Customer Reviews

Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

As the title says, not only do ethnographers objectively research and write "about" cultures, in the process, they are also "writing Culture": that is, we constitute the cultural realities even as we attempt to describe them. Language is not a transparent window through which we describe an already existing reality. language "is the maker of this world" says Fisher. Understanding this, the ethnographer is confronted with writing and its importance in the ethnographic description and analysis of cultural worlds. Self-reflexivity in writing ethnography is central to the text. Who has the authority to write Others into being? How does my position as a gendered, racial, and class subject affect my "writing-up" of culture? These are just some of the questions posed by this text, with the added bonus of some possible answers as well. A must read for anyone on the verge of conducting ethnographic research. Also a great text for qualitative research courses concerned with issues of postmodernity and postcolonialism.

This collection constitutes another solid, suggestive and significant contribution to what is now one of the most dynamic arenas in the humanities and outside: Culture. The essays speak to all manner of representational practices and explore vital questions that no scholar interested in social dynamics of any kind can afford to ignore.

When initially published, these essays provided a salutary textual critique of anthropology. Today they read as essays whose implications are circumscribed to the work of that generation of American cultural anthropologists who developed in the shadows of modernist giants (namely Geertz). This collection represents their mid-life crisis, rather than the field of ethnography. Most of their students (and students' students) have not repeated that generation's unreflexive ethical idealism and political naivete. This progress was not a result of these essays. The exception in this book is Tyler's innovative and actually experimental proposal for "writing culture". Otherwise, be warned. Read these critiques by baby boomer-era anthropologists with a grain of salt.