Writing, Writing, Writing...for social change

Ethnography is challenging, time consuming work. So why am I drawn to ethnography as a scientific method? What compels me (and hopefully you) to traipse around the field and write about what we find there?

• Should we write social science that matters?
• Does writing with a political perspective run counter to the credo of cultural relativity?
• Is ethnography an "ethical practice of social justice"?

Factors:

• our strength as ethnographers is our ability to witness, and to retell stories
• our mission is to allow a variety of stories to be told, especially those that traditionally do not have a voice
• obligation to let those voices reach people who can enact change (policy makers)
• however, we are socialized as scientists to maintain objectivity
• academic journals are often inaccessible
• our writing must also be accessible to those outside of our discipline

Vulnerable writing elicits vulnerable responses and sticks with you long after you encounter it

• Ruth Behar "The Vulnerable Observer"
• connects you to people and leads to social change
• how do we witness without avoiding action?
• She proposes an anthropology that is lived and written in a personal voice. 
• She does so in the hope that it will lead us toward greater depth of understanding and feeling, not only in contemporary anthropology, but in all acts of witnessing.
• how anthropologists situate themselves within their research and the personal experience of fieldwork, is an important one to have in anthropology. 
• We are not so distanced from that which we study, that our research won't affect us.
• How do we move from feeling to action?
• The power of emotion - fuel for action - any emotion will do
• Is the act of writing already an "engagement"? Should we do this deliberately then with purpose?

Advocacy versus cultural relativity?

"I am always a little ambivalent about advocacy. I al- ways want to advocate; but I also always think that they (the people I've studied) could speak better for themselves than I could for them. And, further, to make myself an advocate would provide the other side-government, officials, etc.-with an excuse for not talking to the people themselves.... I have to distinguish between the local community's need for my advocacy and my emotional and intellectual need/inclination to sympathize with them. I decided long ago that my advocacy-such as it is-had to lie in my ethnography: in presenting them and the complexity of their lives in a way that they would feel did them justice."   ANTHONY COHEN, I985

1. is advocacy a form of taking your informant's voices away?
2. is advocacy by definition a lack of objectivity?
3. does advocacy privilege one story over others?

Advocacy Films