Visual Rhetoric Projects: "John Wittman--'Ethnography Project'


What I want to do for this project is look at the details of ethnographic use in composition and education. My specific intentions, however, keep slipping between two points. Initially I wanted to focus primarily on the role objects and the relationships between objects play a part in the construction of ethnographies. The more I read the more I am inclined to focus my attentions on the difficulties of interpretation, i.e. discuss the difficulties of looking at unfamiliar cultural settings rhetorically. At this point I think I will have to include both to some extent. I want to begin with issues of postcolonialism since ethnography's primary purpose in Europe was to learn about cultural groups in order to colonize their land, enslave them, and/or subjugate them in some way. I'm not quite sure what I am looking for here, but I think I need to explore some foundational problems with ethnography's origins. From here I think I need to make some generalizations about how ethnography has developed and been employed over the last few decades. The bulk of the essay will analyze problems with vision. Two things come to mind here. (1) Covino's claim that no vision can see everything and nothing can alter that, and (2) Barry's claims that our vision is premapped for us by our social/cultural environment and even our genetics. Since ethnography is dealing with the unfamiliar, I need to address issues that discuss how our interpretation of cultures different from our own are always 'colored' by our own pasts. How I plan to resolve these issues, ultimately, is using Geertz's idea of thick description, which I am going to try to relate to Barry's point of gestalt theory, and to propose consciousness on the writers part about how they are coloring texts. I hope to extend current theories of triangulation in vision. The goal is to promote ethnography by working through its shortcomings. Despite its shortcomings, it's one of the only ways we have to understand cultural dynamics to the extent that we can incorporate those into real classroom settings. This is of fundamental importance in post open-admission education.

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