Anthropology and autobiography

Social anthropology, more than any other discipline in the humanities and the
social sciences, has developed the practice of intensive fieldwork by a single
individual. Clearly, the ‘race’, nationality, gender, age and personal history of the
fieldworker affect the process, interaction and emergent material, yet the notion of
autobiography within anthropology is regarded by some anthropologists as mere
narcissism.
This volume challenges that view by presenting detailed autobiographical
accounts in the context of fieldwork and relationships with the people
encountered. From a cross-cultural perspective, the contributors examine their
work among peoples in Africa, Japan, the Caribbean, Greece, Shetland, England,
indigenous Australia, Indonesia and Sri Lanka, and provide unique insights into
the fieldwork, autobiography and textual critique of anthropologists. The
collection makes a stimulating contribution to current controversial debates about
reflexivity and the political responsibility of the anthropologist who, as
participant, has traditionally made only stylised appearances in the academic text.
The contributors show that, like fieldwork, the process of writing and the
creation of the final text involve a series of choices which depend on the selective
interests of the ethnographer: monographs, often presented and read as definitive
and timeless, are in fact selective and historically contingent.
Anthropology and autobiography will appeal to students and teachers in the social
sciences, especially those interested in ethnographical approaches to the self,
reflexivity, ‘qualitative’ methodology, and the production of texts.
ASA Monographs 29
Anthropology and
autobiography

Edited by Judith Okely and

Helen Callaway

London and New york

 First published 1992
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 4RN
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© 1992 Association of Social Anthropologists

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 Contents

List of illustrations vii

List of contributors viii
Preface ix
Judith Okely and Helen Callaway

1 Anthropology and autobiography: participatory experience 1

and embodied knowledge
Judith Okely
2 Ethnography and experience: gender implications in 29
fieldwork and texts
Helen Callaway
3 Automythologies and the reconstruction of ageing 49
Paul Spencer
4 Spirits and sex: a Swahili informant and his diary 63
Pat Caplan
5 Putting out the life: from biography to ideology among 81
the Earth People
Roland Littlewood
6 Racism, terror and the production of Australian auto/ 99
biographies
Julie Marcus
7 Writing ethnography: state of the art 115
Kirsten Hastrup
8 Autobiography, anthropology and the experience of 133
Indonesia
C.W.Watson
9 Changing places and altered perspectives: research on a 145
Greek island in the 1960s and in the 1980s
Margaret E.Kenna
vi

10 The paradox of friendship in the field: analysis of a long- 161

term Anglo–Japanese apanese relationship
Joy Hendry
11 Ali and me: an essay in street-corner anthropology 173
Malcolm Crick
12 From affect to analysis: the biography of an interaction in 191
an English village
Nigel Rapport
13 Tense in ethnography: some practical considerations 203
John Davis
14 Self-conscious anthropology 219
Anthony P.Cohen

Name index 239

Subject index 243
 Chapter 11
Ali and me
An essay in street-corner anthropology

Malcolm Crick

‘an anagram made flesh’ (Fowles 1977:656)

The importance of the ‘self’ in the processes of fieldwork and interpretation

should be obvious to anyone who takes the semantic dimension of anthropology
half seriously. If the ‘self’ is the research instrument, any piece of research is
suitable for an exercise in the sociology of knowledge (Gould 1975:64–5): why
this research problem, why this interpretive frame, why this chief informant? If
participant observation is ultimately grounded in human inter-subjectivity (Adler
and Adler 1987:31), we clearly need to understand our ethnographic products in
terms of the producers and the production process, that is to say in terms of
ourselves, our informants and the specific contexts in which encounters have
taken place (Dumont 1978: 96, 199). If much that we call ‘method’ has
characteristics of a ‘reaction formation’ designed to protect the investigator from
anxiety in the face of social phenomena (Devereux 1967), then clearly a most
important kind of ethnographic data is what is going on inside the researcher. If
anthropology is about ‘otherness’, any definition of our subject matter necessarily
involves a corresponding self-definition. The fact that anthropology has always
been implicitly about ‘ourselves’ is now clear; what is required is that the implicit
become explicit (Crick 1976:153, 1982:288, 307–8). We require that our ‘selves’
become objects for scrutiny in the same way that our research has rendered ‘objects’
those other selves with whom we have interacted in the field.
Valuable work has recently been done on gender aspects of the self in
fieldwork, but there are many other dimensions to the ‘self’—something of a
catch-all term for pieces of cultural baggage, personality traits, values,
psychological defences and so on—that still require unpacking. The ‘self’ may be
‘simultaneously enabling and disabling’ (Peshkin 1985:278), but this means that
we have two good reasons for paying it due attention rather than dismissing it as
an unfortunate, complicating factor in our work. In any case, since we cannot
shed the self, we must give it a focal place in our writings (Cesara 1982:2, 7). Some
‘ethnographic facts’, after all, may be little more than temporary agreements on
meaning between anthropologist and informant in a transient relationship, both
involved in a liminal mode of communication, which inevitably produces only
174 ANTHROPOLOGY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY

partial comprehension. This being so, it is vital that our work preserves a strong
sense of its fragile, inter-subjective origins, instead, as has been the case, despite
the importance of ‘being there’ to the fieldwork tradition, of a textual product in
which the presence and individuality of both ethnographer and informant are
obliterated (Crapanzano 1976).
In any relationship, ‘self’ and ‘other’ are both performers and audience to one
another (Berreman 1972: xxxiii). The definitions of ‘self’ of both parties are partly
constitutive of and constituted by the ever-changing bond. Not only can one
never be fully aware of who one is in a relationship, since the self is less a thing
than a process, one can never be entirely sure what definition of ‘self, situation or
relationship the ‘other’ has created. On top of conscious impression management
about what one conceals and reveals, there is the unconscious side, which means
that one can never describe with full confidence the basis of the relationship.
And, given that ethnography normally ties people of different cultural traditions,
we have the fact that the two parties will certainly not share exactly the same
communicative rules or understanding of each other’s role (Fabian 1979). There
is, indeed, something a little unnatural in the almost forced exchanges in this
marginal realm, and it is perhaps a sensing of this that may lead to a reluctance
fearlessly to explore the nature of the ties created for fear that this will lead to a
‘rupture’ and thus an exposure of the shaky grounds of ethnography (Rabinow
1977: 28, 30, 39, 45, 47, 114).
The field situation is thus inevitably ‘ironic’ in that ethnographer and informant
conspire with one another, are part of a ‘working fiction’ that they have a shared
world of meaning, while in reality, at any time, their agreement could fall apart
and they could be exposed as inhabiting separate, mutually uncomprehending
worlds (Geertz 1968:151–4). This is a ‘peculiar species of good faith between
ethnographer and informant which verge[s] on bad faith’ (Webster 1982:93).
With the substantial inequalities of wealth and power which normally separate
anthropologist and informant, combined with the researcher’s professional reasons
for being in the field, speaking of ‘friendship’, as we often do, is somewhat odd. It
is but a strategy, ‘sop behaviour’ (Bleek 1979:202–4) that is merely part of the
extraction of information. The term ‘rapport’, much used in discussions of
fieldwork, thus acquires something of a phoney ‘romantic’ quality, since the
communication for which the ethnographer strives is equally part of his/her
professional self-definition. The relations between ethnographer and informant
are more accurately seen, perhaps, as mutual exploitation. Both parties risk and
exchange information; and one of the risks is necessarily the relationship itself
between them (Lundberg 1968; Agar 1980:86). While the ethnographer clearly
has the accomplishment of professional work as a central motivation, in the case of
informants a range of motivations is possible. But because a mutual dependency
grows up, the durability of the relationship may involve leaving certain stones
undisturbed. Too thorough an investigation of the presenting selves might prove
destructive because it might reveal the mismatch of intentions. In the
ethnographic situation, then, as in others, two parties, dependent perhaps to
 ALI AND ME 175

different degrees, may hold on to deliberately hazy images of their relationship,

which allows them to reach a sufficient number of personal goals for it to be
worth persisting with (Crapanzano 1980: ix).
This chapter concerns the relationship between myself and a pavement hawker
in Kandy, whom I shall call Ali. Ali was of considerable importance during my
seven months of fieldwork in Sri Lanka during 1982 when I was studying
international tourism. That research involved observation, relationships with a
number of people on the streets of Kandy, library research, interviews, essays
written by local schoolchildren, a seminar in the Kandy Town Hall—in other
words, a host of methods—but the relationship with Ali was crucial to my overall
experience of the field situation. As in any relationship, a dimension of my bond
with Ali was unconscious, and insights continue to dawn years after leaving the
field. I have never been sure how to label my relationship with him. I always
referred to him by his first name, and, in fact, he only once told me his full name.
He, on the other hand, always called me ‘Doctor’. This difference in mode of
address no doubt well expresses the asymmetrical character of our situation. If I call
Ali a‘friend’ or ‘informant’, both labels would say too much and also leave
something important out. After half a century of our fieldwork tradition, we are
still not really happy with our lexicon for the ‘other’: natives, locals, informants,
collaborators, respondents, subjects—all are to varying degrees embarrassing or
inappropriate (Whittaker 1981:439, n. 2). If the terms ‘research assistant’ or ‘key
informant’ imply specific duties, payment for service and an almost contractual
arrangement about how much time would be made available, Ali was neither.
Since English is the language used in the informal tourism arena in Kandy, I did
not need an interpreter. I am also sure that my own meanness would have
inhibited my hiring a research assistant in any case. I was also determined to
remain free to follow my interests wherever they led, and I was aware of how
possessive a research assistant can become (Rabinow 1977:75). None the less, the
street corner where Ali sold his goods became the most important of the
‘observation posts’ I set up in Kandy.
Over seven months, Ali and I had numerous conversations, some about
tourism, some about life in general. Only on one or two occasions did I follow a
pre-determined line of questioning with him in any formal kind of setting,
preferring information to flow haphazardly from the more casual context of the
street corner itself, where I could watch what was going on, and he could get on
with his business. I certainly paid Ali for specific jobs he did for me, such as
translating essays written by Tamil schoolchildren. We often shared afternoon tea
or a more substantial meal, and I got to know the rest of his family quite well.
Occasionally I would go to a new guesthouse with him as my guide, and we
often went shopping together, both in Kandy and in the villages nearby where I
was not known. I did not pay Ali for his time because he was collecting
commission. The deal was that he had to tell me how much he had been given,
so that I could learn more about the relationships between guesthouse
proprietors, shopkeepers and street guides. He sometimes offered me the
176 ANTHROPOLOGY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY

commissions back, but I always told him to keep them. I was also able to direct
other business his way. Since I spent so much time on his corner, many tourists
arriving in Kandy asked me about accommodation, and I would fix them up,
sending Ali in advance to certain establishments so that he could claim a cut from
the rent. Towards the end of my stay, the owner of the guesthouse where I was
staying informed me that he wanted to stop ‘catching the tourists’ himself, and so
needed a reliable guide to do the work for him. I suggested Ali to him, and Ali
was engaged—unfortunately, though, for only a limited period of time, since he
found the work in Colombo too difficult.
If there were several ways in which I helped Ali, on occasions he was
invaluable to me, for instance when I wanted to talk to the prostitutes in the slum
area near where he lived about their relationships with tourists. I would never
have embarked on these enquiries alone. Such incidents suggest that my
relationship with Ali was not quite like that which exists between tourists and
locals. Commissions for guides normally raise prices for tourists without their
suspecting anything, but there was I with Ali, deliberately having him accompany
me in order to find out what the level of ‘kick back’ was. I was also frequently
drawn into the bargaining which went on at his corner between Ali, other
vendors and the tourists passing through. The fact that I did not side with the
foreigners, but invariably pointed out that the amount of money they were
haggling over was a small amount to the tourist but might represent a substantial
difference in the daily income of the vendor, gained me the reputation as a
stranger with a difference, since the pavement hawkers there had not seen a
foreigner adopting such a role before.
Ali was a Muslim of deep religious convictions. Apart from the daily
observances, he also knew something of the philosophical literature of Islam. He
told me how if he ever cheated anyone it would rebound on him, because he
would in turn be robbed. He also told me of a recurring nightmare of an
experience he had had early in life of seeing a very rich man dying slowly, and in
extreme agony. Ali had actually been educated at Kandy’s most prestigious private
school, though he did not like other people knowing this.
Though now working on the streets, he came from a very wealthy family. His
father had been a very rich merchant, and his brothers were all wealthy
shopkeepers, in Kandy and elsewhere. Ali had originally wished to study
medicine at university but he had left school instead, to help out in his father’s
business. Since that time there had been a succession of entrepreneurial, clerical
and supervisory positions. A fire had destroyed most of his possessions and he was
then forced to sell goods in the streets to earn a small income. He now lived with
his mother and one of his younger brothers. Despite having ended up on the
streets after a privileged start in life, he was generous with the little money he
had. He donated a proportion of his income to the poor, and he also told me that
a small pension he received was paid directly into a local children’s welfare
association. There was something noble about Ali, even amidst the obvious
colossal fall that had taken place in his life. He waxed lyrical about life in the
 ALI AND ME 177

1940s under the British, as the son of a wealthy merchant attending an exclusive
private school. He was proud of having met Lord Mountbatten during the war
and of mixing easily, so he told me, with white women in the armed services. I was
very aware of having heard only snippets of Ali’s life. He never told me, for
instance, why he married so late in life, and I never discussed the drinking
problem which others told me he had. With one afflicted by so many troubles I
was always on the look out for ‘tall stories’. None the less, I felt that Ali was a
benign soul, which could certainly not have been said of too many of the others
on the streets of Kandy in 1982 who, I felt, would have been only too ready to
trick me.
The first time I saw Ali selling a range of goods on the pavement, I actually
walked straight past him. I was on my way to the central market at the end of my
first week in Kandy, and he was shouting out the wares he had for sale. I did not
stop to inspect his goods, but later that afternoon I passed the same spot on my
way home to my guesthouse and Ali remembered me from the morning and said:
‘Oh, I see you have bought yourself something. Can I have a look at it?’. Ali’s
good command of English, plus his hesitant, polite curiosity, caught my attention.
I informed him that I was in Kandy to write a book about tourism, and he told me
that he knew something about the subject and was willing to help. He added that
he would not tell me anything about drugs, because if he did, he would be killed.
He also asked a number of searching questions in those early days in regard to the
sort of book that I wanted to write. Would it be critical of tourism? Would it stop
Australian tourists from coming to Sri Lanka? Would the street guides in Kandy
suffer if I published my findings? I told Ali that I had a number of criticisms to
make about international tourism in general, but I said that I would try to be fair.
I also stressed that it would not be a ‘guide book’ but an academic work, which
tourists would not read. This last remark, though true, was, I am sure, my effort
to gloss over the misgivings I had about international tourism in the Third
World. I could hardly reveal their full extent and then expect Ali, who earned
money from tourism, to say anything very revealing to me. I also made a habit of
telling people that I was Australian. Again, factually correct, but I was also hiding
the fact that I had been born in England, for fear that ‘English’ was a marked
category in Sri Lanka, given its colonial past, which might affect how people
responded to me. Like other anthropologists, my ‘opening remarks’ were a strategic
combination of revelations and concealments (Georges and Jones 1980:54).
Given my own awareness of the ways in which I fell short of complete honesty,
I was the more curious as to why Ali was so willing to help me. Was his gesture
on a par with the offers of ‘help’ with which tourists are regularly bombarded? I
was wondering, in other words, what Ali’s definition of the situation was. We
need to be aware of the extent to which our ethnographic subjects are themselves
indigenous ethnographers (Clifford 1983:139; Marcus 1980; McKean 1976:12).
But we have also to be aware of the large range of pragmatic motives that might
attract an informant to such a strange identity as an anthropologist; we need to be
aware, in other words, of how the informant is ‘reading’ the anthropologist
178 ANTHROPOLOGY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY

(Goldkind 1970; Herzfeld 1983:162). Informants are ‘culture brokers’ who are
innovative in their interaction with field researchers; their motives might be
altruism, curiosity, ego-enhancement, or sheer financial profit (Kirk and Miller
1986: 64). Obviously one must be wary of ‘professional stranger-handlers’ and
approaches made early in one’s field period (Agar 1980:85–6, 117), but in the
touristic arena, nearly everyone is some kind of stranger handler. There is,
indeed, the so-called ‘touree’ (van den Berghe 1980:378–9), who comes into
being purely because tourists exist, and whose rules for operation may not
correspond to other areas of cultural life. Having been approached by one
professional con-man during my first week in Kandy, I was wary of overtures in
general. No matter how clear the evidence is at the overall systems level as to
who benefits most from international tourism (Crick 1988:44–9), at street level,
the tourist is frequently the victim. I certainly experienced the tourist arena very
much as a predatory niche.
I had a string of very good reasons for starting up and continuing a relationship
with Ali. He spoke three languages. His street corner was near the cafés, hotels
and banks in Kandy, and on the route most tourists took to get from the bus and
railway stations to the hotels or guesthouses. There was a sense of dependability; I
knew that he would always be there. Also, Ali was a ‘marginal’ man, like many
prized informants. He was not, in fact, an experienced street guide, so was on the
periphery of even the ‘informal’ tourist arena (tourist activities not licensed by the
Ceylon Tourist Board). Whilst he occasionally did some guiding, he was mainly a
pavement hawker, and therefore, for the most part, had to deal with the other
street guides as a business man. I regarded this as an advantage, for Ali was not
confined to either an internal or an external view of tourism in Kandy. It was
noticeable how sometimes when Ali spoke to me about tourism he did so as a
guide, and at other times he spoke as someone who simply observed those
involved in tourism, as if he too were a streetcorner anthropologist. Ali was one of
the few people who understood the sort of book I wanted to write. Other
people, including hotel managers and guesthouse proprietors, presumed that I was
planning a ‘guide book’ which would make recommendations about particular
establishments, no matter how much I explained what my real interests were. Ali
was also the only person I met in Kandy who was willing to put any of his ideas
on tape, others being too fearful that what they said would be used against them.
Like many an informant too, he had that often crucial combination of significant
experience of westerners and a series of personal tragedies (Agar 1980:87, n. 3). We
also had what I felt to be common interests. I was in Kandy to learn about
tourism, and because his business activities were not going very well, he was
thinking of abandoning his hawking and becoming a tourist guide instead. So he
wanted to learn more about tourism himself. We were, in that sense, learning
about tourism together.
I am conscious that while all of the above reasons for the relationship are very
rational, they are silent as to my deeper, emotional needs, and presumably those
of Ali too. I was in Sri Lanka for seven months, for most of that time on my own,
 ALI AND ME 179

and non-threatening human contact was vital. Also, apart from the journey from
England to Australia in 1977 to take up a lecturing position, I had never been
overseas. In that sense, I was more naïve and ignorant than most tourists in Asia.
In addition, because of other writing commitments, I had to embark on my
fieldwork with very little preparation (Crick 1989), making me feel even more
uncomfortable. It has been said that the experience of other cultures may
reawaken long-repressed memories (Cesara 1982:3, 7), and I had always hated
holidays and found them meaningless. But there I was, having produced a library-
based doctoral thesis in the quiet confines of Oxford, on a street corner with
touts, prostitutes, con-men, pickpockets, studying people having their holidays.
Faced with my nagging sense of unpreparedness, a feeling that my personality was
less than worthless for research on this particular topic, combined with a
professional responsibility to write about tourism without prejudice, I was
frequently bored by my chosen topic, and the possibility of simply spending time
on Ali’s corner, talking to him about anything under the sun, was not a luxury,
but vital for my own emotional survival.
To cap it all, of course, there was guilt, stemming from the feeling that the
time I spent on Ali’s corner, with my overbearing need for information, would
adversely affect his business activities. The normal opening line in the ‘tactics talk’
of the much maligned touts on the streets of Kandy was ‘Hello, friend’; but there
was I, essentially touting in public for data. Ali told me that my being there did
not affect what he did, but to say that my presence on the street corner made no
difference would be inaccurate. For a start, because I became an object of
attention and gossip, Ali too became an object of close scrutiny. When I appeared
frequently on that street corner, people were asking what kind of business I was
up to, and naturally asked Ali what was going on. When he explained that I was
just studying tourism, many of the guides became very jealous of him, wondering
what qualities he possessed which meant that he, rather than they, had been able
to ‘catch’ me. This jealousy extended even to his guide friends. At one time Ali
and his friend Felix, a young guide, were both quite vigorously competing with
each other as to the quality of their insights and rubbishing each other to such an
extent that I did not know how to return the situation to what it had been before
I arrived. What made things worse was that several people watching me did not
believe that I was really studying tourism at all but was involved in some
nefarious activity. All manner of speculation as to what I was doing was growing
up, from the idea that I was a drug courier to the thought that I might be a plain-
clothes police officer. Rumours about me apart, Ali’s own tentative forays into
tourism were beginning to cause him trouble. One day a thug threatened him
with violence if he did not hand over some money. On another occasion when I
arrived, Ali was looking very glum, and Felix told me: ‘there are things in his life
that you do not know about’. I guessed -correctly—that he had been warned by
some of the rougher guides to stay out of tourism or to face the consequences.
Ali displayed much bravado over this incident, showing me a solid silver belt
180 ANTHROPOLOGY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY

which he wore around his waist which he said he would use to defend himself. He
added that most guides were ‘all mouth’.
Through the seven months that I was in Kandy Ali persisted with his dual
occupations of selling goods from the pavement and trying to catch tourists.
Actually both activities were ‘doing the tourism’ since the goods he had on
display were almost entirely purchased by foreigners. Because tourism was bad in
Kandy in 1982, both sources of income were drying up. Everyone was saying
that there were fewer tourists in the streets, and there was even a feeling that
tourism had peaked in Sri Lanka. Occasionally when Ali found a tourist who
wanted lodgings, he would pack up his wares and disappear for the afternoon.
Sometimes he would be gone for just an hour or so leaving me or a shoe repairer
to watch his goods. Very occasionally he would be absent for several days if he
had been lucky enough to interest a tourist in a longer trip.
Despite my efforts to remain marginal, over time my ties with Ali took on a
significance I could not have envisaged. I realised this most clearly when he told
me he was thinking about moving away from Kandy to try some other means of
making an income, either working on the nearby Mahaweli dam project or else
supervising a coconut plantation for one of his brothers. I realised that if this
happened I would lose an important part of my research routine and also an
important companion. In a way the realisation of my own research plans
depended upon Ali’s failure to find a way out of his predicament. Given the large
number of street guides in Kandy during 1982 and also the relative scarcity of
tourists, catching a tourist became very difficult and making substantial gains an
increasingly rare occurrence. Weeks, indeed months, went by with Ali on the
street corner for seven hours a day without a single sale. He began notching up
marks on a pole to record the number of days without any business. Given that
he lived with relatives he always had enough to eat, but it hurt his pride when he
could not contribute to the household. Things were made worse in the wet
season with the daily need to gather up his wares and rush for cover to escape the
early afternoon downpour; on some days when the weather looked too unsettled
he disappeared at noon and did not return. And precisely because things were
tough that year, many of the guides were driving very hard bargains. They would
arrive with a tourist, negotiate a commission for themselves which, given what
Ali told me was his normal profit margin, meant either selling his goods at cost,
or else pushing his prices up to retain a profit margin but at the same time making
his goods that much less attractive. If Ali refused to deal under these conditions,
the street guides would just tell the tourist that they could find much better
quality goods in the market or elsewhere. In the worst months, Ali, simply to gain
some income, did, in fact, sell some goods below what he told me were cost
price.
A growing sense of desperation in the guides was clearly evident, which
produced intense frustration for the tourists. Many tourists newly arrived in
Kandy, tired from the journey and angry at the number of guides they had to pass
by to get into the town, were exasperated by the time they got to Ali’s corner.
 ALI AND ME 181

They would walk fiercely straight past his display of goods, neither looking at him
nor acknowledging his presence when he spoke to them. Even his quite
exceptional English and jocular behaviour failed to gain him attention. ‘Hello.
Welcome to Kandy. So nice to see you here. Look, real banana skin wallets. I am
so sorry to have troubled you. I would really like to own your knapsack’—
nothing was making the tourists stop and look. Despite the run of bad luck and
the increasingly uncivil atmosphere in the streets, only twice did Ali lose his
temper in my presence. He was sad and resigned rather than angry with those
passing by. He once did get hostile with an arrogant Indian tourist who offered a
ridiculously low price for one of his items, and likewise with a German whom
Ali asked, in desperation ‘Do you think we are babies?’.
It would have been easy to have become embroiled in Ali’s financial
predicament. But, apart from occasionally bailing him out not constituting a long-
term solution to his problems, I was determined not to set any precedents which
might lead to him or anyone else continually asking me for money. I did once
make a very specific small loan, but requested that it be paid back, which he was
able to do a few days later. It was a different matter when Ali announced one day
that his young wife was very ill, and that she and his son had had to return to her
village, followed by her being admitted to hospital. Although Ali did not ask
directly, I simply could not refuse to help, but, again, making it perfectly clear that
this would not be the thin end of the wedge. Ali told me how in a public
hospital, unless the doctors and nurses were given gifts, a patient simply would
not get adequate care and attention. The sums involved were quite beyond Ali’s
reach unless he took out a loan or humbled himself by asking relatives, but they
were not substantial to me. I had to make a judgement about our entire relationship.
Was his wife really ill? Did one really have to give money to staff in a hospital to
ensure good care? Was giving Ali money here simply the only decent thing to do
given our respective circumstances? Can an anthropologist create relationships and
then refuse the ensuing involvement (Dumont 1978:91)? Or was involving myself
in this way with his troubles a way of assuaging the guilt I felt over the
exploitative role playing that I was up to (Gans 1968:56–60)? Or, was this an
archetypal instance of a tourist being taken for a ride?
My need to feel that I was not tied up in a network of deceptions was
enhanced by the fact that I was reading The Magus (Fowles 1977) at the time, a
novel I had chanced to see at the airport on my way to Sri Lanka. As I made my
way through the streets of Kandy each day, hoping for occurrences or encounters
which might suggest patterns in the events I was witnessing, this book took on a
special significance. The reader’s efforts to comprehend what goes on in the book
parallels, it seemed to me, the struggle of Nicholas in the text itself to make some
sense out of the curious string of events in which he was involved. From chapter
to chapter, as contexts changed, characters would appear and disappear; some
relationships would become firmer and others more enigmatic. One interpretation
would be adopted which would bring to the fore its own particular set of fairly solid
landmarks and supporting evidence; a shift of stance, or reliance on another
182 ANTHROPOLOGY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY

person’s account, and other patterns emerged, with the previous markers losing
their value. In anthropological research there is a constant shifting of stance in an
effort to reach a firm view. What at one stage looks like a productive framework
for linking the events suddenly loses its appeal. Evidence suddenly loses its
compelling quality as new insights emerge out of the flux of events. At bottom,
the ethnographer, like the reader of The Magus, and like Nicholas, have to decide
where, if anywhere, to place their trust. Is it possible to occupy a position where
reliable patterns will come to light? Are there any informants on whose testimony
one can place such weight that, in the light of it, one can proceed to build a picture
of the whole in which the details will make sense? Studying tourism may perhaps
not involve the semantic complexity involved in some other anthropological
topics, but the matter of trust is crucial all the same. I was in a niche where
officials, guesthouse owners, shopkeepers and street guides would contradict each
other’s accounts of what was going on. Furthermore, the guides would actively
try to discredit each other’s information, even when they told me that they were
friends. This is clearly a situation where the possibility of systematic deception is
an ever-constant worry. Whatever the seemingly increasingly popular ideology of
the international tourism industry that tourism is a wonderful opportunity for
learning about other cultures, at street level, information is less in evidence than
money-making, deception and harrassment. Indeed, many people’s personal
interests in tourism are quite incompatible with the provision of reliable
information.
The field experience is one where culture shock and being away from the
normal contexts which support one’s definition of self can mean that one can
become a stranger to oneself (Pouwer 1973:2). Stress in the face of ambiguity
obviously enhances one’s need for some stable reference point (Agar 1980:50).
This is a period when just as one may learn something about oneself, so anxiety may
lead to a ‘freezing’ of one’s personality (Crapanzano 1980:137), which lessens the
likelihood of one experimenting with potentially difficult relationships. Because
so many of the events in fieldwork can be ego-dystonic, since one may
experience nagging feelings of failure and incompetence, the need to have oneself
confirmed by a significant ‘other’ is vital (Wax 1960:174). For me, Ali was this
significant ‘other’, a man whom I hoped was a safe reference point. Referred to as
‘uncle’ by some of the younger street guides in Kandy, he liked to keep an
avuncular eye on them lest they get themselves into real trouble. Although the
idea of the fieldworker ‘as a child’ has limited validity, something of my relationship
with Ali, a man in his fifties with me in my early thirties, was in this avuncular
mould. As the months went by, the link acquired several other strands, and when
I went to Katunayake airport to leave Sri Lanka in October 1982, Ali was with
me. I was clutching my bag full of fieldnotes and he was full of tears, thanking me
for what I had done for him and his family.
I would like to think that something that could be called ‘friendship’ had
grown up, but I am conscious that the only reason I was in Sri Lanka was to get
material for a book. Given that ultimate purpose behind all the relationships I
 ALI AND ME 183

forged, it was possibly my own sense of guilt (Golde 1970: 91) that I was using
people, that produced my lingering sense that perhaps everyone was using me.
Perhaps, therefore, even an uncle might be a master magician? A certain amount
of doubt is, of course, useful when appraising information gained in the field; the
doubt creates the distance in which analytical work can be accomplished. But as
the anthropologist, pretending to be more knowledgeable than a mere tourist,
watches the touts catching the ignorant foreigners, perhaps he is in reality not
much more than a sophisticated tourist who gets caught by a sophisticated con-
man? Anthropologists want more lengthy stories than tourists, perhaps they simply
get spellbound and tricked by more masterful tellers of tales? The question
therefore poses itself: did Ali regard me just as some complex type of tourist? Was
our relationship similar to that he had with other foreigners in Kandy? I have
often wondered, for there were very few occasions on which I explicitly talked to
him about our relationship, and even in some of those I was oblique, asking
about the meaning of the Sinhala term yaluva (friend), customary Sri Lankan
mores as regards hospitality and so on. For the most part, I was content not to
examine too closely what it was that kept our relationship going. Was Ali, like
Doc in Street Corner Society (Whyte 1955), more a research collaborator than an
informant? Were we less like anthropologist and informant than two people
mutually producing understanding for one another (Cesara 1982:2, 7)? Or was I
being ‘taken for a ride’ in the same way as many tourists are?
Anyone’s field research is bound up, to a certain degree, with the identity of
the chief informants one obtains. They affect not only what one does, but how
one interprets, to whom one has access, etc. It is also clear that for both conscious
and unconscious reasons one seeks out certain people and avoids others. While it
may be correct to say that it is laziness and disadvantageous to cling to ‘easy’
relationships in the field (Hammersley and Atkinson 1983: 104), it is not easy to
evaluate the overall benefits and drawbacks of any relationship, because one does
not know how one’s research would have gone if one had done things
differently. There is a ‘wager’ character to anthropological interpretation in
general (Dwyer 1982:280, 286), but there is also clearly a gamble element in
regard to the relationships one sets up. One does not know what benefits will
accrue, and one certainly cannot keep withdrawing from ties in a state of distrust
just after creating them, since one would then never get anything under way.
Some act of trust—albeit keeping one’s wits about one—has to be made. One
may have specific research objectives, but again, the ethnographer-informant link,
like any relationship, is unpredictable. It unfolds in ways which neither party
planned, and may require evolving definitions of selves and changing boundaries
as to what is shared and what remains private (Georges and Jones 1980:64; Adler
and Adler 1987:16–17). What is clear is that a strong mutual dependence may
grow up. The mutuality here must be stressed, for while the anthropologist has the
resources upon which the informant depends, the anthropologist depends on the
supply of information. The anthropologist may even unconsciously have chosen
his or her informants for their dependent traits, assuming that these will secure the
184 ANTHROPOLOGY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY

bond and guarantee the information it yields. But the researcher may then
become dependent upon the informant’s dependence. I quickly assessed Ali as an
informant having a strong intelligence and reflexive distance from his own culture.
I also saw that he also had deep personal needs to be met, perhaps to compensate
for the areas of failure in his life. He, I judged, wanted to talk, wanted to be
listened to and wanted to be valued. My needs were the same. I know only too well
what value Ali put on the information he gave me. When making tapes together,
he went out of his way to give me a balanced view of the issues we discussed,
despite the fact that I had emphasised the tapes were to present an individual
voice. I also know how disappointed he was when I informed him that when I
wrote my book I would have to give fictitious names to all the characters in it in
order to protect them. He desperately wanted me to use his real name.
Mutual dependency may produce a strong bond in a relationship, but it
invariably entails a deep ambivalence and a smouldering explosive potential as
well (Georges and Jones 1980:66). There were several times during my seven
months in Kandy when I backed off probing Ali’s world lest I come face to face
with facts I would rather not acknowledge. One such occasion concerned some
gifts I wished Ali to make for me to bring back to Australia as a memento of our
time spent together. Ali was happy to do so, and I gave him a large sum of money
to buy the raw materials. I was then considerably perturbed one day when one of
Ali’s friends told me that Ali did not actually make any of the goods he sold. This
information, I felt, went to the heart of the issue of trust in our relationship,
because Ali knew that the gifts were very special to me since he would be making
them himself. If he could deceive me over this, what about everything else he had
told me? Some days later I raised with him the general issue of the goods he sold,
their cost price and so on, and I told him that a street guide had informed me that
he simply sold things on behalf of others. He was visibly hurt, showing me the
callouses on his hands resulting from the manufacturing process. He told me that
he used his brother’s workshop late in the evening, after the female employees
had gone home. I could have asked to see the workshop, I suppose, but that
would not have removed all my doubts, so I dropped the matter altogether. I had
not been able to be brave enough to raise the issue at all in regard to the gifts
themselves.
One can never really know another person’s motivations. One can know a
person to a certain degree, but there is always a hidden core of individuality
which one must respect in others, just as one wishes it to be respected in oneself
(Crapanzano 1980:136–7, 152). I enjoyed Ali’s company, but I am not really sure
why he tolerated me. Was Ali treating me like a tourist? Were my suspicions,
even if emotionally very real, formulated in an anthropologically appropriate
manner? How many different types of stranger did local people lump together as
‘tourists’ of some kind? After all, my own originally intended Sri Lankan research
on Buddhist notions of social action had shifted to tourism when I was mistaken
for a hippie by a novice monk (Crick 1989). Besides, if ‘self’ and ‘other’ make
meaning equally in the ethnographic encounter, there being no privileged
 ALI AND ME 185

