| From: Paul Stirling, University of Kent. 5/8/93 Report on ASA 4th Dec Oxford for Anth in Action |
| Why did I submit to a last minute request for an instant ethnography |
| (participation and observation) of the recently constructed ten year rites of mystification and self regard held by the U.K. based profession of ethnographers? |
| The Ass of Soc Anthists of the Commonwealth held its Fourth Decennial |
| Conference in St. Catherine's College, Oxford, from Monday 26 to Friday 30 July. A triumph, no less. Well over 450 people attended; by far the largest number ever. |
| Main stream talks (and some discussion) organised by the Convenor, |
| Marilyn Strathern and her Section Convenors, together with receptions, visiting speakers, and other events kept the conscientious and the tame busy all day every day from breakfast to bed time. Kirsten Hastrup and Marshall Sahlins were invited to curtail dinner conversation on Tuesday and Thursday. On Wednesday, into which a lunch hour showing on a new film Firth on Firth had been shoehorned, the Annual Dinner, was capped by Raymond Firth in sparkling nonagenarian person. On Thursday, the assembly was ritually transubstantiated into the Royal Anthropological Institute, to hear first, the Oxford Chancellor Roy Jenkins celebrate its 1 50th Anniversary, and then George Stocking deliver the Huxley Lecture on the professional advice on research (mostly among 'barbarians' and 'savages') offered by anthropologists over some 130 years. |
| The chosen Decennial theme was nothing less than The Uses of |
| Knowledge: Global and Local Relations. Brilliant advertising copy, covering almost everything anyone could think of, with more than a hint of profundity. One useful neologism which this rite seems to justify is polysemic (or polysemous?). A few speakers settled for pure theory; most used their rhetoric to begin and end a report of field research. Styles, competences, causes, claims varied immensely, but I never saw the main lecture theatre less than full. Lots of well known names, at least to insiders. Plenty to applaud or disagree with, fruitfully or sterilely. Far too many words all round. |
| While all this was happening, we had, for the ASA, an innovation. We |
| had 12 'bottom up' parallel non-plenary Associate Sections on a variety of |
| topics, each lasting one day or less, offering all kinds of choice, some perceivable as abstruse; including of course one lucid day of BASAPP see p. 000; plus 2 Open Sessions, and a crowded Special Panel on Ethnic Cleansing, convened by Pat Caplan, on behalf of a new organisation against ethnic violence, [Editor I assume this will be separately reported ? ] see. p. 000. |
| So what were we all really doing? Who says there is any reality? Well, I |
| do for one. Following many decades of uninterrupted tradition, many were asking that old question - what do anthropologists do? Others announced what they ought to do. 'I believe (sic - (why believe?)) that anthropology is properly'; or denounced themimplicitly or explicitly for hegemony, bias, oppression, collusion, functional-structuralism, globalism, localism. If so many have got so much wrong, it must take courage to say " I have got it right". Some seemed to wish to demonstrate that they could produce sentences apparently in English which no one - or only the chosen few - could understand. |
| Fair? Not really. (Wot, reality again? ) . Many papers reported solid and |
| interesting research, with little or no obscure theory. Many presented ideas which audiences found intriguing. (How do I know? Well, I do; osmosis.) And besides, there were opportunities to talk to old friends (and enemies), to make new ones, and to attach faces to books. Most people were professionally intensely busy; and the purposes of dissemination, rapid appraisal, discussion, criticism including self criticism were achieved for hundreds. As Raymond Firth remarked ( not exactly in these words) "Most of this has been said before, if not exactly in these words" . A remark which has certainly, and truthfully, ( not truth as well as reality? ) been made before in much the same words. |
| Six random points out of the 347.73 points which could be made. First, |
| hurrah for field work. Immersion research for your ticket into the profession is one established norm, custom, praxis, hegemonic oppression, of which this conference proved the worth. Most speakers had been forced to make sense of all those months of unexpected detail; to fit the field experience to the original plan, to attempt consciously to understand others ( not THE other - there is, for all the (French?) rhetoric, no such thing) in their own terms, to reflect on ethnocentricism, and to attempt an acceptable thesis about it all. This intense empirical, personal and intellectual experience shows in (almost) all the papers. Something which anthropologists share; more or less exclusively. |
| Second, the main theme, knowledge, is indeed central to the |
| comparative study of human societies and culture; and baffling. We cannot |
| dodge the implicit philosophy, even if we mostly do it badly. (Worse than the philosophers?) |
| Third, political power, the world economy, the search for markets, |
| technology, 'modern' communications and the media have indeed destroyed the once reasonable assumption that we can find people to study who live in communities, isolable at least conceptually; that we belong in the periphery. All natives have long been governed by interferers, from Oxford and Paris to highlands, islands and deserts everywhere. All 'localities' have to cope with massive outside 'forces', global or otherwise. And for good measure, 'synchronic' is equally a goner. The 'global' is not steady, and all 'local' systems are changing systems. So the 'hegemonic rhetoric' 'resonates' for solid reasons. |
| Fourth, field work is now conducted in an increasing variety of contexts; |
| bureaucracies, agencies, economic enterprises, political parties, music makers, artists. Excellent, and often very difficult; but paradoxically this often exacerbates the problems of reliability of the descriptive models we construct. In spite of the chorus about reflexivity, disembodied ethnography, often close to journalism, thrives. " The forces of civil society in X are growing ...." And more complex situations complicate the difficulties - already impressed firmly on me in 1948 that willy nilly anthropologists collect the local dirt, knowledge of which immediately creates nasty problems about both truth, and about moral commitments to persons, groups, sources of information, future researchers, and even crime prevention; and perhaps about the researcher's own safety. |
| Fifth, rage is healthy in two year olds; and in decennials. While we are |
| interpreting and causally analysing human societies and cultures, we also have the right and duty to think about their comparative moralities, and to watch our own morality as researchers. We are pretty uninfluential, and many of us - I plead guilty - may confuse our personal moralities, and what we see as our compassion, with our professional analysis. The morally self righteous may do more harm than good. Yet we are right to be angry, even if we disagree with each other. I attended the BASAPP session, and 1, unlike some colleagues, fully supported the session on ethnic cleansing. But as one colleague who is professionally directly concerned with hatred and violence remarked, "Do not ask me how to cure ethnic hatred. I do not know". So keep our analysis as professional anthropologists firmly apart from our conscious attempts as persons to change the world. Reform, active policy is not our professional business; though our findings are often directly relevant, which is quite another matter. |
| Sixth, boundaries are absolutely basic to thinking, and almost all those |
| that concern us are fuzzy. Both our descriptions and our ideas theories -are |
| normally immensely complex. Words are often simplistic traps; many sentences propaganda. Painstaking care to be as clear as possible ought surely to be one prime intellectual duty for all of us. Yet as a profession we seem to strive for obscurity, confusion, high flown 'polysemes'. Without such pomposity, pretence, showing off, and indifference to precision the genuine and serious issues of this conference could have come through far more sharply. |
| ASA conferences have always been in varying degrees - for conference |
| goers - stimulating, companionable, network building and informative. They force the serious to work extremely hard, and they shake up personal routines dramatically. And they may - they do - act both as rites of solidarity and as advertisements for anthropology. |
| Reflection? My ethnographer's belly button? First, how can I describe |
| 450 people talking for five days? Flippant coward, I have not openly reported - or criticised - any specific contribution. Second, I learnt a lot. Third, I have a strong impression ( what is that ?) that people are facing genuine intellectual puzzles, and struggling with research in new fields. So I am glad I went (expensive for the unfunded); and optimistic. A lot of serious people - many young -, doing a lot of serious thinking and research, no longer primarily about exotic and 'simple' outsiders, but about all human societies and cuitures. The profession looks secure, and, in spite of postmodern carnivals, serious and cumulative. Back with progress, at least as a profession? |