ETHNOGRAPHY, ETHNOLOGY AND THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF ETHNOLOGIES

Abstract

Ethnology seems to be dead, but its project of comparison lives on between the lines of anthropological discourse as well as in the categories of popular culture and especially in discourses of ethnic identity. One of the problems inherent in any comparison is finding like entities to compare. Comparison of material culture has the potential to circumvent this problem by virtue of its simultaneous embeddedness in cultural context and its independent existence as concrete objects. This paper reflects on these matters in the context of Bali, where village spatial organisation reveals its ethnological location in both Indic and Austronesian culture-worlds, and its contemporary politics of identity are founded on an implicit folk-ethnology. It argues for a working dialogue between such scholarly and indigenous ethnologies.