Back on the verandah and off again: Malinowski in South Tyrol and his ethnographic legacy
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3518
Questo saggio introduce la sezione tematica di Anuac da due prospettive. La prima parte guarda alla vita di Malinowski ed Elsie Masson in Sud Tirolo, contemplando il contesto storico-politico della regione e mettendo in luce la presenza e le relazioni della famiglia Malinowski nello scenario locale. La veranda della villa a Oberbozen è il punto di partenza per una visione panoramica su questo territorio e sulla sua gente, e funge da cornice per ripensare la figura di Malinowski. La seconda parte traccia lo sviluppo del Forum Malinowski per l’Etnografia e l’Antropologia (MFEA) alla Libera Università di Bozen-Bolzano, un progetto che dal 2016 ha portato alla luce nuove conoscenze sulla presenza dei Malinowski in Sud Tirolo. Il Forum Malinowski fa da sfondo al Simposio che ha ispirato gli articoli qui presentati allo scopo di riflettere sull’etnografia oggi nei termini delle sue continuità e discontinuità rispetto al canone stabilito da Malinowski quasi un secolo fa.
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Dorothy Zinn
Anuac
Back on the verandah and off again: Malinowski in South Tyrol and his ethnographic legacy
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac
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Thematic section: The Malinowskian legacy in ethnography
2018-12-31
2018-12-08
2018-12-31
2018-12-31
9-25
1
Dorothy Zinn
2018/12/31
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3518
9
Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italia
2239-625X
2
en
25
Back on the verandah and off again: Malinowski in South Tyrol and his ethnographic legacy
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                                             2018 | ANUAC. VOL. 7, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2018: 9-25




Back on the verandah and off again
Malinowski in South Tyrol and his ethnographic legacy
Elisabeth TAUBER
Free University of Bozen-Bolzano

Dorothy ZINN
Free University of Bozen-Bolzano




ABSTRACT: This essay introduces Anuac’s thematic section on Malinowski from two per-
spectives. The first part looks at Malinowski and Elsie Masson’s life in South Tyrol, con-
templating the historical-political context of the region and bringing to light the Malin-
owski family’s presence and relations in the local setting. The verandah of the villa in
Oberbozen is the starting point for a panoramic look on the land and its people, serving
as a frame for a reconsideration of Malinowski. The second part traces the development
of Malinowski Forum for Ethnography and Anthropology (MFEA) at the Free University
of Bozen-Bolzano, a project that since 2016 has been bringing to light new knowledge
about the Malinowskis’ presence in South Tyrol. The Malinowski Forum is the backdrop
to a Symposium that stimulated the articles presented here, with the aim of reflecting
on ethnography today in terms of its continuities and discontinuities with respect to
the canon established by Malinowski nearly a century ago.

KEYWORDS: MALINOWSKI, ETHNOGRAPHY, ALPINE ANTHROPOLOGY, SOUTH TYROL, FASCISM.




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Elisabeth Tauber, Dorothy Zinn
Back on the verandah and off again: Malinowski in South Tyrol and his ethnographic legacy
2018 | ANUAC. VOL. 7, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2018: 9-25.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3518
10                                                           ELISABETH TAUBER, DOROTHY ZINN




1. The Malinowski villa in Oberbozen: 1923-2018

      I am writing now on the balcony […] The sun is just over Kohlern, the
      Rosengarten begins to glow slightly, the air is warm, still and mellow, the deep-
      toned bell of Gries cloister is giving tongue. It is marvelous here; on the
      balcony I think of your pleasure in it (Elsie Masson in a letter to Bronislaw
      Malinowski, October 1927, in Wayne 1995: 101).

   The wooden verandah of the Villa Malinowski in Oberbozen 1 faces south-
west, overlooking a meadow with a few old apple trees. To the left of the
house is the Schlern, a mountain that is one of South Tyrol’s most
distinctive landmarks2; towards the south, you can almost sense Bolzano

