Writing a National Colony: The Hostility of Inscription in the Ge ...

In taking copious notes of that which they observe, ethnographers make scripts which then serve as the basis for interpretation; they transform the event into an account. Yet the significant patterns that emerge from a script during subsequent readings are potentially inherent in the process of inscription, and readings of a script potentially follow received ethnocentric patterns of meaning:

Geertz’s remarks pose a fundamental challenge to notions of an inherent truth value of the firsthand record. Rather, the primary record here seems to be viewed as intercepting the immediacy of the event. As the event recedes forever behind the incessant recordings and interpretations that fix it in time, those recordings stand in for a truth passé, and henceforth, the text becomes truth. Geertz does not go as far as to question the premise of the disinterested, noninterfering scientist-observant, yet his caveat that observation is mediated through writing makes it clear enough that in textual culture, observing something or someone is a creative process. James Clifford clarifies the concept of fiction as applied to anthropological writing thus: “To call ethnographies fictions may raise empiricist hackles. But the word as commonly used in recent textual theory has lost its connotation of falsehood, of something merely opposed to truth. It suggests the partiality of cultural and historical truths, the ways they are systematic and exclusive” (“Partial Truths” 6). Clifford’s clarification is immediately applicable to the work process of the nineteenth-century naturalist, whose work likewise consists in notetaking and crafting the notes into descriptive, narrative, or representational texts. Inasmuch as the act of transcription entails the infusion of cognitive—grammatical and rhetorical—ordering principles into the text, Geertz’s concern with epistemology in the anthropological text applies to all texts.