The concept of reflexivity, after some hectic years as the pennant of a seminar revolution, has at last settled into a kind of comfortable convention. Perhaps too comfortable. Reflexivity, in practice, has become the recognition by most ethnographers of the symbolic wing of American cultural anthropology that adequate anthropological accounts cannot be crafted without acknowledging the forces — epistemological and political — that condition their writing. At its most useful and bland, this has developed into a form of ethnographic writing with distinct features. A typically reflexive effort, hence, will contain a discussion of its writer’s biographical ties (or lack thereof) to the events or peoples being discussed; an admission that the anthropological project of describing human diversity was created as part of the larger Western colonial project of divide et impera (divide and rule); all leading to a reanalysis of the concepts and analytic techniques that biography and the discipline’s dubious history may have brought to the ethnographic process as unspoken givens. The result is supposed to be, and often is, an account that illuminates both what the ethnographer set out to discuss as well as the always contingent grounds of such a discussion.
At its most interesting and disruptive, however, reflexivity has sometimes manifested itself as the epistemological claim that any ethnographic investigation of some ‘other’ is really, inevitably, only a process of self-definition played out within the disciplinary, individuating, Western, ‘self’; and an associated political claim that this revelation, masquerading as observation, is part of a process of writing the ‘other’ back into a kind of textual colonialism (Abu-Lughod 1991). This more radical kind of reflexivity, of course, hints that anthropology, or at least its associated concepts of ‘culture’ and ‘society’, should end with the colonial arrogance that gave it birth. This terminal negativity, along with the tendency of some avowedly reflexive ethnography to ooze autobiographical treacle, has led a few dismissive critics to write off reflexivity as both self-serving and self-indulgent. The episte-mological and political charges it raises, however, remain all too painfully undeniable.
Reflexivity first became an issue to American cultural anthropologists in the late 1960s because of the Vietnam War. (The term already had some usage in radical sociology; see Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992.) Anthropologists doing fieldwork in an antagonistic ‘Third World’ could not help but feel the falseness of their position when challenged by locals outraged by the United States of America’s international power playing. The collection, Reinventing Anthropology, edited by fDell Hymes, which appeared in 1969, crystallized this sense of political unease in a series of essays which confronted American anthropology’s till then largely unexamined colonial past, and contemplated the international and national power dynamic within which its contemporary professional activities continued to be carried out. Bob Scholte’s article in that volume, ‘Toward a Reflexive and Critical Anthropology’, was probably the first to use the term ‘reflexive’ in the sense it now carries today; i.e. by suggesting that anthropologists must always note ‘reflexively’ how the political asymmetries their activities presupposed were connected, in the process of ethnography, to the epistemological privileges of ‘objectivity’ and ‘neutrality’ they also claimed. "fTalal Asad’s 1973 collection, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, levelled a similar critique at British social anthropology. In the late 1970s, a trio of semi-autobiographical ‘ethnographies’, fPaul Rabinow’s Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco (1977), Kevin Dwyer’s Moroccan Dialogues: Anthropology in Question (1982), and Vincent Crapanzano’s Tuhami (1980), carried things a step further, challenging the normal distinction between ‘subjective’ field memoir and ‘objective’ ethnographic monograph by melding the two together in their various accounts of fieldwork in Morocco. Their works, like Barbara MyerhofFs more subtle .Number Our Days (1978), tended to concretize the charge that the ethnographer’s own racial, national, political, financial, and professional position was inextricably at play in the processes of recording and interpreting the field. Rabinow, in particular, isolated a concept central to such accounts by hauling forth, as an accurate characterization of the fieldwork encounter, Paul Ricoeur’s definition of herme-neutics as ‘the comprehension of the self by the detour of the comprehension of the other’; and then pointing out, acutely, that this is the very process reflexivity critiques when it highlights the political preconditions of such ‘detours’ (Rabi-now 1977: 5, 161—2). Their often tragi-comic accounts of conceptual disillusionment and confused, cross-cultural betrayal also left traces of elegiac bemusement and wounded revelation that continue to mark much reflexive ethnographic writing.
