From Culture as a "Product" to Culture as Experience: Back to Ethnography

In 1973, almost 35 years ago now, Clifford Geertz first published his famous remark concerning thick description in anthropology. Attempting not so much to set out a program for anthropology (in short, stating what anthropologists should do), but rather to define the anthropological approach, Geertz furthermore reaffirmed the descriptive character of anthropologists' activities. From the outset, he suggested that in order to understand what makes up a discipline, it was not so much necessary to focus on the results it produced, the theories it formulated or the discoveries that emerged from it; instead, the focal issue should be what its practitioners actually do. And Geertz said that what anthropologists most obviously do is describe; in other words, they are actually ethnographers. Geertz's affirmations are still immensely relevant for today's anthropologists, and it seems to me that they could also very clearly be applied to what ethnology has become in Canada. For the purposes of this text, and, as such, in a manner that is truly exceptional, I wish to apply the classic North American distinction, one that is (or was until recently) made by ethnologists and folklorists, between ethnology (1) and anthropology, with ethnology presenting itself as the diachronic study of Western cultures and defining itself by the fact that the researchers are themselves members of the culture under study (close or the same), whereas anthropology, is (or was) instead thought of as the synchronic study of exotic cultures where the researchers are not members of the cultures they are studying (Bergeron et al. 1978; Desdouits 1997). It must furthermore be specified that, generally speaking, in North America this distinction is essentially made by ethnologists and folklorists and is most often ignored by anthropologists, who, perhaps given their superior numbers (there are fewer ethnologists), seem to regularly ignore the very existence of ethnology, which has long tried to distinguish itself from anthropology. Of course, before having recourse to such a distinction, we must, moreover, immediately add that today it would no longer be considered necessary to provide any distinguishing theoretical, methodological or epistemological foundations for the discipline of ethnology. Notwithstanding the fact that in the past ethnology took on the distinguishing characteristics that I just described and that this distinction has been the source of specific disciplinary institutions and traditions, today there are of course researchers trained in ethnology who work from the synchronic perspective, and sometimes (though more rarely) in exotic contexts as well. In addition, for some time now anthropologists have been interested in the historic dimension of the phenomena that they study, and many of them have also applied their approaches to Western societies. Nevertheless, it would still seem necessary to recognize the existence of an institutional distinction and of different disciplinary traditions. In fact, Universite Laval still has an ethnology program that is separate from its anthropology program, just as at Memorial, there is still a folklore department distinct from its anthropology department, and this same type of overlapping duality can be found in the vast majority of American universities that have folklore departments. Lastly, I would like to emphasize that we would surely be wrong to think that today this distinction only represents an administrative division; nothing seems to me further from the truth! In fact, whereas anthropologists see themselves as being the heirs of Mauss or Malinowski, ethnologists perceive themselves more as the heirs of Van Gennep or Propp, and while anthropology students at Universite Laval read Levi-Strauss for the first time, ethnology students instead discover Favret-Saada. Finally, no matter what can be said about the former culturalist divisions between fields of study, which once enabled people from both camps to establish their anthropological credentials and which no longer seem relevant today, it must be noted that many anthropology programs still reflect divisions into culture areas, and in my view these divisions nowadays seem to resonate even more in the way that new professors are recruited for anthropology departments (in fact, professors are seldom recruited without there being a specification that preference will be given to candidates interested in a particular culture area). …

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