webster dialogue and fiction in ethnography

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DIALOGUE AND FICTION IN ETHNOGRAPHY Author(s): Steven Webster Source: Dialectical Anthropology, Vol. 7, No. 2 (SEPTEMBER 1982), pp. 91-114Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29790063Accessed: 23-03-2015 14:17 UTC

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91

DIALOGUE AND FICTION IN ETHNOGRAPHY

Steven Webster

My first aim in this essay is to try to close the gap which still exists between ethnography and hermeneutics. Anthropologists who have

heard out the occasionally pretentious claims of hermeneutic philosophers may suggest that this all seems a needlessly elaborate extrapola? tion of what ethnographers have always done in the field. In response to this disciplinary provincialism, I will try to clarify why an

epistemology of hermeneutics is nevertheless needed in ethnography now. With the possible exception of history, no other form of social in?

quiry has really come to terms with this philo? sophical tradition. It is doubly ironic that theoretical natural science, after centuries of

setting a fatally misleading ideal for the under?

standing of society, may be discovering its own hermeneutics before the social sciences

do. Sociology, in this hermeneutic "matura?

tion", is far ahead of the other social sciences

but seems to have again been subtly co-opted

by the positivist tradition it seeks to transcend.

Social anthropology, on the other hand, may be the natural home of this new epistemology.

Here, understanding has always ?

professional?

ly, so to speak ? had to confront its own para?

doxes and prejudices, has had always to pro? ceed with a certain irreducible hesitation. Let me begin by epistemologically interpeting conventional ethnographic hesitancy, opening up the way we think about what we do, and the way we write about what we have done.

I

I hope to trace a continuity between two situations of classical ethnography and their recent analogues which poses a dilemma of a

peculiar kind, perhaps an epistemological im?

passe whose time has come in anthropology. As Ruby [ 1 ] has pointed out, Malinowski

began his Argonauts... with an invocation

which the much later revelations of his Diary...

imply he himself was unable to live up to:

... every student of the less exact sciences will do his

best to bring home to the reader all the conditions in which the experiment or the observations are made.

In Ethnography, where a candid account of such data

is perhaps even more necessary, it has unfortunately in

the past not always been supplied with sufficient generos?

ity, and many writers do not ply the searchlight of

methodic sincerity, as they move among their facts but

produce them before us out of complete obscurity [2].

Although refreshing, the ethnographic de?

scription of his observations stopped far short

of the candor he seemed to demand. Profound

personal struggles, disaffection and cynicism about his hosts, guilty self-indulgence on the

margins of European society, are only a few of the implications. The diary was meant to

keep his personal reflections separate from

his ethnography, and privately to discipline himself to objectivity (cf. Firth's introduction), yet how can this aim be reconciled with his demand for sincerity and an accounting of the genesis of objective facts? Yet an integration of such intimate reflections into ethnographic work would still seem irrelevant to us as well as to him. Contemporary ethnography can

Steven Webster is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand

03044092/82/0000-0000/$02.75 ? 1982 Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company

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92

countenance neither the view that these are a part of the field "experiment" which Malinowski recommended on the model of the natural sciences, nor the naive positivist assumption that they are simply inconsequen? tial. This is the dilemma we have inherited

(most directly) from Malinowski. Geertz fixes on the irony of Malinowski's

diary to expose the futility of the romantic em

pathic ideal of ethnography [3]. But he ne?

glects to pursue in this context another sort of

irony he himself had defined in 1968: despite the bitterness and disappointment of one case he recounts,

Such an end to anthropologist-informant relationships is

hardly typical: usually the sense of being members, how? ever temporarily, insecurely and incompletely, of a single moral community can be maintained even in the face of

the wider social realities which press in at almost every moment to deny it. It is this fiction

- fiction not false?

hood - that lies at the heart of successful anthropological field research; and, because it is never completely convinc?

ing for any of the participants, it renders such research, considered as a form of conduct, continuously ironic. To

recognize the moral tension, the ethical ambiguity, im?

plicit in the encounter of anthropologist and informant, and to still be able to dissipate it through one's actions and one's attitudes, is what encounter demands of both

parties if it is to be authentic, if it is actually to happen. And to discover that is to discover also something very

complicated and not altogether clear about the nature of

sincerity and insincerity, genuineness and hypocrisy, honesty and self-deception [4].

In his earlier insight Geertz had focused upon what he called the anthropological irony, a

peculiar species of good faith between ethno?

grapher and informant which verged on bad faith, and thereby constituted, strangely enough, what he suggested was the basis of authenticity in ethnography. Geertz reasoned that there was always some form of reciprocal pretence between anthropologist and host re?

flecting their situational agreement to wel? come one another into their respective cul?

tures regardless of the few realistic grounds for such participation. At least in the new states, this reciprocity of "touching faith" takes the form of an honorary cultural membership for

the anthropologist and a sanguine hope of Western advantages to be gained by his hosts, objective, deterrent conditions aside. The impossibility of such unspoken promises is both the tragedy of cultural difference domination and the ground of its understand? ing. Malinowski's recurrent disaffection from his hosts and longing to be elsewhere suggests another form of the same inevitable anthro? pological irony. The authenticity of his ethno? graphy was sufficient unto the times, but Geertz's halting intuition regarding his own fieldwork some 45 years later suggests that authentic ethnography can no longer in good positivist faith efface the diary from the ac? count.

Perhaps not unlike Malinowski in his ethno? graphic amnesia, Geertz [5] spared us further discomfort and changed the subject from the epistemology of a profound, if uniquely dis? trusting, intimacy between ethnographer and informant, to the epistemology of how the ethnographer understands. An epistemological context which mystifies the native and over?

looks the ethnographer himself seems to sup? plant the earlier insight where both were all too transparent to one another, and authen?

ticity somehow unproblematic. As the article

reveals, Geertz, like Malinowski, had slipped back into a false consciousness of how one

does ethnographic research. On the other

hand, while Malinowski had invoked the reifi cation of "functionalism" to assure the ob?

jectivity for which he strove, Geertz does at?

tempt to recover a sense of the arbitrary

variety of interpretive analogues which consti? tute ethnographic reality, thereby foreclosing on any such simple objectification. Neverthe? less, these analogues are now comfortably

"experience-distant" from himself and his own presumably still "experience-near" con? course with his hosts. In this excavation of

ethnographic epistemology he reveals the inter? pretive strata of our understanding, but stops short of the ground of authenticity he had exposed several years earlier. He has not, so


93

far as I know, dug so deeply again. Only a few years earlier, Kenneth Read had

made mirror-sharp the situations which Geertz

briefly reflects upon in less universal terms [6]. Makis and the Gahuku Gama were his hosts, striving both for a share of Read's culture and humane acceptance of his hesitant intrusion, while Read struggled with the futility of him? self being a Gahuku Gama, the pathos of a future which he could see more clearly than they, and the distractions of a private world of nature and humanity whose graces seemed too

delicate to share except in the pages of his book. The counterpoint is also between Malinowski and Read, both of whom felt their radically different forms of alienation and reverie must be kept apart from their ethnographies. But Geertz did suggest an epistemological basis from which the continuity of all three ethno? graphic introspections becomes apparent, and

perhaps no longer legitimately segregated from the ethnography to which it gives rise.

Another ethnographic and epistemological situation which I will interpret as convergent with the ironies of Malinowski and Geertz is Evans-Pritchard's ambivalent attitude toward Zande witchcraft, oracles, and magic [7]. Geertz's 1968 introspection broached the relationship of ethnography and fiction, so I will exploit the fortuitous appearance of the same word in Evans-Pritchard's ethnography: "There is an established fiction that the Avongara [the Zande nobility] are not witches..." [8]. The enduring brilliance of this

ethnography is his demonstration that witches, oracles, and magic do exist just as the Azande think they do, while never for very long allow?

ing us to lose sight of the fact that they don't really exist at all, or (to put it in terms of the Azande's own response) at least they don't exist in England. Writing when ethnography still often had to convince its readers that other cultures were human, Evans-Pritchard walked a fine line between conscientious under? standing of the way Azande themselves saw these phenomena and a frank incredulity

-

apparently not hidden from the Azande them? selves - that the whole thing could be taken so seriously. I am fascinated by a professional? ism which seems to have left no stone un?

turned, an ethnographic candor which reveals

sufficient respect for his hosts to confront them without patronising indulgence, and sufficient respect for his readers to bare his own innermost epistemological prejudices and ambivalences. Writing fully in the same posi? tivist preconception as Malinowski, he never?

theless achieved the sincerity of which Malinowski was incapable because he could not fully efface his diary from his ethnography.

The innocently paradoxical comment about the Zande "fiction" which I quoted above leapt out at me from Evans-Pritchard's pages as the quintessence of the epistemological dilemma his candor had left bare: due to a certain fiction the nobility are not witches, but due to a radically different sort of fiction many other Azande are witches (in daily, ordinary, and taken-for-granted fact)... and due to yet again a radically different sort of fiction Evans-Pritchard was unable to con?

vince himself, except for certain "lapses" in his everyday practical experience of Zande life and language, of the truth of Zande fiction. Toward the end of this essay I will suggest that the fictions by which we constitute ethno? graphy are not essentially different from those by which the subject constitutes his

world; analysis of the two processes is neces?

sarily integral. The subsequent ethnographic tradition of

explaining witches seems to have circumvented Evans-Pritchard's problem by means comparable to what Malinowski, and later Geertz, adopted to abstract themselves from the way things had been in the field. Rather than struggle with the shifting distinction between the truth and fiction of witches in an intercultural epistemology, most of us have managed to cre? ate the unintended illusion that this central issue becomes irrelevant when witches can be viewed as projections of anxieties, indicators of


94

social strains, or symbolic expressions of evil. While ethnographers, and social anthropologists in general, continued to explain witchcraft as

though Evans-Pritchard (influenced by Levy Bruhl and Pareto) had unequivocally vanquished the witches themselves, philosophers of social science have taken the issue up where Evans

Pritchard left it. Perhaps because ethnography since then has

been little help in this regard, the philosophers continue to veer, much like Evans-Pritchard did himself, between enchantment and denial.

Winch [9] concludes that Zande witches "exist" in whatever terms the Azande them?

selves use, and that if we wish to understand them we can only accede to their terms of

reference;Gellner [10] no more thoughtful? ly than Evans-Pritchard in his dogmatic mo?

ments, scoffs at the whole absurd illusion, in? cluding Winch's. Lukes [11] wants to have it both ways by urging both relativistic and uni versalistic criteria of rationality, but the Zande nevertheless fail on the latter grounds. Jarvie

[12] and Giddens [13] accept forms of rela? tivistic understanding like Winch's but avoid the solipsistic implications of Winch's argu?

ment by pointing out that different cultures are either historically or logically mediated by common meanings. Jarvie implies that differ? ences in cultural conception of reality get worked out historically in a survival of the fittest (and truest) mode. Giddens lucidly sug? gests, on the other hand, that different cultural realities are "frames of meaning" which are

already in the process of mediation (insofar as they are aware of each other). He refrains from drawing conclusions about whether in particu? lar cases this mediation reflects the triumph of rationality or, for instance, coercion or

delusion. This hermeneutic form of relativism, in which the historical situation is the one suf? ficient absolute, certainly helps us understand

why both the Azande and Evans-Pritchard were right about witches, and that while British indirect rule was making progress in overcoming the Zande preconception, Zande

rationalism was making progress in overcoming Evans-Pritchard's assumptions.

We can further understand the relativity of truth and fiction in this instance by comparing it with the more recent but equally significant ethnographic dilemma posed by Castaneda's account of don Juan, the Yaqui brujo or shaman. This comparison reveals the ironic

disparity between the relationship of Evans Pritchard and Castaneda to their respective audiences almost two generations apart. Evans-Pritchard had sought to convince a

sceptical readership of the practical rationality of the Azande beliefs (while convincing him? self that their beliefs were nevertheless a fic? tion); Castaneda sought to convince an en?

thusiastic counter-culture devoted to perceiv? ing "other realities" of the practical irrational? ity of his experiences with don Juan (while convincing himself that these experiences were nevertheless true). Some anthropologists appreciated his epistemological effort, while others pursued the issue of ethnographic veracity with a seriousness that perhaps better than any other circumstance reveals to us the

ephemeral nature of ethnographic commit? ment. The ironic reversal between Witchcraft, Oracles... and its sequel forty years later not

only demonstrates the shifting relationship between the ethnographer, his subject, and his audience: the tension between the former as

palpably true ethnography and don Juan as

convincing fiction also places the tenuous dis? tinction inescapably before us.

I have traced a continuity between a perspec? tive implicit in Malinowski's ethnography (and in Geertz's and Read's), and again between

Evans-Pritchard's ethnography and Castaneda's,

suggesting that these continuities converge as exemplars of an epistemological dilemma for contemporary social anthropology. I have also

suggested that anthropologists have avoided

confronting this recurrent dilemma, Malinowski and Evans-Pritchard in their particular ways

-

and Geertz, Read, and Castaneda (or his de?

tractors) in their's. Now I must make the im


95

plicit accusation clearer, and marshall behind it more than a few tenuous ethnographic re

interpretations. To recapitulate: Malinowski experienced a

profound alienation in the midst of his hosts

that often betrays disdain for them, erotic

distractions, and doubts about himself that would not be unfamiliar to most ethnographers. He set many high standards for full field re?

porting, yet apparently assumed that the con? ditions of research were separable from his scientific purpose. Geertz suggests that at least

in research in the communities of the new states a tenuous trust must be built upon im?

possible ideals of reciprocal cultural mobility, and concluded that this irony is nevertheless

integral to anthropological understanding. Read's own lyrically ethnographic diary, published as a supplement which ironically may itself only be supplemented by his conventional ethnography, suggests a media?

tion which extends to all ethnography. Al?

though Malinowski and Read may be obverse sides of a personal predicament, I think they also represent obverse sides of Geertz's episte?

mological predicament. Geertz's ambiguously sincere reciprocation of "touching faith"

between ethnographer and hosts is implicit in both Malinowski's and Read's accounts, as is their disaffection from their hosts implicit in Geertz's regression from a more penetrating

epistemology. Although the gap between cul?

tures may be theoretically bridgable, few field researchers would presume to have overcome

it, and most would have to admit to an im?

penetrable alienation between themselves and

their hosts, balanced more or less by the ac?

complishment of some degree of understanding.

I don't think my own efforts with recalcitrant and suspicious Quechua has coloured my con?

clusions, because my personal experience among

Maori has been utterly to the contrary yet can?

not rise beyond a similar sense of estranged in?

timacy. Whether this residual sense of mutual alienation arises from a wider context of politi?

cal, economic, or ideological domination by

the anthropologist's culture, or a narrower

cultural context of such domination of the

anthropologist by his hosts, it seems likely that the transcendance of such disparity is ne?

cessarily a fiction. The convergence between this peculiarly ir?

reducible epistemological difficulty and that which I have outlined through Evans-Pritchard and Castaneda further extends Geertz's notion

of anthropological irony. Evans-Pritchard ex?

perienced a profound ambivalence between

the practical and discursive rationality of Zande beliefs and his own conviction that they constituted no more than an elaborately ratio?

nalized fiction, however real to the Azande.

The cultural basis of his own conviction may not have been so clear to Evans-Pritchard who,

after all, confronted a professional audience no less dubious of primitive rationality than the population at large. Castaneda's converse

labour decades later, to convince an enthusias?

tically credulous readership of the practical im?

possibility of believing in a sorcerer's world for very long, however palpably true it might be, puts this dilemma in fuller perspective. However convinced Castaneda and his audience

may be of the truth of don Juan's world, its fiction is apparent insofar as they must come back to the straight world of California; how? ever convinced Evans-Pritchard and his

audience may remain of the fiction in the

Azande's world, its truth is apparent insofar

as they remain there, insistently reabsorbed

in Zande common sense. This version of the

anthropological irony seems to adumbrate a

more radical ontological polarity between an?

thropologist and hosts which underlies the

merely ethical tensions revealed by Malinowski, Read, and Geertz. However, both forms of

polarity are existential in the sense that they necessarily constitute the fieldwork experience, not merely regulate its boundaries. That is to

say, the experience of such existential gaps is itself the ground of the anthropological under?

standing which is indubitably accomplished, and jointly built upon, by strangers living to


96

gether. The gap is the foundation of under?

standing, not its subversion. As Geertz dimly saw in 1968, the ethnography which is to re? flect this accomplishment must in some sense both perpetrate a fiction and claim truth.

