| Abstract: | This paper examines how ethnographers weave/separate "academic" voices from those of their participants in the field. Engaging some of the critical understandings in qualitative research regarding issues of representation and legitimization, authorship and authority, this paper questions where and with which of our ethnographic participants those understandings tend to be em/de/ployed, where and with whom are they still currently absent as ethnographers read and write their world. Exploring the problematics in, and the implications of, differently treating- invoking and textualizing- voices ethnographers conjure while in the field (There) and those they assemble from the academy (Here), this paper examines how a two-tiered system is created whereby the former are problematized, the latter are not. In spite of the poststructural, postcolonial understandings guiding much of the critical work in ethnography, such a twotiered system, this paper argues, induces Othering as well as creates a "There" which subsequently becomes epistemologically and ontologically detached from the "Here" of academe. Very much embedded in the practices it questions and critiques, this paper is not intended to provide solutions for practice but, rather, to broaden the conversation about practice. As such, it strives to promote ways of thinking critically about what critical ethnographers currently do and do not do rather than to further paralyze their inclination or ability to do. |
