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EDUCATIONALTHEORYWinter 1988. Vol. 38, No. 10 988 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Writing Critical Ethnog raphy: Dialogu e,

Multivoicedness, and Carnival in Cultural TextsBy Richard A. Quantz and Terence W O’Connor

Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurablymore complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.- ydor Dostoevsky, The idiot

The narrator in Dostoevsky’s novel Th e Idiot’ shows an awareness of human culturesthat ethnographers all too often fail to appreciate. There has been a strong tendencyamong ethnographers to describe complex, historical, social activities as homogeneous,rule-governed, ahistorical entities. This ethnographic tradition has reinforced a concep-tion of culture as a single, unified set of patterns passed down from generation togeneration which governs life within a community. Such a conception masks the dynamicand conflictual nature of culture in pluralistic societies and effectively reinforces theidea that education must be reproductive rather than transformative. If we in educationwish to write ethnographies that reflect the emancipatory impulses found in marginalizedcultures, we must develop a concept of culture that recognizes the complex contra-dictions within societies and, therefore, makes the idea of transformative educationpossible.

Traditionally, ethnographers’ attempts to view society with an objective, scientificdetachment has transformed disparate acts into a set of universal, homogeneousabstractions. Material goods, social institutions, and rituals have all been used toconstruct coherence and regularity. For example, Spradley and McCurdy by describingculture as “the knowledge people use to generate and interpret social behavior” portrayculture as a unified, consensual system of abstractions located in the human mind.‘Since knowledge is an invisible artifact, Spradley and McCurdy have turned the studyof culture into the study of language, arguing that language provides a single, concrete,and immediate manifestation of thought; but their techniques search for regularitiesand overlook aberrations and infractions. The result is the reduction of cultural life toa static system of categorical relationships which leave untouched many critical factorsinvolved in the construction of cultural exchanges. A s Henry Glassie, a folklorist equallyconcerned with finding the mental roots of cultural commonalities, points out, “Thetimeless portrait of a culture gives it shape but no direction. It gives people no intentionor decision, no way to create their own destiny. [It] petrifies them in an inhuman state,thrall to the scholar’s model of consi~tency.”~ his error obscures the life of peoplewhose thoughts conflict with the status quo, misrepresents the problems of those with

little power to shape the community’s public symbols and institutions, and offers ,nomechanism for ideological and political transformation.

To overcome these shortcomings of traditional ethnography, anthropologist J amesClifford suggests we examine Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of “heteroglossia,” a Bakhtinian

Correspondence: Richard A. Quantz, Department of Educational Leadership, School of Educationand Allied Professions, 350 McGuffey Hall, Miami University, Oxford, OH 45056; Terence W.O’Connor, School of Education, Indiana State University, Terre Haute, IN 47809.

1. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The M o t (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1981), 469.2. J . P. Spradley and D. W. McCurdy, The Cultural Experience: Ethnography in Com plex Society

3.Henry Glassie, Passing the Time in Ballyrnenone: Culture and History of an Ulster Commun ity

(Chicago: Science Research Associates, 1972), 8.

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 375.

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DIALOGUE, ULTIVOICEDNESS, ND CARNIVAL IN THE WORK OF MIKHAIL BAKHTIN

By focusing on Bakhtin’s ideas of dialogue, multivoicedness, and carnival, weshould be able to create a more satisfactory understanding of culture. Bakhtin’semphasis on multivoicedness and dialogue provides a basis for understanding anddescribing complex and contradictory cultural actions by placing culture in the flow ofhistory. His interest in carnival makes possible our recognition that at least somecultural actions are regenerative democratic impulses. Dialogue, multivoicedness, andcarnival are interrelated concepts which lie at the center of a Bakhtinian understandingof culture.

Dialogue

Bakhtin argues that the key conceptual tool for analysis is language or, morespecifically, the ~tterance.~ ecause Bakhtin anchors his work on the utterance, heemphasizes that social context is essential to meaning. Whereas the “word” is abstractand removed from the speaker and listener, the “utterance” is concrete and can only

be understood in the context of the specific speaker and listeners.’” Bakhtin’s insistenceon tying meaning to the concrete situation forces us to deal with language as a socialprocess instead of as an individual object. Since “meaning” can only be constructedin the concrete utterance, language only makes sense as a social concept. Descriptionsthat portray language as an individual act ignore the social medium in which languageconveys meaning, thereby overlooking the heart of the process and preventing it frombeing a useful tool of cultural analysis.

In describing language as social, Bakhtin directs our attention to the communicationprocess itself. He uses the concept of dialogue to focus on the continuous flow ofinteraction and response among individuals. Verbal performance, whether oral or written,responds in some way to previous performances and, in turn, calls forth a responsefrom others.” Language, as dialogue, is always in the process of becoming. “Individualsdo not receive a ready-made language at all,” Bakhtin wrote, “rather, they enter uponthe stream of verbal communication; ndeed, only in this stream does their consciousnessfirst begin to operate.”’2 Bakhtin suggests that the individual first acquires languageas a social activity and only then internalizes outward speech into inward speech. Andsince Bakhtin also argues that individual thought is carried out in inward speech,individual consciousness arises from an ongoing process of social communication. Theprocess of inner thought is not mechanical but a dynamic, internalized dialogue.

This dynamic conceptualization of the individual’s relation to the social worldprovides a vital theoretical advance over the often stated portrayal of the individual asa passive instrument of a larger social structure. It presumes that every individual hasan active role in affecting the communication process and, hence, in continuing theongoing reshaping of the culture. In short, human agency within the community is anessential consequence of this social dialogue.

