On ‘Having’ Ethnography: Mimic M e . . . If You Can

Ghassan Huge Anthropology, University of Sydney

In 1976 I left Lebanon and came to Australia to pursue my studies. I knew then, as I know now, that I made a good move. Initially, I felt unequivocally that being in Australia has been good for me. Then, there were periods of hesitation. Sometimes it felt that I left an exciting land of excess for a boringly predictable and reserved one. Sometimes it felt that I left a land of deceit and violence for a land where social relations were more formal but less hypocritical. Well before I read anything about hybrid identities, the contradictory nature of migrant nostalgia and the condition of endless in-betweenness, I knew that I was destined to live with an irresolvable contradiction. But I could have chosen to live this contradiction anywhere in the world and yet I ended up staying in Australia. That’s one of the reasons why I feel I can claim to be Australian. If the fact that we are drawn by contradictory ambitions and desires defines our identity as a hybrid one, the fact that we decide to live these contradictions in a specific place gives this hybridity a stable space with an identity of its own. Theorists of hybridity forget such a simple truth: even hybridity has an identity. There is a Lebanese way of being tom between Australia and Lebanon and an Australian way of being so. I have come to represent the Australian variant and so I feel I have become more of an Australian phenomenon than a Lebanese one. And so, when asked the inevitable ‘what are you?’ I have no hesitation in responding, despite my lousy accent (and many other things): ‘I am Australian’. Now, this is accepted by most people around me, but of course, there is a minority which I encounter here and there and which always likes to put a question mark over my Australianness. Paradoxically, it is a minority which claims that ‘everyone should be Australian’. So, when I encounter the petty yapping of such Hanson-like characters who insist: ‘but, are you a real Australian?’-which is often an implicit ‘have you got what it takes to be a real Australian?’ which is in turn an implicit ‘you haven’t got it’-this in fact always makes me want to be more Lebanese. I want to say to them, ‘I am actually Lebanese not Australian . . . and I am really good at bringing my conflicts with me . . . and when a

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Lebanese football team comes to Australia, I support them against the Aussies . . . and despite all this I am staying here, and (insert the rude word of your choice) . . . So there

Why have I started with this autobiographical narrative in a paper I have proposed as a reflection on the relation between anthropology and cultural studies prompted by the Peace et al. papers? It is because I wanted to explore in an interesting and self-reflexive way, a way that tickles the imagination and the intellect-a good cultural studies kind of way-the vague feeling I had reading these papers that I was dealing with a quasi- Hansonite tendency in the anthropological world: people worried about the fate of their disciplinary ‘nation’ but feeling entitled to set the standards of belonging to it. Cultural studies academics are clearly their ‘Asians’. Those, to paraphrase Zizek (1991, 1993), who are threatening to steal their anthropological Thing (ethnography), and who are both bludgers and having too much fun, like the Asian migrants who both steal all the jobs while also managing to be always unemployed. Let me make it clear that I don’t think that this is all the Peace et al. papers have to offer. If this tendency in the papers attracted my attention it is because I have encountered colleagues, both in my department as well as in other institutions, who have implicitly and sometimes explicitly voiced such views of cultural studies academics’ relation to ethnography. I have encountered it most explicitly in the ‘anonymous’ refereeing of my work when I submit it to straight anthropology journals. In a sense the value of the Peace et al. papers is that they do offer a certain opening into the anthropological unconscious of those who hold such views. So let me start again . . .

In 1994, I migrated from a department of cultural studies to a department of anthropology. I knew then, as I know now, that I made a good move. Initially, I felt unequivocally that anthropology has been good to me. Then, there were periods of hesitation. Sometimes it felt that I left an exciting intellectual world full of buzzing new ideas for a boringly predictable one. Sometimes it felt that 1 left a land where intellectual pursuit was marked by excessive theoretical pontifications for a land where intellectual pursuit was more empirically grounded and less vacuous. Having been grabbed and seduced by anthropological thinking, mainly through the work of Pierre Bourdieu that instilled in me the necessity to be empirically grounded rather than give free rein to my theoretical imagination, I knew well before I read anything about hybrid identities and the condition of endless in-betweenness, that I was destined to live with an irresolvable contradiction. I could have lived this contradiction in another cultural studies department. But I’ve ended up in an anthropology department. There is a cultural studies way of being tom between anthropology and cultural studies and an anthropological way of being so. I feel more and more that I represent the anthropological variant. I consider myself now more of an anthropological phenomenon than a cultural studies one. And so, I have no problem claiming to be an anthropologist-a cultural studies kind of anthropologist. I say this with the sense of having gained something from anthropology. And while many of my colleagues have had no problem relating to me in this way, there is always the petty yapping of characters who say to me: ‘but, you’re not a real anthropologist, are you?’, ‘have you got what it takes (ethnography) to be a real anthropologist?’ They induce in me very much the same reaction I have to those who question my national belonging. They always make me want to be more of a cultural studies person. I want to say to them, ‘I am actually a cultural studies not an anthropology person . . . and 1 am really good at bringing

? . . .

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my theoretical pontification and lack of empirical groundedness with me . . . and I’ve never done ethnography . . . and despite all this I am staying here, in anthropology, you boring old farts . . .’. I want to say this to them, but I never do, of course, because in an anthropology department, unlike in the nation, you can get the sack! This might be one of the reasons why, instead of resorting to abuse, academics engage in analysis. So, to do the right thing, let me extend the above into ‘an analysis’. Better still, I will attempt an ethnographic analysis (what better way to annoy those who question my anthropological belonging).

I want to centre on two tendencies I have observed while dwelling among the anthropologists (whom I’ve been living with and observing for more than four years now). These are two co-existing modes of speaking about and relating to ethnographic work, what I will call ‘doing ethnography’ and ‘having ethnography’. These two modes are not often expressed in explicit statements and behaviour. They are more often alluded to in a taken for granted kind of way. The kind of way that only long-term (ethnographic) observation makes one capable of capturing. Different people attach different emphasis on each of these two modes and, though co-existing, it would be safe to say that the great majority attaches more importance to ‘doing ethnography’. Only a very small minority lives by emphasising ‘having ethnography’.

Although, it is impossible to ‘do ethnography’ without developing a sense of ‘having it’, it is nevertheless clear that the better one does ethnography-most crucially, the happier one is with oneself doing ethnography-the less one bothers to emphasise ‘having ethnography’. Doing ethnography is a narcissistic mode of being an ethnographer. It is anthropology-for-itself. ‘Ethnographic doers’ are more interested with the final research outcome they can yield with ethnography rather than with what ethnography can do for them personally as a mode of disciplinary distinction. ‘Ethnographic doers’, in my experience, are often interdisciplinary in their approach. They are often philosophically well-grounded, and are not worried about taking on board any minor or major approach, from discourse analysis to psychoanalysis, that can enhance the quality of the knowledge they are producing through their ethnographic work. I meet them down a corridor and they can discuss Deleuze and Taussig one day and Devereux and Merleau-Ponty the next. They don’t get their main ‘anthropological buzz’ out of making grand statements comparing whole traditions.

Those who do engage in denouncing ethnographic-less traditions (especially after a couple of drinks) are those who need members of those traditions for an audience. ‘Having ethnography’ is anthropology-for-others. It is a phallic mode of relating to ethnography with all the insecurity that ensues. For instance, it is those anthropologists who emphasise ‘having ethnography’ that are most prone to attack others: ‘those who don’t have it’. Paradoxically (but not so from within a phallic logic), they are the ones who are also most dependent on the gaze of the others. They are dependent on them for a number of reasons. Those who emphasise ‘having ethnography’ derive their sense of worth from having it and therefore need to constantly emphasise their difference from those who don’t have it. But they need more than emphasising having it. They have to emphasise the value of having it. Consequently, they want those who don’t have it to do more than simply be around to mark the difference between those who have it and those who don’t. They need them to desire having it. There is no point flashing the possession of ethnography for those who

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aren’t going to say ‘wow! I wish I had one like this’. This is why ‘havers’ of ethnography are assimilationist by their very nature. They constantly advocate the importance of everyone having ethnography. If you haven’t got an ethnography, not only can you not obtain anthropological knowledge, you can’t obtain knowledge tout court.

What does Meaghan Morris know about the tourist facing the Henry Parkes Motel? Nothing, since she hasn’t done ethnography. What does Jean-Paul Sartre know about being and nothingness? Nothing since he hasn’t. But as anyone who has studied the logic of assimilationism as a national policy in Australia knows, the point of emphasising that ‘everyone should be like us’ is never to make everybody like us. It is more to stress the difference between ‘us’ and ‘those who are trying to be like us’. By the very nature of this process, those who enter this cycle as mimics (trying to be like those who have ethnography) find themselves exactly where the ‘havers of ethnography’ want them, relegated to the ‘forever trying but always lacking something’ position. Assimilationist mimicry is always less than what it is trying to mimic, and its subject is seen as forever wanting. This is the position the Peace et al. papers like to fantasise cultural studies in: trying to mimic anthropology but always being less than the real thing since it hasn’t got what it takes.

Another important reason that makes the ‘havers of ethnography’ dependent on a construction of another who does not have it but desires it is that the latter give ethnographic data a far stronger ontological consistency than it would otherwise have. How much of an access to the empirical does an ethnography allow? How representative is it? How many perspectives does it manage to register? Are they the most significant in shaping social reality? All of those questions and many more are not questions that undermine the value of ethnographic research. They are simply variants of a basic insecurity that is part and parcel of any empirical research: how much of empirical reality did I really manage to catch and can I rely on it to write confidently in the language of ‘the one who knows’? These are questions that good empirically-based researchers face head- on at the cost of demonstrating how little they know-which, as always, often makes us learn a lot from them. But, to emphasise instead the value of one’s empirical catch as opposed to the poverty of those who have no empirical hold on reality often works as a strategy of evading the insecurity of the empirical. It leads to the exaggerated claims of the solidity of one’s empirical yield which often ends up with equally exaggerated truth- claims that tell us very little.

