Art of Ethnography - 11
THE ART OF ETHNOGRAPHY
Anthropology/Folklore 860- Spring 2009
Over the course of this semester, we will jointly explore the art of ethnography. Not just ethnography, mind you, but the art of ethnography. What does this mean? Simply that we’ll be treating ethnography as more than mere process and skill, and as more than just research and writing. Ethnography, as a process based in conversation and the search for shared understanding, is inherently creative. It is always a “making,” an enacting that begins with conversations in the “field” and eventually finds voice in various forms of artful representation. Both realms of enactment involve a host of choices that ethnographers and their consultants creatively make throughout the course of their engagement. In the field, these choices entail such matters as with whom to speak, how to present self in that speaking, how to share responsibility for charting the flow of conversations, and how to measure one’s emergent understanding. In crafting the representation, choices involve what to include and what to leave out, when to give voice to consultants and when to speak for self, how to frame and how to order and how to story. In these arenas of dialogue and subjective choice lies the art in ethnography.
This semester, we will journey from the classroom into the field to practice this art and to investigate various realms of community meaning. Structured as a seminar, this course will introduce a range of fieldwork techniques and will hopefully prompt thought about the tangled issues of ethnographic representation. Since the only way to “learn” how to “do fieldwork” is to actually enter the field, we will each be planning, conducting, and reporting on a field project.
We’ll begin right away by entering the field. At the beginning of the course, I’d like each of you to choose a potential arena of inquiry. Some of you have already identified a consultant community, and are taking this course to “structure” your inquiry. For those who have not taken this first step (a number that, I suspect, includes most of you), I recommend identifying a regularly occurring, non-campus public event that will become your fieldwork focus for the rest of the semester. I ask that the event be “public” in order to assure relatively easy (if superficial) entry; I ask that it be regularly recurring in order to facilitate repeated attendance. Over the next few months, you will explore what it means to be a “member” of the community engaged in the event. To do this, you’ll have to spend time every week engaged in ethnography.
The selection of communities is yours to make. Your predecessors in this course have investigated such diverse groups as trangendered performance artists, “scholarship and beauty pageant” contestants, gospel choirs, dancers at a local country music “jamboree,” lay midwives, and members of an improv comedy troupe. These communities, in turn, drew the students into regular attendance at nightclubs, local pageants, churches, dancehalls, clinics, and theaters. Other potential field sites would include auctions, community fish fries, religious shrines, and any of a number of occupational settings (e.g., logging crew trips, trial lawyer argumentation, beauty shop conversation, union meetings). Whatever your choice, make your decision carefully. Remember, you’ll be tying yourself to this community—and its attendant events—for the rest of the semester. Involve yourself in a project that both you and your consultants will enjoy.
I’m willing to be flexible in my definition of “public,” “community,” and “event.” For those who have fieldwork projects already under way, we can negotiate an appropriate course of action. My purpose in suggesting an event-based focus is to insure a degree of symmetry in class projects, thus facilitating discussion as you face similar problems and develop mutually helpful insights. When you’ve chosen a potential community, drop by my office and we’ll discuss your project. Then you can begin the actual fieldwork, setting an attendance schedule that will carry you through the next four months.
You may notice that I’ve now twice stressed the importance of regular engagement with your project. Ethnography is not “about” merely fulfilling the requirements for a course. You can’t learn much by attending only the events for which I require a description, and by doing only the interviews needed for the exercises. To do that is to engage your community on only the most superficial basis, and to cheat yourself of the understandings—and the challenges—that fuller ethnography entails. That’s why I encourage you to choose a project that you can engage on a weekly basis—attending events, joining in conversations, and conducting interviews throughout the semester. Ideally, you shouldn’t let a week pass without engaging your consultants; some students have reduced this time to three days. Granted, I’m asking you to make a big commitment, to a project that might well consume more time than demanded by any of your other classes this semester. And I’m asking you to do this on your own, without any policing by me. As you’ll soon discover, you’ll only be reporting a tiny fraction of this work to me and the class. But that’s the way most ethnography works. You shouldn’t “do ethnography” just to gather data, write a paper, or meet a requirement. Instead, you should do it to gain a deeper understanding of your consultants’ world. And that takes time.
Much of our focus in this course will be ethnographic method. Indeed, we’ll spend more time examining the means towards an end than we will the end itself . . . which means that many of the understandings you’ll gain about your consultants won’t find voice in this class. Only in your final class presentation (see exercise #5 below) will you have an opportunity to look beyond ethnographic process to address issues raised by your field-based inquiry. Only then will I ask you to propose and defend a theoretically sound thesis drawn from the semester’s research. And even then, we’ll focus as much on the way you present your argument as on the analytic direction you take. For this reason, I highly recommend that you connect your field project to work in other classes, or that you direct it towards your thesis/dissertation research. If, for example, your medical anthropology course requires a final paper, choose a field project suitable for both classes. This way, the understandings that you glean and don’t apply in this class can find life elsewhere. The theoretical frame of the final presentation is yours to choose; all I ask is that it honors your consultants’ experience.
Some of you might want to conduct your fieldwork in tandem, working through the semester with a partner. I welcome such collaboration; two perspectives often help to reveal the limited singularity of one’s own vision. If you work with a colleague, however, you should nonetheless complete the exercises by yourself. They are designed to elicit personal development; this responsibility is yours alone.
. . . individual fieldwork exercises
As you conduct fieldwork, you will be responsible for six written exercises, each of which will be handed in to me in hard copy form and shared with your classmates on the class’s Blackboard website. Each exercise (except perhaps for #5) should be a minimum of six printed pages. When you complete each exercise, you should post it as a Word attachment to the appropriate Forum listing on the Blackboard Discussion Board. (Please do not copy your exercise into the body of your listing; instead, always add it as an attachment.) I shall return the hard copy to you with comments; the cyber-copy, in turn, will be available for everyone in the class to read. I have representative copies of prior classes’ exercises on file for those interested in seeing how others addressed the issues at hand.
When looking through the weekly schedule, you’ll notice that I’ve set aside four classes for “Comparing Notes.” Before each of these sessions, you are to read and critically evaluate at least seven of your classmates’ exercises. You’ll also see that I’ve assigned no other reading for these days. That’s because I want you to take notes on these essays, and then be prepared to discuss them in class. I expect these discussions to be frank, free-wheeling, and thorough. These sessions offer us an all-too-rare opportunity to get honest assessment of our work from our peers; they’ll work only if you make the effort to make them work.
EXERCISE #1: The first exercise consists of straightforward description, written promptly after first-time attendance at your chosen event. In essence, I’d like you to describe the setting and scene in a way that invites readers to imaginatively step into the event with you. This should be a “first impressions” portrait, a thick description of context, sequence, and feelings about your involvement. Don’t wait until the event has faded in memory to write this essay; do so immediately after returning home, when impressions and emotions are still fresh. The result, in essence, should be an edited version of your field notes, accompanied by reflections on your feelings about the experience. Remember, dialogue with yourself is every bit as revealing as dialogue with your consultants—both for you and for future readers.
In writing your description, be sure to pay attention to the full range of sensory reception. Don’t just relate what you saw or heard; also describe smells, temperature, and other sensed aspects of the scene. And be careful with your words. I’ve discovered in the past that folks often rely on subjective descriptors (like “big room” or “narrow aisle”) when crafting their written portrayals. What constitutes “big”? What makes “narrow”? These are relative terms that have little meaning for outside readers. Try to be more precise, so that others can better envision the scene you’re describing. Toward this end, I strongly recommend that you include a sketch of the described setting; I assure you that your readers will appreciate it. If you do include a sketch, please scan it into your Blackboard entry, so that I’m not the only one that gets to see it.
Please try to be flexible when describing the event’s boundaries. Don’t assume that the formal markers of beginning and end (e.g., the call to order at a political meeting, or the benediction at a church service) actually mark the boundaries of event experience. Take this opportunity to stretch the edges of definition and to explore the limits of encounter. In previous years, many students began their descriptions with their first phone inquiry about event time and place; others began with the step into their cars as they prepared to attend. The choice of beginnings and endings is yours. Be flexible, and be watchful.
Don’t take these calls for precision to mean that you should strive for “objective description” in this essay. Objectivity, after all, is but a chimera; the best we can achieve is a subjective fabrication thereof. And there’s certainly no need for that extra layer of distance/deception. So put yourself in your fieldnotes, freely adding what you felt to what you perceived.
EXERCISE #2: The second exercise entails interviewing—digitally or on tape—a regular participant of the featured event. Choice of interview topics is up to you; ideally, however, you should try to touch upon issues of personal or community meaning. (Do not focus your questions on biographical details; these can come in later interviews.) The written component of this exercise—which will almost certainly extend well over fifteen pages—should include:
· 1) An abbreviated copy of your field notes (describing, e.g., interview arrangements, discursive setting, emotional tone, post-interview feelings) to set the scene before, during, and after the conversation.
· 2) A step-by-step summary of the recorded (and non-recorded) dialogue. This should be a log rather than a transcript. Unlike a transcript, it shouldn’t include every word in the conversation; instead, it should closely paraphrase everything said, including all questions and responses. A thorough log should give you an accessible guide to everything contained on the recording; ideally, you should be able to enter the recording at any point, and within a few sentences be able to locate yourself in the log. This means paraphrasing all the dialogue, and not just the parts that strike you—while doing the logging—as “relevant.” (Leave questions of “relevance” aside for now; you may later discover that the most “relevant” sections are those that didn’t seem germane on first listening.) The log must cover the entire recording, including the section that you will transcribe.
· 3) A verbatim transcript of a five- to ten-minute sequence from the conversation. Ideally, this should be a relatively “contained” conversational segment, a piece that achieves some sense of narrative coherence (i.e., a discussion about a particular event, or series of events). Please include, when appropriate, gestural and paralinguistic cues in this transcript, and then attach the entire transcribed piece after your log. This way, you’ll have two versions of this sequence—one in the log, and the second as an added transcript. Comparing the two is part of the exercise.
· 4) A detailed critical reflection on the act of interviewing, assessing your conversational technique in terms of such matters as expressive authority, thematic control, discursive ease, and emotional involvement. This is the heart—and the hardest part—of this exercise. The rest takes time; this takes thought. I’ll be looking for thorough self-assessment.
· 5) And finally, to get you into a healthy—if often neglected—habit, I’d like you to send a “thank you” letter to the interviewed consultant, and to append a copy to this exercise. All too often, we forget to acknowledge our debt to those who become our collaborators; I add this to the exercise to remind you of your (much broader) responsibility to reciprocate.