Tellings, Doings, and Feelings: The Problem of Narrative

    Last evening, the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS) presented a talk by CUNY-based anthropologist Shirley Lindenbaum, entitled "Four Ways to Tell the Kuru Story:  Production and Dissemination of Authoritative Knowledge".  Lindenbaum presents the ways in which kuru--a fatal degenerative disease found among the Fore people and neighboring populations of Papau New Guinea--is told in four different contexts:  medicine, anthropology, folk knowledge, and journalism.  In so doing, she documents the genre effects that inform and conform the histories of the disease, the Fore, and those who study either or both.  From a slow to be accepted theory of long-gestating prions as infectious agents to uncorroborated explanations of transmission by inoculation that avoid taboo claims¹, from an epidemiological account articulated in terms of cultural diffusion of sorcerous knowledge to sensationalist news coverage of people laughing themselves to death, from the recall and reportage of two Nobel Prize winners as a single "discoverer" to the lifelong (and posthumous) attribution to one scientist of a theory he spent his entire career trying to discredit², these interpenetrating tellings of the kuru story³ present an epistemological problem akin to that presented in Amin's Event, Metaphor, Memory.

    Our reading of Amin was framed (in our syllabus) in the context of Benedict Anderson's discussion of Imagined Communities, specifically, nationalist communities as imagined (and re-imagined) through narrative.  This framing is perhaps premature, as it positions nationalism and nationhood as operating in an ontological category distinct from other kinds of groups.  The research of NYU cultural psychologist Carol Feldman⁴, however, develops nationalist narrative as another case of group narrative, developing analysis of nationalism from research conducted with theatre groups in New York City.  Extracting the question of story, of history, and of ethnography, from an expressly nationalist context, the synchronicity of Lindenbaum's talk for the NYAS becomes more readily apparent, as does, for that matter, the talk given by University of Amsterdam ethnographer Annemarie Mol here at the New School just this past week.  In her presentation, Mol makes a case for (what can be understood as) genre forming and informing our experience even in the absence of explicit narrative:  eating as nutrition is a markedly different doing of eating from eating as meal, just as eating as care does in a way distinct from both.⁵  It is Mol's work that opens up Amin (and indeed, Malkki, Dumont, Bakhtin, et al.) to a different way of thinking about the ethnographic project.

    Amin's multiple tellings:  of millennial moment of empowerment, of crime unrepresentative of nationalist aims, of criminal prosecution, of judicial judgment, of political leniency, of masculine power, of criminal anti-hero, of local sovereignty, of organized police brutality, of colonialist oppression⁶, etc., etc.--each of these accounts point to, but never quite develop, deeper questions of empathy⁷ for and betwixt the many uniquely situated parties involved in the doing and telling of Chauri Chaura.  The challenge of ethnography as performed here, is that it operates explicitly at the level of story, of narrative, but for the most part only implicitly at the level of care.  Having problematized the multivocity that is the telling of history (and thus, of ethnography), the question arises, can we shift from explicit storytelling to explicit empathizing, and in so doing better grasp the cultural actors and circumstances we seek to understand?  Is it possible to move narrative from a position of mediation, still observing it as an artifact, surely, but holding it distinct from our subject, rather than as lens through which our subject is necessarily viewed?

    My tentative answer is yes, but that discussion will have to wait for a midterm paper.

notes

¹ See subsequent footnote re: Mol for explanation.

² i.e., the unrevealed taboo claims previously alluded to.

³ Indeed, four tellings underestimates the situation.  A question from the audience regarding one possible telling, that of a new generation interpreting the varied histories of and about older generations elicited from Lindenbaum yet another telling:  that of those surviving old men (and it is mostly old men, as women were disproportionately struck by and died of the malady) telling the story to two Fore ethnographers, divulging details to these interested grandchildren markedly different from those told to non-Fore anthropologists previously.

⁴ Introduced in a recent class presentation: e.g., C. Feldman (2001). Narratives of National Identity as Group Narratives: Patterns of Interpretive Cognition. In J. Brockmeier and Donal Carbaugh (eds.), Narrative and Identity. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Press.

⁵ The synchonicity between Mol and Lindenbaum's respective talks does not stop here.  For while Mol is exploring the question of being an eater, Lindenbaum's account speaks to Fore as cannibal.

⁶ This particular telling avoided, we are told, through non-publication of photos that might otherwise have been reinterpreted for sensationalist ends by journalists in the United States--representing a transformation remarkably similar to the telling of the White Paper discussed in Malkki.

⁷ Interestingly, I was all set to begin writing this, having organized my thoughts earlier in the day, when--during a brainstorming session in preparation for the departmental conference this Spring--the question of empathy as commitment was introduced as one theme worth exploring for said conference.