HS 3630-Fieldwork - Doing Ethnography and the Challenges of...

Doing
Ethnography
and the
Challenges of
Fieldwork
HS 3630f
October 28
th
& 30
th
,2013
Readings: Bolton and Simon

Outline of lecture

Contextualizing the readings

Review of Bolton and Simon’s articles

“Doing fieldnotes”

Memoirs of a neophyte

“yes, I am the token White guy”

Contextual information : key terms

Ethnography : literally, it means “a
description of a people or ethnic group”

It also refers to the published accounts or
books that contain our descriptions
(ethnographies)

Our fieldwork is also referred to as
ethnography

Participant-observation

Researcher joins the group, spends
significant time observing their
interactions, and participates in as many
domains of social life as possible
•
Traditionally, this meant living for years
with a group of people, learning their
language, being ‘adopted’ and given a
name by the hosts, marrying into the
group, dressing and eating like locals,
and undergoing religious or ritually
prescribed transformations en route to
becoming “one” with the group

Why or why not?

P- O, cont’d
•
A major shift occurred in how social scientists
approached, understood, and wrote about
fieldwork and doing ethnography during the 1980s
•
We began to realize that objectivity is sometimes
impossible and that our presence often generates
significant socio-cultural change within the societies
we study
•
Is objectivity always necessary??
•
Linked with the need to include ‘ourselves’ as
players in the construction of knowledge and some
of the problems that we encounter in the field

The “reflexive turn”
•
The necessity of analyzing our methodologies using
similar principles that we adopt to analyze our field sites
•
Do our methods “fit” within our fieldwork context?
•
i.e., is a survey the best way to gather data about the
construction of sexuality?
•
While doing my doctoral research I tried be conscious of
my own experiences across different domains of human
activity
▫
Are the Devadasis ’ ideas about sex, men, their bodies,
menstruation, raising children, and so on that different
from mine?
▫
Am I aware of the cultural lens through which I am
gathering and analyzing my data?

The world according to me
•
Between the beginning of the ‘reflexive turn’ and
now, there were some theoretical and
methodological growing pains
•
The subjective pendulum swung too far and some
anthropologists began to write about ethnography
mainly from their own experiences
•
Problems: the primacy of the anthropologist over
the research participants, “poor me” narratives,
and a brand of post-modernism that seemed a bit
too big for its own britches

Classic example of auto/self
reflexivity: Ruth Behar

Participant (?)-observation
•
A component of our re-evaluation about
doing ethnography involves asking the
question: how much do we “really”
participate in the lives of the people we
work with?