Hybrid Cultures, Hybrid Selves: The Establishment of Commonalities

Tamar Diana Wilson, UMSL

This paper is about using one’s autobiographical, or life, experiences to

establish commonalities with those one represents, or with whom one co-produces a
representation of members of a culture. These autobiographical experiences may be
acquired before entering “the field,” while doing work--participant-observation
and interviewing--in “the field,” or after withdrawing from “the field.”
Following Gupta and Ferguson (1997: 35), I put “the field” in quotes, because, as
they point out, we are always in the field, wherever we are, yet the notion of
going somewhere where distinctive, geographically bound cultures are held to
exist, entering another world for a shorter or longer period, and then eventually
returning to the world where the academy is located, has been, and still is, part
of an enduring anthropological mythology guiding consciousness. Opposed to this
concept of separate, bounded, and distinct cultures are visions of heterogeneity,
diversity, and stratification within cultures and hybridity, creolization and
deterritorialization between cultures. There is also recognition of the
heterogeneity of a polyvocal individual with multiple and shifting identities.
Opposed to seeing the “Other” as an exotic species, we must realize that the Other
shares aspects of us, and we are partially the other. One must contemplate the
adage: “Everyman is in certain respects like all other men; like some other men;
like no other man” (Kluckhohn and Murray, 1948: 15 cited in Hannerz, 1996: 39).
The same is true for women, and for men and women, wherever their geographical
overlappings occur. To envision how autobiographical overlap can contribute to
social science knowledge, it is necessary to explore the hybridity and
heterogeneity in the world, in cultures, and in individuals.

I. HYBRIDITY, HETEROGENEITY, AND INTERCONNECTIONS

The Mestizaje of the World and of Cultures
A number of scholars have pointed out the multiple interconnections and
hybridity of the modern “nation”-state and its cultures. Said (1993: 5-6, 332)
sustains that the vast empires of the 19th century, British, French, Turkish,
Russian and Japanese, fomented cultural hybridity in the periphery, and that
massive displacements of immigrants, refugees, and exiles contingent on
disruptions in the post-colonial age has fomented cultural hybridity in the core.
Said (1993: 61) views the world as characterized by “overlapping territories,
intertwined histories.” In his words, “Partially because of empire, all cultures
are involved in one another; none is simple and pure, all are hybrid,
heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic” (Said, 1993:
xxv).
But cultural hybridity, diffusion and intermixings occurred long before the
19th century. The empires of the Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch, established in
the 16th century, also led to mestizaje, both “racial” and cultural. The Chinese
diaspora, beginning in the 15th and 16th centuries to South East Asia and the
Phillipines, in the 17the century to Mexico and Peru, in the 18th to India, and
reaching South America, the, the Caribbean, North America and Africa in large
numbers by the 19th century (Pan, 1999) also led to hybridity.
However, the process of cultural hybridization, or what Hannerz (1996: 67-
68) calls the “creolization” of cultures (which he holds has led to a “cultural
continuum”) is seen by many contemporary scholars to have accelerated in the 20th
century, along with processes of globalization. Globalization is, as Hannerz
(1996: 17) tells us, “a matter of increasingly long distance interconnectedness,
at least across national boundaries, preferably between continents as well.” It
involves flows of, and interactions between, people, capital, technology, media,
ideologies and commodities (Appadurai, 1996: 33-36).
A culture, on any scale, indigenous or “national” is heterogeneous within
itself as well, with divisions minimally between men and women, between
generations, between those with wealth and/or power and those without these forms
of capital. A culture often comes to be contested by the subalterns who make up
at least some of its members. One of the best illustrations of culture as
contested, even of culture as contestation, is historian Steve Stern’s (1995) work
on gender relations in late colonial Mexico.
Culture as contestation, contested patriarchal pacts, absolute versus
contingent interpretations of patriarchal right, women´s weapons in the face of a
pervasive patriarchal society, the power of the elders over the young, the elites
and village authorities over the less affluent and the marginalized justified by
patriarchal templates on the societal level--these are some of the ideas Stern
develops in his study of gender struggles in late Colonial Mexico. Focusing on
“subalterns” among the peasants of Morelos and Oaxaca and the “plebians” of Mexico
City, Stern rests his analysis on the perusal of 708 violence and morality
incidents which were registered in the criminal courts between 1760 and 1821. He
shows how “patriarchal pacts” were continually contested, and occasionally
renegotiated, by women. Whereas men generally sustained a view of absolute
patriarchal right within their households (as the elders did within villages),
women viewed their required submission and obedience as contingent upon the
fulfillment of certain male obligations. The obligations included economic
maintenance, avoidance of public flaunting of infidelities and of contracting
liaisons which diverted economic resources from the household, showing a modicum
of respect to wives and daughters, and exercising restrain in domestic violence.
Women, while subordinated within the patriarchal system, nonetheless
possessed certain weapons used to rebel against a husband/father they considered
unjust or noncompliant with his obligations as family patriarch. They could slow
down on expected domestic services or tarry too long on extra-household chores.
They could also stake claims in the public domain in at least four ways:
pluralizing patriarchs, utilizing women’s networks, creating a public scandal, or
resorting to magic--the last taken seriously in a society in which the belief in
the efficacy of magic was pervasive. Pluralization of patriarchs involved seeking
aid from consanguineal or affinal male kin , village elders, authorities, judges,
or other men in positions of power, sometimes even lovers, to bring husbands into
line. “Cross-overs” to a particular woman’s side, Stern argues, did not serve to
undermine patriarchal privilege, but merely strengthened the power of those
patriarchs called upon to sanction wayward men, who were often socially
disruptive and relatively marginalized in any case.
Thus, the overarching norm of patriarchy was contested, and factions often
formed between the subalterns and the dominant forces. Within any culture there
will be contradictions and contestations: cultures are heterogeneous, containing
individuals with multiple identities, factionalized and conflictive (on field
studies of factionalized and conflictive cultures, see, for example Wax, 1985).
Said’s (1994) critique of the practice of Orientalism or Othering of non-Western
peoples and cultures, of the exaggerating of these differences, finds echoes in
Nayaran’s (1998: 88) investigation of what she calls “cultural essentialism,”
which “often conflates dominant cultural norms with the actual values and
practices of a culture.” She sustains that culture is not homogeneous, monolithic
and internally consistent, but factionalized, plural, divergent and stratified,
composed of individuals with multiple world views, values, life ways and beliefs.
Comparing “gender essentialism” (characterized by constructing binaries between
men and women) with cultural essentialism, Nayaran (1998: 88) points out that
“While gender essentialism often equates the problems, interests and locations of
some socially dominant groups of men and women with those of ‘all men’ and ‘all
women,’ cultural essentialism often equates the values, worldviews, and practices
of some socially dominant groups with those of ‘all members of the culture.’” The
error in this thinking is shown by Stern’s work cited above.
Cultural essentialism can be seen as rooted in the overuse, and incorrect
application of Weber’s “ideal types,” a search for “logical investigation” based
on differentiation from other ideal-types while ignoring Weber’s (1978: 20)
warning that “it is probably seldom if ever that real phenomena can be found which
corresponds exactly to one of these ideally constructed types.” Abu-Lughod
(1991: 150) argues against generalizations, such as ideal-typifications, on the
grounds that they tend to homogenize cultures and freeze them in time, and also
constitute a “language of power” which places the observer (morally and
epistemologically) outside of the community being studied. In a sense the
bounded, monadic individual is also an ideal type, ripped from her/his internal
complexity and the complexity of the networks which reach, amoeba-like, ever-
spreading, out into the world.

