Witchcraft, Power and Politics


Witchcraft, Power and Politics : Exploring the Occult in the South African Lowveld

By ISAK NIEHAUS WITH ELIAZAAR MOHLALA AND KALLY SHOKANE

First published 2001
by PLUTO PRESS
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
and 22883 Quicksilver Drive,
Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA


Niehaus_Witchcraft Power and Politics.pdf

Where did anthropology Go? Or The need for “Human Nature”

Where did anthropology Go? Or The need for “Human Nature” 
Professor Maurice Bloch 

I was recently asked the question: “Where did anthropology go?” by a psycholinguist from a famous American university. She was commenting on the fact that she had tried to establish contact with the anthropology department of her institution, hoping that she would find somebody who would contribute to a discussion of her main research interest: the relation of words to concepts. She had assumed that the socio- cultural anthropologists would have general theories or, at least, ask general questions, about the way children’s upbringing in different cultures and environments would constrain, or not constrain, how children represented the material and the social world. She was hoping for information about exotic societies in order to gain a broader cross-cultural perspective. She was hoping that her enquiry about a topic that is inevitable in any discussion about culture would be equally central to the three disciplines of psychology, linguistics and anthropology, and would therefore be an ideal ground for constructive co-operation, that is, one where the different parties could articulate and challenge the theories on which their different disciplines are built. 
In fact she found that nobody was interested in working with her, but what surprised her most was the hostility she perceived, caused, not only by the suggestion that cultural social anthropologists were interested in simple exotic societies, but even more by the idea that they might be interested in formulating and answering general questions about the nature of the human species and that, therefore, their work could be compatible with disciplines such as hers. 
The lack of any generalising theoretical framework within which her research interest might find a place is not surprising when we look at what kind of thing is done in many university departments under the label social or cultural anthropology. Take for example the interests listed on the web site of the anthropology department of the University of California at Berkeley (which incidentally is not where our psycholinguist came from). Here are some Genomics and the anthropology of modernity, Science and reason, The anthropologies of education, law, tourism, Food and energy, space and the body, Post-soviet political discourse, Violence, trauma and their political and subjective consequences, Social and cultural history, (Post) colonialism, Social mediation of mind. 
I do not intend here to criticise the value of the studies, which lie behind these titles. In fact, I know that many are excellent and interesting, but one need not be surprised that our psycho linguist got so little response to her request for a coherent body of theories from anthropologists. What possible core of shared questions and interest could departments of this sort have to which her interest might then be related? 
This incoherent fragmentation, in any and every direction, so long as the topics will find favour with funding bodies and seems relevant to the concerns of the moment, makes the existence of anthropology departments as working units difficult to justify intellectually, especially in a school of social science where others are dealing with these same topics. Indeed, this is what Eric Wolf, already complained about shortly before his death, and led to the near destruction of anthropology at Stanford University. 
But are we dealing simply with a problem internal to the ways in which universities function, simply an accidental result of the way the discipline has evolved in the academy, yet another illustration of the inevitable arbitrariness and shift of boundaries within science? The frustrated hope on the part of our psycholinguist that she could obtain guidance to her questions from professional anthropologists might indeed seem a rather limited problem of communication within modern universities, where, after all, it is common for people from one discipline to misunderstand the nature of another. 
I shall argue here that there is much more at stake, because the negative response to our psycholinguist’s request for a discipline, such as what anthropology might reasonably be expected to be, is far from an arcane missed appointment, internal to the cloistered world of academia. 
Let us consider a very different situation. 
One evening, about a year ago, I was doing fieldwork in the little village of Ranomena. This is a place deep in the Malagasy forest, cut off from all modern means of communication and only reachable on foot. I was sitting in near total darkness in the tiny house of the family who have been my hosts, on and off, during several periods of field study, scattered over almost thirty years. The evening meal had been eaten and consequently the fire had burned down. This was, as is usual at this time, a rare moment of relaxation and reflection, in which I joined freely. The conversation soon turned, as it often did, to questions of a philosophical nature, though it had begun in a less general way. People had been imitating, remembering and making fun of the accents and the vocabularies of other ethnic groups in the huge and culturally very varied island of Madagascar. The people of the village, the men at least, are experts in linguistic and cultural diversity since, when they are young and vigorous, they go as wage labourers to many different parts of the country, where they work for several month at a time as woodcutters or carpenters, and where they are often employed by merchants originating from different parts of the Indian subcontinent. After many anecdotes about the linguistic variations they had encountered on their travels, the conversation rapidly took on a more theoretical turn. If people used different words, did they understand the phenomena they designated so differently in the same way? If we are all related, how had this variation come about? Were the speakers of unrelated languages fundamentally different types of moral beings? And, if they were, as some maintained, was this due to the language they had learnt, or was the language the manifestation of a deeper cause? In order to grapple with this problem the discussants proposed a thought experiment. What about the children of those Malagasy who had emigrated to France and who only spoke French? Were they in any sense really Malagasy in their social morality, in their ways of thinking and working and in their emotions? Would their skin be whiter than that of their parents? And, if not, as everybody seemed finally to agree, if they came back to live in Madagascar, would their dark skin mean that they would learn Malagasy more easily than, for example, I had, or the children of Europeans? Thus the question of what is learnt and what is innate was formulated and reformulated in many, often, completely abstract forms. 
The seminar continued. 
If there was so much variation and mutability, could one say that all humans were one species or several? Were there discontinuities in racial and cultural variation or only a continuum? If we were all one family and, at bottom, all thought alike, how could it be that the histories of different groups of mankind had been so dissimilar and had given rise to such differences in technological knowledge and wealth? Some people had just seen amazing mobile phones in the capital. Why were the people from overseas, which the people of Ranomena tend to consider all much of a muchness, continually fighting, when they, by contrast, were all so peaceful? And, given that there is only one God, (it is a Catholic village), how could it be that in the world there are people like the Hindus who do such completely exotic, unthinkable things, as burning their dead? 
These were the questions I recorded in just one evening, but these and other related ones are a familiar feature of intellectual life in Ranomena. People argue among themselves over these matters, whether I am there or not. However, because I was there, and because by now, after much explaining, the villagers of Ranomena have some idea of the kind of subject I teach, they turned to me for advice and expertise. After all, as they often tell me, I had seen and read about many more different people in the world than they had, I had studied long and hard and had gathered in myself the wisdom of many other knowledgeable people who had been my teachers. So, what could I say about these crucial questions? Well, I answered as best I could. But, what strikes me most clearly, as I reflect on such pleasant and interesting evenings, is that my co-villagers, in spite of their lack of formal education, were coming to the subject of anthropology with much the same questions as we might expect from anybody who turns to our discipline in a country such as Britain, whether as students, as readers of learned publications, or as practitioners of other disciplines in the academy. Indeed, as you may have noted, the very same question was being asked by the psycholinguist of people who call themselves anthropologists as did some of the Malagasy villagers. 
The point I want to stress through these anecdotes is that there is a widespread, perhaps universal, demand for a subject such as anthropology and that this demand, perhaps hunger would not be too strong, exists irrespective of culture, degree of education and intellectual tradition. People ask these questions of anthropologists because anthropology would seem to be the kind of discipline which might provide answers. It is to get answers to questions such as those that preoccupied the villagers of Ranomena, that people in Britain, or indeed anywhere, choose to study anthropology. 
But, had the villagers of Ranomena actually penetrated the portals of the academy, would they have to face the same disappointment as our psycholinguist? The answer is probably yes. And, in order to understand how and why this state of affairs has come about I attempt here an extremely brief overview of the academic history of the discipline. One, which will inevitably involve gross oversimplification and will ignore many counter currents and eddies. I want to understand how and why the anthropology which others seek is becoming absent from anthropology departments. I want to argue that it is this absence which makes interdisciplinary cooperation and disciplinary coherence impossible. 
The late nineteenth century was a time when a number of highly influential anthropological books were published. These purported to give a general account of the history of humanity in terms of general evolutionary laws. Thus, general characteristics of human beings were seen to be the cause of human history, which, therefore, had a necessary and unilineal character. These types of books were not new, but what was new was the fact that these general accounts were to be supported by a scientific research enterprise, the aim of which was to collect empirical evidence in support of the different theories. This became the justification for setting up university chairs and ultimately whole departments of anthropology in many European and American countries, indeed this was the case at LSE. 
The discipline was to operate a bridge between the history of life, up to the emergence of Homo sapiens, the subject matter of zoology, and the history of mankind, from the invention of writing, by which point historians could take over. Evidence to account for what had happened during this gap was to come from the four fields approach, still evident in many contemporary anthropology departments in the United States. The four fields were archaeology, biological anthropology, linguistics and what became social and cultural anthropology. 
The role of social or cultural anthropology in this schema was to provide evidence for the reconstruction of the history of mankind through the study of primitive people. The study of these people was relevant because of a familiar, but fundamental, assumption. The different groups of mankind advanced along a single necessary line of progress, from one stage to another. Technological or intellectual advances were the driving force for forward movement but this was along a road, which was traced by the internal potential of a shared human nature. The itinerary regarding politics, kinship, religion, morals and anything else, was thus universal and what varied was how far different groups had got pushed along. This being so it followed that, if one found a living contemporary group of people using a certain type of primitive technology, for example hunting and gathering, a study of their political organisation, their kinship system, their religion, and so on, would yield information about the politics, kinship, religion and morals of our distant ancestors at the time when they had reached the same point along that single road. By this mean, anthropology could discover the immaterial aspects of the life of those fore bearers whose material prehistory was being only gradually revealed by archaeology. 
This general method was shared by most anthropological accounts of the time, although, of course, the evidence produced in this way was far from clear and, therefore a number of competing accounts of the early history of mankind were produced. All these, however, shared an amazing confidence in the ability of the subject and its methods to fulfil the vast program which it had outlined for itself. These theories are usually described as evolutionist or more precisely as unilineal evolutionist theories and they all rest on a largely unexamined and simple notion of human nature which it was the purpose of the subject to flesh out. 
The period about which I have been talking may be referred to as that of the founders of anthropology. It produced an ordered image of the history of mankind and of cultural and social variation. It is because of this that, in many ways, it was the heyday of anthropology’s popular success. 
Consequently we may consider what happened next as its twilight. In fact, there is not one but two account to be told about this subsequent history of the dimming of the evolutionists light. The first concerns the reputation among anthropologists of this moment of confidence in their subject and the other its reputation in the wider world beyond. 
Very shortly after its establishment, evolutionist anthropology was destroyed by an obvious but fundamental criticism, which took very different forms, but is always ultimately based on the same objection. This is usually called the theory of diffusionism. I shall use the term here much more widely than is usually done to stress the fact that, in spite of superficial differences, we are always dealing with the same point. Thus I include under the term “diffusionism”, such trends as Geertzian culturalism and “post modernism” which all rest on the same foundation. The basic point of diffusionism- the basic objection to evolutionist anthropology- is that human culture does not proceed along a predetermined line, following a limited number of ordered stages. This is because human beings have the ability to learn from each other and can then pass on acquired traits through communication. This enables them to further build, transform, modify and combine what others have learnt and passed on to them. It is thus possible to argue, perfectly validly, if somewhat simply, that it is human contacts and thus, ultimately history, which, in great part, makes people what they are, rather than their “nature”. For the diffusionists it is not fundamental essential characteristics of human beings that explain history but the accidents of whom we are with and have been with. Unlike animals to whom evolutionary laws apply and who are, in the long term, determined by their biological inheritance, humans, for their part, are determined by other individuals, in other words, they are determined by culture. 

