CHAPTER 13

On the Work and Writing of Ethnography

What would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgeableness and not, in one way or another and to the extent possible, in the knower's straying afield of himself…to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known?

—Michel Foucault

 

 

Having explored several variations on the theme of human existence as a continual interplay between the hypothetical poles of beingin-oneself and being-with-others, it is only appropriate that I should consider in this closing chapter the methodological ramifications of this theme in the work and writing of ethnography.

My focus is the ethical question of how it is possible, in our ethnographic fieldwork and writing, to reconcile our intellectual preoccupations with the often radically different preoccupations of our interlocutors. How, in brief, can we strike a balance between doing justice to the people who accept us into their communities, sharing their life experiences and scarce resources, and satisfy the demands of the profession to which we belong and from which we make our living?

This dilemma also finds expression in our existential struggle in the field to maintain a balance between preserving and losing our sense of personal identity.

Montaigne provides a telling example of this dilemma in his essay on the imagination. In the house of a wealthy and elderly man “who suffered with his lungs,” Montaigne meets the attending physician who, when asked by the patient how he might be cured, answers that one way would be for him to infect Monsieur Montaigne, who is in good health, with a liking for his company. “If he were to fix his gaze on the freshness of my complexion,” Montaigne writes, “and his thoughts on the youthful gaiety and vigour with which I overflowed, and if he were to feast his senses on my flourishing state of health, his own condition might well improve.” In the same ironic vein, Montaigne then points out that what the physician forgot to mention was that Montaigne's health “might at the same time deteriorate.”¹

Are we then justified in speaking of a “healthy” or “safe” distance that should be kept between oneself and others, whether they are well or ill?

FIELDWORK

It is customary among the Kuranko that having received a stranger into one's home and given him or her hospitality and protection, one is expected to accompany the guest halfway on his or her journey home. This custom of “escorting” (blessala) or “going along with” (kata ma so) makes a good metaphor for fieldwork, for while one's hosts are obliged to look after their “stranger,”² the stranger is expected to reciprocate by respecting local protocols, being attentive to the rules of the household in which he or she is lodged, and mindful of what is expected of him or her in return for what is given. That one's very humanity is contingent on being accepted into this other lifeworld, albeit as a dependent and a potential risk, is shown by the excessive gratitude with which the novice ethnographer often attempts to ritually repay his or her hosts. Weston La Barre once observed that “out of professional pride, anthropologists seldom admit the quite characteristic depression and paranoia of ‘culture shock’ they have all experienced during the first few weeks or months of fieldwork.”³ But it is not only the alien and the unknown that disorient one in the field, for one is often already marginal in the culture in which one has grown up, and desperate for validation. That one “comes out of the field experience with a mildly fanatic love” for one's particular people, espousing a commitment to their interests and with “deeply gratifying personal friendships that over-ride great cultural and age differences” is, La Barre argues, not because one's real character was acknowledged and appreciated but because the other “rescued one's humanity” at a time when one was vulnerable and struggling to find one's feet. One's indebtedness to the other finds expression in an overcompensatory gesture of praising the other as a friend or kinsman or kinswoman. I think there is more than a grain of truth in La Barre's remarks, and it rings true of my earliest relationships with Kuranko collaborators.

Initially, the people with whom one associates are often marginal in their own lifeworld—outliers, so to speak, who are halfway to being rank outsiders like oneself. But one's relationships with people met in the course of fieldwork change over time, and the deepening of personal ties transforms the kind of conversations and interactions one has, as well as the kind of understandings one acquires, and these transformations may compromise the nomothetic project of anthropology itself—which, in its insistence on explaining human thought and behavior in terms of culture, history, or global processes, finds it difficult to accommodate the idiosyncratic and affective dimensions of social life. Fieldwork that begins with an overwhelming sense of alienation from one's host community may therefore lead to an equally overwhelming sense of identification with it.

But in “going along” with those on whom one's personal wellbeing and professional research depend, one is not obliged to “go all the way,” uncritically accommodating all that is asked of one or accepting all that one's hosts do or say. The crucial ethical demand is that one not foreclose conversations because one presumes to know the origins, motives, or meaning of the other's thoughts or emotions, and that one not judge the views of the other solely from the standpoint of one's own worldview. Just as any conversation requires that one is attentive to what others have to say, without being obliged to embrace their point of view, so being a good guest implies a willingness to meet one's hosts halfway—less a question of an empathic identification with the other which is, as Paul Ricoeur points out, “neither possible nor desirable,” or of cultivated disinterest, but of a “favorable attitude” toward the other, manifest in the act of “accompanying.”⁴ One seeks to strike a balance, as it were, between having it all one's own way and becoming so submerged in the lifeworld of the other that one's own sense of self is utterly eclipsed. The indeterminate character of ethnographic research reflects this tension between a disposition to cling to habitual ways of thinking and acting (because they are second nature and provide a sense of personal stability in an unstable world) and a desire to open oneself up to the possibility of seeing and doing things in radically different ways, even though these might initially seem “unnatural.”

