Reflexive/Diffractive Ethnography

Abstract

This article calls attention to the productive intersection of various postcriticisms of knowledge production and the critique of ethnography as a writing technology for producing scientific knowledge about others. In particular, poststructural and deconstructive criticism, cultural studies, feminist science studies, postcolonial theory, and queer theory are seen to have focused disruptive and useful attention on the ethnographic I/eye, both inside and outside the professional academic texts of human science. A radical or full reflexivity is seen to be particularly useful in this attention to the one who sees, knows, and writes, but this reflexivity has been criticized by feminist technoscience critic Donna Haraway for being in fact too timid. A consideration of Haraway's preferred strategy based on the metaphor of diffraction, which seeks to effect difference patterns in the local worlds where ethnography is done, closes the article.