Postmodern

Ought we not to distinguish ethnography as an academic discipline from doing and writing ethnography? As an academic discipline, at least in the United States (and we have to recognize our parochialism) it is an arena of contestation in which science and the humanities -- science and art -- confront each other. Science has, of course, the (economic) clout.
After I had written Tuhami, I was introduced at conferences as a writer and an anthropologist: never as an anthropologist and a writer. Was this simply a question of sonority? I think not, but those attitudes have been by-passed. Or have they?
My point is that the contestation between science and art affects them both. There is, in the theological sense, an apologetic, if not a defensive, dimension to ethnography s written. I cannot speak for others who do ethnography, but I am quite certain that this contestation influenced my field research and my findings, It is not a simply a question of rigor, systematicity, or objectivity. I am haunted, less so today than when I was a student, by the parti-pris of my interlocutors – my mentors, colleagues, and other insistent figues. Yet, in my most recent fieldwork, with the Harkis, I was troubled by questions of objectivity, even though I tend to look at claims of objectivity with considerable skepticism. I question the objectivity of objectivity. Wasn’t it Goethe who called attention to the fact that objectivity is subjectivity grasped?
But to answer the question: the doing of ethnography is an art as living is an art. We live our field research, despite methodological mystification. This is not to deny the importance of method and methodology. They -- their enactment -- are minimally social facts and have to be taken as such. They must not blind us, however, to the lived dimension of our research – to the lived resistance to order, coherence, and continuity. That too is a social fact. Ethnography has always to loop back, self-critically, on itself.
Yes, within our culture, the writing of ethnography is an art as is all literature. It is, despite itself, a literary form; in fact, a constellation of literary forms.