CRITICAL ETHNOGRAPHY

ETHNOGRAPHIC SURREALISM ---- SURREAL ETHNOGRAPHY

November  2010

       Cultural Farming’s research methodology is critical ethnography.  I consider ethnography to be rather simple, for its definition and method are clearly summed in its etymology: culture writing.  But of course nothing is ever quite that simple.  Indeed the term ethnography is like a big juicy qualitative pie with apparently enough individual slices to sate every individual appetite in every field.  I wish I could use this space to sketch its historical gyrations from Malinowski, Boaz, Mead, Bateson, Levi-Strauss, Turner, Conquergood, Geertz, Marcus, Denzin, Madison, et al. -- it’s a good story.  Instead I will dish out my own sliver-slice: my Cultural Farming technique for (C)ritcally representing graphic presentations of particular people in a particular culture, and how I came to this unorthodox approach.

SETTING THE SCENE:

Contemporary Ethnography Across the Disciplines (CEAD), Conference and Hui,  Hamilton, New Zealand  (2010)

Screening: When Pictures Say Ain’t

      Norman Denzin entered the cavernous men’s toilet directly after me.  We were alone, almost side-by-side, both evacuating our bladders.  This was a perfect opportunity to say something personal that might encapsulate my utter exasperation with my day... 

    “Hey Doctor, I just want you to know that I traveled all this way from Calgary specifically to see you.  Seriously.  This is super special for me.  Yeah...  Do you remember the last time we met?   We were sitting in your campus office, waaay back in 2004.  Yeah, I was interviewing back then.  I wanted to pursue my doctorate with both you and McChesney.  Yeah, I’ve attempted to contact you several times.  That day though you were busy, I guess.  You never really looked up from your keyboard.  Yeah... I knocked, hoping to chat a bit, while I visited Urbana.  Anyway the reason I’m attending this conference is because I understand now that ethnography is my last great hope.  Yeah, I’ve been developing my own methods of critical media ethnography, and your ideas really inspire mine.  Please...let me know when you get a free minute between sessions today.  Yeah, I would love to introduce you to my work.  OK?  Cool, just say the word.” 

      Word never came from Norm.  Over the entire (friendly, intimate, exotic) four day event, he perfectly managed to never speak to me again.  He never even looked in my direction, from what I could tell.  How could that be?  What I had hoped would be an obvious ‘wink’ to this silverback of qualitative methods, had manifested into nothing more than a twitch...not even a blink.  That urinal would prove to be my only confessional in Waikato.

CRITICAL THEORY:

      Critical Theory is social inquiry that can analyze and theorize our uses of knowledge, practices, discourses and policies -- especially as they create and sustain political, economic, social, cultural and environmental inequalities and injustices.  It identifies ideas, actions, and policies that privilege or marginalize particular identities.  (C)ritical theory exposes how hierarchy, inequality and injustice come to seem natural.  For Cultural Farming “inquiry” is the key here.

CRITICAL ETHNOGRAPHY:

      Critical Ethnography is the application of critical theory, as practiced in anthropological and sociological qualitative research.  It places at the centre of ethnographic studies the social and ethical relationships between the interpreter and the one interpreted.  It investigates questions of power and inequality, and the political economy of symbols and actions in contemporary culture.  For Cultural Farming “application” is the key here.

CRITICAL EXPERIMENTAL APPLICATION:

     Inquiry and application are to Critical Ethnography as experimental methodology and method are to Cultural Farming.  Like a lot of language, however, the terms “critical” and “ethnography” hold little consensual meaning.  Both are often demoted to some lesser-status ‘science’, particularly amongst scientists. 

     Indeed, normative applications of these terms typically denature and vulgarize the political significance of critical ethnography, through misconceptions intimating a kind of arm-chair form of deep-thought.  Ethnography is generalized as some bastardized imperialist-critique of exotic far-away cultures, by way of some un-empirical participant observation, field notes, interviews, surveys or kinship charts.  It’s a dicy methodology, which gets further complicated through the mis-understandings and ubiquities of technological observation.  And machines mostly do our business now.  Un-human technics now perform most inquiry and representation, which of course, helps circumscribe the human body as instrument. 

     However, the term critical (Critical) within my Cultural Farming research implies groundings to the critically theoretical Institute of Social Research. This was the Frankfurt School of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse. Its ranks were impressive, including orbiting intellectuals such as Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Rudolf Arnheim, Hannah Arendt.   Even including farther constellations like Antonio Gramsci, and later Louis Althusser. 

