… since Neolithic times we have been marking down representations on cave walls, in the dirt, on parchment, trees, lunchplates, napkins, even on our own skin-all so we could remember where we have been, where we want to be going, where we should be going. There is a deep impulse ingrained in us to take these directions, coordinates, declarations out of the mush of our minds and actualize them in the real world. Since making my first maps I had learned that the representation was not the real thing, but in a way this dissonance was what made it so good: the distance between the map and the territory allowed us breathing room to figure out where we stood’ Reif Larsen The Selected Works of T.S.Spivet
It is significant that ‘culture’ is sometimes described as a map. It is the analogy which occurs to an outsider who has to find his way in a foreign landscape and who compensates for his lack of practical mastery, the prerogative of the native, by the use of a model of all possible routes. The gulf between this potential abstract space, devoid of landmarks or any privileged centre, and the practical space of journeys actually being made can be seen from the difficulty we have in recognising familiar routes on a map or town plan until we are able to bring together the axes of the field of potentialities and the system of axes linked unalterably to our bodies, and carried about with us wherever we go… Pierre Bourdieu Outline for a theory of practice
The Real Deal
‘Get real’ is one of today’s buzz words, and like many catch phrases it is also a portmanteau word – it can mean as many different things as reality itself. In a public culture of impression management it is often a plea to drop the social mask, stop posing and adopt a more truthful, authentic or dialogic stance (Stavaska 2003). For a lot of people, and especially phenomenologists, it means being centered in the primary world of the senses and embodied inter-subjectivity (Straus1963;;Mascia-Lees 2001;Katz and Csordas 2004). In the age of the Internet, it may also be a restatement of the need for face to face communication against the siren call of avatars in cyberspace and an insistence on the aesthetic value of material artefacts (books or vinyl records) over their digitalized formats (Turkle 2011). In everyday parlance getting real and being realistic are often conflated in a single exhortation to ‘show some common sense’, which usually means to adjust attitudes or behavior to conform to some dominant norm, or reduce social aspirations to immediately realisable limits. The phrase is often mobilized against what are seen as excessive structures of feeling, supporting illusory hopes and expectations.
For the political class in Western neo-liberal democracies the real deal means practicing a form of ‘realpolitik’, in the sense that those with the power to inaugurate or implement policies ratify the criteria applied to judging their outcome (Boltanski and Thevenot 2006). This principle of self justificatiom is underwritten by the view, widely held within the political class of all persuasions, that capitalism is the only game in town and there is no alternative (Fisher 2009). Meanwhile, for the French situationists and all those revolutionaries and romantic utopians who reject the notion of politics as the art of the possible, it is imperative to ‘be realistic, demand the impossible’(Debord 1994).
Many groups claim to have privileged access to reality or have such claims made on their behalf. Shamans and gurus develop special techniques to attain a higher spiritual plane of reality (Eliade 1992). ‘Getting real’ here means finding and keeping faith with the revealed truth of another possible world, a rather different, but perhaps equivalent principle of commitment to a situation from which there is no turning back. Their secular equivalent, the exponents of a forensic and panoptic social science, mobilise more mundane methodologies to uncover the mysterious rationale of social attitudes and behavior. For the critical realists, it is a question of delving beneath the surface appearances of social relations as conveyed by informants accounts, to discover the underlying structures or causal mechanisms which produce them, so as to demystify their effects (Bhaskar 2009).For Marxists , of course, it is the economy or the material base of social production that provides the reality check. Real capital (ie capital engaged directly in the means of commodity production) is contrasted with ‘fictitious capital’ ( credit, speculative investment, interest, shares and debt). Standpoint epistemologists take a different tack and invest oppressed or marginalized groups with privileged insight into structures of social reality, because, while subject to the workings of Power, they are not implicated in the need to legitimate them and so potentially at least can adopt a critical standpoint which sees through the real in a double sense (Harding1991).
Meanwhile post modernists have been preaching that the quest for the real is, like God, at best a chimera, as worst another name for self delusion, especially now that reality had supposedly gone virtual. Their notion of hyper-reality, in which the symbolic is foreclosed and the tension between the imaginary and the real is collapsed into an immersive experience of simulation created by digital media (Baudrillard 1983,2000) has been widely influential within that section of the intelligentsia which has found a niche for itself within the cultural industries where it offers a plausible account of their world view. Conceptual artists influenced by post-modern cultural theory have produced an aesthetic counterpoint in the ironic use of pseudo-mimetic techniques to gloss the dis/simulation of the real produced by ‘reality TV ‘ (Holmes 2008). And then we had the cult of the unreliable narrator who cannot tell fact from fiction and systematically conflates them to confuse or confound the reader’s expectations. The lure and blur of the real, the re-branding of authenticity as artifice has led to the creation of hybrid narrative genres – the docu-drama , the factoid.
The advent of psychoanalysis and the idea of a distinctive psychic reality constituted by the Unconscious and irreducible to its social and cultural expression posed the issue of dissimulation in a quite different way. For Freud reality principles were not fixed but linked to particular modes of social reproduction and defined in opposition to pleasures principles, the conflict between social duties and libidinal desires being a feature of civilization and one of its chief discontents(Freud 1985). The skin encapsulated ego was a fragile compromise formation made up of various psychic defences, many of them self defeating, the therapeutic task being to enable patients to be ordinarily –rather than extraordinarily- unhappy with their human lot. Freud’s followers took a different approach. For ego psychologists ‘reality testing’ was about social adjustment and deferring gratification in the pursuit of longer term goals of personal achievement (Federn 1977). For the Kleinians the real deal involved getting in touch with repressed feelings and memories to work through to some more viable accommodation with a traumatic past, rather than compulsively repeating self destructive patterns of evasion or denial associated with a ‘false self’ (Gorer1968;Winnicott 1991). For the champions of the ‘therapeutic society’ who want to abolish unhappiness and the tragic dimension of life altogether this is not enough: for them self- realisation equals self fulfillment, the aim being to ensure that life history always proceeds by its good side (Wright 2011).Against this, psychoanalytically derived critiques of the contemporary culture of narcissism, in which pleasure principles have become the new reality principles, stress that short- run hedonism, while it may keep consumer capitalism happy, is a manic defence against pervasive feelings of loneliness, alienation and loss which this culture engenders: its real ‘ real’ (Lasch 1978;Turkle 2009).
Realism in art, literature and drama has likewise meant following a tradition of representation that explores the darker side of life, the unrulier human passions as well as social injustices, through close observation and a sociologically accurate ‘warts and all’ depiction of both individuals and society (Auerbach2003). The use of vernacular idioms, everyday settings, non-professional actors, and themes that addressed the experience and concerns of ordinary people rather than a cultural elite were the hallmarks of this movement which, however, only reached out to a popular audience with the advent of documentary cinema. The arrival of socialist realism as an ideological dogma sought to institutionalise a materialist aesthetic but only succeeded in replacing concrete explorations of the underlife of bourgeois society with a highly idealized vision of ‘proletarian culture’(Groys 2008).
The ‘reality effect’ produced through a range of narrative and rhetorical devices continues to inform contemporary writing and to underwrite the truth claims of much fiction (Barthes 1982). It has also had a profound effect on ethnographic writing (Clifford and Marcus 2010).
For ethnographers interested in validating locally situated knowledge, key informants are people with a special relation to social reality as ritual experts, performers and interpreters of their own cultures (Geertz 2000). In many instances the real has been equated, or, if you prefer, conflated with the authentic, as a property of first hand, eye witness accounts (Atkinson 1990). At the same time the real deal has involved a process of intellectual dis-illusionment, recognizing the historical hinterland of the discipline in colonial anthropology, and its contemporary implication in structures of academic knowledge/power. The anthropologist is unmasked as a novelist manqué, using a whole repertoire of literary devices and tropes to convey the message ‘I was there’ and to convince the reader of the objectivity of the account. Once the ethnographer was ‘outed’ as a closet story teller , if not a fabulist the way was open to drop the mask of scienticity and engage in literary experimentation as a device for conveying ‘the real’.
The decolonization of ethnography initially produced a withdrawal from fieldwork into more or less solipsistic forms of auto-ethnography ( Davies 2008;Reed-Danahy 2013;Sikes 2013;Boylorim and Orbe 2014). This was accompanied by a retreat to the library bookstacks in order to deconstruct the whole corpus of classical anthropological texts(( Fabian 1982;Katz2004) ). This in turn provoked a counter movement which aims to turn ethnography off its head and back onto its fieldwork feet, moving out from the academic backyard into the social frontline. The real deal in this context means getting to grips with the nitty gritty of social life, asserting the primacy of participant observation over textual analysis, promoting looking and listening rather than reading or writing as key models and metaphors for understanding culture, and a renewed commitment to faithfully represent the idioms and values of informants( Willis and Trondman 2000; Back 2007).
This move to re-ground ethnography might now include widening its interpretive community to include informants themselves. Once the means of recording observations – the camera, the tape recorder, the laptop computer and the smart phone – are in the hands of the non-professional, they can be used to directly reflect and represent the reality of their cultures, rather than having them interpreted by some academic ’talking head’. These new social media point towards forms of collaborative or community based ethnography in which informants have more to say for themselves than just answering the researcher’s questions (Lassiter 2005). A qualitative version of citizen social science has begun to emerge in which research agendas are co-constructed and interpretations crowd sourced within the framework of a dialogic hermeneutics (Cohen 2014). At the same time professional ethnographers, threatened with redundancy, have found new ways to ‘get real’ by showing as well as telling, performing their fieldwork findings in live, often multimedia formats rather than presenting them as academic texts (Denzin 2003;Madison 2012). The popularity of ethno-art shows that the thirst for realism, or ‘reality hunger’ somewhat heightened or spiced up, is unabated, especially where it portrays life on the other side of the tracks (Shields 2010).
