Author: Tala Alraheb

One People, One Blood & Coffee and the Moral Order Precis

Tala AlRaheb

In One People, One Blood: Ethiopian – Israelis and the Return to Judaism, Don Seeman creates an ethnography which sheds light on the lived experiences of Ethiopian Israelis, specifically the “Feres Mura” through examining the cultural and political challenges that they face. In fact, Seeman’s book focuses on “the ‘Feres Mura’ experience of three separate but closely related spheres of state policy and bureaucratic practice that impinge upon them in mutually reinforcing ways: state immigration policy, public health practice, and the power of Israel’s religious establishment.” (3-4) Seeman, furthermore, wishes to examine claims of kinship as well as agency in religious transformation with regard to “Feres Mura” that go beyond the question of “Are they Jewish?” (29) Instead, Seeman argues that the “Feres Mura” dilemma is a “moral discourse” (32) and only when we stop reducing it to fit “fixed categories” (32) will we truly understand what is at stake for individuals. In fact, he criticizes individuals and scholars who have inadequately deciphered the dilemma of the “Feres Mura.” He writes, “In most cases, debates have focused on privileged moments of religious change – the moment of apostasy to Christianity or of return to Judaism —that are treated as starkly definitive and binary, either purely religious or completely instrumental.” (206) Therefore, Seeman argues that we cannot separate the “Feres Mura” dilemma from the broader cultural and political context that surrounds it and create orderly patterns of behavior; the choices of agency and religious decisions happen in social situations, not in a vacuum.

Seeman offers the same argument in his article, “Coffee and the Moral Order: Ethiopian Jews and Pentecostals Against Culture.” In discussing why Ethiopian Jews and Pentecostals often refuse to drink buna, Seeman pushes against framing such practices through cultural or theological patterns since they do not incorporate the disorganized and often confusing ways in which people think and behave every day in the world. Seeman writes,

Recognizing this everyday potential is not at all to detract from the uniqueness of Pentecostal conversion or to deny the importance of distinctive religious and ascetic practices to the emerging conversation about freedom… But it is intended to suggest that our consideration of these specialized practices should be reoriented to an existential and not just ritual or theological register so that continuities with everyday experience might be made more visible and examined across a broader social field. (11).

Thus, Seeman, similar to the point he makes in his book, argues that the choice not to drink buna is undeniably linked to the social context surrounding the individuals. While the case of the “Feres Mura” must be understood in conjunction with “state immigration policy, public health practice, and the power of Israel’s religious establishment” (3-4), the abstention of buna consumption “need[s] to be understood against an intersubjective horizon of emotionally fraught relationships with kin or neighbors, economic pressures, and the shifting, embodied experience of gender and sexuality.” (10-11)

Throughout his book, Seeman successfully achieves his aim of explaining the “Feres Mura” dilemma within the broader context in which it exists. In fact, not only does Seeman explain the “Feres Mura’ life, he also offers the readers an account of ethnographic research within this specific context. Seeman describes unique challenges for ethnography and leaves us with thought-provoking insights into the field of study.  Similar to Kleinman and Wikan, the question of what is at stake for individuals is at the heart of Seeman’s book. Furthermore, methodologically, Seeman argues that in order to understand the experience of the “Feres Mura”, one must engage in an experience- near approach. Seeman writes, “Experience – near or cultural – phenomenological approach to ethnographic writing presumes that our first obligation is to the thick and detailed description not of culture but of what is at stake for real people in local settings – stakes that are patterned in important ways but never wholly defined by cultural considerations.” (6) Furthermore, Seeman concludes his book with the claim that “participant observation – by which I mean living intimately and in conjunction with strangers… is a necessary condition for the very possibility of understanding.” (209)

Living among individuals and trying to understand what is at stake for them means that we are also translating this understanding to readers who have not lived among those communities. Thus, our research bears ethical implications to the lives of the people we study. Not only are we writing about them, but we ought to think about how our writing influences them as well. Seeman brings our attention to this conundrum by stating, “We are also constrained – in a powerful and morally invigorating way – by the fact that the worlds we describe have lives that continue to grow beyond our texts and, with increasing frequency, to talk back.” (208) That being said, what happens when our interpretation of communities, although partially true, is not able to provide a full description of their experiences and thus does not do complete justice to their lives?