The implications of focusing on the ability of humans to imitate and borrow information and then to pass it on to another by non genetic means is genuinely far reaching. It is what makes culture possible. Since people borrow cultural traits one from another, they can individually combine bits and pieces from different individuals. It follows that there are no naturally distinct social or cultural groups, tribes, peoples, etc. And since these combinations arise from anywhere, anybody and in any order, there are no general predictable laws of history. Because, unlike other animals, humans can transmit acquired characteristics across and within generations, the history of culture becomes an entangled, disordered, infinitely complex mess, quite unlike the ordered procession envisaged by the evolutionists. And since the past was this tangled directionless web, so will be the future; therefore it cannot be predicted. Thus diffusionist theory, by emphasising a fundamental aspect of the species, seemed, at the same time, to have done the opposite, that is remove internal human nature as the determinant source of what happens in history and replaced it with factors which are external. It is as though the ability of humans to communicate and to pass on what they have learnt to others made all innate natural capacities irrelevant to the study of human history. A point of view exemplified in Geertz’s uncharacteristically bad tempered and sarcastic lecture “Anti Anti Relativism” (Geertz 1984). 
Diffusionism was, therefore, made to seem a knock out blow against the original ambition of a science that was going to explain what had happened in human history in terms of a necessary evolutionary sequence. No subsequent theoretical criticism has ever had such an impact. Indeed, the point is so fundamental that it has simply been repeated ever since in many different forms. Talk of “construction” in the social sciences is a reformulation of diffusionism and the miasma (Hacking 1999) surrounding both ideas is the same. More particularly, the emphasis on the “construction” of “the individual” or “the person” shows us where diffusionism always leads by means of a kind of theoretical slippage which I shall go on to discuss. Thus the work of such writers as Weber, Durkheim, Dumont, Foucault and many others is evoked again and again to “unmask” the historical specificity of the notion of the “western individual”, a perfectly obvious point which is incoherently received to mean that the very existence of the study of human beings in general has somehow been made theoretically illegitimate. 
Anthropology began by assuming that human history could be written as the natural history of human beings, as though we were an ordinary kind of animal whose behaviour was governed by the same kind of natural laws as that of other forms of life. This tenet was then apparently totally negated by the emphasis on culture, the product of constitutive communication, the producer of unpredictable historical particularities. Thus, unilineal evolutionary theory of human history was thrown out for a good reason, and a totally opposite view was proposed- one in which people are represented as infinitely variable creatures, constructed entirely by the whims of innumerable accidents of communication- came in by default. In a way reminiscent of antique dichotomies, animals were seen as constructed by nature and humans by their freed minds. It is the laziness so often surrounding the words which led and leads to these outdated nature/culture debates since they can mean either simply that all humans act and live in the world in terms of representations which are culturally inflected, a totally obvious and unobjectionable point, or it can mean that these “constructions” enable people to “construct” the world they attempt to grasp as though this was formless plasticine, with minds which are equally able to entertain any old representation, a position which it would be impossible to defend were it ever to be examined. 
However, in the fog of such imprecision diffusionism/constructionism has meant that anthropology could not anymore, have human nature as its subject because there was no such thing. Like history, social and cultural anthropology could then only be an assemblage of anecdotes about this and that. And this is, by and large, what it has become and what has produced the heterogeneous list of interests of the Berkeley Anthropology department. The contemporary situation seems therefore to be one where evolutionism has been dismissed and diffusionism has won, thereby leaving anthropology without the only centre it could have: the study of human beings. 
This is well illustrated by the form of most contemporary anthropology teaching. At the risk of caricature, anthropology courses, whether introductory or more specialised, have in common the following general structure. They begin with a historical section, where the general theories of early anthropologists are explained. These may be from long ago, such as those of Boas, Durkheim, Westermark or Morgan, or, more likely, from the middle distance, Mauss, Radcliffe Brown, Malinowski, Van Wouden, or Levi-Strauss. Then, what is wrong with these theories is demonstrated, usually by means of ethnographic examples, and there the matter rests. Students are, therefore, left with a feeling of having little to say about the subject. They have lost a few misleading illusions in the process, which is all to the good; but, also, more insidiously, they have learnt that the very attempt to generalise -as the historical figures did- was, in and of itself, wrong. To be a good anthropologist thus seems to require to have learnt not to ask the questions which the Ranomena villagers, or our psycholinguist, ask. 
This negative stance is not simply due to the way anthropology has developed within the academy. It is also due to the non-academic reputation of early evolutionary theories. 
Ideas and publications proposing a unilineal evolution of human societies, going through a fixed number of stages, greatly antedates the academic anthropological evolutionists. But, probably, in part because these were so much in accord with their time, the works of the founders had an extraordinary contemporary influence, though often, somewhat indirectly, through such writers as Freud, Marx and several influential literary and artistic figures such as T.S. Eliot, Graves and Breton. The late nineteenth century and early twentieth was thus the period when anthropology, as an academic subject, although a very young academic subject, had an enormous impact on intellectual life. Since then, however, save for a few moments that, for a short time, seem to buckle the trend, the general influence of contemporary anthropology has declined. The work of more recent anthropologists, especially those whose work has come out since the 1950, with the possible exception of that of Margaret Mead on sex and Levi-Strauss on structuralism, has had little influence on the main intellectual currents of the time. 
On the other hand, outside anthropology departments, the influence of the founders of the discipline has continued unabated, distilled in various forms in the general culture in which we bathe. The idea of an evolutionary sequence of societies, customs, laws, religions, morals, extremely similar to that set out by the evolutionist anthropologists is still with us. Thus, few people flinch at the implications of remarks such as “It is particularly shocking to witness such brutality in the twentieth century and in an advanced country.” Even more surprising is the fact that books such as those of Tylor, Morgan or Frazer, which in their times sold far far more than any contemporary anthropology works, are still in print and still much read today, though not in anthropology departments. The reason for the continuing influence of these writers and the relative lack of influence of their successors is not difficult to find. It is simply that these early authors gave answers, however unacceptable, to the questions asked by the Malagasy villagers and by our colleagues in other disciplines, while more recent anthropologists have nothing to say. 
The fact that professional anthropologists live in a world where explanatory theories they consider obsolete still dominate, while their own voices are little heard, has a reinforcing effect on the negative theoretical character of teaching. Every year university anthropologists are faced with new generations of students who have, or are imagined to have, consciously or unconsciously, absorbed anthropological evolutionist theories. Thus the teaching of anthropology is often envisaged by the professionals as an endless fight against erroneous doctrines held by the neophytes and which, ironically, were largely encouraged, if not created, by their discipline’s fore bearers. 
But there is yet a further element in the educational scene which influences anthropology and pushes it still further in this same direction. 
Apart from the general impression that attempting to formulate general theories is a bad and obsolete habit, another message comes through, loud and clear, in the teaching of anthropology. One of the very bad things which the early anthropologists did, was to have placed their own values above those of other cultures, thereby seeing the process of evolution as necessarily progressing towards peoples such as themselves and towards types of societies such as their own. It followed that those most unlike themselves were rude primitives of the very lowest order. To do this sort of thing is called ethnocentrism and is very wicked. Such a message is easily and well received by the kind of students who are likely to choose anthropology and who come from a world where the evils of racism and intolerance have been all too clear. 
Also involved in the notion of ethnocentrism, however, is the warning against seeing people of other cultures through the lens of our own values. In fact, two elements should be distinguished here. The first is a methodological point. It is an injunction to anthropologists that the task of interpretation requires as much as possible an effort of imagination. We must try to see others as though from their point of view in order to understand them. Few would quarrel with the benefits of such a stance. But, closely intertwined with this, is the idea that the avoidance of ethnocentrism is not just a matter of a temporary suspension of disbelief, but an absolute injunction, i.e., that we should never judge or evaluate others by the categories or standards of our culture or indeed by any standards at all. This proposal leads inevitably to moral and cognitive relativism. 
Here I want to concentrate on the theoretical, or perhaps the rhetorical, problems involved in cognitive relativism. Cognitive relativism is often adopted without much theoretical scrutiny since it is based on a gut reaction to any attempt at generalisation. Generalisations are felt to be nothing but mere products of the particular cultural configuration of the ethnographer, who is situated, as he or she inevitably is, at a given time in a given place. The demonstration that this is, and has always been, so is a source of great satisfaction to the profession as it demonstrates the superiority of anthropologists over lay people. “What they think of as the bedrock of their ideas, as natural” , is shown to be but the shifting sand of a unique historical conjuncture in a unique location. 
There is no doubt that this kind of criticism of much theory, especially social science theory, is one of the major contributions that anthropologists have made to scientific enquiry. However, such a position can easily slip into a much more radical claim that any generalisation, which will inevitably use an external basis for generalisation, is always illegitimate because it will always be nothing but the projection of the anthropologists way of thinking. This inevitably implies the idea that anthropology as a generalising science about human beings is a mere illusion of particular cultures, or to put it another way, that the very idea of human beings as a subject of study is shown, once again, to be “ethnocentric”. 
We thus find ourselves in the present ridiculous situation. On the one hand when the question: “Is there a common human nature?” is asked, most people, although they probably will consider it rather silly, will answer without hesitation in the affirmative, but, on the other, anthropologists will very much want to answer no, but wont dare to, so they will just go into hiding. Perhaps, part of the reason for this embarrassment is that a straight negation, taken together with what being a member of an anthropology department would seem to mean literally, would imply arguing themselves out of a job. 
The further surreptitious abandonment of a notion of human nature, involved in the condemnation of ethnocentrism in the dialectics of teaching combines dangerously smoothly with the negative stance that the history of the subject has produced. These two elements therefore reinforce each other in an obscure way and produce the situation I described at the outset of this lecture, where, when faced by the kind of request of our psycholinguist, anthropologists, instead of attempting to respond, go into what looks like a silent sulk wrapped in an aura of self righteousness. 
