PHILIP CARL SALZMAN. On Reflexivity. ABSTRACT The value of reflexivity has been widely accepted in anthropology during the past two decades.
PHILIP CARL SALZMAN
On Reflexivity ABSTRACT The value of reflexivity has been widely accepted in anthropology during the past two decades. The concept of ref lexivity can be seen developing in the work of theorists and ethnographers of the 1960s and 1970s and was brought to flower among theorists and ethnographers of the 1980s and 1990s. But little critical analytic attention has been directed toward its claims to generate new understandings and inform about their positional foundations. However, consideration of the possibility of reliable self-reports leads to skepticism rather than confidence. Furthermore, the underlying assumption that the unavoidable subjectivity of researchers negates any external validation of knowledge proves to be mistaken, making the question of positionality moot. [Keywords: reflexivity, postmodernism, ethnography, positionality, scientific method]
Reflexivity is an immense area of comment and interest, —GeoTge E, Maicus, "Aftei the Critique of Ethnography"
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O IDEA HAS BEEN SO wholeheartedly, unanimously, and uncritically adopted into contemporary anthropology as "Teflexivity," Everybody (apparently) agiees that reflexivity is a good thing, In the two decades of its ascendance, I have never seen a discouraging word about reflexivity, But because it is doubtful that any academic idea can remain healthy without the occasional dose of critical thought, I want to initiate a process of reconsideration. My plan here is to explore what "reflexivity" is and investigate its merits and demerits. WHAT IS "REFLEXIVITY"? SOME FOUNDATIONAL SOURCES
The notion of "reflexivity" has long standing in English, The first meaning in the Oxford English Dictionary is "capable of bending back" (VIII:345), with quotations beginning in the 16th century, More relevant for us is the second meaning, "Of mental operations: Turned or directed back upon the mind itself," with the particularly apt Reynolds quotation of 1640, "In those two Offices of Reason, the Transient and Reflexive act, that whereby we looke Outward on others; or Inward on our selves." In modern studies of humanity, too, "reflexivity" is no latecomer, The concept of "reflexivity" plays a major part in the social psychology of George Herbert Mead. In Mind, Self, and Society, published in 1934, with selections appearing in Strauss 1956, Mead emphasizes the social nature of being human, the formation of the individual resulting from the constant interaction with others, with "the
generalized other" (Strauss 1956:231). The process making this possible is, for Mead, reflexivity: It is by means of reflexiveness—the turning-back of the experience of the individual upon himself—that the whole social process is thus brought into the experiences of the individuals involved in it; it is by such means, which enable the individual to take the attitude of the other toward himself, that the individual is consciously to adjust himself to that process, and to modify the resultant of that process in any given social act in terms of his adjustment to it. Reflexiveness, then, is the essential condition, within the social process, for the development of mind. [Strauss 1956:211]
Here Mead, as a social psychologist, studying the processes by which we become human, identifies reflexivity as a process in the formation of each person's mind and self. Mead does not, however, emphasize reflexivity as a process that goes on between student and studied, between researcher and the thing researched. In anthropology, reflexivity becomes a central imperative for the researcher in Bob Scholte's heartfelt plea in "Toward a Reflexive and Critical Anthropology": Anthropological activity is never only scientific, In addition, it is expressive or symptomatic of a presupposed cultural world of which it is itself an integral part. As anthropologists, we cannot simply take this Lebenswelt and its attendant scientific traditions for granted. We must subject them to further reflexive understanding, hermeneutic mediation, and philosophical critique. [1972:431]
How would Scholte have us proceed? Every procedural step in the constitution of anthropological knowledge (must bel accompanied by radical reflection and epistemological exposition. . . We cannot and should not avoid the "hermeneutic circle" . . but must
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What would be the consequence of this pTOceduie? "We have once again come the full hermeneutic circle: The comparative understanding of others contributes to selfawareness; self-understanding, in turn, allows foT selfTeflection and (partial) self-emancipation; the emancipatory inteiest, finally, makes the understanding of others possible" (Scholte 1972:448), It also makes possible, beyond understanding, emancipatory political action: From "the self-emancipation of anthropological activity," we might/could/would be led to "a Tadical and political emancipation of conaete humanity" (Scholte 1972:448), For Scholte, reflexivity is paTt of a "paiadigm" shift (1972:444) from a scientific, OT, as he puts it, a "scientistic" approach (1972:450 n, 5) to a heimeneutic (OT, as we have come to say, "interpretive") approach; fiom an objectivist perspective to a relativistic, "perspectivist" optic (1972:444-446); and from "value neutrality" to "emancipatory and normative interests" (1972:446-449), Hermeneutic ethnographic research would thus be based not on distanced observation, on researcher recording object of research, but, rather (and here Scholte [1972:439-440] follows Johannes Fabian [1971]), on "human inter-subjectivity," in which there has been "a dialectical and constitutive relation of exchange and communication" (Scholte 1972:440), Reflexivity is thus the constant awareness, assessment, and reassessment by the researcher of the researcher's own contribution/influence/shaping of intersubjective research and the consequent research findings, Some Ethnographic Sources: Two Early Examples
