The Critical Ethnographic Perspective

 THREE BASIC KINDS OF ETHNOGRAPHIES 

Critical ethnography is a qualitative approach to research that explicitly sets out to critique hegemony, oppression, and asymmetrical power relations in order to foster social change.

• While all forms of critical ethnography work to interrogate the structures of power and lay bare inequities suffered by marginalized communities, some critical ethnographers work directly with community members, engaging in participatory research and ongoing dialogue with those being researched. 
• Recently, critical ethnography has taken a turn toward exploring indigenous ways of knowing and producing knowledge, which has led the field in new and exciting directions.

Critical ethnography has been referred to as: critical theory in action. 

• This means that researchers are actively engaged in critique throughout the research process. 
• Critique means to deconstruct taken-for-granted assumptions about what is considered true. (In other words, to deconstruct means to constantly ask "why?")
• In the 1960s, “critical ethnography” (Carspecken 1996) was often based on classic Marxism or neo-Marxist critical theory. As new race, gender, sexual identity, and post-colonial social movements emerged, the philosophical basis for critical ethnography expanded greatly.
• These expansions underscore the growing disenchantment with the positivist notion of an objective social science that produces value-free ethnographies. 
• Post-1960s critical ethnographers began advocating “cultural critiques” of modern society and its institutions. 
• Critical ethnographers not only rejected positivism, but they also worked the divide between the powerful and the powerless. 
• Most ethnographic cultural critiques studied ruling groups and ruling ideologies and/or the sentiments and struggles of various oppressed peoples. Most were deeply committed to research that promotes an egalitarian society. Most hoped to produce both universalistic theoretical knowledge and local practical knowledge.
• This academic revolt is “political” in the sense that it seeks to transform the knowledge production of the academy.

As is obvious from the three kinds of ethnographic analysis described above, 

Traditional ethnography is the most common form of ethnographic analysis in anthropology. The goal of traditional ethnography is to be as objective as possible and to front and amplify the voices of our informants and the culture we study.

Case Studies are most commonly carried out by sociologists, although there are anthropological case studies which look a lot like traditional ethnographies (but drier)

Critical Ethnographies are unlike traditional ethnographies in that they do not pretend to be objective. They are a call to action aimed at correcting the ills wrought by inequality. 

• concerned with how human actions and experiences are generated by the social worlds that we study,  and in turn how these social worlds are generated by them.
• the researcher is a participant observer within a sustained embodied context- FIELD RESEARCH (not like all qualitative research)
• methods are deeply grounded in critical theory and intersectional experience
• ethical responsibility to address problems of inequality and injustice.--based on principles of freedom and wellbeing. 
• CE looks at what COULD BE along with what is
• contributes to the knowledge of life-sustaining knowledge and restorative justice (and knowledge)

Michel Foucault on "critique"*

• critique is to deconstruct and reinvent those certainties that foreclose alternative possibilities for ordering and reordering authoritative regimes of truth
• ...to discern and unveil the relationship between the mechanisms of coercion and what constitutes knowledge
• ...to interrogate the politics of truth that pertain to those relationships of power/knowledge that determine in advance what will and will not count as truth
• ...is the recognition that the "will to be governed" is also "the will to not be governed like this--by these people---at this point.it is not a refusal to be governed or a claim to anarchy.
• ...occurs when a subject gives itself the right to question truth as truth operates through power and to question power as it operates through truth
• ...is to expose the relational processes of subjugation to reveal the possibilities for one transforming oneself (out of subjugation) to become a subject -with agency (rather than object).
• this serves to deconstruct truth/knowledge regimes

*Both Habermas and Fine see the ethnographer as an activist. This means that they take a fowrad stance or position in the service of social justice in their writing. Where social life is represented and analyzed for the political purpose of overcoming social oppression.

The Problem of "POSITIONALITY"

positionality describes the differences in power in dynamic social interactions. The critical ethnographer is acutely aware of their greater authority when positioned aside those they study. Like other ethnographers they much consider their relative position of power when doing ethnography, even as they advocate for their informants. This requires a reflexivity (a looking back on ourselves and our actions).