This peculiarly productive epistemological dilemma must not be confused with those generic to the positivist tradition of social science. Such spurious dilemmas arise from the

illusory assumption that the understanding subject and the object understood are primor? dial realities each condemned to ineffable sub? jectivity in an objective world which stands apart. Descartes' cogito ergo sum gave rise to a positivism which split the unity of concrete experience into subjectivity {cogito, or the isolated consciousness) and objectivity {res, or substance), two polar forms of alienation

which appeared to leave no option between an arrant subjectivism and a scientistic objec? tivism. The epistemological perspective I am

urging, here deduced from ethnographic im?

passes, instead suggests that both subjectifica tions and objectifications are extrapolations from the ground of mutual understanding upon which any encounter necessarily begins insofar as human beings recognize one an?

other as such. This accomplishment, however

ephemeral its inception, is necessarily the

primordial reality and unequivocal basis of an authentic understanding, which is neither a subjectified understanding on the one hand nor an objectified understood on the other. This latter subjective-objective split is the mystification which now misleads us, obscur?

ing the middle ground from which understand? ing dialectically arises.

But, the polarity of subject and object is now very real, as derived from Descartes and

now assumed in the standard Western European worldview. Understanding must be a dialectic, that is to say, a dialogue between subject and

object. Although the dilemma may only be historical rather than ontological, it is no less

inescapable. Interpretation of this spontaneous dialectic of understanding can only waiver be

tween "truth" which reflects the alienation of

subject and object and "fiction" which regains their existential mediation. This is, in most

general terms, the dilemma which Geertz called the anthropological irony. I hope to clarify the philosophical bases and implications of this epistemological problem, and head off some of the ways it may be subverted by the positivist perspective which takes subjectivity and objectivity as given.

Geertz, again as though his explicit episte? mological enquiry in 1974 were a regression from the clarity of his merely moral enquiry of 1968, in the later essay raised the mislead? ing issue of the inaccessibility of the "native's point of view". With Malinowski's disaffection as a demonstration, he suggests that an anthro?

pologist's understanding is instead derived from the native's own "experience-near con?

cepts", mediated by "experience-distant con?

cepts" which the anthropologist brings to bear on the problem from whatever sources are in?

tuitively comparable, including ideas from other cultures as well as his own. I do not take issue with Geertz's hermeneutic method here, but rather with its truncation. Although he suspects that no clear line can be drawn be?

tween the native's innermost point of view and his experience-near concepts, Geertz never?

theless leaves the impression that the former would be the ideal basis of knowledge were it not in principle as inaccessible as the romantic ideal of empathy is futile in anthropological understanding. The frustrated understanding can only hope to approximate this ideal know? ledge "without recourse to pretensions of

more-than-normal capacities for ego-efface ment and fellow-feeling..."; furthermore, "... whatever accurate or half-accurate sense

one gets of what one's informants are really like comes not from the experience of that ac? ceptance as such, which is part of one's own

biography, not of theirs, but from the ability to construe their modes of expression..." [ 14].

In 1968 Geertz had concluded that a certain "moral tension" or "ethical ambiguity" be


97

tween anthropologist and his informants "lies at the heart of successful anthropological re?

search"; its recognition and dissipation "is what encounter demands of both parties if it is to be authentic" [15]. But in 1974 he has reverted to ego-effacement on the one hand, and an approximation to fellow-feeling on the other; he has abstracted his biography from theirs, and furthermore mystified the native's biography by extrapolating an ephemeral sub? jectivity that obscures the authenticity once transparent in dialogue and compromise.

Similarly, Geertz's own "experience-near con?

cepts", ethical and epistemological, disappear in this explicit methodology of understanding. The native's point of view is objectified at one alienated end of a truncated symmetry be? tween its own experience-near concepts and

Geertz's experience-distant analogues, the

native speaking now into a void from which Geertz has absented himself. A more recent version of Geertz's view of hermeneutics still reflects a similarly one-dimensional account

of anthropological understanding [16]. It seems to me that the ineffability of the

native's "innermost" point of view is a

chimera created by this reciprocal alienation from the practical dialogue in which under? standing necessarily arises. The dialectic be?

tween subject and object has implicitly been transformed by abstraction into two alienated

subjectivities, one of which is unapproachable and the the other of which is gone entirely. This background of subjectification implicitly invokes an objectified foreground which

Geertz presents as a methodology, itself ab? stracted from any particular situation. The

dialectic of understanding is saved from Des? cartes' fateful dichotomization of knowledge only by Geertz's proposal of an unrestrainedly arbitrary and pancultural assortment of "ex?

perience-distant concepts". Although these too are presented abstractly, they nevertheless restore authenticity by suggesting a dialogue between Geertz and some others, somewhere. This is one way that the dialogue in which

understanding necessarily arises can be retained in its subsequent ethnography, that is, if a reifi cation of subject and object do not obscure its dialectic.

II

Having rejected Dilthey's futile ideal of em? pathy, Geertz accepts from him the model of hermeneutic understanding as tacking between part and whole or particular and general [17]. Dilthey had distinguished social science from natural sicence methodology, emphasizing that the former, by virtue of itself being social, has direct access to its subject matter, whereas the latter can only impute meaning indirectly to its subject matter. He also emphasized the dialectical or reflexive nature of interpretation which achieves understanding of its object by relating it as partial meaning within a whole context of meaning [ 18]. But as Gadamer has argued [ 19], Dilthey's inconsistency was to abstract the hermeneutic circle from the histor? ical and existential context of the interpreter, just as Geertz has done in re-segregating his own from the native's biography. Beguiled by the positivist ideal of natural scientific know? ledge, Dilthey elevated empathy to intuitive certitude by transcending the historical con? text of the interpreter and objectifying what is interpreted; similarly, Geertz pursues the

objectivist chimera by abstracting not only from any recognition of his own point of view, but also: from any immediate understanding of the native's point of view. This leaves us with what Gadamer calls, in criticism of Dilthey, a "purely formal methodology" unanchored in real life confrontation between subject and object, despite the phenomenological ideal ofDilthey's Lebensphilosophie. Gadamer further suggests that it is just this abstract con? cept of understanding, derived from Enlighten? ment Cartesianism and its positivist apotheosis in Comte and Mill, which rendered Dilthey's method vulnerable to idealism and relativism [20]. Ironically, then, with both the inter


98

preter's and the native's points of view gone

from Geertz's hermerieutic circle, in a still more rigourous approximation to objectivist knowledge it too is liable to inherit the wind, the very subjectivism it abjures. Gadamer, following Heidegger's reincorporation of the

interpreter into the hermeneutic circle of historical understanding, argues that the truth of understanding is neither objective nor subjective, but arises in an intersubjective dialogue between two different points of view:

True historical thinking must take account of its own

historicality. Only then will it not chase the phantom of an historical object which is the object of progressive research, but learn to see in the object the counterpart of itself and hence understand both. The true historical

object is not an object at all, but the unity of the one and the other, a relationship in which exist both the

reality of history and the reality of historical understand

ing[21].

Elsewhere he characterises this "counterpart" or dialectic of understanding as "affinity", a concept drawn from Heidegger:

Every "new" position of understanding which replaces another continues to need the "former" because it can?

not itself be explained so long as it knows neither in what

nor by what it is opposed... We see that there are dialectical

relations between... on the one hand, the prejudice

organically a part of my particular system of convictions

or opinions, that is the implicit prejudice, and on the

other hand, a new element which denounces it, that is, a foreign element which provokes my system or one of

its elements [22].

