Presence and Representation: The Other and Anthropological Writing Author(s): Johannes Fabian Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 16, No. 4, (Summer, 1990), pp. 753-772 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343766 Accessed: 09/07/2008 23:14
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Presence and Representation: The Other and Anthropological Writing

Johannes Fabian

In discussions of the Orient, the Orient is all absence, whereas one feels the Orientalist and what he says as presence; yet we must not forget that the Orientalist's presence is enabled by the Orient's effective absence. -EDWARD W. SAID, Orientalism
and Presence Representations
It is not without significance that in anthropological and sociological usage representation most often appears in the plural. The singular would put the emphasis on representation as an activity or process. Instead, by privileging the plural, we invoke entities, products of knowledge or culture. That this is not merely a matter of practicality-of devising terms that best fit the analytical tasks to which we put themwill, I hope, become clear from the reflections that follow. Taken as a philosophical issue, the idea of representation implies the prior assumption of a differencebetween reality and its "doubles."
This essay was developed from a contribution to a panel on "Othering: Representations and Realities," organized by Smadar Lavie, Kirin Narayan, and Renato Rosaldo for the 85th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Philadelphia, December 1986. In an earlier version, I wrote at this point: "I want to thank my friend and colleague Bob Scholte for his untiring readiness to be a partner in discussions and to share his knowledge of the literature." I now dedicate this essay to his memory.
Critical Inquiry 16 (Summer 1990) ? 1990 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/90/1604-0006$01.00. All rights reserved.
Presence and Representation
Things are paired with images, concepts, or symbols, acts with rules and norms, events with structures. Traditionally, the problem with representations has been their "accuracy," the degree of fit between reality and its reproductions in the mind. When philosophers lost the hope of ever determining accuracy (and thus attaining Truth), they found consolation in the test of usefulness: a good representation is one that works. The proof of its working is that it enables us to act on the world together.' In such a frame, science, including anthropology, is conceived as the pursuit of privileged representations, privileged in that, by their nature or by their combination, they establish knowledge of a special kind. In the case of anthropology, "culture" has served as a sort of umbrella concept for representations. The structuralists have been most explicit about the need to think of representation in the plural, but their position is shared, in varying degrees, by all those who conceive of (cultural) knowledge as the selection and combination of signs in systems, patterns, or structures, in short, as some kind of conceptual order ruling perceptual chaos. The postulate of a difference between reality and its doubles generates another assumption of difference, or rather, distance: that between the knower and the known. This comes naturally, as it were, with conceiving of the (scientific-philosophical) knower as a viewer and observer. It is reinforced by the idea that to know scientifically is to interpose a system of concepts (a method or a logic) between reality and

2. See Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other:How Anthropology Makes Its Object(New
York, 1983) and "Culture,Time, and the Object of Anthropology,"Berkshire Review 20 (1985): 7-23. Vincent Crapanzano, Cultural 2 Anthropology(May1987): 255-67. 4. Jean-PaulDumont, "Prologueto Ethnographyor Prolegomenato Anthropography,"Ethos14 (Dec. 1986): 359.
3. Marilyn Strathern, "Intervening," review of Waiting: The Whitesof South Africa, by
occurring in time and production anything that precedes what one chooses to take as a result or outcome, but in the strong sense of transforming, fashioning, and creating.5 In other words, we anthropologists should perhaps not think of representation in the first place as some enabling capacity of the human mind (although investigations of such a capacity remain legitimate for psychologists, brain scientists, and philosophers) but, more modestly, as something that we actually do, as our praxis. This would help us to realize that our ways of making the Other are ways of making ourselves. The need to go there (to exotic places, be they far away or around the corner) is really our desire to be here (to find or defend our position in the world). The urge to write ethnography is about making the then into a now. In this move from then to now the making of knowledge out of experience occurs. Both movements, from here to there and from then to now, converge in what I called presence. This is the way I would define the process of othering. I may be accused of spreading confusion when, in one place, I oppose representation to praxis, and then talk about representation as praxis, or the praxis of representation, and so forth. I am afraid I know of no less ambiguous way of talking about the issue that, in my mind, is the philosophical stance, together with "representationism"-roughly its hegemonical claims, which also is the object of Richard Rorty's critique (and not only his; I only cite him as a convenient example).6 The aim is to assign to representing a more modest, less imperial, place in a theory of knowledge, not to exorcise by decree what is obviously an important human capacity.7 Incidentally, if representation has to do above all with power, then it may not only be thought of as praxis but it is praxis. All the attempts to make it unassailable by declaring it essentially theoretical would then be so many practical moves designed to preserve its hegemony. If representation is thought of above all as praxis, this has two consequences: (1) The foremost problem with it will not primarily be accurate reproduction of realities but-how shall we call it?-repetition, reenactment. (2) Representations (in the plural) will then be

Presenceand Representation
tation is "at once general, global and diffuse; it is, if you like, a fragment of ideology."8 Whenever in the use of "technical" terms the balances of signification tip heavily on the side of connotation, ideology, obfuscation, and plain intellectual fraud loom large, whereby the blame is first of all ours, not the layman's. But we can do more than cast suspicion. Without pretending to do what should be the work of a careful conceptual history (in several languages), we can state that the term ethnographyacquired its present free-floating character as a result of certain disjunctions that still pose problems and are the reasons why we worry about the meaning of the term in the first place. Summarily, these disjunctions can be stated as follows: 1) Assuming that the term ethnographywas coined following models or such as cosmography geography, its "innocent" meaning would simply be "description of peoples."9 Except that by the time the word was coined, ethnoi had long since lost its innocence as a neutral term and taken on an evaluative notion (somewhat like the Latin gentes, which, to put it mildly, meant "non-Christians" at the height of the Middle Ages). More important, the element of de-scription, writing about, had from the beginning a nominal slant, suggestive less of the activity of writing than of its products: descriptions, tableaux, in short, representations. 2) When, at a much later time, description of peoples became a professional activity, when field research became an accepted and even required practice, the disjunction of ethnography from writing was so advanced that one could, without flinching, designate observation on the spot as "doing ethnography." Bronislaw Malinowski, the man on the spot, was considered an ethnographer; Sir James George Frazer, the writer in his armchair, not really. Yet Malinowski, as James A. Boon
8. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiology, trans. Annette
Laversand Colin Smith (Boston, 1970), p. 91. 9. A quick check of a few dictionaries confirms this. TheShorterOxfordEnglish in 3d Dictionary, ed., 2 vols. (Oxford, 1975) dates the introductionof the term ethnography 1834 and defines it as "thescientificdescriptionof nationsor racesof men, their customs, habits,and differences"(s.v. "ethnography," 1:685).Ethnology appearsin 1842 and is "the science which treats of races and peoples, their relations,their distinctivecharacteristics, etc." (s.v. "ethnology," 1:685-86). The compiler's difficulty in distinguishing between -graphyand -logy is obvious. The use of etc.suggests that he abandonedthe quest for a is (Paris, 1975), ethnographie dated in 1823 and defined as "etudedescriptivedes frangaise ethnies"(s.v. "ethnographie," 655). Notice that while this formuladesignatesan activp. Ethnologie appeareda ity, the reference to writingis found in an adjectivemodifyingstudy. decade later (1834) and is describedas "sciencequi a pour objet l'etude des characteres ethniques,en vue de degager des lois generalesdes societeshumaines"(s.v. "ethnologie," ibid.).

Dictionnaire de la langue precise statement. In a modern French dictionary, Lexis-Larousse:
reminds us, emulated Frazer's writing in his early ethnographies (before he became scientific and boring).'0 3) The disjunction between ethnography and writing has, of course, also been at the bottom of making a distinction between research and write-up that was masked as a mere sequence but was in fact a ritual dramatization of spatial distance between the sites of observation and the places of writing. 4) The process of disjunction had its apotheosis when professionalization of anthropology reached its peak (probably in the 1950s). Two things happened: a) In common usage, ethnography had become synonymous with empirical research and data collection. As such, it was opposed to theory. This was expressed most openly in course requirements and reading assignments; it was, to my knowledge, not often discussed in the literature except in reviewers' complaints about too much or too little ethnography in a given publication. It also gave rise to a curious sort of double-talk: praise was heaped on "theory"; dissertation proposals and Ph.D. theses had no chance of passing if they were considered short of theory, yet the same judges could be caught nostalgically invoking the great ethnographies of the past. b) However, accuracy demands that we note the appearance of an avant-garde of young American anthropologists in the fifties who registered discontent with this mindless devaluation of ethnography. They became the inventors of "new ethnography." The old opposition between theory and ethnography was abolished and ethnography itself was declared a theoretical enterprise. Great efforts went into attempts to provide ethnography with rules (such as in the "ethnography of speaking") and more formal and sophisticated methods (in the various kinds of ethnoscience)." The former branch of the movement-Dell Hymes and a few others-was eventually led to consider anthropological writing itself important, inevitably so, given the attention paid to texts, rhetoric, style, genres, and so forth. The ethnoscientists had put their bets on schemata, tables, and graphs, and algebraic representation. By the time they discovered that there is no way to get around
10. See James A. Boon, Other Tribes, Other Scribes: Symbolic Anthropology in the ComparativeStudy of Cultures,Histories,Religions, and Texts (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 9-21. 11. An example of this new attitude is Harold C. Conklin's entry for "Ethnography" in The International Encyclopediaof the Social Sciences, 18 vols. (New York, 1968), 5:172-78, an important text given its task to formulate a succinct contemporary definition of the term. That the definition was a matter of a group defining what it does or thinks ought to be done can be seen if Conklin's statement is compared to the article that follows it, Harold E. Driver's "Ethnology" (in ibid., 5:178-86). The difference is much less systematic than historical. Driver represents the view of a different generation.

texts, the discussion on ethnographic writing was already in full bloom, and "new ethnography" looked old. Nevertheless, I find in current writings about ethnographic writing a curious lack of acknowledgment of that "turn to language," brought about by both ethnographers of communication and the ethnoscientists. It is to them, above all, that we owe our present critical position. Or, to put it somewhat differently, had we not been prepared by the "turn to language," the reception of hermeneutics (Paul Ricoeur, Clifford Geertz), critical theory (Jiirgen Habermas, for instance), and literary and historical "deconstructionism" would probably not have had the impact they have had. 5) From an outside point of view, which anthropology acquired under the influence of literary theory and criticism, the disjunction between ethnography and theory was not just a matter of assigning different hierarchical status to different sorts of activities (which could be taken as a sign of anthropology reaching maturity as a science). It was expressive of a differentiation of genres of writing or, as some observers have stated, of a generic crisis. Whatever else this literary turn accomplished, it restored writing to its central position in debates about the nature of ethnography, and this occurred in more than one sense. It not only raised questions of authorship and literary form, which, after all, are concerns that do not transcend the confines of our own culture,12 but it also revived critical thought about the role of literacy in relation to orality. The latter makes ethnography political. Othering, in my view, is cut short when awareness of the political dimension of writing remains limited to insights about the political character of aesthetic standards and rhetorical devices. In such critical discourse, anthropology's Other is said to be dominated by ethnography. But to be dominated, it takes more than to be written about. To become a victim the Other must be written at (as in "shot at") with literacy serving as a weapon of subjugation and discipline. Conversely, to stop writing about the Other will not bring liberation. But more about that later.13
Experiments with Genre: Symptom or Therapy?
How do the changes that came about as a result of the so-called generic crisis-comprising, roughly, the demise of the monograph as
12. Limitation to such concerns is what can be held against Clifford Geertz's latest, and again brilliant, work, Worksand Lives: The Anthropologistas Author (Stanford, Calif., 1988). It is a critique of anthropological writing in a voice that talks from, to, about, and perhaps around ethnography as a self-contained practice. For a similar critique (with many references to the recent debate about Geertz's approach), see Bob Scholte, "The Charmed Circle of Geertz's Hermeneutics: A Neo-Marxist Critique," Critiqueof Anthropology 6 (Spring 1986): 5-15. 13. See also Fabian, "Dilemmas of Critical Anthropology" (forthcoming).

the model form, the softening of strictures regarding an "objective" and "realistic" prose style, the refusal to maintain a clear separation of systematic description and narrative account-affect representation? Is the generic crisis a phase within the representationist stance, a period of emerging new genres that will eventually replace the old ones as privileged representations of the Other? Should we therefore fear that what looks like a crisis is just a lot of noise made by anthropologists regrouping in their attempts to save their representer's privileges? Or does the generic crisis go far enough to become a crisis of representation, leadIn which case ing perhaps to a rejection of representation? nonrepresentation, including its most radical form, not-writing, graphic silence, would have to be an inescapable consequence. I shall say something about not-writing in the next section, but first let me offer a few thoughts on the debate about genres. One of the confusing aspects of the debate is a lack of precision in using the term genre. Perhaps this is salutary at this early stage; I find it obfuscating. In the course of its history the term has sometimes taken a singular, or adjectival, meaning (in such expressions as "genre painting," or "this is not his genre") but in the present critical discussion, I believe its primary use should be to signal differentiation within a domain of activity. If, for instance, ethnography qualifies as a genre, this can only mean that it is, without residue, subsumed under literature (and its other genres). This is a way to preempt whatever useful insights might be gained from looking at ethnography as literature. What else would be left over for the critic but to recommend good over bad writing? (Come to think of it, Geertz probably deserves credit for initiating the new literary awareness in anthropology not so much because he fraternized with literary critics but because he dared to write well and got away with it.) The broadest claim made about the generic crisis has been epistemological. Experimenting with new kinds of writing took many different forms, but it has been said that their common background is a crisis of realism.14 Inevitably, this has caused critics to express fears that to abandon realism may be tantamount to giving up on objectivity, which in turn would mean the end of anthropology as a science.'5 In my view, it is too early to sound a general alarm. Instead I would suggest the following line of argument: What was wrong with ethnographic realism (as a literary convention) was not its realism (as an epistemological stance) but the surreptitious substitution of the former for the latter. As a literary form, realism has been a mode of representation, complete with its various privileged representational devices. As such,

dialogue serves to stress the intersubjective nature of ethnographic investigations, it signals an intent to go beyond positivism and scientism. To assure that this (epistemological) position informs all stages of the ethnographic knowledge process, it is not enough to cast the "results" into a dialogic form. Admittedly, to be attentive to literary form (rather than passing off ethnography as neutral reporting according to unreflected canons) expresses recognition of the dialogical nature of ethnography inasmuch as it reflects recognition of the multiple audiences a writer addresses and of "constituencies" for whom he presumes to speak. But to insist that only one form, written dialogue, can do this would in my view run against the declared epistemological intentions of a dialogic approach. There is another way to arrive at the same conclusion. It consists of applying what was said earlier about representation and mirror theories of knowledge. If dialogue as a literary genre were the only adequate (or accurate) representation of dialogic experience made during field research, it would thereby become "analogical" (in Tedlock's understanding of the term). If representationism is to be abandoned and replaced with a notion of praxis as described above, then the appropriate ways of conveying knowledge based on dialogic experience with the Other would be those that transform that experience in a struggle with "means of production" of discourse that include autobiography, political economy, relations of power, scientific canons, and literary form, but do not privilege dialogue as a genre. Conversely, ethnographic representations that are (or pretend to be) isomorphic with that which is being represented should be met with suspicion; more likely than not, they lack what distinguishes knowledge from mimicry.22 With that I have rehearsed my argument regarding poetry in anthropology. I do not pretend to have a full grasp of the issues involved in that particular debate. The remarks I am about to make are addressed to a recent publication, Reflections:The AnthropologicalMuse, especially to the editor's essay, J. Iain Prattis's "Dialectics and Experience in Fieldwork: The Poetic Dimension." Prattis diagnoses a "gap" in field reporting and suggests that this gap may be filled with a new, different "language of experience," which he and others have found in poetry as a form of ethnography. Throughout he defines the problem as one of overcoming the -emic/-etic distinction-between an inside and an outside view of other cultures-and the stifling effect it has had on theory and method in anthropology. At the same time he seems to accept that the constituting acts of field research consist of "observa22. Which is not to deny that mimesis is probably an aspect of all forms of knowing that qualify as ethnographic. On the issue of mimesis and recognition of an Other, see the interesting study by Fritz Kramer, Der roteFes: UberBesessenheitund Kunst in Afrika (Frankfurt am Main, 1987).

tion."23 If I understand him correctly, he advocates poetry as a new, possibly more adequate and hence privileged representation. With that, poetry, a literary genre, is set to compete with scientific prose, another literary genre. I do not deny that such competition may be healthy and entertaining, and that writing poems has helped individual anthropologists to overcome alienation from experience. At the same time I fear that it may do little to further the project of othering. To seek the solution for a problem regarding the production of knowledge in different or better representations of knowledge is to reaffirm, not to overcome, the representationist stance. Matters are different with an approach exemplified by Paul Friedrich. His accomplishments as an ethnographer and as a poet put him above suspicion of using poetry as an escape from ethnography. More important, in his theoretical reflections Friedrich does not begin by advocating poetry as a literary genre but by arguing for poesis as an alternative to representationist conceptions of language and culture. I consider his eloquent critique of linguistic and anthropological obsession with order (and indeed of equating knowledge with the imposition of order on some presumed chaos) one of the most important theoretical advances in recent anthropology.24 In sum, dialogical and poetic conceptions of ethnographic knowledge touch the heart of questions about othering. But they have a chance to change the shape of ethnography only if they lead to literary processes that are hermeneutic-dialectical, or "practical," rather than representational. To preserve the dialogue with our interlocutors, to assure the Other's presence against the distancing devices of anthropological discourse, is to continue conversing with the Other on all levels of writing, not just to reproduce dialogues. In fact, I have gone as far as saying precisely that f fieldwork is conducted dialogically, problems of writing will not be resolved by adopting the dialogical form. Similarly, that we remain attentive to what I called the transformative, creative aspects of ethnographic knowledge, for which I gladly adopt the term poetic, will not be guaranteed by poetry as a form of writing. I am willing to entertain the idea that adopting a dialogical and poetic master trope might change anthropologists from natural histori23. SeeJ. Iain Prattis, "Dialectics and Experience in Fieldwork: The Poetic Dimension," in Reflections: The AnthropologicalMuse, ed. Prattis (Washington, D.C., 1985), pp. 266-83. 24. See Friedrich, "Linguistic Relativity and the Order-to-Chaos Continuum," in On LinguisticAnthropology: Essays in Honor of Harry Hoijer, 1979, ed. Jacques Maquet (Malibu, Calif., 1980), pp. 89-139; reprinted in Friedrich, The Language Parallax: Linguistic Relativism and Poetic Indeterminacy(Austin, Tex., 1986), pp. 117-52. An appreciation of Friedrich's poetry as well as of his theoretical contribution was given by Tyler in "The Poetic Turn in Postmodern Anthropology: The Poetry of Paul Friedrich," American 86 Anthropologist (une 1984): 328-36.

ans into itinerant bards, clowns, or preachers, and that this may ultimately be the aim of "being with others." But I still think that such purposeless conviviality must be earned by the critical labors of interpretation.

Writingand Not-Writing

Different from, but not unrelated to, the kinds of critique of anthropological writing I have commented on so far is the debate about writing framed in the opposition of literacy and orality. Participants in this discussion take varied points of departure: some begin with writing as a technology, or with the special constraints imposed by our system of alphabetic writing; others ponder the changes that take place when sound-events are represented in writing, an issue that is related to that of contrasts between the verbal-aural and the graphic-visual; still others start with the societywide or global impact of literacy as a historical phenomenon; and so forth.25 It is my impression that this debate, perhaps due to the influence of thinkers such as Walter Ong, Jacques Derrida, and Foucault, questions anthropological writing as a praxis of representation in a context of power more radically than the critique of genres. That the problem with anthropological writing is a problem with relating to an Other is much more in the foreground in the literacy than in the literary discussion. The former also tends to give a more compelling expression to the anthropologist's dilemma: if writing is part of a system of intellectual and political oppression of the Other, how can we avoid contributing to that oppression if we go on writing? There are those who respond to a seemingly radical question with a radical answer; they give up writing about the Other and drop out, if not out of anthropology, then out of ethnography. But if the premise is correct, namely that given the power relations in this world writing as such is an act of oppression, then writing need not have the Other as its subject matter in order to oppress the Other. To stop writing altogether would seem to be a logical consequence (for those who care), but
25. SeeJack Goody, The Domesticationof the Savage Mind (Cambridge, 1977), and his earlier work, Literacy in Traditional Societies (Cambridge, 1968). See also Ton Lemaire, "Antropologie en Schrift," in Antropologieen Ideologie,ed. Lemaire (Groningen, 1984), pp. 103-24; Spokenand WrittenLanguage: Exploring Orality and Literacy,ed. Deborah Tannen (Norwood, N.J., 1982); Tedlock, The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation; Tyler, "The Vision Quest in the West, or What the Mind's Eye Sees," Journal of Anthropological Research 40 (Spring 1984): 23-40; and Literacy and Society, ed. Karen Schousboe and Mogens Trolle Larsen (Copenhagen, 1989), especially the essay in that collection by Michael Harbsmeier, "Writing and the Other: Travellers' Literacy, or Towards an Archeology of Orality," pp. 197-228.

funding agencies will accept this view and start sponsoring gratuitous field experience (that they have often done this in the past cannot have escaped their attention); still, to leave much or most of what was experienced unwritten about is how anthropological writing works and always did work, even though this was not always recognized.28 Because the problem is not so much writing in general but ethnographic writing, there is yet another form of not-writing to be considered. To show this, I return to my own case. I may have given the impression that I felt that my first fieldwork was adequately "written up" with ethnographic publications, that the third project was well on its way to turning into ethnography, while I had hardly written anything about the project in between. So strong are our internalized conceptions of ethnography as representation that it takes a special effort of reflection to realize that all of this is inaccurate. Throughout the years I produced "theoretical" and "historical" studies that seemed to be not-writing from the point of view of ethnography because they were not descriptive of what I had found out in field research. Yet none of them would have been conceived and carried out without those experiences. In this sense, these writings are the results of processes that originated "in the field" without being representations of them. They are attempts to formulate insights in response to concrete, practical demands-such as teaching, lecturing, publishing, and making a in academic institutions-while trying to stay in the presence of living the Other.29
If recognizing the necessity of what I called not-writing helps to further a conception of ethnography as praxis, all the better. I realize
28. I remember Paul Bohannan declaring many years ago that should he ever discover a Ph.D. candidate having put everything he knew about the subject into his thesis, he would refuse to certify the candidate as an anthropologist. The realization that ethnographic notes, far from only providing a finite quantity of information, are only contingent extractions from an inexhaustible reservoir of matters for thought shows how misguided (maybe not ethically, but epistemologically) demands are to consign one's "data" to public depositories. This is, of course, not to deny that certain kinds of material that have a documentary character of their own can be shared by more than one ethnographer and may even be of importance to the people studied. 29. Time and the Other (1983), for instance, is in no obvious way about the Jamaa movement, which I began to study in 1965. But I know-and an outside reader might notice this even more than I do-that some of the theoretical issues I address in this book were first experienced as practical problems; and there are some theoretical insights I owe to the teachings of the movement. Similarly, Language and Colonial Power (1986) is not an ethnography of sociolinguistic research on language and labor conducted in 197274. It is a historical study with some theoretical pretensions, but to me it has been the only practical way to make sense of what I had naively taken to be a "given" linguistic situation.

that it is not as such a remedy for what is wrong in our relations with of the Other. It helps to create conditions for othering-recognition the Other that is not limited to representations of the Other. All this makes little more than a start on a long road toward undoing ethnographic representationism. Several of the issues I touched on need to be recast in more subtle terms. Take not-writing, for instance. In its first form discussed above, I described it as a rather trivial case of inevitable selectivity: some data are chosen, others omitted. Positivists write that way, what is so dialectical about it? I hope to have given part of an answer, but the idea needs to be worked out more fully. Furthermore, are cases of not-writing that seem to be a personal affliction and are known to have destroyed careers something altogether different from the ethnographer's temporary silence or the preservation of unwritten-about experience as an ethnographic branch to sit on? How much confusion is spread in discussions of anthropological writing by a failure to distinguish not only between literature and literacy but also between writing and publishing? An important part of myself is now defined as a writer. Given my lack of talents en belles lettres, this would not have happened had I not as an anthropologist sought to converse with an Other and then been pressured to communicate my insights in writing. Through writing I work as best I can on making my experiences critically useful both to the community for which I write and the community about which I write (and there are signs that the two are merging). But does that mean that the people I studied would profit much from reading those of my writings that conventions of anthropological publishing have qualified as acceptable ethnography? In Timeand the Other I made an oblique remark to the effect that given the dominant rhetoric of anthropological discourse, the Other's ethnographic presence goes together with his theoretical absence. In ethnography as we know it, the Other is displayed, and therefore contained, as an object of representation; the Other's voice, demands, teachings are usually absent from our theorizing. Should this current search attain its highest aims-to transform ethnography into a praxis capable of making the Other present (rather than making representations predicated on the Other's absence)-then the work of interpretation can begin. In the end all questioning of the How must be in the service of understanding the What, what it is all about. And the answer to that question carries no promise of illumination: There are those who say that a native will not speak to a white man. Error. No man will speak to his master; but to a wanderer and a friend, to him who does not come to teach or to rule, to him who asks for nothing and accepts all things, words are spoken by the camp-fires, in the shared solitude of the sea, in riverside villages, in

resting-placessurrounded by forests-words are spoken that take no account of race or colour. One heart speaks-another one listens; and the earth, the sea, the sky, the passing wind and the stirring leaf, hear also the futile tale of the burden of life.30
30. Joseph Conrad, "Karain:A Memory," SelectedTalesfrom Conrad,ed. Nigel Stewart(London, 1977), pp. 65-66.