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What Is “the Question”?
Author(s) -
Foster Stephen William
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
anthropology and humanism
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.153
H-Index - 17
eISSN - 1548-1409
pISSN - 1559-9167
DOI - 10.1111/anhu.12015
Subject(s) - ethnography , poetics , style (visual arts) , dialectic , epistemology , politics , sociology , analytics , aesthetics , philosophy , computer science , art , anthropology , political science , visual arts , linguistics , law , poetry , data science
Summary Ethnographers' questions are an impress on their encounters and an investment in the politics and poetics of ethnography. I examine the symbolic aura of the question, generically and substantively, that shapes and textures ethnographic truth‐telling. An encounter in M orocco illustrate the paradoxical dynamics of the question that constrains the dialogues it produces. The art of the question premises an ethics, a recursive style and a mobile analytics in which process and truth coalesce.