Staying a Step Away From Them: Ethical Implications of Creative Ethnographies
Creative writing's power to construct and convey realities cannot be denied. It allows for the expression of the inexpressible, and, significantly, for readers to learn empathy in adopting another's point of view. Though these are invaluable learning experiences, the humanities have often been distanced from more empirical disciplines like the social sciences, even though, as demonstrated by several ethnographic poets, the social sciences can greatly benefit from a humanities approach. As Eshun and Madge (2012) put it, poetry provides “the shortest possible emotional distance between people and their differing experiences” (1411). Poetry provides access to affective experiences that simply cannot be related through data sets. The issue arises, however, in poetry’s use of alternative subject positions. These researcher-poets must accept the responsibility of properly conveying their subjects’ lived experiences. Looking at three separate approaches to ethnographic research through creative writing, it is evident that ethics are either neglected, as in Maynard and Cahnmann-Taylor’s study, overshadowed by personal experiences, as in Ryka Aoki’s personal essay, or acknowledged but treated as an unresolvable issue, as in Eshun and Madge’s ethnographic poetry. These three studies, along with other creative approaches to ethnography or ethnographic approaches to creative works, demonstrate that a fully ethical study is, if not impossible, extremely sensitive and nuanced.
Employing poetry in ethnographic research methods opens up new possibilities in the discipline, primarily through the reintegration of the emotional into the scientific. In Western society, reason is often privileged over intuition. As Eshun and Madge write, “For a postcolonial researcher, poems can therefore be an important means by which to counter ‘western’ ontological privileging of reason over emotions, passions and feelings” (1411). Placing emotional experiences at the centre of research destabilizes colonial structures of knowledge, while allowing alternative voices to speak through. This is put into practice through Eshun’s own interpretive poem, which attempts to voice the concerns of several groups in and around a Ghanaian monkey sanctuary. This poem “reverberate[s] beyond identified persons or groups” (1408) to incorporate several different subjectivities. As such, the poem points to creative writing’s ability to represent more than the researcher’s experience. Maynard and Cahnmann-Taylor’s paper also finds poetry useful in ethnographic research: “…poetry can offer a paradoxical freedom to be honest, more explicit, about one’s observations and feelings, whether as an ethnographic outsider or as a cultural insider who writes from outside oneself” (9). These researchers, then, also gesture to poetry’s positive contributions to the field of ethnography. Both studies view the incorporation of multiple voices and the ability to express oneself fully as positive aspects of ethnographic poetry—when viewed separately from ethical implications, of course.
This is not to say that free prose cannot be just as affective as poetry. Ryka Aoki’s work, “When something is not right,” makes it clear that ethnographic research can blend easily into the realm of the personal essay, and vise versa. In this work, Aoki discusses an evening when a drunk blonde woman in North Carolina thought Aoki (dressed in drag) was biologically female, and that Aoki’s friends (who were not dressed in drag) intended to gang bang her. Aoki’s narrative is structured around the experience of subverted expectations. “Now we’re fucked,” they write of the event, “not because they think we’re transgender or queer but because they think we’re straight” (197). Through Aoki’s documentation, they allow readers a brief glimpse of the world from their multiple positions as transgender, queer, a person of colour, etc. The piece disregards all semblance of data collection, focusing instead on the lived “data” of Aoki’s own experiences. As such, it could be argued that Aoki’s writing is less a piece of ethnographic research than a personal essay, in the same vein as Didion or Barthes. However, its meditations on identity and subject positioning, coupled with its keen observations of the world and its occupants, marks Aoki’s work as ethnographic. This exposes ethnography as a factor present in many creative works; the movement from ethnography to creative writing is not unilateral, but bilateral. Though different in methodologies, these three studies all demonstrate the power of creative writing in documenting alternative subject positions in a way that relates to the average reader more successfully than didactic, scientific prose.
Though ethnographic poetry and creative writing do open up a wide range of new possibilities for ethnographic research, they’re also accompanied by a slew of ethical issues, the first of which concerns the divide between researcher and poet. Within the realm of ethnographic poetry, it becomes unclear where the researcher ends and the poet begins, where reality blends into fiction. Poetry is inseparable from the realm of fiction—it always carries the gleam of creation. Gabriel Eshan’s poems about the Ghanaian community carry this fictive element, separating his poem from the reality of the researched community. For instance, one stanza of a poem titled, “The Oracle Message,” reads:
The emergence of Satellite communities…
And how the congregation of the Saviour Church
Scoffed at the furry taboo and killed monkeys—
And how the elders of Boabeng summoned my father…
They said he has given ancestral land to monkeys
And I remember my father Gesturing at a White visitor and telling me,
Son, when White people visit in numbers then know
We’ve cared well for the children of the gods: the Oracle Message” (1407).
The dialogue here between the father and son is presented through the gossamer fabric of memory. The stanza’s rhythm, too, emphasizes its place n the realm of art, rather than scientific research. As such, these poems, though often affective, become factually less trustworthy—readers consume them with pre-conceived notions that, as creative products, they will not present information as straightforwardly. This dilemma brings forth the issue of poetry’s straddling of ethnography and creative writing. Eshan’s poems are not a far cry from “real” poems embedded in the creative industry. Take, for instance, Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems. As a gay man living in 1950s New York, O’Hara adopts a unique subject position, which transforms itself into keenly observational poems about eclectic groups of people on NYC streets. One of his poems, “A Step Away From Them,” embodies much of ethnographic poetry’s affective and linguistic qualities:
This first stanza relates O’Hara’s observations while exploring New York City on his lunch hour—an innocuous event, but one full of poetic promise. He sees construction workers with their “dirty glistening torsos” and women’s skirts flipping up in an allusion to Marilyn Monroe’s iconic pose, transforming these everyday occurrences into situations worthy of poetic representation and immortalization. As such, Eshan and O’Hara’s poetry share similarities. It could be argued that Eshan’s poetry has specific social justice aims (representing an underrepresented community) while O’Hara’s was written purely for aesthetic value. However, both poems demonstrate ethnographic approaches to poetry and poetic approaches to ethnography through observation, data collection, and communication. This poses the ethical question of artistic license. The ethnographic poet may take liberties in the re-telling and re-presenting of their research subjects, but these liberties should not become so great that the subjects become misrepresented. However, there is no definite way to measure accuracy and inaccuracy in a creative field like poetry. For instance, Aoki’s narrative is clearly written from her own position. From the first page, readers are set up to acknowledge the work’s subjective leaning; based on previous interactions with short stories and personal essays, readers are cued to expect some element of fictionalization, as the lived experience must be mediated by language.
This issue of subject position exacerbates the ethical issues inherent to ethnographic poetry. In writing ethnographic poetry, the researcher-poet must adopt a subject position that is not their own in an act of hyper-empathy. The writer must take on the responsibility of expressing the experiences of someone else. As Buch and Staller outline in their breakdown of feminist ethnography, “It is critical that feminist ethnographers consider how their own identities – class, race, gender – will impact their evidence collection” (121). This statement applies beyond feminist ethnography to ethnography as an entire practice. Ethnographers must take their own positionalities into account when collecting data and, in relation to ethnographic poetry, in writing creative representations of this data. Maynard and Cahnmann-Taylor’s paper is an excellent example of ethnographer-poets who neglect ethics in favour of a one-sided, subjective approach to ethnography. The two researchers do not properly analyze the ethical implications of constructing ethnographical spaces. In the same way that novelists and filmmakers must be held accountable for representations of different subjects within their works, ethnographic poets must remain sensitive to the problematics of representation. For instance, Cahnmann’s poem, “Ghetto Teachers’ Apology,” takes on the perspective of a teacher apologizing to the allegorical figure of a student in a ghetto school for failing to teach her survival skills. This poem is problematic in several ways, the most prominent of which is the neglect of the student, Wilmarie’s, voice. Cahnmann occupies only an outsider’s perspective. Just as there is responsibility in taking on someone else’s voice, there is responsibility in shutting out a voice. Cahnmann’s poem is, then, an example of using an educated, Western format (poetry) to explore marginalized communities, serving only to reinforce certain power structures.
