W13-4 Social Anthropology - 2008 - Zeitlyn - Life History Writing and The Anthropological Silhouette

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D AV I D Z E I T LY N
Life-history writing and the

anthropological silhouette
In this paper I explore ways in which anthropologists can and have approached life-histories. I consider some
of the theoretical background to this and discuss life-writing, biography and autobiography. In conclusion,
I see the life-history as grounding anthropological analysis. As a model for future work I introduce the idea
of an ‘anthropological silhouette’: less complete than a biography, and partial, but demonstrably based on an
individual, and honest about its limitations and incompleteness.
Key words life-history, life-writing, autobiography, biography, silhouette
Sample of one
This paper arose from a project in which I am relating the life-history of Diko Madeleine,
a senior Mambila woman, to the twentieth-century history of the village of Somié in
Cameroon. Elsewhere I am writing about Diko herself and the village in which she lived,
but here I concentrate on the theoretical basis for writing about a single individual, on
the anthropological exercise of life-writing and different ways of approaching data and
its analysis. In the following text there are several references to my work with Diko,
but the details of this will be presented elsewhere.
Ty p e s o f a n t h r o p o l o g i c a l l i f e - w r i t i n g
There are many different kinds of life-writing. In their catalogue of life-narrative

genres Smith and Watson (2001: 183–207) identify 52 different genres, few of which
are ethnographic. However, even when life-writing is not ethnographic in focus or
intention, it is still highly relevant to anthropology: indeed much ethnographic practice
resembles that of (some forms of) life-writing. In order to explore some of these
similarities and differences I next briefly consider some contrasting approaches to
life-writing: the anthropologist as ghost-writer, and as biographer, with an aside on
the anthropologist as hagiographer. I then propose a different model for thinking about
the topic.
154 Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale (2008) 16, 2 154–171.

C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists.
doi:10.1111/j.1469-8676.2008.00028.x
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LIFE-HISTORY WRITING AND THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL SILHOUETTE 155
Anthropologist as ghost-writer
Ghost-writers are the anonymous, hidden authors who produce the texts of what are
usually published as the autobiographies of politicians, film stars or famous sporting
personalities. 1 The first person in these texts is not the writer or amanuensis but their
subject, the ostensibly auto-biographical ‘I’, which in this case is not identical with the
scribe. Ghost-writing shares many problems with anthropological life-writing: how
to convey comprehensibly the words of another and remain true to their spirit and
intention. 2 However, such a summary assumes that the spirit and intention of a set of
words are easily elucidated and unambiguous, which is often not the case.
Ghost-writing poses important analytic questions. The ghost-writer (ostensibly
anonymously) helps a busy or less literate person to write their memoirs. Consider
what the professional ghost-writer Andrew Crofts says of the book Sold. (This book,
usually described as ‘Sold by Zana Muhsen’, is the story of a young girl from England
sold by her father into marriage in Yemen). On the website that advertises his services,
Crofts writes:
To get her story on tape Zana and I spent three days together in a hotel suite in
Birmingham and I then spent between two and three months writing. As with all
the authors I ghost for, Zana had complete control over the text, nothing would
even be shown to the agent until she had okayed it, but she changed almost
nothing.
This creates problems for critical readers: despite her approval of the text we cannot
be sure whether any particular nuance reflects her framing of an event, or whether she
simply did not object to Crofts characterisation of it. These are subtle points, but as we
engage with any narrative spoken or textual they need consideration. Another example
provides guidance on its title page. The long journey of Poppie Nongena (Joubert 1980)
is described by its writer as a ‘novel’. However, she claims it as more than a work of
fiction:
This novel is based on the actual life of a black woman living in South Africa today.
Only her name, Poppie Rachel Nongena, born Matati, is invented. The facts were
related to me not only by Poppie herself, but by members of her immediate family
and her extended family or clan, and they cover one family’s experience over the
past forty years.
Implicit in this are a range of different claims to authority, not only that of Joubert
but also those of Poppie and her family (see Penvenne 2000: 155). They claim the
narrator’s right to state how things were, and how things were felt and experienced
by the actors. In an autobiography this is the central pillar of its authority (which
ghost-writing undermines). A conventional autobiographer claims: ‘I as writer can tell
you what it felt like since it happened to me and I remember it accurately’. Such
claims to authority resemble those made by anthropologists who write ethnographies,
1 Dunaway (1992) discusses the contrast between authorised and non-authorised biographies of
famous people.
2 Philippe Lejeune (1989: 264) called this ‘heterobiography in the first person’. The comments below
on ‘collective autobiography’ are also relevant here.

