From culture as a "product" to culture as experience: back to ethnography.

Pastinelli, Madeleine

In 1973, almost 35 years ago now, Clifford Geertz first published his famous remark concerning "thick" description in anthropology. Attempting not so much to set out a program for anthropology (in short, stating what anthropologists should do), but rather to define the anthropological approach, Geertz furthermore reaffirmed the descriptive character of anthropologists' activities. From the outset, he suggested that in order to understand what makes up a discipline, it was not so much necessary to focus on the results it produced, the theories it formulated or the discoveries that emerged from it; instead, the focal issue should be what its practitioners actually do. And Geertz said that what anthropologists most obviously do is describe; in other words, they are actually ethnographers. Geertz's affirmations are still immensely relevant for today's anthropologists, and it seems to me that they could also very clearly be applied to what ethnology has become in Canada.

For the purposes of this text, and, as such, in a manner that is truly exceptional, I wish to apply the classic North American distinction, one that is (or was until recently) made by ethnologists and folklorists, between ethnology (1) and anthropology, with ethnology presenting itself as the diachronic study of Western cultures and defining itself by the fact that the researchers are themselves members of the culture under study ("close" or the "same"), whereas anthropology, is (or was) instead thought of as the synchronic study of exotic cultures where the researchers are not members of the cultures they are studying (Bergeron et al. 1978; Desdouits 1997). It must furthermore be specified that, generally speaking, in North America this distinction is essentially made by ethnologists and folklorists and is most often ignored by anthropologists, who, perhaps given their superior numbers (there are fewer ethnologists), seem to regularly ignore the very existence of ethnology, which has long tried to distinguish itself from anthropology. Of course, before having recourse to such a distinction, we must, moreover, immediately add that today it would no longer be considered necessary to provide any distinguishing theoretical, methodological or epistemological foundations for the discipline of ethnology. Notwithstanding the fact that in the past ethnology took on the distinguishing characteristics that I just described and that this distinction has been the source of specific disciplinary institutions and traditions, today there are of course researchers trained in ethnology who work from the synchronic perspective, and sometimes (though more rarely) in exotic contexts as well. In addition, for some time now anthropologists have been interested in the historic dimension of the phenomena that they study, and many of them have also applied their approaches to Western societies.

Nevertheless, it would still seem necessary to recognize the existence of an institutional distinction and of different disciplinary traditions. In fact, Universite Laval still has an ethnology program that is separate from its anthropology program, just as at Memorial, there is still a folklore department distinct from its anthropology department, and this same type of overlapping duality can be found in the vast majority of American universities that have folklore departments. Lastly, I would like to emphasize that we would surely be wrong to think that today this distinction only represents an administrative division; nothing seems to me further from the truth! In fact, whereas anthropologists see themselves as being the heirs of Mauss or Malinowski, ethnologists perceive themselves more as the heirs of Van Gennep or Propp, and while anthropology students at Universite Laval read Levi-Strauss for the first time, ethnology students instead discover Favret-Saada. Finally, no matter what can be said about the former culturalist divisions between fields of study, which once enabled people from both camps to establish their anthropological credentials and which no longer seem relevant today, it must be noted that many anthropology programs still reflect divisions into culture areas, and in my view these divisions nowadays seem to resonate even more in the way that new professors are recruited for anthropology departments (in fact, professors are seldom recruited without there being a specification that preference will be given to candidates interested in a particular culture area). In the same way, the clear persistence of diachronic questioning and perspectives (these can be found in all the articles of the current issue of this journal) can also be observed among ethnologists, as well as a predilection for certain subjects that were for a long time focal concerns of this discipline. More concretely, ethnologists have their associations, journals, academic networks and scientific events, and this is also true for anthropologists, and while an intermingling of the two does sometimes occur (some do occasionally venture into their neighbour's backyard), this is still the exception rather than the rule. To make a long story short, even though we seem no longer able to make distinctions as regards methods, theoretical frameworks or subjects of study, the disciplinary heritage is nevertheless not the same and the scholarly literary corpus into which undergraduate students are initiated differs, and this also applies to the areas of study and the types of questioning most often chosen in each respective field. Clearly then we should still recognize a distinction, even if it is only contingent upon and linked to the history of various institutions, and, based on this distinction, note that, though the importance of the ethnographic approach could already be observed more than thirty years ago among anthropologists, it appears to be a relative novelty among ethnologists.

