Word to Dell Hymes

The world of anthropology lost a true giant this week in Dell Hymes. I paid my respects to him silently this week as I considered the value of what was simply said – and not witnessed as ‘authentic’ ethnography, according to a client – during a lone research interview that blossomed into an insanely successful metrics bonanza. Hymes’ approach to understanding communication was certainly more complex than words alone, but I did point out in April that, were he dead, he’d be rolling in his grave at those touting authentic ethnography as witnessed, not worded. Word to Dell Hymes. Read his obit in The Washington Post.

 

Junglist Insights

That the academic world can be slow when it comes to catching on to new ideas and innovations in the underground is old news. That the underground can be slow when it comes to catching on to new ideas and innovations in the academic world is probably newer news. Some recent news hints at the space between these two worlds, Check this blog posting on an article that I co-authored with linguistic anthropologist Jack Sidnell a few years ago.

 

Face Recognition for Ethnography

No, it’s not a wicked new software to partner up with your Livescribe pen. It’s a question: Do you know some of me? If not, that probably explains why you’re still referring to that awesome work you did in California as “ethnography research.” Duh.

 

Talk Isn’t Cheap

If he were dead, Dell Hymes would roll over in his grave every time a so-called ‘authentic’ ethnographer or a client suggested that conversations were a shoddy way to conduct research.

Observing people doing things is a great – and sometimes ideal – way to probe for insights, but to suggest that asking consumers about their behavior, patterns, beliefs, relationships, attitudes, ideologies and cultures or even to engage them to collaborate on where insights on those areas might lie has no value is ludicrous.

There’s more than a few reasons why 100 years of anthropologist in the field figured it might be a good reason to learn the local language – conversation, comeraderie, categories of experience, expert status, and the list goes on. Without these ethnographic foundations we’d have but a paltry few pages on kinship, barely a door ajar to the phenomenological, next to no narrative and auto-ethnography, perhaps zero activist anthropology and a data chasm in the ethnography of communication.

Then there’s social media ethnography or, as some colleagues have tagged it, netnography. Lots of methodologies there and, for those of us who conduct research in the spaces and places between the internet and mobile know, talk ain’t cheap. It might not be the only currency, but it’s value is undeniable.

So the next time you decide to pitch a client or you’re on the receiving end of a contractor’s pitch and ethnography – couched as ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ – is invoked alongside some methodological mumbo jumbo that ex-communicates conversation, try to remember Dave Chappelle’s rant on Keepin’ It Real. Between his take on how that phrase had imploded on hip hop culture and  the late-80’s-and-onwards post-modernist implosion of, arguably, the most of-epic proportions myth of our time, I am un-chuckling over how ‘authenticity’ can be used to refer to anything other than signatures on traveler’s cheques.

P.S. Pulling chimps from their natural habitats and making them wear ties is fucked up. I’d bite and kill people if they did that to me, too.

 

Tailing Portigal’s persona post

A quickie on Steve Portigal’s blog gets cred for posting me towards the new Firefox personas. Like him, I’m not the biggest fan of amalgamated humans transformed from lives and emotions to bullet points and recommendations, but I have eased up a bit in recent months (on the conditions that the thickest description possible and a direct line from researchers to authors to designers is followed). Still, gotta laugh at how the designers who these tools are meant for have so sucked them into their creative realm and spit them out that now we can dress up our Firefox in personalities. Just like so many of the personas folks are passing off as consumers, the Firefox skins are “lightweight, easy-to-install and easy-to-change.”

 

Yard Youth Peer Ethnography

Interesting recent article in The Jamaica Observer where UWI folks are using peer ethnography as a way to not only gather the data and the stories for their work but to draw those data and stories into their study through the lens of other street kids. The article focuses on a young higgler youth in Kingston named Blacks. An excerpt:

“When mi turn 16, mi si some people who seh dem a mi family, but mi nuh really know,” he says somberly. “Mi nuh like all di one who seh she a mi mother. As a matter of fact, mi hate har because of all that happen.”

According to Blacks, had his mother done what she was supposed to do as a parent, he would not be living on the streets.

