Page 88 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

EXPERIENCE

ethnography has tended to rely on a realist epistemology and has thus opened itself
up to considerable critique. In particular, not only is ethnography inevitably
‘positional’ or ethnocentric knowledge but also it is a genre of writing that deploys
rhetorical devices, often obscured, to maintain its realist claims. This argument has 65
led to the examination of ethnographic texts for their rhetorical devices, along with
a more reflexive and dialogical approach to ethnography which demands that
writers should elaborate on their own assumptions, views and positions.
If we think that the purpose of ethnography and other forms of qualitative
empirical work lies in the discovery of accurate representations of an objective
reality then the critique of ethnographic realism is devastating. However, the
critique of the epistemological claims of ethnography does not leave it without
worth or significance for its purposes do not have to lie in the production of a ‘true’
picture of the world. Rather, ethnography has personal, poetic and political, rather
than epistemological, justifications.
The problems of ethnography are issues of translation and justification not
universal or objective truth. If we consider languages (and thus culture and
knowledge) as constituted not by untranslatable and incompatible rules but as
learnable skills, then ethnography can be understood as a part of the continued re-
description of the world that supplies new initiatives that enrich our culture with
innovative ideas.
This does not mean that ethnographic research can abandon all methodical
rigour. First, evidence and poetic style are pragmatically useful warrants for truth
and action epistemologically equivalent to the procedural agreements of the
physical sciences. Second, the languages of observation and evidence are among the
conventions that divide the genre of ethnography from the novel. Third, the
rejection of a universal objective truth is based on the impossibility of word–world
correspondence and therefore of accurate or adequate representation. This does not
mean that we have to abandon word–word translation. That is, we can achieve
‘good enough’ reporting of the speech or action of others without making claims
to universal truth.

Links Ethnocentricism, methodology, positionality, representation, text, truth

Experience The idea of experience appears somewhat paradoxically within cultural
studies. On the one hand, this notion is crucial to understanding culture when
grasped in terms of lived meaningful experience. On the other hand, one cannot
understand experience or undergo meaningful experiences without the framing
work of language. Thus experience seems to disappear as a concrete category into
those of discourse and language.
For an example of the first case we may turn to Raymond Williams, for whom
culture is best understood as ‘a whole and distinctive way of life’. Here Williams
stresses that culture involves ‘lived experience’ and he was particularly concerned
with the working class and their active construction of culture. For Williams, the
purpose of cultural analysis is to explore and analyse the recorded culture of a given
time and place in order to reconstitute the experience and ‘structure of feeling’ of