A postmodern ethnography is a cooperatively evolved text consisting of fragments of discourse intend

1
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).
2
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.
3
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

4
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)

5
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).

6
Two important notions

• Loss of faith in the narratives of modernity
• Attack on modernitys legitimizing movement
  (especially the practicality of modern buildings)

7
Portoghesithe 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 (Kaye1994).

8
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.

9
J.F Lyotard The Postmodern Condition (1977)

• Attacked the totalizing notion in modernism
• Representing wholeness, truthness

10
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)

11
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)

12
Timothy Mitchell

• Orientalism and the Visionary Order1989
• The vision of the Other
• The visual Western episteme,

13
Postmodernist ethnographic techniques and
rhetorical styles

• Paradox
• ambiguity
• eclectic quotation
• anamnesis
• chiasmus
• Ellipsis

14
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)

15

• Phenomenology Edmund Husserl, 1907 and Martin
  Heidegger 1971
• Phenomenological Anthropology Bidney 1973,
  Merleau-Ponty 1973,
• Jackson Minima Ethnographica 1995, Desjarlais
  Body and Emotion1991

16
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)

17
Edmond Husserls 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.

18
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).
19
Life-world

• Point of reference
• Basis for cultural abstractions of the
  anthropologists
• Connected to the anthropological method of
  cultural relativism

20
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)

21
Contemporary Phenomenological Anthropology

• Michael Jackson (1990s on)--According equal
  weight to all modalities of human
  experience---Democratization of the playing
  fields of knowledge
• Robert Desjarlais (1990s on)--Yolmo Sherpa,
  Tibet--A need to draw on sensibilities---Sensation
  s, feelings, emotions

22
Phenomenological and Postmodern Strategies

• PhenomenologyEthnocentric
  epoche--Intersubjectivity--Subjectivity--Experienc
  e--eclectictivity--Evocation
• Postmodern Evocation-Multivocality--Eclec
  tic forms--Rhetorical intentions

23
What are the contradictions and complementarities
of a phenomenological method and a postmodernist
one? Explain.