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WENDY BISHOP
Florida State University
I-Witnessing in Composition:
Turning Ethnographic Data into Narratives
For all its promise, then, the future of the embattled Ethnographic
community cannot be all that bright. There still seems to be among
users and consumers alike, considerable confusion about what sort of
authority it h a s . . . . However diplomatic its users might wish or need
to be in the face of a positivist culture's latent hostility, the method
itself will inevitably be both threatening and radical. It will not mix
and match. (Stephen North, The Making of Knowledge in Composition
313)
project. Since I completed that dissertation in late 1988 and published a revised
version of my work in 1990,1 have watched the surge, development, and now—
perhaps—the cresting of a wave of similar projects. Studies labeled ethnographic,
naturalistic, case study, and so on, are well represented in Research in the Teaching
of English bibliographies of the last several years; the 1991 CCCC program
presented more reports and, in general, much talk about ethnography, including
several panels and a posfconvention workshop.1
In 1986 when I started my research, however, I felt I was inventing ethnogra-
phy on my own. Aside from Shirley Brice Heath's Ways with Words, Glenda
Bissex's GNYSATWRK, Sondra Perl and Nancy Wilson's Through Teachers' Eyes
and a few teacher-researcher articles, my "bibles" were written for social scientists
and anthropologists and I had few studies to study. The methods texts I did
have—Goetz and LeCompte and Miles and Huberman—were valuable. They told
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First of all, I did not realize that "writing it down" was an interpretive act
although I knew that "writing it up" would be. I assumed, and my methods texts
and rhetoric program's general grounding in positivistic research led me to believe,
that the data I collected would be representative, reliable, whole. Then, scrupulous
careful analysis, triangulation, and constant self-questioning would bring me to a
I-Witnessing in Composition 149
reliable and valid understanding of another culture, in this case, retraining teachers
of college writing. It was hard to see, at first, the degree to which "writing it down"
is interpretive, that "what is written 'down' is treated as data in the writing 'up'"
and that "both phases of the work involve the creation of textual materials"
(Atkinson 61).
Although I knew that surely no one else could step into the same river of my
research project for a second time, go back to the same situation I had encountered,
I believed they could replicate my research to the extent that I carefully explained
my methods—that I had collected so many tapes, asked so many subjects so many
questions in just the same order, and so on.
I did not understand then the degree to which all research relies on tropes,
researcher personas, and persuasions, that all research methods and research
reports are rhetorical, that is, all use the reliable triad of classical persuasion: logos,
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the appeal to reason, pathos, the appeal to emotion, and ethos, the appeal of
personality or character. As in any persuasion, "these means we use will be partly
determined by the nature of the thesis we are arguing, partly by current circum-
stances, partly (perhaps mainly) by the kind of audience we are addressing"
(Corbett 37). I was to learn that all research relies on persuasion, including
ethnography. Carl Herndl points out that a primary reporting strategy, Geertz's
technique of "thick description," is "a highly stylized form of verisimilitude that
has become a standard in discussions of ethnographic methods and functions as a
textual strategy authorizing attempts at ethnographic realism" (321).
It is not surprising that I did not begin to learn to do ethnography by critiquing
basic assumptions and strategies of empirical research. Since I began my own
practice from a positivistic epistemology—at least as positivistic as I could be with
my words-before-numbers, humanistic background—I started with the assump-
tions of that epistemology. And positivistic methods do not invite question; in fact,
ethnographic methods are themselves suspect to the degree to which they question
the prevailing tradition; this is the dominant culture's latent hostility mentioned by
Stephen North in an opening quotation. Yet positivism, I would learn, is a position,
and a very firmly entrenched one. William Firestone explains that
Cool style relies on the appeal to reason. The requirement for cool reasoning,
for instance, is laid out for all novices in the Publication Manual of the American
Psychological Association which instructs:
As I read this "cool" description of the field of science, I note the absence of
a first-person author (indeed, the APA manual itself assumes the author-less
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authority of divine creed) and the implied logic of previously proven scientific
truths.