The importance that Canadian ethnologists have placed on ethnographic undertakings seems to me to be closely linked to a shift in perspective which has progressively led away from the study of culture as a product to a study of culture as social experience. In the following pages, I would therefore like to set out what I believe comprises this shift and to reflect upon the characteristics of this type of ethnography as it is currently practiced. It seems to me that the current issue of this journal provides me with the perfect opportunity to risk such an endeavour. In fact, the texts assembled here are very special in that none of them were submitted to the journal in response to the sort of call for articles that we regularly send out when preparing a thematic issue. This collection of texts is thus a priori the group of articles of an "open" issue, i.e. a collection of all the articles received by the journal during the last few years and months. But let me make one thing perfectly clear: even though the texts in question do not necessarily deal with the same subject matter, phenomenon or field of study, there is still a certain unity within the whole. In fact, in contrast to thematic issues, open issues have this particularity: they most often demonstrate a strong disciplinary unity (as is definitely the case with this issue). Though it is common for the journal to publish the work of researchers from other disciplines who offer their texts in response to a call for papers for thematic issues, it so happens that the other articles received by the journal are almost always written by ethnologists, who perceive themselves as belonging to this discipline and consider this journal as being their own. Not only does the unity of these texts seem to me entirely real, but I also find their shared characteristics to be very revelatory given that the articles of this issue deal with a variety of fields of study, periods and phenomena.

From one perception of "culture" to another

When I began my undergraduate studies in ethnology at Universite Laval (in 1994), in nearly all of our courses the professors encouraged us not only to conduct interviews in a near systematic manner, (2) but they also very strongly encouraged us to create a file in the school's folklore archives and always to make sure to file away the results of the surveys carried out in the course of our studies. I do not know to what extent ethnology students today are still encouraged to file the material that they collect in the archives, but it seems to me in any case that this concern for the collection of data and its conservation was quite symptomatic of a certain idea of what culture actually is. In fact, although anthropology and sociology students, for example, are also induced to carry out field investigations as part of their undergraduate training, and though, in certain cases, other departments may conserve in archives the work carried out by their students, (3) as far as I know in neither sociology nor anthropology has anyone ever had the idea of gathering and conserving all the raw data collected by the students (as opposed to the analyses produced on the basis of this data) as part of their fieldwork.

Of course, the above-mentioned concern in ethnology was a legacy (perhaps becoming somewhat anachronistic during the mid 1990s) of a still recent period during which it was believed that certain traits of popular culture, possibly comprising the Volksgeist, should be saved from imminent disappearance as a testimony to an affiliation with a very ancient past within which (even if we knew nothing about it and were not able--for the time being--to see or understand it) veritable buried treasures were perhaps to be found, treasures which, in an unknown future and due to methods not yet invented, might one day deliver their secrets. Thus the nature of the data gathered was of little importance; all such information was to be preciously preserved for posterity ... just in case! When this idea first emerged, at the time of the founding of the archives, what folklorists collected were the products of popular culture, and more specifically those products through which, since the era of Herder, it was believed that the genius of the nation was transmitted, i.e. the productions of oral tradition (stories, legends, songs, etc.). I do not want to insist upon how the framework within which folklorists' and ethnologists' fields of interest were then broadened to progressively integrate the study of material culture, expertise and techniques, popular holidays, beliefs, and rituals, since this has already been the subject of several integrated analyses (see most notably Desdouits 1997; Roberge 2004; Bricault et al 2004). I would simply like to observe that, in comparison with practitioners from almost all of these fields of study, and until at least the beginning of the 1990s (and even much more recently still in the case of certain projects), ethnologists most often examined the "products" of culture, and they then progressively came to focus on the "production" of culture.

Dress, furniture, housing, songs, stories, and ritual are all, in the final analysis, products of culture. Our interest is first drawn to the products themselves before focusing as well on the conditions of their production and reproduction. In this sense, studying techniques or expertise, like studying fashion, the transmission of legends or storytellers' performances, is tantamount to studying what makes the existence of these cultural manifestations possible, and this is what it means to still be focused on the products of a given culture. Regardless of the elements under study, whether arts and crafts, songs, folk art, stories, dress, celebrations, or rituals, when all is said and done, the spotlight is on what we recognize as manifestations of culture. The articles by Luc Dupont and Martyne Perrot in this volume take this direction by analyzing phenomena in progress, such as reality TV or the status of the child, that have become so familiar that they are taken for granted.

Furthermore, in this way of seeing things, one might even detect a generously broadened extension of the commonplace notion of culture, according to which "culture" essentially refers to the realms of aesthetic productions (fine arts, literature, theatre, music and dance) whose exceptional shared characteristic is that of being "observable." This conception of culture as a product or manifestation (and by extension the context in which these manifestations are produced or in which the aptitudes and conditions favourable to their production are developed) is of course clearly different from the way anthropology defines culture, i.e. in Geertz's words (following Weber): "man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun," (1973: 5) or, perhaps more in keeping with the general consensus, as a comprehensive, structured whole reflecting ways of seeing, articulating and doing that enable people to interact with others and act upon their environment. In short, on one side we have culture as a series of observable, even "collectable," manifestations and, on the other, culture as a system of meaning or a conception of the world and one's connection to it.

