Free Voice: Post-Modern Ethnography
A post-modern ethnography is a cooperatively evolved text
consisting of fragments of discourse intended to evoke in the minds of
both reader and writer an emergent fantasy of a possible world of
commonsense reality, and thus to provoke an aesthetic integration
that will have a therapeutic effect. It is, in a word, poetry—not in its
textual form, but in its return to the original context and function
of poetry, which, by means of its performative break with everyday
speech , evoked memories of the ethos of the community and thereby
provoked hearers to act ethically (cf. Jaeger 1945:3 — 76). Postmodern ethnography attempts to recreate textually this spiral of poetic
and ritual performance; Like them, it defamiliarizes commonsense reality in a bracketed context of performance, evokes a fantasy
whole abducted from fragments, and then returns participants to the world of commonsense—transformed, renewed, and sacralized.
It has the allegorical import, though not the narrative form, of a vision quest
or religious parable. The break with everyday reality is a journey
apart into strange lands with occult practices—into the heart of
darkness—where fragments of the fantastic whirl about in the vortex
of the quester's disoriented consciousness, until, arrived at the maelstrom's center,
he loses consciousness at the very moment of the miraculous,
restorative vision, and then , unconscious, is cast upon to the familiar,
but forever transformed, shores of the commonplace world.
Post-modern ethnography is not a new departure, not another rupture
in the form of discourse of the sort we have come to expect as the norm
of modernist esthetics' scientistic emphasis on experimental novelty,
but a self-conscious return to an earlier and more powerful
notion of the ethical character of all discourse, as captured in the ancient
significance of the family of terms "ethos," "ethnos," "ethics."
Because post-modern ethnography privileges "discourse" over
"text," it foregrounds dialogue as opposed to monologue , and emphasizes
the cooperative and collaborative nature of the ethnographic
situation in contrast to the ideology of the transcendental observer.
Infact, it rejects the ideology of "observer-observed," there being nothing observed and no one who is observer. There is instead the mutual,
dialogical production of a discourse, of a story of sorts. We better
understand the ethnographic context as one of cooperative story
making that, in one of its ideal forms, would result in a polyphonic text,
none of whos e participants would have the final word in the form
of a framing story or encompassing synthesis—a discourse on the discourse.
It might be just the dialogue itself, or possibly a series o f juxt
aposed paratactic tellings o f a shared circumstance, as in the Synoptic Gospels,
or perhaps only a sequence of separate tellings in search of
a common theme, or even a contrapuntal interweaving of tellings,
or of a theme and variations (cf. Marcus and Cushman 1982, Clifford
1983a). Unlike the traditional teller of tales or his folklorist counterpart,
The ethnographer would not focus on monophonie performance
and narrativity, though neither would he necessarily exclude them if
they were appropriate in context.