“Called into Being”:

Ethnography, Entanglement, and Play

By Susan Coutin

Prepared for the AES/APLA panel in honor of Barbara Yngvesson

I open my paper with a conclusion, a story that Barbara Yngvesson and I recounted at the

end of an article that we published in American Ethnologist. We wrote:

On the third day of the American Anthropological Association meeting in New Orleans,

we took a walk down to the river. Our conversation turned to a talk given by Marilyn

Strathern [2006] at UC Irvine. [Strathern] argued that among the Murik people of

highlands New Guinea, images can be said to “own” the children whose ties to particular

groups are made visible through the ornaments inscribed on their bodies. In this sense,

people “belong to” the ornaments rather than ornaments belonging to the people who

“have” them. [We were] intrigued by the implications this might have for adoptees and

deportees in search of papers that authorize their belonging…. We then realized that …

like them, we’re in the middle, too, and the form (the image of “the paper” that will make

everything fall into place) is calling to us. It’s the form of the paper (the ethnographic

product) that calls us into being as ethnographers. [Barbara Yngvesson and Susan

Coutin, November 22, 2002, emphasis added]

In this paper, I analyze how the narratives that have been key to Barbara Yngvesson’s

work call into being a particular kind of ethnographic practice, and thus a particular kind of

ethnographer. From her early analyses of disputing in a Swedish fishing village to her study of

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citizen complaints in a New England court to her more recent accounts of transnational adoption,

her ethnographic accounts have been characterized by deep entanglement with the subject

matter, sustained conversations with diverse interlocutors, and a willingness to push the

boundaries of ethnographic form in innovative ways. To produce these accounts, Barbara draws

on interviews, popular culture, her own experiences, legal documents, memoirs, poetry,

drawings, photographs and other texts, reading these in conversation with each other,

juxtaposing them to other accounts, and enabling their narrators and subjects to emerge over

time. These subjects and narrators are both the human actors who tell stories or who are the

subjects of accounts and also the social constructs and nonhuman agents – the child,

commodities, law, theory – that in turn shape and are produced through stories. Retelling these

stories reveals the narrative arc of her own ethnography, through law, language, and lives, as

well as through various collaborations. In keeping with her approach to ethnography, I also

incorporate narratives that I obtained from several of her collaborators about their experiences

working with her. These accounts reveal the creative potential of both ethnography and

storytelling, a potential that Barbara has realized through a willingness to explore unlikely

connections, and imagine alternative realities. Her combination of openness to multiple forms of

engagement with deeply serious subjects has produced an ethnographic record that continues to

inspire others.

Barbara’s essay, “The Atlantic Fishermen,” published in Nader and Todd’s The

Disputing Process: Law in Ten Societies in 1978, both exemplifies the disputing paradigm that

was popular at the time and also introduces themes that turned out to be important in her later

work and that depart considerably from this paradigm. In the preface to this volume, Laura

Nader describes this paradigm as centered on “the dispute case,” which, she asserts,

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is present in all societies. Universally such cases share most of the following

components, depending on what stage the dispute is in: that which is disputed; … the

parties to the dispute; … presentation of the dispute,… procedure or manner of handling

the dispute, … the outcome; the termination of the grievance; and the enforcement (or

nonenforcement) of the decision. (1978:x-xi)

The idea for the volume was that by collecting analyses of the ways that different societies

handled disputes between community members who had to go on living with each other

afterward, it would be possible to build “a general theory about behavior as it pertains to law”

(Nader 1978:xi). During a telephone conversation, Lynn Mather, who went to graduate school

with Barbara and who was also part of this project, told me, “All of the students were to go to the

field and do the same thing. The goal was to examine process, not outcomes, which is what

other people were focusing on, or legal categories, which Bohannon and Gluckman were writing

about. We were to return to the trouble case and go to the field settings to see how people

handled conflict.”

Consistent with this broader project, Barbara’s chapter in the Nader and Todd volume

investigates how residents in a Scandinavian fishing village responded to grievances, arguing

that their response depended less on the nature of the grievance and more on who was involved

in the dispute. Her account is replete with terms – such as “settlement process,” “offending

behavior,” “outside remedy agent,” and “restitution” -- that were part of the dispute analysis

lexicon (1978:59). And she also recounts several cases, one of which I reproduce here, in

summary form.

The Case of the Stolen Goods. A respected fisherman on Rock Island, Harris Jenks,

married a woman from a neighboring island. They had a daughter, Anne, who married

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and settled down on Rock Island. During the course of approximately a year, Anne was

observed shoplifting by employees of the Rock Island cooperative. She hid the goods

from the cashier as she went to pay. Employees of the store discussed among themselves

and informally with other members of the community what they should do about the

thefts, but they took no action for several months. Toward the end of the year, Anne was

accused by the store manager and confessed to the thefts. She begged the manager not to

take the case to court, and said she would repay the full amount. The case was thus

‘settled amicably’ ….

It was reported to me during my fieldwork period that Anne had gone to the

hospital with a nervous breakdown. She told my informant that people on the island were

so harsh and unfriendly to her that she could no longer stand it. (Yngvesson 1978:70-71).

Barbara’s analysis of this case focuses on the ways that the dispute was less about Anne’s

behavior and more about community boundaries. Anne’s shoplifting was attributed to her being

an “outsider,” the daughter of a mother born off the island, and part of a family where theft was

common. However, Barbara notes, Anne could just as easily have been defined as someone

from the island whose behavior could have been tolerated, as occurred in one of the other cases

she presents. Thus, she concludes, “what happened was not so much a discrete act of

punishment as a process of reclassification, of fictive or actual exclusion from the community”

(1978:78). This analysis challenges rule-focused understandings of actions – it is not only

because Anne is an outsider that her behavior is not tolerated, in addition, gossip and ostracism

redefine her as outsider. Moreover, in Barbara’s analysis, some grievances, such as ongoing

property disputes between lighthouse keepers and fishing families, seemingly defy “settlement”

or “processing,” lasting decades or even centuries. To again quote Lynn Mather, “When Barbara

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came back from the field, … she said, ‘It’s really hard. They didn’t talk about their conflict, they

avoided it.’ … The postmistress was the nodal point for gossip, and nothing was ever out in the

open…. It didn’t fit the patterns we had learned in graduate school.”

In Barbara’s analysis, then, narratives of disputes not only provide accounts of what

happened, that is, of social behavior, but also are themselves constitutive of boundaries and

status. Couinterintuitively, Barbara notes, narratives’ power stems at least partially from their

fictional quality. Barbara writes that within the fishing village, accounts can maintain “the

fiction that no change (in the form of a grievance) has occurred” (p. 80). This fiction can allow

relationships to be preserved even when people behave in a deviant fashion.

These themes of boundaries, exclusion, and the productive capacity of narratives were

important in her subsequent work on disputing in a New England Court, published as Virtuous

Citizens, Disruptive Subjects. In this project, Barbara observed “show cause” hearings at a

Massachusetts court in order to understand how the line distinguishing matters worthy of the

court’s attention from so-called “garbage cases” was drawn and contested. Building on her

earlier insights regarding the role of narrative in defining or even hiding grievances, she focused

particularly on language, viewing “disputing … as a contest about cultural meanings, [in which]

particular theories of wrongdoing or of virtue were legitimized while others were suppressed”

(1993: 6). Her analysis demonstrates that as courts decided which theories to authorize, they

simultaneously produced law and community. In her view, power inhered in the ability to make

this determination, resulting in a paradox: when citizens turned to the courts in search of justice,

they exercised their legal rights but also had to submit themselves to the power of the state, a

state that, all too often, considered their problems to be trivial.

