Atkinson et al.

ETHNOGRAPHY: ETHNOGRAPHY OCTOBER JOURNAL OF /CONTEMPORARY POST, PAST, AND/PRESENT 1999

ETHNOGRAPHY
Post, Past, and Present PAUL ATKINSON AMANDA COFFEY SARA DELAMONT NEITHER A FIN DE SICLE SENSE OF ENDINGS nor a millenarian aspiration for new beginnings should blind us to the strong continuities in ethnographic research; nor should we ascribe too great a degree of novelty to recent developments within sociology, anthropology or cognate fields of inquiry. We do not believe that the celebration of posts should blind us to our pasts. Recent accounts of ethnography, and of qualitative research more generally, have tended to suggest a field in turmoil, characterized by an accelerating rate of change, increasingly divorced from its intellectual roots. Such characterizations are themselves narrative constructions, and they contribute to the wider narratives of change at the centurys end. We suggest that these narratives gain their force in part from a neglect of the ambiguities and nuances of the ethnographic project that have extended over many decades. The general historical framework developed by Denzin and Lincoln (1994) captures the current sense of fragmentation and diversity in ethnography. They speculate about an intellectual field undergoing ever accelerated change, growth, and reconfiguration. In taking stock of where we are, they imagine the future of qualitative researchthe sixth moment (Lincoln and Denzin 1998). They reflect on whether it will be a time when the Story is once again in place, or whether it will continue to be a time when fields and disciplines appear to be in disarray (p. 426). By constructing and assuming a particular past, Lincoln and Denzin define the present state of qualitative research, in turn speculating about possible futures. Those pasts, presents, and futures exemplify the discourse and narratives of post. The narratives (postmodern, poststructuralist, postfeminist, postcolonial,
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and so on) all assume or describe one specific type of historical past for ethnographic research methods. They outline a developmental trend that culminates in contemporary practices. Paradoxically, celebrations of the postmodern include their own grand narratives of intellectual historywhile appearing to eschew such narrations. Moreover, such narratives can be unduly neglectful of past achievements that do not fit neatly into their developmental frameworks. In this article, we suggest that such narratives can mislead or distort the intellectual fieldof the past, the present, and the future. Five phases are identified by Denzin and Lincoln (1994) to make sense of the development of qualitative and ethnographic research. Termed moments, each phase associates a chronological time period with a specific theoretical paradigm and/or paradigmatic challenge. The framework adopted by Denzin and Lincoln is well known. For the purposes of completeness, we summarize it here. The five moments are identified as (1) traditional (1900-1950), (2) modernist (1950-1970), (3) blurred genres (1970-1986), (4) crisis of representation, and (5) the postmodern challenge/the present. Denzin and Lincoln use their model to discuss the past, present, and future of qualitative research across all the social sciences, and it clearly intended to be a broad characterization of a considerable diversity of styles and disciplines. It is, however, all too easy for such mappings to become ossified, and they call for critical scrutiny in any evaluation of the current state of the art. In the Denzin and Lincoln (1994) schema, the time of traditional qualitative research (1900-1950) was the age of Malinowski and Evans-Pritchard in social anthropology and of the classic Chicago studies in urban sociology. The first moment had an objectivist and positivist program, sustained by myths of the heroic lone fieldworker. The second erathe modernist phase from 1950-1970in sociology was the heyday of the Second Chicago School: the period of Hughes, Geer, Becker, Strauss, and Gusfield. It was also the era when anthropologists came to terms with the end of colonial empires and focused instead on newly independent nations, Europe, and industrial societies. This second moment, a phase of creative ferment (Denzin and Lincoln 1994, 8) is characterized as modernist,