The importance given by the discipline to productions and manifestations of culture is clearly a by-product of Herder's romantic conceptions that prompted the first collections of folklore (originally those of the Grimm brothers). For Herder, each people was endowed with an original, distinct and unique character forged over the centuries by way of its members' contact with the climate and the earth, and thus constituting, in a sense, the essence of each people as transmitted through language. (4) It may be useful to remind those interested in the history of the ideas that motivated the first collections that traits concerning oral tradition were the first to be collected because Herder believed that the language of the people (i.e. of peasants living according to the rhythm of the seasons, in contact with the earth, preferably illiterate and therefore bearers of this essence in its purest form) transmitted the distinct, unique and particular character of the nation (later referred to as the Volksgeist) (Thiesse 2001). Hence, in keeping with Herder's intention, what one would have wished to find and preserve was of course this mysterious Volksgeist and not simply the stories themselves. However, since it would appear that the exact nature of the Volksgeist was never really identified, nor was the best way to proceed in order to extract this hidden genius from its lair so as to admire it in all its splendour, one had to make do with collecting everything likely to contain or represent a manifestation of it. In short, being unable to study "culture"--or even to know what the term actually referred to--one instead studied its manifestations. After stories came objects, techniques, rituals, and, later still, the "contexts" in which these were produced, transmitted or used; but it is far from sure that this multiplication or expansion of the objects to be studied was based, for all that, on a transformation of how such objects were actually seen. It seems to me that the study of culture as product was the study of a set of signs that were perhaps never so much examined in and for themselves as for something else, that is for what was imagined to be hidden somewhere within them or which served as their foundation and support and concerning which one dreamed (no doubt secretly) of managing to reach by the roundabout route of clever hermeneutic procedures.

Vis-a-vis the transformation of focus to the products and production of culture as a reflection of an interest henceforth directed more toward the connection with the world or toward what might be referred to as social experience, there is certainly no way we can claim to have finally discovered the means to directly study "culture" instead of merely studying its manifestations, i.e. that we have now managed to trace the outlines of this secret force, of this "system of representations" or of this hidden meaning "underlying" human practices and actions. Furthermore, as Jean Bazin (1998), following in the footsteps of Geertz, so clearly demonstrated, it is not at all clear that anything has ever existed anywhere that "underlies" human actions and is waiting to be discovered, above and beyond the simple fact that these actions take place in contexts that are collectively shared, where certain ways of doing things work well and others do not. It is undoubtedly our perspective that has changed so that the discipline no longer looks on culture as a "product," but rather on culture as connected to the world or as a social experience.

Thus, in this issue of our journal, Holly Everett does not wonder about the techniques for gathering berries, their history, the traditions or the expertise that provides their framework, or how these techniques are passed on to others, but rather focuses on their significance as regards the self-image that Newfoundlanders try to create for visitors and on the interactions that are played out between Newfoundlanders and the collective Other. And to clearly demonstrate what this game of representations on the part of Newfoundland society involves, it is certainly useful, while showing the ways in which these representations work, to put the berries into perspective by daring to remind us of the role of fish and chips in daily Newfoundland life, as Everett does in her article. In the same vein, Ian Brodie wonders about the implications for young women of buying a bra for the first time, and he proposes that we should see this event as a sort of passage; there is no question of studying a rite as would still have been done fifteen or so years ago. In fact, in the past, studying a "rite" would probably mainly have involved tracing its history, documenting each of its successive stages, describing in detail the conditions under which it takes place, the roles played by various actors within the context of the rite, the instruments or accessories needed to carry it out, etc., all elements which could possibly have served as backing for a symbolic, structural, historical-geographic or other analysis (depending on the era and allegiances of the hermeneutician in question). Though some of these aspects are of course present in Ian Brodie's work and serve to support his argument, his focus is not the "rite" itself (the author furthermore demonstrates that what is instead and more simply at stake is a passage), i.e. its origin, form, significance and components, but rather the way in which it is experienced by the people, and especially the women, involved. What is of interest for Ian, when all is said and done, is what takes place in practice and subjectively for the young woman who buys a bra for the first time: as such, the subject of study is not so much the passage itself as the way the event is actually experienced.

This seems to me to be the focal perspective of the texts assembled here. In her article about powwows in southwestern Ontario, Anna Hoefnagels describes the very recent character of these types of celebrations, the borrowings that underlie them and the way they have developed in line with the Christian gatherings organized by religious figures and in which Native people participated until the 1950s. However, her work also reveals, perhaps above all else, the nature of the links that Native people currently maintain with these celebrations and the importance they attribute to them; the author subtly leads us to discover the importance of the powwow in the experience of the Native people, not only by way of what they say about it but also, very concretely, by way of the individual and collective practices that serve as its framework. For his part, Van Troi Tran, in his article on the ephemeral during the 1889 world's fait, invites us to discover what is at stake in the various events taking place during the fair, events that constitute places of consumption and interaction, leading visitors to become actors within the context of the fair instead of being reduced to playing the role of receptacles for the prevailing colonial discourse. Here the visitors' experience is the focus of the author's consideration rather than, first and foremost, what they are given to see or consume. Through his description, Van Troi Tran reveals the discrepancies between the party line of the colonial state and the meaning that emerges from the experience in question, with these events, in the final analysis, making it possible to express apparently contradictory conceptions in practice.

