When writing, ethnographers are faced with the hermeneutic task of
interweaving their dialogues with scholars and their dialogues with their interlocutors
in the field. This article is a critique of a long-standing tendency in
anthropology to conflate social analysis in texts with social analysis on the
ground. I am taking issue with a tendency to compare social theorists such as
Heidegger or Bakhtin with the social analysts met during fieldwork. In this intellectual
thought exercise, I compare structural functionalists with Samoan
migrants to explore some of the differences between writing and practicing
social analysis.
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