James Clifford is a historian and Teacher in the History of Consciousness Team at the University of California. Clifford and Hayden White were one of the primary faculty directly appointed to the History of Awareness Ph. D. program in 1978, that was originally the only graduate- office at UC-Santa Cruz. The History of Consciousness department continues to be an intellectual centre for ground breaking interdisciplinary and critical scholarship in the U. S. and overseas, largely credited to Clifford and White's affect, as well as the work of other visible faculty who were appointed in the 1980s. Clifford offered as Chair to this team from 2004-2007. Clifford is the writer of several widely cited and translated books, including The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Books and Fine art (1988), Routes: Travel and Translation in the Overdue 20th Century (1997), as well as the editor of Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, with George Marcus (1986) which I've made my display. Clifford's work has sparked controversy and critical question in several disciplines, such as literature, art history and visual studies, and especially in social anthropology, as his literary critiques of written ethnography greatly contributed to the discipline's important self-critical period of the 1980s and early 1990s.
"On Ethnographic Allegory", by Wayne Clifford is a report on how world perceives other ethnicity, which is to say with allegories and considers ethnographic accounts as allegorical. He holds the thoughts and opinions that "transcendent meanings will be the conditions of its meaningfulness. The rhetorical strategy of extending a metaphor through an complete narrative so that objects, persons, and activities in the text are equated with meanings that rest outside the text. Here it will be worth mentioning the story that Clifford has contained in his essay and that is from Marjorie Shostak commences her publication Nisa: The Life and Words of an !Kung Woman with a story of childbirth the !Kung way- beyond your village, alone, below are a few excerpts: I place there and believed the aches as they emerged, over and over again. Then I thought something wet, the beginning of the childbirth. I thought, "Eh hey, maybe it is the child. " I got up and got a blanket and covered Tashay with it; he was still sleeping. I QUICKLY needed another blanket and my smaller duiker pores and skin covering and I still left. Was I not the only one? The one other woman was Tashay's grandmother, and she was asleep in her hut. So, as I was, I remaining. I waked a brief distance from the village and sat down beside a tree. After she was born, I sat there; I didn't know very well what to do. I had no sense. She lay down there moving her arms about, endeavoring to suck her fingertips. She began to cry. I simply sat there, taking a look at her. I thought, "Is this my child? Who offered birth to the child?" then I thought, " a large thing like this? How could it possibly have recently come out from my genitals?" I sat there and looked at her, seemed and viewed and appeared. Another example which is not in the written text but I thought would be relevant is the movie "Avatar".
Clifford models out to show that ethnography perform the dual function of showing about a culture and making broader, humanistic statements. In both form and content, ethnographies are allegorical, and therefore they encompass additional so this means (as built and told stories) beyond the neighborhood social meanings they presume to provide. Clifford launches his discussion about the ethnographic content being allegorical by arguing that of the levels of the text are allegorical, not just the ones that are recognized to be the interpretive. He illustrates this by embracing Nisa, which he says has three allegorical registers: (1) Nisa as a means in to talking about !Kung culture; (2) question of what it means to be always a woman and also have a woman's experience; and (3) the dialogical connection between your ethnographer and subject matter. Clifford argues that the three strands shed light on the dialogical, contingent, inter-subjective character of fieldwork, which can't be thought of in the same way an empirical means to generalize about a culture.
In another section he identifies, what allegory means to him - namely: "allegory says a very important factor and means another. " I quote: "Allegory prompts us to say of any social description not this signifies, or symbolizes, that but instead this is a (morally billed) story about this (100)" Besides, Clifford points out the process of cultural translation. He emphasizes that if you want to make the other (or an alternative life-style) comprehensible the ethnographer or anybody else has to use sources (images) from his own context. Only in this way the readers may understand the author's concept.
Further, Clifford's newspaper turns to a study of an repeated allegory in ethnography of his time, which he labels ethnographic pastoral, which is the body to the part of his discussion which handles ethnography (written) form. Clifford argues that ethnographies promote the practice of textualization. The act of writing enacts the pastoral theme, making the spoken, living, into something preserved and stable. Clifford implies ways to subvert the allegory of textualization, most radical which is his consideration of Derrida's expanded conception of writing, whereby each culture has its writing, thus making the ethnographer the primary writer of another culture, because the culture is often already writing itself. Clifford thus points out how pervasive the challenge to the allegory textualization is and shows that this new conception issues the ethnographer's authority, for the local who are able to write his own culture issues the ethnographer's expert.
One of the main element illustrations that Clifford deals with is of Nisa: THE LIFE SPAN and Words of a !Kung Girl. Clifford extracts Shostaks description of child labor and birth and points out that the story is about the local cultural meanings and a general report about woman's experience and much more broadly human experience which transcend the particular. Shostak's life of an !Kung individual inevitably becomes an allegory of (girl) humanity. These kind of transcendent meanings aren't abstractions or interpretations put into the original simple account. Alternatively, they will be the conditions of its meaningfulness. Ethnographic texts are inevitably allegorical, and a serious acceptance of this truth changes the ways they could be written and read.
Allegory pulls special attention to the narrative figure of ethnical representations, to the stories built into the representational process itself. It also breaks down the seamless quality of ethnic description by adding a temporal aspect to the process of reading. One level of interpretation in a word will always create other levels.
Coleridge explains a 2-level framework of the ethnographic: one group of agents or images is accompanied by a degree of the super-sensual, the moral. As Clifford points out, what one views in a coherent ethnographic accounts, the imaged construct of the other, is connected in a continuing double structure using what one understands (101).
Clifford argues that there isn't just one level that is interpretive as the other levels will be the factual: a scientific ethnography normally establishes a privileged allegorical register it recognizes as theory, interpretation, or description. But once all significant levels in a text, including ideas and interpretations, are recognized as allegorical, it becomes difficult to view one of them as privileged, accounting for the rest. Once this anchor is dislodged, the staging and valuing of multiple allegorical registers, or voices, becomes an important area of matter for ethnographic writers (103).
The exemplory case of Nisa as given in this specific article has three registers of allegory, which do not mix together but stay as three strands within the work: description of the !Kung female, questioning in what it means to be always a woman (humanist task, looking for commonality), and the dialogical romantic relationship between ethnographer and subject (103-4). The second two registers are especially entwined in Clifford's information. He discusses the three registers:
1) First register is description of Nisa to try and summarize the culture, though Clifford critiques that there is a pressure in the way the particular is intended to speak for the general. Shostak challenges between considering Nisa is distinctive and that she is generalizable. This try out at generalizing, to be medical, is subsequently in anxiety with the personal and inters subjective dynamics of the other two registers.
2) Evidently dialogical, molded by the scholar as well as the subject. Nisa's reflections are prepared into a full life-span. Creating autobiography is non-natural, requires company into a narrative that's not a given. Shostak intervenes to organize, body transcripts, etc. The narration makes individual sense (106).
3) Shostak's bill of her experience in the field. Shostak informed her interlocutors that she wished to better understand womanhood in her own culture by understanding its interpretation in theirs. Nisa talks to Shostak like she is presenting her advice, it takes part in a feminist discourse of distributed female experience (such as oppression) (107).
In the following part he focuses the retrospect or nostalgic view in ethnography. Clifford titles this type of view that he considers consequently of the textualisation of culture or textual embodiment of culture: "ethnographic pastoral". He calls for the allegory of "salvage, " a composition of ethnographic writing, because of this of the transportation of oral-discursive experience to wording. In this manner the ethnographer seems to save vanishing cultures. But today, he claims, this is not the case ever again, if it ever was such as this. There already can be found written sources of cultures and lots of informants have the ability to read and write. Pursuing Derrida he says: "What counts of ethnography is the claim that all human organizations write - if they articulate, classify, have got an oral books, or inscribe their world in ritual serves" (117). Ethnographers do not fix dental accounts in written text messages anymore. They convert or re-write something that already prevails even in another form. In this way the dualism between literate and non-literate does not exist. However the idea to redeem vanishing things persists and in what of Benjamin it is "one of the strongest impulses in allegory" (119). Clifford holds the opinion that people can only resist this impulse if we open ourselves to different histories. At this point emerges the next question: How do we open up ourselves to different histories?
Like a manifest he reveals his final result in five details:
"There is no way definitely to split up the factual from the allegorical in cultural accounts. "
"This is of your ethnographic bank account is uncontrollable. "
"Recognition of allegory poses the politics and ethical dimension of ethnographic writing. "
"Recognition of allegory complicates the writing and reading of ethnographies in potentially successful ways. "
"Recognition of allegory requires that as visitors and writers of ethnographies, we struggle to confront and take responsibility for our systematic structure of others and ourselves through others. "
In Clifford's point of view, the actual fact, that ethnographies produce an allegorical sizing, is the smaller problem - because every word has at least a second meaning. The key point is that a lot of ethnographies do not mark allegories. Clifford argues that people should not get away from allegory, but resist the impulse to help make the short-lived permanent and also to start ourselves to different histories (119).
Recognizing allegory contributes to productive new ways to learn ethnography, beginning reader to new forms of analysis and acknowledgement of different strands within the text and temporal relationships (120). Spotting allegory makes us take responsibility for how exactly we construct the other and thus ourselves (121).
