things on people’s minds. To what extent do such

abstractions, fetishized and made foundational for

academic discourse, reflect the intellectual’s settled

and complacent situation rather than the lifeworlds

that provide grist for the academic mill? How willing

are we to take our interpretative cues from those

whose lives we share in the course of fieldwork,

allowing their thoughts to guide the way we

think, and their feelings to influence what we feel? As

Crapanzano puts it, how can anthropologists reconcile

their intellectual perspectives with the

moral-existential perspectives of those they study –

perspectives that are ‘at times so disquieting as to be

nearly obliterated in our sheltering ourselves from

them in the discipline’s scientific goals’ (2011: 12)? Is it

not the proper task of thought to challenge the

concepts we have inadvertently ontologized, and from

the standpoint of lived experience question if not

actively subvert ‘all established criteria, values,

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measurements ... customs and rules of conduct we

treat of in morals and ethics’ (Arendt 1971: 434)?

If this is our task, then the thinker is naturally

aligned with those whose lifeworlds have been

devastated and whose languages have been lost, who

in the death camps demanded that God answer for

His absence and indifference, and who, in searching

for a life beyond the place where they were born,

experience little continuity between what once was

and what now is.

In this regard, one exemplary work deserves to be

cited. Ironically, it is by a philosopher, not an

anthropologist, though it concerns a people who have

been subject to anthropological study for more than a

hundred years.

Jonathan Lear’s Radical hope (2006) begins with

an arresting comment by the Crow Indian chief Plenty

Coups, in an interview with Frank Bird Lindeman in

the late 1920s, when Plenty Coups was nearing the end

of his life. Looking back on the era before the coming

of the whites, Plenty Coups laments the passing of the

buffalo, and the impossibility of other traditional

pursuits like war and horse stealing. ‘When the buffalo

went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground,

and they could not lift them up again. After this

nothing happened. There was little singing anywhere’

(Lindeman 1962: 311, cited in Lear 2006: 2). Lear’s

book is a systematic exploration of what Plenty Coups

meant by the phrase After this nothing happened – a

phrase that suggested time brought to a standstill,

hope abandoned, and unutterable sorrow. ‘Humans

are by nature cultural animals’, Lear writes; ‘we

necessarily inhabit a way of life that is expressed in a

culture. But our way of life – whatever it is – is

vulnerable in various ways. And we, as participants in

that way of life, thereby inherit a vulnerability’ (2006:

6). Lear goes on to say ‘that if our way of life

collapsed, things would cease to happen’, and he

claims that we, in fact, are living in a vulnerable time

‘of terrorist attacks, violent social upheavals, and even

natural catastrophes’, collectively experiencing grave

doubts about our future (2006: 7).

Lear’s implication is that while some people are

fortunate enough to live in times and in societies

where the conventional wisdom of the tribe – its core

values, customs, and cultural practices – is largely

taken for granted, many other people do not know

what it means to take the world for granted, as if

yesterday, today, and tomorrow lay along a guaranteed

continuum. There may be individuals, and perhaps

there have existed entire societies, where nothing

untoward ever calls the prevailing logos into question,

unless it is a personal tragedy – which, like a rite of

passage, is only a momentary hiatus in the continuity

of social existence. But for many peoples, including

the Crow, historical and natural calamities have

rendered even the most long-standing moral truths

redundant and irrelevant. The rift between before

and after is absolute. Though one may fantasize

recovering the past or reinventing tradition,

one faces a future that one simply does not know how

to negotiate.

During fieldwork on southeast Cape York in the

1990s, my wife Francine and I met an elderly Kuku

Yalangi man called Peter Fischer who had moved away

from the former mission settlement of Wujal Wujal to

create a clearing in the rainforest and plant a garden

on which to subsist. Peter’s biological father was a

part-Aboriginal man called Dick Fischer, the son of a

German immigrant, who mined tin for a while at a

place called China Camp. Peter never met his father

because when his mother became pregnant she was

sent away. When Peter was a very small boy, the police

came to his mother’s camp looking for ‘half-castes’. He

hid in the bush, but his friend and age-mate Oglevie

was caught and taken to the Mission Station at

Yarrabah, south of Cairns, where he died two months

later, Peter said, ‘of homesickness and a broken heart’.

As for Peter, his mother disappeared when he was 7,

leaving him in the care of his maternal grandmother.

My granny was very good to me. She looked

after me better than my own mother. When I

was starving, she fed me wild yams. She is

buried near here. That is why I came here to

live and to die. I have had this place in mind

all my life. I wanted to be close to her.

Peter made us mugs of tea, and we shared the food we

had brought with us, even though Peter’s garden

contained enough food to feed a small community.

Francine explained to Peter that we had visited the

falls on our way up. ‘Kijanka’, Peter said, using the bama

(Aboriginal) word for the locality (literally ‘moon

place’). ‘You have to be careful when you approach the

falls’, Peter warned. The falls had the power to draw a

person over the edge. He also mentioned a rock at the

top of the falls that could move to the bottom of the

falls of its own accord, and back to the top. But when

white miners began blasting with gelignite at China

Camp, they killed the stone, which now lies immobile

at the foot of the walls, bereft of life. ‘Same thing

happened at Daintree’, Peter said.

There was a stone. No matter how many times

bama rolled it to the bottom of the waterfall, it

would find its way back to the top. But you

know how pig-headed Europeans can be? Well,

some policemen wanted to roll the stone down

to the bottom. Bama said, ‘No, don’t touch it,

don’t go near it’. But they rolled it anyway.

After that it stayed there at the bottom, dead.

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I thought: when stone was in the hands of bama, it

was not stone, it was an enchanted thing, animated by

the respect it was given, the songs that perennially

brought it back to life. When it was taken from them, it

lost its meaning and died, like the alienated land itself,

now untended and untravelled. And as one’s connection

with the ancestral world atrophied, so time stood still as

if turned to stone (Jackson 2012: 82-3).

If I am moved to cite these examples of what it

means for a way of life to come to an end, what it

means for one’s innermost conception of a life worth

living to suffer eclipse, and for time no longer to

unfold – since ancestral time cannot be recapitulated

and future time does not yet exist – it is because they

offer us glimpses into lifeworlds in which academic

notions of culture, custom, continuity, and identity

have minimal purchase. They also help me address the

issues that Crapanzano raises in his review of The

wherewithal of life.

I am not claiming, as he suggests, that phenomena

we conventionally call ‘moral’ and ‘cultural’ are never

present in human thought and action. Rather, my

argument is that morality, culture, and our capacity to

recount experiences in coherent narrative form are

often compromised or radically renegotiated,

particularly in critical situations, and that the

inadequacy of such foundational concepts obliges us

to come up with new vocabularies, concepts, and

modes of writing if we are to do justice to life as lived.

Hence my preference for the more neutral and

descriptive term ‘existential’ to cover the complicated

and irreducible field of human social existence. If the

migrant stories I have published in The wherewithal of

life have any relevance to our understanding of the

human condition, it is in their power to remind us

what it is like for a person to become unhinged from

the traditional cultural and moral frameworks that he

or she internalized from early childhood and once

orientated him or her as an adult. What are the

psychological repercussions of the disintegration of

cultural and moral orders, when the tried and tested

truths of the world into which one was born become

residues, remnants, and relics that may have

commemorative value and provide consolation, but

are insufficient for creating viable economic, political,

and collective futures?

Rather than write another lament for the passing

of traditional societies, it may be more edifying to

bring the phenomenon of culture loss from the

shadows of colonial history into the light of our

contemporary day, asking whether and in what way the

gap between reified concepts and lived experience is, in

some measure, an unavoidable fact of all human

experience.

