The Song of the Sirens and the Non-Transcendental

Abstract

Over the past three decades the ethnographic-based human sciences (anthropology, social linguistics, ethnomusicology, sociology, etc.) have come under heavy scrutiny for the perpetuation of injustice and inequality, and a lack of sensitivity to indigenous epistemologies and material needs. Among the nefarious epistemological issues is that of “transcendental knowledge,” information that is presented as “fact” or through impervious narrative in the mode of so-called empirical sciences. The model of transcendental knowledge still pervades the human sciences despite critiques from postcolonial and poststructural scholars. Through a simultaneous re-evaluation of the Dialectic of Enlightenment's critique and an analysis of the pressures and perils of the academic market, we can see how Horkheimer and Adorno's cautionary analysis can be applied to contemporary ethnography in an effort to philosophize and practice writing that does not submit to the reifying pressures of grand and grave theories and represents human life with the deserved dignity and distress.

Notes

Notes

1. In “Life: Experience and Science” Michel Foucault points to Kant and the debate on Was ist Aufklarung? as the first point when philosophy became tied to praxis: “Philosophy appears then both as a more or less revealing element of the signification of an epoch, and, on the contrary, as the general law that determined the figure that it was to have for each epoch.” The Essential Foucault, ed. Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose (New York: The New Press, 1994), 8.

2. See the online Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy entry for “Critical Theory” for one prominent example, along with the more expository writings of Jürgen Habermas.

3. Marx's “Thesis XI” from Theses on Feuerbach remains a critical darling of aspiring critical theorists, especially in the human sciences: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”

4. Foucault points out, in “Life: Experience and Science” that with Kant and Aufklarung, came “the moment when philosophy found the possibility of establishing itself as the determining figure of an epoch, and when that epoch became the form of that philosophy's fulfillment” (8).

5. It is difficult to overemphasize how much our very profession is hinged upon the Enlightenment and its various articulations and logics. See Tadao Mayakawa, ed., The Science of Public Policy: Essential Readings in Policy Sciences (London: Routledge, 2002).

6. See Bourdieu, Pierre, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), and Sherry Ortner, “Theory in Anthropology Since the Sixties,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 26.1 (1984): 126–64.

7. For an excellent and concise summary of culture as a system of practices, see Alessandro Duranti, Linguistic Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), chap. 2, “Theories of Culture.”

8. For a thorough exposition on the transcendental center, focused on the work of anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, see Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1978), chap. 10.

9. See the Epilogue in Gregory Bateson, Naven, 2d ed. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958) for the author's reflexive account of how the changing face of human scholarship changed his book, though the book itself was republished without revision.

10. For a summary and case studies in ethnographic writing and Western representational power, see James Clifford and George E. Marcus, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Writing Ethnography (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986); also see Trouillot, Michel-Rolph “Anthropology in the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness,” in Recapturing Anthropology, ed. Richard Fox (Santa Fe, CA: School of American Research Press, 1991). Talal Asad, “Ethnographic Representation, Statistics and Modern Power,” Social Theory 61.1 (1994): 55–88; Nicholas B. Dirks, “Castes of Mind,” Representations 37 (1992): 56–78; “The Policing of Tradition: Colonialism and Anthropology in South India,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37.1 (1997): 182–212; Eric Wolf, “American Anthropologists in American Society,” in Reinventing Anthropology, ed. Dell Hymes (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), for excellent critiques of ethnographic writing in anthropology.

11. I choose to combine these two terms because in the academy they are codependent and are intertwined even as they exist in very different times and places.

12. Until fairly recently, analyses included chapters on cosmology or world-view, and the discourses of cognitive linguistics, psychoanalysis, psychology and consciousness were deeply embedded in ethnographic works. Along the same lines, were theories of emic and etic knowledge, which gave the fieldworker a special, panoptical epistemic vision as an ‘outsider’.

13. For examples of literature with similar concerns from sociology, see John Van Maanen, Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988); and John Van Maanen, ed., Representation in Ethnography. (London: Sage Publications, 1995).

14. See Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia (London: Verso, 2006), esp. #46, 47, and 50; and Melissa Forbis, “Never Again a Mexico Without Us” (diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2008).

15. Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 278–94.

16. See Forbis, “Never Again a Mexico Without Us,”chap. 1.

17. See Edward Said, “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology's Interlocutors” Critical Inquiry 15.2 (1989): 205–25; and Asad, “Ethnographic Representation, Statistics and Modern Power,” 55–88.

18. Clifford and Marcus, Writing Culture.

19. See Roger Sanjek, “Anthropology's Hidden Colonialsim: Assistants and Their Ethnographers,” Anthropology Today 9.2 (1993): 13–18, for an account of the ways in which informants have been treated in anthropological texts.

20. See Steven Feld's postscript to Sound and Sentiment. He addresses the process of dialogic editing as the process of speaking to, with and through each other, resulting in a multiplicity of voices in the text. In the second edition of the book, he includes his original analyses and then reports on how certain Kaluli readers informed him that his analyses were flawed in some way, leaving the gap between authorial and informant voice present for his readers. Steven Feld, Sound and Sentiment: Brids, Weeping, Poetics and Song in Kaluli Expression, 2d ed. (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990).

21. See Anna Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). In her discussion on universals she brings up the prospect of multiple truths contra Universal Truth.

22. One such example is ethnomusicologist Aaron Fox's Real Country: Music and Language in Working Class Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), and a website that he constructed containing the audio and video clips of the musicians he interviewed, performances and links to purchase their music and view other webpages.

23. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness,” in Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2003), 7–28. Trouillot's is a particularly jarring critique of the moral weight of the past that should be felt by present anthropologists. He states: “Changes in the explicit criteria of acceptability do not automatically relieve the historical weight of the field of significance that the discipline inherited at birth” (18).

24. Ibid.

25. See Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?”.

26. Veit Erlmann, Music Modernity and the Global Imagination: South Africa and the West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

27. Since its publication in 1976, literally hundreds of books and articles have taken up the topic, far too many to cite here.

28. Bruno Frey, “Publication as Prostitution?—Choosing between One's Own Ideas and Academic Success,” Public Choice 116 (2003): 205–23.

29. See Adorno, Minima Moralia.

30. Michael Taussig, always the advocate of the outside voice, has a passage entitled “Address to the Academy,” which hits and spits at such a question, at the beginning of his seminal Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (London: Routledge, 1993).

31. Taken from Carl Schmidt, Political Theology, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), and used several times by Dirks, Nicholas, The Scandal of Empire, India and the Creation of Imperial Britain. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2006, a “state of exemption” occurs when those who make the rules willingly fail to live by them. Indeed in the search of authenticity that grounded so much of anthropology and folklore, it often was the ethnographer who was willfully inauthentic.

32. See Justin Patch, Anti-War Music: A Case Study from Austin, TX 2004–2006. (Masters Report, University of Texas at Austin, 2008); hereafter page references are cited in the text.

33. Bateson, Naven.

34. See Patch, Anti-War Music.

35. Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

36. Unni Wikan, “Beyond Words: The Power of Resonance,” American Ethnologist 19.3 (August 1992): 460–82.

37. See Clifford and Marcus, Writing Culture, for one of many critiques of Malinowski, especially with regards to the anthropologists’ gaze.

38. This is not always the case, however. In my own field of ethnomusicology there have been primary source musicians who have served as cultural pedagogues, and who also have gone on to study music in at western universities, get Ph.D.'s and become tenured at reputable institutions. I can only assume that the same has happened with anthropology, sociology and the other human sciences. These instances, however are more the exception than the rule, and the number who make that specific journey are minute when compared to the number of aid researchers in their own quest for publication, recognition and tenure.