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C h a p t e r 3 What Ethnographies Leave Out In 1927 Margaret Mead prepared to write her second book on Samoa, Social Organization of Manu’a (published in 1930). Having completed Coming of Age in Samoa (scheduled to appear in 1928), which aimed at a popular audience , she now wanted to write a ‘‘monograph’’ to establish her place among ‘‘scholars.’’ Before beginning, she read a handful of what we now call ‘‘classic’’ ethnographies. ‘‘I gathered together a pile of the famous monographs of the period—Rivers’ The Todas (1906), Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), [John] Roscoe’s The Baganda (1911), and [George] Grinnell’s The Cheyenne (1923)—and studied their arrangements.’’1 What Mead discovered, of course, was that the ‘‘arrangements’’ of each work were unique; there was no all-purpose model to which her Samoan data could be affixed and a monograph result. Each author presented a mass of material, and each had designed an internal architecture upon which this mass was hung. These two properties—rich ethnographic detail and cohesive supporting framework—continue to animate the anthropological aesthetic. We applaud works that contain both, and we remain unsatisfied by those with too little ethnography (they are ‘‘thin’’) or too much architecture (‘‘too theoretical’’) or those in which the architecture is inadequate to support the ethnography (‘‘too much detail,’’ ‘‘not wellorganized ’’). Mead’s teacher Franz Boas understood how an ethnography could fail in its architectural mission and had told her, ‘‘The trouble with a monograph is that you need the end at the beginning, and this is true of every chapter—you need each chapter in all the others.’’2 (Good advice for all ethnographic writers upon completing their first draft!) Boas, however, misunderstood from where the desired cohesiveness arose. He imagined it What Ethnographies Leave Out 43 lay within ‘‘the culture’’ an ethnographer studied. As his student Marian Smith explained, ‘‘Masses of data may therefore be worked over with no clear knowledge of what is to be gained at the end. A new hypothesis or a new slant [the architecture] will ‘emerge’ or be ‘revealed’ or ‘suggested.’ The data will ‘speak for themselves.’ This is the procedure by which the exponent of the natural history approach prefers to arrive at a hypothesis: they do not come from systematic thought but from systematically ordered data.’’3 Anthropologists long ago freed themselves from such illusions: even in 1927, Mead was looking for architectural inspiration outside her Samoan fieldnotes. We know that a range of conscious and unconscious biases molds what we see, hear, and record in field notebooks. We attempt to reveal and control these biases, not deny them.4 We no longer pretend that there is nothing on our desk between the fieldnotes and the ethnography we produce. We acknowledge that along with fieldnote indexes and a progression of writing outlines, we turn to the substantive and theoretical writings of others for comparison and contextualization.5 When I wrote my ethnography of Elmhurst-Corona, my desk was covered with (1) two boxes of fieldnotes in the center, with my index to them sitting on top; (2) a succession of constantly evolving chapter and section outlines on the left, each keyed to fieldnotes, newspaper clipping files, and cited works; (3) file drawers, maps, and piles of books and photocopied materials on the right; (4) the computer screen where the ethnography was typed off to one side; and (5) the printer where it all came out on the other. As index categories are formulated, writing outlines refined and expanded, and sources to cite reviewed and selected, we respond to the architectural pole of our aesthetic and move away from the fieldnotes. Yet the other pole, the desire to present as much ‘‘well-hung’’ ethnographic detail as the architecture will bear, constantly sends us back to the notes themselves. Anthropologist Sol Tax once told a despondent M. N. Srinivas, whose Rampura fieldnotes had just been consumed in a fire, ‘‘that no social anthropologist, not even the most industrious, has ever published more than a small portion of his data.’’6 Tax had spent six years doing fieldwork in Guatemala, and his classic ethnography, Penny Capitalism (1951), chockfull of ethnographic detail, plus a set of articles, came nowhere near utilizing all his fieldnotes.7 Still, most anthropologists, who, like Srinivas, have less extensive fieldwork experience than Tax, remain driven to ‘‘use’’ the fieldnotes they produce in a comprehensive ethnography. There are different ways...

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