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11 “ w H at g o E s o n H E r E ? ” The Uses of Ethnography in Composition Studies Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater “What is the postmodernist critique of ethnography?” was a question posed to me by a member of the search committee on a campus visit for a compositionist job I thought I desperately wanted. As a newly minted doctorate who had written a dissertation that was an ethnographic study of undergraduate reading and writing practices (that would become Academic Literacies), I knew I should be able to answer this question since one of the strengths of my interdisciplinary graduate program was my coursework in ethnography, a research approach to the study of cultures,1 including the subculture of schooling.2 In answering this question, I was hyperaware of how skeptical an English department 1. My thanks to Beth Campbell of Indiana University of Pennsylvania for her insights into the connections between ethnography in anthropology and its translations into composition studies. Her dissertation, “Being and Writing with others: On the Possibilities of an Ethnographic Composition Pedagogy,” will be of great value to our field. 2. Culture can be defined in many different ways. Definitions include the following , which can be found in Chiseri-Strater and Sunstein, Fieldworking: Reading and Writing Culture (3): Culture is local and manmade and hugely variable. It tends to be integrated. A culture, like an individual, is a more or less consistent pattern of thought and action (Benedict 46). A society’s culture consists of whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members. . . .[I]t does not consist of things, people, behavior, or emotions. It is rather an organization of things” (Goodenough 167). Cultures are, after all, collective, untidy assemblages, authenticated by belief and agreement (Myerhoff 10). Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance which he himself has created. I take culture to be those webs (Geertz 14). Culture is an invisible web of behaviors, patterns, rules, and rituals of a group of people who have contact with one another And share common languages. (Chiseri-Strater and Sunstein 3). 200 ExP LORI N G C OM P OSI T I ON ST U D I ES might be about hiring a faculty member who could be viewed as a social scientist in English studies clothing. So, discarding my newly acquired knowledge of the ongoing critiques of ethnography by anthropologists and feminists, I stumbled through a response about how ethnographic approaches provided composition researchers with a methodology for examining reading, writing, and language practices within specific contexts such as their own classrooms, a pedagogy for teaching students to observe, reflect, and write about cultures and subcultures, and theoretical grounding for engaging in activist fieldwork, all ideas that skirted the question asked of me. Reader, I did not get the job. And yet that question haunted me, as all failed interviews are apt to do, so I will begin here by addressing that query about postmodern critiques of ethnography, mainly leveled by anthropologists at their own field during the late 1980s and early 1990s but relevant to composition studies both then and now. I’ll argue that the epistemological debates going on in other disciplines at the time were largely ignored by compositionists because our novice field was challenged by a methodological merry-goround of competing research options (cognitive studies, case studies, teacher research, ethnographic fieldwork) that were largely undertheorized and were vying for dominance in our rising field. Further, because the discipline itself was in the process of developing, with one foot in the humanities and another foot in the social sciences, many compositionists had little contact with the ongoing conversations in anthropology , folklore, or feminist studies about the postmodern challenges to ethnographic methodology. Much like the lure of postcolonial theory3 in our field today, composition studies was both attracted by yet resistant to the need to adopt yet one more approach into our already-hybridized discipline. It seems useful, then, to go backward before coming forward 3. In their introduction to Crossing Borderlands: Composition and Postcolonial Studies, Andrea Lunsford and Lahoucine Ouzgane define the agenda of postcolonial studies as seeking to “expose the mechanisms of oppression through which ‘Others’— aboriginal, native, or simply preexisting cultures and groups—are displaced, eradicated, or transformed into obedient subjects” (1). They suggest that their collection wishes to make a connection between the field of postcolonial studies and composition by addressing several like themes: “resisting...

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