Arguments with Ethnography

This critique of the globalisation of the culture principle in anthropology contends that the subjective anthropology promoted through postmodernism represents an extreme development of long established, highly patronising and misleading evaluations of the anthropologist's creative role in the construction of theory. Arguing that theory-building is dependent on the actual study of peoples - a study which is empirically based and historically sensitive - the book advocates the "fieldwork mode of production and reproduction". The simplest model for the construction of empirically-grounded theory involves three interacting sets of factors:the subjective ethnographer and his deployment of current theoretical assumptions; the multi-layered ethnographic "facts" disclosed by fieldwork; the geopolitical and historical contexts in which fieldwork is conducted.