When I first lived in a Kuranko village I preferred to light my own fire to boil water for drinking or bathing. I regarded this mundane task as having little bearing on my research work, and, inevitably, my method of building a fire was careless and wasteful of wood. Though villagers possibly joked about my fire lighting, they did not criticize or censure me, which was remarkable considering the scarcity of firewood and the time consumed in gathering it. One day, for no apparent reason, I observed how Kuranko women kindled and tended a fire, and I sought to imitate their technique, which involved careful placement of the firestones, never using more than three lengths of split wood at one time, laying each piece carefully between the firestones, and gently pushing them into the fire as the ends burned away. When I took pains to make a fire in this way, I became aware of the intelligence of the technique, which maximized the scarce firewood (which women have to split and tote from up to a mile and a half away), produced exactly the amount of heat required for cooking, and enabled instant control of the flame. This practical mimesis afforded me insight into how people maximized both fuel and human energy; it made me see the close kinship between economy of effort and grace of movement; it helped me realize the common sense that informs even the most elementary tasks in a Kuranko village.

Many of my insights into Kuranko social life followed from a comparable cultivation of practical skills: hoeing on a farm, dancing (as one body), trimming the wick of a kerosene lantern, eating with the fingers of my right hand, weaving a mat, entertaining a guest.

During my first few months of fieldwork, I would seek out a quiet and unoccupied room to write up my field notes. Constantly interrupted by my concerned hosts, who were uncertain as to whether I needed companionship or preferred my own company, I moved to the verandah of the house, where I could do my work without giving offense. However, whenever someone came by to chat or sit with me, I felt obliged to offer a cup of tea and engage in small talk. As with my fire lighting, so with my socializing—it took me a long time before I noticed how others performed these tasks, and even longer before I began emulating local usages. This meant breaking my characteristically Western middleclass habit of making conversation with a guest and of filling silences with trivial observations. Among the Kuranko, neighborliness (siginyorgoye, lit. “sitting partnership”) is expressed through customary greetings and the sharing of food and drink. But mutual recognition does not require constant conversation and is best consummated in amicable silence—the art of simply being-with-another, an art of copresence. By learning to rely on observation and imitation rather than interrogation, I went a long way toward a participatory understanding of local praxis, literally putting myself in the place of the other, inhabiting his or her world.

George Devereux has shown that one's personality inevitably colors the character of one's observations and that the “royal road to an authentic, rather than fictitious, objectivity” is perforce the way of informed subjectivity.⁵ But subjectivity is social and somatic in character, and not necessary a synonym for solipsism or self-centeredness. To participate bodily in the everyday practical life of another society may be a creative technique that helps one grasp the sense of an activity by using one's body as others do, just as eating as locals eat, working at the pace that locals work, and going along with local priorities may carry one into an understanding that could not be attained through questioning, interviewing, or conceptual guesswork alone. In other words, ethnographic practice is always more than a matter of observing. Understanding cannot be attained simply by seeing (either through inspection or introspection); it implicates all the senses to varying degrees and involves a bodily relationship with the objects and others around us.⁶ This means that ethnographic practice subsumes the allegedly disinterested understanding of epistêmê in technê, where even theory building is construed as a technique, on a par with word processors, plows, and defense mechanisms, whereby human beings seek to make their relations with the world and with others more practically and socially viable.

There are resonances here of Heidegger's discussion of equipment and equipmentality. Heidegger's argument is that we never encounter things as having a self-evident identity. Things, like other people, reveal themselves in relation to us, just as we disclose ourselves in the ways we relate to them. Thus, simply by looking at a hammer we can deduce little about its function. The hammer only reveals its “being” when it is picked up and put to use. In Heidegger's words, “The kind of Being which equipment possesses—in which it manifests itself in its own right—we call ‘readiness-to-hand’ (Zuhandenheit).”⁷ Heidegger then goes on to say that “theoretical behavior is just looking, without circumspection.” And he argues that understanding depends on our ability to grasp the “readiness-to-hand” of everything from a forest to a fire or an acre of farmland. The meaning of these things resides in their physical implementation.

Can we extend this argument to intersubjectivity and claim that our knowledge of others and of their lifeworlds is contingent on the ways we engage and interact with them? Such a claim implies that it is more fruitful to understand oneself and the other in relation to the situation in which we find ourselves, and that dispositions, identities, roles, and cultural schemata are potentialities, “ready-to-hand,” that come into play strategically, opportunistically, and variously as our interests shift and our situation alters. Bernard Stiegler refers to this ongoing process of becoming as individuation, though he is careful not to conflate this term with individualization, since any interaction entails I and We identifications,⁸ and both are constantly under revision as circumstances change.

To focus on human situations involves calling into question the view that people speak and act in certain ways because they are culturally, historically, or biogenetically predisposed to do so. But while explanations based on disposition are alluringly parsimonious and seemingly coherent, explanations based on situations offer far less intellectual satisfaction, partly because situations are usually too complex and involve too many points of view to allow much analytical certainty. A way out of this impasse is to learn how to draw a line between what can and cannot be expressed in explanatory language.

In his Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein remarks that “even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched,” and he goes on to say that “there are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.”⁹ Gabriel Marcel made a similar distinction between a “problem” that admits of a solution and a “mystery” that can never be entirely solved.

A problem is something met with which bars my passage. It is before me in its entirety. A mystery, on the other hand, is something in which I find myself caught up, and whose essence is therefore not to be before me in its entirety. It is as though in this province the distinction between in me and before me loses its meaning.¹⁰

If our essays in understanding can only go partway toward explaining “all that is the case,”¹¹ does our task then become one of judging when to tell and when to show?

