THE POETICS AND POLITICS OF ETHNOGRAPHY  PT2     2400w

3. Writing of Self

Continued from the preceding paragraph, the mobility in ethnographers’ positions is demonstrated cumulatively in other chapters of Writing Culture as well. Fieldwork in Common Places by Mary Louis Pratt (1986) provides an illustration.

Her essay focuses on the significant history of the relationship “between personal narrative and impersonal description” (1986:27) in ethnographies and travel writings. Pratt starts with a controversy that anthropology graduate Florinda Donner’s work Shabobo: A True Adventure in the Remote and Magical Heart of the South American Jungle is facing accusations of plagiarism, because there are some events in her book which are the same as others. Here, Pratt asks a very inspiring question: as ethnography demands accurate descriptions, for describing the same events at the same place, how could Donner’s work not resemble others? Pratt argues that the authority of ethnography, in some sense, is based on the unique and original “personal experience in the field” not the “factual accuracy” (1986:29) of a certain ethnography.

From this perspective, personal narratives cannot be eliminated from ethnography, and it also explains why the “subgenre” of “formal ethnography”, such as Malinowski’s diaries, has not been “killed by science” (1986:31), but turned into a prolonged tradition of anthropology. Even in formal ethnographies, personal narrative is an integral part. It marks the relationship among the fieldworker, indigenous people, and the audience. It also serves as a regulator, reconciling the inconsistency between the subjective engagement in fieldwork, and the detachment; the “self-effacement” in formal ethnographic writing. Moreover, her analysis shows that, even in the time of so-called scientific ethnography, ethnographers were writing from “multiple, constantly shifting positions”, and “self” is never a “scientist-observer” (1986:39).

To consider further from this point, we could identity a difference between classical ethnography and experimental ethnography. For Malinowski, and his students Firth and Evens-Prichar