Von der Rhetorik des Schreibens zum Eros der Begegnung in der Ethnographischen Praxis. Gibt es einen Weg zurück?
Der Verrat der postmodernen Textualisten im Lichte der zweideutigen Kritik von Geertz (Versuch eines "dichten Lesens")
Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 122.1997:45-71
On the rhetoric of writing towards an Eros of encounter in ethnographic practice. Is there a way back?
The betrayal of postmodern textualists in the light of the ambiguous critique by Geertz (An attempt at "thick reading")
##During the last decade it has become fashionable, in particular in American anthropological circles, to speak of a crisis of representation. Following Geertz' 1973 call for a more transparent research process, many approaches and experiments were undertaken to improve the modes of representation in ethnographic writing. However, this seems to place the focus at the wrong end of the research process: anthropology does not so much have a problem with writing, I would maintain, but rather with the legitimacy of the research encounter. Caution is therefore advisable, lest we put too much emphasis on the product of research through rhetorical artistry while forgetting the process of research itself. The whole movement of "Writing Culture" while en vogue in literary circles and those of "cultural studies", seems to have led anthropology to the barren impasse of the paradigmatic armchair-approach by slipping into literary discourses of introspective meta-exercises, the subjects of the field-encounter, meanwhile, becoming almost invisible. Geertz, on the surface of his 1988 "Works and Lives", disavowed the whole movement of "Writing Culture", yet he did much to foster the belief that anthropology stands or falls with its skill in convincingly und persuasively writing about others. A close reading of his advice discloses the ambiguity of his own position: while sarcastically deriding the Malinowskian aim of a specific ethnographic mode of research and exposing with some scorn the rhetorical skills of the master-generation (Benedict, Firth, Lévi-Strauss and others), he opts in the end for a continuation of this very same rhetoric of persuasiveness in ethnography. The present essay puts this whole movement into perspective in the light of other ideological movements permeating the intellectual scene in the United States at present, among them that of political correctness. The author offers a way out of the conundrum of the endless debates on the textuality of social life by advocating a new concentration on that very topic which Geertz disavowed as "hackneyed", the actual field-research conditions of the ethnographic encounter, through reference to some underrated approaches deriving from Kurt Wolff's notion of "surrender and catch" as well as from a Bakhtinian view of coping with otherness. Both put - similar to the critique of Susan Sontag - the main attention on the "Eros" of research instead of the navel-gazing exercises in meta-discourses among specialists.##
Keywords: ethnography, postmodernism, writing culture, Geertz, C., Sontag, S. Bakhtin, M., Wolff, K., textuality, 'thick reading', 'Eros' of research
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