The Informant — Summary

In November of 1987, an eighty-six-year-old woman named Fa’apua’a Fa’amū gave sworn testimony in American Samoa about conversations from sixty-two years earlier. In 1925 and 1926 she had been one of the two closest Samoan companions of Margaret Mead, who had come to ask the young women about their lives, and she testified that when Mead’s questions turned to lovers, she and her friend Fofoa had teased, spinning tales in the recreational lying Samoans call taufa’ase’e, never imagining the earnest visitor was writing it down. Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa became the most widely read work of anthropology ever printed. The testimony became the centerpiece of Derek Freeman’s claim that Mead had been hoaxed, and then the dispute did the thing that makes it worth an essay: it refused to resolve. Freeman’s own informants were elderly converts speaking to a male authority figure with every reason to disavow their girlhoods; Fa’apua’a’s testimony was itself shaped for its asker. Every piece of evidence on both sides was testimony produced in a relationship, and the relationship had shaped what was said.

Archaeologists have watched such fights from a comfortable distance, because their informants are pots, and the field’s methodological serenity rests on sources without motives. The previous essay catalogued why the new sites offer no such serenity: the artifact that confabulates its history, performs for the excavator, answers differently with each asking. It treated these as evidence failures. They are also the oldest failures in the study of human beings, and the discipline that has faced them longest is not archaeology.

Anthropology’s founding instrument is a person in a place, asking. Malinowski, marooned in the Trobriands, made the accident into participant observation, whose first premise archaeology never needed: the source is a subject, with interests, moods, an image to manage. The private face of the method surfaced in 1967, when his field diaries were published and the discipline met its founder entangled in every relation he claimed merely to observe. What followed was the reflexive turn: the observer’s position is part of the signal, ethnographies are authored and should say so, and the fiction to be surrendered was the observer who leaves no mark. It produced no algorithm, but it produced disciplines of position: declare who you were to your informants, keep the notes that record how each account was elicited, seek the testimony that cuts against your rapport, treat the informant’s shaping of answers as data about the relationship, which is part of the truth of the place. And beneath the craft, a floor of ethics: the informant is a party, owed consent.

Set the new excavator beside the old fieldworker and little translation is required. The site’s performance for the asker is rapport, the accommodation that makes the exchange possible and colors it. Its fluent, unanchored self-account is the informant’s; no one’s testimony about their own formation is privileged. The fixed prompt battery is a disclosed elicitation protocol; differential reading across generations is the village elder checked against the village rival. None of this required invention, only noticing which shelf the problem was already on. And the noticing has not happened where the sites are actually probed, in communities that inherited their epistemics from the lab: elicitation as measurement, accommodation as a bug with a ticket number, while a century of knowledge about learning from a responsive source sits in another building. The cheapest thing the new discipline will ever do is read the old one’s ledger, whose last entry is the reach past method: the strata inside the performing site are made of persons, and the informant in the chair is a chorus that was never asked.

Fa’apua’a died in 2007, at a hundred and six or thereabouts, the most consequential informant in the discipline’s history, believed selectively by everyone. There was never a version of her testimony that was not shaped for its asker, not the teasing, not the oath. Somewhere between the two performances was a life, and the performances are all the record kept.