Examining the passage, I see easily that "The style of science is social in its
entirety, a well-policed communal property" (Gros 934). In this example, the
policing vehicle is the APA manual which tells initiates not what to say—that is,
it doesn't help them choose and design their research projects—but how to say, in
a rhetorically appropriate manner.
Just as scientific writing gains power from the use of cool style, the writing
of ethnographic stories has often been viewed as lacking in rigor and validity when
writers indulge in what I'll call its "warm" style—vivid subjective narratives that
are, inevitably, meditative and interpretive. These narratives, of course, rely greatly
upon the ethos of the author: the work of Clifford Geertz, for instance, is read
widely because we enjoy reading Geertz the author as much as we enjoy reading
his study results. And Geertz is well aware of his rhetorical powers: "I've always
argued that in part I'm represented in my texts by my style, that at least people
won't think my books were written by anybody else, that there's a kind of signature
in them" (qtd. in Olsen 262).
Understanding cool and warm style helps me better understand my own initial
struggles. Throughout my research project, the problems of "writing it up" were
so omnipresent and so clear they obscured all issues of writing it down. And
writing it up is indeed difficult. For instance, it was impossible to move from the
hard data of interview transcripts to the "warm" shaped descriptions I was weav-
ing, without seeing the subjective nature of my enterprise. I worried that my stories
and narratives while "convincing" would be suspect. Starting in positivism, I too
confused the imagined with the imaginary, the fictional with false, making things
out—people, situations, patterns, understandings—with making them up. To an-
chor my creations, I weighed down my six-hundred-page dissertation with one
hundred pages of charts, analyses, transcripts and raw data, data that did, by the
I-Witnessing in Composition 151
way, help me construct my imagined, fictional, and made out understandings, but
data that could never "prove" them.
And "writing it up" proved to be more problematic than "writing it down,"
since "writing up" an ethnographic narrative includes creating that believable and
interesting authorial identity that no one was talking about and no one was
teaching. Research validity rests—to a great degree—on this constructed author.
Geertz claims (somewhat humorously) that
with odd growths and unexplained fevers; a capacity to stand still for
artistic insults, and the sort of patience that can support an endless
search for invisible needles in infinite haystacks. And the authorial sort
of being there is getting more difficult all the time (23-24)
[T]his issue, negotiating the passage from what one has been through
"out there" to what one says "back here," is not psychological in
character. It is literary. It arises for anyone who adopts what one may
call, in a serious pun, the I-witnessing approach to the construction of
cultural descriptions.... To place the reach of your sensibility . . . at
.the center of your ethnography, is to pose for yourself a distinctive sort
of textbuilding problem: rendering your account credible through
rendering your person so. . . . To be a convincing "I-witness," one
must, so it seems, first become a convincing "I." (Geertz 78-79)
For the lay person, such as myself, the main evidence of a problem is
the simple fact that ethnographic writing tends to be surprisingly
boring. How, one asks constantly, could such interesting people doing
such interesting things produce such dull books? (33)
they might draw when making emotional arguments—and the work of both
convinces, often through impassioned textual styles.
Rose and Elbow are in the lucky, even if well-earned, position described by
Corbett: "Some people, of course, already have a reputation familiar to an audi-
ence, and this reputation, if it is a good one, will favorably dispose an audience
toward them, even before they utter a word" (81). Certainly these authors have
detractors who will criticize their authority, their characters, even their feelings.
But such attacks will still honor those authors' rights to move into more complex
rhetorical territories. Ethical and emotional appeals have not been sanctioned by
the community of academic researchers, and the effective use of each would
depend on the long-term exercise of each. The novice is usually told, "prove you
belong," not prove you have "strong beliefs, ideas, feelings, and an admirable
character." Yet feelings, beliefs, character—all are hallmarks of the convincing
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starting to ask if and then how we should conduct context-based studies even as
anthropologists are focusing on questions of discourse, on "writing it up." For
those individuals a postmodern discussion is in full swing. For instance, are there
new ways to evaluate the qualities of ethnographic texts? John Van Maanen
suggests literary standards, arguing:
Literary standards are different, but they are not shabby or second-rate.
