Search

The dialogue of cultures . . . characterizes our age and . . . is incarnated by ethnology, at once the child of colonialism and the proof of its death throes: a dialogue in which no one has the last word, in which neither voice is reduced to the status of a simple object.-Tzvetan TodorovThere is a great dialogical potential in social and cultural anthropology. I say potential, but the dialogue has been there all along in the very doing of anthropology, or at least the part of the doing that takes place in the field. Anthropology is in fact founded upon the very possibility of dialogues that might reach back and forth across rifts of linguistic, cultural, and social difference. But once the field is left behind and books are published, dialogue has a way of disappearing beneath forms of writing that keep anthropological voices and native voices segregated in separate volumes. In ethnographic monographs we mostly hear the voice of an omniscient narrator, declaring, in the third-person plural, what the natives think and do. If we want to hear a native voice for longer than the time it takes to utter what anthropologists call a "native term," we have to go to a separate book, a volume of "native texts," in which only the natives speak and the anthropologist all but disappears, as if no one had been there asking for texts, recording them, and responding to them. Considering these two kinds of books together creates a dialogue of sorts, but with a very long wait for the change from the anthropological to the native voice. And even then, after all that third-person anthropological narrative, we hear mostly third-person native narrative. In both cases the voices of individuals are subordinated to the voices of traditions.