Conversely, Eshun and Madge remain very sensitive throughout their paper to the ethics of ethnographic poetry. They acknowledge that poetry is embedded into Western hegemonic power and is not a form that is natural to many indigenous communities, such as their researched Ghanaian community, for which oral poetry is a much more natural and frequent occurrence (1416). “[T]o suggest that poetry is necessarily more plural than prose,” they write, “is to play down the possibility that researchers can create biased poetic interpretations that reflect their own agendas, theoretical and institutional locations, and geopolitical positionalities” (1416). To offset this issue within ethnographic poetry, Eshun uses participatory methods in creating his works. He asked community members for their input, resulting in collaborative poems, rather than Cahnmann’s individualistic poetry. Madge and Eshun adopt what Bell terms a “feminist ethics of care model” of research, emphasizing caring relationships between the researcher and the researched in an effort to disrupt power structures (80). Their study demonstrates the ways in which ethnographic poetry can remain ethically sensitive, while simultaneously exposing the ethical pitfalls and shortcomings of this very same approach. In effect, Eshun and Madge demonstrate that a truly ethical study might never be possible, particularly in ethnographic poetry, as the honesty of an affective experience can never be quantitatively measured.
The blurred line between art and ethnographic research extends itself into several fields, once again raising ethical questions. The documentary film, for instance, occupies a place as both art and ethnographic research. Each documentarian assumes the responsibility of fairly and honestly depicting their subjects. However, just as in Cahnmann-Taylor’s poems, and Aoki’s narrative, these representations can become altered due to the researcher’s own subjectivities. For instance, the Maysles brothers’ documentary, Grey Gardens (1975), lays bare the issue of dignity and reputation in ethnographic research. The directors follow a mother and daughter – relatives of Jackie Kennedy – who have become recluses, hiding out in their decrepit Long Island home without any social interaction. The two women, known as Big Edie and Little Edie, clearly toe the line between senility and reason. They perform for the directors, go on long-winded rants, and daydream about their lost careers as vaudeville performers. Throughout all this, the Maysles seem to present the women just as they are—willing participants in a documentary. However, with the women’s lucidities in question, several ethical questions are raised: did the Maysles have a right to film these women? Were the women fully aware of how they were represented on film? The documentary unquestionably positions its audiences to laugh at the women’s absurdities. The women are not portrayed as lucid, dignified individuals. The Maysles did not fulfill their responsibilities as creative ethnographers—they did not treat their research participants with respect. Even though they were not ethnographers by trade, this tacit responsibility is still very much present and pertinent.
Ethics cannot be ignored when performing ethnographic research, creative or otherwise. As these examples demonstrate, ethnography is always ethically contentious. Even creative writers should keep the politics of representation at the forefront of their minds. Frank O’Hara’s poem, “A Step Away From Them,” poeticizes this perspective. As O’Hara wanders through the streets of New York, he is, at all times, a step away from those he observes and represents. Ethnographers should be wary of this step away—it is impossible to truly understand someone else’s perspective, to grasp their lived experiences. Though ethnographic poetry comes close to a full realization of an alternative subject position, ethnographers and writers should remain cognizant of the fact that the actualized truth is always a full step away.
Works Cited
Aoki, Ryka. “When something is not right.” Transfeminist Perspectives in and Beyond Transgender and Gender Studies. Ed. Anne Enke. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012. 195-202. Print.
Bell, Linda. “Ethics and Feminist Research.” Feminist Research Practice: A Primer. Ed. Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc., 2014. 73- 106. Print.
Buch, Elana D. and Staller, Karen M. “What is Feminist Ethnography?” Feminist Research Practice: A Primer. Ed. Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc., 2014. 107-144. Print.
Eshun, Gabriel and Madge, Clare. “Now, let me share this with you: exploring poetry as a method for postcolonial geography research.” Antipode 44.4 (2012): 1395-1428. E-journal.
Grey Gardens. Dir. Muffie Meyer, Albert Maysles, Ellen Hovde, and David Maysles. Perf. Edith Bouvier Beale and Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale. Portrait Films, 1975. Film.
Maynard, Kent and Cahnmann-Taylor, Melissa. “Anthropology at the edge of words: where poetry and ethnography meet.” Anthropology and Humanism 35.10 (2010): 2-19. E-journal.
“A Step Away From Them.” Frank O’Hara.org. Frank O’Hara, 2011. Web. 24 January 2016.
