I remember reading a critique of Luhrmann that echoed my own (may have been Greenwood). Interpretive Drift, for instance, is a category that seems to be so vague as to be useless. Any individual when he or she becomes assimilated into a group will tend to take on the language and beliefs of that group. That holds true whether it's a magical group, an online forum, a therapy group, the military, or even a place of employment. It seemed like Luhrmann's interpretive drift was really describing her own process as an ethnographer becoming more and more used to magical work, but she seemed too afraid to claim this for herself (don't want to psychologize too much, but some of it seems so obvious to me in her writing - that's not an academically rigorous criticism, I know, but oh well.)
I wouldn't criticize her for lack of objectivity - in fact, I think it's the opposite. It seemed like she was desperately clinging to this myth
of complete objectivity so much that it kept her from having any substantive insights. Her tendency to keep everything at arm's length was ultimately the work's failure, imo. She even says that when she started to have magical experiences, she basically ignored them because
they wouldn't stand up to rational scrutiny.
As far as her no longer working in this field, I remember a letter she wrote to US News and World Report shortly after the Heaven's Gate incident, in which she uncategorically states that the witchcraft thing was something she did to complete a dissertation and publish a book, but that was the extent of her personal involvement and interest. If that's not a prime example of taking the data and running, I don't know what is. Going through initiations and being disingenuous about your intentions IS a methodological problem. Having said all this, her work was essential and groundbreaking and is the standard by which
subsequent ethnographies are judged, for better or worse. To be honest, I'm probably a bit biased as a Performance Studies scholar trained by Dwight Conquergood who practically preached the gospel of personal committment to your ethnographic subject (so much that he lived with and endlessly supported Hmong refugees and Chicago street gang members, his two main ethnographic subjects in his later career).
Has any critiqued Luhrmann’s fieldwork methodology itself? Aside from the Suster anecdote, all I’ve heard so far are a widespread feeling of betrayal among her consultants. I don’t want to minimize that, but that sort of emotion is common among consultants in many different
settings, especially in modern times when the chance substantially increases that the people studied will actually read the ethnographer’s work. Whether that emotion is justified or not, or whether it derives from the state of anthropology itself, or academia, or (where I intuitively place it) the act of writing about someone else while attempting to maintain some distance, is quite another topic.
Thus, can anyone answer that first question?
Dan Harms
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SUNY Cortland Memorial Library
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