Interpretation In Anthropology Research Paper

1. The Burden Of History: Hermeneutics

A way to get a grip on elusive ‘interpretation’ in anthropology is to trace the concept to the discipline’s modern beginnings. Most historians locate them in the Age of Enlightenment, and this proves helpful provided that the scope is not narrowed unduly (and anachronistically) to a search for eighteenth-century predecessors of anthropology as a natural or social science. Thinkers whom we recognize as proto-anthropologists formulated their ideas in a context of theological, philosophical, and (often overlooked) philological debates. These debates were carried out in a field of tension that developed between the Enlightenment and, largely contemporary, Romantic thought (a complex story still best covered in Gusdorf 1973). From this broader view of our genealogy one can derive a heuristic model whereby modern conceptions of interpretation are seen to go back to moves between two poles. One of them is a long tradition of the exegesis of authoritative texts such as the Scriptures, the Classics but also corpora of Law. Typically, interpreters of such texts partook in the authority of their sources and had an interest in promoting and defending a transhistorical status for their sources. At the other pole, we find a tradition of secular critique. It emerged from moves to historicize authoritative texts by submitting them, often building on methods and techniques developed by theological and philological exegetes, to literary, social, and political analysis and interpretation (a conceptual pair that shows up also in most modern writings). Biblical criticism and what was called the Homeric question had demonstrated that these texts of quasi-transcendent religious and aesthetic authority had a mundane history of creation, collection, and editing under multiple individual and collective authorship. Because they had a past they were relevant to a critical understanding of the present. In a line leading from Hegel to Marx and Weber, to reveal the historicity of human affairs became a foremost task of social science.

Anthropology owes its openness to ideals of rational inquiry into, and appreciation of, the creations of other traditions (‘cultures’) at least as much to this secular tradition of critical interpretation as to the principles and habits of natural science. Given this double inheritance, distinctions between interpretive hermeneutic and explanatory scientific positions that keep the two facing each other in binary opposition become stultifying. The same applies when exegesis, interpretation working close to the material surface of texts, is contrasted with hermeneutics concerned with deep meanings. Least of all do such divisions correspond to that between a subjective quest for authority and power and the objective pursuit of scientific truth. Those who interpret and those who explain have about the same potential for turning into authoritative pundits. In sum, to acknowledge the double genealogy of anthropology in a hermeneutic and a scientific lineage maps a conceptual space necessary to discuss interpretation in anthropology; distinctions between them do not validate or invalidate, or even classify approaches.

While unproductive oppositions should be rejected, it is important to keep in mind that, in its modern usage, interpretation has been a critical and often militant concept. To cite one of Bauman’s conclusions: ‘The method of sociological hermeneutics, like that of empirical science, can serve the practice of communication only in its negative capacity, as the method of criticism’ (1978, p. 241, emphasis in the original).

2. Interpretation And The Object Of Anthropology

Anthropology may have owed much to a tradition of critical interpretation, and J. G. Herder, a thinker steeped in that tradition, can be credited with having bequeathed to anthropology essential elements that went into its guiding idea, culture. Yet interpretation or hermeneutics did not assume a prominent position in debates about the production of anthropological knowledge until the late 1960s. Of the two paradigms under which anthropology gained admission as an academic discipline toward the end of the nineteenth century, evolutionism (as represented by E. B. Tylor) emerged from the Scottish Enlightenment and embraced principles and taxonomic methods of natural history. It derived its methods above all from disciplines such as geology, biology, and comparative anatomy. Diffusionism can be traced to the Romantic project of a universal cultural history but it practiced a hermeneutic that had been narrowed to a positivist methodology of interpreting historical sources, as exemplified in F. Graebner’s (1911) adaptation of the work of E. Bernheim (1970, orig. 1889), a medieval historian. In both paradigms, notwithstanding the literary ambitions of some proponents, such as James Frazer, and the influence of literary critic Matthew Arnold on E. B. Tylor, anthropology seemed to lack an object for critical interpretation comparable to the great texts, the Scriptures, or the Classics. This did not change with the succeeding paradigms of British functionalism, French structuralism, or even (and at first) American culturalism. Primitive, nonwestern societies were not to be interpreted; they called for functional explanation, structural decoding, or structural-functional systemic analysis, until the study of cultural ‘meaning’ took the center stage.

