A writer of lives is allowed the imagination of form but not of fact - Leon Edel

Initial observations

Our roadtrip across the US pivots on the writing of a series of literary portraits. We do not use the term "literary portrait" in the traditional sense of "a portrayal of the life and works of a writer". Rather, we intend "a portrayal of an individual life-world written in everyday prose with the full use of available literary techniques". Our approach is neither strictly journalistic nor strictly ethnographic, though both fields will be reflected in our portraits. In accordance with the above quote from Leon Edel's Writing Lives: Principia Biographica (1984) we aim to represent observations and dialogue as faithfully as possible, yet still retaining the freedom of structure and form.

The nature of our travels impose certain limitations on data collection. Only by making these limitations absolutely clear to ourselves can we learn how to take full advantage of them. This paper first outlines the basic limitations of our travels, then goes on to explain how we intend to use the limitations to propose an ethnography of the encounter which will serve as the overall frame for our literary portraits.

In her influential essay "Writing Against Culture"(1) Lila Abu-Lughod proposes

that we experiment with narrative ethnographies of the particular in a continuing tradition of fieldwork-based writing. [...] I would expect them to complement rather than replace a range of other types of anthropological projects, from theoretical discussions to the exploration of new topics within anthropology (Abu-Lughod 1991: 153)

In his recent book Syrian Episodes(2) John Borneman writes in a similar vein:

Due to the present dominance of History - the code of before and after - there is a tendency within anthropological writing to reduce encounters and interactions during a period of fieldwork to anecdote, before the mass of pastness - the temporal depth and solidity of texts, citations, archives, erudition - is brought to bear on a question. This book argues for the insight from the rawness and brevity of a momentary exchange, an unusual taste, an overheard comment or direct gaze; from the feel of a hand or play of light in a room; from linguistic errors, slights, misunderstandings; from obscure glances and desires that seem to go nowhere. (Borneman 2007: xii-xiii)

We quote both of the above to show that a marked interest does indeed exist in semi-literary ethnographical writing concerned with particularities as opposed to generalizations and communalities. This trend was made explicit during the Writing Culture debate in the 1980s(3), in which the notion of objective authority in ethnography was severely challenged. Since then, ethnographical writing has not been quite the same.

We intend to add to the ongoing experiment of representing reality, not by theorizing, but by putting to practice our concept of the literary portrait as an exemplification of what we have chosen to term "the ethnography of the encounter".


Basic limitations

Chance encounters
We travel by car without a preplanned itinerary. We do not have any specific arrangements made for when we arrive in the US, but intend to get in touch with people by referring them to this website and by making use of www.couchsurfing.com and similar host networks. As we hook up with people and places along the way, new contacts and invitations are bound to emerge. In other words, we let chance plot our course across the country.

Short exposure
We have no intention of conducting prolonged fieldwork in any specific part of the US, nor do we wish to attempt our European minds at any Geertzian "thick description"(4) of American culture as such. Our schedule is tight - and our approach highly superficial - as we aim to research and write a full portrait a week. Close identification with our "models" and their lives is simply not an option. First impressions are all we got to go on.

Lack of context
In literature, portraits have traditionally been seen as the analysis of the actions or psychology of a single outstanding person, either for the sake of biography or for the sake of highlighting a certain historical period. By necessity, ours must be a different approach. We do not pick our own models, and we do not have time for more than a sitting or two. The only background we can hold up the portraits against is the material and emotional circumstances of the encounter itself.

Parts without whole
By representing individual life-worlds in their immediate context we cut off ourselves from the possibility of making meaningful generalizations. Our portraits are as socially and geographically diverse as chance allows for. They will be based on the actual self-representations of our models as opposed to our idea of how the models represent themselves. We do not mess with facts, nor do we try to fit them into any premade template of our own.


Writing portraits

The four basic limitations imposed on our literary portraits boil down to chance, time, context, and fragmentation. In the following we will give them a second look, and see how they can actually help us in taking the initial steps towards an ethnography of the encounter.

The music of chance
When it comes to realizing an ethnography of the encounter chance might not be such a bad thing after all. For starters, chance eliminates the possibility of any preconceived notion of the encounter. Observations are taken at face value, and opinions are formed in the here and now. Prejudices are still brought to the scene by both parts, but as the encounter is not part of any overall plan to prove or disprove certain ideas or facts, the prejudices will not stand in the way of the encounter itself.

Absolute freedom is absolute dependency upon chance, and chance is the universal condition of living. Nothing can be fully planned in advance, and patterns only emerge in the rearview mirage of the roads we travel. Encounters are freed from all hidden agendas except the ones already present in the participants themselves. Thus appears the music of chance, composed of the immediate and everyday American realities we set out to portray.

First impressions last
First impressions form a unique category of observation. Their honesty and clarity is indisputable. They may not infer any deeper level of truth or meaning, but they are revealing in a way that the dullness of prolonged observation is not. Superficiality is often regarded as false and fleeting, but when applied as a conscious method of observation it can help us understand the crucial points of conflict where one life-world ends and another begins.

