Crapanzano the Life History in Anthropological Field Work (1)

8/12/2019 Crapanzano the Life History in Anthropological Field Work (1)

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The first thing to be observed is that the human sciencesdid not inherit a certain domain, already outlined ,perhaps surveyed as a whole, but allowed to lie fallow,which it was then their task to elaborate with positivemethods and with concepts that had at last becomescientific; the eighteenth century did not hand down tothem, in the name of man or human nature, a space,circumscribed on the outside but still empty, which it wasthen their role to cover and analyse. The epistemologicalfield traversed by the human sciences was not laid downin advance: no philosophy, no political or moral option,no empirical science of any k ind, no observation of thehuman body, no analysis of sensation, imagination, or thepassions, had ever been encountered, in the seventeenthor eighteenth century, anything like man: for man did no tex is t . . . .

I do not wish either to procliam or disclaim Foucault sconclusions here. I wish simply to call attention to thefact that that w hich we constitute as a legitimate subjectfor scientific research may, in the most profound sense,be noth ing more than a sector of a wo rld c ontingentepistemologica l space. Tha t we recognize as anth ro-pologists that the conceptualization, if not theexperience, of self varies from society to society mayprevent us from questioning our own assumptions aboutthe sub ject we study in the case in po int abou t manand his personal history - and the form which we giveto that subject in our writing in the case in p oin t the life history and the case history.Like the autob iography and the biography, the casehistory and the life history are distinctly Western genres,contingent, as I have said, on the appropriate worldcondition. And, as such, they shape a particular,pre-selected range of data into a meaningful totality.They reflect not only the more superficial concerns of aparticular historical epoch or a particular culturaltradition but also the more fundamental attitudestoward and evaluations of the person, of time, nature,the supernatural, and inter-personal relations. TheFreudian case history, which provides a model forsubsequent psychiatric and anthropological case historiesreflects, for example, the distinctive Romantic genre ofthe Bildungsgeschichte. Such a genre, as M. H. Abramsobserved in his brilliant N atural Supe rnatural sm (1971)translates "the painful process of Christian conversioninto a painful process of self-formation, crisis, andself-recognition, which culminates in a stage ofself-coherence, self-awareness, and assured power that isits own rew ard."The case history, like the biography, presents a viewof the subject from the perspective of the outsider; itbears the impress of the narrator. The life history, likethe autobiography, presents the subject from his ownperspective. It differs from the autobiography in that itis an imm ediate response to a demand posed by an Otherand carries within it the expectations of that Other. It is,as itwere rdoublyedited, during the encounter itself andduring the literary re-encounter. Not only do the specificquestions posed by the Other reflect certain genericexpectations within his own culture but the veryquestion of life history itself may be an alien constructfor the subject and cause in him an alienating prisedeconscience.(A non-autob iographical example of this isperhaps the Freudian perspective developed by Reichel-Dolmatoff s informant for AmazonianCosmos. (1971))The frequent elimination of the Other, at least in the

form of the narrative I, from the life history renders thelife history timeless and static. Ironically, thiselimination of the I in the name of objectivity wouldtotally preclude both clinical and cultural evaluationwere it not that the voice of the Other sounds throughhis own self-expurgated tex t.Although the life history and the autobiography canbe distinguished in terms of the demand of the Other,

such a distinction is in the final analysis superficial. Thelife history and the autobiography, all writings for thatmatter, are essentially self-constutive; they are moments,fixed in time by the word, in the dialectival process ofself-constitution. They require as such the mediation ofthe Other. The Other includes not simply the concreteindividu al w ho stands before one, but all tha t he standsfor symbolically. At the most abstract level, he is thetranscendental locus of meaning; he is, too , typ ifie d bysocial roles, conventionalized perceptions, culturallydetermined styles, and a whole array of idiosyncraticassociations which may be less than conscious.The life historical t ext is a produ ct of its author's

desire for recognition by this essentially complex Other.It is not simply informative but evocative as well. Itsevaluation requires the understanding of the relationshipbetween the author of the text and the Other, theinevitable interlocutor, whom he is at least symbolicallyaddressing.When we distinguish between the personal historicaltext produced by the anthropologist's informant for theanthropologist as embodied Other and the life history orcase history produced by the anthropologist for hisaudience, his Other, we recognize the complexity ofthose documents w hich anthropo logists - and psy-chologists and psych iatrists have been produc ing all

