Biography as Ethnography

Jay Caldwell

27, 29 March 2009

[Written in a hotel room in Anchorage, Alaska, awaiting the clearing of the ash plume from this morning’s most recent eruption of Mount Redoubt, an active volcano a little over a hundred miles to the southeast, so that I can fly back to Tucson for class.]

[Posted from this same hotel room several days later…with some hope now that the ashfall has been cleared from the airport. No eruption now for 23 hours, 50 minutes.]

At some point during this week’s anthropology readings I came to the conclusion that I no longer knew what exactly ethnography is. Or isn’t. The OED states unambiguously that it is “the scientific description of nations or races of men, with their customs, habits, and points of difference,” and further that ethnology constitutes “the science which treats of races and peoples, and of their relations to one another, their distinctive physical and other characteristics, etc.” These formulations speak of a sort of detachment, or at least the appending of “science/scientific” hints at this. And yet, that detachment is exactly what Renato Rosaldo decries in his chapter in Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis titled “After Objectivism.” He writes, “What if the detached observer’s authoritative objectivity resides more in a manner of speaking than in apt characterizations of other forms of life?” (52). He insists that what makes an analysis/observation more relevant, more meaningful, is an insight informed by an awareness of, an empathy for, the emotional state of a person or group whose behavior/ritual is being studied. His example of a mock ethnography of his future in-laws’ breakfast ritual is a case in point; he argues that “personal narratives offer an alternative mode of representing other forms of life” (60), while at the same time, “[n]ormalizing descriptions can reveal and conceal aspects of social reality” (61), and thus should not be discarded. That said, my problem is that I am unclear about what constitutes a description of “races and peoples, and of their relations to one another.”

Clearly, mere observation cannot constitute the whole of an ethnography. Informants must be queried, questioned, culled, and their reliability and representativeness ascertained. Is not the study of an informant a biography (“A written record of the life of an individual”)? Is not a biography nothing more than one thread of the many from which an ethnography is/can be woven? Henry Glassie pointed out, in Passing Time in Ballymenone, the relevance of history to ethnography. Would not biography then be an important part of an ethnography. Must ethnography be limited to the “present”? Must biography be relegated only to the past? From a well-researched biography of Abraham Lincoln or Ulysses S. Grant or Jefferson Davis would we not glean some information about “races and peoples [of mid-19^th century America], and of their relations to one another”? If the past tense negates a biography’s ethnographic significance, then would not a biography of T. Boone Pickens, Steve Jobbs, or Bruce Springsteen constitute a legitimate source of information about current American culture, just as Rosaldo’s “biography” of Insan reveals (or we stipulate that it reveals) much about Ilongot culture of northern Luzon, Philippines.

I am sure that Biography, as a literary (or scientific) genre, freights as much theory as does anthropology, ethnography, and Everyday Life. But at the heart of biography there lurks the biographer. And a biographer is surely as susceptible to bias, agenda, agency, and colonialism as is an ethnographer. In fact, we hope that a biographer does not see his/her role as the formulator of a mere hagiography, celeb bio. That is where agenda comes in and how, in some fashion, a scientist, an anthropologist, an ethnographer is acknowledged a mantle of dispassion and honesty, whereas a biographer seems to allowed a point-of-view, if not even a pulpit. One might argue that a biographer has at his/her disposal not just the subject him/herself, but a variety of texts relevant to that person, thus creating a kind of pedestal onto which the subject is placed (or from which he is knocked off) and so differentiating a biography from an ethnography. But Clifford Geertz, in his seminal “Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” makes the point that “cultural forms can be treated as texts, as imaginative works built out of social materials” (449) and from an analysis of these “assemblage[s] of texts” sociological principles can be formulated (448). Likewise, Victor Turner, in his piece, “Social Dramas and Stories About Them,” argues that within a social drama there are principal actors “for whom the group which constitutes the field of dramatic action has a high value priority” and conversely there exists what he calls a “star group . . . with which a person identifies most deeply and in which he finds fulfillment of his major social and personal strivings and desires” (69). In my mind it is hard to distinguish these formulations from biography.

From all this I would conclude that the “science” of biography must be (should be) closely aligned with the science of ethnography. I have no idea if what I am saying is so elementary (puerile) as to be meaningless, or whether it may be insightful. Each enterprise would surely benefit, from both its theoretical foundation and its practical undertaking, by studying the world of the other, and both should benefit from Rosaldo’s insistence that distance and neutrality do not necessarily make the product better, since in both projects we are dealing with other human beings, that is to say with others fairly like ourselves.