1 | G o n z a l e s
Snelle Jelle and The Possibility of Organic Ethnography
Miguel Antonio Gonzales 12979309
MSc Cultural and Social Anthropology (Visual) Graduate School of Social Sciences
University of Amsterdam
Master thesis (Discussion Paper) Supervisor: Dr. Vincent de Rooij
Second Reader: Dr. Mattijs van de Port Submitted: Amsterdam, 24th December 2020 Word Count: 10100
2 | G o n z a l e s Table of Contents Declaration on Plagiarism ………..3 Summary ………4 Acknowledgements ………5 Introduction ……….7
Studying Anthropology and Ethnography ………..9
In Another Time, In Another Place ………..13
On Organic Ethnography ……….18
Snelle Jelle ……….27
Conclusion ……….34
3 | G o n z a l e s Declaration on Plagiarism
I have read and understood the University of Amsterdam plagiarism policy http://student.uva.nl/mcsa/az/item/plagiarism-and-fraud.html?f=plagiarism. I declare that this assignment is entirely my own work, all sources have been properly acknowledged, and that I have not previously submitted this work, or any version of it, for assessment in any other paper.
Signed,
Miguel Antonio Gonzales 24 December 2020 Amsterdam, Netherlands
4 | G o n z a l e s Summary
Snelle Jelle and The Possibility of Organic Ethnography is a master thesis submitted by Miguel
Antonio Gonzales for the completion of the MSc Cultural and Social Anthropology (Visual Track) in the Graduate School of Social Sciences at the University of Amsterdam.
The thesis is divided into two parts, the first being Snelle Jelle of het verhaal over hoe ik hier leer
te leven, a written and visual recollection of the author’s stay in the Netherlands, from his arrival
in January of 2020 to the point of writing, spanning close to a year. In Snelle Jelle, various aspects of the life of a newcomer in the Netherlands is shown, from the bureaucratic, practical, emotional, physical, and social. Set against the background of a year as momentous as 2020,
Snelle Jelle is the author’s attempt at reconciling certain critiques of anthropology (such as the
allochronic discourse) with the imagination of what he calls organic ethnography.
The accompanying written essay, The Possibility of Organic Ethnography, traces the author’s personal motives as a student of anthropology, troubled with the prospect of creating anthropological work –after being informed by critiques of anthropology and its history of complicity in colonization and its residue in the discipline’s methodologies. He proposes the possibility of organic ethnography, the idea that non-traditional ethnographers, i.e., the general population, under circumstances of displacement, also share in the project of ethnography, although differentially produced. Though the author himself is categorically considered a traditional ethnographer, Snelle Jelle had been made to be an approximation of organic ethnography, anchored in the displacement and circumstances of his being in the Netherlands. While anthropology remains an academic discipline, he supposes that ethnography, one of its main methods, may be extended beyond the confines of academic research and towards everywhere else that human contact and exchange occurs.
5 | G o n z a l e s Acknowledgements
Amusingly, I have come to the realization that it does indeed take a village –in this case to make a thesis in anthropology.
I would of course, like to first thank my supervisor, Dr. Vincent de Rooij, for the guidance and trust he had given me over the course of this thesis project –most especially during the time of a Pandemic (we have never, at the moment of writing, met each other beyond the tiny box of a zoom meeting). His theoretical input and insights have become indispensable in this endeavour. Next, I would like to thank Dr. Mattijs van de Port, whose guidance in visual anthropology had given me the confidence to do my own thing and trust in my own methods. I would also like to acknowledge the continuous attention and help of Marieke Brand, who has made the navigation of student life at the UvA more manageable.
I would also like to express my utmost gratitude for the people in the village, Benschop –Amber, Dagmar, Huibert and Janine Roodenburg who have welcomed me into their home and their lives, giving me my own thuis thuis here in the Netherlands. I also owe my thanks to Janneke S., Saddam J., the Al-Othman and Al-Hamdan families for showing me a glimpse of what I would eventually imagine as organic ethnography. In Amsterdam, my classmates and friends who have taken part in my little Dutch life: Diana C., Jess M., Joy B., Shirin D., Kato S., Dilara Y., Asteris M., Maria P., Wendy N., Ellemijn I., and countless others.
Finally, my family. My sister Georgina who has been a sounding board for my ideas, often against her will, and my parents Gonz and Bambi, without whose generosity and patience this entire project would not be possible. Maraming salamat.
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7 | G o n z a l e s Introduction
There is much to be learned from each other –that is the premise of anthropology. Or at least that is what I had hoped for, before the -isms, the jargon, all the theoretical underpinnings that constitute the rest of the iceberg that is this discipline. One might say it is too innocent of a definition in its simplicity, or too naïve and bright-eyed and to that I would say of course –one always begins as a student. From there, it does not take a long to realize that we have always begun already standing on the shoulders of giants. And if you zoom out, you will find that the giant is also standing on the shoulders of another, and so on, multiplied to the exponent of generations and suddenly you become acutely aware of yourself on top of it all, barely an infant in this field, barely and anthropologist.
In the beginning it feels like reading mythology. How a pantheon of anthropologists, the greats, household names (in the homes of other anthropologists perhaps), carried out great herculean tasks of ethnography, often in far flung places and often at the risk of their own peril. Levi-Strauss
(1955, p.17) himself saw it as a kind of bondage. How they savoured syllables of different
tongues, stood in the face of magic and sought to make sense of it. How they conjured up underlying systems and structures in cultures and how they broke them all down. How they found themselves accomplice to empire and how they now strive not to be. How they wrestle with the problems of representation and how they develop ever new approaches and methodologies towards them. How collectively, they have attempted to speak of the breadth of the lived human experience, from the thickets and rock-crunch underfoot of scattered middles-of-nowhere, to the cold concrete of metropolitan street corners, teeming with the din of urban life. You become a believer of this mythology. There you are taking it all in, nothing short of a Freirean bank open for business: give me everything you have to teach.
