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FOUCAULT AND THE "INVISIBLE" ETHNOGRAPHER

N. Tosel

Abstract

"What does it matter who is speaking?" asks Foucault in What is an author?. In that text Foucault proclaims the death of the author, as well as only a few years before he had shown another death, that of the subject. In both cases, it is properly a matter of disappearance: the subject and the author establish the representation, but they disappear from the scene, because they are no more represented, as it happens to Philip IV in Velazquez's picture Las Meninas, to which Foucault devotes the first chapter of The Order of Things: an Archeology of the Human Sciences. Unexpectedly we can find that these questions concern closely the work of the ethnographer. The ethnographer in fact uses two fundamentals practices: first of all the observation (even that "participant" theorized by Malinowski) of ethnographic field, and then its reconstruction in writing. In both cases, he has to deal with the disappearances established by Foucault: the ethnographer in fact builds his field of work, giving rise to a sort of representation; but at the same time he is not part of it. The ethnographer thus plays the same role of Philip IV in the above mentioned picture of Velazquez: all represented see the king exactly in front of them, but at the same time he is invisible to outside eyes. The ethnographer usually tries to become invisible reporting objectively the information, never saying "I" and mostly using the so-called "ethnographic present". But Foucault, talking about the death of the subject and the author, doesn't means that the ethnographer has to ignore his impressions and opinions; Foucault speaks here rather of the loss of proper name and identity. What counts is not the ethnographer's life, it counts only what he is now, in the moment in which he is already immersed in his work, it counts his "actuality", to use a term dear to Foucault. And of course also his feelings and his emotions are part of his actual present: he has not to become an impersonal "robot", even when he puts in writing his experience. Indeed, in this case it might be more profitable if he reported everything, including his impressions, and if he spoke in the first person, but he should leave anonymous the text (and Foucault gives a concrete example in this sense: the texts written by the members of the GIP, which he directed, remained anonymous). Achieving this type of invisibility implies a change in the relationships with the others: an "actual ethnographer" gives the word to the representatives, instead of representing them, so they can finally speak. It is exactly here that the ethnographer puts entirely into play his ethical and political task.

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/sgemsocial2014/b31/s8.009

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