Panel 3: Ethnographic description and repatriation: usability and
creativity
Tuesday 5th July, 9am – 12.30pm
Convenor: Lissant Bolton
What are the uses of anthropological or social science descriptions as
understood by the subjects of ethnographic research? In what ways can
these kinds of descriptions fit into people’s own projects, be made useful
or useable? Should social scientists have this engaged focus? What other
forms can description take, and how do they intersect with anthropological
description. Can ethnographic writing be theorised as engagement.
Introductory comments (9am)
Lissant Bolton (9.10am)
Forms of knowledge: repatriating/constituting ethnographic description
in Vanuatu, South Pacific
Abstract:
Ethnographic description is itself part of a (western, academic) knowledge
system. As the goal of anthropological research, it is consituted by a
series of theoretical understandings, and takes a specific intellectual
form. Repatriating ethnographic description can involve a process of
translation and negotiation between divergent knowledge systems. In
Vanuatu, knowledge can be bought and traded, and there are complex systems
of rights which determine who may know things. In response to the cultural
and linguistic complexities of this small nation, the Vanuatu Cultural
Centre has developed an extension worker program, which trains and
encourages indigenous scholars to document and to revive local knowledge
and practice through the archipelago. This programme has negotiated not
only the diverse knowledge systems of the archipelago, but also distinct
gender differences in the way in which knowledge is spoken and practiced.
This paper discusses some of the negotiations necessary to the
repatriation of ethnographic description in Vanuatu.
Bio:
Lissant Bolton is Curator of the Pacific and Australian collections at
the British Museum. She has worked in Vanuatu, South Pacific since 1989,
and is the author of 'Unfolding the Moon: Extending Kastom to Women in
Vanuatu' (University of Hawaii Press, 2003). She has also published both
on the anthropology of Vanuatu and on issues relating to museums and
indigenous people. She is an advisor to the Vanuatu Cultural Centre,
working with ni-Vanuatu women concerned to record, and to sustain, women's
knowledge and practice through the country.
Mark Harris (9.40am)
Recovering the history of peasantries in the Brazilian Amazon, and
some of its problems
Abstract:
This presentation considers two ways of mobilising the past amongst
riverine peasants in the Brazilian Amazon. The first concerns my own use
of unpublished documents in reconstructing a massive rebellion that took
hold of the region in the mid to late 1830s. This project was prompted by
one of my main informants who wanted me to write a ‘real history of
peasants’. In the contrast, the second examines the reclaiming of the
indigenous Amerindian identities of peasants living in the Tapajós valley
of the Lower Amazon in order to assert secure collective land rights.
These identities are essentially derived from the ethnic terms found in
colonial documents, predating the rebellion by some one hundred years. At
the centre of the presentation is the question of how anthropologists,
historians, and other outsiders such as NGO personnel, know their concerns
match those of the people they work with and for. What are the culturally
specific forms of social memory in these peasant societies and how can
academics appreciate the non-written arts of generating knowledge? My aim
is to challenge the hubris that has accompanied such efforts in the
Brazilian Amazon. In opposition to calls in anthropology for more and
better theory, I argue what is needed is more and better ethnographic
descriptions in order to overcome the hubristic tendency.
Bio:
Mark Harris has carried out fieldwork with peasant river dwellers in
the Brazilian Amazon. Recently he started archival research on the region,
focusing on the origins of a massive rebellion in the 1830s. His interests
are in partnering knowledge and history, hybridity and religion. His
publications include 'Life on the Amazon' (Oxford, 2000), 'Some other
Amazonians' (edited with Stephen Nugent, London, 2004), 'The child in the
city' (edited with Anna Grimshaw, Manchester, 2000), 'Teaching rites and
wrongs' (edited with David Mills, Birmingham, 2004).
