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Critical ethnography: Thereflexive turnDouglas E. FoleyPublished online: 25 Nov 2010.

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Critical ethnography: the re¯exive turn

DOUGLAS E. FOLEYUniversity of Texas, Austin

This paper explores the recent debates on ethnographic writing by explicating four types of re¯exivity: confessional, theoretical, textual, and deconstructive. It then illustrates how theauthor has incorporated such re¯exive practices into his recent ethnographies. The paper

generally advocates blending autobiography and ethnography into a ``cultural Marxist’’ stand-point. This perspective also draws upon multiple epistemologies and feminist notions of science,and it highlights the importance of writing in ordinary language. Such narrative experimenta-tion aims to replace the old scienti®c ethnographic realist narrative style with a more re¯exiverealist narrative style. The author argues that re¯exive epistemological and narrative practiceswill make ethnography a more engaging, useful, public storytelling genre.

Introduction

Many ethnographers claim we are living in an ``experimental moment’’ ( Journal of

Contemporary Ethnography, 1999; Marcus & Fischer, 1986). Some of us have been livingthat experimental moment for years. Writing scienti®c ethnographies for a few anthro-pologists has always seemed to me like a colossal waste of ``labor power.’’ Initially,adopting a more political notion of science called ``critical ethnography’ ’ (Carspecken,1996) made writing ethnographies feel less alienating. But after producing twocultural critiques rooted in Marxism (Foley et al., 1989; Foley, 1990), I began experi-menting with ways to make ethnography a more accessible, engaging, public genre. Aswe shall see, that led to some re¯exive epistemological and narrative practices thattraditional ethnographers might consider subjective and unscienti®c.

Most contemporary ethnographers will be familiar with the discussion that follows.There are already several excellent how-to-do it methods books (Co ey, 1999; Davies,1999) that advocate re¯exive ®eld practices and texts. This rumination on my experi-mentation with the ethnographic genre adds, I hope, to these debates. The nextsection presents some re¯ections on critical ethnography. The subsequent sectionde®nes four distinct, yet complimentary, re¯exive practices that transform the ideaof scienti®c ethnography. The ®nal section describes a hybrid narrative style thatemerged from such re¯exive practices. In retrospect, developing my own narrativestyle and voice was what ®nally made me feel more at home in the academic knowl-edge-production factory.

Some re¯ections on critical ethnography

When I became an ethnographer in the 1960s, very few American anthropologistsactually thought of themselves as critical ethnographers. Various apolitical types of

cultural analysis dominated cultural anthropology at Stanford and elsewhere. Those

QUALITATIVE STUDIES IN EDUCATION, 2002, VOL. 15, NO. 5, 469 ±490

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graduate students who were Students for Democratic Society (SDS) and antiwaractivists chafed under this regime. We wanted to do cultural studies that exposedexploitation and inequality. In that era, the only critical anthropologist s wereMarxist, and they generally studied the so-called undeveloped ``periphery’’ countries’

relations with the developed ``core’’ capitalist societies. Radical anthropologists con-centrated mainly on the political economies of tribal societies (Godelier, 1977) and theimpact of colonialism on agricultural economies (Wolfe, 1982). Traditional anthro-pologists dismissively labeled the study of colonialism and imperialism ``politicalscience.’’ They worried that such studies abandoned the basic ideals and objectivemethodologies of a scienti®c social science, thus the historic mission of ethnology to®nd the universals of human language and culture. In the 1960s graduate studentschampioning Marxist anthropology were thought of as little more than ideologues.

But events moved swiftly and by the early 1970s legions of American anthropol-

ogists had become disillusioned and were ``reinventing’’ the study of contemporarycore societies and cultures (Hymes, 1972). It became commonplace among my peersto acknowledge that anthropology was founded upon liberal, humanist doctrines of ameliorism, orientalism, colonialism, and racism. The time-honored charge of eth-nology to record and theorize cultural diversity was thrown into doubt. Recordingcultural diversity before Western capitalist expansion destroyed it had reducedanthropologists to museum curators of dead and dying cultures. Or worse still, theywere technical advisors to international ``development’’ projects that promoted globalcapitalism. Such were the options for would-be radical anthropologists who wanted tobring anthropology back home and transform the American empire.

Many of the early anthropological studies of marginalized populations in corecapitalist societies mimicked what the Chicago school of sociology had been doingsince the 1920s and 1930s. These sociologists studied ``deviant’’ groups like gangs,criminals, ethnics, and transvestites. Their goal was to make the culture and plight of these groups better understood and accepted. But as the 1960s civil rights movementsheated up, some ``activist anthropologists’ ’ decided to work even more directly for andwith oppressed groups. Rather than being sympathetic storytellers, activist anthro-

pologists sought to produce studies that helped win legal battles, rent strikes, andvarious political actions. Such studies had decidedly more political, partisan goalsthan the earlier sociological ethnographies. From this perspective critical ethnogra-phers joined ongoing political struggles as pens for hire. My peers who followed thisroute became dropouts, journalists, and independent anthropological activists.Unfortunately, they disappeared from the face of academe, and they never producedthe type of studies that bring tenure.

Those of us who stayed behind in academe did so with enormous guilt. Theprogressive labor wing of SDS, who fancied themselves labor organizers, made sureof that. They sco ed at the idea of producing theoretical tomes for other academics.To them, such pursuits were thinly disguised intellectual language games to hidebourgeois careerism. Such pseudoscienti®c studies produced little useful knowledgefor transforming society. As the Vietnam War wound down, we antiwar activists were joined by a new generation of post-1960s social scientists marching to all manner of isms. When I arrived at the University of Texas in 1970, the self-proclaimed``progressive faculty’’ was reading French poststructuralist s and deconstructionists .Initially, our study group though the new ``postmodern’’ perspective was interest-

ing but lacked the transformative political agenda of Marxism. Nevertheless, the

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unrelenting skepticism of postmodernism, along with the feminist and critical racecritiques, forced us to question further the limits of class analysis.

In response, we turned to a rich tradition of dissent within Marxism and readGerman Frankfort critical theorists, and French neo-Marxists, especially Pierre

Bourdieu. We also began exploring the work of a very eclectic group of British``new left’’ cultural theorists at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies(CCCS) (Forgaces, 1989). CCCS scholars were interrogating the seminal work of Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, French Marxist structuralist Luis Althusser,and British Marxist E.P. Thompson. The anthropologists in our group found thework of CCCS scholars Paul Willis (1976, 1981) and Stuart Hall (Morely & Chen,1996) particularly important for renovating anthropological concepts of culture. Thestory of ``cultural production’’ and ``practice’’ theorists’ in¯uence on Americananthropology has already been told in some detail (Lave, 1992; Ornter, 1984).

Levinson and Holland (1996) demonstrate that their in¯uence was particularly strongin the anthropology/sociology of education.Put far too simply, the innovation in these two ``neo-Marxist’’ perspectives was a

concept of culture that ®nally acknowledges class con¯ict and collective agency. Thestudy of classes as the social relations of production was transformed into the study of ``class cultures’’ with unique, self-valorizing expressive cultural practices and forms. Inthese formulations, various sites of cultural contestation and everyday cultural prac-tice were interrogated to better understand societal forces of power, dominance, andchange. Ultimately, most ``cultural Marxists,’’ often in response to feminist and crit-

ical race theorists, developed a multiple system of dominance/resistance perspectivesthat no longer privileged economic explanations of exploitation. Jamaican Stuart Halleventually added poststructuralist elements to class culture analysis (Morely & Chen,1996). Various Marxists (Hill, McLaren, Cole, & Rikowski, 1999) have accused Halland other ``post-Marxists’ ’ (Laclau & Mou e, 1985) of lapsing into philosophicalrelativism and abandoning the political core of class analysis.

