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International Journal of
Qualitative Studies in
Education
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authors and subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tqse20
To cite this article: Douglas E. Foley (2002) Critical ethnography: The reflexive
turn, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 15:4, 469-490, DOI:
10.1080/09518390210145534
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09518390210145534
This paper explores the recent debates on ethnographic writing by explicating four types of
reexivity: confessional, theoretical, textual, and deconstructive. It then illustrates how the
author has incorporated such reexive practices into his recent ethnographies. The paper
generally advocates blending autobiography and ethnography into a ``cultural Marxist standpoint. This perspective also draws upon multiple epistemologies and feminist notions of science,
and it highlights the importance of writing in ordinary language. Such narrative experimentation aims to replace the old scientic ethnographic realist narrative style with a more reexive
realist narrative style. The author argues that reexive epistemological and narrative practices
will make ethnography a more engaging, useful, public storytelling genre.
Introduction
Many ethnographer s claim we are living in an ``experimental moment (Journal of
Contemporary Ethnography, 1999; Marcus & Fischer, 1986). Some of us have been living
that experimental moment for years. Writing scientic ethnographies for a few anthropologists has always seemed to me like a colossal waste of ``labor power. Initially,
adopting a more political notion of science called ``critical ethnography (Carspecken,
1996) made writing ethnographies feel less alienating. But after producing two
cultural critiques rooted in Marxism (Foley et al., 1989; Foley, 1990), I began experimenting with ways to make ethnography a more accessible, engaging, public genre. As
we shall see, that led to some reexive epistemological and narrative practices that
traditional ethnographer s might consider subjective and unscientic.
Most contemporary ethnographer s will be familiar with the discussion that follows.
There are already several excellent how-to-do it methods books (Co ey, 1999; Davies,
1999) that advocate reexive eld practices and texts. This rumination on my experimentation with the ethnographi c genre adds, I hope, to these debates. The next
section presents some reections on critical ethnography . The subsequent section
denes four distinct, yet complimentary, reexive practices that transform the idea
of scientic ethnography. The nal section describes a hybrid narrative style that
emerged from such reexive practices. In retrospect, developing my own narrative
style and voice was what nally made me feel more at home in the academic knowledge-production factory.
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graduate students who were Students for Democratic Society (SDS) and antiwar
activists chafed under this regime. We wanted to do cultural studies that exposed
exploitation and inequality. In that era, the only critical anthropologist s were
Marxist, and they generally studied the so-called undeveloped ``periphery countries
relations with the developed ``core capitalist societies. Radical anthropologist s concentrated mainly on the political economies of tribal societies (Godelier, 1977) and the
impact of colonialism on agricultural economies (Wolfe, 1982). Traditional anthropologists dismissively labeled the study of colonialism and imperialism ``political
science. They worried that such studies abandoned the basic ideals and objective
methodologies of a scientic social science, thus the historic mission of ethnology to
nd the universals of human language and culture. In the 1960s graduate students
championing Marxist anthropolog y were thought of as little more than ideologues.
But events moved swiftly and by the early 1970s legions of American anthropologists had become disillusioned and were ``reinventing the study of contemporary
core societies and cultures (Hymes, 1972). It became commonplace among my peers
to acknowledge that anthropology was founded upon liberal, humanist doctrines of
ameliorism, orientalism, colonialism, and racism. The time-honored charge of ethnology to record and theorize cultural diversity was thrown into doubt. Recording
cultural diversity before Western capitalist expansion destroyed it had reduced
anthropologist s to museum curators of dead and dying cultures. Or worse still, they
were technical advisors to internationa l ``development projects that promoted global
capitalism. Such were the options for would-be radical anthropologist s who wanted to
bring anthropology back home and transform the American empire.
Many of the early anthropologica l studies of marginalized populations in core
capitalist societies mimicked what the Chicago school of sociology had been doing
since the 1920s and 1930s. These sociologists studied ``deviant groups like gangs,
criminals, ethnics, and transvestites. Their goal was to make the culture and plight of
these groups better understood and accepted. But as the 1960s civil rights movements
heated up, some ``activist anthropologists decided to work even more directly for and
with oppressed groups. Rather than being sympathetic storytellers, activist anthropologists sought to produce studies that helped win legal battles, rent strikes, and
various political actions. Such studies had decidedly more political, partisan goals
than the earlier sociological ethnographies . From this perspective critical ethnographers joined ongoing political struggles as pens for hire. My peers who followed this
route became dropouts, journalists, and independent anthropological activists.
Unfortunately, they disappeared from the face of academe, and they never produced
the type of studies that bring tenure.
Those of us who stayed behind in academe did so with enormous guilt. The
progressive labor wing of SDS, who fancied themselves labor organizers, made sure
of that. They sco ed at the idea of producing theoretical tomes for other academics.
To them, such pursuits were thinly disguised intellectual language games to hide
bourgeois careerism. Such pseudoscienti c studies produced little useful knowledge
for transforming society. As the Vietnam War wound down, we antiwar activists were
joined by a new generation of post-1960s social scientists marching to all manner of
isms. When I arrived at the University of Texas in 1970, the self-proclaimed
``progressive faculty was reading French poststructuralist s and deconstructionists .
Initially, our study group though the new ``postmodern perspective was interesting but lacked the transformative political agenda of Marxism. Nevertheless, the
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unrelenting skepticism of postmodernism, along with the feminist and critical race
critiques, forced us to question further the limits of class analysis.
In response, we turned to a rich tradition of dissent within Marxism and read
German Frankfort critical theorists, and French neo-Marxists , especially Pierre
Bourdieu. We also began exploring the work of a very eclectic group of British
``new left cultural theorists at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies
(CCCS) (Forgaces, 1989). CCCS scholars were interrogating the seminal work of
Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, French Marxist structuralist Luis Althusser,
and British Marxist E.P. Thompson. The anthropologists in our group found the
work of CCCS scholars Paul Willis (1976, 1981) and Stuart Hall (Morely & Chen,
1996) particularly important for renovating anthropologica l concepts of culture. The
story of ``cultural production and ``practice theorists inuence on American
anthropolog y has already been told in some detail (Lave, 1992; Ornter, 1984).
Levinson and Holland (1996) demonstrate that their inuence was particularly strong
in the anthropology/sociology of education.
Put far too simply, the innovation in these two ``neo-Marxist perspectives was a
concept of culture that nally acknowledges class conict and collective agency. The
study of classes as the social relations of production was transformed into the study of
``class cultures with unique, self-valorizing expressive cultural practices and forms. In
these formulations, various sites of cultural contestation and everyday cultural practice were interrogated to better understand societal forces of power, dominance, and
change. Ultimately, most ``cultural Marxists, often in response to feminist and critical race theorists, developed a multiple system of dominance/resistance perspectives
that no longer privileged economic explanations of exploitation. Jamaican Stuart Hall
eventually added poststructuralis t elements to class culture analysis (Morely & Chen,
1996). Various Marxists (Hill, McLaren, Cole, & Rikowski, 1999) have accused Hall
and other ``post-Marxists (Laclau & Mou e, 1985) of lapsing into philosophical
relativism and abandoning the political core of class analysis.
But many American anthropologist s still read Hall as democratizing and expanding rather than abandoning class theory (Foley & Moss, 2000). Defenders of Hall note
that he refocuses Marxian class theory in much the same way Antonio Gramsci (1971)
did. Like Gramsci, he is interested in understanding how the ruling bloc builds civic
consent through the state and its cultural/educative institutions (schools, mass media,
church, voluntary associations, and families). Since an historical ruling blocs ability
to control these cultural institutions through legal and moral force is never secure,
there is always the possibility that the working class may create a progressive, counterhegemonic culture and historical bloc. Consequently, Halls reformulation of class
theory privileges the study of how collective cultural identities are produced through
various cultural struggles.
In this reformulation, Marxs original notion of alienation and objectication
through wage labor has been broadened to include objectifying, alienating, everyday
cultural practices. Various cultural identity groups are reproduced and produce themselves through communicative or expressive cultural practices in various cultural sites.
The stigmatizing discourses about inferior ``cultural others reproduce inequality and
``steal peoples subjectivity and humanity in much the same way that laboring in
commodity-producin g factories does. Cultural identity groups resist stigmatization
and marginalization and ``produce themselves through self-valorizing expressive
cultural forms (Foley, 1990; Gilroy, 1987; Limon, 1994; Pena, 1985, 1999) and
even through commodity consumption (Willis, 1990, 1999).
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ential encounter with people who live by these cultural constructions of reality; and
(3) a reexive investigator, who has experienced this unfamiliar cultural space and has
dialogued with its practitioners, can portray this cultural space and its people in a
provisionally accurate manner. This is an admittedly a very cryptic representation of
the philosophical foundations of contemporary critical ethnography . But these are a
set of assumptions to which I, and perhaps many critical ethnographers , subscribe.
After writing several critical ethnographies from this general perspective, I began
incorporating more feminist, postmodern, and autoethnographi c practices.