these years often with the naive hope of obtaining "aview from within." We must be aware of the fact thatwithin the case historical or life historical text producedby the anthropo logist, the Other is essentially a bifurcateOther. The anthropologist is addressing not just his"anthropological audience" and their deep symboliccounterparts, he is addressing too his informants(Crapanzano, 1977). He is, if you wi l l , completing thedialogue and he is responding to what we might call thesilent undersong of the dialogue: All that theanthropologist could not say and, to be sure, all that hisinformants could not say but could, often enoughthrough their silence, reveal. (I do not wish to soundmystical here; I wish simply to call your attention to allthat is communicated, and not said, during anyencounter, including the ethnographic encounter.) It isto these paralexical messages that we often, wittingly orunwittingly, respond. (It is not so much the fact thatBateson's (1972) cat is on the mat that irks us - it is themessage of that fact that produces annoyance.) We mustrecognize too the bad faith of many of our stylisticmanouevres which produce the Hlusion of neutrality ifnot objectivity.

What I am asking you here is to recognize the extentto which the stylistic manouevres, the genric constraintsand the literary conventional limitations impose uponnot just simply those ethnographic, those life historicaland case historical texts, we produce, but upon the verydialogue fro m which such texts arise.

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nore than form al differences.They are cultural constructs and reflect those mostfundamental assumptions about the nature of reality,including the nature of the person and the nature of theword, that are considered, if they are considered at all,self-evident by the members of any particular culturalt radi t ion. The recognition of differences in theseassumptions may lead to recognition of the possibility ofanother more-or-less successful way of constitutingreality. Such a possibility may produce a sort ofepistemological vertigo and demand a position ofextreme cultural relativism. Wittingly or unwittingly,however, the differences often disappear in an act oftranslation by the anthropo logist or his reader. (Towhat extent is Lienhardt's description of Dinka mindand memory, cast as it is in neo-Thomistic concepts,adequate. To what extent is he, the anthropologist moregenerally, destined not to adequate description but to anessential act of suggestion: a plea to recognizedifference? Such translations may render bizarre, exotic,or downright irrational what would have been ordinaryin its own context. They may do the reverse as well:render the exotic and the extraordinary and, despiteourselves, we do from time to time encounter the exoticand the extraordinary downright proasic and ordinary.The ethnographic encounter is lost in timelessdescription; the anguished search for comprehension inthe theoretical explanation; the particular in the general;the character in the stereoty pe. In the case of the life orcase history, the informant comes to occupy both in thelife historical or case historical tex t and in theencounter itself insofar as these genres infuse it whatAndras Z empleni (1977) has called "th e comfo rtablespace of the enthnographer's imagination (sonimagi-naire) . What space does the ethnographer himself cometo occupy?The question must be asked and cont inually . Wemust not succumb unquestioningly either to the genericand literary conventional models at our disposal andthe ontological and epistemological assumptions em-bedded wi thi n them or to the theoretical models.These latte r too must be seen as possessing a rheto ricalforce not simply in our texts but in our encounters aswell a rhetorical force which may be more importantto us than any truth we describe. The message of theethnographic text may, in other words, be less importantto us than the fact of its comm unication.

Let me try in the remainder of this paper to illustrateseveral of these problems more concretely but by nomeans more systematically. I am of course destined tofailure; indeed, in giving illustrations, I am contradictingmy very argument. Ideally the ethnographic exchange,however unreadable, should be allowed to speak foritself.

I wi ll use as my example an interchange I had with anilliterate Moroccan tilemaker named Tuhami. Tuhamiwas a gentle man, a man of great dignity, whom I cameto admire greatly. He was too a man who had sufferedmuch in his life . He was married to a she-demon, acamel-footed spirit or jinniyya, named Aisha Qandisha.He was not unique in this respect. Other Moroccan men outsiders always were thoug ht to be married toAisha Qandisha. Aisha held Tuha mi, as she did her otherhusbands, in tight control; she governed particularly

their amorous lives. Unlike some of the she-demon'svictim's, Tuhami was unable to participate in thoseceremonies which would have given him some liberationfrom the she-demon. He was torn between the belief inher power and a distaste, if not a disblief, in the powerof those who could liberate him from her.Tuhami was a story teller - and he was known am ongthe women of the poorer quarters of Meknes for hisknowledge of magic, herbal brews, and the ways ofsaints and demons. He was not considered threatening tothe men of his milieu; indeed, they allowed him even tovisit their women.Tuhami defied from the start stereotyping. Initially Iset out to question him on his knowledge of theHamadsha, the religious brotherhood I had come toMorocco to study, and his involvement with them. Iwanted to learn as much as I could about thesignificance of the order for the non-member. I wasanxious to learn not just what people said the order wasabout but the role it played in their articulation ofexperience, including their personal history. I en-couraged,accordingly, reminiscence and free association.Tuhami was, asIhavesaid,very much the story teller- and in talk ing to me, he used all the rhetorical devicesof the story teller to create the effects he wanted .Encouraged by the ambiguity and the unfamiliarity o four initial encounter and by my "n eu tra lity " as ananthropologist, he permitted himself greater freedom ofexpression during our meeting than in the morestructured encounters of everyday life. He was able, inother words, not only to create the relationship hedesired but to create me for himself as well. I presentedhim with minimum resistance but, through insistenceand the direction of my questions, resistance all thesame. It was I who provided the frame for our

