On Reflexivity in Anthropology
Christopher Turner
Anthropology
500D
Spring
2008
written
for a seminar under Jonathan Hill at SIU Carbondale
Abstract
With
the revamping and critical reevaluation of anthropology during the
postmodernist movement of the late twentieth century, reflexivity became one of
the tools by which members of the discipline sought to override their own
observational biases encountered while conducting and constructing
ethnographies. While it is impossible for the human observer locked within the
human mind to gain a critical evaluative gaze that is completely free of an
ingrained value laden perspective, reflexivity provides a method whereby the
individual can to some extent situate and comprehend their own enculturated
cognitive framework. Though reflexivity has loaned its interpretive schema to
virtually every academic discipline imaginable, and while within anthropology
it has come to take on a variety of differing definitions, the model and
premise of the inwardly turned critical gaze is at the core of the solutions
that have been adopted by the social sciences in response to the
epistemological criticisms that have been leveled by the champions of the
postmodernist paradigm.
[keywords: reflexivity, counter-transference,
intersubjectivity]
Introduction
I
have chosen to write about a topic that is incredibly broad, which consequently
as subject matter has advantages and disadvantages. On a good note, there is a
wide range of published material on
which to base investigations. The same is its disadvantage. A clear and
developed comment and analysis on reflexivity could span several full length
books, or could be the theme of numerous dissertations.
Enter
the term “reflexivity” in Google, and returned are seventy-three 20 page
entries of websites. A Boolean search of Morris Library listings for
“reflexivity” + “reflexive” under “any word anywhere” returns 161 listings,
while the entire I-Share Catalog yields 536 responses. These library entries
span titles from as diverse subject matter as Business Ethics as
Practice: Representation, Reflexivity, and Performance to
Time Gives It Proof: Paradox in the Late Music of Beethoven.
In
this regard, in such a comparatively short paper, I will be unable to explore
fully the concept of reflexivity. My intention is to examine the classic
definition of the concept, its development through the twentieth century
primarily within sociology, moving then to its marked effects on the discipline
of anthropology, and support and criticism of its use in our field. While
reflexivity can be qualified within sociology, literature, or more generally so
in communication, I will be focusing my attention on its applications in
ethnography. Lastly, I will briefly relate information about its
unheralded antecedents as pioneered in the works of the 19th
century ethnographer Frank Hamilton Cushing.
History of the Reflexivity Concept
While
often championed as an edict of the postmodern turn in late 20th
century social sciences, the principle of reflexivity has a deep and varied
past to which anthropology is a rather recent newcomer. The great 17th century English
jurist Sir Matthew Hale (1609-1676) is cited as having called reflexivity “the
turning of the untethered eye inward upon its own actions” (Webster's 2nd
Unabridged 1956). Hence we find the idea of
human meaning creation and its recursive nature being contemplated in
late pre-Enlightenment Great Britain.
Schooled
at Oberlin and Harvard, a professor at the Universities of Michigan and later
Chicago, George Herbert Mead was a prominent American sociologist of the early
20th century. Though he described reflexivity strictly within the
realm of sociology, he must be given credit for development of the concept
overall (Salzman 2002:807). Mead describes the component of the self he called
the “me”, the part of us that learns to negotiate social reality through
adaptive mutual interchange .
Mead
(1934:138) attributes the selfness of the me arising as “...the individual experiences himself
...from the particular standpoints of other individual members of the same
social group, or from the generalized standpoint of the social group as a whole
to which he belongs.” The implications for ethnography should be obvious. For
the anthropologist relocated within the matrix of another society, the
accustomed established indexical norms of communication are no longer present.
We are able to engage within our own society due to our de facto
familiarity with it, such that we “assume the attitudes of the individuals
involved in it [knowing] how they feel about the assumption of their
attitudes”(Mead 1934:176). In this regard, our reflexively gained ability to
communicate has become a hindrance to meaningful ethnographic accounting when
we are situated among the cultural other.
Also
during the 1930s, a different Mead, anthropology's Margaret, was broaching the
topic of psychoanalysis in fieldwork. She famously described various cultures
as group expressions of personality, an attribute that had in the Freudian
sense been intended to describe individuals. Mead and her contemporaries were
strongly influenced by Freud, who died in 1939.
Freud,
in his work with psychiatric patients, coined the term transference to
describe a phenomenon he observed in his
patients during psychoanalysis. Individuals would project identities of past
authority figures onto the psychiatrist during treatment. This non-pathological
event was useful for the analyst because it revealed to some extent the
defenses of the patient. More importantly though for the point of the present
study is the associated concept of counter-transference. This occurs
when the psychoanalyst begins to project their own feelings toward the patient.
