Anthropology and Autobiography 30 years on: An Interview with Judith Okely

Our latest issue of AJEC was dedicated to the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Anthropology and Autobiography, edited by Judith Okely and Helen Callaway (1992). Judith was kind enough not only to publish an article of her own in the special issue but to also be interviewed by us for the blog. We’d like to thank Professor Okely for her time in answering our questions and for the great consideration and effort she put into doing so. As readers will be able to witness, this particular topic is still very relevant three decades later and key to our understanding of the discipline, but ourselves and our relations to it.

Ana and Gareth: Despite all the progress made and the deep discussions, do you think there is behind the scenes still a reluctance towards our own appearance in our texts? How does one deal with a peer reviewer today who still holds those views?

Judith Okely: 

I am pleased at the unpredicted success of the volume even though Helen and I have never received a penny of the royalties! There is still a gender difference in that the masculine humans presume they represent the universal norm. But suddenly men may wake up to gender specificity and the hidden autobiography. For example, I am coediting a book on Roma Gypsies and pollution beliefs. Earlier texts are being reproduced. I pointed out to the male co-editor that it was no coincidence that the main pioneers were female researchers. This was because they as women had greater access to female Roma/Gypsies who were/are responsible for domestic cleanliness, food preparation and clothing and furnishing.

However, sadly, there is indeed a growing emphasis on the number crunching methods as universities depend on businesses to give grants. They have no idea about ethnographic methods and reflect methods where they have a PI or senior researcher who devises the questionnaires administered by ‘slave’ researchers. The Principal Investigator may never even visit the field sites but ultimately writes up the material gleaned from multiple research assistants. I have a ‘friend’ who conducts research in developmental sociology in Africa based on others’ data. Her massive grants involve supervising many employees who administer set questionnaires then sent back to her. She then writes up the findings in the UK. Usually, she does not visit the research locations Recently she shouted at me, ‘You are always talking about yourself!’. This included referring to myself in my seminar papers. 

I am shocked that all this has now happened in sociology. I was on a PhD committee based at the Open University. The student was a former student of mine in anthropology and had real problems convincing her supervisors of sociology or gerontology of the value of fieldwork. One defence is to point out that it was the Chicago sociologists who first devised the term ‘participant observation’ and elaborated in the famous appendix to Street Corner Society (Whyte 1969 [1943]). Another useful reference is an essay by Edmund Leach (‘An Anthropologist’s reflections on a Social Survey’ [1967]).  Leach contrasts work dependent on multiple villages and shows how using just a one-off questionnaire administered to the head of household only came up with misleading results. By contrast, Leach lived for over one year in just one village in the locality (Sri Lanka). He thus discovered the system. Although Leach did not confront too much of the autobiographical, there is a link between the rubbishing of the personal alongside in-depth ethnography.

There are important markers of class mentioned throughout your article, like de Beauvoir’s interactions with working class people. How do we best deal with privilege (or lack of it) when presenting ourselves in academic anthropological texts?

I confronted my class in my highly critical articles on my boarding school, two of which are reproduced in my Own or Other Culture (1996). Usually – especially in the UK – class is recognised by accent. Sent off to that school I even had to change my writing style as I was told it was like that of a maid. I dropped my village school Lincolnshire accent. Abroad, I was labelled more as anglaise in France, although the Normandy peasants said admiringly that I spoke with a Parisian accent. 

Often race and nationality may be more important when doing fieldwork abroad. Although too often the western stranger in non-western cultures may be presumed to be wealthy. But participating in labour may help break this down. When doing fieldwork in Normandy, I met up with a woman dairy farmer because she was the president of the old people’s club then encouraged by [President] Mitterrand. Unlike the non-literate Gypsies with whom I had lived, she did not mind me taking notes. Suddenly, she said she had work to do. I followed her to the barn where she would hand-milk some ten cows. After watching her for some time I asked if I could have a go. She looked utterly amazed. Here, class divisions became apparent. I was introduced to one cow which did not kick. I began and soon realised how skilled it was. She said she would return and left. She came back with a camera. I have a copy of that photo which was put on display in the local town camera shop window. Here, thus, the anthropologist was shown despite being classified as an intellectual and her participation in farm labour was seen as remarkable. Obviously, my class was not picked up by my accent. But in England, one’s own country, this is a problem.

