Participant observation belongs to anthropological method. But it has great meaning in daily life too. If you want to understand people whether they are your family or live in a nation halfway around the world, we need to be a truthful and kind observer and truthful and kind participant at once.
The way we observe and the way we participate need to be beautiful: "All beauty," Eli Siegel stated, "is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves." This is an urgently important principle of Aesthetic Realism, and it is a guide to anthropological method and to having a good life. In the following I give, briefly, some of the reason why.
Participation and observation are opposites. We can participate mockingly or with a desire to understand; we can observe coldly as if persons are "specimens" or with sympathy. We can separate ourselves from the world and "observe it" or observe with a desire to see people from within. Both opposites--participation and observation can be in our minds beautifully or in an ugly way that hurts ourselves. We can feel,"I don't want to have to do with THESE PEOPLE. I'll look on, I'll gather data, but remain off to the side." Or in the opposite mood of ego we can feel, "I'll really rub elbows with them, eat with them, flatter them, use them for my own purposes--but try to know them...? Not on your life."
I have written on both mistakes, and the contempt from which both come. Mind working this way is the enemy to truth and humanity. I have written about this in my own life. What I learned from Aesthetic Realism about these opposite, these opposing forces, deepened my understanding of anthropology and made me both kinder and more accurate as a man.
I first studied Aesthetic Realism in classes taught by Eli Siegel. And I now study with Ellen Reiss, the Chairman of Education at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation in the professional classes she teaches. See:
http://www.perey-anthropology.net/Oksapmin-A.htm -- Oksapmin Society and World View -- This is an ethnography.
http://www.perey-anthropology.net/New_Per.html -- "A New Perspective for American Anthropology: the Philosophy of Aesthetic Realism"
To participate and observe respectfully IS field anthropology. It is very clear, as anyone can see, that a human touch, the sound of a voice, the awareness of another's preferences, the opportunity to ask the right questions, the desire to know as deeply as you can what is in another's mind, cannot easily be replaced if we want to understand another culture or another self. And if we want to respect ourselves.
Yes, there is the deeply comprehending of another self who lived at another time or in another place--I saw this masterful comprehension in Eli Siegel, in his lectures on history, literature, the human self. There is such a thing as the study of culture at a distance.
I agree with Ivo Carneiro de Sousa as to
Marcel Mauss -- Mauss (in
The Gift) wrote a masterpiece without participant observation. In my own reading, Ruth Benedict published some of the best written brief ethnographies in the literature without setting foot in their cultures: the Dobu, and the American Northwest Coast. (In fact she lived with the Zuni people of the Southwest whom she also writes about extremely vividly). Meanwhile when she depended only on the observations of another, as admirable as her work was, it made for certain lacks (see Helen Codere's
The Smoke of Their Fires, for instance, to see what this can mean).
For those who want to know, there is a novel based on my experience as an anthropological participant-observer in Papua New Guinea. You can read chapters online. It's titled
Gwe: Young Man of New Guinea--a novel against racism <
http://www.perey-anthropology.net/GWE_Harlem_Book_Fair-authors-intro.htm >
If we do write successfully from a distance it is because we have become participants THROUGH observation. And deeply we WERE participant observers.