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notable inter alia for attempts to formalize qualitative research methods. The third era, that of blurred genres, is located from 1970 to 1986. This sees the rise of many different theories and the development of new data collection techniques, especially tape-recording and video-recording. This is the period in social anthropology in the United States when Geertz and his influential conceptthick descriptioncame to the fore. In British anthropology, the structuralism of Douglas became fashionable and challenged the older schools of thought. In American sociology, the scholars inspired by the giants of the second Chicago school were publishing, and the Lofland textbook on qualitative methods (Lofland 1971; Lofland and Lofland 1995) appeared. This period also saw the publication of the definitive U.K. textbooks on qualitative methods by Hammersley and Atkinson (1983) and Burgess (1984). Publishers recognized that there was a market for collections of confessional tales by qualitative researchers. There was a new multiplicity of theoretical orientations, paradigms, methods of data collection, and analytic strategies. From the mid-1980s, Denzin and Lincoln (1994) identify a fourth momentthe crisis of representation. This moment articulated the consequences of the blurred genres interpretation of the field. Signaled by the publication of Clifford and Marcuss (1986) Writing Culture, the ethnographic text was perceived as undergoing a crisis of confidence. Previously the text, typically the monograph, recorded the central processes of fieldwork and was the most important product of qualitative research. After Clifford and Marcus, qualitative research took what is variously called the linguistic turn, or the interpretative turn, or the rhetorical turnwith its accompanying legitimation crisis. One of the consequences of the fourth moment is an enhanced awareness of ethnographic writing (Atkinson 1990, 1992). Anthropologists, for instance, reflect on field notes: how they are constructed, used, and managed. We come to understand that field notes are not a closed, completed, final text; rather, they are indeterminate, subject to reading, rereading, coding, recoding, interpreting, and reinterpreting. The literary turn has encouraged (or insisted on) the revisiting, or

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reopening, of ethnographers accounts and analyses of their fieldwork, notably in the work of Wolf, Richardson, Wolcott, and the feminist responses to Clifford and Marcus (1986), such as the collections edited by Behar and Gordon (1995) and James, Hockey, and Dawson (1997). The representational crises of this period put in hazard not only the products of the ethnographers work but also the moral and intellectual authority of ethnographers themselves. The crisis was not founded merely in ethnographers growing self-consciousness concerning their own literary work and its conventional forms. More fundamentally, it grew out of the growing contestation of ethnographers (especially mainstream Western ethnographers) implicit claims to a privileged and totalizing gaze. It leads to increasingly urgent claims to legitimacy on the part of so-called indigenous ethnographers and for increasingly complex relationships between ethnographers selves, the selves of others and the texts they both engage in (Coffey 1999). The dual crises of representation and legitimation form the starting point for the fifth or present moment. This is characterized by continuing diversity and a series of tensions. Lincoln and Denzin (1994) include a postscript on the fifth moment: that of postmodernism. In this, they characterize the present as a messy moment, multiple voices, experimental texts, breaks, ruptures, crises of legitimation and representation, self-critique, new moral discourses, and technologies (p. 581). They identify a field confronting a number of fundamental issuesa sustained critique of positivism and postpositivism, ongoing self-critique and self-appraisal, continuing crises of representation in our texts and authority we claim from them, an emergence of a cacophony of voices speaking with varying agendas (1998, 409), the growing influence of technologywhich in turn are contributing to a constant redefinition of the field. The fifth moment is also time for consolidation, to sharpen the critique of qualitative research, while attempting to correct its excesses and to move on. As we have alluded to earlier, Denzin and Lincoln (1994) use the fifth moment to speculate about the future, sixth moment or perhaps more correctly moments. They project a further multiplication of voices, styles, storiesand hence multiple futures for research.

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We do not wish to dissent totally from Lincoln and Denzin (1994) in their account of the current state of play in qualitative or ethnographic research. The multiplicity of perspectives and practices are not in doubt; they are well rehearsed and documented (Coffey and Atkinson 1996). Ethnography can indeed be characterized in terms of its own cultural diversity, something to which we return later in this article. We are, however, less convinced by Denzin and Lincolns (1994) attempt to periodize the development of qualitative research, and even less convinced by the particular developmental narrative they seek to impose. It would be futile merely to criticize a framework such as theirs for simplifying things: simplification is inherent in such didactic and introductory texts. But their sequence of moments does, we would argue, gloss over the historical persistence of tension and differences. Each of the periods or moments especially the earlier onesis too neatly packaged. The contrast between previous positivist, modernist, and self-confident (but narrow) perspectives, and the contemporary carnivalesque diversity of standpoints, methods, and representations, is too sharply drawn. It could be taken to imply that all contemporary qualitative research takes place from a position of an intellectual field teeming with contested ideas and experimental texts (see also Atkinson, Delamont, and Hammersley 1988, for a critique of a different exercise in categorizing ethnographic research). Equally, we would suggest that such a chronological and linear view of development does a disservice to earlier generations of ethnographers. In the remainder of this brief discussion, we amplify and illustrate these observations.