Inevitably, the questioners, whether they are academic colleagues or Malagasy villagers, are less impressed with such a stance than the anthropologists would like them to be. And so, they simply go elsewhere to look for answers to their anthropological questions. And much is available, in the works of writers whose academic affiliations are very varied, but which I label here, for the sake of simplicity, as the new evolutionists. Thus, to mention only some of the most well known, we have Richard Dawkins, a zoologist, explaining kinship (1976), RenĂ© Girard, a scholar of literature, expounding on the origin of religion (1972), Stephen Pinker, a psycho-linguist, telling us about totemism (2002) and Matt Ridley, a scientific journalist, telling us about incest (2003). The impact of such works can easily be seen if we look at the sales of their books, a commercial success which contrast dramatically with that of my colleagues and my own. These books have sold in hundreds of thousands. In other words, they have had the same kind of diffusion as the work of Tylor, Frazer or Morgan had and they probably have a similar influence. The reason is not difficult to find; it is simply that these works seem to offer answers to the repeated questions of a public hungry for anthropology. The answer to the question “Where did anthropology go?” is therefore “to disciplines outside the social sciences where it is doing very well”. In the meantime social and cultural anthropology department, having lost their anchor in human nature, scrounge around for any odd topics, often already well studied in other parts of the academy, in the short term hope of pleasing students and funding authorities. 
We may well ask what is the reaction of professional anthropologists to the competition from those who seem to have taken over the anthropological core. The answer is almost none at all. They consider these new evolutionists theories with so much distaste that they seem to be almost unaware of their existence. Thus, most of my anthropological colleagues seemed, until very recently at least, never to have heard of Dawkins proposal about the nature of culture, or of the word memes which he had coined to express it, and if they had, they failed to know what it means. This was at a time when, if you typed the word on Google you obtained 1,280,000 entries. 
The point is that, not only do anthropologists not produce the same kind of works as those of Pinker or Dawkins, they also seem to have nothing to say about them. They have withdrawn from the fray to a place where they produce a large number of studies, some good, some bad, about this and that, without any guiding reason or without any attempt at building up a coherent body of knowledge. It is, as though they consider the proposals made in this extra disciplinary anthropology so beneath them, that they are unwilling to acknowledge its very existence. 
Part of the distaste of anthropologists towards such work is not simply arrogance; it is the feeling that they have seen it all before. Indeed, when we turn to the writings of these new evolutionists, we usually find exactly the same problems that anthropologists have demonstrated and denounced throughout the twentieth century in the work of the founders. For in the work of these writers we come across, for example, the old easy assumption that contemporaries with simple technology are fossils of an earlier age, that human groups form distinct empirical entities, that there are obvious and necessary connections between technology and such things as ancestor worship etc. 
Most fundamental of all, however, is the assumption that internal characteristics of human nature can be used directly to account for specific cultures and histories. It is a bit as if someone proposed to account for the pattern of motor traffic in London with an explanation of how the internal combustion engine functions. These writers are simply often repeats of the old evolutionists, although they sometime modify their position by according some place to particular cultures and historical conjunctures. But, in the end, these unique characteristics are represented as merely superficial, or hiding an unchanging and unchangeable universal base. The reaction of contemporary anthropologists then is to repeat the, up to a point, totally legitimate diffusionist points. It sometimes seems as though we were doomed to endlessly repeat the same confrontation between theories based on unacceptable and often superficial views of human nature, but which are nevertheless listened to, and non-theories which are little more than avoiding saying anything and which are therefore ignored. 
But is this bind really necessary? I think not, and the first step in freeing ourselves from this endless to and fro is to note that the diffusionist/evolutionist dichotomy, as it has been interpreted, carries with it quite unnecessary baggage. The evolutionists are believed to necessarily see human nature as a deterministic procrustean bed which makes particularistic history either impossible or a superficial irrelevance. The diffusionists talk as though they must replace evolutionist determinism with such immaterial disembodied phenomena as cultural traits and more recently symbols, representations and dialogues. Thus the diffusionist reaction to evolutionism bundles together a profound point about the nature of human beings, i.e. the revolutionary historical implications of the kind of brain possessed by Homo Sapiens with its ability to communicate, and, a quite different, and indeed contrary, usually totally unexamined, philosophical jump from materialism to the purest of idealism. An idealism which means that questions such as: what are human beings like? cannot even be approached. It is this idealism and its consequent refusal of a base to what we study which, first of all, leads to the incoherence of the subject and, secondly, to its inability to cooperate with other subjects which are not similarly ashamed to be studying the phenomenon Homo Sapiens. 
The point is really quite simple. It is essential that the implications of the continual transformation of people in the complex cumulative socio-historical process, best understood as complex communication, be made central, as indeed it was for the diffusionists. And, that consequently, we recognise that human history cannot be seen as the fulfilling of, a once and forever given potential, which inevitably implies unilineality and predictability. But it is equally essential that the recognition of this central fact about people does not take us, in an absent minded sort of way, to a place where people’s bodies, minds and the world in which they exist, have somehow vaporised. 
And here, a third type of approach might help us, an approach in no way so fundamental as evolutionism and diffusionism, though it has sometimes pretended to be so. A position best thought of as a method, with a potential for theory, rather than a theory as such. I call this type of position functionalism, but again, as I did for evolutionism and diffusionism, I use the word in a wider and somewhat different manner than the way it is usually understood. Functionalism is a position that is not often given its due, partly because it was so clumsily and variously theorised. Also, I recognise and accept, the often repeated if over familiar criticism that have been made against theories of self-proclaimed functionalists, such as is found in Radcliffe-Brown’s and Malinowski’s programmatic articles. These criticisms, however, only apply to extreme formulations, which, in fact, were never very significant for actual studies. 
What I understand by functionalism is, above all, a commitment to seeing culture as existing in the process of actual people’s lives, in specific places, as a part of the wider ecological process of life, rather than as a disembodied system of traits, beliefs, symbols, representations, etc. It is not accidental that such a position has developed together with the advocacy for long term field work and that it has waned with the latter’s decline. This is because maintaining a focus on what has been rather misleadingly called the “embodiment” of life processes is difficult away from specific and closely watched instances. Such a stance, therefore, requires a constant effort. 
This is why functionalism, even in the very general sense in which I am using the term here, has been losing ground and why it has been replaced by various theories of the diffusionism/contructionism type. This lack of interest in functionalism is also probably due to the fact that it has been such a European stance, which has been drowned by imported brassy theoretical American debates, the so-called science wars, endlessly stuck in the evolutionist/diffusionist controversy. However, the virtues of what I call functionalism are many. 
Its strength lies in its insistence on the complexity of life in particular places and at particular times, on the fact that in normal practice the many facets of human existence, which other sciences, such as politics, philosophy, economics, art, agriculture, kinship, medicine, psychology and so on… separate for the sake of clarity and simplicity, are inextricably bound together. For functionalism the mental exists in the practical, and both are conjoined functions of bodies in the wider ecology of life. 
Because of its insistence on local anchorings, functionalism cannot avoid facing frontally the particularism of human situations. In this it is like diffusionism and unlike evolutionism. However, it is not subject to diffusionism’s idealism, since it insists on seeing ideas, representations and values as occurring in the natural world of action and transformation, of production and reproduction. It requires, therefore, a form of epistemological monism, uniting people and the environment, the mental and the biological, nature and culture. Thus, it also resists the dichotomies of some of the modern evolutionists, who, wanting to take into account the reality of culture, end up with a type of dualism which sees individuals as partly made up of an immutable universal natural base, and an essentially different superficial, cultural historical, superstructure. 
Functionalism enables us to recognise the inseparable totality created by the particularisms of the specificity of human history and the properties of natural being in the natural world. It can therefore continue the difficult anthropological enterprise and pick up again the empirical and theoretical job of understanding an animal involved in history. This having been said, however, it is not difficult to foresee the difficulty such a position creates. 
Quite simply by taking so many things into account and refusing to separate them, because they are not separate, one risks finding oneself unable to say much except noting how complicated and interconnected everything is. 
Functionalism is thus good at forcing us to look at the human world as it is and at forcing us to stop ignoring its unpredictable complexity. However, functionalism threatens to overwhelm by the complexity of the task it has set itself. This is because it is an attitude to theory rather than being a theory, though it has sometimes wanted to see itself as such. The functionalist is thus, in desperation, often tempted to give superficial quick fix answers, as did Malinowski, at the end of his life, with his needs theory, or, to take refuge in the mindless contemplation of ethnography for its own sake. Indeed it is ethnography which killed functionalism not theoretical challenge. 
It may thus appear that, if we define our object of study as the unique human combination of unified biological and historical factors, the task of theorising is simply too enormous for our discipline. The point, however, is that, of course, it is. Theory cannot be about what is circumscribed by disciplinary boundaries- these are arbitrary though useful historical accidents-theory is defined by what it is about. 
Let me return to the anecdote I began with. It concerned a psycholinguist who wanted to work in cooperation with anthropologists because she believed that her knowledge of the development of language and conceptualisation in children could contribute to anthropological enquiry, while, for her part, she would gain from what we knew. In this paper I have argued that the reason why such co-operation could not take place was because of the dogmatic and nevertheless largely unexamined refusal by anthropologists to accept that their ultimate aim is the study of human nature, the necessary core of their concerns and the point of contact between disciplines such as psychology and others, including ours, all concerned, with humans, with minds and bodies, living in natural environments. 
However, if we accept what our subject cannot avoid to be about, then communication with many other scientific disciplines, also engaged in this same enterprise, becomes possible. This same enterprise is ultimately theorizing Homo Sapiens. Of course, interdisciplinary communication will still be difficult, but there need not be impassable theoretical partitions. 
Indeed, in this grand alliance, the special appointed task of functionalist anthropology, with its continual insistence on the actual life of specific people in specific places, may, precisely, be to link the different human sciences. These may be separated for good methodological reasons, but heuristic divisions always threaten to gain a false reality. 
From such a perspective, contrary to what the evolutionists imagined, it becomes obvious that anthropology cannot pretend, by itself, to give answers to the questions which most people, including the Zafimaniry sitting around a dying fire deep in the Malagasy forest, quite rightly ask of our discipline. But this will not be a reason for avoiding these requests by disdaining them as do the diffusionist/constructionists. Rather, we will acknowledge that these questions are precisely what we should study together but with other disciplines concerned with the same phenomenon. 

