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Overview
The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography presents a historical, theoretical, and practice-oriented road map for this shift from incidental collaboration to a more conscious and explicit collaborative strategy. Luke Eric Lassiter charts the history of collaborative ethnography from its earliest implementation to its contemporary emergence in fields such as feminism, humanistic anthropology, and critical ethnography. On this historical and theoretical base, Lassiter outlines concrete steps for achieving a more deliberate and overt collaborative practice throughout the processes of fieldwork and writing. As a participatory action situated in the ethical commitments between ethnographers and consultants and focused on the co-construction of texts, collaborative ethnography, argues Lassiter, is among the most powerful ways to press ethnographic fieldwork and writing into the service of an applied and public scholarship.
A comprehensive and highly accessible handbook for ethnographers of all stripes, The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography will become a fixture in the development of a critical practice of anthropology, invaluable to both undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty alike.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226467016 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 05/31/2024 |
| Series: | Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 197 |
| File size: | 367 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Chicago Guide to COLLABORATIVE ETHNOGRAPHY
By Luke Eric Lassiter THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Copyright © 2005
The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-46889-1
Chapter One From "Reading over the Shoulders of Natives" to "Reading alongside Natives," Literally: Toward a Collaborative and Reciprocal Ethnography
In the last several decades, the metaphor of dialogue has influenced the work of a growing number of ethnographers. Many have taken to heart critiques by such anthropologists as James Clifford, George E. Marcus, and Renato Rosaldo and accordingly have replaced "reading over the shoulders of natives" with "reading alongside natives." They have thus sought to develop ethnography along dialogic lines and have in their individual accounts shifted the dominant style of writing from authoritative monologue to involved dialogue between ethnographer and interlocutor. Few ethnographers, however, have sought to extend the metaphor of dialogue to its next logical step-the collaborative reading and interpretation, between the ethnographer and her or his interlocutors, of the very ethnographic text itself.
Geertz refers in "Deep Play" to culture "as an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulder of those to whom they properly belong." ... The image is striking: sharing and not sharing a text. It represents a sort of asymmetrical we-relationship with the anthropologist behind and above the native, hidden but at the top of the hierarchy of understanding. It reflects, I believe, the indexical drama of "The Raid" in which the parties to the ethnographic encounter are brought together in the narration as they are separated through style. There is never an I-you relationship, a dialogue, two people next to each other reading the same text and discussing it face-to-face, but only an I-they relationship. -Vincent Crapanzano, "Hermes' Dilemma: The Masking of Subversion in Ethnographic Description"
IN EARLY SEPTEMBER 1994, IN APACHE, OKLAHOMA, I sat with Kiowa elder and singer Ralph Kotay at his kitchen table, sipping coffee. Ralph reminded me of the role of Kiowa song in his life: "I always give thanks to the Almighty for giving me something that I can enjoy," he said. "Up to this day, I enjoy singing. I sing to help family and friends out.... It's always good. It's my life-my singing."
After several minutes Ralph abruptly changed his tack, speaking candidly about his work with me: "I'm always willing to give out information like this. But ... I don't want anything else said above this. Some people who write books, I've read their stories where they build things up that's not there. When people don't know [any better], anytime they hear these things, they believe what you say or write."
ON POWER AND THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION
Ralph Kotay raises an issue here that many ethnographers have encountered in various forms in their conversations with their ethnographic collaborators: that is, the gap between academically positioned and community-positioned narratives.
At its base, Kotay's concern is essentially about power and the politics of representation; about who has the right to represent whom and for what purposes, and about whose discourse will be privileged in the ethnographic text. These epistemological problems are not new, of course; motivated by the critique of anthropology's relationship to colonialism, anthropologists have addressed these kinds of issues for at least the past three decades (see, e.g., Asad 1973; Hymes 1972). Ethnographers, in turn, have witnessed in the emergence of interpretive anthropology and its postmodern development an increased consciousness of the politics that surround ethnography, from fieldwork to the written text (see, e.g., Clifford 1988; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Fox 1991; R. Rosaldo 1989).
Many, if not most, ethnographers now recognize how power and history shape the ethnographic process; hence, most more adequately acknowledge the role of the "informant" in the ethnographic exchange. In so doing, they have seemingly displaced the politically charged, asymmetrical metaphor of "reading over the shoulders of natives" with that of "reading alongside natives." While the former metaphor assumes a rhetorical distance between ethnographer and interlocutor(s) (Crapanzano 1986), the latter implies a more concerted move toward writing ethnography through the framework of dialogue (Marcus and Fischer 1986). Indeed, anthropologists have increasingly problematized dialogue (see, e.g., D. Tedlock 1983), constructed their ethnographies along dialogical lines (see, e.g., Titon 1988), and shifted the dominant style of writing from authoritative monologue to one that represents involved, intersubjective exchange between ethnographer and consultant(s) (Tedlock and Mannheim 1995). Presumably ethnographers now write with a deeper understanding of, among other issues, the relationship between power and the politics of representation (see, e.g., Marcus 1999).
