This page was created by Collin Hardwick.
Stewart, A Space on the Side of the Road
Discipline/Field: Anthropology, Cultural Studies
Year: 1996
Main Arguments & Concepts
A Space on the Side of the Road is an ethnography of rural Applachia, that also questions the practices of ethnographic research. Stewart applies ideas of subject / object from post- and decolonial studies within a context of studying rural America. In applying these theories, Stewart’s ethnography explores questions of the interaction of the studying and studied, the value of different types of evidence, the creation of alterity (68).Her main objective in this text is to create a new ethnographic form that resists the objectification of the researched “other.” She cautions against quick and overly-totalized analyses, and instead advocates for a “new ethnography” (26), where researchers “dwell in the uncertain space of error or gap not just to police the errors and crimes of representation but to include the ontology and epistemology of precise culture practices including our own modes of exegesis and explanation” (26). To model her theory of new ethnography, Stewart uses a lot of imperative sentences (“picture ...” or “imagine ...” this) in this book, which, in my reading, attempts to force observation without analysis.
Narrative
Stewart highlights the purpose of narrative (29), which, on some level, justifies her methodology and writing style. Stewart suggest that anecdotes should not be relegated to “second class” evidence (71). Narrative, instead allows for more representation of a heterogenous culture: “Such story fragments and lyric images are not easily captured by transcended theories of culture but flood the very effort with voices and forces of their own and an “Other” epistemology” (210). While no form of academic research will create a fully wrought representation of culture, narrative and anecdote can provide a s a “point of entry” (211).
Quotes
“Truth claims emerge in the performative spaces where signs (talk) and meanings (ideals/ideas) collide-- the space on the side fo the road. But this is the very motive for telling the story and its point in the end.”“Culture, as it is seen through its productive forms and means of mediation, in not, then, reducible to a fixed body of social value and belief or a direct precipitant of lived experience in the world but grows into a space on the side of the road where stories weighted with sociality take on a life of their own” (210).
“If in the bourgeois imaginary there is a dram of a utopian public sphere where there can be a free exchange of ideas and where intercultural conflicts can be mediated to avoid violence and fissure, then its counter-publics in ‘unassimilated’ places emerge not as empirical reals but as negations emergent in gaps” (125).
Notes
While I don’t believe Stewart’s main purpose in this book was to report back on Appalachian culture (actually, she’s really making an argument against that mentality), she does offer interesting details in how she conducted her ethnographic research. It was striking to me just how embedded in the community she was -- it sounds like she lived in West Virginia for years. A particularly striking example of the importance of spending time and understanding the community where you are working came up with story of the VISTA worker, who is trying to organize the coal workers. Stewart offers a really thorough discourse analysis of the conversation that ensued between one community member and the VISTA , which was thoroughly counterproductive because the two workers used two completely different ways of referencing the world (pp. 81-83).Related
Basso, Wisdom Sits in PlacesMatheiu,Tactics of Hope
Both texts as questions about what it means to work in community (as research, in Stewart’s case, and as pedagogy in Matheiu’s). What are our responsibilities when we take the academy ‘out into the world?’
Mignolo & Walsh, On Decoloniality
On their face, these two texts seem rather different, but The Space on the Side of the Road and the first two chapters of On Decoloniality are actually both asking similar questions about ethics in academic research. Both are concerned with the academy’s relation to the larger world, particularly when minoritized people are treated as objects of study. Going into my dissertation research, it will be essential to resist this move of objectifying the researched, which is embedded in traditional academic discourses, at every stage of my work.
Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection
