Doing Ethnographies

Mike Crang, Ian Cook

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780761944461, 9780761944454
• eBook ISBN: 9781446226827
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

Doing Ethnographies is an introductory and applied guide to ethnographic methods. It focuses on those methods - participant observation, interviewing, focus groups, and video/photographic work - that allow us to understand the lived, everyday world.

Informed by the authors? fieldwork experience, the book covers the relation between theory, practice and writing, and demonstrates how methods work in the field, so preparing the first-time ethnographer for the loss of control and direction often experienced.

1   Introduction

 

Since the early 1990s, an increasing number of researchers in human geography have drawn on qualitative methods in their work. The aim of this book is to give an introductory guide to the practice of those methods broadly referred to as ‘ethnographic’, i.e. participant observation plus, in our experience at least, interviewing, focus groups and/or video/photographic work. The basic purpose in using these methods is to understand parts of the world more or less as they are experienced and understood in the everyday lives of people who ‘live them out’. In the early 1990s, there was an established literature dealing with the poetics and politics of writing such ethnographies (Atkinson 1990; Crang 1992; Gordon 1988; Marcus and Clifford 1986; Marcus and Cushman 1982; Spencer 1989). Yet, far less had emerged concerning the poetics and politics of doing them. Historically, relatively few researchers, in their final monographs, have included detailed discussions of how their methods ‘worked’ in the field. And, as a result, many first-time ethnographers have found that reading these works, along with any standard ‘how to’ manuals, leaves them ill-prepared for the losses of ‘control’ and surprising twists and turns which their work can subsequently take. Although some may be drawn to the more ‘predictable’ and ‘controllable’ results which quantitative methods often promise, our intention here is to argue that with appropriate preparations, the inevitable contingencies of any ethnographic project can be productively incorporated and built upon from the very start.

This book has by no means been written as a menu of abstract concepts and methods to be learned and then applied in the field to answer tightly defined research questions. Rather, it is intended to serve as a guide to preparing for the sorts of issues and methods which have to be considered throughout an ethnographic project (with its inevitable constraints of time and money). In our experience, researchers have often been reluctant to do ethnographies because they fear that these somehow must either inevitably fail to get to the ‘nitty-gritty’ of a problem, or involve methods which can only be used ‘properly’ by rare, and unusually gifted, people. Our intention here is to argue that neither of these need be true. Drawing on both the techniques literature and our experiences of doing this type of work as undergraduate, Masters and/or PhD students, we want to demystify this approach and thereby provide a positive foundation on which others might build more ‘doable’ projects.

As readers may also gather as our arguments develop, another aim of this book is to dismantle the three-stage read-then-do-then-write model for academic research. We don’t like this at all. Indeed, we see it as one of the main causes of qualitative research going badly wrong. You may be familiar with this model. We have certainly been advised to follow it on more that one occasion. In its purest form, it sets out research as comprising three discrete stages. Stage One (the first year of a PhD, for example) involves reading the literature and preparing a research proposal. Stage Two (the second year) is spent doing that proposed research. And Stage Three (the third and final year) is spent writing up the results of that research. Yet, qualitative researchers often find that things don’t happen the way that they had planned them ‘in the field’ during that second stage. Those who they expect to talk to and what they expect to find doesn’t happen as planned and, often, more interesting issues unexpectedly appear. So, if and when this happens, how can they salvage the situation to get their dissertation or thesis completed and handed in on time? There seem to be two main options:

(a)	spend Stage Three writing up the research as if it didn’t go wrong, clinging as much as possible to that Stage One proposal, or
(b)	spend Stage Three reading the literature which ideally would have been read in Stage One and then, in the limited time remaining, writing up the research that was actually done.

Both of these options are the stuff of nightmares and, we argue, they’re also unnecessary if an alternative combination of reading, doing and writing is pursued from the start of a project. Here, we argue, it’s a very good idea to:

 

• agree with your supervisor to ditch that linear model as the right way to organise your work and time,
• mix up your reading, doing and writing from the start in order to gradually piece together something that’s equally interesting, relevant and doable,
• undertake detailed preparations that will allow you to be ready, willing and able to deal with the unexpected twists and turns which you will inevitably experience,
• make ongoing but systematic attempts to rethink and rewrite research plans ‘on the hoof’ in order to understand how the project is taking and changing shape, and how some influence can be exerted over this and
• refuse to believe that you should be able to state exactly what your research is about (except strategically in formal proposals) because this will change as the research proceeds.

