über die Schwierigkeit in der ethnologischen Forschung Grenzen zu ziehen.
überlegungen zur Ethnologie in der Spätmoderne
Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 122.1997:73-99
On the difficulty to set limits in anthropological research.
Reflections on anthropology in late modernity
##The paper is about the so-called crisis of the ethnology and the epistemological change in science and deals in four steps with the topic. The following points are discussed: 1.About the subject: the limits of the classical ethnological subject became blurred. The own is found in the strange one and the global in the concrete one. Clearly defined social spheres disappear. Ethnology is on the way to deal with the removed/disappeared limits and should not be rash in reconstructing boundaries - just for the sake of illusory clearness and implementation. An extended definition of the ethnological subject, referring to the process may make it easier to endure this ambivalence.
2.About the theory: we have to include in the basic (fundamental) and for ethnology constitutive study of traditional societies, their structures, regularities and social control, theories of late modernity, which analyse the elimination of the conventional limits and the connection of social and geographical "cultures". In regard to the institutional reflexivity characterizing the late modernity, we should come to the obvious conclusion, that also ethnological writing has to be considered as an element of social practise, which itself alters the subject. 3.About field research: field research remains the specialty of ethnology. It embodies the verbal, local and special and the reduction to a particular time. Participatory observation is the effective instrument for the research of processes of disembedding and reembedding and their interlocking. Each field research describes a social situation in which the elimination of limits between tradition and modernity, local and global elements is repeated and reflected in the relation between the ethnologist and the informant. Ethnologists can only do justice to their subject, if they are prepared to consider this correlation in their methodical research.
4.About ethics: It is not the question, that ethnology - in view of the modern development - would need new morals. But it is rather important to adopt a structural ethic. The central issue is, to endure vagueness, ambiguity, ambivalence, and variety without quick generalisation, classification and circumscription, and even more to take advantage of them as an epistemological chance. That means, the always existing ethnological respect for the different, the detail, the concrete and the special proves to be an essential element of structural ethic.##
Keywords: definitions of anthropology, borders of anthropology, ambivalent field of anthropology, late modernity, fieldwork, ethics in anthropology, crisis of anthropology
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