Irony and Ethnography: On Cultural Analysis of One's Own Culture

Abstract

To study one's own culture offers an anthropologist analytical opportunities, as well as pitfalls for the unsuspecting, that are not fully examined. An American analyst working in her own society not only presumably shares a language with the natives, but a common sense and a large part of a cultural system of beliefs and values. Images of the analyst as learner do not fit any better here than they do elsewhere (Karp and Kendall 1982). The analyst working at home has no need to learn much of what the natives know; the problem is in part the result of already knowing it. Doing cultural where one has a native's view violates key traditions from realist to the interpretive anthropologies of the present. Ethnography assumes that it is a radical Other that the anthropologist is to experience and to interpret and report home about Cultural of one's own culture is more in danger of producing an ethnography of witchcraft as written by a witch (Geertz 1983: 57) than of some Other can ever be. It is because the natives' ideas and the anthropologist's seem to lie on continua of experience-near and (Geertz 1983) concepts and not across a divide that natives' views are such an impediment for the anthropologist working at home. Rather than being strange or distant enough to challenge the ethnographer's powers of observation and interpretive skills, everyday life at home falls only too readily into experience-distant analytical categories And the natives readily use them too. How then is an ethnographer to analyze and write in the face of such interference between the indigenous culture and the culture of analysis? Handler (1985) notes that the anthropologist who is also, in complex ways, a native confronts new problems in composing ethnographic accounts as a dialogue between him and other voices. His point is well-taken. Dialogue rests on participants' being aware of their very real chances for misunderstanding in presuming what they do and do not know about each other's cultural grounds. But an modeled on a dialogue where an anthropologist may presume (not necessarily with grounds) that this is not the case-namely, in one's own society-may obscure what ought to be questioned. Handler argues that anthropological ideas of ethnicity, for example, are embedded with Western common sense notions of discrete social units. Thus, one reification feeds on another, though these are different discourses. Drawing on his own work on ethnic nationalist rhetoric, Handler suggests the anthropologist practice a destructive analysis on what the natives of his own culture (analyst and informants alike) think they know. Though I also work on ethnicity (in the U.S.) and to some extent have a native's point of view on ethnicity, some of the problems I have encountered are different from Handler's The people I talked with were not engaged in the creation and manipulation of nationalist rhetorics. They were instead creating and altering personal identities in everyday, local settings While ethnic rhetorics were certainly part of the national and even local contexts of ethnicity in the late 1960s, when I did this fieldwork, dialogues in these local scenes were carried out on several fronts at once. Not all of them touched upon national political discourses. What I saw was a domestication of political and ethnic rhetorics-people talking and acting with and on big issues simultaneously with small ones. 2 Some people, for example, tried to convince me of their ethnic distinctiveness,