me deeply, and it became a watershed to clarify my desire for a critical food studies approach, and for the kinds of methodological contributions that I wanted to make to this field. Rarely do we get to cry reading academic writings … I cried reading this chapter, stopping and re-reading, as if to make sure I was not hallucinating … someone had already saved me so much work by analyzing the tremendous significance of food globally and in Caribbean histories and experiences, the emergence of a creative and new regional cuisine, and its connection to slaves and their descendants’ struggle for survival, freedom and dignity. Mintz gave me also so many clues through this work, to understand the continuing racialization of this food-memory-history in the Caribbean present, the struggles and hopes of Dominican migrant women in NYC, and why they cherished their hard-earned foods, and for understanding even my own family food practices … what a gift!
I encountered Critical Ethnography late in my training. It was, in fact, through the publications and contributions of education and rhetoric scholars that I was first exposed to this version of ethnographic fieldwork (see Anderson 1989, Foley 2002). In 2006, the anthropologist Soyini Madison’s Critical Ethnography and Performance book was first published. By then, I have been gathering trends and fragments of a critical toolkit to guide me in the kind of engaged feminist and post-colonial work that I wanted to produce. My early bricolage of many disparate strands was promising, yet unwieldy. Finding that there was already a community of scholars, with new approaches to ethnography and to other qualitative methodologies, who also addressed many of my theoretical concerns, was a gift. This discovery helped me to focus my contributions on refining my interdisciplinary approaches, cooking up into that mixture the visual methodologies from my ←28 | 29→previous training, as well as mapping methods, relevant to develop critical food research (which lead me eventually to develop foodmaps method). It was from this experience that I began channeling those insights into my teaching practice, choosing an auto-ethnographic project-based and place-based approach. Initially, when exposed to classical ethnographic works in my graduate courses, in spite of appreciating their contributions, I mostly learned from them what I did not want to do and how I would not want to write about my research findings. These older ethnographic styles made me doubt if anthropology was for me, and if I wished to use a tool soiled with such colonial prejudices. Fortunately, I found other interdisciplinary works, which taught me to question the potential and limitations of ethnography as a methodology, and clarified how I could develop a form of engaged scholarship committed to ethical fieldwork and critical cultural analysis, and this eventually had an effect on my choosing a teaching style that foregrounds commitment to civil rights, respect for differences, and struggles for social justice locally and globally.
Many of the authors discussed in this informal genealogy were considered “minorities” due to their own cultural histories or diasporic origins and, hence, their mere existence influenced how I perceived my own problematic relationship to anthropology, my presence in this discipline and in academia, more broadly, since I was also an outsider, a working-class Dominican immigrant studying, of all places, in Texas. These outsider-within scholars represented for me a sense of hope and relief, a certainty that I was where I should be. The scholars discussed in above, and many more that I had to leave out, inspired a commitment to keep refining my ethnographic approach, to engaged scholarship and ethics, and a desire to produce powerful writings whenever I share my research findings. These authors have been mentors-teachers to me, even if, in the majority of cases, we have never met; in a sense, this is a thank you and homage to them, for what they have done, through their work, for me and for other minority scholars. Although some authors who I have discussed are not ethnographers, and the reader might be asking, what do those works have to do with ethnography? I hope it has become clear, that ethnography is an interdisciplinary praxis, and that, in order to be a good critical ethnographer “in the field,” we need to also become a critical scholar outside of it. In sharpening our understanding of the human condition, we sharpen also our “ethnographic eye.”
References
Agar, M. (2006, September). An ethnography by any other name … Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 7(4).
←29 | 30→
Agar, M. (2004). We have met the other and we’re all nonlinear: Ethnography as a nonlinear dynamic system. Complexity, 10(2), 16–24.
Agar, M. (1996). The professional stranger: An informal introduction to ethnography. New York: Academic Press.
Agar, M. (1986). Speaking of ethnography (Vol. 2). Newbury Park: Sage.
Ahmed, S. (1999). Home and away: Narratives of migration and estrangement. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2(3), 329–347.
Allen, J. S. (2007). Means of desire’s production: Male sex labor in Cuba. Identities: Global Studies in Power and Culture, 14(1–1), 183–202.
Anderson, Gary. (1989, Fall). Critical ethnography in education: Origins, current status, and new directions. Review of Educational Research, 59(3), 249–270.
Bal, M., Crewe, J. V., & Spitzer, L. (1999). Acts of memory: Cultural recall in the present. Hanover: Upne.
Barndt, D. (2002). Tangled routes: Women, work, and globalization on the tomato trail. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Behar, R. (1993). Translated woman: Crossing the border with Esperanza’s story. Boston: Beacon Press.
Behar, R. (1996). The vulnerable observer: Ethnography that breaks your heart. Boston: Beacon Press.
Behar, R. (1999). Ethnography: Cherishing our second-fiddle genre. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 28(5), 472–484.
Benedict, R. (2005). Patterns of culture (Vol. 8). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Boas, F. (1989). A Franz Boas reader: the shaping of American anthropology, 1883–1911. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Boas, F., & Codere, H. (1966). Kwakiutl ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Brown, S. G., & Dobrin, S. I. (2004). Ethnography unbound: From theory shock to critical praxis. Albany: SUNY Press.
Chang, H. (2008). Autoethnography as method: Developing qualitative inquiry series. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
Clifford, J., & Marcus, G. E. (Eds.). (1986). Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Christie, M. E. (2003). Kitchenspace: gendered spaces for cultural reproduction, or, nature in the everyday lives of ordinary women in central Mexico (UT-Austin, Doctoral dissertation).
Christie, M. E. (2004). Kitchenspace, Fiestas, and Cultural Reproduction in Mexican Houselot Gardens. Geographical Review, 94(3), 368–390.
Counihan, C., & Van Esterik, P. (Eds.). (1997). Food and culture: A reader (1st ed.). New York: Routledge.
Counihan, C. M., & Kaplan, S. L. (2003). Food and gender: Identity and power. London: Routledge.
Dávila, A. (2006). Latinos, Inc.: The marketing and making of a people. Berkeley: University of California Press.
←30 | 31→
Dávila, A. (2003, spring). Dreams of place: Housing, gentrification, and the marketing of space in El Barrio. Centro Journal, XV. Accessed at: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=37715106
Dávila,