Although her work does not appear a priori as a product of an empirical survey but rather as a re-reading of Margaret Sargent's contribution concerning collections in Newfoundland, Anna K. Guigne offers here an astute ethnobiographical presentation of Sargent's work, highlighting, and helping us to imagine, the experience of a woman who, in 1950, set out for St. John's from Ottawa to conduct fieldwork. From a different perspective, but sharing with Guigne the biographical character of her approach, Maria Mateoniu, for her part, describes her stay in Romania's St. Nicholas monastery where she focused her attention on the importance of the house in the lire journey and memory of Mother Neonila. In a totally surprising way, the entire relational dynamic between inside and out and the whole familial and community memory are revealed through the practices of place and the connections maintained with this house.

This transformation of focus on the part of ethnologists, a change that in turn has led us to examine the experiences of various people in different contexts rather than the products of culture, gives rise to approaches that appear, in my view, to be largely ethnographic in nature. No author appearing in these pages presents a "method" of analysis, proceeding by way of classification, the decoding of symbols, a search for elements of structure or for meaningful unities, or any other undertaking that entails, in one way or another, the reorganization of empirical material under the rubric of formalization. Such approaches have been set aside to leave room for the singularities and actual logic of each individual's field of inquiry. Indeed, the way the fields and subjects of inquiry are in fact understood by each provides evidence for the latter observation, as the approaches prove to be very largely inductive and methodological considerations limited in essence to descriptions of the origins of the material being analyzed: a series of interviews conducted at certain moments with participants recruited in the various manners described, observations made as part of dissertation research at a certain place, or by way of a certain body of archival documents. And furthermore, if these undertakings are ethnological at all, it is more fundamentally because the interpretation of the phenomenon studied is found in the very description of what is uncovered in the field: the essence of the interpretative effort that makes it possible to reveal how the phenomenon under study is intelligible resides in the descriptions of the discourse used, the accounts provided and the actions undertaken in various singular contexts.

Duality of the World and Ethnographic Knowledge

If interpretation exists within description, it is only because description is never merely a simple exercise in the coding of the real, as if "the perception of the world's property and of the events unfolding therein actually escaped the constraints of epistemological activity" (Lenclud 1995: 113). What is different about ethnography as it is practiced by the authors of this issue, as opposed to the past notion of description as a straight transcription of objective reality, imagined as being without an interpretative dimension (and which, for this reason, has for the most part been discredited as an approach: it was advisable to go beyond this level of procedure), is that their ethnological description, generally speaking, appears to be reflexive in nature. We apparently no longer labour under the illusion that we can grasp actual reality, and this is indeed why writers like Ian Brodie, Maria Mateoniu, and Ghislaine Gallenga fully accept the consequences of having their own perspectives present in the field of investigation and place them at the heart of their descriptions. Marie Renier, for her part, makes this illusion of capturing reality through description the very subject of her reflections about travelogues. In her article about travelogues, she examines the way in which this written material--provided by explorers and missionaries as well as anthropologists--becomes part of a shared history which helps give shape to the collective myth of the Other and of Elsewhere. By examining to the same extent what has occurred before the narrative begins, even before the departure of the traveler, as what meeting the Other represents, she not only takes us to the very heart of the construction of the narrative, but also reveals its importance for the traveler's experience.

Above and beyond the reflexive dimensions of the process, we can still, nevertheless, try to understand how a description thus provided enables us to know or understand something about the experience or connection to the world of the individuals or groups described. In other words, in what way are these descriptions different from those that could be produced (and that as a matter of fact are sometimes produced) by the people in question? What type of knowledge makes it possible to provide ethnographic description and what does it describe that allows some type of "knowledge," or, at the very least, an understanding of the phenomenon studied to actually emerge?

