Travelers' Tales: Observations on the Travel Book and Ethnography Author(s): Valerie Wheeler Reviewed work(s): Source: Anthropological

Quarterly, Vol. 59, No. 2, Ethnographic Realities/Authorial Ambiguities (Apr., 1986), pp. 52-63 Published by: The George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3317351 . Accessed: 13/03/2013 07:12
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

The George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Anthropological Quarterly.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded on Wed, 13 Mar 2013 07:12:44 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

TRAVELERS' TALES: OBSERVATIONS ON THE TRAVEL BOOK AND ETHNOGRAPHY'

VALERIE WHEELER California State University, Sacramento
While the travel account is a species of ethnography, classic realist ethnographies are sharply distinguished from travel writing by their respective moral assessments of other cultures and interest in adventure. In contemporary discussions of the creation of the anthropologist and ethnography, separation of experience and outcome is a central puzzle which may be clarified by an examination of how anthropologists' accounts are and are not traveler's tales. "I hate travelling and explorers" (Levi-Strauss 1974: 17) with a definite object, at regular intervals. He is Literate, but not literary, anthropological accustomed to apply a traditionalsaying...to all but not anthropologists, exploring but not who come his way: "Firsttime raw,second time explorers, travel writers produce something ripe"(Cable and French 1944: 35).

like ethnography but not ethnography. Anthropologists seek exotic settings, tell of what they find, and are fond of travel books; but they may deny being travelers, are uncomfortable making their personal experiences public, and produce accounts strikingly different, even opposite in form, from travel books. Though the traveler had an honored place in nineteenth-century anthropology as one who provided data for the armchair anthropologist to analyze (Stocking 1983: 71), travel books today are considered a minor form of ethnographic writing (Marcus and Cushman 1982: 27), and Levi-Strauss' TristesTropiqueshas been called "one of the greatest travel books of the postwar period" (Cockburn 1984: 66). So why not entertain philosopher Alfred Louch's notion of anthropology as a "a collection of traveller's tales" (1966: 159-60), not as a caricature of the profession as Marcus thinks(1982: 164), but as an image worth taking seriously? The light cast on the travel book by Paul Fussell's analysis of literary travel (1980) illuminates the relationship between ethnographer and classical realist ethnography as well. In the following comparison of travelers and their tales, I consider British travel books of the between-the-wars period, with special attention to the work of Peter Fleming, and anthropological materials from both British and American sources within and outside the period to comment on and explicate some parallel comparisons of ethnographers and their ethnographies to travel writing.
Enter the Stranger... It is most natural that the oasis-dweller should question the presence of a stranger,for the only outsiders he sees are men who come and go

The anthropologist as stranger at home and abroad has been well-documented in the last twenty years (e.g., Nash 1963, Powdermaker 1966, Freilich 1977, Agar 1980). Using Ann Roe's (1952a; 1952b) study of anthropologists of the Golden Age, Nash characterized anthropologists as independent, intelligent achievers interested in people and the exotic, often unconventional and in conflict with their upper-status families, and in "a vocation where the anthropologists' sense of social superiority permits a somewhat Jovian survey of their own society as well as others and maintains them in a state of superiority just because they are able to make the survey" (Roe 1952a: 50, in Nash 1963: 160). 2 Furthermore, "They are normally detached, flexible, and tolerant of ambiguity" (Nash 1963: 161). Fieldwork provides achievement, varied experience, identification with a specific exotic society, status at home, and freedom-one can some and go both at home and abroad. Being an anthropologist is an identity; together anthropologists make a community of Wandervogel (Nash 1963: 163-4).

...each time he returns he is riperand riper,until the whole desert colony beams with pleasure at his arrival(Cable and French 1944: 35).

The British between-the-wars travel book writer was not at home in a society remodeled by the Great War. He hated the lack of graceful civilization and the places that were "dingy...moth-eaten...squalid...greasy ... sickly, musty...dead...and damp," where life was "dull...dreadful... desolate...spurious, appalling...sordid,and joyless" (Fussell 1980: 17). Strong individualists, whose upper-class insulation was being undercut by the "national socialism" that the centralizing 52

This content downloaded on Wed, 13 Mar 2013 07:12:44 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

TRAVELERS'TALES

53

forces of the war effort produced (McNeil 1982: 337), they went looking for reaffirmation of their civilized status through contrast with the primitive, preindustrial, and extinct civilizations. Robert Byron went along The Road to Oxiana in search of fifteenth-century Islamic civilizations, reading Thucydides and Boswell's Life of Johnson as he went. Peter Fleming, on his way from China to India in stages that he imagined Marco Polo would have followed just south of the Silk Road,
read Macaulay's History of England. Evelyn Waugh packed Spengler's Decline of the West

telling a tale of what it was like there...

