culture spies

I view cultural anthropology as a humanistic pursuit whose purpose is to express the poetry of people’s lives.

“Students often ask: Is it necessary to have tenure to write the way you do? How do you get away with writing so poetically? The answer is no, you don’t have to have tenure, you can write as I do, and you will write as I do, if you need to. You will reach a point, as I did, where there is no choice but to work from your poetic self.”

No ethnographic film is merely a record of another society; it is always a record of the meeting between a filmmaker and that society.

I think there’s a huge fear of good writing in anthropology—the assumption being that good writing has a tendency to be precious, to be too full of itself, to be self-indulgent (always a no-no in our discipline), to be a distraction from the pressing reality at hand that needs to be analyzed rigorously. A stringent work ethic got established in anthropology from its earliest days, disdaining the idea that ethnography as a literary form could be a source of pleasure. Good writing in our discipline is associated with frilliness, with caviar and champagne. The mission of ethnography required that we sacrifice such privileges. A certain moral righteousness ordained that we not spotlight the ethnographer carrying out the work, but rather those heroic people at the margins of capitalist development who could be assisted in their quest for cultural survival through our attention, activism, and publications. Ethnographic writing had to be as pure, unadorned, and unscented as Ivory soap, and go in and get the job done. -Ruth Behar

Its [the anthropological method] power to make us understand the roots from which our civilization has sprung, that it impresses us with the relative value of all forms of culture, and thus serves as a check to an exaggerated valuation of the standpoint of our own period, which we are only too liable to consider the ultimate goal of human evolution, thus depriving ourselves of the benefits to be gained from the teachings of other cultures and hindering an objective criticism of our own work.

Intimacy describes: a ‘feeling’ of connection or a ‘sense’ of belonging; embodied and carnal sensuality, that is, 'sex’; and that which is 'most inward or inmost’ to one’s personhood. Intimacy is also a vast assemblage of ideologies, institutional sites, and diverse sets of material and semiotic practices that exert normative pressures on large and small bodies, lives, and worlds.