A Call for Renewal in Tourism Ethnographic Research: The researcher as both the subject and object of knowledge
Abstract
Our critique of tourism ethnographic research argues that too much existing published work tends to cite preceding studies as methodological precedents without stating how particular approaches were operationalised. Moreover, findings are often presented as individual cases with limited utility in terms of theory building or wider understanding of contextual phenomena. We argue that closer attention, first to current developments within anthropology, which seek to overcome researcher naivety and second, greater philosophical reflexivity would elevate both the rigour with which such work is undertaken and the seriousness with which it is received in the wider academy. We call for a double-reflexivity in ethnographic research in tourism that accepts both the specific situational nature of individual studies and the wider discursive frames within which they are embedded. We call for constant reflection on, and acknowledgment of, this duality in ethnographic research where, after all, the researcher is so intimately embedded in empirical and subjective terms.
Key Words
Philosophy;Subjectivity; Reflexivity; Ethnography, Cultural Tourism
Acknowledgement
The authors wish to pay tribute to the late Professor Richard Prentice with whom we were working on this project when he sadly passed away. We also thank his wife, Vivien Andersen, for granting us continued access to his papers. Richard’s ideas formed the original impetus for this paper and we hope our development of them does him justice.
A Call for Renewal in Tourism Ethnographic Research: The researcher as both the subject and object of knowledge
This article is prompted by some concerns with thoseusesof ethnography in tourism research which privileges the single ethnographer engaged in brief, stand-alone, periods of fieldwork. Our call is for multiple, associated, ethnographies to express the diversity and potential in association of such expression. This call flows from a hallmark of ethnographic method: namely, that ethnography is personal but that the subjectivities they proceed from and return to are collective. Personal knowledge requires the far reaching participation of the knower (Polanyi, 1962). Further, people express themselves variably in highly interpretive situations, and in this respect ethnographic research in tourism shares many features with so-called ‘creative tourism’as theorised byPrentice and Andersen(2007) andRichards and Wilson(2007). Hom Cary (2004)reflects on the theoretical challenges inherent in capturing the moment where the dissolution of immediate tourist experience dissolves into wider narrative or discursive situatedness. Scarles (2009, p. 485), meanwhile, locates a similar moment of individual dissolution and inter-subjective becoming in tourists’ production of photography and its subsequent incorporation in a wider discursive realm. We suggest that this problematic is also present in the case of individual tourism researchers adopting ethnographic methods where the immediacy of experience, its expression and subsequent enunciation in and as discourse is concerned. The boundary between experientially immersed, actively engaged, consumers of tourism and many researchers of the phenomenon appears indistinct in much existing research. Multi-perspective ethnographies wouldaddress Tribe’s (2006, p. 375)assertion that, “the story that is told will be inevitably skewed by the person or the researcher and their situatedness.” By referring to Foucauldian principles of knowledge production and management and calling for engagement with contemporary anthropological practices in tourism, this article offers fresh methodological insight to the field.
Previous use of Ethnographies in Tourism
Concern about inadequate attention to the actual uses of methods, as distinct from invocation-by-citation of their existence, by some users of ethnography in tourism research forms the motivation for this study. The significance of the personal often ignored in practice and ethnographies are, in effect, reified as representations of generality. In effect, users of tourism ethnographies are over-privileging certain studies by using individual interpretations as infrequently questioned ‘truths’. While users of ethnographies may all know that the representations within them are highly personal, this is rarely demonstrated in appraising the operationalisation of method or in making clear the tentative and contingent qualities of the representations gleaned from the studies used. Our concern is thus with the often stand-alone or ill-defined use of ethnographic methods in tourism discourse, rather than necessarily with their original provenance. Multiple ethnographies undertaken in tourism on the same society or sub-grouping to explore alternative interpretations are rarely undertaken. The closest to such an approach is that of second-order abstraction from the views of others (Matheson, 2008).
