Introduction to Critical Ethnography: Theory and Methods (Madison)

Literature Presentation (Therese E. Dugan, Winter 2008)

Introduction to Critical Ethnography

Madison. D. (2005). Introduction to Critical Ethnography: Theory and Methods. In Critical ethnography: Method, ethics & performance (pp. 1-16).

Madison’s Introduction to Critical Ethnography: Theory and Methods gives an interesting overview about why it is important to do critical ethnography in today’s world. She beings by telling the story of watching a documentary about female genital mutilation in Ghana, in which the filmmaker tells the harrowing account of a Ghanaian woman whose own father wants her to undergo this treatment. Furthermore, the documentarian infers that Ghanaian women, along with many others worldwide, are without support or help from their country against these physical injustices. But now that the woman is safe in the United States, she is free from her pain.

The audience for this film is mainly Western and probably has little or no knowledge of Ghanaian people, their customs, traditions, or culture; they probably saw this sensational film as a triumph in spreading the word about the horrible problems facing women in Ghana. However, when Madison views the film she sees something completely different. She is enraged that the filmmaker leaves out the numerous people in Ghana working tirelessly to help women’s human rights violations in Ghana whom she has worked with first-hand. She is also upset that the filmmaker does little to position her work, tell about herself and her own experience, or explain how her data were collected. While the author feels the filmmaker did not intentionally leave these details out, she uses this example to point out the main goal of critical ethnography is, at present, the need for researchers to take a position on their ethnography regardless of the presentation medium and support their work through their own critical analyses of themselves and their relationships with their subjects.

I believe this article would be very beneficial to students writing and reading about social injustices and working on qualitative ethnography projects. As a documentary filmmaker myself, I know how powerful this medium can be. While many people go into the field with a worthy cause, researchers can easily lose sight of their subject’s story, or the politics, culture, and context behind the story. Although this filmmaker told a heart-wrenching story, she left out some critical information and made the people of Ghana look uncaring toward women’s biological rights even though many people work tirelessly to try and help these women in their own country. By using her film to glorify the United States as the only safe haven for this woman instead of explaining why women must submit to genital mutilation, the filmmaker sacrificed objectivity and completeness of perspective for a good journalistic story. Therefore, researchers must be extremely careful about exploiting their subjects for the sake of making a certain point.

Furthermore, Madison sees critical ethnographers as producing powerful “knowledge which guides and equips us to identify, name, question, and act against the unjust; consequently we unsettle another layer of complicity” (p. 6). In other words, we as ethnographers have power with our words and/or pictures from our work, and we should use that power in a positive, ethical manner. While I primarily agree with her, I am not sure this can be done in every instance, especially in instances of open inquiry because keeping an open mind is challenging when you are trying to view a situation from a specific perspective.

I) Summary of Main Points:

• Convention ethnography for a political purpose.
• Critical Ethnography is the new ethnography and begins with an ethical responsibility to your subject and viewer to address unfairness or injustice within a “lived domain” (p.5).
• Move from “what is” to “what could be” (p. 5).
• One should take a certain position when doing their work and make sure this position is know to subjects and viewers.
• Think about these questions:
1. How do we reflect upon and evaluate our own purpose, intentions, and frames of analysis as researchers?
2. How do we predict consequences or evaluate our own potential to do harm?
3. How do we create and maintain a dialogue of collaboration in our research projects between ourselves and Others?
4. How is the specificity of the local story relevant to the broader meanings and operations of the human condition?
5. How—in what location or through what intervention—will our work make the greatest contribution to equity, freedom, and justice?
   

• The people you are collecting data from are real people just like you and me and so you can never go into a ethnographic situation with preconceived notions of what you might find there but should only comment on what you see and experience.
• Critical ethnography must begin “to extend its political aims and augment its notion of domestication” and ‘politics. Politics alone are incomplete without self-reflection. Critical ethnography must further its goals from simply politics to the politics of positionality” (p. 6).
• Michelle Fine (1994) outlines three positions in qualitative research (p. 17):
1. The ventriloquist stance that merely “transmits” information in an effort toward neutrality and is absent of a political or rhetorical stance. The position of the ethnographer aims to be invisible, that is, the “self” strives to nonexistent in the text.
2. The positionality of voices is where the subjects themselves are the focus, and their voices carry forward indigenous meanings and experiences that are opposition to dominant discourses and practices. The position of the ethnographer is vaguely present but not addressed.
3. The activism stance in which the ethnographer takes a clear position in intervening on hegemonic practices and serves as an advocate in exposing material effects of marginalized locations while offering alternatives.
   

