What Is “the Question”?

STEPHEN WILLIAM FOSTER

Department of Community Health SystemsSchool of NursingUniversity of CaliforniaSan Francisco, CA 94143

SUMMARY Ethnographers’ questions are an impress on their encounters and aninvestment in the politics and poetics of ethnography. I examine the symbolic aura of thequestion, generically and substantively, that shapes and textures ethnographic truth-telling. An encounter in Morocco illustrate the paradoxical dynamics of the questionthat constrains the dialogues it produces. The art of the question premises an ethics, arecursive style and a mobile analytics in which process and truth coalesce. [ethnogra-phy, questions, truth-telling, dialogue, ethics]

Let us consider discourse as it “darts from mouth to mouth.” (Lacan 2006:215)

In Morocco, non-Muslims are forbidden to enter mosques,1 but there areexceptions.2 Casablanca’s Hassan II Mosque can be visited by non-Muslims. Ihad seen the mosque at 3 a.m., lit up for prayer like a vast, art-deco cinema,its minaret beaming a shaft of light into the night sky toward Mecca. In 1997,when I arrived there for an afternoon tour, our group had to wait until thePresident of Lebanon, in Morocco to sign a trade agreement, completed hisvisit and the line of shiny limousines departed from the esplanade in front ofthe mosque.

As our small group waited to enter the prayer hall, one of the largest inIslam, we met our tour guide, Malika, a young woman who had grown up inthe neighborhood of the mosque and had never been outside Casablanca.Her English was impeccable, as were her manner and restraint. An Indian-American family had joined our group, husband, wife, and two teen-agers,the older of who appearing to be about 16. She wore a sleeveless blouse andshorts. After Malika explained that she could not enter the prayer hall withoutmore modest dress and offered her carefully folded shawls for the purpose,the young woman asked “Why?” A revealing question, I thought, perhaps notone she needed to ask. Her father had a question of his own, one that struckme as very American: “How much did it cost to build the mosque?” No doubt,my own Americanness is established by my own remembering of Malika’sexact answer. I may be unfair in my self-stereotyping, but their questionsseemed obtuse and inappropriate. Malika had surely heard such questionsbefore. She handled them with grace and understatement, perhaps in compen-sation. They should have asked their questions differently or asked differentquestions.

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Anthropology and Humanism, Vol. 38, Issue 2, pp 146–159, ISSN 1559-9167, online ISSN 1548-1409.© 2013 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.DOI: 10.1111/anhu.12015.

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To ask a question is to make a statement—if not about the world, at least aboutthe scene of interaction. To ask a question is already to say, to structure a fieldof discourse, however implicitly. Understood in this way, the question containsa reflexive element, a statement about statements, a meta-message. The ethnog-rapher does not, and indeed, cannot simply describe. She is perpetually chal-lenged to set her descriptions on the stage of the questions by which they areelicited. The participant-observer not only denotes the conversation and thepassing scene but must also disclose the dynamics of her questions that com-posed the scene of inquiry and particularly her place and mode of participationin that scene. As part of her description, she must perpetually reflect upon themeaning and effects of her questions, of her intentionality. Such is the receivedwisdom of extant anthropological reflection, however complicated in applica-tion. Our questions are an impress, an investment we make in our encounters,one that deserves more visibility than it is usually given. In this paper, I drawattention to the responsibility, indeed the obligation, of analysts and critics aliketo reflect upon how the gravitas, the symbolic aura of our questions, explicit,implied or unspoken, sustains the politics and poetics of any understanding wecome to of other places and peoples.

* * *In The Passenger, a film by Michelangelo Antonioni (Peploe, Wollen andAntonioni 1975), there is a brief dialogue, if it is dialogue, that graphically—poetically—illustrates my point. This scene is a film within the film. It depicts anencounter captured by David Locke, a reporter interviewing a “witch doctor”(the reporter’s term) in a remote African village:

It is a garden filled with tropical vegetation. . . . In the center of the . . . shot we see anAfrican, about forty years old, sitting cross-legged on the grass with his back leaningagainst a tree.

