That's a problem to get our teeth into. My own feeling is that we've got false alternatives here: it's not a matter of either imposing northern theory on 'them' or else taking their accounts as 'truth'. I tend to think of ethnography as dialogic (or even dialectical) - as in Gadamer's 'fusion of horizons'. I've never been able to articulate it very well, but as Rhiannon says, we as researchers are always part of the frame, trying to understand the people we are talking with, and hoping to make that understanding mnore and more sensitive and complete, but we never escape ourselves, nor should we. At best, the ethnographic encounter - like any really intense conversation - shakes us up and changes us (and in some cases, 'them' too). You *respond* to experiences, you don't accept them at face value. (though I'll confess that I've often found my biggest problem is indeed getting overenthusiastic about the people I study) I'm not sure whether or not I would call myself a poststructuralist. What I do know is that I have lived and developed my ideas during the era of poststructuralist thought and in dialogue with it. You could simply say I've learned from it, in the sense that you develop your ideas in a context, in discussions. Same goes for my conversations in Ghanaian households or chatrooms or whatever. I'm also quite comfortable to disagree with the people I research, or think they are wrong, or that they are doing something other than what they think they are doing. After all ethnography is not interviews. It cannot be ethnography until what people say and what they do, and the tensions between the two, are brought within the same frame (not to prove them liars or deluded, but to flesh out *practice* in toto). Moreover, I've always felt it was a mark of deeper respect for people to believe that everyone is intelligent and autonomous enough to be argued with, and to believe that they can be wrong! I hope they treat me that way too. Just one other thought along these lines - my last few projects have all involved working with local researchers. Their job is very difficult as they are both part of the 'community' and at the same distanced (often by class and education, but mainly by the stance required by the research). Ethnographyt is definitely a dialectic of closeness and distance, and while I am worried by my distance, they are actually plagued by their closeness. I've come out of this feeling that there is a lot to be said about the older anthropology of strangers coming to learn a culture (given plenty of safeguards around issues of power, etc). Anyway, I'm mainly trying to say that I agree with Rhiannon, except in seeing all this in terms of alternatives rather than a rather unstable dialogue. Don _______________________________________________ Don Slater Reader in Sociology, London School of Economics Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE Tel: +44 (020) 7849 4653 Fax: +44 (020) 7955 7405 http://homepages.gold.ac.uk/slater ______________________________________________ -----Original Message----- From: Rhiannon Bury [mailto:welshwitch75@rogers.com] Sent: 12 February 2004 15:11 To: air-l@aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-l] Re: first post (An Internet Without Space) I too enjoyed Don's thought-provoking post and wholeheartedly agree with the main point that we can't just come up with theories about "cyberspace" with no context of use (1990s "cyberbabble", heheh, I've have to remember that one). That said, I'm uncomfortable what seems to be the resurrection of the old theory/practice binary. Like Lori and Radhika, I do ethnographic work, but I'm also a poststructuralist. I certainly understand Don's concerns about imposing "northern strands" (I think those were his words) of theories in non-western contexts. But, what is the alternative? Taking participants' experiences and accounts as unadulterated "truth" that we have "discovered" through our research? Our own stories and that includes our theories, are always part of the frame. As Deborah Britzman say, ethnographic accounts are "overinvested in second hand memories." As I mentioned earlier in the thread, I use Foucault's conceptualization of the heterotopia. It was my data that led to me to work with this notion, not the other way around. Yet, the participants would not necessarily describe their "spaces" as heterotopic and might think it's just a bunch of academic whooey for all I know (but just be too polite to say so.) Rhiannon radhika_gajjala wrote:
ditto.
(I may even take this rant to my research methods class;-))
r
At 2:44 PM -0500 2/11/04, Kendall, Lori wrote:
Woo! I greatly enjoyed Don Slater's post on this issue and particularly the rant about ethnography. (No big surprise to anyone who knows me, I'm
sure!)
Lori ________________________________________ Lori Kendall Assistant Professor of Sociology Purchase College-SUNY lori.kendall@purchase.edu
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