For Bakhtin dialogic consciousness is not only social, it is historically and ideolog-ically located within specific material and symbolic realms. Because individuals must

9. V. N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I.R . Titunik, vol. 1 of Studies in Language (New York: Seminary Press, 1973), 123. Marxism and thePhilosophy of Language as well as Freudianism: A Marxist Critique, although officially authored byV. N. Volosinov, are generrally acepted as written by Mikhail Bakhtin, or at least largely writtenby Bakhtin. We do recognize that the authorship of these texts is not settled, and we make noclaim to further knowledge on this matter. For our purposes it is not crucial to know which memberof the “Bakhtin Circle” actually wrote them. Since we feel these books are consistent with textsknown to be written by Bakhtin, we refer to them as the work of Bakhtin.

10. V. N. Volosinov, Freudianism: A Marxist Critique, trans. I . R . Titunik (New York: AcademicPress, 1976) 101.

11. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. 95, 102.12. Ibid.. 81.

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construct their private thoughts and their public communication within the limit oflanguage opportunities available at a given time and place, the individual humanutterance is formed within historical constraints. Accordingly, Bakhtin chooses to callspeech ”behavioral ide~logy.”’~ s part of a historically situated social dialogue,behavioral ideology represents the concrete manifestation of these limitations on thespeech used by an indi~idua1.l~

Bakhtin develops his strongest analysis of behavioral ideology in his critique ofFreud. In Freud, Bakhtin finds classic bourgeois philosophy at work: “ A sui gener isfear of history, an ambition to locate a world beyond the social and the historical, asearch for this world precisely in the depths of the organi~.”’~ n place of this classicliberal interpretation, Bakhtin suggests that Freud’s concept of the “unconscious” isno more than “unofficial conscious,” those dialogic voices which are not recognizedas legitimate by one’s peers and, therefore, are not outwardly spoken.’6 Accordingly,Freudian psychoanalysis can be recast as a social dialogue located in a historicalsituation and ideologically bound where official and unofficial conscious struggle todirect the individual’s public speech. The dialogic process, wherein the individual mustenter into the flow of meaningful exchanges, represents the dynamic through which

the individual is tied to historical and material conditions. In conversation one allowssome and forbids some of the inward speech to become vocalized. Inward speechwhich becomes outwardly vocalized is probably that which is most compatible with thesocially recognized ideology. Bakhtin’s concepts of official and unofficial consciousmight be better conceived as “legitimated” and “nonlegitimated” voice. In trying tounderstand human behavior, we must be cognizant that some voices are legitimatedby the community and, therefore, vocalized, while other are nonlegitimated and,therefore, unspoken.

With Bakhtin’s concept of dialogue, the dualistic conceptualization of the individualand the society, whether Marxist or liberal, must be rejected. In its place, a dynamicconcept of dialogue between inward and outward speech acts offers a way to understandthe unification of human agency and culture, one that includes an understanding of thematerial representation of history and ideology. A s a result, it can provide the theoreticalgroundwork from which ethnographers may study the opportunities and obstacles thataffect the voices of the disempowered. But while the concept of dialogue helps explainthe relationships between structure and agency, Bakhtin’s concept of multivoicednesshelps show the complexity and contradictions that mark the lives of minority groupmembers.

M u l t i v o i c e d n e s s

Bakhtin’s contemporary L. S. Vygotsky understood clearly the need to conceiveof a unified individual-society. For Vygotsky, like Bakhtin, the mechanism for thisunification is to be found in language. Although we cannot be sure that Bakhtin andVygotsky knew of each other’s work, they clearly had a similar vision regarding thesocial nature of the individual found in internal language. For Vygotsky inner speechis the mechanism whereby people become both more social and more individual. Theybecome more social because their very thought is intimately tied to (although notequated with) language. Yet the power of language makes possible the independenceof the child, the potential extension of thought and activity through language. “J ust asa mold gives shape to a substance,” Vygotsky wrote, “words can shape an activityinto a structure. However, that structure may be changed or reshaped when childrenlearn to use language in ways that allow them to go beyond previous experiences

13. Ibid., 91; an d Volosinov, Freudianism: A Marxist Critique,88.

14. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, 70.15. Volosinov, Freudianism: A Marxist Critique, 14.

16. Ibid., 85.

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CRITICALTHNOGRAPHY 99

when planning future action.”17 The dialectic between thought and language is equatedwith the dialectic between the symbolic world and the material world and between theindividual and the social. But emphasizing “inner” speech, Vygotksy converts this socialprocess into a psychological concept. Bakhtin, on the other hand, maintains thesociological understanding by referring to “ ‘inward’ speech,” “unofficial conscious-nesses,” and “voice,” concepts related to social dialogue and historical conditions.Voice explicitly recalls the idea of utterance and, as a result, must always be locatedin dialogue, whether vocalized or inward. Consequently, while Vygotsky’s concept ofinner speech connects the individual and society, Bakhtin’s idea of nonlegitimated voicefurther locates consciousness in the social dialogue of the historical moment.

While this notion of dialogue unifies the traditional distinction between the individualand the social, Bakhtin’s use of the concept of multivoicedness prohibits a unifiedindividual or a consensual society. This is so because a dialogue requires more thanone voice and each voice has its own identity. Since individuals’ inward speech isdialogical and social, individuals must be understood to speak with many voices. Officialand unofficial consciousness are merely reflections of the multivoicedness of individuals’inward speech, of which some voices are legitimated and some are not. Likewise,

language, as the concrete manifestation of historically situated culture, is impossibleto perceive as something other than, in Bakhtin’s words, “an authentic dialogue ofunmerged consciousnesses.’’ls Society must be understood as in continuous dialogueand, therefore, multivoiced and nonconsensual. This idea of autonomous, unmergedvoices was called several things by Bakhtin, including heteroglossia, polyglot, polyphony,and multivocality, but multivoicedness seems to be a term that best captures the ideathat any particular, concrete, historical dialogue is best described in terms of themultiple voices participating.