The traveler, a stranger who for the most part remained "raw" since he rarely visited any place twice, wrote of his travels to sell books. When Waugh went to the Mediterranean in 1929 and to Brazil in 1932, it was to get material for a speedy commercial success. Of his 1954 trip through Liberia, a venture to pay off debts, Graham Greene writes:
It had seemed simple, before I set out, to write a travel book, but when I returned and was faced with my material I had a moment of despair and wished to abandon the project.A diarywritten in pencil with increasing fatigue and running to less than eighty quarto pages of a loose-leaf notebook, the piece of paper on which I kept the accounts of my carriers' advances..., a few illiterate notes from...the District Commissioner...and... the Commanderof the Liberian Frontier Force, some political literature from Monrovia,a selection of Liberiannewspapers...a number of photographs taken with an old vestpocket Kodak,and memories, memories chiefly of rats, of frustration,and of a deeper boredom on the long forest trek than I had ever experienced before-how was I, out of all this, to make a book? But I had already spent on the journey the three hundred and fifty pounds which my publishers had advanced to me, and I could earn no more until the book was written (1980: 49-50).

for his 1929 cruise in the Mediterranean. Most British literary travelers were Oxford men, including Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, Peter Quennell, Cyril Connolly, Alan Pryce-Jones, Christopher Sykes, Peter Fleming, W.H. Auden, Evelyn Waugh, and Robert Byron. Fussell (1980: 78) remarks that in varying configurations, these travelers showed British traits of "lawless eccentricity" and "flagrant individualism" as well as decency, good humor, and pluck:
The character they jointlyassume...is that of the British traveler as outrageous person, conducting his libertariangesture against the predictable uniformity,the dull "internationalism," of post-war social and political arrangements (Fussell 1980: 78).

As for the anthropologists, Eggan (1974:17) writes without elaborating that "Inthe 1930s anthropology was a way of life that enabled its practitioners to escape the worst features of American culture." Whether or not anthropologists of the period were in search, too, of Golden Ages, the structural-functionalists found harmony, balance, equilibrium, integration, and solidarity (Voget 1975: 531) in societies without history, far from the turmoil of Europe; historical particularism recreated ethnographic presents from the remnants of disrupted cultures, even reanimating the lost through fiction (Parsons 1922, Langness & Frank 1978); culture and personality studies refocused on the individual as the significant unit of study. Even civilization, not simply culture, was a subject of concern in writings such as Kroeber's. And at least some have been outrageous anthropologists persons.

Greene solved his problem by interlacing the outward journey with an inward, apparently
autobiographical one in Journey without Maps.

Peter Fleming, whose forte was non-fiction, avoided the problem with luck and careful attention to his photographs and diaries. The literary travelers did not regard their travel books as literature, though they may have risked life and limb on the journey. When Waugh excerpted what he thought to be the best parts of his travel books, he reduced hundreds of pages to one slim
volume, When the Going Was Good (1946).

Fleming made a point of taking very little seriously: he dismissed the literary outcome of his trips as insignificant, repeatedly deprecated his phenomenal trip across Asia as selfish and justifiable only by the political news he and Ella Maillart brought from volatile Central Asia in 1935, and opened his (1 933) with the flip line, "It BrazilianAdventure began with an advertisement in the Agony Column of The Times." Robert Byron was an

This content downloaded on Wed, 13 Mar 2013 07:12:44 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

54

ANTHROPOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

exception. He devoted three years to creating the perfect travel book(Fussell 1980: 9496), an enthralling narrative presented as a diary in which events become the occasion for tiny learned essays on history, architecture, art, and politics. In contrast, the occasion for writing an ethnography is a contribution to knowledge for a discipline and the enhancement of a professional reputation. Unpublished fieldwork material acquires a mythic El Dorado quality of inaccessible information, irretrievable if the notes are lost or the anthropologist dies. Commercial success, however, is met with ambivalence. On the one hand, anthropologists chafe under persistent stereotypes of the profession; on the other, they are uneasy when anthropological knowledge becomes "popular" and thereby lowered in scientific status. Marcus and Cushman (1982: 51-2) discuss contemporary readerships for ethnography, from the most valued (one's fellow area specialists) to the least valued (the general public); other anthropologists, other social scientists, students and government-military personnel are sandwiched between. Marcus and Cushman do not consider why the general public is so negatively valued that the motives and veracity of those anthropologists who write for it are suspect, but it doubtless has to do with presumptions about these audiences and perhaps with anxieties about their own field's armchair origins and the continuing professionalization of their endeavor. As anthropologists came to acquire their own data through intensive fieldwork, they sought dissociation from the unscientific traveler who was an amateur, a dilettante, and even a novelist. The nonspecific antipathy toward any similarity drawn between the traveler and the ethnographer (Marcus 1982, Marcus and Cushman 1982) maintains that dissociation, even at a time when the nature of scientific knowledge in anthropology is at issue. The subject of the travel book is the essence of"being there,"3 portraying place, people, events and the journey's progress. Such writing is intensely sensory. Here Robert Byron writes about Northern Persia:
Gumbad-i-Kabus(200 ft.), April 24th 1933,Afterfollowing the BandarShah road a little way

back, we turned to the right down a track between wattle fences. High reeds obscured the view. Suddenly, as a ship leaves an estuary, we came out on to the steppe: a dazzling open sea of green. I never saw that colour before. Inother greens, of emerald,jade, or malachite, the harsh deep green of the Bengal jungle, the sad cool green of Ireland,the salad green of Mediterranean vineyards, the heavy full-blown browngreen of English summer beeches, some element of blue or yellow predominates over the others. This was pure essence of green, indissoluble, the colour of life itself. The sun was warm,the larks were singing up above. Behind us rose the misty Alpine blue of the wooded Elburz. In front, the glowing verdure stretched out to the rim of the earth (1937: 227-28).

Evelyn Waugh, reluctant and unhappy, made a journey into Brazil in 1932, and the following description characterizes the tone of much of Ninety-TwoDays:

The country was dead flat and featureless except for ant-hills and occasional clumps of palm;the ground was hardearth and sand tufted with dun-colored grass; thousands of lizards scattered and darted under the horses' feet; otherwise there was no sign of life except the black crows who rose at our approach from the carcasses strewn along the track,and resettled to theirfeast behind us. Here and in the forest we passed a carcass every half-mile. Many were recently dead, for the last drive had lost fortyper cent., and these we cantered past holding our breath;others were mere heaps of bone picked white by the ants, the mound of half-digested feed always prominent among the ribs (1946: 213).

