On Critical Ethnographic Work

Author(s): Roger I. Simon and Donald Dippo

Source: Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Dec., 1986), pp. 195-202
Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
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On Critical Ethnographic Work
ROGERI. SIMON DONALD DIPPO
OntarioInstitute Consultant
for Studies in Education

This article provides an introduction to critical ethnographicwork. Critical

ethnographyis understoodas a form of knowledgeproductionwhich supports
transformativeas well as interpretiveconcerns. Threefundamentalconditions
for ethnographicwork are discussed: (1) a particular "problematic"that de-
fines data and analytic proceduresin a way consistent with one's pedagogicall
politicalproject:(2) the engagementof such work within a public sphere that
allows it to becomea starting point for social critiqueand transformation;and
(3) the inclusion of a reflexive inquiry which would identify the limits of its
own knowledgeclaims. METHODS, CRITICALETHNOGRAPHY

But is it ethnography? As we have talked about our "critical ethno-

graphic work" to a variety of academic audiences, inevitably we have
been asked this question. The following is an attempt to develop a con-
cise answer and to provide a basis for defining the particular features
of a criticalethnography.
When we speak of ethnography we reference more than a particular
research method. Because all methods are ways of asking questions
which presume an underlying set of assumptions, a structure of rele-
vance, and a form of rationality, to understand what is meant by the
term ethnographyone must avoid thinking merely in terms of decon-
textualized techniques. To actually do ethnography is to engage in a
process of knowledge production. Like all other productive processes,
ethnography is organized toward the accomplishment of a product. In
this case, the product is a kind of knowledge that centers on and
makes "topical" both the actual practices and points of view of people
within an organized set of social relations. Although this is the struc-
turing problematic sometimes given as a way of explaining what it is
that is addressed by conventional ethnography, it is an incomplete
and inadequate explanation as long as it fails to specify the particular
way practices and points of view are to be made topical.
This article is a brief sketch of one way of specifying how the actual
social practices and points of view of people may be made topical. It is
what we call critical ethnographic work. A more extended discussion
of this concept would include examples and illustrations from our own
and other's concrete research. Indeed, any discussion of method is

Roger I. Simon teaches and does research at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Edu-
cation. Donald Dippo is currently an independent consultant in the area of work edu-
cation. He was formerly a research officer at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Educa-
tion.
196 & EducationQuarterly
Anthropology Volume 17, 1986

inevitably incomplete without a consideration of specifics. Yet we

have become convinced that there is a need for short conceptual dis-
cussions on issues relevant to ethnographic inquiry. This article is
written as an effort to introduce in schematic fashion the idea of critical
ethnographic work to an audience of educators and researchers inter-
ested in cultural analysis.
We begin our explanation of the practice of "critical ethnography"
with an elaboration of its basic project. We use the term "project" in
the particular sense in which it was discussed by Sartre (1963), as an
activity determined both by real and present conditions, and certain
conditions still to come which it is trying to bring into being. This proj-
ect is in part defined through our interest in how people are implicated
in the regulation and alteration of the terms of how they live together
and how they define what is possible and desirable for themselves and
others. As the notion of project suggests, this is neither a neutral nor
arbitrary interest. Rather, it is an interest organized by a standpoint
which implicates us in moral questions about desirable forms of social
relations and ways of living. Thus the interest that defines critical eth-
nographic work is both pedagogical and political. It is linked to our
assessment of our own society as inequitably structured and domi-
nated by a hegemonic culture that supresses a consideration and un-
derstanding of why things are the way they are and what must be
done for things to be otherwise.
It is as educators that we define our critical ethnographic project. It
is structured in relation to our efforts to construct a mode of learning
and a conception of knowledge that may enhance the possibility of
collectively constituted thought and action which seeks to transform
the relations of power that constrict people's lives (Simon 1983; Lerner
1986). The intent is to make it possible for people to be more so that
they may have more (Corrigan 1986). It is a position which intention-
ally appropriates and reconstructs a "method" in the service of a dis-
tinct form of cultural politics.
We recognize that left vague and unspecified, these intentions be-
come rhetorical abstractions. However, in this short article, we simply
mean to stress that ethnographic inquiry has to be concretely under-
stood as an interrelated set of concepts and research practices con-
structed for the purpose of producing a particulararticulationof knowl-
edge. For us, a critical ethnography requires that this particular artic-
ulation be accountable to the pedagogical/political project specified
above. We view all modes of knowing and all particular knowledge
forms as ideological, hence the issue is not whether one is "biased";
but rather, whose interests are served by one's work.
The importance of our "project" is decisive in that it both becomes
a source of criteria for investigative adequacy and a frame for the ideas,
questions, and procedures that specify how ethnography becomes a
productive apparatus. How ethnographic inquiry is organized, con-
stituted, and accomplished will, to a large degree, determine the form
and substance of the claims one is able to make about specific ordered
Simon & Dippo On CriticalEthnographic
Work 197

