The+Eleventh+Week

Facing Risk: Levinas, Ethnography, and Ethics

Problematic relationship between self and other.

Basis for going beyond the polarized opposition between objective and subjective ethnographic approaches.

Critical self-reflection about the fundamental face-to-face dimension of fieldwork is central to ethnography’s ethical possibilities.

The relationship between self and other and speaks to several of the important problems that define and guide contemporary anthropological research.

Questions of objectivity and the legitimate, ethical, or even violent dimensions associated with the knowledge of other people.

The primacy of “the other” and powerful images of travel found in Levinas’s work provoke critical reflection about the fundamental role of alterity and location in ethnographic fieldwork.

The self is infinitely responsible for the other and that this unequal and hierarchical encounter defines ethics.

Peculiar meaning of “the other” and “responsibility” in his writings.

“Reflexivity” is distinguished from critical self-reflection; while the former 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.

Ethics precedes knowledge and politics in the practice of ethnographic field research.

Ethnography is always a matter of risk for researchers.

Western philosophy’s systematic reduction of “the other” (l’autre) to “the same” (le meme).

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.

Another kind of travel is a journey away from the self, in which one is dissociated from the familiar, the comfortable, and the recognizable.

Encounters with forms of life, experiences, and knowledges that are unexpected, what Levinas calls the “face” becomes the basis for an ethics that departs from the self-centering attitude that Levinas regards as the hallmark of Western philosophy.

Humans are born in to the world amidst a series of relationships that are not chosen and that cannot be ignored.

Because the subject is inherently social, it is amidst this sociality that the face-to-face relationship with another person reveals the mutuality of existing in an immediate, visceral form.

The self is forever more responsible for the other than for itself. Self-preservation and sovereignty come “after” this original responsibility.

Why does the other always have “the face of the poor, the stranger, the widow, and the orphan”, even though the actual other person is not, ontologically speaking, any of these “characters” or “social types?”

Levinas posits this, a certain responsibility before rights, prior to the equality of the social contract. The self is not asked, for example, to simply feed the hungry with “a gift of the heart, but [rather] of bread from one’s mouth, of one’s own mouthful of bread”.
 * This is an interested set of non-liberal ethics. Might be particularly useful for issues of post/colonialism given the ease with which actors were able to subvert liberal ethics and morals to not just comply but serve acts of colonialism and imperialism.

Ethnographic research began to be understood as dependent upon spatial and temporal separation from a “home,” with themes of discomfort, lack of familiarity, and exoticism used to narrate the researcher’s relationship to the “field.”

The mapped totality of a field remained linked to another sense of this difference and desire to inhabit the interiority of difference.

The point of anthropological fieldwork is to “bring us into touch with the lives of strangers”. This valorization of fieldwork, perhaps overly romantic, has more recently been eclipsed by a focus on ethical and political problems of ethnographic representation.

Ethnography, as Nelson put it, is essentially an ambiguous relationship of research to “life”.

The subject of research and the researcher’s status as a subject of scrutiny are partly influenced by spontaneous encounter in which roles are undermined or, even if not fully challenged, rendered ambiguous. According to Nelson the ethical importance of such encounters, has to do with the centrality of privilege and power.

Power is constituted in the research process itself.

Aspects of difference and representational power are central to that very separation.

Face-to-face encounters make ethnography an inherently “open” method, improvisational and potentially transformative of the structural design or set of questions that guide research from the outset.

//Ethics// is the primary mode of anthropological research.

While Scheper-Hughes sees putting knowing before doing as disavowing a basic ethical imperative to become involved, D’Andrade sees putting doing before knowing as representative of a hasty and judgmental assumption that one can intervene or act in local situations based on moral assumptions and often incomplete knowledge about social dynamics.

There is violence involved, a break from ethics, from infinite responsibility, in any interpersonal encounter. When I take up the imperative to act //here// I am failing to carry out responsibilities that lie both //there// and //there//.

Levinas seeks to undermine the sovereignty and control of the subject as social agent. While “involvement” remains a decision for both D’Andrade and Scheper-Hughes, in Levinas’s idealized face-to-face relationship, it is not a contingency to be deliberated upon or unhesitatingly taken up by an active subject.

When “first principles” are obfuscated or elided, there arises the “moral repugnance” to which she refers. In the face of suffering, anthropologists then “have an //ethical obligation// to identify the ills in a spirit of solidarity and the follow…a ‘womanly’ //ethic// of care and responsibility.

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.