• recognizes that there is no such thing as true objectivity (ethnocentrism/politics of knowledge)

System of Knowledge

• faulty generalizations-differences and distinctions are ignored or discounted
• man or mankind means everyone
• circularity-when rationality is conceptualized from only one tradition and then used to prove irrational all others
• one religion proclaims that it alone holds all truths.
• peculiar theoretical constructs and faulty paradigms-ideal models or applications suggest universal applicability without explicitly stating that they do (metaphors)
• employing metaphors and fables as examples of universal truths
• falsification of the status of knowledge- confuse the subject matter as constituted by a particular history of their field with the entirety of the subject matter itself. 
• Great white mens writing ---as English Literature

because of the way knowledge is constructed and given power, as ethnographers we strive to:

• be more self-reflective and self-critical of our own value laden perspectives
• to be aware of where our theories come from and who may have been excluded (as well as included) in these discussions and formulations.
• to be precise in our theoretical and methodological choices

from: Dwight Conquergood

Conquergood (1982) describes dialogical performance in ethnographic fieldwork as the only "ethical" stance in anthropology. These reveal the positionality (one aspect) of the ethnographer. This is seen as the quintessential encounter with others. 

The Nexus of Theory and Method in Critical Ethnography

theory is necessary to try to understand the meaning of what we are witnessing in fieldwork, but we are careful NOT to let theory trump our methodology. Understanding theory as one possible interpretation, while leaving open the possibility that a new explanation or competing explanations may emerge.

• contemporary critical ethnographers are beginning to use multiple epistemologies. 
• They often value introspection, memory work, autobiography, and even dreams as important ways of knowing. 
• The new, more reflexive critical ethnographer explores the intense self-other interaction that usually marks fieldwork and mediates the production of ethnographic narratives. 

Critiques of CE:

---It is simply politics

---it is no less biased than any other interpretation

---it can not speak in plain language

---It is too self-referential (as is the general critique of post modern theory)

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10 Misconceptions about Ethnography

1. Ethnography is Unscientific
• Assumptions
• science must test hypotheses
• science must be based on experiments
• science must be predictive
• science must be quantitative
• ALL science is culture bound 
• Ethnography is multivariate  and focuses on complex processes rather than being "reductionist" -- artificially controlling for variables so that you can test one. 
• ethnography is empirical and rigorous
• Ethnography centers on discovery and interpretation rather than hypothesis testing-this creates a wide angle on research, where research questions can shift- work within the unknown rather than the known (on which hypothesis testing is based) This is more likely to give you broad, potentially unbiased information. Wide range to narrow focus.
• study phenomena their natural environment
• science should not be conflated with experiments-- field sciences meet organisms in their natural environments (scale, complexity, flexibility)
• experiments can not reproduce normal experience.
• GOAL: to generalize WITHIN cases rather than generalize ACROSS them
2. Ethnography is Less Valid Than Quantitative Research
• even quantitative studies require interpretation and are based on assumptions
• validity: how scientific experimentation reflects the natural world.
• quant. data gives us crisp, easy to grasp results. Quant. data requires more complex processes of understanding
3. Ethnography is Simply Anecdotal
• a rigorous appraisal of massive amounts of data spanning participant observation, interviews, artifact collection, historical research, and content analysis.
• try to draw attention to cultural practices (local theories) by offering the reader concrete examples of the issues under discussion.
• these observations are situated within the larger more holistic context of cultural patterns
• attention to nuance and detail rather than generalizations
• focus on validity from months of intensive research
4. Ethnography is Undermined By Subjectivity
• all science contains elements of subjectivity (bias)
• the dynamic flow of social interactions and engagement between people is one of the foundations of the ethnographic encounter
5. Ethnography is Merely Intuitive
• analytical protocols are derived from intense participatory exercises- rigor is embodied in this approach
6. Ethnography is Writing About Your Personal Experience
• auto-ethnography, even when used is not the same as auto-biography (small percentage of research)
7. Ethnographers contaminate Fieldsites By Their Presence
• maintaining a lengthly presence works against this "observers bias" which is inevitable but lessons as the ethnographer becomes a fixture (if, successful)
8. Ethnography is the Same as Grounded Theory
• grounded theory, unlike ethnography is focused of discovering theory through data collection and ethnography is not (although that may happen)
9. Ethnography is the Same As Ethnomethodology
• using experimentation and ethnography does not consciously alter normal interactions
• not what ethnographers do
10. Ethnography Will Become Obsolete  
• becoming more and more popular and extending to almost all disciplines outside of anthropology

NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF ILLUSTRATIVE STORIES. THEY FUNCTION IN THE SAME WAY AS GOOD ART. THEY PRESENT AN EXAMPLE WHICH ALLOWS THOSE ENGAGING WITH IT TO HAVE A DEEP AND AUTHENTIC STRUGGLE WITH MEANING.