Ethnographic Writing and Anthropological Theory

By Richard Handler (University of Virginia)

Most anthropologists, like most social scientists (and probably like most people generally), are not good writers. Our disciplines require us only to be able to write reasonably clearly, present our data in an organized fashion, and relate it to an innovative theoretical argument. Jargon is tolerated if necessary, and it usually is, to describe data, elucidate theory, and (hardly least important) to enable one’s writings to pass muster with an audience of disciplined gatekeepers.

Much ethnographic writing is boring. Most anthropologists do not have the writerly skills to translate personal experiences and personally observed scenes into incisive prose. Yet, writing—“fieldnotes”—is a central methodological tool of our discipline. Rendered as a written record, the experiences and scenes of the field become our data, often our most important data. Organized, edited, elucidated, and translated, those records become central in ethnographic writing and anthropological theory-building.[1]

As many of us argued during the Writing Culture moment of the 1980s, anthropologists create their data by “writing up” their field experiences. This makes anthropological data peculiarly dependent on ethnographers’ subjectivities—which is both the strength and weakness of the ethnographic method. It is a strength because we learn about others’ lives the way all people do, by engaging with their interlocutors and trying to make sense (for whatever purpose) of their engagements. It is a weakness because the data sets we “bring home” are contingent constructions based on the choices we made and the accidents that befell us in the field. This is of course true of all scientifically constructed data sets, but ours are so obviously contingent that they seem much less rationally planned than the data generated by apparently more scientific methods.[2]

These data are put to good use in anthropological writing if and only if they generate or illustrate innovative theoretical arguments. Fieldnotes and other raw data do not go whole cloth into ethnographies. From hundreds of pages of notes, the anthropologist takes only the most important details and scenes—those that in some way bolster the argument—and even these may be presented in almost entirely new prose, with just a few words or sentences quoted verbatim from the notes.

Other than uncertain memory, the main problem we encounter when incorporating our fieldnotes into our writing for an audience other than ourselves is our personal investment in them. While we were taking notes during fieldwork, we were deeply engaged with the people around us, learning as much from them as we could while we were with them. Our notes thus derive from scenes we experienced personally and from ongoing conversations with people we knew at the time and in many cases remain connected to long after fieldwork.

But as we withdraw (over many months and even years) from fieldwork, we learn to wean ourselves from our excitement about our own notes and try to imagine the people who will read our work and who will never be as invested in our experiences (and the notes we took of them) as we have been. The more we adopt the point of view of potential readers, the more will we be motivated to edit the data we present in anthropological writing. Indeed, we come to realize that much of the data we have lovingly incorporated into the first draft of a manuscript is overkill that will bore a reader. We then try to figure out how to get the most theoretical bang out of the fewest evidentiary bucks.

While this is a matter of respecting the limits of our readers’ patience, it is also a matter of the centrality of theory (I claim) to good ethnographic writing. A certain amount of scene setting, autobiographical musing, and artful storytelling can enliven ethnography, but what really counts for anthropology as a social-scientific discipline is the use of field materials to make arguments that enliven theoretical debate.

What I am calling “theoretical debate” is a long-term discourse that has shaped the disciplines of the Western research university starting in the middle of the nineteenth century. For the social sciences, and for anthropology in particular, the main strand in that discourse can be described, roughly, as structuralist, a term I think can be applied to figures as varied as Tocqueville, Marx, Freud, Durkheim, Boas, and Weber.

It’s possible that with the emergence of poststructuralist theory, we are seeing the dissolution of the structuralist canon and the reordering of social science as a component of the research university. As new authors, especially those who are not white men, confront the old canon—and in some cases become canonized themselves—their work, which often entails uncovering the dependence of hegemonic social science on the hegemonic social order from which it derived, calls into question many if not all of the foundational truths twentieth-century social science thought it had established. But whether or not this is a reasonable assessment of the state of theoretical play, it remains the case that the most important work that anthropological ethnography can do, and is doing, is to participate in that critical, ongoing theoretical discourse.

As theory is being reshuffled, so fieldwork and ethnographic writing are changing. As we all know, contemporary anthropologists conduct fieldwork anywhere in the world, and, more important, we now understand that all persons and places in that world are contemporary. We have abandoned, for the most part, the fantasy of the faraway, out-of-time exotic, or perhaps more astutely, we recognize there is nothing more exotic than the contemporary, ourselves (of the modern research university) included. In any event, this now means that today’s ethnographers are as likely to obtain their data from the internet, the mass media, and the archive as from the participant-observation that was our main methodological technique for more than a century.

