Oral History Association

The Anthropological Interview and the Life History

Author(s): Sidney W. Mintz
Source: The Oral History Review, Vol. 7 (1979), pp. 18-26
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oral History Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3675186
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 The Anthropological
Interview and
the Life History
Sidney W. Mintz

In Hearing Secret Harmonies, Anthony Powell has his narrator

report an opinion of the irascible novelist and bohemian, X.
Trapnel, on "the art of Biography":

People think because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Ex-

actly the reverse is the case. Because a novel's invented, it is
true. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true,
since they can't include every conceivable circumstance of
what happened. The novel can do that. The novelist himself
lays it down. His decision is binding. The biographer, even
at his highest and best, can only be tentative, empirical. The
autobiographer, for his part, is imprisoned in his own
egotism. He must always be suspect. In contrast with the
other two, the novelist is a god, creating his man, making
him breathe and walk. The man, created in his own image,
provides information about the god. In a sense you know
more about Balzac and Dickens from their novels, than
Rousseau and Casanova from their Confessions.

Nick Jenkins, the narrator and a novelist himself, remonstrates

with Trapnel, on the grounds that a novelist can be as egotistical as
any other sort of writer: " 'Their sheer narcissism often makes
them altogether unreadable. A novelist may inescapably create all
his characters in his own image, but the reader can believe in them,
without necessarily accepting their creator's judgment on them.
You might see a sinister strain in Bob Cratchit, conventionality in
Stavrogin, delicacy in Molly Bloom. Besides, the very concept of a
character in a novel-in real life too-is under attack.' " Trapnel is
unimpressed: " 'What you say, Nick, strengthens my contention
that only a novel can imply certain truths impossible to state by ex-
act definition. In doing so truth goes astray. The novelist is more
serious-if that is the word."1

Anthony Powell, Hearing Secret Harmonies, Vol. 12 of A Dance to the Music of Time
(Boston: Little Brown, 1975), pp. 84-85.

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 ANTHROPOLOGICAL INTERVIEW AND LIFE HISTORY/19

In characteristic fashion, Powell has interrupted his tale-or

rather, his character Nick Jenkins has interrupted his-to tempt us
with an important idea. It is the idea, of course, of the elusiveness,
the many-sidedness, of truth. Linguist, sociologist, anthropologist,
reporter, novelist, each is a seeker after truth. The anthropologist
interviewing wants to know the truth. Does that mean he or she
demands that everything said by the informant be true, in some
highly specifiable fashion on which a unanimity of opinion, either
of members of the informant's culture or of the eventual reader's, is
possible? Of course the answer must be negative. But a simple "no"
will not do. For if one is as interested in what statements mean, and
in what is meant by saying them, as in whether or not they are true,
then wanting to know the truth becomes an extremely complicated
enterprise.
It is not entirely certain that the anthropological interview
differs significantly from interviews by specialists in other
disciplines, but it may be useful to explore this possibility from the
vantage-point of ethnography. There is probably no better place
to start than a fine essay by Harold C. Conklin, entitled
"Ethnography," which appeared in the International Encyclopedia
of the Social Sciences:

The data of cultural anthropology derive ultimately from

the direct observation of customary behavior in particular
societies. Making, reporting, and evaluating such observa-
tions are the task of ethnography. . . . An ethnographer is
an anthropologist who attempts-at least in part of his pro-
fessional work-to record and describe the culturally signifi-
cant behaviors of a particular society. Ideally, this descrip-
tion, an ethnography, requires a long period of intimate
study and residence in a small, well-defined community,
knowledge of the spoken language, and the employment of a
wide range of observational techniques including prolonged
face-to-face contacts with members of the local group,
direct participation in some of that group's activities, and a
greater emphasis on intensive work with informants than
on the use of documentary or survey data.2 (Italics added.)

Much of this concise statement would need discussion if we in-

tended to examine the ethnographic undertaking in general, but I
shall restrict my comments to the anthropological or ethnographic
interview as used in collecting the life history. For this purpose, two

2 Harold C. Conklin, "Ethnography," International Encyclopedia of the Social

Sciences, 1968 ed.

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 20/MINTZ

of Conklin's emphases deserve special attention: the stress put

upon "intensive work with informants," and the reference to
"culturally significant behaviors."3
Even if fieldwork is confined at some point to dealing with a single
informant, there is great benefit in being able at least to observe that
informant interacting with other members of the group. Though
there is no way of proving it, I suspect that a good deal of the con-
fidence an anthropologist may feel in a particular informant arises
from his or her judgments of how others regard that informant, as
manifested in their interactive behavior. Even in confining my em-
phasis to interviewing for the life history, I would certainly not argue
that verbal communication between informant and biographer can or
should be the sole source of relevant information. Elsewhere, I have
suggested the opposite, contending that many life histories lose some
of their value because the fieldworker lacks sufficient knowledge of
the community and culture within which the informant lives, and
which he or she expresses, in one way or another, in nearly everything
he or she says or does.4 Thus, for the life history, while intensive work
with one informant or several is of course absolutely essential, it must
not preclude broader interviewing, or the study of the community
within which the principal informant lives and works.
Conklin's reference to "culturally significant behaviors" ad-
dresses an important disciplinary premise. Anthropology is con-
cerned with the range and variation of behavior in any given society,
but it is also concerned with behaviors that are "culturally signifi-
cant," which is to say other than random or unique. Thus, while a life
history might be elicited precisely because the informant was so far
from the apparent "norm" for his or her group in one or another
regard, anthropology assumes that any individual, in some fun-
damental and inalterable ways, gives expression to, incarnates, the
culture, and cannot do otherwise. David Aberle has argued:

The individual of the life-history is only one of many com-

parable members occupying the positions in a social system.

I will not deal with the question of the observation of behavior, except insofar as it
concerns the immediate behavior of informants, even though, from the ethnographic
perspective, this is rather like forsaking sight in order to benefit from the simplicity
of reading Braille. Cf. Sidney Mintz, "Comments: Participant-Observation and the
Collection of Data," Vol. 4 of Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 1966-68
(Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1969), pp. 341-49.
4 I believe that this is true even for informants who have migrated elsewhere. Of course
many factors can affect, reduce, trivialize, or romanticize the way the community
and culture are expressed by an informant remote in space or time from his or her
past. But past experience does continue to manifest itself in perception and articula-
lation-only how much or how little is open to argument. Cf. Sidney W. Mintz,
"Comments" on Mandelbaum: "The Study of Life History: Gandhi," Current An-
thropology, 14 (1973), 200.

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 ANTHROPOLOGICAL INTERVIEW AND LIFE HISTORY/21

Every individual in a society is oriented to a set of explanatory

beliefs, most of which he shares with others, and to social
norms, felt both as facilitations and as constraints. Every ac-
tion of his-conforming, individualistic, or revolu-
tionary-is oriented to the fact of those norms, the existence
of which he recognizes and knows that other people
recognize.5

Aberle goes even further, in clarifying the irreducible nature of

culture as something much more than personality writ large:

Although it remains true that within a culture individuals dif-

fer because of biological inheritance, social positions and
idiosyncratic experience, it is a central fact of social science
... that experience is patterned and that the patterns are
limited in any society. The reactions to culturally estab-
lished situations, though varied, are also limited. The history
of any individual's reactions affords considerable under-
standing of the relationship of motivation and institution.
Were the individual grossly deviate-even to the point of be-
ing psychotic, deluded, and hallucinated--his experiences,
interpreted with sufficient care against a background of the
society, would still give us insights and valid knowledge.6

The relationship between culture and personality has never been

articulated fully to the satisfaction of anyone. But I am sympathetic to
those anthropologists who believe personality can only manifest
itself in a cultural guise, and that no psychological interpretation, no
matter how ambitious, can avoid dealing with the cultural encapsula-
tion of personality. Coarse though such a view may seem in these days
of psychohistory and sociobology, it may at least keep us from trying
to explain war as the consequence of aggressive drives, politics as the
consequence of an instinct for power, or good works as the inevitable
outcome of the right genes.
If this viewpoint is accepted, then the ethnographic life history
interview must deal with distinctions between the personal, unique
or idiosyncratic, on the one hand, and the culturally typical or nor-
mative on the other. The distinction between these categories is not
sharp; I tried elsewhere to specify the difficulty, when I wrote: "The
goal of such an undertaking would not be to deemphasize individual

5 David Aberle, The Psychosocial Analysis of a Hopi Life-History, Comparative

Psychology Monographs, Vol. 21, No. 1, Serial No. 107 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1951), p. 2.
6 Aberle, p. 4.

