on abdel hernandez san juan

rethinking the longstanding forms and practices of anthropological research. By George E. Marcus

Edited by Abdel Hernandez San Juan

  By the mid-1990's, I had just about given up hope that the aesthetic issues that were implicated in the so-called Writing Culture critique of anthropology during the 1980's would be developed by anthropologists themselves. Beyond the critique of the authority of ethnographic texts and of the conditions for the production of knowledge in the traditional mise-en-scène of fieldwork, these issues might have defined the ground for rethinking the longstanding forms and practices of anthropological research (the emblematic and defining fieldwork/ethnography paradigm of the discipline) that are so much challenged at present as anthropologists involve themselves with more complicated conditions and objects of inquiry.

   For anthropologists to have explored the aesthetics of inquiry would have required styles of thinking, rhetoric, and practice--keyed to the notion of experimentation––that proved unacceptable to the boundary keeping institutional and professional rules of order in the academy. While anthropology during the 1980's was influenced more than ever (and vice versa) by theoretical developments in the academic humanities through interdisciplinary movements that were themselves caught up in self-images evoking historic avant-gardes (the "theory" tendency in literary studies, for example, had this imago), it was still obliged to be social scientific. Thus, any efforts at experimentation with the ethnographic form, beyond textual maneuvers, were understandably limited, largely rhetorical, and when substantive, idiosyncratic and certainly marginal.

   Perhaps, this is as it should have been. While there have been some remarkable experimental texts exploring the relation between culture, the anthropological task, and aesthetics, produced through and from the trend of 1980's critique

   Still the most compelling aspects of the Writing Culture critique of the 1980's opened questions about breaking the authoritative frames, not only of traditional ethnographic writing, but by implication of the traditional practices and professional regulative ideals of fieldwork in the name of such notions as collaboration, polyphony, reflexive inquiry, and dialogue. These were indeed radical alternative suggestions or hints for practice, and they could hardly be served by mere modifications in the way ethnographies were written or even traditional projects of fieldwork were conducted. Attempts to do so––the body of "experiments" we have––were for the most part considered to be weak, rhetorical, and idiosyncratic. One might conclude then that more radical experiments, touching upon the aesthetics of fieldwork, were something that anthropologists, operating between the critiques of the 1980s and the changing conditions of research in the 1990s onward, could benefit from, but which, because of the weight of the professional apparatus of power, authority, tradition, and self-interest, they could not do for themselves in any coherent way.

   Abdel Hernández is a Cuban cultural theorist. In Caracas, Hernandez continued his anthropologically relevant work. Why his work should be of interest to anthropology is that it makes explicit and experimentally explores tendencies deeply a part of the ethos of the discipline having to do with a combination of scholarly distance and a more active participation in a culture but still within the frame of professional fieldwork.

   Finally, there was the brief surge into "theater anthropology" in the late 70s and early 80s, based on the interesting partnership of Richard Schechner and Victor Turner, and the writings of Eugenio Barba, among others. The main inspiration for this in anthropology was the later work of Victor Turner, who early on had a strong sense of the value of understanding ethnographic settings in dramatistical terms. However, what Hernandez are up to is quite different than this earlier effort at theater anthropology. Turner was really bringing anthropology into the framework of theater, and Hernández have made the opposite sort of move with more radical and interesting results for effacing the boundaries of both art and anthropology as institutions. Also, Turner was less interested in matters of epistemology and method than in universalist and transcendent questions about mind and emotion that could be explored by making theatrical the rituals that anthropologists studied in the field among peoples like the Ndembu and the Kwakiutl. There was never the more provocative bringing of the experiment and the performance to the field, as in Hernandez's work.

   Here, I refer to the idea of ethnography as performance, which has been one of the “key words" of possible alternative for anthropological practice in recent years. Also, there has been a more or less developed idea of ethnographic "competence" being performative. That is, the true standard of judgment of ethnographic interpretation and translation is whether the anthropologist "gets it right," not as judged by his professional peers but by the people he studies. Competence always begins with language, and anthropological folklore often focuses on who among the specialists in an area or region speaks the language “like a native.” To some extent, this very deep but underplayed and romantic ideal of very serious ethnography evokes the much disdained and naive "going native" syndrome.

  Still, anthropologists have often sustained in their judgment of ethnography the related notion of competence or performativity. This perhaps had its most elaborate and scientistic expression in the ethnoscience/cognitive anthropology/new ethnography movement of the 1960s and 1970s (7). Indeed, the ability to play back category systems in speech to the native, to "elicit" action from them was to become the highest scientific standard for anthropology. Of course, this movement eventually fell on hard times once it went beyond color and kinship categories. But something of the same ideal has always been present in the interpretive/symbolic movement as well.