Throughout Visweswaran’s book, the simplest but most important message that she is trying to convey is that information given and pictures painted by ethnographic work are never whole and complete. They are inherently partial because their methodologies are conducted on a fluid human experience by biased humans who sometimes have an agenda. Her book therefore becomes an explanation and critique about how and why this all occurs and the different products of ethnographies created.
Through her exploration of power, biases, situated knowledge, and all other dynamics of that set the researcher apart from the subjects of study, she critiques the different types of literature that has been produced by traditional ethnography. Ethnographies as a fiction, fictional creations that hold space as ethnographic works, memoirs, autobiographies are all necessary in building the canon of knowledge around groups of people situated in time.
She brings up the notion of field work and homework. Homework is what the ethnographer must devote time to discovering their own personal identities, power, biases, areas of knowledge and ignorance and how these will shape and color the research and interpretation of data they produce. Critical fieldwork acknowledges the intersectional issues shaping the identities and cultural of the subjects researched, understanding that these things are fluid in their time and presentation. It acknowledges that a story or interview from one or a few members of a group with an outsider does not capture the nuances of a full culture and way of life.
There is also the issue of the academy and its historic intrusions into the production of ethnographic work. While ethnographers function in many ways as gatekeepers of knowledge about people, the academy acts as a gatekeeper of who allowed to become an ethnographer and produce that work. The western academy has a history of promoting mostly white producers of knowledge which has huge implications for the type of work, truthfulness, and thoroughness or knowledge produced. The western academy is then able to wield this information toward furthering its own agenda in ways that we discussed last week in class around Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s work on Decolonizing Methodologies.
While the issue of knowledge production through the slippery qualitative narratives of ethnographies is always a concern, it is most pronounced in situations where the situation of researcher-as-outsider means that the researcher is attempting to cross multiple intersections simultaneously while attempting to convince an audience of any semblance of neutrality so that the knowledge may be counted as valid. Such is the case with what Visweswaran’s examples of ethnographies of South East Asia where race, culture (individual vs collectivist), East vs West, gender roles, class systems - every one of these areas is a potential for misunderstanding. Yet with the academy acting as the white, western, often male gatekeeper of researchers, academics who might more closely relate to their research subjects for a more nuanced report are rare.
How then, does an ethnographer approach their craft without being discounted before they even begin? Many ethnographic works I have read in my time at UIC have opened or closed with an author’s disclosure on their own identity, experience and situation at the time of research. When a book opens with the disclosure, I feel this is far more helpful than when it closes with one. With the disclosure up front, the reader can keep the work contextualized as they read through it versus if it’s at the end, a reader might be thrown off by the application of an author’s bias after-the-fact. It may be on the reader to research the time history around the production of the ethnography but it would be nice if that was also included alongside the author’s disclosure.
Discussion questions:
Does an author’s disclosure of identity and experience coupled with a historic contextualization of the work make any strides toward validating the work or does the validity lie in the content of the work itself?
Should memoirs be counted as ethnographic works or be counted in a genre all their own?
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