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The promise of successful ethnographic fieldwork: The creative space between
unshared futures or sighting/siting the indestructible past, theorising how it became
the everlasting never-lasting always vanishing present, hoping thereby to
understand or even change the future -producing process
Foreword
It is written that God created man in his own image, but is believed to have done so in
such a way, that unlike the Creator Self, neither the male nor the female of the human
species can know the end of a matter while it is still beginning. Writers of both literature,
especially detective stories, and social science tend to adopt a God- like stance in the way
that they present their products, so that I often counsel students and colleagues to read the
conclusions of a text first in order that they might avoid the necessity of re-reading it to
see if the means of exposition do in fact justify the abstracts’ predictions of intended
ends . This paper cannot entirely escape from this micropolitics of sociological writing
since it is necessary to clarify my view of the nature and importance of specifically
ethnographic study at some length before demonstrating my argument, that it is in my
view, if not a substitute for, a necessary accompaniment to, more quantitatively oriented
approaches to the understanding of the possible future of social relations (if, indeed. they
have a future).
I made a first, unwise very short and naïve attempt at this in 1963, ten years after
my first completed and written- up fieldwork in 1953 (Frankenberg (1957 1990), when I
was invited, by a member of the editorial staff of an alas now defunct journal (or perhaps
more properly magazine, since it was flimsy, and although not peer-reviewed was widely
read) called New Society, to write a brief article on the research method of “participant
observation” as used by British social anthropologists and US, especially Chicagoan, and
British sociologists. It was naïve, amongst other reasons, because it accepted that
anthropologists, consciously identified themselves as having adopted this method. The
later publication of Malinowski’s diaries in 1967 showed the limitations of his practice, at
least in this respect and later (Susan Drucker-Brown 1985) demonstrated to my total
surprise that my, rather casual unscholarly article was the first publication in which an
anthropologist had claimed it as the characteristic methodology of the discipline. I
demonstrated in my original ethnographic text that my role in the village was in fact a
“naturally” occurring human one, recognised very specifically in earlier texts, biblical as
well as classical, namely “the stranger (passing through) but also especially dwelling
within the gates.” As such there existed diverse legal and religious institutions to
incorporate such into social life ranging from obligations imposed first upon the ancient
Israelites (Ruth, Esther and Mordechai); and urged not only upon new Christians, through
for example the gospel parable of the Good Samaritan and the works of St Paul, but also
upon metropolitan Romans through the Ius Gentium (law of the peoples) and the Praetor
Peregrinus (magistrate for non-citizen residents). Buckland (1947 II §10 pp27-29)
suggests without spelling it out in detail that Roman civil law was influenced by the law
of the peoples especially when it was shared by many and came to be recognised as
1
natural because widespread, although they did not take this as far as to abolish slavery!
Such figures had amongst their other recognised social functions, the poss ibility of
accepting or having thrust upon them, at once blame for social mishaps and, perhaps less
often, praise for facilitating necessary change which non-strangers could not easily, i.e.
without become estranged, initiate. I analysed, what I would now describe as the way the
production of the future was enacted, by the small number of villagers, in a sparsely
populated valley in North Wales, in co-operation, at once antagonistically, and in
solidarity with others. The burden of being the stranger was however a shifting one, even
for the temporarily resident “domesticated” male anthropologist who shared the women’s
daily life of gossiping about events as they unfolded, cooking and shopping within the
village and his wife who, as family breadwinner shared with the village men a repetitious
daily jour ney across borders of the village, and often of Wales itself,to work. What was
important and what I now see as the key feature of ethnography in general, and not
merely in my partly atypical mid-Twentieth Century case study, is the oscillating
hybridity of shared cultural process that is the potential basis of the social production of
cosmopolitan futures in parallel to the social patterns of the organic hybridity in the social
possibilities of the developments of, as well as from, biological sexual behaviour and
social reproduction. Recognition of queer theoretical thinking, for example has now
made it possible and respectable for a popular BBC UK radio programme, “The
Archers”, broadcast daily since January 1st 1951, and originally subtitled “An everyday
story of country folk” to introduce a storyline in which a gay male couple are planning to
combine, by means of IVF with a single woman, to produce a family composed of two
men, one woman and a child, who at the time of writing is of indeterminate sex and
gender. At the time of my initial study local farmers in the village pub teased each other
and me by suggesting I was really there to train as a talent spy and future writer for The
Archers, and speculated widely but not too seriously (some times even in Welsh) which
villager was destined to provide the material for characters like the eccentric old Farmer,
Walter Gabriel and his dodgy son Nelson. A suitable candidate was urged upon me at our
almost daily evening meetings (excepting Sunday, of course, when in 1952, drinking in
Wales was forbidden by a Law mostly observed voluntarily in North Wales with
conviction, while in Industrial South Wales it had often to be enforced with Convictions
followed by fines.)
