POSTMODERN ETHNOGRAPHY?

POSTMODERN ETHNOGRAPHY?

In conclusion, it is necessary to take note of the serious debates (Clifford, 1986; Marcus and Fischer, 1986) which have developed in recent years about the epistemological and moral/political issues of empirical audience research. Hartley (1987) and Ang (1989) have addressed the difficulties arising generally from the constructivist nature of any research project, and have warned against the dangers of failing to see that our data are, inevitably, products of the research process. Further, Feuer (1986) has pointed to a tendency in empirical audience research to displace questions of meaning from the text (or

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the critic) onto the audience, only succeeding in producing a new text to be interpreted—that of the audience response (for a critique of Feuer, see Morley, 1989).

In short, what are the politics of audience ethnography? Ang (1989) rightly insists that doing research is itself a discursive practice which can only ever hope to produce historically and culturally specific knowledges through equally specific discursive encounters between researcher and informants. Research is thus, from her and our point of view, always a matter of interpreting, indeed constructing, reality from a particular position, rather than a positivist enterprise seeking a “correct” scientific perspective which will finally allow us to achieve the Utopian dream of a world completely known in the form of indisputable facts.

It is around these issues that recent debates concerning postmodern (or poststructuralist) anthropology and ethnography have centered, especially in the USA. The central issue has been the relationship between the observer and the observed and the basis of the ethnographer’s authority to convey the cultural experiences of others. Fiske (1990:90) refers to “the imperialist ethnographer who descended as a white man [sic] into the jungle and bore away back to the white man’s world, ‘meanings’ of native life that were unavailable to those who lived it.” Among other commentators, Marcus and Fischer (1986) have talked of a crisis of representation, and Said (1978) has cogently argued for a more reflexive analysis of the process of “Orientalization”—the process of imaginative geography which produces a fictionalized Other as the exotic object of knowledge. In these debates, the object of criticism is a form of naive empiricism or ethnographic realism which would remain insensitive to issues of reflexivity, instead presuming both a transparency of representation and an immediacy of the problematic category of “experience” (see Althusser, 1965). For critics like Clifford (1986:22) there can be no “place of overview [mountain top] from which to map human ways of life, no Archimedean point from which to represent the world. Mountains are in constant motion…we ground things, now, as a moving earth.” This, then, requires also media researchers to specify who writes, about whom, and from what positions of knowledge and power.

In response, Geertz (1988) has referred to what he calls the “pervasive nervousness” and “moral hypochondria” engendered by poststructuralist and postmodern writing about ethnography. These

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“Jesuits of the Future” or “diehard apostles of the hermeneutics of suspicion” (Geertz, 1988:86) start from a quite proper suspicion of the Malinowskian ideal of “immersionist” ethnography and of the naive invocation of the ethnographer’s sincerity and authenticity— Being There as the founding authority of the ethnographic account. The point for Geertz, however, is that if the traditional anthropological attitude to these questions (“Don’t think about ethnography, just do it”) is the problem then, equally, to fall into a paralysing (if vertiginously thrilling) trance of epistemological navel-gazing (“Don’t do ethnography, just think about it”) is no kind of answer for anyone with a commitment to empirical work. Even Clifford (1986:7) himself has expressed the hope that this “political and epistemological self- consciousness need not lead to ethnographic self-absorption, or to the conclusion that it is impossible to know anything certain about other people.”

For Geertz, and for us, there is an important limit to what can be conceded to the poststructuralist argument. To recognize the subjective component of ethnography is no more than common sense; the burden of authorship is inescapable. In Geertz’ (1988:140) words, “to argue…that the writing of ethnography involves telling stories” could only ever have seemed contentious on the premise of “a confusion…of the imagined and the imaginary, the fictional with the false…making things out with making them up.” For us, the value of ethnographic methods lies precisely in their ability to help us to “make things out” in the context of their occurrence—in helping us to understand television viewing and other media consumption practices as they are embedded in the context of everyday life.