In certain approaches, inspired by postmodern anthropology such as developed by James Clifford (1986), it has been maintained that the ethnographic approach should do away with any epistemological rupture and that the point of view of the people met in the field should be gathered directly, in order (after the completion of selection and tabulation), the traces of which the ethnologist would certainly have wanted to be able to erase) to then be confined to reporting the diversity of points of view related to a given context, i.e. to describing the diversity and dissonance of the "voices" that resonate within the same social framework--ideally without ever adding anything else to the reporting itself. Logically speaking, such an approach could only lead anthropologists to fabricate the sort of mirrors in which participants could have discovered themselves by contemplating a self-image they had already expressed. And we might ask ourselves, to the extent that the approach would keep us from saying anything at all about what the participants themselves say (the researcher's pen as it were being applied instead to recapitulating and synthesizing what they say), if it would not be simpler to offer a sort of platform to the individuals in question and if playing the role of self-proclaimed intermediary for the participants' own interpretations is not ultimately superfluous. As it happens, the texts assembled here obviously do not limit themselves to such a perspective and do say something more about the context studied than what the actors to be found in the texts themselves have to say about it. But what do they say by way of description?

I would now like to try to venture an answer to these questions. Without wishing to exaggerate the procedural homogeneity adopted by the authors whose work is assembled here, I would ultimately suggest, on the whole and in the final analysis, that the tendency in these texts is toward an approach which consists in rendering experience intelligible and restoring its complexity by implicitly distinguishing and, at the same time, identifying how and to what extent the discourse and practices in question are internally consistent in nature. I believe that it is by identifying the clear gap between the two, by enabling us to see its scope and depth, that these descriptions succeed in making the human experiences with which they deal intelligible. Of course, such an approach is certainly not so clearly obvious in each text, and several of them do not limit themselves to this approach. But the latter perspective, it seems to me, is nevertheless the orientation emerging most distinctly from this collection of work. By reviewing here, as I have understood them, some of the arguments and elements of reflection developed by Jean Bazin (1998) in an article entitled "Questions de sens" [Questions of Meaning], (5) I will try to set out the postulates on which this approach is based and explain its component parts.

We should firstly note that the work of ethnologists involves more than merely describing whatever the individual who interests them might have to say, and this is based on the postulate that there is indeed more to be said about the matter, i.e. that at least on certain levels the actors concerned are not themselves always and forever able to provide an accurate description of the fundamental nature of their own experience. If it were otherwise, the approach adopted by ethnologists would be profoundly pointless: as Clifford has argued, leaving the floor to the participants would be enough. People could of course always be questioned concerning the meaning of their actions (or what they might have said about these actions may be noted, based on what has been found in the archives), and they are naturally always able to produce their own views in response to the questions they are submitted. As Laburthe-Tolra notes, "anybody will have enough good will to provide any sort of answer to any sort of question. In other words, whoever asks questions will get only answers, responses that are often not so much a product of the questions asked as of what are presumably the investigator's expectations, based on what the subject being questioned perceives to be the investigator's concerns and interests" (1998: 14). Moreover, although the meaning that the actors may impute to their actions and the manner that they may discursively report them are certainly not completely arbitrary, and as such deserve a longer look, it does not necessarily follow that the meaning reported by them enables us to determine the intelligibility of the actions, or at the very least that it is possible to restrict ourselves to considering their viewpoints only. As Bazin has pointed out so rightly and emphatically, it is firstly advisable to note that any discourse concerning action obeys its own rules and is a product of the context in which it is articulated. In short, any such discourse "is in itself another action and does not provide the meaning of the action to which it is referring:"

 Of course, I could also ask people what soccer means in their
 lives, what idea of sport accompanies their passion for this game,
 what importance the Catholic religion holds for them, what world
 view "underlies" their Sunday practices, etc. I could solicit from
 them not only information concerning what they do but also
 interpretative commentary, assessments, and value judgments. But
 providing an in-depth explanation to a third party of what interest
 soccer may hold is not the same as attending a match, any more than
 providing a play-by-play account on the radio is tantamount to
 playing. This constitutes another type of action, not an
 encapsulation of the meaning of the first. Their views on sport or
 religion also have their own rules and are expressed differently
 according to the situation, i.e. in the family context, with
 strangers, etc. (Bazin 1998: 33).

On the face of it, this is a banal realization, one that has been reached by nearly all disciplines that conduct investigations in the field. Sociologists express the same difficulty, noting that "actors are sometimes (6) unable to articulate their knowledge and experiences" (Emerson in Cefai 2003: 402); in short, to correctly identify the organizing principle behind this knowledge and experience, it is not enough to question people concerning the meaning of their practices or take note of what they have to say about them. Although people are indeed always able to provide answers to any questions addressed to them, the fact remains--and herein lies the rub--that the explanations provided concerning "the meaning" of the practices, or the rules that these practices obey, do not always take these various elements into account, may flagrantly contradict what is revealed by observation, or what may emerge from other segments of discourse, and may in any case obey an internal logic (that of self-reflexive discourse depending on the context) that is necessarily different from that of the action.

