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The Ethnographic present is the practice of giving accounts of other cultures and societies in the present tense.The ethnographic present, for fabian,functions to take the society so described out of the timestream of history in which ethnographers and their own societies exist.

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The Ethnographic present is the wrongheaded tendency in anthropological writings and thought to award place and time differently to the industrial west (here, and now) and to the rest (there, and then).

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Ethnographic representation is the problematic practice of presenting ethnographic writing in the present tense with sentences like'the xx are matrilineal'. This writing style, which we would not use in the industrial west, in effect awards different 'temporalities' to different peoples when it artificially makes contingent events seem conventional, predictable, frozen in time, and rule determined.

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Reality is a product of perception within an historical context, a tension between re-presentation and presence.

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Representation is a process through which the knower (or observer) interposes a system of concepts, a method, or logic between reality and the mind. It thus involves an interaction between the knower, the known (human reality), and the process of knowing (method or logic).