Reprinted from:
Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography
EDITED BY JAMES CLIFFORD AND GEORGE E. MARCUS
A School of American Research Advanced Seminar
University of California Press
BERKELEY LOS ANGELES LONDON: 1986, pp. 51-76
[Please NOTE: this is a scanned text, so diacritical marks in foreign languages are not accurate.]
[p. 51]
“Hermes' Dilemma: The Masking of Subversion in Ethnographic Description”
by Vincent Crapanzano
"All translation," Walter Benjamin (1969:75) wrote, "is only a somewhat provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages." Like translation, ethnography is also a somewhat provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages-of cultures and societies. The ethnographer does not, however, translate texts the way the translator does. He must first produce them. Text metaphors for culture and society notwithstanding, the ethnographer has no primary and independent text that can be read and translated by others. No text survives him other than his own. Despite its frequent ahistorical-its synchronic-pretense, ethnography is historically determined by the moment of the ethnographer's encounter with whomever he is studying.
The ethnographer is a little like Hermes: a messenger who, given methodologies for uncovering the masked, the latent, the unconscious, may even obtain his message through stealth. He presents languages, cultures, and societies in all their opacity, their foreignness, their meaninglessness; then like the magician, the hermeneut, Hermes himself, he clarifies the opaque, renders the foreign familiar, and gives meaning to the meaningless. He decodes the message. He interprets.
The ethnographer conventionally acknowledges the provisional nature of his interpretations. Yet he assumes a final interpretation-a definitive reading. "I have finally cracked the Kariera section system," we hear him say. "I finally got to the root of all their fuss about the mudyi tree." He resents the literary critic's assertion that there is never a final reading. He simply has not got to it yet.
The ethnographer does not recognize the provisional nature of his presentations. They are definitive. He does not accept as a paradox that his "provisional interpretations" support his "definitive
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presentations." (It is perhaps for this reason that he insists on a final reading.) Embedded in interpretation, his presentations limit reinterpretation. Ethnography closes in on itself. It is even possible that the more general theories the ethnologist generates from ethnography are only refractions, distorted repetitions in another register, of the provisional interpretations that support the presentation of data. The possibility must be entertained. Hermes was the tutelary god of speech and writing, and speech and writing, we know, are themselves interpretations.
Hermes, etymologically "he of the stone heap," was associated with boundary stones (Nilsson 1949; Brown 1969). The herm, a head and a phallus on a pillar, later replaced the stone heap. The ethnographer, if I may continue my conceit, also marks a boundary: his ethnography declares the limits of his and his readers' culture. It also attests to his-and his culture's-interpretive power. Hermes was a phallic god and a god of fertility. Interpretation has been understood as a phallic, a phallic-aggressive, a cruel and violent, a destructive act, and as a fertile, a fertilizing, a fruitful, and a creative one. We say a text, a culture even, is pregnant with meaning. Do the ethnographer's presentations become pregnant with meaning because of his interpretive, his phallic fertilizations? (I have insisted here on using the masculine pronoun to refer to the ethnographer, despite his or her sexual identity, for I am writing of a stance and not of the person.)
The ethnographer is caught in a second paradox. He has to make sense of the foreign. Like Benjamin's translator, he aims at a solution to the problem of foreignness, and like the translator (a point missed by Benjamin) he must also communicate the very foreignness that his interpretations (the translator's translations) deny, at least in their claim to universality. He must render the foreign familiar and preserve its very foreignness at one and the same time. The translator accomplishes this through style, the ethnographer through the coupling of a presentation that asserts the foreign and an interpretation that makes it all familiar.
Hermes was a trickster: a god of cunning and tricks. The ethnographer is no trickster. He, so he says, has no cunning and no tricks. But he shares a problem with Hermes. He must make his message convincing. It treats of the foreign, the strange, the unfamiliar, the exotic, the unknown-that, in short, which challenges belief. The ethnographer must make use of all the persuasive devices at his disposal to convince his readers of the truth of his message, but, as though these rhetorical strategies were cunning tricks, he gives them scant recognition. His texts assume a truth that speaks for itself-a whole truth that needs no rhetorical support. His words are transparent. He does
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not share Hermes' confidence. When Hermes took the post of messenger of the gods, he promised Zeus not to lie. He did not promise to tell the whole truth. Zeus understood. The ethnographer has not.
In this paper I shall present a reading of three ethnographic texts, only one of which was written by an anthropologist, to look at some of the ways the ethnographer tries to make his message convincing. They are George Catlin's (1841; 1867) account of the Mandan Indians' O-Kee-Pa ceremony, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's (1976a; 1982) description of the Roman carnival in his Italienische Reise of 1789, and Clifford Geertz's (1973) study of the Balinese cockfight. The events described in the three texts are explosive, teasing if not the performers' then the authors' assumptions of meaning and order. The authors are challenged, and all make use of many different rhetorical strategies for convincing the reader, and presumably themselves, of the accuracy of their descriptions (see Marcus 1980).
Foremost among these strategies is the constitution of the ethnographer's authority: his presence at the events described, his perceptual ability, his "disinterested" perspective, his objectivity, and his sincerity (see Clifford 1983a). In all three cases, the ethnographer's place in his text is purely rhetorical. It is deictically, or better perhaps, pseudo-deictically, constructed. It is impossible to fix his vantage point. His is a roving perspective, necessitated by his "totalistic" presentation of the events he is describing. His presence does not alter the way things happen or, for that matter, the way they are observed or interpreted. He assumes an invisibility that, unlike Hermes, a god, he cannot, of course, have. His "disinterest," his objectivity, his neutrality are in fact undercut by his self-interest-his need to constitute his authority, to establish a bond with his readers, or, more accurately, his interlocutors, and to create an appropriate distance between himself and the "foreign" events he witnesses.