In the mid-1980s, reflexivity was turned in a direction at once more textual and philosophically sophisticated with the publication, in the same year, of two books: George E. Marcus and Michael M.J. Fisher’s overview of anthropology, Anthropology as Cultural Critique (1986); and the collection, edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986). These works, together, raised a self-conscious call for the doing of more experimentally reflexive ethnographic writing, and, to simplify them mercilessly, derived their feeling of critical urgency as to why this was suddenly so necessary from three interrelated factors. First, a sense, variously articulated, that anthropology’s foundationalist epistemology and scientism — that is, its unspoken presumption that, in the end, anthropology is somehow about discovering the perfect language for articulating either a ‘really real’ universal human essence, or a set of equally ‘real’ if various cultural essences — had been fatally called into question by a growing recognition of that epistemology’s Western provincialism, historical specificity, and unsavoury political implications. Second, a ‘postmodern’ distrust and, sometimes, outright rejection of the standard Western ‘meta-narratives’, or big stories, of how history tendeth as it listeth (as implied by terms like ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’) occasioned by the inevitable unifications and violent juxtapositions that occur when things like, say, Hausa drumming and Charlie’s Angels, formerly separated by these same historical narratives, are forced together into the single space, time, and value of the inexorable, world market. Finally, third, the fatal observation (first made by Clifford Geertz) that since ethnography was, above all else, a form of writing, much of its self-proclaimed objectivity and empirically grounded authority would be better seen as rhetorical effects of the way the ethnographic genre was constructed rather than as either defensible claims or incontestable givens — with the corollary implication that, if constructed, such texts could be, should be, opened up for inspection, and strategically de- and reconstructed. The shorthand way to refer to this kind of text-focused reflexivity is as ‘a politics of writing’; an investigation, that is, of the implications of that hidden struggle in the ethnographer’s office, where larger, generally unacknowledged political and professional hegemonies quietly slouch toward anthropological pronouncement. The appearance of this politics in American anthropology was of a piece with ‘reflexive’ reconsiderations of Orientalism (Said 1978) by literary critics, critiques of the historiography of colonialism by postcolonial scholars, and of the popular media by cultural studies.
All this, of course, has given rise to some passionate objections. Leaving aside, as a momentary dyspepsia, the grumpy disdain of those discomforted by a few too many intimate revelations, these criticisms tend to be of two sorts. On the one hand, there are claims by the epistemo-logically conservative that reflexivity implies a form of radical relativism that would make ethnographic comparison and anthropological generalization impossible. This critique, which at times seems to be taken seriously as a positive claim even by some rather unreflective reflexive anthropologists, is undercut by the difficulty attending any attempt to imagine what ‘relativism’ might mean in the absence of the kinds of claims about cultural essences that most reflexive anthropologists have refused to make. Rather more serious are the charges, levelled by some feminists, postcolonial scholars, and students of science studies, that the reflexive ‘politics of writing’ were often more about the struggle for academic prestige than for social justice — because, that is, the theorists of ‘reflexivity’ merely took old insights into the production of anthropological knowledge offered years before by feminists and Marxists, and redrafted them into an elite post-structuralist language of calculated uniqueness. Some feminists and activists have also argued, in a more interesting, partial application of the conservative epistemological critique, that reflexive anthropology’s non-foundationalism — its forswearing, that is, of the possibility of a ‘really real’ ground underlying its accounts – also destabilizes the political positions activists, such as feminists and some postcolonial critics, require for political engagement. Other critics of anthropology, like Donna Haraway, unwilling to reapply foundationalism in this way, have proposed instead a notion of ‘situated knowledge’, of knowing constructed according to an objectivity locally but nonetheless firmly constrained (Haraway 1991: 188- 96), that would also allow critique to continue without disabling the critic. This position also causes Haraway to reject, as epistemologically naive, the very idea that one can ‘fix’ ethnographic representation by being more self-conscious about how one does it.
However these controversies pan out, it remains that reflexivity has proven itself a fertile concept. Most anglophone ethnography now written, whether in Britain or the United States, pays at least routine heed to the whys and wherefores of its own production. And although this very routinization has resulted in a certain staleness in application, it has also allowed entirely new kinds of questions to be asked; a questioning originally initiated, it is to be remembered, by the very people anthropology had so often silenced in the past.