156 D AV I D Z E I T LY N
and critically assess those written by others. These assumptions were questioned by
Clifford and Marcus, the close readers and historians of anthropology. When reading
conventional ethnographies I need to assess the authors’ claims to represent the
people they discuss, which parallel the autobiographers’ claim to represent themselves.
Statements such as ‘Mambila do not have an ancestor cult’ are typical of anthropological
generalisations, for which anthropologists often provide no evidence. On what basis
did they reach the conclusions they report? Did they speak to ten thousand people
or ten? Such problems are endemic to anthropology and we are well aware of them.
We are rightly cautious about generalisation, wary about the limits of what we can
say with confidence, and happy to embrace different degrees of confidence. This also
helps critical readings of biography and autobiography. Early texts from Africa usually
consider ‘exemplary lives’, which are seen as paradigms and are described in universal
terms (unlike, for example, Nelson Mandela’s, which is an ‘extraordinary life’; but see
below on hagiography).
Another term for ghost-written autobiography is collaborative autobiography
(Lejeune 1989: 265). In a memorably titled book, Julie Cruikshank examines the
narrative and cultural presuppositions underlying the ways in which three Yukon
elders talked about their lives. Through their work with Cruikshank we experience
‘Life lived as a story’ as part of ‘Life told as a story’. Lejeune and Cruikshank frame
autobiographical texts as hybrid, the construct of more than one person. For even the
most self-obsessed monologue, if it is to be comprehensible to others, must acknowledge
other points of view and use language (a communal creation). So any life-writing must
be about more than just the isolated self in order to be readable by others. In other
words, the (auto-)biographical subject becomes a sociological metonym: an individual
token that allows us to comprehend a sociological type. 3 Lejeune describes collaborative
autobiographies as texts in which ‘the writer speaks of the as if it were he, by constructing
his role as autodiegetic narrator; the reader must forget the game for the text to keep
its meaning’ (1989: 265). We must recognise this complexity, while ‘bracketing off’ our
recognition in order to participate in the ‘autobiographical pact’ (in Lejeune’s celebrated
phrase). In a recent publication following collaboration between an anthropologist and
a ‘West African bar girl’, Chernoff’s extended introduction both sets the scene and
enables an appropriate ‘bracketing off’ (2003). By doing so he approaches the position
of biographers, my second category.
Anthropologist as biographer
Biography is an interesting model for anthropology, particularly if we generalise the

model of ‘cultural translation’ to the idea of the anthropologist as cultural biographer.
There is a tension between giving an account of a culture and giving an account of an
individual. Introducing his book about Hawa’s life, Chernoff notes that ‘this book is
not quite the same as an autobiography: Hawa was not telling the story of her life; she
was telling stories from her life’ (2003: 93).
My project began with a set of conversations with one individual whose life
would be recognised by most Mambila as long, interesting and exceptional in very
3 Chernoff (2003) discusses many of these issues in the introduction to Stories of an African bar girl,
which he then presents.

obvious ways. For all that, it is exemplary: recognisably a Mambila life, with which
most adult Mambila would empathise. Lives which are unusual in different ways are
often the subjects of biographies. Only relatively recently have social historians and
anthropologists attempted to write life-histories of ‘ordinary people’. The issue of how
others should read and interpret accounts of exceptional lives is brought to the fore
when thinking about the lives of saints.
Anthropologist as hagiographer
The term hagiography is now usually used pejoratively, to mean an account which
only discusses the good and positive aspects of a life, and neglects criticism or even
any discussion of mistakes made or crimes committed. Similar problems, of course,
beset the field of autobiography. One motivation for writing one’s autobiography may
be to set the record straight, but this may be seen by others as self-serving, self-
propaganda and, as such, resembling hagiography. However, there is a strict sense
to the word hagiography. In the introduction to their edited collection, Reynolds
and Capps distinguish ‘sacred biography’, which they use for the biographies of
founders of religions, from hagiography sensu strictu: the biographies of lesser figures
in extant religions (e.g. saints). More importantly for my argument, they talk (1976:
8) of reconstructing the ‘silhouette’ of a historical life, an intriguing idea to which I
return below. 4 There are some parallels in anthropology: Mandelbaum uses the life of
Gandhi to discuss the structure of life-history (1973), and Tonkin talks of exemplary
autobiography (1992: 55). Saints are exemplary, paradigmatic of what a good (holy) life
should be. Accounts of their lives can teach us about the ideals of such lives, which
ordinary humans (usually) fail to live up to. Few South Africans had lives like Nelson
Mandela’s, but his life-story can teach us much about life for many South Africans
under the Apartheid regime in mid-twentieth-century South Africa. The structures
which Mandelbaum identifies 5 in the life of Gandhi apply to ordinary lives as well as
to those of luminary and extraordinary individuals.
Kadar asks ‘Whose life is it anyway?’ (1992). This is one of those questions that
is deceptively easy to ask, and intriguingly hard to answer. Anthropologists often try
to unpack such questions in order to explain their deceptiveness. The one thing that
is clear, even for old-fashioned adherents of the Big Man view of history, is that an
individual does NOT own their own life. Every one of us, even the most stereotypical
or caricature Western individualist, contains multitudes and cannot be understood as
4 Fischer (2003: 195–6) discusses religious autobiography without considering the possibility of
reflexive or self-hagiography. He contrasts ‘religious lives’ and ‘scientific lives’ (from autobiographies
of religious figures and scientists).
5 Mandelbaum distinguishes three broad features in a life-history. First its (biological, social cultural
and psycho-social) Dimensions. Secondly he looks for Turnings, points of transition and choice.
Finally, Adaptations, in which the individual reconciles the constraints of their social position and
those of their Dimensions with the events manifest in the Turnings they have taken. His approach
is less prescriptive than the earlier work of John Dollard who presented completeness criteria for
life-histories from the point of view of a ‘culture and personality’ psychologist. That Dollard was
impressed by Radin’s Crashing Thunder but found the book inadequate by the standards of his
seven criteria reveals his psychological orientation, hankering for totalising and complete accounts
(1935: 260–3).

