CHAPTER EIGHT

THE RAISON D'ETRE OF EXISTENTIAL ETHNOGRAPHY

by Hugh M. Lewis

Existential ethnography derives its value from the fact that human existence is not without an overarching sense of purpose or direction--but this sense of purpose is gained within a cultural context. We cannot imagine a world that is outside of a cultural framework or that does not have at least some implicit reference to such a framework. Without culture, we are like fish out of water. We depend upon regular cultural immersion for our sense of meaning and purpose in everyday life.

Culture provides not just sanctions for behavior, but constitutes some of the most basic and focal positive values by which its members gain meaning in their lives. When cultural orientations come into historical crisis, the rise of revitalization movements that are culturally resonant, provides empirical evidence for this function of culture in the symbolic unification of reality.

A sense of purpose is important to human existence, and is achieved in life despite circumstances or a general paucity of such meaning in the natural world. Human beings are, as symbolic creatures, goal-directed. They become goal directed whether goals begin within oneself or becomes directed by others or some ideological reference point.

Unfortunately, human goals are rarely obvious, and their achievement usually entails overcoming certain existential obstacles or resolving basic existential dilemmas for which there may be no clear cut answers. The decision for a woman to pursue a career or to begin a family, the desire to do one's job and conform to an authority system, though such conformity may mean jeopardizing basic values.

Religion provides the symbolic closure and unity by which a sense of purpose in life can be achieved. Such an achievement leads to dissipates existential ambiguity and leads to a sense of fulfillment or completion about life. Religion as ideology, and ideology as religion, serves the ideological function of guiding correct behavior toward the satisfaction of certain social goals or realization of values.

The power of symbolic ideology is to bring belief and behavior into a form of agreement, such that we can explain what and why it is we do what we are doing. It is also a power to reify and to make seem as if supremely real what are in essence human symbolic constructions which have to substantive basis in reality except through its behavioral enactment or ideological pronouncements. Thus ideologies have a supreme power of ultimately justifying, beyond all question or shadow of doubt, whatever we want to justify.

The symbolic unification of reality arises from the capacity of symbolisms to stand for more than themselves, and to encompass many different, even incompatible things. Symbolic unification allows us a sense of completeness, certainty and closure about reality which is otherwise lacking, and allows us to deal with those marginal events--death, separation, loss, change--that tend to threaten and relativize our sense of symbolic unity and order about the world. The unification function of symbolization is what we refer to as the process of collectivization.

It is the fact of symbolization, and the symbolic foundation of human reality, which entails that humans must live with a sense of symbolic unity of experience, no matter how relative. It is this basic existential fact of our symbolic foundation that has eventually, slowly, pushed us toward a delineation and advancement of science as a way of objectively coming to terms with the existential antinomies and uncertainties inherent in the human experience.

Thus existential ethnography comes out of and is a direct consequence of human symbolic organization and can be understood as the attempt to empirically understand in a holistic manner the cultural and psychological consequences of this organization, especially as it is articulated and expressed in terms of an individual's life-course, actions, world-view and expectations of experience. The raison d'etre of any individual's life can best be understood and judged from an emic point of view which takes fully into account that individuals actions, expressed motivations, cultural background and social structures.

All individuals are confronted with certain unique existential dilemmas which are rooted in the background of their lives. The rationale and understanding of an individual's actions, views and values can only be gained in relation to the background context of the everyday world and larger events which shape their lives and to which they must respond. This entails a certain sense of biographic holism and idiographic relativism. We cannot nomothetically analyze different individuals in the same manner with the hope of understanding the reasons of their being or their actions, and we cannot simply compare the events and actions of one individual with that of another.

All people must live with chronic existential uncertainties which can neurotically undermine an individual's sense of meaning and purpose in life. And yet all individuals are forced to act and to decide in life certain life-courses of action. The reasons for doing so may not be obvious or directly available, not even to the actors themselves. It is the purpose of existential ethnography to excoriate the context of the individual informant's life in order to discover the important reasons for being and doing by the individual, to descriptively analyze the social context of interpersonal relations which reinforces the individual's identity and responses, and to distill from such biographical profiles those common elements which are shared by members of the same culture or period and place, with the aim of coming to terms with the overarching raison d'etre of the cultural context in the culture bearer's life.

Existential ethnography does not end or begin only with the description or understanding of the existentiality of the other. The ethnographer enters into a reflexive relationship with the other, and must undergo a series of existential crises in which which the existentiality of the author's own reality comes into question at the same moment as the ethnographer must come to terms with those existentialities of the other. These crises moments may appear as a series of ethnographic episodes of subjective experience and involvement in the field--a sequence of events which, in hindsight, appear to be almost predictable. It is the inherent existential blindness and the false ethnocentric expectations which leads the ethnographer, if open to the experience, on a journey of encounter, accident and learning, from which a more realistic understanding of both the self and the other may be achieved. Unless the ethnographer is open and available to such experiences, they will never occur, and, like any tourist, the goal of existential understanding and relationship with the other will not be fully, or even partially, achieved.

It is noteworthy in this regard that the interpersonal quality of the relationship between the ethnographer and the "other" must change from that of what Martin Buber refers to as "I-it" in which the other is treated as a "thing" in reference to oneself and other things, to one of an "I-thou" inter-subjective involvement. It is a relationship of empathetic understandings of the possibilities and alternative identities of being of the other. It is not too much to suggest that this type of relationship takes on affective qualities of love, bonding and attachment that do not normally occur in spurious, impersonal relationships in the marketplace.