But many American anthropologists still read Hall as democratizing and expand-ing rather than abandoning class theory (Foley & Moss, 2000). Defenders of Hall notethat he refocuses Marxian class theory in much the same way Antonio Gramsci (1971)did. Like Gramsci, he is interested in understanding how the ruling bloc builds civicconsent through the state and its cultural/educative institutions (schools, mass media,church, voluntary associations, and families). Since an historical ruling bloc’s abilityto control these cultural institutions through legal and moral force is never secure,there is always the possibility that the working class may create a progressive, counter-hegemonic culture and historical bloc. Consequently, Hall’s reformulation of classtheory privileges the study of how collective cultural identities are produced throughvarious cultural struggles.

In this reformulation, Marx’s original notion of alienation and objecti®cationthrough wage labor has been broadened to include objectifying, alienating, everydaycultural practices. Various cultural identity groups are reproduced and produce them-selves through communicative or expressive cultural practices in various cultural sites.The stigmatizing discourses about inferior ``cultural others’’ reproduce inequality and``steal’’ people’s subjectivity and humanity in much the same way that laboring incommodity-producing factories does. Cultural identity groups resist stigmatizationand marginalization and ``produce’’ themselves through self-valorizing expressivecultural forms (Foley, 1990; Gilroy, 1987; Limon, 1994; Pena, 1985, 1999) and

even through commodity consumption (Willis, 1990, 1999).

cri tical ethnograph y 471

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The poststructuralist turn in Hall’s perspective utilizes Foucault’s notions of powerand discourse. Hall contends that understanding the construction of ideological hege-mony requires focusing on key conjunctural moments or `àrticulations’’ within agiven social formation, e.g., the articulations between various popular discourses

such as nationalism, Catholicism, racism, and classism. Post-Marxist critical ethno-graphers often do ``critical discourse analyses’’ (Luke, 1995±96) of how the capitaliststate and its cultural institutions produce a civil society ®lled with both acquiescenceand cultural struggle. Hall et al.’s (1978) own empirical study of how the British stateand media mobilize racist, nationalistic discourses into hegemonic ideologies is anexcellent example of this type of cultural critique. The poststructuralis t idea of astate administrative surveillance system working through various hegemonic dis-courses expands and compliments the Marxian notion of economic power. Withoutdwelling too much on the di erences between various neo- and post-Marxists , it

su ces to say that these perspectives represent new, useful ways of understandingand critiquing capitalist culture. Moreover, cultural Marxists generally situate anyanalysis of cultural struggle within the existing political economy and capitalist state.Classic Marxian notions of class struggle are expanded and ampli®ed through culturalcritiques, not abandoned.

Self-proclaimed critical ethnographers who march to the cultural Marxist drum-mer hope to create a practical, value-laden science that generates the knowledgeneeded to foster a democratic society and a critical citizenry. In the Gramscian(1971) or Freirean (1973) formulations, such knowledge production is part of a

long dialogic consciousness-raising process. Such knowledge production should havean `èmancipatory intent `` (Habermas, 1971) or a ``catalytic validity’’ (Lather, 1991)that challenges the status quo in some way. Such a value-laden, didactic, practicalsocial science di ers markedly from a traditional, positivist notion of science.Positivists generally idealize a neutral, value-free social science that mimics the naturalsciences in method and purpose. In contrast, cultural Marxist ethnographers oftenadopt what philosopher Richard Bernstein (1983) calls a ``practical rationality’’ thatsteers a middle course between the extreme objectivism of scienti®c rationality, andthe extreme subjectivism of antirationalist, antirealist critics of science. As we shall see,such a practical rationality can be based on rather di erent notions of epistemologyand ®eldwork.

Characterizing the philosophical assumptions of all critical ethnographers isobviously an impossible task. Such ethnographers now ground their ethnographicpractice in a variety of philosophical perspectives. Nevertheless, perhaps most so-called critical ethnographers still think of themselves as doing intensive empiricalinvestigations of everyday, lived cultural reality. They still do at least a year of ®eld-work using the conventional ethnographic methods of participant observation, keyinformants, and interviewing. Such empirical investigations are often founded on thefollowing general ontological and epistemological assumptions: (1) All cultural groupsproduce an intersubjective reality which is both `ìnherited’’ and continually con-structed and reconstructed as it is lived or practiced. This shared cultural reality isexternal in the sense that Bourdieu de®nes ``habitas’’ (Bourdieu & Waquant, 1992). Itis a distinct, lived historical tradition `òbjecti®ed’’ through structuring practices(laws, public policies, cultural conventions). The habitas of a lived historical traditionis marked by a collective memory of particular ecological, geo-political, embodied,spaces/places; (2) a well-trained, re¯exive investigator can know that historical ,

socially constructed reality in a partial, provisional sense through an intensive, experi-


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ential encounter with people who live by these cultural constructions of reality; and(3) a re¯exive investigator, who has experienced this unfamiliar cultural space and hasdialogued with its practitioners, can portray this cultural space and its people in aprovisionally accurate manner. This is an admittedly a very cryptic representation of

the philosophical foundations of contemporary critical ethnography. But these are aset of assumptions to which I, and perhaps many critical ethnographers, subscribe.After writing several critical ethnographies from this general perspective, I began

incorporating more feminist, postmodern, and autoethnographi c practices.Oversimplifying greatly, these various critiques seemed to boil down to a more modestnotion of the social sciences. To make ethnography at least quasi-objective, one has tobecome much more re¯exive about all ethnographic practices ± from ®eld relationsand interpretive practices to producing texts. Since re¯exivity is a very slippery term,the following section di erentiates between various types of re¯exivity, and a subse-

quent section illustrates these practices with examples from my ethnographic texts.

The re¯exive ideal and its many guises

According to philosopher Hillary Lawson (1985), from the Greeks on, most thinkershave practiced some form of re¯exivity. From the early 1900s through the 1950s,however, a particularly unre¯exive style of social scienti®c research, founded uponlogical positivism, took root in the United States. By the 1970s American anthropol-

ogists were reading various philosophical critiques of positivism. The initial anthro-pological response was quite varied, but one in¯uential special issue of Semiotica editedby Barbara Babcock (1980) is particularly noteworthy. The notion of re¯exivityguiding that collection rests heavily on George Herbert Mead’s modernist, symbolicinteractionist perspective. For Babcock, re¯exivity is the capacity of language and of thought ± of any system of signi®cation ± to turn or bend back upon itself, thusbecoming an object to itself. Directing one’s gaze at one’s own experience makes itpossible to regard oneself as `òther.’’ Through a constant mirroring of the self, oneeventually becomes re¯exive about the situated, socially constructed nature of the self,and by extension, the other. In this formulation, the self is a multiple, constructed self that is always becoming and never quite ®xed, and the ethnographic productions of such a self and the ``cultural other’’ are always historically and culturally contingent.

Babcock warns her anthropological colleagues that such self-referential re¯ectionstend to generate an `èpistemological paradox.’’ Turning in on oneself in a criticalmanner tends to produce awareness that there are no absolute distinctions betweenwhat is ``real’’ and what is ``®ction,’’ between the ``self’’ and the `òther.’’Methodologically, this means that we are forced to explore the self±other relationshipsof ®eldwork critically if we are to produce more discriminating, defensible interpreta-tions. In Babcock’s modernist formulation of re¯exivity there remains a degree of optimism that the road to quasi-objective knowledge claims is through a re¯exive,self-critical awareness of our limits as interpreters. It is only through being re¯exivethat we explode our fantasies about ethnographic texts being copies of reality. We alsode¯ate any fantasies we hold about absolute truth and objectivity.

