Manifesto for Ethnographic Voice – The Dance that Border People Do “In the midst of a massacre, in the face of torture, in the eye of a hurricane, in the aftermath of an earthquake, or even, say, when horror looms more apparently more gently in memories that won’t recede and so come pouring forth in the late night quiet of a kitchen, as a storyteller opens her heart to a story listener recounting stories that cut deep and raw into the gullies of the self, do you, the observer, stay behind the lens of the camera, switch on the tape recorder, keep a pen in hand? Are there limits – of respect, piety, pathos, that should not be crossed, even to leave a record? But if you can’t stop the horror, should you at least document it?” (Behar, 1996) What does it mean to stay behind the lens of the camera? What would be lost and what might be gained if we were to switch off the tape recorder, keeping a pen in hand maybe out of habit, but not because we are afraid to miss something. I often wonder what is the most authentic and just way to earn the expertise and agency to tell someone else’s story, and I keep coming back to the same assertion. The person (that “Other”) needs to be a part of you that you are trying to recover and she has to acknowledge that you too, are a part of her. The accuracy of the scientific distance that anthropologists keep so not to disturb the norms of behavior of their subjects can be exchanged for another kind of accuracy. I wish to argue in this essay that solidarity is another tool to be used to achieve ethnographic truth, just like the camera, the recorder, and the pen, and it is a tool that you should never have to “put down,” even in the event of human suffering. In fact, it is a tool that should be held fast to, from the point of “going native” all the way to the moment you craft the voice of your writing. “ I am here because I am a woman of the border: between places, between identities, between languages, between cultures, between longings and illusions, one foot in the academy and one foot out.” (Behar, 1996) As a solidarity worker and a would-be ethnographer, whose primary professional goal is to shift the paradigm of social documentation for the sake of truth and for the sake of justice . . . as someone who believes storytellers are the keepers of culture (Stoller, 1994) and wishes to loosen the stories from the greedy hands of the elite (less than 10% of the world population writing stories about and “for” the other 90%), and as a member of that very same elite, I struggle with positioning myself in my work and my writing. I am, because of this, a woman of the border, looking for a way to write on the border, where “every form of representation must pay homenage to its roots.” (Behar, 1996) Generations of anthropologists have resisted writing on the border, even though they were undeniably there, in some way, shape, or form. They were either born on the border, as Ruth Behar was, or drawn to it, like me. Ethnography is the dance that border people do, the dance that is in their blood. Because I was born with half Jewish blood, you could call me a woman of the border, but it is not that simple for me. I am a woman of the border because I was kidnapped (literally) at age 21 by a man I knew, an experience, which instilled in me a manic sense of social justice. I learned, for better or for worse, not to trust myself – For better because I was humbled in a way that now helps me cross borders and be easily welcomed by “Others.” . . . but for the worse, because my desire to disown the privilege of agency and my hyper-self-criticism are paralyzing. I think many ethnographers, born into privilege but drawn to the borders, experience the same anxieties and possess the same wisdom. What does this have to do with voice? I have lived in the borderland for practically my entire life. I know many languages, but don’t feel confident in any one of them. My “voice” is shaky. How can I write like that? Writerly Identity Numerous ethnographers have grappled with these issues and Ruth Behar (1999) has gone as far as to say that ethnography is in a sort of liminal phase, a “shift toward viewing identification, rather than difference, as the key defining image of our theory and practice.” This is happening, in part, because ethnographers are engaging in social critique, the anthropology of agency. Also, the people who were once considered subject to documentation now have the “qualifications” of anthropologists, forcing an important paradigm shift in social documentation. Genres, such as memoir and auto-ethnography, are now contestably considered legitimate scholarship. Another reason for the shift is that the minority (by this, I mean, privileged or born into agency – a reversal of the traditional use of the word “minority”, but definitely more accurate in terms of numbers) activists are progressively viewing ethnography as a way to express solidarity and connect with the “Other.” To some, this shift becomes somewhat of a crisis, when blurred genres and authorial vulnerability appear to be taking the objectivity and “pure” science out of anthropology (Behar, 1999). Clifford Geertz (1988) may have alluded to this when he asked, humbly, “How is the author function (or shall we, so long as we are going to be literary about the matter, just say, “the author”?) made manifest in the text?” and “Just what is – beyond the obvious tautology, ‘a work’ – that the author authors.” He went on to say that the presence of the author in the text is a question of “construction of writerly identity.” I think this is key. The author’s work is a question of “discourse - vocabulary, rhetoric, and pattern of argument”. Geertz suggests this discourse comes naturally to the author, “ like a remark from the mind”. (Geertz, 1988) However, I question the naturalness of the discourse. There