Qualitative inquiry under fire: toward a new paradigm dialogue

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QUALITATIVE INQUIRY UNDER FIRE

QUALITATIVE INQUIRY UNDER FIRE Toward a New Paradigm Dialogue

Norman K. Denzin

Walnut Creek, California

LEFT COAST PRESS, INC. 1630 North Main Street, #400 Walnut Creek, California 94596 http://www.LCoastPress.com Copyright © 2009 by Left Coast Press, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN 978-1-59874-415-6 hardcover ISBN 978-1-59874-416-3 paperback Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data: Denzin, Norman K. Qualitative inquiry under fire : toward a new paradigm dialogue / Norman K. Denzin. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-59874-415-6 (hardback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-59874-416-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Social sciences--Research--United States. 2. Qualitative research--United States. I. Title. H62.5.U5D397 2009 001.4’2--dc22 2008048713

Printed in the United States of America ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992.

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CONTENTS Acknowledgments

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PART ONE: POLITICS 1 Introduction: Qualitative Inquiry as Social Justice 2 Interpretive Research After 9/11/01 3 The Secret Downing Street Memo, the One Percent Doctrine, and the Politics of Truth: A Performance Text—Shelter from the Storm 4 The Elephant in the Living Room or Extending the Conversation about the Politics of Evidence

11 13 25 39

PART TWO: INTERPRETATION 5 The Art of Interpretation: The Stories We Tell One Another 6 The Practices of Interpretation 7 Reading and Writing Interpretation 8 Emancipatory Discourses, and the Ethics and Politics of Interpretation

83 85

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115 151 175

PART THREE: PERFORMANCE AND PEDAGOGY 9 Analytic Autoethnography, or Déjà Vu All Over Again 10 The Reflexive Interview and a Performative Social Science 11 Memory: Lewis and Clark in Yellowstone, circa 2004

203 205 215

PART FOUR: ETHICAL FUTURES 12 IRBs and the Turn to Indigenous Ethics 13 The New Paradigm Dialogues and Qualitative Inquiry

275 277 307

Notes References Index About the Author

323 343 387 400

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Mitch Allen, Katherine E. Ryan, Yvonna S. Lincoln, Michael D. Giardina, Joe Kincheloe, Shirley Steinberg, and Chris Myers for their support of this project. I cannot thank Mitch Allen enough. His editorial vision guided this book. Since 1990, I have had almost weekly conversations with Yvonna S. Lincoln, the most wonderful and smartest co-editor and co-author in the world. Our weekly talks about qualitative inquiry, methods, politics, and evidence have indelibly shaped everything I have written on methodology over the last 20 years. I cannot thank her enough. Daily conversations about methodology with Katherine Ryan have been invaluable. I am grateful for the intellectual support of the International Institute of Qualitative Inquiry and the Program in Cultural Studies and Interpretive Research at the University of Illinois. Decades-long and shorter conversations with Patricia Clough, Laurel Richardson, Carolyn Ellis, Art Bochner, Mary Weems, Lonnie Athens, Norbert Wiley, Bob Stake, Andy Fontana, Kathy Charmaz, Jack Bratich, James Salvo, David Monje, Aisha Durham, Sara Delamont, Paul Atkinson, Ed Bruner, Soyni Madison, Ron Pelias, Tami Spry, Bud Goodall, Greg Dimitriadis, David Altheide, Andy Fontana, and John Johnson have helped to clarify my arguments. I wish to thank Li (Leo) Xiong for his careful preparation and editing of the bibliography, Stacey C. Sawyer for her careful copy editing and production management, Li Xiong, Myra Washington, and Christina Ceisel for proofreading, Jane Henderson for creating the index, and Sage Publications, India, for their careful composition. This project would not have been completed without the assistance, patience, and talents of James Salvo. I also thank the students at the University of Illinois who patiently sat through formal and informal seminars, listening to earlier versions of my arguments about performance ethnography, cultural studies, politics, and pedagogy. I especially thank Kathy Charmaz, former 7

editor of Symbolic Interaction, and Paul Atkinson and Sara Delamont, editors of Qualitative Research, who published early versions of several of the more experimental chapters that appear in revised form in this book. Finally, I gratefully acknowledge the moral, intellectual, and financial support given this project by the late Dean Kim Rotzoll of the College of Communication, Paula Treichler, former Director, Cliff Christians, current Director of the Institute of Communications Research, and I thank Cinda Robbins Cornstubble, Janette Bradley Wright, and Robin Price in the Department of Advertising for their unfailing support at all levels of this and related projects. Portions of Chapter 2 appeared in Norman K. Denzin and Michael D. Giardina “Introduction: Cultural Studies after 9/11,” 2007: 1–22 in N. K. Denzin and M. D. Giardina (Eds.), Contesting Empire, Globalizing Dissent: Cultural Studies after 9/11, Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. An earlier version of Chapter 3 appeared in Norman K. Denzin, “The Secret Downing Street Memo, the One Percent Doctrine, and the Politics of Truth: A Performance Text,” Symbolic Interaction, 30(4), Fall 2007: 447–465. Portions of Chapter 4 appeared in Norman K. Denzin, “The Elephant in the Living Room: Notes on the Politics of Inquiry,” Qualitative Research, 2009, 9(1). Portions of Chapter 5 appeared in Norman K. Denzin, “The Art and Politics of Interpretation,” 1994: 500–515 in N. K. Denzin and Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of Qualitative Research, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Portions of Chapter 6 appeared in Norman K. Denzin, “The Practices and Politics of Interpretation,” 2000: 897–922 in N. K. Denzin and Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of Qualitative Research (2nd ed.), Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Portions of Chapter 7 appeared in Norman K. Denzin, “Reading and Writing Interpretation,” Qualitative Research, 2003, 3(2): 243–268. Portions of Chapter 8 appeared in Norman K. Denzin, “Emancipatory Discourses and the Ethics and Politics of Interpretation,” 2005: 933–958 in N. K. Denzin and Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of Qualitative Research (3rd ed.), Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Portions of Chapter 9 appeared in Norman K. Denzin, “Analytic 8

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Autoethnography, or Déjà vu All over Again,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 35, 4 (August): 419–428. Portions of Chapter 10 appeared in Norman K. Denzin, “The Reflexive Interview and a Performative Social Science,” Qualitative Research, 2001, 1(1): 23–47. Portions of Chapter 11 appeared in Norman K. Denzin, “Memory: Lewis and Clark in theYellowstone, circa 2004,” Symbolic Interaction, 2007, 3(3): 297–322. Portions of Chapter 12 appeared in Norman K. Denzin, “IRBs and the Turn to Indigenous Ethics,” Advances in Program Evaluation, R. Stake and B. Jegatheesan (Eds.), 2008. Portions of Chapter 13 appeared in Norman K. Denzin, “The New Paradigm Dialogs and Qualitative Inquiry,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 2008, 24, 4 (July–August): 315–326.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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PART ONE Politics

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION Qualitative Inquiry as Social Justice I believe the effort to redefine . . . [qualitative] research in terms of traditional positivist assumptions is part of a larger backlash against what neoconservatives see as the negative consequences of postmodernity. (HATCH 2006: 403) What makes critical qualitative inquiry “critical” is its commitment to social justice for one’s own group and/or for other groups. (COLLINS 1998: XIV, PARAPHRASE)

Qualitative research exists in a time of global uncertainty. Around the globe governments are attempting to regulate scientific inquiry by defining what good science is. Conservative regimes are enforcing evidence, or scientifically based biomedical models of research (SBR). These regulatory activities raise fundamental philosophical, epistemological, political, and pedagogical issues for scholarship and freedom of speech in the academy. These threats constitute the conservative challenge to qualitative inquiry, the topic of this volume. The chapters that follow were written over 15 years. They are inscribed in the politics of the recent past. They represent(ed) attempts to write the present, to get out from underneath the present, to look in the rearview mirror as the present flashes past. They travel across multiple terrains: interpretive work after 9/11/01, science under Bush, the politics of truth, the politics of inquiry, the art and politics of interpretation, reading and writing interpretation, social justice, emancipatory discourses, performance ethnography, pedagogy and politics, a performative social science, memory of the past in the present, Institutional Review Boards, indigenous ethics, 13

and indigenous property rights. I end with a call for new paradigm dialogs, not paradigm wars.

Sometime during the last decade, critical qualitative inquiry in North America came of age, or more accurately moved through another historical phase.1 Out of the qualitative-quantitative paradigm wars of the 1980s there appeared, seemingly overnight, journals,2 handbooks,3 textbooks,4 dissertation awards,5 annual distinguished lectures,6 and scholarly associations.7 All these formations were dedicated to some version of qualitative inquiry (see Donmoyer 2006; Guba 1990a, b; Hatch 2006; Wright 2006). Scholars were in the midst of a social movement of sorts; a new field of inquiry, a new discourse had arrived, or so it seemed, and it flourished. Qualitative researchers proudly took their place at the table. Students flocked to graduate programs for study and mentoring. Instruction in qualitative and mixed-methods models became commonplace. Now there were QUAN and QUAL programs (see Creswell 2007; Eisenhart 2006; Preissle 2006). Paradigm proliferation prevailed, a rainbow coalition of racialized, and queered post-isms, from feminism to structuralism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, poststructuralism, postpositivism, postscientism, Marxism, postconstructivism (Lather 2006a: 3207; Wright 2006). All this took place within and against a complex historical field, a global war on terror, a third methodological movement (Clark and Scheurich 2008: 3673; Teddlie and Tashakkori 2003a: 9), the beginning or end of the Eighth Moment (Denzin and Lincoln 2005: 3).8 In the methodologically contested present, qualitative researchers confronted the scientific backlash associated with the evidencebased social movement connected in North American education with the No Child Left Behind legislation (see Hatch 2006). In the paradigm wars of the 1980s, the very existence of qualitative research was at issue. In the new paradigm war “every overtly social-justice-oriented approach to research . . . is 14

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threatened with de-legitimization by the government-sanctioned, exclusivist assertion of positivism . . . as the ‘gold standard’ of educational research” (Wright 2006: 799–800).

METHODOLOGICAL FUNDAMENTALISM, FACTS ARE A NUISANCE9 In the U.S., primary resistance to qualitative inquiry grows out of neoconservative discourses and recent National Research Council (NRC) reports (see, for example, Feuer, Towne, and Shavelson 2002) that have appropriated neopositivist, evidencebased epistemologies.10 Extreme spokespersons in this movement assert that qualitative research is nonscientific, should not receive federal funds, and is of little value in the social policy arena (see Lincoln and Cannella 2004). The methodological conservatism embedded in the educational initiatives of the Bush Administration have inscribed narrowly defined governmental regimes of truth. The new “gold standard” for producing knowledge that is worthwhile having is based on quantitative, experimental design studies (ibid.: 7). In areas ranging from education and foreign policy to the environment, healthcare, stem-cell research, emergency contraception, water and air pollution, missile defense, and hurricane preparedness, the George W. Bush White House treated facts as a nuisance while displaying a willingness to manipulate, suppress, and misrepresent science and evidence (Kaplan 2004: 95). Thus, while they were raising the bar concerning the standards for conducting and evaluating educational research with one hand, for example, they were simultaneously moving to debunk these same standards in other areas with the other hand. This allowed them to have it both ways: Modern science cannot get us to where we want to be in our schools, and we will use the methods of science to prove the case! In the name of pseudo, fake, or junk science, this callous administration manufactures evidence to support its positions and policies or to debunk that which stands in its way. INTRODUCTION

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For persons in the qualitative inquiry community, this methodological fundamentalism returns to a much discredited model of empirical inquiry (Lincoln and Cannella 2004: 7). The experimental quantitative model is ill-suited to “examining the complex and dynamic contexts of public education in its many forms, sites, and variations, especially considering the . . . subtle social difference produced by gender, race, ethnicity, linguistic status, or class. Indeed, multiple kinds of knowledge, produced by multiple epistemologies and methodologies are not only worth having but also demanded if policy, legislation, and practice are to be sensitive to social needs” (ibid.). Clearly, the scientifically based research movement (SBR) initiated by the National Research Council (NRC), and the scandalous view of science under the Bush Administration, has created a new and hostile political environment for qualitative research. Connected to the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001(NCLB), SBR embodies a resurgent scientism (Maxwell 2004), a positivist, evidence-based epistemology. Researchers are encouraged to employ “rigorous, systematic, and objective methodology to obtain reliable and valid knowledge” (Ryan and Hood 2004: 80). The preferred methodology has well-defined causal models using independent and dependent variables. Causal models are examined in the context of randomized controlled experiments that allow replication and generalization (ibid.: 81). Qualitative research is suspect under this framework. There are no well-defined variables, no hard evidence, no causal models, no random assignment to experimental groups. The epistemologies of critical race, queer, postcolonial, feminist, and postmodern theories are rendered useless, because they are not scientific (ibid.; St. Pierre 2004: 132).

CONTESTING MIXED-METHODS EXPERIMENTALISM Howe (2004) observes that the NRC finds a place for qualitative methods in mixed-methods experimental designs. In such designs qualitative methods may be “employed either singly 16

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or in combination with quantitative methods, including the use randomized experimental designs (Howe 2004: 49; also Clark, Plano, and Creswell 2008; Hesse-Biber and Leavy 2008). Clark and colleagues define mixed methods research “as a design for collecting, analyzing, and mixing both quantitative and qualitative data in a study in order to understand a research problem” (2008: 364).11 Mixed methods are direct descendants of classical experimentalism and the triangulation movement of the 1970s (Denzin 1989). They presume a methodological hierarchy, with quantitative methods at the top, relegating qualitative methods to “a largely auxiliary role in pursuit of the technocratic aim of accumulating knowledge of ‘what works’’’ (Howe 2004: 53–54). The incompatibility thesis disputes the key claim of the mixedmethods movement—namely, that methods and perspectives can be combined. This thesis recalls the paradigm wars of the 1980s and argues that “compatibility between quantitative and qualitative methods is impossible due to incompatibility of the paradigms that underlie the methods” (Teddlie and Tashakkori 2003a, b: 14–15). Others disagree with this conclusion, and some contend that the incompatibility thesis has been largely discredited, because researchers have demonstrated that it is possible to successfully use a mixed-methods approach. There are several schools of thought on this thesis, including the four identified by Teddlie and Tashakkori (2003b)—that is, the complementary, single-paradigm, dialectical, and multipleparadigm models. There is by no means consensus on these issues. Morse (2003) warns that ad hoc mixing of methods can be a serious threat to validity. Pragmatists and transformative emancipatory action researchers posit a dialectical model, working back and forth between varieties of tension points, such as etic-emic, value neutrality-value committed. Others deconstruct validity as an operative term (Guba and Lincoln 2005; Lather 1993). HesseBiber and Leavy’s (2008) emphasis on emergent methods pushes and blurs the methodological boundaries between quantitative and qualitative methods.12 Their model seeks to recover subjugated knowledge hidden from everyday view. INTRODUCTION

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Under a multiple paradigm, mixed and emergent methods approach; a complex, interconnected family of terms, concepts, and assumptions come together. This merger disrupts and threatens the belief that reality in its complexities can ever be fully captured or faithfully represented. The goal of multiple, emergent, or critical triangulation is a fully grounded interpretive research project with an egalitarian base. This hybrid model of mixed methods extends Richardson (2000), Saukko (2003), and Ellingson (2008), who argue that the central image for qualitative inquiry is not the triangle—as in triangulation; rather, the central image is the crystal, or the prism, structures that diffract, rather than refract, or reflect, vision. Mixed-genre texts, including performance texts, have more than three sides. Like crystals, or the pieces in a quilt, the mixedgenre text can assume an infinite variety of shapes, substances, and transmutations. A dialogic framework attunes the researcher to the many different voices at work in a concrete situation. The scholar seeks out and incorporates multiple points of view in the research performance. This expands the egalitarian base of the project and enhances commitment to take into account multiple perspectives (Saukko 2003: 29). The traditional mixed-methods movement takes qualitative methods out of their natural home, which is within the critical, interpretive framework (Howe 2004: 54; but see Teddlie and Tashakkori 2003b: 15). It divides inquiry into dichotomous categories—exploration versus confirmation. Qualitative work is assigned to the first category, quantitative research to the second (ibid.). Like the classic experimental model, it excludes stakeholders from dialogue and active participation in the research process. This weakens its democratic and dialogical dimensions, and decreases the likelihood that the previously silenced voices will be heard (Howe 2004: 56–57). Howe cautions that it is not just the “‘methodological fundamentalists’ who have bought into [this] approach. A sizeable number of rather influential . . . educational researchers . . . have also signed on. This might be a compromise to the current political climate; it might be a backlash against the perceived excesses of 18

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postmodernism; it might be both. It is an ominous development, whatever the explanation” (2004: 57). The hybrid, dialogical model, in contrast, directly confronts these criticisms.

PRAGMATIC AND DIDACTIC CRITICISMS OF QUALITATIVE INQUIRY In addition to receiving criticisms from the SBR movement, qualitative researchers have also been criticized from within the larger qualitative community. Writing as pragmatists, Seale, Gobo, Gubrium, and Silverman contest what they regard as the excesses of an antimethodological, “anything goes,” romantic postmodernism that is associated with the more radical, branches of the qualitative inquiry movement (2004: 2). They assert that too often this approach produces “low-quality qualitative research and research results that are quite stereotypical and close to common sense (ibid.). To counter these effects, they propose a practice-based, pragmatic approach and a situated methodology that rejects the antifoundational claim that there are only partial truths, that the dividing line between fact and fiction has broken down (ibid.: 3). They believe that this dividing line has not collapsed, that we should not accept stories if they do not accord with the best available facts (ibid.: 6). Others criticize what they term the siege mentality within the qualitative inquiry community. They suggest that little is to be gained by identifying new enemies to attack. It is “unproductive and unethical to characterize in broad brush strokes those who are not on board in the QI arena as promoting conservative technologies of truth” (Schwandt 2006: 808). Rather than identifying enemies and attacking methodological fundamentalists, we should be developing activist agendas in neighboring disciplines, reforming the structures of graduate education, while endorsing “a conception of inquiry that is at once scientific and critical, rigorous and heterodox . . . thereby avoiding the extremes of an . . . endorsement of just-about-anything-goes pluralism” (ibid.: 809). INTRODUCTION

19

I am not sure what “just-about-anything-goes pluralism” means. Oddly, these pragmatic, procedural, and didactic arguments reproduce a variant of the evidence-based model and its criticisms of poststructural, performative sensibilities. They can be used by critics to provide additional support for the methodological marginalization of these sensibilities and practices.

FIGHTING BACK: EVOLVING CONFLUENCES Scholars within the critical, qualitative research community are united on the following points. Opposition from the SBR and pragmatic camps has shaped an evolving set of confluences and understandings. “Bush Science” (Lather 2004: 19) and its experimental, evidence-based methodologies represent a racialized masculinist backlash to the proliferation of qualitative inquiry methods over the last two decades (ibid.). The movement endorses a narrow view of science (Maxwell 2004), celebrating a “neoclassical experimentalism that is a throwback to the Campbell-Stanley [1963] era and its dogmatic adherence to an exclusive reliance on quantitative methods” (Howe 2004: 42). There is “nostalgia for a simple and ordered universe of science that never was” (Popkewitz 2004: 62). With its emphasis on only one form of scientific rigor, the NRC ignores the need and value of complex historical, contextual, and political criteria for evaluating inquiry (Bloch 2004). Influenced by the blurring of boundaries between many of the post-postframeworks, a new consensus focuses on the value of multivocal texts, the need to decolonize methodologies, the understanding that there are only ever partial truths, the refusal to see the world in just one color, a shared commitment to social justice and human rights (Guba and Lincoln 2005: 212). These agreements are enormous. They were hard fought. Victory may have lulled the community into complacency. In the United States, we glided blissfully through the centrist Clinton years (1993–2001), content in our accomplishments. We reacted with shock to the post 9/11/01 nightmare of Bush, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We lived through the daily assaults on 20

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truth, civil rights, and freedom. As we gasped for air, a resurgent methodological conservatism came out of the closet and thrived under the conservative educational wing of Bush’s administration (Lincoln and Cannella 2004). Even under assault, critical qualitative inquiry continued to thrive. There was an irony. We were blindsided. We had gone global, and the global was biting back. We ignored the fact that a quiet methodological backlash had been brewing under our very noses. The paradigm wars of the 1980s never really ended. American postpositivists in the 1990s and in the first decade of the new century were aligning with SBR movements that were gaining force under conservative political regimes in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Latin and South America, England, Germany, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. A new world order, methodological and political conservatism, converged under a single regime. Critics stood their ground (Hatch 2006). The anti-SBR literature blossomed into a growth industry (see St. Pierre and Roulston 2006: 681 for a review; Denzin and Giardina 2006, 2007a, 2008). Everywhere we turned there were attempts to discipline and regulate qualitative inquiry.

THIS BOOK So where do we go next? It is time to take stock, time to be reflexively self-critical. In an SBR environment, is it possible to institutionalize a critical, interpretive social science committed to the goals of equity and social justice? What would that framework look like? How does it defend itself against conservative methodological and political challenges? The chapters are grouped under four major headings: politics, interpretation, performance, ethics. Throughout Part One, I am preoccupied with evidence, politics, history, qualitative inquiry, and the conservative challenge to inquiry as social justice. The chapters in Part One span the years of the Bush Presidency. They ask such questions as: “What do facts” mean when the government manufactures its own models of truth and evidence? INTRODUCTION

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The conservatives have manufactured a violent politics of truth. How do we contest that model? How do we interrupt history and assert our own pragmatic models of truth, evidence, and justice? Part Two addresses issues surrounding the politics of representation, the art, politics, practices, and ethics of interpretation. With the exception of Chapter 7 (“Reading and Writing Interpretation”), these chapters were initially written as my contributions to the three editions (1994, 2000, 2005) of the Handbook of Qualitative Research. The chapters move from a kind of innocence borne of a concern for different writing styles (Chapter 5) to an attempt to read interpretation as a set of practices embedded in politics and history (Chapter 6), to a preoccupation with ethics, politics, and emancipatory discourses (Chapter 8). I assume that nothing stands outside representation. We know the world only through our representations and interpretive practices. All representations are performative, political, and pedagogical. The chapters in Part Two move through a circle, from the art of interpretation to forms of interpretive writing, to emancipatory, indigenous discourses, to ethics and liberatory politics. Part Three takes the performance turn in the human disciplines seriously. We have outlived thick description, ethnographies that inscribe another’s way of life; the descriptive and the inscriptive have become performative. The chapters in Part Three connect performance to critical pedagogy and autoethnography, to memory, to a performative social science. If we take performance seriously, then we need to learn how to write performatively, and that is what the last chapter in Part Three—“Memory: Lewis and Clark in Yellowstone, circa 2004”—is all about. We remember the past, we contest the past by performing it in the present. Part Four addresses ethical futures, indigenous ethics, IRBS, the oral history path around IRBs, the Illinois Model, the new paradigm dialogs—and more. I close with an agenda and a set of injunctions concerning how we might move a critical qualitative inquiry deep into the second decade of this new century. We need a global interpretive community that honors and celebrates diversity and difference. We need to draw together in 22

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common purpose and common cause. It is said that societies get the kinds of science they deserve. Interpretive scholars imagine societies where qualitative inquiry is valued. These are societies where progress and humanity are judged in terms of the utopian ideals critical scholars try to live by—justice, equality, human rights. We need a social science that will help societies achieve these ideals. We need societies that will allow their social sciences to do just this. The challenges are great. The payoffs are huge. If the ideals are realized, the consequences will transcend our wildest utopian dreams.

INTRODUCTION

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Chapter 2

INTERPRETIVE RESEARCH AFTER 9/11/011 Few will have the greatness to bend history; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation . . .. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is thus shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. (Robert F. Kennedy, “Day of Affirmation” address, University of Cape Town, South Africa June 6, 1966) Painters, writers, singers, actors, dancers, filmmakers, musicians are meant to fly, to push at the frontiers, to worry the edges of the human imagination, to conjure beauty up from the most unexpected things, to find magic in places where others never thought to look. If you limit the trajectory of their flight, if you weight their wings with society’s existing notions of morality and responsibility, if you truss them up with preconceived values, you subvert their endeavor. (Arundhati Roy 2001a)

The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., changed everything. And they changed nothing (Denzin 2007c: Denzin and Lincoln 2003). They inaugurated a “Global War on Terror.” And they perpetuated a cycle of state-sponsored terrorism in reply. They brought to the fore public discourses on the nature of freedom, patriotism, and democracy. And they led to 25

the state-sanctioned suppression of freedom, patriotism, and democracy in the very same quarters. They generated worldwide support and sympathy for the plight of those affected by the tragedies. And they likewise generated a global backlash when the U.S. government decided to unilaterally trample another sovereign nation. Business as usual continued. And business as usual was forever changed. It all just depended on through whose looking glass you gazed.

QUALITATIVE INQUIRY AFTER 9/11 We are living in a time of global uncertainty. Violence, it seems, is everywhere. Democracy is under attack. America is engaged in a war without end, a permanent war on the world. A politics of fear has offset a politics of hope. What is happening in the world today lies outside “the realm of human understanding” (Roy 2001b: 32). Manipulating their versions of geopolitical reality, George W. Bush and his babysitters have constructed a violent politics of truth concerning America and the so-called threats by terrorists to democracy and freedom. The Bush regime and its neoliberal state allies and global corporatist allies use their version of truth and reality as an excuse for armed aggression. In turn, the slogan “War Is Peace” justifies collateral damage and the loss of lives and culture caused by the weapons of war. Such losses are regrettably necessary if the world is to be made safer and more peaceful. It is irrelevant if the evidence supporting armed aggression does not stand up in a court of law. America is on a mission; centuries of jurisprudence will not stand in the way. And so concepts of justice, truth, and law are carelessly trashed by the dangerously irrational decisions of an imprudent imperial president who “does not represent the will of the American majority, and never did” (Miller 2004: 294). Meanwhile, more than 1,252,595 Iraqis and 4,139 Americans have died in his dirty little Middle Eastern war.2 Yet seven years later, Iraq looks like a ravaged landscape with looters, ransacked buildings, broken glass, broken windows, blown-out walls, concrete 26

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craters in the center of streets, rotting heaps of garbage, rats, fecal stench, borrowed generators producing flickering light, shadows of despair in a darkening gloom, scene after scene of devastation. Outside the deserted National Library in Baghdad, a “tethered donkey lunches on flowers in the garden. A statue of Saddam is still standing out front” (Rodenbeck 2003: 22)—but not his weapons of mass destruction, which apparently never existed. Partially hidden by a row of American tanks, the scene seems too staged to be true. At home in post-9/11 America, dissent is routinely quashed, labeled as traitorous, or discarded as left-wing propaganda. Personal attacks replace reasoned dialogue.3 Stolen elections, Patriot Acts, “Free Speech Zones,” racial profiling, crony capitalism, moblike corruption, illegal wiretaps, and corporate media suppression and censorship have become the rule not the exception. The foreign press and progressive Internet bloggers-cumjournalists are turned to, in lieu of our domestic press, which has abdicated its duties. Education, science, medicine, industry, and the environment have all come under relentless assault, decimated as a form of theocratic neoliberal governance (or, to use the language of the Bush administration, a faith-based market economy) gains an ever-increasing share of public control (see also Denzin and Giardina 2006). And the world community watches, wondering what happened to the America it thought it once knew (as do most Americans).4 In the face of all of this, we turn to Arundhati Roy for wisdom and understanding. She speaks to us. We are living in a time of “Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy (bring to a boil, add oil, then bomb) . . . an Empire armed with a mandate from heaven . . . an Empire that has conferred upon itself the right to go to war at will and the right to deliver people from corrupting ideologies . . . by the age-old, tried-and-tested practice of extermination” (2004: 47). This imperial democracy forces its will on the people. It is not grassroots participatory democracy. It is not Walt Whitman’s wild, radical democracy. It is not a democracy that sings through the body politic (Whitman 1993). It is not a democracy that is bone deep in the moral landscape and soul of a people (Mailer 2003: 22). Imperial democracy is totalitarian fascism INTERPRETIVE RESEARCH AFTER 9/11/01

27

masquerading as democracy; it is state-sponsored violence and terrorism masquerading as peaceful means to (un)just ends. Its victory, apparently, involves getting the world community to believe that war is peace. That imperialism is benevolence. That fascism is democracy. As Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke, and Roberts (1978) maintain, it is imperative for critical qualitative scholars and those committed to a project of social justice and radical, progressive democracy to police our present international crisis, to create a morally centered, critically informed dialogue focused on history and politics as they unfold in front of us. At the same time, as Cameron McCarthy and his colleagues acknowledge, in their discussion of cultural studies: “These evolving changes in social dynamics now taking place on a global scale—dynamics that have profound implications for conceptualizing national identity, citizenship, and democracy—must be addressed in more complex and original ways than most cultural studies scholars have thus far traditionally proposed” (2005: 136). This is because much of what passes for critical inquiry and cultural studies—as currently practiced, theorized, and deployed—is not up to the task and must thus undergo a radical transformation in order to keep pace with the nature of things. Critical qualitative inquiry, is, as they say, caught in a rut, unable (or, perhaps, unwilling) to engage in moral, progressive, interventionist political struggle that was once its hallmark. It is time for this to change. Remaining within the current methodological grid is a recipe for failure. Although many if not most contemporary critical studies scholars offer some language of critique when dealing with the intersecting contextual vectors of power, knowledge, and culture, what they often do not provide is a language of possibility, one that engages what it would mean pedagogically and politically to provide the conditions for rethinking a new type of social agent, one that could individually and collectively imagine a global society that combines freedom and social justice modeled after the imperatives of a radical and inclusive democracy. (Giroux 2003: 58, emphasis added) 28

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To be sure, I am advocating for an activist project, a public intellectualism on the order of the kind Noam Chomsky advanced in his 1967 article “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” when he argued that intellectuals have a moral and professional obligation to speak the truth, to expose lies, and see events in their historical perspective. With this in mind, and standing with Roy, we should never complicate that which is simple and never simplify that which is complicated: “We should never let a little hunk of expertise carry us off to our lair and guard against the unauthorized curiosity of passers-by” (2004: 120). Rather, we must do the opposite. We must create links. Join the dots. Tell politics as a story. Make it real. Present impassioned polemics. And refuse to create barriers that prevent ordinary people from understanding what is happening to them (ibid.: 10). Starting from this point, a newly repositioned critical qualitative studies project must move in at least four directions at the same time. First, we must start with the personal and the biographical and our own location within the world around us. We need a critical, humane discourse that creates sacred and spiritual spaces for persons and their moral communities—spaces where people can express and give meaning to the tragedies in their lives. This project will work back and forth, connecting the personal, the political, and the cultural. It will reject terrorism and the claim that peace comes at any cost. It will help persons think critically, historically, and sociologically. It will move to expose the pedagogies of oppression that produce and reproduce oppression and injustice (see Freire 2000: 54). It will contribute to an ethical self-consciousness that is critical and reflexive, empowering people with a language and a set of pedagogical practices that turn oppression into freedom, despair into hope, hatred into love, doubt into trust. And it will engender a critical racial selfawareness that contributes to utopian dreams of racial equality and racial justice (see especially Denzin 2006). Second, critical interpretive discourse must be launched at the level of the media and the ideological, including discourses on war, America, patriotism, democracy, globalization, neoliberalism, and the silences surrounding peace, human rights, and INTERPRETIVE RESEARCH AFTER 9/11/01

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nonviolence. This discourse will call for justice without war. It will ask for calm deliberations. It will plead against rash actions that could erode human rights and civil liberties. It will ask: “Whose democracy? Whose America?” We do not have a strong, independent, morally critical press in America, one that is committed to the ideals of a democratic imagination, to Deweyan notions of democracy as a participatory practice. We do not have a press that imagines a world where race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation intersect; where language and performance empower; or where human beings can become who they wish to be, free of prejudice, repression, and discrimination. Nor do we have a press that sees itself as guardians of free speech.5 What we do have, however, is a media that can instantly produce a sea of violent images, a media with a memory but no critical history (Baudrillard 1988: 126). Consider the evidence. In our post-9/11 moment, mainstream media have uncritically adopted President Bush’s rhetoric: We are at war; this is our Pearl Harbor; we were attacked by cowards; America’s freedoms are under assault; an international war on terrorists and terrorism must be launched; if innocent citizens are killed, so be it. The narrative is straightforward: benign global technocapitalism and the values of a free democratic world were attacked on Dark Tuesday. Working from this premise—and acting under the umbrella of an increasingly conservative, rightwing neoliberal agenda—President Bush and his national security advisers moved quickly and decisively. The mythology of the Wild Wild West is operative: “Osama bin Laden, Dead or Alive.” The “Dead or Alive” political logic works thusly: “Because America is a democracy . . . some democratic prerequisites might have to be abandoned. What might this mean? Increased domestic snooping by U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies, ethnic profiling, another drive for a national ID card system?” (Cockburn and St. Clair 2001). Congress promises to bail out the greedy airline industry. The lid is off social security. More than 50,000 National Guard troops have been put on alert. Repressive, global corporate politics and religious narratives drive internal domestic policies. 30

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Moreover, cable news outlets such as Fox News Channel (who many believe acts as a de facto “propaganda outlet for the Republican Party” [Dean, quoted in Sweet 2005]) and its shills, such as Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin, and Bill O’Reilly, “wrap their moral nakedness in the American flag” (Zinn 1997: 362) and spew forth right-wing talking points under the specter of fair and balanced reportage, saying we have gone soft on national defense, while slandering patriotic Americans from Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton to Cindy Sheehan and the Dixie Chicks to Howard Dean and Barbara Boxer as being “anti-American” or “weak on terrorism” in the process. Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld justified the U.S. flouting of the Geneva Conventions because it is “archaic,” and Vice President Dick Cheney declares that the prison complex at Guantánamo Bay—the site of numerous human rights offenses— will be kept open in perpetuity, because everyone incarcerated there is a “determined killer,” and we hear nary a peep from the So-Called Liberal Media (which seems too infatuated with the latest developments in the Michael Jackson child molestation case [2004/2005], the Tom Cruise–Katie Holmes engagement [summer 2005], Janet Jackson’s exposed breast during the 2004 Super Bowl, John Edward’s affair [summer 2008] to comment on torture, lies, manipulation, stolen elections, and crimes against humanity). Meanwhile, fundamentalist religioconservatives take to the airwaves, blaming the events of 9/11 and a “culture of apostasy” on homosexuals, feminists, immigrants, and civil rights activists, as when one of its leading voices, Rev. Jerry Falwell, stated two days after 9/11: “I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the gays and lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union], People for the American Way—all of them who have tried to secularize America—I point the finger in their face, and say, ‘You helped this happen.’”6 Adding fuel to an already blazing fire, right-wing pundits and self-promoting authors make outlandish, racist, and essentializing claims against Islam, as when Ann Coulter asserted in INTERPRETIVE RESEARCH AFTER 9/11/01

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the wake of 9/11: “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity.” Likewise, Franklin Graham, who delivered the benediction at Bush’s first inauguration, declared Islam “wicked, violent, and not the same as God.” Getting in on the act, too, was Dr. Jerry Vines, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Jacksonville, Florida, who stated that Islam’s founder and most sacred figure, the prophet Mohammed, was a “demon-possessed pedophile.” And, not to be left out of the slander-fest, the hebetudinous Falwell followed up his earlier missive about the causes of 9/11 by stating that Mohammed “was a terrorist.” Attacks on science go on unchecked as well, or are given legitimacy in the face of absurdity by the mainstream media. This we have seen most recently with respect to intelligent design (or creationism by another name), the ransacking of environmental controls (such as the absurd rejection of the Kyoto Treaty), and the administration’s strident ban against stem cell research (based not on scientific rigor and discovery but rather on an effort to appease his right-wing conservative base). And so the transition to a reactionary, theocratic, neofascist state continues to gain momentum: even as more and more evidence comes to public light on issues such as illegal wiretapping, “faulty” intelligence, and the promotion of torture by the U.S. government (for example, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal), the boundaries of personal democratic freedom continue to shrink; even as the voices of dissent grow louder and more adamant, the very foundations of our democratic institutions remain under assault. And it all happened, it seems, in a week. Third, we need to foster a critical (inter)national conversation on what is happening, a coalition of voices across the political, cultural, and religious spectra; the socialist left, green, peace, women’s, gay, lesbian, African-American, Asian-American, and Latino movements; libertarians, young, old, students, workers, the clergy, and persons from all religions; and intellectuals. Every era must develop its own theory of radical politics and social democracy, a place where citizenship is an argument, not 32

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a sing-along (see Kellner 1989: 227; Vowell 2003: 169). This dialogue is one that must stay alive in our conversations, mutterings, and dialogues about peace, justice, war, and the shrinking of civil liberties and social justice in America and abroad, and it must get louder and continue until a progressive president and Congress is in office (Schell 2003: 6). We must be vigilant against the forces of fascism and statesponsored violence and surveillance done in the name of freedom. As the distinguished American historian Howard Zinn writes: “There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people for a purpose which is unattainable” (1997: 362). We must question jingoistic, flag-waving displays of patriotic nationalism: Whose flag is being waved? What does it mean? How do we celebrate patriotism in this new war, when the war is taking away the very freedoms and ideals the flag stands for? These are the questions pop culture satirist Sarah Vowell contests in her missive about living in New York City in the aftermath of 9/11 when she writes: Immediately after the attack, seeing the flag all over the place was moving, endearing. So, when the newspaper I subscribe to published a full-page, full color flag to clip out and hang in the window, how come I couldn’t? . . . [Because] once we went to war, once the president announced that we were going to retaliate against the “evildoers,” then the flag again represented what it usually represents, the government. I think that’s when the flags started making me nervous. (2003: 158)

We cannot let democratic dialogue be eviscerated in a time of crisis. We cannot allow attacks on persons of color. Or women. Or gay and lesbian Americans. Or kids. Or Muslims, Iraqis, Palestinians, and those subjected to genocide in Africa. We cannot let the political discourse be shaped by the needs and voices of multinational corporations (Giroux 2000: 13). We cannot let Huey Freeman (a comic strip character) and Jon Stewart (host of the fake news program The Daily Show on Comedy Central) continue to be the only ones among the mainstream asking painfully critical questions such as: “Who is guarding our freedom?” INTERPRETIVE RESEARCH AFTER 9/11/01

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“What did America do to provoke this violence?” “Why are we so hated?” Naturally, these questions must not be met by flip rejoinders such as those offered by President Bush (2004), who is wont to state unimaginatively: “These people kill because they hate freedom.” Rather, we must make the voices of those who do not reduce the complexities of daily life to simple catchphrases and jingoistic musings heard; voices such as that of former U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel turned Catholic bishop Robert Bowman, who said in the wake of the terrorist bombings against U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania: We are not hated because we practice democracy, value freedom, or uphold human rights. We are hated because our government denies these things to people in Third World countries whose resources are coveted by our multinational corporations. That hatred we have sown has come back to haunt us in the form of terrorism . . .. Instead of sending our sons and daughters around the world to kill Arabs so we can have the oil under their sand, we should send them to rebuild the infrastructure, supply clean water, and feed starving children . . .. In short, we should do good instead of evil. (quoted in Zinn 2003: 682)

Fourth, there has never been a greater need for critical, interpretive methodologies that can help us make sense of life in an age of the hyperreal, the simulacra, TV wars, staged media events, Top Gun escapades by an illegally selected (mis)leader who avoided the Vietnam draft (cf. Alterman and Green 2004; Palast 2004). These critical methodologies must exhibit interpretive sufficiency; be free of racial, class, gender, or sexual stereotyping; rely on multiple voices; enhance moral discernment; and promote social transformation and critical consciousness (Christians 2000: 145; Denzin 2003: 112). They must combine theoretical rigor with social relevance, moving critical, interpretive practices beyond the mandarin class of Ivory Tower specialists to the streets, the realm of the everyday, the battleground of heartfelt struggles springing forth with a pedagogy of love, not hate (cf. Chomsky 2003; Darder 2002; Giroux 2003). And they must help 34

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informed citizens to consensually develop rock solid, baseline definitions of political reality, enabling us to judge a political regime by its actions not its carefully crafted, focus-group-tested buzzwords and phrases. In this age of global uncertainty, we have, to be quite frank, a moral obligation to police this crisis, to confront the current situation, to speak to the death of lives, culture, and truth, to undo the official pedagogies that circulate in the media (see also Denzin and Lincoln 2003). We need testimonials, autoethnographies, performance texts, new stories, plays, and dramas about real people with real lives, the horror of it all. “Stories about what it’s like to lose your home, your land, your job, your dignity, your past and your future to an invisible force. To someone or something you can’t see” (Roy 2001c: 32). We need stories about what it is like to hate and feel despair, anger, and alienation in a world bursting at the seams as it struggles to reinvent its dominant mythology. We need pedagogical discourses that make these feelings visible, palpable—stories and performances that connect these emotions to wild utopian dreams of freedom and peace. We need to bring about the collapse of the corporate, neoliberal globalization project, the death of old-fashioned imperialism, the death of the new empire before it is too late. Stealing a line from Roy: we are inside a shabby deal right now, a deal gone bad on a global scale, a failed revolution involving power politics. In our community, racism is on the rise. We have more—not less—discrimination. Hate crimes are a daily occurrence. Women have hit glass ceilings. Republicans in Congress have broken the civic compact, the simple code of the Golden Rule that underlies Midwestern civility—a politics of kindness, an obligation to defend the weak against the powerful. (But so, too, have many of our elected Democrats.) Within this space of the everyday, we cannot afford a continued blissful ignorance of groups that are alleged to be different from ours—a practice that is still perpetuated everywhere from the dominant school paradigm to popular television, and from public policy debates to the latest Hollywood blockbuster film. Rather, INTERPRETIVE RESEARCH AFTER 9/11/01

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we have an obligation to raise the stakes on critical thinking in our classrooms and in our writings, for we cannot afford the stubborn refusal of engagement from students who prefer their own comfortable worlds to confrontation with other, startlingly different, worldviews (Denzin and Lincoln 2003: 274). Indeed, discourses of diversity and multiculturalism—long viewed as radical in some quarters—are useful but now weak and superseded terms for a radically reconfigured world that needs to think in terms of geopolitical relations and systemic economic and political repression and oppression. Our legacy to our students, in the final scene, has to be the legacy of the tragedies of September 11: a heightened awareness of our citizenship as contingent, in part, on achieving our rights of free and open citizenship for the global community of which we are a part (ibid.). A politics of liberation can be built on discourses that embody these guidelines. Such a politics provides a platform for mobilizing dissent, for undoing the neoliberal empire and its racist, repressive agenda. Furthermore, we must continue to address the im/moral acts of those who would act on our behalf. We must expose the injustices of capitalism while protesting wars waged in its name. We must be committed to creating “a sense of the public in which oppositional voices are not feared, degraded, or dismissed, but are valued for the instigation to a sensate democracy they occasionally perform” (Butler 2004: 13). We must strive for a future where “brave men and women will write a Declaration of Interdependence that will be read and honored alongside the Declaration of Independence: proof of our evolution, revolution of our own growth and understanding” (Williams 2004: 9). And we must never forget that it is our moral and professional obligation to make our voices heard. We must also remember that it is not just our grandchildren to whom this world is bequeathed. This must be a global project— an international gathering of voices—that seeks a new politics of resistance and truth, a politics of opposition, a worldwide joining of hands in the “globalization of dissent” (Roy 2001c: 33). As the late Susan Sontag reminded us: “A new day has dawned, to be met by humankind’s refusal to allow men to any longer 36

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make and wage war in the name of vainglory, profit and corrupt political ideologies” (2003: 3). And so we join together with our assembled colleagues to reject knee-jerk patriotism that divides the world into us versus them. To reject the dark night of fascism, where our Constitutional rights are trampled and our national standards of fairness and decency disappear. To reject the injustices of democracy and capitalism, including poverty, ignorance, illiteracy, and repression. And to reject taking the road that is the path of least resistance. It is up to the poets, writers, artists, and scholars in critical studies to try to make sense of what is happening; to seek nonviolent regimes of truth that honor culture, universal human rights, and the sacred; and to seek critical methodologies that protest, resist, and help us to represent and imagine radically free utopian spaces. Silence is not an option! Remaining silent is to be in collusion with this immoral political regime: remaining silent is to allow evil to happen. As Howard Zinn notes: “It is living people, not corpses, creative energy, not destructive rage, which are our only real defense, not just against other governments trying to kill us, but against our own, also trying to kill us” (1997b: 330).

BY WAY OF A CONCLUSION Around the globe, governments are attempting to regulate interpretive inquiry by enforcing bio-medical, evidence-based models of research. These regulatory activities raise basic philosophical, epistemological, political and pedagogical issues for scholarship and freedom of speech in the academy. Their effects are interdisciplinary. They cut across the fields of educational and policy research, the humanities, communications, health and social science, social welfare, business, and law. This legislation marginalizes indigenous, border, feminist, race, queer, and ethnic studies. As expressions and examples of a critical studies project organized around moral clarity and political intervention, the chapters that follow challenge commonly held assertions and understandings about qualitative inquiry and its “place” in the academy. At the same time, they attack the imposition of a fascist state via INTERPRETIVE RESEARCH AFTER 9/11/01

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the forces of capitalism, neoliberalism, and globalization. They attempt to unmask the stark operations of power and knowledge circulating in the media with respect to narratives of freedom, democracy, and faux patriotism. They struggle to come to terms with shifting fields of racial affiliation and gender identity. They imagine alternative ways of knowing, of “doing” critical cultural studies work in an age of global uncertainty. And they are passionately committed to peace and social justice. In her homage to Paulo Freire, Antonia Darder writes of a pedagogy of love, of a belief that “we are filled with a vision of a world where human beings will strive consistently to live a revolutionary solidarity, fueled by the integrity of our minds, hearts, bodies, and sprits” (2002: 256). If we are indeed at one of the gravest turning points in the history of the world—as many activists, intellectuals, and ordinary citizens contend—then we must reach out to as many people as possible, to sharpen our critiques without speaking simply to the academy and to broaden our own disciplinary horizons by not shutting off those arenas that have historically been marginalized. As Howard Zinn) reminds us: “History, looked at under the surface, in the streets and on the farms, in GI barracks and trailer camps, in factories and offices, tells a different story. Whenever injustices have been remedied, wars halted, women and Blacks and Native Americans given their due, it has been because ‘unimportant’ people spoke up, organized, protested, and brought democracy alive” (2004: 7).

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Chapter 3

THE SECRET DOWNING STREET MEMO, THE ONE PERCENT DOCTRINE, AND THE POLITICS OF TRUTH A Performance Text—Shelter from the Storm1 With C. Wright Mills (2000 [1959]) I believe scholars have an obligation to write their way into their historical moments. The failure to do so makes us complicit with the histories that too often go on behind our backs.

Published in the Sunday London Times on 1 May 2005, the Downing Street Memo set off a firestorm of controversy. The memo demonstrated that the American and British public had been mislead about the reasons for and the timing of the decision to go to war with Iraq, The secret document indicated that the Bush administration had committed itself to war with Iraq, at least a full eight months before the official start of the war which was 19 March 2003. I want to interrogate this history, a history that involves the politics and pragmatics of truth, the manipulation of evidence and facts about the world by governmental officials. In this interrogation, which is a performance text,2 I move back and forth between local knowledge and global contexts. We are living in dangerous times, year three of the Iraqi War, what Joan Didion and George Orwell call the “New Normal.” 39

SPEAKERS ONE AND TWO: GEORGE ORWELL AND JOAN DIDION

Under the new normal many of us discovered . . . [that] our memories were not satisfactorily under control. We possessed “pieces of furtive knowledge” that were hard to reconcile with what we heard and read in the news. We saved entire newspapers, hoping that further study might yield their logic, but none emerged (Orwell [1949: 33–45] quoted in Didion 2004: 71).

Today in post-9-11 America with illegal wiretaps and a President who performs scripts of fear denouncing evil terrorists, we are struggling. SPEAKER ONE: WILLIAM KITTRIDGE

To revise our dominant mythology . . . to find a new story to inhabit, to find new laws to control our lives, laws designed to preserve a model of a free democratic society based on values learned from a shared mythology.

The ground on which we stand has dramatically shifted. We are asked to accept a new set of myths and laws that threaten to destroy what we mean by freedom and democracy. The complex political spaces of the new normal are profoundly shaping the multiple terrains of qualitative inquiry and symbolic interactionism in the 21st century, including what we mean by words such as science, evidence, and truth. Now the secret memo. SPEAKER TWO: DAVID MANNING

The secret downing street memo (with some paraphrasing)3 This is Secret and Strictly Personal—UK Eyes Only. IRAQ: PRIME MINISTER’S MEETING, 23 JULY

This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents. 40

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SPEAKER ONE: JOHN SCARLETT

Military action is now seen as inevitable. Bush wants to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. SPEAKER TWO: C

The intelligence and facts are being fixed around the policy . . . Bush has made up his mind to take military action . . . The Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal case for military action . . . The case (for war) was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea, or Iran. SPEAKERS ONE AND TWO: TONY BLAIR AND GEORGE W. BUSH

We stand together on these issues. It is impossible to distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam (Alterman and Green 2004: 252).

The memo is chilling. It clearly states that facts and intelligence were being fixed and fitted to conform to a predetermined agenda. Through a series of carefully choreographed presentations involving aerial and ground photographs, statistics, excerpts from secret intelligence memos, Bush and his staff based the case for war on the threats of Saddam’s WMD’s to the world order (Hersh 2005: 235). They were hesitant, however, to sell the argument for war against Saddam Hussein in August of 2002. SPEAKER ONE: ANDREW CARD

From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August (Rich 2005c: 12). SPEAKER TWO: BOB WOODWARD

Bush initiated plans for the war on November 21, 2001 (Woodward 2004: 1).

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But today we know there were no WMDs.4 There were no links between 9/11 and Saddam. Cheering crowds did not greet American soldiers when they marched into Baghdad.5

THE ONE PERCENT DOCTRINE The Downing Street Memo demonstrated that Bush lied. But the underlying logic for the lies did not become apparent until the publication of Ron Suskind’s book, The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America’s Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11 (2006). Suskind outlines the playbook for the Bush Administration. It is based on the One Percent Principle, or the so-called Cheney Doctrine. SPEAKER ONE: DICK CHENEY—THE ONE PERCENT PRINCIPLE

Even if there is a one percent chance of the unimaginable coming due, act as if it is a certainty . . . justified or not, fact-based or not, our response is what matters. We have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It’s not about our analysis, or finding a preponderance of evidence. It’s about our response . . . our response is what matters. If there is even a one percent chance of the terrorists getting a weapon of mass destruction, we have to act as if it were a certainty (Suskind 2006: 62). SPEAKER TWO: SKEPTIC

Hold on here. What about evidence? What about analysis, action, consequences? American foreign policy has always rested on these three terms. What if there is only a small probability of such an occurrence? You’ve set the bar so low, the word evidence no longer applies. Now you are in the situation of having to manufacture evidence to warrant action. This is insane! SPEAKER ONE: DICK CHENEY

You are being unpatriotic, If we don’t stop those terrorists where they live we’ll be fighting them on our eastern shores. We can’t take any more chances. The one percent principle is nonnegotiable. I speak for the President. SPEAKER TWO: GEORGE W. BUSH

Dick is right. We have to be pragmatic and patriotic. 42

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Soft Pragmatism On the surface, the Cheney Doctrine has some appeal for the symbolic interactionist. As pragmatists, we understand that the response to a thing is what matters. Indeed, Cheney’s doctrine enacts a soft version of the pragmatic maxim associated with James, Dewey, and Peirce; that is, the meaning of a thing is given in our response to it. The moral truth of a response is defined by the practical consequences of these actions. These consequences, these meanings, are not given in advance, they are established through and in the interpretive process. Meaning is established in the public arena, in public discourse. Cheney’s doctrine shortchanges the pragmatic maxim. He discounts the need for analysis, the interpretation of consequences, and the search for evidence. He wants action, and, in order to justify action, he will manufacture the evidence he needs. He locates the meanings of the response in the staged news event, in its dramaturgical construction. SPEAKER ONE: FRANK RICH

Democracy “was hijacked on the way to war” (Rich 2005c: 12). SPEAKER TWO: WILLIAM JAMES

I believe the One-Percent Doctrine allowed this to happen. SPEAKER ONE: PRESIDENT BUSH

And we’ve got to win in Iraq. We will win in Iraq. Iraq’s a part of a global war on terror. We’re not leaving Iraq. We are showing the Middle East how democracy works (Press Conference, 4 October 2005). SPEAKER TWO: U.S. GENERAL AND BRITISH DIPLOMAT

This is nonsense. The country is sliding into civil war. Sectarian violence is out of control. The country is closer to war than to democracy (Shanker 2006: 1, paraphrase). SPEAKER ONE: DONALD RUMSFIELD

Well, it’s true, there is conflict, and it is not acceptable. People are killing innocent men, women and children, and they are blowing up buildings and taking the heads off of people on television. But this is just temporary, it will not prevail. THE SECRET DOWNING STREET MEMO

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SPEAKER TWO: PRESIDENT BUSH

I’m not going to stand by and let Iraq become a haven for evil terrorists.

The Bush administration takes to a new level the meaning of the staged news event, borrowing its techniques of news management from Jon Stewart, host of the Daily Show. Fake newsmen, looking like real newsmen, use the practices of real news programs to deliver fake news in prime time (Rich 2005a: 20). SPEAKER ONE: FRANK RICH

The use of fake reporters—six and counting—producing fake news stories has been exposed. The administration paid $240,000 to Armstrong Williams for delivering faux-journalistic analyses of the No Child Left Behind Act (Rich 2005b).

Bush’s handlers script “town hall” meetings. Under Bush, a lie is true if it has the appearance of truth. Manipulating the logic of the lie that looks like the truth insures that Bush’s assertions about the real have the appearance of being truthful.

Truth and Evidence In times such as these, the politics of truth take on increased importance. Many questions are raised. What is truth? What is evidence? What counts as evidence? How is evidence evaluated? How can evidence or facts be “fixed” to fit policy? What kind of evidence-based research should inform this process? How is evidence to be represented? How is evidence to be discounted, or judged to be unreliable or incorrect? What is a fact? What is intelligence? What are the different discourses—law, medicine, history, cultural or performance studies that define evidence and truth? (Pring 2004: 203). Under the guise of endorsing Intelligent 44

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Design, the Administration has launched a full-scale attack on the logic and methods of modern science. SPEAKER TWO: ESTHER KAPLAN AND UNION FOR CONCERNED SCIENTISTS

There is significant evidence that the scope and scale of the manipulation, suppression, and misrepresentation of science [and evidence] by the Bush administration is unprecedented . . .. In the name of pseudo, fake, or junk science, it manufactures evidence to support its positions . . .. Indeed, the Bush Administration has taken the concept of evidence to a new level with the endorsement of what is called scientifically based educational research (SBR) (quoted in Kaplan 2004: 128).

Redefining the mandate of the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, the Bush Administration, as argued in Chapter 1, has stated that traditional scientific methods are inadequate for purposes of educational reform. The scientifically based research movement (SBR) was first introduced by the federal government in the Reading Excellence Act of 1999 and later incorporated by the National Research Council (NRC). Drawing from the biomedical field, SBR has created a hostile political environment for qualitative research. The SBR model raises questions that require serious public discussion (see Chapter 4). The model endorses a narrow view of science and evidence. It celebrates a historical moment when the methods of positivistic science were not being challenged. In valorizing the experimental paradigm, it ignores the many criticisms of experimentalism developed by Donald Campbell over four decades ago, including the inability to adequately treat rival causal factors associated with internal and external validity. SPEAKER ONE: DONALD CAMPBELL

The critics of SBR rightfully raise other issues with the paradigm, including its reliance on a naive realism and its THE SECRET DOWNING STREET MEMO

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failure to take up the value-fact-theory distinction. The paradigm still acts as if a disinterested observer has a God’s eye view of objective reality. It relies on an ethics of deception. It does not address the contexts of knowledge production, nor is it sensitive to the nuances of the researcher-subject relationship (paraphrase; Campbell and Stanley 1963; Howe 2004; Lincoln and Guba 2000).

These limitations of the SBR model involve the politics of truth. They intersect with the ways in which a given political regime fixes facts and intelligence to fit ideology. What is true or false is determined, in part, by the criteria that are used to judge good and bad evidence.

SBR AND THE WAR ON TRUTH There are at least three versions of SBR. SBR One is the model outlined by the National Research Council (2002). SBR Two is a simulacrum of SBR One. It was the model used by the Bush administration when, using the ends-justifies-the-means, hardevidence-is-irrelevant Cheney Doctrine, it sold the Iraqi war to the world. This model produces simulacra of the truth. SBR Three (below) rejects SBR One and Two and articulates a politics and methodology of truth based on a decolonizing critical pedagogy and a feminist, prophetic ethical pragmatism (Denzin 1996, 2003, 2005; Siegfried 1996; West 1989, 1991). SBR One, with its focus on objectively verifiable evidence, was not in play when the Bush administration decided to go to war. Instead, they used SBR Two, which allowed them to act as if they were gathering objective, reliable, generalizable, evidence. But they were not doing this. The intent, instead, was to gather evidence that appeared to have these characteristics. Under the Bush regime, a fact or piece of evidence is true if it meets three criteria: (a) it has the appearance of being factual; (b) it is 46

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patriotic; and (c) it supports a political action that advances the White House’s agenda. Evidence that contradicts that agenda is flawed, and biased. The Bush administration wanted to assert its will in the Middle East. It fabricated a set of facts, using their version of SBR One—SBR Two—to justify that activity. Challenges to the war were unpatriotic and discredited because they undercut the Administration’s desire to protect Americans from violent terrorists who oppose our political system.

The ways in which the world is not a stage are not easy to specify. The dramaturgical politics of the Bush administration is one reason why this is so. Indeed, if, as this administration demonstrates, everything is already performative, staged, commodified, and dramaturgical, then the dividing line between performer and actor, stage and setting, script and text, performance and reality disappears. As this disappearance occurs, illusion and make-believe prevail. Truthful facts are casualties under such regimes. Misrepresentations are passed off as the truth. When this happens, the appropriate people are not held accountable for the consequences of their actions. The consequences of misrepresentation can be devastating. The likelihood of future catastrophes is increased, and, as in the case of Iraq, people die needlessly (Solomon 2005: B-3). In this space, where the hyperreal appears more real than the real, pragmatists and cultural critics require apparatuses of resistance and critique, methodologies and pedagogies of truth, ways of making real realities that envision and enact pedagogies of hope. Such pedagogies offer ways of holding fraudulent political regimes accountable for their actions. A senior advisor to President Bush (Suskind 2004: 51) described this troubling relationship between performance and reality. He contrasted the so-called “‘reality-based community’—people who believe that solutions emerge from . . . judicious study of discernible reality—” with his own worldview. THE SECRET DOWNING STREET MEMO

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SPEAKER ONE: BUSH AIDE

That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you are studying that reality we’ll act again creating other new realities, which you can study, too . . .. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do (Suskind 2004: 51).

How do you respond to a statement such as this? Whose history are they creating? And for what ends? Who gave them this power? Who is holding them responsible for the consequences of their historical actions? If they do not like the effects of one reality, they create a new one to which we must respond, living out the consequences of their experiments in reality construction. SPEAKER TWO: GEORGE BUSH

I am praying for strength to do the Lord’s will . . .. I’m surely not going to justify the war based upon God . . .. Nevertheless, in my case, I pray to be as good a messenger of his will as possible (Suskind 2006: 51).

SBR THREE: CRITICAL PEDAGOGY, ETHICS, AND PROPHETIC PRAGMATISM When the divisions disappear between reality and its appearances, critical inquiry necessarily becomes disruptive, explicitly pedagogical, and radically democratic. Its topics: fascism, the violent politics of global capitalist culture, the loss of freedom in daily life. We need a new politics of truth. We must embrace the justice of our rage. SPEAKERS ONE AND TWO: JUNE JORDAN AND PATRICIA HILL COLLINS

We must reclaim the neglected legacy of the Sixties, an unabashed moral certainty, an incredible outgoing energy of righteous rage. We cannot restore and expand the forms of justice that our lives require until and unless we change the language of current 48

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political and methodological discourse. If we do not reintroduce our concepts of Right and Wrong, of Truth and Evidence, then how shall we finally argue for our cause (paraphrase; Collins 1998: 250; Jordan 1992: 178).

I answer the call of Jordan and Collins by turning to the postpragmatists (see Denzin 1996 for a review; also Siegfried 1996). For the postpragmatist feminist, there is no neutral standpoint, no objective God’s eye view of the world. The meaning of a concept, or line of action, or a representation lies in the practical, political, moral, and social consequences it produces for an actor or collectivity. The meanings of these consequences are not objectively given. They are established through social interaction and the politics of representation. All representations are historically situated, shaped by the intersecting contingencies of power, gender, race and class (Collins 2000; Siegfried 1996: 269). An Afro-Centric, feminist ethical framework) mediates the pragmatic theory of meaning (Collins 1998, 2000. Collins offers four criteria—primacy of lived experience, dialogue, an ethics of care, an ethics of responsibility—for interpreting truth and knowledge claims (2000). This framework privileges lived experience, emotion, empathy, and values rooted in personal expressiveness (Collins 2000: 265–269; Edwards and Mauthner 2002: 25). The moral inquirer, whether a politician or a social scientist, builds a collaborative, reciprocal, trusting, mutually accountable relationship with those studied. This feminist ethical framework is care- and justice-based. It seeks to contextualize shared values and norms. It privileges the sacredness of life, human dignity, nonviolence, care, solidarity, love, community, empowerment, civic transformation. It demands of any action that it positively contribute to a politics of resistance, hope, and freedom (Denzin 2003: 258). For the prophetic postpragmatists there are no absolute truths, no absolute principles, no faith-based beliefs in what is true or false. Following Collins (2000), Pelias (2004: 163), and THE SECRET DOWNING STREET MEMO

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Freire (1999), the moral inquirer enacts a politics of love and care, an ethic of hope and forgiveness. SPEAKER ONE: RON PELIAS

The heart learns that stories are truths that won’t keep still. The heart learns that facts are the possibilities we pretend we trust. The heart’s method of pumping, loving, and forgiving encourages us to proceed with our hearts first. What matters most is that we learn how to use our rage in positive ways, to love, to struggle to forgive. We have little other choice (paraphrase; Pelias 2004: 162–163, 171).

In a methodology of the heart, actions are judged in terms of moral consequences and the meanings people bring to them. Consequences are not self-evident. They are socially constructed. The concept of truth is thus replaced with a consequential theory of meaning. Experience, folded through what Stuart Hall calls the politics of representation, becomes the site of meaning and truth (1996: 473). Facts about the world are treated as facticities, as lived experiences. The pragmatist examines the effects, or consequences, of any line of action on existing structures of domination; that is, the pragmatist asks: what are the moral and ethical consequences of these effects for lived human experience? If people are being oppressed, denied freedom, or dying because of these effects, then the action, of course, is morally indefensible. SPEAKER TWO: CORNEL WEST

At the level of politics and ideology, the postpragmatist acts as a critical moral agent, one whose political goal is the creation of greater individual freedom in the broader social order. Prophetic pragmatists as moral agents understand that the consequences of their interventions into the world are exclusively political, judged always in terms their contributions to a politics of liberation, love, caring, and freedom (1989: 234, 1991: 36; paraphrased).

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The processes that shape national security decision making in a democracy should be transparent and open. They should not be based, as were the Bush Administration’s decisions to go to war, on cherry-picked intelligence; disinformation; secrecy; secret information; secrets that are not secrets; leaked, declassified, and reclassified documents; coded phrases; misrepresentations; distortions; and lies (Sanger 2005: 1, 5). Evidence should not be doctored (Rich 2005d: 13). Contradictory evidence should be openly discussed, its implications for policy debated. Decisions “should be subjected to a robust process of checks and balance” (Herbert 2005: A23).

Leading scientists, including more than 60 Nobel Prize winners, have all spoken out against these abuses of science under the Bush regime (Kaplan 2004: 95, 104, 113). The hallmark of a free society is its unfettered support of research and inquiry on ethically and politically sensitive, controversial issues. Such research yields trustworthy findings that many, including those in political power, may find objectionable. But a society’s respect for critical interpretive inquiry is “based on the common understanding that serious health, economic, and social consequences are at stake” (Hillman 2003). Safeguards protecting scientists and the scientific community from censorship, misrepresentation, repression, and politicization must be commonplace. The values of progressive democracy must be forefront when scientific advice is used for policymaking decisions. The pragmatic consequences for a radical democracy must be taken into account when scientific recommendations for social action are implemented. It is time for all concerned scholars and citizens to rally against the misuses of science, information, and evidence by the Bush administration (Mooney 2005: 255).

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I am calling for an engagement with and promotion of a qualitative research paradigm that imagines creative and critical responses to the fundamentalist regulatory efforts outlined above. This paradigm is forthright in its belief that the personal is political and that the political is pedagogical. It shares in experiences, problems, and hopes concerning the conduct of critical, qualitative inquiry in this time of global uncertainty. To be sure, this is a gendered project, a project where feminist, postcolonial, queer, and indigenous theorists question the logic of the heterosexual ethnographic narrative. It is a moral, allegorical, and therapeutic project, one in which the researcher’s own self is inscribed in the text as a prop to help men and women endure and prevail in the opening years of the 21st century. And it is avowed in its commitment to a project of social justice and radical progressive democracy.

