User:Leafblower55555/sandbox

Until the 1980’s, ethnographic writing operated under the pretense of performing objectivity. Ethnographers performed objectivity through failing to acknowledge personal and theoretical biases that act as constraints on the field of anthropology's authority as a scientific discipline. Although the theoretical biases of the scientific method serve as limitations on other disciplines as well, anthropology's relative inability to replicate fieldwork in the form of experimentation or the identification of representative samples for which to conduct experiments on is particularly unique in comparison to other disciplines due to its preoccupation with the subjective nature of culture and the human experience. Such disciplinary shortcomings have served as threats to the authority of anthropology as an emerging academic discipline in an academic landscape dominated by empiricism. Positionality, or the inescapable impact of an individual's history, culture, opinions and perceptions on their fieldwork and writing also delegitimizes anthropology as an objective pursuit .The publication of Writing Culture (1986) put an emerging dialogue within the field of anthropology about the role of ethnography in a postmodern (later referred to as globalized) world into writing, and circulated rapidly through the field. The collection of essays called for an alternative paradigm for ethnographic writing that accounted for the limitations of anthropologists’ ability to represent cultures through writing due to the subjective nature of observation. The idea that the analysis of culture is inherently separate from the direct experience of culture was central to the arguments of Writing Culture, which criticized performed objectivity and advocated in favor of bringing personal and theoretical biases to the forefront of anthropology because the positioned nature of cultural analysis is at the core of anthropology and its methods. Such criticisms sought to address the gap between the fundamentally academic nature of anthropology and the experiential nature of day-to-day life that ethnography seeks to explore, and sought to rectify the tension between personal, subjective experience and the drive to perform objectivity in order to gain scientific authority. These gaps in the field of anthropology became especially controversial in cases such as that of the ethnography Shabono, a work that was highly praised within the field of anthropology until claims that the ethnographer had not actually engaged in participant-observation research. The claims diminished the perceived validity of Shabono as a true ethnography, calling to question what a true ethnography would be if an ethnography with no participant-observation research behind it can still serve to advance cultural understanding through critical analysis. As the emerging dialogue reflected in the criticisms within Writing Culture continued, a more reflexive view of ethnography and the limitations of anthropology in general as a fundamentally positioned pursuit began to take shape. Female and non-white ethnographers began to enter into the field of anthropology at higher rates as the need to include more perspectives within the previously white male dominated field became a more mainstream idea. As ethnographic writing persists into the 21st century, questions of positionality and the role of ethnographic writing remain, and a parallel dialogue discussing the role of participant-observation in anthropology has also emerged as anthropology continues debate reflexivity, positionality and inclusion in the face of globalization.