By Kim Hopper
Directions May 2024
Introduction
When Caroline Brettell’s edited volume, When They Read What We Write, appeared in 1993, the unvoiced surprise in the title neatly conveyed what had brought these authors together for an American Anthropological Association (AAA) panel 3 years earlier. Long essential to the ethnographic project—as both subjects and (again, usually unvoiced) coproducers (Sanjek, 2014; Tedlock, 1991)—Indigenous people had not conventionally figured among its intended audience. That began to change, of course, as more anthropology was being conducted in a postcolonializing world, as more of its US-based practitioners were employed outside of academia, and as literacy (especially Anglophone) increased. Readership became part of the mainstay predicament of anthropology “at home” in the United States, for which special precautions were recommended (Messerschmidt, 1981). Long before the discipline was publicly grappling with the prospects of “patchwork ethnography”—part-time, improvised, taking into account childcare and household responsibilities, and “full of constant switches between ‘home’ and ‘field’” (Günel & Watanabe, 2024, 134)—practitioners had begun comparing notes on the “stylistic” differences required by work on the North American home front (e.g., Wolcott, 1981). Noticeably slighted in these earlier reflections was how to handle the difficulties that arise “when natives talk back” (Rosaldo, 1986). Cracks in the seawalls of interpretive privilege were beginning to show, however. Brettell’s collection was positioned to delve further into those cracks, building on earlier controversies ignited by ethnographies in rural New York, Mexico, and Ireland. Prominent among her exemplars was Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s Saints, Scholar and Schizophrenics ([1979] 2001).
Surveying the choked grandeur of English countryside mansions, Raymond Williams paused to consider their construction. “Think it through as labour,” he urged his readers (1973, 105). Whose labor? Enlisted, deployed, and compensated how? On what terms? For how long? At what cost? My intention here is to apply that dictum to ethnographic undertakings writ large and long, so as to include the original fieldwork, the disciplinary backdrop and, as signaled above, the response of the people studied. This is more than a little unwieldy, I realize—more thought experiment than reasoned argument—but I’m trying to understand where that throughline of labor, whether planned or provoked, might take us.
Finding Focus: A Prodigal Daughter Returns Home
In the mid-1970s, a fledgling anthropologist and her young family landed in Dublin, eager to plumb the tangled knot of Gaelic sexuality. Within days of Scheper-Hughes’s arrival, a chance meeting with a psychiatrist convinced her to study something more substantive and urgent—runaway rates of schizophrenia in the rural west. Settling down in a village on the Dingle Peninsula, she set out to “study madness among bachelor farmers as a projection of cultural themes” (Kreisler, 2008). In relatively short order, she made interpretive good on that claim. Prominent among inhabitants in this “demoralised, dying, western village” (Scheper-Hughes, 1979, 190) were its lastborn sons, kept in reserve and on retainer (celibate, stuck at home, attending their aged parents). As Scheper-Hughes read the evidence (rising hospital rates, projective tests, open-ended interviews, deep immersion in everyday social life), these men were effectively being groomed for madness.
Rural anxiety about cultural demise, precarious farms, and enforced celibacy was nothing new, nor was concern about poor mental health (although depression and suicide would prove better indicators). [1] But when Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics was published in 1979, it caused a sensation. Alternately hailed and denounced as breakthrough ethnography and heartbreaking exposé, its place in medical anthropology was assured even as its notoriety (and gossip) in the host country festered: complaints about its lopsided portrait, misgivings about its interpretive warrant, deep reservations about the terms of the ethnographic contract in evidence. On her own account, the final product should embody the same “courtesy, empathy and friendship” that we extend to our informants in the field ([1979] 2001, 12−13). But informants may span a wide range of interests and investiture, and a book’s audience will include some bruised by the portrayal. Such, by her reckoning, was the price of speaking truth to power, and civility may be among its collateral damage.
Still, even if we allow for accuracy in the portrait offered, Scheper-Hughes’s project was plagued by a more fundamental issue: what lawyers refer to as “standing.” Put bluntly, who was this prodigal daughter—flaunting her feminism, Freud, and fearlessness—to air our faults, run down our failings, for all the world to see? Because she had no stake in the matter, that she subjected closely held confidences to “public shame” was not merely poor form. It was a betrayal of the welcome she and her family had been extended as guests.
