Hypermedia and the Future of Ethnography

In recent years cultural anthropologists have become increasingly self-conscious (and self-critical) about the nature of ethnography. We have been forcefully made to confront the assumptions that underlie our accounts of other peoples, and have been pressed into a "reflexive" mode. According to Marcus and Fischer (1986) we are in a period devoid of paradigmatic concurrence, a period in which "experimental ethnography" provides the platform for our most significant creative efforts. Indeed, the array of new styles for presenting ethnographic accounts is bewildering, and for those seeking comparative understandings, distressing. Given all the concern that has been expressed for finding innovative ways to more satisfactorily present ethnographic materials, it is surprising how little attention has been paid to the media through which our understandings are channeled. True, increasing effort has been put into ethnographic filmmaking in the past few years, often with remarkable results. Most of us who teach anthropology, I presume, now use films to supplement written ethnographies as a way of heightening our students' interest by adding to the written word a more vivid, visual account. But the constraints of written ethnographies, which remain the center of our productive efforts, have largely been taken for granted. It is time, I believe, that we lay bare the limitations of the written medium itself, and take steps to remove the shackles it has imposed upon even our finest efforts. A new technology is at our disposal and we have only to seize the opportunities it provides. It goes by the name of "hypermedia," and has revolutionary implications for ethnography. If the constraints that book formats place on our ethnographic accounts were limiting in earlier eras, in recent times they have become even more severe. To begin with, production costs and marketing considerations have induced publishers to restrict the length of books to only a couple of hundred pages, hardly enough to include much of the data used to construct our accounts. Furthermore, this restriction has been imposed on us just as the level of complexity of ethnographic analysis has taken a quantum leap. We need more space now than ever to produce compelling accounts. The demand that books be marketable has also led ethnographers to explore literary styles that may be suitable for mass audiences, but often at the sacrifice