Truth be told, I do the ctrl + D thing too when the inuendo and doo-doo get thick. Surely I missed something by doing it too quickly in this thread. But, I woke up thinking today ...
Is the issue in part about direct experience being the basis of some kind of epistemic privilidge? That is, "you can't know if you haven't lived it?". If so, I'd like to weigh in on the side of those who, at some level, accord direct experience some priviledges.
Not, of course, that we can't opine. But I feel basic humility suggests a receptive, reflective attitude is in order when we find ourselves before a "voice of experience."
This is a raging debate in anthropology, for obvious reasons: all sorts of natives asking "where the hell do you get off talking about us that way?!", etc. And (gasp!) some natives even "studying up", taking a critical look at tribes of bankers, say, on Manhattan island.
In that debate I have found the work of Renato Rosaldo very powerful, convincing on the qualified/limited priviledging of experience that humility would seem to suggest. Chap. 1 of his _Culture and Truth_ is exemplary.[*] Entitled "Grief and the Headhunters Rage", he tells a very moving story. His PhD field work was among Ilongot headhunters of the Phillipines. A basic question he asked was "why do you cut off heads?" The answer, by and large, was simple: the rage felt in confronting death. But for the anthropologist this was not good enough, and he turned to all manner of sophisiticated theorizing to find answeres, mining the works of Levi Strauss, etc. etc. Some time later he experienced this rage himself, following the tragic death of his wife, anthropologist Michelle Rosaldo. And, he relates, he then found the original explanation much more satisfying. Point: there was something in the realm of experience (emotion/cognition) that finally allowed him to understand, to which he previously didn't have access.
This is not about de-authorizing (silencing) anyone. It is about affirming that experience does authorize certain versions of things, though how much and when is still, I admit, dicey.
This is common sense, of course. But, I fear, a common sense often lacking when we get into shit fits about who can speak for who and when.
Anyway, if anyone picks up on Rosaldo, I'd love to talk about it.
Tom
[*] The chapter is also a direct criticism of Geertz's suggestion that ethnography is about producing good "thick descriptions" of complex cultural systems, which the anthopologist "reads" behind the backs and over the shoulders of the members. Rather, Rosaldo suggests, we should also pursue "powerful" descriptions of things; that is, that somehow embody in our writing the import of what is learned. This is very polemical, with lots of anthrpologists hollering for a return to more "objective" work. When done well, what Rosaldo calls for is magnificent (see his work, that of Ruth Behar, etc.). When done poorly, though, it tends towards the embarassingly testimonial with little to say about the world, indulgent "feel-my-pain" stuff. But the problem as he poses it is still the vital one.