Response+10



His philosophy is concerned with questions of responsibility and justice; themes that have emerged as central concerns for ethnographers, whether assessing anthropology’s problematic historical connection to colonialism or forging relations of solidarity and social justice with local communities. (30)
 * Benson and O’Neill **

The term “reflexivity” is distinguished from critical self reflection; while theformer totalizes ethnography as either an objective form of knowing or an engaged form of action (both of which return power and authority to the ethnographer) the latter aims to undermine the self’s sovereignty and knowledge. (30-31)

Ethnography thus becomes a deconstructive basis upon which encounters with others dynamically inform the patterns of life and values that define the researcher. (31) Travel is an important trope for Levinas. For Levinas, there are two kinds of travel. One kind is envisioned as a return to “the same,” provoking no substantive transformation in the self’s thought and attitudes. In this case, movement across space and encounters with other beings do not change the traveler, but rather reinforce the kind of person that the traveler was before the journey. Another kind of travel is a journey away from the self, in which one is dissociated from the familiar, the comfortable, and the recognizable. Here, the self begins to depart from “totality” and moves toward an exterior. (33) Yet, because it is dependent on human relationships, occurring in the time and space of lived encounter, the concrete “doing” of fieldwork does not follow a neat map, Ethnography, as Nelson puts, it is essentially an ambiguous relationship of research to “life.” (35)

Face-to-face encounters make ethnography an inherently “open” method, improvisational and potentially transformative of the structured design or set of questions that guide research from the outset. “There is always a hidden, or unknown and unknowable, element that breaks from the definition of the situation,” Castaneda says (2006, 82–84). Here, the phenomenological account of fieldwork resembles Levinas’ account of the unstable quality of any totality. Just as Levinas cautions against the reduction of infinity–otherness, to the same, Castaneda highlights the teleology that reduces the contingent and vital flow of fieldwork to the planned production of a research report, such as a monograph. (36)

The methodological advantage of this ever ambivalent mode of empathy, the “love” is that it helps maintain a productive but potentially irritating and emotionally risky sense of incomplete control that constantly nudges a researcher into critical self-reflection about the cultural and moral assumptions that guide research design and analysis. Such an orientation thus rubs against, without simply or completely overturning, the totalizing sense of control that disallows a marking of the self by the others and reduces the meaning of alterity to the researchers own political, moral, and epistemological concerns. (38) What she describes as “taking sides with humanity” (1995, 420) seems to be a habit-forming solidarity, or an “ethical obligation.” Such a position not only belies what Levinas means by ethics, it also departs from what can be so powerfully ethical about ethnographic fieldwork itself as the situational, open, and ambiguous quality of engaging with other people’s experience. In the face-to-face, the “other” is never a stand in for any “human,” or for generic humanity, but a singular individual, that is, a face (Biehl 2004, 482). (41)

It was not that Levinas was opposed to action, or to acts that Scheper-Hughes calls “world-saving” and “world-repair”… Rather, because, for him, actors come to see themselves as sovereign, righteous, on the “right side,” or even powerful, Levinas seems concerned with a certain risk inherent in such acts. For Levinas, clear-minded and principles-based moral actions can actually distract people from ethics, which are always more basic than moral principles and even the infinite check on moralities. (43)

…this “break” is paradoxically constituted, a deconstructive basis for ethics. Ethics would depend upon a passivity that is actively assumed and maintained on the subject’s part. It is maintained on the part of some “one” in the face-to-face, is not yet fully a subject with autonomy. Essentially, this is about being alive to the open moments of ethnographic research in which one’s own knowledge and experience, design and control are challenged. The consciousness born out of Levinasian ethic, the recognition of one’s responsibility to others and the impossibility of ever exhausting that responsibility—can provoke an empowering turn inward into unending and critical self-reflection aimed at ensuring that the other’s experience cannot finally be assimilated into the mental and moral models of the self. (45)

This vital recognition creates room for an ethical sensibility rather than a moral model. The ethnographic act of becoming a witness to the experience of others always needs to be left open for the better to the weighty Levinasian ideal of the infinite responsibility of witness who is literally held hostage. (49)


 * Todd Ramon Ochoa **

There is much in Hertz’s character that would have drawn him to the likes of Andre Breton, a war survivor, and the Surrealist Revolution he inspired. Or, at the end of the 1920s and in the 1930s, he might have been attracted to a yet more “minor” collective that of Georges Bataille and his gang of left-hand surrealists, who huddled abjectly and gloriously in the back rooms of bookshops calling themselves “The College of Sociology” (Hollier 1988). (478).

Palo is too unexpected in its basic assumptions about the status of matter, the dead, and the living, to be seamlessly assimilated into the prevailing ethnographic modes of analysis as these are defined, above all, by their adherence to regimes of knowing organized under the signs of negation, identity, and being. (479).

This notion of creating a foreign language within our language is Kafka’s, a Prague Jew torn between writing in Yiddish, Prague German, or Czech, and I see in this formulation not only a strategy for my writing about Palo’s dead, but also a suggestion for how as anthropologists we might overcome the notion that ethnographic representation be thought of as a mode of translation, however destabilized. (480)

The stakes involved in creating this foreign language for Palo within our own English-language social science are the same as those involved in the primary questions of discourse and power, of the generation (or preservation) of authority in and through representation, which are simultaneously the stakes involved in the profoundly ethical questions regarding the continued existence, or not, of content in its encounter with form, which is to say, of fieldwork in its encounter with the genre (disciplinary) precedents of ethnography. (481)

Isidra’s description of Kalunga held at its most basic that this sea, in saturating and suffusing, had neither height nor depth but was an indifferent and infinite event seething with as yet uncodified potentials.She and other Palo teachers began this lesson on Kalunga from the murk of visceral experience, at times powerfully moving, at others fleetingly vague. (482)

Thus Kalunga was tangibly learned as radically subjective perceptions at the absolute limits of sentience and credibility, felt subjectively yet collectively influential, and, in the case of Palo, recognized and taught as significant turns of the dead. Kalunga, if it was to be grasped at all, had to be felt first, as a gentle turn of the stomach.(483)

Over and again in the body and across the lips of a Palo healer in Havana, Kalunga, the dead one, the ambient, saturating mass of the dead, emerges as goose bumps and the chills, which in themselves are turns, versions, within a plane of immanence that is unlimited in its becoming, and intense in its potential to turn out bodies and senses. (484)

And this was precisely Isidra’s teaching, that of bodies permeated by the dead, of bodies constituted by infinitesimal repetitions of forceful sensations, a teaching which valued the forcefulness of matter in-and-across-the-body precisely as a privileged kind of knowing, as the sensual affirmation of Kalunga, the sea of the dead. Such a knowing is one wherein fleeting sensation is not negated, but rather felt as a play of forces that constitute a Cuban Kongo life, a play of the dead that suffuses and makes the person who lives Palo.(488)

By drama//,// Deleuze means maximum difference, difference at its fullest potential, which Deleuze also calls “intensity.” Artaud’s theater of cruelty refers not to gratuitous violence, but to the performance of intense bodily involvement with the world around, involvement that throws players and public out of reified configurations of the self and arouses what Artaud (1958, 84–100) called the “passionate convulsion” of life. To this drama, and to the drama of dreaming, I would add the cruel drama of possession, as when a healer is stirred from her sleep, feels a sweat breaking then goose bumps down her back, and the dead are upon her. (490)