Oversimplifying greatly, these various critiques seemed to boil down to a more modest
notion of the social sciences. To make ethnography at least quasi-objective, one has to
become much more reexive about all ethnographi c practices from eld relations
and interpretive practices to producing texts. Since reexivity is a very slippery term,
the following section di erentiates between various types of reexivity, and a subsequent section illustrates these practices with examples from my ethnographic texts.
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``scientic ethnographers, Behar, and perhaps most autoethnographers , are unwilling to privilege the rational over the emotional. Doing so reproduces the old Cartesian
mindbody dualism, which leaves us subscribing to a series of unfortunate dichotomies: sciencehumanities, objectivesubjective, rationalintuitive, and malefemale.
A closely related reformulation of epistemological assumptions has also emerged
out of feminist (Harding, 1998), racial (Collins, 1990), indigenous (Tuhiwami Smith,
1999) and borderland (Villenas & Foley, 2002) standpoint theories. Such calls for a
more situated, embodied way of knowing emphasize an analytic standpoint rooted in
the solidarity and sensibility that cultural and class struggles often produce. Many
white middle-class autoethnographer s (Ellis & Bochner, 1996, 2001) tend to valorize
generalized notions of emotion, intuition, and aesthetics as their ground of knowing
rather than their historical experiences with economic, cultural, racial, and gender
struggles. As more scholars of color incorporate autobiographical practices into their
ethnographies , they will almost certainly challenge mainstream autoethnographer s in
much the same way the feminists of color challenged feminism. For me, standpoint
theory in its various guises helps historicize the somewhat abstract calls to be more
intuitive and poetic.
Leaving aside di erences between standpoint theory and autoethnography , it
would seem that both perspectives are advocating a more intuitive, experiential
way of knowing. Consequently, both challenge the positivistic ideal of developing
and relying upon universal second-order scientic metalanguages. Autoethnographer s
of all strips valorize ordinary, connotative language over scientic, denotative language. They rely on the literary language of metaphor, irony, parody, satire as much
as they rely on social scientic metalanguages . Using a much more robust, embodied,
situated language allows autoethnographi c interpreters to engage more fully the
intractability of life. It allows them to evoke the richness and complexity of everyday
life through complex symbolic language and dramatic, personal stories. As various
autoethnographer s have explained, the act of writing itself becomes a way of being
and knowing.
Traditional, theoretical ethnographers are quick to dismiss autoethnograph y as a
self-indulgent, narcissistic ``diary disease (Geertz, 1988), or excessively subjective,
shallow ``textual reexivity (Bourdieu & Waquant, 1992). Indeed, it is hard to
imagine grand theorists like Geertz and Bourdieu representing themselves as experiencing cultural others in a vulnerable, emotional, embodied manner. Most accomplished authoethnographer s would probably agree that highly autobiographica l
reexive practices, in the hands of an unskilled or egocentric practitioner, can degenerate into self-serving, narcissistic, heroic portrayals of the ethnographer.
Incorporating much more of the researchers personal self and utilizing a more artistic,
a ective way of knowing is not without problems. But as Phil Carspecken (1996) and
Andrew Sparks (2002) note, retaining the idea of a self/author in dialogue with
cultural others positions the researcher in important ways. First, being a dialogic
knower or witness to a cultural scene positions the ethnographer as a much less
imperial, authoritative learner. Second, it obligates the researcher to embrace her/
his personal indebtedness and responsibility towards other individuals. As we shall see,
being a knower/witness with a personal, cultural history (a very modernist notion) is
quite di erent from being a detached theoretical, scientic knower (Bourdieu &
Waquant, 1992) or a detached poetic, postmodern knower (Tyler, 1986).
To create his second ideal type of reexivity, Marcus draws a sharp dichotomy
between the subjective, ``confessional reexivity of feminists and the more objective,
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``theoretical reexivity of Pierre Bourdieu. Put too simply, Bourdieus grand project
is to replace reigning macrosociologica l perspectives such as systems theory and functionalism with an alternative, foundational perspective. Somewhat like earlier phenomenological and ethnomethodologica l sociologists, he too is advocating a return to
the study of everyday life and ``ethnopractices. For Bourdieu, an ``epistemologically
reexive sociologist grounds her theoretical constructs in the everyday cultural practices of the subjects. Such a move replaces abstract armchair theorizing about everyday life with an experiential, abductive (deductive and inductive) way of knowing. An
abductive ethnographer must tack back and forth mentally between her concrete eld
experience and her abstract theoretical explanations of that experience. In the end,
``theoretical reexivity should produce a reasonably objective, authoritativ e account
of the cultural other.