Much ethnographic writing is so replete with explanatory language and so bereft of sustained descriptions of life as lived that one might easily conclude that the ethnographer is seeking to mask with discursive prose a complexity that he or she cannot psychologically tolerate. What passes for theory is thus a defense against the anxiety of the inexplicable, the ineffable, the contradictory, the ambiguous.¹²

Herein lies the case for existential-phenomenological anthropology. Many of the topics on which phenomenologists and existentialists have focused lie at the boundaries of what traditional empiricism, philosophy, religious studies, and social science have defined as their respective preserves. Rather than the analysis or interpretation of texts, we also look to the contexts in which texts are produced, used, abused, or invoked. Rather than the life of the mind, we also consider the life of the body, the senses, the emotions, the imagination, and the material objects we fashion, deploy, and value in our everyday lives. Rather than assuming that our experience of the world may be directly inferred from the ways in which we represent the world to ourselves and to others, we focus on the lack of fit, the slippage between our immediate experience and the conceptual forms whereby that experience is mediated. Rather than isolate the human subject as an arbiter of meaning, a bounded self, a singular existent, we switch our attention to what transpires between subjects and the ways in which our sense of self is contingent on the behaviors, responses, and dispositions of others and the situations in which we find ourselves. Rather than speak of stable and identifiable entities—whether these be personalities, innate dispositions, cultures, religions, or historical periods—we prefer to deconstruct such categories, exploring the mutable and multifarious character of our actual being-in-the-world, and suspending all assumptions as to the epistemological truth of the descriptive labels we deploy in creating the illusion that the world can be subject to our knowledge and control. Our focus is the human struggle for being—the ongoing, resourceful, and various ways in which we work, alone and together, to affirm life in the face of death, salvage life in face of adversity, and make life fulfilling rather than empty of meaning. But life is always lived within limits, no matter how much we fantasize that life may be made limitless—and these limits include the limits of our ability to comprehend and control life, the limits of our ability to endure hardship, the limits of our ability to articulate what it is we think we know, and the limits of our ability to reverse time as if it were like a passage of music that we could replay endlessly until we got it right.

WRITING

Perhaps no philosopher wrestled more with this question of the limits of meaning, of logic, and of thought than Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose Tractatus concludes with the famous remark, “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” But Wittgenstein also argues that even when the philosopher has nothing to say, he may have something to show—obliquely, analogically, descriptively. There are inadvertent echoes here of Husserl's and Heidegger's conception of phenomenology as descriptive showing—a method of bringing something into the light of day, of revealing what it looks like, what it appears to be.¹³ For an ethnographer, therefore, two vital questions arise: first, when do we allow our interlocutors to speak, fully acknowledging their voices, their points of view, and not occlude their voices and views with our own?; second, when do we presume to say what is the case, when do we show what cannot be said, and when do we keep silent?

The trick is of what I have elsewhere called “writing intersubjectivity,”¹⁴ developing a paratactic style that interleaves story and essay, strikes a balance between the voice of the author and the voices of his or her interlocutors, and leaves space for the reader to rethink whatever is being said or shown. One's writing preserves the oscillations in lived experience between moments of complete engagement and moments of detached reflection, while echoing the continual switching in everyday life between moments of self-absorption and moments of absorption in others. Ideally, one's writing shows how understandings emerge from the space between people—a space of conversation, negotiation, and encounter that switches unpredictably between accord and discord, attunement and disharmony. Indeed, the wealth of vernacular images derived from music and applied to both writing and sociality attests to the profound similarities between our relations with others and our sense of sound. Fieldwork is a way of sounding the other out—giving him or her a hearing, getting a sense of the world from his or her point of view. By extension, sound writing echoes the events, encounters, and conversations that make up our everyday life in another society, bringing them back to life on the printed page while at the same time offering our reflections on them.

We may have reached a moment of neorealism in the history of the academy when in-depth, detailed, direct recountings of experience will be considered as illuminating, edifying, and thoughtful as the experience-distant jargon extolled by the rationalists of the Enlightenment. David Shields calls this “reality hunger,” an increased interest in and appetite for “seemingly unprocessed, unfiltered, uncensored, and unprofessional” material, and a blurring of distinctions between fiction and nonfiction, description and analysis, and anthropology and autobiography.¹⁵ Arousing emotion, moving a reader, describing the living context in which one's thoughts unfold, and using artistic devices—narrative, imagery, idiomatic speech, montage—are valid ways of communicating a point of view, making an argument, or revealing a truth. It is becoming acceptable to stir or disturb one's audience in the same way that music or movies do. Rather than distrusting prose that evokes a slice of life, a lived event, or a personal experience, we are learning to distrust forms of discourse in which the assertion of authority requires an autocratic manner. We crave sincerity as much as scholarship, direct testimony as much as indirect speech. The world of thought is being brought back to life. The test of the soundness of philosophy—and, by extension, the writing of philosophy—is whether, in the words of John Dewey, it ends “in conclusions which, when they are referred back to ordinary life-experiences and their predicaments, render them more significant, more luminous to us, and make out dealings with them more fruitful…does it yield the enrichment and increase of power of ordinary things.”¹⁶ And so we ask, how may anthropology or philosophy become what Ivan Illich called “a tool for conviviality”?¹⁷

In addressing this question, my concern is with techniques of writing that enable us to resonate with and remain in touch with the events, persons, and things being written about, writing that does justice to life, that makes sense, that rings true. This is not a call for reverting to old ideas of writing as mimesis or representation—mirroring the nature of the world or creating naturalistic images. Sound writing may capture or convey the spirit of lived experience by radical departures from naturalistic conventions, in the same way that literary dialogue can sound real without resembling actual conversation.

