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    3 views6 pages

    Marcus - Clifford

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    Agustina Longo
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    © All Rights Reserved
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    The Making of Ethnographic Texts: A Preliminary Report James Clifford George E. Mare' Current Anthropology, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Apr., 1985), 267-271. Stable URL: bttp//links jstor.org/sici2sict=001 1-3204% 28 198504%2926%3A2%3C267%3ATMOETA%3E2,0,CO%3B2-5 Current Anthropology is currently published by The University of Chicago Press, ‘Your use of the ISTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use, available at hhup:/www.jstororg/about/terms.hml. JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at hup:/www jstor.org/jouralsuepress.himl, Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the sereen or printed page of such transmission, STOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to creating and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals, For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support @jstor.org. hupslwwwjstor.org/ Tue Mar 22 11:41:59 2005 The 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-

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