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ОглавлениеEthnography is a strange scientific phenomenon.1 On the one hand, it can be seen as probably the only truly influential ‘invention’ of anthropological linguistics, having triggered important developments in social-scientific fields as diverse as pragmatics and discourse analysis, sociology and historiography and having caused a degree of attention to small detail in human interaction previously unaddressed in many fields of the social sciences.2 At the same time, ethnography has for decades come under fire from within. Critical anthropology emerged from within ethnography, and strident critiques by, for example, Johannes Fabian (1983) and James Clifford (1988) exposed immense epistemological and ethical problems in ethnography. Their call for a historisation of ethnographies (rather than a singular ethnography) was answered by a flood of studies contextualising the work of prominent ethnographers, often in ways that critically called into question the epistemological, positive-scientific appeal so prominently voiced in the works of, for example, Griaule, Boas or Malinowski (see e.g. Darnell, 1998; Stocking, 1992). So, whereas ethnography is by all standards a hugely successful enterprise, its respectability has never matched its influence in the social sciences.
‘True’ ethnography is rare – a fact perhaps deriving from its controversial status and the falsification of claims to positive scientificity by its founding fathers. More often than not, ethnography is perceived as a method for collecting particular types of data and thus as something that can be added, like the use of a computer, to different scientific procedures and programs. Even in anthropology, ethnography is often seen as a synonym for description. In the field of language, ethnography is popularly perceived as a technique and a series of propositions by means of which something can be said about ‘context’. Talk can thus be separated from its context, and whereas the study of talk is a matter for linguistics, conversation analysis or discourse analysis, the study of context is a matter for ethnography (see Blommaert, 2001 for a fuller discussion and references; Gumperz & Hymes, 1972 is the classic text on this). What we notice in such discussions and treatments of ethnography is a reduction of ethnography to fieldwork, but naïvely, in the sense that the critical epistemological issues buried in seemingly simple fieldwork practices are not taken into account. Fieldwork/ethnography is perceived as description: an account of facts and experiences captured under the label of ‘context’, but in itself often un- or under-contextualised.
It is against this narrow view that we want to pit our argument, which will revolve around the fact that ethnography can as well be seen as a ‘full’ intellectual programme far richer than just a matter of description. Ethnography, we will argue, involves a perspective on language and communication, including ontology and an epistemology, both of which are of significance for the study of language in society, or better, of language as well as of society. Interestingly, this programmatic view of ethnography emerges from critical voices from within ethnography. Rather than destroying the ethnographic project, critiques such as the ones developed by Fabian (1979, 1983, 1995) and Hymes (1972, 1996) have added substance and punch to the programme.
A first correction that needs to be made to the widespread image of ethnography is that right from the start, it was far more than a complex of fieldwork techniques. Ever since its beginnings in the works of Malinowski and Boas, it was part of a total programme of scientific description and interpretation, comprising not only technical, methodical aspects (Malinowskian fieldwork) but also, for example, cultural relativism and behaviourist–functionalist theoretical underpinnings. Ethnography was the scientific apparatus that put communities, rather than human kind, on the map, focusing attention on the complexity of separate social units, the intricate relations between small features of a single system usually seen as in balance.3 In Sapirian linguistics, folklore and descriptive linguistics went hand in hand with linguistic classification and historical-genetic treatments of cultures and societies. Ethnography was an approach in which systems were conceived as non-homogeneous, composed of a variety of features, and in which part–whole relationships were central to the work of interpretation and analysis. Regna Darnell’s book on Boas (Darnell, 1998) contains a revealing discussion of the differences between Boas and Sapir regarding the classification of North American languages, and one of the striking things is to see how linguistic classification becomes a domain for the articulation of theories of culture and cultural dynamics, certainly in Boas’ case (Darnell, 1998: 211ff). It is significant also that as ethnography became more sophisticated and linguistic phenomena were studied in greater detail and nuance, better and more mature theories of social units such as the speech community emerged (Gumperz, 1968).
