Writing the New Ethnography
H.L. Goodall, Jr.
Writing Ethnography is the material, textual manifestation of a long and complex process of my becoming a writer, a process I am still actively engaged in. Its ethnographic slant has been fashioned by a way of working, a way of entering the world everyday, which privileges asking questions about Others in cultural contexts constructed and understood by a self whose presence is very much in the text. Dan Rose calls this process "living the ethnographic life" (1990), but mostly I just think of it as becoming who I am.
For me, ethnographic fieldwork and the writing that comes of it is less a formal method of inquiry than it is a disciplined attitude and conversational style that I have learned to make into a way of life. In this way, I am fortunate. Universities have paid me to live this way. Many colleagues and students, and in some cases the public, have read and responded passionately to my writing. I have had the personal satisfaction of having "been there" at the front of the interpretive turn in Communication Studies, and now have fine memories of the persons and conversations that made that turn possible. But I don't kid myself. Mine has been a life enriched and rewarded by doing those things I probably would have done anyway. If not in academe, then as an investigative reporter. If not as an investigative reporter, then maybe as a novelist. If not as a novelist, then probably as just another guy somewhere, scribbling a diary or journal that one day he hoped to turn into a book about the times he has lived through, the things he has experienced and witnessed, the people he has loved. In many ways, I've just been lucky to be an academic, to have come into the field at a time when the sort of writing I wanted to do was emerging as a method of inquiry. And in other ways, "lucky" is a word that others apply to me because they only see the work that turned out well. They don't see the mistakes, the failures, the projects that still are incomplete, the articles and books that were rejected.
I don't think I consciously "decided" to live and write this way. I'm not sure anyone does. To become a writer in a genre called ethnography is a choice that more accurately finds you, then defines you. You may want to be a writer. But you have to find something worth writing about. You have to acquire an ability to write about it, which usually means studying the texts, the styles, the heroes and heroines that came before you. You have to practice your art, as does any other artist, which, in my view, means you dedicate at least a part of each day of your entire life to nothing else. While this personal struggle to find your voice and to say something meaningful is going on, you have to learn to take criticism. You have to learn to listen to all of it, respond to some of it, and ignore some of it. You have to cultivate an audience for your writing. You have to go to many places, talk to many people, market your work much as any other hawker of commercial goods does, sell yourself and your work as commodities.
You have to do all of these things and live with yourself.
Live with yourself in a context of others.