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Sterling Brown: an ethnographic perspective

African American Review, Fall, 1997 by Beverly Lanier Skinner

I would like to propose a method for reading the poetry of Sterling A. Brown in light of Brown's complete oeuvre. My proposed method is informed by interdisciplinary inquiry, including recent ethnographic theory and qualitative research methodology and an emerging cultural studies discourse that I and others term black cultural critique. This approach is not intended to overlook any aspect of the aesthetic values or artistic achievement of Brown's poetic output. Rather, this approach intends to offer an additional, interdisciplinary, theoretical context in which to appreciate Brown's poetic achievement. My thesis is that Sterling Brown was a postmodern ethnographer who by the 1940s had pioneered solutions to three major problems with which today's cultural anthropologists are grappling: (1) what form ethnographic writing should take, (2) what methodology can result in competent ethnographies of non-hegemonic, oral-based cultures, and (3) what ways the authority of native informants can be acknowledged in ethnographies.

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James Clifford and George Marcus offer an eloquent explanation of why I feel it is important to look at Sterling Brown's poetic output from an ethnographic perspective. They see ethnography as an "emergent interdisciplinary phenomenon [whose] authority and rhetoric have spread to many fields where 'culture is a newly problematic object of description and critique'" (Writing Culture 3). I suggest that, if we consider Brown's entire oeuvre - poetry, literary criticism, oral history, and cultural critique - from an ethnographic perspective, we can emerge with the understanding that the sum of his writings constitutes an ethnographic methodology that reflects postmodernist sensibilities. However, it was not until the 1970s and '80s that ethnographers like Clifford Geertz, Mary Douglas, Claude Levi-Strauss, and the late Victor Turner advocated the pursuit of what Sterling Brown already had accomplished - namely, "blurr[ing] the old distinction between art and science and challeng[ing] the very basis of the claim to exacting rigor, unblinking truth telling, and unbiased reporting that marked the boundary separating" art from science (Vidich and Lyman 41). Brown's methodology answers the call of numerous ethnographers and anthropologists who seek honest, nontraditional, competent ways of writing the ethnos of non-hegemonic and non-Western cultures.

Before I proceed with my argument, let me offer some definitions. The Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthoropology? defines ethnography as "writing about customs or, more generally, the description of cultures based on firsthand observation and participation in fieldwork. Fieldwork is the process of observing and participating in life ways of people. Anthropologists report the results as ethnography" (416). Postmodern ethnographers, in the words of Vidich and Lyman, "tak[e] seriously the aim of such deconstructionists as Derrida . . ., Lyotard . . ., and Baudrillard." The postmodern ethnographer is one who eschews such traditional pursuits as "the quest for valid generalizations and substantive conclusions" and replaces them with "thick descriptions," in the language of Geertz, so that postmodern ethnography encompasses the "lived experience," "disprivileg[ing] all received texts and established discourses on behalf of an all-encompassing critical skepticism about knowledge . . . [instead] giv[ing] contingency . . . [to] language, . . . selfhood, . . . and . . . community" (Vidich and Lyman 41).

The ethnographic approach that Sterling Brown pioneered answers the call made by several of today's cutting-edge social scientists for a radical, multi-vocal, culturally astute approach to cultural studies. In fact, the brand of ethnography that Brown developed is one that can be appreciated by the most radical of cultural scholars. African-American sociologist John H. Stanfield II explains the problem cultural anthropologists have long faced in their attempts to describe and learn from non-hegemonic cultures. He implies in the following quotation that radical approaches to cultural study simply are not in the mission of universities that currently train ethnographers:

The oral basis of most African cultures and among aboriginal peoples around the world offers a major challenge, because adequate study of such cultures requires a different portfolio of skills from what researchers reared in written word-based cultures acquire easily. In oral-based cultures, . . . records . . . come in the form of poems, songs, testimonies, stories, performing arts, and proverbs, rather than diaries, newspapers, census reports, and surveys. (184-85)

Contemporary literary studies like Gayl Jones's Liberating Voices, Henry Louis Gates's The Signifying Monkey, Houston Baker's Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature, and Stephen Henderson's "The Form of Things Unknown" have helped establish African-American culture as an oral-based one. But even earlier, before the New Negro Renaissance that spawned Brown's literary endeavors, W. E. B. Du Bois had established the oral basis of African-American culture in his 1903 essay collection The Souls of Black Folk.(1)

Sterling Brown: an ethnographic perspective

African American Review, Fall, 1997 by Beverly Lanier Skinner

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