This article examines the potential for narrative style to reposition experience as central to the anthropological project. A disciplinary dichotomy between form and substance in ethnographic writing has privileged a discursive turn away from lived experience, the bedrock of ethnographic data. Drawing on the insights of experimental ethnography and pragmatist philosophy, this article critiques this dichotomy, arguing for the methodological importance of narrative style in ethnographic writing both as an evocation of fieldwork experience and as an act of authentic political engagement. This article will draw on examples from the author's work in Costa Rica and New York City. [

A single highway connects the Caribbean province of Limo n to mainstream society in the highlands of Costa Rica. This paper explores the ways in which that highway affects the status hierarchy of mainstream society in Costa Rica, and how the construction of whiteness as an unexamined racial qualifier for total social incorporation constrains the perception of blacks as social liminars and blackness as a state of communitas. The argument elaborates the work of Victor Turner on ritual liminality to suggest the structural ambiguity of Afro-Latin Americans in the context of Costa Rica.

In this article, I examine the production of meaning in the veneration of La Negrita, the black Madonna and patroness of Costa Rica. Both an apparition and an icon, La Negrita is a 20‐centimeter, dark‐colored statue of the Virgin Mary that appeared to a mulata girl on the outskirts of the colonial city of Cartago in 1635. Throughout the ensuing 400 years, La Negrita has been remade in the image of hegemony, even as the experience of her perceived power has challenged that ideological and coercive project. Through an analysis of this historical progression, I argue for a theory of culture as an aesthetic system, where the egalitarianism of experience is always in conflict with the authoritarianism of meaning.

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