When researching The wherewithal of life, I was

frequently reminded of the Danish ethicist Knud

Løgstrup’s notion of the ‘sovereign expressions of life’

– spontaneous acts of courage, compassion, or

understanding that ‘precede the will’ and are only

partially motivated by moral principles or reflective of

social norms (2007: 68). In as much as ethical actions

are not necessarily prescribed by moral rules (though

they may be cited after the fact as exemplifying moral

principles), they lie outside natural causation and

cultural determination. Accordingly, while morality is

prescriptive, ethics is paranomic and sometimes

antinomian – which explains why I found arresting

resonances between my early research on Kuranko

storytelling sessions, in which people are licensed and

inspired to suspend conventional moral and legal

understandings, and my more recent work on migrant

stories. Both sets of stories – the first allegedly

make-believe and the second biographically true –

involve displacements. Kuranko tilei (fables, folk-tales,

fictions) are framed as occurring outside ordinary

time and space (wo le yan be la – far-off and long

ago); they play with reality, and entertain possibilities

that lie beyond convention and custom (Jackson 1982).

Like migrant stories, tilei typically begin with a

dilemma or disturbance in the ideal order of moral

relations: three sons of a chief, all born at the same

time and on the same day, all claim the right to

succeed their father; an elder brother maltreats his

younger brother; a senior co-wife exploits a younger

co-wife; a man betrays the trust of his closest friend; a

chief abuses his power or imposes an unjust law on

his people; a husband neglects his wife; a love affair

jeopardizes a marriage. The ethical quandary lies in

how to redress a situation in which there is

considerable moral ambiguity, for there are always two

sides to every story and several possible ways of

restoring order, or seeing that justice is done. That is

to say, ethical dilemmas are never resolved by simply

laying down the law, invoking a moral principle that

covers every situation, or passing a judgment; the

dilemmas require collective discussion, in which people

attempt to come up with the best solution possible,

given the complex circumstances, even though it is

understood that any solution may make matters

worse, and that no one is ever in a position to know

the repercussions of his or her actions. By not seeking

consensus, and by suspending dogmatic patterns of

thinking, Kuranko storytelling creates ethical

ambiguity and inspires listeners to think outside the

box. Accordingly, virtue is less a matter of achieving or

exemplifying goodness than a relative question of

doing the best one can, given the limits of any

situation and considering the abilities and resources

one possesses. There are clear connections here

between, on the one hand, the discursive and

imaginative strategies that emerge in both migrant

biographies and traditional folktales, and, on the other

hand, James Faubion’s notion of paranomics (beside

or parallel to the law) – a term that suggests that

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ethical praxis is a matter not of adjusting to or

conforming to moral, legal, or customary formations

but of bending rules or getting around them without

necessarily breaking them (Faubion 2006: 205). Virtue

is thus a matter of virtuosity – skill in overcoming

difficulties and dilemmas. In any story, or any

individual life, there are elements that are shared by

many others – a common cluster of moral values,

normative assumptions, and conventional notions

about the make-up of the world. But the history of

every society and the biography of every individual

also involves, to a greater or lesser degree, critical

moments in which the taken-for-granted order of

things is interrupted, received wisdom is called into

doubt, and people dissent from the majority view.

Preconceived concepts like culture, morality,

causation, continuity, and identity may survive such

crises, but as explanations of how an individual or a

society endures they may prove clichéd or superficial.

The challenge for anthropology remains the same

challenge that Nietzsche issued to philosophy in Thus

spake Zarathustra: ‘O my brothers, is not everything in

flux now? Have not all railings and bridges fallen into

the water?’ (1954: 313). In her phrase ‘thinking without

a banister’ (denken ohne Geländer), Hannah Arendt

urges us to take up Nietzsche’s call to break our habit

of seeking a transcendent grounding in supersensual

categories of thought, or, even worse, treating such

forms of thought as if they were forms of life, and to

become more attentive to what others say and do

when at the limits of reason, the limits of language,

and the limits of their endurance.

Reviewer responseThere can be no particularities without generalities,

just as there can be no generalities without

particularities. Most of the time, we (at least I) live in

a world that lies between them. The particular and

general, both as empty categories and in terms of what

they reference, come to the fore whenever life is

troubled by the unexpected: a surprising question, a

sudden challenge, an unanticipated contingency, an

unforeseen transgression, or a breakdown in

Heidegger’s sense. It is at these times that the

particular and the general, taken singularly, become

rhetorical, justifying all manner of actions, attitudes,

and policies. In their interaction, they limit, however

poorly, rhetorical promiscuity, runaway

rationalizations, and crafty justifications. This is why I

am generally suspicious of the postulation of an ethics

based on unreflected immediacy. As far as I know

(and I am no expert in ethics), such ethics are based,

if implicitly, on the (Platonic) assumption that no

man or woman will knowingly do what is not good.

Our realism, however, teaches us otherwise. This is not

to deny the spontaneous acts of goodness. I have

experienced them, as I have also witnessed impulsive

acts of evil. But occasions cannot justify

generalization. Even our most impromptu thoughts

and actions are fashioned by the moralized world(s) in

which we find ourselves and which we come to

understand, with whatever ambivalence, through

reflection, vocabulary, and models of appropriate

behaviour. These so saturate us that even what we

consider to be immediate responses to surrounding

circumstances are not immune to them. Reflections

on those responses are articulated, evaluated, and

rationalized in normative terms. That is my

point.

I remember the moralistic response to Colin

Turnbull’s The mountain people (1972). Rather than

consider the horrors in a society that had collapsed,

many of his critics turned on Turnbull himself, as

exploiting misery. It was easier that way. When my

book on white South Africans (Crapanzano 1985) was

published, the South African press focused on

discovering where I had done my research rather than

on what I was describing. I would like to say that

when a dominee in the Colored Branch of the Dutch

Reformed Church (an apartheid church) pointed out

this deflection, his words were heard, but of course

they were not. (He was a liberal Afrikaner who had

elected to minister to the Coloreds.) On my way to a

lecture at Harvard on my South African research, one

well-known anthropologist questioned the ethics of

my decision to do research on ‘whites’ there, even after

I suggested that it was about time that anthropologists

studied dominant populations, however morally

egregious we find them. He acted as if I was polluting

myself and spreading contagion. Anthropologists are

certainly not immune to moralistic deflections.

Indeed, I would argue that we should cut through the

moralism that has inevitably insinuated itself into our

research – what we choose and refuse to report – and

its evaluation.

A few years ago, I was teaching a graduate seminar

in which I said that witnessing acts of violence, of

murder even, are not necessarily traumatic. My

students, who, until then, were not particularly

outspoken, were outraged. How I could I say such a

thing? I was an immoralist. It was only when a visiting

Afghan student said that she agreed with me that the

class calmed down and began to consider the way

trauma is moralized and treated thereby. The Afghan

student had the clout to be taken seriously. Trauma, its

attribution at least, can become a marker of rectitude

and goodness – of moral sensitivity.

I share Jackson’s plea that we ‘become more

attentive to what others say and do when at the limits

of reason, the limits of language, and the limits of

their endurance’ and that we carefully consider the

effects of treating ‘a transcendent grounding in

supersensual categories of thought’ on the

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anthropologist’s écoute. Theory can serve not only

understanding but also distancing from the

immediacy of experience (as do the story and the

adage, according to Jackson). In a recent article on the

relations between anthropology and philosophy,

Jackson (2014: 28) goes so far as to construe

philosophy not as a method for forming concepts, but

as a distancing strategy. I fear that, taken seriously,

Nietzsche’s wilfully scandalous rhetoric can encourage

the prevailing anti-intellectualism. We are caught in

the midst. That, I believe, is both a social and an

existential fact.

My experiences among the Harkis and with

patients in psychiatric hospitals have led me to

question the release – the distancing and modelling –

that stories are said to afford. Silence can at times be

as ‘therapeutic’ as storytelling. We anthropologists

have to respect the discretionary economics of the

societies we study. Following up on an ancillary

comment made by one of the reviewers of The Harkis:

the wound that never heals (Crapanzano 2011), my

editor David Brent asked whether I had so emphasized

the negative effects of the Harkis’ response to their

betrayal and abandonment by the French that I had

lost sight of those who went on to lead successful

lives. Without reflecting, I answered that I suppose I

had, given my pessimistic bent. I realized that I had

not acknowledged the resilience of the human

response even in the direst circumstances. There were

certainly Harkis and their children who were able to

overcome the real and psychological wounds they

suffered, despite the fact that those wounds, as I saw

it, could never really be healed. Pain, dislocation,

bouts of depression, and – how to put it? – the

inevitable un-understanding that accompanies those

moments when we have to question our destiny

continue to haunt them. Certainly, Emmanuel,

Roberto, and Ibrahim showed great resilience.

