Ethnography is both a methodology and a product. It offers explanations in terms of multiple voices, and it highlights views not often publicized. Basically, it tries to answer the question, What is it like to be a member of this culture and a speaker of this language?
Ethnography is a broad, interdisciplinary methodology. Yet, despite its all-comers eclecticism, there are some basic elements that hold true of all ethnographic inquiry, as suggested by Martyn Hammersly and Paul Atkinson (1986). It is based on participant observation. It denies even the possibility of being the so-called fly on the wall that is privy to everything that happens and which enables one to make “valid” judgments about its meaning. Ethnographers admit that the observer’s paradox is real (Labov 1972, especially chapter eight). This paradox, also known as the thermometer effect, constantly badgers the analyst. If you want to know the temperature of a glass of water, you stick a thermometer in the water and wait for a reading. But the thermometer being in the water affects the temperature, and the reading is therefore suspect. So the presence of an anthropologist affects the context such that what she or he has to say about it is itself suspect. We basically want to observe what the people are like when they are not being observed. If that sounds like an impossibility, you get the picture.
The solution to this conundrum is not to try to extract oneself from the situation, to “rise above it,” or to hide a tape recorder or video camera under one’s sombrero (which, by the way, is unacceptable to any reputable university social science department). Rather, effective analysts participate (in varying degrees) in the very events that they describe. The goal is to understand the emic categories of the people being studied. With this in mind, ethnography is long-term. One can’t simply ask people, “So, what are your emic categories?” These are uncovered over many months and years of inquiry—both formal and informal—and observation. Ethnography assumes that research is done in the native language as much as possible, and that it is based on firsthand observation. In addition, the search for emic categories makes those studied the experts, since they know what things mean, and we don’t. So an ethnographer’s role is one of a learner, and she learns naturalistically, that is, in social context via relationships with native speakers—they who are the holders of the emic categories and are the ultimate goal of the research. This characteristic of the researcher-as-participant is what ethnographers mean when they say that they themselves are the research instrument. Members of the group being studied answer questions for the ethnographer; they give advice, teach, and learn skills, share meals, and help solve problems in ways that include the researcher in the local life of the group. In such a context, ethnographic researchers plumb their own thoughts and responses to how they are included (or not) in the local scene and they study the language and practices of inclusion and exclusion. In this way, ethnography is reactive and iterative. Questions are never fully answered. Rather, more and more data are brought to bear on how an issue is to be understood in different ways under different circumstances. In this way, researchers can write not about some objectified/sterile sense of what behaviors are exhibited by group members, but they can talk of life in context from the point of view of the cultural insider. That is our goal.
Ethnography is holistic. Ethnographers start with some cultural detail—for example, a cockfight (Geertz 1973:412–453) or a short proverb (Becker 1996:142–159)—and begin to explore it. In the exploration, more and more context is brought to bear upon its interpretation. Questions are asked. Contrasts are sought. Both Geertz and Becker expand the scope of their original topics to include much larger issues of local life, language and thought, Geertz beginning with culture, Becker beginning with language. And yet both end up in a similar place, a thickly described slice of local life with adequate perspective to show us how that slice fits into the larger life of the group.14
The product of effective participant observation is thick description (Geertz 1973), where a researcher looks first at what seems to be going on, at which point he or she begins to add layers of further description by discussing language use, linguistic and cultural categories, local interpretations of events, and further relevant detail. It is this multi-layering that makes the description “thick.” This contrasts with “thin” description which merely states the physical facts, the etic layer with no interpetation. Thick description is reflective as well as recursive, going back over details again and again, and thinking about them from different perspectives and answering new and further research questions until all emic moisture is wrung out of both real-time observation and further discussion with actual participants. This emic wringing Geertz calls “interpretive anthropology,” where the explication of worldview is plumbed, along with how this worldview is realized in linguistic and cultural practice.
Thick description not only extracts the emic from the etic (or the meaningful from the mundane), but it also explains the use of language in culturally accepted and socially expected ways. In essence, thick description is an amalgam of how both cultural insiders and participant observers view a social situation and its relevant context, and it is the technique I use to plumb the idea of centeredness as a cultural theme. What makes Geertz particularly appropriate here is his integration of linguistic and cultural data encompassing two points of view. Both are important. The first has to do with what the data themselves show, the story that Geertz sees. The second point of view emerges from Geertz’s own language and culture, who he is as a person and not just as a scholar. This helps him to relate closely with his audience, and they see the “foreign” story through his eyes, whereby it loses much of its foreignness. This would not be possible if Geertz were to stick with just one side of the story. For example, in his article on Balinese cockfights (1973:412–451) Geertz shows that an ethnographer must look at what he calls the microscopic details of a single event (the etic layer), while also addressing the broader issues of how those details fit into the larger picture of cultural/linguistic life by comparing them with others in contrastive life situations and texts. It is this layering of analysis that is the essence of thick description, which includes ethnolinguistic techniques for probing semantic categories, seeking information and asking questions around topics like kinship, work, religion, or, as in the present case, centeredness and balance.
Geertz’s emic study gives us a powerful ethnographic model to emulate. For Geertz, ethnographic participant observation is different from a simple parade of anecdotes in that it is purposeful, integrated, holistic, contextualized, and centered not only on the researcher’s rendition of what is happening, but on local analysis as well. The ethnographic report based on participant observation is not merely the retelling of anecdotes. Anecdotes are flat—told from a single point of view. They are also streamlined—trying to make a single point. An ethnographer, rather, tells the story from many angles—her own, both personally and professionally, as well as from that of the speakers/doers themselves. The ethnographic story is layered and nuanced.
One’s point of view is not readily reducible to proofs and numbers. In the same way, any connection between language and culture is not so much something subject to measurement as it is to interpretation. Cultural studies don’t enable us necessarily to predict cultural phenomena, but rather to understand them. A Geertzian interpretation, as mentioned above, has both etic (the description) and emic (the meaning) components.
As mentioned earlier, the researcher supports his or her construal of events by triangulation, where generalizations are pursued across the variety of observations, which may or may not seem to be related on the surface, but at a deeper level may be instantiations of the same theme. My goal in this study is in one sense, as Hymes (1966:117) says, to seek not proof, but pattern. But beyond Hymes, we are seeking local interpretation of this pattern. Pattern alone is not enough. Where language and culture come together is in the minds of native speakers. So it is this emic perspective—local meaning—that I’m seeking in this study. How is centeredness, as realized in cultural and grammatical theme, conceived and reflected in talk among the Mam themselves?
What I try to do then, as an ethnographer, is attempt to live the life of a Maya-Mam—at least to a limited degree. What I hope to discover is whether what ends up in my own head and behavior as I endeavor to live that life, corresponds to the way that the Mam themselves think and act.