Social Darwinism and other deterministic dichotomies of self/other, us/them, home/field, object/subject were hence questioned and de-centered in ethnographic ←18 | 19→discourses and practices. This was being done from inside and outside, in particular, ethnography has been re-shaped by the contributions of many interdisciplinary feminist women scholars, for example, the concept of “situated knowledge” (Haraway 1988) became widely used as a trendy garnish in feminist anthropology and other disciplines. Yet, it had profound implications for questioning objectivity and giving ethnographers permission to continue using this tool, in spite of its problematic partiality. The putative “crisis of representation” that Marcus and Fisher identified in their also seminal publication Anthropology as Cultural Critique (1986) was an internal crisis for those that could afford amnesia, that considered themselves unmarked, and held as true the myth of bounded cultural areas and fixed fields of research, but this was not the case for the new kinds of anthropologists entering US academia as minorities, immigrants or indigenous “others,” nor was this the case for those early US women anthropologists, who were also marked by a gendered and racial otherness.
As can be noticed from the discussion above, Ethnography is not a neutral methodology, cooked in isolation by a rational discipline looking for the best tools to create scientific knowledge. In a sense, similar curiosity and approaches to discover human diversity were common centuries before anthropology existed as a profession (from Herodotus to Spanish priests in the 16th century). The origins of ethnography could be found in precursors archival practices such as travel narratives and colonial chronicles, as well as early literary and historical narratives (see Clifford & Marcus 1986). Early Europeans’ travel accounts, documentation of conquest, colonial records and chronics were initially used to help manage the colonial enterprises of grabbing, mapping and classifying lands, resources, people, their labor and the wealth of artifacts-artistic productions of these new territories. These practices helped colonial authorities in the Americas to “know the other” with less conflict and resistance, to train and survey native allies as “cultural brokers” and to impose their language, religion and ways of life with less bloodshed and more cooperation from locals. No total control needs to be assumed, or mean intension a priori, as for example, many individual missionaries turned themselves into the first ethnographers. They were a more benign kind of cultural brokers who made, in fact, remarkable contributions to understand indigenous populations, including the writing of first grammars of unknown indigenous languages (mostly in Africa and México). In some cases, these “unintentional” ethnographers demanded human rights for the indigenous communities they worked with, as the case in the Caribbean of the catholic priest Fray Ramón Pané and father Bartolomé de las Casas in the island of Hispaniola (today Dominican Republic and Haiti).
Hence, claiming a purity or respectable “objective” tradition of doing ethnography, reflects a lack of awareness of this problematic ethno-historical context, which ←19 | 20→the Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot has examined, in a seminal article about the “savage slot” or otherness trope in anthropology (2003). Trouillot traces and analyses how anthropology was made possible by the colonial enterprise as well as by intellectual trends of institutionalization in the social sciences, which needed Sociology and other disciplines to focus on Western societies and its “civilized” internal others in the emergent capitalist system between the 16th and 19th centuries, while anthropology was to take care of the uncivilized colonial others. Trouillot concept of “colonial discursive fields” is useful in this regard to understand how scientific-academic knowledge is produced in very specific ethno-historical contexts, and the fact that he made his critique from inside the anthropological discipline, gives it a very particular taste of poetic justice. He was part of a new generation of minority and indigenous scholars needed to carve out—from the inside—spaces from where their very presence and the validity of their research were possible. As Trouillot suggest, they needed first to problematize and change the ethnographic “savage slot” tropes—where the field is, and who the objects of study could be for this discipline. They also needed to question ethnographic objectivity claims, the “common sense” of colonial western rationality, and the notion of a fixed lineal development of human societies and progress, in which white supremacy and other Euro-centric tenets were privileged.
The critique of classical ethnography that I have offered above, is not meant to invalidate the work of any scholars or to propose discarding anthropology as a valid career choice. I consider anthropology one of the most promising academic fields, of crucial relevance for our current predicaments in this century and in the future. Yet, I am aware of the problematic origins of this discipline as a colonial tool and of its complicity with the exploitation and violence—direct and symbolic—of capitalism by Euro-American imperial regimes. The fact that I became an anthropologist—as an “other,” a Caribbean immigrant woman—unthinkable even for 1960s academic contexts in the US, is a sign of my trust and hope on the liberation potential of this practice and on its usefulness to help us create more just and sustainable worlds, where human differences are not just tolerated but recognized, understood, protected and celebrated.
On the Uses of Ethnography: Feminist, Critical and Post-Colonial Ethnographies
Contemporary ethnography exhibits a wide and diverse range of fieldwork methods mixtures (from applied action research to digital ethnography), and also a diversity of narrative styles in the production and dissemination of academic findings (from self-reflexive, postmodern hybrid texts to performance and ←20 | 21→ethnographic exhibitions). Critical ethnography and Post-Critical Ethnography refer to post-structural, post-colonial and feminist ethnographic praxis, informed by performance and gender/sexuality theorizations coming from diverse disciplines, which had their boom since the 2000s (see Foley 2002, Ortner 1996). Yet, this kind of radical critical ethnographic approach is still not the mainstream in the practice of anthropology, nor among many ethnographers in the US and beyond. The post, in post-critical ethnography (see Noblit, Flores & Murillo 2004), points to the need of an anthropology relevant to understand a post 1990s world, but sadly, given 911 legacies and more recent events in US political “devolvement” (such as the Trump administration), it becomes even more needed now.
Concrete and virtual fields have fuzzy boundaries of where/when “home” and the “field” begin and end (see Gupta & Ferguson 1997).