Angry Writing: (Re)Presenting the Unethical World of the Ethnographer

The manner in which academic protocols fraudulently prohibit certain textual strategies whilst celebrating others is addressed. In particular it is suggested that, in focusing on aesthetics, reflexive anthropologists evade rather than resolve questions both of ethics and of epistemology. This contention can be understood in terms of the responsibility of the author/scriptor with reference to the presence of anger in academic prose and to The Satanic Verses controversy.

This paper questions the manner in which anger routinely disqualifies writing from academic status. In talking theoretically about presentational style, I want to address substantively issues of research ethics. What angers me about ethnographic work generally is that a sustained vogue for reflexivity so commonly casts a crisis of representation in terms of the relation between subject matter and narrative to the cost of consideration of the relation between representation and audience. The smugness of the academy sits comfortably beside ostentatious angst over the academic method. Reflexivity decays into narcissism. What angers me specifically about ethnography in geography is that in the identity crises of everyday rites of credentialism geographers cast themselves as an ‘Other’, pursuing an elusive vogue in social theory, sociology, or, perhaps this week, anthropology. Yet ethnography is neither a passport to a ringside view of the exotic nor a form of methodological avant gardeism. Such issues are discussed here in the context of my own participant observation work with the police; research that was arguably deceitful, unrepresentative, undemocratic, and perhaps indefensible. Reflexively so.