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2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (1): 18


Two or three things I know

about Ethnographic Theory
Giovanni da Col, SOAS, University of London

In the introduction to this collection, I aim to outline the debate sparked by Tim Ingold (2014)
on the relation between ethnography and theory. I outline a few methodological principles
that ground the idea of ethnographic theory by distinguishing it from some cognate
approaches, including the so-called ontological turn and Ingolds idea of correspondence.
Rather than pursuing an isomorphism between thing and concept, between happenstances
and their description, I argue that ethnographic theory rather aims to reach satisfactory
(cf. Wittgenstein [1953] 2009) and felicitous (Austin 1975) effects, which account for the
productive uncertainty at the core of human sociality and the anticipatory, subjunctive, and
metapragmatic dimensions of any interaction.
Keywords: ethnography, theory, pragmatics, ethnographic theory, imagination, uncertainty

 Theory without material is sterile and material without theory is not illuminating
 Bronislaw Malinowski1
 For philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday
 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

One of the tricks of the trade to produce a well-cited work is what I call the title-
argument, which consists in compressing a magnificent argument into a short
title. I learned that from Roy Wagner, who once confessed that the origin of the
success of The Invention of Culture (1975) in the 1980s was a felicitous misunder-
standing: his potential readers thought the book was the anthropological correlate
of Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Rangers (1983) The Invention of tradition (and
partially of Benedict Andersons Imagined communities [1983]). It goes without
saying that Wagners notion of invention is poles apart from the one propounded

1. See Malinowski (1935: 73).

 his work is licensed under the Creative Commons | Giovanni da Col.

Giovanni da Col 2

by Hobsbawm and Ranger. However, one would only need to remember the title
rather than the contentto cite and support a humbug argument that the concept
culture is predicated on fantasy, creativity, and fabrication. We could easily recall
other examples of title-arguments, almost purportedly relying on an effect of coun-
terintuitiveness to achieve spectacular effects of memorability: Thinking through
things; Death without weeping; The souls body. One of the most downloaded
titles in the history of this journal, Tim Ingolds Thats enough about ethnogra-
phy! (2014), shares a similar fate with Roy Wagners and other equivocal bestsell-
ers. Originally part of a special section edited by Bob W. White and Kiven Strohm,
titled How does anthropology know?(2014), Ingolds manifesto was my perfect
gambit. No other journal, I pondered back then, would ever publish a no-holds-
barred critique of its own raison dtre. The gambit proved to be highly rewarding:
the article promptly became the most downloaded piece of the year and it was flat-
tering to notice that a top-tier disciplinary journal, Cultural Anthropology, gathered
a collection of pieces and positions around it in 2016.
It is, however, unfortunate that cursory readers may have held Ingold respon-
sible for casting aspersion on the practice of ethnography per se, or that he would
regard ethnography as irrelevant to the enterprise called anthropology. Admittedly,
Ingolds Hau article is rather a sort of companion piece to his 2008 Radcliffe-Brown
lecture, Anthropology is not ethnography, which features a more analytically
sound title and nuanced presentation of the relationship between ethnography and
theory. That is the relationship at stake. Though some sophisticated musings on
Ingolds Hau article followed (e.g., Shryock 2016), I noticed the articles pompous
title elicited two main caricaturist readings:
1) Ingold was genuinely against ethnography and his position was
associated to his meme, anthropology is philosophy with people
in it. This group denounced the demise of ethnography or its
subsumption to cosmo-philosophies or geontologies (Povinelli
2016), an idealistic move that found its symbolic nadir in the
ontological elaboration of Ingolds meme: What is at stake are the
ideas, not the people who might hold them. So if ... anthropology
is philosophy with people in it, Id say [Ingold] is right, but only
without the people (Holbraad in Carrithers et al. 2010: 185).
2) Ingold was genuinely right in challenging the primacy of ethnography
and the contention of an identity between empirical experience
and analysis, that is, anthropology should be a mirror-image of
ethnography (cf. Heywood, forthcoming).
Briefly, Ingolds position in his Radcliffe-Brown lecture (and in subsequent work)
revolves around the refusal of the classic distinction in philosophy of science be-
tween idiographic and nomothetic sciences. At the risk of producing another cari-
cature, for reasons of space I will only say that where idiographic method focuses
on documenting and describing particular cases, the nomothetic collects and
compares these cases to produce general laws and causal regularities (Ingold, this
issue). Or to put it with Isaiah Berlins animal metaphor, where idiographic fox-
es would describe one single thing well, nomothetic thinkers would know many
things and draw their wit on the comparative knowledge. A. R. Radcliffe-Brown,
Ingold argued, clearly moved beyond this model. At first, his approach seemed


3 Two or three things I know about Ethnographic Theory

nomothetic (Radcliffe-Brown 1952: 2), a form of comparative sociology aimed to

produce acceptable generalization, but the ground of comparison where not soci-
eties conceived as entities or machines (as Edmund Leach would put it) but life-
processes. The real methodological innovation of Radcliffe-Brown was to conceive
anthropology as a process-oriented discipline not dealing with machines or organs
but forms of life. Along similar lines, Maurice Bloch (2000) once argued that eth-
nographies deal with fixed forms and pretend to describe dynamic developments
with static reductions: they are snapshots of ongoing processes. Contrary to the
documentary role of the ethnographer, the anthropologist cannot take snapshots of
people while at the same time being engaged with them.
In Ingolds intimation, ethnography means writing about the people (2014: 385)
or practice of description (390): the elaboration of the term does not move be-
yond these documentary connotations. By doing so, Ingold is setting up quite the
straw man in an attempt to purify ethnography, to use Bruno Latours term. That
observation is inseparable from theory is certainly not an original thought. When
called to provide a definition of theory and ethnography, hardly anyone of the de-
baters would treat ethnography as mere empirical method, or pure objectifying
or documentary practice, or support the argument that a nontheoretical ethnogra-
phy can ever exist. As Laura Nader puts it in the inaugural issue of Hau, ethnogra-
phy is never a description but a theory of describing (2011: 211).
Rather, Ingolds key move concerns the notion of correspondence between the
anthropologists perception and action and his informants, much as melodic lines
are coupled in a musical counterpoint (2014: 389). The notes of Alfred Schutz
and Maurice Merleau-Ponty on intersubjectivity resonate in this allegro ma non
troppo. But Ingolds ultimate craft is a great symphony of reunification. Ultimately,
one needs to dispose of the difference between description and theory, between
anthropology and ethnography. One is always involved. Doing is thinking, being
is becoming, and ethnographic theory is tautological since a) ethnography is not
a method, and b) one does not do anthropological theory of people but only with
people. Participant observation cannot be an observation because one is always
engaged: there is no separate field out there. There is no separation between ob-
servation, description, and comparison. Anthropological writing should not be an
art of description but can only be a practice of non-correspondent description, a
description that has broken away from mere observation (Ingold 2008: 88). In-
deed, it is the issue of correspondence between theory and ethnography the sensitive
nerve that Ingolds article exposed.
This leaves us with different conundrums: a) how does a scholar do anthropolo-
gy of societies he or she cannot be with, like ancient societies or societies represented
in texts?; b) what is the epistemological status of imagination, essential to Ingolds
model?; c) how is such anthropological Dasein played out in situations where the
uncertainty and fragility of the interactions between anthropologist and the peo-
ple give rise to misunderstandings, paradoxes, and unsettling relations? What are
the remainders and refusals produced during the noncorrespondent description?
I cannot exhaust these issues in this short introduction. I would rather displace
a coherent methodological answer to the strategy employed by Marshall Sahlins
(1999) a while ago when talking about culture. By saying a number of things about
an umbrella concept, perhaps two or three will be right.