George Marcus (1998) labels this form of re¯exivity ``confessional’’ and claimssuch interrogations of subjectivity have become fairly standard in contemporaryAmerican ethnography . Barbara Tedlock (1991) notes that so-called confessional

re¯exivity actually began before postmodernism with the publication of


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Malinowski’s (1967) surprisingly frank diary. Many mini-diaries and personal journals (Dumont, 1978; Dwyer, 1982; Frielich, 1970; Golde, 1970; Spindler, 1970;Rabinow, 1977), and several important theoretical re¯ections quickly followed(Crapanzano, 1980; Dwyer, 1982; Fabian, 1983). Important questions were raised

about not only self±other ®eld relationships but also ethical and political questions onthe colonial nature of anthropological scholarship. Tedlock argues that during the1970s and 1980s such confessional re¯ections were only permissible, however, after onehad published separate formal scienti®c realist ethnography. Anthropologists of thatera were essentially keeping two sets of books and writing in a somewhat schizophrenicmanner.

Marginalized feminist (Abu-Lughod, 1991; Behar, 1993, 1996; Behar & Gordon,1995; Krieger, 1991) and native ethnographer s (Gwaltney, 1980; Hanyano, 1979;Narayan, 1993) began incorporating such re¯ections into their formal ethnographies.

Some have labeled these highly subjective, mixed-genre texts ``autoethnography,’ ’ i.e.,a blend of autobiography and ethnography (Reed-Danahay, 1997). This collectionconveys well the wide variety of ethnographic practices subsumed under this rubric.On one end of the continuum is Carolyn Ellis’s (1995) heartfelt, intensely personalstudy of her relationship with a dying loved one, and on the other end is my broad, lessintimate community study of White±Indian race relations in my hometown (Foley,1995). Whatever their di erences, most autoethnographer s are openly subjective.They seek to undermine grandiose authorial claims of speaking in a rational, value-free, objective, universalizing voice. From this perspective, the author is a living,

contradictory, vulnerable, evolving multiple self, who speaks in a partial, subjective,culture-bound voice. Some of my favorite so-called confessional pieces are from thepens of Ruth Behar (1993, 1996), Carolyn Ellis (1995), Susan Krieger (1991), DorrineKondo (1990), and Renato Rosaldo (1989). As we shall see, what autoethnographersgenerally advocate is related to but goes well beyond Marcus’s ideal type called``confessional re¯exivity.’’

Cuban-American anthropologist Ruth Behar (1996) practices this type of re¯ex-ivity in a particularly intense manner, and she has sought to explain her practice morethan most autoethnographer s have. Behar says quite provocatively , ``Anthropologythat does not break your heart is not worth doing.’’ She entreats ethnographers to bemuch more emotionally open, thus vulnerable, observers and interpreters ± or ``wit-nesses’’ as she prefers to call it. To her ethnography is a long, irreversible voyagethrough a tunnel with no apparent exit. Hence, anyone presumptuou s enough toretell the stories about others must surrender to the intractableness of reality. Theymust ®nd a way of witnessing that is neither cold nor afraid to reveal what she calls thehidden dialectic between connection and otherness. Behar insists that exploring theself±other tunnel requires emotion. To break with objectivism, she draws upon heart-felt autobiographica l memories and her feelings of sorrow, shame, fear, loathing, guilt,vanity, and self-deception.

Behar’s reformulation is strongly reminiscent of what earlier existential sociologists(Douglas & Johnson, 1977) were advocating. The ethnographer is much more will-ing to utilize introspection, intuition, and personal memories. Like earlier phenomen-ological sociologists (Schutz, 1964), she acknowledges the inseparability of theoreticallanguage and constructs from everyday language and thought. Consequently, sheutilizes her commonsense understanding of life as much as she uses the abstracttheoretical constructs of her discipline. This addition of, for lack of a better word, a

more artistic way of knowing is a fusion of disciplinary epistemologies. Unlike many


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``scienti®c ethnographers,’’ Behar, and perhaps most autoethnographers , are unwill-ing to privilege the rational over the emotional. Doing so reproduces the old Cartesianmind±body dualism, which leaves us subscribing to a series of unfortunate dichoto-mies: science±humanities, objective±subjective, rational±intuitive, and male±female.

A closely related reformulation of epistemological assumptions has also emergedout of feminist (Harding, 1998), racial (Collins, 1990), indigenous (Tuhiwami Smith,1999) and borderland (Villenas & Foley, 2002) standpoint theories. Such calls for amore situated, embodied way of knowing emphasize an analytic standpoint rooted inthe solidarity and sensibility that cultural and class struggles often produce. Manywhite middle-class autoethnographer s (Ellis & Bochner, 1996, 2001) tend to valorizegeneralized notions of emotion, intuition, and aesthetics as their ground of knowingrather than their historical experiences with economic, cultural, racial, and genderstruggles. As more scholars of color incorporate autobiographical practices into their

ethnographies , they will almost certainly challenge mainstream autoethnographer s inmuch the same way the feminists of color challenged feminism. For me, standpointtheory in its various guises helps historicize the somewhat abstract calls to be moreintuitive and poetic.

Leaving aside di erences between standpoint theory and autoethnography , itwould seem that both perspectives are advocating a more intuitive, experientialway of knowing. Consequently, both challenge the positivistic ideal of developingand relying upon universal second-order scienti®c metalanguages. Autoethnographer sof all strips valorize ordinary, connotative language over scienti®c, denotative lan-

guage. They rely on the literary language of metaphor, irony, parody, satire as muchas they rely on social scienti®c metalanguages. Using a much more robust, embodied,situated language allows autoethnographi c interpreters to engage more fully theintractability of life. It allows them to evoke the richness and complexity of everydaylife through complex symbolic language and dramatic, personal stories. As variousautoethnographer s have explained, the act of writing itself becomes a way of beingand knowing.

Traditional, theoretical ethnographers are quick to dismiss autoethnograph y as aself-indulgent, narcissistic ``diary disease’’ (Geertz, 1988), or excessively subjective,shallow ``textual re¯exivity’’ (Bourdieu & Waquant, 1992). Indeed, it is hard toimagine grand theorists like Geertz and Bourdieu representing themselves as experi-encing cultural others in a vulnerable, emotional, embodied manner. Most accom-plished authoethnographers would probably agree that highly autobiographica lre¯exive practices, in the hands of an unskilled or egocentric practitioner, can de-generate into self-serving, narcissistic, heroic portrayals of the ethnographer.Incorporating much more of the researcher’s personal self and utilizing a more artistic,a ective way of knowing is not without problems. But as Phil Carspecken (1996) andAndrew Sparks (2002) note, retaining the idea of a self/author in dialogue withcultural others positions the researcher in important ways. First, being a dialogicknower or witness to a cultural scene positions the ethnographer as a much lessimperial, authoritative learner. Second, it obligates the researcher to embrace her/his personal indebtedness and responsibility towards other individuals. As we shall see,being a knower/witness with a personal, cultural history (a very modernist notion) isquite di erent from being a detached theoretical, scienti®c knower (Bourdieu &Waquant, 1992) or a detached poetic, postmodern knower (Tyler, 1986).

