91

DIALOGUE AND FICTION IN ETHNOGRAPHY

Steven Webster

My first aim in this essay is to try to close

the gap which still exists between ethnography
and hermeneutics. Anthropologists who have
heard out the occasionally pretentious claims
of hermeneutic philosophers may suggest that
this all seems a needlessly elaborate extrapolation of what ethnographers have always done
in the field. In response to this disciplinary
provincialism, I will try to clarify why an
epistemology of hermeneutics is nevertheless
needed in ethnography now. With the possible
exception of history, no other form of social inquiry has really come to terms with this philosophical tradition. It is doubly ironic that
theoretical natural science, after centuries of
setting a fatally misleading ideal for the understanding of society, may be discovering its
own hermeneutics before the social sciences
do. Sociology, in this hermeneutic "maturation", is far ahead of the other social sciences
but seems to have again been subtly co-opted
by the positivist tradition it seeks to transcend.
Social anthropology, on the other hand, may
be the natural home of this new epistemology.
Here, understanding has always - professionally, so to speak - had to confront its own paradoxes and prejudices, has had always to proceed with a certain irreducible hesitation. Let
me begin by epistemologically interpeting
conventional ethnographic hesitancy, opening
up the way we think about what we do, and
the way we write about what we have done.
Steven Webster is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology
at the University of Auckland, New Zealand
0304-4092/82/0000-0000/$02.75

I hope to trace a continuity between two

situations of classical ethnography and their
recent analogues which poses a dilemma of a
peculiar kind, perhaps an epistemological impasse whose time has come in anthropology.
As Ruby [ 1 ] has pointed out, Malinowski
began his Argonauts... with an invocation
which the much later revelations of his Diary...
imply he himself was unable to live up to:
... every student of the less exact sciences will do his
best to bring home to the reader all the conditions in
which the experiment or the observations are made.
In Ethnography, where a candid account of such data
is perhaps even more necessary, it has unfortunately in
the past not always been supplied with sufficient generosity, and many writers do not ply the searchlight of
methodic sincerity, as they move among their facts but
produce them before us out of complete obscurity [2].

Although refreshing, the ethnographic description of his observations stopped far short
of the candor he seemed to demand. Profound
personal struggles, disaffection and cynicism
about his hosts, guilty self-indulgence on the
margins of European society, are only a few
of the implications. The diary was meant to
keep his personal reflections separate from
his ethnography, and privately to discipline
himself to objectivity (cf. Firth's introduction),
yet how can this aim be reconciled with his
demand for sincerity and an accounting of the
genesis of objective facts? Yet an integration
of such intimate reflections into ethnographic
work would still seem irrelevant to us as well
as to him. Contemporary ethnography can

9 1982 Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company

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countenance neither the view that these are
a part of the field "experiment" which
Malinowski recommended on the model of
the natural sciences, nor the naive positivist
assumption that they are simply inconsequential. This is the dilemma we have inherited
(most directly) from Malinowski.
Geertz fixes on the irony of Malinowski's
diary to expose the futility of the romantic empathic ideal of ethnography [3]. But he neglects to pursue in this context another sort of
irony he himself had defined in 1968: despite
the bitterness and disappointment of one
case he recounts,
Such an end to anthropologist-informant relationships is
hardly typical: usually the sense of being members, however temporarily, insecurely and incompletely, of a single
moral community can be maintained even in the face of
the wider social realities which press in at almost every
moment to deny it. It is this fiction - fiction not falsehood - that lies at the heart of successful anthropological
field research; and, because it is never completely convincing for any of the participants, it renders such research,
considered as a form of conduct, continuously ironic. To
recognize the moral tension, the ethical ambiguity, implicit in the encounter of anthropologist and informant,
and to still be able to dissipate it through one's actions
and one's attitudes, is what encounter demands of both
parties ff it is to be authentic, ff it is actually to happen.
And to discover that is to discover also something very
complicated and not altogether clear about the nature of
sincerity and insincerity, genuineness and hypocrisy,
honesty and self-deception [4].

In his earlier insight Geertz had focused upon

what he called the anthropological irony, a
peculiar species of good faith between ethnographer and informant which verged on bad
faith, and thereby constituted, strangely
enough, what he suggested was the basis of
authenticity in ethnography. Geertz reasoned
that there was always some form of reciprocal
pretence between anthropologist and host reflecting their situational agreement to welcome one another into their respective cultures regardless of the few realistic grounds for
such participation. At least in the new states,
this reciprocity of "touching faith" takes the
form of an honorary cultural membership for

the anthropologist and a sanguine hope of

Western advantages to be gained by his hosts,
objective, deterrent conditions aside. The
impossibility of such unspoken promises is
both the tragedy of cultural differencedomination and the ground of its understanding. Malinowski's recurrent disaffection from
his hosts and longing to be elsewhere suggests
another form of the same inevitable anthropological irony. The authenticity of his ethnography was sufficient unto the times, but
Geertz's halting intuition regarding his own
fieldwork some 45 years later suggests that
authentic ethnography can no longer in good
positivist faith efface the diary from the account.
Perhaps not unlike Malinowski in his ethnographic amnesia, Geertz [5] spared us further
discomfort and changed the subject from the
epistemology of a profound, if uniquely distrusting, intimacy between ethnographer and
informant, to the epistemology of how the
ethnographer understands. An epistemological
context which mystifies the native and overlooks the ethnographer himself seems to supplant the earlier insight where both were all
too transparent to one another, and authenticity somehow unproblematic. As the article
reveals, Geertz, like Malinowski, had slipped
back into a false consciousness of how one
does ethnographic research. On the other
hand, while Malinowski had invoked the reification of "functionalism" to assure the objectivity for which he strove, Geertz does attempt to recover a sense of the arbitrary
variety of interpretive analogues which constitute ethnographic reality, thereby foreclosing
on any such simple objectifcation. Nevertheless, these analogues are now comfortably
"experience-distant" from himself and his
own presumably still "experience-near" concourse with his hosts. In this excavation of
ethnographic epistemology he reveals the interpretive strata of our understanding, but stops
short of the ground of authenticity he had
exposed several years earlier. He has not, so

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far as I know, dug so deeply again.
Only a few years earlier, Kenneth Read had
made mirror-sharp the situations which Geertz
briefly reflects upon in less universal terms [6].
Makis and the Gahuku Gama were his hosts,
striving both for a share of Read's culture and
humane acceptance of his hesitant intrusion,
while Read struggled with the futility of himself being a Gahuku Gama, the pathos of a
future which he could see more clearly than
they, and the distractions of a private world of
nature and humanity whose graces seemed too
delicate to share except in the pages of his book.
The counterpoint is also between Malinowski
and Read, both of whom felt their radically
different forms of alienation and reverie must
be kept apart from their ethnographies. But
Geertz did suggest an epistemological basis
from which the continuity of all three ethnographic introspections becomes apparent, and
perhaps no longer legitimately segregated from
the ethnography to which it gives rise.
Another ethnographic and epistemological
situation which I will interpret as convergent
with the ironies of Malinowski and Geertz is
Evans-Pritchard's ambivalent attitude toward
Zande witchcraft, oracles, and magic [7].
Geertz's 1968 introspection broached the
relationship of ethnography and fiction, so I
will exploit the fortuitous appearance of the
same word in Evans-Pritchard's ethnography:
"There is an established fiction that the
Avongara [the Zande nobility] are not
witches..." [8]. The enduring brilliance of this
ethnography is his demonstration that witches,
oracles, and magic do exist just as the Azande
think they do, while never for very long allowing us to lose sight of the fact that they don't
really exist at all, or (to put it in terms of the
Azande's own response) at least they don't
exist in England. Writing when ethnography
still often had to convince its readers that
other cultures were human, Evans-Pritchard
walked a fine line between conscientious understanding of the way Azande themselves saw
these phenomena and a frank incredulity -

apparently not hidden from the Azande themselves - that the whole thing could be taken
so seriously. I am fascinated by a professionalism which seems to have left no stone unturned, an ethnographic candor which reveals
sufficient respect for his hosts to confront
them without patronising indulgence, and
sufficient respect for his readers to bare his
own innermost epistemological prejudices and
ambivalences. Writing fully in the same positivist preconception as Malinowski, he nevertheless achieved the sincerity of which
Malinowski was incapable because he could
not fully efface his diary from his ethnography.
The innocently paradoxical comment about
the Zande "fiction" which I quoted above
leapt out at me from Evans-Pritchard's pages
as the quintessence of the epistemological
dilemma his candor had left bare: due to a
certain fiction the nobility are not witches,
but due to a radically different sort of fiction
many other Azande are witches (in daily,
ordinary, and taken-for-granted fact).., and
due to yet again a radically different sort of
fiction Evans-Pritchard was unable to convince himself, except for certain "lapses" in
his everyday practical experience of Zande
life and language, of the truth of Zande fiction.
Toward the end of this essay I will suggest that
the fictions by which we constitute ethnography are not essentially different from
those by which the subject constitutes his
world; analysis of the two processes is necessarily integral.
The subsequent ethnographic tradition of
explaining witches seems to have circumvented
Evans-Pritchard's problem by means comparable
to what Malinowski, and later Geertz, adopted
to abstract themselves from the way things
had been in the field. Rather than struggle
with the shifting distinction between the truth
and fiction of witches in an intercultural
epistemology, most of us have managed to create the unintended illusion that this central
issue becomes irrelevant when witches can be
viewed as projections of anxieties, indicators of

