Heading for the Scene of the Crash: The Cultural Analysis of America

By Lee Drummond

American anthropologists have long advocated cultural anthropology as a tool for cultural critique, yet seldom has that approach been employed in discussions of major events and cultural productions that impact the lives of tens of millions of Americans. This collection of essays aims to refashion cultural analysis into a hard-edged tool for the study of American society and culture, addressing topics including the 9/11 terrorist attacks, abortion, sports doping, and the Jonestown massacre-suicides. Grounded in the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, the essays advance an inquiry into the nature of culture in American society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Mar 28, 2018
• ISBN: 9781785336485

Lee Drummond

Lee Drummond is an independent scholar living in southern California, where he directs the Center for Peripheral Studies. Before turning his attention to the analysis of American culture, he worked in Amerindian communities of South America and in Caribbean national societies.

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Chapter 1

Jonestown

An Ethnographic Essay

S everal years before Jim Jones established his community, I was living in an Arawak village in northwestern Guyana, about seventy-five miles from the future site of Jonestown. ¹ It was an Amerindian village, but a very modern one—everyone spoke Guyanese English Creole, wore Western clothing, and embraced Western values generally. The family I knew best was especially progressive by local standards—of five mature children, three were training for professions: teacher, surveyor, engineer. The family was also musical, and two of the boys, responding to their changing environment, had acquired Japanese-made electric guitars and amplifiers. One brother taught at a nearby school and was soon to continue the training that would make him a highly qualified government surveyor. Music and technology, two domains of a modernity he was anxious to make his own, provided the basis of many conversations between us.

The conversation I remember best was about the film Woodstock (1970). My friend had returned to the village after a visit to the capital, Georgetown, where Woodstock was playing to large and enthusiastic audiences. At the beginning of the 1970s Guyanese youth were caught up in the complex forces of an imported counterculture and a local nationalism newly stimulated by the 1970 proclamation of Guyana as a Cooperative Republic. So, besides his reaction to the music in Woodstock, I was interested in my friend’s reaction to the festival as a cultural event—in how he interpreted the happening from a Guyanese perspective. We talked for some time about the various bands and singers, and in that discussion I, as a nonmusician, was clearly a listener and learner. But before I could steer the conversation toward the festival as cultural event, my friend asked a question that stopped me cold. Interrupting his commentary on singers and their songs, he paused and with a perplexed expression asked, But tell me, where did they find all those actors?

Where did they find all those actors? My thoughts raced; the world turned over. It was one of those moments described by Kafka, when the world at its most mundane—acquaintances having a casual conversation—becomes suddenly vertiginous and alien. Amid a tumult of thoughts I realized that my friend and I, although perfectly able to carry on an extended conversation, had not been talking about the same thing. For me, the film Woodstock documented a novel and exciting event in American life. The 200-odd thousand who attended were not paid actors, but, on the contrary, people affirming a mode of life they wished to create and experience. My friend, being more pragmatic and—as it turned out—more accurate, regarded all the events in Woodstock as parts of a staged performance he thought of as an American movie. And the American movie was fiction; it paraded unreal lives lived out against backgrounds of unattainable luxury.

When I tried to explain that Woodstock really happened, that it was not just a movie, he became as uncomfortable with that idea as I had been with his interpretation (after all, the ethnographer does not have a monopoly on Kafkaesque experiences). A crowd a third the size of the entire population of his country had gathered on that New York farm that weekend, and just to listen to music and indulge in bizarre, outrageous behavior. That an event of such magnitude and theatricality should just happen spontaneously was an uncomfortable, irrational notion. He found it more consistent with all he knew and believed to regard Woodstock as one more American movie, but with the proverbial cast of thousands. Hence his question, Where did they find all those actors? I have no evidence on how representative my friend’s interpretation was—I did not conduct a survey—but my knowledge of Guyana makes me feel that his was not an unusual view among Guyanese at the time. And whether or not that is true, the episode taught, or began to teach, me about the nature of ethnography and prepared me to understand a future American cult event, this one staged on Guyanese soil and mostly away from the recording photographic eye.

The Ethnographic Event

How does one begin (or rather, recommence after this faux départ) to make anthropological sense of Jonestown? I propose to do this (indeed, I hope I have already begun) by dwelling on ethnographic events I have experienced, using those to reflect on the nature of ethnography, and situating that reflexive discussion within a large and growing corpus of texts on Jonestown produced by various sources—Guyanese and American, anthropologist and nonanthropologist. But what—since we are consciously striving here to come to terms with ethnography—is that ethnographic event to which I just referred? How do we know when we are doing ethnography?

Surely this question is vital to the project at hand, for in seeking to establish the connection between semiotics and ethnography we are responding to an intellectual tradition that has already—even if only implicitly—identified that relationship as a disjunction. Semiotics, however vague and mysterious the word may sound, can be classified in that tradition as some form of analysis or, in a more literary mode, interpretation. And what does one analyze or interpret? Well, the data—the experiences, the events, the discourse—one has been exposed to in the course of fieldwork. Data and analysis, fact and theory, experience and interpretation, action and reaction, these disjunctions are the comfortable foundations of our thought. And when we consider the particular disjunction that makes anthropology a distinctive field—the native and the ethnographer—it seems quite natural to collapse it within those other, more encompassing disjunctions of modern thought. The native is the source and repository of factual experience; he is studied and made to yield up that body of fact, that authentic experience that, through a painstaking process spanning years, is massaged into analytical or interpretive statements. Within this general intellectual framework, then, the ethnographic event corresponds to the simplest model in information theory: the native is Sender, his action or statement is Message, and the ethnographer is Receiver. The reality, the factualness, of the native’s actions and statements are incontestable within such a model. The ethnographer observes and records or interprets, much as an experimenter charts the events in a physical laboratory or a chronicler the experiences of those around him.

Within the tradition I am describing the ethnographic event is a positive, healthy-minded action; it is much like collecting specimens of rock (we have heard the geological metaphor before) to take back to the lab for—what else?—classification and analysis. Or, in a dramatically different vein but still within the same tradition, the ethnographic event is the suspension of that very subject/object distinction (an embarrassingly nineteenth-century credo, after all) in a psychic blending of diverse intelligences, an empathy, that opens the heart and mind of the ethnographer to the compelling integrity of the native’s experience. The crucial point here, often lost sight of, is that the empathic ethnographer, like the data and analysis ethnographer, believes that the native is in full possession of his world, is its architect and privileged resident. Despite massive evidence to the contrary, both approaches embrace the popular illusion of the native as a unique being poised in a social world of delicately balanced harmony. The empathic ethnographer in particular wants to acquire a lease on that world, wants to understand the native’s experience as an interconnected, intelligible system. He would proceed, like Pilgrim, from a state of ignorance and confusion to one of relative enlightenment, via any number of Sloughs of Despondency familiar to all of us.

The problem with these two conceptions of the ethnographic event, as with the tradition of disjunction from which they derive, is that they insist on a radical separation—native and ethnographer—that somehow, through the latter’s analytic or empathic efforts, gives way to a delicious sharing of secrets and worldview. The ethnographer is a vessel, waiting to be filled (there was another vessel, waiting to be drunk, brimming with a lavender horror of Kool-Aid and cyanide) from the fount of native wisdom. But where did they find all those actors? The question recurs, for in thinking about my own experiences as ethnographer, I cannot dispel the memory of that acute disorientation. In attempting to frame a notion of the ethnographic event, I find the little anecdote I have related much more revealing than the glossy textbook accounts of ethnography as one-way empathy or objective analysis.

How is it revealing? How does the incident show that ethnography is going on? There are two critical points here. First, the colossal discrepancy in our understanding of Woodstock became apparent only after a fairly lengthy, relaxed conversation in which both my acquaintance and I seemed perfectly in control of the subject matter. Rapport, intelligibility, the long, drawn-out process of empathic understanding were already established when that little bit of Kafka intruded. And the disorientation, the shock, was greater than if we had been consciously groping for a common linguistic or cultural ground. Second, the disorientation was mutual: the native was as fallible as I. Drinking at the fount of native wisdom is impossible when the native is as parched as oneself. The peculiar turn in our conversation was edifying precisely because it revealed our mutual misunderstanding; we were forced to recognize that our ability to make sense to one another rested on a profound difference in basic outlook. I have come to regard that underlying difference, that edifying puzzlement,² as the critical feature of the ethnographic event. For it seems precisely then, when both parties are seized by a kind of cultural vertigo, that understanding is possible. It is then that the Other surreptitiously enters.

