The crucial poetic problem for a
discursive ethnography becomes
how to achieve by written means
what speech creates, and to do it
without simply imitating speech
(Tyler 1984c, 25).
FOUR MAJOR CONSEQUENCES BROUGHT
ABOUT BY THE POSTMODERN TURN
1. The
subject matter is changing
2. The medium of anthropology is no
longer predominant.
3. The methods of anthropology are
changing.
4. The intention of anthropology has
been challenged
Postmodernist techniques and rhetorical
styles:
•
•
•
•
•
•
Paradox
ambiguity
eclectic quotation
anamnesis
chiasmus
ellipsis
The Nuer
• By Hillary Harris and Robert Garner
• It portrays the Nuer, group of people who
live along the Nile river in Ethiopia.
• 1970
Evocative, Allegorical
• Little description
• Attain more than one event
• Imagination: cultural norm
--Nuer life revolving around cattle
• Recognize a common experience
I lay there and felt the pains as they came, over and over
again. Then I felt something wet, the beginning of
childbirth. I thought, “Eh hey, maybe it is the child.” I got
up, took a blanket and covered Tashay with it; he was still
sleeping. Then I took another blanket…and I left. Was I not
the only one? The only other woman was Tashay’s
grandmother, and she was sleep in her hut. So, just as I was,
I left. I walked a short distance from the village and sat
down beside a tree… After she was born, I sat there; I did
not know what to do. I had no sense…Then I thought, “A
big thing like that? How could it possibly have come out
from my genitals?” (In “On Ethnographic Allegory,”
Clifford 1986, 99).
For Tyler
• Evocation is neither presentation nor
representation. It presents no objects and
represents none, yet it makes available
through absence what can be conceived but
not presented… It overcomes the separation
of the sensible and the conceivable, of form
and content, of self and other, of language
and the world (Tyler 1986: 123).
The rethinking of the poetics of
cultural representation
Objectivity and Subjectivity
Geertz (1980)
• Hermeneutic:
Pertaining to interpretation
• Exegesis:
Critical interpretation
Reflexivity does not belong to
an individual or cultural vacuum
but to a cross-cultural encounter:
it is not the unmediated world of
the “others”, but the world
between ourselves and the others
(Tedlock 1983: 323).
Reflective Vs. reflexive
• Reflective: thinking about ourselves but
without awareness of the implications of
our action
• Reflexive:to be aware of ourselves and
aware of our actions
Awareness of (communicative)
production
• Producer:(ethnographer)
• process: shaping, encoding of the message
• product: the text, what the audience receives
Only if a producer makes
awareness of self a public
matter and conveys that
knowledge to an audience is it
possible to regard the product
as reflexive (Myerhoff and
Ruby, 1982: 6)
Being reflexive is structuring
communicative products
(ethnographies) so that the
audience assumes the producer
(the ethnographer), process (the
ethnographic fieldwork), and
product (ethnography) are a
coherent whole (Myerhoff and
Ruby, 1982: 12).
Reflexivity and anthropology
• to examine a field problem
• to examine anthropology itself
• to look at anthropology as a tool for
gathering data
• to publicly examine the anthropologist's
response to the field situation
Problem
• the more the anthrop attempts to fulfill his
scientific obligation to report on methods,
the more he must acknowledge his own
behaviour and the persona as a data
• Statements on the method them appear to be
more personal, subjective, biased,
Four factors for the emergence of
reflexivity in Anthropology (Nash and
Wintrob, 1972)
• increase personal involvement of ethnographers
with their subjects
• the democratization of anthropology (more
people becoming anthrop, other classes, other
cultures)
• multiple fields studies of the same culture
• independence of native peoples
Discussion Questions
• Why do we represent certain things in a
culture and avoid others?
• What are the criteria we use to select some
aspects of a culture and ignore other?
• How do we select and why?