Holding the Story Forever: The Aesthetics of Ethnographic Labour
Since the late 1970s, anthropologists have examined ethnography as a form of textual production (Marcus and Cushman 1982; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Geertz 1988; Marcus and Fischer 1986) and as a politicised dialogue between ethnographer and ‘other’ (Crapanzano 1980; Dumont 1978; George 1995; Rabinow 1977). This literature suggests that ethnography is what you write and how you write it (Clifford 1986; Geertz 1973) but not a record of social realities (Marcus and Fischer 1986). Drawing on these critiques, more recent analyses of ‘fieldwork’ examine the very notion of ‘the field’, the centrality of fieldwork to anthropology and the contradictory nature of the discipline in which we are expected to examine an interconnected and deterritorialised world and conduct long periods of research in one ‘localised’ setting (Gupta and Ferguson 1997, 4). Gupta and Ferguson question whether, given the questions we ask in this postcolonial globalised world, we can continue to valorise ethnographic fieldwork as the central experience of anthropology. Marcus (1997) has argued that ethnography is a form of social production that hinges upon ‘complicity’ between anthropologist and ‘other’. For him, the presence of an anthropologist is a constant marker of other places and ways of being in the world and, because of this, anthropologists can access people’s ideas about other places, times and peoples (Marcus 1998, 119). Therefore, fieldwork elucidates and makes connections (p. 120). The anthropologist’s presence makes a perhaps inarticulatable ‘elsewhere’ present for the informant. Complicity is then an affinity between the anthropologist and the informant that ‘arises from their mutual curiosity and anxiety about their relationship to a third’, and this ‘third time space’ is what creates the bond between the two (p. 122). These productive critiques leave a central part of the social relations of ethnography unexamined. They fail to examine the ways in which anthropologists themselves experience the practice of ethnography and the ways in which ‘the field’