This is "true conversation" or dialogue. How?

ever, for understanding to abstract itself from its own historical context, in the pretense of

objective understanding, instead fails to put its own implicit prejudices at risk, and subverts in this evasive or patronising indulgence the truth claim of that which it seeks to under? stand [23]. Consequently, all knowledge is necessarily "an effective unity which can only be analyzed as a network of reciprocal actions"

[24]. What appears, from the perspective of

positivism, to be a potential conservative or

ethnocentric bias retained in the subjectivity of the interpreter, is from the perspective of hermeneutics a necessary participation in the

reformulation of knowledge on its only ob?

jective basis, intersubjective dialogue. Only in this latter way can we discriminate "the

really critical question of hermeneutics, namely of distinguishing the true prejudices, by which we understand, from the false ones

by which we misunderstand" [25]. Gadamer dismisses the imputation to his approach of uncritical acceptance of tradition and socio?

political conservatism, pointing out that the

bourgeois historical consciousness , which

through relativisation of the old embraces

everything new, also courts the hegemony of the old through the relativisation of the new [26]. The roots of Gadamer's dialectic in Plato are clear: Socrates fought the nihilistic and hence potentially demagogic scepticism of the Sophists with the new art of philosophy, whereby a perpetual dialectic of theses and countertheses can only adumbrate an ephem? eral truth ("what something is") but never loses sight of it. Although he represented tradi? tion against the new ideas of the day, the dialectical method borne of this "affinity" between philosophy and "its shadow, sophism" insured that "mere talk, nothing but talk, can, however untrustworthy it may be, still bring out understanding between human beings

?

which is to say that it can still make human

beings human" [27]. This comment about "nothing but talk"

brings me to a final consideration regarding Gadamer's philosophy of hermeneutics which I hope will head off, or rather, co-opt, a

Marxian critique. Gadamer has been charged

by his critical theorist colleague Habermas with proposing a hermeneutics which by re?

maining merely linguistic is impotent to

penetrate the false consciousness which ob?

scures the contradictions of capitalist society [28]. But I consider Gadamer's rejection of the "purely formal methodology" of Diltheyian hermeneutics and its implicit idealism an ade


99

quate guard against this impotence. Rather than the "artifice of hyperbolic

doubt" idealized in the scientific method since Descartes, Gadamer insists that (unlike Dilthey) we must remain consistent with Dil they's philosophy of practical life:

Always and everywhere, life leads to reflection on that

which confronts it, reflection leads to doubt, and life can

only resist doubt in the pursuit of valid knowledge [29].

"There is a decisive difference between the cer?

titude grasped in the heart of life and scientific

certitude," and a decisive difference between

methodic doubt and the sort of doubt which assails us, so to say, without reason, without purpose, spontaneous

ly [30]. ... in the end all understandings are reducible to a com?

mon level of a *I know how to go about it', that is, a self

understanding in relation to something else [31].

I interpret this emphasis on practice in Gadamer's

dialectic as no less "materialistic" than Marx's

own assertion of the inextricability of thought and practice. Indeed, Gadamer's critique of

Dilthey here reads like Marx's own critique of the later Hegelian idealism, and like Marx's

critique it pursues the dialectic of labour and alienation which Hegel himself originated. Like Marx on Hegel, Adorno criticized Heidegger's hermeneutic existentialsm for transcending the irreducible dialectic of subject and object in a subjectivism of Being which pretends to be immune to the determination of objective

history [32]. Although Gadamer credits

Heidegger for the central insights of his new

hermeneutics, I think he has nevertheless

distanced himself from the idealism implicit in the latter's scheme, liable to stultify the dialectic inherent in practical understanding. As Habermas charges, Gadamer's confidence

in the "spontaneous" doubt of ordinary re?

flective life and "the certitude grasped in the heart of life" appears to be naively liable to the false consciousness of systematically dis? torted communication. On the other hand,

this apparent naivety may be viewed as a re assertion of the irrespressible critical capacity of the common man in practice, regardless of the subversions of mass culture and total

administration, an adherence to the original spirit of Marxism until recently neglected in the pessimism of critical theory [33]. This

optimism does not evade the problem; on the

contrary, in the concept of "true prejudice" it identifies the problem without abstracting from its inherent dialectic.

Now the epistemological dilemma I have characterised through the ethnographic reflec? tions of Malinowski, Geertz, Read, Evans

Pritchard, and Castaneda is cultural; what

bearing does Gadamer's concern with the inter?

pretation of history have on this? Gadamer

argues that the "temporal distance" between

the interpreter and his problematic object, often an historical text, constitutes rather than deters true understanding:

... temporal distance is not something that must be over?

come. This was, rather, the naive assumption of histori

cism, namely that we must set ourselves within the spirit of the age, and think with its ideas and its thoughts, not with our own, and hence advance toward historical ob?

jectivity. In fact the important thing is to recognize the distance in time as a positive and productive possibility of understanding. It is not a yawning abyss, but is filled

with the continuity of custom and tradition... [34].

How far can this intra-cultural and temporal

problem be extended to the inter-cultural

and synchronic problems of social anthropol?

ogy? Gadamer himself shifts easily between the problematic interpretation of historical text, personal letter, another person, and a generic

"other", and does not hesitate to assert the

universality of hermeneutics on the basis of communicative process and the model of the

dialogue [35]. Sufficient "temporal distance" is required to separate the observer from sub?

jective or unreflexive involvement in the ob? ject of interpretation, but mere dialogue may satisfy this minimum requirement.


100

What a thing has to say, its intrinsic content, first appears

only after it is divorced from the fleeting circumstances

of its actuality [36].

Ricoeur has more explictly taken herme?

neutics from the traditional concern with

problematic written texts well into the socio?

logical camp with a consideration of corre?

spondingly "fixed" meaningful action [37]. More recently, he has extended this perspective into discourse and dialogue insofar as "the smallest gap... inserts itself between saying and what is said" [38]. He suggests that the

applicability of hermeneutics to action and to history itself, as well as to texts, rests in their common narrative or "story" structure, a new point of departure which I will take up in the last section of this paper. Also like

Gadamer, Ricoeur emphasises the bilateral

character of understanding: whereas for

Gadamer the knower and the known reconsti?

tute one another in an "affinity", for Ricoeur the knower must both "appropriate" his ob?

ject and himself be opened by its "disclosure" of the world [39], and thus experience both a "belonging" to its meaning and a "distancia

tion" which objectifies it [40]. Devereux, apparently independently, argues

for the epistemological "complementarity" of

the ethnographer and his ethnographic subjects

[41 ]. His approach is psychoanalytic, but his conclusions are suggestively parallel with con?

temporary hermeneutics, and likewise extended

generally to the social sciences. His discussions,

derived from reflections throughout his long career of ethnographic fieldwork, focus on an

interdependant relationship of transference and countertransference between ethnographer and his hosts. While his subjects impose upon him role expectations arising from the specific social and cultural situation and their general anxieties, the ethnographer unconsciously countertransfers reciprocal preconceptions of

similar origin. Most generally, this process

masquerades in social science as a methodology

of objectivity, effacing ethnographer and ob

jectifying his subjects, merely repressing the

spontaneous understanding of the interaction itself. Devereux argues that awareness of what

is methodologically repressed is the authentic basis of objectivity, a bridge rather than a bar? rier to it. Whether or not one accepts the

psychoanalytic perspective, Devereux's notion

of the "complementarity" of ethnographic under?

standing clearly converges with the notion of

dialogue I have developed here, and especially with Gadamer's conclusion that interpretation must "learn to see in the object the counter?

part of itself and hence understand both"

[42]. George Marcus has recently suggested an enrichment of Tongan ethnography through appreciation of Tongans' adaptation to the

preconceptions and expectations of the ethno?

grapher, on whom they have compiled, so to

speak, their own ethnography [43]. Tongan ethnography, as a dialogue, must change in

just the same sense that Tonga itself changes.

