traveller's tales

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Travelers' Tales: Observations on the Travel Book and Ethnography Author(s): Valerie Wheeler Reviewed work(s): Source: Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 59, No. 2, Ethnographic Realities/Authorial Ambiguities (Apr., 1986), pp. 52-63 Published by: The George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3317351 . Accessed: 13/03/2013 07:12 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . The George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Anthropological Quarterly. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded on Wed, 13 Mar 2013 07:12:44 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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OBSERVATIONS ON THE TRAVEL BOOKAND ETHNOGRAP (V. Wheeler)

Transcript of traveller's tales

Page 1: traveller's tales

Travelers' Tales: Observations on the Travel Book and EthnographyAuthor(s): Valerie WheelerReviewed work(s):Source: Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 59, No. 2, Ethnographic Realities/AuthorialAmbiguities (Apr., 1986), pp. 52-63Published by: The George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic ResearchStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3317351 .

Accessed: 13/03/2013 07:12

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research is collaborating with JSTOR todigitize, preserve and extend access to Anthropological Quarterly.

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TRAVELERS' TALES: OBSERVATIONS ON THE TRAVEL BOOK

AND ETHNOGRAPHY' VALERIE WHEELER

California State University, Sacramento

While the travel account is a species of ethnography, classic realist ethnographies are sharply distinguished from travel writing by their respective moral assessments of other cultures and interest in adventure. In contemporary discussions of the creation of the anthropologist and ethnography, separation of experience and outcome is a central puzzle which may be clarified by an examination of how anthropologists' accounts are and are not traveler's tales.

"I hate travelling and explorers" (Levi-Strauss 1974: 17)

Literate, but not literary, anthropological but not anthropologists, exploring but not explorers, travel writers produce something like ethnography but not ethnography. Anthropologists seek exotic settings, tell of what they find, and are fond of travel books; but they may deny being travelers, are uncomfortable making their personal exper- iences public, and produce accounts strikingly different, even opposite in form, from travel books. Though the traveler had an honored place in nineteenth-century anthropology as one who provided data for the armchair anthropologist to analyze (Stocking 1983: 71), travel books today are considered a minor form of ethnographic writing (Marcus and Cushman 1982: 27), and Levi-Strauss' Tristes Tropiques has been called "one of the greatest travel books of the postwar period" (Cockburn 1984: 66). So why not entertain philosopher Alfred Louch's notion of anthro- pology as a "a collection of traveller's tales" (1966: 159-60), not as a caricature of the profession as Marcus thinks(1982: 164), but as an image worth taking seriously? The light cast on the travel book by Paul Fussell's analysis of literary travel (1980) illuminates the relationship between ethnographer and classical realist ethnography as well. In the following comparison of travelers and their tales, I consider British travel books of the between-the-wars period, with special atten- tion to the work of Peter Fleming, and anthropological materials from both British and American sources within and outside the period to comment on and explicate some parallel comparisons of ethnographers and their ethnographies to travel writing.

Enter the Stranger... It is most natural that the oasis-dweller should question the presence of a stranger, for the only outsiders he sees are men who come and go

with a definite object, at regular intervals. He is accustomed to apply a traditional saying...to all who come his way: "First time raw, second time ripe" (Cable and French 1944: 35).

The anthropologist as stranger at home and abroad has been well-documented in the last twenty years (e.g., Nash 1963, Pow- dermaker 1966, Freilich 1977, Agar 1980). Using Ann Roe's (1952a; 1952b) study of anthropologists of the Golden Age, Nash characterized anthropologists as independ- ent, intelligent achievers interested in peo- ple and the exotic, often unconventional and in conflict with their upper-status families, and in "a vocation where the anthropologists' sense of social superiority permits a some- what Jovian survey of their own society as well as others and maintains them in a state of superiority just because they are able to make the survey" (Roe 1952a: 50, in Nash 1963: 160). 2 Furthermore, "They are nor- mally detached, flexible, and tolerant of ambiguity" (Nash 1963: 161). Fieldwork pro- vides achievement, varied experience, iden- tification with a specific exotic society, status at home, and freedom-one can some and go both at home and abroad. Being an anthropologist is an identity; together anthro- pologists make a community of Wander- vogel (Nash 1963: 163-4).

...each time he returns he is riper and riper, until the whole desert colony beams with pleasure at his arrival (Cable and French 1944: 35).

The British between-the-wars travel book writer was not at home in a society remodeled by the Great War. He hated the lack of graceful civilization and the places that were "dingy... moth-eaten...squalid...greasy ... sickly, musty...dead...and damp," where life was "dull...dreadful... desolate...spurious, appalling...sordid, and joyless" (Fussell 1980: 17). Strong individualists, whose upper-class insulation was being undercut by the "national socialism" that the centralizing

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forces of the war effort produced (McNeil 1982: 337), they went looking for reaffirma- tion of their civilized status through contrast with the primitive, preindustrial, and extinct civilizations. Robert Byron went along The Road to Oxiana in search of fifteenth-century Islamic civilizations, reading Thucydides and Boswell's Life of Johnson as he went. Peter Fleming, on his way from China to India in stages that he imagined Marco Polo would have followed just south of the Silk Road, read Macaulay's History of England. Evelyn Waugh packed Spengler's Decline of the West for his 1929 cruise in the Mediterranean. Most British literary travelers were Oxford men, including Graham Greene, Aldous Hux- ley, Peter Quennell, Cyril Connolly, Alan Pryce-Jones, Christopher Sykes, Peter Flem- ing, W.H. Auden, Evelyn Waugh, and Robert Byron. Fussell (1980: 78) remarks that in varying configurations, these travelers showed British traits of "lawless eccentricity" and "flagrant individualism" as well as decency, good humor, and pluck:

The character they jointly assume...is that of the British traveler as outrageous person, conduct- ing his libertarian gesture against the predict- able uniformity, the dull "internationalism," of post-war social and political arrangements (Fussell 1980: 78).

As for the anthropologists, Eggan (1974:17) writes without elaborating that "In the 1930s anthropology was a way of life that enabled its practitioners to escape the worst features of American culture." Whether or not anthro- pologists of the period were in search, too, of Golden Ages, the structural-functionalists found harmony, balance, equilibrium, inte- gration, and solidarity (Voget 1975: 531) in societies without history, far from the turmoil of Europe; historical particularism recreated ethnographic presents from the remnants of disrupted cultures, even reanimating the lost through fiction (Parsons 1922, Langness & Frank 1978); culture and personality studies refocused on the individual as the significant unit of study. Even civilization, not simply cul- ture, was a subject of concern in writings such as Kroeber's. And at least some anthropologists have been outrageous persons.

telling a tale of what it was like there...

The traveler, a stranger who for the most part remained "raw" since he rarely visited any place twice, wrote of his travels to sell books. When Waugh went to the Mediterra- nean in 1929 and to Brazil in 1932, it was to get material for a speedy commercial suc- cess. Of his 1954 trip through Liberia, a ven- ture to pay off debts, Graham Greene writes:

It had seemed simple, before I set out, to write a travel book, but when I returned and was faced with my material I had a moment of despair and wished to abandon the project. A diary written in pencil with increasing fatigue and running to less than eighty quarto pages of a loose-leaf notebook, the piece of paper on which I kept the accounts of my carriers' advances..., a few illiterate notes from...the District Com- missioner...and... the Commander of the Liberian Frontier Force, some political literature from Monrovia, a selection of Liberian newspapers...a number of photographs taken with an old vest- pocket Kodak, and memories, memories chiefly of rats, of frustration, and of a deeper boredom on the long forest trek than I had ever experien- ced before-how was I, out of all this, to make a book? But I had already spent on the journey the three hundred and fifty pounds which my publishers had advanced to me, and I could earn no more until the book was written (1980: 49-50).

Greene solved his problem by interlacing the outward journey with an inward, apparently autobiographical one in Journey without Maps. Peter Fleming, whose forte was non-fiction, avoided the problem with luck and careful attention to his photographs and diaries.

The literary travelers did not regard their travel books as literature, though they may have risked life and limb on the journey. When Waugh excerpted what he thought to be the best parts of his travel books, he reduced hundreds of pages to one slim volume, When the Going Was Good (1946). Fleming made a point of taking very little seriously: he dismissed the literary outcome of his trips as insignificant, repeatedly dep- recated his phenomenal trip across Asia as selfish and justifiable only by the political news he and Ella Maillart brought from volatile Central Asia in 1935, and opened his Brazilian Adventure (1 933) with the flip line, "It began with an advertisement in the Agony Column of The Times." Robert Byron was an

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exception. He devoted three years to creat- ing the perfect travel book(Fussell 1980: 94- 96), an enthralling narrative presented as a diary in which events become the occasion for tiny learned essays on history, architec- ture, art, and politics.

In contrast, the occasion for writing an ethnography is a contribution to knowledge for a discipline and the enhancement of a professional reputation. Unpublished field- work material acquires a mythic El Dorado quality of inaccessible information, irretriev- able if the notes are lost or the anthro- pologist dies. Commercial success, however, is met with ambivalence. On the one hand, anthropologists chafe under persistent stereotypes of the profession; on the other, they are uneasy when anthropological knowledge becomes "popular" and thereby lowered in scientific status. Marcus and Cushman (1982: 51-2) discuss contem- porary readerships for ethnography, from the most valued (one's fellow area specialists) to the least valued (the general public); other anthropologists, other social scientists, students and government-military personnel are sandwiched between. Marcus and Cush- man do not consider why the general public is so negatively valued that the motives and veracity of those anthropologists who write for it are suspect, but it doubtless has to do with presumptions about these audiences and perhaps with anxieties about their own field's armchair origins and the continuing professionalization of their endeavor. As anthropologists came to acquire their own data through intensive fieldwork, they sought dissociation from the unscientific traveler who was an amateur, a dilettante, and even a novelist. The nonspecific antipathy toward any similarity drawn between the traveler and the ethnographer (Marcus 1982, Mar- cus and Cushman 1982) maintains that dis- sociation, even at a time when the nature of scientific knowledge in anthropology is at issue.

The subject of the travel book is the essence of"being there,"3 portraying place, people, events and the journey's progress. Such writing is intensely sensory. Here Robert Byron writes about Northern Persia:

Gumbad-i-Kabus (200 ft.), April 24th 1933,- After following the Bandar Shah road a little way

back, we turned to the right down a track be- tween wattle fences. High reeds obscured the view. Suddenly, as a ship leaves an estuary, we came out on to the steppe: a dazzling open sea of green. I never saw that colour before. In other greens, of emerald, jade, or malachite, the harsh deep green of the Bengal jungle, the sad cool green of Ireland, the salad green of Mediterra- nean vineyards, the heavy full-blown brown- green of English summer beeches, some element of blue or yellow predominates over the others. This was pure essence of green, indissoluble, the colour of life itself. The sun was warm, the larks were singing up above. Behind us rose the misty Alpine blue of the wooded Elburz. In front, the glowing verdure stretched out to the rim of the earth (1937: 227-28).

Evelyn Waugh, reluctant and unhappy, made a journey into Brazil in 1932, and the follow- ing description characterizes the tone of much of Ninety-Two Days:

The country was dead flat and featureless except for ant-hills and occasional clumps of palm; the ground was hard earth and sand tufted with dun-colored grass; thousands of lizards scattered and darted under the horses' feet; otherwise there was no sign of life except the black crows who rose at our approach from the carcasses strewn along the track, and resettled to their feast behind us. Here and in the forest we passed a carcass every half-mile. Many were recently dead, for the last drive had lost forty per cent., and these we cantered past holding our breath; others were mere heaps of bone picked white by the ants, the mound of half-digested feed always prominent among the ribs (1946: 213).

Peter Fleming's Brazilian jungle is less bleak:

Night in these jungles has a curious rhythm to it.... There was a permanent regulated back- ground of noise.... The cicadas and the frogs laid measured strips of sounds with no end and no beginning.... Every now and then the cry, the movement in the branches, of some big birds, would come from close at hand, immediate and obtrusive: a throaty, confidential cry, a soft, a careful movement. (Fleming 1933: 245).

Crossing one of the most difficult stretches of their Asian journey, Fleming and Maillart found no sweet water, no pasturage, no barley on the barren high desert of Sinkiang. Then they entered Cherchen, the first oasis:

A cock crowed. The familiar sound, unheard for nearly three months, asserted definitively our return to a world where men had homes; we began to think gloatingly of eggs. I think it was the sounds that were, for me, the most vivid part

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of a strange and unforgettable experience. The wind in the leaves, the gurgling water, a dog barking, men calling to each other in the fields-- these noises, and especially the wind in the leaves, changed the whole texture of our environment, filled the air with intimacy, evoked forgotten but powerful associations. Then a cuc- koo called, lazily; the essence of the spring that we had missed, the essence of the summer that we had suddenly overtaken, were comprehen- ded in its cry, and I had a vision of lawns picketed with great trees, young rabbits scampering into gorse, a wall of ivy loud with sparrows.... We wound deeper into the oasis in a kind of trance. The gaunt camels strode ahead; the little echelon of donkeys followed patiently. Cynara, with Kini up, stepped delicately, twitching her ears and blowing down her nostrils; she had never seen a tree before and was gravely discon- certed by these monstrous growths (Fleming 1936: 234).

While in travel books the people of a place merely step forward now and again, the ethnography sets people against the ground of place. Geertz finds the power of Evans-Pritchard's assured declarations of custom his being-there "signature" (1983:75). While I find Evans-Pritchard's vignettes less vivid than Geertz does, the visual emphasis is shown in this example from The Nuer:

As soon as children can crawl they are brought into close intimacy with the flocks and herds. The kraal is their playground and they are generally smeared with dung in which they roll and tumble. The calves and sheep and goats are their com- panions in play, and they pull them about and sprawl in the midst of them.... As soon as a baby can drink animal's milk its mother carries it to the sheep and goats and gives it warm milk to drink straight from the udders (1940: 38).

Evans-Pritchard himself relied on his excel- lent black-and-white photographs to convey the atmosphere;

No high barriers of culture divide men from beasts in their common home, but the stark nakedness of Nuer amid their cattle and the intimacy of their contact with them present a classic picture of savagery. I ask the reader to look at some of the illustrations...which will con- vey to him better than I can in words the crudity of kraal life (1940: 40).

The photographs do not convey"crudity" but are what Geertz calls"emblematical:" "...they make points of their own" (1983: 75-6).

Malinowski wrote to James Frazer that he had "come to realize the paramount impor- tance of vividness and colour in descriptions of life" (Stocking 1983: 106). In Argonauts of

the Western Pacific he gives a traveler's account of his arrival in the Trobriand Islands, but in the ethnographic present of "an imaginary first visit" (1922: 55):

We now enter an opaque, greenish sea, whose monotony is broken only by a few sandbanks, some bare and awash, others with a few pan- danus trees squatting on their air roots, high in the sand (1922: 49).

His descriptions are painterly, emphasizing line-

Further ahead, through the misty spray, the line of horizon thickens here and there, as if faint pencil marks had been drawn upon it (1922: 49). As we sail in the lagoon, following the intricate passage between the shallows, and as we approach the main island, the thick, tangled mat- ting of the low jungle breaks here and there over a beach, and we can see into a palm grove, like an interior, supported by pillars (1922: 51).

and color, most uninhibited in the diary- ...the poisonous verdigris of Sariba lies in the

sea, the color of blazing of phosphorescent magenta with here and there pools of cold blue reflecting pink clouds and the electric green or Saxe-blue sky. -Last night: sea and sky of a calm, intense blue, the hills shimmering with deep purples and intense cobalt of copper ore, and above them two or three banks of clOuds blazing with intense oranges, ochers, and pinks (1967: 115-6).

but in the ethnography (1922) as well- The round, grey logs, worn smooth by contact with naked feet and bodies; the trodden ground of the village-street; the brown skins of the natives, who immediately surround the visitor in large groups-all these form a colour scheme of bronze and grey, unforgettable to anyone who, like myself, has lived among these people (1922: 51).

While vividness is primary, the travel book is also dynamic. The traveler arrives, leaves, keeps moving by boat, camel, horse, truck, or on foot. The traveler continually notes the date and how many weeks or months have passed since he left Peking or will arrive in Belem, how long it has taken to traverse a desert or ocean, and how many days he was held up by officials, boatmen, or equipment. There is often pressure to be getting on. It varies with the traveler Fleming was nick- named The Galloper and Peter The Impatient by an annoyed Ella Maillart who wanted to linger to ask questions and soak up atmos- phere.4 In Fleming's Brazilian Adventure, which Fussell (1980: 13-14) thinks the most

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popular between-the-wars travel book, time is exquisitely urgent in the last hundred pages as Fleming races a thousand miles down the Araguaia River to Belem, ahead of the expedition leader who abandoned him upstream, to catch his boat to England and be the first to present an account of the expedition's debacle. The reader, too, takes a trip in imaginary time and becomes acquainted with the traveler on the way: thorny Robert Byron softens in his judgments of Persia and Afghanistan after several months along the journey.

A travel book is a narrative that someone tells someone else about what happened (Smith 1980: 232). It has a beginning and usually an end but is mostly middle. Endings tend to offer a returning-home scene or a comment on the sharp contrast between the adventure just past and the familiarity wait- ing, a resolution the traveler may greet with pleasure, ambivalence, or reluctance. Stay- ing in one place is, of course, not traveling, so travelers must be on their way or stay and write an ethnography. Although the anthro- pologist comes and goes in his own and others' societies, the classical realist ethnog- raphy is timeless. Change is absent; the account is in the present tense, although a brief history may preface the work The annual cycle keeps turning, and the reader may be disconcerted to discover that the ethnographer was in and out of the field, staying a few weeks or months, leaving, sometimes for years, or perhaps never going back after the initial sojourn. Time suddenly reveals the experience behind the ethno- graphic account as a reader glimpses what it was like there. Timeless ethnography obscures the pressure of time. The anthropologist, too, has a schedule to keep, things to get done, and brief months in which to figure out the other ways of life. Anthropologists also are held up by officials, truculent boatmen, and broken equipment. But they rarely describe this sort of experience even in personal accounts, less so in ethnographies.

Another distinction of time separates traveler and ethnographer. Travelers usually begin to write immediately upon returning home. Back in England in late October, Flem- ing wrote 120,000 words of Brazilian Adven- ture in two months; the book was published

the following August (Hart-Davis 1974: 105). This ripping yarn came straight from the heat of experience. The way a traveler reworks his material is for background in a future novel. By contrast, although the ethnographer may produce a dissertation or article soon after returning from the field, revision and exten- ded publication may wait, while the heat cools and events fade. The immediacy drains away, leaving hard dry skeletons of exper- ience. The analyst returns to his material periodically, working out the ethnography over many years but distancing himself as well. There are many reasons for the lengthening time between fieldwork and publication. One may be mistrust of first impressions as scientific knowledge. But even though the dispassionate ethnographer avoids committing impressions to the ethnog- raphy, they are cherished in personal memory and private story. The daring may tell those stories in fiction or poetry. 5

The inclusion of sensory and temporal writing varies, of course, with the ethnog- rapher's inclination and ability. Both narra- tive and descriptive writing may be reserved for another account if thought out of place or too literary for scientific writing, stripping the observer of the cloak of invisibility. The classical realist ethnography that works through the expected topics of kinship, economy, political organization, and religion is hostile to narrative; it disassembles and abstracts experience and generalizes events. 6 Exposition that abstracts and explains why other people do what they do also disguises the speaker-the anthropologist is camou- flaged in the bushes or behind a screen, a disembodied voice of authority-while attempts to include a methodological account of field experience tend to violate the preference for abstraction. Meyerhoff and Ruby observe that "the more scientific anthropologists try to be by revealing their methods, the less scientific they appear to be"(1982: 26, emphasis original). To keep anthropology objective has been to sequester personal experience in a diary, letters, an introduction, a separate chapter, a separate account. Narrative revealing the speaker in time and event is avoided.

and of what it was like to be there...

In the travel book the writer presents the

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effect of the experience upon himself; the account is egocentric. A person with per- sonality, character, likes and dislikes, travels to an exotic place in search of the stimulat- ing, dramatic, and bizarre and shares the adventure intimately. The descriptions, allu- sions, explanations, and events are those of a particular person; we see through his or her eyes and know we are doing so.

In the classic ethnography, the intensely personal experience of doing fieldwork has been excised; no self intrudes into the frame, no hand comes out from behind the camera. Although based upon one person's exper- ience and analysis, ethnographic rhetoric is, in its commitment to objectivity, anti-ego- centric. Where Rabinow speaks of "mys- teriously narratorless chronicles common in anthropology" (1977: 179), Marcus and Cushman make the more complex obser- vation:

One of the primary differences between the travel account and the realist ethnography is the marked absence in the latter of the narrator as a first-person presence in the text and the dominance instead of the scientific (invisible or omniscient) narrator who is manifest only as a dispassionate, camera-like observer; the collec- tive or authoritative third person...replaces the more fallible first-person...(1982: 31-2).

The requirements of nineteenth-century scientific writing are clear. What is less clear is the anthropologist's willingness to speak publicly of self at all. Rose suspects there may be no self there, that to be an anthropologist may require giving up self in order to understand others (1982: 240); he goes on to say that he gave up writing poetry because he "wanted to think, feel, and act like an anthropologist" (p. 240), to assume an identity by trading "poetic unconscious experiences for an anthropological public life" (p. 271). He insists (p. 244) that because at the behest of his mentor Erving Goffman he did not use his anthropological identity while doing fieldwork in South Philadelphia in 1969, he could not do anthropology, i.e., categorical data collection, and thus failed to produce a professional text. Feeling like a spy because he did not reveal his true pur- pose, Rose presents instead what he experienced-confusion, incompetence, lack of control, and daring-in an adventure story about what it was like to live in South Philadelphia.

As travelers make no claim to be scien- tific, scientists are ambivalent and inconsis- tent about adventure. Fleming repeatedly announced that his and Maillart's expedition across Asia was not a scientific one. Paleon- tologist Roy Chapman Andrews (1921: 87) said of his time in the Gobi, quoting Vilh- jalmur Stefansson, that "adventures are a mark of incompetence." Levi-Strass declared that "Adventure has no place in the anthro- pologist's profession; it is merely one of those unavoidable drawbacks, which detract from his effective work" (1974: 17). Yet Evans-Pritchard became a fieldworker because he did not want to be "just an intellectual"; he "wanted a life of adventure, too" (1973: 18).

Both the travel book and the ethnography use a moral discourse. The difference, as elucidated by Alfred Louch, is that the traveler makes moral judgments and the anthropologist makes moral assessments:

The first requires nothing beyond one's arsenal of moral convictions and a case to which to apply them. The second requires a much more detailed description of what might be called the moral ecology within which the practice is observed. The first reflects the interference of values with accurate description which social scientists rightly deplore. The second is a case of moral explanation, based upon the most detailed fac- tual picture possible (Louch 1966: 161).

British literary travelers indeed had strong convictions, as shown by Byron's Venetian opening in The Road to Oxiana and Fleming's dutiful but self-conscious descriptions of Caraja Indians in Brazil:

We went to the Lido this morning, and the Doge's Palace looked more beautiful from a speed-boat than it ever did from a gondola. The bathing, on a calm day, must be the worst in Europe: water like hot saliva, cigar-ends floating into one's mouth, and shoals of jelly-fish (Byron 1937:3). It was always fun calling on the Carajas. The women and pot-bellied children would come crowding round as the nose of the leading canoe grated on the sand. The women are said to speak a different language from the men, the principal variation being the omission-or slurring-by the men of the K sound.... Certainly there is a great and striking difference in tone, inflection, and cadence between the speech of the sexes. Dif- ficult as those who are accustomed to polite female society in civilized countries may find it to believe, there is no more maddening sound in the world than the conversation of a Caraja wom- an. She speaks hurriedly in a plaintive petulant

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sing-song, and until you get used to it you think that she is going to break at any moment into rather angry tears. The voices of the men are by contrast dignified and deliberate (Fleming 1933: 154-5).

The traveler expresses judgments about phenomena that violate the values of traveler and audience and thus entertain, stimulate, and by contrast reaffirm those values. Fussell speaks of the "unique British ability to spot anomalies and make a travel book by accumulating a great number of them" because of "a supreme confidence that one knows what is 'normal' and can gauge an anomaly by its distance from the socially expected," an "unquestioned under- standing of the norm and an unapologetic loyalty to it" (1980: 170). Without anomaly there is no travel book, no story to tell, and the more wondrous the anomalies the better the account-thus the tendency of earlier travel books to find cannibals and dog- headed men, to tell tall stories and weird tales.

Ethnographers, however, embrace the task of dissolving anomaly into the moral ecology of the society studied; another generation of British anthropologists, includ- ing Leach and Douglas, made theoretical capital from showing that the seeming anomaly is ordinary. Edmund Leach comments:

For Malinowski the central issue of anthropology was the problem which faces every fieldworker: How should one interpret the bizarre quality which pervades so much of the behaviour which is encountered in the exotic settings which anthropologists usually choose as the arena for their research? The essence of his answer was that as soon as the social context is fully understood, the bizarre quality disappears. In context, the various aspects of human social behaviour..fit together and "make sense" (1982: 28).

Perhaps the very movement of the traveler prevents awareness of any context but the journey itself; in theory the longer the ethnographer's field stay, the more anomaly dissolves. But the traveler needs to preserve the anomalous, otherwise the account fails. The anthropologist who does not dissolve anomalies, who produces moral judgment instead of moral assessment, gets into trou- ble too. Malinowski's diary (1967) provoked a fuss because of his judgments regarding

the Trobrianders. Colin Turnbull, for his extended moral judgment of the Ik (1972)- so anomalous, he said, that they were a social cancer that should be excised-was attacked by anthropologists for his ethics, for misperception of context, and for conse- quent misinterpretation of what the Ik were up to. But the anthropology of anthropology (Stocking 1983) now recognizes the diary's value, and Turnbull's work, too, may be even- tually redeemed by the very openness with which he wrote. Nevertheless, ethnocen- trism is the social scientist's bogeyman. Arens (1979) argues that anthropologists' belief in customary cannibalism is not a mat- ter of fact but a matter of initiation: to exor- cise the demon of judgment, one must be willing to accept infanticide, homicide, even cannibalism as ordinary. Students who accept vulgar cultural relativism are often uncomfortable evaluating anthropological work, mistaking critical assessment for judg- ment they must disavow. For others, Louch's moral judgment and explanation have evolved from a simple subjective-objective dichotomy into a hyper-analytical species of her- meneutics and semiotics.

Authority and fiction

A travel book may contain bits of fiction. Although The Road to Oxiana takes form of a diary, Fussell reveals that Byron had care- fully constructed the work that way and that the dialogues were fictional. In Labels, Waugh transforms his own estranged wife into someone else's. Norman Douglas' com- ment, quoted by Fussell (1980: 175), that "one suppresses much in writing a travel book; why not add a little?" chills the ethnographer. The exceptionally honest Peter Fleming aside-"this book differs... from most books about the interior of Brazil...in being throughout strictly truthful" -the travel book is an autobiographical narrative that uses fictional devices, comes out of the writer's encounter with the far away and unfamiliar, and "claims literal validity by constant reference to actuality" (Fussell 1980: 203).

Anxious about judgment, the ethnog- rapher is concerned that the reader accept his interpretation as competent. Marcus wonders how the traditional ethnography

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can incorporate self-awareness and still retain "the rhetorical usage of language and format by which ethnographers have con- structed their accounts as certain and objec- tive knowledge about others" (1982: 166). He observes that even an ethnographer sen- sitive to the effects of personality and experience upon fieldwork and analysis may treat this reflexivity as "a thing in itself' out- side the ethnography. There is also the temptation I note in Rabinow and others to abstract self-awareness to the point where the anthropological self continues to be insulated by epistemology and structuralism, not revealed as a human being whose work is inevitably autobiographical. Authority assured by method remains infallible.

Any hint of fiction threatens confidence in authority; yet typical ethnographic fictions are encompassed in typifications, pseu- donyms, composite individuals and events. These devices of ambiguity, I think, point out the source of the ethnographer's anxiety about being associated with travelers: claims to be scientific in the positivist sense must be shielded from contamination by rip- ping yarns and tall tales.

The ethnographer revealed, however, looks more and more like the traveler, an adventurer who braves intellectual hardship and danger to experience other ways of liv- ing. Evans-Pritchard's final sentence in The Nuer acknowledges the simile:

We feel like an explorer in the desert whose sup- plies have run short. He sees vast stretches of country before him and perceives how he would try to traverse; but he must return and console himself with the hope that perhaps the little knowledge he has gained will enable another to make a more successful journey (1940: 266).

Both traveler and anthropologist are strangers who deliver the exotic to an audience unlikely to follow them to the places they have visited, but likely perhaps to follow their explorations of them. In neither case is the account written for the people or places experienced, but for person and profession.

Ambivalence and audience

Consider a last example, Brazil. In 1932 a twenty-five-year-old Fleming traveled 3000 miles in three months, much of his journey through that part of the Mato Grosso

occupied by the Caraja and Tapirape Indians. He attempted to enter Shavante country but had to turn back In 1939-40 Charles Wagley, also twenty-five, spent ten months with the Tapirape but did not publish his complete account until 1977, by which time his field notes were "cold" (1977: x). Herbert Baldus had dedicated his own Tapirape opus to Wagley, hoping to stimu- late him to publish. Wagley responded:

So my book is a labor of love, written to fulfill my obligation to my departed colleague and friend, and to attempt to organize my own understand- ing of the Tapirape culture into an integrated pat- tern (1977: xi).

He also noted that "the rather unorganized English expedition described vividly by Peter Fleming" in Brazilian Adventure "curiously" provided the most concrete information about the people and "although rather satiri- cal and certainly not scientific in any way, the book did give me an idea of what I faced in my journey to the Tapirape" (1977: 36, 4-5). David Maybury-Lewis, even though his work is outside the between-the-wars period, was a student of Baldus and worked with the Sherente for eight months in 1955-56 and the Shavante for slightly longer in 1958. He published an ethnography of the Shavante in 1974, and in 1965 a personal account of the fieldwork experience that still stands as one of the most revelatory in the so-called confessional literature of modern anthropol- ogy. The latter narrative is much like a travel account, and Maybury-Lewis (writing with a style like Fleming's) distinguishes it sharply from ethnography:

This book is an account of our experiences; it is not an essay in anthropology. Indeed, i have tried to put down here many of those things which never get told in technical anthropological writings-our impressions of Central Brazil, our personal reactions to the various situations in which we found ourselves, and above all our feelings about the day-to-day business which is mysteriously known as "doing fieldwork". The narrative is therefore intentionally anecdotal. To those readers who find that this book is not as thrilling as a book about the wilds of Brazil should be, I offer my apologies. I can only add by way of explanation that every incident in it is true (1965: 8).

Contrasting the tales of the avowed traveler and those of the anthropologist recalls Levi-Strauss' distinction between melodics and harmonics as dimensions of

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myth analysis. After isolating the mythemes, one tells the myth seriatim by following the arrangement of items (events), and one understands the myth by demonstrating relations between classes of items (Levi- Strauss 1963: 214). The outcome is a mythic symphony of multiple melodies woven into great harmonic chords. One can whistle a melody, or tell a story, but may want the com- plex integration of harmony. Harmony with- out a melodic line, however, risks being merely an intellectual exercise. In the musi- cal metaphor, Fleming's travel account is pure melody; Wagley's "labor of love," organized thematically but heavily narrative, has both melody and simple harmony(a tone poem?); Maybury-Lewis writes a ballad and a string quintet. In another metaphor, Fleming gives the reader a great canvas with charac- ter, feel, flavor, place, motion-a panorama of Central Brazil. Wagley gives a closer portrait of the people, individual natives and their problems, thoughts, actions, made up of events in Tapirape lives with the anthro- pologist in their midst. Maybury-Lewis reveals the Anthropological Innocent staring

out of a Rousseau jungle, suffering con- siderably with his family and managing only by the skin of their teeth. So what is an ethnography? By identifying and tabulating categories and their linkages, an anthro- pologist formulates an argument to explain their point. It does not share experience or tell a story or frame a picture. But it frames reference; on a higher, heretical level, ethnographies are stories, too. It is by hear- ing all the stories we may comprehend Brazil.

As anthropological disciplines continue to evolve and categorical contrast to the traveler or missionary "other" becomes less vital to our professional identity, we may forgo the delicious power of conventional scientific authority, show ourselves as the crucial points of reference within each frame, and, in a distinctive voice of moral assessment, tell how we figure it out. The result will be not merely a synthesis of travel book, ethnography, and autobiography, but the stories of intellectual Travelers engaged in dialectic encounter with realities outside their own.

NOTES 1 An earlier version of this paper was read at the

American Ethnological Society Meeting, Asilomar, Cali- fornia, April 1984. I wish to thank Peter Esainko and Robert Miles for their editorial support; and Dorothy Bell, John Connor, Robert Armstrong, W.J. Lippincott, George Rich, and Mel Weiss for sharing their thoughts on travelers and anthropologists.

2 The population of American anthropologists has certainly changed since Roe did her study, and a new study is in order. Yet Dan Rose (1982) writing of his attrac- tion to anthropology fifteen years ago reveals a biography and point of view consistent with those of the earlier generation. There surely is persistence in preadaptation for the calling.

3 I have borrowed the term "being there" from Geertz but use it with a different emphasis. Geertz refers to the anthropologist's having been there: his descriptions are testimony that he knows what he is talking about. I am considering "being there" from the reader's side: can the reader imagine the scene and "be there" from what the writer has said? My ground is the view of paleoneur- ologist Harry Jerison (1976) who argues that the function of language is not to direct action (lions and tigers can do that) but to share experience. People perceive through language and share their consciousness with others in language through stories, thus increasing the known world of all.

4 Maillart comments on the difference between them: "Peter was bored by my craving to understand the thousands of diverse lives that make up humanity and bored, too, by my need to relate my own life to life in general. How could anybody be so crazy as to want to find out whether men's efforts brought about an improvement in human nature? Peter was troubled by none of these things. In his imperturbable wisdom he looked on human beings as characters in a comedy. As to his deeper self, his timidity [shyness] usually made him hide it beneath a facetious dignity. Except at rare intervals, he seemed per- suaded that his concerns were of no interest to anybody (1937: 148).

5 A colleague who has written novels says he does so to become deeply involved with character, feeling, and flavor, qualities that conventional ethnographic forms do not permit him to express.

6 Interest in the form and function of narrative has spawned a new specialty of "narratology" in modern thought. Marcus and Cushman seem to stretch the con- cept of narrative to include any discourse that moves from one topic to another, referring to the "normative narrative structure" of ethnography, which is "to traverse, in sequential fashion, the units (cultural complexes or social institutions) into which cultures or societies were conceived, on theoretical grounds, to be divided" (1982: 30). Since Marcus and Cushman are talking about

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anthropological rhetoric, such expansion of narrative muddles where it should clarify. While there is certainly an array of opinion on what does and does not constitute narrative (see Critical Inquiry 7[1], 1980, for an entire sym- posium on the subject), it is clear that a narrative tells about a sequence of events (not units) in the past tense; it may or may not have a beginning, middle, and end (closure). Bruner uses narrative to talk more specifically about the assumptions that anthropologists bring to their data, in particular assumptions about history and the future. He finds the concept of narrative more fruitful than model or paradigm because its order is sequence, and he suggests, I think insightfully, that "if classificatory

schemes provide a science of the concrete, possibly narrative schemes may provide a science of the imagina- tion" (Bruner n.d.: 5).

7 Arens (1979) wrote that he found no reliable first- hand account of customary cannibalism in the ethno- graphic literature. Instead, the accounts conformed consistently to wishful thinking on the part of outsiders and scapegoating by insiders The heated response from fellow anthropologists went far beyond what his study warranted because he challenged the traditional exer- cise in suspension of judgment-if the practice does not bias one's evaluation of a society, one is thereby capable of genuine anthropological assessment.

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Anthropological Quarterly April 1986, 59:2

Announcing Special Issue

THE SEMIOTICS OF TOURISM Annals of Tourism Research Volume 16, Number 1, 1989

Several topics invite a combination of semiotic method and observations and analysis of tourism. These include studies of literary accounts of travel, adver- tisements, brochures, and pamphlets, sights and spectacles, monuments, souvenirs, and communication (also miscommunication) between tourists and local peoples. All such topics lead investigation in the direction of an empirically based critical analysis of sociocultural values and ideology. Semiotic studies of specific aspects of tourism serve as a base for highlighting emerging models of popular consciousness (false consciousness, also,) social criticism, and critical theory. Potential article topics include: the ethnomethodology of tourists, "Romancing the Third World," sex- uality and/or exploitation in tourist settings, ethnic identity and tourism, tourist advertising ideology, tourism and cultural deformation, narrative consciousness and the tour.

Prospective authors should directly contact the Guest Editor: Dean MacCannell

Professor and Chair Community Studies

University of California at Davis Davis, California 95616, USA

The deadline for papers is December 1, 1987. However, potential contributors are encouraged to communicate their intent, along with abstracts, to Dr. MacCannell at their earliest convenience.

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