The failure to recognise the essentially personal qualities of ethnographies leads to a second concern about tourism discourse: namely, that of the failure to mirror or to critique changes in ethnographic method as articulated by anthropologists in the wider disciplinary sense. Reference to anthropologists is important, as this is the discipline in which this method has traditionally been developed. Ethnographies are rarely contested in tourism research, unlike, for example, journalistic interpretations. Yet ethnographic discourse in anthropology has moved away from the Empiricist / Structuralist approach commonly imagined in tourism. It has transformed into what may be termed the Interpretative / New Journalism / Poetics approach (Denzin, 1997; Van Manen, 2002)and progressively into the Expressivism / Expressive Perception approach (Rudd, 2003). These phases of transformation are difficult to map in tourism discourse and, it might be said, have largely bypassed it. These developments reveal the rigour of ethnography, as manifested within the tourism subject area to be often lacking in theoretical and applied development.
As said above, our first concern is with how ethnographies have actually been used in tourism discourse. The uses of four well-established methodological approaches for tourism ethnography(Crang, 1996; Palmer, 2005; Smith, 1998; Sørensen, 2003)were analysed in terms of if, and how, the foci of the method used was discussed, and if, and how, the operationalisation of these authors’ methods was fully articulated by other researchers making use of them. Summary results are shown below in Table 1.
[Take in Table 1 here]
The results confirm our concern. Method was rarely discussed by the users of these ethnographies, particularly in terms of detailed accounts of itsimplementation. We are not asserting that allusers should have discussed the methods of these ethnographies before citing them when the need is to, for example, simply cite the precedents of broadly similar studies in analogous contexts. Nor are we, in this paper, casting doubt on the soundness of the original ethnographic methods developed and subsequently invoked. The focus of our concern veers towards ‘claims of use’ rather than acknowledgment of prior occurrence. Yet the overall picture presented is far from an evaluative profile, and in consequence our view is that current attention to method is inadequate. Indeed, the current profile would imply that the findings of ethnographies are being used largely irrespective of how they were derived. Our contention is that this is a misuse of ethnography which needs to be corrected. Quantitative methods are commonly contested and their findings qualified by their users. We are simply asking that ethnographic methods be subject to a like academic scrutiny. In turn, this may require the authors of tourism ethnographies to engage in reflection similar to the discourse of mainstream ethnography.
The Development of Ethnography, Personal Sensing and the Lived Experience
Participation of the knower is central to the interpretive – expressive method. The leading principle of the Vienna Secession was Naked truth and truthful nakedness(Metzger, 2005). The study of lived experience likewise seeks to bridge the duality of the observed and the observer (Coffey, 1999) and to re-align ethnography with hermeneutic phenomenology, as interpretive ethnography. It recognises the potential contributions interpretive ethnography and hermeneutic phenomenology can make to tourism analysis. Briefly defined, phenomenology is the description of lived experience, and hermeneutics is the interpretation of experience. Developments in hermeneutic phenomenology are paralleled in ethnography with changes from classical to interpretive and critical ethnography. Whereas interpretive ethnography is interested in interpreting lived experiences, critical ethnography commonly takes engagement a stage further and challenges power structures (Foley & Valenzuela, 2005).
Despite its importance, lived experience is a comparatively neglected area of consumer experience in tourism research (Franklin, 2003). Likewise, personal sensing is a comparatively neglected method in the subject area, presumably because it makes no pretence to objectivity. It recognises, instead, the centrality of subjective reaction and reflexivity, and is a form of exploration and meaning-making. It is quite literally about relating lived experience. Its input is impression; its process is engagement with subject matter; and its output is expression.
The validity of the method is in the creative process and in the insights produced, with reliability important in identifying the contrasting expressions produced and their linkage to relived experience, rather than in their replication. It is the plausibility and relevance to the reader of the expression which makes personal sensing as a hermeneutic phenomenological method of value (Van Manen, 1990). This is similar to the emotional authenticity felt in performances (Matheson, 2008). Equally, as with design, general principles may be abstracted from expressions made by similar individuals and these principles, however implicit, underpin shared expression. These are the experiential structures, or themes, which give shape to the shapeless from everyday lived experiences (Van Manen, 2002).
