Systems Theory in Anthropology - System Theory: Gregory Bateson - Posthumanist Turn and Ethnographic Writing

Posthumanist Turn and Ethnographic Writing

In anthropology, the task of representing a native point of view has been a challenging one. The idea behind the ethnographic writing is to understand a complexity of an everyday life of the people without undermining or reducing the native account. Historically, as mentioned above, ethnographers insert raw data, collected in the fieldwork, into the writing "machine." The output is usually the neat categories of ethnicity, identity, classes, kinship, genealogy, religion, culture, violence, and numerous other. With the posthumanist turn, however, the art of ethnographic writing has suffered serious challenges. Anthropologists are now thinking of experimenting with new style of writing. For instance, writing with natives or multiple authorship.

The systems theory challenges, among other fields, the ethnographic writing that is usually focused on representing the Other. It also undermines the discipline of identity politics and postcolonialism. Postcolonial scholars’ claims of subaltern identity or indigeneity and their demand of liberal rights from a state is actually falling back into the same signifying Western myth of Oedipal complex of ego and the Id. Instead of looking for a non-unitary subject in multiplicities organized into assemblage and montage; postcolonial studies limit flows into the same Western category of identity thus undermining the networks that sustain people’s everyday lives. Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic and Benjamin’s montage dismantle the top-down and hierarchical social reality and bring into attention the micropolitics of mapping multiplicities of networks and assemblages....