Chapter 14: The Ethnographer as Postmodern Flâneur: Critical Reflexivity and Posthybridity

—Ché Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries (p. 152)

—Zygmunt Bauman (1995, p. 143), “Searching for a Centre that Holds”

The central theme of this collection of reflections is that both the world of academic science and that of everyday life need the agency required of the self-reflexive flâneur. This chapter—originally developed as a type of discursive montage—was provoked by reflecting upon my own location as flâneur in both academic settings and those of the mundane world of popular culture. It developed out of the social trajectory of my own formation as an ethnographer and the social historical conditions of possibility that enable me to exist within the structured spaces, prestige hierarchies, and struggles of academia yet provoke me flagrante bello to remain, for the most part, outside of such spaces. Yet being “outside” the academy while remaining “officially” within it carries with it certain risks surrounding the rapports de force within university life, most notably the risk of being ambushed by the world, being subjectivized by it as one seeks to escape the crippling banality and sterility of formal institutions of higher learning. A theme that repeats itself throughout this chapter is that the professional flâneur as an outsider within is trapped between an identification with the bloom and buzz of the popular and a perverse loyalty to the strident strictures of academic science yet frequently fails to understand how she is positioned simultaneously in both social spaces.