This rnultivoiced conceptualization of social moments is a direct challenge to bothfunctionalists and those Marxists who portray social relations as monophonic deologicalactivities resulting from a predefined social structure. By contrast, the concept ofdialogue as a multivoiced social activity explains how the ideas of the powerful gainand maintain legitimacy as well as how the disempowered can attempt to legitimate

their ideas and beliefs to others. Through the concepts of dialogue and multivoicednessBakhtin offers us a framework for examining cultural continuity and change. His ideasshow us that culture should be seen as a collection of historical events laden with arange of possibilities and shaped by the power resources of the individuals present.Thus, as the multiple voices within the individual and within the community struggle tocontrol the direction of the acceptable dialogue, ideological expressions may bereinforced, reinterpreted, or rejected. An understanding of these processes is criticalto radical ideological efforts to reformulate the terms of collective action.

A multivoiced enthnography, with its presentation of both dominant and othervoices, should provide an approach that offers a more accurate rendition of the complexrelations of cultural life. Moreover, by recognizing and recording the multiple voicesoccurring within communities, we should be able to analyze the specific factors whichaffect the formation in historical situations of legitimated collusions and subsequentsocial actions.

Carnival

Traditional cultural descriptions are constructed by theorists from collections offormal, systemic vocalizations within the community, usually products of the ideologicallypowerful. They subsequently depict social change according to shifts in the dominantideology of the culture. Attention is thus placed on the struggle of well-formed, majorparadigms. Since these struggles tend to be between legitimized elites and not between

17. Lev S . Vygotsky, Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes,

18. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson, vol. 8

ed. Michael Cole et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), 28.

of Theory and History of Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 221.

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the elites and the disempowered, this focus is quite the reverse of what is needed. Inorder to understand the way in which ideas develop into social action, theorists mustturn to multivoiced enthnographies which not only recognize other voices but placethem within the tensions of the community.

Describing nonlegitimated voice within a community of powerfully maintainedlegitimated voices is made difficult by historical and ideological forces that affectexpression in social dialogue. There are, nonetheless, points in community life whichpermit and even encourage expression of nonlegitimated voice. One such juncture isthe carnivalesque, the modern remnant of the medieval carnival. Realizing this, Bakhtinanalyzes the “carnival” text, a medieval genre which represents the essence of popularculture in its freest, most democratic, most social form. The study of carnival canprovide an example of one site where the nonlegitimated voice can find communalexpression and establish the potential for legitimation and eventual collective action.lg

Carnival is a public occasion marked by festivity, laughter, licentiousness, excess,and grotesqueness. Events such as our Mardi Gras, Germany’s Fasching, and Brazil’sCarnival represent modern remnants of the medieval “carnival.” These modern versionspossess some elements of their medieval forerunner while missing others. For our

purpose, carnival should be understood as the “popular-festive life of the Middle Agesand the Renaissance; [where] all the peculiarities of this life have been preserved.”20Carnival with its belly-shaking laughter, its grotesque humor, its emphasis on feasting,defecating, disembowelment, coitus, and other body-related actions, its exaggeration,and its unwillingness to accept anything as sacred creates an arena where freeexpression of nonlegitimated voices can compete with the ideologies of the status quo.It contains the fundamental elements of popular critique as well as those of transfor-mation and renewal. Bakhtin wrote.

For the medieval parodist everything without exception was comic. Laughterwas as universal as seriousness; it was directed at the whole world, at history,at all societies, at ideology. I t was the world’s second truth extended toeverything and from which nothing is taken away. It was, as it were, the festiveaspect of the whole world in all its elements, the second revelation of theworld in play and laughter.”

This second “revelation” is an occurrence that is often ignored today. True carnivallife is not a debased, cynical, and negative derision of marginal groups as it has beendistortedly conceived in modern times, but a rejuvenating, optimistic, and positivemockery aimed at everyone. When understood in its most universal sense, carnivaloffers a democratic, emancipatory, and transformative genre of social expression.

Vocalization. Carnival acts to release social tensions and to permit the formationof nascent counterhegemony. It accomplishes this through the laughter of the market-place, the festivity of feasts, the material bodily principle, and images of death andrebirth. Combined these features of carnival allow new expressions of freedom,recognize the dialectics of opposition, create the social bonds of human community,

and celebrate the rejuvenation of human prospects. Such an arena contains theconditions necessary for the creation of a class consciousness, i.e., the social legiti-mation of silenced voices.

To those mired in the status quo, carnival’s most noticeable feature is its shockingfreedom, its license, its rejection of social norms, and its display of bizarre, grotesque

19. The carnivalesque should be understood as only one juncture in community life whichpermits the expression of nonlegitimated voice. Turner’s concept of the liminal can help usrecognize these interstitial social moments. See Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure andAnti-structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969); Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors (Ithaca, N.Y.:Cornell University Press, 1974); Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness ofPlay (New York: Performing Arts J ournal, 1982).

20. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene lswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1984), 218.21. Ibid., 84.

