Paradigm Shifts: Ethnography Roots, Routes and Transformations
The definitions of ethnography—offered above—correspond loosely to contemporary ways of practicing anthropological research. Yet, ethnography as a methodology has undergone many transformations since its emergence and as it was first use by early scholars in the 19th and 20th centuries in the US (see Boas 1966, 1989, Malinowski 2002, Rochner 1966). The refinement and transformation of ethnographic tools span the foundational uses by Boas, Malinowski and the first women anthropologists such as Ruth Benedict (2005), Margaret Mead (1963) and Zora N. Hurston (1935), the classical positivist ethnography practiced until ←16 | 17→approximately the 1970s to the watershed moments of the “crisis” of representation and the “reflexive turn,” critical ethnography between 1990s and 2000s, and more recent post-critical ethnography (post-colonial) and diverse contemporary experimental approaches (for an overview of this see Foley 2002). Rather than a comprehensive history of its development, I offer below a discussion of few moments, movements and works (practices, debates, publications), about ethnography, otherness, boundaries of the “field,” what is considered “data,” paradigms of objectivity-subjectivity and issues of ethics in the process of transformation from the first uses by Boas (1966) in the 1890s to the current era of post-critical ethnography (Noblit et al. 2004).
The classical iconic image of an anthropologist used to be a white Euro-American upper middle-class male, working in remote “tribal” jungles, with dark-skinned natives, for years on end. Their reports of findings, in many cases, were based on conversing with a few top-ranking males in the community and then writing an “ethnography” (what was supposed to be a full realistic description of an entire society (e.g., “the” Nuer by Evans-Pritchard 1940 or Malinowski’s “the” Trobianders published in 1922). These ethnographies were not only accepted as scientific data, they were also supposed to describe and catalog, once and for all, unchanging, bounded “cultures,” their behavior, how they thought, ways of life and cosmovision of the world, in an unquestioned homogeneity. This huge colonial generalization of human groups has also given way to classical iconic images of what an anthropologist was supposed to look like. From these full ethnographies to what we modestly call today “ethnographic accounts,” there is a huge epistemological gulf; anthropological writing became acknowledged as provisional, partial interpretations of a particular human group at a specific historical place-time, based on partial perspectives of some of the members of a community, as interpreted by particular anthropologists, who came from specific countries.
The major changes in practice and theory within Anthropology, and the changes in how ethnography as a methodology has been used between the 1920 until today, respond, in part, to how anthropology keeps re-inventing itself, through external pressures, forced by changing geopolitical landscapes, by communities themselves that have been objects of its studies, by other disciplines critiques and attacks (see Min-ha 1989, Stocking 1996), but also through a commendable constant internal critique since its institutionalization, by its progressive practitioners, about the present and future political implications of the discipline and its engagement with living populations. The external pressures came concretely through the transformations of colonial territories and of the very empires and countries from where the earlier anthropologists were coming from. The internal transformations we further nurture by new “minority” and “native others” who increasingly were ←17 | 18→able to enter PhD anthropology programs in the US in great numbers, especially after the 1980s.
Social sciences explanatory models, or what it is called a paradigm, were also shifting, generating neo-Marxist theoretical frameworks after the 1960s, that moved the social sciences analysis from positivist science (reality is knowable, measurable and science is objective and value free) to critical theory focused not on neutral science or objective epistemologies but on power and historical praxis with political dimensions for all kinds of knowledge creation. These conditions of production (Kuhn’s scientific revolutions) have implications for how we name and perceive “realities” (for a good discussion of this shift and of social theory as a European post-war academic and cultural movement see Denzin 1999, Ortner 1984, 2006, Foley 2002). Among the most influential theoretical frameworks shaping most productively a paradigm shift in social sciences and humanities were structuralism (the work of Edward Sapir and Levi-Strauss as iconic representatives), Marxism (dialectical materialism), which entered anthropology much earlier yet became most visible in publications during the 1970s and 1980s. It was as a response to these critical intellectual movements that methodological tools were transformed resulting in post-structuralist and post-colonial critiques, beyond the more visible and amorphous discourses of post-modernity, which were coming mostly from the humanities (see Marcus & Clifford, 1986).
This upheaval included further interdisciplinary nurturing from new conceptions of power beyond Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault, which focused on feminist concerns with “theories of practice” (see Rich 1984, Ortner’s 2006 critique of Bourdieu). The more vocal trends were moving from a conception of power as force, control and domination to a fuzzier matrix of situated relations, fluid processes of negotiations, micro an infra-politics beyond