CITATION AND COPYRIGHT INFORMATION:
Cite as: Hay, K. D. (1999, May). Sense-Making the ethnography of communication: Recovering power in communication practices. Paper presented at a non-divisional workshop held at the meeting of the International Communication Association, San Francisco.
© Kellie D. Hay (1999).

ESSENCE OF PROJECT:
I am using Sense-Making as a way in which to bridge the gap that I see present in the Ethnography of Communication project -hereafter EOC. I am working with a local Arab-American organization and I am studying the ways in which national and transnational identities are constructed, negotiated, contested, and traversed in communication practices and processes. I am also interested in theorizing the performative dimensions of communication, particularly in the practice of dance. I have videotaped two annual Hafleh’s-dance parties of the Arab-American organization, interviewed members of the community at large about dance and cultural identity, and I have participated in the organization’s monthly Board meetings over the last four years.

I define myself as a feminist critical ethnographer. What I have found in a detailed review of the literature for our EOC field project was disappointing for the following reasons: 1) speech has primacy in this project and is equated to communication; 2) the body is not theorized in relationship to performance; 3) there is an absence of metatheory that situates the researcher in relation to who is researched; 4) there is no connection between metatheory and method; 5) there is a lack of theory of communication processes and practices; 6) there is no attention to power with respect to social interaction and the constitution of communication Based on the problems that I have identified, I think that Sense-Making Methodology can help bridge the gaps in the EOC project.

THE REASONS I TOOK THIS ROAD:
I took the road to EOC because I think it is important to study what scholars in our field have set out to do with respect to ethnography. Before I rediscovered Sense-Making as a gap-bridging perspective, I looked carefully at contemporary theories and studies of ethnography in anthropology. James Clifford’s work provided a nice theoretical critique of traditional ethnography in several ways. He helped me disrupt the notion that field work is a ground of knowledge, that it ought to be done in far away places about exotic non-western peoples. He also deconstructs the ethnographer’s privilege as an ultimate knower of “others.” And he also insists that knowledge is always partial. Using this kind of perspective as an opening door, I see Sense-Making as a way to further deprivilege the interests of the researcher so as to open up the possibility of theorizing subjects. Whereas contemporary work on ethnography such as Clifford’s has helped broaden my tools for theoretical critique, Sense-Making offers me a methodological foundation and practice for doing richer, more critical ethnography.

Sense-Making offers a philosophy of radical reflection, locating one’s experiences in time and space. Yet unlike other philosophies, it does not abstract above the person-in-situation toward higher metatheoretical ground before moving through the experiences the person and his or her understanding of those experiences. I returned to Sense-Making as a road not taken because of the ways in which people’s experiences are anchored in time and space. Through the micro time-line interview, participants become involved in a conscientizing process of reflection and theorizing. I appreciate Sense-Making further because in as much as one’s experiences become scrutinized, experience is not valorized and privileged as an ultimate ground of knowledge. What is more, Sense-Making takes stock of communication processes and practices through which subjects make sense of their world. Still, one of the most important dimensions of Sense-Making lies in its ability to locate power inequities and relationships as the base of one’s struggles, location, and potential for change. All of these elements are missing in the EOC project, and even in more critically informed contemporary ethnographic practices.

THE BEST OF WHAT I HAVE ACHIEVED:
1) participating in the activities of an Arab-American organization for four solid years; 2) doing an in-depth review of EOC, contemporary studies on critical ethnography, postcolonial theory, cultural theory, cultural identity, and theories of travel; 3) an historical understanding of the Arab World and Arab-American studies; 4) a sophisticated theoretical and methodological framework from which to work.

WHAT HAS BEEN HELPFUL:
Since my study is grounded in a community of self-defined immigrants, exiles, and people living in Diaspora, postcolonial theories of identity and difference, global displacement, and transnational cultures have helped me understand their struggles. Since I am not studying communication and identity exclusively at the level of cultural forms, Bourdieu’s outline of a theory of practice has helped theorize and ground what counts as practice. The work of feminist ethnographers and communication scholars has also helped me draw on work that connects gendered modes of subjectivity and the implications of gendering processes with respect to methodology. Sense-Making studies are also helping me develop further an interlocutor-centered protocol. And finally, my journeyings into the Arab-World are perhaps what has helped me the most. Indeed, I have seen the struggles of Arabs in daily life, the stereotype of terrorist that freezes their identities, and the daily battle with Israeli policy and human suffering. These experiences have been fleshed further in the community I am now with. Their stories of subjugation, and their humbling strategies for changing the world have opened my heart and have taught me much about the ways people set out to bridge the gaps that frustrate their worlds. I think the more I ground myself in Sense-Making, the deeper my understanding of identity-in-the making will be.