Personal sensing is nothing new, either as method or lived experience. It is how we function as human beings and how we amass cultural capital appropriate to our lives. Ethnography seeks to use like methods to describe a group or culture through sensing and reflection while submersed in a local community. This is essentially a long term form of immersion which not only affects the research outcomes but also the researcher (Coffey, 1999). Its intention is to show how social action in one world can be understood from the perspective of another culture. This is what cultural tourists also commonly do. The parallel may be taken further. Ethnographers seek ‘natural’ as opposed to contrived or experimental contexts, although these now include mediated or cinematised environments as the ‘real’ world is no longer the only referent for analysis, if it ever was so (Denzin, 1997). ‘Serious’ cultural tourists, likewise, commonly seek ‘natural’ contexts as authentic.
Expressive Phenomenology and the Need for Multi-Ethnographies
Contemporary ethnography is as much about interpretation as it is about description (Denzin, 1997). Like hermeneutical phenomenologists, ethnographers’ practice is, now, to reflect explicitly on lived experience, and not simply to describe it. It can also become a discourse of emotions, with ethnographers contesting how far it is possible to keep personal emotions out of analysis and representation (Coffey, 1999). As such, it is a method about representing multi-vocal and parallel discourses in which stability and firm representation is challenged. Multi-perspective epistemology and multiple standpoints contest the privileging of any single ethnographer’s representation. Ethnography is thus an impressionistic but also reflexive method, flexible in techniques, and is an approach rather than a set of specific procedures.
‘Serious’ cultural tourists are similarly flexible, being practiced at what they are doing (Stebbins, 2006). Other than in the comparative transience of their stay at a place, ‘serious’ cultural tourists may, in effect, be thought of as ethnographers. Much depends on the reflexivity and seriousness of engagement ascribed to cultural tourists and the impact of their shortness of stays on how far this ethnographic metaphor is appropriate. If it is, cultural tourists may be used as such to form a basis of shared expression for academic analysis. For cultural tourists located in Pine and Gilmore’s educational quadrant, absorption and engagement are foremost, and these are the true ethnographers among tourists.
Like sociological impressionism, expressive phenomenology has also been recently introduced into tourism (Wijesinghe, 2008) as a form of hermeneutic phenomenology. However, in contrast to sociological impressionism, expressive phenomenology has sought to recognise the inevitability of converting impressions into expressions. Unlike sociological impressionism, it seeks to connect beyond the level of feelings, and seeks to get beyond emotions to what is felt (presences) in the context of these emotions. It seeks to grasp and portray presences as a pre-analytical primordial form of knowing before what Davies (2006, p. 182) calls the analgesic effect of historical illusio modifies, through expressive representation, that fleeting aesthetic immediacy.
A useful metaphor for the approach is the early twentieth century European Expressionism artistic genre (Lloyd & Moeller, 2003). The artistic genre sought to primitivise the representation of urban society, emphasising passion, spontaneity and vitality in an intensity of expression (Lloyd, 1991). As a form of ethnography, expressionism commonly uses narrative as a medium, recognising narrative to be an active reconstruction of events and significances, tied together through time by the narrator as a plot, like artist as painter.
Expressive phenomenology also focuses on explicitly past experiences rather than current experiences, as illustrated in the latest use of expressive phenomenology in ‘Netnography’ (after ‘Ethnography’), interpreting blogs as narratives, thus post hoc and written to a reflective plot. In expressive phenomenology the creative process of creating expressions is seen as desirable in this method. In expressive phenomenology the use of narrative is thus not an attempt to recapture the former meaning of an experience as it was first experienced, but is a rearranging of experience in a way that creates possibilities for new meaning to emerge or for the authentication of the original meaning. We acknowledge however, that this rearranging of experience cannot take place outside of the discursive frames within which researchers themselves operate. This brings with it the need for an additional layer of subjective reflexivity to be stated by researchers: a point we will return to. Another important difference between expressive phenomenology and sociological impressionism is that the former has used narratives produced by someone other than the researcher, rather than by the researchersthemselves. However, if interpreted as a form of hermeneutic phenomenology, expressive phenomenology offers a working method for researchers also to convert their own experiences into expressions.
