[Air-l] sharing with Danny

[Ed Lamoureux]

In part, Danny Butt wrote:
the bottom line is that Don comes and
> talks to us about Ghanaians without them necessarily being present.

Ed responds:

Yes, ethnographers often (re)represent (something about) their 
subjects, to others, outside of the presence of those subjects. But gee 
. . . we could pretty much say that about reports of any or all social 
scientific research data. The subjects aren't there; their data is used 
to represent them.

Strikes me that the key issue/question here is about what one is 
studying. If one is studying the meanings-in-use-for-subjects, then (in 
my view) ethnographic methods are going to do a better job at 
representing (to others) those meanings in use than are other (perhaps 
more quantitative) techniques that overlay received wisdom and concepts 
on the observed behaviors. And in the end, being "true" to actual 
meanings-in-use seems to me to be MORE, not less, true to the native 
culture than are re-representations of imposed constructs.

I fully agree in the need for LOTS of professional protection for 
subjects . . . I'm strong with the desire that subjects should benefit 
as much (or more) from the research than does either the researcher or 
the audience.


On Feb 17, 2004, at 1:46 PM, Danny Butt wrote:

> But the bottom line for me is that if the
> goal is to improve the world, and not just ourselves, we need to find 
> a way
> of negotiating between the needs and desires of those under study and 
> our
> own desires for knowledge - and the power imbalances between these. In 
> some
> cases there's alignment between those two desires, which makes things 
> easier
> - both 'me' and the 'others/subjects' are working toward explicitly 
> the same
> thing. Like Don, there are also situations where I think the 'others' 
> are
> wrong, but I'd add an important consideration to the idea that we can 
> just
> "tell each other" about the wrongness: the bottom line is that Don 
> comes and
> talks to us about Ghanaians without them necessarily being present. The
> effects of the circulation of this knowledge in western academia (and
> related appendages e.g. into development policy), away from explicit
> dialogue with the research subjects, can have a far greater impact on 
> the
> subjects' community than their dialogue without us present can have on 
> us.
> No first world ethnographer ever lost their job for their informants 
> not
> being happy with how they are represented, but there are plenty of 
> examples
> of such impacts (and worse) happening in researched communities due to
> research publications (e.g. in this part of the world, Cook's mapping
> practices).
>
Edward Lee Lamoureux, Ph. D.
Director, Multimedia Program and New Media Center
Associate Professor, Speech Communication
1501 W. Bradley
Bradley University
Peoria IL  61625
309-677-2378