The ethnographic gaze is not only a lens built by anthropology to study the peoples of the world who stand before this gaze as “others”, the ethnographic gaze has permeated Western culture and manifests itself in different phenomena that reinforce it. One of the most important effects of the ethnographic gaze has been to create the “others” as homogeneous and exotic entities, a large continent like Africa becomes an undifferentiated whole, indigenous peoples, so radically different from each other, are seen through From the homogenizing lens as an indistinct mass that can be packaged behind the category “ethnic”, the same has been done with what is today labeled as “oriental”. Fighting this homogenization is a pressing need in the processes of reparation and justice derived from colonialist oppression in which anthropology played an important role. The fact that a large part of the American white population believes that Africa is a country, the popularity of what ethnic chic as a trend in fashion or the cinematographic representations in which, regardless of the people in question, the characters of indigenous peoples always speak English or Spanish with the same accent, show that the effects of the ethnographic gaze transcend anthropology as a discipline .
Throughout time, there have been attempts to turn the ethnographic lens around to show the absurdity of its construction. Placing Western culture itself under this gaze is a powerful way of disarticulating its effects. The anthropologist Sheba Camacho presented me with one of those exercises that, within the discipline itself, highlight the exotic springs of the ethnographic gaze. This is Horace Mitchell Miner’s article entitled ‘Body ritual among the Nacirema’ and published in 1956 in the magazine American Anthropologist. Mitchell describes the body cleansing rituals of a little-known North American tribe, using language such that readers find out, only at the end, that the Nacirema (“American” backwards) are really the white Americans of middle class.
Over time I found other efforts to ridicule the camera that has been looking at us for a long time. I remember in particular a parody of Western philanthropy that asked for funds to help the people of Sweden so that they could have more sunlight or the attempts of some friends of mine to create a foundation, fictitious, of course, so that people from the upper classes from Mexico City who could not learn to climb trees in their childhood could have scholarships to travel to the Mixe region and learn how to do it to heal the consumerism that had sickened them.
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During my childhood, the stories in the Mixe language of relatives who had traveled to Mexico City were building an amazing city in my imagination; For my grandmother, the people of that city had interesting customs because, like the moles, they had built underground paths through which to travel. Thanks to this description, one of the first things I wanted to do when I got to know Mexico City was to do “the path of the mole”, travel by subway. The multiplicity of stories that we can make about others is necessary to avoid the fossilization that the ethnographic gaze, because it is hegemonic, causes in our vision of the world.
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