References: 
Dawkins,R. 1976 The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 
Geertz, C. 1984 “Anti Anti-Relativism” American Anthropologist Vol. 86 pp. 263-278 
Gellner, E. 1982 “Relativism and Universals” in M. Hollis and S. Lukes Rationality and Relativism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 
Girard, R. 1972 La Violence et le SacrĂ©. Paris: Grasset 
Hacking, I. 1999 The Social Construction of What? Cambridge.Mass: Harvard. 
De Martino, E. 1977 La Fine del Monda. Torino: Einaudi 
Pinker, S. 2002 The Blank Slate. London: Allen Lane 
Ridley, M. 2003. Nature Via Culture. London: Fourth Estate. 
Schepper-Hughes, N. 1992 Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press. 
Sperber, D. 1982. “Apparently Irrational Beliefs.” in M. Hollis and S. Lukes Rationality and Relativism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 
Stocking, G. 1987 Victorian Anthropology. London: Collier Macmillan. 

The Nature of Magic


The Nature of Magic 

An Anthropology of Consciousness
By Susan Greenwood


The nature of magic.pdf

Interpreting Identities: Advancing Literary Anthropology as a Research Method

Interpreting Identities: Advancing Literary Anthropology as a Research Method  

Dennis J. Sumara, Ph.D. (University of Alberta)

Abstract 
This article advances “literary anthropology” as a research method. In addition to presenting an interpretive text which functions as the report of the author’s engagements with literary fiction, and with philosophical, theoretical, and historical writings, the article provides a theoretical and historical overview of literary anthropology as a research method, with particular attention to how this method is influenced by the hermeneutic philosophic traditions. The article concludes with a discussion of what literary anthropological methods might contribute to literacy education and literacy education research. 

Interpreting Identities: 

Advancing Literary Anthropology as a Research Method 

  Reading and rereading novels has become a preferred way for me to challenge and reinterpret narratives I use to describe the relationship between private and public worlds. In juxtaposing relationships I develop with literary characters to those I have with contents of books that are, more explicitly, theoretical, philosophical and historical, I create commonplaces for critically interpretive work. As I elaborate later, although these commonplaces are organized by texts, responses to texts, and interpretations of relationships among these, the word “commonplaces” refers primarily to the ways in which literary anthropological methods create structures that support interpretation and analysis of collected data. Following Iser’s (1989, 1993) discussions of literary anthropology, these research methods have been influential in helping me to more deeply understand how literary identifications create interesting conditions for the interpretation of human experience. While, in the past, I have published analyses of other reader’s literary experiences (e.g. Sumara, 1996), more recently I have been attempting to incorporate autobiographical and biographical material into my work (e.g. Sumara, in press). 

  In this article, I specifically focus on how I used literary anthropological research methods developed from my engagements with Anne Michaels’ (1996) novel Fugitive Pieces to interpret a relationship to my ancestors, with particular attention to my parents’ emergence from events of World War II. These literary engagements were juxtaposed with historical, philosophical, and theoretical literatures concerned with interpreting relationships among history, memory, culture, geography, language, and identity. In addition to these textual artifacts, I examined personal objects of my own and of my mother’s to analyze how human identity is organized by cultural objects and, as well, how these develop new significance when understood in relation to emergent cultural knowledge. 

  So that my interpretations remain as richly textured as possible, a text which includes excerpts from, and interpretations of, literary fiction, autobiographical narrative, and theoretic and philosophic texts is presented. Following recent work by Alvermann and Hruby (2000) and Luce-Kapler (2000) I offer this text as an illustration of one way text-based research reports might present the researcher’s complicity with matters of research interest. In order to further contextualize my interpretations, I precede this text with a review of influences that have helped me develop both the idea and the practice of literary anthropology as a research method. 

Literary Anthropology as Research Method 

  In her books, Literature as Exploration (1938) and The Reader, The Text, The Poem (1978), Rosenblatt argued that the reading of literary texts is an important and unique way to explore the human condition. Unlike some of her contemporaries who insisted that literary meaning could be extracted from a text or from an examination of the contextual and historical circumstances leading to the production of that text (e.g., Leavis, 1950 [1932]; Hirsch, 1976), Rosenblatt suggested that it is the relationship between reader and text that structures the production of meaning. Concurring with literary reception theorists such as Todorov (1977) and Iser (1978), and following Dewey’s (1916) pragmatist philosophy, Rosenblatt theorized the relationship between reader and text as a site for the production of knowledge, not merely the interpretation of knowledge. As is now commonly believed, readers do not merely extract knowledge from a text, nor do they merely impose personal knowledge on it. Rather, readers and texts and contexts of reading collaborate in the continued inventing and interpreting of knowledge. 

  These sites of production are not, as commonly believed, reserved for experiences that Rosenblatt describes as “efferent.” Lewis (2000) has convincingly argued that the sort of “aesthetic” experiences described by Rosenblatt must include an understanding of the complex ways readers’ identifications with texts are social and political events which create opportunities for the pleasures associated with the development of critical insight. From this perspective, literary engagements can (and usually are) both sites for aesthetic enjoyment and for creative and critical learning. 

  This understanding of reader-response theory is compatible with constructivist (Spivey, 1997; von Glasersfeld, 1995) theories of cognition which describe the learner as co-emergent and co-evolving with the learning that is produced. When a reader engages with a work of literature she or he does not merely experience the characters vicariously or learn moral lessons from their actions. As Beach (2000) has recently shown, the reader’s involvement with text continues to represent the complex ways she or he is involved in various “activity systems,” such as book clubs or classrooms, that both shape and are shaped by literary relationships. And, as the developing field of enactivist learning theory is demonstrating (Davis, Sumara, & Luce-Kapler, 2000; Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, 1991) all of these cultural associations are continually influenced by both biological and ecological systems. These overlapping social, biological, and ecological relationships are made more complex by the human capacity to remember, represent, and reinterpret. In important ways, during and following their active involvement with the literary text, the reader reflects upon past, present and future experiences. 

  In the last several decades, a number of anthropologists have written about the emerging relationship between anthropoloical inquiry and literary studies (e.g., Bateson, M-C, 1994; Behar, 1996; Geertz, 1988). Following post-structural theories of language that conceptualize language as a continually emergent system that is unable to fully represent the fullness of human experience (Derrida, 1976, 1978), they have challenged the commonsense belief that researchers’ are able to represent, unambiguosly and exactly, the experience of others. Their work has contributed to an increased interest by human science researchers in the relationship between knowledge and literacy and literary representation practices. Because most human science researchers depend on print text for the dissemination of its research, the question of authorship and of the relationships between truth claims and the writing of text has been closely examined (Behar, 1996; Clifford & Marcus, 1986; Richardson, 19--). Over the years, this has helped researchers to understand that, while there continues to be an obligation to interpret culture, the reporting of this must be understood as a particular kind of fiction, where fiction is understood as a selection and interpretation by the author of experienced events (Lather, 19--). Understanding research reports as forms of fictional representation has facilitated an understanding of ethnographic writing as an interpretive art which relies upon many literary conventions in representations of knowledge (Richardson, 1997). 