 Acknowledgements: As founders and co-PIs of the Malinowski Forum for Ethnography and
Anthropology, among the many people we would like to thank, we must mention Antonino
Colajanni for early insights into the Malinowski’s time in South Tyrol and suggestions for
further research. Daniela Salvucci has worked splendidly as a research assistant on the
MFEA project, and has been instrumental in furthering research and making it publically
available on the MFEA website: https://mfea.projects.unibz.it/. At Unibz, we are grateful for
the interest and generous support of former President Konrad Bergmeister; the head of the
Library, Gerda Winkler, has offered precious collaboration, along with her staff members
Paolo Buoso and Matthias Einbrodt. Among our local stakeholders, Hannes Obermair and
Waltraud Kofler-Engl have both expressed their enthusiasm for the project, as has Bozen’s
Mayor Renzo Caramaschi and Francesco Comina, formerly of the Centro per la Pace.
Matthias Jud and our friends at the South Tyrol Anthropological Association (EVAA) have
also helped us to promote South Tyrol’s Malinowskian heritage. The MFEA project could not
have taken off without the support of Andre Gingrich and Marilyn Strathern as the first
members of the Scientific Committee, which is currently comprised of Josephus Platenkamp
and the authors of the articles that follow in this issue (except for Eva Knoll). We must also
acknowledge the contribution of the many reviewers who generously offered comments and
suggestions for improving the articles. Last but certainly not least, we give our special and
warmest thanks to the Malinowski family, especially Patrick Burke, Rebecca Malinowska
Stuart, Lucy Ulrich, who have most graciously welcomed us onto their verandah and have
shared their valuable input regarding what we are doing. For this first part of this essay,
Elisabeth Tauber would like to thank Lucy Ulrich and Patrick Burke for their careful reading
of different drafts of this text and their valuable comments and references, Rebecca
Malinowska Stuart for reading and comments, Daniela Salvucci for precision in dating and
her hint about Raymond Firth, Stephanie Risse and Almut Schneider for commenting
previous drafts. Conceived in collaboration, section one of this introductory essay is written
by Elisabeth Tauber, while section two is written by Dorothy Zinn.
1. In the following text, we use the German name for Oberbozen (Soprabolzano) as Elsie and
Bronislaw used it in their letters.
2. The Schlern is pictured on the MFEA web page and is also the title of a German-language
monthly that publishes research into science, research, art and culture in South Tyrol.


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[the capital of South Tyrol; east of the house there is a farmstead; and fairly
close to Villa Malinowski lie several villas, built around the end of the
nineteenth century, that belong to affluent families from Bolzano. As
Dorothy Zinn, Daniela Salvucci and I sat on the cozy verandah in September
2018 with three of the ten grandchildren of Bronislaw Malinowski, Lucy
Ulrich, Patrick Burke and Rebecca Malinowska Stuart, we were given an
insight both into they are embedded locally and into their wider social
networks across South Tyrol. Our encounters with the three grandchildren –
through email exchanges, meetings on the verandah and at the symposium
of which this Special Issue is the outcome – opened out into gentle
conversation. It has become an ongoing dialogue with three people who hold
memories of their grandfather and grandmother, who have vivid memories
of their own childhoods in South Tyrol and who to the present-day maintain
long-term friendships with people in Oberbozen and Bolzano. In their talk at
the symposium, Lucy and Patrick emphasized «their grandparents’ lives in
the South Tyrol and their deep attachment to the region, an attachment they
passed down to their daughters and grandchildren» (Burke, Ulrich 2017).
   On that afternoon in September 2018, as we drank tea and ate biscuits
from one of the traditional patisseries in Bolzano, Lucy, Patrick and Rebecca
recalled the Rittnerbahn (an electric cog railway that used to connect the
people of the high plateau of the Ritten with the city of Bolzano). The vivid
picture given was of a rudimentary infrastructure: Both locals and summer
holidaymakers would travel up and down the mountain on the Rittnerbahn,
which traversed the 1,000-metre ascent and descent at a slow but steady
speed of 7 kilometers per hour. The construction of the electric cog railroad
in 1907 contributed to an economic boom on the Ritten plateau. Thanks to
the train, people could travel up or down the mountain in an hour,
combining a visit to the city with one to the mountain. Lucy, Rebecca and
Patrick remember what a trip to Bolzano was like in the 1960s: the slow
journey down to the town, hurrying to get all the shopping done, then, after
lunch, catching the Rittnerbahn again on Walterplatz (Bolzano’s main
square) for the journey back3. We will read in the following pages of this
Special Issue about the technical and social significance of infrastructure
within ethnographic research, as well as of the «thorough knowledge of
contexts» (Valeria Siniscalchi, this issue). However, we will also learn about
the notion of an «ideational or conceptual infrastructure» and how, since the
work of Malinowski, it may be thought of as a significant aspect of doing
ethnography, as Marilyn Strathern describes in this issue.