CODA The past two decades have seen a steady growth in the practice and the creation of new qualitative methods, as well as the training of new inquirers prepared to undertake such work. After a period of strong growth, qualitative research as a field seemed to stop to take a breath, a breath that was followed by a virtual explosion of new methods, new critiques, new insights, new theoretical developments, new proposals, and new and highly experimental work. The greatest breakthroughs came, from my perspective, in the collapses between the ontological and the epistemological, and between the epistemological and the methodological, in the various proposals, theoretical perspectives, and lenses through which qualitative research has been filtered and refined (Lincoln 2000). We now can embrace sophisticated theoretical stances on critical and qualitative race and ethnic perspectives, border voices, queer, feminist, indigenous, and other non-Western lenses and epistemologies. Previous generations of inquirers could distinguish themselves simply as symbolic interactionists, as qualitative researchers; we know now that the field and its practitioners are neither unitary nor united, except in their critical and/or interpretive stances. We have a rich variety of resources, 52

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theories, and perspectives through which we may draw the results of our studies, illuminating aspects of social, educational, and cultural life previously unknown save to those who lived the experience. Whereas once a qualitative researcher or symbolic interactionist might well claim to have read virtually every extant work on qualitative research, now such a project is practically impossible. As these changes have occurred, centripetal forces attempt to return us to a central and unified discourse on what constitutes “science.” Federal funding increasingly falls under the same guidelines attached to the No Child Left Behind Act, mandating randomized field experiments. If qualitative research is permitted, it is clearly labeled as ancillary to the central project of experimental design. Private foundation monies are increasingly falling prey to “suggested” Federal guidelines on “homeland security,” such that Ford and other philanthropic foundations mandate what shape and form final results must conform to. Attacks on qualitative research, some under the guise of developing “a new paradigm” for research that claims to take the best of both paradigms, the conventional and the interpretive, and to leave unfruitful debates behind, continue unabated. Still, students sign up in large numbers for whatever training they can get. Qualitative-methods books, particularly those that demonstrate some innovation in qualitative research methods, such as works on Internet research, or visual methods, or documentary usage, sell extremely well. Such signs seem to indicate that against all odds, qualitative research and symbolic interaction are mature and thriving, and inquirers-in-training want to know all they can about how to practice such arts and sciences. Clearly, for many the call is radically different. Many desire to transform and change the spaces in which we exist in the academy. We desire to take hold of the terms that define our existence in relationship to the other disciplines, the journals, the apparatuses, the departments, and tenure, recruitment, teaching, instruction, funding, publishing, and journals. We desire to take hold of our own existence, our own history, and make it into a dream that was there from the beginning when we were called THE SECRET DOWNING STREET MEMO

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into this space. Critical, interpretive qualitative research creates the power for positive, ethical, communitarian change, and the new practitioners entering this field deeply desire to use the power of the university to make such change.6

BACK TO DOWNING STREET AND HISTORY’S ACTORS The morally unethical actions of Bush and his administration are exposed in the Downing Street memo. Like the high level leaks that unmasked whistle-blower Joseph Wilson’s wife Valerie as a covert C.I.A. agent, the memo shows that Bush’s History’s Actors, or the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) as they called themselves, were willing to go to any length to justify the war in Iraq. They took the concept of truth as a social construction to a logical but ethically indefensible conclusion. In so doing, they exposed the vulnerability of an epistemology and methodology that relies on manipulations of the world to produce findings that conform to one’s beliefs about reality. Thus did WHIG discredit SBR One, showing that it has no full-proof mechanism for producing objective truth. As long as reality can be socially constructed, fraudulent versions of SBR One—what I have called SBR Two—will be created. In that space, history’s actors must be held accountable to a higher moral truth. A methodology of the heart, a prophetic, feminist postpragmatism, embraces an ethics of truth grounded in love, care, hope, and forgiveness. SPEAKER ONE: PATRICIA HILL COLLINS

This methodology relies on a righteous rage to spur us on, to keep us headed in the right direction, to point the way, to move people toward justice. If it does this then it has made a very important difference in the lives of people (2000: 251, paraphrase).

We demand that history’s actors use models of evidence that answer to these moral truths. 54

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“Shelter from the Storm” And now my subtitle, which is taken from the Bob Dylan song “Shelter from the Storm”: It was in another lifetime, one of oil and blood When blackness was a virtue and the road was full of mud I came in from the wilderness, a creature devoid of form “Come in” she said, “I’ll give you shelter from the storm” . . . Try imagining a place where it’s always safe and warm “Come in” she said, “I’ll give you shelter from the storm.” . . . Now there’s a wall between is, somethin’ has been lost I took too much for granted, got my signals crossed. . . . If I could only turn back the clock to when God and her were born “Come in” she said, “I’ll give you shelter from the storm.”

Qualitative inquiry was born in another lifetime. When our perspective was marginalized, a time of blackness, we were creatures devoid of form, filled with anger. We created networks, special interest groups, and journals that would give us shelter from the storm, a place always safe and warm. We imagined that place and we helped one another build it. But I fear we have become complacent, taken too much for granted, something has been lost—but I’m not sure we can turn back the clock. Shelter from the storm is no longer enough.

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THE ELEPHANT IN THE LIVING ROOM Or Extending the Conversation about the Politics of Evidence There is a current dispute between qualitative and quantitative research. It is international, acrimonious, and there are elements of state-sponsored support “in the West” for a return to a kind of neopositivist quantitative inquiry. (Stronach 2006: 758) To serve evidence-based policymaking we probably need to invent a . . . myth for qualitative work, that is, we too have clearcut guidelines and criteria, maybe not randomized control trials, but we have our criteria. (Hammersley 2005a: 4)

Qualitative researchers are caught in the middle of a global conversation concerning the evidence-based research movement and emerging standards and guidelines for conducting and evaluating qualitative inquiry (St. Pierre 2006). This conversation turns on issues surrounding the politics and ethics of evidence and the value of qualitative work in addressing matters of equity and social justice (Lather 2006: 789). In some senses this is like old wine in new bottles, 1980s battles in a new century. Like an elephant in the living room, the evidence-based model is an intruder whose presence can longer be ignored. Within the global audit culture,1 proposals concerning the use of Cochrane and Campbell criteria,2 experimental methodologies, randomized

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control trials, quantitative metrics, citation analyses, shared databases, journal impact factors, rigid notions of accountability, data transparency, warrantability, rigorous peer-review evaluation scales, and fixed formats for scientific articles now compete, fighting to gain ascendancy in the evidence-quality-standards discourse (Feuer, Towne, and Shavelson 2002; Lather 2004: 21; NRC 2002: 47; Thomas 2004). The interpretive community must mount an articulate critique of these external threats to our “collective research endeavor” (Atkinson and Delamont 2006: 751). We must create our own standards of quality, our own criteria (see Lather 2006; St. Pierre and Roulston 2006). I want to read the controversies surrounding this discourse within a critical pedagogical framework, showing their contradictions, their overlaps, the gaps that stand between them (Denzin 2003). Standards for assessing quality research are pedagogies of practice, moral, ethical, and political institutional apparatuses that regulate and produce a particular form of science, a form that may be no longer workable in a transdisciplinary, global and postcolonial world. Indeed, within the evidence-based community there is the understanding that qualitative research does not count as research unless it is embedded in a randomized control trial (RCT)! Further, within this community, there are no agreedon procedures, methods, or criteria for extracting information from qualitative studies. These interpretations must be resisted. In reviewing these multiple discourses, I hope to chart a path of resistance. Because the qualitative research community is not a single entity, guidelines and criteria of quality need to be fitted to specific paradigmatic and genre-driven concerns, for example, grounded theory studies versus performance ethnographies. I favor flexible guidelines that are not driven by quantitative criteria. I seek a performative model of qualitative inquiry, a model that enacts a performance ethic based on feminist, communitarian assumptions. I align these assumptions with the call by First and Fourth World scholars for an indigenous research ethic (Bishop 1998; Rains, Archibald, and Deyhle 2000; Smith 1999). This call opens 58

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the space for a discussion of ethics, science, causality, trust, and a reiteration of moral and ethical criteria for judging qualitative research (Denzin 2003, 2007; Denzin, Lincoln, and Giardina 2006). I conclude with a set of recommendations concerning review panels, scholarly associations, journals, and criteria for evaluating qualitative research.

THE ELEPHANT IN THE LIVING ROOM I agree with Atkinson and Delamont who state: “We are appalled by the absurd proposal that interpretive research should be made to conform to inappropriate definitions of scientific research . . .. Equally disturbing is the argument that qualitative research should not be funded if it fails to conform to these criteria” (2006: 751; see also Erickson and Gutierrez 2002: 221). Hammersley in turn observes that “Qualitative research tends to suffer by comparison with quantitative work because there is a myth that quantitative researchers have clear-cut guidelines which are available for use by policymakers (Was it a randomized controlled trial? Was there a control group?)” (2005a: 3). Morse extends the argument: “Indeed, qualitative inquiry falls off the positivist grid. Why, it barely earns a grade of C- on the Cochrane scale! It gets worse! It receives the ‘does not meet evidence standard’ on the ‘What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) Scale” (Cheek 2005, 2006; Morse 2006a: 396). Feuer, Towne and Shavelson offer the counterargument: Although we strongly oppose blunt federal mandates that reduce scientific inquiry to one method . . . we also believe that the field should use this tool in studies in education more often than is current practice . . .. Now is the time for the field to move beyond particularized views and focus on building a shared core of norms and practices that emphasize scientific principles. (2002: 8)

A report by the National Center for the Dissemination of Disability Research Standards states: “We need criteria for comparing research methods and research evidence, we need THE ELEPHANT IN THE LIVING ROOM

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terms like credibility (internal validity), transferability (external validity), dependability (reliability), confirmability (objectivity)” (www.ncddr.org/ kt/products/focus/focus9/). A skeptic must ask: “Whose science? Whose scientific principles?”

Two Other Elephants The elephant wears two other garments, the cloak of meta-analyses, and the disguises of mix-methods research. The meta-analysis disguise invites the production of systematic reviews that incorporate qualitative research into meta-analyses (Dixon-Woods et. al. 2006). The mixed-method disguise revisits the concept of triangulation asking how qualitative and quantitative methods can be made to work together (Moran-Ellis et al. 2006). There are problems with both disguises. Meta-analyses of published articles hardly count as qualitative research in any sense of the word. The return to mix-methods inquiry fails to address the incommensurability issue—the fact that the two paradigms are in contradiction (Smith and Hodkinson 2005: 922–924). Any effort to circumvent this collision, through complementary strengths, single-paradigm, dialectical, or multiple-paradigm, mixed methods approaches, seems doomed to failure (see Teddlie and Tashakkori 2003: 19–24).3

Whose Criteria, Whose Standards? Extending Smith and Deemer (2000) within the qualitative inquiry community there are three basic positions on the issue of evaluative criteria: foundational, quasifoundational, and nonfoundational (see also Creswell 2007: 203–220; Guba and Lincoln 1989, 2005; Lincoln and Guba 1985; Spencer et al. 2003: 39). Foundationalists, including those who apply the Cochrane and Campbell Collaborations, are in this space, contending that research is research, quantitative or qualitative. All research should conform to a set of shared criteria (for example, internal, external validity, credibility, transferability, confirmability,

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transparency, warrantability [see Dixon-Woods et al. 2004, 2006; Teddlie and Tashakkori 2003: 13]). Quasifoundationalists contend that a set of criteria or guiding framework unique to qualitative research need to be developed. These criteria may include terms such as reflexivity, theoretical grounding, iconic, paralogic, rhizomatic, and voluptuous validity (Eisner 1993; Lather 1993; Lincoln and Guba 1985). In contrast, nonfoundationalists stress the importance of understanding versus prediction (Denzin 1997; Wolcott 1999). They conceptualize inquiry within a moral frame, implementing an ethic rooted in the concepts of care, love, and kindness (also Christians 2005).

Policy and Praxis Evaluative criteria, as pedagogical practices, are shaped by what is regarded as the proper relationship between qualitative inquiry and social policy. Within the critical qualitative inquiry community, at least four pedagogical stances, or identities, can be distinguished. Each has its own history: (1) discipline-based qualitative research focused on accumulating fundamental knowledge about social processes and institutions; (2) qualitative policy research aimed at having an impact on current programs and practices; (3) critical qualitative approaches that disrupt and destabilize current public policy or social discourse; (4) public intellectuals, public social scientists, and cultural critics who use qualitative inquiry and interpretive work to address current issues and crises in the public arena (Hammersley 2005a: 3). Hammersley cautions that “we should not allow the close encounters promised by the notion of evidence-based policymaking, or even ‘public social science,’ to seduce us into illusions about ourselves and our work” (ibid.: 5). Torrance (2006: 127) is quite assertive: “This new orthodoxy seems perversely and willfully ignorant of many decades of debate over whether, and if so in what ways, we can conduct enquiry and build knowledge in the social sciences, pausing only to castigate educational research for not being more like . . . medical research.”

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The Politics of Evidence The term politics (and ethics) of evidence is, as Morse observes, an oxymoron, and in more than one way. Evidence “is something that is concrete and indisputable, whereas politics refers to ‘activities concerned with the . . . exercise of authority [and power]’” (2006: 395). Evidence in a countable or measurable sense is not something that all qualitative researchers attend to. Few critical ethnographers (Madison 2005) think in a language of evidence; they think instead about experience, emotions, events, processes, performances, narratives, poetics, the politics of possibility. And evidence is never morally or ethically neutral. But, paraphrasing Morse, who quotes Larner (2004: 20), the politics and political economy of evidence is not a question of evidence or no evidence. It is rather a question of who has the power to control the definition of evidence, who defines the kinds of materials that count as evidence, who determines what methods best produce the best forms of evidence, whose criteria and standards are used to evaluate quality evidence. On this, Morse is quite clear: “Our evidence is considered soft . . . it is considered not valid, not replicable, not acceptable! We have failed to communicate the nature of qualitative evidence to the larger scientific community . . . we have failed to truly understand it ourselves” (2006a: 415–416). The politics of evidence cannot be separated from the ethics of evidence.

State and Discipline Sponsored Epistemologies This ethical, epistemological, and political discourse is historically and politically situated. It plays out differently in each national context (see Atkinson and Delamont 2006; Cheek 2006; Gilgun 2006; Lather 2004; Morse 2006a, b; Preissle 2006). In the United States, the United Kingdom,, Continental Europe, New Zealand, and Australia, the conversation criss-crosses audit cultures, indigenous cultures, disciplines, paradigms, and epistemologies, as well as decolonizing initiatives. Depending on the nation-state, the discourse goes by various acronyms. In the U.S., it is called SBR (Scientifically Based Research) or SIE (Scientific Inquiry in Education). In the U.K., the model goes by letters RAE (the British 62

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Research Assessment Exercise) and in Australia, RQF (Research Quality Framework). All these models are based, more or less, on the assumption that, since medical research is successful and randomized experimental designs are used and appreciated in medical science, this approach should be the blueprint for all good research (but see Timmermans and Berg 2003). There is not a single discourse. In the postpositivist, foundational, and quasifoundational American communities, there are multiple institutions (and conversations) competing for attention, including: (1) the Institute of Education Science (IES) within the U.S. Department of Education; (2) the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC), funded by IES; (3) the Cochrane-Campbell Collaboration (CCC), which contracts with WWC; (4) the National Research Council-SBR framework (2001, 2002, 2005), which implements versions of CCC and WWC; (5) the recently IES-funded ($850,00) Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness (SREE); (6) the 2006 standards for reporting adopted by the American Education Research Association (AERA), which explicitly addresses standards for qualitative research, some of which are contained in documents prepared by members of the Cochrane Qualitative Methods Group (Briggs 2006).4

NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL The federally funded National Research Council (NRC) scientifically based research (SBR), or evidence-based movement, argues that educational, health care, and other social problems can be better addressed if we borrow from medical science and upgrade our methods and create new gold standards for evaluating evidence (National Research Council 2001, 2005). For this group, quality research is scientific, empirical, and linked to theory and uses methods for direct investigation and produces coherent chains of causal reasoning based on experimental or quasi-experimental findings, offering generalizations that can be replicated and used to test and refine theory. Research that has these features is of high quality, and it is scientific (National Research Council 2005: 20). THE ELEPHANT IN THE LIVING ROOM

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In the United States, such research must also conform to the Office of Human Subject Research definition of scientific inquiry; namely, scientific research is any activity designed to test an hypothesis, permit conclusions to be drawn, and thereby to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge expressed in theories, principles, and statements of relationships. Research is described in a formal protocol that sets forth an objective and a set of procedures designed to reach that objective. (Title 45, Part 46, U.S. Code of Federal Regulations; AAUP, 2001: 55; also American Association of University Professors 1981, 2002, 2006)

Hand in glove, ethics and models of science now flow into each other. IRB panels can simultaneously rule on research that is ethically sound and of high quality. If these assumptions are allowed, we have lost the argument even before it starts. Lincoln and Cannella are clear on this point: The NRC report is a U.S. government-requested project designed to clearly define the nature or research that is to be labeled as representing quality . . .. Accurately referred to as methodological fundamentalism . . . contemporary conservative research discourses . . . have ignored critical theory, race/ethic studies, and feminist theories and silenced the voices and life conditions of the traditionally marginalized. (2004: 165, paraphrase; see also Feuer 2006; Freeman et al. 2007; Hammersley 2005a; St. Pierre 2006; St. Pierre and Roulston 2006)

Implementing the NRC Model Thirteen recommendations for implementing the NRC model are directed to federal funding agencies, professional associations and journals, and schools of education. These recommendations state that: Research agencies should • • • 64

Define and enforce better quality criteria for peer reviewers; Ensure peer reviewer expertise and diversity; Create infrastructures for data sharing. CHAPTER 4

Publishers and professional associations should • • • • •

Develop explicit standards for data sharing; Require authors to make data available to other researchers; Create infrastructures for data sharing; Develop standards for structured abstracts; Develop manuscript review system that supports professional development. Schools of education and universities should

• • •

Enable research competencies; Ensure students develop deep methodological knowledge; Provide students with meaningful research experiences.

There are several problems with these NRC formulations and recommendations. I start with Maxwell. He unravels and criticizes the centrally linked assumptions in the model (2004). His six points constitute powerful criticisms of SBR. He argues that the model assumes a narrow, regulatory view of causation, privileges a variable-oriented, as opposed to a process-oriented view of research; denies the possibility of observing causality in a single case; neglects the importance of context, meaning, and process as essential components of causal and interpretive analysis; erroneously asserts that qualitative and quantitative research share the same logic of inference; and presents a hierarchical ordering of methods for investigating causality, giving priority to experimental and other quantitative methods (2004: 3). Feuer, Towne, and Shavelson attempt to finesse this criticism, creating a special place for qualitative research, suggesting it can used to capture the complexities involved in teaching, learning, and schooling—that is, when a problem is poorly understood, and plausible hypotheses are scant—qualitative methods such as ethnographies . . . are necessary to describe complex phenomena, generate theoretical models, and reframe questions . . .. We want to be explicit . . . we do not view our strong support for randomized field trials and our equally strong argument for close attention to context . . . as incompatible. Quite the contrary: When properly applied, THE ELEPHANT IN THE LIVING ROOM

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quantitative and qualitative research tools can both be employed rigorously and together. (2002: 8)

Finessing aside, the NRC is clear on this point: “A randomized experiment is the best method for estimating [causal] effects” (ibid.). Flashback to 1926. Déjà vu all over again. Lundberg, sociology archpositivist, is arguing against the use of the case method: The case method is not in itself a scientific method at all, but merely the first step in the scientific method . . . the statistical method is the best, if not the only scientific method . . . the only possible question . . . is whether classification of, and generalizations from the data should be carried out by random, qualitative, and subjective method . . . or through the systematic, quantitative, and objective procedures of the statistical method. (1926: 61)

Fast forward to 1966, to Howard S. Becker: The life history method has not been much used by contemporary sociologists, a neglect which reflects a shift in the methodological stance of the researcher. Rigorous, quantitative, and (frequently) experimental designs have become the accepted modes of investigation. This situation is unfortunate because the life history, when properly conceived and employed can become one of the sociologist’s most powerful observational and analytic tools. (1966: xviii)

The presumption that only quantitative data can be used to identify causal relationships is problematic. Maxwell (2004) shows how the SBR model neglects meaning, context and process. He demonstrates that causality can be identified (after Hume), in the single case; that is, multicase, variable-based causal arguments are just one form of causal interpretation. Other causal, or quasicausal models, of course, are based on multivariant, process, contextual, and interactionist-based assumptions. Further, causality as a type of narrative is only one form of interpretation. Autoethnographic, performative, arts-based, ethnodramatic, poetic, action-based, and other forms of narrative representation 66

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are equally powerful methods and strategies of analysis and interpretation. In additional to Maxwell’s six basic criticisms, I add the following. First, amazingly, there is little attention given to the process by which evidence is turned into data. This is not a simple process, and it is not accomplished by waving a wand over a body of observations. Second, there is no detailed discussion of how data are to be used to produce generalizations, test, and refine theory, and permit causal reasoning. It is clear, though, that data becomes a commodity that does several things. That is, third, evidence as data carries the weight of the scientific process. This process works through a self-fulfilling, self-validating process. You know you have quality data that are scientific when you have tested and refined your theory. How you have addressed problems in the real world remains a mystery. Fourth, the focus on data sharing is critical, and of central concern. It is assumed that quality data can be easily shared. But complex interpretive processes shape how evidence is turned into data and how data, in turn, are coded, categorized, labeled, and assembled into databanks (Charmaz 2005). Data are not silent. Data are commodities, produced by researchers, perhaps owned by the government, or by funding agencies. What would it mean to share my data with you? Why would I want to do this? If I own my data, I want to have ownership over how it is used, including what is published from it. The injunction to engage in data sharing requires amplification. Data sharing involves complex moral considerations that go beyond sending a body of coded data to another colleague. Fifth, money and concerns for auditing from the audit culture seem to drive the process. This is evidenced in the emphasis placed on funding and quality peer reviews. If quality data can be produced and then shared, then granting agencies get more science for less money. However, for greater data sharing to occur, more high-quality projects need to be funded. For this to happen, granting agencies need a better peer-review system with better trained reviewers, who are using more clearly defined rating scale levels. Reviewers will be helped if researchers write proposals that THE ELEPHANT IN THE LIVING ROOM

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use rigorous methodologies and the very best research designs. Such projects will surely have high standards of evidence. Thus does the self-fulfilling process reproduce. We know we are getting quality science of the highest order, because we are using methods of the highest order. Reviewers can easily identify such work. The blind peer review, based on presumptions of objectivity, is the key to this system.5 The peer-review system is not immune to political influence. Kaplan has demonstrated that the Bush Administration has systematically stacked federal advisory and peer-review committees with researchers whose views match the President’s on issues ranging from stem-cell research to ergonomics, faith-based science, AIDS, sex education, family values, global warming, and environmental issues in public parks (2004; also Monastersky 2002).

SOCIETY FOR RESEARCH ON EDUCATIONAL EFFECTIVENESS (SREE) The Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness (SREE) extend the federally sponsored NRC agenda. It appears to oppose recent efforts within the American Educational Research Association (AERA) to soften NRC guidelines (see below). The code words for SREE, which plans its own journal (Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness—JREE), handbook (Handbook of Research on Educational Effectiveness), and electronic journal (Research Notes on Educational Effectiveness) are rigorous research design and randomized control experiment. The mission of SREE is to advance and disseminate research on the causal effects of education interventions, practices, programs, and policies. As support for researchers who are focused on questions related to educational effectiveness, the Society aims to (1) increase the capacity to design and conduct investigations that have a strong base for causal inference, (2) bring together people investigating cause-and-effect relations in education, and (3) promote 68

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the understanding and use of scientific evidence to improve education decisions and outcomes.6 (see www.sree-net.org; also Viadero 2006)

There is no place in SREE here for qualitative research. This is hardcore SBR: evidence-based inquiry. Scientific research becomes a commodity to be sold in a new journal, a commodity that serves and embodies the interests of educational science as narrowly defined.

THE COCHRANE, CAMPBELL, AND WHAT WORKS CLEARING HOUSE COLLABORATIONS The Cochrane, Campbell, and What Works Clearinghouse Collaborations are inserting themselves into the qualitative research conversation. All three represent state-sponsored projects. All three are dedicated to producing so-called scientific peer reviews of high-quality (evidence-based) research that can be used by policymakers. The Cochrane Qualitative Methods Group focuses on methodological matters arising from the inclusion of findings from qualitative studies into systematic reviews of evidence-based inquires. The Campbell Methods Group focuses on methodological issues associated with process evaluations, which use mixed methods, while including evidence gathered via qualitative methods. It is understood that qualitative research can help in understanding how an intervention is experienced, while providing insight into factors that might hinder successful implementation. Randomized controlled trials are central to all three Collaborations. Hence qualitative evidence is of primary interest only when it is included as a data-gathering technique in an experimental, or quasi-experimental study (Briggs 2006). There is some debate on this point—that is, whether “only qualitative research embedded within relevant RCTs should be included” (ibid.). The Campbell Collaboration includes only qualitative materials if they are part of controlled observations (Davies 2004: 30) However, there is no consensus on how to include qualitative evidence in THE ELEPHANT IN THE LIVING ROOM

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such work; namely, how to identify, record, appraise, and extract data from qualitative studies.

Appraisal Tools Enter CASP—the Critical Appraisal Skills Program (Briggs 2006)—which was developed in conjunction with the Cochrane Qualitative Research Methods Group (CQRMG). The Cochrane Group has a broad but conventional definition of qualitative research, encompassing specific methods (interviews, participant and nonparticipant observation, focus groups, ethnographic fieldwork), data types (narrative), and forms of analysis (Nudist, Ethnography, grounded theory, thematic categories) (ibid.). CASP, like any number of other checklists (Dixon-Woods et al. 2004; Jackson and Waters 2005; Popay, Rogers, and Williams 1998; Spencer et al. 2003), is an assessment tool developed for those unfamiliar with qualitative research. The tool presents a series of questions, focused on three broad issues: rigor, credibility, and relevance. Ten questions, concerning aims, methodology, design, subject recruitment, data collection, researcher-participant relationship, ethics (IRBS), data analysis, statement of findings, and value of research are asked. The reviewer of a study writes comments on each of these issues. CASP implements a narrow model of qualitative inquiry. Methods are not connected to interpretive paradigms (for example, feminism, critical theory). Multiple strategies of inquiry and analysis (case or performance studies, narrative inquiry, critical ethnography) go unidentified. Nor is the complex literature from within the interpretive tradition on evaluating qualitative research addressed (see Christians 2005). Thus CASP offers the reviewer a small, ahistorical tool kit for reading and evaluating qualitative studies.

Checklists Here Hammersley is again relevant. This is the myth of the checklist, the myth of the guideline (2005a). Consider the guidelines prepared for the British Cabinet Office (Spencer et al. 2003). This 70

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is another checklist with 16 categories (scope, timetable, design, sample, data collection, analysis, ethics, confirmability, generalizability, credibility, and so on), 80 specific criteria (clearly stated hypotheses, outcomes, justify analysis methods, triangulation, and so forth), and 35 broad criteria (explicit aims, appropriate use of methods, assessment of reliability, validity, and so on). This is old-fashioned postpositivism, applying a soft quantitative grid (confirmability, hypotheses, credibility) to qualitative research. But there is more going on. Like CASP, Spencer and colleagues’ toolkit introduces the notion of credibility; that is, can the findings be trusted? If they can be trusted, they must be confirmable, valid, and reliable—which means they can be generalized. If they are not credible, the whole house of cards falls down. Torrance (2006: 128) challenges the underlying positivist theory at work here, contending “that quality cannot be reduced to methodological prescriptions.” Ratings in a qualitative evidence scale ignore the “reality of doing qualitative research . . . with all the contingencies, political pressures, and decisions that have to be made” (Torrance 2006: 140).

AERA The American Education Research Association (American Education Research Association 2006, 2008) has recently added its collective voice to the conversation, supplementing and departing from the NRC recommendations. Two sets of guidelines, one for empirical research, the other for humanities-based work, have been offered. Both sets are intended to help authors and journal editors and reviewers who may not be familiar with expectations guiding such work. They are also intended to foster excellence in the production of high-quality research.

Standards for Empirical Social Science Research Two global standards are offered for reporting empirical research: warrantability and transparency7 (American Education Research Association 2006: 2).8 Reports of research should be warranted; THE ELEPHANT IN THE LIVING ROOM

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that is, adequate evidence, which would be credible (internal validity), should be provided to justify conclusions. Reports should be transparent, making explicit the logic of inquiry used in the project. This method should produce data that have external validity, reliability, and confirmability, or objectivity. Like the NRC guidelines, these standards are to be used by peer-reviewers, research scholars, journal publishers, and in graduate education programs where researchers are trained. There is extensive discussion of quantitative procedures (ibid.: 6–10), but trust is not an issue.

Trust Trust is an issue for qualitative researchers. The report is explicit, asserting that it is the researcher’s responsibility is to show the reader that the report can be trusted. This begins with the description of the evidence, the data, and the analysis supporting each interpretive claim. The warrant for the claims can be established through a variety procedures including triangulation, asking participants to evaluate pattern descriptions, having different analysts examine the same data, (independently and collaboratively), searches for disconfirming evidence and counter-interpretations. (ibid.: 11)

This is all clear enough, but these validating procedures and standards are not held up for quantitative researchers. When qualitative evidence does not converge, the report recommends that critical examination of the preexisting perspective, point of view, or standpoint of the researcher(s), of how these might have influenced the collection and analysis of evidence, and of how they were challenged during the course of data collection and analysis, is an important element in enhancing the warrant of each claim. (ibid.)

Here is the heart of the matter. The perspective of the qualitative researcher can influence the collection of evidence in such a 72

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way as to introduce a lack of trust into the research process. That presence potentially undermines the credibility and warrantability of the report. But why would the qualitative researcher’s effects on the research process be greater or less than the effects of the quantitative researcher? Doesn’t the quantitative researcher have an effect on the collection, analysis, and interpretation of evidence, including deciding what evidence is?! (See below.) The 2006 AERA recommendations call for the responsible use of quasifoundational tools; that is, threats to trust can be overcome. Transparency, that is, trust, is increased by clearly discussing the process of interpretation, highlighting the evidence and alternative interpretations that serve as a warrant for each claim, providing contextual commentary on each claim. When generalizations extend beyond a specific case, researchers must clearly indicate the sampling frame, population, individuals, contexts, activities, and domains to which the generalizations are intended to apply (external validity). The logic supporting such generalizations must be made clear. A sleight of hand is at work in the AERA recommendations. The intent of the report is now clear. Two things are going on at once. A familiar pattern. Qualitative research is downgraded to the status of a marginal science, second-class citizenship. Since it lacks trustworthiness, it can be used for discovery purposes, but not for the real work of science, which is verification. Only under the most rigorous of circumstances can qualitative research exhibit the qualities that would make it scientific, and even then trust will be an issue. Trust becomes a proxy for quality; transparency and warranted evidence function as proxies for objectivity. Clearly, AERA wants a space for qualitative research that is not governed by the narrow NRC, experimental and quasi-experimental guidelines. We all want this. To its credit, AERA wants a broadbased, multimethod concept of quality. But they falter in asserting that empirical research reports should be warranted and transparent. These are criteria for doing business as usual. No wonder SREE was created. AERA’s educational science does not require randomized control experiments. SREE’s does. THE ELEPHANT IN THE LIVING ROOM

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Rereading Trust and Ethics Trust in this discourse resurfaces as a proxy for more than quality. It spills over to the researcher who does research that lacks trust. Untrustworthy persons lie, misrepresent, cheat, engage in fraud, alter documents. They are not governed by measurement and statistical procedures that are objective and free of bias. They may not be shady characters, they may be well-intended, gifted actors, poets, fiction writers, performers, but they are not scientists! Qualitative researchers are not to be trusted, because their standpoints can influence what they study and report. Somehow quantitative researchers are freed from these influences. This of course is a sham! By implication, quantitative scientists are being charged with fraud, with misrepresenting their data. This may be because many qualitative researchers don’t have data and findings, tables and charts, statistics and numbers. We have stories, narratives, excerpts from interviews. We perform our interpretations and invite audiences to experience these performances, to live their way into the scenes, moments, and lives we are writing and talking about. Our empirical materials can’t be fudged, misrepresented, altered, or distorted, because they are life experiences. They are ethnodramas.

Apples Turned into Oranges: Turning Interpretations into Data Like the NRC, AERA’s ethical guidelines focus on issues relevant to reporting results. Authors have an obligation to address the ethical decisions that shaped their research, including how the inquiry was designed, executed, and organized. Incentives for participating, consent waivers and confidentiality agreements, and conflicts of interest should be presented and discussed. Reporting should be accurate, free of plagiarism, fully accessible to others, and without falsification or fabrication of data or results. Data should be presented in such a way that any qualified researcher with a copy of the relevant data could reproduce the results. Thus are interpretive materials turned into data. The interpretive process becomes an exercise in seeking patterns of evidence, presenting evidence in a way that will engender trust on the part 74

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of the reader while avoiding charges of misrepresentation or fabrication (more on ethics below). But this is not how qualitative researchers work.

Standards for Reporting on Humanities-Oriented Research in AERA Publications9 The 2008 Draft of Standards for Humanities-Oriented Research extends the place of qualitative inquiry in educational research. The document recognizes that traditional social science standards for empirical research cannot be automatically applied to humanities-oriented research. The document focuses on five genres of humanities-linked inquiry, philosophy, history, arts-based research (ABER), literary studies, and studies of the politics of knowledge.10 Space prohibits a discussion of all five genres. I focus on ABER because of its overlap with experimental forms of qualitative inquiry (see Barone 2001; Cahnmann-Taylor and Siegesmund 2008; Eisner 1991; Finley 2003, 2005; Leavy 2009; Richardson 2000a, b, 2001). Two strands of arts-based inquiry, the humanistic or traditional and the activist, critical pedagogical, can be identified. The traditional strand, the one emphasized in the report, contrasts empirical and artistic approaches to qualitative research. Dance, film, poetry, drama, the plastic arts are used to explore various facets of the human condition, the relationship between reason and emotion, the ethical life, self, identity, and meaning (American Education Research Association 2008: 3; Finley 2005: 684). Activist, radical, performative, ethical, and revolutionary forms arts-based work, projects that disrupt, interrupt, and challenge structures of oppression are not taken up (see Finley 2005: 688). The report defers to those forms and methods of humanitiesoriented research that are empirical and use interpretive methods in the analysis of texts, text analogues, and textual artifacts (American Education Research Association 2008: 4). It is asserted that such work is inextricably empirical, which means it can be counted, assessed, and evaluated in terms of a politics of THE ELEPHANT IN THE LIVING ROOM

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evidence. This means there is overlap between empirical and humanities-oriented research (ibid.: 4). Accordingly, the standards for evaluating humanistic work overlap with those applied to empirical work. Seven standards, each with a series of substandards11 that elaborate the major standard are offered: (1) significance, (2) conceptualization, (3) methods, (4) substantiation, (5) coherence, (6) quality of communication, and (7) ethics.12 (These could have been included in the 2006 empirical standards document.) Substantiation and coherence are key standards, and they are intertwined. Together they establish the warrant for the arguments in a text, the adequacy or credibility of its interpretations, the quality and use of evidence, its transparency, and critical selfawareness. A warrantable humanities-based text, like its empirical counterpart, uses evidence that justifies its conclusions. Such a text demonstrates internal and external coherence, offering compelling confirming and disconfirming evidence, and an awareness of competing, external perspectives. What if a work is deliberately not empirical. What if it disrupts the concept of the empirical. What if it disallows the concept of the text and turns the text into a performance, into a site where meaning is multiple, plural, and unclear—in which case an empirical-textual model no longer applies, and the standards of coherence and substantiation no longer apply.

Reading the New Standards As with the discussion of qualitative research, it is clear that AERA wants a space for humanities-based inquiry that is not governed by narrow SBR guidelines. But the window it creates for this form of inquiry is quite narrow. They want to hold humanistic inquiry to a modified set of evidence-based standards. Underneath its claim for inclusiveness, it brings the same criteria—transparency, coherence, evidence, trust—to the humanities that it applied to qualitative inquiry. Its discussion of arts-based-educational research (ABER) ignores, as it did in the discussion of qualitative inquiry, a 76

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large methodological and interpretive literature concerning empowerment discourses, critical performance ethnography, art-for-social action purposes, dialogic spaces, public art, censorship, and neoliberal forms of governmental regulation (see Finley 2003, 2005). It seems that this document was produced outside the discourse that it was intended to regulate. The effect, however, is disarming. There is the impression that we are one big happy family, with different people doing different things. That is not the case. In fact, we are better described as a “house divided.”13 Accordingly, we should resist the “new orthodoxy.” By asserting that everything we do is inextricably empirical, the AERA seeks to diminish, if not erase hard-fought distinction, and all in the name of science!

It is as if the NRC, SREE, and AERA guidelines were written in a time warp. Over the last three decades, the field of qualitative research has become a interdisciplinary field in its own right. The interpretive and critical paradigms, in their multiple forms, are central to this movement. Complex literatures are now attached to research methodologies, strategies of inquiry, interpretive paradigms, and criteria for reading and evaluating inquiry itself. Sadly, little of this literature is evident in any of the recent national documents. It seems that the qualitative community is hemmed in from all sides. But before this judgment is accepted, the for “whom question” must be asked—that is, high-quality science, or evidence, for whom? (Cheek 2006). NRC, AERA, and SREE’s umbrellas are too small. We need a larger tent.

THE QUALITATIVE INQUIRY COMMUNITY There are tensions over the politics of evidence within the interpretive community: (1) interpretivists dismiss postpositivists, (2) poststructuralists dismiss interpretivists, and now (3) the postinterpretivists dismiss the interpretivists (Preissle 2006: 692; THE ELEPHANT IN THE LIVING ROOM

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also Hammersley 2005b; Hodkinson 2004; MacLure 2006). Some postpositivists are drawn to the SBR standards movement, seeking to develop mixed or multiple methodological strategies that will conform to the new demands for improving research quality. Others reject the gold standard movement and argue for a set of understandings unique to the interpretive, or postinterpretive, tradition (St. Pierre and Roulston 2006). Atkinson and Delamont call for a return to the classics in the Chicago School tradition (2006). The American Education Research Association aims to strike a middle ground, neither too postpositivist nor too interpretivist (2006). The immediate effects of this conversation start at home, in departments, and in graduate education programs where Ph.D.s are produced and tenure for qualitative research scholars is granted. Many fear that the call for SBR will drown out instruction, scholarship, and the granting of tenure in the qualitative tradition, or confine it to a narrow brand of interpretive work (Eisenhart 2006: 697). Worse yet, it could lead to a narrow concept of orthodoxy.14

Resistance We must resist the pressures for a single gold standard, even as we endorse conversations about evidence, inquiry, and empirically warranted conclusions (Lincoln and Cannella 2004). We cannot let one group define the key terms in the conversation. To do otherwise is to allow the SBR group to define the moral and epistemological terrain that we stand on. Neither they nor the government own the word science. Habermas anticipated this nearly 40 years ago: The link between empiricism, positivism, and the global audit culture is not accidental, and it is more than just technical. Such technical approaches deflect attention away from the deeper issues of value and purpose. They make radical critiques much more difficult to mount . . . and they render largely invisible partisan approaches to research under the politically useful pretense that judgments are about objective quality only. In the process human needs and human rights are trampled upon and 78

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democracy as we need it is destroyed. (1972: 122; 2006: 193; see also Smith and Hodkinson 2005: 930)

Bourdieu elaborates: The dominants, technocrats, and empiricists of the right and the left are hand in glove with reason and the universal . . .. More and more rational, scientific technical justifications, always in the name of objectivity, are relied upon. In this way the audit culture perpetuates itself. (1998: 90)

There is more than one version of disciplined, rigorous inquiry—counterscience, little science, unruly science, practical science—and such inquiry need not go by the name of science. We must have a model of disciplined, rigorous, thoughtful, reflective inquiry, a “postinterpretivism that seeks meaning but less innocently, that seeks liberation but less naively, and that . . . reaches toward understanding, transformation and justice” (Preissle 2006: 692). It does not need to be called a science, contested or otherwise, as some have proposed (Eisenhart 2006; Preissle 2006; St. Pierre and Roulston 2006). Lather (2006) extends the argument (slightly paraphrased): The commitment to disciplined inquiry opens the space for the pursuit of “inexact knowledges” (787), a disciplined inquiry that matters, applied qualitative research . . . that can engage strategically with the limits and the possibilities of the uses of research for social policy (789). The goal is a critical “counter-‘science’” . . . that troubles what we take for granted as the good in fostering understanding, reflection, and action (787). We need a broader framework where such key terms as science, data, evidence, field, method, analysis, knowledge, truth are no longer defined from within a narrow policy-oriented, positivistic framework.

A NEW TERRAIN, TROUBLE WITH THE ELEPHANT Let’s return to the elephant in the living room. Consider the parable of the blind men and the elephant.15 THE ELEPHANT IN THE LIVING ROOM

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Lillian Quigley, paraphrased: In my children’s book, The Blind Men and the Elephant (1959) I retell the ancient fable of six blind men who visit the palace of the Rajah and encounter an elephant for the first time. Each touches the elephant and announces his discovery. The first blind person touches the side of the elephant and reports that it feels like a wall. The second touches the trunk and says an elephant is like a snake. The third man touches the tusk and says an elephant is like a spear. The fourth person touches a leg and says it feels like a tree. The fifth man touches an ear and says it must be a fan, while the sixth man touches the tail and says how thin, an elephant is like a rope.

There are multiple versions of the elephant in this parable. Multiple lessons. We can never know the true nature of things. We are each blinded by our own perspective. Truth is always partial. To summarize: Truth One: The elephant is not one thing. If we call SBR the elephant, then according to the parable, we can each know only our version of SBR. For SBR advocates, the elephant is two things, an all-knowing being who speaks to us and a way of knowing that produces truths about life. How can a thing be two things at the same time? Truth Two: For skeptics, we are like the blind persons in the parable. We see only partial truths. There is no God’s view of the totality, no uniform way of knowing. Truth Three: Our methodological and moral biases have so seriously blinded us that we can never understand another blind person’s position. Even if the elephant called SBR speaks, our biases may prohibit us for hearing what she says. In turn, her biases prevent her from hearing what we say. Truth Four: If we are all blind, if there is no God, and if there are multiple versions of the elephant, then we are all fumbling around in the world just doing the best we can.

Two Other Versions of the Elephant This is the blind person’s version of the elephant. There are at least two other versions, 2.1 and 2.2. Both versions follow from 80

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another fable; now the elephant refers to a painfully problematic situation, thing, or person in one’s life space. Rather than confront the thing and make changes, persons find that it is easier to engage in denial, to act as though the elephant isn’t in the room. This can be unhealthy, because the thing may be destructive. It can produce codependency. We need the negative presence of the elephant in order to feel good about ourselves. This cuts two ways at once, hence versions 2.1 and 2.2. In Fable 2.1 SBR advocates treat qualitative research as if it were an elephant in their living room. They have ignored our traditions, our values, our methodologies; they have not read our journals, our handbooks, or our monographs. They have not even engaged our discourses about SBR. Like the six blind men, they have acted as if they could create us in their own eye. They say we produce findings that cannot be trusted, we are radical relativists, we think anything goes, why with our values we would not have stopped Hitler! They dismiss us when we tell them they know only one version of who we are. When we tell them that their biases prevent them from understanding what we do, they assert that we are wrong and they are right. In Fable 2.2 the elephant is located in our living room. With notable exceptions, we have tried to ignore this presence. Denial has fed codependency. We need the negative presence of SBR to define who we are. For example, we have not taken up the challenge of better educating policymakers, showing them how qualitative research and our views of practical science, interpretation, and performance ethics can positively contribute to projects embodying restorative justice, equity, and better schooling (Preissle 2006; Stanfield 2006). We have not engaged policymakers in a dialogue about alternative ways of judging and evaluating quality research. Nor have we engaged SBR advocates in a dialogue about these same issues (but see St. Pierre 2006). And they have often declined the invitation to join us in a conversation. As a consequence, we have allowed the SBR elephant to set the terms of the conversation. If we are to move forward positively, we have to get beyond Fable 2.2, beyond elephants, blind persons, and structures of THE ELEPHANT IN THE LIVING ROOM

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denial. We must create a new narrative, a narrative of passion and commitment, a narrative that teaches others that ways of knowing are always already partial, moral, and political. This narrative will allow us to put the elephant in proper perspective. Here are some of the certain things we can build our new fable around: 1. We have an ample supply of methodological rules and interpretive guidelines. 2. They are open to change and to differing interpretation, and this is how it should be. 3. There is no longer a single gold standard for qualitative work. 4. We value open-peer reviews in our journals. 5. Our empirical materials are performative. They are not commodities to be bought, sold, and consumed. 6. Our feminist, communitarian ethics are not governed by IRBs. 7. Our science is open-ended, unruly, disruptive (MacLure 2006; Stronach et al. 2007: 197). 8. Inquiry is always political and moral. 9. Objectivity and evidence are political and ethical terms. We live in a depressing historical moment, violent spaces, unending wars against persons of color, repression, the falsification of evidence, the collapse of critical, democratic discourse; repressive neoliberalism disguised as dispassionate objectivity prevails. Global efforts to impose a new orthodoxy on critical social science inquiry must be resisted, a hegemonic politics of evidence cannot be allowed. Too much is at stake.

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PART TWO Interpretation

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THE ART OF INTERPRETATION The Stories We Tell One Another1 Once upon a time, the Lone Ethnographer rode off into the subset in search of his “native.” After undergoing a series of trials, he encountered the object of his quest in a distant land. There he underwent his rite of passage by enduring the ultimate ordeal of “fieldwork.” After collecting “the data,” the Lone Ethnographer returned home and wrote a “true” account of “the culture.” (Rosaldo l989: 30) I have been working to change the way I speak and write. (hooks l990: 146)

In the social sciences there is only interpretation. Nothing speaks for itself. Confronted with a mountain of impressions, documents, and fieldnotes, the qualitative researcher faces the difficult and challenging task of making sense of what has been learned. I call making sense of what has been learned the art of interpretation. This is also described as moving from the field, to the text, to the reader. The practice of this art allows the fieldworker-as-bricoleur (Levi-Strauss l966 [l962]: l7) to translate what has been learned into a body of textual work that communicates these understandings to the reader. These texts, borrowing from John Van Maanen (l988), constitute tales from the field. They are the stories we tell one another. This is so because interpretation requires the telling of a story or a narrative that states: “Things happen this way because” or “This happened, after this happened, because this happened first.” Interpreters as storytellers tell narrative tales with beginnings, 85

middles, and ends. These tales always embody implicit and explicit theories of causality, where narrative or textual causality is presumed to map the actual goings on in the real world (Ricoeur 1985: 4). How this complex art of interpretation and storytelling is practiced is the topic of this chapter. The history of qualitative research in the social sciences reveals continual attempts to wrestle with this process and its methods. In this chapter, I review several of these methods, or traditions, paying special attention to those that have been employed in the most recent past, including the constructivist,2 grounded theory; feminist, Marxist, cultural studies; and poststructural perspectives. Problems generic to this process are examined. I briefly allude to my own perspective, called interpretive interactionism (Denzin l989) and conclude with predictions concerning where the art and politics of interpretation will be 10 years from now.

THE INTERPRETIVE CRISIS IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES The following assumptions organize my analysis. First, the social sciences today face a crisis of interpretation: previously agreedon criteria from the positivist and postpositivist traditions are now being challenged (Guba l990b: 371; Rosaldo l989: 45). This crisis has been described as poststructural, and postmodern, a new sensibility regarding the social text and its claims to authority. Describing this new situation, Richardson observes: “The core of [this] sensibility is doubt that any discourse has a privileged place, any method or theory a universal and general claim to authoritative knowledge” (1991: 173). Second, each social science community has its own criteria for judging the adequacy of any given interpretive statement (Fish l980). These criteria will be grounded in the canonical texts that the community takes to be central to its mission. What works in one community may not work for another. Patricia Hill Collins contends, for example, that the Eurocentric, masculine positivist epistemology asks African-American women to 86

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“objectify themselves, devalue their emotional life, displace their motivations for furthering knowledge about Black women, and confront in an adversarial relationship those with more social, economic and professional power” (1991: 205). Third, this crisis can be resolved only from within social science communities. It is doubtful that a new set of criteria shared by all points of view will, can, or should be developed. This means that “once the privileged veil of truth is lifted, feminism, AfroAmerican, gay, and other disparaged discourses rise to the same epistemological status as the dominant discourse” (Richardson l99l: 173). Fourth, increasingly, the criteria of evaluation will turn, as Richardson notes, on moral, practical, aesthetic, political, and personal issues—the production, that is, of texts that articulate an emancipatory, participative perspective on the human condition and its betterment. Fifth, as Clough argues, the problems of writing are not different from the problems of method or fieldwork (Clough l992: l36). It is not the case, as some may contend, that the preceding problems can be answered only through new forms of writing. As argued in the introduction, these new writing forms primarily function as sources of validation for a reinvigorated empirical science. They direct attention away from the ways in which the experimental text can perpetuate new forms and technologies of knowledge and power that align qualitative research with the state. The insistence that writing and fieldwork are different cannot be allowed (ibid.). The age of a putative value-free social science appears to be over. Accordingly, sixth, any discussion of this process must become political, personal, and experiential. As John Dewey says, the methods for making sense of experience are always personal. Life and method, as Clandinin and Connelly argue, are inextricably intertwined. One learns about method by thinking about how they make sense of their own life. The researcher as a writer is a bricoleur. He or she fashions meaning and interpretation out of ongoing experience. As a bricoleur, the researcher uses any tool or method that is readily at hand. I discuss, then, the politics, craft, and art of experience and interpretation. THE ART OF INTERPRETATION

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FROM FIELD, TO TEXT, TO READER Moving from the field to the text,3 to the reader is a complex, reflexive process. The researcher creates a field text consisting of fieldnotes and documents from the field. From this text is created a research text, notes and interpretations based on the field text, what David Plath (l990) calls filed notes. The research text is then re-created as a working interpretive document. This working document contains the writer’s initial attempts to make sense out of what has been learned, what Clandinin and Connelly term experiencing experience. The writer next produces a quasipublic text, one that is shared with colleagues, whose comments and suggestions are sought. This statement is then transformed into a public document that embodies the writer’s self-understandings, which are now inscribed in the experiences of the people studied.4 This statement, in turn, furnishes the context for the understandings the reader brings to the experiences being described by the writer. Reading and writing, then, are central to interpretation, for as Geertz (l973: 18) argues, interpretation involves the construction of a reading of an event, both by the writer and the reader. To paraphrase Geertz: “A good interpretation takes us into the center of the experiences being described” (ibid.). Such interpretations, may, however, not take us to the heart of the matter, as these matters are understood in the everyday world. Here is Rosaldo describing, in anthropological terms, the daily family breakfast at the home of his prospective parents-in-law: “Every morning the reigning patriarch, as if just in from the hunt, shouts from the kitchen, ‘How many people would like a poached egg?’ Women and children take turns saying yes or no. In the meantime the women talk among themselves and designate one among them the toast maker” (l989: 46–47). Rosaldo says of this account: “My rendition of a family breakfast in the ethnographic present transformed a relatively spontaneous event into a generic cultural form. It became a caricatured analysis . . . the reader will probably not be surprised to hear that my potential in-laws laughed and laughed as they listened to the microethnography . . . about their family breakfast” 88

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(ibid.: 48). Rosaldo employed terms that Geertz (l983) would call experience-distant, or second-order. Terms and phrases such as reigning patriarch and in from the hunt may work for the anthropologist talking to another anthropologist, but they lacked relevance and meaning for Rosaldo’s prospective new family. Interpretation is an art; it is not formulaic or mechanical.5 It can be learned, like any form of storytelling, only through doing. Indeed, as Laurel Richardson argues, writing is interpretation, or storytelling (2000a). Fieldworkers can neither make sense of nor understand what has been learned until they sit down and write the interpretive text, telling the story first to themselves and then to their significant others, and then to the public. A situated, writing self structures this interaction that takes place between the writer, the text, and the reader. The writer presents a particular and unique self in the text; a self that claims to have some authority over the subject matter that is being interpreted. However, the rules for presenting this self are no longer clear. Krieger comments: “The challenge lies in what each of us chooses to do when we represent our experiences. Whose rules do we follow? Will we make our own? Do we . . . have the guts to say, ‘You may not like it, but here I am”’ (l99l: 244).

Interpretation as Storytelling The storytelling self that is presented is always one attached to an interpretive perspective, an “espoused theory” (Argryis and Schon l974: viii) that gives the writer a public persona. Four major paradigms (positivist and postpositivist, constructivist, critical) and three major perspectives (feminist, ethnic models, cultural studies) now structure qualitative writing. The stories qualitative researchers tell one another come from one or another of these paradigms and perspectives. These paradigms and perspectives serve several functions for the writer. They are masks that are hidden behind, put on, and taken off as writers write their particular storied and selfversions of a feminist, gay-lesbian, Afro-American, Hispanic, Marxist, constructionist, grounded theory, phenomenological, or THE ART OF INTERPRETATION

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interactionist text. They give the writer a public identity. These masks direct the writer into specific theoretical and research traditions, what Argyis and Schon (l974: viii) call theories-in-use. Each tradition has its own taken-for-granted and problematic writing style. These masks offer scenarios that lead writers to impose a particular order on the world studied. For example, if the paradigm is positivist or postpositivist, the writer will present a text that stresses variables, hypotheses, and propositions derived from a particular theory that sees the world in terms of causes and effects (see Guba and Lincoln l989: 84). Strauss and Corbin offer a simple example: “Conditions of intense pain will be followed by measures taken to relieve pain” (l990: 111). Here antecedent conditions (intense pain) produce subsequent actions (measures to relieve the pain). If the paradigm is constructivist, the writer will present a text that stresses emergent designs and emergent understandings. An interpretive, or phenomenologically based, text would emphasize socially constructed realities, local generalizations, interpretive resources, stocks of knowledge, intersubjectivity, practical reasoning, and ordinary talk. A writer working from a feminist standpoint paradigm will attempt to tell a situated story stressing gender, reflexivity, emotion, and an action orientation (Fonow and Cook l99l: 2), examining, for example, how “the ideology of the ‘single parent’ [organizes] multiple sites (parent-teaching contact) in education” (Smith l992: 97). Similarly, a Marxist or emancipatory text will stress the importance of terms such as action, structure, culture, and power, which are then fitted into a general model of society (Carspecken and Apple [l992: 5l3]).

Writing Issues: Sense-Making, Representation, Legitimation, Desire Any discussion of how the researcher moves from the field to the text must address a host of issues or problems closely related to storytelling traditions. These issues group into four areas. (Each problem works its effects on the field, research, and interpretive 90

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texts that lay the foundation for the writer’s final, public document.) These problems may be conceptualized as phases, each turning on a different issue and each turning back on the other, as in Dilthey’s (1976) hermeneutic circle. They may be named and called the interpretation, or sense-making, representation, legitimation, and desiring phases of moving from field to text to reader. They interact with one another as the writer wrestles with them in the field, research, interpretive, and public phases of textual construction.

Sense-Making The first issue describes how the writer moves from and through fieldnotes into the actual writing process (into the research and interpretive texts), making decisions about what will be written, what will be included, how it will be represented, and so on. A considerable literature surrounds this process. (See Wolcott l990 for a review; also Sanjek l990 and discussion below.) For example, Strauss and Corbin direct investigators in this field and research text phase to write memos, as well as theoretical, operational, and code notes concerning conceptual labels, paradigm features, emerging theoretical understandings, and visual representations of relationships between concepts and analytic terms (1990: l97). Richardson (2000) discusses other forms of anticipatory interpretive writing, including observation, methodological, theoretical and personal notes that are kept in an ongoing journal.

Representation The second area speaks to such topics as voice, audience, the Other, and the author’s place in the reflexive texts that are produced (see Geertz l988; Krieger l99l; Richardson l990, l992; Rose 1990; Van Maanen l988). To paraphrase Brady: “There is more than one way to do representation” (l991: 5). Representation, of course, is always self-presentation—that is, the Other’s presence is directly connected to the writers’ self-presence in the text. THE ART OF INTERPRETATION

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The “Other” who is presented in the text is always a version of the researcher’s self. Krieger argues: “When we discuss others, we are always talking about ourselves. Our images of ‘them’ are images of ‘us’” (199l: 5). This can occur poetically, as in Laurel Richardson’s poem “Louisa May’s Story of Her Life.” Richardson has Louisa May say: I grew up poor in a rented house in a very normal sort of way on a very normal sort of street with some very nice middle-class friends. (l992: l27)

Here Richardson’s poetic self-poetically presents Louisa May’s truncated life story. Representation turns on voice and the use of pronouns, including first-person statements. Patricia Hill Collins describes her use of pronouns: I often use the pronoun “our” instead of “their” when referring to African-American women, a choice that embeds me in the group I am studying instead of distancing me from it. In addition, I occasionally place my own concrete experience in the text. To support my analysis, I cite few statistics and instead rely on the voices of Black women from all walks of life. (l991: 202)

Frequently writers are positioned outside yet alongside those Others who are written about, never making clear where they stand in these hyphenated relationships that connect the Other to them. When “Others” are not allowed to speak, they remain “an absent presence without voice” (hooks l990: 126). There are major problems with this approach to “Othering,” and it has been extensively criticized (Denzin l990). In such situations, it is best to let others do their own talking. However, even when “we” allow the “Other” to speak, when we talk about or for them, we are taking over their voice. A multi- as opposed to a singlevoiced text can partially overcome this issue (see Bakhtin l986; also Collins l991). 92

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Legitimation The third problem centers on matters of epistemology, including how a public text legitimates itself or makes claims for its own authority. Traditional foundationalist topics such as reliability, validity, and generalizablity may be encountered here (see Hammersley l992; Lather l993). The postmodern sensibility doubts foundational arguments that seek to anchor a text’s authority in such terms. A more local, personal, and political turn is taken. On this, Seidman is informative: “Instead of appealing to absolutist justifications, instead of constructing theoretical logics and epistemic casuitries to justify a conceptual strategy . . . I propose that we be satisfied with local, pragmatic rationales for our conceptual [interpretive] approaches” (l991: 136; see also Lather l993).

Desire There is still a fourth problem, or phase, in this project, given in the subtitle to Howard S. Becker’s influential 1986 book, Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article. This problem circles back to the first, making decisions about what will be written. But it goes deeper and refers to the writing practices that fieldworkers deploy—how one moves from a blank page (or screen) to a written text, one sentence after another, building an emergent, reflexive interpretation of the subject matter at hand (see also Clough l992 Ch. 5 for an interpretation of Becker’s strategies). The topic, to borrow Roland Barthes’s phrase, is the pleasure of the text (l975). Or, as Laurel Richardson says: “Can we create texts that are vital?” (1994: 517). A vital text is not boring. It grips the reader (and the writer). A vital text invites readers to engage the author’s subject matter. Many qualitative research texts are boring. Writers have been taught to write in a particular style, a style that, according to Richardson, takes the omniscient voice of science, the view from everywhere. The postmodern sensibility encourages writers to put themselves into their texts, to engage writing as a creative THE ART OF INTERPRETATION

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act of discovery and inquiry (ibid.: 517–518). However, engaging or boring writing has more to do with the writer than with the paradigm or perspective that is employed. I turn now to the problems generic to the sense-making, representation, legitimation, and desiring phases of writing. This will involve additional consideration of the relationship between the writer and the text.

TWO MODELS OF THE WRITER The foregoing discussion has separated, or isolated, four phases of writing. Although analytically useful, this formulation conveys a sometimes heroic, Romantic picture of the writer and the text. It presumes a writer with the guts to tell it like it is, to put him- or herself on the line, so to speak. It presumes a socially situated (and isolated), unique writer who has the courage and authenticity to write a bold new text. This writer first experiences, feels, and thinks. Having had the experience, this bold writer then writes, deploying one or more narrative traditions in the story that is told.6 This model makes writing an expressive, not a productive, process. It romanticizes the writer and his or her experiences. It distances experience from its expressions. Sense-making, interpretation, representation, and claims for legitimacy are all part of the same process. They can be only artificially separated. Interpretation is a productive process that sets forth the multiple meanings of an event, object, experience, or text. Interpretation is transformative. It illuminates and throws light on experience. It brings out and refines, as when butter is clarified, the meanings that can be sifted from a text, an object, or a slice of experience. So conceived, meaning is not in a text, nor does interpretation precede experience or its representation. Meaning, interpretation, and representation are deeply intertwined in one another. Raymond Carver, the short story writer, describes it this way. Writing is an “act of discovery” (l989: 25). The writer deals with moments of experience. The writer brings all of his or her powers, 94

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“intelligence, and literary skill” (ibid.: 27) to bear on these moments to show how “things out there really are and how he [she] sees those things—as no one else sees them” (ibid.). This is done “through the use of clear and specific language; language that will bring to life the details that will light up the story for the reader . . . the language must be accurately and precisely given” (ibid.). Experimental writing, Carver argues, is “original . . .. The real experimenters have to Make It New . . . and in the process have to find things out for themselves . . .. writers want to carry news from their world to ours” (ibid.: 24). This means that “absolutely everything is important” (ibid.: 38), including where the “commas and periods [go]” (ibid.). The writer invests experience with meaning, showing how everything has suddenly become clear. What was unclear before has “just now become clear” (ibid.: 23). Such understandings emerge in moments of sudden awakening. The writer brings this sense of discovery and awakening to the reader. Writing, then, relives and reinscribes experience, bringing newly discovered meanings to the reader. No cheap tricks, Carver says, no gimmicks (ibid.). Writing must bring news of the world to the reader. In writing, the writer creates this world. He or she fills it with real and fictional people. Their problems and their crises are brought to life. Their lives gone out of control are vividly described. Their lives, suddenly illuminated with new meanings and new transformation of self, are depicted. What is given in the text, what is written, is made up and fashioned out of memory and fieldnotes. Writing of this order, writing that powerfully re-inscribes and re-creates experience, invests itself with its own power and authority. No one else but this writer could have brought this new corner of the world alive in this way for the reader. Thus are expressive (Romantic) and productive views of writing mutually complimentary. The fieldworker must be a committed writer, but the stories that are boldly told are those that flow from a commitment not to shock, brutalize, or alienate the reader (Carver l989: 24). Experimentation is not an excuse or a “license to be careless, silly, or imitative” (ibid.). THE ART OF INTERPRETATION

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THE WRITING PROCESS Understanding and mystery are central to the writing project. Carver’s writer unravels a mystery, discovering and then understanding what was previously hidden and unclear. He or she cuts to the heart of an experience, disclosing its immediate, as well as deep, symbolic, and long-lasting, meanings for the people involved. This suggests that the writer accurately describes a hidden, or submerged, reality that the text brings to light. So conceived, a text establishes its own verisimilitude. It tells the truth. But there is a complicated relationship among truth, reality, and the text. Every writing genre has its own laws of verisimilitude. For example, verisimilitude is the theme of the murder mystery. “Its law is the antagonism between truth and verisimilitude” (Todorov 1977: 86). In a murder mystery, the murderer must appear to be innocent, and the innocent person must be made to appear guilty. “The truth has no verisimilitude, and the verisimilitude has no truth” (ibid.). The end of the narrative must, of course, resolve this tension, or contradiction. It must show the apparently innocent person to be guilty and the apparently guilty party to be innocent. Only in the conclusion to the mystery, as Todorov notes, do truth and verisimilitude coincide. Thus is truth only and always a “distanced and postponed verisimilitude” (ibid.: 88). Truth is a textual production. So in the end, clear description, as defined by a genre, provides the basis for interpretation, understanding, and verisimilitude; that is, an event or process can neither be interpreted nor understood until it has been well described. However, the age of “objective” description is over. We are, as Lather argues, in the age of inscription (l99l: 9l). Writers, that is, create their own situated, inscribed versions of the realities they describe. There is more than one way to do a description-as-an-inscription. A thin description simply states a set of facts, for example: X drank a cup of coffee at 9:30 A.M. on Wednesday February 3 as he e-mailed a message to his editor and co-editor. (Geertz l973: 9–10; Ryle l968: 8–9) 96

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Here is a thick description, taken from a Carver short story, “So Much Water So Close to Home.” The action described in this passage sets the context for the nervous breakdown of the woman who narrates the story. Four men have gone to the mountains on a fishing trip. They parked the car in the mountains and hiked several miles to where they wanted to fish. They carried their bedrolls, food, and cooking utensils, their cards, their whisky. The first evening at the river, even before they could set up camp, Mel Dorn found the girl floating face down in the river; nude lodged near the shore in some branches. He called the other men and they all came to look at her. They talked about what to do . . . one of them thought they should start back to the car at once. The others stirred the sand with their shoes and said they felt inclined to stay. They pleaded fatigue, the late hour, the fact that the girl “wasn’t going anywhere.” In the end they all decided to stay. (l989: l86–187)

A thin description simply reports facts independent of intentions or circumstances. A thick description, in contrast, gives the context of an experience, states the intentions and meanings that organized the experience, and reveals the experience as a process. Out of this process arises a text’s claims for truth, or verisimilitude. Ethnography, Geertz suggests, is thick description, a “written representation of a culture” (l973: 10). Fieldworkers inscribe social discourse.7 They write it down, turning a passing event into something that now exists in its inscriptions (ibid.: 19). What is written down is itself interpretive, because the researcher interprets while writing, attempting in the process to rescue the “‘said’ of such discourse from its perishing occasions and fix it in perusable terms” (ibid.: 20). The intent is to create the conditions that will allow the reader, through us, to converse (and observe) those who have been studied. Building on what has been described and inscribed, interpretation creates the conditions for authentic, or deep, emotional understanding. Authentic understanding is created when THE ART OF INTERPRETATION

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readers are able to live their way into an experience that has been described and interpreted. Return to Rosaldo’s Ilongot headhunters. Early in his research, Rosaldo explained the headhunting ritual with exchange theory. He presented his theory to an older Ilongot man named Insan. “What did he think, I asked, of the idea that headhunting resulted from the way that one death (the beheaded victim’s) canceled another (the next of kin). He looked puzzled, so I went on to say that a victim of a beheading was exchanged for the death of one’s own kin . . .. Insan reflected a moment and replied that he imagined somebody could think such a thing . . . but that he and other Ilongots did not think any such thing” (Rosaldo l989: 3–4). Fifteen months after his wife’s (Michelle’s) tragic death in the field, Rosaldo returned to his headhunting materials. There, attempting to deal with his own rage, he found the meaning of the Ilongot ritual, and the rage that headhunting addressed. He states: “Either you understand it or you don’t. Unless you have had the experience, you cannot understand it” (ibid.:1–2). Interpretation is done, of course by an interpreter, or storyteller. There are two types of interpreters: the people who have actually experienced what has been described and those who are often ethnographers, or fieldworkers, so-called well-informed experts. These two types (local and scientific) of interpreters often give different meanings to the same set of thickly described-inscribed experiences. Local interpreters use experience-near concepts— words and meanings that actually operate in the worlds studied (Geertz l983: 57). These individuals seek emic, or contextual, situated understandings. Scientific interpreters frequently use experience-distant terms—words whose meanings lie in the observer’s theory (ibid.). They produce etic, or abstract, noncontextualized interpretations. Geertz clarifies the goal in this situation: “[We] set down the meaning particular social actions have for the actors whose actions they are . . . stating as explicitly as we can manage, what the knowledge thus attained demonstrates about the society in which it is found . . .. Our double task is to uncover the conceptual structures that inform our subject’s acts, the ‘said’ of social 98

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discourse, and to construct a system of analysis . . . [which reveals] what is generic to those structures” (l973: 27). Thick descriptions and inscriptions create thick interpretations.8 Thick interpretations interpret thick descriptions, in terms of the local theories that are structuring people’s experiences. In nearly all situations, individuals are able to articulate interpretive stories, or working theories, about their conduct and their experiences. These theories-as-stories are contained in the oral and cultural texts of the group and are based on local knowledge; that is what works for them (Geertz l983). These pragmatic theories give meaning to problematic experiences. The interpreter attempts to uncover these theories, showing how they work in the lives of the individuals studied.

The Text, Its Authority and Style A text and an author’s authority can always be challenged. This is so for three reasons. First, stories can always be told (inscribed) in different ways, and the “Others” who are spoken for may offer different tellings of their story. Second, all texts are biased productions. Many reflect a patriarchal, male, interpretive bias (Collins l991: 203–206). Third, the interpretive criteria that an author employs may be questioned, and the logic of the text that is assembled may be called into doubt. I briefly discuss each of these points.

Different Tellings W. A. Marianne Boelen (l992) recently revisited William Foote Whyte’s cornerville, the site of Street Corner Society. She criticized Whyte’s classic study on several grounds, including the fact that he did not know Italian, was not an insider to the group studied, did not understand the importance of the family in Italian group life, and as a consequence seriously misrepresented many of the facts in cornerville society. Whyte (l992) disputed Boelen’s charges, but they linger, especially in light of Doc’s (Whyte’s key informant) estrangement from Whyte. But unnoticed in the Whyte-Boelen exchange is the fact that no permanent telling THE ART OF INTERPRETATION

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of a story can be given. There are always different versions of different, not the same stories, even when the same site is studied.9

Writing Styles There are several styles of qualitative writing, several different ways of describing, inscribing and interpreting reality. Each style creates the conditions for its own criticism. Some version of the realist tale, or style, however predominates. The realist tale attempts to make the subject’s world transparent, to bring it alive, to make it visible (Clough l992: l32). There are three prevailing realist styles. Mainstream realist writing presents thick and thin descriptions of the worlds studied, giving accounts of events, persons and experiences. These texts assume the author can give an objective accounting or portrayal, of the realities of a group or an individual. Such texts often utilize experience-distance concepts, like kinship structure, to explain a group’s way of life. Mainstream realism leads to the production of analytic, interpretive texts which are often single-voiced. Interpretive realism describes those texts where authors insert their personal interpretations into the life situations of the individuals studied. Clifford Geertz’s (l973) study of the Balinese (which used thick description) frequently privileges Geertz’s interpretations. For example, he states: “In the cockfight, man and beast, good and evil, ego and id . . . fuse in a bloody drama of hatred, cruelty, violence, and death” (l973: 442). Here experience and its meanings are filtered through the researcher’s, not the subject’s eyes. In descriptive realism the writer attempts to stay out of the way and to allow the world being described to speak for itself. Of course this is impossible, for all writing is interpretative. However, the impulse is to tell a multivoiced story (see, for example, Bruner and Gorfain 1991; Ulmer l989). The excerpt from the Carver story, “So Much Water Close to Home,” is an example of this form of storytelling.10 100

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Bias Viewing the world through the male voice and gaze, too many writers equate masculinity with objectivity and femininity with subjectivity. In general, as Reinharz observes, quantitative research defines itself as “hard, firm, real . . . and strong . . . [and] defines qualitative research as soft, mushy, fuzzy, and weak” (1990: 295). But all texts are biased, reflecting the play of class, gender, race, ethnicity, and culture, suggesting that so-called objective interpretations are impossible.

The Logic of the Text Any social text as a story can be analyzed in terms of its treatment of five paired terms: (l) the real world of lived experience and its representation in the text; (2) the text itself and the author, including the author’s voice (first, third person, and so on); (3) lived experience and its representation in the text (transcriptions from interviews, and so on); (4) subjects and their intentional meanings; (5) the reader and the text (see Van Maanen l988: 6). In telling a story, the author attempts to weave a text that recreates for the reader the real world that was studied. Subjects, including their actions, experiences, words, intentions, and meanings, are then anchored inside this world as the author presents experience—near, distant, local, and scientific theories of it. Readers take hold of this text and read their way into it, perhaps making it one of the stories they will tell about themselves. They develop their own naturalistic generalizations and impressions, based on the tacit knowledge and emotional feelings that the text creates for them (see Stake l983: 282). As a narrative production, interpretive writing is like fiction. It is created out of the facts of experience (things that did, might have, or could occur). The story that is told often turns the researcher into a masculinized hero who confronts and makes sense of the subject’s life situation. This situation is frequently conceptualized as a struggle that locates the subject’s experiences within the primordial contexts of work, family, kinship, and marriage. This struggle is given meaning by the writer of the text who becomes the only THE ART OF INTERPRETATION

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person authorized to represent the subject’s story. The story that is finally told becomes the researcher’s accomplishment; his or her self-fashioned narration of the subject’s story (Clough l992: 17).

AN ANALYSIS OF INTERPRETIVE PRACTICES The art of interpretation produces understandings that are shaped by genre, narrative, stylistic, personal, cultural, and paradigmatic conventions. I turn next to a review of the major paradigms and perspectives that now structure qualitative research writing practices: positivist and postpositivist, constructivist, critical (Marxist, emancipatory), poststructuralist, including ethnic, feminist, and cultural studies models. I select an exemplar from each tradition.11 As argued in the introduction, qualitative research is now in the Fifth Moment, writing its way out of writing culture.

Grounded Theory as an Interpretive Style (Postpositivism) The grounded-theory perspective reflects a naturalistic approach to ethnography and interpretation, stressing naturalistic observations, open-ended interviewing, the sensitizing use of concepts, and a grounded (inductive) approach to theorizing, which can be both formal and substantive. Strauss and Corbin (l990) outline the criteria for judging a grounded theory study. They preface their discussion thus: “The usual canons of ‘good science’ should be retained but require redefinition in order to fit the realities of qualitative research.” These usual canons of good science are significance, theory-observation compatibility, generalizability, consistency, reproducibility, precision, and verification (ibid.: 250). They argue, for example, that if a similar set of conditions exist, and if the same theoretical perspective and the same rules for data gathering and analysis are followed, two researchers should be able to reproduce the same theoretical explanations of a given phenomenon. Investigators should be able to provide information on the sample (including theoretical variations), core categories, key 102

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events and incidents, hypotheses, and the negative cases that emerged and were pursued during the research process. The empirical grounding of a study (its grounded theory) should be judged by the range, density, and linkages between and systematic relatedness of its theoretical concepts, as well as the theory’s specificity and generality. They urge that these criteria be followed so that readers can “judge the credibility of [the] theory” (ibid.: 258). The grounded-theory perspective is the most widely used qualitative interpretive framework in the social sciences today.12 Its appeals are broad, because it provides a set of clearly defined steps any researcher can follow (see also Prus 1991). Its dangers and criticisms, which arise when it is not fully understood, are multiple. There may be a flood of concepts unattached to the empirical world, and the analyst may get lost in coding and category schemes. Just exactly what a theory is is also not clear (see Woods l992: 391). Some suggest that because the facts of a theory are always theory-laden, a theory can only ever discover and hence ground itself (Lincoln and Guba l985: 207). The overemphasis on theory has also been criticized, including the use of previous theory as a guide to research and the attempts to make previous theory more dense (but see Gerson l99l: 285). This preoccupation with prior theory can stand in the way of the researcher’s attempts to hear and listen to the interpretive theories that operate in the situations studied. The perspective’s affinities with positivism have also been criticized (Roman l992: 571). There is also a textual style that frequently subordinates lived experience and its interpretations to the grounded theorist’s reading of the situation. At the same time, grounded theory answers to a need to attach the qualitative research project to the “good science” model. Yet the perspective continues to fit itself to feminist and other poststructural, postmodern interpretive styles (Star l99l).

Constructivism as an Interpretive Style The constructivist program of Lincoln, Guba, and others represents a break with the postpositivist tradition, while retaining THE ART OF INTERPRETATION

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(at one level) a commitment to the grounded-theory approach of Strauss and associates.13 A good constructionist interpretation (text) is based on purposive (theoretical) sampling, a grounded theory, inductive data analysis, and idiographic (contextual) interpretations. The foundations for interpretations rest on triangulated empirical materials that are trustworthy. Trustworthiness consists of four components: credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability. (These are the constructionist equivalents of internal and external validity, reliability, and objectivity [Lincoln and Guba l985: 300]).14 Trustworthy materials are subjected to the constant comparative method of analysis that grounded theory deploys—that is, comparing incidents applicable to categories, integrating categories and their properties, delimiting and writing the theory. These materials are then developed into a case report that is again subjected to a comprehensive member check, and an external audit. This done, the study is ready for public release (ibid.: 381). These constructionist interpretive strategies address many of the perceived problems in grounded theory, including the theory and value-laden nature of facts, ambiguities in incidence, and category analysis. The paradigm, while disavowing the ontology, epistemology, and methodologies of postpositivism (Guba l990a: 27) sustains, at one level, Strauss’s and Corbin’s commitments to the canons of good science—hence the enormous commitment to methods and procedures that will increase a text’s credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability. Feminists, liberation theologists, Frierian critical theorists, and neo-Marxists may criticize the paradigm for not being ideological enough (Lincoln l990: 83). However, it is moving in this direction, as the authors seek a language and a set of practices that more fully celebrate and implement the moral, ethical, and political dimensions of social research (ibid.: 86). Still, some would contend that it (like grounded theory) has yet to fully engage the new sensibilities flowing from the poststructural and postmodern perspectives. 104

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Critical Theory as an Interpretive Style There are multiple critical-theory and participatory-action frameworks (Guba l990a: 25). All share a critical realist ontology, a subjectivist epistemology, and a dialogic, transformative, ethnographic methodology (ibid.). These assumptions often produce a criticism of traditional, naturalistic ethnographies (Roman l992: 558). There are two distinct traditions with the cultural studies, critical theory model. One school, following Paulo Freire (l982: 30), regards concrete reality, dialectically conceived, as the starting point for analysis that examines how people live their facts of life into existence. The other school reads social texts (popular literature, cinema, popular music) as empirical materials that articulate complex arguments about race, class, and gender in contemporary life. Some scholars merge the ethnographic and textual approaches, examining how cultural interpretations are acted on and given meaning in concrete local cultural communities. Such work moves back and forth between concrete ethnographic texts and the contextual, semiotic, and narrative analysis of systems of discourse—for example, a particular television show or a film. Critical inquiry is theory-driven by neo-Marxist and culturalstudies models of the race, class, and gendered structures of contemporary societies (Carspecken and Apple l992: 541–542). An emancipatory principle drives such research, which is committed to engaging oppressed groups in collective, democratic theorizing about “what is common and different in their experiences of oppression and privilege” (Roman l992: 557). A constant focus is given to the material and cultural practices that create structures of oppression. A critical text is judged by its ability to reflexively reveal these structures of oppression as they operate in the worlds of lived experience. A critical text thus creates a space for multiple voices to speak; those who are oppressed are asked to articulate their definitions of their situations. For some, critical theory must be testable, falsifiable, dialogical, and collaborative (Carspecken and Apple l992: 547–548). Others reject the more positivist THE ART OF INTERPRETATION

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features of this formulation (Roman l992: 558). Dorothy Smith, for example, evaluates a text by its ability to reveal the invisible structures of oppression in women’s worlds (l992: 96). Thus a good critical, emancipatory text is one which is multivocal, collaborative, naturalistically grounded in the worlds of lived experience and organized by a critical, interpretive theory. Such formulations have been criticized for their tendency to impose their voices and values on the groups studied (Quantz l992: 471), for not being reflexive enough, for being too theoretical (topdown theory), being too preoccupied with theory verification (Roman l992: 571), and not being sufficiently aware of postmodern sensibilities concerning the text and its social construction (Clough l992: l37). These approaches, with their action criteria, politicize qualitative research. They foreground praxis yet leave unclear the methodological side of the interpretive process that is so central to the grounded-theory and constructionist approaches.

Poststructural Interpretive Styles I discuss three poststructural interpretive styles: those connected to the standpoint and cultural-studies perspectives (Clough l992; Denzin l989; Lather l991, l993; Smith l992), those articulated by women of color (Collins l991; hook 1990), and my own approach, interpretive interactionism. Each of these perspectives is intimately connected to the critical and emancipatory styles of interpretation. Women of color first.

Style I: Women of Color Collins offers four criteria of interpretation, which are contrasted to the positivist approaches to research (l991: 206–219). Derived from an Afro-centric standpoint, her criteria focus on the primacy of concrete lived experience, the use of dialogue in assessing knowledge claims, the ethic of caring, and the ethic of personal accountability. Experience as a criterion of meaning directs attention to Black sisterhood, to the stories, narratives, and biblical principles 106

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embodied in Black church and community life. Concrete, Black feminine wisdom is contrasted to knowledge without wisdom: “A heap see, but a few know” (Collins l991: 208, 1998, 2000). Wisdom is experiential, cultural, and shared in the Black feminine community. Dialogue, bell hooks argues, is humanizing speech. Black feminists assess knowledge claims through discourse, storytelling, connected dialogue in a group context. This emphasis on dialogue is directly translated into the Black feminist text. Zora Neale Hurston, for example, located herself inside the folktales she collected and carried on extensive dialogues with them, thus creating a multivocal text (Collins l991: 2l4). Dialogue extends to the ethic of caring, which suggests that “personal expressiveness, emotions, and empathy are central to the knowledge validation process” (ibid.: 215). This ethic values individual uniqueness, the expression of emotionality in the text and seeks writers who can create emotional texts that others can enter into. The ethic of personal accountability makes individuals accountable for their values and the political consequences of their actions. These four criteria embody a “self-defined Black women’s standpoint using an Afro-centric epistemology” (ibid.: 2l9). They call into question much of what now passes for truth in methodological discourse. They articulate a set of criteria that stand in vivid contrast to those criteria contained in the grounded-theory, constructionist, critical, and emancipatory traditions.

Style II: Poststructural Feminist Interpretive Styles Fonow and Cook suggest that four interpretive themes structure feminist research: an emphasis on researcher and textual reflexivity, an action and praxis orientation, an attention to the affective, emotional components of research, and concrete grounding in immediate situations (l99l: 2–13). Lather extends this discussion (l99l: 90–91). Her argument is threefold. First, feminist research challenges narrative realism and the traditional naturalistic ethnography, because there is now an “uncertainty about what constitutes an adequate depiction of THE ART OF INTERPRETATION

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reality” (ibid.: 9l). As noted above, Lather argues that the age of description has ended. We are, as we have always been, in the moment of inscription, wherein writers create their own situated versions of the worlds studied. Accordingly the social text becomes a stage, or a site where power and knowledge are presented. This means, third, that we must explore alternative ways of presenting and authorizing our texts. Lather then turns to a discussion of five new forms of validity, different ways of authorizing a text (l993, 2007). These new forms are called reflexive, ironic, neopragmatic, rhizomatic, and situated validity. Each enacts a multivoiced, reflexive, open-ended, emotionally based text that is action-, or praxis-based. For Lather, and others in this tradition, theory is interpretation. There is no break between empirical activity (gathering empirical materials, reading social texts) and theorizing. Theory as interpretation is always anchored in the texts that it analyses and reads. Conceptualizing theoryas-interpretation, or theory-as-criticism, means that the writer employs a style that immediately connects a theoretical term to its referent. For example, ideology is given in a popular culture text, or desire is present in a Madonna pose. Rosaldo provides an example. Here the text merges with its subject matter; criticism and interpretation are not separated. My anger at recent films that portray imperialism with nostalgia informs this chapter. Consider the enthusiastic reception of Heat and Dust, A Passage to India, Out of Africa, and The Gods Must Be Crazy. The white colonial societies portrayed in these films appear decorous and orderly, as if constructed in accord with the norms of classic ethnography . . .. Evidently a mood of nostalgia makes racial domination appear innocent and pure. (l989: 68)

Style III: Interpretive Interactionism I turn now to a brief exposition of another interpretive style, what I have elsewhere termed interpretive interactionism (Denzin l989, 2001). Interpretive research begins and ends with the biography and the self of the researcher. The events and troubles that 108

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are written about are ones the writer has already experienced and witnessed firsthand. The task is to produce “richly detailed” inscriptions and accounts of such experiences. The focus of research is on those life experiences (epiphanies) that radically alter and shape the meanings persons give to themselves and their life projects. In epiphanies personal character is manifested and made apparent. By recording these experiences in detail, and by listening to the stories people tell about them, the researcher is able to illuminate the moments of crisis that occur in a person’s life. Having had such experiences, the individual is often never quite the same again. (Examples of epiphanies are religious conversions, divorces, experience of family violence, rape, incest, murders, loss of a job.) Sartre’s progressive-regressive method of analysis organizes the interpretive process (l963: 85–166). The investigator situates a subject, or class of subjects, within a given historical moment. Progressively, the method looks forward to the conclusion of a set of acts or experiences undertaken by the subject. Regressively, the method works back in time to the historical, gender, class, race, cultural, biographical, and emotional conditions that moved the subject forward into the experience that is being studied. Interpretive materials are evaluated by their ability to illuminate a phenomenon as lived experience. Such materials should be based on thickly contextualized materials that are historical, relational, and processual. The core of these materials will be the personal-experience stories that subjects tell one another. These stories should be connected to larger institutional, group, and cultural contexts, including written texts and other systems of discourse (cinema, music, folklore). The understandings that are put forth should engulf all that has been learned about the phenomenon. The moral biases that organize the research should be made evident to the reader. The competing models of truth and interpretation (rationality and emotionality) that operate in the subject’s situations should be revealed. The stories that are presented to readers should be given in the language, feelings, emotions, and actions of the people studied.15 THE ART OF INTERPRETATION

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Criticisms of Poststructuralism Poststructural, postmodern, feminist texts have been criticized because of their interpretive criteria. Critics complain that there is no way to evaluate such work, because traditional, external standards of evaluation (internal, external validity, reliability, objectivity) are not followed. This means, so the argument goes, that there is no way to evaluate a good or bad poststructural, feminist text. Others argue that the feminist and poststructural text imposes an interpretive framework on the world and does not allow subjects to speak. These criticisms come, of course, from the positivist and postpositivist traditions. These criticisms are rejected on several grounds. First, they are seen as not reflecting an understanding of the new postmodern sensibility, which doubts and challenges any attempt to legitimate a text in terms of positivist or postpositivist criteria. Such criteria represent attempts to bring legitimacy and authority to the scientific project. Misuse of science, in its traditional forms, is the problem. Knowledge produced under the guise of objective science is too often used for purposes of social control (Clough l992: l34). The criteria of evaluation that poststructuralists employ answer to a different set of problems and to a different project. They seek a morally informed social criticism, a sacred version of science that is humane, caring, holistic, and action-based (see Reason l993). Poststructuralists celebrate uncertainty and attempt to construct texts that do not impose theoretical frameworks on the world. They seek to let the prose of the world speak for itself, mindful of all the difficulties involved in such a commitment. They, more than their postpositivist counterparts, are sensitive to voice and multiple perspectives.

MULTIPLE INTERPRETIVE COMMUNITIES There are many ways to move from the field to the text, many ways to inscribe and describe experience. There are multiple interpretive communities that now circulate within the many terrains of 110

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qualitative research. These communities take different stances on the topics treated above, including the matters of writing, description, inscription, interpretation, understanding, representation, legitimation, textual desire, and the logic and politics of the text. A simplistic approach to the multiple paradigm dialogues that are now occurring (Guba l990a) might use the old-fashioned distinctions between the humanists and the scientists, the tenderand the tough-minded, to borrow William James’s terms (l978 [l908]: l0–l3) (see Table 1). But critical analysis soon makes this pretty picture messy. On the surface, critical, emancipatory, feminist, interactional, poststructural, and postmodern researchers belong to the “tenderminded interpretive community.” Following James, they are more intuitive, emotional, and open-ended in their interpretive work. Some are quite dogmatic about this. But many critical theorists write realist texts, are hardnosed empiricists, work within closed theoretical systems, and follow the canons of good science. In the same vein, positivist, postpositivist, grounded-theory adherents, and constructivists appear to belong to the “toughminded interpretive community. They are hardnosed empiricists, system builders, often pluralistic in their use of theory, and skeptical of nonsystematic theory and empirical work. But there are feminists who use grounded-theory methods and produce Table 1 Two Interpretive Communities. Tender-Minded

Tough-Minded

Intuitive Emotional Open-ended texts Interpretation as art Personal biases Experimental texts Antirealism Antifoundational Criticism Science-as-power Multivoiced texts

Hardnosed empiricists Rational, cognitive Closed texts, systems Interpretation as method Neutrality Traditional texts Realist texts Foundational Substantive Theory Good science canons Single-voiced texts

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traditional-looking texts, based on foundational criteria. There are tough-minded constructivists who are antirealist, antifoundational, and who regard interpretation as more art than method. So, simplistic classifications don’t work. Any given qualitative researcher-as-a-bricoleur can be more than one thing at the same time, be fitted into both the tender- and the tough-minded categories. It is clear that in the Fifth (and Sixth) Moments of qualitative research, the concerns from each of James’s two communities work alongside and inform each other. Accordingly, it can be argued that the following contradictory understandings operate in this broad field we have called qualitative research. Interpretation is an art that cannot be formalized. Scholars are increasingly concerned with the logic of the text, especially the problems involved in presenting lived experience and the “Others’” point of view. Many are preoccupied with the biases in the emotional stories they tell and are drawn to experimental forms of writing, while some reject mainstream narrative realism. It is common for texts to now be grounded in antifoundational systems of discourse (local knowledge, local emotions). These texts tell emancipatory stories grounded in race, class, and gender. Personal experience is a major source of empirical material for many, as are cultural texts and materials gathered via the ethnographic method. More than a few researchers expose their writerly selves in first-person accounts, and many are attempting to produce reader-friendly, multivoiced texts that speak to the worlds of lived experience. It is becoming commonplace for qualitative researchers to become advocates of the moral communities they represent while attempting to directly participate in social change. At the same time, there are those who remain committed to mainstream realism. They write texts that adhere to complex sets of methodological principles connected to postpositivist foundational systems of meaning (“good science”). Their texts are grounded in concrete empirical materials (case studies) and are inductively interpreted through the methods of grounded theory, or variations thereof. Existing theories, both the substantive and the formal, structure inquiry, which is organized in a rigorous, step-wise manner. 112

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Finally, there are conflicting views and disagreements on the very topic of interpretation itself. The immediate, local, personal, emotional biases of many lead them to tell stories that work outward from the self to society. These writers are writing to make sense of their own lives. Others write to make sense of “another’s” life. In the end, it is a matter of storytelling and the stories we tell one another.

INTO THE FUTURE Of course, persons who do interpretations feel uncomfortable making predictions. But where will the field of interpretation, the art and politics of telling stories, be in 10 years? If the past predicts the future, and if the decade of the l980s and the first half of the l990s are to be taken seriously, then interpretation is moving more and more deeply into the regions of the postmodern sensibility. A new postconstructivist paradigm may emerge. This framework may attach itself to a new and less foundational postpositivism and a more expansive critical theory framework built on modified grounded-theory principles. Epistemologies of color will proliferate, building on Afrocentric (Collins), Chicana (Rosaldo, Chabram-Daernersesian, Anzaldua), Native-American, Asian (Trinh T. Minh-ha), Third World (Spivak), and other minority group perspectives. More elaborated epistemologies of gender (and class) will appear, including queer theory (Seidman l993) and feminisms of color. These interpretive communities will draw on their minority group experiences as the basis of the texts they write, and they will seek texts that speak to the logic and cultures of these communities. These race-, ethnic-, and gender-specific interpretive communities will fashion interpretive criteria out of their interactions with the postpositivist, constructivist, critical-theory, and poststructural sensibilities. These criteria will be emic, existential, political, and emotional. They will push the personal to the forefront of the political, where the social text becomes the vehicle for the expression of politics (see Denzin and Lincoln 2008; Denzin, Lincoln, and Smith 2008). THE ART OF INTERPRETATION

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This projected proliferation of interpretive communities does not mean that the field of qualitative research will splinter into warring factions or into groups who cannot speak to one another. Underneath the complexities and contradictions that define this field rest three common commitments. The first reflects the belief that the world of human experience must be studied from the point of view of the historically and culturally situated individual. Second, qualitative researchers will persist in working outward from their own biographies to the worlds of experience that surround them. Third, scholars will continue to value and seek to produce works that speak clearly and powerfully about these worlds. To repeat Raymond Carver, the real experimenters will always be those who Make It New, who find things out for themselves, and who want to carry News from their world to ours (l989: 24). And so the stories we tell one another will change, and the criteria for reading stories will also change. And this is how it should be. The good stories are always told by those who have learned well the stories of the past but are unable any longer to tell them. This is so, because the stories from the past no longer speak to them or to us.

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Chapter 6

THE PRACTICES OF INTERPRETATION1 A marginalized group needs to be wary of the seductive power of realism, of accepting all that a realistic representation implies. (Lubiano 1997: 106) You’ve taken my blues and gone— You sing ‘em on Broadway . . . And you fixed ‘em So they don’t sound like me. Yes, you done taken my blues and gone. You also took my spiritual and gone. . . . But someday somebody’ll Stand up and write about me, And write about me— Black and Beautiful— And sing about me, And put on plays about me! I reckon it’ll be Me myself! Yes, it’ll be me. (Langston Hughes, “Note on Commercial Theatre,” 1994: 215–216, originally published 1940; also quoted by Angelou 1991: vii) “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” I have seen it and like it: The blood the way like Sand Creek even its name brings fear, 115

because I am an American Indian and have learned words are another kind of violence (Alexie 1993: 44)

At the beginning of the end of the Sixth Moment it is necessary to re-engage the promise of qualitative research and interpretive ethnography as forms of radical democratic practice.2 The narrative turn in the social sciences has been taken, we have told our tales from the field, and we understand today that we write culture (Brady 1998; Richardson 1998). Writing is not an innocent practice, although in the social sciences and the humanities there is only interpretation (Rinehart 1998). Nonetheless, Marx continues to remind us that we are in the business of not just interpreting but of changing the world (1983 [1888]: 158). In this chapter, I explore new (and old) forms of writing, forms that are intended to forward the project of interpreting and changing the world, and this is the global world, not just the world as it is known in North America. Specifically, I work back and forth between four interpretive practices: the new civic, intimate, and literary journalisms (Charity 1995; Dash 1997; Harrington 1992, 1997a, b; Kramer 1995; Sims 1995); calls for critical, performance-based ethnographies (Ceglowski 1997; CohenCruz 1998; Degh 1995; Dennison 1996; Denzin 1997, 1999a, b, c; Diversi 1998; Dunbar 1999; Jackson 1998; Jones 1999; Jordan 1998; Lincoln 1997; Rinehart 1998; Ronai 1998; Smith 1993, 1994); variations on a Chicana/o (Gonzalez 1998; Pizarro 1998) black and African-American aesthetic (Davis 1998; hooks 1990, 1996), and the relationship between these practices and critical race theory (Ladson-Billings 1998; Parker 1998). Although there have been efforts to bring critical race theory into qualitative research, few have merged this theory with the poststructural turn in ethnography (see hooks 1990: 123–134). Nor have critical race theory and qualitative inquiry been connected to the radical performance texts stemming from the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s (Baker 1997; Baraka 1997; Harris 1998). These interconnections are now being established in the various Black Cultural Studies projects of the new 116

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black public intellectuals and cultural critics (Hall, Gilroy, hooks, Gates, West, Reed, Morrison, Wallace, Steele). A current generation of blues, rap, hip hop, and popular singers, jazz performers, poets (Angelou, Dove, Jordan, Knight, Cortez), novelists (Walker, Morrison, Bambara), playwrights (Wilson, Shange, Smith), and filmmakers (Lee, Singleton, Burnett, Dash) are also making these links (see Christian 1997: 2019–2020; Harris 1998: 1871–1872).3 This chapter is a utopian project. I attempt to bring these multiple discourses together into a unified framework. I present examples of writing from each these frameworks. In so doing, I assume that words and language have a material presence in the world, that words have effects on people. Amiri Baraka puts it this way: we want poems that wrestle cops into alleys and take their weapons . . . We want a black poem. And a Black World. Let the world be a Black Poem. And Let All Black People Speak This Poem Silently Or LOUD (1998: 1502)

Words matter. I imagine a world where race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexual orientation intersect; a world where language empowers and humans are free to become who they can be, free of prejudice, repression, and discrimination (Jackson 1998: 21; also Parker et al. 1998: 5). Those who write culture must learn to use language in a way that brings people together. The goal is to create sacred, loving texts that “demonstrate a strong fondness . . . for freedom and an affectionate concern for the lives of people” (Joyce 1987: 344). This writing addresses and demonstrates the benevolence and kindness that people should feel toward one another (ibid.). Thus do I examine new ways of writing culture, new ways of making qualitative research central to the workings of a free democratic society. I begin with the civic, public affairs, and intimate journalists. THE PRACTICES OF INTERPRETATION

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AN INTIMATE, CIVIC JOURNALISM As qualitative researchers engage experimental writing forms, a parallel movement is occurring in journalism, and there is much to be learned from these developments. Building on earlier calls for a new journalism (Wolfe l973), a current generation of journalists (Harrington 1997a, b; Kramer 1995; Sims 1995) is producing a new writing genre variously termed literary, intimate, or creative nonfiction journalism (Harrington 1997a: xv). This intimate journalism extends the project of the new journalism of the 1970s. That project was based on seven understandings. The new writers of Wolfe’s generation treated facts as social constructions. They blurred writing genres and combined literary and investigative journalism with the realist novel, the confession, the travel report, and the autobiography. They used the scenic method to show rather than tell. They wrote about real people and created composite characters. They used multiple points of view, including third-person narration, to establish authorial presence and deployed multiple narrative strategies (flashbacks, foreshadowing, interior monologues, parallel plots) to build dramatic tension. They positioned themselves as moral witnesses to the radical changes going on in American society (Denzin 1997: 131). These writers understood that social life and the reports about it were social constructions. Journalists did not map or report on an objective reality. I have no desire to reproduce arguments that maintain some distinction between fictional (literary) and nonfictional (journalism, ethnography) texts. Nor do I distinguish literary, nonliterary, fictional, and nonfictional textual forms. These are socially and politically constructed categories. They are too often used to police certain transgressive writing forms—for example, fictional ethnographies. There is only narrative—that is, only different genre-defined ways of representing and writing about experiences and their multiple realities. The discourses of the postmodern world constantly intermingle literary, poetic, journalistic, fictional, cinematic, documentary, factual, and ethnographic writing and representation. No form is privileged over 118

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another. Each simply performs a different function for a writer and an interpretive community. These practices and understandings shape the work of the intimate journalists. Writers such as Harrington (1992) use the methods of descriptive realism to produce in-depth, narrative accounts of everyday life lived up close. They use real-lifedialogue, intimate, first- and third-person voice, multiple points of view, interior monologues, scene-by-scene narration, a plain, spare style (Harrington 1997b: xiii–xiv; Kramer 1995: 24). The writer may be invisible in the text, or present, as narrator and participant. Here is Harrington talking about himself. The story is “Family Portrait in Black and White”: My journey begins in the dentist’s chair. The nurse . . . and the doctor are [telling] funny stories about their kids, when in walks another dentist . . .. “I’ve got a good one,” he says cheerfully, and then he tells a racist joke. I can’t recall the joke, only that it ends with a black man who is stupid. Dead silence. It’s just us white folks here in the room, but my dentist and his nurse know my wife, who is black, and they know my son and daughter, who are, as they describe themselves, tan and bright tan. How many racist jokes have I heard in my life? . . . for the first time . . . I am struck with a deep sharp pain. I look at this man, with his pasty face, pale hair, and weak lips, and I think: This idiot is talking about my children!” (1992: 1)

Compare this telling, with its first-person narration, to Leon Dash’s description of Rosa Lee: Rosa Lee Cunningham is thankful that she doesn’t have to get up early this morning. She is dozing, floating back and forth between sleep and drowsiness. Occasionally she hears the muted conversations of the nurses and doctors puttering around the nurse’s station . . .. She’s tired and worn down . . .. A full night’s sleep and daylong quiet are rare luxuries in her life. This is the closest she ever comes to having a vacation . . .. Rosa Lee . . . is fifty-two years old, a longtime heroin addict . . . a member of the urban underclass . . . [she] has no intention of ending her heroin use . . .. (1997: 3) THE PRACTICES OF INTERPRETATION

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Harrington speaks only for himself. He is fully present in his text. Dash is invisible. He is the all-knowing observer. He is the fly on the wall narrating an unfolding scene. Dash describes a world, while Harrington talks about how it feels to be present in a world. Both writers create a scene. Each penetrates the images that surround a situation. Harrington and Dash both use a sparse, clean prose. Each creates a vivid image of his subject, Harrington of himself, Dash of Rosa Lee. However, Dash presumes to know what Rosa Lee is feeling and thinking. Hers is a story waiting to be told, and he will tell it. In contrast, Harrington’s text suggests that stories are not waiting to be told; rather, they are constructed by the writer who attempts to impose order on some set of experiences or perceived events. Both writers ground their prose in facts and their meanings. Dash, however, works with so-called verifiable, factually accurate facts, while Harrington writes of impressions and truths that, although not necessarily factually accurate are aesthetically and emotionally true. In Harrington’s text, if something did not happen, it could have happened, and it will happen. Accounts like Harrington’s and Dash’s invoke the felt life. Their goal is to understand “other people’s worlds from the inside out, to understand and portray people as they understand themselves” (Harrington 1997b: xxv). The intent is to build an emotional relationship between the writer, the life told about, and the reader. A year later, Harrington returns to his experience in the dentist’s chair: What I discovered while waiting in the dentist’s chair more than a year ago . . . still remains the greatest insight I have to share: The idiot was talking about my kids! I remember a time when my son was a baby. It was late at night . . . I sat in the dark of my son’s room . . . I watched his face grimace . . . in the shadows. And then, in time so short it passed only in the mind, my son was gone and I was the boy . . . and my father was me . . . just as suddenly, I was gone again and the light was falling across the knees of my son, who was grown, who was a father, who was me . . . this kind of understanding changes everything. Only when I became black by proxy—through my son, 120

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through my daughter—could I see the racism I had been willing to tolerate. Becoming black, even for a fraction of an instant, created an urgency for justice that I couldn’t feel as only a white man, no matter how good-hearted . . . no white man in his or her right mind would yet volunteer to trade places, become black, in America today. (1992: 447, italics in original)

Such writing connects readers to their newspapers by producing narratives about people in extreme and ordinary situations. These stories, or journalistic case studies, politicize the everyday world, illuminating the structures and processes that shape persons’ lives and their relations with others. In so doing, they “nurture civic transformation” (Harrington 1997a: xiv; also 1997b: xviii).4

Civic Transformations At the moment of civic transformation, intimate journalism joins with the call for public journalism, a critical ethnographic journalism that fuses persons and their troubles with public issues and the public arena. A pragmatic, civic journalism invites readers to become participants, not mere spectators, in the public dramas that define meaningful, engaged life in society today. Public journalism creates the space for local ethnographies of problematic community and personal experiences. This is a socially responsible civic journalism. It advocates participatory democracy. It gives a public voice to the biographically meaningful, epiphanal experiences that occur within the confines of the local moral community.5 This form of journalistic ethnography speaks to the morally committed reader. This is a reader who is a coparticipant in a public project that demands democratic solutions to personal and public problems (Charity 1995: 146).6 Taken to the next level, transformed into public-journalism-asethnography, this writing answers to the following goals. Critical, intimate, public ethnography: •

Presents the public with in-depth, intimate stories of problematic everyday life lived up close. These stories create moral compassion and help citizens make intelligent

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•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

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decisions and take public action on private troubles that have become public issues, including helping to get these actionproposals carried out (Charity 1995: 2; Mills 1959: 8); Promotes interpretive works that raise public and private consciousness. These works help persons collectively work through the decision-making process. They help isolate choices, core values, utilize expert and local systems of knowledge, and facilitate deliberative, civic discourse (Charity 1995: 4–8); Rejects the classic model of investigative journalism, whereby the reporter exposes corruption, goes on crusades, roots “out the inside story, tells the brave truth, faces down the Joseph McCarthys and Richard Nixons . . . comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable” (ibid.: 9); Seeks an ethnographer and a journalist who is an expert on the history and public life of the local community, knows how to listen and talk to citizens, to hear and present consensus when it emerges, is also a full-time citizen, and is committed to the belief that public life can be made to work (ibid.: 10); Sees the writer as a watchdog for the local community, a person who writes stories that contribute to deliberative, participatory discourse, thereby maintaining the public’s awareness of its own voice (ibid.: 104–105, 127); Values writing that moves a public to meaningful judgment and meaningful action (ibid.: 50). A central goal is civic transformation (Christians, Ferre, and Fackler 1993: 14); Exposes complacency, bigotry, and wishful thinking (ibid.: 146), while “attempting to strengthen the political community’s capacity to understand itself, converse well, and make choices” (Rosen 1994: 381); Seeks dramatic stories, narratives that separate facts from stories, telling moving accounts that join private troubles with public issues (Charity 1995: 72; Mills 1959: 8); Promotes a form of textuality that turns citizens into readers and readers into persons who take democratic action in the world (Charity 1995: 19, 83–84). CHAPTER 6

These are goals, ideals, ways of merging critical ethnography with applied action research, with the new public journalism, with qualitative research in the Seventh Moment. (They presume a feminist, communitarian, ethical model.) These goals assume an ethnographer who functions and writes as a literary and intimate public journalist. This means that ethnography as a performer-centered form of storytelling will be given greater emphasis (Degh 1995: 8). A shared public consciousness is sought, a common awareness of troubles that have become issues in the public arena. This consciousness is shaped by a form of writing that merges the personal, the biographical, with the public. Janet Cooke’s fictional story, “Jimmy’s World” (1980), is an instance of such writing. Such stories expose complacency and bigotry in the public sphere.

The “New” New Journalism Boynton identifies a second generation of new journalists, what he calls the “new” new journalists (2005: xi–xii). He locates the new new journalism in two historical spaces, the 1890s and the work of Lincoln Steffens, Jacob Riis, and Stephen Crane, and the 1960s and the writers identified by Tom Wolfe (1973) as the new journalists. The new new journalists of the last decade— Adrian LeBlanc, Michael Lewis, Eric Schlosser, Jon Krakauer, Leon Dash—draw on this dual heritage. They bring a “distinct set of cultural and social concerns to their work” (Boynton 2005: xi). They work within the literary nonfiction genre, and to not trouble the distinction between fact and fiction. They are concerned with the complexities of race, class, and gender, and less with social status. They experiment with different ways of getting a story, with different immersion strategies, including participation in the everyday life of the group being written about. The issues that the new journalists write about, from transnational migration to poverty, race, religion, big business, “are the issues that the world cares about” (ibid.: xxix). These are not the social status issues studied by Wolfe’s “new” journalists. With their “muckraking and intensive reporting on social and cultural THE PRACTICES OF INTERPRETATION

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issues, the New New Journalists have revived the tradition of American literary journalism, raising it to a more popular and commercial level than either its nineteenth- or late-twentiethcentury predecessors ever imagined” (ibid.: xxx). Still, the new new journalism is neither transformative nor self-consciously grounded in a communitarian conception of democracy and the media. It simply thickens the call of the old new journalism. Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist Leon Dash is an example. He writes on race and poverty, and states that I have no more interest than informing the public how those circumstances are creating the things you read about on a daily basis . . .. Your suggestions suggest that I ought to be prescribing instead of describing. But that is somebody else’s job. I’m a reporter, not a policy wonk . . .. I try to strike the tone of the honest observer. I’m not there to preach. I’m there to guide the reader through an experience, a world. I want to open your eyes, and perhaps even shake you up a bit. But I want to be as understated as possible. (Dash quoted in Boynton 2005: 57, 71)

Writing Norms A feminist, communitarian ethical model produces a series of norms for the public ethnographic writing project.7 These norms build on and elaborate the four nonnegotiable journalistic norms of accuracy, nonmaleficence, the right to know, and making one’s moral position public.8 The ethnographer’s moral tales are not written to produce harm to those who have been oppressed by the culture’s systems of domination and repression (the principle of nonmaleficence). The identity of those written about should always be protected. These tales are factually and fictionally correct.9 When fiction, or imaginative narrative is written, or when composite cases are molded into a single story, the writer is under an obligation to report this to the reader (see Christians, Ferre, and Fackler 1993: 55). The reader has the right to read what the ethnographer has learned, but the right to know should be balanced against the principle of nonmaleficence. Accounts should exhibit 124

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“interpretive sufficiency” (ibid.: 120); that is, they should possess depth, detail, emotionality, nuance, and coherence. These qualities assist the reader in forming a critical interpretive consciousness. Such texts should also exhibit representational adequacy, including the absence of racial, class, and gender stereotyping.10 The writer must be honest with the reader.11 The text must be realistic, concrete as to character, setting, atmosphere, and dialogue. The text should provide a forum for the search for moral truths about the self. This forum may explore the unpresentable in the culture; the discontents and violence of contemporary life are documented and placed in narrative form. This writer stirs up the world, and the writer’s story (mystory) becomes part of the tale that is told. The writer has a theory about how the world works, and this theory is never far from the surface of the text. Self-reflexive readers are presumed, readers who seek honest, but reflexive works that draw them into the many experiences of daily life. There remains the struggle to find a narrative voice that writes against a long tradition that favors autobiography and lived experience as the sites for reflexivity and self-hood (Clough 1994: 157). This form of subjective reflexivity can be a trap. It too easily reproduces sad, celebratory, and melodramatic conceptions of self, agency, gender, desire, and sexuality. There is a pressing need to invent a reflexive form of writing that turns ethnography and experimental literary texts back “onto each other” (ibid.: 162; 1998: 134). Always a skeptic, this new writer is suspicious of conspiracies, alignments of power and desire that turn segments of the public into victims. So, these works trouble traditional, realist notions of truth and verification, asking always who stands to benefit by a particular version of the truth. The intimate journalist as public ethnographer enacts an ethics of practice that privileges the client-public relationship. The ethnographer is a moral advocate for the public, although a personal moral code may lead individual researchers to work against the so-called best interests of a client or a particular segment of the public. THE PRACTICES OF INTERPRETATION

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The ethnographer’s tale is always allegorical, a symbolic tale, a parable that is not just a record of human experience. This tale is a means of experience, a method of empowerment for the reader. It is a vehicle for readers to discover moral truths about themselves. More deeply, the tale is a utopian story of self and social redemption, a tale that brings a moral compass back into the readers (and the writer’s) life. The ethnographer discovers the multiple “truths” that operate in the social world; the stories people tell one another about the things that matter to them. The intimate journalist writes stories that stimulate critical public discourse. Thus do these stories enable transformations in the public and private spheres of everyday life.

INTERRUPTING HISTORY Typically, journalists and ethnographers write about events that have happened, or are about to happen. Like others who chronicle social life, journalists and ethnographers move back and forth in time, caught somewhere between the past, the present, and the future. It is not enough to assign to journalism the task of writing a first draft of history’s important events. A wait and see attitude too often obtains; that is, the journalist or ethnographer waits for a story to break and then chases it down. It remains for those who have access to the editorial page to reflect on the meaning of the news. A communitarian journalism rejects this passive approach. This type of journalism is a call to arms, an invitation to write in a way that interrupts history. Communitarian journalists and ethnographers have an obligation to show how their performative skills, interpretive methods, and their models of truth, knowledge, and politics can be used to interrupt, disrupt, and intervene in the course of political events as those events are unfolding. Such interventions call for an interruption of history itself. This is writing that does more than record the first draft of history. This is writing that rides the waves of events as they are occurring. This writer changes history by his or her actions. 126

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PERFORMING ETHNOGRAPHY12 I turn next to the concept of the performance text (Conquergood 1992; Turner 1986), illustrating my arguments with materials drawn from an ongoing interpretive ethnography of a small Montana town (Denzin 1999a, b, c, 2008). I seek a set of writing practices that turn notes from the field into texts that are performed. A single, yet complex thesis organizes my argument. We inhabit a performance-based, dramaturgical culture. The dividing line between performer and audience blurs, and culture itself becomes a dramatic performance. Performance ethnography enters a gendered culture with nearly invisible boundaries separating everyday theatrical performances from formal theater, dance, music, MTV, video, and film (Birringer 1993: 182; Butler 1990: 25, 1997: 159, 1999: 19). But the matter goes even deeper then blurred boundaries. The performance has become reality. Of this, speaking of gender and personal identity, Butler is certain. Gender is performative, gender is always doing, “though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed . . . there is no being behind doing . . . the deed is everything . . . there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender . . . identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (1990: 25). Further, the linguistic act is performative, and words can hurt (1997: 4). Performance texts are situated in complex systems of discourse where traditional, everyday, and avant-garde meanings of theater, film, video, ethnography, cinema, performance, text, and audience all circulate and inform one another. As Collins has suggested, the meanings of lived experience are inscribed and sometimes made visible in these performances (1991: 210; see also Brady 1999: 245). Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror (1993) is an example. In this play, she offers a series of performance pieces based on interviews with people involved in a racial conflict in Crown Heights Brooklyn on 19 August 1991. In this conflict, a young black Guyanese boy (Gavin Cato) was accidentally killed by an auto in a police-escorted entourage carrying Lubavitcher Grand THE PRACTICES OF INTERPRETATION

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Rebbe Menachem Schneerson. Later that day, a group of black men fatally stabbed a 29-year-old Hasidic scholar from Australia (Yankel Rosenbaum). This killing was followed by a racial conflict lasting three days and involving many members of the community. A jury acquitted Yankel Rosenbaum’s accused murderer, causing considerable pain for his family, as well as feelings of victimization for the Lubavitchers (Smith 1993: xiv).13 Smith’s play has speaking parts for gang members, the police, anonymous young girls and boys, mothers, fathers, rabbis, Reverend Al Sharpton, playwright Ntozake Shange, and African-American cultural critic Angela Davis. Cornel West observes that Fires in the Mirror is a “grand example of how art can constitute a public space that is perceived by people as empowering rather than disempowering” (1993: xix). Thus blacks, gang members, the police, and the Jewish community all come together and talk in this play. The drama crosses racial boundaries. Smith’s texts show that “American character lives not on one place or the other, but in the gaps between places, and in our struggle to be together in our differences” (ibid.: xii). An Anonymous Young Man #l Wa Wa Wa, a Caribbean American with dreadlocks, describes the auto accident: What I saw was she was pushin’ her brother on the bike like this, right? She was pushin’ him and he keep dippin’ around like he didn’t know how to ride the bike . . . So she was already runnin’ when the car was comin’ . . . we was watchin’ the car weavin’, and we was goin’ 128

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“Oh, yo it’s a Jew man. He broke the stop light, they never get arrested” (ibid.: 79–80)

And so, in performing this young man’s words, Smith contextualizes this drama, showing how it looked from the standpoint of a person who watched the accident unfold. Performance ethnography simultaneously creates and enacts moral texts, texts that move from the personal to the political, the local to the historical and the cultural. Following Conquergood (1985), these dialogical works create spaces for give and take, doing more than turning the other into the object of a voyeuristic, fetishistic, custodial, or paternalistic gaze. Texts turned into radical street performances act to question and “re-envision ingrained social arrangements of power” (CohenCruz 1998: 1). Such works, in the form of rallies, puppet shows, marches, vigils, choruses, clown shows, and ritual performances transport spectators and performers out of everyday reality into idealized spaces where the taken for granted is contested (ibid.: 3). Street or public place performances offer members of the culture alternative scripts or ways of acting in and hence of changing the world (ibid.: 1). Cohen-Cruz suggests that these performances can take several overlapping forms, including: agit-prop—that is, attempts to mobilize people around a partisan view; witnessing, or making a spectacle out of an act that perhaps cannot be changed; confrontation, or inserting a performance into people’s everyday life, thereby asking them to confront a scenario that is otherwise distant; utopia, or enacting an idealized version of reality; and tradition—that is, honoring a set of culturally shared beliefs, as in Fourth of July parades in small-town America (ibid.: 5). In my performance project, I seek minimalist social science, one that uses few concepts. This is a dramaturgical (Branaman 1997: xiix; Goffman 1959; Lemert 1997: xxiv) or performative anthropology (Jackson 1998; Turner 1986) that attempts to stay close to how people represent everyday life experiences. A performative ethnography simultaneously writes and studies THE PRACTICES OF INTERPRETATION

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performances, showing how people enact cultural meanings in their daily lives. Shaped by the sociological imagination (Mills 1959), this version of qualitative inquiry attempts to show how terms such as biography, gender, race, ethnicity, family, and history interact and shape one another in concrete social situations. These works are usually written in the first-person voice, from the point of view of the sociologist doing the observing and the writing. A minimalist, performative social science is also about stories, performances, and storytelling. When performed well, these stories create a ritual space “where people gather to listen, to experience, to better understand the world and their place in it” (Jenkins 1999).

The Performance Turn The performance turn in the human disciplines (Bochner and Ellis 1996; Conquergood 1992) poses three closely interrrelated problems for a critical, interdisciplinary interpretive project— namely, how to construct, perform, and critically analyze performance texts (see Stern and Henderson 1993). Glossing the issues involved in construction and critical analysis, I privilege performance and coperformance (audience-performer) texts in contrast to single performer, text-centered approaches to interpretation (see Denzin 1997: 96). Through the act of coparticipation, these works bring audiences back into the text, creating a field of shared emotional experience. The phenomenon being described is created through the act of representation. A resistance model of textual performance and interpretation is foregrounded. A good performance text must be more than cathartic; it must be political, moving people to action, reflection. The attention to performance is interdisciplinary; sociologists (Bochner and Ellis 1996; Clough 1994; Denzin 1997; Ellis 1997; Ellis and Bochner 1992, 1996; Ellis and Flaherty 1992; Kotarba 1998; Richardson 1997); anthropologists (Behar 1996; Brady 1999; Bruner 1986, 1989, 1996; Cruikshank 1987; Jackson 1998; Turner 1986); communication scholars (Conquergood 1992; Hill 1997); and education theorists (Lather 1993; Lather and Smithers 130

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1997; Lincoln 1995a, b, 1997; Tierney 1997) are calling for texts that move beyond the purely representational and toward the presentational. At the same time, action (Stringer 1996), communitarian (Christians, Ferre, and Fackler 1993), feminist (Lather 1993), constructivist (Lincoln 1995a, b, 1997), cooperative inquiry (Reason 1993, 1994), and participant researchers (Carspecken 1996) are exploring nontraditional presentational performance formats. Such works allow community researchers and community members to co-construct meaning through action-based performance projects (Conquergood 1998; Stringer 1996; also Schwandt 1997: 307). This view merges with a feminist, communitarian ethic, with a moral ethnography that presumes a researcher who builds collaborative, reciprocal, trusting, and friendly relations with those studied (Lincoln 1995b). Performed texts “have narrators, drama, action, shifting points of view . . . [and] . . . make experience concrete, anchoring it in the here and now” (Paget 1993: 27; also see Donmoyer and Yennie-Donmoyer 1995; Mienczakowski 1995). Centered in the audience-researcher nexus, these texts are the site for “mystories” (Ulmer 1989)—that is, reflexive, critical stories that feel the sting of memory, stories that enact liminal experiences. These are storied retellings that seek the truth of life’s fictions via evocation rather than explanation or analysis. In them, ethnographers, audiences, and performers meet in a shared field of experience, emotion, and action. Such performances return to memory, not lived experience, as the site of criticism, interpretation, and action. It is understood that experience exists only in its representation; it does not stand outside memory or perception. The meanings of facts are always reconstituted in the telling, as they are remembered and connected to other events. Hence, the appeal of the performance text lies not in its offer of the certainty of the factual. The appeal is more complicated. Working from the site of memory, the reflexive, performed text asks the reader as viewer (or coperformer) to relive the experience through the writer’s or performer’s eyes. Readers thus move through the re-created experience with the performer. This allows them to relive the experience for themselves. THE PRACTICES OF INTERPRETATION

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Thus can we share in Harrington’s experiences when he tells us about remembering the night he held his young son in his arms. The writer acting thus re-creates in the mind’s eye a series of emotional moments. Life is then retraced through that moment, interpreting the past from the point of view of the present. Here is Susan Krieger writing about the Family Silver: I have just come back from a trip to Florida to settle the affairs of my lover’s aunt [Maxine], who died suddenly at the age of 70. She was carrying her groceries up the stairs to her apartment when she dropped dead of a heart attack . . .. It was an otherworldly experience: going to Florida . . . to clean out the house of a woman I did not know—sorting through her clothes and jewelry, finding snapshots she recently took, using her bathroom, meeting her friends. (1996: 65, 68)

On her last day in Florida, Krieger finds Aunt Maxine’s “silver” flatware inside an old accordion case in the back corner of a greasy kitchen cabinet. Maxine’s flatware was cheap, a replacement set. It was not the real thing like the family silver her mother had gotten from her mother. Krieger asks: “What determines the value of a person’s life, is value different if you are a woman, how do you separate a woman from the things she owns, leaves behind, her clothes, the cheap family silver” (ibid.: 70)? This cheap set of flatware was not an adequate measure of Aunt Maxine. Laurel Richardson’s mother died of breast cancer in Miami Beach on June 8, 1968. Nearly 30 years later, Laurel writes: On June 8, I awoke determined to drive to Key West for the day. I sponge-bathed Mother, greeted the nurse, kissed my parents good-bye, and drove off in Father’s Dodge Dart. When I got to Long Key, I was overwhelmed with the need to phone my parents. Mother had just died—less than a minute ago—Father said. (1997: 234)

Of this news Laurel observes: “I was grateful to have not witnessed her passing-on. I was 30 years old” (ibid.: 235). 132

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Ten years after her mother’s death Laurel wrote a poem, “Last Conversation.” I want to hold your weightless body to my breasts, cradle you, rock you to sleep. (ibid.: 234)

The truth of a person’s and a culture’s ways are given in texts such as these. Such works, when performed, or read, become symbolic representations of what the culture and the person values. In their performances, performers embody these values. Now listen to Angela Davis. In her recent study of the female blues singers, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday, Davis observes that within African-American culture the “blues marked the advent of a popular culture of performance, with the borders of performer and audience becoming increasingly differentiated . . . this . . . mode of presenting popular music crystallized into a performance culture that has had an enduring influence on African-American music” (1998: 5). In their performances, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday presented a set of black feminist understandings concerning class, race, gender, violence, sexuality, marriage, men, and intimacy (Collins 1991: 209). This blues legacy is deeply entrenched in an indigenous, class conscious, black feminism. The female blues singers created performance spaces for black women, spaces to sing and live the blues; black female voices talking about and doing black culture on stage, a public, critical performance art (see Jones 1999). The blues are improvised songs sung from the heart about love, women, and men gone wrong (Collins 1991: 210). Rainey, Smith, and Holiday sang in ways that went beyond the written text. They turned the blues into a living art form, a form that would, with Holiday, move into the spaces of jazz. And jazz, like the blues and culture, is an improvisational, not a static art form. Bill Evans, the great be-bop pianist put it this way: “Jazz is not a what . . . it is a how. If it were a what, it would be static, never growing. The how is THE PRACTICES OF INTERPRETATION

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that the music comes from the moment, it is spontaneous, it exists at the time it is created” (quoted in Lee 1996: 426). The improvised coperformance text, the jazz solo, like Billie Holiday doing the blues, is a spontaneous production, it lives in the moment of creation. The how of culture as it connects people to one another in loving, conflictual, and disempowering ways is what performance ethnography seeks to capture (see Jackson 1998: 21).

RED LODGE, MONTANA: EXPERIENCES AND PERFORMANCES William Kittridge says that the West is an enormous empty and innocent stage waiting for a performance (1996: 97; also 1987, 1994). He continues: “We see the history of our performances everywhere . . . inscribed on the landscape (fences, roads, canals, power lines, city plans, bomb ranges” (ibid.: 97). Moreover, the West is contained in the stories people tell about it (ibid.). Montana is both a performance and a place for performances. It is not possible to write an objective, authoritative, neutral account of performing Montana. Every account is personal and locally situated. Here are some of the ways Montana is performed. In 1994, my wife and I bought a little piece of land outside Red Lodge, Montana, population 1,875.14 We got an acre with a cabin on the river called Rock Creek, and a big bluff of a rock outcrops behind the cabin. Our little valley is marked by lakes, snowcapped mountain ranges, alpine meadows, and sprawling ranches with double-wide house trailers as homes. Early June brings fields of yellow sun flowers, Indian paint brush, and lupine. In the summer, horses and deer graze in the valley above the road to our cabin. Off the big boulder under the big cottonwood tree I catch rainbow and brook trout for breakfast. I fish, my wife quilts, hikes, collects wild flowers. Last Christmas my wife took up cross-country skiing. In the summer, we go to auctions and yard sales, drive into town for groceries. Red Lodge is four miles from our cabin. It was primarily a mining town until the 1943 mine explosion that killed 74 miners. 134

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Hit hard by the depression, even before the mines closed, looking for a way to stay alive, the town fathers pushed for a “high road” (the Hi road) that would connect Red Lodge to Cooke City and Silver Gate, the two little mining communities just outside the Northeast entrance to Yellowstone Park. It took a 1931 Act of Congress and five years of hard work to build the road over the mountain. The Beartooth Highway officially opened in 1936. Ever since, Red Lodge has been marketed as the Eastern gateway to Yellowstone. That’s what got us there in 1990.15 After reading Kittridge and studying Turner (1986) and Bruner (1986, 1989, 1996), I have come to see our little part of Montana as a liminal place, a place for new performances, new stories. Caught up in the shadows of the New, mythologized, cultured West (Limerick 1997: 151; Wilkinson 1997: 114), we are learning how to perform Montana. We are learning to engage in the ritual performances that people do when they are in and around Red Lodge, performances such as going to parades, shopping in the little craft and antique stores, buying things for the cabin, driving over the mountain, eating out, having an espresso on the sidewalk in front of the Coffee Factory Roasters, having a fancy dinner at the Pollard (which is on the National Registry of Hotels), picking up pictures from Flash’s Image Factory, buying quilting materials at Granny Hugs, volunteering in the local library (which is computerizing its entire collection), talking to the owner of the Village Shoppe, who at one time dated the niece of the former University of Illinois basketball coach. We watch other people do what we are doing, separating the experience of being in Montana from its performances and representations, constructing culture and meaning as they go along (Bruner 1989: 113). Three years ago, I overheard a man talking to the owner of the tackle shop in Big Timber. His BMW was still running, the front door open. He had on an Orvis fishing vest. He had driven with his family from Connecticut. “The kids saw that movie, A River Runs Through It (Maclean 1976). Where do we have to go to catch fish like they did in that movie? Can somebody around here give me fly-fishing lessons?” The owner said “no” on THE PRACTICES OF INTERPRETATION

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the lessons but told the man to “go about 20 miles upriver, past four-mile bridge. You can’t miss it” (see also Dawson 1996: 11). Of course, the meanings of these Montana performance experiences are constantly changing. It is not appropriate to judge them in terms of their authenticity or originality. There is absolutely no original against which any given performance can be measured. There are only performances that seem to work, and those that don’t.

Creating Local History Every year we try to observe part of the Festival of Nations celebration. This is a nine-day ritual performance that reenacts the town’s white European ethnic history, white rituals: colorful old world costumes, Finnish, Irish, and Scottish dances, songs, bagpipes, the New Caledonia drum and bugle corps, cowboy poets, “whiteness as race, as privilege, as social construction” (Fine et al. 1997: vii). This is whiteness as moral community. The souls of white folk are on public display (Du Bois 1920: 29; Hughes 1962). Each day of the festival is given the name of a country and nationality: Irish-English-Welsh, German, Montana, Scandinavian, Finnish, Italian, Slavic, Scottish, All Nations. At the turn of the previous century, men from these European countries came to Montana and became miners. Later they married, and their wives taught school, cooked, had children, helped run little shops, carried on native crafts from the home country. Red Lodge tries to keep this history alive. According to local history, the festival started shortly after World War II. Local community leaders decided to build a civic center. They wanted a place for community activities, for an annual summer music festival, a place for arts and crafts exhibits, for flags and cultural items from each of the nations represented in the town. Thus was born the Festival of Nations, and Red Lodge was soon transformed into a “tourist town, a place that offered good scenery, fine fishing, the Hi-Road, the rodeo, cool summers” (Red Lodge Festival of Nations 1982: 4). But they 136

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had more to offer, “The inhabitants themselves were a resource” (ibid.). Nine days every summer, Red Lodge puts its version of local ethnic culture on display, turning everyday people into performers of their respective ethnic heritages. In these performances, residents had only their own history to go on, so they made it up as they went along, one day for each ethnic group, but each group would do pretty much the same thing: a parade down Broadway with national flags from the country of origin, people in native costume, an afternoon performance of some sort (singing, storytelling, rug making), ethnic food in the Labor Temple (everyday from 3–5 P.M.), an evening of music and dance in the civic center. This is improvised ethnicity connected to the performance of made-up rituals handed down from one generation to the next, white privilege, white cultural memory, Montana style (see also Hill 1997: 245).

Montana Jazz I like Montana Day, especially that part that involves ranch women reading their stories about being Montana wives. This is improvised theater, cowgirl women singing their version of the blues. Montana jazz. A tent is set up over the dance pavilion in Lions Park, just next to the Depot Gallery, which is housed in a converted red train caboose, across the street from the Carnegie Library. White plastic chairs are lined up in rows on the lawn. Loud speakers are on each side of the stage. An old-fashioned Montana rancher meal is served afterward: barbecued beef, baked beans, coleslaw, baked potatoes, jello salad, brownies for dessert, coffee and ice tea for beverages. Tall and short middle-aged sun-tanned women take the stage. These are hardworking women, mothers, daughters, and grandmothers who live in the ranches in the Beartooth valley, along the East Rosebud, Rock Creek, Willow Creek, and the Stillwater River south of Columbus and Absarokee. Some have on cowboy boots, others wear Nike sneakers. They are dressed in blue jeans and decorated red, white, and blue cowboy shirts and skirts, and have red bandannas around their necks. THE PRACTICES OF INTERPRETATION

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They have short and long hair, pony tails, and curls. They read cowboy poetry, tell short stories about hard winters and horses that freeze to death in snow banks. Some sing songs. Country music plays quietly, and people come and go, some stop and listen for a while. As these women perform, old ranchers in widebrimmed cowboy hats close their eyes and tap their feet to the music. Young children run around through the crowd, and husbands proudly watch their wives read their poetry. Like Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday, these women sing their version of the cowgirl blues. And there is a certain, firm truth in the way they do this.

Dead Indians Fiedler argues that Montana as a white territory became psychologically possible only after the Native-Americans, the Nez Perce, Blackfeet, Sioux, Assinboine, Gros Ventre, Cheyenne, Chipewayan, Cree, and Crow were killed, driven away, or placed on reservations (1988). He claims that the struggle to rid the West of the Noble Savage and the “redskin” was integral to the myth of the Montana frontier as a wild wilderness (ibid.: 745). Fiedler said the Indian was Montana’s Negro, an outcast living in an open-air ghetto (ibid.: 752). With the passing of the redskin came trappers, mountain men, explorers, General Custer, Chief Joseph, and then ranchers and homesteaders. Indian sites would be marked with signs such as “Dead Indian Pass.” Entering Red Lodge you drive past a NativeAmerican Indian wooden statue, a male Indian face sitting on a big stone. It was carved by a nonnative American. The history of Montana’s relations with the Native-American is folded into Mountain Man Festivals and events like Montana Days in Red Lodge. It is a history that simultaneously honors the dead Indian while denying the violent past that was so central to white supremacy. Two summers ago, we drove over Dead Indian Pass, taking the Chief Joseph Highway back from Yellowstone Park. Chief Joseph led the Nez Perce over this pass just months before Custer’s last 138

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stand. At the top of the mountain there is a turn off, and you look back across the valley, 10,000 feet below. Although it is called Dead Indian pass, there is no mention of Chief Joseph in the little plaque that you walk up to. Instead, there is a story about the ranch families who settled the valley while fighting off the Indians; hence the name Dead Indian Pass. The whites, not the Indians, are honored in popular memory.

PERFORMING MONTANA There are many ways to perform Montana. Montana is a place where locals and tourists constantly mingle, where Orvisoutfitted fly-fishermen from Connecticut connect with Huck Finn look-alike local kids who fish with worms and old bamboo poles. These Montana performances mix up many different things at the same time, different identities, different selves: cowboys, rodeos, classical music, antique hunters, skiers, mountain men, Finnish women who make rugs, rancher’s wives who write poetry, fishing for trout. Being in nature is a major part of the Montana self. My wife and I enact nature, we bring it to us through the very act of bending down and smelling a wild flower, of walking along the river. This contact with the “natural world is an experience that comes to us like a gift” (Kittridge 1996: 108). And so, our corner of Montana is a sacred place, a hole, or house in the sky, to use phrases from Kittridge (1994) and Doig (1978), a place where wonderful things happen, and they happen when we perform them. These are the kinds of things a minimalist, storytelling, performative form of qualitative inquiry makes visible. In these tellings, the world comes alive. The qualitative researcher attempts to make these meanings available to the reader, hoping to show how this version of the sociological imagination engages some of the things that matter in everyday life. But sometimes words fail, for in its naturalness Montana is a place that is stunning in its beauty, a world of images beyond words. THE PRACTICES OF INTERPRETATION

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I turn now to an aesthetic of color16 and critical race theory. I explore how critical race theory can use experimental forms of narrative to criticize and resist racist cultural practices.

