James Clifford and George E. Marcus (eds.), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1986).

The nine essays collected in Writing Culture witnessed and prompted the crumbling of the idea of ethnography as a neutral, scientific form of representation, opening a new debate in ethnography and the social sciences. The “literariness” of ethnography became a central point for reflexivity and argumentation: how we write carries part of our arguments, it reveals our political stance and epistemological approaches. It shows how we construct authority. Literary devices—metaphor, allegory, figuration, narrative—affect the ways empirical realities emerge from the act of reading, how we see the world through texts.

Since its inception as a scientific endeavor, ethnographic writing attempted to render social reality in a transparent and objective way. Like photographs, their “dense descriptions” attempted to portray “cultures,” practices, and meaning through text in a straight-forward manner. The training of ethnographers consisted on learning how to suppress their inner-thoughts, their feelings, and become invisible, something like an instrument—ignoring that representing others always involves simplification, exclusion, selection: the underlying politics of writing and representation. The works of anthropologists and literary theorists in the 1960s began to question some of these assumptions. They prefigured the intellectual context of the book that would later break (or rather reflect the breaking of) this myth: Writing Culture. Based on a seminar organized at the School of American Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1984, this edited volume offers textual, literary, and political analyses of ethnographic writing. As James Clifford writes in the first essay of the collection,

No longer a marginal, or occulted, dimension, writing has emerged as central to what anthropologists do both in the field and thereafter. The fact that it has not until recently been portrayed or seriously discussed reflects the persistence of an ideology claiming transparency of representation and immediacy of experience. Writing reduced to method: keeping good field notes, making accurate maps, “writing up” results.

Writing, therefore, entails much more than a methodology or a medium—as the rest of the chapters brilliantly show. This book reminds us that “cultures,” actors, political or historical processes, do not stand still for their portraits. Representing always involves simplification, inclusion, selection. It always implies a hierarchical arrangement of images, texts, and discourses—and therefore a politics.