As Freud became more aware of the pitfalls of counter-transference, he
“recommended that every analyst undergo personal analysis as well as a periodic
self reflexive examination” (Spiro 2006:525). Here we have the idea that during
a dyadic dialectical interchange, the observer, in this case a psychiatrist,
can never be fully free of bias or a paradigmatic situatedness. Only with some
form of examination of the observer, in this case that they be psychoanalyzed,
is it possible to obtain a self awareness that can ultimately result in an
individual whose interpretive matrix is more fully contextualized. The
extension of this idea to ethnography never became fully developed, and field
work and its subsequent literary productions remained a sort of travelogue and
listing of cultural traits, usually reported in the third person.
Again
discussing sociology, I must mention the work of Harold Garfinkel, the 91 year
old Professor Emeritus at USC. I must briefly refer to concepts developed in
his most noted text Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967). For those of us
saturated in anthropology, ethnomethodology is not quite what it may sound
like. Anthropologists have a specific normative lexicon and a set of acquired
working definitions whereby all discourse engaged in our field is premised. The
same can be said about quotidian prosaic knowledge and meaning as created and
exchanged within a society among its members. If someone walks in and says “It
is raining”, it is known from the context of the setting that the speaker means
that a moderate amount of liquid precipitation is falling from the sky outside
of the very building wherein they speak.
It is known that they do not mean “It is raining in Paris”, nor is it an
analogy suggesting that someone is crying, and it can even be surmised that it is doing more than
drizzling, yet it is not pouring. When they add “So I took the bus”, this does
not suggest that they stole a bus to arrive dry, or that they rode in a yellow
school bus. We do not think twice when we hear “It is raining so I took the
bus”.
This
immediacy of meaning arises, according to Garfinkel, from our inculcated
understanding within our given society. Hence the “ethno” portion of
ethnomethodology must be qualified for the anthropologist: it is not a
reference to a foreign and distant other, rather it refers to any unique
human group wherein meaning is continually created and sustained through
negotiated discourse, of course including one's own societal milieu. Such
meaning is indexical within the setting of each specific discourse event [It is
raining here outside], and is situated and created within the normative
dialogic history of that specific social group. Garfinkel explored the degree
to which indexical assumptions are encoded in normal conversation and other
dialogical exchanges (Garfinkel 1967:1-11, 35-75).
Lastly
within the realm of sociology, mention must be made of the work of Sir Anthony
Giddens. Giddens has championed the concepts of agency and structuration. He has suggested that individual action and
societal structure presuppose one another and form a dialectic. Structuration
is created and recreated in the repeated activities of daily life. “Social systems are systems of social
interaction, so that they involve the situated activities of human subjects,
and exist syntagmatically in the flow of time” (Giddens 1979:66, 69). Giddens
acknowledges the view of Garfinkel: that meaning in human life is recursively
negotiated amongst members of a given society, and that the results of this
reflexive dialog are encoded in language. The use of indexical words (and actions)
employed in a given language become barriers to mutual comprehension
between one's own society and members of alternative human societies (Giddens
1976: 22-26).
Bindings of Logical Positivism
The
Post Enlightenment paradigm of positivism has within anthropology found a long
intellectual history, traceable through works of Comte, Spencer, Tylor,
Durkheim, Malinowski, and Radcliffe-Brown, to the materialism of
Rappaport. Perhaps fueled by the
so-called vulgar materialism of Rappaport and the notion in social sciences of
Binfordian hypotheses testing, it was not until around 1970 that
anthropologists began to question the underlying premise suffused within their
discipline: that one human can consciously and intentionally objectify and
interpret the cultural and cognitive milieu of another.
Roscoe
(1995:494) surveyed the anthropological literature, finding that references to
arguments challenging positivism increased in number around 1971. He found only
four such citings in the 25 years prior to that date, with seventeen mentions
of the term from 1971 to 1975 alone. While he argues for a kinship between
hermeneutics and the scientific method, he acknowledges the chasm between their
properties, particularly in the ethnographic case. The scientist can garner
data from the world at large, which is omnipresent and accessible to all
observers. An example of this as cited by Roscoe is that of astronomers taking
spectrographs of stars: the objective reality of stars, uninfluenced by the
observer, typifies the methodological distancing that is intrinsic to data
collection employed in using the positivist paradigm and its minion, the
scientific method. Conversely, the observational authority of the ethnographer
is based on singular sets of data that are gathered while they are alone in the
field, which setting is reproducible only with great expense and difficulty by
others (Roscoe 1995:498). In this regard, post modern critics have run
roughshod over ethnography in particular. They posit that its errors are the
result of some greater epistemological flaw, but in so doing they overlook that the limitations of any observational
science which is restricted to a singular observer or authority, as is
customarily the case with the ethnographic narrative, is also similarly limited
(Salzman 2002:811).