REIMAGINING PASTS, PRESENTS, AND FUTURES

It is far from clear that there ever were such monolithically positivist and modernist phases, as identified by Denzin and Lincoln (1994). It is wrong to assume that all ethnography in past generations was conducted under the auspices of a positivistic and totalizing gaze, as it is to imply that we are all postmodern now. We would wish to take issue with the narrow view that there was a traditional, hegemonic ethnographic order

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order that insists on marginalizing the new, not treating it as a version of a new order of things, and always defining it as an aberrant variation on the traditional way of doing things (Denzin, 1997, 251). Nor are we suggesting that new, so-called experimental forms of ethnography or messy texts are wrong or irrelevant. Our point is much less profound. Over the development of ethnography, there has been a repeated dialectic between what might be thought of as a dominant orthodoxy, and other, centrifugal forces that have promoted difference and diversity. Rather than the temporal metaphor of moment to describe the historical development of the ethnographic field, a more appropriate one might be that of vector, implying the directionality of forces in an intellectual field. There is, for instance, little need to appeal only to recent developments in ethnographic writing and commentary as evidence of blurred genres. Relationships between the aesthetic and the scientific or between the positive and interpretivist have been detectable for many yearsindeed, throughout the development of ethnographic research this century. (Admittedly, they have not been equally remarked on nor taken the same form at all times.) It is a well-known aspect of the history of sociologybut it bears repetition in this contextthat the early period of urban ethnography in Chicago drew on aesthetic and literary models as much as on models of scientific research. The sociological perspective was fueled by the textual conventions of realist fiction. The sociological exploration of the lifethrough the life-history for instancewas influenced by the novel of development such as Farrells Studs Lonigan trilogy. Equally, some of the literary inspirations drew broadly speaking on a sociological perspective. More generally still, the ethnographic tradition and literary genres in the United States have displayed intertextual relationships over many decades. The styles of urban realism, the literary creation of characters and types in the city, and the narrative of modern fiction have all contributed to the styles of ethnographic representation. The systematic analysis of these intertextual relations may be a fairly recent preoccupation, but the genres are more enduring and more blurred than the moments model as suggested by Denzin and Lincoln (1994).

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The nature of those intertextual linkages deserves closer attention. It is clearly insufficient to deal with a monolithic ethnography, on one hand, and an equally undifferentiated literature on the other. The specific relationships between American fiction and ethnographic reportage are but one set of possible homologies and influences. There were significant parallels between Malinowskis ethnographic enterprise and Joseph Conrads literary work. Likewise, there were multiple cultural and literary commitments that informed Edward Sapirs anthropology and his linguistics. In doing so, he also reminds us that in the figure of Franz Boas himselfits founding heroAmerican cultural anthropology was born out of a complex mix of epistemological and aesthetic commitments. Equally, Ruth Benedicts particular development of one strand of Boasian anthropology was hardly conceived and reported in a narrowly scientistic manner. Zora Neale Hurstons experimental ethnographic writing is another example that has received some attention recently but deserves wider recognition. Our point here is not to review yet again fairly well-known commentaries on ethnography, literature, and aesthetics. Rather, we emphasize the extent to which ethnography in sociology or anthropologywhether conceived in terms of method or its textual productshas never been a stable entity. It has been marked by contrasts and tensions that are not merely departures from an established orthodoxy. The conduct of ethnographic research has rarely, if ever, been established solely under the auspices of a positivist orthodoxy. American cultural anthropology, for instance, has displayed a repeated tension between the nomothetic search for law-like regularities and the idiographic interpretation of cultures. In essence, we take issue with Denzins (1997) suggestion that the dividing lines between a secular science of the social world and sacred understandings of that world are now being challenged and, in some cases, erased (xviii). The point is that these dividing lines were never so starkly drawn in the first place. Furthermore, given the highly personalized nature of anthropological fieldwork and authorship, it is far from clear that any major practitioner ever subscribed to a purely scientistic or positivist perspective. Indeed, although it is virtually impossible to demonstrate, one suspects