Giovanni da Col 4

One of the main points raised by the audience at the SOAS debate was whether
ethnographys sanctity should be preserved. Signe Howell (this issue) rightly point-
ed out that a host of scholars from humanities and social sciences now claim to use
ethnographic methods in grant applications for strategic reasons. Howell argues
that ethnography requires a different level of involvement and in-depth engage-
ment, which should never be given up to armchair anthropology. This leads, how-
ever, to a poignant question: how can anthropology account for phenomena that
limit our capacity of involvement yet require analytical or public response from our
discipline, such social media, fake news, or Trumps utterances (Asa Thomas, pers.
comm.), to name just a few. I personally encountered this conundrum when trying
to study Tibetan self-immolations in regions where access is tightly controlled and
foreigners (and fieldwork) are banned.
Daniel Miller (this issue) provides an intriguing response to this question: for
him, no one can just live on the social media, but in order to understand why
people post on social media we must work offline and adopt a holistic perspec-
tive on social life. Ethnography is a total social fact that deals with the totality of
human creativity in everyday life; it is that humbling experience that allows us to
not fetishize self-absorbing theoretical issues or news without an immersion of
the everyday life connected to them. In sum, if I read Miller correctly, one cannot
pursue ethnography of social media per se without a concrete and humbling per-
sonal exposure to the (regional) issues under scrutiny. An open question remains
whether a previous experience in a field site can constitute a sort of mana-capital of
knowledge and provide that sort of intimacy with the field, which can be deployed
later in life while sitting in an armchair or strolling through a park or reflecting on
walks and lines.

Ethnographic Theory
For David Graeber and me, ethnographic theory began as critique of anthropolog-
ical knowledge, a position that was largely made explicit in the inaugural Foreword
of this journal. We never argued that we were inventing anything novel, ground-
breaking, or mind-boggling. On the contrary, the Hau project of ethnographic
theory has been fairly traditionalist, propounding an awareness of the intellectual
history of our discipline in order to avoid the recurrent reinventions of the wheel,
marking some infamous disciplinary cutting-edgessharpened by fashionable
neologisms and marketable astonishmentsgenerated by the ones keen to play
the philosophers. We clearly expressed our interest in keywords, concepts, and the
floating signifiers of anthropology (taboo, mana, hau, potlatch). However, our in-
terest was not limited to eventful or controlled equivocations (Viveiros de Castro
2004) but the proliferation and historical transmissions of the misunderstandings
rising in everyday interactional confusions or contradictions of common expec-
tations, the paradoxes of everyday life, and communication. We see ethnogra-
phy as a pragmatic inquiry into conceptual disjunctures, we wrote (da Col and
Graeber 2011: vii). It is crucial to summon up that Roy Wagners (1975) notion
of misunderstanding that Eduardo Viveiros de Castro employs to construct his
theory of equivocation was influenced by Gregory Batesons double-bindthat


5 Two or three things I know about Ethnographic Theory

is, the contemporary coexistence and condensation of two contradictory orders

or statements about the world. Let me clarify further the importance of the prag-
matic aspect in our definition of ethnography. If we assume that social life or
engagement is predicated on the trust of others and that others will participate
cooperatively in our lives, it follows that the anticipation of the action of the oth-
ers requires the ability to cognitively model the interdependence of ones own and
others behavior, a form of social contingency and recursive dependence of our
actions on the imagination of authenticity of other peoples actions. From this per-
spective, the attunement and correspondence propounded by Ingold can only be
an emergent property of the interactional dynamics in which agents are necessarily
caught. At stake in this process is the role of anticipatory cognition and imagi-
nation. Through their imagination and capacity to generate subjunctive frames
of action, humans have the capability of questioning the flow of interaction and
opening horizons or domains that are grounded on certain hypothetical, as-if
qualities (cf. Seligman et al. 2008). Participant observation thus entails not just
an intersubjective correspondence but a metacommunicative signal warning the
agent or participants about the nature of their action, such as the famous Bate-
sonian frame (this is a play) that produces an imaginative space where social
rules, truth, and authenticity have a different bearing. This necessity to incorpo-
rate both an anticipatory (where actors must pro-act based on the anticipations of
the others actions) and metapragmatic dimension (where the social actors reflect
on the reasons of their own action and the possibility that their interlocutor may
misunderstand them) is where ethnographic theory differs from other evenemen-
tal theoretical approaches where situations are bracketed out, described in vague
or misleading terms, and occasional or ritual statements are erected to cosmolo-
gies and couched in the idiom of reported belief, and we are never told who said
what, when, and in which context a certain statement is generative of a wider cul-
tural insight. The larger implication of this approach, which has been advocated
by Luc Boltanski (2011) and pursued by a group of young French anthropologists
(cf. Berthom, Bonhomme, and Delaplace 2012), is the study of the productivity of
uncertainty at the heart of social life, where uncertainty locally emerges as an un-
shared commitment (contra Tomasello 2009) and a human non-correspondence
(contra Ingold 2014), often creating paradoxes, confusions, and inescapable situa-
tions that the actors must confront and resolve and makes certain representations
or ontologies transmissible.