Levinasian ethics is formulated as a disposition that arises in the context of everyday life, undermining the active powers of the self, and grounding epistemology and action ina more basic experience of passivity in the face of others.

The very framing and proximity is complicit with the colonial project: “[Colonialism] made possible the kind of human intimacy on which anthropological fieldwork is based, but ensured that that intimacy should be one-sided.

The participation of both of these positions in a stark division between subject and object, self and other, suggests complicity with the very legacies of Western power and knowledge from which they claim to depart.

It was not that Levinas was opposed to action…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.

Falling out, Levinas argues, is a distinct kind of care in which what matters for the other person always takes precedence over what matters for the self.

The self is responsible to all others and is never in control of, nor can delimit responsibility so as to call it one’s own.

Impossibility – the ongoing time of maintaining a critically self-reflective attitude that is predicated upon the marking of other knowledge – at the heart of the project.

If this ambiguity can get covered over by structured control and the standard hierarchy of research design, it can also get animated by encounters that “break” from totalized control.

Following Levinas, 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.

The self’s actions do not, in this formulation, arise out of a feeling of intimacy that belongs to and accrues value for the self.

Anthropology’s “love” becomes a practical ethnographic orientation defined by the maintenance of an elected affinity to being marked by the other’s knowledge and experience.

But while a conversation about these social and cultural issues might have allowed for a more effective course of treatment, it would have been risky, challenging the doctor’s epistemology of disease and moral model of proper compliance.
 * What, here, is meant by risk?

It was essentially about a certain kind of interpersonal relationship, one which led to an experience of passivity and, in turn, to the transformative possibilities of being marked by others.
 * First, I’m not sure I understand what it means to be “marked.” Second, passivity seems to be incompatible with the idea of giving food from one’s own mouth.

Nelson carefully distinguishes the “political consciousness” that can arise in fieldwork from “political righteousness.”

An ethic of risk emerges from the practical impossibility of Levinasian ethics.

Openness to being marked by the other rubs against the tendency to establish a sense of control and mastery.

“[An] ethic that begins with the recognition that no one can guarantee decisive changes in the near future or even in a lifetime. The ethic of risk is propelled by the equally vital recognition that to stop resisting, even when success is unimaginable, is to die. The death that accompanies acquiescence to overwhelming problems.” – Welch

“To be afflicted with another’s suffering,” Lingis has written elsewhere, “requires that we care about the things the sufferer cares for.”

---Levinas’s ethics reminds me of a presentation I saw at 4S about what potential ethical frameworks one might apply to an encounter with extraterrestrial life (both “intelligent” and not). Unfortunately, the presenter used only liberal enlightenment moral philosophers. These are problematic, because many colonial powers had access to these thinkers and their ideas, and yet not only were they not antithetical to the project of colonialism, they were likely perfectly complicit with them. However, at the time I did not know of any alternative, post-structuralist, ethical frameworks. Now, I wonder what applying Levinas’s ethical framework might do for thinking about encounters with the extraterrestrial other?

There are a few important aspects that seem to shape his ethics: putting the other before the self, passivity, being marked by the other, and the situatedness of the face-to-face encounter. The first flies in the //face// of the typical imperative the continuation of the human species takes priority, even over other life. Levinas might argue that if human beings had to make the choice between extinction and displacing extraterrestrial life, we may have to select extinction. Passivity is confusing to me in comparison to the others, but it seems to be connected with the idea that the self has not sovereignty or power in the face of the other. But it is not the same as being a passive observer. It seems to mean that, despite having a responsibility to the other over the self, the self cannot expect any action to improve the lot of the other. Instead, the continuous struggle is important, even though it has no end. This passivity, might include decisions NOT to colonize, or even to venture into space with the discovery of extraterrestrial life. But, the third aspect, the face-to-face encounter, leads us to the fourth, which is that such a decision is entirely contingent. Each extraterrestrial other, much like the others we encounter here on Earth, cannot be assumed to be the same as all others. This would require, importantly, that each one be treated as an individual entity with the same agency as the self, regardless of otherness. This is the major differentiation between Levinas’s ethics and liberal ethics, in which colonized people’s were excluded from ethical consideration with the simple dehumanizing move. This is all the more foreboding when the other is, indeed, not necessarily human. But Levinas’s ethics do not require, but indeed, preclude the consideration of a humanity. Simultaneously, because the mark of the other requires being afflicted by the suffering of the other, we cannot, as was the case with colonial and imperial projects, purport to be helping the other even if they are unaware of what they need.---