Drawing on Bakhtin’s writings on representation and dialogue, a critical look is taken on the application of debate during fieldwork. If academic debate lacks openness and the space to change one’s mind, what does this say for the manner in which we engage with the people we do research with during fieldwork? It is argued that both elements of participant-observation make it impossible to achieve dialogue; to do so involves outlining and arguing our opinions and judgements together with the people whom we research, even if this sometimes leads to disagreement. Starting a first draft of a write-up while in the field and using this as a departure for discussion is put forward as one means of achieving such an exchange of opinion.
'The reality that we are failing to see, the reality right in front of our eyes, every - day, is, I want to claim, the reality of us living our lives in practice. It is this that we do not know how to see for what it is, without continually distorting it, without continually telling ourselves that it must have this or that kind of nature to it.’ (Shotter, 1994: 2)
Every time we move and settle somewhere else, we have to get used to new surroundings, new people, new friends and colleagues. The astonishing thing is, that we do this without too much thought. We learn the 'rules', the 'language' and the 'customs' of our new surroundings with surprising ease – surprising, if we stop to consider that we seem to think it impossible to achieve during fieldwork, because our 'self', cannot bridge the gap separating us from the 'other'. During fieldwork we find it impossible to ever know what the 'other' is thinking and often despair. What do we do in our everyday lives, though? After all, presumably we are in the same situation of never knowing what those around us are thinking.
What I would like to suggest, is that it is the constant feedback from those around us and our feedback toward them that enables us to function within our surroundings. To put it bluntly: if my wife asks me for wine and I pour her a cup of coffee, I will find out sooner rather than later, that something went wrong. Well, that's fine, you might say, but what has that to do with anthropology in general and fieldwork in particular? – Enter Bakhtin, stage right.
When Bakhtin's writings were 'discovered' by European and American writers, they had an immediate impact on quite a few subjects, such as Literary Studies, Linguistics, Cultural Studies and others. While I do not share all of his ideas, my approach owes a lot to him and his writings, which is why in what follows most of the quotes will be from or about him. Bakhtin started with the problem of representation, pointing out, that
'the represented world, however realistic and truthful, can never be […] identical with the real world it represents , where the author and creator of the literary work is to be found.'(Bakhtin, 1981: 256)
Even language itself is 'not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker's intentions [...]. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one's own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process.' (Bakhtin, 1981: 294). Bakhtin's way to get around these limitations is the Socratic debate (Bakhtin, 1984: 110). His view of understanding is analogous to the interaction between people in 'normal' life that I referred to earlier, i.e. directed towards the ‘other’ and towards eliciting a response from the ‘other’ that helps to ‘correct’ the initial (mis)understanding. In Bakhtin’s view, understanding must be directed towards the elicitation of a response because 'all real and integral understanding is actively responsive, and constitutes nothing other than the initial preparatory stage of a response (in whatever form it may be actualised).' (Bakhtin, 1986b: 69).
This is what Bakhtin – at least in translation – calls ‘dialogue’ which should not be confused with dialectics, as dialectics according to Bakhtin is far more impersonal and thus useless:
'Dialogue and dialectics. Take a dialogue and remove the voices (the partitioning of voices), remove the intonations (emotional and individualizing ones), carve out abstract concepts and judgements from living words and responses, cram everything into one abstract consciousness – and that's how you get dialectics.' (Bakhtin, 1986b: 147)
Another demarcation Bakhtin insists on is towards relativism. His dialogue is not a form of relativism as all participants, though respecting each other, do not necessarily accept each others’ positions. Ideally they do not accept each others’ positions at all, and it is the clash of their opinions that forms the dialogue, so that it
'has nothing in common with relativism [...] [B]oth relativism and dogmatism equally exclude all [...] dialogue by making it either unnecessary [...] or impossible' (Bakhtin, 1984: 69)
While these statements might not present us with a working model for research, or even induce us to change our way of 'doing anthropology', they might point us towards a new direction in our attitudes towards anthropology, ethnography and the people we are ‘doing’ anthropology with. This dialogue is no magic cure, however, but has a number of so called 'limitations' that would change the way anthropology is being practised if a dialogic model were to be accepted. One important limitation is the openness of the dialogue. While all academic work should have an ‘open’ character, i.e. be in a constant process of change and adaptation to new circumstances, new evidence, etc., anthropologists and others still tend to regard a book on a certain topic as 'the opinion' of the author without really expecting an author to retract or to completely change his/her views. Following on from his definition of understanding as a continuous interactive process, Bakhtin finds that openness lies in the dialogic 'nature of the word, which always wants to be heard, always seeks responsive understanding, and does not stop at immediate understanding but presses on further and further (indefinitely)' (Bakhtin, 1986b: 127). Any author's book, article, PhD thesis is thus transformed from being a 'masterpiece' into being one utterance – albeit sometimes rather long-winded – in the l a rger on-going dialogue on the topic. These utterances can and should be changed over time, if the author still wants to participate in the dialogue, instead of backing away from it towards other topics. One rather good example of such an evolution can be found in Mark Hobart's articles. Although his basic convictions seem to remain relatively stable, his theories as expressed in his many articles do evolve with everything he reads and comes into contact with (see Hobart, 1982 through to 1998).
This endless dialogue extends even beyond authors to their ideas, which might die if kept under the strict control of one person (Bakhtin, 1984: 88), but will emerge and re-emerge again and again if entered into the dialogue, as Bakhtin elaborates:
'There is neither a first nor a last word and there are no limits to the dialogic context (it extends into the boundless past and the boundless future). Even past meanings , that is, those born in the dialogue of the past centuries, can never be stable (finalized, ended once and for all) they will always change (be renewed) in the process of subsequent, future development of the dialogue. At any moment in the development of the dialogue there are immense, boundless masses of forgotten contextual meanings, but at certain moments of the dialogue's subsequent development along the way they are recalled and invigorated in renewed form (in a next context). Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will have its home - coming festival. ' (Bakhtin, 1986c: 170)
For academics used to instilling and practising reverence for the written word this means a rethinking of academic life itself. In my opinion, this kind of rethinking would breathe new life into many academic debates that suffer from predictability as none of those involved expect anybody to actually change their opinions about anything. In a way most academic debates have become exchanges of monologues in which the participants do not even need to listen to each other any more, as they already know what the others will say. This unwillingness to engage in dialogue, an unwillingness to change one's opinions, ultimately is a posture of supreme confidence in one's own convictions, but not an attitude I would want to associate with any academic researcher, much less with an anthropologist supposedly sensitive and open to cultural and other changes.
Bakhtin insists on this open nature of the dialogue, because he believes that the human intelligence and its products are not reducible to systems and can only be 'captured' within a never-ending dialogue, as Emerson points out:
'For Bakhtin, a human intelligence is always more creative and surprising than anything that could be wholly embedded or extracted as a sign, a system, or an equivalency. And this is so because the voiced utterances and observable events that constitute an existing reality do not exhaust it: there is always unregistered potential, a field of real – albeit unrealized – possibilities that are crucial to its "feel" and provide it with an open future.' (Emerson, 1996: 111)
In the context of fieldwork, Bakhtin is adamantly against something like 'participant observation'. While it is obvious that he would be against mere 'observation' as he would prefer to advise entering into a dialogue with people, he is against any participatory ideas, because as participants we lose our position as viable counterparts in the dialogue with the people we research. Dialogue becomes impossible (see Alexandrov and Struchkov, 1993: 355 and Bakhtin, 1990: 87):
'There exists a very strong, but onesided and thus untrustworthy, idea that in order better to understand a foreign culture, one must enter into it, forgetting one's own, and view the world through the eyes of this foreign culture [...]. Of course, a certain entry as a living being into a foreign culture [...] is a necessary part of the process of understanding it; but if this were the only aspect, it would be merely duplication and would not entail anything new or enriching. Creative understanding does not renounce itself, its own place in time, its own culture; and it forgets nothing. After all, a person cannot actually see or make sense of even his own exterior appearance as a whole, no mirrors or photographs will help him, only others can see and understand his authentic exterior, thanks to their spatial outsideness and thanks to the fact that they are others [...]. In the realm of culture, outsideness is the most powerful lever of understanding. ' (Bakhtin, 1986a: 6f)This shift towards dialogue would make necessary several changes to the way we behave in the field. Suddenly, we would have to pay more than mere lip service to 'emancipating' the people we 'do research on'. It is no longer enough simply to report that the people we research or work with in the field 'do not necessarily agree with (and some are strongly opposed to) the conclusions in this book' (Gladney, 1996: XX). Seeing the people who participate in our research as counterparts means reporting their opinions as well and their reasons for opposing one's conclusions, something Gladney does not do.
One of the important features of my fieldwork was, that I did not merely observe, ask questions and take notes, but actively engaged in discussions with people on the subjects I or they found interesting. I told them my opinions about what they were doing and my conclusions and discussed these with them. This 'owning up' to one's opinions wasn't quite as hard as I had been told and had believed before going to the field, nor were 'the locals' too uneducated to understand my reasoning either – which was another caveat given to me.
