FRAGMENTS OF SELF AT THE POSTMODERN BAR

Abstract

In their introduction to a special issue in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (Taking Ethnography into the Twenty-First Century), Bochner and Ellis called on researchers to produce works that “respond constructively to the challenges to ethnography posed by postmodernist and poststructuralist perspectives on truth, neutrality, objectivity, and language”; indeed, they challenged researchers to produce ethnographies that are “more author centered” and “more engaging to readers,” and that “invite audiences to enter actively into horizons of the human condition where life is shown to be comic, tragic, and absurd, and where endless opportunities exist to create a reality and live it.” In this article, the authors try to meet this challenge by blending autobiographical and impressionistic forms of writing to reveal the complex and contradictory senses of self experienced as a team of ethnographers interviewed, observed, and interacted with the managers, employees, and patrons of an urban entertainment complex they called the “postmodern bar.”