Dialogic Editing: Interpreting How Kaluli Read Sound and Sentiment

An engaging dimension of current interpretive ethnography and its critical rhetoric is the concern to situate knowledge, power, authority, and representation in terms of the social construction of literary realism. Ethnographers today are reading, writing, and thinking more about the politics of ethnographic writing.' That is why I read Bakhtin; in his literary world, a dialogic imagination helps reposition ethnographic writing beyond its overt trajectories, and toward reflexive, critical readings. Yet I've had a tendency to kvetch about the very literary genre and trend that I'm here to contribute to. I like the emphasis on a self-conscious, dialectical invention of culture, but I worry that the enterprise not devolve into an invention of the cult of the author. First-person narrative may be the fashionable way to write and critique ethnography these days, but that alone doesn't guarantee that the work is ethnographically insightful, self-conscious, or revelatory. That is why, in tandem, I read Singer; in his literary world, there is caution that first-person writing not pass as a ruse, that hermeneutic not pass for a mispronunciation of a nom de plum: Herman Nudnik.