Ethnographic Contextualization of Freire's Discourse: Consciousness‐raising, Theory and Practice

This essay integrates the results of a formalist discourse analysis of Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed with field observations of Freire's consciousness‐raising programs in Latin America. The discourse analysis identifies some of the salient features of Freire's discursive construction of knowledge. Freire's “rehumanizing” discourse is shown to be both a means and an end in itself; for Freire, rehumanization is revolution. The field research documents the practice of Freire's rehumanizing discourse within consciousness‐raising programs in both revolutionary and prerevolutionary societies. The field observations partly confirm and partly disconfirm the results of the discourse analysis: users of Freire's discourse, it appears, sometimes “read into” Freire's text a revolutionary practice that is not really there. This suggests an important discrepancy between, on the one hand, the constraints built into a discourse and discoverable through textual analysis and, on the other hand, the reconstruction and use of that discourse within particular “interpretive communities.”