For over thirty years, the development of theory in anthropology has been under heavy influence from literary theory, serving mostly as an inspiration in solving certain problems in the research practice of ethnography. This influence first started with the assimilation of structuralism and semiotics into anthropology, with their concept of culture as a collection of texts interacting with one another. The real interdisciplinary dialogue, however, originated with the discovery, received in the field of ethnography with much suspicion and astonishment, that the practice of anthropology is not only collecting and analysing data, but also ‘producing texts’, and that the textualization of the reality examined is part of that process, too.

At present it is generally, or almost generally, accepted that field data are not ‘things in themselves’, but a result of the process of gaining them (Rabinow 1977, ix). Hence, neither the experience nor the interpretative activity of a researcher are a ‘matrix tool’ for reality. In them, we always encounter translation, which can be defined as a negotiation involving at least two subjects (Clifford 1988, 41; see also: Sperber 1996, 16–18). It was found that dialogue and polyphony (the basis of which was discovered in Bakhtin's writings) characterize the process of translation better than analysis or interpretation, which presume the hierarchical and thus morally uncertain relationship between the researcher and the researched (see Fabian 2001, 25; Wagner 2003, 60), and that hierarchy disturbs the rules of ‘negotiation’, changing the process of knowing into ‘colonizing the other’, and consolidating the obviousness (common sense) of the researcher's thinking.