a lone individual without regard to others around us. Similarly, we do not own either
our life-stories or our genes in the way we own our shirts, otherwise our relationships
to our parents and our children would be fraught with ownership disputes. This is one
of the reasons why anthropologists are drawn to life-writing as a way of exploring
the idiosyncratic and personal in ways that help us to understand the local sense of
what makes this person’s life idiosyncratic, as well as the ways in which their life was
unexceptional. The parallels and asymmetries of perspective and access as we move back
and forth between autobiography and biography must not be ignored. For, as David
Vessey puts it, ‘We are subjects in others’ stories, others are subjects in our stories;
others are authors of our stories, we are authors of others’ stories’ (2002: 2).
The idea of hagiography reminds us of the dangers of focusing on a single life: it
is too easy to view !Nisa as a feminist saint, or Ogotemmêli as an ultra-wise Dogon,
able to condense and explain an entire cultural conceptual system in a few afternoons
with Marcel Griaule and his assistant (Griaule 1965). We should not lose sight of people
as individuals, warts and all. Hagiographers and autobiographers do not tell the only
stories possible. They tend to have axes to grind, sometimes obviously but often less
clearly, challenging a critical reader to interpret. 6
Silhouettes
These three types of life-writing serve as metaphorical extremes within which my work
fits. These lead me to my last orienting point, which is a metaphor, inspired by Reynolds
and Capps (see above) and drawn from visual anthropology: the idea of the silhouette.
A silhouette stems from physical optics just as a photograph does. In the eighteenth
century, silhouettes were produced by using a lantern to cast the subject’s shadow
onto a ground glass screen from which it was drawn, then cut out by the artist. In the
early nineteenth century, silhouettes or ‘physiognotraces’ were produced mechanically
using a modified pantograph to trace the silhouette onto a folded sheet of paper, to
be cut into a silhouette (see the extended discussion in Bellion 2003 and Strathern
1997 for a discussion of Roman imago: wax deathbed impressions with parallels to
the silhouette). Such silhouettes have an empirical basis that, unlike photographs, do
not disguise or dissemble their artefactuality and incompleteness. The representation
cannot, unlike Narcissus confusing his reflection in water for a human, be confused for
the subject ‘itself’. As Reason suggested (1991: 168), it has more in common with the
fate of Narcissus’ shy lover, Echo, who can only repeat what is said to her and thereby
evokes our recollection of the original source. Unlike a photograph, a silhouette does
not pretend to be a simulacrum so, perhaps contentiously, it has a different relation
from a photograph to both the person portrayed and its viewers. It can serve as a
helpful metaphor for ethnographic analysis: we can think of talk (the recounting of a
life-story), transformed into text, as delineating the silhouette of a life-history. Our goal
6 Crapanzano (1980, 1977) provides one of the clearest cases in which his informant’s own account
is, to say the least, self-serving (see other discussion in Blackman 1992a). This poses a challenge for
anthropology. The postmodern response is to adopt a relativist position (see e.g. Driessen 1998)
in which all accounts are valid and the judgement of an account as self-serving is impossible. I
argue elsewhere for a critical realist position in which warranted judgements are possible (Zeitlyn
unpublished).

is a silhouette, honest about its incompleteness, yet striving to faithfulness around the
edges where relatively dispassionate accuracy is possible. 7
These stereotypes of life-writing types (ghost-writing, hagiography, biography,
silhouette) illuminate, in different ways, the role of the anthropologist as translator,
both straightforwardly linguistic and metaphorically cultural. One further important
aspect extends the linguistic dimension to embrace the importance of, in Tedlock’s
memorable title, The spoken word and the work of interpretation (1983).
In anthropological analysis the spoken word must be transcribed before or in
the process of translation. Analytic interpretation follows the act of speaking. This is
profoundly different from the interpretative practice of the co-conversants, which is
immediate and part of the event. If they don’t understand they can say so or signal it
using conversational cues that change the subsequent speech events. Transcription forces
a move from the interactivity and immediacy of conversational exchange to the fixity
of words on paper. Whereas in the original conversations Diko was an interlocutor, a
critical and central party to the conversations, now she risks becoming definitive, so
she can seem to ‘speak to the audience’ without the audience being able to talk back.
Such problems beset all transcription. Voices change as they are written. The translation
theorist House (2001) noted that transcription enacts a ‘translation of medium’ from
oral to written which is more significant than any subsequent translation into another
language. Patai (1988: 147–9) notes another effect of transcription: it distances the
speaker from their audience. Her transcription uses line endings to convey the pattern
of speech, including pauses, repetitions and so forth. Like the transcripts of conversation
analysis, the result is faithful but it is hard to read the nuances; we are distanced by the
written text. (Raphael (1998) discusses other problems of transcription.) 8
I have discussed translation elsewhere (Zeitlyn 2005) where I described anthropo-
logical translation as a version of a text that may be less well rendered than a good
literary translation, but that helps anthropologists understand what is being said. An
anthropological translation unpacks some of the unvoiced assumptions that speakers
and audience take for granted but that need to be spelled out for those with a different
cultural background, and for those reading with comparative analysis in mind. An
anthropological translation provides a bridge over what Lejeune (1989: 211–15) calls the
‘ethnological gap’ between reader, writer/speaker and transcriber. This is the ‘analyst’s
task of constructing a framework so that an outsider can understand [the account] as
would another member of the subculture’ (Agar 1980: 228).
7 Smith and Watson (2001: 130) cite a different but similar metaphor: Leiris talking of autobiography
as ‘scratching’ a set of marks which (partially) defines him; life-writing less as silhouette than as
palimpsest or sgraffito. Using a different metaphor, Howard Becker (1970) described life-histories
as contributing to the overall mosaic formed by complementary research of many different types
focused on the same place, area or problem.
8 Frank (1979: 76) discusses the problems of editing an oral account transcribed from a tape recording.
Crapanzano (1984: 957) talks of the ‘transformation’ caused by writing down the spoken word.
Titon (1980) argues for full transcription and publication. He distinguishes life-stories from life-
histories, focusing on the narrators’ creativity in crafting the telling of their own story. Frank’s
phenomenologically inspired approach blurs the hard distinction that Titon sees between story and
history. Phenomenological involvement also includes a recognition of coevality, which for Fabian
(1983) is too often lacking. Fabian also points to the misleading fixity given by asynchronic accounts
of timeless others. This is related to but remains separate from the fixity given to spoken words
when they are transcribed.

