Brenda Jo Brueggeman

“Still-Life Representations and Silences in the Participant Observer Role”

Brenda Jo elicits some very thought provoking questions.  She follows in the footsteps of Foucault questioning “what does it matter who is speaking.”  She questions the space that the participant-observer occupies.  In what realm does it exist? Are we as ethnographic researchers participants or observers? Or are we both?  And if we are both how do we occupy the space between, the hyphen or “zipper of the participant observer role” (20) as she calls it?  These are all difficult questions.  The space between the observer and the participant is a dark and confusing realm.  It is a place that is hard, if not impossible to define because to occupy that space you have to walk between three worlds.  You have to try and be objective – although I feel that task is an impossible one – and live in the world of the participant in order to truly tell their story, paint their picture, and at the same time you must try and be this objective scientific researcher, this person that is searching for the truth – once again something I think is impossible to find – and all the while you are you.  You are yourself a person constructed socially with biases, opinions, and thoughts – both original and unoriginal.  I think the perspective of the researcher matters.  I think that who the researcher is not only adds originality and perspective to ethnography but it make it real.  I think that if researchers try and fool themselves into thinking that they are objective that what they are writing is somehow fact it completely devalues the work they are doing.  This is part of the problem I have with people like Ray and Purcell-Gates.  I felt as if they thought objectivity was possible.  Maybe I misread, but that’s the feeling I took from it.  Instead of attempting to be objective I think the researchers position should be valued.  Does that taint it?  Does it make it inaccurate?  These are the questions Brueggeman struggled with and they are questions that every good research asks themselves, but I think that objectivity is dead. 

This all goes back to the discussion we had the first or second day of classes about the “Most Photographed Barn in America.”  As the title implies there were many different photos taken of the barn from many different angles, seasons and perspectives.  If one looks at all these pictures of the barn they can get a better sense of what the barn really is than if they just look at one picture. That is why I think that just looking at one ethnographers’ point of view is not enough.  It is only one picture.  To get a true sense of what a culture is we need many different perspectives, many different pictures.  Now is this possible? Probably not, but with this philosophy we can understand that when we read something from an ethnographer it is only their picture.  Now depending on how long and how in depth an ethnographic researcher went into their study they may be able to present a few different angles of the picture of a culture, but the problem is that all those pictures are taken from the same camera and developed in the same dark room (the mind and social context of the ethnographer).

I think it is a huge problem to present research as objective or as the truth.  This past week my partner and I participated in the student research competition here at school, and while our research was not ethnographic in nature it was still qualitative and thus applies on some level.  We studied campus diversity at this University from students’ perspectives and presented our findings.  Our findings were very interesting and in fact help lead in a new direction in defining diversity, no truth was found.  In other words, there was no answer, and while the judges understood the complexity of our work, there were some in the audience who questioned us afterwords because they wanted the answer.  They wanted to know the truth.  I think as humans that’s something we all strive for.   However, I am not sure the truth is out there.  I am not sure we can find it.

In another class, we are reading about the birth of basic writing and the birth of composition as a field.  As we are learning, the fathers and mothers of the field of composition were revolutionary; however, they made mistakes, as does anyone who develops a field or theory does.  One of the problems was that they saw and taught composition as value neutral.  They taught literature as information, as fact.  We have the foresight of twenty-twenty vision and should not make the same mistakes.  We should not teach, see or think that qualitative research like ethnography is value neutral or objective.  We have to balance that zipper, that hyphen and understand that sometimes we as researchers will be observer-participants and other times we will be participant-observers and both are ok.