Anthropology Through a Double Lens. Daniel Touro Linger
process.
Of course, psychological anthropologists have been inclined to offer the other half—meaning systems ripe for instantiation, lost in interior space. I do not see any impediment in principle, however, to a productive rapprochement between discursive and cognitive approaches, that is, to an integrated vision focused squarely on a culturally, socially, and temporally situated analysis of communication.29 Such a perspective is foreclosed equally by analyses of public discourses suspended in a cultural vacuum and by analyses of meaning systems suspended in a social vacuum.
The Inescapable Paradox
I have argued that because symbols do not “have” meanings and because so-called symbol systems are not autonomous structures, symbolic interpretations should be treated with caution. Conduit thinking confers illusory plausibility on theories that overestimate the power of society and culture to dictate meaning, underestimate individual variability and agency, and portray symbols as highly coercive collective representations.
To argue against interpretation as the goal of cultural analysis is not to throw cultural analysis out the window, for culture, an intersubjective phenomenon, is part and parcel of human communication. We need, in short, renewed theory-building across the frontier dividing symbols from thoughts and feelings. Our best chance at such theory-building is, I believe, establishment of a dialogue between those who wish to theorize about minds and persons without isolating them from society and history, and those who wish to theorize about macrosocial phenomena without dehumanizing them.30 The project is certainly daunting. It must inevitably confront anthropology’s most enduring and mind-bending paradox: the inescapable fact that, to paraphrase with a twist Geertz’s paraphrase of Weber, we are suspended in webs of meaning that we our-selves keep spinning.
Chapter 2
Missing Persons
The Problem of Missing Persons
History and anthropology continue to edge closer to each other. Culture, the anthropologist’s stock in trade, has become an indispensable component of historians’ accounts. For their part, anthropologists increasingly emphasize cultural change. Attuned to cultural relativism, they have readily made the further leap into historical relativism. One might say that both disciplines are trying to free themselves from ethno-and tempocentrism.
I endorse this effort, but I have reservations about the widespread tendency to elide considerations of biography, consciousness, and personal agency from analyses of meaning. This erasure—the Problem of Missing Persons—afflicts both history and, less forgivably, my own discipline of anthropology. It is associated, I have argued, with the near-dominance achieved by interpretive and post-interpretive (discursive) approaches to the study of meaning. Those approaches explicitly or, more often, implicitly equate public representations with subjectivities.
The interpretation of public representations has become a privileged method of cultural analysis. The appeal of the method, which treats such representations as texts, is evident. For anthropologists, it permits the inference of subjective patterns from concrete, readily observable, highly public material such as cockfights, naming practices, and shadow plays (Geertz 1973c). Moreover, interpretation provides a single method applicable to both past and present. Its utility is, if anything, stronger for historians than for anthropologists. That is, the interpretation of cultures (Geertz 1973c) dovetails nicely with the archaeology of knowledge (Foucault 1976). An archaeology of knowledge promises that from symbolic detritus—surviving documents and artifacts—a historian can read cultural (or discursive) formations, the changing universes of meaning through which the dead have paraded.
But the dead were once alive. My own fieldwork over the past twenty years has convinced me that public representations are hazardous guides to subjectivities, which I think of as, roughly speaking, cognitive and experiential flows. Another way to say this is: An account of meaning that fails to engage living people cannot reliably infer thoughts, feelings, or motivations. At best an interpretive ethnography or history can sketch a representational environment—but people do radically different things with representations, and their meaning-making is partially hidden from view. To glimpse it we need to employ, where possible, techniques other than textual interpretation.
The ethnographic practice known as person-centered ethnography (LeVine 1982; Hollan 1997; Linger 2001b) permits a fieldworker to explore how people go about making sense of the world into which they were cast. Usually conducted through face-to-face interviews, such research reveals that people affirm, transform, negate, manipulate, and go beyond the public representations that are the objects of conventional symbolic analyses. By highlighting the gap between representational environment and meaning-making, person-centered studies point to the significant indeterminacies inherent in any interpretive ethnography or archaeology of knowledge.
This chapter sounds a note of caution about Missing Persons approaches and suggests a partial (though sometimes unavailable) remedy for their limitations. First I outline some recent critiques of standard interpretive methods and describe the person-centered alternative. I next draw on my 1994–96 research in Aichi prefecture, in central Japan, to examine how Oscar Ueda, a Japanese Brazilian migrant to the city of Nagoya, refashions his national and ethnic identities in an unfamiliar social milieu.1 I end the chapter by discussing the implications of Oscar’s self-making for anthropological and historical investigations of meaning.
Spiders, not Flies
Recall Geertz’s depiction of culture as a web of symbols. The metaphor has, as I noted in Chapter 1, suggested to many that people are flies rather than spiders—that they are caught “in culture” (or “in discourse”). The ethnographer’s main task is, accordingly, to trace the sticky web of representations in which the flies are trapped. The unfortunate flies themselves are incidental to the cultural account. The method required is “thick description,” an analysis of symbolic forms based on detailed, intricate interpretation.
Criticism of representational approaches within anthropology has grown to a drumbeat in the past decade or so, though it has antecedents stretching back almost to the beginning of the century (Sapir 1917). From various angles, the critics make a similar point—that public symbols, rituals, narratives, discourses, and performances are, in Roy D’Andrade’s words, “too elliptical” (1984: 105) to serve as reliable guides to meanings.2 In other words, people are active spiders, not passive flies. Their subjectivities cannot be treated as mere imprints of public representations on minds (Strauss 1992; Strauss and Quinn 1997).
Person-centered ethnography aims to catch the spiders at work—or, shedding the bug metaphors, to treat human beings as active meaning-makers in their own right. Because meaning is always somebody’s, the immediate object of person-centered ethnography is what Theodore Schwartz has called idioverses (1978)—ever-changing individual worlds of meaning. Person-centered approaches thereby recover the missing persons, moving human beings to the center of cultural accounts.
In exploring idioverses, I favor flexible interviews over predesigned question-and-answer sessions. Informal, open-ended conversations encourage people to explore their personal networks of thought and feeling. Of course, conversation is no substitute for ESP. Drawing inferences about thoughts and feelings from what people say is a hazardous enterprise, for even “private,” face-to-face talk is, in a restricted sense, public. Narrative conventions and interpersonal considerations certainly shape such talk (Bruner 1988; Hollan 1997). Yet the substance of a particular conversation is not reducible to rules, any more than the substance of an utterance is reducible to syntax. Moreover, because person-centered conversations take place in what is for most informants a novel interpersonal context, they offer rare opportunities for people to speak their minds.
Most everyday conversations are occasions for sociability, verbal sparring, exchanges of opinions, displays of distinction, joking, and so on. So are, at times, person-centered interviews, but the main objective—the co-exploration of an idioverse by anthropologist and informant—is extraordinary. I try to foster an atmosphere in which my conversational partner can be heard by me, hear herself,