Ways With Words and "The Madness(es) of Reading and Writing Ethnography"

Heath's "The Madness(es) of Reading and Writing Ethnography," the presentation of the reader who is also aware of being read frames a response to the readers of Ways With Words. Her use of Terra Nostra  and its knight, falling victim to reading, provides a literary lens for her work.  The impact of reading is exaggerated in claims that writing about oral cultures destroys them. The significance of the past experiences of the people Ways With Words contains is observed by the readers of the text but is rather unimportant to those being read in the work. Heath's description of her data collection taking place during her wanderings called to mind the dérive. The dérive (also referred to as the “drift”), a technique for exploring spaces, is employed by situationists to understand the environment’s psychological impact. The dérive takes place without previously formed notions about the environment, and the flâneur is the individual who studies the terrain using this method. The one who practices the drift is aware of the environment’s effect on one’s behavior, and such alertness to psychogeographical components of the drift separates the flâneur from the casual wanderer. With this article, Heath makes it evident that the environment of her research had a profound effect on her, not just as an academic studying groups of people, but as a person living what she calls a schizophrenic existence. This particular article pointed out a relationship between my work and ethnographic research that I had not seen before. I never collected ethnographic data outside of visiting English 101 classrooms during my first semester at ISU. I wonder what could have been different about how I wrote my notes and what conclusions I made if I saw a connection between the "wanderings" in the dérive and writing ethnography. Ethnographers always seemed to have too many tools for recording their data and too many restrictions about their interactions to participate in the dérive, but Heath's engagement in the communities she writes about clearly indicates that this is inaccurate. When discussing the personal information Heath should have included in the appendix of Ways With Words, she expresses some of the direct engagement in the communities she worked in (264). She relates he personal history to her comfort level during her research instead of turning directly to the scholarly analysis of her place as an ethnographer. As she reflects back on her wanderings, she offers new insight that helps readers understand her research, and ultimately, she is self reading as she walks back through her dérive.