[Air-l] Re: ethnography

[Danny Butt]

Kia ora all

Well, it's nice that a week or so after me telling Art that he was barking
up a particularly unproductive tree on air-l, that Don and Rhiannon come in
and starts talking some sense, and more particularly starting to open up the
discussion of methodology and its political implications.

I'd just like to throw in another angle as my own new media research has
encountered the same kinds of questions, the most important one being "Why
do qualitative research, and who benefits?". The ethnographic mode has been
accepted into the social sciences as a much-needed corrective to the
positivism of both standard qualitative and quantitative research methods,
but the political implications of it also need to be taken seriously. Paul
Willis' "Notes on Method"  in Culture, Media, Language (1980) is a good
summary - it's a dangerous move to pretend the researchers' basic
assumptions can be overthrown by "experience". And the potential for
debilitating neo-colonial effects is (in my experience) much greater in this
ethnographic mode than in sending out some surveys which communities can
more easily ignore if they obviously don't fit.

As much as I enjoy Don's work and value it's importance for Internet
Studies, I also see many situations where well-intentioned ethnographic work
causes grief for both the community of study and the researcher. It's worth
holding in mind a) the inextricability of the ethnographic mode with the
colonial missionary project and b) the likelihood of unintended consequences
over intended ones, and the very different positions of power which are held
in the ethnographic encounter. Linda Tuhiwai Smith's "Decolonizing
Methodologies" takes up the argument forcefully and should be required
reading for anyone considering this kind of work.

I'm not writing off ethnography per se, as I think it is incredibly
important for researchers to put ourselves into situations outside dominant
cultural frameworks. It makes for less problematic assumptions and better
understanding (as Don points out). But the bottom line for me is that if the
goal is to improve the world, and not just ourselves, we need to find a way
of negotiating between the needs and desires of those under study and our
own desires for knowledge - and the power imbalances between these. In some
cases there's alignment between those two desires, which makes things easier
- both 'me' and the 'others/subjects' are working toward explicitly the same
thing. Like Don, there are also situations where I think the 'others' are
wrong, but I'd add an important consideration to the idea that we can just
"tell each other" about the wrongness: the bottom line is that Don comes and
talks to us about Ghanaians without them necessarily being present. The
effects of the circulation of this knowledge in western academia (and
related appendages e.g. into development policy), away from explicit
dialogue with the research subjects, can have a far greater impact on the
subjects' community than their dialogue without us present can have on us.
No first world ethnographer ever lost their job for their informants not
being happy with how they are represented, but there are plenty of examples
of such impacts (and worse) happening in researched communities due to
research publications (e.g. in this part of the world, Cook's mapping
practices).

My simple point is this:  the "benefits" of research projects to those under
study (or, in too many less-reflexive cases, to "the world") are routinely
treated as self-evident by researchers, yet the experience of those being
researched is more often a betrayal of trust, loss of control, and
unintended consequences. Research is a powerful way of telling stories, and
the key issue from my POV in methodological concerns is not "which method"
but "how are the power relationships here being circulated through my
methodological choices?".

x.d 

-- 
http://www.dannybutt.net


> Slater,D wrote on 12/2/04 12:54 AM:
> 
>> It might get boring to people to keep banging on about ethnography, but
>> it seems to me the only way of subsuming both concepts and numbers
>> within a meaningful engagement with the concrete diversity of social
>> constructions of technology and people.


Slater,D wrote on 16/2/04 7:40 AM:

> That's a problem to get our teeth into. My own feeling is that we've got
> false alternatives here: it's not a matter of either imposing northern
> theory on 'them' or else taking their accounts as 'truth'. I tend to
> think of ethnography as dialogic (or even dialectical) - as in Gadamer's
> 'fusion of horizons'. I've never been able to articulate it very well,
> but as Rhiannon says, we as researchers are always part of the frame,
> trying to understand the people we are talking with, and hoping to make
> that understanding mnore and more sensitive and complete, but we never
> escape ourselves, nor should we. At best, the ethnographic encounter -
> like any really intense conversation - shakes us up and changes us (and
> in some cases, 'them' too). You *respond* to experiences, you don't
> accept them at face value. (though I'll confess that I've often found my
> biggest problem is indeed getting overenthusiastic about the people I
> study)
> I'm also quite comfortable to disagree with the people I research, or
> think they are wrong, or that they are doing something other than what
> they think they are doing. After all ethnography is not interviews. It
> cannot be ethnography until what people say and what they do, and the
> tensions between the two, are brought within the same frame (not to
> prove them liars or deluded, but to flesh out *practice* in toto).
> Moreover, I've always felt it was a mark of deeper respect for people to
> believe that everyone is intelligent and autonomous enough to be argued
> with, and to believe that they can be wrong! I hope they treat me that
> way too. 
> 
> Just one other thought along these lines - my last few projects have all
> involved working with local researchers. Their job is very difficult as
> they are both part of the 'community' and at the same distanced (often
> by class and education, but mainly by the stance required by the
> research). Ethnographyt is definitely a dialectic of closeness and
> distance, and while I am worried by my distance, they are actually
> plagued by their closeness. I've come out of this feeling that there is
> a lot to be said about the older anthropology of strangers coming to
> learn a culture (given plenty of safeguards around issues of power,
> etc). 
>