ANTROPOLOGIENS HEMMELIGHED: Refleksioner over etnografens rolle i studiet af hemmelige ritualer

Resumé

Christian Kordt Højbjerg: The Secret of

Anthropology. Reflections on the Ethnographer’s

Role in the Study of Secret Rituals.

The article gives an account of an apparently

hopeless effort to study men’s secret association

and its masked figure among the Loma

in Guinea. The secret mask is purposely

withheld during the ethnographer’s stay, and

he is not allowed to assist in the meetings of

the men’s society taking place in the sacred

grove. However, the student possesses prior

knowledge about the mask, and information

from the meetings is transmitted constantly.

Therefore, nothing is in faet held secret to

the ethnographer, and the leaders of the

men’s association seem to be aware of it.

Still, secrecy is being practiced by the people

chosen as the object of study. An essential

aspect of secrecy is hereby revealed. Despite

its emptiness, it is efficient in its patteming

of social relations. The methodological point

is that in anthropology, subjectivity can be a

means to objectivity. Not by focusing too

exelusively on the observing scientist, but

rather in the sense that the staging of the

ethnographic encounter by the anthropologist

produces a miscalculation permitting an

understanding of the scientific object. A sort

of role inversion is taking place. The anthropologist

realizes that he has become the victim

of an illusion about the nature of secrecy,

and that he has been subjected to the practice

of secrecy. This lived experience leads to a

concluding observation about the common

but reversed strategies of staging inherent in

secrecy and anthropology. While secrecy deliberately

and inevitably reveals a part of itself

in order to conceal, anthropology is on

the contrary inevitably concealing reality

when constructing its object. But just as secrecy

implies concealment, anthropology is

compelled to unmask reality, at least as a regulative

principle, if it is not to lose its status

as a scientific discipline.