encounters. Tuhami was free within it.Tuhami responded to our encounter with an ease offantasy and self-reference that was not characteristic ofother Moroccans with whom I worked. It was oftenimpossible to distinguish what was real from what wasdream, fantasy, vision, or hallucination. He would beginto describe in a most realistic fashion a trip to Fez toget supplies and end with an erotic fantasy out of theArabian nights. His women, like the heroines of Gerardde Norval, were realistically differentiated, thenembellished, and fina lly collapsed in to a single wom an,usually Aisha Qandisha or one of her refractions.Tuhami contradicted himself so often that even theminimum order I bestow on his life belies itsarticulation. What I take to be real in my understandingof it is in fact my own assumption.

At first Tuhami and I spoke mutually unintelligiblelanguages. I was primarily interested in information;Tuhami in evocations. Our discourse was asymmertrical;it moved from the informative to the evocative and thenback to the informative. We both tried to determine thedirection. I with my prosaic questions. Tuhami,sometimes more extravagantly, with pronouncements. Iremember his beginning an interview with a kind ofDelphic announcement of World War III. He looked as ifhe were not speaking; his eyes were focused somewherefar o ff in the distance; his voice was deep and thro aty ;his words were uttered with finality. "There will betrouble in Casablanca and Rabat, then in Taza andNTHROPOLOGY ND HUM NISM QU RTERLY


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Meknes. Fez alone wi ll be spared. Tangier wi ll be razed.There where there are now houses, plants will grow."More often he would begin by telling me a dream heknew I was interested in dreams or by announcing hisdecision to take along trip . He never did.There was always something captivating aboutTuhami s discourse. It was as though he wanted toentrap me, to enslave me in an intricate web of fantasyand reality to reverse if you w ill the c olonialrelationship that I as a foreigne r must have suggested tohim. (He had had very close relationships with a Frenchfamily.) There was something seductive in his discoursetoo. He did n ot w ant me in fact or anyone else. Tha t,Ithink, would have been to much for him. What hewanted was rather the imaginary fulfillment, I believe, ofa lack, aManque a etre, to use Lacan's (1966) phrase,that he suffered. I became an articulatory pivot aboutwhich he would spin out his fantasies in order to createhimself as he desired. I was, so to speak, created tocreate him . . . .As for me, I was soon captivated and seduced by

Tuhami's evocations. I see this even in my notes of ourfirst encounter. I guarded myself with ((anthropologicalperspective" but this perspective was in fact to breakdown asTuhami revealed more and more of himself andhis suffering. In the end, I had to abandon thatperspective. I became curer, burdened with theknowledge of imminent departure.Tuhami must have felt some of the relief I did by thischange in stance. He yielded to me. He came to speakmy language the language of the real rather than theimaginary, however sanctioned by his traditional idiom.The colonial relationship was restored. I was secure andcould rationalize my position as protector-therapist.Tuham i accepted the reversal wit h ease because, Ithink, he could at last articulate our relationship in amanner meaningful to him. I became curer, and Tuhamidesired to be cured .For me, the moment of my transformation, into acurer, came with Tuhami's more or less accidentalrecitation of a childhood event. I was asking him if hehad ever been afraid.Wereyou everafraid ofwaterNo , I vebeen afraid of rivers.Ever since I was little. Iwas a shephe rd. My friend fell into the river and wascarried away. Since then I've alw ays been afraid ofrivers.I waswith my friend. He said that if he ever sawLalla Aisha he would hit her or throw a rock at her.There wasthunder,and suddenly the river s welled andcarried him away.We w ere trying to climb on a mule atthe moment, and the mule fell into the river.My friendlet go, but I held on to the mule. I didn 't know how toswim.Ico uldn 't help him. My parents always said theywould throw me in the river if Iever cried.I wasafraidof nothing else.How did you feel when thishappenedMy heart was dry like a rock. I w as mute for twodays. EversincethenI havefound myself in misery andon the road. So me say I'll die. O thers say I'll nev ermarry. All my friendsaremarried except form e.Tuhami blamed his in ability his impotence onAisha.I took the death of T uhami's friend to be real just asFreud had taken the fatherly seductions of his female

