Ethnographic Discourse Research Articles

Gender and Gender Redux: Rethinking Binaries and the Aesthetics of Old-Style Javanese Wayang

IN 1993 I PUBLISHED AN ARTICLE ENTITLED Gender and Gender: Gender Ideology and the Female Gender Player in Central Java. (1) Written when I was literally just out of the field, the article represented my preliminary attempts to untangle my own understanding of the paradoxical nature of gender ideologies as they functioned in Javanese culture and in particular in the world of Javanese wayang (shadow theater) performance. (2) I subsequently read deeply into the theoretical and ethnographic discourses in anthropology, linguistics, literature, and gender studies in general and in particular on Java, Indonesia, and Southeast Asia as I analyzed my ethnographic and musical data. Judith Butler's Gender Trouble was compelling for many reasons. (3) In particular, I thought that the idea of gender as a performed process, an ongoing negotiation between an individual and his or her locations in culture, might provide a potential pathway through the morass of conflicting gender constructions and valuations I had encountered in the field and in my reading. Additionally, I imagined that the decentering of gender binaries would prove to be the key to understanding how these multiple gender constructions could coexist synergistically as they seemed to do. The nature of gender ideology in Java, as in much of insular Southeast Asia, is quite different from that in Euro-American cultures. As demonstrated throughout the essays in Jane Atkinson and Shelly Errington's edited volume Power and Difference, gender roles are not generally rigidly defined, although relative rigidity is determined by socioeconomic status in many different ways. (4) While there are certainly roles that are usually filled by either men or women, there are often no rules against a woman or a man performing or living a role normally filled by a member of the opposite gender. So when a woman becomes a dhalang (puppeteer) or a man runs his family's stall at the local market in Java, she or he has merely beaten the gender odds but is not breaking any deep-seated cultural rules, and his or her own location in society is not jeopardized in any way. (5) Studies of gender in Java and in much of Southeast Asia often focus on the seemingly relatively higher status of women in Southeast Asia than in other places in the world. This has had something to do with the fact that in many places in Southeast Asia women have primary roles in controlling the family finances and running the local economy, roles that are traditionally perceived as male in the societies of the researchers themselves. It turns out that in Southeast Asia in general and Central Java in particular the daily engagement with money is not considered a high-status activity, although largess and the ability to move money and power at a metalevel are high-status activities generally associated with men. So the observations about women and money were correct, but the assumptions about the valuation of the activities were wrong. (6) Nevertheless, the nonrigid nature of gender roles remains an important element in Central Javanese gender options for individuals. On the level of individual lived experience it seemed that my engagement with Butler's ideas for the analysis of gender in Central Java might prove to be more than fruitful. Here was a culture in which gender-role difference was reliably acceptable, if not always usual, providing an example of a society in which the gendering of roles and people in them is demonstrably processual and perhaps, pending further research, acknowledged as such by the people who live the culture. The problem turned out to be that this flexible gender-role relationship was counterbalanced by rigidly binary constructions of gender in Javanese mythologies. It occurred to me that the two phenomena were perhaps interconnected in a more general way and that it might be proven with subsequent research that cultures with rigid lived-gender roles might have more flexible gender constructions in their mythologies and vice versa. …

Blackness and Art in Toni Morrison's Tar Baby

I heard Black for the first time in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, in the wake of the de-colonization and nationalistic struggles. Black was cre ated as a political category in a certain historical moment. It was created as a consequence of certain symbolic and ideological struggles. We said, You have spent five, six, seven hundred years elaborating the symbolism through which Black is a negative factor. Now I don't want another term. I want that term, that negative one, that's the one I want. I want a piece of that action. I want to take it out of the way in which it has been articulated in religious discourse, in ethnographic discourse, in literary discourse, in visual discourse. I want to pluck it out of its articulation and rearticulate it in a new way. In that very struggle is a change of consciousness, a change of self recognition, a new process of identification, the emergence into visibility of a new subject. A subject that was always there, but emerging, historically.

