The Ethnographic Work of Cross-Cultural Memoir

Introduction

To describe cross-cultural memoir as auto-ethnographic would, I think, be uncontroversial. In the wake of postmodern critiques of representation, anthropologists from Jean Briggs to Deborah Reed-Danahay have highlighted the role of "auto" in "ethnography," the involvement of "self" in what purports to be "objective" description of others. Auto/biography scholars, including John Eakin in Touching the World and Julia Watson in a more recent article on "counter-ethnography," have similarly drawn attention to the ways that life narratives both encode and call into question cultural models of identity. To argue that certain cross-cultural memoirs make a valuable contribution to ethnography, though, would be more contentious, given both their amateur status—none of them produced in Anthropology departments—and pervasive scepticism about ethnography itself as a project (see Marcus, "After"; Beal; and Watson). However, this is what I will be arguing here.

The model of "ethnography" I have in mind is reflexive. I'm not endorsing a positivistic model in which an ethnographer generalizes freely about another culture without ever turning the critical gaze back on him or herself. But auto-ethnography is ethnographic insofar as it involves placing one's own cultural world in relation to some other world, and it's this other-oriented aspect of cross-cultural memoirs that I want to highlight. As Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin wrote about language: "It is possible to objectivize one's own particular language, its internal form, the peculiarities of its world view, its specific linguistic habitus, only in the light of another language belonging to someone else" (62). By "objectivize" I take Bakhtin to mean not see objectively but from someone else's point of view and, to that extent, inter-subjectively. We can't understand ourselves, including our own "linguistic habitus," in his term, in isolation from other selves and cultures. This may seem a basic, even obvious point, yet it's missing from critical literature on travel writing and from much anthropology of travel. By contrast, it's key to psychological anthropology (work like Naomi Quinn's or Richard Shweder's), which hasn't had much influence on studies of travel or life writing.

Postcolonial critiques of anthropology and travel writing as imperial discourses have given rise to a profound skepticism about the idea that Westerners could produce insights into non-Western cultures. Elleke Boehmer puts it forcefully: "in a neo-colonial world it remains an open question whether any kind of study carried out in the old metropolis, and taking other, once-colonized cultures as its subject, does not remain entrenched within an inherited, uneven discursive geography: the scrutinizer on the one side, the objects of scrutiny on the other" (244). The title of Mary Louise Pratt's influential study Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation signals the same suspicion. There are strong grounds for this suspicion, as Pratt's readings of European travel writing on Africa and South America incisively show. But extending it to include all Western narratives about experiences in non-Western societies risks discounting texts engaged in more reflexive, cross-cultural, and arguably non-colonizing work. Such neglect matters because these texts shed light on how the "linguistic habitus" of English speakers looks from the vantage point of speakers of other languages and help create public space for cultural perspectives beyond the dominant Anglophone one.

Before turning to the contentious issue of Western texts that describe travel in postcolonial or non-Western societies, I consider an immigrant narrative that I see as exemplifying the ethnographic work of cross-cultural memoir. This is Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation, which explores the author's experience of migration from Poland to Canada, and thus interprets one Western culture through the lens of another. I will then move on to look at two American travel narratives about non-Western (or colonized) places, one of which amply justifies Pratt's critique, while the other represents a more dialogic perspective, which suggests a limit to its scope. I end by drawing some conclusions about the ethnographic work of cross-cultural memoir in general.

Immigrant Memoir

Eva Hoffman emigrated from Poland...