Amongst the 1970s' legions of anthropological Marxists, the seed of reflexivity was slow to germinate, But a few early shoots were celebrated as triumphs of humanistic ethnography, Let us remind ourselves of two of these, The first, Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family,
by Jean L, Briggs, published in 1970, could have been subtitled "All about Jean, for it is very much the author's own story as a researcher, and as a particular individual with a particular personality, in the process of living and interacting with her Eskimo hosts and learning through the living and interacting. As she puts it, 1 describe the feelings that 1 myself had in particular situations. My justification for this is that 1 was an intrinsic part of the research situation. The responses of my hosts to my actions and my feelings, and my own reactions to the situations in which I found myself—my empathy and my experience of contrasts between my feelings and those of my hosts—were all invaluable sources of data, [1970:6]
One example is Briggs's misguided attempt at generosity, which led to a more profound understanding of Utku attitudes toward storing and transporting supplies (no little matter among nomadic peoples): Knowing how fond the Utku were of the kapluna [European| foods they ordinarily enjoyed only in the winter, 1
tried to furnish them to the camp (and to myself) during the summer, as well. I caused the community, and Inuttiaq in particular, only consternation. , . . lnuttiaq's expressionless face when he looked at the boxes being unloaded from the plane in June, and his immediate decision to abandon them, made an impression even on my kapluna mind. 1 began to realize that it is not just "improvidence" or "poverty," as some kaplunas think, that makes the Utku buy "insufficient" flour to carry through the summer when they are cut off from Gjoa Haven; they just do not want the bother [1 would say: undertake the counterproductive task] of carrying it around with them. [1970:247] For Briggs, this insight took time and repeated evidence to sink in: 1 was slow to realize how burdensome my dependence on my gear must have been to him, To be sure, 1 was aware that when we moved short distances, Inuttiaq usually made two sled trips, one to move his own household goods and one to move mine. I noticed, too, that sometimes when we were preparing for longer trips, I was instructed to carry some of my things to Pala's sled or canoe, rather than to lnuttiaq's, But it was only after I had returned to my own country that 1 saw, in my photographs of a spring move, the contrast between lnuttiaq's sled load and lpuituq's, the latter little over knee high, the former shoulder high. At the time, 1 was blind, [1970: 246-247]
Never in Anger is an example of research understood by the author to be based on conscious intersubjectivity, and on the author's constant reflection on her own actions and feelings, and can serve as an example of applied (rather than theoretical) reflexivity. This expression of reflexivity, the reporting in print of a researcher's feelings, activities, and interactions, came in the 1980s and 1990s to be a practice widely accepted and frequently manifested, The second early example of humanistic ethnography is the nicely written The Broken Fountain, by Thomas Belmonte, published in 1979. It is an account of life among the poor underclass in Naples and not least the author's experience of it, Belmonte writes in the first person and is commonly part of the scene that he describes: "Participant observation was a means to an end, but it was also an end in itself, It was an immersion in otherness, a prolonged listening, an alteration of self" (1979:xi), This alteration of the self evolved through "an ongoing dialogue in which subject and object constantly change places and reverse roles" (Belmonte I979:x), a nice formulation of (at least one aspect of) reflexivity. Here is a brief assaggio (taste) of Belmonte's experience and self-reflection, As the summer drew to a close, 1 became weary of my association with the young thieves, Although my capacity to speak and understand their language improved, 1 fell into silences with them and was left to myself, Gradually we became strangers again, and our strangeness was edged with a mutual, unspoken sense of betrayal, I wondered how I might gain access to the other lives 1 was glimpsing—the lives of the working people, and the interior life of the family, But 1 pursued no one. 1 sat at my desk and stared out across the balcony, marking my hours and days by the changing schedule of sounds and colors
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which were the measures of time at Fontana del Re. [1979:18] Closing with the observation that "force is the life-beat of all slums," Belmonte defines force as "the capacity to turn another person into an object, to annihilate him" (1979: 144). For Belmonte, intersubjectivity and reflexivity provide an opening of the self that avoids turning people into objects and, thus, avoids annihilating them. Some Ethnographic Sources: Two Recent Examples
