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Partial Theories

On Gossip, Envy and Ethnography in the Andes

Bowdoin College, USA, kvanvlee{at}bowdoin.edu

Gossip is intertwined with the practice of ethnography both in the collection of evidence and in the retelling of stories about other people. Yet ethnographers have directed scant attention to gossiping in particular cultural and linguistic contexts or to its methodological and epistemological implications. Drawing on fieldwork in a small community in the Bolivian Andes, I investigate gossiping as a social practice and narrative genre in which bonds of intimacy and claims to knowledge are intertwined with discourses of envy and progress. Not simply engaging in private, ‘idle’, conversation, gossipers blur the assumed boundaries between local ideals and national ideologies as they ‘theorize’ about (and dialogically produce) relationships and events. Ethnographers are no less embedded in the contingencies of interactions than their interlocutors, which raises the thorny issues of the practices and politics by which they come to present and evaluate the validity of ethnographic claims.

Key Words: gossip • emotion • morality • intimacy • gender • narrative • reflexivity • ethics of fieldwork • Bolivia

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