ArticleExpertise

Tracing ethnography: A
performance approach to the ethnographer’s dis/appearance.

This lecture is
informed by the epistemology of “traces,” which,
according to Jacques Derrida and Susan Stewart, function as material
links that connect contexts and allow situated meanings to be
performed and grasped. The lecture employs reflexive methods with the
aim of critically examining the production of academic knowledge.
Empirically, the focus is on an ethnography conducted in a national
memorial museum located in Jerusalem. The ethnography explored
commemorative discourse and representations thereof, as these are
embodied in the museum’s visitor book and in the writing
practices that it enables. In the ethnography, the visitor book was
conceptualized performatively, suggesting it is not a linguistic or
thematic corpus that should be analyzed, but a situated stage on
which multimodal performances are accomplished by the visitors (Noy,
2008a, 2008b).

But within the economy
of museums’ exhibits and performances, research itself is
implicated by the semiotics of performance and commemoration. While
the ethnography sought visitors’ and tourists’ traces on
the pages of the visitor book, its material—observable and
public—presence at the site, had created it own effects; its
own traces. Ethnographic practice is thus deconstructed with the aim
of shedding light on how in-situ research is itself an ideological
and aesthetic move. Ethnography is n the put on the same footing as
museum visitorship, i.e. as situated, performative accomplishments.
In line with the conference’s Deleuzian
theme, the lecture concludes by suggesting that performance
(experimentation) and not interpretation is the leading semiotic
resource is late-modernity.

Notes 1

Tracing ethnography 3

Being There 3

Collector: Totalizer 4

Techno-Ideologies of Representation 5

References 5

Notes

--Upon
requests from some participants, the organization committee had
decided to postpone the submission of the full length paper. Please,
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--can I not be seen as
an exemplar of a population visiting the site?

מה
שאני מנסה פה
לעשות זה, שוב,
לנסות ולהתייחס
אל עצמי לא (רק)
כאל "חוקר",
אלא גם כאל
"מבקר".
ואכן, אני
דומה מאוד בפרמטר
המרכזי לקבוצות
האחרות של מבקרים
באתר, אותן
ציינתי קודם
לכן, בעיקר
בהתייחס לעבודה
שאני יהודי.
אולם נראה
כי מנקודת מבט
ביקורתית השוני
הוא דווקא ברקע
התרבותי והסוציו-אקונומי.
בניגוד לרוב
המבקרים היהודיים-ישראליים
באתר, שהרקע
האתנו-מעמדי
שלהם נמוך ופריפריאלי
(כאן הפנייה
למאמרים על זה,
למשל בפרק
של קימרלינג),
מוצאי שלי
הנו מן האליטה,
והרקע התרבותי
שלי הוא אשכנזי
מן המעמד הבינוני-גבוה.
כך אפשר להבין
אותי לא רק כבעל
התפקיד של חוקר
אלא גם כבעל
התפקיד של מבקר,
אולם מסוג
מסויים.

--כדאי
לבטא את העמודה
שלי לגבי פרפורמנס
בהקשר זה כבר
בהתחלה (ולהכניס
פה עניין אסתטי):

להגיש
למעלה שאני
מושפע בגישות
שלי על הפרפורמנס
מן העבודות של
גופמן ואחרים
של "תפקידים
חברתיים", להם
אני מוסיף היבטים
הקשורים בצורת
להיות/להיראות
מעל במות חברתיות,
ובעובדה
כי נראות או
היראות זו הנן
קשורות ביחסי
כוח, באפשרויות
ומשאבים מוגבלים
ואקסקלוסיביים,
באידיאולוגיה
ובתנאים מוסדיים,
וכי, לבסוף,
הופעות-מותנות-ביחסי-כוח
אלה הנן תנאי
לקיום ולקול
חברתיים.

Tracing
ethnography

--כדאי
לבטא את העמודה
שלי לגבי פרפורמנס
בהקשר זה כבר
בהתחלה (ולהכניס
פה עניין אסתטי):

להגיש
למעלה שאני
מושפע בגישות
שלי על הפרפורמנס
מן העבודות של
גופמן ואחרים
של "תפקידים
חברתיים", להם
אני מוסיף היבטים
הקשורים בצורת
להיות/להיראות
מעל במות חברתיות,
ובעובדה
כי נראות או
היראות זו הנן
קשורות ביחסי
כוח, באפשרויות
ומשאבים מוגבלים
ואקסקלוסיביים,
באידיאולוגיה
ובתנאים מוסדיים,
וכי, לבסוף,
הופעות-מותנות-ביחסי-כוח
אלה הנן תנאי
לקיום ולקול
חברתיים.

