An American
resident of Canada, experimenting with new forms of critical media ethnography in Cultural Farming.
George Marcus:
...”Like the Frankfort School, the surrealists contested a reified culture, in which they viewed traditional norms, conventions, and collective meanings as artificial, constructed, and repressive. They reveled in subverting, parodying, and transgressing those dead conventions through unexpected juxtapositions, collages of incongruous elements, drawing from the erotic, the unconscious, and the exotic. Indeed, their juxtaposition and collage techniques acknowledged the increasing speed and normality with which the fragments of once different cultures could come together in a modern world. They used the term 'ethnographic' to convey their relativist, subversive attitude, which could contest the contemporary work of French anthropologists in Africa, Oceania, and aboriginal America.” (Marcus and Fischer, 1986, p. 123)
...”The ethnographers who emerge from the dialogue with surrealism, however, are left with a duel legacy. First, to bring out the critical potential embedded in the ethnographic method requires that anthropologists take seriously the notion of modern reality as a juxtaposing of alternative cultural viewpoints, which exist not merely simultaneously, but in interaction, and not as static fragments, but each as dynamic human constructions. Second, the view of culture as a flexible construction of the creative faculties encourages ethnographers to expose their procedures of representation, makes them self-conscious as writers, and ultimately suggests to them the possibility of including other authorial voices (those of the subjects) in their texts.” (Marcus and Fischer, 1986, p. 125)
...“A strong and distinctive practice of cultural critique by anthropologists should combine the empiricism of American documentary with the theoretical vision and vitality of the Frankfurt School in its early period along-with the playfulness and daring of the juxtapositions of French Surrealism.” (Marcus, 1986, p. 127-128)