exoticization

is a methodological device, an effort to render the familiar strange so that it might be apprehended as ethnography.

. . .. 'What renders the field of transnationalism 'new' is not so much the discovery of a new field site or set of material conditions but rather the ethnographic encounter with knowledge practices already familiar to, and indeed in use by, the anthropologist at precisely the moment at which he or she seeks insight through fresh ethnographic observation. We might understand the impulse to exoticize through notions of community, identity, or tradition that characterizes this literature, then, as a methodological device, an effort to render the familiar strange so that it might be apprehended as ethnography. If exoticism is ultimately unsatisfactory as a solution, the problem is inescapably central to the practice of contemporary anthropology' (Riles 2001:5)

exoticization, n.Definitions

exoticization