CHALLENGES TO ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH        1300w

Ethnography in the post-modern era is no longer as simple as it once was – when it was normal to be an armchair anthropologist ‘ethnographic’ work required much less mental gymnastics – today ethnography requires researchers to walk a very fine line in order to produce a thoughtful and impactful piece of research. This has been the case since anthropology underwent a period of internal critique in the 1980’s changing the face of written ethnography. Since then anthropology has been trying to put to bed our “perilous ideas [namely] race, culture, [and] people” (Wolf et al. 1994:1) and the effort has heightened anthropology’s awareness of how it produces knowledge. The tightrope act researchers must walk today requires them to carefully balance their use and investigation of universal claims with, their authority and writing style. A lapse of either one will unbalance the carefully constructed microcosm they are trying to represent. This is further complicated by calls for a more engaged anthropology that at times seems unsure of its own best practices. If we are to “engage in the utopistics of inventing the alternative order” (1994:10) as Immanuel Wallerstein asks us to, then before we dance, we need to be sure we have made it to Rhodes.

The volatile concepts discussed by Eric Wolf are quite possibly the most problematic universals that have been used in anthropology. As Wolf ponders in this article “how they allow us to think.” (1994:2) and the effects of their imposed structure he reveals one of the major weight’s researchers need to balance; the idea of culture. Culture as a concept has itself undergone a number of changes in its definition moving from a universal idea of a people toward a particularistic concept. Despite rallying against typological practices Boas’ notion of culture would still encourage a universal application of the concept which in part was borne out in Alfred Kroeber’s work with Charley Nowell. Nowell was Kroeber’s primary informant about the culture of the Kwakiutl Indians (Reed-Danahay 2019), w