ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the development of fieldwork methods and ethnographic writing as particularly significant in claims to cultural authorship and proprietorship. The different articulations suggest a useful point of departure from which to evaluate conventional understandings of creativity in knowledge production as an inventive capacity or the genius of Western individuals, or, conversely, as a collectively held and shared capacity of non-Western cultures. The chapter aims to examine these concerns through an analysis of Makereti's ethnography, investigating her manuscript notes as a material complex, to evoke a sense of ethnographic authorship as a layered and mutually appropriative process. Reproduction without acknowledgement would constitute a transgression of proprietorship an act of borrowing or copying that is understood negatively as plagiarism or theft of intellectual property. The immediacy of the modern ethnographer’s presence in the field was a rhetorical device for authenticating his or her observations, and it thus constituted the monograph as authoritative.
