Desconfianza and Problems of Representation in Urban Ethnography

Bibliographic Data

ID2953140
AuthorsDaniel M Goldstein (corresponding author)
Year2002
Volume75
Issue3
Pages485-517
Publication date2002-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAnthropological Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0003-5491 • E-ISSN: 1534-1518
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/anq.2002.0046
OpenAlexW1976656203
LanguageEN
Citations received9
References cited38

Anthropologists writing about "indigenous media" have identified ways in which ethnographic research involving visual technology can affect the cultural identity and political power of ethnographic subjects, providing them with tools to enhance their own identity-building projects. In this essay I contend that ethnographic writing can also be a form of indigenous media, an implement of self-representation for people otherwise marginalized from the national political mainstream. But the efforts of native informants to establish control over the ways in which they will be represented in print can also create desconfianza , a feeling of mistrust and suspicion of the ethnographer among the people being studied. I reflect on the relationship between desconfianza and the politics of ethnographic practice, and the extent to which questions of performance and representation, far from being mere matters of ethical or philosophical interest to anthropologists alone, are in fact deeply implicated in the political and economic survival of the peoples being represented

Aesthetics · Critical ethnography · Ethnography · Feeling · Identity (music · Indigenous · Mainstream · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Representation (politics · Social science · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Anthropology: Ethics, History, Culture · Gender Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology

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