2019FHAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 9 (1): 195–199

BOOK SYMPOSIUM

Who defines the new? A plea for

ethnographic humility
Gregor D O B L E R , Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg

Comment on Rees, Tobias. 2018. After ethnos. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

When asked to comment on Tobias Rees’s new book, I
readily agreed. I welcomed the chance to discuss anthro-
pology’s future and to contribute to a common under-
standing of our aims. Reading the book, however, left
me puzzled and unsure whether we actually share a com-
mon field. In this review, I try to mark a clear position
without becoming righteous, excluding or censorious. I
feel somewhat missionary about my own way of doing
anthropology, and I am sure this will show. I would like
my comments to open up a space for conversation, not
to close it down; but I also want to be clear and brief,
which sometimes implies being blunt.
“Ethnography,” Tobias Rees argues, is always caught
up in predefined concepts—most importantly “society”
and “culture” (p. 12ff.). It is ordered by contingent phil-
osophical categories which it does not set out to change,
but merely to fill with empirical content. “Answer-based”
ethnography is more or less like a coloring book: the im-
age changes, but the outline remains the same.
A “philosophically inclined anthropology” (p. 16), on
the other hand, stops assuming that we know how the
world is ordered. Instead of being answer-based, it is
“question-based” (p. 33): fieldwork gives us the possibil-
ity to rethink our own categories and to freshly think
about the human. The main value of anthropology is
not to gather knowledge, but to provide us with new ways
of knowing and new, permanently evolving and trans-
forming ideas. For Rees, anthropology’s aim is the per-
manent revolution of our concepts (e.g. pp. 90f., 105).
Taken as an abstract statement, I can wholeheartedly
agree to this. I just do not think that we can create the
conditions for such a permanent revolution without the
concept-laden, boring, empirical and place-bound work
that has been anthropology’s bread and butter through-
out the discipline’s existence. We cannot have surprises
without letting ourselves be surprised. The occasions for
our surprise are the lives of real people living in real
places; only from them can new philosophical thoughts
and new concepts emerge that may really matter.
“After ethnos” on the history of anthropology
My difficulties with Tobias Rees’s approach start with the
history of anthropology. In the effort to clearly present
what he sees as new in recent anthropology, he defines
away most of its traces from established ethnography.
Rees’s reconstruction of the history of ethnography
and anthropology more or less takes Malinowski’s word
for the shortcomings of his predecessors and for the nov-
elty of his own approach—which then becomes typical
for anthropology as such. Before the Torres Straits ex-
pedition, Rees argues, ethnography came in the form of
either expeditions or deskwork; neither can properly be
described as fieldwork (pp. 119ff.). Why? Expeditions
did not always pass quickly through places, and they were
not always content with haphazardly collecting trinkets,
bones and vocabularies. Think of travelers like Hein-
rich Barth, Charles Doughty, Christiaan Snouck Hurg-

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. Volume 9, number 1. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/704004

© The Society for Ethnographic Theory. All rights reserved. 2575-1433/2019/0901-0021$10.00

