Transcript THE POETICS AND POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION

THE POETICS AND POLITICS OF
REPRESENTATION
The “Crisis of Representation”
Critical Theory & Crisis of
Representation
• The anthropology of gender and feminist
theory
• Marxist & Post-Structuralist concerns with
power & differentiated society
• Postmodernism as incredulity (challenge)
toward metanarratives of “modernity”
– self-other
– universality of development
Some Features of Postmodernism
• Focus on language and textuality
• Postmodernism as incredulity (challenging)
toward metanarratives of modernity – a
systematic skepticism
• Postmodernists are suspicious of authoritative
definitions and singular narratives of any
trajectory of events
• celebrates the multiple, incompatible,
heterogeneous, fragmented, contradictory
nature of postmodern society
• No linguistic normality — we can only produce
pastiche (heteroglossia), partial truths
Hasan: The Culture of
Postmodernism
Modernism
Purpose
Design
Hierarchy
art object, finished work
creation, totalization
Presence
Centering
genre, boundary
Semantics
lisible (readerly)
Narrative
grande histoire
master code
origin, cause
Determinacy
Transcendence
Postmodernism
play
chance
anarchy
process, performance,
decreation, deconstruction
absence
dispersal
text, intertext
rhetoric
scriptible (writerly)
anti-narrative
petite histoire
idiolect
difference-difference, trace
indeterminacy
immanence
Marxism, Post-Structuralism
• concern with power/differentiated societies
• disagreed with the existentialists' claim that each
man is what he makes himself
• individual is shaped by sociological,
psychological and linguistic structures over
which he/she has no control
• development of knowledge was intertwined with
the mechanisms of (political) power
• could be uncovered by using particular methods
of investigation
– deconstruction – archaeology & the order of things
• Writing culture as configuration of
knowledge/power
Anthropology of Gender & Feminist
Anthropology
• Filling in the gaps
• ethnographic data concerning women -- the
reports of male informants transmitted through
male ethnographers
• explore the importance of female activities
• grounded studies that place gender at the center
of analysis
• gender is an important analytical concept
– used to refer to both the male and the female, the
cultural construction of these categories, and the
relationship between them
The “Solution”: Textual Activism
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the breaking down of inherited genre distinctions
Decenter “ethnographic authority”
“Partial truths” & holism
Avoid “essentialism”
REFLEXIVITY
POLYPHONY
Historicize the ethnographic present – people without
history
• Undo bounded group – fluidity & permeability
• Translation is not transparent
• Attention to power
The “problems of representation”
• Reflexivity & intersubjective knowledge
– Made Invisible – solution: make visible
• The hegemony of the text/representation
– identify aesthetic elements, narrative
structures, epistemology of self-other
– “ethnographic authority & the text
• The “political”
– Made invisible – solution: make visible
– Limited scope on the culture/society