“She come in like she out of her mind. She nuh really understand,” he says, his tone angry. “More time mi just feel pissed off. Mi know seh if she waan duh certain things (differently), mi wouldn’t de yah suh.”

Blacks’ sentiments mirror those of other youths in the 2007 study entitled ‘Force Ripe’: How youth of three selected working-class communities assess their identity, support and authority systems, including their relationship with the police. Youth in that study felt that they were being used by various groups in society, namely parents, the church, and the police.

Funded by the World Bank and managed by the now-concluded Jamaica Social Policy Evaluation Project (JASPEV), the investigations were undertaken by Dr Herbert Gayle as the principal investigator and his colleague from the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, Horace Levy.

“They feel isolated and that people are using them and while it may not be true, the fact is that they feel this way means that it is serious enough for the adults in the society to deal with,” said Criminologist Professor Bernard Headley, in commenting on the study at the time. “It is a matter of trust. It means that something is wrong between us, and them. There has to be mutual trust.”

The work looked at youths between 15 and 29 years old from two inner-city areas and one rural community, and employed the use of peer ethnography. The technique saw young people interviewing each other and then returning to researchers Gayle and Levy, who, in turn, interviewed them. 

 

Ethnography vs. Anthropology (The War is ON!!!)

Grant McCracken recently threw up a post that should be heeded by everyone with “ethnography” on their Google alerts, the tip of their market research tongues or the front of their design minds. In it he writes, “There is a distressing habit these days to think due diligence has been satisfied if interviews are done in-home and in-store. In point of fact, an interview not in-home is not ethnographic. Unless certain methodological conditions are satisfied, it is merely an interview done in home.”

I’ve ranted along these lines before and will do so again here, but briefly. Doing “ethnography” is only part of the ethnographic process and, as Grant rightly points out, just because it happens somewhere other than a focus group room with a 2-way mirror and a bunch of branding execs standing behind it to make sure the facilitator is asking the mandated questions doesn’t make it ethnography or ethnographic.

As a process or methodology, ethnography is as much, if not more, about the thinking and writing that goes on than it is about the collection of observations, ideas and insights that such thinking and writing connects to. To “do” that thinking and writing, I believe, requires some training and reading. And that training and reading is in anthropology.

Apologies to my sociologist massive, but I think that anthropology’s unofficial ownership of the ethnographic process is well deserved, only if the notion of ownership is itself part of the problem or crisis that keeps anthropology so on its toes when it comes to researching and writing about human subjects. Long story short: all that colonial-collaboration angst has bred a discipline that tends to be more sensitive, self-reflexive etc. Anthropologists continue to generate the most critical thinking when it comes to human socio-cultural research.

Maybe this means we need to call for a secret cabal meeting of anthropologists working in the business field to agree never again to promote/sell our services as ethnography. Sell anthropology or sell nothing, because at the rate ethnography is being kicked around like a step-child we’ll all be conducting interviews with 2-way mirrors behind us someday soon.

 

Journalism, ethnography & Generation Kill

I’m once again in that stage of a project where the client is working through the process of ‘getting it’. Explaining ethnography isn’t easy, especially when, in the first few meetings, you’re introduced as the archaeologist. That’s cool, because I started my anthro career with every intention of becoming an archaeologist. After falling asleep on my first dig in the dirt of a 15th Century Iroquoian village  and then realizing my future might be more about cataloging fragments of wood than Aztec gold, I changed routes. It’s also cool because, after a week of being referred to as Idea Couture’s archaeologist, I came to the realization that my next hire for a secondary fieldwork specialist would indeed be one. More on that when it happens. But back to explaining ethnography.

I usually start by telling clients that ethnography is the art and science of telling stories about other people’s stories. How people tell their stories, what they tell about, how I choose what parts of that telling to narrate and so on all fit into the final story that, hopefully, is insightful enough and compelling enough to spark some ideas. Good stories should do that, something I learned by osmosis as my dad clattered away on his Underwood in the dining room during the years he was a freelance writer from home and I was a kid recovering at home from the flu or some other school-less malady.