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 22/MINTZ

uniqueness or to eliminate the significance of personality in the

study of change, but rather to specify with more confidence the way
individuality plays itself out against terms set by sociocultural
forces."' When one seeks to interpret a radical change in individual
world-view-the acceptance of a new religion, in this case-as
reflecting the convergence of different and superindividual forces,
how can one weigh the relative importance of individual character
in affecting this outcome? Presumably, not everyone in the culture,
exposed to precisely the same forces, would react in the same way.
But who would? To attempt to find out, one might consider collect-
ing a number of life histories of converts who share some of the fun-
damental class, age, sex, occupational and familial characteristics
of the first informant, in order to try to weigh the possible
significance of each of these features, as against the importance of
distinctive individual traits.
While the ethnographic interview as part of the life history can
proceed primarily on the basis of simple question-and-answer ex-
changes, it will be profitable to return to Conklin's article once
more, for the enumeration he provides of elicitation procedures:

...recording and using natural question-response se-

quences and implications; testing by intentional substitu-
tion of acceptable and incongruent references; testing by
paraphrase; testing by reference to hypothetical situations;
testing by experimental extensions of reference; and testing
by switching styles, channels, code signals, message con-
tent, and roles (by reference or impersonation). ...
Because ethnographers interact personally and socially
with informants, they find themselves carrying on a unique
type of natural history, in which the observer becomes a
part of (and an active participant in) the observed universe.
The extent of this involvement and its importance for
ethnographic recording depend on many situational con-
siderations, including the personalities of the ethnographer
and his informants. In some types of field inquiry the
ethnographer's practical success or failure may depend as
much on those impressions he makes locally as on the
cultural events being observed. . . . Especially where long-
term investigation of intimate personal relationships is con-
cerned, most anthropologists would agree with Condominas
(1965: 35) in stressing the "ndcessitg d'ethnographier les
ethnographes. "8

7 Mintz, "Comments," p. 200.

8 Conklin, p. 172; George Condominas, L'Exotique est Quotidien: San Luk, Viet-
Nam Central (Paris: Plon, 1965), p. 35.

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 ANTHROPOLOGICAL INTERVIEW AND LIFE HISTORY/23

Such assertions underline the highly personal nature of the

ethnographic interview in which, for most purposes, the
ethnographer and his or her informant are interrogating each other.
It is of course absolutely true that such confrontations are most fre-
quently not only between members of two different cultures, but
between those whose access to wealth and power is radically dif-
ferent. While it is conceded that, until the interview relationship is
firmly established, the ethnographer may be figuratively at the mer-
cy of the informant, quite the opposite is likely to be the case
thereafter. It is one thing for a reporter to request and be granted an
interview with a Begin or a Sadat, and quite another for an
ethnographer to record the life history of a Hopi, or a Puerto Rican
cane worker. The prerogatives available to the ethnographer, while
they must be used with some restraint, strengthen his or her in-
vestigative powers immensely. How those powers will be used is, of
course, a different matter.
I have already implied that life history studies must grapple with
the problem of typicality or representativeness. One may expect a
life history to reveal to the reader what is typical in that culture, but
not how representative that life is within it. Indeed, many who have
recorded life histories have consciously rejected the use of the life
history for this purpose. If anything, the stress is usually on trying
to "make sense" of the life itself. I say "if anything" because many
anthropological life histories are, for the most part, descriptive ac-
counts intended to speak for themselves. But they would be much
more useful if the recorder would try to say who he or she is,
and why the life history was recorded in the first place. Some of
what are intrinsically the most interesting anthropological life
histories-those by Oscar Lewis, or Leo Simmons' Sun Chief, or
Michael Smith's Dark Puritan, or Walter Dyk's Son of Old Man
Hat-seem to be pushed out in front of the reader at the end of a long
stick, while the character of the collector and the relationship be-
tween him or her and the collected remain largely obscure. In such
instances, the issue of the possible representativeness of the pro-
tagonist is as dormant as the nature of the rapport.
These assertions are consistent with the fictitious Trapnel's
complaints: "The biographer, even at his highest and best, can only
be tentative, empirical. The autobiographer, for his part, is im-
prisoned in his own egotism." But while Trapnel is entitled to con-
clude that only a novel can "imply certain truths impossible to state
by exact definition," historically-oriented scholars disposed to use
the spoken word as data are not thereby obligated to become
novelists-even if some have tried. The choice ought not to be be-
tween a disembodied individual who floats outside and above the
culture and society, on the one hand, and a culture and society
which imprison and make irrelevant the individuality of the infor-
mant, on the other. The biographer-ethnographer must have a con-