8 | G o n z a l e s And then you hit a wall, right around the time that it is your turn to be up for the task. Suddenly, you are not standing on anyone’s shoulders anymore. The most you can do is look back at them haphazardly, and then toward the void in which your work will materialize –with the hope that you do justice not to their individual works in the past, but to overarching trajectory that they have all been hurling towards, along which you now find yourself at the very forefront of. What shall your work be? Where might you lead these giants behind you? You hit this wall in the dark, fumbling and feeling for a door to lead you out –but there is only a window to look through.
I ask this to myself, some 25-year-old master student of cultural and social anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, who had come from the mean streets of Manila, a staggering 10,000 kilometers away, in the Philippines –a nation colonised twice over. So hispanised that my own name reads like a telenovela character on horseback: Miguel Antonio Gonzales. So Americanised that what you are reading now is one of our official languages and by all means my primary one. So much entangled in this world that categorises us as third world, developing, a part of the global south –whichever you prefer, the experience remains the same however you call it. And yet, so educated to know that we could all do better. Where then is my place in anthropology? Is there a more difficult question for a novice in this field? The answer comes to me not by creating a work of ethnography, but a work about ethnography.
9 | G o n z a l e s Studying Anthropology and Ethnography
I must begin inevitably, with the ethnographer. After all, ethnographies do not just materialize out of thin air. If they did, we would have to find other pursuits. Rather, they are willed into existence, specifically sought out by an individual –like a needle in a stack of needles, exclaiming
this, I will learn about this. So, he goes to seek it out. But before he arrives at any understanding
regarding his chosen subject, he must first quite literally, arrive. This is best shown to us by Malinowski in the account of his foray in the Melanesian New Guinea in Argonauts of the Western
Pacific:
‘Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by all your gear, alone on a tropical beach close to a native village, while the launch or dinghy which has brought you sails away out of sight. Since you take up your abode in the compound of some neighboring white man, trader or missionary, you have nothing to do, but to start at once your ethnographic work (Malinowski, 1922, p. 3)’
I do not imagine that it would be outrageous to suppose that this remains to be a common image of the ethnographer. Often a lone man (save for the likes of Mead and Benedict in those times), often white, hailing from Western Europe or the United States –of course affiliated with an academic institution, thus a highly educated individual. If I even had to guess, he is probably wearing khakis. He is as filled to the brim with excitement as his bag is with gear. On his face, a wide-eyed expression as he awaits his first encounter with the native population of the place he finds himself in, far away from the familiarity of home.
Of course, much had already changed in the world since Malinowski’s arrival. Another world war, and ideological conflict splitting the world in its wake, man on the moon, neoliberalism, a global
10 | G o n z a l e s war on terror, climate change, the internet, fake news, and most recently, COVID-19 –just to name a few. Yet all of these, in some way, shape, or form, affecting in various degrees, lives from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to a deep-country cornfield in the American Mid-west to a remote fishing tribe in the south of the Philippines; we have in other words, globalised. And in this folded-in world, encounters have become multitudfolded-inous, facilitated by ships, planes, trafolded-ins, cars, and the ones and zeros behind the bits and bytes that make up the World Wide Web. Arrival can now be on the other side of an arduous international flight with long lay-overs at ungodly hours at most –or at the very least just a matter of a few clicks on your laptop or smart phone, where instantly you might find yourself chatting with someone you have never met, in a place you have never been to, with a culture you know nothing about. Unless you google it.
Along with these changes in the world, so anthropology had also changed, inevitably. Anthropologists today come in different colors, creeds, and backgrounds, undoubtedly broadening the discipline’s field of interest, and furthering its reciprocity with the other social sciences. I need only look at that man in the mirror, an aspiring anthropologist, who had previously come from a degree in Philippine Studies and creative writing.
If I try to recall my own arrival, I find that even I share certain parallels with Malinowski. After having gone on that Levi-Straussian anthropological bondage of a journey hours on end, I too found myself set down, surrounded by all my gear. My tropical beach, however, was Schiphol airport at night. I too, were to take up my abode in the compound of some white man, who in my case was not a man at all but a woman, a close Dutch friend of mine called Amber (Regardless, she is still white, like Malinowski’s). I too, had nothing to do but start on my work; whether it is ethnographic or not eludes me still. In the bigger picture that is the trajectory of my life, I merely had nothing to do but go on living. It just so happens that the part I am living through is the part where I take up my master in anthropology. But these are all details. Between Malinowski’s arrival and mine, is a hundred years of difference.
11 | G o n z a l e s Between us too, are numerous approaches and developments in the same field. Boasian anthropology and its cultural relativism, Levi-Strauss’ structural anthropology –and the response to it, in the form poststructuralism, informed by the theories of the likes of Derrida and Foucault. The postmodern anthropological crises of representation and its own sense of self-awareness within the discipline and its methods. Bringing us to a point where ‘knowledge becomes relative,
not absolute, and the acceptance of multiple fragmented realities is seen to displace the idea of one unitary transcendent reality (Linstead, 1993, p.100).’
In the university, we often refer to Clifford and Marcus’ Writing Culture (1986) and learned to aspire towards thick descriptions as Geertz had done with tremendous tellings –the anthropologist to him a ‘merchant of astonishment (Geertz, 1984, p.275)’ and I the dazzled student, bought in wholesale.
