ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the concept of journalistic immersion and the critical vocabularies we use to describe it. Specifically, it argues that literary scholars, historians, and journalists themselves have typically used a classical anthropological model of cultural immersion to describe both what journalists do—the physical practice of embedding themselves in a culture or sub-culture—and the styles of writing they use to recreate that border-crossing for their readers. Recently, however, many ethnographers and cultural critics have challenged classical anthropological thinking as too dependent on a holistic notion of culture, too wedded to the idea of a complete and seamless immersion, and too predicated on a naïve reader who identifies with the reporter’s border-crossing. After reviewing the Victorian-era literary conventions of the classical model, this chapter builds upon these recent critiques to explore how three of our finest contemporary long-form journalists—Ted Conover, Barbara Ehrenreich, and William Finnegan—create what the chapter calls a “postethnographic,” second-order narrative that self-reflexively examines their own practice of immersion.
