Fieldwork and the Commodification of Culture: Why the Natives are Restless
Author(s)
Richer, Stephen
Abstract
The paper presents a model of anthropological fieldwork based on Marxist assumptions about the labor process. An argument is developed that this process contains two fundamental contradictions: 1) that between the collective nature of fieldwork and the private appropriation of the ethnography; and 2) that between the native view of culture as use value and the anthropological view of culture as exchange value. These in turn are argued to foster native alienation and resistance to anthropological research, with consequent changes in both the structure of fieldwork and in the extent of political involvement of anthropologists.