So there always was more than just description in ethnography – problems of interpretation and indeed of ontology and epistemology have always figured in debates on and in ethnography, as did matters of method versus interpretation and issues of aligning ethnography with one discipline or another (linguistics versus anthropology being, for example, the issue in the Boas–Sapir debate on classification). In fact, it is our conviction that ethnography, certainly in the works of its most prominent practitioners, has always had aspirations to theory status. No doubt, Dell Hymes’ oeuvre stands out in its attempt at retrieving the historical roots of this larger ethnographic program (Hymes, 1964, 1983) as well as at providing a firm theoretical grounding for ethnography himself (Hymes, 1972, 1996). Hymes took stock of new reflections on ‘theory’ produced in Chomskyan linguistics, and foregrounded the issue in ethnography as well, and in clearer and more outspoken terms than before. To Hymes, ethnography was a ‘descriptive theory’: an approach that was theoretical because it provided description in specific, methodologically and epistemologically grounded ways.
We will discuss some of the main lines of argument in Hymes’ work at some length here, adding, at points, important elements for our understanding of ethnography as taken from Johannes Fabian’s work. Fabian, like Hymes, is probably best known for his documentary work (e.g. Fabian, 1986, 1996), while his theoretical reflections have not received the attention they deserve.
To start with, a crucial element in any discussion of ethnography should be its history, for inscribed in its techniques and patterns of operation are numerous traces of its intellectual origins and background. Ethnography has its origin in anthropology, not in linguistics, nor in sociology or psychology. That means that the basic architecture of ethnography is one that already contains ontologies, methodologies and epistemologies that need to be situated within the larger tradition of anthropology and that do not necessarily fit the frameworks of other traditions. Central to this is humanism: ‘It is anthropology’s task to coordinate knowledge about language from the viewpoint of man’ (Hymes, 1964: xiii). This means that language is approached as something that has a certain relevance to man, and man in anthropology is seen as a creature whose existence is narrowly linked, conditioned or determined by society, community, the group, culture. Language from an anthropological perspective is almost necessarily captured in a functionalist epistemology, and questions about language take the shape of questions of how language works and operates for, with and by humans-as-social-beings.4
Let us immediately sketch some of the implications of this humanist and functionalist anthropological background to ethnography. One important consequence has to do with the ontology, the definition of language itself. Language is typically seen as a socially loaded and assessed tool for humans, the finality of which is to enable humans to perform as social beings. Language, in this tradition, is defined as a resource to be used, deployed and exploited by human beings in social life and hence socially consequential for humans. Further implications of this will be addressed below. A second important implication is about context. There is no way in which language can be ‘context-less’ in this anthropological tradition in ethnography. To language, there is always a particular function, a concrete shape, a specific mode of operation, and an identifiable set of relations between singular acts of language and wider patterns of resources and their functions. Language is context, it is the architecture of social behaviour itself, and thus part of social structure and social relations. To this as well we will return below.
Let us summarise what has been said so far. Central to any understanding of ethnography are its roots in anthropology. These anthropological roots provide a specific direction to ethnography, one that situates language deeply and inextricably in social life and offers a particular and distinct ontology and epistemology to ethnography. Ethnography contains a perspective on language which differs from that of many other branches of the study of language. It is important to remember this, and despite possible relocations and redeployments of ethnography in different theoretical frameworks, the fact that it is designed to fit an anthropological set of questions is important for our understanding of what ethnography can and cannot perform. As Hymes says, ‘failure to remember can confuse or impair anthropological thinking and research, setting up false antitheses and leaving significant phenomena unstudied’ (1964: xxvii).
Let us now get a bit deeper into the features identified above: the particular ontology and epistemology characterising ethnography.
