Reflexive ethnography and history

In general, reflexivity refers to circular relationships between cause and effect.

A reflexive relationship is bidirectional; with both the cause and the effect affecting one another in a situation that renders both functions causes and

effects. Reflexivity also is a term variously applied to certain properties of the grammatical systems and lexical forms of language, to the meanings of such forms, to the mental or cognitive capacities of language users, to the textually formed discourses that users create, to states of agentive consciousness of people acting in social situations, and to the special case of researchers as agents seeking to understand social behaviours such as the use of language in society (Silverstein 2006). Defining the epistemological constraints of the reflexive history of scientific knowledge production, Barbesino and Salvaggio differentiate three forms of reflexivity: cognitive, structural, and embedded reflexivity (1996: 3). Cognitive reflexivity refers to the capacity for awareness and reflection. Although it is intrinsic to a variety of human activities as reflexive monitoring, cognitive reflexivity might as well serve as a basic ontological or epistemic principle, as in various forms of philosophy (cf. Tauber 2005). On the meta-level, such self-awareness demands the duality of theory, which is simultaneously part of the object it tends to describe, is taken into account. Structural reflexivity refers to dimensions of representation involving self-reference by a statement or set of statements. Thereby it may produce one of two logical opposites – tautology or paradox. Tautological statements have infinite truth value, but paradoxical statements are often legitimised creating the meta-level of reference which seemingly dissolves the paradox by restricting the field of reference to a certain portion of statements. While a researcher is central for cognitive reflexivity and structural reflexivity characterises the discourse, embedded reflexivity refers to construction of the research object: the inseparability of representation and represented. Ultimately, it claims that observation of a phenomenon cannot be conceived as independent of this phenomenon. “Within radical constructivism, the notion of embedded reflexivity can be expressed by saying that one can only observe what one can distinguish and indicate. One needs a distinction in order to articulate the field one is faced with and to produce a cut, for in the world there are no distinctions and no negations” (Barbesino and Salvaggio 1996: 4). While in my study these three forms of reflexivity refer to circular relationships at the levels of the agent, discourse, and structure of the research of Latvian mythology, an overall design of the reflexive historiography requires the recognition of reflexivity as a positive move, liberating instead of constraining the study. This serves the notion of ‘collective critical reflexivity’ developed by Pierre Bourdieu. This would consist of objectifying the subject of objectification, i.e. by dispossessing the knowing subject of the privilege it normally grants itself and by bringing to light presuppositions it owes to its inclusion in the object of knowledge.

These presuppositions are of three different orders. To start with the most superficial, there are those associated with occupation of a position in social space, and the particular trajectory that has led to it, and with gender (which can affect the relationship to the object in many ways, in as much as the sexual division of labour is inscribed in social structures and in cognitive structures, orienting for example the choice of object of study). Then there are those that are

constitutive of the doxa specific to each of the different fields (religious, artistic, philosophical, sociological, etc.) and, more precisely, those that each particular thinker owes to his position in a field. Finally, there are the presuppositions constituting the doxa generically associated with the skholé, leisure, which is the condition of existence of all scholarly fields

(Bourdieu 2000: 10).

Such reflexivity as a collective enterprise should enable scientific reason to control itself more closely, in and through conflictual cooperation and mutual critique, and so to move towards independence on constraints and contingencies to which the rationalist convictions aspire and by which it is measured (ibid.:

122). Finally, bringing into the light the social limits of objectification would renounce the absolutism of classical objectivism without falling into post-modern relativism.

