James D. Dyer

Dr. Kim DeVries

ENG 5870

Spring 2009

Writing from the Hyphen

And so I am asking myself now: Can I write it again another way?

Can I write from the hyphen? […]because of those views I am trying, for one thing, to respect the spaces between, and the silence within, those spaces while at the same time I try to re-write, re-represent, re-vision. My life as a participant-observer has been anything but that-has been anything but still. (Brueggemann, 34)

Brueggemann asks some important questions in the wake of her sojourn into ethnography. A couple years after doing her study and writing her dissertation she is still asking herself how her study affected those that she studied, and she is still asking herself how the experience changed herself, and her understanding of just what ethnography is. I think that these are healthy and important questions to ask, and to re-ask, again and again over the course of years. Because the truth is that an ethnographer can never know what they are doing while they are doing it.

It is necessary to get close to your subjects in order to do an ethnographic study, so one first assumes that a researcher will pick a particular group, culture, or society that the researcher either has an affinity for, or a connection with, or at least significant curiosity about.

Yet, the researcher will not know what the group they want to observe is actually about until the study is well under way. Brueggemann mentions that she was surprised by the way that composition was taught at the school, and surprised by the animosity she felt from teachers at the school. I would think that in any ethnographic research, that that is the case—you can’t possibly know what you are getting into until you are well into it. Even doing research of this nature in a classroom that you have taught in for years is going to show you things you never expected to see. That is both the value, and the danger of the ethnographic approach. It allows us an unprecedented window into the workings of human systems, but because it is participant-observer oriented, those observations can never be objective in any real sense. That is why feminist theorists, and post-modern, and critical theorists like the approach. They don’t think that objectivity is possible in any sort of research, so one should just come out from the beginning with one’s perspective, background, and the theoretical lens (or lenses) one intends to use before even starting to talk about the nature of the study one is conducting.

Also, she mentions the fact that her understanding of the process of ethnography has shifted over the years since she first engaged in it. I think that that is inevitable in any such cultural study.

The process being observed is necessarily changed by the fact of it’s being observed, yet we have no more holistic way to study human interaction, so we do the best we can. Statistics are as easy to manipulate as interview data, or data collected by participant observation. I can say this because I regularly employ statistics to make a point while being fully aware of the rhetorical nature of that sort of math. I not only have taken two courses in statistics for the social sciences, but I also TA’d in two more at this university, once for internship credit, and once for money.

The difference between statistics and ethnography has more to do with the public perception of those types of data than it does to do with their relevance or reliability. Western culture is particularly impressed by numerical evidence, somehow believing that it is more scientific, and hence more reliable than, qualitatively observed data. That belief is smoke and mirrors, but it part of a certain materialistic cultural framework that we have been enmeshed in since the beginning of the Enlightenment Era (in the late sixteen-hundreds, so this positivistic viewpoint is more or less ingrained in all of our cultural belief structures. Yet if you read Khun’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions,or philosophers like Nietzsche, and Rorty, and Foucault, or even Kenneth Burke, you will soon find yourself questioning this idea of mathematical superiority. Math is very good for stating certain types of knowledge, and very bad for other things. Personally I have always learned more important things from qualitative data than from numbers, but I use numbers to back up what I learned from talking and listening because it is rhetorically effective to do so.

I suppose that writing from the zipper between things (to paraphrase Brueggemann) just appeals to me in general, I do not believe that there is any one truth, only that by observing and comparing different ideas of truth we can begin to approach that platonic ideal in a sideways manner. And, that by encouraging doubt in our students, that they will become better observers, better thinkers, and better human beings. not that there is anything necessarily wrong with faith, just that blind faith is bad, and questioning everything is good as a matter of policy. There is no such thing as a “still life,” and the point of ethnography is to capture the movement.