The Heterogeneous Individual/Subject

Individuals, too, are heterogeneous, hybrid beings with multiple locations
and intertwined and interconnected identities. They are bears of what Rosaldo
(1989) has called “multiplex subjectivity” with diverse and interconnected
identifications. To cite Said (1993: 336) one more: “No one today is purely one
thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are not more than
starting points, which if followed into actual experience for only a moment are
quickly left behind” (Italics in Original). Individuals are complex beings in
both the etic (categorical) and emic (subjective) sense. Haraway (1991) speaks of
partial knowledges, situated in the multiplicity of an often contradictorily
positioned self, Kearney (1996: 141) of an “internally differentiated subject” who
does not speak monovocally, nor can be classified by categories generated by the
state. Taking Mexican peasants who migrate transnationally and internally for
wage labor as the subject of his monograph, Kearney shows how their entry into
multiple economic niches, as peasants and proletarians, as undocumented workers in
fields and factories, as internal migrants to plantations and urban squatter
settlements, cause them to escape governmental classifications which would contain
them in one subject identity. They are, in Kearney’s (1996: 141) terminology,
“polybians” (as opposed to amphi-bians who occupy only two ecological niches),
living and working in a variety of habitats that a synchronic account cannot do
justice to. Their multiple identities overflow traditional ascriptions.
Kearney’s account can be taken as an etic view of the complex subject.
Haraway (1991: 193) provides a more emic analysis of a heterogeneous self
whose “topography of subjectivity is multi-dimensional” as is the vision of, the
situated knowledges possible for, such a multi-dimensional self. Knowledges are
situated in the partial connections that such a diverse and plural self makes
possible (Haraway, 1991: 196). Endorsing Haraway’s concept of “situated
knowledges,” Gupta and Ferguson (1997: 35) argue that the anthropologist must work
at achieving a location, social, cultural and political, which will permit
building links to those in other, social, cultural and political locations. They
underscore that “As in coalition politics a location is not just something one
ascriptively has (white middle-class male, Asian-American woman, etc.)--it is
something one works at” (Gupta and Ferguson, 1997: 37) (Italics in Original).
As one enters a community, one will be socialized (or re-socialized) as Wax (1985:
14) points out, into new locations and new identities. Besides conceiving of
interlinked locations as a method of generating knowledge and establishing
alliances and “tactical affiliations” (Clifford, 1997: 215) which aid in the
achievement of knowledge (and understanding), I would suggest also stressing, when
in dialogue with members of a community under study (with all of its
interconnecting webs of affiliation with other people and other communities and
entities), the overlapping experience of the anthropologist and the informant have
of the world, including all of its entities such as families, marriage, work,
leisure activities, state policies, etc. One’s life experience, overlapping with
that of others, or coming to overlap in the future, is what facilitates, as well,
the work of finding new locations or positionings, in order to, in Clifford’s
(1997) conceptualization build alliance and seek articulations between the various
locations of gender, race, class, ethnicity, nationality.
The stress on commonalities would lead away, perhaps, from generalizations,
and even writing about “cultures” as though they were bounded unities. Abu-Lughod
(1991: 154) suggests that anthropologists should write against “culture,”
mistakenly construed as homogeneous, coherent, unchanging, timeless, in order to
portray individuals who “are confronted with choices, struggle with others, make
conflicting statements, argue about points of view on the same events, undergo ups
and downs in various relationships and changes in their circumstances and desires,
face new pressures, and fail to predict what will happen to them or those around
them.” Strategizing, improvising, and, within limits, innovating, are the reality
of people’s lives: not just rule following and role playing (both rules and roles
can be bent, expanded, made to apply to unique situations) (Bourdieu, 1977: Abu-
Lughod, 1991: 141). The “ethnography of the particular” that Abu-Lughod calls for
will show the commonalities we share with others, not so far from us as near once
such commonalities are recognized. Abu-Lughod (1991: 158) writes: “And the