When taken seriously they may require even more from an ethnogra-
pher than those formulated by the profession. Fidelity, coherence,
generosity, wisdom, imagination, honesty, respect, and verisimilitude
are standards of a high order. Moreover, they are not exclusionary
ones, since those who read ethnography for pleasure and general
knowledge are as able to judge whether they are achieved as those who
read for professional development. Ethnographies that reach such
standards in the minds of many readers are certainly far fewer than
those that obtain collegial standards. They are not less worthy. (33)
The issue of evaluating our "factional texts" (Geertz's term) with borrowed
literary criteria has come about because anthropologists have received memorable
proofs of the constructedness—the factionality—of the core texts in their field.
Anthropological narratives have been around long enough to allow their authors
to contradict and challenge themselves.
For instance, James Clifford discusses Bronislaw Malinowski's A Diary in the
Strict Sense of the Term. Published forty-five years after Malinowski's original,
field-defining research among the Trobrianders (published as Argonauts of the
Western Pacific), this work alone sets the problems of I-witnessing in bold relief.
In the Diary, Malinowski shows himself to be less than the noble ethnographer,
rather he is ambivalent, lonely, obsessed, and his metacommentary proves that
"ethnographic comprehension (a coherent position of sympathy and hermeneutic
I-Witnessing in Composition 155
encourage them in writing research.3 John Van Maanen calls the traditional eth-
nography a realist tale and distinguishes two other forms: confessional tales—
commentary on realist works—and impressionistic tales—comments on the doing
of ethnography, that is, metacommentary. My dissertation was realist just as this
essay aims for a mixture of confessional and impressionistic. Tales about tales and
narratives about narratives allow us to "treat all textual accounts based on field-
work as partial constructions" (Clifford, "On Ethnographic Self-Fashioning" 97).
That is, treat them as they truly are.
As we tell tales about tales and narratives about narratives in writing research,
we find that metacommentary helps us avoid positivistic and subjective mis-mix-
ing and matching. We learn the reasons for transforming "data" into stories that
matter, journeys to be taken. Yes, reliable and valid stories are possible and needed,
as well as stories of writing it down, writing it up, telling where we went and what
we thought about all along the way.
Notes
1 To define ethnographic research, a new researcher must sort through definitions offered by other
I-witnesses; all are shaded by the originating discipline (like sociology, anthropology, education,
psychology) and the needs of the witness, his or her current project and situation within the humanities
and/or social science professions. Anthropology based—"An ethnography is written representation of
a culture (or selected aspects of a culture)" (Van Maanan 1); Education based— "Ethnographers attempt
to record, in an orderly manner, how natives behave and how they explain their behavior. And
ethnography, strictly speaking, is an orderly report of this recording. Natives are people in situations
anywhere—including children and youth in schools—not just people who live in remote jungles or
cozy peasant villages" (Spindler and Spindler 17); Psychology based—"The self as we experience it,
understand it, and act it out is a function of the dynamic interaction between individual and social
groups, so to describe the self usefully we must investigate these interactions" (Brooke 16-17).
Methods texts may define ethnography by constituent parts and in opposition to other methodologies;
for instance, ethnography may be described as one point in the continuum of empirical research which
moves from descriptive (at that far end—case study and ethnography) to the experimental (at that far
156 Rhetoric Review
end—experiment and meta-analysis) (Lauer and Asher 16). Others view ethnography in opposition to
experimental empirical research:
"Experimental inquiry is generally based on a positivist view of social behavior (Comte
1973; Durkheim 1956) that seeks to identity facts and causes. Ethnographic inquiry
emanates from a phenomenological base (Husserl 1931; Schutz 1970); Weber 1947) that
seeks to understand social behavior from the participants' frames of reference" (Kamil,
Langer, Shanahan 71).
Most definitions identify particular methodological aspects of ethnographic projects: ethnographies
generate hypotheses, focus on context, are written up using thick-description, require participant-ob-
servation, and use multiple measures for data collection, that is, triangulation (Kantor, Kirby, and Goetz
298; North 277; Lauer and Asher 39). More recently, definitions include case study reporting and
ethnographers in composition are often teacher researchers (Bissex Small and Bissex Why, Myers).