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that the social and academic elite members of the community of anthropologists never subscribed to anything quite as vulgar or artisan as a single scientific method or its equivalent. The sociology of scientific knowledge would strongly suggest that the elite core of the subject never espoused such crude oversimplifications as the subsequent historical accounts attribute to them. The emphasis on personal qualities and the uniquely biographical experience of fieldwork meant that the discipline of anthropology was often portrayed as an essentially indeterminate mode of knowledge acquisition. In other words, for all the tidying up of accounts such as that of Denzin and Lincoln (1994), ethnographic research has always contained within it a variety of perspectives. As a whole, it has never been totally subsumed within a framework of orthodoxy and objectivism. There have been varieties of aesthetic and interpretative standpoints throughout nearly a century of development and change. The ethnographic approach to understanding cultural difference has itself incorporated a diversity of intellectual cultures. There have been changing intellectual fashions and emphases, and the pace of change has undoubtedly been especially rapid in recent years (although here again, we would take issue with a model that has change moving ever more quickly and developmental phases becoming increasingly truncated). These so-called trends actually reflect long-standing tensions, rather than constituting a new and unique moment in ethnographic research. They continue the centrifugal and centripetal tendencies that have been perceptible for many years and represent the diverse and broad concerns of a past as well as a present ethnography (Delamont and Atkinson 1995). To conclude, we offer a critique of the developmental trajectory as suggested by Denzin and Lincoln (1994). We do so in the spirit of intellectual engagement, rather than in an attempt to discredit much of what underpins their model. By drawing on the characteristics and limitations of the moments model, we are able to re-present a less demarcated and more messy version of the development and direction of ethnography as an academic field and intellectual tradition. Denzin and Lincoln are intent on establishing a particular form of argumentitself a

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poststructuralist/postmodernist onethat stresses discontinuities and disjunctures rather than continuities. Consequently, they write as if changes are the most significant phenomena in methodology. Theirs is a Foucauldian kind of intellectual history, full of epistemological ruptures, marked by successive paradigm shifts or revolutions. Ironically, however, this is a Whig kind of poststructuralism. Each shift seems to lead us inexorably toward the latest moment, which of course, represents their defining moment. There is, therefore, a subtext to the Denzin and Lincoln scenario, which is teleological. Despite the postmodernist standpoint from which they survey the scene, a grand narrative of intellectual progress is reinvented. The values are reversed in this narrative, as compared to more conventionally modernist accounts. The five or six moments are a reversal of a Comtean sequence of academic progress. In this version (as in many similar contemporary accounts), enlightenment leads us firmly away from positive science and toward the carnivalesque diversity of postmodern social science. Nevertheless, their historical account is teleological for all that. Times arrow still points (if a little more shakily) in one direction. One could, of course, argue that a genuinely postmodern perspective would recognize the multiple discontinuities and contradictions that have inhabited ethnographic and qualitative research for many decades. Indeed, there are many contradictions. As we have argued above, there have for long been alternative standpoints from which ethnographic research and ethnographic writing have been conducted. Indeed, the periodization of research on which Denzin and Lincoln (1994) base their argument leaves under erasure the various transgressive, experimental, and experiential approaches of earlier generationsoften developed by female scholars. Thus, their argument perpetuates rather than questions definitions of orthodoxy. It conflates orthodoxy (in the sense of majority views and practices) with homogeneity of practice. It muddles up what constituted good research at any given time with what all researchers actually did and wrote. Consequently, the model is profoundly insensitive to the precepts of interpretative sociology or anthropology. It contrives to silence some muted voices by reasserting the dominant voices of orthodoxy. It confuses

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what people do and what people say they do; it confuses the hectic contestations of epistemologists and methodologists with the practical work of researchers in the field. It thus glosses over many of the subtleties and nuances of actual research traditions, networks, disciplines, national academic cultures, and other contours of academic practice. The stress on paradigm shifts masks one of the most significant contradictions in contemporary social research. The quickening pace of change that Denzin and Lincoln (1994) describe has been by no means even. Indeed, such change in intellectual fields is almost always unevenrarely marked by wholesale and radical transformations. They have occurred most visibly at the level of methodological writing. Indeed, there is something of a disjuncture between methodological ferment and the everyday practice of social research. The latter has moved more slowly, not characterized by the progressive shift toward the fifth or subsequent moments. Research methods have become remarkably divorced from empirical research in many ways. There is even a danger that methods in themselves can become a self-referential sphere of discoursein a manner analogous to the development of theory in literary criticism. (Sometimes indeed, they draw on similar intellectual sources.) The extraordinary flowering of methodological writing has not been matched by an equivalent volume of sophisticated empirical research texts. Moreover, the actual conduct and writing of ethnographic research remains relatively unaffected by the epistemological upheavals of blurred genres, the crisis of representation or postmodernism. The discipline of anthropology has seen such epistemological issues engaged with most vigorously, yet the vast majority of its empirical monographs and journal papers remain remarkably untouched. The stability and continuity of anthropological scholarship is remarkableif less immediately striking than the superstructure of methodological debate and contestation. In confronting the future of ethnographic research, therefore, we need to maintain a proper awareness of past and present. It is misleading to characterize past periods as unrelievedly positivist or modern. It is equally fallacious to suggest that we are all postmodern now. The field is currently characterized by

