Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal (original) (raw)

1995, Comparative Studies in Society and History

This essay traces the effects of what I call ethnographic refusal on a series of studies surrounding the subject of resistance. 1 I argue that many of the most influential studies of resistance are severely limited by the lack of an ethnographic perspective. Resistance studies in turn are meant to stand in for a great deal of interdisciplinary work being done these days within and across the social sciences, history, literature, cultural studies, and so forth. Ethnography of course means many things. Minimally, however, it has always meant the attempt to understand another life world using the self-as much of it as possible-as the instrument of knowing. As is by now widely known, ethnography has come under a great deal of internal criticism within anthropology over the past decade or so, but this minimal definition has not for the most part been challenged. Classically, this kind of understanding has been closely linked with field work, in which the whole self physically and in every other way enters the space of the world the researcher seeks to understand. Yet implicit in much of the recent discussions of ethnography is something I wish to make explicit here: that the ethnographic stance (as we may call it) is as much an intellectual (and moral) positionality, a constructive and interpretive mode, as it is a bodily process in space and time. Thus, in a recent useful discussion of "ethnography and the historical imagination," John and Jean Comaroff spend relatively little time on ethnography in the sense of field work but a great deal of time on ways of reading historical sources ethnographically, that is, partly as if they had been produced through field work (1992). What, then, is the ethnographic stance, whether based in field work or not? 1 An earlier and very different version of this essay was written for "The Historic Turn" Conference organized by Terrence McDonald for the Program in the Comparative Study of Social Transformations (CSST) at the University of Michigan. The extraordinarily high level of insightfulness and helpfulness of critical comments from my colleagues in CSST has by now become almost routine, and I wish to thank them collectively here. In addition, for close and detailed readings of the text, I wish to thank