The social future never (just) comes. Like all other imaginable phenomena surrounding
social life on earth, it has to be produced through co-operative activity, if not
purposefully and deliberately then, by default. How is it possible for human societies and
the individuals within them to change themselves (and their productive practices in the
broadest sense) embedded, as they inevitably are, in their image and understanding of the
past, and its persistent surviving residues in the present that forms them.
They have to undergo either a revolutionary conversion and thereby to estrange
themselves from their engrained experience, or to create, to employ, or at least to
facilitate strangers who dwell, temporarily or permanently, alongside them. Classical
literatures express in more formal terms, although I did not realise it at the time, the
conclusion that I drew from my own 1950s ethnography of what I identified as a (Welsh)
Village on the Border. The Border mentioned was that of Wales and England. But it was
2
also that of old and new technologies, industrial and agricultural, and of changes in the
experience of sex and gender relations. This approach has been revised and modified by
looking at the results of the study in the light of my earlier and later experience of
encountering Welsh culture and society as well as that that of others working in a broadly
understood Welsh idiom and syntax, sometimes despite its frequent expression in English
words.
In the sacred foundation myths both of Jerusalem, (for example, Ruth the Moabitess,
Esther the Jewish Queen of Persia and Delilah the Philistine and of Athens, Penelope,
Clytemnestra, Sappho). such actors were, characteristically, doubly estranged; female and
foreign (Frankenberg 1972). Through out history, in fact, key and often creative changeagent strangers in male- dominated social organisations have been women.
In Glynceiriog (published pseudonym: Pentrediwaith) I analysed the working of this in
the light of a situation in which the dominant, spatial a nd temporal, social organisation of
men was threatened by the closure of (very) local industry, in this case slate mining and
quarrying, (the former a more deeply felt experience than the latter.)
The first signs of second -wave feminism were in the early 1950’s becoming apparent.
They were nurtured in part, in Wales as elsewhere in Europe and its then satellites,
through the experience and the aftermath of the Second World War so called because it
directly involved all the World that mattered to the Western, and Westernising, World .
Ethnographers themselves are temporary strangers within the gates, or even in rare, but
important cases, more permanent or at least trans -national. (see description of life and
work of Adrian Adam in Senegal and Elizabeth Colson’s work in Zambia below).
Ethnographers, unlike formal sociologists, do not merely ask questions they also answer
them. They allow the subjects of their studies to develop their own “right to narrate” in
Homi Bhaba’s terms. (see especially Kerry Chance 2001, and Homi Bhabha 1990, 1994)
He asserts, and is often able to demonstrate, the way that the right to this autonomy is
openly or subtly denied in post colonial as well as in colonial literature. Ethnography, by
means of a shared gift of reciprocal dialogue with a stranger temporarily within, can
operate either way. Not suppressing the right to narrate but encouraging or enhancing it,
is the social practice not only of many ethnographers but also, of course, of artists,
producers of creative literature, psychoanalysts and others, who often are, or make
themselves, strange but also at the same time, make themselves partially available for two
way exchange and mutual cultural enhancement. Classical examples of this in Wales are
Gwyn Thomas and Caradoc Evans (1878-1945) whose Capel Sion (1916) 2002, which
was written while living in London as a journalist and author, made strange through gross
exaggeration, the lack of moral rectitude in Welsh chapels in his day. He is (ironically)
buried in Horeb Chapel Graveyard in Cardigan.
(http.swan.ac.uk/english/crew/welshwriters/c.evans.htm consulted 14/09/06)
Gwyn Thomas (1913-1981) was born in Porth, Rhondda shared a desk with Will Paynter,
the future miners’ leader, at council school, won scholarships to High School and Oxford.
University He claimed that he ‘went up” by Hunger March but ‘came down’ by remova
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van back to Wales to teach Spanish in Barry until he retired to full-time writing and
occasional broadcasting in 1962. (see eg Thomas, Gwyn 2006 (1946) and Autobiography
(1968)) .He was a regular attender at Miners’ events in Cardiff and elsewhere. His books
about South Wales were written as if he were speaking aloud in his usual Welsh
idiomatic English. He, as did Caradoc Evans, made his points in speech and writing by
making strange through exaggeration. His, however, was tinged with shared bitter
humour rather than the former’s bitterly, yet also sweetly, savoured resentment and
revenge for perceived exclusion.
We are, ethnographers, creative writers and their subjects, sometimes able to relate to one
another to create a partial and healthy mutual self-estrangement. This enables each of us
to observe ourselves and our social partners at once directly and at the same time through
the eyes of the other. This does not imply that there is no conflict but there has always to
be, within it, recognition and respect. Fieldwork without clash, like choirs without
conflict and counterpoint, would imply a lack of engagement with the other that would
surely be intellectually a nd emotionally unprofitable.
