Around the end of last week’s class, Erin made a very interesting claim
about Hartman’s book, explaining how Lose
your mother was successful in avoiding the trap of the ethnographic writing,
which is generally characterized by an “all about me” testimony. I am aware of
the issues that might rest in a process that places the “Other” as an object of
study, especially when performed in a “malinowskian” and essentializing way. However,
in another of my classes, Art and the Museum,
ethnographic writing is discussed as a very privileged avenue of study, particularly
when associated with feminist standpoint theory, which encourages minoritized
communities to develop new sets of knowledge and diverge from the mainstream
and hegemonic voice.
Placing these two points of view in perspective, I would be interested
into the details that motivated such a claim. Moreover, understanding more
concretely how Hartman developed alternative strategies to talk about her
experience in Lose your Mother might
prove very useful in the future. I also know that few other students of the
class are enrolled in Art and the Museum as well, and it would be great hearing
what everyone has to say about that. Thanks!
This is a great question, Yannick! I think the issue of the unquestioned "I" is where I would start. We are coming out of several decades of work around subjectivity - work that questions how identity is created and is sensitive to the notion that modes of address are not neutral. In academic writing, this has led to a deep rethinking of how to articulate an encounter. The most interesting (arguably) discipline for this thinking has been anthropology. That this would come up so forcefully in anthropology makes sense since it was those early texts of encounter from anthropology that organized the "other" as that which merited "study" (the other, it should be added, could only be known through the writings of those who othered). The writings of Levi Strauss are taught everywhere as an example, from the structuralist period, of this kind of othering (this is called scholarship, of course - not othering). With this in mind, we began the course with an anthropologist. The book from which we read of Tim Ingold's Anthropology and/as Education. In this book, Ingold makes a strong claim against ethnography and ethnographic writing. His argument, put briefly, is that ethnography still separates the encounter from life (as though the other needed to be travelled to, discovered and then written about, as though we were not always in the encounter, as though we were not all other). It "stages" experience rather than living it. He would like an anthropological encounter that takes life, all life, every moment of life, as worthy of living (and by extension, of study). The critique is that ethnography still takes us "into the field" in a way that allows us to imagine an "external" position.
ReplyDeleteBut beyond that, what I was trying to gesture toward was less a critique of ethnographic writing per se (I never want to critique general concepts) but the critique of a tendency to do two things
1) write from the perspective of an "I" that is assumed to be neutral, untouched by the encounter. This might be seen as a "white" or "neurotypical" I, an "I" that takes its place in the world without a sense of how that place is being taken, or what the consequences of that "taking" might be. We might call this an "unreflective" or "normative" I. In a more personal kind of writing, a writing that organizes itself from that position, there is often a presupposition that "personal experience" is interesting or important to the reader. If not done carefully, this kind of writing can be quite maudlin precisely because it assumes we already know how to (con)figure this "I" (and our relationship to it).
2) write about others as though there was no entanglement, as though the encounter didn't have an effect on the relation, as though the event didn't change both (and more-than both).
What I like about Saidiya's writing is that there is always a sense that the writing moves beyond the personal, that the "I" is not a position but a figuring of the encounter, a thickness in the relation. The orientation of the book is not to give us a sense of an interiority (as opposed to an exteriority) but to trace a complex diagram that can't ignore the fact of situation. To be situated is to be active in the encounter not as preexisting it but as moving with it, as being moved by it.