Reflexivity In Anthropology Research Paper

According to one of the early statements in this critical trend, reflexivity is ‘… the capacity of any system of signification to turn back upon itself, to make itself its own object by referring to itself: subject and object fuse’ (Myerhoff and Ruby 1982). Myerhoff and Ruby go on to stress that ‘significant distinctions exist between reflexiveness and related attitudes such as self-regard, self-absorption, solipsism, self-reference, self-consciousness, and autobiography. Reflexiveness does not leave the subject lost in its own concerns; it pulls one toward the other and away from isolated attentiveness toward oneself.’

Reflexivity as a practice in the social sciences is, thus, both a distinctive mode of thinking and a strategy of writing that concerns itself with the process of inquiry as an integral part of the claims to knowledge that the inquiry might produce. As a concept, it is related to the idea of feedback in cybernetic models, of metacommunication, and of such functions as deixis and indexicality inherent in the faculty of language use. However, it is the more ideological uses of reflexivity in debates about the revision of anthropology’s distinctive methods of fieldwork and ethnography that are of concern here. Debates about the role and purpose of reflexivity in the process of research as well as in the changing form of the ethnographic text became the major specifiable way of assessing the impact upon anthropology of the broader intellectual movement of the 1970s and 1980s known loosely as postmodernism.

In the broad sweep of European philosophy, reflexivity as a category of interest in social theory begins with Kant’s distinction between analysis and an analytic in which an analytic is the kind of inquiry where the subject of inquiry is also the object of inquiry. One genealogical stream from this originary idea of reflexive inquiry leads through Hegel to phenomenology and eventually to Heidegger and existentialism in France. The other, and for us, more relevant genealogical stream leads to hermeneutics in the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur by way of the neo-Kantian writings of Dilthey and the work of Max Weber, in which reflexivity, while implicit, is a strong element of his methodological considerations. In the work of Gadamer and Ricoeur, reflexivity becomes an explicit and crucial intellectual operation in the activity of interpretation whereby the individual ethical consciousness expands reflectively through encounters with the foreign or the different. Thus, while long a potential existing in a sort of minor key to the predominant positivist tendency of social theory which oversaw the post-World War II expansion of sociology and anthropology in the United States, philosophical works of hermeneutics, in which the operation of reflexivity was highlighted, only developed explicitly a strong appeal among sociologists and anthropologists from the early 1980s onward.

Of all of the social sciences, the importance of reflexivity as a style of inquiry has been most natural to precisely those methods of anthropology which have distinguished it as a discipline. Pioneered by Bronislaw Malinowski and Franz Boas, the pursuit of fieldwork investigation through long-term participant observation, working directly in native languages, and the constant interpretation and translation of behaviors and speech encountered on a daily basis, inherently involves on the part of the investigator a keen consciousness of oneself and one’s relations with specific others as the medium of all claims to knowledge from this research practice.

For a long time, anthropologists only came to terms with the complexities and problems of this distinctive form of knowledge production informally as a pastime of professional culture and folklore, as something to be communicated between mentors and students. It was only at the end of the 1960s, and then again, and more definitively in the 1980s, that anthropologists examined and developed explicitly the varieties of meanings and implications of reflexivity as a major style of knowledge production for the future practice of their discipline.

Since the 1980s, reflexivity has become a ‘keyword’ indicating both a self-conscious, mainstream style of work in anthropology and part of its own enduring disciplinary politics of knowledge. Here, it is important to note that reflexivity has only served as such a central category, standing in turn for the most concrete aspect of the controversial impact of postmodernism on anthropological practice, in the recent evolution of the discipline in the United States. It has been discussed and debated from the 1980s on in other anthropological establishments around the world, but mainly through the stimulus of the prestige and diffusion of trends in United States anthropology.

1. Reflexivity In Two Moments In The Critique Of Anthropology

During the late 1960s, US anthropologists became preoccupied openly with a long simmering critique of their discipline. This critique had theoretical and methodological dimensions, but it was primarily political in nature, stimulated by the ferment of domestic resistance to the Vietnam War, renewed discussions of anthropology’s historic development within the expansion of European colonialisms, and the interest in new work in Marxist theory. At that time as well, Geertz was developing a broad and deep theoretical foundation for cultural anthropology in hermeneutic philosophy, work that was eventually to serve as both the primary foil and influence for later discussions of reflexivity in anthropological method. (See Geertz 1968 for his early position on reflexivity in fieldwork.) But in the de facto reflexive attempt to undertake a critical anthropology of anthropology in the politicized atmosphere of the 1960s, the issue of reflexivity itself as the major dynamic of what it was to practice critical analysis was little addressed. An important exception is the paper by Scholte (1969) which summarized this period of critique. Important as a figure who introduced currents of European social theory into US anthropology, Scholte foreshadowed what sort of theoretical work and changes in practice would be necessary to transform anthropology into a discipline with a sustained critical purpose beyond that moment of heightened political critique.