Locke (voice-over): Yesterday when we filmed you at the village, I understood youhad been brought up to be a witch doctor?The African’s face remains expressionless. He doesn’t answer.Locke (voice-over): Isn’t it unusual for someone like you to have spent several yearsin France and Yugoslavia?The African smiles but doesn’t answer. . . .Locke (voice-over): Has that changed your attitude toward certain tribal customs?The African still doesn’t answer and looks as if he were trying to understand some-thing else hidden in what Locke was asking.Locke (voice-over): Don’t they strike you as false now—and wrong perhaps for thetribe?For the first time the African moves. He looks down at his hands, and then up againat the camera.African (speaking slowly and deliberately in surprisingly fluent English): Mr. Locke,there are perfectly satisfactory answers to all your questions. . . . But I don’t think youunderstand how little you would learn from them.Pause. The African smiles again. He speaks as if making quite an effort.African: Your questions are much more revealing about yourself than my answerswould be about me.Locke: I meant them quite sincerely.The African stares into the camera. Then he speaks again.

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African: Mr. Locke, we can have a conversation but only if it is not just what you thinkis sincere, but also what I believe to be honest.Locke (voice-over): Yes, of course. . . .

We see the African stand up and approach the camera. His hands reach out for it, hiswaist blocks out some of the image. There is a moment of darkness. Then the camerapans suddenly around . . . and comes to a stop facing the opposite wall where wesee Locke. He is clearly accepting the situation and aware of the hidden truth in theAfrican’s actions of turning the camera to face him, the interviewer. (Peploe et al.1975:74–8)

In this scene, the problematizing of the reporter’s craft, of his practice, is clearlydemonstrated, as is the problematizing of the conversation itself, unless ofcourse, a conversation about the conversation is admitted as a critical element inthe exchange. The statement of the thaumaturge, questioning Locke’s questions,is a metaquestion, a critique: the question is an imposition, an intervention thatimplies the agency of the question and an asymmetrical relation of dominanceand submission between questioner and questioned. The question as eventcontrols the encounter, at least initially, so that it becomes a jockeying forposition, a contention about who will set the terms and who can say the truth.According to the African, this metadialogue aspect must be brought into aware-ness and into the dialogue itself: reflection must uncover the question’s “hiddenmeaning” if it is to be meaningful, or “honest,” at all. His challenge is not only tothe reporter but to the ethnographer too. In what follows, I draw attention tosome of the ways the African’s challenge may be understood.

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It is tempting to take the psychoanalytic or psychotherapeutic encounter as aparadigm of “the question” in its problematization as well as in its exotic allureand purposeful obscurantism.3 The layered intimacy of this encounter isrevealed in “the intersubjective play through which truth enters into the real.”(Felman 1987:57) Indeed, the psychotherapeutic encounter represents the ques-tion’s labyrinthine complexity, at least until one thinks of therapeutic software,which may not really be the oversimplification of therapy that it seems. Thera-peutic software is a form of online, structured interaction, based on rhetorical,mechanistic dialogue, in which even affect is programmed in the computer’stone of voice. The de facto one-sidedness of software-driven psychotherapyarguably shows psychotherapy to be, in some avatar, a dialogue with the self inwhich the question actually comes from the patient or client rather than fromthe therapist, just as the answer does. When the therapist becomes the curer, theclient and therapist collude in the latter becoming a purveyor of truth. Yetalthough the therapist is the medium, s/he does not supply the message. Thezero-degree, sometimes silent question of the therapist waves the client on tofind answers of her own by means of the ultimate constructionist gesture that soexasperates the needy client, the therapist’s famous “uh-hum,” the nod of thehead that really only says “I’m here to listen.” As Jacques Lacan (2006:248 andelsewhere) suggests, this listening presence confers no more than an unlimited,“obsessive system of suggestions.” The client must, in the end, listen to herself.In any case, the question asked is not the question that is heard or answered,

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or not exactly. The slippage or crevasse between them is where desire playsitself out and diffuses into narrative. The presence of an Other in itself poses aquestion, providing an occasion for the subject to project her own themes andpreoccupations and to give them material form.

