Petra RethmannAnxieties related to the first kind of being out of one’s mind kick in.
Aren’t the points I make overworked and clichéd? It is a worn-out
truism to point out that fieldwork can be accomplished only in the
presence. Isn’t it too self-reflexive? Knowing that my current project
is more steeped in the history of political imaginations, why do I want
to talk about the presence? And do I, in a certain way, have the guts
to talk about it only now? These are some of the questions that have
troubled me in the context of this writing.
As I said in the beginning, I have learned about the notion of the
presence only recently. And this is strange because it is essentially what
I teach my students, but I have a harder time doing it myself. For the
message is: Do not do only what is doable, but do also what you are
passionate about. Follow your heart. As one eminent scholar said to
me recently, “That’s great that you follow your heart.” “Doesn’t he?”
I wondered.
Let me make one more point—albeit in a roundabout way, via a
detour through experience and writing. Take, for example, the cover
of Writing Culture, a book of profound influence in the discipline,
and one with far-reaching implications for our anthropology’s own
professional self-understanding. Ethnography is not simply a form
of the real but is also fabricated and fictitious, the message says. You
see Stephen Tyler sitting on the steps of the veranda, writing, amid
people quite aware of him. And although writing, using language, is
a large part of what we do, it also struggles to convey what I have
been calling here “presence.” Perhaps that kind of mindfulness and
awareness, if you want to think about it that way, is better conveyed
through experience, to be then followed up by its reflection (for ex-
ample, via writing).
Shura Shishkin, the woman I called grandmother, was not at all
convinced by the anthropological project. It was she who demanded
a different kind of presence. Writing, even taking photographs as a
hard-nosed form of cultural documentation, made sense to her. Af-
ter all, she saw language and knowledge around her, to speak with
the words of Koriak elders—dying (vymiranie). Her concerns were
the concerns of many elders, not only in the peninsulas of the Rus-
sian Far East, but beyond. People forgot their language, their stories,