Rapport Is Overrated: Southwestern Ethnic Art Dealers and Ethnographers in the “Field”

Abstract

Approaches to issues of how, why, and with whom ethnographers establish and maintain “rapport” have often assumed that gaining entry, establishing trust, and maintaining relations with informants would reveal other worlds through the “truth” of their words. But what of contested social worlds where the contradictions and contestations between others’ words reveal other worlds? If ethnography reveals contested and competing constructions of social and cultural realities in process and contradictory multiple truths in creation, then what of rapport? This article explores the nonimportance of establishing and maintaining “traditional” versions of rapport with wholesale and retail ethnic art dealers who navigate a “field” of transnational cultural and social spaces, informing the production, marketing, and consumption of Zapotec textiles. Alternatively, rapport is understood as an expression of a pattern of connections that reveals other worlds through the nuanced, contradictory, and competing nature of assertions about the truth.