What Does Ethnographic Writing Look Like?

The first generation of ethnographers wrote in a literary style termed ethnographic realism. Derived from natural science writing, ethnographic realism is “a mode of writing that seeks to represent the reality of a whole world or form of life” (Marcus & Cushman, 1982, p. 29). According to George Marcus and Dick Cushman, ethnographic realism is marked by (1) an all-encompassing description of another culture; (2) an all-seeing yet distant narrator; (3) composite rather than specific individuals; (4) references to fieldwork only to establish the actual presence of the ethnographer; (5) a focus on everyday practices; (6) a rigid assertion that the emic perspective is represented; (7) sweeping statements preferred over accounts of specific details; (8) the use of jargon; and (9) abstract concepts that disregard the context of native language. The style here is firsthand, present tense, perpetually existing; the ethnographer's past fieldwork is portrayed in the eternal present. As James Clifford (1983) wrote, “The goal of ethnographic realism is to give the reader a sense of ‘you are there, because I was there’” (p. 118).

George Marcus and Michael Fisher (1986) write that these classic monographs tended to be organized around five possible frames: “life history, life-cycle, ritual, aesthetic genres, and the dramatic incident of conflict” (p. 57). These themes are described through narratives and vignettes—short, impressionistic scenes that focus on one moment or give a particular insight into a character, idea, or setting. Many contain a classic trope, or common theme, such as a first encounter or arrival during fieldwork. An oft-cited example is from Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922). Malinowski wrote, “Imagine yourself, suddenly set down surrounded by all your gear, alone on a tropical beach close to a native village, while the launch or dinghy which has brought you sails away, out of sight” (p. 4). This and other arrival scenes, part adventurer's travel log and part colonial exoticism, were intended to set the stage for the reader and establish the researcher as the lone fieldworker surrounded by strangers.

Over the past fifty years, however, postcolonial writers (Bhabha, 1993; Said, 1979; Spivak, 1987) have developed a critique of ethnographic realism, accusing the strong authorial narratives of the first generation of ethnographers of ethnocentrism and questioning the authority of their monographs. They raise questions of representation, that is, questions about the ethnographer's ability and power to accurately portray something or someone else. In the 1980s several texts, including George Marcus and Michael Fisher's Anthropology as Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences in 1986; James Clifford and George Marcus's Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography in 1986; and James Clifford's The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art in 1988, shone new light on ethnographic writing. These authors declared a crisis in ethnography, maintaining that Western researchers could no longer portray non-Western peoples with uncontested authority, and asserting that cultural representation is always partial, contested, and political. The authors identified and encouraged experimental texts that are unconventional—that are polyphonic, or many voiced, and heteroglossic, or having contrasting styles of communication and points of view. Many examples of this experimental use of ethnography are available (Crapanzano, 1985; Fischer & Abedi, 2002; Mahmood, 2005; Masco, 2006; Maurer, 2005; Petryn, 2002; Stewart, 1996; Taussig, 1991; Tsing, 2004). To quote George Marcus (2007, p. 1127), these “messy” texts are “self-conscious experiments in bringing out the experiential, interpretive, dialogical, and polyphonic process at work in any ethnography.”

These experimental ethnographers tend toward two strategies. They write with reflexivity, or introspection; their accounts examine their own sociohistorical locations, in which they are also actors in the story in order to lessen the distance between ethnographer and informant and to negate the suggestion of an all-seeing yet distant narrator. Or they include varied perspectives of ethnographic informants in an attempt to show rather than tell the reader. To address the critiques of ethnographic realism, alternative forms of writing have also appeared, including ethnographic drama (Allen & Garner, 1996; Richardson & Lockridge, 1991; Tillman, 2008); ethnographic poetry (Kusserow, 2002; Lowenstein, 2005); and autoethnography (see Chapter Eight for a detailed explanation of this form of writing).