Applying theoretical perspectives to ethnographic material practice questions.

Renato Rosaldo, who worked among the Ilongot of northern Luzon between 1967 and 1974, recorded that men there said they took a head in order to cast off the rage that follows bereavement. Earlier analyses had explained headhunting as an exchange balancing losses between groups. His objection to those analyses was that

• they rested on what men said in interviews rather than on the systematic counts of raids that alone could have settled the matter
• no raids of the kind described had in fact taken place during the period those analysts wrote about
• the exchange model was sound but had been applied to the wrong generation of Ilongot men
• they explained the practice by a hidden function and set aside what the men themselves said about grief

Answer: they explained the practice by a hidden function and set aside what the men themselves said about grief

The dispute is about what counts as an explanation: a functional model treats the stated motive as surface, whereas Rosaldo argued that the force of grief was the thing to be explained. His later essay makes his own bereavement part of that argument.

In the Malaysian rice-farming village Scott studied at the end of the 1970s, poor households did not confront landlords openly but dragged their feet, pilfered and mocked them out of earshot. An analyst who inferred from the absence of open protest that the poor had accepted the landlords' view of the world would, on Scott's argument, be

• right, because people who accept an arrangement rarely take any action against it at all
• mistaken, because the public show of deference is itself calculated and the critique is voiced elsewhere
• mistaken, because open revolt did in fact occur throughout the period and was recorded in the study
• right, provided that the ethnographer has recorded what tenants say about landlords while the landlords are standing there

Answer: mistaken, because the public show of deference is itself calculated and the critique is voiced elsewhere

Reading quiescence as consent is exactly the inference the concept of everyday resistance blocks: where open revolt is costly, conflict is carried on in forms that leave no public record. The evidence therefore has to be sought offstage.

Mauss built his essay on the gift (1925) out of ethnographic reports written by others, among them Malinowski's account of Trobriand exchange and descriptions of north-west coast potlatch. Applied to the Trobriand material, his central claim is that

• the valuables were traded for profit once the ethnographer's presence had ceased to affect the exchange
• the obligations to give, to receive and to return bind the parties, so the object carries the relationship
• exchange of this kind is found only in societies where money has not yet been introduced and where nothing can therefore be bought outright
• the giving of a gift is free of any obligation, and that freedom is what separates a gift from a commodity

Answer: the obligations to give, to receive and to return bind the parties, so the object carries the relationship

The gift is not the absence of obligation but a different form of it, which is why 'given freely' is the standard error. Note also that the theory was built at second hand, from other people's ethnography, which is part of what makes it arguable.

Sahlins argued in 1972, using time-allocation material gathered by others among foraging peoples including Lee's Kalahari records, that such groups should be called the original affluent society. The argument turns on the claim that

• the groups concerned had access to unusually rich environments compared with their farming neighbours
• they accumulated stores of goods large enough to see them through any season of shortage
• affluence follows where wants are few and easily met, so modest working hours suffice
• their diet has been shown to have contained more calories per head than that of settled cultivators in the same region

Answer: affluence follows where wants are few and easily met, so modest working hours suffice

The move is to redefine the term rather than to add data: affluence is treated as a ratio between wants and means, so the assumption that foraging is a constant struggle for survival collapses. It is a good example of a theory reworking evidence collected by someone else.

Bourdieu described how children in the Kabyle households of Algeria he worked in around 1960 came to know, without ever being taught a rule, where to sit, when to speak and how to hold themselves. Practice theory accounts for the regularity of such conduct by

• a set of unconscious binary oppositions shared by all human minds whatever their upbringing
• explicit norms which members can state on request and then apply deliberately in each situation
• durable dispositions laid down in the body by upbringing, which generate fitting improvisation
• the needs of the social structure, which retains those arrangements that allow the household group to persist over the generations

Answer: durable dispositions laid down in the body by upbringing, which generate fitting improvisation

Habitus explains how a pattern is reproduced without anyone following a rule, which is what separates practice theory both from structuralism and from accounts that treat conduct as rule-governed. Asking people for the rule yields an idealised answer, not the practice.

In Patterns of Culture (1934) Benedict set the restrained ceremonial life she attributed to the Zuni against the competitive display she attributed to the Kwakiutl, treating each as the expression of a single configuration. The standard objection to using ethnographic material in this way is that

• it takes the reported differences to have been caused by the different environments of the two regions
• it compares two societies that were far too similar in scale and history for any contrast drawn between them to be informative
• it remakes each society as a single consistent character and hides the variation and disagreement inside it
• it depends on fieldwork carried out in languages that no member of either group was able to speak

Answer: it remakes each society as a single consistent character and hides the variation and disagreement inside it

Configurational analysis buys its vividness by selecting the material that fits the type, so internal difference, conflict and change drop out. The objection concerns the level at which the generalisation is pitched, not the accuracy of any single observation.