Research following the read-then-do-then-write model is, we have learned from bitter experience, almost bound to go ‘off the rails’ or just plain ‘wrong’. In preparing for his ethnographic research on how legally blind people travelled independently through an American city, for instance, Ian spent approximately ten months reading the literature on which their mobility instruction – and therefore, he supposed, their travel – was based. Only then, after he had honed his research questions, did he arrange to meet with a blind person to see how these worked out in her day-to-day life. Having hypothesised that her travels would be limited to a portfolio of discrete, memorised routes, for instance, he asked her how well she knew them. But she replied quite indignantly:

 

These aren’t routes. These are places. These are maps and I know where I’m going. I do have to think about what I’m doing and where I am within the map…. You don’t have to think. It’s not a route, it’s a space that I know…. I see it in a real clear map so that at any point I know what I’m facing and, if I wanna go somewhere else, what way I’ve gotta turn to get there. I don’t have to think because it’s a map. It’s a three-dimensional cognitive structure, sorta (Cook 1992: 7).¹

This kind of description was very much unlike that which Ian had found in the blindness literature, and meant that many months of work had, to a large extent, been wasted. Subsequently, in discussing travel experiences with three other blind people, he had to go back almost to square one and he ended up addressing many unthought-of research questions which emerged out of this kind of dialogue and which had to be situated in what he had previously regarded as ‘unrelated’ literatures. In the alternative model that we’re advocating, we can’t guarantee that things won’t go wrong but it’s much more difficult to go ‘off the rails’ if you’re helping to lay them, piece by piece, with those involved in all stages of your project.

This book is an attempt to provide a grounded, process-oriented view of ethnographic research. Parts of this book may be useful in preparing a research proposal, because they outline how a variety of qualitative research methods can be selected appropriately, used well and data thereby constructed analysed systematically. So, in the following pages we outline a series of issues that, we hope, will help prospective researchers to more effectively prepare for, revise and complete their research. We discuss, first, how subjectivities can be conceptualised; second, how these conceptualisations can be used to develop appropriate fieldwork strategies; third, what kinds of information or data can be constructed by using differing qualitative methods; fourth, how the consequent mass of information/data can begin to be systematically analysed; and, finally, ways in which researchers can write through this process.

Like the linear read-then-do-then-write model we oppose, our book could be read as set of issues to consider one after the other; the initial section focuses on getting ready for research, the second on constructing ethnographic information and the third on pulling it all together. However, because it acknowledges the inevitable contingencies, twists and turns of research, we prefer to think of it as something that researchers can read early on, but can also carry around and dip into throughout the course of their work. Say, for example, an amazing but unexpected opportunity to do some participant observation research came up halfway through an entirely interview-based research project. Or, say, you notice important and interesting things going on during and after your carefully planned focus group interviews that couldn’t be recorded on tape. Or, say, other people turned up at your carefully planned one-on-one interview and added new dimensions to the topic in which you were interested. Or, say, you felt you had to record conversations during your participant observation research because you couldn’t understand or remember in sufficient detail the nuances in what people were saying. Or, finally, say you happened to take your camera into a field setting and people started to ask you if they could borrow it to take photos of their children. If these possibilities hadn’t been part of your official proposal – and maybe you hadn’t read anything about them because of that – what would you do, especially if you were miles away from the nearest academic library? How would you know when, where and how to combine and do these new strands of research well? Keep to the plan? Make things up as you went along, hoping that you’re doing it OK? Or reread parts of that book you brought with you to try to gain a sense of how to make the best out of your changing circumstances? Any or all of these options might be a good idea.

Section 1

Getting Ready

2 Conceptualising the Subject

I don’t like the distinction between theory and ethnography. There is a saying, attributed to William James, that you can’t pick up rocks in a field without a theory. Ethnography is not simply ‘data collection’; it is rich in implicit theories of culture, society and the individual (Agar 1980: 23).

INTRODUCTION

In the 1970s, humanist geographers began to incorporate ethnographic methods into their research as a reaction to positivist geographers’ general lack of concern with the complexities of different people’s experiences of everyday social and cultural processes (e.g. Ley 1974, 1988; Rowles 1978a; Seamon 1979; Western 1981). They began to draw on sociological and anthropological traditions in which these experiences were not being treated as constellations of measurable variables but, rather, as localised, holistic ‘cultures’ which could be made sense of only through in-depth observation, in situ. Here, readings of inter-war, ‘Chicago School’ ethnographies as well as more philosophical works in phenomenology and symbolic interactionism were particularly important in the rethinking of people’s geographies (Jackson 1983, 1985, 1989; Jackson and Smith 1984). Everyday actions were seen as the result of individuals drawing on the structures of their ‘culture’, rather than these structures being seen as, somehow, existing ‘outside’ the mundane spheres of their everyday action and knowledge. Then, as now, ethnographic research was therefore seen to be of immense theoretical and practical importance (Herbert 2000). Yet, those who appreciated the insights that ethnographies could provide have also criticised them because:

• they have invariably characterised their subjects as having a ‘culture’ which can be unproblematically ‘read’ by an apparently detached researcher,
• these subjects have been treated as pure (that is having one singular cultural identity), transparent, and knowable carriers of uncontested cultural codes,
• their ‘cultures’ have been seen as isolated, pure (that is not incorporating or mixed with parts of others) and homogeneous entities and
• in the face of the still-narrow ‘Scientism’ of mainstream academia, ethnographic researchers have had to fend off criticisms of the ‘mere subjectivity’ of their conclusions.

