Ethnography Unbound: From Theory Shock to Critical Praxis

16. Beyond Theory Shock: Ethos, Knowledge, and Power in Critical Ethnography

THIS CHAPTER THEORIZES VARIOUS aspects of the discursive power struggle between ethnographic research and the postmodern critique of it—an analysis with broader implications not only for pedagogies of cultural change but also for the dialectical relation between theory and practice in general. I review critical ethnography’s strategic responses to the postmodern critique of traditional positivist ethnography, commencing with its countercritique of postmodern theory and concluding with an assessment of the implications for composition studies. I also map some of the new theoretical, rhetorical, and practical terrain critical ethnography occupies as it moves beyond postmodern criticism into a theoretically-informed critical praxis. Critical ethnography is not a univocal, but a polyphonic discourse; it is not a unitary and fixed discourse as it was in its positivist incarnation, but multiple and shifting, characterized by what Juan Guerra describes as a “nomadic consciousness.” It is deeply informed by the postmodern critique of its positivist predecessor; it is redefining if not reinventing itself, even as it moves beyond that critique into exciting, never before occupied, postpositivist terrains. 299 16 Beyond Theory Shock Ethos, Knowledge, and Power in Critical Ethnography STEPHEN GILBERT BROWN IN THE CROSSHAIRS OF THE THEORETICAL GAZE: THE POSTMODERN CRITIQUE OF ETHNOGRAPHY As a discursive relic of a colonial era, it was simply a matter of time before the arcane epistemology of traditional ethnography fell under the critical postmodern gaze. Postmodern theory found an object worthy of its attention when it turned its critical gaze to the largely unexamined goals, assumptions, and methods of traditional, positivist ethnography. Its critique was as incisive as it was comprehensive, as evidenced by a selective litany of its criticisms: the participant’s voice was regularly, if not systematically, subsumed by the ethnographer’s, was silenced throughout the research-to-publication process; the entire ethnographic project was univocal and hierarchical, foregrounding the interests of the researcher while ignoring the ambitions of the participant ; the ethnographic endeavor unwittingly reinforced negative stereotypes of the exotic Other, who was reduced to an object of study while serving the careerist goals of the ethnographer; field research thus often replicated the oppressive effects, if not the material conditions, of colonization, in which the Other found herself not only at the wrong end of a colonial gun but at the short end of an imperial pen; furthermore, the “material conditions of existence” were often omitted from the inquiry, or their inclusion in thick descriptions was unaccompanied by any concern for their transformation in an inquiry that privileged “scientific objectivity” over social progress and the acquisition of knowledge over the colonial effects of the knowledge-making process. Furthermore, the claims to objectivity of the positivist paradigm were called into question, as was its habitual practice of putting the ethnographic Self under erasure. Theory lamented and lambasted the purported “textual absence” of the ethnographer. As Brooke and Hogg observe in “Open to Change,” “arrival in the field was followed by willed removal or withdrawal to a more distant ‘scientific’ stance.” While purporting to be about the Other, positivist ethnography was in reality all about the ethnographic Self, which it nevertheless pretended to efface. Knowledge of the Other was but a means of asserting a narcissism of the ethnographic self, to produce writing that privileged the Self even in the act of representing the Other, that was self-serving in its careerist orientations and outcomes. Consequently , the Other was silenced even in the act of being represented, was put under erasure even while under study. Postmodern theory has demonstrated that claims of scientific objectivity in the knowledge-making industry were as mythical as they were unethical. How, they ask, can an ethnographic Self ever definitively represent the Other, as implied by claims of epistemological authority? As Bruce Horner succinctly asserts in “Critical Ethnography, Ethics, and Work,” the postmodern critique 300 Stephen Gilbert Brown of traditional ethnography, “highlights the partiality and historicity of knowledge and experience.” Postmodern theory invalidated not only the goals and methods, but one of the fundamental assumptions of ethnographic inquiry: that “knowledge” is a de facto, transcendent, a priori signified that can be discovered and possessed through observation. In contradistinction, postmodern critics theorize knowledge as something that is negotiated between knowledge -makers, that is not “found” but constructed, linguistically. Knowledge is language and language is social. Knowledge is not only the shadow of a sign, but also dwells in the shadows between signs, dwells in and between and beyond...