Cultural Studies - Aditi

In the readings for this week, Hall and Abhu-Lughod offer ways of rethinking the practice of ethnography and writing about cultures. Abhu-Lughod offers three ways to engage with forms of writing about cultures that do not generalize the inferences drawn from studying cultures. Specifically, she argues that ethnography must focus on the particular, remove the distance between the researcher and the researched and be aware of the power in placing the researcher outside the subjects being researched (Abhu-Lughod 1991, 474). It also tends to erase all complexity and conflicts from accounts of a culture by producing it as a homogenous unit. As a counter she proposes "ethnographies of the particular" that look at the practices and social contours of a culture at a given time in a given place. 

Hall's notion of cultural identity as a suture, a positioning, and a process are useful to push Abhu-Lughod's work forward. Using the idea that identity is constantly a process of locating oneself in narratives of the past, and can never be a completed, essential definition of a particular individual or a culture, helps to think about how to produce an ethnography that is not homogenizing. I find this to be useful as a means to negotiate issues of power between the researcher and the researched. In discussions so far, we have struggled with understanding how a researcher might ever challenge the power structures of a Western frame of research methodology and epistemology. One way might be to use "identification" and studying the sutures created within it. To unravel the constantly shifting relationships between the researcher and their subject, as well as the continuous pulling away and putting back together of their identities in relation to each other and their wider society, can help to make the dynamics of power as well as agency more present in the work. 

I personally feel that in talking about women in precarious economies, that are in constant motion physically and virtually, it is useful to study identity not as a something static, or as a finished project but as a continuously unraveling and raveling set of relations. Writing this is a challenge but could be attempted through a mixture of fictional and academic forms as experimented in Visweswarans' work. Another possibility might be taking Clifford's tracing of the Kanak peoples constant migration and their ever changing sense of home and belonging. 

Question: 

1. Does Clifford's idea of "articulation" and "rooted cosmopolitans" offer useful ways to think about identity as always in the making and not a static or essential definition? 

2. How might an ethnography of the particular be at cross purposes with the idea of cultural identity as a process of creating an imagined coherence to reclaim stories from the past?