The Fragile Community: Living Together with AIDS.

• Author: Droge, David

By Mara B. Adelman and Lawrence R. Frey. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum 1997. $16.50 (paper)

To offer conclusions about the world is to claim authority. Although traditional empirical scholarship cloaks authority claims in theoretical or methodological conventions, ethnography is more nakedly rhetorical. As Clifford Geertz and others have noted, "authority" is constructed through the ethnographer's text The writer attempts to convince readers that he or she has "been there," has participated in a way of life. The call of an ethnographic text, then, is for a rhetorical response.

This rhetorical turn has led contemporary ethnographers to confront institutional power in their work. Particularly problematic for these writers is the legacy of "interpretive omniscience". As John Van Maanen argued in Tales of the Field, this characteristic of the realist ethnographic tale, in which ethnographers offer the "final word" on how a cultural scene is to be interpreted, submerges power issues. In writing about domestic cultural scenes, ethnographers risk an unconscious alliance with social control masquerading as professional help.

Social critic John McKnight (The Careless Society) has articulated the tendency in a professionalized culture toward redefining people solely as clients in need of services. McKnight differentiates between a therapeutic version of this cultural theme, in which providers attempt to "fix" their clients' problems, and a less oppressive advocacy version, in which providers constitute a protective wall of defense against a hostile society to ensure the person's right to be a functioning individual. Because both visions privilege the service provider's perspective, however, they are less democratic than the community vision, in which people are defined as citizens with assets as well as needs and relations are more egalitarian. From McKnight's perspective community is an achievement which emerges through the struggle of "labelled" individuals (i.e, clients) against the ideology of those offering "help." Ethnographers of domestic cultural scenes, then, should be wary of adopting the providers' perspective as the final word on the scene.

Mara Adelman and Lawrence Frey have produced a courageous and pioneering ethnographic text. In The Fragile Community they have cast their experiences as volunteers at Bonaventure House, a residential facility for people with AIDS founded by Catholic monks in Chicago, as a realist tale. This...