AN AESTHETIC OF COLOR AND CRITICAL RACE THEORY A feminist, Chicana/o and black performance-based aesthetic uses art, photography, music, dance, poetry, painting, theater, cinema, performance texts, autobiography, narrative, storytelling, poetic, and dramatic language to create a critical race consciousness, thereby extending the post-civil-rights Chicana/o and Black Arts Cultural movements into the next century (see Harrington 1992: 208). These practices serve to implement critical race theory (Anzaldua 1987; Collins 1991; Davis 1998: 155; Gonzalez 1998; hooks 1990: 105; Joyce 1987; Ladson-Billings 1998; Parker 1998; Parker et al. 1998; Scheurich 1997: 144–158; Smith 1993: xxvi, 1994: xxii; Trinh 1992). Critical race theory “seeks to decloak the seemingly race-neutral, and color-blind ways . . . of constructing and administering race-based appraisals . . . of the law, administrative policy, electoral politics . . . political discourse [and education] in the USA” (Parker et al. 1998: 5). Thus is Collins’s (1991, 1998) Afro-centric feminist agenda for the 1990s moved into the next century; that is, theorists and practitioners enact a standpoint epistemology that sees the world from the point of view of oppressed persons of color. Representative sociopoetic and interpretive works in this tradition include those of Amiri Baraka (1998), Jones (1966), June Jordan (1998), Joyce Joyce (1987), Larry Neal (1988), Shange (1977), as well as the more recent arguments of hooks (1990, 1996), Smith (1993, 1994), Angela Davis (1998), Gloria Anzaldua (1987), Noriega (1996), and others. This aesthetic is also informed by successive waves of the Asian and Native American, women, gay, lesbian, and bisexual movements, who “use their art as a weapon for political activism” (Harris 1998: 1384; also Nero 1998: 1973). 140

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Theorists critically engage and interrogate the anti-civil-rights agendas of the New Right (see Jordan 1998). But this is not a protest or an integrationist initiative aimed solely at informing a white audience of racial injustice. It dismisses these narrow agendas. In so doing, it rejects classical Eurocentric and postpositivist standards for evaluating literary, artistic, and research work. The following understandings shape this complex project: •

•

• •

•

Ethics, aesthetics, political praxis, and epistemology are joined; every act of representation, artistic or research, is a political and ethical statement (see Neal 1998: 1451). There is not a separate aesthetic or epistemological realm regulated by transcendent ideals, although an ethics of care should always be paramount. Claims to truth and knowledge are assessed in terms of multiple criteria, including asking if a text: (a) interrogates existing cultural, sexist, and racial stereotypes, especially those connected to family, femininity, masculinity, marriage, and intimacy (Neal 1998: 1457); (b) gives primacy to concrete lived experience; (c) uses dialogue and an ethics of personal responsibility, values beauty, spirituality, and a love of others; (d) implements an emancipatory agenda committed to equality, freedom, and social justice and participatory democratic practices; (e) emphasizes community, collective action, solidarity, and group empowerment (Denzin 1997: 65; hooks 1990: 111; Pizarro 1988: 63–65). No topic is taboo, including sexuality, sexual abuse, death, and violence. It presumes an artist and social researcher who is part of, and a spokesperson for, a local moral community, a community with its own symbolism, mythology, and heroic figures. It asks that the writer-artist draw on vernacular, folk, and popular culture forms of representation, including proverbs, work songs, spirituals, sermons, prayers, poems,

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choreopoems (Shange 1977), folktales, blues (Davis 1998), jazz, rap, film, paintings, theater, movies, photographs, performance art, murals, and corridos (see Fregosa 1993; Gates and McKay 1997: xxvii; Hill 1998; Noriega 1996; Pizarro 1988: 65). There is a search for texts that speak to women and children of color; to persons who suffer from violence, rape, and racial and sexist injustice. It seeks artists-researchers-writers who produce works that speak to and represent the needs of the community (drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, murder, gang warfare, AIDS, dropping out of school). It is understood, of course, that no single representation or work can speak to the collective needs of the community. Rather, local communities are often divided along racial, ethnic, gender, residential, age, and class lines.

•

•

•

Thus are sought emancipatory, utopian texts grounded in the distinctive styles, rhythms, idioms, and personal identities of local folk and vernacular culture. As historical documents, these texts record the history of injustices experienced by the members of an oppressed group. They show how members of a local group have struggled to find places of dignity and respect in a violent, racist, and sexist civil society (see Gates and McKay 1997: xxvii). These texts are sites of resistance. They are places where meanings, politics, and identities are negotiated. They transform and challenge all forms of cultural representation—white, black, Chicano, Asian, Native-American, gay, and straight. In her poem “Power,” black lesbian poet Audre Lorde talks about taking action in the world: The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children. (1998b: 1627) 142

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In lines such as these, critical race theory is connected to a heightened, reflexive, and moral sense of race consciousness. Lorde again, this time from “Coal”: I is the total black, being spoken from the earth’s inside. There are many kinds of open how a diamond comes into a knot of flame. how a sound comes into a word coloured by who pays what for speaking . . . Love is a word, another kind of open. As the diamond comes into a knot of flame I am black because I come from the earth’s inside Now take my word for jewel in the open light. (1998a: 1626–1627)

Audre Lorde, once more, from her poem “Stations”: Some women love to wait for life for a ring for a touch . . . for another woman’s voice to make them whole . . . Some women wait for something to change and nothing does change so they change themselves. (1998c: 1630–1631)

In “Taking in the Wash,” Rita Dove speaks to drinking, drunkenness, and violence in the house: Papa called her Pearl when he came home drunk, swaying as if the wind touched only him . . . Mama never changed: when the dog crawled under the stove and the back gate slammed, Mama hid THE PRACTICES OF INTERPRETATION

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the laundry . . . Papa is making the hankies sail. Her foot upon a silk stitched rose, she waits he turns, his smile sliding over. Mama a tight dark fist. Touch that child And I’ll cut you down Just like the Cedar of Lebanon. (1998: 1966–1967, italics in original)

Ntozake Shange’s powerful, Obie Award-winning choreopoem, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf, ends this way; six of the seven women, the ladies in red, purple, orange, blue, green, yellow have spoken. The lady in red summarizes: i was missin somethin . . . i sat up one nite walkin a boardin house screamin/cryin/the ghost of another woman who was missin what I waz missin i wanted to jump up outta my bones & be done wit myself leave me alone . . . i fell into a numbness til the only tree I cd see . . . held me in the breeze made me dawn dew that chill at daybreak the sun wrapped me up swingin rose light everywhere the sky laid over me like a million men i waz cold/I waz burnin up/a child & endlessly weaving garments for the moon wit me tears i found god in myself & i loved her/i loved her fiercely

All the ladies repeat to themselves softly the lines “i found god in myself & I loved her.” It soon becomes a song of joy, started by the lady in blue. The ladies sing first to each other, then gradually 144

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to the audience. After the song peaks, the ladies enter a closed tight circle. Lady in brown: & this is for colored girls who have considered suicide/but are movin to the ends of their own rainbows

And so the world is taken back, and we dream of another day of lightness and being free, of making our own rainbow (1977: 60, 63–64).

Aesthetics and Cinematic Practices Within the contemporary black and Chicana/o film communities, there is a specific set of film practices associated with this aesthetic project.17 These practices inform and shape the narrative and visual content of these experimental texts. They include: •

•

•

•

•

•

Experiments with narrative forms, folk ballads, and corridos that honor long-standing Chicano discourse traditions (Fregosa 1993: 70–76; Noriega 1992: 152–153); The use of improvisation, mise-en-scène, and montage to fill the screen with multiracial images and to manipulate bicultural visual and linguistic codes; The use of personal testimonials, life stories, voice-overs, and off-screen narration to provide overall narrative unity to a text (Noriega 1992: 156–159); A celebration of key elements in Chicano culture, especially the themes of resistance, maintenance, affirmation, and neoindigenism, or mestizaje (Noriega 1992: 150), thereby challenging assimilation and melting-pot narratives; Production of texts that deconstruct machismo, the masculine identity, and the celebration of works that give the Chicana subject an active part in the text while criticizing such timeworn stereotypes as the virgin, whore, supportive wife, and home-girl (Fregosa 1993: 29, 93–94); A rejection of essentializing approaches to identity; an emphasis on a processual, gendered, performance view of

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self, and the location of identity within, not outside, systems of cultural and media representation; A refusal to accept the official race-relations narrative of the culture that privileges the ideology of assimilation while contending that black and Hispanic youth pose grave threats for white society (Fregosa 1993: 29).

•

Return to Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror; listen now to An Anonymous Young Man #2 Bad Boy. The time is evening, the season, spring. The setting is the same recreation room where the interview with Anonymous Young Man #1 took place. Young Man #2 has dreadlocks. On his head is a “very odd-shaped multicolored hat” (1993: 100). He is wearing a black jacket over his clothes. He has a gold tooth. He is soft spoken. That youth, that sixteen-year-old didn’t murder that Jew . . . mostly the Black youth in Crown Heights have two things to do— You either DJ, be a MC, a rapper or Jamaican rapper, ragamuffin, or you be a bad boy you sell drugs or you rob people. What do you do? I sell drugs What do you do? I rap. That’s how it is in Crown Heights. (1993: 100, 102)

In this speech, Smith catches the language of youth, its rhythm, syntax, and semantics. She uses the personal testimonial as a way of bringing another voice into the text, as well as providing narrative unity to the play. Her young man rejects essentializing views of identity but notes that in Crown Heights youth have few choices or options in life. Young Man #2 resists these interpretations. 146

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Artistic representations such as those of Lorde, Dove, and Smith (and Jordan below) are based on the notion of a radical and constantly changing set of aesthetic practices. As hooks observes: “There can never be one critical paradigm for the evaluation of artistic work . . . a radical aesthetic acknowledges that we are constantly changing positions, locations, that our needs and concerns vary, that these diverse directions must correspond with shifts in critical thinking” (1990: 111). At this level, there is no preferred aesthetic. For example, realistic art is not necessarily better than abstract, expressionist, or impressionist art. In the worlds of jazz, ragtime, and New Orleans, classic or swing is not necessarily more or less politically correct or aesthetically better than bebop, cool, hard bop, Latin, avantgarde, or fusion. Nor is Charlie Parker less politically correct than Lester Young, Ben Webster, Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Nancy Wilson, Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith, John Coltrane, or Miles Davis. But then, June Jordan might put it differently. In her jazz prose poem, “A Good News’ Blues,” she pays homage to Billie and Louis, Nina and Bessie, to anyone who sang the blues. Here she praises Billie Holiday: Since the blues left my sky I’m runnin out on Monday To chase down all my Sundays Now a man must be pushing and shoving But a woman’s born to strut and stretch To go outside (for /catch some) lovin Get over past regrets I’m liftin’ weights and wearin sweats . . . And thrillin through the night . . . And if I want to rewrite all the sorry-ass/ victim/passive/feminine/ traditional propaganda spinin out here ain’ nobody’s business THE PRACTICES OF INTERPRETATION

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if I do I been lost but I been found I am bound for Billie’s land that place of longing where the angels learn to sing and play the syncopated music of my soul (1998: 199–200)

And brilliant rainbows cut through the blue and white clouds, connecting distant hills and mountains to the places where I live. Each text, each performance should be valued in terms of the collective and individual reflection and critical action it produces, including conversations that cross the boundaries of race, class, gender, and nation. We ask how each work of art, and each instance of qualitative inquiry, promotes the development of human agency, “resistance . . . and critical consciousness” (hooks 1990: 111). This aesthetic also seeks and values beauty and looks to find beauty in the everyday, especially in “the lives of poor people” (ibid.). Here is an illustration from bell hooks, who recalls the houses of her childhood, especially the house of Baba, her grandmother. Looking back into her childhood, hooks observes that she now sees how this black woman was struggling to create, in spite of poverty and hardship, an oppositional world of beauty. Baba had a clean house crowded with many precious objects. Baba was also a quiltmaker. She turned every-day, worn out clothing into beautiful works of art, and her quilts were present in every room of her small house. Baba’s house was like an art gallery. Late at night, hooks would sit alone in an upstairs room. Light from the moon would send criss-crossing patterns and shadows across the floor and the wall. In the stillness of the night, in the reflections from the moon’s light, hooks came to see darkness and beauty in different ways. 148

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Now, in a different time, late at night, she and her sisters “think about our skin as a dark room, a place of shadows. We talk often about color politics, and the ways racism has created an aesthetic that wounds us, we talk about the need to see darkness differently . . . in that space of shadows we long for an aesthetic of blackness—strange and oppositional” (ibid.: 113). Baba, the quiltmaker shows her how to do this. Aesthetics, art, performance, history, culture, and politics are thus intertwined, because in the artful, interpretive production, cultural heroes, heroines, mythic pasts, and senses of moral community are created. It remains to chart the future. To return to the beginning, to re-imagine the ways in which qualitative inquiry and interpretive ethnography can advance the agendas of radical democratic practice, to ask where these practices will take us next.

INTO THE FUTURE In the end, then, to summarize: I seek an existential, interpretive ethnography, an ethnography that offers a blueprint for cultural criticism. This criticism is grounded in the specific worlds made visible in the ethnography. It understands that all ethnography is theory and value-laden. There can be no objective account of a culture and its ways. Taking a lead from mid-century AfricanAmerican cultural critics (Du Bois, Hurston, Ellison, Wright, Baldwin, Hines), we now know that the ethnographic, the aesthetic, and the political can never be neatly separated. Ethnography, like art, is always political. Accordingly, after Ford (1998 [1950]), a critical, civic, literary ethnography is one that must meet four criteria. It must evidence a mastery of literary craftsmanship, the art of good writing. It should present a well-plotted, compelling, but minimalist narrative. This narrative will be based on realistic, natural conversation, with a focus on memorable, recognizable characters. These characters will be located in well-described, “unforgettable scenes” (Ford 1998 [1950]: 1112). Second, the work should present clearly identifiable cultural and political issues, including injustices based on the structures and meanings of race, class, gender, THE PRACTICES OF INTERPRETATION

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and sexual orientation. Third, the work should articulate a politics of hope. It should criticize how things are and imagine how they could be different. Finally, it will do these things through direct and indirect symbolic and rhetorical means. Writers who do these things are fully immersed in the oppressions and injustices of their time. They direct their ethnographic energies to higher, utopian, morally sacred goals. The truth of these new texts is determined pragmatically by their truth effects, by the critical, moral discourse they produce, by the “empathy they generate, the exchange of experience they enable, and the social bonds they mediate” (Jackson 1998: 180). The power of these texts is not a question of whether “they mirror the world as it ‘really’ is” (ibid.). The world is always already constructed through narrative texts. Rorty (1979) is firm on this point. There is no mirror of nature. The world as it is known is constructed through acts of representation and interpretation. Finally, this performative ethnography searches for new ways to locate and represent the gendered, sacred self in its ethical relationships to nature.18 An exploration of other forms of writing is sought, including personal diaries, nature writing, and performance texts anchored in the natural world. And so we must learn how to enact an enabling, interpretive ethnography, an ethnography that aspires to higher, sacred goals. We can scarcely afford to do otherwise. We are at a critical crossroad in the histories of our disciplines and our nation (Lincoln 1998). Cornel West reminds us that “we simply cannot enter the 21st century at each other’s throats” (1994: 159). But with West we must ask: “Do we have the intelligence, humor, imagination, courage, tolerance, love, respect, and will to meet the challenge” (1994: 159)?

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READING AND WRITING INTERPRETATION1 Rules for “good” experimental ethnographic writing can now be established; at least what should be published as “good” experimental writing can be debated. (Clough 2000: 278) I am concerned with the performance of subversive . . . narratives . . . the performance of possibilities aims to create . . . a . . . space where unjust systems and processes are identified and interrogated. (Madison 1998: 277, 280) We recognize that performative ethnography can mirror and evoke the performative character of everyday life. (Atkinson, Coffey, and Delamont 2001: 9) How can aesthetics move . . . closer to engaged cultural history? (Hartnett 1998: 288)

For qualitative researchers, the turn to experimental ethnographic texts poses the problem of performative criteria—namely, how these texts and their performances are to be critically analyzed in terms of epistemological, aesthetic, and political criteria. Building on recent discussions of interpretive criteria, aesthetics and pedagogy, this chapter examines performative criteria in the Seventh and Eighth Moments (Alexander 2005; Atkinson and Delamont 2006; American Education Research Association 2008; Finley 2005). I foreground subversive, resistance narratives—dramatic, epiphanic performances that challenge the status quo.2 My topics: reading, writing, and judging performances, producing performances that move history. My argument unfolds in four parts. I begin with a discussion of the problem of setting criteria for experimental writing (Bochner 151

2000; Clough 2000). I then turn to feminist and communitarian criteria, as they apply to resistance performance texts. I next discuss alternative modes of assessing narrative and performance texts, building on the recent arguments of L. Richardson (2000a, b, 2001), Bochner (2000), Ellis (2000), Bochner and Ellis (2002), and Clough (2000b). I conclude with commentary on an aesthetic of color, critical race theory, and the politics of interpretation in the performance community.

A CAVEAT In the main, I focus on North American discourse in sociology and cultural studies. This has the effect of slighting the highly relevant work of non-American scholars in other disciplines who have taken up the topics I discuss here. Not explicitly examined are related discussions of writing and rhetoric (Atkinson and Hammersley 1994; James, Hockey, and Dawson 1997; Spencer 2001); the ethnographic self (Coffey 1999); voice (Atkinson and Hammersley 1994: 256–257); authenticity and authentic representations of experience (Atkinson and Silverman 1997); interpretive criteria (Atkinson, Coffey, and Delamont 1999; Brayboy 2000; Delamont, Coffey, and Atkinson 2000); and indigenous, resistance performance texts (Grande 2000; Marcus 2001; Smith 1999). This complex literature is international, interdisciplinary, and in flux. North Americans are not the only scholars struggling to create postcolonial, non-essentialist, feminist, dialogic, performance texts—texts informed by the rhetorical, narrative turn in the human disciplines (Delamont, Coffey, and Atkinson 2000). This international work troubles the traditional distinctions among science, the humanities, rhetoric, literature, facts, and fictions. As Atkinson and Hammersley observe, this discourse recognizes “the literary antecedents of the ethnographic text and affirms the essential dialectic” underlying these aesthetic and humanistic moves (1994: 255). Moreover, this literature is reflexively situated in multiple, historical, and national contexts. It is clear that America’s history with qualitative inquiry cannot be generalized to the rest of 152

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the world (Atkinson, Coffey, and Delamont 2001). Nor do all researchers embrace a politicized, cultural studies agenda that demands that interpretive texts advance issues surrounding social justice and racial equality. After Atkinson, Coffey, and Delamont (ibid.: 9), we must ask how the forces of history and culture structure those versions of everyday life that are mirrored and evoked in performance ethnography.

SETTING CRITERIA FOR PERFORMANCE ETHNOGRAPHY In the social sciences today there is no longer a God’s-eye view that guarantees absolute methodological certainty. All inquiry reflects the standpoint of the inquirer. All observation is theoryladen. There is no possibility of theory- or value-free knowledge. The days of naive realism and naive positivism are over. In their place stand critical and historical realism, and various versions of relativism. The criteria for evaluating research are now relative. Clough rightly warns that setting criteria for judging what is good and what is bad experimental writing, or performance ethnography, may only conventionalize the new writing “and make more apparent the ways in which experimental writing has already become conventional” (2000: 278). More deeply, in normalizing this writing, and the performances connected to it, we may forget that this kind of writing was once “thought to be ‘bad’ writing, improper sociology . . .. It might be forgotten that experimental writing was strongly linked to political contentions over questions of knowledge” (ibid.). And, the new writing, in one moment, was taken to be a form of cultural criticism, a way of also criticizing traditional ethnography. Bochner elaborates, observing that today “no single, unchallenged paradigm has been established for deciding what does and what does not comprise [sic] valid, useful, and significant knowledge” (2000: 268). Furthermore, it is impossible to fix a single standard for deciding what is good or bad, or right; there are only READING AND WRITING INTERPRETATION

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multiple standards, temporary criteria, momentary resting places (ibid.: 269). Too often, criteria function as policing devices. The desire to authorize one set of standards can take our attention away from “the ethical issues at the heart of our work” (ibid.). On this point, Clough and Christians (2000) agree with Bochner; all inquiry involves moral, political, and ethical matters. Clough goes one level deeper. With Atkinson, Coffey, Delamont, Lofland, and Lofland (2001: 3) she reminds us that from the beginning, the criticisms of standard ethnographic writing in sociology were linked to identity politics and feminist theory, and in anthropology to postcolonial criticisms. These criticisms involved a complex set of questions—namely, who had the right to speak for whom, and how? (Clough 2000: 283). The need to represent postcolonial hybrid identities became the focus of experimental writing in ethnography, just as there has been “an effort to elaborate race, classed, sexed, and national identities in the autoethnographic writings of postcolonial theorists” (ibid.: 285). These debates about writing, agency, self, subjectivity, nation, culture, race, and gender unfolded on a global landscape, involving the transnationalization of capital and the globalization of technology (ibid.: 279). Thus from the beginning, experimental writing has been closely connected to gender, race, family, nation, politics, capital, technology, critical social theory, and cultural criticism—that is, to debates over questions of knowledge and its representation and presentation. The drive to performance ethnography within Western ethnography, the drive to the personal and the autobiographical, Clough suggests, reflects a growing sensitivity to issues surrounding agency and the new media technologies. But, the subjectivity and forms of selfhood performed and examined in the new autoethnography are linked to “the trauma culture of the teletechnological” (ibid.: 287). Clough observes that much of the new autoethnography involves persons writing about the “experiences of drug abuse, sexual abuse, child abuse, rape, incest, anorexia, chronic illness, and death.” She goes on: “Autoethnography is symptomatic of the trauma culture that has been most outrageously presented in television talk shows” (ibid.). 154

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This trauma culture exposes and celebrates the erasure of traditional barriers separating the public and the private in American life. In a pornography of the visible, the violent side of intimate family life is exposed, and the contradictions in capitalism as a way of life are revealed. Much of the new autoethnography focuses on trauma, on injuries, on troubled, repressed memories, inabilities to speak the past, the search for a new voice, shattered, damaged egos seeking new histories, new forms of agency. But in speaking from the spaces of trauma, autoethnographers do not “critically or self-consciously engage enough the technical substrata of their own writing form” (ibid.). Clough does not mean to trivialize the trauma written about; rather, she wants to read it as symptomatic of something else that requires attention—namely, how the new television, computer, and media technologies, in conjunction with global capital on a transnational scale, are creating new forms of subjectivity. “I think it is these figures of subjectivity appearing in autoethnography which cultural criticism must now attend” (ibid.). Thus Clough comes back to a single criterion for evaluating experimental writing—namely, cultural criticism and theoretical reflection. Staying close to these two terms allows “experimental writing to be a vehicle for thinking new sociological subjects, new parameters of the social” (ibid.: 290). She is fearful that the search for new criteria will silence cultural criticism (ibid.). I agree. In seeking to conventionalize performative criteria, Clough’s and Bochner’s warnings must not be forgotten. “Orthodoxy . . . is not a stable category” (Atkinson, Coffey, and Delamont 2001: 11). Discussions of criteria move in three directions at the same time: moral, political, and ethical; literary and aesthetic; trauma and the politics of experience.

FEMINIST, COMMUNITARIAN CRITERIA The understandings and criteria for evaluating critical performance events combine aesthetics, ethics, and epistemologies.3 Several criteria can be outlined. Like hooks’s black aesthetic (1990: 111) READING AND WRITING INTERPRETATION

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and Giroux’s public pedagogy (2000b: 25), these performance criteria erase the usual differences between ethics, politics, and power (ibid.). This erasure creates the possibilities for a practical, performative pedagogy, a call for performances that intervenes and interrupts public life. Such interruptions are meant to unsettle and challenge taken-for-granted assumptions concerning problematic issues in public life. They create a space for dialogue and questions, giving a voice to positions previously silenced or ignored (but see Bishop 1998: 209; also L. Smith 1999). Ideologically, this performance aesthetic refuses assimilation to white middle-class norms and the traumas of that culture. It resists those understandings that valorize performances and narratives centered on the life crises of the humanistic subject (see Comolli and Narboni 1971–1972). In contrast, this aesthetic values performance narratives that reflexively recognize, go against the grain, and attack the dominant cultural ideologies connected to race, class, family, and gender. These performances expose cracks in the ideological seams in these dominant cultural mythologies, both through political action and by their subject matter. Richard Posner’s public art functions this way (Pitzl-Waters and Enstrom-Waters 2002: 6). For example, his Berlin installation “Der Wider-HakenKräutergarten” (“Recyled History Garden”) manipulates two swastikas made of broken glass. The first swastika, with its arms spinning clockwise, is a symbol from ancient temples representing the sun and its ability to sustain life. The second swastika, its arms spinning counterclockwise, is the Nazi Hakenkreuz, a symbol of prejudice. Posner positioned this installation on the site where a synagogue had previously stood. Destroyed by Allied bombers, the site had been turned into a toxic place, a public dump. Posner’s art transforms this toxic place into a site that honors the victims of the holocaust, including members of Posner’s family. In a feminist, communitarian sense, this aesthetic contends that ways of knowing (epistemology), are moral and ethical (Christians 2000). These ways of knowing involve conceptions of who the human being is (ontology), including how matters of difference are socially organized. The ways in which these 156

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relationships of difference are textually represented answer to a political and epistemological aesthetic that defines what is good, true, and beautiful. Three interconnected criteria shape these representations of the world. Interpretive sufficiency is the watchword (Christians 2000: 145).4 Accounts should possess that amount of depth, detail, emotionality, nuance, and coherence that will permit a critical consciousness, or what Paulo Freire (2001) terms conscientization, to be formed. Through conscientization the oppressed gain their own voice and collaborate in transforming their culture (Christians 2000: 148). Second, these accounts should exhibit a representational adequacy and be free of racial, class, or gender stereotyping (ibid.: 145). Finally, texts are authentically adequate when three conditions are met: they (1) represent multiple voices; (2) enhance moral discernment; and (3) promote social transformation (ibid.). Multivoiced ethnographic texts should empower persons, leading them to discover moral truths about themselves while generating social criticism. These criticisms in turn should lead to efforts at social transformation (ibid.: 147). All aesthetics and standards of judgment are based on particular moral standpoints. Hence, for example, an Afro-centric feminist aesthetic (and epistemology) stresses the importance of truth, knowledge, and beauty (“Black is Beautiful”). Such claims are based on a concept of storytelling and a notion of wisdom that is experiential and shared. Wisdom so conceived is derived from local, lived experience and expresses lore, folktale, and myth (Collins 1991). This is a dialogical epistemology and aesthetic. It involves a give and take, an ongoing moral dialogue between persons. It enacts an ethic of care and an ethic of personal and communal responsibility (ibid.: 214; Giroux 2000: 130). Politically, this aesthetic imagines how a truly democratic society might look, including one free of race prejudice and oppression. This aesthetic values beauty and artistry, movement, rhythm, color, and texture in everyday life. It celebrates difference and the sounds of many different voices. It expresses an ethic of empowerment. READING AND WRITING INTERPRETATION

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This ethic presumes a moral community that is ontologically prior to the person. This community has shared moral values, including the concepts of shared governance, neighborliness, love, kindness, and the moral good (Christians 2000: 144–149). This ethic embodies a sacred, existential epistemology that locates persons in a noncompetitive, nonhierarchical relationship to the larger moral universe. This ethic declares that all persons deserve dignity and a sacred status in the world. It stresses the value of human life, truth telling, and nonviolence (ibid.: 147). Under the principle of authentic adequacy (above), this aesthetic enables social criticism and engenders resistance (see below). It helps persons imagine how things could be different. It imagines new forms of human transformation and emancipation. It enacts these transformations through dialogue. If necessary, it sanctions nonviolent forms of civil disobedience (ibid.: 148). In asking that interpretive work provide the foundations for social criticism and social action, this ethic represents a call to action. This aesthetic understands that moral criteria are always fitted to the contingencies of concrete circumstances, assessed in terms of those local understandings that flow from feminist, communitarian understandings. This ethic calls for dialogical research rooted in the concepts of care and shared governance. How this ethic works in any specific situation cannot be given in advance. Properly conceptualized, performance autoethnography becomes a civic, participatory, collaborative project. It uses democratically arrived at participant-driven criteria of evaluation (Bishop 1998: 211–213). It turns researchers and subjects into coparticipants in a common moral project. This is a form of participatory action research. It has roots in liberation theology, neo-Marxist approaches to community development, and human rights activism in Asia and elsewhere (Kemmis and McTaggart 2000: 568). Such work is characterized by shared ownership of the research project, community-based analyses, an emancipatory, dialectical, and transformative commitment to community action (ibid.: 568, 598). This form of inquiry “aims to help people recover, and release themselves, from the constraints embedded in the social media” (ibid.: 598). 158

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As a cultural critic, the researcher speaks from an informed moral and ethical position. He or she is anchored in a specific community of progressive moral discourse. The moral ethnographeras-performer takes a side, working always on the side of those who seek a genuine grassroots democracy (Hartnett 1998: 288).

MORAL CRITICISM AND TAKING SIDES The ethnographer-as-performer, as cultural critic, takes a side. This is proper, because this is what politically engaged theatre does. This is a complex process (Becker 1967; Hammersley 2001). Performers-as-critics must make their own moral and political values clear, including the social constructions, values, and so-called objective facts and ideological assumptions that are attached to these positions. Alternative standpoints and claims to truth must be represented with minimal distortion. The performer-as-critic assesses this standpoint, revealing how it disadvantages and disempowers members of a specific group. (Ryan et al. 1998). Performers then show how a participatory, feminist, communitarian ethic addresses the situation through actions that empower and enable social justice. Advocates of the Black Arts Movement in the 1970s, for example, insisted that art function politically. They asked how much more beautiful a poem, melody, play, novel, or film made the life of a single black person (Gayle 1997: 1876). In a call to action, researchers-as-performers engage in concrete steps that will change situations. They may show citizens, as Richard Posner did, how to bring new and sacred meanings to a previously marginalized and stigmatized public site. Through performances, they will demonstrate how particular texts directly and indirectly misrepresent persons and reproduce prejudice and stereotypes. In advancing this utopian project, the performer seeks new standards and new tools of evaluation. For example, Karenga (1997 [1972]), a theorist of the Black Arts Movement in the 1970s, argued that black art should be political, functional, collective, and committed. Politically, and functionally, this art would, as READING AND WRITING INTERPRETATION

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it was for Du Bois’s black theatre (1926: 134), be about blacks, made by blacks, for blacks, and located in local black communities. This community art would support and “respond positively to the reality of a revolution” (Karenga 1997). It would not be art for art’s sake; rather, it would be art for persons in the black community, art for “Sammy the shoeshine boy, T. C. the truck driver, and K. P. the unwilling soldier” (ibid.: 1974). Karenga told blacks that “we do not need pictures of oranges in a bowl, or trees standing innocently in the midst of a wasteland . . . or fat white women smiling lewdly . . .. If we must paint oranges or trees, let our guerrillas be eating those oranges for strength and using those trees for cover” (ibid.; see also Gayle 1971: xxiii). Collectively, black art comes from the people and must be returned to the people, “in a form more beautiful and colorful than it was in real life . . . art is everyday life given more form and color” (Karenga 1997: 1974). Such art is committed to political goals. It is democratic. It celebrates diversity, personal and collective freedom.5 It is not elitist. In asking if a work is political, functional, collective, and committed, Karenga’s black aesthetic compliments the feminist communitarian ethic and its concepts of interpretive sufficiency, representational and authentic adequacy. Multiple criteria can now be brought to a work. Is it political, functional, committed, and free of stereotype? Does it exhibit depth, nuance, detail, coherence, and emotion? Are multiple voices and ethical positions present? Does the work create the conditions for critical consciousness? Committed scholars implement these understandings in their performances. They show persons how to fashion their own grounded aesthetics within the spaces of the everyday world (Laermans 1993: 156; Willis 1990). This grounded aesthetic is at once political and personal. In the area of commodity consumption, this aesthetic deconstructs the images, appearances, and promises of happiness that are used to make objects attractive to consumers (Harms and Kellner 1991: 49). These aesthetic practices speak to the complex interplay between resistance and consumption, between desire and pleasure. They articulate 160

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the many different ways in which consumers creatively use the resources of popular culture for personal and group empowerment (Laermans 1993: 154–155). This grounded aesthetic functions both as a vehicle and as a site of resistance. In the arena of consumption and race, for example, race scholars deconstruct negative racial representations. They turn these negative images into positive representations. They invent new cultural images and slogans. In these moves a racially grounded practical aesthetic is formulated. In the sensuous enactment of this aesthetic, the consumer becomes an active player in the construction of new racial identities. Critical scholars will, of course, make their own values clear. At the same time, they will listen to the perspectives and voices of many different stakeholders. In any given situation, they will advocate for the side of the underdog (Ryan et al. 1998). In so doing, they will attempt to create a critical, reflexive moral consciousness on the part of the citizen-consumer. They will argue that happiness is not necessarily connected to the possession of particular material objects, that in fact the desire to possess is a desire created by the manufacturer of the object in question (Harms and Kellner 1991: 65). Critical researchers will demonstrate how particular consumption patterns and choices reproduce, for particular oppressed consumer groups (poor, women, youth, queer, racial), the normative ideologies of possessive materialism, designer capitalism, and current fashion. They will show how the emphasis on the possession of material goods becomes an end in itself, not a means to attain specific nonmaterial ethical and moral goals. Moreover, scholars will indicate how advertising reproduces gender, racial, sexual orientation, and social class stereotypes and even contributes to consumer practices that are harmful to personal health and the environment. In so doing, interpretive researchers engage in social critique and moral dialogue, identifying the different gendered relations of cultural capital that operate in specific consumption contexts. But more is involved. The researcher-as-performer will evaluate specific programs, making recommendations concerning READING AND WRITING INTERPRETATION

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programs and practices, advocating lines of action that maximize participatory democracy, citizen health, and autonomy. Such a commitment makes the researcher accountable for the moral and personal consequences of any particular line of action that is recommended.

LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITERIA I turn now to the work of Ellis, Bochner, and Richardson. Collectively these scholars offer a subtly nuanced set of criteria that emphasize the literary, substantive, and aesthetic dimensions of the new writing. In the main, these scholars and their students have focused on what Clough calls the experiences embedded in the culture of trauma. Their works (especially Ellis and Bochner) destigmatize the experiences of damaged egos.

Ellis’s Literary Realism Ellis offers a fully developed literary aesthetic (2000: 273). She wants writing that conforms to the criteria of interpretive sufficiency, and authentic adequacy. She wants works that are engaging, and nuanced—texts that allow her to feel and think with them. She wants a story that immerses her in another world, a story that stays with her after she has read it. She privileges evocation over cognitive contemplation. If a writer cannot write evocatively, she recommends that he or she write in another genre. She asks that a story tell her something new “about social life, social process, the experience of others, the author’s experience, my own life. Is there anything ‘new’ here?” (ibid.: 275). To the criteria of interpretive sufficiency, and authentic adequacy, Ellis adds a third, what might be called literary value or what Richardson (2000a: 937, 2000b: 254) calls aesthetic merit. Ellis wants stories to have a good plot, to have dramatic tension, to be coherent, logically consistent, to exhibit balance, flow, and an authenticity of experience, to be lifelike. She asks that authors show and not tell, that they develop characters and scenes fully— but that there not be too many characters or scenes. 162

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She wants careful editing, an economy of words, but vivid pictures, sounds, smells, feelings, conversations that feel like real life, surprise endings that challenge her to see things in a new way. She asks if analysis has been connected closely to the story and to the relevant literature. She asks if the story is worth fighting for, even if it is unconventional (2000b: 276). She wants to know what the author’s goals are, what he or she is trying to achieve, and asks if the goals are achievable and if they are worthwhile. She asks if another writing form would better serve the author’s purposes. She wonders if the writer learned anything new about him- or herself, about other characters in the story, about social processes and relationships (ibid.: 275). Ethical questions are also raised, but in a less detailed manner then required by the criteria of authentic adequacy. She does not explicitly ask for multiple voices, moral discernment, or social transformation. She asks if the author received permission to portray others, if others had a chance to contribute to their perspective in the story. If this did not happen, she wants to know why. She asks if the story causes pain for characters and readers. She asks if the story will help others “cope with or better understand their worlds . . .. Is it useful, and if so, for whom? Does it encourage compassion for the characters? Does it promote dialogue? Does it have the potential to stimulate social action?” (ibid.). She does not specify the form or the direction of social action.

Bochner’s Narratives of Self Ellis’s literary realism compliments Bochner’s vision of poetic social science and alternative ethnography. Bochner also emphasizes issues surrounding interpretive sufficiency (2000). He asks if these new narratives of self use language in a way that allows the reader (and writer) to extract meaning from experience “rather than depict experience exactly as it was lived” (ibid.: 270). Bochner isolates seven criteria. First, he looks for abundant, concrete detail, for the “flesh and blood emotions of people coping with life’s contingencies; not READING AND WRITING INTERPRETATION

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only facts but also feelings” (ibid.). Second, he likes structurally complex narratives, stories told in the curve of time, weaving past and present together in the nonlinear spaces of memory work. Third, he judges authors in terms of their emotional credibility, vulnerability, and honesty. He wants texts that comment on those “cultural scripts that resist transformation . . . squeezing comedy out of life’s tragedies” (ibid.), texts that take a “measure of life’s limitations” (ibid.). Fourth, he wants stories of two selves, stories of who I was to who I am, lives transformed by crisis. Fifth, he holds the writer to “a demanding standard of ethical self-consciousness” (ibid.: 271). Like Ellis, he wants the writer to show concern for those who are written about—concern for their place in the story, concern for how telling the story changes the writer’s (and reader’s) self, and concern for the “moral commitments and convictions that underlie the story” (ibid.). Sixth, also like Ellis, he wants a story that “moves me, my heart and belly as well as my head” (ibid.). He does not demean a story if it is confessional or erotic, or pornographic, because every story is a dare, a risk. Seventh, consistent with the criteria of authentic adequacy, Bochner wants narratives of the self that can be used as “a source of empowerment and a form of resistance to counter the domination of canonical discourses” (ibid.). He values those works that devictimize stigmatized identities, works that “confirm and humanize tragic experience by bearing witness to what it means to live with shame, abuse, addiction, or bodily dysfunction and to gain agency through testimony” (ibid.). These criteria do not actively engage the issues surrounding authentic adequacy, including ethical discernment and social transformation. It is perhaps not enough, Clough would argue, to just bear witness to tragic experience, to just make public the traumas of the trauma culture.

Richardson’s Five Criteria Laurel Richardson asks for more, offering five criteria that move back and forth across the dimensions of interpretive sufficiency, 164

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representational adequacy, and authentic adequacy. Her first criterion is substantive contribution: Does the piece contribute to our understanding of social life? Is the work grounded in a social scientific perspective? Second, she asks if the work has aesthetic merit: Does it succeed aesthetically, is it artistically shaped, is it satisfying, complex, not boring? (2000b: 254). Her third criterion is reflexivity; it involves several separate issues. She asks if the author is familiar with the epistemology of postmodernism. She wants to know how the information in the text was gathered—were ethical issues involved in this process? She asks if the author’s subjectivity is in the text, is his or her point of view clear, is there adequate self-awareness and selfexposure. Is the author held accountable to standards of knowing and telling (ibid.)? The fourth criterion assesses impact. Richardson asks how the work affects her, emotionally, intellectually, and as a scholar. She asks: Does it generate new questions? Does it move her to try new research practices? Does it move her to action? Fifth, she wants to know how the work expresses a reality. “Does this text embody a fleshed-out, embodied sense of lived experience? Does it seem ‘true’—a credible account of a cultural, social, individual, or communal sense of the ‘real’”? (2000a: 937). Together, Ellis, Bochner, and Richardson offer a set of interpretive criteria that emphasize the literary and aesthetic qualities of a work, as well as its substantive contributions to an area of knowledge. Ethically, they focus on the dialogical relationship between the writer and the subject, asking that this be an honest and open relationship. Each of these scholars wants to be moved emotionally and intellectually by a work. Each values reflexivity and texts that empower. A new aesthetic criterion emerges in this reading of Ellis, Bochner, and Richardson. It might be termed the dialogical requirement. In asking that they be moved by a text, these writers want works that invite them into another person’s world of experience. In privileging the reading experience, they bring new meaning to the writerly text. If writing is a form of inquiry, then they want works that provoke self-reflection. READING AND WRITING INTERPRETATION

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Performative Criteria Building on these normative understandings, I value those autoethnographic performance texts that: 1. Unsettle, criticize, and challenge taken-for-granted, repressed meanings; 2. Invite moral and ethical dialogue while reflexively clarifying the author’s own moral position; 3. Engender resistance and offer utopian thoughts about how things can be made different; 4. Demonstrate that the authors care, that they are kind; 5. Show instead of tell while using the rule that less is more; 6. Exhibit interpretive sufficiency, representational adequacy, and authentic adequacy; 7. Are political, functional, collective, and committed. In asking if a performance event does these things, I understand that every performance is different. Further, audiences may or may not agree on what is caring, or kind, or reflexive, and some persons may not want their taken for granted understandings challenged.

Ethics for Performance Studies Any consideration of performance ethics must move in three directions at the same time, addressing three interrelated issues: ethical pitfalls, traditional ethical models, and indigenous performance ethics connected to political theatre (Boal 1995). Conquergood (1985: 4) has identified four ethical pitfalls that performance ethnographers must avoid. He terms them “The Custodian’s RipOff,” “The Enthusiast’s Infatuation,” “The Skeptic’s Cop-Out,” and “The Curator’s Exhibitionism.” Cultural custodians, or cultural imperialists, ransack their biographical past looking for good texts to perform and then perform them for a fee, often denigrating a family member or a cultural group who regard such experiences as sacred. The enthusiast’s infatuation, or superficial stance, occurs when the writer (and the performer) fails to become deeply involved in the cultural setting 166

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that he or she re-performs. Conquergood (1985: 6) says this trivializes the other, whose experiences are neither contextualized, nor well understood. Modifying Conquergood, the skeptic or cynic values detachment and being cynical. This position refuses to face up to the “ethical tensions and moral ambiguities of performing culturally sensitive materials” (ibid.: 8). Finally, the curator or sensationalist, like the custodian, is a performer who sensationalizes the cultural differences that supposedly define the world of the other. He or she stages performances for the voyeur’s gaze, perhaps telling stories about an abusive, hurtful other (ibid.: 7). These ethical stances make problematic the question: “How far into the other’s world can the performer and the audience go? Of course, we can never know the mind of an other, only the other’s performances. We can know only our own minds, and sometimes not well. This means that the differences that define the other’s world must always be respected. There is no null point in the moral universe (ibid.: 8–9). The second issue is implicit in Conquergood’s four ethical pitfalls. He presumes a researcher who is held accountable to a set of universal ethical principles that are both duty-based and utilitarian. Duty-based ethics assume researchers and performers who are virtuous, have good intentions, and are committed to values such as justice, honesty, and respect. This is Conquergood’s ideal performer. However, Conquergood is concerned with more than good intentions; he is concerned with the effects, or consequences, of a performance on a person or a community. Thus he appears to implicitly endorse a utilitarian ethics based on consequences and pragmatic effects, not good intentions. This is the cost-benefit utilitarian model used by human subject review boards when they ask how research will benefit society. Both of these models have deficiencies. Carried to the extreme, the duty position can result in a moral absolutism, requiring that persons live up to an absolute standard, regardless of its human consequences (Edwards and Mauthner 2002: 20; Kvale 1996: 121–122). But who holds these values; whose values are they? The utilitarian model is predicated on the belief that the ends READING AND WRITING INTERPRETATION

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justify the means (Kvale 1996: 122), thus the “wrongness or rightness of actions are judged by their consequences, not their intent” (Edwards and Mauthner 2002: 20). Whose consequences are being considered; whose means are being used, best for whom? It is necessary to contrast these two universalist models with feminist and critical pedagogically informed ethical models (ibid.: 21). Contingent feminist ethical models work outward from personal experience, and from local systems of meaning and truth, to social contexts where experience is shaped by nurturing social relationships based on care, respect, and love. The researcher is an insider to the group, not an outsider (Smith 1999: 139). The desire is to enact a locally situated, contingent, feminist, communitarian ethic that respects and protects the rights, interests, and sensitivities of those one is working with, including ideas specific to the cultural context (ibid.: 119; Denzin 1997: 275). Contingent ethical models have been adopted by social-science professional associations that often navigate between universal normative models and contingent ethical directives (Edwards and Mauthner 2002: 21). Such guidelines are then meant to guide the researcher when the kinds of pitfalls and dilemmas that Conquergood identifies are encountered. These professional guidelines do not include a space for culturally specific ethical ideas and values. Within specific contexts—for instance, the Maori—specific ethical values and rules are prescribed in cultural terms. These understandings include showing respect for others, listening, sharing, and being generous, cautious, and humble. Smith is quite explicit. “From indigenous perspectives ethical codes of conduct serve partly the same purposes as the protocols which govern our relationships with each other and with the environment” (Smith 1999: 120). In contrast to social science codes of ethics and the protocols used by human subject review boards, critical pedagogy seeks to enact a situationally contingent ethic that is compatible with indigenous values. This ethic is predicated on a pedagogy of hope. It is based on values shared in the group. It blends intentions with 168

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consequences. It presumes that well-intended, trusting, honest, virtuous persons engage in moral acts that have positive consequences for others. This is a communitarian dialogical ethic of care and responsibility. It presumes that performances occur within sacred aesthetic spaces where research does not operate as a dirty word. It presumes that performers treat persons, their cares, and their concerns with dignity and respect. Indeed, the values that structure the performance are those shared by the community and its members. These values include care, trust, and reciprocity. Because of these shared understandings, this model assumes that there will be few ethical dilemmas requiring negotiation. A feminist, communitarian performance ethic is utopian in vision. While criticizing systems of injustice and oppression, it imagines how things could be different. It enacts a performance pedagogy of radical democratic hope. “What African American minstrels created was a new form of theater based in the skills of the performers, not their ability to conform to stereotypes” (Bean 2001: 187–88). An empowering performance pedagogy frames the third issue that must be addressed. The multivoiced performance text enacts a pedagogy of hope. A critical consciousness is invoked. The performance event engenders moral discernment that guides social transformation (Christians 2000; Denzin 2003: 112). The performance text is grounded in the cruelties and injustices of daily life. Like Boal’s radical theatre, a documentary-drama format may be used, drawing on current events and media accounts of these events. A radical performance ethic is grounded in a politics of resistance. The performance must be ethically honest. It must be dialogical, seeking to locate dialogue and meaningful exchange in the radical center. The other always exists, as Trinh (1989) would argue, in the spaces on each side of the hyphen (Conquergood 1985: 9). The performance text can be only dialogic, a text that does not speak about or for the other but that “speaks to and with them” (ibid.: 10). It is a text that reengages the past and brings it alive in the present. The dialogic text attempts to keep the dialogue, the READING AND WRITING INTERPRETATION

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conversation—between text, the past, the present, performer, and audience—ongoing and open-ended (ibid.: 9). This text does more than invoke empathy, it interrogates, criticizes, and empowers. This is dialogical criticism. The dialogical performance is the means for “honest intercultural understanding” (ibid.: 10). If this understanding is to be created, the following elements need to be present. Scholars must have the energy, imagination, courage, and commitment to create these texts (ibid.). Audiences must be drawn to the sites where these performances take place, and they must be willing to suspend normal aesthetic frameworks, so that coparticipatory performances can be produced. Boal is clear on this: “In the Theatre of the Oppressed we try to . . . make the dialogue between stage and audience totally transitive” (1995: 42). In these sites, a shared field of emotional experience is created, and in these moments of sharing, critical cultural awareness is awakened. Critical pedagogical theater creates dialogical performances that follow these directives from Augusto Boal (ibid.): Show how 1. Every oppressed person is a subjugated subversive. 2. The Cop in our Head represents our submission to this oppression. 3. Each person possesses the ability to be subversive. 4. Critical Pedagogical Theater can empower persons to be subversive while making their submission to oppression disappear. The coperformed text aims to enact a feminist communitarian moral ethic. This ethic presumes a dialogical view of the self and its performances. It seeks narratives that ennoble human experience, performances that facilitate civic transformations in the public and private spheres. This ethic ratifies the dignities of the self and honors personal struggle. It understands cultural criticism to be a form of empowerment, arguing that empowerment begins in that ethical moment when individuals are lead into the troubling spaces occupied by others. In the moment of coperformance, lives are joined and struggle begins anew. 170

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Ethical injunctions: Does this performance 1. Nurture critical [race] consciousness? 2. Use historical restagings and traditional texts to subvert and critique official ideology? 3. Heal? Empower? 4. Avoid Conquergood’s four pitfalls? 5. Enact a feminist, communitarian, socially contingent ethic? 6. Present a pedagogy of hope? The critical imagination is radically democratic, pedagogical, and interventionist. This imagination dialogically inserts itself into the world, provoking conflict, curiosity, criticism, and reflection. Performance autoethnography contributes to a conception of education and democracy as pedagogies of freedom. As praxis, performance ethnography is a way of acting on the world in order to change it.

THE POLITICS OF INTERPRETATION Writing, Richardson (2001: 879) asserts, is not an innocent practice, although in the social sciences and the humanities there is only interpretation. Nonetheless, Marx (1888/1983: 158) continues to remind us that we are in the business of not just interpreting but of changing the world. Qualitative researchers who write interpretive texts have four lessons to learn from the recent poststructural, postmodern turns in qualitative inquiry. Each lesson involves the social text and the study of lived experience. First, the worlds we study are created through the texts we write. We do not study lived experience, we study (and create) lived textuality. Experience is always mediated and shaped by prior textual and cultural understandings that are then reinscribed in the social text. Second, the social text is a performance, performative writing, a visual construction, a re-representation of the dialogue, voice, and actions of the other. Through the lens of the text the reader confronts the other, whose partial presence is given in quotes and READING AND WRITING INTERPRETATION

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excerpts from talk. These visual representations and performances of voice and presence are textual constructions, specular displays of the other’s lived textuality. Third, there is no external authority for these textual representations. Their legitimation cannot be given by invoking a reality that lies outside the text. Traditionally, the province of validity, a text’s legitimacy has been grounded in its connection to what is observed, measured, or investigated. These external realities confer or withhold various honors for the text. A text has, for example, high or low versions of construct, external, internal, instrumental, pragmatic, predictive, concurrent, face, apparent, or consensual validity. Or its findings are trustworthy, credible, dependable, confirmable, and transferrable. Validity, a text’s claim to authority, can be given only internally, by the claims and spaces it makes and offers to the reader. Fourth, the authority of a text rests on an experiential structure that moves in three directions at the same time. The text must reach out from the writer to the world studied. It must articulate a set of self-referential experiences that allow the writer to make sense of and understand this world in moral and political terms. Finally, the text must speak back to the world it describes. The intention, with each of these textual moves, is not to convince the reader, the writer, or the other that this interpretation constitutes the most valid or correct version of the “Truth.” Understanding is desired, the guiding question is simple. “Have I as a writer created an experiential text that allows me (and you) to understand what I have studied?” Understanding occurs when you (and I) are able to interpret what has been described within a framework that is subjectively, emotionally, and causally meaningful. This is the verisimilitude of the experiential text, a text that does not map or attempt to reproduce the real. The goal is the production of a text that creates its own conditions of understanding. This form of verisimilitude is textual. This text rests on that version of the world I have entered and studied. It articulates the emotional, moral, and political meanings this world has for me. It works outward from my biography 172

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to a body of experiences that have made a difference in my life and, I hope, in the lives of others. Such texts move readers and writers to action. They mark and re-inscribe passing epiphanical experience and give it meaning, allowing others to vicariously share in that experience. They reanchor the text in its historical moment and define the writer as a storyteller who has something important to say about this moment and its personal and public troubles. Experientially grounded, these texts speak alongside the voices of science, privileging the personal over the institutional. So conceived, this form of textuality challenges empirical science’s hegemonic control over qualitative inquiry. Refusing the identity of empirical science, the experiential text becomes a form of social criticism that no longer seeks validation in scientific discourse.

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Chapter 8

EMANCIPATORY DISCOURSES, AND THE ETHICS AND POLITICS OF INTERPRETATION1 From the vantage point of the colonized, a position from which I write, and choose to privilege, the term research is inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism. The word itself, research, is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary. (L. Tuhiwai Smith 1999: 1) A story grows from the inside out and the inside of Navajoland is something I know little of. But I do know myself if I begin traveling with an awareness of my own ignorance, trusting my instincts, I can look for my own stories embedded in the landscapes I travel through . . . I am not suggesting we emulate Native Peoples—in this case, the Navajo. We can’t. We are not Navajo. Besides their traditional stories don’t work for us. It’s like drinking another man’s medicine. Their stories hold meaning for us only as examples. They can teach us what is possible. We must create and find our own stories, our own myths. (Terry Tempest Williams 1984: 3, 5)

This chapter, in the form of a manifesto, invites indigenous and non-indigenous qualitative researchers to think through the implications of a practical, progressive politics of performative inquiry2—an emancipatory discourse connecting indigenous epistemologies (Rains, Archibald, and Deyhle 2000: 338) and theories of decolonization3 and the postcolonial4 (Soto 2004: ix; Swadener and Mutua 2004: 255) with critical pedagogy, with new ways of reading, writing, and performing culture in the first decade of a new century (Kincheloe and McLaren 2000: 285).5 175

I believe the performance-based human disciplines can contribute to radical social change, to economic justice, to a utopian cultural politics that extends localized critical [race] theory and the principles of a radical democracy to all aspects of decolonizing, indigenous societies (Giroux 2000a: x, 25; Kaomea 2004: 31; L. Smith 2000: 228; Swadener and Mutua 2004: 257). I advocate change that “envisions a democracy founded in a social justice that is ‘not yet’” (Weems 2002: 3). I believe that non-indigenous interpretive scholars should be part of this project (see Denzin 2004). How this endeavor is implemented in any specific indigenous context should be determined by indigenous peoples. I also believe that this initiative should be part of a larger conversation—namely, the global decolonizing discourse connected to the works of anticolonialist scholars and artists, including First Nation, Native American, Alaskan, Australian aboriginal, New Zealand Maori, and native Hawaiian peoples (Denzin, Lincoln, and Smith 2008; also Mutua and Swadener 2004; L. Smith 1999).6 A postcolonial, indigenous participatory theater is central to this discourse (Balme and Carstensen 2001; Greenwood 2001).7 Contemporary indigenous playwrights and performers revisit and make a mockery of 19th-century racist practices. They interrogate and turn the tables on blackface minstrelsy and the global colonial theater that reproduced racist politics through specific cross-race and cross-gender performances. They show how colonial performers used whiteface and blackface to construct oppressive models of whiteness, blackness, gender, and national identity (Gilbert 2003; Kondo 2000: 83). Indigenous theater nurtures a critical transnational, yet historically specific, critical race [and class] consciousness. It uses indigenous performance as a means of political representation and critique (Magowan 2000: 311; but see also Darder and Torres 2004: 107). Indigenous theater reflexively uses historical restagings, masquerade, ventriloquism, and doubly inverted performances involving male and female impersonators to create a subversive theater that undermines colonial racial representations 176

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(Bean 2001: 187–188). This theater incorporates traditional indigenous and non-indigenous cultural texts into frameworks that disrupt colonial models of race and class relations. It takes up key diasporic concerns, including those of memory, cultural loss, disorientation, violence, and exploitation (Balme and Carstensen 2001: 45). This is a utopian theater that addresses issues of equity, healing, and social justice.8

Consider the following: In House Arrest (2003), Anna Deavere Smith offers “an epic view of slavery, sexual misconduct, and the American presidency.” Twelve actors, some in blackface, “play across lines of race, age, and gender to “become” Bill Clinton, Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings . . . and a vast array of historical and contemporary figures. (Kondo 2000: 81) In Native Canadian Bill Moses’s play Almighty Voice and His Wife (1993), Native performers, wearing whiteface minstrel masks, mock such historical figures as Wild Bill Cody, Sitting Bull, and young Indian maidens called Sweet Sioux. (Gilbert 2003: 692) In Sidney, Australia aboriginal theatre groups perform statements of their indigenous rights demanding that politicians participate in these performance events “as coproducers of meaning rather than as tacit consumers.” (Magowan 2000: 317–318)

Thus do indigenous performances function as strategies of critique and empowerment.

The Decade of the World’s Indigenous Peoples (1994–2004) has ended (Henderson 2000: 168). Non-indigenous scholars have yet to learn from it, to learn that it is time to dismantle, deconstruct, and decolonize Western epistemologies from within, to learn that research does not have to be a dirty word, to learn that EMANCIPATORY DISCOURSES, AND THE ETHICS

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research is always already political and at least sometimes (even for postpositivists) moral. Shaped by the sociological imagination (Mills 1959), building on George Herbert Mead’s discursive, performative model of the act (1938: 460), critical qualitative research imagines and explores the multiple ways in which performance can be understood, including as imitation, or mimesis; as poiesis, or construction; as kinesis, movement, gendered bodies in motion, (Conquergood 1998: 31; Pollock 1998: 43). The researcher-as-performer moves from a view of performance as imitation, or dramaturgical staging (Goffman 1959), to an emphasis on performance as liminality, construction (McLaren 1999), to a view of performance as embodied struggle, as an intervention, as breaking and remaking, as kinesis, as a sociopolitical act (Conquergood 1998: 32). Viewed as struggles and interventions, performances and performance events become gendered transgressive achievements, political accomplishments that break through “sedimented meanings and normative traditions” (ibid.). It is this performative model of emancipatory decolonized indigenous research that I develop here (Garorian 1999; Gilbert 2003; Kondo 2000; Madison 1999). Drawing on Garorian (1999), Du Bois (1926), Gilbert (2003), Madison (1998), Magowan (2000), Pollock (1998), and Anna Deavere Smith (2003), this model proposes a utopic performative politics of resistance (see below). Extending indigenous initiatives, this model is committed to a form of revolutionary, catalytic political theater, a project that provokes and enacts pedagogies of dissent for the new millennium (McLaren 1997b).

My argument unfolds in several parts. Drawing throughout from an ongoing performance text, I begin with a set of obstacles that confront the non-indigenous critical theorist. I then briefly discuss race, the call to performance, and the history of indigenous theater. I next take up a group of terms and arguments, including indigenous epistemology, pedagogy, discourses of resistance, politics as performance, and counternarratives as 178

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critical inquiry. A variety of indigenous pedagogies are briefly discussed, as is indigenous research as localized critical theory. I elaborate variations within the personal narrative approach to decolonized inquiry, extending Richardson’s model of creative analytic practices, or what she calls CAP ethnography (2000: 929). A politics of resistance is next outlined. I conclude with a discussion of indigenous models of power, truth, ethics and social justice. In the spirit of Du Bois, Dewey, Mead, Blumer, hooks, and West, I intend to create a dialogue between the indigenous and non-indigenous qualitative research community. I want to move our discourse more fully into the spaces of a global yet localized progressive, performative pragmatism. I want to extend those political impulses within the feminist pragmatist tradition, which imagines a radical, democratic utopia. In the style of Du Bois, hooks, and West, these impulses constantly interrogate the relevance of pragmatism and critical theory for race relations and inequality in the global neoliberal capitalist state.

A CAVEAT In proposing a conversation between indigenous and nonindigenous discourses I am mindful of several difficulties. First, the legacy of the helping Western colonizing other must be resisted. As Linda Smith observes: “They came, They saw, They named, They Claimed” (1999: 80). As agents of colonial power, Western scientists discovered, extracted, appropriated, commodified, and distributed knowledge about the indigenous other. Maoris, for example, contend that these practices place control over research in the hands of the Western scholar. This means, Bishop argues that Maori are excluded from discussions concerning who has control over the initiation, the methodologies, evaluations, assessments, representations, and distribution of the newly defined knowledge (2005). The decolonization project challenges these practices that perpetuate Western power by misrepresenting and essentializing indigenous persons, often denying them a voice or an identity (ibid.). EMANCIPATORY DISCOURSES, AND THE ETHICS

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Second, however, critical, interpretive performance theory, and critical race theory, without modification will not work within indigenous settings. The criticisms of G. Smith (2000), L. Smith (1999, 2000), Bishop (1994, 1998), Battiste (2000a, b), Churchill (1996), Cook-Lynn (1998), and others make this very clear. Critical theory’s criteria for self-determination and empowerment perpetuate neocolonial sentiments while turning the indigenous person into an essentialized “other” who is spoken for (Bishop 2005). The categories of race, gender, and racialized identities cannot be turned into frozen, essential terms, and racial identity is not a free-floating signifier (Grande 2000: 348). Critical theory must be localized, grounded in the specific meanings, traditions, customs, and community relations that operate in each indigenous setting. Localized critical theory can work if the goals of critique, resistance, struggle, and emancipation are not treated as if they have “universal characteristics that are independent of history, context, and agency” (L. Smith 2000: 229). Third, there is a pressing need to decolonize and deconstruct those structures within the Western academy that privilege Western knowledge systems and their epistemologies (Mutua and Swadener 2004: 10; Semaili and Kincheloe 1999). Indigenous knowledge systems are too frequently made into objects of study, treated as if they were instances of quaint folk theory held by the members of a primitive culture. The decolonizing project reverses this equation, making Western systems of knowledge the object of inquiry. Fourth (paraphrasing L. Smith [2005]), the spaces between decolonizing research practices and indigenous communities must be carefully and cautiously articulated. They are fraught with uncertainty. Neoliberal and neoconservative political economies turn knowledge about indigenous peoples into a commodity. There are conflicts between competing epistemological and ethical frameworks, including institutional human subject research regulations. Research is regulated by positivist epistemologies. Indigenous scholars and native intellectuals are pressed to produce technical knowledge that conforms to Western standards of truth and validity. Conflicts over who initiates and who benefits 180

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from such research are especially problematic (Bishop 2005). Culturally responsive research practices must be developed. Such practices locate power within the indigenous community. What is acceptable or not acceptable research is determined and defined from within the community. Such work encourages selfdetermination and empowerment (ibid.). Fifth, in arguing for a dialogue between critical and indigenous theories I recognize that I am an outsider to the indigenous colonized experience. I write as a privileged Westerner. At the same time, I seek to be an “allied other” (Kaomea 2004: 32; Mutua and Swadener 2004: 4), a fellow traveler of sorts, an antipositivist, an insider who wishes to deconstruct from within the Western academy and its positivist epistemologies. I endorse a critical epistemology that contests notions of objectivity and neutrality. I believe that all inquiry is moral and political. I value autoethnographic, insider, participatory, collaborative methodologies (Fine et al. 2003). These are narrative, performative methodologies—research practices that are reflexively consequential, ethical, critical, respectful, and humble. These practices require that scholars live with the consequences of their research actions (L. Smith 1999: 137–139).

In proposing a dialogue between indigenous and non-indigenous qualitative researchers, in positioning myself as an “allied other,” I am mindful of Terry Tempest Williams’s cautious advice about borrowing stories and narratives from indigenous peoples. In her autoethnography, Pieces of White Shell: A Journey to Navajoland, she praises the wisdom of Navajo storytellers and the stories they tell (1984: 3). But she warns the reader: we cannot emulate Native Peoples. “We are not Navajo . . . their traditional stories don’t work for us. Their stories hold meaning for us only as examples. They can teach us what is possible. We must create our own stories” (ibid.: 5). As a non-indigenous scholar seeking a dialogue with indigenous scholars I must construct stories that are embedded EMANCIPATORY DISCOURSES, AND THE ETHICS

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in the landscapes I travel through. These will be dialogical counternarratives, stories of resistance, of struggle, of hope, stories that create spaces for multicultural conversations, stories embedded in the critical democratic imagination (see the performance texts in Searching for Yellowstone, Denzin 2008; also Chapter 13 of this volume).

RACE, INDIGENOUS OTHERS, AND THE CALL TO PERFORMANCE Many qualitative researchers and interpretive ethnographers are in the Eighth Moment, performing culture as they write it, understanding that the dividing line between performativity (doing) and performance (done) has disappeared (Conquergood 1998: 25). But even as this disappearance occurs, matters of racial injustice remain. The indigenous other is a racialized other. On this, W. E. B. Du Bois reminds us that “the problem of the 21st century, on a global scale, will be the problem of the color line . . . modern democracy cannot succeed unless peoples of different races and religions are also integrated into the democratic whole” (Du Bois 1978 [1901]: 281, 288). This whole cannot be imposed by one culture or nation on another; it must come from within the culture itself. Du Bois addressed race from a performance standpoint. He understood that “from the arrival of the first African slaves on American soil . . . the definitions and meanings of blackness have been intricately linked to issues of theatre and performance” (Elam 2001: 4).9 In his manifesto for an all-black, indigenous theater, Du Bois (1926) imagined a site for pedagogical performances that articulate positive black “social and cultural agency” (Elam 2001: 6). His radical theater (1926: 134), like that of Anna Deavere Smith’s (2003), is a political theater about blacks, written by blacks, for blacks, performed by blacks in local theaters. Radical indigenous theater wields a weapon to fight racism and white privilege. Gilbert (2003) elaborates, showing how indigenous whiteface performances unsettle fixed racial categories based on skin color; 182

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“such acts . . . remind us of the historical role played by theater in negotiating suppressed fears and fantasies of colonizing nations” (Gilbert 2003: 680).