Peter Fleming's Brazilian jungle is less bleak:

Night in these jungles has a curious rhythmto it.... There was a permanent regulated background of noise....The cicadas and the frogs laid measured strips of sounds with no end and no beginning.... Every now and then the cry, the movement in the branches, of some big birds, would come from close at hand, immediate and obtrusive: a throaty, confidential cry, a soft, a careful movement. (Fleming 1933: 245).

Crossing one of the most difficult stretches of their Asian journey, Fleming and Maillart found no sweet water, no pasturage, no barley on the barren high desert of Sinkiang. Then they entered Cherchen, the first oasis:

A cock crowed. The familiarsound, unheard for nearly three months, asserted definitively our return to a world where men had homes; we began to think gloatingly of eggs. I think it was the sounds that were, for me, the most vividpart

This content downloaded on Wed, 13 Mar 2013 07:12:44 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

TRAVELERS'TALES

55

of a strange and unforgettable experience. The wind in the leaves, the gurgling water, a dog barking,men calling to each other in the fields-these noises, and especially the wind in the leaves, changed the whole texture of our environment,filled the air with intimacy,evoked forgotten but powerfulassociations. Then a cuckoo called, lazily;the essence of the spring that we had missed, the essence of the summer that we had suddenly overtaken, were comprehended in its cry,and I had a vision of lawns picketed with great trees, young rabbits scampering into gorse, a wall of ivy loud with sparrows.... We wound deeper into the oasis in a kind of trance. The gaunt camels strode ahead; the little echelon of donkeys followed patiently. Cynara, with Kini up, stepped delicately, twitching her ears and blowing down her nostrils; she had never seen a tree before and was gravely disconcerted by these monstrous growths (Fleming 1936: 234).

the Western Pacific he gives a traveler's account of his arrival in the Trobriand Islands, but in the ethnographic present of "an imaginary first visit" (1922: 55):
We now enter an opaque, greenish sea, whose monotony is broken only by a few sandbanks, some bare and awash, others with a few pandanus trees squatting on their air roots, high in the sand (1922: 49).

His descriptions are painterly, emphasizing lineFurtherahead, through the misty spray, the line of horizon thickens here and there, as if faint pencil marks had been drawn upon it (1922: 49). As we sail in the lagoon, following the intricate passage between the shallows, and as we approach the main island,the thick,tangled matting of the low jungle breaks here and there over a beach, and we can see into a palm grove, like an interior,supported by pillars (1922: 51).

While in travel books the people of a place merely step forward now and again, the ethnography sets people against the ground of place. Geertz finds the power of Evans-Pritchard's assured declarations of custom his being-there "signature"(1983:75). While I find Evans-Pritchard's vignettes less vivid than Geertz does, the visual emphasis is shown in this example from The Nuer:

and color, most uninhibited in the diary-

As soon as children can crawl they are brought into close intimacywiththe flocks and herds. The kraal is their playgroundand they are generally smeared with dung in which they rolland tumble. The calves and sheep and goats are their companions in play, and they pull them about and sprawl in the midst of them....As soon as a baby can drinkanimal'smilkits mothercarries it to the sheep and goats and gives it warm milkto drink straight from the udders (1940: 38).

...the poisonous verdigris of Sariba lies in the sea, the color of blazing of phosphorescent magenta with here and there pools of cold blue reflecting pink clouds and the electric green or Saxe-blue sky. -Last night: sea and sky of a calm, intense blue, the hills shimmering with deep purples and intense cobalt of copper ore, and above them two or three banks of clOuds blazing with intense oranges, ochers, and pinks

(1967: 115-6).

but in the ethnography (1922) as well-

Evans-Pritchard himself relied on his excellent black-and-white photographs to convey the atmosphere;
No high barriers of culture divide men from beasts in their common home, but the stark nakedness of Nuer amid their cattle and the intimacy of their contact with them present a classic picture of savagery. I ask the reader to look at some of the illustrations...which will convey to him better than I can in words the crudity of kraal life (1940: 40).

The round, grey logs, worn smooth by contact with naked feet and bodies; the trodden ground of the village-street; the brown skins of the natives, who immediatelysurround the visitor in large groups-all these form a colour scheme of bronze and grey, unforgettable to anyone who, like myself, has lived among these people (1922: 51).

The photographs do not convey"crudity" but are what Geertz calls"emblematical:" "...they make points of their own" (1983: 75-6). Malinowski wrote to James Frazer that he had "come to realize the paramount importance of vividness and colour in descriptions of life" (Stocking 1983: 106). In Argonautsof

Whilevividness is primary, the travelbook is also dynamic.The travelerarrives,leaves, keeps movingby boat, camel, horse, truck,or on foot. The traveler continually notes the date and how many weeks or months have passed since he left Peking or will arrive in Belem, how long it has taken to traverse a desert or ocean, and how many days he was held up by officials, boatmen, or equipment. There is often pressure to be getting on. It
varies with the traveler Fleming was nicknamed The Galloper and Peter The Impatient by an annoyed Ella Maillart who wanted to linger to ask questions and soak up atmosphere.4 In Fleming's Brazilian Adventure, which Fussell (1980: 13-14) thinks the most

