Crisis of representation in Anthropology

If it is a film about African history, who should play it? How about women’s
roles in films or music?
Who should be allowed to make representation of a person? And who has
authority to enforce these representation? (Select someone randomly and ask
students to offer description about person’s dressing style or hairstyle or
anything).
To understand why notion of representation arose, one has to go back to
Malinowski whose method of participant observation became a long
unquestioned paradigm, and ethnographers followed this principle of
creating distance from object of research and also excluded in writing.
Malinowski assumed other cultures can be studied and objectively
interpreted by using terms available in different culture (scientific
terms=western terms: they-our).
The term “crisis” of representation implies some generalised dissatisfaction
with modern social science, but it has meaning only in fields, like
anthropology, in which notation and theory are qualitative. No discipline
was more vulnerable to the growing emphasis on indeterminacy than
cultural anthropology—which, during the 1980s, was undergoing
something of an identity crisis. This brought about the question of validity
of the West’s ways of representing others. The new generation of
anthropologists set off to incorporate a heightened awareness of their
situation into their work.
Scholars such as James Clifford started to question truth in ethnographic
texts and how power hinders the ethnographer or the reader from knowing
it. He was also concerned with the question of objectivity and where to
place an author and his experiences within the realm of fieldwork.
Crucial to the changes were ideas of literary criticism and postmodernism
in social science. Some ethnographers welcomed the opportunity for
experimentation of these new changes, but others were uncertain about
how to practice ethnography, and still others were hostile to what they
viewed as the abandonment of scientific method. In light of this
controversy, Marcus and Fischer (1986) declared “a crisis in
representation”. The crisis ‘arises from uncertainty about adequate means
of describing social reality’ (Marcus and Fischer, 1986).
For anthropologists who embraced and celebrated these postmodernist
and poststructuralist traditions, decided so because of two reasons. First,
an ethnographer who examines the cultural practices of a society is, in
effect, “reading” that society as a text. Second, ethnographic research
produces texts that are read by others.
Questioning representation of gender, ethnicity, race etc.
The controversy that surrounded the Royal Ontario Museum's exhibition
Into the Heart of Africa. The exhibition featured 375 African artefacts,
collected by white missionaries, soldiers, and travellers at the turn of the
century. Despite some disclaimers by the organisers at the exhibition and in
the catalogue, many black viewers found the show offensive, claiming that it
was an uncritical "presentation of African culture through the eyes of those
who enslaved, colonised and inflicted genocide on Africans" (Charles Roach,
"Into the heart of a controversy", Toronto Star 5 June 1990). A protest group
was formed, provocatively calling themselves the "Coalition for the Truth
about Africa". They picketed the show, renaming the exhibition Into the Heart
of Racism, and referring to the venue as the "Racist Ontario Museum".
Clearly, the museum failed to consult adequately with its potential audience
before the show opened, underestimating the significance of Africa within the
contemporary black community's 'geographical imagination'. Protestors
argued that the museum's critical stance on colonialism was not clearly
enough expressed: that school parties would not understand the significance
of quotation marks around words like 'primitive' and 'savage'. Some critics
queried the need for any further depiction of colonial views of African history,
however critically presented. But it is hard to see how Charles Roach's
argument that "representatives of the various communities [should] be the
exponents of their own cultural heritage" could actually be implemented at
institutions such as the ROM.
And she goes one step further, moving beyond the world of representations to
analyse the relations of power that generate those representations. Into the
Heart of Africa was offensive not just because of the way it represented 'black
history' but because of the way those representations denied certain aspects
of the relation between a colonising power and a subordinated colonised
subject.
According to postcolonial critics like Edward Said and Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak argue that crisis of representation can be dealt through examination
of politics of position. The argument about 'position' is put most simply by
feminist Nancy Hartsock (1987:188): ‘where we are located in the social
structure as a whole and which institutions we are in ... have effects on how
we understand the world’. According to Hartsock, a politics of position
requires us to attend to the structures of power that privilege certain
(white, male, middle-class) voices, and sanctioning some points of view
while silencing others (black, female, working-class).
In this sense, it leads to questions regarding issues such as who should do
fieldwork (e.g., people “at home” in the field or “native” anthropologists);
how it should be done (e.g., collaboratively, including “informants”; in a
reflexive way, problematizing “culture” and being sensitive to issues of
gender, race, and class; or tracing the translocal in multiple localities); what
topics should be studied (e.g., the “home” countries of anthropology,
Western knowledge and science, or literary practices); and how the
results should be ethnographically represented (e.g., experimentally).
My conclusion
Is there a crisis in representation? What are the implications of this claim
for ethnographic research? Must we change what we have been doing, or
can we proceed, albeit more carefully and less naively? What, if anything,
replaces traditional, realist ethnography, and what criteria do we use to
distinguish good work from bad? What is the relationship between
observation and interpretation in ethnographic inquiry? What basis is
there, if any, for the researcher’s authority to represent others
ethnographically? What is the purpose of ethnography? What are the
implications of uncertainty as a collective presentation of ethnographic self
to our academic and general audiences? The future of ethnography will be
shaped by our answers to these questions.
Maybe the aim of ethnography is not only to give more voice to the
subject, but to give adequate voice to both ethnographer and subject.
Doing ethnography is a subjective experience and an ethnographer’s
generalisations can also be seen as the rendering of that experience.