EUROP.

tEA ETHNOGRAPHY AS A PRACTICE,

Journal des Europeo lli stcs / ) ourIlO ! of 'he Europe al1islS OR THE UNIMPORTANCE OF PENGUINS

Dir~ction / Editor
C iuli o Angion i Mark Hobart
COOlite de Direction I Editorial floilrd
Guy Barhicho n (Univcrsi tc de Paris . Sornon nc)

Alherto Mmio C irc.'1c (U ni vcrsi tc de Rome "La Sap ienza" )

Caro le Counih a n (Millers vill e Un ivers it y. US A)

John Da vis (All So uls Coll ege. Oxford)

This book tells more about peng uins than I am inlerested in kno wing.
Giovanni Lill iu (Accadcm ia dei Lineci, Rome)
[Unknown child's school essay]
Mari anne Mes'nil (Univcrsitc Lih rc de Bruxd les)

Vi ntila Mihflilcscu (U ni vcrs iLc de Hut:arcsL)

We pick out a text here aud there to make il serve our tllrn; whereas,
Cristina Papa (L:nivcrs il c de PCfugiu)
if wetake il all IOgether, (lnd cOllsidered what went before (md "",h at
Pa olo PiqllcrcdJu (l SRE. Nuoro)
followed after, we should find il meant no sllcll thing.
Assia Papa va (CN RS-L AC ITO. Par is-Sari n)
[John Selden, The scriptllres, Tahle talk 16891
Ric ardo Sa nmartIn (U niv c rsidad Compl utcllsC , Madrid)

Ja mes T<l ggart (La ll c,lstcr Uni vcrs ily, USA)

Comile de redaction I Editoria t starr

A problem
Brigitl c Acke rmann, Pao la Atzen i, Be nedclIo Ca lt agirone. Francarosa Cont ll,

PasL:al [ordara. M. Gab r i cll~1 Da Rc. Antoni o Deills. Fra nco Uti. Marin e ll a Ltn inezi .
Ethnography, and ethn ographic writing, are in a parlous state. ' It is no longer clear
G ian ne lt a Murru . Lu ca Na varra. Dav i<..l C. Ni lson. Mari e- Luee Seieur

Direction et redaction I Editorial addr ess Edition et a dministration I Commercial a ddress
EU ROPA:A Ethl.ioni M&T
Facolti\ di Ma g islcro. Piau ,\ d'Armi Vi a SU Ll G regorio Mag no. II
I ~ 09 123 Cagliari ( It al y) 1 - 09127 CagJia ri (Italy)
TeI/ F.x (+39) (70) 2002304 Tel/Fax (+39) (70) 657895
© EU RO P;EA et les aUleurs I a nd the nuthors e-ma il: alie.ni @mlJoX .vol.il
EUROPJEA arises from ren ewed ime rcst in those stud ies gcne rieally deJ1n cd a.s "European ct hnol­
ogy ", and thus fro m the need fo r a new tool fo r investigat ion and confrontation , ava ilable to a nyone
in the worl d concerned wit h Eu rope from an ethnological or anthro pologica l viewpoint, regard lcss
of his theore tica l orientation . hi s subjcct n1<ltter o r hi s research methods.
EU RO PfEA's pur po~ is to attempt to publis h nOl o nly cOll t ribu t ion~ regardin g theoretical and
me thodo logical issues. but particularl y works on Inler-European compari:-:;o n and amlly~is (or those
stimulatin g compariso n a nd analysis) as wel l as brier monograph s on Euro pe.1n peoples or regio ns.
EUROPt£A a lso imends to act as an intermetliary in info rmation and d isc ussion. proposals and
co mme nts, even those beyond [ile alrcady v"lgue themati c (UH..I geopo li tica l limits impli c it ill the
tc rms "ethnology", "rHllhropology". "fo lklore" and a bo "European ".
EURO PfEA is not prcsented with a p rc-established line o r fo rmat. h i11lcnds to invcnt ilscl Cas it goes
alo ng. using a style .suggestecl by the co mrihlllions it will slI cceed in so li c iting. e ither dircctly or in­
directl y. from w hoever is working o n old o r l1ew themes fl.:garding Europcans and [heir ways o f li fe.
how you should set about doing ethnography, writing whal you experienced. or
even what you ~hould be writing about [Clifford & Marcus eds. 1986]. T he image
of the ethnographer as professional scientific theorist became occluded by the
appreciation that what passed for ethnographic experience was a complex a CI of
inlerpretation by which ethnographers textualized the welter of acti vities going
on around them. In place of a scienlific object - society - to be described, measured,
analyzed and explained, there was culture to be read , appreciated , interpreted and
written [Geertz 1973; 1988]. More than is often recognized, the differences between
the two objects lay in part the interests of the dominant polities concerned . Euro­
peans needed to imagine others in terms which enabled them to be admini stered
as part of colonial regimes. Soci al structure was a jural notion appropriale to those
wh.ose task it was to map, control and legisl ate. Americans, by contrast, were con­
cerned with de veloping others to share in the joys of modernization and modemilY,
a process Which involved a quasi-religious conversion of others from a state of
\ This pape r was o ri gi nally \vri Llcn for n se minar on l ex t"U~ li [y nnd fi eldwork en tilled TeslO e larell O
in the Di parlimento di Fil osofia e Seien 7.c Soeiali. Uni vcrsila degli SlUdi o i Siena, I am g rateful {O
Piergio rg io So linas for the original invitati o n and 10 the sem in ar for use fu l co mment s which I have
trie d (a inco rpo rate here.

