A tiled memorial with the word "imagine" surrounded by flowers. Image caption: John Lennon “Imagine” memorial in New York City with tiles spelling out “Imagine” surrounded by flowers. Photo by Dimitry Anikin on Unsplash.

The Working Paper Series, Volume 2016, Issue 1, pp. 1–34
Published 2016
PDF Version

Let Us Pretend! Imaginative Identification: A Form

of Cultural Nonviolence

This is an excerpt. For the full version, please see the following link.

Anita Clarke
Te Ao O Rongomaraeroa National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Otago

This essay investigates writing style as a way of explaining the gap that a number of scholars have observed between social scientists, their own societies and the societies they study. It identifies various practices of distancing in the writing conventions that have become customary in most social sciences and considers how these practices function to obfuscate and thereby reproduce the violence at the heart of a social structure that vests the professional academic with the epistemic authority to story social phenomena experienced and suffered by others who are not granted such authority. The essay explores the potential of autoethnographic narrative to make visible this fact of violence. By refusing to exclude personal experience and emotion, autoethnographic narrative enables intimacies that can communicate an essential unity of social reality and bring into view the violent underside of the social structure that connects the writer and reader to the people at the heart of the investigation.

Keywords: voice, autoethnography, narrative, cultural violence, cultural nonviolence

The power of what is erects the boundaries into which our consciousness crashes.

We must seek to crash through them.

(Theodor Adorno)

From the moment we arrive at university, if not earlier, students of social science are trained to write in a particular style. The vast majority of articles we are assigned to read are written this way and it is expected that the essays we produce are too. We rarely consider alternative ways of presenting research. It is important we are aware that the style in which we are trained to write, referred to here as the ‘academic voice’, is not without history or implication. It is a style of writing rooted in a specific, Western mode of thinking about, knowing and being in the world. It is important we are aware that the academic voice is not the only valuable way of presenting research -‐ it is just one style amongst a vast and rich array of valid alternatives. This essay explores ways of writing differently – ways of shifting the boundaries of what we can say and who we can say it to – ways of writing which may be considered more honest, holistic and humane than the academic voice.

Firstly, I will trace the use of the academic voice in the social sciences back to the colonial era. Considering this historical background enables us to understand how the academic voice came to possess epistemic authority and how it continues to function within a wider social context as a form of what Johan Galtung called ‘cultural violence’. When Elizabeth Dauphinee was confronted by what the dictates of her profession required her to exclude from her research, she began writing differently and created her 2011 novel, The Politics of Exile, in the form of an autoethnographic narrative. The second part of this essay will consider how this writing style has the potential to function as a form of cultural nonviolence. Whereas conventional academic writing functions to separate social reality and create distance between fragmented parts, autoethnographic narrative can enable intimacies – between observer and observed, between the various parts of the world and its holistic constitution and between writer and reader -‐ that communicate an essential unity of social reality.