Women Experience Of Ethnographic Text Way To Study The Influence Of The Production

Ethnography is the foundation of the cultural anthropology as an effective methodology and an academic paradigm. With the various social thoughts developing, the authority of ethnographer in anthropological text has been questioned by people. People start over to think how anthropologists represent the knowledge about the informants in the fieldwork process, and take the subjective experiences of anthropologists as one main part of the whole ethnographic research. Writing Culture is edited by Clifford and Marcus at1986, which redefined ethnographic text as a cultural descriptive writing work is conducted with writers’experiences. Hence, the ethnographic text has character with reflectiveness and literaryness. However, this discussion did not value the female anthropologists’work as one type of creative new ethnography. In fact, at the beginning of the anthropology established, many female anthropologists had anticipated in the research and contributed creative impact which was ignored by their male colleagues. Although many evidences can prove that different gender experience may lead different results of knowledge production, there still are lack of distinction and discussion toward it.At domestic academic area, scholars always focus on fieldwork method, the experience of research object or the literary turn of the ethnographic text, but there is no discussion toward the impact what researchers’subjective experience may cause. According to the two stages of the ethnographic research, fieldwork and text writing which involving the pre-field, fieldwork processing, data analyzing and text writing such progresses. This dissertation is aimed to represent how and by which approaches the empirical factors of female anthropologists may make effective impact on ethnographic knowledge production, and analyze their characters and function accompanying the text producing.The chapter one as a background narrates the history of ethnography within female anthropologists’participation. One part discussed the connection between anthropology and women. Anthropological research turned the focus from women’s question to women’s consciousness was a result conducted by various reasons of social, political and economics. Women participated to ethnographic text writing activity at very earlier time, and involved their own personal experience, which could be said the important contribution to the disciplinary development. Holding a historical perspective to view the whole figures is a better way to depict how women’s experience entered and influenced the ethnographic knowledge production. The chapter two mainly explored the pre-fieldwork process. As cultural subject, female anthropologist’s identity was influenced by her personal background. As academic subject, her professional identity also presents the trace of patriarchal discourse. Hence, the identity of female anthropologist contained multiple layers which make effects on their data choosing, analysis and values reflected from the writing. By analyzing female’s identity, we could understand the previous horizon in their ideology reflected form the text.The chapter three took the fieldwork as a whole progress, analyzed female anthropologist’s experience from their field site preferring, interview method and participant observation. By concluding their different strategies according to the different field sites, and compared these with male scholars’to explore gender experience in the field. There are clear tendency that female anthropologist shows gender consciousness in their methodology, which also lead the distinction from the classic anthropological research method.The chapter four focused on how self conscious of female anthropologist may present during the transference between data analyzing and literary writing, particularly, they present features of dailyness, emotionness, and connectionnenss during the whole depicting process. Analyzing is the initial stage of the ethnographic text writing, and it is also a stage reflected how writer’s self consciousnesses conduct the knowledge producing.The chapter five chose several textual genre and writing strategies to analyze gendered conscious inside, and answered the critique from Writing Culture. Autobiography, biography, life story and novelistic strategies are forms preferred by female anthropologist which emerged in the ethnographies at the early20th century. These forms were hinted with female anthropologist’s self identity and consciousness which also involved in other research stages. These text forms are final work of the representation which conveyed the tension between researcher and their subjects.The conclusion tried to discuss the legitimacy of the transference from experience to knowledge with philosophical perspective. It also tried to discuss the meaning of female experience existed in ethnography and its function to the debate about the truth of the ethnographic representation.