TRASTORNOS CUALITATIVOS DE LA CONCIENCIA.

mean that ethnographers are not, by and large and by virtue of their avocation, able to distinguish their subjects from themselves. What

I mean is that their studies do not normally permit such distinction.

A distinction which is permitted in the study— ethnography, or

ethnological treatise, or whatever— is a distinction between

ethnography and reader. And it is a distinction which the

ethnographer may make while he is writing ethnography and the reader

while he is reading. (And I should mention here that it is a

distinction which the reader may be certain, in the case of most

readers, of making only upon the first comprehensive reading. By

comprehensive reading I mean the first time he knowns that he

comprehends what he reads; thus, what I have said is that the reader

may know for certain that he is himself and that this ethnography is

not part of him only until such time as he reads and comprehends it.

After that, his certitude that he was one thing and the ethnography

he has read was another is only as good as his memory.)

I shall return to the elaboration of this shortly. For the nonce,

let me use this notion of ethnography as distinct from reader to

inform my metaphorical suggestions about Bath and The Baby. In this

case, the ethnography is The Baby. It preexists the reader, or at

least it exists before he discovers it and reads it (a rare and

special case is the ethnography-in-preparation which the reader

awaits, and which he may have a hand in constructing or even

writing). It will be there after the reader has read it, much the

same as the societies which are the Babies of ethnographic research

remain after we leave them. Now the question is where is the Bath? I

said before the the Bath was the theories and hypotheses and

predispositions which infuse the characterization of the studied

society. But in the case of the ethnography, the society appears

only as it is characterized— described, rationalized, assessed— by

the ethnographer; there is no society, only a characterized society.

The society and its weighted and coloured and otherwised

characterized description come together, are together, are

indistinguishable in the ethnography. This is the kind of

relationship I allude to when I say The Baby Is the Bath, Too. The

with the bath can only have come out of a time when there were babies

before there were babies-in-baths. And this makes sense, since no

baby comes with its own bath. But societies do. The idea of some

society as an entity apart from the characterizations of any extant

knowledge of it is suitable only for that sort of mythical idea. (And

societies, or putative ones, of that ilk do 'exist': The Amazons,

Atlantians, etc.)

It may be rightly inferred from what I have written that this

opaque bathwater, as I have equated it with the characterizations

which invariably accompany the 'description' of some society, is

here to stay. Or, at least, that opacity is guaranteed, no matter

that the theories and hypotheses which shall underlie the

characterizations to come may well change. I think this is the case.

I think, too, that if we see some society-Baby in some future study

barely discernable through the bath-muck, and this Baby has only one

arm, we'd do well not to theorize the other arm on the strength of

what the Baby must look like. For we may well find out that this

never-before-studied society has only the one arm, and does quite

well in its sinister fashion. And we shall have nought to do then but

throw the bathwater out if we wish to get rid of that theorized

second arm.

While I don't mind working this Baby-Bath metaphor, I shouldn't

like it to get out of hand. My simple point is that there is only

ideal discrimination possible between theory and theorized object.

And while this in no way hinders those who wish to do idealist

ethnography, nor but little hinders those who seek to make pure

descriptions, it renders all objectivist theoretical anthropology

untenable. So, for those who, like me, wish to pursue theoretical

anthropology, there is the requirement to find something other than

objectivism.

I could rather say here that an objectivism which permitted as its

object The Baby/Bath/bathtub/bathwater/and so forth, would be all

right. But I suspect that such an objectivism would not be

of objective reality in the society (The Baby). In which case there is little point in entering some internecine objectivist debate over what exactly constitutes the Baby for, were I to win that debate, it would have to be determined thenceforward that EVERYTHING constituted the object. Of course, this is exactly what I think is the case. Or, more accurately, anything may constitute the object. This is, thus far, a strictly Kantian position, regarding the Ding an S i c h , the thing itself, to be ascertainable or graspable only via the facts, and that we choose (in some sense) the facts of any Thing.

But I may do a disservice to Kant, allying him post mortem to my