The Brueggemann piece fascinates me because she transforms into reality the nightmares I have had about embarking on anything resembling an ethnographic study. I’ve always imagined myself on the other side of that research, say as a subject like Anna, and what keeps coming to mind is the 1965 Moynihan report, especially the section on the perils of matriarchy. Senator Patrick Moynihan writes the report with the objective of pinpointing the problems African Americans will face in spite of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Though the report does speak to a wide variety of issues, the one that seems to get the most response is the portrayal, based on a study of Detroit families by two researchers, of the power relationships between husbands and wives in African American families. This is how Moynihan interprets the results of this study:

In essence, the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is to out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well.

There is, presumably, no special reason why a society in which males are dominant in family relationships is to be preferred to a matriarchal arrangement. However, it is clearly a disadvantage for a minority group to be operating on one principle, while the great majority of the population, and the one with the most advantages to begin with, is operating on another. This is the present situation of the Negro. Ours is a society which presumes male leadership in private and public affairs. The arrangements of society facilitate such leadership and reward it. A subculture, such as that of the Negro American, in which this is not the pattern, is placed at a distinct disadvantage.

While I am not saying that I agree with this interpretation, it pathologizes any alternative to what’s already been established in the dominant culture for male/female relationships.  I can understand how many at Gallaudet university would be protective of their culture from the researcher they see in the role of a “colonizer” or someone from the dominant society who wants to study and “bring home” knowledge about the natives (22). I am sure that they would wonder how that knowledge would be interpreted and used together with the fact that they will have little agency in determining how they are represented  to a society that is in some ways responsible for their marginalization.  How many of us would like to read a representation of ourselves in a subject position? What would we do with information that seems incorrect or unintelligible?  I would argue that Anna, the research subject that received “her chapter” from Brueggemann , did not like reading about herself represented as subject, and when confronted by information she did not understand or found unflattering could only respond with silence or an envelope marked “return to sender”.

I know the Moynihan report was over fifty years ago, but reading it as an African American, parts of this report still stings. To me, it illustrates the problems of ethnographic studies and interpretation. I know how uncomfortable the faculty and students at Gallaudet would have felt when faced by Brueggemann, in the role as the privileged researcher or as she puts it, in her role as colonizer.   In that regard, her article becomes an object lesson for new ethnographers. Her willingness to share her mistakes and offer a set of questions researchers could ask before embarking on any study will perhaps allow future researchers to avoid the nightmare.