In the interval between the two periods of internal disciplinary critique, perhaps the most important work that served as the raw material on which the eventual surfacing of explicit considerations of reflexivity in anthropology depended was the burgeoning of a literature on fieldwork experience, written alongside the production of more formal ethnographies from which such reflections about the process of inquiry were largely absent. This literature, fueled by the publication of Malinowski’s diaries in 1967, incorporated the spirit of self-critique of the late 1960s and was produced by anthropologists who were then students and young professors. There emerged a more theoretical strain of this literature in which the reflexive character of fieldwork became the major preoccupation (e.g., Rabinow 1979) and that led eventually to experiments with the form of the ethnography itself (e.g., Crapanzano 1980). These works, combined with an interdisciplinary movement, variously characterized as postmodernism and poststructuralism and led by scholars of literature who were experiencing their own disciplinary crisis, stimulated the theoretically deeper, more wideranging, and sustained internal critique of anthropology of the 1980s.

Incorporating all of the dimensions of the earlier critique, the 1980s critique primarily examined the central practices of the discipline, especially in its character as a hermeneutic enterprise, a view for which Geertz had laid the foundation. In particular, it did so by a focus on the rhetoric and forms of the signature textual product of anthropology, the ethnography. (See Clifford and Marcus 1986, the volume that has stood for this critique in the way that the Hymes volume did for the earlier one.) This critique was, thus, the efflorescence of a comprehensive discussion of all of the issues relating to reflexivity that had long been so essential to the practice of anthropology. Influenced by the circulation of much more diverse and sophisticated theoretical resources, anthropologists looked with an unprecedented intensity and thoroughness at the relationships in their work between reflexive modes of knowing, critical and ethical awareness, the political contexts of inquiry, and alternative possibilities for practice.

The basic act of reflexivity which initiated this critique were the probing discussions of the relationships of anthropologists to informants—of the self to other—and the dependence of the production of anthropological knowledge on these relationships which had so often been effaced in the ways that ethnographies had in fact been written. Evoking alternative modes of representing others, questioning the act of representation itself, suggesting the ways ethnographic knowledge emerges from collaboration and dialogue, and probing the political conditions which have inhibited such possibilities, this moment of critique served both to stimulate degrees of experiment with the ethnographic form and to encourage ramifying discussions about the critical purpose of anthropological analysis (e.g., Marcus and Fischer 1999). This undertaking was itself an umbrella act of reflexivity, and reflexive practice became the common frame for thinking about past ethnographies, future possibilities, and the form and purpose of anthropological knowledge itself. This field of discussion was highly contested: some felt that the critique by its nature was too hermetic, too literary, and not sufficiently committed to anthropology’s study of social struggles in the contemporary world; some thought the attention to reflexive issues was an aesthetic distraction and a major blow to the production of objective knowledge that could be shared by a scholarly community and on which disciplinary progress depended; and contrast-ingly, for some, the kinds and levels of reflexivity encouraged by the critique were neither reflexive nor critical enough, leading to a spiralling array of discussions about insufficiencies and exclusions that had even more ideal reflexive practice in view.

The immediate effect of this period of critique were the changes in the ways that ethnographies were both written and discussed. But while the critique was developed through attention to texts and the way that anthropologists rhetorically established authority for them, the larger stake was the effort finally to justify them theoretically and ethically and expand anthropology as a critically reflexive field of inquiry. There can be little doubt that this much has been established as at least a long-term mainstream tendency in the discipline. This tendency has placed anthropology in much closer relation to such parallel interdisciplinary fields, themselves rooted in varieties of reflexive inquiry, as media studies, feminist studies, postcolonial studies, and most broadly, cultural studies, than to its historic partners in the other social sciences.

2. The Incorporation Of Reflexivity In The Mainstream Of Anthropological Research

Discussions about reflexivity, or at least the evaluation of ethnographic claims to knowledge in terms of the specific conditions and relations of inquiry that produced them from fieldwork, are not only highly visible and commonplace in anthropological discourse of the 1990s, they are de rigueur. Further, some form and degree of reflexive commentary is worked prominently into virtually every ethnography written these days. If not enacted in experimental text design, there is the presumption that all ethnography is produced collaboratively, and there are far richer and more probing discussions than ever before about the kinds of contexts which influence ethnographic representations of subjects and shape arguments from ethnographic data (see Marcus 1994). Concern for reflexivity has had a special appeal for ethnographic filmmakers, and some of the most cogent writing on the importance of reflexivity in the representation of other forms of life have come from this arena (e.g., MacDougall 1998). Current productions of ethnographic film and media demonstrate most clearly that the practice of reflexivity crucially redefines and adapts the classic conditions of ethnographic inquiry to new conditions of fieldwork where anthropological research projects must negotiate different identities and roles in relation to the highly articulated projects of their subjects in the overlapping contexts of a globally interconnected world.

