Comment

Comment by M Izabel on December 15, 2010 at 7:48pm

Culture is a collective phenomenon, concept, or what have you.  If the children don't know about their gods, their parents do.  If farmers don't know their rituals, their shamans do.  I just cannot accept the idea that there are things natives do not know in their culture that only anthropologists know and can explain to them.  That is so, well, ethnocentric Western thought. 

 

Culture, as a phenomenon of space and time, is a lifelong practice. If someone stays longer in his community, he will know what he needs to know.  That's why in traditional cultures elders are revered for their wisdom.  They are viewed as keepers of knowledge because it is assumed that they know what should be known about their culture.

 

With the Qur'an example, I did not use any theory to process the simple answer of the husband.  I contextualized his practice in relation to another practice in his community, which should be the right way to do ethnography. 

 

Let's graph people in their culture not the dead white men and women and their theories.

Comment by Huon Wardle on December 15, 2010 at 4:10pm

M, I know from previous experience that you hold this view about culture very strongly, but I still don't understand it. First, to say that everyone knows their own culture is a seeming truism - it is like saying everyone knows what they know. But, even that is doubtful because people can change their minds and they know things in diferent ways and with different levels of conviction.

If you are saying that everyone within the 'boundary' of a culture knows everything about that culture then this can quickly be shown to be incorrect - children know less about some things and much more about others and they know what they know individually and as children; adults can barely read children's minds which often display highly imponderable states of knowledge from an adult perspective. So how can we say everyone in a culture knows that culture?

 

Malinowski was simply saying what is obvious: that I can know more about the context of someone else's actions than they do themselves - and the reverse is true too. My child can in many cases read the context of my actions better than I can. They can for instance note when I am unwittingly contradicting myself or handing out a dictat which goes against principles I have told them to follow. An intelligent third person might likewise quickly see the pattern governing the behaviour and even give me some good advice, who knows. My riposte might be 'I know what I am doing better than you do' - but surely that is only acceptable up to a point.

 

In your example you haven't stuck to your own rules: the man merely said what the Qoran said, he did not say 'I am saying that because otherwise I would be pulled up in front of the Sharia court': so you have introduced a functional explanation of a kind that Malinowski would have completely approved of. However, the Muslim would have every reason to be deeply offended by that statement if, for instance, he fervently believed that having four wives is appropriate according to Qoranic teaching. The (functional) explanation was yours not his and so you are claiming to know something in excess of what he has told you.

Comment by Keith Hart on December 15, 2010 at 1:43pm

Well, I guess we now know that the name was well chosen, if only for the follow up to the first 'What the f--k?' It makes people think, for and against. It is interesting that Danny Miller followed the opposite poetic line with the title for his latest, Stuff. The Latin and Germanic registers of English do express class positions: the church, law and bureaucracy vs the people.

Comment by John McCreery on December 15, 2010 at 9:11am

OK, can't resist.

 

From Maurice Godelier, The Enigma of the Gift, p.21

What would happen if we saw our job as nothing more than reproducing what people tell us? L-S, in his critique of Mauss writes, "Then ethnography would dissolve into a verbose phenomenology, a falsely naive mixture in which the apparent obscurities of indigenous thinking would only be brought to the forefront to cover the confusions of the ethnographer, which would otherwise be too obvious."

Godelier goes on to suggest that anthropologists need to critique both (1) the illusions by which all societies, including our own, maintain themselves and (2) academic theories which ignore what the people studied have to say. I recall Victor Turner's advice that native exegesis is only one part of the ethnographic puzzle that also includes our direct observations and ideas and data brought for comparative purposes from other times or places. I also recall the "Letter to Novy Mir," in which Mikhail Bakhtin argues persuasively that all cultural understanding necessarily emerges from dialogue in which both parties have blind spots only revealed by the other's gaze. 

