Cutting edges: deconstructive inquiry and the mission of the border ethnographer

Research is an activity nursing 'cannot not want'. Such an imperative compels me to sketch out some theoretical borders of a hybrid postmodern methodological framework that I have called 'border' ethnography. It is a methodology suspended between a still authoritative modernity and an as yet only partially legitimate postmodernity. At one level this position is somewhat uncomfortably in a post-methodological terrain. The text that issues from such a tension-laden research space is, I argue, intensely autobiographical, inescapably ethnographic and inherently deconstructive. Ethno(autobio) graphy is a method 'on the run'; it destabilizes while it authorizes, it represents while it misrepresents, and it threatens to disintegrate as it comes into view. But, most importantly, it is the creature of a praxis-oriented endeavour not only to better understand a culture, but to actively intervene in its (re) production.