Engaging Relations: Ethnography with an Aboriginal Organisation

Abstract

This paper seeks to locate and discuss the production of ethnographic knowledge in the intercultural field of Indigenous Australia. While issues of personhood and relatedness, identity and exchange, have been well documented, they have rarely been considered from an intercultural and relational perspective where individuals (including the researcher) are the outcome rather than the premise of relationships. I describe the site of ethnographic research as a field of relational possibilities and discuss naming practices that occur during fieldwork. I argue, in the light of the relationship developed with an Aboriginal grassroots organisation, that the constitution of the researcher himself and his description of a social reality as an objective system are but two aspects of the same process of ethnographic knowledge production. I attempt to draw the epistemological and ethical consequences of such a relational paradigm.