Language is seen as a set of resources, means available to human beings in societies. These resources can be deployed in a variety of circumstances, but when this happens it never happens in a neutral way. Every act of language use is an act that is assessed, weighed, measured socially, in terms of contrasts between this act and others. In fact, language becomes the social and culturally embedded thing it is because of the fact that it is socially and culturally consequential in use. The clearest formulation of this resources view on language can be found in Hymes’ essay ‘Speech and language: on the origins and foundations of inequality among speakers’ (1996: Chapter 3). In this strident essay, Hymes differentiates between a linguistic notion of language and an ethnographic notion of speech. Language, Hymes argues, is what linguists have made of it, a concept with little significance for the people who actually use language. Speech is language-in-society, that is, an active notion and one that deeply situates language in a web of relations of power, a dynamics of availability and accessibility, a situatedness of single acts vis-à-vis larger social and historical patterns such as genres and traditions. Speech is language in which people have made investments – social, cultural, political, individual-emotional ones. It is also language brought under social control – consequently, language marked by sometimes extreme cleavages and inequalities in repertoires and opportunities.
This has no small consequences to the study of language. For one thing, studying language means studying society, more precisely, it means that all kinds of different meanings, meaning effects, performativities and language functions can and need to be addressed than those current (and accepted) in mainstream linguistics.5 Second, there is nothing static about this ethnographic view of language. Language appears in reality as performance, as actions performed by people in a social environment. Hence, strict synchrony is impossible as the deployment of linguistic resources is in itself, and step by step as sentences and utterances are constructed, a process. It is this process, and not its linguistic product (statified and reified sentences or utterances) that needs to be understood in ethnography. In order to acquire this understanding, as much attention needs to be given to what is seen from the statified and reified perspective mentioned as ‘non-linguistic’ matters as needs to be given to strictly ‘linguistic’ matters. It is at this point that one can understand how ethnography triggered important developments both in general sociology – Bourdieu’s work is exemplary in this respect – as well as in kinesics, non-verbal communicative behaviour and indeed social semiosis in general – Goffman, Garfinkel and Goodwin can be mentioned here. From an ethnographic perspective, the distinction between linguistic and non-linguistic is an artificial one since every act of language needs to be situated in wider patterns of human social behaviour, and intricate connections between various aspects of this complex need to be specified: the ethnographic principle of situatedness.6
It is also relevant to underscore the critical potential which ethnography derives from these principles. The constant feedback between communicative actions and social relations involves, as said, reflections on value of communicative practices, starting from the observation that not every form of communication is performed or performable in any situation. Society imposes hierarchies and value scales on language, and the looking glass of linguistic practice often provides a magnified image of the workings of powers and the deep structures of inequality in society. It is telling that some of the most critical studies on education have been produced by scholars using an ethnographic perspective (Cook-Gumperz, 1988; Gee, 1996; Heller, 2000; Rampton, 1995). Similarly, it is an interesting exercise to examine the critique formulated from within ethnography against other language scholars involved in the study of language and power. These critiques are not merely critiques of method, they are about the nature of language–power relationships (see Blommaert & Bulcaen, 2000; Blommaert et al., 2001). Moreover, central to this critique is often the notion of language ideologies (Kroskrity, 2000; Woolard et al., 1998): metalinguistic and hence deeply sociocultural ideas of language users about language and communication that not only appear to direct language behaviour and the interpretation of language acts, but also account for folk and official ‘rankings’ and hierarchies of linguistic varieties.
Object-level (the ‘acts’ themselves) and metalevel (ideas and interpretations of these acts) cannot be separated in ethnography, for the social value of language is an intrinsic and constituent part of language usage itself; that is, in every act of language people inscribe and mark the social situatedness of these acts and so offer patterns of interpretation to the others. These patterns of interpretation are never fixed, of course, but require acknowledgement and interactional co-construction. So here also, strict synchronicity is impossible, for there is both a processual and a historical dimension to every act of language-in-society (Silverstein & Urban, 1996), and the rankings and hierarchies of language are themselves an area of perpetual debate and conflict (Blommaert, 1999). The social dimension of language is precisely the blending of linguistic and metalinguistic levels in communication: actions proceed with an awareness of how these actions should proceed and can proceed in specific social environments. And to be clear about this point, this means that every language act is intrinsically historical.
