Dialogues with Ethnography: Notes on Classics, and How I Read Them (Encounters, 10) (Volume 10) - Softcover

Blommaert, Dr. Jan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783099496 ISBN 13: 9781783099498

Publisher: Multilingual Matters, 2018

Synopsis

This book persuasively argues the case that ethnography must be viewed as a full theoretical system, rather than just as a research method. Blommaert traces the influence of his reading of classic works about ethnography on his thinking, and discusses a range of authors who have influenced the development of a theoretical system of ethnography, or whose work might be productively used to develop it further. Authors examined include Hymes, Scollon, Kress, Bourdieu, Bakhtin and Lefebvre. This book will be required reading for students and scholars involved in ethnographic research, or those interested in the theory of ethnography.

About this title

About the Author

Jan Blommaert is Professor of Language, Culture and Globalization at Tilburg University (The Netherlands) and is also affiliated to Ghent University (Belgium) and the University of the Western Cape (South Africa). He is the Director of the Babylon Research Center at Tilburg University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Dialogues with Ethnography

Notes on Classics, and How I Read Them

By Jan Blommaert

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2018 Jan Blommaert
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78309-949-8

Contents

Acknowledgments, vii, 
Preface, ix, 
1 Ethnography as Counter-hegemony: Remarks on Epistemology and Method, 1, 
2 Obituary: Dell H. Hymes (1927-2009), 10, 
3 Ethnography and Democracy: Hymes' Political Theory of Language, 15, 
4 Ethnopoetics as Functional Reconstruction: Dell Hymes' Narrative View of the World, 26, 
5 Grassroots Historiography and the Problem of Voice: Tshibumba's Histoire du Zaire, 42, 
6 Historical Bodies and Historical Space, 62, 
7 Semiotic and Spatial Scope: Toward a Materialist Semiotics, 77, 
8 Pierre Bourdieu and Language in Society, 87, 
9 Combining Surveys and Ethnographies in the Study of Rapid Social Change, 99, 
10 Data Sharing as Entextualization Practice, 112, 
11 Chronotopes, Scales and Complexity in the Study of Language in Society, 130, 
12 Marxism and Urban Culture, 143, 
13 On Scope and Depth in Linguistic Ethnography: A Commentary, 149, 
References, 156, 
Index, 167, 

CHAPTER 1

Ethnography as Counter-hegemony: Remarks on Epistemology and Method

Introduction

Ethnography is a strange scientific phenomenon. 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. At the same time, ethnography has for decades been under fire from within. Critical anthropology emerged from within ethnography, and strident critiques by e.g. Johannes Fabian (1983) and James Clifford (1988) exposed immense epistemological and ethical problems in ethnography. Their call for a historization of ethnographies (rather than a singular ethnography) was answered by a flood of studies contextualizing 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 e.g. 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, 2001a, for a fuller discussion and references). What we notice in such discussions and treatments of ethnography is a reduction of ethnography to fieldwork, but naively, 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 undercontextualized.

It is against this narrow view that I want to pit my argument, which will revolve around the fact that ethnography can as well be seen as a 'full' intellectual program far richer than just a matter of description. Ethnography, I will argue, involves a perspective on language and communication, including an ontology and an epistemology, both of which are of significance for the study of language in society, or better, of language as well as 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 (1983, 1991a, 1995) and Hymes (1986 [1972], 1996) have added substance and punch to the program.

Ethnography as a Perspective

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 program of scientific description and interpretation, comprising not only technical, methodical aspects (Malinowskian fieldwork) but also, e.g. cultural relativism and behaviorist-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. 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, e.g. the issue in the Boas-Sapir debate on classification). In fact, it is my 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 itself (Hymes, 1986 [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.

I 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.

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 behavior itself, and thus part of social structure and social relations. To this as well I will return below.

Let me summarize 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' (Hymes, 1964: xxvii).

Resources and Dialectics

Let us now get a little deeper into the features identified above: the particular ontology and epistemology characterizing ethnography.

Language is seen as a set of resources or 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' (Hymes, 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, i.e. 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. 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 interactionally 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 behavior 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 behavior, and intricate connections between various aspects of this complex need to be specified: the ethnographic principle of situatedness.

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). And 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 behavior 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 acknowledgment 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, 1996a), and the rankings and hierarchies of language are themselves an area of perpetual debate and conflict (Blommaert, 1999a). 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 me 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 endeavor (Fabian, 1983, 1995). Fabian stresses the dynamic process of knowledge gathering in ethnography, emphasizing the fact that ethnographic work also involves active – very active – involvement from the ethnographer himself (a fact known from the days of Malinowski and emphasized, e.g. 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 molding knowledge is part of that knowledge; knowledge construction is knowledge, the process is the product (see Blommaert, 2001a; Ochs, 1979).

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1783099496
• ISBN 13: 9781783099498
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 184