Interpretive Ethnography

Ethnographic Practices for the 21st Century

Norman K. Denzin

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 1996
• Print ISBN: 9780803972995
• eBook ISBN: 9781506320922
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

At we enter the 21^st century, we are witnessing tremendous changes in the world?s culture. As it has become both postmodern and multinational, so too must ethnography. In Interpretive Ethnography, Norman K. Denzin examines these changes and sounds a call to transform ethnographic writing in a manner befitting a new age. Denzin ponders the prospects, problems, and forms of ethnographic, interpretive writing as we hurtle toward the 21st century. In this breakthrough volume, he argues cogently and persuasively that postmodern ethnography is the moral discourse of the contemporary world and that ethnographers can and should explore new sorts of experiential texts--such as performance-based text, literary journalism, and narratives of the self--to form a new ethics of inquiry.

This outstanding volume by one of the premier qualitative researchers will be essential for professionals and students in qualitative methods, sociology, anthropology, communication, cultural studies, social theory, education, management, and nursing.

PART 1

Reading the Crisis

CHAPTER 1

Lessons James Joyce
Teaches Us¹

A triple crisis of representation, legitimation, and praxis confronts qualitative researchers in the human disciplines. Embedded in the discourses of poststructuralism and postmodernism (Derrida, 1978; Lather, 1991, 1993; Martin, 1992; Richardson, 1992, 1994a, 1994b), these three crises are, as Lather (1993) notes, coded in multiple terms variously called and associated with the “critical, interpretive, linguistic, feminist, and rhetorical turns” in social theory.² These new turns make problematic two key assumptions of qualitative research. The first assumption presumes that qualitative researchers can no longer directly capture lived experience. Such experience, it is argued, is created in the social text written by the researcher. This is the representational crisis. It confronts the inescapable problem of representation but does so within a framework that makes the direct link between experience and text problematic (Denzin, 1991a, 1991b).

The second assumption makes problematic the traditional criteria for evaluating and interpreting qualitative research. This is the legitimation crisis. It involves a serious rethinking of such terms as validity, generalizability, and reliability—terms already retheorized in postpositivist (Hammersley, 1992), constructionist and naturalistic (Guba & Lincoln, 1989, pp. 163-83), feminist (Fonow & Cook, 1991, pp. 1-13; Smith, 1992), interpretive (Denzin, 1991c, 1994a), poststructural (Lather, 1993), and critical discourses (Fay, 1987; Kincheloe & McLaren, 1994). The question from this crisis is, “How are qualitative studies to be evaluated in the contemporary, poststructural moment?” The first two crises shape the third, which questions, “Is it possible to effect change in the world, if society is only and always a text?” Clearly, these crises intersect and blur, as do the answers to the questions they generate.

In this chapter, I examine these three crises and locate them within the history of qualitative, ethnographic research and social theory in the United States (for other histories both in the United States and in Europe, see Atkinson, 1992; Guba, 1990; Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Quantz, 1992; Spindler & Spindler, 1992a; Wolcott, 1992). James Joyce’s four pivotal literary works, Dubliners (1914/1964a), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916/1964b), Ulysses (1922/1968a), and Finnegan’s Wake (1939/1968b), will be used as vehicles to illustrate how the representation and legitimation crises have been resolved in earlier historical moments.³ Drawing on Joyce’s texts (and the stories in Chapters 1 and 2), I outline new directions for research and theory in qualitative research, a discussion that will be taken up again in Chapters 4 through 8.

The Representational Crisis

A single but complex issue defines the representational crisis. It involves the assumption that much, if not all, qualitative and ethnographic writing is a narrative production, structured by a logic that “separates writer, text, and subject matter” (Denzin, 1991c, p. 278; see also Richardson, 1994a). Any social text can be analyzed in terms of its treatment of four paired terms: (a) the “real” and its representation in the text, (b) the text and the author, (c) lived experience and its textual representations, and (d) the subject and his or her intentional meanings. The text presumes that there is a world out there (the real) that can be captured by a “knowing” author through the careful transcription (and analysis) of field materials (interviews, notes, etc.). The author becomes the mirror to the world under analysis. This reflected world then represents the subject’s experiences through a complex textual apparatus. The subject is a textual construction because the real flesh and blood person is always translated into either an analytic subject as a social type or a textual subject who speaks from the author’s pages.