For a short period in the 1950’s in the light of an almost total absence of ethnographic
fieldwork, from the official academic British (but not, of course, at least in Chicago, US)
sociological scene, some scholars, trained in traditional anthropology turned their
attention to the possibility of studying the social lives of selected fellow citizens at home.
Some like Cliff Slaughter (Dennis, Henriques and Slaughter 1967) and I, had been
excluded or expelled from the various current overseas empire-based scenes of
ethnographic activity. This was for international, national or local political reasons
achieved by state or by university actions, or merely by what our teachers,
paternalistically, saw as our, and their own, politically sensitive career requirements. (I
am grateful to David Mills for indirectly making me able to realise this last
complication.)
We and others were mainly encouraged to work “at home”, by future-oriented professors
of social policy and social medicine like T.S Simey in Liverpool, Richard Titmus and
Jerry Morris in London as well as our supervisors and senior collaborators. The former
were would -be engineers of the future or at least visionaries and proponents of a different
future that they did not merely wait to welcome but sought to produce. The purer- minded
scientific sociologists of the here and now or, as it has now become, the there and then,
had other concerns (see Oakley 1997, Alcorn 1994, see also Allatt’s 1981 Keele Doctoral
thesis on the unlabelled proto - feminism of the war period).
We were able to supplement the work done by dissenting freelance expatriates like
Ferdinand Zweig and Fernando Henriques , Viola Klein and Helen Rosenau1 either from
1
The first issue of the academy of social sciences journal Twenty First Century refers,
perhaps characteristically but one hopes not prophetically, only to the South-East Based
head- in-the-heavens Jewish émigrés and ignores the feet-on-the-ground but theoretically
informed who were mostly émigrées and Northern-based to boot!
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colonies or Continental Europe or members of organisations like Mass Observation (itself
founded by a “renegade” anthropologist of Borneo, Tom Harrison) alongside artists and
poets and endorsed, albeit with reservations, by Malinowski, (Madge et al 1938.
Malinowski 1938 and for later publications;
(http://www.sussex.ac.uk/library//massobs/publications_1974.html last consulted
17/09/2006).
These and similar endeavours also arose out of sometimes apparently rarefied, but
influentially rebellious, versions. of literary and artistic criticism centred on the areas of
Britain like Leeds and Wales itself, for example Richard Hoggart and Raymond
Williams, each of whom enthusiastically reviewed Village on the Border and Coal is Our
Life (severally) in The Listener and the New Statesman).
Such writings aroused alarm and despondency for some leading practitioners in both
sociology and anthropology for complex reasons (sometimes defensive to the point of
near paranoia) that it is not necessary to analyse in detail here. However, the danger was
certainly seen as having a possible impact on the future internal practice and funding of
the disciplines, including potential internal demarcation disputes between sociology and
social anthropology, as well as inter- and intra-university rivalries, together with fear of
the loss of scientific standing as experts, rather than the possible embarrassing revelations
of the current situations of unfortunate others in the world at large.
A main aim of this paper is to suggest that the potential of the ethnographic process and
its latent indirect application by others was not foreseen and still has not been fully
appreciated with the result that its implications for the study of temporality have been
largely neglected. Despite the fact that participating in the social lives of others, as
Audrey Richards pointed out (personal communication to author), is in practice at once a
natural (and quasi-naturalist) as well as a social attitude and a potential sociological
methodology. However unlike for most naturalists, a key factor is that ethnographer, on
the one hand, and subject/object of study, on the other, mutually experience shared time.
(see however Coetzee 2003 and Haraway 2003 for the limitations of this reservation).
Ethnographers, however share place and presence in diverse ways. Their pasts and,
especially their futures, are usually different from those of their subjects. As I have
suggested above, effective ethnographers, like successful psychoanalysts, and indeed
locally focused poets, philosophers and other writers and speakers as well as other artists
found themselves especially at the end of the Nineteenth and on into the Twentieth
Century to be acceptable as modern equivalents to the scriptural category of strangers
within the gates referred to. (See Fabian 1983 and 1991 on the importance of shared time
and Slezkine 2004 on the archetypical late Nineteenth/ Twentieth Century intellectual
stranger and refugee; the isolated, dissenting, excluded from home, expelled to abroad,
Jew). As my own early ethnography in Wales helped to reveal, and as feminists by both
their actions and writings have since demonstrated, ethnographers and their artistic
counterparts have also made possible the understanding of the interrelation of temporality
and gender relations perceived through a wider range of possibilities. (Frankenberg 1957,
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1966, 1984, 1990, 1991, Loudon and Frankenberg 2007, Bryceson, Okeley and Webber
eds 2007)
Understanding the present, as well as the past and future, is, of course, based not so much
on knowing all the facts and the transitions between them as it is on deciding what
questions to ask about those elements and processes in which both human and non-human
agents are involved.