2.1 Variant Ideologies In The Practice And Form Of Reflexivity

In sociology, discussion of reflexivity has tended to be integrated formally as a methodological tool or technique (e.g., see Bourdieu 1990), limiting its ability to affect fundamentally the forms and purposes of sociological research. In anthropology, the outcome has been quite different, generating a number of changes in the ways that ethnographies are written and fieldwork is conceived. This in turn has obviously had considerable implications for changes in both the form and content of the knowledge that anthropology’s core research process generates.

In engagement with the terms of the ‘Writing Culture’ critique of the 1980s, the largest body of literature stimulated explicitly by reflexive inquiry examines in great detail the self-other relation in classic conditions and specific sites of fieldwork. While some have characterized this literature as narcissistic or merely self quests, in its most accomplished examples (e.g., Behar and Gordon 1995, Reed-Danahay 1997, Taylor 1999, Tsing 1993), it has addressed cogently issues of contemporary changes in concepts of self, personhood, and identity among many of the peoples who had been the subject of study by previous generations of ethnographers. At the microlevel of fieldwork, it has also clarified aspects of the history of anthropology as an academic enterprise and in relation to the broad range of effects that inquiry itself has on the peoples and subjects studied (e.g., Rosaldo 1989). While somewhat unruly and less governed by genre rules of form in social science writing, this literature has, in sum, been very useful in deepening and critiquing the complexities of constructs of subjectivity and otherness within their conventional usages in Western intellectual discourse—a long-term, continuing objective of anthropology as a discipline. It has also probed critically ethnographers’ positions in relation to initial objects of study so as to transform the objects in novel ways and reconfigure the compass of research in response to radical contemporary changes in both the worlds of the academic and who is identified as subjects of study.

There has also been a strain of reflexive inquiry in anthropology for which reflexivity has been more distinctly a means by which to define an object of study or to circumscribe new temporal and spatial boundaries for a fieldwork project (Marcus 1998). Key to these works is clarity of the positioning or location of ethnographic inquiry, which reflexivity enables, in relation to other historic and geographical agents in the same social field. Reflexivity as positioning not only serves the creation of new forms of objectivity in anthropology, sensitive to the issues of critique that discussions of reflexivity have raised, but redefines both the scope of ethnography and its arguments. In these works the limits and reach of once very locally focussed ethnographic arguments expand in unpredictable and intriguing ways (for a now classic experiment of this sort, see Taussig 1987; for more recent examples, see Martin 1994, Fortun 2000).

Finally, there is the presence of reflexivity in ethnography because of the evolution of certain realities on the ground over the course of career-long scholarly involvements with certain peoples and places. In recent decades, literally self-conscious cultural awareness has increased markedly and even been mobilized politically in many locales and regions such that the conditions of ethnographic research require a rethinking and reorientation toward one’s subjects, now organized into social movements, nongovernmental organizations, and other groups involved in objectifying and representing themselves. Here, reflexive inquiry is the means to a complex and necessary politics of research which not only shapes fieldwork but makes it continuation possible at all (see Warren 1999 for an exemplar of this type of increasing variant of reflexive inquiry).

2.2 Reflexive Modernization And Reflexivity In The Changing Conditions Of Anthropological Fieldwork

Broader changes in contemporary social conditions worldwide that stimulate the trend of reflexive inquiry in anthropology is encompassed in the concept of reflexive modernization (Beck et al. 1994), a development in social theory of the 1990s that responds to the postulation of a present era of postmodernity by trying to specify the characteristics of such an era for the pursuit of empirical inquiry. This construct proposes that the modernity characteristic of industrial society is succeeded by a modernity that involves living with irreducible contingency, living in a more complex and less controllable world. Most importantly, reflexivity as a self-monitoring process on the level of both institutions and individual persons becomes not only a pervasive aspect of society, but also a key focus of social thought itself.

This version of social theory suggests for the proliferation of styles of reflexive inquiry in anthropology that these are not driven only as a result of the internal critique of anthropology, as a seminal countertrend to a preceding era of positivist tendencies, but as a more generally shared condition with the societies and cultures which anthropology makes its subjects of study. This suggestion in turn has a potentially profound and enduring effect on the research protocols of anthropology in recognizing certain affinities and identifications between the reflexive predicaments of ethnographers and those whom they study. Reflexivity is relevant not because it provides truer or more powerful explanatory models with which anthropologists can treat social facts among their subjects, but rather because reflexivity is also practiced differentially ‘out there’ on a widespread basis (see Marcus 1999). This fact suggests the breaking of the frame of conventional scholarly work altogether, at least in the anthropological tradition, rather than the demise and replacement of specific concepts and characteristics of this academic frame. Thus, reflexivity is no longer only a moment in the critique of disciplines but becomes more generally the object and medium of social and cultural analysis as well.

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