      Inflecting the Frankfurt School’s culture and communication modi vivendi (Marx+Freud), Cultural Farming’s parallel purpose is also the emancipation of cultural members from ideologies that are not to their benefit, and not (necessarily) of their creation.  Critical Theoretical thinking then attempts to break-open power, oppression, taken-for-granted 'realities’, and ideologies.  Read prosaically or not, this is an unabashed sketch of radical social action.

     This reconnoitering of terms offers robust opportunities of response, to check and re-limit common perspectives, through which both citizens and qualitative researchers alike can frame critical questions and promote social action.  In this way, critical ethnography (a genre of cultural writing) situates well within the parameters of both quantitative data aggregation, plus ‘thickly written’ descriptions of culture.  Cultural Farming’s descriptions are gooey-thick.

      But critical ethnography also goes well beyond describing, by also ‘action-ing’ for change.  It challenges false-consciousness and ideologies, exposed through longitudinal investigative observation, which helps to re-leverage hegemonic consensus through demands for intentional diversities of discourse.  Indeed, only through civic forms of intentional critical provocation can mediamongers and citizens alike build and sustain modes of democratic cross-communication.

      Dick Hebdige, writes that a mixture of conjunctional analysis and strategic intervention typifies a critical Gramscian approach:

     “The Gramscian model demands that we grasp these processes not because we want to expose them or to understand them in the abstract but because we want to use them effectively to contest authority and leadership by offering arguments and alternatives that are not only 'ideologically correct' ('right on') but convincing and convincingly presented, arguments that capture the popular imagination, that engage directly with the issues, problems, anxieties, dreams, and hopes of real, (i.e., actually existing) men and women; arguments, in other words, that take the popular (and hence the populace) seriously and that engage directly with it on its own terms and in its own language.”  (Hebdige, 1988, pp.203-204, original italics).

      While Hebdige --like most all theorists-- omits examples of practice of how this Gramscian model should manifest, he foregrounds Cultural Farming’s purposeful separation, between critical as mere thinking and/or critique, and the notion of critical as action. 

      And here Stephen Gilbert Brown’s critical ethnography (CE) renders still more important clarifications when the term “critical” is conjoined with the methodological practice of ethnography:

1. •-CE is not a univocal, but a polyphonic discourse.
   

2. •-CE adopts a praxis informed by the theoretical imperatives of postmodern critique, which gestures toward a synthesis of the social, the political, and the personal, in which logos is infused with ethos.
   

3. •-CE confounds theory with its fugitive signs, even as it refocuses its critical gaze on signifying practices of site-specific discourse communities.
   

4. •-CE wages a liberatory struggle of counter-criticism against postmodern theory - talking back, as it were, to the theoretical discourse that would master it.
   

5. •-CE exposes the limitations of critique that so effectively exposed its own -- moving toward a more dialectic engagement with theory and a more dialogic solidarity with participants.
   

6. •-CE is situated at the intersection of radical pedagogy and postmodern theory.
   

7. •-CE is being informed by 'feminist pragmatism': “ethics of care.”
   

8. •- CE counters the criticism of self-reflexive narcissism.
   

                                 (Brown &Dobrin, 2004, pp.299-314)

      Brown’s critical ethnography typology opens doors to my particular Cultural Farming brand of critical research, which carries a certain utopian tone.  This is intentional; I want to help build (design) a better world.  As Avery Gordon puts it:

    “Utopians practice a politics of everyday life, placing a premium on inventing and describing social arrangements designed to create an environment in which latent capacities for individual happiness can be fulfilled.  Notwithstanding the genealogy of the word, most utopians are distinguished by their willful insistence that the good society is not “no place,” but one that we have the human and material resources to build in the present.”  (in Bennett, et al, 2005, p:363)

      But mass media, broadly conceived by the Frankfurt School, were often painted as singularly oppressive culprits against mass culture; thus sharpening a pointed bias against the industries that deploy mass media technologies.  As Armand Mattelart writes:

     “Schools of critical thought began to question the consequences of the development of these new means of cultural production and transmission, refusing to take for granted that democracy would necessarily benefit from these technical innovations .”  (in Berry & Theobald, 2006, p.138).

      I deeply sympathize with this sentiment.  With Cultural Farming, however, I conceive our new media technologies as not merely good or bad, because media are never neutral.  The good, however, is slipping away today.  Evil concoctions continuously multiply and mutate at a much faster clip.  The Devil lies here, within ever newer combinations of ubiquity, seduction and usage.  “We make our tools, and there after, our tools make us.”  So here we begin to excavate the first sites of fundamental moral imperative. 

