Cutting edges: deconstructive inquiry and the mission of the border ethnographer

Research is an activity nursing ‘cannot not want’. Such an imperative compels me to sketch out some theoretical borders of a. hybrid postmodern methodological framework that I have called ‘border’ ethnography. It is a methodology suspended between a still authoritative modernity and an as yet only partially legitimate postmodernity. At one level this position is somewhat uncomfortably in a post‐methodological terrain. The text that issues from such a tension‐laden research space is, I argue, intensely autobiographical, inescapably etiinographic and inherendy deconstructive. Edino(autobio)graphy is a mediod ‘on die run’; it destabilizes while it autfiorizes, it represents while it misrepresents, and it threatens to disintegrate as it comes into view. But, most importandy, it is die creature of a praxis‐oriented endeavour not only to better understand a culture, but to actively intervene in its (re) production.