Writing Ethnographically

Paul Anthony Atkinson

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781526463425, 9781526463418
• eBook ISBN: 9781526481429
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

This original and authoritative exploration of ethnographic writing comes from one of the world?s leading academics in the field, Paul Atkinson. The third book in his seminal quartet on ethnographic research, it provides thoughtful, reflective guidance on a crucial skill that is often difficult to master.

Informed throughout by extracts from Paul's own writing, this book explores and examines a broad range of types and genres of ethnographic writing, from fieldnotes and 'confessions', to conventional 'realist' writing and more. Whilst highlighting the possibilities and implications of ethnographic text, this valuable resource will help those conducting ethnographic research select and adopt the most appropriate approach for their study.

1 Introduction Writing Matters

While this book stands on its own, it is also the third part of a quartet (to be completed by Crafting Ethnography). In the first, For Ethnography (2014), I laid out a manifesto for ethnographic research, a personal re-statement of fundamental objectives and strategies. It was, in part, a reaction to recent methodological approaches that do violence to the ethnographic tradition and do not do justice to the analytic possibilities of ethnographic fieldwork. More positively, I wanted to commend the spirit of ethnographic enquiry, with its demanding intellectual and personal commitments to the everyday lives of one’s fellow men and women. That spirit was carried through into the second volume, Thinking Ethnographically (2017), where I outlined some of the key analytic ideas and perspectives that can (and in many cases should) inform ethnographic enquiry. Some of those ideas were ‘classics’, others more recent. Together, they were intended to provide the would-be ethnographer with an array of productive ideas.

My intention was not, of course, that any other scholar – novice or expert – should copy them, or adopt them wholesale. Rather, the aim was to help others to develop their own ethnographic thinking. But I was conscious of the extent to which students and others can undertake fieldwork with little sense of what to do with the data they collect. In the absence of ideas, field research is idle. Each of those books was devoted to encouraging their readers to make a positive commitment to ethnography and its ideas. I know that my ideas and advocacy were not perfectly coherent, epistemologically or methodologically. No matter, they were not works of philosophy, but were intended to provide students and researchers with motivation and ideas, in order to get going and keep going. In the course of this third book I shall not establish a single ‘position’. Indeed, I am not greatly given to adopting positions. It is far too easy to get stuck in one position, with consequent loss of flexibility. I certainly do not advocate the slavish adoption of pre-existing perspectives. In any case, the theme of the book is the plurality of textual strategies and conventions, and while I am not uncritical, I do not advocate one single approach.

Now, in this third book, my focus moves from analysis to writing. It is based on the truism that ethnographers reconstruct social realities through their textual practices and conventions. There is an important and intricate relationship between our engagement with a given social world and our reconstruction of those social realities into textual forms. In the real world of research, these divisions – into fieldwork, analysis and writing – are spurious. They are simultaneous aspects of the research process, and their synchronicity is a particular feature of ethnographic research. But we have to make some such distinctions in order to examine those complementary facets of the research process. There are particular reasons for addressing the textual practices of ethnography. Writing ethnography is far from being a technical activity. It is not simply a matter of ‘writing up’ our results in a textual vacuum. One needs to recognise: literary models and precedents; textual conventions; distinctive genres associated with particular schools and traditions of field research; fashions in ethnographic style. There exist ‘conventional’ texts (in the sense that they seem unremarkable to writers and readers), and there are overtly experimental or transgressive texts. (They are all conventional to the extent that they reflect shared assumptions and practices.) There are controversies surrounding the textual conventions and their connotations. In turn, authors have created a proliferation of styles and texts, many of which depart from the traditionally conventional. Claims and counter-claims concerning ethnographic representation have been bandied about in the relevant disciplines. These phenomena deserve appraisal in their own right. They also reflect back on our more general interests in undertaking ethnographic research in the first place. There are, therefore, several major reasons to examine the processes of ethnographic composition, and the texts that are generated. They have a certain intrinsic interest too. Since, as social researchers, we all have to write, then it can be engaging and illuminating to examine just how our peers and predecessors have set about the relevant tasks.