Genres
Biography and autobiography are separate genres. I mean this in more than a literary
or stylistic sense: how one talks, the mode of telling, says as much as the words
themselves. This assertion distances me from many of my predecessors. It represents
a textual turn quite different from that of the anthropological postmodernists such as
Fischer and Marcus. My approach is textual, but in the sense of textual scholarship,
the data-driven, empirical humanities disciplines concerned with the decipherment of
manuscripts and fragments of texts. Many interpretations are still possible but they are
constrained by the texts. Indeed, ‘constrained interpretation’ neatly summarises much
of the anthropological enterprise.
This poses problems for an account in English addressed to a literate but non-
Mambila speaking readership who are incapacitated by that lack; they would be none
the wiser if I played the tape and let Diko tell her own life-history. 9 Therefore I must
translate; as an academic I must transcribe; and as an anthropologist I must interpret. We
think our way through people’s lives, our own first among them. As anthropologists we
attempt to consider other lives in ways both similar to, and distinct from, conventional
Western biography and autobiography.
Even within the Western tradition there are texts that challenge conventional
biography and autobiography. For example, Roland Barthes attempted to write about
his own life without writing an autobiography (1977). Autobiographies intrigue. Like
diaries they promise more than they deliver to a sociologically minded reader. We want
more than hints; we sense evasions that intrigue as much as (possibly more than) the
revelations that only some forms of autobiography can reveal. What did I think when I
first met my wife? Only I can answer (if I so choose, if I still remember, if I remember
accurately). In those qualifications are profound problems for autobiography: how
can accuracy be assessed? Counter-intuitively, biographies sometimes go further than
autobiographies. As well as reporting autobiographical revelations, a biographer can
provide more information than an autobiographer chooses to reveal (see my comments
on hagiography above). This includes the wider context, which illuminates and is
illuminated by the subject of the biography. I now consider some precedents for this
enterprise.
Precedents
Of the anthropologists who have written life-histories, few discuss how they obtained
their data; how it was recorded, transcribed and translated. This is problematic for a
critical reading.
Rosaldo’s (1976) account of the life of Tukbaw, his Ilongot landlord, mentor and
friend, provides an anthropological example. 10 As Rosaldo wrote, sometimes a life-
history is collected by accident. He realised that he had unwittingly collected the
material for a life-history while being told how to behave properly, being told off, or
9 In parallel cases, Blackman (1992b) and Schneider (1992) discuss the reception of life-histories in
their communities of origin.
10 Keesing (1978) presents another. He elaborated on the process of writing other Kwaio biographies
in subsequent articles (1985, 1992).

chatting at the end of the day. The anthropologist must then write the life-history,
usually when the subject is absent (sometimes after their death); this exercise resembles
piecing together a jigsaw puzzle. 11 My suggestion is that the completed puzzle will be
less a portrait than a silhouette.
Rosaldo gives some explanation of how Tukbaw’s life-history was written. He starts
by explaining:
how I came, almost by accident, to collect Tukbaw’s life-history as he told it. This
is more than a matter of intellectual scrupulousness on my part; my conviction is
that anthropological life-histories are stories told to a particular person which
inevitably reflect this personal relation. To assess and interpret properly the
content of a life-history one must know something of both the speaker and
the listener. Taken together, the generic life cycle and the story of how the life-
history was collected provide background for lengthy verbatim extracts from
Tukbaw’s narrative. These extracts are ordered chronologically, from infancy
through adulthood, rather than in the order collected. (1976:122–3)
That re-ordering is significant and I return to it below. Without more information we

