Ethnographies In Anthropology

ETHNOGRAPHIES – THEN AND NOW

The purpose of this paper is to critically analyze the way in which anthropological ethnographies have changed in terms of the methods used when conducting a research study and how data is interpreted. Ethnographies play a pivotal role in conducting research and the way in which anthropologists collect important information. Anthropology has only existed for a small time in comparison to many of the other social sciences around today, however, the study has evolved immensely in the way that it consists of several branches of investigation, all largely supported by the way that anthropologists support their theories with the use of ethnographies.

The following sections of this paper will involve the discussion and

Wagner studied the way in which cultures were formed and especially how they were formed differently in terms of the language they used and the practices they adopted. This study is similar to Benedicts in the way that Wagner adopts cultural relativism and seeks to identify the small elements which differentiate cultures from one another.

Wagner’s main argument was that in order to fully understand the differences in cultures one needs to accumulate knowledge about that society in order to identify the values that those people hold. Wagner’s ethnography is set out to challenge anthropologists to withdraw themselves from the dominant Western conception of culture towards an understanding of the “profound differentiation of mankind” (Robbins 2002: 5). Wagner suggests that when conducting fieldwork in anthropology, the relation needs to be made to ignore individual preferences and capture the essence of a culture. What is meant by this is that ethnocentric views need to be expelled in order to completely understand the complexity of human differentiation. The importance of Wagner’s work emphasizes the strict conditions that need to be held when conducting fieldwork and observing cultural phenomena because what we see as normal may be taboo for others.

Clifford provides a critical analysis of consequences of modernism and ethnographies that have been contested in the past. Clifford’s Predicament of culture is a series of reconstructions of historical European ethnographies (James 1988: 597), in which he addresses postmodern concepts of culture in order to transform them into more traditional and modern literature.

Although Clifford was not a practicing anthropologist, his essays have been considered an influential contribution to the development of ethnographic writing and his writings have been compared to a Russian formalist literary technique “ostranenie” which is a surrealist form of “defamiliarisation” which is the way in which cultural anthropologists view and compare world systems of exotic ethnographies (Straus 1989). Clifford’s approach to ethnographies describe the need for anthropologists to adopt a position in which there “ethnographic authority” is challenged and that others are capable of recognizing the reliability of an