The bookchapter engages with the lack of continuity existing between different people’s experiences, and how it may be acknowledged in ethnographic forms of representation involving montage. My discussion was triggered by a concern, which author Daniel Mendelsohn has encapsulated thus: “It has become a cliché in modern culture that you can recreate other people’s experience. I’m very suspicious of that kind of simulacra” (Tetzlaff 2012: 8).i Mendelsohn’s suspicion resonates with historian James Clifford’s discussions about “ethnographic authority,” in which he noted that “it becomes necessary to conceive of ethnography not as the experience and interpretation of a circumscribed ‘other’ reality, but rather as a constructive negotiation involving
at least two, and usually more, conscious, politically significant subjects. Paradigms of
experience and interpretation are yielding to discursive paradigms of dialogue and polyphony” (1988: 41). In my discussion, I infer that a certain use of montage may fit into such polyphonic discursive paradigms.