Ethnographic Writing

Ethnography is an in-depth description of a culture or group of people sharing a culture. It is a fairly straightforward idea until one begins to ask troubling questions, such as: What is a culture? What are the boundaries of the group of people we are describing? Who describes them and upon what terms? What is the point of view of the description? The questions can become more difficult and even esoteric: “Who is privileged? Is it the narrator or the people?” “How objective or subjective can the narrator be?” “Should the narrator attempt to be objective?”

The entire issue of reflexivity has come to the fore in ethnographic writing over the past 20 years or so. The need for the ethnographers to put themselves into perspective regarding social position (gender, social class, age, ethnicity, and so on) has became an imperative for ethnographic presentation, as has the need to produce “texts,” often verbatim, undigested interviews and descriptions from the field. The influence of literary criticism on this movement is apparent. The philosophical positions and techniques of postmodernism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and other relativistic ideas and methods are obvious.

What many people ignore is the fact that many of these questions have troubled ethnographers for many years. Certainly, Franz Boas and his disciples in the United States and Bronislaw Malinowski and his followers in the United Kingdom produced “texts” and described real life people conducting their everyday business. Their papers are filled with such examples, and their letters attest to their interests in producing accurate pictures of societies.

Moreover, major disputes within anthropology between competing pictures of cultures further attracted attention of people to reasons for discrepancies in description. The disputes between Robert Redfield and Oscar Lewis and Ruth Benedict and a young Chinese scholar, Li An-Che, are but two of many disagreements over “ethnographic reality.” For example, long before the Margaret Mead-Derek Freeman controversy over Samoa, in which Freeman waited until Mead was dead, there was the dispute between Mead and Jesse Bernard over New Guinean material, a gentler difference of opinion and one of interpretation, not the gathering of information. However, the Lewis-Redfield differences led to a productive exchange of views in which the importance of the position of the observer was taken into account. The consensus was that it would be good to have a team of ethnographers work in an area. This team could compare its divergent views from various perspectives to present a truer picture of the whole.

[Page 852]Certainly, disputes continue to the present day regarding not only sensitivity and “voice” but also accuracy and consequences of description. The most recent of these disputes has been that over the Yanomami as described by Napoleon Chagnon. The ethical implications of the dispute are serious, as are questions regarding the methods and techniques for gathering information. However, many of the questions regard the description of the Yanomami of Venezuela and Brazil as “fierce people,” as well as the personality of the ethnographer itself. The issue came to a head with the publication of Patrick Tierney's book Darkness in El Dorado, which made serious accusations against Chagnon's field methods and portrayal of the Yanomami.

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