Ethnographic Imagination Research Articles

Out in Africa: same-sex desire in sub-Saharan literatures & cultures

Homosexuality was and still is thought to be quintessentially 'un-African'. Yet in this book Chantal Zabus examines the anthropological, cultural and literary representations of male and female same-sex desire in a pan-African context from the nineteenth century to the present. Reaching back to early colonial contacts between Europe and Africa, and covering a broad geographical spectrum, along a north-south axis from Mali to South Africa and an east-west axis from Senegal to Kenya, here is a comparative approach encompassing two colonial languages (English and French) and some African languages. 'Out in Africa' charts developments in Sub-Saharan African texts and contexts through the work of 7 colonial writers and some 25 postcolonial writers. These texts grow in complexity from roughly the 1860s, through the 1990s with the advent of queer theory, up to 2010. The author identifies those texts that present, in a subterraneous way at first and then with increased confidence, homosexuality-as-an-identity rather than an occasional or ritualized practice, as was the case in the early ethnographic imagination. The work sketches out an evolutionary pattern in representing male and female same-sex desire in the novel and other texts, as well as in the cultural and political contexts that oppose such desires. Chantal Zabus holds the IUF [Institut universitaire de France] Chair of Comparative Postcolonial Literatures and Gender Studies at the University Paris 13 and at the Universities Sorbonne-Paris-Cite, France I. She is author of 'Between Rites and Rights'; 'The African Palimpsest: Indigenization of Language in the West African Europhone Novel', and 'Tempests after Shakespeare'.She is presently Editor-in-Chief of the on-line journal 'Postcolonial Text'.

Spectacles of Ethnographic and Historical Imaginations: Kamatapur Movement and the Rajbanshi Quest to Rediscover their Past and Selves

India since independence has experienced a series of movements based on “identity politics” demanding separate states and reorganization of its internal state boundaries. Much of the contemporary discussions find uneven development and unequal access to power accelerated by regionalism and linguistic fanatism responsible for these movements. Through the study of social movements of Koch–Rajbanshi people in North Bengal, the paper argues that these movements display a timeless quest and aspirations of people that are rooted in their deep sense of history. People's unique sense of history or “historical imaginations” are contextualized within the secular language of socio-economic injustices and socio-cultural differences celebrated in a spectacular manner through these movements marked by re-interpretation, re-writing of the past, real yet imagined, time bound yet eternal. Today the Koch–Rajbanshi people are creating a “new past” and an identity which is a blend of colonial ethnography on one hand and Rajbanshi mythographies on the other. The paper also questions the dichotomy that apparently exists between the past and the present.

Towards a theory of the rough ground: merging the policy and ethnographic frames of religion in the Kyrgyz Republic

Discussions of Islam present two analytical problems, one of interpretation and another of theory. Regarding interpretation, different frames – policy or ethnographic – for viewing religion influence our bias/understanding of religion and give us different senses of what ‘knowing’ the religion of a particular community means. The related issue is one of theory and connects to the problem of theorising movement: how people navigate their religious lives is not linear but much more random, related to events, and at times reified by (though always engaging with) the assumptions of policy agendas and the ethnographic imagination. Exploring implications that the policy and ethnographic frames have for Muslims in the Kyrgyz Republic, I argue that in synthesising the impact of different frames of analysis, a ‘theory of the rough ground’, while anything but neat, better portrays life as it is experienced locally.

Upon Provincialism: Southern Literature and National Periodical Culture, 1870–1900 by Bill Hardwig (review)

