The Research Object and the Subjectivity of the Researcher

No.2 FORUM FOR ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURE 10 The Research Object and the Subjectivity of the Researcher Participants: Sergei Abashin (Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow) Levon Abrahamian (Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, Erevan) Dmitry Baranov (Russian Ethnographical Museum, St Petersburg) Michael Fischer (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Elza-Bair Guchinova (Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow) Zhanna Kormina (St Petersburg State University, Higher School of Economics, St Petersburg) Vladislav Kulemzin (Tomsk State University) Hirokazu Miyazaki (Cornell University) Sergei Neklyudov (Russian State Humanities University, Moscow) Serafima Nikitina (Institute of Linguistic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow) Serguei Oushakine (Columbia University, New York) Mikhail Rodionov (Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography /Kunstkamera/, Russian Academy of Sciences) Nancy Scheper-Hughes (University of California at Berkeley) Tatiana Shchepanskaya (Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography /Kunstkamera/, Russian Academy of Sciences) Mark D. Steinberg (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) Natalya Tuchkova (Tomsk State University) Tatiana Valodzina (Institute of the History of Art, Ethnography and Folklore of the Belarus National Academy of Sciences, Minsk) Valentin Vydrin (Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography /Kunstkamera/, Russian Academy of Sciences) Margarita Zhuikova (Volyn State University, Lutsk, Ukraine) 11 FORUM The Research Object and the Subjectivity of the Researcher FROM THE EDITORIAL BOARD1 The issue raised in our questionnaire, of how the research object and the subjectivity of the researcher may inter-relate, is, one may sup- pose, as old as science and scholarship them- selves, touching as it does on the very funda- mentals of these as knowledge and practice. The essence of the problem has long been known: we can only introduce those fragments of reality that we observe into analytical discussion if we translate them into the symbolic language that is current in a given discipline, for instance, if we write them up as an ethnographical field- work diary or an exercise in narrative history. It is clear that any such text will bear the fingerprints of its writer, of his or her creative work as author. Another observer would per- The ‘Forum’ is central to our journal, and its purpose is to facilitate ceive and describe the given fragments of reality the exchange of ideas between in his or her own, probably quite different, way. members of different disciplines: This process of translation is taken for granted anthropologists, historians, folklorists, linguists, and others. in art, where it is recognised as the norm. We publish discussions here Science and scholarship operate according to relating to current topics of different rules, which have traditionally includ- central interest in the humanities and social sciences. ed insistence on the objective validity of the 1 All contributions to the Forum originally written in Russian were translated by Catriona Kelly. No.2 FORUM FOR ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURE 12 given data and the way that these have been interpreted in a given piece of research. Evoking the concept of objectivity so long associated with scientific and scholarly procedure, one is reminded of what Potebnya wrote over a century ago about magical representations: It should be observed here, that we are inclined to abuse the terms scientific and scholarly, equating these straightforwardly with truth or reliability. Such a view of things is clearly mistaken: it is linked with the childish perception that knowledge in the scholarly sense begins with the last book one finished reading. On the contrary, it began with the analysis of things; and since no-one can determine when that may have started, then it is clearly impossible to determine where knowledge itself may begin. And as for the criteria we use, the yardstick according to which one determines what is true or false, then we must consider to be true what corresponds to the complete range of data that is accessible to our observation; that is, truth does not exist in the atmosphere at large, it exists so far as a given person is concerned [Potebnya 1894: 30]. At different times, the problem of objectivity rises to the surface of academic discussion, a process that is generally associated with a reassessment of the nature of appropriate source material, and of the role played by the subjectivity of the researcher in the analysis of this. The increase of interest in these issues that has been clear over the last two decades is closely connected to the post-modern preoccu- pation with reflexivity, and with the move away from overt concern with theory, and towards descriptive methods.1 And once description had again become respectable, it was inevitable that scrutiny of its character and status should take place. In anthropology and cultural history, scrutiny of the relations between the subjectivity/analytical perspective of the researcher, and the objects of his or her research (informants, historical subjects) has generated two different types of reflexivity. On the one hand, attention is paid to the role of informants/historical subjects, to the fact that these may adopt (and generally do adopt) an active position in the representation of their culture for instance, they may consciously archaise this, or seek to represent it in a favourable light. On the other hand, interest is provoked by the position of researchers as the bearers of cultural stereotypes, analytical preconceptions, and discursive strategies, which in one way or another influence the way these researchers see the cultural phenomena under scrutiny. Ac- cording to such perceptions, an anthropological study can be imag- ined as the result of a dialogue, with each of the sides correcting the information flow in its own way. Work in some other disciplines 1 See further in the round-table discussion published in Forum for Anthropology and Culture no. 1. 13 FORUM (e.g. linguistics, sociology, history, cultural studies) would also be seen in this way. These considerations prompted us to circulate the following questionnaire: Are the pretensions of traditional anthropology (history, linguistics, etc.) 1 to objectivity in terms of the description and analysis of cultural phenomena to be understood as merely a rhetorical strategy, a badge of office marking out academic commentators corporate identity, and legitimating their strivings to control the circulation of knowledge? Or does objectivity have value in its own right (as an ideal, if nothing else)? Recognition of the inevitability of distortion when material is studied can 2 prompt not only the renunciation of pretensions to objectivity in scholarly discourse, but also an emphasis on the subjectivity of such The Research Object and the Subjectivity of Researcher discourse. For instance, the academic commentator may attempt to insert him- or herself into the text of the other, to make his or her experiences and feelings the subject of description and analysis. How productive do you find such initiatives? It has become not uncommon for a fusion of the discourse of the 3 researcher and the informant to take place (as in the genre of auto- ethnography). What are the results of such a fusion, in your view? It is traditionally held that the individual characteristics and motives 4 of the author of a given text (in the broadest sense, i.e. the informant in anthropology, the creator of the particular source in history) come between the researcher and the subject being studied, impede an adequate understanding of this. How much foundation is there for this view? Can there be such a thing as an adequate understanding in the first place? Should the influence of the originator of source material on the researcher be minimised, and if so, how might this be achieved? We invited practitioners of a wide range of disciplines ethnogra- phers and anthropologists, historians, folklorists, linguists to sup- ply answers to our questionnaire. The participants in this discussion are not just from different scholarly and intellectual traditions; they also belong to different generations, come from a range of different countries, and are, of course, also very varied in terms of their per- sonal histories and attitudes. Naturally, we neither expected nor indeed desired consensus. However, it is interesting to note that not one of the participants in the discussion chose to question the fact that striving for objectivity is a primary condition for the existence of scholarship and science. Conversely, one might observe that every- one here recognised that objectivity is in practice an extremely slip- pery and problematic concept. In the past, analogies with the natural sciences have often been used to support the claims of the humanities and the social sciences to represent reality as it is. Many of the par- No.2 FORUM FOR ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURE 14 ticipants here, on the other hand, see recent developments in the natural sciences as a demonstration of how elusive objectivity in fact is, laying bare the inevitability of a strange world in particle physics, or pointing to the inescapable presence of the observer, to the opera- tors hand effect during the electronic recording of data. No dyed-in-the wool positivists found their way into the discussion, then; indeed, it is hard to imagine that any could have done,

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