As
pointed out by Roscoe (1995), positivism as such has become an easy target
for postmodernists in all social
sciences, but especially in ethnography. He suggests that such critics miss the
point that constructed “fragments of discourse” can be neither more nor
less “true” than hypotheses generated by
the scientific method. Roscoe (1995:497) argues that anthropologists have espoused an “overly mechanistic view of natural science
that has obscured not only the thoroughly hermeneutic nature of science but
also the thoroughly scientific nature of their own hermeneutic ethnography.”
The
atomistic nature of all events, whether molecular, macroscopic, cosmological,
or regarding those which occur during dialogical intercourse amongst humans,
prevents their full and complete description. The independence of all actions,
and the infinitude of events which constitute all observable phenomenon, has
been described by chaos theory, upon which I will not elaborate here. Suffice it
to say that no generalizing laws are fully capable of describing in total the
behavior of activities in any realm of the observable universe, whether in the
natural sciences or in the humanities (Roscoe 1995:499-500). Criticisms of
ethnography as being non-scientific and not accountable to positivism are incorrect. Ethnographic
accounts are just a particular case where the repeatability of the observations
is restricted, and where the observing tools utilized lie primarily within the
human mind itself. Reflexivity becomes the method whereby the observer can
learn to reduce and situate, but never fully eliminate, their own inherent
biases.
Reflexivity in Modern Anthropology
With
reference to reflexivity, a major work examining objectivity within ethnography
came with George Devereux's From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral
Sciences (1967). Devereux was trained as both a psychoanalyst and as an
anthropologist, giving him a greater insight into the meeting place of the two.
While earlier sociologists had utilized the working notion of reflexivity, it
had been restricted to its use within the context of meaning creation by and
between members of a given society. It
was Freud's examination of such recursively enjoined dialog within the realm of
psychiatry that had revealed the systematic errors inherent to the dyadic
dialectic exchange that characterized both psychoanalysis and the ethnologist's
paradigm. Devereux formally expounded upon the definition of reflexivity as
regards the latter discipline.
The
reexamination of the aloof detached observer and their presumptive objectivity
had been in the offing across the sciences, both natural and social, throughout the first half of the twentieth
century. Einstein's most well known
contribution to physics was indeed called “The Theory of Relativity”. He posited that the physical parameters
marking the observer's situation-- e.g. location, velocity, and mass – effected
the quantitative outcome of the experimental results. This was followed in the
1930s again in physics with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. This maxim
suggested that the observer's very
presence altered the physical properties of the event being observed and hence
of the data so collected. Because such observational sciences were the fundament
that founded the notion of impartiality within the scientific method, the suggestion that such objectivity did not
exist even within physics inevitably called the ostensibly subjective accounts
of the social sciences into question (LaBarre 1967:vi-x).
Devereux
concisely described the conundrum entailed within the ethnographic event. He
described the ontology of the putatively objective data collected in the
behavioral sciences, particularly in ethnography, as threefold in production:
- The behavior of the subject.
- The 'disturbances' produced by the existence and observational
activities of the observer.
- The behavior of the observer: His[i] anxieties, his
defensive maneuvers, his research strategies, his 'decisions' (= his
attribution of a meaning to his observations)(from Devereux 1967:xix).
In
From Anxiety to Method, Devereux (1967:xviii) suggested that the notion
of objectivity in ethnography is an
illusion, not due to the arguably subjective nature of the social sciences, but
because positivism itself is a human philosophy, and not an independently
extant quality of reality. The very notions of parsimony, compendiousness, and
self-consistency are not necessarily inherent qualities of mind within the
universe, but are really theories of interpretation (1967:11). While the hallmarks of the cognitive,
gestaltic, and psychoanalytic models were accepted as subjective and
value-laden, the physicalistic and mathematical models of the hard sciences had
thus far escaped such definition (1967:11, 29). The stultifying, concretizing
eye of the descriptive ethnographer had been unintentionally reifying the other, such that one so situated “embalms seeds instead of planting them”
(1967:30). Devereux's way out of this seemingly incontrovertible observational
paradox was to employ the Freudian notion of counter-transference.
