Fieldwork did not only involve “living with the local community” but included more specifically compiling “detailed accounts of the life, traditions and cultural practices of the local people” (Palmer 2001:301). Since ‘culture’ is the main substance of ethnography it has tended to perform humanism or at least an asymmetry that privileges people. Despite having the tools to write symmetrical accounts these accounts were most often interpreted for what they say about humans, not non-humans. Therefore this section discusses building on the strength of ethnography to facilitate a symmetrical treatment of humans and non-humans (Chapter Five).
Concerned with a deeper understanding of human nature (Galani-Moutafi 2000: 214), the substance or ‘stuff’ of ethnography is culture. In this regard ethnography and its
anthropological heritage do not offer a clear alternative to humanistic modes of enquiry because this has not been its purpose. What matters for the purpose of conducting a symmetrical study is that ethnography can be given a post-human purpose, and assist anthropology with its ‘problem of culture’ at the same time. It is not difficult to make ethnography post-human because after the argument already made, as good alchemists, ethnographers are already competent in mixing humans and non-humans together.
Nevertheless, as a social scientific method of inquiry ethnography still privileges a holism that encumbers the important thing ‘culture’ on the humans. This leads to ‘victory narratives’ that at other times are described as ‘vanity styled’ ethnography (McWilliam, Lather and Morgan 1997 in Vaughan 2004 pp. 393 and 398) where in either case ‘the people’ come first. To resist this urge not only allows for “ethnographic evidence of symbolic discontent” (Pred 1995:24) but also ethnographic discontent with the evidence of symbolism. The reason for this is non-humans act to hold together or break-up a culture, are indifferent to symbolism, change beliefs and interfere with social alliances. What is important is to keep an obligation to non-humans to allow them to act so that culture is remains an alchemy and relational materialism.
131 In rethinking ‘what culture is made of’ methods developed anthropocentrically extend their technical abilities towards symmetry. Symmetrical ethnography is a “different form of anthropology or ethnography which searches less for meaning and more for new and painstaking descriptions of action” (Franklin 2009: 75). This means that ethnography is an opportunity to substitute the stuff of culture-nature (Law 2004) for the stuff of culture and through this to begin to discover the culture-nature of tourism.
This is an opportunity because despite the humanist trend, in doing ethnography an ethnographer cannot actually ignore all the non-humans involved in the politics; social change; development; management; identity and expressions that happen to the humans. In the pursuit of an inclusive definition of what constitutes an actor, ethnography permits a generous definition of what constitutes data and ways of collecting it. Consequently while the trend towards humanistic approaches continues, it is the obstacles to wholly humanist
outcome that symmetry takes advantage of. The alchemy remains to ensure that despite the humanist beliefs that are added to ethnography, the method itself retains the conditions for post-humanist accounts.
In works produced by anthropologists abroad, you will not find a single trait that is not simultaneously real, social and narrated (Latour 1991/1993:7).
6.7 Writing trials
Having given broad symmetrical consideration to what the field is (not); how time can be made adequate and what culture is made of there is only the trials of writing itself to consider. Chapter Five describes the trials of not quite returning to tourism through a negotiation among human actors and this chapter adopts the metaphor again to help establish the idea that writing is a serious method, and the textual template is a laboratory where writing trials take place (Latour 2005). If ethnography is good for symmetrical analysis because it is flexible and inclusive then this strength carries also a risk in terms of outputs. How ethnography, in other words is not well written travellers’ tales as it used to be (Redfield 1985). The
remainder of this chapter considers this question and ties some of the symmetrical claims about ethnography to the method of writing.
132 The text, in our discipline, is [...] the functional equivalent of a laboratory. It’s a place for trials, experiments and simulations. Depending on what happens in it, there is or there is not an actor and there is or there is not a network being traced (Latour 2005:149).
Recording not filtering out, describing not disciplining, these are the Laws and Prophets (Latour 2005:54).
Ordering is a continuous process, and not a singular event of arranging the perceived reality into an easily understandable construct (Kociatkiewicz and Kostera 1999:43).
