From this perspective it is also possible to compare what X said with more than other observations that make their way into the ethnographer’s field notes. Thus, for example, people who study life in Chinese villages can now turn to a small but substantial library of studies of Chinese communities to pose questions about whether what X said is typical of what is reported in other studies or an outlier explainable by reference to geographical or other material circumstances. It may be worth asking if X’s distaste for the custom of secondary burial common in southern China reflects the fact that X is from northern China, where this custom is regarded as barbaric.

I return, once again, to Clifford Geertz’s remark in the introduction to _Islam Observed_, where he notes that while anthropologists look for insights in microscopic settings, their value can only be tested in larger conversations. What X thinks of how Z construed his statement Y will then, anthropologically speaking, be a less interesting question than whether what Z is saying confirms or challenges received understandings about the population to which X belongs.

The problem arises in cases that were rehearsed by folks ranging from E-P to Ardener (one of my favourites), and later poked and probed by Sperber. Lots of the things we are interested in have to do with things people say about non-verifiable ‘events’ or states of affairs. (We can all fill in the blanks here.) Apart from this, even when we are talking about things that cause no epistemological vertigo – say, that Charlie went to the store (vs. Charlie is a witch) – much of what we trade in consists of renditions of others’ renditions of events.

While I don’t want to get into a figment-of-a-figment regress here, there is always the question of what kind of claim one makes in reporting such a statement. If, for example, Sam tells me that Charlie went to the store (or that his grandfather burned down a village or met a masalai), is the claim that such and such took place, or is the claim that Charlie told me so? This points to something that is often as important to ethnography as the event-facts-on-the-ground: how someone talks about and sees the world. In such a context, the claim that Daniel Wemp may have exaggerated details of the tale has a different status and relevance depending on whether the focus is the event or the teller of the tale. As I say, for most ethnographers, the latter may be more important than the former.

Most of those working in Melanesian (and, it turns out, also among many Native American groups) understand how scrupulous people are about their own knowledge claims and about reported speech (the use of evidentials, or other grammatical features, for example). Apart from whatever inferences one makes about epistemologies and so on, I think this conveys a real sense people have about the responsibility attached to talking about what others have said.

I think at least one unlooked-for lesson embedded in Shearer’s attack is *not* that fact-checking and corroboration in the journalistic sense are the measure of all things, but rather that taking responsibility for reported speech – for talking about what someone tells us – is a serious matter.

None of this should be news to us, but as Alex reminds us, we should all expect to be held to account on this score. Especially if we offer a temptingly high-profile target…

Go see “JL” comments at StinkyJournalism.org –it is the same person as “JohnSo” here.

Go see for yourself, what JohnSo (I mean JL) calls “the same measured tone of voice.”

http://www.stinkyjournalism.org/latest-journalism-news-updates-151.php

While “JohnSo” was posting name calling here at SavageMinds as “JohnSo”, he was also simultaneously posting name-callings and personal attacks on StinkyJournalism.org as “JL” –both with the same email address.

When he started also posting on StinkyJournalism as JL and JohnSo approx 15 minutes apart from the same email address–it became clear he was pretending to be two people. he purpose of this, of course, is to maximize his impact by giving the false appearance of more than one person (he can be JohnSo AND JL) having the same opinion instead of just one. This is clearly sock puppetry.

StinkyJournalism.org rules for comments section: “No Sock Puppets: If you pretend to be two different people, using two (or more) different pseudonyms, when you are actually one person (presumably to give the false appearance that more people than one is commenting) your comment(s) and pseudonyms will thereafter be blocked.”

Cheers,

Johnso

Well yes, we carry two or more cultures with us wherever we go and in whatever we do. Now in terms of the forms of rebellion against culture, I’m not so sure. It’s not so much a rebellion more of what’s more convenient.

Traditional power structures of a chief, clans etc have been eroded by the acquisition and usage of economic power, in other words ‘financial wealth’. And that’s a direct result of education and globalisation.

So how does it play out when someone doesn’t agree with a traditional/cultural convention? Well it depends on their financial status. The richer they are the more allowance for them to create their own social norms, etc. And you’ll note that sadly this attitude and culture has carried on through into our government.

But on a whole you then begin to start seeing a split in society, those that conform to cultural structures and those that don’t and because this runs along lines of financial wealth you create a frustrating situation for the one’s without wealth. The outcome of such frustrations become things like urban crime and other activities like that.

I’m curious: are there forms of indigenous rebellion against indigenous culture? I mean, in PNG before western influence was pervasive, or in that side of it of that remains so, is there anything like, say, a teenager? — OK, that’s sort of a dumb way of putting it, but I’m wondering if there are local forms of chafing against — not western culture, but local culture. If you grow up in a tribe that has a practice that you don’t agree with, is there are a standard way of expressing it? Presumably all societies have power struggles, and political struggles but do all of them have the equivalent of what we would think of as ideological or aesthetic struggles? If so, how do they play out?

Does this question make sense?

I’m not sure about the identity thing: I don’t know anyone who has a clear sense of their own, and in America, anyway, the ones who do tend to be people I don’t like much. For the rest of us, it’s very fluid and ambiguous. We all think it’s something our great-grandparents had that we’ve lost, but I bet our great-grandparents though they’d lost it, too…

Talk to me some more, Emmanuel. I like listening to you.

Thank you JohnSo, I don’t think these issues could be discussed in any other way but by being blunt.

Many of our generation in PNG grew up around ‘David Hasselhoff’ and ‘Astro Boy’ then went through school with ‘Public Enemy’ and ‘Midnight Oil’.So having grown up in two cultures, we automatically assume that using a foreign language is the only way to address an issue raised in that language. Unfortunately cliches become part of that arsenal.

Is that an excuse? Maybe. I’d say we need more forums of discussion on these issues for us to find our own words. We need to talk more and think more about who we are. Our Identity needs to be intact before we can even recognise what we are losing.

As painful as your history may be, it’s even sadder to me to see you guys coughing up crap like this: “Both extremes from which there is no redemption except through being released from our own ignorance by the ‘other’”

– A mindless regurgitation of western academic fluff, phrases which were cliches before, I’m guessing, you guys were even born, which never meant much to begin with, and which have been repeated so often, by now, that they’re completely empty.

As hard as it may be to be exploited, it strikes me as worse to be unable to describe your situation except in your exploiters’ terms. I urge whoever posted that to your blog to find his or her own voice: it’s the first step to fighting back.

Sorry to be so blunt about it, but you guys need to come up with your own way of describing what’s happening to you, instead of shipping our own nonsense back to us, and anybody who tells you otherwise is just another colonialist.