Fictions of Feminist Ethnography

Like Tuhiwai Smith, Visweswaran discusses how research, and in this case, ethnography uses language as a tool of domination and conquest whether subtly or explicitly to become all-knowing and maintain control of what is constructed as the ‘Other.’ More specifically, the woman she came to work with refused to be the subject of her research and instead her silence and resistance because the subject of inquiry. It is through this process that Visweswaran came to question the role of silence and how the researcher negotiates its construction and remains accountable to it throughout their research and in its presentation. She poses interesting questions regarding the name of a subject- using pseudonyms and calls into question the implications of fiction within ethnographical research. In my experience, naming the subject and naming an experience has been used as part of an ‘ethical’ process of identification and giving voice to private realities. The language of visibility and ‘voice’ is used within activist and and organizing spaces as tools of deconstructing dominant narratives/histories and confronting systems of power (and oppression).

Another key point that Jody mentions in their post is the concept of ‘home’ and the ‘impossibility of being home.” I would include too, that community and home have at times become synonyms of each other and used interchangeably to define belonging as well as identity, ‘voice’ and therefore visibility (existence).

Naming the subject (identity/identifying) has been historically (although upon further reading, may have been connected to colonial ideologies) connected to community/home, specifically within the context of social justice movements. So I am asking myself, how powerful (as a different type of resistance) can silence and anonymity be in challenging systems of power and dominant narratives/histories. I am reminded of how suicide (as a deliberate action of not complying or participating within a space, system, or counter-narrative) which could arguably be connected to silence, has been used as a way of resistance.

“One group of Kalinagos was cornered while making a final stand on the now famous headland at Sauteurs and they leaped over the cliff edge to their deaths rather than surrender.” <http://www.cavehill.uwi.edu/BNCCde/grenada/conference/papers/LH.html>

Several questions I am asking myself:
The role of theory (identifying silence, suicide and alternative methods of resistance) within research and more specifically ethnography?
The construction of a fictitious subject based on perceived/represented reality and the consideration of how those subjects are understood and replicated in other spaces.

Militz-Frielink blog #1

Sarah Militz-Frielink

GWS 502

Dr. Nadine Naber

1/28/2014

I felt that Visweswaran’s chapter Refusing the Subject was useful in that it introduces strategies of resistance—lies, silence, and secrets—as a research subject’s innocent defense against an ethnographer’s attempt to study the subject. Visweswaran’s description of her interactions with subject M, who ran an orphanage in India and her refusal to participate in an ethnographic interview, made me rethink research and the history of the feminist struggle in new ways.  A provocative question this particular chapter raises: “How might we destabilize the equation of speech with agency by staging one woman’s subject refusal to speak?” reminds me of the importance of rethinking agency and what it means to be an agent. 

As a scholar/activist committed to social justice work, who has taught school and worked as a journalist, I realize how my attempts to create an empowering space for the people’s voice (one I assumed as empowering) could also be a site of oppression.  Silence, lies and secrets can also be powerful tools for agency.  What is left unsaid as Foucault once posited can be more harmful or helpful than what is said.  This leads me to question stories untold and how marginalized groups and individuals can use silence as a powerful form of resistance and justice.  When researching and writing, I am always concerned about getting the truth out there, not privileging certain voices over others, and encouraging my students and subjects to tell their stories. Yet, counter-storytelling especially about highly contested topics such as immigration and prison abolition for example, can be a dangerous endeavor indeed.  I think about the human rights work I have done on the U.S./Mexico border and the great measures we took to protect our subjects’ identity—some subjects, especially the labor organizers, face possible assassination attempts on a daily basis.  They could be immediately killed if their names were released in the stories we wrote, yet they wanted their stories to be told as an act of subversion.  I take protecting my subject's and student's identities very seriously, but how much counter-story telling (for example) is worth the risk of a human life? How can we be sure our subjects are protecting and more good than harm will come out of our research?

