Clifford’s dense chapter on ethnographic authority addresses the perennial problem of the responsibility of the anthropologist; he must portray the people he studies in a scholarly fashion, but he must figure out how to be honest. This raises the question of objectivity and participant-observation, about which he writes in some detail. He outlines the history of writing ethnographies, citing major authors and describing their methods and their techniques of asserting authority, and his article shows that he is in favor of the evolution that has taken place in the past century. He describes “experiential, interpretive, dialogical, and polyphonic processes” that must all be employed in writing an ethnography to assure its “coherent presentation” (54).
In his discussion of interpretive anthropology, Clifford suggests that reading a culture is like reading a book, and that one can analyze a culture as one would a text. Does this idea fit into the “participant-observation” frame that he has so carefully laid out? Isn’t a culture ever-evolving, whereas a text (written firmly on the page) is only evolving in the way we see it?
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