Between One and One Another. Michael Jackson
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Beyond a certain level of arousal or stimulation, an infant will use “gaze aversion to cut out stimulation,” just as it will invite interaction when bored. Thus, from two to six months, the infant is actively regulating its relationship to the world around, alternating periods of intense interaction with periods of quietness and withdrawal.5 It may be, as Bateson and Mead suggest, that in Bali the “state of dreamy-relaxed disassociation” becomes the basis of trance and thereby is assigned a positive social value that it may not attain in the West, where children are discouraged from daydreaming and told to snap out of it—though prayer, meditation, days of rest (Sabbath/Shabbat), fasting (Lent/Ramadan), and remembrance, or moments of silence for the dead, may be compared to the Balinese silent and trance states. Unfortunately, Bateson and Mead—like many anthropologists—are so focused on what is culturally unique that they overlook what is existentially universal, in this case a capacity for “non-personal concentration” that is present in all human beings, even though it finds expression in manifold ways. Moreover, this alternation of zoning in and zoning out echoes the rhythms of work and relaxation, waking and sleeping, and focused and aimless action that characterize life in every human society and are essential to well-being.
This book explores some of the variations on this interplay between being a part of and being apart from the world. As such, it builds upon my previous existential analyses of elementary forms of intersubjectivity and of the indeterminate relationship between experience and behavior or experience and belief.6 R.D.Laing pointed out many years ago that existential phenomenology implies that existence “may be one's own or that of another,” and that, moreover, “each and every [person] is at the same time separate from [others] and related to them. Such separateness and relatedness are mutually necessary postulates.”7 But, Laing concludes, our being with another can never be completely physical, any more than our being apart from another can ever be psychologically viable. We therefore find ourselves in the “potentially tragic paradox, that our relatedness to others is an essential part of our being, as is our separateness, but any particular person is not a necessary part of our being.”8
By implication, neither complete detachment nor complete engagement is a real ontological possibility, despite early anthropologists' claims that primitive people live in a state of mystical participation with significant others—a collective consciousness, a group mind—or the claims of sages for a transcendental and mystical fusion with the divine. Rather, these contrasted terms suggest that while human existence is profoundly social (comprising relationships with others), it always entails a sense of our own singularity and aloneness (a relationship with oneself).9 My method of exploring this oscillation between sociocentric and egocentric consciousness is dialectical. This implies that the movement between being preoccupied by others and being preoccupied by oneself is experienced as an ethical problem that seldom admits of any final resolution, as in the parable of the tragedy of the commons, in which a number of herdsmen find it impossible to work out a balance between maximizing their individual profits and preserving the environment.10 And though our awareness continually oscillates between self-interestedness and commitment to the common weal—being on stage and off stage, seeing things from without and seeing things from within, associating with others and dissociating ourselves from them—we remain, paradoxically and inescapably, both islands and parts of the main, entire of ourselves as well as involved in all mankind.11 This does not imply that we are divided selves, or that one mode of consciousness is to be preferred over another; it simply means that consciousness is continually shifting from one register to another, and that these varying perspectives have quite different existential and epistemological entailments.12 While psychoanalysis is often portrayed as a process of getting in touch with oneself and one's emotions, “getting into oneself” is productive only if it enables a person to escape “the solipsistic strait-jacket that is used to maintain a fixed image of who we are in our own eyes and what we are thus willing or able to perceive as ‘reality.’”13 As Henry James observed, to get out of one's self and stay out one “must have some absorbing errand.”14
FIELDWORK AS AN ABSORBING ERRAND
It is part of the received wisdom of social anthropology that fieldwork is an initiatory rite. Unless one proves oneself in the field, one has not earned the right to call oneself an anthropologist. Little wonder, then, that novice ethnographers, about to leave the sanctuary of college life and submit themselves to the perils of fieldwork, experience considerable anxiety. Daunted by the prospect of speaking a foreign language, eating unpalatable food, living in uncomfortable quarters, and questioning strangers on potentially inappropriate matters, anthropological neophytes seek assurances that they will survive this ordeal and succeed in their goals. “What should I read on ethnographic method?” I am asked. “What did you do when you first went into the field?” “How do I know that people won't reject me?” In responding to such questions, I have recourse to humor. I recount how my academic advisor at Cambridge sent me to see Dr. Hawtrey May, a physician who had been dispensing medical advice and survival tips to expedition members, colonial administrators, and research scientists since the 1930s. “Always send your beater ahead of you in case of snakes,” Hawtrey May advised. “Kaolin for dysentery. Bungs you up but stops the runs. Quinine ahead of the fever, not after, and always boil your water.”
In a more serious vein, I downplay the exoticism of fieldwork. Books on method, from Notes and Queries to the most recent manual, give the impression that one is about to enter a laboratory rather than another lifeworld in which human beings are going about their lives, caring for their children, struggling to make ends meet, getting along with neighbors, visiting friends, meeting ritual obligations, seeking respite from the daily grind. I suggest to my nervous students that they think of fieldwork as they would any other transitional experience in life—starting school, leaving home for the first time, moving to another town, falling in and out of love. Such experiences seem insurmountable when contemplated in advance but comparatively straight forward in retrospect. The anxiety of doing fieldwork is a form of stage fright or first-night nerves. As soon as one is on stage, one's panic vanishes. Finally, I tell my students to place their trust in the protocols of hospitality, which are basically the same throughout the world. As a guest, you are expected to be unobtrusive and respect the rules of the house; in return, your hosts are bound to take care of you. Moreover, abstract knowledge of quantitative and qualitative methodologies, of great books and foreign languages, will not help you reach an understanding of others unless you share in their lives as a fellow human being, with tact and sensitivity, care and concern.
AGAINST THE VIEW FROM AFAR
I have never believed that standing back from the world is the best way to see it for what it is, and I have always felt an affinity for thinkers who sought to understand the world through active engagement with it, even at the risk of appearing ridiculous. For Marx and Engels, the purpose of this engagement was to change the world, to save humanity from itself, and I spent several years in welfare and community development work endeavoring to do just this. But my real interest, I discovered, was in neither making the world an object of contemplation nor changing it for the better, but in making myself the subject of an experiment, allowing the world to work on me, reshaping my thinking and guiding my actions. Undoubtedly it was this impulse to test and transform myself in interactions and conversations with others that drew me to ethnography. So when I left the Congo in late 1964, disenchanted with the United Nations agenda for controlling and developing the newly independent, mineral-rich, and anarchic country that Leopold II had brutally subjugated eighty years earlier, I naively hoped that anthropology would provide me a way of returning to Africa as a learner rather than a master, an equal among equals.
At Cambridge it took me a year to decide on a field site and secure funds. During this time, I felt cut off from what I called the “real” world and impatient to reimmerse myself in it. Cambridge felt cloistered and claustrophobic, a place of ivory towers, antiquated rituals, and donnish privileges. It was not without irony, therefore, that six months into fieldwork in northern Sierra Leone, I found myself gazing nostalgically at the postcard my wife's friend Didi had sent us from Cambridge of Kings Chapel under snow. Driven by a felt need to visit every Kuranko village, observing critical events, interviewing informants, transcribing stories, covering every aspect of social life, as well as meeting