ABSTRACT
Anthropology was once defined as ‘the science of man embracing woman’ (McLuhan 1965:226). The homology between ethnographic knowledge and carnal knowledge has not escaped the notice of reflexive anthropologists and literary analysts of anthropological texts, while ethnographic film has been critiqued as ‘a kind of legitimated pornography, a pornography of knowledge’ (Hansen et al. 1991:210). We can no longer hide from ourselves the sexual symbolism by which the ethnographic Other, the erotic-exotic, is imagined as inhabiting an enclosed space, the field: stronghold of cultural secrets, breeding ground of experience, virgin territory to be penetrated by the ethnographer’s interpretive thrust. Vincent Crapanzano has suggested seeing this act of penetration as not merely intellectual, but phallic: ‘We say a text, a culture even, is pregnant with meaning. Do the ethnographer’s presentations become pregnant with meaning because of his interpretive, his phallic fertilizations?’ (1986:52).