This content downloaded on Wed, 13 Mar 2013 07:12:44 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

56

ANTHROPOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

popular between-the-wars travel book, time is exquisitely urgent in the last hundred pages as Fleming races a thousand miles down the Araguaia River to Belem, ahead of the expedition leader who abandoned him upstream, to catch his boat to England and be the first to present an account of the expedition's debacle. The reader, too, takes a trip in imaginary time and becomes acquainted with the traveler on the way: thorny Robert Byron softens in his judgments of Persia and Afghanistan after several months along the journey. A travel book is a narrative that someone tells someone else about what happened (Smith 1980: 232). It has a beginning and usually an end but is mostly middle. Endings tend to offer a returning-home scene or a comment on the sharp contrast between the adventure just past and the familiarity waiting, a resolution the traveler may greet with pleasure, ambivalence, or reluctance. Staying in one place is, of course, not traveling, so travelers must be on their way or stay and write an ethnography. Although the anthropologist comes and goes in his own and others' societies, the classical realist ethnography is timeless. Change is absent; the account is in the present tense, although a brief history may preface the work The annual cycle keeps turning, and the reader may be disconcerted to discover that the ethnographer was in and out of the field, staying a few weeks or months, leaving, sometimes for years, or perhaps never going back after the initial sojourn. Time suddenly reveals the experience behind the ethnographic account as a reader glimpses what it was like there. Timeless ethnography obscures the pressure of time. The anthropologist, too, has a schedule to keep, things to get done, and brief months in which to figure out the other ways of life. Anthropologists also are held up by officials, truculent boatmen, and broken equipment. But they rarely describe this sort of experience even in personal accounts, less so in ethnographies. Another distinction of time separates traveler and ethnographer. Travelers usually begin to write immediately upon returning home. Back in England in late October, Fleming wrote 120,000 words of Brazilian Adventure in two months; the book was published

the following August (Hart-Davis 1974: 105). This ripping yarn came straight from the heat of experience. The way a traveler reworks his material is for background in a future novel. By contrast, although the ethnographer may produce a dissertation or article soon after returning from the field, revision and extended publication may wait, while the heat cools and events fade. The immediacy drains away, leaving hard dry skeletons of experience. The analyst returns to his material periodically, working out the ethnography over many years but distancing himself as well. There are many reasons for the lengthening time between fieldwork and publication. One may be mistrust of first impressions as scientific knowledge. But even though the dispassionate ethnographer avoids committing impressions to the ethnography, they are cherished in personal memory and private story. The daring may tell those stories in fiction or poetry. 5 The inclusion of sensory and temporal writing varies, of course, with the ethnographer's inclination and ability. Both narrative and descriptive writing may be reserved for another account if thought out of place or too literary for scientific writing, stripping the observer of the cloak of invisibility. The classical realist ethnography that works through the expected topics of kinship, economy, political organization, and religion

is hostile to narrative;it disassembles and

abstracts experience and generalizes events. 6 Exposition that abstracts and explains why other people do what they do also disguises the speaker-the anthropologist is camouflaged in the bushes or behind a screen, a disembodied voice of authority-while attempts to include a methodological account of field experience tend to violate the preference for abstraction. Meyerhoff and Ruby observe that "the more scientific anthropologists try to be appearto be"(1982: 26, emphasis original). To keep anthropology objective has been to sequester personal experience in a diary, letters, an introduction, a separate chapter, a separate account. Narrative revealing the speaker in time and event is avoided.
and of what it was like to be there... by revealing their methods, the less scientific they

In the travel book the writer presents the

This content downloaded on Wed, 13 Mar 2013 07:12:44 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

TRAVELERS'TALES

57

effect of the experience upon himself; the account is egocentric. A person with personality, character, likes and dislikes, travels to an exotic place in search of the stimulating, dramatic, and bizarre and shares the adventure intimately. The descriptions, allusions, explanations, and events are those of a particular person; we see through his or her eyes and know we are doing so. In the classic ethnography, the intensely personal experience of doing fieldwork has been excised; no self intrudes into the frame, no hand comes out from behind the camera. Although based upon one person's experience and analysis, ethnographic rhetoric is, in its commitment to objectivity, anti-egocentric. Where Rabinow speaks of "mysteriously narratorless chronicles common in anthropology" (1977: 179), Marcus and Cushman make the more complex observation:
One of the primary differences between the travel account and the realist ethnography is the markedabsence in the latterof the narratoras a first-person presence in the text and the dominance instead of the scientific (invisible or omniscient) narratorwho is manifest only as a dispassionate, camera-like observer; the collective or authoritative third person...replaces the more fallible first-person...(1982:31-2).

As travelers make no claim to be scientific, scientists are ambivalent and inconsistent about adventure. Fleming repeatedly announced that his and Maillart's expedition across Asia was not a scientific one. Paleontologist Roy Chapman Andrews (1921: 87) said of his time in the Gobi, quoting Vilhjalmur Stefansson, that "adventures are a mark of incompetence." Levi-Strass declared that "Adventure has no place in the anthropologist's profession; it is merely one of those unavoidable drawbacks, which detract from his effective work" (1974: 17). Yet Evans-Pritchard became a fieldworkerbecause he did not want to be "just an intellectual"; he "wanted a life of adventure, too" (1973: 18). Both the travel book and the ethnography use a moral discourse. The difference, as elucidated by Alfred Louch, is that the traveler makes moral judgments and the anthropologist makes moral assessments:
The first requires nothing beyond one's arsenal of moralconvictions and a case to which to apply them. The second requires a much more detailed description of what might be called the moral ecology within which the practice is observed. The first reflects the interference of values with accurate description which social scientists rightly deplore. The second is a case of moral explanation, based upon the most detailed factual picture possible (Louch 1966: 161).

