Previously I have defined ethnography and looked at a practical example. Today I will detail a few of the necessary steps involved in starting the no doubt exhilarating ethnography project journey. Many of these I have found in my reading of The Cultural Experience by Mccurdy Spradley & Shandy (2012).
After you've decided what you will be studying, or perhaps even before, you need to choose an informant. He or she should be your guide through the world of the microculture you have decided to observe. Picking a friend is a feasible option, but consider the impact that might have on their answers to your questions about said microculture. Because someone knows you on a personal level before embarking on this journey, their reactions around you might be changed, or they might not be willing to take the project as seriously. This also deprives you of the truest form of ethnographic immersion into a culture to which you are truly a stranger . This choice is, of course, purely up to the student.
Think of the cultural informant as a tour guide. You don't really know your tour guide to well when you sign up for the tour, but you only sign up for tours that YOU want to go on. Because it's voluntary you want to learn about what you’re seeing, and because they agreed to this job, they want to teach you. The tour guide is friendly, sharing knowledge without bias to how you personally might react to any information. Unlike a tour guide, however, your informant must be actively involved in the group you are studying.
Ideally, you would want to find an informant who is sociable and willing to talk to you about their microculture in a clear and coherent way. You want to find someone who has been fully immersed in the culture, someone who is not new to it and "knows the ropes". While this process can be stressful, many people have found that informants are willing to help and eager to teach about their passion or life. When talking to your informant (and also when you are interacting with and observing your microculture) keep your eyes open. Just be observing what's going on and you can learn more than what your informant may be able to remember in your interviews.
After you've picked your ideal cultural informant, it's important to think about how the interviewing process will go. What questions will you ask? How many? Will there be more interviews? All are valid questions which need thorough answers. Don't limit yourself on questions. Putting too much structure and constraints on your interview might stress you and/or your informant out. Take it on a step-by-step basis. Asking the right kind of questions can be equally or more important than the number of questions being asked. The saying rings true; quality over quantity. The goal is to keep them talking and you talking as much as possible. On track, of course. While it might be entertaining to hear about their toy poodle for half an hour, it probably won't be useful for your study of the night shift nurse’s microculture. Discovering as many 'folk terms' or jargon during this stage is incredibly important.
Folk terms are important for a number of reasons, not the least of which is understanding what is going on when you are immersed in the culture. For instance, if someone in the surfer community were to say that something is “gnarly” (meaning cool or awesome), without previous knowledge of the word, one wouldn't necessarily come to that conclusion about meaning. Many microcultures have large sets of jargon or folk terms that make the culture more exclusive, making it increasingly important for the ethnographer to fully understand the terminology.
While you're asking questions, you need to remember some key information to gather to help you understand taxonomic structure. Taxonomic structure meaning a way to define and categorize lists of terms and sets of ideas. Also, when asking your initial set of questions, discover facts and details, but not the complex meaning of anything in particular. Discovering what things mean can distract from your initial information gathering interview. Taxonomic structure is just a fancy way of saying categorizing or classifying something under broad and specific terms. The book gives the example of cars as the domain with several car makes under it. It is important to remember that each subcategory in your taxonomy should have at least two strings attached to it, or none at all. In such a way, we also classify different ethnographic factors to form graphs which help the reader to better understand the inner working of said microculture.
Ultimately, learning about these few steps to effective ethnography helped me better understand how I am going to approach learning about different cultures. Hopefully, it can inspire some of you to take the leap and learn about some different cultures yourself. After all, you never know which one you'll end up joining eventually.
No comments:
Post a Comment