IN THE SEMINAL ESSAY “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (1969), Jacques Derrida makes the following aside concerning the origin of ethnology:

Conversely, as a practitioner of a “primarily … European science employing traditional concepts,” the ethnologist “accepts into his discourse the premises of ethnocentrism at the very moment when he denounces them” (282). For Derrida, ethnology emerges as a divided subject that must constantly contend with the contradictory acentric and ethnocentric impulses that gave rise to the discipline.

The contradiction that Derrida perceives in the theory of ethnology also influences the practice of ethnology's modern successor, anthropology. On the one hand, as Clifford Geertz explains, the anthropologist conducting fieldwork while living among the objects of his enquiry must contend with the “difficulties of being at one and the same time an involved actor and a detached observer.” Conversely, the mere presence of an alien researcher in a community may radically alter the behavior of those subjects and thus produce the anthropological analogue to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, that is, a situation in which the very act of observation impinges upon the phenomena observed and thus precludes any objective findings.