Ethnography Lessons

A Primer

Harry F Wolcott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315428956
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie

Harry Wolcott takes the reader inside the process of constructing an ethnographic study, offering a wealth of lessons from one of the masters. In this concise primer, he provides a set of models from which to organize a study, explains how to pick the various components that go into the ethnographic report, advises on how to create analogies and metaphors to help explain your work, and identifies the key features of an effective ethnography. He also discusses the role of serendipity and questions of ethics in doing ethnographic work. Learn the essentials of ethnography from one of the masters.

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9CHAPTER ONE
Ethnography Lesson

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The chapter that I am about to deconstruct was originally written in the period 1968–1972, so its story is hardly newsworthy. In its final version this chapter originally appeared in 1974 and proved to be a great success. It remained in print for years. I have taken this opportunity to share the lessons I learned with other beginning ethnographers. I have written about this material before (Wolcott 2003c), but in that writing I erroneously laid my problem to a problem with writing, rather than to my lack of understanding about ethnography.

What seems most curious is how I happened to save the earliest draft of that original chapter and the subsequent critiques to it that I received. My file drawers have always bulged, a particular problem for any professor who remains at the same institution for so long. Of course, my office moved from place to place and building to building as education experienced its incessant but cosmetic changes. However, the moves were never so dramatic that I needed virtually to chuck everything in order to make the shift. At one time my small office contained five file cabinets full of precious (to me) documents. Still, I was constantly throwing out old material. I suspect that I kept this set of comments with the intention to write more 10about it someday. Now, more than forty years later, I am able to fess up.

The story has multiple strands, but it all began with meeting George Spindler, professor of education and anthropology at Stanford University, in 1960 when I embarked on a course of doctoral studies. I was unaware that such a program existed until I met Spindler. I realized that a program combining anthropology and education was the kind of program that interested me, even if, as I suspected at the time, it didn’t necessarily lead anywhere or at least to a position that anyone was trying to fill. Those of us who elected to study with Spindler were simply willing to take our chances, perhaps hoping later to apply for a position probably in some department of social foundations of education.

With Spindler’s direction, coupled with a large dose of serendipity (to be discussed in chapter 3), I went to Kwakiutl country on Canada’s West Coast to do dissertation research. By the time I completed my fieldwork and had written my dissertation in 1964, there was some call for students of education who had included anthropology in their studies. I took a position with a new educational research center at the University of Oregon, the Center for the Advanced Study of Educational Administration. The center was one of a number of new federally funded educational research and development (R&D) centers established under President Lyndon Johnson’s plan for developing the Great Society. I have been at the University of Oregon ever since.

For my initial assignment at Oregon I was seconded to a sociologist to assist with a normative study of school administrators, not much of an assignment for an anthropologist, but I was too junior to be set free with a project of my own. At Spindler’s urging, I eventually proposed a new 11assignment more to my liking, studying what one elementary school principal did in the course of his daily work. Of course, studying what a principal does did not seem like terribly exciting stuff. I would have preferred to study a classroom or even a whole school. But my interests were constrained by the mission of our research center; I needed to put an administrative spin on the project to win approval.

What I proposed was to follow one school principal around “in anthropological fashion” to see what he (little question in those pre-affirmative action days that it would be a “he”) actually did, in contrast to a literature that was essentially hortatory in nature, reporting what a good principal should or ought to do. This was a natural assignment for me. Immediately prior to attending Stanford, I had been the vice principal of a huge elementary school. I also held a California administrative credential. I would be studying something in which I was already well informed.

During my early years at the Center (1964–1966), I managed to rewrite my dissertation for publication as A Kwakiutl Village and School (Wolcott 1967) for the new series in Education and Culture edited by my mentor. That substantially increased my status as an anthropologist in the Center and attested to the fact that I could “do” ethnography. And Spindler seemed to like what I had to say in that study, at least after he was able to get me to go beyond my data to say what I thought it all meant. That was a not-so-easy jump in those days when we were trying hard to substantiate our claim as empirical observers.

By the end of the academic year in 1966 I had located a school principal willing to allow me to conduct my proposed study, and I began making visits to his school as often as three or four times a week. Although I had 12projected a study of one year for the fieldwork and a second year to write it up—not an unrealistic projection, I thought, since that is how long my Kwakiutl study had taken—I found that with teaching responsibilities and other university obligations, I needed to continue my fieldwork for a second year.

During this time I was becoming aware of how the field of anthropology and education was burgeoning. Suddenly there was interest aplenty in ethnographic research, and positions were becoming available for applicants with appropriate anthropological training.

Meanwhile, Professor Spindler had enjoyed good success with his recently edited book Education and Culture: Anthropological Approaches (Spindler 1963) and had decided to prepare a second edition. He was even considering preparing a totally new book instead of simply revising the old one. And that put him on the prowl for possible new contributors. As one of his students, I was among them.

With an eye to promoting his already well-received series, the Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology, Spindler contacted the authors of that original set of monographs to see if they had anything to contribute to his new volume. Since he had always shown an interest in my projects, he asked if I had something to offer from each of my studies, the Kwakiutl study and now the school principal study. But he laid down one condition: he did not want articles warmed over from those case studies, he wanted new material that would complement what we had already written as well as attract new readers for his book. He posed the question to me in an interesting way. He knew I was then beginning to write up my fieldwork, so he asked, “Is there anything you might share with others who may be having trouble with drafts of their own?”

13Agreeing to write the piece was not an easy decision. True, I realized that I was expected to get an article or two from my study, and the invitation from my former Ph.D. adviser meant that he would reserve a place for me in his forthcoming book. My problem was that I had completed the fieldwork for what would was destined to become The Man in the Principal’s Office, but I had not yet written one word of it. Shouldn’t I work on the full study first, rather than spin off a piece for someone else’s edited collection? Then again, an article for Spindler would have a guaranteed publisher and a ready-made audience. I opted in favor of the sure thing, rationalizing that the writing would not take long (!) and would buy me time to complete the full account and find a publisher.

The pressure to publish has not diminished during the ensuing years. But unlike most of my colleagues, my appointment as research associate allowed time to pursue research as my major activity. Although I held an academic appointment, it required only part-time teaching. I had now completed two years of funded research, and it was time to show what I had accomplished. Further, from day one my study had been touted as “ethnography,” a book-length ethnography at that. My colleagues wondered just what an educational ethnography looked like, especially a study conducted in a local elementary school, rather than on some remote and exotic island.

Without having written the full study, however, I did not know what I should include or exclude. I did not see how to describe in an article-length piece what I would eventually spell out in detail in my book. Spindler imposed no control over content except that he wanted the article to complement my as yet unwritten book—to be an original piece rather than an excerpt.

14Because of that experience, I have always counseled others to write their full and complete account first, if there is to be such an account. The advice seems reasonable; one ought to know if a story is to be told both en toto and piecemeal. The decision is not quite so straightforward, however, and as must already be apparent, I did not follow my own advice.

Where to Begin

I was ready to write about the principalship. I did not intend to write about how I had gone about gathering the data, a “method” that seemed rather mundane to me. But there was much interest in how I had conducted the study and what made it “ethnographic”—and not a few skeptics who wondered if there really was any “method” to my work at all. So method had to be there, at least enough to satisfy an audience of educators that here was a different way to conduct research. If I was going to talk about method, I needed as well to lay out my purposes and how ethnography was going to help me achieve them. I began my draft for the forthcoming Spindler chapter with the following vignette:

The following dialogue occurred while a special committee of school principals was interviewing candidates for new principalship positions which were to be filled the following year. The candidate being interviewed was a principal from a nearby rural district.

Interviewing Principal No. 1: “Why do you say you like autonomy?”

Candidate: “I like to be an individual, just like you do.”

Interviewing Principal No. 2: “Do you like your teachers to be individuals, too?”

