The illusion that ethnography is a matter of sorting strange and
irregular facts into familiar and orderly categories--this is magic,
that is technology--has long since been exploded. What it is instead,
however, is less clear. That it might be a kind of writing, putting
things to paper, has now and then occurred to those engaged in producing
it, consuming it, or both. But the examination of it as such has been
impeded by several considerations, none of them very reasonable. One of
these, especially weighty among the producers, has been simply that it
is an unanthropological sort of thing to do. What a proper ethnographer
ought properly to be doing is going out to places, coming back with
information about how people live there, and making that information
available to the professional community in practical form, not lounging
about in libraries reflecting on literary questions. Excessive concern,
which in practice usually means any concern at all, with how
ethnographic texts are constructed seems like an unhealthy
self-absorption--time wasting at best, hypochondriacal at worst. The
advantage of shifting at least part of our attention from the
fascinations of field work, which have held us so long in thrall, to
those of writing is not only that this difficulty will become more
clearly understood, but also that we shall learn to read with a more
percipient eye. A hundred and fifteen years (if we date our profession,
as conventionally, from Tylor) of asseverational prose and literary
innocence is long enough.