practices and social forms. Thus to clarify what it means to do critical

ethnographic work we must now move to a different level of discourse
that concerns the content and status of such work.
For ethnographic work to warrant the label "critical" requires that it
meet three fundamental conditions: (1) the work must employ an or-
ganizing problematic that defines one's data and analytical procedures
in a way consistent with its project; (2) the work must be situated, in
part, within a public sphere that allows it to become the starting point
for the critique and transformation of the conditions of oppressive and
inequitable moral and social regulation; and (3) the work must address
the limits of its own claims by a consideration of how, as a form of
social practice, it too is constituted and regulated through historical
relations of power and existing material conditions.

The Problematic of Critical Ethnographic Work

The work of critical ethnography requires a problematic that is in-
tended to reveal social practices as produced and regulated forms of
action and meaning (Connell 1983). By problematic we mean a partic-
ular structure of concepts which make it possible to pose some kinds
of questions while simultaneously supressing the possibility of posing
others. As such it defines the field of the visible as well as the bound-
ary of the invisible, revealing the foundation on which relations and
events are judged as important or unimportant. For us a problematic
that reveals social practices as produced and regulated forms of action
and meaning begins with a focus on ordered sets of social practices;
what a particular group of people, concretely situated in time and
space, constitute as their pattern of everyday life. Furthermore, such
a problematic also must specify an investigation of the character and
basis of such practices as particular ways of embodying and enacting
historically structured social forms that organize, regulate, and legiti-
mate specific ways of being, communicating, and acting. By social
practices we are referring here to how people are, and what they say
and do (somatically, linguistically, and motorically). The focus on sets
of practices as recursivelyaccomplishingand regulatingforms is pivotal to
a critical problematic. It provides the conceptual link between a con-
cern with experience and subjectivity and the structurally sedimented
relations of power that mark the terrain of our social formation (Simon
1986).
Power operates not just on people but through them. Power rela-
tions are those that structure how everyday life will be lived; that
structure how forms are produced and reproduced to limit and con-
strain, as well as contest and redefine what one is able to be (Gramsci
1971). Within one's social stock of knowledge, what is legitimated and
available in the way of particular practices in the domains of body, lan-
guage, and activity is not arbitrary. A critical ethnography must con-
tend with the task of understanding, materially and historically, this
nonarbitrary specificity. The emphasis on history and materiality is re-
198 & EducationQuarterly
Anthropology Volume 17, 1986