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Moving one step back—into backstage dialogue—into the medium beyondor behind the therapist or the ethnographer, there is, first of all, languageitself (Crapanzano 2007:95). Language functions much as the question does inshaping the subjectivities of the interlocutors. But that is not new news. Over ahalf-century ago, Benjamin Lee Whorf, who was a businessman rather than ananthropologist or linguist, studied Mayan hieroglyphics, Aztec semantics, andthe structure of Hebrew roots, and undertook oligosynthetic comparisons ofNahuatl and Piman, and in so doing, reflected on the interface between expe-rience and language. His best known research was in Hopi verb forms inrelation to conceptions of time and space, and on that basis, he made himselffamous for claiming that thought and consciousness are linguistic “all the waydown.” What he said was that our “behavior” and the “significance” we give toit is “ruled by a specific system or organization, a ‘geometry’ of form[s] . . .characteristic of each language” (1956:257). With his plethora of analyses ofHopi and other languages and cultures, he concluded that “thinking . . . followsa network of tracks laid down in a given language, an organization which mayconcentrate systematically upon certain phases of reality, certain aspects ofintelligence, and may systematically discard others featured by other lan-guages.” (256) The Whorfian hypothesis, as it was called then, was hotlydebated. In fact, it “permits no test” (Faubion and Marcus 2008:78) and is moresupposition than hypothesis. But arguably, at least in “soft” form, it under-writes aspects of linguistics, anthropology, and cultural studies even now.4

That is surely as it should be because language is the medium in which wetalk with ourselves and each other (if we do) about the phenomenologies,epistemologies, and subjectivities we live in and through. Acts of naming andcategorizing set in motion a “play of signifiers” or symbols, and so culture itselfbegins to unfold and infolds us too (cf. Barthes 1982a:6). As Lacan (2006:219,quoting La Rochefoucauld) suggests, “there are people”—perhaps most ofus—“who would never have fallen in love but for hearing love discussed.” LikeWhorf, Lacan states the case unambiguously: “The form in which languageexpresses itself in and of itself defines subjectivity” (2006:246). In discoursingwith an Other, Lacan writes, “I call him by a name that he must assume orrefuse in order to answer me” (2006:247). How Whorfian! And as to the ques-tion, it must be understood as comparable to the Freudian slip, revealing inits concealing, its indirection, its indirect discourse. As Lacan suggests, “whatconstitutes me as a subject [already] is my question” (2006:247). With Lacan aswith Whorf and two generations of analysts since, there is no submission towhat Martin Heidegger says of language as a situation of having “gotten stuckin these rigid forms as if in a net of steel” (2000:56).

Thus, the situation is not always and not only as Heidegger suggests, whichwould be to take Whorf too literally and too concretely, and would deny Lacan’s

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openings, and Roland Barthes’ (1982) as well. It is evident that literalism andmonovocality will not do. There are few, if any, perfectly normalized construc-tions or unremitting formalisms, except perhaps among linguistic forms thathave died. Language does not impose a net of steel. It is evocative and thera-peutic as much as descriptive or referential. Like linguistic forms themselves,the question, too, is generative, performative, and productive. The questionasked and answered sends us down one narrative track rather than others, forinstance. But the play of the question as signifier precludes linguistic or phe-nomenological determinism because it is always creating openings that arefar more slippery, more elusive, and more negotiable than Heidegger’s meta-phorical net of steel allows. That is what it means “to be in language” (Barthes1986:236). Heidegger (2000:42) is more to the point when he writes: “throughour questioning we are entering a landscape.” Our linguistic habitus may catchus off guard, but possibly for that reason, it makes itself richly thinkable.

I met Said in 1989 on a train from Tangier to Fez. He was slight, bearded, andsmoking in the corridor that ran past the compartments where he soon joinedme. By the time we arrived in Fez, his hometown, he had offered, indeedinsisted on hospitality, and the next day I was at lunch with him in the salon of

Said (right) with the author in front of the Andalusian Mosque,Fez, Morocco (1989) Photo credit: Marianne McDonald

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his parents’ home. Said was a student at the university, and his father was theimam of a prestigious mosque in the medina. But the family had moved intonewly constructed government housing after their previous residence hadbecome unsafe. By the time we sat down to lunch, I thought I knew Said tosome extent. But I was not prepared for the story he had to tell or to enter thelandscape that it mapped (Foster 2006:117–21).

Said told me he was first in his class at the university and held a regulartutorial group for his fellow students. Women also attended. He said that oneof the women played up to him, and her interest seemed to go well beyondpassing her exams. After one of their sessions, Said fell ill but could not sayexactly how or why. Abdelkadir, Said’s father, noticed that he was gray andwithdrawn, and he thought the young woman had “put something” in Said’sfood. Said never used the words “potion,” “spell,” “witchcraft,” magic, orpoison. Neither did Abdelkadir. They did not have to. Were they talking abouta love potion or about poison?