  Iser (1989, 1993) has named interpretive practices associated with reader/text relations a “literary anthropology.” With this phrase he suggests that while the reader will always have an interpretation of the text she or he is reading, the interpretation itself participates in the ongoing development of the reader’s self identity. Linked to Bleich’s (1978) concept of interpretive community, which describes the way individual responses to literature are inextricable from the interpersonal, intertextual experiences of reading, literary anthropological research is organized by the belief that a relationship to a literary text can become an interesting location for the continued interpretation of culture and the way culture is, as Heidegger (1966) argued, historically weighted. It is within these literary commonplaces that readers collect past, present and projected interpretations of themselves and their situations. 

  The relationships developed with literary fictions, however, do not complete the interpretive project announced by the practice of literary anthropology. Literary relationships can only exist as information alongside other remembered and imagined experiences of the reader. In order to create critical awareness from these literary anthropological events some explicit interpretive process is required. In preparing the research report that I present later in this article, for example, I spent several weeks re-reading and responding to my notes from previous readings of Fugitive Pieces and making notes of non-literary works which, I believed, were topically related to matters of research interest. 

Hermeneutic Research Practices 

  The process of literary anthropological research only begins with practices of juxtapostional reading and note-taking. These interpreted reader responses require hermeneutic interpretation if they are to become useful to the researcher and, eventually, to those who examine the researchers’ published interpretations. Following the philosophical writings of Gadamer (1990) and curriculum theory developed by Smith (1991) and myself (1996), hermeneutic inquiry might be best understood as the project of trying to make sense of the relationship between experiences of being human and practices of making and using knowledge. Hermeneutic inquiry seeks to illuminate the conditions which make particular experiences and interpretations of those experiences possible. Understood as such, hermeneutic interpretation is not merely a report of how things work, or an inquiry into the socio-political architecture of these events but, rather, is the activity of engaging in creative interpretations. 

  For Gadamer, and for his mentor Heidegger (1966), hermeneutic inquiry and interpretation moved beyond its origins as biblical and legal exegesis and entered into the realm of the interpretation of human experience. Both philosophers aimed to develop hermeneutic inquiry as the study of the complex relations among human subjectivity, language, and culture. Most importantly, they insisted that all understanding is sedimented with prior experience and must be understood historically. Any event of interpretation, then, must not only consider immediate contextual circumstances but, as well, must be developed around the way these circumstances have been historically influenced. From this perspective, the historical and contemporary cannot be neatly excised from one another but, rather, can only be understood relationally (van Manen, 1990). An experience of identity, then, is always one where past, present, and projected understanding merge into events of consciousness that, in part, are presented and shaped by language. Gadamer (1990) developed this view into a dialectical hermeneutics where understanding is described as the interpretation of relationships between persons and cultural artifacts. As one such cultural artifact, the literary text, when studied in relation to the reader and the act of reading, becomes an important site for the interpretation of human memory and history. 

  As Gadamer (1990) has argued, in order for work to be considered hermeneutic, it needs to be historically informed. For me, this means that subjects of research interest must become known as complexly and deeply as possible. In order to try to understand my relationship to my parents, for example, I have spent years reading histories, memoirs, literary texts, and philosophical arguments written by those who are interested in matters connected to events of World War II, including the exodus of Germans from Europe after the war. As I read these texts, I always annotated them, and created files of “booknotes” which contained favourite quotes and short interpretive response passages. These booknotes were filed in binders. Because I concur with theorists such as Iser (1993), Eco (1994), and Rorty (1989) who argue that literary texts (particularly novels) create strong reader identifications and opportunities for interpretation of the meanings generated, I begin processes of analysis by selecting one novel that functions as my “commonplace text.” Usually, this is a text I have read several times. As I complete each reading, I continue my practice of recording cryptic notes into margins and on any other white spaces available. As well, I record the date and conditions of my reading experiences on the inside front cover. Each time a reading is completed, I re-visit my “booknotes” for that novel and add any new quotes that I have found interesting and, as well, any new interpretive passages that I think about as I am typing in these quotes. 

  I consider these textual marking, re-marking, and response activities to contribute to hermeneutic inquiry since they remind me, as a researcher, to try to remember that all experiences are both historical and contextual. Each time I re-visit a literary text that I have previously annotated, I remember the context of my last reading(s) and, at the same time, notice how my current reading context has changed. In forgrounding the historical and contextual aspects of my interpretive situations and practices, and in creating data that represents these aspects, I am developing an archive of data that supports my research questions and interests.  

  At the same time, these textual annotating and re-reading practices help to foreground the way that language continues to interact with memory in the ongoing development of human identities. Although language is a human invention, or as Foucault (19--) has argued a “technology of the self,” it is seldom considered as such. Because it has become so intertwined into human societies, language has become the unnoticed backdrop of experience and, therefore, is no longer understood to be a cultural tool. As I revisit literary texts I have read and annotated more than once, I am continually reminded of the complex and ever-evolving relationships among language, memory, forms of representation, and senses of personal and cultural identities. 

Literary Texts as Commonplaces 

  Significant to literary anthropological research methods is the practice of using a literary text as the “commonplace” around which ideas are developed and interpreted. For me, and for those who have used the method with me, this practice helps organize data and other information without become overwhelmed with the experience of trying to include too much detail in the interpretive report. 

  It is important to note, however, that I select novels to function as commonplaces that offer what Iser (1978) describes as instances of indeterminacy. He describes indeterminacies as those gaps in understanding suggested by the text that must be filled in by the reader. Although, of course, all literary texts contain indeterminacies, I aim to select texts that challenge myself and/or the readers with whom I am working to expand our perceptions and interpretations. For example, in my research with grade five and six elementary school students (Sumara, 1998) I selected Lois Lowry’s (1993) science fiction novel The Giver. Although most adult readers would likely consider this novel an easy-to-read example of science fiction, for the students it proved to contain many indeterminacies that required explicit interpretation. In my research with high school English teachers who were interested in learning about the relationship between their personal literary reading experiences and their teaching practices(Sumara, 1996), it was necessary to use a novel that rather dramatically departed from structures known by avid readers of literature. In this research, Michael Ondaatje’s (1992) complex novel The English Patient was necessary to create the desired effect. In the research described in this article, the novel Fugitive Pieces was sufficiently unusual in its narrative structure to provoke me to read slowly, to reread, and to elaborate productive interpretive sites from the indeterminacies provoked by my engagement with this text. 

  Literary anthropological research, from my perspective, is distinguished from all forms of literary criticism through its interest in interpreting and further developing what is conditioned by literary identifications and interpretations, rather than emphasizing the interpretations themselves. And so, while my and my research collaborators’ interpreted identifications with characters and plots is crucial to the development of insight, these only account for one part of the process. More crucial is the way ongoing rereadings of the texts create a form of mindfulness, similar to a meditative practice, where researchers continue to collect new information and interpretations into the commonplace organized by their literary engagements. With each return to the literary text, the reader/researcher is compelled to interpret the temporal period that exists between this reading and the last one, thereby creating a generative recursive process. 

  Many have wondered if this process is limited to print fiction. Can literary anthropological work be created through identifications and responses to other representational forms, such as memoirs, theoretical texts, or movies or television shows? Concurring with arguments made by Eco (1994), I believe that literary texts create generous locations for interpretive inquiry because of the way readers organize their perceptions with them. When readers engage with memoirs, for example, they believe that what is being presented is an account of something that actually has happened. The reader of memoir, then, agrees to believe that what the writer is reporting is “true,” even if the reader understands this as a subjective truth. Novels, however, are another matter. In writing a novel, the author pretends to be telling the truth and the reader pretends to believe that what the author is writing is true. It is the experience of “pretending to believe” that creates the sort of open, playful interpretive space that allows readers to insert, in meaningful ways, their own experiences and interpretations to account for perceived gaps in the narrative. While a reader might be reluctant to invent missing details in a memoir that is being read, an experienced reader has no hesitation inventing details to overcome indeterminacies while reading a novel. 

  This experience if “pretending to believe,” of course, occurs whenever persons watch television comedies or dramas, or when viewing a movie, or even when interacting with contacts on Internet chatlines. However, it is my contention that these experiences do not usually create the same depth of interpretive experience that can occur with repeated readings and interpretations of novels. This, however, does not mean that identifications with other forms of imaginative forms does not have a contribution to make in the ongoing human quest to develop personal and cultural insights. In my teaching and research, I sometimes include the viewing and interpreting of movies with students and research collaborators. If the movies are sufficiently “writerly” and if there are opportunities, over time, to view the movie several times, and engage in juxtapositional reading and interpretation practices, these can create similar commonplaces for interpretation. Missing, of course, is the opportunity for viewers of movies to leave a trace of their engagements in the way readers of novels are able to do. 

Gathering and Interpreting Data 

  I have learned that success with literary anthropological methods, to a large extent, depends on the reader’s ability to “mark” and “re-mark” the text that is being read. In the research I have reported in this article, for example, it was critical that I have access to the same copy of Fugitive Pieces for my multiple readings in order to notice how my perceptions and interpretations were evolving. Like the artifacts I have collected representing my and my mother’s lived experiences, these textual tracings create moorings around which past experiences and interpretations of those experiences are organized and, importantly, where new interpretations emerge. 

  One of the most challenging aspects of the development of literary anthropology as a research method has been to learn how to represent the complexity of the “commonplaces” that are developed during the research and interpretation process. How is it possible to create research reports that present insights developed from literary anthropological methods that include some reference to the complex literary and non-literary associations which enabled these insights, without overwhelming and/or confusing the reader with too many details? Further, how is it possible to create a research report that offers conclusions while still retaining sufficient indeterminacy that challenges the reader to feel able to enlarge the interpretations? 

  Although the “reports” of literary anthropological research always include references to and interpretations of literary characters and their situations, these are only presented to demonstrate how these have contributed to the development of ideas that are of interest to the researcher. In the interpretive text presented later, for example, I discuss my identifications with and interpretations of characters and situations in Fugitive Pieces in order to point to insights that have been, only in part, conditioned and influenced by those identifications. Because my intention in this report is to provide a theoretical argument regarding the relations between history and memory, and between language and geography, I must also present my interpreted identifications with other texts I have read, including theoretical and philosophical texts, and examples from my out-of-text experiences. 