• You must protect your subjects and not exploit their problems but explain your reasons thoroughly for being interested. “Knowledge is power” and postionality is important because it forces us to acknowledge our power (pp. 6, 7) and if done correctly should eliminate the notion to pass value judgments.
• As we recognize “the vital importance of illuminating the researcher’s positionality, we also understand that critical ethnography requires a deep and abiding dialogue with the Other as never before. This means that our attention to ethnographic positionality still must remain grounded in the empirical world of the Other” (p.8).
• “This book serves as a resource for qualitative researchers who wish to emphasize critical analysis, ethical considerations, and theories and practices of performance. In order to proceed, I must first stress that criticism, ethics, and performance require a level of theoretical understanding. Theory becomes a necessity, because it guides the meanings and the vocabulary for each of these three domains. Theory is embedded in their definitions and functions: Critical analysis is grounded in social theory; ethics is grounded in moral philosophy; and, performance is both a practice and a theory. In accepting the significance of theoretical knowledge, it is equally important for us to comprehend the way in which theory is at times the same as method, and at other times distinct from it” (p.12).
  

II) Key Concepts, Ideas, & Terminology:

• Critical Ethnography - critical ethnography is not a theory but a perspective through which a qualitative researcher can frame questions and promote action. Its purpose is emancipation of cultural members from ideologies that are not to their benefit and not of their creation--an important concept in critical theory. Because critical ethnography is borne out of the theoretical underpinnings of critical theory, it is premised upon the assumption that cultural institutions can produce a false consciousness in which power and oppression become taken-for-granted ‘realities’ or ideologies. In this way, critical ethnography goes beyond a description of the culture to action for change, by challenging the false consciousness and ideologies exposed through the research. (Thomas, 2003).
• False consciousness - is the Marxist thesis that material and institutional processes in capitalist society are misleading to the proletariat, and to other classes. These processes betray the true relations of forces between those classes, and the real state of affairs regarding the development of pre-socialist society (relative to the secular development of human society in general).
• Ethical responsibility - A compelling sense of duty and commitment based on moral principles of human freedom and well –being, and hence a compassion for the suffering of living beings. (p. 5)
• Resist domestication - she will use the resources, skills, and privileges available to her to make accessible—to penetrate the borders and break through the confines in defense of—the voices and experiences of subjects whose stories are otherwise restrained and out of reach. (p. 5)
• Jurgen Habermas (1971) (p.6)
• natural science model - of empirical analysis, in which the social world can be measured, predicted, and tested as life phenomena in the natural sciences through the invisible reportage of the researcher;
• historical and interpretive model - in which social phenomena is described and its meanings and functions further elaborated through the balanced commentary and philosophical descriptions of the researcher
• critical theory model - in which social life is represented and analyzed for the political purpose of overcoming social oppression, particularly forms that reflect advanced capitalism through the overt polemics of the researcher. (See also Davis, 1999, p. 61.)
  

