.
official ‘rankings’ and hierarchies of linguistic varieties.
Object-level (the ‘acts’ themselves) and metalevel (ideas and interpretations of these acts) cannot be separated in ethnography, for the social value of language is an intrinsic and constituent part of language usage itself; that is, in every act of language people inscribe and mark the social situatedness of these acts and so offer patterns of interpretation to the others. These patterns of interpretation are never fixed, of course, but require acknowledgement and interactional co-construction. So here also, strict synchronicity is impossible, for there is both a processual and a historical dimension to every act of language-in-society (Silverstein & Urban, 1996), and the rankings and hierarchies of language are themselves an area of perpetual debate and conflict (Blommaert, 1999). The social dimension of language is precisely the blending of linguistic and metalinguistic levels in communication: actions proceed with an awareness of how these actions should proceed and can proceed in specific social environments. And to be clear about this point, this means that every language act is intrinsically historical.
This brings us to the epistemological level of ethnography. Knowledge of language facts is processual and historical knowledge, lifting single instances of talk to a level of relevance far higher than just the event. They become indexical of patterns and developments of wider scope and significance, and these wider dimensions are part of ethnographic interpretation. Static interpretations of context – ‘setting’, ‘speech community’ and so forth – are anathema and to the extent that they occur in ethnographic writing they should be seen as either a rhetorical reduction strategy or worse, as a falsification of the ethnographic endeavour (Fabian, 1983, 1995). Fabian stresses the dynamic process of knowledge gathering in ethnography, emphasising the fact that ethnographic work also involves active – very active – involvement from the ethnographer himself (a fact known from the days of Malinowski and emphasised, for example, by Edmund Leach, but often overlooked). This provides ethnography with a peculiar, dynamic and dialectical epistemology in which the ignorance of the knower – the ethnographer – is a crucial point of departure (Fabian, 1995). Consequently, ethnography attributes (and has to attribute) great importance to the history of what is commonly seen as ‘data’: the whole process of gathering and moulding knowledge is part of that knowledge; knowledge construction is knowledge, the process is the product (see Blommaert, 2001, 2004; Ochs, 1979). This is why we will emphasise an often overlooked function of fieldwork in the remainder of this book: the fact that fieldwork results in an archive of research, which documents the researcher’s own journey through knowledge.
Summarising, language in ethnography is something very different from what it is in many other branches of the languages sciences, and so is the status of gathering knowledge. There is no way in which knowledge of language can be separated from the situatedness of the object at a variety of levels, ranging from microscopic to macroscopic levels of ‘context’ and involving, reflexively, the acts of knowledge production by ethnographers themselves.
Ethnography as Counter-hegemony
Walter Benjamin once wrote that the task of historians was to challenge established and commonly accepted representations of history. History, in his view, was necessarily critical and counter-hegemonic, and a science such as history only had a raison d’être to the extent that it performed this role of challenging hegemonies. Exactly the same suggestion can be made with respect to ethnography: it has the potential and the capacity of challenging established views, not only of language but of symbolic capital in societies in general. It is capable of constructing a discourse on social uses of language and social dimensions of meaningful behaviour which differs strongly from established norms and expectations, indeed takes the concrete functioning of these norms and expectations as starting points for questioning them, in other words, it takes them as problems rather than as facts. Central to all of this is the mapping of resources onto functions: the way, for instance, in which a standard variety of a language acquires the function of ‘medium of education’ while a non-standard variety would not. This mapping is socially controlled; it is not a feature of language but one of society. Ethnography becomes critique here: the attributed function of particular resources is often a kind of social imagination, a percolation of social structure into language structure. Ethnography deconstructs this imagination and compares it to observable real forms and functions. It is thus, of necessity, a critical enterprise.
It is also critical in another sense. Whereas in most other approaches, the target of scientific method is simplification and reduction of complexity, the target in ethnography is precisely the opposite. Reality is kaleidoscopic, complex and complicated, often a patchwork of overlapping activities. Compare it to a soccer game. Usually, when we watch a soccer game on TV, we are focused on the movement of the ball and on a limited number of players in the area where the ball is. We rarely see all 22 players in the same shot on TV: the lens directs our attention to a subset of the space, the actors and activities. What we miss is the movement of the other players, the way they position themselves in anticipation of what comes next; we also miss the directions they give to one another, by shouting, pointing, pulling faces or making specific gestures. The 22 players perform all sorts of activities simultaneously: while an attacker moves forward with the ball, a winger may run into a favourable position for a particular set-piece play; the central defender can urge his co-defenders to move forward so as to close the gap between forwards and defenders and reduce the space for the opponents when they launch a counter-attack; a midfielder may simultaneously move down to fill in the space left by an attacking defender. And another midfielder may move a bit closer to an attacker from the other side, so as to curtail the latter’s opportunities for movement when a counter-attack is launched; he might beckon a fellow midfielder to close the gap he’s left by marking the attacker. All the players are constantly monitoring each other, and the coach does the same, shouting instructions to players from the sideline whenever he spots a potential problem. All of this happens at the same time, it is a series of seemingly unrelated – but obviously related – activities, very hard to describe in a linear and coherent narrative because as an activity it is not linear and coherent but multiple, layered, chequered and unstable.
A full account of a soccer game should include all of that, for all of it is essential in understanding what happens during the game. Players usually do not arrive at particular positions by accident or luck; they are there because of the complex interlocking activities that produce the game. Ethnography tries to do just that: describe the apparently messy and complex activities that make up social action, not to reduce their complexity but to describe and explain it.7 This is what makes ethnography a demanding approach: it is not enough (not by a very long shot) to follow a clear, pre-set line of inquiry and the researcher cannot come thundering in with pre-established truths. The procedure is what Hymes (1980: 89) calls ‘democratic’: ‘a mutual relation of interaction and adaptation’ between ethnographers and the people they work with, ‘a relation that will change both’. That too is counter-hegemonic.
We now come to a tricky issue, one that has plagued many researchers facing supervisors and colleagues steeped in a more positivistic tradition of science: representativeness. What exactly do ethnographic data reveal? What sort of relevance do they have for ‘society’? How confidently can you make generalisations from your data?
A first and elementary point is this. Ethnography is an inductive science, that is: it works from empirical evidence towards theory, not the other way around. This has been mentioned several times already: you follow the data, and the data suggest particular theoretical issues. Ethnography, thus, belongs to a range of other scientific disciplines in which induction rather than deduction is the rule – history, law and archaeology are close neighbours. Inductive sciences usually apply what is called the case method: a methodology in which one uses case analyses to demonstrate theory. In the words of Lee Shulman (1986: 11):
A case, properly understood, is not simply the report of an event or incident. To call something a case is to make a theoretical claim – to argue that