The Ethics of Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs

Philosophy

RAVANPAK, PRESCRIPTION DRUG MONITORING, VOICES IN BIOETHICS, VOL. 9 (2023) * Ryan Ravanpak, Ph.D. MIT Department of Philosophy and Visiting Scholar at Phillips Academy © 2023 Ryan Ravanpak. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction, provided the original author and source are credited. Prescription Drug Monitoring: A Perspective Ryan Ravanpak* Keywords: Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs, Database, Addiction Management, Informed Consent INTRODUCTION Ever received a prescription for Xanax? You can bet that there was a record of it made in a digital database. Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs (PDMPs) contain detailed information about which controlled medications physicians prescribe individuals, including where, when, how much, by whom, and more. The programs allow physicians to glimpse into the life of each patient that visits them - sometimes before a single word is exchanged between them. Every state has a PDMP, and many states share the data they collect through it.1 Lately, I have been concerned with the application of these databases in the context of addiction management. In the United States, overdose deaths in a twelve-month period leading to May 2020 involving fentanyl alone increased 38 percent over the same period the previous year.2 Regrettably, I lost a partner to addiction. I have seen the difficulties those struggling with substance use go through - the shame, the guilt, and the roadblocks to positive change. But perhaps the most frustrating part has been the treatment they endure by others who brand them with a scarlet letter. Unfortunately, this can sometimes include healthcare professionals. ANALYSIS My central concern revolves around the lack of an informed consent requirement before entering prescription data into the PDMP when the reason given for the prescription is addiction management. Our community already stigmatizes those struggling with substance use disorder. The thought of having their prescriptions recorded rightly makes many of them feel uneasy. In the past, federal patient confidentiality guidelines prohibited recording narcotic prescription data in the PDMP in these contexts for this very reason.3 However, in 2020, this restriction was revised, paving the way for healthcare practitioners to have access to medication history. Narcotics officers may also have access to the PDMP data and have raided dispensing practices. Their access varies by state and may require a warrant or court order.4 RAVANPAK, PRESCRIPTION DRUG MONITORING, VOICES IN BIOETHICS, VOL. 9 (2023) 2 Permitting access to sensitive prescription information can put patients in a position to be further alienated by their healthcare providers and it can impact access to healthcare. According to a recent study by the University of Michigan, having an active opioid prescription in your medical history is enough to deter 40 percent of primary care practices from accepting you as a patient.5 Additionally, if medical professionals are hesitant to see patients who have legitimate opioid prescriptions, it stands to reason that patients who have prescriptions primarily known for addiction management will not fare much better. Studies suggest that those with prescription access cut off are twice as likely to turn to heroin.6 Some die by overdose or suicide.7 To be fair, the current regulations do exhibit some regard for privacy. If patients receive medication through Federal "Part II" programs, their consent is required to record the prescription in the PDMP.8 Unfortunately, many prescriptions are dispensed by private healthcare providers or sent to local pharmacies. When this is so, the consent requirement does not apply, making the privacy provision extensionally short-sighted. I can understand why the healthcare and law enforcement communities would want easy access to prescription data. A central mission of the PDMP is to curb the diversion of controlled substances to nonprescription users and to help doctors better coordinate patient care. By curbing the diversion of opioid drugs specifically, it is thought that the rate of fatality related to opioid substances will also decline. If we monitor other opioid drugs like oxycodone so closely, we could monitor medications that manage addiction, such as Suboxone. But the parallel between the two is not easily drawn. To be clear, addiction management medication like suboxone does not work on the opioid receptors to the same extent and in the same way that conventional opioids do.9 Those that take suboxone for addiction frequently do not report feeling recreational effects. The medication has a ceiling effect where the receptors the substance targets become too saturated to allow for further effect, making abuse less likely. Lastly, the medication tends to outcompete rival opioids from occupying those receptors of the brain. Users often report that taking suboxone will inhibit them from feeling the effects of illicit opioids. Characteristics like this make it harder to see why we should be as worried about the diversion of suboxone as diversion of other opioids like OxyContin. Even when suboxone is diverted, studies suggest that it is diverted to those with opioid addiction who wish to manage their withdrawals – exactly those whom we would want suboxone to be reaching – rather than those who are looking to abuse the medication.10 In areas without major barriers to suboxone prescription, opioid death and addiction rates have fallen at a dramatic rate. In France, where there are no special waivers or provisions required for doctors to dispense suboxone, opioid overdose deaths have fallen by 79 percent since 1995.11 CONCLUSION An informed consent requirement would allow those people trying to address their own drug misuse to maintain some privacy. As providing the data to practitioners has proven to disenfranchise some patients who have trouble finding care and could even expose them to law enforcement, it makes sense that some patients would not want to participate in PDMPs. The ability to opt out and the requirement of informed consent to opt in would give patients more control over their data. There are good reasons, then, to amend regulations at state and federal levels to exclude addiction related medication from the PDMP without explicit and informed consent from the patient. RAVANPAK, PRESCRIPTION DRUG MONITORING, VOICES IN BIOETHICS, VOL. 9 (2023) 3 1 PDMP TTAC. Accessed May 2, 2023. "PDMP Interstate Partners." PDMP Assist. https://www.pdmpassist.org/Policies/Maps/PDMPInterstatePartners. 2 CDC. 2020. "Overdose Deaths Accelerating During Covid-19." 3 ASAM. 2018. "Public Policy Statement on Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs (PDMPs)" 4 Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). 2020. "Confidentiality of Substance Use Disorder Patient Records." See also: PDMP TTAC. Accessed May 2, 2023. "PDMPs Authorized and Engaged in Sending Solicited and Unsolicited Reports to Law Enforcement Entities". PDMP Assist. https://www.pdmpassist.org/pdf/Law_Enforcement_Entity_Table.pdf 5 Lagisetty, et. al. 2019. "Access to Primary Care Clinics for Patients with Chronic Pain Receiving Opioids" 6 Binswanger, et. al. 2020. "The Association between Opioid Discontinuation and Heroin Use: A Nested Case-Control Study" 7 Oliva, et. al. 2020. "Associations between stopping prescriptions for opioids, length of opioid treatment, and overdose or suicide deaths in US veterans: observational evaluation." 8 Federal guidelines: 42 CFR Part II. 2021. "PART 2 CONFIDENTIALITY OF SUBSTANCE USE DISORDER PATIENT RECORDS" 9 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Administration Center for Substance Abuse Treatment. 2004. "TIP 40." 10 Fiscella, et al. 2018. "Buprenorphine Deregulation and Mainstreaming Treatment for Opioid Use Disorder." 11 Auriacombe, et al. 2004. "French field experience with buprenorphine."


