The Many Faces of Ethnography: A Brief Overview

1. What is ethnography? Can Ethnography: What is it, and Why do it?? Martyn Hammersley The Open University, UK [Personal website: http://martynhammersley.wordpress.com/] Seminar School of Applied Social Studies/School of Education University College, Cork, November 2018

2. A very brief history Ethnography emerged within Western social and cultural anthropology in the early twentieth century: influenced especially by Franz Boas and Bronislaw Malinowski. The focus was to document ‘other’ cultures or societies. Later in the 20th century, ethnography spread outside of anthropology to other social science fields, and now takes a variety of forms. It has been shaped by a range of ideas about the social world; how to understand that world; and what the aim and product of research should be; as well as by new technologies.

3. The many types of ethnography autoethnography, blitzkrieg ethnography, duoethnography, citizen ethnography, cognitive ethnography, critical ethnography, digital ethnography, educational ethnography, ethnomethodological ethnography, feminist ethnography, focused ethnography, functionalist ethnography, global ethnography, hypermedia ethnography, insider ethnography, institutional ethnography, interactionist ethnography, interpretive ethnography, linguistic ethnography, longitudinal ethnography, Marxist ethnography, micro-ethnography, multi-sited ethnography, narrative ethnography, performance ethnography, postmodern ethnography, public ethnography, race ethnography, rapid ethnography, relational ethnography, rural ethnography, slow ethnography, street ethnography, stunt ethnography, team ethnography, urban ethnography, virtual ethnography, visual ethnography, etc.

4. Here’s another one I just discovered: ‘Hearsay ethnography: Conversational journals as a method for studying culture in action’ Susan Cotts Watkins and Ann Swidler Poetics 37 (2009) 162–184

5. A critical view ‘The term [‘ethnography’] has been made useless by promiscuous overuse. I would recommend that it be forbidden, or at least voluntarily given up, if I thought that would do any good.’ (Howard S. Becker Evidence, University of Chicago Press, 2017:44)

6. Reasons for doing ethnography • A desire to know what people do in practice, and what they really believe(rather than what they say they do, or say they believe, on questionnaires, in formal interviews, or in public documents). • A concern to understand the contextual meanings that inform people’s conduct: this requires that one know about their ordinary lives. • A commitment to discover how people’s lives are affected by the situations they face. • A focus on how attitudes and actions unfold over time, and how these may vary across contexts; a concern with the complex paths through which outcomes arise.

7. Key features of ethnography as a research practice • Relatively long term data collection process • Carried out in naturally occurring settings • Relies on participant observation, or personal engagement more generally. • Can employ other types of data as well as that from observation: experiential; interviews (informal and perhaps also formal); documents (elicited and/or already available); material artefacts • Observational and interview data are recorded in the form of fieldnotes and/or through electronic recording (audio or audio-visual).

8. An ethnographic sensibility? • Aside from specific methods, ethnography is a way of looking, listening, and gaining understanding: a particular kind of sensibility is required • One element of this is being prepared to ‘learn other cultures’: this involves suspending one’s own assumptions and evaluations, where necessary • It requires us to resist the temptation immediately to reduce what is experienced to the categories of a theory or a discipline • In the case of scenes that are familiar to us, it requires initially trying to approach what one sees and hears almost as if one were a Martian!

9. Internal tensions within the ethnographic sensibility • Inside vs outside: while it is important to ‘learn the culture’ one must also view the familiar as strange • Particular vs general: ethnographers study the local but also try to ‘see the whole picture’, in other words understand the wider context • Process vs structure: ethnographers focus on the fluidity and contingency of events, but must also identify patterns, structures or forms • Discovery vs construction: The aim is to document social life, but ethnographers cannot avoid constructing their accounts

10. ideas shaping ethnography There is no single ethnographic worldview: • Recurrent waves of philosophical and political ideas have influenced ethnography. These include: positivism, functionalism, psychoanalysis, pragmatism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, Marxism, feminism, post-colonialism, structuralism and post-structuralism, and ‘new materialisms’. • These have exacerbated the tensions within the ethnographic sensibility, producing diverging forms, and generating disputes among ethnographers; as well as among qualitative researchers more generally.

11. Political challenges • Anthropology’s links with colonialism in the past led to the accusation that its findings reflect Western culture and that it serves Western neo-imperialism. • Similar political critiques, this time concerning social-class as well as ethnic divisions, emerged in relation to ethnographic work carried out within the West, and in other disciplines than anthropology; for instance one criticism was that ethnography simply documents and thereby reproduces ‘society as it is’. • In addition, feminists claimed that, in both focus and analysis, social-science accounts reflect and serve male dominance. There were also questions about ethnographic bias in relation to sexual orientation and disability. • In part the issue is who does the research, but also how it is done, and for what purpose.

