Cantwell's article seems to parallel part of what I was trying to say last week (and is probably more successful at it than I was). In the reference to Sartre’s book Anti-Semite and Jew, I wanted to draw a link between the way we (human societies, particularly those in the ‘West’) construct a relationship between past and present and how identity and otherness are contrasted in a process of self definition. Very often, a romanticized version of the past is used to justify a present-day prejudice or stereotype, but ultimately what is at stake is the definition of otherness based upon a process of observation that selects certain characteristics ahead of time and then overlays them upon the reality being observed. As Cantwell expresses it, “the stereotype is, of course, simply a way of sorting information; once the gospel group or the basketmaker or the Cherokee and Acoma athletes have been identified as such, with little more in the way of concretion or amplification, they have been classified and hence in a sense completed” (154). In other words, we have a process of reading not unlike the famous madness of Don Quixote in Cervantes’s book of that name. As a means of understanding the potentially overwhelming mass of circumstance and activity in front of us, humans create systems of signification and meaning. Coming into contact with people or things, one way to deal with the information presented is to sort them based on this preexisting system. Like Don Quixote reading the windmills as giants because of a brain filled with tales of chivalry that he then uses as his lens upon the world, we read the situations in which we find ourselves based upon our systems of value and knowledge, cultural, sociological, economic, etc. Part of the insight of Cervantes’s novel is that through the intervention of his neighbors, Don Quixote’s madness is shown to be more similar to the normal means of reading the world than we might like to admit. Cantwell helps to explain this hesitancy earlier in the article, noting that when we realize the constructed nature of these systems, the result can be like a “terror of falling, of floating freely in a medium in which every value has been fixed in equilibrium with every other so that none has any value in itself” (152). This lack of essential value – or, we could say, identity – means that dependent as we are upon these systems of signification, we must realize as we use them that they can (perhaps even have a tendency to) come between us and a full understanding of the world and people around us. This, as I understand it so far, is where some of the value in everyday life is sometimes missed, when we forget this characteristic about our knowledge of the world.
This problem shows up in several of the articles we read this week as a process of representation contained within artistic or anthropological production. Barbara Babcock’s “Mudwomen and Whitemen” points out some of “problematics of alterity and interpretation,” pointing out what gets missed when reading otherness without interrogation of self (identity). The problem is particularly interesting to me because the work that I’m hoping to do when I finish my degree is a sort of comparative literary study focused on the various traditions that intersect within the Americas, particularly in the region known as the U.S. Southwest. Part of the reason being that I think one valuable way to learn about our own culture (or literary tradition, were we to focus in that way), is to look at the places (geographic and metaphoric) where it intersects with other cultures and traditions. As Babcock writes, “the Southwest is America’s Orient,” referring to Edward Said’s argument in Orientalism that the colonial discourse found in European literature about the “Orient” teaches us as much or more about European thought processes as it does about an actual part of the world named by that term.
As someone who is typically identified (self and by others) as Anglo, my position vis-à-vis so-called ethnic literatures is/will be something to be negotiated carefully. Because of this looming problematic, Paredes’s article on anthropological methodology in the Texas-Mexico borderlands is especially helpful. Like Cantwell, he describes the problem of reading culture or human practices through a preexisting system of taxonomic knowledge that provides a framework to understand the phenomena we encounter. As he writes, the ethnographer’s “training is supposed to discipline him in viewing potential data with the highest degree of objectivity possible. But perhaps the methodological safeguards to compensate for a normal degree of bias are not working very well” (75). Following Michel Foucault’s argument, I would argue that the reason for this is that (as I think we got into a few weeks ago) that all knowledge is linked with a particular system of knowing, meaning that all knowledge is biased in some way. The significance for the investigation or study of everyday life would seem to be that it is inevitable that something gets left out; what we know leaves out what we do not know, and this not-known may be really interesting or important*. This is where the study of everyday life is valuable, because it attempts to seek out what falls through the cracks, but it also points out that this study is itself subject to the same dynamics. As Paredes notes, better sampling techniques might help, but they will only take the ethnographer so far in correcting the problem (75).
