2nd Critical Review

James Clifford, "On Ethnographic Authority"

In this chapter, Clifford writes about the changes that have occurred in beliefs about who is the authority in ethnography. He writes about how university-trained anthropologists came to supplant other ethnographers (missionaries or travelers) who did not share their scientific viewpoint and methodology. The next major wave of anthropologists he writes about shared many of the following beliefs: they did not feel it necessary to be fluent in the language of the people they studied; they emphasized observation and theoretical abstractions; their research was relatively short-term; they focused on particular social institutions; and their personalities tended to be a part of their work. At this time, the method of participant-observation and an emphasis on the fieldworker's experience also came into the fore. In interpretive anthropology, the next school of thought Clifford presents, a culture is looked a bunch of texts to be interpreted. Discursive anthropology, which follows interpretive, recasts the fieldworker's experience in the form of a dialog, but Clifford concludes that this too can be unsatisfactory. He concludes by writing about models of "polyphonic authority," including an example of an anthropologist who included her informants on the title page of the book she wrote about their culture.

Discussion Question: In this chapter, Clifford claims that there is no "neutral standpoint" for an ethnographer to take when writing about a culture. How does his suggestion of "polyphonic authority" (among other things, use of informants who are ethnographers within their culture) address this problem?