Towards a doubly reflexive ethnography: A proposal from the anthropology of interculturality

• Main Author: Gunther Dietz
• Format: Article
• Language: Spanish
• Published: Antropólogos Iberoamericanos en Red 2011-01-01
• Series: Antropólogos Iberoamericanos en Red
• Subjects: Reflexive ethnography; activist research; anthropology of interculturality
• Online Access: http://www.aibr.org/antropologia/netesp/numeros/0601/060102e.pdf
• ISSN: 1695-9752; 1578-9705

Starting from the contemporary debate on ethnographic methodology in anthropology, this paper analyses how new methodological options arise throughout processes of educational interculturality and how these can nourish, rejuvenate and decolonize classica anthropological ethnography. The contrast between a postmodern anthropology and activist ethnography reveals possibilities for fruitfully complement social and political en gagement with the classical canon of ethnography, which is here illustrated for the sphere of Intercultural Studies and the emerging field of what may be called an anthropology of interculturality. The resulting, “doubly reflexive ethnography” completes the contrast of emic and etic approaches through a emic-etic dialectical, structure-oriented perspective, which is particularly suitable for studying institutions and organizations whose actors co-reflect on the same research process as the anthropologist her/himself. This proposal is finally summed up in a three-dimensional heuristic research model, which combines semantic, pragmatic and syntactic dimensions of ethnography and which is particularly suited for “inter-cultural”, “inter-lingual” and “inter-actor” diversity contexts.