Rethinking Fieldwork and Ethnographic Writing
Rent from DeepDyve- Rethinking Fieldwork and Ethnographic Writing
Article originally published as "Replanteamiento del trabajo de campo y la escritura etnográficos," in Luis Guillermo Vasco's Entre selva y páramo: Viviendo y pensando la lucha india, a book published in Bogotá by the Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, 2002, 452-86. Translated by Joanne Rappaport and reprinted in Collaborative Anthropologies with the permission of the Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia and the author.
Colombian anthropologist Luis Guillermo Vasco participated in pathbreaking collaborative research with the History Committee of the traditional authorities (or cabildo) of the indigenous community of Guambía, in southwestern highland Colombia. The collaboration resulted in a series of publications, including the book, Guambianos: Hijos del aroiris y del agua (Bogotá: Los Cuatro Elementos, 1998), co-authored with Guambiano elder Abelino Dagua Hurtado and Guambiano researcher Misael Aranda. The research also made far-reaching contributions to the historical self-consciousness and the political agenda of the Guambiano community itself. In this article Vasco reflects on the nature of collaborative research methods.1
During the 1970s a broad-based questioning of ethnography and its purpose unfolded in Colombia. In part, the origins of this discussion came out of a group of anthropologists with whom I was affiliated, a current that has been somewhat inappropriately called the "anthropology of debate" (Arocha 1984: 90, 97-99). I see the label as inappropriate because there never was a true debate, and those who disagreed with our critique preferred, for the most part, to remain silent. [End Page 18]
Other academics emphasized in particular an important—but not fundamental—issue: our need to achieve wider dissemination of our research results and to ensure that a broader readership understood our writings, given that the language we used at the time was overly specialized, comprehensible exclusively to "initiates," as well as heavy, flat, lifeless, and tiresome.
This debate was also on the rise in other locations, especially in North America, but there are significant differences between what was occurring in Colombia and in the North. While in the United States the central thrust involved writing as a means of communicating research results, the growing presence of a strong indigenous movement in Colombia led us to question the very ways we engaged in research, above all in the field. For us, the key question was: How can we achieve a complete transformation of the anthropologist's craft?
We felt that writing was a secondary issue, although it did come up in our reflections. We focused on a broader and more important set of problems, given the conditions of our country: Why and for whom should we pursue anthropological research? We did not believe that rethinking the literary forms of communication of our research results was of the essence; instead we proposed a reconsideration of the very forms taken by our research as well as the objectives we hoped to fulfill through our work, a reconsideration that in itself would determine the final results, including the nature of our writing.
Moreover, the overwhelming majority of the indigenous people, blacks, and peasants to whom our work was directed were illiterate. Many Native people were monolingual in their own languages, which at the time lacked alphabets that could have made literacy possible; the few alphabets that existed were the products of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), an unmistakable enemy of the indigenous struggle, and for this reason many indigenous people refused to use these writing systems.2 Our general position was to refuse to put the results of our work in writing.
We believed that it was not possible to transform ethnographic writing in a substantial way, except by modifying field methodologies. That is to say, changes in writing only impact form, as we note in the postmodernist current that has been most closely concerned with this issue. It is clear today that the postmodernist rethinking of writing has basically remained at a theoretical level, without achieving the objectives [End Page 19] it proposed. Hence some authors' affirmation that postmodernists cannot move beyond a declaration of objectives; very few works have emerged from their...
