Ned Weidner

Commentary #4

Bonnie Suntein’s representation of ethnographic research is my favorite so far because her illustration of ethnography is the closest to my own.  A lot of the other researchers have presented ethnography in a scientific way, as if it is somehow possible to be objective and that by doing ethnographic research we are somehow doing science.  I have a huge problem with this concept.  Purcell-Gates wrote that ethnographers “come to understand the world through participants perspectives,” (95) and that one of the seven characteristics to ethnography is that it “presents accurate reflection of participants’ perspectives an behaviors” (92). 

I have an issue with Purcell-Gates use of the phrase “accurate reflection.”  How do we know it is accurate?  The reader wasn’t there.  We have to just take the researchers word for it.  I think her description of ethnography is poor.  I would tend to agree more with Brueggeman and her idea that ethnography is like a snap shot of a moment in time from a particular angle, that of the ethnographers view, but she still views ethnography as being objective as being an accurate picture of a culture, at least an accurate picture of that culture from that ethnographer’s position.  Brueggeman’s analogy is closer to Sunstein’s position, but it is not quite there.

Sunstein recognizes that who the researcher is has a lot to do with what they see and what they write.  Her answer to this, and I think it is a good one, is to tell the reader at the beginning of the work who the researcher is.  What type of person are they?  What are their goals?  Where did they come from?  What is their role in the culture they are observer?  These are all important questions to answer and help frame the work for the reader.  It gives the reader a lens through which to read the work.  However that is not all of it for Sunstein.  She hints at something in this article, something that she maybe can’t even see herself, but that she wants to see.

Sunstein does not want to see ethnography as being scientific. She wants to see ethnography as a new breed of research, a new breed of writing.  Somewhere between storytelling and science, at least that’s what I take from this.  She wants to fit ethnographic writing somewhere between a narrative and a report, but not wholly both.  “As writing researchers engaged in ethnographic work, our guilt represents a dialogical responsibility to mediate between storytelling and information” (179).  She writes further, “ethnography is the relationship between what goes on in a culture and how it appears on the page, a relationship dependent as much upon a writer’s lenses and tools as it is on those of a researcher.  Ethnography must describe culture though the perspectives and words of those inside – the informants, as well as those outside – the researcher” (179). 

She does not come out and say that ethnography is not science, and few will.  Why?  I think because as long as ethnography is in the realm of science, it has this built in validity.  Personally, I don’t think it is, and I like ethnography.  I just don’t think it is science.  Nor do I think it is storytelling.  I think it is something in between, cultural studies maybe.  Often times people want to categorize things.  They want to label them.  We all do it.  We do it so that we can understand things because by naming something we give it identity and we can fit it into our world wherever it belongs.  But as Michael Jackson said, “it don’t matter if you’re black or white.”  The little pervert is right. Sometimes things are gray.  They fit somewhere in the middle, and this is where ethnography lies, in the middle. 

Sunstein recognizes this, but for her to say that ethnography is not science would be a huge leap and one she would probably be criticized and outcasted for.  She wants to. She gets close.  “As we write, the boundaries blur between fiction and nonfiction, between poetry and prose” (194).  It’s ok Bonnie.  If you don’t want to say it I will.  Ethnography is not science.