I want to acknowledge Weston's brilliant points in articulating the difficulties that arise when we engage in fieldwork among colleagues, in her case in the context of the U.S. academy, in my case in the context of colleagues and friends in Greece, with whom I don't have a constant institutional engagement but with whom I am in constant intellectual and political exchange. See Weston, “The Virtual Anthropologist,” in her Long, Slow Burn.
- Chapter 1. 1963–2008: History, Microhistory, Metahistory, Ethnography
- » (Speaking of Method)
I am a trained anthropologist, a training that demands that even if I do not follow certain protocols, at least I must acknowledge them. So here I acknowledge the need for historical diagrams (you will find them in an appendix). But I also recognize the need to acknowledge the contentious and problematic delineations of structures of interiority and exteriority, the constant need to walk the dialectic between being here and being there, being simultaneously a daughter, a sibling, a niece, a friend, a colleague and a researcher. There are no claims to privileged or interior knowledge and understandings in this work, any more than would be staked out by anyone else conducting the same research. What is claimed, though, and even this not as privileged or interior but simply as particular, is a longitudinal experience of the events and circumstances described here. There is a group of men and women who had similar upbringings. I don't want to say the “same,” but I will claim that they are “selfsame” in that they animate and produce a fiction of the self as same. The fact that we are not all of us, at all, at the same place in life now is only another crude refutation of the determinism of history. The fact that there were countless other groups of men and women with “similar” or even the same upbringings is only a testament to the commonality of the experience of history. Why it is that this history is only now rising up, and why it is only now that it can be commonly acknowledged and, for some of us, equally claimed, will become evident in the course of these pages.
Anthropology is often accused of being in the salvage business, of concerning itself with dying populations, almost extinct, with trying fervently to take down notes on histories that will have no importance or meaning for anyone after the person recounting them has died, that all this is nothing more than Edmund Leach's “butterfly collecting.” I found myself, in the course of this research, in animating encounters, engaging with people who had long thought of themselves as intellectually and emotionally dead, as having abandoned their psyche somewhere while waiting to die. One of those people was my mother. From the time that I became an anthropologist, hence from the time that there was a legitimacy in my asking questions about the past, about herself, questions to which I ought to have had answers already available, known to me, her encounter with herself did not seem self-indulgent and self-centered, and her stories and her history acquired some value beyond one she understood as trivial in the sense of “telling stories to the children.” This woman, who has lived in the isolation of her dementia for several years now, who cannot remember not only what she had for lunch but whether my mother-in-law ever had children, this woman effortlessly reached deep into her psyche and came back with names, places, circumstances, events that finally explained to me that she is also part of this history that I am researching; that the stories that she had been telling all these years, clipped, fragmented, unfathomable, and almost clinical, were stories based on the specificity of that experience. While I interviewed her in the summer of 2006 (and at one point in these interviews, when I intervened in her narrative to ask for a clarification, she gave me the clarification, but not without saying, “Don't interrupt me, because, you know, my mind isn't all there, and I'll forget what I want to finish telling you”), her eyes had the spark that I remembered, but that I also saw in the eyes of so many older friends, acquaintances, and relatives whom I have been interviewing all these years. Though they would never have written their histories themselves, that spark validated the act of preserving those stories within them.
As James Clifford argued in 1986, even though such attitudes were “diminishing,” the “allegory of salvage [was] deeply ingrained” in anthropological discourse, even at a time when the discipline thought of itself as not being concerned with the “salvage business.” As he wrote, this allegory “is built into the conception and practice of ethnography as a process of writing, specifically of contextualization,” because the transfer of orality to textuality constitutes a re-enactment of the “structure of 'salvage'” (Clifford 1986: 112).