The Rashomon Effect: When Ethnographers Disagree
This[1] introduces an intermediate modified constructionist interpretation of ethnographic results.
A constructionist view of ethnography is not new, and is well characterized (according to Heider) by this passage:
An account of a little community is not something that is given out of a vending machine by putting in the appropriate coins of method and technique. There is no one ultimate and utterly objective account of a human whole. Each account, if it preserves the human quality at all, is a created product in which the human qualities of the creator-in the outside viewer and describer-are one ingredient [2]
Open disputes between ethnographers are rare, but they are important.
What Heider argues is that ethnographic disagreements form a vitaly important source of information. A disagreement between ethnographers is not simply a matter of discerning objective truth, but requires a full accounting of the subjective truths that constructed the ethnographies and mediate the dispute. "Mistakes" (Heider's quotes) are potentially nothing of the sort:That is, even “mistakes” may be made to reveal something of importance about the culture concerned as well as about the background of the ethnographer.
A summary of common reasons for disputes:
- Someone is wrong
- They are looking at different cultures of subcultures
- They are refering the same culture at different times
- They are looking differently at the same culture
- What of different personalities of the ethnographers?
- What of different value systems of the ethnographers?
- What of different cultures of the ethnographers?
[1] K. G. Heider, “The rashomon effect: When ethnographers disagree,” American Anthropologist, vol. 90, no. 1, pp. 73–81, 1988 [Online]. Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/aa.1988.90.1.02a00050
[2] R. Redfield, The little community and peasant society and culture. University of Chicago Press, 1960 [Online]. Available: http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/L/bo3638720.html