     It is our belief in the (in)escapable (un)intentional (mis)usage throughout all media communication, which fuels my central research thrust.  And so, my designer pragmatism diverges from the oft despairing tones of the Frankfurt School in that I remain sharply critical of most current TV/media production (particularly TV news) emanating from publics and industrialists alike.  Yet I remain modestly (quixotically?) optimistic regarding its recuperation.  I want to be equally optimistic about others, like me, eventually intuiting that the endless-struggle to gain a voice within an “ecstasy of communication” is meaningless.  In short, put that stuff down, and go outdoors and learn something earthly.

CREATIVITY -- CULTURE -- INDUSTRY:

     As with all of culture, the cultural-creative industry is comprised of both collective and individual agency.  Yet we forget that media corporations are merely collections of individuals.  Citizens must have a public means for responding directly to these specific media makers.  Not responses to some shadowy abstract thing like a media corporation, but to the very person culpable for particular decisions and actions.  So we should always resist this kind of generalizing, because it’s evident that social uprising accelerates in-parallel to the exclusion of provocative civic response.  Let people respond equally to all this ‘media speaking’, and a revolution --an overthrow-- will indeed come.

      This notion is not to champion more letters to the editor, or more opinion pages, or for still more comments or tweets.  Rather, it is a clarion call --a begging-- for the practice of potlatch: for our media to be equally re-turned, in kind, back into the very heart of the cultural-creative industry project.  A Cultural Farmer knows this method as insurrectionary composting, which further renders the necessity to engage Butler's (1997, p.160) idea of  “a speech act as an insurrectionary act.”  Indeed, it is a familiar premise throughout Cultural Farming. 

      As Judith Butler writes:                                

     “As we think about worlds that might one day become thinkable, sayable, legible; the opening up of the foreclosed and the saying of the unspeakable become part of the “offense” that must be committed in order to expand the domain of linguistic survival.  The resigni-fication of speech requires opening new contexts, speaking in ways that have never yet been legitimated, and hence producing legitimation in new and future forms.”  (Butler, 1997, p.41)

      And in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Paul Rabinow connects a Cultural Farming ethnographical tone to Butler's “speech act as an insurrectionary act” (Fig.3b-5):

     “The guiding value of those interested in experimental ethnographic writing …is dialogic: 'the effort to create a relationship with the Other -- as in the search for a medium of expression which will offer mutual interpretation, perhaps visualized as a common text, or as something more like discourse.'  …Feminist anthropology is trying to shift discourse, not improve a paradigm: ' that is, it alters the nature of the audience, the range of readership and the kinds of interactions between author and reader, and alters the subject matter of conversation in the way it allows others to speak.”  (Clifford & Marcus, 1986, p.255)

      Here again it should be remembered, the culture industries of Adorno and Horkheimer’s times were also paradoxically comprised of individual producer agency, yet ultimately hegemonically persuadable beyond all reason.  That is to say, their theories did little to save them, or their culture.  So maybe corporations can’t be changed from the outside -- and maybe not even from the inside, one minion at a time.  If so, then shouldn’t we invoke other options.  The apparatus has rarely been fingered as the culprit, as Cultural Farming reveals.  Yet all televisual media must be rounded-up, corralled, broken, and then ridden with skill.  That’s the hope here, that good change can still be affected.  A better world can be built.  Thus, certain notions of utopia continue to hold both purpose and promise for Cultural Farming.  Victor Margolin targets these notions, invoking Clifford Geertz:

     “…ideology is a form of 'symbolic action' through which human beings consciously or purposefully create symbols-systems that establish boundaries for human behavior. …The utopian imagination… means to envision new possibilities for human life.”  (Margolin, 1997, p.5-9)

     And here, Cultural Farming’s encouragement of citizens into critical acts of ‘doing’, parallels Henry Giroux’s plea in Impure Acts:

     “My call to make the pedagogical a defining feature of cultural studies is meant to accentuate the performative as an act of doing - a work in progress informed by a cultural politics that translates knowledge back into practice, places theory in the politics of space of the performative, and invigorates the pedagogical as a practice through which collective struggles can be waged to revive and maintain the fabric of democratic institutions.” (Giroux, 2000, p.135)

      Applying notions of critical ethnography (although here, too, Giroux omits a template for “an act of doing”) are but a few examples of intention throughout Cultural Farming.  But one additional importance should be stated: critical ethnographic intention stands in sharp relief to much of the simplistic analyses across popular culture.

