When reading Sunstein’s article, I could not help but think of Mary Roach’s work Stiff. If you’ve read Stiff, you may ask what the study of dead bodies has to do with ethnographic research. I think the two relate because Roach examines the guilty feelings of some scientists as they try to justify the seemingly terrible things they do to the body after death in order to advance some field of study—  to see how the human body behaves in automobile crashes to make vehicles safer, for example, or to directly save another life through organ transplants. (Of course the latter only applies to not-quite-so dead bodies.)  As I read Stiff, I came to the same conclusion as some of the scientists– when someone knowingly donates their body to science, it’s okay to use that body in an ethical study to advance knowledge or save lives. In fact, in my opinion, it’s the duty of those scientists not to waste such an opportunity. While I myself am suspicious of ethnographers, a well-formed research question and an ethical study that will make gains in composition theory can alleviate some of the negative voyeuristic aspects.  Sometimes, we need to move on from the feelings of guilt to get the job done. And if scientists who work with the dead can come to terms with guilt, I think ethnographers can as well.

 However, I do have issues going out into the field without a well-formed research question and then spending an inordinate amount of time turning a phrase on the page to ‘engage the reader’ or ‘create story’,  which brings me to my next point.  I’m concerned when emphasis is placed on making ethnographic write-ups read like fiction. Sunstein mentions that Myerhoff is criticized because her work has, “….too much narrative and not enough of the ‘theoretical and conceptual trappings of the scientists,’ constructing a fiction rather than reporting qualitative social science” (191). In defending her, Sunstein calls her work a “…dazzling display of academic performance…” (192). While I do agree that ethnographers must be able to write in such a way that compels a reader to continue, I’m concerned that in doing so, the researcher may shirk actual results in order to make the story more appealing. This is especially true if they try to conflate or create the idea informant from their study as a literary device. Hollywood does this when adapting true stories to the screen; I don’t think ethnographers should.

Both of these things, guilt and fiction, create another problem Brueggemann mentions in the article about the study of the deaf at Gallaudet University. They put the researcher (and the reader for that matter), not the subject, at the center of the study. The summary of the results should focus on the question being asked and the data discovered in the field.  I did enjoy this article, though, and found the questions Sunstein suggests researchers ask particularly helpful. I just thought too much emphasis was placed on ‘dazzle’.