SOUND PROPERTIES OF THE WRITTEN WORD

Writing carries traces of sound and speech, in the same way that our moments of solitude carry traces of our social lives. This is why the question of whether speech is more authentic than writing is as absurd as the question of whether individuality is a more authentic mode of being than participation in collective life. As with the Gestalt image of figure and ground, these different modalities are mutually entailed and mutually arising. There is, to cite Jacques Derrida, a “metaphysical exchange” and “circular complicity of the metaphors of the eye and the ear.”¹⁸

Consider Ngugi Wa Thiong'o's childhood memoir Dreams in a Time of War, in which the Gikuyu and Kenyan writer describes his first experiences of school at age nine and the Gikuyu primer with which he learned to read. At first he is attracted to the pictures that accompany the text, and only gradually does he learn to tackle long passages that lack any illustrations. One passage he reads over and over again until suddenly, one day, he begins to hear music in the words:

 

God has given the Agky a beautiful country

Abundant in water, food and luscious bush

The Agky should praise the Lord all the time

For he has ever been generous to them.

 

“Even when not reading it,” Ngugi writes, “I can hear the music.” He continues, “The choice and arrangements of the words, the cadences. I can't pick any one thing that makes it so beautiful and long-lived in my memory. I realize that even written words can carry the music I loved in stories, particularly the choric melody. And yet this is not a story; it is a descriptive statement. It does not carry an illustration. It is a picture in itself and yet more than a picture and a description. It is music. Written words can also sing.”¹⁹

There is a long tradition in scholarship of seeing oral and literate technologies of communication as entailing radically different sensibilities and essentially different ontologies. It is argued that the transition from orality to literacy entails a dramatic transformation in consciousness in which words cease to sing,²⁰ intellectuality becomes divorced from feeling, the arts of memory atrophy, vision is privileged over all other senses, thought becomes independent of conventional wisdom, and the reader is alienated from his or her community.²¹ These arguments are often informed by a romantic view that oral cultures enshrine a more ecologically balanced and socially attuned mode of existence in which the life of the community takes precedence over the life of the mind—as in Walter Benjamin's lament that modernity prefers information processing to storytelling, data to wisdom,²² echoing Socrates's conviction that writing is a phantom, undermining memory, poisoning/ drugging the mind, and leading us astray.²³

I want to contest the assumption that orality and literacy are mutually antithetical and that writing necessarily entails a loss of authentic values, eclipsing oral modes of expression and undermining social bonds. I also want to argue against the view that we can characterize and contrast entire societies in terms of their dominant technology of communication—or, for that matter, their dominant modes of government, economic life, or social organization. As George Devereux pointed out many years ago, a complete understanding of any social formation demands that we explore the ambivalence that arises from the copresence of manifest and latent patterns,²⁴ and hence the tension that exists between that which is publicly emphasized and that which is publicly suppressed, between dominant and subdominant leitmotifs, alternative ethical values, and different modes of consciousness. No society exists or has ever existed that comprises individuals whose consciousness is wholly self-absorbed or entirely diffused into the collective, even though these polar positions may find expression in dominant ideologies. Just as persons exist both in their own right and in relation to others, so writing and orality imply both divergent and overlapping modes of communication. This undoubtedly explains the apparent contradictions in Walter Ong's celebrated work, where he claims a “vast difference” between literacy and orality only to speak of this relationship as “complementary” and assert that “writing can never dispense with orality.”²⁵ In this vein, he writes that “in all the wonderful worlds that writing opens, the spoken word still resides and lives. Written texts all have to be related somehow, directly or indirectly, to the world of sound, the natural habitat of language, to yield their meanings.”²⁶ Jacques Derrida takes this argument even further, arguing that writing is haunted by a sense of all that lies beyond its margins in the same way that philosophy is inevitably written in the shadows of the nonphilosophical. Derrida uses the image of the tympanum to capture this sense of sound, albeit muffled, that counters the apparent silence of a text, or the reader of a text, and is vital to the intelligibility of the written word.²⁷

