good enough ethnography

is ethnography in which we use our ability to listen and observe carefully, empathically, and compassionately in acts of solidarity in the work of recognition.

Early in the book, Scheper-Hughes cites C. Wright Mills' dictum 'Methodologist, get to work!' (1992:23). Declaring herself weary of formalistic evasions and postmodern critiques, she calls instead for engagement with other human beings through what she calls 'good-enough ethnography' (28). This means using 'our ability to listen and observe carefully, empathically, and compassionately' in 'acts of solidarity' and the 'work of recognition' (28). Referents for this phrase emerge later in the book when she discusses Erik Eriksson's concept of 'good-enough holding,' and D. W. Winnicott's extensions of this into 'good-enough mothering.' Winnicott, for his part, argued that basic assurance and competence on the part of a mother are usually sufficient for normal infant trust and maturation. Although he saw a lack of good-enough holding in early life as a cause of many developmental problems, his ideas were intended to support 'ordinary mothers' in their 'natural tendencies,' and to reassure them that a child's well-being did not depend on them being paragons of mothering virtues. Scheper-Hughes found Winnicott's ideas 'refreshing,' but and this is a key argument of the book 'based on an overly optimistic view of the infant's adaptiveness' (360), generalizing specific life conditions of the children he studied in mid-twentieth century Britain. Theorizing the 'modernization of child mortality' in the underdeveloped world, she shows how dangerous infancy actually is in the Alto of 'Bom Jesus' translatable as 'the heights of Good Jesus' as Scheper-Hughes chose to allegorize the shantytowns of Timbauba, Pernambuco. Under the murderous conditions of the Alto, many infants did not survive 'lapses of attention and care' on the part of their mothers, who were often themselves struggling for health and survival. Obviously, 'good-enough mothering' was problematic in a place where, as one woman cited by Marilyn Nations and Linda Anne Rebhun said, 'it's easy enough for anyone to die' (Nations and Rebhun 1988: 175, emphasis added... quoted in Scheper-Hughes 1992: 361). Just as surely also, then, our ethnography is not good enough in a thousand ways in relation to the oppressed and the unlucky among them the host of us already dead, as Paul Farmer, among others, has emphasized (Farmer 2004: 307). In what senses then might it be good enough' We could begin by noting Scheper-Hughes' citation of Wittgenstein (1992: 172) that the most difficult things to see are those which are taken for granted. Thus, among our first priorities in medical anthropology is simply to recognize suffering through our ethnography. Scheper-Hughes, satisfied neither with exploring 'the politics of epistemic murk' (Taussig 1987:xii) or working within 'areas of moral clarity' (Farmer, cited in Kidder 2004:101), writes that our task is to '[articulate] standards for. . . a moral and an ethical reflection on cultural practices' (22). And the urgent need to find ways to problematize accepted circumstances and conventions in relation to suffering makes medical anthropologist like those of us also in public health or theology more than physicians' manques.

good enough ethnography, n.Definitions

good enough ethnography