Meanwhile, there is also Said and his Orientalism (1978), bastioning postcolonialism which I, as an oriental, would be remiss not to consider. Then Bhabha, Appadurai, Spivak, all equally enthralling. But then the more I look around and read, the more I see anthropology fragmenting before my own eyes: towards an anthropology of this, the anthropology of that –the anthropology of fill-in-the-blanks. This is by no means to diminish other anthropologies –this is to say I found myself so far removed from the giants already, my footing uncertain, knee-deep in the quagmire of a now kaleidoscopic discipline.
Even more recently, anthropology takes another turn –this time toward the ontological. The Ontological turn poses the following question:
‘How do I as an anthropologist, neutralize or otherwise hold at abeyance or in continuous suspension my assumptions about what the world is, and what could be in it, in order to
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allow what is in my ethnography to present itself as what it is, and thus allow for the possibility that what is there may be different from what I have imagined (Holbraad, Pedersen, 2017, p. 5-6)?’
In the din of all this, I found myself grabbing at loose ends, not knowing where to begin. In this uncertainty, I tried to go beyond myself, finding alternatives to an otherwise more straightforward ethnographic work that I could have potentially churned out after having picked a subject of inquiry, formed a research question, made a review of related literature, conjured up a theoretical framework, submitted a research proposal, gotten an approval, and having done fieldwork elsewhere. So, in an act of radical naivety (or so I thought to myself), I went back to the end that we laboured toward: to learn from each other. To lighten the burden of this debilitating uncertainty, I found that I could imagine the Other as a companion in this endeavour of learning –I have found a possibility of an organic ethnography.
13 | G o n z a l e s In another time, in another place
Before my own imagination, let us first look into the past. There was once a man named H. Otley Beyer. He must have been 20 years old when he had his first encounter with the Philippines –in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, during the Louisiana Purchase exhibition of 1904. The final report of the event reads:
‘The extremes of civilization found in the Philippine Islands were exhibited upon the grounds. The industrial conditions existing in the islands in their various stages of progress were clearly set forth. The millions of visitors who were interested and instructed by this remarkable exhibit must have been deeply impressed with the importance and extent of our new possessions in the Orient (US Dept. of State, 1906, p.119).’
Surely, he must have been among those deeply impressed visitors –so much so that he later joined the Division of Ethnography within the American colonial government in the Philippines. By 1917, H. Otley Beyer became the first chairman of the newly founded Department of Anthropology at the University of the Philippines. Though anthropology already had its place in the academic institution, Beyer still kept in touch with the American mission of ‘benevolent assimilation.’
‘…anthropologists continued to provide ethnographic advice. Beyer was involved with the 1918 Census conducted by Filipino nationalists. The Democratic regime took Barrows’ [Beyer’s predecessor] view of the Filipinos as essentially one people to its logical conclusion: the Filipinos were a nation irreducible to tribes and the United States had the duty to make the Filipino nation capable of political independence (Goh, 2007, p.134)’
14 | G o n z a l e s Onwards came economic exploitation by the US, imposition of the English language and a leaning towards aspirations of an American way of life through imported media and a propagandist public school system. The preparation of the country for independence, facilitated by American administrators. In the 70’s, American support for the dictator Ferdinand Marcos whose regime saw countless human rights violations in a crusade against communism. The establishment of American bases as a strategic foothold in South East Asia (even then, the Philippines as a staging point for departure to Vietnam during the Vietnam war), and to this day Visiting Forces Agreements –hard and soft power converging, rendering the nation a neocolony.
This case of H. Otley Beyer is by no means, an isolated case. From the live human exhibit to the complicity of ethnography in colonialist policy, these are merely manifestations of anthropology’s historically oppressive view of the Other –views that can lead to exponentially influential depictions and following treatment of nations, cultures and peoples.
One such appropriate and scalding critique of this was the polemic against the allochronic discourse in anthropology, as espoused by Johannes Fabian in Time and the Other: How
Anthropology Makes its Object. The book reveals how Western conceptions of Time has led
anthropology to deny coevalness with its Other. Coevalness by which he means to say contemporaneity between the ethnographer and the peoples and cultures he subjects to inquiry. Fabian elucidates further on the denial:
‘I will call it denial of coevalness. By that I mean a persistent and systematic tendency to place the Referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse (Fabian, 1983, p.31)’
15 | G o n z a l e s With Fabian and his ilk envisioning fieldwork as ‘a form of communicative interaction with an
Other, one that must be carried out coevally, on the basis of a shared intersubjective Time and intersocietal contemporaneity (ibid., p.148),’ coevalness then may be considered requisite to
ethnography. To put crudely, who would deny that Malinowski had actually been to the Trobriand islands, or any other anthropologist in their field? This is however, only one part of the contradiction that is the denial of coevalness. The second part is that evolutionary residue, ‘the
Other’s empirical presence turns into his theoretical absence … (ibid., p.xxxix),’ that which enables
the West to position itself in the here and now while the Other is condemned to essentially be
there and then, that which led anthropologists of the past to use words like savage, primitive, barbaric in what they asserted were scientific descriptions, inevitably favouring themselves and
the West from which they came from, with these binary oppositions. After the telling example of Beyer, one need not even dive into the depths of Foucauldian conceptions of Power-Knowledge to see ethnography’s complicity in this enterprise.
This critique of anthropology is not unlike that of Edward Said’s Orientalism, where he sought to trace the underlying ways in which the West essentialises the Orient, portraying them as opposites to themselves and the ideals they strived towards –thus the Orient came to be seen as irrational, primitive, exotic, and so on. Though Said did not initially call anthropology out, the shoe fit quite well, and anthropologists were not remiss into taking this into consideration.