Reflexivity reached full flower in perhaps its most revered example, the acclaimed essay "Grief and a Headhunter's Rage" by Renato Rosaldo, originally published in 1989. Rosaldo, in this essay, sets the scene by explaining that he could not understand what drove the Ilongots of the Philippines to head-hunt: "When the Ilongots told me, as they often did, how the rage in bereavement could impel men to headhunt, I brushed aside their one-line accounts. Certainly no personal experience allowed me to imagine the powerful rage Ilongots claimed to find in bereavement. My own inability to conceive the force of anger in grief led me to seek out another level of analysis" (2000: 522). But Rosaldo's experience was to change in an abrupt and tragic fashion with the accidental death of his wife, the anthropologist Michelle Rosaldo, during fieldwork in 1981: Only after being repositioned through a devastating loss of my own could I better grasp that Ilongot older men mean precisely what they say when they describe the anger in bereavement as the source of their desire to cut off human heads... . Immediately on finding her body I became enraged. How could she abandon me? How could she have been so stupid as to fall? I tried to cry. I sobbed, but rage blocked the tears. [2000:522, 526] Rosaldo (2000:525) concludes from this experience that what the researcher can understand depends on his or her "position": The ethnographer, as a positioned subject, grasps certain human phenomena better than others. He or she occupies a position or structural location and observes with a particular angle of vision. Consider, for example, how age, gender, being an outsider, and association with a neo-colonial regime influence what the ethnographer learns. The notion of position also refers to how life experiences both enable and inhibit particular kinds of insight. [2000:532] In Rosaldo's (2000:533) view, a researcher's "position," both structural and experiential, shapes perception and cognition, thus limiting what the researcher can learn and know. Reflexivity aids a researcher in taking these limitations into account but does not allow the researcher to escape them. All accounts are partial because any observer and commentator is positioned. Claims of objectivity and truth are really just claims of power, claims that a vision from one position should be given priority. But the reality is that there is no objectivity or truth (although presumably this statement is an exception), just different views from different perspectives.
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By the 1990s, it had become common for ethnographic reports to include some specifically "reflexive" discourse. (I leave aside the rare universalist claim that all discourse is inevitably reflexive [Watson 1991:80].) This is regarded as necessary for epistemological reasons: Only honest disclosure of the researcher's "position" will allow the reader to assess the substance of the ethnographic report. To take one from a myriad of examples, William C. Young in The Rashaayda Bedouin (1996) gifts the reader with an autobiographical and methodological epilogue. Why offer this rather than "opening up new topics, such as the Rashaayda's poetry, medical lore, cuisine, kinship terminology, botanical and geographical knowledge, funeral practices, and so on" or placing the Rashaayda in comparative perspective (Young 1994:131)? My primary aim is methodological. Describing the process of fieldwork allows other anthropologists to evaluate my ethnography and see how likely it is that I could have observed the things 1 describe. It also makes it easier to see why I chose to study some facets of Rashiidi life rather than others.. . I am inevitably biased in my choice of topics. Because I am a man I chose not to ask women exactly how they weave tent cloth or decorate their clothing. Because I was born in a city I found it boring to ask about the different varieties of sorghum . . and the Rashaayda's livestock deals. [1996:131] Young also reports, "I resolved to eliminate at least one of the barriers between me and the Rashaayda by converting to Islam" (1996:132), and some of the epilogue deals with his devotions, then and back home. The tools we have for assessing Young's account are, reduced to bare declarations, that he is a male urbanite who converted to Islam. Let us return later to examine exactly how this reflexive portrait helps us in judging Young's ethnographic report. Uses of Reflexivity
What might we identify as the uses of reflexivity? First, there is the organizational effect: Within the discipline, accounts reflecting reflexivity act as a shibboleth, marking the reflexive anthropologists as (at least to some degree) having a postmodern inclination, dedicated theoretically to epistemological relativism, perspectivism and positionality, subjectivity, and moral and political commitment. Reflexivity thus distinguishes the postmoderns from those of more modernist, objectivist, empiricist, realist, and positivist inclination, who are less likely to present themselves at stage front or to believe that their personal characteristics determine their findings. Second, according to some researchers, reflexivity allows us to do better research. Jean Briggs argues that observing and thinking about her own feelings, assumptions, personality, and actions were "invaluable sources of data" (1970:6). (This is recognized by some researchers of a more empirical, modernist bent, for example, Bradburd [1998:47, passim].) Rosaldo (2000:525), however, seems to argue that our "position," structural and experiential, determines what
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we can know, and a step to greater knowledge must come, not from reflexivity, but from a shift in position, a "reposition. Once we are repositioned, reflexivity can inform us as to why and how we now know more, understand better, and grasp more truly. Repositioning, according to Rosaldo, appears to require similar or identical experiences to those that we wish to understand. In other words, the "other" is largely unreachable unless one becomes the other through experience. Thus, for Rosaldo, reflexivity cannot generate knowledge but, rather, only reflect what has been opened by experience. Third, reflexivity provides the listener or reader of ethnographic reports with information necessary to assessing those reports. By being told the "position" of the researcher, we can see the angle and view from which the findings arose. Young (1996:131) is quite explicit that his reflexivity is intended as a service to the reader. ASSESSING REFLEXIVITY: CAN IT LIVE UP TO ITS CLAIMS?
Who can represent himself just as he is, even in his own reflections? —George Eliot, Middlemarch Briggs says that her own feelings and reactions to situations she experienced among the Eskimo were "invaluable sources of data" (see also Bradburd 1998). We can certainly grant that her responses were sources of insights, impressions, ideas, and hypotheses. All of us as ethnographers have drawn on the contrasts between our assumptions and reactions and those of the people we were studying, and sometimes the comparison is made explicit (e.g., Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa [1928]). And of course it is well known that those immersed in any field of study, such as mathematics, physics, and sociology, get insights, impressions, and hypotheses. But insights and impressions are not knowledge; they are paths of investigation. Just as the mathematician must construct a proof, the physicist must organize an experiment, and the sociologist must consult census or interview data, the anthropologist must test his or her insight by means of observation of events, practices, distributions, expressions, and interactions. If we are studying people's lives, we cannot privilege our impressions as authoritative, even under such an impressive label as "reflexivity"; rather, we must measure our ideas against people's lives. This line of thought, however, leads us away from positionality and subjectivity and opens us to accusations of "realism" and "positivism.' What we can conclude, along with Briggs, is that reflexively considering our own feelings and reactions will, almost inevitably, give us impressions and ideas about what is going on in the societies we are studying. Rosaldo's argument that reflexivity is the self-report that one has repositioned is based on the assumption, which he makes explicit, that position determines perception and cognition. But is Rosaldo's reflexive autoethnog-
raphy convincing? He says that he could not appreciate the rage resulting from grief because he had not experienced it. This argument, framed more generally as the argument about positioning, is that we cannot understand people unless we have experienced what they have. That is, we cannot know people unless we are like them. This is an odd argument for a cultural anthropologist, but it is an old and well-worn, and disreputable, argument (Merton 1972): Christians and Jews, blacks and whites, men and women, French and Germans can never understand one another; white women and black women cannot understand one another; black working-class women and black middle-class women can never understand one another; young black working-class women can never understand old black working-class women; young rural black working-class women can never understand young urban black working-class women; and so on to logical absurdity, until no one can understand oneself from moment to moment. My own understanding is contrary to that of Rosaldo. When my father, Norman, died in 1981, I felt stunned, sick, and sad with loss. But my mother, Leonora, whom I accompanied to the funeral and stayed with in her home, was wild, in a flying rage, incensed, and furious at all and everything. I could tell this from her facial expression and body language, her brusque and bitter remarks, and her responses to other people. Her outrage was obvious. Although I was not experiencing her outrage, it was not difficult to recognize. In other words, I was able to observe and appreciate the depth of her anger without experiencing it myself. So it is difficult to be convinced by Rosaldo's example. That he was not able to observe and appreciate rage in grief before experiencing it does not mean that it cannot be observed by those who have not experienced it. The more general argument that we must be like others to understand them seems to doubt human capability' of empathy, sympathy, and imagination. Because I am short, does that mean that I cannot understand that some tall people might feel outsized, awkward, and unattractive or that some people of average height might never give height a thought and feel entirely comfortable with that aspect of their bodies? Because I am not a Catholic, does that mean that I cannot appreciate fear of the hellfire of eternal damnation? Because I do not own livestock, does that mean that I cannot grasp how a Baluch sees beauty in his mahri camel? To live in society, and even in our families, means that we all, to some degree, learn to understand people different from ourselves. The argument that we must be like them or, better, one of them to understand them begins to seem less an epistemologically justified position than a political boundary to silence people beyond constructed boundaries. If Rosaldo's reflexivity fails as epistemology, is it any more successful as cultural analysis? Does rage from grief explain head-hunting among the Ilongot, as Rosaldo argues? If rage from grief does explain head-hunting, then would not Rosaldo himself have been impelled to head-hunt? And although my mother did, in her fury, (metaphorically)
Salzman "bite off some people's heads," it did not occur to her to go head-hunting. Rosaldo's argument is preposterous. It was not rage from grief that led Ilongot to head-hunting but, rather, being Ilongot that led to head-hunting. An adequate cultural analysis would have explained why Ilongot head-hunt rather than engage in elaborate rituals, shave their hair, go into isolation, throw themselves into their work, or any of the myriad of alternatives to headhunting. So this example of reflexivity demonstrates that self-analysis does not necessarily lead to successful cultural analysis. Turning now to reflexivity as a source of criteria for assessment, let us now consider Young's statement on his "position." One aspect of his "position" is that he is a man. What exactly can we infer from this? Should we expect Young to tell us only about men and not about women? If so, Young disappoints us by repeatedly reporting about women: "women's clothing" (17 index references, as opposed to 11 for men); "gender identity" (22 references, many multipage); "history and gender identity" (four references); "sexual inequality" (four multipage references); "marriage" (39 references); "masks worn by women" (ten references); "modesty" (two references); "ownership" (24 references); "political power: women's" (four references); "polygyny: co-wives' right to equal treatment" (three references); "polygyny: women's attitudes toward" (three references); "women's prestige system" (four references); "religion and equality between the sexes" (one reference); "sexual division of labor" (one multipage reference); "space: men's and women's space" (seven references); "veils" (13 references); "weaving as women's work" (two references); "weddings: gender during" (three references); and "work: women's" (two multipage references). Or perhaps Young identifies himself as a male to indicate his partisan favor for males. Yet his vigorous delineation and denunciation of gender inequality disfavoring women would do any female feminist proud (but, of course, not all women are feminists), as would the analyses of many male anthropologists (e.g., Bradburd [1990] and Fratkin [1991], both also pastoral specialists). Can Young's asserted disinterest in livestock deals and other aspects of rural production be attributed to his urban background, as he suggests? Notwithstanding my own urban background (growing up in Baltimore) and (it might be argued) my ethnic propensity for urban life, I (Salzman 2000) have found myself not at all disinterested in livestock, livestock management, and livestock exchanges, as well as other aspects of agricultural production, and perhaps have told my readers more than they want to know about these matters. Finally, what does Young's conversion to Islam tell us about how to consider his account of religious matters among the Rashaayda? Should we assume that Young's reports about Islam are more sensitive, sympathetic, or authoritative than, say, mine (Salzman 2000: ch. 12) because I did not convert to Islam? Surely such a conclusion, without examination of the accounts in their own right, would be a rush to dubious judgment.
On Reflexivity
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So it is hard to see how such general characterizations—by gender, religion, nationality, race, and class—tell us much about the actual perspective of any particular individual. It seems odd for anthropologists, of all people, to imagine that individuals, and particularly such peculiar folks as anthropologists, will mechanically conform to some generally held social stereotypes and cultural labels. In sum, I found that Young's reflexive declaration about being male, of urban origin, and a convert to Islam added nothing to what I learned from reading the substantive text and, if anything, tended to mislead. Misleading is, however, one of the main psychological and social purposes of declarations about the self. As the protagonist in Robertson Davies's The Cunning Man puts it, "We learned a high degree of cunning in concealing what our true nature might be. You could be an artist, or an aesthete, a philosopher, a fascist, or a con-man and only a few people would guess your secret" (1995:17). And while misrepresenting oneself to others is perhaps the species' most popular sport, self-deception is one of the most valued human skills. How many reflexive self-reports are uncontaminated with wish fulfillment, ideal presentation of self, or creative manipulation of image? As Fredrik Barth so mildly puts it, "There is reason to distrust our own description of ourselves" (1994:354). How difficult is it to spot discrepancies when we read reflexive self-reports of people we know well or have observed carrying out ethnographic field research? Let me confide about one instance in which I was astonished to read the "reflexive" selfaccount of fieldwork by someone I knew well and had observed carrying out fieldwork. This individual (who shall, of course, remain nameless—and the details have been changed to protect the guilty) self-presents as an energetic ethnographic explorer, extroverted engager of local informants, and meticulous recorder of critical data. Well, yes, if explorer means one who revisits the same bars and getting drunk every night, if extroverted engager means one who has a somewhat sordid liaison with one of the less reputable members of the community, and meticulous recorder means one who collects all of the beer receipts for grant reimbursement. That researcher's reflexive account is deceptive and misleading, manipulative and dishonest. And it raises the question whether we can ever tell if a reflexive account is reliable. If my skeptical assessment based on firsthand experience seems too cynical, let us take a couple of examples from the public record: History professor Joseph J. Ellis of Mount Holyoke College, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary (Icneration, resigned his
post "after admitting making up his own past" (Broughton 2001 :A2). Teaching a course called "Vietnam and American Culture" at Mount Holyoke and a course on the Vietnam War at Amherst College, Ellis had told undergraduates he had served in Southeast Asia with the 101st Airborne Division and his experiences had led him to join the anti-war movement. . . Mr. Ellis also tried to write himself into the civil rights
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In falsely claiming service in Vietnam, Ellis is far from unique. Many middle-aged American men falsely claim to have served in Vietnam. Glenna Whitley, coauthor of a book on the subject entitled Stolen Valor (Burkett and Whitley 1998), says, "It's an odd kind of mystique. It's men of a certain age who are coming to the point in their lives where they're wondering, 'Did I do the right thing? Should I have gone?' " (Broughton 2001: A2). Probably a similar book could be written about those who falsely claim frontline service in the civil rights movement. The second example is philosophy professor John Luik, a former Rhodes scholar who was dismissed from Nazarene College in Winnipeg because he did not have the Oxford Ph.D. he claimed (Marsden 2001: A12). When he did finally complete his Ph.D., he was hired by Brock University in St. Catherines, Ontario, on the basis of a further padded CV claiming teaching experience and publications that he did not have. What caused concern and led to Luik's dismissal from Brock was "not any single misrepresentation . so much as the apparently uniform pattern of representations engaged in since 1977" (Marsden 2001: A12). Professors Ellis and Luik (and the stars of Stolen Valor) are worth considering not because they are exceptional, egregious examples of deviation but, rather, because they are not atypical in presenting themselves in a distorted fashion: cost fan hitti. Ellis and Luik were imprudent enough to misrepresent themselves about matters easily checked in the public record. Anthropologists are in a much stronger position: Who knows what an ethnographer did or did not do in the deserts of Baluchistan or the mountains of Sardinia? Reflexivity as self-positioning and self-reporting, in depending on realistic self-awareness and honest disclosure, is a rather pre-Freudian idea, assuming, as it does, that all of our critical personal parameters are available to the consciousness, and that people present themselves with no ulterior motives. These assumptions appear to be unwarranted. However, let us suspend skepticism (and experience) for a moment to consider a fuller, more self-aware, more complex, arguably credible self-report. I take for this example Mascia-Lees and Sharpe's report on their experiences, entitled "Interpreting Charges of Sexual Harassment: Competing Discourses and Claims" (2000: ch. 11). It is noteworthy that this account reports the authors' positionality, not in the abstract, but in a specific social context, in response to events that required response. The relative fullness and complexity of the self-accounts owe a great deal to examining positionality in action rather than repose. This informative examination of positions and perspectives in action reminds us of the fruitfulness of situational and extended case study analysis (Van Velsen 1967).
As teachers at Simon's Rock College of Bard, MasciaLees and Sharpe had to respond when some generally esteemed male colleagues were swarmed by a self-appointed "Defense Guard" shouting accusations of sexual harassment. Mascia-Lees and Sharpe's positionality is clear: They are committed feminists, dedicated teachers, and supportive colleagues. The problem is, as they discovered, that these positions are to a degree in contradiction and are not always easily reconcilable, so that they often feel pulled in several directions at once. They did not know exactly how to react and, when they did react, were sometimes surprised: 'How, I asked myself, 'did I wind up speaking for men, for the academy, the establishment, for rationality and due process, for the possibility of impartial justice and the status quo?' (2000:178). So Mascia-Lees and Sharpe themselves would not have been able to predict ahead of time the impact of their own positionality on how they felt and acted. This is not encouraging for the possibility of using authors' abstract reports about positionality to understand the impact of their positions on their work. This case of the Defense Guard confrontation also reinforces the argument (Salzman 1999) that knowing positions and cultures is not sufficient for understanding people's actions, lives, and destinies. The reason is that events, whether internally or externally generated, transform the realities in which people live. As Mascia-Lees and Sharpe report, The students, by refusing to trust any faculty or staff member with their complaints, had suggested their distrust of us all: we would do nothing; we would protect those in power. Yet ironically by failing to trust us, they had pushed us into that position. Had one come with a complaint, I would have been drawn into their cause, eager to see harassment seriously addressed. As things were, all the focus in faculty discussions was on the students' tactics, and I despaired of persuading my colleagues to reconsider gender issues in the classroom when so many not directly accused felt assaulted, mistrusted, and defensive. [2000:177-178] Thus, these feminist authors, inclined to support accusations of sexual harassment, felt forced by the event of confrontation to take an entirely different "position." The event itself changed the equation. In considering these examples, it is difficult to sustain the claimed benefits of reflexivity. Reflexivity is not sufficient to give us sound knowledge, as Briggs claims, although it can provide insights and ideas that, if followed up properly, might yield valuable knowledge. That reflexivity provides insight into the emotions not available by observation or other means, as Rosaldo claims, seems to have no convincing basis, anymore than the idea that emotions can explain cultural facts. Nor does abstract reflexivity provide readers with any reliable understanding of the perspectives of the authors in specific situations, as Mascia-Lees and Sharpe's experience shows.
Salzman • On Reflexivity IMPLICATIONS FOR ETHNOGRAPHY
For anthropologists of a postmodern inclination, reflexive positionality was the last solid ground. Once objectivity and "reality" were jettisoned as modernist delusions, nothing stable and reliable remained except subjectivity and its positional residences in gender, class, and culture (Marcus 1998). Ethnographic accounts could no longer be assessed in terms of their agreement with "reality," according to their adducing of "facts" as "evidence" of their "truth," but only in terms of their authors' reflexive selfreports. Postmodernism, in its rejection of modernity and its dependence on reflexivity, falls back on the romantic virtue of sincerity, "the avoidance of being false to any man through being true to one's own self" (Trilling 1980:7), as is consistent with the underlying romantic inclinations of postmodernism (Lindholm 1997; Pouillon 1996; Salzman 1996). The postmodern reliance on the pre-Freudian notion of "sincerity" thus places the assessment of ethnographic validity on a highly suspect foundation. For, as Trilling points out about the modern sensibility, "the deception we best understand and most willingly give our attention to is that which a person works upon himself" (1980:17). And, as we have learned from Freud, with people so skilled at and relentless with self-deception, what weight can be put on their self-reports, other than admiration for the elegance of creative fantasy and the tenacity of determined delusion? I fear that we cannot go home again to transparent selves and "sincere" reporting. With no sound basis for judging different reports, postmodernists are plunged fully into anthropology as fiction, not in the etymological sense of "something made" (Geertz 1973:15) but in the colloquial sense of something "made up." It is, thus, not surprising that postmodernism has turned its back on discovery and focused its attention on moralizing and political commitment (Salzman 2001: ch. 7). Unfortunately, this strategy denies anthropology's contribution to knowledge and plunges the field into moral and political discourses universal among humankind; the postmodern anthropologist thus has no more (or, coming from an oppressive Western society, less [Marcus 1994:49]) to say than any Baluchi tribesman or Sardinian peasant, each of whom regularly moralizes about neighbors and outsiders and repeatedly considers or commits to one or another political stance (Salzman 1999). The point of a postmodern anthropology consisting of the expression of a few individuals' preferences therefore becomes ever more obscure. The significance of reflexivity for postmodernism rests on the rejection of (what is deemed to be a false claim of) objectivity. In the absence of objectivity, it is argued, there can be no reality, only many subjective realities. As Marcus puts it, "Discourses of the 'real' have been demonstrated to be of a piece with the rhetoric of fiction and to possess the fully literary character of language as narrative, subject to tropes, figuration, and self-consciousness [which has led to rejection of] the objectifying, re-
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alist discourse of positivism" (1994:40). The parallel rejection of science has been pursued through deconstruction in "science studies," currently a growth industry in postmodern anthropology. Lost somehow in science studies iconoclasm is the basic assumption of scientific method: that people in general and scientists in particular are not in the least objective but are, on the contrary, highly subjective at the very least, often self-serving and self-deluding, and not infrequently crooked. It is for this reason that in science any idea or theory must be tested, that is, assessed against independent evidence, and this assessment must be replicable, that is, repeatable by other researchers. Objectivity does not reside in individuals but, rather, in the results of the collective, intersubjective process. Popper thus argues that "the objectivity of scientific statements lies in the fact that they can be inter-subjectively tested" (1959:44). Similarly, Dahrendorf asserts, Insofar as truth exists at all, it exists not as a possession of the individual scholar, but as the net result of scientific exchange. Although criticism and discussion, the refutation of long-accepted theories and their replacement by new ones, cannot banish error, they can prevent error from becoming dogma, as morning exercises in objectivity cannot. Harmless as self-control and self-criticism may be, they are poor guarantees of the progress of knowledge compared with the mutual criticism and correction, the friendly antagonism, of the universitas scholarium. [1968: 243]
He continues, "Whereas it seems futile to hope that all scientists will become 'objective,' it seems quite possible to maintain an atmosphere of mutual criticism" (1968:243 n. 12). When we consider criticisms, evaluations, and new perspectives as they apply to descriptions, analyses, and theoretical frames, how often are these the result of reflexive reconsideration by the authors, and how often are these offered by other researchers? The rejection of "cold fusion," to take a widely reported scientific debate, resulted not from self-criticism by its advocates, but by the failure of other practitioners to find the predicted results. In anthropology, too, the succession of new understandings and frames commonly results from new researchers taking a different view, rather than from a change of heart by the original theorists or researchers. This can be seen in the history of cultural anthropology in the replacement of evolutionism and diffusionism by functionalism; the replacement of functionalism by structuralism, processualism, and Marxism; and the challenge to these by interpretationalism and postmodernism (Salzman 2001). Celebrated cases in modern anthropology show also that dialectical refinement or reformulation is primarily a process of debate among individuals rather than one of selfinterrogation and autocorrection. To take one famous case, all of Margaret Mead's subsequent research never led her to question or reformulate her Samoan findings as reported in Coming of Age in Samoa (1928). We had to wait for the challenge by Derek Freeman (1983), and counterchallenges by others (Grant 1995; Holmes 1987; Shankman
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1996), to revise our picture of Samoa. As regards another prominent debate, Richard B. Lee's (1979, 1993) heartfelt, reflexive conversion from ecoevolutionism to Marxism did not result in any fundamental reanalysis of the Dobe Ju/'hoansi. Rather, an alternative and contrary analysis depended on Edwin N. Wilmsen and others (Wilmsen 1989; Wilmsen and Denbow 1990; see also Wilmsen's and his supporters' comments at the end of Solway and Lee 1990). And Lee, together with his supporters (Solway and Lee 1990; see also Wilmsen and Denbow 1990), responded, as was his right and duty, with a stout defense of his original vision. In these and other important debates in anthropology, reflexivity seems to have played a negligible part. If the history of our discipline is any indication, the advance of anthropology is best guaranteed not by introspection but by a vital and vigorous marketplace of ideas. Therefore, the postmodern conclusion that objective knowledge cannot exist does not follow from the premise that individuals, including individual scientists, are subjective in their perceptions (for earlier romantic excursions into subjectivism, see Whitehead 1927:109-112). The way to improve ethnographic research is, thus, not for the solitary researcher to delve within him- or herself, or to make him- or herself the subject of the account, but to replace solitary research with collaborative, team research, in which the perspectives and insights of each researcher can be challenged and tested by the others (Salzman 1994). Similarly, while postmodernists are correct in recognizing that people come to research with different perspectives, they are in error in concluding that "reality" is therefore a fiction. The reason is that some perspectives are self-validating (Popper 1957), whereas others refer to external criteria for validation. Discussing "the empirical vision," Gellner points to external validation as the most critical feature: What is most appealing in the empiricist vision is . . . the deep insistence that J cognitive system must in the end be judged by something outside itself, and outside social c o n t r o l . . . . Though experience is never pure and free from theory-saturation, nevertheless persistent probing, the refusal to countenance self-perpetuating package deals, does in the end lead to a kind of referential objectivity. 11988: 201-202]
The expectation, or insistence, on some degree of external validation is seen in anthropological debates such as those about Samoa and the Dobe (and other) San. The antagonists, while they do not entirely shy away from insulting one another, spend little effort, if any, trying to make their cases by "positioning" their opponents to show subjectivity, which is just as well, as such an attempt would either show the similar backgrounds of the debaters or lead rapidly to accusations of racism, sexism, classism, and ageism. Instead, the antagonists seek to adduce "external" evidence—ethnographic, historical, archaeological, biological—independent of their own views while nonetheless validating them. It is difficult to imagine how disputes could otherwise be resolved.
What evidence is there that the empiricist vision, which seeks external validation, taps into reality at all or more so than other cultural visions? Gellner's answer is properly an empirical one, that empirically driven science "confers unparalleled economic and military power, incomparably greater than that ever granted to other civilizations, other visions": Scientific/industrial civilization clearly is unique, if only in the number of men it allows to subsist on Earth, and also because it is, without any shadow of doubt, conquering, absorbing all the other cultures of this Earth. It does so because all those outside it are eager to emulate it, and if they are not, which rarely happens, their consequent weakness allows them to be easily overrun. [1988:200]
As anthropologists with ingrained appreciation of cultural variety, we may find this development to be highly unattractive. But a pretense that all cultures are equal in confronting reality is no more than a denial of historical process and the springs of cultural transformation. As Gellner (1988) has suggested and Hayek (1960: ch. 4) has argued, all of history is a giant ecological experiment, with the winners those in closest touch with reality. (The 20th century was primarily a great test of competing economic systems. In the end, one worked and the other did not. Have we learned this lesson?) Postmodernists are correct about individual subjectivity and positionality but wrong about reality and knowledge, as some epistemologists, such as Bunge (Manner 2001: chs. 1, 23, and passim) and Nozick (2001:115-116, passim), have been at pains to demonstrate. Reflexivity, which ideally would have helped had postmodernists been correct about epistemology, becomes moot and in any case proves to be unreliable and unhelpful. Perhaps it would not be unfair to say that we have accepted and adopted reflexivity rather too cavalierly and uncritically. PHILIP CARL SALZMAN Department of Anthropology, McGill
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