Another methodological challenge that Seeman has encouraged me to consider is the question of insider vs. outsider researcher. In chapter three, Seeman describes Messing’s encounter with the descendants of converts. Messing explains that his knowledge of the kin and his positionality helped form trust with his informant. Seeman, furthermore, writes, “Personal relationships are the very medium of knowledge for anthropology, and there is no reason at all for surprise that the existential position of the researcher – here a Jew, tentatively seeking contact with another Jew – made a crucial difference to what he was able to learn about this topic.” (78) A similar issue is brought up again in chapter six, during an Ethiopian-Israeli protest against racism. Seeman writes,

During the chaos of the demonstration, I mustered the courage to ask one young man with a placard what he meant by invoking the Holocaust, and he told me that for him, this was really a protest against racism. Yet when a persistent foreign journalist who had overheard our conversation began to ask leading questions about racism in Israel, he refused to repeat that assertion. Certain accusations, apparently, were still meant for local ears only. (154)

The two accounts of the interaction between researcher and informants beg several questions. How do we form trusting relationships with our informants? What happens if we cannot create trust with our informants? Is it more favorable to be an insider researcher or an outsider researcher? Who decides what it means to be an insider or an outsider? How does our ethnicity, race, religion, gender, and other factors of our identity as future ethnographers influence our research? Can we truly understand what is at stake for individuals if informants don’t trust us as researchers to reveal to us their experiences? I ruminate on these questions because I believe they bring helpful insights into my future research project and help me reflect on the kind of ethnography in which I’ll be involved.

 

Tala AlRaheb

Wikan and Kleinman & Kleinman

Unni Wikan, in her book, Managing Turbulent Hearts: A Balinese Formula for Living, and Arthur and Joan Kleinman, in their article, “Suffering and its Professional Transformation: Toward an Ethnography of Interpersonal Experience”, argue for the reevaluation of the traditional anthropological model. They propose this reassessment in response to the work of anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz and others, who argue for a “view of culture as webs woven into a coherent structure.” (Wikan, 12) Instead, all three scholars call for the privileging of the complex experiences of individuals as they occur in certain contexts, i.e. an anthropology/ethnography of experience. In critiquing Geertz’s methodology, Wikan writes, “Perhaps a direct approach to the lived significance of other people’s concerns should be granted as much primacy as those other approaches.” (xxiv) Additionally, she states that the aim of the book is to “try and grasp how people actually experience their lives, lives lived according to Balinese ideas, concepts, and conventions. How can we best develop a degree of understanding, a resonance, for the events that happen in Balinese worlds, the meanings they have, and the experiences they induce?” (xxiv) Furthermore, in arguing for an ethnography of experience, Kleinman and Kleinman highlight a question often missed in traditional anthropological models, which is: What is at stake for the individuals we are studying?  They write, “It is our opinion that a contextual focus on experience-near categories for ethnography should begin with the defining characteristic of overbearing practical relevance in the processes and forms of experience.” (277) Wikan incorporates this question in her study of the Balinese, as well.  Failing to incorporate individual experiences in the study of anthropology/ethnography runs the risk of “delegitimating” as well as “dehumanizing” those individuals it seeks to study (Kleinman&Kleinman, 276). Or as Wikan writes in reference to Suriati, “we would come close to reducing her to an automaton: a mere embodiment of “her culture.” (Wikan, 13)

In order to exemplify her point, Wikan begins her book with Suriati’s narrative. Suriati, who is suffering due to her boyfriend’s death, cries herself to sleep at night. Yet, when she leaves the house, “she put[s] on that sparkling shine” and shows no signs of grief (9). What is at stake if Suriati shows signs of grief in public? Suriati fears black magic, and she is also concerned with “health, morality, and self-value.” (Wikan, 50) Wikan, furthermore, stresses that Suriati (and Balinese individuals in general), utilize a process of feeling-thoughts. She writes, “feeling-thoughts are regarded as precisely the choice and responsibility of the person and her closest kin. They are moral acts, truly the structures through which one lives in the world.” (139) Later she states, “A Balinese ethnotheory of feeling-thoughts is thus sustained by (super)natural sanctions. The microcosm of the self is linked with the macrocosm of society and the (super)natural world through a construction of individual emotional expression as a force to shape health or undermine it, make or break social relations…” (144) Thus, feeling-thoughts functions as a type of therapy that helps them cope with their suffering and offers them a way of living. If Wikan was content with the observation of Suriati’s public life and neglected to consider her private life and feeling-thoughts, she would have fallen into the shortcomings of traditional anthropological understandings of Balinese practices as “aesthetic at base.” (192) Wikan, however, did not stumble over these traditional pitfalls. Rather, by paying attention to Suriati’s private life, Wikan was able to refute the “anthropological generalization that the Balinese do not cry at death.” (10)