‘…so far as the West was concerned during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an assumption had been made that the Orient and everything in it was, if not patently inferior to, then in need of corrective study by the West. The Orient was viewed as if framed by the classroom, the criminal court, the prison, the illustrated manual. Orientalism, then, is knowledge of the Orient that places things Oriental in class, court, prison, or manual for scrutiny, judgment, discipline, or governing (Said, 1978, p. 40-41).’
16 | G o n z a l e s As much as this view and approach has essentialised the Orient, so it does the opposite for the West –as such binaries go. While anthropologists have been producing knowledge on its Oriental Others, they have also been reproducing their position endlessly as well, which can then be viewed as the opposite, Occidentalism.
‘One important source of Occidentalism in the discipline is the classic texts that continue to inform anthropological education, thought, and debate. Most anthropologists who read these texts do so not naively but through a framework of expectation and assumption about what is really being said, about which bits are important and which are best skimmed. Many of the texts are taken to identify the differences between modern Western society and societies in other times and places, and thus to entail a more or less overt essentialization of the West (Carrier, 1992, p.199).’
So, while the Anglo-American export of anthropology had been ripening in other parts of the world, and indeed Other parts of the world, ‘native’ or ‘indigenous’ ethnographers have also emerged. As Clifford points out in the introduction of Writing Culture, ‘insiders studying their own
cultures offer new angles of vision and depths of understanding. Their accounts are empowered and restricted in unique ways (Clifford, 1986, p.9).’ Being a part of the Other, these ethnographers
might be able offer hints at the possibility of circumventing the inescapable essentialisms of East and West, and to a greater extant, a subversion of the allochronic discourse.
But how does this all apply to me, a child of the postcolonial, born and raised smack-dab in the Orient, on a cluster of islands on the edge of the Pacific, and now finding myself in the Netherlands, with the prospect of setting forth an anthropological work? Can I only avoid some of these anthropological pitfalls as far as I attempt to be a native ethnographer? Can I only be a native ethnographer as far as I study my own culture and nothing else? Can I come to terms with
17 | G o n z a l e s being the traditional Other and wrestle it towards a product that I can, in good conscience, live with?
I remember some time ago, perhaps after having just read some postcolonial texts, I began toying around with the idea of a reverse colonialism –of course it cannot practically be done but allow me to speculate on what it would be like to come to the West, in a fictional arrival, and ‘discover’ them for myself. I can imagine my field journal would say something to the tune of:
‘I arrived today in this strange and gloomy place they call the Netherlands. The natives here are quite pale, certainly from the lack of sun, prompting some of them to take vitamin D supplements to make up for this disadvantage. They are needlessly tall, and a majority are always riding bicycles, a mode of transportation, if you recall, already outdated by petrol and electrically-engined vehicles –their preference for which, I have yet to fully grasp. What they lack for in culinary sophistication they at least make up for in water management. I am convinced that the extreme degree of austerity for every bit of cheese placed in between two slices of bread they call a meal is only rivalled by the complexities of their dikes, dams, and polders. They are a people still preoccupied with the bygone problems of man and his natural environment.’
Amusing as this imagined reversal might be, it indicates to me the difficulties that come with my own displacement. How does one make a work that informed by the critiques of anthropology, and does not fall into essentialisms and lopsided binary oppositions? How can I assert coevalness, professing my own presence and that of the Other at the same time? These are the very questions that have led me to imagining organic ethnography.
18 | G o n z a l e s On Organic Ethnography
Consider again the image of the traditional ethnographer we have arrived at. Now imagine an opposite. If I try to approximate, it would perhaps be a woman. She is in her forties of fifties, a mother for sure. No prior experience with anthropology –might not even know the term. Instead of some distant island in the Pacific, or a remote village in any given mountain range in West Asia, she might just be around the corner from me, here in the Netherlands. Maybe a refugee. Speaks little to no Dutch, maybe only the basics. Who knows, she might rather be back home but is unable to due to war or some sort of oppression. Maybe she’s happy to be here –the point is that she is not here on the basis of an academic curiosity. I might have even bumped into her along the aisles of Albert Heijn. I can imagine her standing face to face with Snelle Jelle, a specific Dutch brand of ontbijtkoek or honeycake –the furthest thing from everything she has ever known all her life. Let us consider her an organic ethnographer.
The ‘organic,’ of course, I have taken from Antonio Gramsci and his idea of an organic intellectual. In Selections from the Prison Notebooks, he tells us that:
‘All men are intellectuals, one could therefore say: but not all have in society the function of intellectuals (Gramsci, 1971, p.9)’
Gramsci supposes that there are two kind of intellectuals –traditional intellectuals who are enabled by society to carry out intellectual endeavours that ultimately reinforce hegemonic culture that only serves to maintain the status quo. And on the other hand, organic intellectuals, who from their own classes are able to bring about new modes of thought that otherwise would not even be remotely possible with the traditional. Taking a little liberty, I appropriate this into
19 | G o n z a l e s my imagination of an ethnographic alternative. Perhaps all men are ethnographers, but not all men have in society the function of ethnographers. Even Dell Hymes hints at this:
‘Such a vision of a democratic society would see ethnography as a general possession, although differentially cultivated. At one pole would be a certain number of persons trained in ethnography as a profession. At the other pole would be the general population, respected (on this view of ethnography) as having a knowledge of their own worlds, intricate and subtle in many ways (consider the intricacy and subtlety of any normal person’s knowledge of language), and as having necessarily come to this knowledge by a process ethnographic in character (Hymes, 1980, p.99).’
We see from Hymes how there are ethnographies, and processes with ethnographic character – with the difference hinging on how they are cultivated, which in turn hinges on who cultivates them. Is it possible to reconsider the latter pole equally as ethnographies? Or more importantly, why shouldn’t we?
