The Ethnographic Imagination: Textual Constructions of Reality

Book Review

The Ethnographic lmagina t ion: Textual Constructions of Reality Paul Atkinson. London: Routledge, 1990. 195 pp.

Reviewed by

Simon Fraser University SUZANNE DE CASTELL AND CELIA HAIG-BROWN

”The ethnography-in sociology and in anthropology-was born with this paradox, this asymmetry. . . . Ethnographers are conscious of the cultural conventions that are their subject-matter, but have all too often remained blissfully unaware of their own cultural conventions” (pp. 177, 178). This, then, becomes the central focus of Atkin- son’s carefully argued and finely grained literary-critical analysis of the rhetorical strategies involved in the textual construction of sociological fact and ethnographic reality. His critique is a foundational one, and in that sense (although not in others, a “paradox” in itself, which we will later discuss) this is a radical text: its focus is on a central contradiction at the very heart of the discipline itself, a contradiction whose detection has become possible only with what’s popularly referred to as the “linguistic turn’’ in the human sciences more generally. From Wittgenstein’s insight that ”the limits of my language are the limits of my world’ has gradually come a transition from, as Ha- bermas has put it, the philosophy of consciousness to the philosophy of language.

Fundamentally, this is a book about literacy, about writing, and about reading, which, although widely and mistakenly constructed as simple skills, are in fact, as Walter Benjamin shows us (in Walker 1987:116-117), among the most difficult things we human beings can learn to do. The idea that reading is a simple and straightforward act stems at root from the species of nafve realism, the regulative ideal of the ”literal” text capable of “stating facts” and ”representing reality.” Atkinson’s work is by no means the first attempt to critically reconsi- der the venerable distinction between fact and fiction, which in many ways extends backwards in time at least as far as Vico. Certainly, for readers familiar with Hayden White’s (1978) work on the ”fictions of factual representation”; Dorothy Smith’s (1974) work on the “documentary construction of reality”; the Nelson, Megill, and McCloskey

Anthropology and Education Quarterly 24(1):82-91. Copyright 0 1993, American Anthro- pological Association.

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(1987) conference papers, The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences; or the Clif- ford and Marcus (1986) collection, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Pol- itics of Ethnography, many of the ideas in Atkinson’s work will be familiar.

Atkinson is at great pains to make clear two points. The first is that the puzzles with which he chooses to work are by no means peculiar to sociology, nor even to qualitative work more generally. Every discipline, and that very much includes the so-called hard or quantitative sciences, constitutes genres of its own, each with its own rhetorical strategies, its own discursive conventions, its own distinctive challenges. Hence, Atkinson’s concern in the first chapter is to establish that ”all authoritative accounts depend upon rhetorical features in order to persuade the reader of their factual nature and to construct their arguments” (p. 9); the next chapter concentrates on making that argument in the particular case of sociology. Subsequently, considerable attention is devoted to elucidating the ways readers are led to the meanings of sociological texts, and to explicating the semantic collab- orations attempted and accomplished by writers strategically manag- ing a vast range of textual and literary resources. Atkinson notes the way in which practices of citation both constitute and presuppose an ”invisible college”: interpretive institutions consisting of propositions ”taken-for-granted,” of accepted interpretations, canonical texts, and stellar figures, in whose reflected glory lesser writers may bathe. Such practices of citation are used both to signal essential context and back- ground knowledge to the reader and to enhance the authority of the writer. Atkinson then explains and illustrates the textual construction of “characters,” both ”round” and “flat” (E. M. Forster’s terms), and discusses the ways in which characterization is often used to bolster and carry sociological arguments. Discussed at some length is the technique of deploying the voices of others-from the already-men- tioned case of citation to the quotation of interviewed subjects as a means of substantiating an otherwise monological ”expert account” to the dialogical use of polyphonic texts. The overall project here is to explain the ways in which both “evidence” and “argument” are achieved implicitly, rather than explicitly, through the provision of sociological analysis, argument, fact, and data.