  So that the “report” of insights developed from these juxtapositional reading, response, and interpretive practice remain somewhat consistent with their writerly influences, it is important that it also be structured with sufficient indeterminacies so that the reader is able to become more explicitly engaged in an interpretive collaboration with the author. Although, as a researcher, I must present, as clearly as I am able, some of the insights generated from the literary anthropological research presented, I must also try to create an open text--one that offers sufficient information to conditions and guide perception, without foreclosing possibilities for new understanding to be developed. 

  If these literary commonplaces are to become useful and interesting for others, however, they must become resymbolized into artifacts that can live both alongside and after the life of the researcher. Just as Anne Michaels creates literary fiction to represent some of her critical conclusions and interpretations, I create research reports that aim to function similarly. In the next section I offer Part I of a research report that attempts to show the complex relations of language, history, and memory. Following Part I is a short “interlude” that provides theoretical support for Part II. 

  In this interpretive text, I have included a number of quotations from Fugitive Pieces. I have done so for three primary reasons. First, although decontextualized from the novel, the quotes, in themselves, point to concepts that I am attempting to develop in the narrative and expository sections of the text. And so, while most readers of the research report will likely not have read Fugitive Pieces, they should still find the quotes useful. In most instances, I have not indicated which character is associated with the quotes since this knowledge, in my view, does not contribute to the development of ideas presented in the research text. My second reason for including the quotations is to remind readers that the research methods and interpretive practices have been developed primarily around readings and responses to this novel. My last reason for including the quotes is to “interrupt” the expository/narrative flow of the other portions of the research report, reminding readers that human experience is not easily represented, and most certainly cannot be represented fully by any text. In creating an interrupted text, I hope to continually remind readers that my interpretations are contextually and historically specific and, as well, that they are inevitably incomplete. 

• • • 

PART I: History and Memory 

“Write to save yourself,” Athos said, “and someday you’ll write because you’ve been saved.” (Michaels, p. 165) 

  In her acclaimed novel, Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels (1996) interprets the tight weave of history and memory. One character, Jakob Beer, a child survivor of the Holocaust, is smuggled out of Poland into Greece by archeologist Athos Roussos. On the small Greek island of Zakynthos, Jakob transforms his sense of self as he learns to remember in a new language. And he does so again when, at the end of the war, he and Athos travel to Toronto, Canada. With each change in geography, Jakob not only must interpret his present circumstances, but must accomplish a revisioning of his history. He eventually learns that history and memory are not identical. 

History is amoral: events occurred. But memory is moral; what we consciously remember is what our conscience remembers. (Michaels, p. 138) 

  For Jakob, the relationship between history and memory becomes central to his work as a poet. Like many living in post-Holocaust times, Jakob puzzles over the paradox of identity--an experience that announces, at once, perceptions and images that are present and those that are imagined. For Jakob, the historical and imagined images are influenced by the traumatic memory of witnessing the murder of his family. These remembered relations continue to weave their way in and out of Jakob’s adult experiences. 

  Jakob’s caregiver, Athos, understands that while the traumatized body is inscribed by its own history, this history is never fixed. As they spend years together on Zakynthos and in Toronto, Athos tells geographical narratives of transformation. His thesis is profoundly simple: Just as geologic forms betray their histories, so too does the human body. 

The present, like a landscape, is only a small part of a mysterious narrative. A narrative of catastrophe and slow accumulation. Each life saved: genetic features to rise again in another generation. (Michaels, p. 48) 

  Athos finds seven-year-old Jakob hiding in a bog that was once the ancient timber city of Biskupin, now an archeological dig where Athos is conducting research. This excavated city was eventually reburied by the Nazis shortly after their occupation of Poland. In order to maintain their invented historical narrative of German superiority, any evidence of an advanced non-German culture was destroyed. Biskupin’s artifacts were smashed, the timber city buried. But not forgotten. It continues to exist in the archeological and poetic narratives that Jakob and Athos eventually write about their relations to this historical time and place. Each interpretation presents the way these traumatic events become complexly connected to small, seemingly trivial events of daily life. As Michaels shows in her novel, the interpretive acts of the archeologist, the translator, and the poet are not meant to resolve history, or to explain, in simple terms, the cultural present but, instead, exist to raise difficult questions about the relationship between history and memory. 

History and memory share events; that is, they share time and space. (Michaels, p. 138) 

  Every moment is two moments. Each speech act, each event (whether noticed or not) is the confluence of history and memory. Interpreting and theorizing any moment is, of course, another moment bearing the character of that which is remarked. Gadamer (1990) calls such activity the hermeneutic circle, referring to the way in which what is newly interpreted depends on what has already been interpreted as it simultaneously affects the ground of its own thinking and products. While we may say that there are two moments--history and memory--they exist as one and can only be captured, however imperfectly and incompletely, in what they contribute to the evolution of human thinking. 

• • • 

  Since its publication in 1996, I have read Fugitive Pieces six times. As is my custom, I have penciled into the book responses to each of my readings. Like Ondaatje’s (1992) main character in The English Patient I have created a Commonplace Book of my copy of Fugitive Pieces. Like many of my generation, particularly those of us who are children of immigrants, I feel compelled to interpret a relationship between my experience and the experiences of my parents, and to those persons from whom and places from which they came. As I read Anne Michael’s novel, and listen to her interviews, I realize that she is trying to do the same. When I become identified with and by characters she has created in her novel, I am able to interpret my life in new ways. 

  It is not surprising that I and other scholars engaged in philosophical inquiry (DeSalvo, 1996; Richardson, 1997; Salvio, 1995) require literary identifications to create intellectual work. While not often considered as such, literary works of art are able to present conditions for thinking and interpretation that are not possible with books that are, explicitly, written to communicate ideas, to make arguments. As Rorty (1989) suggests: 

[I]t is the disciplines which specialize in thick description of the private and idiosyncratic which are assigned [the] job of [associating theory with social hope]. In particular, novels and ethnographies which sensitize one to the pain of those who do not speak our language must do the job which demonstrations of a common nature were supposed to do. Solidarity has to be constructed out of little pieces, rather than found already waiting, in the form of an ur-language which all of us recognize when we hear it. (p. 94) 

  For me, the pleasures and problems of literary identification are necessary reminders that lived experiences are contingent upon the circumstances which organize those experiences. As I come to know Jakob Beer, for example, I understand that his ongoing development requires that he become adapted to new situations, as they arise. These new situations are seldom predictable, but are always influential. Meeting Athos announces a new world of possibilities for Jakob: a new country, a new language, a new set of opportunities. At the same time, these new opportunities mean he must remove himself from his mother tongue and his mother land. In changing languages and geographies, Jakob is forced to translate his understanding of his personal and ancestral past. Like the novelist herself, who is altered through the process of creating lives for characters to which she becomes attached, the characters of this novel are engaged in the ongoing work of inventing identities for themselves. It is the process of creating interpreted relationships among remembered, currently perceived, and imagined pieces that organizes the experience of self identity. 

  For Athos, continued reconciliation of the past with the present and the imagined is performed in his work as an archeologist and historian. Work on his major book Bearing False Witness -- a critical history of Nazi destruction of historical sites and artifacts -- functions as a practice that helps him interpret contradictory and temporally distinct facets of his lived experiences. Athos realizes that if Jakob is to also live interpretively, he must not only learn new vocabularies, he must remember those vocabularies of his past: 

Athos didn’t want me to forget. He made me review my Hebrew alphabet. He said the same thing every day: “It is your future you are remembering.” (Michaels, p. 21) 

  Eventually, Jakob is able to understand his relation to history and to personal and cultural memory through poetry writing. In continually challenging what Rorty has called his “final vocabulary” (1989, p. 73) by inventing new ways of describing old ideas and images with poetry, Jakob is able to invent a more interesting subjectivity for himself and, at the same time, create new cultural artifacts that might help readers to do so. 

  This is how I experience my engagements with literary fiction, particularly with those which have become favorites. My continued rereadings of Fugitive Pieces have been particularly productive, since I feel intellectually attuned not only to the characters of the novel, but to the project of cultural and historical interpretation that these characters announce. While I have not communicated face-to-face with the author about her work, I feel that the two of us, through our shared relationship with characters she invented and characters with whom I identify, are doing some of the necessary cultural work of understanding what it means to live in post-Holocaust times. This literary commonplace continues to help me create a needed relationship between history and memory and, in particular, between the world of my generation and the world of my parents’ generation. As well, it has illuminated, in productive ways, my nomadic disposition. 

• • • 

PART II: Language and Geography 

Just as the earth invisibly prepares it cataclysms, so history is the gradual instant. (Michaels, 1996, p. 77) 

  In the last twenty years I have moved many times and have lived in four cities. During that time I have lived with three different persons, two men and one woman. I think I am getting good at moving, and yet, with each move, I experience a sense of loss. Although I have learned how to negotiate new urban territories quickly, I do not feel that I have come to know them deeply. 

If you know one landscape well, you will look at all other landscapes differently. And if you learn to love one place, sometimes you can also learn to love another. (Michaels, p. 82) 

  Of course, place is more than geography. A sense of place includes the remembered and lived memories and narratives that organize human experience. When I speak of place, I also mean human subjectivity. This is why I believe that my sense of loss with each impending move has less to do with leaving home again as it is with what this points to: a yearning for a vocabulary that might begin to give form to my personal and ancestral pasts. Who we believe ourselves to be is intimately connected to a lived and imagined language of family and cultural history. And so, when I speak of human subjectivity I mean the way in which language, geography, history, and memory become collected into what can be identified as “I”, “you,” “us,” “them.” Learning to love a place means learning to love one’s involvement in the historically weighted moment. 

