In her landmark article “Situated Knowledges” published
first in Feminist Studies in 1988,
Donna Haraway outlines the issue facing those feminist scientists that had
interrogated the great and powerful scientific pillar of patriarchy called
“OBJECTIVITY” and found it wanting.
She narrates the difficult work of “what next” that some feminist social
constructivists went through after this radical deconstruction work was
completed (as Haraway says “too easily”).
They questioned how to, or in fact why to, perform scientific
experiments then if any Objective Truth (with capitals) was simply a
“god-trick.” What’s the point—they
asked—if there is no foundational “Truth,” if all truths are relative?
Haraway’s masterful response (which I will only touch on
here) was that all knowledge is situated—inescapably situated, and that taking
pains to interrogate the situated-ness of ourselves and our knowledges helped
us out of that seemingly unending bind.
Apparently, however, this bind is still strikingly alive and
painful in ethnography studies.
The issues in current ethnography studies, as outlined by
both Martyn Hammersley in “Ethnography: problems and prospects” and by Steven
Z. Athanases and Shirley Brice Heath in “Ethnography in the Study of Teaching
and Learning of English” might be best read diffractively, with Haraway’s
article in mind. Both articles,
written in “the Age of the Postmodern selves” seem at times at peace, and at
times utterly uncomfortable with the idea of letting go of some objective/unbiased
“Truth” as the objective of scientific study.
For example, Athanases and Health admit that analysis is
shaped by the reviewer: “Different
slices of the data, viewed through different analytic lenses, might yield quite
varied portraits of cultural patterns” (276). And yet, a single page later, the authors are illustrating
that being better ethnographers (conducting larger studies with larger bodies
of data) allowed the reviewer to make selections from that data that were accurate representations, that “made
judgments of typicality and anomaly possible” (277). In doing so, they forget that in making a judgment one is
always inserting ones own subjectivities (e.g. one always has a conception of
what might be normal/typical vs. anomalous). And yet, they admit further that
“Ethnographic reporting is the construction of a reality, made possible by the
researcher’s essential instrument, the self,” which is “a perpetual frame”
(278).
The conflict is better seen however in Hammersley’s
work. This is best illustrated in
his conversation about “context” as either “discovered” or “constructed”
(6-7). After outlining various
(important questions) that one must ask to interrogate any traditional sense of
objective discovery of context, he paints a bleak relativist portrait of the
only other option that he sees besides these difficult to answer
questions:
“A rather different point of view is that the choice of
context by ethnographers is necessarily arbitrary, in the sense that a host of
different stories could be told about any situation, each one placing it in a
different temporal and spatial context.
From this perspective, ethnography is simply one means among others for
telling stories about the social world, stories that need not be seen as
competitive in epistemic terms. Of
course, given this orientation, there would be a puzzle as to why anyone would
go to the trouble of engaging in ethnographic fieldwork. Why not just write fiction in the
manner of novelists and short story writers?” (7-8).
(I’m going to set aside the somewhat nasty dismissal of
“fiction writing” as a less than worthwhile enterprise.) I do though want to
interrogate Hammersley in regards to this “dilemma” that he is setting up. In this section, he calls back to traditional
science—he asks what are we doing here if we are not finding out the Truths of
things—what are we doing here if knowledge is really partial, situated. What’s the point. This, to me, is a really uncomfortable
moment in Hammersley’s prose. He
ends the section following the quote above. It seems that he doesn’t in fact have an answer that is
satisfying.
Some at least implicit residue of Hammersley’s
traditionalist viewpoint can be also easily picked up on in his last major
section, “Ethnography as Political.”
In it he argues that “the ethnographer must neither be in the service of
some political establishment or profession nor an organic intellectual seeking
to further the interests of marginalized, exploited, or dominated groups. Both of these orientations greatly
increase the danger of systematic bias” (11). It is frankly hard not to laugh here. Ethnographers should try to not have
any political opinions or beliefs? It is a joke to believe that we can ever
escape the ideological state apparatuses, the systems in which we function and
simultaneously and often unknowingly replicate. I think deep down he knows this
(some of the great questions that he asks elsewhere in his article would point
to this), but he just can’t let go.
Hammersley notes at the end of his article that “the very
character of ethnography has come to be contested” (11). It is threatened. The ideological
underpinnings of what it means to “study” have been reveled.
What I would argue is that this is not a bad thing. That those in ethnography perhaps need
to just learn to be okay with partiality, with the idea that the apparatuses
conducting any particular experiment are always going to control the
results—always going to make the results. Those of us in the Humanities can do
much to let them know that it’s going to be alright.
That, as Haraway recently explained, “No longer able to
sustain the fictions of being either subjects or object, all the partners in
the potent conversations that constitute nature must find a new ground for
making meanings together” (“Otherworldly Conversations” 158).
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