     TV/media appropriation as critical ethnography is not production-as-consumption = consumption-as-production.  Nor do terms like  “citizen-consumer” (Hartley, 2008, p. 65), or “DIY citizenship” and “poaching” (Jenkins, 1992, pp. 9-50), fully exemplify civic agency within the scope of Cultural Farming’s more democratic processes. 

      Conceived in these ways, terms like “prosumer”, “fan”, “freedom” and “critical” mistakenly reflect mere forms of ongoing existence in our world -- mediated or otherwise.  For instance, breathing in and out is no more or less critical than unwittingly snapping a cell phone photo in everyday life.  Indeed, breathing does simultaneously consume and produce as does, say, the production and consumption of the world through innumerable emails, personal videos, etc. 

      But these kinds of generalizations of media interaction do little to advance critical understanding, particularly when today in North America any media action is almost as involuntary as any other.  What distinguishes Cultural Farming from simpler characterizations of everyday production-consumption is critical (self) reflexivity during the acts of production.  It is the addition of this missing ingredient that properly ‘seasons’ Hartley’s words:

     “Critique is perhaps most explicit in the ‘culture industries’ tradition, which has certainly turned a skeptical, jaundiced, and critically practiced eye on the idea of the creative industries.  But at the same time many on the left who have been trained in Frankfurt-style critique have turned up working directly in the creative industries, and in the policy, educational, and government support agencies that serve them.  A turn toward practical engagement, in other words, is not an alternative to critical analysis but its outcome…” (Hartley, 2007, p. 13)

      Critical Theory, while formulated in the early works of the Frankfurt School, has expanded greatly over the decades.  Yet its purpose has purposefully changed very little.  The same might be said for critical ethnographic film/video.  Critical ethnography’s raison d'être is to describe, analyze and open to scrutiny otherwise hidden agendas, power centres, and assumptions that inhibit, repress, and constrain.  Critical ethnography’s means and methods, however, must drastically evolve within a fast changing world. 

      As Jim Thomas (1993: 4) contends, while conventional ethnographic practice "describes what is", critical ethnography "asks what could be".  Where conventional ethnography studies culture for the purposes of describing it, critical ethnographers do the same in order to change it.  Cultural Farming resides in the latter, as a vital extension to seventy years of non-visual TV/media communication research.

      Sergei Eisenstein, Russian filmmaker and arguably the first theorist of critical montage, made his films almost a century ago in a manner similar to how Cultural Farming makes videos today with a computer: clip-against-clip, each placed with an experienced eye-ear-hand-gut, as a means of ‘reversal’ of communication. 

      Critical montage, then, is collectively more than juxtaposition, collage, redaction, editing, mise-en-scène, or contemporary notions of “mash-up”.  Rather, it is purposeful intellectual collision (Eisenstein 1942), where corruptive graveness is (s)mashed and subordinated, for unleashing new incalculable ideas and viewpoints.  This approach to critical ethnography embodies both pedagogical and radical performance, as Denzin argues:

     “Critical pedagogy is a dialectical and dialogic process, whereas revolutionary, radical (and reflexive) performance pedagogy critically situates agency, identity, and discourse within and against a broader historical landscape.”  (2003: 31)

CRITICAL REVOLUTIONARY PEDAGOGY:

      Critical pedagogy is a dialectical and dialogic process, whereas revolutionary, radical (and reflexive) performance pedagogy critically situates agency, identity, and discourse within and against a broader historical landscape.

      For Cultural Farming, following Eisenstein, Benjamin and Brecht, TV/media ethnography employing critical montage is inherently “revolutionary” in both idea and practice as it interjects a necessary form of Gramscian reverse-interpellation; or a “hailing back again response” to TV/media (Forgacs 2000). 

      This in-kind, critical, mediaturgical reciprocation carries the potential for invoking a sway of civic governance to traditional one-way forms of corporatized media production and reception.  After all, technology watches us as closely as we watch it.  Logical-conclusion suggests individual media makers can indeed help to foment change.  But to truly embody this, “subsistence farming” must be widely practiced as public verification that technological lust, runaway capitalism, surreal spectacle, narcissistic self-promotion, and even academic gravity hold little more “authority” than humble civic responsibility, reflexive rational curiosity, and intellectual courage. 

      Robust theoretical notions like Cultural Farming’s mediaturgy require simple, lean, elegant, and publicly available experimental methods which, once combined, oblige a deeply focused civic action because good critical ethnographic storytelling demands longitudinal commitment, experiential discernment, ethical motivation, and craftsmanship.  This is the measure of Cultural Farming.