Harri Englund (10.10am)
Ethnographic description as witnessing: engaging with ‘Human Rights’
in Malawi
Abstract:
Contemporary sociocultural anthropology involves a variety of methods
and procedures that seek to correct the discipline’s earlier tendencies
towards reification and detachment. Collaborative Anthropology and Public
Anthropology are currently popular labels for diverse intellectual and
political standpoints. After a synopsis of these concerns, this paper
considers some of the challenges that a strong official interest in Human
Rights in Malawi presents to the ethnographer. After three decades of
autocratic rule, Malawi has pursued a model of liberal democracy in which
various authorities assert civil and political freedoms as the essence of
Human Rights. The ethnographer’s dilemma has been to engage with this
apparent consensus over the meaning and scope of Human Rights. While
endorsed by politicians, NGOs and donor agencies, rights as freedoms
appear confining, even meaningless, to the country’s impoverished
majority. The paper examines how ethnographic description can become a
form of witnessing that exposes highly particular interests in apparently
universal dispositions. Complicity and self-indulgence, the two aspects of
ethnographic witnessing that have so far received attention among
anthropologists, turn out to be somewhat limiting notions when this mode
of engagement is explored more fully. The paper concludes by arguing that
the burden of witnessing can also be imposed on the ethnographer as a key
existential and moral condition of knowledge production. Bio:
Harri Englund
began his ethnographic work in southern Africa by living with Mozambican
refugees in the Malawi borderland in 1992-93. His relationships with
villagers on both sides of the border have been sustained through several
subsequent visits. His more recent ethnographic work has included, since
1996, research in a township of Malawi’s capital, among Human Rights NGOs
and in the Malawi Broadcasting Corporation. His books include From War
to Peace on the Mozambique-Malawi Borderland and the edited volumes
Rights and the Politics of Recognition in Africa and A Democracy of
Chameleons: Politics and Culture in the New Malawi. Tea (10.45am)
Soumhya Venkatesan (11.15am)
You are skilled, we are knowledgeable: description, creativity and
innovation in a ‘traditional Indian craft’
Abstract:
‘It is not easy to trace the origin of Pattamadai silk mats, a real work
of aesthetics rather than the vision of the mat-weaver.’
Syed Muthahar, “University bid to revive dying skill’ in The Hindu,
23/11/1995
The term ‘traditional Indian craft’ glosses a complex trope involving
material and discursive practices and objects, and, visions of the future
and the past. This paper focuses on the making of craft mats in a South
Indian town. Arguing that weavers who make the mats are only one kind of
producer involved in their existence, the papers seeks to identify the
others, at the same time focusing on the ways in which different inputs
into the mats are masked by the overarching yet amorphous category of
traditional Indian crafts. It asks how the mats are described at various
points in their social lives and what different ethnographic approaches–
whether concentrating on recovering an original meaning or production
context; or thinking about the nexus between power and knowledge - can
contribute to the understanding of their place they occupy in local,
national and international networks. The paper hopes to emphasise the
importance of a process-centred description, which focuses on objects not
as exemplars but as things that engender relations between socially and
physically distant people, and as instantiations of social relations,
tensions and collusions.
Bio:
Soumhya Venkatesan’s research among Muslim craft weavers in Pattamadai
town South India involved learning how to weave the mats for which the
weavers are known throughout India. This has given her a unique
perspective from which to think about the making of the Indian craft
object. Soumhya’s publications include Crafting culture: Pattamadai
mats from South India (2002). This accompanied an exhibition she
curated at the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and
Anthropology. She is currently preparing her doctoral thesis for
publication. Soumhya will be leaving King’s College, Cambridge, where she
is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate in Anthropology, for Manchester
University to take up a lectureship in the Department of Social
Anthropology. David Mosse (11.45am)
Anti-social Anthropology: objectivity, objection and the ethnography
of public policy and professional communities
Abstract:
This paper will focus on the ethnographic analysis of powerful
institutions, drawing on the Dr Mosse's research on international aid and
development projects. David Mosse will show how influential
informants sometimes object to ethnographic accounts, resist
anthropological boundary making, and attempt to unpack academic knowledge
back into relationships.
Bio:
Dr David Mosse is senior lecturer in social anthropology at the School of
Oriental and African Studies. He is author of The Rule of Water:
statecraft, ecology and collective action and Cultivating Development and
has worked in development for Oxfam and the Department for International
Development.
Perspectives on the session (12.15pm)
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