To create his second ideal type of re¯exivity, Marcus draws a sharp dichotomy

between the subjective, ``confessional re¯exivity’’ of feminists and the more objective,


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``theoretical re¯exivity’’ of Pierre Bourdieu. Put too simply, Bourdieu’s grand projectis to replace reigning macrosociological perspectives such as systems theory and func-tionalism with an alternative, foundational perspective. Somewhat like earlier phe-nomenological and ethnomethodologica l sociologists, he too is advocating a return to

the study of everyday life and `èthnopractices.’’ For Bourdieu, an `èpistemologicallyre¯exive’’ sociologist grounds her theoretical constructs in the everyday cultural prac-tices of the subjects. Such a move replaces abstract armchair theorizing about every-day life with an experiential, abductive (deductive and inductive) way of knowing. Anabductive ethnographer must tack back and forth mentally between her concrete ®eldexperience and her abstract theoretical explanations of that experience. In the end,``theoretical re¯exivity’’ should produce a reasonably objective, authoritative accountof the cultural other.

Where Bourdieu di ers radically with autoethnographer s is in his aversion to their

existential notion of an experiential, intuitive, introspective knower. Like other Frenchpoststructuralist thinkers, he distances himself from existentialist or Hegelian notionsof consciousness and an autonomous self. But, unlike most poststructuralis t thinkers,Bourdieu does not reduce the self, subjectivity, and authors to mere `è ects’’ of discourses. His concept of the self or subjectivity retains a much stronger notion of individual agency in relation to dominating structures (Holland, Lachicotte Jr.,Skinner, & Cain, 1998). Although Bourdieu does not have as robust a notion of collective agency as Marx does, his perspective of cultural actors enacting, breaking,and improvising on the normative rules of a given setting is very grounded and

historical. Ultimately, practice theory has a much stronger, more sociological notionof subjectivity, consciousness, and individual agency that most postmodern theoriesdo.

Given Bourdieu’s more sociological notion of self, he calls upon sociologists to bere¯exive in a di erent way than existentialist and phenomenological social scientistsare re¯exive. He argues that a truly re¯exive sociology must also make transparenthow they, as members of a vast academic knowledge-production process, producetruth claims and facts. Bourdieu calls this a ``sociology of sociology’’ that uncoversor `òbjectivates’’ the in¯uence of the scienti®c ``®eld’’ on the interpreting self. Toproduce a local account of knowledge production, an ethnographer must pay parti-cular attention to how the practices and discourses of his/her own discipline a ectwhat and how he/she thinks and writes. Woolgar and Latour’s (1978) exhaustiveethnographic study of a biomechanical laboratory illustrates nicely how to paymore attention to the ``®eld’’ of knowledge production. They demonstrate how deeplyembedded the physical scientists and the ethnographers are in the local relationshipsand politics of the laboratory and their disciplinary specialty. In this type of re¯ex-ivity, the author also consciously situates her representational practices within thedisciplines of past knowledge constructions. Such an interpretive move makes trans-parent the socially constructed, historically situated nature of the authors’ ``facts,’’thus the partiality of their truth claims. Autoethnographers rarely do a sociologicalcritique of the ®eld of production of their texts. They tend to explore psychologicalmatters or feelings more than the sociological, structural conditions of their interpret-ations.

Practice and cultural production perspectives also generally have stronger notionsof agency (praxis) and structure (history) than many autoethnographer s and post-modern ethnographers have. They either focus on how classes of people negotiate,

assimilate, and transform their lived, structured, historical reality or on the collective


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agency of groups. This more historical, political notion of reality is emphasized morethan in autoethnographic and postmodern perspectives. Most cultural Marxists alsosubscribe to a more constructivist ontology that historical cultural forms and practicesexist, as a phenomenologist would say, ``beyond the horizon’’ or consciousness of

ordinary people. To map these cultural constructions, ethnographic knowers are`èpistemologically re¯exive’’ in a least two ways. First, they must critically analyzethe disciplinary and discursive historical context that shapes them and their interpret-ations. Second, they must practice a systematic, disciplined abductive process of the-ory development within and against the discursive traditions of a discipline(s).

From this perspective, the rational social scientist knows reality through the powerof her/his conceptual framework. The abductive process that conjoins theory andempirical ®eldwork eventually produces constructs or heuristic devices used for map-ping and representing (`òbjectivating’’) the taken-for-granted cultural and political

practices observed. Any abstract metalanguage used to map said reality, e.g., ``classformation,’’ ``taste culture,’’ `ìdeological hegemony’’ is best understood as conditionalconstructions grounded in historical `àrticulations’’ (Morely & Chen, 1996) or``practices’’ (Bourdieu & Waquant, 1992). Consequently, these mappings are alwaysapproximate and subject to reformulation and debate within the ®eld of production.Yet no matter how provisional a construct or explanation may be, it functions as a lensor heuristic device which maps cultural practices and spaces much like cartographersmap physical space.

A neo-Marxist abductive ethnographic knower does not generally utilize her/his

artistic, intuitive, introspective sensibilities the way an existential autoethnographermight. He/she is more inclined to privilege the rational, theoretical, scienti®c perspec-tive. Paul Willis’s earlier work on profane and working-class culture is somewhat of anexception (Willis, 1976, 1981). His working-class background and training in thehumanities is much more apparent than in his later theoretical re¯ections on culturalconsumption (Willis, 1999). In contrast, autoethnographer s tend to be more personaland literary and less explicitly theoretical. But as previously noted, some autoethno-graphers do try to hold these two seemingly contradictory ways of knowing in tension.They try to utilize both a scienti®c and a more artistic way of knowing. Being situated,embodied, historical selves/characters in the text, they are far less likely to disappearbehind a grand rational, theoretical framework or, as we shall see, a grand anti-theoretical postmodern call for poetics.

The third and ®nal ideal type highlighted in Marcus’s (1994) typology is the morepostmodern notion `ìntertextual re¯exivity.’’ The most obvious type of intertextualre¯exivity practiced by many scholars is historiography. Most narrative historianshave been trained to pore over and classify the di erences between interpretationsby historical period or era. The rhetorical interplay between di erent texts and inter-pretations is deconstructed, and such deconstructions become the basis and justi®ca-tion for reinterpreting past conventional wisdoms and knowledge claims. Manyethnographers develop intertextual sensibility, but as Johannes Fabian (1983) pointsout, they are prone to valorize the present and lapse into the timeless, authoritativenarrative style of the `èthnographic present.’’ Such practices may make ethnogra-phers somewhat less intertextually re¯exive than historians generally are.

Intertextual re¯exivity also refers to the rhetorical use of representational prac-tices. The early postmodern critiques of ethnography (Cli ord, 1988; Marcus &Fischer, 1986) called upon ethnographers to be much more self-conscious about

their narrative and representational practices. These critiques highlighted the limits


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of scienti®c realists texts and call upon ethnographers to be much more experimentalnarratively. Robert Stam’s (1985) exploration of literary and cinematic texts providesa good introduction to how modernist artists have manipulated the conventions of their genres. A nice example of how artists build re¯exivity into their texts is FrancË ois

Tru aut’s Day for Night

(Stam, 1985). The movie is about making a movie, thus seeksto make its narrative practice transparent. It creates what deconstructionists call an``aporia,’’ a gap or uncertainty that the movie is really a copy of life. Like Latour andWoolgar’s theoretically re¯exive account of the scienti®c laboratory, Day for Night blurs the taken-for-granted narrative conventions of the genre; consequently, it callsinto question our assumptions about fact/®ction, natural/constructed, and truth/falsity. But Marcus’s ideal type, ``textual re¯exivity,’’ although somewhat postmodern,fails to convey a more radical notion of re¯exivity that Kamala Visweswaran (1994)aptly labels ``deconstructive re¯exivity.’’