Where Bourdieu di ers radically with autoethnographer s is in his aversion to their
existential notion of an experiential, intuitive, introspective knower. Like other French
poststructuralis t thinkers, he distances himself from existentialist or Hegelian notions
of consciousness and an autonomous self. But, unlike most poststructuralis t thinkers,
Bourdieu does not reduce the self, subjectivity, and authors to mere ``e ects of
discourses. His concept of the self or subjectivity retains a much stronger notion of
individual agency in relation to dominating structures (Holland, Lachicotte Jr.,
Skinner, & Cain, 1998). Although Bourdieu does not have as robust a notion of
collective agency as Marx does, his perspective of cultural actors enacting, breaking,
and improvising on the normative rules of a given setting is very grounded and
historical. Ultimately, practice theory has a much stronger, more sociological notion
of subjectivity, consciousness, and individual agency that most postmodern theories
do.
Given Bourdieus more sociological notion of self, he calls upon sociologists to be
reexive in a di erent way than existentialist and phenomenological social scientists
are reexive. He argues that a truly reexive sociology must also make transparent
how they, as members of a vast academic knowledge-productio n process, produce
truth claims and facts. Bourdieu calls this a ``sociology of sociology that uncovers
or ``objectivates the inuence of the scientic ``eld on the interpreting self. To
produce a local account of knowledge production, an ethnographer must pay particular attention to how the practices and discourses of his/her own discipline a ect
what and how he/she thinks and writes. Woolgar and Latours (1978) exhaustive
ethnographic study of a biomechanical laboratory illustrates nicely how to pay
more attention to the ``eld of knowledge production. They demonstrat e how deeply
embedded the physical scientists and the ethnographer s are in the local relationships
and politics of the laboratory and their disciplinary specialty. In this type of reexivity, the author also consciously situates her representational practices within the
disciplines of past knowledge constructions. Such an interpretive move makes transparent the socially constructed, historically situated nature of the authors ``facts,
thus the partiality of their truth claims. Autoethnographers rarely do a sociological
critique of the eld of production of their texts. They tend to explore psychological
matters or feelings more than the sociological, structural conditions of their interpretations.
Practice and cultural production perspectives also generally have stronger notions
of agency (praxis) and structure (history) than many autoethnographer s and postmodern ethnographers have. They either focus on how classes of people negotiate,
assimilate, and transform their lived, structured, historical reality or on the collective
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agency of groups. This more historical, political notion of reality is emphasized more
than in autoethnographi c and postmodern perspectives. Most cultural Marxists also
subscribe to a more constructivis t ontology that historical cultural forms and practices
exist, as a phenomenologis t would say, ``beyond the horizon or consciousness of
ordinary people. To map these cultural constructions, ethnographic knowers are
``epistemologically reexive in a least two ways. First, they must critically analyze
the disciplinary and discursive historical context that shapes them and their interpretations. Second, they must practice a systematic, disciplined abductive process of theory development within and against the discursive traditions of a discipline(s).
From this perspective, the rational social scientist knows reality through the power
of her/his conceptual framework. The abductive process that conjoins theory and
empirical eldwork eventually produces constructs or heuristic devices used for mapping and representing (``objectivating ) the taken-for-grante d cultural and political
practices observed. Any abstract metalanguage used to map said reality, e.g., ``class
formation, ``taste culture, ``ideological hegemony is best understood as conditional
constructions grounded in historical ``articulations (Morely & Chen, 1996) or
``practices (Bourdieu & Waquant, 1992). Consequently, these mappings are always
approximate and subject to reformulation and debate within the eld of production.
Yet no matter how provisional a construct or explanation may be, it functions as a lens
or heuristic device which maps cultural practices and spaces much like cartographer s
map physical space.
A neo-Marxist abductive ethnographi c knower does not generally utilize her/his
artistic, intuitive, introspective sensibilities the way an existential autoethnographe r
might. He/she is more inclined to privilege the rational, theoretical, scientic perspective. Paul Williss earlier work on profane and working-class culture is somewhat of an
exception (Willis, 1976, 1981). His working-class background and training in the
humanities is much more apparent than in his later theoretical reections on cultural
consumption (Willis, 1999). In contrast, autoethnographer s tend to be more personal
and literary and less explicitly theoretical. But as previously noted, some autoethno graphers do try to hold these two seemingly contradictory ways of knowing in tension.