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diversity, controversy, and tensions. It is undeniable that the proliferation of styles and texts has taken on a new degree of urgency in recent years, as the pace of change in the human sciences has quickened. But this has not been a total shift. On the contrary, inspection of the empirical fields in which ethnographic research has flourished and continues to be significant (health and medicine, education, urban studies, deviance and so on) shows that many scholars continue to produce monographs and papers that are realist in textual style and are based on classic modes of field research, reflecting the formalizing mode inspired by Denzin and Lincolns (1994) modernist moment. Rather than a developmental model, therefore, we would conceptualize the field of ethnography in terms of continuing tensions. Indeed, those tensions themselves give the field much of its vigor and impetus. The repeated, and indeed longstanding, tensions between scientific and interpretative inquiry, between realist and experimental texts, between impersonal and experiential analysesare recurrent motifs in ethnography. Recent innovations do not have to be seen as wholesale rejections of prior positions. Equally, the futures we project do not have to be couched in terms of revolutionary paradigm changes. As in the past, so in the foreseeable future.

REFERENCES
Atkinson, P. A. 1990. The ethnographic imagination. London: Routledge. . 1992. Reading ethnographic texts. London: Sage. Behar, R., and Gordon, D., eds. 1995. Women writing culture. Los Angeles: California University Press. Burgess, R. G. 1984. In the field. London: Allen and Unwin. Clifford, J., and Marcus, G. E., eds. 1986. Writing culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Coffey, A. 1999. The ethnographic self. London: Sage. Coffey, A., and Atkinson, P. A. 1996. Making sense of qualitative data. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Delamont, S., and Atkinson, P. A. 1995. Fighting familiarity. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton. Denzin, N. K. 1997. Interpretive ethnography: ethnographic practices for the 21st century. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Denzin, N. K., and Lincoln, Y. S., eds. 1994. Handbook of qualitative research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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Hammersley, M., and Atkinson, P. A. 1983. Ethnography: Principles in practice. London: Tavistock. (2nd edition 1995, London: Routledge.) James, A., Hockey, J., and Dawson, A., eds. 1997. After writing culture. London: Routledge. Lincoln, Y. S., and Denzin, N. K. 1994. The fifth moment. In Handbook of qualitative research, edited by N. K. Denzin and Y. S. Lincoln, 575-86. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. . 1998. The fifth moment. In The Landscape of Qualitative Research, 2d ed., edited by N. K. Denzin and Y. S. Lincoln. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Lofland, J. 1971. Analyzing social settings. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Lofland, J., and L. Lofland. Analyzing social settings. 3d ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1995.

PAUL ATKINSON is professor of sociology in the Cardiff University School of Social Sciences. His publications include Ethnography: Principles in Practice (with Martyn Hammersley, 1995, 2d ed.), The Ethnographic Imagination (1990), Understanding Ethnographic Texts (1992), and Medical Talk and Medical Work (1995). He is currently working on an ethnographic study of an major opera company and on the development of hypermedia techniques for ethnographic representation. AMANDA COFFEY is a lecturer in sociology in the Cardiff University School of Social Sciences. Her publications include Making Sense of Qualitative Data (with Paul Atkinson, 1996) and The Ethnographic Self (1999). She is currently working on a number of projects on youth and citizenship, feminism and teaching, and ethnographic representation. Together with Atkinson, Delamont, Lofland, and Lofland, she is editor of Sages new Handbook of Ethnography. SARA DELAMONT is reader in sociology in the Cardiff University School of Social Sciences. Her publications include Knowledgeable Women (1989), Fieldwork in Educational Settings (1992), Appetites and Identities (1994), Fighting Familiarity (with Paul Atkinson, 1995), A Womans Place in Education (1996), Supervising the PhD (with Paul Atkinson and Odette Parry, 1997), and Success and Failure in Graduate School (with Paul Atkinson and Odette Parry, 1999). Together with Coffey and Atkinson, she is general editor of the series Cardiff Papers in Qualitative Research, published by Ashgate.