In James Clifford and George E. Marcus’ book ‘Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography’ (2010), both authors raise the issue of ethnography as a broad framework of cultural identifications. I have underlined four key areas that examines the complexities of ethnography. First, the definition of ‘Post-modern ethnography. Second, the role of translation, third, the concerns around eurocentrism, Middle-class readership and otherness. Last, the medium of writing as a textual experience of ethnography/fieldwork in contemporary discourse.

Post-modern Ethnography

• “Ethnographer as trickster.” - Page 6

• “Post-modern ethnography captures this mood of the post-modern world, for it, too, does not move toward abstraction, away from life but back to experience. It aims not to foster the growth of knowledge but to restructure experience; not to understand objective reality, for that is already established by common sense, not to explain how we understand, for that is impossible, but to reassimilate it, to reintegrate the self in society and to restructure the conduct of everyday life.” - Page 135

 
Problems with translation

• “Fuctionalist method requires that sentences always be evaluated in terms of their own social context. So the worried anthropologist reinterprets the original sentence, with a more flexible and careful use of the contextual method, in order to produce a ‘Good’ translation. The sin of excessive charity, and the contextual method itself, are together linked, Gellner writes, to the relativistic-functionalist view of thought that goes back to the Enlightenment.” - Page 147
• “examining translation as a process of power.” - Page 148

The textual experience of ethnographic writing; the medium and form

• “The ethnography as modern essay profoundly disrupts the commitment to holism that is at the heart of most realist ethnography and that is increasingly problematic (as the hedges in Willis’s text indicate). It does not promise that its subjects are part of a larger order. Instead, by the open-endedness of the form, it evokes a broader world of uncertain order—this is the pose the modernist essay cultivates supremely.” - Page 192

 

• “Ethnographic discourse is not part of a project whose aim is the creation of universal knowledge. It disowns the Mephistophelian urge to power through knowledge, for that, too, is a consequence of representation. To represent means to have a kind of magical power over appearances, to be able to bring into presence what is absent, and that ‘grammarye,’ a magical act.” - Page 131

 

• “The subtlety of this use of the essay is that whatever or not the subject is explicitly viewed as living in a fragmented world system, at the level of her experience and that of the ethnographer the broader world is evoked indirectly through the attempt in ethnographic writing to convey alien experience. This is the radical approach to the representation of cultural difference in a world where the salience of difference has diminished, at least among Western middle class readerships. Such ethnography seeks to convey the quality of its subjects’ experience, free of the mediation of customs and institutions, concepts that carry an embedded bias toward seeing order, where on the level of experience such order is not felt or imagined to the same degree.” - Page 192

 
Readership and class systems (George Marcus)

• “The ethnographer having become the focus of ‘difference’ in a perverse version of the romanticism that has always been in ethnography, no matter how desperately repressed and marginalized by the objective impulses of seekers for pure data.” - Page 128

 

• “Fuctionalist method requires that sentences always be evaluated in terms of their own social context. So the worried anthropologist reinterprets the original sentence, with a more flexible and careful use of the contextual method, in order to produce a ‘Good’ translation. The sin of excessive charity, and the contextual method itself, are together linked, Gellner writes, to the relativistic-functionalist view of thought that goes back to the Enlightenment.” - Page 147

 

• “To put it crudely: because the languages of Third World societies—including, of course, the societies that social anthropologists have traditionally studied—are ‘weaker’ in relation to Western languages (and today, especially to English), they are more likely to submit to forcible transformation in the translation process than the other way around.” - Page 158

Mami Wata is a water deity originating from the Niger Delta and Cross River. She embodies both the serpent iconography and the fish symbol. According to John Drewel: “Mami Wata is widely believed to have “overseas” origins, and depictions of her have been profoundly influenced by representations of ancient, indigenous African water spirits, European mermaids and snake charmers, Hindu gods and goddesses, and Christian and Muslim saints.” (Page 60- Mami Wata by John Drewel). Her image is multiple and transgresses various cultural realms.

]“The snakes that appear coiled on either side of the head are among the most frequent motifs depicted on Sowei/Nowo headdresses. Generally considered to be water creatures, snakes reveal a constellation of ideas about ancient African water spirits and, later, Mami Wata. They are the guardians of the medicines of Sande/Bondo, and shrine sculptures often depict a female-headed coiled snake or a female head and neck encircled by a snake (Phillips 1995:146, Fig. 7.6). Wall paintings of Tingoi/Njaloi sometimes show her as a serpent-fish with a human head adorned by elegantly arranged and luxuriant hair.“ Page 64.

Sometimes, she surfaces the rivers to possess individuals, empower them, and continue the ancestral bloodline. Those possessed are often female. Offerings and sacrifices from locals are left in the river as a way of redirecting her possession – those inflicted can experience convulsions, as she appears in dreams. Some become priestesses of the Mama Wata cult.

The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche
Karmic traces manifest in dreams and therefore become replicated in the physical world through this transferal of consciousness. As stated by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, the writer of the book The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep (1998):
 
“Although this example focuses on karma on the psychological level, karma determines every dimension of existence. It shapes the emotional and mental phenomena in an individual’s life as well as the perception and interpretation of existence, the functioning of the body, and the cause and effect dynamism of the external world. Every aspect of experience, however small or large, is governed by karma. The karmic traces left in the mind are like seeds. And like seeds, they require certain conditions in order to manifest. Just as a seed needs the right combination of moisture and light and nutrients and temperature in order to sprout and grow, the karmic trace manifests when the right situation is encountered. The elements of the situation that support the manifestation of the karma are known as the secondary causes and conditions.” Page 28
 
The importance of dream yoga or dream practice in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition emphasises the dream space as a site for experimentation to test and trail out potential traumas, triggers and karmic seeds. By tackling them in this space, one can build the resilience and stamina to deal with them in the physical world. Karma is, therefore, training, dreams are the training ground, and the dreamer is the student. The body is an archive storing daily patterns, habits and karmic residue from the past and present; sometimes, these are from our ancestors or conditioned by society. Rinpoche calls this the “Kunzhi namshe” (page 32), an archive of this consciousness stored in the body. Some karmic residues or information can become blockages, leading to somatic illness or some kind of resistance. Through dream yoga, the aim is to unlock and let go out of these fragmented programs to become more expansive, so these locks don’t become reactionary in the material world. Dream yoga is essentially a healing practice that aids the disappearance of karmic seeds through discipline and daily/nightly awareness. The final aim of enlightenment would be to have no dreams at all. ~The karmic aim

The Ruskin School of Art, Creative Writing Dissertation 2020: Oil and Melancholia 
Supervised by Jonathan Miles (The Royal College of Art)