ISS N 11 24 - 5425 3
EUROPA:A 19%, 11·1
 Mark Hobart
traditional superstition and ritual 10 reason and enli ghte nment . This required
understanding the cultural values of others: what made the m what they were .'
Whichever way you imagined the object of study, th e difficulty remained though
that the accounts were monol ogic. They privileged the authoritati ve voice of the
ethnographer and silenced the polyvoca'l reality of social life. Acco rding to thi s
critique, ethnographic writings should include the voices of the me mbers of the
soc iety, so that th e final ethnographi c text would, in both se nses, re presenl its
various participants [Clifford 19831 . The sorts of new ethnogra phy proposed [e.g.
Crapanzano 1980; Dwye r 1982) look rather Iikc a step backwards to extracts from
the notebooks of the old scientific anthropologists with all the problems of power
and knowl edge swept under the (Moroccan) carpetlFardon ed. 1990) . The idea of
liberating authentic nati ve voices to speak for themse lves rein vents the originary
presence and 'authorizes' the natives . As usual it is on the anthropologist's lerms
[Hoba rt 19901 . In both textual and 'd ialogic' analyses the e thn ogra pher relales to
others as subj ects through an intersubjectivit y, the te rms of which, again, the
anthropologist determines [Hobart in press (a)). The paradox is that the more
intellectu ally imposing the argument s and the finer the techn iques for registering
the actualities. the more the ac tions, concerns and lives of the people described
lend to fade into paleness. It is not just that what is desc ribed becomes increas­
ingly virtual. The stcess is also increasingly on the knowing subject of the ethnog­
rapher, so that th.e people who arc the objects or subjects of the account disappear,
either literally o r by being biographized (e.g. Abu-Lu ghod 1993; cf. Lindholm
1995: 809-8 11) and so overinterpreted and transmuted into a form quite alien to
their own practices of self-descriptio n, whateve r th ese mi ght be. Ethnography be­
comes increas ingly reflexive to th e point that it comes close to dispensing with its
object altogethe r.' The re is something seriously wrong he re.
! Understanding also is easi ly adaptable 10 di vining what people. as consumers, wanl. Oftell. or course.
thi s lakes the form of inlclllrcling . and so a\locat ing - 10 people wishes they did m)1 know they had . f
am inclined to think thaI the .ground gained (from the 1960s on) in l3rili sh social anthropology by
cullure as the predominant not ion is nO( co incidcmal to the hclillr.:d rcnlil'.alion or the Joss of empire. nor
the emorcscencc of understanding as a nOlion with the triumph of capitalistn. howe\ 'cr disorganized,
j ThaI this seems to be part icularl y common (hut , fortunately. far from universal ) among AlIlCril.' an­
trained anthropologists in vi tes more considerat ion than it has been given. ] suspect among A fri cans,
Asians and Latin Amcrican s it may ha ve somcthing to do with a rcac ti on against previous European
object ifications of them [Said 197~ 1 . Among th ose AmClican an th ropologists much given to sel[·cen ·
lred reflexi vit y. I wonder whether thi s is not the combination of two strands among others. Thc first is
religious practices of confessiun. 111e second relates (much as I dep lore recent overuse of the term) to
the United SlaLeS' period of 'hcgemony', as pan of the \.:onstruction' of others in the image of self.
4 ElJROPtEA 1996. II- I
F.IhJ10~rdP " \' Wi a PI'(lClice. or the Unimportance of Pen ,'1uill s
Quite what I think is wrong would take up at least a book. Let me deal with
one strand . It is the presupposition in Euro-American academic writing, which
embraces ethnograp hy, ethnographic writing and anthropology, that re presenting
some how mi rrors a reality, the task of experts being to establish that reality undis­
torted and , if possible, in its full origi nality. Thi s presupposition gets in the way
of wonde ring if reality is quite of that k,ind and what part the inquire r plays in
determining that reality. let alone as to whether the people we work with appreci ­
ate the issue in the same way. In othe r words, the grip o f a particu lar kind of time­
less, situati onless e pistemOlogical thinking remains the default intellectual position .
The result is to create a dichotomy between epi stemology and ontology, between
subject and object, which runs like a fault line through much European thought.
What is so wrong with such duali sm? Briefl y, it is bad manners . If we are to
e ngage seriously with others, it is an act of power to impose our categories on
them befo re we even inquire what theirs' are . It also arroga ntly assumes the supe­
ri ority o f the knower to th e known, in a non-mutual, non-recip rocal relationship.
It recreates the world according to particular processes of mind, treated as sepa­
rate from malter and bodies .' By making the relations hip between the Euro­
American intellectual and local intellectuals asy mmetrical - the latter become
objects to be thought - it gets in the way o f that criti cal appreciation and recogni­
ti on of difference, which I take to be a mutual process in some sense [Colling­
wood 1933) . It trans fers agency from people in various arrangements rethinking
and reworking their li ves, under cond itions usually not of their choosing, onto
that of the knower. The e ffect is to deify academics (well, it is the last chance
they will get) as knowi ng subjects, who are invariably superi or to , and detached
from, what they know . It is also hypocritical and incoherent. «Anthropology lives
by seeing and interpreting everythin g as culture-bound ( ... ) everything but itself»
(McGrane 1989: 125) . In what fo llows, I wish to conside r if it is poss ible to wri tc
about ethnography as a practice in a way which avoids both such unnecessary
ierarchizing of kn ower and known (es pecially when the known are other people)
and fal se identificati on by which we tame the strange. the different, by redescrip­
tion, so making it mere ly a puzzle.
4 I think that it is easier to render a duali st system in non· dualist terms than vice versa, hut I havc
yet 10 work thi s throu gh carefully. As dualism remains the default positi on, even among some post·
struturalists like Dcrrid a [see Foucault 1972: 602 Il], 1 prefer to err towards a non·dualist anal ysis
both hecau$;e i( makes a change from reinseribing a European meraphysics and because it li ts better
with my appreCiation of the presupposilions of the people wi th whom [ work. namel y Balinese.
ElJROPAlA 1996. 11- t 5
 Mark Hobart
Text
Let me start with a point about which most of us might appear to agree. "Events
only seem to be intelligible. Actually they have no meaning without interpretation»
[Sontag 1972: 655). The first, and usual, reading (sic) is the idea that ethnography
is interpretative and involves textualization as a prerequisite of interpretation. An
altcrnative analysis might run as follows. Interpretation is a particular kind of
practice which creates meaning and makes textualization appear a natural. ,logical,
even necessary, step. The former account owes much to Clifford Geertz's [1973]
reworking of Ricoeur's The model of the text [1971). The latter is closer to Fou­
cault's rethinking of Nietzsche [1990].
Textualizatiol1, on Rjcoeur's and Geertz's account,
is the process through which unwriuen behaviour, speech, !Oeliers, oral tradition
or ritual, come to be marked <.IS a corpus, a potentially meaningful ensemble
separated out from an immediate discursive or pcrformative situ<.llion. In lhe
moment of texlualization this meanjngful corpus assumes l.I mo rc or less slab Ie
relation 10 a context [Clifford 1983 : 130l
The ethnographer can take thesc texts away for later perusal and interpretation
because, unlike discoursc, tcxts travel. In the process of separation , texts become
evidence of «a "cultural" reality», a «generalized "author" must be invented» [e.g.
the Balinese, Clifford 1983: 1:32]. The argument is circular. Textualization is
possible because behaviour is declared to be part of a unitary aod coherent corpus,
and so is potentially meaningful by virtue of the analyst'S constitutive activity of
declaring culture to be a totality sec [Fabian 1983: 156] and so - gernndively ­
intclligible, interpretable. The whole argument presupposes the existence of what
can perhaps be best described as an abstract substance, 'meaning'. This singular
entity is implicit in action, or even events. It can be revealed, rather as you use
stain to differentiate organic tissue, by marking out actions as cultural and so
meaningful. Or alternatively the meaning lies in the act of textualization. While
the former argument tends to circularity, the latter does not necessarily, unless of
course you make the slip of imagining meaning to have any existenec other than
by virtue of textualizing itself.
I shall not review the debates in dctai I here about the nature of 'text' or 'Text"
In the narrower sense, text refers to what Barthes called 'work', that «is a fragment
~ J have written, probably at quite unnecessary length, about meaning lHoban 19821. IcxLs [19::)5J.
and tcxluality and interpretation fin press (b )], For an opposed point of view, apart ('r om th L'. sources
already cited, sec Boon {1982, 1990.1.
6 EURO P,£;\ t 996. II -I
F:1 1r'~'1if{!.phy' as i f PtClC1ict!.:...or ,IJ~ Uni"'l'Drrance ()1'l~nJlu ill,Y
of substance, occupying a part of the space of books» [1977: 156-57]. In the
broader sense, text «is a methodological field ( .. _) the Text is experienced only in
an activity of production» [1977: 157]. In the latter sense, it is of a bigher logical
order than the Ricoeurian text used by Geertz, which is itself a complex whole
built out of sentences [1976: 1-23].
There are two obvious problems. First you cannot write an epistemological
space. (Quite why spatializing, and so hypostatizing, knowing is so fraught is nicely
elucidated by Lefebvre 199 L) Second , it conllates culture and work/texL Unless
you inhabit a peculiarly recondite world, culture is nOI a texL Before the tcxtually­
inelined declare me a vulgar positivist, let me explain what I wish to say by thi s
It may be fruitful to treat culture as if it were a texL I doubt it though. This has
not stopped many soi-disant postmodemists from making great rep.utations by
celebrating the catachresis. It has become conventional in the last decade or so
among those suffering PMT (postmodernist trendiness) cheerfully to talk about
how texts have constituted people in ever more ambagious ways. Quite what
being constituted by a text - be it a book, a methodological field or a condition of
intelligibility - would actually involve is charmingly mind-boggling.
The problem with subsuming the whole strange eventful gamut of human
actions and events across history under the soubriquet of 'Text' is that it
homogenizes whatever has happened and sets up that comfortable, old and
appealing dichotomy by which mind triumphs once again over the world . That it
does so largely by definition, does not detract from the thrill of the familiar.
Anyway, if everything is Text, the notion is vapid [ef. Baudrillard 1987 on Fou­
cault's idea of power). It becomes an abstract substance, empowered with amaz­
ing, if largely imaginary, qualities. In short, it becomes a Transcendental Agent,
beyond history, with hermeneuts and deconstructionists as its immanent intelli­
gence to tell us what It is up to.
How does this process actually work? As Clifford remarked:
By representing the Nuer, the Trobrianders, or the Balinese as whole subjects.
sources of a meanin gful intenti o n, the ethnographer transforms the research
situalion's ambiguities and diversities of meaning into an integrated portrait.
BUL it is important to nOle whal has dropped oul of sight. The resean.: h pro~ess
is separaled from the texts it generates and from the fictive world lhey are
made to call up [1983: 132) .
Meaning, text and human subjects are defined each as coherent, integrated and
unitary respectively, and as related. That these turn out mysteriously to be proper­
ties of those things in the world which instantiate the ideas is tautology at its finest.
EUROPAlA t 996. It-I 7
 Mark lIohart
And Clifford's critique has its own difficulties. Note how he assumes that c ulture
is about meaning and, if natives do not have texts, they do not have lextuality.
Clifford himself regards lextualization as something which gets in the way of the
native voice (his idiosyncratic rende ring of Bakhtin's notion of hel erog /{Jssia ,
which , on other readings, is aboul speech not voice at all). Clifford judges new
approac hes
by their ability to give everyone involvcd in the elhnographic project interpret ·
crs. informants. various groups of natives, ClC . . an autonomous voi<.:e in the
cthnography ... Clifford's fundamental assumption is that "Olonoiogical ethnog­
raphy" tends to "historical abstract understanding of indigenous societies .. . The
underlying assumption of Clirforcl's argument is that every point of view must he
included untouched, Dc(.:ausc the anthropologist's version or rhe other vo ices will
"distort" them [Kohn n.d. 5, 8-9}.
Citing Collingwood [19461, Kohn points out that the quality of the analysis
depends on the questions asked by the analyst and on her capacity to engage in a
dialectic between the evcnts under study as appreciated by th ose taking part and
by the anal yst using the full range of contemporary argument available to her.
That Kohn, writing an undergraduate essay at the Universi ty of Chicago, could
dismantle the emperor of ethnographic textuality says much about the quality of
textualist thinking.
What is there other tha n text then? After all, according to Ricoeur, action is
tex tlike [1971; ef. Hobart 1985]. It may be useful to distinguish textual ity as a
frame of reference which includes what Derrida called 'inter-' or 'pre-text' (those
prior and other texts which we assume to be intelligible in speaki ng and writing),
from textualizing, which is better reserved for the particular act of inscribing in
textual form. Textuali zing also, importantly, tran sforms. Consider how hard it is
10 reconstruct 'reality' from the textualists' texts. The literary pretensions of
textualists have obscured the differences in degree and kind between the object
that novels notionally refer to as against ethnographies. As with scientific realism,
cthnographic texts reduce complex and partly underdetermined states of affairs to
less complex, and more overdetermined, ones [Burke 1969: 505-507]. Like flavour­
e nhancers in supermarket pre -prepared food , Ihe supplement - here coherence,
meanin g, adjusting to readers' preconceptions - often has precious little to do with
whence it came.
Textualizing is above all , these days, an academic practice. This raises the
question of whether other peopJes necessarily textualize to the same degree or
even in the same way. In South and South East Asia, texts are often treated less as
instantiations of the mind of some superior author, but as something to be worked
8 EUROP.£A 1996, II- I
1~llw(}flraJ~!/Y ru £/ Pmnicc. a_I" lilt' (!n;mpOI:loll,l' p! Pen~flilU
o n by readers as agents [Errington 1979; Inden 1990] . Under these circumstances,
the implicit closure of academic textualizing is reversed . Tex.!s become a possible
preco nditi on for kinds of action which are not determined by the text itself.
Academics' reverence for texts not onl y enshrines closure, but also a singular
form of superiority. What proportion of people in Italy, England or, say, Bali spend
muc h of their time read ing texts? My guess is that it is forms of popular culture
and mass mcdia which occupy most people>' time and attention in many parts of
the world. The idea that people might escape textual closure is so horrendou s that
we have two related fields, cultural and media studies, the self-appointed task of
which is to textualize shopp ing and fashion , film and television . Just consider the
title of Fiske and Hartley's analysis of television: Reading lelevi.\·;(JII . Watching
televi sion and film or shopping may well involve textuality in complex ways. II
does not mean thai such aCl iviti es are texts . By textualizing Ihe world academics
have condemned themselves to be even more irrelevant than they already are. For
all anthropologists' claims to the common touch , our practices are deeply elitist
and are enshrined in our originary moment - an aristocratic Pole facing the pros­
pect of living with savages.
Culture
What however is the object which is at once textualized and the means to textu­
alization? It is commonly culture in some form . «In finished anthropological writ­
ings ( ... ) what we call our data are really our own construction s of othe r peoples'
constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to» [Geertz 1973a: 9]." If
thinking and speaking (which involve Ianguage) are cultural,' much social life
consists in people thinking and talking about thinking and talking. In fact this is
where anthropologists start to come in. What we deal with arc a mixture of these
two, mostly the latte r. Our thinking is already third order. And our note-writing in
the field - our textualizing if you insist - is already fourth order. Which makes our
monographs at least fifth order and 'cu lture' a concept so 'meta-' in its removal
Ii This slillleaves the question: who 'radically con~lruc~' the texts, or rather 'the constnlctcd understand·
ing of the l·onslrucled native·s constructed point of view'?[Crapanzano J9X6: 74). Gccrtz is quite happy
with the idea of ficlions . in Ihe sense of 'something made' {Geertz 1973: 15 J . it is somelhing which
has been, not is being made. It is already appreciated in archaeological modc. Gccnz, in Thick descrip­
tiol/, treats social reality as a building which has to be cx:c<lv<ltcd lHobm 1986J .
1 What would it be to engage in any of these activities cxtra·culturully ? The dif!iculty in speaking
thi s way reveals the extenl to which cul ture is a container, what it contains is meaning [Reddy 19791
and it must be whole . Otherwise presumably meaning would trickle out.
EUROPJ£A 1996, tJ-1 9
 Mark Nohan
from any possible social action that it is best not thought about at all. Texts enter
a similar spiral of csscntialized levels. Arguably «culture doesn't "include" or
"contain" its basic values; it is its basic values» [McGrane 1989: 119). (Note how
such rarefying filters oul confusions, contlicts, antagonisms, which never loomed
large in thi s vision of culture anyway .) Anthropologists ha ve o n the whole been
loath to consider the consequences of the lISC of culture by themsel ves and colonial
Europeans as a di viding practice, which ranked human bcings [Said 1978: 45] .
Much the same holds for the Obj ec ti fyi ng practice which almost everyone seems
to engage in these days. It is where humans beco me identified metonym icall y
ei ther with culture as what they have made (Geertz above) or invented [Wagner
1981 J as craftsmen or innovators, or else which they own, possess, borrow,
acquire, commoditize and enjoy in a grand fl ou rish of the spirit of capitalism.
Culture, ,like text, easily leads to a vicious circle of academicizing. So let me
cut thc Gordian knot. Johannes Fabian remarked, percipiently, that
contrary to its popul ar image, cu llural anth ropology has been a scie nce, not of
emergence, but of di sap pearance. Cu lture, inasmuch as it served as ant hropo l­
ogy's gu iding co ncept , has always been an idea POSI joctulII. a noti on oriented
toward s the past ( to 'custom' and 'tradition'), descriptive of a state of affairs
(and often a status quo), a nostaJgic idea at best (when ie mi xed the stud y of
cXOl ic socie ties with regret) and a reacti onary ideologeme at worst (when it was
used opt imisticall y to explain away as 'vari ati on' what in many cases was the
result of discrimination and violence) [1991 : 91, 193].
Anthropological recourse to cul ture is a mortuary practice, a practice of burying
the indeterminacies which keep polities going under the silt of custom, a celebration
of already dated (and usually male) comprom ises and deals. As an overarehing
conc ept, culture is a deeply apolitical, even anti-political, idea. Anthropo logists
do not just study and write about - i.e. textualize - mortuary practices, anthropol­
ogy itself is such a practice. It is, in Levi-Strauss' phrase, en cie de mort [1966 :
194). Pe rhaps it is time we bccame a little less infatuated with the idee Jalaie of
the text, or of culture .
There is, as Fab ian notes in the same article, a quite different sense of 'culture'
as practices of thinking about and knowing about something. Moreover, whereas
text (in e ither sense) impli es a dicho tomy between text, thought and inte rpretation
on the o ne hand and the world on th e other, knowi ng does not necessaril y [Hobart
1993]. My concern here is with what is involved in ethnography. Few scholars
have argued - yet at least - that ethn ography has nothing at all to do with th ink ing,
knowing and understanding. Wh at I wish to put fo rward here is a non-dualist
argument for thinking, knowing, interpreting, understanding and indeed textualizing
10 EUROPftOA 1996,11 · 1
E"fJJ1I o,::ral'lnr as a Pmclice. 01' IIie UlIimptJTUmce of PeT/Ruins
as social pract ices. Both the people concerned and anthropologi sts engage in
these practices in di ffe re nt ways - ones which come to overl ap - as a central
aspect of ethnography .
Practice
Unfortunately, fo r my purposes, there is no useful account o f practice. Marxist
accou nts of praxis a re part of a di scourse of structure and ideology, singularly
unsuited to my present concern s.' Bourdicu's theory of practice (an oxymoron ,
