Ethnography Unbound: From Theory Shock to Critical Praxis

11. Unsituating the Subject: “Locating” Composition and Ethnography in Mobile Worlds

Rather than tracing back the roots . . . to their source, I’ve tried to show how the roots themselves are in a state of constant flux and change. The roots don’t stay in one place. They change shape. They change colour. And they grow. There is no such thing as a pure point of origin. —Dick Hebdige, Cut’n’Mix: Culture, Identity, and Caribbean Music It becomes ever more urgent to develop a framework of thinking that makes the migrant central, not ancillary, to historical process. An authentically migrant perspective . . . might begin by regarding movement, not as an awkward interval between fixed points of departure and arrival, but as a mode of being in the world. —Paul Carter, Living in a New Country: History, Travelling, and Language ASKING “WHEN?” AND “WHERE?” PAST CONVERSATIONS ABOUT ethnographic research methodologies in composition studies have generally proceeded on a similar course with those in 201 11 Unsituating the Subject “Locating” Composition and Ethnography in Mobile Worlds CHRISTOPHER KELLER anthropology.1 Questions about the authority of the ethnographic writer, the “fictional qualities” of ethnographic texts, the problematic complicity of ethnographic research and imperialist or oppressive institutions and nations, and the problematic construction and representation of “others” into texts have all come to the fore in both composition studies and anthropology, especially since the 1980s. This is certainly not a coincidence. That is, I do not mean to suggest that composition studies and anthropology have been moving on two similar, yet completely discrete, disciplinary tracks. Certainly a large degree of interdisciplinary feeding has taken place between the two: compositionists have often looked toward anthropology for knowledge about “culture,” cultural formations, cultural studies in general, and ethnography, whereas several anthropologists have mined composition and literary studies for ways to examine the “rhetorical and discursive construction” of knowledge in anthropological and ethnographic texts.2 Cristina Kirklighter, Cloe Vincent, and Joseph Moxley, editors of Voices & Visions, for instance, ask important questions about the roles and status of ethnography for the field: What is unique about how compositionists conduct ethnography? Should positivism or postpositivism inform the authority of ethnography? To what extent should ethnographies be about the ethnographer, the research community , or the surrounding community? To what extent should an ethnographer act as a cultural worker or as an objective scientist? How can ethnographers “tell the truth” when doing so reflects negatively on the communities or when they cannot get respondents’ written permission to be published? (viii) These questions are important ones that compositionists must ask and seek answers to, yet these questions, perhaps, tend to look for large, generalized answers that can be applied to some imagined totality of composition studies and need, rather, to be phrased a bit differently: first, all of these questions need to be considered in light of the first one. That is, all of these inquiries need to be looked at closely in terms of how they are contextualized within composition studies. As is, the latter four seem to drift into the realm of larger, more universal questions about ethnographic practices. And second, rather than couch these questions in terms of “shoulds” and “cans,” composition studies might better be served by asking “when?” and “where?” In other words, rather than ask “should” positivism or postpositivism inform the authority of ethnography; “should” ethnographies be about the ethnographer, the research community, or the surrounding community; “should” an ethnographer act as a cultural worker or objective scientist; and “how can” ethnographers tell the truth when doing so reflects negatively on the communities they study, compositionists might ask instead “when” and “where” each of these ethnographic priorities is feasible, necessary, and needed. 202 Christopher Keller The previous questions as they are stated tend to posit composition studies (and the “fieldwork” within) as a homogenous entity, as a discipline that needs to decide (for good) on the right or wrong way of doing ethnography, and they do so without recognizing explicitly that certain contexts and research agendas call for certain forms of ethnography and ethnographic practices. George Marcus argues in “Anthropology on the Move” that ethnographic theories are too often derived outside of the contexts of ethnographic fieldwork: “My problem with much . . . ethnography is that its arguments and significance are not produced or given within the frame of ethnographic work itself but by the contextualizing discourses and narratives in which the ethnography comes to be embedded” (13). He continues by suggesting that those engaged in ethnographic research...