A Brief History of Indigenous Theater The origins of blackface minstrelsy in the United States is traced by Lhamon (1998) to the early 1800s and marketplace transactions in New York City. By the 1840s, white performers in blackface were using blackness as a way to represent the color of nonwhite persons, including African Americans, Chinese, Native Americans, and Japanese (Bean 2001: 173). The “first black minstrels . . . existed as early as 1850” (ibid.: 177), and within a short time African-American male and female impersonators were engaged in satiric, subversive performances that were critical of white stereotypes of blacks (ibid.: 187). On this, Ellison observes that black performers were tricksters, playing a joke on the white audience, laughing all the time behind their backs, understanding that blackface was a “counterfeiting of the black American’s identity” (1964: 53). Thus by the mid-19th century, a subversive theater was born within the racist institution of minstrelsy. Blackface minstrelsy was the “symptomatic 19th-century stage form for an era of territorial expansion, not just in the United States but also in other settler colonies with growing non-indigenous populations” (Gilbert 2003: 683). From the 1850s forward, minstrelsy had a transnational presence in the performances of touring groups who performed in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States, Britain, Germany, France. Italy, India, Jamaica, Nigeria, and South Africa (ibid.). The American minstrel shop traveled to the popular stage in the Canadian West, where its subject matter included narratives about runaway slaves and Native Canadians (ibid.). William Cody’s Wild West show toured Europe offering audiences a Far East section called the “Dream of the Orient” (Reddin 1999: 158). In each of its geographical formations the minstrel show validated racism and imperialism. At the same time, indigenous performance companies were contributing to a counter-hegemonic discourse. This discourse EMANCIPATORY DISCOURSES, AND THE ETHICS

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embodied the reflexive critical race consciousness identified by Ellison (1964). Persons of color knew they were performing stereotyped identities for white. Through the use of humor they engaged in a form of self-or role-distance from that identity (Goffman 1959). Indians playing Indians for whites, and blacks playing blacks for whites were engaged in reflexive, doubly inverted performances mocking and ridiculing white racist stereotypes. Thus does indigenous theater criticize the racial masquerade behind blackface. In such performances, the performativity of race is revealed. The indigenous performer in whiteface (and blackface) peels back, as in pentimento, the colors and shades of whiteness, showing that “white is a color that exists only because some of us get told we’re black or yellow or Indians” (Gilbert 2003: 687, 689). Using a ventriloquized discourse, the whiteface performer forces spectators to confront themselves as “mirrored/parodied in the whiteface minstrel mask” (ibid.: 693). Native Canadian whiteface performers in David Moses’s play, Almighty Voice and His Wife (1992), deploy ventriloquism to turn the tables on whites. In the stand-up section, just before the finale, the Interlocutor, dressed in top hat and tails, black trousers, tie, white gloves, and studded white boots, taunts the audience: You’re that redskin! You’re that wagon burner! That feather head, Chief Bullshit. No, Chief Shitting Bull! Oh, no, no. Blood thirsty savage. Yes, you’re primitive, uncivilized, a cantankerous cannibal. Unruly redman, you lack human intelligence! Stupidly stoic, sick, demented, foaming at the maws! Weirdly mad and dangerous, alcoholic, diseased, dirty, filthy, stinking, ill-fated degenerate race, vanishing, dying lazy, mortifying. (ibid.: 94–95; quoted in Gilbert 2003: 693)

Through double coding, race and gender exchanges and the use of minstrel tropes, Moses has Indians criticizing Indians playing Indians. In this way he “critiques . . . Indian stereotypes” (ibid.: 692) even as he reflexively stages a grotesque spectacle of “Native performers enacting their own objectification” (ibid.: 693). 184

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Such performances function as genealogies. They document the “historical dissemination of particular performance practices across space and time” (ibid.: 696). By manipulating the tropes of minstrelsy, indigenous performers use whiteface and blackface to critique specific colonial practices. Thus Aboriginal Australians in whiteface performances protest the colonial habit of poisoning Aborigines with flour, just as Moses uses Indians in whiteface in his reenactment of the Massacre at Wounded Knee (ibid.). In these ways, whiteface “is continually subjected to processes of citation and appropriation that triangulate white, black, and indigenous performance traditions in complex ways” (ibid.). Thus does indigenous theater expose whiteness in its ordinary and extreme forms. Made visible as a repressive sign of violent racial domination, whiteness “is forced to show its colors” (ibid.: 698).

bell hooks observes that, as children, she and her sisters learned about race in America by watching the Ed Sullivan show on Sunday nights: seeing on that show the great Louis Armstrong, Daddy who was usually silent, would talk about the music, the way Armstrong was being treated, and the political implications of his appearance . . . responding to televised cultural production, black people could express rage about. (hooks 1990: 3–4)

INDIGENOUS VOICES, CRITICAL PEDAGOGY, AND EPISTEMOLOGIES OF RESISTANCE Sandoval (2000), Collins (1998), Mutua and Swadener (2004), Bishop (2005), and Lopez (1998) observe that we are in the midst of “a large-scale social movement of anticolonialist discourse” (Lopez 1998: 226). This movement is evident in the emergence and proliferation of indigenous epistemologies and methodologies (Sandoval 2000), including the arguments of African-American, EMANCIPATORY DISCOURSES, AND THE ETHICS

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Chicano, Latina/o, Native-American, First-Nation, Hawaiian, and Maori scholars. These epistemologies are forms of critical pedagogy; that is, they embody a critical politics of representation that is embedded in the rituals of indigenous communities. Always already political, they are relentlessly critical of transnational capitalism and its destructive presence in the indigenous world (see Kincheloe and McLaren 2000).

Epistemologies of Resistance Indigenous pedagogies are grounded in an oppositional consciousness that resists “neocolonizing postmodern global formations” (Sandoval 2000: 1–2). These pedagogies fold theory, epistemology, methodology, and praxis into strategies of resistance unique to each indigenous community. Thus the oppositional consciousness of Kaupapa Maori research, is like, but unlike, Black Feminist Epistemology (Collins 1991, 1998), Chicano feminisms (Anzaldua 1987; Moraga 1995); Red Pedagogy (Grande 2000; Harjo and Bird 1997), and Hawaiian epistemology (Meyer 2003). Still, there is a commitment to an indigenism, to an indigenist outlook, which, after Ward Churchill, assigns the highest priority to the rights of indigenous peoples, to the traditions, bodies of knowledge and values that have “evolved over many thousands of years by native peoples the world over” (1996: 509). Indigenist pedagogies are informed, in varying and contested ways, by decolonizing revolutionary and socialist feminisms. Such feminisms, in turn, address issues of social justice, equal rights, and nationalisms of “every racial, ethnic, gender, sex, class, religion, or loyalist type” (Sandoval 2000: 7). Underlying each indigenist formation is a commitment to moral praxis, to issues of self-determination, empowerment, healing, love, community solidarity, respect for the earth, respect for elders. Indigenists resist the positivist and postpositivist methodologies of Western science, because these formations are too frequently used to validate colonizing knowledge about indigenous peoples. Indigenists deploy, instead, interpretive strategies 186

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and skills fitted to the needs, language, and traditions of their respective indigenous community. These strategies emphasize personal performance narratives and testimonios.

A Maori Pedagogy As an example, Maori scholar Russell Bishop (1994, 1998, 2005) presents a collaborative, participatory epistemological model of Kaupapa Maori research. This model is characterized by the absence of a need to be in control, by a desire to be connected to and to be a part of a moral community where a primary goal is the compassionate understanding of another’s moral position (Bishop 1998: 203; Heshusius 1994). The indigenist researcher wants to participate in a collaborative, altruistic relationship in which nothing “is desired for the self ” (ibid.: 207), in which research is evaluated by participantdriven criteria, by the cultural values and practices that circulate, for example, in Maori culture, including metaphors stressing selfdetermination, the sacredness of relationships, embodied understanding, and the priority of community over self. Researchers are led to develop new story lines and criteria of evaluation reflecting these understandings. These participantdriven criteria function as resources for resisting positivist and neoconservative desires to “establish and maintain control of the criteria for evaluating Maori experience” (ibid.: 212). Extending Sandoval, indigenists enact an ethically democratizing stance that is committed to “equalizing power differentials between humans” (Sandoval 2000: 114). The goal “is to consolidate and extend . . . manifestos of liberation in order to better identify and specify a mode of emancipation that is effective within first world decolonizing global conditions during the 21st century” (ibid.: 2).

Treaties as Pedagogy These pedagogies confront and work through governmental treaties, ideological formations, historical documents, and broken promises that connect the indigenist group and its fate to the EMANCIPATORY DISCOURSES, AND THE ETHICS

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colonizing capitalist state. Thus, for example, during the “first 90-odd years of its existence the United States entered into and ratified more than 370 separate treaties . . . [and] has . . .; defaulted on its responsibilities under every single treaty obligation it ever incurred with regard to Indians” (Churchill 1996: 516–517; also Stirling 1965). First Nation tribes in Canada did not have Aboriginal rights recognized in law until the Constitution Act of 1982 (Henderson 2000: 165). In New Zealand, Maori debate the Treaty of Waitangi, which was signed between Maori chiefs and the British Crown in 1840. This treaty was defined as a charter for power sharing between Maori and Pakeha, or white settlers, but it subjugated Maori to the Pakeha nation-state and its economic, educational, and political practices (Bishop 2005; L. Smith 1999: 57). Pedagogically, these treaties inscribed and prescribed only one way of being indigenous—that is, as a person subservient to the colonial powers-to-be. When Rigoberta Menchu accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of indigenes, she reminded her audience that “we indigenous Peoples attach a great importance to the Treaties, Agreements, and other constructive accords that have been reached between Indigenous Peoples and the former colonial powers or states. They should be fully respected in order to establish new and harmonious relationships based on mutual respect and cooperation” (quoted in Cook-Lynn 2001: 34). Thus does Menchu announce an ethical tenet, a requirement that the agreements of the past be respected, held as sacred truths (ibid.: 35). Linda Tuhiwai Smith observes that the attempt of Maori “to engage in the activities of the state through the mechanisms of the Treaty of Waitangi have won some space . . . [but] this space is severely limited . . . as it has had to be wrestled not only from the state but also from the community of positivist scientists whose regard for Maori is not sympathetic” (2000: 232). What is “now referred to as Kaupapa Maori research’” (ibid.: 224) is an attempt to find a space and set of practices that honors Maori culture, convinces Maori people of the value of research for Maori, and shows the Pakeha (white) research community of the need for greater Maori involvement in research. Kaupapa Maori research 188

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is culturally safe and relevant and involves the mentorship of Maori (ibid.: 228).

A Red Pedagogy Native American indigenous scholars thicken the argument by articulating a spoken, indigenous epistemology “developed over thousands of years of sustained living on this Land” (Rains, Archibald, and Deyhle 2000: 337, italics in original). An American-Indian Red Pedagogy (Grande 2000) criticizes simplistic readings of race, ethnicity, and identity. This Red Pedagogy privileges personal identity performance narratives. These are stories and poetry that emphasize self-determination and indigenous theory (Brayboy 2000). For Grande, Red Pedagogy has four characteristics: (1) politically, it maintains “a quest for sovereignty, and the dismantling of global capitalism”; (2) epistemologically, it privileges indigenous knowledge; (3) the Earth is its “spiritual center”; (4) socioculturally, Red Pedagogy is grounded in “tribal and traditional ways of life” (2000: 355). The performance of these rituals validates traditional ways of life. The performance embodies the ritual. It is the ritual. In this sense the performance becomes a form of public pedagogy. It uses the aesthetic to foreground cultural meaning and to teach these meanings to performers and audience members alike.

A Hawaiian Pedagogy Manulani Aluli Meyer’s discussion of Hawaiian epistemology complements a Red Pedagogy. A Hawaiian pedagogy resists colonial systems of knowing and educating (2003: 192). It fights for an authentic Hawaiian identity (ibid.). It defines epistemology culturally; that is, there are specific Hawaiian ways of knowing and being in the world (ibid.: 187). Seven themes, organized around spirituality, physical space, the cultural nature of the senses, relational knowing, practical knowing, language as being, and the unity of mind and body shape this epistemology (ibid.: 193). This framework stresses the performative place of morality in knowledge production. Culture restores culture. Culture is sacred. EMANCIPATORY DISCOURSES, AND THE ETHICS

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Culture is performed. Spirituality is basic to culture. It is sensuous and embodied, involving the senses—taste, sight, smell, hearing, and touch. Knowledge is experienced and expressed in sensuous terms, in stories and critical personal narratives focusing on the importance of practice and repetition (ibid.: 185). Knowledge is relational. The self knows itself through the other. Knowing the other and the self locates the person in a relational context. This involves harmony, balance, being generous, responsible, being a good listener, being kind.

Decolonizing the Academy As argued above, critical indigenist pedagogy contests the complicity of the modern university with neocolonial forces (Battiste 2000a: xi). It encourages and empowers indigenous peoples to make colonizers confront and be accountable for the traumas of colonization. In rethinking and radically transforming the colonizing encounter, this pedagogy imagines a postcolonial society and academy that honor difference and promote healing. A decolonized academy is interdisciplinary and politically proactive. It respects indigenous epistemologies and encourages interpretive, first-person methodologies. It honors different versions of science and empirical activity, and it values cultural criticism in the name of social justice. It seeks models of human subject research that are not constrained by biomedical, positivist assumptions. It turns the academy and its classrooms into sacred spaces, sites where indigenous and non-indigenous scholars interact, share experiences, take risks, explore alternative modes of interpretation, and participate in a shared agenda, coming together in a spirit of hope, love, shared community. This decolonizing project attempts to rebuild nations, communities, and their people through the use of restorative indigenous ecologies. These native ecologies celebrate survival, remembering, sharing, gendering, new forms of naming, networking, protecting, and democratizing daily life (Battiste 2000b; L. Smith 1999: 142–162). 190

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Theory, method, and epistemology are aligned in this project, anchored in the moral philosophies that are taken for granted in Maori and other indigenous cultures and language communities (L. Smith 2000: 225). A pedagogy of emancipation and empowerment is endorsed, a pedagogy that encourages struggles for autonomy, cultural well-being, cooperation, collective responsibility. This pedagogy demands that indigenous groups own the research process. It speaks the truth “to people about the reality of their lives” (Collins 1998: 198). It equips them with the tools to resist oppression, and it moves them to struggle, to search for justice (ibid.: 198–199).

Indigenous Research as Localized Critical Theory In these commitments, indigenous epistemologies overlap with critical theory. Indeed, Linda Smith (2000) connects her version of indigenous inquiry, Kaupapa Maori research, with critical theory and cultural studies, suggesting, with Graham Smith (2000), that Kaupapa Maori research is a “local theoretical position that is the modality through which the emancipatory goal of critical theory, in a specific historical, political, and social context is practised” (L. Smith 2000: 229; also Bishop 2005). However, critical theory is fitted to the Maori worldview, which asserts that Maori are connected to the universe and their place in it through the principle of Whakapapa. This principle tells Maori that they are the seeds or direct descendents of the heavens. Through this principle, Maori trace themselves to the very beginning of time (L. Smith 2000: 234–235). Whakapapa. turns the universe into a moral space where all things great and small are interconnected, including science and research. The local, which localizes critical theory, is always historically specific. The local is grounded in the politics, circumstances, and economies of a particular moment, a particular time and place, a particular set of problems, struggles, and desires. A politics of resistance and possibility (Madison 1998; Pollock 1998) is embedded in the local. This is a politics that confronts and breaks through local structures of resistance and oppression. This is a politics that EMANCIPATORY DISCOURSES, AND THE ETHICS

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asks: “Who writes for whom? Who is representing indigenous peoples, how, for what purposes, for which audiences—who is doing science for whom?” (L. Smith 1999: 37). Smith argues that a critical politics of interpretation leads the Maori to ask eight questions about any research project, including those projects guided by critical theory: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

What research do we want done? Whom is it for? What difference will it make? Who will carry it out? How do we want the research done? How will we know it is worthwhile? Who will own the research? Who will benefit? (L. Smith 2000: 239)

These questions are addressed to Maori and non-Maori alike. They must be answered in the affirmative; that is, Maori must conduct, own, and benefit from any research that is done on or for them. These eight questions serve to interpret critical theory through a moral lens, through key Maori principles, including whakapapa. They shape the moral space that aligns Kaupapa Maori research with critical theory. Thus both formations are situated within the antipositivist debate; they both rest on antifoundational epistemologies. Each privileges performative issues of gender, race, class, equity, and social justice. Each develops its own understandings of community, critique, resistance, struggle, and emancipation (ibid.: 228). Each understands that the outcome of a struggle can never be predicted in advance, that struggle is always local, and contingent. It is never final (ibid.: 229). By localizing discourses of resistance, and by connecting these discourses to performance ethnography and critical pedagogy, Kaupapa Maori research enacts what critical theory “actually offers to oppressed, marginalized and silenced groups . . .. [That is,] through emancipation groups such as the Maori would take greater control of their own lives and humanity” (ibid.). This model requires that indigenous groups “take hold of the project 192

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of emancipation and attempt to make it a reality on their own terms” (ibid.). This means that inquiry is always political and moral, grounded in principles centered on autonomy, home, family, kinship, on a collective community vision that requires that research not be a “purchased product . . . owned by the state” (ibid.: 231). Localized critical indigenous theory encourages indigenists to confront key challenges connected to the meanings of science, community, and democracy. G. Smith (2000: 212–215) and L. Smith (2000) outline these challenges, asking that indigenists: 1. Be proactive; they should name the world for themselves; further, “being Maori is an essential criterion for carrying out Kaupapa Maori research” (ibid.: 229–230); 2. Craft their own version of science and empirical activity, including how science, scientific understandings will be used in their world; 3. Develop a participatory model of democracy that goes beyond the “Westminister ‘one person, one vote, majority rule’” (G. Smith 2000: 212); 4. Use theory proactively, as an agent of change, but act in ways that are accountable to the indigenous community, not just to the academy; 5. Resist new forms of colonization, such as NAFTA, while contesting neocolonial efforts to commodify indigenous knowledge. In proactively framing participatory views of science, empirical research, democracy, and community, indigenous peoples take control of their own fate. They refuse to be sidetracked into always responding to the attempts by the state to define their life situations (ibid.: 210).

Pedagogies of Hope and Liberation In response to the continuing pressures of neocolonialism and neocolonization, L. Smith outlines some 25 different indigenous projects, including those that create, name, restore, democratize, EMANCIPATORY DISCOURSES, AND THE ETHICS

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reclaim, protect, remember, restore, and celebrate lost histories and cultural practices (1999: 142–162).10 These indigenous projects embody a pedagogy of hope and freedom. They turn the pedagogies of oppression and colonization into pedagogies of liberation. They are not purely utopian, because they map concrete performances that can lead to positive social transformations. They embody ways of resisting the process of colonization. Smith’s moral agenda privileges four interpretive, research processes. The first is decolonization, which reclaims indigenous cultural practices and reworks these practices at the political, social, spiritual, and psychological levels. Healing is the second process, and it, too, involves physical, spiritual, psychological, social, restorative processes. The third process is transformation, which focuses on changes that move back and forth from the psychological to the social, political, economic, collective levels. Mobilization, at the local, national, regional, and global levels, is the fourth basic process. It speaks to collective efforts to change Maori society. These four processes address issues of cultural survival and collective self-determination. In each instance, they work to decolonize Western methods and forms of inquiry and to empower indigenous peoples. These are the states of “being through which indigenous communities are moving” (ibid.: 116). These states involve spiritual and social practices. They are pedagogies of healing and hope, pedagogies of recovery, material practices that materially and spiritually benefit indigenous peoples.

CRITICAL PERSONAL NARRATIVE AS COUNTERNARRATIVE The move to the politics of performance has been accompanied by a shift in the meaning of ethnography and ethnographic writing. Richardson observes that the narrative genres connected to ethnographic writing have “been blurred, enlarged, altered to include poetry [and] drama” (2000: 929). She uses the term 194

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creative analytic practice (CAP) to describe these many different reflexive performance narrative forms. These forms include not only performance autoethnography but also short stories, conversations, fiction, personal narratives, creative nonfiction, photographic essays, personal essays, personal narratives of the self, writing stories, self stories, fragmented, layered texts, critical autobiography, memoirs, personal histories, cultural criticism, coconstructed performance narratives, and performance writing that blurs the edges between text, representation, and criticism. Critical personal narratives are counternarratives, testimonies, autoethnographies, performance texts, stories, and accounts that disrupt and disturb discourse by exposing the complexities and contradictions that exist under official history (Mutua and Swadener 2004: 16). The critical personal narrative is a central genre of contemporary decolonizing writing. As a creative analytic practice, it is used to criticize “prevailing structures and relationships of power and inequity in a relational context” (ibid.).11 Counternarratives, such as those given in Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom, explore the “intersections of gender and voice, border crossing, dual consciousness, multiple identities, and selfhood in a . . . postcolonial and postmodern world” (ibid.). The testimonio is another form of counternarrative. Its purpose, in part, is to raise political consciousness. In it, the writer bears witness to social injustices experienced at the group level (ibid.: 18). The testimonio has a central place in this project. Linda Tuhiwai Smith begins her discussion of the testimonio with these lines from Menchu: “My name is Rigoberta Menchu, I am 23 years old, and this is my testimony” (1984: 1). The testimonio presents oral evidence to an audience, often in the form of a monologue. Indigenous testimonios are “a way of talking about an extremely painful event or series of events.” The testimonio can be constructed as “a monologue and as a public performance” (L. Smith 1999: 144). Critics contended that Menchu made up her story, that it was not truthful and could not be verified through scientific EMANCIPATORY DISCOURSES, AND THE ETHICS

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methodology (Cook-Lynn 2001: 203; see also Beverley 2000). But as Cook-Lynn observes, respectfully remembering and honoring the past, not factual truthfulness, is how the testimonio should be read. Further, Menchu was asking that the treaty agreements of the past be respected, so that new and harmonious relationships based on mutual respect and cooperation could be built (Cook-Lynn 2001: 34). This ethical tenet and utopian impulse have been ignored by Menchu’s critics (ibid.: 35). The struggle of colonized indigenous peoples to tell their own stories is at stake in the criticisms of the testimonio. Those who question these stories because they do not exhibit so-called factual truthfulness are denying the indigenous voice its rightful place in this political discourse (ibid.: 203). The contemporary neocolonial world stages existential crises grounded in issues of race and gender. Following Turner, the indigenous performance ethnographer enters these existential spaces, writing and performing personal narratives that make racial prejudice and oppression visible (1986: 34). Focusing on racial epiphanies, the writer imposes a utopian narrative on the text, imagining how situations of racial conflict and strife could be different. The utopian, counternarrative offers hope, a politics of possibility, showing others how to engage in actions that decolonize, heal, and transform. In this way, critical personal narratives extend Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s project. Critical personal narratives embrace the democratic, storytelling imagination. These narratives are hopeful of peaceful, nonviolent change, understanding that hope, like freedom, is “an ontological need” (Freire 1999: 8). Hopeful stories are grounded in struggles and interventions that enact the sacred values of love, care, community, trust, and well-being (ibid.: 9). Hopeful stories confront and interrogate cynicism, the belief that change is not possible. The critical democratic, storytelling imagination is pedagogical. As a form of instruction, it helps persons think critically, historically, sociologically. It exposes the pedagogies of oppression that produce injustice (see Freire 2001: 54). It contributes to reflective ethical self-consciousness. It gives people a language and a set of 196

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pedagogical practices that turn oppression into struggles for freedom, despair into hope, hatred into love, doubt into trust. This ethical self-consciousness shapes a critical racial self-awareness that contributes to postcolonial utopian dreams of racial equality and racial justice.

PERFORMANCE, PEDAGOGY, AND POLITICS Clearly, the current historical moment requires morally informed performance and arts-based disciplines that will help indigenous and non-indigenous peoples recover meaning in the face of senseless, brutal violence, violence that produces voiceless screams of terror and insanity. Cynicism and despair reign on a global scale. Never have we had a greater need for a militant utopianism to help us imagine a world free of conflict, oppression, terror, and death. We need oppositional performance disciplines that will show us how to create radical utopian spaces within our public institutions. “Performance-sensitive ways of knowing” (Conquergood 1998: 26) contribute to an epistemological and political pluralism that challenges existing ways of knowing and representing the world. Such formations are more inclusionary and better suited for thinking about postcolonial or “subalteran cultural practices (ibid.). Performance approaches to knowing insist on immediacy and involvement. They consist of partial, plural, incomplete, and contingent understandings, not analytic distance or detachment, the hallmarks of the positivistic paradigms (ibid.; Pelias 1999: ix, xi). The interpretive methods, democratic politics, and feminist communitarian ethics of performance [auto]ethnography offer progressives a series of tools for countering reactionary political discourse. At stake is an “insurgent cultural politics” (Giroux 2000a, b). This cultural politics encourages a critical race consciousness that flourishes within the free and open spaces of a “vibrant democratic public culture and society” (Giroux 2000a: 127). Within the spaces of this new performative cultural politics, a radical democratic imagination redefines the concept of civic participation and public citizenship.12 Struggle, resistance, and EMANCIPATORY DISCOURSES, AND THE ETHICS

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dialogue are key features of its pedagogy. The rights of democratic citizenship are extended to all segments of public and private life, from the political to the economic, from the cultural to the personal. This pedagogy seeks to regulate market and economic relations in the name of social justice and environmental causes. A genuine democracy requires hope, dissent, and criticism. These ideals embrace a democratic-socialist-feminist agenda. This agenda queers straight heterosexual democracy (Butler 1997). It asserts capitalism’s fundamental incompatibility with democracy while thinking its way into a model of critical citizenship that attempts to unthink whiteness and the cultural logics of white supremacy (McLaren 1997a, 1997b: 237, 259, 1998a, b, 1999, 200l; Roediger 2002; West 1993). It seeks a revolutionary multiculturalism that is grounded in the relentless resistance to the structures of neoliberalism. It critiques the ways in which the media are used to manufacture consent (Chomsky 1996). It sets as its goal transformations of global capital, so that persons may begin to “truly live as liberated subjects of history” (McLaren 1997b: 290).

A Moral Crisis Critical indigenous discourse thickens the argument; the central tensions in the world today go beyond the crises in capitalism and neoliberalism’s version of democracy. The central crisis, as defined by Native-Canadian, Hawaiian, Maori, and AmericanIndian pedagogy, is spiritual, “rooted in the increasingly virulent relationship between human beings and the rest of nature” (Grande 2000: 354). Linda Tuhiwai Smith discusses the concept of spirituality within Maori discourse, giving added meaning to the crisis at hand: the essence of a person has a genealogy which could be traced back to an earth parent . . .. A human person does not stand alone but shares with other animate . . . beings relationships based on a shared “essence” of life . . . [including] the significance of place, of land, of landscape, of other things in the universe . . .. Concepts of spirituality which Christianity attempted to destroy, 198

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and then to appropriate, and then to claim, are critical sites of resistance for indigenous peoples. The value, attitudes, concepts, and language embedded in beliefs about spirituality represent . . . the clearest contrast and mark of difference between indigenous peoples and the West. It is one of the few parts of ourselves which the West cannot decipher, cannot understand, and cannot control . . . yet.” (1999: 74)

A respectful performance pedagogy honors these views of spirituality. It works to construct a vision of the person, ecology, and the environment that is compatible with these principles. This pedagogy demands a politics of hope, of loving, of caring nonviolence grounded in inclusive moral and spiritual terms.

Performance [Auto] Ethnography as a Pedagogy of Freedom Within this framework, extending Freire (1998) and elaborating Glass (2001: 17), performance autoethnography contributes to a conception of education and democracy as pedagogies of freedom. Dialogic performance enacting a performance-centered ethic provides materials for critical reflection on radical democratic educational practices. In so doing, performance ethnography enacts a theory of selfhood and being. This is an ethical, relational, and moral theory. The purpose of “the particular type of relationality we call research ought to be enhancing . . . moral agency,” (Christians 2002: 409; also Lincoln 1995: 287), moral discernment, critical consciousness, and a radical politics of resistance. Indeed, performance ethnography enters the service of freedom by showing how, in concrete situations, persons produce history and culture, “even as history and culture produce them” (Glass 2001: 17). Performance texts provide the grounds for liberation practice by opening up concrete situations that are being transformed through acts of resistance. In this way, indigenous and non-indigenous performance ethnography advance the causes of liberation. EMANCIPATORY DISCOURSES, AND THE ETHICS

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CRITICAL PERFORMANCE PEDAGOGY A commitment to critical performance pedagogy and critical race theory (CRT) gives the human disciplines a valuable lever for militant, utopian cultural criticism. In Impure Acts, Henry Giroux calls for a practical, performative view of pedagogy, politics, and cultural studies. He seeks an interdisciplinary project that would enable theorists and educators to form a progressive alliance “connected to a broader notion of cultural politics designed to further racial, economic, and political democracy” (2000a: 128). Such a project engages a militant utopianism, a provisional Marxism without guarantees, a cultural studies that is anticipatory, interventionist, and provisional. Such a project does not back away from the contemporary world, in its multiple global versions, including the West, the Third World, the moral, political, and geographic spaces occupied by First Nations and Fourth World persons, persons in marginal or liminal positions (Ladson-Billings 2000: 263). Rather, it strategically engages this world in those liminal spaces where lives are bent and changed by the repressive structures of the new conservatism. This project pays particular attention to the dramatic increases around the world in domestic violence, rape, child abuse, hate crimes, and violence directed toward persons of color (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001: 1–2) and globalization’s “production of poverty” (Hartnett and Stengrim 2005).

Critical Race Theory and Participatory, Performance Action Inquiry Extending critical legal theory, critical race theory theorizes life in these liminal spaces, offering “pragmatic strategies for material and social transformation”(Ladson-Billings 2000: 264). Critical race theory assumes that racism and white supremacy are the norms in American society. Critical race scholars use performative, storytelling autoethnographic methods to uncover the ways in which racism operates in daily life (but see Darder and Torres 2004: 102–103). Critical race theory challenges those neoliberals who argue that civil rights have been attained for persons of color. Those who argue that the civil rights crusade is 200

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a long, slow struggle are also criticized (Ladson-Billings 2000: 264). Advocates of CRT argue that racism requires radical social change. Neoliberalism and liberalism lack the mechanisms and imaginations to achieve such change (ibid.). Strategically, CRT examines the ways in which race is performed, including the cultural logics and performative acts that inscribe and create whiteness and nonwhiteness (McLaren 1997b: 278; Roediger 2002: 17). In an age of globalization, and diasporic, postnational identities, the color line should no longer be an issue, but sadly it is (McLaren 1997b: 278.) Drawing on the complex traditions embedded in participatory action research (Fine et al. 2003; Kemmis and McTaggert 2000), critical performance pedagogy implements a commitment to participation and performance with, not for, community members. Amplifying Fine and associates (2003: 176–177), this project builds on local knowledge and experience developed at the bottom of social hierarchies. Following Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s (1999) lead participatory performance work honors and respects local knowledge and customs and practices and incorporates those values and beliefs into participatory, performance action inquiry (ibid.: 176). Work in this participatory, activist performance tradition gives back to the community, “creating a legacy of inquiry, a process of change, and material resources to enable transformations in social practices” (ibid.: 177). Through performance and participation, scholars develop a “participatory mode of consciousness” (Bishop 1998: 208) that folds them into the moral accountability structures of the group.

CONCLUSIONS: TURNING THE TABLES ON THE COLONIZERS At the end it is possible to imagine scenarios that turn the tables on the neocolonizer. It is possible to imagine, for example, human subject research practices that really do respect human rights, protocols of informed consent that inform and do not deceive, EMANCIPATORY DISCOURSES, AND THE ETHICS

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research projects that do not harm, projects that in fact benefit human communities. Bishop’s, G. Smith’s, and L. Smith’s ethical and moral models call into question the more generic, utilitarian, biomedical, Western model of ethical inquiry (see Bracci and Christians 2002; Christians 2000, 2002). They outline a radical ethical path for the future. They transcend IRB principles that focus almost exclusively on the problems associated with betrayal, deception, and harm. They call for a collaborative social science research model that makes the researcher responsible, not to a removed discipline (or institution) but rather to those studied. This model stresses personal accountability, caring, the value of individual expressiveness, the capacity for empathy, and the sharing of emotionality (Collins l991: 2l6). This model implements collaborative, participatory performative inquiry. It forcefully aligns the ethics of research with a politics of the oppressed, with a politics of resistance, hope and freedom. This model directs scholars to take up moral projects that respect and reclaim indigenous cultural practices. Such work produces spiritual, social, and psychological healing. Healing, in turn, leads to multiple forms of transformation at the personal and social levels. These transformations shape processes of mobilization and collective action. These actions help persons realize a radical performative politics of possibility. This politic enacts emancipatory discourses and critical pedagogies that honor human difference and draw for inspiration on the struggles of indigenous persons. In listening to the stories of indigenous storytellers, we learn new ways of being moral and political in the social world. We come together in a shared agenda, with a shared imagination, and a new language, struggling to find liberating ways of interpreting and performing the world (L. Smith 1999: 37). Thus does research cease to be a dirty word.

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PART THREE Performance and Pedagogy

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ANALYTIC AUTOETHNOGRAPHY, OR DÉJÀ VU ALL OVER AGAIN1 Voices, where to begin. Less is more, show, don’t tell.

Carolyn Ellis is a good place to start [quoted in Stacy Holman Jones (2005: 765)]: Autoethnography is . . . research, writing and method that connect the autobiographical, and personal to the cultural and social. This form usually features concrete action, emotion, embodiment, self-consciousness, and introspection. (Ellis 2004: xix)

Tami Spry. Autoethnography is . . . a self-narrative that critiques the situatedness of self and others in social context. (Spry 2001: 710)

Mark Neumann. Autoethnographic texts . . . democratize the representational sphere of culture by locating the particular experiences of individuals in tension with dominant expressions of discursive power. (Neumann 1996: 189)

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Leon Anderson: Analytic autoethnography has five key features. It is ethnographic work in which the researcher (a) is a full member in a research group or setting; (b) uses analytic reflexivity; (c) has a visible narrative presence in the written text; (c) engages in dialogue with informants beyond the self; (d) is committed to an analytic research agenda focused on improving theoretical understandings of broader social phenomena. (2006: 373–374)

Finally, Jones herself: Autoethnography is a blurred genre . . . a response to the call . . . it is setting a scene, telling a story, weaving intricate connections between life and art . . . making a text present . . . refusing categorization . . . believing that words matter and writing toward the moment when the point of creating autoethnographic texts is to change the world. (2005: 765)

Apples and oranges. Are we dealing with two different things? Leon Anderson and traditional interactionists want to use analytic reflexivity to improve theoretical understandings. Stacy wants to change the world. Carolyn wants to embed the personal in the social. Tami Spry’s self-narratives critique the social situatedness of identity. Mark wants to “democratize the representational sphere of culture” by writing outward from the self to the social. Are we in parallel or separate universes? Who is talking to whom? It’s déjà vu all over again. Richardson and St. Pierre observe that the narrative genres connected to ethnographic writing have, in the past decade, “been blurred, enlarged, and altered. . . . These ethnographies . . . are produced through creative analytical practices (CAP)” (2005: 962). These new writing practices include autoethnography, fiction-stories, poetry, performance texts, polyvocal texts, reader’s theater, responsive readings, aphorisms, comedy and satire, visual presentations, allegory, conversation, 206

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layered accounts, writing-stories, and mixed-genres. Creative nonfiction, performance writing, mystories, memoirs, personal histories, and cultural criticism can be added to this list of narrative forms that can be used by the creative analytic ethnographer. The CAP ethnographer has little in common with Leon Anderson’s analytic ethnographer. Anderson’s agenda, as well as the agenda of analytic ethnographers in general, is clear. These agendas want to define and then claim ownership over at least one version of autoethnography, what Anderson calls analytic autoethnography. He is impressed by the success of evocative or emotional autoethnography. But he fears this success may eclipse other versions of the method. This success also obscures the ways in which this other version of ethnography may fit productively in other traditions of inquiry, especially the so-called classic Chicago School. Like others before him, Anderson does not want to review the debates that have gone on between the analytic and evocative schools of [auto]ethnography. Rather, he wants to clarify and embed his approach in traditional symbolic interactionist assumptions. This return to the basics has the feel of something familiar. The old, or the new old, in the form of the first and second generations of the Chicago School (Fine 1995), can do the work of the new. Indeed, we may speak of a third Chicago School, that sociological cohort that came of age after the Vietnam war. This cohort, the Third School, had to bear the brunt of many new formations, from ethnomethodology, to standpoint epistemologies, to feminist, queer, critical race, postcolonial, and now indigenous methodologies. This is the space Anderson writes from. So, a return to the basics, to traditional symbolic interactionist assumptions, has the effect, intended or not, of leading to a negation of the recent poststructural, antifoundational arguments that have been swirling around for at least a quarter-century. These are the very arguments that support CAP. Anderson seems to fear that we are in danger of forgetting our past. In returning to the past, while claiming that portion of the new that fits with the past, we can move forward as a mature, interpretive discipline. In doing so, we will understand that the work of the good realist ANALYTIC AUTOETHNOGRAPHY, OR DÉJÀ VU ALL OVER AGAIN

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ethnographer has always been to study and to understand a social setting, a social group, or a social problem. Good ethnographers have always believed in documenting and analyzing those phenomena for fellow scholars. They have gone for the best data, never losing sight of their research focus, even when studying insider meanings, including their own! These researchers were self-reflexive but not self-obsessed. They were, most of the time, professional strangers; the bulk of their analytic ethnographies were not autobiographical. Still, while they knew how to connect biography with social structure, they did not believe in writing themselves completely into their texts. They understood the value of self-understanding, but they knew that most of the time their research interests and their personal lives did not intersect. The new- and old-school Chicago ethnographers do not write messy vulnerable texts that make you cry. They keep politics out of their research, although they may still worry now and then about whose side they, or you, are on. The New Third Chicago School is not preoccupied with the crises of representation, legitimation, and praxis. They keep their eye on the goal of describing the world with their methods, and they focus on a small number of key, or classic themes. Some get quite bold and go global, or become reflexive, or phenomenological, calling it theoretically informed; some use extended case methodologies, a litany of missing names: Bourdieu, Wacquant, Foley, Willis, Burawoy, Carspecken. They do this by borrowing one or two techniques from the creative, analytic, evocative autoethnographers. But mostly, they want to expand the reach of analytic ethnography into their version of reflexive [auto]ethnography. And here we have apples and oranges. Ellis, Bochner, Richardson, St. Pierre, Holman Jones, and their cohort want to change the world by writing from the heart (Pelias 2004). The writers in the Third Chicago School want none of this. In offering his reflections on these themes and questions, Leon Anderson and the traditionalists want to assert a continuity with the past while charting a more stable future for their version of 208

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ethnographic inquiry. Of course, I disagree. In discounting the arguments of the CAP school, Anderson returns almost uncritically to the past. The first-generation Chicago sociologists are still my heroes, but after decades, I find that they no longer help me do the kind of work I want to do. I want to move on. Leon does not share this view. So we part ways, reluctantly and respectfully. My position can be briefly summarized. Ethnography is a not an innocent practice. Our research practices are performative, pedagogical, and political. Through our writing and our talk we enact the worlds we study. These performances are messy and pedagogical. They instruct our readers about this world and how we see it. The pedagogical is always moral and political; by enacting a way of seeing and being, it challenges, contests, or endorses the official, hegemonic ways of seeing and representing the other. Critical pedagogy, folded into and through performance [auto]ethnography, attempts to disrupt and deconstruct these cultural and methodological practices performatively in the name of a “more just, democratic and egalitarian society” (Kincheloe and McLaren 2000: 285). I want a new qualitative research tradition focused on the themes that come from this commitment. It is time to close the door on the Chicago School and all its variations. My current project builds on these commitments. It enacts a critical cultural politics concerning Native-Americans and the representations of their historical presence in Yellowstone Park and elsewhere (Denzin 2008). With Pelias, I seek a writing form that enacts a methodology of the heart, a form that listens to the heart, knowing that “stories are the truths that won’t stand still” (2004: 171). In writing from the heart, we learn how to love, to forgive, to heal, and to move forward. I offer an example. In bringing the past into the autobiographical present, I insert myself into the past and create the conditions for rewriting and hence re-experiencing it. History becomes a montage, moments quoted out of context, “juxtaposed fragments from widely dispersed places and times” (Ulmer 1989: 112). I move across and between several writing styles, genres, and representationalperformative forms, some borrowed from Dos Passos, including, news of the day (Newsreel), and the Camera Eye. Words ANALYTIC AUTOETHNOGRAPHY, OR DÉJÀ VU ALL OVER AGAIN

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and quotations, visual texts, historical advertisements, maps, and photographs are performance vehicles, ways of “revealing and evoking the character of the person who spoke [or produced] them . . . they are not an end in themselves” (Smith 1994: xxiii–xxiv). With Anna Deavere Smith (2000), I seek a dramatic, performative poetic, a form of performance writing that includes excerpts from personal histories, official and unofficial government documents, scholarly articles, and popular culture texts. The history at hand is the history of Native-Americans in two cultural and symbolic landscapes: mid-central Iowa in the 1940s and 1950s and Yellowstone Park in the 1870s. Quoting from multiple texts, including personal autobiography, popular culture and history, and scholarly discourse, I attempt to create a chorus of discordant voices (and images) concerning Native-Americans and their place in Yellowstone Park, as well as in our collective imagination (Spindel 2000: 8). I read Yellowstone, America’s first national park, metaphorically. In and across the discourses that historically define the park are deeply entrenched meanings concerning nature, culture, violence, gender, wilderness, parks, whites, and NativeAmericans (Bartlett 1985; Haines 1996a [1977], 1996b [1977]; Schullery 1979, 1997). I situate these voices and discourses in my own biography. The presence of Native-Americans in the collective white imagination is almost entirely a matter of racist myth, shifting meanings of the color line, the Veil of Color (Du Bois 1989: xxxi, 2–3), theatricality, and minstrelsy (Spindel 2000). Call this “critical race theory and critical pedagogy confront Yellowstone National Park and its histories” (Denzin 2003). As a child I lived inside this white imaginary. I played dressup games called “Cowboys and Indians.” I watched “Red Rider and Little Beaver” and “Lone Ranger and Tonto” on Saturday morning U.S. television. On Saturday nights my grandfather took me to Western movies—Shane, Stagecoach, Broken Arrow, The Searchers—at the Strand Theater in Iowa City, Iowa.

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Voice 1 Narrator-as-Young-Boy: When I was not yet 10 one Sunday mother and dad took my brother and me to Tama, to the Mesquaki Reservation, to see a Pow Wow. It was raining, The sky was dark gray. The road was muddy. We drove down a lane to a large fair ground and parked in a back row with other cars. We walked through the mud, past teepees to the center of a big field. Indians in costumes with paint on their faces, and long braids of hair were singing, and dancing. Some were drumming and singing. At the edge of the field tables under canvas tents were set up. You could buy trinkets, moccasins, beaded purses, and belts and wooden flutes. In another area a family was making and selling Indian fry bread. Dad bought some fry bread for all of us, and bottles of cold Root Beer. We took the fry bread and pop back to the dance area and watched the dancers. Then it rained some more

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and the dancing stopped, and we got in the car and drove home. Voice 2 Narrator-as-Adult: Today a local travel company organizes overnight bus trips for senior citizens from Champaign, Illinois, to the big casino on the reservation in Tama, Iowa. Voice 3 Narrator-as-Young Boy: The next time I saw an Indian was the following Saturday night, when grandpa took me to a movie at the Strand Theater in Iowa City and we watched Broken Arrow with Jay Silverheels, Jimmy Stewart, Debra Paget, Will Geer, and Jeff Chandler, who played Chief Cochise. Those Indians did not look like the Indians on the Tama Reservation. They rode horses, carried spears, had bows and arrows, and tomahawks. I thought maybe it was just a different time and a different place. That is, those were the real Indians in the movie, because they were from the Wild West and they were in a movie. The Tama Indians were less real, they kind of looked like everybody else, except for the dancers in their costumes. Voice 4 Doug Foley 1: The Chicago anthropologists studied the assimilation process, how the Mesquaki were absorbed into white culture. (Denzin 1995: 6) Voice 5 Foley 2: Kids were told to stay away from “those Indians” . . . it was a dark, scary place full of violence . . . I heard many scary stories 212

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about the settlement, but one version told by a white woman married to a Mesquaki stands above all others. Her scary story was about a white boy who got castrated for messing around with an Indian woman. (ibid.: 3–4) Voice 6 Narrator-as-Writer: It saddens me to hear a story such as Foley’s, Is it true? because, because if it is to forgive is to risk letting everything fall apart and can there ever be any hope of healing?

Today I want to write my way out of this history, and this is why I write my version of autoethnography.

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THE REFLEXIVE INTERVIEW AND A PERFORMATIVE SOCIAL SCIENCE At the beginning of a new century it is necessary to re-engage the promise of qualitative research as a form of radical democratic practice. The narrative turn in the social sciences has been taken. We have told our tales from the field. Today we understand that we write culture and that writing is not an innocent practice. We know the world only through our representations of it. For a full century, the interview has been the basic information gathering tool of the social sciences. Over a decade ago, Holstein and Gubrium estimated that 90% of all social science investigations exploit interview data (1995: 1). Increasingly, the media, human service professionals, and social researchers get their information about society via interviews (ibid.). We have become an interview society, a cinematic society, a society that knows itself through the reflective gaze of the cinematic apparatus (ibid.; also Atkinson and Silverman 1997; Denzin 1995: 1). My discussion unfolds in six parts. I begin with an interpretive framework that locates the reflexive interview within the structures of the cinematic-interview society. This leads to a discussion of the concepts of the performance interview, performative writing, and ethnodramas (Mienczakowski 1995, 2001; Pelias 1999; Pollock 1998; Schechner 1998; Sedgwick 1998). I then use Trinh T. Minh-ha’s 1989 film, Surname Viet Given Name Nam, as a vehicle for comparing and contrasting the reflexive and traditional interview forms (see also Heyl 2001). I next explicate Anna Deavere Smith’s project, especially her concepts of performance, and the 215

poetic text. I move from Smith’s arguments to a performance text based on a reflexive interview with Mrs. Anderson, who led the battle to desegregate the schools in Edge City in the mid-1960s. I conclude by returning to my utopian themes and the promises of the reflexive interview for a free and just society. This essay is a utopian project. I search for a new interpretive form, a new form of the interview, what I call the reflexive, dialogic, or performative interview. The reflexive interview is not an information gathering tool per se. It is not a commodity that you hire someone to collect for you or that you pay someone to give you. It belongs to a moral community. On this point, I borrow from Leopold, who says of the land: “We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect” (1949: viii). We do not own the land; the land is a community to which we belong. Substitute the words interview and research for the word land. As researchers, we belong to a moral community. Doing interviews is a privilege granted us, not a right that we have. Interviews are part of the dialogic conversation that connects all of us to this larger moral community. Interviews arise out of performance events. They transform information into shared experience.1 They do more then move audiences to tears. They criticize the world the way it is and offer suggestions about how it could different.

INTERPRETIVE FRAMEWORK I want to reread the interview, not as a method of gathering information but as a vehicle for producing performance texts and performance ethnographies about self and society (see Richardson 1997: 135–136). I want to locate this reading within its historical moment. Qualitative research operates in a complex historical field that cross-cuts multiple moments, all of which operate in the present.2 The present moment is defined by a performative sensibility, by a willingness to experiment with different ways of presenting 216

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an interview text. The performative sensibility turns interviews into performance texts, into poetic monologues. It turns interviewees into performers, into persons whose words and narratives are then performed by others. As Richardson argues, in the postexperimental period no discourse has a privileged place, no method or theory has a universal and general claim to authoritative knowledge (1997: 121).

The Interview as Interpretive Practice The interview, as an interpretive practice, has had a different set of meanings in each historical period. Its meanings, forms, and uses change from moment to moment, moving from the structured, semistructured, and open-ended objective format of the traditional and modernist periods to the feminist criticisms of these formats in the Third and Fourth Moments (see Oakley 1981; Reinharz 1992), to autoethnographic uses of the method in the Fifth and Sixth Moments (DeVault 1999), as well as the more recent postexperimental performative turn, which is the approach taken here (see also Smith 1993). The present moment is further defined by increased resistance from minority groups to the interviews done by white university and governmental officials. The modernist interview no longer functions as an automatic extension of the state, as an interpretive practice that persons willingly submit to. The interview is a way of writing the world, a way of bringing the world into play. The interview is not a mirror of the so-called external world, nor is it a window into the inner life of the person (see Dillard 1982: 47, 155). The interview is a simulacrum, a perfectly miniature and coherent world in its own right (ibid.: 152). Seen thus, the interview functions as a narrative device that allows persons who are so inclined to tell stories about themselves. In the moment of storytelling, teller and listener, performer and audience, share the goal of participating in an experience that reveals their shared same-ness (Porter 2000). The interview’s meanings are contextual, improvised, and performative (Dillard 1982: 32). The interview is an active text, a site THE REFLEXIVE INTERVIEW AND A PERFORMATIVE SOCIAL SCIENCE 217

where meaning is created and performed. When performed, the interview text creates the world, giving the world its situated meaningfulness. Seen thus, the interview is a fabrication, a construction, a fiction, an “ordering or rearrangement of selected materials from the actual world” (ibid.: 148). But every interview text selectively and unsystematically reconstructs that world, tells and performs a story accordingly to its own version of narrative logic. We inhabit a performance-based, dramaturgical culture. The dividing line between performer and audience blurs, and culture itself becomes a dramatic performance. This is a gendered culture with nearly invisible boundaries separating every-day, theatrical performances from formal theater, dance, music, MTV, video, and film (Butler 1990: 25, 1997: 159, 1999: 19). But the matter goes even deeper than blurred boundaries. The performance has become reality. On this, speaking of gender and personal identity, Butler is certain. Gender is performative, gender is always doing, “though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed . . . there is no being behind doing . . . the deed is everything . . . there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender . . . identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (1990: 25). Further, the linguistic act is performative, and words can hurt (1997: 4). Performance interviews are situated in complex systems of discourse, where traditional, every-day, and avant-garde meanings of theater, film, video, ethnography, cinema, performance, text, and audience come together and inform one another. The meanings of lived experience are inscribed and made visible in these performances.

Ethnodramas Mienczakowski (1995, 2001) locates the performance interview within the framework of ethnodrama. Ethnodrama is a form of ethnographic theater involving “participant and audience empowerment through forum reconstruction and ‘dialogical interactions’” (1995: 361). Coperformers read performance scripts based on fieldwork and interviews conducted in the 218

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fieldsetting. Ethodramas and ethnographic performances are “about the present moment and seek to give the text back to readers and informants in the recognition that we are all coperformers in each other’s lives” (Mienczakowski 2001: 2; italics in original). Ethnodramas enact performance writing, through a particular type of ethnographic theater. With Anna Deavere Smith (1992, 1993) and Mienczakowski, I want a performative social science, a social science and a public theater that embraces racial diversity and social difference (see Denzin 1997: 123; also Turner and Bruner 1986). This social science asks: “Who has the right to ask whom what questions?” “Who has the right to answer?” “Who has the right to see what?” “Who has the right to say what?” “Who has the right to speak for whom?” (Smith 1993: xxviii). These are the questions that “unsettle and prohibit a democratic theatre in America” (ibid.: xxix). Perhaps more deeply, these are the questions that unsettle the discourses of a democratic social science in America today.

THE REFLEXIVE INTERVIEW AND THE CINEMATIC SOCIETY Our second-hand world is mediated by cinema, television, and the other media apparatuses of the postmodern society. We have no direct access to this world; we only experience and study its representations. A performance-based social science studies culture and society as dramaturgical productions. In their performances, people enact cultural meanings. Interviews are performance texts. The active, reflexive, and dialogical interview is a central component of this interpretive project (Denzin 1995, 1997; Gubrium and Holstein 1995, 1997; Jackson 1998). A performative social science uses the reflexive interview as a vehicle for producing moments of performance theater, a theater sensitive to the moral and ethical issues of our time (Smith 1992: xi). This interview form is gendered and dialogical. In it, gendered subjects are created through their speech acts. Speech is performative. It is action. The act of speech, the act of being THE REFLEXIVE INTERVIEW AND A PERFORMATIVE SOCIAL SCIENCE 219

interviewed, becomes a performance itself (Smith 1993: xxxi; also Butler 1990: 25).3 The reflexive interview, as a dialogic conversation, is the site and occasion for such performances; that is, the interview is turned into a dramatic, poetic text.4 In turn, these texts are performed, given dramatic readings. In such events “performance and performativity are braided together by virtue of iteration; the copy renders performance authentic and allows the spectator to find in the performer ‘presence’ . . . [or] authenticity” (Phelan 1998: 10). Recall, from Chapter 5, Laurel Richardson’s Louisa May introducing her life story: The most important thing to say is that I grew up in the South. Being southern shapes aspirations shapes what you think you are . . . I grew up poor in a rented house in a very normal sort of way on a very normal sort of street with some very nice middle class friends. (1997: 131)

Louisa May comes alive as a person in these lines. She comes off the page, and if her words are spoken softly, with a middleTennessee twang you can feel her presence in the room. The reflexive interview is simultaneously a site for conversation, a discursive method, and a communicative format that produces knowledge about the cinematic society. This interview form furnishes the materials that are fashioned into critical performance texts; critical narratives about community, race, self, and identity (Smith 1992: xxiii). One of the young black men interviewed by Smith after the 1992 Los Angeles race riots reflects on the meanings of race, ethnicity, and identity in his life: Twilight is the time of day between day and night limbo, I call it limbo, and sometimes when I take my ideas to my homeboys 220

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they say, well Twilight, that’s something you can’t do right now . . . I affiliate darkness with what came first, because it was first, and relative to my complexion, I am a dark individual And with me being stuck in limbo I see the darkness as myself. (1992: xxv–xxvi)

The Interview Society Atkinson and Silverman remind us that the postmodern is an interview society, a society of the spectacle, a society of the personal confession. The interview society, according to them, is characterized by the following features and beliefs (1997: 309–315): (1) It has turned the confessional mode of discourse into a public form of entertainment. (2) The private has become a public commodity. (3) Persons are assumed to have private and public and authentic selves, and the private self is the real self. (4) Skilled interviewers and therapists (and sometimes the person) have access to this self. (5) Certain experiences, epiphanies, are more authentic than others, they leave deep marks and scars on the person. (6) Persons have access to their own experiences. (7) First-person narratives are very valuable. They are the site of personal meaning. The reflexive interviewer deconstructs these uses and abuses of the interview (ibid.; Holstein and Gubrium 2000: 227–228). Indeed, to paraphrase Dillard, serious students of society take pains to distinguish their work from these interpretive practices (1982: 46). In the surveillance society, journalists, social scientists, psychiatrists, physicians, social workers, and the police use interviews to gather information about individuals. Interviews objectify individuals, turning lived experiences into narratives. The interview is the method by which the personal is made public. The interview turns transgressive experience into a consumable commodity. These narratives are bought and sold in the media and academic marketplace. Thus does the interview society affirm the importance of the speaking subject and celebrate the biographical. Nothing is any longer private. THE REFLEXIVE INTERVIEW AND A PERFORMATIVE SOCIAL SCIENCE 221

Of course, there is no essential self or private or real self behind the public self. There are only different selves, different performances, different ways of being a gendered person in a social situation. These performances are based on different narrative and interpretive practices. These practices give the self and the person a sense of grounding, or narrative coherence (Gubrium and Holstein 1998). There is no inner, or deep, self that is accessed by the interview or narrative method. There are only different interpretive (and performative) versions of who the person is. At this level, to borrow from Garfinkel (1996: 6), there is nothing under the skull that matters.

Narrative Collage and the Postmodern Interview5 The postmodern or contemporary modernist interview builds on narrative collage, the shattering of narrative line. Dillard compares narrative collage to Cubism: Just as Cubism can take a roomful of furniture and iron it into 9 square feet of canvas, so fiction can take 50 years of human life, chop it to bits, and piece these bits together so that, within the limits of the temporal form, we can consider them all at once. This is narrative collage. (1982: 21)

In the postmodern interview, storied sequences do not follow a necessary progression. Narrative collage fractures time; speakers leap forward and backward in time. Time is not linear, it is not attached to causal sequences, to “fixed landmarks in orderly progression” (ibid.). Time, space, and character are flattened out. The intervals between temporal moments can be collapsed in an instant. More than one voice can speak at once, in more than one tense. The text can be a collage, a montage, with photographs, blank spaces, poems, monologues, dialogues, voice-overs, and interior streams of consciousness. In montage, a picture is made by superimposing several different images on one another. In a sense, montage is like pentimento, whereby something painted out of a picture (an image the painter “rependted,” or denied) now becomes revisible, creating 222

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something new. What is new is what had been obscured by a previous image. Montage and pentimento, like jazz, which is improvisation, create the sense that images, sounds, and understandings are blending together, overlapping, forming a composite, a new creation. The images seem to shape and define one another; an emotional, gestalt effect is produced. Often these images are combined in a swiftly run sequence. When done, this produces a dizzily revolving collection of several images around a central, or focused, picture or sequence; such effects signify the passage of time. In montage, the narrative can “shatter time itself into smithereens” (ibid.: 22). Points of view and style collide, switch back and forth, comingle. Now and then, the writer intrudes, speaking directly to the reader. Sentences may be reduced to numbered lines. The “arrow of time shatters, cause and effect may vanish and reason crumble” (ibid.). No one can say which sequence of events caused what, and the text makes no pretense about causality. Time, effect, and cause operate, as Borges would say, in a “garden of forking paths” (ibid.). Space is no longer fixed, confined to a walled-in, threedimensional site. It moves back and forth, sometimes randomly, between the public and the private realms, which may be only temporary resting places. As space shifts, so, too, do forms of discourse, character, voice, tone, prose style, and visual imagery (ibid.: 22–23). In these ways, narrative collage allows writer, interviewer, and performer to create a special world, a world made meaningful through the methods of collage and montage. These uses lay bare the structural and narrative bones of the reflexive, postmodern interview. In text and in performance, this form announces its reflexivity. No longer does the writer-as-interviewer hide behind the questionanswer format, the apparatuses of the interview machine.

The Interview and the World The interview elicits interpretations of the world, because it is itself an object of interpretation. But the interview is not an interpretation of the world per se. Rather it stands in an THE REFLEXIVE INTERVIEW AND A PERFORMATIVE SOCIAL SCIENCE 223

interpretive relationship to the world that it creates. This created world stands alongside the so-called bigger and larger world of human affairs of which this creation is but one tiny part. The lifelike materials of the interview absorb us and seduce us. They entice us into believing that we are seeing the real world being staged. This is not so. But then there is no real world. There are no originals. There is no original reality that casts its shadows across the reproduction. There are only interpretations and their performances. Nonetheless, the reflexive interviewer gives special attention to those performances, spaces, and sites where stories that crisscross the borders and boundaries of illness, race, class, gender, religion, and ethnicity are told (Gubrium and Holstein 1998). These are the kinds of stories that concern Trinh, who works back and forth between narrative collages and cinematic representations of the world (1989a, b, 1991, 1992).

Surname Viet Given Name Nam6 T. Minh-ha Trinh’s film Surname Viet Given Name Nam is about Vietnamese women whose names change and remain constant, depending on whether or not they marry a foreigner or a Vietnamese. In this film, Trinh has Vietnamese women speak from five different subject positions representing lineage, gender and age status, leadership position, and historical period (1992: 49). This approach creates a complex picture of Vietnamese culture, showing women and their kin in a variety of overlapping positions of power, intimacy, and submission (ibid.: 144). The film is multitextual, layered, a montage with pensive images of women in various situations. Historical moments overlap with age periods (childhood, youth, adulthood, old age), ritual ceremonies (weddings, funerals, war, the market, dance), and daily household work (cooking), while interviewees talk to off-screen interviewers. There are two voice-overs in English; a third voice sings sayings, proverbs, and poetry in Vietnamese (with translations as texts on the screen). There are also interviews with Vietnamese subtitled in English, and interviews in 224

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English synchronized with the on-screen image (ibid.: 49). The interviews are re-enacted by Vietnamese women, who are then interviewed at the end of the film and asked about their experiences of being performers in the film (ibid.: 146). The film allows the practice of doing and performing reflexive interviews to enter into the construction of the text itself. Thus the true and the false (the actresses are not the women interviewed by Mai Thu Van) and the real and the staged intermingle. Indeed, the early sections of the film unfold like a traditional, realist documentary film (ibid.: 145). The viewer does not know these are actresses re-enacting interviews. Nor does the viewer know that the interviews were conducted in the United States, not Vietnam. (This becomes apparent only near the end of the film.) In using these interpretive strategies, Trinh creates the space for the critical appraisal of the politics of representation that structure the use of interviews in the documentary film. In undoing the interview as a method for gathering information about society, Trinh takes up the question of truth (ibid.). Whose truth is she presenting, that of the original interviewer (Mai 1983), that given in the on-screen interview situation, or that of the womenas-actresses who are interviewed at the end of the film? In the world that Trinh creates, culture comes alive as a dramatic performance. Each actress is a performer, performing an interview text. The performer comes alive in the words of this text. Indeed, the truth of this text is assured by the performance. The viewer is drawn ever deeper into this world. Space and time, and point of view, move around. Trinh crosses genres and discourse systems. The film becomes the object of our attention, demanding interpretation. The truth of its multiple realities is never doubted until the final scene. But then, at this point, we do not ask if the representation is true. We ask instead, is it probable, workable, fruitful; does it allow us to see things differently and to think differently (see Dillard 1982: 134)? And the answer is yes, it does. In this way, the performance text works its subtle pedagogy. It elicits an interpretation of the world by being “itself a worldlike object for interpretation” (ibid.: 155). THE REFLEXIVE INTERVIEW AND A PERFORMATIVE SOCIAL SCIENCE 225

CINEMA MEETS ETHNOGRAPHY Trinh is a filmmaker first. She understands that truth is a social construction. She begins by deconstructing the use of the interview by documentary filmmakers. (Her deconstruction extends and compliments the arguments of Atkinson and Silverman.) In their use of the traditional, nondialogical interview, documentary filmmakers start with the real world and the subject’s place in that world. They use an aesthetic of objectivity and a technological apparatus that produces truthful statements (images) about the world (1991: 33). Trinh contends that the following elements are central to this apparatus (ibid.: 33–39): • • • • • •

• • • • • •

• • •

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the relentless pursuit of naturalism, which requires a connection between the moving image and the spoken word; lip-synchronous sound; the use of real people in real situations; real time is more truthful than film-interview time; few close-ups, emphasis on wide-angle shots; use of the hand-held, unobtrusive camera to “provoke people into uttering the ‘truth’ that they would not otherwise unveil in ordinary situations” (ibid.); the filmmaker interviewer is an observer, not a person who creates what is seen, heard and read; only events, unaffected by the recording eye, should be captured; the film-interview captures objective reality; truth must be dramatized; actual facts should be presented in a credible way, with people telling them; the film-interview text must convince the spectators that they should have confidence in the truth of what they see and hear; the presence of the filmmaker-interviewer is masked, hidden; the use of various persuasive techniques, including personal testimony, and the talk of plain folks; the film-interview is made for the common, silent people; they are the interview-film’s referent (ibid.). CHAPTER 10

These aesthetic strategies define the documentary, interview style, allowing the filmmaker-as-interviewer to create a text that gives the viewer the illusion of having “unmediated access to reality” (ibid.: 40). Thus naturalized, the documentary interview style has become part of the larger cinematic apparatus in American culture, including its pervasive presence in TV commercials and news (ibid.). Trinh brings a reflexive reading to these features of the documentary film, citing her own texts as examples of documentaries that are sensitive to the flow of fact and fiction, to meanings as political constructions (ibid.: 41). Such texts understand that objective reality can never be captured. Documentary interviewing thus becomes a method for “framing” reality. A responsible, reflexive, dialogical interview text embodies the following characteristics: • • • • • • • •

it announces its own politics and evidences as a political consciousness; it interrogates the realities it represents; it invokes the teller’s story in the history that is told; it makes the audience responsible for interpretation; it resists the temptation to become an object of consumption; it resists all dichotomies (male/female, and so on); it foregrounds difference, not conflict; it uses multiple voices, emphasizing language as silence, the grain of the voice, tone, inflection, pauses, silences, repetitions; silence is presented as a form of resistance (ibid.: 188).

The dialogic interview exposes its own means of production. In contrast, the documentary interview hides behind the apparatuses of production, thereby creating the illusion that the viewer and the reader have direct access to reality. Trinh’s reflexive interviews, as performance texts, seek the truth of life’s fictions, the spirit of truth that resides in life experiences, in fables, proverbs, where nothing is explained but everything is evoked (ibid.: 162). THE REFLEXIVE INTERVIEW AND A PERFORMATIVE SOCIAL SCIENCE 227

Learning from Trinh, I want to cultivate a method of patient listening, a method of looking cinematically. This will be a way of hearing and writing that allows one to address the kinds of issues Gloria Naylor discusses in the following passage: Someone who didn’t know how to ask wouldn’t know how to listen. And he coulda listened to them the way you been listening to us right now. Think about it: ain’t nobody really talking to you . . .. Really listen this time; the only voice is your own. But you done just heard about the legend of Saphira Wade . . .. You done heard it in the way we know it, sitting on our porches and shelling June peas . . . taking apart the engine of a car—you done heard it without a single living soul really saying a word. (1998: 1842)

ANNA DEAVERE SMITH’S PROJECT Anna Deavere Smith knows how to listen. She says of her project: “My goal has been to find American character in the ways that people speak. When I started this project, in the early 1980s, my simple introduction to anyone I interviewed was, ‘If you give me an hour of your time, I’ll invite you to see yourself performed’” (1993: xxiii). Smith soon transformed her project into the production of a series of one-woman performance pieces about race in America (1992: xvii). Over the last 20 years, Smith has created performances based on actual events in a series she has titled On the Road: A Search for American Character. Each of these performances “evolves from interviews I conduct with individuals directly or indirectly . . .. Basing my scripts entirely on this interview material, I perform the interviewees on stage using their own words” (ibid.). In May 1992, she was commissioned to create a performance piece about the civil disturbances in Los Angeles in April 1992. Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, is the result of her search “for the character of Los Angeles in the wake of the initial Rodney King verdict” (ibid.).7 Smith’s Fires in the Mirror (1993) (see also Chapter 6) extends the Los Angeles project. In this play, she offers a series 228

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of performance pieces based on interviews with people involved in a racial conflict in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, on August, 19, 1991. In this conflict, a young black Guyanese boy was accidentally killed by an auto in a police-escorted entourage carrying Lubavitcher Grand Rebbe Menachem Schneerson. Later that day, a group of black men fatally stabbed a 29-year-old Hasidic scholar. This killing was followed by a racial conflict lasting three days and involving many members of the community. Smith’s play has speaking parts for gang members, the police, anonymous young girls and boys, mothers, fathers, rabbis, Reverend Al Sharpton, playwright Ntozake Shange, and African-American cultural critic Angela Davis. The theater that Smith creates mirrors and criticizes society; hers is a project that is “sensitive to the events of my own time” (ibid.: xxii). In fashioning her performance texts, she uses dramaturges, “persons who assist in the preparation of the text of a play and offer an outside perspective to those who are more active in the process of staging the play” (ibid.).8 Smith turns interview texts into scripts. She fashions an interview text “that works as a physical, audible, performable vehicle” (ibid.: xxiii; italics in original). Words become a means, or methods, for evoking the character of the person. Smith learned how to listen carefully. She learned how to inhabit the words of the other, to use his or her manner of speech as a mark of individuality, to see that a person can be completely present in her or his speech, and this is a gift (1993: xxvii, xxxi). Here is how Smith rendered her interview with Reverend Al Sharpton: James Brown raised me Uh . . . I never had a father. My father left when I was ten. James Brown took me to the beauty parlor one day And made my hair like this. And made me promise to wear it like that ‘til I die. THE REFLEXIVE INTERVIEW AND A PERFORMATIVE SOCIAL SCIENCE 229

It’s a personal family thing between me and James Brown. I always wanted a father And he filled that void. (1993: 19)

Smith’s goal is to create “an atmosphere in which the interviewee would experience his or her own authorship” (ibid.: xxxi). If this space is created, “everyone . . . will say something that is like poetry. The process of getting to that poetic moment is where ‘character’ lives” (ibid.). Playwright, poet, novelist Ntozake Shange reveals her character thus to Smith: Hummmm. Identity— it, is, uh . . . in a way it’s, um . . . it’s sort of, it’s uh . . . it’s a psychic sense of place it’s a way of knowing I’m not a rock or that tree? I’m this other living creature over here? And it’s a way of knowing that no matter when I put Myself that I am not necessarily what’s around me. (ibid.: 3)

An unavoidable and painful tension exists in American today, a tension that has been taken up by women and people of color; the tension that surrounds race, identity, and gender, it “is the tension of identity in motion” (ibid.: xxxiv). This tension turns, in part, on: “Who can speak for whom?” “Who can ask questions, who can listen?” A profound danger exists “if only a man can speak for a man, a woman for a woman, a Black person for all Black people” (ibid.: xxix). If this is so, then a bridge connecting diverse racial and gendered identities to discourse in the public arena cannot be constructed. Democratic discourse is threatened. But, as argued above, there are no privileged identities, no deep, or essential selves connected to inner structures of meaning (Gubrium and Holstein 1997: 74). There are only different performances, different ways of being in the world. And so, in 230

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her performances, Smith performs and presents the poetic texts of men and women of color. Smith’s two plays document what she has learned and heard in these two sites of racial disturbance. The performance reiterates what has been learned. It is a drama about the process that creates the problem in the first place, the drama surrounding racial identity (1992: xxiv).

Performance Writing Smith engages in a form of performance writing (see Pollock 1998; also Phelan 1998: 1–14). Using the methods of narrative collage, performance writing shows rather than tells. It is writing that speaks performatively, enacting what it describes. It is writing that does what it says it is doing, by doing it. Performative writing “is an inquiry into the limits and possibilities of the intersections between speech and writing . . .. [It] evokes what it names” (Phelan 1998: 13). Performative writing is not a matter of formal style, per se, and it is not writing that is avant garde or clever (Pollock 1998: 75). Pollock suggests that performative writing is evocative, reflexive, multivoiced, criss-crosses genres, is always partial and incomplete (ibid.: 80–95). But in performative writing, things happen; it is writing that is consequential, and it is about a world that is already being performed. To say that Smith writes performatively is to say that her scripts (like Trinh’s) allow persons to experience their own subjectivity in the moment of performance. Performance writing is poetic and dramatic. It transforms literal (and transcribed) speech into speech that is first-person, active, in motion, processual. In such texts, performance and performativity are intertwined, each defines the other. The performer’s performance creates a space the other enters. Now a performance text (of sorts) of my own.

PERFORMING RACIAL MEMORIES On July 28, 1966, Edge City desegregated its 10 elementary schools. The local newspaper said that Edge City was THE REFLEXIVE INTERVIEW AND A PERFORMATIVE SOCIAL SCIENCE 231

the first town in Illinois to do this. In 1965–1966, there were 456 African-American elementary school children in the district; 95% of these children attended the virtually all-black Martin school in the north end of town. To accomplish desegregation, the district bused all but 100 of the African-American students from Martin school to its 9 other, all-white schools. It then sent 189 international children to Martin school. The international children lived with their parents in a university housing complex. The board called this cross-busing. The newspaper said that no white children were bused, just the kids from university housing (see Denzin et al. 1997). Mrs. Anderson was the only woman on the all-white school board who made the decision to desegregate. I had read stories about her in the paper, seen her picture. I knew that she has been a secretary at one of the grade schools and that she had worked at the Citizens Building Association. I did not know that she has been a single parent when she served on the board, nor did I know that her daughter would marry a black man and that she would be the grandmother for her daughter’s biracial family. I learned these things later. The newspaper said she died in her home, at 6:35 P.M. on November 10, 1996. She was 81 years old, a victim of old age and emphysema. A long clear-plastic air hose connected her to an oxygen machine. She breathed with great effort and had brief spells of intense coughing. She had the look of a patrician, a commanding presence, tall and graceful but slow in her movements, held back by the hose. She had crystal-clear blue eyes. She was elegant in her velvet floor-length blue robe. Her chair faced the picture window. She looked out into her small, well-cared-for, fenced-in back yard, a garden with roses, bird feeders, evergreens, and a dying river birch. A jar of jellybeans was on the coffee table next to the sofa where I sat. I put the tape recorder next to Mrs. A’s chair and pinned the microphone to the collar of her robe, careful not to disturb the oxygen tube. She began to speak, to tell her story about how desegregation happened in Edge City. Her story moves from the

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mid-1960s to the present. Point of view in her story changes as she takes on different voices.9 It started with two people, James and Marilyn Daniels. They led a group of their neighbors in the black neighborhood. They said: Look, you’re moving all those kids from university housing by bus to school. Why don’t you take Martin School and bring them up here and take King school kids out to the various neighborhoods? (pause) And 30 years later I look back and wonder at what kind of courage it took for those people to say that. And so after some talking about it back and forth . . . we had a six to one vote . . . But they came to us. I don’t think we were actually aware of the fact that there was a segregated school over there . . . I think probably at heart we didn’t know how racist we were behaving by allowing the school to stay there. (She coughs. She gets up and goes to the kitchen and gets a glass of water. She comes back and looks out the window. The phone rings. She ignores it. She returns to her thoughts.) I remember the night we voted on it. I remember— It’s stupid,

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you remember what you thought, not what you said. I said, We’ll we’re only 12 years late. Let’s go. And I said Something stupid and female, like I’d be honored. I sat there and said to myself, This is historic. We are doing something historic. Of course this did not happen all at once. There were community meetings before the board voted, one meeting involved the parents from university housing. We met with people at Martin School. That was ghastly. We sat up front. The board and the people asked us questions and then they got a little nasty. I was not frightened, but I was so unhappy. A graduate student stood up and said, Those people, those AfricanAmericans, don’t want to leave their homes and their schools . . . 234

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“Those people” has haunted me for 30 years. (pause) We only had one outspoken racist on the board at that time. He is dead now and we can speak ill of the dead. He happened to be a national guard, that was his bread and butter. The night we voted, he had just come back from Chicago where the Guard had been sent to hold down some of the riots. And he turned to me and said, You haven’t been in Chicago and listened to those black bastards calling you names. No was his vote. I had a different upbringing then, many folks I guess. For years I can remember my mother saying, The happiest years of my life were the 10 years we lived next door to a Negro family down in Joliet. And I don’t know if that impressed me THE REFLEXIVE INTERVIEW AND A PERFORMATIVE SOCIAL SCIENCE 235

that Negroes were people or what, but I remembered it and felt it and I have some black friends today. See the picture on the VCR?

I crossed the room and removed the large family photo from the top of the VCR and handed it to Mrs. Anderson, who handed it back to me. It was one of those close-up color photos, a blowup—four people, mother, and father in the back, two children, two little girls in the front. The father was black, the children mulatto, the mother white. Mrs. Anderson explained: That is my older daughter and her husband and my two beautiful grandchildren. Aren’t they pretty. I swear they had the best of both worlds! The young man graduated from Columbia and played basketball for four years. Now he’s taking his M. B. A. at UCLA. The young lady, my daughter, graduated from Wesleyan. She’s now at Indiana University in the school of law. 236

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Another Set of Memories As we prepared to leave Mrs. Anderson’s house, one more question came to mind. It concerned the school board elections in 1968. I asked her about a black woman named Mrs. Caroline Adams Smith, who was part of an all-white coalition that ran against Mrs. Anderson and her fellow board members. The paper had said that Mrs. Smith’s group felt that the incumbents on the board did business behind closed doors, that the busing situation had not been done in public. There were other complaints. In the summer of 1968, the Martin parents walked out of a school board meeting because the board did not consider their complaints. Mr. Daniel’s group wanted more representation of AfricanAmerican teachers, they wanted an African-American principal at Martin, more after-school programs for their children. In 1972, there was a report about desegregation, and according to Mr. Daniels the report ignored the efforts of the Martin parents in the desegregation project. The president of the board apologized to Mr. Daniels. I reminded Mrs. Anderson that the newspapers called the summer of 1968 “Edge City’s Summer of Discontent.” She was quick to respond. They must have taken the Summer of Discontent from the John Steinbeck novel. They had to have taken it from someone. They were not that clever. Were you reading last night’s paper? I said that the wrong way. Still the same old things, 30 years later. But I just flat out don’t remember those complaints. Caroline Adams Smith. She never did like us very much. I’m having a problem bringing up the story though. THE REFLEXIVE INTERVIEW AND A PERFORMATIVE SOCIAL SCIENCE 237

probably it was not nice and I turned it off and didn’t want to remember it. I have one habit that is really very well ingrained, and that is if it was distasteful, I put it away and don’t remember it My mind is horrible. I don’t remember this. I’m remembering the report now. But I pitched it.

Another Memory Six days after the interview Mrs. Anderson called me at home. It was early evening. Hello, Dr. Denzin, this is Alice Anderson. After you left last week I remembered I kept a scrapbook of the years I was on the school board. I think you should have it. I want someone to tell my story, now that I am getting so old. You are welcome to it, if you want it.

When I arrived at her home, she directed me to her kitchen table, there lay a large scrapbook, 12 by 14 inches, and two folders, as well as a large manila envelope with press clippings inside. The scrap book carried the notation “School board, 6/66–4/67” (the first year of her first term on the board). Two collie puppies were pictured on the scrapbook, one sitting in a red wheelbarrow. 238

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Out of the folders fluttered clippings, pictures, stories, and congratulation notes concerning her victorious 1968 re-election to the board. Mrs. Anderson remembered what she had forgotten. She hadn’t pitched her files. She had kept all of them. Her scrapbook was a record of the past. But not everything was here. She indeed forgot to clip those stories about the Summer of Discontent, and she had no record of the 1972 desegregation report that ignored Mr. Daniels and his group. These were painful experiences, and Mrs. Anderson had the habit of not remembering distasteful things. Thirty years ago, a lot of distasteful things surrounded desegregation in Edge City.

Reading Mrs. Anderson’s Performance I have attempted to turn Mrs. Anderson’s interview into a dramatic, poetic text. Smith says that such texts should evoke the character of the speaker. They should allow the speaker to be fully present in their speech. Mrs. Anderson uses irony to convey her views of the world, a racist world she disdains. With her words, she creates a narrative montage. Inside this world of jumbled images and memories, she looks back, locating herself in the summer of 1966. Thirty years after the fact, she sees courage in the eyes and words of James and Marilyn Daniels. She sees that she and her colleagues allowed themselves not to see the segregated school “over there.” And she applies the term racist to this gaze. But when she voted, she voted as a woman and said something “stupid and female,” as if a woman could not have a voice on race matters in 1966. She recalls the graduate student who spoke harshly of “those people.” She willingly speaks harshly herself of the one outspoken racist on the board. The 1966 Chicago race riots are evoked by the images behind her words: “You haven’t been to Chicago and listened to those black bastards calling you names.” So for one man, Edge City’s desegregation vote was a vote to give a voice to these black bastards. THE REFLEXIVE INTERVIEW AND A PERFORMATIVE SOCIAL SCIENCE 239

In her montage, Mrs. Anderson separates herself from other white people. Her family lived next to a Negro family in Joliet, and she came to see that Negroes were people, too. She passed this understanding along to her daughter, as the color photo dramatically demonstrates. All did not go well in Edge City’s desegregation experiment. There was a summer of discontent. The white school board did ignore the black parents. Mrs. Anderson’s scrapbook, with its pictures and clippings, tells part of this story, but the most painful part she did not keep. And in her obituary, there was no mention of her part in this history. The paper did not even record the fact that she served on the school board.

CONCLUSION Anna Deavere Smith contends that Americans have difficulty “talking about race and talking about [racial] differences. This difficulty goes across race, class, and political lines” (1993: xii). There is, she says, “a lack of words . . . we do not have a language that serves us as a group” (ibid.). Smith’s plays are attempts to find that language. Her performance texts allow us to see more clearly the limits of the language we now use. Performances such as Mrs. Anderson’s create spaces for the operation of racial memories. They create occasions for rethinking the politics of race and racism in the 1990s. Mrs. Anderson’s text shows that a wide gulf existed in the 1960s between whites and blacks in Edge City. White male voices reproduced racial stereotypes. When a white woman spoke out, she felt uncomfortable, as a woman. But a white woman did speak out in 1966, and she crossed racial boundaries. Listening to Mrs. Anderson’s story today reminds us that we still need performers like her (and performances like hers), if the promises of a racial democracy are ever to be achieved in America. I seek an interpretive social science that is simultaneously autoethnographic, vulnerable, performative, and critical. This is a social science that refuses abstractions and high theory. It 240

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is a way of being in the world, a way of writing, hearing, and listening. Viewing culture as a complex performative process, it seeks to understand how people enact and construct meaning in their daily lives. This is a return to narrative as a political act; a social science that has learned how to critically use the reflexive, dialogical interview. This social science inserts itself into the world in an empowering way. It uses the words and stories told to us to fashion performance texts that imagine new worlds, worlds where humans can become who they wish to be, free of prejudice, repression, and discrimination. This is the promise of a performative social science in a cinematic society. This social science refuses to treat research as a commodity that can be bought and sold. As researchers, we belong to a moral community. The reflexive interview helps us create dialogic relationships with that community. These relationships, in turn, allow us to enact an ethic of care and empowerment. This is the kind of ethic Mrs. Anderson sought to create in Edge City in the summer of 1966. In performing her interview, we learn a little more about how we can do the same in our own communities.

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MEMORY Lewis and Clark in Yellowstone, circa 20041 Memory is a three-act play that enacts a critical cultural politics concerning Native-Americans and the bicentennial commemoration of the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804–1806 in the greater Yellowstone region in 2003 and 2004 (see Denzin 2003, 2004, 2005; Shay 2004; Webb 2004; Zellar 2004).2 The object of my inquiry, the Lewis and Clark expedition, comprises a particular intersection of forces, discourses, and institutions (Foucault 1980). These contradictory forces come together in 2003–2004 to produce a certain set of effects, the commemoration itself. In making sense of Lewis and Clark, their place in this current historical moment and their relations with Native-Americans, I follow Benjamin’s (1983) advice about writing history. Drawing on newspaper accounts, popular texts, and official and unofficial documents, Benjamin’s histories consist of a series of quotations placed side by side. A literary montage is produced, a decentered narrative, a multivoiced experimental text with voices and speakers speaking back and forth, often past one another (Benjamin 1999: 460). Benjamin’s histories rip the present and the past out of their current contexts. These histories refuse to privilege the past, contending that history unfolds only as a series of interconnected presents—one crisis, one catastrophe, one state of alert, one national emergency seamlessly knitted into the next. Quoting the past back to itself exposes contradictions and ruptures in official history (Benjamin 1969: 255–266, 1983: 24). In quoting from the histories and discourses surrounding Lewis and Clark, I hope 243

to expose and criticize a racist politics buried deep inside the American democratic imagination. Memory is a fractured, revisionist, personal history, an intersection of biography and history, an attempt at a personal mythology that contests the rhetorical uses of Lewis and Clark and their scientific discoveries for political, patriotic purposes. Using historical documents, personal memory, and materials from the present, I critically read the utopian discourses stitched into our memories and representations of the Corps of Discovery.3 I refuse to romanticize the expedition, reading it instead as an embarrassing instance of the Empire’s colonization of NativeAmericans—a violent exercise of political, cultural, sexual, and economic power. This play is woven in, through, and around memories and representations, including those of Hudson’s Bay blankets, families, Native-Americans, illness, and Lewis and Clark in the greater Yellowstone region. Building on previous interpretations of the negative history of Native-Americans in Yellowstone Park (Bartlett 1985; Denzin 2005; Haines 1996a; Janetski 2002; Schullery 1997; Spence 1999, 2003), I contend that much of that history makes sense when Lewis and Clark’s relations with Native-Americans are critically examined. The expedition implemented in the western United States an ideological view of Native-Americans that had been previously enacted in the American Colonies. Embedded in the racial politics of Manifest Destiny, the theories of Savagism, and the Great Chain of Being (Wallace 1999: 95), this ideology directed Lewis and Clark to kill those Native-Americans who did not assist the expedition in the attainment of its goals. A rereading of these myths and relations requires a new set of understandings about the Corps of Discovery, and about Yellowstone today. The interrogation of Lewis and Clark’s journey as it passes symbolically through Yellowstone Park and my tiny corner of the West represents an opportunity to take up again Kittridge’s (1996) and Limerick’s (2001) challenge to rethink Western history and mythology by starting all over again out at ground level. I begin with scenes from the present and the past. 244

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ACT ONE Scene One: Getting Started Voice 1 (offstage) Historian-as-Social-Critic: If the Lewis and Clark bicentennial is to have lasting value, we need to reject . . . simple romance . . . and epic heroism . . . and replace [them] with a more sophisticated understanding of the expedition’s purposes and legacies. In the process we might begin to recognize how current efforts to commemorate the expedition . . . perpetuate a set of historical and ecological burdens that are becoming increasingly intolerable in the 21st century (Spence 2003: 57). (pause) Course Announcement, Yellowstone Association Institute, Summer 2003: “Along the Yellowstone River with Lewis & Clark” July 25–27, Limit: 19 Location: Mammoth Hot Springs/Three Forks, and Dillon, Montana Credit Pending; Instructor: Jim Garry, M.S. $180 (member’s fee $170) In the summer of 1805, Lewis and Clark passed through the Yellowstone region en route to the Pacific Ocean . . . Almost 200 years later, we will walk in their footsteps, see what they saw, read their journals. (pause) “It was something like the Lewis and Clark [traveling] Medicine Show.” (Ronda 1984: 18; see also Ambrose 1996: 157) (pause) But the park did not exist in 1805. What kind of history is this?

Scene Two: Hudson’s Bay Blankets Voice 2 Author-as-Narrator-to-Audience, explaining project: On July 5, 1955, my father returned to our little house on Third Street in Indianola, Iowa, from a fishing trip in Ontario, Canada. MEMORY

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He had been gone two weeks. Mother greeted him at the door. Slightly intoxicated, Dad, with what I thought was a guilty look, handed mother a Hudson’s Bay wool blanket as a present. He promptly left for the office. I still have that blanket. In this family, we value these blankets and exchange them as gifts. This exchange system gives me a somewhat indirect history with Lewis and Clark, Canada, Hudson’s Bay Company blankets, the fur trade, 19th-century British and French traders and Native-Americans. This history takes me right into the myths about Yellowstone Park, Lewis and Clark, the Corps of Discovery, and Sacagawea. Lewis and Clark, it appears, also traded blankets and other gifts for good will on their expedition. But this was a tainted exchange. In many instances (see below), these blankets were carriers of the smallpox disease. The blanket father gave to mother was embedded within a tainted, disease exchange system—in this case, alcoholism. While father’s alcoholism was not yet full blown in 1955, it would be within two years of his return from this fishing trip.

Scene Three: Yellowstone Time Line The Camera Eye 14—Silent Movie Historical insert (moveable poster board) Time Line: Lewis and Clark in the Greater Yellowstone Area 1805–18145 1805 April 7 April 25

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Lewis and Clark send Jefferson a map showing the “River Yellow Rock” (Haines 1996a: 5, 34) Lewis camps at mouth of Yellowstone River: “This river, which had been known to the French as the Roches jaunes, or as we have called it the ‘Yellowstone,’ arises according to Indian information in the Rocky mountains [in the Yellowstone National Park].” (Çoues 1965 [1893], Vol. 1: 283; Jackson 1987: 3) Expedition camps 120 miles west of current Yellowstone National Park boundary (Spence 1999: 152) CHAPTER 11

1806 July 17– August 7

August 14

Clark and small expedition explore the Yellowstone River from Livingston to mouth of Missouri river (Moulton 2003: 353–362) John Colter leaves expedition and returns to Yellowstone River area, summer and winter of 1806 and 1807, camping along Yellowstone Lake, Tower Falls, Lamar River, and Soda Butte Creek, to the headwaters of Clarks Fork (Haines 1996a: 36–37)

1814 Biddle publishes Clark’s map of the river 2004 Summer celebrations of Lewis and Clark Bicentennial begins; entire greater Yellowstone region celebrates accomplishments of the expedition.

Scene Four Voice 3 Narrator-as-Dramatist/Narrator-as-Traveler: Airport Sightings: In the summer of 2003 and 2004, passengers waiting for their luggage in the Billings, Montana, airport were forced to walk around a large 20-feet by 10-feet high diorama, a three-dimensional exhibit titled “Lewis and Clark on the Yellowstone: July 1806.” In order to get out of the airport, you had to confront and walk past a long exhibit on Lewis and Clark and the legacy of their journey in the Yellowstone region.

As the time line and the Yellowstone Association Institute course announcement showed, Lewis and Clark were in this region in 1805 and 1806. In the summers of 2003 and 2004, nearly 200 years later, the footprints of Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, Sacagawea, and the Corps of Discovery were again all over MEMORY

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the greater Yellowstone region (Shay 2004; Webb 2004; Zellar 2004). Clark’s July 1806 trip alongside and down the Yellowstone River was marked by celebrations, parades, and historical reenactments. Museums, city squares, and riverside parks in Livingston, Big Timber, Greycliff, Reed Point, Columbus, Laurel, Billings, and even Red Lodge had displays honoring the Corps. On July 24, 2004, downtown Billings was filled with history fans who were enjoying a “Taste of the Trail”—eating food that Lewis and Clark and their men might have eaten on the trail, including smoked elk and buffalo. Munching on smoked elk burgers, listening to Native-American flute music, history buffs, dressed in historically accurate costumes, strolled past reconstructions of Pompeys Pillar, where volunteer/vendor Alysa Winterhalter, wearing a buckskin dress, was giving away Krispy Kreme doughnuts (Shay 2004). Each day that the expedition was in the Billings area, the Billings Gazette published an excerpt from the Gary Moulton (1983–2001; 2003) edition of the Lewis and Clark journals. Thus, for July 25, 1804 (2004), the paper excerpted accounts from the journals, placing the excerpts alongside a map of the journey as it progressed from St. Louis to the mouth of the Columbia River near Portland, Oregon: The Lewis and Clark journals: “Small butifull river” Lewis and Clark’s location 200 years ago this week: July 25, 1894, Clark: “at 2oClock Drewyer & Peter . . . informs that no indians were at their towns.” July 25, 1894, Floyd: “Continued Hear as the Capts is not Don there Riting” (Billings Gazette Sunday 25 July, 2004, 2C: 3). In Mountain Men Rendezvous events across the region, white males dressed as traders and trappers, and Native-Americans reenacted the trading and exchange rituals that were so basic

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to the expedition. And so, in this way, readers and tourists were transported back in time, as the expedition was honored in the present. A historical moment was created. Time stood still; history was happening in the present. In a narrow strip of time, July 25, 2004, persons stepped through a membrane into the summer of 1804. In that temporal space they collaborated in the production of a “historical imaginary that denies and jumbles time by sustaining one small slice of it indefinitely” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998: 197). In so doing, they actively forgot “what came after the moment they were re-enacting” (ibid.). Indeed, they either forgot, or did not remember what needed to have been done in order for that moment to have occurred. These historical performances flit by, like images on an Imax screen or scenes from a Ken Burns film. Lewis and Clark and the past are treated as if they were things that could be fixed, frozen in time. Indeed, the historical re-enactment of the Expedition is endowed with special powers. It stands outside time, remembering the frozen-in-time past “the way it really was” (Benjamin 1969: 257). There is great danger in these historical masquerades. Particular versions of whiteness and white history are performed. A peaceful bond between the imagined past and the present is forged. In this nostalgic space, the benign past-ness of Lewis and Clark comes alive. Their historic journey of conquest is celebrated. A territorial and cultural politic is signified. The white community owns this land, this river, this park, this place, these meanings. The white community and its city fathers have the right to re-create in these cultural spaces their version of how these two men and their expedition helped win the West for Thomas Jefferson and White America (Williams 1997). Under such a utopian scenario, forgiveness for the handful of sins committed by the explorers is easily given (see Grossman 2003: 2–5). Indeed, forgiveness gives way to forgetful celebration, to a displacement, a shift from conquest to eco-environmentalism, to nature, the joy of floating the Yellowstone or the Missouri under the banner of Lewis and Clark.

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Scene Four: A Time for Nostalgia Voice 4 Historian: A few years ago I was helping my friend Stephen Ambrose lead a group of people along some of the most scenic stretches of the Lewis and Clark Trail. On a warm summer evening, after a pleasant day of paddling canoes on the Missouri River, we camped amid the eerie and majestic White Cliffs of north-central Montana, close to the exact spot where, on 31 May 1805 Meriwether Lewis wrote one of his most lyrical journal passages about the wondrous landscape he and his men were encountering with fresh eyes. “As we passed on,” Lewis concluded, “it seemed as if those scenes of visionary enchantment would never have an end.” Nearly two centuries later, we found the enchantment equally palpable as we sat around the campfire and gazed at the silent cliffs reflected in the river, tinged pink by the setting sun (Duncan 2002: v). Voice 5 Author to Audience, in a Cynical Tone: I challenge those myths that celebrate and present Lewis and Clark as culturally sensitive frontier diplomats, as ethnographers and gifted linguists who were models of multiculturalism in their dealings with Native-Americans (Ambrose 1996: 35; DeVoto 1997: xii; Grossman 2003; Ronda 1988: xi; Slaughter 2003; Spence 2003: 58–59).6 I also question the New West model of the cultural marketplace, because it structures performances connected to the bicentennial as nostalgic consumption events. In these celebratory spaces, no mention is made of how Lewis and Clark and the Corps exploited, threatened, stole from, belittled, killed, and sexually exploited Native-Americans (see Slaughter 2003: 160–185).

Montana Magazine: “Lewis and Clark Never Stayed Here—Ad for Sacajawea Hotel, Three Forks, Montana” (March/April, 2003) 250

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“Undaunted Hospitality: The Sacajawea Hotel” (March/April, 2003) The Wheat Montana Journal: I commanded a most perfect view of the neighbouring country . . . a distant range of lofty mountains rose, their snow-clad tops above the irregular and broken mountains which are adjacent to this beautiful spot. (Meriwether Lewis, atop the limestone cliffs on the edge of our farm of the Three Forks of the Missouri River, below [photo] in 1805) The perch where Lewis penned his description happens to be only a few hundred yards from where we now farm acres of the “beautiful plains” he describes . . . the land we now call Wheat Montana Farms. (Wheat Montana Journal, Vol. 11: 2003)

Scene Five: Savages Voice 6 Meriwether Lewis: We believe that the surest guarantee of savage fidelity to a nation is a thorough conviction on their minds that their government possesses the power of punishing promptly every act of aggression committed on their part against the person or property of their citizens (Lewis letter to Hugh Henry, 20 July 1806, in Jackson 1962: 310). Voice 7 Expert on Frontier Race Relations: When . . . Lewis and Clark looked at an Indian, they saw a noble savage ready to be transformed into a civilized citizen. When they looked at a Negro, they saw something less than human . . .. William Clark tried to adopt a part-Indian Boy [Sacagawea’s son] as his own son. He would not have dreamed of adopting a black boy as his own son [he had his own slave, York] (Ambrose 1996: 55). Voice 8 Thomas Jefferson: The Indian [is] as ardent as the white man, free, brave, preferring death to surrender . . . moral and responsible . . . loving to MEMORY

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his children, caring and loyal to family . . . and equal to whites in vivacity and activity of mind . . . The Negro is physically ugly, offensive in body odor, and oversexed (Jefferson, quoted in Wallace 1999: 77–78). Voice 9 Anthony F. C. Wallace and the Theory of Savagism: The picture of the Indians presented in [Jefferson’s] Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) . . . articulated an American theory of savagism—that the savage [is] one whom circumstances, for good or bad, have held in an early state of society . . .. Thus the Indians could be regarded as . . . culturally inferior, childlike, in their savage state. . . . The theory of a scale of progress or Great Chain of Being was fully current in the literature of the Enlightenment by the time Jefferson was writing in the 1780s (Wallace 1999: 95). Voice 10 Narrator to Audience: This is only slightly different from viewing Native-Americans, like African-Americans, as biologically and culturally inferior beings.

ACT TWO Scene One: Getting Situated in the Present newsreel 1 Voice 11 Narrator to Audience: I have to show you this piece of mail I received in the mail from the University of Iowa Alumni Association, 30 September 2003. (holds up brochure to audience) (front page) “In the wake of Lewis & Clark: A Voyage Along the Columbia & Snake Rivers: Iowa Voyagers, May 18–24 2004, Aboard the M. V. Sea Bird” [photo of Sea Bird in harbor]. (inside text) 252

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Dear Iowa Voyagers: In the summer of 1803 Thomas Jefferson appeared before Congress to request money to fund an exploratory odyssey across the vast unmapped section of the American continent . . . Jefferson’s dream fueled the Lewis & Clark expedition, and achieved a victory that looks as large in history (for many historians and citizens—scholars) as the Civil War or the moon landing. There’s something in the story of Lewis & Clark expedition for everyone—fans of adventure, history, science nature . . .. And now 200 years after they completed their exploration, Lewis & Clark have never been more popular. Their original “Corps of Volunteers for Northwest Discovery” officially began May of 1804 and lasted two years. Ours will begin on May 18, 2004, and last seven days. Come with us and add this chapter to your life history.7 Narrator’s Aside to Audience, in disgust: I don’t think I want these experiences in my life history!

Scene Two: Getting Situated in the Past: The Object of the Trip Voice 12 MacKenzie and DeVoto: By opening the intercourse between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and forming regular establishments through the interior . . . the entire command of the fur trade of North America might be obtained (MacKenzie 1801, quoted in DeVoto 1997 [1953]: xxxix). Voice 13 Historian-as-Interpreter: Jefferson read MacKenzie’s book in the summer of 1802. MacKenzie’s geography . . . interested Jefferson less than the challenge MacKenzie posed for his own nation: to discover the continental passage, colonize the Pacific Coast and tap its fur resources, and establish commerce with the Orient. That, Thomas Jefferson believed ought to be done by the United States, not Great Britain . . .. By the end of 1802 the president had sounded MEMORY

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out a suspicious Spanish envoy in Washington about a scientific expedition into Spanish Louisiana . . . By the spring of 1803 . . . he commissioned his private secretary (Meriwether Lewis) to organize such an expedition . . . to help lead it Lewis called on an old army comrade, redheaded William Clark, . . . veteran frontiersman and Indian fighter (Utley 1997: 3). Voice 14 Mr. Thomas Jefferson, the President-as-Trip-Organizer: The object of your mission is to explore the Missouri river, & such principle stream of it, as, by its course & communication with the waters of the Pacific Ocean, may offer the most direct & practicable water communication across this continent, for the purposes of commerce . . . In all your intercourse with the natives treat them in the most friendly & conciliatory manner . . . allay their jealousies as to the object of your journey, satisfy them of its innocence (Thomas Jefferson, Instructions to Lewis, dated 20 June, 1803, reprinted in DeVoto 1997 [1953]: 482, 484). Voice 15 Mr. Thomas Jefferson on Collateral Damage: The ultimate purpose of engaging Indian leaders is to obtain lands from them . . .. If ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it down til that tribe is exterminated . . . they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them (Jefferson [1803; 1807], quoted in Spence 2003: 59–60).

Scene Three: Resistance Voice 16 A Native-American Responds: William Least Heat-Moon: The adventure and romance of the great Expedition have blinded many Americans to its central aims which were more political and economic than scientific. A key duty of Captain Lewis was to inform people who had dwelt on the land for twelve thousand years . . . that they were now “children” under the hand of the great and distant White Father. 254

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That is an act of conquest, not science . . .. Some history buffs prefer to ignore the following sentences (below, Act Two, Scene Four) that Jefferson wrote on 4 July 1776 in the Declaration of Independence (1999: 264–265).

Scene Four: Manners, Morals, and Sex in the West CHORUS 1 In Their Own Words: Frontier Race Relations, Part Two (10 Voices):

Chorus Voice 1: Thomas Jefferson “The King of Great Britain . . . has . . . endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions” (Thomas Jefferson, July 4, 1776, The Declaration of Independence). Chorus Voice 2: Meriwether Lewis “Children, we have been sent by the great Chief of the Seventeen great nations of America to inform you . . . that a great council was lately held between this great chief and your old fathers the French and Spaniards. There it was decided that the Missouri River now belonged to the United States, so that all those who lived in that country, whether white or red, are bound to obey the commands of their great Chief the President who is now your only great father . . . he is the only friend to whom you can now look for protection . . . he will take care to serve you, & not deceive you” (Ambrose 1996: 156–157; also Biddle 1962 [1814]: 23–24). Chorus Voice 3: Meriwether Lewis on the Sioux “These [Teton Sioux] are the vilest miscreants of the savage race” (Meriwether Lewis, 23 September 1804, in Çoues 1965 [1893]: 128; also Moulton 2003: xx; also Ronda 1984: 27—who attributes this statement to Clark and not Lewis). MEMORY

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Chorus Voice 4: Meriwether Lewis on Shoshone Dinner Manners “When they reached the place where Drewyer had thrown out the intestines, they [the Shoshones] all dismounted . . . and ran tumbling over each other like famished dogs; each tore away whatever part he could and instantly began to eat it . . .. It was indeed impossible to see these wretches ravenously feeding on the filth of animals, and the blood streaming from their mouths, without deploring how nearly the conditions of savages approaches that of the brute creation” (Meriwether Lewis, 16 August 1805, in Biddle 1962 [1814], Vol. 1: 229; also Çoues 1965 [1893]: 503; Moulton 2003: 183). Chorus Voice 5: William Clark “Sex and the Medicine Dance: We sent a man to this Medisan Dance last night, they gave him four girls” (Clark, 5 January 1805: 77 in Moulton 2003: 77). Chorus Voice 6: Patrick Gass and Others “We ought to give some account of the fair sex of the Missouri . . .. The fact is . . . the women are generally considered an article of traffic . . . for an old tobacco box one of our men was granted the honour of passing a night with the daughter of the headchief of the Mandan nation” (Gass, 5 April, 1805 in Moulton 2003: 90). Chorus Voice 7: Ronda and a Native-American Disclaimer—On Sex and Trading with Strangers (paraphrased) Interest in sexual and commercial commerce with traders was based on three distinct cultural and gender (masculine) understandings: (1) A desire to obtain European goods. Having sexual relations meant receiving these objects in payment for favors— ironware, paint, blue beads, cloth [blankets] were part of the exchange. (2) Sex with traders was an integral part of northern 256

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plains hospitality. (3) Sexual conduct was perceived as a means of transferring spiritual power from one person to another. Sex became a conduit for power (Ronda 1988: 62). Mandan and Arikara Indians believed that spiritual power is a constituent of sperm. They believed that just as a father’s seed carried his character through a mother to their son, so, too, the mystery of a great warrior through a wife to her husband. (Slaughter 2003: 122). Chorus Voice 8: Narrator Rhetorical Question to Audience:So do you think the Corps of Discovery understood this theory? The men in the Corps seemed to believe that the women were lecherous, without Christian virtue, always looking for sexual pleasure (Ronda 1988: 64). This is how the men tell it anyway! It is not clear in this gendered telling if women had the power to contest these beliefs and sexual practices. Chorus Voice 9: Meriwether Lewis on Native Women’s Dress The usual dress of females . . . covers the body from the armpits to the waist, it conceals the breasts, but on other occasions they are suffered to remain loose and exposed, and present, in old women, especially a most disgusting appearance . . . nor have we seen any more disgusting object than a Chinnook or Clatsop beauty in full attire (Lewis, 21 January 1806, in Biddle, 1962 [1814], Vol. 2: 369–370). Chorus Voice 10: Lewis and Clark on Chinook Female Sexuality Lewis: Among these people, as indeed among all Indians the prostitution of unmarried women is far from being criminal or improper . . . the female is farmed out for hire . . . [with] regular prices . . .. The little intercourse which the men have had with these women is . . . sufficient to apprise us of the prevalence of . . . venereal disease (Lewis, 21 January 1806, in Biddle, 1962 [1814], Vol. 2: 369–370). MEMORY

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Clark: The women were very fond of caressing our men (Clark, quoted in Ronda 1988: 64).

Scene Five: Additional Commentary on Glitter and History CHORUS

2 (6 Voices): Chorus Voice 1: Larry McMurtry

This journey of the Corps of Discovery is one of the most celebrated in United States history, perhaps our “first really American adventure . . . our only really American epic . . . a national myth” (McMurtry 2001: 139, 141). This is a buddy story of gigantic proportion—two meditative outdoorsmen, reflective naturalists, white men conquering wilderness and the Western frontier— Audobon, Muir, Leopold, Lopez, Berry, Abbey—prototypes of other famous buddy teams—Lone Ranger and Tonto, Roy and Dale, Butch and Sundance, Huck and Jim (McMurtry 2001: xii, 140–141). Chorus Voice 2: Bernard DeVoto Conducted under the guise of a scientific expedition, it represented a questionable victory for science, capitalism, and nationhood (DeVoto 1997 [1953]: xxxii). Chorus Voice 3: Chorus of Wise Men: Dee Brown, Robert Utley, Stephen Ambrose, Alston Chase It opened up the frontier for economic expansion, and the colonization of the American West (Brown 1971: 300–301; Utley 1997: 3). It shaped the conditions for the Indian Wars of 1860– 1890 (Brown 1971: 11–13, 335), the short-lived, trans-national, inter-mountain fur trade economy (Utley 1997: 6), the transcontinental railroad (Ambrose 2000: 19), the erasure of complex Native-American cultures (Brown 1971: 335), the near destruction of the beaver, bear, and the buffalo, and helped create the 258

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notion that white men could play God in the West, and perhaps even in Yellowstone (Chase 1986: 107, 145). Voice 17 Narrator-as-Cultural Critic: Today when Americans revisit Lewis and Clark and Yellowstone Park, the darker side of race and gender and political economy become more evident. The journey could not have been accomplished without the assistance of Native-Americans and at least one African-American, Clark’s slave York (Slaughter 2003: xv). Jefferson’s view of the expedition and his attitude toward NativeAmericans cannot be ignored.

Scene Six: Packing for the Trip The Camera Eye 2—Silent Movie, Indian Givers: Collecting Gifts for the Trip Historical insert (moveable poster board: pictures of Jefferson peace medals, medallions, U.S. flags, guns, ammunition, whiskey bottles, blue glass beads, cheap rings with glass stones, mirrors, scissors, sewing needles, brooches, brass kettles, fishhooks, hawks bells, ruffled shits, red-handled knifes, 15 3-pt. blankets, 15 match coats [Lewis 1803, in Jackson 1962: 93], face paint, packets of tobacco, cloth fabric, combs, arm bands, ear trinkets, thimbles, awls, two corn grinders [Ambrose 1996: 88; Jackson 1962: 63–74, 93–99; Ronda 1988: 8–9]). Colonial experience taught that fruitful diplomacy and peaceful relations with native peoples required the exchange of gifts for each meeting. French and English forest diplomats learned that lesson early. . . . Europeans . . . perceived . . . gifts as bribes to ensure compliance with treaty terms . . . heaps of blankets, pots, and guns meant something else to the Indians. The act of reciprocal gift giving . . . symbolized concern for each other. Neglecting to give gifts meant failure to “brighten the chain of friendship” that bound Europeans and Indians together. . . . By the time Jefferson created the Corps . . . gifts were a recognized part of the protocol of Indian diplomacy (Ronda 1988: 8). MEMORY

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Scene Seven: Stealing Horses and Killing Indians along the Yellowstone in 1806 Voice 18 Narrator as Historian: On July 15, 1806, Clark and 12 other members of the Corps of Discovery proceeded along the Yellowstone River, below Livingston, Montana on horseback . . .. On 24 July, clearly in an expansive mood, Clark names a river flowing into the Yellowstone after himself, calling it the Clark’s Fork of the Yellowstone. On July 26, two days later, less than two hundred miles north, Lewis and his men meet a group of Blackfeet in Two Medicine River valley. Lewis boasts that the Americans will now be controlling the sale of guns to the Blackfeet, as well as to the Blackfeet’s enemies— the Shoshones, the Nez Perce and the Salish (Fifer and Soderberg 2001: 176). Early on the morning of the 27th, the Blackfeet attempt to steal the guns of Drewyer, Fields, and Lewis. Voice 19 Lewis: The Two Medicine Incidents (paraphrased): “In retaliation, R. Fields . . . stabbed the indian to the heart with his knife the fellow ran about 15 steps and fell dead . . .. I jumped up and asked what was the matter . . .. I reached to seize my gun and found her gone, I then drew a pistol from my holster and terning around myself about saw the indian making off with my gun. . . . I now hollowed to the men and told them to fire on them if they attempted to drive off our horse . . .. I called to them [the Blackfeet] that I would shoot them if they did not give me my horse . . . one of them (Side Hill Calf) jumped from behind a rock. . . . I shot him through the belly . . . we . . . retook out flagg and left the medal about the neck of the dead man that they would be informed who we were” (Moulton 2003: 344–345; see also Ronda 1988: 243–440; Utley 1997: 8–10). Voice 20 Historians on the Two Medicine Myths (paraphrase): Lewis’s killing of Side Hill Calf would be used by popular historians, including Washington Irving, Elliot Çoues, and Nicholas 260

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Biddle to explain later violence between the Blackfeet and American traders (Ronda 1988: 244; Utley 1997: 10). Voice 21 Narrator: In any event the Two Medicine incident left two Native Americans dead, and they were killed by Lewis and Fields. Voice 22: Narrator to Audience (meanwhile a year earlier): Historical Aside: They spent the winter of 1804–1805 with French and British traders in the Mandan Indian villages along the upper Missouri River in North Dakota, near present-day Mandan and Bismarck, North Dakota. Representatives of the Hudson’s Bay and the Northwest Trading Company, who had been active in the area for at least a decade, were also in the camp. In December of 1804, Sacagawea, whom Clark sometimes called Janey (Clarke 2002: 31; McMurtry 2001: 137; Slaughter 2003: 111), and her husband Charbonneau join the expedition as translators. Sacagawea’s son, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau (nicknamed Pompy, or Pompey, by Clark) is born on 11 February 1805 (Ambrose 1996: 197–198).

Scene Eight: Much Earlier: In a Naming Mood Voice 23 William Clark: July 25, 1806 . . . at 4 P.M. arrived at a remarkable rock. . . . This rock (about 28 miles northeast of present-day Billings) I shall Call Pompy’s Tower (for Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, Sacagawea’s son) . . .. The nativs have ingraved on the face of this rock the figures of animals &c. near which I marked my name and the date of the month & year (Moulton 2003: 358). Voice 24 Narrator’s Aside to Audience: In January 2000, President Clinton proclaimed Pompey’s Pillar, and an area of about 50 miles surrounding, a national monument (Grossman 2003: 122). MEMORY

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Scene Nine: Clark as the Godfather Voice 25 William Clark to Charbonneau: You have been a long time with me and have conducted yourself in such a manner as to gain my friendship (Tinling 2001: 19–20). Voice 26 Narrator: In his final report to Jefferson in 1807 Clark said of Charbonneau, “he was a man of no peculiar merit [but] useful as an interpreter . . .” [17 August 1806]. “His wife was particularly useful among the Shoshones. . . . We therefore paid Charbonneau wages amounting to $500.33, including the price of a horse and a lodge [tent] purchased of him.” No wages were paid to Sacagawea (Clark and Edmonds 1979: 82). Voice 27 William Clark to Charbonneau: If you will bring your son [Pomp] Baptiest to me I will educate him and treat him as my own child (Tinling 2001: 19–20). Voice 28 Jean Baptiste Charbonneau—Little Pomp (paraphrase): When I was six, my family accepted Captain Clark’s offer to educate me and Lisette, my sister. So in 1809, dressed in white boy’s clothes, I was sent to St. Louis to live. I was baptized in the Catholic Church by a Trappist Monk. . . . I went to a church school for half-Indian boys. Because I was a half-Indian, I lived in a boarding house not with Clark’s family. Clark’s wife did not accept me because I was half-Indian. I did not have a place in white society (Fifer and Soderberg 2001: 202; McMurtry 2001: 155–156; Tinling 2001: 103). Voice 29 Lewis on Sacagawea: If she has enough to eat and a few trinkets I believe she would be perfectly content anywhere (Ronda 1988: 259). 262

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Voice 30 Bernard DeVoto (paraphrased): A dismaying amount of the Lewis and Clark history has been written without regard to their relations with and their views of Native-Americans. But if Lewis’s remarks are a measure of their views, perhaps this is as it should be (Ronda 1988: xii).

ACT THREE Scene One: Of Memories, Blankets, and Myths Voice 31 Narrator Re-Remembers the Past—1955: I want to return to the summer of 1955, when my father sold me a $5,000 life insurance policy from the Farm Bureau Life Insurance Company. I was 14 years old, and a life insurance policy at that age seemed a stretch. But Dad was desperate. He said this sale would put him over his quota for the month and qualify him for a fishing trip to Ontario, Canada. It did, and that summer he came home to our little house in Indianola, Iowa, with a four-pelt Hudson’s Bay wool blanket. Today that blanket is in the guest bedroom. Nate and Heidi used it the last time they visited. Voice 32 Narrator Remembers Another Version of the Past—1994: The Hudson’s Bay blanket that my father bought for me and my wife at a farm auction in Kalona, Iowa, in the winter of 1994 was expensive. He and his best friend bid against each other, driving the price up over $300.00. The price was fitting, for the blanket is marked with four black pelt or point lines, which defined the blanket’s worth in that 19th-century economy, when pelts were traded for blankets. A four-pelt blanket is indeed pricey. Today that fourpelt blanket is in the guest room in our cabin outside Red Lodge. Voice 33 Narrator Remembers the Past—2002: For Nate and Heidi’s 28th birthdays we went shopping at the Red Lodge Mountain Man Rendezvous. We found a trader from MEMORY

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Fort Worth who was selling Hudson’s Bay blankets. We bought two four-pelt blankets and shopped them to Seattle. The trader explained that the short black lines on the blanket referred to the number of fur pelts the blanket was traded for.

Scene Two: The Blanket Story from Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) Voice 34 Hudson’s Bay Historian Peter C. Newman (paraphrase): The Hudson’s Bay blanket, the most durable legacy of the Company’s involvement in fur trade, was developed so that Indians could trade “the very fur off their backs” and still have something warm to wear on their way home. Introduced at the end of the 18th century, the blanket’s trademark coloured marks were added later on, and the modern blanket still bears a set of small black stripes along its edge representing the number of made beaver pelts that size of blanket was worth (Newman 1989: 61–62). Voice 35 Hudson’s Bay Salesclerk #1: Actually today, a new four-point chief blanket sells anywhere from $250–$400. Your father got a good deal, even if he thinks he overpaid at that auction! You know we have many different products that have the blanket design: scarves, children’s tuques and mittens, pillows, Swiss Army knives. Voice 36 Hudson’s Bay Salesclerk #2: What Burberry’s plaid is to London, the Hudson’s Bay blanket is to Canada (Fulsang 2003: L5). Voice 37 Sarah Richardson, Savvy Designer and Host of HGTV’s Room Service: I grew up with the Hudson’s Bay blanket at my family cottage, so they always bring back that concept of cozy rustic simplicity . . .. That simple strip is always in fashion (Richardson, quoted in Fulsang 2003: L5). 264

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The Camera Eye 3: Make Your Own Blanket Coat: A One-Day Workshop For those inspired by the Bay’s iconic blanket, one-day workshops are available. For about $200 you can sign up, get a sewing kit, instructions by a specialist, a history lesson, and make your own point blanket. While you make your blanket you can listen to aboriginal stories and music and have a traditional plowman’s lunch. (Fulsang 2003: L5).

Scene Three: Historically Authentic Trade Blankets Voice 38 Summary of information from the Web: Okay, Hudson’s Bay Company sold the blankets, but somebody else made them and put the HBC label on them. It is generally understood that the practice of hand-weaving points into blankets for HBC started in 1780 with Thomas Empson, who was at that time the major supplier of blankets to HBC. The major blanket producers and distributors include, besides Empson, and HBC (1) Early’s of Witney, founded in 1669 and still in existence; (2) Eatons’s of Canada, which imported and sold blankets under the ‘Trapper Label’; (3) J. C. Penny which competed for mail order business from HBC and Eatons, and in the 1960s marketed the ‘Golden Dawn’ blanket—without points; (4) Nor’West Company; (5) Woolrich. Voice 39 Blanket Skeptic: So this blanket story is not so straightforward. When you go to an auction and bid on an HBC blanket you better check the label! But hold on there is more to the story. These blankets weren’t just fashion statements or items to be traded in the frontier economy. I’ll get to this in a minute. Voice 40 Bernard DeVoto—The Size and Cost of Blankets: Points were lines woven into blankets to denote their size . . .. A four-point Mackinaw measured 72 × 90 inches. The Hudson’s MEMORY

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Bay Company four-point blanket today is the full double blanket, 144 inches long. At one period the blanket cost one beaver pelt per point (DeVoto 1997 [1953]: 290).

Scene Four: Germ Warfare, Diseased Blankets, and Smallpox Epidemics Voice 41 Skeptic: These blankets were not innocent commodities. The concept of the “diseased, smallpox blanket” circulated during the French and Indian Wars between 1755 and 1760. Mayor (1995) notes that stories of disease-infected blankets deliberately given to Native-Americans surfaced after the first European contact and continue to circulate. For example, in 1763 General Amherst, British commander-inchief for America sent a letter to Colonel Henry Bouquet, wondering if it could be contrived to send the Small Pox to the Indians by inoculating blankets with the disease—suggesting that every possible method be used to “extirpate this Execreable Race.” Voice 42 Medical Historian (paraphased): The British used smallpox as a weapon of war. In 1763 when Ottawa Indians, under Pontiac, organized on the Pennsylvania border, British officers gave them two Blankets and a Handkerchief out of the Small Pox Hospital (Fenn 2001: 88). Voice 43 James Ronda: Protecting Lewis & Clark and Native-Americans from Smallpox (paraphrase): It was advised, that if Lewis and Clark were to have extensive contact with whites, they needed to be protected against smallpox. Dead Indians could not participate in an American trade network and dying natives could only blame the explorers for spreading disease (Ronda 1988: 2). Voice 44 Mr. Thomas Jefferson, the President-as-Trip-Organizer: Carry with you some matter of kinepox, inform those of them [Indians] with whom you may be of its efficacy as a preservative 266

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from the small-pox; and instruct and incourage them in the use of it (Thomas Jefferson, Instructions to Lewis, dated 20 June 1803 reprinted in DeVoto 1997 [1953]: 485). Voice 45 William Clark, 14 August Tuesday 1804—Omahas Ravaged by Smallpox: The ravages of the Small Pox (which swept off 400 men & women & children in perpopotion) has reduced this nation not exceeding 300 men and left them to the insults of their weaker neighbours (Clark in DeVoto 1997 [1953]: 19). Voice 46 Historical Cynic (Fast forward to 1837)—Donald Jackson on William Clark as Superintendent of Indian Affairs (paraphrase) and the Smallpox Epidemic of 1837: In 1807, William Clark was named Superintendent of Indian Affairs. In 1832, the U.S. Government decided to fight a severe outbreak of smallpox that was raging through white and red populations. Funds were allocated by Congress and stipulating that it was the duty of Indian agents, under the Secretary of War to put a smallpox vaccination program into effect. Two doctors were hired to treat the Indians on the Missouri, including the . . . Arikaras and Mandans . . .. In the spring of 1837, smallpox broke out on the Upper Missouri, then raged among the Arikaras and the Mandans. The epidemic took lives in most of the tribes along the Missouri, but was far less among the tribes that had been vaccinated. By February 1838, Clark was reporting to his superiors that the Mandan nation had been reduced to a handful of persons. Clark did not intervene. It is not clear if he felt any responsibility for the genocidal neglect of the tribes (Jackson 1987: 41–42). Voice 47 Contemporary Journalist, Ron Franscell (2002): The idea of a “smallpox holocaust” haunts Indians to this day. Sunday, October 13, 2002—Washburn, N.D. When the state of North Dakota returned some museum bones to Indian tribes for MEMORY

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reburial . . . Mandan-Hidatsa elders . . . feared that even breathing the bone dust might infect them with smallpox. . . . It is a widely held belief that the U.S. government deliberately infected Indians during westward expansion. Voice 48 Contemporary Metis Adult: It is common knowledge that the Bay blankets were infested with smallpox. I learned this as a child. Nobody doubts it. Voices 49–50 Conversation at Local Thai Cafe (Server and Author, 28 October 2003): SERVER:

What are you reading? book on the smallpox epidemic of 1775–1782. SERVER: Oh, I know about that. My brother had a book about it that I read. Did you see the Southpark—the TV show—episode about SARS and diseased blankets. The Native-Americans give the Americans a SARS-infected blanket and spread the disease to them! Cool. AUTHOR: No, I didn’t see it—so it was a play on the diseased smallpox blanket story. SERVER: Yah, it was called “Crossing Borders.” AUTHOR: A

Voice 51 Historian DeVoto—The Infected Stolen Blanket Story: However it started, in the summer of 1837 smallpox nearly destroyed the Mandans. In 1843, Francis A. Chardon (who commanded for the American Fur Company) . . . told John James Audubon that in 1837 Mandan Indians stole a blanket from a dying crew member, and that “though a reward for it was offered at once, it could not be got back.” . . . The story of the stolen blanket has a quality of legend and it reappears at Fort McKenzie, and in fact nearly everywhere else (DeVoto 1997 [1953]: 280, 283). 268

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Scene Five: Indian Traders Voice 52 Meriwether Lewis—July 26, 1806: They (Blackfeet) informed me that they trade on the Suskasawan river [which] is only 6 days easy march . . . from these traders (Hudson’s Bay, North West) they obtain amunition, speritous liquor, blankets & in exchange for wolves and some beaver skins (Moulton 2003: 343). Voice 53 Stephen Ambrose: This was unwelcome news. It reinforced Jefferson’s worst fears: that agents of Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company were firmly entrenched on the Northern Plains and were rapidly extending their monopoly (Ambrose 1996: 379). Voice 54 Historian—Lewis and Clark and Blankets: We know Lewis and Clark took blankets for purposes of trade and gift-giving. Fifteen 3 pt. blankets are listed on Lewis’s summary of purchases of 18 May 1803 (Jackson 1962: 98). In the Mandan villages, they encountered a complex trading system. All sorts of items, objects, goods and services could be bought, sold, or traded for, including: English blankets, sex . . . Spanish horses . . . fancy Cheyenne leathers, whiskey, tobacco, painted buffalo hides and English trade guns (Ambrose 1996: 182). Voices 55 and 58 Imagined Dialogue—Hugh McCracken, North West Trading Company Trade, Lewis and Stephen Ambrose (Ambrose 1996: 185): MCCRACKEN: I’m with the North West Company. We are competing

with Hudson’s Bay Company for control of the Mandan market. LEWIS: We want this market. We are opening the Missouri river from St. Louis to the Mandan villages for the St. Louis and American Trading Companies. You no longer have any authority in this region. We own it all. MEMORY

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AMBROSE: In 1808, Lewis and Clark became partners in the St. Louis Missouri Fur Company. As the newly appointed governor of the Territory of Louisiana, Lewis granted a trading monopoly to the new company . . . and then authorized funds for a private militia to accompany a trading flotilla up the Missouri River to the Yellowstone (Ambrose 1996: 454). Under federal protection, Lewis and his men would then push British and French traders back into Canada. Indians would be made dependent on the St. Louis Missouri Fur Company (Ambrose 1996: 452; see also Lewis [1808] in Çoues 1965 [1893], Vol. 3: 1215–1243). LEWIS: Let me clarify my ideas about an Indian Policy. Because of ten years of trading with the British, these Indians cannot “be brought back to a state of primitive innocence” (Lewis, [1808] in Çoues 1965 [1893], Vol. 3: 1224). Still, our government is committed to friendship with all the savage nations. We will use force and coercion only as a last resort. We want to help these “wretched people of America, as well as secure to the citizens of the United States all those advantages which ought of right exclusively to accrue to them from the possession of the Upper Louisiana” (also Lewis [1808] in Çoues 1965 [1893], Vol. 3: 1240–1241).

Voice 58 Historical Skeptic: This plan, as Ambrose writes (1996: 431–432), kept Indians—these wretched peoples—in a state of economic dependency, allowed an American fur-trading empire to flourish and was consistent with Jefferson’s genocidal policy toward Native-Americans. (pause) So Lewis and Clark used their great western adventure to personal advantage. Voice 59 Other Skeptic: Yes, and they traded blankets, and whiskey and guns for furs, and had dreams of getting rich! Voice 60 Narrator to Audience: Now I see the link. The British traded the HBC blankets for furs. This exchange relationship helped them colonize First Nations 270

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peoples and their territories in Canada. In direct competition, the Americans sought to colonize the same territories, from the Upper Missouri to the Pacific Coast and the Pacific Northwest. Lewis and Clark did not have HBC blankets, but they had 4-pt. blankets, beads, guns, Jefferson peace medallions, whiskey, and trinkets to trade. These blankets were known to be and would continue to be seen as carriers of the smallpox disease. When my father brought that HBC blanket home to Indianola, he brought a part of this history right into our house—a history of disease, exploitation, and destruction. He kept the history alive when he bought us the blanket for the cabin. In turn, we carried that history into the new cabin. When we bought Nate and Heidi their new HBC blankets, we passed the history right along to the next generation. As you can see, my family has a long, somewhat indirect and troubled history with Canada, Hudson’s Bay blankets, the fur trade, 19th-century British and French traders and Native-Americans. Uncomfortably, this history takes me right back into the myths of Lewis and Clark, the Corps of Discovery, Sacagawea, and the bicentennial commemoration activities in 2003–2004.

CODA: CONTESING MEMORIES OF LEWIS AND CLARK In 2005, Lewis and Clark were everywhere present in our national imaginary. The bicentennial anniversary turned this slice of American history into a set of narratives and experiences that were to be bought and sold (Spence 2003). Cookbooks describing the meals the men prepared could be purchased in Barnes & Noble. New scholarly and popular interpretations of their project appeared with great frequency (see Hall 2003; Slaughter, 2003; Spence 2003; also Ambrose 1996; Heat-Moon 1999; Hill 2001; Schullery 2002; Turner 2003), as did new editions of previously published works (Clarke 2002 [1970]; DeVoto 1997 [1953], 1998 [1947]; also Ronda 1988 [1984]). The bicentennial celebration was and is to this day central to America’s revisionist understandings of itself in this new century. MEMORY

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Remembering Lewis and Clark celebrates neocolonial mythologies about nature, science, the wilderness, the frontier, sexuality, gender, and race relations in the 19th century. Lewis and Clark are being turned into models of environmentally friendly cultural anthropologists. The centennial is about forgetting, about memory, about one model of memory, about remembering only certain memories. Benjamin understands that memories are never innocent. In their own tangled ways, our memories embed us in history, culture, ideology, and politics. What the members of a social group remember is always overdetermined, structured by the artifacts of material culture. To remember, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998: 197) observes, is to assemble a set of circumstances—pictures, music, costumes, performances—that re-create a representation and a memory of what has happened before. But each remembering is a new interpretive act. Memories are social constructions. We remember, we create the Lewis and Clark that fit our current needs. We clothe these men in the dress of the times. We give them a language, a racial politic, and an environmental ethic that fits our model of who we want to be in this new century. But as we do this, we must also remember that if in 2005 America honored white men with undaunted courage (Ambrose 1996), then it honored men who kept slavery and racism alive while performing central parts in the spreading of the deadly smallpox epidemic of the 1800s. Both Lewis and Clark were committed to implementing Jefferson’s goal of obtaining land and furs from Native-Americans, and this included killing Indians and enacting a form of democracy that was violent and ethnically exclusive (Ambrose 1996: 452–453; Wallace 1997: 30, 1999: 18).8

The celebratory histories of Lewis and Clark, with few exceptions (Heat-Moon 1999; Limerick 1997), ignore these dark sides of the story. So in whose honor are these images, memories, 272

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and narratives crafted? Who is honoring whom? Symbolic interactionism and critical race theory collide in these spaces. This collision makes it possible to imagine another version, or telling, of the Lewis and Clark myth. Following Williams (1997: 62–67), it is possible to use the Jefferson and Lewis and Clark narratives as an occasion for re-imagining indigenous human rights. Williams argues that Jefferson’s theory of democracy should be taken up by indigenous peoples, who can claim, as whites did, the natural, inalienable rights of self-recognition, self-governance, of survival, self-autonomy, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and sovereign authority over their own lands. In future celebrations, Lewis and Clark would be pushed aside. In their place, indigenous performers would enact a counter-hegemonic theater, reclaiming and celebrating the inalienable rights of Native-Americans to own and control their own history.

In producing this performance text, I have attempted to disrupt official racial history. I have performed an alternative version of the Lewis and Clark project. In doing this, I was taken back to childhood memories, my father and mother in Indianola, Iowa, to stories about illness, alcoholism, disease, Hudson’s Bay blankets, gift-giving between generations in my family—in short, my family’s place in Lewis and Clark mythology.

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PART FOUR Ethical Futures

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IRBs AND THE TURN TO INDIGENOUS RESEARCH ETHICS1 As one period of history is left behind and another begins, our mandate is not a research ethics of any sort under any conditions. The only legitimate option is an ethics that is culturally inclusive rather than biased toward Western hegemony. (Christians 2007: 438)

I want to read the controversies and scandals surrounding IRBs within a critical pedagogical discourse.2 Ethics are pedagogies of practice. IRBs are institutional apparatuses, regimes of truth and systems of discourse that regulate a particular form of ethical conduct. As suggested in Chapter 4, this is a historically specific form suited to a “neoliberal world of legislative controls, legal responsibilities, and institutional audit and accountability” (Halse and Honey 2007: 349). It is clear that this regulatory formation is no longer workable in a transdisciplinary, global, postcolonial world. Extending the arguments in Chapter 8, I seek a progressive performative cultural politics that enacts a performance ethics based on feminist, communitarian assumptions. I attempt to align these assumptions with the call by First and Fourth World scholars for an indigenous research ethic (Bishop 2005; Smith 1999, 2000, 2005). This approach allows me to criticize the dominant biomedical ethical model that operates in many North American universities today. I return to my earlier discussion in Chapters 7 and 8 of an indigenous, feminist, communitarian research ethic. This evolving ethic has two implications: it would replace the current utilitarian ethical model that IRBs utilize; it argues for a 277

multitrack IRB model within the contemporary university setting (see Cannella 2004). I conclude with a case study.

CULTURAL POLITICS AND AN INDIGENOUS RESEARCH ETHIC As argued in Chapter 8, indigenous scholars have significantly advanced the critical discourse about ethics. Smith and Bishop, for example, are committed to a set of moral and pedagogical imperatives and “to acts of reclaiming, reformulating, and reconstituting indigenous cultures and languages . . . to the struggle to become self-determining” (Bishop 2005; Smith 1999: 142). Battiste (2000a, b, 2007, 2008) and Battiste and Henderson (2000) outline a model of research ethics that protects indigenous knowledge and the property and heritage rights of indigenous communities. These models criticize the Eurocentric bias in Western research. They honor sacred knowledge. They resist the commodification of knowledge. They seek to empower indigenous persons. They return control over research to the local, moral community. In turn, a specific participatory approach to inquiry is required. In his discussion of a Maori approach to creating knowledge, Bishop observes that researchers in Kaupapa Maori contexts are repositioned in such a way as to no longer need to seek to give voice to others, to empower others, to emancipate others, to refer to others as subjugated voices, but rather to listen and participate . . . in a process that facilitates the development in people as a sense of themselves as agentic and of having an authoritative voice . . .. An indigenous Kaupapa Maori approach to research . . . challenges colonial and neocolonial discourses that inscribe “otherness.” (1998: 207–208) This participatory mode of knowing privileges storytelling, dialogue, listening, voice, and personal performance narratives (Collins 1991: 208–212). This is a moral pedagogy. It is a performative ethic, grounded in the ritual, sacred spaces of family, community, and everyday moral life. It is not imposed by some external, bureaucratic agency. These ethical codes are the same 278

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protocols that govern the relations indigenous persons have with one another and their environment.

The Performative as a Site of Resistance Because it expresses and embodies moral ties to the community, the performative, ritual view of meaning serves to legitimate indigenous worldviews. Meaning and resistance are embodied in the ritual act of performance itself. The performative is political, the site of resistance, the space where moral meaning is enacted. At this critical level, the performative provides the context for resisting attacks on the legitimacy of cultural practices in question. Neoliberals and neoconservatives deny the culture any legitimacy. They blame its members for the problems that the members of the culture experience. Liberals encourage assimilation to the values of the dominant culture while radical, emancipatory theorists “claim that they have the formula for the emancipation of . . . oppressed and marginalized people” (Bishop 1998: 212). These positions presume that persons inside an indigenous culture are incapable of solving their own problems. Neoconservatives and postpositivists want to control the criteria that are used to evaluate indigenous experience. These criteria usually involve outcome measures that record the appalling conditions in the culture (ibid.). Under the guise of objectivity and neutrality, neoconservatives deny the culture’s rights to self-determination. These political positions undermine the integrity of the indigenous culture. They question the culture’s commitments to the performative as a way of being, as a way of being political. The performative is where the soul of the culture resides. In their sacred and secular performances, the members of the culture honor one another and the culture itself. In attacking the performative, the critics attack the culture. Smith states the issue clearly: “The struggle for the validity of indigenous knowledges may no longer be over the recognition that indigenous people have ways of knowing the world which are unique, but over proving the authenticity of, and control over, our own forms of knowledge” (1999: 104, italics in original).3 IRBs AND THE TURN TO INDIGENOUS RESEARCH ETHICS

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More is involved at this level, for the grand battle may not be between traditional science and communitarian values.4 The professional work of educators, and those in the human services, is many times driven by practical constraints, by humanistic concerns tempered by utilitarianism. In such spaces, as Bishop notes (2005: 110), the practical constraints of doing empowering education under a colonial regime may be impossible, or difficult at best. Communitarian scholars who collaborate with persons at the front lines are under two injunctions. First, they must work to insure that their research does not advance the benefits, interests, concerns of the larger neocolonial society. Second, they must insure that their work does more than just serve the lofty ideals of communitarianism (ibid.: 131).