can only guess at the extent of his editorial input. We cannot question the editorial input
into creating a life-history (I return to this point when discussing !Nisa, below). This is
true for most published life-histories, whether past or contemporary. 12 However, the
internet might provide a partial solution (see below).
In the absence of narrative flow I cannot let Diko tell the story ‘merely’ in my
translation: I must intervene as editor, as writer and as anthropologist. The text is
mine and it is the village’s; it relates not just to Diko, but to her children, her co-
wives’ children, and the village as a whole (I could also include a larger swathe of
middle-belt societies between the cultural south and cultural north of Cameroon, 13
Nigeria and other West African countries). This amounts to conflation of Dilthey’s
contrast between narrator and historian: ‘the narrator achieves his effect by emphasizing
the significant elements of a course of events. The historian describes certain human
beings as significant and certain turning points in life as meaningful’ (1961: 107). The
narrative excellence that !Nisa brings to her life-story refutes any simple or direct
link to literacy or education as determining factors. I am not convinced that there
is as profound or general a contrast with Western tradition as the Comaroffs imply
(1992: 25–7, see below) but there is considerable variation. Mambila are not in the
habit of constructing life-histories. So !Nisa’s narrative skills must be attributable either
to a general cultural predilection or concern, or to some complex combination of
factors (including preferences for particular narrative styles), literacy and education
that together can explain the concern about the individual in western Europe and
among gatherer-hunters such as the !Kung and its relative lack among the agricultural
peasant communities of western central Africa, such as the Mambila.
Before pursuing the theoretical implications of anthropological life-writing, we
should consider some precedents. Other examples illustrate some of the issues examined
11 Some similar examples from Africa are included in Romero (1988), some describing similar starting
points to Rosaldo.
12 Crapanzano (1980), unusually, discusses in detail how the life-story was a product of his relationship
with Tuhami.
13 Life-histories from several such are included in Bah (1998).

above but also raise the question of gender. Voices, especially women’s voices, used to
appear too rarely in the historical literature. 14
The earliest biographies from Africa concern slaves and former slaves. They were
written in Europe, the Americas and Africa, from 1772 onwards, and were part of
the anti-slavery movement and missionary endeavour (usually combined). Many are
conversion narratives, such as those collected by the missionary and ethnographer
Kootz-Kretschmer in East Africa. Importantly, she belonged to the Moravian church.
This church has a ‘view of spiritual progress [that] involved the entire career of a member,
who was encouraged to write his or her autobiography to demonstrate the working of
the Lord’ (Wright 1989 and 1993: 23). Consequently, narratives from the early twentieth
century preserve opinions of some East African people of whom we would otherwise
know nothing. Significantly, these life-histories were recorded in the vernacular so,
although affected by the problems of transcription without sound-recording, they were
not originally beset by translation problems. They were collected in the context of the
colonial imposition of the abolition of slavery within Africa. It is salutary to read them
alongside Audrey Richards on the Bemba, enthusiastic slavers of neighbouring groups,
among whom the Moravians found converts (Wright 1993: 6–7).
The early texts are written with clear purposes, such as promoting the anti-slavery
movement, so they sought to demonstrate that Africans had similar sensibilities to the
Europeans who were sending them as slaves to the Americas. Such texts play down
cultural differences. Missionary texts (including those from the Moravian church)
may make more of cultural difference, but they are primarily conversion narratives.
They assume a structural teleology in which a pagan lifestyle before conversion
is described but denigrated: compared unfavourably to the civilised assumption of
Christian (European) values following conversion. These texts, like the anti-slavery
ones, were written both as propaganda for their causes and for fund-raising reasons.
Their intended readership was not academic, nor did they aspire to such an audience. 15
Other African lives are reported in later, more complex documents such as Ten Africans,
edited by Marjorie Perham in 1936. Her introduction explicitly states her purposes: to
introduce European readers to some individual Africans; to individualise the colonised
and subjugated masses (my terms). She notes ‘I did no more than offer a few tentative
suggestions as to the lines upon which the narrator should be guided if guidance should
prove possible without injury to the spontaneity of his subject. The African should
be encouraged to sketch the main events of his life; should be coaxed to explain any
customs which he might otherwise regard as requiring no explanation; should refer
to the coming of the Europeans if that event seemed to interest him, and should be
invited to philosophize a little at the end, if philosophy seemed to come naturally
to him’ (1963 (1936): 14). There are two women among the ten Africans. One is
Nosente, a senior Xhosa, whose history was ‘recorded’ by Monica Hunter (or rather
transcribed and translated). It is a classic ‘as-told-to’, a literary genre that is true of
many recently published ghost-written autobiographies (see above) and early exercises
in ‘autobiography’.
14 Hence the decipherment Liz Stanley had to perform to rescue Hannah Cullwick from the
editorialising of her husband and employer Arthur Munby (Stanley 1984 and 1986).
15 Patricia Geesey’s collection (1997) includes discussion of these issues.