The Village Pub and Young People's Drinking Practices in the Countryside

This paper explores the ways in which young people in rural areas experience their identity through their drinking practices. This research is founded on a close ethnography of three pubs and explores the significance given by young men and women to their discursive leisure and drinking practices and the extent to which these practices lead to inclusionary and/or exclusionary experiences. Through understanding identity formation as a contingent process, subject to socially produced alteration, this paper teases apart the different lived experiences of rural young people by arguing that much of their behaviour in pub(lic) and private space(s) can be seen in terms of acts of spectacle, compliance and challenge to disciplinary frameworks. This is illustrated though ethnographic case study examples and discussion on how young people employ various embodied strategies to move between spaces to experiment with alcohol. Through shedding light on drinking practices, this research reveals how this experimentation affects their sense of belonging in the countryside.

“The Subaltern Ethnographer: Blurring the Boundaries through Amitav Ghosh’s Writing”

This study aims to interpret Amitav Ghosh’s works as an alternative positioning within the post-colonial debate. His role as an ethnographer is particularly outstanding in this respect, and I may go as far as to suggest the figure of Calcuttaborn novelist Amitav Ghosh as incarnating the role of the subaltern anthropologist who is able to effectively contest the traditional discursive practices inspired by orientalist ethnography. Two parallel strategies will be used to achieve this objective: (1) turning ethnographic discourse from “a discourse that narrativizes” into “a discourse that narrates”, in the direction of Hayden White’s The Content of the Form; and (2) revitalising the “anthropological spirit” within Benedict Anderson’s definition of the nation as an “imagined political community”. To that purpose we will examine two relevant works in Ghosh’s early writings, The Shadow Lines (1988) and In an Antique Land (1992), as examples of the implementation of “thick description” in both literary and non-fictional texts. Ghosh’s overall strategy is to “write back to the centre” through means other than metafiction, parody or the Bakhtinian carnivalesque —i.e., strictly literary devices widely popular in current post-colonial fiction— and use the practices of contemporary anthropology —traditionally associated with Empire— in the construction of subaltern identity.

Meaning of language differences between doctors and educators in a collaborative discourse

This study of an ethnographic discourse examines the language of professionals – teachers and psychiatrists – working in collaboration in a special education school. The research objectives were examination of the meanings of recurring key words and the role of language in the verbal interaction between educators and doctors in their daily professional life. Data were collected from formal meetings, informal meetings, semi-constructed ethnographic interviews and documents published in the course of the school year. The paper offers two models for analyzing the interprofessional discourse. The first examines how key words reflect the perceptions of the speaker and his/her discipline, looking at the purpose of the communication. The second allows the researcher to examine the transferability of these concepts to the other discipline, focusing on the results of the communication. The findings reveal areas of discontent in the work of staff members with pupils, as well as the process of language transferability between professionals.

Unsettling Politics, Locating Ethics

This article traces the concept of reciprocity in historical and contemporary constructions of qualitative research methodology. It demonstrates how a particular construct—even if designed to serve as a liberatory corrective to hegemonic practices of social science (i.e., positivist)—can and does materialize into texts that reinscribe some of the foundational assumptions against which we position ourselves. Specifically, the author’s analysis explores textual and material accounts of reciprocity and the implications of these practices by centering on three nodes: (a) the construction of reciprocity historically within ethnographic discourses, (b) the (feminist) practice of conceptualizing reciprocity in terms of individual interpersonal relationships in the field, and (c) deconstructive approaches to ethnography and the implications for reconceptualizing reciprocity. Through this investigation, the author argues that deconstructive analysis encourages researchers to sustain a commitment to issues of power but redirects the locus of attention from individual exchanges to the representations we produce.

