Jean Briggs

Life Time Achievement Award

Society for Psychological Anthropology

April 10, 2005

Reflections by Jean Lave

I am full of delight on this occasion.  We are gathered here to celebrate the extraordinary accomplishments of my colleague and friend Jean Briggs.  The force of her work and her person inspire all of us, and beyond the SPA, anthropology in general. 

Jean and I were graduate students together in Social Relations at Harvard, two of the three social anthropology students in the class of 1960 (we were known as JA, JB and JC – that’s Jean in the middle with John Adams and myself, then Jean Carter, on the sides).   Among other enthusiastic greetings, and mighty cheers this evening I bring my mother’s.  On hearing that Jean was receiving the lifetime achievement award she reminded me that she had been visiting in Cambridge when Jean took her orals and had ironed her dress the night before. 

I had dinner last night with Jean.  As we were catching up with the past year she made occasional references to “IMP.”  It took several repetitions before I figured out that this is her nickname for her book, Inuit Morality Play.

IMP – yes indeed.  And it applies to the author as well as to the work.  Jean Briggs is herself an

Imp.

She is playful and fierce and mischievous.  She is a disturber of intellectual cant and tranquility.  But if the image fits it only takes us so far.  There is much weightier stuff to tell:

Her working life might be characterized as

Intellectual Morality Play

(1) She made her way through graduate school following her own intellectual path, against the fashion and against the grain of much of the intellectual novelty on offer, by which, more often than not, we were weighed up and judged by faculty and fellow students. 

(2) She often refused to read the texts she was assigned in classes, and once took a look at an exam in one of Talcott Parsons’ courses, crumpled it up, threw it on the floor, stomped it good, and stalked out the door.  To this day she says she doesn’t read at all.  Naomi Quinn commented this morning that Freud said he never read anything either.  Looks like he has some good company. 

(3) She undertook incredibly arduous, difficult, -- scary – fieldwork in the Canadian far north.  You know from Never in Anger that her attempt to defend her Inuit family resulted in her suffering their silent condemnation in close conditions far from other human habitation over an extended period of time.  Her dedication to intense, extended ethnographic inquiry -- which defines her but also defines anthropology more completely than anything else --is evident:  Her book gave the study of emotional life (the quality, content and logic of lived, changing social relations), a gravitas, complexity and groundedness that could only be achieved through long patient, painful, close observation.

(4) She made her academic home at Memorial University in St. John’s, Newfoundland.  It suited her in many ways.  It is also a long way from centers of academic or anthropological power and influence.

(5)She abhors academic politics and rarely comes to AAA meetings.  Yet she has a wide array of working colleagues and deep admirers.  Indeed, Jean and her work are extraordinarily widely known through the most substantive of channels.  Her scholarly ties have been forged all over the world with anthropologists and others who wanted to know more about her work.

Jean is here, receiving the SPA Lifetime Achievement Award, in short, because she has pursued an exemplary, rigorous intellectual project brilliantly and at great cost to herself, with nonetheless enormous impact on anthropologists (among many others).  The satisfactions of working in Jean’s way are arguably more enduring and the costs certainly different, than a cynical or fearful path charted through a reified academic jungle. 

But this leads us back to “IMP” – What of the quality and character of Jean’s work?

Inuit Morality (in) Practice.

As I have read and reread Inuit Morality Play, I see a carefully forged language for the close analysis she undertakes.  A careful analysis of her way of talking/writing about Inuit morality play would yield an intricate theory of their play and of her own analytic play/work.  Jean is adamant that she does not wield, represent, employ or otherwise condone any theoretical –ism; her work is true to this line she has drawn in the sand (snow?).  But not theoretical?? I admire the complex and rigorous theory-in-practice that I see there.

She begins with a close description of a short episode/drama, when Chubby Maata and her mom drop in to visit Yiini for a few minutes.  To our ignorant eyes it appears to be a quick, insignificant interchange.  There’s a little background, a little analysis of what’s happening.  Then, Jean says, “there’s more to be said.”  What follows is a closer analysis, exploring what’s going on between and among participants, and further exploring what’s going on from one participant's view after another.  I love it when she says she doesn’t know whether she is right in her speculations about the participants’ feelings, intentions, or about what they want with and from each other.  After awhile, as she lays out the complexity of possibilities, their simultaneity, and every participant’s uncertainty, like Jean’s, they come alive for us.  We begin to see of what everyday encounters are made and to marvel at their subtlety and anxiety-making ambiguities.  “Okay,” I think.  “She’s gotten to the bottom of it now, I can’t imagine one more thing that could be said to deepen the picture she has created.”  But she opens the next section of the chapter by saying, “there’s more to be said about this incident….” and we are blessed with another layer of analysis; and then another.  Such searching and relentless brilliance!

Her work shows us the immense, instantaneous complexity of the ubiquitous small dramas that compose our everyday lives.  She shows us what we have always already known in our own embodied morality play/practice. But we are startled, bowled over, and convinced by the news, such is the power of her work, because at the same time we recognize that we have been entirely ignorant until she showed it to us.  That’s the highest accolade for an anthropological scholar that I can imagine.

If I got to choose a lifetime’s achievements to bestow recognition upon, it would surely be Jean’s.

Jean Lave (aka JC)

May 27, 2005