From this brief survey it is clear that however the real is defined, whether in material or metaphysical, social, psychological or aesthetic terms, there is running through all these different usages a common thread : reality resists, yet somehow also shapes, its symbolic representation. Whether the real is regarded as constraining or liberating, traumatic or ecstatic, immanent or transcendent, hidden or visible, it is recalcitrant and does not readily correspond to the way it is depicted and lived, whilst also setting limits and conditions to its perception. The language that is used – we talk about ‘grasping’ or ‘capturing’ reality- indicates its elusive character, the asymptotic quest to ‘pin it down’.
Phenomenologically, to real-ise something is to reach out and render manifest or material what is latent or ’immaterial’ and invest it with value and meaning. To find the words that are on the tip of the tongue, or the worm of an idea on the end of a semantic hook is to enter a zone where what you know you don’t know can enter into conversation with what you don’t know you know, and so make the previously unthinkable both thinkable and potentially do-able. But this process always encounters its opposite – a strategy of de-realisation, that pushes things, people, ideas, away from awareness and renders them alien and unknowable, if only because they are sensed intuitively to unsettle established custom or belief.
This dual movement is perhaps most readily observable in the various kinds of maps, both conceptual and experiential, that we create In order to navigate and make sense of the world, especially that part of it which is unfamiliar or unknown. Of course, the contours of what is mappable continually shift, not only as a function of available technologies of representation but in relation to the cultural geographies and modes of spatiality which mapping processes themselves help to produce. If there is a hidden ethnography of the real it is surely to be found in tracing these articulations.
Neither here nor there : the ‘Other Scene’ between map and territory
Ethnography has never not been an implicit form of cartography. In its founding moments fieldwork often accompanied and sometimes actively substituted itself for strategies of land and population survey that were directly or indirectly implicated in acts of conquest or were instruments of colonial governance ( Brody 1981). The naming and claiming of territory was inextricably linked to practices of survey and surveillance (Harley 1992; Carter 1996 ). Although the early anthropologists were much interested in native cosmographies, they largely ignored the cognitive maps of their informants which would have indicated how they constructed and read their own profane spaces. It is only in the past twenty years that anthropologists have begun to work with indigenous groups whose customary spatialities are being threatened by a multi-pronged attack from ‘modernisers’ on their ancestral lands and entitlements. Increasingly counter-mapping has become part of the critical ethnographers toolkit, as a way of both problematising dominant space/power relations and creating platforms for staking claims by endangered communities over local amenity and resource (Chapin and Threlkeld 2010 ).
At the same time mapping as metaphor rather than model has become a generalized paradigm in the human sciences as a result of the spatial turn (King 1996 ). Bourdieu’s field theory elaborates a complex cartogram of cultural and intellectual practices, and draws attention to the fact that the ‘field’ is indissolubly social and semantic, its construction never not implicated in power and language games (Bourdieu 1977). Latour’s actor network theory emphasises the map’s power of abstraction, its role as a mobile centre of calculation, its capacity to act at a distance, making the far near (Latour 2005). Both theories stress the terrritory’s autonomous power, whether through the science of navigation or the art of landscape painting.
Finally and most famously Alfred Korzybsky’s dictum that ‘the map is not the territory’ draws attention to the fact that something always escapes even the most imperious cartographic projects. (Korzybski 1981). Korzybsky still believed that the world could be scientifically mapped, but also that this did not correspond to the way it was made sense of in everyday language and bodily experience. Today that gap has widened, engendering a whole array of split perceptions. As car drivers we implicitly trust our sat navs to steer us to our destination across what remains terra incognita. And then we make up urban folk tales about what happens when we religiously follow the instructions of the inboard GPS while ignoring what we can see out of the car window and end up in a rubbish dump! Some Marxists have gone as far as to claim that advanced capitalism’s ‘global positioning system’ i.e. its space of commodity flows, had made cognitive maps based on locally territorialised knowledge redundant, or simply false because they no longer correspond to the scope and scale of the socio-economic forces shaping them (Jameson 1998;Harvey 2000).
Much of non-correspondence theory treats map and territory as if they exist in separate domains, closed off from one another which then enter into relation only through a play of binary oppositions viz:
MAP TERRITORY
Mind Body
Symbolic Material
Abstract Concrete
Inscriptive Performative
Indexicality Proxemics
Signifier Referent
Topographic Topological
(Table 1)
Amongst geographers, dialectical idealists emphasise the maps inscriptive power in demarcating bounded space, ignoring the fact that many territories are reticular and consist of trajectories of movement, not fixed frontiers or reference points (Elden 2013). Hysterical materialists insist that the body politics of spatiality remain intimately tied to the economy of its production or just possibly to the brain’s internal navigation system. For post-structuralists the map is the territory and everything outside it becomes either an avatar or unrepresentable. On the other side of the Great Debate, naïve realists, empiricists and positivists agree in asserting the primacy of territory as an environment of spatial facticities, although they differ on how and how accurately its essential features are captured in particular mappings.
Increasingly, though, it is being recognized that map and territory do not exist independently of one another but only in and through specific, culturally variable, patterns of inter-animation(Pickles 2004; Crampton 2010 ). They are never directly commensurable, the move from one register to the other always involves an act of translation in both scope and scale. The map defines the territory only in so far as the territory exceeds the map and summons it into being as a means of navigation.
Let’s take a concrete example of the intricacy of map/territory relations. Mental maps consist of locally situated knowledge which enables us to get from A to B quite efficiently without the use of any navigational aid apart from our memories(Downs and Stea 1977); they also scope out memoryscapes and enable us to imagine other possible worlds( Casey 1993 ;Cosgrove 1999). By that very fact they introduce an irreducibly symbolic element, and form part of a wider narrative landscape configured by structures of feeling and perception that ‘customise’ the physical environment and turn spaces into places with specific reputations and identities(Ingold 2000 ). We may avoid that street corner because its where a local gang is rumoured to hang out, or because it’s a notorious accident hot spot. By the same token, these narrative landscapes are constructed through performative acts which stake symbolic claims to own and control access to material spaces and resources; whether that staking is done by the nation state through turf wars conducted by rival armies, by taggers or street artists, or by youth gangs asserting local prides of place, the terrain of the real is always and already worked over with symbolic value and meaning to constitute a distinctive spatial imaginary(Cohen 1998). A wilderness is simply a space defined by the absence of such claims(Macfarlane 2007).
As this example suggests if there is a structural gap between the real and the symbolic it is one filled by the imaginary. That was the crucial insight of the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, who made it the foundation of his theory of the Unconscious considered as a structure of desire articulated by a discourse of the Other (Lacan 1981;Laplanche and Pontalis 1973,1986). Lacan made a series of characteristically gnomic pronouncements about the real: the real is impossible – the real never stops writing itself – nothing is lacking or absent in the real -nothing real happens in psychoanalysis etc. For him the real is unrepresentable because it belongs to a primordial world of instinctual needs and physical gratification bound up with the infant’s primary experience of the maternal body, a world from which we are irrevocably separated by our entry into the symbolic order of language, culture, society and the regulation of desire. The real is now everything that is outside the symbolic but which remains its hidden reference point. What is not symbolized returns in the real in the form of bodily symptoms, parapraxes and in dreams; in the words of Freud the real is the dream’s navel, a limit point where the unknown emerges and becomes anchored to specific signifiers, as a principle of their chronic repetition (Rosolato1978).
Freud’s term for this emergent topos of meaning present in the dream was ‘the Other scene’, by which he meant a psychic location where there is a certain return of the repressed which is also manifested in such everyday events as slips of the tongue, jokes, and parapraxes(Freud 1987). The Other scene is related to the earliest memories of the mother’s body, forever held unconsciously in mind; this is not only the first territory we explore and stake a claim to, but furnishes the elementary structure of our mental maps at a stage when map and territory are not yet differentiated; as such it configures the sensory landscape, the sights, sounds, smells and touch through which the external world is first rendered real (MacDougall 1989). This homeland, once upon a time so familiar, from which the child feels evicted, may have become a foreign country, yet it is one to which s/he longs to return, if only to dispossess those others ( the father, sibs,etc) who are imagined to have taken his or her place there. For Freud this scenario is unconsciously evoked by all those settings and situations where we suddenly become aware of the existence of the (M)Other in the guise of what seems at once familiar and strange, homely and unhomely. Freud linked this to the common experience of the Uncanny and the ‘déjà vu’ where the real becomes unreal, and the unreal seems all too real (Freud 2003).
The Uncanny is a popular haunt of the gothic imagination where it is often figured by the ‘double’ – that ‘other’ who bears such an uncanny resemblance to the self, as it crosses the border between the symbolic and the real, and sometimes between the living and the dead : walking, talking living dolls, homunculi, animated statues, human robots, zombies are frequent visitors to this mis en scene which has become such a marked feature of contemporary popular culture( Holmes 2008; Phillips and Witchard 2010 ). It emerges too whenever a city becomes enshrouded in fog and even the most familiar landmarks become mysterious, or an area is devastated by riot, war or economic collapse so that it becomes an edgeland or a ghost town where only its ruins remain to remind its inhabitants of their other lives, before the real, in the shape of catastrophe and its traumatic consequences, intervened (Woodward 2001;Edensor2004;).