When I first moved onto a Gypsy site, Harriet, a Gypsy lady, said, ‘Oh Judith I do like the way you speak. You must have had special lessons to talk like that.’ I was sceptical. Harriet and her family went off travelling for some weeks and having been taught by a student of Malinowski, I knew I had to learn the language. When she returned, I had dropped my H’s, inserted some near-Cockney words, and extended my vowels. It was the opposite to My Fair Lady learning to say ‘the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain’. Harriet heard my new language devoid of my boarding school class signals and she said, ‘Oh Judith, your speech has improved’.

I used this example when invited as keynote speaker to a Gypsy Lore Society conference in Helsinki attended at the opening by the president of Finland. Later, a security man came up and thanked me, saying they were all so nervous at the opening, but it had made them all laugh. So, class irony even in a foreign language to mainly Finns was understood. Thus, we need to be aware of class divisions, e.g. de Beauvoir’s isolation, but fieldwork and the autobiographical field experience needs dissecting and adaptation. Anthropologists – whether they like it or not – are often confronted by class or wealth differences. In my interviews with anthropologists in my Anthropological Practice (2013), some had to confront the presumptions that they were wealthy outsiders.

You talk of the PI phenomenon today. This seeps into anthropology more and more. How can we make space for group autobiography of researchers in our writing?

We have to confront our specificity in the field. If we embrace the power of Freud we can learn how our choice of location, topic and informants also may have links with our early and later experiences. But sometimes it may be unconscious for a long time. Patrick Williams, the brilliant French anthropologist has a second book on French Gypsy death rituals (1993, 2003). In the opening paragraph, he thanks me for my chapter on mortuary rituals in my Traveller-Gypsies (1983). A brilliant editor asked me to review it and add anything personal (2003). I asked myself why I was a pioneer. Again, I credited Malinowski who included death rituals as worthy of his holistic study of the Trobriands but I gradually realised a long-hidden subconscious explanation. In one chapter on families (1983), I included photos of two Gypsy fathers and their little daughters. I never revealed that one father was dying of a brain tumour. Then, in the final chapter on death rituals, I enclosed photos of the now-dead father’s funeral with children present and throwing earth into his grave. I recognise the blurred image of myself in the background. Here is the autobiographical link.

My father died of polio when I was about the same age as the little girls in the first photo but neither I nor my sister were told he had polio until long after his death. We were not allowed to visit him when in hospital in an iron lung. We certainly never attended his funeral and only learned of his death weeks later, when our mother came down to the school to tell us. She left soon after having delayed telling us for two days. I returned to the dormitory and sat crying on my bed. The matron ordered me to stop making a noise as it was against the rules… so much for class privilege.

Again, in my Anthropological Practice (2013), I found that the majority of the anthropologists interviewed changed their focus in the field. They were also drawn by both explicit and unforeseen foci. Thus, anthropologists doing fieldwork should give way to their total being, emotions etc and not be bound by preordained hypotheses which modern quantitative research prioritises. Modern mass numerical distant social science (so-called ‘big data’ – Eds) does not have space for this.

Academic writing is itself subject to trends and follows closely societal developments. In the current ‘regressive’ moment we seem to find ourselves in (restrictions on abortion rights, increased militarization, the re-emergence of far-right ideologies, etc.), what do you think anthropologists can do through their own writing to counter racist, sexist, and classist narratives that gain traction in mainstream discourses?

Anthropologists automatically defend difference and rarely publicise things they abhor in a different community. I have been available on radio to defend things about Gypsies. I have acted as a character witness at the Old Bailey for a Gypsy wrongly accused of attempted murder. Now, with increasing mass media we can join in. But too often people don’t want to hear if they are racist. I keep telling people that Gypsies were responsible for about 90 percent of the seasonal farm work. But I stupidly critiqued Evan Davis for not knowing this before my BBC [Radio 4] Today programme interview, so the BBC cancelled my visit to the studio! We need media training so we can take an informed public stance on all these issues. Ironically, many now literate Gypsies love my monograph (1983) because they say I take their culture seriously. My unconscious drive motivating my interest in Gypsy death rituals (I was a near-pioneer) also proved informative for the study of Gypsies and Roma beyond even the UK, hence the thanks by Patrick Williams in his second book. It is also not surprising that his first book was on Gypsy marriage (1984). It is no coincidence that he married a Gypsy from a group called the Manouches.