At this point, an axiomatic selective (even naïve and populist) exploration of some
primitive quasi-philosophical propositions about social time and its continuity is
necessary. This is developed indirectly from Benjamin (2003)
The past and future are always present, and usually held in mind, whereas the present in
thought and significance is simultaneously everlasting and never- lasting.
The past is over and presently indeterminate in two senses. First, it can no longer be
changed and secondly because we can never be sure at any significant level that we have
in the present, a clear, let alone totally shared understanding of what happened during the
period when the past was the de facto present. The past is therefore always, collectively,
severally and individually, continually constructed and reconstructed, through selection,
enhancement, and/or diminution. It operates, ‘as through a glass darkly’ through the
distorting mirrors of fluid mercurial memory to give a falsely true impression of being
fixed and enduring. Indeed, its enduring ambiguous uncertainty is frequently and
mnemonically frozen in stone in museum and in monument. Pragmatically in exchanges
of information, both with texts and colleagues, we act as if each epoch and human
grouping were able in reality to know and share a fixed and knowable past.
Currently people in power, perhaps as they have
artificially shared view on others.
throughout history, seek to impose an
A vulgar misinterpretation of these processes of memory gives rise to this attempt to
force immigrants to graft, what some mistakenly still see as “our”, as yet unshared
history, onto their own “other ” supposedly separate past in order to ensure a fully
integrated future. They say in effect “We demand the surrender of your right to narrate as
the price of your future presents/presence here.” They are not merely being asked to
adopt a new and alien history but also to reject their former understanding of their own
history
Despite their differences, France and Britain, can glorify past battles like Trafalgar and
Blenheim in unity. Given the passage of time, their nationals can perceive diametrically
opposite outcomes that are now seen (anachronistically) as equally acceptable. As Robert
Southey (1774- 1843) wrote on the1704 Battle of Blenheim then still just within living
memory:
But what good came of it at last?"
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Quoth, little Peterkin.
"Why that I cannot tell," said he,
"But 'twas a famous victory."
This is not however true, for example, for the more recent struggle s between
inhabitants of Kenya (Elkins 2005) and of pre- independence Zimbabwe on the one hand,
and Britain on the other, nor for events with long term and continuing painful outcomes
like the Slave Trade and the continuing present personal disadvantage that can be traced
back to it.
The adjective and the noun forms of present in English, both suggest a passing moment of
uncertain and indeterminate duration. The English adverbial form of the concept
presently cautiously suggests (unlike the more immediate Scottish usage?) a hypothetical
reality for the approaching near future.
I wish to argue, empirically and theoretically that dialogue about social reality, at most
levels of discourse, consists, not in displaying an historic past nor in describing an
ethnographic present, but in a continually contextualising reflexive process of producing
hypothetical shared or unshared futures. 2 Most ethnographers, consciously solve the
dilemmas this creates, as do creative artists, by counter- intuitively adopting methods of
self alienation which as I have suggested elsewhere, is, itself a technique they have more
or less consciously borrowed from the latter. (Frankenberg 2005 see also Iwan Bala 1999
on modern Welsh graphic art and Raymond Williams passim on literature)
As social beings our very sociality, as lived daily, compels us consciously to live in
relation to an imagined personal and social posterity. I argue that social and cultural
anthropologists as ethnographers are privileged, or were at least in the latter part of the
XXth Century, by the form of an intersocial and above all inter-subjectivising apposition
to a cultural other, which is in the first instance literally embodied in and through what we
call Fieldwork. Research results are, for many orthodox questionnaire and schedule using sociologists, merely empapered (in both phases, research and report) rather than
embodied. As Ann Oakley (1981) alongside others, in Helen Roberts (ed.) (1981) once
pleaded, especially in relation to women, that we should talk more with those whom we
wish to understand and interview them less, replacing subject and object with sharing
subjects. The most effective ethnographers, as in this exemplar, pursue their analyses of
interactive observations and their eventual publication, not merely to describe difference,
nor certainly to deny or hide it, but to analyse the implications of that difference.
The substrate of social anthropological analysis, like that of the more successful
practitioners of literature and other arts, is ne ither the objectively observed culture of the
2
A notable exception in Wales is Dé Murphy’s paper in Davies and Jones edited
collection (2003) where her field of study was herself and her fellow residents who were
about to be evicted from the Field where they lived.