Although the classic ethnographic norms that underscored the hierarchical divisions between the colonizer and the colonized have clearly begun to erode (R. Rosaldo 1989), Ralph Kotay's sentiment still echoes an uncomfortable politicized chasm created by the colonial encounter and sustained by the hierarchical division between the academy and the so-called (and now ever-shifting) research site-a division that, although admittedly blurred, still resounds in the texts that we produce and thus continues to be very real for consultants like Kotay (King 1997). While most ethnographers have now embraced a writing strategy that alludes to a move away from "reading over the shoulders of natives" toward that of "reading alongside natives," resituating a text's authority in dialogue does not necessarily resolve the issue that Kotay raises. As James Clifford (1986a, 17) writes, "however monological, dialogical, or polyphonic their form, [ethnographies] are hierarchical arrangements of discourses." How we choose our words, how we couch our interpretations, how we assemble our audiences all play prominently in the writing that is often written not only over but also (to paraphrase Kotay) above our consultants' shoulders.
In Native American Studies, for example, the politics of fieldwork and text have been discussed at length (see, e.g., Mihesuah 1998), and many ethnographers have sought to meaningfully resolve this disparity. Anthropologists and American Indian scholars alike continue to call for models that more assertively attend to community concerns, models that would finally put to rest the lingering reverberations of anthropology's colonial past. In their recent volume Indians and Anthropologists: Vine Deloria, Jr., and the Critique of Anthropology (1997), anthropologists Thomas Biolsi and Larry J. Zimmerman argue that Vine Deloria's critique of anthropology in Custer Died for Your Sins (1969) still rings true in part today: as in the 1960s, anthropology's placement in academia couches the discipline in terms of class and privilege. Anthropological practice, they write, continues to "reflect the agendas of the 'establishment' rather than those of Indian people" (Biolsi and Zimmerman 1997, 17). In the same volume, Deloria wonders if anthropologists will ever achieve full engagement with Native American communities, mainly because anthropology endures as, he writes, a "deeply colonial academic discipline" (V. Deloria 1997, 211).
Ralph Kotay's comment forcefully bears out Biolsi, Zimmerman, and Deloria's observations: the distance between his community and the academy as embodied in textual production is more than rhetorical; it is also profoundly political. Although a host of ethnographers have explored this very problem on several different theoretical levels, few have examined how in actual practice ethnographers persistently write not for their consultants but for their fellow elite in the academy-thus maintaining their place in a hierarchy of understanding, not textually in the sense implied by the ethnographic metaphor of "reading over the shoulders of natives" (Crapanzano 1986), but literally in the sense that Deloria directly references in the quote above (V. Deloria 1997).
Kotay's concern thus rests at the crux of larger ethical, methodological, and theoretical issues in anthropology (Peacock 1997). As anthropologists increasingly call for a more relevant and public anthropology (Basch et al. 1999), ethnographers are ideally situated to directly address the kinds of petitions made by Kotay: that is, to write texts that are both responsive and relevant to the public with whom they work. Indeed, if we actually believe that ethnography's exploration of the "native point of view" and the cultivation of informed cultural critiques enhance anthropology's mission "to broaden the framework of discussion" of culture and meaning (Peacock 1986, 113), then an old question remains pertinent to contemporary ethnographers: Can the disparity between the academy and the communities in which we work be narrowed further through ethnographic practice and writing? Given our understanding of the politics of ethnography from the field to the final text (Escobar 1993), newly emergent questions follow: If we take the dialogic metaphor of "reading alongside the natives" to its next logical step, beyond its representational role to the use of dialogue in the actual practice of writing, then what happens when we collaboratively read and interpret the ethnographic text alongside our consultants as it develops-not just sitting down to verify quotes, for example (which is merely bureaucratic); but using the developing text as the centerpiece of evolving, ongoing conversation? Might this more completely extend the dialogic metaphor through to its political implications? Might collaboratively written ethnographies help resolve the problems of class and privilege that Biolsi, Zimmerman, Deloria, and others continue to recognize and critique?
COLLABORATIVE AND RECIPROCAL ETHNOGRAPHY: EXAMPLES
With conversations like the one with Ralph Kotay in mind, I set out first to address these kinds of questions in the process of writing my PhD dissertation, and then while preparing the book born of the dissertation, The Power of Kiowa Song (Lassiter 1998a). Using a collaborative methodology whereby my consultants and I read and discussed the text as I wrote and rewrote it, I explored a number of tensions between the academy and the so-called ethnographic site-among them, the tension between how the community defines spiritual encounter and how academics often write about that encounter.
By way of example, many Kiowa people like Kotay talk about a felt entity encountered in song called, in Kiowa, daw, and in English power, or more precisely spirit. Spirit is the deepest level of encounter with song, and Kiowa people regularly talk about their experience with it. In the process of writing my ethnography about song, I soon learned that Kiowa people like Kotay have been very conscious of how academics theorize this talk about song within their own academically positioned narratives, effectively dismissing or explaining spirit away in their texts (see Lassiter and Ellis 1998 for a detailed illustration).