As an undergrad and grad student, the specter of journalism always haunted my anthropology papers. On more than one occasion, comments in red from a professor admonished me for being journalistic. Part of that tendency, I think, was the rush to tell the story, to cut through the lit review, the theory and the politics of academic writing in order to get to the (and my) ideas. So it’s sort of ironic that when clients and co-workers ask about ethnography, I’ve taken to turning them on to Generation Kill.

The HBO show based on the book by Rolling Stone journalist Evan Wright and adapted for TV by David Simon and Ed Burns of The Wire fame follows the Marine Corps’ 1st Reconnaissance Battalion as they invade Iraq in 2003. What makes Generation Kill such a compelling and effective story is how it captures the boundaries between journalism and ethnography. Unlike The Wire, where the viewer rolls into B’More through the eyes of so many squad cars, police stations, schools and re-ups, Generation Kill unfolds primarily through the participant-observational lens of Wright. Like an anthropologist, he tasks himself with listening more than talking, understanding rather than judging. As a result, the audience ‘gets’ the social hierarchies, kinships, language, rituals, processes, tasks, duties, fears, funs and more of what is was/is to be a soldier in that time and place. That the story is ultimately so co-constructed between Simon, Burns, Wright and the soldiers he rolled with, makes it that much more ethnographic.

 

Reinventing the ethnographic eye

When it comes to social research, some of us have a way with words and an eye for ethnography. Thanks to Rob Spence, a Canadian filmmaker, that eye could go bionic in no time. As Wired and others have noted this week, Spence is planning to incorporate a video camera into his prosthetic eye. I’ve been eyeing (no pun intended) this little camera that hangs around your neck like a Flava Flav necklace to do more discrete ethnographic observations. That’s starting to look like last year’s hot idea.

Such additions to being-human are not widely available nor are they currently part of the consumer landscape; however, Moorfields Eye Hospital in London has impanted artificial retinas in two patients to receive electrical impulses from an Argus II camera attached to a pair of sunglasses that sends moving, rudimentary images of motion and light/dark through the optic nerve to the brain.

We’re entering a whole new era of surveillance. Foucault would shit his pants. I’m calling Oscar Goldman!

 

Ethnography Alerts

My Google Alerts is driving me nuts! I’m signed up for a variety of words to be funneled my way, one of which is ‘ethnography’. On the non-insane side of things, it feeds me the kind of information that us anthropologists used to get only through conferences, guest lectures and the few issues of our favorite journals each year: new research, findings, ideas, methods, practices, book reviews, social theories, applications of theories from other fields and such. Faster than a speeding copy of American Anthropologist and, because of Internet banter, more reflexive than a dinner with Renato Rosaldo, the rate and regurgitation of information is both fantastic and often messy. On the insane side of things, however, the ease with which some bloggers and so-called practitioners bandy the term about is unsettling and messy, in a not-good way.

Many of the references to and claims of conducting ethnography drift somewhere between way off, totally incorrect, company hype and pure nonsense. Some can’t be blamed; they’ve learned their ‘ethnography’ from second hand sources online and at work. Others are more culpable, blatant conjurers of the smoke-and-mirrors that keep clients confident that their overpriced agency is up on their best practices game. And a few are just clueless, thinking that a fieldtrip out of the focus group and into a mall or customer home is what it is.

It isn’t. Ethnography is the art and science of telling stories about people’s stories. In most cases, the words, sentences, themes, plots, dialogue, narrative structure and such of these stories are inspired and guided by degrees of participation and observation of people in places – like malls and homes. But good stories are about lives lived through a lens, they have a depth to them that, if experience is to be captured and transmitted to the reader, requires an understanding of and appreciation for the performative.

That understanding and appreciation can be cultivated in a whole host of ways: through experiences, experiences of experience, acts of ‘becoming’ those under study skills, basic trial and error, formal training and, perhaps most important of all, a healthy reading list.

How can you ‘do ethnography’ without having read ‘an ethnography’? You can’t. And if you don’t get the distinction, you haven’t. So, in the spirit of Google Alerts togetherness, a micro reading list of a few  favorites for those who might considering catching up on how ethnography as a best practice is best read, written and conducted.