ABSTRACT
The ethnographic present is dead, but we do not know with what to replace it. The trouble with the ethnographic present-that style of describing forms of life other than our own as though what people say and do now they have always said and done, and always will barring external intervention-is that it robs the life of these people of its intrinsic temporality, removing their society from the ‘timestream of history in which ethnographers and their own societies exist’.1 For the ethnographer there is life after fieldwork, and for the people, too, life goes on after the ethnographer’s departure, just as it did before his or her arrival on the scene. The ethnographic encounter is, after all, but a moment in the historical unfolding of a field of relationships in which all parties are inevitably bound up. But to represent the people as existing forever within that moment, caught-as it were-in suspended animation, is to consign their lives to a time that, in the experience of the ethnographer, has already been left far behind. As with the dreamlike world of our childhood recollections, where time stood still, the ethnographic present is the projection, on to another place and another people, of our own past-a ‘foreign country’, where they ‘do things differently’.
