"There is, of course, no way that we can know, except perhaps through an empathetic leap, how the symbols are appreciated within the conscious life of another individual. We can learn how an individual uses his symbol in a portrayal (retrato, descrio, pintura) of reality. This distinction is important. We can know, in other words, the rethoric of symbols, but we cannot know, except hypothetically, how symbols are experienced." (intro p. xi)essa idia do retrato em contraposio a experincia pode ser interessante.procurar "The life history in anthropological fieldwork" de Crapanzano"It was Tuhami who first taught me to distinguish between the reality of personal history and the truth of autobiography. The former rests on the presumption of a correspondance between a text, or structure of words, and a body of human actions; the latter resides within the text itself without regard to any external criteria save, perhaps, the I of the narrator (Frye, 1976). Their equivalence is, I belive, a Western presumption." (p.5)Frye, northrop history and myth in the bible"Generic differences are not simply formal differences. They are cultural constructs and reflect thoses most fundamental assumptions about the nature of reality, including the nature of the person and the nature of language, that are considerered, if they are considered at all, self-evident by the members of any particular cultural tradition. The recognition of such differences, of the possibility of another more or less successfull way of constituting reality, is aways threatening; it may produce a sort of epistemological vertigo and demand a position of extreme cultural relativism (Crapanzano 1977d - on the writting..). Wittingly or unwittingly, however, the anthropologist and his reader often causes the differences to disappear in the act of translation. Such translation may render bizarre, exotic, or downright irrational what would have been ordinary in its own context. The ethnography comes to represent a sort of allegorical anti-world, similar to the anti-words of the insane and the child. The ethnographic encounter is lost in timeless description; the anguished search for comprehension in the theoretical explanation; the particular in the generak; the characther in the stereotype." (p.8)"The life history and the autobiography, all writings for that matter, are essentially self-constitutive; they are moments, fixed in time by the word, in the dialetical process of self-creation. They require, as such, the mediation of an Other." (p.9)