ABSTRACT
In the world of anthropology are always faced with the worry of how to handle ‘chaos’ in data. The idea of ethnography as fact – as true knowledge – has remained stubbornly resistant is to attack over the years. In the 1980s post-modern critiques raised the notion that ethnography was ‘fiction’ in the specific sense that it was a creative construction elaborated through the medium of writing. Ethnographic facts exist as facts only within socially embedded conversations involving multiple perspectives and cross-cutting intellectual networks. But there is a further intricacy that follows from this. Ethnographic facts have an emotionally or morally committed aspect to them. Lee Drummond captures some of the recurrent potential of ethnography to provoke in his study American Dreamtime. There he argues for a serious comparison between American cinema with Aboriginal Dreamtime mythology. The real life of Americans is as interwoven with myth as the real life of Australian aboriginals, he proposes.
