Summary
“Confessional Tales” – John Van Maanen
Book: Tales of the Field: On writing ethnography
Observation: “The confessional tale has become (…) an institutionalized and popular form of fieldwork writing. (…) It is necessarily a blurred account, combining a partial description of the culture alongside an equally partial description of the fieldwork experience itself. (…) Missing data, incompleteness, blind spots, and various other obscurities are admitted into the account.” (JVM, p.91)
Central issues: (1) “At issue is the fact that there are always many ways to interpret cultural data. Each interpretation can be disputed on many grounds.” (JVM, p.95) > Consctructivist perspective on ethnography (writing): “Field data are constructed from talk and action. They are then interpretations of other interpretations and are mediated many times over (…)”(JVM, p.95) - by the fieldworker’s own standards of relevance for what is of interest; - by the historically situated queries put to informants - by the norms current in the fieldworker’s professional community for what is proper work; - by the self-reflection demanded of both the fieldworker and the informant; - by the intentional and unintentional ways a fieldworker or informant is misled; - by the fieldworker’s mere presence on the scene as an observer and participant. >> Theoretical foundation for this perspective: “No longer is the social world, as mentioned in chapter 1, to be taken for granted as merely out there full of neutral, objective, observable facts. (…) Rather social facts, including native point of view, are human fabrications, themselves subject to social inquiry as to their origins.” (JVM, p.93) > “Fieldwork constructs are now seen by many to emerge from a hermeneutic process; fieldwork is an interpretive act, not an observational or descriptive one (Agar, 1986).” (JVM, p.93) + “(…) ethnographic writing of any kind is a complex matter, dependent on an uncountable number of strategic choices and active constructions (…).” (JVM, p.73)
(2) “Only in textualized form do data yield to analysis. The process is not dependent on the events themselves, but on a second-order, textualized, fieldworker-dependent version of the events.” (JVM, p.95) > “The problem here is how to crack the textualization process itself.” (JVM, p.95)
(3) “The line between what informants and fieldworkers make of the world is not an easy one to locate.” (JMV, p.95)
Confessional tales must be considered as attempts to overcome these issues: While… “(…) realist writings take what the authors know (or at least think they know) as their subject matter and, by and large, ignore how such things came to be known.” (JVM, p.96) confessional writings… “(…) take the author or knower as subject matter and by and large bypass what it is that the author knows as a result of field work.” (Ibid.) >> “There is then a clear break between the representation of the research work itself and the resulting ethnography (which appears elsewhere in the text or in another text altogether).” (JVM, p.75) + “Each treats the other as supplemental.” (JVM, p.96) > “The avowed purpose, of course, is to lift the veil of public secrecy surrounding fieldwork.” (JVM, p.91) >> “This process begins with the explicit examination of one’s own preconceptions, biases, and motives , moving forward in a dialectic fashion toward understanding by way of a continuous dialogue between the interpreter and interpreted (see Rabinow and Sullivan, 1979).” (JVM, p.93) - - - i.e. participant observation regarded as “(…) a metaphor best reformulated in hermeneutic terms: a dialectic between experience and interpretation.” (JVM, p.93) > Confessional tales as a dramatic narrative of the research process (see JVM, pp.77-78) - “The narrator of the confessional is often a foxy character aware that others may be, intentionally or unintentionally, out to deceive him or withhold important information.” (JVM, p.76) - “Often the ethnographer mentions personal biases, character flaws, or bad habits as a way of building an ironic self-portrait with which the reader can identify (…). The omnipotent tone of realism gives way to the modest, unassuming style of one struggling to piece together something reasonably coherent out of displays of initial disorder, doubt, and difficulty.” (JVM, p.75) > types of portrayal: * the apprentice: “Learning from living in the culture is the predominant theme.” (JVM, p.75) * the translator or interpreter of indigenous texts. (JVM, pp.75-76) - “The implied story line of many a confessional tale is that of a fieldworker and a culture finding each other and, despite some initial spats and misunderstandings, in the end, making a match.” (JVM, p.79) - “The attitude conveyed is one of tacking back and forth between an insider’s passionate perspective and an outsider’s dispassionate one.” (JVM, p.77) - - - i.e. “Typically, the concern for the fieldworker’s perspective is told as something of a character-building conversion tale in which the fieldworker, who saw things one way at the outset of the study, comes to see them in an entirely different way by the conclusion of the study. The new way of seeing the world is normally claimed to be similar to the native’s point of view.” (JVM, p.77)
(Stereotypical) motives for use: (A) Sustaining ethnographic authority: “Some confessions are (…) an attempt to shore up the fieldwork craft as a still scientifically valid one. They attempt to show how a reader might work back from a display of the conditions under which the fieldwork was accomplished to some assessment of how reliable and valid the realist ethnography itself might be.” (JVM, p.92) >> Elements included in confessionals to suggest “that even though there are flaws and problems in one’s work, when all is said and done it still remains adequate” (JVM, p.79): - Empathy & involvement – “[Fieldworkers] are (…) expected not to withdraw from the passing cultural scene but to become as involved and fully engrossed in the daily affairs of the people studied as possible. (…) Moderation become the key which normalizes the setting and conveys to readers the sense that fieldwork is not very different from other kinds of work.” (JVM, p.80) - Acceptance - “The confessional becomes, in part, a special kind of etiquette book in which fieldworkers show how they learned to comport themselves according to the proper standards of behavior in the culture of interest. (…) Typically lessons are said to be learned through breaches of local propriety.” (JVM, p.80) - Natives as informants – “Such figures must be said to know the culture well. They are represented therefore as ‘experienced’, ‘veteran’, ‘revered’, ‘respected’, ‘senior’, and ‘central’ informants.” (JVM, p.81) >>> “In confessional tales, then, cultural knowledge may rest securely on the testimony of personal experience and can be presented to reader in the form of explicit behavioral norms or interpretive standards the ethnographer learned to follow in the field in order to stay in the field.” (JVM, p.78) (B) Questioning ethnographic authority: “(…) some confessional tales are written explicitly to question the very basis of ethnographic authority and to transform ethnography, insofar as possible, into a more philosophical, artistic, phenomenological, or political craft; a craft sensitive to matters thought by these writers to be more relevant and important than what ethnography provided to readers in the past.” (JVM, p.92)
Norms and standards (or: what should be included in a confessional tale?) (see JVM, pp.93-94) - discussion of the author’s preunderstandings of the studied scene + own interest in that scene; - discussion of the author’s modes of entry, sustained participation (or presence), and exit procedures; - discussion of the responses of others on the scene to the presences of the author (and vice versa); - discussion of the author’s relationship with various categories of informants; - discussion of the modes of data collection, storage, retrieval, and analysis.