A post-modern ethnography is a
cooperatively evolved text
consisting of fragments of
discourse intended to evoke in
the minds of both reader and
writer an emergent fantasy of a
possible world of commonsense
reality....(Tyler, 1986, 125).
The modern movement emerged in the
late 19th century and it encouraged the
idea of re-examination of every aspect of
existence, from commerce to philosophy,
with the goal of finding that which was
"holding back" progress, and replacing it
with new, and therefore better, ways of
reaching the same end.
The condition of modernity was
dominated by:
• the idea that the history of thought is a
progressive enlightenment towards a
foundation or universality
• the notion of a legitimizing “truth” (within
science, the arts, morality or any other
realm of thought or practice)
• totalizing notion, representing
wholeness, truthness
POMO turn (1970s)
Ihab Hassan and Charles Jencks (artistic movement
in the U.S.
“postmodernism is a way of thinking,“weak
thought, provisional and ongoing, without
foundation in universal or trans-historical truth”
(Vatimo 1988: 3).
The ‘post-’ in the term ‘post-modern’ indicates in
fact a taking leave of modernity. In its search to
free itself from the logic of development inherent
in modernity... (The End of Modernity 1988)
The Strada Novissima: a new
‘architecture of communication’
• ‘an architecture of the image’, characterised by
ironic plays with conventions and styles from the
past. Observing the loss of faith in the modernist
tenets of ‘useful = beautiful, ‘structural truth =
aesthetic prestige’, ‘forms follow function’ …
‘ornament is crime,’ and so on…(Kaye, 1994).
Two important notions
• Loss of faith in the ‘narratives of
modernity”
• Attack on modernity’s legitimizing
movement (especially the practicality of
modern buildings)
Portoghesi:the excibition was a
critique of:
• the modern city, the suburbs without qualities, the
urban environment devoid of collective values that
has become an asphalt jungle and a dormitory; the
loss of local character, of connection with place:
the terrible homogulation that has made the
outskirts of the cities of the whole world similar to
one another, and whose inhabitants have a hard
time recognising an identity of their own
(Kaye:1994).
Related techniques and rhetorical
figures important to the style.
• paradox, oxymoron, ambiguity,
disharmonious harmony, amplification,
complexity and contradiction, irony, eclectic
quotation, anamnesis, anastrophe, chiasmus,
ellipsis, elision, etc.
J.F Lyotard
“The Postmodern Condition”
(1977)
• Attacked the totalizing notion in
modernism
• Representing wholeness,
truthness
In Anthropology
• “Writing Culture” Clifford and Marcus
(1986)
• “Anthropology as a Cultural Critique”
Marcus and Fisher (1986).
• Stephen Tyler “Post-modern Ethnography:
From Document of the Occult to Occult
Document (1986)
Stephen Tyler
•
•
•
•
Evocation rather than representation
The split between orality and literacy
One perspective (literacy)
Versus polyvocal present of multi realities
(orality).
• Object (anthropologist) with subject (the
other)
Timothy Mitchell
• “Orientalism and the Visionary Order”1989
• The vision of the Other
• “The visual Western episteme,”
Postmodernist ethnographic techniques
and rhetorical styles:
•
•
•
•
•
•
Paradox
ambiguity
eclectic quotation
anamnesis
chiasmus
Ellipsis
The postmodernist turn
highlighted four important points
• emphasis on epistemological concerns (ways
that unable us to know) as opposed to ontological
concerns (ways that unable us to find and name
things)
• emphasis on process rather than end-results
• consideration of performance, experience and
process as contingent
• emphasis on process as open-ended
• emphasis on experimentation with form
(therefore with content)
****
• Phenomenology: Edmund Husserl, 1907
and Martin Heidegger 1971
• Phenomenological Anthropology: Bidney
1973, Merleau-Ponty 1973,
• Jackson: “Minima Ethnographica” 1995,
Desjarlais: “Body and Emotion”1991
Merleau-Ponty:
•
•
•
•
•
•
“Phenomenology and the Social Sciences” (1973)
Crisis of philosophy:
Excesses of science
Logism (extreme psychology)
Lebenswelt (Life-world)
Intersubjectivity (between whole and part)
Edmond Husserl’s
Phenomenology
• “The crisis of European Sciences and
Transcendental phenomenology” (1907)
• Lebenswelt: Life world
• Life-world is the world of human
existence, a world experienced by man
who lives in a social ecological
environment.
Each cultural life-world is a subjective world;
it is the historic world created by human effort
and thought which has meaning and value for
the members of that society at a given time
and place. A culture is an intersubjective
system of meaningful experiences,
institutions, activities, symbolic expressions
of ritual and art… (David Bidney, 1973: 133).
Life-world
• Point of reference
• Basis for cultural abstractions of the
anthropologists
• Connected to the anthropological method of
cultural relativism
Ethnocentric Epoche
• Suppressing or suspending our own cultural
beliefs so that our analysis of a culture does
not interfere too much with the life-world of
the people in the culture studied
• A dialogue between subjects and in between
subjects (intersubjectivity)
Contemporary Phenomenological
Anthropology
• Michael Jackson (1990’s on)--According
equal weight to all modalities of human
experience---Democratization of the playing
fields of knowledge
• Robert Desjarlais (1990’s on)--Yolmo
Sherpa, Tibet--A need to draw on
sensibilities---Sensations, feelings,
emotions
Phenomenological and
Postmodern Strategies:
•
Phenomenology:Ethnocentric epoche-Intersubjectivity--Subjectivity-Experience--eclectictivity--Evocation
•
Postmodern: EvocationMultivocality--Eclectic forms--Rhetorical
intentions
What are the contradictions and
complementarities of a
phenomenological method and a
postmodernist one? Explain.