Exploded worlds — Text as a metaphor for ethnography (and vice versa)

Conclusion

There is a class of scholars who seek to write about and perpetuate the culture of all those who do not write about and perpetuate their own culture. Do these scholars write about and perpetuate their own culture?

Paul Ricouer and others have put forward the text metaphor for social science production — for what we produce and the way we work with it. It is one of many metaphors that we anthropologists have available to enable us to grasp better our challenging and so often inchoate enterprise. I have expressed misgivings about this metaphor because it takes us back into a world, the academic one, where we do not really belong — with its concerns for distance, invariance, truth value — and away from a world — the variable and voluble world of discourse — where anthropology should be at work if not at home. It is also a metaphor that can beguile us into ignoring the pervasiveness of self-reference and self-replication in our (the intellectual's) creation of worlds and surely in our anthropological creation of other people's worlds. As the pronouns are the fundamental entities of the world of discourse, we have focused on what we can learn from them about the dynamics of self-reference and reference and particularly about the parlous shift from talking to persons — as with the first two persons of discourse — to talking about persons — which is to say the third or absent “person” of discourse. The pronouns also teach us about “turn-taking.” Here also one has misgivings about the text metaphor for it takes us into altogether too sui generis a world of the scholar alone with his writings and his imagined or self-created audience for those writings. It is the world of the “I” perpetually talking and the other perpetually listening. Anthropology in contrast works on the other side of turn-taking where we emphasize the other as an “I” talking and we ourselves as a “you” listening. In a world where the powerful military-industrial centers of things do most of the talking, it is altogether appropriate that the peripheries should have their turn through the work of anthropology. That those voices should be heard is a fundamental anthropological task.

We should not pretend in the conclusion, however, that the channel for hearing those voices is absolutely clear and unimpeded by self-reference — from the insertion, as it were, of the anthropologist's own voice. We do not escape the need to negotiate these various voices. And for that reason I have placed as an epigraph to the conclusion a rephrasing for the anthropologist of Epimenides' paradox. It is a rephrasing that evokes the paradox involved in giving voice to the voices of others. but to recognize the problem at the very center of our enterprise does not justify the abandonment of that enterprise nor the admirable and unique efforts at turn-taking that characterize the calling of anthropologists.