quired, for while the production and reproduction of social forms is a

result of what people do, it can never be understood in terms of what
they intend. Furthermore, locating the specificity of social practices is
central to understanding how oppressive relations "work" (how they
happen). The practices available to us very much limit both what we
can do and how we make sense of our engagements with the people
and things around us.
For these reasons, we are required to historicize the practices and
forms we study. Our project requires that we subvert a view which
constitutes existing forms of social life and social consciousness as ob-
vious, natural, and taken for granted. We need to comprehend how
the limits we all live within are historical limits. Thus in our form of
ethnographic work, history is not to be relegated to the collection of
"background data," but rather becomes an integral part of the expla-
nation of the regularities explored in any specific analysis. To histori-
cize within ethnographic work is to show the conditions of possibility
of a definite set of social forms and thus simultaneously establish the
historical limits of their existence.
There is, of course, a far more detailed set of issues to be discussed
regarding the necessary problematic for a critical ethnographic in-
quiry. Minimally, this agenda includes the formulation of a concept of
culture that incorporates questions of power and the dialectical con-
struction of meaning, a conception of ideology that includes its in-
scription in concrete practices, and the related view that practices do
signify meanings and hence are the fundamental structures through
which multiple and contradictory positions are constituted within
subjectivity (Henriques et al. 1984). However, as we said earlier, the
point here is not to give a full theoretical accounting of the required
framework but simply to sketch the outlines of the analytical orienta-
tion that makes an ethnographic work "critical."
It may be noted that we have said nothing here about the impor-
tance or priority of qualitative data. To argue for such a position be-
cause such data provide "an understanding of a way of life from par-
ticipants' point of view" misses the point. Qualitative data are impor-
tant not for this reason but because they provide access to the practices
(the words, the actions, the personally appropriated signs that mark
one's place in social space) of social actors. But furthermore, this meth-
odological emphasis does not preclude the importance of quantitative
data as a way of both indexing practices and characterizing the distri-
bution and extent of particular material circumstances. The prerequi-
sites of a critical ethnography do not exclude quantification.

Critique and Transformation Within the Public Sphere

The pedagogical/political project of critical ethnographic work re-
quires efforts to foster the critique and transformation of unjust and
disabling forms of moral regulation and material distribution. Thus
such issues as how one should formulate and communicate the anal-
Simon & Dippo On CriticalEthnographic
Work 199

yses and conclusions of an inquiry are integral to our conception of

such work.
This is neither a paean to "social relevance" nor a self-righteous
stand against writing and speaking to a scholarly circle. The issues
here are far more difficult and complex than reducing the problem to
one of identifying and addressing multiple audiences. Critical ethno-
graphic work requires entering the public sphere. Such a sphere is the
place of public critique of social practice which leads people to an un-
derstanding of the grounds of their own actions in the historically and
socially situated context of their lives (Giroux 1983). Within this
sphere, issues concerning the moral quality of our social order are de-
fined, and transformative projects articulated. But it is the nature of
this entry that is in question: how can it be done without implicating
ourselves in the very hegemonic processes that are the object of the
critique implied in our work?
Our intent in raising this concern is to put on the agenda of ethno-
graphic inquiry the exploration of ways of enabling those who engage
our work (in its textual form, in its oral form, and in its appearance in
suggestions for alternative social practices) to appropriate it as a re-
source for examining the constraints on the authorship of their lives
and the lives of those with whom they live and work. It is not always
obvious how research might be "taken up" in such a manner (for an
excellent example of an accessible form that has been "taken up" in
this way see Connell, Ashenden, et al. 1982). In our society, intellec-
tual scholarly work is rapidly becoming a commodity to be consumed
in the service of promoting and legitimating particular interests. We
often meet a view of research which cedes it legitimation and status
through the formal credentials of its authors while still remaining a
somewhat mystifying procedure. It is seen as an apparatus that sup-
plies authoritative knowledge claims that are either to be embraced
with the warmth of a newfound ally or rejected with the vehemence
of one whose interests are about to be threatened. Neither of these
types of responses are acceptable, for they are passive forms of en-
gagement.
The ideal "audience" for our work is not composed of isolated, pas-
sive consumers of social spectacle. They exist as a collective-people
brought together by the experience of lived contradictions and desir-
ing a mutual examination of the fabric of social relations of which they
are a part and a sense of what they might do to enhance the range of
possibilities in their lives. Such a group would be in a position to use
ethnographic work as a resource, critically appropriating aspects of
the work for their ability to clarify the basis of everyday life and the
possibilities for its transformation.
But in our society such an "audience" is rare; when it does exist it is
often only a very temporary existence. This is because we commonly
experience our inner and outer worlds as radically and inexorably sev-
ered from each other (Kovel 1981). Our experience of "self" is as an
isolated entity, defining our uniqueness in the very suppression of our
200 & EducationQuarterly
Anthropology Volume 17, 1986