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These dynamics are clear in one of the key cases discussed in Virtuous Citizens,

Disruptive, that of Charlie. Barbara describes Charlie as “an infamous courthouse regular,

familiar to clerks, judges, and probation staff, and a constant source of aggravation to police”

(1993:80). A homeless person who reportedly was from a wealthy background, Charlie bridged

categories, violating the law through his very existence (urinating in public, exposing himself)

but also mastering the law in repeated court appearances. Barbara writes, “His performances

were compelling (and thus permitted) precisely because they spoke to the concerns of court staff

about the gap between moral and legal sense, and to the limitations of law as a ‘wet noodle,’

unable to fuly [sic.] contain the ‘undesirables’” (1993:81, emph orig). During hearings, Charlie

displayed lawyerlike skills and was able to entertain on-lookers, describing an incident of

indecent exposure as a mere accident: “As I ran to get the ball, my pants fell down…. My pants

fit loosely…. My pants were only down for a second or two. I pulled them back up as soon as I

could” (1993:82). Such comments “transformed the hearing into satire in a performance in

which Charlie, rather than the judge, was momentarily in control” (1993:83). Though Charlie’s

behavior eventually became more disturbing, landing him in state prison, this story stands out for

the way that he transcended boundaries, temporarily imposing his own normative order on that

of the court.

Barbara’s analysis of show cause hearings also became the basis for a collaborative

project with Carol Greenhouse and David Engel, resulting in the book, Law and Community in

Three American Towns. This book grew out of conversations in which Carol, David, and

Barbara discovered striking similarities in the ways that individuals in disparate U.S.

communities viewed court use by newcomers as disruptive, as a sign that values were being

eroded and that litigious troublemakers – often of different racial, ethnic and class backgrounds

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than long-time residents – were moving into their neighborhoods. Barbara, Carol and David

concluded that townspeople’s perceptions of increasingly litigiousness promoted a “myth” of

community, namely the assumption that “their communities, once integral and distinctive, were

now under siege from the future. Such claims are misleading, in that these towns have always

been diverse places (Greenhouse, Yngvesson and Engel 1994:22). Narrative again was key to

their analysis, both particular narratives about specific cases but also a metanarrative about

community change. Within this narrative, insiders and outsiders were sharply distinguished:

“Condemnation of certain types of litigation almost immediately transforms itself into

degradation of the plaintiffs themselves as poor, uncultured, ethnically undesirable, or

unchristian” (Greenhouse, Yngvesson and Engel 1994:121).

When I wrote to David Engel to ask him for a “Barbara story” – and I didn’t ask Carol

for one, because she is already on our panel -- David described this collaboration. David wrote,

My sense of Barbara has mostly involved a deep awareness of how she views the world,

her understanding of people and what makes them work, and her reading of situations.

That's what has been coming to mind rather [than] particular stories with a beginning,

middle, and end.

He continued:

I have had the good fortune to have known Barbara for many years and to have

traveled with her to places as different as Canada, the Finger Lakes, Germany, Hawaii,

and Thailand. Barbara, Carol Greenhouse, and I spent weeks together with our families

when we co-authored a book on law in three American communities. We have shared

many personal ups and downs, and we have watched our children grow up to be adults.

You would think that it would be easy to recall one or two stories that capture the essence

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of this wonderful friend, but it isn't. Looking back, I don't remember particular incidents

so much as Barbara's presence, her point of view, and her uncanny assessments of people

and situations.

David nonetheless was able to come up with a story for me, about a trip that he took to Thailand

with Barbara and with Jane Collier in 1990, to plan a conference on law and society in Southeast

Asia. He wrote:

Seeing the country - which is a second home to me - through Barbara's eyes was quite a

wonderful experience. Although she knew almost nothing about Thailand, she was

amazingly perceptive, even when she was observing conversations in Thai that she

couldn't understand. Our interviews with Thai scholars eventually produced an invitation

list for the conference, and her insights based on very subtle clues always led to sound

decisions about whom to invite. I remember in particular how she bristled when one very

famous Thai human rights advocate repeatedly used the term "target populations" when

describing his work. This expression really rubbed her the wrong way. She saw in it not

just the jargon of a different field but a callous self-importance that had not been

completely apparent to me until Barbara identified it.

On that same trip, the three of us stayed at an old and historic hotel in Bangkok

that had gone to seed. I was unhappy that one wall in my room was covered with a thick

green blanket of mold, but I hesitated to say anything to Barbara and Jane. I assumed that

these two anthropologists, who had slept on boats and in village huts, would hardly notice

the flickering lights and offensive smells of this hotel. Much to my relief, the next

morning they both admitted that their rooms were extremely unpleasant and that they did

not enjoy the gaze of the creepy middle aged men who sat in the public areas and

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watched their comings and goings. We moved to a more modern hotel that day, and I

learned that anthropologists, who can tolerate all kinds of personal hardships and

unpleasant accommodations in their fieldwork, do not insist on them under all

circumstances.

I must say that I had a similar experience traveling with Barbara. In 1999, I traveled to

Portland, Oregon for the American Ethnological Society meeting along with both Barbara and

Phyllis Chock. The three of us took a break from the conference to go for a long walk, in which I

had difficulty keeping up with the two of them, and we came across a used bookstore. Phyllis

and Barbara both found novels by their favorite mystery writers, and so walked out with

armloads of books. I was completely impressed that these two women, who I admired greatly,

took the time to read simply for fun, driving home for me the lesson that it is important to take

the time to enjoy oneself, whether that means moving out of a moldy hotel, as in David’s story,

or picking up a mystery novel.

But, I am getting ahead of myself. Following her collaboration with David and Carol,

Barbara moved away from her earlier focus on disputing to a new project: a study of open

adoption in the United States. I first encountered this research when I happened to bring her Law

and Society Review article, “Negotiating Motherhood” with me to read on a plane flight. In this

piece, Barbara analyzes “how borders are reproduced and transgressed in the relations and

subjectivities of birth and adoptive mothers whose position at the meeting place of self with

other in open adoption is revealing of the paradoxical interplay of sameness and difference,

connection and separation, that the process we call "reality" involves” (1997:32). In this article,

which is a deliberately nonlinear account, Barbara interweaves accounts of her own experiences

adopting her son Finn, the form through which Finn’s birth mother surrendered her parental

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rights, excerpts from a letter written by Finn’s birth father, an op-Ed piece about adoption,

journal entries, memoirs, and interview material. Some of this material is presented without

explanation, enabling the article to convey some of the analysis through performance.

Importantly, the form of her article defies scholarly conventions in that it moves between deeply

personal accounts that are not and really can never be “data” and material (observations at an

adoption agency) that was obtained as “data” but that, through juxtaposition to the other material,

becomes more than this. As the distance between “researcher” and “research subject,” between

the personal and the professional, dissolve, the “data” also becomes personal and deeply moving,

at the same time that it is there in order to further an analysis. Barbara thus elucidates “the

boundaries that are continually set in place, disturbed, and transgressed by [movement]-between

life and work, between the people we study and the people we are, between the legal and the

everyday, between legitimate and illegitimate families, and between adoptive parents,

birthparents, and their children” (1997:33).

In 1997, when I read “Negotiating Motherhood,” I did not know Barbara well. I had met

her at conferences, and we had corresponded as I wrote a review essay for LSR when she was

book review editor there. But her analysis of adoption resonated with my emerging

understanding of the ways that naturalization – and particularly dual nationality, which might be

akin to open adoption – disturbed yet reinforced traditional notions of citizenship. So on an

impulse, I wrote to her to suggest that it would be interesting to examine parallels between

adoption and naturalization. Generously, she responded, and thus began a collaboration that

turned out to be enormously important for my own thinking, and that at one point, also involved

Bill Maurer. In fact, Bill, Barbara, and I spent a month together at the International Institute for

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the Sociology of Law in Oñati in the Basque country in Spain. There, we put our work on

immigration, transnational adoption, and offshore finance into conversation.