Given that the traditional and my proposed organic ethnographies are inherently different (in that they are cultivated by different sorts of ethnographers), there would be no point in trying to reconcile them, or have them meet halfway, or put one under the other. The most that we can do is to find a common thread running between the two, so that we (those who are reading this as an anthropological text) may be able to see the latter as ethnographies as much as the former –as I have come to think would be possible.
20 | G o n z a l e s Liminality
A common thread that I have identified between the traditional and the organic ethnographer are their both being liminal entities. The ‘liminal phase’ that certain individuals find themselves in, from Arnold van Gennep’s conception of rites de passages (1909), as expounded on by Victor Turner is seen as such:
‘Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial. As such, their ambiguous and indeterminate attributes are expressed by a rich variety of symbols in the many societies that ritualize social and cultural transitions (Turner, 1977, p.95).’
Looking into the three phases of rites de passage as van Gennep identifies, namely separation,
limen or margin (in which the liminal phase occurs), and aggregation, we may be able to fit the
experience of fieldwork within them. Let us first see this in the case of the traditional ethnographer.
Ironically, the first phase, separation, occurs upon arrival in his field. And in this field, he will feel his way through, applying his research methods, collecting data, all the while attempting to be self-reflexive (thus that ambiguity of the second liminal phase) –he is at that moment betwixt between knowing and not knowing what he set out to learn. From his fieldwork, he will be able to draw up anthropological findings in which he will seek to, at the very least, describe ,and at the very most explain what he had encountered. This sense of fieldwork as a rite of passage has already been thought of long before, even Turner attests to in On the Edge of the Bush:
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‘It has long been the jest of anthropologists that field "experience" equals our "rite de passage." But this remark is no metaphor; it describes a true psychological passage from one way of seeing and understanding to another, a passage not vouchsafed to those who hold hard to the values, meanings, goals, and beliefs they have grown up to think of as reality (Turner, 1985, p.205).’
On the other hand, we may find that these phases are also very much applicable to the organic ethnographer. Previously, I imagined her as a refugee –she does not even have to be. The operative aspect is her displacement. Like the traditional ethnographer, her arrival also indicates her separation. She begins at the outset, as an outsider who will, through various processes, whether bureaucratic, social, and cultural, might be enculturated, which is ‘the process through
which the individual acquires the culture of his group, class, segment or society (Shimahara, 1970, p.143),’ or even integrated (though this is a term that I veer away from given its highly political
and bureaucratic connotations).
Then, the same liminal second phase is experienced, though not as singularly focused as that of the traditional ethnographer (he is on a specific mission, with research questions, and objectives), without defined methods of research, and without the guidance of certain fields of inquiry and academic disciplines. Certainly, this positions the organic ethnographer in an immensely more ambiguous liminal state than the traditional ethnographer’s.
A stark difference, however, comes at the final phase of aggregation or reincorporation. As the process is much more diffused for the organic ethnographer, her final phase occurs I believe, differentially. For example, after navigating the liminality of learning her field’s language, her transformation is consummated by her linguistic performance, and to a greater extent, by her communicative competence –that she is able to function to a certain degree in that specific speech community. Of course, there are more aspects to cultures and societies than simply being
22 | G o n z a l e s a particular speech community, hence the differential occurrence of the final phase of reincorporation. The organic ethnographer is continually reincorporated in the various aspects of their belonging or adherence to their field.
Habitus
It is at this ambiguous juncture in the liminal state (for both traditional and organic ethnographers) that I would invoke the Bourdieuan concept of habitus, that which he broadly uses and obscurely refers to as:
‘…systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them (Bourdieu, 1980, p.53).’
These dispositions and capacities, or habitus, are encountered by the ethnographer in his field. It is the incongruence between the ethnographer’s habitus with that of his subject that enables intersubjective communication between them, and thus, enables ethnographic data to be derived from the experience of fieldwork. At the risk of being overly structuralist, I liken this to apprehending Bourdieu’s derivation of the concept of capital which he would split into economic, social, cultural, and symbolic –all of which inform habitus. The traditional ethnographer’s project can be seen as a survey of the interplay and conversions between these capitals and their effects on the habitus of their subject (whether it be in the context of a single event or to the extent of a broader culture). From this survey, ethnographic data are churned through theoretical frameworks, seen through various approaches, postcolonial and postmodern, and so on --until conclusions are made, and anthropological texts are published.
23 | G o n z a l e s As for the organic ethnographer, their experience in the field and subsequent understandings are not surveyed and translated into academic text, but rather they inform her performance within the same field –at higher and much more personal stakes than that of the traditional ethnographer (of course there are anthropologists who end up staying for longer and personal terms in their fields, but what we are referring to now is the initial intent of their ethnographic enterprise). Hence, the organic ethnographer is enculturated and socialized by the conditions of her field, in turn transforming habitus. The organic ethnographer might be seen then, for lack of a better term, as ‘buying in’ to their field, acquiring the various forms of capital that play within it –to the extent that their performance becomes one of reproduction, wherein they navigate their place within the culture and society being reproduced.
This perhaps, is the key difference between the traditional and the organic –that traditional ethnography hinges on an academic output. Looking back at how Hymes refers to the general population’s involvement with ethnography, that they come to possess knowledge ‘…by a
process ethnographic in character (Hymes, 1980, p.99),’ I believe the operative word here is process, which I would oppose from the ethnographic product (book, journal article, thesis) of
the traditional. Can the culturally and socially reproductive performance of the organic ethnographer be considered as ethnographies? Or are anthropologists otherwise monopolizing the capacity to produce ethnographies?
