The man with the leaking bucket: Ethnography, journalism, and the quest for the transformative self.

Abstract

This article looks into the status and identity of ethnography by paying attention to the ideas of transformation and becoming, and to the meanings of “reality” in post postmodern times. Based on a personal reflection about the intellectual journey of the author, and his transition from journalism to academic research, it first provides an illustration of the complicated relationship between journalism, and journalistic practices, with social research during the 20th century. It highlights the trailblazing work of German–Jewish intellectual Siegfried Kracauer during the Weimar years, whose eclectic attention to popular culture and social theory has been for a long time overlooked. Following the postmodern turn, reflexivity has taken center stage in ethnographic methods, but this has not diminished the differences within social sciences and humanities in the way the subject, the researcher, is perceived and interpreted. A contested area of debate remains that of representation, and particularly, the realization that nothing meaningfully exists outside the process of representation. However, this point is further complicated by the status of “reality” in the age of the implosion of social life through the conflation of the private and the public brought about by the digital revolution.