De eerste etnografische monografie: <i>De Kaffers aan de Zuidkust van Afrika</i> (1810) van Lodewyk Alberti

This paper examines the ethnographic discourse in the first ethnographic monograph which appeared in the Netherlands, De Kaffers aan de Zuidkust van Afrika, Natuur- en Geschiedkundig beschreven (1810) by Lodewyk Alberti. Within a European context this book is unique for being the only successful implementation of the ethnographic questionnaire of Joseph-Marie Degérando, the Considérations sur les diverses méthodes a suivre dans l’observation des peuples sauvages (1800), and the anthropological ideas of the Société des Observateurs de l’homme. In Alberti’s case, this resulted principally into a focus on the cultural aspects of ethnographical description. Furthermore, Alberti was the first to proof the usefulness of ethnographic knowledge in the management of colonial relationships. The personal aim of his book was to apply for the position of landdrost of Uitenhage, assuming that the Cape Colony could be restored to Dutch rule, which was in 1810 still a possibility.

Performance of Identity: The Pelegongan Andir of Tista, Bali

The pelegongan andir dance ritual of possession has been performed by a small community (Banjar Carik) in the village of Tista, Bali, in Indonesia since about the 1930s. The community prizes this exorcistic practice above all other ceremonial events, since its enactment fulfills a crucial role in determining communal welfare. At the same time, the dance symbolically embodies local identity in the person of the spiritually possessed dancer. This paper presents a historical and ethnographic discussion of its performance during 1995–2001 and posits that the community's religious practice may ultimately contest national policies on dance and circumvent the government's efforts to establish a pan-Indonesian identity.

Toddlers’ emotional reactions to separation from their primary caregivers: successful home–school transition

The purpose of this study was to examine toddlers’ emotional reactions to separation from their primary caregivers through the observation on a group of toddlers (18–30 months old) at a university preschool classroom. Interactional ethnography with ethnographic perspective and sociolinguistic discourse analysis was used as the theoretical framework to investigate individual children’s behavioral patterns from an insider’s perspective. The focus was on the multiple interactions between and among the participants in this specific cultural setting. The observation on children and the interviews with the informants supported most previous studies on the interaction between children and parents and its impact on young children’s transition from home to school setting. Additionally, different perceptions from teachers, parents and grandparents were compared on how to help young children deal with the stress during transition time. The finding of this study contributes to the literature that younger children (infants and toddlers) are able to go through a smooth transition in a high‐quality early childhood program.

Historicization of Homeless Spaces: The Seoul Train Station Square and the House of Freedom

This paper historicizes "deserving" citizenship of South Korea by tracing spatial changes and meanings of two places: Seoul Train Station Square and a former textile factory renovated to a homeless shelter. Both have been emblematic space where the most homeless people were populated since the break of the Asian Debt Crisis. However, each place embodies different history of "deserving" citizenship in a complementary way. The square, a politically charged literary and physical topography, became a location of protecting "normal" citizen from potentially violent homeless people. The factory, a spatial marker for the state regulation of laborer, became a site to promote the benevolent image of welfare state for protecting homeless people through a demarcation of short-term street living people—as "deserving" homeless citizens—from long term street living people. The embedded history in two places would be the transition of developmental state towards the welfare state that shifted its capitalist state focus from labor/economic policies to welfare policy: neoliberalization of state governance in South Korea. In concrete, this paper examines how homeless people emerged as new welfare subjects in an urban landscape; how only short-term street living people were selected as proper; how various social agents were involved in the process of implementing homeless policies; and how dualistic capitalist control over labor power, such as regular workers and surplus laborer, was imposed.

Remembering Papua New Guinea: An Eccentric Ethnography (review)