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other nor, as some postmodernist analyses seem almost inadvertently to suggest, merely
the subjective experience of the observing self. It is the hybrid two-way inter-subjectivity
of their interaction in which intermingling cultural processes are expressed. 3
Robert Pool (1994:239) is amongst those who have expressed this most clearly in this
summary of his fieldwork in the, from his point of view, linguistically and culturally
alien Cameroons:
Fluctuation, fragmentation and indeterminacy are only a problem as long as we continue
to assume the pre-existence of an external objective reality or an underlying order capable
of being gradually revealed by the application of proper research methodology or
analytical techniques and then authentically represented in the final monograph through
some form of literary realism. Once we accept that ‘real’ native culture does not exist out
there in some pure or pristine form waiting to be discovered by the ethnographer, but that
ethnography is above all, shared praxis, dialogue, performance and production, in which
communication is often not unambiguous and complete but indeterminate and
fragmentary, then the problem appears in another light.
The present essay is, a general argument for exploration of the findings of
anthropological fieldworkers, at home and abroad in a fluid and temporal, rather than
merely in a static and spatial, context. A wholly or partially unshared future, visualised
and/or textualised, is first produced and then becomes, for a time, predominant as the
starting point for discussion. Pool calls it the evocation of [shared?] reality which is
significantly seen as a continuous process without beginning or end, patterned but not
restricted to past or present tense but pointing towards an emergent relatively open, but
not totally indeterminate future. The job of the analyst (s) of the fleeting present is to
uncover all the various theoretical possibilities embedded in the presentation of the
perceived past and to decide which outcomes, different categories of person in interaction
will seek, and/or succeed in bringing about.( I learned at the conference that applied
futurologists have formalised this as the Scenario Method. Like Molière’s M. Jourdain I
had been talking Prose all the time!)
I argue that, for field anthropology, especially in my view, in a relatively at-home
context, people, place and landscape, for example, do not, in themselves contain, connote
or accumulate meaning. Meaning is never intrinsic, it has always to be collectively
produced.
Interpretations by human beings individually, and linked together into social groups or
networks by, for example, gender, class, nationality and religious affiliation,
simultaneously produce both themselves and social meaning from the context of lived
conversation about the social environment. Nor does the process end there, the reader
3
This inadvertently echoes in part a statement made by Ian G.Anderson and J.R.E Lee at
page 289 of their article Taking Professor Gluckman seriously which was published in
Frankenberg ed (1982). I am sorry it took nearly 25 years for me to rediscover and
understand it let alone accept it!
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even of creative literature or the secondary observer of any art form have still to produce
their own local meaning of what they perhaps appear merely to consume.
The current fashion in social science is in general, and I suspect especially in relation to
the probability of future events, over-focused on the quantifiable probabilities, often
presented outside the context of a broader and deeper discussion of meaning made
possible by critical analysis of discussions between professional ethnographers and their
lay partners. The sociology of answer-producing, rather than question-asking, approaches
is tragically often, applied to positing a future seen as a thing rather than a process.
(Ironically, it is entitled evidence-based, usually without the necessary modifier of
ignoring complexity- formerly enshrined even by economists and epidemiologists in the
tag, other things being equal (ceteris paribus).
This lack dominates social science applied to Medicine, for example, in the name of (an
honorary Welsh) Scot, Professor Archie Cochrane, who did not swoop down, from
outside, as some of his successors have done, to measure the realities of Welsh ill health,
but who first paused long enough to understand the factors producing Welsh health and
finally remained to check the outcomes of applying his findings. (He also praised TudorHart’s. alternative policies of praxis (combining treatment, research and direct individual
intervention) of sharing and quantifying the past and present to pose questions about the
future and its present indicators (Cochrane and Blythe 1989:162) Unlike Cochrane’s
research subjects, Tudor Hart’s patients did not ha ve to read about the results of his
studies but they were encouraged, even expected, actively to live them in the here and
now, materially changing their own personal futures and the health status of the
Principality. 4
Misinterpretation often arises, as in this case, through failing to see that things are not
only always produced but are also thereby capable of being analysed positively, in terms
of the processes that produced them and their actual outcome, as well as negatively in
terms of possible outcome s that might have arisen but did not in fact result. (see
Frankenberg 2004a)
Ancestors
Anthropology is a practice, even more than other scholarly pursuits, even perhaps
conventional sociology, in which both objects and subjects depend on the ‘worship’of
virtual ancestors. Departures from findings of accepted truth or theory, even their
reiteration, have to be justified with due reference to text and deference to the original
begetter thereof.
Those peoples, the majority of world inhabitants, who consciously pay tribute to their
ancestors, see them, if properly treated, as not merely having existed in the past, but also
as future potential sources of benefit. Embodied ancestors, who lived in the past, are
influential spectres in the Now and, if we recognise or defy them, can, in ideology or
4
see Tudor Hart 1988 and 2006 for the latter’s more general approaches
9
reality, hold us responsible, and reward or punish us in the future. (Derrida 1994
ironically deconstructed the Communist Manifesto and emphasised what Marx actually
said, namely not that a Communist future was haunting the Chancelleries of Europe but
that “The spectre of Communism”, i.e. a supposed repetition of the past, was so doing. It
was pay-back time) Ancestors are above, and perhaps beyond, all time and, as those who
have gone before, are eagerly seen as awaiting the future apotheosis of reunion, joyful or
painful as that may be. They too are strangers, both present and not present; hybrids
living in the past and in the future having to be summoned from afar for consultation or
even for recognition in the present. The ethics of publication rightly demands full and
painstaking attention to their overt acknowledgement in anthropological and other socalled social science texts and by a more subtly latent, echoing, tribute and/or
condemnation in the texts of literature, art and music.
When I embarked on on-site fieldwork in North Wales, early in 1953, I took it for granted
that the world that I had to penetrate and the difficulties I would have to overcome would
be shadowed by obscuring clouds derived from my difference in background (lived
experience; political, class, culture and national identities) and from the imperfectly
concealed, British nationwide and local repercussions of the traumatic adventure of my
recently politically aborted first attempt to research the then fashionable topic of impact
of social change and employment status on family life far away in the Caribbean. The
immediate research project had now, by the operation and interpretation of arcane
University Regulations, been transferred perforce to a just emerging new era of gender
relations in a village without locally available paid work, situated in a former slate mining
area of Denbighshire.
It was imposed, by the University Vice-Chancellor, on someone he considered to be
dangerously irresponsible and likely to continue to be so in the future. He required me to
find somewhere within a day’s return drive from Manchester and, my supervisor’s belief
that proper anthropology was conducted in other than one’s native tongue ensured that I
chose a Welsh-speaking area.
I was, in fact, influenced (as were most other pioneers of study at home) in choice of field
by previous links to the area. I had married into a Welsh5 Family (albeit from South
Wales) or one that was so regarded since its socially significant male ancestor had, like
many of the “native” Welsh moved from the English Midlands into Glamorgan to build
and man railroad and mine in the mid- and late nineteenth century and stayed to conduct
small scale trade. In my recent stocktaking efforts, I have come to realise a considerable
number of other formerly only semiconscious links that I had with the area and its
inhabitants.
Similar migrations to that of my affinal kin to Wales were those of Italian food providers
(Colin Hughes 1991) and Jewish general merchants (and poets!) (Grahame Davies 2002,
Ursula Henriques, ) are now well documented and publicised although they were scarcely
5
Welshness is, of course, a cultural process as much or more than it is a sociobiological
one.
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documented at all in 1950. Wales has long been cosmo - or even chaosmo-politan ---- and
none the less Welsh for that. It is only quite recently that I have myself realised that after
Yiddish and Polish, living within earshot of a Welsh dairy on Cricklewood Broadway in
NW London had meant that Welsh was probably the first non-English language that I had
heard as an infant.6 I had also seen, discussed and been moved by several films on Welsh
themes and a nationally shared consciousness of the impact of pre- World War Two
events on Wales and its inhabitants. (for a fuller account of my experiencing Welshness
see Frankenberg 2003)
Specifics aside, I now see that I appeared suddenly from an unshared past, to become for
career and methodological reasons, a sharer of a normally unshared present. This made
me unlike summer holiday visitors “who asked no questions and heard no lies” (only
occasional romantic versions of truth). My potential sting, however was in the future, in
my temporal tail and inscribed tale. I was to record and store this present for posterity,
theirs and mine. Their lived culture would through my experience and analysis be
translated into my metaculture, the raw material of an academic career. Like Dr Grose,
recorded by Robert Burns, I was “A chield amang them taking notes” and like him would
make use of the material in a book, whom we all assumed that they were unlikely to read.
I have now realised that my extra- fieldwork private life did cast a shadow likely, at once
to obscure and complicate, but also properly and ethically used to ensure success. This
lay, not mainly in an unshared past with the people of Glynceiriog but, in the fact that our
very futures seemed likely to coincide only briefly and then to take rather different but
nevertheless, more or less mutually entangled courses.