The
title of Devereux's book points toward the thrust of his commentary: it is the
very anxiety that is aroused in the ethnographer that becomes their greatest
avenue of insight into analyzing the nature and degree of their own inherent
biases. Former day ethnographers, perhaps
most famously Malinowski, failed to address their own anxiety within the
context of the ethnographic narrative, eventuating in Malinowski's case in the
writing of a parallel document replete with its own pathology (Stocking
1983:71, 93-112). Devereux suggests that it is this very tension that serves as
the window into the mind of the self-situated ethnographer. The ethnographer
must accomplish the seemingly impossible task of seeing through the biases of
their mind, while using their own mind.
I found Devereux's
accounts of such situational biases to be well explicated, but I was less
satisfied with his mapping a way out of the implicit conundrum. Valerie Yow
(1997:79) does a better job at articulating the methodology of self-examination
that can liberate the ethnographer from this predicament:
“There are
specific questions to ask so that
we understand what is happening:
1. What
am I feeling about this narrator [i.e. the subject under study]?
2. What similarities and what differences
impinge on this interpersonal situation?
3. How does my own ideology affect this process?
What group outside of the process am I identifying with?
4. Why am I
doing the project in the first
place?
5. In selecting topics and questions, what
alternatives might I have taken? Why didn't I choose these?
6. What other possible interpretations are
there? Why did I reject them?
7. What are the effects on me as I go about this
research? How are my reactions impinging
on the research?”
In this regard, the goal is not to
eradicated subjectivity, which is impossible, but to acknowledge it and attempt
to reduce and perspectivize it. As suggested by Roscoe (1995), all investigations
involve judgments, and all contain elements of value laden truth
concepts. The goal is not to escape positivism, a feat that cannot be
accomplished without abandoning logic, but to use it to most aptly ameliorate
biases. Just as the chemist or physicist gives their best effort at calibrating
and zeroing their measuring devices: scales, calipers, thermometers; so
too must the ethnographer calibrate their tools of scientific inquiry, in this
case their actions, behaviors, inquisitions, and interpretative schemata.
Some earlier ethnographers are
credited with using the reflexive method to illustrate the inherent systemic
flaws within an unbridled ethnography. Levi-Strauss produced Tristes Tropiques
in 1955. The literary classic is in the dense style of European writing circa
World War II. Its author pines for the romanticized pre-Industrial world,
nobelizing not the prototypical savage but all of former day humanity, all that
had not been despoiled by contact with Homo europicanus. While the
account breaks with the mold of earlier static ethnographies, it is hardly a
guidebook on how to renegotiate one's own observational biases. It is more so a
straightforward introspective autobiographical travelogue, if I dare say so
about the still-living master's work (for similar criticisms see Dumont
1978:10-11). Nonetheless, it is often cited in regards to early examples of
reflexivity in ethnography.
Another example from the same period
is Laura Bohannan's 1954 novel Return to Laughter. Written under the
pseudonym of Elenore Smith Bowen, the account is purely fictitious.[ii]
It is invariably lauded in this regard and is cited as an example of
reflexivity in action. The novel is set in Africa amongst the Tiv where
Bohannan undertook actual real-world ethnography. I have not read the book, nor
am I familiar with her ethnographic work. As such, it is unclear to me whether
Bohannan was attempting to augment her research interpretations by portraying
her subject from a distinctly different vantage point, and was hence aiming Return
to Laughter at fellow anthropologists, or if in fact she was attempting to
overtly produce a novel as based on her personal experiences that were gained
through her efforts during her fieldwork.
It and Tristes
Tropiques typify the genre called the confessional ethnography.
While I lack the necessary background reading to confidently comment on this
genre of ethnographies, I will go out on a limb and suggest that these do not
appear to be teleologically driven to produce a more insightful accounting or
interpretation of each author's ethnographic material[iii],
and in this regard they are not manifesting and utilizing reflexivity as
described by Devereux or Yow.
In an article subtitled “The
Emergence of Narrative Ethnography”, Barbara Tedlock (1991) details the period from 1930 up to the
1980s, outlining the development and occurrences of confessional or autobiographical
ethnographies. These span the gamut from
Gladys Reichard's Spider Woman (1934) to Paul Rabinow's 1977 Reflections
on Field Work in Morocco. As suggested by Tedlock, the key distinguishing
trait of these accounts is their use of the first person pronoun. Citing
Evans-Pritchard's The Nuer (1940), she notes that the author
“...included a seven-page first-person
confessional account of the terrible living conditions and informant
difficulties he experienced during
fieldwork in the Sudan. In sharp contrast, the remainder of the book,
written in an omniscient third-person authoritative voice, describes highly
abstract... actions...: the Nuer do
this, the Nuer do
that” (Tedlock 1991:74). The innovation suggested with Evans-Pritchard's
introduction and subsequent confessional and auto-ethnography was the
rescission of the putatively objectifying 3rd person literary
device. It had been practically taboo amongst anthropologists to include the
self within the ethnographic narrative. While intersubjectivity could be
explored with a first person voice, such articulation was not tantamount to the
use of reflexivity. The term reflexive appears only three times in Tedlock's
article, once in text, once in a citation, and another time in a footnote.
Tedlock does not equate the use of reflexivity with the change in person
deixis. In footnote 16, she briefly
suggests a definition for reflexivity: “In ordinary "reflectiveness", one is conscious of oneself
as an Other, but in "reflexivity," one is conscious of being
self-conscious of
oneself as an Other” (italics author's
1991:85). Here we get a serpentine, self-referential definition that hardly
elucidates. While Tedlock's article is explanatory and well written with regard
to the advent of the auto-ethnography, it is evident that such narratives do
not implicitly employ reflexivity and its radical self-inspection. They merely
expand the ethnographer's account to include the self in the observer-participant
dyad.
During the 1970s and 1980s, numerous
volumes and articles detailing reflexivity in anthropology appeared. It will be
impossible for me to have read and reviewed let alone to mention all of these.
I will instead concentrate on some key examples that are repeatedly cited in
ethnographic literature.
A good case of this is A Crack in
the Mirror (1982), edited by Jay Ruby. This is a collection of essays
treating the diversely interpreted notion of reflexivity. As is usual with
treatises in the social sciences after the advent of postmodernism, proofs of
argument are rooted less in the accumulation of acceptable premises, and seem
instead to rely on clever twists of logic that may or may not withstand full
elucidation. Dense writing and non-linear thinking is the norm in such
constructs. It is as if one is commended on the abstruseness of an argument,
rather than on its sensible delineation: after all, common sense and normative
cognition are pilloried by the postmodernist.
While A Crack in the Mirror
does not espouse the full-blown relativity of postmodernism, it definitely
privileges the perspective of the self. Starting on page one, reflexivity is
channeled into the working definition of “consciousness about consciousness,
thinking about thinking”. In the aftermath of Dadaism and the psychedelic era
of the 1960s, the use of jarring imagery as a didactic tool became more
acceptable, invoked as if to elicit the illumination of a Zen koan.
Tellingly in this regard, Myerhoff and Ruby (1982:1-35) cite Frank Zappa,
Marcel Duchamp, Tom Wolfe, Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan, Kurt Vonnegut, etc. The
result is a flippant, shallow version of reflexivity. These authors never once
mention George Devereux, Harold Garfinkel, nor Freud. The version of reflexivity they espouse and
proffer is much closer to the confessional autobiography than to
the self-examination of methodology as suggested by Yow (1997). They boast of
the increased use of the autobiography as a technique for inquiry. “We find
recurring films about filmmakers, prints of printmakers making prints,
photographs of photographers and their equipment, plays about playwrights”(Myerhoff
and Ruby 1982:9). Like the verbose self-absorbed victim at a cocktail party who
wears their problems on their sleeve rather than solving them, the Myerhoff
/Ruby form of reflexivity would have the ethnographer air every iota of their
internal discourse encountered in the field to the beleaguered ear of the
reader. “The more the ethnographer attempts to fulfill a scientific obligation
to report on methods, the more [they] must acknowledge that [their] own
behavior and persona in the field are data”(1982:26). One chapter in A Crack in the Mirror
is entitled “How to Look at Us Looking at the Yanomami Looking at Us” (Michaels
1982:133-148)[iv].
The koan-like title exemplifies my point about the ill-defined, riddle-like
nature of the book's arguments. The purpose of using reflexivity is to escape
the confines (as much as is possible) of the biased eye of the observer. It is
a self-reflective method that never need be explicated to the reader except
indirectly inasmuch as it has altered the interpretations of the collected
ethnographic data. The methodological
revisions offered by Myerhoff and Ruby are only extensions of the same
unquestioned eye, whose field of view has simply been expanded to include more
processes and data, in this case, a purported identification with the gaze of
the other[v] : “The ethnographer becomes audience for a
performance so that he or she can become a performer for us, the
audience”(1982:30). This sort of “reflexivity” purports to acquire a
less-fettered viewpoint by transposing its gaze through another observer and
then back into the original judging gaze. These conundra remind me, to
play their game, of Bob Dylan's line about
“the one who tries to hide what they don't know to begin with.”[vi]
I am not alone with such criticism.
