A Quarterly of Criticism and Review i^^^^^^^^fcEjfc $15

KevinMcNeillyHis Own Best NarratorFranz Boas and the Kwakiutl TalesIn the last ten years or so, ethnography has become anincreasingly self-conscious discipline. Anthropologists express a keenawareness of the problematic dynamics of cultural appropriation withintheir work, and have begun to pay much closer attention to the part played inthis dynamic by the act of writing itself. They have come to recognize themselvesas authors, and thus as agents within their own texts. The problem ofsubjectivity in ethnographic material has been acknowledged since the emergenceof anthropology as an academic discipline, but it is only recently thatthe anthropological observer has been understood as a rhetorical construction,and not simply a misleading "outside" presence to be filtered away. Thequestion of authorship, as Clifford Geertz points out in 1987, is "not usuallyacknowledged as a narratological issue, a matter of how best to get an honeststory honestly told, but as an epistemological one, a matter of how toprevent subjective views from colouring objective facts" (9). The ethnographer'stask, for Geertz, has become not simply a matter of pretending to animpossible objectivity or transparency, but instead a matter of discoveringhow such self-representations and cultural blurrings necessarily occur:Getting themselves into their text (that is, representatively into their text) may beas difficult for ethnographers as getting themselves into the culture (that is, imaginativelyinto the culture). . . . But in one way or another, however unreflectivelyand with whatever misgivings about the propriety of it all, ethnographers allmanage to do it. There are some very dull books in anthropology, but few if anyanonymous murmurs. (17)29