Feb 26, 2015
A post-modern ethnography is fragmentary because it cannot be otherwise. Life in the field is itself fragmentary, not at all organized around familiar ethnological categories such as kinship, economy, and religion ... At best, we make do with a collection of indexical anecdotes or telling particulars with which to portent that larger unity beyond explicit textualization. It is not just that we cannot see the forest for the trees, but that we have come to feel that there are no forests where the trees are too far apart, just as patches make quilts only if the spaces between them are small enough.
Stephen A. Tyler, "Post-modern ethnography"