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Panel Discussion 1
Ruth Frankenberg
I would like to provide some quick connections among these stimulating and fascinating papers. Clearly all three deal with questions of otherness in relation to white male and female authorial gazes, and do so in different ways suggesting notions of double (and even multiple) otherness. The papers also tease apart, in different ways, the construction of authority and the construction of positionality, while still managing to show their interconnectedness. In addition, there is a questioning of the boundaries of canons as seen in Kamala's opening up of ethnography, as well as in John's reading of Kipling as ethnography. Your common frustrations with the ruptures and the fragmentation surrounding unconceptualized and reconceptualized questions of representation suggest the seeming impossibility of taking account of gender and colonial positionalities. How to consider these two together is a common concern here, and you have posed beginning questions and suggestions regarding new strategies for representation, for seeing, reading, writing and theorizing.
Linda Hess
This is a practical question on genre boundaries (or lack thereof) between what you can call today "ethnography" and literature." How do you generalize the authority of what a particular author has to say? On the one hand there are assumptions about what literature is, what it does, and the author's creativity or imagination. On the other hand there is something different generically in ethnography; something about its objectivity, its generalizability. Have any of you transcended the problem of using literature as ethnography? Do you have some suggestions about how to go about it that will avoid some pitfalls and challenges?
Kamala Visweswaran
My particular take on it is that ethnographers haven't looked at literature as ethnography. They don't like to see it done. I think the whole question of the constitution of the self is something that can be redeemed from the experimental ethnography movement in anthropology; that is, if we are going to be accountable to the quest for self-representation, we should read literature as ethnography. I was trained as an anthropologist. There is this liberal humanist strand in our discipline that says we can get a better understanding between cultures if we understand what they are. But I think that people are fully equipped to represent themselves.
Linda Hess
When you read a novel do you just assume you can generalize the experience reported in that novel to the culture or that it's common sense to figure out what is generalizable and what isn't?
Kamala Visweswaran
I don't know. I think that people who are working on this are telling us what is generalizable and what is not. In Cherríe Moraga's work, for example, she talks about her positionality as a lesbian within the Chicano community. She tells us what's generalizable and what's not about the Chicano community from her own position.
John McBratney
The concept of discourse might be useful here because it erodes the boundaries between genres of writing. Within Orientalist discourse, for instance, writers like Kipling, Forster and others "join" ethnographers who are engaged in the practice of representing the other. In this general way, the concept of discourse allows you to bring together ethnographic and so-called literary writings.
Kamala Visweswaran
I have another quick take on that. The notion of generalizability, I think, comes out of the positivist tradition. And a valuable thing about experimental ethnography is its recognition of issues of specificity. But that's nothing new -- interpretive anthropologists have been saying that for a long time.
Linda Hess
Well, when you talk about women anywhere you're generalizing.
Donna Haraway
I'd like to put a little more tension between the quest for self-representation and the idea of people being fully equipped to represent themselves. And one of the terms in experimental ethnography that seems to me properly and potently privileged is the dialogic structure of ethnographic attempts. In relationship to the tension between feminism and colonial discourse, watching the constitution of the female subject and the colonial subject seems to me precisely part of the problem. American writers, in particular, assume there is a problematic and pre-existing self to represent. The cultural tendency of self-representation is big in American culture, and it seems to be part of the political problem that keeps anti-colonial and feminist critics (in academia and God knows where else) apart. The problem is the assumption that there is somehow a domain that is more naturally one's own. There is a fine tension between what Jenny Terry describes as taking the vacation spot of speaking from the place of the other and the testimony of the self that I think Susan Griffin does not problematize. This American cultural tension is also part of our academic lives, which is also part of the political problem in the serious project of anti-colonial and feminist joint criticism. There is a running back to the place that one takes as one's own natural preserve; it is politically safe. This running to safe spots has been part of all three talks and is part of a larger structure. So I'd like some folks to comment on it.
Debbie Gordon
You've raised an interesting question, but I think you have to be careful not to collapse all interest in subjectivity into a single category, genre or problematic. Otherwise you get stuck with looking for a single alternative or a single counter-genre. I don't think that the generality about Americans bears up when you actually look at what people do or write. I think one has to keep a tension between the boundaries and constraints within which people live, and the fact that people do occupy certain locations that may not be singularly characterized--that they may be multiple and locatable. And I think that the best thing we can do is to point to that tension and have that tension apparent in one's work. For example, Biddy Martin and Chandra Mohanty, in their essay "What's Home Got To Do With It" (Feminist Studies/Critical Studies) rework the genre of autobiography in partial response to a certain post-structuralist refusal of subjectivity as a problem to work out.
Donna Haraway
It seems to me that autobiography is only one form of self-representation. One could provide a crude caricature of Western philosophy as the dominant genre of self-representation without admitting it. One can also ask what happens when the third person/first person discourse is used to talk about self-representation? The discourse of man is perhaps the most privileged locus of self-representation in European-derived cultures. And you never need to use the word I. To me, one of the most interesting things that experimental ethnography has done is to mess up a lot of ethnographic authority. While in some ways feminist inquiry also problematizes the constitution of the self, in other ways it also makes those conversations tense. But it seems that both come out of shared European preoccupations with what counts as the self.
Kamala Visweswaran
Regarding your last comment about European representation of the self: I agree that there is probably an American cultural obsession with a self that can't be defined. Yet, I'm uncomfortable with certain poststructuralist theories that view the subject as split, identities as negative, in the Lacanian sense. A good illustration is seen in the first part of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Practice which gives a Lacanian reading of identity "as not what you are, but what you are not." By the end of the book, they talk about social movements and quests to create positive identities. For me, that is a real contradiction. So I agree with your criticism but I guess I'm also suspicious of the poststructuralist overtones and the present bias towards that kind of theory in the academia.
Debbie Gordon
In addition I think it is useful to show that this European tradition is more multiple than it looks, and not to get seduced by its sense of being one tradition. If Europeans originated the preoccupation with the self, it no longer "belongs" only to them. If we think about self-representation and who has claimed self-representation, in what ways, then it would be a mistake to collapse, say, the quest of the European philosopher for self-representation with that of a white feminist or a woman or man of color. I think there is something to be gained by stressing what is similar in that strategy, but I think it is important to recognize differences when differently-positioned persons claim that form of authority.
John McBratney
I second that too. It seems that the tradition of European self-representation has been mostly a male tradition. It is very easy for the male to deconstruct that authority because the male starts with authority. I think that the whole notion of questioning authority is the privilege of someone who really has authority. And I think that in the very question about authority you call upon a kind of anterior authority, your authority as self-reflexive critic. And you get caught in a sort of infinite regress. You become an authority on authority on an authority. I think you get trapped within your own authority. I found that in reading the essays in Writing Culture, the accounts of the loss of authority, of the deconstruction of authority, sounded very authoritative.
Trinh Minh-ha
I was going to come back to a point that was raised earlier without identifying my race--European French, or American, or non-European. The question of autobiography is not one of trashing it or rejecting it. As already mentioned, it is a question of understanding autobiography differently. As women have so long struggled to widen the notion of the personal to the political, so this question of autobiography would also have to be redefined in a similar sense. And the boundaries surrounding the definition should be modified constantly. Thus the question of autobiography is not one of simple rejection, replacement of the form for another, but one of modifying the boundaries and returning within them.
Julianne Burton
I want to support that with an example: During this discussion I keep thinking of a Guatemalan text called I, Rigoberta Menchu, which is autobiography-as-testimony told in the language of the colonizers. But it is also a kind of auto-ethnography and auto-anthropology that both reveals more about the nature of the indigenous society than ever revealed before, while constantly reminding the interlocutor/reader something is being withheld. All cannot, and will not, be revealed by the informant on her culture, because of her and her culture's understanding that the mechanism for it's survival and perpetuation lies precisely in retaining certain secrets.
Jim Clifford
I do think that the issue we are getting at here about rethinking "experience" in ethnography is really important. It is a coming back to experience after semiotics, if you like, having taken on the "hermeneutics of suspicion" and sense of the codedness at every level of "experience" but then going back to it in a nonreductive way and relooking at categories like the autobiography, or the "as-told-to," or the various forms of hybrid text, or those texts like Jean Briggs' Never in Anger that sit somewhere between "hard" and "soft" anthropology. It seems to me that there is a job to be done that these papers are advancing in different respects. What is required and what we are getting at are very fine discriminations in the politics of genre. No one here would say ethnography equals literature or is literature. We say, ethnography as literature. That word as is a very complicated word when it is making a kind of comparison of unlike things in a politically charged, academic, generic field which then defamiliarizes and moves, displacing the two categories.
