Ethnography Unbound: From Theory Shock to Critical Praxis

7. Open to Change: Ethos, Identification, and Critical Ethnography in Composition Studies

ONE OF THE TRUISMS of ethnographic research is that the research itself will change you. In the research encounter with some Other culture, your understanding of your own culture—and your own self—will transform. As Clifford Geertz has shown (Works and Lives), traditional ethnography is full of such descriptions of personal change, from Levi-Strauss’s growing disillusionment with colonial culture in Tristes Tropiques to Margaret Mead’s outright critique of American sexuality in Coming of Age in Samoa. More recently, ethnographic writing has become more explicitly autobiographical as a means of addressing real issues of representation and authority. For instance, Marjorie Shostak meditates on what it means for herself to be a woman in response to her dialogues with her Australian counterpart (Nisa; Return to Nisa); Vincent Crapanzano questions the transformative power of friendship and projective identification in Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan; and Ruth Behar explores the personal wounding that comes from ethnographic practice in The Vulnerable Observer. In composition studies itself, the personal location of the literacy ethnographer has also become a subject of much conversation—witness the roundtable article “The Politics of the Personal” in September 2001 College English, featuring the remarks of Deborah Brandt, Victor Villanueva, Anne Ruggles Gere, and Ellen Cushman, among others. Compositionist Ralph 115 7 Open to Change Ethos, Identification, and Critical Ethnography in Composition Studies ROBERT BROOKE and CHARLOTTE HOGG Cintron, in his recent Angels’ Town, even suggests that ethnographic knowledge is outright dependent on the character, the “ethos,” of the ethnographer. He writes, “the persuasiveness of the ethnographic knowledge claim is constituted through and through, both in the moments of fieldwork and the moments of the final text, by ethos” (4). In short, the “self” of the ethnographer —and the changeable nature of that self—has emerged as a major question in ethnographic practice. This article probes this question of the changeable ethnographer’s self. We are motivated to do so because we have each experienced such changes. We have not remained the composition researchers we were when we began studying elderly rural women in Paxton and successful rural schools in Henderson , Albion, or Cedar Bluffs. In the process of our research, we have come to call ourselves “regionalists.” This new way of understanding ourselves is intriguing in how we discuss our work with other compositionists at national conferences, write our ethnographic research, and enact local community projects in Nebraska. From our experience, thus, we are convinced that changes in public self, in “ethos,” are a direct consequence of our work. We suspect, with Cintron, that such changes are central to ethnography. For this collection on critical ethnography, we want to extend Cintron’s move toward an examination of “ethos” as it explicitly affects critical ethnography . What sort of changeable self is specifically implied when ethnographers see their work as critical? Of course, what is and is not “critical ethnography” as opposed to just plain “ethnography” is an open question these days. In the recent Critical Ethnography in Educational Research, for instance, series editor Michael Apple writes that there are “more than a few differences within the multiple orientations that might be labeled ‘critical’” (Carspecken x), and author Phil Carspecken begins with a request to “put away, as best you can, all your preconceptions of what ‘critical’ means. Wait to see what sense I give this term” (2). Given the shifting meanings of the term, every author who uses it probably means something a bit different by it. As we understand the term critical ethnography from our position as composition scholars, the term applies primarily to two related sets of educational issues. First, critical ethnography emerges from an extensive body of work in critical pedagogy in which the goal of teaching is to engage students (or other groups of learners) in the dialogic work of understanding their social location and developing cultural action appropriate to that location. This body of work for us harkens back to Paulo Freire and moves through Ira Shor and Henry Giroux in contemporary U.S. education. Second, critical ethnography emerges equally from researchers interested in the ethics of representation or the question of how research on a cultural group can represent that group fairly as well as reciprocating in the economics of research itself. Ellen Cushman and 116 Robert Brooke and Charlotte Hogg Michelle Fine seem to us clear representatives of this position. Drawing on these two bodies of work, we understand...