FOR AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF THE REAL
FOR AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF THE REAL

Summary/Abstract: The present article was imagined around one single field encounter which took place in the very first days of my PhD research on working-class formation in socialist Romania. It starts with a one-day, non-eventful interaction between me, my research assistant and our newly found informant. This meeting prompted me to rethink and discuss the ethnographer’s problematic encounter with the Other, beyond the crisis of representation in which post-structuralist and post-modern anthropology submerged in the last decades. It builds upon the fundamental relationship between ethnography and history, and it argues for the continuing methodological strength of ethnography to access and reveal both the systematic and the contingent layers of the real. It does so by connecting my history and the Other’s, as empirical, materialized, and therefore, historically contingent manifestations of deeper, broader, and complex processes and relations which can be theoretically described and explained. I argue that grounding our encounters into a strong realist ontology, while acknowledging our ethnographic accounts to be social artifacts, we can reempower anthropology both methodologically and politically, evading at the same time the old foundations of ethnographic authority.

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