Finally, inviting the extension of herme neutics fully into the problem of cross-cultural

understanding, Giddens addresses Evans

Pritchard's problem of Zande witches [44]. He asserts, as I have argued above, an episte?

mological congruence between historical

distance and cultural difference [45]. He sug?

gests that cultural realities as disparate as those

of Zande witches and English scepticism about them are nevertheless already mediated as

"frames of meaning" integral to practical situ?

ations [46]. Although these confrontations may have a superficial resemblance to mutual

contradiction or incommensurability, inviting either scientific arrogance or solipsistic relativ?

ism, these are illusory abstractions from the bedrock of specific practical situations, such as

resolving a particular witchcraft accusation

with the poison oracle or implementing in a

particular Zande province Indirect rule which tolerates no such thing. From the point of

view of actual practice, such situations are

worked out and understandable in the same

sense that metaphors, irony, or other apparent?

ly self-contradictory statements are meaning


101

ful in concrete context rather than nonesensical on some spurious logical grounds. These "miniature" semantic situations apply "macro

scopically" to "the understanding of alien be?

lief systems" [47]. Giddens' approach to

understanding not only emphasises its dialogi cal nature but also, like Gadamer's emphasis on practical rather than abstract points of

view, reminds us of the objective context of social action and power inequality in which

meaning typically occurs.

I think this synoptic review of contemporary hermeneutic theory suggests a problematic epistemological continuity between "temporal distance" as constitutive of historical under?

standing, and "cultural distance" as constitu?

tive of anthropological understanding. If Giddens' insight is right, these forms of social scientific understanding are homologous to certain semantic processes in their practical use. I would further suggest that anthropologi? cal understanding is prototypic, because its social basis is insistent and immediate and least liable to an unreflexive assumption of

understanding. Whether or not these claims are accepted, it is at least clear that the model of the dialogue is necessarily the common denominator of social scientific understanding. Consistency with this epistemological basis re?

quires that both anthropological self-awareness and ethnographic account reflect the dialectic

by which this understanding is constituted.

At least in the case of anthropological under?

standing, raising the concept of "cultural dis?

tance" to the level of a basic epistemological

principle appears especially paradoxical. The

hermeneutic insistence on the reintegration of

the interpreter in the object of knowledge ap? pears to collide with cultural relativism and invite or legitimize ethnocentrism, the obverse

apodictics of twentieth century anthropologi? cal theory. However, I think this apparent contradiction can be resolved in just the same

way as Gadamer has defended himself against the charge of traditionalism or conservatism.

This reconsideration of basic tenets of the

discipline has the added advantage of integrat? ing them in the reflexive critique which moti? vates the new approach. Gadamer's relativisa

tion of historical understanding is intended as a sword which cuts both ways: by reaffirming the logically necessary priority of the inter?

preter's historicity in an apprehension of

truth, he also gives us the ground always to

suspect its motives, to discriminate, as he says, its false from its true prejudices. The latter, in

turn, can only be provisionally tolerated as

implicit or invisible, subject to subsequent controversion by openness to the truth claim of another point of view. While the conviction of "true prejudice" is the only basis upon which understanding can be built, the move? ment of understanding in the changing circum?

stances of history also convicts true prejudice of falsehood or illusion. This dialectical ap? proach to understanding puts the anthropologi? cal apodictics on less dogmatic grounds: if cultural relativism is treated objectivistically its logical conclusion is just another form of

ethnocentrism; this happens in much the same

way that Dilthey's romanticist hermeneutics forgets itself in an apotheosis of empathy as

positivist history. On the other hand, ethno? centrism must underlie the profession of social

anthropology insofar as we can only translate

one culture into another. To put it another

way, escape from ethnocentrism is our busi?

ness, but a definitive escape puts us out of

business altogether. Meanwhile, ethnocentrism, like true prejudice, is the only basis upon

which we understand at all, and, when unavoid?

able, discriminate good from bad cultural prac? tices (our own or others!). Similar to Gadamer's

fragile "true prejudice", Ricoeur suggests that the dialectic of understanding seeks a "second

naivete" once criticism has purged the first [48]. These paradoxes do not expose anthro?

pology as a charade any more than Gadamer's

hermeneutics is a reactionary subterfuge; they only reassert the inescapably historical and dialectical nature of understanding, and redis?

cover certitude as a dialogue. From this perspec


102

tive, positivist objectivism or scientism becomes the ultimate ethnocentrism, at least in the pre? sent conjuncture of our historical self-under?

standing.

Ill

I have extended "the anthropological irony" from Geertz himself to several other examples of ethnography in extremis, arguing with Gadamer that this apparent difficulty is really the vindication of ethnographic truth. Geertz also sensed this at one time, furthermore point?

ing out how uncomfortably close this irony is to hypocrisy, bad faith, self-deception, false consciousness. I think these are the other side of the coin of understanding, namely, mis?

understanding of varying degrees of culpability, and not separable from its dialectic except through a positivist sleight-of-hand. Karl

Popper, in his maturity, similarly suggests that all forms of distinctively human knowledge arose originally in lies or "story-telling" [49]. Now, embedded in the long history of know?

ledge, we are in no better position than we ever were to discriminate between the story which is built truthfully on the epistemological foundation of anthropological irony from that

which is falsehood or false-consciousness. This

discrimination must be made, but cannot be

made in abstraction from particular instances

of interpretation. In any case, if the positivist vision of an undialectical truth is now revealed

as chimerical, we can no longer draw the line

between truth and fiction so simplistically. Geertz's comments on the anthropological

irony also broach the issue of fiction, and give me the opportunity to take it up where he has left off. For Geertz in 1968 the "touching faith" between anthropologist and informant

suggests a "... fiction ? fiction not falsehood

?

that lies at the heart of successful anthropolog? ical field research" [50]. A few years later he

goes further, extending this perception of

understanding to ethnography itself, and draw?

ing comparisons with Madame Bovary and

painting, making the point that all are neces?

sarily multi-layered interpretations which can? not easily be discriminated from their referen? tial reality [51 ]. He nevertheless asserts a dis? tinction between this fictio

? "something

made" - and falsehood or unfactuality, and

suggests that the intention to depict reality, and other conditions of this depiction, serve to distinguish it more or less from the fiction of a novel. Although not really "verifiable", the fictions of ethnography are "appraisable, not merely aesthetically, but as better or worse than other accounts; and although co?

herence or thickness of description is a crite? rion of such appraisal, correspondence to

action and events is indispensible:

If anthropological interpretation is constructing a reading of what happens, then to divorce it from what happens - from what, in this time or that place, specific people say, what they do, what is done to them, from the whole

vast business of the world - is to divorce it from its ap?

plications and render it vacant [52].

This is one of the crucial points at which Geertz opts at the last minute for a vestigial positivism that threatens to reincorporate and paralyze his hermeneutics. There is no doubt

that the basic difference between ethnography and fiction is that the former intends, and is taken to intend, truth. Realistic fiction, on the

other hand, encourages a suspension of doubt, or signals its status in some even more subtle

way. But this distinction, far from being ob?

vious, instead seems to be the focus of the

thickest description of all, a broad semantic no-man's land. "Correspondence" or pure factual reference to "what happens..." is cer?

tainly a necessary illusion for ethnography to

maintain, but at the same time it must not in? vite us to hypostatize the facts and lose sight of the irreducible ambiguity of circumstance Geertz is elsewhere at pains to make clear.

Such covert factualisation of the world is, in social science, the correlative of the magical abstraction of the scientist from the under?

standing presented. The tricks through which


103

ethnography claims truth are no less complex than those through which the novel claims fiction. Now, this difference must be exam? ined rather than taken for granted.

If we are to take up, perhaps more seriously than Geertz does himself, his suggestion that both ethnographic fieldwork and ethnography are sorts of fiction, where shall we go? My own direction was initially dictated, I should confess, by a spurious hope to marry ethno?

graphy and the art of the novel. But this vanity was already being met halfway by forms of

literary criticism which concern themselves with the relation between fiction, realism, and

reality. This particular form of hermeneutics has come to be called narrative theory; I will survey the positions of some of its contributors, following these particular implications of the

general rapproachment of hermeneutics and

ethnography. My own conclusion, which I should at this point forecast, is that narrative

theory can make clearer to us the dialogue im?

plicit in both fieldwork and ethnography, and

help overcome the dogma which obscures the dialectic of fiction and truth inherent in both.