I have a tin ear and cannot hold the simplest tune or learn a foreign language by listening alone. Much as I admire John Blacking's How Musical Is Man?, his thesis that everyone has a capacity for music²⁸ does not apply to me. If deafness is a disability, so, arguably, is tone deafness—the inability to discern, recall, or mimic sound. But it is said that people deficient in one area of the sensorium will compensate by developing skills and sensitivities in another, and Oliver Sacks describes how a person with expressive aphasia (speechlessness) may still be able to sing “very tunefully and with great feeling, but only getting two or three words of [a] song.”²⁹ My eidetic memory is excellent. And since childhood I have depended on the written word to make good my aural-oral ineptitude. Yet writing has never been, for me, a substitute for speech, any more than scholarly pursuits have been inimical to sociality. One mode of being or communicating does not necessarily preclude another. And so when I ask whether the oral is entirely absent when I read or write, I can confidently say no, since in composing this very sentence I am murmuring the words as I write them down, trying to get a feel for how they will resound in the sequence I am testing on my tongue, seeking a structural balance that will be easy on the ear. Fiction writers often confess a similar sense of hearing voices, of writing down dialogue they have heard, and of assessing its verisimilitude less against the standard of recorded speech than against an inner standard of what rings true. The idea is very old that thinking is a form of talking to oneself, which is why people who undergo surgery on their vocal chords are told not to read until the lesions heal. In brief, the distinctions we like to make between speech and writing, or speech and thought, are largely artificial, and there are greater phenomenological continuities between these conventionally contrasted activities than we are ordinarily aware of.

Consider, for example, the opening lines of Seamus Heaney's poem Oysters:

 

Our shells clacked on their plates.

My tongue was a filling estuary,
My palate hung with starlight:

As I tasted the salty Pleiades

Orion dipped his foot into the water.

 

Alive and violated

They lay on their beds of ice:

Bivalves: the split bulb

And philandering sigh of ocean.

Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered.³⁰

 

Is it not true that as one reads these lines, one also hears them—and, furthermore, that one sees and tastes the brine-slicked bivalves lying in their flaking, ice-caked shells on a pewter plate? Surely the written word not only conjures sound and sense; it is haunted by sound textures; it possesses metrical properties. And is this not true of both self-consciously rhythmic and tonal poetry and the less carefully composed, atonal prose of a novel, an essay, or a tract?

The inextinguishable presence of a voice in a written text may be a result of synesthesia³¹—a faculty that all human beings share to some degree, making it inevitable that one area of the sensorium will evoke others, including touch—which may explain why we speak of a piece of writing as a text—a term that derives, like texture, from the action of weaving. Whether written or spoken, language is always interwoven with threads of experience that are, strictly speaking, beyond words. Writing puts a spin on the ineffable, making it seem to be sayable, or subtly indicates what is outside its ability to signify.³² We might therefore say that the look of a particular writer's prose, or our sense of his or her style, will evoke a memory of his or her voice—or, if we have never heard the writer speak, summon “a” voice that goes with the text, that makes it audible.

Despite these claims that literacy never entirely divorces itself from orality, the view is still held, particularly in the academy, that a logical, analytically coherent, and thoughtful disquisition on any subject requires the suppression of what Derrida, following Husserl, called “the sensory face of language.”³³ Making experience intelligible requires the subjugation of its sensible properties, including sound.

I now turn to exploring in more detail the analogy I have drawn between the technical relationship of experience to writing and the social relationship of private to public life. I begin by spelling out some of the principles that have guided my own experiments in sound writing, and I go on to provide an example of these principles in practice.

Just as sound ethnographic writing is careful not to mute the voice of the ethnographer or his or her interlocutors, it does not exclude the reader. Rather, it invites the reader to enter into the text, to feel free to get his or her own sense of the scene or events unfolding, and to arrive at his or her interpretation of what the text conveys. This is what Eugenio Montale meant by “the second life of art.”³⁴ While the author owns the process of authoring a text, painting a picture, performing a role, he or she cannot lay claim to the work once it has been put into circulation in the public sphere. For the work is now not only available to readers or audiences; it belongs to them; it is theirs to interpret according to their own persuasions and predilections.

Second, sound writing reflects sound research. And the key to sound research is openness and inclusivity. This implies an observational alertness to what is happening in the field. But, more important, perhaps, is one's social sensitivity to the people who have accepted one into their households and everyday lives. Sound research is, therefore, not simply a matter of suspending preconceptions and going with the flow; it is predicated on an awareness that the quality of what one may know is determined by the quality of one's relationships with those one comes to know in the course of fieldwork.

Third, it is imperative that one allows one's empirical material to determine any interpretative response. This means paying meticulous attention to vernacular expressions, local figures of speech, and ontological metaphors. These, rather than any theory one has acquired, provide the windows through which one may glimpse the inner workings of another lifeworld. In his fieldwork with ex-combatants in Guinea-Bissau, Henrik Vigh became familiar with the vernacular term dubria. Young men would use the word in describing their struggle for work, to make ends meet, or to find sources of enjoyment in an impoverished social environment. One informant conveyed the meaning of dubria to Henrik by moving his upper body in a disjointed yet rhythmical sway, looking somewhat as if he were shadowboxing: arms along his side, weaving and bobbing his torso back and forth as though dodging invisible pulls and pushes. “Dubrial” Pedro exclaimed. “You dubria…so that you can see your life.” Henrik realized that dubriagem connoted the “use of shrewdness and craftiness to navigate dangerous or difficult terrain,” and his concept of navigation as “motion within motion”—action in an unstable environment when you are yourself destabilized—was born of listening hard to what his informants were telling him.³⁵

Fourth, one must entertain the possibility that every situation calls for a different response. Just as joking and avoidance are universal strategies for dealing with socially ambiguous or non-negotiable relationships, so the ethnographer sometimes turns to contemplation, sometimes to writing, sometimes to speech, or sometimes to direct action in seeking the most appropriate way of responding to what others say or do, or demand. But even when one writes, there is always the question of what kind of writing is called for.

