“In moving from experience of social life to conceptualization and intellectual history, I follow the path of anthropologists almost everywhere. Although we take theories into the field with us, these become relevant only if and when they illuminate social reality. Moreover, we tend to find very frequently that it is not a theorist’s whole system which so illuminates, but his scattered ideas, his flashes of insight taken out of systemic context and applied to scattered data. Such ideas have a virtue of their own and may generate new hypotheses. They even show how scattered facts may be systematically connected! Randomly distributed through some monstrous logical system, they resemble nourishing raisins in a cellular mass of inedible dough. The intuitions, not the tissue of logic connecting them, are what tend to survive in the field experience.”

“Social Dramas and Ritual Metaphors.” In Victor Turner, ed., Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society, Cornell University Press, 1974, p. 23.

If, however, there is one thing that has struck me repeatedly in Turner’s work, it is that in nothing he wrote do we find facts simply documented or interpretations confined to a local context. Even in the most minute or intimate details, there is a striving to grasp a larger significance through explicit or implicit comparison with events in other times and places. Thus, for example, the white sap of the tree and its role in Ndembu ritual as symbol of milk, matrilineage, and community lead instantly to reflections on the significance of white in the color symbolism of other peoples in other places. When reading Turner, I never feel that I am being told about the Ndembu. Instead, through Vic’s encounters with particular Ndembu individuals, I am being urged to think about all sorts of relationships in my own and other lives. To me that is what makes Vic’s humanism also anthropology.

Neither an attempt to test or, more often, to merely illustrate, theory nor merely local history of little interest to anyone who does not have sentimental attachments to the place or people in question, Turner’s humanistic anthropology was always broadening as well as deepening our understanding of humanity writ large.

Or so it seems to me, when I ride this particular hobby horse.

As for the Cuba piece, and my own piece on the death in Bulgaria, I think they don’t really qualify as “scholarly” (in the traditional sense) because they are self-consciously reflections from the field, and not trying to put forward and substantiate any arguments. One could make the argument that they are “scholarly” because they are written by scholars, so what this all boils down to is our definition of the word “scholarly,” and how that definition operates within academia today (e.g. in hiring decisions, on tenure and promotion committees, etc.). From the perspective of the profession, and for those of us operating within the constraints of the contemporary university system, our work is supposed to make arguments and further theoretical claims, or else it will not be judged as “scholarly.”

That being said, I personally do not believe that all ethnographic writing should be subsumed under an organizing theoretical framework to further a certain claim. At different stages in our careers, ethnographers can experiment with different genres of writing. As the incoming president of the Society for Humanistic Anthropology, which welcomes a wide variety of ethnographic writing styles, I feel that ethnography can serve a documentary function, or that its function can be to evoke emotion and empathy, rather than merely furthering arguments. Much of the ethnographic poetry and fiction that is published in our journal, Anthropology and Humanism, is “scholarly,” because it is informed by years (if not decades) of deep engagement in the field. This work is not generalizable, in the sense that the case study is not being used to support abstract social theories, but it is generalizable in that it helps us better understand the beauty and diversity of the human experience.

For what it’s worth, I have begun composing my online postings in Evernote. The formatting options are more than adequate for online material, and the comfort of knowing that whatever I write will be safely stored and searchable more than offsets the minor trouble it takes to copy and paste to a blog.

I do hope that the thoughts return. I very much look forward to reading them.

I am a WordPress Newbie, and just spent 45 minutes responding to your comment, but my text has disappeared, and I can’t find it anywhere. I will never compose on this interface again…