Jonathan Boyarin: the Ethnography of Reading: JB2~

IN "WRITING UP" THIS EXPERIENCE FOR A PROFESSIONAL AUDIENCE, I FOUND IT NECESSARY to counter the lingering anthropological prejudice that literate cultures were somehow less authentic, less "anthropological," than cultures that relied strictly on oral communication. As I began rea-ding the current scholarly literature, I found that I was not the only researcher questioning the very dis-tinction between oral & literate cultures. I reasoned that, no matter how famously prominent texts may be in Jewish life, the situation of 'living textuality' I found at the yeshiva could hardly be unique to Jewish culture. Comparing the place of texts in various cultural situations might also be one way to counter, and to help explain, the persistent isolation of Jewish culture as a research specialty in anthropology. JB tested this hypothesis by organizing sessions on the ethnography of reading in 1989 at the conventions of the American Anthropological Association & the Modern Language Association. In addition to the inherent interest in the topic, JB saw it as one way to build what many scholars realize are needed bridges between cultural anthropology and literary studies. One indication of both the promise & the lag in this synthesis is that the MLA session was sponsored by the "Divison on Anthropological Approaches to Literature" - a body whose name reflects an older concept of the APPLICATION of anthropo-logical theory & method to the study of something that still remains set apart as Literature, rather than what we are working toward in the essays here - the collaborative exploration of a shared human field.
On the other hand the broader rubric of "cultural studies," institutionally problematic as it still is, for now finds more of a place in literature than in anthropology. It is as if the anthropologists, seeing themselves in terms of the vanishing primitive, still felt some need to preserve their "integrity" & thus delimit their field. Meanwhile the people at the MLA take language use in the broadest sense, anywhere in the world & by anyone in the world, as their legitimate field of inquiry. JB's impression, in fact, is that the distinctions between the approaches of anthropologists & literary scholars in these essays is not so much methodological as chronotopic - between those who are learning how to include textiality as one of the fields of interaction they study in the present, & those who are learning to see fields of interaction shaping & surrounding the textual remains of the past. For Mor/Asih this started with Jeanny & Shula in the Springtime of 1967 @ Pireus harbour: "the three of us" went to Israel just before the Six Day War....
10 mrt 2020 - bewerkt op 11 mrt 2020 - meld ongepast verhaal
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