Finding Secrets and Secret Findings: Confronting the Limits of the Ethnographer’s Gaze

Abstract

Ethnography, inevitably, can only provide a partial account of the culture, society or field under study. James Clifford (1986: 7) wrote, ‘Even the best ethnographic texts … are systems, or economies, of truth. Power and history work through them, in ways their authors cannot fully control.’ Here, Clifford was referring to the construction of ethnographic writing and the fact that ethnographers inevitably must translate the reality of informants into a finished, narrative account. It is the ethnographer who ultimately chooses what to include or exclude in their authored expression of the cultures, lives and meanings that were observed and described to them in the field. Far from threatening the empirical value of the ethnographic endeavour, its partial nature can mirror ‘the partiality of cultural and historical truths, the ways they are systematic and exclusive’ (p. 6). Hammersley and Atkinson (1995: 255) argue, ‘The relationship between the ethnographic text and its subject-matter may not be entirely straightforward. But it is not totally arbitrary … There are social actors and social life outside the text, and there are referential relationships between them.’