Limitations

I believe Visweswaran’s work is limiting because her discipline anthropology is not the discipline that contributes directly to my dissertation—which will be employing qualitative and humanities-based methodologies.  I wonder if the broad scope of my studies at UIC is compromising the depth of my dissertation topic.  However, I believe the first book we read in this class contributed to my area of study and should be a requirement for all doctoral students. Decolonizing Methodologies does a thorough job of critiquing various disciplines—one of them being anthropology—and reminds us of how dangerous anthropological research can be with its reliance on White missionaries and other colonizers who mine, exploit and perpetuate conditions of subjugation.  To that end, reading a book about anthropology, immediately after finishing Decolonizing Methodologies, made me wonder if Visweswaran’s research left a bad taste in her subjects’ mouths especially after chapter 4.  How did she project her subjects?

How might you apply it to your real or imagined project? 

           Visweswaran’s work inspired me to stay focused on my chosen area of study—African American Feminist Spirituality and Pedagogy—and reminded me of how much Kathy E. Ferguson’s conceptual framework—mobile subjectivities—is useful to my project.  Ferguson shatters the academic assumption that scholars have to pick one conceptual framework (i.e. cosmic feminist, linguistic feminist, etc.) to ground their dissertation with the introduction of her mobile subjectivities theory.  The binary nature of dissertation methodology means each body of work falls prey to the weaknesses of the conceptual framework employed and its accompanying assumptions.  I think humanities-based research appeals to me because it allows various standpoints, theories, and works of literature to be a part of the final product.  I also believe dissertations utilizing other types of (decolonized) methodologies can accomplish the same thing, as long as we continue to ask ourselves, what does this mean, and so what?

Jody Ahlm

 Visweswaran grapples with the epistemelogical problems of a discipline founded in the study of the Other. She suggests, among other things, two epistemelogical shifts related to the positionality of the researcher and her subject. In “hyphenated ethnography,” the researcher makes use of her hybrid positionality, or hyphenated identity, to study a culture that she is neither entirely a part of, but which constitutes an aspect of her hybridity. Visweswaran also suggests a shift away from fieldwork, in favor of “homework.” One way of decolonizing anthropology is by focusing on demographics instead of geographies, and exploring the meaning of “home”.

In my current research on Grindr, I find myself neither at home, nor away from home. As Visweswaran discusses, studying “home” often means exploring the difficulty of defining that term and the impossibility of “being home.” The online space of the app I study, and the space of the interviews I conduct, is comfortable in many ways. Yet I often find myself questioning what affinity I have with my subjects and whether I “belong” in that space at all.  Not because of it's geography, but because of it's demography. Of course, belonging and home rarely have an easy relationship. One does not necessarily imply the other.

What, then, is my positionality in relation to my subjects when studying gay men's sexual culture? Am I traveling to “the field” or am I doing “homework”? Am I a hyphenated researcher, studying a place and a culture that is not quite my own, but not quite foreign? There is a familiar moment when I turn to face a man in a gay bar who has just made a suggestive pass at me. Knowing that I have been misrecognized, I prolong that misrecognition by hesitating before responding, when inevitably my voice will betray my femaleness and I will become, in a second act of misrecognition, undesirable.

Yet it is this field of my misrecognition that I find myself studying. Grindr is a virtual gay cruising space. There is a continuum of sexual and non-sexual interactions and intentions, but it is widely known to be a “hook-up app,” and as such, is a sexualized space. It is also a highly gendered space, so much so that it goes unmarked. Profiles can include race/ethnicity, height, weight, and relationship status, but not gender. There is literally no place for gender, unless you include it in the small text box that many people don't read. My profile includes the disclaimer that I am a “queer masculine woman,” an identity that I am more at home in than most others, but which fails to capture my positionality when considered relationally and in the context of the space I study.

The disclaimer was an addition made after discovering how tedious keeping up with messages can be, and wanting to filter out those guys who wouldn't continue a conversation beyond the disclosure of my gender. This itself was a lesson in the routines and social practices of Grindr users. Profile construction and message management are essential for tailoring the app to a user's goals. Visweswaran warns against a generalized notion of hybridity that ignores power relations and the relative ability to “choose” certain identities. My generalized hybridity would be that I am a gay-woman. But in my “field”, my gender is more salient than my sexuality. Only if I were a man would my sexuality matter. On Grindr, desire is first and foremost gendered, and the affective space of the app centers around desire. Does my hybridity, then, even matter? Undesirable because of my gender, am I an insider in this space in anyway?

