Observation, Interpretation and Theory

As a novice to the study of everyday life/folklore and its theories, I am still intrigued by the interpretive model and find the focused examination of a particular aspect of a culture fascinating. While a greater understanding of the economics and politics of a culture certainly has a bearing on cultural practices, first looking and recording must be an integral element to the study of a people and their way of life (case in point being Glassie’s study of Ballymenone—if one has no knowledge of the complex politics of Ireland, one is already behind in understanding much of the content of the stories told). Everything we study is in essence interpretive, because we take the information we gather from myriad sources and try to make sense of it—as Professor Alvarez mentioned in our last class—cultural theory is not science; it is not law; it is interpretive (although I believe some of the most radical advances in science and law has also come about from free thinking and interpretive methods). The same holds true for art history—each art historian can only look and respond to formulate their own interpretations of what they see. The main point with any study is to accept or reject a scholar’s observations recalling that there is never any one way to explain a culture’s actions. What we learn from one scholar’s study is looking through a single lens.

But while I began this writing with the intention of focusing on Geertz, I returned to Turner’s piece only to find upon the second reading that it made more sense. He too learned the structuralist-functionalist style of anthropology in which laws of structure and process are revealed, but he sees this approach as limiting. What is key here is his comment that “the general theory you take into the field leads you to select certain data for attention, but blinds you to others perhaps more important for the understanding of the people studied.” (63) The concept of “structures of experience” as fundamental units in the study of human action, seems to take a more distanced approach than Geertz’s, yet it keeps from overly romanticizing particular practices, such as reducing the cock fight to an extension of the male penis.

When Turner lays out the threefold nature of these structures of experience as cognative, conative, and affective, he explains that what has lacked in the study of culture is the psychology of individuals who greatly contribute to the actions of a community. “We never cease to learn our own culture,” Turner explains, “let alone other cultures, and our own culture is always changing.”(64) How true—a study of a certain group of people in America in the 1960s would be vastly different from a study of the same community in the 2000s—technology, age of the community, world economics, and countless other changes in the world at large affect the actions of a group, not to mention the psychological makeup of the people as individuals. To solve this problem, Turner’s approach (and those of Hayden White and others) is to pick out the “threads” that link the event to be explained to different areas of the context. These threads describe the nature of connections between and “element” or “event” and its significant environing socioculture field views. Turner calls these events “social dramas” which are a type of narrative that can be examined in two ways (taken from Kenneth Pike): from “emic” and “etic” perspectives. Emic perspectives involve descriptions provide an internal view, while etic perspectives come from criteria external to the system. This inside/outside view allows the researcher to see the focus of their study objectively. It seems reasonable to assume that in order to know a culture and its practices that one must look deeply into the minutia that is their lives as much as to step back to see patterns and structures that emerge and link them to a bigger picture.

Turner's description of the division between “chronicle” and “story” brings to mind Glassie’s distinctions between the ceilis, histories, songs, and chat of the people of Ballymenone. The connection can be seen in how autobiography, personal account, factual record, and other information can turn chronicle into a story and vice versa. In many ways it also recalls how memory works in regards to photographs in modern society—we create a memory when seeing a photograph of our past rather than simply conjuring up the memory on our own. Many times a recollection of our past comes not from our own memories, but from the stories told to us by others (in effect, their version of the past, not necessarily our own) augmented by photographs, also filtered by the individual who took the photograph and the conditions of the moment based on technology, lighting, etc.

So, there is no real truth, but versions of it based on random information and images that are loosely organized by the people themselves or those who study them. I recall a recent phone call from my sister asking me my recollection of an event in my family’s history (my older sister locking in me in the garage in the 1960s to keep me from going to a rock concert and getting into trouble) and how we had three different versions of the story, (some including more than one of us locking each other in the garage at various times!) By now the real truth is impossible—no one wrote the event(s) in their diaries and there are no photographic documents. Yet the story persists in the family. While perhaps a trivial event, it does however, speak much about the dynamics of a family in the 1960s struggling with a changing middleclass culture that was threatened by drugs, free love, and resistance to war. The small, emic perspectives inform the etic perspective, but in actuality, they are all loose compilations of facts, conjecture, and interpretations that are subjective from both the observer and the observed.
-Julie Sasse