Between love and culture: Misunderstanding, textuality and the dialectics of ethnographic knowledge

Abstract

This paper will explore the intertextual dialectics of understanding and misunderstanding in the negotiation of relations between consultants and the ethnographic fieldworker. The material for this essay draws on conversations with consultants from the Fort Apache Reservation. I will argue that the textual constructions of otherness through which consultants apprehend the social presence of the fieldworker are transformed in the fieldwork encounter. These transformations allow consultants to author relations with the ethnographer. I will also explore attempts by field consultants to understand the objective and limits of the ethnographic project by framing it in terms of locally constituted idioms of relationship. I will conclude by suggesting that the entextualizing practices of ethnography threaten to obscure the authority asserted by consultants in fieldwork conversations.