Writing Ethnography: Representation, Rhetoric, and Institutional Practices

In composition and rhetoric, ethnography has emerged during the last decade just as the anthropological tradition from which it came has undergone radical revision. Beginning with the work of Mina Shaughnessy and Stephen Wilson, a number of early ethnographic works on writing began to appear in the late seventies and early eighties. At the same time, anthropologists interested in Marxist and poststructuralist theories of text, writing, and representation began to question the security with which ethnographers have traditionally presented their work because studies of the way representation reproduces the structures of ideology and power by critics like Raymond Williams, Michel Foucault, and Edward Said made it impossible to write ethnography without considering the rhetoric and politics of the ethnographer's discourse. Faced with this critical awareness, researchers who study culture have had to recognize that their own discourse proceeds, like the orientalism Said described, according to a detailed logic governed not simply by empirical reality but by a battery of desires, repressions, investments, and projections (8). I take up the issue here because I am concerned by the facility with which ethnographic research on writing passes into articles, textbooks, and pedagogy. Along the way, its findings are displaced from their sources in the everyday activity of subjects and become part of a disciplinary discourse whose production of authorized knowledge resists the theoretical self-consciousness of the original research ethos. Put more directly, the reflexivity of postmodern ethnographic theory conflicts with the demands of a professional, institutional practice. The authority generated by textbooks and the daily demands of curriculum and pedagogy often resist the critique of knowledge and representation described by postmodern theory. As members of the research community, we need to understand the way our disciplinary discourse appropriates the experience of the research subject and represents it in our institutions. We need to consider our discourse as both a communally maintained rhetoric and as an institutional practice shaped by the material conditions in which researchers and teachers work. As the experience of penetrating an other world and making it known through written description, ethnography is a thoroughly textual practice. As Carl G. Herndl is an Assistant Professor of English at North Carolina State University. He is currently working on social rhetoric and critical theory.