Native Informant as Impossible Perspective: Information, Subalternist Deconstruction and Ethnographies of Globalization
Author(s)
Mookerjea, Sourayan
Abstract
Knowledge produced through ethnography has long flowed into popular culture, and the circulation of stereotypes and information about cultural differences is a characteristic feature of our time. Yet the integration of ethnography into the circuits of information of postmodern culture has received little critical attention. How can ethnographic research on globalization resist the formal reduction of ideas into information? This essay reworks literary theorist Gayatri Spivak’s practice of subalternist deconstruction as a critical stratum of reading ethnography. Subalternist deconstruction enables a materialist politics of form by attending to the fiction implicit in the metaphor of the social text.