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social strains, or symbolic expressions of evil.
While ethnographers, and social anthropologists
in general, continued to explain witchcraft as
though Evans-Pritchard (influenced by LevyBruhl and Pareto) had unequivocally vanquished
the witches themselves, philosophers of social
science have taken the issue up where EvansPritchard left it.
Perhaps because ethnography since then has
been little help in this regard, the philosophers
continue to veer, much like Evans-Pritchard
did himself, between enchahtment and denial.
Winch [9] concludes that Zande witches
"exist" in whatever terms the Azande themselves use, and that if we wish to understand
them we can only accede to their terms of
reference; Gellner [ 10] no more thoughtfully than Evans-Pritchard in his dogmatic moments, scoffs at the whole absurd illusion, including Winch's. Lukes [ 11 ] wants to have it
both ways by urging both relativistic and universalistic criteria of rationality, but the Zande
nevertheless fail on the latter grounds. Jarvie
[ 12] and Giddens [ 13] accept forms of relativistic understanding like Winch's but avoid
the solipsistic implications of Winch's argument by pointing out that different cultures
are either historically or logically mediated by
common meanings. Jarvie implies that differences in cultural conception of reality get
worked out historically in a survival of the
fittest (and truest) mode. Giddens lucidly suggests, on the other hand, that different cultural
realities are "frames of meaning" which are
already in the process of mediation (insofar as
they are aware of each other). He refrains from
drawing conclusions about whether in particular cases this mediation reflects the triumph
of rationality or, for instance, coercion or
delusion. This hermeneutic form of relativism,
in which the historical situation is the one sufficient absolute, certainly helps us understand
why both the Azande and Evans-Pritchard
were fight about witches, and that while
British indirect rule was making progress in
overcoming the Zande preconception, Zande

rationalism was making progress in overcoming

Evans-Pritchard's assumptions.
We can further understand the relativity of
truth and fiction in this instance by comparing
it with the more recent but equally significant
ethnographic dilemma posed by Castaneda's
account of don Juan, the Yaqui bru]o or
shaman. This comparison reveals the ironic
disparity between the relationship of EvansPritchard and Castaneda to their respective
audiences almost two generations apart.
Evans-Pritchard had sought to convince a
sceptical readership of the practical rationality
of the Azande beliefs (while convincing himself that their beliefs were nevertheless a fiction); Castaneda sought to convince an enthusiastic counter-culture devoted to perceiving "other realities" of the practical irrationality of his experiences with don Juan (while
convincing himself that these experiences
were nevertheless true). Some anthropologists
appreciated his epistemological effort, while
others pursued the issue of ethnographic
veracity with a seriousness that perhaps better
than any other circumstance reveals to us the
ephemeral nature of ethnographic commitment. The ironic reversal between Witchcraft,
Oracles... and its sequel forty years later not
only demonstrates the shifting relationship
between the ethnographer, his subject, and his
audience: the tension between the former as
palpably true ethnography and don Juan as
convincing fiction also places the tenuous distinction inescapably before us.
I have traced a continuity between a perspective implicit in Malinowski's ethnography (and
in Geertz's and Read's), and again between
Evans-Pritchard's ethnography and Castaneda's,
suggesting that these continuities converge as
exemplars of an epistemological dilemma for
contemporary social anthropology. I have also
suggested that anthropologists have avoided
confronting this recurrent dilemma, Malinowski
and Evans-Pfitchard in their particular ways and Geertz, Read, and Castaneda (or his detractors) in their's. Now I must make the im-

95
plicit accusation clearer, and marshall behind
it more than a few tenuous ethnographic reinterpretations.
To recapitulate: Malinowski experienced a
profound alienation in the midst of his hosts
that often betrays disdain for them, erotic
distractions, and doubts about himself that
would not be unfamiliar to most ethnographers.
He set many high standards for full field reporting, yet apparently assumed that the conditions of research were separable from his
scientific purpose. Geertz suggests that at least
in research in the communities of the new
states a tenuous trust must be built upon impossible ideals of reciprocal cultural mobility,
and concluded that this irony is nevertheless
integral to anthropological understanding.
Read's own lyrically ethnographic diary,
published as a supplement which ironically
may itself only be supplemented by his
conventional ethnography, suggests a mediation which extends to all ethnography. Although Malinowski and Read may be obverse
sides of a personal predicament, I think they
also represent obverse sides of Geertz's epistemological predicament. Geertz's ambiguously
sincere reciprocation of "touching faith"
between ethnographer and hosts is implicit
in both Malinowski's and Read's accounts,
as is their disaffection from their hosts implicit
in Geertz's regression from a more penetrating
epistemology. Although the gap between cultures may be theoretically bridgable, few field
researchers would presume to have overcome
it, and most would have to admit to an impenetrable alienation between themselves and
their hosts, balanced more or less by the accomplishment of some degree of understanding.
I don't think my own efforts with recalcitrant
and suspicious Quechua has coloured my conclusions, because my personal experience among
Maori has been utterly to the contrary yet cannot rise beyond a similar sense of estranged intimacy. Whether this residual sense of mutual
alienation arises from a wider context of political, economic, or ideological domination by

the anthropologist's culture, or a narrower

cultural context of such domination of the
anthropologist by his hosts, it seems likely
that the transcendance of such disparity is necessarily a fiction.
The convergence between this peculiarly irreducible epistemological difficulty and that
which I have outlined through Evans-Pritchard
and Castaneda further extends Geertz's notion
of anthropological irony. Evans-Pritchard experienced a profound ambivalence between
the practical and discursive rationality of
Zande beliefs and his own conviction that they
constituted no more than an elaborately rationalized fiction, however real to the Azande.
The cultural basis of his own conviction may
not have been so clear to Evans-Pritchard who,
after all, confronted a professional audience
no less dubious of primitive rationality than
the population at large. Castaneda's converse
labour decades later, to convince an enthusiastically credulous readership of the practical impossibility of believing in a sorcerer's world
for very long, however palpably true it might
be, puts this dilemma in fuller perspective.
However convinced Castaneda and his audience
may be of the truth of don Juan's world, its
fiction is apparent insofar as they must come
back to the straight world of California; however convinced Evans-Pritchard and his
audience may remain of the fiction in the
Azande's world, its truth is apparent insofar
as they remain there, insistently reabsorbed
in Zande common sense. This version of the
anthropological irony seems to adumbrate a
more radical ontological polarity between anthropologist and hosts which underlies the
merely ethical tensions revealed by Malinowski,
Read, and Geertz. However, both forms of
polarity are existential in the sense that they
necessarily constitute the fieldwork experience,
not merely regulate its boundaries. That is to
say, the experience of such existential gaps is
itself the ground of the anthropological understanding which is indubitably accomplished,
and jointly built upon, by strangers living to-

96
gerber. The gap is the foundation of understanding, not its subversion. As Geertz dimly
saw in 1968, the ethnography which is to reflect this accomplishment must in some sense
both perpetrate a fiction and claim truth.
This peculiarly productive epistemological
dilemma must not be confused with those
generic to the positivist tradition of social
science. Such spurious dilemmas arise from the
illusory assumption that the understanding
subject and the object understood are primordial realities each condemned to ineffable subjectivity in an objective world which stands
apart. Descartes' cogito ergo sum gave rise to
a positivism which split the unity of concrete
experience into subjectivity (cogito, or the
isolated consciousness) and objectivity (res,
or substance), two polar forms of alienation
which appeared to leave no option between
an arrant subjectivism and a scientistic objectivism. The epistemological perspective I am
urging, here deduced from ethnographic impasses, instead suggests that both subjectifications and objectifications are extrapolations
from the ground of mutual understanding
upon which any encounter necessarily begins
insofar as human beings recognize one another as such. This accomplishment, however
ephemeral its inception, is necessarily the
primordial reality and unequivocal basis of
an authentic understanding, which is neither
a subjectified understanding on the one hand
nor an objectified understood on the other.
This latter subjective-objective split is the
mystification which now misleads us, obscuring the middle ground from which understanding dialectically arises.
But, the polarity of subject and object is
now very real, as derived from Descartes and
now assumed in the standard Western European
worldview. Understanding must be a dialectic,
that is to say, a dialogue between subject and
object. Although the dilemma may only be
historical rather than ontological, it is no less
inescapable. Interpretation of this spontaneous
dialectic of understanding can only waiver be-

tween "truth" which reflects the alienation of

subject and object and "fiction" which regains
their existential mediation. This is, in most
general terms, the dilemma which Geertz called
the anthropological irony. I hope to clarify
the philosophical bases and implications of
this epistemological problem, and head off
some of the ways it may be subverted by the
positivist perspective which takes subjectivity
and objectivity as given.
Geertz, again as though his explicit epistemological enquiry in 1974 were a regression
from the clarity of his merely moral enquiry
of 1968, in the later essay raised the misleading issue of the inaccessibility of the "native's
point of view". With Malinowski's disaffection
as a demonstration, he suggests that an anthropologist's understanding is instead derived
from the native's own "experience-near concepts", mediated by "experience-distant concepts" which the anthropologist brings to bear
on the problem from whatever sources are intuitively comparable, including ideas from
other cultures as well as his own. I do not take
issue with Geertz's hermeneutic method here,
but rather with its truncation. Although he
suspects that no clear line can be drawn between the native's innermost point of view
and his experience-near concepts, Geertz nevertheless leaves the impression that the former
would be the ideal basis of knowledge were it
not in principle as inaccessible as the romantic
ideal of empathy is futile in anthropological
understanding. The frustrated understanding
can only hope to approximate this ideal knowledge "without recourse to pretensions of
more-than-normal capacities for ego-effacement and fellow-feeling..."; furthermore,
"... whatever accurate or half-accurate sense
one gets of what one's informants are really
like comes not from the experience of that acceptance as such, which is part of one's own
biography, not of theirs, but from the ability
to construe their modes of expression..." [ 14].
In 1968 Geertz had concluded that a certain
"moral tension" or "ethical ambiguity" be-

