On partiality…
The key, or keyhole rather, is in the postmodern emphasis on perspective.
In the early 1930s, the anthropologist Ruth Bunzel went to the small Guatemalan village of Chichicastenango to conduct her field work. The resulting ethnography, published in 1952, remains firmly rooted in its time, yet has a lasting appeal for historians of anthropology. Bunzel realized that she was exploring new methodological terrain, and did her best to articulate selfconsciously her assumptions and assert her presence in the ethnography. At the same time, she recognized the uncertainty inherent in her work, noting that in the practice of social anthropology, “there is no magic formula, but there are many paths to partial truths. ‘’
Elisabeth Kaplan, 2002, Many Paths to Partial Truths’: Archives, Anthropology, and the Power of Representation, Archival Science 2: 209-220.