15Candidate: “Yes. As a matter of fact, I encourage it.” During a period of two years, May 1966 to May 1968, I tagged along with one elementary school principal to study what it is that principals do, how they feel about it, and how the many other roles they play as human beings affect and are affected by their role as principal. To my amazement, I have occasionally been asked, “Did the principal know you were making the study?” I can assure you that he did, as did his faculty and family, all of his fellow principals, many visitors to the school, and even quite a few of the pupils. A few of the pupils even learned the nickname which the faculty assigned to me as a way of jokingly acknowledging what I was about: “The Shadow.”¹

That first draft ran to thirty-eight pages. Three pages of introduction were followed by seven pages describing my ethnographic approach, eleven pages discussing “salient aspects” of the principalship, and a conclusion discussing paradoxes in the role. I wrote comparatively, across the role, rather than confining my observations only to the case study principal.

I prepared the draft during the summer, mailed it off to Spindler in August 1968, and received his comments two months later. I felt pretty well into ethnography at that point. My first book, transforming my dissertation into one of the original volumes of the new Case Studies in Education and Culture series edited by the Spindlers had been published the previous year. Now, the fieldwork for my second study was completed, and I had begun to write it up. My brilliant career.

Spindler did not usually edit on a point-by-point basis, but he peppered my draft with comments. I guess I kept copies of the evolving manuscript all these years to keep 16me humble. His words were never unkind, but they went right to the core of the problem—and to my core, as well. No doubt Spindler recognized the importance, or the potential importance, of this effort of one of his early students to make the case for educational ethnography. He wanted me to say it just right. If I couldn’t say it by myself, he would say it with me. If necessary, he would even say it for me.

On page one of my draft he offered a critical examination of my discussion about method:²

Pp. 1–12. A little meandering. Needs sharper focus—exposition and defense of why as well as how you study only one man and his operational context.

How do you justify studying one principal in order to understand principals?

Questions to answer in 1st part: What did you want to find out? Why do you call it an ethnography? Why couldn’t you find out other ways?

Further along, where I sing the praises of capturing dialogue but fail to employ any, Spindler asks, “Yes, but what use is the dialogue? Dialogue is good to use, but its relevance should also become clear.” I also introduced and defended the idea of viewing the principal’s behavior in cultural terms. Spindler’s note on that point was succinct: “Too vague. What are cultural terms?”

By page 5, Spindler seemed to be getting nervous: “After a brief Introduction, with more observational materials, the paper could start here.” [I still find something similar on every early draft I circulate. It reminds us all to look again at beginnings: first sentence, first paragraph, first section, entire first chapters. Realize that it may take us a while to warm up, but while we’re at it, our readers may be cooling out. We need to get right at it, the quicker 17the better. It doesn’t hurt to attempt to snag your reader by stating your purpose with your opening sentence.]

Once through method, and twelve pages into the manuscript, I did (finally) launch into what principals actually do. I explained my purpose: “I have chosen to make some rather broad statements, and I have chosen to speak about the elementary school principalship in general rather than restrict my comments to the actions of one man over a given period of time.” Were I given to using a lot of italicized words in my writing, every word in that sentence would now be italicized, for they reveal the essence of my problem.

In the margin, Spindler raised a profound question with a simple word: “Why?”

He pointed out that I could make the case that this principal was like all others in ways that could be defined through other kinds of studies. And he recognized that I did observe other principals in the course of my study. But he reminded me that my study was about one particular principal. From the outset I had jumped the track. I was keeping my observational data largely to myself, using them only as a springboard for reviewing the principalship in general.

By page 31, Spindler had seen enough generalizations. He started changing my every use of the word “they” to “he” to try to get me back on track. But reading half a page later he gave up on that approach and issued a directive in the margin: “Don’t generalize. The heart of ethnography is singularity.” Where I had written “Most principals organize their time in such a way that they minimize unencumbered time or eliminate it completely,” he responded in the margin, “Show this in this case.”

I did eventually get down to cases. I wrote about a series of meetings in which “my” principal and five 18other principals were convened as a screening committee to make recommendations about who among many candidates looked promising for positions that would open up the following year. But even here, rather than restrict my comments to the deliberations at hand, I could not resist going to the literature to review studies from California and New York for perspective on the phenomenon I was examining,

I decided to send Spindler this new draft as a work-in-progress to get his reaction, for even I had begun to feel that my words were getting nowhere. I was, as Gertrude Stein once described it, trying to say everything about everything, to fit everything together and squeeze it all into one draft. Instead of writing th...