Page 73 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

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This contemporary cultural condition—postcolonial, postindustrial, postmodern,
postcommunist—forms the historical backdrop for the urgency of rethinking the
significance of ethnography, away from its status as realist knowledge in the direction of
its quality as a form of storytelling, as narrative. This does not mean that descriptions
cease to be more or less true; criteria such as accurate data gathering and careful
inference making remain applicable, even if their meaning and importance may become
both more relative and more complicated, not just a question of technique but also
perhaps one of ethics. It does mean that our deeply partial position as storytellers—a
doubly partial position, as I have claimed earlier—should more than ever be seriously
confronted and thought through in its consequences. Any cultural description is not only
constructive (or, as some might say, ‘fictive’), but also of a provisional nature, creating
the discursive objectification and sedimentation of ‘culture’ through the singling out and
highlighting of a series of discontinuous occurrences from an ongoing, neverending flux,
and therefore by definition always-already falling short and falling behind. The point is
not to see this as a regrettable shortcoming to be eradicated as much as possible, but as an
inevitable state of affairs which circumscribes the implicatedness and responsibility of
the researcher/ writer as a producer of descriptions which, as soon as they enter the
uneven, power-laden field of social discourse, play their political roles as particular ways
of seeing and organizing an ever elusive reality. This is what Geertz has called the
‘discourse problem’ in anthropology (1988:83). For Geertz, this is ultimately a problem
of authorship:

The basic problem is neither the moral uncertainty involved in telling
stories about how other people live nor the epistemological one involved
in casting those stories in scholarly genres […]. The problem is that now
that such matters are coming to be discussed in the open, rather than
covered with a professional mystique, the burden of authorship seems
suddenly heavier.
(Geertz 1988:138)

This burden of authorship is all the heavier, I would suggest, as soon as we do not
conceptualize it as an individual predicament, but as a deeply social and political one.
This implies two things. First, it is important not to reduce the anthropologist-as-author to
a literary figure, engaged in writing ethnography as a self-indulgent, purely aesthetic
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practice. If ethnography is not science, it is not literature either. Ethnographic discourse
should retain its primarily hermeneutic ambition to provide representations that allow us
to better understand other people’s as well as our own lives. The choice for this or that
literary style of writing, this or that form of storytelling, though essential considerations,
should be explicitly related to this ambition.
Second, let us not forget that the burden of authorship does not only convey a problem
of writing, but also one of reading; it is not only a question of producing texts, but also of
their reception. In short, the social context in which ethnographies are written, published,
read and used is to be taken into consideration. Which stories to tell, in which form, to
whom, where and when, and with what intention, are questions which academic scholars
are not used to asking themselves, but they are central to the politics of intellectual work.