Auto/Ethnography: Rewriting the Self and the Social

Abstract

Auto/Ehnography: Rewriting the Self and the Social. DEBORAH E. REED-DANAHAY, ed. Oxford: Berg, 1997; 277 pp. Since the 1980s a community of anthropologists, both in the United States and in Europe, have placed written at the forefront of analysis. Think, for example, of Text, play and story (Bruner, ed. 1983), Literary anthropology (Poyatos, ed. 1988), Literature and anthropology (Dennis and Aycock, eds. 1989), Domains et chateaux (Aug* 1989), Jane Austen and the fiction of culture (Pandler and Segal 1990), Anthropological poetics (Brady, ed. 1991), Anthropology and literature (Benson, ed., 1993), Creativity/anthropology (Lavie et al. 1993), The ethnography of reading (Boyarin, ed. 1993), Ecritures ordinaires (Fabre, ed. 1993), The prose and the passion (Rapport 1994), Exploring the written (Archetti, ed. 1994), and Culture/contexture (Daniel and Pecks, eds. 1996). The book edited by Reed-Danahay joins this significant trend of literary anthropology. This development has in most cases occurred spontaneously, as the by-product of genre mixing and the influence of cultural studies, without a dominant theoretical body and without the consolidation of a legitimate speciality, like psychological or medical anthropology. This fact reflects perhaps the complexity of this intellectual enterprise that I will now explore. The practice of anthropology in the contexts of little implied an emphasis on the study of oral practices: speaking, singing, and orating. Therefore, the anthropological written texts originate, in principle, from oral transmissions - and, of course, behavioural observation. Orality was thus transformed by the writing of the anthropologist. However, in contexts of great traditions, social discourses were and are also embedded in, or expressed through, writing. Anthropologists working in complex societies with ample literary traditions are confronted with a variety of texts. These different have been produced nationally, even locally, in the community studied, or elsewhere, by the informants themselves or by others in general: writers journalists, scientists, politicians, bureaucrats or teachers. Confronted with this dense jungle of texts, research strategies can vary: the emphasis on the consumption of concentrates the analysis on the impact of reading, while the emphasis on the production of permits a discussion on the implications of writing in the shaping of cultural forms. Any cultural theory thus needs to reflect on the multiplicity of writings because identities, or the interface between the self and the social, are also created and recreated through writing. So how heterogeneous literary works affect the understanding of a given sociocultural setting is a relevant question to pose. In her introduction Reed-Danahay defines the main objectives of the volume. All the chapters of the book result from research carried out in contemporary literary societies and can be seen as an attempt to problematize and, in a way, to transcend the distinction between autobiography and ethnography. Three crucial genres of writing intersect in the different chapters: (1) native anthropology, where the subjects of enquiry become the authors of studies of their own group; (2) autobiography, characterized by personal narratives written by members of ethnic groups; and (3) autobiographical ethnography, in which anthropologists transform given personal experiences, in the context of field work or in the realm of the lived, into ethnographic writing. The articles explore various interconnections, mixtures of genres and voices, in order better to shape the complexity between ethnography and autobiography. Some of the case studies are indeed innovative. The chapters in Part One deal with contexts of state repression and the possibilities of resistance in life stories and autoethnography. Kay B. Warren discusses the prose of Victor Montejo, a Jacaltec Maya from Guatemala, who fled the rural violence of 1982 and became an anthropologist and writer in exile. …