The second major point repeatedly stressed by Atkinson is that his is a critique not intended to undermine or to de-legitimate the enterprise of qualitative sociology: “The status of any discipline,” he goes on to explain,

is not enhanced by a flat denial of its conventional features, nor by a pur- blind reluctance to suspend naive theories of representation. A readiness to question and to examine those conventions, on the other hand, is not ips0 fact0 a threat to the decencies of scholarly enquiry. . . , There will be no es- cape from conventional forms of some sort . . . [but] the fact that linguistic signs derive their meaning from their relations with other signs-paradig-

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matic and syntagmatic-does not strip them of referential function. [pp. 175-1761

Hence, argues Atkinson, we need not fear that self-understanding. ”Rather than detracting from our scholarly endeavours,” he goes on to say, “an understanding of our textual practices can only strengthen the critical reflection of a mature discipline” (p. 176). Atkinson argues that for ethnography to be a fully mature discipline it needs to have “a reflexive awareness of its own writing, the possibilities and limits of its own language, and a principled exploration of its modes of representation” (p. 180). In concluding, he remarks:

This book will have failed if it seems to render the work of ethnography less important, or even impossible. It will have succeeded if it encourages others to find a new complexity and a new source of fascination in their own writing and in the writing of others. [pp. 180-1811

To be sure, this critique does not strip ethnography of its referential function. But this cautious formulation of its implications does not deal with the obvious further question of what is then to be the ethnography’s primary reference: the to-be-investigated phenomenon? Or the ethnography (or even the ethnographer) itself? How are we to distinguish discovery from our own inventions, from what Bacon referred to as ”dreams of the imagination”?

For, as much as it is about literacy, this is also a book about imagination. At issue here, then, is the distinction between “discovery” and ”invention,” and at stake, therefore, is the very possibility of ethnographic scholarship itself. Is ethnography inevitably just a ”dream of the imagination”? Can we only imagine ethnography? Danger indeed. And what is to be done? To be sure, Atkinson’s is a useful corrective to the problem he identifies: a “facile reliance on unexamined rhetorical forms” (p. 180) and (surprisingly) the woefully insufficient attention given to the challenges of reading and writing in the context of ethnographic training. But his conclusion-about finding a new complexity and a new source of fascination in one’s own writing and the writing of others-seems weak and even evasive, given the extent to which it has been precisely the discussion dismissed, a discussion on the very possibility of ethnography as a legitimate scholarly form and as a legitimate methodology for empirical research, which has profoundly discomfited those by whom such rhetorically oriented critique has been taken most seriously. And here is, perhaps, the central problem for us with Atkinson’s work: it is a literary-critical analysis of sociology whose point, however, is far more literary-critical than it is sociological. Once we learn, as Atkinson would encourage us to do, how to read and to write in these forms and, possibly with time, how to read and write outside them and in new forms as yet uninvented, what then? What difference will this kind of critical literacy make to sociological understanding? That is to say, where are the people?

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Where are the problems? And, above all, where are the purposes in this book?

Atkinson has failed to explore, even in the most general of terms, the relationship between rhetorical forms and sociological insights, let alone the purpose of such an investigation for those whose interests extend beyond intellectual complexity and aesthetic fascination. At very many points throughout the book it certainly sounds as if Atkin- son will get to some potentially critical and certainly fundamental ob- servations and analyses. He makes, for example, the important obser- vation that “histoire is a way of signifying: it is not a mode of narrative which is somehow empty or devoid of significance” (p. 101). He remarks that what appears (“deceptively”) to be a simple introduction to one illustrative work in fact “reflects and encodes an implicit social theory of urban life” (p. 101). But he never explicates that implicit social theory nor, therefore, does he critically interrogate its validity or the (possibly strategic or hegemonic) function of the account provided to readers.

Similarly, Atkinson observes that, “in theorizing about the textual conventions and codes of the novel and the short story, critical theorists have sought to uncover some of the ways in which texts achieve their reality-like effects” (p. 62). But it is important to point out that critical theorists have sought to uncover a good deal more than that. They have also sought to uncover the reasons why such persuasions would be attempted, in whose interests they stand, of what kind of account is the attempt made to persuade readers. Such criticism might use the work of Bakhtin (1981), for instance, to show how different forms of the novel make possible different representations and hence different perceptions of the social world, of the individual, and of the possibilities and strategies for change within a world so portrayed. This kind of critical deconstruction is surely of greater sociological significance than is an analysis wholly directed toward literary means of persuasion, in and for itself.

The same sort of situation arises when, in discussing The Social Order ofthe Slum (Suttles 1968), Atkinson points out how, “confronted by the surface appearance of disorganization, the text progressively con- structs an ordered social universe” (p. 164, emphasis in original). What kind of order is a question never asked. Yet this, surely, is precisely what is critical to understanding what’s sociologically significant about the textual construction of ethnographic accounts. Atkinson goes on to talk about the ways in which ”the sociologist who trades in con- trasts, ironies and differences . . . relies upon the rhetorical construction of ’otherness,’ ” hyperbolically exaggerating “cultures in various ways” (p. 165). But isn’t this a problem? Doesn’t this beg to be called into question, not just reported on? What does it mean, after all, to reduce participants’ experience of contradiction to the rhetorical de- vice of “irony,” given that whether something is seen as irony or con-

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tradiction may depend primarily upon which end of the power struc- ture you’re on. Nowhere, however, does Atkinson question or chal- lenge the subject-position of the author who assumes the “ironic” stance that, he says, typifies ethnographic writing.