Reflexive theory in ethnography and reflexive history share common inspirations mentioned in the previous sections of the thesis. Dealing with cultural Others, reflexivity is “the awareness of looking at oneself looking at the other, and how these simultaneous gazes qualify and construct each other, has made the anthropologist / ethnologist / folklorist aware of how ethnography is in a fundamental way an act of representation that cannot be independent of the discursive processes in which the objectified other is made an object” (Anttonen 2005: 22, cf. Kuutma 2005a: 10). Adapting the insights from reflexive ethnography, reflexivity in my study manifests in three dimensions: subjective self-awareness (or cognitive reflexivity), conception of method, and object of study. Regarding the first, I will presume an identity of historiography and ethnography, therefore following Johannes Fabian’s claim that “all ethno-biography is connected to (auto)bio-graphy”, and moreover, “critically understood, autobiography is a condition of ethnographic objectivity” (Fabian 2001: 12). Regarding the second, reflexive research of disciplinary history is, paraphrasing George E. Marcus, a ‘multi-sited historiography’ that avoids totalising meta-narratives. It can define its object of study through several different modes or techniques, such as: following the people, following a certain thing, following the metaphor, following the plot, story, or allegory, following a life or biography, etc. At the end of the day, “In this cognitive and intellectual identification between the investigator and variously situated subjects in the emergent field of multi-sited research, reflexivity is the most powerfully defined as a dimension of method” (Marcus 1998: 97). Explored in the writing of disciplinary history, any combination of these techniques supposes the highlighting instead of hiding the political and ethical dimensions of scholarly production, as well as foregrounding structural and embedded reflexive properties of the research object as it was historically constructed within the field of study. Regarding the third meaning of reflexivity in my work, the reflexive disciplinary history of Latvian mythology is overw-helmingly a study of texts. Texts as a source of other texts, intertextual connections of texts, texts as scholarly production, decontextualised and

entextualised texts, etc. Concerning their textual nature, my reading of the scholarly productions of the past is informed by the approach of new historicism²⁵. With all respect to literary theory as a main inspiration, new historicism is an interdisciplinary approach that equally draws upon a systematic, one can say, textual understanding of cultural phenomena and their embedment in the social fabric. The focus on the historicity of the text (or, ultimately, a semiotic system) highlights the negotiations and economy of exchange at the moments when, via conventional and institutional practices, the discursive formations of one domain (e.g. aesthetic or cult-related) are trans-ferred into another (e.g. scientific). However, “New historicism is a collection of practices rather than a school or a method” (Greenblatt 2005: 3). Resisting disciplinary hegemony, it insists on a contextual way of reading historical documents²⁶; it recognises construction of historical truth within the narrative on history, but simultaneously rejects corresponding grand narratives and well established views on particular historical periods. Ultimately, it admits the rootedness of each interpretation in the historical moment when this inter-pretation takes place. New historicism questions reflexive relationships between art and society and between various institutionally demarcated discursive practices (for an extended list of characteristics see Greenblatt 2005: 22).

Greenblatt had informed my study regarding the textual level of the subject matter, but the analysis of metadiscursive²⁷ practices I have conducted with the help of the method of linguistic anthropology represented by Charles L. Briggs.

His approach was illustrated above by analysis of Grimms’ work and its role in the construction of early disciplinary identity. Referring to Foucault, Briggs has paid special attention to the history of scholarship: “Institutional histories similarly not only accept the authority of the discourse they examine but generally are accorded a lower rung in the textual hierarchies that define disciplines. Rather, critical historical research can play a crucial role in critically scrutinizing our tendency to see concepts and theories as neutral, objective tools” (Briggs 1993: 388). First, this statement means awareness of the nature of all scholarly formulations as socially and politically situated constructions that enter into creating, sustaining, and challenging relationships of power and inequality (Briggs 1993, Briggs and Bauman 2003). Second, it supposes close reading unveiling the very metadiscursive practices, along with strategies used

25 Stephen Greenblatt is the most influential practitioner of new historicism or cultural poetics. The approach itself shares the influence of both Geertz’s Interpretation of Cultures and Foucault’s The Order of Things (cf. Greenblatt 2005:4) with the Writing Culture movement.

26 Defined as such primarily by belonging to the past not to a particular genre; new historicism constantly re-examines the relationship between ‘literature’ and ‘history’.

27 Drawing from Foucault’s understanding of the discourse, “metadiscursive practices characterize discourses that seek to shape, constrain, or appropriate other discourses”, and they can be used both in “generating shared meaning and obscuring meaning or rendering it ambiguous” (Briggs 1993: 389–390).

in mobilising them and rhetorics used in justifying them. These practices constitute powerful means of situating themselves in social, historical, and political terms. Multiple metadiscursive practices centre around entextua-lisation – “the formal processes associated with producing particular types of texts in the service of social and political agendas” (Briggs 1993: 390). The analysed texts, at the same time, are not perceived as static, immanent struc-tures. Thus, one more key-term of my analysis is ‘intertextuality’; this means that the structure, content, and significance of individual texts and contexts emerge dialogically in the active interface between utterances²⁸. “Like textuality, intertextuality is a social product; both the relative importance of the role that intertextuality plays in a particular utterance and the way in which it is utilized thus involve questions of tactics, strategies and discursive constrains”

(ibid.). Since scholars link the texts they study to other texts, analysis of foregrounding and backgrounding the intertextual links and gaps is crucial for research of the knowledge production process. Elements of contextualisation link each intertextual element indexically to both the specific social and discursive setting in which it is produced and received, as well as to broader social, political and historical parameters. Likewise, decontextualisation and recontextualisation are processes linked to extra-textual practices²⁹, leading, for example, to commodification or exploitation of texts for propaganda purposes.