This last development was tied to the concept of symbol that, unbeknownst to many who wielded it (leaning on Freud, Cassirer, Kenneth Burke, or Susanne Langer), always threatened to take anthropology back to precritical hermetic traditions of interpretation. Most daringly stated by Roy Wagner (1975), a ‘symbolic anthropology’ staked its claims— also with a Reader (Dolgin et al. 1977)—at about the time when calls for an ‘interpretive and hermeneutic’ approach were first heard (possibly prepared by Palmer’s excellent general introduction to hermeneutics in English published in 1969). Clifford Geertz was invoked as an authority by the symbolic as well as the interpretive movement. He remained somewhat aloof of both and continued to call his approach ‘semiotic’ (that is, sign-centered) although he went further in the direction of hermeneutics than any of his predecessors when he suggested that anthropology’s object of study, culture, might be approached as (or like) a text (an ‘ensemble of texts’ in his words). Geertz referred to an essay by Paul Ricoeur (1971, reprinted in Rabinow and Sullivan 1979, pp. 73–101). Ricoeur had advanced the ‘hypothesis’ that the human sciences, by adopting a hermeneutic approach, could proceed from ‘Explanation to Understanding’ (for a broader statement of the relevance of hermeneutics and interpretation to the social sciences, see Ricoeur’s influential study of Freud, 1970). Earlier influences from Dilthey and Weber had prepared the ground for giving to ‘understanding’ this new and sharp focus.

3. Interpretation And Method

Thus, by the mid-1970s, one of its most influential proponents seemed to have steered anthropology back to the Romantic tradition of interpretation. However, important as this move may have been at the level of theory (that is, in redefining the object of anthropology and in clarifying the status of the discipline as an interpretive rather than explanatory science), its practical consequences were limited. The model of the text did not generate a new distinctive method; thick description and a knack for discerning ‘webs of signification’ continued to work as the ethnographer’s ‘magic.’ For those who embraced the hermeneutic stance, text remained essentially a metaphor and few among these writers were compelled by this figure to direct their ethnographic research and writing to actual texts and their interpretation. The latter happened in a movement that was roughly contemporary with Geertzian hermeneutics and had intellectual roots that, acknowledged or not, go back to W. von Humboldt. It took its departure from a critique of formalist structural linguistics, of purely classificatory approaches in folklore, and of positivist views of ethnography. It was in this field of innovative endeavors where critical thought in language-centered anthropology (Hymes 1974) and the philosophy of social science (Habermas 1988, orig. 1967) converged that we began to see how interpretation might develop from a theoretical figure to a practical guideline, a method organizing the production of anthropological knowledge from field research to writing.

Whether or not certain choices, steps, procedures, and strategies devised for interpretation can count as an anthropological method is an epistemological question: how must we conceive the nature of anthropological inquiry, how the nature of its object? From a hermeneutic position the answer would roughly be this: anthropology, though aware of, and in some of its branches concerned with, neural, etiological, and certain statistically demonstrable determinations of human behavior, starts with the assumption that human experience as well as the study of that experience are always mediated. Mediated means that experiences (and our understandings) are made, shared, and transmitted by means (lit. things in the middle, media) that include language (in the broadest sense of the term), practices of communication and representation, and material objects. This is an epistemological, not an ontological view: When we conceive of an ensemble of mediations as culture this is not to posit culture as an entity. Culture is a discourse on mediations and practices. In this view, mediations are objectifications of human action somewhat but (as we shall argue) not quite in the sense envisioned by Ricoeur when he stated that ‘action itself, action as meaningful, may become an object of science, without losing its character of meaningfulness, through a kind of objectification similar to the fixation which occurs in writing. By this objectification action … constitutes a delineated pattern which has to be interpreted according to its inner connections’ (1971, p. 538). The analogy with fixation in writing (the reason to introduce the model of the text in the first place) ‘prepares the detachment of the meaning of the action from the event of the action’ (1971, p. 538). In the passages from which these quotations are drawn Ricoeur deploys the vocabulary of Weberian– Parsonian culturalism (pattern, meaning, meaningful action, interaction) and thereby advocates interpretation as an operation on elements of culture that, though objectified, are disembodied—a point often made in the critique of American culturalism and echoed in Bourdieu’s (1977, p. 96) qualifying the hermeneutic stance as ‘objectivism.’