Reviewed by: Remembering Papua New Guinea: An Eccentric Ethnography Dan Jorgensen Remembering Papua New Guinea: An Eccentric Ethnography, by William C Clarke. Canberra: Pandanus Books and Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, 2003. ISBN 1-74076-034-4; viii + 176 pages, figures, maps, photographs, notes, bibliography. A$49.50 (includes GST). When Australian administration was extended through the relatively poorly known highlands of New Guinea after the Second World War, it wasn't long before the first wave of ethnographers followed in the patrol officers' wake. The region became a testing ground for some of the day's latest anthropological ideas, and many viewed the highlands as a laboratory for ethnographic analysis. A number of coordinated research programs were launched, and none was more ambitious than A P Vayda's project on "Human Ecology in the New Guinea Rainforest." Set among the Maring of the Jimi and Simbai Valleys, the project gave rise to a number of studies of the relation of the Maring to their environment, including Roy Rappaport's famous Pigs for the Ancestors (1968). Trained both as an anthropologist and geographer, Bill Clarke joined the project in 1964. Originally brought in with fellow geographer John M Street, Clarke undertook survey work to assess agricultural practices, land use, and the possible effects of resource constraints on Maring culture and behavior. He then stayed on among a small Maring group, the Bomagai-Angoiang, and completed the research that he published in his own book on the Maring, Place and People (1971). Clarke's stay among the Maring also yielded a large photographic archive. When the film began to deteriorate in the 1990s, he began salvaging his photographs with digital technology, a process that triggered many of the memories he recalls in this book, written nearly four decades after his original visit. True to its title, the book's organization is eccentric—a cross between a glossy picture book and a collection of short ethnographic notes. It has upwards of sixty color plates, mostly of the Bomagai-Angoiang. The photos are often striking, but the tone is unspectacular and quiet, the collection offering a combination of individual portraits, scenes from everyday life, and landscape shots illustrating the context of Maring livelihood. This works well to foster a mood of nostalgia for a past marked by subsistence affluence and few of the troubles that fill accounts of PNG life today. Each photograph is paired with a page of text. Sometimes Clarke is content to simply describe the photograph, place it in context, and offer a few relevant observations, as when he tells us that a raised cooking platform is more convenient but less efficient than an earth oven (32), or that ringworm can render an otherwise pretty young woman unattractive to potential suitors (78). Occasionally, especially at the beginning of the book, he rhetorically addresses his comments to particular individuals whose photos appear on the facing pages. More often, however, he uses the photographs as points of departure for reflections that tack back and forth between academic debates and contemporary concerns about the environment, [End Page 176] development, and the situation of the Maring and people like them. Melanesianists will recognize certain themes that reprise some of Clarke's contributions to earlier ethnographic discussions, such as his argument that episodes of madness in the New Guinea highlands often have a theatrical quality in which temporarily crazy individuals and their neighbors seem to be in cahoots with one another (124). Beyond that, much of the book can be read as a relaxed but pointed conversation with other Maring ethnographers (Roy Rappaport, Georgeda Buchbinder, Chris Healey, Edward LiPuma, and A P Vayda) concerning their overlapping projects. By far the most important talking point is the significance ofenvironmental limitations in understanding Maring culture. One of Clarke's key contributions to ecological anthropology was a debunking of the notion of "carrying capacity," a seemingly hard-edged concept that proved to be as mushy as they come. His work among the Maring and other New Guinea peoples showed that local productive systems are extremely elastic because people have a large repertoire of techniques of intensification that can effectively push back apparent...

KIND OF MAN ARE YOU?: Beckettian Anthropology, Cultural Authenticity, and Irish Identity

Situating Beckett's writing in relation to anthropological accounts of Ireland, this article examines how his postcolonial parody of ethnographic discourse serves to critique the notion of cultural authenticity. Since the late nineteenth-century anthropological representations, from A.C. Haddon's studies for The Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland to Conrad Arensberg's ethnographies of western Ireland, had incorporated native culture into a fundamentally primitivist perspective. In , however, Beckett revises this perspective to offer overtly constructed images of authentic Irishness, which refuse the hegemonic modes of cultural identification and epistemological mastery implicit in more conventional anthropological representations of Ireland.

Stories from the Margins: Toward a More Inclusive British Columbia Historiography

Abstract Drawing on the oral narratives of Okanagan storyteller Harry Robinson (1900-1990), this article challenges historians, folklorists, and others to consider how the early Boasian ethnographic archive has shaped our understanding of Aboriginal historical consciousness. At every turn, Robinson challenges the archive’s fixation on a static Golden Age Past. Robinson’s Coyote, for example, is important not for what he represents in the deep past, but for his fluid relationships with non-Aboriginal peoples from the beginning of time to the present. Taking its lead from scholars such as Charles Briggs and Richard Bauman, the article argues for the need to refocus attention on Aboriginal interpretations of the recent past, paying close attention to what ethnographic discourse has excluded and why. It concludes that what we have inherited from the Boasian archive may reveal more about dominant discourses of imperial accommodation and material power than about the living Aboriginal discourses of its times.

Death and Celebration among Muslim Women: A Case Study from Pakistan

After September 11 2001 questions about the nature and society of Islam were asked all over the world. Unfortunately in the rush to provide answers inadequate and even distorted explanations were provided. Muslim groups like the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan with their brutal ways came to symbolise Islam. The need to understand society through a diachronic and in-depth study was thus even more urgent. The following work is an attempt to explain how Muslims organise their lives through an examination of rituals conducted by women. This particularistic account has far-reaching ramifications for the study of Muslim society.This article seeks to contribute to the general debate on Islamic societies. In particular it contributes to the ethnographic discussion on the Pukhtun. First, it seeks to establish the distinctive sociality of Pukhtun wealthy women or Bibiane in terms of their participation, within and beyond the household, in gham-khadi festivities, joining them with hundreds of individuals from different families and social backgrounds. Second, the article makes a case for documenting the lives of this grouping of elite South Asian women, contesting their conventional representation as idle by illustrating their commitment to various forms of work within familial and social contexts. Third, it describes the segregated zones of gham-khadi as a space of female agency. Reconstructing the terms of this agency helps us to revise previous anthropological accounts of Pukhtun society, which project Pukhtunwali in predominantly masculine terms, while depicting gham-khadi as an entirely feminine category. Bibiane's gham-khadi performances allow a reflection upon Pukhtunwali and wider Pukhtun society as currently undergoing transformation. Fourth, as a contribution to Frontier ethnography, the arguments in this article lay especial emphasis on gham-khadi as a transregional phenomenon, given the relocation of most Pukhtun families to the cosmopolitan capital Islamabad. Since gham-khadi is held at families' ancestral homes (kille-koroona), new variations and interpretations of conventional practices penetrate to the village context of Swat and Mardan. Ceremonies are especially subject to negotiation as relatively young convent-educated married Bibiane take issue with their ‘customs’ (rewaj) from a scriptural Islamic perspective. These contradictions are being increasingly articulated by the female graduates of an Islamabad-based reformist religious school, Al-Huda. Al-Huda, part of a broader regional and arguably national movement of purist Islamization, attempts to apply Quranic and hadith prophetic teaching to everyday life. This reform involves educated elite and middle-class women. These women actively impart Islamic ways of living to family members across metropolitan–rural boundaries. The school's lectures (dars, classes) provide a basis for questioning ‘customary’ or Pukhtun life-cycle practices, authorizing some Bibiane to amend visiting patterns in conformity to the Quran. The manipulation of life-cycle commemorations by elite and middle-class women as a vehicle of change, Islamization and a particular mode of modernity furthermore becomes significant in the light of recent socio-political Islamic movements in post-Taliban Frontier Province. More broadly, the article contributes to various sociological and anthropological topics, notably the nature and expression of elite cultures and issues of sociality, funerals and marriage, custom and religion, space and gender, morality and reason, and social role and personhood within the contexts of Middle-Eastern and South Asian Islam.

Stories from the Margins: Toward a More Inclusive British Columbia Historiography

Drawing on the oral narratives of Okanagan storyteller Harry Robinson (1900–1990), this article challenges historians, folklorists, and others to consider how the early Boasian ethnographic archive has shaped our understanding of Aboriginal historical consciousness. At every turn, Robinson challenges the archive's fixation on a static Golden Age Past. Robinson's Coyote, for example, is important not for what he represents in the deep past, but for his fluid relationships with non-Aboriginal peoples from the beginning of time to the present. Taking its lead from scholars such as Charles Briggs and Richard Bauman, the article argues for the need to refocus attention on Aboriginal interpretations of the recent past, paying close attention to what ethnographic discourse has excluded and why. It concludes that what we have inherited from the Boasian archive may reveal more about dominant discourses of imperial accommodation and material power than about the living Aboriginal discourses of its times.

