Prof: Glenn Hinson, Spring 2001, Anthropology/Folklore 297

Course notes by Danny de Vries, May 2001

Structured as a seminar, this course introduces a range of fieldwork techniques and hopefully prompts thought about the tangled issues of ethnographic representation. Since the only way to "learn" how to "do fieldwork" is to actually enter the field, each class member will plan, conduct, and report on a semester-long field project. As the project unfolds, students engage in a series of exercises that invite them to critically assess their emergent understandings. Every exercise includes a reflective component, and many ask students to present their work to their consultants for evaluation.

This class has been about the story and how to tell it.

We have tried to reposition ethnography not as producing knowledge, but as creative engagement. Not as a truth, but a reflection, conversation, sharing, invitation. This perspective changes the way you read it. The authority is not with the author, but instead you are looking at different voices and reflexive moments. It is about experience. We tried to move away from the denial of subjectivity, of experience as a model or system, of unpacking hidden meanings.

How do I invite others to experience this place? Self-conscious subjective histories. Admitting uncertainties, idiosyncrasies. Lives are patterned, but also unpredictable. Not rules, but sets of options. Experience, memory, and hope: every moment is framed by our own selves. Unpredictability invites uncertainty, extrapolation, and connection. Resaldo argues that as we recognize it in our own life, then we see connections. We all live in complexity, and there is instability to distill. It is insanity to distill to the point that it erases complexity. At the same time the self we know is framed by the sociality of our existence. A dialectic self that in a confrontation with multiple identities changes every time. Cultural difference forces the self to recenter. How do others recenter? Glenn clarifies through a story of adaptation by African singers in a white folks festival, and how they choose to regroup at their hotel to share their experience with each other and as such recenter before the festival was over.

A story: finding a thread that carries others through. Selecting partiality and crafting narratives around it. Not living the wholeness of complexity, but the stories. Embrace the role of the teller of the story. All stories are framed. When I claim lives understanding bound up in my experiences, then the authority claimed is "experiential". Is this a retread of generalization, without patterns? No: we deny unchallenged reigns of tools, ways of speaking. There is not a right of wrong way, but not challenged ways. We challenge in order to destabilize and decenter with the goal of pointing out that there are other ways. We invite idiosyncrasy and incompleteness.

Pattern is part of who we are. Pattern gives us an allure of comfort and when identified allows us to say something. However, one has to recognize the disjunctures of pattern. Is pattern so compelling or is the variation every bit of compelling? Is the variation part of the bigger picture? Playing with the subjective is liberating. It is about individual variation, your experience. Shared eyes captures in particularism

Where does this lead us?

1. Absolute creativity: ethnography as creative, improvisational, emergent process. Guiding, but also guided. When you read an article, improvisation speaks to every moment of the ethnographic production.
2. Friendship: not holy agreeing, but relating and engaging.
3. Reflection
4. Dialogue, conversation, dialectic: A collaborative moment of growth
5. Portraying: How? And how with passion? Accessible to consultants/audience? Powerful? Grabbing the reader has to do with how you are saying it. It has to do with passion and commitment. Crafting the skill of a storyteller.
6. Responsibility: to yourself and to your consultants. Ethics.
7. Making the collaborative real: Give up control. Write something down you don’t believe in if your consultants believe in it.

How is our reality shaped by our experience, our past we are wrapped up in? When something in our present does not fit in our past, when the frame is broken, we call it an experience. If experience grounds in the past, it at the same time frames the future in expectations. There is a notion of predictability within which there is safety. As an ethnographer you are asked to describe meaning: what do you do?

1. Classic ethnography:

Tries to engage experience as a reference point, but never as the center. Realist community is portrayed. You back away and find a place that allows you to speak about "the girls". Remove yourself enough to erase singularity.

"Standard ethnographic practice is to talk about a provisional reality and to use that as an excuse to not talk about it. This is not a cross cultural encounter, but a cross reality encounter. "

Weber: suspending disbelief. The world as a theater, open for the moment, invites you to ask questions, but also dismisses other worlds through distancing.

2. Early 60s: Ethnoscience

Classical notion of scale of community was challenged in an ethnoscience approach that came from linguistics. Sapir, Benjamin Worf. The challenge came form the notion how language crafts experience and thought. When there are categories of meaning language does not take us to, can we experience them? Sapir-Worf hypothesis: language can be the primary tool of acculturalization. When you learn language you are still young. In the post-baby stage, learning language is learning a way to think. Ethnoscience came with the distinction between emic (insider perspective) and etic (outsider perspective) as a "thick description of the language experience". To extrapolate from what people were saying proved very productive. Still, language is at a distance from experience. Is this then linguistic reductionism? Can you fall in love and describe it? It must be more than mere language!

3. 1980s: The anthropology of experience

Attempts to think more on own experiences. Tools to talk about experiences of others. The goal was to look beyond behavior and confront lived experience in its immediacy. Turner and Brown (1986) "The anthropology of experience". The struggle to capture the existential moment proved to be unsatisfying:

1. Notion of self-experience: the "be-there" authority. To become a sorcerer yourself as the only way to understand. To "become exotic". "tax deductible LSD"
2. Capture it by reenactment: performing collectively forces us to think why we are writing this way. A collective ritual that refocuses our eyes.
3. Let's talk about structures of lived experiences. Reduce it to models: let models represent the experiential essence. Use testimonies in the service of a general model of "the experience at large".

Victor Turner: drama. Depths of recognition through enactment. You will do a "frame-shift" where you will engage, in that moment. Conflict resolution through enactment is goal oriented and not a good example, because it is about feeling something, not about making a conclusion.

"The experiential moment of falling and somebody catching you on ropes. That will lead you to think further. Your feeling is going to make you read text on rope course therapy differently."

There is a move from the scripted to the real moment when you refocus by recognizing the distance between experiences.

Resaldo: I only understood when I experienced. Before that I constructed psychosocial "structures" of experience. Some readers might follow these words. "The way to understand experience is by experience."

 

4. Today: Heteroglossia and polyphony

Bahktin: the playful confusion of subjectivities it is all about lots of individual stories in dialogue with each other. Juxtapose lives and let the reader figure it out.

"There are lots of people that say they do polyphony, but few really do."

Glenn argues the same for the apprenticeship approach. Eric in our department who studies acupuncture is a good example. Still, his book is slammed as too subjective and not reviewed yet.

1. Pick yourself apart: how did you get there? Overcome self-reflexive hurdle.
2. Once you get there, your story is more powerful.

"Nobody writes about how it feels to sing"

The preacher pointed a finger at Glenn: "If you never experienced it, you will never understand it".

This is where ethnography flees: "I don’t want to be there, I want to write about it."

"Participant observer"

"Observant participant" is a claim to experiential repositional.

One has to caution to the power of ethnography using personal voice as a tool where your invocation of experience may not be as grounded. Whose experience?

"Moving to my experience of the experience"

Move the reader into that direction is called transference, of the body, of emotion, of openness, of connection, of wholeness.

What if this experience is a challenge to your reality?

Marsha: "Is every deeply experienced ethnographic account a conversion? Leaving the church without a conversion, does that mean that the ethnography has failed?"

Glenn: "It is all about latitude. What are you seeking to convey? The fullness of a simple fleeing moment can never be captured, so we try to move toward understanding. The argument is not the way, but a way. … I seek openness, not conversion. Ethnographer's often do not have this."

"It is all about dissolving boundaries"

Glenn argues against "criminal structures of explanation that do not resonate with the real.:

"We are invoking the model to undermine the model. For to hear in different ways, engage in different ways"

"As soon as the mind sees words like this, they think poem, fiction and brings different meanings to it. The conventions invite a misreading.

The frustrations of choosing what to write. AN ongoing self-doubt: "Why am I writing this?"

"You need to compel the reader into the playground"

Tedlock on oral politics: we need to pay as much attention to how it is said as what is said. The goal is to capture what an actor knows, since this is what conveys meaning. In medieval times the silent reading of texts was deeply suspicious, because you would invite the devil in the playground of the mind.

How do you find your voice? Move beyond ethnographic realism to find comfortable description? You draw the reader in object lessons: to make them learn from your mistakes. And if the purpose is the rhetoric, then why does it have to be true? To absolve myself from the claim of fabrication by having consultants co-fabricate. Present complete fabrications and consultants will edit it to their like. Whose goals are the goals? When your consultant fabricates a story, will you write it down? Transcription is not real, dry, what happened, but contextualization by building a fictional narrative. Elaborate some things to speak to the reader. Feel something beyond the words. The essay becomes 1) a personal witness, and 2) centered in the self. To inscribe the self and describe the community.

Picasso: "Great art is telling lies to invoke truth"

"To get the word out there we have to become essayists: nobody reads ethnographies because of the way they are written"

Narrayan 4 measures that make the difference:

1. Disclosure of praxis: tell what you are doing.
2. Generalization: Highlight the particular and cloaking a background of generalizable. Ethnography as the particular to invoke the general.
3. Representation of subjectivity: Reading cues. How do you know "he was hesitant"? The claim to be able to speak for others is fiction.
4. Accountability: To whom? To the discipline, the consultant, the self, or the reader?

Ethnography is building toward an argument

Fiction is a story and less rhetorical.

Story, trajectory, path, understanding, resolution, emotion, moral characters, time, events, ideas.

Different kinds of stories Personal experience: first person, honest, emotion, time, scale, moments.

Historical story: emplotment through time. Newspaper, storytelling, ethnography.

Do we link our memory in the form of stories?

Ethnography emerged as anti-reaction to genres. But it emerged with a convention, and soon became its own realist genre. What happens in the realist ethnography?

1. Nuer: Partitioning the whole in pieces. Writing about a-religion, b-politics, etc.
2. Present it to convincingly suck in the other as authoritarian. A distancing of the narrative from the travel log in the form of a 3^rd person. "The Nuer… "
3. People become common denominators and loose individuality.
4. Erasing "me" and thus insert the self subtly (preface, afterword) in a "I was there" authority.
5. Focus on a few selective moments that you describe vividly (battle, conversation) and remove this from the context of every day.
6. Synthesize descriptive and analytical goals. As long as you don’t talk about selectivity, you talk about the native point of view. Self-evident moments of truth. That which does not fit is only momentary. You don’t present complexity, which is idiosyncrasy. You tease particularity and idiosyncrasy into typicality.
7. Truth is timeless. Crafted composite with "them". The detailed, typical, event removed from history has now become the generic argument. Write in the moment, you always are out of date. Present it as a-historical instead and you talk about culture and tradition, denying change.
8. Inclusion of jargon which underlines the scientific nature. Language declares your own competence.
9. One never gains fluency in language. Ethnographers take features and institutionalize them.

Worldview is how we establish predictability.

Is time value free?

The punch line is at the end of a good job done.

Save the best for the last.

We think about time as progression, the climax of the present is the future, not the past

Cyclical time: the future is the past. The order is now; no planning needed, only if you want to change things. "The flow of the world will provide". Cause and effect will not work. In the modern mind this is an invitation for pathology in the order of magical systems. Without the cause and effect link explanations of magic are much easier to swallow.

Helix time: neo-paganism.

In narratives: stories in which people repeat themselves exist. "As an ethnographer you listen again. But the world mentioned that you already said that"

Circular reasoning is that you can't see cause and effect, in that it does not follow a line.

Repetition is often seen close to pathology. Stuck in the mud. They can't keep up with the times.

• Walk the straight and narrow
• Straighten up and fly right
• He's crooked
• Bent out of shape
• Loopy
• Playing it straight
• Out of line
• Put your ducks in a row
• Don't get sidetracked.

Imprinting: Put your child in a crib, which is square. Kids on playground: all lines are denied. When they get older, play becomes more organized and gridded. "The life in a grid". The freedom of childhood playground is kid stuff. Boundaries are mature. How do we dance? Traditional dancing versus pogooing.

The primitive is the sexual because of the way the body moves. Free pelvis implies sexuality.

The bus line that Americans make is all in the head. Ever seen a square lake?

"You don’t believe, thus you don’t see"

"You’ve kept the door shut"

"You don’t understand our world"

Eileen Lawless argues there is a fundamental problem with the way we do ethnography and suggests a dialogical approach. Ethnography as an ethnography of your conversation and the resulting understandings. Eileen chose in later ethnographic projects groups that are closer to her perspective in order to be able to relate.

Conversation

Directed conversation: probing, initially

Open conversation: learn about community, understanding over time.

Ethnographies are not one shot interview but long term.

Build relationships on humanity, not on agreement. "Agree to disagree".

On a race project: Framed charicature of self is out there. Open the complexity of white supremacists. There are aspects of their lives that you can agree with. Collaboration is advocacy, opening understanding. The alternative presentation. Opening up of the portrayed. Challenging perception.

Obviously there is a thin line with "racist apologies" (academic biographies that excuse them).

Make ones position clear. Author your disagreement. Present your disagreement in conversation that becomes part of the book. Present your stance.

The articles that cover this topic in ethnographic methods are unique. Remarks often extend to "don’t sleep with the locals". Gender is not an issue officially. Why?

1. Victorian heritage in postcolonial anthropology. Science as object and asexual. Sexuality would be contaminative to the data.
2. Don’t get involved because of the possibility of exploitation due to power differentials. It is unethical to allow oneself to engage in sexual practice, or even present oneself as a gendered being.

But gender is so pervasive, it can not be ignored. You will not be accepted as neutral. Where do we set the boundaries? Gender as a vehicle for greater understanding. Women anthropologists: as outsiders they were situational males. Threaded as men, until a certain question arose. Suddenly they would be subjected to a sexual issue. You don’t know when the switch is off or on.

The act of creating knowledge Lawless challenges. The authority of the interviewer lies in the one way direction of question asking and the duty of providing an answer.

To present yourself as a student of the world is disempowering: "You are the teacher". "I know nothing". But that becomes the real move.

Do not immediately carry your tapedeck in. First built the relationship. Invite consultant to participate not s an informant but as a collaborator. Recognize the ends of the consultant. A collective strategy needs to emerge.

When the tape is on, how do you begin?

Oral history problem: methodological training gives you a form that is not inviting. Get basic historical information (birth, parent name, etc.) and the respondent will wonder "why do you want to know about something unrelated" or "why do you want to know about me before you are telling about you?"

Tips:

1. start to hear what the person has to say
2. over time construct what is being said
3. create a comfortable and expected path for both parties
4. We are hesitant to let people go on. The interviewer decides when it is time for a question. This is a "mode shift". However, digressions are often the most valuable pieces of information.
5. Come up with questions in conversation with the consultant. "These are the kinds of things I want to talk about".
6. Don’t impose on time. Stop, close, come back.
7. Always prepare a list of questions (interview guide). Go over them with the consultant. Memorize them; do not pull out the sheet, only sometimes. Questions alienate.
8. After interview listen to the tape quickly and make a log in which you paraphrase the account, in order to find places on the tape and have a summary of the conversation. Reflect on emotions, moments.
9. The ideal according to Goldstein would be to every week sit down with your notes from the past week, look at them, and reflexively make more notes.

Myerhoff: does the consultant present a well though out understanding or perhaps never thought about it? The latter is an emergent self-crafting of identity and a powerful position to be in as a responder. The ethnographer becomes therapist. A self-crafted answer might diverse critically from later, developed opinion.

Birdwhistle

One of the first to argue that communication is multichannel. "Nothing never happens" At any social moment there is scores of covert forms of communication. The slightest movement, microbehavioral clues of heat, etc. These are simultaneous complementary systems. The written alone is limited and an invitation to ethnographic despair. The study of linguistics has been misconceived.

Del Hymes. In a dense linguistic article he provides a heuristic guide on how to describe and perceive (understand) in the form of an acronym: SPEAKING

S = Setting and scene: Setting is time, place, physical, while scene is more cultural ("having church").

P = Participants: Describe everybody, who’s speaking, who’s listening, hearing. Include all participants, like "the Holy Spirit". How are the participants viewed? Being there but not being paid attention to roles, ways of acknowledgement.

E = Ends: The expected outcomes, things conventionally recognized. Music that is explicitly there in order to… What people expect when they go about goals, strategies, motives.

A = Act sequence: Message form, content, what is said, of how it is being said, in what order.

K = Key: Tone of spirit in which words are being conveyed.

I = Instrumentalism: Channels of communication; gestures, posture, forms of speech, code switching, mode (whistle/chant), changes in channels.

N = Norms: 1) Norms of interaction. Options of appropriate situation. 2) Norms of interpretation. What happens if somebody coughs? Way in which you affirm conversation. Africans: back and forth communication with overlapping talk ("crossed conversation") as appropriate.

G = Genre: Identify categories of action that are culturally designated. Formal expectations that go along with genre.

"The bedroom" in "Let us now praise famous man":

Seeing a room through the eyes of the describer. Stoler calls this "flavorful ethnography", a description that evokes the sensuality of experiencing. This is what the bedroom author was after, to color the description with experience. It was seen as an accurate portrayal of southern life during the Depression. Glenn argues it is a realist ethnography through the removal of time, and it exemplifies the power of description to control the experience.