Ethnography, Intertextuality and the End of Description

The politics of method: from leftist ethnography to educative research

“…What they have found is that it is a history of textual practice because what ethnographers do is write (Geertz, 1973;see Clifford & Marcus, 1986). Ethnographers do not so much describe culture as inscribe it in discourse; indeed, the "end of description" (Tyler, 1985) has been announced. The claim, instead, is that ethnographies can never be mere descriptions because the act of writing binds together politics and poetics (Clifford, 1983;Clifford & Marcus, 1986).…”

“…Often, gaining access to the group studied required that ethnographers ally themselves with colonial administrators, and although this Downloaded by [University of Chicago Library] at 15:51 08 December 2014 240 ANDREW GITLIN el al. move succeeded in separating ethnographers from missionaries, it was not ideologically innocent. Caught up in the European expansion, ethnographers and colonial administrators together effectively maintained the status quo (Tyler, 1985;see Pratt, 1986).…”

“…Bronislaw Malinowski usually is credited with establishing ethnography as the sine qua non of cultural anthropology (Erickson, 1986), but travellers and missionaries produced good ethnographies as well (Tyler, 1985). For a discipline trying to establish itself as a "science," such apparently biased and theoretically naive works posed a threat.…”

Bourdieu and Initial Teacher Education‐a post‐structuralist approach

“…What are important here are the generative structures, as indicated in Figs 1 and 2 and illustrated in my discussion of linguistic competence. Tyler (1985Tyler ( , 1986 argues that, from a post-modernist position, the objective of research is not how best to represent but how to avoid representing. He advocates 'evocation' as a suitable alternative, as only here is ethnography freed from mimesis, which he sees as an inappropriate mode of scientific rhetoric that entails 'objects', or facts, descriptions, inductions, generalisations, and concepts of truth.…”

Ethnography and the politics of absence

“…Tyler (1985) and Clifford and Marcus (1986) argue that since edinography inscribes culture in discourse rather than merely describes it, it is die end of description, for the very act of writing binds politics and poetics. The choice of edinography, in this sense, needs to be justified as much as what one does with -and how one writes -ethnography.…”