9 - Writing Secrecy
from Part IV - Traces
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
Summary
Concealment and revelation are part and parcel of the fieldwork experience. Secrecy is performed not only between Casamançais: they often performed secrecy in interaction with me. Secrets and their revelation are often ambiguous, or deliberately meant to produce ambiguity (Piot 1993). I was often at a loss as to what was secret and what not. Often, it was hard to tell whether secrecy was performed for all or just for me. Yet the ambiguity of this fieldwork experience is usually not represented in the ethnographic text. In ethnographic texts fieldwork is often made to appear as the gradual penetration of hitherto hidden knowledge (Clifford 1988; Gable 1997). Ethnographic authority is built upon mastery of the secret. This raises the question how secrecy is represented in ethnographic texts, as the question of ethnographic authority remains relevant (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Clifford 1988; Geertz 1988; James et al. 1997; Sanjek 1990). We need to re-examine every aspect of the way in which we make representations. Here, I would like to conclude by examining how the rhetoric of secrecy has contributed to a particular ethnographic understanding of culture and how it has sustained the positivist distinction between subject and object in ethnographic writing. This chapter therefore deals with the politics and poetics of secrecy. Rather than assuming that a focus on the poetics of ethnography leads us away from its politics (Said 1989), this final chapter works with the assumption that poetics and politics are intricately intertwined.
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- Masquerades of ModernityPower and Secrecy in Casamance, Senegal, pp. 185 - 194Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2007