Ethnography by Design

Scenographic Experiments in Fieldwork

Luke Cantarella, Christine Hegel, George E. Marcus

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000181517
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Ethnography by Design, unlike many investigations into how ethnography can be done, focuses on the benefits of sustained collaboration across projects to ethnographic enquiry, and the possibilities of experimental co-design as part of field research. The book translates specifically scenic design practices, which include processes like speculation, materialization, and iteration, and applies them to ethnographic inquiry, emphasizing both the value of design studio processes and "designed" field encounters. The authors make it clear that design studio practices allow ethnographers to ask and develop very different questions within their own and others' research and thus, design also offers a framework for shaping the conditions of encounter in ways that make anthropological suppositions tangible and visually apparent. Written by two anthropologists and a designer, and based on their experience of their collective endeavours during three projects, Luke Cantarella, Christine Hegel, and George E. Marcus examine their works as a way to continue a broader inquiry into what the practice of ethnography can be in the twenty-first century, and how any project distinctively moves beyond standard perspectives through its crafted modes of participation and engagement.

1 Introduction

In Act Two of the play Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov, Astrov, the local country doctor, sits at a table talking with Sonia, the daughter of his friend Professor Serebryakov, a retired and chronically ill professor. Astrov drinks glasses of vodka, eventually proclaiming he will never drink again, as Sonia tries to discern whether he might love her. She asks him if he’s satisfied with life, to which he responds:

I like life as life, but I hate and despise it in a little Russian country village, and as far as my own personal life goes, by heaven! there is absolutely no redeeming feature about it. Haven’t you noticed if you are riding through a dark wood at night and see a little light shining ahead, how you forget your fatigue and the darkness and the sharp twigs that whip your face? I work, that you know—as no one else in the country works. Fate beats me on without rest; at times I suffer unendurably and I see no light ahead. I have no hope; I do not like people. It is long since I have loved any one. CHEKHOV 1999

Sonia then asks “You love no one?” Astrov: “Not a soul.” As Chekhov writes it, it’s late-night, vodkafueled, idle conversation, and simultaneously a moment of profound implication. Nothing really happens except the quiet unfolding of an evening in their lives. All the dramaturgical architecture, including Chekhov’s particular phrasing and the preceding scene that leads into it, and the typical design of the production—the antique furniture upon which the characters sit, the dimly lit room that evokes a kind of static melancholy, the sound of the wind in the night air and approach of a summer storm—is leading the audience toward compound recognition. Of our capacity as humans to squander moments of possible connection with one another. Of the unrelenting cycle of days in a life. The scene evokes something about the human condition through a deliberate and enframed encounter, offering granular and deeply felt understanding.

Such moments, in which a small event or non-event becomes an opening onto something larger, are what ethnographers seek. Geertz’s (1973) classic scene of the Balinese cockfight, often held up as a zenith of observational-analytic acumen, is precisely one of these moments. In other words, a moment in which the ethnographer, through thick description, links meanings to action and through his hermeneutical effort we become keenly aware of the unfolding tension between tradition and behavior, the past and the present. Although environments, institutions and macro-level processes forge the conditions of everyday life, anthropology must reckon with how existence unfurls under these conditions and find ways to register the “unresolved emergent” (Smith and Otto 2016: 34).

This book situates anthropology’s object as emergent social life, recognizing at the same time the methodological challenges that occasions. Facts on the ground are stated as structures of feeling through a combination of narrative and conceptual inventions. This evokes for us the thought and work apparent in theater design. The extent to which scenographic craft can enhance and transform the capacities of ethnographic research in fieldwork is what we explore in this volume. The decades following the publication of the Writing Culture essays, which challenged anthropology’s faith in its authority and ethics, saw anthropology expand and embrace reflexivity, identity, and public culture as new languages of investigation, and materiality and science and technology studies emerge as new broadly influential arenas of research (Marcus 2009: 40; see also Clifford and Marcus 1986; Rabinow and Marcus 2008). But the promise and potential of such a rupture to make room for a range of experiments in epistemology, even while some of the contours of traditional ethnographic research held stable, remained underdeveloped. Once thought the most settled of anthropology’s signature aspects, methodological questions became the most pressing and interesting area for new thinking in the post Writing Culture era. Gunn, Otto, and Smith (2013) build on this realization, noting that “although anthropology has an interest in social change and people’s imaginations of the future, as a discipline it lacks tools and practices to actively engage and collaborate in people’s formation of their futures” (Gunn et al. 2013: 3). As such, this book grows out of Marcus’ insistence that:

a concept that conceives of research practice in a way that provides the long view, encompassing the phases of research today in a coherent way, retaining the focus on individual research while incorporating and making visible and accessible to the professional community the complex relations that compose it, is that of the design process. I am not thinking of the idea of formal research design, which is a standard category in the implementation of social science methods, but of design, as it is defined in studio fields like art, graphic and industrial product design and architecture . . . MARCUS 2009: 26; EMPHASIS ADDED

Design, powered by and accountable to ethnography, is the engine of several proposals towards a new anthropological practice. Design entails particular ways of thinking and sets of practices that are common across studio disciplines; it is, generally speaking, a “distinct way of knowing” derived from the rhetoric and values of the design and craft traditions of the West (Otto and Smith 2013). It is typically concerned with the material and the properties and affordances of materials, the role of things in human lives, and materialization as a zone of possibility. Design is also concerned with people, their individual habits and concerted efforts, and their relationships to one another alongside and in relation to the material. Design anthropologists work between these two disciplines in various configurations, and although Suchman’s observation that design should be taken up as problem by an anthropology of the contemporary is well observed (Suchman 2011), there is a growing sense that design tools and practices are good to think with (Gunn and Donovan 2012b). Design anthropology is a rich and varied terrain, but includes, for example, analyses of design studios as social milieus and sites of emergent logics and imaginings (Drazin 2013, Murphy 2015), the temporally situated effects of designed objects (Hallam 2013, Kjaersgaarten 2013), and connections between digital technologies and understandings of heritage and the past (Drazin et al. 2016, Otto and Smith 2013). Design anthropologists have addressed the different temporal orientations of these disciplines (Kjaersgaard et al. 2016: 4; see also Hunt 2011), used design’s future orientation to experiment with strategies of “rehearsing” the future as part of social inquiry (Halse 2010), and used an anthropological lens to problematize design practices that grapple with the future by “formulating visions, speculating on alternatives and steering toward particular ideals” (Mazé 2016).

Attending to the future-possible in order to create a frame for reckoning with the emergent has implications for conceptualizations of the “field.” As Rabinow and Marcus (2008) have argued, the field is a found imaginary. It is found in the sense of being actually experienced and not a figment of the imagination, and imaginary in that it emerges across space and time according to how, and with whom, the ethnographer traverses a set of research concerns. The field, therefore, is always diffuse and ephemeral. Ethnographers delineate a set of things, which come to be marked as a field, foreclosing the inclusion of other possibilities. In other words, ethnographers speculate, both in the sense of conjecturing and risking. An ethnographer’s found imaginary is a conjecture, rooted in empiricism yet mediated by subjectivity, that the field so demarcated is both meaningful and telling.

If we accept that the ethnographer engages in a form of controlled speculation in the course of fieldwork, it becomes ever clearer that ethnography is in need of new iterations to attend to the emergent and to do “ethnographies of the possible” (Kjaersgaard et al. 2016). Because ethnographers are always already conjecturing what is true and valuable in order to compose the “found imaginary” space of inquiry, then design modalities that call attention to the making of the everyday world are key to knowledge production in anthropology. Design experiments that are fundamentally interventionist, including co-designing with communities, imaginative endeavors, and materialization, reckon with people’s aspirations and concerns with deliberate assemblages. The kinds of interventions overtly speculate on questions of social life, framing the possible in order to evaluate its alignment with the emergent.

