In a previous entry, I took the text by Renato Rosaldo -“After the objectivism”- to analyze the problem of relations between representation and ethnography. In particular, the use of the notion of “ritual” as a way of taking distance from the other, to see all of his practices as social conventions unprovided of any possibility of emotion and improvisation.

One of the main problems of excessively focus on representations is forgetting that these are important when materialized into significative practices, or put into strategies that legitimate certain manners of organising the world. Racism is not only a representation that sees the world as populated by human beings with different rights and duties; it’s also a body of practices that legitimates and allows this representation of the world to perdure.

Anyways, the distance between the analyst and the analysed group remains there, even when we discuss the best way to “represent” the other. On one side, I share with Rosaldo the dissappointment for the complete elimination of emotions from any ethnographic description. But, on the other side, I understand why sometimes the “ethnographed” is not happy at all with the ethnography analysis. At the end, as analyst we don’t use the tribe’s words to describe them. We rather focus on their practices and we see them for another point of view. For example, we relate them to a different structure of signification, we cross them with other observations, we see relevant things where natives simply don’t consider anything too interesting. By not taking this quotidianity as “something of everyday”, we accomplish to see the elaborate process by which common sense processes are naturalized, as ethnometodologist analyzed
long ago.

Almost in another topic, we find the discussion of why are almost always the same ones -in a very schematic way, western whites- who have had -and have- the authority to represent the others, seen, of course, as “ethnic groups”. A category that usually doesn’t reach the dominant group.

Anyways, one knows that not always taking distance means a good thing. Once we ran into an american tourist who was convinced that Buenos Aires buses had different colors to allow illiterate people to distinguish them. If we take into consideration that alphabetization rates in Argentina are above 96%, we can see that in fact this “representation” of the world hid deeper meanings. Of course, in the United States urban bus lines usually have the same colors, but it is so because they belong to the county or state. In Argentina, they have different colors because they belong to differente private companies, that paint them the color of their choice. And no, it’s not a sign for the illiterate…