Clifford Reading Response

I honestly didn't think that anything could top the laboriousness that was reading the excerpts from Redfield, but I don’t think I've ever disliked reading something as much as these 26 pages of James Clifford. I don’t even really understand why Clifford had to go to the effort of writing this essay, as he’s essentially just saying essentially what Redfield said, yet somehow manages to come across as even more pandering and overly wordy. The only saving grace from Clifford’s reading is probably that he has an overabundance of secondary sources, name-dropping dozens of anthropologists, ethnographers and their works that defend his claims on the evolution of ethnographic study and writing. However, Clifford essentially rephrases nearly everything Redfield said three decades earlier, just citing more examples of how different cultures were analyzed, such as the indigenous tribes of India, the modern day tribes of Native Americans, and the feminist take on ethnographic study, but they’re only examples. What Clifford had to say honestly could have been summed up in a paragraph or two, by saying how and why ethnographic study has evolved to study niche, smaller aspects of cultures that all amalgamate together to form larger ones in order to see how the inner machinations of life come together. The only reason he’s able to fill 28 pages worth of this explanation is by citing examples and padding his writing with long, convoluted phrases filled with large complex words. It sounds complicated, but I feel Clifford’s essay essentially is him flexing his academic knowledge.