an object of contemplation nor changing it for the better, but in making myself the subject of an experiment, allowing the world to work on me, reshaping my thinking and guiding my actions. Undoubtedly it was this impulse to test and transform myself in interactions and conversations with others that drew me to ethnography. So when I left the Congo in late 1964, disenchanted with the United Nations agenda for controlling and developing the newly independent, mineral-rich, and anarchic country that Leopold II had brutally subjugated eighty years earlier, I naively hoped that anthropology would provide me a way of returning to Africa as a learner rather than a master, an equal among equals.
At Cambridge it took me a year to decide on a field site and secure funds. During this time, I felt cut off from what I called the “real” world and impatient to reimmerse myself in it. Cambridge felt cloistered and claustrophobic, a place of ivory towers, antiquated rituals, and donnish privileges. It was not without irony, therefore, that six months into fieldwork in northern Sierra Leone, I found myself gazing nostalgically at the postcard my wife's friend Didi had sent us from Cambridge of Kings Chapel under snow. Driven by a felt need to visit every Kuranko village, observing critical events, interviewing informants, transcribing stories, covering every aspect of social life, as well as meeting the incessant demands of neighbors, I was quickly exhausted and fell prey to fantasies of Cambridge, where I might find asylum and indulge the Wordsworthian luxury of writing down experiences recollected in tranquility.
Since that first arduous year of fieldwork, I have returned to Sierra Leone many times and done stints of fieldwork in Aboriginal Australia and elsewhere. Every one of these forays has recalled the first: the sense of immense relief, such as Ishmael describes on the opening page of Moby Dick, when one dismounts the treadmill of a landlocked existence and can “get to sea…take to the ship.” Yet I am always mindful of the irony that, having escaped the confines of the academy and cast myself adrift in the world, I find myself, within a few weeks or months of labor-intensive fieldwork, longing to get back to the sheltered precincts from which I so elatedly sallied forth.
John Dewey argued that this dialectical movement between home and the world is the natural rhythm of human life, for we are constantly forced to rethink our lives in the light of new experiences that unsettle what we once took for granted or regarded as tried and true. Empirical method in science is simply the systematic implementation of this familiar mode of testing what we think we know against what we don't. For Dewey, philosophy should be understood in the same way—testing a hypothesis against experience in a controlled environment in order to arrive at a provisional conclusion that demands further testing. It follows that the good of philosophy is a matter of its ability to do justice to life. And so Dewey asks:
Does it end in conclusions which, when they are referred back to ordinary life experiences and their predicaments, render them more significant, more luminous to us, and make our dealings with them more fruitful? Or does it terminate in rendering the things of ordinary experience more opaque than they were before, and in depriving them of having in “reality” even the significance they had previously seemed to have? Does it yield the enrichment and increase of power of ordinary things which the results of physical science afford when applied in every-day affairs?15
There are, of course, many ways in which one can absent oneself from the world, and many reasons for doing so, including disenchantment, dread, disablement, or a desire for intellectual or spiritual illumination. And there are just as many ways in which one can be actively present in the world, gregarious and engaged. But the task of balancing these modes of thinking and of being—rather than ranking them or emphasizing one at the expense of the other—is difficult. In the following pages I explore this problematic through a set of portraits of thinkers I have known, many of whom would not recognize thinking as a self-conscious, systematic activity at all. My interest is in their ways of negotiating the vexed relationship between being part of and standing apart from the world. My aim is to show the limits of what is practically possible rather than describe what is abstractly conceivable. Naturally I was drawn to these individuals because I saw something of my own struggle in theirs, particularly the struggle to integrate my thinking with my life, to make thought worldly rather than merely wordy, and to clarify the relationship between how one thinks and who one is. As an anthropologist, I have never sought the kind of knowledge of others that purports to transcend the world of their experience, reducing human lives to cultural representations, innate imperatives, social rules, traditional values, or global processes; my interest is in the knowledge that may contribute to tolerant coexistence in a world of entrenched divisions and ineradicable differences. To this end one needs an ability both to think for oneself and to be open to the thinking of others, and a capacity for both self-analysis and social critique.
PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION
The tension between philosophy conceived as a conversation with oneself or within a closed community and philosophy conceived as an open-ended conversation with the world at large reflects a tension that is natural to consciousness itself, which oscillates constantly between a sense of being apart from the world and being a part of it. On the one hand, the world constantly invades my consciousness, breaking into my thoughts, disturbing my dreams, and sometimes subverting my sense of who I am or would seem to be. On the other hand, I experience a countervailing impulse to leave the world behind, to put my dealings with it on hold, opening up a space in which the rhythms of my inner life govern the way the external world appears to my consciousness. I regard this tension between turning toward the world and turning away from it as an expression of a deeper existential dialectic between being acted upon and being an actor. For the world can be so overwhelming that one is swept away by it, with no time to think, no sense of being in control, no opportunity to be still or silent. But in stillness and silence we may become estranged from the joys and obligations of our worldly life. Hannah Arendt's distinction between the vita contemplativa and the vita activa captures this antinomy, though, like Dewey, she favored the latter over the former, preferring the activist to the contemplative, the man of the world to the ascetic, even though both modes of thought and modes of being are, in practice, mutually entailed.
It is to the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski that we owe the term participant observation.16 Strictly speaking, Malinowski's coinage is an oxymoron, since one cannot be at one and the same time actor and audience, player and spectator, deeply involved in an event and disinterestedly observing it. In reality, of course, an ethnographer plays these roles successively, not simultaneously. At times, one sets aside one's notebook and engages socially with others, sharing a meal, assisting with farmwork, tending a sick child, or participating in a ritual event without much thought of academic gain. At other times, one is an outsider, standing back, observing an event from a discreet distance, taking notes, making a film, recording a story. Even though one's initial separateness becomes, in time, transmuted into a nominal kinship or genuine feeling for the world into which one has ventured, one never ceases to stand out in that world—by one's appearance, accent, idiosyncratic interests, and transience. What gives anthropological writing its unique character is its interleaving of these very different modes of being-with others—relating to the other as a fellow subject (a friend) and relating to the other as an object of intellectual interest (a stranger).17
This oscillation between being a part of and being apart from is, as I have noted, not peculiar to ethnographic or empirical methods. It is in the nature of human consciousness itself, for our minds are continually and spontaneously moving between absorption in a task and reflection on it between doing something without thinking and thinking about what we are doing. What is true of thinking is also true of being.18 Although we sometimes experience ourselves as singular or solitary, this experience is always predicated upon a sense of what it means to be with another. This is what Paul Ricoeur means by the phrase “oneself as another.” It “suggests from the outset that the selfhood of oneself implies otherness to such an intimate degree that one cannot be thought of without the other.”19 We are thus analogues of one another. Anthropology is the systematic application of analogical thought to a pluralistic universe, a way of understanding the other as oneself in other circumstances.
We
