The end of informality? A few thoughts on Malinowski’s legacy and craftsmanship
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3522
L’articolo esamina la funzione attuale del metodo dell’osservazione partecipante di cui Bronisław Malinowski è stato promotore, e pone la domanda della misura in cui tale metodo di ricerca sia valido in un’epoca in cui le persone, le merci, il denaro, e le conoscenze si muovono con una velocità e frequenza che erano inimmaginabili fino a tempi molto recenti. Partendo dalle riflessioni dell’autore sulla sua ricerca sul campo in area alpina e sulla sua esperienza in qualità di docente universitario, l’articolo discute alcuni cambiamenti che il lavoro sul campo ha subito negli ultimi anni alla luce dell’irruenza della cultura della valutazione in ambito universitario e del crescente individualismo nella società. L’articolo trae una conclusione: lo stile di ricerca sostenuto da Malinowski rimane importante non soltanto in funzione di una possibile “scoperta”, ma soprattutto in quanto pratica che favorisce incontri tra diverse realtà sociali e partecipazione nella sfera pubblica e nella vita politica.
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Jaro Stacul
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The end of informality? A few thoughts on Malinowski’s legacy and craftsmanship
Text.Serial.Journal
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Thematic section: The Malinowskian legacy in ethnography
2018-12-31
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2018-12-31
2018-12-31
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Jaro Stacul
2018/12/31
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3522
95
Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada
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The end of informality? A few thoughts on Malinowski’s legacy and craftsmanship
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                                          2018 | ANUAC. VOL. 7, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2018: 95-117




The end of informality?
A few thoughts on Malinowski’s legacy and craftsmanship
Jaro STACUL
University of Victoria




ABSTRACT: This article explores the role of the deep, long-term fieldwork,
pioneered by Bronisław Malinowski, and raises the issue of how far his
fieldwork style remains a valuable tool at a time when people, goods, money,
and knowledge travel with a speed and frequency that were unthinkable
until very recently. Drawing upon reflections on the author’s own fieldwork
in the Italian Alps, as well as on his experience as a university lecturer, it
analyzes some of the changes that ethnographic fieldwork has undergone in
the last few years in order to assess its value in the face of the pervasiveness
of audit culture in the academia and of the emergence of an increasingly
individualized society. The article pursues the argument that Malinowski’s
research methods remain valuable not just as a heuristic device, but
particularly as a practice promoting encounters with difference in the public
sphere, and fostering participatory models of civic and political life.

KEYWORDS: ALPS, GRAFTSMANSHIP, ETHICS, FIELDWORK, MALINOWSKI, PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION.




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Jaro Stacul
The end of informality? A few thoughts on Malinowski’s legacy and craftsmanship
2018 | ANUAC. VOL. 7, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2018: 95-117.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3522
96                                                                             JARO STACUL



   Discussing Malinowski’s contribution to ethnographic practice is a
challenging task for at least two reasons: first, a lot has been written about
it; second, the discipline has undergone many changes since Malinowski’s
time1. I can relate to Malinowski’s legacy in several ways: I pursued my
doctoral studies in Britain, and conducted fieldwork in the 1990s in an
Alpine valley in the Italian region of Trentino, not very far from the place
where Malinowski himself used to spend summer holidays. I subsequently
undertook a new project in Poland, namely, Malinowski’s birthplace.
Although I became familiar with his research as an undergraduate student,
the person who played a major role in stimulating my interest in his work
was my supervisor, whose informal supervisor had been Malinowski’s
student. To a certain extent I feel part of a tradition that had been handed
down from one generation of anthropologists onto another.
   What kind of tradition? One of Malinowski’s major contribution to the
practice of ethnographic fieldwork has been his emphasis upon the
observation of how people perform a “custom”, on how different customs
were functionally dependent on one another, and ultimately on the necessity
to immerse oneself in a culture in order to grasp the «native’s point of view»
(Malinowski 1922: 6, 1929: xxxi). Ironically, neither Malinowski’s advocacy
of the study of the interconnections between different customs nor his
particular brand of psychological functionalism achieved much appeal
among his students (Kuper 2015: 53-55). Yet there is little doubt that his
legacy played a central role in ethnographic fieldwork training until very
recently: as a doctoral student, I was told by the person convening the pre-
fieldwork seminar to take note of everything while in the field, even of
things we might consider unimportant. This suggestion echoed Malinowski’s
advocacy of keeping a field diary to write down all experiences: according to
him, taking accurate notes helps the researcher understand the regularities
of a process, and prevents him or her from having «flights of imagination»
(Malinowski 1922: 8-9, 1929: xxiv-xxv).
   Following in Malinowski’s footsteps was assumed to entail some degree of
“suffering”, in the sense that most researchers were expected to travel to
faraway, “exotic” settings, learn the vernacular, endure the harshness of the
climate, obtain a research visa, etc. Researchers conducting deep, long-term
1. This article is a revised version of a paper delivered at the Symposium The Malinowskian
Legacy in Ethnography (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, 21-22 September 2017). My
thanks are due to Patrick Heady, Cris Shore, Marilyn Strathern, Elisabeth Tauber, and
Dorothy Zinn whose valuable insights and constructive criticism helped me improve the
quality of this article and strengthen its argument.