This brings us to the epistemological level of ethnography. Knowledge of language facts is processual and historical knowledge, lifting single instances of talk to a level of relevance far higher than just the event. They become indexical of patterns and developments of wider scope and significance, and these wider dimensions are part of ethnographic interpretation. Static interpretations of context – ‘setting’, ‘speech community’ and so forth – are anathema and to the extent that they occur in ethnographic writing they should be seen as either a rhetorical reduction strategy or worse, as a falsification of the ethnographic endeavour (Fabian, 1983, 1995). Fabian stresses the dynamic process of knowledge gathering in ethnography, emphasising the fact that ethnographic work also involves active – very active – involvement from the ethnographer himself (a fact known from the days of Malinowski and emphasised, for example, by Edmund Leach, but often overlooked). This provides ethnography with a peculiar, dynamic and dialectical epistemology in which the ignorance of the knower – the ethnographer – is a crucial point of departure (Fabian, 1995). Consequently, ethnography attributes (and has to attribute) great importance to the history of what is commonly seen as ‘data’: the whole process of gathering and moulding knowledge is part of that knowledge; knowledge construction is knowledge, the process is the product (see Blommaert, 2001, 2004; Ochs, 1979). This is why we will emphasise an often overlooked function of fieldwork in the remainder of this book: the fact that fieldwork results in an archive of research, which documents the researcher’s own journey through knowledge.
Summarising, language in ethnography is something very different from what it is in many other branches of the languages sciences, and so is the status of gathering knowledge. There is no way in which knowledge of language can be separated from the situatedness of the object at a variety of levels, ranging from microscopic to macroscopic levels of ‘context’ and involving, reflexively, the acts of knowledge production by ethnographers themselves.
Ethnography as Counter-hegemony
Walter Benjamin once wrote that the task of historians was to challenge established and commonly accepted representations of history. History, in his view, was necessarily critical and counter-hegemonic, and a science such as history only had a raison d’être to the extent that it performed this role of challenging hegemonies. Exactly the same suggestion can be made with respect to ethnography: it has the potential and the capacity of challenging established views, not only of language but of symbolic capital in societies in general. It is capable of constructing a discourse on social uses of language and social dimensions of meaningful behaviour which differs strongly from established norms and expectations, indeed takes the concrete functioning of these norms and expectations as starting points for questioning them, in other words, it takes them as problems rather than as facts. Central to all of this is the mapping of resources onto functions: the way, for instance, in which a standard variety of a language acquires the function of ‘medium of education’ while a non-standard variety would not. This mapping is socially controlled; it is not a feature of language but one of society. Ethnography becomes critique here: the attributed function of particular resources is often a kind of social imagination, a percolation of social structure into language structure. Ethnography deconstructs this imagination and compares it to observable real forms and functions. It is thus, of necessity, a critical enterprise.
It is also critical in another sense. Whereas in most other approaches, the target of scientific method is simplification and reduction of complexity, the target in ethnography is precisely the opposite. Reality is kaleidoscopic, complex and complicated, often a patchwork of overlapping activities. Compare it to a soccer game. Usually, when we watch a soccer game on TV, we are focused on the movement of the ball and on a limited number of players in the area where the ball is. We rarely see all 22 players in the same shot on TV: the lens directs our attention to a subset of the space, the actors and activities. What we miss is the movement of the other players, the way they position themselves in anticipation of what comes next; we also miss the directions they give to one another, by shouting, pointing, pulling faces or making specific gestures. The 22 players perform all sorts of activities simultaneously: while an attacker moves forward with the ball, a winger may run into a favourable position for a particular set-piece play; the central defender can urge his co-defenders to move forward so as to close the gap between forwards and defenders and reduce the space for the opponents when they launch a counter-attack; a midfielder may simultaneously move down to fill in the space left by an attacking defender. And another midfielder may move a bit closer to an attacker from the other side, so as to curtail the latter’s opportunities for movement when a counter-attack is launched; he might beckon a fellow midfielder to close the gap he’s left by marking the attacker. All the players are constantly monitoring each other, and the coach does the same, shouting instructions to players from the sideline whenever he spots a potential problem. All of this happens at the same time, it is a series of seemingly unrelated – but obviously related – activities, very hard to describe in a linear and coherent narrative because as an activity it is not linear and coherent but multiple, layered, chequered and unstable.