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 Gregor DOBLER
ronje—let alone Frank Hamilton Cushing or Werner
Munzinger. Think of missionaries, from Sahagún to La-
fitau to Krapf and Rebmann.
These were not minor figures; their works were central
to the formation of modern anthropology. Rees accepts
Malinowski’s view as authoritative, a view that excluded
everything before him from the science of anthropology.
In order to become a hard science, Malinowski argued,
anthropology had to study a single society and the in-
terlinkages between its different institutions. Fieldwork
then becomes bounded by ethnicity and uninterested in
historical change. Rees is very right in attacking this no-
tion of fieldwork, but surprisingly, he takes Malinow-
ski’s self-image seriously and lets it taint everything that
came before (p. 127). Malinowskian ethnography is only
one form of fieldwork embedded into a deeper history
of curiosity, enquiry and human relationships. Through-
out this history, anthropology has been interested in
the relation between anthropos and ethnos. While older
ethnographers took ethnos for granted, their main aim
was rarely to describe ethnos. It was to understand
humanity.
Spatial vs. temporal difference?
His narrow view of anthropology’s history has conse-
quences for Rees’s conception of the discipline’s future.
He characterizes classic modern anthropology as “inter-
ested in spatial difference (how people live elsewhere)”
(p. 131). I read these words as dismissive. “How people
live elsewhere” smacks of butterfly collecting and anti-
quarianism. Yet where do we stand if we stop to be in-
terested in how people live, elsewhere or here?
For me, the difference that matters today is not be-
tween ethnography interested in spatial difference and
ethnography interested in temporal difference. The dif-
ference is between an ethnography interested in people
other than ourselves, which takes the effort to get to know
them and their lives; and an ethnography intent on writ-
ing clever and impressive words interesting to our peers
and our tenure boards. This divide runs through all of
us. If we can no longer conceive of spatial difference as
defined by cultures, this does not imply that we should
throw out the baby of curiosity toward other possibilities
of living with the bathwater of culturally organized pat-
terns (cf. p. 131).
This relates to my second difficulty with Rees’s argu-
ment. How do we identify the new? Rees, it seems to me,
mostly identifies it in relation to his own frame of refer-
ence: new is that which surprises me (pp. 132f., 143f.). If
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196
that reading is correct, anthropology runs the danger of
becoming trapped in a constant race to find ever new
permutations of theory, to tell ever new stories about
the world—stories whose main virtue is to surprise the
teller and a select readership which, in order to be sur-
prised by the same things, has to be very similar to the
one who tells the story. This comes close to my percep-
tion of large parts of our discipline today, but it is prob-
ably not what Rees had in mind.
The definition of “new” has to be tied to empiric facts
about the world. As difficult as the notion of an empiric
fact has, for very good reasons, become, I do not think
we can do without it. We can no longer think about facts
in empiricist or positivist terms (or at least I cannot), but
still: I do not stop passionately arguing about the truth
or falsehood of statements about the world. Fake news
is different from real news; fake science is wrong, both
morally and intellectually. If we agree on that, then the
newness of anthropological or ethnographic statements
has to be grounded in careful description of what is
there. We cannot achieve “thought” and “philosophically
inclined anthropology” without a thorough grounding
in learning about the world and the human possibilities
realized in it. Shortcuts make for bad philosophy and
even worse anthropology.
Newness—“differences in time”—can emerge in two
often interconnected ways. We can find something new
in the world and analyze it, adapting our concepts to it
(say, container ships, financial derivatives, or interna-
tional human rights law); or we can find a new way to
think about old circumstances. Marx did not create alien-
ation as a fact, but he perceived it, identified it as a con-
cept, and allowed us to recognize it in the world. Both
ways of identifying something new, the empirical and
the conceptual, rely on the notion that it is possible to
heuristically distinguish fact from interpretation.
This implies that in every ethnography worth read-
ing, “differences in time” come together with and are
embedded in “differences in space.” “Differences in space”
means that we identify a fact about the world as it is in a
certain place, for certain people. The way twentieth-
century anthropology used to order these differences—
in tribes, ethnicities, bounded places linked to bounded
cultures—was ideological from the start and has become
completely unacceptable today. I do not think, however,
that “differences in space” should cease to matter when
we give up twentieth-century ways of ordering them.
When doing research, we compare figurations and
assemblages and try to understand what differentiates
