Voice

I finished the first complete draft of my bachelor’s thesis, The Social Role of Draughts in an Asante Village: Power, Performance, and Popular Culture in Southern Ghana (PDF, 5.27 Mb), shortly before leaving Kumase for a brief stay in London, where I’d visit my friends Brian and Deirdre and attempt to view the fieldnotes of Robert Sutherland Rattray, an anthropologist who’d done extensive long-term work in Ghana in the 1920’s. While in Ghana, I’d felt very pressed to conform to a couple of different ideals of masculinity — one Asante, one more urban and multi-cultural. Though I’d had my first (stupid, stupid) relationship with another man in Kumase, I also felt more trapped by machista (metchista? kantankista?) heteronormativity than I had since the eighth grade. Attempts to be a Man dominated my sexuality, my interactions with other people, and my voice. This was an odd aspect of fieldwork I hadn’t expected — once I wandered away from my American peers in the Friends World Program, I felt an enormous pressure to conform to the entirely foreign culture that surrounded me. There were initial expectations that I would behave like the Ghanaian stereotype of an American, but as people became aware of my Twi abilities, that expectation converted into one that I would behave like a local. Arriving in London, then, I didn’t feel like the person I’d known since high school — the inoffensive, quiet, and accommodating queer boy. (Though, thinking back on it, adopting another culture’s masculinity was, itself, a fairly accommodating thing to do.) Arriving in London, then, and spending time with my American friends, I felt like I was struggling, once again, against a coerced masculinity and trying to find a more comfortable self. Because my thesis, at that time, was my central concern, most of my worries about my identity expressed themselves through the issue of voice.

At the time, I thought myself a Geertzian of some sort (I’ve still got hecka love for the man), and I was deathly afraid of imitating his style, of which I was also enamoured at the time (now, not so much). E-mail contact with my advisor didn’t do too much to alleviate my fears:

A more Olympian, Geertzian tone may come with time & the distance that opens up when you’re home writing up field notes. But I really like the personal, informal voice of what you’ve written so far, & hope that remains the tone of the whole. As you know, that kind of voice is becoming more familiar in anthropology, & it allows room for you to shift dimensions as often as you want to. It also will be an asset in providing concrete descriptions of dame performances, where the extent & even messiness of your involvement with the citizens of Adwafo is apt to pay off.

The informality of voice may, if you’re not careful, turn into pedantic garruloulness around scholarly issues, tho I believe this will all come out in the wash as you revise.

But, in London, it seemed to me that I had already succumbed to a sort of crass confidence. I eventually revised my thesis into a varying tone that I liked — a mix of playful, punning prose (that was, decidedly, sometimes over-the-top or precious) and sincere pathos. There are sections I dislike, now (the introduction is deep purple, and at one point I wrote ‘It is a “chase after the wind,” in the Biblical phrase. After each victory, at the symbolic point where the ratio of power requires division by zero [implying infinite victory], the dame board reverts to 20:20 equilibrium.’ I also referenced Hamlet not once, not twice, but three times. Who is this guy?), but overall, it became the piece that I wanted.

I’m on my thirteenth post for this blog, now, and I find myself in the same situation. I’m a decent essayist and, I think, a good ethnographer, but I don’t know how to blog. Looking at my last post, and at what’s written so far of this one, one thing I notice is that I hyper-contextualise. Maybe over-contextualise. Who cares about the vegan raspberry mocha cake? Who cares why I was on the train, or what cities I was between? How do those affect the story? None at all. Why do my previous struggles to find an authorial voice matter for the present attempt? Clearly, there’s a historical connection, but does it really matter for what I’m writing right now? The verbosity irks me, but I can’t say I’m not a little pleased: Aside from accuracy and a sharp “eye”, there’s not too much that matters more in ethnography than context. Ethnography’s not, really, what I’m doing right now, but it’s the genre I’d most like to be well-prepared to write.

Worse than that, this blog seems, so far, to be a personality-free zone. I am, remarkably enough, a pretty funny guy: Most of my writing is full to the chock with word play and self-effacing humour. Even more remarkably, I have not one playful mood, but a full range of human emotions, including anger and melancholy. None of this is here.

Direction

I think a lot of this has to do with direction, in two senses:

1. I don’t know what I’m writing about.

   Anthropology has a few important things to contribute to American culture at large, in my book: recognition of difference as human, rather than utterly alien — the humanisation of other peoples; recognition that our culture is just that — culture, not human nature — things could be different, if we wanted them to be; this is perhaps a corollary of the first subclause — an understanding of other rationalities, allowing us to interact with other peoples, rather than simply react ultimately impotently but sometimes devastatingly to caricatures and imaginary representations.

   The social and political uses of intercultural understanding and cultural self-examination are immensely important to me. I want to use cultural anthropology to help make the American public more aware of this stuff. That’s what I want to do with my life. I don’t imagine that this blog is going to do much, but it’s a start. It’s meant to be practice for me. But still… What is it? It grew out of an effort to point out cultural biases, imperialist arrogance, human nature fatalism, and basic intercultural misunderstandings in media and popular culture. Problem is, we on the Left are extremely good critics, but haven’t really pulled through (in this country, at least) when it’s come to workable solutions. (And too often, it’s seemed that we just don’t care.) I think cultural critique is necessary, and that anthropologists are well-prepared to participate and provoke. But I think we need more: We need thoughtful, accessible, and engaging ethnographies (and I use that term broadly). I intend to do some of that work myself, and soon, and I intend to document it here, but for the moment, this seems like an odd, uncomfortable, reactionary nothing.

2. I don’t know whom I’m writing to.

   To whom is what I write directed? Who’s my readership? I don’t really have one, yet. There’s Nik. There’s Erin. Probably my dad. Without an audience, I’m not sure how to develop a tone. Without an interesting tone (and especially when that lack is paired with weak content), I’m sure as heck not going to develop a readership. But even setting that aside, who would my audience be if I had one? Not other anthropologists — I’m a patzer; I haven’t got much to say that they haven’t already heard. The public at large? If so, I’m not doing a very good job at being accessible. Other Lefties? It seems that that’s where I’m most directed, so far, but God damn it… We talk to ourselves so much. Surely there are others in this country we could talk to?

It’s all a matter of time and effort, I suppose.

This entry was posted on Monday, 30 May 2005 at 23:45 and is filed under Becoming an Anthropologist, Blogosphere. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.