How do we enhance the value of autobiographic & auto-ethnographic writing when there is an insistence on ‘hard data’ and positivistic research from policy makers, legislators, and the media alike?

I repeat the relevance of Leach’s pioneering article. Ironically it was a critique of Stanley J. Tambiah, who later converted to anthropology and became a lecturer in Cambridge. I should also add that the personal in-depth experience becomes ever powerful. My first project directed by a seconded civil servant was eventually converted to what William F. Whyte in Street Corner Society (1969 [1943]) referred to as ‘just hanging around’ rather than asking questions. She went back to the Gypsy families she had visited regularly for years near Slough and instead of asking questions she just listened and found the dialogue completely contradicted what they had told her in formal answers. She was convinced by my in-depth material arguing Gypsies did not want settlement and housing and that travel was key in their economy. My chapters formed key content in the joint-authored book Gypsies and Government Policy in England (Adams et al. 1975). We spoke at a special event in Westminster Hall with representatives from councils and government present. It entirely reversed the Labour government’s policy. They continued the policy of site provision, but John Major’s 1994 legislation abolished the duty to provide sites. Many of us, including Travellers and Gypsies, demonstrated outside the House of Commons but to no avail. The closure of sites has restricted movement and people have forgotten that the majority of seasonal farm work was done by Gypsies and Travellers. They provided their own accommodation and came and went according to the farmers’ needs.

In your volume with Helen Callaway, you write about ‘embodied knowledge’. What becomes of that embodiment process in times when research methods had to adapt to pandemic conditions, and most research moved to digital realms? What do you think this move is likely to do to anthropological knowledge and writing over the next few years?

It is very difficult to persuade the number crunchers with business qualifications and limited perspectives on science. Fieldwork involves bodily activity. We are admired and respected when we engage. We learn new, unexpected things. I learned about the Gypsy economy and its multifacetedness by participating. Clearly, Zoom fieldwork is limited. But we can talk about it until the post pandemic, which is not for ever. Sometimes we can build on past bodily action.

References

Adams, B, J. Okely, D. Morgan and D. Smith (eds) (1975), Gypsies and Government Policy in England: a Study of the Travellers’ Way of Life in Relation to the Policies and Practices of Central and Local Government (London: Heinemann Educational).

Leach, E.R. (1967), ‘An Anthropologists’ Reflection on a Social Survey’, in D.G. Jongmans and P.C.W Gutkind (eds) Anthropologists in the Field (Assen: Van Gorcum), 75-88.

Okely, J. (1983), The Traveller-Gypsies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

­­­––– (1996), Own or Other Culture (London: Routledge).

––– (2003), ‘Deterritorialised and Spatially Unbounded Cultures within Other Regimes’, Review of ‘Gypsy World: The Silence of the Living and the Voices of the Dead’ by Patrick Williams’, Anthropological Quarterly 76, no. 1: 151–164.

––– (2013), Anthropological Practice: Fieldwork and the Ethnographic Method (London: Berg).

Okely, J. and H. Callaway (eds) (1992), Anthropology and Autobiography (London and New York: Routledge).

Williams, P. (1984), Mariage tzigane: Une cérémonie de fiançailles chez les Rom de Paris [Gypsy Marriage: A wedding ceremony among the Romani of Paris] (Paris: L’Harmattan-Seraf).

––– (1993), Nous, on n’en parle pas: les vivants et les morts chez les Manouches [We Don’t Talk About It: The Living and the Dead among the Manouches] (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme).

––– (2003), Gypsy World: the Silence of the Living and the Voices of the Dead, (trans.) C. Tihanyi (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press).

Whyte, W.F. [1943] (1969), Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).