This book is an argument for designed interventions in the field, an approach we have come to call ethnography by design. Such an approach can fruitfully upend the dominant eye observational approach typical in anthropology towards the production of contextual and shared insights, and a working model of collaboration emphasizing multiple roles and perspectives and co-creation. To be clear, what we propose here diverges in subtle but important ways from participatory design (c.f. Light 2015, Smith et al. 2017) in its intention; participatory design has generally sought to bring communities into the design process as a democratic approach to real-world problem-solving. What interests us are the more diffuse potentials of collaborative encounters, or, as Binder has framed it, ways of creating “third spaces in which everyday experiences are reconstructed through design interventions” (Binder 2016: 269).

Ethnography by design is distinct from ethnography in design; in other words, uses of ethnography to serve the needs of design to access insights into “users” and consumers as can be seen in the development of design methodologies such as Human-Centered Design (HCD) and service design, as well as in corporate design consultancies (IDEO and Fjord, for example). In contrast, we formulate ethnography by design as the use of imaginative and material practices to design ethnographically informed provocations in collaboration with publics who vet, co-design, experience. In turn, such publics are positioned to respond to these interventions as part of their own emergent knowledge of their communities and the contemporary world. There are linkages here to Tim Ingold’s (2013) suggestion for an anthropology by means of design, in which the designer’s habit of thinking through making might be applied to ethnographic practice. Materialization practices, he posits, move beyond logocentric modes of analysis and in so doing can develop insights by means of identifying and producing correspondences. Ingold’s work has had a deep impact among designers who see anthropology as a legitimating framework and resource for questions about the users and social practices in relation to which their design problems are raised and solved.

Yet we distinguish our practice from many of those working in the space between design and anthropology by embracing scenography, its design practices and habits of thinking, as a central disciplinary method. In so doing, we apply generalizable design practices of collaboration, materialization, iteration, speculation, and a focus on problem-setting and problem-solving to the design and staging of encounters with and among various publics. The encounter is a fundamental unit of ethnographic understanding, and by situating our work around points of encounter we are interested in thinking both about how ethnographers might encounter publics and how publics might encounter one another. Moreover, we aim to design encounters that are “productive” in that they set in motion forms of intersubjective discovery among co-makers and publics and create a zone of disputation. As such, productive encounters are materialized propositions that engage publics, informed by and accountable to ethnography as part of a process of social inquiry. Productive encounters are an assertion that ethnography’s boundaries cannot always be resolved by a discursive object like a book or an article and might more aptly be resolved by a project that is closer to ethnography’s enlivened, interactional forms. Our aim is to generate hybrid, deeply felt, embedded, and original articulations of contemporary problems (the object of ethnographic work everywhere) not readily available through other forms (Cantarella et al. 2015). Our own productive encounters, and the design practices they entail in the development process, have sought to create space to confirm, disconfirm, and shift developing insights that traditional ethnographic methods of interviewing and participant observation have not sufficiently facilitated. By shifting the product of research from the ethnographic monograph to the designed encounter, we join a movement away from a representational ethnography and towards an embodied, multi-modal, co-constructed ethnographic experience legitimized by the receptive engagement of its direct witness: a participatory social science.

The scenographic model to which we are most closely aligned is that of expanded scenography, which refers to artistic practices that derive from the traditions of stage design but exist outside the normal institutional frames of theater or play-making. Expanded scenography is in tune with movements in art and design that turned towards explicitly social aims, including relational aesthetics, socially engaged art, littoral art, social practice, conceptual design, critical design, design for debate, design art, and others. The typical values of art and design are deferred in these forms towards concerns about social forms and connections. Expanded scenography has design-like habits of problem-solving while also making use of aesthetic fictions. It is a zone of thickly rendered representations; it relies on detail and correspondence, similar to the way that ethnographers in the Geertzian tradition have valued thick description of the “real” (non-fictional) social. In the ethnographic model, the ethnographer observes things and makes meaning; she articulates the authoritative interpretation. In the theater model, the three-dimensional field of signifiers is produced and recursively interpreted by not only designers and performers but also audiences. The fictionalized and often playful space of expanded scenography creates opportunities for embodied and participatory meaning-making about the emergent real.

The idea of doing ethnography by design forces us to grapple with the tension between aesthetics and utility in the field. There is an aesthetics to ethnography that is part of its episteme and affective potential. Since the reflexive turn, ethnographers have keyed into modes of storytelling and argumentation that take cues from literature, filmmaking, and photography, among other artworlds. Using these visual mediums and writerly strategies, ethnographers have sought to convey more vividly that they were there and to bring the reader there as well. We make rich and layered compositions that are intended to evoke and transport, not simply to offer evidence that supports a line of argumentation. We build sympathy for our analysis through curation, and just as mathematicians seek not just to solve a problem but to solve it with the most elegant formula possible, anthropologists seek to present the most beautiful, logical interpretation possible. Qualitative researchers do not typically rely on fixed measurement strategies or quantification but rather seek multiple sublime webs of connection. These are essentially aesthetic decisions about what compels, what is trenchant, what aligns.

Aesthetic valuation of ethnographic representation operates in tension with the valuation of ethnography in terms of its potential utility. Even anthropologists who focus on the theory-building potentials of ethnographic data understand their work as having broader humanist utility to illuminate and ameliorate social ills. The utility of ethnography is highlighted by entities like EPIC, the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference, which brings together people working in the private sector who seek to create “business value” by using ethnographic techniques in arenas such as product innovation, marketing, and user-experience. But EPIC is also a forum for critical scholarship on uses of big data, technology, and design that create and deepen forms of inequality; such critique is intended, in this forum, to impact corporate strategies more directly. Public-interest ethnography and applied anthropological projects in areas such as development, environmental policy, healthcare, prison reform, and the like are explicitly geared towards identifying problems and making change, and there are many ways in which ethnographic research can and should be useful. Yet, it could be argued, a focus on utility as a primary value can obscure less coherent but richer ideas of ethnographic truth.

There is a useful parallel in the tension between the aesthetics and the utility of participatory forms in dematerialized art practices in the 1960s. Spurred largely by Debordian critique of the spectacle, the all-encompassing forces of global capital that reduced all human experience to commodity exchange, arts such as the Situationists sought to create detournément, a rupture or hijack of everyday life, with discontinuous experiences that could reconnect the spectator with an authentic experience (Debord 2000). While the medium of these works (happenings, walks, interventions, etc.) was new, the terms of shock and rupture were aligned values of the historical avant-garde (Bishop 2012). Simultaneously, a separate community-based art movement arose that repositioned the artist’s role in the community not as provocateur but rather as facilitator who could use art-related practices in the process of community building and repairing social bonds (Kester 2004). This sensibility comes to bear on the ethnography by design approach through its simultaneous attachment to aesthetics and utility in the form of collaborative and materialized problem-solving around meaning and experience. Grant Kester’s Conversation Pieces (2004), an examination of socially engaged art projects that artists in the US and Europe have undertaken in recent years, has influenced our work. The participatory art projects he analyzes share a capacity for instigating and making visible dialogues between social actors of different statuses, political affiliations, and races. He points out that some of these pieces, including a piece by the Austrian WochenKlausur arts collective that brought politicians, sex workers, and journalists into a conversation about issues of drug addiction and homelessness, are overtly designed to generate consensus. Others are simply directed towards facilitating dialogue and exchange, not for spectators but as “an integral part of the work itself” (Kester 2004: 8).

Although our proposal has its roots generally in the concept of para-ethnography through staging or enframing ethnographic encounters (Marcus 2000), Kester’s argument that socially engaged art practice can produce forms of what Hans-Herber Kögler has called “reciprocal elucidation” is a useful articulation of the kinds of participatory knowledge production we aim for with designed encounters. Kögler p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Project Credits
• 1 Introduction
• Part One
• Part Two
• Bibliography
• Index