ABSTRACT
With the advent of poststructuralist theories, these understandings need to be examined. The ground upon which ethnography is built turns out to be a contested and fictive geography. Those who populate and imagine it (every participant, including the author and the reader) are, in essence, textualized identities. Their voices create a cacophony and dialogic display of contradictory desires, fears, and literary tropes that, if carefully “read,” suggest just how slippery speaking, writing, reading, and desiring subjectivity really are. In poststructuralist versions, “the real” of ethnography is taken as an effect of the discourses of the real; ethnography may construct the very materiality it attempts to represent. Poststructuralist critiques begin with assumptions of historicity and define ethnography as both a set of practices and a set of discourses. As an interpretive disturbance to the promise of representation, poststructuralists read the absent against the present. Thus, the ethnographic promise of a holistic account is betrayed by the slippage born from the partiality of language of what cannot be said precisely because of what is said, and of the impossible difference within what is said, what is intended, what is signified, what is repressed, what is taken, and what remains. From the unruly perspectives of poststructuralism, ethnography can only summon, in James Clifford’s (1986) terms, “partial truths” and “fictions” (p. 5). In this ethnographic version, the authority of ethnography, the ethnographer, and the reader is always suspect.