The present, like a landscape, is only a small part of a mysterious narrative. A narrative of catastrophe and slow accumulation. (Michaels, p. 48) 

  Even nomadic persons must find ways to invent a continuing identity. Like many academics, I have, to a large extent, organized my subjectivity through relations with books and with authors of these books whom I have come to know over the years. While our associations and identifications are not generally geographically organized locally, they continue to thrive because we read one another’s work, communicate electronically and, occasionally, meet at academic conferences. It is within and between these electronic, typographic, and physical encounters that I am able to maintain a thought and continue the process of inventing an interesting identity for myself. I re-read my own work to remind myself of past relations to other people and their ideas. I also read my work to recall who I thought I was at the time of writing and to engage in the curiously interesting practice of wondering what has become of this person. 

The memories we elude catch up to us, overtake us like a shadow. A truth appears suddenly in the middle of a thought, a hair on a lens. (Michaels, p. 213) 

  This historical retracing of subjectivity through rereading practices is not unlike my occasional wanderings through the small box of personal items I have carried with me through my many moves. In the past, these have consisted wholly of objects I have saved which represent my own experience: photographs of and letters from former friends and lovers, childhood treasures, the recorder that I learned to play in grade 4, evidence of honors I have received. Recently, I added my mother’s collection of objects to mine: her report cards from the private school she attended in Germany before and during the Second World War; her marriage certificate (dated June 21, 1948) to my biological father; the land deed to the house she and my father bought in 1953 in Lethbridge, Alberta; her collection of my elementary and high school report cards, as well as certificates and articles from newspapers acknowledging various of my achievements over the years; a German passport from my Polish father, dated 1940, that bears the insignia of the Deutsches Reich; a photograph of her at age 16 wearing the uniform of the Nazi Youth. 

It is a strange relationship we have with objects that belonged to the dead; in the knit of atoms, their touch is left behind. (Michaels, p. 265) 

  As I sort through my mother’s artifacts I wonder what they meant to her and I wonder what they can possibly mean to me. I experience her touch as I examine documents that have been unfolded and folded hundreds of times over the years. A trace of scent creates folds of memory associated with handkerchiefs, deep coat pockets, and Saturday afternoons at the Eaton’s department store. This juxtaposition of my mother’s and my artifacts creates curious interpretive possibilities: What can be said of her sixteen-year picture and mine? Both clear-skinned, light-eyed, half-smiling faces that, to another observer, could be seen as brother and sister. 

We think of photographs as the captured past. But some photographs are like DNA. In them you can read your whole future. (Michaels, p. 252) 

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962) reminds us that humans are both biological and phenomenological creatures. Human identities are organized by their physiological structures and their cultural organizations. Recent studies in neuroscience (e.g., Deacon, 1997; Johnson, 1997) have confirmed that the human biological system is marked by experience. Research in complexity theory (e.g., Capra, 1996; Cohen & Stewart, 1994) has expanded this idea, showing how human bodies co-develop with geographic, meteorological, economic, political, and social systems. This has helped those of us interested in literacy research to understand that our inquiries must never merely be confined to examining the personalities, the objects, or the contexts or the histories of literacy engagements but, as well, must be interested in interpreting the relations among these. 

On the map of history, perhaps the water stain is memory. (Michaels, p. 147) 

  As I study my newly expanded collection of artifacts I am provoked to wonder about their relations to one another and, especially, to the ways they announce questions about geography, language, and identity. In particular, they ask me to develop a more fully interpreted understanding of my own relationship to my parents and to the their contexts of experience, including their emergence from World War II. What can I say about how those events, and interpretations of those events, have participated in the creation of my own subjectivity and, particularly, of my own academic interests? 

Never trust biographies. Too many events in a man’s life are invisible. (Michaels, p. 141) 

  In A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War, Susan Griffin (1992) juxtaposes autobiographical narratives with historical accounts of nuclear destruction, and of personalities and events associated with the Holocaust. Her thesis is that the usually unknown aspects of experience continue to be influential. Family secrets about alcoholism and incest, for example, continue to color and shape personal identities and collective relations even if they are never disclosed. The unknown details of traumas such as the events leading to the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima or the murder of millions of Jews during World War II continue to shape historical interpretation and historical memory. 

  As I read Griffin’s interpretations, I realize that the gaps in my knowledge about my family are astonishing. I know only a small amount about my mother’s family, almost nothing about my biological father’s. Most of what I know of my mother’s family has been gleaned from often repeated small stories she told me over the years--stories which, as I explain later, do not offer more than the most superficial overview of only a few events. 

  I am not alone in my ignorance of family and cultural stories. A large number of Canadians and Americans of my generation trace their immediate ancestry to the events in Europe during and following the Second World War. Many of my childhood friends were the descendants of German, Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, and Italian parents. Although most of my friends’ parents spoke their first language at home, my parents did not. Largely because they did not share a common first language, the language of their marriage was English, a second language they learned together. But it was not the English that I know. It was less sure, shaped by German and Polish sensibilities and intonations. More than any other changes they made, for my parents, the change of language required a radical alteration in subjectivity. As Gerda Lerner (1996) suggests: 

When you lose your language, you lose the sound, the rhythm, the forms of your unconscious. Deep memories, resonances, sounds of childhood come through the mother tongue--when these are missing the brain cuts off connections. (p. 39) 

  My mother left Germany in 1949, one year after her marriage to her first husband, a Polish soldier who was working in her family’s area immediately following the Second World War. At that time, according to her account of it to me, it was not desirable for Germans to marry Poles and so emigration to another country for couples of mixed ethnicity was common. Despite my mother’s post-secondary education and newly-acquired status as a member of the educated middle-class in post-World War II Germany, she arrived with her new husband to Canada to work as a farm laborer. Her certificate from the “Displaced Person Professional Testing Board” classifies her as a “housemaid.” My father is classified as both a “farm worker” and “wood worker.” My mother arrives in Canada with her work visa and some treasures from home, including a package of her favorite opera records. She also brings a love of literature, a strong education in the arts, and a desire to continue a life of intellectual stimulation she experienced during her education at the convent school. The latter remains largely unfulfilled. She works as a housemaid for three years and then works in dry cleaning establishments as a presser and a seamstress until her health fails in 1984. 

Language. The numb tongue attaches itself, orphan to any sound it can: it sticks, tongue to cold metal. Then, finally, many years later, tears painfully free. (Michaels, p. 95) 

  Of course, German continued to insert itself into the collective consciousness of our family. Even though the German language did not organize everyday domestic relations in our house, it was felt in the food that was prepared, in the opera records my mother played, and in the songs she sang to me as a child. Eventually, however, even these slipped away. In the last fifteen years meals were primarily inspired by recipes from magazines and music reflected popular North American tastes. Once retired, a great deal of my mother’s time was taken up with reading of romance and mystery novels. She continued to insist that she would die if she could not read. I believed her and that is why I knew she was dying when, one day at the hospital, she explained that she no longer found reading interesting. 

And later, when I began to write down the events of my childhood in a language foreign to their happening, it was a revelation. (Michaels, p. 101) 

  Language does not exist as a veil between subjects and objects but, rather, functions to fuse together, in resymbolized relations, the tightly bound fabric of experiences that constitutes one’s identity. It is the capacity to use language to not only create links among things that are present to consciousness but, as well, to things that are remembered or predicted that gives humans a unique ability to interpret the relations of past, present, and projected experience. Supported by the capacity to remember, to bear witness, and to interpret history, humans are able to engage in the imaginative acts of reconsideration and creative invention. 

  In the last several decades work in curriculum theory (e.g., Pinar, Williams, Slattery, & Taubman, 1995), cultural studies (e.g., Grossberg, Nelson & Treichler, 1992) and interpretive research methods (e.g., Denzin & Lincoln, 1994) has learned to understand how discursive practices shape experiences and how they influence interpretations of experience. Borrowing from literary theory, pragmatist and continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, and poststructuralism, researchers of human experience have learned to pay attention to how people are involved in overlapping, shifting, and contradictory narratives. More specifically, researchers have learned that rather than representing experience, discursive practices create experience. 

  As a first generation Canadian of parents who became exiled in English, I have found it challenging to piece together a coherent identity that makes sense to me. Much of this difficulty, I have recently come to understand, emerges from my history of living with an older generation who lost the resonances of early memories through the loss of their first language. While my parents found ways to represent their early experiences with English, it was evident that these were unsatisfying. As various scholars have suggested (e.g., Hoffman, 1989; Lerner, 1997), it is impossible to translate memories from one language to another. 

Athos’s stories gradually veered me from my past. Night after night, his vivid hallucination dripped into my imagination, diluting memory. (Michaels, p. 28) 

  During the last weeks of her life, my mother becomes preoccupied with narrating events from her childhood and young adulthood in Germany. There is the story of how each Sunday her mother drove a bicycle 30 kilometers to the convent school to visit the Mother Superior. “That was her holiday,” she tells me. “After working to keep the farm going for six days, on Sunday she came to have coffee with the Mother Superior. That was her holiday.” She remembers the time when black cars came and took the nuns away: “I never saw them again. They turned the school into a hospital.” There is the story of my grandfather returning from the prisoner of war camp. My mother is the first to notice his approach, although she does not recognize him. “I saw him coming up the road. I called to your grandmother, ‘Here comes another hungry one.’ He was never the same.” 

Sometimes the body experiences revelation because it has abandoned every other possibility. (Michaels, p. 53) 

  I have come to believe that in the last part of her life my mother tried to represent her early experiences but, with English, it was not possible to convey the depth of her knowledge. While continuing to be identified as a German woman because of her accented English, she had become disconnected from the German language and, as a result, from the resonances of her childhood. Her German experiences could not be adequately captured in English, no matter how many times they were told. As a native English speaker, I continued to be frustrated with the thinness of the narrative. I yearned for more nuanced and literary accounts of my mother’s early years. I wanted to hear, in more emotionally charged ways, how she experienced the contradictions of living in Nazi Germany during the years of her adolescence. 

