Diogenes 53 (3):77-91 (
2006)
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Abstract
If all language is, in essence and in practice, the systematic repository of the collective awareness of the society that uses it, how can the ethnographer use his own language to write about a collective awareness that is not his own? How can he write so that he may properly represent this foreign collective awareness (which he can only partially share with the society that possesses it) without it sounding like a lot of gibberish? One way or another, through the use of native terms, some degree of progress is made, and the moment finally arrives when the book or article about a particular aspect of the society being studied leaves the ethnographer's hands, though he is certainly aware that what he has said is, inevitably, only an approximation that will require a considerable amount of correcting and polishing. As an ethnographer, in the end, you grow accustomed to this feeling of being overwhelmed by a social reality that is foreign to your own. It is actually far more difficult to regain fluidity in your own language - after days and days of forcing it and stretching it to its absolute limits in the attempt to wrap it around foreign physics and metaphysics, one's own language often feels as though it has lost its own elasticity, as if it has been stretched so very far that it can no longer return to its normal state of use.