Post-Heroic Feminist Ethnographies. The Subaltern, subversive Language of Southern Ethnographers

Abstract

This work deals with the universalization of the ethnographic language and the master principle that founds what I define as “androcentric heroism”. Based on the reading of ethnographies carried out by feminist women from the South, it investigates a series of overlaps and decentralizations of female voices considered as minority languages, as well as the treatment of subaltern “natives” and ethnographers in border areas and scenes of war. The “multi-sited ethnographies” emerging in the Global North, as a relatively new modality for the challenge of global hegemonies, showed that the center of contemporary ethnographic analysis is not based on the claim of some previous cultural state, but in the new cultural forms that have arisen in subalternized colonial situations. This mobile ethnography takes unexpected trajectories by following cultural formations through and within multiple sites of activity. However, global hegemonies remain a challenge for the destabilization of conventional forms that have overlapped other non-hegemonic, anti-colonial and antipatriarchal knowledge produced in the South.