3. Today the Ritten cable car leaves every four minutes and mainly carries local hikers and
tourists.

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12                                                          ELISABETH TAUBER, DOROTHY ZINN


   The verandah in Oberbozen offers a space for conversations that
contributed significantly to our initiative of the Malinowski Forum for
Ethnography and Anthropology (MFEA, Salvucci 2017). What these conver-
sations also brought to light were family memories, deeply anchored within
local networks. It is Lucy, Patrick and Rebecca’s relationship with the house,
the place and the people there that makes me think that we are close to the
interests of their grandfather. Malinowski does not seem to have considered
taking an ethnographic look at South Tyrol or, more broadly, at the
European Alps. A focus of that kind would have also had a historical and
political perspective. Yet, as we read in this journal, Malinowski «had valid
political reasons in his time for keeping […] historical fields as much at bay
as possible» (Gingrich, Knoll, this issue). This lead us to think that it was for
this reason South Tyrol and its cultural practices never became one of
Malinowski’s «asides» (Strathern, this issue). Although differing from
Malinowski’s own academic-political agenda (Gingrich, Knoll, this issue), it
was an enlightening experience for us to sense the grandchildren’s
intimacies with the place and its people. It is also possible that verandahs in
different places of the world have «supported ethnographic enterprises»
(Strathern, this issue).

1.a. The family within the South Tyrolean local context

      Good ethnography requires the alertness of every sense. Enthralled by the
      romantic beauty of the islands, Malinowski enjoyed a heightened awareness of
      his surroundings. Just a few steps from the sea, he could hear from his tent ‘the
      sound of gentle plashing, and the noise of torrents up above in the lofty green
      wall’. He went for daily rowing excursions with Ginger, absorbing the scenery
      from the drifting dinghy (Young 2004: 536).

   Although Malinowski did not pursue the idea of actively studying South
Tyrol, not least because there was a distinctly nationalist air to cultural
representations of the time4, it is likely that travelling on the cog railway
from the Ritten to Bolzano and back would have given this highly talented
and pioneering anthropologist an opportunity to sense the beauty of the
mountainous landscape and the cultural complexities of the region in the
1920s and 1930s. Raymond Firth wrote: «He maintained for many years,

4. The Schützen (marksmen) and the Deutschorden (the Teutonic Order) still conduct
religious parades in Oberbozen, as they do in almost all German-speaking South Tyrolean
villages and towns (Tauber 2013; for a comprehensive introduction to Tyrolian nineteenth
and early twentieth-century subnationalism see Cole 2000; Cole and Wolf 1974; Clementi
2013; Nequirito 2000).


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until his death, a villa at Oberbozen (Soprabolzano) in the South Tyrol,
looking out on the Dolomites, on the mountains of Rosengarten, Latemar
and Schlern – on to what he declared was the finest scenery in Europe»
(1957: 4).
   We do not know to what extent Malinowski was aware of Italian peasants
struggling to drain swamplands that in the broad Etsch valley near the old
market town of Bolzano. Or if he pondered on the networks of the farmers
who shipped their products on the Etsch river to the Italian south (Dughera
1998). We do not know to what extent he sensed the cultural differences
between these Italians and the self-sufficient German peasants living up on
the plateau of the Ritten. They worked on dry and often steep land, with
family and domestics organized around the head of the farmstead, the Bauer
(Cole, Wolf 1974). Or if he mused on the differences between his
neighbouring farmers and the rich Bolzano merchants whose profits – made
through wine production, transport and Bolzano’s trade fair – were invested
in prestigious summer villas in mild and sunny Oberbozen. How would he
have seen the routes down in the main valley, which connect the northern
Alps and Germany with northern and central Italy, and the contrast between
this movement, of which Bolzano was a nodal point, and the seeming
stability up in the mountains? How aware was he of the networks that exist
between town and village, valley and mountain, north and south, of the
marriage and inheritance patterns, the rituals of exchange and pilgrimages
of these «upland communities» (Viazzo 1989)?
   We see a family from elsewhere integrating into local social networks,
passing memory along three generations, in a context where belonging is
intertwined with language, locality, relations to land and relations with
property. This is expressed through the family’s unaffected relationships
with neighboring farmers, calling on Oberbozen’s artisans to carry out any
work to be done in the house, as well as through friendships with politically
and intellectually prominent South Tyrolian families. While the public
sphere where people meet for informal chats and conversations seems to be
vanishing in the twenty-first century, something Jaro Stacul thinks makes it
difficult to practice the form of participant observation Malinowski
established (see Stacul this issue), the verandah of the little summer house
in Oberbozen invites casual conversation. Does this verandah, with its view
of the mountains, have anything in common with another verandah which
played a part in Malinowski’s life: the verandah of his friend Billy Hancock,
on the Trobriand islands in Papua New Guinea «whose house was on the
shore of the lagoon» (Strathern, this issue)? Or is the recurrence of the
verandah just a historical coincidence? Whatever the answer, we believe that
the verandah in Oberbozen allows us to become acquainted with the place
and its people.