And that brings me to Bill Maurer’s “Barbara story,” which he entitled, “The Cat” and

related to me over the phone. Here it is:

Barbara, Bill, Bill’s husband Tom Boellstorff, and Tom’s sister Darcy were in Oñati,

Spain at the International Institute for the Sociology of Law, and one evening, they all

went to the market to buy some really good Basque cheese. Bill tried, with difficulty, to

explain what they were looking for, then Barbara ordered the cheese in impressively

fluent Spanish. On the way back from the market, they heard mewing sounds coming

from a mailbox and realized a kitten was trapped underneath. Using the cheese as bait,

Tom lured out a tiny kitten, scooping it up in his hands. It was a beautiful scene – the

tiny kitten, the setting sun, and town residents walking past. They brought the tiny kitten

back to the residencia where Barbara, again using her fluent Spanish skills, called the

Basque equivalent of the Humane Society. They were told to take the cat outside and

release it. So, they returned to the mailbox, put down the cat, and sure enough, a mother

cat appeared to claim it.

The next day, Barbara returned to the market to buy more cheese. She noticed

that people were looking at her strangely, but she didn’t know why. Finally, a

community person walked up to her and asked, “So what happened to the cat?”

Apparently, everyone in town was aware of the spectacle of the cat’s “rescue.”

We see in Bill’s story echoes of several points made by David Engel: Barbara’s language

skills, whether Spanish fluency or the ability to understand aspects of interactions conducted in

Thai, a language she did not understand. We also see her appreciation of taste: ordering good

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quality cheese, moving to more comfortable accommodations, selecting mystery novels. And

both this story and David’s account are about ethnographers’ travels. In Bill’s story, the

ethnographers become something of a spectacle to the local community, a classic predicament,

and in David’s, ethnographers defy his own assumptions about anthropologists’ desire to “rough

it.”

The other reason that Bill chose this particular story was because it was about a cat. And

that brings me to my own Barbara story, though I think I managed to sneak in a couple of others

earlier.

Barbara and I had the opportunity to meet in Onati again in 2005 for a sociolegal studies

workshop. Remembering my earlier experience in Portland, I had visited a used

bookstore in Long Beach, where I picked up a collection of short stories by the science

fiction writer Ursula K. LeGuin. As I read it in Oñati, trying to fall asleep despite the

time difference, I had been intrigued by a story entitled, “Schrodinger’s Cat.” The story

played with parallel realities in which metaphors were taken literally (e.g., a couple

“broke up” and literally broke into pieces), the world seemed to be coming to an end, and

quantum physics and religion explored questions of certainty, uncertainty, and whether

realities could exist independently of observer. It seemed to me that there was something

profound in the story, but I could not figure out what. So, as Barbara, her husband

Sigfrid and I drove through the hills around Oñati, I asked them if they had heard of

Schrodinger’s cat. Sigfrid, who is a physicist, immediately launched into a lengthy

explanation of quantum theory, waves, and photons, and several hours and diagrams

later, I had a vague understanding of the physicist Schrodinger’s thought experiment.

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And Barbara and I had an idea for a new paper: “Schrodinger’s Cat and the Ethnography

of Law,” which we published in PoLAR in 2008.

This story conveys to me the importance of fortuituousness, something that we as

ethnographers, may tend to underestimate, and also the creative potential of uncanny

juxtapositions and of play, of pushing boundaries, of not limiting research and writing to the

formal activities that are described in grant proposals. This is something that Barbara knows

well. By moving beyond these boundaries, she demonstrates a deep respect for the subjects she

presents in her work. For example, her most recent book, Belonging in an Adopted World, opens

with a letter that a Colombian mother wrote to the parents who were adopting her infant son.

