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Between Biography and Ethnography

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2008

Michael D. Jackson
Michael D. Jackson*
Affiliation:
Harvard Divinity School
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Extract

My point of departure in this essay is Davíd Carrasco's Convocation Address at the Harvard Divinity School in September 2006. Speaking of the borderlands between Mexico and the United States, Carrasco projects an image of a vexed and ambiguous zone that is not merely geographic or political; it defines an existential situation of being betwixt and between, of struggle and suffering, that Karl Jaspers sums up in the term Grenzsituationen (borders/limit situations). The frontier throws up images of borderline experiences, of a destabilized and transgressive consciousness in which “dreams, repressed memories, psychological transferences and associations” possess greater presence than they do in ordinary waking life, and religious experiences emerge from the unconscious like apparitions. This interplay between borderlands and borderline phenomena—between “the differences we have with others and the conflicts within ourselves” also finds expression in the work of Gloria Anzaldúa. “Mestiza consciousness,” she observes, may be identified with a “juncture … where phenomena collide.” This implies “a shock culture, a border culture, a third country” where migrants find themselves at the limits of what they can endure, border patrol agents are stretched beyond the limits of what they can control, and intellectuals find that orthodox ways of describing and analyzing the world do not do justice to the experiences involved.

Type
ARTICLES
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 101 , Issue 3-4: Centennial Issue 1908–2008 , October 2008 , pp. 377 - 397
Copyright
Copyright © President and fellows of Harvard college 2008

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References

1 Jaspers contrasts Grenzsituationen with Alltagssituationen (everyday situations). While we are able to “gain an overview” of our everyday situations and get beyond them, limit situations “possess finality”; “they are like a wall against which we butt, against which we founder.” Karl Jaspers, Existenzerhellung (vol. 2 of Philosophie; 3 vols.; Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1932) 178–79. For an account of Grenzsituationen in English, see Karl Jaspers: Basic Philosophical Writings (ed., trans., and intro. Edith Ehrlich, Leonard H. Ehrlich, and George B. Pepper; New York: Humanity Books, 2000) 97. Though Adorno treats the term “frontier-situations” as part of a jargon of authenticity—on a par with “being-in-the-world,” “individual existence,” and “heroic endurance”—a way of “usurping religious-authoritarian pathos without the least religious content,” I see it as a way of escaping from the two dominant discourses of our time, the first that reduces all meaning to political economy, the second to religious belief or doctrine. In my view, it is precisely this tendency to politicize or intellectualize religious experience that the existential concept of Situation helps us to overcome. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (trans. E. F. N. Jephcott; London: Verso, 1978) 152.

2 Davíd Carrasco, “Desire and the Frontier: Apparitions from the Unconscious in The Old Gringo,” in The Novel in the Americas (ed. Raymond Leslie Williams; Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 1992) 102.

3 Ibid., 106.

4 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999) 101.

5 Claude Lévi Strauss, Totemism (trans. Rodney Needham; Boston: Beacon Press, 1963).

6 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958) 8.

7 Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another (trans. Kathleen Blamey; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) 2–3, 116.

8 Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson, First Contact: New Guinea's Highlanders Encounter the Outside World (New York: Viking, 1987) 44.

9 “A man is never an individual. It would be better to call him a singular universal; totalized and thereby universalized by his period, he retotalizes it by reproducing himself in it as a singularity. Universal by the singular universality of human history, singular by the universalizing singularity of his projects, he demands to be studied from both sides.” Jean-Paul Sartre, The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert 1821–1857 (trans. Carol Cosman; 5 vols.; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981–1993) 1:7–8.

10 Michael Herzfeld, Portrait of a Greek Imagination: An Ethnographic Biography of Andreas Nenedakis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

11 Arendt, Human Condition, 183.

12 Donald W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974) 113.

13 Ibid., 116 [emphasis in text].

14 Baraka, from the Arabic, is often used as a synonym for duwe, but the conventional way of accepting a gift is to say either “i n wale”, or “n ko baraka” (I say blessedness), in order to approve or bless the person or party who has symbolically affirmed the value of your life.