Abdelkadir took his son to the hospital where the doctors told him he had tohave surgery right away. Said raised his shirt to show me an ugly, irregular scaron his abdomen. Had it been appendicitis or a perforated ulcer? (It looked morelike a knife wound).5 I was not alone in trying to reinterpret Said’s illness interms of Western medicine. It was Abdelkadir who took him to the hospital. AsI listened, I began to feel out of my depth. Said told his story with a vehemence,a towering rage that was incongruous with the suave, well-mannered youngman I thought I had already come to know.

The surgery and its circumstances had gone against all of Said’s assump-tions about being a man in control of his life. Taking his cues from Abdelkadir’sinterpretation of his illness, Said concluded categorically that Moroccan womenare not above suspicion, and he vowed never to marry a Moroccanwoman—he would instead look only for a European wife. He wanted me tohelp him find an American woman who would come to Morocco to be his wife.(This request struck me as a melodramatic apotheosis.) Such a woman, heseemed to suggest, would not commit the Moroccan woman’s hubris of covert,magical control. I was taken aback by the paradoxes that cropped up in hisnarrative.

As I listened to Said’s story, I forgot about the tasty salads arrayed on thetable and realized that Said and I were in performance, or he was, with me aspassive, perhaps feminized audience: my presence represented questions I hadnot, could put into words.6 By remaining silent, I wanted to avoid defining Saidas “native informant” and instead acquiesce to his definition of the scene, but Ido not think I succeeded in doing so. In any case, Said’s performance created aspace of wholly masculine narrative, like the poetry recitations of men in Yemen(Caton 1990) or the narrative poses and disputations of Lebanese men (Gilsenan1996), both potent rhetorics of self-making (Battaglia 1995).7 Said’s story pro-moted his symbolic capital at a distance from female power as he described it,inserting himself into a narrative of wider magnitude, a performance in a malevenue in which its symbolic resonance could extend into the larger world of“the West.”8 Thus, Said had his agenda, but so did I. If he articulated his storyin terms of desire, his desire to stay in control, to maintain male domination inrelation to female hubris by negotiating a space for us, I too, passively articulated

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desire, my desire to have his story overweave my own as a Western man, tocontradict Western domination as I represented it to him, to myself. “Bargainingfor reality” (Rosen 1984) as Moroccans do, our negotiated reality also repro-duced Moroccan conventions.9

A man Michael Gilsenan (1996:118) knew in Lebanon told him a sardonicaphorism, saying “the world is a lie.” If so, Said tried to seal over “the gapbetween what seems and what is” by proposing a scenario that he never admittedwas only “as if” (1996:118). The “truth” of his narrative, such as it was, becamepart of our bargaining: What narrative could be made to “stick,” by way ofcharisma, rhetoric or repetition? (Gilsenan 1996:313). I decided that the truth ortruths of his performance did not refer only to Said, his culture, or his situationbut particularly to our encounter, its unfolding, its prospects, its process. As I havesuggested, its message—its truth—was is a metamessage.

What symbolic capital did he suppose the Westerner, the American, to have?Was I to be a source of power, an outside agent who could provide a meansof restitution? Was I a means of escape by way of that alleged power? (Didhe fetishize “the West” and the Westerner, too?) I was reminded of the saints’shrines where Moroccans sometimes seek baraka, good luck, cures for illness,improved life chances. Was Said’s story a kind of pilgrimage? His narrative andhis request raised more questions than they answered. My own questions wereon the tip of my tongue, but as I have said, for the most part, I did not ask them.I did not have the guts. Said’s words tried to spin a world out of the possibilitieshe reached out for across difference, differences between religions, societies,and languages, a scene to be played out in the theatrum mundi. His discoursecast words in a magical role: the power of language would force into existencea reality that was, as yet, only desired. Again, the truth or truths (they arelayered, multiple) of our encounter were less about Said than about the encoun-ter itself, its unfolding, its dynamic, its performance. Such performance is notunusual in Morocco. Said was a showman, like the storytellers (hlayki) whoused to gather in Morocco’s cafés and public squares. Indeed, I had little if anycontrol of the cadence and shape of Said’s story, except after the fact, later whenI composed this interpretation.10

