Johannes Fabianxihypertrophic reflexivity, exhibitionist confessionalism, or whatever the
invectives may have been in recent years.
Lest I get carried away with praise, I should add a few critical re-
marks. Gratifying as the positive response to my observations on ec-
static moments, not as impediments but as integral parts of field re-
search, may be, the prescription, if it is one, should be treated with
caution. The ecstatic in our work is not limited to “the field,” a point
made by the editors and one of the contributors, Guy Lanoue. He
warns us against the dangers of a new kind of spatialization-cum-
reification of the “field” that may have the effect of forgetting time—
the time it takes to make and represent ethnographic knowledge af-
ter having left the field. Another point is perhaps of a more personal
nature. The position I reached with the essay subtitled “From Rigor
to Vigor,” and later in Out of Our Minds, had a history, one part of
which seems to have gone unnoticed: the inspiration my generation
of critical anthropologists took from Dell Hymes and his “ethnogra-
phy of communication.” Neither he nor some other important con-
tributors to that particular turn in the recent history of our discipline
are mentioned in this volume.
I am not suggesting that this is an omission that should be remedied.
Such seeming absence may, as is often the case, be proof of effective
presence. Nevertheless, we should keep the memory of where “we come
from” alive. Finally, I must confess that reports of ethnographers em-
bracing either the religion of those they study or some other religious
faith (particularly Catholicism; see the repeated references to Victor
and Edie Turner who became Catholics following their experience of
rituals, both of healing and of initiation, among the Ndembu, in Af-
rica) make me uneasy. As a certified Catholic agnostic I would not for
a moment deny the importance of religious knowledge, especially of
the kind of bodily experience that comes from participating in ritual,
in ethnographic inquiries of religion—as long as this does not make
us ignore the fact that the discipline that got us to where we are now
had its beginnings during the Enlightenment as part of a movement of
emancipation from religion. Arguably, that movement has not ended
with success, but it should not be abandoned either.