Brettell had pointedly subtitled her edited collection, “the politics of ethnography,” with specific reference to the reception and interpretation of its issue by those “who are the subjects, directly or indirectly, of anthropological investigation”—by people, that is, with “a vested interest” in how the text produced portrays the lives they live (1993, 3). (Accuracy, it becomes clear, is hardly the whole story.) The contributions were wide-ranging, full of unresolved quandaries, heartfelt confessionals, and not a few tributes to Scheper-Hughes’s work. In her introductory essay, Brettell treats the text and its reception as occasion for self-scrutiny and reflection.
Others were less careful. In some, the whiff of schadenfreude was unmistakable. (For a choice selection, see Scheper-Hughes, 2000.) Invited to address a meeting of the Irish Anthropological Association, for example, she was informally shunned after arriving. Indeed, it’s not too much to suggest that at times collegial criticism bordered on the academic equivalent of slut-shaming: holding the author publicly accountable for sins all too commonly committed by other ethnographers but rarely confessed to or (at that time, anyway) exposed—if for no better reason than the inability of their erstwhile subjects to read the offending text.
But these takedowns, not unlike the text in question itself, would prove to be hurried, premature, even… generative. Debts had been incurred, accusations levied, and a response was needed.
Reparation Ventured
Fast forward 7 years: a new “twentieth anniversary” edition of Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics (SSS), is published, the original version now built out with opening and closing commentary. Those intervening years had been hard on the author. Scheper-Hughes had weathered a gale of criticism, from both natives and colleagues, and knew (I think) that more was to come. By then, too, she was having to deal not just with the legacy of her visit and the book that came of it but with the increasingly encrusted narrative of that legacy—not just what she wrote but what others wrote about what she has written, what some had heard about what she had written, what others had mis-heard or mis-transmitted about what she had written, and so on: the whole cumulative bolus of text, rumor, counternarrative, commentary, and screed.
The revised edition, penned under heavy indictment and nagging guilt, bore all the earmarks of a defense mounted before an ecclesiastical court against accusation of heresy. What she got right, she proudly recounts, a few brave souls did countenance ([1979] 2001, 56, 323). But what she got wrong? What she left out? Hedged and begrudged, some sort of redress was called for, and it is most clearly on display in her beautifully crafted epilogue (“Crediting an Clochán”). There, she amends her one-sided original with what she later recognized as having been missing: a kind of hymn to an all-but-lost communitas where neighbors can still be expected to pitch in when needed and women need not fear walking alone. But this is no palimpsest revision of the old fault-ridden text; the unrevised original is pointedly left intact, still uncorrected let alone atoned for, uneasily wedged between fresh apologia and rueful corrective. To get to that mollifying epilogue, the reader must traverse the prologue’s hear-me-roar response to critics: a barrage of marshaled detail, anchoring incident, countermemory, discursive detour, scholastic pedantry, literary outsourcing, and local champions (Heaney, prominently), all summoned to vouchsafe her work and provide surrogate imprimatur.
Withal, the work of revision is itself unsettled, the labor of reparation interrupted, put on hold. Denied forgiveness—her steadfast refusal to apologize didn’t help things—she seemed nonetheless to seek it; all the while bent on further provocation. She logs her spare notice, “unrepentant meets unforgiving” ([1979] 2001, 327), and marches on.
There was something else I noticed this time around, a suspicion I hadn’t entertained when I had read the original. Never one to run away from a fight, had our conscience-stricken author actively sought this one out herself? Was the new edition the long-awaited defense of the semi-justly accused? Might it even have been, in ways not consciously available to its author, a trial foreseen, even sought out—the noxious bug that turns out to have been a hidden feature?
Western Ireland’s windswept Dingle Peninsula is not exactly thickly settled. Clues to Ballybran’s location on that village-sparse jut of land are strewn throughout the original volume: the “single, twisting road” that leads from Tralee “over the Slieve Mish mountain range, through deep glens, alongside the ‘wild’ coastline, past low sand dunes and steep cliffs, ending up at the sheltered bay of Ballybran” ([1979] 2001, 77). You can get lost in the poetry but the landmarking is still there. Then there’s the annual pilgrimage up St. Brandon (77, 80), at the near foot of which is the “sheltered bay” where An Clochán is situated. And, with geometric precision, the intersection of two circles—the radius of one 30 miles from Tralee, that of the other 12 miles from Dingle, the latter reached from An Clochán though a “narrow mountain pass” (112−13). Far from requiring the dogged sleuthing of seasoned investigative reporters, the identity of the village was readily worked out by any schoolchild with a compass and a pencil. Ballybran’s cover was blown when the book went to press. [2]
So, one has to wonder: Did our ethnographer (no stranger to Freudian back stories) set herself up to be found out? And was the resulting inquisition and (partial) atonement an essential part of what would become a long, drawn-out ethnographic project, no single segment of which is complete without the others? And is this the labor—dialogic, agonistic, under a charter of extended duress, fueled by passion and resentment—that present-day ethnographers should be ready to sign on for if they’re serious? And what of the inquisitor herself? Think about it: what the good people of An Clochán were accusing Scheper-Hughes of having left out was what she herself most loved about the place ([1979] 2001, 317). (What kind of tradecraft requires its practitioner to quiet her heart?) On the other hand: Didn’t that same silence provoke precisely the objection—“You never wrote about our strengths” ([1979] 2001, 27, 311)—that would justify its later inclusion? And wouldn’t righting the balance serve as post hoc justification for the still-uncorrected presence of her original indictment?
