Anthropology, interviewing, and communicability in contemporary society

Abstract

Developing an anthropology of interviewing could provide a rich focus for ethnographies of the contemporary and illuminate how anthropologists' modes of knowledge production intersect with practices that play crucial roles in the media, corporations, electoral politics, state bureaucracies, and a wide range of professions. Interviewing is informed by ideological constructions of discourse production, circulation, and reception, communicable cartographies that are widely shared by anthropologists and nonanthropologists. The capacity of interview-based texts to project maps of their purported sources, processes of encoding, modes of circulation, recipients, and legitimate modes of reception naturalizes interviewing, simultaneously imbuing interviews with power and shielding them from critical scrutiny. Analyses of David Stoll's attack on the veracity of I, Rigoberta Menchú, Américo Paredes's critique of ethnographic work on Mexican-Americans, and the author's interviews with Venezuelan women convicted of infanticide illustrate this process. An anthropology of interviewing has potential for illuminating such issues as the spatialization and temporalization of ethnography, the doubling of ethnography "in the field" and at "the desk," questions of scale, the science wars in anthropology, and the ways in which anthropologists mirror and are mirrored by other "expert" knowledge makers. © 2007 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved.