First, a caveat. This chapter does not claim or aim to be a âreview of the literatureâ on insider-outsider research. What we hope to do here is trace a modest, somewhat wandering but, we hope, coherent, path, through early anthropology (the general study of human society and culture) and ethnography (the method by which cultural anthropology is conducted; the study of specific cultures and societies), and then, more generally, into the social sciences, particularly education. In the various disciplines of the humanities, fieldwork is conducted to understand people, their lives, families, social structures, values, works, hopes and dreams, on the local level, in order (and this is always the challenge!) to arrive at some new âgeneralizableâ understandings of the human condition. The path we will trace will bring us to these central questions: Who should conduct such fieldwork? Who is best placed to arrive at âtrueâ knowledge? Participants in the culture, or those outside it? Each position carries potential insights, blinders and challenges.
Let us begin.
All stories must begin somewhere. Beginnings, of course, have their roots in previous beginnings. Every thinker or writer finds his or her roots in the thoughts and writings of those who went before. Any review of ideas, concepts and methods begins at a significant but inexact point. We could, in fact, begin in antiquity; people have always been interested in how âforeignâ peoples live and have for many centuries written their observations of cultures they encountered on their travels. Marco Polo did this; Columbus did it; explorers and traders and wandering poets have encountered, described and tried to understand âforeignâ cultures for centuries. Hodgen (1964) says that we can trace the foundational concepts of anthropology at least as far back as the sixteenth century, when exploration and trade were bringing about the meeting of cultures such as never before. Our review begins with Bronislaw Malinowski, who is widely considered to be the founder of social anthropology.
Before turning to the contributions of Malinowski to this discussion, though, we would be remiss if we did not devote a paragraph to the other great early anthropologist, Franz Boas. Boas was born twenty-six years before Malinowski and was working before him, though they both died in 1942, researching and writing during the same period during the 1920s and 1930s. Boas, often called the father of American anthropology, was trained as a geographer. As a geographer he traveled to the frozen Canadian north to study the relationship between the physical environment and native Inuit migration patterns. This sparked his interest in the study of culture, and he embarked on several follow-up ethnographic field trips. He used the results of his ethnographic work, as well as studies of human skeletons from various cultures, to argue against the scientific racism that was dominant at the time. The Euro-centric beliefs of the time stated that cultures evolve through a series of predictable, hierarchical and physical stages and that European culture is the pinnacle of human culture. All âprimitiveâ or Indigenous cultures are less advanced, lower on this hierarchical scale. Boas introduced the idea of cultural relativism that different cultures are different but equal and that people view other cultures through the lens of their own culture (Levy-Zumwalt 2019). This was an extremely important contribution, the beginning of the freeing of the anthropological mind. Understanding that Indigenous cultures are no less valuable, human and sophisticated than Western cultures also spelled the slow beginning of the end of the âhistory of exploitive research that contributed little to no benefit, or worse, research that caused damaging effects for Indigenous peoples and their communitiesâ (Webster and John 2010, 175).
No doubt influenced by the older Boas, Malinowski brought to the young field of anthropology the understanding that culture can only be understood from the inside. He did not write about insiders and outsiders â in his time only the academic outsider did research â but thanks to Malinowski, the study of culture moved from âobjectiveâ description to âparticipant observation.â
Malinowskiâs interest in studying culture probably began at home. His father was a university professor who studied Polish dialect and folklore. As a young man, Bronislaw read Sir James Frazerâs The Golden Bough, a classic tome on practices of religion and magic, and was fascinated by it. In university, he studied folk psychology, and, in 1910, he traveled to England to study at the London School of Economics, where the young field of anthropology had been formally established as a discipline.1 He did doctoral and postdoctoral fieldwork in Papua New Guinea and then the Trobriand Islands, where, during the First World War, he spent an unprecedented amount of time, due to the political difficulties of travel during the war.2
During these extended field studies, he made breakthroughs that truly launched the field of cultural anthropology, writing vigorously on his insight that culture cannot be understood from the outside and cannot be captured meaningfully in brief descriptions sketched by âimpartial,â passive observers. He âbroke with convention by abandoning the positivist pretense of aloof scientific objectivity by inserting a witnessing self into his narrativeâ (Young 2014, np). Malinowski famously taught that only through in-depth participant observation can the anthropologist fulfill the real work of anthropology: to grasp the nativeâs point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision, his world (sic in terms of the pronouns).
Malinowski was ahead of his time, but he was still a product of it. The language of the introduction to Argonauts of the Pacific, contrasting ânative racesâ with âmen of academic training,â makes this quite clear:
The research which has been done on native races by men of academic training has proved beyond doubt and cavil that scientific, methodic inquiry can give us results far more abundant and of better quality than those of even the best amateurâs work. Most, though not all, of the modern scientific accounts have opened up quite new and unexpected aspects of tribal life. They have given us, in clear outline, the picture of social institutions often surprisingly vast and complex; they have brought before us the vision of the native as he is, in his religious and magical beliefs and practices. They have allowed us to penetrate into his mind far more deeply than we have ever done before.
