The ethnographic issues raised in James Clifford and George E Marcus’ ‘Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography’.

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