[Air-l] Re: ethnography

Sat Feb 21 08:08:22 PST 2004

Hi,

I've been out of webshot for a few days, so apologies for responding to
several day old postings on this thread. But I did want to pick up a few
points. Although it seems to have moved into more generic  (and older)
critiques of enthnography, I do think these issues are crucial for
internet research specifically.

Firstly, I agree with much of what Danny wrote, and in particular on
being reflexive - and positively *dealing with* - the power relations
that constitute our projects of knowledge and representation. If I
elided these, as someone else said, it was because I got caught up in
polemics. 

On the other hand, I get worried by phrases like 'the inextricability'
of ethnography from colonial mmissionary project. If we accept that all
research methodologies constitute and are constituted within power
relations, and are therefore political, we also have to accept that all
methodologies are political strategies which have to be rethought in
shifting political contexts, as strategic interventions - in order to
see what will make people's lives better *now*. NO method ensures
political purity or non-complicity in power, none can elide these
relations. You just deal with them differently in different
circumstances. I am not working as an anthropologist under a colonial
regime; I am working as a sociologist under a donor dominated
neo-imperialism of Washington consensus neo-liberalism, which is
dominated by the positivist metrics of audit, indicators, accountancy
and globalized discourses of development and information economy. I have
to add that all this also dominates the thinking of so many of the
Southern intellectuals, academics and activists who are the Ghanaians or
Indians or Trinidadians who do have the power to represent themselves in
international spaces (hence some of my talk about disagreeing with the
people I work with). So obviously I come to exactly the opposite
conclusion from Danny: surveys offer *NO* possibibility for people to
contest knowledge projects, and - even worse - they produce
self-legitimated representations of people, in the form of unchallenged
numbers and recommendations, which become unquestioned tools in global
governance by IMF, World Bank, etc, etc. My own own funder has huge
leverage at the heart of the Ghanaian government through control of a
big block of centrally donated money. I promise you now that they will
not get from me a single number or summary statement from one of their
bloody forms that they can continue to assimilate into their machinery
of intervention. I will give them difficult data based on how different
people think about themselves.

Two days ago, Janet (my Ghanaian colleague) and I were sitting with a
poor urban family doing an unstructured interview that took about two
hours to go through all the ways they communicate with people
(technologies, time, cost, content, etc) plus long conversations about
their household finances, problems etc. At the end they asked us if we
had anything to do with the guys who had come by the day before with a
survey form, who spent the whole time ticking off boxes next to
questions that were standardized and made little sense to them. In the
conversation that followed, it was abundantly clear that *they* were
articulating the difference between a form that demanded they fit into
imposed categories, and a conversation in which we explored their lives
from within their own categories. And that it was *our* job to work out
how to conceptually organise this material afterwards, rather than to
force an organization onto it before we even started. They were
extremely clear, though using a different language, that they felt
misrepresented by the survey guys but that Janet and I were at least
trying to understand. And they were most reassured by the fact that we
were going to be working in Maamobi for at least a year. 

Finally, they asked the question that everyone here asks at the end of
any research encounter - what will all this do for us? What are you
going to do with it all? We explained, as usual, that we don't have any
money to give out ourselves but that so much of the spending on ICTs in
Ghana as elsewhere is done without any detailed understanding of either
how poverty works or how people communicate in these places. Yes, they
said, no one bothers to talk to them.

Internet research has been too dominated by global ideas that can easily
become globalizing, especially when the big development agencies are all
buying in to Castellian-style network society metaphors. These ideas -
like the equally globalizing poverty discourses - are already inscribed
in generic survey and evaluation tools. Is it any wonder that I feel we
should cling to ethnographic approaches which in principle seek to
represent people at least through a dialogue between 'their' terms and
'ours', and which at least has a long history of grappling reflexively
with these issues - even if they are of course insoluble within a world
of power - and not pretending they are not there. 

Don

PS - in personal terms, the point I most relate to, below, is trying not
to confuse my own desire to know with the need to know what will
actually change something. Quite simply, it's all so bloody interesting,
but that's not (or shouldn't be) the point.

_______________________________________________

Don Slater
Reader in Sociology, London School of Economics

Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE
Tel: +44 (020) 7849 4653
Fax: +44 (020) 7955 7405

 http://homepages.gold.ac.uk/slater

______________________________________________

-----Original Message-----
From: Danny Butt [mailto:db at dannybutt.net] 
Sent: 17 February 2004 19:47
To: aoir.org
Subject: Re: [Air-l] Re: ethnography

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).
> 

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