In Light of Another's Word. Shirin A. Khanmohamadi

I argue, the Descriptio may be viewed as an early form of “autoethnography” as theorized by Mary Louise Pratt: a native ethnographic self-description in dialogue with metropolitan representations of that self in ways that intervene in metropolitan modes of understanding. Autoethnographic texts are, importantly, not “autochthonous or ‘authentic’ forms of representation”; rather, they are hybrid documents featuring “a selective collaboration with and appropriation of idioms of the metropolis or conqueror… merged or infiltrated to varying degrees with indigenous idioms.”¹⁰ The Descriptio’s ambivalent mixture of two contradictory languages—the one Anglo-Norman, the other Welsh—each aware of and responding to the other, I argue, ultimately undermines the stability of metropolitan or colonial viewpoints. Finally, in addition to being “bilingual,” the Descriptio is scrupulously bifocal: it is twice interrupted in order that its author may approach his object of study from an opposing gaze. In what follows, I examine the implications of this duality of discourses and gazes for Gerald’s ethnography of the Welsh, and for medieval ethnographic poetics generally.

      AUTOETHNOGRAPHY AND DOUBLED DISCOURSE IN THE DESCRIPTIO KAMBRIAE

      In keeping with the connections between ethnography and the description of cultural practices marked as alien from those of the writer and audience, Gerald opens his description of the Welsh thus:¹¹ “Kambriae nostrae descriptionem, gentisque naturam, aliis alienam nationibus et valde diversam, hoc opusculo declarare” (I now propose, in this short treatise, to write a Description of Wales, my own country, and to describe the Welsh people, who are so very different from other nations) (“First Preface,” 211). Already Gerald’s signature ambivalence becomes visible: the grandson of Nest in one breath authorizes his decision to write a descriptio of the Welsh on the basis of its being “nostra” and declares the Welsh utterly different from other peoples, “aliis alienam nationibus et valde diversam.” The components of Welsh—and, nearly always simultaneously, Irish¹²—“alienness” that follow are largely shaped by the developmental anthropology of his day, according to which difference was measured by the yardstick of distance from Anglo-Norman norms (see Chapter 1). But as I show below, the Descriptio Kambriae’s participation in the distinctly colonial idiom of developmental anthropology is disrupted and offset by its selective appropriation of powerfully resonant native Welsh themes, so doubling its languages and functions.

      Anglo-Norman discourses on Welsh incivility or savagery are prominently voiced in Gerald’s ethnography of the Welsh, whether he is considering their “good points” in book 1 or their “less good points” in book 2. Gerald wastes little time in getting to a depiction of Welsh incivility in the Descriptio: to his initial announcement of subject matter, the mores of the Welsh, is appended “Et primo de audacia ejusdem, agilitate, et animositate” (Their boldness, agility and courage). Welsh boldness and agility easily shade into excessiveness and ferocity in what follows: the Welsh are, Gerald declares, a “gens armis dedita tota” (an entire people trained in war) (1.8); they are “Vindicis enim animi sunt, et irae cruentae” (vindictive by nature, bloodthirsty and violent) (1.17). Gerald here follows the barbarian script: an inexplicable ferocity is a fixed feature of Celtic difference and of “barbarians” wherever twelfth-century German and French writers—among them Otto of Freising, Adam of Bremen, Gunther of Pairis, Helmold, the anonymous author of the Gesta Stephani, William of Newburgh, William of Malmesbury, Gervase of Tilbery, and Gerald of Wales—came into contact with them.¹³

      Economic life takes a central place in delineating civil societies from savage ones according to classical developmental anthropology. Gerald clearly has in mind this model, made available to him from Lucretius via Cicero, when he writes of Welsh industry thus: “Totus propemodum populus armentis pascitur et avenis, lacte, caseo, et butyro. Carne plenius, pane parcius vesci solent. Non mercimoniis, non navigiis, non mechanicis artibus, nec ullo prorsus nisi martio labore vexantur” (In this way the whole population lives almost entirely on oats and the produce of their herds, milk, cheese and butter. They eat plenty of meat, little bread. They pay no attention to commerce, shipping or industry, and their only preoccupation is military training) (1.8). The eating of milk and meat rather than bread is shorthand for the presence of pastoral economies according to the developmental account of civility, where it occupies a middle space between complete savagery and urban civility, here marked by Gerald through the technologies of “commerce, shipping, or industry.” Gerald sketches the logic and stages of developmental anthropology most clearly in his depiction of the Irish in the Topography of Ireland (see Chapter 1), in which he groups civility, markets, town life, and the rights of citizenship, opposing these terms to barbarism or primitivism, country or woodlands living, and pastoral lifeways.

      The developmental model linked habitat with civility, and the habitat of the Welsh and other Celtic peoples constitutes another category of their incivility according to Anglo-Norman writers. Celtic lands are frequently said to have open pastures and forests¹⁴ and these natural environments are, moreover, linked to the humans living in them, rendering them “uncivil,” as in the following treatment of Welsh habitat in the Descriptio: “Non urbe, non vico, non castris cohabitant; sed quasi solitarii silvis inhaerant. In quarum eisdem margine non palatia magna, non sumptuosas et superfluas lapidum caementique structuras in altum erigere, verum tecta viminea, usibus annuis sufficientia, modico tam labore quam sumptu connectere mos est” (They do not live in towns, villages or castles, but lead a solitary existence, deep in the woods. It is not their habit to build great palaces, or vast and towering structures of stone and cement. Instead they content themselves with wattled huts on the edges of the forest, put up with little labour or expense, but strong enough to last a year or so)” (1.17). According to this description, the twelfth-century Welsh are an antisocial, solitary people content to live in the woods, a seminomadic existence implied in the description of their huts as usibus annuis sufficientia (strong enough to last a year or so). That the passage describes the Welsh almost solely on the basis of what they do not do—“non urbe, non vico, non castris … non palatial magna, non sumptuosas”—suggests the extent to which Gerald is enacting an implicit comparison with contemporary Anglo-Norman life, which as we know from abundant contemporary evidence was indeed town oriented, and built around stone palaces and castles, those symbols of Norman conquest throughout England and Wales. Gerald’s description of Welsh forest dwelling is far from value free: as we know both from Ciceronian developmental anthropology and from stock medieval encyclopedic sources such as those of Pliny and Solinus, a people content to live in the woods win themselves the label of silvester (pl: silvestres, literally savages), from the Latin for forest, silva.

      Welsh political life constitutes a final, major category of ethnographic interest to Gerald and other writers of Celtic custom. Anglo-Norman writers were here, too, most struck by the differences from the political organization of their own realm. Gerald is not alone in noticing the lack of centralized authority or single kingship in Celtic lands, though he is unusual for recommending against it as he does at the end of book 2. Observers found in Wales and Ireland, particularly the upland and western regions out of reach of the Anglo-Norman orbit, political organization more kin based than lord based.¹⁵ The overriding significance of kinship structures in Welsh life is not lost on Gerald, as we see at the end of the Descriptio when he notes the fractious effects of the “antiquus in hac gente mos” or ancient Welsh custom of “brothers dividing between them the property which they have” (2.4), that is, of Welsh partible inheritance. Similarly, he describes Welsh kinship: “Genus itaque super omnia diligent; et damna sanguinis atque dedecus acriter ulciscuntur. Vindicis enim animi sunt, et irae cruentae; nec solum novas et recentes injuries, verum etiam veteres et antiques velut instantes vindicare parati” (As they have this intense interest in their family descent, they avenge with great ferocity any wrong or insult done to their relations. They are vindictive by nature, bloodthirsty and violent. Not only are they ready to avenge new and recent injuries, but old ones too, as if they had only just received them) (1.17). Here Gerald refers to the practice of blood feud, in effect throughout the twelfth century in Wales and phased out gradually a century later when Wales began to assume the centralized organization of a feudal state.¹⁶