Jean Briggs' Never In Angeris particularly interesting precisely because it doesn't allow itself to be categorized in one of those "soft" areas of anthropology. (And by the way, the soft areas of anthropology, the personal modes, are often done by women, and they are also often done by men, Turnbull, Leiris, Read. There is a long list of them.) The point is, I think, not that they are more done by women or men, but that they are classified as "feminine" in generic categories of discourse, the established discursive distinctions. "Subjective" ethnography bleeds generically into the whole history of Western travel writing done by lots of men, which is all about having certain kinds of subjective experiences in exotic encounters. It's when that comes into a discursive area defined by serious knowledge and science that it becomes categorized as feminine.
We should not conflate Briggs, Hortense Powdermaker, and Laura Bohannon, all of whom are occupying complicatedly different border areas and contested generic zones. Bohannon had to write as a kind of "literature," but when seen from another optic it's a very serious ethnography. She calls it a novel, and takes a nom del plume for serious institutional reasons having to do with tenure and things like that. But the fact that she does, and that Jean Briggs manages to write an extraordinary "subjective" ethnography which does not fall into the category "literature' makes a difference in this shifting politics of genre.
The way in which genres, and subgenres keep moving and getting defined interests me a lot. And finally, I'm really interested in how the "genre" of experimental ethnography has gotten created. What's at stake is basically various articles, an edited book, and the invention of a tradition [out of those articles]. Experimental ethnography exists. It has institutional existence, certain kinds of privileges and authorities. It has inclusions and exclusions all which can be critically analyzed. Speaking as someone who represents it in some sense (I mean if anyone is a native in that culture it's me) I feel in dialogue with these critiques. I may squirm, but I feel there is dialogue here. On the other hand there is some danger in a process of "othering" experimental ethnography, of "genrefying" and typecasting it in certain ways. Just one tiny example: various people have talked about bringing in ethnic autobiography, Cherrie Moraga for example. I merely point out that Michael Fisher's essay in Writing Culture is all about the relevance of this kind of writing for ethnography. And nobody saw fit to mention it. It seems to me, from the inside, that "experimental ethnography" is in fact diverse, changing and full of internal debates. I think we have to find ways of talking about generic, institutionalized, authoritative differences which can show them as such, but which also don't simplify or "other" them and don't overlook the areas of common politics and potential alliance.
Debbie Gordon
I agree with you on the problem of a discriminating politics of genre. I use the concept of "disciplinization" to talk about the institutionalization of writing in a politicized way. I think that one of the ways out of the problem of "othering" is to attend to the processes by which specific discourses reconstitute themselves.
But I'm not sure I agree that the field of experimental ethnography is filled with debates. The only debate I see in Writing Culture is that raised by Paul Rabinow ("Representations are Social Facts: Modernity and Post-Modernity in Anthropology").
Jim Clifford
Do you equate experimental ethnography with Writing Culture ?
Debbie Gordon
No. But you and (George) Marcus are really important actors or gatekeepers in producing that discourse and as such I would say that paying attention to that work is important in seeing where those boundaries are.
Kamala Visweswaran
I have some responses. First the comment about Fisher is well taken. An important disclaimer in my paper that I forgot to announce was that I do not take Writing Culture as the only example of experimental ethnography. Actually, what I used was Clifford's essay "On Ethnographic Authority" (1983) and work by Kevin Dwyer and others. And so my paper actually stops with this book. I'm glad you pointed out Fisher's essay which, while problematic, is a step in the right direction. But I disagree with your reading of my reading of the feminist anthropologists. Let me clarify my point: the idea was not that men also write confessional ethnographies, the point was to look at women. I specifically chose three women who were professional anthropologists -- not the wives of hubbies who went to the field -- to show that there is something about how they are writing these texts that comes from the positionality of women fieldworkers. Looking at the relationship between Laura Bohannon's and Jean Briggs' writings, for instance, does not concern so much the politics of genres, as it does a politics of canon. What I find exciting about experimental ethnography is the formation of an alternative canon. And my point was that if we talk about an alternative canon, then these women should also be incorporated. I also want to respond to the question of how experimental ethnography gets created. Debbie has touched upon this; to an extent, I think, people at the Santa Fe seminar have codifield experimental ethnography. It is interesting why people like Kevin Dwyer and Steven Webster aren't in this book since they began to ask these questions in the late 1970s. What really interests me is how experimental ethnography becomes a genre and who gets to represent it.