This article is
informed by the epistemology of “traces,” which,
according to Jacques Derrida and Susan Stewart , function as
material links that connect contexts and allow situated meanings to
be performed and grasped. The article employs reflexive methods with
the aim of critically examining the production of academic knowledge,
with specific reference to ethnographic practices. I use the space
available here to rethink an ethnographic research conducted during
Autumn, 2006, at the Ammunition Hill National Commemoration Complex
(Giv'at Hatachmoshet), in Jerusalem, Israel. I offer a
performative rending of museum ethnography, which rests on two
reflexive (and hindsight) insights: first, I try to employ a type of
theorizing of my ethnographic stint there, which is similar to the
type of theorizing I employed when trying the account for the
visitors performances at the site. In this sense I use reflexivity
critically, as I try to put visitors' visits and my work there on the
same footing.

Second, regardless of
the conceptualization of visitors' performances, I wish to
problematize my ethnographic study at the national commemorative
complex and specifically at the museum therein, by viewing my
observations there as "museum visits". By doing this I
acknowledge the power and authority (sovereignty) of the modern
institution of the museum, which leads to suggesting that what is
commonly viewed as (ethnographic) "research", might be,
under different circumstances—such as ideological contexts and
institutional semiotics—viewed or "framed"
differently ; in this case, as a museum visit (albeit particular). In
other words, altennative framing are (always?) possible, and pursuing
them might lean to both a reflexive insight into the construction of
academic knowledge and with it to bettering and enriching the
ethnography itself. The research is thus steeped mainly in
explorations into reflexive ethnographies and new museum studies .

Being
There

The expression "Being
There" nicely captures the performative rendering of the
ethnographic research I have conducted at the Ammunition Hill Museum.
This expression's twofold designation indicates the complexities of
my approach to museum ethnography. The term "being" touches
on an existential notion of presence; a Heideggerian
being-in-the-world or Dasein. This type of
being-in-ethnographic-research concerns the meanings and implications
of being some-where; being within physical and semiotic confines of
various places, in the present case of a commemorative site and
museum.

The term "there"
compliments the notion of being-in and suggests a particular site in
which being-in take place (in fact, Dasein literally means "being
there"). This is true for all being-ins-the-world, and
specifically complicated for ethnographic inquiry, which is always
situated and always has a "field" or "site" of
research. This is in fact the very definition of ethnographic
research, a research of being—observing, recording,
interviewing, participating and other social activities that take
place—"there," wherever that this "there"
may be. Note that in situated research practices such as ethnography,
there are always references to specific places and locales, and with
them always indexical references that reveal the relationship between
the researcher and the field/site. "Here" or "there"
are common indexical terms used to describe the distance between the
field and the homeplace, whether distant (there), or proximate
(here). As suggested earlier, in this article I pursue my
ethnographic visits to the site in a manner that is similar and that
parallels the way I researched and conceptualized performative
entries in the VB. The indexical deictics "here" and
"there" relate to how visitors who inscribe the visitor
book accomplish the task of producing entries performatively.
Accomplishing a meaningful and effective performance necessitates a
deictic anchoring of the performance in the space/on the stage
whereat it is revealed as a meaningful and aesthetisized social
action (Noy, forthcoming).

--where does this go?
Maybe here?

For the many visitors
at the site (at least for those who chose to inscribe in the VB), the
matter of their actual (corporeal, "authentic") presence at
the site is crucially important, and it is vital for the
effectiveness of their performances in the VB. The visitors made this
clear by repeatedly indicating that their performances are performed
in situ, and that they are anchored to the "here" of
the site. And so a typical entry would include the words "I was
here." After all, what good (meaning) would it do if someone
would have indicated having "been here," where the latter
word indicates an insignificant location. The visitors were "here,"
and that space-place meant variously the AHNMS, (the Holy City of)
Jerusalem, and the Land of Israel (see Noy, forthcoming).

In ethnographic
research, however, the field is commonly located "there,"
at a distance from both homeplace and workplace. Yet if I wish to
re-frame and re-render my ethnographic excursions to the AHNMS
museum, I should consider the "here" of the researched. If
I am to critically assume the responsibilities and the moral
obligations of the research conducted "there," then I must
acknowledge the hereness (rather than the "thereness") of
the research and attend to it. When I do so I remove one of the veils
that hides the similarities—or that constitutes the
differences—between other visitors and other visits and my own.
By looking at the here, rather than there of my research, …

Collector:
Totalizer

-- Stewart (1993,
p.161), "It is the museum, not the library, which must serve as
the central metaphor of the collection … [because it is there
that] closure of all space and temporality within the context at
hand" occurs.

In this section I shall
briefly argue for another parallel or in terms of power relations
another competition, between the semiotics of the museum and those of
the ethnography. This parallel is evinced in the intuitions'—museums
on the one hand and ethnography on the other, to sample and collect
artifacts (broadly defined), and by and by also to
re/de-contextualize their meanings.

Techno-Ideologies
of Representation

Finally, in scene
number three I wish to complete the circle that describes the power
(inter)relations between museumal and ethnographic semiotics, by
arguing that both agencies essentially employ means of
representation, and that these means convey ideologies of
representation which have both similarities and differences.

References

Noy, C. (In press). 'I
WAS HERE!': Addressivity structures and inscribing practices as
indexical resources. Discourse Studies.