And here, instead of quoting the letter, I will quote Barbara’s statement about it. She writes,

I include this letter not because it is representative of others (nor because it speaks for

other birth mothers who do not leave written messages for the future parents of their

children), but to provide some sense of a relinquishment narrative, the circumstances that

can lead to the ‘abandonment’ of a child, and a particular historical moment when

awareness of the child’s interest in his or her ‘identity’ led officials in sending nations to

support the production of such documents. (Yngvesson 2010:2)

This strikes me as an immensely complex yet respectful statement. Barbara rejects the notion

that this letter is “typical” and instead encourages readers to accept it on its own terms. At the

same time, she indicates that there were historical conditions that generated this document, that

officials may have solicited it, and that children usually are not simply “abandoned” but rather

are relinquished for complex reasons including tremendous resource differentials between

nations. As well, Barbara’s inclusion of narratives about her own experiences, as in the

“Negotiating Motherhood” piece and throughout Belonging in an Adopted World, demonstrate

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the degree to which she as author and we as readers are entangled in the very processes that she

recounts. Instead of a “reflexive” account, which attempts to subvert but also relies on and

reproduces the distance intrinsic to notions of “objective” knowledge, her account pursues a

strategy of interweaving. By attending not only to socioeconomic realities but also to fantasy,

imagination, and desire, which are often conveyed through narrative, she is able to examine “the

power of law to make and unmake ‘natural’ belongings” (2010:8). Importantly, in her analysis,

it is through imagination that the ‘real’ is often revealed.

I conclude by coming full circle, to one more “Barbara story” conveyed to me by Lynn

Mather, but this time about Barbara’s childhood. Lynn explains that for decades, she and

Barbara would always share a room at the Law and Society Association meeting. They used to

compare notes at the end of the day, about who they met and with whom they had spoken. When

I asked Lynn for a story, she recalled a conversation that, she thought, might provide insight into

Barbara’s unusual skills of perception, what David remarked on as “her uncanny assessments of

people and situations.” Lynn said that late one evening at LSA in the 1980s, Barbara told her

that she had had a fascinating conversation with someone else who, like her, was a child of a

foreign service officer. Barbara told Lynn that she had never realized how unusual this

experience was until she was able to compare notes with someone else who had had the same

experience. More recently, Lynn spoke to Barbara to update her recollection of this

conversation. Lynn related:

As the eldest of 3 children of a distinguished U.S. foreign service officer, Barbara grew

up all over the world - Dominican Republic, Canada, Brazil, New Guinea, Chile,

Australia, the U.S. Her Dad once told her that she had lived in 28 different houses by the

time she left for college. At age 7 when she was living in Brazil, her ability to speak and

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read Portuguese surpassed her English language skills. Although she never articulated it

as such to me, I can't help but think of the dislocation that every move must have

engendered for her and her younger brothers. Not just being pulled away from the

comfortable surroundings of friends, school, and home - as many of us experienced with

a parental move - but pulled away from an entire country with its own culture, language,

geography, and history and then plunged into a new one…. I can't help but wonder about

how this helped to shape her intellectual interests and her focus on narrative. I come up

with this.

For a strong, self-confident child like Barbara, with a supportive family, each

move could be an opportunity… to gain new experiences, to go on an exotic new

adventure and perhaps even to reinvent herself…. She intuitively learned that language

and narrative provided powerful tools in her new surroundings - tools for presentation of

self but also for understanding the new social order she was now living in. She could

listen intently to the stories others told and the ways in which those stories reflected

hierarchy, values, and norms of everyday practice. The sooner she understood the

meaning of those narratives, the quicker would be her adjustment to new surroundings.

Lynn concludes, “I have no idea if my hypothesis makes any sense, but if it does, we can all be

thankful to Barbara for how she transformed her childhood experiences of global movement into

original intellectual contributions about culture, self, and social orders.”

I share Lynn’s gratitude, as do, I think, all of the panelists, and so I conclude by echoing

Lynn’s central point: thank you.