I have essayed such a task before, in The Ethnographic Imagination (1990). There I discussed just some of the textual resources and devices whereby ethnographic texts establish their plausibility and credibility, applying elements of literary theory to selected examples of ethnographic writing. Of necessity, this book touches on some of those same themes. But in the years since that monograph, the terrain of ethnography and its associated texts has proliferated and transformed. It is, therefore, timely to revisit the whole topic, and to reflect on the many ways in which ethnographers can and do write. The rise of autoethnography and experimental writing deserves much greater attention. The possibilities for ‘authorship’ that are provided by digital resources also raise issues about writing and representation. They too deserve attention. In the intervening years there have also been numerous commentaries and debates concerning the writing of ethnographic texts. We need, therefore, to take stock. As I shall go on to discuss in the next chapter, some of those interventions seem to offer little by way of practical advice to the would-be ethnographer. Indeed, some seem to render the entire exercise so problematic as to leave little space for practical work. Here, therefore, I tend towards the opposite extreme, attempting to cut through some of the more esoteric issues.

In the same spirit as my previous two books, I address my readers directly. But this is not a how-to-do-it manual. It is not a handbook of style. I do have personal ideas and preferences about academic writing in general and ethnographic writing in particular; but one must look elsewhere for avuncular advice and help. Howard Becker is a shining example, and here I do not seek to rival him as a guide and mentor (e.g. Becker 2007a, 2007b). At the same time, this is not just a dry rehearsal of how different people have addressed themselves to the tasks of writing. The reader will find that I am critical as well as descriptive. Just as I have tried to encourage people to think critically and constructively about ethnography more widely, so here too I want my readers to use my reflections to guide their decision-making.

When I started writing about and publishing these and related matters, there was precious little literature to work with (or against). In the intervening decades, much has been published. It is not all equally helpful, and some of it seems to have generated more fervour than constructive thinking. Yet it deserves attention, as we cannot pretend that this is terra incognita. In the following chapter, therefore, I introduce some of the key issues and debates.

By way of introduction, however, we must ask ourselves just why the writing of ethnography matters. In doing so, we need to recognise the reflexivity of accounts. The term ‘reflexivity’ has been used, and misused, in various ways, not least in relation to the conduct of ethnographic and similar, qualitative research. Here, as elsewhere, I take it to be a fundamental feature of ethnographic enquiry. (It is by no means confined to the ethnographic, though that is my focus here.) The phenomena we study and describe do not exist perfectly independently of the methods we use to render them visible. The principle of the reflexivity of accounts means, simply put, that phenomena are – in part – constituted by our accounts of them. I say ‘in part’ because our descriptions are not totally arbitrary or whimsical. Phenomena, such as social acts, are also constituted by material circumstances, the modalities of their expression, and by actors’ own accounting practices. But we must recognise from the outset that the subject-matter of our research, and of our disciplines, is formed in part by our descriptive practices. And they, of course, depend upon conventions of written texts. This, then, is a different notion from the use of reflexivity to describe the capacity of human actors to ‘reflect’ on their own activities and to formulate their own motives and those of others. It is, also, different from the use of reflexivity to capture the attitude of the reflective practitioner. The researcher in the field must indeed ‘reflect’, in the sense that she or he must nurture a self-conscious awareness of what is being observed, how things are being learned, how one’s presence in the field bears on one’s understanding of it, taking into account one’s biographical baggage and standpoints. Here, I stress, I am thinking and writing about textual reflexivity precisely because ethnographic texts and genres help to determine the very subject-matter of anthropology, sociology and related disciplines.

In the chapters that follow I shall comment on a variety of texts that together help to constitute the genres of ethnography. I begin with what I call ‘texts of the field’. Ethnographers have for many years relied on the construction of fieldnotes. The image – indeed the reality – many of us harbour of fieldwork involves periods of intensive participation and observation followed by equally intense periods of writing. Fieldnotes remain a major source of ‘data’ for many field researchers, even when observations can be complemented by audio and video recordings. Such notes can take many forms, from brief jottings to worked-up narratives. They are not the complete repository of ethnographic knowledge, as all fieldwork results in varieties of personal knowledge, sometimes tacit, that the ethnographer accumulates. One’s cultural competence, gained through periods of close attention in a social world, is not captured solely in the fieldnotes themselves. They are, however, a wellspring of materials from which the ethnographer can draw ideas, memories, prompts and cultural exemplars.

Field researchers also write other kinds of ‘texts of the field’. We write reflections on the process of the research itself. These are, like fieldnotes, primarily for the author’s own use; although, as we shall see, they can also find their way into published materials, just as extracts from fieldnotes can. Equally, we have a distinctive genre of ‘confessions’, often published texts, that recount the natural history of the research in a ‘warts and all’ fashion. The confession provides opportunity for readers to glimpse the backstage features of fieldwork, and for authors to reveal at least some of the contingencies – personal, interpersonal and intellectual – of field research. Now reflections and confessions also have their distinctive characteristics. That does not mean that they are in any way dishonest or bogus. Rather, it means that even ‘personal’ accounts can include various shared conventions. I shall, therefore, examine some of the distinctive features of such confessional accounts.

When we turn to ethnographic monographs, then we can start to ask ourselves how they characteristically achieve their effects for readers. There is a considerable extent to which ethnographic argument is promoted through rhetorical and textual devices. That does not mean that it is only about rhetoric. There are issues of evidence and analysis that are intrinsic to the relevant social sciences. The sociological or anthropological disciplines are not conjured up out of thin air. The hard work of field research yields evidence, and our texts marshal that evidence, based on careful and complex analysis. But all disciplines display textual genres and styles. There is no escape from conventions of reporting and representation. Given the discursive nature of ethnographic monographs and papers, however, there is every need to examine just some of the recurrent textual methods that are deployed. There is no doubt that ‘analysis’ and ‘writing’ are inextricably linked.

I shall therefore pay attention to some of the techniques that ethnographic authors use in developing their arguments. They include the alternation between generic ideas and specific cases, so that there is a recurrent dialectic between the two: the text recapitulates the processes of analysis and reflection that pervade the ethnographic process. Ethnographies also develop narratives. They sustain analytic narratives that go beyond cases and particularities, including what I shall describe as ‘parables’. They have their dramaturgical structures, exploring the comedies and tragedies of everyday life. I shall, therefore, examine some of those ‘literary’ formats. Again, I do not want to imply that ethnographers ‘just tell stories’; but it is the case that social ‘theories’ often take the form of narratives, and I shall develop analysis along those lines.

Ethnographic narratives often convey authors’ key conceptual ideas. Ethnographic research is rarely susceptible to summary form as theoretical propositions. That does not mean that ethnography is devoid of theory, though it is not always framed in terms of grand theory. Ethnographic research does not have to take the proverbial dead white male theorist for inspiration. Indeed, it is one of the strengths of ethnographic work that it does not use general social ‘theory’ as an intellectual crutch. But that does not mean that ethnographies are devoid of ideas. On the contrary, successful ethnographic research uses and develops ideas in abundance. Often they are conveyed through ethnographic narratives that inscribe key ideas about the social world in question. Some monographs are carried through their own narratives – tragedies of unintended consequences, or comedies of manners. Others may deploy rhetorical devices such as extended metaphors to convey a distinctive perspective on processes of social life. In other words, the textual forms often carry the argument. Indeed, it can sometimes sound heavy-handed if an ethnographic monograph is too heavily couched in terms of ‘big’ theory or theorists. I shall therefore examine examples of how rhetorical effects are achieved in chosen texts.