Rereading the precedents: !Nisa and other voices
Marjorie Shostack’s !Nisa is the best known anthropological life-history. As mentioned

above, Mambila are very different from !Kung, and !Nisa is very different from Diko.
The differences between Mambila and !Kung on one hand, and between !Nisa and Diko
on the other, exemplify much anthropology and life-writing theory. Mambila do not talk
about sex in the same way as !Kung do, and although extra-marital affairs are common
in Mambila, as in many societies, my impression is that they are not discussed, even
with confidantes, as !Kung women (not only !Nisa) discussed them with Shostak. 16 In
my opinion, the differences of culture and age are more significant than the difference
of sex, although of course that has had its role to play. It is occasionally possible for
foreign male anthropologists to talk to Mambila women about sex (during the women’s
masquerade (suàà bɔ̀v ) and, although I have not ‘talked dirty’ with Diko, at least I
have had an opportunity to talk frankly about sexual matters. However, for Mambila
of both sexes adultery is a serious matter and people do not talk about it lightly, nor
usually at all.
Nor do Mambila people talk about themselves in the way that !Nisa did with
Shostak (see discussion of the Comaroffs, below). In the introduction to !Nisa Shostak
quotes from her conversation with Bey, an elderly !Kung woman, in which they circled
around each other and got nowhere; I think this will be familiar to many readers. Shostak
contrasts 50-year-old !Nisa with Bey, aged 75, who was the oldest woman in the camp
(1990: 37–8). She quotes a conversation with Bey which conveys the frustration of being
unable to induce an informant to discuss the topics of concern to the researcher.
Bey, [. . .] we’ve already talked about how people still remember some of their
childhood experiences, no matter how old they are. You agreed and said that was
true for yourself. Won’t you tell me about the things you still remember?
Yes, I certainly remember things from my childhood. I am old and have

experienced much. You ask me about something and I’ll tell you about it.
Why don’t you tell me about anything that comes into your mind about your
childhood, something that has stayed with you over the years?
Are you saying that people don’t remember their childhoods? They do. Ask me
and I’ll tell you.
Tell me about the things your mother and father did.
Fine. They brought me up, gave me food, and I grew and grew and then I was an
adult. That’s what they did. (1990: 37–8)
This was not exactly my experience with Diko, but I think that many researchers who
have attempted to collect oral histories will recognise the experience (there are generic
problems for young people talking to those much older). Shostak started working with
!Nisa in the late 1960s, and some of her topics were an explicit response to feminism.
!Nisa was then about 50 and Shostak in her late twenties. By contrast Diko was in
16 See Draper (1992) for an account of other !Kung women talking to a different anthropologist.

her seventies when I started working with her in my late twenties; in 2003 she was
over 90. Age contributed to Shostak’s problems when talking with Bey, but I think
they also stem from variation in the self-perception which leads one to make narrative
out of one’s own life (Waterson 2001: 5–6). Especially in societies without literate
traditions, such activity is uncommon. That is true of the Mambila. To ask someone
for the story of their life presumes that lives can be cast as stories. This is not the
case in Mambila, and the conversations that I have had with Diko were artificial and
somewhat strained. The Comaroffs discuss this issue, summarising it as ‘Biography is
anything but innocent’ (1992: 25). They question the cultural and historical specificity
of biography as resting on the conceit that individuals control their own destinies. They
warn against an ethnocentric imposition of Western models of life-history. This echoes
some of Waterson’s concerns, without recognising her more general psychological point
that ‘some coherent memory of the past’ is required in order to act in the world. 17 The
most important question this raises is about the degree and quality of the coherence
with which our memories are organised. The Comaroffs’ counsel is not to desist from
the study of life-history altogether, but to proceed with caution.
Edward Bruner makes a similar point: ‘A life lived is what actually happens. A life
experienced consists of the images, feelings, sentiments, desires, thoughts and meanings
known to the person whose life it is. [. . .] A life as told, a life history, is a narrative
influenced by the cultural conventions of telling, by the audience, and by the social
context’ (quoted in Denzin 1989: 30).
To return to !Nisa, Clifford (1986: 103–9) points out that we are given no idea of
how !Nisa told her stories through the series of interviews with Shostak. Shostak was
faced with no small editorial task in writing the book we know today. She organised
it around a classical chronological armature, presenting stories from !Nisa’s life in
historical sequence, not in the order in which they discussed them (see above). We can
only speculate whether that is how !Nisa herself chose to talk 18 (Shostak’s papers are
yet to be archived). Clifford remarks that the author is faced with an impossible task
(1986: 109): either one must follow the speaker (and the rambling conversations at issue)
or use Western literary conventions to produce a book that is readable; there was no
straightforward way of doing both. 19
Another set of contrasts between Diko and !Nisa concerns the intellectual
background to the research: Shostak was part of the 1960s Kalahari Hunter-Gatherer
research project. The project was explicitly inter-disciplinary, but was self-consciously
interested in contemporary hunting and gathering groups as providing information
about social forms and ways of life in prehistory (for all its explicit recognition of
twentieth-century change with the advent of Tswana and Herero pastoralists). Much of
their research took a positivist approach to many aspects of social life and this research
informed Shostak’s work and her book. This background has been fiercely attacked
by revisionists such as Wilmsen (e.g. 1997) in the hunter-gatherer debates of the 1990s.
Shostak set out to answer a very different set of questions from those asked by Lee,
17 Linde (1993) explores the psychology of making sense of one’s own life.
18 Crapanzano (1984: 957–8) criticises the editing out of Shostak’s questions, especially about sensitive
topics such as sex, where the style of questioning may influence the answer received.
19 The internet may now provide a solution: one can post source material on the web, making
it available for those who want access to the material with less editorial mediation from the
anthropologist. Thus we can demonstrate empirical responsibility and still feel free to recast the
words spoken and the sequence of topics so as to be comprehensible to our readers.

