The Interview

An Ethnographic Approach

Jonathan Skinner, Jonathan Skinner

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000181616
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Sciences sociales
• Categoría: Anthropologie

What are new interview methods and practices in our new 'interview society' and how do they relate to traditional social science research? This volume interrogates the interview as understood, used - and under-used - by anthropologists. It puts the interview itself in the hotseat by exploring the nature of the interview, interview techniques, and illustrative cases of interview use.What is a successful and representative interview? How are interviews best transcribed and integrated into our writing? Is interview knowledge production safe, ethical and representative? And how are interviews used by anthropologists in their ethnographic practice?This important volume leads the reader from an initial scrutiny of the interview to interview techniques and illustrative case studies. It is experimental, innovative, and covers in detail matters such as awkwardness, silence and censorship in interviews that do not feature in general interview textbooks. It will appeal to social scientists engaged in qualitative research methods in general, and anthropology and sociology students using interviews in their research and writing in particular.

Part III

Interview Cases

—7—

Instances of Inspiration: Interviewing Dancers and Writers

Helena Wulff

Last week my table turned, temporarily. Instead of conducting an interview for my research, I was interviewed for a research project. The interviewer, a young American psychology student, was doing a master’s degree at the London School of Economics on work–life balance among women in academia. Sweden, with its extensive policy and laws on equality, is a useful case in point. The interview accentuated for me, however, what we as anthropologists tend to neglect, at least we did before the conference resulting in this volume: the interviewee’s point of view. What exactly does the interviewee get out of being interviewed? I was very busy as usual and on the way to the interview, to be honest, slightly bored with the prospect of having to reply to fairly routine questions I did not think would catch my imagination. But it became a really nice encounter over an iPod in my office at Stockholm University, not least as it left me with one or two new insights about my own life and work. My interviewer managed to establish rapport by saying ‘I couldn’t do this without you’, even though I am far from the only woman academic in Sweden. Still, I took her point and agreed to join her inside a Batesonian ‘This is interview’ frame.¹

As society changes, so does anthropology. In order to capture contemporary issues, new research techniques are required in addition to traditional participant observation (cf. Melhuus et al. 2010; Faubion and Marcus 2009; Hannerz 2003; Wulff 2002). Interviews are not a new technique, but with increasing diversity in social life as well as new recording devices and computer programs for categorizing interview data, interviewing has developed into an increasingly sophisticated and multifaceted research technique. Interviewing is now a core method in contemporary anthropology which impacts knowledge production in the discipline.

In this chapter, I am interested in the anthropological interview as an instance of inspiration when the interviewer and the interviewee trigger each other into an exchange of escalating states of creativity beneficial for the interviewer’s research process as well as for the interviewee in the form of potential new personal or professional insights. When it works, this can be seen as a synergy situation, as the two people involved would not have reached these particular insights independently. Featuring interview cases from extensive ethnographic research on dancers and writers, this chapter is intended to bring out connections between participant observation and interviews and also to discuss the interviewer’s demeanour and design of questionnaires.

Dancers and writers differ when it comes to verbal eloquence and how they talk about their work in interviews. Dancers are trained to talk with their bodies while writers are trained to talk with words, when it comes to speaking about their work as well as doing the actual writing. Both dancers and writers contribute to a contemporary interview society (Atkinson and Silverman 1997; Gubrium and Holstein 2002), as they are frequently interviewed by journalists for newspaper and magazine features and promotional articles, as well as for documentary films, television and radio programmes on the arts. It happens that dancers are interviewed live at dance festivals in front of an audience, while writers appear regularly as interviewees at literary festivals and conferences. Such interviews are often streamed live on the Internet and later broadcast on YouTube. All this interviewing in media means that especially famous writers and dancers acquire a polite, polished attitude to interviewers that the anthropologist has to break through in her search of backstage life in dance studios and writers’ workrooms.

