| Abstract | Abstract Post-Modernist critiques of ethnographic method tend to reduce research and writing to only writing and erase the traces of the researcher's field experience that may appear in a text. Such critiques confer more power on the ethnographer or oral historian than he or she possesses. I argue that researchers invariably manoeuvre within political contexts in order to obtain knowledge, and that the intersubjective interaction between scholar and subject creates both silences and visibilities in the final text. In Agrarian Revolt Paul Friedrich constructed a revolutionary counter memory against his own hidden master narrative of opportunism, betrayal, and political violence. Yet partly due to his interaction with members of the competing political clans, he replicated in his counter-memeory the crucial premises of the ruling clan's ideology: the ‘doctrine of genealogical unity’ and its correlates of blood descent and female purity.
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