position as regards the definition of the situation (Rabinow 1977:151), my

suspicions about Ali were tantamount to denying him any say in defining our
encounter. Anthropologists have a time-honoured tradition of distancing
themselves from other kinds of Europeans in the Third World, whether they be
missionaries, traders, administrators and so on. But the fact is that whatever their
individual outlook, their discipline is sustained by the same structures of
economic and political inequality that made possible the presence of these others.
The anthropologist, in this sense, is a metonym of the western world (Dumont
1978:44). But so, in this day and age, is the tourist. Quite apart from Ali’s right to
bring his own set of meanings to our relationship, then, perhaps we have some
painstaking comparative work to do when construing the anthropological ‘self’. To
put it pointedly, is an anthropologist an ‘in-depth tourist or an entirely different
breed of sensation seeker?’ (van den Berghe 1980:376). If Ali regarded me as a
kind of tourist, perhaps he was right (Brewer 1984:499).
A number of anthropologists have made passing remarks about the similarities
between tourists and anthropologists, but they seldom dwell on the matter long
enough for us to be able to derive much self-knowledge. But field researchers and
tourists are overlapping identities (Crick 1985:76–83), no matter how much we
acknowledge that there are different types of research, as indeed there are
different types of tourist, and no matter how many very obvious differences exist
between what anthropologists and tourists do. Can we be so confident that our
motives for being in other cultures are totally different to those of tourists? If it is
our relationship with our informants which converts us from tourists into
anthropologists (Richardson 1975:520, 527), do our relationships really rest on a
completely different basis? If the tourist-local link is a parody of a human
relationship (van den Berghe 1980:378), and if there is an overlap between
ethnographers and tourists, perhaps further scrutiny here may throw some light on
the shadow side of our anthropological selves. MacCannell suggests that we are
very different from tourists because mystification is fundamental to tourism
whereas we are clear about our motives (1976:179). This may sound
commonsensical enough, but we must not exaggerate the extent to which tourists
are mystified, nor can we afford to exaggerate the level of reflexive insight we
have attained.
Both anthropologists and international tourists are temporary strangers in
another culture and their reasons for being there are very much more to do with
our culture rather than the interests of the ‘other’. What for one is the ‘pleasure
periphery’ visiting which gains one kudos, for the other is the ‘ethnographic
periphery’ where one gets data to build a career. At the end of the stay, tourists
leave clutching what they prize—photos, souvenirs etc.—and anthropologists
leave clutching notes (and, no doubt, photos and souvenirs as well). What for one
is a matter of conspicuous consumption, for the other is conspicuous production
(of data, and later publications). While in the field both rely on a range of local
‘culture brokers’ who know what they want—tourist guides in the one case, and
interpreters, research assistants, and the like, in the other—their guides and our
186 ANTHROPOLOGY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY

informants may not be dissimilar in their motivations. If we look somewhat

askance at the brief, instrumental relations established with locals by tourists trying
to get what they want, behind our own myths of ‘rapport’ and ‘immersion’, we
actually engage our energies in entrepreneurially forging links which will deliver
the goods we are after. As tourists move on, failing to keep promises about
sending gifts or writing, so many anthropologists let relationships fade once back
in the writing environment and with a different audience; the anthropologist is
also free to ‘pick up and go’ (Mintz 1977:56–9). If the tourist is ‘at play’ while we
are ‘at work’, we must recognise that for the anthropologist, the field is a rest from
normal routine academic duties (Gonzalez 1986:97). Fieldwork is also very much
like playing a game. The irony of the field situation, its ethical ambiguity, are very
much to do with the fact that participant observation is like ‘playing at’ being a
member of another culture (Karp and Kendall 1982:257). Let us, finally, not
forget that though academics, we are not in a totally different universe to tourists,
sightseers and spectacle hunters: etymologically, the terms ‘theory’ and ‘theorist’
derive from the Greek for sightseer and spectacle (Abbeele 1980:13). We are, in
other words, intellectual tourists. If these suggested similarities between
anthropologists and tourists seem unpalatable, others writing in the reflexive
mode have recently found other identities to compare us to—conmen, double
agents, shamans, tricksters, among others (Schechner 1982:81; Boon 1982: x, 6).
We need to look again at the interactive, dialogical basis from which much of
our anthropological knowledge ultimately derives. On a street corner in Kandy
stood an ethnographer and an informant. But we have only to ask what kind of
an ethnographer the informant is, and what kind of a tourist the anthropologist is,
in order to see very differently the identities of ‘self’ and ‘other’ involved. Did I
not spend much time reading novels, being bored, hating the place I was in, and
having very mixed feelings about the people I was with, just like most tourists
(Barley 1983:20, 97)? And did Ali’s very livelihood not depend upon his
knowledge of human nature, his understanding of what people from other
cultures were after, and his ability to act quickly in social situations—in short a
well-developed anthropological sensibility? And if Ali did regard me as some kind
of tourist, employing the same rules in our relationship as he did in those with
other tourists, does this undo the value of his testimony anyway? After all, if our
relationship was between a tourist and a local, it was exactly such relationships that
I had come to Kandy to explore.
Such a view highlights the irony of the field situation. It is obvious that
‘participant observation’ coexists with a series of sometimes painful contradictions
—stranger/friend, involvement/detachment and so on. One of these ever-present
tensions is that between having insight and being in the dark, and sometimes,
indeed, not being able to recognise the difference. This is a familiar existential
situation for ethnographers in terms of the relationships they create in the field,
just as for everyone else. Perhaps we have to accept that to the extent that our
fieldwork is reflexive, it must be ambiguous (Karp and Kendall 1982:250). Even if
it were theoretically possible to remove the uncertainties in my relationship with
 ALI AND ME 187

Ali, the possibility of even commencing the task is not there for me at present.
Kandy has not escaped the escalating violence in Sri Lanka over the past few
years, a violence which has severely crippled the tourism industry in that country.
The relative calm which made mass tourism possible also made my stay, and thus
my relationship with Ali, possible. I have left the place I call ‘the field’, but Ali is
still there. It says something about the courage of one anthropological self, that
while the occasional tourist will still, no doubt, be passing Ali’s corner, the threat
of violence notwithstanding, I am only prepared to risk myself to the extent of
writing papers, from a very safe distance, about my experiences there.

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