Similarly, in reporting their case study in China, Kleinman and Kleinman, oppose the conclusion which regards, “emotions in Chinese society as irrelevant to the legitimation of the social order.” (288) To combat this, they examine the “Third Century text, Renwu zhi” which argues that one must balance emotion in the face of suffering in order to remain in control (288). Through an analysis of the text, they delve deeper into personal experiences of suffering and arrive at the conclusion that, “uncontrolled emotional displays threaten one’s position in a world of power.” (288)  As we can see here, the anthropology and ethnography of experience shatter false ideas regarding culture and un-otherize cultures by explaining the process by which individuals choose to display emotion. It makes the individuals being studied more relatable and more human. Reading this book made me realize that I too will be engaging an anthropology and ethnography of experience in studying Christian women in a patriarchal Palestinian society. Therefore, I cannot help but wonder, can the study of experience become too individualistic? Does such a methodology have its limitations?

Nonetheless, through the study of experience, Wikan is able to go beyond the reach of the study of individuals within public spaces. In doing so, she is able to see into their private lives and spaces. Wikan, argues that there is a connection between the public and private spheres within Balinese culture that governs their behavior and makes them choose to “make [their] face look bright and clear.” (51) Without the anthropology of experience, one, like Geertz, would apply Western understanding of the public and private to Balinese culture. Therefore, she argues, “for the abandonment of the public/private dichotomy in the study of Bali and for a general restraint in using the pair as an analytical tool in any cross-cultural study.” (62) Wikan, thus, stresses the need to disregard the Western notion of public/private in order to understand people’s concerns and actions in a certain context and what is at stake for them. Furthermore, in studying both the public and private life, one arrives at the same conclusion that both Wikan and Kleinman come to, which is intersubjectivity. This means that while each experience is unique, it shares certain aspects with regard to feelings and concerns that make them generalizable to others. Wikan writes, “ The complex world of individual concerns, feelings, passions, and fears of Balinese, though private in the sense of being shielded from the scrutiny of strangers, is also essentially shared and intersubjective, hence cultural” (116) Kleinman and Kleinman take the idea of intersubjectivity a bit farther than Wikan and claim that “the intersubjective experience of suffering… is itself a defining characteristic of human conditions in all societies.” (280) Thus, while the anthropology/ ethnography of experience begins with the individuals, it also points to shared cultural and universal experiences.

Thus, the starting point for the scholars is experience. Wikan writes, “I argue, that we should start, methodologically, with people’s compelling concerns as they are evinced through their everyday life experiences.” (Wikan, 47) This necessitates a certain engagement with individuals within a culture that goes beyond participant observation. Wikan, instead, engages in interpersonal interactions and interviews in order to understand the various experiences of her subjects. She writes, “I tried as much as possible to be a friend and sympathetic listener to people. I never used a tape recorder and rarely took notes on the spot. Thus most of the conversations and observations I relate are rendered from memory.” (xxv) Reading this statement elicited several questions for me. What are the possible implications of becoming friends with those we are studying? Do we lose a certain objectivity when the lines between researcher and subject are blurred? Or do we gain more insight into the lives of the individuals we are studying when we take the researcher goggles off, and instead become a part of their daily lives? The second claim in Wikan’s statement was problematic for me. If these interviews were mostly “rendered from memory,” can we truly rely on her analysis of these conversations? Could she have forgotten or misremembered some of the conversations thus leading her to a different conclusion regarding Balinese society? Or did the fact that she was not using a tape recorder, generate a more natural flow of situations, since people did not feel watched by her?

With these questions being raised, however, the method of Wikan clearly achieves her aim of understanding how Balinese live their lives and what is at stake for them when they make their faces bright and clear. She un-others the Balinese to the Western audience and helps us connect with them in order to achieve her final aim which is resonance. She writes, “Resonance thus demands something of both author and reader: a joint effort at feeling-thought; a willingness on the part of both to engage with another world, life, or idea: to use one’s own life experience… to try to grasp the meanings…evoked in the meeting of an experiencing subject with the text; in the next instance, then, to share such understandings with others.” (269) Wikan prompts us to engage with the narratives in the book and understand why a project that begins with experience is essential. How did you interact with the stories and the text? Did you resonate?

** NOTE** Please feel free to also engage any other parts of the book or article you found intriguing in your comments. (Black magic, feeling-thoughts, the contributions of Wikan and Kleinman to medicine and Psychology)