The requirements of nineteenth-century scientific writing are clear. What is less clear is the anthropologist's willingness to speak publicly of self at all. Rose suspects there may be no self there, that to be an anthropologist may require giving up self in order to understand others (1982: 240); he goes on to say that he gave up writing poetry because he "wanted to think, feel, and act like an anthropologist" (p. 240), to assume an identity by trading "poetic unconscious experiences for an anthropological public life"(p. 271). He insists (p. 244) that because at the behest of his mentor Erving Goffman he did not use his anthropological identity while doing fieldwork in South Philadelphia in 1969, he could not do anthropology, i.e., categorical data collection, and thus failed to produce a professional text. Feeling like a spy because he did not reveal his true purpose, Rose presents instead what he experienced-confusion, incompetence, lack of control, and daring-in an adventure story about what it was like to live in South Philadelphia.

British literary travelers indeed had strong convictions, as shown by Byron's Venetian opening in TheRoad to Oxiana and Fleming's dutiful but self-conscious descriptions of Caraja Indians in Brazil:
We went to the Lidothis morning,and the Doge's Palace looked more beautiful froma speed-boat than it ever did froma gondola. The bathing,on a calm day, must be the worst in Europe:water like hot saliva, cigar-ends floating into one's mouth, and shoals of jelly-fish (Byron 1937:3). It was always fun calling on the Carajas. The women and pot-bellied children would come crowding roundas the nose of the leading canoe grated on the sand. The women are said to speak a different language from the men, the principal variationbeing the omission-or slurring-by the men of the K sound.... Certainlythere is a great and striking difference in tone, inflection, and cadence between the speech of the sexes. Difficult as those who are accustomed to polite female society in civilized countries mayfind itto believe, there is no more maddening sound in the worldthan the conversation of a Carajawoman. She speaks hurriedlyin a plaintive petulant

This content downloaded on Wed, 13 Mar 2013 07:12:44 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

58

ANTHROPOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

sing-song, and until you get used to it you think that she is going to break at any moment into ratherangry tears. The voices of the men are by contrast dignified and deliberate (Fleming 1933: 154-5).

The traveler expresses judgments about phenomena that violate the values of traveler and audience and thus entertain, stimulate, and by contrast reaffirm those values. Fussell speaks of the "unique British ability to spot anomalies and make a travel book by accumulating a great number of them" because of "a supreme confidence that one knows what is 'normal' and can gauge an anomaly by its distance from the socially expected," an "unquestioned understanding of the norm and an unapologetic loyalty to it" (1980: 170). Without anomaly there is no travel book, no story to tell, and the more wondrous the anomalies the better the tendency of earlier the account-thus travel books to find cannibals and dogheaded men, to tell tall stories and weird tales. Ethnographers, however, embrace the task of dissolving anomaly into the moral ecology of the society studied; another generation of British anthropologists, including Leach and Douglas, made theoretical capital from showing that the seeming anomaly is ordinary. Edmund Leach comments:
the central issue of anthropology ForMalinowski was the problem which faces every fieldworker: How should one interpret the bizarre quality which pervades so much of the behaviourwhich is encountered in the exotic settings which anthropologists usually choose as the arena for their research? The essence of his answer was that as soon as the social context is fully understood, the bizarre quality disappears. In context, the various aspects of human social behaviour..fit together and "make sense"
(1982: 28).

the Trobrianders. Colin Turnbull, for his extended moral judgment of the Ik (1972)so anomalous, he said, that they were a social cancer that should be excised-was attacked by anthropologists for his ethics, for misperception of context, and for consequent misinterpretation of what the Ik were up to. But the anthropology of anthropology (Stocking 1983) now recognizes the diary's value, and Turnbull's work, too, may be eventually redeemed by the very openness with which he wrote. Nevertheless, ethnocentrism is the social scientist's bogeyman. Arens (1979) argues that anthropologists' belief in customary cannibalism is not a matter of fact but a matter of initiation: to exorcise the demon of judgment, one must be willing to accept infanticide, homicide, even cannibalism as ordinary. Students who accept vulgar cultural relativism are often uncomfortable evaluating anthropological work, mistaking critical assessment for judgment they must disavow. For others, Louch's moraljudgment and explanation have evolved from a simple subjective-objective dichotomy into a hyper-analytical species of hermeneutics and semiotics.
Authority and fiction

Perhaps the very movement of the traveler prevents awareness of any context but the journey itself; in theory the longer the ethnographer's field stay, the more anomaly dissolves. But the traveler needs to preserve the anomalous, otherwise the account fails. The anthropologist who does not dissolve anomalies, who produces moral judgment instead of moral assessment, gets into trouble too. Malinowski's diary (1967) provoked a fuss because of his judgments regarding

A travel book may contain bits of fiction. Although TheRoad to Oxiana takes form of a diary, Fussell reveals that Byron had carefully constructed the work that way and that the dialogues were fictional. In Labels, Waugh transforms his own estranged wife into someone else's. Norman Douglas' comment, quoted by Fussell (1980: 175), that "one suppresses much in writing a travel book; why not add a little?" chills the ethnographer. The exceptionally honest Peter Fleming aside-"this book differs... from most books about the interior of Brazil...in being throughout strictly truthful" -the travel book is an autobiographical narrative that uses fictional devices, comes out of the writer's encounter with the far away and unfamiliar, and "claims literal validity by constant reference to actuality" (Fussell 1980: 203). Anxious about judgment, the ethnographer is concerned that the reader accept his interpretation as competent. Marcus wonders how the traditional ethnography