97
tween anthropologist and his informants "lies
at the heart of successful anthropological research"; its recognition and dissipation "is
what encounter demands of both parties if it
is to be authentic" [ 15]. But in 1974 he has
reverted to ego-effacement on the one hand,
and an approximation to fellow-feeling on the
other; he has abstracted his biography from
theirs, and furthermore mystified the native's
biography by extrapolating an ephemeral subjectivity that obscures the authenticity once
transparent in dialogue and compromise.
Similarly, Geertz's own "experience-near concepts", ethical and epistemological, disappear
in this explicit methodology of understanding.
The native's point of view is objectified at one
alienated end of a truncated symmetry between its own experience-near concepts and
Geertz's experience-distant analogues, the
native speaking now into a void from which
Geertz has absented himself. A more recent
version of Geertz's view of hermeneutics still
reflects a similarly one-dimensional account
of anthropological understanding [ 16].
It seems to me that the ineffability of the
native's "innermost" point of view is a
chimera created by this reciprocal alienation
from the practical dialogue in which understanding necessarily arises. The dialectic between subject and object has implicitly been
transformed by abstraction into two alienated
subjectivities, one of which is unapproachable
and the the other of which is gone entirely.
This background of subjectification implicitly
invokes an objectified foreground which
Geertz presents as a methodology, itself abstracted from any particular situation. The
dialectic of understanding is saved from Descartes' fateful dichotomization of knowledge
only by Geertz's proposal of an unrestrainedly
arbitrary and pancultural assortment of "experience-distant concepts". Although these
too are presented abstractly, they nevertheless
restore authenticity by suggesting a dialogue
between Geertz and some others, somewhere.
This is one way that the dialogue in which

understanding necessarily arises can be retained

in its subsequent ethnography, that is, if a reification of subject and object do not obscure its
dialectic.
II
Having rejected Dilthey's futile ideal of empathy, Geertz accepts from him the model of
hermeneutic understanding as tacking between
part and whole or particular and general [17].
Dilthey had distinguished social science from
natural sicence methodology, emphasizing
that the former, by virtue of itself being social,
has direct access to its subject matter, whereas
the latter can only impute meaning indirectly
to its subject matter. He also emphasized the
dialectical or reflexive nature of interpretation
which achieves understanding of its object by
relating it as partial meaning within a whole
context of meaning [ 18]. But as Gadamer has
argued [ 19], Dilthey's inconsistency was to
abstract the hermeneutic circle from the historical and existential context of the interpreter,
just as Geertz has done in re-segregating his
own from the native's biography. Beguiled by
the positivist ideal of natural scientific knowledge, Dilthey elevated empathy to intuitive
certitude by transcending the historical context of the interpreter and objectifying what
is interpreted; similarly, Geertz pursues the
objectivist chimera by abstracting not only
from any recognition of his own point of view,
but also: from any immediate understanding of
the native's point of view. This leaves us with
what Gadamer calls, in criticism of Dilthey,
a "purely formal methodology" unanchored
in real life confrontation between subject
and object, despite the phenomenological
ideal of Dilthey's Lebensphilosophie. Gadamer
further suggests that it is just this abstract concept of understanding, derived from Enlightenment Cartesianism and its positivist apotheosis
in Comte and Mill, which rendered Dilthey's
method vulnerable to idealism and relativism
[20]. Ironically, then, with both the inter-

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preter's and the native's points of view gone
from Geertz's hermeneutic circle, in a still
more rigourous approximation to objectivist
knowledge it too is liable to inherit the wind,
the very subjectivism it abjures. Gadamer,
following Heidegger's reincorporation of the
interpreter into the hermeneutic circle of
historical understanding, argues that the
truth of understanding is neither objective
nor subjective, but arises in an intersubjective
dialogue between two different points of
view:
True historical thinking must take account o f its own
historicality. Only then will it not chase the phantom
of an historical object which is the object o f progressive
research, but learn to see in the object the counterpart
of itself and hence understand both. The true historical
object is not an object at all, but the unity o f the one
and the other, a relationship in which exist both the
reality o f history and the reality o f historical understanding 121].

Elsewhere he characterises this "counterpart"

or dialectic of understanding as "affinity",
a concept drawn from Heidegger:
Every " n e w " position o f understanding which replaces
another continues to need the " f o r m e r " because it cannot itself be explained so long as it knows neither in what
nor by what it is opposed... We see that there are dialectical
relations between.., on the one hand, the prejudice
organically a part of my particular system o f convictions
or opinions, that is the implicit prejudice, and on the
other hand, a new element which denounces it, that is,
a foreign element which provokes my system or one of
its elements [22].

This is "true conversation" or dialogue. However, for understanding to abstract itself from
its own historical context, in the pretense of
objective understanding, instead fails to put
its own implicit prejudices at risk, and subverts
in this evasive or patronising indulgence the
truth claim of that which it seeks to understand [ 23 ]. Consequently, all knowledge is
necessarily "an effective unity which can only
be analyzed as a network of reciprocal actions"
[241.
What appears, from the perspective of
positivism, to be a potential conservative or

ethnocentric bias retained in the subjectivity

of the interpreter, is from the perspective of
hermeneutics a necessary participation in the
reformulation of knowledge on its only objective basis, intersubjective dialogue. Only
in this latter way can we discriminate "the
really critical question of hermeneutics,
namely of distinguishing the true prejudices,
by which we understand, from the false ones
by which we misunderstand" [ 251. Gadamer
dismisses the imputation to his approach of
uncritical acceptance of tradition and sociopolitical conservatism, pointing out that the
bourgeois historical consciousness ,which
through relativisation of the old embraces
everything new, also courts the hegemony
of the old through the relativisation of the
new [261. The roots of Gadamer's dialectic
in Plato are clear: Socrates fought the nihilistic
and hence potentially demagogic scepticism
of the Sophists with the new art of philosophy,
whereby a perpetual dialectic of theses and
countertheses can only adumbrate an ephemeral truth ("what something is") but never
loses sight of it. Although he represented tradition against the new ideas of the day, the
dialectical method borne of this "affinity"
between philosophy and "its shadow, sophism"
insured that "mere talk, nothing but talk, can,
however untrustworthy it may be, still bring
out understanding between human beings which is to say that it can still make human
beings h u m a n " [ 27].
This comment about "nothing but talk"
brings me to a final consideration regarding
Gadamer's philosophy of hermeneutics which
I hope will head off, or rather, co-opt, a
Marxian critique. Gadamer has been charged
by his critical theorist colleague Habermas
with proposing a hermeneutics which by remaining merely linguistic is impotent to
penetrate the false consciousness which obscures the contradictions of capitalist society
[28]. But I consider Gadamer's rejection of
the "purely formal methodology" of Diltheyian
hermeneutics and its implicit idealism an ade-

99
quate guard against this impotence.
Rather than the "artifice of hyperbolic
doubt" idealized in the scientific method
since Descartes, Gadamer insists that (unlike
Dilthey) we must remain consistent with
Dilthey's philosophy of practical life:
Always and everywhere, life leads to reflection on that
which confronts it, reflection leads to doubt, and life can
only resist doubt in the pursuit o f valid knowledge [29].

"There is a decisive difference between the certitude grasped in the heart of life and scientific
certitude," and a decisive difference between
methodic doubt and the sort of doubt which assails us,
so to say, without reason, without purpose, spontaneously [30].
... in the end all understandings are reducible to a common level o f a 'I know h o w to go about it', that is, a selfunderstanding in relation to something else [31].

I interpret this emphasis on praetice in Gadamer's

dialectic as no less "materialistic" than Marx's
own assertion of the inextricability of thought
and practice. Indeed, Gadamer's critique of
Dilthey here reads like Marx's own critique of
the later Hegelian idealism, and like Marx's
critique it pursues the dialectic of labour and
alienation which Hegel himself originated. Like
Marx on Hegel, A d o m o criticized Heidegger's
hermeneutic existentialsm for transcending
the irreducible dialectic of subject and object
in a subjectivism of Being which pretends to
be immune to the determination of objective
history [32]. Although Gadamer credits
Heidegger for the central insights of his new
hermeneutics, I think he has nevertheless
distanced himself from the idealism implicit
in the latter's scheme, liable to stultify the
dialectic inherent in practical understanding.
As Habermas charges, Gadamer's confidence
in the "spontaneous" doubt of ordinary reflective life and "the certitude grasped in the
heart of life" appears to be naively liable to
the false consciousness of systematically distorted communication. On the other hand,

this apparent naivety may be viewed as a reassertion of the irrespressible critical capacity
of the common man in practice, regardless
of the subversions of mass culture and total
administration, an adherence to the original
spirit of Marxism until recently neglected in
the pessimism of critical theory [33]. This
optimism does not evade the problem; on the
contrary, in the concept of "true prejudice"
it identifies the problem without abstracting
from its inherent dialectic.
Now the epistemological dilemma I have
characterised through the ethnographic reflections of Malinowski, Geertz, Read, EvansPritchard, and Castaneda is cultural; what
bearing does Gadamer's concern with the interpretation of history have on this? Gadamer
argues that the "temporal distance" between
the interpreter and his problematic object,
often an historical text, constitutes rather
than deters true understanding:
... temporal distance is not something that must be overcome. This was, rather, the naive assumption o f historicism, namely that we must set ourselves within the spirit
o f the age, and think with its ideas and its thoughts, not
with our own, and hence advance toward historical objectivity. In fact the important thing is to recognize the
distance in time as a positive and productive poss~ility
o f understanding. It is not a yawning abyss, but is filled
with the continuity o f custom and tradition... [34].

How far can this intra-cultural and temporal

problem be extended to the inter-cultural
and synchronic problems of social anthropology? Gadamer himself shifts easily between
the problematic interpretation of historical text,
personal letter, another person, and a generic
"other", and does not hesitate to assert the
universality of hermeneutics on the basis of
communicative process and the model of the
dialogue [35 ]. Sufficient "temporal distance"
is required to separate the observer from subjective or unreflexive involvement in the object of interpretation, but mere dialogue may
satisfy this minimum requirement.

100
What a thing has to say, its intrinsic content, first appears
only after it is divorced from the fleeting circumstances
of its actuality [36].