2
North's worries about the limits of ethnography—that it is a field with edges but no center—seem
to stem from his use of an experimental rather than a phenomenological measure. Ethnography will
never be well defined using the standards of empirical experimental research. Thomas Newkirk claims
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that:
the price of [such] respectability comes high... If the case study and ethnographic report
are to be treated as research, they are still to be judged by the traditional standards of
educational research—replicability, validity, objectivity, generalizability. . . . To be
accepted, the researcher must also accept positivistic assumptions about the existence
"out there" of generalizable truths that transcend particular contexts "(128).
Instead, many researchers, myself included, find I-witnessing is "a way of learning, not a method for
proving" (Bissex, "Small" 71). North's analysis did help ethnographers say, "No, that is not what we
meant at all," and they have gone on to redefine and discuss their work in ways I have started to outline
here.
3
Geertz's Works and Lives discusses the writings of four influential anthropologists; he looks around,
through, and behind the construction of their major texts. He is also at work on a book, After the Fact,
that looks at his own ethnographic practices. Van Maanen discusses his own field work and the
bibliography to his book offers further readings, including critical tales and literary tales. Clifford's
book and coauthored collection (with Marcus) offer many sidelong and behind the scenes descriptions
of fashioning field reports.
Works Cited
Atkinson, Paul. The Ethnographic Imagination: Textual Constructions of Reality. London: Routledge,
1990.
Bishop, Wendy. Something Old, Something New: College Writing Teachers and Classroom Change.
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—. A Microethnography with Case Studies of Teacher. Development Through a Graduate Training
Course in Teaching Writing. Dissertation Abstracts International, 49, UA: 1989. (University
Microfilms No. 89-05, 333).
Bissex, Glenda. GNYS AT WRK: A Child Learns to Write and Read. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1980.
—. "Small is Beautiful: Case Study as Appropriate Methodology for Teacher Research." The Writing
Teacher as Researcher: Essays in the Theory and Practice of Class-Based Research. Ed. Donald
A. Daiker and Max Morenberg. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1990. 70-75.
—. "Why Case Studies?" Seeing for Ourselves: Case-Study Research by Teachers of Writing. Ed.
Glenda Bissex and Richard H. Bullock. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1987.7-20.
Brodkey, Linda. "Writing Critical Ethnographic Narratives." Anthropology & Educational Quarterly
18 (1987): 67-76.
I-Witnessing in Composition 157
Brooke, Robert. Writing and Sense of Self: Identity Negotiation in Writing Workshops. Urbana: NCTE,
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Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography.
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Corbett, Edward PJ. Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1990.
Elbow, Peter. What Is English? New York: MLA, 1990.
Firestone, William A. "Meaning in Method: The Rhetoric of Quantitative and Qualitative Research."
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Geertz, Clifford. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1988.
Goetz, Judith P., and Margaret LeCompte. Ethnography and Qualitative Design in Educational
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Gros, Alan G. "Does Rhetoric of Science Matter? The Case of the Floppy-Eared Rabbits." College
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Heath, Shirley Brice. Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms.
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Herndl, Carl G. "Writing Ethnography: Representation, Rhetoric, and Institutional Practices." College
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North, Stephen M. The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field. Upper
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Olsen, Gary. "The Social Scientist as Author: Clifford Geertz on Ethnography and Social Construction."
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Perl, Sondra, and Nancy Wilson. Through Teachers' Eyes. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1986.
Pratt, Mary Louise. "Fieldwork in Common Places." Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of
Ethnography. Ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986. 27-50.
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Education." Interpretive Ethnography of Education: At Home and Abroad. Ed. George Spindler and
Louise Spindler. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1987. 17-33.
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158 Rhetoric Review
Wendy Bishop teaches writing and rhetoric at Florida State University. Currently, she is editing The
Subject Is Writing: Essays by Teachers and Students on Writing (forthcoming, Boynton/Cook), a
textbook for first-year writers; with Hans Ostrom, she is coediting Colors of a Different Horse:
Rethinking Creative Writing (forthcoming, NCTE), a collection of essays by creative writing teachers.
Her currentresearchprojects include a naturalistic study of new teachers of college writing during their
first year in the classroom and a study, with Gay Lynn Crossley, of one year in the life of a college
writing program administrator.
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