"There is, of course, no way that we can know, except perhaps through an empathe

tic leap, how the symbols are appreciated within the conscious life of another i
ndividual. We can learn how an individual uses his symbol in a portrayal (retrat
o, descrio, pintura) of reality. This distinction is important. We can know, in othe
r words, the rethoric of symbols, but we cannot know, except hypothetically, how
symbols are experienced." (intro p. xi)
essa idia do retrato em contraposio a experincia pode ser interessante.
procurar "The life history in anthropological fieldwork" de Crapanzano
"It was Tuhami who first taught me to distinguish between the reality of persona
l history and the truth of autobiography. The former rests on the presumption of
a correspondance between a text, or structure of words, and a body of human act
ions; the latter resides within the text itself without regard to any external c
riteria save, perhaps, the I of the narrator (Frye, 1976). Their equivalence is,
I belive, a Western presumption." (p.5)
Frye, northrop history and myth in the bible
"Generic differences are not simply formal differences. They are cultural constr
ucts and reflect thoses most fundamental assumptions about the nature of reality
, including the nature of the person and the nature of language, that are consid
erered, if they are considered at all, self-evident by the members of any partic
ular cultural tradition. The recognition of such differences, of the possibility
of another more or less successfull way of constituting reality, is aways threa
tening; it may produce a sort of epistemological vertigo and demand a position o
f extreme cultural relativism (Crapanzano 1977d - on the writting..). Wittingly
or unwittingly, however, the anthropologist and his reader often causes the diff
erences to disappear in the act of translation. Such translation may render biza
rre, exotic, or downright irrational what would have been ordinary in its own co
ntext. The ethnography comes to represent a sort of allegorical anti-world, simi
lar to the anti-words of the insane and the child. The ethnographic encounter is
lost in timeless description; the anguished search for comprehension in the the
oretical explanation; the particular in the generak; the characther in the stere
otype." (p.8)
"The life history and the autobiography, all writings for that matter, are essen
tially self-constitutive; they are moments, fixed in time by the word, in the di
aletical process of self-creation. They require, as such, the mediation of an Ot
her." (p.9)