Insistence and Response: On Ethnographic Replication

This essay is one of three responses to Casper Bruun Jensen’s article “Experiments in Good Faith and Hopefulness: Toward a Postcritical Social Science,” published in the Spring 2014 issue of Common Knowledge. Jensen suggested that the postcritical mode of knowledge production should focus on a continuous and persistent analytical effort to resist despair by “insisting properly.” This commentary, by one of three authors on whom the original article focused, contrasts Jensen’s emphasis on insistence with the idea of ethnography as response. The reconceptualization of ethnographic work as response can have various and divergent consequences, some of which are explored here with reference to the author’s own ethnographic research on indigenous Fijian gift-giving and Japanese financial trading. While his immediate interest here is to expose differences in the kinds of openness that insistence and response afford, he concludes that willingness to respond is more basic to anthropology than the ethnographer’s cultivation of the internal strength required to keep anthropology going as an enterprise.