In Said’s story, I am interested in the site of interlocution where questionand questioner have their day, and particularly in the rigging or filamentsthat connect the encounter with its figuration or refiguration in discourse(Crapanzano 2007:98–9; 2010). Who could say what Said’s story meant ormeans? Could he? Could I? It was, for one thing, a method of self-verification,in my eyes, from the listening Other—about myself, in all my opacity, in relationto him. I was a symbol, a cipher, a trope, little more. He had to have thoughtof me as “the Westerner.” The questions, such as they were, went mostly oneway. He asked me very little. He did not have to. As is evident, I did not ask himmany of my questions, either. I was the obverse of David Locke, the reporter inThe Passenger, whose insistent questions attempt to define the story but onlyforce him to look in the mirror. Perhaps disingenuously, I was more reticentthan Locke. I adopted a “weaker” position. Maybe I only asked Said his name.In the moment, I did not think that was a leading question. I am certain nowthat my questions “meant” nothing to him beyond their function as rhetoricalopeners. The question I know I did not ask, even indirectly, was what my

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questions may have meant to him, how they “struck” him, how I struck him. AsI have said, I was mostly an audience, a witness.

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By conferring, dictating a context, the question opens a discursive space, a voidthat must be filled. Yet, I have already alluded to the paradoxical property of thequestion: its productivity and its initiation of discourse also implies constraintand the genre conventions of narrative that shape, structure, and thereby limitand control the discourse it allows. Its generative potential is likewise its poten-tial to exclude.

The theatricality of Said’s narrative, its Scheherazade-like artifice, immediatelymade me want to ask further questions: “Was he only really telling his storyto himself?” “Who is the real Said?” “What is his ‘core self’?” Such questions arefake, implicitly self-referential because the self is our cultural artifice, our preoc-cupation, more than his. The scene we constructed in performance, the questionsshaped or left unstated in that venue were the outcome of knowledge weassumed about each other but that was dubious, far from established. Thecontradictions that bit at the edge of Said’s narrative suggested that it wasa fabrication. His disclosures were already a displacement, a streamlining, areduction. If my theatrical metaphor is credible, Said’s telling was, to someextent, a hiding, a mask of the self. Whatever the “core of the self” may have beenfor him, the construction of a façade, a screen behind which the changeable,multifaceted person fades, is deconstructed, evaded in his narrative.

To me, his story in the moment was a waterfall, an eruption, a conflagration,a fire. It left me breathless. To say it came from his “culture” would be toosimple, reductionist. (We were not, during our encounter, “located” in “hisculture” or in mine; we were in a liminal interzone.) I had to see his story asexternalizing something of his reality, describing something of his situation, ifonly in response to my presence as a Westerner. In the end, I came to imaginethat his question—his request—to me had to do with his desire to reversefemale power by means of a “cultural” substitution: his gender issue could, inhis theory, be solved by substituting culture for gender, substituting a Westernwoman for a familiar, Moroccan one. In any case, that was the desire, theillusion that his narrative seemed to me to pursue. The power he attributed tothe “West” was implicit in his question, in his request.

My rethinking of Said’s story in retrospect has gone on longer than I care toremember. Perhaps I have fetishized his story, fetishized him. More than oneanthropologist has claimed that once engaged, the intercultural encounternever ends (Clark-Decès 2007). If questions direct memory and forgetting, andthe ethnographer’s memory is reconfigured by the questions he forgot to ask, oronly thinks of asking later, his pretense in the encounter is itself a question forthe Other. And now, my questions multiply, tumble out of our discourse as Iremember it. In retrospect, I ask: Did they subliminally calibrate the differentialof power between us? Were they a metalanguage, a coding for our affiliationacross difference, its potential, its lack? It did not occur to me to ask thesequestions then. My questions would have damaged the artifice of his recitation.Perhaps the etiquette of the encounter, that fragile interlocutionary moment,

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could not sustain such probing. I now believe that such a line of inquiry wouldhave foreclosed Said’s narrative and my perception of it as performance,display, or theater, as self-posed exposé, self-exposition (Goffman 1973). Mydesire was to hear, to have his story. I was greedy, avaricious. But because the selfitself is less an entity than a process, with its changing focus and its poiesis, mydesire is also what made possible a foreclosure, an ending, contrived andartificial as it had to be.11 Perhaps I postulated Said’s story as narrative simplyin order to define a climax, a denouement.

If I could not ask all my questions then, in the moment, not wanting tointerrupt or punctuate Said’s performance, acquiescing as I did to the etiquette ofits theatricality, I can all the more easily ask them now. The necessities of narrativedo much to suggest my silences and the shifting context of the listener’s con-sciousness that makes certain questions retreat or expire, or on the other handappear boldly to direct the interlocutionary play that drives narrative. Perhapsmy silence is a backhanded recognition of the power of the question. In any case,the mesh of discourse’s delicate materiality, its narrative frozen in language—and specifically in writing—dapples the image that its performance constructs,as well as the ones it defers.12 Its fluidity and dynamic process demonstrates, onceagain, the impress of language, our assumption, our doxa that language istruth-laden.

The ambiguity of the question—including the unspoken question and theloaded or leading question—to construct and constrain says much about itsgiving us pleasure, astonishment, and surprise. To play my history with Said inthat register, I could ask now: Could my questions, as sparse as they were, havemeant so much, asked for all that, such a rich, poignant response? Such impro-visation? Yes, my questions did in a sense contain his story, his gift. That is to say,he answered, was responsive to my question (or simply the question implicit inmy presence), though I certainly did not expect to elicit such a narrative. I couldwrite that he was loquacious and generous in doing so. Or I could write that hewas exercising a narcissism that demonstrated the degree of his preoccupation,his self-referentiality, even his egotism. Beyond that, his story was a request, andso a “set-up,” as such answers often are if one listens closely. Said configured ourconversation as an exchange, a chain, a rhetorical flourish that sought its owninstrumental extension into the real for his own advantage. Whether I could givehim something he wanted, something he could use—that was his wager, hisquestion. What I gave him beyond my presence, my ear, whatever that may havebeen worth to him, was not the possibility of meeting a Western woman. Instead,I gave him only the suitcase he asked me for later. That was only a placeholder, aproxy, a symbol of a symbol, a way—in imagination or fantasy—to contain, totravel, and to cross borders, a representation of the possibility of a continuingexchange but also an escape and a resolution and closure.13

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What anthropological wisdom teaches is that truths about other places andpeoples do not come packaged as propositions. That form of ethnographic truthtelling has long since been vaporized by incessant cultural critique. Proposi-tional truths will not do, as debates about ethnographic veracity in works such

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as The Chrysanthemum and the Sword or Coming of Age in Samoa (among others)clearly show. Instead, ethnographic practice needs to take seriously its ownengagement with (and enmeshment in) difference as we construe and constructit. From place to place, culture to culture, moment to moment, difference isalways with us. As Ruth Benedict (1946:13) says, it is the difference “betweenTweedledum and Tweedledee.” You and I, now and then, are always different,and so are “they.” In the messy, shifting realm of the contemporary, what can befound are lapidary, kaleidoscopic representations of episodes, exchanges, andmoments (McLean and Leibing 2007). To be an ethnographer of difference isalso to be one’s own ethnographer. One follows from and synergizes the other.To some degree, auto-ethnography is a necessary element of ethnography. Ourquestions go two ways so that self-description and social description enable oneanother. We and our questions are necessarily part of the scene. Under theseconditions, Heidegger (2000:23) argues that “the only one who knows is the onewho understands that he must always learn again.” Whatever truths there maybe in this realm are transitive, if not transient, and are to be found in the fray ofdialogue and the evanescent meaning or meaning-effects that they produce. Inthe dialogic, intersubjective space of our encounters, however pro forma, evenstatements can rhetorically be questions—openings.

Yet, this position still sits uneasily with the institutional factors that anthro-pologists submit to in avoiding leading questions, or trying to. However care-fully they craft their questions, however politic their research formulations, andhowever innocent their questions may seem, in some respect, all questions canbe leading questions. Can we lift such mystifications as underwrite our pre-sumption of empirical science? Can we reflect upon them (as well as upon ourintersubjective dynamics) by making process more explicit? Research questionsand researchable questions contain black boxes within boxes. What these blackboxes—or blind spots—contain is the institutional apparatus that premisesethnographic practice (Bourdieu 1988, Taussig 2011:48–9). Institutional entail-ments and genre conventions, to say nothing of the politics of the academy,14

stylize how we manage participant observation, reproducing “the contradictionbetween what can be known and what must be thought” (Spivak 1999:30). To besure, the audacity of “a play of styles” (Marcus 1998:192) has taken hold. So myquestion—a loaded question, I admit—becomes: Can this conventional uncon-ventionality be obviated in turn, and the figure of the “native informant” alongwith it? When the process of questioning is tied to this carefully crafted, over-defined figure, both dialogue and writing factor out the morass and messinessof process and the “raw” person as well, limiting the truths that our questionsand our ethnographies produce.15

A politicohistorical construct, the “native informant” deserves to bedeconstructed (Spivak 1999).16 Following our questions beyond a “he-said-she-said,” “I am a camera” perspective, beyond the figure of the “native informant,”into this morass is well worth risking.17 Locating ethnography in the immediatemateriality of the “he-said-she-said” is an error of concrete thinking. Ethnogra-phy and the site of the truths it can produce deserves to be relocated in theintersubjectivity of the questioner in performance with the “raw” person, who Iwould venture to call the person per se. The writing of ethnography must stretcheven further than it has, must become yet more tentative and soft-focused, I dare

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say, more arch and mannered, Dionysian, fetishistic, Nietzschean, pointillist,anarchic.18

Jean-Paul Sartre (1968:174) wrote that “the questioner, the question andthe questioned are one,” but he must have known that such is really ourproblematique. My point is that understanding the politics and the poetics of thequestion, generically and substantively, is essential for ethnographic truth-telling. The content, output, or message of ethnography, and arguably of philoso-phy too, is not simply propositional or doctrinal but a metamessage, a truth,if you will, about truth itself, about “process.” Open-ended questioning, dispu-tation or (as in classical Greek drama and philosophy) agon—its give andtake—is what truth there is, beyond substantive propositions. In that sense, theform is the content. No wonder Socrates said, in essence, “I know nothing” butkept on asking questions to the end. In his case, “the questioner was nothingother than the question itself” (Batchelor 1997:26). That is still our situation now.If nothing else, Socrates proved that “the philosopher’s work is never done”(Faubion 2011:107). Neither is the ethnographer’s.

Questions ad infinitum do not therefore imply too much reflection, too muchreflexivity, or inquiry reduced to self-referential navel gazing. Such a practice orpursuit is not just a detour but a quest, a route leading directly into the heart ofa resonant, mobile analytics, a style, an experiment. However anxiety provoking,questions, our own and the Other’s, are, more importantly, thought-provoking.That is their significance, their value. This question, then, is really the one wehave to ask . . . ourselves: What question should be asked? What is the nextquestion? And, perhaps more courageously: What questions have not beenasked—yet? What questions have not been asked that need to be? Ask, and keepasking—and listening. As long as we keep talking, all will be well. Like critique,the art of questioning is a virtue, or perhaps an ethic well worth pursuing.

Notes

Acknowledgments. To Susan Ossman, who provided the occasion for writing thispaper and for presenting an earlier version to the Global Studies students at the Uni-versity of California, Riverside, and to Vincent Crapanzano for stimulating conversationabout Heidegger and, over the years, much more. Julia Demmin, Louis Dorsey, KarenElliott, and Doris McAndrew provided valuable insights. Two anonymous reviewersprovided richly suggestive comments. The usual disclaimers apply.

1. I knew that already. In the 1970s, I had walked through the crowds at the celebra-tions in Moulay Idriss for the saint’s birthday and had seen the uniformed guards withmachine guns standing at the barricaded entrance to the mosque. Their presence thenmade my blood run cold, as its memory still does now.

2. Casablanca’s Hassan II Mosque was completed in 1993 and opened to non-Muslimvisitors. In an astute public relations intervention, the Moroccan makhzen (government)made the mosque a venue for foreigners to learn about Moroccan Islam, to witnessthe claimed glories of the culture, and to see Moroccan tradition inscribed in stone.Hassan II’s (b.1929, d.1999) father, Mohammed V (b. 1909, d. 1961) opened the mosque–mausoleum of Moulay Ismaïl (b.1634?, d.1727) in Meknes to non-Muslims after Moroc-can independence in 1956. The mosque in Tin Mal in the High Atlas Mountains,completed in 1156, can also be entered by non-Muslims after its restoration and desig-nation as a UNESCO World Heritage site.

