Reflexive Textuality: Researcher as Fractured Context

Abstract

Ethnography is a form of reading in its postmodern sense. This is a methodological principle the present paper attempted to demonstrate. By analyzing an ethnographic work written by a Filipina anthropologist about a religious community in the Philippines, the author generated several rules concretizing a research methodology he called reflexive textuality. This approach transforms investigators into readers of both text and context. The basic assumption however, is that whether the investigators are reading texts and/or contexts, their interpretive engagement extends to and matters most in, the actual writing of their textual outputs. Thus, reflexive textuality does not only involve contextualizing a text (i.e., interpreting a text via its context), but also textualizing a context (i.e., converting context into a readable text). In the latter, the multiple and fragile positions a researcher invokes and brings into play while writing his/her ethnography ultimately displace the authentic context of the data set initially co-produced and co-interpreted with research participants. The paper ends with some notes on the implications of reflexive textuality as a qualitative research approach.