However, close reading of other users' profiles isn't a universal practice, and I still have conversations that begin and end with misrecognition. In fact, I am unintelligible to many people I encounter on Grindr.  Misrecognition is inevitable in many cases.  But does home imply recognition? Can some place be home if we are constantly misrecognized? Visweswaran's accounts of her own work reflect the impossibilities of feeling at home while doing hyphenated ethnography. Misrecognition occurs often, by strangers as well as relatives. In reflecting on my own motives for my research, my “more than accidental academic trajector[y]” (127), I've come to wonder if there is sometimes pleasure in misrecognition. There is also alienation, disappointment, even anger, but I think part of any “homework”, or of any hyphenated ethnography, is a pleasure in certain misrecognitions that actually legitimize the fractures and ambiguities of our identities.

Paige Sweet

In her book, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography, Kamala Visweswaran poses important questions about what constitutes knowledge, inquiry, “data,” and “truth” in ethnographic studies. In particular, I was intrigued by her analysis of lies, secrets, and silences as strategies of resistance; following that analysis, she asks how ethnographers can write someone’s silences without inscribing them into a subjectivity which they have refused. Because I study domestic violence, and hope to do interview and ethnography work with women victims of domestic violence, this question of silence is a powerful one. On the one hand, feminist interventions into domestic violence have been about silence, about disrupting the cultural silence surrounding violence against women, politicizing forced silences. On the other hand, when we as feminist researchers ask our interviewees to narrate their experiences of domestic violence, we also usher them into a ready-made feminist subject position, something Visweswaran also cautions us against. Victims become subjects of feminist research, symbols of the recalcitrance of patriarchal control and violence. There are some dangerous assumptions underpinning these modes of investigation: that speaking (confessing?) is always a move toward healing or liberation; that Western feminist discourse is the correct destination for women victims of violence.

            

Visweswaran’s analysis of silence as resistance is instructive for imagining the multiple roles that silence can plan in subjects’ narratives, in a feminist ethnographer’s analytical toolkit, and in politics. For example, Visweswaran forces us to question the equation of agency with speaking, demonstrating how a subject’s refusal of research participation can be read as a refusal to be made into the subject of a particular type of story. This line of analysis leads me to question how I can read and write silences in victims’ narratives. Of course, silence can be oppressive; it can signal a lack of safety or space to be heard. On the other hand, as Visweswaran emphasizes, silence can signal an active refusal to engage in an institutionalized “empowerment” or “survivor” discourse. The question remains, then, how to identify what specific silences mean, in both feminist discourse and in victims’ stories. Moreover, how can we theorize silences without evacuating them of their resistance strategies, without erasing their desire to not be placed at all? Perhaps Visweswaran’s use of “betrayal” in her discussion of deconstructionist ethnography is useful for answering these questions. She argues that an ethnography premised on “betrayal” does not seek simply to identify the power relations that infuse our epistemologies, but to actually subvert those power relations in the way we tell our stories (p. 77). The difficult work here, then, may be to use feminist ethnography to reveal the multiple roles that silences play, refusing to arrive at a single answer for silence, refusing to create silence’s “take-away” point.

Michael De Anda Muñiz Visweswaran

            The two aspects of Visweswaran’s book that I relate to most are her discussions of “betrayal” and the role of identity in ethnography. I appreciated both of the chapters devoted to these issues, because I am constantly reflecting on issues of power when conducting my own work. My identity as a 4.5-generation Chicano will no doubt result in various issues of identity when working with Latinas. In what ways is power unequally slanted towards me due to gender differences? How do I address this? Also, how do I deal with issues of perceived difference and commonality, both on my part and those I work with, when the feel may or may not be mutual?

