ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the ethical question to what extend we are allowed to fabricate evidence in order to make the ethnographic narration more accurate and more accessible to the wider public. It reexamines the persistent issues of field research, interpretation and meaning articulation in anthropology, and frames them in an expanded understanding of research ethics that leaves room for imagination, creativity, omission and “tampering with evidence” as part of a viable ethnographic practice. In doing so, it discusses the central epistemological division between episteme and techne (as art and as technology), which has been posing tantalizing questions to the humanities and social sciences since Aristotle. It introduces the idea of the ethnographic artifact (a notional and tangible object that stands both etymologically and epistemologically midway between art and fact) as a tentative resolution of the tension between a politics of truth and a politics of fabrication and storytelling. The author posits that, since academic writing has often failed to do justice to the research subjects or adequately engage with nonacademic audiences, research-based fiction may be an answer to a wider politics of representation and knowledge dissemination. The analysis draws on the research project “Ethnography and/as hypertext fiction: representing surrogate motherhood” (HYFRESMO), which focuses on the emerging social practice of surrogate motherhood in order to critically address digital ethnographic textuality by producing nonnormative ethnographic “texts.”