Devore and Marshall, and especially to understand ‘how they felt about their lives’ (1990:
5). Yet perhaps this asks too much: at home in Britain, as in Somié village in Cameroon,
sometimes I feel unable to answer the question of ‘how I feel about my life’ for myself
or those close to me, let alone others – even if they were raised as I was. Shostak was
reacting to the positivism of Lee and Devore’s work. The intellectual climate in which
Shostak worked was very different from that in which Lila Abu-Lughod wrote only 12
years later. Influenced by Clifford and other anthropological postmodernists, as well as
feminist theorists, Abu-Lughod sought to write ‘against culture’ (1993: 6ff), identifying
several problems with the concept, especially its homogenising effects and the way that
talking about a culture reduces the agency of its members. Both sought to find a path
between generalisation (‘we are all one’) and conflicting problems of particularism (‘no
one else can share my experience’: a form of solipsism). Abu-Lughod’s solution is to
concentrate on story-telling, on the individual story-tellers; she refuses to append a
conclusion, denying the reader the closure that would give. The book finishes, but the
people live on.
For Abu-Lughod, like Dilthey before her, individuals can only be understood
in their social context, yet that context can be communicated and approached by
considering some exemplary individuals. As Abu-Lughod says: ‘attending to the
particulars of individuals’ lives need not imply disregard for the forces and dynamics
that are not locally based; the effects of extra-local or long-term processes are always
manifested locally and specifically’ (1993: 8; see also 14–15). This closely accords with
work such as that of Shula Marks in South Africa. Marks used the letters exchanged
between three women in the first half of the twentieth century to present those women
as unique individuals living in circumstances not of their making. As Marks says:
the correspondence moves us beyond the aridity of an unpeopled political

economy, to the ambiguities of everyday life. Yet through it we can see the
overarching constraints of social structure on human agency, and the complex
relationship of individual psychology with a culture-bounded social order.
(1987: 1)
Elsewhere, Marks makes a similar point: ‘Undiluted personal narratives have a power of
their own, not to be usurped by analysis. Yet in the interpretation of such texts, history
claims a place beyond mere elucidation’ (1993: 123).
Approaching lives, approaching life-histories
When considering texts or transcribed conversations as the raw material for anthro-
pological analysis it is helpful to consider approaching the texts twice: first as literary
analysts, secondly as anthropologists. In reality we do both together, but the conceit
of separation helps an initial consideration of the issues concerned. The literary analyst
is concerned with the production and composition of texts, concentrating on the who,
how, where, why and when of textual creation. The anthropological approach typically
starts by asking ethnographic questions of the resulting texts, which can lead to a set of
worries about representativeness. The issue of representativeness is of concern whether
or not we use life-history or case studies. Much ethnographic research focuses on single

or rare events and uses them as the basis for exploring wider social phenomena. 20 An
approach of methodological pluralism that triangulates different sorts of data provides
a robust solution to the question of the representativeness of a single life-history or case
study.
A closely related but somewhat different solution to the concern about repre-
sentativeness is what Krupat calls the ‘collectivized autobiography’ (1989: 122). 21 He
discusses Yellow Wolf, who told his life-story to McWhorter in front of witnesses who
corroborated and corrected the narrative. This is a variety of laying bare the mechanism
of composition, or ‘baring the device’ (119). To a large extent the tapes and transcripts of
conversations with Diko can serve the same function. The discussions between people
in the original conversations reveal their shared understandings, enabling generalisation
beyond the person who is the focus of my concern.
Moving from the spoken words to background assumptions enables me to escape
what Lila Abu-Lughod (1993: 22) calls the ‘relentless specificity’ of focusing on just
one person and one telling, and instead to present a more general account. This uses the
conversations with and the stories told by Diko as starting points for ethnographical
exploration.
Co-conversants with a shared culture make presuppositions that form the unspoken
background to their conversations. Bozzolli (1991) argues that these contingent
specificities make interviews unrepeatable, yet give them particular value and offer
sources of insight when unpacked by the anthropologist.
Texts are written, composed. Someone picks up a pen and writes, or types. How
is the resulting text different from one written while someone else speaks? Or if one
person speaks to a translator, who reports their words to a third person who writes? Is
it significantly different if one person is both translator and scribe? Is a text in which
the first-person narrator is preserved by the transcriber essentially different from a
biography, in which the narrator’s voice is sometimes heard? All these cases, as discussed
above, involve a complex hybridity. Indeed, the aspects of inter-textual reference and
authorial dispersion are perhaps easier to grasp here than in the conventional subjects
of literary analysis such as novels or poems.
Jean Davison neatly summarises the problem:
Often, as in the life-histories in this collection, the narrative is audio-taped, then

translated and transcribed into a form that is rendered meaningful to a reading
audience outside the culture of the narrator. As a result, life-history as a literary
genre straddles autobiography and biography. Whereas a life-history is recorded
by an ethnographer, and the transcribed text adheres to the informant’s oral
narrative, it approximates autobiography. However, once the ethnographer begins
to rearrange or delete material found in the original transcription in order to clarify
meaning for an external reading audience, the ‘impress’ of a second person other
than the original narrator is felt. (1989: 6)
20 In life-history research this parallels Denzin’s concern with epiphanic moments in life (1989: 70–3).
Although this came originally from his work on recovering alcoholics in AA, the idea has broad
application, and connects with Life Stage Transitions and Mandelbaum’s Turnings (see footnote
above).
21 For Lejeune this is ‘the autobiography of those who do not write’ (cited in Smith and Watson
2001: 144). This type of autobiography is not mentioned by Kluckhohn (1945), Langness (1965)
or Watson and Watson-Franke (1985) in their surveys of anthropological life-writing.