Ricoeur has more explictly taken hermeneutics from the traditional concern with
problematic written texts well into the sociological camp with a consideration of correspondingly "fixed" meaningful action [37].
More recently, he has extended this perspective
into discourse and dialogue insofar as "the
smallest gap.., inserts itself between saying
and what is said" [38]. He suggests that the
applicability of hermeneutics to action and
to history itself, as well as to texts, rests in
their common narrative or "story" structure,
a new point of departure which I will take up
in the last section of this paper. Also like
Gadamer, Ricoeur emphasises the bilateral
character of understanding: whereas for
Gadamer the knower and the known reconstitute one another in an "affinity", for Ricoeur
the knower must both "appropriate" his object and himself be opened by its "disclosure"
of the world [39], and thus experience both
a "belonging" to its meaning and a "distanciation" which objectifies it [40].
Devereux, apparently independently, argues
for the epistemological "complementarity" of
the ethnographer and his ethnographic subjects
[41 ]. His approach is psychoanalytic, but his
conclusions are suggestively parallel with contemporary hermeneutics, and likewise extended
generally to the social sciences. His discussions,
derived from reflections throughout his long
career of ethnographic fieldwork, focus on an
interdependant relationship of transference
and countertransference between ethnographer
and his hosts. While his subjects impose upon
him role expectations arising from the specific
social and cultural situation and their general
anxieties, the ethnographer unconsciously
countertransfers reciprocal preconceptions of
similar origin. Most generally, this process
masquerades in social science as a methodology
of objectivity, effacing ethnographer and ob-

jectifying his subjects, merely repressing the

spontaneous understanding of the interaction
itself. Devereux argues that awareness of what
is methodologically repressed is the authentic
basis of objectivity, a bridge rather than a bartier to it. Whether or not one accepts the
psychoanalytic perspective, Devereux's notion
of the "complementarity" of ethnographic understanding clearly converges with the notion of
dialogue I have developed here, and especially
with Gadamer's conclusion that interpretation
must "learn to see in the object the counterpart of itself and hence understand both"
[42]. George Marcus has recently suggested
an enrichment of Tongan ethnography through
appreciation of Tongans' adaptation to the
preconceptions and expectations of the ethnographer, on whom they have compiled, so to
speak, their own ethnography [43]. Tongan
ethnography, as a dialogue, must change in
just the same sense that Tonga itself changes.
Finally, inviting the extension of hermeneutics fully into the problem of cross-cultural
understanding, Giddens addresses EvansPritchard's problem of Zande witches [44].
He asserts, as I have argued above, an epistemological congruence between historical
distance and cultural difference [45]. He suggests that cultural realities as disparate as those
of Zande witches and English scepticism about
them are nevertheless already mediated as
"frames of meaning" integral to practical situations [46]. Although these confrontations
may have a superficial resemblance to mutual
contradiction or incommensurability, inviting
either scientific arrogance or solipsistic relativism, these are illusory abstractions from the
bedrock of specific practical situations, such as
resolving a particular witchcraft accusation
with the poison oracle or implementing in a
particular Zande province Indirect rule which
tolerates no such thing. From the point of
view of actual practice, such situations are
worked out and understandable in the same
sense that metaphors, irony, or other apparently self-contradictory statements are meaning-

101
ful in concrete context rather than nonesensical
on some spurious logical grounds. These
"miniature" semantic situations apply "macroscopically" to "the understanding of alien belief systems" [47]. Giddens' approach to
understanding not only emphasises its dialogical nature but also, like Gadamer's emphasis
on practical rather than abstract points of
view, reminds us of the objective context of
social action and power inequality in which
meaning typically occurs.
I think this synoptic review of contemporary
hermeneutic theory suggests a problematic
epistemological continuity between "temporal
distance" as constitutive of historical understanding, and "cultural distance" as constitutive of anthropological understanding. If
Giddens' insight is right, these forms of social
scientific understanding are homologous to
certain semantic processes in their practical
use. I would further suggest that anthropological understanding is prototypic, because its
social basis is insistent and immediate and
least liable to an unreflexive assumption of
understanding. Whether or not these claims
are accepted, it is at least dear that the model
of the dialogue is necessarily the common
denominator of social scientific understanding.
Consistency with this epistemological basis requires that both anthropological self-awareness
and ethnographic account reflect the dialectic
by which this understanding is constituted.
At least in the case of anthropological understanding, raising the concept of "cultural distance" to the level of a basic epistemological
principle appears especially paradoxical. The
hermeneutic insistence on the reintegration of
the interpreter in the object of knowledge appears to collide with cultural relativism and
invite or legitimize ethnocentrism, the obverse
apodictics of twentieth century anthropological theory. However, I think this apparent
contradiction can be resolved in just the same
way as Gadamer has defended himself against
the charge of traditionalism or conservatism.
This reconsideration of basic tenets of the

discipline has the added advantage of integrating them in the reflexive critique which motivates the new approach. Gadamer's relativisation of historical understanding is intended as
a sword which cuts both ways: by reaffirming
the logically necessary priority of the interpreter's historicity in an apprehension of
truth, he also gives us the ground always to
suspect its motives, to discriminate, as he says,
its false from its true prejudices. The latter, in
turn, can only be provisionally tolerated as
implicit or invisible, subject to subsequent
controversion by openness to the truth claim
of another point of view. While the conviction
of "true prejudice" is the only basis upon
which understanding can be built, the movement of understanding in the changing circumstances of history also convicts true prejudice
of falsehood or illusion. This dialectical approach to understanding puts the anthropological apodictics on less dogmatic grounds: if
cultural relativism is treated objectivistically
its logical conclusion is just another form of
ethnocentrism; this happens in much the same
way that Dilthey's romanticist hermeneutics
forgets itself in an apotheosis of empathy as
positivist history. On the other hand, ethnocentrism must underlie the profession of social
anthropology insofar as we can only translate
one culture into another. To put it another
way, escape from ethnocentrism is our business, but a definitive escape puts us out of
business altogether. Meanwhile, ethnocentrism,
like true prejudice, is the only basis upon
which we understand at all, and, when unavoidable, discriminate good from bad cultural practices (our own or others!). Similar to Gadamer's
fragile "true prejudice", Ricoeur suggests that
the dialectic of understanding seeks a "second
naivete" once criticism has purged the first
[48]. These paradoxes do not expose anthropology as a charade any more than Gadamer's
hermeneutics is a reactionary subterfuge; they
only reassert the inescapably historical and
dialectical nature of understanding, and rediscover certitude as a dialogue. From this perspec-

102
tive, positivist objectivism or scientism becomes
the ultimate ethnocentrism, at least in the present conjuncture of our historical self-understanding.
III

I have extended "the anthropological irony"

from Geertz himself to several other examples
of ethnography in e x t r e m i s , arguing with
Gadamer that this apparent difficulty is really
the vindication of ethnographic truth. Geertz
also sensed this at one time, furthermore pointing out how uncomfortably close this irony
is to hypocrisy, bad faith, self-deception, falseconsciousness. I think these are the other side
of the coin of understanding, namely, misunderstanding of varying degrees of culpability,
and not separable from its dialectic except
through a positivist sleight-of-hand. Karl
Popper, in his maturity, similarly suggests that
all forms of distinctively human knowledge
arose originally in lies or "story-telling" [49].
Now, embedded in the long history of knowledge, we are in no better position than we
ever were to discriminate between the story
which is built truthfully on the epistemological
foundation of anthropological irony from that
which is falsehood or false-consciousness. This
discrimination must be made, but cannot be
made in abstraction from particular instances
of interpretation. In any case, if the positivist
vision of an undialectical truth is now revealed
as chimerical, we can no longer draw the line
between truth and fiction so simplistically.
Geertz's comments on the anthropological
irony also broach the issue of fiction, and give
me the opportunity to take it up where he has
left off. For Geertz in 1968 the "touching
faith" between anthropologist and informant
suggests a "... fiction - fiction not falsehood that lies at the heart of successful anthropological field research" [50]. A few years later he
goes further, extending this perception of
understanding to ethnography itself, and drawing comparisons with Madame Bovary and

painting, making the point that all are necessarily multi-layered interpretations which cannot easily be discriminated from their referential reality [ 51 ]. He nevertheless asserts a distinction between this f i c t i o - "something
made" - and falsehood or unfactuality, and
suggests that the intention to depict reality,
and other conditions of this depiction, serve
to distinguish it more or less from the fiction
of a novel. Although not really "verifiable",
the fictions of ethnography are "appraisable,
not merely aesthetically, but as better or
worse than other accounts; and although coherence or thickness of description is a criterion of such appraisal, correspondence to
action and events is indispensible:
If anthropological interpretation is constructing a reading
of what happens, then to divorce it from what happens
- from what, in this time or that place, specific people
say, what they do, what is done to them, from the whole
vast business of the world - is to divorce it from its applications and render it vacant [52].

This is one of the crucial points at which

Geertz opts at the last minute for a vestigial
positivism that threatens to reincorporate and
paralyze his hermeneutics. There is no doubt
that the basic difference between ethnography
and fiction is that the former intends, and is
taken to intend, truth. Realistic fiction, on the
other hand, encourages a suspension of doubt,
or signals its status in some even more subtle
way. But this distinction, far from being obvious, instead seems to be the focus of the
thickest description of all, a broad semantic
no-man's land. "Correspondence" or pure
factual reference to "what happens..." is certainly a necessary illusion for ethnography to
maintain, but at the same time it must not invite us to hypostatize the facts and lose sight
of the irreducible ambiguity of circumstance
Geertz is elsewhere at pains to make clear.
Such covert factualisation of the world is, in
social science, the correlative of the magical
abstraction of the scientist from the understanding presented. The tricks through which

103
ethnography claims truth are no less complex
than those through which the novel claims
fiction. Now, this difference must be examined rather than taken for granted.
If we are to take up, perhaps more seriously
than Geertz does himself, his suggestion that
both ethnographic fieldwork and ethnography
are sorts of fiction, where shall we go? My
own direction was initially dictated, I should
confess, by a spurious hope to marry ethnography and the art of the novel. But this vanity
was already being met halfway by forms of
literary criticism which concern themselves
with the relation between fiction, realism, and
reality. This particular form of hermeneutics
has come to be called narrative theory; I will
survey the positions of some of its contributors,
following these particular implications of the
general rapproachment of hermeneutics and
ethnography. My own conclusion, which I
should at this point forecast, is that narrative
theory can make clearer to us the dialogue implicit in both fieldwork and ethnography, and
help overcome the dogma which obscures the
dialectic of fiction and truth inherent in both.
Soon after Geertz extended Ricoeur's model
of textual interpretation to the Balinese cockfight [53], Ricoeur extended it even more
generally to social action and historiography
[54]. Ricoeur drew attention to narrative as the
c o m m o n epistemological basis of the text,
social action, and history. Whereas action
"fixes" discourse in a way comparable to the
text, history "fixes" action and itself becomes
a text. All are "stories" in the sense of narrative, whether truth or fiction, whose meaning
has become free from the original conditions
of their production and remains open to new
social contexts and an indefinite series of possible "readers" [ 55 ]. Through this hermeneutic
emphasis on the historical relativity of meaning
in diverse aspects of social reality, Ricoeur also
suggests a dialectical reunification of natural
science explanation and social scientific understanding in a form of interpretation which remains open to history. From this perspective,

historiography, like any text and like social

action itself, is:
the operation by which the narrator tells a story and his
listener hears it [561 ... a reciprocal relation between recounting and following a history which defines a completely primitive language game...; to follow a history is
a completely specific activity by which we continuously
anticipate a final course and an outcome, and we successively correct our expectations until they coincide with
the actual outcome. Then we say that we have understood [571.