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THE END OF INFORMALITY?                                                          97


fieldwork had to learn to be “participant observers” and gain an under-
standing of a specific issue from an intimate relationship with a group of
people in the face of several challenges. In Malinowski’s words (1922: 6),
they were expected to «evoke the real spirit of the natives».
   One of the characteristics of Malinowski’s fieldwork techniques was his
reliance upon people with whom he interacted on a regular basis, and he
used to quote their statements at length (Malinowski 1922: 17-18). Engaging
in informal relationships with different people has been an integral part of
ethnographic fieldwork since Malinowski’s time. Yet a clarification is in
order: “informality” is often defined as «ways of getting things done»,
namely, informal practices escaping articulation in official discourse
(Ledeneva 2018: vii). In this paper, the same term refers to sets of relation-
ships between people not mediated by money or a contract (like, for
example, the informed consent forms that have become part of social
research practices in several countries). With Anthropology’s growing
interest in issues that decades ago were not even considered anthropo-
logical, participant observation as a data collection method declined in
significance. While, for example, conducting fieldwork in the headquarters
of the European Union or the study of organizations more generally may
require some of the techniques of which Malinowski had availed himself
(Wright 1994, Shore 2000), the same techniques may be more difficult to
apply to the study of fields such as policy. The growth of anthropological
studies of the virtual space of the Internet has complicated things further.
Moreover, whereas “classic” ethnographic research largely involved focusing
on groups of people with a connection with a place, with a locality,
movements of peoples and the widespread use of electronic communication
have had dramatic consequences on anthropological research, in the sense
that scholars may have to deal with informants who are physically in one
place and mentally (and virtually) in another. One question that such
developments raise is how far the fieldwork style pioneered by Malinowski
remains a valuable tool at a time when people, goods, money, and
knowledge travel with a speed and frequency that were unthinkable until a
few years ago, and the spread of electronic communication has challenged
commonly-held ideas about the connections between people and places; the
other question that these changes open up is how far the fieldwork
techniques of which generations of anthropologists have availed themselves
can be communicated nowadays to graduate and undergraduate students.
   In an attempt to partially answer these questions, I would like to rely
upon my own experience as a researcher and a teacher. Ever since I started
my doctoral studies at the University of Cambridge, I have been interested in

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issues of nationalism and the state in Europe. In the mid-1990s I undertook
a project on localism and local identity in an Alpine valley in eastern
Trentino, which is part of the larger region which Malinowski himself used to
visit with his students while on vacation. It was meant to analyze the impact,
at the local level, of regionalist and autonomist political forces (the Northern
League, for example) which were making big inroads in northern Italy. I will
not go into all the details of that research project. Suffice it to say, for now,
that I did not intend to focus on a specific political ideology or message.
Rather, my goal was to understand how certain political messages were
accommodated to local-level discourses and filtered through the lens of
“local culture”, and the form of participant observation advocated by
Malinowski seemed appropriate to this end.
   I ended up interacting informally with a wide range of people that
included not just professionals or municipal councilors, but also agricultural
workers, lumberjacks, hunters, retired men and women, office workers, and
so forth. I discussed a broad range of topics with people of different social
classes and cultural backgrounds, even though localism and local politics
remained my main foci. More importantly, I endeavored to take note of
everything: who said what, what meanings are attached to hunting, what my
co-conversationalists remember about the past, how the same people relate
to one another and to outsiders, my landlady’s endless discussions about her
cats’ behavioral idiosyncrasies, stories about strangers trespassing across
property boundaries, etc. In sum, most of my sources were embodied in the
behavior and in the memory of living people (Malinowski 1922: 3).
Obviously, the data I collected was already culturally mediated by the people
I met (Rabinow 1977: 150), yet building a relationship of trust with these
people enabled me to collect information (and the interpretation of this
information) which I would not have been able to gather if I had confined
myself to an analysis of political ideologies or official discourses only.
   I did not look at the ways different customs were functionally dependent
on one another. However, I attempted to understand how society
“functions” in small communities, and the fieldwork style introduced by
Malinowski enabled me to «read between the lines», namely, assess the ways
practices and ideas that apparently have very little or nothing to do with
political and economic processes form the background against which such
processes are debated and understood by a wide range of people (Malinowski
1922: 10). Hunting is a case in point: in local discourse hunting is significant
because, unlike agriculture, it involves movement through an open space,
and is connected with humans’ relations with the environment and its social


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THE END OF INFORMALITY?                                                               99


appropriation. Hunting land is described as individual property, that is to
say, a “bounded field” to which only locals should have access. Hunting is
also talked about as a means to control and protect land from outsiders, and
mapping the hunting land is considered part of the process whereby locality
is materially and symbolically produced. In local discourse this is epitomized
by the idea that a hunter is like a cultivator who knows his territory well, and
knows when the time is ripe to shoot game.
   The hunters with whom I talked use the image of “harvest” to describe
their practices, thereby implying that wildlife needs to be cultivated like
fields, and that hunting “protects” nature by preventing wilderness from
advancing. Central to this view is the idea that those who own and control
the land also keep it clean and tidy, whereas those who do not possess it (e.g.
outsiders) cannot be interested in keeping it clean, simply because it is not
theirs. Hunters’ conceptualizations of hunting land as individual or “private
property”, for example, helped them make sense of ideas of local and
regional identity emanating from regional and other centers of political and
economic power, and I became aware of these connections during informal
conversations. Some of these ideas may have been passed from one
generation onto another, yet they enabled locals to reconcile some of the
values of a peasant (or post-peasant) society with those of economic
liberalism, most notably hard work ethic, self-reliance, and opposition to the
structural constraints of the state.
   While this approach helped me understand local identity in the late
1990s, it was put to the test a few years later when my research focus
switched from locality to the state (Stacul 2016). This shift entailed
rethinking not just my theoretical approach, but also my fieldwork methods:
several anthropologists who studied the state in the early 2000s did not avail
themselves of Malinowski’s (or Evans-Pritchard’s) fieldwork techniques, but
were primarily drawing upon Foucault’s theory. Part of the problem was that
because the state cannot be an “empirical given”, until quite recently it was
largely dismissed as a subject for anthropological study (Abrams 1988,
Trouillot 2001). The other problem was the growing popularity, in the social
sciences, of issues such as globalization and neoliberalism 2. This popularity
involved increasing interest, especially in Anthropology, in power relations
as well as in uneven development of regions. While this theoretical approach

