BOOK RWIEW

Interpretive Ethnography: Ethnographic Practices for the 21st Century

By Norman K. Denzin
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997
325 pp. $56.00 (hardcover), $26.95 (paperback)

Reviewed by Joseph A. Kotarba, University of Houston

As I read Norman Denzin’s latest epistle on postmodern ethnography, or the new writing,
I felt a quite pleasurable sense of deja vu. I was swept back to my graduate school days at
UCSD, and my initiation into ethnomethodology via Hugh Mehan and Houston Wood’s
The Reality of Ethnomethodofogy (1975). After tantalizing intellectual trysts with Hus-
serl’s philosophic search for the Transcendental Ego and Garfinkel’s playful experiments
with the taken-for-granted grounds of everyday life, reading The Reality of Efhnomethod-
ofogy on the beach at La Jolla served as a full-blown affair with the most formidable chal-
lenge available to both Parsonian sociology and pragmatist interactionism. The Reality of
Ethnomethodology did not simply extend or refine sociology at the three-quarter century
mark; it proposed a radical alternative to the way we see social life. Sociologists who read
The Reafig of Efhnomefhodologyback then either loved it or hated it, seeing it either as a
remedy for sociology’s malaise or as the ultimate schismatic threat to our discipline.
I expect Interpretive Ethnography to pose the same sort of challenge to interactionists,
and to generate the same sorts of responses. Interpretive Ethnography is the major state-
ment to date on the new writing. It is a sweeping and often brilliant integration of ideas and
activities that fall under Denzin’s liberally inclusive rubric. Although ethnomethodology
challenged the scientific status of our enterprise by questioning the way we theorize and
collect data, Interpretive Ethnography goes much further. It locates ethnography clearly in
the middle of the humanities by challenging the way we write. Although ethnographers,
like other social scientists, have traditionally thought of writing as one of several tasks
involved in our work, Denzin cuts to the chase by talking about us as writers. He forces his
readers to reflect on themselves as writers, a scary but ultimately liberating self-definition.
His model for writing ethnography strikes me as the metaphoric equivalent of the auteur
theory of film-which is, coincidentally, one of Denzin’s favorite windows to the social
world. And Denzin’s vision of ethnography is nothing if not timely. In our increasingly
global, postmodern, multinational, and mass-mediated culture, reading Interpretive Efh-
nography goes well with a cup of cappuccinejust as reading ethnomethodology in the
countercultural 1970s went well with a glass of red wine.
Denzin begins with a re-statement of the three crises in qualitative research: representa-
tion, legitimation, and praxis. I say “re-statement’’because the substance of this critique is

Symbolic Interaction 21(3):329-331 Copyright 0 1998 by JAl Press Inc.

ISSN 0195-6086 All rights of reproduction in any form resewed.
330 Symbolic Interaction Volume 21, Number 3, 1998

