Ethnography in Revision: Black Ethnography and Notes From Kiese Laymon

Abstract

Ethnography has been used to reinscribe boundaries of power within academic disciplines. This essay uses Kiese Laymon’s conception of revision to wreck the genre to move sociology beyond the circular process of documenting disparities and offering quick solutions, toward understanding ethnography as a process of frustrating knowledge. It offers two points of entry for revision into the ethnographic process. (a) The shift to reflexivity within ethnography should not stop at naming our positionality, commitments, and relations. Rather revision demands an interrogation of the type of person we are and to reckon with the type of person that our ethnographic witnessing requires us to grow toward. (b) Revision moves us to reexamine the underlying logics of how we make sense of the world, particularly the ways we have been disciplined into thinking and to demand more from our ethnographic desires than our field of study has made possible.