VI. Representation

Point to ponder:
Witchdoctor: “Mr. Locke. There are perfectly satisfactory answers to all your questions. But I don’t think you understand how little you can learn from them. Your questions are much more revealing about yourself than my answer would be about me.”
• Why does the witchdoctor turn the gaze towards the reporter?

Kevin Dwyer locates ethnography in a process of dialogue in which interlocutors actively negotiate a shared vision of reality –with sometimes unpleasant results on the side of the participating ethnographer:

• (Dwyer): “To your mind, what is the most important subject that we talk about?”
• (Faqir): “I’m not concerned with a single one of your questions […]. I know these questions serve your purposes, not mine.”
• (Dwyer): “Well, what would you like to ask me about?”
• (Faqir): “It doesn’t matter to me, you could even ask me about snakes.” _{(Dwyer 1982, S. 225–226)}

Good read:

• Dwyer, K.1979. The Dialogic of Ethnology. Dialectical Anthropology, 4(3), 205-224. [in his “Moroccan Dialogues” the chapters are composed in form of a dialogue…]

• The power of personal experience in the field (“the witness”: “I saw it with my own eyes!”)
• The ability to interpret (“the interpreter”)
• The textual authority over research participants and recipients (“the writer”)
• “Ethnographic work has indeed been enmeshed in a world of enduring and changing power inequalities, and it continues to be implicated. It enacts power relations. But its function within these relations is complex, often ambivalent, potentially counterhegemonic.” _{(James Clifford 1986:9)}

Point to ponder: Take a close look at the cover photo of “Writing Culture” (on the left): what does the scene tell us about the relationship between field researcher and research participant?

Giving ‘Voice’
[..] what obligation do we have to ensure that we give voice to the people we work with. How can we ensure we do not co-opt their story?

• “[..]Brainstorm ways to make sure the voice of the participants is heard.
• One of the most obvious is to include direct quotes,but be sure to consider how easily these can be manipulated if you pick and choose according to your own agenda rather than theirs.
• [..]include your participants in the process of writing and revising. You could show drafts of your work to them and ask for input.” _{[PERCS 2018; Section29]}

Another way of escaping the “[..] ethical issue of representing, speaking for, or appropriating the voice of others”, would be to use the method of collaborative autoethnography. _{[Lapadat 2017:589; cf. also Ellis et al. 2011]}

• [..] a multivocal approach in which two or more researchers work together to share personal stories and interpret the pooled autoethnographicdata[..]a shift from individual to collective agency, thereby offering a path toward personally engaging, nonexploitative, accessible researchthat makes a difference.”, as Judity Lapadat stated recently in an article on the ethics of autoethnography _{[Lapadat 2017:589]}

• Steven Tyler (Post-Modern Ethnography): “We better understand the ethnographic context as one of cooperative story making which, in one of its ideal forms, would result in a polyphonic text, none of whose participants would have the final word in the form of a framing story or encompassing synthesis -a discourse on the discourse.” (Tyler 1986: 126).
• Manjep/Bulmer Writing with equal rights: the respective contributions of ethnographer Ralph Bulmer and his New Guinean interlocutor Ian Saem Majnep are represented by different fonts (see photo on the left).

Point to ponder:
• At the time of writing, representations become controlled by the author, whose voice is privileged _{(Wright and Nelson 1995: 150).}
• They pass over into the property of the Western world, becoming part of their ‘truth regimes’ _{(Foucault 1980)} or ‘world ordering knowledge’ _{(Hobart 1993).}
• But ‘does the anthropologist need to be an author?’ ‘Can’t there simply be a dialogue where the erstwhile objects become subjects and anthropologists follow the leads given by them’ _{(Jain 2000: 1)}?
• Do you know of empirical examples where this decolonizing claim was taken seriously:
• -> in ethnographic fieldwork?
• -> in ethnographic writing?

• In collaborative North-South projects “..different layers of collaboration exist that implicitly confirm underlying logics of knowledge production,” as Vlassenroet (2020) states in the Bukavu series, a blog that seeks to give space to invisible voices in the production of knowledge.
• Despite a more and more prevailing participatory paradigm “[..] research agendas and guiding conceptual frameworks are usually still developed by a core group of researchers (in most cases based in the North) and taken as given by the rest of the research team (in most cases but not exclusively based in the South” _{(Vlassenroet 2020)}

Who could be called a ‘decolonial person’?:

• “Muhammad Ali. Recall his comments when American journalists asked him why he refuses to join the army for the war in Vietnam. He answers: ‘No Viet-Cong has ever called me a nigger’. [..]
• My mother. The other day, I was reading some articles on the Internet, and she was looking at me. I told her: ‘It’s too bad that you can’t read French, you could have read like me.’ She sadly answered: ‘No, what I regret is that I can’t read Arabic. I could have read the Qur’an.’ My mother (and I’m more than a bit proud) is decolonial.” _{(Houria Bouteldja, in: Decolonizing Europe).}

To work against the scientific principle of the ‘privilege of the last word’, the authors of the Charter of Decolonial Research Ethics call for a tripartite peer review process:

• “[..]the first peer-review is made by the decolonial movements with whom the researcher has aligned herself.
• The second peer-review is the ‘traditional’ one that takes place with other academic peers.
• In cases where substantial changes have been made to the original manuscript [..], there is a third process of peer review inasmuch the text must be approved once more by the decolonial movements before being sent to publication.” _{(Decoloniality Europe. 2013).}

Visual artist Rebecca Sakoun, in a workshop discussion on ‘undisciplined’ ethics, emphasizes that artists/authors can sometimes ‘lose control’ of their images:

• “Even photographs made in the most respectful of circumstances can be appropriated or used in vastly different contexts, to express very different ideas (or critiques).
• Images can surpass authorial intent, change, or move between categories.
• Copyright can be difficult and extremely expensive to protect, claims of ownership are not always upheld, and more and more images circulate and are ‘recycled’ in new and unprecedented ways.” _{[Sakounin Göttkeet al. 2019]}

• Various ethical issues (like “meeting audiences’ expectations, embarrassing revelations, participants changing their minds after the study,… : see left side)
• and practical tips when making your work public can be found in the Online-Module:
• “The Ethics of Fieldwork, edited by the “Program for Ethnographic Research & Community Studies” (PERCS) at ELON University, North Carolina
• at PERCS’ Website: _{https://www.elon.edu/u/academics/percs/resources/ethics/communication/}

Tip:
Points for consideration when assigning authorship, acknowledging contributors, reporting to interlocutors, and negotiating the publication of research results – tailored to the cultures and societies of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples – can also be found in the guide to applying the AIATSIS Code of Ethics 2020, Chapter 3.