ABSTRACT
The emergence of the critical discourse of ‘new ethnography’ coincided with the effervescence of feminist perspectives in anthropology. The restricted opening given to ‘native anthropology’ in the new ethnography was determined by its universalistic presuppositions that mediated its conception of cultural difference. The shift from classical anthropology to the new ethnography in American discourse put into crisis rigid divisions between the subjective and the objective. ‘Native anthropology’ was in many ways an offspring of Franz Boas’s anthropology and its principle of self-reflexivity. Ethnography is a stage in the agon of contemporary cultural experience and major protagonist. Culture becomes the process by which historical experience is reinterpreted through thought, action and object relations and it is mediated and internalized as everyday life by social actors. Ethnographic translation is a performance practice articulated in-situ in the everyday embodied action of fieldwork. The difference between social and cultural anthropology can be summarized in the debate between stable kinship structures versus the performative, symbolic, interactionist.
