If you’ve ever been in an anthro class with me, you’ll know that I am obsessed with discussing the ever-confusing distinctions and interactions between “reality” and “representation.” I thought this Mitchell reading built nicely on Geertz’s piece, applying this notion of “Winks upon winks” to how we venture into the ethnographic field subconsciously searching for a “picture” or a “pictorial order” of things. It’s so engrained in our methods of observation that we don’t even notice! I mean, this is precisely how I approached my thesis research this summer- hoping to capture a full picture of the filmmaking culture in Hollywood- and Mitchell’s piece has now really allowed me to reflect on how the way in which we organize information or tell stories, even, is marked by a certain line of thinking.

One of my favorite writers, Jorge Luis Borges, has written a lot on the impossibility of truth and on the destructive capacity of words- “writing as an erasing machine,” as anthropologist Michael Taussig would say. (Fun fact, the movie Interstellar is loosely based on Borges’ short story “The Library of Babel”…how could you not love this guy??) Borges wrote a short story- honestly I would say it’s more of a paragraph- called “On Exactitude in Science” about a map of the world so big and so accurate that it was the actually the size of the world itself. I think this speaks really well to Mitchell’s paradox of representations; you want them to be as “real” as possible, but at the same time only “real” to the point that it is still distinguishable as a representation. Borges’ story goes on to describe how as soon as perfect accuracy was achieved, the map was deemed useless by its creators and the discipline of cartography as a whole was abandoned. “What matters about this labyrinth [of exhibition],” Mitchell says, “is not that we never reach the real, never find the promised exit, but that such a notion of the real, such a system of truth, continues to convince us.” Knowing that the absolute best ethnography we can do will always only be a representation at best, I constantly wonder if I should think of myself as more of a creative writer or an artist…it makes me dizzy.