Ethnography, travel literature, and literary ethnography (1)

Find the frog in vernal pool. Spring 2022. Photo by Jeff Titon.

 I was interested to see, in the first volume of the ninth edition of the Norton Anthology of American Literature (2016), a section with the heading Ethnographic and Naturalist Writings (Vol. 1, pp. 641ff). The section’s introduction begins, “Broadly defined, the genre of literary ethnography is the written description of peoples, cultures, and societies. . . . Virtually all of the earliest ‘American’ literature offers instances of ethnographic and naturalist writing, as the sustained European encounter with the Americas that begin in 1492 provided writers with a treasure trove of new material” (641). My interest was piqued, first of all, by the use of the word ethnography outside of the anthropological/ethnomusicological/folkloristic context in which I know it. Inside that context, although ethnography is defined as the written description of the culture, or some aspects of the culture, of a social group, it is not regarded primarily as literature or even as a literary genre. Instead, it aspires to be systematic, its reliability grounded and guaranteed by thorough documentation. Systematic ethnographic descriptions to a certain extent resemble inventories--these are the ways the group thinks of kinship relations; these are their laws and traditions; this is how their government is organized; these are their rituals and ceremonies; that sort of thing. This kind of ethnographic description is later used as evidence for cultural analysis, cultural comparisons, and cultural histories. 

Yet when ethnographers become narrators, portraying as much as describing, telling anecdotes based on their personal encounters, anecdotes that encapsulate the meanings and offer grounds for interpretation--not analysis--of this or that cultural behavior, then our tales take on literary qualities, because they exhibit such things as individual characters, settings and scenes, point-of-view and narrative reliability. But because truth-telling is our goal, it would be highly unusual for any ethnographer, narrating in the first person, to present themself as an unreliable narrator and impossible to offer up an ethnography as fiction, unless it were meant as satire or comedy--in which case, the audience would need to be let in on the ruse sooner or later. Or not; there are some famous exceptions, such as Carlos Castaneda's once-popular narrative ethnographies on the teachings of a Mexican shaman he called Don Juan.

I was, also, curious about the deliberate juxtaposition of ethnographic and naturalist writings in this section, suggesting that describing “peoples” is, or at least was, during the early European colonization of the Asian, African, and American continents, not altogether different from describing esoteric plants and animals. Such a juxtaposition also reflects empire, but is it a recognition of similarities in these literatures, "ethnographic" and naturalistic, of the 17th and 18th centuries? Or might it reveal a residual settler colonialism in the Anthology editors' thinking? More on that in a later blog post. Third, I was struck by the Anthology editors' apparent reluctance to use the accepted term "travel literature" to describe this kind of writing. Travel literature is an ancient genre; portions of Herodotus' history fall into this category, while perhaps the 13th-century Travels of Marco Polo is the most famous example, both from a period that predates European colonialism. Anthropology, and to some extent ethnomusicology and folklore, have a history of ambivalence toward travelers' accounts of exotic lands and peoples; on the one hand, they may contain new information that makes a genuine contribution to knowledge; on the other, the travelers are amateurs after all and therefore their observations cannot be taken at face value. Indeed, as the 20th century wore on, professional, advanced degreed anthropologists increasingly got out of their studies and into the "field," traveling themselves to the field sites where the peoples lived whose cultures they wished to describe. They thought of themselves as scientists, and made a distinction between themselves and the untrained amateurs, tourists whose observations were haphazard, their judgments subjective and often prejudiced; whereas these scholar-scientists considered themselves objective documentarians and analysts pursuing knowledge in a thorough, systematic, unbiased and objective fashion. 

This conception of ethnography as a scientific endeavor began to unravel during the period of the great social movements of the latter 1960s and early 1970s, and by 1990 or so many cultural anthropologists, if not archeologists and linguists, had largely abandoned the idea that their methodology was ever scientific in the sense of the ideal that it was impersonal, objective, unbiased, and replicable. (Of course, critics of science also claimed that objectivity was a myth in all scientific endeavor, even natural science.) Indeed, in the face of post-colonial independence movements, cultural anthropologists began to realize that their field was part of the legacy of empire; that in many cases access to "other" cultures in faraway lands was possible (and relatively safe) only because of the protection of colonial governments. And in the 1980s, cultural anthropology (and, a little later, ethnomusicology) became a locus for debates over such things as cultural appropriation and theft; the relevance of post-structuralist thinking; and of course the literary qualities of narrative ethnography--and whether narrative ethnography was fiction, or whether it was only "like" fiction. It was in the context of these old debates--advanced but never settled--that I first pondered the term "literary ethnography" and its application to the literature of travel and exploration written by European explorers and colonists in the New World beginning in the late 15th century. I'll say more about these topics in a subsequent blog post.