In The Predicament of Culture, Clifford uses the word ethnography as a something completely different from the empirical research technique of a human science, and instead refers to a more general cultural predisposition - making the familiar strange, and the strange familiar. For Clifford, both surrealism and ethnography arose in the Paris of 1925 as a means of redefining the stable orders of collective meaning, which as we know are constructed, artificial, idealogical, and usually oppressive. Members of the surrealist movement and early students of anthropology looked to Africa and Oceania for new forms and new beliefs, attempting to replace every local custom with an exotic alternative. The issues of reality for the individual in the time between the two great wars - essentially nihilism and the belief that the self must find meaning wherever it may - applied to the predicament of culture, for issues of the individual become issues of culture.
The avant guard act of stripping objects of their function reflects the popularity of flea markets at this time, and the flaneur's way of experiencing not only the urban metropolis, but life as brief, fleeting moments of existence in general. Culture's lack of spacio-temporal boundaries mimics the urban dweller's lack of boundaries within his or her own existence. Clifford seeks to expand the use of both surrealism and ethnography as historical categories. The new use of each term is meant to provoke new retrospective unities, while expanding the boundaries between both art and science, both the rule and the transgression.
For Clifford, culture and identity happen between people - a form of negotiation that occurs through a complex process. By joining art and science, surrealism and ethnography, Clifford seeks to demonstrate the full human potential for cultural expression, while abandoning the distinction between both high and low culture. Perhaps this is the shift in from a "transitional mode of communication", based on an oral narrative and shared experience, to a cultural style, characterized by bursts of information -- the photograph, the news paperclip, and essentially the work of art, the only tangible, physical, and "real" representation of both the rule and the transgression existing as the collective meaning that is considered culture.
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