It also means that the monographs we write, which we sometimes call “ethnographies,” may be based on very little or even no ethnographic fieldwork. But then, there has always been confusion in anthropology about the terms “monograph” and “ethnography.” Although it’s probably fair to say that all book-length ethnographies are monographs, not all monographs are ethnographies. One of the greatest monographs by a student of Boas, Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946), was written during a war that made it impossible for Benedict to visit Japan. Relying on published sources, popular media, and interviews with Japanese people in the United States, Benedict managed to produce a three-hundred-page interpretation of the “patterns of Japanese culture” (as the subtitle of the book put it) that the people of postwar Japan thought quite convincing.[3]

Benedict was explicit that fieldwork was not the source of anthropology’s magic—of its ability to make sense of human realities. It was theory that most counted, in particular, the use of the culture concept (and Benedict’s idea of “patterns” was nothing if not what I have called “structuralist”) to elucidate “their” culture in a comparative process that necessarily also involved a critique of “ours.” To write up or write out that comparative process, Benedict incorporated an almost random assortment of odd details and narrated stories (taken from “secondary” sources of one kind and another) from both Japanese and US culture. But always, she put such “ethnographic detail” into the service of a larger argument; she never mistook the narration of details as the primary goal of her writing.

A great deal of anthropological writing today looks much more like The Chrysanthemum and the Sword than it does like the iconic Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande—at least in the sense that Benedict’s data derive not primarily from field experience but from odd assortments of publicly available materials. The fact that the ethnographic monographs considered iconic in anthropology were almost all written by men is not an accident; nor is it an accident that women were writing ethnography in “experimental” ways long before it became fashionable and therefore acceptable for men to do so as well. But the gendering of canonical renderings (as Kath Weston might put it) is beyond the scope of this short essay.

Still, as with fieldwork-based writing, the most readable contemporary anthropological writing goes beyond reportage and assemblage to engage with contemporary theoretical debates. When it fails to do that, it can become aimless (“What’s the point?” we might ask, after reading such writing), self-indulgent, and boring (“Why are you wasting my time with this?”).

In sum, very few anthropologists and social scientists write well enough to make us want to read them for the sheer pleasure to be derived from their prose. (After all, who among us could sneak a sentence like this into “serious” writing: “Unlike his feathered friends, the individual must commit himself to walking on a flooring.”)[4] Instead, we read anthropology to participate in a generations-long debate concerning the nature of . . . culture, society, gods, ghosts, and persons. That is also why we continue to do ethnography and to write anthropology.

NOTES

[1] Here I leave aside the question as to how different technologies of inscription—like audio and video recording—require different approaches to and understandings of editing and translation.

[2] The relatively new field of science studies has analyzed in detail the various kinds of contingencies affecting the gathering or construction of data in many disciplines that seem more scientific than anthropology.  

[3] The Japanese translation sold well over two million copies; Pauline Kent, “Japanese Perceptions of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword,” Dialectical Anthropology 24:181–92 (1999). 

[4] Erving Goffman, Relations in Public, p. 384. New York: Basic Books, 1971. 

Richard Handler is professor of anthropology at the University of Virginia. He studies modern Western societies, nationalism, ethnicity, and the politics of culture. Since 1990, he has worked with Eric Gable and Anna Lawson on an ethnographic study of Colonial Williamsburg, on the invention of history and tradition with a further focus on corporate culture, class, race, and gender. He has worked on the intersection of anthropology and literature and is particularly well known for his attention to the history of American anthropology, having published on Jules Henry, Richard Hoggart, Dorothy Lee, Erving Goffman, Thorstein Veblen, and Alexis de Tocqueville. He is currently working on US postage stamps. Among his publications are: “Auto-Ethnography from Two Guilded Ages: Thorstein Veblen, Bonnie Urciuoli, and the Higher Learning in the United States”; Vehicles: Car, Canoes and Planes as Metaphors of the Moral Imagination (coedited with David Lipset); The Fiction of Culture: Jane Austen and the Narration of Social Realities (with Daniel Segal); and “What’s Up, Doctor Goffman? Tell Us Where the Action Is.” He is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Anthropology and Humanism.