Ethnographic Practice Research Articles

Waarheid en interpretatie in etnografie (deel 1)

Abstract Truth and interpretation in ethnography (part 1): Tracking clues with marginalized groups and uniformed professions This essay is the first part of a reaction to Beuving’s discussion on evidence and truth in ethnography (KWALON 74). Gigengack stresses that ethnography is inferential and involves interpretation work. Whereas social scientists may shy away from “truth,” and prefer “reality,” philosophies of truth illuminate empirical ethnography. Taking the Goffman/Mead controversies as histories of truth, Gigengack discusses created, relative, powerful, and holistic truths on the basis of these ethnographies. It brings Gigengack to a critique of functionalist-empiricist ethnography, and to point out the subjectivist and objectivist fallacies in the ethnographic practice of making truths through social facts.

Moving Ethnography

In this article, we describe how our work at a particular nexus of STS, ethnography, and critical theory—informed by experimental sensibilities in both the arts and sciences—transformed as we built and learned to use collaborative workflows and supporting digital infrastructure. Responding to the call of this special issue to be “ethnographic about ethnography,” we describe what we have learned about our own methods and collaborative practices through building digital infrastructure to support them. Supporting and accounting for how experimental ethnographic projects move—through different points in a research workflow, with many switchbacks, with project designs constantly changing as the research develops—was a key challenge. Addressing it depended on understanding creative data practices and analytic workflows, redesigning and building technological infrastructure, and constant attention to collaboration ethics. We refer to this as the need for doubletakes on method. We focus on the development of The Asthma Files, a collaborative ethnography project to understand the cultural dimensions of environmental health, and on the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, digital infrastructure first built to support The Asthma Files but now available as a community resource for archiving, analyzing, and publishing ethnographic data and writing. A key finding is that different traditions and practices of ethnography require different infrastructures.

Refoulement as Biopolitical Praxis: Subalternity, Ethnography, and Ethics at the Mexico-Guatemala Border

This article analyzes the Mexico-Guatemala border through the lens of the author's sensory ethnographic engagement there. It also uses oral history interviews and collaboration undertaken with refugees, migrants, and deportees. It argues for the contravention of human rights and refugee rights under the Trump Administration as an aspect of a longer history of biopolitics enacted in border regions and beyond them. It draws on border studies and notions of immunity in biopolitics to develop this argument, and its uses collaborative visual ethnographic practices as a way to consider the border.

“We are fed up …Being research objects!” negotiating identities and solidarities in militant ethnography

Abstract This article describes experiences of long-term ethnographic fieldwork on disobedience, disloyalty and dissensus among women in public space in selected (post-)Yugoslav cities. I focus on the opportunities and pitfalls of feminist ethnography and methodology in the context of positionality, engagement and solidarity as essential elements of research into activist networks. In order to problematize the emerging field positionalities and solidarities, I examine the “militant ethnography” methodological approach (Jeffrey Juris), which seeks to move beyond the divide between research practice and politically engaged participation. It is about being among and within the activist network and adopting many identities and roles by constantly shifting between reflective solidarity and analysis. In trying to shed light on the critical self-reflective research process of embodied understandings and experiences, I focus on ethnographic practices embedded in transnational “crowded fields” that encompass the dynamics of relationships and dependencies between knowledge producers.

Minding the field: sensory and affective engagements with high Arctic fieldwork

ABSTRACT This introduction to this special issue considers various approaches to understanding ‘the field’ as an object of archaeological and anthropological research, and researchers’ own engagements with it. We draw out some theoretical and methodological approaches to the field as a way of interrogating the cognitive and physical engagements of the researcher with it, not only as a place and process of data gathering and knowledge production, but one of reflexivity and self-understanding. This seeks to appreciate the effects that the fieldwork experience has on the researcher and, thus, on the science they produce for their (disciplinary) field. Building on reflexive approaches to fieldwork and ethnographies of practice, we explore the implications of fieldworking in, particularly, the European Arctic. This paper further considers several entanglements in the past and present of the European Arctic as a field more generally as a way of framing the specific field site that we have focused this special issue around: the village of Kilpisjärvi (Gilbbesjávri) in Finnish Lapland.

Towards an Ethnography of Crisis

This article analyses the challenges posed by carrying out ethnography with migrants experiencing mental distress and living in conditions of multiple marginality (social and existential). Drawing on the notion of crisis, I consider the experience of disorder as an ethnographic object reflecting the intersection between the individual and the collective. This article examines how ethnographic practice can be applied to, and is altered by, the study of these experiences, asking: How are we, especially as first-time fieldworkers, affected by unsettling encounters? How do we react and respond to the crises of others? What use can we make of our own experiences of crises by developing new ways of practising fieldwork?

Critical Affects

Techlash encapsulates a breaking point reached with the critique of technology companies. To investigate how this whirlwind of rage, inquiry, and accountability affects the lives of tech workers, we conducted interviews with 19 tech workers. Our methodological approach and contribution adopts a style of writing and analysis associated with anthropologist Kathleen Stewart, where we focus on the affective textures of everyday life in an attempt to redirect the temptation to representational thinking to a slowed ethnographic practice. This paper dwells on the affects of tech workers facing critique and scrutiny. Through this approach, we find that emotional habitus conditions the possibilities of personal and political action and inaction in response to critique. By emotional habitus, we refer to the emotional dispositions honed among tech workers by tech culture's rationality and optimism. This habitus must shift if people are to access new ways of relating and acting. We argue for more fruitful attitudes and practices in relation to critique.

Over-Complexifying Social Reality: A Critical Exploration of Systematicity and Rigidification in Ethnographic Practice and Writing

Qualitative methodological development has produced canonical tendencies that over-complexify and fix a fluid and lived social world. Meanwhile, critical theory has produced critiques on methodology but without enough attention to the qualitative tradition. I bridge these gaps by using an Adornoian position to interrogate the concepts of systematicity, rigidification, complexification, and their problems in ethnographic research and qualitative methodology. I conduct an urban ethnography and autoethnography of the metropolitan blasé as a public attitude of indifference to articulate an alternative, quotidian approach to ethnography that better captures social embeddedness, meaning-creation, and how contexts should drive data collection, analysis, and method-selection.

Epistolary storytelling: a feminist sensory orientation to ethnography

ABSTRACT This article presents a series of letters the authors exchanged while conducting ethnographic research in Belize and Ghana. The letters reveal an affinity between feminist ethnographic praxis and a politically attuned epistemology of the senses, what the authors call a sensory feminist orientation to scholarship. Expanding on criticism of the way sensory hierarchies inform Western knowledge-building, the authors reevaluate their own epistolary exchange as a methodological provocation. As stories, the letters detail what the authors orient themselves toward in the field, as well as embodied moments of disorientation: danger, violence and estrangement. Untidy and raw, they offer readers an opportunity to “listen to sense” and, in the process, consider the consequences when ethnographers are encouraged to excise certain field encounters from scholarship. The article includes paintings that Beth Uzwiak created while in the field as a component of the authors’ sensory experiment in epistolary ethnography. Their focus on the affective registers of storytelling contributes to broader efforts to disrupt the androcentric tendencies of ethnographic voice.

Paleoethnobotanical identification criteria for bulbs of the North American Northwest

Paleoethnobotanical assemblages from the Northwestern region of North America often yield geophyte subterranean organs, but these carbonized remains are difficult to identify to species or genus level. We examine 11 species (8 genera) of the most ethnographically prevalent Northwest geophyte foods for macro- and micro-morphologic geophyte features, with a focus on bulbs from the Asparagales and Liliales orders. In this contribution, we discuss ethnographic practices which may affect archaeological material and provide digital photographic and quantitative references for both fresh and carbonized geophytes. We determine that pavement epidermal cells are the most diagnostic criteria for identifying bulbs in paleoethnobotanical assemblages. These identification standards provide researchers with comparative material to address questions of plant use, preparation, and stewardship across the greater Northwest Coast and Columbia-Fraser Plateau cultural and geographic regions.

The Dialogic Process, Relational Approach, and Transformative Aspect of Interviewing

ABSTRACT Oral history interviews can often have a far-reaching transformative effect on the narrator as well as on the researcher. The opportunity to be shaped by new perspectives and the chance of being touched by a shared deeply emotional encounter with another human being are inherent in the practice of both therapists and oral historians. This paper focuses on the commonalities that postmodern schools of collaborative and narrative therapy share with oral history, mainly the humanistic and feminist approaches, and offers an interdisciplinary perspective on the interview process. Based on my background in ethnographic and therapeutic practice, I see interviews as a relational dialogic experience. The realization that the relationship is significant to any dialogic process allows for deep responsive listening, creating safe space, and sharing vulnerability. A relational approach honors the way we communicate as complex human beings—not only through words, but also through shared emotions.

Reporting on the Potlatch: Franz Boas and the Popular Press

The German-born Franz Boas, known as the father of American Anthropology, fought the law banning the potlatch alongside his students. In letters throughout his life, Boas condemned Canada’s persecution of indigenous people and practices. Boas hosted multiple potlatches himself. He defended and collaborated with indigenous people who were persecuted for hosting potlatches, including Dan Cranmer and George Hunt. Alongside anthropologists like James Teit, he petitioned against the potlatch ban. And he corresponded with Indian Agents, missionaries, and officials in Ottawa in hopes of persuading the Canadian government to amend the Indian Law prohibiting potlatches. Boas listened to indigenous activists, sympathized deeply with them, and shared in their desire to preserve traditional culture. Despite all of this, Boas scholarly work depicted the potlatch as a megalomaniacal destruction of property. In his diaries and letters, Boas voiced appreciation for the communal, theatrical, comedic, funereal and judicial aspects of the potlatch. But in scholarly work, Boas obfuscated the depths of the potlatch. There he depicted the potlatch as a usurious, status-seeking institution, with little to no communal value. He interpreted the “symbolic economy which employs material items as a metaphor for spiritual wealth” of the Kwakiutl through a capitalist lens, contradicting a central theoretical tenet of his ethnographic practice, to try to interpret cultures as the cultural participants do themselves. Perhaps Boas planned to revise his interpretation of the potlatch. He left unfinished a synthesis of Kwakiutl ethnography, and his letters before his death indicate a deepening appreciation of the depths of Kwakiutl traditional life. How did Franz Boas come to hold such contradictory views on the potlatch? This essay compares how Boas reported on the potlatch to coverage of the popular press in British Columbia. On the westernmost frontier, local newspapers were a main source of information and entertainment. Local newspapers present a plethora of potlatches as well. A cultural biography of Franz Boas places the man in his times and his ideas in the current of the age. Boas sensationalized the potlatch, as did the press; he reduced the potlatch to narrow economic terms, as did the press. By comparing the similarities and differences between popular reporting on the potlatch, and diary entries and letters of Franz Boas during his first ethnographic trip to British Columbia, this essay critiques and puts in context popular perceptions of the potlatch, and situates Boas within a spectrum of white people, often anonymous journalists, who reported on the potlatch.

The Azentún Photography Workshop: A Proposal for Self-Representing the Urban Mapuche Teenagers in Santiago de Chile

This article reflects on the Azentún Photography Workshop’s visual and ethnographic practices. The workshop took place in the city of Santiago de Chile, to explore the identity construction of young Mapuche people through historical and contemporary photograph readings. The teenagers created new visual representations to offer multiple meanings relating to their identity. The resultant visual documents serve as self-representations that bring out and subvert the treacherous matter of Mapuche identity. A new reading on the prevailing hegemonic perspective on the Mapuche people is proposed.

Ethnographic Gameness: Theorizing Extra-methodological Fieldwork Practices in a Study of Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs

This article theorizes the fieldwork experiences that I gained while studying outlaw biker subculture. Drawing on Bourdieu’s practice theory and Goffman’s dramaturgical interactionism, I argue that ethnography in practice is pre-disposed by the ethnographer’s primary habitus, which shapes symbolic interaction. To substantiate this claim, I disclose my own upbringing in a troubled working-class family and my personal ties with outlaw bikers, both prior to and beyond my research. This article then illustrates how my habitus helped me to compensate for the vagueness of ethnography in theory with regard to three recurrent issues of fieldwork, which are the practices of (1) approaching/entering the field, (2) negotiating participation, and (3) managing (un)fortunate circumstances. After reflecting on my cleft habitus as the buddy and/or researcher in ethnographic practice, this article concludes with the metaphor of gameness. This concept, which is borrowed from early prize fighting, is used to outline and label the ideal-type of the ethnographer who is well-suited for the immersion into deviant, criminalized, or otherwise culturally elitist fields.

REVIEW OF CHANDAN BOSE'S PERSPECTIVES ON WORK, HOME, AND IDENTITY FROM ARTISANS IN TELANGANA

This review considers Chandan Bose’s ethnographic study into arts and crafts practices in Telangana, India. Merits of the book include Bose’s nuanced interrogation of ethical complexities in and around ethnographic work, a centring of artisans’ voices through direct quotes, and an emphasis on knowledge as something crucially formed in and through subjective inter-relational connections. Bose draws links between practices of ethnography, art and storytelling. Broaching the book as a collaboration with rather than a study of the artisan community, Bose offers ways of re-seeing research, knowledge, and cultural engagement that will hold relevance across a wide range of fields and practices in and beyond contemporary academies.

Overcoming

This session identifies three scale‐related challenges for applying ethnography in business and distills practical lessons for overcoming these challenges. First is the challenge of initializing and sustaining ethnographic practice in large scale organizations. Second are the organizational and cultural barriers to scaling ethnographic research within firms. Third is the challenge of resolving the scale differences between qualitative and quantitative research when trying to integrate the two methodologies.

Comparing Social Network Structures Generated through Sociometric and Ethnographic Methods

Social connections between individuals are often an important source of information for both quantitative and qualitative anthropological research. Here, we seek to understand the relative strengths and weaknesses of sociometric and ethnographic representations of social connections. We do this by comparing network data collected using a sociometric technique (a name generator) with a network drawn by project ethnographers representing their understanding of social structure in the study population. We find many similarities in the two networks, but they offer somewhat different perspectives into the local social structure. Although the ethnographic network is shaped by the ethnographers’ deeper knowledge of a subset of network members, individuals with high degree (but not betweenness) in the sociometric network are generally present in the ethnographic network. The ethnographers’ interpretation of the factors that lead to high degree centrality in the network is broadly accurate. However, the sociometric network is characterized by a high level of transitivity not seen in the ethnographic network. We consider the importance of the differences we observe for ethnographic practice.

Linking digital wayfaring and creative writing: true fictions from ethnographic fieldwork

ABSTRACT In this article, I explore how creative writing links to mobile media ethnographic practices. Through my digital ethnographies, I have found empirical evidence that socialising, art-making, and wayfaring can and do occur simultaneously in online and offline worlds. The more than textual, more than representational, material and corporeal experiences, and everyday processes are important to how we imagine and theorise art-making practices with mobile media. In this article, I pose the question: How can fiction techniques be used as a method to expose links between digital wayfaring and the creative writing practices? I explore this question through three fictionalised vignettes based on material from my ethnographies. These are grounded in a discussion of non-representational theory as a theoretical perspective to situate the everyday creative practices that go into mobile media art projects involving creative writing.

Construction and Change of Identity of an In-House Ethnographer: A Case of an Anthropologist Working in Japanese Industrial Laboratory

In recent years, ethnography, which is a concept and methodology grounded in cultural anthropology, has spread in various business fields. However, the practice of ethnography in the business fields often confuses academic trained anthropologists, destabilizes identities and force changes. Japanese companies employ very few anthropologists as “anthropologist”, thus the world is unaware of the difficulties faced by anthropologists employed in Japanese business fields. This paper is auto-ethnography of my experience of working at an industrial laboratory in Japan. This paper gives an account of the issues faced by anthropologists working in Japanese companies by the virtue of my experience.

Self Exposures: The Political Arts of Ethnoracial Identification in Latin America and the Caribbean

ABSTRACT The papers for this special issue summon the concept of “exposure,” or the act of revealing something hidden before an audience, to understand the performances that animate ethnicity-based social movements across Latin America and the Caribbean. We introduce the phrase “arts of exposure” in order to articulate how social movements big and small are drawing a new politics out of enacting the representations of racial, ethnic, and class identities that have historically been used as tools of repression. The papers in this special issue explore how people use performance to reveal and transform their ethnoracial selves through the categories of difference that have been applied to them. With examples drawn from diverse scenes and encounters across the region, we track the arts of exposure that people mobilize to assert ethnoracial identity and engage reappraisals of their alterity and subjugation. The articles collected here illustrate the ways people are tactically appropriating and recomposing once-constraining norms, formerly othering processes, and seemingly essentialized identities as they face a multitude of governing agents, oppositional forces, and other audiences. Close ethnographic attention reveals the nuanced ways in which these struggles are experienced, contested, and rethought by people on the ground. As we reflect on the implications of studying arts of exposure as topics of analysis, we also ask how thinking about performance across lines of ethnoracial difference can help us reshape our ethnographic practices and writing.