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?