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Victor Turner's Vision of Anthropology By DECENTERING ETHNOGRAPHY: VICTOR TURNER'S VISION OF ANTHROPOLOGY BY BENNETTA JULES-ROSETTE (University of California, San Diego) Introduction During the past decade, the works of Victor Turner have been reread and reinterpreted in many ways. His contributions to the analysis of social process, ritual symbols, play, and performance stand as landmarks in the fields of anthropology and humanistic studies. The unfolding of Turner's theories involves a complex, nonlinear interweaving of multiple voices and influences from, in Edith Turner's words, the 'Ndembu of Zambia to Broadway' .' This essay examines Turner's contribution to decentering ethnography and repositioning the postcolonial subject. Although Turner would not have used these terms to describe the impact of his auvre, a rereading of Turner's early ethnographies and later essays places his work squarely within contemporary debates about postcolonial society and postmodern culture. Ethnography as a method of documentation in the social sciences was classically based upon the assumption that researchers could provide authentic and reliable accounts of the lives of their subjects. The researcher, thus, operated as an omniscient ego. Anthropological studies of preliterate societies positioned the ethnographer as the scribe and interpreter of arcane oral traditions. Concepts such as structure, function, and conflict, emerging from this type oaf anthropology, clearly separate the researcher from the other, whose social world is described as an insulated microcosm (Mudimbe, 1988:82). The colonial subject, who became the target of this anthropological discourse, played an intriguing role of passive assent and active collaboration in the production of exotic cultural narratives. With the waning of the colonial period, the authority of the ethnographer's voice was challenged. Marcel Griaule wrote Dieu d'Eau (1948), his account of the world view of 161 a Dogon sage, two years before Victor Turner began his field research in Northern Rhodesia. Griaule's transformation of the Ogotemmeli's words into an ethnophilosophy and theology was . part of a larger French scientific and political project. He wanted to create a 'more fertile, ...less brutal, and more rational' collabora- tion between colonizers and colonized people (Griaule, 1931:4). Griaule never intended to challenge colonial empire as a whole but merely to give a new voice to its subjects. British social anthropology and French ethnology were influ- enced by similar historical conditions during the 1950s. Ironically, Griaule's scientifiC'and political project at the close of the colonial era was the first step toward decentering ethnography. He began to move the ethnographer as recorder and writer away from an omniscient stance and toward the position of an empathetic inter- preter in a cross-cultural dialogue. Although Turner generally cites . Griaule only with reference to Dogon rituals and masking tech- niques, he made similar decentering efforts in his early work on the Ndembu of northern Zambia. Turner, however, was the product of a later historical period, in which he witnessed the collapse of colonial control in southern Africa and the emergence of a new type of ethnographic subject. Although I shall call this new ethnographic subject the 'postcolonial subject,' I do so with certain caveats, which have to do with how the subjects conceived of themselves. While the Ndembu, as described by Turner, do not speak of their colonial status, they live this identity through local political and economic contestations and ritual afflictions, including possession by European spirits and obsessions with guns and other material traces of Western culture. James Clifford (1988:14) provides an apt description of the postcolonial subject when he states: 'Twentieth-century identities no longer presuppose continuous cultures or traditions. Every- where, individuals improvise local performances from (re)collected pasts, drawing on foreign media, symbols and languages.' Dean MacCannell (1992:302) refers to the postcolonial subject as anthropology's 'ex-primitive' who reconstructs versions of waning cultures for anthropologists, tourists, and local consumers. The postcolonial subject, however, is not to be confused with the postmodern subject, caught in an endless web of commodification, prefabricated identities, mediated culture, and vacuous meta- narratives (cf. Appiah, 1992:155-157). The postcolonial subject is .
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