In contrast, approaches to text and interpretation in anthropology that, explicitly or not, focus on mediation and on culture as praxis are concerned with maintaining or restoring the event-character of action. Interpretation then becomes a method of translating the texts and documents, that is, those ‘fixations in writing’ that are the ‘data’ produced by interactive, communicative ethnography (notes, recordings, collected texts, including some that made their way into historical or administrative archives), into events and eventually into processes. Not the model of ‘the’ text but models of text making are required for such interpretive work, much of which has been inspired by Dell Hymes’s (1974, orig. 1964) seminal observations on components of speech events. His ideas, sometimes called ‘sociolinguistic,’ were further developed by the contributors to Bauman and Sherzer (1974). Linking the notion of speech event to that of genre, Dan Ben Amos has shown methodological consequences for folklore studies (1976), and a classic in this vein is Dennis Tedlock’s collection of essays (1983). Fabian has stated the philosophical (anti-positivist) point of departure, offered a model of text production, and a warning against tendencies to grammaticalize Hymes’s pragmatic approach to texts (1991, Chaps. 1, 3, 5).

4. Interpretation And Performance

The move away from semiological to pragmatic concerns reflected and promoted yet another understanding of interpretation. ‘Interpretation’ used to be a discipline and skill taught in speech and drama departments; today, many of them have become part of a multifaceted field called Performance Studies. Performance, as a theoretical concept usually paired with ‘competence,’ was adopted by Hymes from generative linguistics and applied to his ethnography of speaking but it undoubtedly gained its wider currency in anthropology in the more specific, theatrical understanding promoted, above all, by Victor Turner (stated most comprehensively in 1986). Actually, as his work shows, attention to performance in the interpretation of culture has a complex intellectual history. Turner began by giving focus and life to drama, a pervasive but mostly dead theatrical metaphor in social theory (for instance in Parsonian functionalism–structuralism) that was at the origin of such crucial sociological terms as role, actor, and enactment. He saw drama above all in ritual, and came close (as did Max Gluckman) to postulating a distinctive type of premodern society whose social dynamic was not determined by linear accumulation of change and innovation but by cyclical enactment of a dramatic script. Undoubtedly, this presented a gain over static views of primitive or traditional societies. However, not unlike the model of culture as a text, the drama metaphor had its limits when it came to understand its practical consequences for the production of ethnographic knowledge. What was needed was an epistemological conception of performance as both a way in which a culture works and a method by which it may be studied and represented. Taking an increasingly literal approach to performance as theatrical performance (including experimental collaboration with Richard Schechner, a producer and theorist in the field of theater), Turner ended in an impasse that eventually led him to advocate a biological (neurological) position not unlike that earlier taken by Levi-Strauss (see Turner 1986, pp. 156–77). Nevertheless, his work helped to make anthropologists aware that large parts, perhaps most expressions, of cultural knowledge are performative in the sense that what they say is also constituted by how contents are enacted. An emerging ‘ethnography of reading’ (Boyarin 1993) applies this to texts fixated in writing and opens to anthropology a wide field of interpretation no longer predicated on categorical distinctions between orality and literacy; for methodological consequences and procedures, see Finnegan (1992) and Tonkin (1992). What changed, and was gained, by including pragmatic (sociolinguistic) and performance aspects in methods of interpreting oral sources is best illustrated by comparing Vansina’s classic work on oral tradition (1961) with its radical revision (1985).

Finally, it should be mentioned that a pragmatic and critical stance toward the interpretation of texts also leads to a re-evaluation of ‘context,’ a concept that has had a long history in anthropology. It was applied mainly in the validation of ethnography and often, much like text, in a metaphorical manner in admonitions to place specific facts or data in their historical, political, economic, religious, etc. ‘context.’ In-as-much as this suggested that, though relevant to an interpretation of findings, context was itself not subject to interpretation (at least not at the moment when it was invoked), this has become an untenable proposition. Context poses problems of interpretation, it does not solve them.

5. The Politics Of Interpretation

A review of theoretical and practical views of interpretation in anthropology would not be complete without developments that emerged in the 1980s. They consisted of moves giving anthropology a ‘literary turn,’ an apt designation if it is understood as promoting attention to writing in the production of ethnography and anthropological knowledge. Not metaphorical invocations of text as a model, but calls for critical interpretation of ethnographies as texts were formulated by a group resolved to lift the veil under which modern, scientifically minded anthropology had kept ethnographic authorship (Marcus and Cushman 1982, Clifford and Marcus 1986, Clifford 1988). Postmodernism became a convenient but doubtful label for this movement—doubtful because it obscures its roots in decidedly modern advancements in the historiography of our discipline, in the theoretical confrontation with its colonial and postcolonial political role that had occupied critical anthropology since the 1960s, and, though less obviously, in feminist critique of anthropological discourse.

