Anthropology News • February 2007

18

hours of recordings, I found that in translating and reworking half a sentence from page 7 of the tran-scriptions and combining it with half a sentence from page 704, I had something like the verse of a prose poem. And even where the words weren’t beautiful, images appeared that clearly belonged more to the realm of literature than to that of a social science.

Creation is not the exclusive domain of God, of mothers, or of first-world writers, Bruna seemed to say, I can do it myself. Gender was one realm in which she had already reinvented herself, in this case as a putative woman—through dress, demeanor, the pitch of her voice, her peculiar sashay, the use of fem-inine adjectives in self-reference,

anywhere except, of course, into the mind of another person. Like cin-ema, ethnography remains outside and at most can evoke a person’s thoughts, but such evocations never escape the realm of conjecture. Film can make visible things that litera-ture cannot. Yet try to convey men-tal turmoil and cinema can reveal at best its symptoms, enactment, and consequences, though not at all the interior of the shattered mind itself. Which is why Proust would have the upper hand over Bergman and why, it seemed to me, in this par-ticular case an ethnographic fiction had advantages over ethnography cut-and-dried.

Ethnographic fiction might be compared to historical fiction, where lives and events that exist only in the imagination of the author are introduced into the larger sweep of what is widely agreed to have occurred. All the characters portrayed need not have existed nor must all the events related actually have taken place, but they could have: they must be consequent with what we know as historical processes.

In his essay “On the Historical Novel,” Alessandro Manzoni, the 19th-century Italian poet, novelist and critic, wrote that one of the main charges against historical fic-tion is that “fact is not clearly distin-guished from invention and that, as a result, these works fail to achieve one of their principal purposes, which is to give a faithful representa-tion of history.” But conceding that these charges are not unwarranted, Manzoni countered that “joining together bits of copper and bits of tin does not make a bronze statue.”

Ultimately, when I wrote the book that emerged from this fieldwork what I hoped would ring true was an ethnographic present; it is against that rendering that the fiction begins, with the insubstantiality of charac-ters who go about their invented lives. In the end, it would be no more revealing to say that Bruna was lying when she spoke into my tape recorder than to say that Alexandre Dumas was lying when he wrote the Count of Monte Cristo. What mat-ters is that they rendered their stories with a palpable awareness of what could be truth.

Tobias Hecht received the Mead Award in 2002 from the AAA and the Society for Applied Anthropology. He is the author of After Life, an ethnographic novel that grew out of the research discussed here.

Ethnographic FictionContinued from page 17

Leading Questions

By Jonathan Skinner (Queen’s U Belfast)In response to Jonathan Marion’s “’Where’ is ‘There?’ Towards a Translocal Anthropology” (May 2005 AN), Laurie Frederik’s “Competition Ballroom Dancing: The Native’s Point of View” (December 2005 AN) and Jonathan Marion’s “Why ‘Ballroom’ is Bigger than the Studio Floor” (December 2005 AN).

Strictly Come Dancing and its US version Dancing with the Stars have recently sparked much social interest on both sides of the Atlantic. The shows have generated inter-est in dance with new student figures at UK and US dance studios doubling in many cases, as well as prompting much discussion and debate as loyal supporters root for their “home” celebrity dancer and professional partner.

This resurgent interest in ballroom dancing has not been lost to anthropologists with professional and hobby ballroom dance interests, such as Marion and Frederik whose exchange about community and dance culture amongst competitive ballroom dancers was recently featured in AN. Their thoughts resurrected interesting questions about the anthropologists’ fieldsite (single or multi-sited) and informants (the possibility of a “tribe” of dance practitioners), as well as anthropological methods in general (the challenges of “translocal” and “activity-based” research).

Reading Marion, it would appear that his case study is one of globalization and the homogenization of dance culture as studios look the same and dancers from all around the world seem to interconnect seamlessly. One of Frederik’s points, however, is that Marion’s constant research mobility is at the expense of research depth: sampling a large number of dance venues and events leads to a cumulative impression that they are very similar when, in fact, a detailed and nuanced portrait of a studio—and presumably also the tracking of participants through their ball-room dance competitions, the before and the after as well as the during—would reveal the hierarchies, tensions, friendships, individual expressions and idiosyncrasies between dancers, as well as the feel of each studio (Arthur Murrays versus The Ballroom versus Del Campos Studio all in Sacramento, CA, in my experience), the allegiances and how and why they are wrought.

Working with studio ballroom dancers and nightclub salseros and salseras in Sacramento each summer between 2005 and 2007, I have both found and circum-scribed my own “activity-based field” of dancers (tracking students and instructors over the weeks, interviewing both on and off the dance floor), dance locations (observing and dancing in a range of venues), and dance events (organized parties, impromptu competitions and spontaneous “dancing in the streets” expressions). I have taken “fieldnotes” (daily written accounts of interactions), “headnotes” (men-tal memories and impressions of my experiences), and “bodynotes” (an awareness of my own body’s changing physical muscle memories brought about by different dances, dance instruction and different dance styles within the dance, for example, the feel of LA versus Cuban salsa).

My point here is that there are additional avenues available for Marion to take with his ballroom dancing research. He could track individuals and couples; appraise his own training and competing; interview competitors on the way to and on the way back from their competitions; and try to get insight into the judging and audi-ence reception of the dances and dancers (why and how is it that some competi-tion dancers catch the audiences’ eye, and what are the turning points in audience support for dance couples in their fickle cheering?).

To Marion’s credit, though, it is extremely important to dance and be a part of the dance community rather than apart from the dancing community, not just for negotiating access to the community and gaining creditability as the researcher.

[Ethnography] can

go almost anywhere

except, of course,

into the mind of

another person.

and by assuming what Brazilians call the “passive,” or receptive, role in sex. But more than her gender, she was recreating her nature, as if she herself were a character in mul-tiple and concurrent scripts.

Ethnographic Fiction and AwarenessEthnography and fiction are not mutually exclusive categories: some novelists put more research into making a particular setting realistic than do ethnographers who have been known to use a few half-un-derstood snatches of conversation as the steppingstone to high theory. As I conducted the research for this book it became evident that the story did not consist simply of events and actions; at its center were thoughts. Ethnography can take one into ritu-als and mundane daily events, into gossip and funerals, into the worlds of work and leisure. It can go almost

Jonathan Skinner and UK dirty dancing compe-tition partner. Photo courtesy of Jonathan Skinner, 2002

F I E L D N O T E S