A collective self-consciousness about textual forms and conventions has led some authors to express their ethnographic understanding through experimental textual forms. Most of those stylistic innovations are (understandably) not exactly experimental, but are forms adopted and adapted from other genres. Overtly ‘literary’ styles can be used to convey ethnographic understanding. In a similar vein, some authors have advocated experimentation with so-called ‘messy’ texts. It is suggested that the traditional, realist style of monograph can present too unified a view of the social world, or that the complexity of social realities calls for complex textual forms. Consequently, I shall examine just some of these stylistic variations. I shall also point out that overtly literary work is by no means novel, though it has enjoyed popularity in recent decades. Such narrative devices include the production of ethnographic fictions, which is not a single genre, but yet another extension of ethnographic writing. As I shall indicate, it too is far from novel, although varieties of fiction have gained prominence in the wake of ‘new ethnography’ and ‘new writing’ movements.

Part of a general shift in ethnographic writing has been a tendency to write more overtly about the ‘self’ of the ethnographer. Whereas the traditional monograph was and is characterised by a self-effacing author, various alternatives have been advocated, in which the ethnographer is more visibly present in the text. The personal and interpersonal nature of fieldwork is thus embedded in the text itself: this contrasts with the ‘confessional’ that is created as a separate text that, as it were, saves the appearance of the realist text. The apogee of such personal writing is the autoethnography. While that term covers a variety of meanings, it is widely taken to cover autobiographical texts in which the ethnographer/author is not merely visibly and audibly present, but becomes the main focus of the text. This reverses the traditional polarity between ‘self’ and ‘other’ in ethnography, such that the self becomes the object of scrutiny. I shall examine some of the textual implications of this perspective. In particular I shall reflect on the textual construction of the ‘self’ of the author, and question to what extent such authorial exercises remain faithful to the core commitments of ethnography itself.

Throughout the book I have used some of my own texts, published and unpublished. That is not, I hope, unduly narcissistic. In a few instances I have constructed a text from my own previously unpublished fieldnotes and other notebooks, for the purposes of illustrating a particular point. This is because I can reproduce and comment on my own work from the privileged position of being its author. Fieldnotes and other texts of the field are often ‘private’. It remains rare for researchers to share their primary materials. But this is not a matter of self-congratulation. These are materials to think with and to reflect on, not for celebration. Of course I make reference to published work too: this is not just about me. It remains the case, however, that documents like fieldnotes and diaries are rarely visible to one’s students and colleagues. Even though there are digital archives of social data, the problems of rendering field data anonymous and otherwise ethically acceptable can often mean that they are not archived. (The interviews from field research are much easier to archive or make available for secondary analysis than are fieldnotes.) In any case, except in special circumstances, it can be difficult to comment on other peoples’ fieldnotes. That is because we always bring to bear our socialised competence when writing, reading and re-reading our own materials, while that kind of competence is not available when it comes to other researchers’ data. In the same way, I can comment on my own attempts to create particular kinds of text, what I was trying to convey, and how I thought about the materials. I can of course comment on published materials – and I have done so. But I hope that using my own work as the primary source of examples gives the book a certain continuity and coherence too. Furthermore, I have noticed that some of the most prominent commentators and critics of ethnographers’ textual practices and their authorial warrants seem to have no fieldwork or ethnographic texts of their own to illustrate and develop their arguments. I would not want readers to think that I have not made the effort to undertake field research, or to grapple with the hard work of producing publications derived from it.

The materials I have drawn on are derived from several research projects, spanning several decades. I have used them selectively to introduce and illustrate some of the themes in this book. In order to contextualise those texts, I am providing the following summary of those projects. Unlike some social scientists who specialise in one substantive field (education, health, crime and deviance), I have found myself doing field research in quite different kinds of setting. My first, brief, acquaintance with fieldwork was in an Essex village called Elmdon. It was a place where Cambridge anthropology students could spend a short period of time during the summer by contributing to a collective project about the village. My friend, Julian Laite, and I did a short-term project about housing tenure and kinship. We were instructed to make notes in notebooks – rough notes on one side, and the written-up notes on the facing page. The accumulated notebooks were indexed on file cards, and all of the materials were kept in a trunk. Most of our data were collected through interviews – some more formal than others – rather than participant observation. If I learned anything from that experience, it was that one can learn and write a lot in a short space of time. The whole project can be found written up by Marilyn Strathern (1981) and the relevant materials have been archived. As a student I also took part in a vacation project, together with two student friends, Michael Herzfeld and Gregg Eaves, recording folk music on the island of Crete. I also took numerous photographs. Crete provides the setting for one of the texts I use here. Herzfeld went on to conduct major ethnographic research on Crete and elsewhere in Greece (e.g. Herzfeld 1985).

