All representations of culture are necessarily partial accounts
Evidence
The final principle draws from voluminous literature in cultural anthropology and feminist theory over the past two decades that has challenged the analytic drive to represent forms of social life as internally coherent. This challenge, inspired by the postmodern critique of the totalizing master narratives characteristic of previous generations, surfaces in ethnography in the realization that all representations of culture are necessarily ‘partial accounts’ (Clifford and Marcus, 1986). This idea has long been central to feminist analysis – as well as to the early work of female ethnographers who predated the emergence of second-wave feminism in the 1970s – in which there is an ethical commitment to recognizing the situatedness and partialness of any claim to knowledge (see Behar and Gordon, 1995; Visweswaran, 1994). The feminist commitment to explicitly positioning oneself as a researcher rather than effacing one’s presence in the research process, a practice which echoes the politics of location in reflexive ethnography, has exposed the fact that reality itself is intersubjective in nature, constructed through the particulars of self and other in any localized encounter. — Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, Identity and Interaction, 109
Categorization
- DEFINE: Defines the principle of partialness as the recognition that all knowledge claims and cultural representations are situated and incomplete.
- XREF: Connects to the reader’s known frame of positionality in qualitative research and reflexive ethnography. — connects to: Subjects are constituted by unconscious cultural categories rather than their authors; Economic-only explanations of culture cannot capture conjunctural specificity — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 206; Full cultural assimilation cannot erase ineradicable traces of another place (+7 more)
- QUESTION: How does the principle of partialness reconcile with conversational data offered as evidence of identity mechanisms — is the analyst’s partial account in tension with the drive to identify stable micro-mechanisms?
Broader Connections
- All representations are embedded in their representer’s language, culture, and institutions.
#corroborates(0.86) - Modern cultural analysis requires fragmenting meaning rather than seeking closure
#corroborates(0.80) - Economic-only explanations of culture cannot capture conjunctural specificity
#qualifies(0.78) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 206 - Culture means suspending objectification, yet criticism re-objectifies what it studies
#complicates(0.76) - Subjects are constituted by unconscious cultural categories rather than their authors
#expands(0.75) - Full cultural assimilation cannot erase ineradicable traces of another place
#exemplifies(0.74) - Representing cultural specificity requires formal invention rather than universal empathy
#qualifies(0.74) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 32 - Perceptions of the Other are always shaped by available cultural tools
#expands(0.73) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 351 - Orientalism reflects the producing culture rather than its putative object
#exemplifies(0.72) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 91 - Cultural meanings emerge from convergences of multiple productions, not single sources
#corroborates(0.72) — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 1154