12. The problem of ‘representation’ • One of the areas where both political and philosophical challenges have impacted most strongly has been on questions of writing: how should ethnographers ‘write up’ their observations and analyses? Is an ‘objective’ account possible? If so, how? • The significance of the fact that ethnographers produce representations of other people and their lives, drawing on rhetorical devices, has been emphasised. • This raises political, ethical, and philosophical questions – even about whether it is possible or desirable to ‘represent’ others.

13. Philosophical/political divergences • Micro or macro? Local or global (or glocal)? • Theory-driven or Data-driven? • Concerned with ‘giving voice’ to people versus documenting their behaviour? • Realist or constructionist? Discovering facts or constructing fictions? • Science-based versus Arts-based? • Appreciative/interpretive versus critical or ‘public’? • Detached or activist? • Researcher-controlled versus participatory?

14. The case of ‘critical’ ethnography • ‘Critical’ = evaluating the social phenomena being studied, usually from a Leftist political perspective • The term arose from the ‘critical theory’ of Frankfurt Marxism in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, but also drew on the ideas of other Marxists, notably Gramsci. • Later (especially post-1989), ‘critical research’ came to be a label for research drawing on many different strands of ‘oppositional’ thinking, from feminism to disability activism. • There are fundamental tensions between what I outlined as the ethnographic sensibility and a ‘critical’ orientation, but there are many people who promote the practice of critical ethnography in one form or another.

15. ‘Critical’ tensions The tensions within ‘critical’ ethnography include the following: • Between an ethnographic commitment to description and a ‘critical’ concern with evaluation. • Between an ethnographic concern with the local and the ‘critical’ commitment to understanding ‘the’ wider context • Between the inductive orientation of ethnography and ‘critical’ researchers’ reliance on a prior theory about social forces and structures. • Between the ethnographic commitment to understanding people’s perspectives in their own terms and ‘critical’ analysis focusing on the role of myth and ideology.

16. New technology: challenges and opportunities From all-encompassing locality to the ‘global village’. A series of historical changes, most notably: • From anthropologists studying non-literate to studying literate societies • Information and communication technologies: mobile audio- and video-recording and communication devices expand the realm of data production and analysis; virtual social interaction provides new research sites and new sources of data; and both of these bring new possibilities for the presentation and preservation of research findings and data. There are, of course, ethical issues associated with these developments

17. Variations in ethnographic practice • Offline or online? • Amount of time spent in the field (how long and how intensive)? • Single site versus multi-site? • Participant observation, documents, and/or interviewing.? Fieldnotes, audio- and video-recording, digital photography, elicited materials? • Variation in role of the participant observer (covert/overt participation; established role or new one?; the nature of the researcher’s role) Variation in practice is produced by differences in type of setting and/or in people studied as well as differences in philosophical or political orientation.

18. External Threats to ethnographic work • A current emphasis on ‘big data’, randomised controlled trials, and mixed methods. • Demands for accountability, engagement, ‘impact’, ‘efficient’ data collection and analysis, etc. • Working conditions in universities: temporary contracts, ‘busyness’, etc. • Increased problems in gaining access to settings. • Forms of ethical regulation that are incompatible with ethnography, or at least make it very difficult.

19. Conclusion • Ethnography is not a single method or a single approach: it is perhaps best thought of as a family of approaches • Some differences reflect variations in the phenomena being investigated • But ethnography, like qualitative research generally, is also the site for fundamental disagreements about the nature of the social world, how it can be understood, and what form social research should take • Some of these disputes may be resolvable through ethnographic work itself, but others reflect differences in basic commitments. It is difficult to know how these could be resolved. If they cannot be resolved, does this matter?

20. Further information about the issues discussed here can be found in the following: (With Paul Atkinson) (2007) Ethnography: Principles in Practice, London, Routledge, new edition coming out next year. Reading Ethnographic Research, London, Longman, 1990; second edition 1997. What is Qualitative Research?, London, Bloomsbury, 2012. ‘Ethnography: problems and prospects’, Ethnography and Education, 1, 1, 2006, pp3-14 ‘What is ethnography? Can it survive? Should it survive?’, Ethnography and Education, 13, 1, pp. 1-17, 2018. For a selective bibliography on ethnography, see under ‘Other Resources’ at https://martynhammersley.wordpress.com/teaching-material/ These slides can also be found there as a pdf.