Although Atkinson repeatedly points out how the use of these textual strategies functions to make arguments implicit, rather than ex- plicit, he nowhere goes on to point out, critically, the way such strategies function to render an “argument” beyond criticism. Hence, he consistently fails to point out how textual strategies can constitute for- mal obstacles to readers and informants arguing against or contradict- ing “expert” accounts.

Not surprisingly, then, Atkinson takes quite a conservative view, too, of the reader, both in this book’s implicit conception and in its rhetorical construction of its anticipated readers, although it would be more accurate here to speak of the reader to whom this book is ad- dressed, since Atkinson constitutes readers as a unified abstract universal. The reader is referred to throughout as having one reaction to the text. There is no acknowledgment of the possibility, let alone the likelihood, of diverse, competing interpretations, reading “against the grain,” and so on, save for one or two points at which, as if in after- thought, Atkinson acknowledges that texts cannot totally “deter- mine” or ”compel” readers to read either how or what an author in- tends (pp. 2, 70).

This relative neglect, and certainly this reduction of readers’ roles, is surprising-particularly at a time when increasing attention is being given to the study of audiences generally and, in relation to texts, to the critical and constructive role of readers in particular. James Clif- ford, for instance, quoting Roland Barthes’ view that “a text’s unity lies not in its origin, but in its destination,” argues that ”the ability of a text to make sense in a coherent way depends less on the willed in- tentions of an originating author than on the creative activity of a reader” (1988:52). And he suggests that “it is intrinsic to the breakup of monological authority” (a breakup that comes with the realization that ethnography can no longer be seen as the monopoly of “certain western cultures and social classes”) that ”ethnographies no longer address a single general type of reader” (1988:52). Clifford goes on to consider, as Atkinson pointedly does not, the possibilities of “Trobri- and readers of Malinowski; Ndembe readers of Turner” (1988:52). Thus, taking seriously the possibilities of different readers and different readings against the grain of the text’s dominant voice, possibilities that eventuate from “the recent questioning of colonial styles of representation . . . [and] the expansion of literacy and ethnographic consciousness” (1988:53), Clifford goes on to make the important point that political and epistemological assumptions, which ethnographers are no longer able to ignore, are built into ways of writing.

But these are indeed precisely the kinds of assumptions Atkinson does ignore. In extensive excerpts from selected ethnographic ac-

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counts, he does a valuable service in explaining and illustrating how these textual strategies, literary figures, and tropes work-but to what end? Time and time again, it is rhetorical production of ”authenticity,” with its consequent “warranting” of the ”authority of the ethnographer,” that takes overwhelming precedence over any and all other purposes. As a result, much is lost, overlooked, glossed, eradicated- most notably, self-critical reflexivity, whether in respect of the field itself, of ethnographic texts, of the ethnographers whose work is exten- sively quoted and analyzed, or, most pointedly, of the analyst (Atkin- son) himself.

One begins to hope for this reflexivity when Atkinson introduces a chapter on “voices in the text” by observing that the complexity of ethnographic texts ”reflects commitments and tensions which derive from the ethnographer’s sociological and epistemological convictions” (p. 82). But, far from showing how readers and writers can explicate those commitments-thereby enabling the production and reception of critical ethnographies-Atkinson focuses, yet again, on how the writer persuades the reader of the authority of the account.

Atkinson draws our attention to the ways in which sociologists “ed- itorialize” by qualifying informants’ statements, but he says little about the ethical or epistemological problems inherent in so doing. He talks about the way authors use text shifts, “from the voice of the sociologist to the voice of the actor in the social scene, and back again” (p. 89). But his interest here is only in the ways such strategies ”help the readers to enter into the author’s argument” (p.90) or “provide a form of warrant or authenticity” (p. 93), which might otherwise be de- nied the sociologist. That this is his only interest here belies the sin- cerity of his inclusion of ”multiple perspectives,” “polyphony,” or “the voices of the other,” for the use of the informant’s voice is clearly not at all the same thing as the inclusion of the informant’s voice. In- deed, it is merely a thinly veiled exploitation of the informant, an exploitation that Atkinson observes and even names as such, but nowhere questions or criticizes.