Ethnography, as Bazin conceived of it, is based upon a certain idea of humankind and of language that is closely linked to recognizing this discrepancy between what is consistently said and what is consistently done. According to Bazin, the ethnographer's basic assumption is that discourse and practice are not of the same order. It would seem to me that Anthony Giddens distinguished practical from discursive consciousness precisely in order to make this sort of distinction. For Giddens (1987) as for Bazin (1998), the numerous types of knowledge and the range of conceptions that are mobilized in the most ordinary practices are neither conscious (in the sense that they might be well thought out), since they emerge as "going without saying," nor unconscious, to the extent that they are not, psychoanalytically speaking, repressed: they are instead part and parcel of what each and everyone takes for granted and admits as making up the order of things within the realm of action. Hence Giddens describes practical consciousness as being "non-conscious" (1991: 36). And this is once again a conception of things that seems to me to be very similar to what is found in Fernand Dumont's Le lieu de l'homme [Man's Place] where two levels of culture are singled out, starting with a "primary culture," i.e. the world of ordinary certainty and evidence of the real that serves as a framework for practice and action:

 [a] world of primary cohesion where we perceive everyday things and
 act in an everyday manner with complete assurance, a world where
 all things have a name, and where we experience a sense of
 belonging to the many and varied contexts woven in a fabric of
 familiar symbols around us. In sum, a common sense world in both
 accepted senses of the term: "as certain truth and as unanimous
 truth.... Primary culture is a given. Human beings move within
 their primary culture in a world of familiar meanings, models and
 agreed upon ideas, a place of diagrammed actions and customs, an
 entire network through which people spontaneously recognize
 themselves in the outside word as they do at home (Dumont 1968: 40,
 51).

Dumont distinguishes this primary culture from what he calls secondary culture, which is the culture of another world,

 [a realm] of change, of the possible, of uncertainty, of anguish;
 many of our actions and words endeavour to express these elements
 or to keep them at bay: we seek, in both word and deed, to restore
 meaning and, in so doing, to constantly reestablish continuity. But
 human beings do not limit themselves to sealing cracks in the world
 in which they live or to stemming losses of meaning; they construct
 parallel universes where perception, action and discourse may
 recover their purposes and foundations (1968: 40).

For Dumont, a human being's "place" is therefore neither in the primary culture, which serves as the framework for action, for the obvious, ordinary acts and practices that we carry out without consciously realizing that we do so, nor in the secondary culture that, conversely, never manages to recognize the primary culture and in any case produces another image of the world. Our "place" is instead within the space of comings and goings between these two realms of culture: "One culture seeps through the cracks that the other wishes to paper over, suggesting that consciousness may not be confined within the world or within itself; from this uneasy situation, it pieces together the fragments of another world. And from one to the other, the hesitations, setbacks, and appeasements from an outline of a shifting relationship that must be grasped even as it shifts" (Dumont 1968: 64). Even though several other authors have also formulated this conception of human experience as divided into two universes (that of discourse on the meaning and foundations of practices and that of the practices themselves), there are very few who, like Bazin, have adopted this conception as a basis for reflecting upon what such a notion implies on the epistemological level with respect to our interpretative initiatives.

The difficulty that arises when the time comes to undertake an interpretative initiative based on these overlapping worlds is essentially epistemological in nature, resulting from the fact that, as Dumont observes, although the consistent nature of familiar acts is not comparable to that of the discourse that attempts to summarize these acts or say something about them, the two levels intersect and are superimposed at a number of different points. The entire problem seems therefore to involve finding a rigorous way to establish the exact moment when individuals lucidly manage to fully grasp the meaning of their actions and, conversely, when even the most sincere speaker instead makes every effort to "invent another world," as Dumont would have it, and to tell a story that may only very poorly take the universe of gestures, actions and practices (that the storyteller would claim to be establishing) into account. In short, it is as if the problem consisted in separating the moments when ethnologists can state the meaning of their subject of study by merely reporting what the main interested parties have to say about those elements, about which there may be something else to be said, from those instances when it would be advisable to analyse and interpret what has been said. The sociologist Jean-Claude Kaufmann (1996), for instance, has recognized the existence of this problem and raised it in a very honest manner, nevertheless without managing to solve it. He instead merely insists upon the skills that researchers may develop over time and from experience and that may enable them to acquire a solid sense of judgment about the matter. This way of getting around the problem is reminiscent of Wittgenstein's criticism of the approach to interpreting dreams developed by Freud (see Bouveresse 1991). In fact, according to Freud, it was possible, in certain cases, for patients themselves to manage to correctly interpret some of their dreams, whereas, at other moments, the barrier of repression made such lucidity impossible, and therefore only the psychoanalyst could accurately decode the dreams. How, therefore, is it possible to establish in a rigorous manner the boundary which distinguishes the moments when consciousness sees clearly from those when the unconscious prevents it from doing so, or when individuals are completely mistaken concerning the meaning of their dreams? Freud never solved this problem and instead restricted himself to affirming that only the psychoanalyst was in a position to know the real nature of the problem--a reply that, of course, could never satisfy Wittgenstein and that constituted an essential element of his criticism of Freud.

