Clifford 26

          Reading this chunk of pages from James Clifford’s Writing Culture, I found myself very hooked at the beginning, liking how he had referred to, and elaborated on the picture before the introduction. However, continuing on, I discovered his writing (or perhaps more my own reading experience) to be very similar to the Redfield reading. It seemed very textbook-like as he described processes and theories in ethnography and anthropology.

Overall, it seemed he was trying to clarify the literary importance of this field of study, recognizing it as a crucial aspect. He mentions and compares the two types of writings, pointing out the similarities between the usual methods of writing to what he refers to as “ethnographic writing”, but identifies the key differences as critical to Ethnography, and lists them as things to identify this type of writing by. Again, I found it a little hard to follow this entire reading. I only was able to pick up on small aspects here and there that stood out to me, such as Clifford’s mention of the lack of a feminine standing within ethnographies. I liked how he continued to point out how any works written by females didn’t necessarily reflect a feminist standpoint, rather went over the works through a non-feminist one. Other than small portions like that, it was hard to follow along with everything Clifford mentioned as his paragraphs had a lot of "meat" to them, and often jumped from subject to subject, without a very definite flow.