incidentally) is an anti -structuralist return to a form of transactional ism and again
is unsuitable [Bourdieu 1977, 1990). It owes more to an indi viduali st and ccono­
mistic comple menting of SlilJcture of the kind argu ed in anth ropo logy by Firth
and Barth th an to M arxist and post-Marxist thinking. Above al l it is deeply
dualist: it proposes the determination of society by individual agency as agains t
structure. Its products, ltabilLls, are merely what Briti sh an thropologists used to
call 'social instituti ons' (that is, 'standardized modes of co-activity') in a new
guise, prec ise ly the 'custom' whic h Fabian c riticized . I find the work of Foucault
[esp. 1972b, 1977 , 1982, 1984, 1986] provides a better starting point.
What I a m a tte mpting to work out currentl y is an accou nt of agency which
aims to transcend the dichotomy by presuming agents not necessari ly, indeed com­
monl y not, to be individuals, bu t compri si ng complex confi gu rations [see Hobart
1990b; Inden 1990; both foHowing Collingwood 1992].' My account of practice
presumes there to be agents who are responsible for deciding upon a course of ac­
tion and wh o take, or are attri buted with, responsibility for that action. The actions
are carried out by in st ruments. Actions are performed upon either pati ents or ob­
jects, depending upon whe the r they are considcred to be aware or effectively
unaware of what is being done to them. Agents may double as instrument, . So
K ErneS lo Laclau is among the most interesting theorists in freeing act ion and thought from st ructure
<lnd ideology [1 990a , 1990b), but he has still 10 produce an accou nt of practice.
') I undersl~nd the st ress upon organizations and arrangements. from po litical parties. 10 the Church.
to voluntary associalions, 10 families. partnerships, friendships etc. 10 be the kind of agents about
which Gramsci was writing. There is also an interesting second Itali an connection , that is ill the usc
Collingwood made of the work of Benedetto Croce. My analysis here has been worked ou t over the
years with Ron Inden. In fact, on this score we form a good example of a \;omplcx agent ', in which
other people have also pl<lyed a pal', notably ou r research students. Differen t people may parti ci pate
in differing degrees an d kinds in a complex. agent. The relationship of the pallS to the whole and the
working of a complex agent is a convenient way of differemi ating such a noti on from, say. <.:o m­
pound, compOsite or co ll ective agen ts, the last having, of cour~ c, Durkheimi an overtones.
UROPtEA 19%, It -I 11
 Mark 1-101>(11'1
may patients, spectacularly in those forms of discipline snch as the panopticon,
where pri soners learn to monitor themselves, but not as agents. Actions also have
an outcome. However I also take it that evaluations of agency, action and out­
come arc underdetermlned and always open to subsequent acts of rc-presentation
by subsequcnt agents. Following Taylor {1985]. I treat consciousness as best
approached as historically situated public actions, not as a mysterious, private,
inner state possessed by a unitary coherent individual. Similarly I take it that
knowing, thinking and even remembering are public, historical and cultural actions
[see Matilal 1986 on Indian phil osophical parallels, also Hobart 1990a; 1995b].
'Practice' I take to rcfer to certain recognized means of acting upon the world
and upon humans for the purpose of producing a definite outcome. Among prac­
tic es, those of particular significance deal with the making, changing or recogni ­
tio n of agents - complcx, human, Divinc - and so the unmaking of others, that is
the crealion of instruments and patients. Practice also invol ves making others, or
oneself, the subject of actions. 'Actions' I take to be what agcnts decide npon and
so to be ex traordinarily varied . It seems se nsi ble therefore to think of practices as
far more encompassing than actions and, in being recognized, to be framed, whcther
by the analyst or by people involved . Fai lure to rccognize the latter is not an
omission but an act of negation, ho wever careless, by an agent. By 'activities', by
contrast, r have in mind congeries o f actions which are ,less directed tow ards a
specific goal, less formal or less explicitl y recognized. Whether they are aware of
it at the time or not, what anthropologists do in the field are as often activities
then as they arc practices.
Ethnography is not just any set of practices . [t is a triply reticulated sct. At
once. the anthropologist is identifying, trying to work with or find out about, then
stndy, local agents. The anthropologist is also cxerting her agency - most notably
aftcr leaving the ficld when she 'authorizes' the people she worked with. The people
and organizations she studies are usually also trying to exert their agency on hcr
to affect the outcomc. The possibility of ethnography howevcr supposes both a
differcnce, a tension, an antagonism [in Laelau's I990a sense] between ethnogra­
pher and cthographed . (The absence of the latter tenTI, or its equivalent, from
anthropological d.iscourse speaks volumes in the silences about just how, in the
end, our much-vaunted 'collaborators' and 'friend s' end up .) And , far from trying
to reinvent the ethnographer as hero, [ a m concerned wit h the conditions whic h
made suc h determination s possible. on
If} A wonderful example in Bali is how one court , in Ihe vil!agc or UbuJ. 1T1~ldc their \'i ~ ion Ilf Bali
hegemonic by 'cooperaling' with, and even inviting 10 Slay, distinguished artists like Walter Spies
12 EUROPIEA t996, tt- I
Ethf/osraphvas 0 PraL·(icf'~. ( II" Ihe Ulliml'0l"/f{fH·(' '1 Peli81linx
Knowing. understanding, interpreting and writing, or textualizing, are not then
any humdrum set of practices. They are vital ones in identi fying. recogni zing,
imagining etc . agents and patients. In being inscribed , these accounts have a nasty
habit of becoming definitive, especial ly whcn the anthropologi st leaves the fi e ld
or the original pcople concerned die (in one horribl e scnse, thcy are much the
same). [n short , we are c10sc to what Foucault, partly retrospectively , elaborated
as his lifclong study of «the different modes by which, in our culiure, human beings
are made subjects» [1982: 208]. Thesc wcrc, first, «the modes of inquiry which
try to give themselves thc status of sciences» such as anthropology. the ohjectiviz­
ing of the subject as cultural. Second, they included «dividin g practice s» through
which «the subject is either dividcd inside himself or divided from others », young
against old, males against females , the object of stud y as againsl the subject who
does the studying. Finally there are practices by which a human being turns her­
or himself into a subject [1982 : 208].
Overinterpretation
Treating cu lture, or life itself, as a text avoids a recognition of lextuali zing as a
cultural practice. People write, speak, read and listen ; textualize events and actions
in circumstances which depend on the existence of previous practices o f textual ­
izing. What I call 'the Literary Tendency', which has become the fa shionable modc
in anthropology, especially in the United Slates, is itself part of snch practices.
Solipsistically its practitione rs hypostatize practi ces into abstract Objects (tex ts)
and imagine particular practices to be constitutive, essential or even universal.
The sort of approach I am advocating here however treats practices as particular,
historical, situated and varying in degree and kind. I assume that, far from having
a determinate, extractable essence, facts are underdetermined by explanation Quine
[1953, 1960] or, put another way, that «reality tran scends the knower» lInden
1986: 402]. On Ihi s account, any activity or practice, the agents who engage in
them and the patients who are their subjects, are themsel ves partly a consequence
of, but are not fully determined by, past practices and activities . Among practices,
somc rework past practices (e.g. commenting, criticizing. correcting. but also leg­
islating or even making fun of someone); " others aim at tran sforming patients
and scholars such as Margaret Mead and Gregory Batcson, to whose writings Cli fford Gccrtz owes
so much of his vision or Bali.
11 The number of activities which mo.y go on during JOy one practi ce. such =ts nttcndmg a seminar.
may be highly diverse. During the semi nar at which I first presented this paper, I noted down Ihe
EUROPIEA t996, I1-1 13
 M ark Hobart
(e.g. gradu ating, curing, managing) and the age nt s the mselves (e.g. crowning,
pray ing, self-di sc iplining [cf. Foucault 1986]). O the r prac tices are concerned with
transformin g reality (these include textuali zing, recording, wri ting, measurin g,
televisin g etc. among oth ers) . Ye t other prac ti ces are concerned with tryin g to
elimin ate the underdel erm ina ti on of acti ons and events, including m uch academi c
writing and 'ritual'. I choose the refore to treat both explaining and interpreting as
often prac tices of determin atio n, o r essentializing, in some fo rm .
Now, if the re is one practice which is distincti vc of ethnogra phy amo ng othe r
practices, but which is rare ly recognized as suc h, it is what fo r lack of a bette r
word I shall call overinterpreting. This is ove rdetermining one interpretati on where
alte rn ative equally plausible interpretations are poss ible, or have in fact bee n put
forward . As a practi ce, overinterpr eting is a whole mass of practi ces which usuall y
start wi th preinterpreting prior to an y engagement with what is actually to be
inte rpreted (i.e. before you go to the field) and concludes in defending the inte r­
pretati on agai nst c riticism (i.e. oft e n decades aft er everyone but yo u is dead).
Evide ntl y, local peopl e, in thi s instance Balinesc, may well on occasion also
overinterpret for all kinds of reasons. Where they differ from ethnograp he rs is
that Ihe latter's justificati on fo r exi sting is that they somehow add mo re 10 what
the locals arc perfectl y capa ble to saying for themse lves . This something is a
logical method for validating proba ble interpretations, presumed - in a fi ne example
of preinte rpretation - to be so supe rior to Balinese methods that no interprete r has
bothe red 10 inquire what they are or if they even ex ist. Interpretation in an thro­
pology is the tri via'i business o f tex tuali zing a nd pl aci ng our interprelations upon
other peopl es' prac tices. In stead I am concerned wit h anal yzing how other people
ex pl ained and talked about the pr ac tices in whic h they were e ngaged in terms of
their own presuppos itions. Tha t is meta ph ysics, in Co llingwood's teI1]1s [1 940).
The presuppositions behind fi eldwork
What does seem d isti nc ti ve, indeed consti tutive, of anthropo logy is ethnographic
fieldwork by parti cipant-observation. But we are in deep trouble immediatel y.
Anthropologists' in vestigat ive meth od depended upon a conj unction of a naturalist
fo llowing (quite apart from the more narrowly dermed acade mic activities usual on such occasions).
They incl uded looking al photographs, books. OUI of the window , at other people (no one had
brough t proofs to read, a British favourite), doodling; dozing, chaUing; both caS!:icLLC and video
rct.:ording proceedings; wandering 10 and fro in a gallery extension, smoking; promising copies of
one's work 10 others, avoiding ccrt<lin people etc. elc.
14 EUROP'£A 1996. II- I
Elhll o{o?rapitY.. DJ' {/ Practice, or tltt Unjmpllrlf",ct! o f PtHlg"ills
e pistemo logy (facts are give n, Ihe re to be collected and subsequentl y owncd)"
and thc peculiar conditi ons epitomized and underwri tten by colonial governments,
under whi ch th e inquiring ethn ographer had Ihe ri ght to poke he r nose into other
peoples' Ii vcs and write aboul Ihem without let , hindrance or considerati on of the
co nsequences fo r those described. We are deepl y scopophiliac [Walkerdine 1990).
(Were someo ne to snoop into my li fe as I did in my first fieldwork into Balinesc
vill agers' li ves, I would fee l inclined to serve an injunction on the anth ropolog ist
to prevent he r comin g near my house, still less write about mc without Illy havi ng
the right to check the publi shed account fo r acc uracy, defamation etc.)."
Par ticipant-obse rvati on always was a rather arcane idea. It is not so much that
observati on be longs to naturali sti c se ienti sm. It is tha t the visual metaphor of
knowing creates a world of relati vely sta ble states. The image is al so inadequate.
Whe n yo u see something in Ihe field , yo u usuall y have to go and ask someone
what it is that you have just seen. We ask quest ions. T he problem is how to get
from shift ing, inte nsely situated polylogues and dialogues to the timeless mo no­
logues of the professional s. And as to 'participation', the less said the beller. If you
have seen as ma ny anthropo logists in the fie ld as I have, or if yon have ever heard
people laughing over you r own attempts, you need to be in'edeemabl y narcissistic,
disingenuous or plain knavis h to use the ex press ion with a straight face.
12 To lell a story against mysel f to make the poilU. like other anthropologists trained in the I 960!'. I
thought J was sUPP(Jscd to co li ecl genealogies. That the subtle ways Bali nese have of referring (()
relationships. might be incommensurable with the cruder. but notionall y exact , ones I was laught
o.nl y slowly dawned on me. It did so by a breakdown in exactit.ude. A mailer Ralinese regard as im­
portant is who agreed to the union and Ihey give diflerent names to, say, elopement from marri age
by capture (H oban 199 1] . The trouble was the woman's family often gave a dine-renr descri ption
from the husband's, and other people in conversalion wou ld label it quile differentl y agai n. Arler
futil ely trying til son ou t wh ich was the true version , J finally realized thai events do nOI eOllle wi th
neal labels altached. It was not just a matt er of wanting to present your family in a good light. It be­
came clear thaI people. incl uding of course different members of the same fami ly. appreciated what
happened differently and irreducibly. and spokc of events differentl y according to the ci rcumstances
in which they were articulated.
I ] A prcsuppositional critique or ethnographic practice might seem lilli e recherche and to smack of
philosoph y to some of (he more bluff, empiricisl eth nographers. However they seem equall y im­
mune to recogni zing {h e practical problems wh ich indicate how far classica l et hn ography was the
peculiar product of a pm1icular mOlllent in European hi story. Visas and permission ror much re­
search is no longer fonhcoming in many Countries. The conditions of funding for researc h students'
fieldwork (upon wh ich hump anthropologists trad itionally li ved for <I lifetime) have drast,icall y
altered the whole enterprise. Thc strain is often intolerahle on students who must somehow square
new styles of theori zi ng and writing with new research conditions in a much shorter time. Yel the
fantasy of the authentic ethnographic momenlli ves on, largely unreconsid ered cri ti call y.
EU ROPIEA 1996.11- 1 15
 Mark H ol}(lrl _ -
For HllIh ropo logis ts to sllstain thc falllasy of c uhurc as whole, s low, apprccia­
ble, thcy have to c nsure their incompetence in thc vernacular. David Pocock o nce
re markcd that whcn you me t an anth ropologi s t who to ld you that aftcr a yea r o r
two he s po ke the languagc flucntly, you had me t a bloody liar. If you cannot
understand people speak ing to o ne ano ther undcr any circumstance , as virtuall y
•
..
no non -native s peaker can , thcn you arc restri cted to a degree to question and
..
answe r w ith a ll its well rchcarsed limi tat io ns and misdirection s. When I once
asked why. o n sllccessive fieldtrips , I rece ived different answers to tbe sa me
ques tions, my Balinese colleagues told me thai I wOludn't have unders lood the
rep ly earlier o n. Hobart's 4th . law of ethn ography re ads: " Peop le gear down
info rn1atio n to the ig norance of the anthropologi st». So we tend to focu s on key­
words and occas ion s that our preformed theories tell us a rc paradigmatic, not o n
the complexi ties of translating or figurin g how 10 addrcss the radicall y contingc nt
naLUrc of the conditions of possibility of social practices and their consequences.
Wc s hy away from an erotic of events, s urfaces, prac tices , to reimagi ne an Ur­
hc rme neutic depth with a transcendc ntal object med ia ted by obscu re entities like
'symbo ls', 'ritual s' and institutio ns [So ntag 19721. It is like hunting by gelling
III
someo ne to tie down your buffal o fo r you first. The stuffed head o n the wall , like
fadin g copies of ethnographic monog raphs - tel ls no ta les.
If you stop and think about it, field work is a very pecu liar practice. Quite what
is it, in its pristine Malinowskian form, about a European male living among, if
not part of, a group of pcoplc for two yea rs Or more , which imparts a knowledge ­
o r unders tanding - achievablc in no o the r way ? The conventional answcrs are
most un satisfactory. It does not follo w thou g h, by recourse to a crudc bin ary
logic, that. if long-term fieldwork by participant-observation does not produce
certain knowledge, it is e ither di s pensibl e in favour of evocative nco-impress ion­
ism [Tyler 1986: 123 ; scc thc c ritique by Carneiro 1995 : 12-14] or rc du cible to
ac ts oftcxtualizing, as Geertz [1988 ] and B oon [1982, 1990] would have it.
The problem facing e thnography, und er whatever description , might appear to
be that it involves two differe nt o nto logica l o rde rs. On the one hand there is the
disordered world of cvcnts, actions, contingenc ies and uncertainties, which happen,
convenientl y, in that remo te, pe riphera l place, 'the field'. On the one hand, therc is
that cohe re nt, structured, meaningful realm of narrative, tcxt and profcssional ac tiv­
ity, which coi ncidentall y happe ns to be 'home', the centre. Quarles van Ufford has
argued Ihat il is this di sjuncture between planning and its implcme ntati on in th c
real world which undermines so many development projects [1993]. Thi s argument
onl y works however from with in the dic hotomous ontology which gave u s the
hierarchy of mind over matter in the first place. The problem of both naturalism
t6 EUROP/EA IWo. II- I
EJ!,wu:rll,,/tV (J. { (I Pratlice, 01' I/lf' Un;mpnr IGJlr..e of P(,/H~/liIlS
and textuali sm is thai thcy both subscribe to this o nto logy, albei l in slighlly
differenl ways, and land in the trap o f how do you rcpresent the world in words ?
Reconside ring rcprcscnration as a practi ce provicie:-; a way of avoiding the
Cartesiani sm which is presupposcd in so much cthnographi c writing. I take it Ihat
represcnting is always a transformational acl. You represent something as some­
thing else Isee G oodman 1968: 3-10] on particu lar occas ions to particular agents
or patient s for various purposes." Ethn ographie s do no t rc flect a re a lilY, mo re o r
less authentically, accurate ly , dramatically, expressively, meaningfully or truthfully
It is practices of e thnographic writing which raise probl ems or rcwork prcviou s
arguments about what it is to bc authe nti c, accurate and so forth . By their practices,
ethnographers turn a double di slocation into a triple di s location and C()I1scque nll y
are engaged in a triple act of articulation .
Lct me clarify what I am saying. I am deeply unhappy with the persistent ten­
dency in th c human scicnces to di cho tomize cx planations of rcificd notions of
society in terms of cithcr structural dcterminism or free human agency. (/\ppcals
to 'cullure' instead merely di spl aces the proble m onto an obscure ontological cn­
tity , meaning [Qu ine 1970: Hobart 1982].) Tcxtua li zing is a most e ffective means
of di ssipating the deg ree of rad ical undecidability . Far from thc socia l comprising
a coherent stru c ture, it is morc scnsitivel y apprcciatcd as rent by proccsscs of
di slocation (the subject existing in virtue of such di s locat io ns) and counte rvailin g
prac tices of articulation . Articu lation here has a double sense : it is bo th making
inte lligibl e and connecting that which is, o r has bccn, separat cd [Luc lau J 990a;
cf. Hall 1986]. It is not so mu ch that the e pi ste mOl ogical and structural as pec ts of
the term overlap, whereby privileging one over the other cmpoverishcs and
trivializcs the notion . It is rather that the order which stru cture noti ona lly instan­
tiates is not scparab le from inquiring into, talking about, or ass uming that o rd e r,
just as, recurs ivc ly, such practi ces presume an object. Artic ul ati o n prcsupposes
there to be something - under whateve r description - which need s artic ul atin g.
A doub le di s locati on then predates, and is not just the prcco ndition for the
cthnographers' arrival, but for th c e thn ographers' existence as such : these are the
dis locati ons of each ethnographer's own society and those o f the socicty whic h
she studies . In turnin g up in the fi e ld, the e thnog rapher, whose pro fcss io n. ex is­
tence and presence in the field is predicated on o ne set of di s locati ons, is faced
I~ For illst;mcc. when J origina ll y presented th is paper, J was asked how identity fi lled in wi th my
argument. I hope it is c\e-rtf (hm I do not adhere analyt icall y (0 lhe idea of a uniHu), subJccl. far k ss
any itien lil Yof persons . objects o r events, which may be extrapolated as an csscncti<ll pcrdu ring set
of propcnics fro m hi sto rieall y sped lie ac ts of representing as.
EUROP tEA 1996, II- t 17

