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In purely formal terms, this is a rather unusual ethnography. Its style is at times almost novelistic; at others, it shifts into much more conventional modes of ethnographic writing. The same characters who appear in one part of the text as actors often reappear in others as narrators or analysts, providing (often critical) commentary about customs, local issues, and each other. When I began writing, I had not entirely worked out most of the theoretical ideas about politics and narrative that now appear in it, so I cannot really say that I wrote it the way I did because of them. But I did want to convey the sense I had of the people I knew in Betafo as both actors in history, and as themselves historians. According to the very broad set of definitions I did work out in the course of writing, to represent them in this way is also to represent them as political beings. It is, I have argued, in so far as we all act in, recount , interpret, and criticize our social worlds that we are all political beings of one sort or another.1 Throughout the book, I have tried, whenever possible, to emphasize such areas of common ground. In fact, if there was one impulse—one might even say one moral imperative—that drove me from the very beginning, it was a desire to explode some of the sense of artificial distance that so many ethnographies create between author, audience, and the people who are being studied . I wanted the reader to be able to think of the inhabitants of Betafo as people they could at least imagine meeting and even, under the right set of circumstances, getting to know. If nothing else, I have tried at least in small ways to always emphasize how—cultural differences notwithstanding—we do inhabit the same world, and ultimately the same history and the same moral universe; or, if one wants to define history in a more culturally specific fashion, then at the very least, that we all could be sharing one. 379 EPILOGUE 12 Perhaps one way anthropologists might begin to undermine this sense of distance would be to look at what we’re doing as more akin to history—which just about every culture has some way of thinking about—than to what we are used to thinking of as science. I’m not saying this in order to weigh in to the sporadic debate in anthropology about whether the discipline should define itself as a science or a humanity. To me at least, it seems a pointless argument: after all, people who are mainly interested in, say, problems of nutrition or verb structure are obviously going to be relying on a different set of methods than people who are mainly interested in understanding shamanic performance ; as long as we all happen to have ended up in the same departments, it seems only reasonable to allow that our discipline is a hodgepodge and leave it at that. But the debate does raise some interesting issues. Why exactly is it, for instance, that history is considered one of the humanities, and not a social science ? Obviously there are historical reasons—there were people who considered themselves historians long before there were ones who considered themselves social scientists (or for that matter natural scientists). But if it has remained among the humanities, in the company of the study of literature, art, and philosophy and not that of sociology or political science, I suspect it is ultimately because of some sense that science deals with regularities—if not with “laws,” then at the very least with things that are to some degree predictable— and that history tends to focus on the very opposite, on the irregular and the unpredictable, on events that could no more be predicted, before they happened , than the production of a novel or a work of art. For some, I will allow, this might seem a rather old-fashioned view of history. Certainly, not all modern historians feel their discipline should even be among the humanities; there are many proponents of a “science of history”— one which can make predictions. In ways the debate within history parallels the one in anthropology. Much of the literature about the nature of narrative which I made use of in the introduction to chapter 6, in fact, emerges from just such a debate (Rosaldo 1989:127–143 provides a useful summary), in...

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