Gigi Wikes
I like Kamala's "fables of rapport" section, and I find it very useful. The first point I want to make is that I see those women ethnographers as predecessors of the seminar that produced Writing Culture, insofar as they complicated the experiences of their writing. But if that is taken to be a contribution of feminist anthropology to experimental ethnography, I think there is also a contribution the other way. Experimental ethnography seems to problematize race and racism, both of which have been the biggest issues facing feminism in America. The suppression of issues of race has been voiced by many authors (who have also disclaimed the label of feminism). I think Writing Culture brings up ways in which feminism can have a much sharper understanding of how "fables of rapport" don't work even in feminism; rather than 'rapport,' it is 'tensions' in writing that need to be brought up.
Kamala Visweswaran
Let's take Paul Rabinow's Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco and Jean-Paul Dumont's The Head Hunter and I as examples of where certain disjunctions are glossed and presented. My point is to ask why it is that these two authors are presented as having done something different from these women authors. And why are these books taken as "theoretical" in ways that the women authors are not? Paul Rabinow does a nice hermeneutic reading in the beginning of his book. These women ethnographers are implicitly hermeneutic. I think they are doing the same thing. If we are going to valorize this as experimental ethnography, then we should look at these women authors.
Ruth Frankenberg
I'm glad that you place side by side the debate over ethnographic representation and the criticism of racism in West European and North American feminist movements. To consider these two debates together can be profitable if it will allow us to see how the two processes interrelate, how they inform each other.
I am interested in where experimental ethnography could teach feminism about racism. But I also see a lesson going in the other direction. Obviously, feminism is a multiply-voiced discourse right now, and particularly so around contested questions of race, race difference, and culture. If there is a contribution that the feminist debate on racism can make to the struggle over representation, it is the importance of recognizing positionality--in particular, recognizing one's dominant position in culture, structure, class, and gender around the globe. The mistake that can be made is then to essentialize that positionality, and perhaps that is a lesson that feminism can learn from experimental ethnography. When authority is questioned without a simultaneous questioning of one's positionality, certain things usually happen. This is something I noticed several years ago in looking at responses to Edward Said's Orientalism, namely, a generalized anxiety about how can we represent, a trans-historicizing of the problem. Will one culture always define itself in opposition to another culture? Must there be a throwing up of the hands and a conclusion that nothing meaningful can be said? Do we end up with a general anxiety about signification and representation themselves, eventually becoming crabby and proclaiming that "we've got to get on with our jobs or go do something else (as one review of Orientalism concluded)? I think this is what happens when one questions authority and authoriality without addressing positionality, without questioning the relationship between one's position (i.e. as a white female) and its relationship with another's.
Mira Kamdar
That is a very good point, but there is another danger that comes after acknowledgment of positionality if one is speaking from a place of authority of a dominant discourse. For example, I appreciated John's confession as a white male discussing representation of feminism. But it seems dangerous to me to simply acknowledge one's positionality within a dominant discourse, if only to get on with the job. Kamala alluded to a remaining concern in the need to create discursive spaces in places such as the American academic institution, its publications, etc. in order for people outside of those positions of authority to express their own views. How can indigenous anthropologists, indigenous ethnographers, women like Rigoberta Menchu be brought into dialogue with those voices from positions of authority?
John McBratney
How can this dialogue take place? How can this voice of the other come into being? One way is for authority to unseat its power and invite the other to speak, but that's condescending. How is it that the other can sort of move into a position of authority?
Mira Kamdar
That's a complicated question that deserves a very careful response, and I am just raising the question. But it is very easy to have everything then recuperated into the same kinds of structures that we wish to break down.
Debbie Gordon
Marilyn Strathern (in mine and Kamala's papers) alludes to the political and ethical problems involved here. As difficult and dangerous as it is, it is important to begin to think 'ethically' now about this very question of dialogue in contexts of unequal authority and positionality.
Panel Discussion 2
Panel Discussion 3
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