not onl y with another set. That, after a ll, was the precondition and raison d'erre
of ethnography. She is also faced wi th a dislocation be tween the two di slocations
brought about by the prac tice of ethn ography itself, whi ch sets up all sort s of in ­
coherences, challenges to orde r, s urpri ses, crises. These arc far from being o f a
pure ly insu lated inte llectual nat ure. They affec t what the ethn ographer does (and
even is) subsequentl y. How temporary and superfic ial this is depends in pan on
how successfully the ethnographer manages to deny them. What Laciau refers to
as antagonism [I 990a: 17 ff.l , for ethnography I take to be evinced in the intellec­
tual, political. material , gastric and other shocks that ethnographic tlesh is heir to."
It is the self-appointed task of ethn ographic writing to articulate these thrce
non-i somorphic di slocations and their acco mpanying antagonisms . E thnographi c
writing then is a peculiarl y compl ex prac tice, because it involves notionall y three
kinds of articulatory practi ces. To simplify matters, ethnographers usually privilege
one over the others in thei r writin gs, and so dras ticall y oversimplify the issue of
multiple, non-coordinate kinds of articulation. A remarkable amount of ethnography
is about using others to understand ourselves better. The hall mark of such writ ing
is often a singula rly vague and incoherent grammatical subject, the 'we', 'the west'
wh ic h such aecoums serve to sut ure. I wo ndcr though quite how oflen they are
used seri ously to address, rather than re-insulate, the unrecogni zed contingencies
which permeate the ethnographer's home society. My impression is that there are
few indigenous ethnographies which primaril y articulate antagoni sms in the society
in question, partl y because the who le en terprise of ethnography is condi tioned by,
defined in terms o f, and addressed to, the dislocati ons of a quite different society.
The retlexi ve tum in anthropology attempts to address the third dislocati on."
Especially in some of the woolli er recent American versions however, articulation
1!Ii If you stu dy your own society. the<.l islocatioll s appear \0 be rather less acute. However Europcans
and America ns ra rely st udy the social class they come from in their own society. Olher groups in
yonr own society may be as shockingly different 35 some 'remote' SOCiet y . Non-Euro-Amcricans arc
usuall y co nstrained anyway \0 reprc5enl their own socielies in terms of an alien SCI of discursive
practices. Anyway, as in psychoan al ysis. those practices produce their own disJocaiions of the famili ar.
Dislocation is not some 'objectivc' deJc(;t in structure per(;c ived by a uculral observer, but emerges
in the course or inquiring.
H, By con trast. the rcOexive movcment in phil osophy, whether in its modernist Haberma5ian, P()st ·
modern Dcrri dcan, or pseudo-prag matist Ronian turns, remai ns incredibly myopic , caught up as it is
in the dislocali ous of some Gargantuan. if largely mythi ca l, 'west', wh ich phi losophers sct ahout
resuturing ( Habcnnas), dcsuluring (Dcrrida) or .~imply critica ll y admiring (Rort y). Put this way. lor
all its fau lts, by compari son anthropology looks surprisingly adventurous and rclcv'.Ln1 10 thl.': ap·
proaching th ird millenium.
18 EUROPtEA 1996, II- I
E rIIlW{(HipJr.\! as a IImellu , 0" rht! U"I."'J!.O"rance ?l PrJ,~uin.I
is reduced to epistemological navel-gazing and so loses any point [e.g. Clifford &
Marcus eds. 1986 ; Marcus & Fisher 1986]. Epistemologizing ethnograph y con­
demns it to become an evcr more obscure and narcissistic pursuit, because the
concepti on of knowledge and the subject is largel y, if inevitabl y, de fined in terms
of, and addressed to, the dislocations of the knowing subjec t's o wn society. The
pro blems remain , indi ssolubl y onto logical and ep istemo logical at once, of how
others address the contlicts, contradictions and dead-ends o f their worlds, and
ho w ethnographers relate to, and relate, this double di slocati on.
What is di fficult, important and exciting about ethnography as a serious practice
then is precisely that it is one of the few ways in which we can engage with these
dislocations directl y. The imponderables which necessaril y surround fi eldwork _
where you happened to land up, who befri ended yo u, when you happe ned to be
there, what chanced to happen and what not - are not mere acc idents, but part of
the contingency which marks di slocation. T here is then a double contingency.
So me anthropologists fear that to recogni ze thi s would make a moc kery of an y
remaining natural scientific pretensions. So they attempt to pape r ove r the cracks
by appealing to an abstract substance - the collecti ve, or meaning, or so me such ­
of whi ch any event is simply an instance."
Natu ralizing then requires the cohe rent, given object; whereas semanticizing
presumes some kind of coherence-seeking, self-constructing subject. An alternati ve
approach which app reciated the ex tent of historical situatedness, contigency and
antagoni sm both in the society under study and in the circumstances of stud y is
not without its difficulties. We have li ved so long in the remorseless shade of struc­
ture (together with its props: cause, meaning, fun ction, context) and with genres
of writing which retlect Of create such shadows, that thinking seriously about alter­
nati ves has bare ly begun . One way to start is to rethink ethnography as a prac tice.
Fieldwork situations
The circumstances of fi e ldwo rk bear directl y on some of the prac ti ces of ethnog­
ra phy. M y age, seniority, wealth, contacts, previous resea rch and abil ity in language
all affec t how I worked an d was allowed to work . So too has the transformation
of the settlement where I wor k from a poor agricu ltural communi ty into a re lati vely
J7 Thi s i5 circu lar. or course . All Ba linese (o r whoever) sh,Jrc common feat ures. so if two or Ihree
(or however many) Balinese ~ay the same th ing. we have a socii'll rnd. How do we identi fy a co ll cc·
ti vity. 'Balin ese'. in {he first pi nl:e'! It is because Ihey share [he samc rcatLires and agree to lhe sa me
soci al fac t s ~
EUROPtEA 1996, II- I IY
 EIJIIIORrtlpily (IS a Praclice, OJ' lhe Unimporwllce (4 Pcnguills

