Reflexivity :: Enthnography Anthropology Essays

ReflexivityAnthropologists research and write. They participate and observe in commit to produce ethnographies. While some anthropologists venture to exotic lands to study the natives, others get by ethnographic research within their own culture. Despite the diverse cultures they picture and the use of a tape recorder instead of a save and a notebook, the ethnographic process is virtually the same. Or is it? Although similarities between ethnographies exist, when it comes spate to it, ethnographies differ from one anthropologist to the next and one culture to the next found on the writing techniques applied by the ethnographer, the survey of the anthropologist (age, gender, class, culture), and his or her manners experiences. Some ethnographers use reflexiveness, a writing tool that personalizes ethnography as the anthropologist writes about his/herself in the work. In a reflexive ethnography, the anthropologist strengths his/herself in similarity to the examined culture and writes about his/her ethnographic experience, an experience which hopefully bridged the gap between the anthropologists culture and studied culture, converting the outsider status of the anthropologist to an insider position. Reflexivity allows the ethnographer to immortalize how and why it is that he/she empathizes with a culture and to allow the audience an prospect to identify with a culture that is not his/her own. Ultimately, reflexivity conveys the importance to cognise the similarities and differences that exist between cultures.In a reflexive ethnography, anthropologists locate their position in another culture and outline their experiences inside and outside of the examined culture. George E. Marcus describes reflexivity as the practice of lay (Marcus 198). Reflexivity locates the ethnographer . . . his or her literal position in relation to subjects (Marcus 197-198). In other words, reflexivity conveys to the audience that the ethnographer was there. In most cases the ethnographer uses phrases such as, I realized, or, I examined, or simply I. This solution of first-hand cultural knowledge grants the ethnographer authority to write about and understand a culture because he/she participated and observed the culture in action. Renato Rosaldo writes about positioning and the authority it gives him to write about the Ilongot tribe. In Grief and a shrinks Rage, he writes, The ethnographer, as a positioned subject, grasps certain human phenomena break down than others. He or she occupies a position or structural fixture and observes with a particular angle of vision .