Grace and correspondence in ethnography and psychotherapy

Abstract

For all the ways in which anthropologists have addressed relations during the history of the discipline, from kinship to the contemporary focus on comparison, it is surprising that anthropologists rarely write about the pragmatics of the messy dynamics of relating between interlocutors themselves and between interlocutors and ethnographers. This is despite some anthropologists having highlighted the work of these relations and our approach to them as crucial for the discipline. In this paper I argue that the inquiry practiced in one particular psychotherapeutic approach, namely systemic psychotherapy, is relevant to this micro practice of anthropology. I will present a transcription of a piece of systemic psychotherapeutic work. I will make three points, inspired by work in systemic psychotherapy as well as anthropology. My first point concerns plurality, my second point refers to second-order observation or the use of reflexivity, and my third to the temporal dimension of the inquiry as a process. I suggest that considering these three points will enhance methods of inquiry in both disciplines.