Ethnographic writing as grassroots democratic action

Composition Studies, Spring 2003 by Kahn, Seth

Other descriptions of ethnographic pedagogies have attached ethnographic writing to the projects) of critical theory: Lester Faigley's micro-ethnography assignment that he discusses in Fragments of Rationality; Zebroski and Nancy Mack's "Ethnographic Writing for Critical Consciousness"; Richard Miller's "Not Just Story-Collecting"; and Linda Brodkey's "Writing Critical Ethnographic Narratives." Although the specific assignments in each of these texts are very different, taken together they argue that ethnographic writing supports the critical agenda of teaching students to understand, negotiate, and resist various subject-positions into which they are placed as members of various cultures.

There's certainly a value to assignments that encourage students' discovering, articulating and resisting their subject-positions, but what might happen if we tried to go further in articulating the political possibilities of ethnography, i.e., articulating an action-oriented pedagogy that moved toward changing structures of domination instead of (or in addition to) resisting them? In none of these assignments is there any sense that students are producing anything but critique; moreover, there's no sense that anybody besides classmates and their teachers are seeing their texts. Some ethnographic writing advocates begin articulating more proactive interventions, particularly Miriam Dempsey Page and Mack. Page's "Clifford Geertz and Beyond: The Interpretive Interview/Essay and Reflexive Ethnography" situates the agency of ethnographic writing in a particular kind of ethnographic practice:

The question of "ethnographic authority" is paramount in narrative or reflexive ethnography because subjective or interpretive response becomes part of the story. What has happened as reflexive ethnography has become a respected body of anthropological literature (though not without its detractors) has been a change in what constitutes valid science . . . . The old questions of the relation between subject and object no longer work, not if one is to be serious about getting inside "lived experience." (11-12)

Getting "inside 'lived experience'" requires more than simply representing participants' points of view fairly. In addition, writers must also participate in "exchange," or "gift-giving" with participants, so that both researchers and participants are transformed in the ethnographic process. If writers and participants exchange and share life experiences, each of them benefits from the process. However, in the end, Page, who is trained as an anthropologist, risks minimizing the value of ethnographic interventions in an effort to account for epistemological problems with traditional ethnographic writing. Following from Clifford ("Partial"), Stephen Tyler and Vincent Crapanzano among others, ethnographic writing should always be construed as "fiction" in order to circumvent the genre's problematic claims to scientific authority. Following these authors' logic, reading ethnographic writing as fiction certainly enables some kinds of critique that aren't available to scientific writing; nevertheless, doing so also complicates the ethos of writers and their texts.