So, both decontextualisation and recontextualisation within the thesis will be seen as strategic social processes. At the moment, concluding with the reflexive dimension of the method of my study, as close reading of socially and politically embedded historical texts, I will further outline the reflexive properties characteristic to the object of this study.

In addition to the history of religion, the overwhelming context of the research into Latvian mythology has been folkloristics – by folklore constituting the main source of the reconstructive and further comparative studies of myths or particular motifs, and by folkloristics constituting the dominant institutional as well as methodological framework of such studies. Therefore it is necessary to take a look at how folkloristics, involved in studies of Latvian mythology, have constructed their object of study – texts, customs, belief systems, etc., which, again referring to the discursive dynamics of modernity, might be summarised under the umbrella term ‘tradition’. The particular understanding of this object and implications of its existence, as they will be more closely analysed below, emerged already in the 1980s. Here I would like to stress two now classical discussions regarding tradition’s authenticity and relation to history. The first is a particular understanding of tradition as outlined in the

28 For more on the relations of intertextuality and sociality see Briggs and Bauman 1992.

29 The link between these specific terms is well illustrated by Briggs’ note on KHM:

“Herein lies part of the popular success of the tales; being both more highly entextualized and much more structurally homogeneous, the narratives were ready made for decontex-tualization from the collection and subsequent recontexdecontex-tualization in a host of new formats, including reading and retelling in nurseries” (Briggs 1993: 396).

breakthrough essay by Richard Handler and Jocelyn Linnekin (1984). Departing from textual analysis, the motto of reflexive history might be Handler and Linnekin’s statement that “the past is always constructed in the present” (1984:

286). This does not mean that there is no correspondence with the past; but, as society and tradition are meaning processes rather than bounded, natural objects, the construction of historical continuity or discontinuity is never a pure fact. Therefore, “We must understand tradition as a symbolic process that both presupposes past symbolisms and creatively reinterprets them. In other words, tradition is not a bounded entity made up of bounded constituent parts, but a process of interpretation, attributing meaning in the present though making reference to the past” (Handler and Linnekin 1984: 287). The authors’

understanding of tradition as a socially and symbolically constructed entity (and as such neither genuine nor spurious) that never exists apart from its interpretation also corresponds to the somewhat narrower but still influential notion of ‘invented tradition’, developed by Eric Hobsbawm:

‘Invented tradition’ is taken to mean a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which auto-matically implies continuity with the past. In fact, where possible, they normally attempt to establish continuity with a suitable historic past

(Hobsbawm 2009 [1983]: 1).

These can be both ‘traditions’ actually invented, constructed and formally instituted and those emerging in a less easily traceable manner within a brief and dateable period. Although the many large-scale events, symbols or ceremonies mentioned by Hobsbawm aim for fixity, it is now a generally accepted view that traditions in general can be dynamic, contested and claimed by different, sometimes even openly opposite, groups at different moments (cf.

Anttonen 2005, Edensor 2002). Importantly, they are always responses to novel situations which take the form of reference to old situations, or which establish their own past by quasi-obligatory repetition; thus, the inherent structural reflexivity serves as a means of legitimising the invented traditions. Where Handler and Linnekin in the above mentioned essay generalised two studies of contemporary societies, Hobsbawm was more concerned with the changes of public sphere, and subsequent formation of new ritual and symbolic representation in the second half of the nineteenth century, i.e. the age of rapid changes brought on by modernity, industrialisation, and the formation of nation states; in other words, in a time which also gave birth to folkloristics. However, in both cases traditions appear as rhetorical constructions that denote an active political process of creating historical meaning. As my study does not concern traditions as such but the research on traditions as a framework for the research of mythology, these two complimentary perspectives on tradition are chosen to highlight its embedded circular relationship, i.e. reflexivity. Consequently, in the following subchapters I will elaborate on the reflexive properties of the

studies on Latvian mythology, as conceptualised within the scholarly discourse and, which at the same time, legitimises the founding of this discourse.