particulars suggest that others live as we perceive ourselves as living, not as
robots programmed with ‘cultural’ rules, but as people going though life agonizing
over decisions, making mistakes, trying to make themselves look good, enduring
tragedies and personal losses, enjoying others, and finding moments of happiness.”
We thus share, with many men and many women, all men and all women, some men and
some women (but can it be said with no man and no woman?) some overlapping
autobiographical experiences. Just as an individual’s ever-expanding (through new
births, new marriages, mobility, etc.) network will not completely overlap with
another’s, while many individual’s networks will contain members of other’s
networks (of varying ages, sexes, stages in life cycle, work, migratory and family
histories), no personality will completely overlap with another’s, though there
will probably be partial overlap, at least one network node.

II. COMMONALITIES BETWEEN SELF AND OTHER(S)

There are at least five kinds of commonalities which anthropologists should
seek in their fieldwork (the gaining of knowledge based on understanding) and
their texts (the display of understanding based on knowledge). First
commonalities based on the hybridity or creolization of cultures and
interconnectivity of the world. Second, commonalities based on ascriptive
location (race, sex, class, nationality, ethnicity) as well as commonalities based
on personal situation (work, family and migration histories, stage in the life
cycle). Third, commonalities based on emotional experiences (joys and tragedies,
celebrations and mournings) in common. Fourth, commonalities based on
(re)socialization into the community under study. Fifth, commonalities based on
sharing a common moral vision, what you can say “no” to: torture and terrorism,
babies dying for lack of food or medical care, children eating from the garbage
dumps (Cf. Berger, 1974; Scheper-Hughes, 1995).

Commonalities on a World Scale

A field site to which the anthropologist travels by foot, car, bus or plane,
or some combination thereof, can be seen as loci of overlapping force fields (in
Bourdieu’s (1998) sense of a field enabling and constraining action),
concentrating particular bundles of political, economic, social and media
processes and activities (which take place on global, international,
transnational, national, regional and local scales). Awareness of these processes
and activities can form a ground for establishing commonalities, through
translating one’s own experiences of these processes and activities in dialogue
with members of the community, as they, in dialogue will translate for you.
People will provide metaphors and similes for the commonalities of macro-
experience. For example, a woman on a rancho in Jalisco (where I did research in
1989 and 1990)--a rancho (unincorporated rural village) with high rates of
outmigration and recurrent migration to the United States--likened the U.S.-Mexico
border to the Berlin wall, and hoped it, too, would someday fall. In this simile,
perhaps, though I do not know, she was including Mexico’s lost lands, lost during
the war which ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe in 1848. I did not pursue her
simile, unfortunately, to see how deeply seated in Mexican history it may have
been, or whether only an observation on contemporary conditions in which the
undocumented face innumerable angers to cross the border (Fieldnotes, 1990).
On the subject of U.S. immigration laws, one recurrent migrant entered the
subjectivity of American citizens who protest the presence of the undocumented in
their midst. He said, to paraphrase, that they were right to erect barriers, for
if there were none, we would all go, and there would be no more United States
(Fieldnotes, 1990). Not all were in agreement with this observation, of course;
the rancho residents are a heterogeneous lot, and each person had his/her unique
opinion on how immigration laws should be changed, ranging from open borders to a
new bracero program, to being able to cross to the north as easily as I was able
to cross to the south. The “mediascape” (as Appadurai (1996) terms it) has led to
closer interconnectedness between people, as they share vicariously processes and
events that cross whatever border might be drawn on a map. So, too, has
international and transnational migration led to greater actual interconnections
with ever-expanding, in home and host societies, networks of social relations.
Thus it would not be surprising, when doing fieldwork in North Africa, for
example, if the anthropologist mentioned Paris, Marseilles or Cadiz, that a a
person in dialogue would offer “I have a cousin in Paris” (or Marseilles or Cadiz)
or might even have been to one or more of these cities himself/herself.

Commonalities Based on Ascriptive Location and Personal Situation

Although we must avoid a gender essentialism (Narayan, 1998) which lumps all
men together with all other men, and all women together with all other women, it
can be summized that some of men’s experiences will overlap more with experiences
of other men that they will with women’s experiences. And the same goes for some
experiences of women. A number of ethnographers have discussed how their
ascriptive statuses gave them differential access to members of a community.
Rosalie Wax (1979) argues that ascribed characteristics of the self, especially
age and sex, can either facilitate or hinder, communication with various
ascriptively located members of a community. A rigid sex segregation on the Sioux
reservation made it impossible for her husband, Murray Wax, to interview women
because of the gossip it would provoke. She, as a mature woman, had easy access
to other mature women, and even to some men’s activities. Wax (1979: 518)
speculates that, while mature women had access to most women and some males, a
young woman would be rejected by other young women who would view her as
“formidable competition” for the attentions of young men. On the other hand,
commonalities based on gender, which often make it easier for women to interview
women and men to interview men, can be overcome by political positioning, as
Gorkin et al (2000= foundÑ Gorkin’s left wing political stance make his
viewpoints resonate with some of the El Salvadorian women he interviewed, and gave
him access to life stories that were offered less fully to his female El
Salvadorean interviews.
Being a woman does not automatically give access to all women “in the
field.” Golde (1986: 87) found suspicions about her possibly alienating the
affections of novios (sweethearts) or husbands among young women in a village in
Mexico, with whom she thus had difficulties in establishing communication. But
sometimes such suspicions can be overcome, as the anthropologist’s presence
becomes normalized in the community and if s/he accepts the prevalent local values
and works, or strategies, through them. Thus, when I interviewed male heads of
household on the rancho in Jalisco similarly rent by gender suspicions, I always
first explained to the wife what the interview was about, make an appointment to
interview her husband through her, and invited them to be present if they wished
(which they almost always did). Since I was doing migration and work histories,
wives’ presence was valuable in establishing the exact year of crossing, often
forgotten if there were multiple crossings. Women would jog men’s memory, with
reminders such as “don’t you remember, it was a year after little Carlos was
born.” In sum, establishing commonalities may be more easily done when one shares
an ascriptive status recognized as a category in the community.
 Sudarkasa’s (1986: 182)) age was an important factor in her fieldwork that
both facilitated her establishing commonalities with some groups and hindered it
with others. As a young woman she was able to establish close friendships with
other young women, and “to learn from elderly men, who regarded me more or less as
a daughter to whom they could explain things.” It was more difficult for her to
approach or get information from young men about her age. One’s talents (about
which more below) can aid in establishing commonalities as well. Phil DeVita
established his credentials with the Acadian lobster fishermen by his mechanical
and fishing abilities, part of the autobiographical experience he brought into the
field. Initially rejecting, community members eventually embraced him because of
these talents. In his worlds, “I became accepted as a mechanic and a fisherman,
not as an anthropologist” (DeVita, 1992: 163). Talents he developed in his pre-
fieldwork experience aided him in establishing rapport with members of a closed-
to-outsiders community: because of his abilities he became a “partial insider”.
Even “full” insiders engaged in autoethnography are insiders to only some
members of the community under study, however. Insiders are also outsiders in
some ways, and can even be surprised by things that go on within “their culture”
(Narayan, 1997). That is because “cultural ‘realities’ and interpretations of
events among individuals in the same group are highly variable, changing or
contradictory. Thus, an insider’s position is not necessarily an unchallengeable
‘true’ picture; it represents one possible perspective” (Hayano, 1979: 102).
Being an insider, a partial insider, or even seeking acceptance in the community
as a stranger, can thus restrict access to information from certain categories of
people, especially the young to middle-aged of the opposite sex (see, for example
Abu-Lughod, 1988; AlTorki, 1988; Dumont, 1992; Sudarkasa, 1986; Wax, 1979) It
can be argued, however, that whether insider or outsider there will be some
autobiographical overlap with some members of the community, if only because we
live in the same historical period and are subjected to similar political and
economic, social and media influences on a macro-scale.
In longitudinal studies, the commonalities established can change. Caplan
(1993) found that as she matured, married and had children, as she passed though
her life-cycle, and as anthropological paradigms were transformed (from a focus on
feminism to a focus on gender relations), her positionality, or locations,
changed--both from her own point of view and from the points of view of the
members of a Tanzanian village to which she returned three times. The
commonalities established were different and perhaps amplified, as her family
history developed, as she moved from single to married woman to mother, and as her
“paradigm for looking” was altered.
Although commonalities can be established based on categorical ascriptions
or personal situations relevant to the community, it is useful to remember:

The ethnographer, as positioned subject, grasps certain human phenomena

better than others. He or she occupies a position or structural location and
observes with a particular angle of vision.. Consider, for example, how age,
gender, being an outsider, and association with a neo-colonial regime influence
what the ethnographer learns. The notion of position also refers to how life
experiences both enable and inhibit particular kinds of insight . . . . . By the
same token, so-called natives are also positioned subjects who have a distinctive
mix of insight and blindness. Consider the structural positions of older versus
younger Ilongot men, or the differing positions of chief mourners versus those
less involved during a funeral (Rosaldo, 1989: 19; see also Okely, 195: 14).

Some autobiographical overlap between anthropologists and community members of

varying categories, however, is not only possible, but probable. The importance
of an “ethnography of the particular” comes to the fore in considering with whom
most commonalities can be established.

Commonalities Based on Emotional Experiences in Common

 According to James Clifford (1986: 109), “Much of our knowledge about other
cultures must now be seen as contingent, the problematic outcome of
intersubjective dialogue, translation, and projection.” This statement could
easily be changed to, “Much of our knowledge about each other must be seen as
contingent, the problematic outcome of intersubjectivity, dialogue, translation,
and projection.” Many of our commonalities both “in the field” and “at home” are
established by trading stories, about ones joys and sorrows, about ones triumphs
and set backs.
Agonizing over choices and following the ups and downs of life the best way
one can, may be understood by members of a community even if it goes against
perceived dominant norms. Schrijvers (1993) went into “the field” in Sri Lanka
accompanied by her second husband and children from her first marriage. She
feared information leaking out about her “scandalous past,” in a village where
divorce was not countenanced. But when she eventually revealed her story, having
to do so because of her children’s remarks to people in the village, people
treated her well and she and her family “came to be viewed as ‘normal’ human
beings, people who, just like most villagers, had undergone serious difficulties
in their personal lives” (Schrijvens, 1993: 149).
My being divorced, in a colonia popular in Mexicali with a large number of
female-headed households, allowed me to establish communication about the
existence of prior husbands--often more than one--that I would perhaps not
otherwise had access to, given the prevailing moral injunction that a woman should
marry once and endure the marriage, however bad it was, for life. Women talked
easily to me about the various fathers of their children, even though, to friends
from the same colonia who were currently married (and often pretending it was
their only marriage to neighbors) they might not admit the number of their
previous alliances.
Sharing information about joyous (or tragic) life events in dialogue is also
one way of gaining knowledge and understanding. In her study of a Zapotec village
in Oaxaca, Nader (1985: 101) reveals that “in eliciting information about exchange
at marriage, I would describe a stereotypic American wedding, nothing who hives
what to whom and when. When I became their informant, more symmetry in the
relationship could come about.” Giving information about one’s particular life,
the real wedding of a friend or cousin, the real funeral of a mother or
grandfather, can also provoke information-giving as resonance, or perhaps
dissonance, comes to be stressed in conversation by those you are dialoguing with.
Notably, reciprocity is a major means of establishing empathy and
commonalities in “the field.”. The strengths one brings to “the field” include
both physical and mental talents, encompassing everything from mechanical ability,
to knowledge of basic medicines or how to fill out legal papers, all of which
allow communicative acts to take place. Reciprocity in the field is often
grounded in exchanging one’s special talents (and inclinations to help people
solve their problems) for access and enables the establishment of (mutual) trust.
The anthropologist can offer certain services in exchange for people’s time and
patience. Golde (1986: 10) points out that “Reciprocity in some form can be the
anthropologist’s means of demonstrating her value, her membership in the
community, and of counteracting the negative effects of her differences.” Such
aid also leads to establishing common experiences with members of the community
via=vis entities such as governmental offices, schools, hospitals and the like in
the surrounding environment that impinges on the lives of community members.
Experiences that take place after fieldwork can also lead to greater
understanding of what one has seen and heard and talked about, a feeling of
greater commonality with those with whom you have dialogued. Thus Rosaldo (1989:
7-8) only understood the anger at bereavement which led to headhunting among the
Ilongot when he experienced his own grief and subsequent rage over the premature
death of his wife.

Commonalities Based on (Re)socialization into the Community Under Study

 In the dialectic between Self and Other involved in most successful
fieldwork there occurs at a minimum the attempt by Others to make the fieldworker
more of an insider and the attempt by the ethnographer to attain at least marginal
insider status.
The ethnographer’s presence is normalized, and people attempt to bind him or
her to their communities, in ways that are similar cross-culturally. They do this
through fictive kinship ties and through the attempted establishment of affinal
kinship ties, that is, marriage to one of their group or family, as just a brief
look at the ethnographic literature reveals. It is their means of “socializing”
the outsider or even partial insider into the group.
Fictive kinship may include being adopted as a “daughter” by a family, a
role that may involve restrictions, expectations, and limitations perceived as
overwhelming whether among the Eskimo (Briggs, 1986), in modern-day Japan (Kondo,
1986) or among the Bedouins (Abu-Lughod, 1988), although such a role may
constitute, on the other hand, a valuable identity in facilitating fieldwork in
societies as diverse as Tanzania (Caplan, 1993: 170), Malaysia (Karim, 1993: 83)
and Nigeria (Sudarkasa, 1986). Conformity to local gender norms required
especially by an “insider” to the community under study may be similarly
restrictive (Berik, 1996; Altorki, 1988). The fictive kinship in which the
outsider becomes involved may be either ad hoc, or a cultural institution, such as
the practice of compadrazgo in Ibero-America as well as among other Catholic and
non-Catholic groups worldwide (Sandstrom, 1995; Freedman, 1986: 352; Hutheesing,
1993: 97). Becoming normalized as kin and socialized into kinship roles may
involve being considered a potential marriage partner, and being offered a wife or
husband, or being encouraged to find a spouse within the community (Golde, 1986:
73; Karim, 1993: 84-85; Freedman, 1986). Freedman (1986: 354) recounts that upon
her return to a village in Romania as a widow she was urged to remarry within the
community, partially because she was perceived “as a threat to the women and a
temptation to the men.” Unmarried status hindered friendship ties with young,
unmarried women in a village in Guerrero, Mexico studied by Golde (1986: 87):
these young women viewed her as a potential competitor for male attention.
Such fears may lead to trying to normalize (or exorcise) the fieldworker’s
dangerous, out of place presence by turning him/her into a married or otherwise
kin-tied person who is thereby restrained and constrained to a recognizable
“place” in the society. In this regard it is worth noting that Macintyre (1993:
251) ascribes her being adopted into a totemic clan on the island of Tubetube
(Papua New Guinea) as an effort “to minimize the disruption I caused by having no
rightful place.” Men adopted as “sons” may also have their gendered identities
regulated. Thus, Abrahamson’s (1993: 73) fictive mother among the Serea of
Melanesia felt “it was her mission to try to secure and insure me against the
temptations of illicit sex and violence that existed for the ancestors, and to
which human women occasionally fell victim.”
Often, unmarried women are seen as in need of protection (O’Brien, 1993:
244). Sisterhood may be conferred upon single women in societies where male
protection is considered a prerequisite (Joseph, 1996). Fueled by their cognitive
dissonance in finding the stranger, that is, the ethnographer, a person out of
place--or potentially out of place because obviously unaware of insider norms--and
thus possibly polluting in Mary Douglas’ (1966) sense, people attempt to normalize
the outsider’s presence by binding him/her to local idioms of kinship and gender
relations.
But adoption and marriage proposals are not defined only negatively: they
are an expression, often, of positive affect for the ethnographer, an attempt to
make him/her more “one of us.” How many of the readers have hoped a good friend
would marry a sibling or a cousin, or had a good friend try to arrange such an
alliance with a relative? Normalization is less the motive here than binding, and
both may be traits found universally in the treatment of strangers with perceived
positive intentions toward the family, band, or village. I would like to suggest
this by comparing Dumont’s accounts in The Headman and I with my experiences in a
Mexicali squatter settlement, or as the people themselves would call it, a colonia
popular.
One of the men with whom Dumont had ongoing friendly relations began to
call him “father,” which, given the classificatory kinship system among the
Panare, made him by the logic of the system, the headman’s “brother.” Although
Doming Barrios began calling Dumont “father” in perhaps no more that friendly
jest, both Domingo and the headman gained economically from the adoption (Dumont,
1992: 94). Domingo Barrios, as Dumont's “son” both felt, and by local custom was,
entitled to a share of Dumont’s wealth, including such items as tobacco and
ammunition. So was Dumont’s “brother,” the headman, who mediating Dumont’s
supply of goods and services to the rest of the community. But responsibilities,
following group norms, were reciprocal: the headman reciprocated with services
