From the start, I found Dixon’s approach to her ethnography to be incredibly interesting and rather well-rounded considering the intended goals of her work. When used correctly, ethnography can do exactly what we have discussed in class: unveil the non-obvious. And Dixon appears to do just that through this piece, actually deciding to call it a “story,” rather than merely research, with the intent of divulging how “midwives are strategically navigating the changing global discourse around women’s health to both strengthen their professional authority and improve health outcomes for their patients and communities” (Dixon, 2020: 7). She even notes how the ethnographic method is quite useful in these circumstances given its ability to “allow us to see how individual experiences, desires, and outcomes in health are related to conversations and interventions at local, national, and global levels,” though this regard for ethnography causes me to consider a recent reading that I have done that actually notes some of the drawbacks of the research method (2020: 11). DeGenova in his own book Working Boundaries: Race, Space, and Illegality in
Mexican Chicago actually makes note of the colonialist foundation of the practice, especially since his interlocutors were especially distrusting of him due to his scholastic status. Within the first chapter, he asserts that he “had a responsibility not to transpose my research into the kind of dehumanizing study by which a white social scientist… presumes to make authoritative pronouncements about ‘the Mexicans’ and some ossified thing called ‘their culture'” while presenting the research in this book, an acknowledgement that Dixon does not appear to blatantly state in her own work (DeGenova, 2005: 18). Though she acknowledges the systematic structures inherently involved in the basis of her research, she does not appear to grapple with the inevitability of similar oppressive structures within the practice of ethnography itself. This, however, has a possibility of being omitted depending on how her work represents the studied demographic, but it may be difficult at times to neglect the oppressive foundation of the practice as a whole in relation to the demographic that was, at one point, affected by that same oppression. My question now is how necessary such an acknowledgement is in works like these that call attention to movement throughout ironclad political and institutional structures, and how effective this awareness can be in diminishing the strength of these powers.