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).

1
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).
2
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

3
Postmodernist techniques and rhetorical styles

• Paradox
• ambiguity
• eclectic quotation
• anamnesis
• chiasmus
• ellipsis

4
The Nuer

• By Hillary Harris and Robert Garner
• It portrays the Nuer, group of people who live
  along the Nile river in Ethiopia.
• 1970

5
Evocative, Allegorical

• Little description
• Attain more than one event
• Imagination cultural norm
• --Nuer life revolving around cattle
• Recognize a common experience

6
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 blanketand I left.
Was I not the only one? The only other woman was
Tashays 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 senseThen I thought,
A big thing like that? How could it possibly
have come out from my genitals? (In On
Ethnographic Allegory, Clifford 1986, 99).
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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).

8
The rethinking of the poetics of cultural
representation
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Objectivity and Subjectivity
10
Geertz (1980)

• Hermeneutic
• Pertaining to interpretation
• Exegesis
• Critical interpretation

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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).
12
Reflective Vs. reflexive

• Reflective thinking about ourselves but without
  awareness of the implications of our action
• Reflexiveto be aware of ourselves and aware of
  our actions

13
Awareness of (communicative) production

• Producer(ethnographer)
• process shaping, encoding of the message
• product the text, what the audience receives

14
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)
15
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).
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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

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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,

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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

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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?