Clifford, James, ed.
Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. (University of California Press, 1986)
This volume of essays, originally printed in 1986 and reprinted in 2011 for a twenty-fifth anniversary edition, is a reflection of the decades-long existential crisis of cultural anthropology - and its lack of resolution. It also highlights the fracturing of anthropology as a discipline. The text as a whole discusses two intertwining stalemates: the inherent difficulty in the idea of the ethnographer as neutral observer, and, recalling Hayden White, the inherent difficulty in the idea of objective prose. At one point one of the essayists comments on the difference between ethnography and travel writing or journaling. The fact that there is a difference, but that it is so incredibly difficult to pin down, underscores the trouble.
I often hear historians pooh-pooh cultural anthropology as a field. It's a silly dismissal, since it fails to take into account that historians are doing essentially the same work as ethnographers, only from a greater distance and through the medium of assembled, pre-digested texts rather than through direct observation. I have also heard historians grumble at the notion, popularized by literary theorists, of "everything as text." Although I agree, to a certain extent, that calling everything a text can rapidly devolve into hoity-toity nonsense, and, in a more troubling way, can center on discursive issues (in a Foucauldian sense) at the expense of materialist analysis, still I am inclined to think that reading everything as text has a certain value. In particular, contemporary media and the way that people have come to interact with it require a re-evaluation of texts and images, and a constant reminder of the "meta" that is now pervasive; what you are reading now, after all, is an essay composed for a blog - a new medium - and one that, because of its newness, feels transient. It is also a medium of text and image.
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