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The definitions of ethnography—offered above—correspond loosely to contemporary ways of practicing anthropological research. Yet, ethnography as a methodology has undergone many transformations since its emergence and as it was first use by early scholars in the 19th and 20th centuries in the US (see Boas 1966, 1989, Malinowski 2002, Rochner 1966). The refinement and transformation of ethnographic tools span the foundational uses by Boas, Malinowski and the first women anthropologists such as Ruth Benedict (2005), Margaret Mead (1963) and Zora N. Hurston (1935), the classical positivist ethnography practiced until ←16 | 17→approximately the 1970s to the watershed moments of the “crisis” of representation and the “reflexive turn,” critical ethnography between 1990s and 2000s, and more recent post-critical ethnography (post-colonial) and diverse contemporary experimental approaches (for an overview of this see Foley 2002). Rather than a comprehensive history of its development, I offer below a discussion of few moments, movements and works (practices, debates, publications), about ethnography, otherness, boundaries of the “field,” what is considered “data,” paradigms of objectivity-subjectivity and issues of ethics in the process of transformation from the first uses by Boas (1966) in the 1890s to the current era of post-critical ethnography (Noblit et al. 2004).

The classical iconic image of an anthropologist used to be a white Euro-American upper middle-class male, working in remote “tribal” jungles, with dark-skinned natives, for years on end. Their reports of findings, in many cases, were based on conversing with a few top-ranking males in the community and then writing an “ethnography” (what was supposed to be a full realistic description of an entire society (e.g., “the” Nuer by Evans-Pritchard 1940 or Malinowski’s “the” Trobianders published in 1922). These ethnographies were not only accepted as scientific data, they were also supposed to describe and catalog, once and for all, unchanging, bounded “cultures,” their behavior, how they thought, ways of life and cosmovision of the world, in an unquestioned homogeneity. This huge colonial generalization of human groups has also given way to classical iconic images of what an anthropologist was supposed to look like. From these full ethnographies to what we modestly call today “ethnographic accounts,” there is a huge epistemological gulf; anthropological writing became acknowledged as provisional, partial interpretations of a particular human group at a specific historical place-time, based on partial perspectives of some of the members of a community, as interpreted by particular anthropologists, who came from specific countries.

The major changes in practice and theory within Anthropology, and the changes in how ethnography as a methodology has been used between the 1920 until today, respond, in part, to how anthropology keeps re-inventing itself, through external pressures, forced by changing geopolitical landscapes, by communities themselves that have been objects of its studies, by other disciplines critiques and attacks (see Min-ha 1989, Stocking 1996), but also through a commendable constant internal critique since its institutionalization, by its progressive practitioners, about the present and future political implications of the discipline and its engagement with living populations. The external pressures came concretely through the transformations of colonial territories and of the very empires and countries from where the earlier anthropologists were coming from. The internal transformations we further nurture by new “minority” and “native others” who increasingly were ←17 | 18→able to enter PhD anthropology programs in the US in great numbers, especially after the 1980s.

Social sciences explanatory models, or what it is called a paradigm, were also shifting, generating neo-Marxist theoretical frameworks after the 1960s, that moved the social sciences analysis from positivist science (reality is knowable, measurable and science is objective and value free) to critical theory focused not on neutral science or objective epistemologies but on power and historical praxis with political dimensions for all kinds of knowledge creation. These conditions of production (Kuhn’s scientific revolutions) have implications for how we name and perceive “realities” (for a good discussion of this shift and of social theory as a European post-war academic and cultural movement see Denzin 1999, Ortner 1984, 2006, Foley 2002). Among the most influential theoretical frameworks shaping most productively a paradigm shift in social sciences and humanities were structuralism (the work of Edward Sapir and Levi-Strauss as iconic representatives), Marxism (dialectical materialism), which entered anthropology much earlier yet became most visible in publications during the 1970s and 1980s. It was as a response to these critical intellectual movements that methodological tools were transformed resulting in post-structuralist and post-colonial critiques, beyond the more visible and amorphous discourses of post-modernity, which were coming mostly from the humanities (see Marcus & Clifford, 1986).

This upheaval included further interdisciplinary nurturing from new conceptions of power beyond Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault, which focused on feminist concerns with “theories of practice” (see Rich 1984, Ortner’s 2006 critique of Bourdieu). The more vocal trends were moving from a conception of power as force, control and domination to a fuzzier matrix of situated relations, fluid processes of negotiations, micro an infra-politics beyond resistance-accommodation, and new performative identity politics at diverse scales and dimensions (see Spry 2006). Simultaneously—and more prominently today—further theoretical and methodological contributions came from Black feminist theory (Hill-Collins 2002), Critical Race Theory (Delgado & Stefancic 2001) and feminist political ecology (Fraser 1990, Duncan 1996). In particular, feminist theory and methodologies had tremendous influence in furthering critical analysis and refining theories of practice and power in feminist scholarship and beyond (see Hess-Biber et al. 1999). The works of Faye Harrison (1991, 1993, 1997, 2008), specifically, Harrison’s proposal for de-colonizing anthropology and calling for an anthropology of liberation, had a significant impact, especially among minority and other non-traditional anthropologists in the US and beyond, as it showed us, in practice, how to do critically engaged ethnographic research.

