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...