In Managing Turbulent Hearts, Unni Wikan writes an account of Balinese culture which advocates for an anthropological turn to lived experience. Wikan argues that there is a discrepancy between the ways in which Balinese life has been depicted in western media and anthropological literature and the ways in which life in Bali is actually lived. Wikan initially set out to build on an existing study undertaken by Geertz, but realized once she arrived that her experience brought to light claims that were different from—and even contradictory to—evidence previously presented by her colleagues. Wikan’s purpose is to decenter anthropology’s tendency to stereotype and overgeneralize which, according to Wikan, has been historically characteristic of the discipline. In order to accomplish this goal, she turns to a theory which is not so concerned with “culture” as it is concerned with people. Wikan states that cultural models like symbols and ideas serve to order people’s lives, but that they are only partially operative in shaping people’s lives. She states, “I argue that the truly significant meanings of symbols, signs, and events are such as propel and constrain people, and thus it is to theirlives one must look to grasp what is entailed.” (Wikan 19). In her turn to “their” lives, she develops certain major themes.
An important aspect of Wikan’s methodology is her attention to the particularities of people’s lives and circumstances. In order to accomplish this, she puts effort in to cultivating relationships and abandoning her own preconceived notions. One of the most salient relationships she cultivates is that with Suriati. While she acknowledges that the data she draws is concerning one particular person’s life and experiences, she hopes that within this particularity various aspects of Balinese life will be illuminated in an “experiential whole” (Wikan 26).
One important theme threaded through Wikan’s work is her attention to what is at stake in the lives of her informants. In Suriati’s case, she notes that from the outside Suriati embodies the Western stereotype of Balinese—graceful, aesthetically-minded, and poised. It is only through Wikan’s prioritization of Suriati’s lived experience that she became contextualized, multivalent, and humanized. She sought to acknowledge the concerns and feeling-thoughts of individuals in their relationships to others as they navigate the world: one which is never organized or seamless. Saliently, Wikan argues that we should take the category of feeling-thinking seriously in place of our own western notion of “experience”. This move, Wikan states, allows us insights into the human condition that cannot be realized unless we choose to abandon, temporarily, our own cultural knowledge.
Kleinman and Kleinman also advocate for a turn to lived experience in their critique of medical anthropology. They argue that both anthropologists and medical professionals participate in a “process of professional transformation” which “trivializes the experience of their subjects” (Kleinman and Kleinman 276). Echoing Wikan, they argue that there are things at stake for people in their lives, and that we should ask what things are at stake in order to advance an ethnography of experience. In their analysis of human suffering, Kleinman and Kleinman present the case of Huang Zhenyi, a survivor of China’s Cultural Revolution. Through this illustration, they seek to argue that “the anthropological tendency to create cultural archetypes out of the always messy and uncertain details of a personal account of illness…is as invalid an interpretation of the human core of suffering as is the biomedical tendency to create a purely biological metaphor for pain.” (Kleinman and Kleinman 280). For the authors, suffering is complex, narrative, and has a multiplicity of meanings. It is not enough to stop at culture or biology, they argue, for “There is something definitively human at the core of experience…that would emerge as universal from cross-cultural translation…if we focused ethnographic descriptions more self-consciously on experience and its modes.” (Kleinman and Kleinman 292).
In comparing these works to the literature we have read in previous weeks, I found many of Wikan’s and the Kleinmans’ arguments refreshing. I agree that the best way to get at a description of the experience of another is not only through their own words, but through their own conceptual frameworks. These works also prompted me to ask questions about the task of ethnography and its implications. Certainly, Wikan holds that overcoming exoticism and creating resonance are central to her task. Her work suggests that she is writing not only for the sake of contributing to the discipline, but that the discipline should not be removed from the moral and political worlds which authors navigate. What happens when ethnography becomes not merely “thick description” but an attempt to un-other? I admire Wikan for her contributions but I also wonder how she is received in the academy at large.
Kristin, thank you for raising some of the main issues at play in our readings for this week. I am interested in discussing how Wikan complicates the anthropologists attempt to describe culture verse what you wrote that “she turns to a theory which is not so concerned with “culture” as it is concerned with people.” It was not so clear to me how Wikan is completely undermining such an approach when she also analyses and paints her own picture of Balinese culture. I think a careful reading of her argument in the beginning of the book will reveal that culture, or simply a series of larger meaning-making and contexts, is always at play in people’s lives. What we need to unpack is exactly how Wikan shifts her focus back and forth from those larger forces which certainly act upon people (black magic, social expectations, gender, social status, etc.) and the personal experience of people living within and struggling with such forces. Are we at a point in history where we want to see the individual as unique and the scholars themselves also assume such a singularity among experiences? Is it not also possible that people’s individual experiences are cast in the framework of what it means to resist such structures. This also raises the questions we have asked in class about how much we can speak about a “universal” human experience. Can we assume that underneath culture is a untouched soul who shares basic experiences with all other humans? From my feminist background, it makes me think of the claim that gender is 100% a social construct, in fact one that a person can even choose. Using the same logic how does that resonate with other aspects of a person such as their responses to pain and suffering? Are they also social constructed? I wonder how Wikan’s work would have been different has she used a more feminist lens.