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images and behaviors couched in raucous, obscene laughter. To those within carnival,however, these actions mark the features of democratic possibility. Bakhtin explains,“Carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from theestablished order: it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, normsand prohibitions. . . . It was hostile to all that was immortalized and completed.”2zMedieval carnival represented a deliberate uncture from the normal social relationships,a meaningful revelling in the subversion of standard meaning. “For a short time lifecame out of its usual, legalized and consecrated furrows and entered the sphere ofutopian freedom.”z3

This moment of freedom is revealed in the very laughter of the people, its liberatingeffects being the source of the humor. At a deep level, laughter releases people fromfear of an inequitable, immutable society and, therefore, it deflates the seriousness ofsocial relations which depend on such assumptions. The feeling of escape created bylaughter is a first step in the creation of alternative social expressions. As Bakhtinnotes, “Complete liberty is possible only in the completely fearless Laughter,then, displaces the constraints of everyday definitions and allows the free expressionof unofficial opinions. This, in itself, reveals carnival as an important psychosocial arena;

however, its contribution to the formation of an alternative public consciousness isequally important.Democracy in Opposition. Carnival presents a democratic setting not merely for

some but for all. It incorporated all people, whether high-born or low, not discriminatingamong people in its mockery and laughter, but rather representing “the utopian kingdomof absolute equality and By being drawn into the expression of the people’snonlegitimated culture, all hierarchy could be repudiated, all static definitions redefined,all truth ridiculed. Control over social symbols is restored to the power of individuals.In short, carnival established a realm where all had the right to legitimate expressionof the unthinkable. As a result, this kind of social moment permits the restoration ofdemocracy of expression and provides the potential for the formation of new, trans-formative conceptions capable of standing in opposition to the controlled structures ofthe official world.

For Bakhtin, this free, democratic setting promoted a capacity to create and sustainan alternative sociocultural framework. Carnival festivities, he wrote, “offered completelydifferent, nonofficial, extra-ecclesiastical and extra-political aspects of the world, ofman, and of human relations; they built a second world and a second life outside ofofficialdom, a world in which they lived during a given time of the year.”26 Thisnonlegitimated community is more than an escape from “real” life. Bakhtin claims thatfestive humor allows this social framework to challenge and overthrow, symbolically,the official order. In other words, carnival engages the serious world in direct, openopposition. As Bakhtin argues, “Festive folk laughter presents an element of victorynot only over supernatural awe, over the sacred, over death; it also means the defeatof power, of earthly kings, of the earthly upper classes, of all that oppresses andrestrictsF7

Feasts provide an example of this oppositional potential. Official feasts of court orof “proper society” with their monolithic seriousness and eternal and immutable truthsupported the hierarchical and undemocratic status quo, while carnival feasts with theirfestive laughter and temporary emancipation from the prevailing truth and establishedorder claimed the exclusion of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions.’’What is important about this parallel structure is not simply that a liberating settingand a democratic leveling allow the fool to become a king, but that the carnival laughter

22. Ibid., 10.23. Ibid., 89.

24 . Ibid., 47.

25 . Ibid., 264.26 . Ibid., 6.

27 . Ibid., 92.28. Ibid., 30.

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produces a subversive dialectical counterpoint. Writing about how the second worldstands in opposition to the official state-defined world, Bakhtin says, ”Medieval laughteris directed at the same object as medieval seriousness. Not only does laughter makeno exception for the upper stratum, but indeed it is usually directed toward it.Furthermore, it is directed not at one part only, but at the whole. One might say that itbuilds its own world versus the official world, its own church versus the official church,its own state versus the official ~tate.”‘~ his unofficial world of carnival is a worldwhere all “first truths” are questioned and mocked, a world in which the dispossessedcome to gain some control over the public definitions of interaction.

The laughter of the carnival feast is not just a personal strategy for coping withsocial order, but is a social strategy laden with the possibility of transfer back to thesocial relations of the official world. “Through this victory, laughter clarified man’sconsciousness and gave him a new outlook on life,” Bakhtin explains. “This truth wasephemeral; it was followed by the fears and oppressions of everyday life, but fromthese brief moments another unofficial truth emerged, truth about the world and manwhich prepared the new Renaissance consciousness.”3o Carnival with all its grotesqueimages and bizarre humor is not a defeatist attitude accepting the inevitability of

servitude, but rather a victorious celebration of the liberation of people over fear andoppression. The escape from the hopeless inevitability of the official world provides asecond world where universal reedom and democracy permit the expression of unofficialvoice. This victory of laughter over fear provides the key to carnival’s potential as asite for open dialogue.

Social Solidarity. Victorious laughter alone is not enough to sustain a dialectic ofopposition. The formation of social groups requires the establishment of bonds of~olidarity.~’ he process through which carnival encourages social solidarity beginswith its drive to reduce, ideologically, all people to the same social level. This is evidentin its use of the body. Carnival is not the abandonment of self to hedonistic egocentrism,as it is often portrayed, but a social affair acting as a continuous reminder that peoplefind humanity in social communion rather than individual self-fulfillment. t is a celebrationof people. Bakhtin recognizes this in carnival’s exaggerated interest in the human body.“The material body is contained not in the biological individual, not in the bourgeoisego, but in people, a people who are continually growing and renewed.. . . Manifes-tations of this [bodily] life refer not to the isolated biological individual, not to theprivate, egotistic economic man, but to the collective ancestral body of all the people.”32