Soon after Geertz extended Ricoeur's model of textual interpretation to the Balinese cock?

fight [53], Ricoeur extended it even more

generally to social action and historiography [54]. Ricoeur drew attention to narrative as the common epistemological basis of the text, social action, and history. Whereas action

"fixes" discourse in a way comparable to the

text, history "fixes" action and itself becomes a text. All are "stories" in the sense of narra?

tive, whether truth or fiction, whose meaning has become free from the original conditions

of their production and remains open to new social contexts and an indefinite series of pos? sible "readers" [55]. Through this hermeneutic

emphasis on the historical relativity of meaning in diverse aspects of social reality, Ricoeur also

suggests a dialectical reunification of natural science explanation and social scientific under?

standing in a form of interpretation which re?

mains open to history. From this perspective,

historiography, like any text and like social action itself, is:

the operation by which the narrator tells a story and his listener hears it [56]... a reciprocal relation between re?

counting and following a history which defines a com?

pletely primitive language game...; to follow a history is

a completely specific activity by which we continuously anticipate a final course and an outcome, and we succes?

sively correct our expectations until they coincide with

the actual outcome. Then we say that we have under?

stood [57].

In this way Ricoeur skirts the pre-emptory positivist vision of a predictable world, which would incorporate hermeneutics as a momen?

tary illusion, and instead reincorporates this closure in the irreducible "openness" of inter?

pretation. Geertz strains for such a resolution, but cannot for long let go of the positivist vision, at least in his most theoretical moments.

Tom Wolfe, the first of three narrative theorists I will briefly consider, similarly seems

closely to approach but stops just short of a dialectical understanding of the reality he seeks to depict [58]. Wolfe reveiws the rise of "new journalism" in the 1960s, arguing that its recourse to the devices of the 19th century tradition of realistic fiction (especially scene

by-scene construction, dialogue, third-person

point-of-view, and depiction of status life) have ensured an immediate touch with the

realities journalists must painstakingly docu?

ment. Ironically, literary fiction itself has de?

serted realism, pursuing a new form of classi?

cal story-telling or "neo-fabulism" which loses

all contact with reality, if only because it can no longer compete on these grounds with up? start journalism [59]. Furthermore, the

earlier "beige" on studiedly neutral journalism reacted with complaints of "parajournalism" or "zoot-suited prose", which recalls the

indignant charges of populist sensationalism with which the original realism of Fielding, Sterne, Smollett, Dickens and Balzac were met

[60]. Yet these reactions often betray a moral?

izing or politicizing elitism which is veiled by a

pretence of either objectivity or aestheticism


104

[61 ]. Wolfe's reassessment of the conventional

boundary between objective reporting and re? alistic fiction is especially relevant to ethno?

graphy, which may also aim to be a form of

journalism. He and the new journalism have

given palpable legitimacy to a style of writing which bespeaks the same commitment to cons?

cientious fieldwork and unexpected detail, yet belies the illusion of abstracted objectivism. Many ethnographers would readily agree with this perspective, however chary of the literary techniques of realistic fiction. But Wolfe is concerned precisely to argue that if we are to write about such real experience, the style of social realism cannot be avoided without laps? ing into pretension. He claims that the develop?

ment of this technique is for literature what

electricity is for technology, and such evolu? tion cannot be undone except in reactionary

flights of fancy [62]. Wolfe's insight regarding the truth about

reality and the fictional techniques by which we depict it is a point from which we cannot

regress; however, I am dubious [63] that any classical device of realism, let alone these four, can be canonized as eternal verities without

paralyzing the reality both ethnographers and

journalists seek to depict. Kermode, whom I

will discuss next, describes a "pleromatic" criterion of historical realism to which the writers of the Bible and their medieval com? mentators subscribed: authentication was im?

plicit in prophecy and other forms intercalat?

ing disparate periods of time and meanings of

metaphor which instead imply inauthenticity to the post-Enlightenment mind [64]. The shift of criteria of realism which Wolfe him? self traces from classical story-telling to social realism and from "beige" positivist journalism to the new journalism further reveals the his? torical relativity of our narrative techniques for depicting reality; the "neo-fabulism" (e.g.

Borges, Garcia) which Wolfe suspects of bour?

geois evasiveness may capture the essence of

contemporary reality as effectively as Chaucer or Homer did their times. Wolfe's own tech

nique of declasse immediacy, mixed metaphor, and stream of turned-on consciousness seems

less able to depict the 80s than the 60s, and even scenes, dialogue, point-of-view, and

status cannot be supposed above the history which gave rise to these techniques. Wolfe's evolutionist analogy between realism and electricity is naive enough for me to relativise the criteria of "social realism", hanging on in? stead to the dialectic perception of reality im? plicit in his more basic criteria: "the reader knows all this actually happened" [65]. This reminds us that the dialogue upon which under? standing is founded in experience extends also to the documentation of this experience, and itself sets the terms of authenticity.

The line of development of narrative theory which I have picked up from Ricoeur and Wolfe must also be traced to Frank Kermode, who similarly examines the interrelationship of literary fiction and reality. In The Sense of an Ending [66], Kermode explored the ways in which both fictional and historical or factual accounts of the world necessarily "make sense",

impute "followability", especially a teleology of beginning, middle, and ending, to a phenom? enal experience of contingency and opacity. They are "Active models of a temporal world"

[67]. This narrative reading of experience arises from and perpetuates a consensus which nevertheless accomodates the objective world

by deriving its conclusions ad hoc, integrating spontaneous experience

? "a babble of un

foreshortened dialogue, a random stubbing of

cigarettes, a collection of events without con?

cordance" ? in terms of an ending, anticipated but adjustable [68]. Heisenberg's and Bohr's principle of complementarity, whereby theore? tical physics uncomfortably reconciles divergent views of the world which no pragmatics can re?

solve, serves as a paradigm for either science or

fiction, and does not even necessarily preclude self-contradiction [69]. On the other hand, the invention of such fictions nevertheless

must correspond to some primordial reality of "human nature" against which it can be mea


105

sured [70]; furthermore, false, insidious, or totalitarian fiction is in principle distinguish? able from innocent fiction insofar as the latter

explores rather than dictates the human world and only calls for conditional assent [71 ]. That these distinctions themselves assume a

discrimination of truth from fiction is the existential dilemma which fascinates Kermode, recalling to me Gadamer's distinction between true and false prejudices. Like Sartre, Kermode ends by requiring of great fiction the paradox? ical faith in, and versimilitude to, the contin?

gent world of reality which is lost in the ob

jectivist illusion maintained by non-fiction.

Consequently, although he speaks on behalf of fictional literature, his conclusion parallels Wolfe's regarding the journalism of real ex?

perience. Ethnography, as the non-fictional ac?

count of other cultures, can least of all the sciences maintain the objectivist illusion.

In the Genesis of Secrecy [72] Kermode views this dilemma at the boundaries between fiction and reality in terms of a contemporary ambivalence between classical or medieval

Platonic Realism (which assumed the world to be itself meaningful) and the nominalist

scepticism (to which we as heirs of the En?

lightenment are also committed). Spinoza, in 1670, fatefully distinguished between mean?

ing and truth, seeing the likelihood of authori?

tarian misuse in their equivocation [73]. Since

the advent of this nominalist scepticism, we must admit the basic principle that "no narra?

tive can be transparent on historical fact" [74], that is to say, truth is never implicit in the

meaning of discourse about the world. Yet

this axiom is exceedingly hard to hang on to, and we invariably slip back into the more an?

cient, innocent, and comfortable assumption of the Realists who intuited a potential con?

tinuity between words and things that guaran? teed a transparency of the world. Kermode

quotes Barthes:

We cannot escape the conclusion that the fact can exist

only linguistically, as a term in a discourse, although we

behave as if it were a simple reproduction of something or other on another plane of existence altogether, some

extra-structural 'reality* "

[75].