patients to be real. I had discovered the event which wascentral to Tuhami's articulation, the subject of hispersistent fantasies, the root of his emptiness, hisimpotence, his being dead. I had discovered the fatalinstant - to quote Sartre ( ) - that Tu ha mi, likeGenet, carried in his heart, the instant that had lost noneof its virilence, the instant that Tuhami continued to liveand relive I could have written his entire life aroundthat instant - much as Freud wrote the case study o f ratman around the rat punishment.At the time I did not recognize my presumption. Iunderstood. I did not realize that Tuhami's recitationwas for me symbolic of my own transformation andwhat I took to be Tuhami's transformation. I committedwhat Erikson would call the sin of originology. Thestory became a pivotal point in my articulation of ourencounters; the questions I posed. It reflected then notsimply a theoretical perspective which precluded,incidentally, an appreciation of Tuhami's own manipula-tion of the dialogue; it reflected too a genre into whichTuhami was being formulated at the time.Iuse this example of the infusion of the ethnographic

encounter with both literary and theoretical conventionsto demonstrate the degree to which these conventionsaffect the articulation of the exchange and then itsliterary write-up. They serve and this is my point arhetorical function within the ethnographic encounterthat form ulates it, gives it a certain direc tion , andembeds it with the anthropologist's unquestionedpresuppositions.Of course, I am precluding the role that theinformant plays within the interchange. It was not justIwho, for whatever reasons, wanted to convert myrelationship w ith Tuha mi into a therapeutic one. Tuhamiwas not without initiative; he was not simply passive.

The essence of even the most directed relationship is oneof creative mutuality. It is dialectical. Tuhami'srecitation of his friend's death may not have had thesame rhetorical force for him as it did for me. Otherrecitations did: they involved the intracacies of hisrelationship with Aisha Qandisha. Their force for himwas confirmed by my interest. How then can I judge o ftheir significance in his life's articulation?Freud ( ) in the rat man case I mentioned wasmoved, as you will remember, by rat man's fear of therat punishment. He assumed that rat man's hesitation totell him of the punishment was resistance. Not only didthis presumption determine his therapy with rat man,

but it also formed the focus of his highly influential casehistory. What Freud did not recognize was that rat manmay in his hesitation have been using the gossip's oldesttr ick. "Do you know what I saw Marvin doingyesterday? No. I'd really like to tell yo u. But it is justtoo awful." Should such hesitation be interpreted asresistance or rhetoric?Let me conclude with an irony. I have written up aportrait of Tuhami. I include in that portrait not onlyTuham i's recitations but my own questions, explica-tions, musings, and theoretical confabulations. I try toavoid the presuppositions of the case history of the lifehistory - presuppositions that did inevitably influence

my exchange with Tuhami, as I have shown. They haveinfluenced my text too insofar as it is a reaction to them.What has resulted is a manuscript that is uncannilyNTHROPOLOGY ND HUM NISM QU RTERLY


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familiar. It resembles less the case history or the lifehistory than the modern novel of the alienatedindividual whocannot communicate. Both Tuhami and Iemerge as alienated anti-heroes.Onegenrehasreplacedanother. We are,I suppose, destinedby the idiom intowhichwehave been caste.

BIBLIOGRAPHYAbrams,M. H.1971 Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in

Romantic Literature. New York: Norton.Bateson,Gregory1972 A Theory of Play and Fantasy. In Steps to an Ecology

of Mind. New York: Ballantine.Crapanzano, Vincent1977 The Writing of Ethnography. Dialectical Anthropology

I I : 69-73.Foucault, Michel1970 The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human

Sciences. New York: Pantheon.Freud,Sigmund

Three Case Histories. New York: Collier.Harris,Marvin1964 The Nature of Cultural Things. New York: Random

House.

Lacan,Jacques1966 Ecrits. Paris: Seuil.Lienhardt, Godfrey1967 Divin ity and Experience. Oxford: Clarendon.Reichel-Dolmatoff, G.1971 Amazonian Cosmos: The Sexual and Religious Sym-

bolism of the Tuhana Indians. Chicago: University ofChicago.

Sartre,Jean-Paul1952 Saint Genet. New York:Zempleni,Andras1977 From Symptom to Sacrifice: The Story of Khady Fall.

In V. Crapanzano and V. Garr ison eds.) Case Studies inSpir it Possession. New York: John Wiley.

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Crapanzano the Life History in Anthropological Field Work (1)

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