2. By “neoliberalism” I mean a type of economic policy that involves the enclosure of the
commons, privatization, and the construction of a framework of open commodity and
capital markets (Harvey 2003: 184-190). However, it can also represent a “culture”
expressed by inclination towards transparency, competition, responsibility, and self-
improvement.

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does not preclude forms of fieldwork based on participant observation, it
may result in more attention being paid to supra-local processes as opposed
to day-to-day social interaction. In this context, formal interviews with
bureaucrats (as opposed to informal conversations) are deemed more useful
than participant observation itself, and the anthropological study of the
state is often understood as the analysis of “state effects”, namely,
discourses of politicians, official documents, and so forth. However, there
seems to be no automatic contradiction between the anthropological study
of the state and some forms of participant observation à la Malinowski,
especially when research involves observation of social actors who embody
the power of the state, and in what follows I will try to highlight the
connections between them.

Participant observation and the anthropology of the state
   In 2002, James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta published the article
Spatializing States, which influenced quite a few anthropological studies of
the state. The authors drew upon Foucault’s theory to pursue the argument
that states are made socially effective through images and symbolic devices:
in representing themselves «as reified entities with particular spatial
properties», states become understood as realities encompassing other
institutions (Ferguson, Gupta 2002: 982). In this sense, the “spatialization of
the state” refers to the sets of techniques whereby states naturalize their
authority. My interest was not in the spatialization of the state per se, but
rather in the ways the Italian state became understood as an entity with
spatial properties between the late 1990s and 2011, when media tycoon
Silvio Berlusconi was Prime Minister. Thus, I examined the ways his
constructions of the Italian state were reproduced by different politicians at
different levels of the body politic.
   Even nowadays, underlying Berlusconi’s discursive constructions of the
state is a contradiction: when he wants to present himself as the leader close
to the people, he promises major works, and represents the state as an entity
protecting its citizens; by contrast, when investigating magistrates
prosecute him, or when state laws hinder the expansion of his economic
empire, he avails himself of the language of business, and casts the Italian
state as a “distant” reality and as a bureaucratic and obsolete entity that
needs to be modernized and rationalized, and many people I met in the Alps
of Trentino declared themselves to be in agreement with Berlusconi’s ideas.
   While the state’s legitimacy may depend on its spatialization through
discursive constructions from the centers of economic and political power,
individual social actors, too, can play a significant role in the localized social


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THE END OF INFORMALITY?                                                           101


processes through which the state is legitimated (or contested). What makes
people’s encounters with the state problematic is the fact that they are often
mediated by local officials who embody the power of the state through
discursive constructions, narratives, performances and public re-
presentations of statehood. Central to my analysis was an attempt to find
out how local officials, as “mediators” between the state and localities,
“represent” the state at the local level and affect people’s understandings of
such representations. This analysis, then, involved the examination of
bureaucrats’ engagement in active processes of negotiation, and particularly
in a dialogue with different social actors.
    In Italy, these bureaucrats play the roles of “administrators” and
“mediators” between different administrative levels of state structure. I use
the same term “mediation” to describe practices through which power
brokers or people familiar with the realm of bureaucracy mediate and
“translate” between two different universes, that of officialdom and that of
the local community: in this sense, the ability to “translate” between such
universes can play a crucial role in creating the essential link between
localities and distant sources of authority. The Trentino province represents
an intriguing social and political context for the study of this issue, because
it is part of the larger autonomous region of Trentino-South Tyrol, and the
state and its institutions do not have the same significance that they have in
other Italian regions. Moreover, most of the Trentine people do not live in
cities, but in villages, and it is the municipal and the regional council, rather
than the central state, which loom largest in their lives.
    The ethnographic information I analyzed was about the practices of an
estate agent who had been mayor of a municipality in eastern Trentino
almost continuously from the early 1990s until his untimely death in 2009.
Because of the significance of such “mediating” practices in the context of a
rapidly-changing political situation, the mayor gained considerable political
and economic power not just in the municipality, but also in eastern
Trentino. He held multiple positions in political and economic organizations
in the area which gave him links to almost every political and economic
agency within the provincial territory. He had access to a huge range of
information about the people residing in the municipality, and used to
present himself as a person at an interface between the state and the local
community who is able to “mediate” between the local community itself and
the outside world. Furthermore, by describing himself as someone who «can
get things done» in the provincial capital of Trento, he could present himself
as someone organically part of the community who can be trusted. I knew
him personally, and had a few informal conversations with him.


