MIASU Research Seminar – 28 October – Mark Turin

I Was Wrong: Anthropological Lessons in Spite of Ourselves

Mark Turin (The University of British Columbia, Canada)

N.B. This seminar is in-person only

I have become increasingly interested in how anthropologists recognize mistakes made during fieldwork as well as in their ethnographic writing, including acknowledging errors in analysis.

In today’s seminar, I will shine a light on all kinds of rights and wrongs, from the hubris baked into the founding of anthropology as a discipline and the ways this inheritance haunts us, to the everyday errors and mundane mistakes that we make in the field as well as in our writing. Sometimes these are unconscious errors of omission; other times these are wilful blind spots — uncertainties we might try to ignore in favour of “airtight” arguments, neat social theories and tidy stories. As with others engaged in the business of knowledge production, anthropologists can have a problem with acknowledging, plainly, that we may be, or have been, wrong. Why is this admission so fraught and painful? And what dynamics – at once professional and interpersonal – keep such acknowledgements at bay? 

Drawing on examples from fieldwork in the Himalaya and the Pacific North West, in this lecture I investigate not only how we teach anthropology and learn to practice ethnography, but also how we associate ourselves with our professional roles and identities. I ask how we know what we know and the limits of that knowing. Can we move from a posture of being right to doing what is right? Is it possible for responsibility — for our own actions, to people and places, to all our relations — becomes response-ability: a principle of ethical action across shifting terrain of what is knowable, what is do-able and what is right. And it may be that doing what is right means talking about when and how we are wrong.

Bio:

Mark Turin (PhD, Linguistics, Leiden University, 2006) is an anthropologist, linguist and occasional radio presenter, and an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia. He is cross-appointed between the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies and the Department of Anthropology. Mark founded both the World Oral Literature Project, an urgent global initiative to document and make accessible endangered oral literatures before they disappear without record, and the Digital Himalaya Project  in 2000 as a platform to make multi-media resources from the Himalayan region widely available online. For over twenty years, Mark’s regional focus has been the Himalayan region (particularly Nepal, northern India and Bhutan), and more recently, the Pacific Northwest. Mark writes and teaches on language reclamation, revitalization, documentation and conservation; language mapping, policies, politics and language rights; orality, archives, digital tools and technology. He is the author (or co-author) of five books, the (co)editor of 12 volumes, and he edits an open access series on oral literature. Mark has been a regular BBC presenter on issues of linguistic diversity and language endangerment.