Viewing as a Martian – deterritorializing. NASA photo, public domain, from Wikimedia Commons.
The critical role of correspondence and letters in ethnographic research is often underappreciated. Letter writing by anthropologists provides insights into the micropowers of fieldwork and offers closer examinations of methods and research processes. The open and fragmented state of letters initiates dialogue, maintains connection, and prompts response and self-reflection. The practice of writing letters from the field signifies a place, measures distance, and convenes both absence and presence; letters depend paradoxically on a sense of alienation and distance as well as intimacy and immediacy (Derrida 1987: 185). This register of writing—like any other—is a certain method unto itself; it requires the writer to anticipate an audience and distill, capture, describe, and translate from a new perspective accordingly. These habits of translation, critical self-reflection, and intersubjectivity are particularly important aspects of fieldwork and the discipline of anthropology at large. The process, reflection, and contemplation through composition inherent to the practice of writing letters provides a moment for meta-analysis and methodological examination. While immersed in another culture, or feeling out of place, letters re-establish a sense of direction and connection to the location, position, readership, and objectives of origin. This makes them valuable, as Margaret Mead describes, to balance between the ‘immersion’, ‘empathy’, and ‘self-awareness’ that fieldwork ‘depends on’ (Mead 1977: 38). Letters contain details of the culturally unfamiliar intended for a familiar audience, this requires a step of translation important to anthropology which conveys the estranged experience of the researcher and casts a new light on the familiar. A hyperbolic example of this can be found in the 1979 poem by Craig Raine, ‘A Martian Sends a Postcard Home’ in which a Martian writes of life on Earth to an extraterrestrial audience. Read from the terra, this poem provides a new and estranged view of some earthly preoccupations which may seem mundane and familiar.
At night, when all the colours die,
they hide in pairs
and read about themselves —
in colour, with their eyelids shut.
(excerpt from Raine 1979)
Works Cited
- Derrida, Jaques. (1987). The Post Card. University of Chicago Press.
- Mead, Margaret. (1977). Letters from the Field 1925-1975. Harper & Row, New York.
- Raine, Craig. (1979). A Martian Sends a Postcard Home. MIT Press.