CONTEXT ANALYSIS OF THE CONCEPT OF OBJECTIVITY, ACCURACY AND “OTHER” IN ETNOGRAPHIC CONTEXT

Abstract

The doctrine of Johannes Fabian and Rigoberta Mençu, which is discussed and discussed in our study, includes a lot of variability in context. If these doctrines and the conceptual terminology, they contain are mentioned; the analysis of Menchú’s work has seems a bit more complex and ambiguous. These ambiguities lie in different aspects of the work: Here, there is a more complex knower-known relationship than the binary opposition between the subject which produces knowledge about the other and the passive object which expects the knowledge to be produced about itself. In relation to this, to employ a genre different from the dominant genres within humanities, particularly in anthropology, and its reliability are questionable according to the current science paradigms. Moreover, the emerging of such contradictory views about the production, reproduction, representation, and reception of Menchú's work -the attempt of producing and representing a different knowledge for and about her own community- brings about questioning of possibility of producing an absolute knowledge/abstract truth about the other communities independent from social, political and economic context. This again draws our attention to the power-knowledge relation, the partiality of knowledge and situated knowledge. Thus, establishing a relation with the other needs to study epistemology of contemporary ethnography willing to produce better understanding, and requires investigating this epistemology embedded within/along broader social relations that locate researcher and researched in different places. This attempt entails to deal with the positivist scientifism inherited by ethnography from modern anthropology that is to say with the dominant assumptions of western modernity project. In our study, these concepts were questioned, interpreted, and discussed.