Nocturnal Ethnographies: Following Cortázar in the Milongas of Buenos Aires

Abstract

How to write an ethnography and a critique of the ethnographic predicament at the same time? How to create ethnographies, the descriptions and interpretations of something exotic brought into the familiar or of something familiar turned into exotic, while simultaneously addressing the ideological traps and the political stakes of the ethnographic enterprise? How to deliver an ethnographic product that retains the tension of the ethnographic encounter, the romance and the falling-outs, the fascination and the disgust, the wealth and the poverty of ethnographic knowledge and the differences for its participating subjects and objects? An enumeration of some approaches to ethnographic writing might help to clarify what I am strug gling to get at. I do not mean, for example, the inclusion of a critical perspective within an ethnography as in 'for starters, be aware dear readers that I know that ethnographies are problematic intellectual exercises.' And then, after a self-reflexive statement (more or less elaborate, more or less incisive, more or less honest and devastating) a switching into the ethnographic mode, framed by a mixture of resigned resentment and vindictive nostalgia as in 'after all I have spent all these years perfecting the arts of representing others, identifying and analyzing their otherness, and there is an audience out there made up of academics, amateurs, and even some of those very others who I am representing ready to consume my ethno-product so, here it is.' Nor am I making reference to an ethnography that in incorporating critical statements would promise to deliver a new ethnography, as if ethnography could run against itself (its premises and practices) and still claim an ethnographic status as in getting away with ethnographic murder, if not in actual practice at least in its intentions. My list of neithers and nors also accommodates the possible critiques of ethnography that 'other' ethnographers and their writings, dealing at the distance with the past history of ethnographic enterprises and/or ethnographic futurology. Innovative recipes without the actual experimentation as in 'here are the problems'

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