Etnografías sin final feliz. Sobre las condiciones de posibilidad del trabajo de campo urbano en contextos globalizados

Abstract

What is the epistemological justification for current ethnography, at a time when the flux of persons, knowledge and meanings erodes any closed, self-contained sense of culture? What will be the theoretical role played by key concepts such as «culture», «community» and «place,» until now used to lay the groundwork for our routines of research? On the basis of this deep transformation underway of the contextual conditions for ethnography, this paper explores some of them, focusing on three problems: (1) holism, (2) the nature of contemporary chronotopy and (3) the incommensurability of knowledge. Far from an abandonment of ethnography as a method, the author argues for the heuristic potential of ethnographic interpretation for reconstructing the unexpected connections among distant cultural realities in a temporally and spatially single world.