By keeping constant track of our observations and interpretations in notebooks and blogs, we trace not only our first impression of people and places, but also our own changing attitudes and levels of awareness (this last point becomes important in relation to the basic limitation of fragmentation further down the page). Thus, first impressions and their varying impact on ourselves form the basic descriptive category of our encounters. What people themselves consider as trivialities, we consider as striking examples of the individual uniqueness of their lives.

Text is context
Presenting our portraits outside of any wider social, political, historical, etc. context will help us keep the individual encounter free of the problem of general representation. Instead, the encounters generate a context of their own dependent upon actual physical and emotional circumstances. Situation, mood, and unexpected disturbances all go together to form a context of immediacy, not unlike that imposed by chance and the lasting quality of first impressions.

We arrive as portrait writers on the move somewhere in the midst of people's lives, and leave just as sudden. Our encounters are slice of life encounters, and we do not wish nor pretend for them to be anything more than that. Instead of concerning ourselves with life stories and chronology, we write down whatever is right in front of our eyes at the time of the encounter. Paradoxically, this may turn out contrary to how people prefer to see themselves. But again, our aim is to represent people as they present themselves to us, and not as we might think they would have liked to present themselves. In the words of the Danish painter Kirsten Kjær - who portrayed Americans in the early 20th century - we attempt to the best of our abilities to write "portraits of the soul" as experienced by us at the exact moment of the encounter.

Pearls on a string
At the end of the day we ourselves are the true models of our portraits. We do not say this to belittle the portraits nor the people they portray. Their value is absolute as unique representations of unique individuals in unique life situations. Only the neck from which they hang suspended as pearls on a string is our own. It is we who bring them together, and it is we to whom they all relate.

When read in the chronology of our travels the portraits will take on a meaning quite different from the people described in them. A meaning of two Danish travelers who set out on a journey to discover for themselves the diversity of American reality, and whose views and attitudes changed and churned as they went along. Such is the string which binds the pearls together without in any way interfering with the pearls themselves nor adding to or subtracting from their value.

To achieve this overarching effect requires a great deal of honest self-observation. In our daily blog posts we will try to remain as faithful as possible to our impressions and prejudices, even stating what mind or modesty tells us not to. Furthermore, we will attempt to integrate into the individual portraits our own dawning sensitivities to the general customs of the country, thereby tracing a trajectory of human understanding across the US.


The Ethnography of the Encounter

If we were to define the ethnography of the encounter we would not define it as a fixed set of rules, but rather as a flexible set of guidelines. We maintain that each and every encounter is unique in its own right, and therefore demands its own unique form of representation. In this respect, again we are limited. Our literary portraits are to be presented as feature-length articles of between 6000 and 8000 words. However, the mode of presentation is not agreed on beforehand. On the contrary, we are to free to let content determine form. An extensive catalogue of literary techniques exists for us to draw upon, and we are prepared to go as far out of our way as necessary to apply them. Ideally, no two portraits will be alike, just as no two encounters will be.

To us, an ethnography of the encounter is an ethnography of individual life-worlds as perceived by the unprejudiced an unprejudicing view of the outsider. As always, the shadow will fall between the ideal and the reality, but we are wont to believe that this exact shadow is the governing principle of all empirical research. In the famous words of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, to suggest otherwise would be to suggest that

since a completely sterile environment is impossible, a surgeon might just as well operate in a sewer(5)

One last thing remains to be said before we take off for the US - and that is the thing about the US itself. Alternately described as the land of the free, the land of dreams, and the land of opportunity, the US is most certainly the land of individualty. Its consitution is a constitution of and for the individual, and as such we could not think of any better place to conduct our portrayal of individual life-worlds. If anywhere, we believe this to be the country to look for and describe them. The hegemony of American culture willing.

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1) Abu-Lughod, Lila (1991) "Writing Against Culture" in Richard G. Fox (ed.) Recapturing Anthropology. Santa Fe, New Mexico: School of American Research Press, pp. 137-62
2) Borneman, John (2007) Syrian Episodes: Sons, Fathers, and an Anthropologist in Aleppo. United States of America: Princeston University Press.
3) See for instance: Clifford, James and George E. Marcus (red.) (1986) Writing Culture. Berkeley, Los Angeles og London: University of California Press and Marcus, George E. and Michael M. J. Fischer (1986) Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago og London: The University of Chicago Press.
4) "Thick description" is a term coined by the late American anthropologist Clifford Geertz in his highly influential The Interpretation of Cultures (1973). Geertz advocated what he called symbolic or interpretative anthropology as a means of understanding the context of cultures, thereby arriving at a deeper and more complex - and certainly more personal - notion of the meaning of culture. Though we aim at describing the context of our encounters, we do not aim at constructing meaning on any cultural level beyond the individual encounter.
5) Geertz, Clifford (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic, p. 30