Page 90 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

ETHNOGRAPHY 79

This theoretical ‘confession’, however, need not specify the whole of social
reality in a given region; it has merely specified the kind of world in which its
action is seen as taking place. Although it involves the general form of, it does
not include, specific explanation—especially concerning the manner, the ‘how’
or the degree of external determination of a given social region—nor does it
anticipate the particular meaning of the future flow of data.
It is indeed crucial that a qualitative methodology be confronted with the
maximum flow of relevant data. Here resides the power of the evidence to
‘surprise’, to contradict, specific developing theories. And here is the only possible
source for the ‘authenticity’, the ‘qualitative feel’, which is one of the method’s
major justifications. It is in this area—short of any challenge to one’s world view
—that there is the greatest possibility of ‘surprise’.
This is not to allow back an unbridled, intuitive ‘naturalism’ on impoverished
terms. Even with respect to what remains unspecified by the larger ‘confession’,
we must recognize the necessarily theoretical form of what we ‘discover’. Even
the most ‘naturalistic’ of accounts involves deconstruction of native logic and
builds upon reconstruction of compressed, select, significant moments in the
original field experienced. There is an art concealing art which precisely
obscures the theoretical work that has taken place.
Having recognized the inevitability of a theoretical component, it can be used
more self-consciously to probe those areas about which knowledge is incomplete.
We will find in any cultural form and related form of consciousness a
submerged text of contradictions, inconsistencies and divergencies. If we are
tuned in to an illusory attempt to present a single-valency account without
interpretative or reductive work, we shall more usually miss (or, at best, simply
reproduce) this sub-text. It is necessary to add to the received notion of the
‘quality’ of the data an ability to watch for inconsistencies, contradictions and
misunderstandings and to make theoretical interpretations of them. We must
maintain the richness and atmosphere of the original while attempting to
illuminate its inner connections. Certainly, the necessary and inevitable level of
interpretative theorizing within the method can be used to explicate chosen
topics without running greater dangers than are run conventionally in an
unrecognized way.

On reflexivity: the politics of fieldwork
If we wish to represent the subjective meanings, feelings and cultures of others,
it is not possible to extend to them less than we know of ourselves. What is so
often taken as the ‘object’ and the researcher lie parallel in their humanity. The
‘object’ of our inquiry is in fact, of course, a subject and has to be understood
and presented in the same mode as the researcher’s own subjectivity—this is the
true meaning of ‘validity’ in the ‘qualitative’ zone. The recognition of this truism
is not, however, to declare against all forms of ‘objectivity’. We are still in need