            Visweswaran illustrates the various ways that betrayal may occur during the research process. Visweswaran learned that her interlocutors had kept secrets from her about their pasts, but she also confronted her interlocutors with knowledge she had learned about them from other sources. In both cases there were acts of betrayal. To do good work, means to respect individuals’ humanity and right of consent. We are often trained to find the “truth” by any means up to the point that IRB would have a problem. Betrayal is not seen as a legitimate harm by the IRB. So, we often may end up using our power in ways that harm those we are working with. Perhaps we should consider omissions and contradictions as aspects of truth rather than obstacles to it. The fact that Uma and Janaki were not forthright about their marriages says something possibly more important, truer than “the truth”.

I appreciate Visweswaran’s call to claim silence as a tool of feminist ethnography. She notes how refusals to speak are acts of resistance and agency. She continues, “If we do not know how to ‘hear’ silence, we cannot apprehend what is being spoken, how speech is framed” (51). Of course, researchers hold a great amount of power when we attempt to interpret silence. My various identities, especially those privileged ones, must be checked in order to not reinforce structures of oppression. If my interlocutor chooses silence, then perhaps it would be better to work towards understanding the silence itself without attempting to sneak my way past to what it is possibly “hiding”. To do the latter would to exercise my power as a man and academic, which would maintain and re-create systems of oppression.

The chapter, “Identifying Ethnography,” discusses how her identity as a second-generation Indian-American affects her understanding of the world and the ways others understand her. Second-generation Indian-Americans must confront questions of citizenship, Americanness, cultural belonging, and race often on their own, because the first generation does not equip them with tools to deal with these issues. I can relate to what she is describing when I reflect on my own personal journey. Growing up as a 4.5 generation Chicano in a middle-class, predominantly white neighborhood, the hyphen has different meaning to me. The hyphen in Mexican-American represented the tension between how others, white and Latino, saw me and the way I felt and wished for them to see me. Like Visweswaran explains, my parents, due to their class positioning, failed to prepare me to deal with questions of belonging. Despite the troubles this caused me growing up, I think it prepared me well to be a reflexive researcher, because I am always aware of how I perceive myself and others and how they may perceive me based on my identities. Just as Visweswaran claims that hyphenated identities create various dilemmas while doing research, I, too, feel that issues of accountability, responsibility, and power are constantly a part of my research experiences. She says, “those of us engaged in identifying ethnography may be moved by different sets of questions concerning power, domination, and representation; how we may ourselves be positioned (and not always by choice) in opposition to dominant discourse and structures of power” (140).

Indira Neill Hoch

Unlike Visweswaran who identifies with the shuttling inherent in claiming the hyphen in Indian-American (or Asian-American, or any of a host of other hyphens), I feel giddy at my rejection of the hyphen. I also have an Illinois birth certificate (mother: Indian; father: white) that could give me claim to the kind of fractured, oscillating identity that Visweswaran and several other women in the essay “Identifying Ethnography” contend with. But I’m not of Visweswaran’s generation, and I ended up the child of an “Indian” mother and “white” father by a very different route, in a different generation under different circumstances. The hyphen is too static (even with all its vibrations) and too sad for me to identify with.

A different contextual hyphen that I do claim is “scholar-fan” when writing about online fandom communities. Busse and Hellekson (2006) argue that scholar-fans “merge fan and academic discourses, but it does so not by placing fans’ quotes and voices next to our analyses, but rather by gathering together fans who are already academics and academics who are already fans (p. 24).” Personal engagement in fandom practices does not mean sacrificing rigor in research, but does mean involving “informant-fans” in the process of meaning-making. Lothian, Busse & Reid (2007) used the online platform LiveJournal.com as a discussion space between fans and scholar-fans to construct an analysis of online slash fandom as a queer female space. The essay is more of a roundtable discussion than a reiteration of an informant and researcher dialogue. Women discuss the bonds and relationships they have developed over years of participating in various slash fandoms. Quotes are not abstracted to simply prove some point about women who flirt with other women over stories about men having sex with other men. Instead, the piece reenacts the texture of conversations I’ve somehow heard before and been a participant in, when no researchers are watching.