Belief, rationality, and psychophysical laws

Philosophy

BELIEF, RATIONALITY, AND PSYCHOPHYSICAL LAWS Henry Jackman Davidson has argued that the connection between belief and the "constitutive ideal of rationality" precludes the possibility of their being any type-type identities between mental and physical events. However, there are radically dif ferent ways to understand both the nature and the content of this "constitutive ideal," and the plausibility of Davidson's argument depends on blurring the distinction between two of these ways. Indeed, it will be argued here that no consistent understanding the constitutive ideal will allow it to play the dialectical role Davidson intends for it. I. DAVIDSON'S ARGUMENT Davidson argues that there cannot be type-type identities betweenmental and physical events because: (a) if there were such identities, then there would be lawlike statements relating mental and physical events, and (b) there can be no such lawlike statements.1 According to Davidson, there can be no lawlike connections between the mental and the physical because of the "disparate commitments"2 of the two realms. Davidson's argument for this claim can be schematized very roughly as follows: 1. The application of mental predicates is constrained by the constitutive ideal of rationality. 2. The application of physical predicates is not constrained in this way. 3. Therefore, there can be no lawlike statements relating the two sorts of predicate. HENRY JACKMAN 48 According to Davidson, if we are to ascribe propositional attitudes such as beliefs and desires to people at all, we are committed to finding them to be rational. As Davidson puts it, "[n]othing a person could say or do would count as good enough grounds for the attribution of a straightforwardly and obviously contradictory belief."3 If someone were treated as having such manifestly contradictory beliefs, the fault would lie with the interpretation of the person's thoughts, not with the thoughts themselves.4 Since this "constitutive ideal of rationality" controls our interpretations, "we must stand prepared, as the evidence accumulates, to adjust our theory in the light of considerations of overall cogency,"5 and in doing so we "necessarily impose conditions of coherence, rationality, and consistency"6 on the beliefs ascribed. The constitutive ideal will thus affect which mental predicates we actually attribute. There is, however, no corresponding pressure upon our attribution of physical predicates. As a result, we cannot expect there to be any lawlike connections between the two types of predicates, even if the two happen to occur together. As Davidson puts it: As long as it is behavior and not something else we want to describe and explain, we must warp the evidence to fit this frame. Physical concepts have different constitutive elements. Standing ready, as we must, to adjust psychological terms to one set of standards and physical terms to another, we know that we cannot insist on a sharp and lawlike connection between them.7 It should be stressed again (since it will be important later on) that it is essential to Davidson's argument in these passages that we must actually adjust our attributions so that they live up to the constitutive standards. We can see how these conflicting pressures are meant to be felt in a case like the following. Imagine that one had a device (hereafter the "cerebroscope") that could provide one with characterizations of anyone's brain-states in as much detail as desired. One then extensively monitored the brain states and beliefs of various subjects in hopes of finding correlations between the two. Now imagine that one found that every time a particular brain state (hereafter "@") was detected by the cerebroscope, its subject believed that rhubarb was nourishing.8 In such a case, Davidson would argue that the correlation could never be lawlike, since such psychophysical generalizations must be treated as "irreducibly statistical in character."9 Any discovered correlation between mental and physical terms would be like that between, say, a physical term like "piece of wood shaped like a tower" and a chess term like "rook." Even if all and only the small wooden towers we encountered happened to be rooks, the connection between the two would not be lawlike. The discovery of a rook of a different shape, or a small wooden tower that wasn't a rook would BELIEF, RATIONALITY, AND PSYCHOPHYSICAL LAWS 49 always be possible. What is essential to being a rook has to do with the way it moves in a game of chess and has nothing to do with its physical makeup. Since the rules of chess make no references to factors such as shape or material, it would always be possible for the two correlated kinds to come apart. The connection between the shape and the role in the game is not a necessary one, and it is easy to imagine a world in which small wooden towers were used as knights and small wooden horses were used as rooks. In much the same way, Davidson insists that there will be no necessary connections between mental and physical predicates even if they do happen to be coextensive.10 A physical predicate can never have, as a matter of law, the same extension as a mental predicate. If the cerebroscope ever detected state @ when the belief that rhubarb was nourishing was one that the interpretee could not reasonably hold, then the constitutive ideal of rationality would require that the belief not be assigned. The constitutive ideal would block the belief assignment, but it wouldn't affect our attribution of brain state @, and so the two would come apart. II. ROBUST AND MINIMAL RATIONALITY However, Davidson's suggestion that we must act in this fashion in the face of such divergences between the cerebroscope readings and what is rational to believe stems from running together at least two conceptions of the "constitutive ideal of rationality." On the one hand, one could view the relevant notion of rationality as "robust" in the sense that it includes all of what we should, in fact, consider rational.11 It would involve insuring both that one drew all the consequences of one's beliefs and that one made sure that all those beliefs were consistent. In addition to consistency and closure, the robust ideal might also demand that one be rational in less "formal" ways such as only forming beliefs supported by one's evidence, revising beliefs in "reasonable" ways, and having appropriate desires. In short, the robust conception of the ideal demands that one treat every believer as "consistent, a believer of truths, and a lover of the good."12 Unfortunately, it is simply false that we must always adjust our interpretations so that our interlocutors turn out to satisfy such robust norms. People can be relied upon to lack both consistency and closure in their belief sets. Indeed, thoroughly living up to these ideals is probably beyond human computational capacity.13 As a result, if the cerebroscope indicated the presence of brain state @, one should not be prevented from assigning the belief that rhubarb is nourishing by the mere fact that such an assignment would conflict with the robust HENRY JACKMAN 50 ideal of rationality. The fact that the belief would be inconsistent with non-obvious consequences of the speaker's beliefs in other areas would provide little reason to give up the assignment. The robust conception of rationality's constitutive content is not one to which our actual beliefs seem to conform, and it is hardly surprising that those who presuppose robust conceptions of rationality are frequently criticized for trying to work with an ideal that our actual ascriptions clearly don't reflect.14 As a result, if the content of the ideal is understood robustly, the nature of the ideal cannot be of the sort that requires that we always bring things into line with it. There would not need to be a "tight fit" between the constitutive ideal and the objects in its domain. Davidson's argument, however, with its reliance on our making adjustments to bring our ascriptions up to the ideal, requires just the sort of tightness of fit that the robust account does not allow. Since robust rationality is rarely (if ever) completely attained, there have been many attempts to "humanize" the constitutive constraints on belief by claiming that they only require that we treat those we interpret as believing what a "typical" person would if she were in their situation. Such a drive is behind not only the frequent suggestions that we replace Davidson's "Principle of Charity" with something like Grandy's "Principle of Humanity," but also Goldman's claim that when we interpret others we don't use the Principle of Charity but rather engage in a type of "cognitive simulation" in which we ascribe beliefs to others based upon imagining ourselves in their position.15 Indeed, even these positions may ultimately be too demanding, since we can perfectly well interpret people who fail to make some of the inferences which we or any "typical" person would. As a result, it can seem reasonable to exclude from the constitutive ideal any standards that we know at least some people occasionally fail to satisfy. This results in a "minimal" conception of rationality which could be applied to all our interpretations, but it leaves rationality without much of its 'normative' character. The minimal conception of rationality requires only that our interlocutors turn out to have the minimal reasoning power shared by anything that one could recognize as having a (rational) mind; it would involve neither perfect consistency nor closure, but only those inferences that minds are, as a matter of fact, always disposed to make. Since this minimal conception is tailored to our actual thoughts, its hard to imagine how our thoughts could ever be out of line with it. Consequently, if the cerebroscope recommended belief ascriptions which violated such a minimal conception, we might very well have