This content downloaded on Wed, 13 Mar 2013 07:12:44 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

TRAVELERS'TALES

59

can incorporate self-awareness and still retain "the rhetorical usage of language and format by which ethnographers have constructed their accounts as certain and objective knowledge about others" (1982: 166). He observes that even an ethnographer sensitive to the effects of personality and experience upon fieldwork and analysis may treat this reflexivity as "a thing in itself' outside the ethnography. There is also the temptation I note in Rabinow and others to abstract self-awareness to the point where the anthropological self continues to be insulated by epistemology and structuralism, not revealed as a human being whose work is inevitably autobiographical. Authority assured by method remains infallible. Any hint of fiction threatens confidence in authority; yet typical ethnographic fictions are encompassed in typifications, pseudonyms, composite individuals and events. These devices of ambiguity, I think, point out the source of the ethnographer's anxiety about being associated with travelers: claims to be scientific in the positivist sense must be shielded from contamination by ripping yarns and tall tales. The ethnographer revealed, however, looks more and more like the traveler, an adventurer who braves intellectual hardship and danger to experience other ways of living. Evans-Pritchard's final sentence in The Nuer acknowledges the simile:
We feel like an explorer in the desert whose supplies have run short. He sees vast stretches of country before him and perceives how he would try to traverse; but he must return and console himself with the hope that perhaps the little knowledge he has gained will enable another to
make a more successful journey (1940: 266).

occupied by the Caraja and Tapirape Indians. He attempted to enter Shavante country but had to turn back In 1939-40 Charles Wagley, also twenty-five, spent ten months with the Tapirape but did not publish his complete account until 1977, by which time his field notes were "cold" (1977: x). Herbert Baldus had dedicated his own Tapirape opus to Wagley, hoping to stimulate him to publish. Wagley responded:
So my book is a labor of love, written to fulfillmy obligation to my departed colleague and friend, and to attempt to organize my own understanding of the Tapirapeculture into an integrated pattern (1977: xi).

He also noted that "the rather unorganized English expedition described vividly by Peter Fleming" in Brazilian Adventure "curiously" provided the most concrete information about the people and "although rather satirical and certainly not scientific in any way, the book did give me an idea of what I faced in my journey to the Tapirape" (1977: 36, 4-5). David Maybury-Lewis, even though his work is outside the between-the-wars period, was a student of Baldus and worked with the Sherente for eight months in 1955-56 and the Shavante for slightly longer in 1958. He published an ethnography of the Shavante in 1974, and in 1965 a personal account of the fieldwork experience that still stands as one of the most revelatory in the so-called confessional literature of modern anthropology. The latter narrative is much like a travel account, and Maybury-Lewis (writing with a style like Fleming's) distinguishes it sharply from ethnography:
This book is an account of our experiences; it is not an essay in anthropology.Indeed, i have tried to put down here many of those things which never get told in technical anthropological writings-our impressions of Central Brazil,our personal reactions to the various situations in which we found ourselves, and above all our feelings about the day-to-day business which is mysteriously known as "doing fieldwork".The narrativeis therefore intentionallyanecdotal. To those readers who find that this book is not as thrilling as a book about the wilds of Brazil should be, I offer my apologies. I can only add by way of explanation that every incident in it is true (1965: 8).

Both traveler and anthropologist are strangers who deliver the exotic to an audience unlikely to follow them to the places they have visited, but likely perhaps to follow their explorations of them. In neither case is the account written for the people or places experienced, but for person and profession. Ambivalenceand audience Consider a last example, Brazil. In 1932 a twenty-five-year-old Fleming traveled 3000 miles in three months, much of his journey through that part of the Mato Grosso

Contrasting the tales of the avowed traveler and those of the anthropologist recalls Levi-Strauss' distinction between melodics and harmonics as dimensions of

This content downloaded on Wed, 13 Mar 2013 07:12:44 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

60

ANTHROPOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

myth analysis. After isolating the mythemes, one tells the myth seriatim by following the arrangement of items (events), and one understands the myth by demonstrating relations between classes of items (LeviStrauss 1963: 214). The outcome is a mythic symphony of multiple melodies woven into great harmonic chords. One can whistle a melody, or tell a story, but may want the complex integration of harmony. Harmony without a melodic line, however, risks being merely an intellectual exercise. In the musical metaphor, Fleming's travel account is pure melody; Wagley's "labor of love," organized thematically but heavily narrative, has both melody and simple harmony(a tone poem?); Maybury-Lewis writes a ballad and a string quintet. In another metaphor, Fleming gives the reader a great canvas with character, feel, flavor, place, motion-a panorama of Central Brazil. Wagley gives a closer portrait of the people, individual natives and their problems, thoughts, actions, made up of events in Tapirape lives with the anthropologist in their midst. Maybury-Lewis reveals the Anthropological Innocent staring

out of a Rousseau jungle, suffering considerably with his family and managing only by the skin of their teeth. So what is an ethnography? By identifying and tabulating categories and their linkages, an anthropologist formulates an argument to explain their point. It does not share experience or tell a story or frame a picture. But it frames reference; on a higher, heretical level, ethnographies are stories, too. It is by hearing all the stories we may comprehend Brazil. As anthropological disciplines continue to evolve and categorical contrast to the traveler or missionary "other" becomes less vital to our professional identity, we may forgo the delicious power of conventional scientific authority, show ourselves as the crucial points of reference within each frame, and, in a distinctive voice of moral assessment, tell how we figure it out. The result will be not merely a synthesis of travel book, ethnography, and autobiography, but the stories of intellectual Travelers engaged in dialectic encounter with realities outside their own.

