Presentation clifford partial truths PDF

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Postmodernism: Postmodernism has three major tenets; that there is no unbiased knowledge and that no ethnography is objective, culture is a type of performance and that power is embedded within knowledge. Postmodern anthropologists usually focus on language, power and meaning and often reject universal theories. Clifford, from this piece, has clearly been influenced, and it’s evident that in this essay post modern anthropological theory builds upon theory from symbolic and interpretive anthropology. Partial truths looks on various ethnographies and tries to focus on mainly the critique. Clifford argues that these ethnographies are not particularly objective, but should be, and ethnography should be considered a type of literature and a form of art. Partial truths shows clear evidence of post modernism where Clifford believes that ethnographies should be a fusion of literary theory AND ethnography. He makes this point further on, near the end of this chapter, where he says ‘ethnography is a hybrid textual activity’ which ‘traverses genres and disciplines. The essays in this volume do not claim ethnography is only literature’ This ‘fusion’ is typical of post modernism pieces. Looking purely at the first paragraph and the literary style, Clifford breaks up his text into fragmented sections with heavy use of rhetorical questions. “Taking dictation? Fleshing out an interpretation? Recording an important observation? Dashing off a poem?.... Looks over his shoulder.. with boredom? Patience? Amusement?” he asks, all within the same paragraph. The writing style is perfect for postmodernism literature, and the fragmentation of the sentence structure alone shows post modernism qualities. The question marks are asking rhetorical questions and are not especially scientific and uses of these sentence structure devices are often present in postmodernism literature. The ‘fusion’ is brought back here through the sentence structure and grammar, Clifford is discussing anthropological accounts but in an ‘arty’ and literary way. To reiterate that, post modernism argues that ethnographies are inherently subjective because they are interpretations of a specific culture by the anthropologist studying them, and therefore should not be considered scientific or objective because if they’re an interpretation – they can’t be! He goes on to discuss how most ethnographies cannot be objective because the anthropologist uses their own knowledge of western culture in order to actually evaluate that culture. “Every version of an other wherever found, is also the construction of a self” (437) is the perfect statement from Clifford to show and indicate that every ethnography written, no matter how objective the anthropologist tries and attempts to be, is a representation of the anthropologist, rather than the culture they are studying. The issue that we run into here, however, is that ethnography slowly becomes an interpretation of an interpretation, and so forth. Although not necessarily a positive thing to pull from this essay, as it is one of the criticisms that comes with post modernism, but it highlights how Cliffords piece is from a post modernist stand point and how much he incorporates it into this critical essay and tries to evaluate other ethnographic pieces from a postmodernist point of view. Clifford goes on to say that it’s then difficult for cultural accounts to be evaluated as ‘true’ if they are not scientific or objective so as when studying cultures there is no way to know this all-encompassing truth and that ethnographic pieces can’t even begin to approach the Truth of the culture they’re studying. Cliffords resolution, so you could say, was that anthropologists should look and focus on the fragmented nature of fieldwork – all the little pieces that come with doing a piece of fieldwork, and split up an ethnography that way, instead of presenting the full, complete study of the culture. As

aforementioned, fragmentation is a key point to a post modernist piece of literature and ethnography. Clifford discusses how ‘language, rhetoric, power, and history – must now be openly confronted in the process of writing’ and that ‘they can no longer be evaded’ He runs into problems here with how the truths of an ethnographic piece can not be verified, and who has the authority to separate science from art, knowledge from ideology? He says that we should no longer claim to know the whole truth as ethnographic writers. Post modernism welcomes reflexivity and a form of standpoint theory, where a persons perspective in writing and cultural interpretation of others is guided by their own background and experiences, and this is evident in this piece. Ultimately the goal was to creates a more honest ethnography with postmodernism, and this is exactly what Clifford is arguing....