Critical Review #1 James Clifford 1988

The most salient takeaway points for me in this article was the dialogue between "heteroglossia" and irreconcilably incomplete and relative ethnography/anthropology, and this idea of "textualization" from Paul Ricouer . Clifford's subtitle to his article, "Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art", does well to situate ethnography and attempts at anthropology amongst artistic endeavors. As Clifford traced the history of ethnography and authority, I kept returning to the question, not of what lends ethnography "authority", but what the purpose and place of ethnography is in the first place. In other words, what's the point. The realist, cultural-tableau-vivant approaches don't approach scientific or even historical legitimacy, and the one tact that rectified that for me was the "textualization" theory. Behavior, culture, and discourse, taken as a text for reference and understanding seems to be the best attempt at a hands-off approach. Clifford says "text, unlike discourse, can travel", and I think as such quantifying culture not as experience or interpretation or even history is as clean and distinct as quantifying culture as a text.

The slippery slope here is there is nothing that can't be "textualized"--how much of the process/author/audience etc. gets swept up along in the process? For whom does this all end up being? What do we choose to or need to "textualize" in order to understand? If our discourses end up as texts anyways, what's the purpose of operating under the pretense of authority at all--why not just use art instead? What is the point of being real..?