Writing experience: does ethnography convey a crisis of representation, or an ontological break with the everyday...

This paper is premised on the "ontological break" as coined by Alfred Schutz that disconnects two realms: the "world of consociates" where social reality is directly experienced face-to-face in the vivid present, and the "world of contemporaries" where the other is interpreted in terms of "types." It is argued that this break is a suggestive vehicle for conducting a meta-exposition of major claims which problematize the traditional authority of ethnography. In the light of the break, the postmodernist attempts to attain or retain the here-and-now understanding of subjective meaning, or "voice" in ethnographies are but epistemological impossibilities. It is concluded that the postmodernist privileging of a "naive ethnography" which emphasizes "experiential," "interpretive," "dialogical," and "polyphonic" processes is neither able to deliver on its promise at the methodic level, nor amendable to Schutz's ontological break at the theoretical level.