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.
Conjuring "the people"