affluent, centre of handi craft production through which thirty or IllOre tourist
buses thunder each day. Agency was an issue in my fieldwork from th e start. nt
• presence changed what happened, although it would have been easy to fool
myself that it did not.
When I began postgraduate research in Bali in 1970-72, the problem was how to
choose a vi llage. Everyone I spoke to dismissed everyone else's sugges ti ons and ,
worse, hinted at dark secrets from the time or the mass executions of the COIll­
• Since 1989 I have been back every year to run a projec t to record Balinese
cultural programmes o n television. [ ha ve employed two Balinese to record and
transcribe the text for the last five years. They have become re lati vely affluent as
munist Party members in 1965-66. Choosing tbe least awful-sounding patrons, I
was placed inevitably with a branch of thei r family in the local court in a suitable
remote [Ardener 1987], and therefore wonderfully authentic, vi llage. I was allo­
• a result, in a communit y where some people are rapidly ge tting rich . Not much is
said about the fact tbat anthropologists pay people as assistants, informants or

"I

'friends'. I" If we are to unde rstand how people art icu late th eir worlds to us , it is
cated a bodyguard, which seemed unnecessary at the time, but which turned out important not to dissociate issues of epis temology from power.
to be 'l ife-saving. Before I had spent a night in the vi llage I was a political issuc,
both because the rival fac tion to the court's wanted money from my presence and
because I had ste pped unwittingly into a hotbed - even by Balinese standards - of Before and after
murder and post-1965 intrigue. r had, especially initially, to work through relati ons While fieldwork may be a situated activity, it does not follow tho ugh that e thnog­
which had been assigned me. I felt less an agent than like a Ping-Pong ball. The raphy is not highl y struc tured . On the contrary, ethnography is on ly one of a 10llg
village was then remote. As far as I have been able to ascertain, I seem to have series of overlapping practices, most of which happen rar away from th e field
been the third European to set foot there. But I doubtless exaggerate.
III
Focus ing on fieldwork as the dramatic moment of authenticity side lines the Fact
During my second fieldtrip in 1979-80, 1 re nted a compo und ill the Same vil­
lage ward and held open house. My research bill included £ 3,000 for alcohol,
mos tl y fruit liqueurs, whi ch were a great attraction. The style of fie ldwork suited
..
that what you will sec, and the practices you e ngage in, have been largely deter­
mined long before you arrived the re; and will be red etermined afte r you leave.
Ethnographic practices begin, I would argue, during undergraduate train ing.
my study of indigenous styles of argu me nt and philosophical ideas, as people
would tum up and argue with one another. I belatedly realized that Balinese do
much of their thinking in informal and changing groups; and that di scussing, ar­
guing, having meetings are among the most common practices in many places. So ..
Crucial to these is the exc ru ciatingly boring nature of most uni versity teaching,
which is designed to turn acolytes into subjects whose primary objective is se lf­
discipline [in Foucault's 1977 sense], not inqui ry, as an end not just a means.'" At
thiS stage, the nature of the field, the purpose and goals of rescarch, the expected

•..