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24/MINTZ

ception of how people are at once products and makers of the social
and cultural systems within which they are lodged. He or she must
also make an honest effort, at least after the materials have been col-
lected, to address the issue of how the informant and the
fieldworker were interacting, why they were drawn together, what
developing concerns for (or against) each other influenced the
rhythm and nature of the enterprise. In short, he or she must re-
spond to Conklin's observation that ethnographers carry on "a
unique type of natural history, in which the observer becomes a part
of (and an active participant in) the observed universe."
There are really two contentions here. The first is that the
ethnographer try to define his or her place between the informant
and the reader. The second is that the ethnographer help the reader
to see the informant within the culture and society. Perhaps a little
more can be said about this second assertion. Many social scientists
have grappled with the supposed distinctions between the concepts
of "society" and "culture," and some have even referred to "per-
sonality" as a kind of third or middle term. It may be useful to add
to this view with particular reference to the life history. In his il-
luminating essay on the study of life history, Mandelbaum
distinguishes between the cultural and social dimensions in a
satisfactory fashion. The cultural dimension provides a scenario or
chart, with the attendant understandings and behaviors, for the in-
dividual life; while the social dimension comprises the real-life in-
teractions in which individuals make choices, and even shift
cultural definitions. To these, Mandelbaum adds a psychosocial
dimension; in general, his treatment corresponds to that offered by
Parsons, Geertz, and Wolf.9 Though such conceptual schemata are
never entirely satisfying, they do enable us to think usefully about
our research.
An institution, a cuisine, a complex of belief and behavior tradi-
tional within some society, can be traced backward in time, and its
elements or features isolated and examined. Whether it be pants-
wearing, handshaking, or choosing godparents, the social historian
is often able to provide us with historical guidelines of a kind. Such
materials are "cultural." But at any point in time, in any specific
society, the particular ways people wear pants, shake hands, or
choose godparents, and the ways they start doing them differently,
will depend on numerous considerations that are immediately rele-

David G. Mandelbaum, "The Study of Life History: Gandhi," Current Anthro-

pology, 14 (1973), 177-206; Talcott Parsons, The Social System (Glencoe, IL:
The Free Press, 1951); Clifford Geertz, "Ritual and Social Change: A Javenese Exam-
ple," American Anthropologist, 55 (1957), 32-54; Eric R. Wolf, "Specific Aspects
of Plantation Systems in the New World: Community Sub-Cultures and Social
Class," Plantation Systems of the New World, Social Science Monographs, No. 7
(Washington, DC: Pan American Union, 1959), pp. 136-46.

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 ANTHROPOLOGICAL INTERVIEW AND LIFE HISTORY/25

vant, and that cannot be explained simply by reference to the past.

Such maneuverings are "social." They are the reflections of both
the composition and structure of the social group at that point in
time, and the manifestations of individual variation within the
group. It is in this sense that the elusive phenomenon we dub "per-
sonality" reveals itself at the boundary between social and cultural
perspectives on behavior. To be specific about the life of an infor-
mant, in order to illustrate this assertion, would require too much
narration. Perhaps it is sufficient to say that we make our decisions,
as individuals, under conditions laid down by forces over which we
have unspecified control, and that our perceptions of such condi-
tions clearly influence our sense of autonomy. In getting at the life-
profiles of others by collecting data on their experiences, we may ex-
amine, within limits, the extent to which such profiles are isomor-
phic with each other, or with some aggregate profile of the culture
as a whole-if we know enough about the culture to make such
comparisons possible. Differences among individuals are revealed
not only by differences in the decisions made, but also by differen-
tial perceptions of alternatives.
But there are only two immediately apprehendable ways to get at
the range of variation within one or more cultural norms or values.
One must either find out from a large number of people, by observ-
ing their behavior or by asking them about it; or one must pose to
one or more informants who have acted in accordance with such
norms or values the possibility of alternatives, to which such infor-
mants may then respond with word or deed. Since the ability of peo-
ple to explain their behavior post hoc appears to be very widely
distributed, there are tangible benefits to be gained from studying
decisions that are being made while one observes them, together
with the collection of data on past decisions of a similar kind. For
instance, while allowing for the many possible sources of difference,
I found it useful to ask older informants about their first marital
unions, and, at the same time, collect information on how their
children were entering into comparable unions in the present.
Among other things, such subject matters naturally provoke con-
siderable discussion about how things are not what they used to be.
Although a good deal of phony piety may enter, so do moral
judgments, moral prescriptions, and active comparisons. It is
within such terms that culture, conceived of as a repository of
prescribed opportunities, and society, conceived of as an arena of
maneuver, may be highlighted by the opinions of a single infor-
mant, silhouetting his or her distinctive experience against the
backdrop of our knowledge of the group.
There is no high road to insights of this sort. But since there
seems to be no way to learn about the culture without learning
about the informant, or vice-versa, there are good reasons for mak-
ing the life history interview the last kind of ethnographic undertak-

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26/MINTZ

ing, rather than the first. The questions we learn to ask may not be
the better psychologically, but they should, at least, serve us well in
coaxing the individual, the distinctive, and the idiosyncratic into
clearer view.

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