Aditi Aggarwal - Fictions of Feminist Ethnography

This book is a collection of essays, which serve as an intervention in the writing and methodology of anthropology. Visweswaran makes two key arguments in this book towards the creation/ definition of a feminist ethnography.

Firstly, she argues that attention must be paid to the distinct relations between fiction, autobiography and ethnography, as these reveal the ways in which identities are constituted by specific power relations and determined historically (Visweswaran 1994, 8). These different textual forms can constitute a feminist ethnography that demonstrates the “fictions of ethnography” in the constitution of knowledge, power and authority in anthropological texts. First person narratives in particular have been used by women in the field as an “implicit critique of positivist assumptions and as a strategy of communication and self-discovery” (Visweswaran 1994, 23). This provides an intervention on the side of women as researchers in the field, looking at their diverse writings, and how these contribute to a feminist research project. 

Secondly, she focuses on the power relationships between the researcher and their subjects, specifically with respect to those researchers who like her have “hyphenated” identities (Visweswaran 1994, 15). A feminist ethnography must pay attention to two things here. Firstly, it must not assume that subjects are willing to talk, or comply with the researcher. Specifically, in the case of women ethnography must look at why and when women talk, as well as consider their refusal, their acts of betrayal and feeling betrayed as part of the analysis (Visweswaran 1994, 30).

I find both these arguments to be extremely important when considering my own position as a native researcher trained in Western academia, researching communities of informal women vendors in India. Firstly, it raises the issue of my own power relationship with those being studied, specifically with respect to class and caste differentials in our positions. Secondly, working in an economy defined as “illegal” and marked by uncertainty, questions of betrayal and suspicion arise in relationships with the subjects of my research. The ways of conducting a feminist ethnography and specifically writing a feminist ethnography offer some critical options to me as a researcher. The idea of producing collaborative texts, or ethnographic texts that disturb the distinctions between fiction and non-fiction are both appealing to me. These I feel can be useful to bring out the unequal power relations in the production of the ethnography, as Visweswaran states in her essay on “Betrayal”. It might also allow for greater maneuvering when limiting the knowledge revealed to the audience, specifically a Western academic or native bureaucratic audience, to interrupt as she says a “Western project of subject retrieval” (Visweswaran 1994, 50). The short story at the end I believe provides a good text of autobiographical ethnography that can be analyzed further on whether it delivers as a feminist text disrupting Western notions of subject formation and knowledge production. I am particularly curious to see what such a strategy of writing might offer for translating research into the languages of the communities that we work with?

Discussion questions:

1.     How might the arguments of Visweswaran and Smith be used to produce an ethnography that is collaborative and accountable to its research subjects?

2.    Can a “critical feminist epistemology” provide ways to expand the cannon of anthropology and thereby engage in a project of reworking the foundations of the discipline as Visweswaran attempts in her first two essays?

Clarification question: 

           1. What is a critical realist narrative?