Text as terror: second thoughts about charisma [1979]

Ethnographic objectivity is not just a matter of the researcher's attitude, nor simply of the Jarvie submission to a scientific code; it, as this chapter likes to reformulate it, a quality of active participation in communicative interchanges and of the interpretation of the resulting knowledge as product of communicative processes. The chapter proceeds from programmatic statements to specific tasks and brings together a number of observations concerning a communicative event which is crucial in most ethnographic work, has as such received little thorough attention, namely, the unstructured fieldwork interview. The interviewing techniques is indispensable in many social sciences, is the object of considerable technical elaboration and critical examination. The chapter understands the epistemology of the interview, the conditions of possibility of initiating communicative exchanges in problematic and intercultural situations. It further focuses on the concepts and contexts like: Fieldwork, Interview, Language and sociolinguistics, Language situation and Language choice.