James CliffordThinkers

Allegory prompts us to say of any cultural description not 'this represents, or symbolizes, that' but rather, 'this is a (morally charged) story about that'.

Articulation is a way of seeing cultures as articulated series of joints and not as living bodies with organic structures. Doing so allows us to accept that, as a collection of joints, no joint is firmly anchored so that groups can (and do) assemble and reassemble, shelf, and re-introduce their cultural identities in the present from various materials of their collective past.

Articulation is mode of analysis which makes questions of a culture's authenticity secondary by promoting the notion that a community is no less a community even though it is constantly engaged in hooking and unhooking, making and remaking -in other words, articulating -the various cultural forms that constitute it.

Authenticity is that which (wrongly) tends to be produced by removing objects and customs from their situation.

Authenticity is wrongheadedly produced in museums by removing objects from their situations.

Cultural poesis is suggesting a role for 'poetry in ethnography, however, it should be kept in mind that poetry is not limited to romantic or modernist subjectivism: It can be historical, precise, objective. And of course it is just as conventional and institutionally determined as 'prose'.

Cultural poesis is the constant reconstitution of selves and others through specific exclusions, conventions, and discursive practices.

Ethnographic authority is a term referring to the ways in which authority over cultural representation has been shaped in ethnographic practices over the last century and how in the 19600s that authority came to be challenged or dispersed.

Ethnography is a fiction, which is not a falsehood, per se, but something systematic and exclusive which is made or fashioned against the backdrop of the partiality of cultural and historical truths.