Narrative Privacy

Evading Ethnographic Surveillance in Fiction by Sherman Alexie, Rigoberto González, and Nam Le

Bibliographic Data

ID7914550
AuthorsColleen Gleeson Eils
Year2017
Volume42
Issue2
Pages30-52
Publication date2017-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueMELUS Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0163-755X • E-ISSN: 1946-3170
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/melus/mlx026
OpenAlexW2604569726
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited15

As a method of anthropological inquiry predicated on observing and describing foreign cultures to institutional authorities, ethnography is a historically fraught form of compulsory visibility for indigenous people and people of color in the United States. From the early amateur and semi-professional forms produced by colonial explorers, missionaries, and traders to the later scientific, academic incarnations and the early twenty-first century’s more self-reflexive, politically aware studies, ethnographic accounts have long shaped public knowledge and policies about indigenous and nonwhite peoples in the United States. If, as Linda Tuhiwai Smith argues, “Imperialism and colonialism are the specific formations through which the West came to ‘see,’ to ‘name,’ and to ‘know’ indigenous communities,” ethnography has been an authoritative meaning-making mechanism that enabled this colonial seeing, naming, and knowing (63).1 Moreover, classical anthropology has insisted on unilateral visibility by dividing the world “in the form of us and them, of viewing subject and viewed object” (Chow 180). Peoples subjected to ethnographic study, objectified and assumed to be knowable and available to researchers, have historically experienced a form of compulsory visibility. This visibility compromises personal and communal understandings of privacy and makes the objectified peoples more vulnerable to dramatic social and cultural change. Contemporary practices of looking for differences between groups of people, objectifying otherness, and assuming the privilege of observing other cultures’ bodies, sacred institutions, epistemologies, and stories, for example, are learned behaviors with colonial, ethnographic genealogies; they constitute an ethnographic gaze, or “a dominant mode of looking that is culturally sanctioned as well as circumscribed and often contested” (S. Smith 2). The continued vulnerability of individuals and communities to dominant ethnographic gazes—collectively, ethnographic surveillance—attests to the enduring, uneven power relations between powerful institutions, such as governments, universities, and publishing houses, and the nation’s marginalized populations.2

Aesthetics · Art · Colonialism · Ethnography · Indigenous · Literature · Media studies · Narrative · Object (grammar) · Political science · Privilege (computing) · Reflexivity · Sociology · Subject (documents) · Anthropology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Gender Studies · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration

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