of cultures (Geertz 1973c) dovetails nicely with the archaeology of knowledge (Foucault 1976). An archaeology of knowledge promises that from symbolic detritus—surviving documents and artifacts—a historian can read cultural (or discursive) formations, the changing universes of meaning through which the dead have paraded.
But the dead were once alive. My own fieldwork over the past twenty years has convinced me that public representations are hazardous guides to subjectivities, which I think of as, roughly speaking, cognitive and experiential flows. Another way to say this is: An account of meaning that fails to engage living people cannot reliably infer thoughts, feelings, or motivations. At best an interpretive ethnography or history can sketch a representational environment—but people do radically different things with representations, and their meaning-making is partially hidden from view. To glimpse it we need to employ, where possible, techniques other than textual interpretation.
The ethnographic practice known as person-centered ethnography (LeVine 1982; Hollan 1997; Linger 2001b) permits a fieldworker to explore how people go about making sense of the world into which they were cast. Usually conducted through face-to-face interviews, such research reveals that people affirm, transform, negate, manipulate, and go beyond the public representations that are the objects of conventional symbolic analyses. By highlighting the gap between representational environment and meaning-making, person-centered studies point to the significant indeterminacies inherent in any interpretive ethnography or archaeology of knowledge.
This chapter sounds a note of caution about Missing Persons approaches and suggests a partial (though sometimes unavailable) remedy for their limitations. First I outline some recent critiques of standard interpretive methods and describe the person-centered alternative. I next draw on my 1994–96 research in Aichi prefecture, in central Japan, to examine how Oscar Ueda, a Japanese Brazilian migrant to the city of Nagoya, refashions his national and ethnic identities in an unfamiliar social milieu.1 I end the chapter by discussing the implications of Oscar’s self-making for anthropological and historical investigations of meaning.
Spiders, not Flies
Recall Geertz’s depiction of culture as a web of symbols. The metaphor has, as I noted in Chapter 1, suggested to many that people are flies rather than spiders—that they are caught “in culture” (or “in discourse”). The ethnographer’s main task is, accordingly, to trace the sticky web of representations in which the flies are trapped. The unfortunate flies themselves are incidental to the cultural account. The method required is “thick description,” an analysis of symbolic forms based on detailed, intricate interpretation.
Criticism of representational approaches within anthropology has grown to a drumbeat in the past decade or so, though it has antecedents stretching back almost to the beginning of the century (Sapir 1917). From various angles, the critics make a similar point—that public symbols, rituals, narratives, discourses, and performances are, in Roy D’Andrade’s words, “too elliptical” (1984: 105) to serve as reliable guides to meanings.2 In other words, people are active spiders, not passive flies. Their subjectivities cannot be treated as mere imprints of public representations on minds (Strauss 1992; Strauss and Quinn 1997).
Person-centered ethnography aims to catch the spiders at work—or, shedding the bug metaphors, to treat human beings as active meaning-makers in their own right. Because meaning is always somebody’s, the immediate object of person-centered ethnography is what Theodore Schwartz has called idioverses (1978)—ever-changing individual worlds of meaning. Person-centered approaches thereby recover the missing persons, moving human beings to the center of cultural accounts.
In exploring idioverses, I favor flexible interviews over predesigned question-and-answer sessions. Informal, open-ended conversations encourage people to explore their personal networks of thought and feeling. Of course, conversation is no substitute for ESP. Drawing inferences about thoughts and feelings from what people say is a hazardous enterprise, for even “private,” face-to-face talk is, in a restricted sense, public. Narrative conventions and interpersonal considerations certainly shape such talk (Bruner 1988; Hollan 1997). Yet the substance of a particular conversation is not reducible to rules, any more than the substance of an utterance is reducible to syntax. Moreover, because person-centered conversations take place in what is for most informants a novel interpersonal context, they offer rare opportunities for people to speak their minds.
Most everyday conversations are occasions for sociability, verbal sparring, exchanges of opinions, displays of distinction, joking, and so on. So are, at times, person-centered interviews, but the main objective—the co-exploration of an idioverse by anthropologist and informant—is extraordinary. I try to foster an atmosphere in which my conversational partner can be heard by me, hear herself, and respond to her own words. This is unusual conversational practice, and, when successful, yields unusually rich material.
Because rapport is essential, I prefer interviewing those with whom I have already established a comfortable relationship. I seek to put the person at ease, to assure her that her point of view is valued. I encourage her to think things through and to speak with candor. I try to ask questions that are pertinent, responsive to issues she herself raises. My efforts to elicit frankness, to avoid imposing my own perspective, and to listen carefully sometimes fail, but often I gain some insight into another’s concerns and ways of thinking. People also appreciate the chance to reflect out loud and to be taken seriously. I used to be surprised when informants thanked me for talking with them, but no more.
In underscoring the advantages of person-centered ethnography, I do not mean to discard Missing Persons approaches, which are always valuable and sometimes irreplaceable. The representational environment, past or present, here or there, deserves close attention. And where persons are in fact missing one must employ Missing-Persons methods: without a time machine one can hardly interview residents of ancient Athens.
My aim here is simply to put Missing-Persons approaches in their place. They invite us to situate ourselves, with our own particular biographical, emotional, and conceptual baggage, among unfamiliar representations, and to make sense of them. The interpretive technique resembles, at worst, a projective test. At best, practiced by a sensitive, informed observer adept at leaps of imagination, it can undoubtedly yield insightful and provocative speculations about the propositions with which others are bombarded.
But nothing can substitute for verbal give-and-take with those who inhabit an alien representational environment.3 Oral explorations of life histories, thoughts, and sentiments provide checks on interpretive conjecture and shed light on the personal meaning-making and subjective diversity missed by analyses of public symbols. A successful person-centered interview creates a space where the interviewee can verbalize and hammer out her understandings of the world and herself, bringing to life the generative dialectic between public representations and personal experience.
From Japan to Brazil to Japan
Before moving to Oscar Ueda’s reflections, let me sketch the historical context of his journey from Brazil to Japan.4 Beginning in 1908, Japanese migrants, recruited and assisted by a Japanese government eager to export its surplus population, traveled to Brazil in large numbers to work on the coffee and cotton plantations of São Paulo and other southern states.5 Most of the migrants (isseis) intended to return to Japan after a short stay, but they rarely did.6 Instead they scraped together some money and bought farms or started small businesses. Their children (nisseis) and grandchildren (sanseis) spoke Portuguese and, for the most part, adopted Brazilian lifeways, even as they often identified as, and were labeled, japoneses. Members of the later generations also began to marry “Brazilians” at increasingly high rates, raising mestiço (mixed-blood) children.7 Brazil’s current nikkei (Japanese-descent) population has grown to one and a half million,
