For a Postmodernist Writing in Anthropology

The Interpretation of Cultures

Abstract

James Clifford’s Partial Truths is an introduction to an anthropological collection of essays, perceived as illustrative of a historical and theoretical movement, of a conceptual shift, consisting in a sharp separation of form from content to its utmost degree, the fetishizing of form. (Carstea 2021: 52) Ethnography, a hybrid activity, thus appears mainly as writing, as collecting. Viewed most broadly, perhaps, it is a mode of travel, a way of understanding and getting around in a diverse world that, since the sixteenth century, has been cartographically unified. I will argue, in concurrence with the postmodernist tenets of anthropology, put forth by James Clifford, that ethnographic knowledge could not be the property of a single discourse or discipline: the condition of off-centredness in a world of distinct meaning systems, a state of being in culture while looking at a culture, permeates postmodernist writing. Thus, to an important degree, the truth recorded is a truth provoked by ethnography, as Clifford acknowledges. The fictional, fashioned self is invariably associated with its culture and its language, namely its coded modes of expression. The subjectiveness he finds is “not an epiphany of identity freely chosen, but a cultural artefact,” (Greenblatt 2008: 257) because the self manoeuvres within possibilities and constraints offered by an institutionalised assortment of collective codes and practices. I will conclude that ethnographic truths cannot be other than inherently partial and incomplete, a fact which justifies and substantiates the experimental, artisanal quality tied to the work of writing, of cultural accounts. Textualization engenders meaning by way of a circuitous movement which insulates and subsequently adds context to an event or fact in its engulfing reality. Ethnography is the interpretation of cultures.