As regards interpretation, the subtitle of the Clifford and Marcus volume, ‘The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography,’ pointed to the directions further work could, and did, take. Along the lines of a hermeneutical understanding of the term, interpretation now applied to the canon of anthropological writing the tools developed by literary theory and criticism (exemplified by Geertz 1988). Interpretation in the performative sense encouraged, beyond literary deconstruction, ‘experimentation with genre’ which resulted, if not quite in its demise, then in relativizing the status of the monograph as the authorized form of ethnography: narrative, dialogue, poetry, collage, and autobiographic inclusion of the ethnographer in his or her account have begun to shape much of anthropological writing. Perhaps it is not always easy to draw a line between hard-won freedom from scientism and gratuitous literary posing; postmodern ethnography is at its best when it is able to justify its choice of representational forms on epistemological grounds. How an author translates practices of research into writing has become a foremost task of critical interpretation in anthropology. To be able to discern narrative plots and strategies, identify tropes and other rhetorical devices, and to recognize intertextual connections is now required when we discuss the validity of ethnographies. Conversely, though it would be foolish to cast away all our prior habits and techniques, field research can no longer rely largely on preconceived methods that once were thought to yield data without being themselves subject to constant interpretation (which would have made methods useless in a classical positivist research setup). Attempts to formulate these insights have reached the level of textbooks and handbooks that steer a difficult course between opening a back door to flat-footed methodology and scaring anthropological novices with hermeneutic hypersensitivity.

Distinguishable but never separable from attention to poetics is the concern with the politics of ethnography, that is, with relations of power that determine production of anthropological knowledge in all its phases from research to writing. Therefore the question of interpretation in anthropology cannot be raised without (taking a lesson from Michel Foucault) questioning the devices of control and domination deployed in the discourse anthropology pronounces on others. Interpretation may be ‘just interpretation,’ but neither as a hermeneutic alternative to scientism nor as a pragmatic method should it make anthropology complacent about its achievements.

Bibliography:

1. Bauman R, Sherzer J (eds.) 1974 Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
2. Bauman Z 1978 Hermeneutics and Social Science: Approaches to Understanding. Hutchinson, London
3. Bernheim E 1970 Lehrbuch der historischen Methode und der Geschichtsphilosophie. Burt Franklin, New York (Reprint, original edition 1889)
4. Ben Amos D (ed.) 1976 Folklore Genres. University of Texas Press, Austin, TX
5. Bourdieu P 1977 Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
6. Boyarin J (ed.) 1993 The Ethnography of Reading. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA
7. Clifford J 1988 The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
8. Clifford J, Marcus G E (eds.) 1986 Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA
9. Dolgin J L, Kemnitzer D S, Schneider D M (eds.) 1977 Symbolic Anthropology: A Reader in the Study of Symbols and Meanings. Columbia University Press, New York
10. Dundes A 1980 Interpreting Folklore. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN
11. Fabian J 1991 Time and the Work of Anthropology: Critical Essays 1971–1991. Harwood Academic Publishers, Chur, Switzerland
12. Finnegan R 1992 Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts: A Guide to Research Practices. Routledge, London
13. Geertz C 1973 The Interpretation of Cultures. Basic Books, New York
14. Geertz C 1988 Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA
15. Gusdorf G 1973 L’Avenement des sciences humaines au siecle des lumieres. Payot, Paris
16. Habermas J 1988 On the Logic of the Social Sciences (trans. Nicholsen S W, Stark J A). Polity, UK
17. Hymes D 1974 Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA
18. Marcus G E, Cushman D 1982 Ethnographies as texts. Annual Review of Anthropology 11: 25–69
19. Palmer R E 1969 Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer. Northwestern University Press, Evanston
20. Ricoeur P 1970 Freud and Philosophy: An Essay in Interpretation (trans. Savage S). Yale University Press, New Haven, CT
21. Ricoeur P 1984 The model of the text: Meaningful action considered as a text. Social Research 51(1–2): 185–218
22. Tedlock D 1983 The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA
23. Tonkin E 1992 Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
24. Turner V W 1986 The Anthropology of Performance. Performing Arts Journal Publications, New York
25. Vansina J 1961 De la tradition orale. Essai de methode historique. Musee Royal de l’Afrique Centrale, Tervuren
26. Vansina J 1985 Oral Tradition as History. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison