#critical ethnography

[vnavarrowriter]

In a sense, every type of cultural performance, including ritual, ceremony, carnival, theatre, and poetry, is explanation and explication if life itself, as Dilthy often argued. Through the performance process itself, what if normally sealed up, inaccessible to everyday forth--Dilthey uses the term Ausdruck, "an expression," from ausdrucken, literally "to press or squeeze out. 'Meaning' is squeezed out of an event, which has either been directly experienced by the dramatist or poet or cries out for penetrative, imaginative understanding (Verstehen). An experience is itself a process, which 'presses out' to an 'expression' which completes it.

Victor Turner, from Ritual to Theatre (1982), qtd. in D. Soyini Madison (2005), Critical Ethnography: Methods, Ethics, and Performance. Sage Publications, p. 150-151.

[vnavarrowriter]

What we experience is most often whatever needed to be expressed, whether through story, gossip or humor on the one end, or poetry, novels, or film on the other. The experience now made into expression is presented in the world; it occupies time, space, and public reality. Experience made into expression brings forth reader, observer, listener, village, community, and audience. In arriving at this third evolutionary stage of expression, we have arrived at the threshold of performance evolving into experience. Experience becomes the very seed of performance.

D. Soyini Madison (2005), Critical Ethnography: Method Ethics, and Performance. Sage Publications, p. 151-152.

[softclindgren]

“We are always learning what we are already doing. ... [begins to talk about her field of related critical ethnographers] We're a bunch of critical contrarians who explore learning as embodied practice; refuse to separate knowledge from processes of knowledge production from processes of producing knowledgably skilled practitioners. And we think that all of these relations are made in the political economic and historic relations in which they are a part. That's a tall order. If you do not treat apprenticeship as a thing in itself nor learning as a thing in itself then how do you go about inquiring into that?”

I love Jean Lave's work and wish I had a methods/methodologies course that took up her work.

[putawaytheglobe]

The purpose of this criticism [of British social anthropology] is to further a collective endeavor. Criticizing 'savages who are after all some distance away,' in an ethnographic monograph they cannot read, does not seem to me to have the same kind of purpose. In order for criticism to be responsible, it must always be addressed to someone who can contest it.

Talal Asad, "The concept of cultural translation in British social anthropology"