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102                                                                 JARO STACUL


   In the municipal territory, where relations of kinship, neighborhood, and
friendship represent important resources when dealings with the realm of
officialdom become necessary, practices of mediation take two forms: one is
that of power brokerage; the other is expressed by the capacity to “translate”
between the universes of officialdom and of the local community. When a
person needs to apply for a document (e.g. a national identity card or driver
license) to municipal or national offices, for example, one usually asks a
neighbor, friend, or relative about the procedure, and avoids getting in touch
with the offices issuing the documents needed. There are at least two
reasons for keeping dealings with bureaucracy to a minimum: firstly, it is
deemed preferable to ask for help from a trusted person who already knows
enough about the ways of bureaucracy; secondly, contacting public offices is
usually deemed a waste of time, since it is assumed that the information
they give is incorrect or difficult to understand.
   The mayor in question engaged in both types of “mediating” practices,
and played a crucial role in affecting locals' understandings of political
transformations and their encounters with state institutions and economic
agencies outside the public sector. He wrote various articles in the local
magazine and delivered several public speeches to make residents aware of
the privatization initiatives occurring throughout the country and of what
these involved in the context of the reorganization of the national economy.
These articles and speeches served to explain to residents that the area could
no longer rely exclusively upon state and regional subsidies.
   While he tried to put across the message that getting a job is no longer an
entitlement, he also resorted to Berlusconi’s language of business when he
stressed the fact that this is conditional on entrepreneurship and on
possessing specific skills. During his first two terms as mayor, from 1990
until 2000, he had to mediate between a central state in the process of being
strengthened administratively and economically, and a local community that
perceived state reorganization as resulting in the state’s becoming more
intrusive in local affairs. Although the majority of the people living in the
valley voted for him in the elections to the local council in the 1990s, he was
not well regarded. Moreover, many of my co-conversationalists shared the
view that, like Berlusconi, he could not separate clearly private and political
interests either. However, most of them did not think that this was a big
problem: as a man of the area said, «Although [the mayor] pursues his own
interests, he does not stir up trouble».
   The rhetoric he deployed in his speeches, both as a mayor and as a
candidate for election to the municipality, contributed to gaining him the
support of both manual workers (including the retired) and professionals


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THE END OF INFORMALITY?                                                          103


who had become disillusioned with national politics. During the 1995
mayoralty campaign, which resulted in his re-election, he presented himself
as the person who takes care of the interests of the local community. He
committed himself to address a problem that was at the forefront of locals’
concerns, that of alienation of landed property to outsiders who do not have
any kinship ties in the area. In a social context within which the
identification of farmers with their landholdings remains very strong, the
transfer of property rights to strangers was perceived as resulting in the loss
of community identity. Thus, in one of his electoral speeches, the mayor
stated that this needed to be curbed. Most of the people who listened to such
speeches were aware of the fact that preventing landholdings from being
sold to outsiders was against the mayor’s interests as an estate agent. Yet
the rhetoric he deployed was very effective at a time when the rise of
regionalist parties made local identity a central issue. Implicit in his message
was the idea that the community and its territory are “property” of those
who were born and have kinship ties in the valley. Moreover, in making
space a powerful symbol, the mayor defined the community in spatial terms,
and drew a sharp distinction between those who belong to the community
and those who do not.
   In late 1998, news spread that the municipal council was contemplating
the possibility of building a dam at the lower end of the municipal territory
and of subsequently creating an artificial lake for the production of electric
energy. While the construction of the dam was designed to foster the growth
of the local economy, the project aroused deep concern among the people
inhabiting the area involved, and some of them roundly criticized the mayor.
The mayor, in response, referred to the construction of the dam as just the
initial phase of the “intensive therapy” that the local economy needed. Such
advocacy served to mediate the locals’ encounter with the Italian state at a
time of significant economic transformations: as the mayor said in various
occasions, the valley could no longer rely upon state and regional subsidies
as it had done in the past.
   The mayor’s role as a representative of the state became prominent
during several state-sponsored commemorative ceremonies held in the area.
The territory of the municipality he administered had been the theater of
fights between the Italian and Austro-Hungarian armies during World War I,
and 1996 marked the eightieth anniversary of the arrival of the Italian troops
in the valley. At a time when the institutions of the Italian state were losing
credibility, the reassertion of the primacy of national identity was high on
the agenda of the state itself, and such ceremonies were meant as
opportunities to reaffirm the state’s image as an entity above localities,

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regions, and communities. During the commemorative ceremonies held in
the area (which I attended), the mayor gave speeches with patriotic
overtones, celebrating the idea of national unity and identity, most of which
were meant to reaffirm the continuing relationship between the area and the
Italian nation-state in spite of claims to northern Italian identity by different
regionalist parties. The mayor highlighted this relationship by representing
high moral values which placed him above internal conflicts within Italian
society, and served to naturalize and reaffirm the state's authority over the
“local”.
   The mayor’s reputation as a loyal and law-abiding representative of the
Italian state was questioned when the official of the military police stationed
in the area, a man from the South of the country, sued him. According to the
official, the mayor had abused his power by issuing permits to renovate two
restaurants and a hotel in the village where he used to live, and had
circumvented the bureaucratic procedure that the issue of such permits
requires. In the face of these charges, the mayor wrote an article in the local
magazine to explain that because of the action taken by the official of the
military police, the administration of the municipality has become more
bureaucratic, and the administrators and inhabitants of the valley can no
longer trust one another. Because of these charges, the mayor was brought
to trial three times, but was acquitted. Soon after his acquittal, the mayor
and the municipal council sued the official of the military police. The
decision was made, as the mayor stated, in order to put an end to the
growing «psychological pressure» the official had placed upon the
administrators of the municipality. The news stirred localist feelings against
the official, and most of the inhabitants of the area I conversed with
remained sympathetic with the mayor. One comment I heard, in the valley,
was that the administration of the municipal council is not the business of
an official of the military police from southern Italy, in that he is not familiar
with local customs, and therefore he should not have interfered.
   The reference to the official’s place of origin had a specific meaning as
well as a political dimension: one of the key points of the regionalist parties’
propaganda (particularly the Northern League’s) in the 1990s was the idea
that because of a putative lazy and inefficient South, the Italian economy
could not grow. In this sense, the official of the military police was believed
to embody the inefficiency that is often ascribed to the Italian South on the
one hand, and to the state on the other. He was perceived as representing
the bureaucracy of the state that prevents the administrators of the
municipal council from working efficiently.


