Objective Vs Subjective (and Anti-Objective)
The distinction between objective and subjective data (which is sometimes used to distinguish between the physical sciences and the humanities – with the social sciences hovering somewhere in the middle) is popularly believed to be an easily defined dichotomy. Often, people view objective reality as being independent of any observer, whereas subjective reality is filtered through the biases of a human spectator. For instance, “This coffee is 95°C” (objective) versus “This coffee is too hot” (subjective). This commonsense dichotomy has been under scrutiny by scholars for centuries because it is deeply problematic when held up to the light. Can there be a physical “objective” reality that is independent of the senses needed to appreciate its composition? Postmodern philosophers have further questioned the seemingly “obvious” distinction between objective and subjective realities and led anthropologists to question whether objectivity (however defined) is possible at all – especially in the social sciences. Can a fieldworker objectively study a social situation? Should they even try?
The critique of objectivity in anthropology began in the postwar years, reaching one kind of climax in the essays in Dell Hymes’s collection Reinventing Anthropology (Hymes 1972). The last two sections of this anthology focus on different facets of this critique (see especially Jay 1972; Scholte 1972; Diamond 1972). Since then, the forces of philosophical opposition to objectivity in anthropology have shaped into well-known main currents in the discipline, such as the movements toward reflexivity and humanism (see e.g. Clifford and Marcus 1986; Dwyer 1999; Geertz 1990, Goodall 2000; Hertz 1997; Herzfeld 1987; Marcus 1998; Richardson 1990; Robben and Sluka 2012).
While the critique of objectivity in the social sciences has taken many forms, what one should carefully consider before embarking on fieldwork is less the notion that the data obtained through fieldwork are unobjective, or incapable of being made objective, but rather the idea that they can be deliberately conceived of as anti-objective; that is, they can stand in conscious opposition to objectifiable data. In the case of life histories, for example, certain parts of them may be objectified (in the conventional sense) when it comes to certain kinds of facts, but that is not their point. Personal meanings are inscribed deeply within them, and these are not matters of objectifiable fact at all, but, rather, what certain incidents or events mean to the individual in question (see Linde 1993; Rosenwald and Ochberg 1992; Zeitlyn 2008). Such meanings cannot, by their very nature, be made “objective.”
It may be that this anti-objective approach to field data always requires some kind of conversion experience on the part of the fieldworker mediated by the people they are engaged with in the field. An illustration of this concept comes from my dissertation fieldwork in Tidewater, North Carolina, which I discuss in greater detail in Chapters 7 and 16. The experience helped me move away from attempting to objectify the data that constituted the daily lives of my research participants, but it was a tough lesson to learn (Forrest 1988a; Forrest and Blincoe 1995). The following exchange took place in my very first interview in the town where I conducted my doctoral fieldwork in 1978. I was sitting in FI’s2 living room and she had a quilt on her lap that was a prized family heirloom. Because as a brand-new fieldworker I was eagerly intent on getting the “facts” (objectively) I asked:
| JF: | So when was it made?” |
| FI: | Well let me see … it was made by Lizzy Brown, my daddy’s granddaddy’s second wife when they were first married. I think he was around 42 or 3 at the time. Now he died when I was five and he was 93, and I was born in 1902, so you work it out. |
| JF: | OK, He must have died in 1907 at the age of 93, so he was born in 1814, which would have made him 42 in 1856. That means it’s about 120 years old [in 1978]. |
| FI: | Uh-huh. |
It took me over six years of listening to this recording and other interviews again and again, before the penny dropped and I realized the degree to which FI and I were pursuing radically different agendas. Of course, it is possible to objectify certain facts about the quilt, such as its date of manufacture (or its age), but such objective facts are outside FI’s value system – as it relates to the quilt. Two responses in FI’s discourse make this clear. The first is the command, “… so you work it out.” In essence, what she is really (politely) saying is something like the following: “I will tell you what I know about the quilt’s chronology in terms that matter to me or are significant to me, and you can convert them into your value system if you want to – I don’t want to and I am not going to.”
Having then finished that part of our conversation, and being proud of my mental skills, and, indeed, beginning to see the “value” of the quilt in my terms (i.e. “my gosh, 120 years old”), FI brushed aside my interest with the noncommittal “Uh-huh” which stops short of being impolite, but could be translated as “if you say so, but so what?” Her tone and facial expression indicated that she had heard what I had said, but was not interested. Her value terms in relation to the quilt were:
1 the maker’s name
2 her affinal relationship to the maker
3 her consanguineal relationship to the maker’s husband
4 chronological information associated with rites of passage:the maker’s husband’s age at marriagethe maker’s husband’s age at deathFI’s age at the maker’s husband’s deathFI’s year of birth
What I later discovered was that for FI, affines get named when discussing them, but consanguineal kin are referred to almost exclusively by kin terms. Furthermore, even though an affine made the quilt, its history is linked to the chronological details of a blood relative. Having made this discovery, I was then able to go back to other interviews with FI and note that she always said “my daddy made … “or “my mama did …” but never “my husband worked …”; always “Lem worked …”
I was too far removed from the value system of the community at the time of these interviews to be able to be instructed in anything other than a kind of objectified way. It was not just a simple matter of me being a foreigner geographically (born in Argentina, raised in Australia and England); I was a cognitive stranger as well. The sad truth is that I would have related to them in their own terms a lot quicker than I did if I had never taken anthropology courses, because the discipline had inclined me to study them (that is, observe), rather than to learn from them (that is, engage). They tried their best to include me in their value system, but my training resolutely resisted their efforts. I get it now – too late, of course. What is critically important to understand, though, is that no matter how bad a pupil I was, our interviews always had an instructional purpose, and that what I thought I was trying to discover was less important in the minds of the people in the community than what they thought I ought to know. That is, they rejected my attempts at etic analysis in favor of their own emic approach, which they considered to be more important. And, of equal importance, I recorded all the interviews, and therefore have been able to return to them year after year, deepening my understanding of the community. Field notes are a permanent record.
What I did