ABSTRACT
The examples in Chapter 3, while varied, are still all coming from the same direction, that is, the voice of the author. In early realist tales this was a disembodied voice. Indeed, at times it was as if there were no human author there, but some supernormal being. Charmaz and Mitchell (1997: 193) talk of the ‘myth of silent authorship’. Thomas (1992: 10) refers to the ‘frozen text’, where all the dynamism between researcher and others in the course of data collection is lost in the written account. It is the ‘style of no style, windowpane prose’ (Golden-Biddle and Locke 1997: 75). However, after the first wave of ethnographic studies in the UK in the 1970s, it was perhaps a natural development for researchers to become more reflexive about their work and tell ‘confessional’ in contrast to ‘realist’ tales (as, for example, in the collection by Burgess 1984). Soon, ethnographic authors began to write themselves into the text. An early example of this is Davies (1982: 5). She writes: ‘My reasons for presenting myself as “I” rather than as “the author” stem not just from a stylistic preference, but from a recognition of the fact that the pragmatic nature of this study necessarily involves me as a person. To present the data as if I had not been involved would be to tell only part of the story’.