The psychic space of the Other Scene is thus never without its co-ordinates within physical, cultural or political geography, even if irreducible to them. If it is the mother’s body, whose exploratory mapping provides the unconscious model for building dens, establishing ‘turf’, and constructing a whole range of imaginary fiefdoms, especially for ‘home boys’, it also provides a template for the narcissism of minor difference which animates all manner of social rivalries (Freud 1985). The Other Scene is thus where the alien and the foreign as represented by the other class, other gender, other ’race’ becomes an object of both curiosity and dread, interrupting our familiar intercourse with the world and rendering it uncertain and threatening, but also a source of prurient speculation, even envy. Not surprisingly this borderland is heavily haunted by ghosts, monsters, and folk devils. As I will try to show later on, in working class areas subject to rapid demographic and socio-economic change, where many of the familiar features of their childhood landscape have been erased or rendered strange, these figures of the Uncanny often serve to represent young peoples’ sense of social dislocation (Rathzel and Cohen 2007). It is also where the borderscapes of globalization, the lines of demarcation drawn in the space of flows cohere around a specific nexus of power(Balibar 2009).
The real can also be rendered strange by being subject to disavowal, and here psychoanalysis distinguishes between two strategies of de-realisation: denial of the real (i.e. denial of any lack or loss, such as those related to illness, ageing, infirmity and death) and denial by the bias of the real, in which empirical justification is found for all manner of fantasies (Zizek 2005).The most bizarre conspiracy theory can always mobilise facts in support of its delusional beliefs; the 12% of Californians who report that they have been abducted by aliens frequently cite as proof of their experience the fact that their intimate knowledge of an advanced and hitherto unknown space technology could not have been gained by any other means (Brown 2007;Dery 2010).
These examples underscore Lacan’s point that if the symbolic order positions the subject in a nexus of linguistic and social exchange whence specific dispositions are acquired, the imaginary enables that positioning to be magically transformed so that the real is kept at bay. It constitutes a field of narcissistic identifications that turns mice into men and back again, enables the powerless to feel all powerful, the abject and degraded to assume heroic postures, ideal selves and ideal others to be created out of whatever unlikely material lies to hand and the Tongs to rule OK, at least in their own eyes. We can see this process at work in each and every community, even the most grounded in everyday practice.
By the same token ‘community’ is Janus faced. Its inclusivity is conditional on enclosing itself in rituals of recognition that regulate its boundaries and make them more or less impermeable to outsiders. The Other is now always just around the corner, just out of sight or reach, but the ever present focus of rumour and gossip, fear and loathing. The slightest and most trivial distinction can then become the basis of social animosities : living in the next street, supporting a different football team, belonging to a different school or gang, voting for a different political party, following a different faith. And while some of these rivalries may be more or less friendly and harmless, or rendered less toxic through the medium of banter and joking relationships, they can also under certain circumstances escalate into deadly feuds. Ethnic cleansing is only nationalism of the neighbourhood become more virulent and extensive in scope. Imagined community always has its ‘Other Scene’ which subverts its identitarian claims even as it asserts them(Agamben 1993).
All this is very much the stuff of contemporary urban anthropology. Equally ‘taking the role of the Other’ has long been part of the fieldworker’s toolkit. The process of de-familiarisation is a well known experimental device used to help informants problematise or make explicit the taken for granted aspects of their culture by imagining how they would appear to a stranger or outsider (Brice Heath 2006;Faubion and Marcus 2006). In fact the ethnographic imagination of culture does not make sense without introducing this principle of alterity as a crucial dimension of comprehension (Taussig 1993). However for a long time this principle was tangled up in a process of projective identification, of siding, more or less consciously, with marginalised groups and outsider cultures, and sometimes rendering them into exotic presences. It is only recently that we have come to recognize that alterity always begins at home, with the Other within as an object of disavowed desire; it is this internalized Other who occupies the place of the stranger we become to ourselves through social identities assumed or imposed upon us, including the professional identity of ‘ethnographer’ (Kristeva1991).
If ethnography has become especially sensitized to this involuntary process of ‘alteration’ it is not, in my view, just because it was so conspicuously exposed to cultures other than its own, but because it is integral to the position fieldworkers have to adopt as a condition of their practice. We always have to negotiate some position of legitimate peripheral participation which allows us to watch and note how members of an informant group go about their business, without unduly interfering in it; in this way we replicate how ‘beginners’ learn to eventually master the protocols of their elective culture within a given community of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991). In this liminal space which is neither defined by selves or others, which is pulled one way in the quest for an ‘inside story’ and another toward an ‘objective account’, yet can furnish neither, we are subject to a continual alteration of perspectives, a constant to-ing and fro-ing between different possible mappings of the material. The tracings of this dialogic hermeneutics simply is the work of interpretation. What remains to be spelt out are the elementary structures and precise modalities of an ethno-graphology that places this operation at the heart of its concerns.
Mimesis and masquerade
The comparative study of the forms of mapping and territoriality through which cultures define and position themselves vis a vis one another is in its infancy ( Toscano and Kinkle 2015). One starting point for such a project is to grasp that the work culture does in establishing a set of imaginary correspondences between the symbolic and the real through specific socio-spatial practices of representation so that we can act as if the fictive concordance between map and territory was empirically observable and verifiably in place. In Western cultures there have been two quite distinct ways of performing this conjuring trick: mimesis and masquerade.
Mimesis is the art and craft of verisimilitude. It is a practice of simulation which seeks to master or comprehend some element of reality through a model or analog device that reproduces its essential features, usually in a scaled down and hence more accessible version (Gebauer and Wolf 1995). Children’s toys, automata, puppets, dolls, maps, diagrams, scale drawings, working models and role models all function in this mode. Liking is here to do with likeness and bound up with a sense of appropriate correspondence or analogy between an act of representation and its object. The social here mirrors the cognitive : we like who or what we know and know what or who we like. Mimesis creates and implies a basic epistemic trust in the world: what you see is what you get, and thus establishes a principle of strong one to one correspondence between territory and map. Memoryscapes constructed according to mimetics are organized around principles of contexture ( furnished by the mental map ) linked to what is spatially contiguous or consecutive (the territory). This kind of chrono-topography weaves a seamless web of narrative associations between people, places, objects and events and anchors them to concrete configurations of meaning.
Mimesis works its mirror magic through the medium of metonym so that the connotations of any signifier remain grounded in everyday, culturally coded substitutions ( viz of the producer for the product, as in branding, or tagging). It is also a medium of identification with others which lessens rivalries and suspends or denies differences – it enables us to imitate those we seek to emulate without envy or rancor (Taussig 1993). We learn to do what they do by observing closely how they do it. Finally mimesis makes the real an accomplice of our desires, or an alibi for their repression. It offers a strategy of denial by means of the real even as it keeps our beliefs firmly grounded there.
Masquerade in contrast is a practice of dissemblance or dissimulation which aims to overcome or deny a perceived deficit or actual absence in the real by substituting a simulacrum that can be manipulated to magically achieve an effect of mastery ( Handelman 1998). It creates and implies an epistemic standpoint of distrust in world as well as a fascination with its appearances. Here the traditionally ‘feminine’ techniques of disguise and impression management hold sway. We learn how to walk the walk and talk the talk by imagining what it is like to be someone else who does it. Through masquerade people play at difference, learn to take the role of the Other without becoming wholly other to themselves. There is a weak correspondence between map and territory, which opens up a play of symbolic substitutions, whether of condensation (territory) or displacement (map) so that memoryscapes constructed along these lines no longer observe the dramatic unities of space and time, but are structured topologically around specific narrative themes as they weave a web of dissociation between people, places, objects and events.
The model that figures in masquerade fashions nothing but what it clothes with its own rhetorics of desire. Gender bending and social transvestism is very much its scene, viz Camp and Drag – men pretending to be women sending up men. Passing. This is a strategy of social performance designed to stage manage identity in a way which both acknowledges and reduces anxiety of influence, and so helps maintain positions of symbolic control in situations of relative powerlessness. Masquerade offers a denial of the real, a pretense that things are other than what they are but, by the same token, it also allows us to imagine other possible worlds where things are done differently.
Cultures, contexts and conjunctures can be distinguished by which order of representation they privilege, and this has a lot to do with their relation to social production. No child played at being a robot until the advent of automation made it possible to imagine artificial intelligence! And, for example, the current dematerialization of the economy and the growing importance of regimes of emotional labour has given skills of impression management and social masquerade much greater vocational weight than the mimetic apprenticeships of the manual trades and this too is reflected in the games children play. ( Hochschild 2003;Cohen 2015).
Onto-genetically, however, the two orders remain intimately linked. As Walter Benjamin pointed out long ago, children’s play is dominated by the mimetic faculty, but its realm is in no way limited by what one person can imitate in another(Benjamin 1973) The child plays at being not only a shop keeper or a nurse, but also a windmill, a train or a space capsule. These make believe games are the passport to other possible worlds in which our earliest social ambitions take shape; they are fledgling utopias (Schwarzman 1978;Goldman 1998; Bloch 2000); we become an astronaut and fly off to unknown galaxies in search of a missing cat, or cross the Atlantic in a canoe to visit an elderly Aunt in New York. In those personal myths of origin which Freud called the ‘family romance’ we imagine our ‘real’ ie. Ideal fantasized parents, and hence ourselves, as members of another, superior and more desirable, class, or ‘race’ and our actual parents to be mere impostors who have kidnapped us for the sole purpose of making our lives a misery by making us brush our teeth and go to bed by nine ( Freud 1985; Roberts1982).
