Ethnography and Development

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The NEHU Journal, Vol IX, No. 2, July 2011 50 ETHNOGRAPHY OF DEVELOPMENT Ethnography of Development: Challenges and Promises GEETIKA RANJAN Abstract Ethnography as a tool for social research plays a vital role in the development of a people. The present article argues for the indispensability of ethnographic research for arriving at the actual understanding of a people. It addresses the need to cast aside the obsession with post modernist view on ethnography if the goal is to undertake meaningful research. Key Words: Ethnography, Development, Anthropology, Post Modernism, Fieldwork. own views, one’s own cultural ethos and it is through these that he interprets the culture under study (not that they consider auto-ethnography to be the ultimate solution). Therefore the study of other cultures cannot be objective. There is bound to be bias in this search for meaning of the other culture and as such the claim of ethnographic writings about telling the truth is a fallacy. They make a clarion call for deconstruction and the need for a new understanding of representation in knowing the truth about a culture. Post Modernism urges anthropologists to give up cultural generalizations and the task of giving laws and switch to description, interpretation, and the search for meaning (Ferraro 2006). From the above it becomes quite clear that the post modernist anthropologists have been making a conscious effort to cling on to the ghost of colonial ethnography and 19th century cultural evolutionist theorists’ shortcomings to make their point of view much more conspicuous than it actually deserves. It cannot be denied that the earliest writings on the tribes in India by administrator ethnographers smack of ethnocentrism. Elwin mentions that John Butler uses derogatory terms to refer to the Assamese people, the Khamptis, the Singphos and the Abors and in similar vein
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