The meaning of the world arises in the intricate

imputations of our narrative about it, but de?

spite the scepticism of the Enlightenment we cannot for long see it this way, and again take the meaning to be true of the world. This is, ironically enough, the same ambivalence which Evans-Pritchard (and Castaneda) felt about the

compelling but unbelievable transparency be?

tween Zande (or don Juan's) meaning and truth; but as I think must be the fate of ethnography, the pendulum of ambivalence swings between two or more alternative worlds of naive realism,

clear across the peculiar chasm of scepticism created by Enlightenment nominalism.

In illustration of the dilemma as it faces

historians, Kermode quotes Pynchon:

Let me now quote a historical, or pseudo-historical, nar?

rative of a very different kind. It purports to describe an

engagement between an American and a Russian warship

off the coast of California: 'What happened on the 9th March, 1864... is not too clear. Popov the Russian admiral

did send out a ship, either the corvette 'Bogatir' or the

clipper 'Gaidamek', to see what it could see. Off the coast

of either what is now Carmel-by-the-Sea, or what is now

Pismo Beach, around noon or possibly toward dusk, the

two ships sighted each other. One of them may have fired;

if it did then the other responded; but both were out of

range so neither showed a scar afterward to prove any?

thing.' This passage describes an historical event which is

held to have occurred, to have left no trace, and to be

susceptible of honest report only in the most uncertain

and indeterminate manner. It admirably represents a

modern skepticism concerning the reference of texts to

events. Events exist only as texts, already to that extent

interpreted, and if we were able to discard the interpreta? tive material and be as honest as historians, quite honestly,

pretend to be, all we should have left would be some

such nonsignificant dubiety as this account of the first

engagement ever to take place between American and

Russian forces [76].

Such a purged chronicle applies "too strict a distinction between meaning and truth and would leave few historical narratives capable of interesting us" [77]. Although it is illusory, "we shall continue to write historical narrative

as if it were an altogether different matter


106

from making fictions or, a fortiori, from telling lies" [78]. With my case already made for the episte?

mological equivalence of historical and cultural

distance, I can now claim that historians and

ethnographers, as well as journalists, are in an

epistemological predicament similar to novelists. Kermode's appreciation of the historical dialec? tic between "pleromatic" certitude and

classical realism, the positivist certitude of the

Enlightenment, and the vertigo of a scepticism which only gathers momentum since the

sophists and the nominalists (Gadamer's "shadow of philosophy"), ending in the defi? ant honesty of Sartre's fiction, all this leaves little room for a facile epistemological re? assurance which pictures itself as outside

history. The reorientation of journalism docu?

mented by Wolfe further fills in this herme? neutic circle. The meaning which we hurry to see as truth transparent to the world is not

only inevitably a narrative of our own making, it is a dialogue in Gadamer's and Ricoeur's senses, a conversation with more than one

point of view, which is irrevocably part of its historical moment and changing with history. That this relativism does not relieve us of the

demands of truth and morality is ironic or

tragic, but nonetheless true.

Rabinowitz [79] has clarified a further di? mension in the narrative theory of fiction and

realism by examining the relationship between

author and audience. This more recent "reader

oriented" approach, rather than the "text

oriented" approach still evident in Kermode and Wolfe, reflects the convergence of literary criticism and Gadamer's and Ricoeur's philos? ophy of social science on the epistemological model of the dialogue. If one does not pre emptorily sever the text from its context, it may be argued that all of the conventions of realistic narrative pointed out by Wolfe and

Kermode are, phenomenologically, not nar?

rative at all but dialogue. I think that these perspectives can help a reflexive ethnography to better understand what it is doing.

Rabinowitz claims we must distinguish at least four audiences implied in any narrative literary text, correlative to as many different

modes of the author. The relationships between these several audience-author levels of narra?

tive meaning are the basis for contextual dis? criminations between truth and fiction. Most pivotal here is the author and his assumed or intended actual audience (authorial audience), and the internal narrator, typical of realistic fiction, and his intended audience (narrative audience). For War and Peace, the

authorial audience accepts the reality of the War of 1812 while only the narrative audience accepts the reality of Natasha, Pierre, and the other characters. The tension between the

two is distinctive of fiction. For Metamorphosis, the narrative audience is asked without apology to accept what is incredible for the authorial audience, although the entire context is per?

fectly realistic. "When the distinction between the two [authorial and narrative audiences] disappears entirely, we have autobiography or

history" [80]. I would add that the device whereby authorial and narrative audiences

are merged also includes ethnography, and emphasize (as would Wolfe and Kermode) that

this is a device.

Rabinowitz further points out that the

authorial and narrative audience each have

their further levels. The former necessarily

implies a factually actual audience and

author (the social and historical facts); the latter fictional level often includes an "ideal

narrative audience" which is "taken in" or

duped by any fiction the fictional narrator chooses to create. The two innermost fictional

levels readily become an infinite regress, as Rabinowitz illustrates with Nabakov's Pale Fire [81 ]. Successful management of the two outer levels creates a sense of truth against which these levels of fiction are played off.

Just as the ambiguous levels of dialogue with?

in the fictional narration may exuberantly

explore the distinction between relative truth and relative fiction, the central ambiguity


107

between narrative and authorial audience

(and between their authors) explores the more inclusive and less simply fictional dis? tinction between its own fiction and an ac?

count of reality. It seems to me that each of the four levels of dialogue which Rabinowitz invokes serves as a true frame of reference or

"truth-frame" relative to which its lesser in?

clusive levels are appreciated as fiction. Pheno

menologically, we approach the whole as fic?

tion, yet take each more inclusive level as true relative to our discovery of an included fiction, suggesting the mutual definition of these levels is dialectical. Rabinowitz empha? sizes the simultaneity of the perception of both truth and fiction [82], precluding any simplistic resolution of this dialectic. The

dialogical nature of the monological narrative illusion itself is made clearer by the author's apparent intention of such a simultaneous

and multivocal display of meaning, and the reader's appreciation of the author's intentions.

Fiction is here a sliding function of truth, al?

though neither is ever unambiguous. What I want finally to suggest is that in

ethnography, truth is a sliding function of fictional frames of reference, although neither is ever unambiguous. This merely puts a some?

what different perspective on Gadamer's dia?

lectic of "true prejudice". Along with auto? biography and history, ethnography works from an assumption of truth, rather than an

assumption of fiction. I think it can be shown that the illusion of meanings "transparent" to truth is achieved through the implicit accep? tance of a more inclusive level of fiction.

Through the ethnographic exemplars with which I started my discussion, I will now only suggest some of the ways in which this per? spective may be developed. At the very least, such considerations would reopen our under?

standing of ethnography as a dialogue, as well as a narrative, and reintegrate it in its own

social and historical context. Rhetorical devices which encourage the

impression of veracity or transparency are in

the first instance simply grammatical. These are less obvious than, for instance, the scholar?

ly form of documentation which invokes authority through citation of the wider con? text of scientific literature. In most non

fictional literature, like history or biography, third-person narration is "the mode which

best produces the illusion of pure reference"

[83]. On the other hand, the grammatical pattern most typical of social science is no point of view at all, effacing on behalf of neutral abstraction even the implied objectiv? ity of third-person narration. Where some

narrator must be invoked, usually some pas? sive voice avoids dispelling the aura of objecti fication. The first person plural is occasionally asserted in what is still sometimes a fictional claim of authority ("... we have concluded..."). The first-person singular "I" or "me" is con?

sistently avoided in order not to compromise the sense of objectivity achievable in a de? tached narrative.

Such innocent but careful modulation of locutions which introduce or evade introduc? tion of specific points of view is probably general throughout social science literature.

Perhaps peculiar to ethnography is the "ethno? graphic present", the previously unquestioned convention whereby history may tacitly be ig? nored. This sentimentalism seems no longer legitimate, but is survived by other conventions

such as the segregation of cultural change from

culture, extraneous from intrinsic factors, or

dysfunction from function. Even if ethno?

graphy can no longer be accused of these in? nocent forms of decontextualisation, it is diffi? cult not to conclude that there are others of

which we are not aware, or simply by consen? sus not inclined to recognize as fiction in any ideological sense. Omission is, of course, selec?

tive, and thereby also constitutes narrative.

