In April, I’ll be leading an “intensive” weekend session on ethnographic research. The session already has a reading pack designed by a previous instructor, which I was just reviewing to decide whether I would make some quick modifications. Intensive methodology sessions are fairly rough-and-ready: they are designed to give students who are largely not very familiar with a particular methodology, with a quick overview of the strengths and weaknesses, pros and cons, of individual methods. The students who attend these sessions are not yet ready to workshop their actual research designs, and the sessions are too brief to provide more than the most cursory glimpse of a method. There is really no time to cover higher level concepts, and students are expected to pursue more advanced training from here, based on their final research proposals.
I was therefore curious to note that the very first reading, in a reading pack intended to be streamlined for use in this emphatically introductory course, deals with the pros and cons of having sex with the people you’re studying. Not in a “the ethics committee really, really won’t like it if you do” sense, but in a fairly open-ended way, including substantial discussion of the position that you really can’t know a culture unless you’ve… er… immersed yourself… Now, all of this is, I’m sure, quite interesting and useful to think about in a higher-level course but, in context, is this really the best entry point into explaining what ethnographic methods entail – or even for reflecting on ethical challenges in ethnographic research – for students who largely have no background in the field at all? At the very least, it seems a somewhat over-literal and blunt way into the complex emotional dynamics and relationships that make intensive field research so charged and ethically fraught…
Hi. Interesting. Wish I could participate.
What kind of practical experiences are you going to let them do ?
Are participants expected to already having done fieldwork in whatever context (seminar etc) or is it an introductory one?
This course is very basic. It’s a supplement to another course, which covers the concepts behind research design and the mechanics of writing a research proposal. Where the main research design course focusses on the “logic” of research design – how to ask a good question, how to make sure that your proposed research might actually answer that question, how to think through the ethical and practical issues involved in your research, etc. – the weekend intensives are designed to give students an opportunity to gain an introduction to specific research methods.
In general, people seem to attend intensive sessions for methods that will mainly be supplemental to their research – so, someone might already be comfortable with number crunching, for example, but unclear on survey design – so they’ll attend the relevant session. Ethnographic methods don’t fit all that well into this structure for a couple of reasons. First, the students who register (at least, the students who registered last year, when I stepped in to cover this course somewhat last-minute) often don’t actually know what ethnography is: most of the folks last time around were actually interested in fairly structured qualitative research (structured interviews, surveys, etc.), but had registered for the ethnography sequence because they were confused… Second, ethnography is just… more complicated – there is less you can break down and distill in the format of a weekend intensive. Of course, all the other methods instructors probably feel this about “their” method, as well…
But no: participants aren’t expected to have done any fieldwork – this is mainly a course to get people thinking about whether their research questions might need some kind of fieldwork, and then about whether they have the aptitude, time, budget, etc., for the fieldwork that might be required. The course is probably most helpful for letting some students know that fieldwork is not for them, while letting other students know that, if they do intend to do fieldwork, they should undertake specific kinds of further study before they go into the field…
Hmm, Paule Marshall takes kind of an ambiguous position on the Biblical sense of getting to know another culture in her 1969 novel, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People, which is definitely worth a read for the ways it theorizes trauma and mourning, in addition to its perspective on anthropology. And more fun than Hegel!
Yes – I might very well need something on trauma and mourning after reading Hegel :-) Many thanks for that suggestion.
Anthropologists have long been known to sleep with informants, it goes with the ethnographic immersion thing, but it is not for everyone. I can’t imagine how you would suddenly introduce people to the idea without the anthropology background in terms of long periods of field immersion and understanding a culture. If you suggested that it was a valid way of conducting field research students with no anthropology (or perhaps sociology) background would at best think you a bit nutty and at worst exploitative.
P.S.
I hope you are feeling better about Hegel soon! And people send little ‘I hope you recover soon!’ cards after hearing about your foray into Hegel.
The article itself, of course, is fine – there’s nothing actually wrong with the topic or with the way in which the article discusses the issue. It’s just that, yes, I couldn’t really understand what would possess someone to begin an introductory “what is ethnography?” session with this topic…
Not yet feeling better about Hegel, alas… And, rather than “get well soon” cards, I think the foray has resulted in something more like quarantine… ;-)
I remember taking that particular seminar for the course that you are doing in 2003. It was the one where I ‘found’ my primary supervisor. It was a funny thing, but I must have kept her in mind for over two years. My then primary supervisor left for another institution halfway through 2005, and then my secondary supervisor also left shortly afterwards. This person who taught about ethnography then seemed the logical choice to work with three years down the track. Never mind the fact, since then, she has been on a fellowship in Ireland over the last year. Communicating electronically has still been better than other options for supervision at our institution. Although I suppose it is a little bit of a surprising thing for two people with an ethnographic sensibility to be doing, considering both of us prefer face-to-face interactions.