On Ethnography

Sarah Daynes, Terry Williams

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780745685601, 9780745685595
• eBook ISBN: 9780745685632
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In turn creative thinker and street flâneur, careful planner and adventurer, empathic listener and distant voyeur, recluse writer and active participant: the ethnographer is a multifaceted researcher of social worlds and social life. 

In this book, sociologists Sarah Daynes and Terry Williams team up to explore the art of ethnographic research and the many complex decisions it requires. Using their extensive fieldwork experience in the United States and Europe, and hours spent in the classroom training new ethnographers, they illustrate, discuss, and reflect on the key skills and tools required for successful research, including research design, entry and exit, participant observation, fieldnotes, ethics, and writing up. 

Covering both the theoretical foundations and practical realities of ethnography, this highly readable and entertaining book will be invaluable to students in sociology and other disciplines in which ethnography has become a core qualitative research method.

1
Foundations of Ethnographic Fieldwork

Ethnography originated in colonial anthropology, as the holistic collection of cultural facts and artifacts in Western European empires that were being built through exploration and colonization. With the rise of British social anthropology at the beginning of the twentieth century, the discipline consolidated its use of ethnographic fieldwork: it became its privileged method, a rite of passage “which marks one's entry into the brotherhood of ethnologists.”¹ Fundamentally (and even if only once, at the beginning of one's career), the anthropologist is an ethnographer. So central is fieldwork to the discipline that field-based geographical distinctions have long been used by anthropologists, often thought of as specialists in an area: an Africanist, or an Americanist. This geographical unit was disrupted with the emergence of new ways to understand ethnic groups in the second half of the twentieth century and especially with the rise of “non-located” field sites such as diasporas or, especially, the internet – Patricia Steinhoff's work with radical left activists comes to mind as an example of fieldwork without a well-delimited geographical field site.² Yet “the field” still possesses a magical aura and centrally defines both the practice and the status of the anthropologist, even when it has become virtual, fragmented, or located in the past.³

Ethnography never had such a central place in sociology. At the turn of the century, French sociologists used ethnographic data collected by others – missionaries, colonial officers, and anthropologists alike – to produce comparative sociological analyses of social phenomena, such as Émile Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life ([1912] 1995) or Marcel Mauss's The Gift ([1925] 2000). They did not do fieldwork themselves, but Marcel Mauss trained his students as ethnographers, producing a generation of famous anthropologists and sociologists that included Marcel Griaule, Roger Bastide, Michel Leiris, Alfred Métraux, and Claude Lévi-Strauss.⁴ Elsewhere, sociology was clearly distinct from anthropology, and ethnography a method seldom, if ever, used. There was an exception, however, and it is especially important to American sociologists: the Chicago School of urban sociology which, in the interwar period, used a variety of methods to understand the city yet had a strong inclination for fieldwork.⁵

The Chicago School sociologists were quite an interesting collection of characters – Robert Park, for one, had been a journalist for several years before joining the University of Chicago. It is quite funny to read the reactions of an outsider: in 1930, French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs spent one semester as a visiting professor at the University of Chicago. Even though he was aware of the use of fieldwork, as he was a member of the Durkheimian circle, he was not quite prepared for meeting the formidable Robert Park and his “muckrakers” engaged in the exploration of urban life. When Ernest Burgess offered to take him “to a place [French: local] where one can meet murderers,” Halbwachs balked: “I found it stupid, and I refused,” he wrote to his wife, “I might be an idiot, but I think you'll approve of my decision.”⁶ On busy street corners, in bars and dance halls, Park's colleagues and students hung out with thieves, immigrants, prostitutes, or factory workers, following his injunction:

Go and sit in the lounges of the luxury hotels and on the doorsteps of the flophouses; sit on the Gold Coast settees and on the slum shakedowns; sit in the Orchestra Hall and in the Star and Garter Burlesque. In short, gentlemen, go get the seat of your pants dirty in real research.⁷

The series of books they produced in the interwar period offers a deep and detailed observation of Chicago, the modern American city par excellence.⁸

Thus, there are two originating moments for contemporary ethnography, at least in the sociological context: the refinement of fieldwork in anthropology, and especially social anthropology, on the one hand, and the “dirty work” advocated by the Chicago School of sociology on the other. However, both are based on one single, simple premise: the foundational idea that personal interactions with human subjects in their everyday life are necessary to a deep understanding of social and cultural phenomena. The key terms here are human subjects and everyday life: they set up ethnography as radically different from other methods used in the social sciences, which are either person-less or contact-less (as in surveys, or even a one-time interview with a stranger), or laboratory-based. A simple proposition, it has, however, complex epistemological ramifications.

The Imponderabilia of Actual Life

The basic premise for the pertinence of ethnographic methods in social inquiry is that people matter. For colonial anthropologists, presented with exploring and studying societies of which they knew nothing, direct observation and interaction were commonsensical: when language, religious beliefs and practices, diet, social organization, or kinship systems are all unknown, the best way to gain knowledge is to get in direct contact with the people. Yet it was also a revolutionary notion: for the foundation of the idea of fieldwork is the desire and need to understand the worldview of the people studied in vivo and from their own standpoint, in contrast with the partial, biased, and often superficial knowledge reported by colonial officers, settlers, traders, and missionaries. As Malinowski argued, it is by collecting broadly and systematically all the data possible, and by studying each phenomenon “through the broadest range possible of its concrete manifestations” by “an exhaustive survey of detailed examples” as opposed to isolated anecdotes, that the pitfalls of unscientific colonial studies can be avoided;⁹ by doing so, the ethnographer's first task is to trace a “clear and firm […] skeleton of the tribal life.”¹⁰ Yet this “excellent skeleton” must be given “flesh and blood,” and it is only through extensive, continuous, and direct contact with the subjects that “the full body and blood of actual native life” can fill out “the skeleton of abstract constructions”:

In other words, there is a series of phenomena of great importance which cannot possibly be recorded by questioning or computing documents, but have to be observed in their full actuality. Let us call them the imponderabilia of actual life. Here belong such things as a man's working day, the details of his care of the body, of the manner of taking food and preparing it; the tone of conversational and social life around the village fires, the existence of strong friendships or hostilities, and of passing sympathies and dislikes between people; the subtle yet unmistakable manner in which personal vanities and ambitions are reflected in the behaviour of the individual and in the emotional reactions of those who surround him. […] these imponderable yet all important facts of actual life are part of the real substance of the social fabric.¹¹

Thus we find, in Malinowski's 1922 seminal monograph and despite the shortcomings of his work, the heart of the ethnographic epistemological hypothesis. The three goals of fieldwork outlined by Malinowski¹² have remained today, albeit refined and articulated in various ways: a general yet systematic outline of the organization (structure, anatomy) of the group; a documentation of everyday behavior (practices, action); and an understanding of collective mentality (ideas, beliefs, representations). All three can be achieved only through direct contact with individuals in their everyday life. Further, this direct contact must be continuous, extensive, and immersive.

Here stands the gap between ethnography on the one hand and the common use of qualitative methods in sociology (as found for instance in interview studies, focus groups, or episodic observation) on the other hand: the ethnographer spends time, and quite a lot of it, with subjects in their daily life. While the length of ethnographic fieldwork is usually shorter in sociological research than it is in anthropological studies, where the standard is complete immersion for at least a full year, while sociologists often practice fieldwork part-time or in a series of successive periods, it remains that in both disciplines ethnographic fieldwork is, at the very minimum, understood as extensive time spent participating in subjects' daily lives: there is a field, and the ethnographer goes into the field.

Into the Field

Primarily, and for most of the twentieth century, the field has been understood as a geographical place. The anthropological focus on “tribes” and later “ethnic groups” once made it easy to envision and think of the field as a simple, well-delimited ensemble, an encapsulated space with social and cultural elements neatly contained within clear boundaries. Thinking about the field as a radically distinct space – a capsule of well-contained culture – was obvious in colonial times and made to feel even more “natural” by physical distances: going into the field was what Western scholars did, and it was a major affair, which was prepared months in advance and involved a long travel period by various modes of transportation and guaranteed cultural shock upon arrival.

Some of the most famous lines in ethnographic writing describe (construct?) this enormous distance and radical distinction between the world of the ethno...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1: Foundations of Ethnographic Fieldwork
• 2: Thinking about It
• 3: Getting Involved
• 4: Being There
• 5: Seeing, Writing, Narrating
• 6: Writing Up
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement