The Problem with Key Informants

Anthropological Forum, Vol. 10, No. 2, 2000 The problem with key informants ALEXANDER SOUCY Many of the people I knew while doing eld work in Hanoi (1997–1998) remarked on how dramatically things had changed in the last 10 years, since the door to the West opened and the restructuring of Vietnam’s economy began.1 Along with the burgeoning trade in consumer goods came a resurgence in religious practice and a concern for Vietnamese tradition at all levels of society. The state, while still keeping an eye on religious practice, was at least more permissive in its attitude. Spirit medium rituals and other ‘superstitious’ practices, which had been severely curtailed a decade before, were being performed more openly despite the retention of ofcial rhetoric against them. This meant that I, as an anthropologist, was able to do independent research at smaller pagodas in Hanoi without attracting the gaze of the state. I was never given a formal introduction to the pagoda at which most of the material for this paper was gathered; instead, I simply walked off the street and formed a relationship with the pagoda community. At no time did I feel there to be restrictions on our discussions or any hesitancy on the part of my informants to speak because of concern over who was watching.2 This situation contrasts sharply with the experience of eld workers in the 1980s, and with those even now who carry out research in rural areas or regions considered sensitive by the state (e.g., Hue, in the case of Buddhism), where ofcial introductions are required and researchers are not given the opportunity to work independently. I prepared for my eld work by reading ethnographies dealing with religion and ritual. Much of what I read privileged the explanations of key informants (most often the religious specialists), and seemed, in my view, not to take adequate account of the divergent ways that people acted and articulated their practices. To avoid over-reliance on such specialists, I thought it important to go beyond a focus on ritual as the dening aspect of religion and examine religious practice as a whole. My objective here is to show how such a standpoint can provide space for studying religion in a way which uncovers the issues of power that affect access to information by anthropologists. Buddhist practice can be understood as a much broader and more inclusive category of religious action than ritual, and brings up questions about the validity of approaching religion as a ‘cultural system’ (Geertz 1966). Buddhist practice means not only participation in ritual, although ritual in the strictest sense is indeed part of it. Nor is it meditation, which is not a widespread ISSN 0066–4677 print/ISSN 1469–2902 online/00/020179–21 Ó 2000 Department of Anthropology, The University of Western Australia 180 ANTHROPOLOGICAL FORUM practice in northern Vietnam, despite the impression given by virtually all descriptions of Vietnamese Buddhism.3 Buddhist practice can be reading and studying. It can be making offerings and wishes for purely material gain. It can be the wearing of special clothes, prayer beads or uniforms to indicate one’s commitment to Buddhism. It can be building an altar in one’s house or hanging Buddhist calendars and neon clocks with haloed images of the bodhisattva, Guan-yin. It can be going on pilgrimages (which are themselves not always viewed as purely religious events), or it can be engaging in informal discussions of religious issues. Buddhism can only be dened by the specic contexts of its practice and is not limited strictly to interpretations authorised by discourses of orthodoxy; it allows for both local inuence and historical change.4 My view of Buddhist practice accepts that what goes on inside the pagoda cannot be isolated from wider social practice. The motivation and the intent of religious practice are informed by the social positions (themselves contextual and relational) of those who interact with Buddhist symbols. Participation in Buddhism, and religion in general, provides avenues through which people not only provide meaning but also wrestle for control of their lives. Buddhist practice is concerned with ‘fundamental processes by which human beings construct and transform their life situations’ (Kapferer 1997:xii),5 rather than with abstract meanings and discrete cosmological systems. This basic premise leads me to position myself against claims for universal explanations or denitions of religion, such as the universal core of religion propounded by Eliade (1959). He stresses the similarities of the ‘religious man’ as a universal category, and places ‘the sacred’ in the centre of his analysis. Such a view of religion ignores how the process of religious practice is historically constituted and transformed. As Asad (1983:238) states, a universal denition of religion is not a viable project because it cannot take into account historical processes and particularities. Even within specic traditions (that is, understand- ings of religious practice at a particular temporal and spatial point), the tendency to construct ‘systems’ is a project of the anthropologist who, while drawing on explanations from indigenous exegetes, identies and classies the symbols to make them coherent in a way that few, if any, of the practitioners would do (Asad 1993:61). Indeed, such constructions often miss the point of the motivation for religious practice in the rst place. Key informants and cultural capital Many studies of religion have tended to take religious practice as synonymous with ritual.6 My objective here is not to engage in a discussion of ritual as a subject of inquiry, as a code to be broken or a tangle of symbols to be unravelled in order to provide insight into a particular society. It is more to point out that there is still a tendency in anthropological inquiry to rely on ritual specialists for THE PROBLEM WITH KEY INFORMANTS 181 ascribing a unied ‘meaning’ to a ritual. Sociological factors such as power or accumulation of cultural capital are often ignored, as are individual experiences of a ritual, or motivations for participation in it. This stress on the importance of establishing, as authoritatively as possible, the fundamental meanings and representations of ritual as an anthropological category is a project that has roots in the history of Christian exegesis (Asad 1993:60). Reconstructing the meaning of ritual is not necessarily a preoccupation of the participants themselves. This concentration on the symbolic meaning of ritual has privileged the discourses of those who are more articulate in describing (and ascribing) ritual meaning. The interpretation of these rituals is typically obtained from a key informant who is a religious expert, and it is taken for granted that others, if they know anything at all, would verify the expert’s opinion. As an example of this, Keesing writes: Religions, rst of all, explain. They answer existential questions: how the world came to be, how humans are related to natural species and forces, why humans die, and why their efforts succeed and fail. Undoubtedly, not all individuals in a society worry about such questions. But every society has its philosophers who seek answers to existential questions, while others carry on assured that there are answers, and are more concerned with coping, solving, and striving than with explaining (Keesing 1975:330; emphasis in original). What gets lost in this approach—and what interests me—is the multiple ways that people engage in religious practice and how this relates to their lives. Most practitioners with whom I spoke did not explicitly relate their practice to a cosmology, though they could if pressed. This had less to do with an inability than it did with an unwillingness. Religion for them had little to do with the act of explaining. It had much more to do with framing themselves in the world through relationships—relationships with the numinous as well as with those who had the greatest impact on their lives: their families and com- munities. Religious practice cannot therefore be isolated from everyday social practice. There are always those who are pointed out or who make themselves known when an explanation of ritual is requested. What Keesing’s statement ignores is that at the root of individuals being regarded as ‘philosophers’ are complex processes of power and authority, so more than just ‘knowledge’ is involved. For this reason, performances of expertise should not be accepted at face value. It is surprising that the body of literature addressing the connections between power and the use of language (e.g., Bourdieu 1991) has not signicantly affected the way religion and ritual are approached by anthropologists. Key informants/ritual specialists have a vested interest in providing the anthropologist with ‘deep’ 182 ANTHROPOLOGICAL FORUM explanations of ritual symbolism. Clifford (1988:45) suggests that ‘indigenous control over knowledge gained in the eld can be considerable, and even determining’ of what the anthropologist learns, to which I would add that it is not ‘indigenous’ people as a unitary group but individuals within the group who often have the control over the development of the eldworker’s under- standing. Their authority to speak is a manifestation of their cultural capital, which stems partly from cultural signiers, such as social position, gender, and education level, and also from the presentation of the self, to use Goffman’s (1956) phrase. The practice of conveying such knowledge to anthropologists is partly a result of their position and partly the very construction of it. It is a performance. Thus, one can ask: whose analysis is it and from which contexts is the person speaking? The valuing of a particular kind of authoritative knowledge by anthropologists ignores the social contexts and dynamics from which the explanations emerge: that there are other kinds of knowledge and other interpretations that are not voiced as loudly because they lack authority, or the status of their bearers is marginal.

Load more