Abstract
The last two decades have witnessed an increasing sense of crisis in the central practical1 activity of the discipline of social anthropology — the creation of ethnographies. The impasse that seems to have been reached has resulted in what one recent commentator (who is also a‘participant’) has been led to call a‘failure of nerve’ (Geertz, 1985:624). This chapter surveys the crisis, examines one peculiar development which pretends that the crisis does not exist, and then explores the work of Pierre Bourdieu. It will be argued that by ‘working on the working subject’ (1984:511) in the very act of dealing with the objects of his scientific work, Bourdieu partially overcomes a series of obstacles that have stood in the way of other ethnographers. He has shown how ethnography can be reflexive without being narcissistic or uncritical; how to generate a critical ethnography of modern societies which overcomes the problem of defining an ‘authentic’ group for the application of the ethnographic method; and he provides the theoretical apparatus appropriate for the new mode of analysis necessitated by his innovations in ethnography.
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NOTES
See, for example, Marcus and Fischer (1986) and Clifford and Marcus (1987).
Marcus and Cushman (1982) discuss in detail the conventions that shaped the final written ethnography.
‘Every field of scholarly production has its own “rules” of propriety, which may remain implicit and only be known to the initiate’ (Bourdieu, 1984:601). That this symbolic capital is utilised explicitly on occasion can be little doubted by a close reading of a passage like the following:
The recent controversy and some of the reaction surrounding the publication of Freeman’s analysis (Freeman 1984) of Margaret Mead’s Samoan ethnography is partly symptomatic of this attitude.
The literature, though not large, continues to grow. Some crucial texts are Said 1979; Asad 1973; Moniot 1976; Copans 1974; Fabian 1983.
See, for example, the remarks in Note 2.
In New Zealand there is, at the time of writing, a vigorous debate at a variety of levels about the relationship of non-Maori researchers, film producers, etc. to ‘Maori’ topics and subjects. Thus, for example, the historian Michael King, who has written and edited a large number of works on ‘Maori’ subjects, has felt it necessary recently to abandon the field and to take up Pakeha themes — such as l’Affaire Greenpeace!
Bourdieu (1977:2) discusses the reliance of anthropologists on models of culture which borrow metaphors from cartography. Here LeviStrauss provides a concrete example of this reliance.
the influence is wider than this: Few anthropologists in recent years have enjoyed wider influence in the social sciences than Clifford Geertz. Sociologists, political scientists, and social historians interested in popular culture have turned increasingly to anthropology, and the anthropologist most often embraced is Professor Geertz (Roseberry 1984:1013).
In his early work Geertz was influenced by Ryle. Bourdieu acknowledges convergences between his ideas and those of Wittgenstein. The parallels between a certain tradition of analytic philosophy and the work of these two anthropologists would be worth exploring if only because Bourdieu’s work represents an opportunity for the analytic tradition to escape its sterility. See also Snook’s comments in Chapter 7 below.
See Bloch, Maurice, 1983, especially Chapter 5, ‘Marxism and American Anthropology’.
It is interesting to note that Geertz’s early work showed strong influences from the American tradition of materialism. He seems to have left this far behind and his recent work hardly shows any vestiges of it.
This is not to say that Bourdieu’s materialism is a Marxian one. It nevertheless grew out of and developed in relation to it.
See Singer (1984:4–6, 32ff.) for one of the clearest discussions of these distinctive approaches to the study of symbolic forms. Semiological approaches are, generally speaking, those that construct symbolic systems in such a way that the analysis of them is seen merely as a matter of internal analysis, of recovering the logic of the system itself. Semiotic approaches on the other hand, emphasise the relationship between symbols and ‘symbolising’ subject.
This account of Cultural Studies relies heavily on the review by Steve Baron 1985.
Thus, for example, he argues in 1978 and 1980 that ‘the specific and finally irreducible problematic of the Participant Observation method should be used as a resource in a “self-reflexive” analysis — not regarded as the implicit limits of “scientific inquiry”.’ This merely repeats what Lévi-Strauss had said in his inaugural lecture to the Co11ége de France in 1960, in its turn merely reformulating ideas already current in ethnology and social anthropology.
Leon sur la legon is at once a more sustained and yet more narrow meditation on this subject. Taking as his focus his own location in the social space Bourdieu subjects it to a critique which he initially develops in Outline and Distinction. See Chapter 8 in this book.
Marxist theory in particular suffers from this effect: ‘The historical success of Marxist theory, the first would-be scientific social theory to have realised itself so fully in the social world, thus helps to bring about a paradoxical situation: the theory of the social world least capable of integrating the theory effect — which Marxism has exerted more than any other — nowadays no doubt represents the most powerful obstacle to the progress of the adequate theory of the social world, to which it has, in other times, contributed more than any other.’ (1985:744).
The importance attached to and the prominent position given to Canguilhem and Bachelard in his collaborative work Le métier de sociologue (Fr. ed., 1968) justifies this claim (see also Fr. ed., 1987:13–14).
This reflexiveness is reflected too in Bourdieu’s style of work. A large number of works have appeared with him as joint author indicating his devaluation of the notion of the self. Furthermore the continual return to the same objects of research (see Chapter 1) indicates his ‘scientific’ spirit, his critical evaluation of his own work. This contrasts strongly with the style of work of someone like Lévi-Strauss: singular and constantly in search of new subjects to show his skills. Lévi-Strauss speaks of his intelligence as being neolithic, slash-and-burn; Bourdieu has the patience of a peasant to cultivate the same plot year after year yielding different crops.
This is a task becoming increasingly urgent from another point of view because the ‘traditional’ societies which have been the grist of anthropological mills have begun to disappear both theoretically and historically.
In another context there is trenchant critique of this notion by someone whose work comes close at times to Bourdieu’s position:
A note on Bourdieu’s statistics: typically, Bourdieu uses an innovative and ‘French’ technique of statistical analysis (see Bourdieu 1984:571–2). This technique is associated with the ‘Analyse des donn€es’ school whose key figure is Jean-Paul Benzecri. Lebart, Morineau and Warwick (1984) have recently made available an English text on the techniques and methods of this school. They write (ibid.:165):
See Le sens pratique (Bourdieu, Fr. ed. 1980) for further commentary on ethnography, especially Chapter 2. The journal Actes (see Section B of the bibliography in this book) also contains work by Bourdieu relevant to this discussion of ethnography. See especially No. 59 (September 1985) which includes a discussion with Darnton and Chartier making reference to the work of Geertz. Another issue (No. 62, June 1986) entitled ‘L’illusion biographique’ is also particularly relevant. In one respect Bourdieu’s ethnography, though novel, nevertheless gives expression to a suppressed tendency in French ethnography. Clifford (1988) has argued that we need to see the close relationship at its origin between French ethnography and surrealism and in his essays calls for surrealistic ethnography. Bourdieu’s work, though not surrealistic, nevertheless adopts the methods of montage and collage in its construction.
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© 1990 Richard Harker, Cheleen Mahar and Chris Wilkes
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Barnard, H. (1990). Bourdieu and Ethnography: Reflexivity, Politics and Praxis. In: Harker, R., Mahar, C., Wilkes, C. (eds) An Introduction to the Work of Pierre Bourdieu. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21134-0_3
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