to reject the readings of the cerebroscope. However, the resulting notion of rationality is so minimal that it is far from clear that it could not be captured by a physical theory, in BELIEF, RATIONALITY, AND PSYCHOPHYSICAL LAWS 51 particular, by a functionalist one. Like Davidson, functionalists deny that there are identities between mental states and first-order physical states. Indeed, their reasons for doing so are much more intuitive than Davidson's somewhat opaque argument.16 However, functionalists still allow for type-type identities between mental states and second-order physical states. Furthermore, while rationality constraints may have no echo in physical theory, "counterfactual constraints which are isomorphic to [them] may show up in the physical facts."17 Consequently, functionalists may be able to accommodate the minimal rationality constraint at the level of second-order states relating to the brain's functional organization. It is not surprising, then, that while Brian Loar claims to have no quarrel with "what Davidson calls the constitutive force of rationality in the ascription of beliefs and desires," he insists that this does not stand in the way of a functionalist account of the mind.18 Loar claims that the norms of rationality can be captured functionally with the help of a series of fifteen logical constraints (which he refers to as his "Lconstraints") on the brain's functional organization. These L-constraints embody simple principles (e.g., believing not [p or q] entails not believing p and not believing q), which Loar believes could correspond structurally to counterfactual constraints on physical states. These L-constraints are meant to generate a vast network of counterfactual relations among physical states, and should ultimately describe "a system of physical state-types whose counterfactual relations mirror the relevant logical relations between beliefs and desires."19 Minimal rationality is so minimal that there is no reason to think that its entire content couldn't be captured by the L-constraints. As a result, Loar believes that one could assign to each belief predicate a distinct functional state, and still (with the help of the L-constraints) recognize the constitutive role of (minimal) rationality. It would be impossible for a cerebroscope designed to recognize such functional states to ever assign a belief that conflicted with minimal rationality. Since the L-constraints embody the content of minimal rationality, no such functional state could violate minimal rationality, and so the readings of a cerebroscope designed to recognize such states could not either. As a result, the constitutive force of minimal rationality would pose no problems for such a functionalist. The cerebroscope readings could still, of course, assign beliefs that failed to meet the more robust standards of rationality.20 However, the functionalist will insist that we should simply follow the cerebroscope in such situations. Since robust rationality represents a standard we often fail to live up to, a properly functioning cerebroscope should produce readings that conflict with it. Indeed, Loar considers it a virtue of his theory that the HENRY JACKMAN 52 L-constraints neither "imply that the set of a person's beliefs is deductively closed," nor "require that one is proficient at making inferences."21 Complete consistency and closure (which are characteristic of robust conceptions of rationality) are not found in actual minds, and so they shouldn't show up in functional models of the mind either. In short, while the robust conception of the constitutive ideal's content deprived it of its claim to a tightness of fit with the objects in its domain, the minimal conception preserves this tightness of fit only by stripping the ideal of the normative content that Davidson needs to rule out the possibility of a physical system being constrained by the ideal. III. DAVIDSON'S DILEMMA We have, then, two possible ways of understanding the content of the constitutive ideal. A robust way, which cannot be captured by a physical theory, but which we can understand ourselves as frequently violating, and a minimal way, which we can't understand ourselves as violating, but which can be captured by a physical theory. Davidson, however, often tries to have things both ways, preserving both the strong normative character of the robust conception of rationality, and the tightness of fit associated with more minimal versions of it. This may be why there is no consensus over just what Davidson has in mind when he speaks of the constitutive ideal. Writers such as Dennett, Haugeland, McDowell, and Cherniak all seem to think Davidson is working with a robust conception of rationality, while others such as Loar and Stich are equally confident that he has only minimal rationality in mind. Davidson's ambivalence is of some consequence for his argument, which we should remember goes roughly as follows. 1. The application of mental predicates is constrained by the constitutive ideal of rationality. 2. The application of physical predicates is not constrained in this way. 3. Therefore, there can be no lawlike statements relating the two sorts of predicate. Unfortunately, one can only hold both premises (1) and (2) by equivocating about the content of the constitutive ideal, understanding it minimally for premise (1) and robustly for premise (2). Since no conception of rationality preserves both robustness and tightness of fit, Davidson faces the following dilemma: either (a) the rationality constraints are understood robustly, in which case we are not always required to make adjustments to fit them, or (b) the rationality constraints are BELIEF, RATIONALITY, AND PSYCHOPHYSICAL LAWS 53 understood minimally, in which case they can be mirrored by functional relations isomorphic to those constraints. If one chooses horn (a) of the dilemma, premise (1) of Davidson's argument must be given up. If one chooses horn (b), premise (2) of Davidson's argument must be given up. Whichever horn one chooses, one of the two premises turns out to be false, and Davidson's argument fails to go through. Henry Jackman, Department of Philosophy, University of Toledo, Toledo, OH 43606-3390; email@example.com NOTES 1. See, especially, Davidson, "Mental Events" and "Psychology as Philosophy" (hereafter ME & PAP), both of which are found in his Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). I would like to thank Robert Brandom and John McDowell for comments on previous versions of this paper. 2. ME, 222. 3. Davidson, "Deception and Division," Action and Events, ed. Lepore and McLaughlin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), 138. 4. This requirement is a clear descendent of Quine's claim that "One's interlocutor's silliness, beyond a certain point, is less likely than bad translation" (Word and Object [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960], 59). 5. ME, 223, italics mine. 6. PAP, 231, italics mine. 7. PAP, 239, italics mine. 8. Of course, I have no reason to believe that we will find such corrections, but my pessimism on this subject is not inspired by the reasons Davidson suggests. 9. PAP, 240. This should not be confused with the claim that they are probabilistic. Probabilistic laws can project, while the 'statistical generalizations' need not. 10. "There may be true general statements relating the mental and the physical, statements that have the logical form of a law; but they are not lawlike" (ME, 216). 11. One sees such a reading of the rationality constraint in McDowell, "Functionalism and Anomalous Monism," Actions and Events, op. cit.; Haugeland, "Pattern and Being," Having Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998); idem, "Dasein's Disclosedness," Heidegger: A Critical Reader (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992); and Dennett, "Intentional Systems," Brainstorms (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1978). HENRY JACKMAN 54 12. ME, 222. 13. For a discussion of this issue, see Cherniak, Minimal Rationality (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986). 14. See, for instance, Stich's criticism of Dennett in "Dennett on Intentional Systems," and Cherniak's criticism of Davidson in Minimal Rationality, op. cit. 15. See Grandy, "Reference, Meaning and Belief," The Journal of Philosophy 71 (1973): 439–52, and Goldman "Interpretation Psychologized," Liaisons (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992). 16. These reasons often draw upon the intuitively plausible claim that mental states could be realized in a number of different ways. See, for instance: There is a quite independent reason for doubting that there are any psychophysical laws of at least one sort Davidson has in mind-namely, those that assert one-one correlations between specific propositional attitudes and structural (first-order) as opposed to functional (second-order) physical states. For it seems highly unlikely that one neural state is in all of us reserved for being, say, the belief that rhubarb is nourishing (Loar, Mind and Meaning [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981], 21). [I]f we can find one psychological predicate which can clearly be applied to both a mammal and an octopus (say "hungry"), but whose physicalchemical "correlate" is different in the two cases, the brain-state theory has collapsed. It seems to me overwhelmingly probable that we can do this. (Putnam, "The Nature of Mental States," Mind, Logic and Reality [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975], 436.) 17. Loar, Mind and Meaning, op. cit., 23. 18. Ibid., 20. 19. Ibid., 23. 20. Indeed, there is some reason to doubt that the robust conception of rationality could ever be adequately captured by even an extended version of Loar's L-constraints. For a discussion of this, see McDowell, "Functionalism and Anomalous Monism," op. cit. 21. Loar, Mind and Meaning, op. cit., 72.


That's enough about ethnography

Philosophy

Ethnography has become a term so overused, both in anthropology and in contingent disciplines, that it has lost much of its meaning. I argue that to attribute âethnographicnessâ to encounters with those among whom we carry on our research, or more generally to fieldwork, is to undermine both the ontological commitment and the educational purpose of anthropology as a discipline, and of its principal way of workingânamely participant observation. It is also to reproduce a pernicious distinction between those with whom we study and learn, respectively within and beyond the academy. Anthropologyâs obsession with ethnography, more than anything else, is curtailing its public voice. The way to regain it is through reasserting the value of anthropology as a forward-moving discipline dedicated to healing the rupture between imagination and real life.

| Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (1): 383–395 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Tim Ingold. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau4.1.021 FOrum That's enough about ethnography! Tim Ingold, University of Aberdeen Ethnography has become a term so overused, both in anthropology and in contingent disciplines, that it has lost much of its meaning. I argue that to attribute "ethnographicness" to encounters with those among whom we carry on our research, or more generally to fieldwork, is to undermine both the ontological commitment and the educational purpose of anthropology as a discipline, and of its principal way of working-namely participant observation. It is also to reproduce a pernicious distinction between those with whom we study and learn, respectively within and beyond the academy. Anthropology's obsession with ethnography, more than anything else, is curtailing its public voice. The way to regain it is through reasserting the value of anthropology as a forward-moving discipline dedicated to healing the rupture between imagination and real life. Keywords: correspondence, education, ethnography, fieldwork, method, participant observation, theory Explaining what we mean "Ethnographic" has become the most overused term in the discipline of anthropology. It is hard to say exactly when the term broke loose from its moorings, or what the reasons were for its subsequent proliferation. These reasons are undoubtedly complex and could be the subject for a separate historical study. my concern in this article, however, is prospective, not retrospective. For I believe that this overuse is doing great harm to anthropology, that it is holding it back while other fields of study are surging forward, and that it is actually preventing our discipline from having the kind of impact in the world that it deserves and that the world so desperately needs. And because the cause is desperate, I shall not refrain from polemic. The tenor of what follows is partisan, and deliberately so. I am sick and tired of equivocation, of scholarly obscurantism, and of the conceit that turns the project of anthropology into the study of its own ways of working. A discipline confined to the theatre of its own operations has nowhere to go. In 2014 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (1): 383–395 Tim Ingold 384 its spiraling descent into irrelevance, it has no-one and nothing to blame other than itself. my aim is not to eliminate ethnography, or to expunge it from our anthropological consciousness. Nor is it to underrate its significance, and the complex demands it places on those who practice it. rather, I am concerned to narrow ethnography down so that to those who ask us, in good faith, what it means, we can respond with precision and conviction. Only by doing so, I contend, can we protect it from the inflation that is otherwise threatening to devalue its currency to the extent of rendering the entire enterprise worthless. For it is not only within anthropology that ethnography is on the loose. I am sure I speak for the majority of anthropological colleagues in deploring the abuse of the term that has become commonplace in social sciences beyond our shores. How many research proposals have we read, coming from such fields as sociology, social policy, social psychology and education, in which the applicant explains that he or she will conduct "ethnographic interviews" with a sample of randomly selected informants, the data from which will then be processed by means of a recommended software package in order to yield "results"? Such a procedure, in which ethnographic appears to be a modish substitute for qualitative, offends every principle of proper, rigorous anthropological inquiry- including long-term and open-ended commitment, generous attentiveness, relational depth, and sensitivity to context-and we are right to protest against it. And, we are equally entitled to protest when those who assess our own proposals demand of us, in the name of ethnography, the same slavish adherence to the protocols of positivist methodology, by requiring us to specify-for example-how many people we intend to talk to, for how long, and how they will be selected. Against such benchmarks, anthropological research is bound to be devalued. Our protests, however, will be of no avail unless we can explain what we mean by ethnography in terms that are cogent and intellectually defensible. It is not enough to for us to say that anthropological research is ethnographic because that is what we anthropologists do. To wear ethnography as a badge of honor is unlikely to impress anyone beyond our own charmed circle. At a time when so many of us feel that our discipline is under threat, pushed to the margins where it no longer enjoys the public voice it once had, the growing inability to explain what we really mean by ethnography is an increasing source of embarrassment-all the more so when, as a defensive reaction, we continue to fall back on ethnography as the one thing that marks anthropology out, and justifies its existence as a discipline with something distinctive to contribute. To stake our fortunes in such shifting sands is a risky strategy indeed! What ethnography is Consider just some of the terms to which the qualifier "ethnographic" is routinely applied: there is the ethnographic encounter, ethnographic fieldwork, ethnographic method, ethnographic knowledge. There are ethnographic monographs, and ethnographic films. And now we have ethnographic theory! Through all these runs the ethnographer. Taking this as a primary dimension of identity, it would appear that everything the ethnographer turns his or her hand to is, prima facie, 2014 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (1): 383–395 385 That's enough about ethnography ethnographic. Suppose you reflect and write only on your own experience? Well, if you are an ethnographer, then that's autoethnography. Suppose that your job is to curate artefacts in a museum, collected from different parts of the world, then that's museum ethnography. Curiously, however, the term does not extend to what goes on within the confines of the academy. As students, we are not said to undertake ethnography when we train with more senior scholars. Nor to my knowledge do any of my anthropological colleagues, when they work with students, claim to be practicing ethnography in the classroom. In the settings of seminars, workshops and conferences, academic anthropologists talk a great deal about ethnography, but rarely if ever do they claim to be doing it. The ethnography, it seems, is always going on somewhere else. I shall return to these anomalies in due course. First, let me declare my hand by stating what ethnography means. Quite literally, it means writing about the people. Though we anthropologists would likely not turn to the dictionary for an authoritative definition, others well might, and this is what they would find: "a scientific description of races and peoples with their customs, habits and mutual differences."1 To us, of course, this sounds hopelessly anachronistic. We would move at once to remove all reference to race. We would insist that there is far more to description than the mere cataloging of habits and customs. In thickening our descriptions, and allowing a real historical agency to the people who figure in them, we might want to qualify the sense in which these accounts could be considered to be scientific. Ethnographic description, we might well say, is more an art than a science, but no less accurate or truthful for that. Like the Dutch painters of the seventeenth century, the European and American ethnographers of the twentieth could be said to have practiced an "art of describing" (Alpers 1983), albeit predominantly in words rather than in line and color. Theirs is still a standard against which we measure contemporary work. These issues have been debated ad nauseam. much of this debate has fallen under the rubric of the so-called "crisis of representation." Quite reasonably, controversial questions have been asked about who has the right to describe, on what grounds any description may be taken to be more truthful or authoritative than any other, to what extent the presence of the author can or should be acknowledged within the text, and how the whole process of writing it might be made more collaborative. I do not intend to prolong these controversies. my focus is rather on what is not ethnographic. While a written monograph, in so far as it aims to chronicle the life and times of a people, may justifiably be called ethnographic, and while the same may even be said of a film that shares the same objectives, I do not believe the term can be applied to our encounters with people, to the fieldwork in which these encounters take place, to the methods by which we prosecute it, or to the knowledge that grows therefrom. Indeed to characterize encounters, fieldwork, methods and knowledge as ethnographic is positively misleading. Autoethnography, when there are no people to describe but only the self, and museum ethnography, where there are only curated objects, are simply oxymoronic. As for ethnographic theory, my argument will be that this is to get anthropology precisely back to front. 1. Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 6th ed., s. v. "ethnography." 2014 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (1): 383–395 Tim Ingold 386 Encountering the world Let me begin with ethnographic encounters. Simply put: in the conduct of our research, we meet people. We talk with them, we ask them questions, we listen to their stories and we watch what they do. In so far as we are deemed competent and capable, we join in. There is nothing particularly special or unusual about this: it is, after all, what people do all the time when they encounter one another. What, then, could possibly distinguish an encounter that is ethnographic from one that is not? Here you are in what you imagine to be the field (of which more below). You tell people that you have come to learn from them. You are perhaps hoping that they will teach you some of their practical skills, or that they will explain what they think about things. You try very hard to remember what you have observed, or what people have told you, and lest you forget, you write it all down in fieldnotes as soon as the opportunity arises. Could it be the eagerness to learn, the strenuous memory-work, or perhaps the subsequent writing of notes, that lends an ethnographic inflection to your encounters with others? The answer is no. For what we could call "ethnographicness" is not intrinsic to the encounters themselves; it is rather a judgment that is cast upon them through a retrospective conversion of the learning, remembering and note-taking which they call forth into pretexts for something else altogether. This ulterior purpose, concealed from the people whom you covertly register as informants, is documentary. It is this that turns your experience, your memory and your notes into material- sometimes spun quasi-scientifically as "data"-upon which you subsequently hope to draw in the project of offering an account. The risks of double-crossing entailed in this ethnographizing of encounters, and the ethical dilemmas consequent upon them, are well known and much discussed. No one could accuse anthropologists of turning a blind eye to them. This is not where the fault lies. It lies rather in a temporal distortion that contrives to render the aftermath of our meetings with people as their anterior condition. Johannes Fabian (1983: 37), alluding to the same distortion, speaks of the "schizochronic tendencies of emerging anthropology." In effect, to cast encounters as ethnographic is to consign the incipient-the aboutto-happen in unfolding relationships-to the temporal past of the already over. It is as though, on meeting others face-to-face, one's back was already turned to them. This is to leave behind those who, in the moment of encounter, stand before. Twofaced indeed! Over a period of time, encounters with people are compounded and folded into what we have come to know as fieldwork. Thus the objections I have raised to the ethnographizing of the former apply to the latter as well. Ethnographicness is no more intrinsic to fieldwork than it is to the encounters of which it is comprised. The conflation of ethnography with fieldwork is indeed one of the most commonplace in the discipline, and all the more insidious because it is so rarely questioned. That the field is never experienced as such when you are actually there and caught up in the currents of everyday life-that it only stands out when you have left it far behind and begin to write about it-is widely acknowledged. What we have been less ready to accept is that the same goes for the ethnographic. Perhaps then, if we are to be really consistent, we should drop both the ethnographic and the field from ethnographic fieldwork, and refer instead to our tried and tested way of working, 2014 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (1): 383–395 387 That's enough about ethnography namely participant observation. Ethnography and participant observation, as Jenny Hockey and martin Forsey (2012) have pointed out, are absolutely not the same. Observing from the inside To observe means to watch what is going on around and about, and of course to listen and feel as well. To participate means to do so from within the current of activity in which you carry on a life alongside and together with the persons and things that capture your attention. As with the encounter, anthropological participant observation differs only in degree from what all people do all of the time, though children more than most. But children have all their lives to learn. For the adult anthropologist, arriving as a complete newcomer and with limited time at his or her disposal, the hurdles are considerably greater. Now as a way of working-or better perhaps, as a condensed expression of the way we all work-participant observation is a procedure that I wholeheartedly endorse. But, I am not so sure that we have the full measure of why it is so important and so essential to what we do. In this regard, I want to make two points about it. The first is about ontological commitment; the second-to which I move in the next section-is about education. It is sometimes supposed that participation and observation are in contradiction. How can one simultaneously watch what is going on and join in? Is this not tantamount to asking us to swim in the river and stand on the bank at the same time? "One can observe and participate," writes michael Jackson (1989: 51), "successively but not simultaneously." Observation and participation, he goes on, yield different kinds of data, respectively objective and subjective. So how can the engagement of participation possibly be combined with the detachment of observation? These questions, however, are founded upon a certain understanding of immanence and transcendence, deeply rooted in the protocols of normal science, according to which human existence is constitutionally split between being in the world and knowing about it. The alleged contradiction between participation and observation is no more than a corollary of this split. As human beings, it seems, we can aspire to truth about the world only by way of an emancipation that takes us from it and leaves us strangers to ourselves (Ingold 2013: 5). Anthropology, surely, cannot passively acquiesce to this excision of knowing from being. more than any other discipline in the human sciences, it has the means and the determination to show how knowledge grows from the crucible of lives lived with others. This knowledge, as we are well aware, consists not in propositions about the world but in the skills of perception and capacities of judgment that develop in the course of direct, practical, and sensuous engagements with our surroundings. This is to refute, once and for all, the commonplace fallacy that observation is a practice exclusively dedicated to the objectification of the beings and things that command our attention and their removal from the sphere of our sentient involvement with consociates. recall