A full account of a soccer game should include all of that, for all of it is essential in understanding what happens during the game. Players usually do not arrive at particular positions by accident or luck; they are there because of the complex interlocking activities that produce the game. Ethnography tries to do just that: describe the apparently messy and complex activities that make up social action, not to reduce their complexity but to describe and explain it.7 This is what makes ethnography a demanding approach: it is not enough (not by a very long shot) to follow a clear, pre-set line of inquiry and the researcher cannot come thundering in with pre-established truths. The procedure is what Hymes (1980: 89) calls ‘democratic’: ‘a mutual relation of interaction and adaptation’ between ethnographers and the people they work with, ‘a relation that will change both’. That too is counter-hegemonic.
We now come to a tricky issue, one that has plagued many researchers facing supervisors and colleagues steeped in a more positivistic tradition of science: representativeness. What exactly do ethnographic data reveal? What sort of relevance do they have for ‘society’? How confidently can you make generalisations from your data?
A first and elementary point is this. Ethnography is an inductive science, that is: it works from empirical evidence towards theory, not the other way around. This has been mentioned several times already: you follow the data, and the data suggest particular theoretical issues. Ethnography, thus, belongs to a range of other scientific disciplines in which induction rather than deduction is the rule – history, law and archaeology are close neighbours. Inductive sciences usually apply what is called the case method: a methodology in which one uses case analyses to demonstrate theory. In the words of Lee Shulman (1986: 11):
A case, properly understood, is not simply the report of an event or incident. To call something a case is to make a theoretical claim – to argue that it is a ‘case of something’, or to argue that it is an instance of a larger class.
Your data become cases of such larger categories by applying theoretical models to them; theory is the outcome of a theorisation of your data, you ‘theorise them into a case’, so to speak. To turn to Shulman again: ‘Generalisation does not inhere in the case, but in the conceptual apparatus of the explicator’ (1986: 12).
This is an important point: generalisation is perfectly possible, and it depends on the theoretical apparatus that you bring to bear onto your data. Thus, in a situation in which your data are classroom observations about response behaviour by pupils, your data can be framed in, for instance, a Marxist perspective in which social class distinctions are central issues. Your analysis of the data will then focus on features in the data that speak to social class distinctions, and your generalisations will be about such class issues. If you frame your data in a cognitive-psychological theoretical approach, the data will be analysed accordingly and your generalisations will be about cognitive processes you observe in response behaviour.
Such things, of course, do not occur just at the end of your trajectory. You have explored theoretical frameworks prior to starting your fieldwork, and many of the choices mentioned here have been more or less determined by your particular research preparation and the formulation of your research goals. You usually know beforehand whether you will use a Marxist or a cognitive-psychological framework for your work, and these choices have influenced the design of your fieldwork and, of course, the particular kinds of data you have collected. The important point here is, however, methodological: generalisation is perfectly possible, because your data instantiate a case, and such a case belongs to a larger category of cases. The unique and situated events you have witnessed can and do indeed reveal a lot about the very big things in society.