The postmodern notion of ``deconstructive re¯exivity’’

Most antifoundational postmodern thinkers would argue that the three aforemen-tioned types of re¯exivity still do not break su ciently with modernist epistemologicalassumptions and scienti®c ideals. To these critics, the recent concern over re¯exivity islittle more than a very old positivist longing for an objective, foundational socialscience. Philosopher Hillary Lawson’s (1985) discussion of antifoundationa l re¯exivity

highlights how Nietsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Derrida initiated full-scaleattacks on the modernist ideal of providing a reliable epistemology for the ``factual’’disciplines of social science and history. For many years antifoundationalist s haveargued that a scienti®c epistemology based on ordinary language is susceptible towhat philosophers call the ``liar’s paradox.’’

To illustrate the liar’s paradox, Lawson tells the story of the Cretan prophetEpimenides who observed, ``All Cretans are liars.’’ Epmenides did so to demonstratethat categorical knowledge claims invariably falsify themselves. In this particular case,we have a Cretan asserting that it is true that all Cretans are liars. If all Cretans areliars, how is it possible that one Cretan can be telling the truth about all Cretans beingliars? This truth claim, like all absolute truth claims is based on an either/or logic thatinvariably degenerates into a paradoxical, contradictory knowledge claim.

Recent deconstructionists like Derrida have used semiotics to restate this radicalform of skepticism. He points out that all signi®cation systems invariably generatesuch logical paradoxes. The moment we imagine ourselves representing externalreality through purportedly rational constructs, we lose sight of these constructs’commonsense, metaphorical character. When we deconstruct our allegedly objectivetheoretical constructs, i.e., subject them to a rigorous rhetorical analysis, they turn outto be full of hierarchical preferences expressed through their either/or logic.Conceptual distinctions like bourgeois±proletariat, male±female, black±white inevit-ably ``defer’’ or displace meaning, i.e., ®x meaning in a way that is contrary to the waywebs of signi®cation work. Signi®cation systems generate an endless, indeterminateplay of signi®ers that never produce one ®xed meaning but rather analogical distinc-tions based on paradoxical both/and logic.

Since our invented linguistic categories are always caught up in webs of signi®ca-tion and the ceaseless play of signi®ers, our attempts at logically, rationally stabilizing

inherently unstable, ambiguous conceptual distinctions are doomed to fail. Radical


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postmodernists argue that our best hope may be to abandon our desire to know in anyabsolute sense and to make grand, foundational constructs and knowledge claims.According to deconstructionists, the best way out of this linguistic/semiotic quagmireis actually to embrace the paradoxical , analogical both/and logic of signi®cation

systems. As we shall see, some postmodern ethnographers embrace the more analogi-cal logic of poetic images rather than either/or dichotomies. As Rosenau (1992) sug-gests, one could read this philosophical position as skeptical to the point of nihilismand relativism. Or one could read it as a radical skepticism that constantly searches fora deeper, less ideological, more realistic position than the so-called realists.

Postmodern ethnographer Patti Lather (2001) advocates this more radical, anti-foundational position in what she considers a constructive manner. She stresses theneed to open up rather than foreclose analytic categories and advocates exploring theaporias or indeterminate character of all representational attempts. She highlights the

deep commitment of postmodern thinkers to indeterminate, evocative, poetic accountsof experience or reality. As Lather puts it, being theoretical is actually about ``gettinglost’’ and building on the ``ruins’’ of knowledge rather than assuredly mapping anddiscovering reality. To be ``theoretically re¯exive,’’ in the deconstructive sense, is to beradically skeptical about the stability and utility of all theoretical constructs, thus allattempts by scientists to mimic or visually map reality. From her perspective, auto-ethnographers often use postmodern rhetoric to justify their poetic, evocative texts,but they continue to use modernist, realist notions of the self, author, voice, text, andscience. What, then, does a more postmodern notion of author and text look like?

Steven Tyler’s (1986, pp. 125±126) in¯uential essay on authorless, evocative post-modern texts articulates in detail an alternative to realist ethnographies:

A post-modern ethnography is a cooperatively evolved text consisting of frag-ments of discourse intended to evoke in the minds of both reader and writer anemergent fantasy of a possible world of commonsense reality, and thus to pro-voke an aesthetic integration that will have a therapeutic e ect. It is, in a word,poetry ± not in its textual form, but in its return to the original context andfunction of poetry, which by means of its performative break with everyday

speech, evoked memories of the ethos of the community, thereby provokedhearers to act ethically.

Tyler’s explanation of what it means to evoke reality like a poet emphasizes the needto abandon the visualist metaphor of scienti®c discourses. When an ethnographerevokes rather than explains the lived reality of others, he/she refrains from all mono-logic, rational attempts to map, explain, classify, and describe social facts/reality.According to Tyler, a fragmented, polyphonic text operates like poetic metaphorsdo. Metaphoric representations shift the burden of making meaning to the reader,or as Tyler puts it, create a paradoxical, dialogic encounter between author±text±reader. It is this encounter, not the author’s explicit subjectivity or theoretical virtu-osity, that produces meaning. It is in this sense that the postmodern ethnographerabolishes the self or author so central to modernist texts.

Illustrating what this sort of deconstructive re¯exivity looks like textually is di -cult because few ethnographies are thoroughly postmodern. Contrary to popularstereotypes, full-blown postmodern ethnographies (Dorst 1989; Gomez-Pena, 1996;Lather & Smithies, 1997; Stewart, 1996) are neither relativistic nor nihilistic. Theyoften make rather strong political and cultural critiques, but they are not poetic in the

modernist, realist sense. There is no author-poet waxing autobiographically about his


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relationships, life, and the landscape (Foley, 1998; Foley & Moss, 2000). Perhaps acloser analogy might be the impressionist painter or poet who intuitively arrangeslight and color and shapes or words in disjunctive, unexpected ways. For example,Lather and Smithies (1997) attempt to do this through a pastiche or collage of

factoids, unmediated voices, footnoted authorial re¯ections, and visual/verbal imagesof angels. Somewhat like painters/poets, they deploy the ambiguous, polyvocal meta-phor of angels found in Western mythology to `èvoke’’ the meaning of the AIDS crisesfor their HIV-positive subjects. Ultimately, the reader encounters their artistic juxta-position of human voices, factoids about AIDS, and the angel metaphors. This para-doxical encounter of author±text±reader evokes meaning without explicitlyrepresenting in a realist, mimetic sense who these women are or how they copewith their disease. The only realist dimension of the text is its portrayal of a focusgroup of HIV-positive women sharing what they consider their ``true stories.’’

Other postmodern ethnographers seem to practice deconstructive re¯exivitythrough very explicit rhetorical analysis of textual images (Norris, 1982). Typically,the cultural critic/author ``lays ruin to’’ or deconstructs an unstable, ambiguous hier-archy of ideas or concepts in popular and/or academic discourses. Kathleen Stewart(1996) does such a deconstruction when she portrays how academics and journaliststypically represent poor white Appalachians and the region as ``the other America.’’The text presents troubling, powerful images of many outsiders stereotypingAppalachia. It also contrasts the way eloquent, poetic Appalachians construct theirown reality through memories and plain talk. Stewart creates a collage of

Appalachian talk and memory of place that `èvokes’’ rather than explains andmaps what she aptly calls `à space at the side of the road’’ in America. Again, thereader is left to make sense of a relentlessly deconstructive, somewhat disjunctive textthat also includes a good deal of theoretical discussion. Stewart ®lls her text withdisclaimers about any ethnographer, including her ever ``getting it right,’’ ever pro-ducing a de®nitive, true account. Such methodological ruminations and her decon-struction of others’ texts actually make Stewart a much more explicit author thanLather and Smithies are. Nevertheless, both of these postmodern ethnographies seemto be good examples of Tyler’s (1986) ideal of a more authorless, evocative textproduced in conjunction with research subjects and readers.

