1.on authority Who has the power to construct and portray a culture and how 2.on textuality how your

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1. on authority (Who has the power to construct
and portray a culture and how?)2. on textuality
(how your writing strategies, style, choice of
voice (I, them, he, she) influences readers
perception of the culture?)
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Realist ethnographies ( a realist account of a
culture) Realist texts allow the ethnographer to
remain in an unchallenged control of his (her)
narrative.
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Modernist ethnographiesCame as a reaction to
realist ethnographies and they challenge them on
the dialogics of ethnographer and subject
interactions.
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Characteristics of Realist Ethnographies

• Most popular style
• Single author
• Exclusion of personal experience
• authenticity

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Conventions of a Realist Ethnography

• Experiential Authority
• Ethnographic Form (style)
• Native Point of View (arranging)
• Interpretive Omnipotence (power to describe)

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Experiential Authority

• Absence of the author
• Academic credentials
• Audience expectations

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I concentrated upon girls of the community. I
spent the greater part of my time with them (16)
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2. The Ethnographic Form (style)

• Focus on the mundane
• Details
• Unchallengeable
• Complete
• Nothing missing

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Poor relatives whisper their requests to rich
relatives, men make plans to set a fish trap
together, a woman begs a bit of yellow dye from a
kinswoman, and through the village sounds the
rhythmic tattoo which calls the young men
together (19)
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3. The natives Point of view

• Presentation of carefully edited quotations
• Sometimes left out (Mead)
• Monovocal(one voice)

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Girls stop to giggle over some young
neer-do-well who escaped during the nigh from an
angry fathers pursuit and to venture a shrewd
guess that the daughter knew more about his
presence than she told (18).
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4. Interpretive Omnipotence

• Final word
• Interpretation and presentation
• Theoretical question

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It is I who will describe them or create them
(Stoking, 1983 101) What method then is open
to us who wish to conduct a human experiment but
who lack the power either to construct the
experimental conditions or to find control
examples of those conditions here throughout our
own civilization? (14)
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Defamiliarization by cross-cultural juxtaposition

• Using one cultures examples to critique another
• Anthropology as a cultural critique

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Trends against ethnographic realism

• The subject matter of anthropology (usually the
  exotic Other) has changed or is changing.
• The medium of anthropology (usually the
  monograph, ethnographic realism) is no longer
  predominant.
• The method of anthropology (usually participant
  observation) is no longer enough.
• The intention of anthropology (has been usually
  to present an objective portrayal of an alien
  culture by the anthropologist is no longer
  valid.)