15 William James, Pragmatism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978) 97.

16 Michael Jackson, Paths Toward a Clearing: Radical Empiricism and Ethnographic Inquiry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989) 24.

17 Ibid., 24–25.

18 George Devereux, From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences (The Hague: Mouton, 1978) 118.

19 Sewa and Noah died within a few months of each other in 2003.

20 Michael Jackson, In Sierra Leone (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).

21 Jean-Paul Sartre, Between Existentialism and Marxism (trans. John Matthews; London: Verso, 1983) 42.

22 Jean-Paul Sartre, L'Imaginaire. Psychologie-phénoménologique de l'imagination (Paris: Gallimard, 1940).

23 Sartre, Family Idiot, 2:174.

24 James Fernandez, Bwiti: An Ethnography of the Religious Imagination in Africa (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982) 215.

25 Michael Jackson, Existential Anthropology: Events, Exigencies and Effects (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005).

26 Michael Young, Magicians of Manumanua: Living Myth in Kalauna (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).

27 Ibid., 177–78.

28 Ibid., 19 [emphasis added].

29 Janet Hoskins, Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of People's Lives (New York: Routledge, 1998) 3.

30 Ibid., ch. 3.

31 Herzfeld, Portrait, 15.

32 For anthropological treatments of the life course, see Vincent Crapanzano, “Life Histories,” American Anthropologist 86 (1984) 953–60. Jennifer Johnson-Hanks, “On the Limits of Life Stages in Ethnography: Toward a Theory of Vital Conjunctures,” American Anthropologist 104 (2002) 865–80. For sociological surveys of the subject, see Jenny Hockey and Allison James, Social Identities Across the Life Course (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) or Stephen Hunt, The Life Course: A Sociological Introduction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

33 William R. Bascom cites Kono, Bete, Lamba, Ila and Dyula examples in African Dilemma Tales (The Hague: Mouton, 1975) 93–94.

34 A. M. Homes, The Mistress's Daughter: A Memoir (New York: Viking, 2007) 7.

35 Ibid., 28.

36 Oliver Sacks, foreword to The Man With a Shattered World: The History of a Brain Wound, by A. R. Luria (trans. Lynn Solotaroff; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987) viii.

37 Ibid., viii. (emphasis added).

38 Arthur Kleinman, The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing and the Human Condition (New York: Basic Books, 1988).

39 Cited in Sacks, “Foreword,” x.

40 Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr (trans. Bernard Frechtman; New York: George Braziller, 1963) 49.

41 Lionel Trilling, introduction to Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1952) xi–x.

42 Ibid., xvi.

43 Herman Melville, Billy Budd and Other Stories (Hertfordshire, U.K.: Wordsworth Editions, 1998) 296.

44 The title of Nina Baym's renowned essay, “Melville's Quarrel with Fiction,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 94 (1979) 909–23.

45 The term was coined by the New York Herald in 1849 to describe the activities of a certain “William Hudson” and later became associated with the showman P. T. Barnum, whose signature phrase “there's a sucker born every minute” was in fact put into circulation by one George Hull who unearthed a fake giant near Cardiff, New York in 1859 and made a small fortune from the thousands, who flocked to see it.

46 Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990) 84–85.

47 When writing The Confidence Man, Melville may have had Montaigne's observations in mind: “We are all framed of flaps and patches and of so shapelesse and diverse a contexture, that every peece and every moment playeth his part. And there is as much difference found betweene us and our selves, as there is between our selves and other.” (Michel de Montaigne, The Essayes of Montaigne [trans. John Florio; New York: Modern Library, 1948] 298). Certainly, in Billy Budd, Melville reveals a debt to Montaigne as a writer skilled in “treating actual men and events … free from cant and convention” and able to “philosophize upon realities” (ibid., 244).

48 Leslie White, “Autobiography of an Acoma Indian,” in New Material from Acoma (Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 136; Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1943) 301–59.