An anthropological life-history, whether we see it as metaphor, questioning activity

(Collingwood 1950), negotiated co-composition, or silhouette (my preferred metaphor)
is the right sort of hybrid complex. It is sensitive to the context of its own production, to
the phenomenology of interaction that led to its writing (Frank 1979). It is sensitive to
the social context, to change and to the wider factors that shape individual lives without
losing sight of the individual interpretations and understandings through which humans
make the worlds they live in.
Conclusions
Anthropology confers an odd, unchosen, immortality. It is a literary product but a

bizarre one: the names of a few individuals (!Nisa, Baba of Karo, Ogotemmêli and
Muchona are African examples) will be remembered in ways in which most of their
friends and contemporaries will not. Historians working in European archives often
talk of individuals centuries dead, and know them so well that some can recognise the
handwriting of, for example, Queen Elizabeth I. She is a historic personality and much
history revolves around her.
However, this in an age of subaltern studies, and I am an anthropologist. Some
anthropology creates, often as a by-product of other interests, documents (that may
contribute to archives) about those whose lives would otherwise probably not be
archived. In this sense we accrete material for future subaltern studies, for future
generations of researchers of various disciplines. Other people’s lives are documented in
texts that they themselves have written. Raoul (2001) considers individuals whose ‘lives
are saved’ through the survival of their personal diaries. Without the chance survival of
the manuscripts and their passage to publication nothing would survive of the women
whom Raoul considers except, possibly, the record of their births and deaths. Diko and
I met and talked, and her words now have a new life on paper.
However, my work with Diko was not an archival exercise. As anthropologist rather
than historian, the material to archive remains a by-product. Diko’s conversations help
reveal Mambila society by revealing her own understanding of it. The way she saw the
play of systems of power and authority (without ever using such terms) and how they
changed over the last century helps us understand Mambila society.
I have two further conclusions: one that of Marjorie Shostak, the other my own.
Shostak, a pioneer of life-writing in modern anthropology, has been an important
interlocutor in this paper. In a key collection, Interpreting women’s lives (in which
complicity and authorial complexity are discussed) Shostak concludes that
It is for Shmuel, !Nisa, and the silent others they represent, as well as for ourselves,
that we should continue to record these lives and memories. The ethical and
methodological problems may be formidable, but they are small compared to
the goal. Indeed, the most important ethical message regarding life-histories is
not a restriction but an obligation: we should make every effort to overcome
obstacles, to go out and record the memories of people whose ways of life often
are preserved only in those memories. And we should do it, urgently, before they
disappear. (1989: 239)
Finally, I return to my parallel with the silhouette. The many conversations I had with
Diko over 18 years do not add up to a conventional life-history. However, I think

they may be described as producing an anthropological silhouette: less complete than

a biography, but demonstrably based on an individual, and honest about its limitations
and incompleteness. The work of anthropology gives substance to the ‘anthropological
silhouette’:
Acknowledgements
This paper is based on material presented at the 2003–4 Evans Pritchard Lectures at
All Souls College, Oxford. I am very grateful to the Warden and the Electors to the
lectureship for giving me the opportunity to explore these ideas, and to the staff of All
Souls for making my stay there so productive. I could not have written this without the
help and trust, not only of Diko herself, but also the rest of the population of Somié
which is a gift I can never fully reciprocate. Anna Rayne has helped in more ways than
can be imagined. Bill Watson provided incisive and helpful criticism of a later version
of the paper. To all these I say jie, jie (thank you in Mambila).
David Zeitlyn
Department of Anthropology, University of Kent,
Canterbury CT2 7NR
D.Zeitlyn@kent.ac.uk
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14698676, 2008, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1469-8676.2008.00028.x by National Yang Ming Chiao Tung Unive, Wiley Online Library on [09/02/2023].

Life-history writing and the

Key words life-history, life-writing, autobiography, biography, silhouette

There are many different kinds of life-writing. In their catalogue of life-narrative

154 Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale (2008) 16, 2 154–171.

Biography is an interesting model for anthropology, particularly if we generalise the

That re-ordering is significant and I return to it below. Without more information we

Rereading the precedents: !Nisa and other voices

Marjorie Shostack’s !Nisa is the best known anthropological life-history. As mentioned

Yes, I certainly remember things from my childhood. I am old and have

Tell me about the things your mother and father did.

the correspondence moves us beyond the aridity of an unpeopled political

Approaching lives, approaching life-histories

Often, as in the life-histories in this collection, the narrative is audio-taped, then

An anthropological life-history, whether we see it as metaphor, questioning activity

Anthropology confers an odd, unchosen, immortality. It is a literary product but a

they may be described as producing an anthropological silhouette: less complete than

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