Aside from the devices the ethnographer uses to constitute his authority, he uses others to establish the validity of his ethnographic presentations directly. I single out three of these, which are used to various extents and with variable success by Catlin, Goethe, and Geertz. In Catlin it is a hypotyposis that predominates. In Goethe it is an external (nonmetaphorical) theatrical narrativity. Geertz depends primarily on interpretive virtuosity. In all three cases, as we shall see, the very figures the authors use to convince their readers-and themselves-of their descriptions in fact render them suspect, and in all three cases this failure to convince is covered by an institutionally legitimated concern for "meaning.” Catlin and Goethe give the ceremonies they describe an allegorical (moral) significance. Geertz claims
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a phenomenological-hermeneutical perspective on meaning that is, at least rhetorically, insufficient. His essay becomes exemplary, and the cockfight itself takes on not only metaphorical but methodological significance. The O-Kee-Pa, the carnival, and the cockfight all become figures of disorder-of arbitrary violence, unruliness, and meaninglessness-in a transcending story in which precisely this disorder, this violence, unruliness, and meaninglessness are overcome. The ceremonies are shown to have, if not order and meaning, then at least significance. But, ironically, as figures that mask an initial rhetorical subversion-a failure to convince-the descriptions are again subverted. The O-Kee-Pa, the Roman carnival, and the Balinese cockfight become the "O-Kee-Pa," the "Roman carnival," and the "Balinese cockfight."
"With this very honourable degree which had just been conferred upon me, I was standing in front of the medicine-lodge early in the morning, with my companions by my side, endeavouring to get a peep, if possible, into its sacred interior; when the master of ceremonies, guarding and conducting its secrets, as I before described, came out of the door and taking me with a firm professional affection by the arm, led me into this sanctum sanctorum, which was strictly guarded from, even a peep or a gaze from the vulgar, by a vestibule of eight or ten feet in length, guarded with a double screen or door, and two or three dark and frowning centinels with spears or war clubs in their hands. I gave the wink to my companions as I was passing in, and the potency of my medicine was such as to gain them quiet admission, and all of us were comfortably placed on elevated seats, which our conductor soon prepared for us."
With these words, George Catlin (1841 161-62), the romantic-realist painter of the American Indians, describes his entrance into a medicine lodge in which he was to witness what is surely one of the most sanguinary rites in the annals of ethnography, the Mandan 0-Kee-Pa-"an ordeal of privation and torture" in which young Mandan men, "emaciated with fasting, and thirsting, and waking, for nearly four days and nights," were hung by rawhide passed through the skewered flesh of their shoulders and breasts from the lodge's roof until they were "lifeless." The O-Kee-Pa was celebrated annually, according to Catlin, to commemorate the subsiding of a great flood that the Mandan believed once covered the world, to ensure the coming of the buffalo, and to initiate the young men of the tribe into manhood through an ordeal "which, while it is supposed to harden their muscles and prepare them for extreme endurance, enables the chiefs who are spectators to the scene to decide upon their comparative bodily
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strength and ability to endure the extreme privations and sufferings that often fall to the lots of Indian warriors" (1841: 157).
It was the summer of 1832-six years before the Mandan were decimated by an epidemic of smallpox. Catlin had spent several weeks with them. He found that "they are a people of decidedly a different origin from that of any other tribe in these regions," and later he argued that they were descendents of Welsh sailors who under the direction of Prince Madoc had set sail in the fourteenth century (actually in the twelfth century) and were thought to have settled somewhere in North America (Catlin 1867; Ewers 1967). The day before his admission to the medicine lodge, Catlin painted the master of ceremonies, and so pleased was this great magician with his portrait-"he could see its eyes move"-that he and the other "doctors" unanimously elevated Catlin to a "respectable rank in the craft" of magic and mysteries and gave him the name "White Medicine Painter." It was this honor that allowed him to enter the lodge, and it was his reputed medicine that enabled his companions J. Kipp, an agent of the American Fur Trade who had long been familiar with the Mandan and spoke their language; L. Crawford, Kipp's clerk; and Abraham Bogard, whose identity I have not been able to determine-to accompany him. They were apparently the first white men to witness the 0Kee-Pa, and Catlin was the first to describe it: on January lo, 1833 (though written on August 12, 1832), in the New-York Commercial Advertiser; then in 1841 in his Manners, Customs, and Conditions of the North American Indians; and, finally, in 1867 in a little book (with a Folium Reservatum for scholars) entirely devoted to the ceremony.
Catlin asserts melodramatically that he shudders and even shrinks from the task of reciting what he has seen. "I entered the medicinehouse of these scenes," he writes
as I would have entered a church, and expected to see something extraordinary and strange, but yet in the form of worship or devotion; but, alas! little did I expect to see the interior of their holy temple turned into a slaughterhouse, and its floor strewed with the blood of its fanatic devotees. Little did I think that I was entering a house of God, where His blinded worshippers were to pollute its sacred interior with their blood, and propitiatory suffering and tortures-surpassing, if possible, the cruelty of the rack or the inquisition; but such the scene has been, and as such I will endeavour to describe it.
(1841:156)
Despite all of Catlin's shuddering and shrinking, he and his companions managed to watch the spectacle from the seats they were assigned. "We were then in full view of everything that transpired in the lodge, having before us the scene exactly, which is represented in the
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first of the four pictures (that Catlin painted of the ceremony and that illustrated his second and third accounts]. To this seat we returned every morning until sun-down for four days, the whole time which these strange scenes occupied" (1841: 162). They were not even permitted to move' from their assigned places. Once when Catlin got up to take a closer look at what he calls the central mystery of the rite