Play also opens up a space of parody and pastiche in which the child learns to ‘ape’ the gestures of adult authority, at once identifying with and subverting their power. Through the mediation of mimicry the artfulness of mimesis is transformed into the artifice of masquerade (Bhabha 2004). And this happens too in that form of imaginative materialism in which children create what D.W. Winnicott called transitional objects,( viz teddy bears or imaginary companions ) as props in a magic theatre where they learn to negotiate the discourse of the Other through the idioms of the self (Winnicott 1991). There is many a memoir that stars a favourite doll who is made to slavishly imitate or carry out its young master’s or mistresses commands and so allow them to escape into other less obediently mimetic roles, only to find itself turned back into a lifeless corpse and discarded as soon as it is no longer animated by the child’s desire for a double or a deputy to act as a go between in games of transgressive enchantment.
Despite this continual reversing of mimesis into masquerade, it has not proved easy to bring the two sides of the story together so that the precise trajectory of these transformations can be empirically traced. An ethnography committed to techniques of faithful representation and to emulating the graphic presence of the photograph or the scopic power of documentary film to show life in motion is well versed in oral cultures where mimesis rules OK but tends to reduce the uses of enchantment to merely concealing the real as a cognitive map or a territory of the unknown (Pink 2008).
Conversely an ethnography concerned with performance, ritual, myth, and textual practice is well up on all the tricks of ‘trading places’ which these media licence but is not so at home in material cultures where artefacts do most of the talking or adept in tracing the genealogy of the social through relays which connect things not themselves social (Latour2005). As I suggested earlier, this school of ethnography focusses on masquerade either as map, treating it as a space in which free floating signifiers permanently defer both meaning and the real, or, alternatively, as territory, a form of social misrecognition or mystification behind which the real is hidden but which can be made to reveal its true effects by locating them on another, more theoretical, map available only to professional social scientists.
Whether the focus is on the real or the symbolic, in both cases the ’Other Scene’ become disembedded from its social anchorage in specific geographies; as a result the social imaginary floats free and becomes quasi -autonomous, spinning around its own absent centre, generating an endless mash up of cultural idioms and genres where mimesis becomes masquerade (and vice versa). As has frequently been pointed out this perspective merely glosses the ‘auto-poetic’ dimension of post Fordism and its apparently frictionless circulation of commodities organised in the form of a totalizing consumer Spectacle (Debord 1994 ;Boltanski and Chiapello 2005).
There have been various attempts to reconcile these two perspectives in some kind of pseudo-dialectical ‘third space’ which turns out to be simply a bricolage of disparate ideas linked thematically or conjuncturally (Soja1996). A more promising approach comes from
Actor Network Theory. ANT is primarily a method for tracing the connections between people, places, technologies, narratives and things which is closest to how these connections are made in our everyday mental mappings. It is a prescription for a method, which is a bit like Husserl’s epoche in that it involves bracketing out the theoretical a priori’s of traditional sociology. So out go macro and micro, deep and surface structure, process and agency, local and global. Instead of nesting these concepts inside one another as explanatory devices, as if the relation between their scope and scale were as causally fixed as it is in Cartesian cartography, the activity of scoping and scaling is studied in itself for what it tells us about the relations of power which it formats (Latour 2010).The different regimes of envisagement created through periscopic or telescopic perspectives, the forms and practices of governance shaped by the mono-scalar one-size-fits-all policies , as against multi-scalar interventions, these are the new foci of ethnographic engagement with the disciplining of bodies and the regulation of labour, the exchange of information and the circulation of commodities, the distribution of power and the reproduction of inequalities.
Once we realise the futility of simply finding yet more ethnographic evidence to show that it is capitalism , or racism , or patriarchy what dunnit, once we stop thinking that globalisation is an irresistible force and the local an immovable object , a whole field of scholar activism opens up in which voice is no longer confused with vociferousness and we can begin to relearn what it means to look with a third eye, and listen with a third ear as we try to make sense of worlds that have made us , but are not of our making.
Groundwork[i]
The theoretical issues I have been discussing have been central to my work with young people and communities in East London over the past 25 years, a necessary, if sometimes difficult counterpoint to the practical engagement. But there was a methodological question too. In seeking to document and analyse the impact of structural and demographic change on local lives, livelihoods and life stories it became clear at an early stage that the conventional approach to observation and interviewing would be unlikely to do the business. Instead I have been experimenting with methods of visual ethnography which put a premium on graphic forms of narration and self-representation – making photo-stories, or self portraits, going on video walkabouts, making maps, as a way of doing thick description; this material is then used as a focus for group discussions or individual interviews in order to co-create an interpretative frame around it (Cohen 2013). It has been an attempt to put the graphic back into ethnography and, in some contexts, a stab at doing a qualitative form of citizen social science in which informants become fully fledged members of the interpretive community (Cohen 2014).
At the same time, in addressing highly sensitive issues of race, gender and class, often in front-line situations of social conflict in schools or neighbourhoods, where the research is, of necessity, dealing with taboo topics and highly defended subjects (Hollway and Jefferson 2013), I have had to supplement these methods with the use of guided fantasy, imaginative writing and art work in order to explore by indirection some of the deeper, more unconscious, indirect or repressed dimensions of popular attitudes to ‘the other’. What has emerged from this are graphs of social anxiety, envy, rage, frustration, hurt, loss and despair, but also aleatory moments of insight, generosity, friendship, hope and solidarity. And while it is always possible to join up the dots in such a way as to yield a story picture of utterly broken lives alleviated by heroic moments of redemption – the version of ‘Benefit Street Britain’ currently popularized in numerous factoid soaps – the material itself occupies a narrative landscape which does not allow for such easy moralizations. Let alone political solutions.
As an example of this approach I will describe some work I did with young people on the Isle of Dogs in East London in the 1990’s at a time of high tension between the Bengali and residual white working class community (Cohen 2013). The aim of the project was to explore young people’s landscapes of safety and danger and their associations, both positive and negative, to particular places and populations. For this purpose we constructed a guided phantasy exercise in which young people were given two starter narratives, ‘The Waterfront’ furnishing a scene of urban dereliction, and ‘The Marshland’ set in a rural wilderness. The young people were asked to complete the stories, taking a line of thought for a walk, as their imagination dictated, using the narrative elements and settings given, but adding to or transforming them as they went. The stories were carefully constructed to provide agencies and situations that might support a range of codings of safety and danger and also drew on aspects of the local physical geography of this docklands area. We were interested in which of these features were selected for narrative elaboration, how they were treated and how this varied between boys and girls, both white and non-white. The trigger narratives are reproduced below:
THE WATERFRONT
It’s Sunday morning. You get up early, while everyone else is still asleep. Without telling your parents, you have arranged to meet your best friend down by the riverside. Your friend has been given a metal detector as a birthday present and you are going to try it out on the foreshore. You have heard that people find all sorts of things down there, old Roman coins, the bones of prehistoric animals, Elvis Presley records. You decide to take your dog, Skip, with you to help you in the hunt.
When you get down to the riverfront, the place is deserted. You wait around for a while but your friend doesn’t show up. You decide to get started anyway.
You see a ladder tied against the river wall, so carrying the dog under one arm, you clamber down onto the ‘beach’. It is muddy and pebbly and littered with rotting mattresses, bits of old prams and rusty motorbikes. What a waste of time!
You are feeling quite fed up when Skip suddenly gets very excited and starts digging frantically in the mud. Bit by bit a large metal door is uncovered, sunk into a concrete base. You pull on the handle, and to your surprise the door opens.
Inside there are some steps leading down into the darkness. It smells damp and musty. You suddenly hear what sounds like a human voice, a faint echo coming from a long way down inside the tunnel. You listen intently and recognise it–it’s your friend!
Before you can think what to do, you are interrupted by hearing Skip’s bark some way off behind you. You look up and see the stupid animal is trying to swim out to a small boat which is anchored in mid-stream, but is having difficulties with the strong current.
You look around you. To your left, on the opposite bank, a gang of boys are chucking stones into the river. You are not sure whether they are aiming at Skip or just playing skimmers. Overhead a helicopter is circling around, as if looking for something. Or someone.
You notice that the tide is coming in fast. You turn back to the river wall and realise, with a sense of shock, that the ladder is no longer there and you have no way to climb back up.
Looking to your left, you see a strange figure coming towards you dressed in a diver’s (or is it an astronaut’s?) suit. It is sweeping the ground with a metal detector. There is something odd about its jerky, almost mechanical motions.
Somewhere in the distance you hear the chug chug chug of a tug.
MARSHLAND
You are on a camping holiday with some friends by the seaside. One day you all decide to go exploring further up the coast.
You visit a bird sanctuary in the marshlands. While your friends are having lunch you notice a BLACKBIRD sitting on a fence. You go over to give it some bread, but it hops away.
You follow it. The bird leads you ever deeper into the marshland. It is very boggy and you suddenly miss your footing and plunge into the mud up to your knees.
You manage to get out, but when you look around the blackbird has disappeared. You are alone and not sure of how to get back.
o the left you see some higher ground with a COW (or is it a BULL?) grazing. Behind you there is a HOUSE with, next to it, a SINGLE MOTIONLESS FIGURE silhouetted against the skyline. Perhaps it is only a SCARECROW?
