III.3. Ethnography and participant observation
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Nicholas Rush Smith
CUNY - City College - Posts: 6
- Joined: Thu Apr 07, 2016 12:05 pm
Examples of Excellence
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Samantha Majic
John Jay College-CUNY - Posts: 12
- Joined: Thu Apr 07, 2016 2:00 pm
Re: Examples of Excellence
nrsmith.ccny wrote:From the moderators: What are examples of ethnographic work that effectively show how research was conducted on a day-to-day basis or which changed over time?
Bernstein, Elizabeth. 2007. Temporarily yours : intimacy, authenticity, and the commerce of sex, Worlds of desire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Haney, L. Offending Women: Power, Punishment, and the Regulation of Desire. University of California Press, 2010.
Newman, Katherine S. 1999. No shame in my game : the working poor in the inner city. 1st ed. New York: Knopf and the Russell Sage Foundation.
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Sarah Parkinson
Johns Hopkins University - Posts: 12
- Joined: Mon Apr 18, 2016 4:32 pm
Re: Examples of Excellence
nrsmith.ccny wrote:From the moderators: What are examples of ethnographic work that effectively show how research was conducted on a day-to-day basis or which changed over time?
Pachirat, Timothy. 2011. Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Literally about the day-to-day and how changing positions affected the analysis.
However, I worry how, in a discipline where few people use ethnography and where certain forms of transparency are emphasized over others, this "effective showing how research was conducted" could accidentally become a function of: 1.) How present the ethnographer is in her work; and 2.) The author's willingness to present an appendix that is essentially an "Ethnography 101," primer rather than getting at the aspects of their work that structure their inferences (e.g. relationships, power, reflexivity). In other words, I don't think its intellectually productive to fall into a habit of explaining ourselves or our research rather than explaining politics.
Neither Lisa Wedeen nor James Scott detail the day-to-day of how their research was conducted in the same exhaustive, end-to-end way that Pachirat does, though both discuss their methods. These choices are a function of the questions they ask, the focus of research, and the way that they're each deploying ethnographic methodology. It's pretty clear, though, how they conducted their research and I would consider them both exemplars of variations on ethnographic methodology.
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Guest
Re: Examples of Excellence
-This is really, really smart. The fetish for transparency can reduce the space we have to talk about our insights, rather than our process. The best work in these areas does not reconstruct the research process, it reconstructs the social relations, cultural meanings, and material practices that are the subject.
(I would add Dorinne Kondo's "Crafting Selves" and Iver Neumann's work on Diplomacy to the list of great examples).
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Calvert Jones
University of Maryland-College Park - Posts: 3
- Joined: Sun Apr 24, 2016 10:16 pm
Re: Examples of Excellence
"In this value system, viewer remarks along the lines of, "I barely recognized him" and "My god, look at how much weight he lost!" and "Was that really him falling off that cliff?" take the place of more nuanced evaluations of the actor's art. Acting becomes a stoic's routine, a form of monk-like self-flagellation to prove devotion to one's craft. Lose that weight. Eat that flesh. Take the punch to the face. Are you man enough?" http://www.rogerebert.com/mzs/why-leo-w ... for-acting
So I would worry that something similar would occur with ethnography, essentially de-legitimizing more nuanced approaches, and yes, perhaps less immersive approaches, which nevertheless provide absolutely essential insights.
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