Looking at looking at people, through a more critical lens

I found the readings this week, while not necessarily more technically demanding, certainly more emotionally draining to consider. Although I’ve had some reservations building about the classification and categorization of peoples through quantitative research methods, Linda Smith’s portrayal of Western societies’ colonization and “collecting” of knowledges left me with a bad feeling about the historical development of ethnographic research.
That said, I liked how Smith situated her critical analysis of the development of Western research methods, or knowledge-acquisition, within the concepts of, and the power negotiations involved with, modernity and liberalism. It seems like a horrible twist of fate for a set of ideals, the Enlightenment, that aimed to liberate people from the clutches of powerful monarchs, to develop into the culture-claiming and annihilating force of colonization. As Smith writes, the knowledge-developing prospects started out quite innocently:
Once it was accepted that humans had the capacity to reason and to attain this potential through education, through a systematic form of organizing knowledge, then it became possible to debate these ideas in rational and “scientific’ ways” (p. 59).
But this intellectual freedom took place in “The nexus between cultural ways of knowing, scientific discoveries, economic impulses and imperial power [enabling] the west to make ideological claims to having a superior civilization” (p. 64), and the combining of these dynamics making new colonies the “laboratories of Western science” (p. 65). It was amidst these colonial cultural laboratories that research methods, including ethnographic methods, were developed.
I wonder to what extent, and in what ways, ethnographic research, as it is currently practiced by education researchers, is continuing the “culture-collecting” agenda of the long-standing ethnographic practices. Does this differ by areas of the U.S., as well as by country, in which ethnographers are learning and practicing their methods? How might our research approaches maintain and institute this critical perspective toward the historical development of methods?
EH