Mirror for the Other: Marijuana, Multivocality and the Media in an Eastern Caribbean Country

Abstract

Abstract: Cultural anthropology's for has always been a mirror mainly by and for the West. A corollary of the preoccupation with writing to ourselves about the Other in the specialized jargon and prose of the discipline is that little effort is made by First World anthropologists to write for and to the Third World Other in a manner that is accessible to them.My aim is to illustrate how the discipline's mandate of cultural can be extended to incorporate and engage that Other by referring to my experience of anthropology as journalism in the Eastern Caribbean country of St. Vincent and the Grenadines where my consisted of a long series of newspaper articles questioning elite and middle-class societal beliefs about the causes and consequences of marijuana production, sale and consumption.A] fundamental change is required in the perception of the world in which and for which critical projects of ethnography are undertaken. This necessitates, in turn, transformations both in the way ethnography is written, and in the ethnographer's awareness of for whom it is written.George E. Marcus and Michael J. Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural CritiqueCultural anthropology has always been an academic exchange mainly with and for the West about the Rest.(f.1) observation that Western anthropologists write almost exclusively to themselves about the Other is as trite as it is axiomatic. Though it reflects the fact that our priority has always been to communicate to other anthropologists (Kuper 1994:551; cf. Scheper-Hughes 1995: 438), it also means that our Mirror for Man (Kluckhohn 1949) has also been one of First World academic self-reflection, self-criticism and self-narrative. Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa (1923), the most popular anthropological book ever written, was meant to teach Americans about their own society through the study of another way of life (Freeman 1983; Marcus and Fischer 1986). second most widely read work in anthropology, Clyde Kluckhohn's Mirror for Man, was a mirror only for the West: Studying primitives enables us to see ourselves better. . . . Anthropology holds up a great mirror to [Western] man and lets him look at himself in his infinite variety (1949:11, emphasis in original). crack in Jay Ruby's (1982:1) mirror is a fracture in ethnographic epistemology--consciousness about being conscious--in and for First World anthropology; so are the reflections in DeVita and Armstrong's Distant Mirrors (1993). Such academic Westerncentrism has an obvious corollary that has received little critical attention: hardly any effort is ever made by Western scholars to write for and to the Other about themselves using simple prose and popular local outlets.(f.2)According to Marcus and Fischer: Writing single texts with multiple voices exposed within them, as well as with multiple readerships explicitly in mind, is perhaps the sharpest spur to the contemporary experimental impulse in anthropological writing, both as ethnography and cultural critique (1986:163, my emphasis). But this uncritically constrains such experimentation by ignoring the possibility of also writing different texts for different readerships when the single academic work is either unavailable or incomprehensible. Marcus and Fischer (1986:138) also argue from a traditional Westerncentric position when they claim, like Kluckhohn and many others before them, that The challenge of serious cultural criticism is to bring the insights gained on the periphery back to the center to raise havoc with our settled ways of thinking and conceptualization. A truly global anthropology would also argue that insights from either domain should be employed to raise havoc in the periphery, too, when the settled ways of thinking and conceptualization there are as intolerant or uncritical as their counterparts at the centre. Failure to accept this implication of cultural critique--to argue that the Other is either too backward to sustain such a (from the West or from within itself) or that the public questioning of belief and behaviour may threaten future field work (don't insult your hosts or they won't invite you back to feast on their culture)--would be as paternalistic as it is careerist. …