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Journal of Asian American Studies 4.2 (2001) 179-182



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Book Review

Cultural Compass: Ethnographic Explorations of Asian America


Cultural Compass: Ethnographic Explorations of Asian America. Edited by Martin F. Manalansan IV. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000.

The very presence of this important new collection begs the question of why ethnographic work on Asian America is in fact so scarce. Emphasis on "the Asian American experience" in course titles suggests that "experience" is an important imaginative space for Asian American studies, but the ontological issue of how one might access it is rarely addressed. Manalansan's excellent introduction to the book is both an overview of current anthropological approaches to [End Page 179] ethnography as well as a prolegomena for its place in Asian American studies. Ethnography evokes the specter of colonialism, and this in turn activates the problematic relationship between Asian studies and Asian American studies, so in some ways it is surprising that Asian American studies scholars are still willing to dive into the fray. 1 As a committed scholar who believes that the basic principles of ethnography have much to offer Asian American studies, I am both sympathetic to the aims of this collection as well as a bit disappointed by its shortcomings. 2

The collection itself is somewhat uneven. Many of the essays are focused more on "the material"--i.e., the information gleaned from field research--than with questions of knowing, experience, and the construction of Asian American identity. Manalansan's introduction evokes a Geertzian approach to ethnography (it is subtitled "The Ethnography of Asian America: Notes toward a 'Thick' Description"), but that approach is little in evidence in the chapters. Most of the essays are closer in tone and spirit to traditional sociology than to the new anthropology--that is, it has a closer proximity to the social sciences than to the humanities, with an emphasis on broad patterns over particularities. Cultural Compass thus sometimes feels a bit like first-wave Asian American studies--its emphasis is more on getting at the stuff of Asian American culture than on reflexive questions of subject position and the location of knowledge and knowing. It covers a wide variety of sites and practices, from Khmer health care in the Bay Area, to Vietnamese and Filipino American community organizations in San Diego, to API AIDS organizations in San Francisco, to Filipino Americans in Daly City, to Korean American marriage patterns, to comparative considerations of Punjabi Mexicans and Hyderabadis in rural California, to transnational Hmong and Miao marriage arrangements.

Linda Trinh Võ's essay, "Performing Ethnography in Asian American Communities: Beyond the Insider-versus-Outsider Perspective" is one of the strongest in the volume and will probably speak to the widest cross-section of Asian Americanists. Võ productively addresses the challenges, rewards, and problems of being an Asian American who is researching an Asian American community; rather than focus narrowly on the particularities of her project, she addresses the complexities of how gender, ethnicity, nationality, age, etc., produce multiple identities for both researcher and the researched. She argues for a consideration of "how Asian Americans relate to one another" (26) and presents a model for Asian American field research that accounts for shifting positions, advocacy, investment, and deep differences.

There is little close interpretation here beyond snatches of overheard conversations between researchers and subjects; one gets the sense that many of [End Page 180] the essays are distilled, refracted versions of much longer works. Only one essay, Timothy Keeyen Choy's "Cultural Encompass: Looking for Direction in The Asian American Comic Book," offers a close reading, in this case of a single cultural artifact. Choy sets up an unaddressed slippage between textual analysis and ethnographic interpretation that I found troubling, given the essay's position at the end of the collection. What might it mean to "read" a text ethnographically? Choy asserts that his analysis is ethnographic, but the comic book remains an isolated text throughout his discussion: the reader is never entirely sure whether it is an idiosyncratic text or part of a broader phenomenon, and Choy...

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