The solution that he gestures towards throughout the rest of the article (a more self-inquisitive and open-minded approach to interpretation being one important component), appears to correspond to a problem of consciousness. I haven’t quite worked this out in an entirely coherent way, but I think that we might find a parallel between the problem of reading/interpretation of everyday life (and ethnological practice) and the interpretation of dreams or the unconscious. The understanding that I’m getting from my other class this semester (in which we’ve read several pieces of psychoanalytic theory) is that the unconscious appears to be illogical, but this is only because we don’t always understand its logic. One reason for this is that we have a constructed conscious identity (the ego, in some ways, the super-ego in others) that tries to instill uniformity and order upon our experienced reality and upon our unconscious desires. Both this reality and desire are not necessarily disordered, but do have a logic that goes beyond the capability of the conscious mind to encompass or understand. The ego (which is partially conscious, partially unconscious, as I understand it) attempts to repress those things that do not make sense, and dreams are the way that they find release. However, they do so in a manner that the ego does not understand, because if it did, the avenue of expression would be closed. I think we might find the same kind of dynamic between everyday life (and the lives of those who are othered and minoritized in particular) and well-meaning attempts to understand them through categorization and methodical study. The ethnographer’s failure to understand the double or hidden meanings of jokes, stories, and other reportings of his or her informant comes from a system of knowledge that, like the ego, does not admit a particular kind of signification. This repression, which is like the unconscious part of the ego (but still systematized), does not mean that these meanings do not find an avenue for expression, simply that they are not recognized for what they are. Like Cantwell’s description of stereotype in “Ink Spots”, the ethnographer (ego) layers an ordering system of knowledge over the joke or story (unconscious desire or full reality), and in doing so misses important pieces of information or meaning. Paredes’s own language suggests this correspondence, as he refers to problems of consciousness and unconscious but systematic misreadings on the art of various ethnographers throughout the article. If the goal of psychoanalysis is to make the person being analyzed aware of the structure of repression, the goal of Paredes’s article is show the potential ethnographer that “he must be very conscious of the informant as a potential performer” or someone who manipulates signifiers to mean multiple things at one time (110). As I said, this idea is fairly sketchy at this point, and some of the terminology might need revision, but it would seem that maybe what the practice of cross cultural comparison (whether ethnographic or literary) needs is an awareness of these structures of repression or misreading. This awareness would come from a kind of methodological (psycho)analysis, even as one is using said method, which is way of looking at Said’s book (and perhaps Babcock’s article as well). This, I think, is what Paredes, Cantwell, and Babcock are suggesting: an awareness of the constructedness of self embedded in the practice of cultural or literary analysis, and a recognition that what we miss is often the most important part of what is being communicated.
As a side note, I’m reminded in reading through these articles and problems of a book by literary critic and theorist C.L.R. James called Beyond a Boundary. It’s part memoir and part exploration of the cultural and political relationships between Trinidad and Great Britain in the years surrounding the island’s independence. In it, James uses his own experiences as a lens to examine the problem of culture and meaning through the game of cricket. Thinking about it in relationship to our readings this week, it seems to offer another model for tackling these issues, as James places himself as both insider and outsider, a hybrid identity that establishes the tension driving much of the book, which is written at least in part for a British and American audience. As such, he might be read as taking both the role of ethnographer and informant tackling these problems as they show up within his own identity. If anyone’s interested in identity in this way, I’d recommend it highly. Aside from all of this stuff, it’s also a fascinating look at the game of cricket, something hard to come by in this country.
*Perhaps this is what Secretary Rumsfeld was trying to say when he was talking about what we know we don’t know a few years ago in response to a reporter’s question about the war in Iraq.
- Andy DuMont
Sunday, March 8, 2009
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