is often a tension between the discourse of the academy and that of the author, particularly when he or she is a member of an identity group that has had less access to influence in the construction of that discourse. Behar unpacks that notion in her essay, “Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart.” (1999) Once we allow ourselves to truly inhabit our “border identities” as anthropologists (a mix of who we were “born to be” and the part of us that attracts us to the borders of our lives to seek out the “Other” in us), we can construct, if we are so clever, our “writerly identities” - and write in a way that explains that attraction to the reader. Crafting Voice I repeat, I am looking for a way to write on the border, where “every form of representation must pay homenage to its roots.” (Behar, 1996) How we represent our ethnographic subjects is rooted in how we position ourselves. Solidarity is a question of authorial positioning that will affect the way we write – positively, I think. I have worked as a popular educator for years, primarily in Nicaragua, but I stopped writing a few years ago. This is because I had no problem “being there,” but I was not always sure who I was when I was there. I thought of myself as a borderland “Other”, and if Geertz is right about what the two most important questions facing ethnographers are, then that would explain my paralysis. In terms of craft, how does one write as the borderland “Other?” While I am currently part of the academy (considering checking out though), the discourse of the academy does not surge from my identity “like a remark from the mind.” (Geertz, 1988) I resist ethnography for the same reason that I am drawn to it – a thorny bush with luscious berries, like the tangled raspberry in my neighbor’s yard, where I used to pillage, filling myself up, and returning hope marked with guilt, red lipstick stains on my lips and cheeks. Vampiric. Late night, clandestine work, grave robbing . . . out of respect – is it even possible? I can’t help but feel that I am always stealing stories, stealing voices . . . To counteract that vampiric tendency, to avoid stealing agency, and to feel whole again, I have intentionally turned myself into an intersection of people and lives, in search of my missing pieces, brothers and sisters separated at birth (that is what solidarity work is all about). So, my story, and my view of myself are forever inhabited. A wise woman once said that one of the secrets to good ethnographic writing is to have a good editor (Krause, 2009). The clincher is that I’ve got an internal editor with no business sense whatsoever. An internal editor who edits my thoughts and word, running them through a filter of generations of guilt – deceased ethnographers, watching from the afterlife as we question their intentions – generations of ethnographic subjects, a silent army wishing to dismantle the empire of knowledge production, which uses them to write dictionaries. My editor is hyper-vigilant, and since she lives inside my head, she marks my body and my work with red pen. Proof reading. Reading a text for proof of its truth, for proof of authenticity, proof of respect. She’s a good editor, as long as she keeps me from writing. I am, thus, left with the same cracking adolescent voice. How can reclaim and mature that voice? One way to start is to take a look at what other “author-ethnographers” have done and doing with voice meanwhile our discipline engages in and simultaneously resists the inevitable “vocal” rites of passage. A Brief History of Ethnographic Voice Levi Straus, one of the fathers of ethnography works on the assumption that “the world exists for anthropology, rather than anthropology exists for the world.” (Lynch on Levi-Struaus In Geertz, 1988). His work, thus, is very philosophical and he takes great license in his authorial voice, positioning himself as an expert interpreter of symbols in the world, even those symbols that “belong” to the “Other.” His voice is authoritative, the voice of an academy, which has assigned itself the office and agency to name things and to give them meaning. While he claims resistance to the anthropology-colonialism binary, he colonizes these very same symbols by claiming the ability to interpret them. (Geertz on Levi-Strauss, 1988) Almost two decades later, Sidney W. Mintz chose direct transcription of interviews as his authorial medium, claiming to do so out of respect for his subject in Worker in the Cane. Still, he did not relinquish his authority to order and structure his subject’s world by interpreting these interviews, and even ordering and structuring them to support his theory Puerto Rican cane workers experience. Furthermore, while Mintz notes that ____ often took time to think his answers through, and often did not answer the question directly or maybe, did not understand the question at all, we see very little of this in what is shared with us as readers. How many pauses and indirect answers were edited out? Finally, each chapter is followed by summary – directing (or redirecting) the reader as to how to interpret what ____ has said. Even though Mintz gives us the story in _______’s words, the science is there, as if it were always there, just waiting for him to discover it. This does not mean that his interpretation is wrong, it simply makes me question, “Were his interpretation wrong, would we ever know?” What we can learn from this is that using your subject’s words is one step toward giving voice to their story, but if you, then, order those words and interpret them, you are still hoarding interpretive authority. Another “vocal” technique is to use the reader’s understanding and the reader’s discourse to shape the narrative, to speak the reader’s language, as Geertz claims that Evans Pritchard does (1988). The advantage of this