Anthropological poetics: Reflections on a new perspective

Conclusion

Given that the poetic dimension in anthropology is real, a code for understanding, a metaphor for truth, a myth about anthropology-as-practised, revealing the paradoxes of that discipline, where then does “Reflections” lead us? What are the implications of realizing that there are whole areas of anthropological field experience that have never been communicated in monographs and journal articles? Does a resolution of paradox, of the myths created by anthropologists, require the leaving of anthropology and university departments and an active engagement in praxis rather than an armchair documentation of consciousness raising? Is there to be an inversion between a practical endeavor that is non-praxis in outlook?

It is true that a reflexive self-aware anthropology and the radicalness of poetic expression puts anthropology into question, but therein lies the basis of evolution to a different kind of anthropology. This is important as it becomes more and more difficult to justify fieldwork, particularly for professionals alienated from their own society and discipline.

There is, however, a more important consideration. If the field lies to a great extent within us, then the question arises as to just what is anthropology doing in other people's cultures? Rarely are anthropologists invited to a particular field locale by the cultural groups living there. Their own presuppositions and career dictates lead to a global selection which is then rationalized and justified to university departments and funding bodies. It is an obvious but often overlooked fact that the discipline and culture of the anthropologist is located firmly within the social and ideological context of which it is a part. Anthropologists, therefore require a critical awareness of their relationship to the ideology of their own society and must take care that they do not unthinkingly aid in the reproduction of those conditions that in fact frame their object of study. The major part of anthropological practise has dealt with traditional and modernizing societies and anthropologists are often identified with the ideological dimension of a dependency that has already been defined in economic and political terms.

Much of the reaction to and ambivalence towards anthropologists on the part of native groups is in terms of their implicit awareness that the anthropologist is part of the process that defines their present situation. Furthermore, they more often than not realize that the anthropologist needs them far more than they need the anthropologist! Without a critical awareness it is unfortunately the case that despite the best intentions of the anthropologist his presence in another culture is often part of an ongoing process that weakens and eventually destroys the culture chosen. Lévi-Strauss is exceedingly bitter about the role of anthropology as the harbinger of destruction [¹] because an anthropology geared to the exigencies of professionalism is the vanguard of a destructive process that seems unrelenting. I want a different kind of anthropology, one that will engage dialectically with the cultural other and express it in a way that is ultimately useful for the other culture and my own society.

Edmund Carpenter's introduction to Stephen Williams' The Inuit Today speaks eloquently to this issue of destruction. He describes how “the newcomers could not see the patterns of Inuit life; they smashed into them almost as innocently as men walk through cobwebs” [²]. Professionalism, whether by anthropologists, explorers, or art experts resulted in a devastation that Carpenter alludes to as a faith being lost, an art replaced. “We emptied graves, moved sacred objects from secret caves to public vaults, transferred songs to tapes, stored myths on dustry shelves. Reverential became referential; private, became public, theirs became ours” [³]. And later — “When Inuit history got classified as loot, the past was rewritten to justify the present. We re-invented the Inuit, then hired them to act out this action on film. We even re-invented their art, the taught them how to make it” [⁴]. Carpenter's anger is directed at the way in which scholars use their “tribe” for self promotion, for movement along a professional career trajectory that bears little relation to those communities that hosted their initial intrusion. A double and devastating alienation. It must be pointed out, however, that anthropologists have increasingly moved into new venues —large urban areas of their own and other cultures, hospitals, factories, ghettoes and unemployment lines. The potential for unwitting damage is less obvious but one wonders if the ideological component of a hierarchical methodology is just as dangerous in these situations.

Does all this necessarily lead us into the streets, missions and revolutions of this world or is it possible for anthropology to find an additional documentation of observation that will heighten perception about cultural others then diffuse to the civilization surrounding us? Both options are readily open, just as are the different methods of dealing with alienation for self and society — praxis or a gathering of the forces that may overcome alienation.

This is where I wish to root my argument about anthropological poetics. My contention is that there is something crucial that is missing from fieldwork reporting. The collision of cultural assumptions that is the raw material of the discipline is usually expressed in emic/etic distinctions whereas I am proposing that a dialectic which subsumes both emic and etic considerations and moves both to a new language of experience is the missing component in anthropology. It can be expressed in various ways — art, narrative, theatre — anthropological poetics is simply the medium I have chosen to write about. What I am referring to is a process of incorporation that is coded in a symbolic way that then alters the professional perception of self/cultural other which then makes a different kind of impact on the professional's own society. The experience of other cultures by anthropologists should have diffused a greater humanism into Western consciousness. By and large this has not happened because as professionals we have not found the means to accurately represent the dialectic engaged with in the field. It is my conviction that anthropological poetics is one way of completing the anthropological endeavor, and thereby changing it. This is one of the major challenges facing the discipline in the closing era of the twentieth century. This latter theme has been elucidated in a highly instructive form in Stanley Diamond's poetry volume Totems [⁵], which brings me to a final statement.

Stanley Diamond, in an interview with Dan Rose, charted his evolution as a poet with the attendant circumstances that led to the latency of his poetic expression in favor of anthropological work. He emerged with a marvellous line to the effect that he chose anthropology because it was the next best thing to poetry [⁶]. I appreciate and admire Diamond's insight and humor but neither he nor I think anthropology is the next best thing to poetry. Diamond's original contribution to anthropological poetics demonstrates how the sensibilities of self and the cultural other can be fused [⁷]. Poetry in its own right is a powerful and moving mosaic of experience, but for anthropology in its present state of evolution it is so much more. It is a vital spark, a new signifying process for a discipline that is rethinking its own foundations and methodology.

By methodology I refer specifically to the context of observer effects and follow Rose in treating poetry as poetic observation [⁸]. His comments are a critique, particular to Stanley Diamond's Totems. Diamond achieves the interiority I have referred to earlier, more strikingly than any other anthropologist-poet I have read. It is not so crucial for me or Dan Rose that he is a superb poet, it is that he has taken ethnography into a new domain, beyond the emic/etic distinction that shackles the discipline to methodological stasis. Diamond's ethnographic accounts in his poetics mirrors that which is not yet communicated within the discipline but it speaks directly to his own society rather than simply reporting on the state of the cultural other or Diamond himself. This is why I wish to take Rose's particular comments and move to the general as his observations about Diamond provide possible guidelines for the further development of anthropological poetics.

Rose has described poetic observation as a vantage point “where the poet resides in relation to his experience and to the poem, where the subjects of the poem exist in relation to the poet and where the reader stands in relation to subjects, author (observer) and text” [⁹]. This set of connections succinctly exposes the dilemmas of interpretation and communication found in every field situation. The argument is that anthropological poetics as methodology permits another culture and comprehension of it to be expressed and interpreted in a way that moves beyond it. In this way one refers not just to interpretation but to a different way of “relating to meanings inherent in another cultural system.” Rose argues further that “The accepted fieldwork device of plunging from the global to the local and rising from the local to the global preserves an older hierarchical methodology — a legacy of our anthropological forebears” [¹⁰]. He invites us to compare this hierarchical legacy with the establishment of a new dimension between the anthropologist and native that involves different ways of perceiving the relation between cultural others and ourselves.

Anthropological poetics — poetry as observations — thus has a crucial transforming role that should not be confined to the literary outlets of the day, but placed within the mainstream of anthropology as an evocation of a new consciousness for the discipline and the society of which it is but a part. It is an ethnographic statement that is presently missing from the discipline, wherein the anthropologist uses a rich linguistic code and different structures to express certain crucial areas of field experience that have not been communicated in professional monographs and articles. In addition the evocation of a critical self awareness within the discipline underlines the argument that a significant part of the field for anthropology lies within its professional practitioners. Fieldwork therefore belongs to us and our own civilization, the cultural other is a crucial part of our developing self-awareness. The anthropologist-as-poet using field experience as part of his raw material has chosen a form to convey the experience of the cultural other which then has the power to alter the listener, the reader, the unconvinced, “irreversibly in a direction at once more human and humane” [¹¹]. It also may change the manner in which anthropology is justified and perhaps practiced.