What then is inspiration? The concept of inspiration has traditionally been associated with artistry, and as Brogan (1994: 15–16) describes these impulses that lead to creativity: ‘Every poet recognizes that during poetic composition material emerges—words, images, figures, rhythms—from sources which lie beyond the pale of consciousness.’ Looking back in history, he goes on to talk about the widespread belief that these sources were divine. In the West in classical times, there was also the idea of the muse who would inspire poets. Brogan points to ‘the claim that when the god does take possession, the poet enters a state of transcendental ecstasy or frenzy, a “poetic madness” or furor poeticus.’ But Brogan is eager to bring up a long-standing awareness that inspiration does not come without practice. This highlights ‘the importance of craft’ or ‘the application of effort and skill in the acquisition of technique—practiced, learned, remembered, repeated.’² This description parallels scholarly work in general, but above all it captures the process of anthropological interviewing where inspiration can only spring up if the interviewer has been trained, has practised and learnt the skill of interviewing. And if anthropological interviewers and interviewees do not quite get into a transcendental ecstasy, when inspiration strikes, and the interview lifts, ‘composition material emerges—words, images, figures, rhythms—from sources which lie beyond the pale of consciousness’ and can still appear.

Reaching for Rapport

The crucial point here is that in anthropological interviews, inspiration is relational and a possibility after a ‘mutual tuning in’ (Schutz 1964: 161) has been taking place between the interviewer and the interviewee. Both parties have to set their mind on this shared task. Still, we as interviewers are in charge and responsible for the subsequent rapport. The fact that rapport in anthropological interview situations can take many forms is exempli ed in Skinner’s article on an interview he did with a woman salsa dancer with whom he also danced (2010: 114). They established a ‘relaxed rapport’, but when Skinner asked the woman to comment on his article the year after, she admitted having been trained in counselling technique which resembled Skinner’s social science interview training. Skinner (2010: 124) then realized that: ‘Before, after—and during the interview, we had been literally dancing around each other.’

Having conducted interviews in six anthropological studies between 1981 and the present,³ I know that occasionally the rapport between interviewer and interviewee never happens; when rapport happens, it tends to de ne the interview early on, but it may come later after the interviewer has tried and failed with a number of strategies to reach the interviewee. Interviewing a prima ballerina in Stockholm, I did not get anywhere until I took to one aspect of a counselling technique I had learnt informally from a psychologist friend. Conducting counselling sessions, my friend would reveal a sensitive matter about herself which related to the issue troubling the patient. This would make the patient realize that she or he was not the only one dealing with a situation like that, and so a sense of community and trust would begin to develop. The Stockholm ballerina did not make any efforts to hide that she was blasé, and kept replying without enthusiasm to my questions. As it was something of a scoop to get to do an interview with this prominent ballerina, and thus an important opportunity for my study, it had to be a good, useful interview. While posing my questions, I was trying very hard to think of how to reach her, searching for some common ground. It was when I shared with her what I had learnt about the stage fright university lecturers with large classes can have that she opened up. Inspired by my confession, she started con ding in me about her experiences of vulnerability on stage. Suddenly, we were close, and she talked at great length about how she often felt exposed on stage as ‘the audience, they can see what you have inside’. In dancing leading dramatic roles, dancers use their ‘emotional memory’ (cf. Stanislavsky 1967: 55) of strong feelings such as passion, desire, fear, sadness and grief. The ballerina kept her open and warm approach during the rest of the interview when we moved into questions on other topics.

Inspiration is linked not only to creativity, but also to notions of ow and improvisation as it can initiate both types of situations. Writing about creativity and the difficulty of defining this concept, Ingold and Hallam contrast

two notions of creativity that can be discerned in early twentieth-century philosophical works. It may be understood, on one hand, as the production of novelty through the recombination of already extant elements, or on the other, as process of growth, becoming and change. The former view posits the world as an assemblage of discrete parts; the latter as a continuous movement or ow. (2007: 16)

Ingold and Hallam acknowledge the role of collaboration in creativity and argue that ‘the capacity for creative improvisation is exercised by individuals against the conventions of culture and society. Improvisation and creativity, we contend, are intrinsic to the very processes of social and cultural life’ (2007: 19). So is improvisation. Ingold and Hallam appreciate Edward Bruner’s suggestion of ‘the importance of rules and codes’ and that ‘we will never understand how culture works, or how it changes, unless we take into account the human capacity for improvisation and creativity’ (1993: 26). In other words, people improvise because rules cannot cover every contingency. Just like in musical improvisation, such as jazz (Berliner 1994), and choreographic improvisation (Wulff 1998), improvisation in life—and in interviewing—consists of the slightly changed repetition of an already existing element put into new combinations (see also Cerwonka and Malkki 2007).

