Abstract
This text is an ethnographic text, if somewhat surreally. It invites the reader, not so much to agree with the evidence and the analysis set forth by its author, but to enter actively into the process of researching one’s own historical and biographically given position within what might be described provisionally as ‘the postmodern scene’ of contemporary America (Kroker & Cook, 1986). It begins with a terrifying fragment of this scene, the image of Lt. Col. Oliver North, Jr., telling the truth about the ‘facts’ of U.S. foreign policy. This scene is terrifying, precisely because for many of us there was an other side, or several, to North’s truth. There was ‘factual’ knowledge of the dead and mutilated bodies of others who opposed this country’s right to imperial domination. And there was the terror that facts of ‘the other side’ make little difference within the consumptive mediascape of postmodern America that any facts are all too easily converted televisually into their opposite and then recirculated ritualistically into a fascinating amalgam of truths. Truths that feed vampirically upon images of apparent contradiction, amassing more and more information, data-banking everything, giving nothing in return, inoculating themselves against structural contradictions with periodic massmediated spectacles of scandal.
To write ethnographies in the model of collage would be to avoid the portrayal of cultures as organic wholes, or as unified realistic worlds subject to a continuous explanatory discourse....The ethnography as collage would leave manifest the constructionist procedures of ethnographic knowledge, it would be an assemblage containing voices other than the ethnographers, as well as examples of ‘found’ evidence, data not fully integrated within the works of governing interpretation. Finally it would not explain away those elements in the foreign culture which render the investigator's own culture newly incomprehensible. (Clifford, 1988, pp. 146–147
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Pfohl, S. (1990). Terror of the Simulacra: Struggles for Justice and the Postmodern. In: New Directions in the Study of Justice, Law, and Social Control. Critical Issues in Social Justice. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-3608-0_10
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