Thinking of the millions of refugees, the immiserated,

and the victims of torture and war, I have to remind

myself that attributions of resilience can also

rationalize cruelty and ease the conscience of those

who find themselves helpless before the enormity of

that cruelty.

But enough. I am falling away from The

wherewithal of life and Jackson’s sensitive response to

my review. I want to conclude these reflections with a

story that has become a personal allegory for me.

Orestes, a patient in the mental hospital where I

worked as a lab assistant one summer in college,

helped out at the morgue which was next to the

laboratory. Orestes very rarely said anything. All

anyone knew about him was that he had worked in a

hippodrome before he was hospitalized more than

twenty-five years earlier. With the tips he received

from undertakers for helping them load the dead into

their hearses, Orestes would go to a local ice cream

parlour and order three enormous, thick milkshakes

called Awful Awfuls in order to get a fourth one free. I

never managed to finish one of them. Each morning

when he had finished work, Orestes would come into

the lab and write with a yellow pencil on a couple of

pages of a yellow legal pad, which he stored in an old

filing cabinet. There were hundreds of pads. We

called them Orestes’ diary, though, out of discretion,

none of us had ever looked at them, that is, until he

died that summer. I was asked to read them, as

difficult as it would be to read yellow on yellow. We

were all curious. What had he been writing all these

years? What I found were page after page of squiggly

lines, not a letter or word among them. What was

Orestes writing, if he was writing? I was confronted

with the wholly unknown – the unknowable – and

left with a story. Yes, there is power in the story. But

whose story is it? How can we speak of its effect? But

we do.

Author responseCrapanzano’s second set of remarks on The

wherewithal of life are compelling, both as personal

anecdotes and as philosophical insights. They make it

clear that we are both struggling, in our ethnographic

work, with the moral dilemmas and cultural conflicts

of people in harrowing situations, and that neither of

us has an investment in promulgating an academic

point of view that forgets or distances us from these

situations. I would nevertheless like to reiterate my

conviction that the world is largely mediated by

concepts and categories that we have internalized in

the course of growing up, and regard as natural.

Because we see the world through the lens of our

particular parentage, heritage, ethos, and language, we

find it difficult to think outside these parameters – to

adopt a view from elsewhere, or to take up a sceptical

attitude to the beliefs and values that we have come to

take for granted, as common sense or second nature.

However, most people’s life experience involves critical

moments when conventional wisdom does not make

sense, or when they doubt the truths to which they

have previously referred. When reality appears to

encompass more than our preconceived notions

allowed, and demands words, explanations, concepts,

we simply do not possess, we are thrown, and we

desperately seek to reconfirm old beliefs or find new

ones. Indeed, a human life may be understood best

not in terms of any conventional model of

enculturation or socialization whereby we acquire and

internalize a standardized worldview that comes to

completely govern our thinking and satisfy all our

emotional needs, but in terms of constant trial and

error – a process of experimentation, negotiation, and

improvisation in which received views are modified,

new understandings are born, old coping strategies are

Review dialogue780


jettisoned, and new ones are tested out. In many ways,

existential-phenomenological traditions are based on

precisely this view of experience as experimentation –

per being the common root, and meaning ‘to attempt’,

‘to venture’, ‘to try something out’. Sartre’s emphasis

on the situations in life when we are forced to go

beyond the tried and true and transcend the

circumstances that initially shaped us, Hannah

Arendt’s emphasis on natality and the unexpected

departures that take our lives in radically new

directions, and Husserl’s method for suspending or

setting aside our a priori notions as to what is

meaningful, causative, primary, good, or true, in either

the scientific or the religious senses of those words, in

order to explore more perspicaciously the way we

actually experience the world in which we live – all

share an emphasis on human life as a dynamic

relationship between being a creature and being a

creator.

Vincent Crapanzano Graduate Center, City

University of New York

Michael Jackson Harvard Divinity School

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