The view of ethnography that emerges from this discussion is not that of the data and analysis or even the empathic approach. The latter is unsatisfying because it retains a Benedictian faith in the internal consistency and boundedness—the wholeness—of cultures. And while insisting on their integrity, the empathic approach curiously strives to penetrate those whole cultures, to stand beside, or behind, the native and read over his shoulder.³ The ethnographer is a privileged reader, but the native retains full possession (and authorship; he holds the copyright) of the text. The data and analysis approach emphasizes answers (hypothesis testing) rather than questions and thereby discounts the interpretive process of creating a cultural text. There are variations on this approach, and I do not propose to examine them here; they range from the search for environmental determinants of behavior to ethnosemantic works that give context and interpretation an important place in models of conceptual relations. I find the approach generally mistaken, for I think that analytical entity we call culture is really a set of fundamental questions and their groping, desperate responses, and not a recipe-like set of answers—a view developed in my American Dreamtime (1996), Culture, Mind, and Physical Reality: An Anthropological Essay (2010), and The Serpent’s Children: Semiotics of Cultural Genesis in Arawak and Trobriand Myth (1981). The models we sometimes construct, even when they do not profess to identify the causes of cultural phenomena, constrain our thinking in such a way that the restlessness of thought in the rough gives way to the poise of an analytical construct.

The degree of underlying organization or structure of cultural productions is a major issue in anthropology today; it is certainly the major issue in anthropological semiotics. The little anecdote about Woodstock serves to call attention to that issue and, hopefully, to promote a skeptical attitude toward ethnographic accounts that render the described culture altogether explicable. Failures, sometimes colossal, to understand oneself, one’s group, and other groups are as much part of culture as are orderly semantic categories. In what follows, I pursue the idea that self-doubt and vertigo are fundamental aspects of cultural activity and, hence, of the ethnographic event.

Jonestown as Ethnographic Event

In the sense I have just outlined, Jonestown is for me an ethnographic event, though I was certainly not present at Port Kaituma on that fateful day in November 1978, nor even in the country at the time (I arrived about two months later, on my third research visit to Guyana). Jonestown was a colossal failure, a hideous stain on the fabric of the human spirit. The suicides/murders threatened to overwhelm the last refuge of a basic human decency and caring in a modern consciousness numbed by the imminence of nuclear holocaust and the commonness of individual violence. Somehow the horrors of nuclear war, assassination, and urban crime paled by comparison with a community of persons ready, at the command of a madman, to destroy not only themselves but their children. I was closer to it than most, but its appalling normlessness and vertigo afflicted all of us. And yet the event’s notoriety and ugliness are precisely what would lead most anthropologists to discount it as an ethnographic subject. The Jonestown horror is a specifically non-ethnographic event for them because it was so bizarre and so modern. Although we do not write a great deal about the subject in methodological texts, we do cling to a distinction—intuited more than taught—between journalistic and ethnographic events. And Jonestown was decidedly a journalistic event; like a major earthquake or political assassination it seemed to demand the kind of attention only international correspondents could give. And give it they did, to the extent that it became arguably the truest media event in American life prior to 9/11. What other isolated jungle community has been so much discussed in newspapers, on television, and in popular literature?

But it is not my intention to dwell on Jonestown as media event (although that would form part of a comprehensive study). I will begin instead by asking why the professional instinct of my anthropological colleagues is to ignore Jonestown. I believe two factors are at work here: the event’s sensationalism and its ugliness. While I find the two interconnected, I feel my colleagues would tend to emphasize the first, claiming that Jonestown was a bizarre and probably unique event precipitated by an American outcast in a foreign land. Hence, its analysis would yield nothing in terms of understanding the regularity, the everyday functioning, of any social or cultural system. This caveat, however, disguises a more fundamental reason for avoiding a professional examination of Jonestown, and that is the basic human reluctance to confront malignancy—a reluctance we actually enshrine in our theories of society by representing social processes and institutions as long-term, adaptive, integrative affairs. The feeling is that a social or cultural system must be systematic, must possess a high degree of organization and stability, if it is to persist over time. Although we are prepared to discount functionalist explanation in contemporary theory, we do not seem to have abandoned its penchant for assuming that enduring, shared sets of social relations and beliefs are the proper objects of study. Social change may be studied, to be sure, but only if it is orderly (and preferably part of a large-scale, seemingly irreversible process, such as liminality, urbanization, class conflict, or