Ethnography as Learning by Whitaker

A constructionist position is one which assumes that all human meaning and knowledge is constructed in some way by people themselves. Marcus and Fischer presuppose this in their book not only because it is the position held for the most part (though often unreflectively) by interpretivist school of anthropology from which the "critiques" they were considering issued, but because it is consistent with the deflationary claims of their project.

It is undeniable that one of the clubs with which Western imperialists most liked to thump impudent anticolonial challengers was their "epistemological privilege" - the claim, that is, that Western scientific objectivity provided descriptions of the world (including the social world) that were beyond challenge except in their own terms. However, stated so vaguely, Marcus and Fischer's constructionist stance left them open, on the one hand, to misinterpretation and, on the other, to outright attack.

The only way ethnography can avoid the twin evils of "positivism" (read epistemological privilege) and "imperialism" is to engage in a "poetics" that "evokes" rather than describes.

We experience critical ethnography open to the suspicion, on the one hand, that all representation is repressive and, on the other, that being political and critical at the same time may be incoherent. My own feeling is that anthropologists make their work both less readable and less clearly political out of a background of fear that one or both of these suspicions may be right.