them from others. Without such a comparison (which
197
remains anchored in spatial difference), the notion of
“difference in time” would not make any sense. To take
Rees’s example of international health (pp. 153f.): his
identification of private foundations as “new” players
marks a difference and tells us he sees the ensuing as-
semblage as somehow distinct from earlier ones. This
“new” assemblage then plays out differently in Tan-
zania and in North Korea – not for any cultural logic in-
herent to Tanzanians or North Koreans, but because it
comes into contact with different institutions and actors
and thereby changes its nature as an assemblage. Rees’s
choice to still call it “international health”—and not
something completely different in both places—implies
a choice about identifying rupture or continuity; so does
the choice to identify “international health” as one as-
semblage different from avian flu, mushrooms or trans-
port infrastructure. The fact that many things come to-
gether in an assemblage does not do away with the
necessity of identifying (and constantly rethinking)
boundaries and ruptures.
To do so, any empirical work needs descriptions of
differences in space and differences in historical situa-
tions. In order to identify what Rees calls “differences
in time,” we have to rely on descriptions of such con-
cretely bounded and anchored phenomena. Whether
they are the focus of our interest (as in: “I plan to write
a monograph on Trobriand gardening”) or not (as in: “I
am interested in rhythms of capitalism”) is secondary
(unlike Rees argues on p. 135). I am not sure we need
more research whose avowed ultimate focus is on “dif-
ferences in time,” but that is certainly a valid argument
to make. Basing this argument on a principal opposi-
tion between “differences in space” and “differences in
time” seems to me to be tenable only from a purely ide-
alistic standpoint.
I see traces of such idealism in Rees’s book. “The aim
of anthropology after ethnos is to focus on that which
escapes the already established—which escapes the pos-
sibilities implicit in the already thought and known—its
focus is precisely not on history but on those aspects
in the here and now that escape it, that cannot be ex-
plained by it” (p. 160).
I find these sentences problematic and troubling. I
can only understand them if I assume that the anthro-
pological observer is unbounded by history: an objective
presence that has a privileged and privileging capacity
to understand our situation without being embedded in
it. The anthropologist becomes the avant-garde thinker
who can identify what is not quite there yet, what is not
even “implicit in the already thought and known.”
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WHO DEFINES THE NEW?
We all are part of our world, and we cannot think
what is not thinkable in it. We are the product of his-
tory. This does not mean that we are condemned to
constantly repeat what others have done before us (al-
though there is a lot of that, too); but I see no grounds
for such a grandiose description of our role. What we
can do is to humbly describe the world and think about
it. Identify new “facts” and abstract types and patterns
from them. Remain in a conversation with those around
us—all around us—in order to challenge and refine our
understanding. Let ourselves be touched by others, be
they humans or not. There is no way to focus on that
which escapes us—unless we declare that our thinking
is avant-gardist by definition.
The politics of avoiding re-railment
Finally, I cannot agree that we have to avoid what Rees
calls “re-railment” (p. 131). I understand the point.
Don’t construct systems that start thinking for you;
don’t let your own insights make you uncurious; don’t
settle for less than permanent revolution. But should
we not sometimes make a point? Should we not try to
be exact and convincing in the way we describe reality?
Should we not make connections, identify patterns, tell
other people what we have come to believe about the
world? Completely avoiding re-railment would decou-
ple curiosity from its objects and turn it back onto it-
self. The only way to evaluate what we write would be
whether it adds to our puzzlement.
This brings me to politics. Rees is keenly aware of the
politics of co-evalness in anthropology (p. 6). His mis-
givings about spatial difference have much to do with
the knowledge that relegating others to their own space,
their distinct society, turns them into people who live in
a world different from ours. We have to describe oth-
ers in the same terms as we describe ourselves; we are
all of us (including nonhuman others) elements of as-
semblages, intertwined and co-defined by each other.
Yet from the pages of After ethnos, I heard no echo of
people who do not live in our own world. All voices of
which I heard traces in the long conversation that pre-
ceded the text seemed to me curiously alike: Western,
academic, post-industrial, and interested in paradigms.
I could not fit the interests, voices, and routines of the
people whose lives I shared during fieldwork into its
pages.
I do not mean that theory has to be intelligible to ev-
erybody, or that we cannot transcend fieldwork experi-
ences to arrive at a level of abstraction that might be dif-