1 have worked with single 'informants' only as an exception since then.
My third study in 1988-89 was o n the media and development. M y closest
companio n had insi sted that I s tay with him. No alternative was acceptable to
him. By then public life in the village had contracted sharply . People worked day
and halfway through the night making carvings; and watched television while doing
so. No onc would come to an open house; and my previous key site - the vi llage
food and coffee stalls - had mostly closed for lack of business . I worked mainly
with various groups of people who were th rown together by circumstance and
choice in an attempt to interpolate myself into existing groupings. Of course, my
It) On my lirsilrip. I dill nOI even have a choice. J W<lS nssigncd a drivcrlhodygttard ilnd tWO you ng
III In n fuller aCcOLmt I would begin with how I ca me 10 uecide to study Bali in the first pl.lcc.
Bnclly. after graduating I laught anlilro pology al the University of Singapore with the aim M find·
ing a su ilahk society to research. I had I() leach the work or Clifford GcCrll on Ja va and Bali. Hav .
lion sti ll in 1980. By my next lrip. labour wa,~ at a premium.
ing h<lcl undergraduate training on South and Soulh East Asian anthropology, Gecrtz's repre.senla­
lion of Bali as totally un-Indic looked OlJd. I decided to go and have a look ...
minuet! , intcresleiJ and manage 10 turn [hem into boreiJ and boring_ narrmv· minucd pcd ant!o> <lnu
format for presenting results, th e role of texts, the place of field research and
publication in academic anthropology and the uni vers ity as a polity ha ve been
effectively presc ribed. Exa minations form the rite de !w.I'.l'l1ge, proof positive of
your submission .
Research training e nsu res that you ha ve read, learned, marked and inwardly
digested previous ethn ography so thorou gh ly that the risk of you r e ncou ntering
anything new when yo u get to the field has been ai most totally eliminated . This
lUI
men as cooks and cleaners. Providing liS many people a~ possibl e with n livelihood was <In obliga­
III
21:1 A collcagltc, Liam HmJson chose 10 leave ncndcmia hecause he found it impossible to feyerSe the
way in which universities i.tccept young people. most or whom arc hrighL. enthusias tic. open­
iii
professionals within three yC.1r~.

20 EUROPIEA 1996. II· t EU ROPIEA 1996,1t·1 2t

 Mark I-Iobon
will, of course, not appear to be the case because research by dcfi nit ion is about
d iscovering some thing new. However what coun ts as new - Iikc what makes up
news on television - is massively prestruc tured and predetermined [Fiske 1989].
Likewi se you are takc n th rough methodology courses whi ch, by defi niti on, prede­
te rmine how you will assess, record, measure and write about prccisely wha t
•I.
ough t to be un known, situat ional, contextual, to-bc-thought-ovcr and under no
circumstances to be taken for granted or 'routinized'. We al so learn language as if
it were a tool (to open a men tal ca n?), not itself a contested and underdctermi ned
set of practices [Volosinov 1973). But the more that grant-giving bodies demand
rigoro us train ing, the more we train thought out of future researchers. The paradigm
fo r research is previous examples of successful research. A moment's thought
shows this to be ret rogress ive. If rescarc h is about rethinking and breaking away
from past practices, why train people to emu late them, except to learn fro m mis­
takes and go beyond? If I drove a car around London facing backwards the whole
•
time, I would rapidl y crash if I werc not arrested by the police first. Fo rmul aic
military regu lation is a better image of research than is critical thinking. It is not
for nothing that Foucault wrote about d isc ip lina ry practices.
A fu rther crucial set of practices begi n on yo ur return from the field . Thi s is the
busi ness of 'authorizing' the people you worked wi th, so becoming thei r agent [Asad
1986; Hobart 1990) . If you were well trained, your notes are already so textualized
that the transi tion from provisiona l text to final text is relatively painless. The
prob lem of articulating the conditi ons of your interpolation in other peoples' lives
effectively by-passcd . Students w ho forgot their disciplinary background for a
moment and actually got on with the people they studied often have terrible trouble
tcxtualizing what happened. (There is a crude inverse corrclation between the origi­
nality of ethnograph ic fieldwork and professional advanceme nt.) From the moment
of return , the researcher is caught up in a series of ever more rigorous disciplinary
practices - from interpreting the results, prescnting drafts of thesis c hapters, to
givi ng seminar papers, to attending Anthropo logical Associati on mcetings, to thc
monograph (which as the name suggests forec loses saying you got it wrong), to
gossip, to 'networking', to be all owed to practise teaching on new initiates - dc­
signed to turn her into a fully-fledged, totally-textual ized, reality-free professional.
Thereafter design ing coursc outl ines, teaching, exami ning, politicking and publish­
ing because it is required are all practi ces of reinscription. T he best way to cope
with the superfluity of fieldwork, its sheer ex uberance, complexity, uncertainty,
danger, misery, fun - all the things acade mics are in business to textualize and
den y - is not to ignore all thi s, but to sanctify it by declaring cthnography thc foun­
dation, the originary moment, the epistemological prccondition or some other
22 EU ROr' lEA 1996. 11-1
l;mport'!."L°1! 0/ Pe'JJ.lI ill5
waffle. By whatever mcans, the complex of pracli ces which is ethnography must
be carefu ll y circumscribed a nd turned into a simulacrum [see Baudrillard 1983].
Subject positions and activities
Finally I can turn to ethnographi c pract ice in the narrowes t sense. However, let
me nol start with a round-up of the usual suspects. about which too much imagi­
nary has bcen written in accou nls of fie ldwork, but with our relati onship with the
local people into whose lives we have interpolaled ourselves. We cannot do field­
work, as Evans-Pritchard discove red among the Nuer, unless they cooperate at least
minimally. So the first kind of practice in which the ethnographer is engaged, the
precondition to all othcrs, is disciplining the natives. T his takcs many forms.
Minimally, we have to train them to speak, think and act towa rds us in ways with
which they are unlikely to have been familiar. Without this, there is nOlthe minimal
dcgree of commensurab ilit y we requirc to c ngagc with them. As Wingcnstein
remarked, «If a lion cou ld talk, we could not understand him» [1958: 223] .
Our relationships wit h our main informants go much furt her. In order to engage
in critical discussion with thcm, wc havc to persuade them to Ih ink about - and
perhaps e ngage in - their own societies, their ac tions, themselves and thci r rela­
tionships in ways quite different from thosc to whic h they are uscd . T he process
requires them to adopt unfamiliar 'subject positions' [in Foucault's terms, 1972]. I
have been through thi s myself, when an ESRC research tea m was interviewing
members of my department abou t our experi ences of leaching research students. I
found myself represc nting such teaching in coherent terms which bore little relation
10 my experience of the situated practice of supervisin g. The c ircumstances of thc
inquiry made me articu late relations hips , roles, pract ices, difficulties, both intel­
lectually and, later, in pract ice. I fo und myself adopti ng a subject position I had
never experi enced before. If Laclau's idea of the subject being constituted in
di slocations a t the edge of structures [1990a: 61) had scemed elegant but some­
what ideal beforehand. it ga incd a curious immed iacy th roug h the encounter.
To elaborate bri efly, I found myself at oncc ex poscd and answerable not j ust
for my own actions but fo r accepted administrative procedures, whic h appcarcd
strangely shorn of thc situ ated understandings that make them possib lc. I was
required 10 step back and objectify li ved relationships into detached prosc . Being
over-coherent was effectively obligatory if I wcre to spcak about what wc ncver
spoke about that way . What surprised me far mo re was the sudden sense of Ihe
chasms which yawned under everyda y activities, the shockingly contingent naturc
of what it was to supervise students and my own relations hip - or lack of it - to
EUROPIEA 1996, II- t 21
 Mw·k H obart Etllllojt raphv {i.I· {J PmcJlic/:, or/h e Ullilllpo/"/(iI/Ce of Pel1f<itil!.~

