Ethnographers narrating Patagonia: The selk'nam and Anne Chapman

Abstract

The usual form of ethnographic description, this is, how the ethnographer presents a human group, has been named ethnographic realism. This is because some traits of the literary realism of the XIX Century, as the importance of details, exhaustive descriptions, and the idea of completeness, also appeared in ethnographic texts. In “Ethnographies as texts” (1982), George Marcus y Dick Cushman described how the conventions of that genus allowed ethnography to give the sensation of create a world. From this perspective, we set out to analyze the construction of a realistic ethnographic text written in Patagonia by Anne Chapman with the last selk'nam, between 1964 and 1974.