Between Biography and Ethnography

by Michael D Jackson

- One read about "the" Trobriand Islanders as tho a people living in the same place, participating in the same economy, and having roughly similar view about boat building or begetting... and only changed their ways of thinking and acting when the outside world forced itself upon them.

- Anthropologists like Raymond Firth showed that structure does not preclude the exercise choice in the organisation of everyday life

- Few anthropologists reflected on what "we" might have in common with "them", or how "they" might differ amongst themselves.

- Exoticising terms served mainly to distance the rational subject - the anthropologist - from the supposedly irrational other - the object of his/her observations

- societies differ not in their essences but in the ways in which they manage universally identical existential issues; variations on ubiquitous themes that are grounded in the evolutionary history of our species

- Hannah Arendt: human beings are distinctive but none is absolutely other, for we share the same capacity for interacting and communicating with one another, based on a common evolutionary heritage and vague perception of a common humanity

- to make a person other, one arrogates Being entirely to oneself, and makes of the other a mere object of one's actions, one's judgment, one's compassion or one's theorising

- focus on differences; advent of structuralism and sociobiology brought universals back into vogue

A suggestion for a way in which the antinomy between the particular and the universal

- Sartre's "singular universal" + Michael Herzfeld's "ethnographic biography

= individual lives and cultural circumstances are neither ontologised, nor polarised, but seen as mutually arising and contrapuntal aspects of our continually shifting sense of ourselves as being both uniquely a "you" or a "me" and members of a class or a culture, as in "We, the Tikopia"

- Winnicott: culture is a "common pool ... into which indiciduals and groups of people may contribute, and from which we may all draw if we have somewhere to put what we find."

- figurative language is a way of retrospectively and selectively acknowledging those experiences of a relationship that have confirmed a moral ideal

- William James: "Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process; the process of verifying itself."

- Accordingly, "natural" symbols such as blood and bone, or "moral" terms such as amity and love are not axioms; they are what we talk about when we talk about life. They are ways we express our sense of depth, intensity and binding power of what emerges in the course of any intimate relationship that weathers life's vicissitudes over time. In truth, what we call moral bonds are often habits we have formed by living with others; but the virtue we assign to familiar routines and our attachment to significant others is largely a way of dignifying relationships that simple grew - possessing a life and inertia that was greater than the work we actively put into them.

- Although, at any given moment, we have a fair idea as to who we are and what we have become, we tend to be blind to who we are for others and to the many unknown forces that may bear upon our fate.

- Accused of sorcery, this alternative form of power suddenly presents itself to Noah as another way of seeing himself - an analogue as Sartre calls it, because this new identity is initially mere potentiality, an object that is still absent and irreal. In beginning to imagine he might actively become the person that he has been accused of being, he turns a stigmatising identification to his own advantage, liberates himself from the humiliating position of existing in his brother's shadow, and acquires powers that, while marginal, nonetheless have a legitimate place in the social order

The "struggle for being": the largely pre-reflective and amorphous desire, yearning or will to be present-in-the-world, not as an object that simply suffers the actions of others but as an acting subject whose existence is recognised by others, and makes a difference to their existence

- In Kalauna (PNG), every lineage possess its own corpus of myths (neinya). These myths enable their custodians to simultaneously express and legitimise both collective values and personal preoccupations. When Young first sat down with Iyahalina and asked for "the story" of his life, not a single autobiographic detail was discerned from the soliloquy: seemingly a sequence of familiar myths interspersed with details about Iyahalina's duties as a "ritual expert". Men like Iyahalina both introject the dramatic structure of the myth and project their personal preoccupations into it.

- the Kodi of Sumba (Eastern Indonesia) give oblique expression to their biographies through valued personal possessions. That objects are surrogates for people, metaphors for social relationships, and serve as objective correlatives of subjective moods and states, may, Hoskins suggests, have a lot to do with the fact that in Kodi ritual life, objects often substitute for persons.

It is our Eurocentric bias that leads us to foreground and publicise what is, in the cultures we study, often kept in the background and unspoken. But the aim of anthropology is not to represent the other solely from his or her own point of view, but rather to problematise all points of view, including the ethnographer's, and show that every dominant leitmotif in any culture coexists with sub-dominant themes that, on certain occasions, or in certain persons, come into focus.

Rather than simplify the general conditions governing the possibility of a particular human relationship, or risk reducing the complexities of lived relationships to determinate causes, cultural rules, or classificatory categories, one seeks to explore the experiences that transpire in the transitional spaces of intersubjectivity - experiences that often confound our formal descriptions and overflow our conceptual frameworks. Whereas the classical empiricist approaches human bonds with an eye to underlying patterns and explanatory principles, the radical empiricist shares with the creative writer a fascination for the mysterious, emergent, and conflicted character of all human relationships.

One can invoke no hierarchy of values that implies that the life of one of these individuals can be set unequivocally above the others. Life confounds reason and is refractory to explanation. Our relationship with ourselves burs into relationships with significant others.

Luria's approach to neuropsychology was informed by the conviction "that even the most elemental functions of brain and mind were not wholly biological in nature but conditioned by the experiences, the interactions, the culture, of the individual." All human beings, in all societies, experience existence as a struggle between limitations and expectations.

To understand in depth and detail what transpires within intersubjectivity we draw upon work by social scientists, psychologists and ethologists to be sure, but it is to the work of artists, fiction writers, and biographers that we turn for techniques that help us do greatest justice to lived experience. In venturing beyond the borders of orthodox science, we may be accused of departing from empirical truth or worse, of pure invention and wild surmise. But there may be middle ground, where anecdote and biography enrich rather than invalidate our work.

By locating oneself in the borderland between conventional certainties and vigorous innovation, a writer may be taken to task for playing fast and loose with the facts - as Melville was - when, in fact, truth itself is mercurial in this domain where what rings true to experience or works in practice may be scientifically unproven, and what is empirically true falls short of what we ned to believe if we are to live.