The Making of Ethnographic Texts: A Preliminary Report
James Clifford
George E. Mare'
Current Anthropology, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Apr., 1985), 267-271.
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Tue Mar 22 11:41:59 2005The Making of Ethnographic Texts:
A Preliminary Report
by Gzonce E, Marcus and James CLirFoRD
Department of Anthropology, Rice University, Houston,
Tex, 772511History of Consciousness Program, University of
California, Santa Crus, Calif. 95064, U.S.A."24 vit 84
‘A seminar on the making of ethnographic texts was held atthe
School of American Research, Santa Fe, New Mexico, on
April 16-20, 1984. The participants included eight’ an-
thropologists, a historian, and a literary scholar (see appendix)
‘The seminar papers are Currently being revised in light of the
group's amicably disputatious and wide-ranging conversa
tions, and as the organizers we are drafting an analytic in
troduction to what should be a provocative contribution to
present debates on the poetics, polities, and history of ethnog:
raphy. This report merely summarizes the issues raised by the
papers and the discussions and conveys a sense ofthe terms of
discourse,
‘The purpose of the seminar was to identify practices by
which ethnographic texts have been constructed over the past
century and to examine recent innovations in ethnographic
writing. The papers and discussions focused on the special
thetorics of cross-cultural description, modes of authority and
narrative form, the ways oral discourses (including those of
fieldwork) are’ inscribed in representational accounts, the
‘means by which “objects” of description are classified and
bounded, changing historical contexts of power and knowl-
edge, disciplinary constraints, the shifting boundaries of eth
ography and allied genres such as travel writing, the novel,
historical narrative, and realist and modernist styles in the
social sciences, literature, and cultural criticism. ‘The seminar's
emphasis on changing forms of textual production reflected an
assumption loosely shared by the participants that ethnog-
raphy—writing about other people and their societies—is
constructive, historically contingent activity
'By looking critically at one of the principal things ethnos-
raphers do—that is, write—the seminar sought both to rein
terpret social and cultural anthropology’s recent past and to
‘open future possibilities, But while pursuing various textual
and literary analyses, the seminar also considered the limita-
tions of such approaches. Several papers stressed, and discus-
sions repeatedly returned to, larger contexts of systematic
power inequality, world-systems constraints, and institutional
formations which could only party be accounted for by a focus
on textual production, The seminar thus pursued a limited set
of emphases ina self-