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   Yet central to the mayor’s rhetoric was not just the idea of efficiency, but
also that of trust. According to him, following national laws to the letter
makes the administration of the municipal council more bureaucratic, and
more bureaucracy results in diminishing trust between administrators and
residents of the area. In pointing to the detrimental effects that following
national laws to the letter may have, the mayor implicitly constructed
locality as a social context in which its inhabitants know and trust one
another, and where negotiation is part of the order of things. In this sense,
laws imposed from the outside were described as threatening the unity of the
local community, and generalized trust was seen as conducive to efficiency.
   Soon after he had been acquitted, the mayor got into new legal troubles,
and had to pay a fine of roughly 250 Euros because of his failure to inform
the higher authorities in the provincial capital of the issue of a permit to
renovate a hotel in the valley. The issue of the permit was looked askance by
the military police not just because the higher authorities had not been
informed, but because it turned out that the applicant was closely related to
the mayor. In a municipal council meeting the mayor admitted that some
mistakes had been made when the permit had been issued. Yet he stressed
that such mistakes were due to the fact that understanding national laws
requires familiarity with an arcane and specialist language. In stating this,
he made the audience understand that the Italian state imposes laws that
prevent locals and business from working efficiently, and deploys a
bureaucratic language that few or nobody can understand.
   In sum, the mayor implicitly reiterated a point Berlusconi made several
times in his discourses, namely, that national laws were at best irrelevant
and at worst a threat to the proper running of public administration. His
discursive constructions, then, highlight a perceived opposition between
relationships of exchange governed primarily by morality and the supposed
“indifference” of state bureaucracy. But here lies the paradox: while in
commemorative ceremonies the mayor constructed the state as an entity
above society and encompassing its localities in spatial as well as in symbolic
terms, after he had been sued it was encompassment that became the object
of contestation.
   Contestation involved denying the significance of law as a sign of the
sovereignty of the Italian state. While the enforcement of law represents one
of the techniques whereby locality is made «legible», in James Scott’s terms
(1998), it was national laws that were pointed to as evidence of the state’s
“distance” and “illegibility”. These images were very powerful, for they
enabled the mayor to appeal to people who lost interest in national politics
and were not inclined to tolerate abstract ideologies or obscure languages.

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106                                                                         JARO STACUL


The state, then, was mobilized to convey different, even contradictory
messages. The mayor contested encompassment by constructing the Italian
state as an entity outside the area in terms of knowledge, because its
officials are not familiar with local customs; and, more importantly, in terms
of language, for very few or nobody in the area can understand the state’s
arcane idiom. In this sense, because of its putative “illegibility”, the state
was not represented as “above” locality, but “outside” it.
   If the ethnographic challenge facing us is to understand the spatiality of
different forms of government, as Ferguson and Gupta suggested in their
article (2002), the information I collected has suggested instead that in order
to better understand state spatialization, researchers should also be mindful
of individual political actors who stand at an interface between the state and
local communities. While I acknowledge that state/civil society dualisms
should be avoided, I suggest that examining the spatiality of government
also means understanding the local actors and localized social processes
through which spatialization takes shape, and participation in the daily lives
of people is an integral part of this task. It also entails understanding “local
idioms” and meanings, and ultimately engaging in a dialogue with a wide
range of people who may have different views about the state, its instit-
utions, and its representatives. Local-level ideas about private property,
work and bureaucracy, for example, formed the background against which
the mayor’s discourses (and his constructions of the Italian state) were
debated and understood. I am not inferring that an Anthropology of state
effects à la Malinowski always works to capture the nuanced ways in which
the power of the state itself operates. Rather, I am suggesting that it helps
understand processes (including mental processes) through which messages
and symbols emanating from national, regional, and other centers are
accommodated to local-level discourses3. These processes may be more
complex than indicated by an approach taking everyday practices of state
institutions as its main object of enquiry.
   Does the complexity of the above processes mean that the fieldwork style
pioneered by Malinowski remains a valuable heuristic device despite
transformations in the discipline? One problem we encounter, in attempting
to answer this question, is that much depends on what the ethnographer
wishes to find out in pursuing research. An additional problem is what

3. I am not claiming that my approach to ethnographic fieldwork is unique. The idea that
anthropologists should pay attention to the ways in which nationalist ideologies are
accommodated to local-level discourses figures centrally in the work of Heady (1999),
Herzfeld (1997), and Sutton (1997), to name a few.


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represents anthropological research nowadays, and I suspect that there is no
agreement among scholars. Much of my fieldwork relied not just upon
interviews with politicians, but particularly on observation of and informal
interaction with people gathering in places like the café, the public library,
the square in front of the church, etc. which Habermas (1991) would
probably describe as a «public sphere». Yet the social context within which I
studied localism and the state a few years ago has changed considerably.
Quite a few of these cafés closed down as a result of depopulation and the
economic crisis. Many of the able-bodied with whom I had endless
conversations used to have a job in the valley or in its vicinity; by contrast,
now they have to commute to other places on a daily or weekly basis, and
when they are back in the valley they hardly find time to socialize and have a
cup of espresso or a glass of wine with friends or neighbors (or the
researcher). For the researcher, in turn, data collection may be even more
challenging when potential informants have the Internet connection at
home and spend a considerable amount of time in front of the screen.
Informality, then, has become a “scarce resource”. How does this “scarcity”
affect the ways fieldwork techniques are taught in an academic context? I am
turning to this issue next.

