Professional Documents
Culture Documents
CLIFFORD GEERTZ
I.
BEING THERE
Anthropology and the Scene of Writing
The illusion that ethnography is a matter of sorting strange
and irregular facts into familiar and orderly categories-this
is magic, that is technology-has long since been exploded.
What it is instead, however, is less clear. That it might be a
kind of writing, putting things to paper, has now and then
occurred to those engaged in producing it, consuming it, or
both. But the examination of it as such has been impeded by
several considerations, none of them very reasonable.
One of these, especially weighty among the producers,
has been simply that it is an unanthropological sort of thing
to do. What a proper ethnographer ought properly to be
doing is going out to places, coming back with information
about how people live there" and making that information
available to the professional community in practical form,
not lounging about in libraries reflecting on literary ques
tions. Excessive concern, which in practice usually means
any concern at all, with how ethnographic texts are con
structed seems like an unhealthy self-absorption-time
wasting at best, hypochondriacal at worst. What we want to
BEING THER.E
know about is the Tikopians and the Tallensi, not the nar
rative strategies of Raymond Firth or the rhetorical machin
ery of Meyer Fortes.
Another objection, here coming mostly from the con
sumer side, is that anthropological texts are not worth such
delicate attention. It is one thing to investigate how a Con
rad, a Flaubert, or even a Balzac, gets his effects; to engage in
such an enterprise for a Lowie or a Radcliffe-Brown, to
speak only of the dead, seems comic. A few anthropolo
gists-Sapir, Benedict, Malinowski, and these days Levi
Strauss-may be recognized as having a distinctive literary
style, and not being above an occasional trope. But that is
unusual and somewhat to their disadvantage-suggestive
even of sharp practice. Good anthropological texts are plain
texts, unpretending. They neither invite literary-critical
close reading nor reward it.
But perhaps the most intense objection, coming from
all quarters, and indeed rather general to intellectual life
these days, is that concentrating our gaze on the ways in
which knowledge claims are advanced undermines our ca
pacity to take any ofthose claims seriously. Somehow, atten
tion to such matters as imagery, metaphor, phraseology, or
voice is supposed to lead to a corrosive relativism in which
everything is but a more or less clever expression of opinion.
Ethnography becomes, it is said, a mere game of words, as
poems and novels are supposed to be. Exposing how the
thing is done is to suggest that, like the lady sawed in half, it
isn't done at all.
These views are unreasonable, because they are not
based on the experience of threats present and actUal, or
even looming, but on the imagining of possible ones that
might occur were everything to be suddenly otherwise than
it now is. If anthropologists were to stop reporting how
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Sri Lanka, but it has been far less attended to. Mead argued
that Gregory Bateson's hundreds of photographs demon
strated her arguments, but hardly anyone, including Bate
son, much agreed with her.) Perhaps ethnographers should
be believed for the extensiveness of their descriptions, but
that does not seem to be the way it works.
Just why the idea persists that it does so work is difficult
to say. Perhaps old-fashioned notions about how "findings"
are "established" in the harder sciences has something to do
with it. In any case, the main alternative to this sort of fac
tualist theory of how anthropological works convince,
namely that they do so through the force of their theoretical
arguments, is no more plausible. Malinowski's theoretical
apparatus, once a proud tower indeed~ lies largely in ruins,
but he remains the ethnographer's ethnographer. The rath
er passe quality that Mead's psychological, culture-and
personality speculations now seem to have (Balinese Char
acter was supported by a grant for the study of dementia
praecox, which the Balinese were supposed to display in a
walking-around form) doesn't seem to detract very much
from the cogency of her observations, unmatched by any of
the rest of us, concerning what the Balinese are like. Some,
at least, ofUvi-Strauss's work will survive the dissolution of
strUcturalism into its all-too-eager successors. People will
read The N uer even if, as it has tended to, segmentary theory
hardens into a dogma.
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a~a!!Y.~d~or, if you prefer, been penetrated by)
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"
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coming round from the south, outside the reef, on which the tide
was low. The outrigger-fitted traft drew near, the men in them
bare to the waist, girdled with bark-cloth, large fans stuck in the
backs of their belts, tortoise-shell rings or rolls of leaf in the ear
lobes and nose, bearded, and with long hair flowing loosely over
their shoulders. Some plied the rough heavy paddles, some had
finely plaited pandanus-leaf mats resting on the thwarts beside
them, some had large dubs or spears in their hands. The ship an
chored on a short cable in the open bay off the coral reef. Almost
before the chain was down the natives began to scramble aboard,
coming over the side by any means that offered, shouting fiercely
to each other and to us in a tongue of which not a word was under
stood by the Mota-speaking folk of the mission vessel. I wondered
how such turbulent human material could ever be induced to sub
mit to scientific study.
Vahihaloa, my "boy," looked over the side from the upper
deck, "My word, me fright too much," he said with a quavering
laugh; "me tink this fella man he savvy kaikai me." Kaikai is the
pidgin-English term for "eat." For the first time, perhaps, he began
to doubt the wisdom of having left what was to him the civiliza
tion of Tulagi, the seat ofGovernment four hundred miles away, in
order to stay with me for a year in this far-off spot among such
wild-looking savages. Feeling none too certain myself of the re
ception that awaited us-though I knew that it would stop short
of cannibalism-I reassured him, and we began to get out the
stores. Later we went ashore in one of the canoes. As we came to
the edge of the reef our'craft halted on account of the falling tide.
We slipped overboard on to the coral rock and began to wade
ashore hand in hand with our hosts, like children at a party, ex
changing smiles in lieu ofanything more intelligible or tangible at
the moment. We were surrounded by crowds of naked chattering
youngsters, with their pleasant light-brown velvet skins and
straight hair, so different from the Melanesians we had left behind.
They darted about splashing like a shoal of fish, some of them fall
ing bodily into pools in their enthusiasm. At last the long wade
ended, we climbed up the steeply shelving beach, crossed the soft,
dry sand strewn with the brown needles of the Casuarina trees-a
home-like touch; it was like a pine avenue-and were led to an old
chief, clad with great dignity in a white coat and a loin-cloth, who
awaited us on his stool under a large shady tree. 2
"
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IS
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p.I.
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7R. Barthes, "From Work to Text," in Harari, Textual Strategies, pp. 73-82.
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