When I was assigned Jean Guiart for this bio, the name vaguely rang a bell. I majored in anthropology in college, so it's likely that I did hear the name of this 20th century French anthropologist. Though I can’t remember if his name is remembered with disdain and notoriety, as are the names of so many white, European 20th ct. anthropologists, or with respect.
Thinking, studying, and writing about other people who are not you is essentially what anthropology is. This is probably the most reductive definition of that field ever written, but for my purposes here, and in my own life as a writer, it tracks. Because I’ve often wondered if there is much of a difference between what I do as a nonfiction writer who writes (mostly) about other people who are not me, and what Guiart did as an anthropologist.
There was a seismic, if gradual, shake-down in the field of “anthro” (the shorthand term college students use) sometime late in Guiart’s life. Its practitioners began to interrogate the ethics of their practice and question whether they were truly the objective, dispassionate observers they thought or hoped they were, or instead voyeurs incapable of divorcing their own prejudices from the observations they made of the people and cultures they studied. A widely-adopted solution was for the anthropologist (often called an ethnographer) to include a kind of self-portrait in their writing, so as to imbue some kind of transparency in their interpretations. As I write this, I’m even further surprised by the similarities between the role of the ethnographer, and my own as a nonfiction writer whose interests lie in thinking about the lives of other people. I try to interrogate, and question, and probably more often than not I fail, but I keep trying anyway. I wonder if Guiart did the same.
-Eugenie Dalland