(Malinowski 1922, xi)
In a similar vein, Malinowski writes of âthe hope of gaining a new vision of savage humanity through the labours of scientific specialistsâ (xi).
We will not âcancelâ Malinowski for his use of such language (âsavage humanity,â etc.) or deride his male-centered, Euro-centered worldview. We are all products of our time, place and culture, including those of us writing and reading this book. Instead, we will appreciate his invaluable contribution that culture can only be truly understood from participantsâ lived experience and point of view and mark this as the beginning of our story.
The term âsavageâ began to fall away as a result of Malinowskiâs work. The understandings generated by participant observation showed that ânativeâ cultures (a less loaded term than âsavageâ) were every bit as sophisticated and complex as Western, European cultures. Before Malinowski, the westerner looking from the outside saw savages. Malinowskiâs contribution was to show us that when ethnographic work is conducted over time, through participant observations, complex human motivations and cultural rules and norms begin to be revealed. The researcher is still an outsider, but he or she is trying to understand the insider experience.
For the first seventy years or so of the twentieth century, it could be said that â[d]espite all of the diverse peoples, cultures, practices, and places that anthropologists have studied, the discipline has really operated with only one paradigm or model of ethnography, that of the traditions of Malinowski and Boas, refined over the past seventy years in several varieties of British and American anthropologyâ (Marcus 2002, 192).
During these years, there was development of the idea that culture could be viewed from the outside and from the inside, and new terminologies were introduced to the discussion.
In 1954, linguist Kenneth Pike coined the terms âemicâ and âetic.â These terms have come to be generally understood as insider (emic) and outsider (etic) knowledge, experience and perspectives. Pike took the terms from the linguistic terms âphonemicâ and âphonetic.â In linguistics, a phoneme is a particular set of sounds in a particular language, understandable by native speakers of that language. Phonetics is the study of speech sounds, across languages and in all languages. From here it is an easy leap to âemicâ as âspecific approaches to specific culturesâ aimed at âeliciting within a particular culture that set of differences that make a difference. Conversely, âeticâ refers to general approaches resorting to universal or all-purpose analytical tools. Etic apprehends cultural systems in a comparative perspectiveâ (Jorian 1983, 41).
Despite the refinement of these understandings that culture can be researched from the outside, through âobjectiveâ observation and description, as well as from the inside, through long-term, in-depth participant observation, and the generation of new terminology to help with this refinement of understanding, it took another philosophical, social and epistemological transition to move the discussion and practice of cultural study to a new plane.
We refer to the shift from modernism to postmodernism. Modernist ethnographic work remained based in its roots, âwhich have at times defined cultures, named people, and told them who they are and what they might become. In short, ethnography grew out of a master discourse on colonizationâ (Clair 2003, 3). Postmodernism is a complex topic of discussion, rife with heavy terminology and subject to endless definitions. We do not intend here to strew too much terminology or too many definitions on the path we are sketching. Suffice it to say, for our purposes (and this is a vast simplification), that postmodernist research rejects meta-narratives and âfocuses on the problematic nature of representationâ (Pool 1991, 315). Who has the right to write about whom? Who âknowsâ about a culture? Who can produce a âtrueâ text?
Ethnographic reporting can today, since the âcrises of representation and legitimizationâ that began in the 1980s (Denzin 1997), come in forms as diverse as drama, dance and art, but most research into culture still produces written text. Pool (1991, 326) argues that âethnography is necessarily textual. Ethnographers transform cultures into texts, and these texts then become the objects of further anthropological study and theorizing. Textualized cultures are eternal, and can be analyzed and compared long after the ârealâ cultures on which they were based have changed beyond recognition or disappeared completely.â
This is problematic, since todayâs ethnography is infused with phenomenology and is aimed at capturing lived experience. Like pinning a live butterfly to cardboard and then covering the lovely, dead thing with glass, writing culture captures a people and a time under glass. Paradoxically, this is also the great contribution of ethnography. Eternalizing culture not only preserves precious people and times but these written texts are also the sources from which we do try, from intimate details, to learn more about ourselves and others, and yes, to theorize, in order to learn and plan and work toward better human societies on the basis of knowledge about the multicolored human clan of which we are all a part.
So, if knowledge is to be captured, written and preserved in this way, what kind of research, and researchers, will produce ethnographic texts with high verisimilitude?3 This brings us directly to insider-outsider research.
An important part of our discussion is researcher reflexivity, a term that emerged during the late 1970s to capture growing understanding that qualitative researchers must position themselves in relation to those they are researching; to ask, in effect, what co...
