Some Interpretations

Abstract

Debates on representational bias in the discipline of anthropology have focused on partialities arising from the subjectivity of individual researchers and from specific historical patterns of unequal relations between the societies in which ethnographers live and those they study. There are thus two layers to this debate, with bias operating both at an individual and a collective level. In the first case, biased representations of other ethnic groups and their cultures can arise from the personal subjectivity of individual researchers. In the second, ethnography is compromised as a collective enterprise by unequal historical and contemporary power relations between the societies concerned. ..