NOTES
1 An earlier version of this paper was read at the American Ethnological Society Meeting, Asilomar, California, April 1984. I wish to thank Peter Esainko and Robert Miles for their editorial support; and Dorothy Bell, John Connor, Robert Armstrong,W.J. Lippincott, George Rich, and Mel Weiss for sharing their thoughts on travelers and anthropologists. 2 The population of American anthropologists has certainly changed since Roe did her study, and a new study is in order. Yet Dan Rose (1982) writing of his attraction to anthropology fifteen years ago reveals a biography and point of view consistent with those of the earlier generation. There surely is persistence in preadaptation for the calling. 3 I have borrowed the term "being there" from Geertz but use it with a different emphasis. Geertz refers to the anthropologist's having been there: his descriptions are testimony that he knows what he is talking about. I am considering "being there" from the reader's side: can the reader imagine the scene and "be there" from what the writer has said? My ground is the view of paleoneurologist HarryJerison (1976) who argues that the function of language is not to direct action (lions and tigers can do that) but to share experience. People perceive through language and share their consciousness with others in language through stories, thus increasing the known world of all. 4 Maillartcomments on the difference between them: "Peter was bored by my craving to understand the thousands of diverse lives that make up humanity and bored, too, by my need to relate my own life to life in general. How could anybody be so crazy as to want to find out whether men's efforts brought about an improvement in human nature? Peter was troubled by none of these things. In his imperturbable wisdom he looked on human beings as characters in a comedy. As to his deeper self, his timidity [shyness] usually made him hide it beneath a facetious dignity. Except at rare intervals, he seemed persuaded that his concerns were of no interest to anybody (1937: 148). 5 A colleague who has written novels says he does so to become deeply involved with character, feeling, and flavor, qualities that conventional ethnographic forms do not permit him to express. 6 Interest in the form and function of narrative has spawned a new specialty of "narratology" in modern thought. Marcus and Cushman seem to stretch the concept of narrative to include any discourse that moves from one topic to another, referring to the "normative narrative structure" of ethnography, which is "to traverse, in sequential fashion, the units (cultural complexes or social institutions) into which cultures or societies were conceived, on theoretical grounds, to be divided" (1982: 30). Since Marcus and Cushman are talking about

This content downloaded on Wed, 13 Mar 2013 07:12:44 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

TRAVELERS'TALES

61

anthropological rhetoric, such expansion of narrative muddles where it should clarify. While there is certainly an array of opinion on what does and does not constitute narrative (see CriticalInquiry7[1], 1980, for an entire symposium on the subject), it is clear that a narrative tells about a sequence of events (not units) in the past tense; it may or may not have a beginning, middle, and end (closure). Bruner uses narrative to talk more specifically about the assumptions that anthropologists bring to their data, in particular assumptions about history and the future. He finds the concept of narrative more fruitfulthan model or paradigm because its order is sequence, and he suggests, I think insightfully, that "if classificatory

schemes provide a science of the concrete, possibly narrative schemes may provide a science of the imagination" (Bruner n.d.: 5). 7 Arens (1979) wrote that he found no reliable firsthand account of customary cannibalism in the ethnographic literature. Instead, the accounts conformed consistently to wishful thinking on the part of outsiders and scapegoating by insiders The heated response from fellow anthropologists went far beyond what his study warranted because he challenged the traditional exercise in suspension of judgment-if the practice does not bias one's evaluation of a society, one is thereby capable of genuine anthropological assessment.

REFERENCES CITED AGAR, MICHAELH.

1980 - The Professional Stranger: An Informal Introduction to Ethnography. New York: Academic Press.

ANDREWS, ROY CHAPMAN

1921 - Across Mongolian Plains: A Naturalist's Account of China's "Great Northwest." New York: D. Appleton.

ARENS, WILLIAM
1979 - The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy. New York: Oxford University Press.

BRUNER, EDWARD M.
n.d. - Ethnography as narrative. In The Anthropology of Experience, Victor Turner and E.M. Bruner, eds., forthcoming.

BYRON, ROBERT
1937 - The Road to Oxiana London: Jonathan Cape.

CABLE, MILDRED with FRANCESCA FRENCH

1944 - The Gobi Desert. New York: Macmillan.
-

COCKBURN, ALEXANDER
1984 Bwana vistas: The lost, lamented world of the travel writer. Harper's Magazine 269 (1611): 65-69.

EGGAN, FRED
1974 - Among the anthropologists. Annual Review of Anthropology 3: 1-19.

EVANS-PRITCHARD,EDWARDE. FLEMING, PETER

1940 - The Nuer. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1973 - Genesis of a social anthropologist. The New Diffusionist 3 (10): 17-23.

1933 - Brazilian Adventure. New York: Chas. Scribner's Sons. 1936 - News from Tartary:A Journey from Peking to Kashmir. New Yoric Chas. Scribner's Sons.

FREILICH,MORRIS, ed.
1977 - Marginal Natives at Work: Anthropologists in the Field. New York: John Wiley and Sons.