Sound Memory: Paris Street Cries in Balzac's Pere Goriot

At the heart of Le Père Goriot, on the eve of one of "les jours les plus extraordinaires de l'histoire de la maison" (3:91),1 is an episode in which Madame Vauquer's boarders, flush with Bordeaux wine, recite and bellow the cries of Parisian street peddlers at dinner. Rastignac has apparently committed himself to two mutually exclusive romantic plots, either of which would secure his fortune, by both courting Victorine Taillefer and accepting Goriot's offer of a garçonnière. That night, Taillefer fils will be murdered, enabling Rastignac to obtain Victorine's dowry and share the profits with Vautrin, the mastermind behind the deal. This will be Vautrin's last meal at the Pension Vauquer before he is unmasked and arrested as Trompe-la-Mort. At this moment, as each intrigue is wound tighter, it may seem odd that the lodgers are imitating street peddlers, those itinerant merchants who circulated among the faubourgs crying out their wares. Yet this short scene, which stages Vautrin's relationship to the other main characters, relates to a long tradition of discourse on street cries dating back to the Middle Ages. Representations of street cries had renewed appeal in the mid- to late-nineteenth-century writings of, among others, Jo–seph Mainzer and Victor Fournel. Seen in this broader context and in the context of Balzac's other references to modern Paris, the street cries in Le Père Goriot draw out the novel's ethnographic discussion of the sounds and class dynamics characteristic of early-nineteenth-century Paris. Like the ethnographic literature with which it shares a common interest in the crieurs de Paris as expressions of Parisian identity, Honoré de Balzac's novel reconstructs a folkloric aural past and shows the extent to which sound defines identity. From the Middle Ages onward, chapmen or colporteurs traveled from village to village advertising their wares in the streets. Each trade [End Page 67] had a distinctive cry, a combination of words and characteristic tune, such that buyers could identify the itinerant merchant by a sound marker; however, street criers are frequently conflated into a broad category of peddlers. Although originally colporteur signified the official profession of the itinerant vendor of broadsheets (papiers volants) and images, the word came to designate all hawkers.2 By the eighteenth century, colporteurs were viewed with increased suspicion, because they sold goods illegally, sold defective merchandise, or spread malicious and subversive information, and laws were created to regulate hawking.3 The evolution of street criers' representation parallels the sedentary bourgeois' increased suspicion toward lower-class transience, marginality and criminality. Street cries eventually become a metonym for the working class as a whole, now defined by raucousness and criminality as opposed to bourgeois silence and respectability. The Cris de Paris refer both to the historical practice of peddling and to an art (either written, visual or aural) form that dates back to Guillaume de la Villeneuve's thirteenth-century poem "Les Crieries de Paris," and to sixteenth-century woodcuts.4 A modern revival of interest in the Cris de Paris from as early as the 1820s coincided with a gradual decline in the practice. As Balzac and Fournel were keenly aware, the reorganization of space following the urban renewal begun under Napoleon I and spearheaded by Baron Haussmann in the 1850s was changing sound culture, and street criers were increasingly confined to the older neighborhoods of Paris. Their perceived disappearance, and their concomitant association with Vieux Paris, was likely what motivated nineteenth-century writers engaged in Parisian ethnography. These ethnographers drew on the genre set out in Louis-Sébastien Mercier's Tableau de Paris to document their societies and capture what was new and changing. Balzac heeded this documentary impulse by contributing to an evolving body of littérature pano–ramique5; moreover, his novels, especially Le Père Goriot, can be productively read as a folkloric record or a literary ethnography...