Graham Watson (1987:29) wrote about his reaction to a conference held in 1984
on reflexivity: “While listening to
papers being presented there, it occurred to me that when anthropologists talk
about reflexivity, either they do not know what they are talking about or they
are talking about something other than what they seem to be talking about.” He
suggested that speakers were “claiming to confront reflexivity while merely
managing it”. Watson believes that some anthropologists cannot confront true
reflexivity because it undermines their authority as narrators. By “managing” reflexivity,
they keep themselves in the privileged role of controlling the situation and
are never compelled to disengage from their predisposed methodologies (Watson
1987:33). Levi-Strauss (1955:385) put it well when he wrote “Since we are
permanently unable to escape from the norms by which we have been conditioned,
our attempt to put different societies, including our own into perspective are
said to be no more than a shame faced way of admitting superiority over all
others.” Championing what he sees as the most apt form of reflexivity, Watson
(1987:34) goes on to cite Hammersley and
Atkinson's Ethnography: Principles in Practice (1983:236): “...one of the distinguishing characteristics
of science for us is precisely its reflexive self-consciousness about
methodology [where] there is an obligation placed upon practitioners to
scrutinize systematically the methodology by which findings, their own and
others, are produced, and in particular to consider how the activities of the
researcher may have shaped those findings.” The reader will notice how close in
substance the statement is to that of Valerie Yow cited earlier.
Another good example concerning the
ambiguity and multi-valence of the reflexivity concept is revealed in the short
essay by Ohnuki-Teirney (1984). The Japanese born anthropologist relates her
experience of returning to Japan to undertake ethnography after having lived in
the US for two decades. At first, though she was raised there, she was taken
aback by the culture she encountered in Japan: “...they seemed strange, with
intriguing behavioral patterns and thought processes” (1984:584). She notes
having felt enlivened and stimulated by the foreignness of the Japanese in
Kobe, whom she observed in her capacity as ethnologist. After some 6 weeks she
reports that the newness had worn off and that she began to feel more like one
of “them”, as she phrases it. In response, Ohnuki-Teirney returned to the
US. “...[A]fter about four months I felt the need to pull
back from them to regain a sense of reflexive perspective” (1984:584). Here, we see an anthropologist interpreting
the reflexive paradigm as if it is intended to create a distancing
effect on the observer. Others would perhaps argue that it was precisely when
she began to feel ingrained within the societal milieu of Kobe that she was
best positioned to make incisive observations. To my thinking, reflexivity does
not purport itself to be the remedy to the dichotomous relationship resulting
from one's degree of nativeness or lack thereof. It is rather a method whereby
we can learn to observe and contextualize our cognitive positionality, of
which nativeness is just one dimension. Ohnuki-Teirney's understanding of the
“reflexive perspective” simply becomes a rehashing of the classic version of
the objectified observer-participant viewpoint, a viewpoint which was premised
on the notion of possessing an observational acuity deriving from the
ethnographer's very foreignness. Reflexivity seeks to burst the bubble of such
putative objectivity, and to turn the mind's eye to the self, thereby examining
one's own cognitive framework, and to as skillfully as one can, negotiate
inherent inevitable biases and inculcated interpretive schemata which we all
possess.
Cushing's
Antecedent to Reflexivity
As described earlier, the notion of
reflexivity was long in developing, and even longer in entering ethnography.
Yet 50 years prior to its discussion by George Herbert Mead in the late 1920s,
a form of reflexivity was being practiced by the oft overlooked anthropological
pioneer Frank Hamilton Cushing. Cushing was part of an expedition to the
southwestern United States funded by the Smithsonian Institution in the late
1870s, spending four years with the Zuni people from 1879 to 1882. His
ethnographic accomplishments are invariably overlooked in anthropology today.
For instance, he proceeded Malinowski by forty years in employing the
participant-observer method during his stay with the Zuni[vii]
(Hinsley 1983:56-58, Mark 1980). Of note here however with regard to
reflexivity is what Cushing called the reciprocal method. Rather than
only absorbing didactically the culture of the other, Cushing and the
Zuni would trade stories. “Folklore and myths were not collected but rather
exchanged” (Mark1980:103). He wrote that “...my method must succeed, I
live among the Indians, I eat their food, and sleep in their houses. [...I]
will look with unfeigned reverence on their beautiful and ancient ceremonies,
never laughing at any absurd observance, they love me, and I learn” (Green
1990:60). Cushing would give informal classes in history and philosophy,
underscoring his notion of exchange within what he called the reciprocal method
(Green 1990:167). While this form of
reflexivity is closer in tone to the sort of dialectical interchange (Page
1997) outlined by Ruby than to that of Devereux, it is nonetheless recursive in
approach and was a century ahead of its time. [viii]
Cushing's perception of language as a barrier
to understanding the Zuni had compelled him to strive to master their native
tongue. Yet as an ethnographer, Cushing shunned the dry typological accounting
of cultural features. Resultantly, when producing ethnographic narratives,
writing in English, he freely translated Zuni folk tales with the nuances of
his own language that he felt to be appropriate in capturing the meaning he
encountered in the field. He has been roundly criticized for such methods as
being a form of embellishment and falsification (Tedlock 1983:33-36). Critics
of Cushing adhere to the static literal mode of cross-cultural representation,
not recognizing that it is inevitably impossible to capture the subtleties of
such an exotic foreign language as Zuni. While Cushing's English translations
from the late 1800s of Zuni folktales may sound flowery today to the modern
ear, his accounts have a distinctly human tone to them commensurate with the
storytelling genre. This is especially so when compared to the analytical
efforts of works such as those by Tedlock (1983) that are suffused with
diacritic marks and presented in schematically choreographed paragraphs, denuded of all sense of humanity
and the natural flow of the spoken word .
Cushing seemed to grasp in the
reflexive sense that it is the entire human mind that must be employed in
interpreting and representing the ethnographic account of another culture, not
just a verbatim dry dehumanizing replication of the purported facts. Being a
human in the midst of humans, he enjoined his humanity in the portrayal of
humanity. If such methodology had been more keenly observed within anthropology
on a continuing basis, the need for the postmodern revolt may well have been
lessened or even vitiated, or perhaps, exacerbated further.
Comments and
Personal Observations on Reflexivity
With
the realization that true objectivity is never attainable, reflexivity becomes
the portal through which we can see our own misshapen parochial world views.
These are produced by both our societal inculcation, and by the vagaries of our
own human foibles and personal experiences. It is easy to imagine that certain
individuals of particular personality types would not make successful
ethnographers. Those with strongly focused wills, individuals who need to
perceive reality with the caveat that they are in control at all times, would
perhaps be unable to disengage with the self to the degree necessary to enjoin
the self-reflexive inspection. The ethnographer must allow for a measured loss
of identity necessary for the detached perspective needed to de-situate their
own comfort zone, while still retaining an eye for recording behavioral
detail.
The
reflexive conundrum finds its greatest paradox embodied in the social science
interview. In normal dyadic discourse in quotidian interactions, reflexivity is
not a problem, in fact, following Giddens' idea of structuration, it is the
glue which holds the encounter together and the seed which makes the dialogical
interchange within the context of society the wellspring for the creation of
culture. Atoms of personal agency that foment and arise within the grainless
continuum of living dialog are the symbionts of reflexivity. It is when the ethnographer intrudes into a
social situation with the premise of gathering data and observing society that
the problematic nature of such discourse comes to the fore.
The classic model of ethnographic interaction
is that the anthropologist intentionally relocates to a distant culture
expressly to negotiate the otherness and to distill therefrom an account
of a human society in action. This immediately creates a language barrier that
ethnology has long confronted, and which it is ostensibly able to overcome by
mastery of the different code we call a foreign language. Of course, we can
never learn all of the intricacies of the associated meta-code. Also, the
anthropologist is expected to legitimatize their study by remaining as long as
is practically possible with the distant other, for months or better yet
years, so as to have time to penetrate to the true depths of the very nature of
the society or group being studied. It is exactly under such circumstances that
the anxiety explicated by Devereux most intensely comes to the fore.
Ethnographers have become contemptuous of their subjects (itself a
semantically charged word), as with Malinowski, or have overly identified with
them and had to negotiate feelings of love, emotional involvement, or the
temptation to go native, a charge with which Cushing is still branded
today (Tedlock 1991).
Conclusions
Reflexivity in one
form or another has been around for hundreds of years. It found its greatest
development throughout the first half of the twentieth century within the
discipline of sociology, while well constructed notions that paralleled
reflexivity arose within the practice of Freudian psychoanalysis. Freud's
concept of counter-transference is the bedrock upon which later efforts by
George Devereux were founded. He gave what I consider to be the fullest
substance to the working definition of reflexivity. Using Freud's principle of
counter-transference, Devereux reasoned that the anxiety experienced by the
ethnographer became the best window into the usually veiled internal dialog of
the mind of the field worker. Like the proverbial idea of pulling one's self up
by one's own bootstraps, it is nearly an impossibility to engage with and
disarm inherent biases successfully. Reflexivity becomes the method whereby an
observer can gain some insight into the perspective of their own ethnographic
gaze. This is achieved, as Sir Mathew Hale's definition from the seventeenth
century suggests, by “the turning of the untethered eye inward upon its own
actions.” As outlined by Valerie Yow,
the observer must take an incisive inventory of their own reasonings and
viewpoints. Becoming mentally agitated in the field, Devereux's anxiety, allows
particular interstices within the flow of the ethnographer's internal dialog to
be used to gain insight into the cultural differences between the observer and
the observed, and to see more clearly the predisposed intellectual framework of
the anthropologist. A paced thoughtful introspection of the cognitive milieu of
the individual can allow the field worker to regain a mental equilibrium and
assist in coming to terms with their observational viewpoint. This is much like the effect gained with psychiatrists being themselves
psychoanalyzed, as Freud recommended. While we can never become completely free
of value laden judgments, it is the best we can do to calibrate our own
cognitive situatedness.