                                     2018 | ANUAC. VOL. 7, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2018: 9-25
14                                                 ELISABETH TAUBER, DOROTHY ZINN



   In 1923, when Bronislaw and Elsie came to live in Oberbozen (Wayne
1995: 27f), the German, Italian, Ladin and Sinti speaking people in South
Tyrol were confronted with Italian Fascism. All the linguistic and cultural
groups were faced with the politics of Italianization (Gatterer 1968; Di
Michele 2003; Lechner 2005). The historian Stefan Lechner sees the political
agenda of Italian Fascism in South Tyrol as defined by three elements: first,
the internal border situation with Trentino; second, the external border with
Austria; and, third, the ethnic-cultural borders within South Tyrol itself
(Lechner 2011: 51). The Italian Fascists were keen on creating a «total act of
submission» (ibidem: 52). It is noteworthy that economic and political power
was in the hands of the German-speaking population, while Italians were de
facto excluded from all spheres of power. Italian Fascists in Rome and
Bolzano interpreted this as a continuation of the Austro-Hungarian
oppression of the Italians, which they were eager to oppose by dismantling
all symbols recalling this particular past of the region.
   Firth reported that Malinowski «reacted strongly against local injustices,
as he saw them in the South Tyrol (Alto Adige) under Italian fascism» (1988:
21-22). The letters of Bronislaw and Elsie (Wayne 1995) give us an insight
into how they observed, experienced and commented on Fascism, as well as
their everyday lives in South Tyrol. In 1926 Elsie writes to Bronislaw: «By the
new decrees, no passes are to be given for anyone to leave the country and
old ones are withdrawn, also all antif. [antifascist] papers completely
suppressed, including our local ones» (Wayne 1995: 86). In October 1927
Bronislaw, in his discussion with his colleagues at the LSE, speaks of Fascists
as «a certain political Sect (the Bloody Fools)» (ibidem: 101). In one of her
letters of June 1927, Elsie enunciates the political atmosphere and how
everybody was talking about the Italianization of school education: «there is
no doubt that step [of banning the German language] has touched the
peasantry as no other would have done» (ibidem : 95). Notwithstanding the
political danger, the family decided to send their daughter Józefa to private
German lessons and Wanda «went to a kindergarten also run in German.
Such schooling had been made illegal by the Fascist government» (ibidem :
86). Elsie continues by describing her stay with farmers in a village on the
other side of the Ritten plateau, near the Dolomites, visiting Anna (a former
maid) and her family, who had prepared «an enormous and very well cooked
meal» and given Elsie and the children «the best bedroom» (ibidem: 94).
   In her letters Elsie gives insight into the everyday performance of
Italianization:


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      This afternoon I went rather early to the grand opening of the Turnverein
      [athletics club] in its Italianised form Hilpold, the old Turnlehrer [gym teacher]
      and Frl. Civegna have got permission to give gymnastic lessons but have to join
      the new [Fascist] society and give all commands in Italian (November 1927,
      ibidem: 109).

   And she expresses her disgust of the Fascist propaganda:
      I have not felt inclined to read any actualities … even the speech of a certain
      person [Mussolini] failed to awaken any reaction except that of a sort of dry
      disgust. In fact the nearer I approach the mis-en-scène [of Fascism] the less
      emotional I feel (March 1928, ibidem: 111).

   In October 1929 the family decided to move to London (ibidem: 146), the
house in Oberbozen became a holiday home. The family visited Oberbozen
in 1930, 1931 and 1933, after 1933 Elsie did not see Oberbozen again 5. Elsie
moved to Natters near Innsbruck in 1934, because its road to the city meant
that it was so much easier to get medical help quickly. Her multiple sclerosis
had advanced to the point where the length of time it would have taken her
doctor to reach Oberbozen from Bolzano was too great 6. Elsie passed away in
1935. Bronislaw and the girls visited Oberbozen in 1937 and 1938 7. Later
«the house in Oberbozen was administered by a bank as enemy property
through the war years. It was handed back to the Malinowska sisters soon
after the war and stays in the family» (ibidem: 242).
   The family, and in particular Elsie and the girls, had seen the region
experience the first phase of Italian Fascism and its politics of Italianization.
Yet they were not to witness the events that forced the German- and Ladin-
speaking population, like many other minority groups all over Europe, to
resettle outside their region (Wedekind, Rodogno 2009)8.
   When Malinowski’s children returned to Oberbozen in the 1950s, the
region was still experiencing violent conflict in which the German-speaking
population opposed the dominance of the Italian state. Furthermore, unlike
the rest of Europe, the region underwent an agricultural revolution only in
the 1950s and 1960s. Farming structures which had guaranteed the survival
of extended families were transformed into smaller nuclear units (Cole, Wolf