such as fixing a leaky roof and with gifts of yams, cassava, fruit, and smoked
fish (Dumont, 1992: 134). Nonetheless, Dumont feels the affection kin terms used
for him by members of the band, who related to him through Domingo’s
classification, were based on his economic contributions more than any other
motive.
Throughout Latin America, the formal fictive kinship relations known as
compadrazgo also involve economic considerations. Becoming a godparent on the
occasion of a baptism, a school graduation, a first communion, a coming out party,
or a wedding means that you have a responsibility for your godchild in the case
that his or her parents die, as well as reciprocal social and economic ties with
their parents, your compadres or co-parents. These economic and social
obligations may involve anything from attending family parties, exchanging gifts
at Christmas and on other occasions, inviting one another to dinner to lending
money or facilitating entry into a job. Often godparents of a higher
socioeconomic status are sought, although fictive kinship relations are also
established among relative equals (Nutini and Bell, 1980; Lomnitz, 1974; 1978;
Wilson, 1999). From the Panare of the Amazon (Dumont, 1992) to the Mescalero
Apache (Farrer, 2000) and the inhabitants of a Micronesian island (Flinn, 2000), a
kinship idiom is used to socialize the outsider anthropologist into insider
behavior and norms. And the kinship idiom is taken seriously. Joking with her
“sister” in Micronesia about her son one day marrying her “sister’s” daughter,
Flinn (2000) was rebuked: such an arrangement would be incest she was told. Her
son and her “sister’s” daughter were classificatory siblings by local reckoning.
And, it was offered, her “sister’s” daughter would be happy to bring up her son’s
children, as was a common practice among sisters and brothers on the atoll.
Through the rebuke and the offer Flinn was socialized into an insider
understanding of the relations between kin, and led to know how fully she had been
accepted in the community.
Sometimes such attempts at socialization may be misunderstood. Let me
diverge here to Dumont’s experience of being offered a wife. By the
classificatory kinship system that made Domingo Barrios his “son,” the elder,
widowed woman offered to Dumont as a wife was in the proper relationship for this
alliance, as she was Domingo Barrio’s real mother. Dumont’s marriage to her, as
he points out (1992: 140 (Italics in original)), would have strengthened his
status within the group, as he moved from fictive kin to “actual affine.” Dumont
felt that this was to be a restricting and limiting marriage, however, because
older men among the Panare do not marry coevals, but rather young fertile women
who stand in a DaDa relationship to them. With Hortensia, he would not be able to
reproduce. I find this interpretation weighed too far on the side of limitations
rather than opportunity. The Panare are polygynous, and offering Dumont and
older, infertile woman may not have been to contain him, but rather to offer a
trial marriage with his “son’s” mother, and later offer him a young fertile woman
as his second wife if he proved to be a good or adequate husband. I offer this
only as a possible scenario not considered by Dumont.
Dumont does make an interesting observation about the economic motives
behind the proposed marriage, however. He writes (1993: 141): “Although I meant
no prestige or status for her at all, I--being rich--could give her goods which
eventually would be redistributed within the local group. The whole idea behind
this marriage project was to force me into giving more, to place Hortensia under
my economic protection, so that everybody in the group would benefit from it.”
Marriage as economic alliance has historically been quite common cross-culturally.
As a single woman living alone in the squatter settlement in Mexicali or on
the rancho in Jalisco, I was out of place in the ideal order of things, out of
place in the sense of being potentially polluting (Douglas, 1966). Where male
infidelity is common (LeVine, 1993), I was, as Freedman (1986) in Romania, “a
threat to women and a temptation to men.” Thus women in the whole community had
an interest in seeing me permanently partnered, and thus twice in Jalisco and
thrice in Mexicali women offered me sons or brothers in marriage. Notably, this
is one of the reasons Dumont’s marriage may have been suggested: strange men
among Panare women were distrusted, i.e., he posed a “sexual threat” (Dumont,
1992: 61).
My intent is to suggest that the establishment of fictive kinship and the
attempt to establish affinal kinship are common cross-cultural reactions in
adopting an outsider and trying to make him/her more of an insider. They are a
means of socializing the outsider into the “inside,” of making him or her more one
of them. Not only are they a means of expressing positive affect and of gaining
access to economic resources, neither of which are culturally dissonant, but they
are ways of normalizing the presence of the outsider, exorcising both the danger
his/her presence represents to the ideal order of things, and, these fictive
kinship relations come to form a part of the ethnographer’s autobiography, which
though left physically, remain in memory and emotional life.