Jackson (1989: 51): observation, he says, yields "objective data." Nothing could be further from the truth. For to observe is not to objectify; it is to attend to persons and things, to learn from them, and to follow in precept and practice. Indeed there can be no observation without participation-that is, without an intimate coupling, in perception and action, of observer 2014 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (1): 383–395 Tim Ingold 388 and observed (Ingold 2000: 108). Thus, participant observation is absolutely not an undercover technique for gathering intelligence on people, on the pretext of learning from them. It is rather a fulfilment, in both letter and deed, of what we owe to the world for our development and formation. That is what I mean by ontological commitment. An education by attention But to practice participant observation is also to undergo an education. Indeed I believe there are good grounds for substituting the word "education" for "ethnography" as the most fundamental purpose of anthropology. I do not mean to give a boost to that minor and unjustly neglected subfield known as the anthropology of education. I want to insist, rather, on anthropology as a practice of education. That is to say, it is a practice dedicated to what Kenelm Burridge (1975: 10) has called metanoia: "an ongoing series of transformations each one of which alters the predicates of being." Though Burridge argues that metanoia is the goal of ethnography, to my mind it much more appropriately describes the goal of education. Jackson (2013: 28), who fully concurs with Burridge in the way he thinks about his own research, much of it carried out among Kuranko people in Sierra Leone, acknowledges that "Sierra Leone transformed me, shaping the person I now am and the anthropology I do." Exactly so: but that is why the anthropology he does is a practice of education and not of ethnography. "I have never thought of my research among the Kuranko as elucidating a unique lifeworld or foreign worldview," he admits. "rather, this was the laboratory in which I happened to explore the human condition" (ibid.). With his Kuranko mentors, Jackson studies the conditions and possibilities of being human. That, precisely, is to do anthropology. But by the same token, since he is not setting out to elucidate the Kuranko lifeworld, it is not ethnography. And yet, despite this, Jackson continues to portray himself as an ethnographer! Elsewhere, however, he comes close to defining his anthropological project in educational terms: it is, he says, about "opening up new possibilities for thinking about experience" (ibid.: 88)-a process which, following the philosopher richard rorty, he calls edification. For rorty, to edify is to keep the conversation going and, by the same token, to resist all claims to final, objective truth. It is to open a space, he writes, "for the sense of wonder which poets can sometimes cause-wonder that there is something new under the sun, something which is not an accurate representation of what was already there, something which (at least for the moment) cannot be explained and can barely be described" (rorty 1980: 370). Does this sense of wonder, which rorty attributes to the poet, not also lie at the root of anthropological sensibility? Like poetry, anthropology is a quest for education in the original sense of the term, far removed from the sense it has subsequently acquired through its assimilation to the institution of the school. Derived from the Latin educere (from ex, "out," plus ducere, "to lead"), education was a matter of leading novices out into the world rather than, as commonly understood today, of instilling knowledge in to their minds. Instead of placing us in a position or affording a perspective, education in this sense is about pulling us away from 2014 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (1): 383–395 389 That's enough about ethnography any standpoint-from any position or perspective we might adopt. In short, as the philosopher of education Jan masschelein (2010a: 278) has observed, it is a practice of exposure. Surely participant observation, if nothing else, is just such a practice. It is one that calls upon the novice anthropologist to attend: to attend to what others are doing or saying and to what is going on around and about; to follow along where others go and to do their bidding, whatever this might entail and wherever it might take you. This can be unnerving, and entail considerable existential risk. It is like pushing the boat out into an as yet unformed world-a world in which things are not ready made but always incipient, on the cusp of continual emergence. Commanded not by the given but by what is on the way to being given, one has to be prepared to wait (masschelein 2010b: 46). Indeed, waiting upon things is precisely what it means to attend to them. On intersubjectivity and correspondence As every anthropologist knows, there is a great deal of waiting in participant observation. Launched in the current of real time, participant observation couples the forward movement of one's own perception and action with the movements of others, much as melodic lines are coupled in musical counterpoint. For this coupling of movements that, as they proceed, continually answer to one another, I have adopted the term correspondence (Ingold 2013: 105–8). By this I do not mean the endeavor to come up with some exact match or simulacrum for what we find in the happenings going on around us. It has nothing to do with representation or description. It is rather about answering to these happenings with interventions, questions and responses of our own-or in other words, about living attentionally with others. Participant observation is a practice of correspondence in this sense. Yet cast within the schizochronic frame of ethnography, correspondence reappears in the quite different guise of "intersubjectivity." And intersubjectivity, following Edmund Husserl, is about living with others not attentionally but intentionally (Duranti 2010; Jackson 2013: 5). Of ethnographic intersubjectivity, we are bound to ask: is it given, as an existential condition, or is it achieved, as a communicative result? The question is unanswerable, since it is wrapped up in the very move by which the ethnographizing of encounters converts end results into initial conditions. With correspondence, however, the question does not arise. Correspondence is neither given nor achieved but always in the making. For one thing, it is not a relation between one subject (such as the anthropologist in person) and others, as the prefix interindicates, but one that carries on or unfolds along concurrent paths. And for another, in carrying on, persons and things are not already thrown, as the suffix –ject implies, but are in the throwing. They are not subjects at all, nor objects, nor are they hybrid subjectobjects. They are verbs. This is as true of humans as of beings of any other kind. Indeed, humans are not really beings at all but "becomings" (Ingold and Palsson 2013). Wherever you find them, humans are humaning. That is to say, they are corresponding-as letter writers do, scribing their thoughts and feelings and waiting for answers-living lives that weave around one another along ever-extending 2014 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (1): 383–395 Tim Ingold 390 ways. The "loose ends" that Johannes Fabian (in the themed section of this issue of Hau) finds in intersubjectivity are precisely the threads which are twined together in correspondence, and that allow life to keep going. In an interconnected world, where everyone and everything is already joined up and all lines lead from A to B, no life would be possible at all. To practice participant observation, then, is to join in correspondence with those with whom we learn or among whom we study, in a movement that goes forward rather than back in time. Herein lies the educational purpose, dynamic, and potential of anthropology. As such, it is the very opposite of ethnography, the descriptive or documentary aims of which impose their own finalities on these trajectories of learning, converting them into data-gathering exercises destined to yield "results," usually in the form of research papers or monographs. And this brings us to the question of methods. It is, of course, as common for the word ethnographic to be placed before method as before fieldwork. What is usually implied is some form of participant observation. I have already shown that the a posteriori ethnographizing of participant