 A great book; it must have articulated some of the incipient ideas in anthropology at the time (1989). Some of the ideas expressed in the book feel familiar, and other ideas feel fresh.
Rosaldo recalls his fieldwork with the Ilongots, who lived near Manila in the Philippines. The Ilongots practice head-hunting because of "the rage in bereavement." He could not understand the grief that they spoke of and tried to understand head-hunting intellectually, as a system of exchange; only after the accidental death of his wife could he understand the grief and rage they spoke of. While anthropologists in his time used words like thick description, richness, texture, and webs of meaning, Rosaldo introduces the concept of emotional "force." Positionality affects the anthropologist's comprehension of culture. Anthropologists are not scientists with an objective bird's eye view onto the world; they are positioned subjects. The historical conjuncture of the late 1960s fractured the unified consciousness motivating "monumentalist" and classical forms of "objective" ethnographic writing that wrote of cultures in the "ethnographic present." As Rosaldo notes, writing in the ethnographic present sounds parodic for the "natives." Consider the following description of the mouth-rite (brushing one's teeth): "The daily body ritual performed by everyone includes a mouth-rite. Despite the fact that these people are so punctilious about care of the mouth, this rite involves a practice which strikes the uninitiated stranger as revolting. It was reported to me that the ritual consists of inserting a small bundle of hog hairs into the mouth, along with certain magical powders and then moving the bundle in a highly formalized series of gestures." The classical form of ethnographic writing are but one possible mode. It strips events of the emotional force and render them as spectacle, and it makes it difficult to imagine spontaneity in these acts. Rosaldo senses something else happening in the classical form of ethnographic writing. The form constructs an innocent and detached observer that allows the anthropologist to avoid complicity with the structures of domination that were actively changing the societies in which the anthropologist was studying. Rosaldo terms this the imperialist nostalgia (a great concept), "where people mourn the passing of what they themselves have transformed." In place of classical conceptions of culture, which have rigid structure and non-negotiable cultural boundaries, Rosaldo calls attention to the porousness of culture. Instead of "culture as a self-contained whole made up of coherent patterns," Rosaldo adopts the image of "culture... as a more porous array of intersections where distinct processes crisscross from within and beyond its borders." Interestingly, Rosaldo also describes rituals and individual identity in similar terms; ritual and identity is described as an intersection of various processes. (Perhaps this is due to the influence of structuralism, where the principles of structure at different levels are similar.) Rosaldo attempts to open up avenues of study that were previously inaccessible in classical conceptions of culture and classical forms of writing. Instead of viewing culture as order and control over chaos, Rosaldo wonders about the unexplored "realm of 'nonorder'"--he notes that "human conduct often results from improvisation." He also tries to think about the tempo of a culture, which is difficult to capture. Finally, Rosaldo wonders about the narrative forms that anthropologists impose on their interlocuters--what kind of ethnographies could emerge if the narrative forms of the "natives" were used instead?
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 How do we regard the pain of others? Sontag seems to ask; she develops these essays with her extensive knowledge of photography and art--the book almost reads like an extension from Sontag's On Photography.
Sontag identifies the privilege of regarding pain in locales all over the world through photography as "a quintessential modern experience" provided through the "professional, specialized tourists known as journalists." Depictions of suffering and pain through images are not a new emergence with photography; there is a rich history in painting for such depictions, like in Goya's The Disasters of War. However, Sontag comments that "Goya's images are a synthesis" that claim that "things like this happened," unlike photography's claim to literal representation that are built in formally. Photography unites "two contradictory features"; it is impartial and objective, but also subjectively positioned through the photographer: this allows it to be "both objective record and personal testimony." Of course, photography is not a transparent copy of an untouched, virgin reality; "to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude"--the photograph is the result of manipulation. Photographs thus transform captured reality, but nostalgia for the original copy leads to criticism of photos that are too "aesthetic." There is here an echo of the connection between surrealism and photography that Sontag explored in On Photography; there is an element of uncontrolled happenstance that goes into the final work. Sontag likens the photograph to "a quotation, or a maxim or proverb." Photographs have a "deeper bite" than moving images from the television because "memory freeze-frames; its basic unit is the single image." Photographs thus have a functional role in the creation of collective memory. When this occurs, and the photograph is embedded in a specific narrative or is in use by a certain ideology, the shock value of photographs do not wear off. Or as Sontag says, "pathos in the form of a narrative, does not wear out." Her remark reminded me of Milan Kundera's definition of kitsch in his The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Do photographs of atrocity coerce an ethical response? Sontag begins her essay with this question and returns to this question at the end. Images are disseminated everywhere--they lose the aura of reverent contemplation and are involved in new settings and take on new meanings (a la Walter Benjamin). And ultimately, Sontag seems to suggest a chasm between the viewer of the photograph and the suffering subject that cannot be bridged: "'We'--this 'we' is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through--don't understand. We don't get it. We truly can't imagine what it was like. We can't imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can't understand, can't imagine. That's what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right." |
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