It is in researching fandom communities where I feel I have the most to lose in terms of identity. I am quite easily “Indian” in a room full of non-minorities, or “white” when I go to Trinidad, or “Trinidadian” when I take the time to actually explain my mother’s ancestors’ complicated estrangement from India. Negotiating these identities doesn’t strike me as a problem. Unlike Visweswaran, I went to school with other Indian children who couldn’t speak Hindi (my mother can’t either, in any case). My best friend growing up had a Pakistani father and a white mother, but that wasn’t at all why we were best friends. We were best friends because we would watch X-Files until 1am and go to the arcade and beat grown men at Tekken 3 to watch the embarrassment on their faces. My friends in high school shared interests in anime and Doctor Who. They would read the racy stories I wrote while we were all still virgins. In a comfortable, multi-ethnic, middle-class society, it was our media habits that bound us together, rather than the fact I was “Indian,” Laura was “Taiwanese,” and Matt and Andrew were “white.”

Like Visweswaran, who states that her coming to India to research as a hyphenated identity was not accidental, neither is my coming to fandom and my rejection of questions of ethnicity regarding fandom practices. Yep, I’m also a little too tall and a little too fair and I have my father’s pointy nose with a little bump right in the center instead of the broad, flat nose of my mother and brother. But I’m also a little bit of an outsider now approaching Tumblr users; I’m a little too old and I don’t get Homestuck references and damn, I remember the days when we had to wait weeks to get translations of that year’s best anime series on VHS instead of it being subtitled and online an hour after it has aired in Japan. Visweswaran doesn’t quite speak Tamil in a way she will ever be accepted and likewise I don’t speak the particular code of in-jokes and references that I did ten years ago. The scholar- now precedes my engagement as –fan. This is my “continual process of coming into being as a researcher” (p. 139).

It may seem petty and superficial compared to the kinds of ethnography we have been reading and will continue to read; maybe it is. But I would not be here today if not for the way internet fandom communities shaped my childhood and continue to occupy my time. For good or ill, it was part of the community I acquired made me blissfully happy and let me know hundreds of people would read my silly stories and dozens would tell me how they loved them. It’s the community that let Julie Campbell break my heart when I was 16 and got me detention because I “dressed oddly.” There were “real world” consequences for my “online” life. It’s important to me, and more than anything I wish to do it justice in my research.

Busse, K., & Hellekson, K. (2006). Introduction: Work in progress. In K. Busse, & K. Hellekson (Eds.), Fan fiction and fan communities in the age of the internet: New essays (pp. 5-32). Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc.
Lothian, A., Busse, K., & Reid, R. A. (2007). ``Yearning void and infinite potential'': Online slash fandom as queer female space. English Language Notes, 45(2), 103-111.

Rannie (Rannveig Sigurvinsdottir)

I found the point of ethnography as literature quite an interesting point. In the book, Viswewaran argues that the only real difference between ethnography and literature is that they both construct a believable world, but one is accepted as factual and the other is not. We could probably say that this idea could be extended beyond just ethnography and into other forms of research.

I’m studying psychology, the mainstream of which is definitely post-positivistic, meaning that it assumes the existence of an objective and measurable reality. This can then be captured (usually imperfectly) using various methods of data collection and analysis. The fact that certain phenomena exist is not debated, we presume that even though we cannot see certain things, such as intelligence, they do exist in the real world.

In this sense, the discussion of literature and fiction as being a part of anthropology is completely foreign and quite unacceptable to most psychologists. We are describing things that are real, not imagined or fictional. Some psychologists, such as those who practice community psychology, would argue that reality can indeed be quite subjective and that people construct different meanings and concepts from the world around them. Even though these academics may see reality as having multiple different meanings and representations, I have never heard any of them describing their work as fiction or literature. They believe they are studying things that are real. They may not be real to everyone, all of the time and in all situations, but on some level they are real and not imagined. However, when these researchers undertake ethnographic research, it might be useful to think about constructing people’s realities in ways that are not so different from fiction. At the same time, emphasizing the creativity and subjectivity of the undertaking would very likely result in these researchers and their conclusions not being taken seriously by others. But this also begs the question, do these researchers actually do this and not realize it? Or they just don’t talk about it?