They try to utilize both a scientic and a more artistic way of knowing. Being situated,
embodied, historical selves/characters in the text, they are far less likely to disappear
behind a grand rational, theoretical framework or, as we shall see, a grand antitheoretical postmodern call for poetics.
The third and nal ideal type highlighted in Marcuss (1994) typology is the more
postmodern notion ``intertextual reexivity. The most obvious type of intertextual
reexivity practiced by many scholars is historiography . Most narrative historians
have been trained to pore over and classify the di erences between interpretations
by historical period or era. The rhetorical interplay between di erent texts and interpretations is deconstructed, and such deconstructions become the basis and justication for reinterpreting past conventional wisdoms and knowledge claims. Many
ethnographer s develop intertextual sensibility, but as Johannes Fabian (1983) points
out, they are prone to valorize the present and lapse into the timeless, authoritativ e
narrative style of the ``ethnographic present. Such practices may make ethnographers somewhat less intertextually reexive than historians generally are.
Intertextual reexivity also refers to the rhetorical use of representationa l practices. The early postmodern critiques of ethnography (Cli ord, 1988; Marcus &
Fischer, 1986) called upon ethnographers to be much more self-conscious about
their narrative and representationa l practices. These critiques highlighted the limits
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of scientic realists texts and call upon ethnographer s to be much more experimental
narratively. Robert Stams (1985) exploration of literary and cinematic texts provides
a good introduction to how modernist artists have manipulated the conventions of
their genres. A nice example of how artists build reexivity into their texts is Francois
Tru auts Day for Night (Stam, 1985). The movie is about making a movie, thus seeks
to make its narrative practice transparent. It creates what deconstructionist s call an
``aporia, a gap or uncertainty that the movie is really a copy of life. Like Latour and
Woolgars theoretically reexive account of the scientic laboratory, Day for Night
blurs the taken-for-grante d narrative conventions of the genre; consequently, it calls
into question our assumptions about fact/ction, natural/constructed, and truth/
falsity. But Marcuss ideal type, ``textual reexivity, although somewhat postmodern,
fails to convey a more radical notion of reexivity that Kamala Visweswaran (1994)
aptly labels ``deconstructive reexivity.
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postmodernists argue that our best hope may be to abandon our desire to know in any
absolute sense and to make grand, foundational constructs and knowledge claims.
According to deconstructionists , the best way out of this linguistic/semiotic quagmire
is actually to embrace the paradoxical , analogical both/and logic of signication
systems. As we shall see, some postmodern ethnographers embrace the more analogical logic of poetic images rather than either/or dichotomies. As Rosenau (1992) suggests, one could read this philosophical position as skeptical to the point of nihilism
and relativism. Or one could read it as a radical skepticism that constantly searches for
a deeper, less ideological, more realistic position than the so-called realists.
Postmodern ethnographer Patti Lather (2001) advocates this more radical, antifoundational position in what she considers a constructive manner. She stresses the
need to open up rather than foreclose analytic categories and advocates exploring the
aporias or indeterminate character of all representationa l attempts. She highlights the
deep commitment of postmodern thinkers to indeterminate, evocative, poetic accounts
of experience or reality. As Lather puts it, being theoretical is actually about ``getting
lost and building on the ``ruins of knowledge rather than assuredly mapping and
discovering reality. To be ``theoretically reexive, in the deconstructive sense, is to be
radically skeptical about the stability and utility of all theoretical constructs, thus all
attempts by scientists to mimic or visually map reality. From her perspective, autoethnographer s often use postmodern rhetoric to justify their poetic, evocative texts,
but they continue to use modernist, realist notions of the self, author, voice, text, and
science. What, then, does a more postmodern notion of author and text look like?
Steven Tylers (1986, pp. 125126) inuential essay on authorless, evocative postmodern texts articulates in detail an alternative to realist ethnographies :
A post-modern ethnography is a cooperatively evolved text consisting of fragments of discourse intended to evoke in the minds of both reader and writer an
emergent fantasy of a possible world of commonsense reality, and thus to provoke an aesthetic integration that will have a therapeutic e ect. It is, in a word,
poetry not in its textual form, but in its return to the original context and
function of poetry, which by means of its performative break with everyday
speech, evoked memories of the ethos of the community, thereby provoked
hearers to act ethically.
Tylers explanation of what it means to evoke reality like a poet emphasizes the need
to abandon the visualist metaphor of scientic discourses. When an ethnographer
evokes rather than explains the lived reality of others, he/she refrains from all monologic, rational attempts to map, explain, classify, and describe social facts/reality.
