On “Can Stacie Gilmore Speak?”: Unfortunately, you wouldn’t be breaking new ground.

My “Speech” teachers in first grade decided, definitively, “No.” Not until 9th grade could I in fact “Speak,” in proper English, no thanks to them. They were eager to point out faults but shitty teachers. According to them, I couldn’t even pronounce my own name properly because the letter I was deficient in was “S.” Actually, this representational territory of the Internet taught me. I was giving a presentation in psychology class, a project designed by the teacher to boost students’ self-confidence, and two imbecilic punks were making fun of my pronunciation of “S.” What the worthless teacher was doing I have no clue. I was so pissed (more pissed than typical) that I was determined to teach myself, looking up resources on the Internet, and within a couple days or weeks, I had learned it. But what a pain, for 9 years! All because of f*ing Proper English.

Now that you are writing on the Internet, an infinite distance in all directions. Not just a joke either — this is the very means that is threatening to overturn, indeed eliminate, the entire position of anthropologists as intermediaries, as the meaning-making middlemen specialists.

I did not mean for “territory” to be taken too literally, even if acts of representation often do have some physical and spatial manifestation to them.

The idea is simply this: Want to know about Stacie Gilmore? Great, then read the book with Max Forte’s name across the front cover and down the spine. Listening to Stacie talk about her life cannot ever be as reliable, informative, and instructive as when Max Forte talks about Stacie talking about her life. Really, without a Max Forte, can there ever really be a Stacie? In fact, that gives me an idea for a journal article, to be titled “Can Stacie Gilmore Speak?”

Whose representational territory is anthropology?

That is what we are trying to determine — really, it’s not an evasive answer, it goes right to the heart of these posts.

(Thanks again for your, as usual, very tough questions, they are much appreciated. By the way, I always had a serious pet peeve with Spivak’s title, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” — leaving aside that I find her writing to be virtually unintelligible, I always thought there should have been an article with a title that answered hers, such as: “I don’t know, could you shut up so we can hear them speak?”)

How far around me does my representational territory extend? 5 ft radius in all directions? I know it’s not meant literally, but it doesn’t necessarily correspond to geographical territory right? I think it’s a good way to put it. I’m just trying to nail down what it is.

For example, are the producers of the dictionary infringing on my representational territory by defining “woman” with things things like “Etymology:… wife + man,” “distinctively feminine nature,” “a woman who is a servant or personal attendant,” “wife, mistress, girlfriend”… ?

Say I have a friend who insists on calling me nicknames I dislike in public places. Would that be an instance of her occupying my representational territory without being welcome? Because if that’s what we’re talking about there are other times when I’d gladly welcome someone to contribute to my representational territory, a positive recommendation for instance. Depends on the circumstance and what they want to say about me . . .

Also, whose representational territory is anthropology? Kuper’s? Yours? Mine? These people seem to be the ones who hold it, fairly or unfairly:

“The ethnography – before and after publication – is subjected to critical, collegial examination by other ethnographers, and also by geographers, historians, economists and so on, themselves engaged in local research and equipped with overlapping and complementary expertise. This is a conversation that today decisively shapes ethnographic production, and, of course, it may often include both local scientists and a variety of foreigners… (p. 549)”

So what about conflicts over representation within shared or overlapping territories?

I am actually very much in agreement with the points you made here, and that might sound like I also agree somewhat with Kuper (not that such a thing would be tantamount to sin). The difference is that he does not call for an end to fieldwork, rather the way he chooses to place fieldwork that intersects “folk models” so that these are defined as inferior, while the folk models of the academic are superior, finds me in disagreement with him. The idea of a moratorium on fieldwork is a very good one, and in some cases, especially where indigenous communities are concerned, it has become almost inevitable since so many of them express either hostility, suspicion, or a generally fed up attitude towards being hounded by sticky anthropologists and their questions, and the questions themselves seem to be repetitive. Ethnology seems to have become extinct. It certainly is not taught, not in any program in which I have studied or taught. It seems that few persons, if any, know of any of the methods for conducting large cross-cultural analysis: what makes disparate works comparable? How does one compare different ethnographies, done at different times, in different places, by different persons guided by different theories, and produce something that is as coherent as if it had been an organized global survey?

As for ethnography being valued as if it were the only valid research approach, as you say in your comment, there too I agree with you that this needs to change. Ethnography is, at best, only good for asking very limited questions, with results that are generally valid — if at all — for the small group of persons one has studied.

At this moment, in my “media ethnographies” course, we are seeing just how often audience ethnographies in fact support the so-called armchair theorizing of the past, or, by virtue of being too limited, do not provide enough evidence to contradict those sweeping theories made by the dominant theorists of the past decades. Finding that actual persons may be either duped by the media, or very critical of it, only tells us that there is a problem that cannot be resolved by either ethnography or media studies alone. We are confronted with a problem in social theory: how is that some have the resources and critical faculties to actively engage media, to deconstruct media, expose underlying assumptions, while others simply nod in agreement and regurgitate what they hear? Ethnography is almost useless for answering that question, as it is useless for answering most other monumental questions such as: how did capitalism become a world-system?

Let me stop here, I am writing too much.