Social Darwinism and other deterministic dichotomies of self/other, us/them, home/field, object/subject were hence questioned and de-centered in ethnographic ←18 | 19→discourses and practices. This was being done from inside and outside, in particular, ethnography has been re-shaped by the contributions of many interdisciplinary feminist women scholars, for example, the concept of “situated knowledge” (Haraway 1988) became widely used as a trendy garnish in feminist anthropology and other disciplines. Yet, it had profound implications for questioning objectivity and giving ethnographers permission to continue using this tool, in spite of its problematic partiality. The putative “crisis of representation” that Marcus and Fisher identified in their also seminal publication Anthropology as Cultural Critique (1986) was an internal crisis for those that could afford amnesia, that considered themselves unmarked, and held as true the myth of bounded cultural areas and fixed fields of research, but this was not the case for the new kinds of anthropologists entering US academia as minorities, immigrants or indigenous “others,” nor was this the case for those early US women anthropologists, who were also marked by a gendered and racial otherness.

As can be noticed from the discussion above, Ethnography is not a neutral methodology, cooked in isolation by a rational discipline looking for the best tools to create scientific knowledge. In a sense, similar curiosity and approaches to discover human diversity were common centuries before anthropology existed as a profession (from Herodotus to Spanish priests in the 16th century). The origins of ethnography could be found in precursors archival practices such as travel narratives and colonial chronicles, as well as early literary and historical narratives (see Clifford & Marcus 1986). Early Europeans’ travel accounts, documentation of conquest, colonial records and chronics were initially used to help manage the colonial enterprises of grabbing, mapping and classifying lands, resources, people, their labor and the wealth of artifacts-artistic productions of these new territories. These practices helped colonial authorities in the Americas to “know the other” with less conflict and resistance, to train and survey native allies as “cultural brokers” and to impose their language, religion and ways of life with less bloodshed and more cooperation from locals. No total control needs to be assumed, or mean intension a priori, as for example, many individual missionaries turned themselves into the first ethnographers. They were a more benign kind of cultural brokers who made, in fact, remarkable contributions to understand indigenous populations, including the writing of first grammars of unknown indigenous languages (mostly in Africa and México). In some cases, these “unintentional” ethnographers demanded human rights for the indigenous communities they worked with, as the case in the Caribbean of the catholic priest Fray Ramón Pané and father Bartolomé de las Casas in the island of Hispaniola (today Dominican Republic and Haiti).

Hence, claiming a purity or respectable “objective” tradition of doing ethnography, reflects a lack of awareness of this problematic ethno-historical context, which ←19 | 20→the Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot has examined, in a seminal article about the “savage slot” or otherness trope in anthropology (2003). Trouillot traces and analyses how anthropology was made possible by the colonial enterprise as well as by intellectual trends of institutionalization in the social sciences, which needed Sociology and other disciplines to focus on Western societies and its “civilized” internal others in the emergent capitalist system between the 16th and 19th centuries, while anthropology was to take care of the uncivilized colonial others. Trouillot concept of “colonial discursive fields” is useful in this regard to understand how scientific-academic knowledge is produced in very specific ethno-historical contexts, and the fact that he made his critique from inside the anthropological discipline, gives it a very particular taste of poetic justice. He was part of a new generation of minority and indigenous scholars needed to carve out—from the inside—spaces from where their very presence and the validity of their research were possible. As Trouillot suggest, they needed first to problematize and change the ethnographic “savage slot” tropes—where the field is, and who the objects of study could be for this discipline. They also needed to question ethnographic objectivity claims, the “common sense” of colonial western rationality, and the notion of a fixed lineal development of human societies and progress, in which white supremacy and other Euro-centric tenets were privileged.

The critique of classical ethnography that I have offered above, is not meant to invalidate the work of any scholars or to propose discarding anthropology as a valid career choice. I consider anthropology one of the most promising academic fields, of crucial relevance for our current predicaments in this century and in the future. Yet, I am aware of the problematic origins of this discipline as a colonial tool and of its complicity with the exploitation and violence—direct and symbolic—of capitalism by Euro-American imperial regimes. The fact that I became an anthropologist—as an “other,” a Caribbean immigrant woman—unthinkable even for 1960s academic contexts in the US, is a sign of my trust and hope on the liberation potential of this practice and on its usefulness to help us create more just and sustainable worlds, where human differences are not just tolerated but recognized, understood, protected and celebrated.