Revisiting
In the summer of 2005, my wife and I boarded the ferry in Wales for Dún Laoghaire. After an uneventful crossing, we picked up a rental car, drove halfway cross country, before settling in—requisite draft Guinness quaffed—for the night. The next day we headed for An Clochán itself, arriving midday. The central pub was not difficult to find, nor crowded. We were engaged in the pleasant, no-account conversation typical of roots-seeking tourists when, at the mention of my wife’s family name, a voice boomed from the other side of the wall dividing the seating area from the bar: “Crehan? Crehan? Sheep-stealers, I hear!” whereupon an elderly gentleman came round to check out the visitors.
Here, providentially, was exactly the moment I needed to run my own Gaelic member check on the Scheper-Hughes legacy. To find out, firsthand, what these stalwart holdouts on a blasted coast really thought about the whole, faintly sordid affair. And… I couldn’t do it.
There are probably lots of reasons for this. (“Am I really cut out to be an anthropologist?” comes to mind.) But one stands out: getting in and getting out on a tourist’s visa, a faux innocent abroad ambushing his genial host, just wasn’t sufficient warrant. It felt like a grifter’s con. There was also—no avoiding it—a sense of my own unconfronted complicity. The terms of the public debate, the vivid hues of call-and-response, the academic snubs and discourtesies Scheper-Hughes continued to endure—even the uneasy truce lacing up the still-unsettled account of what once-was-Ballybran—all this tended to mute and sideline a host of ethnographic knots that most of us grapple with: the inevitable betrayals of intimacy and trust; the unannounced spelunking into the unconscious and alien-world interpretations of once-familiar lives; the deceptive transparency of the absurdly open-ended ethnographic contract; resort to unexamined (and, in the event, misleading) administrative records when we know that official functions are not the only ones; the inescapable knowledge that your representation of their suffering may not only not relieve but inadvertently compound that suffering; the dull insistent sense that the trade has been uneven, and that an unrequited debt remains.
I can put this simply: As this still-unfolding story so ably shows, “revisiting” is not just one way of doing the work of reflectivity in ethnography; it may also, as Michael Burawoy (2003) has suggested, be a searching extension of the original work itself. That first effort, the impossible product of an improbable apprenticeship, reveals itself over time as a fool’s errand invariably in need of emendation and expansion. This may include the brickbats thrown by outraged villagers, self-appointed scribes, and one’s own colleagues. In Scheper-Hughes’s case, the outcome was a much-improved account of a still-evolving locale. That ugly dissident chorus made it a better book. (How did Ireland’s late bard Samuel Beckett put it? “Fail again. Fail better.”)
Postscript: Five years later, I returned to An Clochán after an unsuccessful gale-blown attempt to climb Mt. Brandon, only to find the pub closed. There was motion behind the misted window and after a tentative knock the owner let us in, allowing a pint while he continued to clean and converse. This time I had come better prepared, having stopped at a bookstore in Dingle and confirmed with its owner that Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics was indeed the infamous study of a nearby village. A casual mention on my part was all it took: the complaints came out in a torrent, with a bitterness seemingly uneased by the passage of time. It came off as both well-rehearsed and somehow freshly felt. This time around it wasn’t only her tradecraft (she had taken “these very poorly educated people and used them as terms of reference”). No, what seemed to rankle more was the family’s poor housekeeping and the Yank’s habit of breastfeeding her infant in public. But again, this was something of a set-piece and the accused had received and parried such criticisms before. In comments that further complicate that “crediting” epilogue, she had also paid curt heed to how the rural village was “fractured by divisions of class, gender, and age,” in ways that disfavored the “old ones” and solitary hangers-on at the periphery. The Scheper-Hughes family lived in a nearby hamlet, Faha, on the dirt road that leads to the trailhead for Mt. Brandon and hosted a free day care center in the summer. On her telling, they were not welcome by the families living on the main street of the village, the commercial class of a rising rural middle class (Scheper-Hughes, 2016).