over ten years old. The impatient reader is anxious to see just what the alternatives are.
Well, Denzin surprises the reader by inviting an unexpected guest to help him design the
alternatives: Irish novelist James Joyce, who transformed modem literature the way Den-
zin would like to transform modem ethnography. Joyce’s writings began with a modernist,
realist description of ordinary people’s lives; evolved into a high-modern, first-person,
avant-garde experiment with point of view; and ended with “unreadable” writing that
explores the mysteries of writing itself. Is Denzin telling the ethnographer to write novels?
Not necessarily, but Denzin does encourage the ethnographer to follow Joyce in treating
writing as a project in its own right, to use words to describe the inner world of experience
as well as the outer, visual world traditionally described in ethnography. Like Joyce, the
ethnographer should not take himself or herself too seriously, but should play with lan-
guage to create new myths to replace old and discredited myths (ie., modernist social the-
OW>.
In the remainder of the book, Denzin provides us with a virtual supermarket of strategies
from which to choose when writing the new ethnography. Standpoint epistemologists chal-
lenge the dominant white-heterosexual-malestandpoint in modernist ethnography by argu-
ing for the inclusion of texts written from the standpoint of women, persons of color,
homosexuals, and other excluded groups. Performance ethnographers turn their texts into
lived experiences on the postmodern stage, where distinctions between producer, per-
former, writer, and audience are blurred. The new journalism of Wolfe and Mailer teaches
us to write in a personalized narrative style that does not seek facts, but rather a creative
relationship between writing and the realities it tries to represent. Detective stories have a
surprising way of exploring the contradictory, ambiguous, and violent features of the post-
modem world. Ethnographic poetics liberate the writer to display his or her deepest per-
sonal feelings and experiences.
What sense can interactionists and ethnographers make of all this? I read Inferprefive
Efhnography from a miscegenetic position: I conduct modernist ethnography, but increas-
ingly dabble in the new writing-specifically , performance ethnography and mystory. To
say that my standpoint allows me to see clearly both types of ethnography on the horizon
would be pretentious. Nevertheless, my standpoint leaves me sensitive to the problem of
accessibility. Audiences for the new writing who are potential friends, if not converts,
should be given three tools to help them unlock the treasure chest. The first tool is a CD,
which should accompany all copies of Interpretive Efhnography. It makes little sense to
argue in favor of multi-media writing styles without giving examples of them, especially
the audio and visual varieties. One really has to witness Jim Mienczakowski’s two-act play
on alcohol and drug abuse, Steve Pfohl’s solo, multi-media, and heavily costumed reading
of contemporary urban life, or Allen Shelton’s recitation of “My Bloody Valentine” to
understand the power of performance ethnography.
The second tool is a theory of aesthetics that will help the audience to appreciate the new
writing. The varieties of new writing are art forms, and conventional mechanisms for gaug-
ing quality in social science (e.g., validity and reliability) simply do not apply. As Denzin
notes, “experimental writing must be well-crafted, engaging writing capable of being
respected by critics of literature as well as by social scientists” (p. 200). Denzin begins for-
Book Reviews 331

mulating a strategy for a rationalistic exegesis. The latter is borrowed from the new literary
criticism, and it is of little use to the present audience. My point is that good poems are
pretty, good dramatic plays are moving, and good rock music rules. If the new writing is
bad writing, the audience will walk out before the popcorn is gone, regardless of the artist’s
analytical, ethical, or political intentions. The new writers must deal more directly with the
audience’s enjoyment of their work. A new issue emerges: Is performance ethnography
entertainment?
The third tool is a strategy for allowing the audience to maintain traditional ethnographic
interest in others, a social orientation if you will, while dabbling in the new writing. While
it is clear that all ethnography is written from the author’s standpoint, many scholars feel
that the new writing focuses too heavily on autobiography. The sad truth is that our lives as
academic ethnographers are not always sufficiently interesting, exciting, exotic, or event-
ful to sustain the dramatic tension needed in the new writing. One of the strong points of
modernist ethnography has been its success in locating interesting people about whom to
write captivating stories. Paradigmatic statements on the new writing, like Interpretive
Ethnography, should include advice on how to tap into other peoples’ lives, and how to
turn other people into characters for our stories and plays.
What will come of new writing? Again, I think we can learn from the natural history of
ethnomethodology, which never replaced sociology or interactionism. Much of eth-
nomethodology was absorbed into other disciplines or interdisciplinary areas of interest-
such as communications studies or education. Yet ethnomethodology’s legacy is imbedded
in the widespread acceptance and use of its key ideas, such as reflexivity and indexicality.
At the very least, the new writing’s legacy will be the forceful way it has etched the word
“writing” on our collective intellectual consciousness. Ethnographers can never again be
part of a research team in which writing is considered just one of many tasks to be appor-
tioned in a division of labor, nor can we think of writing as the last task in a field project.
Writing is what social research is all about. Indeed, I predict that the new writing will con-
tinue to be a major force in interactionist ethnography, if for no other reason than it has sen-
sitized us to the centrality of the mass media in culture and social life. Norman Denzin’s
leadership lies in his ability to clarify and mark the direction in which many different think-
ers from a range of disciplines are traveling. You can bet your last biscotti that this will not
be his last epistle on the new writing.

REFERENCE
Mehan, Hugh and Houston Wood. 1975. The Reality ofEthnomethodology. New York Wiley.