According to Tyler, a fragmented, polyphoni c text operates like poetic metaphors
do. Metaphoric representations shift the burden of making meaning to the reader,
or as Tyler puts it, create a paradoxical, dialogic encounter between authortext
reader. It is this encounter, not the authors explicit subjectivity or theoretical virtuosity, that produces meaning. It is in this sense that the postmodern ethnographer
abolishes the self or author so central to modernist texts.
Illustrating what this sort of deconstructive reexivity looks like textually is di cult because few ethnographies are thoroughly postmodern . Contrary to popular
stereotypes, full-blown postmodern ethnographies (Dorst 1989; Gomez-Pena, 1996;
Lather & Smithies, 1997; Stewart, 1996) are neither relativistic nor nihilistic. They
often make rather strong political and cultural critiques, but they are not poetic in the
modernist, realist sense. There is no author-poet waxing autobiographicall y about his
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relationships, life, and the landscape (Foley, 1998; Foley & Moss, 2000). Perhaps a
closer analogy might be the impressionist painter or poet who intuitively arranges
light and color and shapes or words in disjunctive, unexpected ways. For example,
Lather and Smithies (1997) attempt to do this through a pastiche or collage of
factoids, unmediated voices, footnoted authorial reections, and visual/verbal images
of angels. Somewhat like painters/poets, they deploy the ambiguous, polyvocal metaphor of angels found in Western mythology to ``evoke the meaning of the AIDS crises
for their HIV-positive subjects. Ultimately, the reader encounters their artistic juxtaposition of human voices, factoids about AIDS, and the angel metaphors. This paradoxical encounter of authortextreader evokes meaning without explicitly
representing in a realist, mimetic sense who these women are or how they cope
with their disease. The only realist dimension of the text is its portrayal of a focus
group of HIV-positive women sharing what they consider their ``true stories.
Other postmodern ethnographer s seem to practice deconstructive reexivity
through very explicit rhetorical analysis of textual images (Norris, 1982). Typically,
the cultural critic/author ``lays ruin to or deconstructs an unstable, ambiguous hierarchy of ideas or concepts in popular and/or academic discourses. Kathleen Stewart
(1996) does such a deconstruction when she portrays how academics and journalists
typically represent poor white Appalachians and the region as ``the other America.
The text presents troubling, powerful images of many outsiders stereotyping
Appalachia. It also contrasts the way eloquent, poetic Appalachians construct their
own reality through memories and plain talk. Stewart creates a collage of
Appalachian talk and memory of place that ``evokes rather than explains and
maps what she aptly calls ``a space at the side of the road in America. Again, the
reader is left to make sense of a relentlessly deconstructive, somewhat disjunctive text
that also includes a good deal of theoretical discussion. Stewart lls her text with
disclaimers about any ethnographer, including her ever ``getting it right, ever producing a denitive, true account. Such methodological ruminations and her deconstruction of others texts actually make Stewart a much more explicit author than
Lather and Smithies are. Nevertheless, both of these postmodern ethnographies seem
to be good examples of Tylers (1986) ideal of a more authorless, evocative text
produced in conjunction with research subjects and readers.
Having rejected ethnography as a scientic, objective enterprise, thoroughly postmodern ethnographer s have trouble representing their epistemology as rational, technical, systematic, or abductive. Having renounced modernist notions of the self,
author, and realist narrative forms, they cannot easily represent their epistemology
as introspective , intuitive, and experiential. Stripped of any trustworthy way of knowing, the more fundamentalist postmodern view (Lather & Smithies, 1997; Tyler,
1986) seems to fall back on the abstract ideal of being more like artists than empirical
social scientists. This formulation creates considerable rhetorical distance from the
modernist dream of scientists telling true stories about the cultural other. It also
whittles the author function down to the ambiguous notion of evocative poetic texts.
