Kia ora all Well, it's nice that a week or so after me telling Art that he was barking up a particularly unproductive tree on air-l, that Don and Rhiannon come in and starts talking some sense, and more particularly starting to open up the discussion of methodology and its political implications. I'd just like to throw in another angle as my own new media research has encountered the same kinds of questions, the most important one being "Why do qualitative research, and who benefits?". The ethnographic mode has been accepted into the social sciences as a much-needed corrective to the positivism of both standard qualitative and quantitative research methods, but the political implications of it also need to be taken seriously. Paul Willis' "Notes on Method" in Culture, Media, Language (1980) is a good summary - it's a dangerous move to pretend the researchers' basic assumptions can be overthrown by "experience". And the potential for debilitating neo-colonial effects is (in my experience) much greater in this ethnographic mode than in sending out some surveys which communities can more easily ignore if they obviously don't fit. As much as I enjoy Don's work and value it's importance for Internet Studies, I also see many situations where well-intentioned ethnographic work causes grief for both the community of study and the researcher. It's worth holding in mind a) the inextricability of the ethnographic mode with the colonial missionary project and b) the likelihood of unintended consequences over intended ones, and the very different positions of power which are held in the ethnographic encounter. Linda Tuhiwai Smith's "Decolonizing Methodologies" takes up the argument forcefully and should be required reading for anyone considering this kind of work. I'm not writing off ethnography per se, as I think it is incredibly important for researchers to put ourselves into situations outside dominant cultural frameworks. It makes for less problematic assumptions and better understanding (as Don points out). But the bottom line for me is that if the goal is to improve the world, and not just ourselves, we need to find a way of negotiating between the needs and desires of those under study and our own desires for knowledge - and the power imbalances between these. In some cases there's alignment between those two desires, which makes things easier - both 'me' and the 'others/subjects' are working toward explicitly the same thing. Like Don, there are also situations where I think the 'others' are wrong, but I'd add an important consideration to the idea that we can just "tell each other" about the wrongness: the bottom line is that Don comes and talks to us about Ghanaians without them necessarily being present. The effects of the circulation of this knowledge in western academia (and related appendages e.g. into development policy), away from explicit dialogue with the research subjects, can have a far greater impact on the subjects' community than their dialogue without us present can have on us. No first world ethnographer ever lost their job for their informants not being happy with how they are represented, but there are plenty of examples of such impacts (and worse) happening in researched communities due to research publications (e.g. in this part of the world, Cook's mapping practices). My simple point is this: the "benefits" of research projects to those under study (or, in too many less-reflexive cases, to "the world") are routinely treated as self-evident by researchers, yet the experience of those being researched is more often a betrayal of trust, loss of control, and unintended consequences. Research is a powerful way of telling stories, and the key issue from my POV in methodological concerns is not "which method" but "how are the power relationships here being circulated through my methodological choices?". x.d -- http://www.dannybutt.net
Slater,D wrote on 12/2/04 12:54 AM:
It might get boring to people to keep banging on about ethnography, but it seems to me the only way of subsuming both concepts and numbers within a meaningful engagement with the concrete diversity of social constructions of technology and people.
Slater,D wrote on 16/2/04 7:40 AM:
That's a problem to get our teeth into. My own feeling is that we've got false alternatives here: it's not a matter of either imposing northern theory on 'them' or else taking their accounts as 'truth'. I tend to think of ethnography as dialogic (or even dialectical) - as in Gadamer's 'fusion of horizons'. I've never been able to articulate it very well, but as Rhiannon says, we as researchers are always part of the frame, trying to understand the people we are talking with, and hoping to make that understanding mnore and more sensitive and complete, but we never escape ourselves, nor should we. At best, the ethnographic encounter - like any really intense conversation - shakes us up and changes us (and in some cases, 'them' too). You *respond* to experiences, you don't accept them at face value. (though I'll confess that I've often found my biggest problem is indeed getting overenthusiastic about the people I study) I'm also quite comfortable to disagree with the people I research, or think they are wrong, or that they are doing something other than what they think they are doing. After all ethnography is not interviews. It cannot be ethnography until what people say and what they do, and the tensions between the two, are brought within the same frame (not to prove them liars or deluded, but to flesh out *practice* in toto). Moreover, I've always felt it was a mark of deeper respect for people to believe that everyone is intelligent and autonomous enough to be argued with, and to believe that they can be wrong! I hope they treat me that way too.
Just one other thought along these lines - my last few projects have all involved working with local researchers. Their job is very difficult as they are both part of the 'community' and at the same distanced (often by class and education, but mainly by the stance required by the research). Ethnographyt is definitely a dialectic of closeness and distance, and while I am worried by my distance, they are actually plagued by their closeness. I've come out of this feeling that there is a lot to be said about the older anthropology of strangers coming to learn a culture (given plenty of safeguards around issues of power, etc).