Encountering Malinowski in the neoliberal academia
   Although I started reading anthropological case studies (including
Malinowski’s) as an undergraduate student, it was not until I undertook my
doctoral studies in Britain that I understood at least some of the challenges
of ethnographic fieldwork. Nowadays undergraduate students become
familiar with such challenges early on, given that most Anthropology
programs on both sides of the Atlantic offer courses on fieldwork research.
The title of this course varies across the universities: Fieldwork Methods,
Qualitative Methods, Ethnographic Methods, Ethnographic Fieldwork, and
so on. A student majoring in a social science discipline usually takes this
course in one’s third year or later. However, some universities allow students
to take it earlier if they have the prerequisites, whereas others offer an
additional fieldwork course (essentially, a “light version”) in the second year.
Books on fieldwork techniques are published by several academic presses,
and the students who choose to attend this course are expected to
familiarize themselves with one of these publications.
   Undergraduate students of British and North American academic
institutions start learning about Malinowski early on, when they take the
introductory Anthropology course. All the libraries of the universities in


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which I have taught hold copies of the documentary video Off the verandah
(Singer, Dakowski 1986), which I show in introductory classes every semester
to give students an idea of the places where Malinowski had conducted
research, and of the issues he had addressed a century ago. The video’s focus
on participant observation as a quintessential anthropological data
collection method helps clarify the difference between participant
observation itself and “verandah research”, namely, a research style based
on observation without participation which is ascribed to the generation of
anthropologists before Malinowski.
   I have taught the fieldwork course several times in the course of my
career. Until recently it was taken mostly by students majoring in
Anthropology shortly before completion of their studies. Because of its
research component, it used to be considered one of the most important
(and challenging) courses in an Anthropology program. What makes it
challenging is the fact that students are expected to write a short research
proposal, conduct research on a topic of their choosing, and write down the
findings of their project in the form of a research paper in less than four
months. Because of time constraints, there is no expectation that these
students conduct fieldwork in faraway places or learn a foreign language. In
taking this course, they become familiar not only with relevant anthropo-
logical works on the topic, but also with the ways different anthropologists
have conducted fieldwork, and with the applications of Malinowski’s
research methods. Teaching it may also be a highly rewarding experience,
especially since it is meant to attract students truly interested in the
discipline and committed to putting to practice what they have learned in
their studies, and some of the research papers they wrote for the courses I
taught were very accurate ethnographic descriptions and developed original
arguments. I have remained in touch with some Canadian students who took
the fieldwork course not long ago, completed their undergraduate studies,
and subsequently found administrative jobs in the public sector. These
people got back to me to say that the skills that they had gained from their
ethnographic research experience were very helpful while they were
applying for jobs, and turned out to be even more useful in the workplace,
particularly in cultural policy jobs or in those that entail dealing with publics
of different cultural heritages.
   With the steep decline in public funding for post-secondary education in
western Europe and North America and the subsequent transformation of
the higher education sector into a tool at the service of the labor market,
universities compete for additional tuition revenue by presenting
themselves as institutions focused on students and learning. Meanwhile, the


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declining significance of the humanities and social sciences in the academy
and the need to increase student numbers in such fields has forced program
chairs to waive prerequisites for several upper-level courses. As a result,
several students taking a fieldwork course as an elective have very limited
knowledge of Anthropology, and those working part-time often choose this
course not out of interest, but because it fits in their work schedule. Thus,
although the course is designed to introduce students with a background in
Anthropology to fieldwork techniques, in practice the person teaching it is
forced to make accommodations for students who are encountering the
discipline for the first time.
   I have faced quite a few challenges, in the last few years, in sparking
students’ interest in fieldwork and Anthropology more generally, and I
understand that other colleagues have experienced similar problems. Some
of these problems stem from the fact that students with very limited or no
knowledge of the discipline have to plan and complete a research project in a
limited time. In an attempt to sort this out, I often encourage them to
choose a topic whose exploration does not pose too many problems in terms
of access to data, and many students working part-time (especially in North
America) end up writing a short ethnography of their workplace based on
observation of social behavior.
   The students taking the fieldwork course are told to bear in mind three
things: one learns by doing participant observation; data collection takes
time; one may find out important things by accident. Although most
anthropologists often collect a significant amount of data through informal
interaction with different people, being able to engage in these forms of
interaction is conditional on clearance from a research ethics committee. A
lot has been written, in anthropology and cognate disciplines, about the
impact of such boards on social research, and it is beyond the purview of this
article to add to existing debates. I will simply say that while such boards are
meant to promote the highest ethical standards particularly for social
research, their growing number actually reflects an increased concern with
legal liability and protecting the university’s reputation (Kohn, Shore 2017:
229-230). The Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research
Involving Humans, issued by the Government of Canada, for example, clearly
states that Research Ethics Board’s clearance is not required for research
involving the observation of people in public places where «it does not
involve any intervention staged by the researcher, or direct interaction with
the individuals or groups» (Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Natural
Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada 2014: 17). However, it is required in
most cases, and ethnographic research based on participant observation is
not exempted.

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   Ethics codes produce «responsible practitioners» and refashion the
relationship between individual and state (Strathern 2000: 293). Because
such codes limit and regulate interaction, they may have the effect of
formalizing informal relationships. Anyone intending to interview old
friends or co-workers has to keep confidentiality and privacy in mind, and
ask interviewees to sign an informed consent form. Many research ethics
committees consider problematic and «un-scientific» research involving
informality (Kohn, Shore 2017: 235). In formalizing the relationship between
the interviewer and the interviewee, such procedures set a limit to what may
be said during the interview and in class presentations, and to what may be
written in research papers. Because an informal relationship between the
researcher and the interviewee is hardly contemplated by the policy
statement, many students believing that the goal of research is the
“discovery” of something end up with the impression that ethnographic
research forms part of a larger bureaucratic exercise. In other words,
relationships between researchers and participants, originally meant to be
based on informality and trust, often end up being based on formalized audit
protocols (Kohn, Shore 2017: 237-238). Some departments manage to sort
this problem out by encouraging students to undertake research involving
observation only, and eventually only those who need to conduct fieldwork
as part of their honors thesis or independent study apply for the research
ethics committee’s clearance. But here lies the paradox: following all ethics
procedures entails formalizing the relationships between the researcher and
the informant, and precludes the collection of meaningful information, just
as a research based only on observation is tantamount to the “verandah
research” about which Malinowski himself had quite a few reservations.
   Among the goals of this course, and of anthropology more generally, is to
teach how to make the familiar “exotic”, i.e. how to make sense of the
familiar through reflection on and comparison with information collected by
various anthropologists in a wide range of locales. An issue I encountered in
the last few years is that of the decreasing significance of the “exotic” itself
in higher education. When I crossed the Atlantic and started my first
academic job in Canada, one of the courses I was asked to teach was on the
Anthropology of Europe. Among those who chose it, there were some
enthusiastic students who said that they became curious about it because it
was not offered for many years. Others explicitly stated that because they
had never been to Europe, they thought that they would learn about the old
continent by taking this course, whereas others said that they were
interested in Europe because their ancestors had come from there.


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   Interest in Europe and other regions was hardly surprising: most of the
regional courses offered by that and other Anthropology departments in
which I have been working were about areas outside of North America. Only
a limited number of anthropological courses on Canada or North America
could be found on the course catalogs. In this sense, completion of an
Anthropology degree implied knowledge of and interest in cultures and
societies outside one's immediate surroundings, and students undertaking
ethnographic research were expected to be familiar with anthropological
works on a wide range of regions. Yet as the years went by, more and more
academic institutions in Canada encouraged the creation of courses with
“Canadian content”, namely, regional courses on Canada and indigenous
peoples. Whereas the emphasis on Canadian content is designed to attract
government funding and increase student numbers, it also has the effect of
shifting students’ attention (particularly local students) from what happens
in different parts of the world to what happens in one’s community or
region. Phrased differently, it has devalued anthropology’s comparative
perspective.
   Likewise, although the fieldwork course and other research-based courses
are meant to foster, among other things, a participatory model of civic and
political life, most of the students who have taken such courses in the last
few years stated that they do not read newspapers and that they do not
follow politics either. This sense of unease, while relating to the public
sphere or the realm of politics, is hardly surprising if we allow for the
increasing popularity of social and other virtual media. I became aware of
this sense of unease when I realized that most of those attending a small-
size course (like the fieldwork course, for example) hardly know one another,
and are not even interested in getting to know their classmates. Some of
these students asked me about the possibility of conducting Internet-based
research as opposed to observing people in a public setting, and others asked
whether they could use old friends or close relatives as informants. One
student who recently took the fieldwork course contacted me to express her
concerns about the possibility of conducting ethnographic research on the
grounds that she is uncomfortable talking to people she does not know.
Interestingly, the above students’ sense of unease seem to mirror university
ethics committees’ widely shared view that even talking to people may be
problematic and fraught with danger (Kohn, Shore 2017: 236).
   Interest in one’s friends seems to echo academic institutions’ emphasis
on students’ involvement in projects that are relevant to their own
communities. However, it also seems to contradict one of these institutions’
main goals, namely, the promotion of citizenship through education and
participation in public life, and mirrors instead a view of citizenship as

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passive. Such interest is at odds with the promotion of a public sphere
devoted to the production of a democratic political culture, and mirrors a
retreat into private identities. Thus, while the supposed aim of field research
is to stimulate students’ interest in the complexities of societies and cultures
(including one’s own), it is precisely the understanding of diversity or
complexity that is increasingly shunned by students on the grounds that it is
considered too difficult. This pragmatic (or passive) vision of education
stands in sharp contrast to an image of a politically interested and mobilized
citizenry: it mirrors a widely shared unwillingness to encounter difference in
the public sphere (Brown 2006: 87-89).
    How does part-time work affect students’ pursuit of ethnographic
fieldwork? The neoliberal economic reforms implemented from the early
1980s onwards resulted in the restructuring of the public sector and
economic insecurity, and also meant students’ exposure to a rhetoric that
emphasizes self-discipline, individual responsibility, flexibility, and
entrepreneurship. While this rhetoric is not new, at least in an Anglophone
academic context, it became prominent in light of the recent cuts in public
funding for higher education all over Europe and North America. As a result,
while in the recent past undergraduate students had to resort to part-time
work only occasionally in order to meet basic needs, nowadays not having a
part- or full-time job is no longer an option, and students have to embrace a
present suffused with the disappointments of unreliable futures. The
university, as an institution of learning, is adjusting to these changes:
whereas it is tasked with producing citizens who are critical thinkers, it also
has to communicate knowledge to mobile and flexible workers whose skills
have been pegged to a new market logic. In other words, it has to produce
employable citizens.
    The emphasis on individual responsibility and flexibility has been taken
very seriously by most students: being able to pay one's own bills or repay a
loan is conditional to commitment to individual responsibility;
responsibility, in turn, is expressed by a flexible approach to work, studies,
and ultimately by one’s willingness to work a variety of part-time menial
jobs. Most students with different part-time jobs who took the fieldwork
course between 2015 and 2017 did not hesitate to state that collecting data
on a regular basis would mean taking too much time off work. Obviously, I
am not inferring that all the students who have taken the aforementioned
course stated this: some students were very committed and were happy to
devote time to the production of an accurate and detailed research paper.
However, nowadays these students form a minority even in upper-level
classes.

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   What characterized Malinowski’s approach to research was accuracy, in
the sense that he sought to take very detailed note of all experiences.
Richard Sennett (2006: 103-104) has called «craftsmanship» the attitude
which entails doing something well for its own sake. For a craftsman (or
craftswoman), the pursuit of quality ideally becomes an end in itself. Mental
craftsmanship also exists, as in the effort to write clearly, and teaching
Malinowski’s fieldwork techniques is designed, inter alia, to instill a
craftsman’s ethic in students. Yet Sennett notes (2006: 105) that
craftsmanship sits uneasily in the institutions of «flexible capitalism», and
the neoliberal academia is no exception. Nowadays the fieldwork course is
one of the many courses to be chosen from online course catalogs, and is not
necessarily meant to be challenging, especially in an academic system
increasingly focused on training (as opposed to education) and favoring
facility at the expense of digging deep (Sennett 2006: 194).
   At a time when an increasing number of individuals work in and deal with
institutions based on short-term transactions and constantly shifting tasks,
commitment to craftsmanship is not necessarily rewarded or deemed useful.
After all, deepening one’s skills in any pursuits takes time, and in a
neoliberal organization time is money. In this sense, in organizations in
which goals and objectives are constantly shifting and projects end as
abruptly as they begin, the capacity to solve problems quickly is highly
rewarded, whereas an employee’s commitment to the pursuit of detailed
knowledge may be frowned upon. Interestingly, in academic institutions
committed to producing employable subjects the capacity to solve problems
often looms larger than that to identify them or make a research topic
problematic. It is not purely coincidence that one of the slogans of a
university in which I have been working was «Are you a problem solver?».
Likewise, because students have to balance work and study in order to be
able to pay their tuition fees, they have to move from one menial, dead-end
job to another, and timeanxiety does not foster craftsmanship. Rather,
students prioritize the completion of a research paper by the deadline, and
for good reasons: in order to avoid mark deductions, to start studying for
another test as soon as possible, or to turn up at the workplace without delay
(Stacul 2018: 6-7).

Conclusion
   These reflections on fieldwork in the Alps and on teaching fieldwork
courses bring us back to the issues raised at the outset, namely, how far the
fieldwork style pioneered by Malinowski remains a valuable tool, and how far
the fieldwork techniques of which generations of anthropologists have


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availed themselves can be communicated to students nowadays. Reference
to Malinowski’s work is in order: in championing interaction with
informants on a regular basis and the study of the local language,
Malinowski did not simply make participant observation an integral part of
the discipline: he also pushed researchers “off the verandah”. Since
Malinowski’s time participating in the lives of the “natives” has been central
to ethnographic practice.
   Most anthropologists probably agree that the move from the “verandah”
to forms of participant observation has been a significant achievement in the
discipline. Yet its significance does not simply derive from participant
observation’s worth as a heuristic device: rather, practicing and teaching
participant observation promote encounters with difference in the public
sphere, and foster participatory models of civic and political life, as well as a
politically interested citizenry. However, the universities’ concern about
“ethics” and “safety” and the fact that informality has become a “scarce
resource” mean that engaging in participant observation is getting harder
and harder, and even discouraged. As a result of these developments,
students withdraw into private concerns (one of which is the increase of
tuition fees) and turn to old friends or the “virtual verandahs” of the
Internet and the social media as sources of information, just as more
anthropologists undertake research projects involving limited participant
observation. Obviously, I am not suggesting that this is not anthropology.
This line of reasoning suggests that besides asking whether Malinowski’s
fieldwork techniques remain valuable tools (they certainly do), we might also
ask how we can successfully promote participant observation as a practice
fostering both craftsmanship and participatory models of citizenship at a
time when everything (including research and social interaction) is being
bureaucratized. Perhaps it is time to take informality (broadly defined) more
seriously.




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116                                                                       JARO STACUL


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 Ja r o STACUL holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of
 Cambridge. He has worked in various academic institutions in Britain and
 Canada, and currently is Assistant Teaching Professor at the Department of
 Anthropology of the University of Victoria. He has published extensively on
 issues of nationalism, the environment, and the state in Europe (Poland
 and Italy), and has recently undertaken a research project on working
 students in Newfoundland. His publications include the book The bounded
 field. Localism and local identity in an Italian Alpine valley (2003) and the
 volume, co-edited with Christina Moutsou and Helen Kopnina, Crossing
 European boundaries. Beyond conventional geographical categories (2005),
 both published by Berghahn Books.
 jstacul@uvic.ca




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Jaro Stacul
The end of informality? A few thoughts on Malinowski’s legacy and craftsmanship
2018 | ANUAC. VOL. 7, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2018: 95-117.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3522
