| ANTH 565: ETHNOGRAPHY AS SCIENCE AND LITERATURE |
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CLASS HOME PAGE CLASS SCHEDULE |
September 26: Cliff NotesBefore reading any ethnographies (you'll get enough of those, rest assured) you are going to read a little bit of what two critics named Clifford say about ethnography as a literary genre. One of these, C. Geertz, is a distinguished ethnographer himself; the other, James C. is a literary critic and intellectual historian who has done only a little ethnography but has read a lot of it.Geertz's Works and Lives remains, I think, the best introduction to ethnography as writing, coming from someone who not only had a lot of field experience but who could also write (he died last year). Read the whole thing first, and think particularly about the questions of voice and authority that he raises. Put yourself in the position of someone who has collected a lot of field material and who is in the position of sitting down to start writing it up. Which of the writers you read about in Geertz would you try to emulate, and why? Or don't you like any of them, and again, why? Then read the chapter On Ethnographic Authority from James's The Predicament of Culture. How do his modes of ethnographic authority, the experiential, interpretive, dialogic, and polyphonic, fit or not fit with Geertz's categories? Your first writing assignment should be finished by 8:00 on the morning of class, and should be posted on the class message board. You should write a few hundred to a thousand or more words on the fantasy topic of "what I would like my first ethnographic monograph to look like." In class, we will have introductions of the instructor and the students, a brief presentation about sociocultural anthropology by Ann Anagnost, and then a general discussion of our own Cliff Notes. |