Problem etnografii laickiej (entropologiczna dzika karta)
The Question of Lay Ethnography (The Enthropological Wild Card)

Summary/Abstract: Translated by Sławomir Sikora. Who was Carl Einstein? What was the role played by the exotic in the conception launched by the editors of „Documents”? For what purposes did they need ethnography? In „Documents” ethnography was identified with the supreme form of that which Bataille soon described as heterology. Ethnography appeared to be the saviour of the heterogeneous at the same time when it became obvious that the historical fate of differences is their obliteration. (In Tristes Tropicos Claude Lévi-Strauss coined the famous neologism of „enthropology” in order to suggest that the founding motif of anthropology was the prompt disappearance of its object. In turn, fascination inspired by exotic otherness was enrooted not in pleasure stemming from otherness as such as from anxiety about it or, to cite Roland Barthes, not so much from an ethnographic interest in the positive aspect of studium as from sensitivity to that which in Camera lucida he described as a wound, punctum...

• Details
• Contents