ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to problematize the reflective gaze of the ethnographer and the reading of ethnographies. The flaneur or dandy whose aim is to be aimless, to shun any idee fixe, to master the intellectual poker face, must negotiate the everyday scene of postmodern hybridity. He must bring some semblance of meaning to intercultural social relations within the frenetic narratives and signs that are available without the gaze of the flaneur assimilating the other. Postmodern society offers disillusionment and hope in reanimating the possibilities for narrative identities that will enable new forms of critical reflexivity. A crucial question that emerges in relation to the development of the postmodern flaneur/flaneuse has to do with the question of reflexivity as sociological praxis. Deconstructive ethnography often disrupts such identification in favor of articulating a fractured, destabilized, multiply-positioned subjectivity. Whereas reflexive anthropology questions its authority, deconstructive anthropology forfeits its authority.