Needless to say, I prefer those who emphasise doing ethnography to those who emphasise having it. It is because of them that I can still say that being in an anthropology department continues to be good to me. Having begun some research with Lebanese Muslims in Sydney, I decided to consolidate my background knowledge by teaching a course on the anthropology of Arab Islam. I did not know much about the anthropology of Arab Islam beyond studying some basic texts as a student of Middle-East politics, memories of my daily experience and interaction with Muslims as a Christian in Lebanon, and Edward Said’s Orientalism (1 978). Every anthropological text I have read so far has taken me to important places and activated my imagination in ways which have enriched both my specific empirical knowledge and my general theoretical/analytical capacity for analysis. Those texts demonstrated to me the poverty of Said’s hold on the rich empirical research of the early orientalist anthropologists. But for all that, I would never want to be

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without the theoretical insights of Said and his exceptional capacity at unearthing the hidden relations of power underlying the veneers of empirical knowledge produced about the ‘Orient’. If all I look at in Said is whether he has got any ethnography, I would miss many of his rich and subtle arguments. And I must say that I think that one can get more, on the whole, from academics who engage in empirically free theorising than from some anthropologists, I have sometimes encountered, who ‘have an ethnography’ but seem to walk around carrying it like a cross, not knowing what to do with it.

Ade Peace’s reading of Meaghan Morris (1993) and Ken Wark (1994) is a good example of how much one misses if all one looks for in a text is whether it has or hasn’t got ethnography. After all, as Morris (appropriately enough) has once quipped: doing ethnography is very good, but it is also very good to be able to read. This is especially true when it comes to reading subtle texts full of theoretical and philosophical innuendos. Peace misses the whole ironic power of Morris’ oblique reference to Baudrillard in ‘the tourist facing the motel’ paragraph. Of course, if one has not read Baudrillard one is bound to miss the irony. This is not a weakness since we are all bound to be not so well- read in one tradition or another. But not everyone transforms their inability to capture something as a lack in the author they are reading. One’s starting point has to be an a- priori negative disposition to do so. Could it be that Morris is a ‘doyenne’ because she is brilliant? Why is it that someone like me and many other anthropologists find her essays highlyperceptive? Could it be that we are capturing certain things that Peace is not capturing? Far from Peace to allow for such a possibilty. As far as he is concerned, Morris is seen as brilliant, despite her irremediable lack, because people who don’t, or no longer, care about ‘ethnography’ are gullible. Luckily he, and other people like him, are still around to keep unmasking how empirically vacuous the doyenne’s comments really are.

Peace’s reading of Ken Wark is equally guided by such a negative disposition which makes him unable to read even the bits of Virtual Geography he uses as a quote. Wark is quoted as saying that his aim is to create his own ‘particular understanding of the global as seen from the antipodes’, the global as experienced by Australian people watching news events on the media. However, he is criticised because: ‘What the local populations of Baghdad, Berlin, Beijing, and New York, themselves made of media coverage of them, plays no part’ in his account. Apparently, if one is to understand how people in Australia have experienced watching the Gulf War on TV, one needs to research what the people of Baghdad made out of it first. Is that because no one in Australia would dare to formulate a TV-based opinion about the Gulf War without asking the people of Baghdad what they thought of it first?! Give us a break Ade.

Disciplines today seem to be facing the same choices that nations are facing in the era of globalisation: they either have to embrace the pluralities that constitute them and recognise their constitutive ‘multiculturality’ or become increasingly anachronistic monocultural ‘Serbias’. It is clear that today, a hybrid, interdisciplinary mode of knowledge is increasingly the dominant form of knowledge produced in the humanities and the social sciences. But, as I began by pointing out, those who emphasise hybridity fail to perceive that it has itself an identity, a space where it is lived. It is this space which constitutes disciplinary space today. It is probably the strength and the weakness of cultural studies that the space it has created is too wide. But if anthropology shuts itself to the dominance of hybrid interdisciplinarity (which is hardly new to it anyway), it will not

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protect itself as a discipline. It will merely fail to provide that disciplinary space where people can live their interdisciplinarity in a specifically anthropological way. Like those who cling to monocultural nationalism in the face of the multicultural Real, they are bound to live in an increasingly phantasmagoric world where sooner or later they will come face to face with their own irrelevance. I think it would be fair to say that despite the strength of the ‘having ethnography’ in them, there are traces of precisely such willingness to hybridise in the Peace et al. papers. They represent an already changing anthropology which, like all changing social landscapes, is often experienced by being both embraced and feared.

References Morris, M. 1993. At Henry Parkes Motel. In M. Morris and J. Frow (eds) Australian Cultural

Studies: A Reader. Sydney: Allen and Unwin.

Said, E. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.

Wark, M. 1994, Virtual Geography: Living with Global Media Events. Indianapolis: Indiana

Zizek, S. 1991. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture.

Zizek, S . 1993. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology. Durham:

University Press.

Cambridge, Mass.: The Massachusets Institute of Technology Press.

Duke University Press.