The felicitous intelligibility

It is puzzling that in his attack on the concept animating this journal, Ingold (2014)
refrains from recalling that the first reference to the idea of ethnographic theory
is found in volume two of Malinowskis Coral gardens and their magic: An eth-
nographic theory of language and some practical corollaries (Part IV) and An
ethnographic theory of the magical word (Part VI). Here, Malinowski makes clear
that the study of language cannot be separated from practices, actions, and habits
often oblivious to the utterers.


Giovanni da Col 6

In dealing with language at the pre-literate stage, the ethnographer is

faced by another difficulty. The speech of his people does not live on
paper. It exists only in free utterance between man and man. Verba
volant, scripta manent. The ethnographer has to immobilise the volatile
substance of his subject matter and put it on paper. ... The ethnographic
approach thus demonstrates better than any other how deeply language
is connected with culture. It also shows how to study language outside
the framework of its cultural realitiesthe beliefs of the people, their
social organisation, their legal ideas and economic activitiesmust
remain entirely futile. Language therefore must be linked up with all the
other aspects of human culture. Language is not something which can be
studied independently of cultural reality. (Malinowski 1935: VI)
This passage seems to speak eloquently to the inseparability of ethnography from
theory. If language cant be understood and separated from social flow it activates
and coordinates, then perhaps we should stop searching for a definition in order to
conceive a theory-laden ethnography and a life-engaged and humaning-attuned
anthropology. This methodology would perhaps take Ingolds definition of par-
ticipant observation to its radical consequences. Maurice Bloch once put it quite
bluntly: he writes I know what anthropology is, and explains that he came across
it by watching the Zafimaniry in Madagascar asking why people descending from
the same ancestors had different languages or whether all humans love their kins-
men equally (2000: 116). Notably, when trying to comprehend imagination, Witt-
genstein argued, one ought to ask, not what images are or what goes on when
one imagines something, but how the word imagination is used (1953: 270). The
same can be applied to ethnographic theory. Poignantly, Rita Astutis proposal
(this issue) speaks to these concerns by pointing out that people know far more
than what they say and it is incredibly hard to learn what they never feel the need
to verbalize. Thus, the anthropologist could, for example, develop tasks or gener-
ate conditions that would challenge an informant to artificially raise imaginative,
surprising, and abstract situations that dont have readymade answers.
Ethnographic Theorys answer to events, life-processes, or values affected by
productive uncertainties of everyday life is not an explanation, a truth-effect, or a
judgment of rationality or irrationality but rather a felicitous intelligibility emerg-
ing out of the uncertainty of everyday life, to paraphrase J.L. Austin (1975), or a
sort of satisfaction (Befriedigung), as Wittgenstein ([1967] 1979) put it when con-
fronting the custom of kissing a picture of a loved person, which could otherwise
be explained by an alleged sympathetic correspondence between the picture and
the person, aimed to generate an effect at distance. But here Wittgenstein wants
to move beyond the equivalence between thing or action and concept. Rather, we
are in the realm of the traduttore, traditore. Equivalence never satisfies. A transla-
tion cannot just correspond but must be intelligible. Geoffrey Lloyd once mused
that no anthropologist has ever returned from the field announcing that he or she
could understand nothing (2004: 4). Because even the denial of the possibility of
translation already presupposes a degree of intelligibility from which a conception
of translatability would apply (cf. Hanks and Severi 2014; Severi 2014). It is perhaps
this effect of intelligibility, felicitousness, and satisfaction that a good ethnographic
theory aims to seek and deliver.