Toward a Cultural Topography of Cave Use in East Timor: A Preliminary Study

In his seminal work on the archaeology of East Timor, Ian Glover (1986) notes that there appeared to be little archaeological evidence for change in the nature of cave use as a focus for settlement, despite the subsistence changes that occurred with the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture. Looking to the ethnographic record for hunter-gatherer groups, he found little evidence to support the expectation that caves served as "permanent home bases" and commented that "at a time when stable village settlements existed in Timor it is inevitable that the caves provide an even more biased sample of the total Timorese way of life . . ." (1986 : 206). In this paper we revisit the issue of contemporary cave occupation in East Timor with the purpose of providing a more detailed ethnographic discussion of the caves' various uses and meanings. These encompass both the sorts of secular uses described by Glover as well as the social status of caves as sacred or in other ways significant natural formations in the cultural topography of local and national landscapes. The implications some of these observations on contemporary cave use hold for the interpretation of the archaeological record are briefly explored. We also review the sparse literature on contemporary cave use for tropical and tropical semi-arid regions and conclude that the notions of "permanent home cases" and "stable village settlements" are probably not very meaningful, either in contemporary horticultural or past hunter-gatherer contexts.

Exit Noise Summer Fest: Explaining the audience in ethnographic discourse

In Ethnology, studying festivals is a relevant activity since it could enlighten a number of complex cultural and social processes. The festivals represent public events, public ceremonies, cluster of rituals and produce many symbols, and as such, they are in fact a creative reflection of a society. In this paper, we analyze the Exit Noise Summer Fest, the biggest music festival in SE Europe. The aim of the analysis is to gain understanding of the cultural event of this kind and its protagonists, namely, the audience. Shedding a light to a music spectacle, from a standpoint of social and symbolic communication, directs to a different perspective in reading of rituals, communities zones, and semantic constructions of noise and body in the center of ritual behaviors. The research shows that the music experience and atmosphere of the celebration, though having somewhat unclear ritual borderline and zone, are compatible with the daily culture and social processes, in which the event is created and further reflects itself through various mediums.

Frontiers of Language and Frontiers of Narrative

The status of the French language, we know, varies from country to country and depends on whether it is a mother tongue, an official language, one of common usage or one of culture. Francophone literatures share the fact that they are young literatures and their writers find themselves at crossroads. l Questions of representation thus take on a special importance, one which we would be wrong to attribute to any linguistic essentialism, but which must rather be seen as a desire to explore the language afresh, going beyond simple ethnographic discourse. This is a phenomenon I refer to as the writer s supra-consciousness [surconscience linguistique]. In fact, I believe that the common denominator of the so-called emerging cultures, especially in French, is to embed in any discussion of identity, a reflection on language and the ways in which relations between language and are expressed in varying contexts. The complexity of these links, usually involving a degree of conflict and competition, among one or more languages creates this supraconsciousness to which numerous writers have borne testimony in a variety of ways. Writing thus becomes a veritable speech act. Beyond simple modes of integrating the oral in the written or mimetic representations of social speech, the state of a itself is revealed, its integration/definition of codes and finally a reflection on its nature and functions. To varying degrees then, supra-consciousness affects francophone writers in literatures labeled by turns regional, minority, or (perhaps even) minor as understood by Deleuze and Guattari according to a free interpretation of Kafka: literature created by a minority in the language of a majority. While it cannot be applied indiscriminately to all French-language literatures and may even appear suspect in some regards (How, for

The Uncontrollable Afterlives of Ethnography

How does the work of ethnographers contribute to policies they did not anticipate, policies they may even abhor? This article explores the ways 19th-century Europeans who would never have considered themselves as policymakers or even policy wonks – writers, artists, missionaries, and ethnographers – influenced colonial ‘native policy’. The article focuses on the case of precolonial European representations of Polynesia (Samoa in particular), tracing the effects of these discourses on the foundational process of colonial state formation in German Samoa after 1900. German colonialism in China and Southwest Africa is also discussed. Both the form and the content of ethnographic discourse influenced colonial interventions, even if these effects were dependent on a contingent array of other determinants. The conclusion discusses various ways in which ethnographers can try to see that their writings are not enrolled into political projects to which they might object.