Table Of ContentBeyond Textuality
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DE
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Approaches to Semiotics
120
Editorial Committee
Thomas A. Sebeok
Roland Posner
Alain Rey
Mouton de Gruyter
Berlin · New York
Beyond Textuality
Asceticism and Violence in
Anthropological Interpretation
Edited by
Gilles Bibeau
Ellen Corin
Mouton de Gruyter
Berlin · New York 1995
Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague)
is a Division of Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin.
© Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the
ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication-Data
Beyond textuality : asceticism and violence in anthropological
interpretation / edited by Gilles Bibeau, Ellen Corin.
p. cm. - (Approaches to semiotics ; 120)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 3-11-013889-1 (acid-free paper)
1. Culture — Semiotic models. 2. Anthropology in literature.
3. Anthropology - Philosophy. 4. Participant observation -
Philosophy. I. Bibeau, Gilles, 1940- . II. Corin, Ellen E.
III. Series.
GN357,B46 1994
301 -dc20 94-36450
CIP
Die Deutsche Bibliothek - Cataloging-in-Publication-Data
Beyond textuality : asceticism and violence in anthropological
interpretation / ed. by Gilles Bibeau ; Ellen Corin. - Berlin ; New
York : Mouton de Gruyter, 1994
(Approaches to semiotics ; 120)
ISBN 3-11-013889-1
NE: Bibeau, Gilles [Hrsg.]; GT
© Copyright 1994 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., D-10785 Berlin.
All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book
may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, includ-
ing photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publisher.
Printing: Gerike GmbH, Berlin. - Binding: Lüderitz & Bauer, Berlin. Printed in Germany.
Preface
In presenting this volume of anthropological essays under the title of Beyond
textuality. Asceticism and violence in anthropological interpretation, the edi-
tors want to translate the basic ambiguity experienced today by anthropolo-
gists about the identity of their discipline, as well as the uncertainty sur-
rounding the boundaries of the territory covered by ethnography. Anthro-
pology has recently entered into an era of self-questioning regarding the spe-
cificity of its own methods and its autonomy as a discipline within the huma-
nities and the social sciences. A deep current of interrogation lies at the con-
fluence of three concerns that initially developed separately as answers to
specific questions but which since seem to have merged together and created
the context of uncertainty in which many anthropologists presently practice
their discipline.
A few words about these three sources of concern will permit us to put into
perspective the project that lies behind this volume and will help to clarify its
architecture:
(1) Contact with numerous North American and European graduate students
who have recently entered the discipline of anthropology has shown that
many have been led to explore literature and drama by prestigious
authors, such as Geertz, who define culture as an assemblage of texts and
who transform ethnography into an exercise of reading. In this context
interpretive anthropology and its derivatives have focused on textual
modes of understanding and have ultimately led to the equation of
textualization and ethnography. In the footsteps of literary criticism and
practitioners of comparative literature it has become fashionable to look
for multiple meanings, for fuzzy logic and liminal categories, for internal
disorders and more stable arrangements in the process of reading semio-
tic cultural systems and making them intelligible.
(2) Concurrently, many young ethnographers feel that the practice of their
craft should involve more commitment, more authenticity, less self-
deception and less remoteness from lived experience; the inescapable
involvement of the ethnographer within the human world in which he/she
is a participant observer transforms the ethnographer into an actor who is
engaged in the local drama, a reality that makes any pretense to pure
VI Preface
objectivity spurious. In this context, observation from a distance is trans-
formed into the participatory experience of partnership. The position of
the participant observer shifts from the periphery to the center of the
stage upon which the ethnographer becomes a dominant character and
ultimately, the interpretation of others is subsumed within a discourse
which deals with the "/" of the ethnographer. The cultural facts which are
submitted to the interpretation - interpretandum - in classical ethno-
graphy, are displaced by the eminence of the interpretive subject - inter-
pretans. In addition, so-called post-modern anthropology has gone so far
in this direction that the act of writing, the resulting ethnographic texts
and the anthropologist qua author become, in certain cases, the very
center of the whole anthropological enterprise.
(3) This new style of ethnography has led many anthropologists to find re-
fuge in schools of thought that criticize objectivism, subject/object
dichotomies and distantiation. Traditional questions addressing cultural
translations and interpretations made by anthropologists have been re-
phrased in a radical way: what is the nature of the presumed gap existing
between the interpretations made by informants and the interpretive con-
structions made by anthropologists? Can anthropological interpretations
be valid if they imply meanings of which the actors are unaware? How do
anthropologists move from the local knowledge of complex cultural
meanings to their expression in ethnographic texts? And more generally,
what is the validity of ethnographic interpretation and on what kinds of
considerations can anthropologists rely when they want to construct
reliable and valid frameworks for interpretation?
These three movements of thought (culture defined as texts; the anthropolo-
gist as author; and the translational process from ethnographic data to mean-
ing) have converged at the heart of anthropological work to raise explicit
fundamental problems of the reliability of our ethnographic interpretations.
Are we in our ethnographies writing about the people we claim to be actually
writing about, or are we rather projecting ourselves in the forefront as origi-
nal writers or as partners in debates whose terms are imposed by the fashions
of intellectual circles? The editors of this volume are convinced that it is high
time for anthropologists to clarify the methods they use in the translational
process that goes from collected data to meaning and interpretations.
This volume represents a collective effort made by a group of North
American and European anthropologists to critically assess the prevalent
conceptual frameworks and analytical instruments employed by contem-
porary anthropologists in their interpretation and translation of cultural facts.
Preface VII
As guidelines for systematically evaluating the conceptual and operational
value of dominant interpretive trends in today's anthropology and more
generally in contemporary humanities and social sciences, all contributors to
this volume have agreed to engage in a debate encompassing the two follow-
ing requisites.
First, each contributor explicitly states the key heuristic concepts that he
or she uses in passing from facts and local interpretations to his or her ethno-
graphic translation. Although we do not pretend to present a systematic and
critical review of all prevalent trends in interpretative and hermeneutic move-
ments, this book is intended to offer a solid discussion of the main analytical
frameworks presently used by anthropologists, these being philological
analysis combined with literary criticism, post-Saussurean trends in Con-
tinental semiology such as practiced by Barthes, Kristeva and Derrida,
historicized versions of classical structuralism, interpretive anthropology in
the Geertzian mode, the hermeneutics associated with Ricoeur and Gadamer,
hierarchical readings ά la Dumont, some revised Peircean semiotics, poly-
semic symbolic analysis and references to psychoanalytical principles of
interpretation.
A number of analytical concepts that anthropologists rely upon in their
interpretive work have been uprooted from their native soil in linguistics,
literature, history, philology, exegesis, psychoanalysis and philosophy. In
order to deal with problems arising from such eclectic selection of analytical
concepts taken out of their intellectual and philosophical traditions, each
contributor has been asked to present the larger movement of thought which
nourishes his or her own selection of heuristic and analytical concepts. Many
terms used in interpretative anthropology receive their full meaning only
when read against the background of the exegesis, philosophy, history,
linguistics and literature in which they have developed.
In addition, each contributor has been asked to apply the chosen analytical
instruments and key heuristic concepts to the interpretation of concrete
literary texts or social and cultural data. We decided to apply this procedure
in order to assess the operational value of the various interpretive methods
and to test their productivity as tools when they are handled by anthropol-
ogists. A classical Taoist text, a ritual song from India, a few verses of the
Book of Revelation, the ship journals of Captain Cook, the court accounts of
a trial for murder in the Solomon Islands, and the verbatim record of
dialogues and interviews performed during fieldwork constitute the six main
texts of this book. Each text focuses on the analysis of content and form with
the aim of elucidating their multi-level systems of meaning. In an effort to
move from the order of the text to the order of culture and with the explicit
VIII Preface
objective of demonstrating that there exists some discontinuity between
the hermeneutics of texts and the ethnographic interpretation of cultural data,
an equal number of papers (6) are dedicated to the analysis of various life-
cycle and spirit possession rituals as well as to divination procedures, areas
which form the most creative and most polysemic parts of any culture. We
are mainly concerned in this book with the questioning of the naively and
widely assumed continuity between the order of the text and the order of
culture.
Ethnographic interpretation is presented by the twelve contributors of this
volume as a systematic practice which challenges the dominant discourse
about the inevitability of subjectivism in interpretation, although no one goes
so far as to suggest the revival of ethnographic realism and positivistic
methods in the practice of anthropology. In contrast with the strict textualist
and subjectivist fashion which often reflects interpretive virtuosity in the
writing of ethnographies, the contributors remind their colleagues that the
construction of any ethnographic text should abide by some ascetic rigor;
and, contrary to positivist-minded scholars who pretend to save the scientific
character of anthropology from the dangers of interpretive and hermeneutic
chaos, the contributors insist that cultural institutions and texts both contain
sub-meanings which can be attained only when interpreters "do violence" to
the texts or to the cultural data that they analyse. The editors have expressed
their views in the introductory chapter about what reliability and validity
mean in the field of anthropology. Our positions, translated under the title of
"From submission to the text to interpretive violence" pervade the whole
volume, give coherence to its division in four parts, and weave together the
various contributions.
The idea of editing a volume in which European hermeneutics and North
American semiotic movements are pragmatically assessed in terms of their
operational value for the practice of anthropology, grew out of the circum-
stances in which the two editors practice their anthropological work. Ellen E.
Corin is a European-born Francophone doing socio-cultural psychiatric re-
search in an Anglophone and natural-science oriented environment at McGill
University, while Gilles Bibeau is a Canadian Francophone who has been
trained in several European countries and who currently works in medical
anthropology within a bilingual interuniversity group based in Montreal. The
two editors live in Montreal, a bilingual city, which has historically consti-
tuted a crucible for North American and European intellectual traditions.
Their daily practice of bilingualism has made them sensitive to the recent
process of integrating European, above all French, theoretical trends into
North American anthropological circles. Located as they are on the bound-
Preface IX
aries, they consider themselves to be in a good position to assess major
current trends typical of the interpretive movement in anthropology.
The intellectual atmosphere in which the anthropologists belonging to the
generation born in the forties were trained, including the promoters of all
variants of interpretive anthropology and the two editors of this volume, has
been marked by fundamental debates between Marxism and existentialism,
and between phenomenology and psychoanalysis. The powerful influence of
linguistics over large parts of the social sciences also affected the intellectual
atmosphere of this period as did a profound renewal of historical studies (the
Annates school, for example) and the development of new approaches to
literary criticism. While a large proportion of the social scientists in North
America were, during this same period, trying to bring their disciplines into
line with positivist requirements, their European colleagues were devoting
much time to theoretical discussions similar to those that Sartre and Ricoeur
conducted with Levi-Strauss in the early sixties or Gadamer and Habermas
in the late sixties. The success of structuralism, phenomenology and semio-
logy nourished a great skepticism about positivistic methods among Euro-
pean anthropologists of the sixties and seventies. This conjuncture may
explain why in France ethnology occupies a singular place which touches
both literature and philosophy, and also why the interpretive anthropology of
France with its anti-positivist tone, has preceded that of North America. In
this context, it is not surprising to discover that leading protagonists of
textualism such as James Clifford, Paul Rabinow and Vincent Crapanzano
were strongly influenced by their French colleagues. One can imagine that
Roland Barthes may have had the French ethnologists in mind when he wrote
in his autobiographical portrait: "de tous les discours savants, c'est l'ethno-
logique qui m'apparait le plus proche d'une fiction" (1975: 87) [of all learn-
ed discourses, the ethnological one seems to me the closest to fiction].
Whether intentional or not, most new orientations in North American
interpretive anthropology have links with intellectual movements which
began in France or in Germany. In order to better understand the ways that
ideas and concepts circulate about intellectual traditions and how they may
travel from one continent to the other, the two editors have drawn some of
their colleagues into dialogue; many of whom are themselves located on the
boundaries of these two intellectual worlds. Five English-writing anthropo-
logists (James W. Fernandez; John G. Galaty; Roger M. Keesing; John
Leavitt; Gananath Obeyesekere) who are all quite familiar with European
intellectual circles were invited to share their views on interpretation with
Francophone colleagues. Among the seven Francophone contributors, three
(Patrick Kaplanian; Mary Picone; and Andräs Zempleni) work in France
X Preface
while the four others (Jacques Chevalier; Ellen E. Corin; Charles Le Blanc;
and Jerome Rousseau) either work on a daily basis within an Anglophone
environment or at least maintain close contact with Anglo-Saxon intellectual
traditions. This volume has been intended as a platform for the confrontation
of scholars coming from different linguistic and intellectual horizons but
who are at the same time well-informed of others' traditions.
The volume is comprised of papers which were presented in their pre-
liminary version at one or another of three conferences which were succes-
sively held in 1987, 1988 and 1989. The first symposium was held in Quebec
City in May 1987, during the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Ethnology
Society, and dealt with the evaluation of the interpretive movement in North
American medico-psychiatric anthropology. For the second event, over thirty
anthropologists gathered in Zagreb in July 1988, for a two-day symposium
entitled "Between semantics and rationality". And finally, in November
1989, during the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Associa-
tion, a symposium was held on: "Experience, Subjectivity and the Self. An
exchange between philosophy and anthropology". The Quebec conference
was organized with the cooperation of David Howes, while Deborah Gordon
should be credited with the idea of holding a symposium to reconsider the
place of experience and subjectivity within contemporary anthropology. Pro-
fessor Pierre Maranda of Laval University served as discussant and critic at
both the symposium in Quebec and in Zagreb. For this reason the editors have
invited him to conclude this volume with a postmodernist view of interpre-
tative anthropology. This "resonant anthropology" as Maranda so calls it, is
echoed throughout the following pages as it is frequently used by several of
the contributors to this book.
This volume should, therefore, be seen as a collective effort organized by
G. Bibeau and Ε. E. Corin. Over a period of four years, many informal
meetings have been held with the contributors and many versions of the
papers have been reviewed. They have now become chapters of an integrated
book which should serve as a landmark in the evaluation of contemporary
anthropology.
Gilles Bibeau Ellen E. Corin