A literary-critical deconstruction of sociological scholarship, pre- dictably enough, cries out for a literary-critical deconstruction of its own. It’s sorely tempting to think about the general shape such a ”reading” of The Ethnographic Imagination might look like in broad out- line. It might begin with Atkinson’s view of titles. Indicative of his concern with titles is the number of times Atkinson raises them (e.g., pp. 16,43,56,75-83,173). The definitive section is a consideration of what he calls “Ethnographic Entitlement.” He suggests that the positioning of paired phrases before and after a colon is of enough significance to develop categories for classifying the phrases-generic: topical; topical: generic; and on to a variety of ”binary oppositions” (p. 79). Atkin- son says his own title refers to “two classics of modern sociology: The Sociological lmagination (Mills 1959) and The Social Construction of Reality

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(Berger and Luckmann 1966),” and is intended to convey the degree to which the book is about other books (p. 3).

What we have in Atkinson’s particular title is a paradigmatic example of synecdoche, of taking a part for the whole, but not before a prior transformation: the reification of a vital field of diverse and often contesting people and practices (ethnographers and ethnographies) into the “thingness” of ”the imagination,” not even flesh-and-blood “imagining” let alone diverse “imaginings,” but an abstract universal two removes, as Plato would have put it, from “reality.” What we are given, then, is itself a rhetorical construction not of ethnography as a purposive intellectual engagement, but of the professional ethnographer whose archetypical ”imagination” is the heart and soul of this book but is here reified into the imagination, a heart and soul without flesh or blood.

Although this is undoubtedly not Atkinson’s intent, little reassur- ance of this is given by the book’s cover: an 1857 illustration of two aging, bespectacled white men in military garb, both with pipes, sur- veying together a field map of an imaginary city and its environs. They appear to be arguing, and what one is pointing to is not itself in the map, but is the written text beneath the map describing the events of the military campaign, the siege of the city of Olabolika. The eyes have it. And the suspicions that this initial spectacle arouses in the reader- that this is an “official story” of events in the field, although from one particular (and hegemonic) perspective, and at a great distance from the front-are never fully allayed.

A clear and ever-present danger of any text whose “resource and topic” is itself a corpus of disciplinary texts is the tendency to define and delimit, to erect a “canon” of sanctioned and authorized texts and approaches, and, accordingly of course, to censure, disregard, ex- clude, and omit. Accordingly, student readers can reliably turn to At- kinson for an explicitly articulated map of the terrain in question with no dearth of evaluations concerning canonical status. He doesn’t hes- itate to advise readers about which works are “classics of the genre,” which “not especially distinguished,” which “awkward, flat and fea- tureless,” which conform to “the normal canons of ethnographic writing,” and which are “required reading.”

“There is a modest limitation to this enterprise,” writes Atkinson (p. 3), and he goes on to emphasize that his is not intended to be a text- book of sociological research methods. Nor is it intended to be pre- scriptive or exhaustive, concerning itself with just one genre of sociological writing, the ethnography, and with “texts that reflect a diver- sity of subject-matter,” including “well-known and firmly established classics together with some less well-known ones, and refer[ring] to British and American authors” (p. 4). Atkinson’s focus is on urban sociology, particularly that stemming from the Chicago School, of whose origins he provides a brief but helpful account. He traces the emer-

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gence of qualitative sociology to the early work of ex-city journalist Robert Park, W. I. Thomas, Herbert Blumer, and other colleagues and students, explaining their focus on urban “underlife” and the overlap, both socially and professionally, between sociological and literary cir- cles from the very beginning of the tradition. Claiming an ”un- ashamedly eclectic approach’ to contemporary literary-critical analysis, Atkinson seeks, he says, “to avoid an excessively Philistine, em- piricist or commonsense perspective . . . to avoid the more scholastic debates and epistemological niceties. At the outset I confess a sympathy with the more ’domesticated’ versions of contemporary literary theory, often associated more with British exponents than with their more florid versions,” and he explains that he has ”little sympathy for the extremes of theoretical enthusiasm and disputation,” which seem, he says, “unduly obscurantist and convoluted” (p. 7). The point of this rather lengthy quotation is to provide a sense of Atkinson’s own style, which is both elegant and intelligent as well as opinionated, dis- missive, and imperialistic. Are we to dismiss others’ work as “obscurantist“ and ”florid,” and why? And what’s behind this rhetorical re- pudiation of “the extremes” in favor of, one assumes, the proper “cen- ter” for textual analyses of sociology? All we are told, by way of sub- stantive explanation, is that ”this book will be based on a number of general perspectives on sociology, but not tightly bound to any nar- row definition of its proper task and conduct” (p. 7).