FUSSELL, PAUL
1980 - Abroad: British Literary Traveling between the Wars. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

GEERTZ, CLIFFORD
1983 - Slide show: Evans-Pritchard's African transparencies. Raritan. Fall: 62-80.

GREENE, GRAHAM
1980 - Ways of Escape: An Autobiography. New York: Simon and Schuster.

HART-DAVIS,DUFF
1974 - Peter Fleming. London: Jonathan Cape.

JERISON, HARRY
1976 - Paleoneurology and the evolution of mind. Scientific American 234 (1): 90-101.

LANGNESS, L.L. and GELYA FRANK

1978 - Fact, fiction, and the ethnographic novel. Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly 3 (1-2): 18-22.

This content downloaded on Wed, 13 Mar 2013 07:12:44 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

62

ANTHROPOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

LEACH, EDMUND
1982 - Social Anthropology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

LEVI-STRAUSS,CLAUDE
1963 - The structural study of myth.In Structural Anthropology, Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf, trans. New York Basic Books, pp. 206-231. 1974 - Tristes Tropiques. John and Doreen Weightman, trans. New York Atheneum.

LOUCH, ALFRED
1966 - Explanation and Human Action. Berkeley: University of California Press.

ELLA K. MAILLART,

1937 - Forbidden Journey From Peking to Kashmir. London: Wm. Heinemann Ltd. 1922 - Argonauts of the Western Pacific New York EP. Dutton. 1967 - A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, Norbert Guterman, trans. New York Harcourt, Brace and
World.

MALINOWSKI,BRONISLAW

MARCUS, GEORGE
1982 - Rhetoric and the ethnographic genre in anthropological research. In A Crack in the Mirror:Reflexive Perspectives in Anthropology, J. Ruby, ed. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 163172.

MARCUS, GEORGE and DICK CUSHMAN

1982 - Ethnographies as texts. Annual Review of Anthropology 11: 25-69.

DAVID MAYBURY-LEWIS, MCNEILL,WILLIAMH.

1965 - The Savage and the Innocent. Boston: Beacon Books. 1974 - Akwe-Shavante Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1982 - The Pursuit of Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Reflexive Perspectives in Anthropology, J. Ruby, ed. Philadelphia: 1982 - Introduction.In A Crack in the Mirror: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 1-35. 1963
-

MEYERHOFF,BARBARAand JAY RUBY NASH, DENNISON

The ethnologist as stranger An essay in the sociology of knowledge. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 19: 149-67.

PARSONS, ELSIE CLEWS, ed.

1922 - American Indian Life. New York: Viking Press. 1966 - Stranger and Friend: The Way of an Anthropologist. New York: W.W. Norton.

POWDERMAKER,HORTENSE RABINOW, PAUL ROE, ALICE

1952b -

1977 - Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco. Berkeley: University of California Press.

1952a - A psychological study of eminent psychologists and anthropologists, and a comparison with biological
and physical scientists. Psychological Monographs 67: 1-55. Analysis of group rorschachs of psychologists and anthropologists 212-224. Journal of Projective Techniques 16:

ROSE, DAN

1982 - Occasions and forms of anthropological experience. In A Crack in the

Anthropology. J. Ruby, ed. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania

Reflexive Perspectives in Mirror. Press, pp. 219-274.

SMITH, BARBARA HERRNSTEIN STOCKING, GEORGE W., Jr.

Press, pp. 70-120.

1980 - Narrative versions, narrative theories. Critical Inquiry 7(1): 213-37. 1983 - The ethnographer's magic: Fieldwork in British anthropology from Tylor to Malinowski. In Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork. G.W.Stocking, Jr., ed. Madison: University of Wisconsin

TURNBULL, COLIN VOGET, FRED W.

1972 - The Mountain People. New York: Simon and Schuster. 1975 - A History of Anthropology. New York Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

This content downloaded on Wed, 13 Mar 2013 07:12:44 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

TRAVELERS' TALES

63

WAGLEY,CHARLES WAUGH, EVELYN

1934 1946 -

1977 - Welcome of Tears: The Tapirape Indians of Central Brazil. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1930 - Labels: A Mediterranean Journal. London: Duckworth.
Ninety-Two Days: The Account of a Tropical Journey through British Guiana and Part of Brazil. London: Duckworth. When the Going Was Good. London: Duckworth.

Anthropological Quarterly

April 1986, 59:2

Announcing Special Issue

THE

SEMIOTICSOF

TOURISM

Annals of Tourism Research

Volume 16, Number 1, 1989
Several topics invite a combination of semiotic method and observations and analysis of tourism. These include studies of literary accounts of travel, advertisements, brochures,and pamphlets, sights and spectacles, monuments, souvenirs, and communication (also miscommunication)between tourists and local peoples. All such topics lead investigation in the direction of an empirically based critical analysis of sociocultural values and ideology. Semiotic studies of specific aspects of tourism serve as a base for highlightingemerging models of popularconsciousness (false consciousness, also,) social criticism, and critical theory. Potential article topics include:the ethnomethodology of tourists,"Romancingthe ThirdWorld," sexuality and/or exploitation in tourist settings, ethnic identity and tourism, tourist advertising ideology, tourismand culturaldeformation,narrativeconsciousness and the tour. Prospective authors should directly contact the Guest Editor: Dean MacCannell Professor and Chair Community Studies University of California at Davis Davis, California 95616, USA The deadline for papers is December 1, 1987. However, potential contributorsare encouraged to communicate their intent,along with abstracts, to Dr.MacCannellat their earliest convenience.

This content downloaded on Wed, 13 Mar 2013 07:12:44 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions