Ethnographic R. From outside, no access to cultural meanings From inside, only limited access to cultural meanings

Transcription

1 Methods Oct 17th

2 A practice that has most changed the methods and attitudes in empiric qualitative R is the field ethnology Ethnologists tried all kinds of approaches, from the end of 19 th c. onwards but all attempts to mediate a foreign cultural context seemed too vague and pale They tried standard observation and interviews but found out that they did not have information enough to observe, nor had the savages any clue what the scholar were talking during the interviews

3 Bronislaw Malinovski, Edward Westermarck, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead and Gilbert Herdt are some of the scholars who developed the methods and changed the attitudes: From outside, no access to cultural meanings From inside, only limited access to cultural meanings Life-world of people is made up of practices, beliefs, theories, narratives, presence together with others, etc. Only by sharing life-world and its constituents the scholar may become a part of life The life must get a narrative that is as multi-layered as the life: mythological narratives that can be interpreted to analysis and description

4 One possible approach: Artistic presentation is better than representation in other media: Jean Rouch, cineast, made documentaries that show without explanation the life of African (mostly Nigerian) people That was taken one of the best presentations of savage life that left open all interpretations but still included the methodical mind of the cineast

5 Gilbert Herdt gave direct narratives the people he lived with were told him: Narratives included all that took place They were not refined, nor explained Herdt: give the story separately, don t interpret it but give your analysis of the items that are included in the story (Melanesian rites of adulthood)

6 Ethnographic R showed that Value of a phenomenon that comes under R is no subject of R The key to understand a phenomenon comes solely from the culture that reveals it A researcher cannot evaluate the significance of a single phenomenon, nor a single cultural procedure But only cultural contexts and what they made of

7 Ethnographic R changed moral expectances in US but never reached authorities: even today US and UK work on global level as if there were no ethnographic knowledge available This seems true both in domestic and foreign politics But in R the change has been enormous: we have lost our innocence and know that cultural meanings are highly complex issues

8 These highly complex issues need quite complex approaches if we are ready to see how: E R changed our idea of people s relation to the society they live in E R changed our idea how society is taken by people who seem to construe it E R showed how separate and similar people and societies are E R showed that culture is often the least adequate concept to use

9 Ethnographic R gave us both an approach and methods to use Today we do ethnographic R in factories, schools, universities, museums, amongst elderly people, drunkards, misfits, communities of minorities, mafia, organized crime, drug addicts, politicians, civil servants, artists, designers, musicians, kids, prisoners, etc We try to define a group and its practice, a culture, a tradition, a coherent life-world and then we approach it as an ethno

10 Such an approach includes interviews, doing something together, discussions, observation, action R, and many kinds of methodical paths The main idea is to define the object as something (dependent on the researcher) and then explain or understand it from that point of view E R does not claim that it will give objective knowledge but that it will give us significant knowledge that may perhaps ground a further R with other methods

11 The use of explanatory theories must be confined to a minimum since theories may both prevent the adjustment of the researcher into the ethno, and refrain the researcher from trusting to the intrinsic knowledge that rises up from the life-world of the group Naturally the researcher must know well all the scholarly discussion that gives information of the group s/he explores but have a split-mind: to know and not to know

12 Today you can find specialized methodical solutions of ER to various groups All they follow the tradition of ER All they recognize the basic obstacle that a researcher must conquer: how to become a part of the group or at least inside member of some its functions The best sources to understand the ER is to read books that explain ethnographic expeditions and their narratives

13 Good sources: Gilbert Herdt Guardians of the Flute Michael Taussig Mimesis and Alterity Defacement

14 ER is quite often activism and it may encourage social change Often this is not Action R as such since the change thus encouraged goes further than only within the R Political consciousness may be triggered off by ER if the R procedure has been very successful: the researcher becomes a member of his/her group and starts to act up for the rights of the group

15 That kind of an activism is taken as a part of the R There is a long history of research bound activism and political work in ethnography (e.g. in Amazonian Brazil and Peru), in African studies against the consequences of colonialism, in prison studies, and asylum studies, as well in gay studies Researchers cannot stay academically cool

16 The need for change has been explained in/ as a research rapport that not only grounds actions but in a sense includes actions; if the actions are absent, the validity of the research is questionable Such an attitude is quite unfamiliar in Western academic circles but after some 60 years of activist ethnographics in ethnology the idea seems to ripen in all ethnographic approaches

17 We may think ER as a postmodern Action R that is more open to random and collateral social and civil right movement The theory of ER (e.g. in Taussig) is very far from objectivist ideas and comes closer to political philosophy and critical social thinking Taussig justifies his attitude with the coherence of human experience and understanding and the shared world

18 ER could thus be used in R where the researcher assumes to find a chance for some change that is in need of wellbased substantiation This assumption may rise from the practice that has motivated the R and therefore from the expertise of the researcher

19 ER quite often gives new names, new concepts and contexts to practices previously short of conceptual tools Naming is most often the significant tool that encourages the change And naming must be grounded by well-based conceptual mapping, as has been done in the criticism of colonialism, in minorities R, and in interpretation of foreign narratives

20 A source: Jim Thomas Doing Critical Ethnography

21 Visual Ethnography VE is a part of ER but has developed into full scale methodical approach during the last 30 years The point is in the images: taking, doing, collecting and classifying images And then reading images as a material, as a document of something Or, interpretation of them, after some method quite alike to close reading

22 Visual Ethnography From the beginning, VE has claimed that written material (observation log book, notes, transcribed interviews, conceptualized explanations given by the informants) always lacks of context and perspicuity because written material is pre-conceptualized and cannot show the speciality of the R object as it is

23 Visual Ethnography Though images are, as well, conceptual, they are not exhausted in concepts: they have the visual surplus that is always more than can be conceptualized or get exhausted in premeditated theoretical approach Thus VE focuses on visualizing the material: take photos, draw, paint, take videos plus is interested in narratives that show images that are like abbreviations of traditional explanations

24 Visual Ethnography The theory of images in VE is not very developed one but moreover a practical method to collect data that always includes more than can be exhausted by concepts Thus material can re-interpreted several (practically limitless) times and researcher always ends up to new findings that were there all the time

25 Visual Ethnography VE includes close reading of images that imitates the close reading method in research of literature: 1) Structural analysis: layers that can be identified in the image 2) Analysis of each layer, the contents 3) The story, the narrative element 4) The disorder of the contents 5) The continuity of the image outside of its borders 6) The constituents of a possible contextual entirety 7) The event in the image (time scale & history) Etc.

26 Visual Ethnography VE requires complex analysis that may include not only theories of experience but as well some idea of the role the following may play in understanding: body as a presentation (the role of body in narratives), psycho-history (individual history), re-presentation modes (how & where something is given as images), psycho-analytical multilayered realities, sacral presentation (what is left outside) etc,.

27 Visual Ethnography The idea of reification becomes important in visual material: anything becomes a thing (lat. res) when it gets a visual representation But still it won t become released from its un-thing-ly nature, as a representation of something that includes a story, a message, a significance much wider than the image itself The material goes beyond itself but how?

28 Visual Ethnography You may think of images with apples: they not only represent apples but as well awakens in us the shared reality of taste, smell, acidity, etc. that never becomes a part of an image but always affects our understanding The more so with images of alien contexts: they affect a person who has unorganized (shared) reality in things represented, e.g. because of denial, refusal, prohibition of something; denial of seeing, interpreting, completing the observation, etc.

29 Visual Ethnography Theoreticians of VE stress on the impact of observation skills, opening one s vision, plus becoming conscious of differences, lacks, breach, flaws, fragmentation, insufficiency, inconsistency, etc., all factors that are against a fluent narrative interpretation Narrative and non-narrative aspects of an image must both be examined in balance and all of them are needed

30 Visual Ethnography Sources: A Journal: Visual Anthropology Review In a book form: Visualizing Theory. Selected Essays from V.A.R Ed. Lucien Taylor

31 Critical Visual Methodology A new branch of VE that includes study of art objects & contemporary culture studies Visual Culture is here understood as a meaning giving context that may act for general reference to all visual phenomena Includes all the methodical aspect of VE but excludes the complex reading used in VE Instead encourages a compositional reading: an image is a composition that has no preconceived order but many orders that must be approached with many methods

32 Critical Visual Methodology Composition and content (both describe), semiology and psychoanalysis (both decode), discourse analysis and audience studies (both give order), and picture elicitation as a complementary act in R When the context is Visual Culture, all these function as an analysis of its phenomena, and the outcome will be an open-ended interpretation of visual aspects of the researched issue

33 Critical Visual Methodology Source: Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies A very practical book of instructions, directed to how-to-do needs Sarah Pink, Visual Ethnography A book of mixed origins, mixed theories, practical instructions and no original theory behind the ideas