Psychoanalytic ethnography and the transformation of racially wounded communities

Abstract

This paper first defines race and related dehumanizing experiences and then explores the history of the study of Blacks in ethnography and in psychoanalysis before addressing the primary focus: psychoanalytical ethnography. Psychoanalytical ethnography is valuable for transforming racially wounded communities into vibrant open communities through creating a safe place for community leaders and residents to ‘play’. In the process of their play, they gradually unravel the layers of race, which most fundamentally is emotionality, and begin to engage in tasks that work towards developing a more open, welcoming community. The paper draws on the work of neo‐Freudians such as Winnicott and Kohut to develop a safe space for the researcher and focus groups to create a process of play that unpeels layers or race as an emotional scar and to develop empowering ways to transform closed communities into open communities.

Notes

1. One of the oddest patterns in American community studies is that, historically speaking, usually when race is considered it is in the ethnographic literature regarding Black and other people of color communities. Rarely have ethnographers of white communities discussed the normative role of whiteness as a mode of consciousness and identity and as symbolism in shaping civil culture and local institutions (consider William I. Thomas’s Polish Peasant study). Thus, if we wish to study the impact of race in the construction of American communities, we must turn more to the historical Black ethnographic literature. The few exceptions are ethnographers such as Herbert Gans and Jonathan Reider who have written extensively on the race consciousness of urban white ethnics.