Several questions follow from this interpretation (see Denzin, 1991b, p. 61). Who is the subject? Does the subject have direct access to his or her lived experiences (see Fuss, 1989, p. 25)? Is there a layer of lived experience that is authentic and real? Is any representation of an experience as good as any other? Are the subject’s formulations always the most accurate? Traditional ethnographers have historically assumed that their methods probe and reveal lived experience. They have also assumed that the subject’s word is always final, and that talk directly reflects subjective and lived experience. The literal translation of talk thus equals lived experience and its representation.⁴

Critical poststructuralism challenges these assumptions. Language and speech do not mirror experience: They create experience and in the process of creation constantly transform and defer that which is being described. The meanings of a subject’s statements are, therefore, always in motion. There are, as Bruner (1986) argues, inevitable “gaps between reality, experience, and [the] expressions [of that experience]” (p. 7). Ethnographers deal, then, with performed texts, “structured units of experience, such as stories, or dramas . . . socially constructed units of meaning” (Bruner, 1986, p. 7). There can never be a final, accurate representation of what was meant or said—only different textual representations of different experiences. As Lather (1993, p. 3) observes, these arguments do not put an end to representation, but rather they signal the end of pure presence. Description becomes inscription. Inscription becomes evocative representation (see Tyler, 1986, p. 130). That is, in the written (and performed) text the writer textually presents the subject’s experiences (as I did in Chapter 2)—for example, the telling of a story, recounting a conversation, or describing the performance of a ritual. Accordingly, the task is to understand what textually constructed presence means because there is only the text, as Derrida (1976) argues.⁵ This leads to the question of a text’s authority.

The Legitimation Crisis

A poststructural, critical, social science challenges traditional postpositivist arguments concerning the text and its validity.⁶ Poststructuralism interprets the postpositivist’s validity as a text’s call to authority.⁷ It understands postpositivisms’s validity to be a plea for epistemological certainty and calls this version of validity or legitimation epistemological. A text’s authority, for the postpositivist, is established through recourse to a set of rules that refer to a reality outside the text. These rules reference knowledge, its production, and representation. These rules, as Scheurich (1992, p. 1) notes, if properly followed establish validity. Without validity (authority) there is no truth, and without truth there can be no trust in a text’s claims to validity (legitimation). With validity (legitimation) comes power (Cherryholmes, 1988). Validity as legitimation becomes a boundary line “which divides good research from bad, separates acceptable (to a particular research community) research from unacceptable research. . . . It is the name for inclusion and exclusion” (Scheurich, 1992, p. 5).

Critical poststructuralism reads the discussions of logical, construct, internal, ethnographic, and external validity, text-based data, triangulation, trustworthiness, credibility, grounding, naturalistic indicators, fit, coherence, comprehensiveness (see Eisenhart & How, 1992, pp. 657-669), plausibility, truth, and relevance (Atkinson, 1992, pp. 68-72) as attempts to reauthorize a text’s authority in the postpositivist moment. Such moves cling to the conception of a “world-out-there” that is truthfully and accurately captured by the researcher’s methods. Radway (1988), describing the ethnographies of communication, phrases this as a struggle to be overcome

No matter how extensive the effort to dissolve the boundaries of the textual object or the audience, the most recent studies of reception . . . begin with the ‘factual’ existence of a particular text which is understood to be received by some set of individuals. (p. 363)

The methodological strategies that lie behind such words as credibility, grounding, and the epistemological status of data represent attempts to thicken and contextualize a work’s grounding in the external empirical world (e.g., postpositivism’s critical realism). They designate efforts to develop a set of transcendent rules and procedures that lie outside any specific research project. These rules, when successfully followed, permit a text to bear witness to its own validity (authority). Hence, a text is valid (legitimate) if it is sufficiently grounded, triangulated, based on naturalistic indicators, respondent validation, carefully fitted to a theory, comprehensive in scope, credible in terms of member checks, and so on (see Silverman, 1993, p. 159). The text’s author then announces these validity claims to the reader. Such claims now become the text’s warrant to its own authoritative representation of the experience and social world under investigation.

