According to Foucault, “the (…) author’s name is not simply an element in a discourse; it performs a certain role with regard to narrative discourse, assuring a classificatory function.” (Foucault 1969: 107) and adds up that “although, since the eighteen century, the author has played the role of the regulator of the fictive, a role quite characteristic of our era of industrial and bourgeois society, of individualism and private property, still, given the historical modifications that are taking place, it does not seem necessary that the author function remain constant in form, complexity, and even in existence.” (Foucault 1969: 119)
Besides, for Foucault, the author is a function using language to relate the author, the message, and the others. Both, anthropologists and natives are authors; in that way, do authors have the right to tell the story in behalf of “the others”? According to Nelson, “the product of ethnography —our texts—receives close scrutiny, while the process of ethnography— our fieldwork—is rarely examined. (Nelson 1997: 120) She also asserts that “our writing techniques are politicized, our research techniques are also politicized, only more so.” (Nelson 1997: 121) and concludes by stating that “face-to-face exchange between the ethnographer and her respondent is politically constituted, if not because of social difference (i.e., class, gender, ethnicity, nationality, age, education, etc.), then simply because of the dominant role the researcher plays in guiding the exchange. (Nelson 1997: 121)
As a matter of fact, in Taussig’s work, informants are presented as “M”, “P”, a neighbour, the shop worker, a buyer or an former public servant. What Taussig does in the text is to play with this logic: he melts his voice with those he interviews, while contrasting the discourse from each one of his informants (p. 113). According to Briggs, he is disengaging from the research to “collect ‘voices’ much like an archaeologist collects artefacts” (Briggs 1986:123). Interviews, according to my reading of his work, are presented in the book as a first-hand understanding of the situation perceived by the inhabitants. Many times it is not his voice telling the story, it is the voice of members of the community, nostalgic of old times o horrified by the current situation; however, sometimes these accounts are coloured sporadic opinions from the author. Taussig is doing what Guber affirmed when quoting Jacobson, that is to make a “description (which is) neither the natives’ world, nor how the world seems to be for them, but an interpretative conclusion made by the researcher.” (Guber 2001: 15) Another example of Guber’s remarks is the analysis Taussig makes on the “death lists” (p. 74) as he infers, according to the different kinds of lists published in the town and those mentioned in them, that it is about “class warfare”. Although there is no reference to literature on the topic, this is not only his interpretation as he makes his observations based on what he perceives and what the informants tell him.
On the other hand, and in spite of the ‘true’ character that this ‘first-hand strategy’ prints on the text, to my viewpoint such character has its cons. Quoting Charles Briggs’s words, “interview techniques (...) are tied to relationships of power and control. The same patterns of inequality emerge from the relationship between controlling and subordinate groups within societies, between ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’ societies, and between interviewers and interviewees.” (Briggs 1986:123) However, James Clifford asserts that “one increasingly common way to manifest the collaborative production of ethnographic knowledge is to quote regularly and at length from informants.” (Clifford 1983:13)
Furthermore, it is important to mention something that goes beyond the reference to the interviewees and the author’s interpretations of their accounts confronted with the reality perceived through participant observation. This is a very human vision of reality; through the diary Taussig asked himself what the purpose of his work was, he even writes about his own life (p. 126), feelings and fears while doing fieldwork, not as a scientist analyzing something, but as a person with contradictions, fears and expectations. In a way, he is following Nelson’s remarks on the importance for an anthropologist to make “his life public in order to gain validity of his own research” (Nelson 1997: 122). Notwithstanding, it is opposed to what Foucault stated when he wrote that “as a result, the mark of the writer is reduced to nothing more than the singularity of his absence; he must assume the role of the dead man in the game of writing” (Foucault 1969: 103).
Finally, a very interesting aspect that called my attention is that, with the exception of some comments on Colombian sociologists and anthropologists’ works in the conflict environment, all along the text only few references to studies on violence made by other scholars are presented as a way to back up what Taussig is concluding. According to Foucault, “One defines a proposition’s theoretical validity in relation to the work of the founders.” (Foucault 1969: 116) In the case of Taussig, his comments are validated, not according to other scholars, but according to his own participant observation. However, in some cases the references to other researches can give more value and make the bases of one’s work more valid. For instance, when Taussig defines Limpieza he elicits the different meanings of the word from cleaning in old times (ritual cleaning of mind and body as indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities understand it) to cleaning in modern times (“means to wipe out and kill defenceless people, much the same as a ‘purge’ of the unclean” (Taussig 2003: xiii). He could have cited, for instance, the work by Blok when referring to the ethnic violence in the Balkans as “not only physical harm and destruction, but also social and cultural destruction, ethnic cleansing involves the legitimation and construction of an object defined as polluting that has to be purged” (Blok 2000: 32).
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