In the contact zone: W. G. Sebald and the ethnographic imagination

Abstract

In this essay, I address the question of Sebald’s interactions with ethnography from three interlinked perspectives. I begin by analysing Sebald’s reading of ethnographic texts in the 1970s and 1980s, using his own annotated copies of works by Claude Lévi-Strauss and Norbert Elias, and then situate this reading within the context of Sebald’s professional life during the same period. I go on to examine the comments on ethnography and related forms of representation that occur in Sebald’s literary criticism of the 1980s. These imply a critique of many of ethnography’s central practices: the ‘salvage paradigm’, the participant observer, and the effects of power produced by representing an unfamiliar Other to a metropolitan audience. I close by tracing the transformations of ethnographic discourse in ‘Max Ferber’ (the last story of Die Ausgewanderten / The Emigrants ( DA/TE)) and in The Rings of Saturn ( RS), and show that Sebald’s prose involves a partial adoption and partial critique of ethnographic representation.

Ethnography in Motion, or Walking With WG Sebald

“…But perhaps the ‘third’ position can be found elsewhere. JJ Long (Long, 2011; see also Long, 2007) has attempted to show how it might be located by focusing on Sebald’s critical adoptions of other ethnographic conventions. After recognising the problems that arise from Sebald’s self-professed affiliation with Lévi-Strauss’ bricoleur / bricoleuse , Long identifies two such conventions that find some support in Sebald’s own texts.…”

“…On the one hand, we have a German narrator whose ethnographic gaze follows the occasionally perplexing undertakings of the English, and on the other, the narrator’s anglicised alter ego whose relationship with his native Germany is characterised by the equally perplexed sentiments of an expat. With this move, ‘the rhetorical basis of the power differential [prioritising the observer over the observed] turns out to be provisional and its authority dissolves’ (Long, 2011: 424).…”