Realism and Reification in the Ethnographic Genre

Abstract

This essay considers, from the vantage point of critical theory, some of the implications of an ethnographic genre of realism. Following Raymond Williams's discussion of the contemporary meanings of 'realism' in terms of attitudes towards the world and toward representations of it, I suggest that the current predicament of ethnography is to have purveyed a particular form of realism without awareness of the representational conventions with which it has done this, and foresee some reactions to any new awareness. To pursue this, I interpret Williams's discussion of the meanings of realism in the light of Benjamin's and Lukács's critiques of ideology in literary discourse. Then I discuss two recent analyses of ethnography as a genre, and suggest that ethnographic realism has developed in the specific sense of a reifying and critically impotent naturalism, and that as a scientific discourse this has paralleled literary realism rather as an inversion or a negation of it. The implicit concern of the two recent analyses with the historical development of the genre is pursued to suggest contradictions within and external to the formation of the ethnographic tradition, which further outline the general cultural hegemony of which it is a part.