5. Patrick Burke, personal communication, 2018.
6. Lucy Ulrich, personal communication, 2018.
7. Patrick Burke, personal communication, 2018.
8. The division and conflict continued after WW II. However, up to the present, neither of
the languages has established itself as completely dominant by totally enforcing or pushing
to the edge the other. Instead, one tends to find forms of monolingual practice (in remote
villages) or the most diverse forms of «individual multilingualisms» in towns (Risse 2013:
111).

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16                                                  ELISABETH TAUBER, DOROTHY ZINN


1974). Some farmhouses started offering rooms for tourists; people recall
how they would offer «the only good room» to tourists while the family
would squeeze into the stable and sleep on the floor. The area of Oberbozen
and the Ritten had the advantage of having had experience of summer
vacationers from the end of the nineteenth century onwards. New small
enterprises burgeoned alongside established hotels, inns and restaurants. I
wonder how it was for the daughters of Malinowski to be back in Oberbozen
in those years, marked by political tension, agricultural transformation, rural
poverty, emigration and a restrictive, conservative, Roman-Catholic
atmosphere.
   Since the 1960s South Tyrolean society has undergone rapid transf-
ormation, though its people, like others of the Alpine region, have been
described as being “hard” (e.g. Heady 2001; Ladurner 2003), which might
have to do with their farming background and their strong attachment to
land. To get a sense of what constitutes these people and how they construct
and maintain their society today one needs to allow for «the slender thread
of consolation that long-term ethnography» offers (see Chandana Mathur,
this issue). Fifty years after Cole and Wolf’s research it might be high time to
get off the verandah again to ethnographically understand these people. On
that note, the villa Malinowski in Oberbozen and the owners who care for it
give occasion to discuss and disseminate what Bronislaw Malinowski stands
for and what Marilyn Strathern attributes to him in this issue, namely «that
there was [and is] no substitute for first-hand knowledge».

2. The Malinowski Forum and the Malinowskian legacy in ethnography
   In 2016 we created the Malinowski Forum for Ethnography and
Anthropology (MFEA), housed at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, with
two primary audiences in mind: on the one hand, a more general public, and
on the other, our colleagues in the academic sphere. With regard to the first
of these, and within it especially the local population, our public mission
would be to draw attention to the Malinowskian presence in South Tyrol.
Unlike what we have witnessed with other cultural figures such as Sigmund
Freud and Gustav Mahler, this history has remained widely unknown on the
local level. Before we ourselves were apprised of it, the Malinowski family’s
villa was “rediscovered” in October 2006, on the occasion of Polish journalist
Ryszard Kapuscinski’s visit to Bozen for a public lecture organized by the
City of Bolzano’s Peace Center. Kapuscinski knew about the house in
Oberbozen and surprised his hosts by insisting on making a pilgrimage to it.
With a camera crew and a group of students from Trento in tow, he paid


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homage to the compatriot whom he regarded as an inspiration for his own
signature brand of journalism, characterized by long-term dwelling among
different peoples that informed his poignant, engaged descriptions of them.
Subsequently, South Tyrol’s historical commission [the Heimatpflege-
verband] adorned the façade in Oberbozen with a commemorative plaque
dedicated to Malinowski, as well as an engraved slab on the side of the house
honoring Elsie Masson, something akin to a stone textual rib emanating
from the façade’s Adam. In 2017, city officials unveiled a memorial marker to
Malinowski in Bozen’s neighborhood of Gries, where the family often stayed
in the winter, and in the same year the city’s newly established «Hill of the
Sages» park included Malinowski among numerous other cultural figures
celebrated with the tribute of a tree planted in his name.
   All the while well aware of what heritage-making processes entail for
better or for worse, we admit that we are unabashedly pleased to contribute
to the “heritagization”of Malinowski and Masson with our work in the
MFEA. To date, our contribution has been to promote research that would
illuminate the presence of the Malinowskis in South Tyrol, especially since
those years were a critical historical period in local history, that of the 1920s
and 30s. It was a time just after South Tyrol’s passage from the Austrian-
Hungarian Empire to the Kingdom of Italy’s sovereignty, increasingly
bearing the grip of Mussolini’s Italian nationalism and all of the conse-
quences this had for the German and Ladin-speaking populations (see
Tauber, first part of this essay). Alongside our attention the figures of
Malinowski and Elsie Masson, though, we have wanted the MFEA to bring a
public focus upon anthropology as a discipline and ethnography as a
practice: these latter bear manifold potential contributions that are
publically relevant here in South Tyrol as elsewhere in general – for
example, with health, migration and refugee flows, minorities, education,
the environment – but given the local territory, a renewed consideration of
Alpine anthropology occupies a particular place in the project.
   With the Malinowski Forum being anchored at the University, though, the
other moiety of its dual nature has an eye to the academic community.
Learning more about this period in Malinowski’s life has meant shedding
light on the history of the discipline, and the exciting work by our research
collaborator Daniela Salvucci has helped to reconstruct intellectual networks
of the period, as well as infrastructures (as Marilyn Strathern deems them in
her contribution to this issue) that contributed to the realization of
Malinowski’s work. Preeminent among these infrastructures was the role of
his first wife, Elsie Masson, but they were also infrastructures that
Malinowski himself catalyzed, with a coterie of students and colleagues who
visited the villa.