In front of you the path carries on towards the sea. You notice that THE TIDE is coming in fast. Above you see a HELICOPTER flying back and forth, and in the distance, running towards you, a MAN
From this starting point the young people took the story off in many different directions. Claire chose The Marshland and turned it into a classic Witches’ Sabbath tale. She tells the story in the second person–a classic displacement device–putting the reader right where the action is, at the same time as being remote controlled by an invisible narrator:
You are blinded by the sun, staring down the track–your friend comes running towards you. You stand there smiling at her but she runs straight past you as if you weren’t there. You call her name but you get no reply. As you walk up to her and the rest of your friends you hear her saying ‘There’s no sign of her anywhere, the helicopter will keep searching until dark. I don’t have a clue where she went, she just disappeared.’ ‘I’m here, look’ you shout, but they ignore you. You realise they can’t see or hear you. The blackbird pops up and leads her to the house. The door opens and inside there is a fairy-tale witch (black cloak et cetera) who tells her she is under a spell and soon will become the next witch of the marshlands. ‘Why me–choose someone else I want to go home’ she protests but the witch replies ‘No one will hear you it’s too late–you’ll never speak to anyone again.’ The witch flies off on her broomstick and the narrator wakes up. She tells her mum she had the strangest dream: ‘I was going to rule the Marshlands with a magic stick.’ ‘You’ve been watching too many horror movies’ her mum laughs. ‘By the way there was a little blackbird on your windowsill this morning–it was a very ugly old bird and flew away.’ ‘Mum the black bird was in my dream.’ ‘Don’t be silly’ says her mum.
This story, with its distinct echoes of H. G. Wells and The Invisible Man, is here worked into a variation on the everyday theme of being ignored by your friends. The ‘it’s all a dream…or was it?’ angle was a very popular device allowing the young writers’ imaginative scope to explore fantasies of getting lost, being kidnapped, trapped, chased, threatened, and finally rescued, all in the safe knowledge that you would end up back home in your own bedroom with mum waking you up to pack you off to school.
A lot of the young people chose to work aspects of everyday predicament into the story, using the narrative props to explore different strategies of boundary testing, often involving issues of peer group loyalty and the limits and conditions of adventure and precaution. A good example of this was Charissa, a white girl in a predominantly Vietnamese/Chinese friendship group. She was described by the fieldworkers as very bubbly and articulate. She lived near Millwall Football Ground but really hated New Cross, finding it confining; she goes to the West End a lot with her friends and enjoys the sense of adventure involved. Charissa chose ‘The Waterfront’ and wrote a story rich in physical detail–the feel and smell of the underground tunnel is vividly conveyed and is used to portray an inner landscape of the emotions. There are the heroine’s conflicting loyalties to her dog Skip and her friend Laura, the lurking threat of the diver following them down into the tunnel, a pervasive sense of danger closing in. The narrator summarizes the plot:
My mum doesn’t even know I’m here, Skip’s gone missing, we’re down in a hole, with a strange man, and no one knows where we are and we can’t get out.
Laura starts blaming herself–‘if it wasn’t for me none of this would have happened’–but Charissa says ‘don’t be silly, no one’s to blame, but we should have told our parents where we were going.’ The voice of conscience and rational precaution is woven into the threads of a girl’s own adventure story in which resourcefulness is displayed in the face of danger and adversity. At one point the girls find some matches and light a fire to keep warm. They find their mobile phone, but the battery has gone flat due to overuse (a nice cautionary touch!). They find a cupboard that reveals a secret escape passage. However, the diver eventually catches up with them and accuses them of being on private property. He turns out to be a security guard who takes them home, no doubt to be grounded for a few days.
Variations in the configuration of these narratives told their own story about the different ways in which positions of race, class, and gender were being taken up, and how this was shaped by historical and material circumstance.
Caroline Ke was a Vietnamese/Chinese girl living on the Isle of Dogs. In her art project she described her storyworld as follows:
My journey begins in my lovely bedroom. I looked out of the window and saw a lovely beach with the sun setting on the water. So I ran out to open the door and the sky went black with lots of eyes staring at me. I don’t know why but I just kept walking and it got darker and darker. I felt terrible, frightened, lonely, bad. There were eyes everywhere. Then I found that I had got flushed down the toilet.
Her story box describes the classic paranoid descent into phobic space, ending in a state of abject self-abandonment. The eyes that haunt every nook and cranny of this girl’s landscape powerfully evoke Hoffmann’s legendary Sandman. In the story, the ‘hero’ carries a sack of glass eyes with him everywhere, which he uses to bring the dolls he makes ‘to life’; it is the uncanny resemblance of these ‘dead’ automata to human beings that Freud sees as a quintessential figure of the uncanny. Rilke in his famous essay on dolls also highlight their ‘uncanny loneliness’ as they lie about ‘on the edges of children’s sleep, allowing themselves to be dreamed.’ In Caroline’s story, however, there is no doll, no transitional object that can symbolize the interplay between the familiar and the unknown, the living and the dead. She starts from a paradisal holiday setting and then abruptly switches to the nightmare scenario without any visual or narrative transition. The school bullies’ threat to flush first years’ heads down the toilet is thus transformed into a fully-fledged scenario of panic attack which nothing, it seems, can arrest. What this absence of symbolic mediation represented in terms of her actual strategies for negotiating geographies of risk came out clearly in her interview.
Int.: Do you feel brave enough to walk anywhere on your own?
Caroline: If it’s round my area, yeah, where I live, down Tiller. I don’t think it makes any difference ‘cause I know most of the people down there anyway. But if it’s somewhere down Poplar or somewhere like that, probably not. If you don’t know the places properly, you don’t know what might happen when you just walk down the street. I heard about this girl, yeah, when she was walking down the street this drunk man came up to her and started punching her up, and all her friends were just standing there watching it. I knew her, actually, I did ask her if it was true, she doesn’t want to talk about it, but if it wasn’t true, there wouldn’t be rumours.
The line she draws between areas where you feel safe because you are known and areas of dangerous unfamiliarity is of course one of the most usual constructions, and one which we found evenly distributed across the entire sample. But what was significant in her case is where this line led. ‘If you don’t know a place properly’ means also, in this context, ‘if you don’t know your proper place’, and once you are seen to be ‘out of place’ you become a visible target for attack. As evidence of this process she cites the incident of a random and unprovoked attack on a friend of hers by a drunk.
In their mental mappings many of the girls in this study area in fact marked pubs as dangerous no-go areas on account of fears of just these attacks. Caroline, however, does not quote this as an example of a generic threat of male violence fuelled by alcohol abuse, since in her case that would bring the threat quite close to home; she lived almost opposite a well-known local pub with a bad reputation in this regard. Rather, she locates the danger at a safer distance, in an area she would never, by her own account, dream of venturing into. But this projection leads her to consider the de-ontology of place, and hence the legal status of the hearsay story–is it a true and just description of what the area is like? She asks her friend for an ‘I was there and this was what happened to me’ version of events to corroborate her perspective. She is disappointed. Her friend ‘doesn’t want to talk about it’. This silence might, in a court of law, discredit the whole narrative enterprise, but in this context it subtly implies that something so terrible and damaging happened to this girl that it is beyond the power of words to describe. But then this rhetorical effect is entirely spoiled by the final paradoxical statement ‘but if it wasn’t true, there wouldn’t be rumours.’
This is a restatement of the familiar rationale of rumour-mongers who say ‘there’s no smoke without fire’ before proceeding to fan the flames. But what the smokescreen hides in this case is not her friend’s silence, but her own. What she cannot put directly into words in the interview situation, but which she portrays through her artwork, is the great fear of ‘losing the plot’, not being able to control, or hide, the sense of mounting panic which she later admitted to feeling whenever she moved beyond the familiar confining world of home and school. Her defence against this happening was to create an idealized landscape where the sun always shines and all element of threat is removed. She adopted just this strategy in the guided phantasy exercise. In her ‘Waterfront’ story, almost uniquely, the diver is a good guy–he befriends Skip–and they both use metal detectors to explore the foreshore together. Skip joins in the hunt and digs up a card saying Happy Birthday; then everyone jumps out saying ‘Surprise!’. It turns out the diver was her dad in disguise and the whole story is about a birthday treat. He does not, however, appear to have been around in her inner world to save her from her headlong flight into phobic abjection.
This material, taken as a whole, hovers on the borderline between rational precaution and phobic closure, between a strategy for negotiating reality principles and flight from them, between rumour and panic, the canny and the Uncanny. Rumour, as Ovid put it, in Ted Hughes’ translation of the Metamorphosis, ‘loves to spice big blobs of the false with a pinch of true, and who, gulping her own confection, grows from nearly nothing to fill the whole world.’ As a communicative genre rumour puts a premium on the device of the deferred subject; its addictive quality comes from the fact that, like a soap opera, the story so far is always to be continued; elements of the real embedded in the narrative offer tantalizing glimpses of ‘who or what dunnit’ without ever providing enough data to be quite sure. And so we are left wanting more. Scandal forecloses rumour by providing a clear event structure with a decisive narrative closure. Scandal ontologizes place, person, and practice; confirms–and rationalizes–worst fears by giving them a semblance of logic, causality, and a social raison d’être. It stabilises epistemic trust, where rumour undermines it. Scandal, like gossip, relies on mimetic devices, to establish its credibility, its realism. Rumour belongs to the world of masquerade. Caroline cannot allow herself the luxury of scandal-mongering, and so she turns to the grammar of panic to give voice and credibility to her sense of process overturning or dissolving structure.
The role of atrocity stories in this context is to provide an edge of graphic realism and social substance to what would otherwise remain chimeric ‘scares’, and thus turn precautionary stories (what would happen if) into full-blooded cautionary tales (what did happen when). Caroline was not sufficiently embedded in gossip networks to find a point of consensual confabulation for her fears; which is perhaps why she wishfully confuses the role of gossip (a pseudo-fact-finding mission designed to provide a shared definition of the situation) with that of rumour. The result is that she ends up telling a story in which her worst fears are realized by what happens to another girl.
