Of Rhetoric and Representation: The Four Faces of Ethnography

Abstract

Influenced by the new literary movement and postmodernism, in the 1990s sociologists began to reflexively examine their writings as texts, looking critically at the way they shape reality and articulate their descriptions and conceptualizations. Advancing this thread, in our presidential address we offer an overarching analysis of ethnographic writing, identifying four current genres and deconstructing their rhetoric: classical, mainstream, postmodern, and public ethnography. We focus on the differences in their epistemological, organizational, locational, and stylistic self-presentations with an eye toward better understanding how these speak to their intended audiences, both within and outside of the discipline.As an outgrowth of the merging of the humanities and the social sciences, the practice of identifying tropes within sociological genres grew in the 1980s. Influenced by literary criticism, ethnographers, in particular, became involved in a reflexive movement, directing their gaze at the process of how they construct and analyze their texts. This has been called the "linguistic turn" in ethnography. Denzin andLincoln (1994, 2000) have articulated several "moments" in this reflexive process, of which the three most influential were the "blurred genres" period (Geertz 1973(Geertz , 1983 in which the social sciences turned to the humanities for models, theories, and methods of analysis; the "crisis of representation" (Clifford and Marcus 1986;Marcus and Fischer 1986;Geertz 1988;Van Maanen 1995) that deepened the reflexive thrust in research and writing and challenged the conventions of ethnographic realism; and the "crisis of legitimacy" (Atkinson 1990;Lincoln and Guba 1990;Hammersley 1992;Smith 1992) in which ethnographers called into question the link between experience and text. These movements questioned the authority and accuracy of sociological texts, challenging researchers and writers to examine their politics and rhetoric. Issues of representation sensitized ethnographers to multiple, possibly conflicting interpretations of reality and the problems of voice (Hertz 1997), especially as some people and the interpretations they offered might be privileged over others.We focus in this Address on the linguistic turn in ethnography both because of our biographies and because these ideas have received their greatest foment in the ethnographic realm of our discipline. Vidich and Lyman (1994:25) have noted that ethnography means "the science devoted to describing ways of life of humankind." One of the

Ethnographic Stories for Market Learning

“…(Matthew, vice president, market research company) Ethnographic knowledge is suffused with emotional texture, providing executives with newly imagined ways of being in the world, in the way the psoriasis ethnography alerted the client to the intensity of people's anxieties, eventually guiding their communication efforts to be sensitive to such feelings. Thus, working primarily in a realist mode of representation (Adler and Adler 2008;Nafus and Anderson 2006;Van Maanen 2011), ethnographic stories are uniquely able to convey to managers the complexity of customers' lives and the stress and challenges they have to face in ways that are not only actionable but transformative.…”

Public ethnography: an introduction to the special issue

“…The 'past' Plummer refers to is the early days of classical anthropological and sociological ethnographic writing and thus the work of Ruth Benedict, Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, William Whyte, and other public intellectuals whose tales from the field captured the imagination of large lay audiences. Adler and Adler (2008) implicitly agree with Plummer in suggesting that public ethnography has been around for a long time. Like Plummer (1999) and Gans (2010), they find that ethnography is in an advantageous position to capture the attention of lay publics because of its narrative and personally intimate characteristics.…”

“…Madison, 2011), decolonized (Denzin et al, 2008), collaborative (Lassiter, 2005), and policy-focused (Becker et al, 2004;Tedlock, 2005;Vaughan, 2005) orientation can allow them to move from a simple do-no-harm ethics to a do-something-good agenda (see Borofsky, 2011). In addition, public ethnography has the potential to educate and even entertain lay audiences thanks to its engaging approach, sensitivity to current affairs, intimate and personable orientation, and affective style (Adler and Adler, 2008;Gans, 2010;Plummer, 1999;Vannini, 2012b;Vannini and Milne, in press). In particular, we find that four groups of people have a stake in the development of public ethnography.…”

“…The true definition of public ethnography hinges on the measure of its communicative success (Adler and Adler, 2008;Gans, 2010;Tedlock, 2005;Vaughan, 2005). Essentially, if the outcomes of ethnographic research are brought to the attention of a nonacademic audience, then that particular study can be said to be a public ethnography.…”

The Anthropology of Family Business: An Imagined Ideal

“…Ethnography, or inquiry based on participant observation, is the core method of social and cultural anthropology. Perhaps I should say set of methods, plural, due to the medley of approaches (Adler & Adler, 2008;Malkki, 2007). Anthropological ethnographers lack a consensus on, or even an interest in, the criteria and standards for appraising these productions (Briggs, 2007;Werner, 1998;Wigren, 2007).…”