Short Abstract:
In writing ethnographic accounts, we are bound to attribute causal links between events and to attribute agency to collective entities. Yet, ethnographic evidence is constituted by experiences of communication that are grounded in indeterminacy and that remain ultimately underdetermined. In this plenary, we would like to explore how ethnographic doubt is written into the ethnographic narrative. In short, what does the ethnographer have to assume to make ethnography possible?
Long Abstract:
What are the conditions of possibility of ethnography? Anthropologists have to keep asking this question at regular intervals, as the answer depends on the basic cosmological assumptions that ground the broader scientific enterprise at any particular time, and these are constantly shifting. In the 1950s, Michael Polanyi stated that “we cannot comprehend a whole without seeing its parts, but we cannot see the parts without comprehending the whole.” We must agree with him that ethnographic observation involves an analytical drive that remains ever hypothetical. However, we now realize that behind the opposition that he sets up between seeing (supposedly a passive act) and comprehending (supposedly an analytical assumption) there is an infinite regression, because all parts are also wholes. In ethnography, in particular, we deal centrally with persons (live persons, dead persons and metapersons of all kinds). But, unlike Polanyi, we now know that “the bringing together of many persons is just like the bringing together of one”, as Marilyn Strathern warned us. There is no ultimate material reduction in ethnography; ethnographic evidence is based on experiences and on relations that are grounded in indeterminacy and that, because they involve emergence, remain ultimately underdetermined. The whole has properties that are greater than the sum of the parts but which interact with each of the parts in complex processes of entanglement. In this plenary, we ask once again: how can ethnography respond to the challenges both of determinacy and of emergence, of vagueness and of structure. Doubt and vagueness coexist with the essential need of all scientific accounts to provide narratives that, unlike our everyday endeavours, are both ordered and bound by the laws of logic.
Read the convenor's introduction here:
https://easaonline.org/downloads/conferences/easa2020/plenAintro.pdf
Accepted papers:
Session 1
Unhinged: On Ethnographic Games of Doubt and Certainty
Stephan Palmie
(University of Chicago)
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Paper short abstract:
Proceeding from a perspective guided by Collingwood and Wittgenstein, I aim to probe the limits of the ethnographic endeavor vis a vis worlds unthinkable in terms of the ethnographer’s own “hinge” propositions around which doubt can turn, but which cannot themselves be allowed to fall into doubt.
Paper long abstract:
Can we talk about what we cannot conceive of? How far can the ethnographic gesture, however well-intentioned, guide us into worlds not our own: worlds that seem to call into question what Collingwood called our own (historically mutable) “absolute presuppositions” from which we, like it or not, must spin our ethnographic propositions. “Witches, as the Azande conceive them, cannot exist” wrote E.P. pretty much at the start of a 500-page monograph aiming to prove the eminent rationality of Zande witchcraft beliefs. Taking as cases in point, Evans-Pritchard’s famous equivocations on the issue of coming to inhabit worlds of thought and action that the ethnographer takes to be based on mistaken premises (as well as an example from my own Afro-Cuban ethnography calling in question the authorship of my own research), I argue that what Wittgenstein called “hinge propositions” – that is points on which doubt can turn, but which can never fall into doubt themselves – have long, and all invocations of “radical alterity” as a remedy to the contrary, both enabled, and plagued the ethnographic enterprise from the start. A tentative conclusion might be that the entire conundrum ultimately devolves to an undue exaggeration of the “problem of other minds” – explored by mid-twentieth century analytic philosophers without proper attention to sociological issues; or to the problem of “multiple realities” explored by Alfred Schutz – without proper attention to the issue of cultural difference. Can we really become “unhinged”, in Wittgenstein’s sense?
Ethnography as the translation of a translation
Anne-Christine Taylor
(CNRS)
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Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I want to reverse the ethnographic lens and reflect first on what the ethnographic situation does for the 'ethnographed': what kind of work do the subjects of an inquiry engage in when they consent to an ethnographic relation? What affordances does it offer them?
Paper long abstract:
Instead of focusing directly on the epistemological problems facing the anthropologist, I want to reverse the ethnographic lens and reflect first on what the ethnographic situation does for the 'ethnographed': what kind of work do the subjects of an inquiry engage in when they consent to an ethnographic relation? What affordances does it offer them? Briefly put, my answer to this question would be that it allows them to experiment novel ways of giving shape to and translating forms of reflexivity that are always historically and politically situated. If this is indeed the case, it follows that the ethnographer is involved in translating a process of translation he or she has elicited, indeed co-produced with the subjects of the inquiry. What might be the consequences of viewing ethnography as the translation of a translation - as opposed to the translation of 'a culture'?