An ethnography of the nation

The classic statement on ethnographic method, by Bronislaw Malinowski, the father of modern fieldwork, that one must begin from “the native's point of view,” is still considered, some seventy years later, an axiom of anthropological research. Like all axioms after seventy years of practice, however, it is now more a statement of the problem than its solution, more an orientation than an answer. Not only do natives differ among themselves and over time as to what things mean, but native symbology rarely has identical counterparts in the ethnographer's world. Ethnographers are now asking: “Whose life?”, “What meanings?”, “And when?”, “Which ethnographer?” The issues that Malinowski avoided – periodization, categorization, and classification – are now central to anthropological writing and research.

In response to positivist ethnography – the attempt to record culture, in all its facets, holistically and for all time – many anthropologists have taken what Clifford Geertz (1974: 47–53) has dubbed an “interpretive turn.” A focus on disputed symbols and contestable meanings, or what might be identified as a hermeneutic anthropology, does not so much regress ethnography to a crisis in representation as force an understanding of representation as a research aporia, an insoluble problem. The task, then, is not to overcome or bracket the problems of representation, but to examine their process of constitution and efficacy.