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18                                                ELISABETH TAUBER, DOROTHY ZINN


   The MFEA project has, moreover, given us a platform for exploring
themes in ethnography and anthropology, and one of our concrete
endeavors in this regard is the Biennial Symposium «Anthropological Talks
in South Tyrol». Indeed, the articles we assemble in this issue developed out
of the presentations made at the third Symposium, held in Bozen-Bolzano in
September 2017. Unlike the previous two editions of this symposium, on this
occasion it was an initiative under the aegis of the newly created Malinowski
Forum, and when planning the event, we inevitably looked to Malinowski as
a source of inspiration for an overarching theme. Although Malinowski was
not the first anthropologist to conduct fieldwork, his contribution was by all
admissions decisive in the consolidation of a canon of ethnography in the
twentieth century, and his name is indelibly associated with the practice as a
founding figure of its modern form. For our symposium, we finally settled on
a broad theme that would pay tribute to the master’s towering status and his
hallmark contribution, and at the same time allow us to think about current
developments in anthropology: The Malinowskian Legacy in Ethnography.
   Now, an indubitably vast quantity of ink has been spilled in the last few
decades on ethnographic research and writing, variously suggesting how and
why it should be re-tooled, in accordance with developments in the
discipline throughout the century that has passed since Malinowski
formulated the conception of fieldwork that would become a standard.
Without aspiring to recapitulate all of these debates here, which would be
truly beyond the scope and available space, we merely want to offer the
reader the backdrop to the question we posed our Symposium speakers:
what, if anything, remains recognizably “Malinowskian” in ethnography
after all these years? Ethnography has changed not only in time, but also in
space, as the techniques promoted by Malinowski have spread
transnationally within what has become the current global, hegemonic
anthropology. We have seen ethnography «through thick and thin» as the
droll title of George Marcus’ collection of essays puts it (Marcus 1998),
moving through copious changes in the epistemologies underlying it, so
much so as to provoke a form of disciplinary “turn” fatigue. The synchronic
approach of Malinowski’s functionalist ethnography has yielded to an
reconsideration of history in those national traditions where it was
previously ignored; post-colonial and feminist thought have given impetus
to reflexivity, as well as to autoethnography and native ethnography; most
recently, phenomenological theorizing has led to sensorial ethnography, not
to mention the ontological turn and multispecies ethnography.



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   Ethnography’s emplacement has likewise undergone a great delimitation,
from its classic exotic village loci to ethnography at home (presumably a
Western home), to «non-places» à la Augé, to Marcus’s multiple sites, to
cyberspace and netnography. The spatial metaphors describing the
ethnographer’s own subjective emplacement vis-à-vis her research subjects
have shifted like a needle on a compass, with the long-standing tradition of
studying «down» having been complemented with Laura Nader’s «studying
up», and more recently, «studying through» (Wright, Reinhold 2011). A type
of engagement scarcely conceivable in Malinowski’s time is ever more
prevalent in collaborative forms of ethnography, not to mention action
research and PAR9. These latter modes seem to lack a neat spatialization of
their own, but perhaps we could suggest that they are “convergent”.
   In order to answer our question about the Malinowskian legacy, we also
prodded our contributors to consider the effects of the present-day
conditions in which we perform ethnography. In this third millennium, we
asked, what does it means to be an ethnographer in a brave new world of
audit-centered, academic turbo capitalism? Are third-party funders and
evaluation processes dictating the contents and contours of ethnographic
research to an excessive degree? In particular, we wondered to what extent it
is it still possible to actually conduct deep and long-term fieldwork,
Malinowski style, with all of its implications for creating relations with
research participants, what Čarna Brković – in her suggestive comparison of
ethnography to clientelism – has called «sociality with a purpose» (Brković
2017). Even so, assuming that it is indeed possible, some might argue today
that it is no longer necessary to devote such lengthy spans of time to doing
fieldwork, and what Madden (2012) calls «step-in-step-out» research
projects have gained a certain legitimacy. It is hard to say how much time is
needed for the ethnographer to gain an «a feel for the game», as Bourdieu
would put it – an ethnographic intuition, particularly if working at home.
   Moreover, the structural conditions of modern Western society have
affected ethnography in still other ways. As Agar (2006) has noted,
worsening job prospects in academia for anthropology graduates have been a
factor in the changing status of applied ethnographic research, which has
moved from disciplinary scheduled caste to mainstream, if not actually
vogue. Whether in industry, education, health care or the social services, in
this context ethnography’s older and more literal meaning of description
and documentation of a people yields the priority to its rich potential as an
9. As Daniela Salvucci’s recent research has highlighted, however, Malinowski’s wife Elsie
Masson moved in the direction of engagement in her own early «almost anthropological»
fieldwork and in her journalistic critiques of Fascism in South Tyrol (Salvucci 2018).

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20                                                ELISABETH TAUBER, DOROTHY ZINN


instrument for problem solving. In all of its various forms, since
Malinowski’s time ethnography has expanded its toolkit to increasingly
embrace mixed methods and even interdisciplinary teams.
   Indeed, whether inside or outside the academy, the use of ethnography
has proliferated and become exceedingly fashionable in a number of
disciplines outside of anthropology. While some scholars coming from
outside anthropology are certainly conducting research that is recognizably
ethnographic, not all, however, are acutely conscientious in their
exploitation of the term’s cachet. This is the point Howell (2017) makes,
describing her irritation upon reading innumerable ERC applications that
propose using qualitative methods that are blithely deemed «ethnography».
Would it be right to say, then, that ethnography is a victim of its own
success, in that the substance of Malinowskian ethnography is being
hollowed out? In the end, what remains the sine qua non of ethnography in
the Malinowskian legacy? Among the elements highlighted by Howell, we
note the importance of the special epistemological stance that undergirds
anthropology’s use of ethnography: most crucially, the comparison and
relativism that constitute ethnography’s horizon. Moreover, this epistemo-
logical stance leads the ethnographer to problematize her own categories in
the process of doing fieldwork, a heuristic practice not easily discerned in
much of the qualitative work done in other disciplines.
   Each of the articles here, then, addresses one or more of these broad
queries in probing the Malinowskian legacy, and in doing so they make
reference to their own areas of ethnographic expertise. Andre Gingrich and
Eva Maria Knoll’s piece treat the relationship of history and ethnography, in
its introductory section eloquently resituating the question of using history
in fieldwork in Malinowksi’s time. They restore a context in which different
national anthropologies variously interpreted the relationship between the
two disciplines, tempering the notion of a categorical distinction between
history and anthropology with their proposed notion of a continuum. In the
second portion of their text, Gingrich and Knoll reverse the usual question of
how ethnography can benefit from historical approaches by offering a
concrete example from research on navigation in the Maldives in the early
Islamic period of the fourteenth century, demonstrating that knowledge
from ethnography itself can be of value for historical interpretation.
   In her engaging essay, Marilyn Strathern employs the notion of «infra-
structures» to grasp the material and non-material, including conceptual,
preconditions that make ethnography possible. She draws our attention to
what we usually conceive as lying outside ethnography, the traces of which
may become visible as context, and she illustrates her point by looking


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BACK ON THE VERANDAH AND OFF AGAIN                                                 21


specifically at the role of such infrastructures, especially the colonial ones,
in Malinowski’s Trobriand fieldwork. With great breadth of vision, Strathern
indicates some of the shifting sands of infrastructure through the changes in
ethnography that have taken place since Malinowski’s time. What remains
central, as she argues with reference to further examples from Oceanian
ethnography, is the importance in ethnographic practice of taking relational
infrastructure as both instrument and object.
   Strathern’s essay suggests a key to reading the article by Valeria
Siniscalchi: while not using the term «infrastructures», in reviewing her own
ethnographic experiences in three different fields, Siniscalchi reminisces
precisely about such infrastructures, starting with the conceptual
infrastructures developed through her training in a specific Italian school of
ethnology. If the spazialization of Malinowski’s ethnography was clearly
local and synchronic, by using the concept of «economic space», Siniscalchi
chronicles how her practice of ethnography has shuttled among various
other spatial and temporal scales for grasping social phenomena in a world
in which the local and its extralocal and global interconnections have
become an object of inevitable reflection. The examples she provides from
her work in economic anthropology in a Southern Italian town, a French
province and in a food activist organization all meditate on the different
relational infrastructures that went hand in hand with the shifting scales of
her research.
   Jaro Stacul’s reflection embraces several of the questions posed by our
symposium, drawing on many years of ethnographic research in the Trentine
Alps and Poland, and on his experience as a professor of anthropology in
Canada. Like Siniscalchi’s work, Stacul’s research shifted in scale, moving
from an initial local focus to the state, and he argues that Malinowskian
ethnography still offers much for investigations of this type. He further
addresses the changes wrought in a field where new technologies of
communication have transformed the physical public sphere, probing the
concept of «informality» as a quality of the classic ethnographer’s
relationality in the field with research subjects. Moreover, as a teacher of
ethnography in a Canadian university, Stacul offers a sobering account of the
concrete ways in the contemporary late-capitalist academy creates
challenges for fieldwork practice.
   Embodying the changing politics of fieldwork and the academy since
Malinowski’s time, Chandana Mathur writes from a post-colonial and
feminist perspective that takes stock of a revisit to her old field site in white,
working-class Indiana after twenty-five years, inverting the conventional
relationship of who should study whom. She considers not only the

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22                                                  ELISABETH TAUBER, DOROTHY ZINN


transformations that have taken place among the people she knew and the
structural conditions of their local post-industrial society, but she attends to
the shifts in her own intersectionally marked identity vis-à-vis her
interlocutors. In this encounter of what she terms «naked ethnography», she
also problematizes the possibility of empathy and mutual understanding as a
fieldworker among people who might be part of a group that is antagonistic
towards her own subjectivity, or even repugnant to her (and anthropologists
in general).
   On a final note, we should point out that we do not intend to neglect the
fact that ethnography has its own duality as both research methodology and
research product (the graphy), but in the present venue we have chosen to
focus on research practice. On the other hand, we will instead highlight the
form our ethnographic communication takes in our upcoming ATST
Symposium in 2019, Gender and Genre in Ethnographic Writing. In the mean-
time, we invite the reader to take a comfortable seat on his or her own
verandah, laptop or tablet in hand, and simply enjoy the articles assembled
here in this thematic issue of Anuac.




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BACK ON THE VERANDAH AND OFF AGAIN                                                     23



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 Elisabeth TAUBER is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the Free University
 of Bozen-Bolzano, and co-founder of the Malinowski Forum for Ethnography and
 Anthropology (MFEA). She has conducted long-term fieldwork with the Sinti in
 Northern Italy: Balanced or negative reciprocity – dreaming, thinking, remembering
 and taking money among the Italian Sinti Estraixaria (Ethnologie française, 2018); on
 representations and practices of cultural integration in regional and European in-
 stitutions: Good bureaucratic action and informal scrap metal collection in Northern
 Italy (Anuac, 2017) and more recently on ethnography and archival research: Sinti,
 peasants and the police in the crownland Tyrol (1904 -1910) (La Ricerca Folklorica,
 forthcoming). She is interested in questions of movement and nomadism, theories
 of the gift, begging economies and in relations with land in the European Alps.
 elisabeth.tauber@unibz.it
 Dorothy ZINN is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the Free Univer-
 sity of Bozen-Bolzano, and co-founder of the Malinowski Forum for Ethnography
 and Anthropology (MFEA). With a geographical focus on Italy, she has published
 extensively on patronage-clientelism and corruption (including the monograph La
 raccomandazione, 2001, English edition 2019), along with various works on South-
 ern Italian political economy. Her other main line of research has dealt with im-
 migration, second generations and multiculturalism, with publications including
 the recent volume Migrants as Metaphor (2018). She has also published two annot-
 ated translations of classic works by Italian ethnologist Ernesto de Martino, The
 Land of Remorse (2005) and Magic: A Theory from the South (2015).
 dorothy.zinn@unibz.it




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Elisabeth Tauber, Dorothy Zinn
Back on the verandah and off again: Malinowski in South Tyrol and his ethnographic legacy
2018 | ANUAC. VOL. 7, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2018: 9-25.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3518