3. The parallel between psychotherapeutic and ethnographic encounters shouldnot be taken to suggest that they are the same. My purpose here is heuristic. As I know

156 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 38, Number 2

from my training as therapist and ethnographer, many elements of process are foundin both (mechanisms of defense, transference and countertransference, and so forth) asin all social interaction, but the rationale, skill sets, and objectives of each are distinct(Crapanzano 2010:64).

4. As I reread what I have written here about Whorf, I cannot help thinking of thestructuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss (particularly his Mythologiques series, 1964–71). ButI have not known Lévi-Strauss to be described as a Whorfian.

5. I leave the interpretation of the surgical knife in its phallic implications for anotheroccasion. Its associations range from the scaring inscription of the wound, throughcastration, to the pen that inscribes a text.

6. Would my unasked questions have become easier to ask as I came to know Saidbetter? Had we been more intimate, perhaps another, less pro forma scene could havebeen created between us. A more informal, substantive scene, less a matter of abstract,“artificial” narrative would have meant that we could have had a conversation.

7. Comparable portrayals of women’s verbal arts and rhetoric include Messick(1987), Abu-Lughod (1993), Kapchan (1996) Riaño and Baghdadi (2007), and Hoffman(2008).

8. Said’s story anticipates an increasingly prevalent “model of different forms of lifethat intersect everywhere” (Ossman 2013:121). Ossman vividly characterizes this mobil-ity as “choreography” (2013:1, 122), using a metaphor of dance (cf. Taussig 2011:24).

9. The Moroccan market (Geertz 1979) may have been Rosen’s prototype for his moregeneral “model” of “bargaining for reality” (Rosen 1979, 1984). Moroccan categories of theperson are highly contextualized and variable, providing what Geertz describes as “onlya vacant sketch . . . to be filled in [negotiated] by the process of interaction itself” (Geertz1983:68, Foster 1986:207).

10. Walter Benjamin notes that the storyteller pursues a “chaste compactness” (1968:91) and gives “no explanations” (1968:90). Citing the example of Herodotus, he says thatthe storyteller’s “report is the driest” and “resembles the seeds of grain which have lain forcenturies in . . . the pyramids . . . and retained their generative power.” The story does notconvey information but “achieves an amplitude that information lacks.” (1968:89)

11. Perhaps all full stops in dialogue or discourse, all endings (or in psychothera-peutic jargon, terminations) are artificial, except when death itself intrudes.

12. The writing of ethnography and “writing up” our encounters with “native infor-mants” is directly related to the question of the question. From early (Crapanzano 1977)to late (Jackson 2012), and the plethora of “writing culture” reflections along the way, ithas been examined ad infinitum, as it ought to be.

13. Whatever our intentions, Said and I never did reconvene after our initial encoun-ter. We only exchanged letters.

14. A fellow anthropologist told me when she got tenure that professors work sohard to follow the rules (on publication, “attitude,” and professional appropriateness)that when they finally get tenure, they have forgotten how not to follow the rules.

15. I like to think that the process notes psychotherapists and analysts take during orafter their sessions with clients are more opened, more complicated, more bristling withreactions and interpretation, more “blurred genre” than field notes, particularly of the“he-said-she-said” sort. But perhaps I am wrong. Field notes, if not published accounts,already often encompass the messiness, the morass of intersubjectivity (Jackson 1990).I must note that my use of “process” in this essay refers to intersubjectivity not toFreudian “primary process.”

16. The degree to which the “native informant” has been constructed to serve apurpose, that of ethnography, for one thing, must be acknowledged. Our construction ofthat figure is, in a number of respects, self-serving.

17. Kevin Dwyer (1982) struggled valiantly with what I would call the surface (andwoefully incomplete) truths of dialogue between ethnographer and informant. Probably,no distinction can seriously be sustained between ethnography and (its) interpretation.

18. Ethnographic work that stretches itself (and takes risks) in this respect can befound in Sartre (1963), Crapanzano (1980), Lingis (2004), Faubion (2011), Taussig (1991,2011), and Ossman (2013).

Foster What Is “the Question”? 157

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