Our intention in this section, then, is to argue that, in using ethno graphic methods, it is an extremely good idea for the prospective researcher to incorporate social and cultural theories which will allow her/him to take these issues into account from the very start.

THE DETACHED RESEARCHER?

In the history of ethnographic and related research, ‘cultures’ have conventionally been represented as independent both from the means by which the researcher gained access to and (mis)understood them, and from the ways in which they were produced, reproduced and transformed in the histories and day to day struggles of the people under study (Cloke et al. 2004; Duncan 1981). As Barbara Tedlock has written about E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s classic ethnography of The Nuer (1940), for instance, in perhaps typical style he:

… included a seven-page first-person confessional account of the terrible living conditions and informant difficulties he experienced during fieldwork in the Sudan. In sharp contrast, the remainder of the book, written in an omniscient third-person authoritative voice, describes highly abstract, nonempirical entities, such as lineage and age-set systems, and the idealised actions of common denominator people: the Nuer do this, the Nuer do that (1991: 74).

The point here, then, is that such essentialised ‘common denominators’ who all ‘do this’ and all ‘do that’ – whether ‘at home’ or ‘abroad’ – have not simply been discovered in the third person by a detached researcher, but constructed out of an intersubjective research process always saturated with relations of power/knowledge.¹ If mentioned at all, these kinds of relations have usually been either consigned to the introductions, footnotes and appendices of an ‘academic’ text, or written as a separate account under an assumed name or by the researcher’s (usually female) partner and published as a ‘non-academic’ text, as if one could be so easily prized apart from the other (Abu-Lughod 1990; Behar and Gordon 1995; DeVita 1992; Grimshaw 1992; Pratt 1986; Tedlock 1991).

In contrast to this masculinist scientific stance which has spuriously claimed a cool, calm and collected detachment for the heroic fieldworker, other approaches have emerged which critique this for concealing the fact that both researcher and researched are equally positioned, interconnected and involved in the changing social and cultural relations under study (Bondi and Domosh 1992; Bourdieu 2003; Conquergood 1991; Haraway 1988; Katz 1994; Kobayashi 1994; Nast 1994; Oakley 1981; Rose 1993). The impersonal, detached account tends to suggest ‘the researcher as a detached head – the object of Thought, Rationality and Reason – floating from research site to research site, thinking and speaking, while its profane counterpart, the Body, lurks unseen, unruly and uncontrollable in the shadows of the Great Hall of the Academy’ (Spry 2001: 720). In reality, research is an embodied activity that draws in our whole physical person, along with all its inescapable identities. What we bring to the research affects what we get, so as Steve Herbert has put it, ‘ethnographies are as much about the culture of the student as they are of the studied’ (2000: 563). Ethnographies involve relationships developed between people of similar and/or different cultures, classes, genders, sexualities, (dis)abilities, generations, nationalities, skin colours, faiths and/or other identities. What’s important about this is that the ways in which these relationships (can) develop have highly significant effects on the understandings which emerge from them (Cupples 2002; Nagar 1997). And the relationships that matter are not only those between researcher and researched in a traditionally ascribed ‘field’ setting. Others, in the academy (e.g. supervisors, examiners, referees, editors, colleagues, students), in a researcher’s ‘outside’ life (e.g. family members, friends, children, community members) and elsewhere, have just as much, if not more, influence over the ‘findings’ of research (Clifford 1997; England 2001; Keith 1992; Shokeid 1997; Taussig 1992; Twyman et al. 1999). Thus, writing in a detached, scientific, third-person style rarely, if ever, represents anyone’s experience of research (Richardson 2000a). If anything, it tends to mystify this experience. But the textual performance of objectivity can help researchers ‘prove’ to others that they are worthy of their jobs in the Scientific academy and that their projects are worthy of external funding (Bourdieu 1988; Delaney 1988; Mascia-Lees et al. 1989; Pratt 1986). In sum, whether it is acknowledged or not, it is important to understand that research on social relations is made out of social relations which develop within and between the multiple sites of researchers’ ‘expanded fields’ (Clifford 1997; Cook 2001; Katz 1992, 1994).

THE PURE SUBJECT?

As much as the researcher is embedded in these multiple contexts, so are the subjects of her/his research. People experience and act in the world at multiple points, times and places and, strung together throughout their/our life courses, these experiences and actions form different biographies and self-identities. In turn, these identities are gendered, classed and coloured and, therefore, cannot be understood without understanding the histories and impacts of these and other categorisations. Moreover, while various groups have specific ethos and habits which condition what they take for granted, they/we also try both to overcome and to utilise the materials and obstacles encountered on the way. As a result, it is not enough for researchers to identify where people are (both socially and spatially) – they mus...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• SECTION 1 GETTING READY
• SECTION 2 CONSTRUCTING ETHNOGRAPHIC INFORMATION
• SECTION 3 PULLING IT TOGETHER
• Notes
• References
• Index