In this way Ricoeur skirts the pre-emptory

positivist vision of a predictable world, which
would incorporate hermeneutics as a momentary illusion, and instead reincorporates this
closure in the irreducible "openness" of interpretation. Geertz strains for such a resolution,
but cannot for long let go of the positivist
vision, at least in his most theoretical moments.
Tom Wolfe, the first of three narrative
theorists I will briefly consider, similarly seems
closely to approach but stops just short of a
dialectical understanding of the reality he
seeks to depict [58]. Wolfe reveiws the rise of
"new journalism" in the 1960s, arguing that
its recourse to the devices of the 19th century
tradition of realistic fiction (especially sceneby-scene construction, dialogue, third-person
point-of-view, and depiction of status life)
have ensured an immediate touch with the
realities journalists must painstakingly document. Ironically, literary fiction itself has deserted realism, pursuing a new form of classical story-telling or "neo-fabulism" which loses
all contact with reality, if only because it can
no longer compete on these grounds with upstart journalism [59]. Furthermore, the
earlier "beige" on studiedly neutral journalism
reacted with complaints of "parajournalism"
or "zoot-suited prose", which recalls the
indignant charges of populist sensationalism
with which the original realism of Fielding,
Sterne, Smollett, Dickens and Balzac were met
[60]. Yet these reactions often betray a moralizing or politicizing elitism which is veiled by a
pretence of either objectivity or aestheticism

104
[61 ]. Wolfe's reassessment of the conventional
boundary between objective reporting and realistic fiction is especially relevant to ethnography, which may also aim to be a form of
journalism. He and the new journalism have
given palpable legitimacy to a style of writing
which bespeaks the same commitment to conscientious fieldwork and unexpected detail, yet
belies the illusion of abstracted objectivism.
Many ethnographers would readily agree with
this perspective, however chary of the literary
techniques of realistic fiction. But Wolfe is
concerned precisely to argue that if we are to
write about such real experience, the style of
social realism cannot be avoided without lapsing into pretension. He claims that the development of this technique is for literature what
electricity is for technology, and such evolution cannot be undone except in reactionary
flights of fancy [62].
Wolfe's insight regarding the truth about
reality and the fictional techniques by which
we depict it is a point from which we cannot
regress; however, I am dubious [63] that any
classical device of realism, let alone these four,
can be canonized as eternal verities without
paralyzing the reality both ethnographers and
journalists seek to depict. Kermode, whom I
will discuss next, describes a "pleromatic"
criterion of historical realism to which the
writers of the Bible and their medieval commentators subscribed: authentication was implicit in prophecy and other forms intercalating disparate periods of time and meanings of
metaphor which instead imply inauthenticity
to the post-Enlightenment mind [64]. The
shift of criteria of realism which Wolfe himself traces from classical story-telling to social
realism and from "beige" positivist journalism
to the new journalism further reveals the historical relativity of our narrative techniques
for depicting reality; the "neo-fabulism" (e.g.
Borges, Garcia) which Wolfe suspects of bourgeois evasiveness may capture the essence of
contemporary reality as effectively as Chaucer
or Homer did their times. Wolfe's own tech-

nique of declass6 immediacy, mixed metaphor,

and stream of turned-on consciousness seems
less able to depict the 80s than the 60s, and
even scenes, dialogue, point-of-view, and
status cannot be supposed above the history
which gave rise to these techniques. Wolfe's
evolutionist analogy between realism and
electricity is naive enough for me to relativise
the criteria of "social realism", hanging on instead to the dialectic perception of reality implicit in his more basic criteria: "the reader
knows all this actually happened" [65]. This
reminds us that the dialogue upon which understanding is founded in experience extends also
to the documentation of this experience, and
itself sets the terms of authenticity.
The line of development of narrative theory
which I have picked up from Ricoeur and
Wolfe must also be traced to Frank Kermode,
who similarly examines the interrelationship
of literary fiction and reality. In The Sense o f
an Ending [66], Kermode explored the ways in
which both fictional and historical or factual
accounts of the world necessarily "make sense",
impute "followability", especially a teleology
of beginning, middle, and ending, to a phenomenal experience of contingency and opacity.
They are "fictive models of a temporal world"
[67]. This narrative reading of experience
arises from and perpetuates a consensus which
nevertheless accomodates the objective world
by deriving its conclusions ad hoc, integrating
spontaneous experience - "a babble of unforeshortened dialogue, a random stubbing of
cigarettes, a collection of events without concordance" - in terms of an ending, anticipated
but adjustable [68]. Heisenberg's and Bohr's
principle of complementarity, whereby theoretical physics uncomfortably reconciles divergent
views of the world which no pragmatics can resolve, serves as a paradigm for either science or
fiction, and does not even necessarily preclude
self-contradiction [ 69]. On the other hand,
the invention of such fictions nevertheless
must correspond to some primordial reality of
"human nature" against which it can be mea-

105
sured [70] ; furthermore, false, insidious, or
totalitarian fiction is in principle distinguishable from innocent fiction insofar as the latter
explores rather than dictates the human world
and only calls for conditional assent [71].
That these distinctions themselves assume a
discrimination of truth from fiction is the
existential dilemma which fascinates Kermode,
recalling to me Gadamer's distinction between
true and false prejudices. Like Sartre, Kermode
ends by requiring of great fiction the paradoxical faith in, and versimilitude to, the contingent world of reality which is lost in the objectivist illusion maintained by non-fiction.
Consequently, although he speaks on behalf
of fictional literature, his conclusion parallels
Wolfe's regarding the journalism of real experience. Ethnography, as the non-fictional account of other cultures, can least of all the
sciences maintain the objectivist illusion.
In the Genesis of Secrecy [72] Kermode
views this dilemma at the boundaries between
fiction and reality in terms of a contemporary
ambivalence between classical or medieval
Platonic Realism (which assumed the world
to be itself meaningful) and the nominalist
scepticism (to which we as heirs of the Enlightenment are also committed). Spinoza,
in 1670, fatefully distinguished between meaning and truth, seeing the likelihood of authoritarian misuse in their equivocation [ 73]. Since
the advent of this nominalist scepticism, we
must admit the basic principle that "no narrative can be transparent on historical fact" [74],
that is to say, truth is never implicit in the
meaning of discourse about the world. Yet
this axiom is exceedingly hard to hang on to,
and we invariably slip back into the more ancient, innocent, and comfortable assumption
of the Realists who intuited a potential continuity between words and things that guaranteed a transparency of the world. Kermode
quotes Barthes:
We cannot escape the conclusion that the fact can exist
only linguistically, as a term in a discourse, although we

behave as if it were a simple reproduction o f something

or other on another plane o f existence altogether, some
extra-structural 'reality' " [ 75 ].

The meaning of the world arises in the intricate

imputations of our narrative about it, but despite the scepticism of the Enlightenment we
cannot for long see it this way, and again take
the meaning to be true of the world. This is,
ironically enough, the same ambivalence which
Evans-Pritchard (and Castaneda) felt about the
compelling but unbelievable transparency between Zande (or don Juan's) meaning and truth;
but as I think must be the fate of ethnography,
the pendulum of ambivalence swings between
two or more alternative worlds of naive realism,
clear across the peculiar chasm of scepticism
created by Enlightenment nominalism.
In illustration of the dilemma as it faces
historians, Kermode quotes Pynchon:
Let me now q u o t e a historical, or pseudo-historical, natrative o f a very different kind. It purports to describe an
engagement between an American and a Russian warship
off the coast o f California: 'What happened on the 9 t h
March, 1864... is n o t too clear. Popov the Russian admiral
did send o u t a ship, either the corvette 'Bogatir' or the
clipper 'Gaidamek', to see w h a t it could see. O f f the coast
o f either w h a t is n o w Carmel-by-the-Sea, or w h a t is n o w
Pismo Beach, around n o o n or possibly toward dusk, the
two ships sighted each other. O n e o f t h e m m a y have fired;
ff it did t h e n the other responded; b u t b o t h were out of
range so neither showed a scar afterward to prove anything.' This passage describes an historical event which is
held to have occurred, to have left no trace, and to be
susceptible of honest report only in the m o s t uncertain
and indeterminate manner. It admirably represents a
m o d e r n skepticism concerning the reference of texts to
events. Events exist only as texts, already to that e x t e n t
interpreted, and if we were able to discard the interpretative material and be as h o n e s t as historians, quite honestly,
pretend to be, all we should have left would be some
such nonsignificant dubiety as this account o f the first
engagement ever to take place between American and
Russian forces [76].

