La etnografía como género. Una aproximación desde la Lingüística Sistémico Funcional

Abstract

This study analyzes ethnographies published in journals in the field of sociocultural anthropology from Argentina and other Latin American countries. Within the frame of Systemic Functional Linguistics, the Introduction and Development sections of 10 recently published ethnographies were subjected to qualitative analysis of the Contextual Configuration and Generic Structure Potential of semantic elements. As a text, an Ethnography is a product resulting from the field work of an anthropologist and it constitutes one of the most frequently taught genres in under-graduate programs in Social Sciences. Regarding the paratextual elements that organize the different sections, the analysis reveals that these texts are characterized by the inclusion of quotes from the social actors involved in the study in the titles and/or subtitles. The Introduction includes obligatory elements (the claim of topic centrality, the objectives, the review of previous research and the spatio-temporal location of the research) and optional ones (the organization of the article). On the other hand, in the Development, the description of the theoretical approach and the analysis of each investigated subject are obligatory while the methodology is optional. This research tries to make a contribution to the understanding of ethnography as a genre using the tools of SFL.