 Gregor DOBLER
ficult to reconcile with a peasant’s life world. That, of
course, is our daily bread, and it is what we trained for.
Yet where does the stress Rees puts on the emergent,
the new, the always-not-quite-yet-understood, leave the
experiences of daily routines which are nothing like
new? What is our task if we see exploitation at work,
old-fashioned and boring and terrible? Do the surprises
of an ordinary life in a Namibian village—fostering
grandchildren, growing millet, tending cattle and sing-
ing in Church on Sundays—qualify as material to the
new ethnography after ethnos?
In short: Can ethnography that puts the stress on be-
ing avant-garde remain in a dialogue with the people,
or assemblages, we are writing about? What happens if
others find it imperialist and power-laden and want to
decolonize it—whose perspective do we, then, privi-
lege? I fear that putting too much stress on the novelty
of the things we find, we may forget the human be-
ings which anthropology once set out to describe. We
may forget to integrate their sense of the just and right
(and the world’s failure to live up to that sense) into
our surprises, and fail to develop political solidarity with
them.
Most crucially, we risk leaving aside their ways of be-
ing in the world, bodily, sentient, pragmatic and intel-
lectual—and with theirs, ours. In this book, Rees seems
to be more interested in epistemology than in the world;
in making our categories explode colorfully than in
bringing about justice; in how we can think about the
world than in how being in the world changes us.
My own perspective: ethnography and
anthropology
What, then, would my own perspective on anthropol-
ogy be? Like Rees, I am looking for an anthropology af-
ter ethnos, but for me, that mostly means an anthropol-
ogy that does not see cultures and societies as spatially
and socially bounded. I do not look for an anthropology
after culture or after society. People jointly make sense
of their world and interpret it in a way that informs their
interactions with it. We live in relation to other humans
and other living beings and other things, and these hu-
mans and beings and things to some degree inhabit us,
form us, and structure what we can and want to do—
structures that take on a fluid, but objective form. To
me, it seems useful and convenient to call this precarious
sense-making culture and these fluid structures society.
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198
I think we can and should sometimes take them for
granted, objectify them and use them as an abbreviation
for explanation, and at other times ask how exactly they
exist and come into being.
We should use fieldwork as a unique possibility to
immerse ourselves into the networks and assemblages
and corporeal being-in-the-world and sense-making of
people and beings and things which are not us, and
thereby both to change our selves and to acquire knowl-
edge (tacit and explicit) about the world we share. The
ethnographies I find most interesting are precise and
lively—and closer to the life-worlds we describe than
to the questions we set out to answer before coming to
know these life-worlds. This is what I would call empir-
ical description, knowing that we can never remain out-
side of it.
Anthropology only exists as –logy, as the abstractive
practice and poetic creation of meaning, an activity that
(as Faust finds when translating ‘logos’) is at the begin-
ning of our world and in which words, meanings and
action intersect. Anthropology needs to be grounded in
an engagement with the world. Before we interpret the
world, we should get to know it; we should participate
in a practical dialogue with others whom we allow to
change our perspective. The more thoroughly and the
more carefully we immerse ourselves into this dialogue,
and the more chaotic and meaningless the facts about
the world we collect seem at first, the more interesting
can (not necessarily will) our interpretations become.
Ideally, they are abstracting, not abstract; they find their
inspiration in the concrete and stubborn realities we
encounter in fieldwork rather than in the conversations
thrilling our university peers; they take inequality more
seriously than incommensurability.
In short, we should work towards anthropology through
ethnography. The –logy part, for me, is concerned with
temporal difference (or similarity) in Rees’s sense, whereas
the –graphy part is probably more concerned with spa-
tial difference. Both only make sense if we join them in
what we are doing. The –graphy gives relevance, poi-
gnancy, and the power to surprise to the meaning we
produce in the –logy.
How different is this approach from that of Rees? I
am not sure. His forceful and provocative presentation
probably has brought me to seem much more certain
and full of myself than I hope I actually am. My aim
was not to tell anybody what anthropology should be,
but to present a viewpoint for which, I hope, there is
space even in an anthropology after ethnos.
199 WHO DEFINES THE NEW?

Gregor DOBLER is Professor at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität
Freiburg.
Gregor Dobler
Institut für Ethnologie
Werthmannstr. 10
79085 Freiburg
Germany
gregor.dobler@ethno.uni-freiburg.de

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