Language
Going back to Hymes’ example of the intricacy and subtlety of how the general population had come to their knowledge of language, is it also the same as how the organic ethnographer acquires the language of their field –that is to say, an ethnographic process? Take Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o’s elucidation on the relation of language and culture from Decolonising the Mind:
24 | G o n z a l e s
‘Language as communication and as culture are then products of each other. Communication creates culture: culture is a means of communication. Language carries culture, and culture carries, particularly through orature and literature; the entire body of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world. How people perceive themselves affects how they look at their culture, at their politics and at the social production of wealth, at their entire relationship to nature and to other beings. Language is thus inseparable from ourselves as a community of human beings with a specific form and character, a specific history, a specific relationship to the world (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, 1981, p.15-16).’
With such a view of language, the organic ethnographer’s acquisition of the language of their field can be equated to the acquisition of entirely new places in the world, new relationships to it –possibly spread out in all parts where human activity takes place, multiplied to the exponent of globalization, all the nooks and crannies of contact, filling all the cracks and crevices where people meet people, where new words and gestures are learned, whether out of necessity or curiosity, where there are attempts to understand an other.
Unfortunately, in this example of language, already much eludes the traditional ethnographer. The barrier for entry is much higher for traditional ethnographies, the rigours of research and learning involved even before contact. Anthropological research, according to Keesing:
‘entails a deep immersion into the life of a people … One learns their language and tries to learn their mode of life, One learns by participant observation, by living as well as viewing the new patters of life (Keesing, 1981, p.5-6).’
25 | G o n z a l e s To a certain extent, language even becomes part of a kind of fieldwork mystique, which certainly is shrouded within the anthropologist’s bag of tricks, if he is indeed, as Geertz (1984) says, a
merchant of astonishment. Oftentimes, these will never make the final print, the struggle with
language –
‘Anthropologists are normally expected to ‘learn the language’, and while most try to do so, many of us feel we fail. Since this means failure to measure up to a publicly required occupational definition, anthropologists have often taken refuge in silence. (Tonkin, 1984: 178 cited in Borchgrevink, 2003, p.95)’
To be completely honest, the entire enterprise that leads to this silence is understandable. After all, if the means by which ethnographic data is transmitted, i.e., language, comes into question, then the authority of the text itself will be under the same scrutiny. I genuinely ask myself, to what extent is this silence tolerable, or to what degree of transparency should we aspire to?
To appropriate Wittgenstein’s words into this example of language, for both the traditional and organic ethnographers, the proposition ‘the limits of my language mean the limits of my world
(Wittgenstein, 1922, p.74)’ rings true. In more recent anthropological projects, it is not even
solely cultures or societies anymore that are being looked at, but rather lifeworlds. Michael Jackson employs this Husserlian concept to which he anchors ethnography:
‘Ethnography throws one into a world where one cannot be entirely oneself, where one is estranged from the ways of acting and thinking that sustain one’s accustomed sense of identity. This emotional, intellectual, social, and sensory displacement can be so destabilizing that one has to fight the impulse to run for cover, to retrieve the sense of groundedness one has lost. But it can also be a window of opportunity, a way of
26 | G o n z a l e s
understanding oneself from the standpoint of another, or from elsewhere … Ethnographic understanding simply means that one may glimpse oneself as one might be or might have been under other circumstances, and come to the realization that knowledge and identity are emergent properties of the unstable relationship between self and other, here and there, now and then, and not fixed and final truths that one has been privileged to possess by virtue of living in one particular society at one particular moment in history. (Jackson, 2012, p.10).’
In the end, I find it insufficient and even inconsiderate to only view the traditional as practitioners of ethnography. Unlike the academic and institutional, lifeworlds are much more fluid and permeable, each individual is in it as much as the next. And if it is only the focused inquiry of an anthropologist or traditional ethnographer that sets certain lifeworlds as his ethnographic fields (that in which his ethnographic research will take place), then perhaps our discussion on liminality, habitus, and language, opens up the ethnographic field a little more. When it comes to Anthropology, I am of firm belief that efforts must be continually made to welcome and include the first part of that word, Anthropos-, human, in the most basic –organic sense.
27 | G o n z a l e s Snelle Jelle
So after considering the critiques of anthropology that we have mentioned, the allochronic discourse, a historically orientalist orientation, and then deconstructing the product and process of ethnography both traditional and my supposed organic, I still find myself lost in the quagmire that is the prospect of creating anthropological work in the aporetic postmodern. The nonpassage being constituted by the contradiction that is myself –that I am already categorically, a part of the tradition. A traditional ethnographer –I am, after all, writing this essay. It dawns on me that my imagination of the possibility of an organic ethnography will remain simply that, an imagination. That I will never be able to make an organic ethnography –that I have found a door on the wall I have been fumbling and feeling my way through, and that I cannot open it an see the other side. The most I can do, and that I have done, is to keep imagining –to the point of approximation. A kind of approximation informed by past and present anthropological discourse, an attempt, for lack of a better way of putting it, to do anthropology without doing Anthropology.
What I have made is a kind of journal. I call it Snelle Jelle of het verhaal over hoe ik hier leer te
leven –in English, Snelle Jelle (a brand of Dutch honey cake for breakfast) or the story of how I
learn to live here. It is, in the simplest terms, a recollection of my stay in the Netherlands, from arrival to the point of writing –almost a year. Though we have already established that I am already condemned to fall under the category of the traditional ethnographer, I also find myself sharing the kind of non-research related displacement with the organic. I have come to the Netherlands for a master education –not for a specific ethnographic research. It is in this displacement that I anchor my telling –all the while careful and cautious not to do unto my Other what the past had done unto theirs.