ties to others and the shared material conditions which others have
determined for us. Mutuality is then based on the perceived interest
of the "self" at a particular moment. Ethnographic work that is rooted
in a materialist problematic unavoidably must challenge these familiar
assumptions and ideas. The work must find ways of communicating
that do not simply reaffirm old "ways of seeing"; it must challenge the
very foundations of our experience of ourselves yet be understandable
and sensible. This is the dilemma of any form of radical thought. We
cannot simply reproduce accounts of social life that draw their validity
from the fact that they "ring true" or "tell it like it is." Yet to challenge
familiar assumptions and values through a discourse which, to be
understood, is compelled to reproduce in its very content and orga-
nization the assumptions and values of the discourse itself, presents
enormous difficulty. This is the heritage of the avant-garde. To chal-
lenge common sense is at times to challenge the syntax and semantics
of common sense, remembering when we do we always run the risk
of speaking to ourselves.

Reflexive Considerations
The third fundamental condition that must be met by critical eth-
nographic work is that it must reflexively address its own situated
character. This means that we must acknowledge that the knowledge
we produce is inevitably limited by our own histories and the institu-
tional forms within which we work. This is again not simply an ad-
mission of inevitable "bias." Rather, it is raised to justify the third cen-
tral feature of critical ethnographic work, a commitment to study the
character and bases of one's own work practices and their relation to
the knowledge such practices produce. This is not a narcissistic turn,
but rather a fundamental questioning of how the structured relations
within which we live are implicated in the constitution of knowledge
we put forward. It is a call for the development of a political economy
of social research as well as a collective attempt to negate and trans-
form the institutional forms that regulate and shape what will be pro-
duced as knowledge of our social world.
The dimensions of this difficult task are multiple. While the follow-
ing is not an exhaustive list, it does illustrate the range of concerns
subsumed under reflexive considerations.

1. We must come to grips with the recognition that most ethno-

graphic data is "produced" and not "found." In our research
work we engage in considerable social interaction with those
whom our data reference. We need to recognize our own impli-
cation in the production of data and thus must begin to include
ourselves (our own practices and their social and historical basis)
in our analyses of the situations we study.
2. We need to redefine empathy to include the recognition of what
historical and structural differences limit one's understanding of
Simon & Dippo Work
On CriticalEthnographic 201

others. Every particular study needs to be located at its vantage

point; a point defined by the resources (the habitus-see Bour-
dieu 1977) for interpretive work that specific researchers bring to
their hermeneutic efforts.
3. We should turn to a consideration of how the discourse we use
to talk with others and through which we write and think, silences
as well as articulates. This is especially important for us white
males who have long acquired the cultural capital of those who
control our institutions. At times we have a tendency to univer-
salize our discourse, forgetting its regulatory impact.
4. We must face up to the implications of the petit-bourgeois loca-
tion of academic work situated in a university economy that
structures our personal desires, frustrations, and assumptions
(Giroux and Simon 1984). Our location does influence our posi-
tion relative to issues such as how should a research team work
together (or should there be collective work at all); what forms of
authority will apply in the work process, whose work is it, etc.?
5. We must begin the difficult task of convincing our colleagues,
students, and those who fund our work that a significant allo-
cation of time and money for reflexive study is an important and
worthy priority. Reflexive inquiry will remain rhetoric unless a
commitment of material resources can be made; too often when
resources are scarce it is the first research objective to be aban-
doned.
To summarize our position, ethnography as a general term refers to
a range of possible procedures for structuring one's experience of a
social situation and transforming that experience into a systematic ac-
count which renders the social practices of the situation into patterns
through which social forms are constructed and maintained. Critical
ethnographic work transforms this general procedure into a particular
one by supplying it with additional perspectives, principally historical
and structural, that alter the ethnographic project toward one which
supports an emancipatory as well as a hermeneutic concern (Haber-
mas 1971). This makes it a procedure with a pedagogical and political
interest. However, as Walter Benjamin (1978) argued some fifty years
ago, "there is a decisive difference between the mere supplying of a
productive apparatus and its transformation." Supplying a "produc-
tive apparatus without changing it, is a very questionable activ-
ity ... even if the material with which it is supplied seems to be of a
revolutionary nature." If we want to avoid yet new forms of cultural
imperialism, we will have to redefine our work both in its substance
and form. When we do this will it still be "ethnography?" Will it mat-
ter if it's not?
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