Many social research methods draw a fine but clear line between conducting the methods and then writing up the results of this whereas for ethnography, writing is not what happens after the methods. Ethnographers ‘write through’ the research and this is maintained through the importance of documenting and journaling observations and conversations. Since the final aim or test of ethnography lies in the production of an account that conveys a “uniquely adequate account of a given situation” (Latour 2005: 144), writing constitutes a large part of what ethnographers do.
[A] single narrative that weaves together the way people regard the heavens and their ancestors, the way they build their houses and the way they grow yams or manioc of rice, the way they construct their government and their cosmology (Latour 1991/1993:7).
Writing is both a technique for collecting information – ‘field-notes’ and presenting
information by bringing these actors together - ‘the ethnography’ (Picken in Walter 2010). A symmetrical approach insists that writing is a method in the sense that writing is given all the rights of a method and is not what comes after to simply communicate what was done. The “source of intellectual security” comes from the ability to write in such a way as to describe rather than practice asymmetry (see Elam 1999:2). Writing is a practice that brings together and describes material relations between non-humans and humans. It is the means through
133 which social connectedness, or culture is traced (Latour 2005:148) and through which
familiarity is made of something that is otherwise strange (Vaughan 2004:397).
Ethnographic writing has not escaped the critical turn and ‘crises of representation’.159 The death of the author and his/her invisible writing techniques that produced among others ‘ethnographic realism’ (Bruner and Kirshenblatt-Gimblet 1994), meant that the writer faced a challenge of authority (see Foucault 1972).160 It struck an odd chord that there were questions concerning how far we should ‘clean up’ data that never concerned writing and a compromise has appeared in both discourse analysis and in reflexivity sporting a more dialogical, inter- subjective awareness that is aimed at making the ethnographer more accountable for his/her own relations with subjects in the field and in writing.
To allow writing to be a method is not the same as treating writing as a discourse and adding another method to writing. Adding a method (of analysis) to discourse as a way of ‘clearing it up’ ignores the claim of symmetrical analysis that “words already have reference to the world, and science grasps the things themselves” (Latour 1999:16). A ‘statement’ for
example, escapes the discursive limits of Foucault (1972) to become “anything that is thrown, sent, or delegated by an enunciator” (Latour 1991: 105). The statement ‘return your keys to the front desk’ can be thrown to or attached to “a sentence uttered by the hotel manager” or to “a material apparatus [oversized key ring] which forces customers to leave their keys at the front desk” (Latour 1991: 106).161 It is only when a researcher believes there is a problem
with extracting information from a real world outside the mind that writing is refused the ability to jump from ideas to managers to keys and to therefore act as a method prima facie without privilege or prejudice.
The aim is not to get caught up in representational anguish, and the ‘common world’ takes on the risk associated with ignoring it (see Chapter Four). Discourse analysis ‘grows methods’ in order to bridge “the perilous abyss” that separates “words from things” that symmetrically
159 See Aitchison (2000) and Nöth (2003).
160 The association of ‘objective style’ with ethnographic realism for example is at first a method of writing that
has to be learned and crafted, but then becomes an auto-response from a scientific community and an idea that writing is not a method, that it consequently does not style, nor have the right ‘in its style’ to style.
161 A simple way of understanding the link between these approaches is that symmetrical analysis makes
Foucault more ‘doable’ because the distance between ‘words and things’ is shorter for symmetrical analysts than for Foucault (see the English translation of Foucault’s (1966) original ‘Words and Things’ translated The Order of Things 1970)
134 “cannot hold up” (Latour 1999:196). Similarly a reflexive style, like an objective style, is an attempt to justify a connection that symmetrically does not need to be justified. Like adding a method to writing, or adding an ‘objective style’, adding reflexivity and subjective awareness ‘adds noise’ (Serres 1990/1995: 8), adds mystery and interferes with the task of describing material relations in order to validate the describer’s right to describe in the first place (Latour 2005:33).