In modern life the ribaldry of the medieval feast is seen as distasteful and degradingindividual excess; however, feasting can be understood as a banquet for all the worldbecause people, through their labor and struggle, have triumphed.33 The bourgeoismentality conceives the human body as an individual isolated corpus and draws aprotecting, impenetrable curtain between the individual and the world; but such thoughtsdo not apply to carnival where the body is not only penetrable, it is openly andgraphically drawn into union with the world. In carnival’s images the body is createdby and in turn creates the external world. Eating and drinking, urinating and defecating,sexual intercourse and birth are all processes whereby the body is built, flushed andrenewed. Of course, it is precisely these raw, universal images that official culturerejects and fights to discredit and outlaw. In carnival, the emphasis on the materialbodily principle inverts this official voice and displays officially private and vulnerableparts of life in order to break down the barrier between individuals in carnival laughter.By using these images to provoke laughter, carnival attempts to shock individuals intofeelings of social aommunity. “Medieval laughter,” wrote Bakhtin, “is the social con-

29. Ibid., 86.30. Ibid., 90-91,31. See Randall Collins, Th e Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education an d

32. Bakhtin, R a M a i s and His World, 19.

33. Ibid., 32.

Strarificarion (New York: Academic Press, 1979).

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sciousness of all the people.”34 Through festivity, “the individual feels that he is anindissoluble part of the collectivity, a member of the people’s mass body.”35

Because the symbols and actions of carnival shock individuals into a sense ofsolidarity, carnival promotes a social understanding of democratic freedom. It createsa primordial social ocean wherein nonlegitimated thoughts and feelings may join togetherin new expressions of social opinion. This potential realignment of the legitimatedtensions of official social relations requires a transformative promise in addition to thevocalization and solidarity already discussed. Again, Bakhtin readily illustrates how thispotential can be found in the swirl of carnival.

Transformative Promise. To understand how carnival, in promoting the generationof new forms of expression and solidarity, can serve as a potential site for renewaland transformation, it is necessary to understand the grotesque images of death andrebirth that are central to carnival festivities. Bakhtin points to the laughing, senile, andpregnant o ld women of Kerch to make this point. “It is pregnant death, a death thatgives birth. There is nothing completed, nothing calm and stable in the bodies of theseold hags. They combine a senile, decaying and deformed flesh with the flesh of newlife, conceived but as yet ~n fo rme d . ”~~ akhtin explains that banquet images must also

be understood in terms of regeneration, in terms of life over death. “In this respect,”he wrote, “it is equivalent to conception and birth. The victorious body receives thedefeated world and is renewed.”37 To the modern eye the black humor of medievalcarnival seems to wallow in death, but that is because we tend to miss the link ofdeath to birth that is an integral aspect of carnival. To defeat the unjust world is notenough, the social moment also contains an impetus requiring the death of the old toinclude the promise of rebirth. In other words, it is essential to understand that suchsocial occasions contain strong relations between life, death, struggle, triumph, andregeneration.

Bakhtin specifically notes that Rabelais wrote in a period of social reconstructionand that the spirit of Rabelais’s work reflects the transformative nature ofIn Rabelais, he explains,

the old dying world gives birth to the new one. Death throes are combinedwith birth in one indissoluble whole. This process is represented in the imagesof the material bodily lower stratum; everything descends into earth and thebodily grave in order to die and to be reborn. This is why the downwardmovement pervades Rabelais’ entire imagery from beginning to end. Al l theseimages throw down, debase, swallow, condemn, deny (topographically), kill,bury, send down to the underworld, abuse, curse; and at the same time theyall conceive anew, fertilize, sow, rejuvenate, regenerate, praise and glorify. Thisgeneral downward thrust, which kills and regenerates, unifies such differentphenomena as blows, abuses, the underworld, and the act of devouring.39

In carnival, Bakhtin shows us a genre capable of depicting the expression ofnonlegitimated voices. Moreover, he illustrates how this expression provides for ademocratic and emancipatory impulse for countercultures in the ideological dialogueof the community, one which can give birth to new social movements. Disempoweredpeople, when forced to live within a stable, hierarchical system, often turn to thecarnivalesque for rejuvenation. Surrounded by the “inevitability” of their lives , they mayoften seek the festivity of the bizarre and the freedom of the absurd in order to findan equitable world; a world in which all people, powerless or powerful, come to inhabitthe same flow of life. Our tendency to label the grotesque and festive as delinquent,immature, or sadistic tells as much about our own immutable ties to our historical

34. Ibid., 92.35. bid., 255.36. Ibid., 25-26.37. Ibid., 283.

38. Ibid., 403.39. Ibid., 435.

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moment as it does about the true meaning of the acts. The grotesque and all the othercarnivalesque behaviors must be understood as having the potential for emancipationand the kernels of transformation: they must be seen as the self-preserving actions ofpeople seeking dignity.

While carnival holds much promise, we must always keep in mind that true carnivaldied with modernity. Carnival is a genre of the middle ages, not a social event likely tobe found in the present. Our point in this paper is not that carnival exists today, butthat carnivalesque moments do arise which share some of the fundamental elementsof carnival while lacking others. For those of us interested in the possibility oftransformation, these carnivalesque moments should be understood to be imperfectexamples of carnival and, therefore, flawed emancipatory moments. Like all culturalevents, carnivalesque activities must be understood to be multivoiced, speaking partlyto emancipation but also partly to oppression. As critical ethnographers we should beas interested in revealing how carnivalesque moments differ from carnival as we arein showing how they are similar.