A final irony: The book’s original thesis—the conjectured link between “blocked and frustrated aspirations” in these stunted rural lives and rising rates of schizophrenia—turned out to be a sophisticated, culturally upgraded explanation for a problem that wasn’t there. More rigorous, community-based incidence studies (e.g., Ni Nuallain et al., 1987; see also Scheper-Hughes [1979], 2001, 24, 40) not only failed to support the purported high rates but also found hospitalization data to be a poor proxy for accurate diagnosis. And “seasonal warehous[ing]” of the “unattached elderly” in asylums ([1979] 2001, 35) had long been practiced. But the documentation mustered in support of that failed argument with respect to young people has entered local lore. A recent indie film set in Dingle, The Welfare of Tomás Ó Hallissy (Campbell, 2016), pays respectful tribute to its portrait of dead-end rural prospects. Schizophrenia may have missed the mark, but the toll of redundancy, sexual exile, and no heirs is achingly apparent.
Incompleteness
An unusual exhibition opened New York’s Met Breuer Museum in the fall of 2016. Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible was dedicated to an uncommon approach to making objects or images. Incompleteness wasn’t the object of the assorted art displayed; rather, it was the way the image or object was being made or had been left unmade—sometimes by design, sometimes by disruptive accident. But regardless of their provenance, the resultant works strike the viewer as “unsettled, uncertain, provisional, unresolved, and open to change ” (Baum et al., 2016, 14). Denied finality of form, one commentator argued, we are “thrown back into the context of the work’s production, asking all the questions regarding intention and reception we otherwise might hold at bay” (Stewart, cited in in Baum et al., 2016, 141).
Even with finished forms—and especially at a time when what it means to form or finish is unsettled—anthropologists ask those questions anyway. Ethnography is our collective métier, our joint travail, calling upon us to complete, extend, and rework what others in our trade have done. We are forever picking up the pieces they left behind, resuming conversations they started, repaying debts they incurred, delivering on unmet promises, making good on unrequited pasts.
Still, it’s the rare ethnographer who plants a depth charge in her own work, but such I’d argue is the anomalous achievement of Nancy Scheper-Hughes. She took head-on the “social, psychological and economic aspects of mental illness in rural Ireland,” and—battered, bloodied, and still unrepentant—produced (and continues to revisit and revise) a work of enduring power. “An ethnography to break your heart” (2016), to be sure—and one whose watchword (reportedly the last note penned by her hero Heaney) remains: Noli timere.
And those sidelined issues mentioned above—the terms of recognition, reciprocity, and accountability we are prepared to play by—remain the durable sources of disquiet in my own professional life. I don’t expect resolution anytime soon.
Acknowledgements
My first meeting with Nancy Scheper-Hughes occurred by accident. (We were thrown together for a panel at an annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, a happenstance that would later unfold into incident and acquaintance.) Out of the mix, I learned something of what it took to be a serious ethnographer: it helped to have nerve, a decent way with a pen, the scouring rasp of time, a thicker skin than the one I owned at the time, and fortitude. An understanding spouse and field-game kids wouldn’t hurt, too. The test-case text in question was Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics ([1979] 2001). From what has since taken shape in scholarly precincts as a tangled tale of betrayal and atonement, I also learned (in slow, labored, tenuous chunks) how wrenching having “second thoughts” can be.
My thanks, too, to Caroline Parker, Deniz Yonucu, and Vita Peacock for helpful comments on an earlier draft.
Notes
[1] William Trevor’s The Hill Bachelors (1999) would give voice to what had long been known locally.
[2] In the revised edition, Scheper-Hughes mocks the “cute and conventional use of pseudonyms” ([1979] 2001, 12) and says that (excepting a couple of cases) she would not use them a second time.
Works Cited
Kelly Baum, Andrea Bayer, and Sheena Wagstaff. eds. 2016. Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Caroline B. Brettell, ed. 1993. When They Read What We Write: The Politics of Ethnography. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey.
Burawoy, Michael. 2003. “Revisits: An Outline of a Theory of Reflexive Ethnography.” American Sociological Review 68(5): 645–679.
Campbell, Duncan, dir. 2016. The Welfare of Tomás Ó Hallissy. London: Nakba FilmWorks.
Günel, Gökçe, and Chika Watanabe. 2024. “Patchwork Ethnography.” American Ethnologist 51(1): 131–139.
Kreisler, Harry. 2008. “ Conversations with History: Nancy Scheper-Hughes.” University of California Television, Streaming video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYu6VMC_42k.
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