As it happened the village was also host to a prominent member of the Twentieth Century
Science Establishment, who nevertheless defied, in his popularising works, both the then
more fashionable Communist intellectuals and the sceptical, even Bohemian aristocratic
atheists: strangest of strangers, Lancelot Hogben. Almost alone amongst biological and
social scientists of both left and right, he challenged the morality of Eugenics. He also
challenged village morals: loved and married his illicit village schoolmistress lover, when
she had been widowed, and nursed her as his dying wife. He learned to speak Welsh
fluently although over-correctly by village standards. (He wrote a new grammar of the
language to overcome the disadvantages of the (presently still) existing Latin-based
grammars, as he had previously devised a new interna tional language for scientists,
Interglossa based on Greek to replace over Latinate Romance-based Esperanto. While he
worked spasmodically elsewhere (Birmingham and Guyana), he lived out his life and
made his home on the outskirts of the village. He is now commemorated, alongside Lloyd
George, with a bronze bust in the village hall and museum. (A and A Hogben (eds) 1998)
Despite a brief local newspaper and Welsh television and radio notoriety, the
anthropologist and his book, is not there, nor did he, at any point, expect to be.
6
For more about Welsh London see Jeremy Segrott in Davies and Jones (eds.) 2003
11
Looking to the Future
My living arrangements in the village illustrate the primacy in the social life of
forthcoming events casting shadows before. My first lodgings, with full board in a
farmhouse on the outskirts, were suggested by the Vicar, who looked forward to a year of
interesting discussions, on Judaism, in the Ruridecanal Chapter about which he and his
colleagues were, it transpired, much more concerned, as well as more theologically
informed, than I then was. Mrs Hughes was happy to fill a present and future, seasonal
gap in holiday bookings on her farm with a windfall, a passing anthropologist and his
wife. and by a barter arrangement make use of their English and teaching skills to
improve her young Welsh-speaking son’s indifferent, in both senses, performance at
nearby Llangollen Grammar School.
Mrs Evans, in whose house in the village itself, we became mainly self-catering, paying
guests for the rest of our stay, took us on stated grounds of generalised reciprocity, in
recognition that a household in Aberystwyth was to put up her son whose Ph.D.
programme in Physics required him to stay there. (The ‘fifties’ were years of acute
housing shortage in Britain.)
Johannes Fabian, in justly famous and influential publications (1983, 1991) argued that
ethnographers must ensure that they are not merely in the same place as their so-called
informants. They must also experience and share, as fully as possible their subjective
experience of time. They must, he argued, not only be co-present but also co-eval. The
aspiration so to do, I entirely agree is essential. I now doubt, however the existence of a
real-time isolatable present to share, although an image constructed post-facto can appear
to capture an apparently stable reality in text or picture, radio-broadcast Welsh Woman’s
Hour talk or commercial television documentary.
It perhaps does this, however by understating the cosmopolitanism of even the apparently
most local. At the time I represented the village economy as being lik e that of an excolonial or colonial island. I now see that lack of communication by car, telephone,
television or train concealed the many ties to Liverpool and London, never mind nearby
Llangollen and even Patagonia in distant sub -Equatorial Argentina (K yffin Williams
2004). There was even a Black “West Indian” in the football team although his maleness
and his coal-dust-coloured mining occupation over the border were, rather than his
genetically determined skin colour, his most salient characteristics for the villagers. These
cosmopolitan ties revealed themselves in the small print of Funeral Notices which I
collected from the local newspapers. (see also Loudon 1961 who describes this elsewhere
in Wales)
Moments (magic or commonplace, filled with love, hate or indifference) do not exist as
singularities; the imagined, even imaged, present passant, is reconstructed, re-collected
or recollected, as it happened, by participant, historian, ethnographer, artist or poet.
Outside particle physics, perhaps even within it, time is always produced, or produces
12
itself, as process not as instant; strictly speaking as diachronic rather than synchronic.6 I
want to suggest that the field anthropologist (aided and abetted by close co-operators
amongst the people he studies) does something similar to Christina and Tomas Hellstrom
(2003) in technological design since her/his daily activities are directed not only to
present orientation but also to future documentation, the data collected are destined to be
produced into a technical explanatory device, in my case a thesis designed to get me a
PhD and to transform me, through re-presenting it as a text, to my now acknowledged
professional cosmopolitanism, and into the recognised incumbent of two new lifelong,
qualitatively and quantitatively rewarding, social roles as a licensed purveyor of
knowledge and as a professionally recognised anthropologist.. Where conditions are right
it may also help to produce or shape the future of individual community members and of
the community at large.
The generalisation of this.
In Marx’s formulations, as interpreted by Benjamin and Gramsci, the dialectical analysis
of the perceived passing present, in the context of the immediate and never ending
processes of its creation, constitutes the material history through which historical
materialism and the understanding of reality are produced. In the lived experience of the
several participants, it instantaneously becomes the past in the dynamic plural
recollections of both incumbents of the very near future and those of distant posterity.
The shared/unshared space, the necessary difference between ethnographer and subject
which, following Pool, I suggest is the subject of anthropological analysis, derives not so
much from unshared presence in t ime or in place as from unshared, even perhaps,
unshareable future prospects and intentions, as projections and as actualised events.
