UK Linguistic Ethnography Forum Seminar 4
19-20 April 2004, King’s College, London

The Interface Between Linguistic and Post-Structuralist Feminist Ethnographies

Report by Rosie Flewitt

The term ‘interface’ derives from scientific descriptions of the plane of separation or boundary between two substances, and is commonly used in electronics to describe the process of creating compatibility between two differently constructed operating systems. Small wonder then that when presented as an ‘interface’, the plane of separation between linguistic and post-structuralist feminist ethnographies is often tense, problematic or avoided. Certainly, the different perspectives of participants at the UKLEF seminar led to 2 days’ rich discussions orbiting around a re-examination of linguistic ethnographic assumptions in the light of post-structural feminist approaches - and vice versa. 

This report on those discussions is partial. I came to the seminar with a research history of using post-structuralism to explore the contradictions and inconsistencies in preschool children’s situated, multimodal communicative practices and using feminist post-structuralism to deconstruct dichotomous assumptions about middle/working classes and male/female gendered behaviours.

Valerie Hey opened the seminar by discussing the untapped potentials of post-structuralism to explore representations of realities in research. Drawing on post-structuralist concepts of how identities and identifications are constructed in networks of power during dialogic processes, Hey proposed that psycho-social approaches offer an alternative vocabulary that explores personal and private aspects of discourse, revealing the tensions within and between inter- and intra-personal relationships of researcher, research communities and the researched. This led into a discussion of ‘others’ and of ‘the other within’, with data to illustrate how working class women often judge themselves in relation to others and who they are not rather than in terms of who they are. These ‘others’ may be real, imagined, relational or discursive but they impact on what participants do and on what we as researchers do. For example, Hey exposed tensions in her own career as a ‘working class nomad’ in middle class academia, highlighting how social identities live in the present in the shadow of the past.

The notion of ‘otherness’ was central to Don Kulick’s thesis that the nature of the pleasure ‘barefoot’ anthropologists get from identifying with powerless people can be viewed in Freudian terms of masochistic power. In Brian Street’s words, Kulick ‘wheeled on a huge apparatus’ of psychoanalysis to argue that just as Freudian masochistic pleasure is derived by substituting the ‘self’ for the ‘other’, so in some anthropological research, pleasure is derived from substituting the self for the powerless. Although ‘barefoot’ anthropology can lead to closer relationships with those researched, Kulick argued that some feminist post-structuralist anthropologists’ work used anthropology as a vehicle for this Freudian relationship, eliding the people their research was conducted on rather than feeling and conveying the resonance between their own and others’ voices. Whereas Freud asked ‘Was will das Weib?’, Kulick asks ‘Was will die Anthropologie?’. Are anthropologists interested in the ‘other’ or in using the ‘other’ as a prop from which they can derive their own pleasure?

After tea and a nuts and bolts SIG business meeting, where possible future venues, events and funding arrangements were debated, we resumed increasingly informal discussion of the afternoon’s themes over an increasingly long line of empty bottles in a local Thai restaurant. 

Tuesday morning brought a focus on the pre-circulated readings, with debates on ‘What is feminism?’ and the need for a capacious view of feminisms with the predictable bottom line that a ‘feminist’ approach must be political and about and for women. Epistemological and ontological issues of ‘How do we know what we claim to know?’ were also aired, as was researcher subjectivity and the need to address the unconscious as a key component in what we do and don’t say in our research. There seemed to be some consensus that social science researchers should acknowledge what is not said but be wary of reading too much into data or making analytical claims about data that is not there. For me, when presenting ethnographic research, beliefs about what can be known are linked not only to beliefs about what exists, but also to ethical issues of how much information the researcher can divulge.

Shereen Benjamin presented compelling data from her research on how 15-year-old girls/young women make sense of themselves as school students when school definitions of ‘successful’ benchmark standards are not attainable or accessible to them. This gave rise to debates on meritocratic fantasies, popular images of ‘success’ and the silent erasing or public denial of ‘failure’, which haunts individuals internally but is seldom given a place for discussion with others. Linguistic analysis of the data led to discussions of identity and genre, particularly in pupil accounts of their own achievements and school records of pupil achievement. For example, one student’s use of the pronoun ‘we’ in her portrayal of success and ‘I’ in her portrayal of failure. 

This led into the concluding session on ethnography as a narrative genre and ethnographic representations of different data collection methods, including issues arising from the transcription and/or translation of different languages, dialects and accents when working as a lone researcher and in teams. Again, this highlighted the centrality of researcher subjectivity in the construction of data sets and data framing, but here, rather than ‘interfacing’ smoothly, opinions remained divided about the extent to which researcher subjectivity should be laid bare to readers of research texts and whether open reflexivity is essential in the construction of a convincing argument in linguistic ethnographic writing. 

Throughout the seminar, several relatively new words were sprinkled into the discussions: technologies; apparatus; the technologising of literacy; new knowledge communities; virtual communities; portfolio people etc. In an age dominated by media, image and design, how do we as linguistic ethnographers interpret and use these terms? What do they mean and what does their use (or non-use) mean for the development and role of linguistic ethnography in the study of networks of communicative media? Is this another interface?

One last point – many thanks to the organising committee for making the seminar happen and for all their careful planning to ensure we were well fed and watered throughout.