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

becoming aware of oneself as the producer of the message
(communication exchange)
• Producer:(ethnographer)
• process: shaping, encoding of the message
• product: the text, what the audience recieves

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.

Reflexivity and cultural phenomena: turn toward subjectivity
•
Changes in the sciences: Kuhn (the structure of Scientific Revolution, 1962).
• ---Geerts Blured Genres, 1980
• --exegetics; critical interpretation
•
Arts and Social Sciences: autobiographies as an avenue for self-expression(Mead)
• ---Oscar Lewis (anthrop of Poverty)

Reflexivity and anthropology
• to examine a field problem
• to examine anthropology itself
• to look at anthropopology as a tool for gathering data
• to publicly examine the anthopologist’s response to the field situation

The paradox/dillema within anthropology
• 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,

List of 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

Reflective Vs. reflexive