7 Two or three things I know about Ethnographic Theory

The collection of four transcripts originates in the debate Two or three things
I love or hate about ethnography, held at the Centre for Ethnographic Theory
(SOAS, London) on November 29, 2016. Alpa Shah and Maurice Bloch kindly of-
fered two pieces that spoke eloquently to the issues discussed in the debate and
were included later in this collection.
I am very grateful to the Chair of the Centre, Edward Simpson, and the depart-
ment of anthropology at SOAS for organizing the event. For their challenges and
inspiring questions I am grateful to the following members of the audience: Asa
Thomas, Gabrielle Fenton, Charles Beach, and Yeyang Su. I wish to thank Paolo
Heywood, Michael Lambek, Ellen Kladky, Thorgeir Kolshus, for advice and help at
different stages, and the marvelous Michelle Beckett for her prompt and brilliant

Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined communities. New York: Verso.
Austin, J. L. 1975. How to do things with words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Berthom, Franois, Julien Bonhomme, and Grgory Delaplace. 2012. Preface: Cultivating
uncertainty. Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2 (2): 12937.
Bloch, Maurice, with Mark Maguire. 2000. PostmodernismThe nature/culture debate in
just another guise? Irish Journal of Anthropology 5 (1): 11620.
Boltanski, Luc. 2011. On critique. Cambridge: Polity.
Carrithers, Michael, Matei Candea, Karen Sykes, Martin Holbraad, and Soumhya Venkate-
san. 2010. Ontology is just another word for culture: Motion tabled at the 2008 meet-
ing of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory, University of Manchester.
Critique of Anthropology 30 (2): 152200.
da Col, Giovanni, and David Graeber. 2011. Foreword: The return of ethnographic theo-
ry. Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 1 (1): vixxxv.
Hanks, William, and Carlos Severi. 2014. Translating worlds: The epistemological space of
translation. Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (2): 116.
Heywood, Paolo. Forthcoming. Making difference: Queer activism and anthropological
theory. Current Anthropology.
Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger. 1983. The invention of tradition. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Ingold, Tim. 2008. Anthropology is not ethnography. Proceedings of the British Academy
154: 6992.
. 2014. Thats enough about ethnography! Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4
(1): 38395.
Lloyd, Geoffrey E. R. 2004. Ancient worlds, modern reflections: Philosophical perspectives on
Greek and Chinese science and culture. Oxford: Clarendon.


Giovanni da Col 8

Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1935. Coral gardens and their magic: A study of the methods of tilling
the soil and of agricultural rites in the Trobriand Islands, volume two: The language and
magic of gardening. London: Routledge.
Nader, Laura. 2011. Ethnography as theory. Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 1 (1):
Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2016. Geontologies: A requiem of late liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 1952. Structure and function in primitive society: Essays and ad-
dresses. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
Sahlins, Marshall. 1999. Two or three things that I know about culture. Journal of the
Royal Anthropological Institute 5 (3): 399421.
Seligman, Adam B., Robert P. Weller, Michael J. Puett, and Bennett Simon. 2008. Ritual and
its consequences. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Severi, Carlo. 2014. Transmutating being: A proposal for an anthropology of thought.
Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (2): 4171.
Shryock, Andrew. 2016. Ethnography: Provocation. Correspondences (blog), Cultural An-
thropology website, May 3. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/871-ethnography-provocation.
Tomasello, Michael. 2009. Why we cooperate. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2004. Perspectival anthropology and the method of con-
trolled equivocation. Tipit: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South
America 2 (1): 122.
Wagner, Roy. 1975. The invention of culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. (1953) 2009. Philosophical investigations. Translated by G.E.M. An-
scombe. West Sussex, UK: Basil Blackwell Ltd.
. (1967) 1979. Remarks on Frazers Golden Bough. Translated by A.C. Miles, edited
by Rush Rhees. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.

Giovanni da Col is a Research Associate at SOAS, University of London, where he

is also the Director of Publications of the Centre for Ethnographic Theory, which
he cofounded. He lectures in the anthropology of thought at Cambridge and is
currently a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the
University of Edinburgh.
 Giovanni da Col
 Centre for Ethnographic Theory
 SOAS, University of London
 Thornaugh Street, Russell Square
 London, UK