In this way, carnival exposes the complexities inherent in community tensions andreveals the seeds of transformation located in the voices of the oppressed. It is one

prominent point where multiple voices may find equality of expression in the publicdomain, where conditions for solidarity may be formed, and where mediated acceptanceor resistance may be formulated by the oppressed. On the other hand, they are alsomoments in which the oppressed fail to complete the emancipatory impulses and tounderstand the democratic possibilities; these moments may even result in the partic-ipation of the oppressed in their own oppression. The carnivalesque activities ofmarginal people, the raucous laughter of many students, and the rowdy mockery ofsociety's institutions by disenchanted youth (e.g., "punk") may all be understood asexamples of nonlegitimated voice. The class clown, like the medieval clown, may infact be the "herald of the second truth"; may in fact represent the expression ofunofficial voice; however, we must understand this as an incomplete carnivalesquemoment.40 While this extension of carnival deserves greater discussion, the argumenthere is for the need to recognize the profound importance of these interstitial socialmoments for scholars studying the problems of the disempowered. As multivoicedethnographies emerge, particularistic analysis of these points may clarify the factorswhich restrict or promote the legitimation of the silenced voices.

ETHNOGRAPHY F MARGINALIZED ULTURES

The first part of this paper has explored some Bakhtinian themes which mighthelp us read cultural texts; the second part will develop other Bakhtinian ideas thatmay help us write ethnographic texts. In researching and writing ethnography, onemust describe the dynamic and conflictual nature of marginalized cultures, record thedialogues that bind the individual into a private world and a social community, andreveal the many voices struggling for expression. Realizing this, the ethnographer must

not construct a single set of patterns from single-minded individuals, but must presenta range of legitimated and nonlegitimated voices found in the community. This rangemay be focussed by centering on those points in the community (like carnival) wherethe relationships among history, people, and ideas are revealed. In his analysis offiction Bakhtin provides us with analytic concepts which wHI help accomplish this task.Accordingly, we shall explore his notions of time and space, characterization, ideology,and ambivalence for their value in creating critical ethnography.

Time and Space

According to Bakhtin, Dostoevsky's principal literary technique is to make timestand still and reveal life by bringing contradictions into a common space. In this way,

40 . Ibid., 95.

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CRITICALTHNOGRAPHY 105

the multidimensional aspects of characters, social situations, or issues are revealed.“Dostoevsky,” Bakhtin wrote, “attempted to perceive the very stages themselves intheir simultaneity, to uxtapose and counterpose them dramatically, and not stretch themout into an evolving sequence. For him, to get one’s bearings on the world meant toconceive all its contents as simultaneous, and to guess at their interrelationships in thecross-section of a s ing le m~rnent .”~’

Coexistence and interaction are the fundamental principles of dialogue and,consequently, of life. To illustrate this point, Dostoevsky suspends the flow of time inhis stories and makes possible the careful presentation of all the voices speaking atonce. This strategy allows the author to emphasize the relationship of ideas, people,and historical conditions. A s a result, ideas can be viewed in context of competingideologies, people can be seen in conflict with others, and material conditions can bedrawn as historical moments. These goals critical ethnography should also seek.

Like Dostoevsky, the ethnographer who wishes to represent the coexistence ofmultiple voices in the social arena must reexamine the framework of space and timewithin which they present their findings. Traditional methods generally attempt to distillideas into a unified, abstract structure, to isolate individuals as objectified subjectivities,and to organize cultural patterns into atemporal systems. Bakhtin’s theory of alternativespace/time presentation provides the ethnographer with a way to avoid these biases.His ideas demand that the ethnographer replay the multiple voices that created theoriginal scene. The presentation of informants’ comments in such temporally situated,multiple-coexistent ethnography would, in a sense, parallel the presentation of disparateperspective found in cubist painting or polyphonic music. Bakhtin uses the musicmetaphor in describing Dostoevsky’s novels as polyphonic. Bakhtin’s use of polyphonyimplies the weaving of autonomous, unmerged themes throughout a single composition.The polyphonic novel builds a single text out of the unmerged consciousness of thevarious characters. Each voice maintains an integrity even while contributing to the

Accordingly, we can use Bakhtin’s metaphor to call such cultural descriptions“polyphonic ethnography” and contrast it with the typical practice, “homophonicethnography.”

Polyphonic ethnographies would present the utterances of disempowered groupsin dialogue both externally and internally. They would show people in dialogue amongstthemselves as well as in dialogue with social elites. Also these dialogues should beisolated in time. Portraying a cultural scene as isolated in time does no t mean topresent culture as atemporal. To see a culture as isolated in time is to recognize thattime is an essential element which contributes to the existing relationships. Thus whileethnographers must stop time to juxtapose elements spatially, they must also explainthe historical moment in which these relationships exist. As we have pointed out,Bakhtin sees historical conditions as crucial to an understanding of dialogue. Unfor-tunately, when writing ethnographies of the disempowered groups, many ethnographerstend to ignore the historical conditions which help constitute the cultural dynamic. Thetraditional “ethnographic present” seems to make timeless that which, in reality, existsin time and makes the culture appear to be “outside of” rather than “isolated in” time.Bakhtin’s work suggests that such ethnography fails to portray an accurate picture ofthe culture. Yet, when analysis and description of history are combined with the spatialjuxtaposition, the utterances of the disempowered can be situated within the greaterdialogue of the day. Subcultures thus are not isolated from the powerful, their cultureis set into relation to the dominant cultures surrounding them; they are not portrayedas outside of time, but seen in relation to historical forces.

41 . Bakht in , Problems of Dostoevsky’sPoetics, 3042. Ibid., 28 .

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Characterization

Writers of polyphonic ethnographies must characterize their informants differentlythan traditional ethnographers. Again, Dostoevsky’s literary techniques provide insightinto the requirements of this process.

Bakhtin describes a Dostoevsky hero as a character who makes possible thepresentation of a perspective. “The hero interests Dostoevsky as a particular point ofview on the world and on oneself, as the position enabling a person to interpret andevaluate his own self and his surrounding reality. What is important to Dostoevsky isnot how his hero appears in the world but first and foremost how the world appearsto his hero, and how the hero appears to himself.”43 This approach to the hero standsin contrast to those novelists who fill their characters with ideas and words that fit theStory constructions rather than the character. Bakhtin is suspicious of these authors.Their characters do not remain true to themselves, but are prisoners of the author’sdiscretion. He argues that Dostoevsky attempted to retain the integrity of eachcharacter’s voices. A similar concern must be shared by the polyphonic ethnographer.

Dostoevsky’s approach to this problem follows from the idea that dialogue is the

person. “The author constructs the hero not out of words foreign to the hero,” Bakhtinwrote, “not out of neutral definitions; he constructs not a character, nor a type, nor atemperament, in fact he constructs no objectified image of the hero at all, but ratherthe hero’s discourse about himself and his world.”44 Following such a principle,ethnography can be seen as essentially a process of uncovering and presenting thevoices of historical characters. To avoid shaping these individuals into the imagepreconceived by the author, it is essential to illustrate their vision of the world andthemselves through their dialogue. To understand and recreate the social dimensionsof the community, characters need to be seen as important because of their discourserather than because of our descriptions of them.

While Bakhtin is willing to allow characters to represent a particular point of view,he is not interested in artificially portraying individuals as unified voices. He remindsus that individuals are polyglot. Inner speech is constituted of many voices, somelegitimated and others not. This contradiction is evident in Dostoevsky’s frequentdivision of characters into more than one so that he could set up a dialogue betweenone voice and another which, as Bakhtin wrote, ended up

forcing a character to converse with his own double, with the devil, with hisalter ego, with his own caricature (Ivan and the Devil, Ivan and Smerdyakov,Raskolnikov and Svidrigailov, and so forth). This characteristic explains thefrequent occurrence of paired characters in Dostoevsky’s work. One couldsay, in fact, that out of every contradiction within a single person Dostoevskytries to create two persons, in order to dramatize the contradiction and developit exten~ively.4~

While novelists have the ability to divide these voices artificially, ethnographers donot. Of course, occasionally one’s “double” actually does exist in real life, andethnographers, rather than ignoring such “alter egos” as contradictory in those caseswhere they are found, must listen carefully for evidence of the multivoicedness thatcharacterizes their informants’ consciousnesses. Instead of pushing for some form ofconsistency and coherence, ethnographers must chart the contradictions and conflictsthat mark their informants’ lives.

When listening to the disempowered, we must listen closely to the multiple voiceswith which they speak. Accordingly, we should expect to hear the conflicts which havebeen set up within them. This is especially true for those ethnographers interested indiscovering how the dominant cultures have penetrated the consciousness of the

43. Ibid., 47.44.

Ibid., 53.45. Ibid., 28.

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disempowered and given them a voice that leads them to participate in their ownoppression. If we listen to individuals as if they were Dostoevsky heroes and acceptthem as contradictory polyglots, then we should, in our ethnographic portrayal of them,be more likely to treat them with integrity than as products of our own constructions.

Ideology

The presentation of dialogue is not simply an act of accurate reporting. Dialogueis an ideological process; consequently, polyphonic ethnographies are inherently con-cerned with ideology. The same is true of Dostoevsky novels. His stories are writtenaround ideas. These ideas are presented only within the speech of the characters,thus the inward and outward dialogues become the embodiment of each book's ideas.Bakhtin explains,

The ideas begin to live, that is, to take shape, to develop, to find and renewits verbal expression, to give birth to new ideas, only when it enters intogenuine dialogic relationships with other ideas, with the ideas of o thers . Humanthought becomes genuine thought, that is, an idea, only under conditions ofliving contact with another and alien thought, a thought embodied in someoneelse's voice, that is, in someone else's consciousness expressed in discourse.At that point of contact between voice-consciousness the idea is born and

Like novels, hisotrical moments involve the working out of ideas. Polyphonic ethnogra-phies, in their recording of dialogue, are engaged in examining the ideology of theculture at that point in time.

Bakhtin's critique of Freud lays the groundwork for the exploration of ideology inethnography of minority cultures. Bakhtin's use of official and unofficial consciousnessto replace Freud's conscious and unconscious makes possible the revelation of ideologythrough the internal dialogue of informants. Of course this also requires the ethnographerto establish a relationship with informants that enables him or her to hear their fears,fantasies, and dreams. It demands that the ethnographer have skill and patience enoughto obtain his or her informants' confidences. This is not a matter of psychologicalanalysis, but rather a concern to learn about the nonlegitimated voices of a people,the boundaries of the ideology of the time.

By searching for ideologies within the dialogue of individuals in a historical setting,the ethnographer must be willing to juxtapose outward vocalizations which comprisepublic acts. This treatment, however preferable to homophonic studies, may still overlookthe underlying ideological tensions within the community, the forces leading to theunfolding of the ideas present and possible. To do this, one must compare outwardspeech to inward speech and look for the contradictions of the moment. Not onlyshould the unvoiced speech of the disempowered help lay bare the hegemonic workingsof the dominant ideologies, but it should also reveal the potential for ideological

transformation.Ambivalence

The ideological tension between inward and outward voice that supports the publicculture means that the polyphonic ethnographer must be especially sensitive to themany ambivalences contained in cultural expressions. Official symbols purport to beuniversal and noncontradictory; yet, rarely do individuals live within such monolithicarrangements. Their real lives are spent manipulating the undefined terms of culturaldiscourse to their advantage. Laws are both protecting and oppressing, institutions areboth helpful and obstructive, the critical difference lies in the terms in which onenegotiates this ambivalence.