However, there is one way in which I have heard narratives and stories referenced in psychology, and that is when results are written up. Often times when people do not understand your paper or feel that the writing is unclear, they say something like “What’s the story here?” This sentence clearly implies that you are supposed to take your results and frame them into some sort of compelling narrative for people to understand them. Implicit in the question is also that you must construct meaning out of what you are presenting for the reader. We may present our findings in one way or another, but at the end of the day, we are still presenting something that is grounded in reality.

Emily Ruehs

DISCLAIMER: I recently received some difficult feedback from a journal about an article that I wrote, and I am using this blog post to debrief and reflect on these comments as they overlap quite well with the reading. I apologize if this verges on a stream-of-conscious diatribe!

While I thoroughly enjoyed Visweswaran’s book as a creative and academic endeavor, I am having a difficult time understanding how to apply her epistemological questions to my own research. Like many feminist writings on epistemology and methodology, I find the arguments compelling but far from practical in my understanding of how to proceed in my own work. The most “practical” area that the author discusses is perhaps her reflection on positionality. Starting on page 24, Visweswaran explains that issues of positionality, suggesting that women researchers might more often confront issues of their personal identity interfering with the stories that they are able to observe or the stories that they are told. Reflecting on three different stories of women anthropologists, Viswewwaran suggests that these narratives be read as fables of rapport or fables of imperfect rapport, and she praises them for understanding “fieldwork experience in terms of its disjunctions and gendered misunderstanding” (29).

                In research that I conducted for my MA (and have since sent to journals for publication), I found that using my own “fable of (imperfect) rapport” was helpful in the overall analysis. In fact, many of my conclusions are based upon my understanding of myself as researcher in relation to the men I interviewed. As I researched young Latino men who immigrated to the United States as unaccompanied minors, I understood my positionality as a white, American young woman as influencing what they were willing to share with me. Like in Shostak’s research (27) where the women were more likely to talk with her about sex then their  emotional relationships with women, I found that the young men were much more likely to share with me their experiences of “adventure” than their experiences of fear (although this was not always the case). Using a gendered analysis, I understood this to be a show of masculinity, based in the gendered relations of the interview, as well as specific points, quotes and phrases that reoccurred throughout the interviews. Turning in this project for review, I felt that I had adequately expressed how my positionality impacted my entire analysis, and I believed that I had done a good job of producing a feminist analysis on young men and immigration. However, based on the reviewer comments, I seem to have been mistaken. One reviewer in particular, felt that my understanding of my positionality and subsequent analysis was “shallow,” “patronizing,” and even “self-serving.” These comments obviously have been difficult to hear (especially as I work very hard and very consciously to not be those things), but I am going to try to use this week’s reading to debrief these comments and see where it is that I have gone wrong and how I should proceed.

One way in which my article varied from the work highlighted in the reading was the fact that my positionality was a section of the article that was discussed prior to the main points of analyses. The anthropologists in Visweswaran’s book immersed themselves in the entire analysis, never truly separating themselves from their work. Visweswaran reflects: “Thus when the ‘other’ drops out of anthropology, becomes subject, participant, and sole author, not “object” then, in Kevin Dwyer’s words, we will have established a ‘hermeneutics of vlunerability’ and an ‘anthropology which calls itself into question.’” In my piece, the young men are still the other. I place myself into my discussion of methods, and then I exit the piece, becoming the omniscient narrator in the analysis section rather than first-person narrator that is representative of much early feminist ethnography (33).  I wonder, though, if I could ever publish this piece if I were to place myself in the entire analysis. This is still not a particularly acceptable genre in the journal in which I hope to publish (Gender and Society). Furthermore, I wonder if the style of my research (qualitative interviews rather than ethnography and participant observation) prevents me from entering my analysis in the same way. I certainly can discuss how I contacted the participants, but unlike the anthropologists in the article, I have not lived with and been in community with the majority of the men I interviewed. So, perhaps the foundation of my data collection methods prevent me from having a fully feminist ethnography.

