ABSTRACT
In ‘Belief and the problem of women’, Edwin Ardener drew attention to what he described as ‘an interesting failing in the functionalist observational model’, namely that ‘statements about observation were always added to the ethnographer’s own observations.’ For Ardener this was less a criticism of ethnographic method than its inevitable condition, but as he went on to comment, ‘The confusion had many serious consequences; in particular the difficulty of dealing with statements that were not about “observation” at all (relegated to “belief” and the like)’ (1989: 75). In this paper I want to explore some of the consequences of that confusion in the context of anthropological accounts of ‘honour’, once the mainstay of ‘Mediterranean anthropology’ and now its virtual bogey-man.1 Like some other contributors to this volume (particularly Rapport, Hughes-Freeland, and Sharma) I shall thus be as much concerned with how we as anthropologists come to divine the intentions of others as I shall be to show how, in another culture, others communicate amongst themselves. In either case, however, we are confronting the same question of human intersubjectivity, and it is perhaps as well to state from the start that the two aspects of my enquiry are not far apart. As Ardener suggests, much of what we state about others we have not derived from their statements, but from their behaviour. Similarly, much of what is communicated between the members of any society is communicated between them not through words but through context and action. As anthropologists, however, as professional sense-makers of other people’s sense-making (Strathern 1992), we are accustomed to making explicit what is in reality implicit, to expressing in language much more than is ever linguistically expressed. That in itself is
no bad thing. That, indeed, is part of our job. The trouble is that in so doing we run the risk – and I think it is a grave risk – of sometimes representing all that is implicit in action and context as if it were the explicit content of the linguistic terms that social actors habitually employ. We thus commit a twin error. On the one hand we mistranslate those terms – build into their meanings more than (and other than) their users themselves would consider them to contain; on the other hand we deny social actors the very ambiguity and indirection which, in context, their enunciation of those terms so often entails. In fact we arrive at a paradox: it is anthropologists’ common human ability to pick up on what is not said that tempts them to portray those whom they study as much more baldly forthright than they are.
