9. Ethnographic Writing as an Ethical Practice of Voicing
Researchers who study and write about the experiences of others also struggle with this issue of who "owns" voices, and for what purposes. Ethnographers, like sound engineers, are responsible for producing finished texts that are composites of edited voices. As we have suggested in the juxtaposition of scenes rendered by print versus audiovisual means, when it comes to making visible the relationship of voice to agency and authorial control, sound has the ability to conceal what is revealed in textual renderings of cultural experience and to reveal what may otherwise be concealed.
Consider that anyone learning to do qualitative, person-based research must learn not only the tools for such research ("methods"), but how these tools participate in a methodology (a program of theorized moves). As a rhetoric, a methodology is an ethical system, for which the operations of soundwriting, with its structure of editorial decisions, has the potential to expose. In interview-based studies like Deborah Brandt's (2001) Literacy and American Lives and our own LiteracyCorps Michigan (LCM), decisions about renderings and representations of voice are fairly easily foregrounded: You elicit a story, and then you have to make a decision about telling it. And yet all person-based, narrative research is fraught with ethical decisions about how to encounter research participants as agentive, "voiced" subjects. Ordinarily, learning how to manage these decisions—from initial research encounters, to representation in moments of inscription in notes or transcripts, to rendering as characters in a textual product that does rhetorical work in the world—entails not only encounters with theory (of research methods, hermeneutics, and culture) that may help to serve as heuristics for decision-making, but also embodied experiences of the entailments of human encounters. It entails learning that—and how—research is a rhetorical practice, the operations of which are sometimes occluded by the commonplaces of everyday social routines. For example, the conventional ethnographic methods of participant-observation and interviewing are (planned, goal-driven, and intentional) analogs to social practices that happen "in the wild"—for instance, paying attention to what's happening in social situations and talking to people to learn things. The question, in helping novice researchers to manage encounters with their participants and to document these encounters, is this: Is it possible to create learning situations that are both experientially rich and embodied, and also available for inquiry and critique?
In his oft-cited inquiry into predicaments of authorship in rendering stories of cultural experience, Tales of the Field, John Van Maanen (1988) explained that how you "hear" experience has to do not only with decisions around documentation of events as they are seen and heard, but the ethical work you imagine the finished ethnographic product will perform. Van Maanen identified several conventional "tales of the field"—that is, ethnographic genres like realist, confessional, and impressionist tales, among others. These have to do not only with conventional narrative genres but also with decisions the author/researcher makes about his or her own perspective and position in the meaning-making enterprise that is the ethnographic project. And yet, though they need to be informed by the rhetorical goals of the end product, decisions about rhetorical stance begin far prior to the moment the researcher (now author) begins crafting the ethnographic text. In their popular research guide Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes, Robert Emerson, Rachel Fretz, and Linda Shaw (1995) assumed, as well as demonstrated, how researchers behave rhetorically far before the moment of production of an ethnographic work—as soon, in fact, as an ethnographer enters "the field" and begins to inscribe what he or she sees and hears there. There is no moment in the ethnographic encounter that is without rhetorical implication when it comes to the ethics of voice and voicing.