Learning how to ask in ethnography and psychotherapy

Abstract

To social anthropologists an affinity with psychotherapy lies in the view that this discipline is a social science. Increasingly, social anthropologists offer comments and analyse their own data using psychotherapeutic or psychoanalytic frames of reference. At the same time, a methodological crisis has developed in ethnography. This is a crisis of how to carry out an ethnographic enquiry in a disciplined manner without either claiming to be a detached observer on the one hand or explaining away the subjective experiences of informants or clients with too much interpretation on the other. The aim of this paper is to address this crisis and to suggest ways in which ethnographers can use techniques from one type of psychotherapy, namely systemic or family psychotherapy in order to access social and psychological aspects of the lives of their informants. The paper achieves this by describing systemic psychotherapy and its theoretical foundations in the ethnographic work of Gregory Bateson. It then reviews the mainly medical anthropology literature in which the connection between psychotherapy and anthro pology has been discussed. While this literature has suggested a narrative and a performative approach to ethnographic data and, therefore, to informants, it has not extended the analytic frame to include the ethnographer him/herself within these frames. Clinical case material is presented to demonstrate how such an inclusion is central to the practice of systemic psychotherapy and to show that this type of material is ethnographic. The techniques of double description, hypothesising and circular questioning are described and demonstrated, and it is argued that adapting these to an ethnographic enquiry will enhance the validity of the anthropological project.