Having rejected ethnography as a scienti®c, objective enterprise, thoroughly post-modern ethnographers have trouble representing their epistemology as rational, tech-nical, systematic , or abductive. Having renounced modernist notions of the self,author, and realist narrative forms, they cannot easily represent their epistemologyas introspective, intuitive, and experiential. Stripped of any trustworthy way of know-ing, the more fundamentalist postmodern view (Lather & Smithies, 1997; Tyler,1986) seems to fall back on the abstract ideal of being more like artists than empiricalsocial scientists. This formulation creates considerable rhetorical distance from themodernist dream of scientists telling true stories about the cultural other. It alsowhittles the author function down to the ambiguous notion of evocative poetic texts.

Yet as hard as I try, I cannot imagine entirely authorless texts, or entirely evoca-tive, poetic ethnographies. And it would seem that many practicing feminist post-structuralist and postcolonial ethnographers cannot either (Behar, 1996; Ellis, 1995;Pillow, n.d.; St. Pierre & Pillow, 2000; Villenas, 1996). Many of these new ethnogra-phers are actually producing very eclectic texts with many modernist elements. Someauthors situate themselves as characters in the text that have personal and cultural

histories. Others explicitly deploy theoretical constructs and make explicit knowledge


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claims based on data. For example, Kirby Moss’s (2002) ``deconstructionistethnography’ ’ of the white working class utilizes his African-American sensibilityand a realist narrative to deconstruct the notions of racial and class privilege. Inshort, the new wave of ``postmodern ethnographers’ ’ does not seem to follow the

dictates of Tyler’s perspective (1987) as closely as Lather or Stewart do.In my own case, I was only able to go so far down the road of experimentation.Once you strip ethnographies of their allegorical force and their evidentiary claims,ethnographic texts must rise and fall on their artistic, literary virtuosity. Like mostsocial scientists , I have doubts about being able to produce a genuinely evocative,poetic text. Consequently, I fell back on a realist storytelling style that is based on``data,’’ thus still makes evidentiary claims. When these texts were written, I had fewexplicit ideas about types of re¯exivity or narrative styles. Looking back through mytypology, my recent ethnographies are neither scienti®c realist texts nor postmodern

antirealist text. What follows is how I tried to make my ethnographic texts morepersonal and re¯exive, thus more open, accessible, and public.

Some re¯ections on the production of ethnographic texts

In a recent ethnography , Learning capitalist culture (LCC) (1990), I portray how aSouth Texas high school stages the deployment of di erent kinds of linguistic capital.The study highlights how middle-class Chicano students use deceptive and dehuman-

izing bourgeois speech styles to achieve school success, yet retain their ethnic distinc-tiveness and pride. Conversely, working-class Chicanos deploy nonstandard Englishand nonbourgeois manners and are labeled, punished, and pushed out of school. Theirlack of communicative competence in deceptive speech preserves their working-classlanguage, thus increases their chances of failing. Theoretically, this work represents anextension of Marx’s notion of alienated labor and Lukacs’s (1971) rei®cation thesisinto the domain of everyday language or ``communicative or expressive labor.’’

Narratively, LCC breaks more thoroughly with the language of scienti®c ethno-graphy than Peones to politicos (Foley, Mota, Post, & Lozano, 1989) did. To avoid jargon-®lled descriptions of football, dating, and academic work, my theoretical/inter-pretive perspective is placed in an appendix. This narrative move violates a sacredconvention of scienti®c realist narratives: the textual unity of a running theoreticalcommentary of ``thickly’’ described everyday cultural practices. In addition, my inter-pretive perspective is presented in an autobiographical style. Personal class experi-ences are juxtaposed with academic readings. There is no pretense that I amdeploying an abstract, universalistic scienti®c theory without personal roots. I repre-sent myself as a proud working-class, ``organic intellectual’’ (Gramsci, 1971) doing acultural critique of class cultures.

In addition, vignettes of my interactions with kids and teachers are sprinkledthroughout the text. They help convey that the narrative was mutually produced.There is no pretense that I am standing above or outside the experience and simplyrecording it. The text generally has what John Van Mannen (1988) calls an ``impres-sionist’’ ®rst-person style. The story of how youth learn capitalist culture is told with ahealthy dose of metaphor, irony, parody, and satire. Speci®c events and actualpersonal encounters are reported rather than composite typi®cations of events andcharacters. Such an extensive use of ordinary language narrative practices makes the

story very accessible to nonacademic readers.


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Nevertheless, the tone and voice of LCC is still very analytic and striving to maketranscendent statements. The text is tightly structured around a uni®ed theoreticalperspective and its strong knowledge claims. One small South Texas is writ large asAmerican culture in general. Key constructs like ``impression management’’, ``making

out games’’, and ``bonded sexuality’’ are used to authoritatively map and explain thecultural reality of South Texas and America. The text is realist in the sense in whichLukacs (1962) characterizes 19th-century bourgeois novels. He argues that socialistintellectuals and 19th-century bourgeois artists and novelists practice critical or``dialectical realism’’ when they uncover the hidden, dehumanizing rei®cation of everyday life under capitalism. At the time, I did not describe my narrative practiceas dialectical realism, but in retrospect, my primary goals were similar to those of thesenovelists. Like them, I wanted ``to reveal the driving forces of history which areinvisible to actual consciousness.’’ The ordinary language games observed in class-

rooms, dating, and sports were conceptualized as a kind of linguistic factory thatstaged highly ritualized speech events. During these events, humans treated eachother as objects, thus reproduced the logic of capitalism. I, the transcendent ethno-graphic observer of capitalist ideology, was providing a ``deeper reading’’ of whatmost Americans take for granted as fun and ful®lling.

LCC also begins to use personal memories and an ordinary language voice in acautious but explicit manner. I also make my ideological standpoint or interpretivelens very clear, and I reconstruct Marxist class theory in a re¯exive manner. Thereis, however, relatively little concern over the question of misrepresentation or littleinclination to do a sociology of knowledge critique of my interpretation. In retrospect,LCC is clearly responding to the initial postmodern critiques of ethnography(Cli ord, 1988; Marcus & Fischer, 1986). On the other hand, I am still claimingthat LCC is a quasi-objective account based on the epistemological assumptions of scholars like Bourdieu and Gadamer. Although I remain proud of this two-volume,16-year study of the Chicano Civil rights movement (Foley, 1990; Foley et al., 1989), Ifelt it did not break su ciently with the epistemological and narrative practices of scienti®c realism (Marcus & Cushman, 1982). The study made a ``grand’’ theoretical

statement, but it did not expand the genre of ethnographic storytelling as much as Ihad hoped.

My most recent ethnography , The heartland chronicles (Foley, 1995), a study of White±Indian relations in my hometown, remains grounded in an abductive episte-mology, and it continues to map the reality of cultural others with metaconstructs.Like a good cultural Marxist, I use Gramsci’s notion of hegemony and Foucault’snotion of a discursive regime as heuristic devices to map the cultural struggle betweenWhites and Indians over assimilation/cultural survival. I portray my hometown asawash in ``discursive skirmishes’’ over Indians dying on train-tracks, brawling in bars,sitting silent in schools, missing football practice, and keeping house poorly. Mesquakinovelists, historians, journalists, and political cartoonists counter these local Whitestories and the assimilationist texts of academics and journalists with their own anti-assimilationist texts and oral stories. In addition to highlighting such cultural politics,Chronicles also includes extensive material on everyday conventional politics. TheMesquaki civil rights movement is chronicled as a series of barroom ®ghts, studentwalkouts, and American Indian Movement (AIM)-led courthouse demonstrations .These portrayals of cultural and conventional politics are presented with no explicit

discussion of the aforementioned theoretical constructs.


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Consequently, most reviewers have focused on the text’s re¯exive, narrative style.And, to my great surprise, Chronicles is often labeled a ``postmodern text,’’ despite itsmodernist notions of epistemology and author, and its realist narrative style.Moreover, it would seem that making the text highly accessible to ordinary readers

made my use of theoretical constructs and political critique inaccessible to academicreaders! No one points out that the text is analyzing the discursive production of thehegemonic assimilationist discourse. I hope that the following discussion will conveythe idiosyncratic mix of experimental practices used in the Chronicles.

Experimenting with confessional, autobiographical re¯exivity

I followed the lead of recent feminist ethnographers who champion using an auto-biographical voice (Behar & Gordon, 1995; Oakely & Callaway, 1992; Reed-Danahay, 1997). This new style of autobiographical writing breaks with the oldWestern, modernist notion of autobiography in several important ways. Gone is the®ction that individuals evolve into a uni®ed self that lives outside history. The newfeminist autobiographer is much more likely to present a highly re¯exive portrayal of the author as a constructed, con¯icted, multiple-self. Lila Abu-Lughod (1991) arguesforcefully for replacing the language of generalization with a language of ``tacticalhumanism.’’ For her, the little-known body of anthropological writing by non-

professional anthropological wives exempli®es what she calls ``ethnography of theparticular.’’

Chronicles begins with my earliest recollections of Indians and racism and continuesthrough my teenage years. I recount my romanticized view of Indians, my timidity tospeak out against white school bullies, and my general indi erence to and ignorance of local racism. Like Behar (1996) I tell several stories that analogize my feelings andreactions to those of other Whites. In e ect, I am claiming to be a metaphor for somelocal Whites who bear no intense malice towards the Mesquaki, but who have littleinterest in and knowledge of their way of life. By representing myself as a metaphor forWhites, it helps me be didactic without being too preachy and moralistic. TheChronicles is nuanced with personal memories to characterize and situate myself his-torically and ideologically. The autobiographical vignettes also help represent how theethnographic text was produced through a series of personal encounters. Finally, thetext is openly subjective, and I make judgmental remarks about events and actors.This allows me to break openly with the usual objectifying scienti®c voice.

But Chronicles does not go nearly as far as Ellis (1995) and Behar (1993) do inexpressing and using personal emotions and vulnerabilities analytically. There aremany personal and philosophical reasons for my moderation. Heavy primary social-ization to be a stoic, taciturn working-class male, and professional socialization to bean authoritative social critic are at play here. So is the notion of a classic ethnographiccommunity study and the charge to write about an imagined or real ``cultural other’’rather than the self. Behar and Ellis are telling co-constructed life stories (Plummer,2001) about their relationship with one person. The study of a single relationship overtime probably lends itself to a more intimate tale than the ethnographic study of awhole community does. For a variety of reasons, my use of autobiography seemssomewhat more limited and perhaps more explicitly methodological than the more

autobiographica l writings of Behar and Ellis.


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In retrospect, the most important autobiographical feature of Chronicles may be itsdeep commitment to ordinary language and a highly personal voice. I tried hard tobreak with the analytical voice so characteristic of a good academic ethnography bycreating a hybrid voice that blends my regional dialect, ``Iowaese,’’ into my academic

dialect, ``anthropologese.’’ The key to making this narrative fusion was regaining myIowa sense of humor. I used this powerful and distinct oral speech style to leaven theabstract, generalizing, classifying, and typologizing discourse of theoretical anthro-pology. I narrate and interpret events in an idiosyncratic voice that breaks with theformal disciplinary discourse for two very di erent reasons. The ®rst is to resist thepostmodern decree that there are no individual authors, only discursive regimes anddiscourses. I speak Marxese, Foucaultese, and Bourdieuese with a strong Iowa accent.I imagine myself willfully polluting rare®ed academic discourses with ordinarylanguage.

Second, by speaking in a hybrid voice, I wanted to try and come down fromMount Academe. I wanted to bridge the enormous cultural and linguistic gap thatseparates academics from ordinary people. In e ect, I wanted to create a kind of ``linguistic reciprocity’’ that transcends the discursive regimes of all academic disci-plines. I wanted to demonstrate my respect for and skill in the language of local peopleboth during the ®eldwork and in the ®nal written ethnography. In return, I expect thelocal folks, and local folks everywhere, to engage and learn from what is left of myanthropologica l voice. Countless methodological articles have been written about howresearchers develop reciprocity with their informants. We all know how to do little

favors for informants to get information, but most of us still do not have a clue how tocreate linguistic reciprocity that honors, and, in some sense, empowers our subjects.

Besides speaking in a hybrid voice, the other key narrative device that might createlinguistic reciprocity is the foregrounding of people, characters, and events overacademic, theoretical commentary. Such a narrative move makes displaying one’smastery of academic discourses, hence one’s cultural capital, secondary to telling astory about cultural others. Although both LCC and Chronicles have received mainlypositive reviews, it is obvious that colleagues do not quite know what to make of an ethnographic narrative that uses a hybrid voice and backgrounds theory.Many ethnographers now advocate writing more popular, personal, and passionateethnographies, and they often assign them to their undergraduates; but professionalpreferences for a formal, theory-driven, impersonal academic narrative style persist;consequently, many young ethnographers are caught between the dictates of thediscipline to write theory-driven texts and their political desire to write accessiblepopular texts. But backgrounding theory does not mean abandoning theory. As Itried to convey earlier, Chronicles still uses social scienti®c constructs heuristically,but they are embedded in the stories and rarely interrupt the narrative ¯ow.

Experimenting with epistemological and intertextual re¯exivity

As previously noted, the text presents an exhaustive account of how local talk and thetexts of white journalists and academics have been discursively constructing theIndian cultural other for years. By calling attention to a long, systematic historicalprocess of image construction, a ``cultural mode of production,’’ I am situating myown representations within a historical ®eld of knowledge production. This helps

convey that I am one more voice in a long line of White voices. This should suggest


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the possibility that I too may be misrepresenting Mesquaki culture. Perhaps my care-fully researched, heartfelt account is still an `è ect’’ of its ®eld of production. Moreimportantly, it is probably not what Mesquakis would write about themselves. And if situating my representations intertextually fails to convey their constructed nature,

then perhaps a direct ``community review process’’ will. Forty of the key characterswere asked to read and critique a draft of the Chronicles, and the highlights of theircommentary are published in the epilogue. Some locals are quick to point out that I,like others, have misrepresented Indians and Whites. Several reviewers claim that Iam hopelessly biased and romanticize various events and characters, that my story is just a story, not an objective, scienti®c study.

Another way that Chronicles is intertextual or polyvocal is through an extensive,explicit use of native theories to explain and portray Mesquaki reality. Typically,ethnographers rely heavily on the insights of their informants, but they do not always

highlight such collaborations. Rarely do they dethrone the rational, scienti®c talkinghead that announces what various everyday events really mean. In sharp contrast,Chronicles elevates some Mesquaki stories to the status of formal or `ò cial’’ interpre-tations. For example, tribal historian Jonas CutCow’s explanation of the intratribaldebate over assimilation sounded very much like the anthropological notion of `èth-nogenesis’’ (Roosens, 1989). He convinced me that outsiders have consistently misreadthe dialogue between tribal ``progressives’’ and ``traditionalists’’ as destructive faction-alism. The Mesquaki political system is then christened ``dysfunctional’’ and in need of democratic White ways. Jonas is portrayed as an `òrganic intellectual’’ critiquing

such theories and o ering an alternative, indigenous view.In addition, the text highlights various encounters with other thoughtful

Mesquakis on culture, politics, and religion. The portrayal of these encounters seeksto convey how much my `èxpert’’ interpretation relies on local knowledge. For ex-ample, the Chronicles includes a story about a BIA agent who sought to terminate thetribal school but died in a mysterious plane crash shortly after leaving the settlement.Most Mesquakis believe that God terminated the agent who was trying to terminatetheir culture. This tale is told somewhat like the magical realist tales of Gabriel GarciaMarquez. The plane crash was a strange, mysterious occurrence that de®es interpret-ation. For all I know, the Mesquaki version of it is true.

Experimenting with deconstructive re¯exivity

Unlike some postmodern ethnographies , Chronicles does not purport to deconstructtaken-for-grante d reality through a disjunctive, evocative, poetic text. Nor does itdeconstruct its metaconcepts through a careful rhetorical analysis. Instead,Chronicles deconstructs popular and academic images of Indians and Whites withtwo modernist narrative devices, allegory and parody. For example, the story of JayWhitebreast, the AIM activist, is in many ways the story of every Mesquaki who hasexperienced local racism. Whitebreast, a dutiful student and star athlete, drops out of school and becomes an activist. He is driven to assuage the sting of a scurrilous localnewspaper story about the mysterious death of his drunken mother. Like any lovingson, he rebels against his mother being turned into a humiliating public spectacle.Various other portrayals of traditional Mesquaki wakes and adoption ceremonies arealso told in a very personal, nontechnical manner that highlights Mesquaki feelings

and sentiments. It conveys how Mesquakis deal with the loss of their loved ones. There


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are no abstract cultural others present. There is no detailed, pedantic account of theevent’s sequence and symbols. Various stories about Indian and White ``border cross-ers’’ who can function in both cultural worlds are also used to disrupt rigid either/oressentialized racial categories. In the end, such portrayals of Mesquaki politics and

culture deconstruct both rabid racist and arid scienti®c otherings of Indians.The other major deconstructive narrative device, parody, is used to disrupt thenotion that it is ``normal’’ for outsiders, including me, to collect and represent tra-ditional Mesquaki culture. Chronicles portrays a steady stream of scientists, literarytypes, and journalists vainly searching for authentic Indian culture. It parodies severaldi erent types of voyeuristic White searches: the anthropological search for authentic,ancient religious ceremonies, the journalistic search for sensational stories about dog-eating Indians, and the literary search for heightened spirituality among Indians. Myown guilty e ort to see a wake is analogized to other exoticizing or vilifying accounts

of the Indian cultural other. I hope the aforementioned stories disrupt the naturalizedrelationship between Mesquaki ``informants’’ and outsiders who write about triballife. They call into question whether such portrayals actually serve the public interest.

Summing up: a re¯exive realist critical ethnography

Using a typology of re¯exivity to situate my ethnographic practice in a complexacademic debate is a risky business. Any deconstructionist steeped in social theory

could poke holes in the ideal types used to crudely map these debates. Having madesuch a sustained, earnest e ort to represent my perspective, I am tempted to revert toa silly bit of popular culture. One of my favorite banalities on TV was Donnie andMarie Osmond. Week after week they grinned and cooed, ``I’m a little bit country;I’m a little bit rock and roll.’’ In the same vein, I cannot be as fervently postmodern asPatti Lather, or as boldly autobiographical as Carolyn Ellis, or as devoutly scienti®c asPierre Bourdieu. I cannot even be a ``real’’ Marxist. After 30 years, perhaps I end up alittle bit Marxist and a little bit postmodern. This became very clear when I tried outmy perspective on old friends of di erent ideological persuasions. Cultural MarxistPaul Willis said my perspective was philosophically contradictory and too self-indulgent and postmodern for his tastes. At the other end of the spectrum, PattiLather says I am too modernist and realist for her postmodern tastes. Such commen-taries are enough to provoke a professional identity crisis! Well, not really. In retro-spect, perhaps the only thing new in this tortured re¯ection is the way I cobbletogether allegedly contradictory perspectives.

Unlike Phil Carspecken (1996), I have little interest in developing a foundationalscienti®c method for critical ethnography. I am much more interested in expandingthe notion of cultural critique by tapping into the genres of autobiography , new journalism, travel writing, and ®ction. Appropriating epistemologies and textual prac-tices from these genres will help us create more public, useful ethnographic storytellingforms. Such a ``science’’ would still subscribe to extensive, systematic ®eldwork, and itwould speak from a historically situated standpoint. Such a science would be highlyre¯exive, which, I have tried to argue, means much more than borrowing a fewnarrative nostrums from novelists or postmodern ethnographers. On that score, for-merly marginalized feminists and scholars of color seem to be leading the way.

Among other things, re¯exivity involves holding dichotomies like science±

humanities/art in a useful tension. In this regard, I continue to use a quasi-scienti®c


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abductive epistemology, or what Paul Willis (1999) now calls an ``ethnographic ima-gination’’ to know, map, and explain the lived reality of cultural others. But I am alsotrying to tap into introspection, intuition, and emotion the way autoethnographer s(Ellis & Bochner, 1996, 2001) and ethnic (Collins, 1990) and indigenous scholars

(Tuhiwami Smith, 1999) are. Such experimentation does not make me a novelist ora poet, or a postmodern ethnographer . It does make me an ethnographer who istrying to use common sense, autobiographical experiences, ordinary language,irony, satire, metaphor, and parody to understand everyday life. And for good mea-sure, I have social theory and the ¯at, colorless, denotative language of science in myinterpretive/narrative arsenal as well.

Ideally, this eclectic approach helps produce realist narratives that are much moreaccessible and re¯exive that either scienti®c realist or surrealist postmodern narratives.My reasons for trying to create such realist texts are practical and political. I believe

that most academics, including cultural Marxists, acquiesce to the huge cultural gapbetween intellectuals and ordinary people. Like many ``native ethnographers’’ on thefringe of academe, I feel a great need to communicate with ordinary people. AlthoughI generally agree with the postmodern critique of scienti®c realism, some postmoder-nists abandon realism far too quickly. For better or worse, ordinary people under-stand, enjoy, and consume the deceptively simple realist narrative style. Radicallyanti-realist ethnographic texts may be interesting literary experiments, but they are nomore accessible and engaging than dry, jargon-®lled scienti®c realist texts. Rather, weshould learn from earlier modernist textual experimentation (Stam, 1985; Brecht,

1964) how to create accessible, highly re¯exive realist cultural critiques.Writing in a more re¯exive realist style will not magically democratize the acad-

emy or society, but such texts may help ordinary people develop a critical literacy(Kellner, 1995) about scienti®c texts and knowledge claims. It might also curb thehubris of academic knowledge production a little. If an ethnographer uses all thevarieties of re¯exivity in practice, she really will be forced to give up what DonnaHaraway (1988) calls the ``god-trick’’ of science and utopian thought. No matter howepistemologically re¯exive and systematic our ®eldwork is, we must still speak as meremortals from various historical, culture-bound standpoints; we must still make limited,historically situated knowledge claims. By claiming to be less rather than more, per-haps we can tell stories that ordinary people will actually ®nd more believable anduseful.

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