• Postcritical Ethnography - They not only describe positionality, but also comprehensively critique it relative to traditional notions of critical ethnography. (p.7)
• Mojado Ethnography - (wetback) refers to Mexicans and other Latinos who cross the nation-state territorial border into the United States, and are socially, politically, economically (as well as legally) constructed as “illegal entrants,” and “newcomers.” . . . Mojado symbolizes the distrust and dislike experienced in gringolandia, as la raza odiada, “those damn Mexican,”—extranjeros, which literally means “outsiders.” (p. 7)
• Auto-Ethnography- autobiography, travel writing, or memoir; an exclusive experience. (p.9)
• Structural Functionalism - A. R. Radcliff-Brown’s (1958) development of structural functionalism is concerned with defining and determining social structures and the interconnectedness within their own system of structures. It excludes any consideration of external influences; the focus was on the mechanisms that sustain the structure, thereby deeming human behavior as a function of the structures that guide and determines their culture and conduct. (p.11)
• The Chicago School - The Chicago School of ethnography developed in the 1920s in the Department of Social Science and Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Key contributors to the school were Robert Park (1864–1944), who turned the focus of fieldwork to the urban landscape; G. H. Mead (1865–1931) and John Dewey (1859–1932), who emphasized pragmatism; and Herbert Bloomer (1900–1987), proponent of symbolic interactionism. The Chicago School is credited for laying the foundation for “a vibrant and increasingly methodologically sophisticated program of interpretive ethnography” (Thomas, 1993, p. 11). (p.11)
• Positivism - Positivism is based on the idea that empiricism must reach the goal of positive knowledge—that is, prediction, laws of succession and variability. Positivists believe genuine knowledge is founded by direct experience and that experience is composed of social facts to be determined while reducing any distortion of subjectivity (theology or metaphysics) by the presence of the ethnographer. Therefore, positivism is based on the following assumptions outlined by Norman K. Denzin (2001): (a) There is a reality that can be objectively interpreted; (b) the researcher as a subject must be separate from any representation of the object researched; (c) generalizations about the object of research are “free from situational and temporal constraints: that is, they are universally generalizable” (p. 44) (d) there is a cause and effect for all phenomena— there are “no causes without effects and no effects without causes” (p. 44); and (e) our analyses are objective and “value-free” (p. 44). (pp.11-12)
• Post-Positivism -The post-positive turn—or what is variously referred to as the “performance turn,” the “postmodern turn,” the “new ethnography,” or the “seventh movement” (Denzin, 2001, 2003)—has denounced the tenets of positivism. Positivism’s goal for objectivity, prediction, cause/effect, and generalization has been replaced by the recognition and contemplation of subjective human experience, contingencies of truth claims, value-laden inquiry, and local knowledge and vernacular expressions as substantive analytical frameworks. (p.12)
• Positionality - Positionality is vital because it forces us to acknowledge our own power, privilege, and biases just as we denounce the power structures that surround our subjects. A concern for positionality is a reflexive ethnography; it is a turning back on ourselves. When we turn back on ourselves, we examine our intentions, our methods, and our possible effects. We are accountable for our research paradigms, our authority, and our moral responsibility relative to representation and interpretation. (p.14)
• Dialogue/Otherness - Dialogue emphasizes the living communion of a felt-sensing, embodied interplay and engagement between human beings. Dialogue keeps the meanings between and the conversations with the researcher and the Other open and ongoing. The conversation with the Other that is brought forth through dialogue reveals itself as a lively, changing being through time and no longer an artifact captured in the ethnographer’s monologue or written transcript—fixed in time and forever stagnant. (p.14)
• Theory/Method - Critical ethnography becomes the “doing” or the “performance” of critical theory. It is critical theory in action. Theory, when used as a mode of interpretation, is a method, yet it can be distinguished from method (and indeed take a back seat to method) when a set of concrete actions grounded by a specific scene is required to complete a task. We rely on theory—whether it is Marxist theory, critical race theory, or phenomenology—to interpret or illuminate a social action. However, in composing a lay summary, designing interview questions, or coding data, theory may inspire and guide, but it is a methodological process that directs and completes the task. (p 15).
  

III) Linkages to Other Class Readings:

• All of the readings for this week can relate in someway to the basic ideas of critical ethnography in that they all point out the main points of the “new” or “contemporary” ethnography.

IV) Class Discussion Questions:

• Take an image—it can be from a photograph, a painting, an advertisement—and speak from the points of view of the various objects or characters within the image. How are they each expressing differently what it means to be within the frame or parameters of the image? How are they expressing their relationship to the other figures or images around them? In your various voicings of what is within the image, are you giving more emphasis to one or more images over others? Why or why not? (p.15)

Example(s):

V) Additional Readings:

Carspecken, P. F. (1996) Critical Ethnography in Educational Research; A Theoretical and Practical Guide. New York and London: Routledge.

Stanton, J.M. (2006). Book review Critical Ethnography: Methods, Ethics, and Performance Organizational Research Methods, 9, 3, p. 404.

Thomas, J. (2003). Musings on critical ethnography, meanings, and symbolic violence. In R.P. Clair (Ed.), Expressions of Ethnography. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, pp. 45-54.