The notions of “culture” and “ethnography” are variously intertwined in the anthropological literature[1]. It is generally assumed that the notion of “ethnography” depends on the notion of “culture” for its coinage and usage. One fundamental definition of ethnography coincides with the etymological meaning of the term: “ethnography” literally means “to write about (or inscribe) culture”. This generic relationship though, is not grounded on a theoretically abstract and general discussion about culture, but is founded instead on particularism. Ethnography, by tradition, relates to culture as a particularity. Although there may exist several ethnographies about the same culture, the particularity of ethnography emerges from two distinct yet related realities, concerning writing in general and ethnographic writing in particular. The act of writing is a unique process by itself and, eventually, a particular modality of expression, modifying through its generic particularity anything argued about in its context. The second reality in question concerns the fact that ethnographic writing refers always to one or several particular cultures. In writing about cultures, ethnographers have engaged themselves in long discussions on the translatability of cultural experience into ethnographic expression. Such discussions have focused mainly on the issue of representation as a central theoretical and methodological problem of ethnography. Epistemological, ontological and ethical concerns have been expressed as instances of criticism against the centrality of representation in ethnography [2].

This debate has grown mainly out of a theoretical shift in ethnographic focus which gives primacy to reflexivity over representation. This shift owes its justification to the understanding of the realities of writing and reading in general and of ethnographic writing and reading in particular. Working in the vein of reflexivity, ethnographers have identified a crisis of representation and argued for a new, non-representational ethnography. By becoming more sensitive to the act of writing as a particular modality of expression, as opposed to writing as representation, ethnographers have established a new awareness about ethnography as a distinct reality which interacts with other realities (cultural and ethnographic), but stands out as a unique and particular reality in and by itself. This awareness has brought to the fore new ontological, epistemological and ethical concerns in regards with the encountering of the juxtaposed realities through writing. To discard the view that ethnography is a representation of culture, ethnographers had to redefine ethnography in relation to both culture and itself. Translating culture into ethnography involves transforming a modality of culture to an ethnographic modality. This means that a logic (or a set of logics) of a particular culture may become, through transformation, the logic of a particular kind of ethnography. In acknowledging that “culture” and “ethnography” constitute different realms of experience, expression and communication, it is also necessary to acknowledge that any meaningful account of the encountering of the two realms in question should rely for its articulation on a symbolic modality[3].

The diverse logics of experience, expression and communication associated with a particular culture may help to define new modalities of ethnographic writing. Any transformation of a cultural logic to the logic of ethnography itself does not, by principle or any other necessity, reduce the cultural element in question to an ethnographic element of representation. This kind of transformation is less the relating of information about a culture than the performance of relating, which emerges as an ethnographic response to the cultural reality encountered through writing. Thus, the transformation of a cultural to an ethnographic modality is a symbolic process in the course of which various logics of culture are juxtaposed with various logics of ethnography. On such a symbolic level of reference, any experience, expression, or communication associated with a particular culture or ethnography is conceptualized anew as an emergent reality of juxtaposition. In the context of symbolic juxtaposition, the cultural and the ethnographic elements do not lose their distinctive character but, in addition to their particularity as cultural and ethnographic elements, they acquire an additional quality that pertains to another order of reality: symbolic encountering.