This
method is not the same as that employed by anthropologists throughout part of
the twentieth century that was obtained by writing auto-ethnographies. While
these literary forms perhaps are an improvement over those versed strictly in a
third person format, they do not involve reflexivity as such. Reflexivity has
perhaps been misunderstood by ethnographers writing confessional narratives, if
in so doing they were trying implicitly to regauge their inherent viewpoint. It
can be argued that the auto-ethnographic approach does little more than expand
an already limited critical gaze. Simply enjoining with a first person deixis
does not guarantee the removedness necessary to surmount a myopic view that can
be at least partially ameliorated by a reflexive self-accounting.
Though
there may be some ambiguity as to exactly what constitutes the reflexive act,
it would be improper to say that anthropologists of all stripes have completely
misunderstood the idea. The use of reflexivity spans a wide range of academic
categories, and even within anthropology itself has so many different working
definitions, that though they may be in conflict with each other, it seems that
reflexivity legitimately represents a variety of concepts to a variety of
individuals. Any increased degree of self-inspection resulting from any of
these variants constitutes an improvement on a static reified viewpoint.
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[i] Devereux
wrote before the advent of gender issues in anthropology and uses the masculine
“he” throughout.
[ii] It is perhaps insightful to note that the
academic body of ethnographers and anthropologists would praise the fictional Return
to Laughter for its innovative form and purported usage of reflexivity,
while the same cadre of commentators defame and deride ostensible works of
fiction by Carlos Castaneda. The latter never acknowledged the fictitious
nature of his series of books based on his ethnographic involvement with the
Yaqui Indian Don Matus in Mexico. Matus was a practitioner of the use of
psychotropic plants, and the accounts rendered by Castaneda include illogical states
of mind induced by the hallucinogens administered to him by the Yaqui curendaro.
Matus described entire versions of reality that are at odds with normative
non-pathological awareness. Yet Castaneda's accounts have never been praised
for examining non-normal shamanic modes of cognition and understanding, nor for
their insight into questioning the relativistic nature of an objectified
interpretation of reality.
[iii] Jean-Paul Dumont wrote in The Headman and
I: “I emphatically do not intend to dwell myopically on...the
self-indulgent emotions of a fieldworker mainly attempting, by confessional
narratives, to create an introspective travelogue...”(1978:3).
[iv] Michaels' article is neither primarily about
the Yanomami, nor does it overtly discuss the theoretical implications of
reflexivity. It is rather a look at the increasing use of film in portraying
the ethnographic moment and message.
[v] “While
we already know
all too well
the problems that
an "objective"
anthropology entails, it
appears now that
an anthropology of the"subject" might
not be quite viable
either...” (Dumont 1986:358).
[vi] From Bob Dylan's song Positively 4th
Street (1965).
[vii] Not only was Cushing a pioneer with the
observer-participant method, but he also accomplished many other “firsts” for
which he has not been credited. He preceded Boas in speaking of culture in the
relativistic sense as early as 1882 (Mark 1980:109-112, Green 1990:356). Also
foreshadowing Boas, Cushing practiced the four-fold approach to anthropology while
in the field with the Zuni (Green 1990:99-107). He practiced recreating chert
reduction methods and copper tool fabrication, now called chaine operatoire or
operational sequence studies (Cushing 1892, 1895). Cushing also as early as the late 1880s led a
multi-disciplinary team to explore archaeological sites in Arizona (Hinsley
1983:60), an achievement often credited as first pioneered by A.V. Kidder's
work at Pecos pueblo circa 1920.
[viii] In keeping with the reflexive
introspection as outlined with Devereux, I must acknowledge my own
identification with Cushing as underdog. I myself have been plagiarized and
blacklisted by members of the
anthropologic academic community, and have had scholastic grades influenced by such
prevailing prejudices. I have had works of mine ignored by such entities. As
such, not only can I relate to what has happened to Cushing's work, but I am
likely to over interpret affronts toward his written corpus in this regard.
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