downshifting is that it is easier for the reader to engage. The dangers are that it does not (at least not in itself) push the reader to the borders, and if the reader is part of the hegemonic discourse-producing machine, this reinforces hegemony. For me, this raises the question that Geertz (1988) asks, what is our work as ethnographers? What does the piece of text we produce do or not do, and how can voice shape what the reader will do with the text? As the genre begins to blur, we have Narayan, who chooses a child’s voice in My Family and Other Saints, seemingly to represent her position in her family and to remind us that it is, in fact, her older brother, who shaped her reality. By speaking as a child, she highlights the chaos that adults can create. She is a child on the border – out of place. . . . but the book is not a children’s book. So, she is not “relating” to peers in her writing, nor is she identifying with her family. She seems to clearly position herself “vocally” as an “Other among Others” and focuses on the alienation that comes with that territory. While the book may not be completely successful in making this explicit, I do think that it is one of her objectives. If she had done this more skillfully, we might, as readers, be able to look at ourselves as “others among others.” To me, that would be a great contribution to the discipline. And then there are ethnographers, like Tobias Hecht, who seem to indicate that they may have found their missing piece - a sister, brother, or child, separated at birth. Known as a translator, there is very little information available about Hecht. He does little to make his intentions clear, other than to indicate that his subjects have taught him that “what might have been” can be as compelling, revealing, and even truthful, as the “truth” itself. He seeks to prove this by taking on a hypothetical voice, the voice of a gay female anthropologist who has recently had to have her uterus surgically removed, instead of writing as himself (whoever that is), and also creates a hypothetical subject, who lives the possible lies that his actual subject told in interviews with him. I was moved by Hecht’s “authorial voice”. I felt that his trying on an different sex and gender was a bold experiment, whether he did it because he feels like a gay woman with her uterus cut out, or he supposes that that is how his subjects may feel, and wishes to try on those feelings. The choice also says a lot about his views about ethnography. He positions his main character (anthropologist) expertly as a mother who can’t mother, perhaps to raise questions about the limits of what ethnography can actually do for the subjects themselves. What have I learned from taking a look at these works? As an ethnographer, I am more than just “vulnerable observer” (Behar, 1999), but a living, breathing human being, who reads and writes her imperative for immersion in the reality of “others” in order to find and reclaim the lost worlds that were with her in the womb and somehow, as she was raised by “her people,” got filtered out. So, I have to reflect my attraction to the border in my writing. I cannot filter out that attraction. If I recover my missing pieces in my work as an anthropologist, only to then distance myself and deny that the attraction was any more than just academic curiosity, an impulse to test a theory or a natural response to the seductive power of something exotic, the sharpest critics will still (I hope!) catch the craft that filtered out the truth. They will pin a lens on me, if I don’t identify it myself. And worst of all, I will not be honoring my true relationship as a human being to other human beings, potentially leading the reader to maintain distance as well - as if we need any more barriers! That is not what anthropology is for. If Levi-Strauss is right that the world exists for anthropology, then it is not because the world cries out to be ordered by the elite, but because it cries out to have its borders broken down. It calls on humanity to “unmap” or “demap,” rather than to map the world and its people. Look what all this mapping has done – take the case of Somalia, for example, mapping the “territories” of nomadic clans to explain tensions that were engineered by the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., mapping out who to give guns to (what a great help it was!). Connections and crossroads over artificial borders. Just because I was born into one tribe doesn’t mean that that is my tribe. Narayan’s displacement in her memoir makes this clear, and I can attest to its truth. By crafting voice, we are, perhaps, paying tribute to our lost tribes – actually reclaiming rituals that we never learned but needed in order to feel whole. Is this potentially just as vampiric? Yes! But most theistic religions tell us that we must be aware of our intentions whether or not our intention is to please God. I doubt pillaging pleases God, but linking ourselves, expressing solidarity, and offering something in return, if at all possible, we can create a new economy of social capital through our ethnographies. At least that’s what I’d like to do. So, how, how, how, how, how to decolonize myself and my writing? Liberatory Ethnography – Considerations for Crafting Voice Who to be? When crafting voice, I must decide who to be. “I perform culture as I write it – presenting myself as a radical educator, an urban ethnographer, an individual with collective consciousness who creates [auto] ethnographic performances from the borders I have lived, labored, and crossed.” (Moreira, 2009) “We cannot erase the oppression in the marked body But we can allow the wounds to speak up In their own bodies.” (Moreira, 2009) At the risk of unintentionally sounding “sensual,” (Stoller, 2000), I vow to let my readers read the contours of my own “marked