ABSTRACT
Ethnosemiotic research2 involves repositioning social scientific activity in such a way as to privilege boundary situations and settings of culture contact over emic descriptions of ‘pure’ or undisturbed cultural facts. However, this simple re-framing of cultural studies has potentially radical implications for the future of intercultural understanding.3 Perhaps the most disturbing of these implications, the one with the greatest potential institutional impact, is the implicit disavowal of conventional ethnographic expertise as the final arbiter of inter-group relations. In focusing on real relations between real groups, denial, refusals and failures of understanding are more important in the historical formation of relationships and identities than are scientific neutrality and descriptive precision in accounting for one group to another.4 The introduction of ‘expertise’ into this setting is virtually guaranteed to be politically motivated and misleading. What is needed to improve our understanding of inter-group relationships is not an increase in ‘truth seeking’ in ethnographic accounts, but better analysis of the kind of error that is generic to inter-group relations.