Following these three general treatments of writing, when writing ‘disappears’ in the sense that it is made authoritative and therefore unremarkable social scientists:
[A]re prone to state the objectified results of their research, to draw epistemological or philosophical lessons from it and to codify their methods in a quasi-axiomatic form (Descola 2005:66).
When writing ‘appears’ in the sense that it is made transparent then the text is either analysed to give it transparency as in discourse, or else the writer is analysed to give him/her a
transparency that would “expound with full ingenuity the windings, the doubts and the accidents that mark out the course of their enquiries and render them possible” (Descola 2005: 66). When the visibility of writing is taken for granted and writing starts to perform it becomes instead a method that acts to describe a state of affairs. There is ‘unique adequacy’ (Callon 1999: 202) to be found in the situation at hand, which is always a ‘luxury of
circumstances’ (Serres 1990/1995: 31) from which there is more than enough to write already (Latour 2005).
Writing is action (Callon 2002: 201).
The aim of the academic written analysis is to put on paper the text of what the various actors in the settings are doing to one another (Latour 1992:529).
Every single interview, narrative and commentary, no matter how trivial it may appear will provide the analyst with a bewildering array of entities to account for the hows and whys of any course of action (Latour 2005:47).
135 The following considers linguistic symmetry and translation as well as literary templates and narrative resources as useful ways to think about doing writing.
6.8
Linguistic symmetry and literary templates
Writing can be strung together (as in this sentence) and if it is assumed that this language describes the world itself then it can be used to map orderings. The strings of words that describe strings of actors that are orderings are discussed below. This section considers writing as a translator or as capable of making translations.162 Chapter Five discussed a requirement to follow actors across their changes of registers and with ethnography this means an ability to describe a ‘shuttling between’ what is natural, social, fictional and so on (Bingham and Thrift 2001: 282). These “displacements from one frame of reference to the next” (Latour 2005:53) need to be recorded. To do this the idea of a ‘single repertoire’ is evoked and the aim of symmetrical accounting is to describe these events without relying on ‘changing registers’ to register a distinction (Callon 1986: 200).
In developing a method of writing, there have been calls for the development of an infralanguage (Latour 2005:30) or a translation repertoire (Callon 1986: 200) that would enable the researcher to write across multiple languages in one simple language. While the notion of an infra-language has been criticised as a green-light for jargon (Fine 2005), the terms used are not technical, exclusive terms like jargon but general, inclusive ones for ease of access. The term ‘symmetry’ means symmetry; ‘translation’ means translation;
‘enrolment’ means enrolment and ‘an obligatory point of passage’ is a point through which a passer is obliged to pass. If something ‘delegates’, it is in the usual sense of the verb ‘to delegate’, and so on for ‘cost’, ‘distribution’, ‘competency’, ‘ordering’, ‘becoming’, ‘hybrid’, ‘engagement’ and ‘association’. Since an infralanguage is a language that attempts to avoid any specialisation the terms are to be taken in their ‘common’ sense.
What is confronting and seemingly jargonistic is the use of these terms to join disassociated registers through a language that is a writing strategy insofar as it enables the distribution of terms usually reserved for human subjectivity among non-humans (Feenberg 2000:154) and
162 The term translation is ‘figurational’ in the sense that “[t]o say ‘culture forbids having kids out of wedlock’”
136 vice versa. Chapter Eight will describe for example how a mountain enlists the science of geology to delegate a political battle ground, and it will speak of ‘the competency of a wall’ and ‘the becoming of a street’. Chapter Nine describes a translation between a personal attachment to place and a professional competency to plan that place emphasising the means by which a repertoire of duration, memory and ‘subjective engagement’ can be made into a language of authority, professional competency and ‘objective practice’. Describing these translations and sliding between registers also allows multiplicity a chance to be registered. This movement from one ‘playing field’ to another becomes the symmetric operation of producing a written account that has been translated into a unified language first.
