What is the goal of ethnography? Is it the exact reconstitution of what happened, or what is happening in the society studied? To answer this affirmatively would be to forget that we are confronted here to systems of representations that differ for each member of the group and that, together, differ from the representations of the investigator. The best ethnographic study will never transform the reader into a native. The Revolution of 1789[#1] as lived by an aristocrat is not the same phenomenon as the Revolution of 1789 as lived by a sans-culotte,[#2] et neither one nor the other would ever correspond to the Revolution of 1789 as conceived by some one like Michelet or Taine[#3]. All that an ethnographer can do, and all that one should ask of them, is to broaden a particular experience into a general, or more general, one, and, in so doing, makes this experience available as experience to people of other places or times
This passage is from an essay placed as an the introduction to the collection of his essays Lévi-Strauss published asAnthropologie Structurale. The essay is ostensibly about the relation of history to ethnography, highlighting similarities and differences in order to affirm that both are necessary for either to contribute to further knowledge about our own world. In the process Lévi-Strauss moves ethnography away from Malinowski's affirmation about "the native's point of view," prefigures and challenges Geertz's affirmation that "the vocation of anthropology is not to answer our deepest questions, but to make available to us answers that others, guarding other sheep in other valleys, have given, and thus to include them in the consultable record of what man has said" (Geertz 1973:30). While Lévi-Strauss moves away from a claim of truth about "the native's point of view," he claims a further positive value for anthropology (and history).
#1 The major event of French history of the past three centuries that marked the violent entry of France into the modern world
#2 The often poor, working class and uneducated foot soldiers of the Revolution on whom the leaders relied during the most violent years of the period
#3 Famous French historians of the 19th century who represented the Revolution to France.