Visayan Vignettes: Ethnographic Traces of a Philippine Island

Abstract

Dumont's title signals reader that here one may find an example of widely discussed, but still rarely written, ethnography. By crossing over and drawing on a term traditionally associated with impressionistic tales in humanities, vignettes, and emphasizing nature of his work by referring to its ethnographic accounts as traces, Dumont clearly breaks with boldly definitive and unself-consciously positivistic titles of most modernist ethnographies. Dumont maintains that his title presents a more accurate reflection of contents of his book, stories he heard and now relates, and of ethnographic process by which anthropological insights are acquired (p. 1). Dumont's misgivings about conventional ethnographic format are epitomized by traditional introductions. Introductions inevitably pre(fix) a text in which ethnographic information is overly organized and packaged (p. 7), in which localized, situated, partial (p. 2) and emerging truths are sacrificed on altar of a coherent and closed discourse and a structural organization and theoretical framework which is associated with traditional scholarship. Dumont, reluctantly, premises his own work by informing reader of his intention to address these concerns through medium of a new rhetorical style. At root, Dumont's concerns are political and ethical in nature. Dumont contends that ethnographers do violence to others (p. 5) by hiding confusions and contradictions that accompany field-work experience, sometimes by not discussing these at all, but always by writing in a manner that implies these hurdles have been successfully overcome. Others become reified and are shaped by intellectual debates that are current in West and by publishing strategies and academic politics (p. 5). Because Dumont insists that the form of a text is itself constitutive of its content and thus...a political tool (p. 7), he suggests that problem of misrepresentation may perhaps be remedied by writing in such a way that experience of reading ethnography becomes more analogous to fragmented, intercultural and frequently incoherent experiences of field work (p. 6). As one may expect from a text which grants writing process itself a central epistemological place, Dumont's book is well written and, barring moments where text feels too self-conscious and overly crafted, book is compelling reading. A feature of Dumont's work is its structural organization. The reader receives information on established topics, such as subsistence practices, in a fragmented manner. This clearly emulates way a field worker receives information, embedded in disparate occurrences and stories, that is later determined to belong together. A drawback to Dumont's organizational choices is that he is sometimes forced to repeat previously presented information. …