A Concept Note

‘All translation is only a somewhat provisional way of

coming to terms with the foreign-ness of languages.’

Walter Benjamin

I

The Genre

Ethnography may be seen as a provisional way of coming to terms with the foreign-ness of languages—of cultures and societies. Ethnography is historically determined by the moment of the ethnographer’s encounter with whomever (s)he’s studying.

The classical Malinowskian tradition of ethnography has functioned as an archetype for most anthropological practice. It regarded only such ethnography to be of unquestionable scientific value, in which a clear line could be drawn between, on the one hand, the results of direct observation and of ‘native’ statements and interpretations, and, on the other, the inferences of the author-ethnographer. Malinowski drew a sharp distinction between ethnography and ethnology—the former referred to the empirical and descriptive results that constituted the raw material for a science of human behaviour (that is, anthropology), while the latter referred to speculative and comparative theories that rendered the raw material meaningful. Therefore, field notes form the basis of a scientific claim but do not constitute science as such. This implied that the published anthropological text would contain only the authoritative conclusions about a people but not the processes by which the anthropologist comes to understand other people.

In other words, the experience of ‘doing ethnography’—its complexities, uncertainties, and day-to-day ordinariness are lost in the final product. Moreover, it also blocks out the very special, culturally bracketed, and politically mediated nature of the ethnographer’s own role.

While the ethnographer’s personal experience, especially those of empathy and participation, were recognised as central to the research process in the Malinowskian tradition, it was nonetheless firmly restrained by the impersonal standards of observation and ‘objective’ distance.

In classical ethnographies, the voice of the author was always manifest, but the author’s subjectivity was separated from the objective referent of the text. For instance, states of serious confusion, violent feelings, changes of course, and excessive pleasures were excluded for the published account. There was a tendency to pose cultural facts as things observed, rather than, for example, heard, invented in dialogue, or transcribed.

In the 1960s, ethnographers began to write their field experiences in ways that disturbed the prevailing subjective/objective balance. There was an increasing realisation that reality includes the researcher—(s)he is not outside the object of inquiry but intrinsic to it. This led to the emergence of ‘self-reflexive’ ethnography that questioned the claim to transparent representation; viewed culture as composed of seriously contested codes and representations; asserted that the poetic and the political are mutually inseparable; and argued that science is not above historical and linguistic processes.

Ethnography was no longer regarded as mere raw material but as a worthy intellectual project in its own right. There was also an increasing recognition of ethnographic writing as fiction—not that they were false or un-factual, but that they are ‘something made, created, or fashioned’—which was, in fact, the original meaning of the word ‘fiction’.

Further, the idea that only professionally-trained observers could be trusted to collect ethnographic data was seriously challenged. There was a growing recognition of heterodox ethnographic representations such as novels about the field, novels by ‘natives’, folklore, ‘insider’ ethnography, or use in ethnography of observations derived from ‘growing up in a culture.’ It is among such heterodoxies that one can place ‘Self-Critical Travel Ethnography’ as a new and alternative genre.

‘On and Off the Tourist Map’ project of the Society for Social Research (SSR) makes a case for travel ethnography as a valuable and viable mode of knowing and writing about ‘people in their places’ and ‘places and their people.’ Travel can be a means of engaging with and knowing about both familiar and unfamiliar places and their people. And travel writing can be a valid and valuable form of ethnographic representation.

Travel ethnography is conceived as something on the margins of travel writing and ethnography. Margin refers to a border that differs ‘in texture from the main body.’ To write on the margin does not mean necessarily to be marginal in the sense of limited viability or relevance but actually connotes a spirit of resistance since one is uncomfortable with the ‘centre’ and suspicious of the ‘mainstream’.

Locating travel ethnography at the margins of travel writing and ethnography is not a refusal to choose sides but a way of being bound to both and of becoming something new by engagement and interaction with both sides—thereby animating critically different types of reflections.

Travel writing or the ‘travelogue’ is written from the perspective of an individual traveller—his experiences of travelling through places hold the centre-stage of the writing. The focus is more on a ‘feel’ of the places rather than the people who inhabit those places. ‘People’ remain peripheral—present only through the fleeting encounters that the traveller has with them.

The ethnographer too is a visitor of places—one who travels away from home to unfamiliar territory, not for the sake of travelling but with a well-defined purpose. (S)he seeks to know about the life-world of a people/community.

Trouble is, the ethnographer unfortunately disappears from the text even as his/her biases, concepts, categories, and perspectives find full play in the process of understanding the people.

Contrary to this, ‘Self-Critical Travel Ethnography’ involves a journey where the encounter with another world and its people (or, in other words, another people and their world) enables and fosters a more holistic understanding of the traveller-ethnographer’s self and where that self comes from. And, therefore, the experiences of that journey—and the ruthlessly self-critical documentation of one’s own reactions in the course of the encounters—are made salient, nay, given pride of place in the travel-ethnographic text.

The point of this enterprise is to ‘know oneself by entering the other’s world’—thus engaging with the boundary between the self and the other.

‘Travel Ethnography’, both as a mode of ‘doing ethnography’ and as a form of ethnographic representation, thereby seeks to overcome the following dichotomies—literature and art versus science; fact versus theory; objectivity versus subjectivity; truth versus imagination; and realism versus literary construction.

