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Cultural Politics and the Pragmatics of Resistance: Reflexive Discourses on Culture and History
DOI link for Cultural Politics and the Pragmatics of Resistance: Reflexive Discourses on Culture and History
Cultural Politics and the Pragmatics of Resistance: Reflexive Discourses on Culture and History book
Cultural Politics and the Pragmatics of Resistance: Reflexive Discourses on Culture and History
DOI link for Cultural Politics and the Pragmatics of Resistance: Reflexive Discourses on Culture and History
Cultural Politics and the Pragmatics of Resistance: Reflexive Discourses on Culture and History book
ABSTRACT
Although ethnicity has become a dominant concern in ethnographic fieldwork and cultural and political analysis, theories of ethnicity remain complex and demand better differentiation among the practices being studied.2 A key problem is the role of the ethnographer in shaping expressions of ethnic identity. Ethnographers bring specific understandings of ethnicity that have developed through critique of modernity and its ethnic and national forms of social stratification. In addition, ethnography often takes place in contexts involving cross-cultural interaction, and the ethnographer’s presence tends to shape interaction in ways that make cultural differences more salient. Researchers are generally outsiders to the group and hence encounter ethnic practices and discourses that have developed in response to contacts with outsiders. Scholarship on ethnicity thus tends to involve an implicit outsider perspective.