Linguistic symmetry is a simplistic and therefore effective way of increasing the repertoire of actions allowed to non-humans. Telling the story of these ‘diverse interactions and relations’ requires a diversity of terms that are less socially coded (Callon in Barry and Slater 2002b: 294) than those we tend to develop in respective disciplines. Tourism as a multi-disciplinary endeavour can only gain from such a language since it is always tripping across registers and confronts in a manner that is not unlike the ethnographer, multiple language barriers. These barriers are there not only among tourists and hosts but also among researchers and the various specialist dialogues they are trying to explain. Symmetry and the deliberate joining of hitherto irreconcilable domains like nature and society, or science and the real world is as much an outcome of a written method that attempts to overwrite the effectiveness of these barriers without erasing them.
The writing of ethnography is valued for its attention to the detailed relations between humans and non-humans, however the ‘template’ for writing trials or the architecture of the ‘textual laboratory’ (Latour 2005:25) comes from literary studies (Serres in Latour
1990/1995: 73).163 To write a picture of the world novelists grasp the ‘things themselves’ by drawing on every resource available to them including people, objects and ideas. This togetherness or dense network of material relations provides a unique adequacy, and also ensures that people and their discourses are never the only actors. Even novels about humans, about ‘super’ humans like notorious criminals for example, will not rely on the criminals to explain themselves.
163 Taking precedent from the practices of literature both emphasises and de-emphasises the science / fiction
137 Well before the start of proceedings, the courtroom’s stern demeanour and furnishings and coat of arms – that powerful combination of law, history, punishment and varnished timber – had awed and mystified them. As much as by their current adverse circumstances they looked crushed by important- looking wood (Drewe 2000:7).
Similarly, to piece together a picture of ‘tourism in the world’ which has an implicitly
ontological leaning (Franklin 2004), the researcher attempts to take note of and make full use of the non-human effects or actors in the writing of accounts. Nobody would argue with Drewe putting the accusation on ‘important looking wood’ is irrational because we have all ‘been there’, if not actually in the docks, then nevertheless appreciating these kinds of effects. What scientific accounts can learn from literature is that by drawing on and taking advantage of these ‘narrative resources’ (Latour 1991/1993:111) it is possible to start to ‘literally’ enable a post-human explanation of tourism ordering and a symmetrical ethnography that provides a way to experiment with the ability of non-humans to carry out important roles and accomplish important things.164Writing becomes the means to record, describe, string
together and experiment with emerging and becoming orderings.
In throwing all of these actors together, symmetry does not suggest that a discourse of urban design will act in the same way as an urban designer or a building; that they are to be made symmetrical in this sense and neither is there the suggestion that these actors will act equally (see Chapters Eight, Nine and Ten). Rather the suggestion is that they be treated
symmetrically in that there is made available a language or written method to describe these actors as they act together, and a willingness to recognise in these various orderings. Tracing these orderings draws again from literary studies to suggest a reading of semiotics that is interested more in the movement of signs captured in a story containing heterogeneous ingredients than in assigning meaning to those signs (see Serres in Latour 1990/1995: 183).
Take off the meaning, and you will dance. […] When the sign loses its meaning, when it loses all possible meanings, then it becomes pure sign, naked sign, abstract sign (Serres 1990/1995: 42).
164
Novelists draw on these heterogeneous resources to “invent unknown or unrecognised affects and brings them to light as the becoming of his characters” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994 in Spinks 2001:23) and researchers are required to be prepared to discover the same of subjects and objects.
138 The naked sign for Serres equates to the naked subject and blank object (Chapter Five). It is the simplest form of a sign and therefore the one that holds the greatest potential for
becoming and meaning. A semiotics without meaning is a kind of reversed reading of semiotics (Serres 1982/1995: 5-13) that is interested in how meaning is made from the
arrangement of signs, the associations they make and the stories or orderings they take part in telling. The single unit for this kind of analysis is association, a link that is designated by either a verb or a preposition.1 Taking the literary method one step further verbs and prepositions become important and pivotal in accounts that are made of heterogeneous assemblages. Entities comprising this assembly, or the nouns become involved in in multiple