Ethnographic writing as grassroots democratic action

Composition Studies, Spring 2003 by Kahn, Seth

Although most cultural studies and ethnographic pedagogy advocates don't make specific reference to discourse-community models of writing theory that were dominant in the mid- to late 1980s, one impetus for what some disciplinary commentators call the "cultural turn" was resistance to the idea that the mission of composition courses is to "bring students in" to academic languages, i.e., to help them, or to demand that they internalize and naturalize language practices that may have little to do with their previous or future experiences. Other impetuses seem to have been: 1) the influx of postmodern theory into composition, with its emphases on fragmented knowledge, localization, textuality, and resistance; 2) the critique of positivism/scientism that swept across the humanities and social sciences at large throughout the 1980s; and 3) a growing dissatisfaction with the rendering of composition as a service discipline for the rest of the academy. There are likely others as well. These signs enabled the formation of pedagogies that emphasized local, not traditionally academic, interdisciplinary ways of doing and thinking about writing. Obviously this turn didn't take over the entire field. For example, at the same time that some compositionists were turning to ethnography, cultural studies, and service-learning, others (in significant numbers, it seems) were turning to professional/technical/business writing pedagogies. The thrust of those pedagogies, echoing the goal of preparation that I find problematic, appears to be towards preparing students to engage in the kinds of writing tasks that will constitute their work lives after college.

Regardless of the specific theoretical frames within which ethnographic writing is situated in these accounts (in any accounts for that matter), there are some common features of ethnographic writing we can see across ethnographic pedagogies. In a nutshell, these features are ethnographers' ways of showing the importance (I would go as far as to say crucial-ness) of rendering the contexts in which the writing happens and from which it emerges. Most obvious is the use of narrative as the primary style of presentation. Narrative-writing is deeply embedded in the history of ethnographic writing; moreover, much ethnographic theory turns to narrative and description as responses to positivist, decontextualized accounts of phenomena. Along similar lines, ethnographic writing tends to include substantial amounts of dialogue and physical/sensory detail. Because ethnography works inductively, ethnographic writing tends not to be thesis-driven, delaying claims/assertions until readers have seen the descriptions from which they're drawn. Finally, especially for teachers of ethnographic writing who are interested in postmodern theory, texts tend to feature self-reflexive situating moves in which students think through the implications of their engagements with their sites.

In very large part, and not surprisingly, published accounts of ethnographic pedagogies tend to situate their arguments in whatever disciplinary debates were current. For example, in the midst of debates over postmodernism and the disciplinary status of composition, James Zebroski ("Rewriting") argues that ethnographic writing (by both students and teachers) blurs "killer dichotomies" (Ann Berthoff's term that Kate Ronald and Hepzibah Roskelly use to structure their anthology Farther Along) between teaching and research and between students and teachers (and, tangentially to that particular debate but useful for this argument, between researchers and participants in ethnographic projects). Likewise, in the midst of debates over how the field might/should value "personal" versus "academic" writing, Matthew Wilson argues that ethnographic writing, which is inherently "intersubjective" (Clifford, Predicament), makes the personal/academic distinction irrelevant.