Ethnographic writing as grassroots democratic action

Composition Studies, Spring 2003 by Kahn, Seth

Composition Studies, Volume 31, Number 1, Spring 2003

Theories of writing grounded in cultural studies and ethnographic writing have explicitly taken up questions of writing students' relations to cultures and communities outside the academy. There are close interconnections between these theories; at the forefront is the notion that the work students do inside the academy (as writers, readers, interpreters) is closely related to students' political engagements outside the academy (as consumers, employees, union members, volunteers for non-profits, grassroots political participants, voters). In other words, these theories emphasize what students do as members of cultures/communities; those activities' connections to classroom practices vary widely, and as a result, they construe writing and its relations to culture in very different ways. Many ethnographic writing assignments, especially those that derive from anthropologists like Clifford Geertz, James Clifford and George Marcus, construe writing as an interpretive act. A different conception of ethnographic writing drawn from radical anthropology, one that emphasizes the material implications of engaging in processes of producing and circulating texts, offers students, teachers, and participants in ethnographic research some powerful options for collaborating in processes of grassroots democratic action.

Let me be clear from the beginning that I don't intend to detail a pedagogy that enacts the theoretical argument this piece makes. There are several reasons for this choice. First, ethnography is quintessentially local; to tell anybody how to do it is contrary to its politics. Second, other writers have provided any number of possible ways of teaching ethnographic writing (or using ethnographic writing to teach certain concepts), many of which are cited (if not described in some detail) in the text. Third, although ethnographic writing offers strong democratizing potential for composition students and teachers, elaborating its practices may overdetermine the ways that readers might enact this kind of theoretical position on curricular or programmatic levels.

WHAT'S LEFT OF LEFT PEDAGOGIES

Although it's not exactly right to say that cultural studies and ethnographic writing pedagogies are oriented identically (even among advocates of any of those pedagogies, the politics aren't identical), it seems fair to say that the common turn away from academic writing for its own sake is no accident of history. The politics of cultural studies pedagogy was developed in some detail in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In early formulations, cultural studies pedagogies emerged from composition studies' urge to reclaim a leftist political trajectory in response to Reagan-Thatcher era conservatism (see Trimbur's "Cultural Studies and Teaching Writing" for details of this account). Two strong critics of this turn, Maxine Hairston and Gary Tate, pushed advocates of cultural studies to articulate the political project of cultural studies with the educational project of composition studies. James Berlin, John Trimbur, John Schilb, and Bruce McComiskey have invoked theoretical constructs emerging from and/or popularized by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Culture Studies (BCCCS) to describe and teach the situated nature of writing: Williams' theories of culture; Louis Althusser's, Smith's and Goren Therborn's notions of ideology, interpellation and agency; Roland Barthes', Robert Hodge and Gunther Kress' and Stuart Hall's notions of semiotic codes; and the theories of textuality and discourse that circulate through these theorists and their cadre.

Attempts to theorize writing through these lenses have taken two different, although not entirely distinct, approaches. First, Berlin (see "Rhetoric and Ideology," "Composition and Cultural Studies," and "Composition Studies and Cultural Studies") and Trimbur ("Cultural Studies," "Literacy") relate the projects of composition studies and cultural studies under the rubric of rhetoric; this relation allows them to reclaim the tradition of political participation that stretches back to classical rhetorical training. Second, Berlin ("Rhetorics, Poetics"), Schilb and McComiskey argue that cultural studies theory describes relations between writers, readers, texts and cultures that position students as writer-subjects with agency to resist oppressive ideological formations. Connecting these two approaches, both Berlin and McComiskey turn to the work of Karen Burke LeFevre, whose Invention as a Social Act argues that rhetorical invention happens in the context of socially and historically determined commonplaces; as such, the making of text and the sharing of textual meanings are socially and historically determined to a large degree.

Although the notions of writing both as politically/culturally situated and as politically/culturally constitutive that circulate through these texts are appealing, the ways that students are positioned as writers while they're actually in writing classes are not. Berlin, Schilb, Trimbur, and McComiskey (along with Henry Giroux and other critical pedagogists) construct the classroom as a place where students don't necessarily do political/cultural work, but instead learn to do it. The classroom is a place to practice the practices of political participation rather than to engage in such practices. Berlin and Schilb offer particularly stark examples of this point.