 

Comment by M Izabel on December 15, 2010 at 5:33am

Toby, I had no intention to "blaspheme" Malinowski.  It just happens that alternative ethnography is one of my interests.  Not long ago, a paper of a UCLA professor was linked here.  He said something about natives not knowing and thinking about their culture.  Since then, I have been tracing the root of such "othering" idea that, I think, is ethnographically questionable.  I believe Malinowski started it all with his concept of "imponderabilia."

 

An MIT-published qualitative research design book has the paper of Tim Plowman (2003), "Ethnography and Critical Design Practice," in which he says:

 

"By imponderabilia, Malinowski meant the daily life of the people, their ordinary behavior, which the "natives" themselves find difficult to explain or articulate."

I'm not questioning his statement because I'm a native of a marginalized culture.  It just also happens that I'm interested in epistemology.  I can understand if he only uses "articulate" since language can be a barrier, but he double-kills it with "explain."  Are there really anthropologists here who believe that there are natives who do not know their culture?  

 

I think the problem lies in the processing of ethnographic data.  If a Feminist anthropologist asks a Muslim husband why he has four wives, she will not be satisfied with his answer that it is allowed in the Qur'an.  Maybe she will use Feminist theories so the man and his culture can be labeled as misogynist.  A Marxist anthropologist will think of it as an issue of property, production, and gender as class.  Postmodernist can connect the patriarchal power that subjugates to state structures.  Does his answer have to be understood using different theories before it becomes a knowledge?  Isn't his answer already a knowledge? 

 

For me, his Qur'an explanation makes sense since Muslim men with wives exceeding four are dragged to Sharia courts for not following the teaching of the Qur'an.  What else do they want from the man before his answer is accepted as what it is?  That's the unscientific in anthropology.  A man pissing in public can be analyzed differently, maybe, from the psychoanalytic unconscious to Bourdieu's habitus.  There is no consistency.  There is no clear truth. 

Comment by Toby Austin Locke on December 15, 2010 at 2:45am

I had hoped for more constructive and engaged debate regarding the journal itself rather than an attack on one word used by the very founder of the discipline. Of course Malinowski got things wrong, everyone gets things wrong, and furthermore he was the first to engage in participant observation per se so he was on pretty shaky ground. I think he did quite well considering this. All Malinowski was trying to point to, with the word imponderabilia, was the monumentally difficult task of the anthropologist and ethnographer who has to observe and make sense of practices which fall well outside of their previous understandings of human interaction. I would also agree with Richard when he suggests he was pointing to the weakness of language. Surely, Izabel, you are not saying language is the ethnographers only means of understanding a society.

 

Hopefully we can engage in some debate regarding the content of the journal at some point rather than simply discussing the validity of Malinowski's use of the word impoderabilia. He was attempting to highlight the importance of complete absorption when practising ethnography and the difficulty of the task at hand. The purpose of this group is for engagement with the journal Imponderabilia rather than an in depth analysis of the weakness of Malinowski's use of the language.

Comment by M Izabel on December 14, 2010 at 9:04pm

The first time I read/encountered "imponderabilia" even before I decided to take anthropology in college,  three things came to mind:

 

1)  Participant-observation is mostly observation.

 

Anything in a culture can be imponderable to an outsider that observes it.  Take the bicycle photo above as an example.  To an observer, it is one of those street imponderabilia--pertaining to something imponderable.  He cannot really ascertain why the bike looks like that, why it is positioned that way, why it is there, and why it has to be there.  To the bike owner, he does not have those pondering questions.  He can explain from the bolts of the bike to the black-painted post where he locks his bike onto.  Impoderabilia, therefore, only exists in the realm of the observing outsider.  I believe humans are not cognitively wired to think the obvious but to accept it.  I have never touched a fire because I have accepted it to be obviously hot since it boils water. 

 

2) The natives cannot explain or do not ponder upon their cultural practices. 

 

If anthropologists cannot extract answers and exact explanations about a local culture from its natives, the latter are either lying or withholding information.  Since anthropologists are trained to detect lies, exaggerations, silences, and even indifferences, the easiest culprit is that these natives simply do not know their culture.  It is convenient to say, for example, that they do not know even their taking a bath and using coconut oil as shampoo and rough stones as body cleaning tools.  They do them without thinking.  The fact is that natives can explain every facet of their culture but do not have the gumption to spend time thinking cultural nuances and minutiae that are obvious or negligible.  Why should they explain in details why they eat rice, for example, since it is a kind of thing they just do and do not intellectualize.  They can, however, tell you how they produce rice or tell about their folktales about rice.  If you expect them to answer about rice being the primary source of carbohydrates, you need to talk to vegans and nutritionists.      

 

3) Imponderabilia was Malinowski's imponderables not of the Trobriands.

 

This quote by Malinowski (1961) alone will explain that:

 

The goal of anthropologists/ethnographers is "to grasp the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world"  Why can't the explanation that a cup of steamed rice goes well with a slab of broiled pork be accepted as what it is not grasped intensely or overly thought? It is in grasping that anthropologists and ethnographers interpret things whose absurdity tends to border around exaggeration or over-analysis.

Comment by Richard Irvine on December 14, 2010 at 5:43pm

Just in response to M Izabel on the definition of imponderabilia. While broadly speaking I agree with the idea of attempting to understand the logic of human life from the point of view of those living it (and so I am committed to ethnography, and thankful to my forebears such as Malinowski who helped pioneer the method), I think there are limits to what you're saying here:


1) If we rely only on the explanations and narrations of those participating in a culture, without any attempt to render them in a language outside of that that they themselves use, then communication between cultural settings becomes difficult or impossible. Anthropology is not simply the gathering of stories, but an attempt to think about different ways of doing comparatively. Malinowski's observation of exchange in Argonauts of the Western Pacific (from which the quote is drawn) not only informs us about what the Trobriand Islanders do; it also informs us about what we do, by giving us comparative tools to think about exchange in a different way. If we are restricted to only thinking about Trobriand exchange through their own language and logic, without making this vital move of trying and re-orient our own understanding using the comparative case of Trobriand exchange, then anthropology loses much of its potential.

2) Part of what Malinowski is pointing to here is the limits of language. Some things cannot be transmitted through oral explanation or documentation, but need to be observed. This is well known to anybody who has attempted to learn a craft (I was apprenticed in carpentry in my field site). My understanding is that he's not simply branding other cultures "imponderable", but pointing to a truth about learning-through-participation. The early chapter of Argonauts from which this quote is drawn is, after all, a rallying cry against armchair anthropology.


Oh yeah, and I think it's an ok name. Certainly looks pretty on the cover! And I sincerely doubt there was any elitist intention on the part of the original creators. While there is some truth in the claim that Cambridge is elitist, I don't think archaeology and anthropology undergraduates (and this was, at the point of inception, an undergraduate initiative) are the primary culprits in this at all. I think I posted something elsewhere on OAC about the radical potential of this project... but part of it is certainly that they're building a community of students that is wide and inclusive - certainly not 'Cambridge-only' or 'anthropology-only'.

Comment by M Izabel on December 14, 2010 at 10:47am

Do you think that definition makes sense?  From birth to death, what a human being experiences is a series of phenomena.  That's why only insiders know why they do things in their cultures outsiders think as a series of imponderable phenomena.  They can dissect and explain those phenomena too for  anthropologists who have no time to observe the entire series in its actuality.  Most terms coined by anthropologists do not make sense in the cultures they study.  I wish they stick to studying language rather than making one. 

Comment by Toby Austin Locke on December 14, 2010 at 10:09am

I'm not sure what you are trying to say Izabel, I only think you can not have  taken the time to read the introductory statement taken from Argonauts of the western pacific:

Imponderabilia - 'a series of phenomena of great importance which cannot possibly be recorded by questioning or computing documents, but have to be observed in their full actuality' - Malinowski, B. [1922] (2002:18) 'Argonauts of the Western Pacific'. Routledge: London

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