Introduction: Place and Voice in Anthropological Theory

Abstract

The problems of place and voice are vital to anthropological practice and so is the relationship between them. The following set of articles is the result of a symposium on this subject held at the 85th annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Philadelphia, in December 1986. The articles by Appadurai, Dresch, Fernandez, Marcus, and Rosaldo are revisions and elaborations of presentations at that symposium. Strather's article is based on her responses (as a discussant) to the oral presentations at the symposium, which included one by Paul Friedrich, in addition to the ones published here. More than with any of the other human sciences, anthropology is based on circumstantial evidence. The circumstances in which the evidence is gathered (those of fieldwork) and the circumstances of the writing up of fieldwork have been much discussed recently and do not need to be revisited here. But it is worth noting that the spatial dimension of this circumstantiality has not been thought about very much. This spatial dimension has many aspects, including the issue of maps and terrains, regions and areas, landscapes and environments, distance and scale, centers and boundaries. The articles in this collection do not by any means deal with all of these issues, though some of them are touched on. What they do focus on is one aspect of the problem of space in anthropology, and that is the problem of place, that is, the problem of the culturally defined locations to which ethnographies refer. Such named locations, which often come to be identified with the groups that inhabit them, constitute the landscape of anthropology, in which the privileged locus is the often unnamed location of the ethnographer. Ethnography thus reflects the circumstantial encounter of the voluntarily displaced anthropologist and the involuntarily localized other. One problem that the articles discuss, in their various ways, is the light shed on this circumstantiality by attending to the dimension of place. When it comes to voice, we face another problem. Much fieldwork is organized talk, and the ethnographic text is the more or less creative imposition of order on the many conversations that lie at the heart of fieldwork. But in fieldwork there is a curious double ventriloquism. While one part of our traditions dictates that we be the transparent medium for the voices of those we encounter in the