But still, what I’m interested in isn’t ethnography of reading but ethnography as reading. Sitting on a bench reading a book as a way of being-there in an academic world. Reading as a form of participation, not just of observation. After all, the locals are constantly trying to get me to partake in their common means of textual exchange, by constantly suggesting books for me to read. These book suggestions are of course themselves invaluable ethnographic data. But reading itself is a way of learning one’s way around a space, a way of retracing a set of thoughts or “problématiques,” a way of developing competences of comprehension and belonging for later use, a way of assimilating some of the aesthetic parameters of a social world, its characteristic framing devices, its cast of characters, its rhythm. There’s a reason why half of my conversations here revolve around who has read what: having read a text provides a source of social solidarity and a ground for further exchange.
The Ethnographer’s “Job” Makes a Little Boy Laugh
How could this be a “profession”? What kind of job, indeed, is this? The way we go to other societies, staring at people, poking at them, recording them, asking them questions that have little or no importance for them, trying to evade their questions about us, a glorified form of canine ass sniffing, or what another anthropologist brutally and reductively called (and perhaps this is taken out of context): “Other fucking”. Are we not ashamed? Where do we find the nerve to undertake this bizarre combination of leisure and espionage?
What kind of world do we think we are living in where we think we need to travel to other people’s homes, to scrutinize strangers? Who do we think we are in doing that?
The Ethnographer’s “Job” Makes a Little Boy Laugh
