Aloha,
Sabina Magliocco wrote:
> In James Clifford's groundbreaking collection _Writing Culture_ (1986), Stephen Tyler, in an essay entitled "Postmodern Ethnography," wrote about ethnography as an act of evocation or invocation, whereby the author attempts to conjure for the reader a particularly ineffable experience -- what s/he has experienced through fieldwork. He also attempted to delineate what a postmodern ethnography would look like. No one to date has really been able to comprehend, let alone produce, what he describes, but I believe it comes close to a ritual or dramatic production (there's that connection between ritual and theater again!).
>
Maybe the ongoing efforts aimed at cultural reconstruction and historical
reenactment move in this postmodern/performance ethnography direction.
I often continue to look at enthnography as a textual representation of
a culture. Mostly because that's what filled up the libraries and because I
am by preference a textual (rather than visual) thinker. At it's best, an
enchanting literature. Not a movie or a TV show or a computer meme.
> In any case, as work of fiction (in the sense of something created by an author, NOT something false!) that attempts to conjure a different reality is, as far as I am concerned, an act of magic. So ethnography is a magical act, and ethnographers are magicians of a sort. In fact one of the earliest ethnographers, Bronislaw Malinowski, was himself aware of this power when he wrote his famous essay, "The Ethnographer's Magic."
>
Let me just share here a blog post from a Pagan friend about meeting Isabel
Allende, a novelist of the "magical realism" current. I find it an
enchanting
account, and it mentions that Allende identifies herself as a "pagan."
Ethnography, and the resources of ethnography, may themselves be
experiences and accounts of experiences...
http://besom.blogspot.com/2008/11/celebrating-isabel-allende.html
Musing Life & Its Representation! Rose,
Pitch
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