Yet as hard as I try, I cannot imagine entirely authorless texts, or entirely evocative, poetic ethnographies. And it would seem that many practicing feminist poststructuralist and postcolonial ethnographer s cannot either (Behar, 1996; Ellis, 1995;
Pillow, n.d.; St. Pierre & Pillow, 2000; Villenas, 1996). Many of these new ethnographers are actually producing very eclectic texts with many modernist elements. Some
authors situate themselves as characters in the text that have personal and cultural
histories. Others explicitly deploy theoretical constructs and make explicit knowledge
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Nevertheless, the tone and voice of LCC is still very analytic and striving to make
transcendent statements. The text is tightly structured around a unied theoretical
perspective and its strong knowledge claims. One small South Texas is writ large as
American culture in general. Key constructs like ``impression management, ``making
out games, and ``bonded sexuality are used to authoritativel y map and explain the
cultural reality of South Texas and America. The text is realist in the sense in which
Lukacs (1962) characterizes 19th-century bourgeois novels. He argues that socialist
intellectuals and 19th-century bourgeois artists and novelists practice critical or
``dialectical realism when they uncover the hidden, dehumanizing reication of
everyday life under capitalism. At the time, I did not describe my narrative practice
as dialectical realism, but in retrospect, my primary goals were similar to those of these
novelists. Like them, I wanted ``to reveal the driving forces of history which are
invisible to actual consciousness. The ordinary language games observed in classrooms, dating, and sports were conceptualized as a kind of linguistic factory that
staged highly ritualized speech events. During these events, humans treated each
other as objects, thus reproduced the logic of capitalism. I, the transcendent ethnographic observer of capitalist ideology, was providing a ``deeper reading of what
most Americans take for granted as fun and fullling.
LCC also begins to use personal memories and an ordinary language voice in a
cautious but explicit manner. I also make my ideological standpoint or interpretive
lens very clear, and I reconstruct Marxist class theory in a reexive manner. There
is, however, relatively little concern over the question of misrepresentation or little
inclination to do a sociology of knowledge critique of my interpretation. In retrospect,
LCC is clearly responding to the initial postmodern critiques of ethnography
(Cli ord, 1988; Marcus & Fischer, 1986). On the other hand, I am still claiming
that LCC is a quasi-objective account based on the epistemological assumptions of
scholars like Bourdieu and Gadamer. Although I remain proud of this two-volume,
16-year study of the Chicano Civil rights movement (Foley, 1990; Foley et al., 1989), I
felt it did not break su ciently with the epistemological and narrative practices of
scientic realism (Marcus & Cushman, 1982). The study made a ``grand theoretical
statement, but it did not expand the genre of ethnographi c storytelling as much as I
had hoped.
My most recent ethnography , The heartland chronicles (Foley, 1995), a study of
WhiteIndian relations in my hometown, remains grounded in an abductive epistemology, and it continues to map the reality of cultural others with metaconstructs .
Like a good cultural Marxist, I use Gramscis notion of hegemony and Foucaults
notion of a discursive regime as heuristic devices to map the cultural struggle between
Whites and Indians over assimilation/cultural survival. I portray my hometown as
awash in ``discursive skirmishes over Indians dying on train-tracks, brawling in bars,
sitting silent in schools, missing football practice, and keeping house poorly. Mesquaki
novelists, historians, journalists, and political cartoonists counter these local White
stories and the assimilationist texts of academics and journalists with their own antiassimilationist texts and oral stories. In addition to highlighting such cultural politics,
Chronicles also includes extensive material on everyday conventional politics. The
Mesquaki civil rights movement is chronicled as a series of barroom ghts, student
walkouts, and American Indian Movement (AIM)-led courthouse demonstrations .
These portrayal s of cultural and conventional politics are presented with no explicit
discussion of the aforementioned theoretical constructs.
critical ethnograph y
483
Consequently, most reviewers have focused on the texts reexive, narrative style.
And, to my great surprise, Chronicles is often labeled a ``postmodern text, despite its
modernist notions of epistemology and author, and its realist narrative style.
Moreover, it would seem that making the text highly accessible to ordinary readers
made my use of theoretical constructs and political critique inaccessible to academic
readers! No one points out that the text is analyzing the discursive production of the
hegemonic assimilationist discourse. I hope that the following discussion will convey
the idiosyncratic mix of experimental practices used in the Chronicles.
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critical ethnograph y
485
the possibility that I too may be misrepresenting Mesquaki culture. Perhaps my carefully researched, heartfelt account is still an ``e ect of its eld of production. More
importantly, it is probably not what Mesquakis would write about themselves. And if
situating my representations intertextually fails to convey their constructed nature,
then perhaps a direct ``community review process will. Forty of the key characters
were asked to read and critique a draft of the Chronicles, and the highlights of their
commentary are published in the epilogue. Some locals are quick to point out that I,
like others, have misrepresented Indians and Whites. Several reviewers claim that I
am hopelessly biased and romanticize various events and characters, that my story is
just a story, not an objective, scientic study.
Another way that Chronicles is intertextual or polyvocal is through an extensive,
explicit use of native theories to explain and portray Mesquaki reality. Typically,
ethnographer s rely heavily on the insights of their informants, but they do not always
highlight such collaborations. Rarely do they dethrone the rational, scientic talking
head that announces what various everyday events really mean. In sharp contrast,
Chronicles elevates some Mesquaki stories to the status of formal or ``o cial interpretations. For example, tribal historian Jonas CutCows explanation of the intratribal
debate over assimilation sounded very much like the anthropological notion of ``ethnogenesis (Roosens, 1989). He convinced me that outsiders have consistently misread
the dialogue between tribal ``progressives and ``traditionalists as destructive factionalism. The Mesquaki political system is then christened ``dysfunctional and in need of
democratic White ways. Jonas is portrayed as an ``organic intellectual critiquing
such theories and o ering an alternative, indigenous view.
In addition, the text highlights various encounters with other thoughtful
Mesquakis on culture, politics, and religion. The portrayal of these encounters seeks
to convey how much my ``expert interpretation relies on local knowledge. For example, the Chronicles includes a story about a BIA agent who sought to terminate the
tribal school but died in a mysterious plane crash shortly after leaving the settlement.
Most Mesquakis believe that God terminated the agent who was trying to terminate
their culture. This tale is told somewhat like the magical realist tales of Gabriel Garcia
Marquez. The plane crash was a strange, mysterious occurrence that dees interpretation. For all I know, the Mesquaki version of it is true.
486
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are no abstract cultural others present. There is no detailed, pedantic account of the
events sequence and symbols. Various stories about Indian and White ``border crossers who can function in both cultural worlds are also used to disrupt rigid either/or
essentialized racial categories. In the end, such portrayals of Mesquaki politics and
culture deconstruct both rabid racist and arid scientic otherings of Indians.
The other major deconstructive narrative device, parody, is used to disrupt the
notion that it is ``normal for outsiders, including me, to collect and represent traditional Mesquaki culture. Chronicles portrays a steady stream of scientists, literary
types, and journalists vainly searching for authentic Indian culture. It parodies several
di erent types of voyeuristic White searches: the anthropological search for authentic,
ancient religious ceremonies, the journalistic search for sensational stories about dogeating Indians, and the literary search for heightened spirituality among Indians. My
own guilty e ort to see a wake is analogized to other exoticizing or vilifying accounts
of the Indian cultural other. I hope the aforementioned stories disrupt the naturalized
relationship between Mesquaki ``informants and outsiders who write about tribal
life. They call into question whether such portrayal s actually serve the public interest.
critical ethnograph y
487
abductive epistemology, or what Paul Willis (1999) now calls an ``ethnographic imagination to know, map, and explain the lived reality of cultural others. But I am also
trying to tap into introspection, intuition, and emotion the way autoethnographer s
(Ellis & Bochner, 1996, 2001) and ethnic (Collins, 1990) and indigenous scholars
(Tuhiwami Smith, 1999) are. Such experimentation does not make me a novelist or
a poet, or a postmodern ethnographer . It does make me an ethnographer who is
trying to use common sense, autobiographica l experiences, ordinary language,
irony, satire, metaphor, and parody to understand everyday life. And for good measure, I have social theory and the at, colorless, denotative language of science in my
interpretive/narrative arsenal as well.
Ideally, this eclectic approach helps produce realist narratives that are much more
accessible and reexive that either scientic realist or surrealist postmodern narratives.
My reasons for trying to create such realist texts are practical and political. I believe
that most academics, including cultural Marxists, acquiesce to the huge cultural gap
between intellectuals and ordinary people. Like many ``native ethnographers on the
fringe of academe, I feel a great need to communicate with ordinary people. Although
I generally agree with the postmodern critique of scientic realism, some postmodernists abandon realism far too quickly. For better or worse, ordinary people understand, enjoy, and consume the deceptively simple realist narrative style. Radically
anti-realist ethnographi c texts may be interesting literary experiments, but they are no
more accessible and engaging than dry, jargon-lled scientic realist texts. Rather, we
should learn from earlier modernist textual experimentation (Stam, 1985; Brecht,
1964) how to create accessible, highly reexive realist cultural critiques.
Writing in a more reexive realist style will not magically democratize the academy or society, but such texts may help ordinary people develop a critical literacy
(Kellner, 1995) about scientic texts and knowledge claims. It might also curb the
hubris of academic knowledge production a little. If an ethnographer uses all the
varieties of reexivity in practice, she really will be forced to give up what Donna
Haraway (1988) calls the ``god-trick of science and utopian thought. No matter how
epistemologicall y reexive and systematic our eldwork is, we must still speak as mere
mortals from various historical, culture-boun d standpoints; we must still make limited,
historically situated knowledge claims. By claiming to be less rather than more, perhaps we can tell stories that ordinary people will actually nd more believable and
useful.
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