the supervi sor in question. At the end, the researcher thanked me for my openness
- my colleagues had apparently sutured the ir work beller than I. I was aware while
being interviewed that. if the resea rchers were 10 know \Vhm was happening. it
was incumbent upon me to tell the truth in full as I saw it , not to hide behind
administrative platitudes. Many Balinese I have worked with seem to me to ha ve
stru ggled to maintain a kind of se lf-objectifying honesty when working with me.
•• dealing with outsiders, depending upon whether they were traders (to be dealt
with according to accepted lan guage and etiquette of the market), bureaucrats (to
be deferred to and, if possible, persuaded to go away or at least placated into
directing their allention elsewhere) or other visiling Balinese (to be Ireated ini­
tially according to caste and supplemented by any ot her available knowledge) . I
fell roughly into Ihe second category. The mcans of getting rid of me was 10 put it
On several occasions those I know the best have told 111e how straining it was. not about that I was a spy sent to inves ti ga te the murders in 1965. In my attempt to
because they did not wish to te ll the truth. As I now think back on what they said, escape lhis categorization, it became clear I had powerful contacts. This made me
it may have been because it was an unfamiliar kind of truth and the telling of it a dangerous. What do yo u say 10 such a person? It is best to avoid the m altogether _
dislocating expe rience. not a good basis o n which to do fieldwork. Fonnally my Landrover was available
Bei ng on the rece iving end is a salutaJY experie nce. As ethnographers, we are far for important public needs, including taking people to hosp ital. Years lal er I dis­
more familiar with the disruptions we encounter when e ntering the fi e ld . There is covered the villagers considered this as my main value, one they were prepared to
an entire genre, ant hropological autobiography, to celebrate the experience. At its match with conditional tole ration of my presence. What I did not realize unlil still
best, it may say something about the dislocation arou nd which et hnography centres, later, when I staned to rethink ethnography in terms of practice, is thai Ihe
but seems to address less the other dislocations which are its preconditi o n. (One rumour-mongers had a rar subtl er appreciation of what I was doing than I, the
drawback of going o nce o r twice a year to Bali is that I slither gracelessly, but trained expert, had .
painlessly, from one massive apparatus for the displacement of radical contingcncy
to another and back.) The ethnographic process feels very diffe re nt depending o n
whether you are the agent (for the moment, the ethn ographer) or its s u~j ects. II' we
..
Alongside this, to the far smaller number of people with whom I regularly had
dealings, 1 gradually became - I like to thin k - part-human . To these people , one
key s ubject position I occupied, and which lasted over two fieldtrips . was of
appreciated the complexit y of the c ircumsta nces we induce in those we talk to
and work with, fieldwork would, I hope, be a vas tl y different activity. Margaret
Mead o nce said that, to study somewhere like Bali , you should be parachuted in
with no prior knowledge. My point is that we carry that knowledge as practices,
including practices of non-reciprocal unde rstanding, with us anyway .
...
overgrown c hild to be educated into Ba linese ways of doing things, behaving and
speaking. They became responsible to the vi JJ age for my not causing serious
abuse, disruption or pollution, no easy task in Bali at that time . Simultaneously,
in accepting money in some form, these people were also my emp loyees or cli ­
ents, relatio ns hips which they understood because both were common. The
Who is it that anthropologists ta lk to anyway? Marvin Harri s [1969] tellingly
III
problem was - did I? Again , they had to discipline me into understanding what
pointed to the importance of 'we ll-informed info nnants', people who are often
marginal to their own society and who, like Cassius, «think too muc h: suc h men
are dangerous» [Shakespeare, Julius Caesar I, ii]. Perhaps the mos t famous ex­
ample is Victor Turner's relationship wit h the thinker and diviner, Muchono (71/e
Fly), a man deeply distrusted, it seems, by the Ndembu. I would suggest that the
...
was required of me , then e nsure I continued to do it. What s tand s out from my
first fieldwork is how much time Balinese spent disciplining me.
On my second visit, I realize in retrospect that I tried to introduce a new k.ind
of relationship and so new practices. I tilink, again after the evenl, thaI I was al ­
lowed to do so because people thought I had learned enough self-discipline to be
people anthropologists relate to, and can work with, are local inte llectual s. We
may get on well with o ther people, but we cali/wI talk tu them abo ut what malleI'S
to us. There is an impo/lam work to be written about the relationship between aca­
III

~I
semi-safe ou t on my own, as it were. In having an open house, [ was to a degree
emulating Ilgajakollg, when a wealthy villager invites others to work for him and
reciprocates by s howering them with food, drink, cigarettes (later cigars and even
demics and local intellectuals, be these traditional, organic, episodic or whatever.
What subject positions then did Balinese in the village where I worked ascribe
to me, and I to thcm? And what were the attendant practices? I shall deal mainly
III

,
pipe tobacco) and gifts . It is a relati ons hip marked by much obligatOly joJJi ness.
It does not last. It had at least the vi rtue of inc lud ing rupture, which is important.
Anthropologists go away : the people you work with know you arc going to go
with the first trip. At that time Balinese villagers had three kinds of ways of
IiII
away. They arc stllck there. Going back every year has made malters very diiferent.
There is now a degree of continuity and with it I have , tan ed to engage in

24 EUROPIEA t996, II- I

III
EUROPIEA 1996, 1I-t 25
 Mark Hoban
idiosyncratic relationships which go beyond easily recognizable practices with a
few Balinese with whom I work regularly in different capacities.
Thinking back on it, during the first fieldtrip I saw the villagcrs in sharply
contradictory r6les. First and foremost, they were a resource, a source par excel­
lellce of information. My purpose in being in Bali was to extracl thai informa­
tion." If I couM get inside their heads and empty out the contents, I would have
revealed Bali and would be a professional success . My subject position was in­
vestigator, which required me to be interrogator, at times inquisitor - or so I
thought. So my practice was geared to extracting information, which I took to be
an internal state.
Like other ethnographers, I mustered a ragbag repertoire of specialized activi­
ties to achieve this. They included interviewing, attending meetings, listening,
observing, discussing, above all misunderstanding; measuring, counting, enu­
merating, weighing, listing, recordi ng, abovc all writing notes , sketches, lists, of­
ten compulsively, usually unthinkingly; attending, eliciting, emoting, confiding
(for the purposes of being confided in), being taught, above all judging. I often
talked when I should have li stened ; and, especiaJly during the early stages,
thought I should observe when I would not have understood what I saw anyway. I
almost invariably judged prematurely and regretted itlatcr.
All this pales beside th e central and crucial practice: misunderstanding. For a
start it is far from clear what it is to understand someone. And is what we under­
stand a person or their acti ons? Do we, through the mystic can-opener of inter­
subjectivity, get direct psychic access to other minds? And how does this work
when we barely command the language? Or do we have to infer intentionality from
its Iraces in what people said and did? And, if we resolved these problems , we
would still have to work out on what grounds we may assume others to understand
one anotner in terms we can understand without bcgging the qucstion. Anthropol­
ogy is nothing if not a mass ive monument to human misunderstanding .
All this required discipline : attending endless rites , going through the etiquette
required before 'getting to work', asking well-formed questi ons in Balinese, looking
pleased when they told me what I wanted to hear and troubled when they did not ,
writing things down when thcy expected me to. I learned to do what I thought
they expected and to be what I thought they expected.
There were other contradictory images. I imagined Balinese at moments as
21 This raises 4ucstions about what is the object, or subjcct. of anthropological inquiry. )( is an issue
anthropologists have dodged for the moM pan because the answers are banal , incohere!)1 or fnghtening.
26 EUROPJEA 1996, 11- 1
£'hltO~f'(J"hv as a Prlletl'c~. or Ilt~ Unimpo rtance of Pe fl,l?,ttilts
:
very stupid (they did not answer my questions as I wantcd them to - I still have
difficulty with this one); as clevcr but unwilling to confide; as people from a dif­
ferent planet." Part of this though is retrospective from subsequent fieldwork. AI
the time, I remember seeing the villagers as dangerously unknown and ex otic to
•I'.
be handled with as much care as they themselves handled the spitting cobras,
which were everywhere. My key practice then can be summarized as plaeatory­
ex tractive. I cajoled and, as my bodyguard was a professional hit-man, sometimes
bullied thcm for informati on, all the while stockpiling what I fondly imagined to
be the facts. In shon, I wheedled. After about a year I began to reali ze the futility
I _ of thi s, but it was not until my second trip that I managed more or less complelcly
to give on the idea of ethnography as extraction.
Over some i.ssues, different groups of villagers and I devcloped shared con­
cerns. I was a source of amusement, mostly due to my incompctence, ineptitude
(for example, one day I got 23 blisters on my hands froro agricultural hocing) and
•.. for mistakes." The other day r attended the 50th. annive rsary of Independence in
the village and it was clear that after twenty-five years most of the senior villag­
e rs are still not quite sure what to say to me. So mu ch for integration. I was, by
agreement, a source of help and of cash to individuals and public causes. They
were however clearly aware of the responsibility for my welfare wh,ich was thrusl
.. on them by my presence. They havc ne ve r collectively, but occasionally indi­
vidually, asked to make use of my official connections in Bali. By contrast, the
more senior government offi cials in BaJi seemed to find my presence when I was
spotted lent a certain cachet to their visits. My first ficldwork can perhaps be
r. summed up as me ex tracting, them tolerating me and trying to limit the damage J
might cause. To my shame, it was only after rethinking fieldwork as a practice for
this paper that I realized how important it was for the villagers at such a sensitive
time to minimize the injury I could cause them.
Ethnographic practices
Ethnography, I suggest, involves discipline. Ethnographers di sc ipline the peo ple
they work with, these in turn have as a matter of urge ncy to discipline the ethnog­
III n The longer r am there , the more often this lhought passes my mind. But then it docs about my
colleagues and sameti mcs my sci f.
B The most mortifying was when I had been treating a womall for tropical ulcers who was married
to one of two identica l twins in the village. When I bumped into the mher twin and asked how his
II1II
•
wife was, he repli ed: «Not bad, considering she's dead». For a moment, to everyone's greal amuse­
ment, I thought J had killed her.
II EUROPIEA 1996, 11 -1 21
 Mark/lobclr,
rapher. Balincsc havc had to self-disciplinc thcmselves greatly in dcaling with
mc; and I have Icarncd to discipline mysclf wit h thcm. This makes ethnography a
singular, but not unique, congeries of practiccs. What I had not apprcciated at the
time was the degree of mutual disciplining and se lf-disc iplining .
The discipline was not howcvcr to those e nds with which wc are familiar from
Discipline and flunish. Those bear marc closely on examination (i ncluding, for
instance , thc cxamination of your work as a research stude nt). " The vi ll age rs
werc concerned by contrast, I think , with discipline to quite other ends. I needed
to be contained, first from makin g a nuisance of myself: later, and more serious ly,
from inquiries which threatened their accommodations with their own dislocations .
(I'rom one point of view, travel literature, ethnography, Ncw Age movements and
the voguc for Asian religions are all ways we have of accorrUllOdating ours, who­
ever 'ours' is he re.) My disciplining Ba linese was to ma ke them tractable to a dif­
ferent set of practices: investigation. Having e ngagcd in it for man y ycars, I think
Foucault may have been justi fied in desc ribing it «as an authoritarian scarc h for a
truth observed or attested ... [a) sovereign power arrogating to itself the right to
establi sh the truth by a number of regulated techniques» ( 1977: 225). To read the
work of Firth (1971) or Nadel (1951), or more narrowl y that infamous scries, Notes
and queries 011 unthropology, c ulminating wi th Ell en (1 984), you might be led to
think that someone had thought Ihrough teChniques to add ress the difficult ques­
tions of foren sic inquiry, te xtual cri ticis m, modes of evaluating hearsay, justified
inference from contradic tory sources, forms of non-fallaciou s reasoning which an
ethnographer, like a magis trate, requires as a mailer of daily rOUline. You would
be disappointed. Some ethnographers arc of course superb inquirers, as is clear
from their work. The 'regu lated' techniques are consigned though to courses called
'fieldwork methods', relegated in Illy institution to be taught by casual hired
labour. On the other hand, what a course on methodology that confronted
ethnograph y's triple dislocations and a rticu latio ns, and then regulated them all,
wou ld look like is the stuff ni ghtmares are made of.
There are other consequences of treating ethnography as a set of activities which
is part of a larger complex, designed to achieve more or less c learly stated goals .
It makes people easily dispensible as a means to an e nd . What concerns me here
l~ That mindless disL"i plinc, designed 11.1 lOrn agenls into the instrument s of their 0''''0 self-su bjec­
tion . required an altogether dinercm rtgimc of power, the markel, and managcrialism as the means
of illlcrprcling and imposing il s writ. Thatcherism and Rcaganism have becn the 1l1l'"tlns to roundi ng
up leral and unreliable agents like academics by ever mO re rococo diSCiplinary mcan~. such a;-,
cmJiess crricicncy ami producti vity reports.
28 EUROPAlA 1996.11 · 1
(;tlmo!!, I(JI,hv CIS a Prac,ice. or the Ullimponal1ce of PCll f!,lIins
.' is the kinds of practice implic it in those activi ties. During my first fi e ld wo rk . the
•..
practices which I imagined I was engaged in were locati ve (finding the bcst infor­
mants, i.c. those who confi rmed my preconceptions) and ex plo itati ve (l'he parallel s
with mining and with Dutch colonial economic int erests is not coi nciden ta l).
During my second fieldtrip, I was mucl1 more concerned with textuali zi ng." 1 took
it that the re was implicit knowledge which Balinese presupposed in order to gc t
through the day, make choices and think retrospectively about those choices . I
..
imagined, I think , that k.nowledge as textual, in the sense of it being Insc ribed . if
not physically. at least in peoplcs' memories. So I wrote endless notes, made hun­
dreds of hou rs of cassette recordings (the arri va l of the cassette recorder c hanged
..
ethnographic practice) and promptly textualizcd the recordings by paying Balinese
to tran scribe them. So 1 turned conver~aLions int o texts in the narrow sense . Since
then I hope I have co mplicated my practiccs somewhat to diversify from textual ­
..
izing. but r am still too close to them to judge what it is I am doing now,
In more general terms, during my first fieldwork I natural ized Bali and Bali ­
nese. There was a sort of obj ec t, soc iety, compri sing social inslilLHlons. structure ,
dyads, networks, symbols, be liefs etc. whic h had a sort of objective existence.
Balinese talkin g a nd doin g things were evidence of these objective structures
instantiated. I am less interested in whether the conception of soc iety pr~ceded
.. the practices of stud ying or vice versa than I am in how I objectified Balincse
practices, while at the samc time subjectified what they took to be objectivc, likc
treating techniques for dealing with the non-manifest as 'ritual'.
I look back on that time with grow ing horror. Unfortunately , whi le my sw iteil
to inquiring into Balincse philosophical ideas was an improvement in that I no
iii longer sought objecti ve struclUres, in textualizing - and carefu lly eonte' tualizing
- those ideas I desituated them. (Constructi vism is of course the reverse process
--..­
of subjectivizing eve rything which leads, by yet another reduction, to biography
as the essence, the true voice, of the native , free of colonial hegemony , subaltern­
ism and ethnographic writing itself.) I retumed to Bali explicitly rejecting the
idea of abstract coherent patterns of knowledge independent of situated practice .
However, my method of inquiry detached Balinesc intellectual practices more
...
2~ Some of the staple acti viti es of tcxtualizing see m to be: reading. rc.·reading. rcOccl in g. savounng,
..- empathizi ng vicariou!ily. There follows the more familiar stages of writin g. although I think Ihi5
familiar ground needs criti cal reexamination. In sum, lc:-:.[unli7.ing seems to mc a rather solitary. even
onanistic. acti vity. It is in many ways the antithesis of dialogue. which academic:; n:a ttach to tcx[ual­
izing. but which seems to me pot entially to run the opposite way .
• EUROPAlA 1996. It -I 1('

than necessary from the situations in which they took place." Now I am not alone
• attention to thc conditions undcr which others arc supposed to understand one
•iii
here. Balinese objectify themselves in different ways on different occasions
through various practices. Where I went wrong is in failing fully to link my ac­
count to the articulations in which Balinese were engaged in so doing.
For the world at large though it is the objectifying practices of anthropologists
and others which may have the most serious consequences. Balinesc now learn
what they are really like at university by reading Geertz's Perso/~ lime, lind con­
duel ill Bali, an object lesson in textual objectification by reducing persons to
names, time to calendars and action to etiquette, There are su btl er forms of ob­
jectifying practice, Two recent ones are singularly effic ient in that they in volvc,
cruciall y, self-discipline. One is development planning. Balinese are urged by
endless government advertising, civ il responsibility campaigns etc. to turn them­
selves into se lf-regulating recipients of devel opment. The other is television.
'.
..
Television-viewing practices arc means by which Balinese turn themselves if not
yet always into c itizens of Indonesi a, at least into consumers, participants in new
worlds and adopt new subject positions in the course of so doing. In the same
..
breath , as it were, they are caught up in their own subjeetifieation as cuddly
creatures to be filmed, photographed, financed , flown all over the world, fiitled
with and fucked by.
..
What to do now?
A conclusion would be out of place - a Requiem perhaps less so. The possibility
of anthropology has rested upon several implic it, interlocked relati ons of under­
standing. These are the e thnographer's understanding of the actions of the people
she works wit h; their understanding of one another; their understandin g of the
ethnographer; and anthropologists' understanding of one another. Ethnography is
III
largely confi ned to the first of these possibilities, where understanding becomes a
form of power far more frightening than mere knowledge. It e1aims direct access
to others' minds, an access which is not reciprocal. Ethnographic writing is the bu si­
ness of e nabling distant others, who have no re lationship with the people in ques­
tion, to understand them vicariously, by proxy, requiring no more effort than simply
reading the written page." [n their practice most anthropologists pay so little
~I'i There is. of course, no authenti c moment or experience which acts as a Y<ln.ls.li r.:k ur guarantee. It
does not follow by crude dichotomous logic that we have nothing therefo re hut leX-IS , the pOSition
only lhe trul y dimwittcd embrace without quaint.
27 In Ihi s, oddly. it resembles some rcminisls' complaints about female pornography (but sec the
reply in Gibson & Gibson (993 ). Is part of the link the voyeurism Ihey share?
30 EUROP£A 1996, tf·t
.--
r·'UUlQ.SfOI''','· a.f a Pracria or til., Ullillll'Of'Il.mCt' of Pt'lJl4uins
another, that even thi s sceming-innocent possibility is ncgatcd by lack of intc rest.
The whole approach is fraught with problems. The practicc of unde rstanding
here i.s not simp le or unitary. Indccd I velY much doubt that there is a discriminable
e1ass of actions (far less mental states which, foll ow ing Needham [198 J], I tl Y to
avoid imputing) which correspond s in English to the aCl . or Slate. of 'understanding',
let alone in French, German, Italian or l3alinese. I am t~l1lpted to reversc the
grand thrust of Herl11Cllcwik and return understanding to an odd-job idea or
perhaps, with Wittgenstein, argue we should
try not to think of understandillg as a 'mental process' al aiL For that is th e
expression which confuses yo u. But ask yourself: in WhHl sort of cas~, in
what kind or c.:in.:umstanccs, do we say "Now I know how to go on",? [1958:
61c, *1541 .
On that account, understanding is a way of going abou t something whc n you
appreciate what it involves . It bears an interesting relationship to articu lating
which became left out of the tetradic formulation of unde rstanding above . The
effect was to impute something esse nti ally similar to the way , under different cir­
cumstances, people address, articulate or understand (in Wiltgenstc;n's sense) thc
cont in ge nc ies and dislocations with which they engage, and in so doing share
something in common. There is nothing more in common in acts of undcrstand­
ing than there is betwee n differeut ways of 'going on'. It does not follow that eth­
nography is reduced to a bloodless enterprise. In place of understanding, perhaps
we should think in terms of recognition. To me 'recogn iti on' suggests the ,ippre­
eiat ion of difference, be these in circumstances, in goals, interests or inclinations.
What is important is that recognition is mutual and momentary. and between
agents or pati ents, be they complex or simple. Understanding in e thnography is
usually far from mutual. It also easily becomes timeless: once I have understood
x, the re is the assumption that I shall a lways do so. Recognition cannot be one­
sided, nor can its continuity be presumed . It lends itself less easil y than does un­
derstanding to verbs of power and possession ."
Perhaps then, recognizing others in the fullness of thc ir differencc and being
recognized in return is part of the point of ethnography and part of its justifica­
tion. To take the man I have known for twenty five yea rs and with whom I now
211 TIlis raises the question of Hegel's problematic relat ionShi p of mU!lIl:f and slave. RL'mgnir ion is
central. TIle relationship hinges un the master's need for recogni tio n of his mastery. wherein lies its
complex ity .
EUROPtEA t996. I1 . 1 31
 Mark Hol)ol"/ t."tlmogmpl/v {/.~ () Prauir".l.'. or l he Unimlwr/(llIrc oj P('J!~ I/ills

stay when in Bali , to say I understand him or that he und e rstands mc, secm~ a Bourdieu, Pierre
s ingularl y vac uo us statement. What wo uld it imply? T o say lhat I kn ow such- and­ 1977 Ollilille of a IheOl~\' qlpJ"(Iclice. Ri chard t\'icc (lrans.). Cambridge, Cambridge UniversiLY Press.
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suc h about him and he knows s uch~and~such about me hardly sets the pulse
Ca rneiro, Robert L.
rac in g. T o say that we recognize each other as perso ns, as nOll-unitary and J 995 '·God7.illa meels New Age nnlhropology: faci ng the post-modernist cha lle nge to <l sc ience of
complex beings, who are each grappling with very different life c irc umstanc es cul ture". 1~'lIroj)(('(I, No. I, pp. 3 22.
v

(d is locati ons, if yo u will), and that our asymmetrical relationship bears on how Clifford , JUntCS
we are each separate ly e ngaged in articulating our lives within the social arran gc­ 198J "On ethnograp hic au thori ly". Rcpre.l"CI1!clliolls. Vol. I, No.2, pr. I I 8~ 146.
me n( s of which we arc part , at times through this strange relatio nship. makes Clifford, James a nd Ma rcus, George (c dS.)
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Mark Hobarl
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