WHAT I HAVE STRUGGLED WITH:
Achieving critical distance has been a struggle for me. On a political level, I am very pro-Palestinian and I identity deeply with the pain and struggles of the Arab-American community. In fact, I am an active member of the community that I am studying. I have had to constantly bracket my political sensibilities and allegiances so that I don’t fall into an “us and them” kind of mentality. I have often seen Arab-Americans slipping into moments of demonizing Jews to make their voices heard and legitimized. While I can’t tell members to change their behaviors, or even question their tactics, I worry that lapsing into a politics of negation often undercuts what they set out to do humanly and politically. And as much as I hate to admit it, I have to struggle with my own tendencies to demonize Jews. When I see overt racisim taking place in Israel, or when Israel misses its targets and kills innocent people, I struggle not to hate them. And when I hear American Jews claiming that Palestinians can go to any of the twenty-two Arab nations, I feel sad and usually very angry. While no theory or methodology can solve these kinds of problems, subjecting myself to constant reflection and questioning my own limits help me work through the inclination to fall prey to racism. On a more theoretical note, I struggle with scholars in our field who are not willing to do interdisciplinary work. With respect to the EOC project, they pull readily form folklore studies, yet they barely treat contemporary ethnographies that address communication activity. Also, given the discourse-centered approach that guides this project, poststructuralist theories of discourse remain untapped and so does a theory of subjectivity tied to the production of discourse. This line of inquiry assumes that the discourse speaks for itself and this troubles me.

I have also encountered some struggles on the theoretical level. Since Hymes’ initial intervention into ethnographic studies, a plethora of communication scholars have embraced the ethnography of communication and have made it their/our own. While I appreciate the tedious work that communication scholars are doing within this project, I am concerned with their particular objects of study and the metatheory that guides this style of ethnography. First and foremost, communication scholars within this project center their work on speech phenomena as if it were the single or the most important form of communication. They embrace the notion that the overarching purpose of the project is to explicate communication practices. When push comes to shove, only speech shows up in this project as communication practice. Thus we see projects about talk shows, joking, speech strategies of teamsters or question-asking practices in the context of academic colloquia. Performance becomes important insofar as it shows up in speech. I wonder where the body is in this project and why it is not theorized in relationship to performance? Before I discuss metatheoretical issues, I want to raise one more theoretical point and that is, what counts as a communication practice? I think each term needs clarification. In this project, communication processes and practices are collapsed. What is more, there is no element of critical theory that shapes our understanding of practice. Borrowing from Bourdieu and Althusser, I understand practice as embodied, materially grounded and symbolically constructed. Ethnographers of communication certainly provide the context of their research communities, though their material struggles are too far in the background. Second, I see embodiment as pushing the limits of language, yet in the EOC project we don’t see scholars engaging in semiotic excess; in other words, the body has little status with respect to knowing the world; the sensuous is absent. And with respect to communication processes, turn-taking, adjacency pairs and social alignment theory still have hegemony in this discourse. While these perspectives give us some understanding of micro practices, they do not provide an exhaustive theory of processes.

WHAT WOULD HELP NOW:
I would appreciate suggestions and comments to help me theorize the differences between communication processes and practices. I have argued that the EOC collapses the two, yet I do not have a better explanation of communication processes at this time. I can theorize practice all day, though I don’t understand fully what counts as a process. I would also appreciate critical comments about the issue of critical distance, particularly if participants have struggled with issues of going native or identifying too much with their research communities. I would also benefit from and appreciate discussion about the theory of time-space within Sense-Making.

PROJECT ABSTRACT:
The ethnography of communication project began in the late 1960’s with Dell Hymes’ classic essay, which introduced the possibilities of an ethnography of speaking. Trained in anthropology and folklore, Hymes’ work responded to the ways in which culture and communication were treated in anthropology at the beginning of the 1970’s. He argued that culture is not bound and fixed, frozen in time and rooted in territory. While these claims almost seem as givens today in contemporary anthropology, they were radical in Hymes’ day. Before Hymes’ intervention, the subject of cultural anthropology was kinship systems and their relationship to the economic and social structure from which they emerged. When Hymes introduced the ethnography of communication project, Levi Strauss’ structural anthropology and the structural functionalism of Radcliff-Brown and Evans Pritchard were the reigning theoretical perspectives in anthropology. Hymes clearly took a different path, drawing on the work of literary semiotics and social linguistics so as to recover narration, the possibilities of meaning and material culture. Hymes was also the first to place performance at the center of communication phenomena.

I am still surprised when I delve into this literature base, that for a sub-field that is so focused on discourse analysis and social interaction, Foucault and de Certeau are not brought to bear on this project. Questions of who can speak under what conditions, for whom and for whose interests are not tapped. The notion that power relationships are constitutive of communication practices does not yet enter the ideas that shape EOC. And it is these absences, particularly the notion that speech equals communication, that shape my struggles with this project. Therefore, I turn to Sense-Making as a way in which power, process and practice can be recovered in this project, and I argue that Sense-Making fills the metatheoretical gap that exists in the EOC project. Finally, I may add that dance was selected as the theme for the study of the Arab community because it is a major site of contest, standing between a former world where dance was a more closely codified ritual and their new home where dance intersects with a number of complex conditions, e.g., dance as stereotyped in the media, dance as a site of changes in gender definitions and conflicts between genders, dance as symbolic attachment to disappearing roots, and so on.

REFERENCES:
(For references to works by Dervin and colleagues, see Dervin’s writings: Chronological listing.)

Bourdieu, P. (1972). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Clifford, J. (1998). Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

De Certeau, M. (1998) The Practice of Everyday Life: Volume 2: Living and Cooking. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Hymes. D. (1981). In Vain I Tried To Tell You: Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics. Philadelphia, PN: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Phillipsen, G. (1992). Speaking Culturally: Explorations in Social Communication. New York: State University of New York.

OTHER MATERIALS BY THIS AUTHOR ON THIS WEB SITE:
See: http://communication.sbs.ohio-state.edu/sense-making/AAauthors/authorlisthay.html