Quite a few of the young people we worked with on this project had directly experienced racial violence and used the stories to struggle with how to deal with it as a fact of everyday life. Jushna lived on the Tiller estate on the Isle of Dogs. Her family was the first Bengali family to move into the area and they bore the full brunt of local racism. Their house was broken into three times, graffiti daubed on windows and doors; one of her father’s restaurants was burned down. She comes from quite a well-to-do family in Bangladesh who have been subject to threats from armed gangs in the homeland. However, she still likes Bangladesh and associates the place with freedom, wide open spaces, animals, and no traffic. In her photoscapes she represented the neighbourhood play area as generally safe, but pinpointed a scary alley that was a short cut to local shops. Local roads were marked unsafe and indexed to stories of accidents. She was scared of strangers and told a story of being followed, and of her friend Hazera being threatened by a man. This scared her but they didn’t tell anyone. She was very aware of escape routes and boltholes, places where she could go to get away from danger.
She has relatives in nearby Bethnal Green, which she says is dangerous and scary, there are gang fights, bad people, and drugs; similarly with Brick Lane and Whitechapel. She told a story of a fourteen-year-old girl who was murdered by her uncle. Two years ago a ‘Paki-bashing’ incident in a local park, in which her brother and a neighbour were beaten up, also greatly affected her. This is a landscape of pervasive danger, interspersed with a few safe places. But Jushna succeeds in avoiding phobic closure by drawing on a symbolic resourcefulness that others suffering similar difficulties may have lacked. Her strategy for doing this comes out in her ‘Marshland’ story, which she starts like this:
I am petrified I don’t know what to do. I was clammy and felt deserted. The helicopter ignores my appeals for help. I start to cry, then I see a figure running towards me; I’m not sure if it is someone who will help me or not.
But she waits and it turns out to be ‘my friend Angela’–who had followed her to bring her back.
But I did not want to go back so soon, as I wanted to explore this isolated place, so I made Angela stay for a little while longer.
They run into the bull, which is attracted by Angela’s red jumper. They run and hide, and the bull disappears. The house is really pretty–small circle windows, red frame, painted blue–an ideal home from home. The motionless figure beside the house (potentially threatening earlier on) turns out to be a scarecrow. She concludes:
We wanted to explore the country more but it was getting dark and we had to get back to camp. We were afraid that if we got lost again, we would be lost forever.
In the unfolding cartography of this story we can see how this Bengali girl is exploring the shifting limits and conditions of safety and danger through a discrete series of narrative moves. Initially she is petrified by fear, but she manages to turn this to dramatic advantage–it allows her to wait and see if the approaching figure is friendly or hostile, and of course, because she has had the courage to stand her ground, it is her friend Angela who has come to find her. This move emboldens her to explore further the open countryside, where there are animals and not much traffic, as in Bangladesh. The bull starts out threatening but as soon as the family home comes into focus, the threat disappears. The petrified figure also turns out to be a harmless scarecrow. Her conclusion mirrors accurately enough her actual predicament. She complained that because of the racism, her family would not let her go out. She did hang out with a few Bengali friends, but she longed to be free to move around the city, go to the West End like some of the white and Chinese girls she knew. Standing her ground for Jushna meant precisely not being confined to home base. But once out in open country, and despite its associations with her homeland, she felt terribly vulnerable, frightened that if she stayed out too long in such an exposed situation she would never be able to find her way home. Her balancing act, the tightrope she walked between phobic closure and manic risk taking, is all too clearly delineated.
The plots of the stories I have been discussing are phantasy constructs. Their narrative logic is that of fairy tales, and sometimes of dreams.(Todorov 1990). And of course the methodology we adopted is expressly designed to elicit such constructs, in somewhat the same way as the rule of free association operates in the psychoanalytic setting.
Nevertheless, in the rewriting, the completed stories often deploy all the rhetorical devices of mimesis and the realist text to persuade us that they really did or at least might have plausibly happened. The description of events is highly graphic, the narrator is often cast in the role of a first-person eye- and ear witness, dialogue is usually reproduced verbatim, the dramatic unities of time and place are carefully observed. All of this to persuade the listener, and sometimes the teller, that this is the way things really were, especially in contexts where the narrator is used to being disbelieved. In this respect these stories are not so unlike the accounts that young people often give of their dealings with the police, of incidents of racial encounter, and sexual abuse. I have elsewhere discussed some of the theoretical issues concerning the status of these accounts as evidence (Rathzel and Cohen op cit). Here it is enough to emphasize that these statements should not be treated a priori as either pure fabrications (that is, calculated deceptions) or as sociologically accurate statements about an actual state of affairs. Such readings would remain entrenched in the view that phantasy and reality, map and territory, are separate and antithetic domains, each with their own incompatible truths.
Muggers, Zombies and the Urban Uncanny
Just how intricately enmeshed the real, the symbolic and the imaginary can become was illustrated for me by the following conversation between four ten-year-old white working class boys in which they are recounting one of their adventures in docklands:
Darren Do you go down Deptford High Street often?
John I’ve heard that if any white person goes down there they get mugged. The niggers just hang about all day sunning themselves, which is a waste of time for them, but then some poor white kid comes along on his way home from work and they nick all his money.
Paul My mum went over there [Deptford] once and she was nearly mugged. There’s a video shop where they all hang out.
Mark Me and John are going to school in Deptford and that is a black area, you know. A blacks’ paradise over there!
John Niggers galore!
Mark They all clan together don’t they. They help each other out but they wouldn’t lift a finger to help one of us.
John It was the same with the Jews. If they had a cousin they’d buy off their cousin, and that cousin would buy off another cousin who would buy off their dad and the dad would buy off the granddad.
Mark The other day we was down the market this side of the water and we saw this geezer come up out of a manhole and he was speaking some foreign language. I dunno what it was – Russian I think.
Paul Yeah probably was Russian, cos they had one of their warships out there in the river. I saw one too, come out of the ground. He didn’t know where he was.He just stumbled around,like he was a zombie or something. He started talking to these black muggers and they showed him where to go. They’re probably working together in the sewers you know. My dad says if Labour win (the election) the Russians are gonna take over the docks and maybe the whole of London.
Darren Well I went down there with my friend and we didn’t see anything like that. We just went shopping in the market.
The standard sociological explanation for this exchange is that Paul and Mark have been influenced by media scare stories and moral panics about ‘black muggers’ (possibly mediated through their parents) and are using their vivid imagination to elaborate a highly racialized scenario which articulates in a displaced manner their sense of class insecurity.
But that is only part of the story. For threaded through this apparently all too predictable litany of grievance, there a surprising element, a vision of a black El Dorado, where the inhabitants sit around sunning themselves and living a life of ease on their ill-gotten gains. John’s little vignette certainly seems to support the thesis, associated with the research of David Roediger in the USA, about white working-class racism being driven by envy and resentment of blacks’ free and easy life style (Roediger 1999;Cohen 2015). Blacks are portrayed as criminally lazy and parasitic, enjoying themselves at the white workers’/taxpayers’ expense, while rejoicing at being together, in their own self-sufficient community, having found a paradise they can call home. Yet I think such a reading, while an advance over the previous one is still reductionist – it is to underestimate the intensity of the ambivalence which such narratives articulate.
What does it mean for these white boys that they cross the water and enter an alien world, which is also a paradise where they do not belong, where ‘working people’ are robbed of what they have earned by their own labour, not by exploitative employers but either by blacks possessed of legendary sexual powers, or by Jews with their mysterious gift for self-enrichment? The manic glee of John’s ‘Niggers Galore’ and its link with his anti-semitic view of Jewish community and its culture of mutual aid seems to suggest an underlying phantasy about a closed world of kith and kin which regenerates itself through inbreeding: a mirror image of his own racial utopia. Yet at this point the uncanny presence of the Russian zombie enters the scene; this figure who represents, by projective identification, the boys own sense of dislocation, of the familiar world of their childhood suddenly rendered strange, takes on its full implication in the conspiracy theory woven around it : a ‘Russian takeover if Labour win the election’, a gloss on quite another ‘invasion’. For it bears on the fact that those doing the ‘dirty jobs’, in this case repairing London’s antiquated sewage system, are often from the EU, especially Poles, whose language might well sound ‘Russian’ to these boys and whose presence raises the spectre of the old indigenous working class fear of immigrants bidding down wages and ‘taking our jobs’.
Even so what gives this scenario its emotional power for these boys is something much more grounded in their own direct experience – the anxiety they feel about the prospect of leaving a primary school where they are ‘big fish’ and entering a much larger secondary school where they will be ‘small fry’; a difficult transition in any case but here complicated by another even more perilous rite of passage, the journey from one side of the river to another. The closure of the docks has meant that the intricate web of work practices that connected the two riverine communities, everything that was solid about the solidarities of dock labour, has melted into thin air. This vacuum has been filled by the residual insularities of what Hannah Arendt called ‘the nationalism of the neighbourhood’ and, in this case, by conjuring up an unholy alliance between Black Muggers and Russian Zombies in a bizarre simulacrum of lost working class solidarities. In a variant of the ‘there be dragons’ of medieval maps, these boys populate their terra incognita with monsters, but in such a way as to make familiar sense of it according to their existing rules and rituals of territoriality. What is being denied or disavowed in the process is not only the local loss or lack of manual jobs but the redundancy of the associated code of masculinity, the apprenticeship to an inheritance of labour powers that connected growing up with working and class. The real deal.
As for the provenance of the Zombies, they are, of course, the subject of an ever increasing number of popular sci/fi cum horror movies (Botting 2010). Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later(2002 ) and, Francis Lawrence’s I am Legend (2007) both feature devastated cities where gangs of mutants rule OK. Zombies, despite their origin in rites of spirit possession in traditional kinship societies, have today been variously reinvented as figures of a catastrophic modernity. In Fritz Lang’s Metropolis for the first time the gothic imagination fully embraces the dehumanisation of industrialised work : the shuffling workers personify the weight of dead labour on living labour, the ghosts in the machinery of Fordist production. In the scenario created by these boys the zombie figure is an undead worker living a twilight existence in the sewers and the advance guard of an invasion by an alien force; as such it represents both the boys’ own sense of bewilderment at finding themselves strangers in a once familiar world, and the conspiratorial powers that they fantasise are in league against them to deliver this outcome.
