James D. Dyer

Dr. Kim De Vries

ENG 5870

Spring 2009

 

Re: Sunstein—She missed something here:

 

[…] it is useful to ask such key focusing questions as:

1. Where is the culture?

2. What is the researcher-writer’s position in relationship to this

culture?

3. Where is the history? Whose is it? Where does the researcher/writer

find it?

4. What theory drives the researcher-writer’s informants? What

theory drives the researcher-writer?

5. What are the researcher-writer’s sources of data?

6. What is the researcher-writer’s position in relationship to the

data and the text? (181)

 

I may be beating this to death, but I am going to talk about the researcher’s perspective again, and that of their informants, and the ways in which they may be similar, and the ways in which they are inevitably different. Not the researcher’s theoretical orientation, which is also important, nor the “history” of the people being observed, which is likewise important, but the life story and perspective of the researcher, not as an academic, but as a human being who just happens to be an academic in one of their roles.

 

No, I am not suggesting that every piece of academic work needs to start with the autobiography of the researcher, but the researcher cannot ignore their autobiography when engaging in ethnographic research. Sunstein does not completely ignore the issue, she uses a couple of passages from Myerhoff that show Myerhoff reflecting on how her own Jewish identity affects her understanding of her subjects, and in the latter part of the article she asks a couple of questions relating to the researchers background as well as to that of the subjects, but in this article I get no sense of who Sunstein herself is as a person. And, well that is not necessarily a requirement in academic writing in general, I think that it should be reflexive in anyone who calls themselves and ethnologist, or a composition scholar, and particularly in who tries to tell me how to do ethnography.

 

I do not suffer from ethnographers guilt, I try to be conscious of the needs and feelings of my informants, and I tell it like I see it, and damn the torpedoes. If someone does not like what I have to say, I will try to explain to them why I felt that I had to say what I did—my goal is not to hurt anyone’s feelings, nor is it to alienate friends and informants, however, the work is the important thing. If ethnography is indeed rhetorical, as Sunstein claims it is, and I believe it to be, whatever “truths” that it may show us about the nature of humanity, or of human interactions, are dependent upon the ethnographer telling the story of their subjects as “truthfully” as possible from their previously described point of reference.

 

So I find it curious that the people who write about ethnography from an informed point of view, and who wish to promote ethnography, and claim some expertise in the craft of ethnographic observation and explication of cultural groups (whether they be tribes, gangs, or classrooms) do not automatically and with forethought include their own cultural perspectives early on in their descriptions of what it is that they think is happening in the particular culture that they are observing. Overall, I like the questions Sunstein asks us to keep in mind when pursuing ethnography, and when writing about culture, but I was still disturbed by the fact that she used Myerhoff as a proxy for all of the personal details of the researcher that she actually included in her essay.

 

Thank you.