Rarely is there a candid accounting of basic conditions of understanding such as linguistic fluency, duration of time in the field, form and degree of acceptance, or theoretical biases and their modification. This seems avoided for


108

much the same reason that the first-person

singular is judged inappropriate, and the speci? ous plural form occasionally invoked. Insofar

as authority is established through such con?

ventions, cultural strangeness, geographic re?

moteness or difficulty of access, and the futil?

ity of replication, may be accepted implicitly as credentials rather than deterrents to credibil?

ity. It is by now apparent that in lieu of other

criteria of verifiability, clearly futile but never? theless desired in the social sciences, functional

explanation maintains the fiction of transpar?

ency in much the same way that Kermode's

teleological "sense of an ending" maintains

coherence of a narrative through "followabil

ity". Among the various structural, semiotic, or hermeneutic alternatives which have suc?

ceeded functionalism, the implicit criteria of coherence has increasingly come to rest in the narrative form of ethnography itself rather than in some metaphysics which it invokes. Geertz's "thick description" [84] may be seen as an explicit recognition of ethnography as

narrative, even as implicitly recommending such devices of social realism as championed by Wolfe on behalf of the New Journalism. More recently, Marcus has suggested approach?

ing ethnography as a genre in the interest of

appreciating the claim of authenticity implicit in distinctive rhetorical devices [85]. Among these he suggests that:

readers expect an ethnography to give a sense of the con?

ditions of fieldwork; of everyday life (Malinowski's "imponderabilia"); of micro-process (an implicit valida?

tion of participant observation); of holism (a form of

portraiture integrated with the pursuit of particular claims); and of translation across cultural and linguistic boundaries

(the broad, contextual exegisis of indigenous terms and

concepts) [86].

He also points out that Rabinow [87] and Dumont [88], like Bateson, appear conscious?

ly to be experimenting (if only implicitly) with an:

ethnographic genre which can accommodate reflexivity while retaining the traditional authority of its texts, that is, the rhetorical usage of language and format by which

ethnographers have constructed their accounts as certain

and objective knowledge about others [89].

I only seek to press to its full epistemological implications the insights which Geertz and

Marcus present as methodologies; unless these implications are made explicit, such methodo? logies are liable simply to be reincorporated in the positivist preconception of ethnography.

Having broached these considerations, I

suggest that the ethnographic dilemmas dis? cussed in the beginning are problematic be? cause the merger of authorial (that is, intended or assumed) audience and narrative (that is, internal or constructive) audience, necessary to turn realistic fiction into non-fiction, be? comes uncomfortably conscious. The tension

between the two audiences, which serves as

the focus of fictional narration, becomes super?

ficially the embarrassment, but more profound?

ly the authentication, of ethnography. The grammatical and other conventions which I

have suggested above implicate a narrative

audience which is prepared to grant the ethno? graphy many shortcuts to a transparent truth.

Behind this tacit narrator/narrative audience

agreement stand the author and his authorial

audience, ethnographer and readers whose in? nocence of any such conspiracy constitutes a

key factor in the truth of the narrative account.

Tacit fiction serves as a frame of reference for

the assertion of truth.

Furthermore, the retrospective exposure of

ethnographic authorship through Malinowski's diary, and its introspective exposure in Geertz's and Read's reflections, suggest a background of other audiences we have also overlooked.

At least two of these are the people we write for and those we write about. Even in fictional literature the subjects of the work are an

audience in some sense (e.g., an "ideal narra?

tive audience"), so presumably even an ethno


109

graphy which successfully abstracts itself from its fieldwork must nevertheless address these real people in some form. As becomes apparent in all five ethnographic exemplars I have con?

sidered, the correlative of these two audiences is a perfectly sane, but not morally innocent, schizophrenia of authorship. The problems of translation intrinsic to ethnography may make it inevitable that it cannot speak equally to both audiences, but because the ethnographer once did so (i.e., in his fieldwork), to resolve the problem by fiat wholly in favour of the

ethnographer's vernacular audience (or worse,

his scholarly audience) begs this central episte? mological question. At least in this way a fictional authorial audience seems reciprocal?

ly to be created, participation in which estab? lishes the truth for a narrative audience which

only appears to include both whom the ethno?

graphy is written for and whom it is written about.

A narrative theory of "anthropological irony" may also be extended from the moral equivo? cation examined by Geertz and Read to the

ontological equivocation examined by Evans

Pritchard and Castaneda. Here, the efficacy of the ethnography, much like realistic fiction, depends upon the ambivalent disjunction of authorial and narrative audiences: while one

must believe in witches the way the Azande or don Juan do, the other cannot. Behind this

ambivalence Evans-Pritchard was able to main?

tain the illusion that narrative and authorial

audience were one, whereas Castaneda was

not; consequently the former was accepted as ethnography while the latter is generally

regarded at best as realistic fiction. Finally, I

suggest that while Evans-Pritchard had to in? voke an authorial audience which did not be? lieve in witches while his narrative audience

did, Castaneda had to invoke a narrative audi?

ence which could not believe in witches, while his authorial audience did. This historical re? versal or irony suggests that ethnographer audience dialogues are not merely internal to

ethnography, but span ethnographic traditions

in which theoretical controversies may be

merely epiphenomenal. Like the stringent or paradoxical standards

which Wolfe sets for journalism and Sartre and Kermode set for realistic fiction, I suggest that ethnography must both consciously ex?

ploit the distinctions between its various audi? ences and strive to overcome them. As the

hermeneutic perspectives I have outlined

finally imply, it is the irreducible disparity of dialogue upon which the authenticity of

ethnographic truth must rest, rest vulnerably, that is, as "true prejudice". The fiction on which ethnography must verge always threatens to reveal its prejudices, while the current invis?

ibility of these must be recognized as the only ground of a claim to the truth. The practical dialogue of cross-cultural experience can in

this way avoid being foreshortened into narra?

tive prone to the assumption of transparency. The "open-endedness" which Ricoeur imputes to any narrative, fictional or not, must not be

innocently closed; on the other hand, the license of fiction implies that ethnography

must strive for the illusion of closure which

continually threatens to unravel into an open

dialogue again. Just as the merger of authorial and narrative audiences legitimizes non-fiction, so does this gesture of closure legitimize ethno? graphy as science rather than fiction. But it is

just because ethnography is not merely fiction

that it cannot abdicate an open-endedness in

its closure.

Which of the exemplars I have examined

approaches this ideal? Malinowski's personal

intensity and awareness of the "imponderabilia" of his methodology suggests that his ethno?

graphic vividness was only misled by the posi? tivist seientism which was hardly resistable in his time. Evans-Pritchard's ethnography is

usually dominated by the same innocence, but rather than segregating his existential doubts in a diary apart from his ethnography, this

dialogue crops up where it took shape, in the true fiction of Zande witches and the non

unilineal patrilineages of Nuer kinship. Evans


110

Pritchard's unpretentious confidence was far

less vulnerable than Malinowski's strident in?

tegrity, and nearly saved him from his times. In many ways, Read's ethnographic confes?

sional, produced not long after the golden age of functionalist false-consciousness, re?

mains closest to the ethnographic ideal of a

reopening closure I am here postulating. His

reflections are an antithesis to Malinowski's

diary, inviting an ironic gaze that now even seems intended by both of them. But even Read's gentle tour deforce loses the internal

dialogue of openness, remaining an apologetic sequel to another ethnography promised to be less self-indulgent if more fragmentary.

Castaneda, on the other hand, seems seduced

outside the bounds of ethnography; but one feels this is the fault of two of his audiences, one too enthusiastic and the other not enough, rather than the fault of don Juan, the audience which only appears to have seduced him. At the very least, Castaneda's ethnography suc?

ceeded in blurring the dogmatic lines between

ethnography and fiction. I have already said enough about Geertz to reveal my own ambi?

valence about his approach to ethnography. More recently in the rise of herm

webster dialogue and fiction in ethnography

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