Ethnography Unbound: From Theory Shock to Critical Praxis

2. Critical Ethnography, Ethics, and Work:: Rearticulating Labor by BRUCE HORNER

IN THIS CHAPTER, I argue that a cultural materialist perspective on the work of critical ethnography in composition studies can provide a useful framework that accounts for and can help to resolve some of the significant ethical dilemmas to which recent critiques of critical ethnography in composition have pointed (Cintron, Cushman, Kirsch, Kirsch and Ritchie, Lu and Horner, Mortensen and Kirsch). My argument is aligned with, and intended to further, the materialist emphasis of those critiques. Responding to the limitations of traditional ethnographic practices, those critiques resituate the work of ethnography in the material social circumstances of its enactment to take into account the power relations among those involved in such work and the material consequences for those living at the research “site.” But this has led to calls for a seemingly endless series of ethical strictures on the direction, conduct, outcome, and writing of critical ethnographies that, in their overwhelming number and sometimes conflicting recommendations , can appear to place an impossible set of responsibilities on the shoulders of the critical ethnographer. This results, I argue, not from the materialist emphasis of these critiques but by their failure to be materialist enough in their conception of the work of ethnography. By challenging how such critiques define the work, workers, and the production of value through such work, and by locating that work more insistently in the 13 2 Critical Ethnography, Ethics, and Work Rearticulating Labor BRUCE HORNER material realm, a cultural materialist perspective, although not eliminating the ethical demands on critical ethnography, can redefine by redistributing more broadly the meanings and means of addressing such demands as indeed demands, not dilemmas. I begin by describing recent critiques of ethnography in composition studies, highlighting the model of academic work to which such critiques respond but that remain in the recommendations emerging from these critiques . I go on to describe how a cultural materialist view of academic work redefines the dilemmas addressed in such critiques from being understood as strictly ethical dilemmas to being understood as challenges arising out of material social conditions and therefore to be addressed in terms of such conditions . To demonstrate the aptness of such an understanding for critical ethnography in composition, I revisit some of the critiques of ethnographic work to consider alternative strategies for responding to the dilemmas these critiques identify. Recent critiques of ethnography have complicated not simply researchers’ understanding of ethnography but also their research practice as well. Researchers now must ask themselves a host of new questions as they design, conduct, and report on their research. These questions respond to feminist, postcolonial, and poststructuralist perspectives on experience and knowledge that highlight the partiality and historicity of knowledge and experience— importantly, not only the “informant’s” but also the researcher’s—and consequently call for reimagining research projects as “praxis,” responsive to the local research site and those residing there in its origination, implementation, and representation (Kirsch and Ritchie 25 and passim; Lu and Horner 261–63). Knowledge and experience are approached as “partial” in all senses: neither complete, fixed, disinterested, universal, nor neutral but instead situated , local, interested, material, and historical. To ensure a socially just response to the partiality of knowledge and experience in the practice of ethnography, greater attention is paid to asymmetrical power relations between researcher and informant, researcher and researcher, researcher and community, institutional site and researcher, and funding agency and researcher as these affect the definition, conduct, outcomes , and reporting of the ethnographic project. Put crudely, given inevitably asymmetrical relations of power between these parties, and given the partiality of knowledge and experience, researchers are now expected to ask themselves what would constitute ethically responsible ways of defining, initiating, carrying out, and reporting on their research. Those asking such questions have produced myriad recommendations, but I will focus on the three that have garnered the most attention and that are most germane to questions of materiality: an emphasis on collaboration, on multivocality, and on self-reflexivity . Although each of these challenge the traditional model of academic 14 Bruce Horner work, my argument will be that they are not materialist enough in the framework by which they understand that model, and so the recommendations they present remain insufficient. ��� Once upon a time, the Lone Ethnographer rode off into the sunset in search of “his native.” After undergoing a series of trials, he encountered the object of his quest in a distant land. There he underwent his rite...