46. Ibid., 88 .

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Similarly, unofficial symbols carry their ideological potential n ambivalence. Bakhtin’sanalysis of Rabelais emphasizes the ambivalence that is essential to carnival life. Ifthe grotesque forms of carnival are not to be debased to mere mockery and trivializedto coarse humor (as happens so much with parody in the modern world), then it isessential that these symbols contain the latitude for individuals to negotiate the dialecticaltensions of unofficial and official ideology. The world of carnival thus maintains doublemeanings in all its images; death is linked to birth, defecation with eating, urinatingwith drinking, war with celebration. In these unofficial moments, the individual mustreconceive his or her full relation to social life. The ambivalence which permits theexpression of fear of death and hope of rebirth, of misery in laughter and laughter inmisery, of good in evil and evil in good provides a rich and complex site for thedevelopment of an ideological voice.

The polyphonic ethnographer, then, must examine the ways in which individualscreate and maintain ambivalence in their ideological communities. The ethnographerof disempowered cultures must learn to use these ambivalences to create alternativeimages and actions; that is, in carnival terms, to reflect the second truths of thenonlegitimated voices. Thus, our study of schools may reveal that the high status of

the class clown, the ribaldry found in making a fool of the teacher, the decidedly festiveatmosphere of school cafeterias serve as carnivalesque moments. These unofficialmoments of social expression may illustrate how the grotesque humor of disempoweredstudents may be fundamentally democratic, potentially emancipatory ideological actionstaken within the ambivalences of the carnivalesque. Likewise, the odd sounds, theflippant jokes behind teachers’ backs may serve as ideological challenges to the stiflingseriousness of official school life. Certainly the sociability engendered by such festiveacts suggests the utilization of these moments to counter the moments of individualrisk of failure in official class activities. Approaching the ethnography of the disempow-ered people with the recognition of the ambivalences of social discourse, especiallythose promoted by the unofficial and the carnivalesque, may help us understand theideological dynamics of the oppressed.

CONCLUSION

Since human beings and their cultures are constituted in dialogue, the presentationof humans as outside dialogue misrepresents life. Science is a dialogue located inhistory and bound by ideology, consequently social scientists cannot separate them-selves from their dialogical descriptions; they themselves are in the dialogue. On theother hand, to be part of a dialogue requires that the other voices be authentic. Dialoguerequires that unmerged voices be presented, that the multiple voices maintain theirintegrity. “The author of a polyphonic novel is not required to renounce himself or hisown consciousness,” Bakhtin wrote, “but he must to an extraordinary extent broaden,deepen and rearrange this consciousness . . . in order to accommodate the autonomousconsciousnesses of Ethnographers must learn to present their informants’voices accurately while at the same time placing them in a historical and ideologicalframework. Bakhtin is aware that the author of a novel is fully its author, and there isno reason why we should not accept that the author of an ethnography is just as fullyits author. What we must garner from Bakhtin‘s work is not just that culture isheteroglossic, but that it is dialogic and textual. Ethnography must always be understoodas discourse situated in time and place and as authored by humans participating in adiscourse of their own.

Cultural resistance theorists like Aronowitz and Giroux and critical ethnographerslike Connell, McLaren, Weis, and Willis have begun to portray disempowered groupsas existing in relation to dominant cultures. This recognition that marginalized peopledo not create a culture isolated from the social forces of power and history is essentialto our understanding of culture as it affects our educational institutions. Bakhtin provides

47. Ibid., 68.

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us with the concepts to extend these beginning efforts, to make possible the morecomplex and accurate descriptions of this resistance, and to reveal the manner inwhich the dominant cultures have penetrated the consciousness of many minoritychi d re n.

We are suggesting no less than a redefinition of the basis of critical ethnography,a set of concepts that redirects the focus of our ethnographic studies. A Bakhtinianview of culture forces us to ask many questions. What are the conditions that allowdifferent voices to be heard or others to be suppressed? What is the relationship ofpower existent in various expressions of dominant and subordinate voices? What arethe moral consequences that emerge from differing voices in teacher-student relation-ships? How can we better portray the politics of cultural difference? How do werecognize the place of both the private stories of individuals’ lives and the publicnarratives of official voice that come to constitute minority cultures? How do oppressedpeople come to participate in their own oppression? In which dialogues are “silenced”cultures really silenced, and in which ones lie the impulses for democratic transfor-mation? Our belief is that by building on Bakhtin’s concepts of dialogue, multivoicedness,and carnival, as well as time and space, characterization, ideology, and ambivalence,

we will be able to construct polyphonic ethnographies ocated in historical and ideologicalsituations and, therefore, portray more accurately the dialogic nature and transformativepossibilities of marginalized

Mcland

48. Many ideas in this paper were informed by discussions with Henry Giroux and Peter-aren; we would like to thank them for their careful and thoughtful reading of our manuscriptfor the many helpful conversations that we have had together. We would also like to thank

all of those people who have commented on the various manuscripts which led to this article,including the anonymous reviewers for this journal. Through such conversations our final paperis greatly improved.

Some parts of this essay were delivered in a paper at the annual meeting of the AmericanEducational Research Association in San Francisco, 1985, while others were delivered in a paper

at the Ethnography in Education Research Forum, P hiladelphia, 1987.

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carnival in cultural text

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