I have tried to indicate how in this co-constructed narrative elements of the real, the imaginary and the symbolic continually reverse into one another, requiring us to track these shifts in its centre of gravity in order to establish its unfolding meaning. Does this play of substitutions mean that dissimulation and the art of masquerade has triumphed over any possible mimetic retrieve, any anchorage in what we might regard as a common world? What are we to make, in this context, of Paul’s closing remark which brings the whole fantasmagoric story back down to earth with such an elegant bump. Whew, some readers might be forgiven for thinking, at last a moment of ‘truth’, a ‘realistic’ remark, a ‘victory for common sense’ against the power of the racist imagination. Unfortunately the celebration is premature, and not just because, as Gramsci showed us so long ago, common sense is such a rich mash up of contradictory elements held within the unspoken framework of a dominant ideology (Gramsci 2000;Crehan 2011). Common sense is built around an active denial, marginalisation or suppression of uncommon sense, those intimations of how the world might look and might just become from a standpoint other than that of Power, where alternative social and political arrangements might conceivably be envisaged. For example,at one point in the above discussion, when I demurred at one of John’s more outrageously racist remarks and muttered something about ‘having to learn to live together’ he rounded on me and said ‘Come on, get real, can you imagine Britain with a Black Queen’. I certainly could’nt but the point was he could ! ‘Get Real’ was a rhetorical injunction, but instead of foreclosing the argument it opened up a new area of debate ( i.e. about the nature of the monarchy and hereditary power) which moved the discussion in a much more progressive direction. For him of course, it was a dystopian vision which conjured up all his worst fears. That, after all, is what dystopias do. But perhaps better a dystopia than passive acquiescence in ‘the way things are’. The effective foreclosure in this discussion came with Paul’s remark which said in effect ‘there is no Other Scene’, there is only going shopping.’
Of course it is always better to go shopping than to spend your time, like John, in plotting how to ‘get back at Blacks’ as he put it. But the point here is epistemological, not moral. However abhorrent people’s views we have to contain them within a dialogic space in which these knowledge claims can be compared just as rigorously as our own for their adequacy as explanations of the local situational logics to which they refer. This does not mean testing what our informants tell us against some normative notion of the real, or according it purely symbolic value, or treating it as a specimen of the social imaginary to be displayed in our cabinet of curiosities. Instead the materials we collect through whatever media– diaries, drawings, videos, photographs, personal statements, interviews, focus groups, field notes – have to be worked on through a constant interpretive toing and fro-ing between map and territory to explore that ‘strange land of borders and otherness, ceaselessly constructed and deconstructed’(Kristeva 1991) where their meaning emerges. But what implications does this have for the reach of ethnography in a world which is largely indifferent, if not outright hostile, to its methodology?
Cartographies of the translocal
It has been argued forcefully that the future of critical ethnography lies in producing an in- depth account of late capitalism through a concrete and comparative analysis of its multiple sites of reproduction and their translocal networks of connectivity (Burawoy 2000; Molyneux 2001; Boyarin and Tilly 2009; Xavier and Rosaldo 2008;Knowles 2014). At the same time we have to devise ways of holding on to the social embeddeness which is our primary warrant.( Katz 1997). Ethno-cartography is one possible method for squaring this circle in so far as it involves our informants, as mappers of their own territories of meaning,in reflexively considering these linkages within an interpretive frame that is both intensely local in scale but global in scope ( Turnbull 1996; Cohen 2014).
We saw this happening in the Docklands project just discussed; the field work included a memory mapping exercise that encouraged the young people to anchor their own individual life histories in a wider cultural geography. Students were given a small outline map of the world and asked to indicate the places where they had spent some time, either living there, or visiting. These small maps were then placed in the centre of a large sheet of paper, and lines drawn out from these points to mark off the different areas of the memory map. The young people were asked to think about these different places, and to note down any strong images which came to mind. This might be a physical landmark with strong associations for them; some situation or event they remembered taking place there; or, something different or special about the place which they liked or disliked. Our focus, once again, was on areas where the young people felt safe and at home, or saw as ‘foreign’, and the circumstances under which what was felt as unfamiliar or different might be perceived as exciting or threatening. These were cartographies of the imagination, in which fantasy was as important as fact. As one boy pointed out to me rather indignantly when I demurred at his placing Glasgow somewhere to the west of Leeds, they were supposed to be doing art not geography!
Those young people who had experienced long distance migration (e.g. from Bangladesh or Vietnam) understandably tended to stress the discontinuities between the landscapes of their early childhood and living on the Isle of Dogs. The most complex and sophisticated memory map was produced by a Bangladeshi girl. It was rooted in a specific historical moment in the struggle for national independence. Jaswinder described it as follows:
‘It was a long time ago, in 1971, I think. Many Bengali students died fighting in front of the Medical College. They were fighting because of their language, Bengali. Bangladesh was called East Pakistan at the time and no-one could speak their own language. Because of that they fought and died. So they built a memorial to them which I show here, and every 21 February they go there with flowers. The soldier in the picture is to remind us of what the military did. They went to knock down the memorial again and again, and again and again we rebuilt it until they had to give up and we were free.’
In amongst the wreathes, and the pictures of different scenes from the life of Bangladesh, she places a photograph of herself aged five, the age at which she left home. The inscriptions in Bengali refer us both to the actual events she describes and to the issues of language and representation which were their focus. These issues clearly do not just belong to the past or to the origins of Bangladesh as a nation. They are very much alive in her own personal struggle for independence as a Bengali girl growing up in the East End today. This dual meaning is also picked up on the other side of the picture where she explores l signifiers of Englishness: the archaic English script, country houses, her school, a Christmas scene, a jar of coins, stamps, and various conventional symbols of modernity. The cross-referencing is deliberate – she compares Bengali and Christian rituals, and picks up the colour of the Christmas tree in the area around the Memorial. The two sides of the story are literally stitched together, with this suture placed along the exhaust trail left by the plane which has carried her from Bangladesh to England.
In another map drawn by a 16 year old boy living on a tough estate on the Isle of Dogs, we were presented with the other side of the globalisation story ( see illustration). This is a dynamic image of a young man going places, (like Bognor Regis and the Isle of Wight), very traditional English destinations to be sure, but he is getting there in a ‘flash car’ and by joining the windsurfing set associated with the international high fliers of the financial services sector who work in Canary Wharf and often live in gated communities of luxury apartments nearby. He signs his map ‘Alan Zammit, Art Director of State’, as if he had already made the links between these signs of the ‘good society’, living in the fast lane, and working for the creative industries. Yet there is another side to the story – and the picture. As both discipline and metaphor, windsurfing is about the art of balance: how to keep your feet (or head) above water when the going gets rough, and how to bend the forces of nature (or destiny) to your own advantage. Certainly a recipe for success in the race, but also one that, at another level, provides a model of psychic equilibrium of particular relevance to those going through the ‘storm and stress’ of adolescence.
Yet in the story Alan told about this picture it becomes clear that the disturbed flurry of water represents not only the emotional turbulence of adolescence, but a ‘sea change’ going on in the area. He confided that he was worried that the Isle of Dogs was slowly sinking into the Thames under the weight of Canary Wharf and all the new building going on. He was worried that there might be a flood and he would be drowned in his sleep. For him the space of flows took on an ominous resonance:
I had this funny dream about an enormous tidal surge that came up the river and just demolished everything, people, houses, just carried them away out to sea. And there was all these ethnics in boats and canoes, paddling around, they didn’t seem bothered, we was all swimming about in the water, just trying to keep afloat, they smiled and waved at us but they didn’t offer us to come on board….
There are a number of possible ways of interpreting this dream, in the context of its retelling. It could be read ‘sociologically’ as articulating an anxiety about the consequences of global warming. There had been much talk locally about whether the nearby Greenwich Flood Barrier would be sufficient to protect the low lying Isle of Dogs in the future. The boy’s own interpretation was over determined by his social aspirations and by his dissociation from his own ethnic background as Maltese. He associated ‘the flood’ not only with his fear of being on a sinking island, but with the presence on it of ‘ethnics’. So it could be read as a fantasy that re-iterates Mrs Thatcher’s infamous ’swamping’ speech about immigration and perhaps an oblique comment on the ‘sink or swim’ philosophy promoted by Thatcherism. The ‘ethnics’ – by which he means to refer to the local Bangladeshi and Vietnamese- Chinese community (the latter known colloquially as ‘boat people’) – were certainly widely regarded by as keen supporters of enterprise culture, and indeed envied for their business ability. In this nightmare scenario, it is they who are keeping afloat as they paddle their own canoes, while the whites are drowning in their own anger, resentment and envy. The fact that Canary Wharf functions both as a focus of local aspiration amongst young people and as a virtual no go area for many of them, casts a long shadow; if this edifice to capitalism’s ‘vital thrusting growth’ constitutes the real which is the navel of a dream where libidinal forces are so clearly threatening to overwhelm psychic defences it is not just because of the obvious phallic symbolism. The destructive side of capital’s creativity is transformed here into a force of nature, as it sweeps away local dwellings and inhabitants and this naturalisation underwrites the sense of impotence which is the other side of this young man’s surge of anger.