Bazin, for his part, seems to solve the problem by inviting us to eliminate it, i.e. to avoid venturing into an area where the issue would in fact arise. Based on Wittgenstein's injunction from Tractatus ("it is advisable to remain silent about that which we are unable to speak"), and recognizing the fact that both the action and the discourse that reports it obey their own rules and have their own inner consistency and logic, he instead suggests that interpretation should consist in describing both aspects simultaneously in such as way as to demonstrate how each has its own inner consistency and to allow them to clarify one another, without ever falling into the trap of explaining one by the other: "on the one hand, they perform ceremonies, on the other they eventually produce theologies or cosmologies (or at least some of them do) ... but it does not follow that these ceremonies would be the visible expression, the acting-out, of an 'internal' system of representations" (Bazin 1998: 34). In short, finding a solution does not involve venturing out in search of truths and attempting to separate the true from the false, but much more simply identifying on the one hand the consistency of the practices, and on the other the consistency of various types of discourse concerning these practices. In this regard, there is indeed a very clear breach between this ethnographic approach, which presupposes that anything that enables us to make a universe of experience intelligible is already implicit in that universe itself, and the approach that involves studying the culture as product, an approach which in one way or another has sought to look behind or beyond the subject under study in order to try to reach a "hidden" meaning (that supposedly underlies the phenomena studied) or that, in any case, has been organized at the very least on the basis of the postulate that such a hidden meaning does in fact exist.

If, as Bazin suggests, human actions are "meaningful," and therefore intelligible, it is not because they may be the product of a driving force that "supposedly underlies them" or that may organize them and that may be worth our while to try to decipher; they are instead meaningful and intelligible because they are products of conscious subjects who, as opposed to bees or molecules, know what they are doing and are able to articulate it by way of language. Such being the case, to the extent that human actions are meaningful, a description cannot accurately define them by restricting itself to reporting on movements of bodies alone; it is, in short, necessary to be able to distinguish between the action which consists in running because one is being chased and the one that consists in running so as not to arrive late at the airport. Moreover, the description of the action will then be "dense" or "thick," according to Geertz's well known formula, i.e. it will put the gestures, practices and acts of language back into their respective contexts in order to demonstrate their component parts.

From this property of human actions--that they are meaningful--it follows that to be able to accurately relate them, the observer can never remain outside the realm of language itself: unless one follows the runner in order to discover his or her reasons for running (which will of course not always be possible), the only way to know why this individual runs is still to ask the person in question. And here we seem to return to square one and once again come up against the problem that consists in determining exactly when actors are capable of accurately describing their own actions and when instead they are producing a certain image of themselves, giving themselves (possibly in the first place for themselves) the justifications they need to ensure their own sense of consistency or, more simply, as Dumont would have put it, to "utter their world." This being the case, and once again in line with Bazin, it may be suggested that what we have here is a false problem, since what matters is absolutely not distinguishing between the moment when people are able to provide a lucid description of their actions and when they may not manage it, but rather differentiating between the moment when one's actions are simply related and when one instead sets out to give them a meaning. The problem does not arise to the extent that there is a recognition that a whole world lies between the fact of relating actions, recounting for instance that one was with such and such a person on the day of buying one's first bra, and the fact of giving them meaning, of explaining what a practice represents or what it enables one to express; from then on, it is no longer a matter of reporting the practice but rather of justifying it, of describing what may be its foundations or making it appear as a visible sign of a profound conviction.

We immediately have to provide the following clarification: the fact that the inner consistency of the action is not the same as the consistency of the discourse concerning the meaning of the action obviously does not in any way mean that it is not possible to use language (and, hence, possibly individual interview techniques or archives of written documents) to accurately describe the action itself. As Bazin points out,

 they may if necessary explain what they are doing to an outsider
 like myself who has landed in their midst by accident and who
 hasn't the slightest clue about what is going on. For example, they
 will explain that they shout as a protest (there was no offside,
 and faced with my lack of understanding, they will also explain
 what an "offside" is). In so doing, they do not provide me with a
 description of their mental state but instead of what they are
 actually doing (1998: 31).

Moreover, it seems to me that the distinction upon which a number of the ethnographic descriptions presented here are based does not consist in separating, on the one hand, the segments of discourse that may stem from illusion, i.e. the stories that people tell themselves, from those that, on the other hand, would be typical of lucid subjects who are capable of accurately reporting their actions. What is involved is a much more radical step: making a distinction between discourse that simply consists in describing the action itself and discourse (generally following close on the heels of the latter form) that supposedly justifies the action and describes what it may mean or what would explain it. In short, the distinction that a number of the authors make in this issue, one that is at the very core of their interpretations, obviously does not put into question people's capacity to accurately articulate what they do, or to explain what their practices mean for them either; it instead seems to postulate that there is a certain heuristic value in addressing separately what people do and what they say about what they do.

