Writing Critical Ethnographic Narratives

Abstract

This article assumes that educational anthropologists are interested in critical theory, or what Marcus and Fischer have recently called “a renewal of the critical function of anthropology as it is pursued in ethnographic projects at home” (1986:112), because critical theory argues that social institutions, such as schools, are sites of cultural hegemony. In other words, I am presuming that educational anthropologists, like many other academics, are interested in grounding their research in a theory of social construction because they wish not only to describe and analyze social practices, but to interrupt those social practices they believe oppress certain designated classes inside educational institutions, namely students, teachers, minorities, and women. Hence, whether one's interest in cultural criticism derives from the work of the founding members of the Frankfurt School or from that of educational revisionists, such as Friere's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1973), Bowles and Gintis's Schooling in Capitalist America (1976), Bourdieu and Passeron's Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture (1977), Apple and Weiss's Ideology and Practice in Schooling (1983), and Giroux's Theory and Resistance in Education (1983), to name only a few, the goal of critical ethnography is always the same: to help create the possibility of transforming such institutions as schools—through a process of negative critique. NEGATIVE CRITIQUE, ETHNOGRAPHIC NARRATIVE, CULTURAL HEGEMONY, WRITING