This is the first "ethnography of a person" that I've read, and I liked it. Well, perhaps that's not true, as Derluguian's ethnography/biography of world-systems sometimes did feel more like the ethnography of Shanib(ov). The writing and subject were engaging, and the pictures were moving. I kept thinking that if Biehl made a version of this for a general or non-academic audience, it would probably be popular.
Like the ethnographies of the other things we've read so far--friction, world systems, late socialism (or was Yurchak's an ethnography of the paradox of late socialism?) Biehl's had a central locus, and then showed all the interconnecting webs of relationships and associations on different scales from the economic and political climate in Brazil to Catarina's family relations. In a way then, this project was less "new" than Klima's ethnography-as-theory project. But, the book did make for a great read, and I think that he achieved his task of showing how focusing on one person can reveal an ethnographic text that shows interconnections on different scales.
I’m not sure where to begin, but the thing that seems sublimely important about Vita pertains to Hugh’s question in class last week, “So what is ethnography?” Biehl almost obsessively addresses this question, self-conscious, it seems, about the unconventionality of his text. I understand his wariness—I’m guessing that complaints of “thin ethnography” will be replaced this week with reproaches of “thin critical theory.”
He describes his ethnography progressively throughout, contending, I think, with his own sentimental attachment to his subject. He begins with the premise that, “The ethnographic challenge is to find these empirical relations and linkages—technical, political, conceptual and affective—and bring them out of thoughtlessness”(66), evolves it to “…ethnography can help us to resituate and rethink psychopathology within these various circuits and struggles over belonging, agency, and care”(106) and ending up with, “…what began as an ethnography of social abandonment and then of madness evolved into an ethnography of transition.”(125)
I think, even in its very very very local specificity, Vita’s power comes from this: the fact that it is about all anthropological work, and the immanent struggle between the big and little, universal and singular. This book is at times so romantic, so emotional, so nostalgic, that one feels perilously close to losing one’s academic purchase. But Biehl knows this too, “This is also, then, a story of the methodological, ethical, and conceptual limits anthropology faces as it goes into the field and tries both to verify the sources of a life excluded from family and society and capture the density of a locality without leaving the individual person and her subjectivity behind.”(23)
What Biehl comes to in the end is that Catarina’s life was not one of exception, but one of CONTINGENCY, “her dying in Vita is nonetheless traceable to a specific constellation of forces.”(14) Strangely, it made me think of the Yurchak; the lives (or non-lives) of those people in Vita’s social abandonment are both shocking and familiar, unbearably unthinkable, yet somehow expected.
I had the privilege of being in the student meeting last year with João Biehl, and we read a few chapters of Vita and got to hear him speak about it. What struck me most, was how he spoke about what he describes in the book as unexpected “space-times,” where dominant forms of knowledge shift and emerge. When did it become part of acceptable familial, social practice to abandon one’s unproductive relatives? He talked a lot about a genealogy of contact—liminality—becoming: that the individual is not a manifestation of institutions, but has to negotiate, move and place self within those things. I really liked what he had to say about ethnographic work, talking about how anthropology allows us to be marked by the Other, engage with the unexpected, and face the uncanniness of the ordinary.
2 Comments:
At 5:45 PM,
Kadija Ferryman said…
This is the first "ethnography of a person" that I've read, and I liked it. Well, perhaps that's not true, as Derluguian's ethnography/biography of world-systems sometimes did feel more like the ethnography of Shanib(ov). The writing and subject were engaging, and the pictures were moving. I kept thinking that if Biehl made a version of this for a general or non-academic audience, it would probably be popular.
Like the ethnographies of the other things we've read so far--friction, world systems, late socialism (or was Yurchak's an ethnography of the paradox of late socialism?) Biehl's had a central locus, and then showed all the interconnecting webs of relationships and associations on different scales from the economic and political climate in Brazil to Catarina's family relations. In a way then, this project was less "new" than Klima's ethnography-as-theory project. But, the book did make for a great read, and I think that he achieved his task of showing how focusing on one person can reveal an ethnographic text that shows interconnections on different scales.
At 6:24 PM,
amber said…
translator
anthropologist
interpreter
invested investigator
I’m not sure where to begin, but the thing that seems sublimely important about Vita pertains to Hugh’s question in class last week, “So what is ethnography?” Biehl almost obsessively addresses this question, self-conscious, it seems, about the unconventionality of his text. I understand his wariness—I’m guessing that complaints of “thin ethnography” will be replaced this week with reproaches of “thin critical theory.”
He describes his ethnography progressively throughout, contending, I think, with his own sentimental attachment to his subject. He begins with the premise that, “The ethnographic challenge is to find these empirical relations and linkages—technical, political, conceptual and affective—and bring them out of thoughtlessness”(66), evolves it to “…ethnography can help us to resituate and rethink psychopathology within these various circuits and struggles over belonging, agency, and care”(106) and ending up with, “…what began as an ethnography of social abandonment and then of madness evolved into an ethnography of transition.”(125)
I think, even in its very very very local specificity, Vita’s power comes from this: the fact that it is about all anthropological work, and the immanent struggle between the big and little, universal and singular. This book is at times so romantic, so emotional, so nostalgic, that one feels perilously close to losing one’s academic purchase. But Biehl knows this too, “This is also, then, a story of the methodological, ethical, and conceptual limits anthropology faces as it goes into the field and tries both to verify the sources of a life excluded from family and society and capture the density of a locality without leaving the individual person and her subjectivity behind.”(23)
What Biehl comes to in the end is that Catarina’s life was not one of exception, but one of CONTINGENCY, “her dying in Vita is nonetheless traceable to a specific constellation of forces.”(14) Strangely, it made me think of the Yurchak; the lives (or non-lives) of those people in Vita’s social abandonment are both shocking and familiar, unbearably unthinkable, yet somehow expected.
I had the privilege of being in the student meeting last year with João Biehl, and we read a few chapters of Vita and got to hear him speak about it. What struck me most, was how he spoke about what he describes in the book as unexpected “space-times,” where dominant forms of knowledge shift and emerge. When did it become part of acceptable familial, social practice to abandon one’s unproductive relatives? He talked a lot about a genealogy of contact—liminality—becoming: that the individual is not a manifestation of institutions, but has to negotiate, move and place self within those things. I really liked what he had to say about ethnographic work, talking about how anthropology allows us to be marked by the Other, engage with the unexpected, and face the uncanniness of the ordinary.
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