Ethnographic Contextualization of Freire's Discourse: Consciousness-raising, Theory and Practice

This essay integrates the results of a formalist discourse analysis of Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed with field observations of Freire's consciousness-raising programs in Latin America. The discourse analysis identifies some of the salient features of Freire's discursive construction of knowledge. Freire's "rehumanizing" discourse is shown to be both a means and an end in itself; for Freire, rehumanization is revolution. The field research documents the practice of Freire's rehumanizing discourse within consciousness-raising programs in both revolutionary and prerevolutionary societies. The field observations partly confirm and partly disconfirm the results of the discourse analysis: users of Freire's discourse, it appears, sometimes "read into" Freire's text a revolutionary practice that is not really there. This suggests an important discrepancy between, on the one hand, the constraints built into a discourse and discoverable through textual analysis and, on the other hand, the reconstruction and use of that discourse within particular "interpretive communities."