So inspiration, creativity and improvisation all lead to the formation of something new out of existing parts, but the important difference between inspiration on one hand and creativity and improvisation on the other, I would argue, is that inspiration is the initial state that can turn into a process of creativity which might include new moments of improvisation. So inspiration can be the start of what John Blacking (1977) famously referred to as transcendental states or peak experiences. During such moments we enter into ‘flow’ in Csikszentmihalyi’s (1992) terminology, when a task—that of an artist, scholar, any craftsman—suddenly becomes effortless as it reaches into new territories.

‘If I Could Tell You ...’

‘If I could tell you what it means, I wouldn’t have to dance it’, Isadora Duncan is reputed to have said (Middleton 1988: 165). Dance is, of course, mostly nonverbal⁴ and has the potential to create and convey circumstances, moods and form that cannot be expressed in the same way, or at all, through words, orally or textually (Blacking 1988; Wulff 2001, 2008b: 75). This is why dancers are trained to talk with their bodies. In the ballet and dance world, this is referred to as ‘talking with your feet’; in Ireland, traditional dance is sometimes described in terms of the poetic ‘song of feet’ (Wulff 2007: 70). During interviews I did with dancers in my study of the transnational ballet world it often happened that the dancer would get up from the table and start illustrating a point he or she was making through a step or a combination of steps. It was also more common than not that the dancer I interviewed would move around while sitting down, flapping arms and lifting legs under the table. Once a male principal dancer I was interviewing over a breakfast table in a hotel on a tour got so excited over a role in a performance we were discussing that he overturned the table, sending coffee cups and croissants ying around the room, to the amusement of everyone present.

My study of career and culture in the transnational ballet world was conducted between 1993 and 1995 with four major ballet companies: the Royal Swedish Ballet in Stockholm, the Royal Ballet in London, the American Ballet Theatre in New York and the contemporary ballet company Ballett Frankfurt in Frankfurt-am-Main (Wulff 1998, 2008a,b). The methodological repertoire included primarily participant observation complemented with interviews and to some extent watching videos used for documentation and promotion in the ballet world. I did participant observation of everyday work: training, rehearsal and performances. In addition, I conducted almost 120 interviews with dancers, choreographers, coaches, directors, musicians, conductors, critics and other ballet people working in the theatres or belonging to fan followings. Interviewing ballet dancers was a specific situation for me, different from interviewing teenaged girls, teachers and youth workers in South London, young Swedes in New York or traditional dancers or writers in Ireland. It was my experience of having grown up in the ballet world that made this difference. I engaged in intense ballet training for fteen years until I unexpectedly had to stop in my late teens because of an injury. The fact that I went to the same ballet school as some of my interviewees, used to dance with them and thus grew up with them is an unusual aspect of anthropological research. We had a shared past, which meant that I was able to contextualize people and events from their childhood and youth that they talked about in the interviews. So there we were, me asking questions and a dancer responding in an attentive yet flexible tone. Contrary to most other interviews I have conducted, I could sense the dancers’ trust and how they reach out for me. There was a give and take and exchange just like in dancing. They were trained in partnering.

Writing about the interview Skinner did with the woman salsa dancer, he notes that it is ‘a learning case study’ and ‘above all, one based around muscle and cerebral memories’ for both of them (2010: 11). When I was interviewing ballet dancers, many of them, again, related to me as if we were dancing a duet together. For me, Bourdieu’s (1977) body hexis was activated, and I was reminded of my bodily memory of having danced classical ballet. It is important that the dancers were aware of this as dancers see themselves as different from other people, often misunderstood. My dancing past made them trust me and accept me as a part of their setting.

Working with Words

My ongoing study of the social world of contemporary fiction writers in Ireland such as John Banville, Colm Tóibín and Anne Enright focusses on work practice, prestige and career patterns, the private versus the public and the local versus the global in a postcolonial age (Wulff 2008c, 2009). I do participant observation at writers’ festivals and retreats, literary conferences, book launches, prize ceremonies and creative writing workshops. I also meet the writers on informal occasions. I do in-depth interviews with them and I read their work. Important, I connect participant observation and interviews: a piece of information I first get through participant observation, I then check during the interview, and vice versa; something I learn in an interview, I look for during participant observation in order to confirm and contextualize it.

Even though writers work with words they are not necessarily easier to interview than dancers. In a seminar I gave at Stockholm University on my research on Irish writers at Stockholm University, a colleague asked: ‘What has been the hardest part of your research this fa...