body” when I write. In my ethnographic writing, I will cry out, whine . . . groan about my perceived deprivation – about the hard metal filter grazing my shoulders and keeping brothers and sisters out. I will cry out against the silence of lost voices, the poverty of the story. I will clearly identify myself as someone who has come to the border in search of something. I will let the reader know what piece I am missing. I will assume that some of my readers will understand my longing and I will appeal to their sense of longing by giving it voice. My authority will be expressed in the sincerity of my search. Who to write for? “On the one hand, through our standard disciplinary practice of situating our works within the conversation of others, who are perhaps more renown than ourselves, we increase trust through authority. . . . On the other hand, the way we write puts off non-specialists. Our audiences shrink. What happens? Beyond the tired explanation of accessibility, I would like to suggest that our writing strategies undermine the trustworthiness of our voice. Our rapid-fire sideward glances stir us dysfluency and even confusion. (after Baktin, Hill 1995). . Only the similarly trained can possibly keep up with us. For many, our professional ventriloquism raises suspicion. It weakens the resonance of our voice. Those would-be readers sense gaps in our sincerity. People activate an unconscious trust meter when they read. They gauge whether the voice is tinny or sincere.” (Krause, 2007) “What is so threatening about me and the critique about the way even self-proclaimed activists have kept visceral knowledge of oppression under the academic weight of theoretical sophistication.” (Moreira, 2009) I will not write for an academic audience (the elite 10% I am part of) unless is it a call for change or a cry of protest against the marking of my body and my experience and the bodies and experiences of others. For the few years that I have left to dance with my lost brothers and sisters, I enter the professional field of writing, releasing my words, thus, to the other 90%. However, I will not alienate the academy – I accept the offer of the critics to complete my work by talking about them and revealing their imperfections. When to write it? “Though at first she had tried to know about his past, she had managed to discover almost nothing. In the absence of knowledge of what he had lived before that time, she came to feel that he had no past. He was who he was when she discovered him, though she might have been able to make him into something else. . . . Which memories are oldest? Aparecida [the subject] says she remembers and Zoe [the ethnographer] re-remembers, takes the pieces as she finds them, joins one with the other.” (From After Life, Hecht, p. 85) In After Life, one can imagine both the ethnographer and her subject saying, “There was something that she wanted, something she didn’t have. She wouldn’t say, but, even so, for a while, I wanted to be that something.” (from After Life, Hecht, p.91) I vow to do solidarity work without mothering, marking bodies, co-opting stories, and blurring, blurring, blurring, blurring unless it is for the sake of being be true to self without claiming and co-opting the agency of others, but I know that I will fail . . . and try again. Memoir is considered a blurred genre of ethnography, but I think it can be used to bring clarity and to guide the reader to progress, just as anthropology itself is progressing. I personally would like to write in the now, and then come back to that writing, years later, and treat it as a memoir, commenting on what I have learned since then. How to write? Voice is not just a matter of words. Images and sounds can craft “writerly identity” and convey a message just as effectively. We should not be afraid of things being “open to interpretation” and we should not fool ourselves into thinking that writing with “words” will shield our work from interpretation. Furthermore, writing with words excludes nearly 40% of the world population that cannot read or write. I vow to use images and other mediums to document the human experience, without compromising precision and science because I want my work to be accessible and I am, like many of us who are part of this legacy, truly in debt to many people who cannot read. My hopes for this manifesto are modest. I have been brought to the border not to build a wall, but to bridge an enormous gap. This is ethnography for me – the dance that border people do. References and Works Cite Behar, Ruth. The Vulnerable Observer – Anthropology that breaks your heart. Beacon Press. Boston, MA. 1996 Behar, Ruth. “Cherishing Our Second Fiddle Genre.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. 1999: 28; 277 Hecht, Tobias. After Life. Duke University Press. Durham and London. 2006. Krause, Elizabeth L. “A Manifesto for Voice.” 106th Annual Meeting of American Anthrpological Association, sponsored by Society for Humanistic Anthropology. Washington, DC. Saturday, December 1, 2007. Moreira, Claudio. “Transgressive Bodies, Transgressive Scholarship: A Fragmented Life in so Many Acts.” Claudio Moreira. Amherst, MA. 2009 Stoller, Paul. “Ethnographies as Texts/Ethnographers as Griots”. American Ethnologist. 21(2) 1994, 353-366. Stoller, Paul. Sensuous Scholarship. University of Pennsylvania Press.Philadephia. 1997. Willis, Paul and Mats Trondman. “Manifesto for Ethnography”. Ethnography. 2000; 1:5. Sage Publications. 2000. About the author:
Erin Myers was diagnosed with Autism at age 48. Erin supports neurodiverse learners and their allies through her organization, Pipe Dreams Youth and Families (www.itsnotapipedream.org). This will be her first publication from a massive body of work she has been utterly too shy to share.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