Commonalities Based on Sharing a Common Moral Vision

During the Cold War period, Peter Berger (1974), in his Pyramids of
Sacrifice, argued that, instead of adopting capitalist or communist paradigms to
view (and to manipulate) the world, people (and governments) should agree on what
conditions of life they could, in common, view as unacceptable. He advocated
generating political and ethnical propositions on which all sides could agree, by
finding a common “no”: “No to children living in garbage, no to exploitation and
hunger, no to terror and totalitarianism . . . . .” (Berger, 1974: 252) (Italics
in Original). This list can be expanded, for example, to: no to torture, no to
babies dying for lack of adequate food and medical care, no to forced
prostitution, no to a situation of poverty so dire that a man in India might sell
a kidney in order to support his family, no to child abuse, no to violence against
women, and so on. Such a moral vision has entered anthropology mainly though
stress on advocacy, the most commonly endorsed alternative to neutrality and
disengagement (Clifford, 1997: 215).
Some social scientists advocate action that can be seen as political in the
traditional sense. Resting on insights from her study of poor, urban, Afro-
American women, Ladner (1987: 79) sustains: “The inability to be objective about
analyzing poverty, racism, disease, self-destruction, and the gamut of problems
which faced these females only mirrored a broader problem in social research.
That is--to what extent any scientist--white or Black--considers it his duty to be
a dispassionate observer and not intervene, when possible, to ameliorate many of
the destructive conditions he studies” (Italics in Original). Short of joining
political action groups or social service agencies to try to ameliorate the
existing conditions of the oppressed and subaltern (which is one alternative),
there is the act of witnessing, a “politically connected” stance (Scheper-Hughes,
1995: 419), as a basis for forming a moral community which would include the
ethnographer. It involves, as Beverley (1999: 38-39), jumping off from Rorty
(1985) envisions it, the decision to practice “solidarity” rather than to attempt
“objectivity.” According to Malkki (1997: 96), witnessing shows one’s
“political positioning” and is a reflection of one’s situatedness in Haraway’s
(1991) sense--a reflection which should be conscious, i.e. become reflexivity.
Malkki (1997: 96) contrasts the anthropologist as investigator (with overtones of
police work) grounded in uncovering secrets and decodifying mysteries, with the
anthropologist as witness who thereby affirms his/her “own connectedness to the
ideas, processes, and people one is studying.” Scheper-Hughes contrasts the more
passive role as observer with the more active role of witness. She sustains that,
“In the act of writing culture what emerges is always a highly subjective, partial
and fragmentary but also deeply personal record of human lives based on eye-
witness accounts and testimony” (Scheper-Hughes, 1995: 419). Thus, we must be
aware of our values, our positioning, and our situatedness in order to relate
adequately to those we study and represent. Scheper-Hughes (1995: 419) further
points out that “Witnessing, the anthropologist as companhiera, is in the active
voice, and it positions the anthropologist inside human events as a responsive,
reflexive, and morally constituted being, one who will ‘take sides’ and make
judgments, though this flies in the face of anthropological nonengagement with
either ethics or politics. Of course noninvolvement was, in itself, an ‘ethical’
and moral position.” The anthropologist as companhiera/o, compañera/o, comrade in
viewing the world is central to Scheper-Hughes’ argument. As seen above, this
comradeship is often extended to adoption as fictive kin or the attempt to make
the anthropologist more of an “insider” by attempting to marry him/her to a member
of the in-group.
One can also go further than witnessing, as often one must, in the name of
humanitarian practice. Such universal values as are embodied in the fight against
the death of a young pregnant woman (Colfer, 2000) and the intervention against
physical damage of one community member by another (Marshall, 2000), once
displayed, often lead to greater acceptance within a community. That is because
community members recognize, in such actions by the anthropologist, the sharing of
basic values against harm to one of their members, and take such actions as a
demonstration of solidarity. The anthropologist does not just think, but must
also feel (Heggenbougen, 2000). Heggenbougen (2000: 270), viewing the sufferings
and joys of people in a Guatemalan community, came to realize, based on feelings,
“that the rational for anthropology made sense only in terms of justice and human
rights” (Italics in Original).
It is important to keep in mind that we, anthropologists and the people
under study, share in this heterogeneous, hybrid, interconnected world, and that
there are an array of negative experiences to which people are subjected that we
(anthropologists and members of the community to be represented in writing) can
take a common (political, moral, ethical) stance against. Thus do our
autobiographies overlap even more, and the process of “fieldwork” brings us closer
on the continuum of “cultures”

CONCLUSIONS
In a world characterized by international and transnational mobility,
cultural diffusion (fueled by media, commodity consumption, intermarriage and
return migration among other processes), overlapping cultures, hybrid cultures,
interconnected lives: commonalities between the anthropologist and members of a
community s/he is witnessing, rather than differences should be stressed--for both
moral and analytical purposes.
In a world characterized by people bearing multiple identities based on
race, gender, class, ethnicity, nationality, vocation and family, work,
educational and migration histories, an overlap of autobiographical experiences
can be expected--never a complete overlap as this would erase the fact of
individuality, but at least a partial one. Commonalities based on something or
cluster of things can be expected among widely separated (geographically or
stratigraphically) peoples. The anthropologist should--and often has done--
establish communication by stressing these commonalities, as well as portraying
them in his/her academic writings.
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