The first sustained project was my doctoral research. In the early 1970s I carried out fieldwork in the Edinburgh teaching hospitals. I spent an academic year following medical students in their first clinical year, observing the teaching of general medicine. I then spent a second year following the next cohort of students in their first clinical year, observing the teaching of general surgery. I kept fieldnotes in reporters’ notebooks. I did this as I had learned in Elmdon – with jottings crossed through and written up on the facing page. I still have the notebooks safely. The doctoral thesis of 1976 resulted in a monograph (Atkinson 1981/1997). The core of that research was an account of the dramaturgical work that is carried on at the patient’s bedside in the reconstruction of classic medical knowledge. The teaching clinicians would use the patients to display typical signs and symptoms, inviting the students to elicit the right symptomatic accounts and to recognise the right signs. It was a professional pedagogy that recapitulated a mode of medical thought and practice that had endured for over 200 years.

The second major piece of fieldwork took place over the academic year 1984–5. I followed up my interest in medical knowledge with an ethnographic study of haematologists. That specialty was chosen because I wanted to focus very specifically on the professional construction of medical investigation and diagnosis, in the laboratory, in the clinic, in the morning round, in the grand round and the clinical conference. I spent several months in a major university hospital in the United States, and a similar period in a British teaching hospital. I kept detailed fieldnotes, and made audio recordings of ‘rounds’. I wrote up detailed notes, again in notebooks. I still have those notebooks too. The work was written up (mostly using the American data) in a monograph (Atkinson 1995). A continuation of my doctoral research in many ways, my analysis focused on the rhetorical and discursive means through which the haematologists assembled their accounts and so constructed their ‘cases’. Both of those hospital studies were concerned primarily with the creation and re-creation of medical knowledge.

Having continued working and publishing on aspects of medical knowledge, I undertook quite different fieldwork with the Welsh National Opera Company over a number of years (1997–2002). My medical work was informed by an interest in performance, and I turned my attention explicitly to a performative environment. A major part of my fieldwork consisted of observing the rehearsals and performances of a series of operas. Again, I kept detailed fieldnotes about those activities. The fieldwork resulted in a monograph (Atkinson 2006). In a much smaller way, the work with the opera company was followed by observations and writing about masterclasses for young opera singers (Atkinson 2013).The opera studies concentrated on the intensely focused encounters that singers and director, or singers and their teachers engage in in order to ‘get it right’, either in performance or in the masterclass. In parallel to those projects, I also completed a part-time BA in opera studies.

More recently I have undertaken a number of activities that do not altogether count as proper research projects. I have participated in a series of learning activities. Like the opera project, they reflect two things simultaneously. First, they capitalise on personal engagements. Opera had been a lifelong interest, and I have followed my personal interests further by taking classes in a series of art or craft activities: in glassblowing, ceramics, silversmithing, woodworking, life-drawing, perfume-blending and photography. I have kept detailed notes on all of those activities. I have also spent time in studios, observing the work of accomplished craft workers. Secondly these are all methodological exercises. I have set myself the task of trying to document the rudiments of such craft work, as well as the methodological challenge of writing about them.

Those do not exhaust all my research and publishing work, but those p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Acknowledgements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction Writing Matters
• 2 Textual Reflexivity
• 3 Notes and Margins Texts of the Field
• 4 Reflections and Confessions
• 5 Ethnographic Presence
• 6 Stories and Parables
• 7 Modernisms
• 8 Writing the Self
• 9 Fictions and Performances
• 10 Reflexivity Revisited
• References
• Index