28 | G o n z a l e s In het Nederlands
The first thing to be noticed, even without opening the journal, is that it is written in Dutch. This is by no means done simply for novelty –but rather to be transparent about my commitment to my field, and to a greater extent, the lifeworlds that I find myself absorbed in. It is also to limit what American translation theorist Venuti supposes as the violence of translation that which he refers to:
‘resides in the very purpose and activity of translation: the reconstitution of the foreign text in accordance with values, beliefs, and representations that preexist it in the translating language and culture, always configured in hierarchies of dominance and marginality, always determining the production, circulation, and reception of texts (Venuti, 2002, p.14).’
I have tried not to commit this violence from the very outset –which is why I have attempted and continue to attempt to learn the Dutch language. Of course, many anthropologists, if not most, are encouraged to do the same. The difference, however, is that my attempt is not only so that I may be able to understand in the language, but also so that I may be able to express and produce in it in the end –again an avoidance of that violence. This means to say that I have written about my life in the Netherlands, so that they, the Dutch and whoever also speaks their language, may be able to read it without translation. And those who do not speak it will not be complicit in the violence I could otherwise have inflicted.
With regards to my competency in the Dutch language, I must disclose that I have taken no official language courses, or opened any grammar book, or employed the help of a tutor –before and during my stay in the Netherlands. While my Dutch is not nearly fluent, I take it to the extreme
29 | G o n z a l e s of writing the entire journal in it, to show my effort and investment in ways of life here –the ‘buying in’ to my fields and its Bourdieuan capitals, allowing it to permeate into my habitus. The journal itself chronicling, like the title says, my learning to live here.
Photography and Things
Beyond the written word, the journal is also inevitably filled with photographs. I have been, in my personal and professional life, a photographer --for a nearly a decade now. Most photographs I have included in the journal have been taken in the context of my personal life here in the Netherlands (save for the photographs of the Syrian refugees, when my research was still in its initial direction; but why can this also not be personal?) Stylistically, as a matter of personal choice, I have elected to shoot the photographs in analog black and white –another practice that comes from my personal and professional life as an analog photographer. I found this to be apt for Snelle Jelle for three reasons. The first being that black and white film is much cheaper. Second, that I intend the photographs to emphasize on the encounter, the reality trace (as I will expound on shortly) –meaning to say I find that there is no need for color. Lastly, that I intend
Snelle Jelle to be printed simply and affordably, even photocopied –so that it is easily consumable
by anyone who so wishes. With regards to the degree of creativity or artistry within the photographs, I have no control over anymore –I cannot escape myself and my capacities in this sense. After all, what should anthropological photography look like? In the context of an imagination of organic ethnography, why should it matter?
The inclusion of visual material is also not without its perils. Going back to Fabian, with his critique of Anthropology and how it creates its Object, he dedicates a chapter to discuss the visual tendencies in anthropology. He assigns the term visualism ‘to connote a cultural, ideological bias
toward vision as the “noblest sense” and toward geometry qua graphic-spatial conceptualization as the most “exact” way of communicating knowledge (Fabian, 1983, p.106).’ While he does not
30 | G o n z a l e s explicitly refer to photographs or videos, he underscores the field’s use of visualization in order to record and propagate knowledge. Charts, diagrams, documentation, language that lean on one’s sense of sight, etc. All this buttress the scientific slant of the field. He does mention however the possibility that visual anthropology, then an emerging branch of the discipline (as it still is now), might be ‘directed against the limiting effects of visualism on a theory of knowledge (ibid.,
p.123).’ Although, he also cautions at the end that ‘visual ethnography lends itself to methodologization, in some instances of the most excessive kind (ibid., p.123).’ Yet another thing
to consider –though I hesitate at taking heed of it because he is still pertaining to traditional ethnography.
The depersonalization and distance that the visual bias anthropology had/has is exactly what I seek to wrestle with. Imagining organic ethnography visually (the redundancy occurs to me that
imagining already implies visually), anchors the process and the one who carries it out onto the
present, with the understanding that visual representations, such as photographs, are traces of reality, as Sontag indeed supposes, ‘a photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image),
an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask (Sontag, 1977, p.154).’ In this view, one could argue that the reality
trace also asserts coevalness, lending visual methods ironically effective against the allochronic discourse Fabian identified. Reality traces, set against metanarratives also show us how photography can be liberating in this sense, as Berger proclaims:
‘All photographs are possible contributions to history, and any photograph, under certain circumstances, can be used in order to break the monopoly which history today has over time (Berger, 1982, p.109).’
Beyond the photographs and the text, there is also a wide variety of found objects (either directly scanned or otherwise drawn). Things such as envelopes, cards, newspapers, song lyrics, food
31 | G o n z a l e s wrappers, and others. While they are presented visually, they also form a different class of visual ethnographic material. With these, I lean on the ontological turn and its methodological project of thinking through things:
‘It encourages anthropologists to attend to ‘things’ as they emerge in diverse ethnographic settings, and to begin such investigations with what, for the ethnographer, may appear as a logical reversal: rather than providing data to which theory is applied, revealing the strengths and flaws of an existing theoretical model, the things encountered in fieldwork are allowed to dictate the terms of their own analysis… (Henare, Holbraad, Wastell, 2007, p.4).’
Within the imagined organic ethnography, things are also taken to the extent of not being analysed, but rather merely shown –allowing it to speak for itself within the narrative of the journal. To colonize the image with theory would be to cross over to the traditional. From this little dabbling into the ontological turn, however, I am able to glint at future possibilities for organic ethnography, but we will get to that later. There is still the most important aspect of my approximation: myself, the author.
