On Dialogue and Destructive Analysis: Problems in Narrating Nationalism and Ethnicity

Abstract

Recent proposals for 'dialogic' narrative ask anthropologists not merely to include the voices of others in their ethnographic narratives, but explicitly to share 'ethnographic authority' with them. Yet such a strategy may not be well suited for narrations about realities one wants to explore critically. For example, the analysis of nationalist politics reveals a set of basic presuppositions about the nature of culture that most anthropologists share with nationalist ideologues. In this case to share narrative authority simply traps ethnographic writers in a discourse from which they might need to distance themselves.