A WRITING SAMPLE

In early 2002 I returned to Sierra Leone after many years away. I took with me a book I had hastily bought at Gatwick Airport, and I would read and reread this book during the following weeks, finding in its elegiac tone echoes of the devastated social landscape and tragic stories to which I would bear witness. When I came to write of that time, W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz haunted every phrase, every sentence, imparting to my narrative something of the strange interplay of resignation and resilience that I encountered in Sierra Leone. In the following pages I describe an episode in my journey north, in the company of my old friend, S. B. Marah, a few weeks before peace was officially declared. This was S. B.'s first visit to his political constituency in a long time, and a way of mending the political fabric torn apart by years of pillaging, violence, neglect, and scarcity. I hope this text will exemplify what I have been saying about sound writing, as well as provide a variation on the theme that has run like a red thread throughout this book, namely, that it is extraordinarily difficult, in a society of scarcity, to strike a balance between acquiring what one deems vital for one's own well-being and providing others with what is vital to theirs. How can there be social justice when the basic requirements of existence—food, shelter, and water—are insufficient to go around, so that one person's feast is always another's famine, one person's gain is inevitably another person's loss? The beef has, therefore, dual meanings: connoting an argument or a point of ethical contention, as well as denoting a cattle beast, a source of life energy and power.

THE BEEF

For two days, a young steer had been tethered by a short rope to a mango tree at the edge of the compound. It was a gift to S. B., meant to be taken to Freetown, along with several goats. Constrained by the rope, the steer was unable to stretch its neck to the ground; all it could do was occasionally nose or lick dew from the long grass that was within its reach. When it defecated, it held its tail horizontal, its spine as straight as a spirit-level, and the tuft of hair by its penis twitched when it finished urinating. So forlorn did this animal seem that I became convinced that it knew its imminent fate.

On the morning that we packed the vehicles, preparing to leave Kabala, it became obvious that there was not enough room in the back of the pickup for the steer. As the Big Men discussed their quandary, I sat some distance away, listening to an elderly man recount the history of Mande to a young newspaper reporter—passing from a description of Sundiata, who ruled the empire in the mid-fourteenth century, to an account of the first clans, the origins of the xylophone, and the birth of praise singing. Old Musa's spectacle frames were tied upside down to his cap, because this was the only way the one remaining lens could cover his one good eye. Earlier in the day he had asked if I could send him some new glasses from Freetown—j ust as Leba had asked for a camera and the musicians had begged me to help them buy new guitars and amplifiers.

When I noticed that the Big Men and soldiers were gathering by the mango tree, I went down into the courtyard to talk with Leba, who said he had come to say good-bye. “They are killing the beef,” he observed. And as we watched from a distance, saying nothing, the steer was forced to the ground and its throat cut. The carcass was then cut into portions, and the head, neck, forequarters, rump, underbelly, entrails, hide, heart, and liver were set out in separate piles on some banana leaves. Nearby, ten vultures stood their ground, occasionally flapping their ungainly wings and craning their necks toward the kill.

Suddenly a young man standing next to Leba muttered something about how short life was. When I asked him what he meant, he said: “The way they slaughter these cows for these ministers. If we the young men wanted some of that beef, those Big Men would fight us, juju-way. They'd say, ‘If any young man looks at the meat, let him beware.’ So they make you afraid to go there. That is why we young people should not open our eyes too much on the meat. The big men could make us impotent. Or they could shoot us with their fetish guns.”

I knew that many older men were similarly possessive of their young wives, but this was the first time I'd heard of possessiveness toward meat—though one heard rumors of so-called Leopard Societies that, in days gone by, committed ritual murders so that Big Men might augment their power by eating the vital organs of children. The logic ran as follows: children, women, and cattle were wealth. A man's capacity to father children, marry many times, and acquire cattle was a sign of power. And status and stature were intimately linked. It was not for nothing that one of S. B.'s praise names in the north was simba, elephant—an allusion to his physical bulk as much as his commanding presence, his social standing, and his political power. Still, it amused me that so many Big Men were immobilized by their own obesity—sluggish, unwell, and impotent. Was this why they were so preoccupied with the virility and appetite of young men? If so, the young men, denied meat and obliged to do the Big Men's bidding, seemed to find little consolation in the fact that what they lacked in status they made up for in strength and vitality.

When we drove off, I noticed that the vultures were clumsily quarreling around the spot where the steer had been butchered and picking at the blood-blackened earth.

The sun was hot. The summit of Albitaiya was lost in the haze of the harmattan. In the backseat of the 4Runner I felt cramped and uncomfortable. Underfoot were several bags of meat, including the steer's severed head. Copies of the Noble Qur'an in English, which Fasili had mysterious acquired in Kabala, kept falling on my head. And our police escort again filled the landscape with its wailing sirens as we drove over the rice and clothing that villagers had spread on the roadside to dry or through smoke from burning elephant grass.

At Fadugu the police Land Rover left us, and as if released from an obligation to behave itself, the 4Runner began to lose compression and suffer from brake failure. Yet even as we labored up the last hill toward Makeni, S. B. was pressing his nephew to overtake slower-moving poda podas, and urging us on. “Le' we go, le' we go,” he said, as if his impatience and willpower would be instantly transmitted to the vehicle and it would obey. By the time we crawled the last few yards into a roadside repair shop, I realized it had taken us five hours to travel seventy miles. The hood of the 4Runner was quickly opened and propped up, and the engine exposed to the scrutiny of a dozen or so grease monkeys, while the Big Men issued advice, diagnoses, and orders from the makeshift seats that had been brought out for them. “This car na too slow,” S. B. observed. “It don vex us too much,” added his acolyte Fasili. Watching the Big Men as they sat unmoving and unmoved in front of a rusty, wheel-less vehicle that had been chocked up with driveshafts and a wooden mortar, I had a flashback to Gatwick Airport, when I had found myself with several hours to kill before my flight. The departure lounge had been almost deserted, though not far from where I was sitting a young businessman was talking on his mobile phone. As I listened to his conversation with diminishing interest, a woman started vacuuming the walkway between us. As she drew near, I lifted my feet so she could reach under the seat. But when she moved on to where the man in the suit was talking on his mobile phone, he ignored her completely. It wasn't as if he could not see her; he simply did not want to acknowledge her. Nor, it appeared, did she expect anything of him. When he showed no sign of moving either his feet or his bag, the woman left the space around him as it was—littered with candy wrappers and used telephone cards. Trivial in itself, this incident left me troubled. Not only did I want to know why certain people, as a matter of principle, will make absolutely no concession to those they consider their inferiors; it made me ask myself why I felt so acutely uncomfortable with status distinctions, and sought, wherever possible, to avoid or nullify them. Recollecting this incident at Gatwick also reminded me of how awkward I sometimes felt at the hotel in Freetown where I had lodged before travelling up-country. Where most people would readily accept being waited on—for, after all, this is what waiters are paid to do—I felt embarrassed by the deferential or obsequious rigmarole and could not abide having someone pour water into my glass, place a napkin over my lap, or call me sir. No one could be less suited for high office than myself. Indeed, so assiduous was my need to avoid the trappings of authority and privilege that I instinctively sought the margins and the shadows—the world of the underdog or the young.

I wandered away across the tamped, grease-and-oil-stained earth, past the decaying mud-brick building that served as an office, the lean-tos under which old car seats, cylinder blocks, radiators, differentials, mufflers, and cannibalized engine parts had been stacked, to where I could sit alone, collect my thoughts, and scribble some notes. Then I strolled up the road to buy a bread roll and a tin of sardines from which to make a sandwich.

When I returned to the vehicle, S. B.'s nephew, who was known as small S. B., explained that the brake fluid line to the rear wheels had been burned through by the broken muffler and had to be replaced. The air filter also required cleaning. As one of the grease monkeys was dispatched into town to find a spare brake fluid line, food was brought for the Big Men—for the third time that day. But eating did not interrupt their critical commentary on the mechanics' efforts. “Why you no fix em before now?” the Alhaji asked testily. “Come on bo, le we go now,” S. B. added, with a weariness that appeared to preclude any response. Dr. K. said nothing. He was too busy ordering one of the mechanic's boys to uncap two bottles of Heineken beer for him as he tugged rubbery strands of meat from a boiled goat's head. “Kam eat,” he said to me. When I explained I did not eat meat, he was incredulous. “Where do you get your protein?” he asked. “Where do you get your strength?”

“We Africans have tough stomachs,” Fasili observed.

“It's not stomach,” I said. “It's heart. I don't eat meat for health reasons.”

When he had finished eating, Dr. K. removed his gray safari shirt and summoned a small boy to scratch his back. He was like a hippo, as dour as he was massive. And while he picked his teeth with a sliver of wood, the boy started to massage his enormous shoulders.

S. B. was being ear-bashed by two local men who had lost their local businesses in the war.

Makeni, I knew, had been a Revolutionary United Front (RUF) stronghold. Even now there were billboards at the roundabouts in the center of the town with photos of Foday Sankoh and RUF political slogans.

Perhaps this was why S. B. showed so little sympathy for their plight. “No one went into exile here,” he asserted. “You have only yourselves to blame for what happened here.”

“We had nowhere to go,” one of the Makeni men replied.

And then, as if to elicit my understanding, the second man described how well the RUF was organized. “They would send small boys to spy on prominent people,” he said. “The kids would disguise themselves as cigarette sellers or petty traders. They would carry messages. We never knew who they were. They would get information about a place before they attacked it.”

“You know,” S. B. said wryly, “one time the RUF entered a mosque and asked, ‘Anyone here believe in God?’ No, we don't, everyone said. Even the Imam. No, no, he said, I do not believe!”

The Makeni men both laughed.

“But seriously,” S. B. said, “the SLPP [Sierra Leone People's Party] expects people to work for the country. Government is composed of people. You should not fear to speak the truth to your government. The government does not want to hurt you. As long as you are on the right side, you have nothing to fear.”

As S. B. was talking, a truck had pulled in at the roadside. Intrigued by the slogan emblazoned on its side—Fear Not the World but the People— I walked over to the truck to see what it carried and was dismayed to find that twenty-five steers were crammed together on the back, their horns roped to wooden beams that were in turn lashed to a metal frame covering the vehicle's tray. The animals were unable to move. The flank of one had been so badly lacerated by the jolting of the truck over degraded roads that its hip bone was exposed. They had been packed top to tail, in rows of five, to maximize space. Their muzzles were dry, foam flecked their mouths, their eyes were closed with pain and exhaustion, and their heads had been forced up over the rumps of the animals in front. From time to time an unbearable moan was released from the herd, and I was reminded instantly of the bobby calves I used to hear baying mournfully in the night when I was child, as they waited out the hours of darkness in a cramped railway wagon on a siding in my hometown before going on to the slaughterhouse the next day.

The driver and his mate tilted the cab of the truck forward and began inspecting the engine, while a couple of other young men clambered up onto the back of the truck and walked over the steers, checking the lashings.

“You should have brought your camera, Mr. Mike.” It was small S. B., who had sidled up to me unseen.

“I was thinking,” I said, “that this is how Africans were once packed in the slave ships, head to foot, to save space.”

But where I saw slaves, or imagined myself, small S. B. saw only cows. And I did not feel inclined to share with him my ruminations on when, and under what circumstances, we might extend human rights to animals or, for that matter, deny these rights to our fellow human beings, treating them as if they were mere chattels or beasts. Yet it was suddenly very clear to me that my own notion of rights reflected the egalitarian ethos of the country in which I was raised. In tribal societies such as Kuranko, one's worth was ostensibly relative to one's patrimony, rank, and title, which is why, I guess, the Big Men always wore their status on their sleeves—Honorable, Doctor, Paramount Chief. In such a society, one's due was generally reckoned in terms of birth, not worth. A chief was due a retinue, and tithes, not to mention praise and honor. A father was owed his children's respect. And a wife was duty bound to honor her husband, and to obey him without question. For the Kuranko, this calculus of social distinction was both categorical and unambiguous. People were superior to animals, first-born were superior to second-born, men were superior to women, adults were superior to children, the patriline was superior to the matriline, rulers were superior to commoners, and commoners were superior to praise singers, blacksmiths, and leather workers. At the bottom of the social scale, finabas—the bards and custodians of chiefly traditions—were superior to no one, except perhaps slaves. In practice, however, the worth of a person was far less fixed than this schema would suggest. When Keti Ferenke explained this to me many years ago, he began by punning on the word kina, which, depending on a subtle difference in pronunciation, could mean either beehive or elder. His argument was that someone who is nominally elder could lose the right to be considered superior if he behaved unjustly or idiotically. A person could be an elder, a status superior, he said, but if he acted like a child, he was a child. Superiority, he noted, derived not only from being born first, or from being big and powerful; it also stemmed from the way one behaved. For Keti Ferenke, whose pride in his own intellectual adroitness was, at least in my company, undisguised, a person's true worth was defined by his or her social gumption, or nous, though other innate traits, such as temperament, bearing, and moral courage, might also elevate a person beyond his or her given social position. Consider the myth of Saramba, for instance, a warrior chief of great renown, whose jealous half brothers decided to waylay and murder him. When Saramba's humble finaba, Musa Kule, got wind of the plot, he devised a plan to save his master's life. After persuading the ruler to exchange clothes with him, Musa Kule rode the chief's horse ahead along the road where the ambush had been laid. As a result, Musa Kule was killed instead of the chief. In recognition of his sacrifice, Saramba declared that from that day hence their descendants should be considered equals, because the moral qualities of the lowborn fina had effectively eclipsed the status superiority of his master.

Subtle reciprocities are disclosed here. The relationship between respect paid and recognition returned, for example, or the implicit understanding that a chief will give his protection to those who submit to his authority and place themselves in his hands. But what if a chief or pol itical leader turns into a tyrant—seizing people's property, taking advantage of his subjects, repaying tribute with obloquy? What if a husband abuses his dutiful and obedient wife? And should the young have regard for the ancestral order of things when it is evoked only to bolster the powers and prerogatives of an elite that is indifferent to their needs, contemptuous of their aspirations, and blind to their talents? For many young people in Sierra Leone, their patience with autocracy, traditional or modern, has worn thin. For them, their due was determined by need, and this is not delimited by their inferior station in life but by what they imagine might be theirs as citizens of the world. These questions, born of my Kuranko research, were, I realized, not unrelated to the RUF rebellion, but at that moment, as if to derail my train of thought, small S. B. said that the 4Runner had been repaired and we could be on our way.

As I walked back to the 4Runner, I found the boss mechanic negotiating with S. B. for a little extra money. The mechanic's son was at his father's side. He was about the same age as my own son. As the father spoke to S. B., he cradled his son's head in his hand. Then he ran his hand over the boy's shoulders and back, pressing him to his side. And all the while, the boy was beaming with happiness. One and one another. The two of them mirroring my relationship with my own son. Myself a part of and apart from their life-world, at once close and distant.

Spinoza was right, I think, in persuading us not to speak of ontologically different types or entities but of different aspects or modes of the one inexhaustible reality.³⁶ Anthropology can only become a truly dialectical science when it finds ways of doing justice to the interplay of particular and universal perspectives, singular and shared modes of human being, in fieldwork, analysis, and writing alike.