One allegedly, “gone-native renegade” originally a US citizen, despatched by her British
supervisor to West Africa in the mid-twentieth century, was sadly disillusioned during
fieldwork (both by the way that her work was cited in support of development policy and
especially that, far from improving their health and wealth, that policy was undermining
the prosperity of the villagers). After writing a closely documented paper stating her case,
(Adrian Adams 1977, 1979, Hargreaves 2005) ) she sought out her later life partner and
co-author, Jaabé, in Paris, to which he had gone as a migrant seafarer, and came back
with him to live out their lives in his family compound of Kounghani in Senegal. She
suffered the fate of many African intellectuals and died in a car crash in 2000 at the age
of 54 but not before she had written three major ethnographic books (two in French) as
6
Christina and Tomas Hellstrom (Time and Society September (2003) in an article called
The Present is Less than the Future: Mental experimentation and temporal
experimentation in design work. discussed the way in which the technical designers of
industrial and household objects and devices use temporality by projecting a future goal
and by investing this goal or image with an emotional loading by hypothesising, and
according emotional value to a vision of the future
13
well as articles in the Review of African Polical Economy. 7 She was one of the very few
real cosmopolitans to have taken co-evalness seriously in all its implications. Her work
was, at first offered to students, if at all, as an awful warning against “going native” rather
than as a shining example. She became a major figure in the World Commission on Dams
in Cairo and with her husband and fellow villagers forged a style of autonomous local
organisation which radically changed the technological pattern of developme nt towards
local profitable enterprise instead of being a high tech non-sustainable intervention,
accompanied by burdensome local debt, and causing mass labour migration to France and
elsewhere
Elizabeth Colson is another unique but rather different example although she shares with
Adam, research and practice into and concerning the social consequences of water control
and Dam building. Colson for 60 plus years, while never losing close involvement in
teaching and research at the University of Berkeley, California, (and often in co-operation
with Thayer (Ted) Scudder and successively the British government of Northern
Rhodesia and that of Independent Zambia), has studied a single people sharing the
common language of Tonga in Southern Zambia. She has a home there as well as in
California, and Zambians whom she adopted as children have attained the highest offices
in the State. Some years a ago she arranged for her work with Scudder and the Zambians
to continue and recruited and trained possible successors.
My final example is more complex and is taken from my own fieldwork in the then
Communist-run Comune of Tavarnelle val di Pesa, halfway between Florence and Siena,
Tuscany, Italy, where as Fabio Dei (1996, (5)105) tells his readers in a friendly but
critical article, “(…it seems they called him il compagno inglese, “the English comrade”,
a definition which stresses proximity and alterity at the same time.)”. He is critiquing my
account (Frankenberg 1993) of a piece of historical auto-ethnography by local youth the
form of a promenade play, (Testo e progettazione teatrale) in Tuscan dialect, written and
directed by a well-known writer-producer, Ugo Chiti in co-operation with them. It was
performed at the site and within an old tenant’s farmhouse (casa colonica). The audience
were conducted from outside to inside the house as guests invited to a Wedding and then
from room to room within following the action until they were peremptorily expelled
from it as unwanted witnesses of the misery of farm family life in that private space. (It
is available with additional material in text form. (Chiti 1984) I analyse it in terms of
auto-ethnography because I see it, in an analogous way to my other examples as a direct
conflict-avoiding assertion of one side of a social conflict.
The young people of the Comune were at the time being criticised by the Communist
mayor (Sindaco) for their lack of concern for the past traditions of the area and not
knowing about its history or understanding or speaking local dialect. The young people
7
I knew about the beginnings of her career and read her original Letter to a Young
researcher befor she returned to Senegal. Our careers diverged and this account is taken
mainly from her obituary on the website of the World Commission on Dams
Le Long Voyage des Gens Du Fleuve see also ROAPE 10,September- December 1977 pp
33-59 and, so far indirectly, John Hargreaves 2005
14
and especially the young women were critical of the mayor, the Comune Council and the
local Communist Party in general as being unconcerned about their more modern
problems of employment, housing and education and especially their lack of official
involvement in relevant decisions. Presenting the play in the local dialect and using it to
criticise the way women had been treated in the past, drew attention to the partial
marginalisation of women and young people in the present. In order to influence the way
that the future was being produced, they at once accepted the narration of their elders as
legitimate and used it to create an unusual opportunity to narrate their own experienced
truth in a way that was difficult to reject.8
8
it is a variation of a common device re-enacted in English drama at least as far back as
Shakespeare and no doubt in other world literatures as well. It is echoed again in
Shakespeare and in world culture by the ubiquitous teasing banter of licensed fools. See
Beatrice K.Otto 2001
15
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