Linguistic Ethnography Seminar 19-20 April 2004: ‘The interface between linguistic and post-structuralist feminist ethnographies’
The linguistic ethnography seminar was something of a luxury for me, and no doubt others - two days devoted just to discussing and exploring ideas.  We seemed to cover a substantial amount of ground which it’s not possible to do justice to here.  I’ve tried therefore just to give a flavour, albeit rather partial.
The seminar was structured around presentations from three speakers, Valerie Hey, Don Kulick and Shereen Benjamin.  Valerie Hey characterised her own position as feminist, materialist, post-structuralist: taking up a position as a feminist researcher was something she regarded as ‘inherently dilemmatic’, raising issues about knowledge production, relations with research participants, ‘writing up’ and representing others.  She referred to some of the tensions she faced in carrying out research with working-class girls, necessarily affected by her own earlier working-class identity.  Don Kulick identified three significant seminar themes: power, commitment and representation.  His own presentation addressed these in relation to anthropological research, critically examining calls for an anthropology of the powerless amongst, predominantly, female anthropologists.  He asked what anthropologists gained from an identification with relatively powerless people, and offered, somewhat controversially, a psychoanalytical interpretation in terms of masochistic desire.  Shereen Benjamin discussed her ethnographic study of a girls’ school, looking at the position of girls seen as having learning difficulties within an education system that represents success as achievable through diligence and effort.  Much of this session was concerned with the exploration of data relating to one of Shereen’s research participants, examining representations of ‘success’ and ‘failure’, as well as the significance of ‘silences’ in the data.
Several issues recurred across these presentations and follow-up discussions: issues of representation – of participants in research but also of ourselves as researchers; power, not just in terms of relationships between researchers and other participants but also between co-researchers; the value of (different forms of) reflexivity in ethnographic research.  The question of feminism itself, and undoubted differences in how we understood this, was explored rather less, beyond the common ground of critical engagement and the generally accepted argument that we need a baggy, capacious definition.  Along with some fairly abstract discussion it was good to focus on data in some sessions, and to discuss the basis for analyses/interpretations.  Issues here included warrants for the interpretation of what is not said (absences or silences in the data); different levels or types of interpretation (language as a source of content vs a greater focus on the quality of texts); and the relative merits of CA-type vs more contextualised approaches.  A few valiant attempts were made to unpack differences and potential complementarities between linguistic and feminist post-structuralist ethnography at the level of data analysis though, perhaps unsurprisingly, we left this unresolved.
Joan Swann
May 2004