ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how authorship and authority are constructed in ethnographic texts through both presences and absences. It also argues that out of specific constellations of relationships in the field and in the academy emerge writers as authors – that is, as agents with the capacity to know, represent and analyse. As a reader will regularly come across accounts of fieldwork often placed at the start or close to the beginning of ethnographies. Writers frequently emphasise the contextualising purpose of these narratives, the fact that they provide essential information regarding the ways knowledge was acquired in the field. Fieldwork narratives, then, depend on two core authorial devices: they ambiguate the agency of authors so as to endow them with the capacity to represent, and they do this by enshrining the figure of the anthropologist as both outsider and insider.