Presumably, anthropologists as a whole are increasingly conscious of these kinds of discrepancies. Yet as many critical theorists continue to point out, ethnographers still choose to explain such encounters through psychological or metaphorical models, dismissing the fact that these encounters really exist as they do in the communities they study (see Hufford 1982; E. Turner 1994; Lassiter 2002a, 167-80). We may suggest, for instance, that spirit doesn't exist as an empirical reality-that it exists because Kiowas believe it exists, that it is a product of culture. And because culture is very real, spirit is very real. Yet for people like Kotay, spirit is not a concept. It is a very real and tangible thing. An encounter with daw informs belief; not vice versa. We as academics take a leap of faith-or one of disbelief, in David Hufford's (1982) terms-when we argue otherwise. And when we argue from our position of disbelief, however constructed, we argue from a political position of power, privileging our own voice in our literature (see Lassiter 1999a for a fuller discussion).
Dialogues like the one I had with Ralph Kotay-both about song and about the representation of song in text-literally forced me to shift my focus from situating spirit within an academic sacred/secular dichotomy, based in distance and disbelief, to emphasizing the phenomenological questions about spirit, based in proximity and belief, that emerged in our collaborative conversations. Discussions about the ethnographic text itself powerfully reshaped and redefined the book's evolution and further shifted the authority and control of the text from the ethnographer to the dialogue between ethnographer and consultants (see esp. Lassiter 1998a, 3-14).
Folklorist and ethnographer Elaine Lawless calls this collaborative approach to writing "reciprocal ethnography." It is an "inherently feminist and humanistic" approach, she writes, one that puts into practice the "denial of hierarchical constructs that place the scholar at some apex of knowledge and understanding and her 'subjects' in some inferior, less knowledgeable position" (Lawless 1993, 5). Philosophically speaking, the method is simple: "The scholar presents her interpretations," Lawless writes; "the native responds to that interpretation; the scholar, then, has to adjust her lens and determine why the interpretations are so different and in what ways they are and are not compatible" (Lawless 1992, 310). As a method reciprocal ethnography is simple, though far from easy; still, the reciprocally or collaboratively constructed text can have great value for all involved in its production. I wholeheartedly agree with Lawless that while the process is "tedious at times, difficult and time-consuming, and often frustrating, it is clearly and most certainly worth the e=ort" (Lawless 1993, 285). Importantly, among the effort's foremost benefits is that of taking the metaphor of dialogue one step further to its literal implications, thus bringing the text itself into the ongoing dialogic exchange between ethnographer and consultants about culture and meaning (Lawless 1993, 5).
All of this is to say that while most ethnographers would agree that dialogue centers almost all ethnographic work (Geertz 1973, 1983) and that fully representing this emergent dialogue in the written account is now critical to writing good ethnography (Clifford 1983), many of them delay conversation about the ethnographic text itself until well after the text is finished. Many of us often give our ethnographies-whether written as student papers, dissertations, or monographs-back to our consultants after we've finished writing them, often hoping that our texts will be liked and appreciated, and our consultants sometimes respond with comments. Positive or negative, however, their interpretations of our interpretations have little bearing on the shape of the final ethnographic product, which is immutable at this stage. If they are considered at all, they often take a secondary role-included in an epilogue or a postscript in a book's second printing, for instance (see, e.g., Feld 1990).
Lawless offers a poignant example of how not involving her consultants in the interpretation of her interpretations significantly compromised her first ethnography, Handmaidens of the Lord (1988). In an important essay, "'I Was Afraid Someone Like You ... an Outsider ... Would Misunderstand': Negotiating Interpretive Differences between Ethnographers and Subjects" (1992), Lawless relays how, after giving her consultants copies of the book "after the fact," she received a series of painful letters from one of her main consultants, whom she calls Sister Anna. Sister Anna had taken a prominent place in the book's development, and-as is so often the case in ethnographic research and writing-she had also become a close friend of Lawless's. Sister Anna revealed in her letters that she was uncomfortable with how Lawless had represented her in the book as a "Super Woman"-a noble image of a female minister who sought to seize control of a male-dominated world while she rejected her role as a mother and a wife. "I am sorry I came across like I wanted to be a Superwoman or that I 'ruled' in my home and church," she wrote Lawless (emphasis in original) (1992, 309). Sister Anna's letters provoked Lawless to question her feminist-based interpretations, which through the power of ethnographic representation had achieved hegemony over any interpretations (and reinterpretations) that Sister Anna might offer about her own life as a woman and a minister in her own community.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Chicago Guide to COLLABORATIVE ETHNOGRAPHY by Luke Eric Lassiter Copyright © 2005 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
Preface and AcknowledgmentsPart One - History and Theory
1. From "Reading over the Shoulders of Natives" to "Reading alongside Natives," Literally: Toward a Collaborative and Reciprocal Ethnography
2. Defining a Collaborative Ethnography
3. On the Roots of Ethnographic Collaboration
4. The New (Critical) Ethnography: On Feminist and Postmodern Approaches to Collaboration
Part Two - Practice
5. Ethics and Moral Responsibility
6. Ethnographic Honesty
7. Accessible Writing
8. Collaborative Reading, Writing, and Co-interpretation
Notes
References
Index