Reviewed by: Upon Provincialism: Southern Literature and National Periodical Culture, 1870–1900 by Bill Hardwig Mark Noonan Upon Provincialism: Southern Literature and National Periodical Culture, 1870–1900. By Bill Hardwig. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013. 192 pp. $49.50, $24.50. In the last twenty years, several scholarly books redirected the study of American literary regionalism. Richard Brodhead’s Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (1993) argued that the aim of regional writing was not so much to document the characteristics of any particular region or to “mourn lost cultures,” but to narrate a unified vision of modern nationhood. Stephanie Foote’s Regional Fictions: Culture and Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2001) asserted that regionalism offered a robust alternative to nationalism, helping the nation absorb and accept colorful local differences and markers of foreignness. Judith Fetterley’s and Majorie Pryse’s Writing Out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture (2003) claimed that the geographic determinism of the term regionalism had distracted readers from recognizing the form as “a location for critique and resistance,” often a uniquely feminist one. Another seminal work was Brad Evans’s Before Cultures: The Ethnographic Imagination in American Literature, 1865–1920 (2005), which emphasized the distinction between region and regionalism, the latter being a commodity that circulated, often in periodicals, and sought to glamorize ethnographic alterity and subcultures in new, “chic” ways. Adding to this list of groundbreaking works on regionalism, and building on its connection with periodicals, is Bill Hardwig’s Upon Provincialism: Southern Literature and National Periodical Culture, 1870–1900. The first aim of Hardwig’s book is to dismantle simplistic categories and canonical divisions that all too often limit our understanding of the actual literary landscape of a particular era and region. Focusing on the writings of George Washington Cable, Charles Chesnutt, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Lafcadio Hearn, Mary Noailles Murfee, and Thomas Nelson Page, Hardwig seeks to re-imagine regionalism as a highly porous genre whose meanings are linked closely with the editorial aims of the magazines in which they were originally published, as well as their intended audiences. These authors were often published in the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, and the Century, alongside William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and Henry James, at a time when the canon had not yet sorted writers as major or minor. Also significant was the inclusion of writings on the South in northern magazines for mostly upper-class readers. As Hardwig posits, local color writing was similar to travel writing about the South, in that readers of both genres sought the thrill of the exotic and the “authentic.” Yet what constituted authenticity proved difficult to discern. For example, Mary Noailles Murfee published her stories under the pseudonym Charles Egbert Craddock, depicting the rough and tumble world of Appalachian life. Murfee’s [End Page 100] stories were a sensation, but when the author came to the offices of the Atlantic Monthly, editors were stunned to find a “pleasant young lady” instead of a brawny, rough-necked male. When the author’s gender became known to the critical establishment, attention shifted from the verisimilitude of the tales to analyses of how a woman could write like a man. The confusion caused by Murfee’s charade came at a time of growing anxiety over changing definitions of race, gender, class, and culture. The unveiling of Charles Chesnutt’s race caused a similar commotion. Initially, his conjure stories had appeared in the Atlantic Monthly and were assumed to have been penned by a white writer in a realist vein. But when his race was revealed in the Bookman, he became a black writer whose anger suggested that he was not a realist writer at all but a propagandist, performing the role of spokesperson for his race. Chesnutt’s and Murfee’s writings were disruptive indeed, especially for elites who did not like their expectations being thwarted. By pairing Murfee and Chesnutt for analysis, Hardwig calls attention to the tendency in literary studies to overemphasize race and gender at the expense of other dynamic tensions latent in local color writing. In a similar vein, his work strives to resist traditional studies of...

Actor-Network Theory and the ethnographic imagination: An exercise in translation

The publication of Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to ActorNetwork-Theory (2005b) was a remarkable event, which capitalized on the steadily growing interest in the works of Latour, Callon, Law, Mol, and others assembled, willfully or not, under the label “Actor-Network Theory” (ANT). For those unfamiliar, Reassembling the Social charges that sociology’s over reliance on a particular metaphor of “the social” has blinded it from the much messier and heterogeneous practices of association that constantly make and remake what we have lazily come to think of as “society.” Turning towards its etymology, Latour defines “the social not as a special domain, a specific realm, or a particular sort of thing, but only as a very peculiar movement of re-association and reassembling” (7). Marshaling over two decades of research and theorizing—his own and that of his colleagues—Latour makes the call for carefully descriptive accounts of this movement. At times a polemic and sweeping broadside against what Latour dismissively calls “traditional” and “critical” sociology, at other times an accessible review of the ANT corpus, and still at others an elaboration of its “amodern” philosophical underpinnings, the book ends with what seems like false modesty:

The sound of street corner society: UK grime music as ethnography

This article explores the ways in which popular music can be linked to ethnography. While there is a tradition of connecting popular music with sociology, this article posits a further resonance that is not so much theoretical as methodological. The article suggests that forms of contemporary popular music parallel key facets of ethnography, not simply in terms of sociological analysis, but with regard to popular music as an ethnographic resource, as ‘data’, and as the reflexive expression of Paul Willis’ conception of the ‘ethnographic imagination’; and the article argues that contemporary British hip-hop in the form of ‘grime’ is a potent exemplar. This is due to the resolutely cultural, spatial nature of grime music: a factor that marks out grime as a distinctive musical genre and a distinctive ethnographic form, as it is an experientially rooted music about urban locations, made from within those urban locations.

Ethnographic imagination in the field of the prison

Ethnographic imagination in the field of the prison

Poiesis of Possibility: The Ethnographic Sensibilities of Ursula K. Le Guin

SUMMARY This article explores some of the ways Ursula Le Guin (daughter of famed anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber) uses ethnographic modes of writing and anthropological insights in her works of social science fiction. It is based on a close reading of her fiction and an e-interview with the author. While science fiction may seem a far cry from ethnography, careful attention to the critical functions of Le Guin's fiction can shed light on some of the underlying assumptions and implications of the ethnographic imagination and writing. As Le Guin herself has observed, anthropologists and novelists share common traits and often find themselves writing about similar things.

Mediations on Making Aaj Kaal

This article excavates a discussion on the mediations that informed the making of the film Aaj Kaal by Asian elders, in a project directed by Avtar Brah and coordinated by Jasbir Panesar with the film trainer Vipin Kumar. It brings this largely unknown and inventive film to the foreground of current developments in participative media research practices. The discussion explores the coming together of the ethnographic imagination and performative pedagogies during the course of an adult education community project centred on South Asian elders making a film. Collaborative dialogic encounters illuminate post-war British front rooms, the seaside and public spheres from what is usually an unlikely vantage point of view in public accounts.

In the contact zone: W. G. Sebald and the ethnographic imagination

In this essay, I address the question of Sebald’s interactions with ethnography from three interlinked perspectives. I begin by analysing Sebald’s reading of ethnographic texts in the 1970s and 1980s, using his own annotated copies of works by Claude Lévi-Strauss and Norbert Elias, and then situate this reading within the context of Sebald’s professional life during the same period. I go on to examine the comments on ethnography and related forms of representation that occur in Sebald’s literary criticism of the 1980s. These imply a critique of many of ethnography’s central practices: the ‘salvage paradigm’, the participant observer, and the effects of power produced by representing an unfamiliar Other to a metropolitan audience. I close by tracing the transformations of ethnographic discourse in ‘Max Ferber’ (the last story of Die Ausgewanderten / The Emigrants ( DA/TE)) and in The Rings of Saturn ( RS), and show that Sebald’s prose involves a partial adoption and partial critique of ethnographic representation.

Knocking on doors: recruitment and enrichment in a qualitative interview‐based study

This paper describes the process of recruiting participants for a qualitative interview‐based study by leafleting and door knocking. It is argued that door knocking can enrich and thicken research that usually takes place ‘behind closed doors’, enabling researchers to engage their ethnographic imaginations by observing neighbourhood interactions, familiarising themselves with the places their participants inhabit and through the embodied, sensory experience of walking itself. By treating the recruitment process as data, it is suggested that the door knocking researcher can ensure his/her individual participants are understood as connected to the wider social, physical and sensory environment they inhabit. Door knocking is also seen as enabling researchers to find interest in an element of the research process often viewed as a somewhat irksome means to an end.

