An Anthropology of the Shallow and Boring - musings from the fieldnotes

[I rediscovered this entry dated on 2nd Oct 2011 while revisiting my fieldnotes recently. I find the condescending tones here amusing, which perhaps reflect the frustration that I was experiencing in fieldwork then. Since this is unlikely to get to anywhere else, I thought I’d just share it for people’s amusement. It’s obvious that I felt a bit smug about coming up with this metaphor at that time; but now I realize it was probably a metaphor of Geertz's surfacing from my subconscious.]

 

    The work of an anthropologist is like observing a Monopoly card game or 三国杀, not knowing the rules and trying to figure out them. All the players in the game know the rules by their heart, though perhaps to varying degrees of skillfulness. The small booklet explaining the rules of the game that comes with the set has now been misplaced, and the puzzled anthropologist looks at how players deal the cards and move on the game. They are enjoying themselves, thinking, strategizing, plotting against each other, and carrying out actions. They laugh and banter among themselves; but the observer feels lost. The rules can be fairly complicated, and on the cards are strange and colorful symbols which are part of the rules; and sometimes the function of a card is written on the card itself. But the anthropologist, observing the game over people’s shoulders and being distracted by players’ exclamations and bantering, cannot see clearly what’s written on the cards. His task is to figure out, as far as possible, the rules that govern the players’ actions.
    Intellectually, the game is shallow and boring; and the anthropologist feels this by instinct. But until he has figured out the rules, he is actually the most vulnerable and stupid among them all. The anthropologist knows that the players are also boring and shallow: their laughter, their banters…all quite trifle; but even for the boring and shallow, some rules govern their actions; and until the anthropologist uncovers those rules—they may not be stable but rather dynamic rules that are re-/constructed on the go—he cannot dismiss them. He has to produce an account adequate enough to explain the players’ behaviors; he is an anthropologist of the shallow and boring, but his understanding is neither shallow nor boring.