I found this week’s discussion to be particularly impactful because it exposed a misconception I had about the purpose of ethnography, which I now realize was misleading my understanding of its imagined audience and intended function. Last week, I wrote a post that identified ethnography’s contextualization as its largest weakness because of its propensity to take on the value judgements of the ethnographer.  While I still firmly believe this, I don’t know if I still consider its reliance on culture interpretation to be inherently negative after our conversation on Tuesday. As such, I feel like it is important to revisit my post from last week with my new informed perspective in order to further explore how ethnography’s dependence on interpretation can actually assist the achievement of its larger goal.

Last Tuesday, we briefly touched on the ultimate purpose of ethnography, which actually made me discover a personal bias that I had when I wrote my previous post. According to Professor Himpele, the goal of ethnography is not to provide a conclusive answer, but rather to create and maintain a sustained dialogue between people. This really resonated with me and made me reexamine my prior analyses / conceptualizations. In my most recent blog, I said that “ethnography’s contextualization can also be perceived as one of its largest weaknesses” because it “heavily relies on cultural interpretation”. In hindsight, this was probably reductionist and neglecting an important nuance because it hinged on the assumption that the value judgements and interpretations of the ethnographer reduce the “authenticity” of the piece. This assumption, I now understand, is steeped in a Western, Mitchell-esque perception that representations always need to strive to be perfect depictions of reality. Based on this reasoning, I conceptualized the influence of the ethnographer as “noise” that hindered the “accuracy” of the work. However, in actuality, as I believe Grace pointed out, embracing one’s positionality can actually increase the “authenticity” of the ethnography’s representation in some cases. After all, if the goal of ethnography is to contribute to public discourse, to add new insight to the conversation, then why pretend that your influence doesn’t exist? Why attempt to venture outside of the community in a vain attempt to capture the subject’s essence like a postcard when you can invite the audience into the center of the action like with the Kayapo?

To me, this speaks to the cruciality of increasing diversity and inclusion in anthropology’s academic community, as well as the positive impact empowering local communities can possess. While I understand the importance of maintaining the appearance of a detached academic perspective, it seems as though this is chasing an unattainable dream of “a room with a voice”, as Morris described. Instead, I now believe anthropologists should encourage their subjects to exercise a higher degree of agency over the representation of their culture and become active members in the ethnography’s construction, to step behind the camera as it were. By embracing ethnography’s positionality and bringing the people they study into the production process, anthropologists can transform cultural interpretation into a source of strength that increases the “authenticity” and “accuracy” of the representation, and in that is tremendous value and power. At least from my experience with sociology, I would argue this represents a critical divergence from traditional ethnographic studies where academics always attempt to distance themselves from their positionality, making it an incredibly profound point that will definitely continue to challenge and re-shape my conceptualization of the role of cultural interpretation moving forward.

Thank you all for this week’s insightful discussion! Have a great weekend!