The advantage of engaging 'the other' in such a way is, that we become more 'recognisable' to them, we become persons with convictions, feelings and thoughts, instead of trying to 'pretend' to be friends but limiting real interaction to the barest minimum so as not to disturb the waters we are looking at:
'Whatever I sign, I must work with; if I make a habit of refusing to sign, for what - ever reason, I forfeit my identity and become what Bakhtin calls a "pretender". Only after I have signed an act can my consciousness move outward in the world and engage other consciousnesses. And since that real world is a source of infinite surprise, fragmentation, and one-timeonly events, only my personal signature, affixed over and over again, makes possible an even provisional unity for my personality. ' (Emerson, 1996: 117)
This of course necessitates that we familiarise ourselves with the people we do our research with (Bakhtin, 1984: 132) and that they get to know us as well. It does not stop there, though. It means taking up a position, maybe even alienating some of the people we are interested in working with to such an extent as to make fieldwork impossible, but also having to reflect what our opinions, positions and judgements mean for our relationships with the people we research.
As a practical matter it might be a good idea to try and start a first draft of one's paper, article, thesis, etc. while in the field. I know that the objection against this will be one of time and of access to bibliographical resources. However, in my experience it is definitely possible, to store a good part of the academic sources one wants to use on the laptop almost everybody is taking to the field nowadays. It is in fact time saving to start the write-up in the field. In my case, my attention was refocused on the problems I hadn't yet thought about and unworkable theories became apparent. I know that many people will accuse me of thus forcing my fieldwork experience into the strait-jacket of my theories, as I don't give myself the chance to experience the supposedly ‘radically different’. My answer is that the discussion of one's approach, methodology and paper with the people one is writing about is probably more radically different than anything else anthropologists have done so far. It allows for 'pressing' and correction by the people one studies.
To sum my approach up: I think it is possible to ignore or rather answer the epistemological question, if and only if the researcher stays within a dialogue with all the people concerned, both in academia and in the field – and beyond both (see Couldry, 1996: 317). Maintaining a dialogue means:
• accepting the fluidity of the dialogue and one's own position (see Shotter, 1994: 4);
• respecting people as equals, especially the people we research;
• accepting one's personality while doing fieldwork, instead of denying it;
• accepting that ethnography is something that takes place between cultures and between individuals and is not, and should never be, something someone from one culture does to others from a different culture.
It is this view of academia and of the people I worked with during my fieldwork, that enabled me to 'do anthropology' without forcing myself into schizophrenia and without having to look at everyone around me as if they were merely 'objects of observation'. I am 'untidily implicated in the lives of the people' that I 'work with and study,' and want to 'start from the recognition of the inescapability of this implication.' (Hobart, 1997: 4). 'The world is quite different from the ideal and imaginary conditions achievable in a laboratory. […]. A dialectic, or a dialogue, might be more useful than an arrogant professional monologue.' (Hobart, 1990: 6).
References cited
Alexandrov, Daniel and Anton Struchkov. 1993. Bakhtin’s Legacy and the History of Science and Culture: An Interview with Anatolii Akhutin and Vladimir Bibler. Configurations 1.3, 335-386.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination (ed.) Michael Holquist. Trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.
–––––. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Trans. by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
–––––. 1986a. Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff. In Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (ed.) Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.
–––––. 1986b. Speech Genres. In Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (ed.) Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.
–––––. 1986c. Towards a Methodology for the Human Sciences. In Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (ed.) Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.
–––––. 1990. Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays (ed.) Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Couldry, Nick. 1996. Speaking about others and speaking personally:
Reflections after Elsbeth Probyn’s Sexing The Self. Cultural Studies 10, 315-333.
Emerson, Caryl. 1996. Keeping the Self Intact During the Culture Wars: A Centennial Essay for Mikhail Bakhtin. New Literary History 17.1, 107-126.
Gladney, Dru C. 1996. Muslim Chinese: ethnic nationalism in the People’s Republic. 2nd edition (Harvard East Asian monographs 149). Cambridge (Mass.) and London: Harvard University Press.
Hobart, Mark. 1982. Meaning or moaning? an ethnographic note on a little-understood tribe. In Semantic anthropology (ed.) David Parkin (ASA 22). London: Academic Press.
–––––. 1990. In defense of the indefinable: the relevance of culture in the contemporary world. Public lecture delivered on August 18th to the Pusat Kajian Kebudayaan Bali, Centre for Balinese Cultural Studies, Universitas Udayana in Denpasar, Bali.
–––––. 1996a. AVery Peculia Practice, or the Unimportance of Penguins. Paper to the Anthropology Department Seminar, SOAS, 14th. October 1996.
–––––. 1996b. Cultural Studies will be the Death of Anthropology. For the motion. Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory, Manchester, 30th. November 1996.
–––––. 1997. The end of the world news: disarticulating television in Bali. To be published in Staying local in the global village: Bali in the twentieth century by M. Hobart.
–––––. 1998. Drunk on the screen: Balinese conversations about television and advertising. Paper to the conference on Asian Advertising and Media held at the University of Hong Kong 22nd to 25th. April.
Shotter, John. 1994. Now I can go on: Wittgenstein and communication. Paper given at University of Calgary, Department of Communication, Sept 30th, 1994.
David Herold is completing his PhD on the relation between education and progress in a small minority in Northwest China.