Epistemological validity (authority) can now be interpreted as the desire of the postpositivist’s text to assert its own power over the reader. Validity as legitimacy, however, represents the always just-out-of reach-but-answerable claim a text makes for its authority. After all, the research could have always been better grounded, the subjects more representative, the researcher more knowledgeable, the research instruments better formulated, and more member checks could have been conducted. A fertile obsession, validity is the researcher’s mask of authority (Lather, 1993, p. 674) that allows a particular regime of truth within a particular text (and community of scholars) to work its way on the reader.

Responses to the Legitimation Crisis

Within the social science community, there have been four responses to the legitimation crisis. First, there are those, the positivists, who see no basic difference between qualitative and quantitative research. Here, there is the belief that one set of criteria should be applied to all scientific research; that is, there is nothing special about qualitative research that demands a special set of criteria. The positivists apply four standard criteria to disciplined inquiry: internal validity, external validity, reliability, and objectivity. A normative epistemology organizes work within this paradigm. It is assumed that the normal is what is most representative in a larger population, and it is to that “normal” population that generalizations are directed. Less attention is thereby given to the “nonrepresentative,” marginal formations that can exist in any social structure (Fiske, 1994, p. 196).

The second position, postpositivist, argues that a set of criteria unique to qualitative research needs to be developed. This is so because qualitative research represents “an alternative paradigm to quantitative social research” (Hammersley, 1992, p. 57). Although there is considerable disagreement over what these criteria should be, there is agreement that they should be different (see Lincoln & Guba, 1985). In practice, as discussed previously, this position has often led to the development of a set of criteria that are in agreement with the positivist criteria; they are merely fitted to a naturalistic research context (see Kirk & Miller, 1986; Lofland & Lofland, 1995; Silverman, 1993, pp. 156-169).

Hammersley (1992, p. 64) summarizes the postpositivist criteria in the following way: Such researchers assess a work in terms of its ability to (a) generate generic and formal theory, (b) be empirically grounded and scientifically credible, (c) produce findings that can be generalized or transferred to other settings, (d) be internally reflexive in terms of taking account of the effects of the researcher and the research strategy on the findings that have been produced.⁸

The third position, which may be termed postmodernism, argues that “the character of qualitative research implies that there can be no criteria for judging its products” (Hammersley, 1992, p. 58). This argument contends that the very idea of assessing qualitative research is antithetical to the nature of this research and the world it attempts to study (see Smith, 1984, p. 383). This position doubts all criteria and privileges none, although those who work within it favor criteria such as those adopted by some poststructuralists (see below).

For postmodernism, ethnographic practices are ways of acting in the world. These ways of acting (interviewing and observing) produce particular, situated understandings. The validity, or authority, of a given observation is determined by the nature of the critical understandings it produces. These understandings are based on glimpses and slices of the culture in action. Any given practice that is studied is significant because it is an instance of a cultural practice that happened in a particular time and place. This practice cannot be generalized to other practices; its importance lies in the fact that it instantiates a cultural practice, a cultural performance (story telling), and a set of shifting, conflicting cultural meanings (Fiske, 1994, p. 195).⁹ Messy texts are based on these kinds of empirical materials—for example, the death from AIDS described in Chapter 2. Postpositivist concerns for representativeness, generalizability, and scientific credibility do not operate in this paradigm.

The fourth position, critical poststructuralism, contends that an entirely new set of criteria, divorced from the positivist and postpositivist traditions, need to be constructed. Such criteria would flow from the qualitative project, stressing subjectivity, emotionality, feeling, and other antifoundational criteria (see Ellis & Flaherty, 1992a, pp. 5-6; Richardson, 1994a; Seidman, 1991). It is to this position that I now turn.

Poststructural Forms of Legitimation

Paraphrasing Lather (1993) and invoking Derrida (1974/1976), it is now necessary to ask, “What do we do with validity and the legitimation question once we’ve met critical, poststructuralism?” The following answers, all politica...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1: Reading the Crisis
• Part 2: Experiential Texts
• Part 3: Whose Truth?
• References
• Index
• About the Author