observation undermines both the ontological commitment that it enshrines and its educational purpose. Questions remain, however, around the notion of method. Granted that participant observation and ethnography are entirely different, that one is a practice of correspondence and the other a practice of description, can either be regarded as a method at all? A way of working That depends, of course, on what we mean by method. We could perhaps characterize participant observation as a way of working. This was probably what C. Wright mills (1959: 216) had in mind, in a celebrated essay on intellectual craftsmanship, when he insisted that there can be no distinction between the theory of a discipline and its method-that both were indissoluble aspects of the practice of a craft. If anthropology's method, in this sense, is that of the practitioner working with people and materials, then its discipline lies in the observational engagement and perceptual attunement that allow the practitioner to follow what is going on, and in turn to respond to it. But this is far from what is conventionally meant by method in the protocols of normal science, where to implement a method is to follow through a sequence of prespecified and regulated steps towards the realization of a determinate goal. For the steps of participant observation, like those of life itself, are contingent on the circumstances, and advance towards no end. They rather tread ways of carrying on and of being carried, of living life with others-humans and non-humans all-that is cognizant of the past, attuned to the conditions of the present and speculatively open to the possibilities of the future. What then of ethnography, sensu stricto? Is it a method? As a craft of writing about the people, ethnography doubtless has its methods, much as mills intimated. But that it is a method, applied in the service of some greater end, is questionable. I would argue strongly that it is not. Ethnography, surely, has value in its own right, not as a means to something else. We do not have to look beyond it for justification. What greater good is there, to which ethnography allegedly owes its existence? The traditionalist might answer that it is comparative anthropology. There was a 2014 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (1): 383–395 391 That's enough about ethnography time when we were told to treat ethnographic studies as compendia of empirical data, on the diverse societies and cultures of the world, which could then be used to test our theoretical generalizations (Sperber 1985: 10–11). Still today we persist in assembling studies culled from here and there between the covers of edited volumes, in the hopes that insights of a general sort might fall out. Not only, however, is ethnographic writing grossly devalued by its reduction to "data," but also the idea that universals are anything more than abstractions of our own has long been shown to be fallacious. Anthropology and ethnography are indeed distinct, as I have indicated, but this distinction cannot be aligned to one between the general and the particular, or between comparative-theoretical work in the study and empirical data collection in the field. Ethnography is not a prelude to anthropology, as fieldwork to writing up. If anything, it is the other way around. The ethnographer writes up; the anthropologist-a correspondent observer at large-does his or her thinking in the world (Ingold 2011: 241–3). A conversation of human life The fruits of this thinking are what we tend to call "knowledge." Sometimes we speak of anthropological knowledge, sometimes of ethnographic knowledge. An enormous amount of ink has been spilled on the question of what this knowledge amounts to. There is widespread agreement, nowadays, that knowledge is not built from facts that are simply there, waiting to be discovered and organized in terms of concepts and categories, but that it rather grows and is grown in the forge of our relations with others. I will not rehearse the arguments in support of this view, but will take them as read. Knowledge, as Bob White and Kiven Strohm explain in their preface to the themed section in this issue of Hau, is co-produced. This is the point, however, at which to return to my earlier observation that in the eyes of most colleagues who would call themselves, interchangeably, anthropologists and ethnographers, the practice of knowledge generation or co-production that they would call "ethnographic" appears to stop at the walls of the academy, and not to penetrate within. Inside the walls, they talk endlessly about ethnography, to each other and to their students, and of course they write it up, but they do not do it. Thus knowledge co-produced with informants is ethnographic, knowledge co-produced with students is not. Now I am not suggesting that we should become ethnographers of our students or of our academic colleagues. We are there to work with them, not to make studies of them. However, I would challenge those who insist on using the word ethnographic to describe the knowledge that grows from their collaborative engagements (or correspondence) with the people among whom they work, to explain why they would not consider it equally appropriate to describe knowledge that grows from their correspondence with colleagues and students. Is it not because, despite all protestations to the contrary, they remain complicit in reproducing a pernicious distinction between those from whom and with whom we learn, respectively inside and outside the academy? Surely when we seek an education from great scholars, it is not in order that we can spend the rest of our lives describing or representing their ideas, worldviews, or philosophies. It is rather to hone our perceptual, moral, 2014 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (1): 383–395 Tim Ingold 392 and intellectual faculties for the critical tasks that lie ahead. But if that is so, and if- as I have argued-to practice anthropology is to undergo an education, as much within as beyond the academy, then the same must be true of correspondences with our "non-academic" interlocutors. Knowledge is knowledge, wherever it is grown, and just as our purpose in acquiring it within the academy is (or should be) educational rather than ethnographic, so it should be beyond the academy as well. One example of the kind of distortion to which I allude comes from a recent editorial, in the journal Anthropology Today, by Catherine Besteman and Angelique Haugerud. Their call is for a public anthropology. Of course, as they acknowledge, there has never been a time when anthropology has not been public, "in the sense that our disciplinary forte is ethnography and we carefully probe the views of our research interlocutors" (Besteman and Haugerud 2013: 2). Now I would be the first to agree that the careful, even forensic probing of ideas is a primary desideratum of good scholarship. To do so in the name of ethnography, however, is precisely to neutralize the challenge that critical engagement with other ways of doing and knowing can present to public understanding. Why? Because in the ethnographizing of these ways, the priority shifts from engagement to reportage, from correspondence to description, from the co-imagining of possible futures to the characterization of what is already past. It is, as it were, to look through the wrong end of the telescope. Instead of calling on the vision afforded by our education to illuminate and enlarge upon the world, the ethnographer takes his or her sightings from the world in holding up the other's ways to scrutiny. Who would dare do such a thing to our mentors and peers within the academy? Beyond its walls, however, such treasonable activity is not just routine; we even flag it up as our disciplinary strong point! Anthropology back to front That anthropology has lost its public voice, or that it is scarcely audible, is certainly a cause for concern. Peddlers of other wares, often with ill-conceived, populist or fundamentalist agendas, are only too keen to fill the vacuum. Some are even prepared to fake anthropological credentials in their eagerness to feed popular prejudice. It is a symptom of anthropology's retreat that it has signally failed to keep such miscreants in check. In their manifesto for the renewal of ethnographic theory, Giovanni da Col and David Graeber (2011: ix) go so far as to lament that anthropology, in its current predicament, is "committing a kind of intellectual suicide." But is this, as they claim, for want of original insights? Is it the turn to