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.
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