Such a purged chronicle applies "too strict a

distinction between meaning and truth and
would leave few historical narratives capable
of interesting us" [ 77]. Although it is illusory,
"we shall continue to write historical narrative
as if it were an altogether different matter

106
from making fictions or, a fortiori, from telling
lies" [78].
With my case already made for the epistemological equivalence of historical and cultural
distance, I can now claim that historians and
ethnographers, as well as journalists, are in an
epistemological predicament similar to novelists.
Kermode's appreciation of the historical dialectic between "pleromatic" certitude and
classical realism, the positivist certitude of the
Enlightenment, and the vertigo of a scepticism
which only gathers momentum since the
sophists and the nominalists (Gadamer's
"shadow of philosophy"), ending in the defiant honesty of Sartre's fiction, all this leaves
little room for a facile epistemological reassurance which pictures itself as outside
history. The reorientation of journalism documented by Wolfe further fills in this hermeneutic circle. The meaning which we hurry to
see as truth transparent to the world is not
only inevitably a narrative of our own making,
it is a dialogue in Gadamer's and Ricoeur's
senses, a conversation with more than one
point of view, which is irrevocably part of its
historical moment and changing with history.
That this relativism does not relieve us of the
demands of truth and morality is ironic or
tragic, but nonetheless true.
Rabinowitz [79] has clarified a further dimension in the narrative theory of fiction and
realism by examining the relationship between
author and audience. This more recent "readeroriented" approach, rather than the "textoriented" approach still evident in Kermode
and Wolfe, reflects the convergence of literary
criticism and Gadamer's and Ricoeur's philosophy of social science on the epistemological
model of the dialogue. If one does not preemptorily sever the text from its context, it
may be argued that all of the conventions of
realistic narrative pointed out by Wolfe and
Kermode are, phenomenologically, not narrative at all but dialogue. I think that these
perspectives can help a reflexive ethnography
to better understand what it is doing.

Rabinowitz claims we must distinguish at

least four audiences implied in any narrative
literary text, correlative to as many different
modes of the author. The relationships between
these several audience-author levels of narrative meaning are the basis for contextual discriminations between truth and fiction. Most
pivotal here is the author and his assumed
or intended actual audience (authorial
audience), and the internal narrator, typical
of realistic fiction, and his intended audience
(narrative audience). For War and Peace, the
authorial audience accepts the reality of the
War of 1812 while only the narrative audience
accepts the reality of Natasha, Pierre, and the
other characters. The tension between the
two is distinctive of fiction. For Metamorphosis,
the narrative audience is asked without apology
to accept what is incredible for the authorial
audience, although the entire context is perfectly realistic. "When the distinction between
the two [authorial and narrative audiences]
disappears entirely, we have autobiography or
history" [80]. I would add that the device
whereby authorial and narrative audiences
are merged also includes ethnography, and
emphasize (as would Wolfe and Kermode) that
this is a device.
Rabinowitz further points out that the
authorial and narrative audience each have
their further levels. The former necessarily
implies a factually actual audience and
author (the social and historical facts); the
latter fictional level often includes an "ideal
narrative audience" which is "taken in" or
duped by any fiction the fictional narrator
chooses to create. The two innermost fictional
levels readily become an infinite regress, as
Rabinowitz illustrates with Nabakov's Pale
Fire [ 81 ]. Successful management of the two
outer levels creates a sense of truth against
which these levels of fiction are played off.
Just as the ambiguous levels of dialogue within the fictional narration may exuberantly
explore the distinction between relative truth
and relative fiction, the central ambiguity

107
between narrative and authorial audience
(and between their authors) explores the
more inclusive and less simply fictional distinction between its own fiction and an account of reality. It seems to me that each of
the four levels of dialogue which Rabinowitz
invokes serves as a true frame of reference or
"truth-frame" relative to which its lesser inclusive levels are appreciated as fiction. Phenomenologically, we approach the whole as fiction, yet take each more inclusive level as
true relative to our discovery of an included
fiction, suggesting the mutual definition of
these levels is dialectical. Rabinowitz emphasizes the simultaneity of the perception of
both truth and fiction [82], precluding any
simplistic resolution of this dialectic. The
dialogical nature of the monological narrative
illusion itself is made clearer by the author's
apparent intention of such a simultaneous
and multivocal display of'meaning, and the
reader's appreciation of the author's intentions.
Fiction is here a sliding function of truth, although neither is ever unambiguous.
What I want finally to suggest is that in
ethnography, truth is a sliding function of
fictional frames of reference, although neither
is ever unambiguous. This merely puts a somewhat different perspective on Gadamer's dialectic of "true prejudice". Along with autobiography and history, ethnography works
from an assumption of truth, rather than an
assumption of fiction. I think it can be shown
that the illusion of meanings "transparent" to
truth is achieved through the implicit acceptance of a more inclusive level of fiction.
Through the ethnographic exemplars with
which I started my discussion, I will now only
suggest some of the ways in which this perspective may be developed. At the very least,
such considerations would reopen our understanding of ethnography as a dialogue, as well
as a narrative, and reintegrate it in its own
social and historical context.
Rhetorical devices which encourage the
impression of veracity or transparency are in

the first instance simply grammatical. These

are less obvious than, for instance, the scholarly form of documentation which invokes
authority through citation of the wider context of scientific literature. In most nonfictional literature, like history or biography,
third-person narration is "the mode which
best produces the illusion of pure reference"
[83]. On the other hand, the grammatical
pattern most typical of social science is no
point of view at all, effacing on behalf of
neutral abstraction even the implied objectivity of third-person narration. Where some
narrator must be invoked, usually some passive voice avoids dispelling the aura of objectification. The first person plural is occasionally
asserted in what is still sometimes a fictional
claim of authority ("... we have concluded...").
The first-person singular "I" or "me" is consistently avoided in order not to compromise
the sense of objectivity achievable in a detached narrative.
Such innocent but careful modulation of
locutions which introduce or evade introduction of specific points of view is probably
general throughout social science literature.
Perhaps peculiar to ethnography is the "ethnographic present", the previously unquestioned
convention whereby history may tacitly be ignored. This sentimentalism seems no longer
legitimate, but is survived by other conventions
such as the segregation of cultural change from
culture, extraneous from intrinsic factors, or
dysfunction from function. Even if ethnography can no longer be accused of these innocent forms of decontextualisation, it is difficult not to conclude that there are others of
which we are not aware, or simply by consensus not inclined to recognize as fiction in any
ideological sense. Omission is, of course, selective, and thereby also constitutes narrative.
Rarely is there a candid accounting of basic
conditions of understanding such as linguistic
fluency, duration of time in the field, form
and degree of acceptance, or theoretical biases
and their modification. This seems avoided for

108
much the same reason that the first-person
singular is judged inappropriate, and the specious plural form occasionally invoked. Insofar
as authority is established through such conventions, cultural strangeness, geographic remoteness or difficulty of access, and the futility of replication, may be accepted implicitly
as credentials rather than deterrents to credibility.
It is by now apparent that in lieu of other
criteria of verifiability, clearly futile but nevertheless desired i n t h e social sciences, functional
explanation maintains the fiction of transparency in much the same way that Kermode's
teleological "sense of an ending" maintains
coherence of a narrative through "followability". Among the various structural, semiotic,
or hermeneutic alternatives which have succeeded functionalism, the implicit criteria of
coherence has increasingly come to rest in the
narrative form of ethnography itself rather
than in some metaphysics which it invokes.
Geertz's "thick description" [84] may be seen
as an explicit recognition of ethnography as
narrative, even as implicitly recommending
such devices of social realism as championed
by Wolfe on behalf of the New Journalism.
More recently, Marcus has suggested approaching ethnography as a genre in the interest of
appreciating the claim of authenticity implicit
in distinctive rhetorical devices [85]. Among
these he suggests that:
readers expect an ethnography to give a sense of the conditions of fieldwork; of everyday life (Maiinowski's
"imponderabilia"); of micro-process (an implicit validation of participant observation); of holism (a form of
portraiture integrated with the pursuit of particular claims);
and of translation across cultural and linguistic boundaries
(the broad, contextual exegisis of indigenous terms and
concepts) [86].

He also points out that Rabinow [87] and

Dumont [88], like Bateson, appear consciously to be experimenting (if only implicitly)
with an:

ethnographic genre which can accommodate reflexivity

while retaining the traditional authority of its texts, that
is, the rhetorical usage of language and format by which
ethnographers have constructed their accounts as certain
and objective knowledge about others [89].

I only seek to press to its full epistemological

implications the insights which Geertz and
Marcus present as methodologies; unless these
implications are made explicit, such methodologies are liable simply to be reincorporated in
the positivist preconception of ethnography.
Having broached these considerations, I
suggest that the ethnographic dilemmas discussed in the beginning are problematic because the merger of authorial (that is, intended
or assumed) audience and narrative (that is,
internal or constructive) audience, necessary
to turn realistic fiction into non-fiction, becomes uncomfortably conscious. The tension
between the two audiences, which serves as
the focus of fictional narration, becomes superficially the embarrassment, but more profoundly the authentication, of ethnography. The
grammatical and other conventions which I
have suggested above implicate a narrative
audience which is prepared to grant the ethnography many shortcuts to a transparent truth.
Behind this tacit narrator/narrative audience
agreement stand the author and his authorial
audience, ethnographer and readers whose innocence of any such conspiracy constitutes a
key factor in the truth of the narrative account.
Tacit fiction serves as a frame of reference for
the assertion of truth.
Furthermore, the retrospective exposure of
ethnographic authorship through Malinowski's
diary, and its introspective exposure in Geertz's
and Read's reflections, suggest a background
of other audiences we have also overlooked.
At least two of these are the people we write
for and those we write about. Even in fictional
literature the subjects of the work are an
audience in some sense (e.g., an "ideal narrative audience"), so presumably even an ethno-

109
graphy which successfully abstracts itself from
its fieldwork must nevertheless address these
real people in some form. As becomes apparent
in all five ethnographic exemplars I have considered, the correlative of these two audiences
is a perfectly sane, but not morally innocent,
schizophrenia of authorship. The problems of
translation intrinsic to ethnography may make
it inevitable that it cannot speak equally to
both audiences, but because the ethnographer
once did so (i.e., in his fieldwork), to resolve
the problem by fiat wholly in favour of the
ethnographer's vernacular audience (or worse,
his scholarly audience) begs this central epistemological question. At least in this way a
fictional authorial audience seems reciprocally to be created, participation in which establishes the truth for a narrative audience which
only appears to include both whom the ethnography is written for and whom it is written
about.
A narrative theory of "anthropological irony"
may also be extended from the moral equivocation examined by Geertz and Read to the
ontological equivocation examined by EvansPritchard and Castaneda. Here, the efficacy of
the ethnography, much like realistic fiction,
depends upon the ambivalent disjunction of
authorial and narrative audiences: while one
must believe in witches the way the Azande
or don Juan do, the other cannot. Belaind this
ambivalence Evans-Pritchard was able to maintain the illusion that narrative and authorial
audience were one, whereas Castaneda was
not; consequently the former was accepted
as ethnography while the latter is generally
regarded at best as realistic fiction. Finally, I
suggest that while Evans-Pritchard had to invoke an authorial audience which did not believe in witches while his narrative audience
did, Castaneda had to invoke a narrative audience which could not believe in witches, while
his authorial audience did. This historical reversal or irony suggests that ethnographeraudience dialogues are not merely internal to
ethnography, but span ethnographic traditions

in which theoretical controversies may be

merely epiphenomenal.
Like the stringent or paradoxical standards
which Wolfe sets for journalism and Sartre
and Kermode set for realistic fiction, I suggest
that ethnography must both consciously exploit the distinctions between its various audiences and strive to overcome them. As the
hermeneutic perspectives I have outlined
finally imply, it is the irreducible disparity
of dialogue upon which the authenticity of
ethnographic truth must rest, rest vulnerably,
that is, as "true prejudice". The fiction on
which ethnography must verge always threatens
to reveal its prejudices, while the current invisibility of these must be recognized as the only
ground of a claim to the truth. The practical
dialogue of cross-cultural experience can in
this way avoid being foreshortened into narrative prone to the assumption of transparency.
The "open-endedness" which Ricoeur imputes
to any narrative, fictional or not, must not be
innocently closed; on the other hand, the
license of fiction implies that ethnography
must strive for the illusion of closure which
continually threatens to unravel into an open
dialogue again. Just as the merger of authorial
and narrative audiences legitimizes non-fiction,
so does this gesture of closure legitimize ethnography as science rather than fiction. But it is
just because ethnography is not merely fiction
that it cannot abdicate an open-endedness in
its closure.
Which of the exemplars I have examined
approaches this ideal? Malinowski's personal
intensity and awareness of the "imponderabilia"
of his methodology suggests that his ethnographic vividness was only misled by the positivist scientism which was hardly resistable in
his time. Evans-Pritchard's ethnography is
usually dominated by the same innocence, but
rather than segregating his existential doubts
in a diary apart from his ethnography, this
dialogue crops up where it took shape, in the
true fiction of Zande witches and the nonunilineal patrilineages of Nuer kinship. Evans-

110
Pritchard's unpi'etentious confidence was far
less vulnerable than Malinowski's strident integrity, and nearly saved him from his times.
In many ways, Read's ethnographic confessional, produced not long after the golden
age of functionalist false-consciousness, remains closest to the ethnographic ideal of a
reopening closure I am here postulating. His
reflections are an antithesis to Malinowski's
diary, inviting an ironic gaze that now even
seems intended by both of them. But even
Read's gentle tour de force loses the internal
dialogue of openness, remaining an apologetic
sequel to another ethnography promised to
be less self-indulgent if more fragmentary.
Castaneda, on the other hand, seems seduced
outside the bounds of ethnography; but one
feels this is the fault of two of his audiences,
one too enthusiastic and the other not enough,
rather than the fault of don Juan, the audience
which only appears to have seduced him. At
the very least, Castaneda's ethnography succeeded in blurring the dogmatic lines between
ethnography and fiction. I have already said
enough about Geertz to reveal my own ambivalence about his approach to ethnography.
More recently in the rise of hermeneutic consciousness in ethnography, Rabinow [90] and
Dumont [91] have explicitly developed a
reflexive perspective. But, as Marcus points
out, these first steps are still presented as supplements or afterthoughts to the preceding
conventional ethnography rather than integral
revisions of this style, "implicitly raising an
important issue about ethnographic writing
which they in no way address" [92].
Malinowski's situation, with which I began,
again serves as paradigm for my final point,
which I hope to put emphatically. Whereas
his conscious intention was to "ply the full
searchlight of methodic sincerity" on the conditions of fieldwork, rather than produce the
facts before us "out of complete obscurity",
it was clearly for him no fiction to have kept
his diary separate from his ethnography and
from most or all of his audiences. This ap-

parent paradox puts before us two false solutions to the central dilemma of ethnography:
(1) a positivist reincorporation of the dialogue
as objectified reflexivity (e.g., as context
variables or hypotheses); or (2) an alienated
subjectivism which subordinates itself as supplementary explanation.
Malinowski's plea means to urge closer
approximation to the laboratory model of
scientifically controlled experiment. In the
positivist convention of segregating facts
from values, the diary was apparently meant
to be a catharsis which enabled the ethnographer to vent his frustrations and achieve
greater objectivity through self-knowledge
and control. If we misconstrue contemporary
hermeneutics in this same way, it is stillborn:
on the one hand, we end with an objectification of Malinowski's personal preoccupations
as controllable variables in the midst of
Trobriand social process; on the other hand,
we opt out in a subjectification appropriate
only as a supplementary "personal approach"
in methodology, or a foray into literature
respectfully distanced from the serious ethnography. The latter is increasingly a popular
compromise, and even seriously reflexive
ethnography is liable to be mistaken for "light
anthropology" merely because it refuses to
risk reification of its critical epistemology
by making its intentions explicit. But in either
of the above misconstruals, the ethnography
maintains an illusion of closure or transparency
which misrepresents the experience it seeks
to depict.
Alienated subjectivism has long had its supportive role to play in the social sciences; in
anthropology, approaches which seem to me
to be subverted by positivism in this way are
Jay's "personal vision" [93 ] and Honigman's
"personal approach" [94]. Neither challenges
the epistemology of objectivism except to
emphasize its limitations, as though these
were merely methodological. This may be a
more fatal miscontrual of hermeneutics than
an objectivist reduction of the dilemma. How-

111
ever, the superficial resemblance of hermeneutic "openness" or the dialectic of true and
false prejudical to the positivist criteria of
verifiability orfalsifiability is equally liable
to subvert hermeneutics. Openness of interpretability and the potential exposure of true
prejudices are mistaken as hypotheses, the testing of which results in disproof or provisional
confirmation. But these characteristics of
knowledge are ultimate, not intermediate,
conditions of understanding. Naively to mistake them as hypotheses simply closes the
dialogue, assumes transparency, or takes true
prejudice as simply true, unilaterally severing
the dialogue from which they arise and pretending that this abrogation is not itself a
fiction.
Both subjectivist and objectivist misconstruals of contemporary hermeneutics arise from
the same illusory Cartesian dualism which subverted Dilthey's own hermeneutics and may
continue to mislead Geertz's. This dichotomisation of knowledge itself joined the dialectic of
enlightenment and alienation, resulting (through
the rise of 19th century positivism) in the
monopolisation of knowledge by positivist objectivism and the relegation of all alternatives to
subjectivism. Whereas Enlightenment nominalism had forever separated truth from meaning,
Enlightenment positivism again pursued transparency as though this had never happened.
The new realism, founded initially on a false
dichotomy, reified its terms and promoted its
own form of subjectivity to scientific status:
"The objectivity of truth, without which the
dialectic is inconceivable, is tacitly replaced
by vulgar positivism and pragmatism - ultimately, that is, by bourgeois subjectivism"
[95]. German Romanticism from Herder and
idealism from Kant and Hegel, by reacting to
this monopolisation of knowledge, earned the
stigma of their names [96]. The patronizing
of "subjectivist" initiatives by objectivist social
science merely continues this tradition of subordination, perhaps deservedly among those
who naively in the romanticist tradition accept

the Cartesian dichotomy undialecticaUy.

But the dilemma of objectivism and subjectivism like other dilemmas is met by going between its horns. Subject and object are an
irreducible dialectic, and knowledge must
arise in the unforeclosed dialogue between
the two, not the closure of some illusory resolution in behalf of one or the other. Subjectivity and objectivity are equally reifying abstractions from the practicality and particularity of
dialogue. Each has already assumed a meaning
transparent to the world, and so has given
away the dialectic on which it is based and
from which it must derive its authenticity.
Nevertheless, these fictions are the framework
in which an elusive truth must continuously
be reestablished. The dialectic of enlightenment from Plantonic realism to nominalism
and Cartesianism, to positivism, contemporary
hermeneutics, and critical theory, is not merely
illusory but the heavy context of history in
which we necessarily think. However, this
movement itself implies that thought cannot
take itself undialectically for granted as given
(as Descartes did). The challenge for ethnography is to bridge the gap between fieldwork
and presentation in just the same mode and
style that it bridges the gap between one culture and another, and in just the same way
that everyone can bridge the gap between
himself and another, encompassing the closure
of objectivist or subjectivist alienation with
the openness of dialogue. Ethnography must
hang on in good faith to the myriad contingencies and opaque personalities of reality, and
deny itself the illusion of a transparent description, a luxury reserved for less reflexive sciences.
If in so doing it must give up both the quest
for general knowledge of society and a particularly indulgent form of subjectivism, this
will only constitute the loss of prejudices
which are no longer true.
I have suggested that dilemmas inherent in
anthropology, and also verging upon the discipline from the philosophy of social science,