Methods in dialogue: beyond the ethnographic contract
It will not have escaped the reader’s attention that the analysis of the fieldwork material presented here moves back and forth between a number of theoretical discourses in a way that cuts across traditional disciplinary boundaries: ideas and insights from psychoanalysis. narratology, anthropology, cultural geography, urban sociology etc can be found jostling side by side. From some points of view such an approach is anathema – at best a strategic eclecticism, at worst an intellectual mashup which dissolves the specificity of both concepts and objects. Yet despite the hardening of boundary maintenance devices in the neo-liberal university, the classification and framing of academic knowledge has weakened decisively (Bernstein 1971)and inter-disciplinary dialogue has become, if not the norm, than a well established part of the intellectual landscape, with its own distinctive protocols (Strathern 2005;Serres 1997). Partly this is due to the way certain key paradigms and concepts have permeated many fields of research in the arts and humanities and become part of a generic, transdisciplinary vocabulary(Bal2002). Mimesis and Masquerade are cases in point: the terms can be found in art history, literary criticism, aesthetics, biology, anthropology and psycho-social studies, albeit sometimes being used in slightly different ways.
The intellectual trajectory described in this article has a precise focus: it turns on the emergence of critical cartography at the intersection between environmental science, cultural history, urban ethnography and ‘psycho-geography’ (Toscano and Kinkle 2015). The latter approach, associated with the French Situationists, set out to trace the ‘lines of desire’ inscribed on the urban landscape by pedestrians in and against the rational grid of zoning and regulated space imposed by the mappings of town planners. Paradoxically Bachelard’s ‘topo-analysis’ which inspired the Situationists was purely phenomenological in inspiration and turned its back on the Freudian Unconscious, the Urban Uncanny and the Other Scene (Bachelard 1969) ). However much this radical pedestrianism took a walk on the wilder side of town, it did not displace, or even disrupt the dominant grid of spatial flows: edgelands after all, confirm centre/periphery relations even as they reverse the values assigned to them (Jorgensen and Keenan 2012).
Ethnography. at least in its Anglo-American version, also turned away from psychoanalysis, following Malinowksi’s spat with Freud over the universality of the Oedipus (Kulkick 1992;Pulman 2003 ). Nevertheless this interface has provided a fertile site of collaboration for a number of ethnographers and psychoanalysts: the work of Roheim (1988), Devereux( 1978 ) and Obeyekesere (1990) and more recently an important body of feminist research(Molino 2004;Moore 2007) bears eloquent witness to the continuing vitality of this tradition (Heald and Deluz 1994).
I have suggested why I think the interface between psychoanalysis, with its focus on the Unconscious as discourse of the Other and ethnography, defined as the discourse of the other’s discourse of the Other is likely to prove especially productive in developing a critical cartography of the real. For if psychoanalysis is designed to produce an enriched map of inner phantasy worlds, anthropology, with its focus on myth, social ritual, and material culture brings an indispensable additional layering. J-P Valebrega’s groundbreaking analysis of myths and phantasies of origin and destiny, and the role which social ritual and techniques of the body play in transforming myth into phantasy and vice versa, has offered us a glimpse of the rich possibilities of such an encounter (Valabrega 1967,1980, 2001). But what would ethnography have to be like if it were to bring its own special gift to the party ? Here are a few pointers:
1)We clearly need an approach that avoids abstract theoreticism or myopic empiricism and restores to the fabrication of the real both its imaginary and symbolic dimensions (Willis 2001 ;Weber 2001). Between a graph which locates a line of desire according to a set of pre-existing social co-ordinates and a graphic account that depicts its existential effects, there is a whole story waiting to be told.
2)We have to pay as much attention to material culture as to texts (Hicks and Beaudrey 2010 ), restoring narrativity to things as well as people (Latour and Weibel 2006), while confining reading and writing to their own specific domains rather than using them as a generic model or metaphor for understanding culture tout court. Even rubbish dumps have a story to tell about the Other Scene if we know how to ask the right questions (Hawkins 2003).
3)If it is important to continue to give primacy to participant observation, it is also necessary to insist that this involves listening with a’ third ear’ for what remains coded or unspoken, looking out for what is ‘off the scene’, hidden in and by the social performance, as well as reading between the lines of the authorized informant’s story(Back 2007;Hobbs 2011).
4)Ethnography has to learn to deal in counter-factual histories. The other possible worlds opened up by the ethnographic imagination include the past, the present and the future considered as fields of political, social, cultural and economic action (Wright Mills 1959; Comaroff and Comaroff 1994). The bridge that did not get built between two riverine communities, the creation of dysfunctional rituals of collective memory, the plan to ‘regenerate’ an urban working class area are all worthy subjects of ethnographic research.
5)Ethnography’s special knack is to unsettle interventionist accounts of cultures and communities based on voyeuristic or sanitizing interpretations. Provided we guard against any residual tendency to exoticise or esotericise our subject matter (Fabian 2002), our work can move beyond imagining being in some one else’s shoes or fantasizing about them being in ours, towards a more strategic dialogue: no longer a game of trading places organized around the vicarious desire to know or experience what life is like on the other side of the tracks but to discover in what our informants cannot show or tell us about their worlds what it is about our own that inhibits their fuller articulation and understanding. This negative dialectics is in permanent counterpoint to the positivism of panoptic social science.
6) The traditional ethnographic contract has to be replaced by a qualitative form of citizen- or rather denizen– social science. In place of the professional ethnographic text which supposedly confers the mark of humanity onto informants, who thereby grant it ‘authenticity’, and who otherwise would remain wholly ‘other’, we have to produce platforms which co-authorise the account and involve a continual alteration of perspectives through a dialogue between all participants. In this way the iterative rite of passage into the community of fieldwork practice and the process of apprenticeship into a particular set of cultural protocols begin finally to converge on a shared space of critical liminality (Rabinow and Marcus 2008).
Ethno-graphology:towards a new poetics of fieldwork
These propositions run counter to some recent attempts to mainstream ethnography by making it into a supplementary tool of market research or governmental administration, putting some ‘human flesh’ on the bare bones of social statistics ( Prus 1989;Brownlie 1997). In the UK more than half of anthropology graduates now work for corporations, using their ethnographic skills to help companies achieve deeper penetration of markets, advising municipal authorities how to rebrand their cities to attract more investors and tourists or constructing narratives to enable government departments to win consent for their policy agendas . However I am not arguing for ethnography to remain ‘pure’ and confined within the subcultural niche that it has always occupied within the human sciences. Instead we need to get our hands dirty by infiltrating the corridors of knowledge/power, trespassing into areas of enquiry which have traditionally been declared out of bounds and establishing public platforms of critical engagement with both market and state policy driven agendas (MacClancy 2002).
There is another, more inward facing , dilemma : on the one hand the selective integration of diluted aspects of fieldwork practice into the generic researcher’s toolkit, and on the other the severance of ethno- from its own idiomatic graphology and its attachment as a prefix to many diverse fields of practice: ethno-biography, ethno-musicology, ethno-pharmacology, ethno-ornithology and many other varieties of ethno-science. In principle this should embed a principle of cultural reflexivity into these practices but the effect has been to intensify the fragmentation of the academic division of labour as each creates its own apparatus of specialization. Against this trend I am arguing for the role of ethnographology as a meta-discipline which studies the means of graphic representation which different cultures and communities deploy to create an imaginary correspondence between map and territory (Elkins 1999). Its special vocation is to connect mappings of the real to their Other Scene. I have suggested why I think ethnography has an elective affinity with both psychoanalysis and critical cartography. But there is another point of convergence. The poetics of such an enterprise must be close to what Wallace Stevens had in mind when, in trying to define it for his own purposes, he wrote:
From this the poem springs: that we live in a place
That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves
For the poet that place belongs to the object itself existing with its own obdurate alterity quite independently of what the poem might want to make of it (Stevens 1976;Cleghorn 2000). For the ethnographologist, that place, which is not our own, and not ourselves, belongs to the de-centred human subject for whom the familiar has become suddenly strange and the hitherto unknown uncannily familiar.
Stevens was insistent that poesis must not only respect but be part of the out thereness of its subject matter. It is the quality of the observation that counts and he warns against letting the writing become so entangled in its own language game, so carried out by its own craft or cleverness, that it is not allowed to find its true idiom in the emergent properties of the thing itself. It is always a question of showing and not just telling. For even if ….
The words of things entangle and confuse,
The plum survives its poems.
To which we might add that despite- or because of – our attempts to render their voices and values in their own idiom, our informants and their social world survive whatever sense we might want to make of them. Stevens also suggest an appropriate approach:
As for the poet she
tries by a peculiar speech to speak
The peculiar potency of the general.
The aim then is to use the power of language to give a local habitation and a name to generic aspects of the world, to grasp the uncommon in the commonplace. Wallace Stevens was no mystic. He knew the map was not the territory and neither confused the two nor reduced one to the other. He saw poetry as offering a gaya scientzia articulating precise observation into memorable speech. The peculiar diction of ethnography, its idiosyncratic idiom as a science of the concrete, if it is not to be just another jargon of authenticity entranced by its own metaphysics of ‘being there’, must share in poetry’s empirical ambition, while it learns to show as well as tell, listening and looking more closely at what our informants have to tell and show in order to grasp what is silenced or occluded by our own folly in imagining that we could ever do anything else.
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[i] The research reported here took place in two areas of London’s docklands, Deptford and the Isle of Dogs, and two comparable areas of Hamburg between 1998 and 2000. This research is fully reported in Finding the Way Home :young people’s narratives of gender, class, ethnicity and place in Hamburg and London V & R Unipress Hamburg). Some of the fieldwork material reproduced here has been subject to reinterpretation. Other material is previously unpublished but will appear in the forthcoming Material Dreams.