Truth grows gradually in us, like a musician who plays a piece again and again until suddenly he hears it for the first time. (Michaels, p. 251) 

  Days before her death, I show my mother a new book that I took part in authoring. It is a selfish act, since I understand that at this point in her life books do not matter. I point out personal photographs that my co-authors and I included in the book. One photograph is of my mother reading. “Do you recognize this person?” I ask hopefully. She peers at the picture and shuts the book. “It’s an ugly old woman.” I am startled by her response. She resumes leafing through the book, finding the pictures of the house she and my father built from materials discarded from the old Municipal Hospital. “That’s my house. That’s a picture of your father in the war.” She closes the book and fixes her eyes on me: “How did I ever get such a smart son?” She does not mean this rhetorically. It is a real question, announcing the incredulity parents experience when they realize that they and their children have different stories, different songlines. 

After burying the books and the dishes, the silverware and photos, the Jews of the Zakynthos ghetto vanish. They slip into the hills, where they wait like coral; half flesh, half stone. ...In their cramped hiding places, parents tell their children what they can, a hurriedly packed suitcase of family stories, the names of relatives. (Michaels, p. 40) 

  In his book My German Question Peter Gay (1998) interprets memories of living in Nazi Germany from 1933-1939. In providing details of the conflicted ways he exists both inside and outside German history, language, and cultural sensibilities, he is able to show how identity is never stable or resolved. Like the characters in Fugitive Pieces, Gay continues to experience the curious ways the weight of the past endures in the present moment. While it is impossible to escape the effect of memory and history on consciousness, it is possible and necessary to interpret these effects. This is, according to Gadamer (1990), an important project for humans who have developed language as a way to organize memory. Hermeneutically speaking, it is important to make sense of my parents’ lives, not so much to understand them, but to understand how their experience continues in mine. 

The present, like a landscape, is only a small part of a mysterious narrative. (Michaels, p. 48) 

  In the end, I do not believe that my mother was able to say much more about her experience of growing up during the Second World War. Not only was she limited by a language that could not adequately present her memories, but she was constrained by the interpretive tools that had been made available to her. Unlike myself, she did not have an opportunity to spend a large part of her life contemplating her own experience and learning how to critically interpret it. Instead, like many immigrant women, she worked to connect the fragments of lives organized by two languages, two countries, and two cultural and social contexts. I do not believe that she ever fully resolved her conflicted relationship to her own immigration, the loss of her parents and grandparents, or the loss of her language and nation. Before arriving in Canada to invent a new life, her subjectivity was overdetermined by cultural narratives about who immigrant women were generally, and who German women were, specifically. But, of course, her life does not end with the demise of her biological body. It continues to exist in the artifacts she left behind, in the memories of her family and friends, and in the narratives of hers that we have made ours. It exists, in significant ways, in this writing. 

I knew suddenly my mother was inside me. Moving along sinews, under my skin the way she used to move through the house at night, putting things away, putting things in order. (Michaels, p. 8) 

  My position as what Rorty (1989) has called a “liberal ironist” helps me to better understand the difficulty of being theoretically aligned with anti-essentialist discourses and, at the same time, being identified with the political left. I am committed to social justice and to eliminating the cruelties imposed on certain individuals and groups. Although I understand that language can never fully represent the complexity and fullness of human identity and experiences of identity, I also know that in order for individuals to experience a sense of personal and cultural coherence, language must be used to create identities that are able to be recognized. And so, while I do not want to “essentialize” human identities by trying to pin down what constitutes, for example, the absolute requirements for membership in identity categories “man” or “woman,” I understand that, to some extent, these categories have been necessary. I also know, however, that any experience of identity is contingent. It emerges from a biological, geographical, social and cultural history that is given shape and form by language. This helps me to remember that my experience of identity is never really present to me but can only exist after the fact--in the memories and narratives that organize who I believe myself to be (and who I believe others to be). As part of my personal project of reconciling contradictions and difficulties I experience in my lived subjectivity, I create theorized and interpreted narratives to render coherent the available pieces that make that subjectivity possible. This means using tools currently available to me to critically understand the generation that preceded me. I do not do this to condemn or celebrate them. I do so because I understand that because their experience continues in mine I am obligated to try to understand what this means. I experience this as a creative act of invention: I do not discover my identity. I participate with history and with contemporary culture in the making of it. Part of this ongoing process of invention is to learn to incorporate identifications with those who identify and are identified as historically other to me. And so, I continue to read books written by people whom I have not met but, through whose work I identify. Some of these books are memoirs. Some are fictions. Some are works of philosophy or theory. I think about what it means to create these literary and theoretical commonplaces, using my current vocabulary to help me to interpret the relationship between my own sense of identity and my vocation: the practice of teaching and the researching of literary engagements. 

  Reading and thinking, however, do not complete the creative process. As Borgmann (1992) suggests, it is important to make something which can contribute, alongside and after the biological life of the thinker, to the ongoing interpreting of history and the creating of human subjectivity and culture. My work, as I have come to understand it, is to collect the fugitive pieces of history and memory--the bits and pieces of what I find in literary, historical, autobiographical, and other fictions--and stitch them together into interpretive essays (from the French essayer: to try) that attempt to represent the evolution of an idea. 

One can look deeply for meaning or one can invent it. (Michaels, p. 136) 

• • • 

Literary Anthropology and Literacy Education Research 

  Over the years my students, research collaborators and I have experimented with different ways to present our work and insights emerging from this work. Although different writers develop unique styles, all of us, it seems, have been able to do so using the basic method of anthropological inquiry that I have been outlining in this article. The reading, marking, rereading, re-marking, of literary texts, juxtaposed with engagements with non-literary texts, other collected research data (autobiographical, biographical, ethnographic), creates the skeletal framework for interpretive work. Alongside and following these reading and response activities we engage in what I call “interpretive linking.” For the research described in this article, for example, I began my work by trying to identify thematics from Fugitive Pieces that were particularly compelling to me. In the early stages of my work, the phrase “Every moment is two moments” (referring to the confluence of history and memory) continued to present itself as interesting to me. During the time that I worked with this novel, I was continuing my study of events of World War II, of pragmatist philosophy, of philosophical hermeneutics, and of reader-response theory. In order to create small pockets of interpretation that were manageable, I would take one quote from Fugitive Pieces, one statement from a memoir (for example, Peter Gay’s My German Question) and one statement from a philosophical or theoretical text (for example, Rorty’s (1999) Philosophy and Social Hope), type these into a new computer file, and assign myself a writing practice that attempted to “link” the three ideas together into some sort of interpretation. While not all of these assigned writing/interpretation practices yielded what I considered to be productive insights, many of them did. As these interpretive “puddles” were created, I printed them and filed them in a binder. Over a period of weeks, as I continued the process of reading, rereading, marking, remarking of text and juxtaposing these with one another and other experiences, and, as well, continued to assign myself the practice of creating short interpretive texts, I discovered that new insights were being developed. 

  While I tend to repeat these research processes, my final research products are always, of course, conditioned by other factors. Although I have written other interpretive texts emerging from my ongoing engagement with Fugitive Pieces, for example, the one presented in this article was created while I was in the middle of making another move across the country, changing academic institutions, trying to understand my relationship to events of the World War II, and continuing the process of learning to understand the way my parents’ experience continues in mine. By referring to my booknotes and, most importantly, developing my interpretive writing around ideas prompted by my identifications with characters from Fugitive Pieces and other texts, I eventually came to learn that in order to better understand some of my preoccupations, I needed to develop a larger analysis of the relationships among language, memory, history, and geography. These thematics, it is important to mention, did not prompt my reading or early response and interpretive practices. Rather, these emerged from my ongoing rereading of Fugitive Pieces and my continued practices of juxtaposing responses from this literary text to responses to other texts and other non-text experiences. 

  The “report” of my research that I develop, then, is one which tries to present some of the insights developed from my work and, as well, some description and discussion of some of the influences that conditioned these insights. Recently, I have come to understand that my teaching methods in literacy education have both informed and been informed by literary anthropology. Although I did not know it during my years of teaching junior high school, for example, when I asked my students to interpret their responses to literary fiction in relation to their own personal and collective experiences, I was involving them in a kind of literary anthropology. In my more recent teaching of undergraduate and graduate students in education, I understand my insistence that we read novels alongside works of theory, philosophy, and history -- followed by writing practices which ask them to create interpretations that link ideas from two or three of these -- is another way of engaging in these research and interpretation practices . 

  I mention these pedagogical practices in order to highlight my belief that, while I present literary anthropology in this article as a research practice, I also use it and experience it as a pedagogical practice. This is not surprising since, for me, the research practices described are an important form of personal and cultural learning. In the interpretive writing presented earlier, the learning emerged from a deep engagement with cross-disciplinary and intergenerational representations and interpretations of my and other people’s experiences. In juxtaposing engagements I had and relationships I developed with a literary text and its characters with material from other sources, I created conditions for a personal hermeneutic interpretation of much larger historical and cultural events. In beginning with the particularities of autobiographical and biographical experience, and developing historical and theoretical narratives around these, I have attempted to perform, what I would consider to be, an important form of cultural learning that is, in part, presented in the “report” of my research. 

  I would like to conclude by stating that it has been helpful for me to interpret a critical relationship with the events emerging from my parents immigration to Canada following the Second World War. This is not so much because of what I have learned about them or myself but, rather, because of what I have learned about how large and small events of history continue to weave themselves into the contemporary world. Although these insights are personal, they also contribute to the social and cultural world. As I come to more clearly understand my relationship to the historical, the geographical, and the social and cultural, I develop new interpretive tools that help me in my daily situations. 

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