A Moral Code: Resisting Colonialism A set of moral and ethical research principles, fitted to the indigenous (and non-indigenous) perspective, are suggested. These are moral matters. They are shaped by the principles previously discussed—sharing, reciprocity, relationality, community, neighborliness, kindness. They embody a dialogic ethic of love and faith grounded in compassion (Bracci and Christians 2002: 13; West 1993). Under this moral code, the purpose of research is not the production of new knowledge, per se. Rather, the purposes are pedagogical, political, moral, and ethical, involving the enhancement of moral agency, the production of moral discernment, a commitment to praxis, justice, an ethic of resistance, a performative pedagogy that resists oppression (Christians 2002: 409). A code embodying these principles interrupts the traditional practice of research. It resists the idea that research is something white people do to or for indigenous peoples. Further, unlike the Belmont Code (see below), which is not content driven, this moral code is anchored in a culture and its way of life. Unlike the Belmont Code, it is connected to a set of political and ethical actions intended to increase well-being in specific cultures. The code refuses to turn indigenous peoples into subjects who are the natural objects of white inquiry (Smith 1999: 118). 280

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These principles argue that Western legal definitions of ethical codes privilege the utilitarian model of the individual as someone who has rights distinct from the rights of the larger group, “for example, the right of an individual to give his or her own knowledge, or the right to give informed consent . . . community and indigenous rights or views in this area, [is] generally not . . . respected” (ibid.).

THE BIOMEDICAL MODEL OF ETHICS AND THE BELMONT PRINCIPLES As Halse and Honey (2007: 338–340), Gunsalus (2002: B-24), and Gunsalus and associates(2007) observe, the rules governing human subject research are rooted in scandal. The list is long and includes the “Nazi atrocities on humans in the name of medical science” (Halse and Honey 2007: 338); the deliberate exposure of prisoners to live cancer cells; the Tuskegee Syphilis Study (American Association of University Professors 1981: 358); the Willowbrook Hepatitis Experiment; Project Camelot in the 1960s. A series of events in the 1970s compound the travesty: Milgram’s deceptions of experimental subjects; Laud Humphrey’s covert research on homosexuals; the complicity of social scientists with military initiatives in Vietnam (Christians 2002: 141). More recent events include the discovery of apparent misrepresentation of participants’ worldviews in such classical studies as Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa, William Foote Whyte’s Street Corner Society, and the villagers in Melanesian New Guinea in Malinowski’s Argonauts (Halse and Honey 2007: 338–339). Institutional and public concerns for research ethics during the 1980s and 1990s, combined with the development of professional codes of ethics and extensions of the IRB apparatus “are credited by their advocates with curbing outrageous abuses” (Christians 2002: 141). IRB discourse was shaped by the ethical directives in the Nuremberg Code (1949) and the Helsinki Declaration (World Medical Association 1964). These two codes directly addressed IRBs AND THE TURN TO INDIGENOUS RESEARCH ETHICS

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abuses in medical research. From the 1960s forward, these two documents have framed ethical discourse in terms of a biomedical model of research. Four governing principles and obligations were distilled: respect for autonomy, nonmaleficence, beneficence, and justice. These ethical precepts drew from Kant (autonomy), Rawls (justice), Mill (beneficence), and Gert (nonmaleficence) (Halse and Honey 2007: 339). This model, with its ethical precepts, led to the implementation of institutional review boards (IRBs), informed consent forms, value-neutral conceptions of the human subject, and utilitarian theories of risk and benefits (see below).5 Today, the institutional protection of human subjects has expanded far beyond these original impulses, leading many to fear that there may be ethics drift, or “mission creep” (Gunsalus et al. 2007), an overextension of IRBs and their power. Mission creep implies that the workload of IRBs has expanded beyond their ability to function effectively. Gunsalus and associates (2007) outline the negative consequences of mission creep. It rewards compliance and rewards the wrong kinds of behavior, including a focus on technicalities, to the neglect of difficult ethical questions. It locates power at the wrong level and implements only a superficial view of the local community where inquiry will occur. It leads to exaggerated efforts to comply with unwieldy governmental regulations. It is harmful “to academic freedom and a scholar’s First Amendment rights” (Gunsalus 2002: B-24). Thus scholars may shy away from particular projects for fear they will be rejected by a local IRB (Gunsalus et al. 2007: 635). Clearly the IRB model rests on untested assumptions.6 It implements unclear definitions. It misdirects energies, leading to a focus on nonrisky research. It blurs boundaries between teaching and research. When is a class project research, and when is it instruction? Do instructional projects require IRB supervision? It leads to oversight of “projects that are far afield of truly risky or harmful projects” (ibid.: 633). There are many cases in which IRB supervision is not needed, either because workable ethical 282

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precautions are already in place or a given methodology, field, or inquiry, such as oral history, is known to not carry any threat of risk or harm. In the case of journalism, IRBs are especially troubling. Journalists have a primary obligation to the public. This means that only in rare instances can confidentiality be maintained. The public has a right to know who has been interviewed, or who holds a particular opinion. The requirement of confidentiality directly conflicts with the journalists’ code of ethics. At issue in these criticisms are these terms: human subjects, human subject research, harm and ethical conduct, and the institutional apparatus of the IRB itself, including its local make-up and membership. These terms, in turn, are embedded in six larger institutional and cultural formations, or social arenas and social worlds: universities and colleges; the federal government and its regulatory agencies; professional associations, such as the AAUP; disciplinary associations, such as the American sociological, historical, and anthropological associations; individual researchers; and human subjects. As currently constituted, IRBs privilege medical and experimental science membership. This situation leads to the use of highly restrictive, biomedical definitions of research, human subject, harm, and ethics. It also leads to the uncritical implementation of federal guidelines, although the Bush administration has “allowed the charter of the National Human Research Protections Advisory Committee, which had been studying these issues to expire” (Gunsalus 2002: B-24). Professional associations, such as the AAUP, act as watchdogs over the abuse of federal guidelines. Many disciplinary associations do the same while also disciplining the conduct of their own members. Individual researchers have to work through local IRBs, while human subjects seldom have recourse to appeal procedures. However, Fourth World Peoples, as Smith and Bishop argue, are actively taking inquiry into their own hands and developing their own conceptions of human subject, researcher, research, ethics, harm, and community review apparatuses.7 IRBs AND THE TURN TO INDIGENOUS RESEARCH ETHICS

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Addressing IRB Deficiencies The IRB framework assumes that one model of research fits all forms of inquiry, but it does not. This model requires that forms be filled out concerning consent, risks, benefits, confidentiality, and voluntary participation. The model also presumes a static, monolithic view of the human subject, who is someone on whom research is done. Performance autoethnography, for example, falls outside this model, as do many forms of participatory action research, reflexive ethnography, testimonios, life stories, life history inquiry, personal narrative inquiry, performance autobiography, conversation analysis, and ethno-dramas. In each of these cases, a collaborative, public, pedagogical relationship between subject and researcher is developed. The walls between subject and observer are deliberately broken down. Confidentiality disappears, because there is nothing to hide or protect. Participation is entirely voluntary; hence, there is no need for a consent form. The activity that makes up the research is participatory—that is, it is performative, collaborative and action- and praxis-based. Hence, participants are not asked to submit to specific procedures or treatment conditions. Instead, acting together, researchers and subjects work to produce change in the world. The IRB model presumes a complex ethical framework that is problematic. This leads to a peculiar conception of harm—why would a collaborative researcher bring harm to those studied? In short, the Belmont Principles need to be recast in light of contemporary understandings of participatory, performance authoethnography, and empowerment inquiry.

The Professional Associations and Societies By 1998, numerous professional associations, including the American Historical Association, the Oral History Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the American Anthropological Association had started communicating with one another and with over 700 Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) to encourage them to take account of the standards of practice 284

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relevant to the research in their specific disciplines (American Association of University Professors 2001: 56). Concern within the professional societies involved the biomedical definition of research and the corresponding definitions of harm, beneficence, respect, justice, and informed consent. The problems start with how the regulations define research, which is any activity designed to test an hypothesis, permit conclusions to be drawn, and thereby to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge expressed in theories, principles, and statements of relationships. Research is described in a formal protocol that sets forth an objective and a set of procedures designed to reach that objective. (ibid.)

This definition turns human beings into research subjects who may be exposed to harm because of the protocols that implement the research design. The model works outward from the Belmont Report and its ethical principles (see American Association of University Professors 2001, 2002; Christians 2000; Lincoln and Cannella 2002; Lincoln and Tierney 2002; Pritchard 2002). The current version of these rules, the 1991 regulations, and their revisions are also known as the “Common Rule” (American Association of University Professors 2001, 2002). The Common Rule describes the procedures of review that are used by more than 17 different federal agencies. It is presumed that this single regulatory framework will fit all styles and forms of research, but as Pritchard notes (see below), this is not always the case (2002: 8). In principle, the Common Rule is implemented through informed consent. The Belmont Report sets forth three basic ethical principles: respect for persons, beneficence, and justice. Respect involves treating persons as autonomous agents, protecting them from harm while protecting persons who exhibit diminished autonomy. Respect implies voluntary participation in the research project. The principle of beneficence asks that research maximize benefits to the person, and the collectivity, while minimizing harm. Typically, harm has been determined through the application of the Common Rule, which asks if harm or risk does not IRBs AND THE TURN TO INDIGENOUS RESEARCH ETHICS

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exceed what is “ordinarily encountered in daily life” (American Association of University Professors 2001: 56). This rule asks that members of society accept the fact that long-term benefits may result from research that harms or places certain subjects at risk. Justice is the third ethical principle. It requires that persons be treated equally, that groups not be disadvantaged, in terms of being selected as subjects or in being able to benefit from the research. The three principles of respect, beneficence, and justice are implemented through disciplinary codes of ethics and through a set of procedures, administered by IRBs who follow the Common Rule. Respect is implemented through informed consent (passive, versus active). Informed consent involves at least three issues: insuring that subjects are adequately informed about the research, although deception may be allowed; insuring that the information is presented in an easily understood fashion, which may also include seeking third-party permission; insuring that consent is voluntarily given.8 Beneficence is determined through a complex set of procedures that assess risks and benefits. The term risk refers to harm; benefit refers to something of positive value to health or welfare. If it is determined that subjects are at risk, IRBs ask if the risks are minimal and if they are minimized and warranted (Pritchard 2002: 8). Under this risk-benefit model, risk is measured in terms of the probability of benefits, and benefits are contrasted with harms, rather than risks. There are multiple forms of harm: psychological, physical, legal, social, economic, and cultural, as well as corresponding benefits. Risks and benefits must be assessed at the individual, family, and societal levels. Risks must be exceeded by benefits, although risks at the individual level may be justified if the benefits serve a greater cause. Although not specified in the Belmont Report, codes of ethics developed by scholarly disciplines insist on “safeguards to protect people’s identities and those of the research location” (Christians 2000: 139). The principle of justice is expressed in the assurance that there be fair procedures and outcomes in the selection of research subjects. Special populations should not be unduly burdened by being 286

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required to participate in research projects. The benefits of research should not be unfairly distributed throughout a subject population, nor made available only to those who can afford them.

Exemptions Of course, there are exemptions from the Common Rule (see Puglisi 2001: 34), creating a partial two-track IRB model (see below) if the three Belmont Ethical Rules are followed. Waivers, or exemptions, can be given if the research involves normal educational practice, the use of interviews, previously collected materials, research on cultural beliefs, or the observation of public behavior. The discourse on exemptions reflects an attempt to fit the model to the human disciplines but asks scholars within the respective disciplines to still adhere to the Common Rule. There is no attempt to rethink the Common Rule in light of disciplinary differences.

Internal Criticisms of the Model As indicated above, this regulatory model, with the apparatus of the Institutional Review Board and the Common Rule, has been subjected to considerable criticism. Criticisms center on the four key terms and their definitions: human subjects, human subject research, harm, and ethical conduct. Science and ethics first. As Christians notes (2000, 2005, 2007), the Common Rule principles reiterate the basic themes of “valuefree experimentalism—individual autonomy, maximum benefits, and minimal risks, and ethical ends exterior to scientific means” (2000: 140). These principles “dominate the guidelines contained in codes of ethics: informed consent, protection of privacy, and nondeception” (ibid.). These rules do not conceptualize research in participatory, or collaborative, formats. Christians observes that in reality IRBs protect institutions and not individuals. The guidelines do not stop other ethical violations, including plagiarism, falsification, fabrication, and violations of confidentiality. Pritchard notes that there is room for ethical conflict as well (2002: 8–9). The three principles contained in the Common IRBs AND THE TURN TO INDIGENOUS RESEARCH ETHICS

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Rule rest on three different ethical traditions: respect from Kant; beneficence from Mill and the utilitarians; and justice as a distributive idea from Aristotle and Rawls. These ethical traditions are not compatible; they rest on different moral, ontological, and political assumptions, different understandings of what is right, just, and respectful. The Kantian principle of respect may contradict the utilitarian principle of beneficence, for instance. Respect, beneficence, and justice are problematic terms. Surely there is more to respect than informed consent, more than just getting people to agree to be participants in a study. Respect involves caring for others, honoring them and treating them with dignity. An informed consent form does not do this and does not confer respect on others. Beneficence, including risks and benefits, cannot be quantified, nor can a clear meaning be given to acceptable risk or to benefits that clearly serve a greater cause. Smith and Bishop, for instance, argue that the collectivity-as-a-whole must determine the costs and benefits for participating in research. Further, individuals may not have the individual right to allow particular forms of research to be done, if the research has effects for the greater social whole. A cost-benefit model of society and inquiry does injustice to the empowering, participatory model of research that many Fourth World peoples are now advocating. Justice extends beyond fair selection procedures, or unfairly distributing the benefits of research across a population. Justice involves principles of care, love, kindness, fairness, a commitment to shared responsibility, to honesty, truth, balance, and harmony. Taken out of their Western utilitarian framework, respect, beneficence, and justice must be seen as principles that are felt as they are performed; that is, they can serve as performative guidelines to a moral way of being in the world with others. As currently enforced by IRBs, however, they serve as coldly calculating devices that may pit persons against one another. Now research. Pritchard (2002) contends that the model’s concept of research does not adequately deal with procedural changes in research projects, with unforeseen contingencies that lead to changes in purpose and intent. Often anonymity cannot 288

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be maintained, nor is it even desirable; for example, participatory action inquiry presumes full community participation in a research project. Staffing presents another level of difficulty. IRBs are often understaffed or have members who either reject, or are uninformed about, the newer, critical qualitative research tradition. Many IRBs lack proper appeal procedures or methods for expediting research that should be exempted. Recent summaries by the AAUP (2001, 2002, 2006) raise additional reservations, which also center on the preceding five issues: Research and Human Subjects: •

•

•

failure by IRBs to be aware of new interpretive and qualitative developments in the social sciences, including participant observation, ethnography, autoethnography, and oral history research the application of a concept of research and science that privileges the biomedical model of science and not the model of trust, negotiation, and respect that must be established in ethnographic or historical inquiry, where research is not on but rather is with other human beings an event-based and not a process-based conception of research and the consent process

Ethics: • • • •

failure to see human beings as social creatures located in complex historical, political, and cultural spaces infringements on academic freedom, by not allowing certain types of inquiry to go forward inappropriate applications of the “Common Rule” in assessing potential harm overly restrictive applications of the informed consent rule

IRBs as Institutional Structures: • failure to have an adequate appeal system in place • the need to insure that IRBs have members from the newer interpretive paradigms IRBs AND THE TURN TO INDIGENOUS RESEARCH ETHICS

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Academic Freedom: • • • •

•

• •

First Amendment and academic freedom infringements policing of inquiry in the humanities, including oral history research policing and obstructing research seminars and dissertation projects constraints on critical inquiry, including historical and journalistic work that contributes to the public knowledge of the past while incriminating or passing negative judgment on persons and institutions failure to consider or incorporate existing forms of regulation into the Common Rule, including laws of libel, copyright, and intellectual property right the general extension of IRB powers across disciplines, creating a negative effect on what will or will not be studied vastly different applications of the Common Rule across campus communities

Important Topics Not Regulated: • • • •

•

•

the conduct of research with indigenous peoples (see below) the regulation of unorthodox or problematic conduct in the field, for example, sexual relations relations among IRBs, and ethical codes involving universal human rights disciplinary codes of ethics and IRBs, and new codes of ethics and moral perspectives coming from feminist, queer, and racialized standpoint epistemologies appeal mechanisms for human subjects who need to grieve and who seek some form of restorative justice as a result of harm experienced as a research subject Fourth World discourses and alternative views of research, science, and human beings

Disciplining and Constraining Ethical Conduct The consequence, of these restrictions, as Christians (2007), Shopes (2000), Shopes and Ritchie (2004), Lincoln and 290

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Tierney (2002), Lincoln and Cannella (2002), and Townsend (2006) observe, is a disciplining of qualitative inquiry that extends from granting agencies to the policing of qualitative research seminars and even the conduct of qualitative dissertations. In some cases, lines of critical inquiry have not been funded and have not gone forward because of criticisms from local IRBs. Pressures from the Right discredit critical interpretive inquiry. From the federal to the local levels, a trend seems to be emerging. In too many instances, there seems to be a move away from protecting human subjects to an increased monitoring, censuring, and policing of projects that are critical of the right and its politics. Lincoln and Tierney (2002) observe that these policing activities have at least five important implications for critical, social justice inquiry. First, the widespread rejection of alternative forms of research means that qualitative inquiry will be heard less and less in federal and state policy forums. Second, it appears that qualitative researchers are being deliberately excluded from this national dialogue. Consequently, third, young researchers trained in the critical tradition are not being listened to. Fourth, the definition of research has not changed to fit newer models of inquiry. Fifth, in rejecting qualitative inquiry, traditional researchers are endorsing a more distanced form of research that is compatible with existing stereotypes concerning persons of color. Christians (2005, 2007) summarizes the poverty of this model. It rests on a cognitive model that privileges rational solutions to ethical dilemmas (the rationalist fallacy), and it presumes that humanity is a single subject (the distributive fallacy). It presents the scientist as an objective, neutral observer. Private citizens are coerced into participating in so-called scientific projects, in the name of some distant, public good. The rights-justice-and-actsbased system ignores the dialogical nature of human interaction. The model creates the conditions for deception, for the invasion of private spaces, for duping subjects, and for challenges to the subject’s moral worth and dignity. Christians calls for its replacement with an ethics based on the values of a feminist communitarianism, an ethics of empowerment, a care-based, dialogical ethics of hope, love, and solidarity. IRBs AND THE TURN TO INDIGENOUS RESEARCH ETHICS

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This is an evolving, emerging ethical framework that serves as a powerful antidote to the deception-based utilitarian, IRB system. It presumes a community that is ontologically and axiologically prior to the person. This community has common moral values, and research is rooted in a concept of care, of shared governance, of neighborliness, of love, kindness, and the moral good. Accounts of social life should display these values and be based on interpretive sufficiency. They should have sufficient depth to allow the reader to form a critical understanding about the world studied. These texts should exhibit an absence of racial, class, and gender stereotyping. These texts should generate social criticism and lead to resistance, empowerment, and social action, to positive change in the social world.

AAUP Revisions and IRB Mission Creep The IRB apparatus was initially intended to apply only to federally funded research—namely, to all research on human subjects conducted at, or sponsored by, colleges, universities, hospitals, and nonprofit organizations that is to be supported by any of the federal departments and agencies that have adopted the regulations must be approved in advance by a local IRB. (American Association of University Professors 2006: 1)

However, on June 23, 2005,9 the federal government extended these regulations to include a second requirement, namely, to include IRB supervision, whatever the source of funding: Institutions at which or under whose auspices, federally funded research on human subjects is to be conducted must provide assurance that they will protect the rights of the human subjects of all their research . . . whatever its source of funding. (ibid., emphasis added)10

Committee Å of the AAUP (2006) issued a critical response to this document,11 resisting this expansion of IRB reviews to nonfunded research projects. Building on the arguments of the Oral 292

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Historical Association (below),12 the report called for certain methodological exemptions ipso facto. The Committee also supported the move of more than 184 institutions that refuse to submit nonfederally funded research for IRB supervision. This new requirement gives unchecked power to IRBs. It has generated an increasing number of by now familiar complaints: (1) there are no appeal procedures; (2) committees not researchers are defining risk; (3) prior approval must be given, whether or not research poses serious harm. Still, because most universities are risk averse, the new requirement has been adopted by the majority of institutions (ibid.). The new requirement supersedes the previous understanding that a waiver could be granted if there is no risk of serious harm. That exclusion seems to have disappeared. Many are now calling for a blanket exemption for interpretive research in the social sciences and the humanities (ibid.: 3). The lack of an appeal process is critical. An IRB may demand that a change be made in a research protocol as a condition of approval. If the IRB cannot be convinced, the research does not move forward. Difficulties scheduling meetings with an IRB may cause lengthy delays. Requests for change may be unreasonable: A linguist seeking to study language development in a preliterate tribe was instructed by the IRB to have the subjects read and sign a consent form before the study could proceed. (ibid.: 2)

Given this new version of IRB mission creep, AAUP recommends not a disciplinary exclusion, or exemption, but rather exemptions based on methodology; namely, research on autonomous adults whose methodology consists entirely of collecting data by surveys, conducting interviews, or observing behavior in public places should be exempt from the requirement of IRB review, with no provisos, and no requirement of IRB approval of the exemption. (ibid.: 4)

This recommendation creates a space for interpretive, social science inquiry and recognizes that a single model cannot be made IRBs AND THE TURN TO INDIGENOUS RESEARCH ETHICS

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to apply to all forms of research. It eliminates many hardships currently imposed on scholars. It would also eliminate “a considerable amount of totally unnecessary work currently done by IRBs, freeing them to devote attention to seriously risk-imposing research projects” (ibid.: 5). The AAUP issued a second recommendation regarding the supervision of nonfederally funded research; namely, the blanket application of current federal guidelines to nonfunded federal research needs to be rethought. If a project is methodologically exempt, and if it is not federally funded, then it should also be exempt from IRB approval. A strong version of this guideline would endorse the practice of the 184 institutions that refuse to submit nonfederally funded research for IRB supervision. A third guideline, borrowed from the Oral History Association (OHA), can be added to this list; namely, neither OHRP nor a campus IRB has the authority to define what constitutes legitimate research in any field, only what research is covered by federal regulations.

THE EXCLUSION OF ORAL HISTORY FROM IRB REVIEW The Oral History Association (OHA) has endorsed the AAUP position. In its October 2006 annual meeting, the executive council of the Oral History Association, following AAUP, recommended that academic institutions consider as “straightforwardly exempt from IRB review any ‘research whose methodology consists entirely of collecting data by surveys, conducting interviews, or observing behavior in public places’” (Howard 2006: 9). This endorsement builds on previously established exclusions of oral history from IRB review.13 The U.S. Office for Human Research Protection (OHRP), working in conjunction with the American Historical Association and the Oral History Association, determined in 2003 that oral history interviewing projects in general do not involve the type of research defined by HHS regulations and are therefore excluded from Institutional Review Board oversight. 294

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Federal regulations, as noted above, define research as “a systematic investigation, including research development, testing, and evaluation, designed to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge.” The type of research encompassed by the regulations involves standard questionnaires with a large sample of individuals who often remain anonymous, not the open-ended interviews with identifiable individuals who give their interviews with “informed consent” that characterizes oral history. Most oral history interviewing projects are not subject to the requirements of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) regulation and are excluded from institutional review board (IRB) oversight, because they do not involve research as defined by the HHS regulations. Only those oral history projects that conform to the regulatory definition of research now need to submit their research protocols for IRB review.14

Oral History Exclusions Oral historians establish their exclusion from IRB review on these grounds: 1. Their version of systematic, qualitative interpretive inquiry does not involve the key assumptions of positivistic science. Their research does not use large samples, nor does it aim at testing hypotheses or forming statistical generalizations or generalizable knowledge. 2. Unlike biomedical and behavioral science researchers, oral historians do not seek underlying principles of historical or social development, nor do they seek underlying laws or generalizations that have predictive value. 3. Historians explain a particular past, or particular event, or study the life of single individuals. 4. Oral history interviewees and narrators are not anonymous individuals selected as part of a random sample for the purposes of a survey or an experiment. Nor do they respond to standard questionnaire items. Oral history narrators engage in dialogues tailored to fit their unique relationship to the topic at hand (see www.oralhistory.org). IRBs AND THE TURN TO INDIGENOUS RESEARCH ETHICS

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Since the 2003 understandings (Shopes and Ritchie 2004), most campus-based oral history projects have been able to proceed with their interviews without submitting protocols for review by an Institutional Review Board.

Practical, Ethical Implications These understandings produce the following practical, ethical implications for interpretive inquiry: 1. Such work is excluded rather than exempt from review. If oral historians deem that their oral history projects do not meet the regulatory definition of research, they can proceed without consultation with an IRB. If a project does meet the regulatory definition of research, it could still be “exempted” by an IRB, but that must be determined by the IRB. (For the regulatory definitions, see http://ohrp.osophs.dhhs.gov/ humansubjects/guidance/45cfr46.htm.) 2. Rather than going to a campus-level IRB, interpretive scholars should take their research protocols to their departmental or college IRB officer or other administrators responsible for institutional compliance with federal regulations. 3. The policy statement does not say that oral history is “not research.” It says that oral history does “not involve research as defined by the HHS regulations.” 4. This exclusion does not mean oral history, interpretive inquiry, need not be sensitive to ethical issues (see below). Rather, they are freer to act in accordance with ethical and legal standards appropriate to oral history, or interpretive studies, and not biomedical or behavioral research. For decades, oral historians have promulgated high ethical and professional standards, including their ethical requirement to obtain informed consent prior to conducting an interview and a signed legal release at the conclusion of the interview. These issues are codified in the Oral History Association’s Principles and Standards and Evaluation Guidelines.15 296

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The Multitrack IRB Model It is necessary to rethink the single-track IRB model. Some campuses (Texas A&M, University of Texas at Austin, Purdue, University of South Florida, University of California, Berkeley) are moving to a two-track system, one model for the biomedical sciences, another model for the human sciences and the humanities. The current IRB system with its system of exemptions anticipates this shift. But the current system only looks for ways to fit anthropological, sociological, linguistic, historical, literary, or journalistic research into the Common Rule framework. A true two- or multitrack IRB model would be based on a new system of regulatory practice, if there were agreement that such a system was required. A humanities-based, interpretive inquiry model based on feminist, communitarian understandings would stand alongside a revised biomedical model. A more traditional, positivistic social science model might represent the third track. There are two other alternatives. A radical rethinking of the Belmont Principles would produce an inclusive, ethically empowering model that would be applied to all forms of inquiry. More radically, institutional IRBs would disappear. The regulation and supervision of inquiry would shift from the current topdown, state-sponsored model to the local level entirely. Inquiry would be collaborative, done through the kind of moral give and take outlined by Smith, Bishop, and other indigenous and First Nation scholars.

Not Research I want to extend the AAUP and Oral History Association discourse on what is and what is not research. I accept Smith’s argument that research is a dirty word (2005: 86); that is, traditional positivist research has done more harm than good for colonized peoples. Accordingly, rather than claim IRB exclusions or exemptions on methodological grounds, I want to move the discourse beyond epistemology and methodology. Discourse needs to be anchored in a moral space, the spaces of decolonization. Critical IRBs AND THE TURN TO INDIGENOUS RESEARCH ETHICS

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scholars engage in pedagogical practices that make the world visible. A politics of representation structures how this happens. It shapes how we act on the world. These pedagogical practices extend beyond those material practices that produce research findings. Indeed, they cannot be contained within a “research model framework.” Our actions reside within a critical, scholarly, aesthetic space. Our actions are moral, political, and performative. Critical scholars abandon the dirty word called research. In taking up a critical, interpretive approach to the world, we are aligned with all manner and form of scholarship that seek not only to understand but to change the world in positive ways.

THE ILLINOIS MODEL I am the IRB officer for the College of Communications, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. In 2004, I asked our campus IRB officer if the oral history exemption is recognized on this campus, and if so, could it be extended to interpretive research in my college.16 He replied that the UIUC IRB generally upholds the OHA and AHA positions on this. As such, the UIUC typically considers oral histories excluded from IRB review, unless there are severe extenuating factors of some sort (for example, interactions involving deception) that may increase the level of review. I then argued that interpretive media research involves historical research and open-ended, oral history interviewing. This research does not fit the type of research defined by federal regulations, as stated previously: “a systematic investigation, including research development, testing, and evaluation, designed to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge.” I argued that much of our research is based on case studies, open-ended interviews, life histories, and life stories. Each individual case is treated as unique. This category of social science research has historically been called idiographic or emic. Emic studies emphasize stories, narratives, collaborative performances, and accounts that capture the meaning persons bring to experience. Nomothetic studies, in contrast, conform to the federal definitions of research. Researchers seek abstract 298

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generalizations, test hypotheses, and use random sampling techniques, quasi-experimental designs, and so forth. I requested that the Oral History exclusion apply to interpretive research in the College of Communications, with these stipulations: 1. The research is not federally funded. 2. The research does not place subjects at risk or harm. 3. Researchers demonstrate that this exclusion should be granted, because the research in question does not involve research as defined by the HHS regulations. An exemption could be granted, if research does meet the HHS definition. 4. Scholars define their work as scholarship, not research, and locate it within an artistic, humanistic paradigm, including critical pedagogy, arts-based inquiry, narrative or performance studies (see below). A set of specific guidelines, embedded in an indigenous, feminist, communitarian ethic, remain to be developed.

AN INDIGENOUS FEMINIST, COMMUNITARIAN ETHIC It is against this background, that indigenous peoples debate codes of ethics and issues surrounding intellectual and cultural property rights. In this politicized space, “indigenous codes of ethics are being promulgated . . . as a sheer act of survival” (Smith 1999: 119). Thus the various charters of indigenous peoples include statements that refer to collective not individual human rights. These rights include control and ownership of the community’s cultural property; its health and knowledge systems; its rituals and customs; its culture’s basic gene pool, rights, and rules for self-determination; and an insistence on who the first beneficiaries of indigenous knowledge will be. These charters call on governments and states to develop policies that will insure these social goods, including the rights of indigenous peoples to protect new knowledge and its IRBs AND THE TURN TO INDIGENOUS RESEARCH ETHICS

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dissemination. These charters embed codes of ethics within this larger perspective. They spell out specifically how researchers are to protect and respect the rights and interests of indigenous peoples. These are the selfsame protocols that regulate daily moral life in the culture. In these ways, Smith’s arguments open the space for a parallel discourse concerning a feminist, communitarian moral ethic. In the feminist communitarian model, participants have a coequal say in how research should be conducted, what should be studied, which methods should be used, which findings are valid and acceptable, how the findings are to be implemented, and how the consequences of such action are to be assessed. Spaces for disagreement are recognized, while discourse aims for mutual understanding, for the honoring of moral commitments. A sacred, existential epistemology places humans in a noncompetitive, nonhierarchical relationship to the earth, to nature, and to the larger world. This sacred epistemology stresses the values of empowerment, shared governance, care, solidarity, love, community, covenant, morally involved observers, and civic transformation. This ethical epistemology recovers the moral values that were excluded by the rational Enlightenment science project. This sacred epistemology is based on a philosophical anthropology that declares that “all humans are worthy of dignity and sacred status without exception for class or ethnicity” (Christians 1995: 129). A universal human ethic, stressing the sacredness of life, human dignity, truth-telling, and nonviolence, derives from this position (Christians 1997: 12–15). This ethic is based on locally experienced, culturally prescribed protonorms (Christians 1995: 129). These primal norms provide a defensible “conception of good rooted in universal human solidarity” (ibid.; also 1997, 1998). This sacred epistemology recognizes and interrogates the ways in which race, class, and gender operate as important systems of oppression in the world today. Thus do Smith, Bishop, and Christians outline a radical ethical path for the future. In so doing, they transcend Belmont Principles, which focus almost exclusively on the problems associated with betrayal, deception, and harm. They call for a collaborative social 300

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science research model that makes the researcher responsible not to a removed discipline (or institution) but rather to those studied. This model stresses personal accountability, caring, the value of individual expressiveness, the capacity for empathy, and the sharing of emotionality (Collins l991: 2l6).This model implements collaborative, participatory, performative inquiry. It forcefully aligns the ethics of research with a politics of the oppressed, with a politics of resistance, hope, and freedom.

UTOPIAN FRAGMENTS Indigenous, radical-democratic, and social-justice-based studies are under threat from several sides. Externally, around the globe “there are federal government demands for evidence-based practice, where experimental and quantified knowledge become[s] the privileged form of scientific evidence” (Brinkmann and Kvale 2005, 2008; Kvale 2003, 2008:1; Timmermans and Berg 2003: 7). Within the North American and European academy, the bureaucracies of Institutional Review Boards threaten to stifle what little qualitative human subject research does get done (Christians 2005). Another threat arises from within the qualitative research community itself. There is, as Brinkmann and Kvale observe, a tendency to “portray qualitative inquiry as inherently ethical, or at least more ethical than quantitative research” (Brinkmann and Kvale 2008: 162; Kvale 2008: 10). They call this qualitative ethicisim—that is, the inclination to see research within preferred ethical terms, with the belief that qualitative research uniquely embodies these goals. The dangers with qualitative ethicism are two-fold. It can lead to an uncritical romanticizing of qualitative research. At the same time, it can direct attention away from the ways in which qualitative inquiry in the form of focus groups, open-ended interviewing, and ethnography is used to sell products in the consumer and governmental marketplaces (Kvale 2008: 16). Qualitative researchers cannot claim a mantle of ethical superiority. They must be vigilant in terms of how their methodologies IRBs AND THE TURN TO INDIGENOUS RESEARCH ETHICS

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are used by neoliberal regimes. Indeed, the rush to embrace the interpretive turn in consumer research is a mixed ethical blessing.

A Case Study Battiste (2008) and Battiste and Youngblood Henderson (2000) offer a set of ethical practices that confront the problems of ethicisim while ensuring self-determination and the protection of indigenous intellectual property rights. These ethical principles deromanticize qualitative research. They specify institutional and researcher responsibilities. They are based on the guidelines developed by the Mi’kmaq First Nation and the Mi’kmaw Ethics Watch (Ethics Eskinuapimk). Marie Battiste helped write these guidelines. She is a member of this tribal community. Battiste insists that indigenous people have control over their own knowledge. They must have mechanisms that will inform them when research is being done on, among, or with them. They must train people in protocols for doing research, and this must be research that will benefit, strengthen, and revitalize the community. She is blunt. The challenge is how to create ethical mandates and ethical behavior in a “knowledge system contaminated by colonials and racism. Nowhere is this work more needed than in the universities that pride themselves on their discipline-specific research” (2008: 966). Mi’kmaw Ethics Watch oversees research proposals on behalf of the larger community (see their website: http://mrc. uccb.ns.ca/prinpro.html). Any research done in the community must be reviewed by the Ethics Watch. Their guidelines include these: 1. Mi’kmaw people are the guardians and interpreters of their culture, knowledge, arts, and lands. 2. Mi’kmaw people have the right and obligation to exercise control to protect their cultural and intellectual properties and knowledge. 3. All research on the Mi’kmaq is to be approached as a negotiated partnership. 302

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4. Participants shall be recognized and treated as equals in the research done instead of as “informants” or “subjects.” 5. All research partners must show respect for language, traditions, standards of the communities, and for the highest standards of scholarly research. 6. All research partners shall provide descriptions of research processes in the participant’s own language (written and oral), which shall include detailed explanations of usefulness of study, potential benefits, and possible harmful effects on individuals, groups, and the environment. Researchers must clearly identify sponsors, purposes of the research, sources of financial support and investigators for the research (scholarly and corporate), tasks to be performed, information requested from Mi’kmaw people, participatory research processes, the publication plans for the results, and anticipated royalties for the research. 7. All consent disclosures shall be written in both Mi’kmaq and English, depending on the community norms. All individuals and communities have the right to decline or to withdraw from participation at any time without penalties. 8. All research partners shall inform participants in their own language of the use of data-gathering devices: tape, video recordings, photos, physiological measurements, and how data will be used. They shall also provide participants information on the anonymity or confidentiality of their participation and, if this is not possible, inform participants that anonymity is not possible. Participants shall be informed of possible consequences of their choice to remain in the research and of their right to withdraw consent or participation in the research at any time. 9. To ensure accuracy and sensitivity of interpretation, all research scholars shall invite Mi’kmaw participation in the interpretation and/or review of any conclusions drawn from the research. 10. The Mi’kmaw Ethics Watch shall increase efforts to educate each community and its individuals to the issues, concerns, benefits, and risks of research involving Mi’kmaq people. IRBs AND THE TURN TO INDIGENOUS RESEARCH ETHICS

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These ethical guidelines are typical of the kinds of procedures that now regulate inquiry in indigenous communities. They represent ways of bringing control back to the local community. They also represent ways of decolonizing inquiry while shaping the uses to which qualitative research will be put.

IN CONCLUSION: LEARNING NEW ETHICAL BEHAVIOR17 In the next decade, there will be renewed efforts to embed critical and indigenous methodologies in decolonizing discourses. These discourses will interrogate the ways in which power, ethics, and social justice intersect. Multiple models of justice will be explored. Feminist, communitarian ethics will be informed by the empowerment ethics of specific indigenous peoples. Indigenous and non-indigenous scholars will refine models of restorative justice that heal the wounds of globalization. They will develop new indigenous methodologies that better address the social and economic concerns of oppressed persons. I hope that in the next decade, utopian dreams of universal social justice will be better realized. Brinkmann and Kvale (2008: 276–277) suggest that learning a new form of ethical behavior will be a key challenge for decolonizing qualitative researchers. The communitarian model anchors this learning process in a moral community of stakeholders and researchers. This must be a dialogical process. It presumes a community where there are shared moral values, such as is the case for Ethics Watch, as described by Battiste. This model deplores a naive ethicisim. It emphasizes the moral dimensions of inquiry, reminding us that no one has a corner on moral superiority. Thus do Battieste, Kvale, Brinkman, Smith, Bishop, and Christians outline a radical ethical path for the future. In so doing, they transcend Belmont Principles, which focus almost exclusively on the problems associated with betrayal, deception, and harm. They call for a collaborative social science research model that makes the researcher responsible, not to a removed discipline 304

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(or institution) but rather to those studied. This model forcefully aligns the ethics of research with a politics of the oppressed, with a politics of resistance, hope, and freedom. This model directs scholars to take up moral projects that honor and reclaim indigenous cultural practices. Such work produces spiritual, social, and psychological healing. Healing, in turn, leads to multiple forms of transformation at the personal and social levels. These transformations shape processes of mobilization and collective action. These actions help persons realize a radical politics of possibility.

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THE NEW PARADIGM DIALOGUES AND QUALITATIVE INQUIRY1 Let us engage in the paradigm wars. Let us defend ourselves against those who would impose their modern notions of science on us by exposing the flaws in what they call scientifically based research. Let us mount a strong offense by generating qualitative studies that are so powerful they cannot be dismissed. (Hatch 2006: 407) Society in general is unimpressed with the contributions of social/behavioral inquiry; a pox will soon be called down on all our houses, if there is continuing conflict rather than cooperation among the paradigm adherents. It is to everyone’s benefit to cooperate. (Guba 1990b: 374) We need an ethical framework grounded in notions of justice ¼ for justice ¼ is expressed through deep feelings that move people to action. (Collins 1998: 199, 248; slight paraphrase)

I agree with Amos Hatch. At the end of the first decade of the 21st century, let us re-engage the paradigm disputes of the 1980s (Gage 1989). But after Guba (1990a, b), I call for a paradigm dialog,2 not a new war. We must find ways to cooperate, new ways to use our work for purposes of social justice. We are in a Third “Methodological Moment” (Teddlie and Tashakkori 2003a: ix). Mixed methodologies and calls for scientifically based research are in the ascendancy. It is time to think through how we got to this place, time to ask where we go next. Taking my lead from Hatch, I briefly review the 1980s paradigm conflicts. I quickly shift from the 1980s to the present, taking up multiple forms of paradigm discourse in the Third Methodological Moment. I then 307

reengage Hatch and his critique of the SBR backlash against interpretive inquiry. I conclude by returning to Guba’s 1990 call for dialogue and collaboration across paradigms and interpretive communities.

Clearly, as argued in previous chapters, the seeds of “the current upheaval and argument about ‘scientific’ research in the scholarly world of education” (Clark and Scheurich 2008; Scheurich and Clark 2006: 401) began before the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Reading First ([email protected]) Acts. Of course, these acts required a focus on identifying and using scientifically based research (SBR) in designing and implementing educational programs. Although it is too easy to blame NCLB for the mess we are in today, the turmoil did not start here. Indeed, the seeds for current controversies can be traced, as Hatch (2006) and Donmoyer (2006: 12–13) argue, to the paradigm war(s) of the 1980s (Gage 1989) and the call by Guba (1990a, b), and Guba and Lincoln (1994, 2005) and others for a paradigm dialogue among positivism, postpositivism, critical theory, and constructivism. A legacy of the 1980s paradigm wars was a ready-made institutional apparatus that privileged a resurgent postpositivism, involving experimentalism, mixed methodologies, and “governmental incursion into the spaces of research methods”(Lather, 2006a: 35). Lather calls this the alphabet soup of postpositivist acronyms (2004)—CC (Cochrane Collaboration), C2 (Campbell Collaboration), AIR (American Institutes for Research), WWC (What Works Clearinghouse), SBR (scientifically based research), IES (Institute of Education Science), and NRC (National Research Council). These institutional structures converged when neoliberalism, postpositivism, and the audit-accountability culture took aim on education and schooling. The relationships among these structures are complex and by no means well understood. The financial-auditing mechanism has been substantively and technically linked with the methodology of accountability (Biesta 2004; 308

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Skrla and Scheurich 2004). Neoliberals added one more piece to their puzzle when they understood that with a knowledge-based economy there was a need to produce better educated workers for the global economy. IES, NCLB, SBR, CC, C2, and WWC worked hand in glove, a new age was upon us, we were blindsided by a New Paradigm dispute and didn’t even know it! The watchwords: audits, efficiency, high-stakes assessment, testbased accountability, SBR. It was only a matter of time, as outlined in Chapter 4, before this apparatus would take aim at qualitative research and create protocols for evaluating qualitative research studies (see Briggs 2006; National CASP Collaboration 2006; also American Education Research Association 2006; Bell 2006; Morse 2006). To confront this situation, the qualitative inquiry community must ask itself how it lost its place at the bargaining table in the first place. We are caught in the middle of a global conversation concerning the evidence-based research movement and emerging standards and guidelines for conducting and evaluating qualitative inquiry (Denzin and Giardina 2006; Morse, 2006; St. Pierre 2006). This conversation turns on issues surrounding the politics and ethics of evidence and the value of qualitative work in addressing matters of equity and social justice. In some senses, this is like old wine in new bottles, 1980s battles in a new century, the New Paradigm War.

THE 1980s PARADIGM WARS While accepting Hatch’s invitation to re-engage the paradigm wars of the 1980s, I seek a nonmilitary metaphor, something more peaceful, less combative.3 I believe we are in the midst of a complex set of discourses that are moving in several directions at the same time. Central features of the new disputes are embedded in the mixed-methods movement, as that movement re-enacts arguments from the 1980s (see below). According to Gage (1989), during the 1980s, the paradigm wars (after Thomas Kuhn) resulted in the demise of quantitative research in education, a victim of attacks from antinaturalists, interpretivists, THE NEW PARADIGM DIALOGUES AND QUALITATIVE INQUIRY

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and critical theorists. Ethnographic studies flourished. The cultural appropriateness of schooling, critical pedagogy, and critical theorists’ and feminists’ analyses fostered struggles for power and cultural capital for the poor, nonwhites, women, and gays (Gage, 1989). (Gage imagined two alternative paradigms: pragmatism and Popper’s piecemeal social engineering.) Guba’s The Paradigm Dialog (1990a) signaled an end to the wars, at least for the constructivists. In The Paradigm Dialog, postpositivists, constructivists, and critical theorists talked to one another, arguing through issues connected to ethics, field studies, praxis, criteria, knowledge accumulation, truth, significance, graduate training, values, and politics. We were, for a moment, one big happy family. The cornerstone of the 1980s Paradigm War turned on two arguments: (1) quantitative and qualitative methods were fundamentally different, or incompatible (incommensurable), and (2) interpretive, or theoretical paradigms were also incompatible. By the mid-1980s, “qualitative research had begun to be widely used and widely accepted” (Donmoyer 2006: 18). It was evident that many “champions of qualitative methodology did indeed operate from a fundamentally different worldview than the one more traditional researchers embraced, and this new worldview could not be simply appropriated into traditional thinking (ibid.: 23). By the early 1990s, there was a proliferation of published works on qualitative research; handbooks and new journals appeared. Qualitative inquiry flourished, as did work in critical, feminist, poststructural, performance, and queer theory paradigms. Paradigm proliferation seemed to mark a confluence of understandings concerning inquiry, politics, and scholarship. Guba and Lincoln could write in 2005 that “the number of qualitative texts, research papers, workshops, and training materials has exploded. Indeed it would be difficult to miss the distinct turn of the social sciences toward more interpretive, postmodern and criticalist practices and theorizing (191). Qualitative researchers were comfortably in charge of their own destiny. Perhaps they became too complacent. They had their own journals and special 310

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interest groups. Sage Publications led the way. But all was not quiet on the Western Front.

THE THIRD MOMENT AND THE NEW PARADIGM DIALOGUES Teddlie and Tashakkori use the term third methodological moment (2003a: ix) to describe an epistemological position that evolved out of the discussions and controversies associated with the 1980s paradigm wars. The Third Moment mediates quantitative and qualitative disputes by finding a third, or middle ground. I argue, extending Teddlie and Tashakkori, that there are in fact two distinct versions of the Third Moment. There is the mixed-methods version of the Moment, and there is a somewhat more radical position. This is the version that endorses paradigm proliferation, a version anchored in the critical interpretive social science traditions (Donmoyer 2006; Lather 2006a).

Mixed-Methods Discourse In the first version of the Third Moment, the two incompatibility, or incommensurabilty, theses are rejected. On the surface, this seems somewhat akin to mixing apples and oranges, or just rewriting history. When the field went from one to multiple epistemological paradigms, many asserted that there was incompatibility between and across paradigms, not just incompatibility between positivism and its major critic, constructivism. Paradigm proliferation followed. It was only a matter of time before critical theorists, feminists, and critical race theorists were fighting. It was no longer just a conflict between positivism and nonpositivism. Beneath the surface, another conflict was brewing, and it spread to all perspectives. The language of multiple paradigms prevailed. Some called for a truce; let a 1,000 different flowers bloom. Ironically, as this discourse evolved, the complementary strengths thesis emerged, and is now accepted by many in the mixed-methods community. Here is where history starts to be rewritten; that is, multiple paradigms can be used in the same THE NEW PARADIGM DIALOGUES AND QUALITATIVE INQUIRY

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mixed methods inquiry (Teddlie and Tashakkori 2003b: 23). At the same time, the mixed- or multiple-methods approach gained acceptance. This seemed to extend the triangulation arguments of the 1970s (Dixon-Woods et al. 2006). Thus the demise of the single theoretical and/or methodological paradigm was celebrated (Teddlie and Tashakkori 2003b: 24). For the mixed-methods advocates, the residues of the first paradigm war are positive and negative. The demise of the incompatibility thesis, as it applied to methods and paradigms, was “a major catalyst in the development of the mixed methods as a distinct third methodological moment” (ibid.). Regrettably, for the mixed-methods movement, a lingering negative legacy of the 1980s wars is the tendency of students and graduate programs to still consider themselves as QUALS or QUANS. On this, though, there is agreement: “we need to get rid of that distinction” (Schwandt 2000: 210). Once this is done, only technical problems remain: that is, how do we implement this new paradigm? The mixed-methods discourse introduced complex discussions involving design typologies, logistics, validity, data, standards, inferences, and findings that can be generalized from studies that combine quantitative (QUAN) and qualitative (QUAL) methodologies.4 The new paradigm requires multiple investigators with competencies in more than one method or paradigm. The problem of dual competency can be solved with a team approach or with a model that presumes minimal competency in both quantitative and qualitative design (Teddlie and Tashakkori 2003b: 44–45). Teddlie and Tashakkori recommend “methodological bilingualism” (ibid.: 45). For some, it is a short step from methodological bilingualism to SBR, from discussions of design, inference, data quality, and transferability to inquiries that privilege QUAN over QUAL. But it is not this simple.

Phases in the Paradigm Discourse In the first-phase 1980s Paradigm Wars, qualitative research took its rightful place in the interpretive community. Qualitative inquiry 312

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flourished in this moment, which lasted slightly over two decades (1980–2000). But by the end of the 1990s, SBR emerged as a force, poised to erase the majority of the gains won in phase one. With a wave of the postpositivist wand, the two pivotal assumptions of the interpretive moment were demolished. It was as if we were back in the 1980s, fighting that old war all over again. The two incompatibility theses were back on the table; there is science, and there is nonscience. As SBR was gaining strength, so, too, was the mixed-methods movement. Mixed-methods advocates said that it was more complicated then SBR advocates would have us believe. Mixed-methods critics such as Morse (2006) contested the basic assumptions of SBR, including the fact that RCT conditions are not replicable in day-to-day clinical care. Morse noted that an exercise of disciplinary power underlies any concept of evidence. SBR had no monopoly on the word evidence. Indeed, their model of evidence is inadequate for critical, qualitative health care research (ibid.: 80). Regrettably, the language and discourse of the mixed-methods group was easily coopted by some SBR, CC, C2, and NRC advocates; that is, experimental, non-experimental, QUAN, and QUAL mixed-methods designs were one answer to the demand for SBR. Soft qualitative research procedures—interviewing, observation—could be folded into Random Control Trial protocols (Bell 2006; Briggs 2006).

Another Discursive Formation The field is on the edge of New Paradigm Dialogue, a third formation existing alongside SBR and mix-methods discourses. This is the space primarily filled by non-mixed-methods interpretive researchers: critical constructionists, feminists, critical pedagogy and performance studies, oral historians, CRT, interpretive interactionists. These are scholars in a different space. They seldom trouble terms such as validity or reliability. For some, a minimalist approach to theory is endorsed. A disruptive politics of representation is the focus, crafting works that move persons and communities to action. THE NEW PARADIGM DIALOGUES AND QUALITATIVE INQUIRY

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Indeed, it is clear that scholars are working in three directions at the same time; they are critically engaging and critiquing the SBR movement. They are emphasizing the political and moral consequences of the narrow views of science that are embedded in the movement (Hatch 2006; Preissle 2006; St. Pierre and Roulston 2006). They are asking questions about the politics of evidence, about how work can be done for social justice purposes. They are struggling to advance the causes of qualitative inquiry in a time of global crisis. A second group of scholars celebrates paradigm proliferation (Donmoyer 2006; Lather 2006a) and the profusion of interpretive communities. They do not necessarily endorse the incompatibility theses that are so important for the mixed-methods community. They understand that each community has differing interpretive criteria (Creswell 2007: 24). This discourse functions as a firewall of sorts against the narrow view of nonpositivism held by SBR authors. Still, a third group of scholars, as discussed in Chapter 12, are resisting the implementation of narrow views of ethics, human subject review boards, IRBs, informed consent, and biomedical models of inquiry (see Cannella and Lincoln 2007; Christians 2005; Ryan and Hood 2004). Many campus-level IRBs attempt to manage or to redefine qualitative research. This has the effect of interfering with academic freedom, as well as shaping questions concerning design, informed consent, and the researchersubject relationship. Two tendencies must be avoided. Some overreact and claim an ethically superior stance to the IRB and SBR apparatuses. Others claim the victim identity. The dangers of these two versions of ethicism are self-evident. There is uncritical romanticizing of qualitative inquiry. At the same time, a productive engagement with these competing discourses is shut down. There is no dialogue. The opportunity to teach others in the opposing camps is wasted. Nobody wins, nobody learns. While the turmoil now going on in the Third Moment seems to repeat 30-year-old arguments, some progress has been made. Moral and epistemological discourses now go on, side by side. This 314

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was not the case 30 years ago. A vastly superior mixed-method discourse now exists. The mid-century multimethods of arguments of Campbell and Stanley seem naive. Race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, the research rights of indigenous peoples, whiteness, and queer studies are taken-for-granted topics today. That was not the case in the 1980s.

HATCH REDEUX I return to Hatch. His argument moves through four steps: (1) neoconservatism and postmodernism; (2) postmodern paralysis; (3) fighting back; (4) re-engaging the paradigm wars.

Neoconservatism and the Postmodern Backlash For Hatch, the efforts to redefine educational research are part of a larger “backlash against what neoconservatives see as the negative consequences of postmodernity” (2006: 403). SBR is a well-orchestrated attempt to return to modern ways of thinking about “knowledge, knowing, and research methods” (ibid.: 404). In the language of the paradigm wars, this is a return to positivism. Methodological conservatism blurs into and supports conservative political ideology (Cannella and Lincoln 2007). The political and methodological right object to postmodernism’s challenges to universal truth, as well as its emphasis on context, subjective meaning, process, discovery versus verification, the theory-and-value-ladenness of facts, the interactive nature of inquiry, and the impossibility of objectivity (see Guba and Lincoln 1994: 106–107). The convergence that Hatch sees between methodological and political conservatism is nuanced. There are many postpositivists who are not conservative. A sad irony is at work. In this version of the Third Moment, postpositivists have seen portions of their discourse put to conservative methodological and political purposes. Postpositivism has been placed in the SBR blender, folded into the SBR mix (see Torrance 2006). THE NEW PARADIGM DIALOGUES AND QUALITATIVE INQUIRY

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The conservative and SBR criticisms of the critical and constructivist (postmodern) paradigms may have created divisions within the qualitative research community. Rather than endorsing many different forms of inquiry, SBR has helped marginalize critical qualitative inquiry. The imposition of experimental criteria on qualitative inquiry has created a rush to produce our own standards. The mixed-methods group (Creswell 2007) has been most helpful, because they have painstakingly catalogued interpretive criteria. We have not made productive use of this discourse. It is as if we were starting in a vacuum, when in fact this is not the case at all.

Postmodern Paralysis Hatch places some of the blame on those who speak about the end of ethnography, the crisis of representation, and the postmodern performance and autoethnographic turn in qualitative inquiry. He fears that many who fought on the front lines of 1980s paradigm wars now feel trapped between “retrenched positivist forces on the one hand and stinging poststruturalist critiques on the other” (2006: 405). This debate, he contends, creates paralysis. People are writing and theorizing about research but not doing it. Students are not being taught how to do actual qualitative research. Few “data-based studies” (ibid.: 406) are being conducted. Hatch worries that “the next generation of qualitative researchers will have been prepared to theorize, deconstruct, and critique but have no clue how to design a study, collect data, and generate findings from a thoughtful analysis” (ibid.). I disagree. In many North American and European journals, including Qualitative Studies in Education, Qualitative Inquiry, Qualitative Health Care, Qualitative Social Work, International Review of Qualitative Research, British Educational Research Journal and Qualitative Research,5 scholars working across a wide range of paradigms and methodologies are publishing excellent qualitative research. This work is informed by the postmodern turn. At the same time, it speaks to issues involved in schooling, health care, immigration, the justice system, the 316

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family, child care, literacy, to name just a few areas of social policy concern. Monograph series sponsored by such university presses as NYU, Minnesota, and Duke and such commercial publishers as AltaMira, Left Coast Press, Oxford, and Routledge are also publishing qualitative work in these newer traditions. I do not believe we are witnessing a postmodern paralysis.

Fighting Back Hatch wants research done within all the qualitative paradigms to be considered legitimate. He does not want “knowledge and how it is created to be in the hands of those who happen to hold political power” (ibid.). He does not want to take a giant step back to the pre-1980s paradigm wars. He wants a strong line of defense in order to re-establish qualitative inquiry as a valuable and “respected form of inquiry” (ibid.). He outlines several ways to fight back: (1) publishing well-designed qualitative research in high-quality journals; (2) increased support for new scholars doing qualitative research; (3) lobbying journals and editors to publish more qualitative work; (4) defending our territory by “exposing the flaws, faulty logic, shaking assumptions, and sheer banality that characterizes many of the arguments in the SBR movement” (ibid.); (5) rejecting SBR criteria for evaluating our work; (6) critiquing SBR studies that are held up as models for the field; (7) refusing to accept SBR’s concepts of science and knowledge and proper inquiry.

Whose Science, Whose Research We cannot allow the new positivist, SBR camp to claim control over the word science, just as we must reclaim control over what we mean by research. Eisenhart (2006) proposes a model of qualitative science that is interpretive, after Geertz (1973), and practical, after Flyvberg (2002). A development of these alternatives to experimental science could help improve the status of qualitative inquiry in the current political environment. Likewise, queer, feminist, indigenous, and postcolonial models of science THE NEW PARADIGM DIALOGUES AND QUALITATIVE INQUIRY

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open up additional spaces for resisting the narrow, hegemonic SBR framework. I endorse Hatch’s conclusions: “If we do not fight back, qualitative research in education could become self-absorbed, fragmented, and ineffectual. And the neoconservative dream of a return to modernity will have come true” (ibid.: 407). We will have lost.

Forming Alliances We need to find new strategic and tactical ways to work with one another in the new new paradigm dialogue. This means that dialogues must be formed between the poststructural, mixedmethods and the SBR advocates, as well as spokespersons for the NRC, CC, and C2. These three main interpretive communities need to develop ways of communicating with and learning from one another. This means we must expand the size of our tent; indeed, we need a bigger tent! We cannot afford to fight with one another. Mixed-methods scholars have carefully studied the many different branches of the poststructural tree (Creswell 2007). The same cannot be said for the poststructuralists. Nor can we allow the arguments from the SBR community to divide us. We must learn from the paradigm conflicts of the 1980s not to overreach, not to engage in polemics, not to become too selfsatisfied. We must develop and work with our own concepts of science, knowledge, and quality inquiry. We need to remind the resurgent postpositivists that their criteria of good work apply only to work within their paradigm, not ours. Over the course of the last two decades, poststructuralists have fought hard to claim an interpretive space for inquiry that questioned norms of objectivity, emphasized complexity, subjective interpretive processes, performance, textuality, difference, uncertainty, politics, power, and inquiry as a moral as well as a scientific process (see Lather 2006a: 48–52). These understandings, like obdurate structures, ought not to be compromised. They are knots in our interpretive handkerchief. 318

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Further, we cannot just erase the differences between QUAN and QUAL inquiry, QUAN and QUAL departments and their graduate training programs. Specialization in discourses is still a requirement. Qualitative inquiry is a huge field, not easily mastered by taking one or two overview courses (see Eisenhart and DeHaan 2005). A minimal competency model, methodological bilingualism, seems superficial, perhaps even unworkable.

CARRYING ON THE NEW PARADIGM DIALOGUES I want to end by returning to the themes outlined in Guba’s essay “Carrying on the Dialog” (1990b). This essay enumerates ten emergent themes and three agenda items from the 1989 “Alternative Paradigm Conference,” the conference that is recorded in Guba (1990a). I believe that these themes and agenda items can guide us today. I phrase them as injunctions, or theses: Thesis 1: There needs to be a greater openness to alternative paradigm critiques. Thesis 2: Confrontationalism by alternative paradigm proponents must decline. Thesis 3: Paths for fruitful dialog between and across paradigms should be explored. Thesis 4: Simplistic representations of the newer (and older) paradigms should be avoided. This will help address confusion. Thesis 5: Complexity and interconnectedness, not simplicity, are ineluctable (Guba 1990b: 373). Thesis 6: The commensurabilty theses, as they apply to paradigms and methods, need to be revisited. What is gained, and what is lost with these two theses? Thesis 7: A change in paradigmatic postures involves a personal odyssey; that is, we each have a personal history with our preferred paradigm, and this fact needs to be honored. Thesis 8: The three main interpretive communities (poststructural, mix-methods, SBR) must learn to how to cooperate and work with one another. This is so, because paradigm dominance THE NEW PARADIGM DIALOGUES AND QUALITATIVE INQUIRY

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involves control over faculty appointments, tenure, training, funding, publication, status, and legitimation (Guba 1990b: 374). Thesis 9: There is a need for conferences that will allow scholars from competing paradigms to see one another face to face and to interact. The annual International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry is one attempt to address this need (www.qi2009.org). Thesis 10: The complexity of the field of qualitative research should be honored. Polarization and elitism need to be avoided. In conferences and congresses, multiple language communities should be represented. Dialog between persons and interpretive communities is critical.

Into the Future Three agenda items emerged from the 1989 Conference. I move them forward, into the present, to 2009. They offer a framework for action and collaboration. It is time to stop fighting. To repeat, we must form strategic and tactical alliances. We need to form interactive networks across interpretive communities. The Intellectual Agenda: The global community of qualitative inquiry needs annual events where it can deal with the problems and issues that they confront at this historical moment. These events should be international, national, regional, and local. They can be held in conjunction with “universities, school systems, health care systems, juvenile justice systems, and the like” (Guba 1990b: 376).6 The Advocacy Agenda: The community needs to develop “systematic contacts with political figures, the media ¼ the professional press and with practitioners such as teachers, health workers, social workers, [and] government functionaries” (ibid.). Advocacy includes: (1) showing how qualitative work addresses issues of social policy; (2) critiquing federally mandated ethical guidelines for human subject research; (3) critiquing outdated, positivist modes of science and research. The Operational Agenda: Qualitative researchers are encouraged to engage in self-learning and self-criticism, to resocialize themselves, if necessary. Their goals should include building 320

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productive relationships with professional associations, journals, policymakers, and funders (ibid.). Representatives from many different professional associations (AERA, AEA, ASA, APA, AAA) need to be brought together.

IN CONCLUSION Qualitative researchers belong to a global community. The recent SBR disputes and conflicts in the United States are also being felt in Europe, Australia, South America, Africa, and elsewhere. The interpretive community must draw together into one large community so we can share our problems and experiences with these new discourses. Scholars who share the values of excellence, leadership, and advocacy need venues to engage in debate, frame public policy discourse, and disseminate research findings. We need a community that honors and celebrates paradigm and methodological diversity and showcases scholarship from around the world. As fellow travelers, we must research agendas that advance human rights and social justice through qualitative research. If we can do this, the rewards will be “plentiful and the opportunity for professional [and societal] impact unsurpassed” (ibid.: 378). We need a roadmap and an agenda to carry us into the next decade of this new century, a call to arms. Throughout these 13 chapters, l have attempted to lay the foundations for that roadmap. I take up the call to arms in my next book.

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Chapter 1 1. Qualitative inquiry in North America has passed through several historical moments, or phases: the traditional (1900–1950); the modernist, or golden age (1950–1970); blurred genres (1970– 1986); the crisis of representation (1986–1990); the postmodern (1990–1995); postexperimental inquiry (1995–2000); the methodologically contested present (2000–2004); the fractured future (2005– ). These moments overlap and co-exist in the present (see Denzin and Lincoln 2005: 2–3). This model has been termed a progress narrative by Alasuutari (2004: 599–600), Seale, Gobo, Gubrium, and Silverman (2004: 2), and Atkinson, Coffey, and Delamont (2001). The critics assert that we believe that the most recent moment is the most up to date, the avant-garde, the cutting edge (Alasuutari 2004: 601). Naturally we dispute this reading. Teddlie and Tashakkori (2003: 5–8) have modified our historical periods to fit their historical analysis of the major moments in the emergence of mix methods in the last century. 2. Today the list for the United States (and England) is very, very long; many of the journals are published by Sage, including Qualitative Inquiry, Qualitative Health Research, Qualitative Research, Qualitative Social Work, Cultural Studies—Critical Methodologies, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Discourse Studies, Discourse and Society, Ethnography, Field Methods. Other important journals include International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, Anthropology and Education, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Text and Performance Quarterly, and The International Review of Qualitative Research. 3. Again, from Sage—the Handbooks of: Qualitative Research, Grounded Theory, Ethnography, Interviewing, Narrative Inquiry, Performance Studies, Critical and Indigenous Methodologies. 323

4. Sage seemingly has dozens of these texts, including those focused on case study, interviewing, Internet inquiry, ethnog raphy, focus groups, visual data, conversation analysis, observation, participatory action research, ethics, qualitative design and analysis, life history, and interpretive biography (see Staller, Block, and Horner [2008] for a review of Sage’s place in this discourse). 5. Including the distinguished qualitative dissertation awards of the International Association of Qualitative Inquiry and the American Educational Research Association (AERA). 6. Including the Annual Egon Guba Distinguished Lecture for the QUALSIG of AERA. 7. On 7 May 2005, on the last day of the First International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, the International Association of Qualitative Inquiry (IAQI) was founded in Urbana, Illinois, USA. IAQI is the first international association solely dedicated to the scholarly promotion, representation, and global development of qualitative research. At present, IAQI has 1,500 delegates representing 60 nations worldwide. It has established professional affiliations with over 50 collaborating sites in Oceana, Africa, North and South America, the Caribbean, Europe, the Middle East, Japan, Korea, and China (see qi2008.org). The IAQI Newsletter appears quarterly, as does a new journal, The International Review of Qualitative Research. 8. Mixed methods research is Teddlie and Tashakkori’s third movement or moment. The first movement is quantitative research, and the second is qualitative inquiry. The third moment offers a middle ground that mediates quantitative and qualitative disputes (Teddlie and Tashakkori 2003a: x, 2003b: 4–9). 9. The following sections extend remarks in Denzin and Lincoln (2005: 8–10). 10. Scholarly association also got into the picture. In 2007 an American Education Research Association (AERA) Task Force created a draft of “Standards for Reporting Humanities-Oriented Research.” These standards are intended to complement AERA’s 2006 “Standards for Reporting on Empirical Social Science Research.” The Humanities-Oriented Research document is available for comment at: www.logiforms.com/formdata/user_forms/7993_ 9562493/62303/. The 2006 standards are available at the AERA

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website. These guidelines mediate the narrow SBR model, which is also embedded in guidelines issued by the Institute of Education Science (IES), the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC), and the Cochrane-Campbell Collaboration (CCC). They are discussed in Chapter 4. 11. They identify four major mixed methods designs: triangulation, embedded, explanatory, and exploratory (371). 12. Their emergent model focuses on methods that break out of traditional frameworks, methods that exploit new technologies and innovations; this is a process model that includes politics, epistemology, theory, and methodology.

Chapter 2 1. An earlier version of this chapter was written with Michael D. Giardina (see Denzin and Giardina 2007a). 2. I take these numbers from two websites: antiwar.com and icasualities.org. 3. These lines were first drafted in 2006. Two years later, it seems that little has changed. 4. I write these words three months out from the 2008 U. S. Presidential election. Barak Obama is offering the world community a positive view of what American might become. 5. However, we do believe that progressive Internet blog communities such as DailyKos (www.dailykos.com), European Tribune (www.eurotrib.com), Blog-foramerica (Governor Howard Dean’s former presidential campaign blog, now the blog home of Democracy for America, http://democracyforamerica.com/) and Atrios’s Eschaton (http://atrios.blogspot.com) are examples of this ideal in action—a performative space in which “citizen journalists” are actively committed to progressive change, critique, and community. Also, and while oftentimes dismissed as “simply a comedy show,” The Daily Show with Jon Stewart regularly embodies a critical media literacy that is seriously lacking in the rest of mainstream media. 6. Falwell made these comments on Pat Robertson’s 700 Club cable television program. Following Falwell’s remarks, Robertson stated unequivocally: “Well, I totally concur.” Though, perhaps, he was just kidding on the square (cf. Franken 2003).

