James Clifford: Of course all methodologies, which in the interpretive/historical studies are always modes of partial translation, first get you somewhere and then run out of gas.
Interview with James Clifford From the journal de-,dis-,ex-. (Alex Coles, ed.) Vol. 4, "Siting Ethnography," Sp. 2000. London: Black Dog Publishing.

Alex Coles: In your writing you often take the ethnographer (and the discourse of anthropology) as your primary site. A neat quote from Paul Rabinow attests to this, "Clifford takes as his natives, as well as his informants, anthropologists." (You even quoted this passage in The Predicament of Culture.) What do you think of if? Is it less true now than it was a decade ago?

James Clifford: Well, my relations to anthropologists, whom I have never considered to be "my natives," have been complex. A kind of fraught, shifting colleagueship would be more like it. Paul's quip was meant to say that I couldn't, as a critic, escape the structures of authority I analyzed in anthropological fieldwork. To which I responded, by making his text an epigraph: "of course." Nor were the predicaments I thought I could see with special clarity in a changing anthropology peculiar to one discipline. But socio-cultural anthropology--perhaps because of a certain historical exposure, because it was so inescapably located in changing (decolonizing, recolonizing, modernizing, re-localizing etc) cross-cultural domains--lived through crucial problems of authority in a very public way. And anthropology's experience, its "crisis," became a paradigm for other fields where similar pressures were being felt.

I think that anthropology has grappled with the historical changes in its relations with its "objects" of study in a generally positive way. The process has not led, as some feared, to self-absorption and hyper-relativism, but to much more complex historical accounts of an expanded range of socio-cultural phenomena.