This
week I want to take up Hammersley’s discussion of some of the key critical
debates surround ethnographic research practices by focusing on the issue of
the observer or researcher. Hammerseley writes that one problem “concerns
whether the researcher must locate what is being studied in the context of the wider
society, or whether instead he or she should concentrate on studying in great
detail what people do in particular local contexts” (6). He continues: “First,
how are we to determine what is the appropriate wider context in which to
situate what we are studying? Second, how are we to gain the knowledge we need
about that context? Neither of these issues is straightforward. As regards the
first, we perhaps ought to ask whether context is discovered or constructed;
and, if it is constructed, whether it is constructed by the participants or by
the analyst. One approach to context is to argue that it is generated by the
people being studied, so that the analyst must discover and document context as
this is constituted in and through particular processes of social interaction.
In other words, it is suggested that participants in social activities
effectively ‘context’ those activities in the course of carrying them out, by
indicating to one another what is and is not relevant. This is an argument
developed by conversation analysts, but now also employed by many discourse
analysts and some ethnographers. From this point of view, any attempt by an
analyst to place actors and their activities in a different, ‘external’,
context can only be an imposition, a matter of analytic act, perhaps even an
act of symbolic violence” (6-7) Hammerseley ultimately discounts this model,
arguing that it fails to account for the wider social forces at play in
ethnographic situations. Though Canagarjah particularly counters this argument,
noting the need to “take a closer look at the day-to-day functioning of the
classroom and the lived culture of the students” in order “to interrogate the
range of behaviors students display in the face of domination-the awareness of
which should precede and inform any development of such pedagogies” (603), the
problem of how the researcher or observer’s own positionality shapes the both
the research and the documentation of that research must be addressed if
language and literacies scholars aim to adopt ethnographic methods in ethical
ways.
One
negotiation of the issue of the researcher/observer’s positionality comes from
activity theories, which see context as a way to abstract the outside—that is,
not as a location but as an act. Bruno Latour especially attends to this issue
with ethnographic data, objecting to the kind of theorists whose research
interests or frameworks dictate their research results vis-à-vis the mapping of
a priori theories onto their research subjects, then confirming the validity of
that mapping to the extent that the subjects disagree. For example, a
researcher wants to study a writing classroom at ISU to see what kind of power
relations exist in it. The researcher has an a priori Marxist lens, and
discovers that the students, who own the means of production in terms of their
compositions’ content, genre, and evaluation (they do peer grading) of their
texts in this particular classroom, have the most power because they’re operating
under a Marxist system; the students’ objections (“We’re not Marxist! We’re
just trying to get good grades by figuring out what the teacher wants”) would
reinforce for the researcher that his or her conclusions are correct, because
subjects are always-already constructed as such and can’t see outside their own
ideology. This researcher would not, then, take into consideration the course
policies, day-to-day interactions between students and teacher, interactions
between teacher and WPA, etc. In neglecting to do so, he or she might also be
missing information that would lead to a different kind of reading of the
situation – say, one in which the power struggle is actually between
traditional notions of composition classes/their outcomes and students/teachers/administrators,
etc. For Latour, these observer impositions are harmful because the research
site caught in a kind of a feedback loop, where the researcher has an idea of
what they’re going to see, they see it, and the subjects’ objections confirm that
they saw it.
Latour
confronts this issue directly in Reassembling
the Social; in terms of the possibility of an “objective” researcher, he
writes “A good text is never an unmediated portrait of what it describes – nor
for that matter is a portrait….There is nothing less natural than to go into
fieldwork and remain a fly on the wall, pass out questionnaires, draw maps, dig
up archives, record interviews, play the roles of a participant-observer,
compile statistics, and ‘Google’ ones’ way around the Internet” (136). So,
while it’s clear that he isn’t suggesting that researchers be unbiased,
ideology-free, “flies on the wall,” it’s not exactly clear how the mediated
subjectivity of the observer factors into the study.
Latour’s
failure to fully account for this mediation is further evident when he notes
that “ANT is simply the social theory that has made the decision to follow the
natives, no matter which metaphysical imbroglios they lead us into” (62) but
insists that “to treat a report of social science as a textual account is not a
weakening of its claims to reality, but an extension of the number of
precautions that have to be taken onboard and of the skills requested from the
enquirers” (127). The crux of my uncertainty about the perspective of the researcher
lies in between these statements. If I, as an activity-theory researcher, am
given the task to “follow the natives,” and I want to make clear that the
report I will produce from this tracing has some claim to reality, then how do
I take “onboard” the extended “number of precautions” that factor into my basic
choice in even deeming a subject in a given situation “native”? In other words, the observer’s subjectivity
leaves its mark not only on the “textual account” of the situation but also on
their fundamental observations of the situation – on whom or what they call
“actors.” As Humberto Maturana says in the introduction to his and Francisco
Vaerla’s “Autopoiesis and Cognition” essay, “Everything said is said by an
observer.”
This
oversight on Latour’s part constructs for the activity theory researcher a kind
of tension between disinterest and engagement. As Latour puts it, “We wish to
be more disinterested than was possible with the social engineering project of
traditional…But we also wish to be much more engaged than what was possible
with the scientistic dream of a disinterested gaze. And yet, something like
disinterestedness is offered by the deployment of the four sources of
uncertainty…while engagement comes from … the fifth uncertainty” (256). So,
Latour’s researcher is a “more objective” one than the contemporary
sociologist—not overly engaged, but not entirely disinterested (because such an
ideal isn’t humanly possible). Even while shifting the degree of objectivity,
however, Latour doesn’t quite fully recognize the fact that there is always
contingency—someplace else from which the observer can make his
observations—and recognizing these alternative possibilities that stem from a
researcher’s own perspective might make ANT even more useful in its
methodologies.
What
Latour and Hammerseley remind me in terms of ethnographic methods for language
and literacy research, then, is the necessity of considering this
contingency—where else I could make the “cut” as to what I’m actually seeing
(or not seeing) in that situation, based on how my own subjectivities might
shape who/what I define as an actor, etc.
No comments:
Post a Comment