Do anthropologists have the right to speak for their informants? Is this a form of exploitation? Discuss with reference to at least two ethnographic examples.

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AN101 Lent Term Assessment Essay                                                                                          Joanna Clarke

Do anthropologists have the right to speak for their informants? Is this a form of exploitation? Discuss with reference to at least two ethnographic examples.

  Since its roots in colonialist academia, anthropology has come a long way in its thoughts and behaviour towards its informants.  In this essay, I will use the work of Asad, Clifford, Said and Abu-Lughod in discussing, theoretically, the question of authority in ethnography, looking at the traditions of anthropology and the methodology of ethnographic work.  I will use Abu-Lughod’s ethnography to show how these theories can work in practice, contrasting it with Marjorie Shostak’s work on a !Kung woman which, although it ‘lets her informant speak’, still maintains some of the potentially exploitative traditions of anthropology.

   Relations of power between anthropologist and informant must be discussed in respect to this question.  As Asad notes in the introduction to the collection of essays he compiled connecting anthropology and colonialism, the very existence of the discipline is due to the imbalance of power that existed (and still exists?) between the West and the non-West during colonialism (Asad 1973).  This political and economic dominance enabled Western anthropologists to go and live with non-Western communities with the security of their position as somehow superior.  Asad argues that not enough is made in anthropology of its colonial roots, a beginning that ultimately sustains a notion of cultural hierarchy even to this day.  As Clifford adds in his work on ‘Writing Culture’, anthropology seems to have claimed a “monophonic authority” (Clifford 1986: 15) over its informants because of imperialist influence.  Edward Said, in his seminal work ‘Orientalism’, calls for an analysis of authority (Said 1995), a call that is being heard in contemporary anthropology and which in this essay I hope to explore.  There exists a tension in the very notion of ethnography, of bringing other cultures to Western attention, in that the culture is observed, analysed, and discussed in Western terms.  Anthropologists control the form (if not the content too), and are supported by their dominance in economic, social and political life.  Said notes that to “study other cultures and peoples from a libertarian, or a nonrepresseive and nonmanipulative, perspective…one would have to rethink the whole complex problem of knowledge and power.” (Said 1995: 24).  

  With a background such as this, how can anthropology begin to distance itself from imperialism and Western cultural superiority?  One way, Lila Abu-Lughod suggests, is to close the constructed gap between self and other (Abu-Lughod 1991).  Anthropology, in its beginnings, was able to call itself “the study of primitive cultures” (Asad 1973: 11), a description that no longer sits comfortably within the discipline.  The construction of ultimate difference between the known self and the unknown other is under extreme attack.  Abu-Lughod argues that as we build a notion of self in opposition to other, we inherently create a hierarchy of power.  (In this way, anthropology has been said to have contributed, if unconsciously or unintentionally, to the sustenance of imperialist ideology (Asad 1973).)  The term ‘culture’ suggests homogenous, coherent, and timeless entities that exist in opposition to one another (Abu-Lughod 1991), while the ‘lived’ world is nothing like this.  It seems that while distinct notions of ‘culture’, ‘self’ and ‘other’ continue to pervade ethnographical thinking and writing, anthropology will remain true to its colonial, imperialist roots.

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  While attempting to do away with ideas of self and other, a recognition of the ethnographer’s position in the community he or she studies must be present in the ethnography for situating the information they impart.  The circumstances that have passed to allow such a contact between ethnographer and informant must be acknowledged.  The history of colonialism and its relationship to anthropology, and its heritage inherent in the minds of all (including Western anthropologists), undeniably marks the ethnographer’s work, for example, “it must…be true that for a European or American studying the Orient there can be no disclaiming the ...

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