On Ethnographic Allegory

This article by James Clifford is a study on how society perceives other ethnicity's, that is to say with allegories. He made a great example of a study conducted by two different sociologist Mead and Freeman who both did a study of the Simoan culture. The two had very different views toward the culture and based most of the study on allegories rather then science. After that Clifford describes a ethnographic perspective towards women who are regarded very differently in semi-nomadic societies then settled cultures. Ultimately allegory reveals to be the best way to understand why women are the way they are in society using an example women named Nisa. Clifford goes on to describe how anthropology is not a good way to understand cross-cultural differences because they often degrade to "just-so stories". More importantly using anthropology alone is not a good way to fully understand cultures. Clifford goes on to describe the anthropological view of doomed cultures which was devised at the dawn of imperial colonialism is diminishing because of the new ethnographic allegory.
Eventually Clifford concludes that there is no definite way to separate the facts from the allegories when it comes to cultural perspectives, the meanings are uncontrollable, allegories pose the political and ethnic dimensions, you will always find allegories in ethnography's and readers/writers understand the way they view their own cultures.
Clifford over-elaborated on everything and in my opinion could have made this chapter half as long not to mention use more lam ens terms because some words he used were new to me. However this is an important topic because most people do not understand how to perceive other cultures.