II

The Themes

The project will encompass a variety of possible encounters between the traveller-ethnographer and people. Only a preliminary classification can only be attempted at this stage:

1. Indigenous or tribal communities in forest areas and potential eco-tourism zones;

2. Traditional rural communities in villages surrounding semi-urban or urban centres of historical or religious importance;

3. Traditional artist and craftsmen communities in small towns; and

4. Tourism-dependent occupations, for instance, travel guides, shopkeepers, persons running and working for lodges and eateries.

The first attempt under the project will be towards knowing and understanding Forests and their People in the Twenty-first Century. Why are we doing this?

Indigenous people or tribals constituted ‘pure’ subject matter in classical anthropology because they presented the most extreme cases of otherness from the point of view of the Euro-American middle class self. The Malinowskian tradition of ‘doing ethnography’ involved an ‘active forgetting’ of conquest and colonialism—the brutal history of the conquerors ravaging the societies, economies, and cultures of indigenous peoples—the process that had, in fact, provided the conditions for the take-off of the ethnographic enterprise.

Choosing to look the other way when the blood-splattered, sledgehammer blows of foreign powers were re-shaping the peoples’ cultures—even as one was ‘studying’ them—to fit the slots assigned them within the new, contested relationships of domination and subordination that reached out across the continents, the ethnographers more and more claimed not simply to ‘reconstruct’ the ‘natural state of the primitives’ but to ‘observe it directly.’ Refusing to acknowledge colonialism’s denial of the natives’ inalienable right as a people to make their own history, the classical ethnographers chose to spread the canard of the ‘ahistoricity’ of the indigenous people they were observing.

This refusal to recognise the rapid and destructive changes wrought by colonialism shored up the hollow claim that the people being studied formed isolated, self-contained societies, the reality of whose cultures was aptly represented by the ethnographers’ descriptions—as if this ‘directly observed’ reality had nothing to do with the world of the conquerors, to which the ethnographers belonged, both intellectually and physically. This was tantamount to denying the pain and scars of colonial oppression that were as much a part of the natives’ life-worlds as elements of culture that could be sourced to pre-colonial times.

Truth is, tribal communities cannot be seen as ‘ahistorical’ societies as there have always been varying degrees of contact with the ‘outside world’, movement across space, and socio-cultural change—all of which involve the dynamics of socio-political and economic power, and the making of history by human agency.

Just as ‘doing ethnography’ in the early period of anthropology was situated in a colonial context, ‘doing ethnography’ today cannot be isolated from the larger socio-economic and political context that both the ethnographer and the community ‘under study’ inhabit, and the historical dynamic shaping the wider world. It is important to recognise this in the writing of the ethnographic text as well.

This is the perspective with which the traveller-ethnographer will approach the twenty-first century life-worlds of the forest-dwelling communities. The study will try to unravel how they have survived as a people over time, and describe their cultures in terms of everyday life and its relationship to their livelihood systems. The study will seek to glean from popular memory and folklore, oral histories of the people’s encounters with the outside world over the years. The basic strands of ethnic cosmology and popular thought-systems will be described in their intricate relationship with the reality of dwelling in harsh terrain. Aspects of life that will be looked into will include: indigenous forms of medical practice; culinary practices; village and home architecture and design; story-telling and song-dance traditions; other leisure pursuits; working, earning and spending patterns of men and women; family, marriage, and love; patterns of intra- and inter-group solidarities and conflict, and traditional dispute-settlement systems; and local-level political organisation.

This study will be done with two different communities for enabling a comparative perspective: one, the ‘nearby people’, whose places have been on tourist/hiker/trekker itineraries, or in the government’s development plans for a long time now, and, two, the ‘faraway people’, inhabiting the fewer and fewer places of ‘natural beauty’ that are yet to emerge as most-favoured destinations.

III

Significance and Outcome

This project will not be the lone enterprise of a single individual. It aims to develop itself into a collective endeavour of young students, by creating an interest in unorthodox fieldwork-based social research among them. It seeks to take the culture of fieldwork-based research outside the narrow disciplines of the anthropological and sociological specialists and experts. It will open up the possibility of new, varied, and creative experiences for young undergraduate and post-graduate students, fostering their engagement with the real world, outside the world of books and the confines of the college.

Small groups of students will first participate in a workshop on the genre and the themes, and will then undertake an ethnographic hike through selected places. The possible products from this collective endeavour may include ethnographic essays and novels, films, and still photography.

This later part of the project will commence after the first volume of travel narratives is published by SSR. This volume, tentatively titled Hiking in 21^st Century Forest Country, is expected to come out sometime in 2008. Some written output is expected even while the preparatory work is in progress. These will be posted on the SSR website or e-journal, and will be sent for publication to general, academic, and travel journals and magazines for popularising this SSR project.

IV

The Researcher

Satyadeep, an Associate of SSR for the Travel Ethnographies Project, is a journalist by training, and an independent researcher and writer by inclination. Having received his college education in sociology, he has worked for a while with the development sector as copy editor and website content writer, and then as a book editor with a publishing house. He is currently working on an annotated English translation of eminent Oriya writer Gopinath Mohanty’s classic novel of 1949, Amrutara Santana, based on the most populous tribal community of Orissa, as a case-study of the novel as a mode of ethnographic representation. This translation project also involves the preparation of a Beginner’s Guide to Amrutara Santana Today, which will attempt to introduce to the lay reader the community Gopinath Mohanty wrote about, by tracing a brief social history of the people and their places from the time the novel was written to the present day.