The Return of the Native: Organizational Discourses and the Legacy of the Ethnographic Imagination

One of the arguably “scholarly” by-products of the West’s era of high imperialism was ethnography—the institutionalized practice of studying indigenous (non-Western) peoples through a process of extended cultural immersion. While ethnography for the most part tends to be strongly identified with the anthropological subfield that engages in cultural depictions of “other,” its own cultural influence extends way beyond its immediate academic location. Indeed, something that might well be called an “ethnographic imagination” (Evans, 1999; Herbert, 1991) is very much present in many realms of Western society. As di Leonardo (1998: 29) has astutely observed, “anthropology as trope has long been an element of American [and Western] cultural baggage.”