The case method, as said, is typical for inductive sciences, and especially in legal studies the case method is dominant, also in teaching law. The interesting thing, however, is that it in turn builds upon a much older tradition, which Carlo Ginzburg (1989) calls the ‘evidential or conjectural paradigm’: evidential because it uses (inductive) empirical facts as its point of departure, ‘conjectural’ because these facts are seen as probably meaning this-or-that. The facts generate hypotheses that can then be verified. This paradigm is epitomised by Sherlock Holmes, who was able to deduce more insights from a cigarette butt left in an ashtray than his rival police inspector could by deploying his elaborate (deductive) criminal investigation tactics. But it is also epitomised in clinical medicine, where the surgeon first searches for small symptoms (‘clues’) that can then be conjecturally related to a larger category – the disease – and then be treated with drugs or other means. Thus the surgeon spots a rash on your arms, a swollen liver and a yellowish colour in your eyes, they hypothetically connect this to hepatitis, and then administer drugs to fight hepatitis. The surgeon’s hypothesis will be proven correct when the drugs are effective and the symptoms disappear.
Ginzburg finds ancient roots for this paradigm in divination – where the divinator would examine small things in order to predict big things – and he nicely summarises the case:
the group of disciplines which we have called evidential and conjectural (...) are totally unrelated to the scientific criteria that can be claimed for the Galilean paradigm [in which individual cases do not count – JB & DJ]. In fact, they are highly qualitative disciplines, in which the object is the study of individual cases, situations, and documents, precisely because they are individual, and for this reason get results that have an unsuppressible speculative margin; just think of the importance of conjecture (the term itself originates in divination) in medicine or in philology, and in divining. (Ginzburg, 1989: 106)
History, philology, psychoanalysis, archaeology, medicine, law, art history: these are the companions of ethnography in a long and venerable tradition of scientific work. In fact, every truly social science falls in this category. Chomsky’s linguistics was an attempt to bring the study of language – a social science, evidently – into the orbit of Galilean science. To Chomsky and his followers, linguistics would be a deductive science in which individual performance had no place, because individual cases could never invalidate the generalisations made from theory. In other social sciences as well, we have seen how strong the appeal of a deductive Galilean model of science was. The effect has been that the existence, and the validity, of this evidential and conjectural paradigm has been largely forgotten. Yet, it is the methodological basis for generalisation in ethnography, and it is a very firm basis.
Notes
(1) The following sections are based on a paper called ‘Ethnography as counter-hegemony’; International Literacy Conference, Cape Town 2001, downloadable from http://www.kcl.ac.uk/education/wpull.html.
(2) The journal Ethnography (launched in 2000) testifies to the impact of ethnography in a wide range of social sciences. An important, and frequent, contributor to the journal was Pierre Bourdieu, operating alongside sociocultural and linguistic anthropologists and microsociologists. Bourdieu’s own take on fieldwork and ethnography was exemplified in a special issue of Ethnography in 2004 (Wacquant, 2004).
(3) Cf. Hymes (1980: 89): ‘The earliest work that we recognize as important ethnography has generally the quality of being systematic in the sense of being comprehensive’.
(4) It may be interesting to point out that this view has percolated contemporary pragmatics. In the introduction to the Handbook of Pragmatics (Verschueren, 1995), pragmatics is defined as a functional perspective on language and communication. Verschueren refers, significantly, to Sapir (1929) as a source of inspiration for this view.
(5) At a very basic level, this pertains to the assumption that language has a function, and that its main purpose is communication. Truistic as it now may seem, at various points in the history of the language sciences these points required elaborate arguing.
(6) For those who wish to read up on this, Blommaert (2005b) provides an extensive discussion of this viewpoint.
(7) Erving Goffman’s work theorises this complexity, and does so in a highly readable way. See Goffman (1971) for good examples.
Read up on it
Fabian, J. (1983) Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press.
Hymes, D. (1980) Language in Education: Ethnolinguistic Essays. Washington, DC: Centre for Applied Linguistics.
Hymes, D. (1986) Models of the interaction of language and social life. In J. Gumperz and D. Hymes (eds) Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication (2nd edn, pp. 35–71). Oxford: Blackwell.
