Discourse and power: On the limits of ethnographic texts

Abstract

"language is . .. the institutionalization of subjectivity" An interest in the making of ethnographic texts the rhetorical conventions of how anthropologists convey their material and establish their authority ? has become a thriving cottage industry in certain quarters of anthropology in recent years [1]. These attempts have varied from unpretentious and highly successful attempts at integrating other voices, photographs and a certain ethnographic humility into a basically stan? dard ethnographic presentation [2], to more ambitious programmatic calls, heavily influ? enced by deconstructive practices, which seek (or so they proclaim) truly radical recasting of ethnographic writing. We already have several influential overviews of this material [3]. What I intend to do here, is to begin from the given (although hardly widely recognized) that ethnographic texts are in? deed texts, and to question some of the critical claims made for this insight. Barthes asks: Who speaks? Who writes? To answer this question adequately we would need a sociology of language. Barthes gives us only a semiotics. But semiotics provides us with commonplaces and commonplaces, as any student of rhetoric who has read her Cicerco knows, are necessary to advance any and all arguments. During the sixteenth to the nineteenth century (Barthes calls this the "entire classical, capitalist period", dem? onstrating his disinterest in sociology) the person who wrote was the author. The liter? ary profession (with its rigid rules of use, genre and composition) sanctioned, protected and surveilled by state institutions, was charg? ed with the production of language. The writer, Barthes tells us, emerged during the time of the Revolution, when language was seized, and used for political ends. Barthes should have added that the Academie Fran caise has always used language for political ends [4]. Perhaps Barthes means by polit? ical the self-conscious use of language in ex? plicitly instrumental ways. The replacement of the "author" by the "writer" was a slow process. Although the revolutionaries began the process of turning language into a trans? parent instrumentality, revolutionary orators still employed the Classical rhetorical embel? lishments and perorations. Only with the emergence of modern intellectuals, during the Zola affair, did this historical transition finally establish a new place and a new use for language. "The writer ... is a transitive man, he posits a goal (to give evidence, to explain, to instruct), of which language is only a means; for him language supports a praxis, it does not constitute one. Thus lan? guage is restored to the nature of an instru? ment .of communication, a vehicle of "thought." Even if the writer pays some at Paul Rabinow is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.