The troubled history of ethnographic data. Some reflections on its problematic nature

Abstract

A peculiarity of the discipline of anthropology consists in the fact that the data on which it is supposed to be based, ethnographic data, is anything but 'data'. The product of observation procedures, analysis, interpretations, elaborations, reconstructions, extracted from long speeches of natives and synthesized more or less arbitrarily by the anthropologist, the data often discounts the opacity of its origin. Is it the representation the observer devises of an alleged object (e.g., an indigenous institution or practice) or rather is it a native representation (what natives think of their own institution) or is it the interpretation of a representation (what the anthropologist thinks natives think of their own institution)?  The datum changes epistemological status as the observational strategies devised by the anthropologist, the theories used in field research, and the changes involves also the epistemological assumptions on which anthropological theories are constructed.