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Chapter 3 1. The alternative title of this essay is taken from the Bob Dylan song “Shelter from the Storm.” An altered version of this text is also given in Denzin, Lincoln, and Giardina (2006); see also Denzin (2007a). 2. The text is to be performed on a stage with three speakers: a narrator at a podium and speakers A and B seated behind a table. Speakers A and B assume the voices of a variety of persons, including Joan Didion, President Bush, Tony Blair, and George Orwell. A spot light moves to each speaker when it is his or her turn to speak. When speaking, the speaker first announces the name of the person being spoken for. 3. The text reads:

This is Secret and Strictly Personal—UK Eyes Only David Manning FR: Matthew Rycroft Date: 23 July 2002 cc: Defence Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Attorney-General, Sir Richard Wilson, John Scarlett, Francis Richards, CDS, C. Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan, Alastair Campbell IRAQ: PRIME MINISTER’S MEETING, 23 JULY This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents. John Scarlett summarised the intelligence and latest JIC assessment . . . C reported on his recent talks in Washington . . .. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy . . .. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action . . .. The Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal case for military action . . .. But the case (for war) was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea of Iran. 4. Since no WMD were found, the reasons for the war had to be changed. They now include bringing American-style democracy to Iraq and the Middle East; fighting terrorists in Iraq before they 326

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strike America; and honoring the dead who have been killed in the war. 5. Saddam did not represent a threat to America, nor to the world. There were no secret purchases of uranium oxide from the African nation of Niger (Alterman and Green 2004: 265). No one will take responsibility for, nor be accountable for the mass destruction, the murders and the violence that have occurred since the beginning of the war. Facts: over 2,000 dead American soldiers; more than 30,000 dead Iraqi; disgrace and degradation in Abu Ghraib. 6. This is what the International Association of Qualitative Inquiry is all about. For more on this association and the Annual International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry see http://qi2009.org.

Chapter 4 1. Audit culture refers to a technology and a system of accounting that measures outcomes, and assesses quality in terms of so-called objective criteria, such as test scores. Some argue that the global audit culture implements conservative, neoliberal conceptions of governmentality (Bourdieu 1998: 90; Habermas 1972: 122; 2006: 193). 2. Lather (2004) offers a history and critical reading of this alphabet soup of acronyms CC (Cochrane Collaboration), C2 (Campbell Collaboration), AIR (American Institutes for Research), WWC (What Works Clearinghouse), IES (Institute of Education Science) (see http://w-w-c.org/whoweare/overview.html#ies). There has been a recent move within CC and C2 and to create protocols for evaluating qualitative research studies (see Briggs 2006; National CASP Collaboration 2006; also Bell 2006, and below). 3. Over the past four decades the discourse on triangulation, multiple operationalism, and mix-method models has become quite complex and nuanced (see Saukko 2003: 32; Teddlie and Tashakkori 2003 for reviews). Each decade has taken up triangulation and redefined it to meet perceived needs. 4. The common thread that exists between WWC and C2 is The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Reading First (Reading.First@ ed.gov) Acts. These acts required a focus on identifying and using scientifically based research in designing and implementing educational programs (What Works Clearinghouse, http://w-w-c.org/ whoweare/overview.html#ies.). NOTES

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5. Ironically, the blind peer review recommendation flies in the face of a recent CC study that argues that there is little hard evidence to show that blind peer reviews improves the quality of research (Jefferson et al. 2006; see also White, 2003, especially p. 241; Judson 2004: 244–286). Indeed the Cochrane researchers found few studies examining this presumed effect. 6. Their first annual conference (March 2–4, 2008) is outcome based, calling for rigorous studies of reading, writing, and language skills, mathematics, science achievement, social and behavioral competencies, dropout prevention, and school completion ([email protected]). 7. Warrantability and transparency are key terms in the new managerialism, which is evidence-based and audit-driven; that is, policy decisions should be based on evidence that warrants policy recommendations, and research procedures should be transparently accountable (Hammersley 2004: 141) Transparency is also a criterion advanced by the Cochrane Qualitative Methods Group (Briggs 2006). 8. The reporting standards are then divided into eight general areas: problem formation, design, evidence (sources), measurement, analysis and interpretation, generalization, ethics, title, and abstract. 9. I thank Kenneth Howe for his comments on this section. He was a member of this AERA committee. 10. The report reduces interpretive work to three generic categories, or kinds of objects: texts, text analogues (reports, narratives, performances, rituals), and artifacts (works of art). 11. For example, the significance standard has four levels, involving topic and scholarly contribution. The methods standards have three levels, conceptualization five levels, and so forth. 12. Ethically, humanities research, as with empirical research, should be carried out in accordance with IRB approval. Scholars should announce their values and any discuss any conflicts of interest that could influence their analysis. 13. I thank Ken Howe for this phrase. 14. In the last two decades, qualitative researchers have gone from having fewer than three journals dedicated to their work to now having 20 or more (Chenail 2007). 15. The text that follows borrows from and paraphrases Koukl (2007 www.str.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=6191). 328

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Chapter 5 1. I thank Mitch Allen, Kenneth Gergen, Meaghan Morris, Laurel Richardson, Katherine E. Ryan, and Yvonna Lincoln for their comments on earlier versions of this chapter. This chapter shows its age—it was originally drafted in 1992! 2. Here I deal with the constructivism of Guba and Lincoln (1994). 3. Rosaldo argues that anthropological doctrine presents this as a three-step process, involving preparation, knowledge, and sensibility, but cautions that “one should work to undermine the false comfort it can convey (l989: 8). At what point can people say that they have completed their learning or life experience?” 4. Mitch Allen and Yvonna Lincoln clarified these steps for me. 5. Yvonna Lincoln suggests that this may have been less the case in earlier historical moments, when realist tales were organized in terms of well-understood conventions. 6. I am deeply indebted to Meaghan Morris for her help in clarifying the meanings in this section. 7. Conquergood undoes Geertz’s thick description, writing culture model, arguing this is a form of textualism that privileges distance, the said and not the saying, the done and not the doing (1998: 29–31). 8. Elsewhere (Denzin l989: 99, 111–120) I have offered a typology of descriptions and interpretations, including descriptions which are primarily micro, macro, biographical, situational, interactional relational, incomplete, glossed, pure and interpretive, and interpretations which are thin, thick, native, observer-based, analytic, descriptive-contextual, and relational-interactive. 9. The Whyte-Boelen exchange is similar, in these respects, to earlier controversies in this area, including the famous Redfield-Sanchez, and Mead-Freeman debates over who got it right; the original, classic study, or the reinvestigation of the same site by a later researcher. 10. Mainstream, interpretive, and descriptive realist stories may be supplemented by more traditional and experimental formats, including confessional (“The problems I encountered doing my study”), and impressionistic (“dramatic and vivid pictures from the field”) tales of the field (Van Maanen l988), as well as personal memoirs of the field experience (Stollar and Olkes l987), narratives of the self (Ellis and Bochner l992; Ellis and Flaherty l992; Ronai l992), NOTES

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11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

fiction texts (Stewart l989), ethnographic dramas and performance texts (McCall and Becker l990; Richardson and Lockridge l991). These, of course, are my interpretations of these interpretive styles. The presence is greatest, perhaps in education, the health sciences and communication, but also in sociology, less so in anthropology. When one peels back the layers of discourse embedded in any of the numerous qualitative guides to interpretation and theory construction the core features of the Strauss approach are presented, even when Strauss and associates are not directly named. It argues that the facts for any theory are always interpreted and value laden, that no theory can ever be fully tested (or grounded), and an interactive relationship always exists between the observer and the observed. A dialectical, dialogic hermeneutic posture organizes inquiry which is based on thick descriptions of action and subjective experience in natural situations. Specific strategies and criteria are attached to each of these components. Credibility is increased through prolonged field engagement, persistent observation, triangulation, peer debriefing, negative case analysis, referential analysis (Eisner’s term for cinematic methods which provide a record of social life), and member checks (talking to people in the field). Thick description (l985: 316) provides for transferability, while dependability can be enhanced through the use of overlapping methods, stepwise replications, and inquiry (dependability) audits (the use of wellinformed subjects). Confirmability builds on audit trails (a “residue of records stemming from inquiry,” 3l9) and involves the use of written fieldnotes, memos, a field diary, process and personal notes, and a reflexive journal. The five steps to interpretation should be followed: deconstruction, capture, bracketing, construction, contextualization (Denzin l989: 27).

Chapter 6 1. I thank Meaghan Morris, Ivan Brady, Yvonna Lincoln, Jack Bratich, Laurel Richardson, and Katherine Ryan for their comments on earlier versions of this chapter. 2. To repeat, as argued in Chapter 1 (see also Denzin and Lincoln 2000), the seven moments (now eight) of qualitative inquiry are traditional (l900–l950), modernist, (l950–l970), blurred genres 330

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3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

(l970–l986), crisis of representation (l986–l990), postmodern, a period of experimental and new ethnographies (1990–1995), postexperimental inquiry (1995–2000), methodologically contested present (2000–), and the future, which is now (2008–). A parallel movement (see below) is occurring in the worlds of cinema, where Chicana/o and black filmmakers are using voiceovers, first-person and off-screen narration, mise-en-scène, and montage as ways of disturbing traditional gendered images of the racial subject (see Fregosa 1993: 70–76; Noriega 1992: 152– 153; also Hall 1989). This movement is a consequence, in part, of a 1968 U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity funded program called the New Communicators, “designed to train minorities for employment in the film industry” (Noriega 1996: 7). The following section draws from Denzin (1997: 280–281). At the same time it is understood that “participating in a citizen’s initiative to clean up a polluted harbor is no less political than debating in cultural journals the pejorative presentation of certain groups in terms of stereotypical images (Benhabib 1992: 104). Public journalism is not without its critics, including those who say it is news by focus group, that it is a marketing device to sell newspapers, that it is a conservative, reform movement aimed at increasing the power professional journalists, and that its advocates do not understand the real meanings of community, public life, or civic discourse. See the essays in Graber, McQuail and Norris (1998), and Glasser (1999), but also Carey (1995). This ethic values community, solidarity, care, love, empowerment, morally involved observers, caring relations with the community (see Denzin 1997: 275). These are extensions of the norms Christians, Ferre, and Fackler (1993: 55–57) see as operating for journalists. Things are known only through their representations. Each representational form is regulated by a set of conventions. Factual tales should be objective and conform to certain rules of verification. Fictional tales are regulated by understandings connected to emotional verisimilitude, emotional realism, and so on. I thank Clifford Christians for this principle. The rules in this paragraph plagiarize Raymond Chandler’s “12 Notes on the Mystery Story” (Chandler 1995: 1004–1011). The following section draws from and reworks portions of Denzin 1999a.

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13. As Meaghan Morris indicates (in conversation), the Australians involved in this case felt that justice was not served, that they had to deal with the loss of a loved one strictly within American political terms. Rosenbaum became a cypher in these accounts. 14. There are various stories about how the town got its name. The generally accepted theory is that the Crow Indians who inhabited the area colored their lodges with red clay (Graetz 1997: 23). 15. They have a website. Do a browser keyword search for “Red Lodge, Montana”; within seconds you can be looking at a map of downtown Red Lodge. 16. I borrow this phrase from bell hooks’s essay “An Aesthetic of Blackness (1990: 103–113). 17. The implementation of the 1968 New Communicators Program (note 3 above) at the University of Southern California and the University of California at Los Angeles produced first and second generation minority filmmakers called by some the black and brown Los Angeles Schools (see Diawara 1993; Fregosa 1993: 31, 129; Masilea 1993; Noriega 1992: 142, 1996: 7–8). Among this group of filmmakers are such names as Burnett, Dash, Van Peeples, Rich, Duke, Trevino, Vasquez, Martinez, Valdez, Nair, Wang, Hooks, and Nava. More recent names include Lee, Singleton, and the Hughes Brothers. These post-civil rights filmmakers are implementing a cinematic version of critical race theory, and their works should be read alongside those of hooks, West and others. Funding for this project was cut back under the Reagan administration in the 1980s. 18. Ivan Brady clarified this point for me.

Chapter 7 1. An earlier version of this essay appears in Denzin (2003a). I thank Paul Atkinson, Sara Delamont, and Amanda Coffey for their comments on earlier drafts. 2. These narratives enact Turner’s (1986) four-fold processual model of breach, crisis, redress, reintegration, or schism. 3. Definitions: aesthetics: theories of beauty; ethics: theories of ought, of right; epistemology: theories of knowing; anti-aesthetic: denies a privileged aesthetic realm, is political. This section draws from Denzin (2000: 326–327). I seek a radical anti-aesthetic that operates as political critique, challenging at every turn the aestheticization 332

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of everyday life and modernist ethical models (Eagleton 1990: 119; Featherstone 1991: 67; Jameson 1981: 299). 4. I thank Clifford Christians for clarifying these principles. 5. These parallel Du Bois’s four criteria for real black theater; such theater, he said, should be about us, by us, for us, near us (1926: 134).

Chapter 8 1. Author’s note: I thank Russell Bishop, Aisha Durham, Michelle Fine, Grant Kien, Joe Kincheloe, Yvonne Kanlukane Lefort, Yvonna Lincoln, Peter McLaren, David Monje, Katherine Ryan, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, and Shirley Steinberg for their comments on earlier versions of this chapter. 2. This chapter extends arguments in Denzin (2003: 1–23, 242–262). A performative cultural studies enacts a critical, cultural pedagogy. It does so by using dialogue, performative writing, and the staging and performance of texts involving audience members. 3. Decolonizing research is not necessarily postcolonial research. Decolonization is a process that critically engages, at all levels, imperialism, colonialism, and postcoloniality. Decolonizing research implements indigenous epistemologies and critical interpretive practices that are shaped by indigenous research agendas (L. Smith 1999: 20). 4. Drawing on Shohat (1992), Hall (1996). Dimitriadis and McCarthy (2001), Swadener and Mutua (2004), I trouble the concept of postcolonial. With Hall, I ask: when was the colonial ever “post”? The term post-colonial functions as a temporal marker implying linearity and chronology. Following Swadener and Mutua, I prefer the term postcolonial, which implies a constant, complex, intertwined, back-and-forth relationship between past and present. In this sense, there are no postcolonial, only endless variations on neocolonial formations (Soto 2004: ix). 5. For McLaren (1998a: 441) and Kincheloe and McLaren (2000: 285), cultural pedagogy refers to the ways that cultural production functions as a form of education: “It generates knowledge, shapes values and constructs identity . . . cultural pedagogy refers to the ways particular cultural agents produce . . . hegemonic ways of seeing” (Kincheloe and McLaren 2000: 285). Critical pedagogy (McLaren 1998a: 441) attempts to performatively disrupt and NOTES

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deconstruct these cultural practices in the name of a “more just, democratic, and egalitarian society” (Kincheloe and McLaren 2000: 285; but see Lather 1998). 6. See also Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin (1989), Balme and Carstensen (2001), Battiste (2000a, b), Beverley (2000), Bishop (1998, 1994), Churchill (1996), Cook-Lynn (1998), Cruikshank (1990), Ellsworth (1989), Gilbert (2003), Greenwood (2001), Harjo and Bird (1997), Kondo (2000), Magowan (2000), Marker (2003), Menchu (1984, 1998), Pratt (2001), G. Smith (2000), L. Smith (2000), and Waerea-I-Te-Rangi Smith (2000). 7. This theater often uses verbatim accounts of injustice and violence in daily life. See Mienczakowski (1995: 5, 2001; also Chessman 1971) for a history of “verbatim theater” and Mienczakowski’s extensions of this approach, using oral history, participant observation, and the methods of ethnodrama. A contemporary use of verbatim theater is the play Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom (Riding 2004). This anti-Iraq war play addresses the plight of British citizens imprisoned at Guantanamo. The “power of Guantanamo is that it is not really a play but a reenactment of views expressed in interviews, letters, news conferences, and speeches by various players in the post-Sept 11 Iraq war drama, from British Muslim detainees, to lawyers, from U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, to Jack Straw, Britain’s foreign secretary” (ibid.). Nicolas Kent, the play’s director, says he believes “political theater works here because the British have an innate sense of justice. When we do stories about injustice . . . there is a groundswell of sympathy . . . people are furious that there isn’t due process. With Islamophobia growing around the world I wanted to show that we, too, think there is an injustice’’ (ibid.). 8. At another level, indigenous participatory theater extends the project connected to Third World popular theater. This is political “theatre used by oppressed Third World people to achieve justice and development for themselves” (Etherton 1988: 991). The International Popular Theatre Alliance, organized in the 1980s, uses existing forms of cultural expression to fashion improvised dramatic productions that analyze situations of poverty and oppression. This grass-roots approach uses agit-prop and sloganizing theater (theater pieces devised to ferment political action) to create collective awareness and collective action at the local level. 334

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9.

10.

11.

12.

This form of theater has been popular in Latin America, in Africa, in parts of Asia, in India, and among Native populations in the Americas (ibid.: 992). Race and racism for Du Bois were social constructions. performances, minstrelsy, and blackface are powerful performance devices that produce and reproduce the color line. Du Bois believed that African-Americans needed performance spaces where they could control how race was constructed. Consequently, as Elam (2001: 5–6) observes, African-American theater and performance have been central sites for the interrogation of race and the color line (also Elam and Krasner 2001). The inherent “constructedness” of performance and the malleability of the devices of the theater serve to reinforce the theory that blackness . . . and race . . . are hybrid, fluid concepts” (Elam 2001: 4–5). Stuart Hall is correct: persons of color have never been able to successfully escape the politics and theaters of [racial] representation (Hall 1996: 473). Other projects involve a focus on testimonies, new forms of storytelling, returning to, as well as reframing and re-gendering, key cultural debates. Cast in this form, the critical personal narrative counters the criticisms that it is inherently conservative because it romanticizes marginality, ignores issues of political economy, and engages in simplistic, chauvinistic essentialisms (see Darder and Torres 2004:103–104). Here there are obvious political connections to Guy Debord’s (1970) situationist project.

Chapter 9 1. Originally written (Denzin 2006) as an interpretive response to Leon Anderson’s “Analytic Autoethnography,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 35, 4 (August 2006): 373–396.

Chapter 10 1. At one level, the reflexive interview implements Gubrium and Holstein’s concept of analytic bracketing (1998: 165). Analytic bracketing is the attempt to deal with the multiple levels of meaning in the interview context, including how a story is told, the NOTES

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2. 3.

4.

5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

context of the story, its audience, and so on. Heyl (2000) notes that reflexive interviewing allows individuals to connect in mutually empowering ways. See the discussion of these moments Chapter 1. I want to avoid the debate about whether it is “really possible, even in theory, to divide utterances between the performative and the constative” (Sedgwick 1998: 106–107), to distinguish utterances that merely say, versus those that do. Words have material effects on people. Subjects, as gendered selves, are constituted in and through their performative acts—that is, acts that both do and say something: for example: “With these words I thee wed” (ibid.: 107; also Butler l993: 24, 1997: 97, 1999: 11). There is “no abiding, gendered subject” (Butler 1990: 140) who precedes a performance (ibid.: 25, 141). A performance is an interpretive event. A performance, such as an interview, is a bounded, theatrical social act, a dialogical production (see also Kuhn 1962: 196–197 on the interview as a social act). I steal this term from Fontana and Frey (1994: 368, 2000). The following section draws from Denzin (1997: 74–79). Released as a film (filmed performance) in September 2000, with this title, directed by Marc Levin, with Smith playing an assortment of characters from the 1992 text. The dramaturges for Twilight were Dorrine Kondo, a JapaneseAmerican anthropologist, Hector Tobar, a Guatemalan-American journalist who had covered the riots for the Los Angeles Times, and Elizabeth Alexander, an African-American poet. This interview was conducted with my colleagues Belden Fields, Walter Feinberg, and Nicole Roberts.

Chapter 11 1. I thank Laurel Richardson, Reuben May, Robert Ivie, Kevin Dolan, Grant Kien, and Shoshana Magnet for their comments on earlier versions of this manuscript (see Denzin 2004). 2. Following Benjamin (1999: 460), I present these materials as a layered text, a montage moving back and forth between original sources and documents, newspaper clippings, memories, events, history, and interpretations. The lines that are spoken are all taken 336

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3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

from published texts. I have imposed a narrative order on them. This essay reworks the arguments in Denzin (2004). This involves a reading of the Lewis and Clark journals and their various editions, starting with Biddle (1962 [1814]) and moving to Çoues (1965 [1893]), Thwaites (1904–1905), Jackson (1962), and Moulton (1988–2001, 2003). I maintain original [mis]spellings when quoting from the journals. Other accounts include those of John Whitehouse, John Ordway, Patrick Gass, and Charles Floyd (on these supplemental journals, see Slaughter 2003: 54; also Clarke 2002 [1970]; on reading the various versions of the originals, see the essays in Ronda 1997; also DeVoto 1997 [1953]; Jackson 1987; Slaughter 2003: 47–64). In addition to these sources, there is Ken Burns’s 1997 documentary, Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery, a Lewis and Clark newsletter, websites, and a “minor academic industry of conference proceedings, edited books, journal articles, and monographs written on the expedition” (Slaughter 2003: xiv). Newsreel and camera eye are Dos Passos’s (1937) terms. Newsreel is his method for incorporating current events, stories, advertisements, and newsworthy items into his text. It could also be called news, or media/story event. Camera eye is his method of referencing a third-person perspective or interpretation of the events at hand. I am using the camera eye to reference both first- and third-person interpretations. Early on, the Yellowstone River was known as the Yellow Rock or Crow River. In 1797, it appeared on a map as R. des Roches Jaunes, or Yellowstone; in 1800, as the Rio Amarillo; in the late 1700s as the Elk, Crow, or Yellow Rock, and the Yellow Stone in 1805 (see Jackson 1987: 122; also Çoues 1965 [1893]: 283; DeVoto 1953: 101). Among the many other myths are those that read the men as epic figures, as adventurers, heroes of a young nation, men who overcame great obstacles to blaze a path through an uncharted frontier, and proto-ecologists who speak to us today (see Spence 2003 for a review). Depending on the accommodations, prices range from $2,390 to $3,750. Jeffersonian constitutional democracy presumes that all white men are created equal and have the natural, inalienable self-determining rights of self-governance, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness,

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the right to grant lands, and sovereign authority over those lands (Williams 1997: 57–58, 61). Jeffersonian democracy authorized the colonization of Native Americans.

Chapter 12 1. This essay draws from and extends Denzin and Giardina (2007); Denzin, Lincoln, and Giardina (2006), and Denzin (2003: 242–258). 2. For criticisms of this model in the United States see Cannella (2004), Cannella and Lincoln (2007), Rambo (2007), and Gunsalus et al. (2007). Halse and Honey (2007) and Cheek (2005) offer criticisms about the system in Australia (National Health and Medical Research Council). Marxano (2007) examines its formations in Italy, while Tilberg and Gormley (2007) criticize its Canadian (Tri-Council Policy) formations, as does Battiste (2007). In the United Kingdom, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) publishes guidelines for human subject research. See also the essays by Christians, Pelias, Bochner, and Ellis in Denzin and Giardina (2007). The new Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics (JERHRE) focuses on issues related to ethical decision-making under various regulatory systems. 3. The testimonio has a central place in Smith’s list of projects. She begins her discussion of the testimonio with these lines from Menchu: “My name is Rigoberta Menchu, I am twenty-three years old, and this is my testimony” (1984: 1). The testimonio presents oral evidence to an audience, often in the form of a monologue. Indigenous testimonios are “a way of talking about an extremely painful event or series of events. The testimonio can be constructed as “a monologue and as a public performance” (Smith 1999: 144). 4. I thank Bob Stake for this insight. 5. Federal protection of human subjects has been in effect in the United States since 1974, now codified in Title 45 Part 46 of the U. S. Code of Federal Regulations. Title 45, Part 46 was revised November 13, 2001, effective December 13, 2001. IRBs review all federally funded research involving human subjects to ensure their ethical protection. More recently there has been a move in many universities to place all human subject research, not just federally funded research, under IRB control. 338

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6. Puglisi (2001) demurs, arguing that these regulations “are extremely flexible and should present no impediment to welldesigned behavioral and social science research” (1). This, however, is not the case. 7. Vine Deloria, Jr. (1969) proposes that anthropologists be made to apply to tribal councils for permission to do research, and that permission be given only if “he raised as a contribution to the tribal budget an amount of money equal to the amount he proposed to spend in his study” (95). 8. The Family Education Rights and Privacy Act, the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment and the Parental Freedom of Information Amendment extend additional privacy rights to children (see Shavelson and Towne 2002: 152–153). 9. www.hhs.gov/ohrp/humansubjects/guidance/45cfr46.htm 10. Regarding nonfederally funded research, it is perhaps of interest to note that 80% of all research projects reviewed by the University of Chicago’s Social Science IRB are personally funded, privately funded, or unfunded. To date, 164 institutions, including Harvard, Princeton, Chicago, and Berkeley, have explicitly declined to commit themselves to imposing on research that is not federally funded the regulations that govern federally funded research. AAUP hesitates to formulate policy for unfunded research, except for the recommendation below. 11. www.aaup.org/AAUP/About/committees/committee+repts/ CommA/ 12. See Chronicle of Higher Education 2006; Shopes 2000; Shopes and Ritchie 2004; Townsend 20006. This appeal echoes previously established understandings that waivers could be given (as noted above) if the research involves normal educational practice, the use of interviews, previously collected materials, research on cultural beliefs, or the observation of public behavior. 13. The following section draws directly from Shopes (2000). 14. To clarify, while some oral history scholarship clearly involves research that lends itself to generalizations, oral historians’ standard operating procedures do not fit the type of research defined by federal regulations: “A systematic investigation, including research development, testing and evaluation, designed to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge.” Individually tailored interviews with a narrator’s informed consent do not meet this definition of “research.” Nor do they contribute to “generalizable NOTES

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knowledge,” even if conducted with people identified with a common group, theme, or event, and whether or not the interviewer or other researchers might draw some historical generalizations from multiple interviews. The interviews must be designed specifically to produce generalizable knowledge in the scientific sense. Interview projects that meet the preceding federal definition should be submitted for IRB review. Those that do not are not subject to review. 15. Oral history involves interviews for the record, explicitly intended for preservation as a historical document. Informed consent means that those being interviewed fully understand the purposes and potential uses of the interview, as well as their freedom not to answer some questions and their identification in research and writing drawn from the interview. Legal releases are linked to issues of evidence and copyright. If a researcher makes explicit use of an interview in written work (in direct quotation and/or paraphrase), the interview should be cited in a footnote, so that others can identify and locate that information within the framework of extant evidence. Recorded interviews involve copyright, and interviewees must sign an agreement that establishes access for those who use the interview in any way. If the interviews are deposited in a library or archives, legal releases will establish ownership of the copyright and the terms of access and reproduction. If the interviews are published, legal releases will satisfy publishers’ concerns over copyright. 16. There are four research paradigms or streams in my college: (1) experimental and survey-based research; (2) oral history, interpretive inquiry that does not require IRB review; (3) standard behavioral research that qualifies for expedited review within the college IRB; (4) journalist inquiries involving investigative, narrative, and public affairs reporting. Such work is routinely exempted from review under the First Amendment. 17. I take this phrase from Brinkmann and Kvale 2008: 276.

Chapter 13 1. I thank Katherine Ryan and Michael Giardina for their comments on earlier versions of this text. 2. This is Guba’s spelling. 340

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3. Less militaristic terms would include dispute, fracas, conflict, engagement. More peaceful terms would focus, as Guba (1990b) did, on dialog, discourse, conversation, collaboration. 4. This is a gloss on a complex discourse. The mixed-methods community is by no means defined by a single set of assumptions, beliefs, or practices. 5. As indicated in Chapter 1, many of these journals are published by Sage. 6. On 7 May 2005, on the last day of the First International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, the International Association of Qualitative Inquiry (IAQI) was founded in Urbana, Illinois, USA. IAQI is the first international association solely dedicated to the scholarly promotion, representation, and global development of qualitative research. At present, IAQI has 2,500 delegates representing 65 nations worldwide. It has established professional affiliations with over 50 collaborating sites in Oceana, Africa, North and South America, the Caribbean, Europe, the Middle East, Japan, Korea, and China (see www.qi2009.org). The IAQI Newsletter appears quarterly, as does a new journal published by Left Coast Press, The International Review of Qualitative Research.

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386

REFERENCES

INDEX

AAUP (American Association of University Professors), 283, 284–85, 289–90, 292–94 ABER (arts-based educational research), 76–77 aboriginal rights, in Canada, 188 aboriginal theater groups in Australia, 177 AERA (American Education Research Association), 71–78, 324–25n10 aesthetics, defined, 332–33n3 aesthetics of color, 140–49 African-American theater and performance, 183, 335n9 Afro-centric feminism, 49, 157 agit-prop, as performance form, 129, 334–35n8 “A Good News’ Blues” (Jordan), 147–48 AIR (American Institutes for Research), 308–9 Alexie, S., 115–16 Almighty Voice and His Wife (Moses), 177, 184 “Alternative Paradigm Conference,” 319–20 Ambrose, Stephen, 250, 251, 258, 269, 272 analytic autoethnography, 205–13 analytic bracketing concept, 335n1 Anderson, Leon, 206–9 Anderson, Mrs. Alice, 232–40 anti-aesthetic, defined, 332–33n3 Arikara Indians, 257 Armstrong, Louis, 185 arts-based inquiry, 75 Atkinson, P., 151, 221 audit culture, 57, 67, 327n1 Australia, 63, 177 authentic adequacy principle, 157–58 autoethnography, 154–55, 197, 199, 205–13

Baraka, Amiri, 117 Battiste, Marie, 278, 302–5 Becker, Howard S., 66 Belmont Principles, 283–86, 297 beneficence, 285–86, 288 Benjamin, W., 243 bias in writing styles, 101 biomedical model of ethics, and the Belmont principles, 281–94 Bishop, Russell, 187, 278, 300–301, 304–5 Black Arts Movement, 116, 159 Black Cultural Studies projects, 116–17 blackface minstrelsy, 183–84 Blackfeet Indians, 260–61 black feminist understandings, in the blues, 133–34 Black Public Intellectuals, 117 Blair, Tony, 41 blankets: disease-infected, 266–68, 270; Hudson’s Bay, 245–46, 263, 264–65, 270–71 Blind Men and the Elephant, The (Quigley), 80 blues, as spontaneous production, 133–34 Boal, Augusto, 170 Boelen, W. A. Marianne, 99–100 Bourdieu, P., 79 Bowman, Robert, 34 Brinkman, S., 304–5 British Cabinet Office, guidelines for, 70–71 Brown, Dee, 258 Bush, George W., and Bush administration: abuses of science by, 20, 51; and Downing Street Memo, 39, 41, 54, 326n3; dramaturgical politics of, 47–48; expiration of National Human

387

Research Protections Advisory Committee charter, 283; Iraqi war, 26–27, 43; methodological fundamentalism of, 15; One Percent Principle, 42; post-9/11 rhetoric of, 30, 34; and SBR Two, 46–47; staged news events by, 44; and violent politics of truth, 26 camera eye, 209–13, 337n4 Campbell, Donald, 45–46 Campbell Collaboration (C2), 57, 308–9, 327n2 Campbell Methods Group, 69–70 Cannella, G. S., 64 Card, Andrew, 41 “Carrying on the Dialog” (Guba), 319 Carver, Raymond, 94–95, 114 case reports, 104 CASP (Critical Appraisal Skills Program), 70 CCC (Cochrane-Campbell Collaboration), 63 Charbonneau, 261–62 Charbonneau, Jean Baptiste, 261, 262 Chase, Alston, 258 checklists for qualitative inquiry, 70–71 Cheney, Dick, 31, 42 Cheney Doctrine (One Percent Doctrine), 43–47 Chicago School, 207–9 Chief Joseph, 138–39 Chomsky, Noam, 29 Christians, G. C., 277, 291–92, 300–301, 304–5 cinema: aesthetic of color in, 145–49, 330–31n2; critical race theory and, 332n17; culture as dramatic performance in, 225; portrayal of imperialism with nostalgia in, 108 civic compact, 35 civic journalism, 121 civic participation, redefined concept of, 197–98 civic transformations, intimate journalism and, 121–23 Clark, William: along the Yellowstone River, 260–61; and frontier race relations, 256, 257; and race, 251;

388

and ravages of smallpox, 267; and St. Louis Missouri Fur Company, 270; in the Yellowstone region, 248 Clough, P. T., 151, 154–55 “Coal” (Lorde), 142 Cochrane-Campbell Collaboration (CCC), 325n10 Cochrane Collaboration (CC), 57, 308–9, 327n2 Cochrane Qualitative Methods Group, 69–70 Cochrane Qualitative Research Methods Group (CQRMG), 70 Coffey, A., 151 cognitive model of research, poverty of, 291–92 collaborative social science research model, 202, 300–301 Collins, Patricia Hill: and Afro-centric feminism, 48–49; criteria of interpretation, 106–7; on importance of critical qualitative inquiry, 13; on interpretive crisis in social science research, 86–87; on need for ethical framework, 307; and qualitative inquiry, 54; on use of pronouns, 92 colonialism, resistance to, as moral code, 280–81 Colter, John, 247 Common Rule principles, 285–92 communitarian journalists, 126 comparative method of analysis, in grounded theory, 104 complementary strengths thesis, 311–12 confessional format, 329–30n10 confrontation, as performance form, 129 Conquergood, D., 166, 329n7 conscientization, as criterion in performance aesthetic, 157 conservatism, convergence between methodological and political, 315 conservative challenge to qualitative inquiry, 13–14 constructivism, as interpretive style, 90, 103–4, 112, 316 contemporary modernist interviews, 222 contingent ethical models, 168 Cooke, Janet, 123

INDEX

coperformed texts, 130, 170 Corps of Discovery, 248. See also Lewis and Clark expedition cost-benefit utilitarian model, 167, 288 Coulter, Ann, 31–32 creative analytical practices (CAP), 194–95, 206–7 creative nonfiction journalism. See intimate journalism credibility, 330n14 critical and indigenous theories, dialogue between, 181 critical civic literary ethnography, criteria of, 149–50 critical epistemology, value of, 181 critical interdisciplinary interpretive projects, 130 critical (inter)national conversation, 32–34 critical interpretive discourse, 29–32 critical interpretive methodologies, 34–37 critical intimate public ethnography, goals of, 121–23 critical paradigms, conservative criticisms of, 316 critical pedagogically informed ethical models, 168 critical pedagogical theater, 170, 171 critical pedagogy, 48–52, 168, 209–13, 333–34n5 critical performance pedagogy, 200–201 critical personal narratives, 194–97, 335n11 critical qualitative inquiry, 28, 29–37, 61 “Critical Race Theory and Critical Pedagogy Confront Yellowstone National Park and Its Histories” (Denzin), 209–13 critical race theory (CRT), 116–17, 140, 142–45, 200–201, 332n17 critical scholars, 161 critical theory, localized, 180, 192 critical theory, traditions in, 105–6 criticisms of qualitative inquiry, 19–20 Crown Heights, Brooklyn, racial conflict in, 127–29, 146, 228–29 cultural criticism, 61, 149, 170 cultural custodians/imperialists, 166 cultural pedagogy, 333–34n5

INDEX

cultural politics, 197, 278–81 culture, 154–55, 189–90, 225, 279 curator or sensationalist, as ethical pitfall, 167 cynic or skeptic, as ethical pitfall, 167 Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The (television program), 325n5 Daniels, James and Marilyn, 233, 237, 239 Darder, Antonia, 38 Dash, Leon, 119–20, 124 data sharing, 67 Davis, Angela, 133 “Day of Affirmation” address (Kennedy), 25 dead Indians, 138–39 decolonization, 179–81, 190–91, 194, 304–5, 333n3 decolonizing writing, 195 Delamont, S., 151 Deloria, Vine, Jr., 339n7 democracies, safeguards of, 51–52 democratic-socialist-feminist agenda, 198 “Der Wider-HakenKräutergarten” (Posner), 156 descriptions, thin vs. thick, 96–97 descriptive realism, 100, 119 desegregation of elementary schools in Edge City, Illinois, 231–40 DeVoto, Bernard, 258, 263, 265, 268 dialogical criticism, 170 dialogical epistemology and aesthetic, 157–58 Didion, Joan, 40 Dillard, A., 222 discipline-based qualitative research, 61 dissent, in post-9/11 America, 27 documentary interviews, 226–27 Dos Passos, J., 337n4 double coding, in Almighty Voice and His Wife, 184 Dove, Rita, 142–43 Downing Street memo, 40–42, 54, 326n3 Du Bois, W. E. B., 182, 333n5, 335n9 Duncan, C., Jr., 250 duty-based ethics, 167 Dylan, Bob, 55

389

Edge City, Illinois, desegregation of elementary schools in, 231–40 Ed Sullivan show, 185 educational research, redefinition of, 315 Eighth Moment of qualitative research, 182 Eisenhart, M., 317 elephant and the blind men parable, 79–80 elephant in the living room, the, 59–63, 81–82 Ellis, Carolyn, 205, 206 emancipatory discourses and the ethics and politics of interpretation, 175–82 emancipatory principle, as driver of critical inquiry, 105 emancipatory texts, 90 emergent methods model, 17 emic vs. etic understandings, 98 empirical material, personal experience as, 112 empirical research, AERA guidelines for, 71–77 enthusiast’s infatuation, as ethical pitfall, 166–67 epistemologies: of color and gender, 113; critical, 181; dialogical, 157–58; Hawaiian, 189–90; indigenous, 191; of resistance, 185–94; sacred, 300; state and discipline sponsored, 62–63 epistemology, defined, 332–33n3 ethical framework, based on values of feminist communitarianism, 291–92 ethical principles for qualitative research, 302–4 ethical self-consciousness, 29, 196 ethic of care, 169 ethics: in Black feminist texts, 107; defined, 334n3; for performance studies, 166–71; and prophetic pragmatism, 48–52; situationally contingent, and pedagogy of hope, 168–69 ethics of research: alignment of, with politics of the oppressed, 202; under Common Rule principles, 288–92; from indigenous

390

perspectives, 168; learning new, 304–5; in Nuremberg Code and Helsinki Declaration, 281–82 ethnodramas, 218–19 ethnographers, 85, 124–26, 159, 196 ethnographic approach to critical inquiry, 105 ethnographic writing, 151, 154, 206–7 ethnography, 97, 121–23, 127–34, 149–50. See also performance ethnography evaluative criteria: for experimental writing, 155; feminist communitarian, for critical performance, 155–59; for grounded theory study, 102; for interpretation in the social sciences, 87, 109; participant-driven, for Kaupapa Maori research, 187; positions on issues of, 60–61; poststructuralist, 110; rejection of SBR’s, for qualitative research, 317; for research, 153–54; shaping of, 61 Evans, Bill, 133–34 evidence: and the Cheney Doctrine, 44–46; as data, 67; politics of, 57–59, 62, 77–78; truth of, under Bush regime, 46–47; warranted, as proxy for objectivity, 73 evidence-based community, 58 evidence-based movement, 63–64 evidence-based research model, as elephant in the living room, 57–58 exchange theory, and Hongot headhunters, 98 experience: as criterion of meaning in Black feminist texts, 106–7; as empirical material, 112; mediation and reinscription of, 171 experience-near and experience-distant terms, 98 experiential texts, 172, 173 experimental quantitative model, 16 experimental writing, 95, 112, 153–55 factual tales, 331n9 Falwell, Jerry, 31, 32, 325n6 “Family Portrait in Black and White” (Harrington), 119, 120–21 female blues singers, 133

INDEX

feminist, Chicana/o and black performance-based aesthetic, 141–42 feminist communitarian criteria, for resistance performance texts, 155–59 feminist communitarian model, 124, 160, 300, 331n7 feminist communitarian performance ethic, 169 feminist ethical framework, 49 feminist ethical models, 168 feminist interpretive styles, poststructural, 107–8 feminists, and grounded-theory methods, 111–12 feminist standpoint paradigm, 90 Festival of Nations celebration, Red Lodge, Montana, 136–37 Feuer, M. J., 59, 65–66 fictional tales, 331n9 Fiedler, Leslie, 138 field and research texts, 88, 93–94 fieldworkers, writing practices deployed by, 93–94 Fifth Moment of qualitative research, 102, 112 Fires in the Mirror (Smith), 127–29, 146, 228–29 First Nation tribes in Canada, 188 Foley, Doug, 212 For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf (Shange), 144–45 foundational arguments, postmodern sensibility and, 93 foundationalists, on issue of evaluative criteria, 60 Fourth World Peoples, and research, 283, 288 Fox News Channel, 31 Franscell, Ron, 267 free society, hallmark of, 51 fundamentalist religioconservatives on 9/11, 31

Geneva Conventions, 31 Giroux, Henry, 28, 200 global audit culture, 57, 67, 327n1 global decolonizing discourse, 176 global interpretive community, 321 globalization, 36–37, 200 gold standard for producing knowledge, 15, 78 Graham, Franklin, 32 Grande, S., 189 grounded aesthetics, 160–61 grounded theory, 102–4 Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom (Riding), 334n7 Guantánamo Bay, 31 Guba, E., 307, 310, 319

Gass, Patrick, 256 Geertz, Clifford, 100 gender, as performative, 218

IES (Institute of Education Science), 63, 308–9, 325n10 Illinois Model, 298–99

INDEX

Habermas, J., 78–79 Hall, Stuart, 335n9 Hammersley, M., 57 Harrington, W., 119, 120–21 Hartnett, S., 151 Hatch, Amos, 13, 307, 315–18 hatred against America, 34 Hawaiian epistemology, 189–90 Hawaiian pedagogy, 189–90 healing, as interpretive research process, 194 Health and Human Services (HHS) regulation, 295 Heat-Moon, William L., 254–55 Helsinki Declaration, 281–82 Henderson, J. , 278 Henderson, Youngblood, 302–4 historical masquerades, danger in, 249–50 Holiday, Billie, 133–34, 147–48 hooks, bell, 85, 107, 148–49, 185 House Arrest (Smith), 177 Hudson’s Bay blankets, 245–46, 263, 264, 270–71 Hughes, Langston, 115 humanities-oriented research, 75–76, 328n12 human subject research, 281, 338n5 Human Subject Review Boards, 167

391

imperial democracy, 27–28 impressionistic format, 329–30n10 improvised ethnicity, in performing Montana, 137 Impure Acts (Giroux), 200 incommensurability issue, 60 incompatibility theses, 17, 312, 313 indigenist researchers, 187 indigenous and non-indigenous discourses, 179–81 indigenous communities, 299–300, 302–4 indigenous epistemologies, 191 indigenous feminist communitarian ethic, 277–78, 299–301 indigenous knowledges, 180, 279–80 indigenous models of power, truth, ethics and social justice, 179–82 indigenous pedagogies, and strategies of resistance, 186–87, 189–90 indigenous performer ethnographers, 196 indigenous research, 191–94, 278–81, 304–5 indigenous theater, 176–77, 182–85, 334–35n8 indigenous worldviews, legitimacy of, 279 informed consent, 286, 340n15 inquiry, as disciplined, rigorous and not science, 79 intellectual agenda, in framework for New Paradigm Dialogue, 320 intellectuals, public, 61 Intelligent Design, 45 intercultural understanding, required elements of, 170 International Association of Qualitative Inquiry (IAQI), 324n7, 341n6 International Popular Theater Alliance, 334–35n8 International Review of Qualitative Research, The (journal), 341n6 Internet blog communities, 325n5 interpretation: basis for, in the writing process, 96; ethics and politics of, 175–82; practices of, 102–10, 115–17; as productive process, 94–95; in social sciences, 85; steps to, 330n15; as storytelling, 89–88; theory as, 108; transformation of, into data, 74–75

392

interpretive communities, 110–12, 114, 318 interpretive criteria, in new postconstructivist paradigm, 113 interpretive ethnography, 127–34 interpretive framework for reflexive interviews, 216–19 interpretive interactionism, 86, 108–9 interpretive media research, 298 interpretive realism, 100 interpretive research: after 9/11/01, 25–26; attempts at regulation of, 37; focus of, 108–9 interpretive researchers: engagement of, in social critique and moral dialogue, 161; local vs. scientific, 98; as storytellers, 85–86 interpretive sufficiency, 125, 157, 163–64 interpretive texts, 90, 112–13 interpretive themes in feminist research, 107 interpretive work, generic categories of, 328n10 interpretive writing, 91, 101–2 interventions by ethnographers, 126 interviews: dialogic vs. documentary, 226–27; as information gathering tool of social sciences, 215; as interpretive practice, 216–17; meanings of, over time, 217–18; modernist and postmodern, 222; performative, 218–19; recorded, 340n15; re-enacted, in Surname Viet Given Name Nam, 224–25; reflexive, 215–21, 225, 240–41, 335n1; texts of, as scripts, 228–31 interview society, 221–22 intimate journalism, 121–25 Iraqi War, 39–44 IRBs (Institutional Review Boards): apparatus of, 292–93; appeal process, lack of, 293; basis for, 281–82; confidentiality of, 283; criticisms of regulatory model of, 287–90; deficiencies of, 284; and evidence-based movement, 64; exclusions from review by, 294–96; exemptions from review by, 298–99; and indigenous research

INDEX

ethics, 277–78; as institutional structure, 289; membership of, 283; and mission creep, 282, 293; multitrack model for, 297; and New Paradigm Dialogue, 313; principles of, 202; protection of institutions vs. individuals, 287; and research involving human subjects, 338n5 Jackson, William, 267 James, William, 43 jazz, as improvisation, 133–34, 223 Jefferson, Thomas, 251–52, 254, 255, 266 Jeffersonian democracy, 337–38n8 “Jimmy’s World” (Cooke), 123 Jones, Stacy Holman, 206 Jordan, June, 48–49, 147–48 journalism: communitarian, 126; and IRBs, 283; new, 118, 123–24; public, 121, 331n6 journalistic ethnography, 121 journalistic norms, 124 journals of qualitative research, 316, 328n14 justice, principle of, 286–88 Kaplan, Esther, 45 Karenga, M., 159–60 Kaupapa Maori research, 187, 188–89, 191–93, 278–79 Kennedy, Robert F., 25 Kent, Nicolas, 334n7 Kincheloe, J. L., 333–34n5 King, Rodney, 228 Kittridge, William, 40, 134 knowledge production, gold standard for, 15, 78 Krieger, Susan, 132 Kvale, S., 304–5 Lather, P., 79, 107, 108 legal releases, 340n15 legitimation, as writing issue, 93 Lewis, Meriwether: and frontier race relations, 255–57; and Indian traders, 269; and race, 251; on Sacagawea, 262; and St. Louis Missouri Fur Company, 270; on

INDEX

trading with Indians, 270; in the Yellowstone region, 247–48 Lewis and Clark bicentennial celebration, 271–72 Lewis and Clark expedition, 243, 246–48. See also Memory (Denzin) “Lewis and Clark on the Yellowstone: July 1806” (diorama), 247 Lincoln, Y. S., 64 literary journalism. See intimate journalism literary nonfiction genre, 123 literary realism, 162–63 logic of the text, 101–2 Lorde, Audre, 142–43 Los Angeles race riots, 220–21, 228 “Louisa May’s Story of Her Life” (Richardson), 92 Lubavitcher Grand Rebbe Menachem Schneerson, 127–28 Lubiano, W., 115 Lundberg, G., 66 Madison, D. S., 151 mainstream media in America, 30–31 mainstream realism, 100, 112 Mandan Indians, 257, 268 Manning, David, 40 Maori pedagogy, 187 Maori people, 179, 188, 191 Maori research. See Kaupapa Maori research Maxwell, J. A., 65, 66–67 McLaren, P., 333–34n5 McMurtry, Larry, 258 media. See mainstream media in America memory, 131, 272 Memory (Denzin): overview, 243–44; “Additional Commentary on Glitter and History,” 258–59; “The Blanket Story from Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC),” 264–65; “Clark as the Godfather,” 262–63; “Germ Warfare, Diseased Blankets, and Smallpox Epidemics,” 266–68; “Getting Situated in the Past: The Object of the Trip,” 253–54; “Getting Situated in the Present,” 252–53; “Historically Authentic

393

Trade Blankets,” 265–66; “Indian Traders,” 269–71; “Manners, Morals, and Sex in the West,” 255–57; “Much Earlier: In a Naming Mood,” 261; “Of Memories, Blankets, and Myths,” 263; “Packing for the Trip,” 259; “Resistance,” 254–55; “Savages,” 251–52; “Stealing Horses and Killing Indians along the Yellowstone in 1806,” 260–61; “A Time for Nostalgia,” 250–51 Menchu, Rigoberta, 188, 195–96, 338n3 meta-analyses, 60 methodological bilingualism, 312 methodological fundamentalism, 15–16, 21 Meyer, Manulani Aluli, 189–90 Mi’kmag First Nation, 302 Mi’kmaw Ethics Watch (Ethics Eskinuapimk), 302–4 militant utopianism, 200 minority filmmakers, 332n17 minstrelsy, transnational presence of, 183 mixed-methods community, 316, 318, 341n4 mixed-methods designs, 325n11 mixed-methods movement, 16–19, 309, 311–13 mixed-methods research, 60, 324n8 mobilization, as interpretive research process, 194 models concept of research, 288–89 moments of qualitative research, 330–31n2; Eighth, 182; Fifth, 102, 112; Seventh, 121–23; Sixth, 116–17; Third, 311–15 monograph series on qualitative work, 317 montage, 222–23 Montana, performances of, 134–40 Montana Day, 137–38 Montana Magazine, 250–51 moral and epistemological discourses, 161, 314–15 moral consequences, 50 moral crises, 198–99 moral criticism, 159–62 moral pedagogies, 278–79 moral standpoints in performance aesthetic, 157

394

Morris, Meaghan, 332n13 Morse, J. M., 62 Moses, D. D., 177, 184 Mountain Men Rendezvous events, 248–49, 263 multivoiced texts in qualitative research, 112 mystories, 131 narrative collage, 222–23, 231 narratives, new, elements of, 82 narratives of self, 163–64, 329–30n10 National Human Research Protections Advisory Committee, 283 Native-Americans, 138–39, 189, 209–13, 244, 256, 337–38n8 Naylor, Gloria, 228 NCLB (No Child Left Behind) Act, 16, 44, 327n4 neoconservatism and the postmodern backlash, 315–16 Neumann, Mark, 205, 206 New Communicators, 330–31n2, 332n17 new journalism of the 1970s, 118, 123–24 Newman, Peter C., 264 new narrative, elements of, 82 New New Journalists, 124 new normal, the, 39–40 New Paradigm Dialogues, 313–15, 319–21 new politics of resistance and truth, 36–37 newsreel, 209–13, 337n4 New Third Chicago School, 208 New Zealand, 188. See also Maori people 9/11/01 terrorist attacks, 25–37 non-American scholars, 152–53 nonfoundationalists, on issue of evaluative criteria, 61 “Note on Commercial Theater” (Hughes), 115 NRC (National Research Council): and evidence-based movement, 63; formulations and recommendations of, 64–68; guidelines of, 77; and mixed-methods experimental designs, 16–17; in postpositivist institutional apparatus, 308–9; resistance to quality inquiry, 15; and SBR, 45; and SBR One, 46 Nuremberg Code, 281–82

INDEX

Office for Human Research Protection (OHRP), 294–95 Office of Human Subject Research, 64 One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America’s Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11, The (Suskind), 42 One Percent Doctrine (Cheney Doctrine), 43–47 On the Road: A Search for American Character (Smith) Oral History Association (OHA), 292–95 oral history exclusions from IRB review, 294–99 oral history scholarship, 339–40nn14–15 Orwell, George, 40 parable of the blind men and the elephant, 79–80 Paradigm Dialog (Guba), 310 paradigm dialogues, multiple, 111 paradigm discourse, phases in, 312–13 paradigm proliferation, 310–11, 314 paradigms and perspectives, as masks, 89–90 paradigms in interpretation, 52, 90, 113, 312, 316. See also New Paradigm Dialogues paradigm wars, 14–15, 308–13 participatory approach to inquiry, 289 participatory performance work, and respect for local knowledge, 201 patriotism, in post-9/11 America, 30–31 pedagogies: critical, 48–52, 168, 209–13, 333–34n5; cultural, 333–34n5; of emancipation and empowerment, 190–91; of freedom, 199; of hope, 169, 193–94; indigenous, 186–87, 189–90; of love, 38; moral, 278–79 peer review, 67, 68, 328n5 Pelias, Ron, 50 pentimento, 222–23 performance: the call to, 182–85; in critical qualitative research, 178; defined, 336n4; in human disciplines, 130–34; interdisciplinary attention to, 130–31 performance aesthetics, 140, 156–57 performance approaches to knowing, 197

INDEX

performance autoethnography, 197, 199 performance-based human disciplines, and social change, 176 performance-based social sciences, 219 performance ethics, 166 performance ethnography: author’s project, 129–30; as enabling, 150; feminist communitarian criteria, 155–59; in a gendered culture, 127; literary and aesthetic criteria, 162–71; overlapping forms of, 129; as pedagogy of freedom, 199; setting criteria for, 153–56 performance events, as struggles and interventions, 178 performance interviews, 215, 218–19 performance of rituals, 189 performance pedagogy, 156, 169, 197–99 performances, doubly inverted, by persons of color, 183–84 performance studies, ethics for, 166–71 performance texts, 131, 169–70, 231, 323n2. See also “Critical Race Theory and Critical Pedagogy Confront Yellowstone National Park and Its Histories” (Denzin); “Secret Downing Street Memo, the One Percent Doctrine, and the Politics of Truth, The” (Denzin); Smith, Anna Deavere performative criteria, for ethnographic texts, 151, 166 performative model, of indigenous research, 178 performative social science, 241 performers-as-critics, 159 performing Montana, 135–36, 139 performing racial memories, 231–40 personal accountability, in collaborative social science research model, 300–301 personal memoirs format, 331n10 Pieces of White Shell: A Journey to Navajoland (Williams), 181 policing activities under Common Rule principles, 291 policy and praxis, 61 political theater in Britain, 334n7

395

politics: of evidence, 57–59, 62, 77–78; of interpretation, 171–73; of representation, 225, 298, 313; of resistance, 179–81; of truth, 44–45 positivism, 14–15, 103 Posner, Richard, 156 post-9/11 America, 27, 30–31, 34 post-colonial vs. postcolonial, 333n4 postmodern interviews, 222 postmodern paralysis, 316–17 postmodern sensibility, 93–94, 113 postpositivism and postpositivists, 21, 308, 315. See also grounded theory postpragmatist feminists, 49 postpragmatists, prophetic, 49–50 poststructuralism and poststructuralists, 106–10, 318 “Power” (Lorde), 142 practice-based pragmatic approach, 19 pragmatic maxims, 43 press. See mainstream media in America Principles and Standards and Evaluation Guidelines (Oral History Association), 296 professional associations, 284–87 progressive-regressive method of analysis, 109 prophetic pragmatism, 48–52 public art of Richard Posner, 156 public citizenship, redefined concept of, 197–98 public ethnographers, intimate journalists as, 125–26 public journalism, 121, 331n6 Puglisi, T., 339n6 qualitative ethicism, 301 qualitative human subject research, threats to, 301 qualitative inquiry: attacks on, 53; author’s call for new paradigm in, 52; in comparison with quantitative research, 59; contradictory understandings in, 112–13; criticisms of, 19–20; field of, as interdisciplinary, 77; historical phases in North America, 323n1; improving the status of, 317–18; lessons to learn from poststructural,

396

postmodern turns in, 171–73; methods of, 53–54; moments of, 330–31n2; performative model of, 58; as social justice, 13–15; use and acceptance of, 310 qualitative inquiry community, 35–37, 61, 77–79 qualitative-quantitative dispute, 57. See also paradigm wars quantitative research, 59–60, 309–10. See also SBR (scientifically based research) Quigley, Lillian, 80 race, and the call to performance, 182–85 racial injustice in the 21st century, 182 radical performance ethic, 169 RCT (randomized controlled trials), 69–70 Reading Excellence Act of 1999, 45 realist styles of qualitative writing, 100 recorded interviews, 340n15 “Recycled History Garden” (Posner), 156 Red Lodge, Montana, 134–39 red pedagogy, characteristics of, 189 redskins, in myth of the Montana frontier, 138–39 reflexive interviews, 215–21, 225, 227, 240–41, 335–36n1 representation, as writing issue, 91–92 representational adequacy, 125, 157 representational form, regulation of, 331n9 research: comparisons of methods, 59–60; as defined by federal regulations, 285, 295; as dirty word, 297–98; guidelines for, 302–4; human subject, 289; nonfederally funded, 339n10; permissions required for, 339n7; regulation and supervision of, at local level, 297; vantage point of the colonized, 175 research agencies, and implementation of NRC model, 64 researchers-as-performers, 159, 161–62, 178 research paradigms, 340n15 research texts, 88, 91–92 resistance, within the qualitative inquiry community, 78–79

INDEX

respect, 283, 286, 288 “Responsibility of Intellectuals, The” (Chomsky), 29 Rich, Frank, 43, 44 Richardson, Laurel: on creative analytic practice, 194–95; criteria for performance ethnography, 164–65; on death of her mother, 132–33; on ethnographic writing, 206–7; and Louisa May’s life story, 92, 220 Richardson, Sarah, 264 Riding, A., 334n7 risks and benefits, in code of ethics, 286 Robertson, Pat, 325n6 Rodney King verdict, 228 Ronda, James, 256, 266 Rosaldo, R., 85, 88–89, 98, 108, 329n3 Rosenbaum, Yankel, 128, 332n13 Roy, Arundhati, 27 Rumsfeld, Donald, 31, 43 Sacagawea, 248, 261, 262 Sacajawea Hotel, ad for, 250–51 sacred existential epistemology, basis of, 300 Saddam Hussein, 327n5 Sage Publications, 311, 323–24nn2–3 Sartre, J. P., 109 savagism, theory of, 252 SBR (scientifically based research): anti-SBR literature, 21; contested assumptions of, 313; criticisms of, 65; dialogues with advocates of, 318; and experimental paradigm, 45; and hostile environment for qualitative research, 16; introduction of, 45; limitations of, 45–46; and marginalization of critical qualitative inquiry, 316; and New Paradigm Dialogue, 314; in postpositivist institutional apparatus, 308–9; as return to positivism, 315; versions of, 46–47; and the war on truth, 46–48 SBR Three, 48–52 Scarlett, John, 41, 327n3 scenic method, 119–20 science: attacks on, by Bush Administration, 44–45, 51; canons

INDEX

of good, 102; Federal guidelines on, 53; and inquiry, 79; and mainstream media, 32; misuse of, in traditional forms, 110 science-based research, and the war on truth, 46–48 scientifically based research. See SBR (scientifically based research) scientific research, defined by Office of Human Subject Research, 64 scientists, Western, as agents of colonial power, 179 “Secret Downing Street Memo, the One Percent Doctrine, and the Politics of Truth, The” (Denzin), 39–50 self-determination rights of indigenous cultures, 279 self-presentation as representation, 91 sense-making, as writing issue, 91 Seventh Moment of qualitative research, 121–23 Shange, Ntozake, 144–45, 230 Sharpton, Al, 229–30 Shavelson, R. J., 59, 65–66 “Shelter from the Storm” (Dylan), 55 Side Hill Calf, 260 silence, as collusion, 37 Silverman, D., 221 Sixth Moment of qualitative research, 116–17 sloganizing theater, 334–35n8 smallpox, as weapon of war, 266 smallpox epidemic, 267–68 Smith, Anna Deavere: and critical discourse about ethics, 278, 304–5; on difficulty of Americans in talking about race, 240; Fires in the Mirror, 146; and House Arrest, 177; and Los Angeles race riots, 220–21; project of, 228–31; and radical ethical path for the future, 300–301; and testimonio, 338n3 Smith, Caroline Adams, 237 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, 175, 188–89, 191–94, 198–99 social justice: indigenous models of, 179–82; qualitative inquiry as, 13–15

397

social movement of anticolonialist discourse, 185–86 social science research: idiographic or emic, 298; interpretive crisis in, 86–87; nomothetic, 298–99; performancebased, 219; traditional standards for empirical research, 75–76 social scientists, public, 61 social text, 101, 171–73 social transformation, performance aesthetic and, 157 soft pragmatism, 43–44 “So Much Water So Close to Home” (Carver), 97, 100 Sontag, Susan, 36–37 Southpark (television show), 268 specialization, in discourses, 319 Spence, M., 245 spiritual crises, 198–99 spirituality, in Hawaiian culture, 190 Spry, Tami, 205, 206 SREE (Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness), 63, 68–69, 73, 77 St. Louis Missouri Fur Company, 270 St. Pierre, E. A., 206–7 “Standards for Reporting HumanitiesOriented Research” (AERA), 75–76, 324n10 standpoint epistemology, 140 “Stations” (Lorde), 142 storytelling traditions, 90–94 Strauss, A., 330n12 Street Corner Society (Whyte), 99 Stronach, I., 57 subjective reflexivity, in struggle to find a narrative voice, 125 subjectivity, media technologies and new forms of, 155 subject selection, and principle of justice, 286–87 Surname Viet Given Name Nam (Trinh), 224–25 surveillance society, use of interviews in, 221 Suskind, Ron, 42 “Taking in the Wash” (Dove), 142–43 Tashakkori, A., 311–15

398

Teddlie, C., 311–15 tender-minded interpretive communities, 111 terrorist attacks of 9/11/01, 25–37 testimonio, 195–96, 338n3 “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (Alexie), 115–16 texts: authority and style of, 99–102; autoethnographic performance, 166; Black feminist, 106–7; coperformed, 130, 170; emancipatory, 90; experimental ethnographic, 151; legitimation of, 93; logic of, 101–2; multivoiced, in qualitative research, 112; research, 88, 91–92; social, 101, 171–73. See also performance texts textual approach to critical inquiry, 105 textual authority, experiential structure and, 172–73 textual realism, as norm of feminist communitarian ethics, 125 textual representations, legitimation of, 172 Theater of the Oppressed, 170 theories, preoccupation with prior, 103 theories-as-stories, local knowledge as basis for, 99 theory as interpretation, 108 theory of savagism, 252 thick descriptions, 97, 99 thick interpretations, 99 Third Chicago School, 207 third methodological movement, 311 Third Moment of qualitative research, 311–15 Third World popular theater, 336–37n8 tough-minded interpretive communities, 111 Towne, L., 59, 65–66 tradition, as performance form, 129 traditional interactionists, 206–9 transformation, as interpretive research process, 194 transparency, 71–73, 328n7 trauma culture, 154–55 treaties, 187–89 triangulation, discourse on, 327n3 Trinh, T. Minh-ha, 224–25

INDEX

trust, 72–74 trustworthiness, in empirical materials, 104 truth, 44–46, 80 Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (Smith), 228, 336n8 Two Medicine incident, 261 Union for Concerned Scientists, 45 United Kingdom, state and discipline sponsored epistemologies in, 62–63 United States: causes for hatred against, 34; post-9/11/01, 27, 30–31, 34; state and discipline sponsored epistemologies in, 62–63; treaties with Native-Americans, 188 universal human ethic, in sacred epistemology, 300 University of Iowa Alumni Association, 252–53 utilitarian ethics, 167–68 utilitarian model of the individual, 281 Utley, Robert, 258 utopia, as performance form, 129 utopian counternarratives, 196 validity, forms of, 108 value-free experimentalism, Common Rule principles and, 287–89 ventriloquism, in indigenous theater, 184 verbatim theater, 334n7 verisimilitude, writing genres and laws of, 96–97, 172 Vines, Jerry, 32 Vowell, Sarah, 33 Wallace, Anthony F. C., 252 “War is Peace” slogan, 26 warrantability, 71–72, 328n7 ways of knowing, 82 West, Cornel, 50, 128, 150 What Works Clearinghouse (WWC), 63, 69–70, 308–9, 324–25n10 Wheat Montana Journal, The, 251

INDEX

white community, in historical masquerades, 249–50 White House Iraq Group (WHIG), 54 whiteness, 136–37, 185 white racist stereotypes, in indigenous theater, 184 Whyte, William Foote, 99–100 Whyte-Boelen exchange, 99–100 William Cody’s Wild West show, 183 Williams, Terry Tempest, 175, 181, 272–73 witnessing, as performance form, 129 Wolfe, Tom, 123–24 women of color, and poststructural interpretive styles, 107–8 Woodward, Bob, 41 words and language, material presence of, 117 working interpretive documents, 88 world constructions, representation and interpretation in, 150 worldviews, 279, 281 writers, models of, 94–95 writers’ position, in field and research texts, 92 writing: as act of discovery, 94–95; as interpretation, 88–89; issues of, and storytelling traditions, 90–94; practices deployed by fieldworkers, 93–94; problems of, compared to problems of method or fieldwork, 87; process of, and creation of authentic understanding, 97–98; styles, 100–102 WWC (What Works Clearinghouse), 63, 308–9 Yellowstone Association Institute course announcement, 245 Yellowstone project. See Memory (Denzin) Yellowstone River, 337n5 Yellowstone Time Line, 246–47 Zinn, Howard, 33, 37, 38

399

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Norman K. Denzin is Distinguished Professor of Communications, College of Communications Scholar, and Research Professor of Communications, Sociology, and Humanities at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. One of the world’s foremost authorities on qualitative research and cultural criticism, Denzin is the author or editor of more than two dozen books, including Reading Race; Interpretive Ethnography; The Cinematic Society; The Voyeur’s Gaze; The Alcoholic Self, and Performance Ethnography. He is past editor of The Sociological Quarterly, co-editor (with Yvonna S. Lincoln) of four editions of the landmark Handbook of Qualitative Research, co-editor (with Yvonna S. Lincoln and Linda Tuhiwai Smith) of Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies, co-editor (with Michael D. Giardina) of three plenary volumes from prior Congresses of Qualitative Inquiry, co-editor (with Lincoln) of the methods journal Qualitative Inquiry, founding editor of Cultural Studies/Critical Methodologies, and founding editor of International Review of Qualitative Research, and editor of three book series.

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