Although we are not questioning the capacity that people from all walks of life have to accurately describe their actions, we must be very careful not to consider in the same manner what people report as defined actions (theirs and others') having in fact been carried out by specific subjects and how they willingly and confidently hold forth about what others do in general. In short, the key essentially lies instead in the story of a "specific life as it is being lived," to borrow a phrase from Marc Auge (1994), and in the events that make it up, where the material that enables us to describe the action is to be found. And this is the reason why these ethnographies are not based on remarks about what people may have said concerning ways of doing things "in general;" instead they carefully examine the specific nature of what is played out at a given moment in history in the life journey of very real people.

In short, ethnographic description does not depend either on the action itself or on the words and representations that give meaning to the action, organize it or justify it: it concerns itself with defining both so as to differentiate them and sometimes also to highlight the gaps between them. In reading Holly Everett's article, we understand that the culinary experience in Newfoundland is not restricted to fish and chips, in the same way that, if Holly is to be believed, we would be very naive to take it for granted that, at the level of everyday experience, the berries of the province are as important as the discourse of the tourist industry contends that they are. But make no mistake about it; this interpretation is not designed to update the "real meaning" of the Newfoundland diet and, consequently, it is not in a "true account" that she links wild berries with fish and chips--which would entail understanding the discrepancies or dissonances as a product of "illusion," even of "a falsehood." She instead aims to restore the complexity of the experience, in recognizing that human beings are atone and the same time trapped in the world and busy giving it meaning. Therefore, the culinary experience in Newfoundland as reported here is instead one in which fish and chips are also consumed, combined with the idea of the omnipresence of berries that one gathers oneself and with which one makes pies and homemade jam. A full understanding of this specific context resides in our putting these two dimensions into perspective: each is as essential as the other and juxtaposing them is amply sufficient, to the extent that each serves to clarify the other. When all is said and done, in the same way that neglecting to examine the logic of a given action so as to concentrate on the way people create meaning for it would be tantamount to postulating a rationalism and a clairvoyance --an "interiority of meaning" in line with Wittgenstein's perspective to which Bazin refers--that are perfectly untenable and that even the most superficial observation quickly serves to belie, on the contrary, ignoring the discourse or the representation would be tantamount to taking people for "cultural idiots," as Garfinkel (1967) has proposed, incapable of thinking up their universe, of inventing it, of transforming it and of giving meaning to their actions and to their lives; in the final analysis this would be, in Dumont's sense of things, to skirt around half of the world in which human beings live. As such, it seems to me that these ethnographies serve to make human experiences intelligible by simultaneously describing the world of action and of discourse or representation, so as to highlight the tensions and discrepancies between them, an approach which is obviously based on being able to address the world as conceived, lived in, represented and experienced in its full duality, avoiding the risk of interminglings that may atone point make the discourse, and at another, the action, appear absurd, or that worse still, may lead the researcher to succumb to the irresistible temptation of erasing the complexity and the sometimes contradictory character of human experience in order to produce the illusion of a "seamless" world.

References

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Madeleine Pastinelli

Celat and the Department of Sociology, Universite Laval

(1.) In English Canada and the United States, the discipline is more commonly referred to as folklore rather than ethnology.

(2.) Among my memories, I recall going to my father's barn to take photos of objects for a course in material culture, conducting several interviews concerning a roadside cross in Boischatel for a folk religion course, conducting interviews in the county of Bellechasse regarding the history of a country school for a course in oral investigation, interviewing nuns at the Hotel-Dieu hospital for a practical course in ethnological fieldwork, conducting others still with stringed-instrument makers for a special project, and venturing into yet another field for my practicum. Without a doubt, of all the study programs in the Social Sciences at Universite Laval, at least during this time period, the ethnology program was by far the one where students were asked earliest and most regularly to conduct interviews and to use a tape recorder.

(3.) For example, the sociology department with which I am associated jealously preserves all the survey reports that have been carried out for over 25 years by the students of the department in the sociology research laboratory.

(4.) Herder formulated the essential elements of this thesis in 1771 in his Treatise on the Origin of Language.

(5.) This article appeared in one of the issues of Enquete dealing with description and was put forward as a critical re-reading of Geertz's perspective on description and, more fundamentally, on the conception of culture underlying the latter's viewpoint. Characterized by great clarity, and in my view of fundamental importance, this text also represented an opportunity for Bazin to explain the nature and limits of interpretative work in ethnology. Bazin's viewpoint emerges as a rigorous application of Wittgenstein's philosophy, and, more specifically, his conception of language, to anthropology. This section of my paper is deeply indebted to Bazin since I merely go back to and reformulate his reflections by linking them to other works and tying them in with what I have perceived concerning this transformation of our disciplinary perspectives.

(6.) Emphasis mine.