Hypertext and Ethnographic Writing

Diogenes 53 (3):77-91 (2006)
  Copy   BIBTEX

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.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,616

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Hypertext and/as collaboration in the computer-facilitated writing class.Douglas Eyman - 1996 - Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy 1 (2).
Visions of Hypertext: Literacy Implied in Electronic Writing.Jin Shen - 2007 - Philosophy and Culture 34 (11):113-135.
On Ethnographic Allegory.James Clifford, Olessia Kirtchik & Andrei Korbut - 2014 - Russian Sociological Review 13 (3):94-125.
Searching information in legal hypertext systems.Jacques Savoy - 1993 - Artificial Intelligence and Law 2 (3):205-232.
Student Problems with Hypertext and Webtext: A Student-Centered Hypertext Classroom.J. Bowie - 2001 - Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy 6 (2).

Analytics

Added to PP
2010-08-10

Downloads
122 (#136,946)

6 months
1 (#1,040,386)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

The Savage Mind.Alasdair MacIntyre & Claude Levi-Strauss - 1967 - Philosophical Quarterly 17 (69):372.
Las Moradas.Teresa de Jesús - 2008 - Revista Agustiniana 49 (148):329.

Add more references