Literature as laboratory: Hilda Kuper's factional representations of Swaziland

Anthropologists have long recognised the intersections between factual and fictional representations of other cultures, and have actively engaged in producing imaginative cultural translations alongside ethnographic accounts. This resulting ‘blurring of genres’ has also been investigated by anthropologists, but often at the expense of the imagined subject and the social, political, and cultural forces at work in the literary versions. Hilda Kuper's literary expression attests to how an anthropologist can negotiate the boundaries of science and art to produce a literature of protest that acknowledges the larger project of writing back to empire, engages with South African apartheid, and intervenes in the representation of Swaziland by earlier colonial and travel narratives by producing alternative visions that at once affirm and critique custom and tradition. At the same time, her fiction and drama betray the tensions at work in the ethnographic imagination.

The field as labyrinth: Exploring ethnographic practices through the works of Jorge Luis Borges

The brilliant short stories of the Argentinean author Jorge Louis Borges echo many of the themes raised through the ethnographic encounters of practicing anthropologists. Through the exploration of such questions as identity, memory, language, commensuration and human relationships, the characters invented by Borges continuously navigate new physical and intellectual landscapes. The following paper draws from several of Borges’ short stories, outlining how their themes and characters present useful allegories for scholars interested in exploring ethnographic imaginations. As an “armchair ethnographer,” Borges’ preoccupation with human endeavors towards greater understanding thus provides a unique and creative lens through which to consider the practical and ethical questions of ethnographic enterprises.

Portrait of a circus girl

Drawn from many months of ethnographic research with a classic European Circus in Switzerland, this narrative traces the author’s close contact and experience with one young circus woman over a 24-hour period. Through this brief portrait witnessing one particular individual’s story, larger themes — language, hierarchy, family, circus/town divides, belonging and exclusion, performance, gender roles, national identity, and more — all arise as key practices and performances for understanding the experience of European circus life. ‘Alessandra’ is a real person, a friend, and to those who know her in or out of the circus world, a compelling character. Not an explicit reflection on, nor analysis of, ethnographic experience, this ‘tale from the field’ is instead in-the-moment narration and commentary written to immerse the reader, engaging them in the ethnographic imagination, evoking lived experience, and inviting as many worthwhile questions as it may answer.

Comment: World without Art

Comment: World without Art

Out in Africa: Queer Desire in Some Anthropological and Literary Texts

We need to criss-cross queer theory with postcoloniality, in order to examine the phenomenon of those who are ‘out in Africa’. To date there have been only embryonic attempts to consider the literary representation of same-sex desire in a pan-African context.2 What is more, we lack a comparative approach to queer studies of African literatures, for research remains split between anglophone and francophone, let alone lusophone, studies, patterned on the colonial carving up of the African continent. Research has also privileged the colonial over the postcolonial period and male over female intimacies.3 It has therefore become crucial to identify those literary texts that present, in a subterranean way, homosexuality-as-an-identity rather than an occasional or ritualized practice, as was the case in the early ethnographic imagination. I have therefore attempted to place my analysis in the historical context of the dominant anthropological discourse and to sketch out an evolutionary pattern in representing male and female samesex desire in the novel while confining my scope to sub-Saharan Africa, even if Islamic homosexualities in the Maghreb and the Mashreq need to be addressed as well.4 Homosexuality is still thought to be not only ‘un-African’ but also a highly suspicious import from the deviant West. As a case in point, in the wake of the trial for sodomy of the first president of Zimbabwe, Canaan Banana, his successor Robert Mugabe spoke of homosexuals in his 2002 electioneering speech as ‘mad person[s]’ who will be sent to jail: ‘we don’t want to import it [homosexuality] to our country [Zimbabwe], we have our own culture, our own people’.5 Whereas Dennis Altman contended

“If you can walk down the street and recognise the difference between cast iron and wrought iron, the world is altogether a better place”: Being Enthusiastic about Industrial Archaeology

“If you can walk down the street and recognise the difference between cast iron and wrought iron, the world is altogether a better place”: Being Enthusiastic about Industrial Archaeology

Constance Fenimore Woolson's Anthropology of Desire

Constance Fenimore Woolson's Anthropology of Desire Neill Matheson Constance Fenimore Woolson has increasingly been recognized as a subtle and acute observer of cultural norms for gender and sexuality in late nineteenth-century America. Scholars have noted her ambivalent representations of heterosexual love and her recurrent interest in figures of social marginality and isolation: "spinsters," foundlings, outcasts.1 Her fiction often avoids conventional marriage plots, focusing on less socially visible desires, passions, and affinities. According to her friend Henry James, Woolson was "interested in general in secret histories, in the 'inner life' of the weak, the superfluous, the disappointed, the bereaved, the unmarried" (272), sympathetically exploring identities that have been defined by their failure to conform successfully to conventional middle-class values. What has received less attention, though, is how these thematic and cultural interests are inflected by racial and cultural difference, especially in her early local color fiction, written mostly in the mid-1870s. Her story "Felipa" is a particularly significant example: Relegating marriage to the status of subplot, this text explores same-sex love within the context of its young orphan protagonist's ultimately failed or refused socialization into normative femininity and heterosexuality. The story has been read as an important early expression of emergent ideas of sexual inversion, in which nonnormative sexuality is understood in terms of one sex taking on the gender identity of the other—as illustrated by stereotypes of the mannish lesbian or effeminate male homosexual.2 I argue, however, that the ideas about gender and sexuality that Woolson explores in "Felipa" are not reducible to the theory of inversion and can be fully understood only by taking into account the story's engagement with cultural alterity. The story's ethnographic dimension, its invocation of an imagined primitive culture, has received relatively little critical scrutiny, especially in relation to its more salient representation of nonnormative sexuality. Woolson projects a kind of magical thinking about sexuality onto its foundling [End Page 48] protagonist, whose heterodox beliefs blur distinctions between masculine and feminine, white and nonwhite, even self and others. These textual meanings become more legible within the context of nineteenth century anthropology. I address them alongside the work of the evolutionary anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor, who provided highly influential theories of such relevant concepts as animism, fetishism, and idol worship. Anthropological constructions of primitive culture have substantial affinities with late-nineteenth-century American literary writing, particularly local color writing, with its interest in regional and cultural difference. Recent scholarly work has demonstrated that American regionalist writing in the decades after the Civil War shares significant aims and interests with nineteenth-century anthropology, taking part in a parallel exploration of new ways of thinking about race and culture.3 More specifically, the ethnographic imagination of literary regionalism complicates American histories of sexuality, loosely borrowing anthropological notions of primitive culture to fantasize about alternatives to prevailing cultural norms for sexuality and gender. Though anthropologists' investigations into the marriage customs or sexual practices of putatively primitive societies certainly privileged Western models, they also confronted readers with other ways of organizing sexual relations, making it possible to think of Western institutions as not simply natural and inevitable. Exploring the ethnographic imagination of local color writing—its fictional staging of encounters across cultural or racial difference—potentially brings to light literary attempts to re-imagine sexual desire, apart not only from normative heterosexuality, but also from such emerging scientific frameworks as inversion. "Felipa" invokes ethnographic signs of primitive culture, mapping them onto the figure of a child not yet socialized into the norms and values of white middle class American culture. This remarkable story is well worth critical scrutiny in its own right, but I approach it as a representative text in which nineteenth-century anthropological theories and new ideas about sexuality converge in particularly rich and intriguing ways. The story's complex engagement with these broader cultural discourses becomes fully apparent only through close attention to the specific details and nuances of its language. "Felipa" offers a subtle but relatively expansive literary exploration of the intersection between ethnography and nonnormative sexuality. In many ways, the text enforces discriminations between white and nonwhite, cosmopolitan and primitive, masculine and feminine, proper...

Before Cultures: The Ethnographic Imagination in American Literature, 1865–1920.

Before Cultures: The Ethnographic Imagination in American Literature, 1865–1920.

Book Review: The Ethnographic Imagination

Book Review: The Ethnographic Imagination