Just as when defining what is life, sometimes it is best to focus on characteristics rather that attempting a coherent definition. Ethnography as a methodology involves conducting fieldwork research with living human groups, in everyday settings, rather than in labs or controlled experiments (calling this “natural” settings is problematic). Given the complexity of our human lives, ethnographers focus on a particular topic, and generate specific research questions to guide their focus during fieldwork, but trying to take in, holistically, all the rest. The main method of fieldwork is participant-observation, acquiring original knowledge from interactions with particular people, in specific places, to produce primary sources by documenting (through fieldnotes and audiovisual recordings) ordinary behavior, communication, practices, artifacts, and gathering narratives, oral histories, informal interviews, elicitation of vernacular knowledge, questionnaires, among other qualitative instruments. As any other research involving interactions among humans, the ethnographic fieldwork is a process that requires ethical training and compliance. The central ethical and legal mandate, as it is supposed to be in medicine, is first “doing no harm,” to interact in respectful and patient ways, regardless of what is going on.
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Through ethnographic fieldwork research, we try to understand the individual and group experiences in their own cultural specificity and simultaneously in the shared grounds of our humanity; how we do, perceive-think, speak-communicate, and create the marvelous and weird things we do as well as the tensions, conflicts and negotiations that ensue. Yet no social group is homogeneous, and no individual human is generic; hence, ethnographers need to document behaviors and events from culturally specific points of view, angles or perspectives of particular people, in particular geographic places at particular space-times, and in specific local-global relations. As ethnographers we are aware that many points of view or perspectives [henceforth POVs] are needed for a wider vision of the human condition, so generalizations from our data is not the main aim, that is why the sampling is valid even if it focuses on a small group, one family or even one single individual (as Ruth Behar has done). Like a close-up photo, we narrow the human unity to get a more depth of understanding of differences, to feel-hear-see-touch-taste what it means for the participants in our studies to be human (this is what we call the “emic” or inside POV). We also do more classical bibliographic and archival research about our project’s community and field-site, to locate them in historical context and current statistical data, and to find out about the current state of academic understanding about the particular topic of our research project. This goal of this bibliography is to create an “etic” understanding from the “outside” POV of the researcher, and to inform the analysis and interpretation of the field data.
Of course, this kind of research, as any other qualitative methodology, is not clear cut, nor is a smooth going somewhere and “gathering data.” As will become evident in further discussions below, these clear-cut steps and tasks (as practiced mostly before the 1980s) are still one of the major problematics of ethnographic research, that have driven critiques, transformations and refinements of this tool from within and outside anthropology (and these limitations is what auto-ethnography puts, so powerfully, in evidence). More simply put, ethnographers gather stories in the context where they occur. We listen, ask (and respond if prompted), observe and participate in what is going on. Ideally, we are supposed to be fully present, engaged in the measure that collaborators in our studies allow us to participate and to share their worlds. Ideally also, this process happens in a non-judgmental space of acceptance and appreciation of differences, aware of our own ethnocentrism, this is, consciously examining the influences of our own cultural filters. Through fieldwork many challenges and micro-political negotiations occur; yet, this method also renders marvelous mutual insights and discoveries. In this sense, ethnography is a space of intercultural and interpersonal encounters and exchanges, as complex, contingent and “real” as our everyday interactions. To me, these experiential aspects of our human interactions are what makes ethnography a needed tool for qualitative research.
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To conduct ethnographic research and to understand what ethnography is, we need to address the term culture. Widely varied definitions of culture have been proposed, and their implications have been debated since the 19th century (in their 1952 book, anthropologists Kroeber and Kluckhohn gathered more than 200!), and the problematics of its essentialized usage has been questioned and denounced (see Stocking 1996). The concept of “culture,” so central in US anthropology, was also transformed during the 1980s “crisis” within the discipline; culture went from a concrete “reality” out there, that can be easily identified as an avocado in a tree (bounded “culture areas” or studying “a culture,” for example) to an abstract concept in its adjective form (“cultural” practices), this is the version that most ethnographers use commonly today. The following is an idiosyncratic, yet useful metaphor for “culture”: “… But it was fitting me like a tight chemise. I couldn’t see it for wearing it. It was only when I was off in college, away from my native surroundings that I could see myself like somebody else and stand off and look at my garment. Then I had to have the spy-glass of Anthropology to look through that.” It was subtly proposed by a US Black woman anthropologist, Zora N. Hurston, in her book Mules and Men (1935). Such subtlety was maybe needed, not to be accused of theorizing or interpreting her data, which was not well seen in ethnographic works of the 1930s, and much less to be taken seriously from a black woman in the segregated and sexist society of that time. This indirect theorization is useful and revealing of how this scholar was already using a “critical” conception of “culture,” bounded more by historical and political conditions than by purely geographical and natural “culture area.” Hurston was also writing from an auto-ethnographic perspective, not only looking at her Black community in Florida as an objective detached observer.
Chang’s book about Autoethnography as Method (2008) includes a wonderful chapter called “The Web of Culture,” which my students reported to be useful to grasp this slippery, yet productive concept of culture. The author asks, early on in the chapter, provocative philosophical questions, such as “where is culture located?” or is it individual or collective? Using a “web” metaphor, she manages to describe the many matrixes and interconnections of the “cultural” in our human experience. She also clarifies that individuals are social agents, yet interdependent of others as social species and shaped by the context of their survival. Humans are not puppets of culture, but rather imaginative beings that have created remarkable complexities, beauty and terrors throughout our history. In particular, I appreciate how Chang makes emphasis on migration and cultural change, to understand social transformations across generations, as this is also a foundational phenomenon that I teach in almost all my courses: the centrality of movements and diasporas in our becoming the kinds of humans we are today, but also in re-inventing our cultural histories. It is through “culture,” as a human evolutionary tool, that we have amazed ←15 | 16→our staggering diversity of material culture and archives of representation (these archives are strategic memory-work that have given us hegemony as a species).
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