a quote from Mary here
>http://www.educ.ubc.ca/faculty/bryson/menolesbian.html
>Threaded through both Talburt’s own identity-disclosure statements, and
>her description of the three women chosen for this project, is an
>over-arching ambivalence concerning the significance of being lesbian to
>one’s various engagements with/in higher education. In the introduction
>to the book, Talburt distances herself from the subject/s of her inquiry,
>referring to lesbians as “they”, and makes the following enigmatic claim:
>
>I began with lesbian at the center of my inquiry. To invoke the category
>locates me, I suspect, as a person who has benefited from participation
>in social, political and intellectual projects undertaken by lesbians,
>despite my ambivalences. (4)
This IS the problem with ethnography and the assumptions embedded in
"researching" others - i recall Mike, years ago, realizing the
significance of the term, "re-search" as a term that indicated "re-read"
but in the contexts of PEOPLE, there is no terrain with which to "look
again" because the ethnography is a first-glance based upon a particular
inquiry or, usually, a particular investment.
SO, dragging thoughts from discussion on an Other list, i mention Edith
Cobb's "The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood, " 1950s publication,
because from her interviews and studies with M. Mead, Cobb realized that
ethnography, and anthropology, is effectively an interpretive work of
fiction. And after YEARS of so-called ethnographic data gathered on
children, Cobb realized it wasn't TRUE data, but more of
other kinds of fiction. Her anthropological data, thus, turned towards
memories and autobiographic texts as a source of childhood,
arguing that it was just as valid, since no adult can actually know the
mind of a child. BUT, adults can learn to treat their memories as valid
sources of experience, not in physical reality or detail, but in the the
phenomenological residue that experience deposits in our lives.
THANKS Mary.
diane
************************************************************************************
"Things do not change: people change."
Henry David Thoreau
*************************************************************************************
diane celia hodges
university of british columbia, centre for the study of curriculum and
instruction
vancouver, bc
mailing address: 46 broadview avenue, pointe claire, qc, H9R 3Z2
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