Next is the issue of representation. “The question is not really whether anthropologists can represent people better, but whether we can be accountable to people’s own struggles for self-representation and self-determination.” (32). I also think that this is where I may have gone wrong. For me, the difference between “representing people better” and being “accountable to people’s own struggles for self-representation” is a confusing distinction on a practical level. Philosophically, I understand what that means. Practically, though, I do not. How could I have been more accountable to my participant’s struggles for self-representation? I discussed this idea, in a way, with a couple of the men. Some seemed delighted, even relieved, to tell their stories to me, asking for a copy of the transcript. Yet, how do I translate that transcript to an article to allow their words to continue to represent their experiences (and, furthermore, how do I publish something out of that?). As it is now, I have chosen parts of their words to highlight, which in and of itself, gives me the power of representing them instead of them representing themselves.

Finally, I want to address the stinging critique I received which centered around the idea of self-indulgence. Is the foundation of an epistemology that understands the positionality of the knower in itself self-indulgent? On one hand, positionality addresses the idea that the knower is limited by his or her social location. Yet, it places what is known around the knower and any analysis or knowledge that is developed is always developed within the sphere of the researcher. To me, it seems that we can’t really escape being in the center of the knowledge, whether or not we address that we are. But, maybe the issue of self-indulgence isn’t so much about where we are in relationship to the production of knowledge but rather our acknowledgement of issues of power. If my analysis was “patronizing,” perhaps I did not adequately address the “relationships of power not only within culture, but also between cultures” (38-9).

While this blog entry has been quite helpful in debriefing my own thoughts and feelings, I am not sure that I have come to any real conclusions or points of action—really, I have more questions now. Also, the final question I have: if I am to write a better—and truly “feminist”—article, is that something that will ever be publishable considering my position as a graduate student?

Lex's Blog Post on Visweswaran

Conjunctural Description as Methodology

Though Visweswaran's discussion of "conjunctural description" comes early on (pg. 13), this concept, borrowed from James Clifford, remained a theme throughout the text. Visweswaran defines conjunctural description as distinct from "thick description," made famous by interpretive ethnographer Clifford Geertz. I found Visweswaran's use of this term useful in thinking about my own work, especially in thinking through how to do ethnographic work grounded (somewhat) in critical realism. 

Critical realism, which Visweswaran mentions but does not elucidate, is a metatheory that foregrounds ontology and claims that there are causal mechanisms that propel history forward. These causal mechanisms are contingent and conjunctural; in other words, a specific combination of things that depend upon each other.The uses of critical realism within ethnography have increased in recent years. Would Visweswaran name her work as critical realist? I think she would, with several caveats. 

Critical realism has been critiqued for not acknowledging experiential knowledge enough, and Visweswaran contributes to an implicit critique of CR by emphasizing positionality, situated knowledges, and location. What she takes from CR, however, is the conjunctural nature of all of these things. I kept thinking about Donna Haraway's distinction between views from "nowhere" and "somewhere." For Visweswaran, that "somewhere" is always multiply constructed, fragmented, contingent and conjunctural. 

Visweswaran goes on to suggest that knowledges can also be situational, that is, produced within and for specific contexts (1994:49), and describes Janaki as "no longer a puzzle to solve, but a woman with her reasons, not so unlike me" (1994:50). This statement comes out of Visweswaran's analysis of betrayal that emphasizes the specific and contingent nature of knowledge, but also acknowledges Janaki's ontological subjectivity as well. Visweswaran's foregrounding of the historical contexts surrounding Uma and Janaki's stories leads her to what she earlier names as a "hermeneutics of vulnerability," in which she questions both the epistemology, and I claim, the ontology, of anthropology. 

Conjunctural description as methodology is something that I will take with me from this book. To expand upon Visweswaran's definition, conjunctural description is attentive to the historically contingent situations and contexts in which people live their lives, but also pays attention to the politics of knowledge, disclosure and refusal (silence). The latter demands accountability to subjects as subjects. Visweswaran's "Betrayals" is an example of how to structure such a project: Narrative/Performance, reflection on one's own subject position (p. 48), and analysis in several layers/parts. Visweswaran also provides guidance in "Refusing the Subject," where she places a subject's refusal in a subjective context through an analysis of nationalist/generational politics in India.