112
require a reorientation of ethnography. Although the authenticity of ethnographic fieldwork itself may be above this immanent critique, our understanding of and presentation
of it as ethnography is nevertheless vulnerable
to the critique. The perspective and style of
ethnography is dated, reflecting a naive era of
social science which is no longer epistemologically or socially defensible; a new selfunderstanding is immanent, although this too
is only historically relative. In the first part of
the essay, I considered two classical and three
comparatively recent ethnographies, using
Clifford Geertz's own ethnographic reflections
to adumbrate an inherent dilemma of which
he himself seems to lose sight but which is
common to them all. This dilemma reflects a
dialogue between the ethnographer and his
subjects which surfaces in these instances but
may be generally obscured in most other
ethnography. In the second part of the essay
I reviewed several contributors to hermeneutic
theory in the social sciences, concluding that
this dialogue is the foundation of ethnographic
authenticity rather than an impediment to
proper understanding. Its characteristics are,
variously, true conversation, true and false prejudices, temporal or cultural distance, affinity,
complementarity, openness, and practical engagement, all understood in a dialectical mode
which is not reducible to a monologue or to
an objectification. In the third section, I pursued Geertz's passing comments on the epistemological proximity of ethnography and
fiction. I also reviewed the recent development
of narrative theory in literary criticism, suggesting that the conventions whereby truth
is asserted and accepted in ethnography are
part of a non-fictional narrative tradition
which achieves the illusion of transparency
to fact through innocent fictions. Finally, I
urged that the authentic ground of ethnographic truth in dialogue be retained in ethnography through the conscious use of fictional
devices of narrative which intimate transparency to truth without giving in to the posi-

tivist illusion of an objective or predictable

state of affairs. Ethnography must remain as
hesitant and open to contingency and interpretation as is the concrete social experience
upon which it is based. And it must avoid
subversion by the positivist abstractions of
subjectivity and objectivity.

NOTES
1 J. Ruby, "Exposing yourself; reflexivity, anthropology,
and film," mimeographed paper presented at the Sydney
Film Festival, Australia, 1978.
2 B. Malinowski, Argonauts o f the Western Pacific (New
York: Dutton, 1961), p. 3.
3 C. Geertz, "From the native's point of view: on the
nature of anthropological understanding," in J.L.
Dolgin, D.S. Kemnitzer and D.M. Schneider (eds.),
Symbolic Anthropology (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1974, 1977), pp. 480-481.
4 C. Geertz, "Thinking as a moral act: ethical dimensions of
anthropological fieldwork in the New States," Antioch Review, vol. 28, no. 2 (1968), pp. 139-158.
5 Geertz, op. cit., 1977.
6 K. Read, The High Valley (New York: Scribners, 1975).
7 .E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among
the Azande (London: Oxford University Press, 1937).
8 Ibid., p. 32.
9 P. Winch, "Understanding a primitive society", American
Philosophical Quaterly, vol. 1, no. 4 (1964), pp. 307-324.
10 E. Gellner, Cause and Meaning in the Social Sciences
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973); E. Gellner,
Legitimation and Belief (London: Cambridge University
Press, 1974).
11 S. Lukes, Essays in Social Theory (London: McMillan,
1977), p. 121ff.
12 I. Jarvie, Concepts and Society (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1972).
13 A. Giddens, New Rules of Sociological Method (London:
Hutchinson, 1976).
14 Geertz, op. cit., 1977, p. 492.
15 Geertz, op. cit., 1968, p. 154.
16 C. Geertz, "Blurred Genres; The Reflguration of Social
Thought", American Scholar, vol. 49, no. 2 (1980), pp.
165-179.
17 Geertz, op. cit., 1977, p. 491.
18 W. Dilthey, "The understanding of other persons and their
life-expressions," in P. Gardiner (ed.), Theories of History
(Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press, 1959); W. Dilthey, "The
rise of hermeneutics" in P. Connerton (ed.), Critical
Sociology: Selected Readings (Haxmondsworth: Penguin,
1976).
19 H.-G. Gadamer, "The problem of historical consciousness,"
in P. Rabinow and W. Sullivan (eds.), Interpretive Social
Science: A Reader (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1979), pp. 106, 118-128.

113
20 Ibid., p. 124.
21 H.-G. Gadamer, "The historicity of understanding," in
P. Connerton (ed.), Critical Sociology: Selected Readings
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976a), p. 125.
22 Gadamer, op. cit., 1979, pp. 157-158, also p. 132.
23 Gadamer, op. cit., 1976a, p. 125.
24 Gadamer, op. cit., 1979, p. 134.
25 Gadamer, op. cit., 1976a, p. 124.
26 Gadamer, op. cit., 1979, pp. 108-109.
27 H.-G. Gadamer, Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1980), pp. 122-123.
28 H.-G. Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1976b), pp. 26-36; J.
Habermas, "Systematically distorted communications,"
in P. Connerton (ed.), Critical Sociology: Selected
Readings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976); P. Ricoeur,
"Ethics and culture: Habermas and Gadamer in dialogue,"
Philosophy Today, vol. 17, no. 5 (1972), pp. 153-165.
29 Dilthey, quoted in Gadamer, op. cit., 1979, pp. 124-125.
30 Ibid., pp. 125-126.
31 Ibid., p. 130.
32 T. Adorno, Jargon o f Authenticity (Evanston, Illinois:
Northwestern University Press, 1973).
33 F. Hearne, Domination, Legitimation and Resistance;
The Incorporation o f the Nineteenth Century English
Working Class (London: Greenwood, 1978); J. Alt,
"Review of domination, legitimation, and resistance by
F. Hearne," Telos, vol. 37 (1978), pp. 207-216.
34 Gadamer, op. cit., 1976a, p. 123.
35 Gadamer, op. cit., 1979, p. 108.
36 Gadamer, op. cit., 1976a, p. 123.
37 P. Ricoeur, "The model of text: meaningful action considered as a text," in P. Rabinow and W. Sullivan (eds.),
Interpretive Social Science: A Reader (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). See also the paradigm of
Geertz, "Deep play: notes on the Balinese Cockfight" in
the same reader.
38 P. Ricoeur, "Explanation and understanding; on some
remarkable connections among the theory of the text,
theory of action, and theory of history," in The Philosophy
o f Paul Ricoeur (Boston: Beacon, 1978), p. 153.
39 Ricoeur, op. cit., 1979, p. 100.
40 Ricoeur, op. cit., 1978, p. 166.
41 G. Devereux,From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioural
Sciences (New York: Humanities Press, 1967).
42 Gadamer, op. cit., 1976a, p. 125.
43 G. Marcus, "The Ethnographic Subject as Ethnographer A Neglected Dimension in Fieldwork," Rice University
Studies, vol. 66, no. 1 (1980a), pp. 65-68.
44 Giddens, op. cit., pp. 46-47.
45 Ibid., p. 58.
46 Ibid., p. 143.
47 Ibid., p. 147.
48 P. Ricoeur, "Hermeneutics: restoration of meaning or
reduction of illusion? in P. Connorton (ed.), Critical Sociology: Selected Readings (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1976), p. 195.

49 K. Popper, Unended Quest; An Intellectual Autobiography

(Glasgow: Fontana, 1976), p. 190.
50 Geertz, op. cit., 1968, p. 154.
51 C. Geertz, "Thick description: toward an interpretative
theory of culture, in C. Geertz, The Interpretation o f
Cultures (London: Hutchinson, 1975), pp. 15-16.
52 Ibid., pp. 16-18.
53 Geertz, op. cit., 1979.
54 Ricoenr, op. cit., 1978, pp. 149 ff.
55 Ibid., pp. 152, 161.
56 Ibid., p. 154.
57 Ibid., pp. 154, 163-164.
58 T. Wolfe, "The new journalism," in T. Wolfe and E.W.
Johnson (eds.), The New Journalism (Bongay, Suffolk:
Picador, 1973); T. Ludvigson, personal communication,
1979.
59 Wolfe, op. cit., pp. 55-56.
60 Ibid., pp. 51-52.
61 Ibid., pp. 54, 58.
62 Ibid., pp. 11, 49, 57.
63 With Philips, mentioned inlbid., p. 49.
64 F. Kermode, The Genesis o f Secrecy: On the Interpretation o f Narrative (Cambridge: MA: Harvard University
Press, 1979).
65 Wolfe, op. cit., p. 49.
66 F. Kermode, The Sense of a n Ending; Studies on The
Theory o f Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press,
1968).
67 Ibid., p. 54.
68 IbM., pp. 150, 157.
69 Ibid., p. 59.
70 Ibid., pp. 43-44.
71 Ibid., pp. 37-39.
72 Kermode, op. cir., 1979.
73 Ibid., p. 119.
74 Ibid., p. 116.
75 Ibid., p. 117.
76 Ibid., pp. 107-108.
77 Ibid., p. 114.
78 Ibid., p. 109.
79 P.J. Rabinowitz, "Truth in fiction; a reexamination of
audiences,'" Critical lnquiry, vol. 4 (1977), pp. 121-141.
80 Ibid., p. 131.
81 Ibid., p. 140.
82 Ibid., pp. 125, 128 ff.
83 Kermode, op. cit., 1979, p. 117.
84 Geertz, op. cit., 1975.
85 G. Marcus, "Rhetoric and the ethnographic genre in
anthropological research," Current Anthropology, vol. 21,
no. 4 (1980b), pp. 507-510.
86 Marcus, op. cit., 1980a, p. 509.
87 P. Rabinow, Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).
88 J.P. Dumont, The Headman and L"Ambiguity and Ambivalence in the Fieldworking Experience (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1978).
89 Marcus, op. cit., 1980a, p. 508.
90 Rabinow, op. cir., 1977.

114
91 Dumont, op. cit., 1978.
92 Marcus, op. cit., 1980b, p. 508.
93 R. Jay, "Personal and extrapersonal vision in anthropology,"
in Dell Hymes (ed.), Reinventing Anthropology (New York:
Vintage, 1974).
94 J. Honigmann, "The personal approach in cultural anthro-

pological research," Current Anthropology, vol. 17, no. 2

(1976), pp. 243-250.
95 T. Adorno, "Cultural criticism and society," in P. Connerton (ed.), Critical Sociology: Selected Readings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 270.
96 Cf. C. Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1975).

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