This rather miserly explanation becomes a good deal more significant as the discussion proceeds to differentiate works whose qualities are primarily “literary” from works that are more recognizably “sociological.” But what makes a work more ”recognizably sociological”? Surely this is an important question when what is at stake is the very distinction itself. But all we are given as criteria are, first, generaliza- tion and, second, a relationship to “recognizably sociological or an- thropological concepts,” such as “rites of passage” (p. 70). Later in the text, Atkinson says that, ”sociologically speaking,” Willis’s (1977) privileging of the perspectives of his informants “is a major method- ological flaw” (p. 150). A first reaction to this criticism would be to re- call James Clifford’s (1988:40-41) point that someone’s voice is always privileged and inevitably so, but it’s usualEy the voice of the ethnographer; rather rarely, indeed, is it the voices of academically failing working-class teenage ”lads.” The further and more substantial question here is, of course, what is it to ”speak sociologically”? Again, there is very little help given for those who really want to take seriously the question of what distinguishes the sociological from the literary, with which it is so closely interwoven, as indeed it is the primary purpose of this book to make clear. All we get by way of subse- quent explanation of “the sociological” is that ”the reading of sociological texts as sociological” means reading such texts “for evidence of cultural themes, social problems, or whatever” (p. 151). This is not a lot to go on.

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It is, of course, terribly unfair to indict an author for failing to write a book he never intended to write, all the while ignoring the value and importance of the one he did write. So it needs to be said again how useful a contribution to scholarship this book is, how helpful and in- formative, both about the texts it analyzes and the analyses to which it introduces the reader. After all, Atkinson is quite clear about what his own purposes are, as he is clear about their limits:

It must be said at the outset that such an exercise is not intended to remedy shortcomings or to propose wholesale changes. An awareness of conven- tion does allow us to consider alternatives and how things might be otherwise. . . . The prime purpose of this work is interpretive rather than normative. . . . I am concerned primarily with the discovery of sociologists’ methods for doing sociology rather than trying to prescribe these or other methods.” [p. 91

And yet, it seems puzzling, even somehow contradictory, to pron- ounce that one’s aim is merely descriptive, not normative, and at the same time to devote such intellectual energy to establishing the prop- osition that there is no neutral language of description.

Perhaps, indeed, it is we readers, diverse as we may be, who are finally responsible for making both the sense and the nonsense that we find in the texts we read. So perhaps it is, finally, only because we invest the perspective Atkinson discusses with so much promise, so much importance, that it issues, for us, in such intense frustration, in so much disappointment. For our sense is here of lost opportunities, of missed chances to do so much more, to see further, to do, in short, so much better than we have hitherto done, both as writers and as readers of the human sciences. And it then seems somehow culpable for Atkinson not to have taken us this distance, to have done so little with such powerful tools, especially at a time when profoundly dis- turbing and difficult questions are being raised in other works about the very possibility of ethnography, questions about both the ethics and the epistemology of “representing” the ”other,” questions about why, and for whom, this is done, about whether ethnography can ever be more than just a ”dream of the imagination.”

When all that Atkinson seems finally concerned with is how the sociologist deploys rhetorical resources to “warrant” and “authorize” accounts as ”true,” without once raising questions about whether or not such accounts ever can be ”true,” we read this work, with all its critical potential, as a conservative, even a reactionary, text. It functions, finally, to domesticate and to de-fuse potentially powerful insights by containing them, uncritically, within a particular tradition, passed off, Raymond Williams (1977) reminds us, as the tradition. The selective representation of contemporary critical ethnographic practices thereby enabled becomes a representation within which truth and truthfulness remain subservient to the effectiveness of conven-

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tions, a representation that functions in turn to pre-constrain and limit the possible futures into which these insights might otherwise lead us.

References Cited Bakhtin, M. M.

1981 The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Michael Holquist, ed. Austin: University of Texas Press.

1988 The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Lit- Clifford, James

erature, and Art. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press. Clifford, James, and George Marcus, eds.

1986 Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Nelson, John S., Allan Megill, and Donald N. McCloskey, eds. 1987 The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences: Language and Argument in

Scholarship and Public Affairs. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

1974 The Social Construction of Documentary Reality. Sociological Inquiry Smith, Dorothy

44(4):257-268. Suttles, G. D.

Walker, John 1968 The Social Order of the Slum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

1987 A Narrative Critique of Practical Texts in Education. Master’s thesis, Simon Fraser University.

White, Hayden

Press. 1978 Tropics of Discourse. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University

Williams, Raymond

Willis, Paul 1977 Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

1977 Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. New York: Columbia University Press.

The Ethnographic Imagination: Textual Constructions of Reality

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