As in all hermeneutical analysis, the task becomes that of interpreting pattern to make details meaningful. Central to hermeneutics is its circular or spiralling method: the meaning of the part can only be understood if it is related to the whole; and the meaning of the whole only through its parts, and the repeated progression through this. What is interpreted is not fact or data, but text made up of meaningful signs, requiring identification and contextualisation. Contextualisation includes new contexts from other fields of knowledge and re-contextualisation through a dialogue with a text. This dialogue requires entering the text, with dialectic between familiarity and distance, and a dialogue with the imagined reader of the interpretation.
Hermeneutics commonly recognises the importance of insight and intuition. That is, that knowledge is not acquired through reasoning but instead is gained in an instant flash. It is the authors’ belief that hermeneutical spiralling can be used to operationalise expressive phenomenology as a method for articulating self-expression as well as understanding the expressions of others by cross-association with shared subjectivity and discourse. All of these processes can apply to so-called ‘my-stories’ and ‘self-narratives’ as they can to the texts of others. Indeed, hermeneutical practice includes starting with personal experiences as both accessible and orientating (Van Manen, 1990). Self-narrative analysis thus provides one means of starting engagement with seeking meanings in experiences. This is, we suggest, a self-conscious manifestation of what Said (1983, p. 40)has called “the designed interplay between speech and reception” where experience rendered into text finds its ‘worldly’ place and discursive utility.
Personal sensing has not been totally ignored in tourism. For example, Lynch(2005) used what he termed sociological impressionism as a method. This is a method concerned with subjective experience, the spiritual and the emotional self. It focuses on the intangibles that arise from experience, and attempts to capture a stream-of-consciousness, and therefore to represent the uniqueness of subjective experience. Lynch (2005) concentrated on immediate perceptions that acquire permanency and on impressions which were as near spontaneous as circumstances permitted. The method seems to be a less formal application of Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES) which has been used in psychology for twenty years (Hulburt & Scwitzgebel, 2007). In the latter method, experiences are recorded by subjects at set times. Like DES, sociological impressionism requires researchers to focus on analysing their own experiences. As such, sociological impressionism is a method of personal sensing, but not one undertaken at fixed intervals, rather recorded on an opportunist and situational basis.
The difficulty with sociological impressionism is that it has so far focused only on the expressions of a single individual, rather than seeking shared expressions. It is unclear how impressions can be any more than a diary or set of notes produced at the moment of impression, and whether these notes are an accurate representation of introspection. DES has attracted like concerns. Further, once written up as an academic paper the author, in effect, converts impressions into expressions, but without a formal method to record the processing of the information.
Discourse in hermeneutic phenomenology and interpretive ethnography would further contest the ability of a researcher to report impressions rather than expressions of discourse. This is because the transcription of feelings and emotions itself simplifies and interprets these into words. “All recollections of experiences, reflections on experiences, descriptions of experiences, or transcribed conversations about experiences are already transformations of those experiences” (Van Manen, 1990, p. 54). And likewise, “Our data are constructed through our memories of happenings and memories of our informants” (Coffey, 1999, p. 110). Statements such as these reflect the engagement qualitative methods foster in their users, and that memory can be reformed given that it is simultaneously situational and temporal.
Philosophical Associations and Subjective Reflexivity
It would be an abrogation of intellectual responsibility if we did not acknowledge that our concerns are manifestations of a philosophical problem of longstanding: that of the anxiety producing dialectic between individual and collective subjectivities. Our response is not to argue for a refinement of method within the tradition of individual tourism ethnographies, allowing for more rigorously derived and empirically sound outcomes. Rather, we argue for attention to be paid to the possibility for individual subjects’ forms of knowing within the wider discursive formations they inhabit. This requires the systematic collation of multiple ethnographically derived representations drawn from circumstances as similar and controllable as the unpredictable nature of research in the social and cultural world may allow.