philosophy-specifically of continental European provenance-and away from ethnography that has set the discipline on the path of self-destruction? I think not. For one thing, I do not share da Col and Graeber's pessimistic assessment of recent anthropology. There has been no shortage of original insights. Compared with most other disciplines, anthropology constantly astonishes with its originality. But if there is one thing that prevents anthropological insights from having the wider, transformative effects that we might hope for them, it is the constant resort to ethnography. "Ethnographically oriented particularism," as Stuart mcLean (2013: 66–7) has noted, "has become not only the default setting for much current anthropological research and writing, . . . but also the basis for many 2014 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (1): 383–395 393 That's enough about ethnography arguments concerning the discipline's continued relevance to the understanding of contemporary social processes." mcLean is skeptical of this "almost ubiquitously shared vision of anthropology," and so am I. For far from increasing its social relevance, it seems to me that the appeal to ethnography holds anthropology hostage to the popular stereotype of the ethnographer, which is not without foundation, as one who is bound to the retrospective chronicling of lives that are always on the brink of disappearing. So what is this strange hybrid of pragmatism and philosophizing that goes by the name of ethnographic theory? In some ways it goes back to where I began my anthropology, as "philosophy with the people in": an enterprise energized by the tension between speculative inquiry into what life could be like and a knowledge, rooted in practical experience, of what life is like for people of particular times and places (Ingold 1992: 696). I have already shown, however, that in its ethnographization, this experience is schizochronically put behind us, even as it is lived. As for theory, it becomes a domain in which ethnographers, having turned away from their respective field sites, trade in the "insights" they have brought back. Like connoisseurs of exotic art, they aspire to put their treasures on display, and to extract value from their comparison or juxtaposition. In the museum of ethnographic theory, such concept-objects as totem, mana and šaman, originating from three continents of the world, rub shoulders on the shelf, awaiting the attentions of the virtuoso scholar, who will magic them into some kind of "disjunctive homonimity" (da Col and Graeber 2011: viii). Indeed ethnography and theory resemble nothing so much as the two arcs of a hyperbola, which cast their beams in opposite directions, lighting up the surfaces, respectively, of mind and world. They are back to back, and darkness reigns between them. But what if each arc were to reverse its orientation, so as to embrace the other in an encompassing, brightly illuminated ellipse? We would then have neither ethnography nor theory, nor even a compound of both. What we would have is an undivided, interstitial field of anthropology. If ethnographic theory is the hyperbola, anthropology is the ellipse. For ethnography, when it turns, is no longer ethnography but the educational correspondences of real life. And theory, when it turns, is no longer theory, but an imagination nourished by its observational engagements with the world. The rupture between reality and imagination-the one annexed to fact, the other to theory-has been the source of much havoc in the history of consciousness. It needs to be repaired. It is surely the task of anthropology, before all else, to repair it. In calling a halt to the proliferation of ethnography, I am not asking for more theory. my plea is for a return to anthropology. References Alpers, Svetlana. 1983. The art of describing: Dutch art in the seventeenth century. London: Penguin. Besteman, Catherine, and Angelique Haugerud. 2013. "The desire for relevance." Anthropology Today 29 (6): 1–2. 2014 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (1): 383–395 Tim Ingold 394 Burridge, Kenelm. 1975. "Other people's religions are absurd." In Explorations in the anthropology of religion: Essays in honour of Jan Van Baal, edited by Walter E. A. van Beek and J. H. Scherer, 8–24. The Hague: martinus Nijhoff. da Col, Giovanni, and David Graeber. 2011. "Foreword: The return of ethnographic theory." Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 1 (1): vi–xxv. Duranti, Alessandro. 2010. "Husserl, intersubjectivity and anthropology." Anthropological Theory 10 (1): 1–20. Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the other: How anthropology makes its object. New York: Columbia university Press. Hockey, Jenny, and martin Forsey. 2012. "Ethnography is not participant observation: reflections on the interview as participatory qualitative research." In The interview: An ethnographic approach, edited by Jonathan Skinner, 69–87. New York: Berg. Ingold, Tim. 1992. "Editorial." Man, New Series 27 (4): 693–96. ---. 2000. The perception of the environment: Essays on livelihood, dwelling, and skill. London: routledge. ---. 2011. Being alive: Essays on movement, knowledge, and description. Abingdon: routledge. ---. 2013. Making: Anthropology, archaeology, art and, architecture. Abingdon: routledge. Ingold, Tim and Gisli Palsson, eds. 2013. Biosocial becomings: Integrating social and biological anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge university Press. Jackson, michael. 1989. Paths toward a clearing: Radical empiricism and ethnographic inquiry. Bloomington, IN: Indiana university Press. ---. 2013. Essays in existential anthropology. Chicago, IL: university of Chicago Press. masschelein, Jan. 2010a. "The idea of critical e-ducational research-e-ducating the gaze and inviting to go walking." In The possibility/impossibility of a new critical language of education, edited by Ilan Gur-Ze'ev, 275–91. rotterdam: Sense Publishers. ---. 2010b. "E-ducating the gaze: the idea of a poor pedagogy." Ethics and Education 5 (1): 43–53. mcLean, Stuart. 2013. "All the difference in the world: Liminality, montage, and the reinvention of comparative anthropology." In Transcultural montage, edited by Christian Suhr and rane Willerslev, 58–75. New York: Berghahn. mills, C. Wright. 1959. The sociological imagination. New York: Oxford university Press. rorty, richard. 1980. Philosophy and the mirror of nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton university Press. Sperber, Dan. 1985. On anthropological knowledge: Three essays. Cambridge: Cambridge university Press; Paris: maison des Sciences de l'Homme. 2014 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (1): 383–395 395 That's enough about ethnography Assez avec l'ethnographie! résumé : L' ethnographie est devenu un terme tellement galvaudé, en anthropologie et dans les disciplines liées, qu'il a perdu beaucoup de son sens. Je soutiens qu'attribuer une qualité « ethnographique » aux rencontres avec ceux parmi lesquels nous effectuons nos recherches, ou plus généralement au travail de terrain, porte atteinte à la fois à l'engagement ontologique et au but éducatif de l'anthropologie en tant que discipline, et à son principal outil de travail à savoir l'observation participante. Cet usage reproduit également une distinction pernicieuse entre ceux parmi lesquels nous étudions et apprenons, respectivement à l'intérieur et au-delà du cercle académique. L'obsession anthropologique pour l'ethnographie, plus que toute autre chose, étouffe sa voix publique. une façon de la retrouver consisterait en la revalorisation de l'anthropologie comme une discipline allant de l'avant et dédiée à panser la rupture entre l'imagination et la vie réelle. Tim Ingold is currently Chair of Social Anthropology at the university of Aberdeen. He has carried out ethnographic fieldwork among Saami and Finnish people in Lapland, and has written on comparative questions of environment, technology and social organisation in the circumpolar North, on the role of animals in human society, and on human ecology and evolutionary theory in anthropology, biology and history. more recently, he has explored the links between environmental perception and skilled practice. Ingold is currently writing and teaching on issues on the interface between anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. His latest book, Making, was published in 2013. Tim Ingold Department of Anthropology School of Social Science University of Aberdeen Aberdeen AB24 3QY Scotland, UK email@example.com