Revisiting The Crisis of

Representation.

Decolonizing Participant

Observation.

Conference: (Be-)Deutungsansprüche in qualitativer Forschung

Positionen, Strategien und

Perspektiven (selbst-)kritischer Wissensproduktion

Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main 2012

Harpreet Cholia, M.A and Vanessa Eileen Thompson, M.A

Department of Sociology, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main

Revisiting The Crisis of Representation.

Decolonizing Participant ObservationAccounts of a critical reflection of

anthropology’s complicity with the colonial encounter emerged.

Malinowski’s diaries (published in 1967) gave rise to a concussion of ethnographic authority. Within this context the attempt to part with the dichotomy between monographs (public) and memoirs (private) created a new genre: Autoethnography.

Revisiting The Crisis of Representation.

Decolonizing Participant Observation

Critique of the epistemic premises of the humanities. Questions of power and power relations and their intertwinement with knowledge came into discussion (Literary/Postmodern turn) (Foucault)

Development and growth of ‚indigenous anthropology’, in a sense that the research subjects of color started to speak back within the ‚teaching machine’

Revisiting The Crisis of Representation.

Decolonizing Participant Observation

The texts that mostly represent this debate are Ethnographies as Texts (1982) of George Marcus und Dick Cushman, On Ethnographic Authority (1983) of James Clifford and James Clifford’s and George Marcus’ Essay edition Writing Culture (1986) that resulted out of the seminar The Making of Ethnographic Texts in 1984.

Revisiting The Crisis of Representation.

Decolonizing Participant Observation

“an important focus should be the various connections and interconnections, historical and contemporary, between a community and the anthropologist working there and writing about it, not to mention the world to which he or she belongs and which enables him or her to be in that particular place studying that group” (p.472).

Revisiting The Crisis of Representation.

Decolonizing Participant Observation

‚unlearning one’s privilege as one’s loss’ and learning ‚to learn from below’

Which perspectives are closed for us because we are privileged?

What are our privileges based on, what are we not able to see because of them, what are we not able to hear because of them?

Revisiting The Crisis of Representation.

Decolonizing Participant Observation

Revisiting The Crisis of Representation.

Decolonizing Participant Observation

Revisiting The Crisis of Representation.

Decolonizing Participant Observation

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