Snelle Jelle, in the end, only qualifies as literature –broadly. Whether it is an ethnography, I can
only speculate. As literature, it bears an author, and this specific one, bears my name. Given the dual nature of Snelle Jelle as both an imagination of organic ethnography (presented academically), and an innocent journal of a guy’s learning to live in some place (presented publicly), my authorship might inevitably bring about certain tensions within the text. In this regard, I have taken preemptive measures to kill myself –in that Barthesian sense of the death of
the author (1977). This move also serves to reduce the anthropological import that my
personality might bring. There is not much about me outside the text that is put into it. There is only my likeness in photographs, my name, my penmanship. Some details are inevitably allowed
32 | G o n z a l e s to slip in, for purposes of sincerity –that I am in the Netherlands for a master program in Anthropology. With regards to where I come from, I have only mentioned the Philippines once, and only to tell the circumstances of my meeting a certain person mentioned intext. In line with this, I also strived not to make comparisons with other cultures and societies –most especially not to my own. This is done with the intent to assert coevalness between myself and my field and those who inhabit it, doing away with essentialisms and the talk of the here and now and
there and then.
With all these considered, the use of the Dutch language (even my misuse at times), inclusion of photographs and things, and the attempted exclusion of myself, I have materialized my imagination, to the best of my abilities and always with careful consideration of what and who I have written about. It goes without saying that Snelle Jelle is not perfect –if there even is a perfect imagination. Certainly, someone might just come along, put it under critical consideration, deconstruct it, and to that I say: welcome. I have after all, only come to imagine it after doing the same to what I have thus far learned about anthropology. I am reminded of a certain response Gayatri Spivak gave to the question whether she saw Derrida’s Of Grammatology (which she translated into English) as a deconstruction of western Philosophy:
‘That’s what de-construction is about, right? It’s not just destruction. It’s also construction.
It’s critical intimacy, not critical distance. So you actually speak from inside … “ ... you can only deconstruct what you love [quoting Paul de Man].” Because you are doing it from the inside, with real intimacy. You’re kind of turning it around. It’s that kind of critique (Spivak, 2016).‘
In this way, Snelle Jelle is also imagined from inside anthropology. I have not lost sight of the giants, but have even gone closer to them through this endeavour. I even borrow their words sometimes. In a certain page I write ‘en als alles klaar is, is er niets anders to doen dan door te
33 | G o n z a l e s
gaan met je leven’ –which are almost the same words written by Malinowski about his arrival in
the Melanesian New Guinea, save for my organic spin: ‘you have nothing to do, but to start at
once your ethnographic work (Malinowski, 1922, p.3).’ With Snelle Jelle, I do not seek to parody,
but rather, praise –not the works of the past but the tradition that allows us little by little to move the needle towards an anthropology of our own time –otherwise, you wouldn’t be reading this, would you?
34 | G o n z a l e s Conclusion
I began with the naïve proclamation of the premise of anthropology, that there is much to be learned from each other. From there, we have briefly traced a bit of anthropological history, some of its turns, and how it all relates to my particular position –being from the Philippines, taking up a master in cultural and social anthropology in the Netherlands. I have shown the particular predicament I found myself in, after having seen a face of anthropology that did not sit well with me. The internal critique of the allochronic discourse in the discipline as shown by Fabian, and the broader critique of the Orientalism from Said and how they have shaped anthropology –the aftermath of it all, the complicity to empire such as the case of H. Otley Beyer, and the residue of archaic ways of thinking of the Other. All these confounded by the prospect of creating my own anthropological work. In the overwhelming impasse, I considered the possibility of what I call ‘organic ethnography.’
Borrowing from Gramsci, I have appropriated the organic aspect of his concept of ‘organic intellectual.’ Applying it to ethnography, I began imagining ways in which displaced individuals might be considered organic ethnographers –given certain common threads running between them and the traditional. The liminal state that occurs for both traditional and organic ethnographers, instructed by van Gennep and Turner’s conceptions of rites of passage, the incongruence in habitus, in the Bourdieuan sense, that in turn enables intersubjective communication –a crucial ingredient in ethnography. Finally, an example of language acquisition and the ways in which it may be seen as parallel to the ways in which we apprehend lifeworlds.
With the inescapable fact of my being a student of anthropology, hence categorically traditional, I have attempted to approximate my imagination by means of a visual journal, chronicling my life in the Netherlands from my arrival in January of 2020, until the point of writing. By writing in the Dutch language, I avoid the violence of translation –both from understanding, and later towards
35 | G o n z a l e s literary use. I wrestle with the visual methods as well as lean on the ontological turn, using them to employ the visual bias against aforementioned oppressive discourses in anthropology. And most importantly, have made an effort not to make comparisons or relativisms at the cost of excluding much details about myself.
When I first thought of it, and even during the time I had been creating it, I had not yet thought of further possibilities that might branch out from Snelle Jelle, and from this exploration of the possibility of organic ethnography. However, after having recently read about the ontological turn, it has led me to consider further possibilities –perhaps a way of finding and understanding organic ethnographies without subjugating it. The ontological turn, after all, is much more considerate in this sense:
‘The signature move of the ontological turn is just that: a thoroughgoing attempt to turn on its head the relationship, as well as the hierarchy, between ethnographic materials and analytical resources. Rather than treating ethnography as the object of analytical concepts and procedures, the turn to ontology treats ethnography above all as their source (Holbraad, Pedersen, 2017, p.6).’
With everything said and done, Snelle Jelle stands on its own. With or without this essay that seeks to ‘pop the hood’ or ‘lift the veil,’ so to speak, outlining the impetus of the project, it can thoroughly be read –by an anthropologist or otherwise. After all, if it were indeed to be imagined organically, in that Gramscian sense, it must inevitably be available and even specifically catered to broader audiences, and not limited to traditional ethnographers and intellectuals.
36 | G o n z a l e s At the end of my inquiry into the possibility of organic ethnography, and my imagination that follows it, I return to the beginning: there is much to be learned from each other –that remains not only the premise of anthropology, but also its promise.
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